Latest / Mahon McCann / Plato’s Republic, Book 9: How the Tyrant Is Made (and Why Justice Wins)

Transcript

Plato’s Republic, Book 9: How the Tyrant Is Made (and Why Justice Wins) · Mahon McCann

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, my name is Mahon.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a PhD researcher in philosophy and part-time lecturer.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this is lecture nine of a series of lectures on Plato's Republic,
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: of course, dealing with book nine.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: So if you haven't seen the other lectures, I recommend going back, checking them out.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: The link will be in the description.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: So book nine of Plato's Republic really comes full circle in a sense.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: We return to this question that started out in book two,
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: which is why is the just person happier than the unjust person?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Is the tyrant wretched or blessedly happy?
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: So in some sense,
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: the whole rest of the Republic has been putting
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: in place all this architecture really for Plato to address this question,
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: to defend justice, which is really morality itself.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like why be a good person when bad people can get all this status and money and reward, etc.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so Plato's had to go kind of the long way around and establish all these And so
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: in book nine,
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: we're going to look at how the tyrant comes to be basically, how to make a tyrant.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then we're going to compare and contrast the tyrant with the philosopher king.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: The philosopher king, of course, is the most just for Plato and the tyrant is the most unjust.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so in a sense,
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: you have these two extremes to compare to each other to You know,
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: who's happier and who's more wretched.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then he'll make two other arguments in defense of why justice is better than injustice.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: One based on the tripartite psyche and the second one on pleasure and pain,
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: which he says is the most significant of them, which is how he comes up.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: The formula of justice is 729 times better than injustice.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, that's what we're going to talk about.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: So in order to explain the tyrant,
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Plato returns this normativity of desires that he set up in book eight,
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: which is that there's unnecessary desires and there's necessary desires.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Necessary desires are desires that we have to meet, like eating food and drinking water.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And unnecessary desires are things that are added on to that,
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: really, that can be trained out of us that aren't, you
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And Plato does something here,
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: which is, I mean,
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Freud gets credited with the discovery of the unconscious,
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: you know, 2,400 years later or whatever, 2,300 years.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: But really Plato's talking about our unconscious here.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: He's recognizing that the desires...
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: He
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: says that our dreams establish that there is dangerous wildness and lawlessness within us.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: In your dreams, you'll do all manner of things that you wouldn't do, you know, rob it.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: The Tyrant is completely lawless, basically.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And in that sense, because they have no superseding normativity,
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like no separation between good and bad desires.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: They also lose the ability to control their desires.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: They have no ability to actually regulate themselves.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so in that sense, the tyrant does awake what most people do in their dreams.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Plato describes the tyrant as being like a person in a dream.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Contrast this with the philosopher king,
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: who is the one who wakes up,
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: the cave, leaving the cave is a myth of enlightenment, waking up to reality.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the tyrant is a person who lives in a dream,
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: essentially,
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: and behaves completely immorally because they have no actual connection to reality.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: How does the tyrant come about?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: The tyrant is the son of a democrat in this case.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: His father isn't lawless,
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: but indulges in unnecessary desires like everybody else in the democracy,
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: as Plato says.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: that he values freedom and he values equality and so loses the ability to discern
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: between good and bad desires.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: The Democrat son's father had his kind of oligarchic desires to pull him to
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: the middle of the road.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, his love of money, he still has that a little bit.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that kind of keeps him from going completely off the deep end.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: But the tyrant doesn't have any of this anymore.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so he gets involved in more extreme lawlessness, really.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: The father and the family try and get through to him,
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Plato says, but they fail and he's implanted with a sting of longing.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really strange idea.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: He uses this metaphor of a great winged drone.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: That implant this kind of madness in him, really.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: He's got this addictive, erotic desire for everything.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not desire for the love of order and beauty, but something mad, really.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: A kind of mania, almost,
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: that leads him into things like housebreaking and purse snatching
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: and temple robbing.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And basically any unjust action that comes along in the Republic.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's complete anarchy and lawlessness.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Planoxia, he's gone mad.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: As he gets older,
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: he kind of becomes a hedonist,
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: you know, feasts,
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: revelry,
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: luxuries, got a lot of girlfriends, but he's really bad at organizing his life.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: He gets in debt and he needs money to meet his desires.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So he takes advantage of his parents who got all the stuff from the oligarchs
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: and he'd even kill them really if they got in his way of him kind
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: of plundering their estate, Plato says.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: But the more crimes he commits, the further he becomes detached from any moral norms.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of like Macbeth,
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: when he says, like, I am stepped in blood so deep that to go on is to go err.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: When you've transgressed against these things,
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: it's almost like there's nothing, there's nothing stopping you.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Those norms are what allow you to control your behavior.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you transgress against them,
