The Auron MacIntyre Show - Did Plato Predict the Coming of Christ？｜ Guest： Ronald Dodson ｜ 6⧸29⧸26

00:00:00 Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:07 We talk a lot on this channel about the problems of universalism versus particularism, but that's only one of many different types of metaphysical tension that our society is currently facing.

00:00:20 Yes, this is all very complicated. Yes, at some level it's kind of esoteric, but this is the kind of channel where we talk about these things.

00:00:27 we engage with the philosophy we engage with the theory behind this whole thing and my friend rod

00:00:33 dodson just gave a fantastic speech that i saw and when i saw that i said ron we have to have you on

00:00:39 we have to have a conversation about this we're going to go all over the place so i'm not even

00:00:43 going to try to uh kind of wrap up the description of the talk entirely in one byline but i think you

00:00:50 guys are going to enjoy this a lot so ron thank you so much for coming on man i'm so excited that

00:00:56 you asked me to be on. This is a bit of a passion project for me, and I really enjoy the topic.

00:01:03 I think it's something, maybe not for everyone, but for those who are interested in the deeper

00:01:11 things, I do think it's exciting and not dry, dusty, and just for the graduate-level classroom.

00:01:21 well like i was saying to you before we came on uh you know this is a channel where we spent a lot

00:01:27 of time reading uh guys like nick land and tried to decode his work so if there's one audience

00:01:33 that's ready to hang in there and uh go deep into the weeds with you it's definitely these guys so

00:01:38 i think you've come to the right place to delve into issues like this so that said uh you know

00:01:44 the title of your talk here is the metaphysical tension being becoming physics versus nomos nature

00:01:50 versus convention universals versus historicism and the ditch on the other side of the road so

00:01:56 the good news is brevity was not what you were aiming for there uh but but but we are going to

00:02:02 touch on all of these issues i'm just going to kind of walk through uh the presentation as uh

00:02:09 you you kind of explain a little bit and i'll be asking clarifying questions as we go so that said

00:02:14 why don't you kick us off what are we talking about here well it's two plus two equals four

00:02:22 it's something that you learn at the very beginning of school something that is true

00:02:28 everywhere and always and it's simple and it just establishes that there is reality that isn't

00:02:38 subject to your whim or wish. And the other picture is that of a cup of coffee. I've got one

00:02:45 right here, which is as fleeting. I mean, this cup right here by the halfway through our talk

00:02:55 will be tepid. And I'll drink it anyway, because my throat gets dry. But it's fleeting. It's

00:03:03 momentary. It is completely dependent upon the situation. It is the epitome of historical,

00:03:12 and then it's gone. As Stephen King might say, the Langoliers are quick to eat it. 1.00

00:03:17 And so those are just kind of, in a kindergarten sense, the two ends of the spectrum between 1.00

00:03:25 what we might call, in a cheap way, universal truth versus radical historicity.

00:03:33 and i think a lot of times people get tied up having to be in one camp or the other which is

00:03:40 why i really enjoyed your presentation because this is something i am always struggling to try

00:03:46 to get people to kind of grasp that yes like these universal eternal higher truths are critical

00:03:52 there's no taking away from that i'm not a relativist i don't it's not that i don't think

00:03:57 they exist but in our western tradition that seems or at least it may be perhaps better to say

00:04:03 in an anglo tradition that tends to be where the focus lies as where a lot of people will then

00:04:09 sneer it's a continental philosophy something like phenomenology and they will say oh well

00:04:15 that's only talking about this experience and that's you know that's what matters and so that

00:04:20 that's that's bad philosophy because it doesn't focus only on the higher things and i think the

00:04:26 answer that you come to as we roll through this is that both matter that both are critical that

00:04:31 we are beings that exist in both worlds, and trying to isolate one or the other leaves us

00:04:38 with lesser knowledge. But obviously, you have a lot to say about that, so I'll let you get into

00:04:44 it here. Well, all this slide does is take it up a notch. And so we have, as the viewers are

00:04:53 looking on their left, that's the graphical representation of the Pythagorean theorem.

00:04:58 and again it's more complex than two plus two equals four but once you look at it and perceive

00:05:05 its truth as the classic classical thinkers did it speaks to a at least I'll just to me I remember

00:05:16 the first time I saw it depicted this way and it really spoke to me this longing for permanence

00:05:22 that I think is bound up in the soul of man. And there's a capital T truth there that is

00:05:32 beautifully depicted. And it spoke, it certainly spoke to Plato and his contemporaries and those

00:05:42 who came just before him as to speaking again to this permanence. I want to stay away a little bit

00:05:51 from universal, although that's true. It's true everywhere and always. And then on the other side 1.00

00:05:57 is something that is completely and utterly fleeting, even though it speaks to that which

00:06:05 is universal. And it's just, this happens to depict a particle accelerator, a particle smashing into

00:06:14 one another and there's uh this is the graphical representation of one of the earliest uh pieces

00:06:21 of evidence of materialized evidence for the higgs boson and uh you know we can you know i don't get

00:06:30 me off into those weeds we we will we'll be here for four hours we don't have time for particle

00:06:34 physics ron we can't we don't there but it's but the point is again something that speaks to

00:06:39 a universal permanence versus something that happens within you know a microsecond

00:06:45 so yeah and yeah you know I don't want to sit here and read the read the presentation but it's

00:06:55 true human life exists in uh from that which is being imposed from above or capital T truth that

00:07:05 our lives are bounded by. Gravity exists. If my heart stops beating, I will die. And then

00:07:17 the phenomenal things, the love I have for my kids, which changes every day, but as they grow

00:07:27 and get older, now they're grown and it's different than it was yesterday. But if we focus on either

00:07:33 one of those, if we take either one of those to the extreme and camp out there, there's

00:07:40 a ditch that's hard to get out of.

00:07:42 And that's kind of really the topic of the conversation.

00:07:46 We ask questions about the permanent so that we can apply them to the phenomenal, to the

00:07:54 here and now.

00:07:56 Yeah, and again, I think this is so important because we see the incredible just advancements

00:08:02 and all of the wonders that kind of having this understanding of the wider world and how it works

00:08:08 and how it functions its laws you know these things all are of course real and important

00:08:13 but we have focused so much in the modern world on perhaps mastering those structures and those

00:08:21 understandings that we have then robbed the moment the day to day the actual lived life

00:08:28 of meaning but then we have the opposite problem where so many of kind of these post-modern

00:08:34 philosophers and others have gone the other direction and they want to focus so much on

00:08:39 kind of the moment uh the lived life the direct experience that they deny even the existence of

00:08:46 this like larger truth that binds the world together and so again like that's what i liked

00:08:51 so much about your topic here, your talk, is that it's holding those things in suspension with each

00:08:59 other. It's not saying we only focus on one, the existence of one denies the other. We have to

00:09:05 recognize that we are integrating these two things. We are not separating them for the advantage of

00:09:11 analysis. Right. And part of my passion for this is there's always going to be schools of thought

00:09:19 or happenstance that are going to pull you to one extreme or the other. On the right, especially

00:09:25 because of the abuses of, say, the neocons or the neoliberal universalists that want to, you know,

00:09:36 that happiness is a Starbucks on every corner of Afghanistan, we immediately turn to such

00:09:46 particularity that um we forget maybe some of these you know whether like i said here uh is

00:09:53 justice real what does justice mean you know and that uh the classics dealt with these things and

00:10:02 but but so do the analytical philosophers what do these things mean so this is just

00:10:07 Parmenides and Heraclitus being and becoming is reality completely this ontos, this ontological

00:10:19 eternal reality. I'm going to, hey, if you're a philosophy bro, be prepared to be frustrated

00:10:29 because whatever thing I gloss over, you're going to, yeah, but you didn't say this.

00:10:35 hey, look, I can't say everything everywhere all the time. So just be prepared. We're on ice

00:10:42 skates. We're not in an easy chair. We're moving fast. We're becoming. And so the other is,

00:10:48 is everything flux? And the answer is yes. It's both.

