The Stranger Side of Ancient Philosophy: Materialism & Metaphysics with Max Wade

What did "materialism" actually mean to the ancients, and how does it differ from our modern scientific understanding? In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Max Wade (Ph.D., Boston College) to bridge the gap between ancient Greek ontology and modern philosophical debates.

We dive deep into the "weirdness" of ancient thought, exploring why the Stoics believed in physical gods and why the Epicureans were the only true ancient materialists. Dr. Wade challenges the secularized modern reading of Socrates and Plato, revealing how their theories of divine design were actually a reactionary response to pre-Socratic natural philosophy.

In this episode, we discuss:
The Miriology of Being: Why the relationship between parts and wholes is the key to unlocking ancient ontology.
Active vs. Passive Matter: The crucial distinction that separates Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics from the Epicureans.
The "Swerve": Why materialism and determinism were considered incompatible in the ancient world.
Plato’s Atlantis & Egyptian Wisdom: Why reading Plato literally misses his point about the soul's forgetfulness and eternal truth.
Marxism & Hegel: How modern materialism is often a misreading of ancient concepts through a German Idealist lens.

About Our Guest: Dr. Max Wade is a scholar of ancient philosophy whose dissertation focused on Plotinus’ Ontology of Artifacts. Follow his work at maxway.substack.com.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

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C. Derick Varn 0:48

Oh, welcome to Varmlog. And today I'm talking with Max Wade, Doctor of Philosophy and Philosophy. That's never redundant at all. From Boston College. Your dissertation was in Plotinus's ontology of artifacts. And I wanted to talk to you after talking to a mutual friend of ours who's been on the show, Tim Shatz. That I wanted to make ancient philosophy both understandable and weird again. And you seem to be a prime candidate for that. I talked about it in terms of 19th century philosophy and their particular

Welcome And Making Ancients Weird

C. Derick Varn 1:36

reading of the ancient philosophers. And this has also come up somewhat infamously in a very public debate between Benjamin Studebaker and Chris Catrone, friend of the show and friend of me of the show, respectively, where I agreed with Studebaker's accusations of Cotrone not actually making his case well, but I actually didn't disagree with his case. Even if Marx thought he was an Epicurean, which I don't know that he did, but doing a whole series on Daniel Tutt about materialism and Marxism and how Marxist materialism is different. But even as Marx thought he was an Epicurean, he's an he was an Epicurean as read through Hegel, as read through the Project of German philosophy, philology, and philosophy, which means he was not an Epicurean. And I wanted to get into that with you. I've talked a lot about the idealist and how absolutely strange we might actually find ancient idealism and how I and another thing I'm gonna throw out in my front loading before I let you talk. Sorry, Max. Is that in studying ancient philosophy and non-Abrahamic religions, I do not know why we a pretend the concept of religion actually makes a lot of sense outside of Abrahamic traditions, and I'm not even sure it makes that much sense there. Um and two, in all seriousness, the ancient philosophies were religions in the broader sense of that term. If that term has any meaning, which I will admit sociologically and anthropology, anthropologically, I'm not sure it does. But there were not just like ethical commitments in these texts, and my big frustration has been the secularization of Socrates and Plato, as well as the complete misunderstanding of the Stoics and popular philosophy, but even in some academic philosophy. How is it different from materialism the way it's understood in say analytic philosophy today? But also, what the hell was materialism for Adamus and Democritus and the Epicureans? Because it doesn't really seem to be the same thing we mean by the word. So I wanted to ask you in the ancient world, uh, what were the most common ontologies and and metaphysical beliefs? At least let's just start with ancient Greece. I don't we're not gonna talk about everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 4:43

Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you very much for having me on. There's a lot in an introduction. We could probably spend a single episode on any one of those things. So hopefully we can get to most of it. If not, more for later. You can come back.

C. Derick Varn 4:56

Like every now and then I have to stop talking about how it feels like the world is ending, and that's when I talk about philosophy. So go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Yeah, well, we can we can we can talk about how the world ends many, many times uh in the ancient world. But yeah, I mean, I I definitely share a sort of similar approach or sort of interest in ancient philosophy. I think the way to make it relevant is to make it weird, to not sort of treat it as a kind of given that these people are gonna see the things the way that we would see them, that the concepts and even terms they're using are gonna have a natural one-to-one with how we do. In fact, more often they don't. And so making this stuff much more unfamiliar, really checking our attempts for the door, does help us see stuff that's really, really interesting, I think. So we asked a question about ontologies. And so I'll sort of start there. I think bracketing some more minority schools like the skeptics or others, I genuinely think there's a sort of division we can make between sort of two basic camps in the sort of ancient and Hellenistic world. Uh, I'll sort of, I'm more of a Hellenist here, so I'll sort of talk about like kind of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy. I think it's sort of where my natural sort of position is, but we can see people who really trace their origins back to Socrates and people who trace their origins to Democritus. So basically, on one hand, Plato, Neoplatonists, Middle Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics, I see as actually all being in basically one and the same camp.

Two Traditions Socrates Versus Democritus

SPEAKER_00 6:27

They have many differences. I'm not trying to sort of taper over it too much, but I do think they have a sort of shared set of basic assumptions that are fundamentally different than how Epicureans and other kind of non-standard materialists think about things. And that's not really necessarily a mainstream view, but I can certainly defend it on a on a number of points. I think the way to think about this, one of the keys to thinking about ancient philosophy often is that miriology. So for those of you unfamiliar, it's mirros is just the Greek word for part, the study of parts and holes. The relationship between parts and holes is kind of I'm not gonna say it's sort of the skeleton key that unlocks a lot of ancient philosophy, but it's way more important than I think most people would expect. How do parts relate to holes is a really kind of fundamental ontological question that gets actually kind of dropped out quite a bit when we get to modern philosophy. So to sort of sketch out briefly my sort of basic position on this, uh Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics are all going to agree that in various different forms of assenting to this, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The whole has the level of reality that it's prior to that of the parts. So when we think about just we'll take a human being, it's usually kind of an easier example. It's the whole thing, then from that we get the various differentiation into parts. So it's not that you see me as you know a set of organ systems or uh, you know, matter and form, it's there's first the sort of uh unified subject, which we then can break down into its constituent parts. The atomistic tradition is is going to say the parts can produce the whole, the parts are prior to the whole. And in that sense, I think there's a sort of fundamental difference in perspective.

C. Derick Varn 8:34

So this sort of like structural ontology, and this is one thing that I've tried to get people to understand back a long time ago when I used to still teach philosophy, which I haven't done even to high schoolers in over a decade. Used to teach philosophy to Mexican high school students. I would point out that to understand Plato and to understand a lot of the ancients, you had to understand their notions of math. But that their notions of math, A, were weirder and more religious than ours, and B, they were not based off of like the idea of math as a universal language because they didn't use numer numbers the way we did. It was based

Parts And Wholes Shape Metaphysics

C. Derick Varn 9:21

off of forms, and that was analogous specifically to geometry. So I guess this does bring me to the kind of two problems that you kind of have with talking about ancient materialist and modern materialists. Like the question for modern materialist is often whether or not there's anything supernatural, or whether or not that that that phrase is even a coherent phrase to utter. Like now, I would find this interesting for like we talk about the ancient stoics who were holistic, but they were materialist in that they believed that even the gods were made out of matter and that ultimately they were also a manifestation of one god who was kind of um also made out of matter, and that is hard for me to get across. Now, it does actually matter in early modern philosophy because Hobbes was also one of these weird people who was an utter materialist who also believed in some kind of Christian God, although, albeit a highly heretical one by anyone's standard, and he does seem to have believed that God was a literal material being, if I'm reading him correctly, and no one's been able to disprove that to me. Um so this is this is an interesting you know problem. Now, you you talk a lot about you know ontology in your in your dissertation about Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism, but I wanted to get into this because so the debate between like the atomist and the epicureans and the other forms on what we might call metaphysical ontology, to just combine two words together. So, what is the nature of being, and what is the nature of what grounds physics? It is very different from our natural supernatural dichotomy. Yeah, would that distinction had even made would even make sense to ancient people? Like, I've actually wondered this, I don't know. So, do you know?

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Yeah, this really comes up a lot, and especially in the like discussions of like ancient theories of magic, ancient theories of astrology, things like that. Also, stick to Platinus, that's kind of my core, but I think it's really illustrative here. Plotinus has a very funny attitude toward magic, he basically thinks it's almost as mundane a skill as farming. You know, you're using certain kind of technical skills to manipulate natural processes to get desired results. The farmer does it with plants, the magician does it with spells, but it's essentially the same thing. You're just using non-apparent features of the natural world to get results for human ends. You know, Pliny Yelder is a sort of good barometer for sort of more popular attitudes about this. He's not a philosopher, but he is sort of a paraphilosopher of the Roman period. He's trying to do his own version of sort of Roman popular philosophy at times. And he says, oh yeah, magic's awful. It's this foreign thing that comes in from the East. But he admits plenty of things that we would immediately identify as supernatural. He doesn't think that magic doesn't exist, he just thinks it's like bad because it's bad to sort of pursue human ends over that of nature. But when the Vestal Virgin can make people freeze and fall down, that's not magic. That's just divinely ordained what we call supernatural kinds of powers. And so our boundaries are sort of religion and supernatural. These things can be really fuzzy and not map on neatly to our concepts. You mentioned the Stoics believing in material physical gods. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Greek who doesn't think this in some sense. You know, let's not forget Plotinus, this you know, thinker of the one, these kind of grand, you know, metaphysical principles. For him, the heavenly bodies are gods, they are the gods in the material world. You know, they're not reducible to their bodies, they're not exclusively their bodies. You know, they have divine souls that are why they exist. But you know, you can look up in the stars and see the gods. You know, they're they're not hidden from you, at least in that sense. So we should also be perhaps surprised or find it a bit weird when Epicureans, on the other hand, deny the divinity of the heavenly bodies, they just think that they're the same size they appear to be, which is one of the weirdest Epicurean positions. They think it's really a problem for them historically, because it's so obviously not true. You get these hilarious arguments from the Crishus where he's like trying to get away from the fact that Epicurus has committed them to this. But later Epicureans call Epicurus Soter savior. You know, he is the person who is a self-like you know, basically a messiah figure who liberates humanity from all the fear of death and things like that. He's basically divine, they call him divine, that you know, Lucretius does many times, and I think we should take that seriously. It's not just praising their founder. Epicurus, in the mind of the Epicureans, is godlike. Um, and for reasons that we can probably get into more down the road, but again, the boundaries between sort of what we call supernatural and natural, plenty of things that we call supernatural, the ancients find mundane. It's not surprising in their mind that the various heavenly bodies are gonna have effects that we can then predict through astrology. I sort of make this point to people, I think it's an interesting way of thinking about it. You know, us as moderns, we will certainly admit that some heavenly bodies are gonna have effects on the earth. You know, the sun warms it, the moon affects tithes. For the ancients, it's weird that we stop just there. You know, why just those two? Why not all the rest? And why shouldn't those effects be predictable through various forms of systematic, mathematized, predictive models? So things that we consider obviously supernatural or not obviously supernatural, and the boundaries for them between sort of licit and illicit

Natural Supernatural And Everyday Magic

SPEAKER_00 15:43

magical practices, I think that would sort of fall under that umbrella, it has often more to do with where is it coming from? Is it sort of seen as a foreign imposition or a sort of foreign influence, or if it's domestic and sort of sanctioned by popular religion? And by and large, the sort of natural, supernatural distinction is going to be something that you don't really see a clear version of, in large part, and this I think might be a good segue to talk about, in large part because the gods are not really, at least in philosophical camps, seen as actively engaging in the worldly affairs. They're always involved in worldly affairs, but not in a way that requires special intervention. And in fact, generally the Greek attitude is the gods should not really be concerned with human affairs. It's kind of gross to think about the gods as being caring directly about what we get up to. Much more Abrahamic way of seeing things.

