Crop Rotation - 005 - Voltaire - Selected Stories

Voltaire: Micromegas and Plato's Dream

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many too while we all stop with us. Hard times come again. Hard times, hard times come again. Many days you have lingered around my cabin door. Oh hard times come again no more.

SPEAKER_02 0:47

Welcome to Crop Rotation, a literature, theology, and philosophy discussion podcast. A good farmer doesn't grow the same thing every year. For the soil to thrive, there needs to be variety. We're a group of friends who found that we missed the life of the mind that we were able to live together when we were at St. John's College in Annapolis two decades ago. This podcast is an opportunity to explore and discuss works of art and of intellect that we've each discovered in the intervening years. Before each meeting, one of us gives the group an assignment. This leader is also responsible for asking an opening question to begin the discussion.

SPEAKER_03 1:27

Coming back at you live, WKBP on the evening commute. We've got the boys from St. John's filling in the time for the long drive on 85, sending it away to my guy Josh. Oh, thanks. Really appreciate it. Hi, my name's Josh. I represent some guys from St. John's College. We're doing this thing where we talk about stuff. And tonight we were going to talk about some fever dreams of Voltaire's. There were two specific works that we read: Micromegas and Plato's Dream. Wanted to talk about Micromegas first. If you gentlemen are in agreement that it is the medier and more substantial of the two works that we read tonight and more worthy of our time. Hearing no immediate protest, I'll charge on. There were a couple of really funny moments to me that some of the satire landed for sure. I felt like there were some really universally delightful things to be experienced watching, you know, hoity-toity people be made fun of. That's just vicariously funny anytime in history. But I was kind of fascinated by the issue of size, relative scale being kind of the fundamental metaphor or image of the difference of scale of experience of all these different species scattered throughout the universe. So we've got one guy who's, you know, 500,000 feet tall, and another dude who's only 50,000 feet tall. The comparison is that of a small lapdog behind a Prussian warrior on his war horse, right? And that's the visual to help us get a relative scale. So worlds within worlds, but adjacent enough to be beheld through the work of perception, right? There's a really fascinating sequence where they roll all over the earth and they grok the whole thing pretty quickly because they're so fast. And then they look around and they barely notice that whales are there. But then once they notice that people are there, the first thing that they wonder is, oh, I think I see them having sex. So it's very interesting how there's this immediate projection of the recognition of this very deep part of ourself, the reproductive self. So that was a moment I'd love to zoom in on. But really, I think there is an obvious question that must be asked as the opening question, having kind of skipped across a rehighlighting of some of the things that I'd love to talk about. The real question is what on earth are those blank pages and what do they mean? I'm going to read the passage leading up to this. A small partisan of Locke was nearby, and when he was finally given the floor, said I do not know, said he, how I think, but I know that I have only ever thought through my senses. That there are immaterial and intelligent substances, I do not doubt, but that it is impossible for God to communicate thought to matter, I doubt very much. I revere the eternal power, it is not my place to limit it. I affirm nothing, and content myself with believing that many more things are possible than one would think. The animal from Sirius smiled. He did not find this the least bit sage, while the dwarf from Saturn would have kissed the sectarian of Locke, were it not for the extreme disproportion. But there was unfortunately a little animacule in a square hat who interrupted all the other animacule philosophers. He said that he knew the secret, that everything would be found in the Summa of Saint Thomas. He looked the two celestial inhabitants up and down. He argued that their people, their worlds, their suns, their stars, had all been made uniquely for mankind. At this speech the two voyagers nearly fell over with the inextinguishable laughter which, according to Homer, is shared with the gods. Their shoulders and their stomachs heaved up and down, and in these convulsions the vessel that the Syrian had on his nail fell into one of the Saturnian's trouser pockets. These two good men searched for it for a long time, found it finally, and tidied it up neatly. The Syrian resumed his discussion with the little knights, he spoke to them with great kindness, although in the depths of his heart he was a little angry that the infinitely small had an almost infinitely great pride. He promised to make them a beautiful philosophical book written very small for their usage, and said that in this book they would see the point of everything. Indeed, he gave them this book before leaving. It was taken to the Academy of Science in Paris, but when the ancient secretary opened it he saw nothing but blank pages. Ah he said I suspected as much. What on earth is the message of the blank pages on the part of the alien to humanity? And having established that, is there a significant difference between that and what this old man knew ahead of time that caused him to suspect as much? I don't even uh I I would love to know from the story's perspective, do you think there's a very clear meaning of agreement between what the old man sees and what the alien intended? Are those different? Uh, you see what I mean? I I think it's interesting that this matter of how two characters within the story have this tension of dramatic irony of claiming to be, you know, able to interact with each other across space and time, of this uh, oh, I suspect it as much. There's almost a meeting of the minds, right? So I'm curious to know was that clear to you guys what that meant, what the alien meant, what the old guy meant, and did you have a strong sense of that? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

I have what I suspect is a canonical interpretation, and then I also have a subversive interpretation. Lovely. I'm happy for either, but I'm also happier from anybody else.