00:10:55 and so the the Israelites and hey look I know there's a lot of folks who are maybe self-described

00:11:06 pagans or atheists I'm just I'm going to tell you I'm coming from a I'm a devout Christian

00:11:13 I I hopefully can look at things in a way that respects those who don't have that belief system

00:11:22 but realize I'm going to pull my prepositions, my presuppositions are formed by that.

00:11:30 And so there's, just hear me out, but Moses in the burning bush, we hear this as this,

00:11:37 is it a mythical story? What's going on here? But it was dealing, look, either, you know,

00:11:45 God is approaching the Israelites in this very same issue, this very same frame of being and

00:11:54 becoming, because here is a bush that's very natural, that's very, in theory, very historic.

00:12:03 It grows and it dies. Matter of fact, the word we get that we translate natural is physis,

00:12:10 and it comes from the idea of how a plant grows. That's its etymological root. And yet,

00:12:18 and here is the very expression, one of the stoicheia, fire, and it's not burning it up.

00:12:25 So there's this being and becoming all wrapped up in how God, Yahweh, I am that I am,

00:12:33 appears to Moses. And so the point is, is whether you believe that story is true or not, I do,

00:12:41 but for those of you who don't realize this being and becoming thing isn't a question that just the

00:12:47 Greeks are thinking of. 800 to 1,000 years before that, this very thing is occurring to the

00:12:55 Israelites, the descendants of the Abrahamic thing. By the way, although I am a Christian, 0.92

00:13:04 I don't think all of reality is bound up in the Hebrews, Israelites, Jews, three names for

00:13:11 similar covenantal people. The Noahic covenant, from a Christian standpoint, is still going on

00:13:17 all over the world, and God is dealing with people in interesting ways all over. So I don't

00:13:24 think that we're going to veer off into uh uh israelite theology because that's not the point

00:13:29 here well and really interesting you know no spoilers here i'm sure we'll get into it more

00:13:35 in detail but isn't that really the story of jesus himself right it is the imminent and the

00:13:41 transcendent meeting right it is that moment where that which uh you know is above and is eternal

00:13:47 becomes real and embodied and that is what creates the salvation that is what creates the very faith

00:13:54 that you and I hold, that our civilization was built on, is this moment of that meeting

00:13:59 beginning somewhere in the burning bush, but really manifesting itself truly in the figure

00:14:04 of Christ.

00:14:05 Well, and this is the story of all the prophets. All the prophets are dealing with this question

00:14:12 of this tension of lived life in the face of eternal truth, and that is uncomfortable.

00:14:19 um change uh flux uh becoming is uncomfortable but so is if if if if certain truths are real

00:14:31 regardless uh then that means i'm i'm accountable to them and that's uncomfortable too and those

00:14:37 who tried to tie these ideas together uh often died at the hands of the city yeah yeah yeah

00:14:44 so this is stoicheia is a fancy Greek word that means the elemental principles and this is how

00:14:53 they were understood are fire earth air and water and the ancients believed that these were the

00:15:00 basic elements along with the these celestial beings being the the wanderers planetos so the

00:15:13 The moon, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, those things that could be seen with the naked

00:15:21 eye along with these four elements basically controlled the world.

00:15:28 And so Paul deals with this in the New Testament.

00:15:31 He speaks directly to this.

00:15:32 He said, we're coming to a new age, and that's no longer the case.

00:15:36 And so did the Greek philosophers.

00:15:38 They knew a change was coming.

00:15:43 So, just so, in case you don't know, this is just, these were all contemporaries. Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi are the guys who finish up the biblical Old Testament, literally the end of the Book of the Twelve, which forms the Minor Prophets.

00:16:03 They're writing from 520 to, call it, 430 BC, and Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato

00:16:12 are rough contemporaries. Plato is a little bit later, but he just uses Socrates as his muse,

00:16:22 so to speak. So these ideas that are this prophetic change that is coming over all the world of how

00:16:30 mankind sees himself in light of being and becoming of of of of the historic and the

00:16:38 transcendent or the eternal uh this is happening all over the world so to speak

00:16:44 so plato's it's considered his greatest work uh athenian stranger and i both think that that's

00:16:55 really laws, but most people know, at least know of, uh, Politeia or how we, we translate it the

00:17:01 Republic. It begins with this question that every regime, every political ordering, uh, wants to

00:17:09 avoid. And that is what is justice? And we're like, oh gosh, justice. And see this, this is part of the

00:17:15 issue is justice has been taken over as a word, uh, by the social justice war, uh, warriors. We think

00:17:22 that justice is some type of left-leaning idea. And justice just is the Greek word dikaio. There's

00:17:32 this fancy D-I-K word group in Greek that's dike, which means right, as in right and wrong,

00:17:39 dikaio, dikaio, if you want to be real technical about it, of justice or justified, dikaios,

00:17:48 and dikaiosune, which means righteousness. All these things are bound together. And Plato,

00:17:54 these sound like biblical words, and they are, but Plato, these are the words that Plato most

00:17:58 often uses. And it's the question, in the city, when we're all bound together, when we're living

00:18:05 in covenant, and whether you like it or not, if you're in a city, we all have to obey the traffic

00:18:11 signs, and we have priests or the ministers of the law, and they wear the hats and either ride

00:18:19 on motorcycles or in the cars with the lights on them. We're a covenantal people. We are bound

00:18:25 together whether we like it or not, and therefore there must be some standard of justice of that

00:18:32 which is right and wrong. And Plato's dealing with this. What does Athens call justice? Not

00:18:40 And is that truly rooted in good and evil, or is it just whatever the democratic mob wants?

00:18:50 And this is, what's funny is, Socrates is not speaking of just some type of eternal question.

00:18:57 This is very rooted in the history of Athens at the time. They had just lost the Peloponnesian

00:19:02 War. Then there was the time of the 30 tyrants, to which Socrates had some connection to.

00:19:08 and now there's this hyper-democratic ruling class, and Socrates uses that historical reality

00:19:19 to question, well, is right and wrong just what the majority thinks it is? In America,

00:19:26 this is very, very important to our question of who we are right this second as a people.

00:19:33 Heck, the Supreme Court was opining on it today.

00:19:38 And this is so important for people because this requires a frame shift.

00:19:43 If you grew up entirely in a Christian-tinted world, this doesn't occur to you perhaps the same way. 0.86

00:19:49 In the Greek and later Roman traditions, the gods are not necessarily good.

00:19:54 They are not just in the way that we believe that all justice flows from God, that God and the good are one and the same.

00:20:04 This is not true of the Greeks.

00:20:07 And so when you have to ask what is justice, Plato is reasoning his way to something that is not revealed divinely in his religious tradition.

00:20:16 So that's a critical thing for people to grasp.

00:20:18 Yeah, Socrates in book three, beginning of book four, is of the Republic. And when you say book, that's just, call it a chapter. But he's saying that, hey, the Greek god, the pantheon is kind of crazy.

00:20:41 They're just anthropomorphic ideals of how we act.

00:20:49 They lie, they cheat and steal, they cheat on each other, all these kind of things.

00:20:54 And if law is based on right and wrong, then we need to move past that.

00:21:02 And this really frustrated the people of Athens.

00:21:05 So, yeah, Socrates was a pain for Athens. 1.00

00:21:09 He was akin to a Gentile prophet. That's kind of part of my thesis here. And like the Hebrew 1.00

00:21:15 prophets, he was hated in his hometown. The prophets always saw this necessitated and

00:21:23 unavoidable change. Because as my spiritual mentor, a guy named James B. Jordan,

00:21:30 Presbyterian minister, his most famous book, a book called Through New Eyes, highly recommended.

00:21:36 He said the prophets saw with what was coming, not necessarily always in the sense of prophesying all the little details.

00:21:49 Sometimes there was that, but what they saw was God is bringing change, and that is, again, always painful.

00:21:57 So Athens, this is what Socrates is basically proclaiming.