C. Derick Varn 16:45

This is interesting though, because even the Abrahamic way of seeing things, when you parse out ancient thought, like I've I've always talked about like, okay, you want to talk about successors of the Greeks, and I'm like, well, it's and even the ne and even the the neoplatonics, I'm like, it's Gnostics, it's it's it's actually any sort of Jewish mysticism, it's because Jews also ancient ancient Judaic peoples also saw the material universe as pretty much the ground basis of reality. When they talk about resurrection, they mean it literally, they don't mean it as some like metaphor of the body arising. And this seems to have come out of a logic problem that they split this out in response to Neoplatonism's concept of what forms were kind of translated into a Near Eastern North African context, and that's that leads some interesting things when we talk about what materialism is. I've actually tried to like break down a modern materialism, like people talk about it as if it's clear what they mean. Sort of infamously, I've been reading Shawnamiaville and Richard uh Seymour, yeah, on this from Britain, and they've had this like crisis of materialism, but then honestly, and consciousness to but honestly, their definitions of consciousness, even though they pointed it out that that they were equivocating, they couldn't stop equivocating in the text between like different meanings of the term that aren't actually all that related. But I found this true materialism. Like when most people mean materialism, they in a modern scientific context, they mean naturalism, that everything it is is natural and is under natural law, and natural law is an emergent scientific fact, as opposed to what natural law meant even in the early modern period, which was it was it was a scientific fact because God made it that way. Um, and then the other thing they mean is ultimate substance monism, and yet this gets quite vague, even in modern thought, of whether or not the substance monism is actual matter or whether or not it's energy. And then what do you mean by energy since energy is just a potential to do work? And that you know, I have scientists who will respond that this is absolutely obviously clear, and I'm like, actually, it's not, it's it's not clear at all, and it and that's the kind of play Craig Ghana people like Zizek will pick up on. Yeah, when you get to someone like Marx, who's reading Epicurus through Hegel, and read and Hegel's reading the ancients through this German philosophy and philology project, which is very much actually has a specific geopolitical context in competition with the kind of Romanism of the British. And this this is a like almost an ideological myth that the Prussian, specifically Academy, is coming up with to unify German culture and create another idea of Europe based on the ancient Greeks. Now, it's not that the ancient Greeks weren't important, like I just said, they're super important to like pretty much everything Abrahamic. You don't I I really you really have a hard time understanding medieval thought without understanding some conceptions of Plato and Aristotle. I mean, absolutely, yeah. I mean basically, basically until like the 20th century, you had to contend with everything Aristotle said, no matter how bad it crazy it was, even by ancient standards. So think it back to you to this point here, though, about this these different these different forms. What is at stake between these thinkers who think that there's a gestalt hole, be it the one or the mini, or whatever, if we talk about the pre-Socratics, whatever the underlying physical substance is. Because I do want to bring this up to like some modern thinking when a lot of Western thinkers, Western, I'm gonna use that in quotation modes because even I don't always know what we mean by it. Western thinkers, so let's just say in the European and Islamic world, and I'm gonna include the Islamic world because I think excluding it, there are there are substantive differences, but they're both descendants of this like ancient classical milieu, yeah. Um when they hit something like Buddhism, people are like amazed. You mean these people like don't think gods are important, but they think that they're real, but they don't think ontology has anything to do with this grounding of being in a deity. And I'm like, if you look at ancient Greek thought, neither of them much most of them, too. I mean, like, it's like it was it was my understanding from Buddhism and coming over to Buddhism, going like, oh, this is not as weird as moderns make it out to be. Like, this is kind of the baseline of most of the Hellenistic and pre-Hellenistic uh Greek philosophical schools that so but there is a stake, like just like there's a stake between Buddhist on Ottman and non-Ottman and emptiness and substance. There does seem to be a stake between the people who think the whole comes first versus the people who think division comes first. So, so what is the stake?

SPEAKER_00 22:19

Yeah, yeah. Lots of pick up on there. One thing I I think I should kind of want to address first and maybe sort of then get into this whole part distinction is you sort of in passing, you mentioned the notion of sort of like incorporeals, incorporeal powers and stuff. I think this is a this is I think where people kind of classify Stoics and Epicureans as materialists together. Um I think this might be. Good thing to kind of get cleared up first, address this, and sort of get into a little bit more detail. The for both for Plato, Aristotle, and the people following from them, so pretty much all the pretty much pretty much all the medievals are gonna agree with them on this. You need incorporeal entities to exist as a explanation for physics to work at all.

C. Derick Varn 23:19

Kind of like we need dark matter to exist for physics to work at all. But go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

In my mind, that is a clear indication of these secularized versions of basically ancient philosophical things. That's a whole other style, right? I don't need to get into that. But basically, you know, the the very, very short intuition is that for the Platonist and Aristotelian, and in this sense, they're basically kind of one and the same, bodies on their own are going to run out of energy. You know, energy, it's a sort of negative, it's a negatively entropic system to sort of perhaps muddy the terms a little bit here. But if you leave bodies to their own devices, they will run out of energy on their own. So you need something that's constantly inputting energy into the system. And

Incorporeals And Ancient Physics Problems

SPEAKER_00 24:05

for the Platonist and Aristotelian, that has to be something incorporeal, it has to be something immaterial. So for Aristotle, that's the unmoved movers, the things that move the heavenly bodies, and that gives you everything on earth. For Plato, Platonist, it's sort of even further. It's really if you were to get rid of the forms and intelligible principles, everything would just disintegrate basically immediately. Because that's the only thing that gives bodies their existence. Again. Aristotle, you could probably feasibly read as having that position as well, but neither here nor there. The Stoics, by our standards, by most standards, especially again, this consciousness-focused standard of materialism, are materialists. Because they think that insofar as incorporeals do exist, you know, Stoics do acknowledge the existence of incorporeals in some really weird ways, only bodies are causally efficacious things. So for Stoics, for something to be able to produce an effect, it has to be a body. So in that sense, incorporeals are invoked in order to understand how things like uh predication and like logic works. But by and large, you're not using incorporeal things to explain your physics for a stoic. And similar for Epicureans. The kind of incorporeal things for Epicureans are gonna be more epistemological. So like the stand, the status of like the images that come off of bodies. Again, very sort of tricky kind of questions to ask about what those things actually are. It's not really clear to me what they are. But in any case, Epicureans and Stoics don't think you need to invoke incorporeal things in order to explain why the world doesn't run out of energy. Platonists and Ristilians do. And that's why the medieval like it, because you know, there's a reason why almost all medieval philosophers invoke cosmological arguments for the existence of God. It's a physical problem. And God is the solution to a very clear physical problem of why doesn't the world run out of energy. And you get this, you know, in early Jewish philosophy, like Sadia Gayon, he's making this exact argument for why the world can't be eternal, things like that. So as early as like the you know 900s, these arguments are very clearly drawing on this intuition. So to sort of bring it back to this question of materialism, for the ancients, when we're defining materialism, we don't need to invoke consciousness. As much as I love this, it'd be a slightly odd name to invoke here, but uh Quintin Mansu, I think he's in some ways actually still underrated philosopher, despite the sort of buzz that the unlimited materialist who is like the gonna be the gateway between analytic and continental philosophy about 15 years ago.

C. Derick Varn 26:53

Yeah, yeah, I remember him.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

Yeah, I unfortunately I don't I don't think he has been sort of given his full dues because I actually do think he really hits the nail on the head in some actually really important ways I don't think have been fully grappled with. Conversation for another time, but he's dealing with this in a post-Kantian way. You know, his idea of materialism is thought comes posterior to matter. You know, matter exists prior to and is the conditions of thinking. Very succinct, sort of modern materialist framework, but kind of incoherent for ancient philosophy. In no small part because sort of what's meant by like the subject and thinking for ancients is not the same as we get in the modern period. So when we think about ancient materialism, bracket off all this stuff about consciousness. Like I actually actually generally don't like to talk about consciousness because I don't really know what it even is. And I think using it as our like sort of standard for what we mean by materialism is gonna mean that we have to now start talking about consciousness. And I think that is going to inherently lead to a conversation that bakes in more assumptions than it does clarify. So, in my mind, what is ancient materialism? What's the distinction actually here? It's a question of is matter what what whatever school we're talking about is going to define as matter, is that something that's an active or a passive principle? And this I think follows along the demarcation I made initially. For Plato, for Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics, the thing that they call matter is passive. It is the thing that is shaped, it is the thing that is malleable, is the thing that responds to whatever active, and they usually identify active principles with the divine. Certainly true for at least all three of those: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics. The active principle is the divine force in the world that works like a craftsman to shape matter into various determinant forms.

What Counts As Ancient Materialism

SPEAKER_00 28:51

So matter is not the explanation for why things happen, it's the substrate. You know, hula is the word that Aristotle uses. It's wood, it's the thing that's shaped into a particular form. For Plato and the Platonists, matter isn't even shaped at all. It's more of like a mirror where things appear in it. Matter is so absolutely passive for the Platonists that it doesn't even change, doesn't become anything else. So they cannot be materialists because they don't think that matter is the cause of why I am like a thinking thing, or why I act, or this or that. It's the underlying substraint. To be an ancient materialist, you have to reject that premise. And that's why I think the Stoics are ultimately not materialists. The Stoics would say, Oh, yeah, no, we're corporealists. The only things that produce any kind of effect are bodies. So we don't need to invoke anything incorporeal to explain reality. But they would not call themselves materialists because matter is passive. Matter is just the thing that is being shaped by God, like quite literally. Diogenes says, Diogenes Laertes, this chronicler of various ancient philosophical views, he says, Yeah, the Stoics think that ultimately there's sort of two principles in the world: God, which is this pneumatic fire that shapes the world, and matter, the body of God that's being shaped. You know, matter for the Stoics is still passive. Matter is not the active principle at work in the world. This is what is different about the Epicureans. And this is why I think they're the only genuine material school in ancient philosophy. They consider matter to be the passive principle. Matter is what gives rise to the various different forms of things that we see. It's the principles or motions or activities of matter that can give rise to more complex phenomena. And I think that's really the really crucial distinction I'm kind of would like to hammer home for a lot of people is that we're not thinking about minds. I mean, minds are related to this. We can sort of talk about minds, but it's the subject almost always comes after that. You know, we're really not thinking from the perspective like Descartes, sense certainty or the grounding of mind. It's what is the active principle, what's the passive principle? And for the Epicureans, they don't even really use this language. You know, they don't talk about matter in no small part because Hulay or the Korah, which is what Plato would call matter, these are terms that imply passivity, imply lack of agency, lack of generativity. Things are being, you know, matter is something that's shaped for all these sort of things that trace themselves back to Socrates, basically. We can talk about the pre-Socratics, but that's what I think a good place at least for the the later schools and the kind of division line making.

