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Lesson 1.8: The Spell of Mathematics
14 Plays27 days ago
Topics discussed:
- The history and mythology of Pythagoras
- The workings of Pythagorean communities
- The benefits of routine and social pressure
- The ethics of the Pythagorean Archytas
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Transcript
Myth vs. Reality of Pythagoras
00:00:02
Speaker
Today's lesson, at first glance, might seem a little bit out of order. When we last left off, we had just covered Socrates. Socrates died in 399 BCE. And we had also covered Xenophon, one of Socrates' students. And Xenophon died in the 350 BCE.
00:00:25
Speaker
So we've been crawling slowly but surely from the year 600 BCE to the 350s BCE. e Why then would today we go back to a person or the ideas of a person who lived in the middle of the 500s? I mean, after all, we're in the 350s now. Why go back to the 500s?
00:00:48
Speaker
Well, the person we're covering, or I should say, the ideas that we're covering today had a long-lasting legacy, and it's not entirely clear that they actually belong to the person we're going to begin this lesson with. What am I saying? Okay, today we are covering the ideas of Pythagoras.
00:01:11
Speaker
Now, the problem is Pythagoras, more than anyone else in this course, has been shrouded in myth and mystery. There's almost been deliberate obfuscation of who he was. In other words, people have said things about him, have embellished his biography, have exaggerated the account of his life,
00:01:37
Speaker
so that we really don't know much with certainty about the man himself. I want to start with a couple of biographical details that are probably true. And then after that, we're going to leave him behind and instead think about Pythagorean ideas, whether or not they actually were his or not. They were eventually attributed to him.
00:02:02
Speaker
And so that's the main theme of today's lesson, Pythagorean ideas. Now, we should give a few details about Pythagoras. Let's begin with that. He was a contemporary of some people we have covered, Anaximenes and Xenophanes. If you recall, Anaximenes was one of the Milesians, perhaps the student of Anaximander.
00:02:29
Speaker
And Xenophanes, well, we'll come back to him, but he made fun of Pythagoras a couple of times, if you recall. Pythagoras, like many of the people we covered, was originally from the Ionian region, what is modern-day Turkey. And because of political instability and maybe other reasons, he left the Ionian region and eventually settled in southern Italy.
00:02:56
Speaker
And centuries after this point, by the way, southern Italy would be sort of the center of Pythagorean thinking in the Greek world. While he was in southern Italy, he might have been involved with politics. It might have been the case that either he or some of his followers gained some kind of political status.
00:03:19
Speaker
But what we do know for sure is that essentially wherever he went, ah different cities in southern Italy that he was in, communities would crop up, communities that revolved around allegedly the teachings of Pythagoras.
00:03:38
Speaker
We'll come back to these communities in a little bit. Let me now speak of the myth of Pythagoras. There are so many intellectual inventions and ideas that he is credited with. And most of them, it turns out, we have no real proof that they are from him, but let me tell you about them anyway. Perhaps the most famous of these are his alleged mathematical contributions.
00:04:09
Speaker
Now, there is even a theorem that bears his name, so the Pythagorean theorem is an example of these. We can say with a high degree of confidence that Pythagoras probably didn't come up with this. In fact, the Pythagorean theorem was probably already in use in Babylon at the time.
00:04:29
Speaker
And we can say that by all the alleged mathematical contributions of Pythagoras. I have here a quote from the mathematician and historian of mathematics, Alberto Martinez, who is over at the University of Texas in Austin.
00:04:46
Speaker
And here's a ah nice little quote from him that sort of summarizes what we know about Pythagoras and mathematics. Quote, in the end, what can we attribute to the Pythagoras as opposed to contemporaries who shared his name with certainty in the history of mathematics?
00:05:04
Speaker
nothing. As argued by historian Walter Burkert, the apparently ancient reports of the importance of Pythagoras and his pupils in laying the foundations of mathematics crumble on touch, and what we can get ahold of is not authentic testimony, but the efforts of latecomers to paper over a crack, which they obviously found surprising. Historian Otto Nugebauer briefly remarked that the stories of Pythagoras' discoveries must be discarded as totally unhistorical.
00:05:41
Speaker
and that any connection between early number theory and Pythagoras is purely legendary and of no historical value." End quote. Perhaps a little bit disappointing, but as far as we know, Pythagoras was not a mathematician and did not make any contribution to the field.
Core Beliefs of Pythagoreanism
00:06:05
Speaker
But of course, that's part of his legend, right? And this is only one part of his legend. You probably had heard of the mathematical, the alleged mathematical aspect of Pythagoras' life. You probably haven't heard some of the myths ascribed to him. So I will share those with you now. According to reports from Diogenes Laurdius, remember he's one of the intellectual biographers that we're relying on for this course.
00:06:34
Speaker
Pythagoras has been described as the god Apollo in human form. It is claimed that he had a golden thigh. He allegedly persuaded a greedy bull to abstain from eating beans. By the way, he also made a bear swear not to harm living things anymore. Oh, and by the way, the bear obeyed. The bear actually listened to Pythagoras.
00:07:04
Speaker
And of course, most infamously perhaps in this course already, Pythagoras could recall previous incarnations, right? He believed in reincarnation and he said he could remember his past lives. And related to this, we recall that Pythagoras once claimed that he could recognize the voice of a friend, of a long dead friend in the yelps of a little puppy.
00:07:33
Speaker
And Xenophanes, who we covered a few lessons ago, took Pythagoras to task for this, saying there's no way that's actually possible. What a ridiculous claim. But there it is. Pythagoras is basically a living God and was able to do all kinds of things, cure the sick even. So that is the degree to which Pythagoras, the historical man, has been mythologized.
00:08:02
Speaker
And I hope you agree with me, we can't really take any of these claims at face value. It seems to be a bunch of biographical details that have been added to the historical figure of Pythagoras, not things that he maybe actually did, or maybe he did do them, but everything is just obscured by the misinformation we've gotten about Pythagoras.
00:08:26
Speaker
Here is one thing we do know about Pythagoras with, again, a considerable degree of confidence. He initiated several different communities, and from here on out, we'll just call these Pythagorean communities, although sometimes they refer to as the Pythagorean Brotherhood.
00:08:48
Speaker
These have been very influential. and They might have played a role politically in Southern Italy, as we've already discussed. And if that doesn't do it for you, here is an interesting factoid. Pythagorean communities, at least aspects of Pythagorean communities, might it have served as the model for Plato's Academy. Just so that you get an idea of the time scale here,
00:09:18
Speaker
Plato's Academy was not initiated, not founded until about a hundred years after Pythagoras had died. That means these communities were around and thriving and still active 100 years after the master had died. And they were doing so well, it seems that Plato himself thought, well, let me borrow some of these ideas. We'll come back to that during the lesson on Plato.