SPEAKER_02 7:28

Can I add a little bit of context before the interpretation? Please do. My edition had a footnote uh after the phrase the inextinguishable laughter, which, according to Homer, is shared with the gods.

SPEAKER_03 7:41

Hmm. I also had a footnote for that.

SPEAKER_02 7:44

So this footnote goes to a place where the gods are having a feast in Olympus, and Hephaestus, who has a limp, pours wine for all of the gods from left to right, and unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods as they saw Hephaestus puffing through the palace. So this is apparently a reference to the gods making fun of their fellow god who has a limp.

SPEAKER_03 8:11

Excellent. Excellent context.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Um, I also have a footnote for the part that says, He promised to make them a beautiful philosophical book. Written very small. And the footnote is from the translator, I guess, of this edition. The edition that I believe to be original, and the one dated 1750, reads, quote, He promised to make them a beautiful philosophical book that would teach them of the admirable admirable things and show them the goodness of things. That said, that is a a different edition than mine actually said, which does not have that. And then it goes on to say they would see the point of everything. It's not actually in the thing, but as a footnote, like on that part, and it seems relevant, so there it is. Right.

SPEAKER_04 8:58

Real quick, I would point out that we have the two aliens asking the humans about scientific stuff. It's a little bit before this. And they're all speaking in unity and answering correctly, you know, like what degree is some star and how much does air weigh and all of that stuff. And the other thing is like, oh, you know about everything outside, so let's talk about everything inside. And then they all start speaking on their own. You know, each person has their own idea. And the two aliens, the Saturnian and the Syrian, are like, oh, look at these silly people. They don't know what they're talking about when it comes to the soul. And then they promise, one of them promises to write this book that will explain everything, and there's not nothing. They also don't provide any answer to their question. And it just struck me that I don't think they know. I think that's why there's nothing in the book, because they don't know what the soul is either.

SPEAKER_03 10:07

Yeah, I mean uh early on in the story, one of the things that the aliens talk about is the fact that traveling outside of your circumstance and perspective and culture to see the world at different scales and be exposed to the world in different ways is the only real way to shape yourself and emerge as a wiser, more knowledgeable, more sapient being. I'm just yeah, just doing homonyms now. So if that's the case, then are the blank pages the message? You know, the real treasure was the friendship that we forged all along, that it's the joys in the journey, it's in the discovery, that the point of alchemy is not to make gold, it's to get good at alchemy. It's to get good at trans transforming your own soul.

SPEAKER_02 11:03

Man, I think these aliens don't know anything. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 11:08

Yeah, I I think I think he's like, Oh, I'll I'll write you this book, and then he sat down to write it, and he's like, Oh, wait, I I don't know either. And so he just left.

SPEAKER_02 11:18

No, so but here's what I'll say to support my uh assertion there, is that there's a thing that you do in fantasy and sci-fi, which maybe had not been invented yet when this was written. Maybe Voltaire didn't have this literary technology yet. But what you do is you're your alien that is wiser than humans, or your you know, godlike being or whatever, that can prove that it knows stuff that humans don't. And you, the author, don't actually know that stuff. So you just make it up. You say, We have blorgl technology, and blorgl technology can teleport you and then teleport them from here to the Arctic Circle and back, and then that proves that you are a superior being with superior science, right? Yeah, you, the author, don't actually have to know it. You can fake it for the fiction so that your alien, godlike characters or whatever, can convince your other characters. That does not happen here pointedly.

SPEAKER_04 12:23

The only reason the Syrian and the Saturnian are better quote than the humans is they're larger.

SPEAKER_03 12:31

Well, it's interesting. Right.

unknown 12:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

They have more senses, they can see more colors, and live longer. Their homes have more categories?