C. Derick Varn 31:53

So the fundamental thing to look at when we talk about this, for example, is that what we tie up in modern materialism and even bracking out consciousness, because you you're right. Consciousness is a hard problem, even in the sense of I don't know how we all consistently define it. So, for example, like is consciousness in the brain or is it embodied or is it emergent? It partly depends on what you think the primary sense organ is, and how you think causation to that organ and where it is processed is, and that actually has not been solved by physical science yet. And what physical science currently indicates is weird in a way that almost can't be true, which is the idea that you actually have have made a decision and maybe are even conscious of that decision before it registers in the brain as electrical activity, and and yeah, problem. But uh, one of the things I find very interesting, you know, and bringing up to why I care so much about ancient stuff as a proxy for caring about modern stuff, is that this consciousness debates in Marxism. I'm like, well, none of you have defined what you mean by materialism. It's like when I used to deal with the skeptics movements and the aughts, and they all talk about rationality, and I'm like, which rationality? What you talk about rationality as if it is too generously obvious, which means you have no idea what it is. Like um, do you mean the circular rationality of the economic market? Do you mean predicate logic? Do you mean modal logic? Do you mean mathematical coherence? Do you mean linguistic coherence? Those all can flame under the words rational. Got those aren't the same thing. And you know, when I bring this up in like the realm of politics and stuff, even political theory, people would be like, well, this is not important. I'm like, it kinda is, though. About, you know, my big example is like there's a lot of people who are hyper-deterministralists who are also like political radicals, and I don't understand. I just I mean, other than the fact that by their logic, they couldn't help but be that way anyway. But I'm just like, you know, unless you believe eschatologically almost that this is the way things have to go, and that you are just fulfilling something that you have to do, and I guess your belief doesn't matter because you believe it anyway. I don't understand why you'd have any politics derived if you really believe that. Because what sort of norm can you impose on something that it doesn't matter what your norm is, everything's gonna unflow in a certain way because of the random movement of the Big Bang. I have no idea. Conversely, in Marxism, and when you have to talk about ancient stuff, is me trying to explain why certain Trotskist and Marxist-Leninist sects reject the Big Bang, has to do with arguments from Aristotle and their notions of dialectics and eternity going back to Aristotle, and you know, 18th, 19th century understandings of that, even and it's very weird to insist on that with modern people today because it is a philosophical argument masquerading as a scientific one, but then so are most of the Big Bang related. I mean, like my big thing right now that I haven't talked about in about 10 years, but in studying the ancients, I started like thinking about things like okay, so we are assuming that math implies the existence of entities, and you have deduced entire entities that actually don't really correspond with your physics to make it up, and you have worked out an elaborate metaphysical system in things like M theory and brain theory, which even with all the problems of falsification of probability, there's no way to probabilistically or are falsifistically coparianly check those theories. There's none. I don't even know that you could experimentally do it without destroying the universe if they were right. So, how do you know you are not just assuming things off of a web of coherence and retrojecting the path? Because we know from ancient philosophy, people did people, you know, modern people will drop this stuff out because it seems embarrassing to them. But I'm also fascinated by this stuff. When I explain, for example, Aristotle, I did a I did some explainers in Aristotle back in the back in the day in Aristotle's politics, but I was like, you have to understand Aristotle's metaphysical conceptions to understand what he what he's prioring, because he's assuming these forms, even though he's not a form a formist like Plato. I'm not saying that, but he's assuming these forms parallel each other because the natural world parallels, and that's an assumption off of understandability, and then there's also the ways in which he's basing like his teleology and what makes an organism coherent based off of assumptions of well, the unmood mover would only waste energy on something that is unique, so everything must have some unique function because we can't have waste and energy. Because why would the unmood mover, which isn't really a consciousness, of not, I don't think, at least knock on wood, it might be. I'm gonna be careful in what I say about what Aristotle actually thought about what the unmoon mover was, but there's a certain amount of coherence and energy logic and all this that goes into this, it actually is fairly rationally adroit. Like it's just you know, you have to take those first assumptions, which is one of the things I used to argue when I used to argue with the skeptics movements, and they're like, Oh, well, philosophy, we don't do philosophy, we do physics. I'm like, Oh, yes, you do do philosophy. Like what you consider a cutoff between a thing and energy is a philosophical question, believe it or not. So and to bring this back to the ancient world, because I this is my whole like, why do we care about this? Um I think it's important to understand the difference between passive and active substance and then corporality versus non-corporality or corporality, because I think in the modern discussions about like supernaturalism, for example, in ancient ways of framing that, that's what corporalist versus non-corporalist thought. Like, that's not actually about materialism, like, yeah, exactly. All right, so what else do we misunderstand? I mean, like, so the Epicureans, there's been a lot of trying to reclaim Epicureus. I guess we went through our stoics and we had to go through the other one, and I've been very suspicious of this again because my my background and like knowing and understanding Buddhist

Determinism Modern Science And Metaphysics

C. Derick Varn 39:09

philosophy has clued me in on certain Epicurean things, and not because I think Epicureanness was like some secret form of Buddhism or some shit. I think these were based off of logical, good convergent logical systems based off certain assumptions of unity or disunity and physicality that had ethical and political and you know all kinds of implications. I mean, for I guess for Epicureans, it would be ethical and anti-political, but it's interesting to think about, and it's it's also hard to explain, for example, like the Sereniacs, my favorite weird group that everyone forgets. And everyone's like, Oh, the Sereniacs are so radical hedonists. I'm like, but but who would have I'm like, and most people thought they were true heirs to Socrates, buddy. Like, why it's you know, it's not what you think it is, it has to do with this questioning, this questioning logic and and notions of what is already innate and why that is the way it is. And while we don't know that much about the Serenia, don't have that much left of their of their own writings if there ever were actually if they were ever extant in the first place. Um, because I'm not sure that we know that they were. We know that they existed, but we don't know that they wrote anything down.

SPEAKER_01 40:38

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 40:41

I I have found that like when you get into those weird categories, or another example, maybe we can use this to get back to Epicurus. I realized and listening to believe it or not, a podcast, the history of the what is it, the West History of Western Chronos. I forget what it is, and then also listening to another podcast, the history of philosophy without any gaps. But the the history, the secret history of Western esotericism, which is weirdly actually a philosophy podcast, which people don't expect. Um, but what when I realized like how much symbolic cosmology is in Plato's politics, and that we don't have the keys to all of it, and that this also has like metaphysical hints to what Plato and or maybe Socrates Astros, probably not Socrates, thought, and that's been interesting to try and deal with because when you talk to modern Marxists, a lot of times they do take their cues from German idealism, which is fine, but they take German idealist readings of this or that at face value, and I don't think you can do that. So for example, what do we know about them about the physical assumptions beyond the holisticness of Plato?

SPEAKER_00 42:13

Yeah, I think one thing I think actually it might be even sort of interesting to sort of address in a slightly different angle is you mentioned Socrates. I think actually one of the most interesting things we can say about Socrates, and this is an atypical Socrates, it's not the Socrates that people normally focus on, is that if you want to think about Socrates in the context of what he really changes from the pre-Socratics, is and this is something that's in both Plato and Xenophon. Not enough people read Xenophon. I'll sort of bang that drum a lot too. Not enough people read Xenophon. Xenophon Socrates is actually the primary Socrates for both the Stoics and John Stuart Mill. Funny enough, John Stuart Mill read Xenophon before reading Plato. So just interesting sort of footnote historically.

C. Derick Varn 43:01

I often do the whole triangulation thing and go if it's in both Xenophon and Plato, it might be true.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

I don't know why that's not seen as a more like common assumption, but people sort of don't like that in like Socrates' studies. But that's just yeah, for me, I'm still yet to sort of understand why that's the case. But there's something really interesting that comes up in both Plato and Xenophon on this point, and I think it's pretty reasonable to say this comes from Socrates. Socrates seems to avoid talking about natural philosophy pretty much writ large in both Xenophon and Socrates. Sorry, Xenophon and Plato. And I think that at least I find the arguments for this kind of compelling, that this stems from Socrates seeing natural philosophy as what we call science or something kind of like that to you know now, as being fundamentally incapable of explaining final causes or whys, purposes in the world. Socrates, I David Sedley wrote a book on this called Creation and its Critics in Antiquity. Highly recommend it. Really sort of changed my opinion on a lot of this. It seems like Socrates is kind of a creationist reactionary response to pre-Socratic natural philosophy. Pre Socratic natural philosophy is explaining the transformation among elements, why different sort of elementary bodies, and already probably presuming too much to say that, but how different elements produce the plenitude that we experience in the world. Socrates sort of pulls back and says, Well, We need to invoke divine design in order to explain nature. So there's two really interesting passages in Xenophon's memorabilia where Socrates is coming out swinging, basically, against the view that we can explain things without invoking divine design, without invoking kind of cosmic mind. And you get the same exact thing in Plato's Vido, where Socrates talks about how he heard the books of Anaxagoras being read in the square. Anaxagoras being his pre-Socratic philosopher. Anaxagoras has this idea that you had all the different seeds of things and that were sort of unmixed. There's this cosmic mind that mixes it all together, and then that's how you get all of reality. What that means, probably a bit unclear both then and now. In any case, Socrates says, Oh, that's great, but it doesn't explain why I am here now. Okay, my body's in various configurations, but why is Socrates here in prison being put to death? It seems like Socrates, in both Plato and Aristotle, needs to invoke some kind of final cause, some kind of percosiveness to nature in order to explain why things are the way that they are. And because Socrates is pretty clear, I don't talk about natural philosophy. When Plato writes the Timaeus, Socrates talks about Atlantis and, you know, this, you know, the stories in the Republic. And then when the actual natural philosophy comes, he punts and gives it to this Pythagorean who's going to then expound the Py what we get in the actual Timaeus itself. But what's still there is a divine demiurge shaping the world based on forms. Divine design is still present, even when Socrates sort of put takes the foot off the gas and has someone else explain it. So it seems like there's this thread of this kind of need to invoke some kind of divine craftsmanship, some divine design that Socrates brings back into natural philosophy. You get this in the Stoics, and the Stoics call the world soul a craftsman. The world soul works on its own body like a craftsman, intentionally designing everything in the world. Aristotle, Plato, it's all there. It's not there in the Epicureans. The Epicureans wholesale reject all arguments from design. There's all these wonderful passages in book five of Lucretius, where he is giving all these examples of things in nature that don't work very well as evidence that divine design can't be the case, because otherwise it would have been designed better. And what's really interesting, there's this woman, Sylvia Berryman, who's done a lot of good research on mechanistic thinking in antiquity. She is really, really clear on this. I think this is absolutely right. Epicureans are not mechanists, they don't think about things as if they're machines, in large part because machines have designers, machines have purposes. Then nature for Epicureans does not have design or purpose. The gods are off doing

Epicureans Against Divine Design

SPEAKER_00 48:06

their own thing, they're not concerned with designing the world. If they were, the world would be, you know, again, if gods were to care about the world, it wouldn't have all these imperfections. It wouldn't be falling apart like it is for the Epicureans. So the fact is, for the Epicureans, they're not invoking craft analogies. They're not thinking about the world as a machine. They're not thinking about the world as operating on machine logic like you get in the early modern period. If anything, they're attributing all the different variation among the world to chance, to spontaneity, to contingency. And I think that's a really fundamental point that people really need to sort of take seriously is that determinism and materialism in the ancient world, those two things are not just unrelated, they're kind of incompatible. That to be a materialist, you know, this is again the swerve in Epicureanism, is something that a lot of people sort of find kind of bad. But in my mind, I think on this point is it's entirely obvious why they posit a swerve, this sort of uncaused chance thing. Well, you don't have determinism, so why should we even presume that everything follows regular regular predictable laws? You know, determinism works when something is externally imposing an order on nature. That's fine for Plato, Aristotle, Stoics. Yeah, you have God imposing order on nature. Epicureans say, no, no, the gods don't do that. Nature is self-governing. The natural order of things does not have any divine intervention, not in the sense that God's tinkering with it and fixing it, it's that God doesn't rule over it at all. That's just not what gods do. And I think that's a really fundamentally important point that we should take seriously if we're interested in modern materialism. Should we even consider materialism and determinism to be related? I think for things from a perspective of ancient philosophy, we probably shouldn't. And to sort of go back to something I said earlier, I think this is actually why Mayasu is such a good materialist. Because he actually separates those two things. And in my mind, kind of in that sense, is a really loyal Epicurean in a way that's actually really good and really important. But again, conversation for another time. But again, it's an important thing that again we take for granted. So much of our thinking about materialism is still rooted in early modern conceptions of things, where determinism is thought through this machine kind of picture machine analogy. And you know, to be materialist means having immutable laws of nature. Again, to me, that sounds weird because who's writing these laws? Where do you get laws from if there's not a lawgiver? Makes perfect sense if you're in a theistic mindset like Descartes, you know. Descartes' writing the meditations to argue for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. If you're taking on his ontology, you're going to actually, in my mind, be committed to those things too. So really bracketing our assumptions about what we assume materialism and determinism and things like that, you know, what these things might not actually entail each other. In fact, they may actually go in part. That's sort of a thing I'm certainly happy to flesh out more as well. But again, I think it's an important thing to be be keeping in mind.