00:09:46
Speaker
What were these communities like? Well, scholars are now realizing that early on mathematics didn't play a role. Now this kind of jives with everything that we're just saying about Pythagoras not being a mathematician, about how Pythagoras as a mathematician is an exaggeration or an embellishment or a mythologizing of Pythagoras after he died. So there was not a lot of math going on early on in these communities.
00:10:16
Speaker
Eventually, there would be. So it seems like around
Life in Pythagorean Communities
00:10:20
Speaker
Plato's lifetime or during Plato's lifetime, we see mathematics being more central to Pythagorean communities. We're talking 380 BCE onward. And that's when being mathematically literate, having numeracy, was more central to being a Pythagorean.
00:10:41
Speaker
if you wanted to be a member of this community, you had to abide by the central teachings. So let me give you a snapshot of what these teachings were, and then we'll go over the actual initiation and ethical code you had to abide by. But here's a general overview of the central teachings.
00:11:04
Speaker
Number one, the soul is immortal and it is continually reborn, right? So this is technically known as metempsychosis, but many people just call it reincarnation. So you do not die forever. You die and are simply reborn into another body, perhaps even not a human body, but maybe an animal.
00:11:30
Speaker
And that is one of the central teachings. Let me just make two quick notes on this. First of all, this is so, so different from the Homeric worldview. If you recall, for Homer, when you die, you sort of lose your life force and you become a shade, right? You live in Hades as a shade. Well, that means you're you're done. that's There's no more you, really. There's just a shadow of you around.
00:12:00
Speaker
That's not at all what Pythagoras seems to have been saying. He's like, no, you'll come back as ah as another human or as an animal, perhaps. So this is very different. And if it was the case that Pythagoras himself said it, well, this is sort of a stunning trend of events, right? A shocking idea probably to the contemporaries of Pythagoras. Second point I want to say on this, you actually can't find this idea and many other places. You can find it in pre-Buddhist India, right? India before Buddhism. And you can find it in Empedocles. We covered Empedocles before.
00:12:36
Speaker
Remember, he's the philosopher who argued that love and strife are cosmic powers that lead to everything getting condensed into a single location and then expanding, you know, as far as possible so that all the elements are in their own separate quadrants. And then it all comes back. It's kind of like a big bang and a big crunch over and over and over again.
00:13:00
Speaker
That's Empedocles. And Empedocles did seem to believe in reincarnation, so very few places can you find this idea. And certainly in Greece, this might have been a very you know jarring notion to people. Okay, another of the central teachings, nothing is really new, right? Because we are in a perpetual, never-ending cycle of life and birth.
00:13:28
Speaker
much like Empedocles, everything that happens has already happened and will happen again. There is just a never-ending cycle. The universe just kind of goes in loops. But here's the third central teaching. You can escape from this cycle of rebirth. And by the way, you want to escape from the cycle of rebirth because it's not the case that this life is, you know, awesome and honky-dory and everything's good. Life for Pythagoras is a kind of a punishment. Now we'll get into more details later, but you actually want to escape the p cycle of rebirth. And the way to do that, of course, is to improve your soul. One more final central teaching to discuss. All living things are part of the same family. So there is a sort of a non-harm principle involved here. Any living thing you should basically consider a sibling or some kind of relative.
00:14:26
Speaker
Be good to living things. That's the general message here. This in later Pythagorean communities would mean a very strict vegetarianism. I should note that it wasn't or it isn't clear that vegetarianism was a part of what the community was about from the very beginning.
00:14:46
Speaker
may be Pythagoras formed his doctrines, so to, you know, minimally clash with the religious traditions of his time, we don't really know. In any case, eventually, this idea that, you know, all living things are are family, this would lead to and vegetarianism, very strict vegetarianism. How do you get initiated into the Brotherhood? Well,
00:15:11
Speaker
There is a five year trial period. and You have to show your worth over the course of five years. That's a long time. Clearly, this is a very serious undertaking. During this time period, property is held in common. What that means is that all that you own, right, you give to the brotherhood,
00:15:32
Speaker
And you and all the soon to be disciples live off of your shared things. During this time period, you have to learn the way of the Pythagorean. So when Pythagoras was alive, you would listen in silence to his voice. And he was apparently behind a curtain. And this part I'm just imagining, but I am, you know, I just think that there's a candle behind him. So the awe that you see is a silhouette of Pythagoras.
00:16:00
Speaker
Nowhere have I read that, but that just sounds cool. I think that's what was happening. Why not? In any case, after you've proven your worth to the Brotherhood, you've proven that you are serious about committing to the Pythagorean way of life, then you become a quote unquote esoteric. That means you're a member of the inner circle. And by the way, you get to see the master in person. So now you're in. You're part of the Brotherhood.
00:16:29
Speaker
and you have to follow the ethical code of the Pythagorean community, this is called the Akusmata. This Akusmata is a collection of sayings, probably some of them going all the way back to Pythagoras himself.
00:16:49
Speaker
Some of them probably being added along the way, some of them being reinterpreted over time, sure. But in general, this collection of sayings, the Akismara, is what shape your day-to-day existence in the community.
00:17:06
Speaker
We know a little bit about the sources of the Akusmara. It seems that before Pythagoras settled in southern Italy, he spent a lot of time learning about different cultures and different religious traditions. We know that he was very likely involved with the mystery cults from a very young age. Now, we described the mystery cults early on in this course, literally on day one.
00:17:35
Speaker
And here is where they come back into the picture. Pythagoras went above and beyond to learn as much as he could about these mystery religions. He even learned Egyptian and somehow figured out how to get into those very highly guarded Egyptian mysteries. So Pythagoras is a collector of ideas about life and the beyond and he implemented all these ideas into his Pythagorean communities. While I'm on the topic of Pythagoras' travels, it seems that he also collected cures from all of these different ethnic groups, and those kind of were passed down for it seems like centuries, right? We actually have the writings of a Roman, Lenny, who repeatedly references Pythagoras, so it seems that
00:18:32
Speaker
You know, Pythagoras was really out there trying to learn from different communities, or we think he was. I guess we'll never know. Okay, so let's look now at the Akusmara. How do you have to live day in and day out? Well, the Akusmara, there's basically three types of Akusmara of sayings. The first kind is a definition, basically, what is X? For example, what is human happiness?
00:19:01
Speaker
The second type of Akusmara in the technical jargon is identifications of the superlative.
