Episode #014 - Transcript
Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!
For the last several episodes we’ve been talking about the Hellenistic Age. And as you know by now, this was a period of uncertainty and, many times, chaos for the average citizen living in the Mediterranean Sea region. But the Hellenistic Age is just one segment of time that’s part of a much larger whole that’s known as classical antiquity. Classical antiquity refers to the events in the Mediterranean Sea region—you know, Greece, Italy, North Africa, etc.—during the entire span of time from around 800 BC, right when the first Greek epic poems start being written, to about the first few centuries AD—that whole span of time. The end of antiquity is really marked by the ascendency of Christianity and the fall of the Roman Empire, which obviously didn’t really happen in tandem or on a specific date.
Now, if you’ve listened to the podcast from the beginning, we’ve almost covered this entire time period. We started with the Presocratics, some of the earliest of them like Thales and Pythagoras living in what historians would call early antiquity. And we’ve made it all the way to the end of the Hellenistic Age now, a time that’s sometimes called the post-Hellenistic Age when referring to philosophy, but historically speaking, we’re moving into late antiquity.
The events that are about to unfold right here at the end of the Hellenistic Age—both politically and philosophically—they are the reason why, before you even clicked on this podcast to begin with, you had heard of the names Plato and Aristotle and you had never heard of people like, for example, Zeno of Citium or Arkesilaos. They are the reason why people wrongly just think of Epicurus as a guy that weighed 600 pounds and had 100 girlfriends and nothing more. Think of this time period—the period of time from the end of the Hellenistic Age to the end of antiquity—think of it as a race to the Dark Ages.
We’ve heard a lot about four schools that gained popularity during the Hellenistic Age. But where are the followers of Plato and Aristotle during all this if their founders are such big names today? If this time period is a race to the Dark Ages, then you’re about to find out how Plato and Aristotle are Seabiscuit. They started out slow, but they break late. And on that last straightaway that 80-pound man wearing that weird helmet is driving him to the triple crown. They’re going to win this thing.
Quite a lot has changed in the political landscape from early antiquity to where we are now. See, Athens used to be the cultural center of the world—without question the center of the world when it comes to philosophy. I mean, being a Greek city-state under first the protection of the powerful Athenian navy and then under the protection of the greatest army on the planet under Alexander the Great, that allowed for a lot of stability. That stability allowed philosophers living in Athens to make Athens the center of philosophy. Then it all changed. Alexander the Great died. The whole world, as far as they knew it, descended into chaos. And all of a sudden, it was a fight for control over the entire region. And Athens began to fall from grace when it comes to their prevalence as the soul-center of the philosophical world.
There’s something called a pyrrhic victory. I’m pretty sure people use it in the United States as a colloquialism. But to be honest, I’ve only heard a couple people use it throughout my entire adult life. People will use it when they’re referring to a situation where technically they’ve won, technically there was a victory here, but it came at a severe cost. And that severe cost makes it almost like it wasn’t even a victory to begin with. People will use it when they’re talking about doing something like driving through the Costco parking lot.
It’s pandemonium in the streets in the Costco parking lot if you’ve ever been there. People walk across the road at the slowest pace ever recorded. It’s like the anti-Olympics. It’s a glacial pace across the street. You’re screaming at everybody; you’re angry. People are trying to tether giant wheels of cheese to the roof of their car, and it rolls past your car. You got to slam on your breaks. Finally, after navigating the parking lot for 20 minutes, you finally find a parking spot. It’s out on the edge of town somewhere. It’s not even in the same zip code as the Costco anymore. And congratulations! Now you can walk 12 miles to the front door of Costco and save 30 cents on that 55-gallon drum of almonds that you went there to get. That’s a pyrrhic victory. Because, yeah, you got a parking spot. You’re going to save the money. But is that sacrifice of your wellbeing and the two weeks you subtracted from the end of your life worth that parking spot? People would call that a pyrrhic victory.
Well, Athens losing their position of dominance and as the sole kings of philosophy, that was a situation many other Greek city-states went through as well during the Hellenistic Age, just in different ways. That period is the origin of the phrase “pyrrhic victory.” See, part of Greece aligned themselves with a guy named Pyrrhus of Epirus. He was a general, a very great general, for the record. During this time period, a few different parts of Greece came together and asked Pyrrhus to lead an army against the Romans who were just dominating everything at the time. And to Pyrrhus’ credit, he did a really good job.