00:22:03 He's doing kind of similar. He's, not to get too specific about it, but he is telling Athens

00:22:14 that their days are over. The Athenian Empire is over. Athens, as the way it's constituted,

00:22:23 is over. Change is coming. And it was. A generation later, Alexander is going to conquer

00:22:32 the entirety of this whole thing and bring in a completely new order and the hyper democrats are

00:22:38 are done so socrates posits the pantheon i apologize for my this was kind of uh for uh 0.77

00:22:46 for uh you know punch in a speech but the pantheon's fake and gay athenian democracy is 0.94

00:22:52 fake and gay homer is fake and gay again and socrates really did appreciate homer from a 0.94

00:22:59 cultural standpoint but he said it didn't speak it didn't proposit justice as being based in right 0.98

00:23:07 or wrong it was a different thing and then he's saying opinion is fake and gay opinion cannot

00:23:13 in and of itself legitimize and this is such an interesting uh point here because homer is

00:23:21 basically the bible for hellenic identity it is absolutely truth it's what they're trying to

00:23:28 body it's who they want to be and so when socrates is attacking this this is like walking into a

00:23:34 christian town and saying jesus was false you know like this is walking in and saying everything

00:23:39 that underlies your belief system your culture your way of life these are wrong these are untrue

00:23:46 these are not moral there is a truth that is higher than this document by which we have defined 0.95

00:23:52 our civilization and uh you can see why uh people wanted to kill him uh because he is a heretic to

00:23:59 his own people in a very significant way yeah this is paul walking into galatians and saying

00:24:04 you don't need to be circumcising anymore right right into galatia not galatians the galatians

00:24:12 of the people okay so so if you if you read that we'll go through this very very quickly because 0.89

00:24:17 But if you read the Republic just on first pass and don't really get into what Plato's trying to do or Socrates is trying to do, it looks like a gay communist manifesto. 0.88

00:24:29 I mean, you've got sharing. 0.99

00:24:32 No one has any private property.

00:24:35 No one gets to, you know, complete sharing of wives, of children.

00:24:42 You're set into you have no choice over what you do for a living.

00:24:46 even the rulers uh if you get picked as if you're a you know uh and and play and socrates makes the

00:24:53 point the problem is the these philosopher kings don't if they if they're into philosophy they

00:24:58 don't really want to be kings and if they're kings they really don't want to worry about philosophy

00:25:02 and and so on and so forth and so uh you've there there's there's this kind of obvious after you've

00:25:10 read it a couple of times, something more is going on here. Socrates is making a point. Again,

00:25:17 it's this prophetic point. He's kind of judging Athens, but you might miss that on first reading

00:25:23 as he's talking about how only certain modes, modes are particular versions of the 12-tone

00:25:32 musical scale. Certain modes only lead, I mean, it's hilarious in its irony,

00:25:38 but you got to get the irony.

00:25:44 Celebrate Canada Day by getting even more for your points.

00:25:48 It's the Super Redemption event at Shoppers Drug Mart,

00:25:51 Friday, June 26th to Wednesday, July 1st.

00:25:54 Valid in-store and online.

00:26:00 Oh, and one of the points of that slide is

00:26:03 Strauss makes the point,

00:26:05 he makes it most clearly in a book called The City and Man,

00:26:08 uh, that you, you notice if you pay attention to the imagery that the entirety ever, I think most

00:26:14 people have heard of Plato's cave or the cave of, of, of the Republic. Strauss makes the observation

00:26:21 that kind of the whole, the entirety of the dialogue takes place in the cave. So it's all

00:26:26 shadow and, and, and that's very compelling to me. So yeah, that's, uh, that's sitting on my

00:26:32 nightstand now. Thanks. Now I have to read more Leo Strauss. I appreciate it. Hey, look, I'm, I'm,

00:26:37 i'm just your friend and encourager uh so so anyway the republic is uh is is positing a

00:26:47 political heaven that can't exist in reality because and strauss is the guy who points out

00:26:55 he points this out not as to be some kind of uber snob seeing something no one else is seeing he's

00:27:03 seeing this, trying to provoke a recovery of classical philosophy. But the idea is

00:27:11 there's a reason people call Christianity a platonic philosophy for the masses. There's

00:27:21 much truth to this. The Republic is really positing a political reality that can only happen

00:27:30 once man has been removed of everything that makes him a man here, chiefly his sin nature, 0.69

00:27:37 his, for those who aren't Christian in the audience, his imperfectibility. In other words,

00:27:45 there is nothing that can make a man righteous here on earth that is within himself. It is,

00:27:52 Paul says this, but so does Plato, righteousness or living in the right with your fellow citizen

00:28:01 can only be done in an alien way. It's an alien righteousness. In other words,

00:28:07 it has to be pointed outside yourself. So along comes Strauss, the big villain

00:28:15 for a lot of, uh, for, for a lot, again, you know, and, and full disclosure, I write for

00:28:22 the Claremont Institute, which is a Straussian thing. And, and I, and I, uh, and I owe a lot

00:28:28 to those guys. They've been very, very good to me and published me. Um, and, and, and I'm not a

00:28:34 full bore Straussian, but I, I have, I really appreciate Strauss and this is why. So let me,

00:28:41 let me uh give give people a little bit of uh cred for you here when i was doing my uh speech

00:28:47 and my eventual episode of the show that was critical in strauss in many ways i came to you

00:28:53 to verify the information so ron is fair on this like even if you're coming with you know some

00:28:59 skepticism about strauss he will tell you the truth about where strauss is coming up short uh

00:29:04 so you know yes he's a fan of strauss but i you know i trust ron enough that when i am being

00:29:09 critical of Strauss, I go to Ron to verify those facts, so. I'm not, well, that's very kind of you,

00:29:15 and I'm not going to go through this entire slide because we'd really get in the weeds, but

00:29:21 what, but it's the part of Strauss, I'm a Christian, and Strauss was an atheistic Jew,

00:29:30 So we have some presuppositional issues there where I find Strauss very profitable, whether you agree with him or not, is his academic, his scholarship is outstanding.

00:29:45 He is maybe one of the greatest readers of the classics, at least the reading I've done.

00:29:54 He's a very detailed reader.

00:29:59 An important mentor of mine said, hey, read your—and most of my writing before I, you know, earlier on in my writing was all biblical theology.

00:30:12 and the guy who was my mentor said, read your Bible the way Strauss reads Plato and Machiavelli.

00:30:19 In other words, read with detail. So if you read Strauss, what you're getting mostly is,

00:30:26 does he do some actual philosophizing? Yes, but what he's really doing is commentating on

00:30:34 these great texts, and he's a fantastic reader, whether you agree with his conclusions or not.

00:30:42 So I find that important. And then I do think, and we'll get into this in a minute, his recovery, his attempted recovery of classical political philosophy is something I find incredibly important.

00:30:57 um again whether you agree with all his conclusions or not that is something that

00:31:03 I'm fully on board with and that's the part of the Straussian project that I am uh I am I'll

00:31:10 I'll wave the flag for that part so here's the Straussian move and I I I think this is cool and

00:31:19 this is so to give a little bit I'm going to go really fast but what in when Socrates comes into

00:31:26 onto the scene he does this sock what's called uh his turn and but before Socrates the philosophers

00:31:37 were natural philosophers they were coming up with the Pythagorean theorem and the arguing of

00:31:43 being and becoming and and considering uh eternal causes and and all these things and and what

00:31:50 Socrates really, or at least Plato's version of Socrates, is there is this turn to the human

00:31:59 things, and the idea is that if it's almost as though, yes, metaphysics are important, but we

00:32:09 have to ground them in the reliability of our perception. Even though man is flawed, what

00:32:17 Christians would say man is sinful and has a sin nature. All we have is that which we can perceive,

00:32:24 and this is what the later, this was moved away from later, and that's, we'll talk about that in

00:32:30 a second, but Socrates wanted to focus on how do we live together and discover what is natural,

00:32:41 in other words, by what we can perceive and observe and see how people relate. In other words,

00:32:47 Uh, what is it that we all consider? Is there something to be, uh, can we reason towards good

00:32:54 and evil? And sometimes yes, and sometimes no. Uh, and, and so on and so forth. And that's his

00:33:01 quest. Well, Strauss saw this same mechanism going on in philosophy, uh, particularly post

00:33:10 Kant. And you saw it in the, in the idea was that we were turning so inward, particularly with

00:33:20 Nietzsche and then Heidegger and his Strauss's most famous work, although it's, it's not my

00:33:25 particular favorite is it was a response to being in time. It's called natural right in history.