Philosophical Influence and Legacy
00:19:08
Speaker
What does that mean? Well, basically what is the most blank, right? So what is the best thing? What is the worst thing? What is the truest statement? These are another type of Akusmara.
00:19:23
Speaker
And last but not least, of course, the third type is just the precepts, just the rules that you ought to you know govern your life by. So what should be done, what should not be done, that kind of stuff. Okay, so let's get a feel for these Akosmara. Here's one. Happiness is the most excellent thing. All right, so this is sort of in the eudaimonic tradition, right? so in the eudaimonic tradition, what you're supposed to do is things that get you to be happy, to thrive, to flourish. So if Pythagoras is saying that happiness is the most excellent thing, clearly he's going in that direction. Here's another of the Akusmara. Humans are happy when they have a good soul. We have seen this idea before in Heraclitus. Remember, he thought that there is an ethical bearing to the soul and you can actually make it better or worse.
00:20:21
Speaker
And so Pythagoras here seems to be expressing the same idea. Here is what is more uniquely Pythagorean. How about this one? Labors are good. Pleasure is bad. You should not enjoy yourself. Pleasure is not a good thing because this life is for punishment.
00:20:49
Speaker
Right? You are in this never ending cycle of rebirth and this is a bad thing. You want to get out of it. How do you get out of it? Will you improve your soul? And to that end, you ought to work. Labor is good.
00:21:07
Speaker
Okay, you're getting a feel for what Pythagoreanism is all about. The truest statement, according to Pythagoras, is that humans are evil. Humans the way we are living our current lives, that is. And that is why we have to employ these precepts of Pythagoras, this code of life, this code of ethics, so that we stop being evil.
00:21:33
Speaker
Moving on here, the most momentous thing in human affairs is to win some over for good rather than evil. So one of the best things you can possibly ever do is bring someone to the side of goodness, right? Well, that includes bringing people over to the Pythagorean fold, right? Virtue is being at harmony with oneself and the world.
00:22:01
Speaker
In other words, you know you want to know what moral excellence is. Be at harmony with yourself. Have your mind in order, in other words, and make sure that your mind is in harmony with the world. What that precisely means, we don't know. However, we do know that later philosophers would take this idea and kind of run with it. We'll cover that again when we talk about the Stoics.
00:22:31
Speaker
Another saying of Pythagoras, the universe is constituted according to harmony. That is, there seems to be an ordering of the universe and it is done in proportion, right? There is a rationality to the way the universe is organized. The most just thing is to sacrifice.
00:22:56
Speaker
What this means is that it is good that you give up of your time, of your energy, of your money. You have to work in this life to be good. And that also includes worshiping the gods in the right way. We'll come back to the gods in a little bit, but this is the life of work. This is the life of self-sacrifice. This is a very interesting one. What is right has the force of oath.
00:23:27
Speaker
Now, I almost have to backtrack here a little bit. What words like right and good used to mean, for example, in Homeric times, had to do with the elite. What's good? Well, being a member of the elite, that's what's good. During the time period we are in the middle of, the 300 BCE,
00:23:48
Speaker
What is right has to do with what gets you to flourish, right? Many of the people we're covering are eudaimonists, and the right thing to do is to do things that get you to thrive, that are good for you. And by the way, this often entails being good to other people. Being good to others is an indirect way of being good to yourself, right? It ultimately benefits you.
00:24:11
Speaker
Well, what Pythagoras is saying here is something very much closer to the more modern conception of morality. When you think of morality today, you think of those things that you have to do, no ifs, ands, or buts. You just have to do those things, right? Like a promise, like keeping a promise. That's what Pythagoras is saying about right actions.
00:24:33
Speaker
Those things that are deemed right to do, it's almost like you made a promise to do them, right? You
Math, Politics, and Society
00:24:39
Speaker
can't give up on them, you must do them. It's not because it's good for you, it may be that they're good for you. That's not the main reason that has the force of oath. It's like a promise you must keep. So Pythagoras here is, in a way, very modern, right? This is a very different take on what morality is. It must be done.
00:25:01
Speaker
Not because it's good for you, it just has to be done. Let's come back here to the gods. Procreation is obligatory, right? You must make babies because we need to ensure the continual worship of the gods. We need to keep making the gods happy. And the way to do that is of course to engender more humans so that the next generation has plenty of people to keep the gods happy.
00:25:29
Speaker
staying on the topic of worshiping the gods, you have to follow the rituals very, very carefully. And let me tell you exactly what Pythagoras means by this. Not only does it have to be at the right time and in the right way and all that, but Pythagoras in his Akusmara seems to stress that you need to do things with full focus. In other words, you can't be mind wandering while you're doing the ritual.
00:25:58
Speaker
It has to all be done very deliberately with your full attention. Peak focus is a good way to say it. This is all that matters right now. Nothing else to think about, nothing else worth worrying about. This is everything right now. Very interesting take on how one ought to worship the gods. Let's talk about Akusmara having to do with speaking.
00:26:24
Speaker
Here's the first one, practice self-control when speaking. What Pythagoras seems to have met by this is that if you don't know, then don't say, right? So don't start speculating wildly, just you don't have to add anything if you don't know. Another saying of Pythagoras having to do with our speech, only give advice with the best of intentions.
00:26:50
Speaker
You know, sometimes people ask us, what do you think I should do? And you kind of just, you know, spitball a little bit, not with a whole lot of forethought. I'm not sure Pythagoras would be happy with that. You have to really think, really reflect and say, well, do I have their best interests in mind when I make the suggestion that I'm going to make? If not, you should just stay quiet and that's okay.
00:27:13
Speaker
There's some other things here that are maybe pretty standard. One should not engage in extramarital affairs, right? No cheating. That's probably a good idea. Here's another one. It is better to endure injustice than to kill someone. So this is a turn the other cheek kind of mentality here. Centuries before Christianity has shown up on the scene.
00:27:37
Speaker
Let me finish off with these two because I think they're kind of interesting, kind of weird. At least this first one is weird. Pythagoreans insisted that friends should share everything. Okay. But one should not remove burdens from friends. To the contrary, one should help others be burdened.
00:28:00
Speaker
What is going on here? Well, this is because, again, hard work is good. This life is for of punishment. So not only do you not want to encourage laziness, you don't even want to encourage relaxation. Help people be busy all the time. That's sort of the idea here.