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: you end up kind of just, yeah, the desire to ramp up and get worse.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's entirely possessed by desire and isn't really an agent anymore.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's why he's a slave to his desires.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: He's the most unfree of anybody.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not even like these desires are good desires.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Plato will talk about this later in The Pleasures and Pains,
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: but the problem with the tyrant's desire is that they're insatiable.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're like a vessel full of holes.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like the more you pour in more desires, it just keeps coming out.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like the Rolling Stones.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: The tyrant can't get no satisfaction, basically.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: The tyrant's political assent.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Basically,
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: if he was just alone,
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: it would be, you know, it's not great, but it wouldn't be catastrophic.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's really the context.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's an opportunity there.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the tyrant takes advantage of the polis in the same way he took advantage
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: of his mother and father.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: But Plato, there's a weird kind of double.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like a misfortune for the tyrant in some sense.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Tyrant is a person who has no judgment here, doesn't have good judgment.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: So for them to become the ruler, Plato's like, is a really bad.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's bad for them.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's bad for everybody else.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: He describes it as being like a sick person having to become an athlete.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like their body is unwell, but now they're competing with other well bodies.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the tyrant has really bad judgment.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: But he's now in the position of being the person who has to decide how things go.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's bad at his job.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he can't govern himself, let alone govern a whole state, a polis.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so he uses people.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: He associates flatterers and people who can benefit him.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't have any real friends.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: He's always a master to one and a slave to another.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't get a taste of true freedom or true friendship.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, Plato's like, He's really emphasizing how miserable that life is, basically.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's not in any way better than the life of the just person
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: who would have true friendship and true freedom,
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: even despite maybe being punished by people like the tyrant.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: So the tyrant rises to political ascent because of the context,
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: but totally not fit to be there in some sense.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: The tyrant is like living in a dream.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: The dream is a kind of nightmare for Plato.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: But as they ascend politically, everybody else comes to live in that nightmare as well.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like a weird Freudian type thing where it's like a person in
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: the family has this kind of darkness in them and then the rest of the family start
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: to live in that darkness as well.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: In this case,
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: the tyrant Who takes over the state,
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: makes the state their kind of psychological environment in some sense.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Plato makes a crazy comparison.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's really interesting.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: He says like the experience of living under a tyranny.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you were a person who lived in a tyrannical state,
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: you could imagine like you'd be very paranoid.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Couldn't tell the truth to people.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: You'd be under threat.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it would be super oppressive and dangerous.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like he says that that's an experience of what it would be like to be the tyrant.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: He's like,
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: that's an insight into the tyrant's actual mind to live in that state,
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: which is just an amazing kind of metaphor, a way of communicating.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Why the tyrant would not be in any way happier than the just person,
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: based on just the experience of living in their regime,
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: because that's, you're living in their head.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: So now we're in a position to compare and contrast the tyrant and the philosopher king.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: As Glaucon said,
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: the two statues,
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: putting them up beside each other, investigating the good life and the bad one.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: And they're opposites to each other.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: The philosopher king has left the cave,
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: has woken up,
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: has gone on the journey to the good and has returned out of compassion for others.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the tyrant lives in a fantasy,
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: treats people as objects for their own desire, has no wisdom.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you can think about this in terms of the tripartite psyche as well.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: The philosopher king is ruled by reason in alignment with spirit over appetite.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas for the Tyrant, it's the exact opposite way around.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: They're ruled entirely by appetite and some spirit in there, but reason is completely gone.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: They've lost reason entirely.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why they're opposites to each other.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so Plato argues the tyrannical man is badly governed inside.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he tries to rule others when he can't even rule himself.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And in that sense, he's the biggest slave of all.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: He's the most wretched, fawning, manipulating people.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: He's envious, untrustworthy, unjust, host and nurse to every kind of vice.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas a person like the Philosopher King who can rule themselves well...
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: is going to be happier, basically.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And particularly if they're in the position of being the ruler and they're able
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: to rule themselves and rule the regime well,
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: they're going to be much,
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: you know, obviously you want to do a good job rather than a bad job.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to be typically much happier than the alternative.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he compares the two cities to say like the city ruled by the philosopher king,
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: how the harmony in that city and everybody has a purpose
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: and everybody plays their role versus the city ran by the tyrant,
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: which is poor, Long-term chaotic, filled with fear and distrust.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, which one would you rather be, basically?