I mean, he won several big battles. He had an extravagant army. He had close to 15,000 soldiers. There are stories of him even borrowing some war elephants from Ptolemy II. And there’s all these great stories of the elephants charging into battle and defeating the Romans and then running away. But even despite losing, the Romans were so powerful and so able to reinforce so much more quickly than the Greeks were that these victories ended up costing Pyrrhus the war.
Plutarch gives a really great description of the quandary Pyrrhus found himself in that led to his demise here. “The army separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he had brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.”
This account is a perfect microcosm of the Hellenistic Age as a macro. Rome made some brilliant decisions and, as a result of that, became an unstoppable tsunami just taking over everything. One hundred years after Pyrrhus lost Magna Graecia, Athens would be under full Roman control. Now instead of Athens being this philosophical oasis, now there were other places that were cultural hubs. We start seeing notable philosophers appear in places like Alexandria and Rome. I mean, after all, if philosophy at least in some capacity reacts to the political events of the day and a certain amount of stability is needed for people to spend their entire lives studying philosophy—that’s understandable—then why live in Rochester, New York when you can live in New York City? Why live in a place like Western China when you can live in a city like Beijing or Hong Kong?
Just to clarify, yes, the four schools we’ve already talked about continued to argue against each other after the Hellenistic Age all during this time period. And yes, in Rome, stoicism took hold and became the dominant philosophy. We’ve already talked about that. But under the surface, a storm was brewing, a storm that people didn’t realize the full significance of until it came to a climax in 300 AD, right at the end of late antiquity with a guy named Plotinus and the founding of Neoplatonism. Neoplatonism changes everything. Right now, you may be saying to yourself, “Neoplatonism? Doesn’t that mean new Platonism? Whatever happened to non-Neoplatonism?”
Well, we’ve already talked about Plato, right? We’ve already talked about that period of 75 years after Plato’s death and the people that had control over the Academy only expanding upon and defending the positions that Plato held. Well, those people would be some of these non-Neoplatonists. They’re known as the dogmatic Platonists—dogmatic being a word that means you lay down things to be absolutely true, in this case, the doctrines of Plato. Well, we know what comes after those guys, right? The skeptical Academy, the complete opposite of those people. These are the people that questioned everything. How can you know anything for certain, let alone what Plato had to say?
Well, after a while, people got tired of the skeptics. Philosophy as a whole started shifting in a more dogmatic direction. And this dogmatic shift was most evidently seen in the return to a more dogmatic Platonism. Nobody really knows for certain why philosophy started heading in this direction. But it doesn’t really matter. I mean, it’s not like people are staring at each other throwing their arms up in the air clueless as to how it ever could have happened. There are many theories to it. And because why it exactly happened isn’t that important in the grand scheme of philosophy, I’m not going to bore you with all of them here.
But my personal favorite, and probably the most popular of the theories is that, like the rest of the culture and thought during the Hellenistic Age, people eventually started becoming disappointed with the chaotic time period that they were living in, and they started looking to the past for things from when times were better. And philosophy was no exception. In this way, the Hellenistic Age served the same purpose that the Warring States period served in Eastern philosophy, I mean, when people like Confucius and Laozi looked to the past for systems of thought present when things were better. It’s kind of the same thing.
And that’s exactly what these Platonists were looking for, a complete system. And these people recognized that Plato had a huge body of work that was compatible with these new monotheistic religions that were cropping up at the time too. Quick recap: there were the original Platonists, the dogmatic Platonists who lived near the time of Plato. Then the Neoplatonists from 300 AD onward. So, these Platonists that we’re talking about, the Platonists that lived after the decline of the skeptical Academy and paved the way for Plotinus and the Neoplatonists—these people are known as the middle Platonists. This is the final chapter of the Hellenistic Age even though most of it happened long after the Hellenistic Age. The four schools—the cynics, the stoics, the skeptics, and the Epicureans—are all around during this time. But this is about the rise of the last two schools, making six in total—Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism.
But let’s start with the middle Platonists. The middle Platonists can kind of be seen as mad scientists in a way, taking the best parts from this creature and fusing them with the best parts from this creature, and eventually making a Frankenstein monster of all the best stuff. Like a mad scientist, they would take this great idea from this philosophy and combine it with this great idea from this philosophy—usually small things because all of it had to be compatible with Plato. The Frankenstein monster that they were making was Neoplatonism, but they didn’t know it.