00:33:31 Even the title is kind of an answer to Heidegger's being in time. And he wanted to return

00:33:37 to classical political philosophy, to these human things, these human questions, rather than

00:33:45 a philosophy, particularly in Heidegger and then, you know, Sartre and so on and so forth, that

00:33:51 really question our ability to judge reality. In other words, is reality chiefly on the inside or

00:34:00 is reality chiefly on the outside? And you even see this, Nick Land deals with this. He's, when

00:34:07 his previous Twitter handle was outsideness before he lost his password. I think that's

00:34:13 what happened and became xenocosmography. But it's this radical understanding of is reality

00:34:20 determined outside of me? Is it alien or is it determined inside of me? And Strauss's argument

00:34:27 echoing Socrates and Plato was, well, if it's inside of me, none of these questions really

00:34:33 matter there can't be a right and wrong or a good and evil this these biblical questions these grand

00:34:41 political uh questions because ultimately it's all determined in here uh and again and that's

00:34:49 husserl and and and again way too much to talk about maybe we can do another show on some of

00:34:55 those things but that's where strauss is really saying no we need to recover and being in time

00:35:00 is kind of like theology without god i've heard uh michael seguru called it that and i look look

00:35:06 go watch michael seguru's youtubes so good on uh on plato on heidegger on husserl

00:35:15 on aristotle fantastic stuff he just died a couple of years ago but a great great stuff on all that

00:35:21 um but but that's where strauss i find very very uh that's the straussian part of the project that

00:35:28 that I find very helpful is, no, we need to recover this part of the political philosophy

00:35:35 project. And you can see why many were ready to embrace Strauss as some kind of hedge against

00:35:43 postmodernism, a regrounding in a way that did not emphasize just how you feel, what you're

00:35:50 experiencing, the all truth is inner truth, these kinds of things. That's right. And so for the

00:35:58 guys who've never really read any of this stuff or consider any of this stuff, philosophy just

00:36:02 means love and pursuit of wisdom. It is rooted, it's part of the Edenic story. The tree of the

00:36:11 knowledge of good and evil is about wisdom. Philosophy has become kind of a Paganini of the

00:36:23 mind, just the ability to logic and critical think, and that's really a separate thing from

00:36:31 classical philosophy. Classical philosophy is particularly classical political philosophy,

00:36:38 and the Bible is very political. Don't let anyone tell you it's not. It is absolutely,

00:36:43 the body of Christ is a political body. But it is this love, as Plato would say, an eros,

00:36:54 a passionate love towards wisdom, the understanding of what is right and wrong, of good and evil.

00:37:02 And yet we know even in why, you know, in the Edenic story, Adam and Eve are punished for

00:37:10 eating this apple to attain this knowledge of good and evil before their time well there's a

00:37:15 sense in which it's only for the mature if if you're really questioning these things you know

00:37:21 the immature wants all the cookies right now you want to live for ice ice cream for every meal man

00:37:28 let's sharpen a stick at both ends and rule the island right uh that's a golding uh lord of the

00:37:36 flies reference. Um, and, and, but the mature says, no, I've got to live at peace with the people

00:37:43 around me. And there's an ordering to that. You see this Christ reveals this in the, in, uh, you

00:37:49 know, the golden rule, um, uh, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. You know, how, how

00:37:54 about you just treat people the way you would like to be treated? And that's justice. That's right.

00:38:01 And so don't think of rights. Think of what is right in the sense of what is right and wrong.

00:38:08 And then wisdom is not intelligent, just merely intelligence, technical competence.

00:38:13 It's the right understanding. It's the right application of good and evil.

00:38:17 It's ultimately morality grows out of this.

00:38:27 So knowledge, these are just the building blocks so that you can get to this.

00:38:31 knowledge is it's hard to be mature unless you know stuff okay unless uh unless you for instance

00:38:41 i write on a lot of geopolitical stuff at claremont and and uh and and for uh responsible

00:38:49 statecraft if i'm not doing my homework to understand the happenings in for instance right

00:38:55 now in the middle east and all the players and what are their motivations i'm not going to be

00:38:59 very wise when I try to put thoughts together. I'm just going to, it's going to be mere opinion,

00:39:05 right? Well, we should just, you know, blow all of Iran up. Well, that would be impossible 1.00

00:39:11 and have really bad consequences, and it probably would be evil. So knowledge is just the building

00:39:19 blocks so that you can get to a point of having wisdom. And then, again, this assumes that reality

00:39:27 as perceived is reality. Now, do I know when I look here at my screen and I see the bearded guy

00:39:34 looking at me right here, I know that's just pixels, right? But I know that's Oren, and he's

00:39:42 sitting, you know, in a different time zone. I know I can really trust that that's him or can I,

00:39:49 you know, and if you get to a point where you question even that, then politically, covenantally,

00:39:57 you're kind of useless, because then nothing has any meaning, and that's the thing we have to guard

00:40:03 against. So, and then the last thing, good is the proper object of wisdom. For Plato in the Republic, 0.94

00:40:11 that's the highest principle, and he was moving towards, in book four, he even personifies this,

00:40:16 that can we imagine that the ruler is justice and good personified? That sounds pretty,

00:40:24 that sounds a lot like he's looking for somebody who's without sin right pretty cool i mean i

00:40:31 remember the first time i read that i literally had the hairs on i'm like wait a minute is he

00:40:37 saying what i think he's saying and then he moves quickly but he doesn't have he's not speaking

00:40:42 empowered by the holy spirit as we would understand as christians he's just a gentile trying to

00:40:47 understand these things by looking around them but you know so anyway but you have to believe that

00:40:54 there is a good and that that that has to have some kind of staying power so to speak some

00:41:00 eternality okay we can move on i talked way too much about that that slide sorry well but if you

00:41:07 you know if you're somebody who believes in natural law if you believe that the truth of

00:41:11 christ can be revealed through its creation and through rational exploration then this all makes

00:41:16 perfect sense right like yeah plato is a gentile prophet in the sense that he is somebody who is

00:41:22 able to reason himself into many of the things you know at least the the the vague outlines of

00:41:28 the things that would be revealed through revelation in a mirror dimly his way through

00:41:32 this yeah exactly mirror dimly yeah that's romans one um it's romans one kind of stuff so

00:41:38 and justice and righteousness again try to we've heard these words for so long it's kind of like

00:41:45 the word sin, that it's lost all its meaning, but it's this Greek word dikaiosune. Its root is

00:41:53 dike, and from the Greek goddess of right or justice, and the idea is it's righteousness is,

00:42:06 you can think of it, I am righteous with regards to my wife if I am covenantally faithful to her,

00:42:13 if i take care of her if i provide for if i'm not out running around on her if i'm coming home at

00:42:20 night making sure you know um i'm not i don't want to get into this isn't about you know how to be a

00:42:27 good husband talk but but dikaiosune is this idea especially in in the bible but it's it's it's

00:42:34 hinted at in in in these in this classical political philosophy it's covenantal faithfulness

00:42:40 How do I live rightly with a whole ton of people I've got to be at peace with in the city, acting as this weird organism, as a body?

00:42:52 See 1 Corinthians, where Paul borrows this concept and speaks of it.

00:42:59 But so righteousness or justice is this covenantal faithful.

00:43:05 Am I acting?

00:43:06 Look, if I had somebody, it's pretty obvious.