C. Derick Varn 51:22

This is actually really important for a couple of different things. I think one.

The Swerve Contingency And Action

C. Derick Varn 52:11

Divorces, and I actually think it's interesting that this has already happened several times. I mean, it's already happened several times in several different cultural traditions. Yeah. Now we can talk about we've been talking about ancient Greek. I can bring this up in the in the context of Dharmic philosophy where this division not only occurred between proto-Hindus and Buddhist and Jains. We gotta include the Jains in there, but also if we really study it, we'll see it it occurred within those traditions when they separated again. You can talk one of the the weirder debates that is a weird philosophical debate that most non-Buddhists don't understand, is the debates over whether or not Buddha nature has substance or not.

SPEAKER_00 53:01

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 53:02

And people go, What does that mean? I'm like, it has it has both metaphysical, ethical, and believe it or not, physical um implications if you understand the world this way, and it was highly worked out. And so when I when I started noting this with in the ancient Greeks, I'm like, okay, we're confusing something, yeah, because most people who talk about determinism versus indeterminism, you know, and I'll I I've said before I'm a compatibilist, and they were like, Oh, you're really a libertarian. I'm like, no, I don't really think you have counter causal free will, not because I don't think you have control over your agency, I'm not sure what you is, and I'm not sure, believe it or not, and I'm not sure what counter causal would be, but if there are multiple options, and those options are substantive, even if they're limited by other constraints, they are real. So that makes me a compatibilist, I guess. But to get this away from minds, because the modern way of thinking about this is minds, and I I will have I will say most of the time, uh I forget the philosopher who says this a lot, but that most questions after Heidegger that we call ontology should actually be called epistemology or psychology, yeah, because they're not really about ontology. And in fact, one of the things in critical theory is I want to ban people from using the one are uh ontology unless they can tell me what being is like by but by what they mean by being, are becoming, are nothing, which at least that means the German idealists can stay, but everybody else get the fuck out. You don't know what the word means. Then people go, but words change. I'm like, okay, right, you got me.

SPEAKER_00 54:57

Yeah. But just to sort of briefly interject here on a relevant point on this, is that you know, coming at this from a basically more of an ancient thing, ancient perspective, and being in a graduate program that is again prehistorical, has a lot of continental people in it, you know, every time I sort of just sort of talk about the nature of things, which in my mind is kind of in some ways what the kind of core of philosophy is is talking about the nature of things, you know, I start asserting some kind of reality about the world. The first response is usually, well, how do you know this? How is this sort of how do you know this? So it's almost like the shift to modernity or even post-modernity, you can't actually talk about how things are, you just talk about how you know that things are what they are. And it's usually the kind of punt is the shift from ontological deceptions to epistemological, which I think is fine. I understand why that happens, but at a certain point, we have to actually talk about metaphysics, and you can't get around it. That's sort of been the eternal thing that people have always been trying to find a way out of metaphysics, but in doing so, you just end up having very impoverished ontologies.

C. Derick Varn 56:01

Sorry, logical positivists, sorry, logical positive, but they recognize this themselves, they were they know no, no, yeah. Yeah, no, no, one of my biggest my big I always say this stuff about logical positivists, but I want to be very clear on this. The logical the positivists defeated themselves. You didn't beat them, yeah. Like the the disproof of logical positivism came from a logical positivist. It is not like I mean, I know some people try to resurrect it, but like seriously, the the the the criterion of of science of positive science was undone by them, not by an outside movement. And actually, that's kind of rare that you know a group is that self-honest. So so I'm not actually slagging the logical positivist the way most like English grad students who learn about how the logical positivists were wrong do. I say this as a person who learned philosophy and then became an English grad student. But I I I want to I want to get back to this. We were talking about Plato and like the assumptions of Plato. You we talk about Socrates, I think is actually quite interesting. Yeah, one of the things I think we miss is I also think since we since we understand Greek religion mostly through mythology, and we understand most modern religion through dogmatics, ontology, and metaphysics, and then the psychologies emerge from that, I do think we miss some of the ways in which Socrates may have been, and Plato may have been more in line with certain elements of religious thought at the time than it initially seems, even though sometimes they seem almost like monotheist, sometimes they I mean it's very hard, they don't they don't talk in this mythic way, except when they do, because Plato's always talking, I mean, even more in Socrates, always talking in mythic ways, and yet we don't often recognize them as myths. I mean, the the biggest example of this is the fucking Atlantis story because like that's clearly a both a probably an esoteric story and also an ideological myth, and people read it literally. That was fun. Thank you, 19th century. Good job.

SPEAKER_00 58:25

Yeah, on the on this point about Atlantis, I think you know it's very clearly invented. No one else talks about this, it's just Plato. So he is clearly invoking it not as a historical event, but as a sort of teaching point. And I think this is actually a point that can actually help us really get into the Greek mindset, how they sort of see themselves in the world. And that's actually, I think, very interesting. The Greeks are very, especially at the time of Plato, more than ever, very aware of how they are like extremely historically illiterate compared to the seemingly and you know, seemingly eternal civilization of Egypt. You know, Egypt stretches back in their mind basically forever. You know, there are records run out at some point, but the Greeks have no real expectation that the Egyptians are ever going to stop existing. So the Egyptians geographically are kind of like in their relationship to the Greeks, are kind of like the relationship between the gods and the human beings. And this actually is very interesting. While the Greeks are subject to these periodic cycles of being wiped out by natural disasters and having to reconstitute themselves in the same way that human souls forget divine wisdom and have to relearn it, the gods or the Egyptians are spared from this and have a basically unbroken access to eternal truths. So the Atlantis story really is a kind of grappling with on a personal level the forgetting that the soul undergoes and the needing to recall what it once knew on the personal, social, and kind of metaphysical level, and the cycles of conflagration that the Greeks are subjected to, they get it from the Egyptians because the Egyptians are sort of separated off. They are an eternal civilization that has access to these eternal truths. And that's why, in some ways, for the Greeks, their philosophy begins as this wisdom tradition with the Egyptians, because the Greeks are constantly forgetting and having to relearn. You know, Aristotle is like, oh my god, we finally relearned the four causes. But in his mind, they the Egyptians are kind of actually the original source of this. And the Atlantis myth, you can't really disentangle from that. It's a story of the Greek awareness of forgetting and relearning that other civilizations, in virtue of being separate off from that kind of geographical issue, aren't subjected to. And so obviously it makes no sense to read it literally. It's put there at the very beginning of the Timaeus because you're then about to start talking about cosmology. You're then about to start talking about the order of the universe. And so you understand the soul's place in it first. The Timaeus is basically begins with a recap of Plato's Republic. The last thing in Plato's Republic is the myth of Ur, this grand trip through the cosmos, this sort of near-death experience where the whole universe is sort of laid out in this divinely ordained order. And so then you need to understand why the soul forgets that. You know, it ends with again this story of a soul's vision to the afterlife and the forgetfulness that souls are subjected to. And then you get this analogy, this sort of similar story at the beginning of the Timaeus to remind you hey, here's where we left off. We're resuming right there again.

C. Derick Varn 1:02:05

One of the more interesting things that I was thinking about when we talk about like Marxist fused of materialism, because there's a great debates between like Hegelian Marxist materialism, although that is in and of itself is ironic because Hegel was not a materialist. I also think we need to take early modern philosophy at face value and quit trying to say, like, Hog was secretly an atheist, Descartes was secretly an atheist, Hegel was secretly an atheist. No the fuck they weren't. Their philosophy makes no sense, actually. If you do that, you are picking and choosing to uh make things work. Now, are there notions of God in incommensurate with like Orthodox Catholic Christianity or Orthodox Protestant Christianity or Lutheranism? I mean Hegel thought it was, but no, I mean, absolutely not. But that but the idea that you can just say, Oh, when he's talking about religion and God, he it because it's negativity, he doesn't actually mean it, what are you on? Marx thought he meant it for sure, but this also leads us to a problem Marx, and this is a problem that we get into a great debate because some people will say Marx is an Epicurean materialist, and I think in the sense that he thinks of materialism as a form and an emergent quality, that is loosely kind of true. It is he is not like a say clockworkist Englishman who thinks the universe is a clockwork and that's because God made it that way, and then like we don't believe in God anymore, but we still believe in the clock God built. You know, which even Richard Dawkins, who's not a person I would normally cite as a philosophical authority or anything, realizes is a problem for you know, picking up an early materialist thinking in like Victorian and Edwardian times versus you know, slightly later on, because evolution supposedly changes everything. Although the point I am making is no, it already kind of was assumed that way in Epicurean thought in some way. It's just that they they weren't atheists like you were. You still had to have, you know, they just assume God. I mean, like there's no evidence that they didn't assume the gods were real, just like there's no evidence that they early Buddhists didn't assume that the gods were real, they just didn't matter. Which I guess blames me to though taking Marx as with problems with taking Marx as an Epicurean of any sort, or an Aristotelian, which I was also something is important. I do think you have to know Aristotle to get some of what Marx is up to, but I don't think you can read him as an Aristotelian, and that's kind of because he does have certain Aristotelian assumptions about teleology that an Epicurean would never have. Yeah, but they are not Aristotle's or Aquaus' assumptions about teleology, they are kind of the assumption that there must be a teleology for the historical dialectic to work. And what is a teleology? Well, the teleogy is is negative, but and what is what is the most negative virtue would be freedom, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There are a lot of, you know, and and I know Marx is supposed to be well, this is not this is this is not philosophy, this is science. And I'm like, it's not science. I'm sorry. Like, I mean, not in the way we mean the word now, anyway. I know I could also do that 70s thing where you say, well, but Marx meant vision could have, which is uh, which can kind of mean science, but can also mean logic. And I'm like, yeah, but it's that doesn't get you away from the problem as much as you think it does. I find it interesting that the anti-Hegelian people also actually end up being more like true Epicureans, and my example of that is Althusser, yeah, yeah. Although from Spinoza's allator materialism is basically a return to the Lucretian swerve.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:17

Yeah, no, it's very clear. It's very clear by the end of it, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:06:22

And why does he do that? Well, he gets into a determinism problem, yeah. Like he wants to bracket out all the, you know, he relaxed too. We what ultimately we do actually have indications of his psychology, so I can psychology psychologize them fairly. He responds to his earlier kind of science of logic Hegelian self, realizes that there's a problem with some of these notions of consciousness and. Alienation. Now, I actually think alienation is more scientific of a concept than than Altocer does, but but I get why he thinks that in the context of the early 20th century and mid-20th century thought. He's also his model for science is structural linguistics and I guess Lukanian psychology, which that's a weird model for science. But until Zizek that.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:48

I know it's on online somewhere, whereas him, Alenka Zupancich, and Mladen Dular, and Zizek relate an anecdote about probably the most greatest compliment, but also simultaneously most damning insult that Mladen Dular made about Zizek, which is that he's been writing the same book for his entire career, just in various different sort of facets and manifestations, but it's just the same shtick. And Zizek was like, you got me, it's completely right. And so you'd think that if it's the same book, you'd be a little bit more consistent, but that's you know, again, I don't want to speak too ill on Zizek. I'm actually rather rather favorable toward Zizek, even though I think he gets a lot wrong. I still have a soft spot for the sniffly scoving, but he was he was my gateway drug.