For example, from an ethical standpoint, stoicism and Platonism actually have a lot of similarities. They actually agree on the most fundamental of ethical points back then. Both believe that the key to living a happy life is living a virtuous life, but they had their disagreements. And much like a Red Sox fan and a Yankees fan watching sports together on Sunday, they could have been friends; they have a lot in common. But unfortunately, they disagree on an issue that was much more important to both of them: how the universe was created to begin with.
See, the stoics knew for a fact that the universe was God and that everything was formed by this conflagration of fire and air called Pneuma. But a pantheistic outlook like that wasn’t compatible with the three religious groups of the time: Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity. Plato’s outlook was for the most part. And to explain why, I think it’s best to discuss it in relation to one of the most noteworthy and brilliant of the middle Platonists, Philo of Alexandria.
First and foremost, Philo of Alexandria lived in Alexandria. The city of Alexandria was named after Alexander the Great. He founded it on the north coast of Africa in 331 BC, and he created this entirely new, extraordinary kind of city. There was an island called Pharos that was about a mile offshore of Alexandria at the time. And because the Egyptian coast is really jagged, for the most part you can’t make a port city on a very jagged coast because boats can’t land there consistently. But Alexander, to circumvent this problem, built a giant causeway from the shore of Egypt all the way to this island which created a massive artificial harbor that also connected directly to the Nile. And on this island of Pharos, so that every ship passing in the night would know exactly where this new city was, he built one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
It became one of the biggest cities in the ancient world. But that’s not it. The city itself was magnificent. When Alexander conquered the area, he actually embraced a lot of the Egyptian culture. So instead of just razing their cities to the ground, burning them down and building more Greek cities more in Alexander’s image, the people of Egypt embraced him. And they ended up building these huge, beautiful temples and monuments that are a really interesting fusion of Greek and Egyptian architecture. Not only that, but they had one of the biggest and most influential libraries in all of the ancient world. And by the time Philo was living in Alexandria, it would have been a busy, prosperous nexus of cultures. So, that’s where he’s working.
And if there were three main religious groups at the time, we’re going to talk about one philosopher that heavily influenced each one of them. For Judaism, it was Philo of Alexandria. But this isn’t the same Philo that we talked about in the last episode about skepticism. Philo was Jewish, but he was also a Platonist. And he spent his entire life trying to reconcile these two things. But in fairness to Philo, he didn’t think there was very much to reconcile because his favorite philosopher, even over Plato—and in his eyes, not only the godfather of all philosophy, but the greatest philosopher who ever lived—was Moses.
John Myles Dillon was a philosopher from the 1930s, and he talks in his book about how Philo thought of Moses here: “His guiding principle was that Moses was a great philosopher (in fact, it turns out in practice, a great middle Platonist), that all parts of his work are replete with philosophic content, and are coherent and consistent with each other….How, one may ask, does Moses come to be, not just a Greek philosopher, but a full-fledged Middle Platonist? One half of this answer lies in Philo’s view of the history of philosophy, which I have alluded to earlier. According to this view, Plato was a follower of Pythagoras…and Pythagoras was a follower of Moses.” John goes on later in that paragraph, “For Philo, Moses was not only a philosopher, but the very father of philosophy, from whom all Greek thinkers take their best ideas.”
Think back to our Plato episode for a second. Plato was heavily influenced by Pythagoras. Philo knew this. And based on evidence that later became heavily disputed, Philo also thought that Pythagoras was taught and heavily influenced by the followers of Moses. Philo recognized Plato’s brilliance. He was a Platonist, after all. But really, he just saw Pythagoras as an extension of Moses and Plato as an extension of Pythagoras. Plato’s value was that he was a relatively modern guy that encapsulated all of this ancient wisdom that Moses laid out incredibly well, but more importantly, he gave people new philosophical works to study. I mean, without Plato, what would these middle Platonists be reading? Pythagoras never even wrote anything down, and Moses lived long before Pythagoras. And it was because of this view that he thought that other Western thinkers like Aristotle and the stoics and all of the other subsequent Greek philosophy schools were just restating what Plato and Moses had already said.
These are some wild accusations, some pretty big statements. And where is he coming from with all this? Well, he got it from reading the philosophical works of Moses, or at least he saw it that way. See, the first five books of the Old Testament are known as the Torah. These first five books are not only incredibly important to Judaism as a whole, but they’re also supposed to be the writing of Moses himself. You know that very important groundwork that God laid out, the foundation on which your eternal fate rests? God told Moses to just pass it along to the rest of us.