00:28:22
Speaker
Let me give you one last one here. It looks like the elimination of anger was a recurring topic for the Pythagoreans. For example, one should not further provoke angry people. So if someone is already angry, you should do whatever you can to not only not, you know,
00:28:42
Speaker
egg them on and make them even angrier, but to diffuse the situation, right? You're seeking social harmony and certainly anger disrupts social harmony. So what you want to do is assuage people, calm them down.
00:29:00
Speaker
Here is another Akusmara relating to anger. One should not be resentful after being angry, right? So once the anger has subsided and whatever was said was said, do your best to let bygones be bygones. Let's forget about that. Let's put that behind us. And that seems to be something that later philosophers would pick up on this need to control our anger.
00:29:29
Speaker
Okay, so those are the Akusmata that dictate your daily living. We do have a little bit more information about how the Akusmata were treated. According to some scholars, there are two approaches to the Akusmata, and they each have two different labels for them.
00:29:54
Speaker
Now, I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce these, but the first group, I'm gonna say they're called Akusmatisi. They focus just on the saying themselves. They just wouldn't question them. They would just abide by them. They would treat them almost like divine doctrines, divine commands. Then there are the Mathematici.
00:30:18
Speaker
I think that's how you pronounce it. They would try to understand the rationale for those rules, for those precepts. And sometimes this meant some kind of weird numerology. ah The classicist and philosopher Charles Kahn calls it symbolic speculation. And it's just it's very strange to me.
00:30:46
Speaker
Here is, you know, one example of this kind of numerology. So the number 10 was considered sacred. And so they would say, well, there must be 10 celestial objects, right? 10 things in the and the sky above us. So they knew about the five planets and also the sun, the moon, and the earth.
00:31:04
Speaker
That's only eight, and so they came up with the idea of the invisible central fire, all right? So it's a fire that holds everything together that you can't see, and something called a counter-earth, right? Also invisible. The point of all this was just to make it to the number 10, and that was how they did their, you know, that was their rationale behind some Pythagorean idea.
00:31:32
Speaker
This isn't exactly mathematics yet. We've already covered it before. The real mathematics would come much later on. As I already mentioned, the mathematization of the Pythagorean communities happened in the 300s. And so we don't have to get too far into this. Here is the basic idea. There were differing approaches to follow how to follow the Akismara.
00:31:57
Speaker
But either way, it kind of didn't matter, right? Even though scholars disagree about, you know, how literally these precepts were read and all that, almost everyone agrees this. Everything in the Pythagorean community was ritualized. I have a quote here from one scholar. There was a frightening constriction of action in daily life.
00:32:23
Speaker
In other words, people were just doing everything, everything, everything according to the Yakuzmara. Whatever prevailing interpretation of the Yakuzmara dominated that particular brotherhood, that's how you lived your life. The same scholar says it was consciously, almost anxiously, adhered to. All right, so there is a frantic following of rules in these communities.
00:32:51
Speaker
What does that mean for us? Well, what I want to talk about here is the potential benefits of ritualizing your life, of adhering to a routine religiously. So let's talk about that for a second.
00:33:09
Speaker
I think that to many people, this idea of adhering very strictly to a routine, sort of imposed on you by someone else, like in the case of Pythagoras, right? I think this sounds absolutely abhorrent to people, to many people, but I want to actually to give you the flip side. I i want to try to tell you that Some of these people might have actually enjoyed this or benefited from it in some way. um So I went and looked at a couple of different psychologists to see what they had to say about routine. And I did find some some interesting things. The first researcher I would like to mention is Katie Milkman. She's a psychologist. And she has a book called How to Change. And there's a lot of advice in there, not directly relevant to us here.
00:34:01
Speaker
But here's a little bit that is, rigorous planning allows one to break up our daily goals and activities into bite-sized chunks and relieves the need to think about what you'll do in the moment.
00:34:16
Speaker
In other words, if you routinize your day, perhaps even especially if it's done as extensively as the Pythagoreans did, then you're freeing up your mind from having to think about what you have to do in the next moment and making each individual goal more achievable.
00:34:37
Speaker
Now, in the case of the Pythagoreans, their goals were literally to escape the cycle of rebirth, right? So they wanted to improve their souls. That's kind of a lofty goal. Rather than having this very kind of vague goal in mind, they would just break it up into small little chunks. Here is how I worship the gods. Here's what I'm allowed to eat. Here's what I do now. Here's what I do later.
00:35:06
Speaker
And by doing this, this goal of breaking the cycle of reincarnation becomes more manageable. That's even what we see, even if your goal isn't to escape the cycle of reincarnation. If you want to just have a better exercise routine or be better about schoolwork, this will benefit you as well, having a bit of a routine, rigorous planning regimen. Here is a quote from Milkman.
00:35:34
Speaker
When a given behavior is repeated or drilled over and over in a consistent environment, and when positive feedback of any kind accompanies its execution, it tends to become instinctual. You don't even think about it anymore, right? And that's exactly what the Pythagorean community was able to do for its members.
00:35:58
Speaker
the social pressure of basically the entire community just made all the prescribed actions more natural, easier to comply with, right? So it would be hard to do on your own, but through routine and with the social pressure of the entire community, it can be done. By the way, there's also here a relationship between routine and social pressure and self-control.
00:36:27
Speaker
So here is another quote from Milkman. Positive habits are key to what we often mislabel self-control. Those around us who seem to have tremendous willpower, people who run three miles every morning, are focused at work, hit the books hardest at school, and generally seem to make the right choices, are not actually endowed with a preacher natural ability to resist temptation.
00:36:53
Speaker
Instead, good habits keep them from facing temptation head on in the first place. They don't even think about making the wrong decision. That's what the Pythagorean communities were for. The wrong thing, the wrong action, and wasn't even an option. It's not that these people had all this willpower to abide by the Pythagorean precepts.
00:37:19
Speaker
is that the social environment was engineered so that the wrong thing to do didn't even come up. No willpower necessary. Now, I'm sure some of the things they did, did develop some willpower, but they didn't have to exclusively rely on it to follow their precepts, right? To abide by the Pythagorean way of life. So maybe here's a lesson from Pythagorean communities We have to update our social environment, engineer it so that it ensures that we do the right things without always requiring us to think about it or to have the willpower to follow through. You have to design your space so that the right actions more naturally flow from you.
00:38:42
Speaker
So far, we've learned some lessons about how we should live from Pythagorean communities in general. What I'd like to cover now is an individual Pythagorean, a specific person who lived in the late 400s, early 300s BCE. e We think he was born around 435 BCE, and he probably died around 360. So basically, when Socrates was off fighting in the Peloponnesian War, this is when Architas was born.
