Ep. 109: Systemic Sophistry

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2022

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do you find the truth in a world designed to keep it from you? In this episode of Young Heretics, Spencer Klavan talks through statesmanship, philosophy, and the relationship between the two in a culture that rewards power, but not truth. From the cave to Twitter, most of what passes for philosophy is just regime enforcement—Spencer unpacks Plato's advice for turning the mind toward the true, the beautiful, and the good.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	O addictshape fair attitude with breed of marble men and maidens overrought with forest branches in the trotten weed,
0:09.4	thou silent form dusts tees us out of thought as doth eternity, cold pastoral.
0:17.2	When old age shall this generation waste, thou shalt remain in midst of other woe than ours,
0:24.7	a friend to man, to whom thou sayest, beauty is truth, truth, beauty. That is all you know on earth,
0:33.5	and all you need to know.
0:38.8	Well, that was the last stanza of a poem, which is not the main subject of this episode,
0:45.0	but which I think kind of centralizes a question that we've been touching on for a while,
0:51.3	which is this idea of the relationship between truth, beauty, and goodness, which we should know
0:55.9	about on this show because this is the show about truth, beauty, and the stuff that matters,
0:59.2	right? I mean, the central to a classical education, some notion that those things exist,
1:03.4	that they are eternal, and that they are at least in some part and by some process,
1:08.0	knowable to the human mind. And these are some of the issues which become central also in Plato's
1:14.4	Republic book six. So I began with Keats, old on Eurasian Earn, in order to lead us into our next
1:20.8	Republic episode. And those who have been with me for a while will know that we are reading through
1:25.5	the Republic book by book. I think this is essential. It is a requisite of a classical education to
1:31.1	have read the entire Republic. Obviously, I'm not reading the entire thing aloud, but I am walking
1:35.9	through the arguments of the whole thing because I think as a foundational text with all of its
1:42.4	excesses and curiosities and complexities and difficulties, right? It's something you need to
1:48.3	know about and wrestle with. It's about the perfect state, the calypoulos, which is the
1:53.8	polys, the city, or indeed, simply the government, or not even, I mean, more than the government,
1:59.2	really, the small sea constitution, the political life together, which is Kalos, good, and beautiful.
2:05.1	And even that word in Greek, meaning both things, sort of combines the concepts. And there's
	...

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