Well, Philo thought this was double awesome. I mean, for him, this was like Elvis and Justin Bieber doing a concert together if you like those guys. Philo was Jewish and he loved Moses. So, it’s not too big of a surprise that he spent his life trying to interpret the Torah not just as a divine proclamation on behalf of God, but also as a philosophical text from the philosopher Moses. As far as Philo saw it, there was much more to the first five books of the Bible than meets the eye. He went through it line by line writing commentary, not just interpreting what the average reader might initially think it meant, but giving it an account of what he thought were obvious allegories underneath the surface purposefully written by Moses.
This was revolutionary, really. I mean, to a modern person, it may seem really obvious that you can read the Bible—or some other religious text, for that matter—and think, these stories and this explanation for how it happened isn’t actually how it happened, but these numbers and characters in stories symbolize other things, much greater things. Well, for the people of Philo’s time, it wasn’t obvious. In fact, Philo was kind of a genius. He may be one of the main reasons it’s obvious to me and you that you can do that. And if you look at Philo through the scope of philosophy as a whole, this is the most important thing that he brings to the table: the idea that you can look at the Bible, you can look at these things that just seem like stories on the surface, but underneath the surface there are broader philosophical overtones at work here. That’s huge.
Philo was a pioneer in this field. Some people even think he may be the sole reason that once Christianity became so dominant in the western world that philosophy could even exist alongside it in a small capacity. He may be responsible for that. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.
We’ve all heard about the story from the Bible of how the earth was created in seven days, right? Now, at first glance, this seems like a fairytale. How can God have a day if he’s not orbiting around a sun? It seems like a nice story created by ancient humans to explain things to other ancient humans before they realize the implications of what day and night actually are. But if you look at this account like Philo did, he said that it wasn’t that it happened in seven days. That’s ridiculous. Philo said, why would an all-powerful God take seven days to do anything? He obviously did it instantly. But Philo said the real significance of the story was that Moses was kind of speaking in code here.
The creation story of the Bible goes that on the first day God created light; on the second day he separated the waters, etc.—the whole story. But Philo thought that the thing Moses said was created on each day corresponded with something else, mostly the properties that each number inherently holds—you know, the properties that we’d later see the Pythagoreans talking about on their commune. Remember, the Pythagoreans thought that each number had certain properties. The number 6 was a perfect number because it was equal to the sum of all the numbers that can divide into it besides itself—in this case, 1, 2, and 3. You add those together, it equals 6. Philo said that this is why God created the physical world on day 6, that perfection; it’s a perfect number. But he didn’t stop there. He had one for each day. He thought that animals were created on day 5 because they have 5 senses—those sorts of things.
Well, he went through the entire Torah like this, verse by verse; first giving the interpretation that most people would have, the one that’s only on the surface, and then the true philosophical meaning as he saw it underneath the text. And how the universe was created was the most important part to him because he had to find a way to reconcile his interpretation of the Bible with Plato and his story of about the universe was created. And Plato gave his creation story in his famous work called the Timaeus. He had to reconcile the Judaism creation story with Plato’s Timaeus.
And it really wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I mean, there were definitely some similarities at the start. On one hand, you have the book of Genesis talking about one supreme God that has unquestionable dominion over everything. And on the other hand, you have Plato who believes that the universe was created by a master craftsman, a master craftsman who looks to the world of forms as a preexisting blueprint for how to make each individual thing. Look, the best way to understand how Plato thinks the universe was made is to think of yourself as a master craftsman.
Now, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not even a mediocre craftsman let alone a master craftsman. In fact, the only time I even feel like a master craftsman—and come to think of it, the only time I ever build something from a plan at all—is when I get something from IKEA. When I build something from IKEA, I feel like a master craftsman. So, bear with me here. IKEA is the world of forms. Just imagine yourself as a master craftsman God walking through the aisles of IKEA, and you come across some bookshelf called—like, I don't know, one of the IKEA names, Ørganblagen, something—some bookshelf called Ørganblagen, and you buy it.