00:39:18
Speaker
Architist was a Pythagorean. He was a philosopher. He was a mathematician. He was a statesman. He held public office, in other words. And he served as general all in his town of Tarentum, which is in southern Italy, by the way, which is where which is near where Pythagoras himself died. So southern Italy was always a bit of a stronghold for Pythagorean communities and ideas.
00:39:46
Speaker
In fact, later on in the story, when Plato wants to learn about the Pythagorean ideology, he goes to southern Italy, in particular to Syracuse in Sicily. Okay, so what did Architas do? Well, he applied mathematical principles to problems in mechanics.
00:40:11
Speaker
And also optics, apparently, he worked on physical acoustics. In other words, he was sort of at the forefront of applying abstract mathematical ideas to you know actual problems, physical problems. So we might call this applied mathematics.
00:40:30
Speaker
He also, by the way, looks like he was a tinkerer. He invented little toys and gadgets. Sidebar on the toys. He seemed to you know just be good with children. He liked children. He was also kind to slaves. This is totally not the norm at the time. So um he might've been a nice guy from this little tidbit that we get. It seems like he was um had a kind soul, should we say.
00:40:58
Speaker
But of course, what we're going to cover today are some of his philosophical ideas. So there is this book called On Law and Justice. And although it is disputed, whether Architas actually wrote it or not, many scholars do seem to think that he was the man behind the pen in this case. And so we're going to treat it as being from Architas. And well, let me just give you a couple of ideas from this book. Again, it's called On Law and Justice. So the Pythagorean take on law and justice.
00:41:32
Speaker
This first thing I want to cover will probably not surprise you. Here is what Architas is telling us in a nutshell, living well, flourishing, in other words, is inseparable from being part of a social structure that is just and self-sufficient.
00:41:50
Speaker
So we've already gotten this lesson by thinking about Pythagorean communities. Arcadis is really driving the point home here, though. He's going to give us actual insights into how to make sure that whatever social order we're a part of is actually just and self-sufficient. By the way, by self-sufficient, Arcadis means that your community Essentially, he can stand on its own. It doesn't necessarily need any goods or anything else from from outside its own borders. So he wants the community to be autonomous, in a sense. That's another word for that, right? Not only that you govern yourself, but that you can make do just with what's inside your borders.
00:42:35
Speaker
Okay, so what is Architas' big idea as to how to make sure that our society is just and self-sufficient? Well, in a nutshell, he thought we should mathematize political theory.
00:42:51
Speaker
This is sort of maybe what we mean today by political science, although I think it goes even further than most political scientists would want to go today. Now, that's me reading architists in a particular way. I'll tell you what I mean by that in a second. Let me begin with some quotes from On Law and Justice, and then we'll move into my interpretation of it. I hope I'm not being too radical in my interpretation.
00:43:19
Speaker
already flagged that real quick. But here we go with a couple of lines from his book. Actually, before I even say this line, let me kind of you know give you this this insight from Pythagoreanism in general. You want your society to be in accordance with nature. And that means that you want your laws to be in accordance with nature. Now, what does that mean? Well, Architists is going to go ahead and clarify that for us. He says the ruler or rulers must imitate the natural system of justice. There's already a justice in reality itself, and we have to kind of make our society match that.
00:44:02
Speaker
And this natural order to the cosmos that he's talking about, this is very Pythagorean here, is basically this idea of proportionality. There is already a balance, a harmony in the cosmos. That means you have to get that somehow duplicated or replicated or imitated in your society. So make your society balanced. And he actually gives us here a little line about what it means to be balanced. Quote, what falls to each in accordance to worth, what falls to each in accordance to worth.
Impact on Plato and Utopian Thought
00:44:44
Speaker
Okay, this might sound a little communistic to you already.
00:44:48
Speaker
And yeah, you know they the Pythagoreans did you know share things. That was kind of one of their things. I'm not exactly sure that he wants to say something like you know Marxist communism or anything like that. Let me give you another line, and then I'll give you my radical interpretation. So here's another line. The law is beneficial to the political community.
00:45:12
Speaker
if it is neither ruled by an individual nor in the service of private interest, but rather in the public interest and extended to all. So the law, in other words, ought to be in the public interest, not for the benefit of some you know private interest group, not for the benefit of the rich, not for the benefit of some tyrant that's governing everyone, treating everyone like slaves.
00:45:41
Speaker
For everybody, that's the whole idea. The benefits of the law ought to be extended to all. So maybe the way to kind of sum this up is we have to structure society in a way that is proportionate, right? What it means is what falls each in accordance to worth, and that will lead to the benefit of all. That's sort of the goal.
00:46:05
Speaker
It's almost like he's thinking about eudaimonic ethics, right how to get us to flourish, but not at the level of the individual, but at the level of society. right So maybe that's the way you want to think about this. Here's one more line that maybe adds a little bit of nuance to what Architas is trying to to get at.
00:46:25
Speaker
The law should pay attention to both the place and the location, for neither is a ground able to receive the same seeds, nor the soul of a human being the same virtue." Okay, so he's saying we need to be smart, we need to create harmony and balance in our societies, and that has to do with proportionality, but that doesn't mean that every single community has to be governed by the same laws.
00:46:52
Speaker
or the same political structure. It might be the case that different societies require different forms of political organization. By the way, here's a sidebar. There is a very famous figure in South American history named Simon Bolivar, and he's known as you know so kind of a general, but he also wrote a couple of philosophical treatises on political theory in particular. And he said something very similar. It's not the case that every community needs to have the exact same
00:47:27
Speaker
political structure imposed on it. It might be the case that different communities need different forms of government. In any case, balance and harmony is what Architas wants. And so here is my radical interpretation. This is totally me. There is nothing whatsoever in Architas that you know would lead to something like what I'm going to suggest here.
00:47:52
Speaker
But I wanted to find an example that would sort of maybe shock you in the way that Architist probably was shocking some of his contemporaries, right? These are pretty novel ideas and there's something really, you know, I wanted to come up with an example that was both jarring but thought-provoking. Maybe that's the way I should explain this. So here is a study that I found. Let's see if we can squeeze out some radical conclusions from it.
00:48:22
Speaker
The researchers in question are Lockwood, Nathanson, and Weill, I think is how you pronounce it. The name of the study is Taxation and the Allocation of Talent. It's from the Journal of Political Economy. Here's my summary in a nutshell. Researchers attempted to quantify the difference in social costs and social benefits of different employment types to see which jobs were the most socially valuable.
00:48:51
Speaker
Okay, so translation of my own summary. These economists wanted to see which types of work created the most social benefits, and they wanted to compare that with the social cost that that type of work creates, right? So maybe just to kind of get your intuitions primed here, you should think of teachers, right?