C. Derick Varn 1:08:33

Him and Badoo were my gateway drugs out of the milieu uh post-structuralism and our reactionary analytical thought. Not that all I'm gonna be clear, not that all analytical thought was reactionary. The part that I was it was reactionary, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:51

And I can say the same, yeah, on my end as well. So I I have to give you know credits where credit where credits do. You know, again, I think you know, they're especially the kind of the dead end of especially very lit criticized, you know, postmodernism in the academy, where it's just this sort of spinning your wheels forever. Gizak and Badu great gateway drugs out of that for sure. But yeah, let's let's sort of bring it to Marx. I think there's so much that could be said about tracing Marx's sort of ancient and even medieval influences. I wouldn't say it's a great book, but it's an interesting book. This guy, Cyril Smith, reformed Trotskyist, wrote this book, Karl Marx and the Future of the Human, where despite the title, a huge chunk of it's basically focused on looking at the kind of neoplatonic and Western esoteric underground current in Marx. And I was often kind of unsure if this connection really held any water. But as I got more into Plotinus, I actually do think there's a really interesting point where both Marx and Plotinus actually have a very similar notion of something we call self-creation. And this is what Smith does talk about. I don't think he articulates it, articulates

Marxism Teleology And Materialist Tensions

SPEAKER_00 1:10:02

it super well, but again, I think it's it's on to something there. Uh so uh this will sound familiar to people who've read Marx, but probably less familiar for people who kind of think about Plotinus. But uh Plotinus has this way of thinking about creation or self-actualization. Again, these are gonna be a bit vague initially, but hopefully it'll become clear as I describe it. Where uh you have this thing that's known as the principle of two acts. For uh something to be what it is, its first activity is uh its own self-constitutive unity. So uh being what it is is its first activity, and its second activity is manifesting an image of itself exterior to itself in a way that doesn't directly affect that thing. Super vague sounding. If you're not super into philosophy, you're like, what is this dude saying? Here's an analogy way of thinking about it. Times often appeals to like the sun. So the sun,

Plotinus Two Acts And Self Creation

SPEAKER_00 1:11:02

in being the sun, is just sort of doing its own thing. As a result of it being its own thing, being the sun, it's generating all this heat and light and energy. That all right. So okay. The specific analogy of the sun, that's where you want me to resume? Mm-hmm. Okay. So, yeah, understanding these complex ideas. Always good to use analogies. I think this is something you see a lot in ancient philosophy for a reason. I'll give a couple. I'll start with one I think is perhaps kind of intuitive. Plotinus, for example, thinks about this in terms of the sun. The sun, in being the sun, you know, boiling heat, plasma energy, what have you. That is the first activity. It just sort of does that all on its own. The second activity of the sun is the generation of light and heat that emanates out from that. And that is, as people like Bataille and others pick up on, that is then responsible for the whole of say human civilization, of life, all the stuff we get on earth. But the first and kind of primary activity of the sun is not concerned with any of its effects, it's just being the sun. And in virtue of being the sun, it then produces an aspect of itself outside of itself. And so Plotinus sees this as basically how you get the whole metaphysical system in his mind. It's like a really core principle of all cause and effect, not just in time, but in logic and things like that. So in the human version of this, you know, we, in virtue of being humans, sort of have to, our primary act is our organic self-constitution, basically, sort of being a unified organism. For Plotinus, health and unity are basically kind of one and the same kind of thing. The more healthy you are, the more unified your body is, etc. But we create an image of ourselves, something like ourselves in the artifacts that we make and the technologies that we produce. And so Marx, I think, consciously or not, is picking up on an idea or an aspect of this in his theory of alienation and the early writings on species being in a way that is actually, I think, probably responding to Rousseau more than anyone else. But Rousseau is super Epicurean on this point. Not to get too far afield on like Epicurean anthropology, but uh for readers of Rousseau, you'll probably recognize this from the second discourse, both the Epicureans and then Rousseau think that technology emerges because of uh natural scarcity, but that is not a natural state of affairs for human beings. It's a thing that's done out of necessity because we need to do it, not because we want to do it. And so there's a sense in which, for someone like Rousseau, when we use technology, we're sort of alienating ourselves inherently because we're taking a part of ourselves and putting it in something outside of ourselves that uh disunifies the human person. I think I think Marx can't ever fully say no to that, but he wants to have a positive upshot for it. He wants to have a sense in which there is a form of human self-actualization that is generative, that produces something external to itself that doesn't come at the diminution of our essence. So alienated production for someone like Marx is going to be that Russoe incense, where you're taking something in yourself and putting it outside of yourself. But in the same way that the sun, when it is the sun, isn't doing that for the sake of the world on earth. It's not doing that because it really wants there to be all these plants and animals thriving on Earth, it doesn't know or care about the things that goes on on Earth. It's just being itself. There's a similar sort of way in which human technical activity, again, in the positive sense for Plotinus, is generative, puts something outside of itself that doesn't come at any sort of cost or diminution to what you yourself are, but rather is the expression of what you yourself are. I think Marx understands non-alienated production as being like that. It's not you removing something from your essence and putting it outside of yourself, that's alienated production, but this more Neoplatonic notion of self-creation, where you are in virtue of completing and unifying yourself, producing an image of that outside of yourself. In fact, I think Marx goes a little more Hegelian and says, you know, it actually that's how you reach the completion, is in that sort of externalizing activity. So even these things that sound very abstract, metaphysical, I think are still rooted in some of these very ancient ways of understanding the nature of the subject, causation, things like that. And so tracing these sorts of lines historically, there you need to know where Marx is getting these things, where he's getting these ideas from. You know, yes, he's very Epicurean in that, unlike all these other schools, he thinks that nature has no governor. You know, there's no thing outside of nature that's ruling over nature. Nature is self-constituting, nature is self-ruling. But, you know, this is something you can see in like people like Paracelsus or, you know, sort of dissident Protestant philosophers in the early modern period, too. And there's a reason why Marx and Engels have a somewhat positive appraisal of some of these people. Again, it's complicated, there's many threads, but the particular way in which Marx wants to see his way out of certain problems posed by this kind of Rousseauian Epicureanism, again, you need to understand the way in which he's getting it from these other strands as well. So we've got a lost the train thought a little bit, I think, with some of the interruptions, but I think that does kind of resume pretty neatly of where we were initially thinking.

C. Derick Varn 1:17:13

Yeah, uh, what this clarifies to me uh is a couple of different things. One, we are getting an Epicureism read through a bunch of different thinkers, which inadvertently or deliberately incorporates other forms of thinking that do not come from that tradition, both modern and ancient. Yeah. I remember I remember perusing Cyril Smith's book way back in the day. Okay, when it was new, around 2007, 2008, somewhere in there. Maybe it wasn't even new then. When it first came into Marxism, and the other, you know, Cyril Smith was basically the only other person other than Lisha Kolakowski, a guy whose opinion of Marxism is very much colored by his reaction to the Soviet Union and his disillusionment with that. But it is interesting to me that he also sees Marx's origin in Plotinus, because he does. It's like where he starts the history of Marxism and the Kolakowski main core. It starts with Platinus, and the Cyril Smith book got me thinking, okay, maybe this isn't as wack-adoo as I initially thought it was. I mean, I thought it was just like, okay, so we we we we locate German idealism in its neo in its ancient Neoplatonic, I guess, high uh late Neoplatonic middle. Where's Platinus in the Neoplatonic?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:35

He's Plotinus basically founds Neoplatonism. In his mind, he's not doing anything original, but that's true for most ancient philosophers. Most ancient philosophers, most most pre-modern philosophers think that innovation is the worst thing that you could be doing. You know, you're deviating from the transmission of ancestral wisdom, basically. And when Plotinus critiques the Gnostics, he's like, you're making up your own books and attributing them to people. That's not true. At least that's what Porphyry says. And he's like, you're deviating so much from Hellenistic philosophy by introducing these new foreign elements. That's the core of his critique. Then he sort of takes them to task on specific points. But again, in his mind, Plotinus isn't doing anything new, even when he is doing stuff that's new. Plotinus is third century, so roughly the year 200 to 270 is where his life more or less goes. And unlike a lot of the later Neoplatonists, he's not just doing commentaries, he's kind of doing commentaries. You know, he's certainly, you know, commenting on Plato and Aristotle, but he really sets the curriculum for the next couple hundred years in the Neoplatonic school. And a lot of that basically sets the scope of the debate, and at least the picture of ancient philosophy that people have through the entire Middle Ages. And, you know, again, things change, obviously, but the neoplatonized reading of Aristotle is kind of the default mode of Jewish, Islamic, and Christian, both Western and Eastern philosophy, pretty much for the next thousand years.

C. Derick Varn 1:20:21

Yeah, I was about to say, is it is the reason why we could trace like Marx to some reason back to Plotinus is because this is Hegel's reading this version of Aristotle, which comes to us through Christian and and Islamic thought, particularly Aquinas, but not just to give the Catholics all the credit, also through Al Kindi and uh all the Islamic philosophers. And they clearly, I mean, like they attribute stuff to Aristotle that's only attributed to Aristotle and Neoplatonist and full work. And they also read Aristotle and Plato as totally copesthetic, which is interesting. But but once you know that,

Neoplatonic Reception And Misreading Greeks

C. Derick Varn 1:21:08

you you do you do see this, like, okay, there's so now there's this there's this like tradition of reception that weirdly the German philological project has actually managed to bury, even though a lot of these early readings are based on it, which is a very interesting problem. Because you know by the time you get the Heider, you got people claiming they're getting back to the essence of these original texts, and or you have what is being done in like the Victorian Academy Ford and it in English language philosophy, where they are stripping out anything weird from these texts to make them copacetic with a fairly modern, semi-materialist, soft Christian worldview.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:02

You see this a lot with the way in which at this time you start read people start reading proto-evolutionary ideas into both Aristotle and Epicureanism, despite the fact that neither of them really, by any remote stretch of the imagination, would have that. Sometimes it just is a kind of a blatant misreading of the text. But in the case of Epicureanism, at least it's a little bit more understandable why they would think it's something like evolution. But, you know, sometimes it really just is wanting to see something that's there, in large part because they want it to be kind of prefigured in classical texts. But you know, you have no notion of evolution in any of these things.

C. Derick Varn 1:22:43

Yeah. I've read a whole lot about atheism in the age in the ancient world, for example, and I have concluded that there were a few, but a lot of people that that that both modern philosophers and modern like skeptics and his modern, you know, modernist readings of this, they they take a weird cue from Leo Strauss, actually, where they're like projecting a secret esoteric reading onto these people. Oh, they would be suppressed by the church. Okay, sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:11

What church in ancient Greece?

C. Derick Varn 1:23:13

Yeah, or well, yeah, or or even when you deal with early moderns, like, oh, well, you know, Descartes didn't really believe that because he would have he was secretly an atheist because it would have been suppressed by the church. And I'm like, okay, prove it though.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:30

Like, yeah, if anything, what you what's more likely and more fair to say is that the kind of dissident religious trend that's breaking with the church is like weird mystical pantheisms, and like Spinoza, yeah, exactly.