Now, imagine if when you’re looking at that Ørganblagen bookshelf on the sales floor of IKEA, imagine if that was the only blueprint you ever had to put it together when you got home. Just imagine if you had to look at the bookshelf perfectly put together at IKEA and go home and try to make it exactly like that one. Well, you probably wouldn’t do it absolutely perfectly. You’d probably end up like me when I have a blueprint to study, half a bag full of screws left over. You’d probably end up with an inferior copy of that bookshelf at IKEA. Your bookshelf is never going to be as perfect as that one at IKEA. But it’s still a bookshelf, right?
Well, in that case, IKEA is the world of forms—the IKEA store up in the sky with the perfect version of the end table that you’re going to build, the perfect version of the bookshelf. Think of the bookshelf you put together as the inferior copy of that bookshelf, or the physical world full of inferior copies as created by the master craftsman of Plato’s Timaeus. See, Plato thought that the world of forms exists separate from the master craftsman and that the master craftsman creates the world using these forms as a blueprint.
Philo said that the creation story in Genesis wasn’t talking about the creation of the earth but that Moses was really laying out an explanation for the creation of the world of forms. Then Philo points to specific passages much later on in Genesis to make a case that that is the actual time that the physical world was created, not the world of forms. The importance of this is that it allows the fundamental ideas of Plato, like his world of forms and his creation story—slightly tweaked, they’re compatible with Judaism now.
See, Plato thought this master craftsman of his was only that, a craftsman. His role was only to put the universe together. He had these perfect forms he was seeing in the world of forms, or at IKEA. See, the universe to Plato’s master craftsman was kind of like one of those sample living rooms they have at IKEA—you know, so you can see how things would look in the context of an entire room. This master craftsman was looking at the Ørganblagen bookshelf right next to the Støcklaben nightstand next to the entertainment system, and he was recreating it.
But Plato’s Timaeus wasn’t perfect for Philo yet. There still needed to be some tweaks because Plato’s account of how the universe was created isn’t very friendly with the monotheistic outlook that God is an all-powerful, supreme being that has dominion over everything. Plato almost puts God and this world of forms on the same level. I mean, how different is that from a modern-day, religious, monotheistic outlook that God is just the guy that put everything together? There’s no fortune telling. There’s no divine providence. There’s no wish granting or anything like that. So, Philo had to make adjustments.
And with a very slight adjustment, Philo says that God is in fact a supreme being and that the forms really only exist in his mind. There’s no separate world of forms that he’s looking to. God can still look at these forms as a plan. He just doesn’t have to drive all the way down to IKEA to see the world of forms. He has them in his mind. So, basically, in the context of our example, God has a photographic memory. He sees the bookshelf perfectly in his mind.
Like what he has to say or not, I think Philo is a genius. It’s not just Plato’s Timaeus that he reconciles. He manages to take even the ethics laid out in the Torah and reconciles them with Plato’s Ethics. The idea that happiness lies not in bodily pleasures or external goods but in living virtuously is something that’s touched on in not only Plato’s Ethics but Aristotle’s Ethics and stoic ethics as well. See, Philo thought that all of these ethical positions are derived from the same guy—Moses. Philo said that the Torah—like Plato, Aristotle, and the stoics—strongly reinforces the idea of turning away from bodily pleasures and towards virtue.
And he had one of the stories of the Bible to go along with it. He didn’t think man actually began his existence with one man, one woman in some paradise garden somewhere. He thought that the garden of Eden symbolized virtue and that Adam and Eve’s submission to that persuasive talking snake and the subsequent eating of the fruit actually represents a submission to bodily pleasures and a departure from virtue. Plus, as we’ve seen before, there can also be a semantics game at work here. The definition of what virtue is varies from philosopher to philosopher. For Philo, virtue means adherence to God.
Now, if Philo of Alexandria was the middle Platonist representing Judaism, then the middle Platonist representing Paganism was a guy named Plutarch. Plutarch was born into a very privileged life. His family was extremely wealthy and successful. And Plutarch didn’t waste this gift that he was given. He became a priest at the local temple for the Greek god Apollo at Delphi. But on top of that, he became a magistrate in his hometown of Chaeronea. And what that entailed is he would travel around and represent his home at the various places where they needed a representative of his town.
Now, despite his obvious differences from Philo of Alexandria, he still dedicated the time he spent as a middle Platonist to reconciling the teachings of Plato with something compatible with modern religious beliefs of his time. The most notable philosophical work of his life was a clarification of Plato’s creation story—the Timaeus that we just talked about—that allowed the Timaeus to be completely in harmony with Plato’s Ethics.