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, seems kind of obvious.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: The second argument he makes why the just life is better than
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: the unjust life is linked to the tripartite psyche, okay?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: So there's three parts of the tripartite psyche, obviously.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: The rational part is wisdom-loving.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: The spirited part is victory or honor-loving.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the appetite is gain-loving.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is about pleasure.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's about desire.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's about money-making because the money can meet those desires as well.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: But Plato's arguing that these are modes of being in the world.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever you love defines your character.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: So these are three kinds of characters that exist in all of us.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And since all these modes of being,
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: ways of life are in dispute with one another,
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: how would we judge which one is the best, basically?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: To say the unjust life is happier than the just life is really to say that the life
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: of gain is better than the life of wisdom.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so Socrates argues that the one who has experienced all these ways
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: of life is best able to judge.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is for the lover of gain, they're going to reject social esteem.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: So they don't care about honor and victory,
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: but they also don't care about learning and wisdom either.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: So they're not going to get, they're never going to taste those pleasures in the first place.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's kind of a childishness in a way.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like we all start out as two-year-olds as just wanting our own way.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the tyrant never really grows out of that, never experiences anything beyond it.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so the lover of gain can't really judge if honor is better as a pleasure or
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: if wisdom is better because they have no experience of it.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: What about the lover of honor?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because the lover of honor definitely rejects gain.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: They would have experienced that, but then they also reject wisdom and learning.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Think, oh, reason's stupid or it's soft or whatever.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm just going to focus on winning competition.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so also they have no frame of reference for that either.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: So they're not in a fit position to judge.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: But the lover of wisdom, as Socrates argues, will have tasted all of these pleasures before.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, they'll have tasted their desires getting met because they're a human being.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: But also if they're successful in some aspects of life,
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: they'll have had honor and social esteem as well.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: But then on top of that,
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: they've also tasted the true pleasures of wisdom and learning the truth.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so in that sense,
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: the lover of wisdom is the only one actually qualified to really address
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: the question of which life is best.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a developmental argument here.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it's quite interesting,
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: like the Latin for wisdom,
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sapientia, And so in this sense, wisdom is a kind of taste.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so obviously, the person who spends their life cultivating the best judgment
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be in the best position to judge which is the best life.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so true happiness for Plato comes from this, from knowing reality, basically.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: And for the others, they're basically in the cave.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: They're like loving shadow paintings rather than what the paintings actually point
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: to, their reality.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so he claims the just person has defeated the unjust person twice.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: The third argument is based on pleasure and pain.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: So some people would make the mistake,
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Plato thinks,
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: that in claiming that the tyrant's life has more pleasure And the life of
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: the philosopher king.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they would say this because the tyrant has feasts and revelries and hedonism
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: and all this kind of stuff.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the philosopher king is austere,
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: there's moderation, there's study, there's pursuit of the truth.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's the suffering.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: So somebody might be tempted to think, well, that's less pleasurable than that.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: But Socrates argues basically that this is based on a mistaken understanding
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: of pleasure and pain.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Makes a distinction between illusory pleasures and real pleasures or true pleasures.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And in order to do this, he kind of lays out that pleasure is the opposite of pain.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, when you have pleasure, you don't have pain.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: When you have pain, you don't have pleasure.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: They're like hot and cold, rough and smooth.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also an in-between state between the two, which is kind of a calm.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's not pleasure.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not pain.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's the absence kind of of both of them.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: But that they kind of follow on the heels of one another.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: So a person who's sick or in pain,
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: They praise the absence of pain.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: They're grateful for it.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas a person who's in a state of pleasure that returns to a state
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: of calm can experience it as a kind of pain, a return to an unhappy kind of medium.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so our interpretation really affects what we perceive to be pleasure and pain,
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: what we judge to be pleasure and pain.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: He uses a kind of cave argument where it was like,
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: if we were down below in the bottom of a cave and somebody brought us up a level to
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: the middle, we might be tempted to think we're at the top.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: But this is just because we've never been to the top.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: And this is kind of the same with pleasure and pains, basically.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: We can be deceived or wrong about what is truly painful and what just seems painful.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: So examples like if you were as a child and you were running along and you fell
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: and hit your knee, you might conclude this is the worst pain anybody has ever felt.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is as bad as it gets.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: But then you get a bit older and say you get a horrible toothache and you have
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: to get your tooth out and it's infected.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: You might think, oh, I was wrong.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: That knee pain was actually totally fine.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: This was a way worse pain.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: So it sets the standard of what pain is in some sense.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: So we're always making these comparative judgments about pleasure and pain and