C. Derick Varn 1:23:44

Also not an atheist, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:47

And I actually, again, name that probably I just shouldn't be mentioning, but I do think at least picks up on this correctly. Peter Lamborn Wilson, I think, is not going to mince words on this. Like historically, when he's like looking at these sorts of things, he's like, oh no, no, spiritual anarchism needs to be a kind of weird mystical pantheism. It's not atheism, it's just weird mystical pantheism. That doesn't touch on anything else that he says, but again, I think he at least is right to pick up that that is that's the dissident trend. It's not prefiguring modern atheism in any stretch of the imagination.

C. Derick Varn 1:24:17

No. And I just I think it's, you know, for example, when Spinoza, I'm like, yeah, Spinoza really thought he was an atheist after he got excommunicated from his community. There's no reason why, at least in his private notes, he couldn't have admitted it. Like, um at that point, I mean, like, yeah, the Christians might get him, sure, but like in his private notes, but we have no evidence. We have absolutely no evidence. It's not like we've lost a lot of Spinoza's writing that I know of.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:55

Yeah, yeah, I mean, even in a lot of his letters, like he's referring to medieval proofs for the God's existence by Crescus and others, and you know, clearly reading like Crescus, Gershanis, these like Jewish medieval philosophers. He's like, Oh, well, they got their arguments for God's existence wrong. Here's a better argument.

unknown 1:25:12

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:12

That's not an atheist. That's by no stretch of the imagination an atheist.

C. Derick Varn 1:25:16

Now, it's also not like a folk theist that you'll meet at an evangelical church, yeah, but that's not all, that's not most medieval thinkers.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:26

Very few, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:25:29

I mean, and I know after reading Carlo Ginsburg, we also don't really understand what everyday people thought, too, and it's often way weirder and more elaborate than you think.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:40

Yeah, exactly.

C. Derick Varn 1:25:41

Um so I mean I wanted to, you know, you made this point about this. I was gonna ask you, what do you make of this? Because uh materialism does I want to bring to bear the problem that you get in Marxism because it's materialism based. And I'm not just talking about monism and imperial criticism or what is it? Monism and imperial criticism, the the the terrible Lenin book, the Lenin book I don't like, where like he he has a you know dialectic of mind and and then I'm like, but but what is mind for you though, since you don't um you know it's it mind is another substance, but anyway just getting this back on track. It there's a great debate within Marxism about how rigid his determinism is, and his own rhetoric is actually wild. I mean, like I I've read almost every single thing I get in Marx English, I've read a lot of it in German. Haven't played around in the archives of the Mega 2 or anything, so I you know I'm not that cool. But like, although most of people who do that just seem to say the same thing the new left does, and I'm uh and they don't really produce it anyway. That's a that's a side complaint where I'm like, oh, you're supposed to get this whole new revelation, and I haven't seen it yet. But anyway, the the thing that I want to focus in on here, though, is like this the strange conception of materialism in in Marx, which seems to have some properties of what we might call later on emergence or systems thinking, but isn't that because it's not grounded in that philosophy. And I think like I have said in the past, and I meant it, that it's pointing towards that, but it is not that. Um and this leads to a couple of things. Whether or not you think he meant socialism was inevitable literally, or not, whether or not he thought that socialism would automatically emerge from the working class even if socialist didn't exist, and these questions he hedges his bets on in his letters and stuff, actually, like that's clear, like because sometimes it's socialism inevitable, sometimes it's socialism and common ruin. I'm like, those are different things. He also has a human-centric view of teleology where he does see humans as somehow uniquely special. He he he places his specialness in labor, which I which is what I find kind of weird. There are some like anthropological astruse into like human cooperation and building a social reproduction is kind of our advantage. We can't even beat most of our primate relatives in any. Anything important other than the fact that we can cooperate, we don't eat each other's babies automatically for lipids, and even if they're not directly related to us generally, and because of that, we cannot compete and seem to have enough generational skills to like you know build complex tools. All right, just yeah, so there's some anthropological truth to Marxist talk about labor. I don't want to completely discount it, but he really believes this is a uniquely human trait. And I'm like, well, the but the other primates do this. I don't know, like they have tools like and thumps. So I was I was like thinking about this problem and with turns to Marxist materialism because it poses a bigger problem in the 20th century. I mean, that's what that you know the alienation thing, the Russonian alienation, which I don't think is as unscientific an idea as as the Altisarians do, but there's a whole lot the Altissarians are responding to more than just that, yeah, absolutely, about how to justify you know structures because they they want to get out of like very humanistic, very voluntaristic conceptions of history, and in Marx, there's something about the implications of his materialism that seem to almost have it both ways, you know. Men, you know, men create their history, but they're not of their own blah blah blah blah blah. And I actually think there's some like truth to that, to be completely honest with you. There's the like contingency and necessity to uh get back to Masot are not really all that separate, yeah. But what you can't do is say that he is then an Epicurean in the way the Epicureans were, because contingency and necessity, I mean, they would just say, well, stuff emerges because stuff happens, and that is kind of like where Altercara gets. And the problem that has for Altercare's politics is you like the allegory materialism does just make it sound like well, the swerve that creates the space to act is random. So basically, okay, well, then how do you why do you fight for revolution? And you actually are gonna have a problem answering that. I think he does. I really do think ultraser does have a problem answering that in specific. It leads to a kind of ideological despair towards the end of his life. We also see this with Lukash completely separately from the Hegelian standpoint, they end up in the same kind of pit, partly partly because of political things and and material history. Completely true. There's you know what happened in the Soviet Union, bummed them out, the Sino-Soviet split, really complicated Al Tessayer's life, uh, you know, all the shenanigans and the French Communist Party, you just list them forever. But there also does seem to be, in a very real sense, a philosophical problem here that comes from this kind of weird materialism that Marx didn't completely work out. And I do think it's incomplete. I mean, like, that's me being charitable and not just saying it's incoherent. And I think that's partly because there is this formalism that's coming from the Epicureans, but it's read through so many different things, and it's not it's the you know, the Epicurean formalism. I mean, the Epicurean formal materialism and the atomism and all that is actually a remarkably coherent worldview, actually. I mean, like it really is like like random stuff happens because random stuff happens, because everything is you know, the basis of everything is passive matter, it's interactions create activity, and that's where most things come from. Maybe even gods have a nice day, and that's it. And like just be happy with what happens with you and carve out your little space in that because you're not going to be able to shape it, which is also why Epicureans reject politics, yeah. Like 100%, it is a remarkably coherent worldview, as is the stoic worldview, which was opposed to it. Like, but this kind of Epicureanism in Marx, uh, you know, he's reading it through Rousseau and he's reading it through like, well, the Epicureans are materialists, but he's reading that through like a very you know post-Enlightenment lens, and he's trying to reconcile that with like Hegelian dialectical determinism and then also liberal Whiggish determinism, of which Marx is not. I don't think I think calling Marx Whiggish is actually wrong, but like he he's still pulling from that tradition in some ways, and I guess I should define that from for new listeners. Whiggish is when you believe that progress continually gets better because you know what better and progress is, and continually and linearity somehow works. And so you have this thing, but if you don't this kind of vagueness, but if you don't accept a teleological reading of Marxist materialism, then a whole lot of Marx's arguments don't work, you know. Because one of the things that you have to understand, I think, from the standpoint of what Marx is trying to do in response to German idealism, is German idealism is about the is alt problem's a big problem because we realize that a lot of the a lot of the issue are still described in odds because we still have to like use normative language to speak about anything, right? The German idealists kind of they don't directly say that this is me reading it in modern terms, and maybe you would reject me doing that, but they kind of see the problem, but their way of fixing it, I don't think works, to be quite frank with you. And then what Marx does is like he's got a he he's he's a materialist and he's not religious, he's definitely you know pushing past his left Hegelian reading of uh of history into something that he would deem more scientific, but he doesn't seem to completely reconcile this, like hangover from the old way of being, because if he's truly got an Epicurean physics and an Epicurean metaphysics, his politics don't make a lot of sense, right? Like, yes, the Epicureans are communalists, yeah, true, but they're they're also completely apolitical. They think that you should basically leave you know the the life of the polis to itself, go live out in a garden and stay away from everybody who's not just living out with you in the garden and not having a lot of stuff and eating cheese and fruit or whatever. Like that's what they really believed, and so it's it's just weird. It does seem like this kind of plagues Marxism, and I say this because it shows up all over the place. This claim about materialism and ontology is also why Marx claims to not need an ethical basis for what he's arguing. But Marx clearly makes ethical appeals all over the place, even though he's denying he's doing it. There's no way around that acknowledgement, like he's saying he doesn't do it, but then like even in his scientific work, there's ethical, you don't call the bourgeoisie vampires if you don't have an ethical framework. Um but again, that tension is partly from a physical material tension in his own thought. I wanted, I wanted to like ask you that because you know you and I talked off air, and I was we were talking about the Chris Katron, Benjamin Studebaker debates, and I was like sympathetic with Studebaker methodologically, that like I don't think Katrone is really taking the ancient world that seriously in his statements, but that ultimately I think Catrone's actually somewhat right that we can't really say that Marx is an Epicurean or that the ancient philosophy is really is really super informing what he's doing, even if Marx thinks it is.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:48

Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of there's a lot of threads to pick up on, probably many that'll have to sort of leave there. And I'm not gonna pretend I'm a Marxologist, even though I've been you know certainly interested in this and thinking about it for a while. I think in part because sort of similar to some things that you mentioned at the with the people who are in the mega and working through all the archival material. I feel like every time I sort of say something about Marx, it immediately just raises up the red flags of people who sort of work on this, and so I kind of want to defer to that. But at times I'm saying things that I think kind of obviously have to be true, but people will contest vehemently anyway.

C. Derick Varn 1:37:28

Well, though, like find a scrap note from something he said once off the back of a sheet of paper and then use that to justify an old argument from the 1960s. Yeah, um, I'm I'm being a jerk, but that is my experience of a lot of like the the mega stuff. And sometimes I'm like, are you actually interested in going through the archives for us to understand Marx? Are you interested in going to the archives so you can find a scrap of paper to turn Marx into a brinquilliquist dummy? Yeah, well, welcome to philosophy. That's all we do. It's like we just everyone's got their hand up an image of Plato and just make it a talk.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:05

Like I mean, I think I think you just gotta you gotta in some ways you gotta know when you're doing the here is me reconstructing, here is me being creative. You can do both, but those are different things. You gotta know really clearly what you're saying that's sort of grounded in that, and what you're saying that's just hey, look, isn't it crazy how he has the exact same opinions that I do on this? And always good to keep those two stuff. I'm never gonna pretend that I'm I agree with Platinus on most things, but again, it's good to know what you think that he sort of is generative for. So here's one example of the Marx thing that I think always was sort of baffling to me. I feel you get this reading of the base superstructure relation. First off, I'm not even convinced that Marx has a like super rigorous, fle rigorous, fleshed out theory of base superstructure. I don't think he even listened to what what do you say?