00:43:08 I office with a bunch of other guys and I have a little window next to my door. If somebody were

00:43:12 to run in here when I'm obviously on this podcast and start screaming and dah, dah, dah, that they

00:43:18 would not be righteous towards me. That would clearly be kind of a jerk move, right? So just 0.99

00:43:24 think of it, think of it that way and then build upon it from there. And for people who think,

00:43:29 Oren, where are we spending time on these terms? I know these words, like, why do we care about

00:43:34 this the answer is very simple remember one of the reasons that you know these words is you learn

00:43:40 them as a child they were indispensable to the world around you but as we've probably learned

00:43:45 i've talked about this before when you learn something young you have to learn it at a low

00:43:50 resolution and as you get older you have to then raise the resolution and what happens to most

00:43:55 people is they learn the most basic things and then they never raise their understanding to an

00:44:00 adult level they think that because they learned it as a child any child can understand it but

00:44:05 actually these are incredibly complex concepts that had to be reduced down to the level that

00:44:11 you could grasp because they're so fundamental to being to your society your society to everything

00:44:16 that you need to be a human that you couldn't skip them so just because you understood a very

00:44:22 shadow of these concepts when you were young does not mean that they are simple and it's important

00:44:28 because the deconstruction of those simple understandings of these concepts

00:44:33 is what many postmodernists rely on.

00:44:36 They rely on the fact that you are operating on a child's understanding of these concepts

00:44:42 so that then when they try to demystify them,

00:44:45 when they try to break them down and deconstruct them,

00:44:47 they're not actually addressing the full, properly discovered version of these truths.

00:44:56 they are attacking them at this childish level. And that is what so often people fall for. They

00:45:01 look at the deconstruction of these child's toys and say, oh, well, then that means that all of

00:45:06 this was a lie. All of these things about God were a lie. And no, actually, there are much,

00:45:10 much more complex versions of this that you never graduated to. And because you didn't take time

00:45:15 to ponder these issues, you are now easy prey for the deconstructionist.

00:45:20 that's a hundred percent correct i mean and and that call to maturity is so important because

00:45:25 think about it in in the biblical tradition we see the sheep which is one of the sacrifices

00:45:32 is righteous to the family in the sense that the sheep was faithful to grow and produce wool

00:45:37 and milk and and and and grow you know and and do all the things that were necessary

00:45:45 right? It's covenantally faithful to the family. And then there was this demanded sac, the people,

00:45:52 you know, anyway, that's why that picture of a righteous sacrifice, that's where that comes

00:46:00 from. Interestingly enough, the shepherd and the sheep is one of the first examples that

00:46:05 Socrates uses in book two of the Republic. All right, so Socrates isn't just

00:46:15 thinking about justice in the sense of what would be best right now for him, okay? It's what would

00:46:27 be best for Athens and for in conceptually, not particularly, but conceptually for everywhere.

00:46:37 What do I mean by that is, is that every city has to have some form of covenantal faithfulness or it doesn't exist. A house divided cannot stand. And so there's the, both the universal and the particular tied up in this.

00:46:57 okay so the democracy that uh so so the city that claims to love wisdom kills the philosopher the

00:47:04 democracy that claims to honor civic virtue condemns the just man uh in in our sense uh the

00:47:11 democracy uh makes a mockery of the democratic vote um so the pantheon the poets the sophists

00:47:19 so on, is all converge in this death of Socrates. They all are calling for his death. And so there's

00:47:29 a sense in which his death really is a judgment on, it's a covenantal lawsuit against Athens.

00:47:37 And again, we see this echo of the prophets and then eventually Christ, right? Like the man who

00:47:42 comes, you know, is a stranger in his homeland, brings the truth, is hated for speaking the

00:47:48 truth and ultimately pays the price, you know, while Christ's death is redeeming at the end of

00:47:54 this, everyone up to him is simply, as you say, a judgment upon those who are ultimately rejecting

00:47:59 the truth, the challenge that is brought by those prophets. That's right.

00:48:06 So anyway, you know, this is talking about the idea of the righteous person. We can,

00:48:16 um it there's there's this introduction in the in here of this idea of good death in other words

00:48:23 that if the death of one man can show a civilization where it has gone wrong um

00:48:34 because that man ultimately it will be judged by history as being righteous in a in christ sense

00:48:43 with a capital R, but in other senses with a lowercase r. But there's this sense of good

00:48:50 death, and this was very radical for the time, that all death was considered bad. And even,

00:48:57 you know, the Romans, when confronted later with the gospel of Christ, were like,

00:49:04 wasn't this guy stuck on a cross and killed outside the city gates? No, that's bad. That's

00:49:11 always bad. Well, we should probably clarify though, because they would have understood like

00:49:17 a glorious death in battle, right? So it can't be all death is bad. That's right. That's right.

00:49:21 I'm talking about the death that's brought upon by the politia itself, by the regime.

00:49:27 Yeah. Great, great clarification. So this is the quote that really got to me. It says,

00:49:36 it was therefore for the sake of a pattern, Socrates says, that we were seeking both for

00:49:41 what justice by itself is like and for the perfectly just man, if he should come into being

00:49:48 and what he should be like once he came into being. We were not seeking them for the sake

00:49:53 of proving that it's possible for these. In other words, Socrates, in a sense, prophesies,

00:50:00 not really, but tries to imagine that the only thing that would make this right is if there

00:50:06 was the perfectly just man, because it's impossible otherwise for the perfect city to exist.

00:50:16 It has to almost be this legal miracle, to quote Carl Schmitt.

00:50:24 So Strauss comes along, and he's useful because he understood the modern world had lost the

00:50:30 seriousness of this ancient question, the ancient question being, is justice bound up in what is

00:50:37 right? And you can disagree with Strauss's conclusions about how that applies, and sometimes

00:50:45 I do, but I think the question is justified, pardon the pun. So the modern, because of

00:50:55 the, the, the worry was if, if all law was positive, in other words, if all law was just

00:51:03 because what we all agreed, you know, the democratic ideal, that the law is what we all

00:51:08 agree it is, and that therefore it is relative, completely relative, all, you know, no, it's

00:51:17 completely customary, then man must be viewed as perfectible, because the law, by definition,

00:51:28 has to be perfect, right? Because it has the power of life and death. So if it's not perfect,

00:51:36 we have, it's by definition unjust, because we are killing people, right? So the modern view

00:51:45 had to see man as perfectible because he had the role of the ultimate lawgiver. It was not from

00:51:52 above, and therefore the good in the transcendent sense was passé. And so Plato's good, to put a

00:52:01 pin in it, is not liberal universalism. It's not human rights ideology. It's not democratic

00:52:08 evangelism. It's the intuition that the visible political world is not completely self-explanatory.

00:52:16 The city cannot finally justify itself. The soul cannot finally order itself. The human being is

00:52:22 not perfectible. Justice can't completely ground itself. There must be a good, in Socrates'

00:52:30 picturing, beyond the cave of our own individual understanding. It has to be outside our

00:52:36 outside ourself yeah and again you can see how this will eventually lead to the understanding

00:52:43 that is so close to christianity yeah so we already covered this uh strauss saw that through

00:52:53 the imagery that the entirety of this of this polity of or the regime the republic this entire

00:52:59 dialogue takes place in a cave in the cave that that that socrates towards the end and in book

00:53:05 seven uh uh describes um and that it's that it's really impossible that that if you seek perfection 0.78

00:53:16 here without ordering the soul first you're going to end up with gay race communism that's just 0.52

00:53:23 yeah no it's a very interesting reinterpretation of the republic i'm i'm certainly looking forward

00:53:30 to uh getting through that essay and uh and getting full grasp of his argument uh you know

00:53:35 of course reserve judgment until i'm done but that is a very i think that is a very very

00:53:40 interesting way to approach that and if that is an excellent argument that he makes uh that that

00:53:45 does revolutionize in many ways your understanding of what's going on here which you know again could

00:53:51 understand why people then have so much respect for strauss at least in this area yeah well i

00:53:56 ultimately, Plato takes the esoteric lens off in laws, where he's just very clear about a lot of

00:54:08 this. They're outside of Athens. They're away from the cave. And then they, you know, Athenian

00:54:13 Stranger, I think, has either lectured, I think he's lectured on this, and it's fantastic. I

00:54:18 recommend, highly recommend him. You can look him up on X. Go subscribe to his stuff. It's fantastic.

00:54:24 Yeah, he's been a guest on this channel multiple times.

00:54:27 I can say his recommendations.

00:54:28 Just a great dude and a big noggin.

00:54:32 So anyway, Strauss argued, so historicism is the idea that is, you know, I've used some pretty fancy language here.

00:54:42 But it's that in order to truly understand everything, everything has to be historically bound.