00:49:12
Speaker
So there is probably a benefit to having teachers around. You want to see what the cost to having teachers around is, right? So it obviously costs money to build the infrastructure, the schools, and to pay and train all these teachers and all that. And you almost want to set up a ratio to see how beneficial it is all things considered to have teachers around. Now, this is what the researchers did with all kinds of employment types. And I'm going to just give you the the punchline here. What job has the highest social benefit and incurs the least social cost? Right. So which is the best for society and has the least cost? That's like the best ratio, I guess.
00:49:57
Speaker
Well, that would be medical researchers. So apparently, it doesn't cost as much when you compare it to the amount of gain that we get from medical research. I actually do have a friend who works in the field, and it really is a thankless job. I mean, people kind of, you know, when they find out what he does, say, oh, that's really awesome, and that's great work that you're doing. But the pay isn't phenomenal.
00:50:27
Speaker
And they're always, you know, kind of looking for funding to do their research and all of that. So it's not terribly lucrative. And, you know, they come up with with cures and and ways to improve our health. And, you know, it seems to be a lot of benefit there.
00:50:44
Speaker
By the way, per this exact same study, the job sector with the least social value, right? You don't do as much for society, but also that has the highest cost to society, right? Maybe we get some negative repercussions from this type of employment. That is the banking sector, right? So this is the one with the highest cost to society and which gives back the least.
00:51:13
Speaker
And so if you go into banking, you're probably gonna make a lot of money, right? I think that those in the banking sector are overrepresented in the 1%, the proverbial 1% we're always talking about. And so it seems that all things considered, that is a job that gets paid a whole lot and doesn't really give back to society.
00:51:38
Speaker
in a in a commensurate way, in a proportionate way. And there is the key word, right? Proportionate. What I'm suggesting that maybe architists is trying to get at is that we should mathematize this whole thing and look for proportion. So just like the researchers did, they looked for ratios and they found which employment types benefited society the most. the most And here's the controversial claim that I wanna say. Maybe those employment types that provide the highest social benefit, those should be the ones that get the best pay. And those jobs that have the you know the lowest ratio of benefit to cost, well, those should get the lowest pay. Maybe that is what Architas is saying.
00:52:37
Speaker
Now, I will give you a little bit of support for this idea. He doesn't anywhere directly say this, but let me give you this quote. It's kind of a long quote. And tell me if you don't get this vibe. Quote, once calculation was discovered,
00:52:54
Speaker
It stopped discord and increased concord for people to not want more than their fair share. And equality exists once this has come into being. Let me pause right here. What he's saying is that once a way for quantifying social benefit is developed, we can all see what is truly fair to receive and give. Once I figure out, once you actually show me data and says, hey, this is how much benefit for society your job and curse.
00:53:26
Speaker
Well, then I will be okay with getting the commensurate pay. That's Architist. Maybe he's being a little ah naive or maybe a little idealistic. ah Quixotic is another word for that. um But that's what he says. Once we see what we actually bring to society, we will be okay with the sort of you know pay or the fair share that we ought to deserve based on that.
00:53:54
Speaker
Alright, let me keep going here with the quote. for by means of calculation we will seek reconciliation in our dealings with each other through this then the poor received from the powerful and the wealthy give to the needy both in confidence that they will have what is fair on account of this So there's definitely some sort of redistribution of wealth or some method by which we can make proportionate what we get based off what we give. This is clearly a radical idea. In fact, some might even you know accuse it of being some kind of utopian idea. And well, when we talk about utopia, there's two types of utopia, right? There's a utopian thinking where it's just never gonna happen, right? It's completely impossible.
00:54:42
Speaker
But there's also utopian thinking that is just trying to improve society, not in a complete and total overhaul, right? But just a couple of policies here and there that might kind of get things moving in a better direction. It might be the case that architects would respond that his type of utopian thinking is the second type. He's not trying to overhaul the entire system. He's trying to put in place some policies that make things, well, at least the way he considers them, more proportionate, more harmonious. And so, Arquitas here is giving us some really interesting ideas because this is combining ethics and political philosophy.
00:55:27
Speaker
I mean, clearly he's saying that if we want society in general to flourish, we need to structure it the right way. And one of those ways is by making it harmonious when it comes to how much we benefit society, how much our employment type benefits society. So these are very interesting ideas that get us to think about maybe becoming more active, more proactive in attempting to bring about laws that are going to help everyone flourish.
00:55:56
Speaker
I'm not saying it has to be the law that I basically just invented that I put in the mouth of architects, but maybe something in that direction is what architects are suggesting.
00:56:22
Speaker
All right, so that's Archytis on maybe fiscal policy or or on money in general. Let's talk about Archytis' views on the law. He said that the law should not be inscribed on temples or doors, but rather in the characters of the citizens, right? So the way I interpret this is that, you know, something you don't want to be reminded of.
00:56:47
Speaker
There are some ideas, some aspects of your everyday life that you want to basically internalize so that you completely, here's a psychological piece of jargon, so you completely operationalize them, right? They are just the way that you see reality. the way They're the way you function. They're just part of your operating system, basically. And so let me give you kind of a weird example of this.
00:57:16
Speaker
But there is plenty of evidence that mindfulness meditation improves your anxiety levels. It helps with working memory. It helps with stress. So for those reasons, lots of people want to meditate. And so they get these meditation apps that, you know, they just kind of give you little reminders to sit down and and meditate for a little bit.
00:57:41
Speaker
But I've actually spoken to some Buddhist scholars and they tell me that this is exactly missing the point. I mean, to get an app to remind you to be mindful is not really training yourself to be mindful.
00:58:00
Speaker
If your app has to do it for you, it's not you doing the mindfulness, right? So you need to train your mind itself to, on its own, seek to be present. If you are just relying on an app, you are not really moving closer to training yourself to being mindful.
00:58:23
Speaker
and so That's kind of what I feel architects are saying with regards to the law. We should be habituated into the law. We need to find the law intuitive. and you know What's not a good way to do that?
00:58:37
Speaker
to make the law so complicated that you don't really even understand it. Or it's so many laws that you have to look things up because there's no way you can memorize that, right? So perhaps what Architos is saying here is that we want to obituate our citizens into following the law and maybe a necessary ingredient in that habituation is that the law not be so complicated. i mean Currently, the laws are so complicated in some domains that we just need lawyers to understand them and we pay them to to do that for us. right It gets so complicated that people typically hire
00:59:18
Speaker
you know, whether it be a lawyer or a paralegal or something like that, to work through inheritance laws, right? Or if they want to make a fund for their family, a trust fund, or if they want to get divorced. It's so complicated that any little mistake doesn't really work out and you have to start all over, or it doesn't actually do what you wanted it to do.