C. Derick Varn 1:38:59

That's it. He doesn't. Next question. I mean, like it's a metaphor that comes up a few times, and like the the even in Marx, everyone's like, oh, the base determines the superstructure. I'm like, actually, even Marx presents it as like almost a yin-yang feedback loop that where the base ultimately is more important, but then you have to deal with the fact relations of production which determine all the superstructure are part of the base, and that's what I mean by the yin-yang part of it. It's not actually as as clearly separate, and it and like economics determine everything, particularly when you think about in modes of production, it's not clear in prior modes of production that politics and superstructure and economics are even separate from Marx. He seems to think that that's like a that's a feature of capitalism that it's unclear if Marx thinks is actually real, too, if that's like an ideological feature of capitalism or a real trait of capitalism. And the reason why I say that is in capital, in capital, it seems like it seems to be like a like a ideological figure, but like if you read Marx's debates with the anarchists, then he seems to assert it as if it's real.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:18

But anyway, yeah, I mean, I sort of I guess I largely reiterate everything you said, but I will sort of say also, too, if Marx is a materialist, he has to have a sense in which the base is logically prior to the superstructure, otherwise, it's not the base. It has to be some sort of material base that then produces these things that exist as a result of matter. So I will say, too, that again, it's not that the base, the material base is immutable, unchanging, bound by deterministic laws, because clearly it is in a dynamic reciprocal relation with these other things as well. You know, you're if you're a hunter-gatherer society and then suddenly start planting stuff to reuse year after year, you've transformed the material basis on which your society survives. So clearly these things are gonna have to affect each other. But again, I don't I hear some of these like very critical theorized iterations on these sort of things in Marx, just to me end up sort of obfuscating so much where it's like, I don't, as you're saying, I don't really see every particularly rigorous theory of basement superstructure present in Marx's philosophy. He's invoking these sort of terms at times, I think, mostly just a designated logical relation in terms of certain kinds of what causes other things, but generally it's not like a particularly metaphysical account, at least as far as anything I can really glean from it. So, one other thing I want to pick up on too is the point about sort of is Marxism teleological, is it deterministic? And I think what's really tough and hard to say with some of those things is that we may be talking about very different notions of teleology and many different notions of determinism. There go. Yeah. And so one thing I'll sort of say just from the outset that is, I think, is always really important to keep in mind, is that in the ancient Greek, I'll just say the ancient world in general, necessity and freedom are not seen as opposed. In fact, they're actually basically those two things go together. You're free because you act in accord with necessity. For moderns, it's no, no, it's the opposite. You're free because you can diverge from necessity. But you know, uh that's a fundamentally different way of sort of thinking about freedom. Laws gets introduced when people start thinking about the will as a distinct like faculty, very Christian kinds of problems. You see this in like Anselm and you know other kind of thinkers trying to think about the will as a distinct causal role. Much more modern way of thinking about free will is based on this. So, Plotinus, for example, he says the one is the most free thing there is. Why? Not because it couldn't have done something else or that chose. No, the one didn't choose anything. Choice is between multiple options. That's unfree if you are choosing between multiple options because you're not perfectly unified. Rather, if the one is free because nothing's making it do what it does, all its actions stems from itself. Freedom is self-actualization, self-activity. That's what freedom consists in for most ancient philosophers. Not having something else determine your activity for you. But if it's perfectly deterministic in the sense of you couldn't have done anything otherwise, you have no counterfactual freedom, doesn't matter. That's sort of not really a consideration.

C. Derick Varn 1:43:37

That's really it's irrelevant and stupid and dumb. No, um, I mean, for the ancient, it kind of is. I mean, like, and even for the Christian, like, like, like, like you get to this on on like free will. This is actually a theological debate within Christianity and in Islam, yeah, 100%. And it's very important, it's a very important one in Islam. But what that's about is actually not about materialism, it's about what you think concordance with God is. And so these the way people talk about this after the 19th century and the like what I like to think of the secularization of Christian thought and early modern thinking, yeah. And but I don't necessarily mean that they were secular, I mean that like they started trying to explain Christian thought in secular ways. This this really confuses things, I think, when it comes like because that's when you have to like well, God's law, and if you logically extrapolate from God's law, and you also believe in either predestination or at least what is it, double wretchedness or whatever the shit, like whatever Luther was on about, you end up having to like two things prompting you to

Freedom Necessity And Rights Without God

C. Derick Varn 1:44:57

think in a way where, like, okay, we have a mechanistic law of the universe because we have laws, laws come from God, etc. etc. etc. Now, to be fair, I've been mean the Marxism. I also think modern liberalism is utterly incoherent about this shit because like worse ways, too, if I'm being honest. Yeah, like way more worse. Like, yeah, human rights. I I when I say this, people like liberals will say I am a radical conservative, but I'm like, human rights actually do not make sense when you no longer believe in divine origins of a natural law because it's obvious they're alienatable because we alienate them all the damn time, and there's like, which is also why in liberal human rights thinking, you can basically call any fucking thing a right, and I I and I know people get really uncomfortable when I say stuff like if you're a consistent person who does not believe in either social contract theory or natural law, and natural law does not it does not require you to be Christian, but it does at least require you to believe that there's God. Your your associate your assertions of rights are basically big rock candy mountain shit whistlist. And whoa my god, do people get mad at me for that? Um like you sound like a radical because you know conservatives argue this all the time. I'm well, the conservatives aren't wrong. I mean, they they're they're probably wrong that there's the singular divine creator that in a sense is natural law, and I'm not even sure the concept of natural law actually makes any goddamn sense, but but a human uh human rights as something other than just tacit political agreements that transcend national boundaries really are based on that way of thinking, and you don't believe in the basis anymore, or you can't argue that that that basis can be the primary basis if you're also secular, even if you do believe in that basis. So you can't argue that, like, you know, well, clearly there's the whole world believes in some kind of divinity which is a lawgiver, no, they don't. Like, you might could think that I mean it's it's a stretch, even in even in the early modern period, but you could probably convince yourself of that somewhat rationally, off of your existing evidence and misinterpretations of religions. But once you have any knowledge of stuff like the Dharmic traditions and certain shamanistic ways of thinking, and and then the borderlines between you know anthropology and religious studies, etc. etc., you just have to throw that out the window. Like, it's just like nope, gone. No, there's not not everybody has a lawgiver, it's just like uh that is not a human universal, yeah. So, you know, that's the problem. So when I say this about Marx, I'm still a Marxist, I just think we have to we have to admit that you know Big Daddy Marx didn't work all this shit out. I mean, the other place where I think it's like I believe in modes of production, but Marxist work on modes of production is the essentially like a list that Ingalls made that he made that he cribbed from some bourgeois economists that he doesn't even totally believe in, and there's a here be dragons for like pretty much everything in the ancient world as far as how the modes of production actually work, yeah. Um, and oh my god, if it's in Asia, we're just like Asiatic despotism because Hegel said so bye! Like, you know, and it's it's this weird mixture. I mean, the mode, the list of modes he gives us is this weird mixture of uh Whiggish British thought hybridized with Hegel's story and and the phenomenology and in the in the lectures of the history of religion, and I'm not even sure Marx really believes in it that deeply. Like, you know, for example, like does he actually believe that there is a coherent slave mode of production in the class in the antique world? Yeah, kinda actually he does, but if he had known more about the antique world, would he have thought that was the primary driving thing? Because it only is sometimes, like it is in the Roman and Greek classical world, but it's not everywhere. And I think you know, we live in this weird heyday where like everyone's trying to come up with new modes. My favorite is Samir Amin, and this is off of your specialization, but like he comes up with like everything is tributary mode of production except for European capitalism, basically, and even it's gonna become tributary mode of production because of decadence. And I'm just like, well, that doesn't really explain anything, dude.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:58

Yeah, um, you see the same impulse of the whole technofeudalism discourse.

C. Derick Varn 1:50:02

Oh my god, that is so it's a bad reading of everything. Like, yeah, I know I was I was watching Giannis Farrafakis talk about Palantir entering the war in Iran, which is by the way, we're recording three days after that started. Yeah, that's what I'm distracting myself from right now, right? Uh is a proof of techno-neofeudalism. And I'm like, what do you think what the internet was used for during the during the global war on terror? In fact, in fact, who invented the internet and why? It was the fucking military. Um, and they gave it to private sector corporate, and and that was also why we couldn't get the Soviets to release their comp their computers and their cybernetic systems because they kept it as A military secret.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:49

If we had a trinary computing device, that would be the solution to all this.

C. Derick Varn 1:50:53

Oh my god. It's but but so I'm like, I'm like techno neo, and I'm also like okay. In feudalism, rents also are tied to food. What's producing the food and the energy in your techno neo-feudal matrix, my friend? It's not robots. But anyway, and I'm like, these are this is like a reductive analysis is based off of rhetoric. And then you're like to defend Marx, he didn't do that that much. Like, and and I think the the biggest condemnation that you can make of Marx is just like he's inconsistent because he's also a political thinker. He's not yeah, he's actually not setting out to build a coherent system, he's setting out to build a coherent political economy, but that political economy does have implications for materialism, the study of history, etc. etc. etc. So, like I think this is important when you look at ancient philosophies because it's not like Aristotle just had a random grab bag of shit he believed. Well, except about science. I think science is sometimes a random grab bag of shit he believed.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:07

Well that's the best part about all the the natural philosophy stuff. It's here's all these principles, but there is this thing that does violate it, so we have to, you know. Like one of my favorite examples of that is in Aristotle's On Dreams, he re he relays this thing that no one else says, and he has no reason to mention, but he thinks that pregnant women, sorry, not sorry, women while menstruating can stain mirrors red by staring at them long enough. I do remember this actually, and being completely baffled by everyone's baffled by it because Aristotle is famous for having a theory of vision where stuff enters into our eyes rather than what was the more common view that Plato and others talk about, where our eyes shoot out beams of light that then come back to us and get us sensory information like a cane sticking out and poking things. Aristotle thing out beams of light, but menstruating women do turn mirrors red when they stare at them. This is what's funny about ancient philosophy is you have to ask yourself, why on earth are these people committed to some of these things?

C. Derick Varn 1:53:16

No, it is wild what some of these people I mean, like this is like when people are like trying to convince me that Plato's like ultimately rational, and I'm like, not by our standards. Like, no, like if you I assume his base worldview, yeah, I mean, yes, it is rational from that perspective, but like, yeah, my my favorite is all the weird legends about someone we know very little actually about, which is Pythagoras. Yeah, I've been reading all kinds of histories on Pythagoras, and everyone's like, you know what, we don't actually know anything. But my favorite was like, he dies. I mean, we don't even know because there's multiple stories of a deaf, even, but he dies because he won't run through a field of beans because beans are souls, are maybe they have insul because they look like embryos, maybe. I mean, and and that's not even in the story, it's just like you get the story. I I remember reading Simon Critchley's book on the death of philosophers and getting the various legends of how Pythagoras dies, and I'm like, so he wouldn't run across the field of beans because he thought they might be insult because they might look like babies, but even you don't really know that you're trying to make sense of the of the stories from what we do know that he wouldn't eat beans, and I don't that's weird. I am sort of like, man, if you're a vegetarian who doesn't eat beans in the ancient world, I don't know where you're getting your protein from, but uh um maybe that explains a lot, but nonetheless, you just get these wild stories, and people just take them as one-offs. And I'm like, no, we're missing what connects us, or or maybe it is one of those weird things, like, no, he just really didn't think you should eat beans. I don't know, man. Like, and we don't know, but you know, it's either we don't know, and you should say we don't know, or we should assume it's coherent, and then I gotta figure out what it has to do with the music of the spears and the transmigration of the soul, and why he believed that and what the fuck that has to do with beans, probably something. I mean, if I'm really being honest, it's probably something about the animating force of air and gas, and I'm not joking, yeah. But like, we don't know that. I'm just wildly speculating here, but I just know what people thought the animating force in the ancient world might be wind, puma, uh, pinoma. And so, like, that's why that word means that. So you get that in Indian philosophy too.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:54

I'll give one example that I think is really, really fun from Plotinus. We know next to nothing about Plotinus's early life. We have actually very few biographical information about him, really, as far as like what his day-to-day life was. We know two really interesting things that Porphyry gives us about his life. One, Plotinus suffered from GI issues, like he had like gut problems for his whole life.