00:54:49 Now, this is going to sound like I'm being very anti any kind of historicity, and that's not true. I'm a huge Paul Gottfried fan, and Paul would probably call himself a historicist.

00:55:04 But, but, um, it's just, it's just the, you want to guard against is, does historicism completely

00:55:14 swallow up anything, uh, being, does it say that, uh, that the Pythagoras was only true in ancient

00:55:23 Greece? Well, clearly Paul Gottfried wouldn't argue that, uh, uh, or, uh, you know, uh, so that's

00:55:30 kind of my point we just want to be on guard here yeah there's an interesting uh way that

00:55:35 this gets overshot and i'm i don't know enough you know to to say that strauss saw it this way

00:55:40 but for instance i you know when in doubt i reference oswald spangler uh you know spangler's

00:55:45 assertion was not that uh you know math didn't work outside of the different uh societies the

00:55:53 different civilizations he was speaking of what he believed was that the the understanding of

00:56:00 those people was limited by that historical moment that uh you know that kind of hermeneutic that

00:56:06 comes inside that civilization and so they could only grasp and reach for certain pieces of that

00:56:13 mathematical truth his assertion was not that science wasn't real math wasn't real these eternal

00:56:17 things were impossible it was simply that our perception of them was historically bound was

00:56:23 bound by civilizations so it can be very uh easy and people often do take these things to both

00:56:28 extreme saying everything is entirely historically contingent or nothing is historically contingent

00:56:33 it's all eternal it's all transcendent and the answer is as i think is really the point of your

00:56:39 entire presentation here both uh and so we want to look for thinkers who even if they tend to fall

00:56:45 a little into historicism or a little into something else they ultimately still recognize

00:56:50 the truth of both positions because if you're maximalizing one way or the other as you say

00:56:55 you end up in the ditch. That's right. So if wisdom is only, here's what I, this was what really

00:57:03 propelled the inspiration for this talk. If wisdom is only, if this wholehearted, passionate desire

00:57:13 to pursue the knowledge of good and evil is only historical, not does it, are we limited by our

00:57:21 experience. I know I have been, but if it's only historical, then there really is no wisdom. If

00:57:28 justice is only historical, then there is no justice. If good and evil are only historical,

00:57:34 then there is no good and evil. There are only preferences, wills, regimes, genealogies,

00:57:39 and masks. In other words, if Nietzsche's will to power is maximalized, then I can argue good

00:57:51 and evil away. Yeah, this is the, if all of these things are contingent, then Nietzsche has to be

00:57:59 correct, right? That's the only logical conclusion, which is why Alistair McIntyre says it's either

00:58:06 Aristotle or Nietzsche. Those are your options. I've just gotten, by the way, just gotten into

00:58:14 studying him a little bit. What a fascinating thinker. You might be able to tell I'm a little

00:58:19 bit of a fan yeah yeah maybe so I included this in here because uh if look Nietzsche's captivating

00:58:30 I mean if you've never picked up if you can put down the space or Zarathustra and it's so good 1.00

00:58:41 the writing just propels you along if you're into this kind of stuff you know the gay science it is 0.96

00:58:48 captivating stuff. It raises great questions. I think, I think Nietzsche starts with a lament.

00:58:57 I really do early in his writing and who knows how much of his stuff, his sister fudged around

00:59:04 with, you know, who knows. Um, but, and it, but it ends, you know, here's, he's getting on here

00:59:12 a little bit. And this picture, it, it, you know, he's speaking of will to power. And here's this

00:59:17 picture of this unrequited love interest who has the guy she's evidently really interested in and

00:59:24 Nietzsche she's whipping and they're pulling along the cart I mean this is just it to me shows the

00:59:30 ultimate emptiness of his pursuit that the that the that the telos is going to and look I know

00:59:37 there are so many Nietzsche bros out there who are going to send me hate mail don't I think Nietzsche

00:59:42 he's worth reading. I think he's fantastic. I think his questions are, I think he has good

00:59:47 questions. If a, if a culture abandons that which founded it, founded it, then somebody's going to

00:59:55 have to pick up the pieces. The problem is I think Nietzsche over time realized he wasn't capable of

01:00:02 picking up those pieces. I don't think any human is. I think Socrates was right. It takes the

01:00:08 perfectly just man to do so and that's impossible turns out trying to pick up the pieces literally

01:00:15 drove him insane and by the way literally yeah and if you um have not listened to daryl cooper's uh

01:00:22 talk on uh nietzsche versus um duster dostoevsky as soon as you're done with this just go do that

01:00:29 just go do that and uh bring some tissue for the end at least if you're up real yeah unbelievable 0.99

01:00:36 so anyway nietzsche's not dangerous because he's stupid he's dangerous because he's honest he 0.97

01:00:40 understood that if the christian platonic canopy collapses christian from inside the covenant 0.99

01:00:46 platonic from outside the covenant then morality does not remain intact that's take that it becomes

01:00:54 genealogy by all these other things and you you better maximalize those other things um

01:01:01 um yeah I'm halfway back through the genealogy of morals so uh that's all fresh for me so there

01:01:09 was a real important guy here Cyril who was uh really interesting had a really cool project

01:01:17 tried to basically have the unified field theory of ontology and I think he failed

01:01:24 brilliant guy, worth, uh, I love Segru's, uh, Michael Segru's, uh, about an hour long lecture

01:01:34 on Husserl. It's fantastic. But Husserl was, uh, Heidegger's, uh, uh, main influence and his

01:01:43 professor. And so Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, German thinker,

01:01:47 had to be one of the smartest uh humans of the 20th century just brilliant was in seminary to

01:01:56 be a catholic priest and then i think and again i am no heide heidegger expert but it seems to me

01:02:05 that he left over this idea and i can't remember the german term but it's translated into english

01:02:12 gracious throneness that he struggled with this idea of that that God if if God is real his

01:02:21 sovereign will is arbitrary we have no we can express no will over who where how we and the

01:02:31 circumstances of our birth the limits of our of our mind all these things really I think gave

01:02:40 heidegger as it has throughout history a lot of uh intellectuals a real hard time that that divine

01:02:49 providence seems arbitrary and if there is a long struggle against calvinism yeah well yeah and and

01:02:58 i don't want to disrespect that i think those are honest i think i think the the bible has answers

01:03:05 I think that, I think some of the people after Calvin, you know, we can hold, do a whole nother thing on Calvinism.

01:03:12 I'm a Presbyterian.

01:03:13 Don't need a sidetrack there.

01:03:14 But, but no, but so Heidegger, Heidegger had this question of, of because of this problem with

01:03:22 thrownness, then he had, then he saw, he wanted to really refocus the question on ontology of being,

01:03:31 of how do we live in our own perception? And he didn't go full on solipsism. In other words, that

01:03:39 my entire reality is behind these my closed eyes and I don't have any idea of what's going on out

01:03:46 there but you it can lead to that um so anyway uh he wrote a book being in time that deals with all

01:03:54 this and Strauss we've already mentioned this but Strauss responded to being in time with natural

01:03:59 right in history and and Strauss says and Strauss again was an atheist so he he wanted to not rely

01:04:06 on revelation whatsoever only on rationality he wanted to show that there was a what that you could

01:04:13 get to um right or in as in good and evil as right and wrong um rationally but but he wanted to focus

01:04:25 that there was good and evil outside of my own perception and so this was his response um many

01:04:34 are captivated by natural right in history uh others find it uh lacking again what i appreciate

01:04:41 is the recovery to the classical questions so here's here's you know this the summary you can

01:04:48 screenshot this and read it later later we've already gone over an hour so i don't want to

01:04:53 you know i do want to focus real quick was is on eight nine and ten strauss says because of these

01:05:02 these the the movements in continental philosophy towards the phenomenological he has this emergency

01:05:10 return to plato and his students and and strauss really has a problem part of straw and i'll admit

01:05:20 this part of strauss's problem with heidegger is heidegger is a nazi and so heidegger speaks of

01:05:26 resoluteness in in being in time i think that's in being in time of this resolute um decisionism

01:05:34 and you see uh uh schmidt is riding along the same times you see his decisionism in the same kind of

01:05:41 thought and this was and and schmidt and and strauss were very friendly with one another schmidt

01:05:47 helped him get away from uh germany and into uh fellowship in the u.s but but heidegger's uh strauss

01:05:56 I don't know if they personally got along or not. I haven't done enough research. But I know he really went after this resoluteness idea. And he really attacked, he thinks that that's Heidegger's way of excusing, you know, I don't know if he meant he doesn't mention Heidegger by name, but it's clear that this is in his crosshairs.