00:59:44
Speaker
And so this seems to be running against the spirit of the law. This seems to be the opposite of what Architists wants. He wants it to be such that we can internalize it. It doesn't have to be easy to internalize. or There could still be a degree of complexity, sure. and But the amount of complexity there is currently in our laws, I don't think Architists would approve of. It needs to be something that we internalize, operationalize.
01:00:12
Speaker
Okay, how do we get people to follow the law? Well, architects seem to think that shame, social shame, is better than monetary fines or punishment.
01:00:25
Speaker
So this goes against what other philosophers of the time period thought. A generation after Architists, Aristotle would say that, you know, fear of punishment, at least for most people, that's what's necessary to get people to follow the law. Well, Architists are saying, not punishment, just shame, just Get people to realize that when they break the law, they are disrupting the social order. They are taking society out of its harmonious state. You are throwing society out of balance by doing what you're doing, by breaking the laws in this way.
01:01:09
Speaker
In this sense, I think that Architas is a little bit closer to maybe some Eastern societies than Western societies. In Eastern societies, maybe Japan is a good example of this, there is a real emphasis in social order and social harmony.
01:01:29
Speaker
I was recently in Japan. And if you get into their their metro system, it's just dead silence in there because Japanese people, especially in Tokyo, they consider loud speaking in public spaces to be disruptive and uncurdious. And so they don't do it. And I literally mean they don't do it. Imagine getting into a New York subway and expecting silence. I mean, that's that's bonkers. It's completely crazy. It's not going to happen.
01:01:59
Speaker
That's exactly what happens in Tokyo. And so this is, I think, something that architects would approve of. just Tuning people to feel shame if they are disrupting social harmony, that's the key to do things. You don't need punishment. That just brutalizes a society. That just gets people to thinking that the way to fix everything is by punishment. Instead, we should just invoke our social emotions like shame, like embarrassment, to try to get everyone to you know behave in the right way. It's the soft stick, not the hard stick.
01:02:37
Speaker
By the way, I did find a couple of studies here that back architists up. I have some studies here from, let's see, Friedman, 1965, Lepper, Aronson, and Carl Smith. These are essentially studies on how it is to get children to learn certain rules. And what they did in these various experiments is that they would try to teach kids a rule, some kind of rule like, hey, don't play with this toy.
01:03:04
Speaker
And they would put them in different threat conditions, right? In the high threat condition, this is, why by the way, why it's such an old study here from 1965, because in the high threat condition, they would essentially insinuate to the children that if you break this rule, they're going to hit you. So that's the high threat condition that probably wouldn't fly anymore. It wouldn't get past an ethics review board.
01:03:29
Speaker
There's also the low threat condition. the you know Basically, we're not going to be very happy with you if you break this rule. And we won't have to not let you play with this toy anymore if we catch you.
01:03:44
Speaker
So there's at least those two conditions, high threat and low threat. And they wanted to see which of the children would come back you know a couple of weeks later and still follow the rule. Is it the high threat children, the ones who are basically threatened with getting beaten if they played with a toy? Or is it the low threat children, the ones but that were just told, hey, I don't want you to play with this. Please don't do so. I might have to take it away with from you if you end up playing with it. too Well, according to all of the studies mentioned here, it's actually the low threat condition that gets people to internalize a rule. A couple of weeks later, when the children were retested, those that went through the low threat condition were more likely to stick by the rule, even when they're given an opportunity to you know to cheat, right to play without the researchers looking. So low threat conditions do seem to be the way and
01:04:40
Speaker
to get people to internalize a rule, at least according to these studies. So in that sense, maybe archetypes is right. Punishment is probably not the right way to go if at all possible. We should try to tune our culture so that shame is generated when social rules are broken and that we should be more attuned to you know not wanting to feel shame.
01:05:05
Speaker
So whatever procedures and steps and acculturation happened in Tokyo, that maybe according to architists should be studied because that's what we should duplicate in other societies. And again, to drive the point home,
01:05:22
Speaker
Architists thinks that this type of social structure will lead to flourishing for all, right? It's a social structure that relies on social emotions instead of punishment to get people to do the right things. The last thing I want to mention here are the views of Architists on freedom.
01:05:44
Speaker
According to Architas, there are three types of freedom. There is the one that was very obvious in his day, not being a slave, right? If you are not a slave, then that's one kind of freedom. Obviously, it is undesirable to be a slave, and although it's not the case that Architas argued for the abolition of slavery, or maybe we just don't know that he did, but it seems like he he didn't.
01:06:09
Speaker
He was kind to slaves, and he definitely thought that that is not a good condition to be in. And maybe that's all we can ask for in this time period. Nonetheless, he wants us to try to develop the two other types of freedom, right? So here is the second type of freedom.
01:06:27
Speaker
Self-sufficiency, right? This is exactly what I was mentioning earlier. We want our our city, our society, to be free from needing other cities. We ought to be autonomous in the sense that everything that we need, we can generate within our own borders. So he obviously thought that that was also a good thing. But last and certainly not least, there is a third type of freedom.
01:06:56
Speaker
Once you have a body politic that is self-sufficient, that is what enables individual citizens in that society to be self-sufficient. In other words, to be free from excess desire.
01:07:16
Speaker
According to Architists, this is in part what it means to flourish. You need to have your emotions, your passions under control. You are not a slave to every single desire that crosses your mind. Some people are. Some people, as soon as they get an impulse to get on social media to procrastinate doing some assignment or um watch funny cat videos instead of you know working on this big project that they have due at their office. Or instead of working out, they go ahead and have a snack instead, right? Some of us, unfortunately, we're just kind of too beholden by our desires. As soon as we feel one, we we go for it. We just kind of give in to it.
01:08:06
Speaker
and architects are saying that, A, we don't want that to be the case, and B, this is, you know, a kind of freedom that you can develop within yourself and it is not separate from developing a just society. The right society will enable citizens to do this. So there it is again, this influence of the Pythagorean Brotherhood, right the community matters, and we should design our communities such that they enable the best in us, including this kind of self-sufficiency, being free from excess desire. Architist has this interesting analogy. He says that this mastery of our desires and feelings
01:08:53
Speaker
You need to train for it. It's a little bit like athletes overcoming physical challenges through you know training for the Olympics or whatever. This takes a long time and you can't just start by taking on your biggest desires and saying, I'm going to overcome them. You have to start small, just like you wouldn't begin training for a marathon by running 20 miles. You have to first start with one mile, in many cases, right? Bring it up to two, three. You go, I think you're supposed to go by 20% every week or so. That's what Archets is saying about our mastery of our passions.