C. Derick Varn 1:56:21

And the other thing me.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:23

Go ahead. The other thing is that the one detail of his childhood we know is that Plotinus was breastfed really, really late, up until maybe like early teens.

C. Derick Varn 1:56:34

Oh wow, okay, that's really, really late.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:36

Okay, and we know both very psycho, both very psychoanalytically interesting and not, in my mind, not arbitrary things that Porphyry's including is life of Plotinus. I'm not gonna mention it otherwise matter, but they are interesting to sort of keep in mind.

C. Derick Varn 1:56:53

Yeah, no, because why would Porphyry mention it if he doesn't give us any other details? Is that these two weird ones, like yeah, and Plotinus is one of these people we're we almost as certain has existed. I know there's certain ancients who were like, I don't know, but although I do remember for a while, I I remember someone telling me there was a debate. What this was like a community college professor, and you should probably shouldn't have said this. There's a debate on the existence of Socrates, and I'm like, I doubt it since there's like multiple sources, yeah. Um and and and there's points in which they, as we mentioned, was Xenophon and Plato, like I do the triangulation, like what does Xenophon say? What does Plato say? What did the people making fun of Socrates say? Because we have some of that too, yeah. And then what do the stoics and the Sereniac anecdotes say because they also tie back into Socrates and it gives us these because the Sereniacs definitely don't guilt don't agree with the Neoplatonist, so we but they all claim Socrates, so you gotta like try to figure out how they all fit together at all. So it it's it it's wild the ancient it's wild with the ancient world. I mean, and and you know, and we have better grounds for the Greeks than we do for like you know, I I've mentioned Darmic philosophy. I've read a shit ton of Narga Juna, I'm not sure he's real. I mean, like there were people called Narga Juna for sure, but like is it even one person? Those writings don't read. I I don't read enough of Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit to know, but like they don't read like the same person in translation. I'll tell you that.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:38

Like, yeah, you get this all the time with Aristotle, and Plato to some degree, but especially Aristotle, where so much of the assumptions with is this an authentic thing by Plato? Is this an authentic thing by Aristotle? There's some examples where it's pretty cut and dry, but there's some examples where it's like, oh, well, Plato Aristotle wouldn't have written this because it doesn't agree with the rest of the things that we believe about Aristotle or Plato, and it's like, well, cart and horse are now fully intertwined in this case.

C. Derick Varn 1:59:08

Can we talk about an example of that for both of them? I mean, my my favorite was like trying to recon reconcile the Parmenides with everything else. Oh, because I'm like, wait, did Plato just debunk his own theory of forms? What the fuck is going on here?

SPEAKER_00 1:59:21

Like, yeah, I will say, I will say this. This is one of the things I will say in big favor of Neoplatonism. The Parmenides is an awfully hard dialogue, but the Neoplatonists make it a lot more coherent as far as fitting in within Plato's project. And no small part too, because it seems like when you look at Plato's dialogues, sort of spread out over the course of things, there are certain ways of talking about the forms that you're gonna have to move beyond at a certain way. But in many ways, the Parmenides is a is

Parmenides Plotinus And Closing Links

SPEAKER_00 1:59:55

one of the most important dialogues, especially for Neoplatonists, because it's where they think, one, they get all the kind of like crazy hypostases from. You know, they they see it all in the Parmenides, they really just see it as a systematization of what's laid out in the Parmenides, and even like relatively weird arguments, like at one point in the Parmenides, there's certain things that are being discussed. One is whether or not there's a form of hair and mud. This is actually a very important question for later Platonism. But then there's also this question of are the forms do they cover over things like a sail coving over multiple people laying down? Again, weird arguments in Plato, but you actually get really different, diverging theories of how forms instantiate based on whether or not later Neoplatonists agree with the sale metaphor or not. And so they see the Parmenes as really being this kind of like thing that you give students who are they've gotten the basics down, you know, they've read the dialogues that are being circulated to the general public, the stuff about like, you know, friendship and you know, good conduct, those sorts of things. There's things that like you know, the stupid normal people can handle. Once you've done your due diligence, you need now be like vigorously disabused of many of your notions that you've developed of what the forms and sort of these metaphysics ultimately are. And so many of Neoplatonic debates are really about interpretation of the Parmenides, how we understand the principles that give rise to the forms. Because that's actually the thing that people really misunderstand, I think, about Plato is that the forms are not really not necessarily what Plato's main innovation is. You know, Plato's actually not the first one to talk about forms. You actually get it even as far back as Democritus. What's really interesting about Plato is that again, he's actually trying to account for forms, but prior to that, principles. So we can get to these later dialogues, things like The Sophist, where he's trying to figure out what the the highest genera, the highest kinds. He's trying to think about principles, like fundamental principles, and trying to, in some ways, reduce that to a single first principle. I do think that's in Plato. I think the Neoplatonists are not introducing new things when they articulate uh one.

C. Derick Varn 2:02:12

But I mean, it's also an Aristotle, too. That's legitimately in Aristotle, like like it's not like the neoplatonic the neoplatonic thinkers or the late Platonists or the Middle Platonist put it there. Like and I uh this is what I mean about the like when I said forms and geometric logic, but geometric forms are also based off proofs, which are first axioms. And if you have this mind where you where like the the most complete thing is the simplest self-organizing thing that is both necessary and self-sufficient, blah blah blah blah blah, you know, you gotta have an axiom emergent from that thing to justify everything else. And there have been times where I get over-reductive myself, and I've been like, well, this is why Western science is the way it is, versus like whatever the hell was going on in ancient India, because you don't have a tendency to reduce things. In fact, what you have in like if you know the history of like abidarmic thought, which is their version of metaphysics, and it's and it's collapse, you have an attempt to get down to first principles after you remove the concept of a first principle. Then you just have like, well, there's a dharma. What's a dharma? I don't know, it's a form, and they're like, but how does a form have a form? Shit. And then you get okay, well, you have emptiness. What is emptiness? Is it nothingness? No, it's it's it's untapped, unformed potentiality. There, all right, but but that's not a first principle. That's actually back to like it's almost epicure, like Epicurean ramdeness from a completely different set of metaphysical and physical assumptions, yeah. And I think I think it really is the one thing I think people need to do. I mean, this this is where I wanted to because I know Chris has another thing where he's where he basically says that the ancient Greeks were basically you know caved, like semi-caved railing mystics, and we we've progressed so beyond that today because he does have a wiggle theory history, and I'm like, in some sense that's true, but I would actually argue that so was Descartes, motherfucker. Yeah, like and so am I, so like my cave's just gotten a lot nicer, yeah. Um so you know, I I I do think I do think like we have to go back and make it weird, but like it is coherent, it is, it does have a rationality, not the rationality, I don't know what that is, but a rationality. Once you figure out the first principles, you figure out the assumptions, you figure out how they're structuring their arguments, they do flow, except for the weird places where they don't like pregnant women turn mirrors red and uh administrative women turn mirrors red, and but there's some other there's a lot of weird biology.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:09

I I wrote a little short thing about how you get this coming up all in all sorts of Roman writers seem to talk about how there's a certain place in Portugal where wind can impregnate horses. Yeah, and you can go, okay, that's really odd, but it has a really interesting sort of later relevance for the history of natural science. Because when people were trying to propose a theory of pollination, they were saying, hey, well, if these ancient writers said that this works in the case of animals, it should also then work in the case of plants as well. So there's all sorts of weird ways in which this history is not as like irrelevant and obscure as it may seem. We're in the kind of two-hour mark. I think we'll probably off here. Definitely much more to say.

C. Derick Varn 2:05:55

I think um you and I can probably talk about this all day. And I what I think I'm gonna have you do is in about three months, I'd like to ask you back on to actually just talk about Plotinus. Sure. And the relevance of Plotinus to European thinking. Because weirdly, today, the only people I know who talk about Plotinus are you weirdos and ancient philosophy and our Hellenistic philosophy, not like like truly ancient philosophy, not pre-Socratic, and occultist because they also really like the Titus. And I don't I'm not saying that the occultists are right, I although they're not entirely wrong either. What I am I think it's interesting that he's been kind of dropped out of more mainstream philosophical discussion in ways that people that we have much less of, like people make a lot big, I mean, probably because of Nietzsche, but people make a lot of a big dah of Heraclitus. I'm like, we got like I I've read all of Heraclitus, yeah, it's on two pages, yeah. Like like, and then the anecdotes and like Diogenes Laertus and a few of what like that's what I got.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:15

Yeah, like I got it, I got it right here. This is a thick book, right? You know, this is not this is a lot to have from the ancient world, yeah. It's rare that you get this much from any singular thinker. Huge. Like, yeah, but the thing is, in some ways, the historiography of Plotinus is in some at some points more interesting than Plotinus itself. So love to talk about the sort of changing winds around how people think about Plotinus, why he's still kind of marginal, but in some sense, in my mind, why, you know, in some ways, you can do your Plato and Aristotle, but you gotta read your Plotinus. In no small part, too, because you run to all these thorny things, you go, what on earth are they doing? I'm not gonna say Plotinus makes it clearer, but Plotinus at least gives you a very compelling reading of things that you go, ah, even if I'm not committed to this, I hate how well this seems to make things fit together. So at least knowing the kind of live options for the historical interpretation can at least give you a good basis to at least do something different. But yeah, Platinus, there's all sorts of fun things at Plotinus. I could probably talk for we could probably do you know multiple podcasts on Plotinus. So I'd love to come back chat about that for sure.

C. Derick Varn 2:08:28

I've been I've been I've been doing more on philosophy. I've I could see a couple of people, I'm also talking to Chris Sator, uh of the I think the new idealist or the the young, I can't remember what he calls this show, but to get people more into understanding the the broader context of this philosophy, because I I it's really easy for Marx to say, oh, we've solved philosophy because we know how stuff works that. And I'm like, well, apparently you don't though. I'm just like saying, like the assumption that that that we have all figured we figured out what the world is and now we can change it, it did kind of presume that you figured out what the world is, and good luck with that. So on that note, thank you. Where can people find your work, Max?

SPEAKER_00 2:09:11

Yeah, thanks. Well, so I have my sort of academic stuff on my academia.edu, but most of the stuff I think the audience would be more interested in, and I have stuff out there kind of in circulation, but my substack is really the kind of core central point. Some of the stuff we've talked about today will either be either on the substack or will be coming forthcoming. Probably by the time this goes live, some of it will be. Right now, I'm working on sort of a series of essays on the principle of plenitude and like theories of multiplicity in ancient philosophy and medieval receptions of it, a lot relating to questions of like what does it mean to be materialist? What do we even mean by matter? Stuff like that. So the Substack, maxwaade.substack.com. If you're interested in weird sort of speculative writing, some stuff on kind of like mysticism, philosophy. I'm gonna have some creative writing stuff on there as well, but you know, a lot of this stuff I'm really trying to use as an outlet where it's like this is a little too weird for peer review, but I'm still trying to kind of think through threads in a way that I think a lot of people would find interesting. Even if it's not explicitly political, you won't have to sort of think too far to see where some of these connections might be. You know, there's a lot I think that your your audience would definitely enjoy that I sort of write and think about. And so I'm having about two posts a month and sort of see that for the foreseeable future. So if you're interested, it's free to subscribe, maxwaite.substack.com.

C. Derick Varn 2:10:40

Right. So you're you you like me name name things after yourself. Good man. Um you're independent, you are your own brand.

SPEAKER_00 2:10:47

You know.

C. Derick Varn 2:10:49

Thank you for coming on. I really enjoyed it. I'll definitely have you back. And I gotta go back to to reading horrible things and figure out what's going on in the world. So I'm gonna go do that. Take care, man.

SPEAKER_00 2:11:01

We'll leave the cave. All right, thank you very much for having me on. All right, take care.