01:06:20 And he wants to really, he has real problems for, you know, obvious reasons. 0.71

01:06:27 He's Jewish with the Third Reich. 0.97

01:06:29 So his followers, his students, which include Alan Bloom and Harry Jaffa and Harvey Mansfield and Seth Bernadetti and some really smart guys. 0.94

01:06:44 Bloom's worth considering.

01:06:46 I really like Mansfield.

01:06:47 I write for Claremont. 0.93

01:06:49 Claremont's a Jaffa.

01:06:50 uh i'll admit jaffa is not my personal uh favorite but jaffa was a very smart guy wrote some

01:06:56 cool stuff for uh uh wrote some good speeches very strong on the homosexuality question

01:07:03 so um but but anyway some very interesting guys but some of the students of those guys

01:07:09 ended up being some of your mega neocons and so um do with that what you may i personally think

01:07:18 that's kind of like blaming Calvin for some of the excesses of the Puritans and the scholastic,

01:07:26 you know, the scholastic reform scholasticism movement. But, and I think that's kind of unfair

01:07:33 to Calvin. I think some of the excesses of the neocons movement were due, you know, it's hard

01:07:41 depend directly on Strauss, but that chain is there. So, you know, make your own decision.

01:07:49 Again, I like that return to classical political philosophy. Part of that is the question of the

01:07:55 best regime. And boy, the neocons ran with that. They ran with that. But assuming that the American

01:08:05 regime was best always and everywhere for everyone, that mixed regime, and that's probably 0.99

01:08:11 another topic for another day but there's reasons that people have turned on strauss because of this

01:08:17 uh you know the crystals i'm not going to make any excuse uh you know so yeah but horowitz is

01:08:26 in such yeah but uh all that to say i as i said when i gave my presentation on strauss i agree

01:08:32 with you that i think he's a very interesting scholar i think that he has some very important

01:08:37 things to say uh i do think that some of the implications of his his ideas do get us to where

01:08:43 we are uh you know i i would i don't want to one for one him with like marx like obviously i think

01:08:48 there's more wrong with marx at the end of the day but you know if carl marx saw his his modern

01:08:53 day communists he would probably uh say yeah they belong in a ditch you know but like you know so

01:08:58 i'm sure strauss would feel the same way about uh you know the bill crystal but when you look at

01:09:03 some of the underlying thought there. You can see how that line gets drawn. You get the connective

01:09:09 tissue. And I wrote a long thread on this on X once, but Strauss started as a staunch Zionist

01:09:17 and then abandoned Zionism. He was careful with it because that's a big pull. You don't want to

01:09:27 be seen as disloyal, but he had some really critical things to say about Zionism. He was a,

01:09:33 uh, he was a big supporter of Nixon. Uh, and so it's just, you know, you've got to take each day.

01:09:41 We're not talking about, uh, this isn't a, uh, uh, it's just a smart guy, a good, a good scholar

01:09:48 and, uh, you know, read them and take what you want and, uh, but help him, you know, help

01:09:54 So just take the scholar, you know, the scholar aspect of it if you don't want to take the rest

01:10:01 of it. Yeah, as always, with most people who are operating at this level, it's complicated.

01:10:08 And the desire is to, you know, I did a whole podcast with Athenian Stranger on what Christians

01:10:17 should learn from Nietzsche, right? Because like a lot of people will want to look at him and say,

01:10:20 oh, well, he's anti-Christian, so there's just no reason I should understand anything he said.

01:10:24 he's automatically bad and that's true at some level but like also there's deep insight there

01:10:30 and so you know that doesn't mean everyone needs to explore these topics guys i know

01:10:35 uh it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of effort we're not telling you hey you need to

01:10:40 read a thousand books but we're just saying when you address these issues if you aren't able to

01:10:45 consume everything about a thinker just remember you know you can have judgments on them you can

01:10:50 make uh you know assumptions you can look at what they're doing and draw conclusions but remember

01:10:54 there's more there and there's always another level and you should be willing to go that other

01:10:59 level if that is something that interests you if that is something that you want to pursue it

01:11:03 doesn't have to be for everybody but it is something to keep in mind try not to reduce

01:11:06 everybody down into this flat uh you know uh kind of a cartoon of who they are what they were

01:11:13 thinking uh try try as much as possible to give a great thinkers room to room to grow if that's

01:11:19 one thing strauss is really telling you it's that you know make sure you're looking at all the

01:11:24 layers involved not just the surface reading in any given uh glance uh that said ron obviously

01:11:30 uh there is just about a thousand hours more we could go on about this uh so we're gonna have to

01:11:35 limit ourselves to just about the hour 15 we've clocked so far uh we've got a few questions from

01:11:41 the audience so we'll jump to those in just a second but before we do where can people find

01:11:45 all your work? Well, I write for The American Mind, which is a publication of Claremont. I

01:11:55 write for American Reformer, and I owe them something. I have time for you to write for

01:12:04 them again. It's about time. You can find me on Substack, where I put my more outside the box

01:12:13 and experimental stuff, or maybe just something I'm thinking about while I'm drinking coffee.

01:12:17 I have thumbed out more than one essay there, but with obviously no editorial going on. It's

01:12:25 just whatever. And that's the eyes of Apilles, a reference to the end of the book of Romans.

01:12:32 And then I'm on X, so at Ron Dodson, you can find me there. And then I also write for

01:12:41 responsible statecraft uh uh occasionally and uh love the folks over there um some really good

01:12:48 thought-provoking stuff yeah so you're just fine right at your local think tank uh or at his uh

01:12:55 his sub stack that's right all right guys that's right one thing i wanted to mention

01:13:01 in this is that with uh you know look whether you agree or disagree with strauss if it hadn't

01:13:08 been for strauss i wouldn't have seen these deeper um covenantal truths that are being hinted at in

01:13:17 even in plato that god and again i'm a christian you don't have to be to get all this stuff out

01:13:23 here but for me it was incredibly encouraging to see um what i think was god at work in and among

01:13:30 the gentiles all along it wasn't just about what was going on in israel with the hebrews with the

01:13:37 israelites with the jews that got you know we see pictures of this throughout the old testament you

01:13:42 see guys like melchizedek and jethro and uh you know uh use so um and then it turns out these

01:13:51 same questions were being you know in the area uh that eventually would become the bedrock of

01:13:58 christianity you had these guys at the same time thinking about these greater things of righteousness

01:14:02 And then, you know, Plato's greatest student is Aristotle, and one of his students is Alexander, who conquers the entire eastern Mediterranean.

01:14:14 Because of that, they all speak Greek, and the gospel of Jesus Christ is able to go out.

01:14:20 That's very compelling to me.

01:14:22 And then in Acts, you see Paul has this vision, this dream of a man from Macedonia beckoning him to come and give this message to those.