See, Plutarch noticed, like many others, that there were a couple lines in two completely different treatises by Plato that seemed to say the opposite thing from each other. In the Timaeus, Plato says that the universe was created by a master craftsman. But in another work called the Phaedrus, he says that because the human soul moves around all by itself, based on that, the soul is eternal and wasn’t created by anything. Plutarch manages to clear this up by saying that Plato is talking about two completely different kinds of souls in these two books. One of them is an irrational, eternal soul that isn’t created by anything—a soul that’s in each one of us, not created by the master craftsman. I mean, God did create the world, but he didn’t create the stuff that he makes the world out of. So, because this irrational soul is part of that stuff, because it isn’t made by a perfect creator, it’s irrational. However, the master craftsman does make a rational soul for the entire universe. And it was that rational world soul that Plato was talking about in the Timaeus.
This is a view that’s unique to Plutarch. And it’s obvious this is one of those Frankenstein monsters—the combination of multiple elements from different philosophies that we talked about earlier. You know, both Plato and Aristotle and the idea of the soul having a rational and irrational part constantly dueling against each other—it had the stoics and the spark of divine reason that governs all things being inherent in every one of us and obviously Plato and his creation story in the Timaeus. It was a combination of all those things.
This irrational part of the soul is something that Plutarch refers to all the time in his philosophy, even Ethics. Things that are not virtuous appeal to the irrational part of our soul. People who are destructive or fake appeal to the irrational part of our soul. Plutarch actually had a lot to say about friendship. He had a lot to say about how to treat your friends and what makes a good friendship. He actually wrote an entire book called How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend. And it’s exactly what you’d expect. He lays out a comprehensive argument for what a flatterer is, how to identify a flatterer versus a friend, how to treat flatterers and not sacrifice your own virtue in the process. He even spends the last 12 chapters of his book sounding like Dr. Phil, talking about the proper way to speak to your friends honestly.
This topic was obviously very important to him. And it makes sense. I mean, Plutarch was born into a rich family, and he had a prominent standing in local politics. If you were someone looking to flatter someone to get some sort of selfish gain, Plutarch is the exact type of person you would target. There’s no question he dealt with tons of these people all the time. But the most important part of his work How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend is how much of it directly applies to relationships today.
So, what is the difference between a flatterer and a friend? Well, to Plutarch, friends are incredibly important to our individual happiness and wellbeing for various reasons. For one, they bring us companionship. You know, we talked about that a little bit with Epicurus. It’s nice to know no matter what happens, someone is always going to be there for you. But the most important thing—the biggest value that friends have to us as far as Plutarch sees it—is that they can be honest with us.
I mean, think about it. Who else can we actually rely on to be that voice of reason for us 100% of the time? Who can we actually rely on to call us out when we’re lying to ourselves or we’re acting like an idiot somewhere? Strangers? Yeah, they might do it sometimes. But can we really rely on them for that? I mean, most strangers just mind their own business and go on about their day. Can we rely on our enemies to do that? Well, of course not. Way too much is at stake to rely on your enemies for anything, and your enemies don’t have your best interest in mind anyway.
We need friends. Sometimes we need a different set of eyes other than our own to look at ourselves and tell us we’re being an idiot. No, you’re not going to go out in public wearing that fanny pack. I don’t care if you’re trying to be ironic or not. You’re not going outside in that wolf t-shirt. Sorry. Just imagine if the only things you could ever improve about yourself were things that you were not only perceptive enough but honest enough with yourself to notice. I mean, think of how slowly you’d improve at everything. Think of how little you’d ever even notice was wrong. We need this other objective set of eyes that we know is going to be working in our best interest.
Plutarch says that this is because we delude ourselves. It’s even easy to be a flatterer to yourself. He said, “We must eradicate self-love and conceit, because by flattering us beforehand, they render us less resistant to flatterers.” Has somebody ever invited you over to their house, and the minute you walk in the front door a cloud of old food and dead animal stench hits you and almost knocks you over? Well, it’s not like these people are spraying dog feces-scented Febreze around their house or something. It’s not like they like that smell. They just can’t smell what you smell because they’re immersed in it constantly. You’ve all heard the phrase: a fox can’t smell his own hole. Well, to your friend, their house just smells like air. But an objective outsider like you knows better.