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: that we can be wrong about it.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: So Plato would say the tyrant has a lot of pleasures,
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: the feasts, the extravagances, like hedonistic relationships.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: But he would say these are really illusory pleasures
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: because they actually make you want more pleasure.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: They don't fill you up in the first place.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: These are desires actually are pleasures that as you participate in them,
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: that make you want more pleasures.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: They actually increase your desire rather than curing it.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas for Plato,
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: the pursuit of wisdom and learning reduces desire and hence leads to more calm,
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: more peace, which is a genuine pleasure, something like joy or gratitude.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Really interesting idea.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think, I mean,
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: modern neuroscience,
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think, has really bore this out that Plato was totally on to something there.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Dr. Anna Lemke,
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: who I've had on the podcast before,
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: she's the chief of Stanford Addiction Lab at Stanford University.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Wrote the book, Dopamine Nation.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: She argues that the greatest discovery of the 20th century,
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: one of them anyway,
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: is that pleasure and pain is located in the same part of the brain.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: So pleasure and pain works like a balance, basically.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: When you tip your brain to the side of pleasure, dopamine is releasing the reward pathway.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: But then the more the balance tips, the more pleasure we feel.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then the balance wants to remain level and homeostasis.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: So if you tip it to one side,
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Then self-regulation will return it not to level,
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: but to the same amount on the other side, on the pain side.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: So there is that calm in between.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: But basically,
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: if you're a hedonist who's pursuing pleasure all the time,
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: you're constantly tipping that balance to the side of pleasure.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: You're actually going to experience more pain.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the tyrant in that sense is experiencing loads of those pleasures,
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: but they're actually experiencing more pain because of the type
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: of pleasures they're engaging in.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is the basis of addiction, really.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Tolerance, neuroadaptation, hedonic treadmill.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, as you get more of the reward, it devalues.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: You need more of the reward to feel the same amount.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then you end up on this kind of treadmill of just pursuing rewards
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: that actually leads to more pain and pain.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: More suffering.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: So in some sense,
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: the true hedonist should really be a moderate,
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: should really be living very moderately.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: So Plato's really,
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: he's really getting to something here,
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: something that's very true to the human experience.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so he argues that the illusory pleasures are those kind
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: of crass hedonistic pleasures, but that the true pleasure is in learning.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Really the learning that we see in the cave example, which at first is painful.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's difficult to turning around to see the fire.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: But then as you get a grasp of those patterns,
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: like you could imagine the pleasure of the person leaving the cave
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: as they're encountering those real objects and really getting a grasp on reality
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: through it is a deep sense of joy that has no downside really.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: So as we get better at kind of reducing those errors, we can,
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: we get a grasp of what that true pleasure is like and then we can get more
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: of it pretty much.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so for Plato, it's like, yeah, The highest pleasures come from learning, essentially.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it's interesting because dopamine is the neurochemical involved in reward learning.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it's for, essentially.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what goes wrong in addiction is reinforcement learning,
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: whereby you basically build a habit,
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: but it's not a habit that you actually want to have.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in this case,
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Plato's arguing that you're building a habit,
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: that you're rewarding genuine learning and development,
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: expanding one's model of reality.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's, again, he's really picking up something that we're still catching up to today.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so the philosopher king who pursues wisdom,
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: pursues learning, is going to have more of the true pleasures.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: But the tyrant who pursues the hedonism side and doesn't learn anything is going
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: to have more of the illusory pleasures.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Based on this argument,
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Plato actually works out a proof,
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: basically, of how much happier the philosopher king is than the tyrant.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: The tyrant is three times removed from the oligarch.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: Who is three steps removed from the king.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: So three times three equals nine.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: Which one cubed, three times equals 729.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: So the vast difference between the gap between the life of virtue and the life
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: of vice is nearly insurmountable.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the tyrant's life, who's the most unjust person, is actually overwhelmingly painful.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: So this is really the climax of his defense of why the just life is better than the unjust life.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it also addresses the question of appearance in reality that Like
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: as Glaucon argued with the Ring of Gyges,
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: that we do injustice and licentiousness, but we don't want to get caught doing it.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Plato's still arguing,
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: even if you don't get caught and discovered,
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: you're still going to have this inner transformation that's really
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: the problem that's going the wrong way.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so being undiscovered is actually worse than being discovered because
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: the corruption is going to keep on going and you're going to get worse
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: and worse like the tyrant and it's going to lead you to disaster, essentially.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: So really by the end of book nine,
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Plato has completely dismantled the argument of why the unjust life would be better
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: than the just life.