01:14:32 well who would have been that man from macedonia everyone who would have heard that would have

01:14:36 immediately thought of alexander so to me this makes uh it just i see a thread a plumb line

01:14:44 going through history that's very compelling and so i'm thankful to strauss for pointing me in that

01:14:49 direction but by the way there is an iron maiden song about how alexander the great the great uh

01:14:55 paved the way for christianity like not even kidding about that uh but uh no i'm glad you

01:15:00 said that because you know people often ask me why do you why would you read someone like

01:15:05 alexander dugan he has these evil ideas and he does he does absolutely you're right about that

01:15:10 or why do you have nick land on you know why are you reading his stuff you know he's got all these

01:15:14 crazy ideas maybe he's talking to satan he might be actually uh but the point is that when you

01:15:20 read these people as you say you it's like turning the gym you know all of a sudden you see the

01:15:25 different angle and even though they're wrong about most things the things they're right about

01:15:30 are so important so you get to see the truth more clearly and so when you're reading people i know

01:15:36 this is really controversial sometimes for some of our mainstream conservative uh twitter uh you

01:15:41 know crusaders uh but you can actually read somebody and not agree with everything they say

01:15:46 you can actually read a philosopher understand what they're saying uh you know hold those ideas

01:15:52 in your mind find that which is important and then move on and you don't actually have to just

01:15:58 absorb every literally everything in a book that that you read uh so that said yes definitely check

01:16:03 out uh ron's work and let's catch up with our questions real quick um altheist says uh virgil's

01:16:10 fourth uh echelog does uh virgil even begs to be given a few years of life to see it jesus was born

01:16:17 20 years after he died i've heard this before ron but i don't know enough about virgil are you

01:16:23 familiar with the story i took five years of latin but i've forgotten most of it uh once i learned

01:16:30 greek and started doing that whole thing uh so i'm sorry i'm not much of a help here ron says

01:16:37 one dead language at a time my brain can hold one dead language at a time hey man i'm 59 you know i

01:16:42 gotta i gotta i need a lot more of this no i mean i'm i use duolingo to learn my latin so i have no

01:16:49 room to talk. I'm very good at identifying cookies

01:16:53 and wine and ordering. For some reason, they still, even though

01:16:57 it's a dead language, they assume that everything you want to learn is how to order at a restaurant, just like

01:17:01 they do with all their other languages. It's like, guys, I don't think the majority of people trying to

01:17:05 learn Latin are trying to order at the restaurant. But who knows?

01:17:10 Cherry Coke Nixon says, were Egyptian

01:17:13 Atenas? I'm not sure how to pronounce that. A preview of

01:17:17 Yahweh? Well, there's a lot of, you know, this is, you know, again, probably you could go down

01:17:25 this rabbit hole and spend another hour talking, but just know this, there is a ton of Egyptian

01:17:32 imagery that is used. If you take the biblical account, if you take the last part of Genesis,

01:17:39 if you take that account seriously, and again, I do, it makes sense that there's a ton of Egyptian

01:17:46 imagery uh in that finds itself into the uh mosaic cultists um you have the use of strong drink

01:17:56 which is beer uh as as the libation offering then once they enter into the land it becomes wine

01:18:03 because one is uh you know the the commoner worker soldier drink of the wandering and then

01:18:09 the kingly drink of taking rest in the land. But the cherubim are very definitely Egyptian

01:18:21 in imagery, sphinx-like in imagery, and so on and so forth. Lots of really cool stuff,

01:18:30 but we would expect that, that God would use, again, if you take it seriously, that God would

01:18:35 use aspects from all over his world to uh to do things but um as far as a preview of yahweh i

01:18:44 don't know exactly what the question is getting at but i know that there was a lot of imagery

01:18:48 that was used uh chary cook nixon says any thoughts on the idea of that the biblical magi

01:18:55 were zoroastrian clerics sent to witness the nativity by god any other non-abrahamics

01:19:01 receiving prophecy. Well, and it wouldn't be direct prophecy, but yeah, the Maserat

01:19:06 was absolutely in the Zoroastrian, you know, retinue, so to speak. Yeah, I think they were 0.98

01:19:16 Zoroastrian, and they were probably converts going all the way back to Jonah, and, you know,

01:19:25 in present-day Mosul, which is where Nineveh was, and that whole, if you read the, you know,

01:19:33 any Zoroastrian stuff, it reads like Noahic covenant kind of musings on God. Again, outside 0.72

01:19:39 the intimacy of the covenant, but there were people who were, you know, worshiping Elohim

01:19:45 all over the place. So, yeah. Any other non-Abrahamics? You know, we, it's, you could say

01:19:53 maybe, you know, is Gilgamesh pointing to that? I don't know. And if you take this stuff

01:20:01 seriously, the problem is you get a lot of folks who don't take it seriously doing the research.

01:20:08 And so it's a real mixed bag, but I'm going to say just sure. I think the Noahic covenant was

01:20:15 fully in play the entire time. The Jews were the administrators of Yahweh's local presence, 1.00

01:20:23 But that didn't mean God wasn't work throughout the rest of the world through the Noahic covenant.

01:20:29 We see this in Acts chapter 15 when we see all the former disciples, now apostles, gather in Jerusalem.

01:20:38 And what do they decide to recapitulate? The Noahic covenant.

01:20:42 So the four things, the four stipulations, they don't mention the Mosaic law other than Moses needs to be, for political reasons, respected.

01:20:52 but it's the noaic prohibitions that have to be held to uh going forward and so uh pretty

01:21:00 interesting stuff indeed uh nixon also says off topic but erickson's attempt to conflate you with

01:21:06 cavalier was disgusting uh you'd uh you'd press the deport button he would appeal to constitutional

01:21:12 pieties uh thanks i mean it's eric erickson he's wrong about everything all the time so you know

01:21:17 he's wrong about that too uh the funny thing is that of course eric like openly called for the

01:21:22 murder of the j6 protesters so him pretending like he gets queasy about the discussion of violence

01:21:27 is a little adorable uh i miss i miss og eric back in the when he founded red state with 0.51

01:21:33 you know uh those other guys what happened you know uh i only know eric is a little cow that's

01:21:41 yeah og og in late 20s eric was a different um late 20s in his age not right we're in the late

01:21:49 20s but anyway weirdy kurt says humanity is like a drunk man who falls off his horse to the left

01:21:55 uh then to even things out he mounts his horse and falls off to the right uh sounds like a uh

01:22:01 a famous quote of some kind i don't know the reference but uh yeah certainly some truth there

01:22:09 uh althea says i'm rather fascinated by the daniel 11-3 uh but fascinated that uh the daniel 11-3

01:22:16 calls alexander a uh rab uh rav miss small which arguably means rabbi of domination i.e the jews

01:22:26 considered him a scholar of war to learn under yeah so rav here uh remember there is a uh with

01:22:34 the muslim uh takeover of greece you had the shift of of beta to vita so we know that it was a beta

01:22:43 the alpha beta gamma delta epsilon beta was originally pronounced with the bah

01:22:49 sound due to the onomatopoeia describing the sound that sheep make but it became

01:22:55 the V phonetic sound the fricative rather than explosive and so when you

01:23:01 see Rob that's that that's why it's Rob and not Rob or Reb and this is a this is

01:23:10 under the interpretation that Daniel was written late. I take it as written when it says it was

01:23:16 written. So cool stuff, though. Interesting to think about. And Althea says, there's an alternative

01:23:24 idea of Mismal to mean will to power, in which case Alexander is considered the rabbi of the

01:23:30 will to power. So a continuation of that theory, I assume. Yeah, and I mean, it's interesting.

01:23:35 Alexander, if you take the accounts seriously, there's a reason the Jews were allowed to 0.79

01:23:45 continue to speak Hebrew. Greek encroached under the Seleucids. That's after Alexander. Seleucis 0.95

01:23:54 was one of his generals that took the area of Syria. But Alexander kind of left, the legend is

01:24:04 that he even sacrificed a free will offering at the at the temple um that would match all this

01:24:09 other interesting stuff so who knows right no fascinating fascinating glimpses throughout

01:24:15 history uh if depending on how where we look all right guys well we're going to go ahead and wrap

01:24:20 this up once again make sure you're checking out all of ron's work and if it's your first time on

01:24:23 this channel you need to go ahead and subscribe click the bell notifications all that stuff so

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01:24:37 with the algorithm magic thank you everybody for watching and as always i will talk to you next time

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The Auron MacIntyre Show - June 29, 2026

Did Plato Predict the Coming of Christ？｜ Guest： Ronald Dodson ｜ 6⧸29⧸26

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

The Auron MacIntyre Show - June 29, 2026

Did Plato Predict the Coming of Christ？ ｜ Guest： Ronald Dodson ｜ 6⧸29⧸26

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Did Plato Predict the Coming of Christ？｜ Guest： Ronald Dodson ｜ 6⧸29⧸26