Just how this person isn’t able to tell that something is wrong despite being around it all day long, the same thing applies to the way they behave or the way they look or the way they think. Friends offer an objective, honest perspective that we can rely on. And the value of that is priceless. Now, only by understanding how important friends are can we truly understand how dangerous flatterers are to Plutarch. If the value of friends lies in their honesty and the various ways that honesty enriches our lives, then the danger of flatterers lies in their dishonesty and the various ways that that dishonesty destroys our lives.
But what exactly is a flatterer? How do we even know we’re talking to one? Plutarch isn’t scared to answer this at all. And he even refers back to what we were talking about before—the irrational part of the soul versus the rational part of the soul. The flatterer appeals to the irrational part of the soul. Plutarch says, “The flatterer is always covertly on the watch for some emotion to pamper. Are you angry? Punish them. Do you crave anything? Buy it. Are you afraid? Flee. Are you suspicious? Give it credence.”
Plutarch goes on paragraph after paragraph giving an extremely detailed account of not only the common mannerisms of these flatterers but the common tactics they use to try to get what they want. He paints a picture of how these people go about their lives in a methodical fashion to try to find victims. They find someone that has something they want, something that they can give them. Keep in mind, this doesn’t need to be money or stuff. This could be anything. This could be a womanizer. This could be someone that just wants a ride down to the convenience store—any way to use you.
And once these people find the person that has something they want, they pretend to agree with them. And Plutarch says the reason why they pretend to agree with you is that they’re pretending to have similar interests and similar ways of thinking like they’re your friend. Plutarch says, “Why should the parasite insinuate himself under that disguise? And yet he, as counterfeit gold imitates the brightness and luster of the true, always puts on the easiness and freedom of a friend, is always pleasant and obliging, and ready to comply with the humor of his company.”
So, did you catch that? He actually refers to these people as parasites. These people weren’t just an inconvenience to Plutarch; they were toxic. A parasite by definition is an organism that lives by consuming nutrients at the expense of its host. And that’s what these flatterers were. And that really underscores the difference between a friend and a flatterer to Plutarch. It was a question of motives. A true friend always acts in your own best interest no matter what the immediate cost is to you or them because that’s what’s in your best interest. A flatterer just always tries to please you because they want something from you. One slight shift of motives and there’s a huge difference.
You know, the other day I was reading a book about World War II. And the book I was reading was talking about how, whenever one of Hitler’s top generals would come to him with information or results about something that was not entirely positive, that bad things would happen to that person. The person that gave him bad news would get—they’d get fired; they’d get shot. Something bad would happen. Well, problems didn’t just stop happening. People just stopped telling him about the problems. So, eventually, Hitler didn’t even have the ability to fix anything because he didn’t have anyone that was willing to tell him the truth for fear of what might happen to them. Hitler in the closing days of World War II basically surrounded himself with flatterers. And I don’t think I need to tell you guys how that ended up working out for him.
Plutarch said, “The flatterer thinks he ought to do anything to be agreeable, while the friend, by always doing what he ought to do, is ofttimes agreeable and sometimes disagreeable, not from any desire to be disagreeable…. He is like the physician who administers an unpleasant remedy.”
So, what should we do about these people that selfishly damage us for their own personal gain, pretending to be our friend so they can get whatever they want? On that same note, how do we know someone is a flatterer for certain? How can we know for certain whether somebody is just a really clever flatterer or actually our friend?
Well, Plutarch suggests a couple different courses of action to find out for sure. But my favorite, and one of the best ways to know for certain if you’re dealing with a flatterer—Plutarch says to feign ignorance about something. He says to give them terrible advice, advice that’s so bad nobody could ever actually do it. It’s supposed to be ridiculous though. You’re supposed to pretend you are stupid. But you got to do it with a perfectly straight face, and you got to sell it. Because if he thinks you’re serious, then he’s going to agree with you about anything, right? And if he agrees with you about your terrible advice, well, then he’s definitely a flatterer.
Plutarch says, “Now to discover the cheat which these insinuations of our own worth might put upon us (a thing that requires no ordinary circumspection), the best way will be to give him a very absurd advice, and to animadvert as impertinently as may be upon his works when he submits them to your censure. For if he makes no reply, but grants and approves of all you assert, and applauds every period with the eulogy of ‘Very right! Incomparably well!’ –then you have trepanned him, and it is plain, though he counsel asked, he played another game, to swell you with the opinion of a name.” Plutarch actually started freestyling at the end of that quote. That’s how easy this stuff is for him.