01:09:33
Speaker
Start with the little ones, then go on to the middle size ones. The big ones, you just have to wait till the end. And don't worry, you're improving along the way. But if you go right for the big ones right away, those big entrenched habits that we have, the bad habits that we wanna get rid of,
01:09:52
Speaker
you might fail because those have been probably reinforced for an entire lifetime. And so if you try to go at those right away, you won't have the stamina, the mental fortitude that it takes to take them on. So there is this gradual you know overload idea, right? You gradually get to your to the desired level of mastery.
01:10:15
Speaker
So if we were to teleport Architists to our modern age, what would he say about some of our desires and our lack of control of them? Well, I think one thing you would definitely talk about is probably our excessive use of social media based on the literature that I've been reading on this. Some people spend, you know, seven, eight hours on their devices per day, and most of that time is on social media platforms.
01:10:47
Speaker
There are also cases of addiction to social media where you spend most of your waking time on these platforms. What we do know from the work of Jonathan Haidt that this is totally, absolutely not good for your mental well-being.
01:11:06
Speaker
This also, from the work of Marianne Wolf, is bad for your cognitive strength, if you want to call it that. Basically, your ability to focus on things deeply gets diminished the more time you spend on social media. That's because you spend your time on these platforms continuously looking for stimulation, right?
01:11:30
Speaker
It turns out that most of the things that are challenging in life, they're just not that immediately rewarding. But you're training yourself to always be getting that immediate reward. And so things that take time like, oh, I don't know, writing an essay or learning a new skill, you begin to decrease your degree of cognitive patience for these things. You want the quick fix all the time.
01:11:57
Speaker
And these are obviously bad. And I think architects would probably say something about these. These are unnatural and unnecessary desires, clearly excess desire. Here in the States, it's also the case that many people are overweight. And so this instinctive eating of unhealthy food is maybe something that architects would touch on.
01:12:22
Speaker
What I mean by this instinct of eating is that many of us get into these sort of habit loops and that leads us to unhealthy snacking. For example, maybe you eat unhealthy snacks when you feel anxious or you eat unhealthy snacks when you're bored. And because of this, obviously there is a widespread weight problem.
01:12:45
Speaker
What architects would, you know, have us do and is probably break some of these habit loops. If you feel anxious, then you have to, well, sure, that's a bad feeling, but eating unhealthy food is probably not going to help out in the long run.
01:13:03
Speaker
So you want to find ways to break these loops of behaviors, especially when, you know, they don't really bring the results that you want. I'm not sure anyone has ever been bored and then eaten an unhealthy snack and thought to themselves, well, I'm not bored at all anymore. I think it just leads to some other activity to try to get rid of your boredom.
01:13:25
Speaker
One more example of being controlled by desire that I will mention is a very modern problem. This is something that was only possible beginning maybe in the 80s. But I'm talking here about video game addiction.
01:13:41
Speaker
This is a real thing. In fact, in some countries, the government has found it necessary to tax people after a certain amount of video game usage. It's, I think, in a couple of Asian countries that's going on, but you can check that out for yourself. What I want to focus on here is that I think architects would definitely see this as your desires being in control of you, right? If you are playing video games so much that you're not getting schoolwork done, you're not making friends in, quote unquote, the real world, you are not holding a steady job, this is clearly desire winning, right? You are being controlled by your passions.
01:14:27
Speaker
And you know I think architects would say, you need to rein them in here. This is excessive desire. And so to sum up, architects, ah here is roughly the way I see it. And I think looking at it through the lens of freedom is very helpful. As I mentioned before, he probably thought slavery was bad and he was kind to slaves, meaning he had, I think, maybe some kind of basic opposition to it.
01:14:54
Speaker
But the two things that we focused on the most in this little talk on Architas is how he thought we should try to make society harmonious and balanced, and that this would lead to the benefit of every citizen within that society.
01:15:11
Speaker
And once you do this, once you create some kind of proportionality in society, that's when you allow or enable, as a better way to put it, the individual citizens within that society to develop self-sufficiency, to master their desires, to get self-control. And so it's all interlinked. As I mentioned before, this is a slightly utopian idea, but maybe it's a kind of utopianism that is somewhat defensible.
01:15:42
Speaker
Speaking of utopianism, the ideas of architects and the ideas of the Pythagorean Brotherhood in general are going to influence quite a few people in this time period. and These utopian ideas, this idea that we have to figure out how to optimally structure society,
01:16:05
Speaker
These, in particular, will be prevalent in the philosophy of one of the friends of Architas. The philosopher that I have in mind was a student of Socrates, much like Xenophon that we covered last time, and he traveled three times to southern Italy to learn about the Pythagorean Brotherhood and to meet with Architas.
01:16:30
Speaker
In fact, there was some kind of host-friend relationship, an official host-friend relationship between Architas and this philosopher I'm talking about. And you can definitely see that for this man, after he came into contact with the Pythagorean Brotherhood and Architas, his philosophy changed subtly at first and then more and more.
01:16:57
Speaker
This philosopher that I'm speaking of, I've actually already mentioned him once before in this lesson, his name was Plato. And it might be the case that the legacy of architects is best reflected in the influence he had on his friend Plato. In Plato, we see several Pythagorean ideas, the way Plato organizes school.
01:17:24
Speaker
was in some ways according to the communal way of life that the Pythagoreans engaged in. We also, as I mentioned earlier, saw that Pythagoras himself was shrouded in myth. Well, we're going to see Plato's philosophy also having various mythological elements. In some cases, he even, instead of giving us arguments for a position, he just writes up a little myth. And perhaps most tellingly,
01:17:52
Speaker
In developing his philosophy, Plato finds it useful to engage in utopian thinking. By thinking about what the perfect community is like, he figures out how it is that we should live. But a word of warning, many people who are unfamiliar with Plato's ideas are probably not expecting what they get when they read Plato.
01:18:21
Speaker
Whereas, architects may be coming up with individual policies to improve society. Plato is going to engage in a radical overhaul in one version of his perfect city. Everyone over the age of 10 is banished and we start completely fresh.
01:18:45
Speaker
the whole society is structured in order to enable an elite group of thinkers through the study of mathematics to come to know reality as it really is, to truly have wisdom, to live the philosophical life. And once they gain this secret knowledge, they have complete and total control over the city because they will know best.
01:19:13
Speaker
these philosopher kings.