In modern times, we think of friends slightly differently in particular circumstances, right? The main thing I get from How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend is that if Plutarch lived today, he would have hated Facebook. If a flatterer is someone who falsely represents themself for personal gain, then everyone’s Facebook Friend list is full of flatterers. And you know who I’m talking about.
There was a guy I used to work with who was completely miserable. He was always angry about something. He constantly spoke about how much he hated his wife and kids. He’d be attacking people behind their back saying that—I remember one time he said vacation is worse than working, and working makes him want to kill himself. The guy was 28 years old with crow’s feet around his eyes. But it wasn’t because he grew up in Hawaii and couldn’t afford sunglasses. He had crow’s feet because he was always glaring about how mad he was about something.
I worked in close proximity to this guy for a good year. And I can honestly say that I never heard him say a single thing that wasn’t disingenuous conversation or a complaint. It was one of those two things always. One day, completely randomly, he was taking a picture with someone, and instantly his expression changed. He was smiling for the camera. And it was weird. I had never even seen him smile before. I didn’t even know it was possible. I mean, I had seen him at work, outside of work, with his family—never. He never smiled.
Now, 500 years from now when someone looks at that guy’s Facebook page, when they look at his timeline of pictures, they’re going to say, “Here’s a guy who’s obviously a happy guy that worked hard; he loved his family, and he enjoyed life. I mean, look at him! He’s smiling in all his pictures. Here’s a list of all the things he’s passionate about. Here’s a list of the places that he went. He must have really enriched the lives of everyone around him, right?” Is a Facebook Profile a true representation of a person, or is it just who that person wants you to think they are?
To me, the things that make people unique and interesting are their flaws, the things they initially wouldn’t be inclined to tell you about, the things they wouldn’t dream of including on a Facebook page—their false identity interacting with the false identities of others. But it’s unavoidable. Social media profiles will never be truly accurate for the same reason that reality TV will never be reality once the cameras are turned on. Plutarch would have pointed out, yeah, this person has 900 Friends on Facebook, but how many of those people are being totally honest with them? How many of those people can they truly say are always working in their best interest, and how many of them are parasites that occasionally please them?
So, Philo and Plutarch were middle Platonists—followers of Plato who moved away from the skeptical academy and towards a more dogmatic reading of Plato, borrowing the best things from a few other philosophers to eventually make a sort of Frankenstein philosophy that would dominate late antiquity called Neoplatonism. Now, the resurgence of Aristotelianism during this time is a little less straight forward and not entirely relevant, to be honest. There was certainly more going on for Aristotle during the post-Hellenistic Age than in the actual Hellenistic Age, but all of it is insignificant compared to the dominance he gains later on.
Many of you listening to this may already know that the Dark Ages was, well, among many other things, a time in the West when philosophy didn’t have much going on. And as we’ll talk about then, most people think it can be entirely attributed to the dominance of Christianity at the time. But that’s not entirely true. Many people say that Aristotle, at least indirectly, played just as big of a role in the stagnation of the Dark Ages as Christianity did, maybe even more. The rise of Aristotelianism during the time period leading up to Neoplatonism mostly was the terrific commentaries that sort of microwaved last night’s left-over Aristotle so that the middle Platonists could take it, pick out the best parts of it, and apply it to their system.
Alright, time for the question of the week. We’ve talked a lot about Plutarch and his views on friendship today. He has some pretty strict rules for what constitutes a friend. I mean, I can only think of a few people that are so close to me that they would pass Plutarch’s test. I think I consider most of my friendships transactional. Maybe that’s a crude way to put it, but I don’t think that makes me a bad person. In fact, I think most relationships, most friendships, are mutually beneficial, and people expect it to be a give and take. Maybe the point that you become a jerk is when you start thinking of these relationships as transactions; you start to dehumanize people, which I certainly don’t.
So, this week I’m not going to ask you how many of your friendships would pass Plutarch’s test. I’m not going to ask you to take a close look at your friends and a close look at yourself and figure out which of them are actually always acting in your best interest and which ones just appear to be acting in your best interest. That would be way too obvious and boring of a question to ask you at the end of an episode. My question to you is, how many people if they were asked that question would look at you and say, that person is truly my friend?
Have a great week. I’ll talk to you guys soon.