SPEAKER_05 12:46

Hmm.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

So let me real quickly throw out my two injury. Yeah, I want to hear it. Dwight, I liked yours. I had not thought of the one that, or both of y'all, that the Voltaire's assertion is that they don't know anything. Both of mine have that Voltaire's assertion is that they do know something. The first is, and I think this is the one I think is canonical, although I hold that very loosely. That there is no point, there is no purpose, you're just doing stuff. It's blank because there's nothing worthless to discuss, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_04 13:17

They know that it's worthless.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Yeah, they're materialists purely and doing their stuff. Seems to me likely to be the canonical one. Again, I hold that very loosely. The subversive one is that the contents, it does actually explain the point of things and all of that, and the contents are written in one of the senses we don't have. One or more. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 13:40

I was gonna ask about that. Whether or not it's a matter of scale or something like that, is is the information there, but we have no way of getting to it because, like the Library of Babel, the tome is somewhere in the library, but we can't touch it.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

In the subversive interpretation that I gave, if I were giving Voltaire a little bit of undeserved charity, I think that he might say the point of it as a trope might be something like when humans have gotten far enough that they can see it, then they'll be able to apprehend what we have written, you know. And I don't think that's what he's doing. But that's what if I were making a Hollywood movie of this would be the point.

SPEAKER_02 14:25

I think I like that interpretation because there is all this talk about colors and things. Yep. Yep. But I think I think it has that interpretation has to grapple with the difficulty that McRomagas would have in constructing a book that human beings could transport. Like they have to get out their very best. Sorry? You mean just the smallness of the book? Yeah, they can they have to get out their very best microscopes to be able to see an entire ship. Yeah. He's got it balanced on the edge of his fingernail and they're looking at it with microscopes. So, like, how does he make this book?

SPEAKER_03 15:09

Yeah, no, I think that's the matter of that. Could be the issue of the sci-fi woo-ness of it, is that he made a book that had all the stuff in it, and he had the technology to make it tiny, but not to get the information conveyed into the tininess, too. There could be something weird.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

If I were keep going though, keep going. If I were trying to overcome that obstacle and doing what I do, which is try to put a coherent world together, I would say that there's a very simple mechanism, which is narration.

SPEAKER_04 15:43

Yeah, I mean, they start talking to them. There's a little bit of that sci-fi hand waving with oh, he clipped his fingernails and formed it into a trumpet that allowed him to like that's not, you know, that's that's woo.

SPEAKER_03 16:00

Well, there was one more layer there, right? They talked about the fibers that ran through the nails. So he did do a clever little bit of transduction there. It's true, the little those fibers based on their rigidity could possibly act like the old RCA phonogram. You know, it's just a needle on a wax cylinder, and there's literally physical amplification of the jittering with a sound trumpet, that kind of thing. That's what we're going for.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

I will throw in there.

SPEAKER_03 16:30

Yeah, I don't the trumpet thing was weird. I remember that. And one last thing about that, he mentions Leewin Hook, right? And we should it's important to point out that this is cutting-edge, hot, yeah, hot science that he's writing about here. You know, he's yeah. Dwight, how many years has it been since Lewin Hook? I don't know. By the time we get to Voltaire? Yeah, I'm not sure where he falls and all that. But it's recent, right? It's very recent. I think so.

SPEAKER_02 16:59

Yeah. Deck. I think I think they didn't narrate it. He promised to make them a beautiful philosophical book written very small for their usage, and said that in this book they would see the point of everything. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

It's not a McCon. I think they didn't either, Matt. I don't think there was a dictation. I'm just saying it that there is a ready-made solution that, in my opinion, makes the difficulty of creating it not a great objection.

SPEAKER_02 17:32

Yeah, I just think I think that the interpretation of it as like the moral of the story or the end of a fable is a little more likely than that the explanation is sort of a world-building or technological explanation. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

Yeah, yeah. Right. I um and I'll just point out that I pronounced his name differently than either of y'all did. I said micromegas because it's looks to me clear that it's micro, tiny, mega, huge. And by putting it that way instead of mega micros, right? He's putting the mega first. And for some reason, sorry, not first chronologically in as in the reading, but first in priority, right? He's not a small duck. He's not a duck small, he's a small duck, right? Uh for some reason, he's a very small giant.

SPEAKER_03 18:26

It's Megamacross, I think. It's d da da. Like the Greek, it's always on it's like two str it's the third stress in almost always, for some reason.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

I'm willing, but it but it is isn't he saying he's a small great thing? Not like a great great thing, he's not mega magus.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

Does it talk about him being a big thing? He is a great of the small things. He's a small of the great things. He's a magus. What kind? He's a micro magus. My reason for saying the reason I care about that is that lends towards Dwight's interpretation, I think, in that he is not a at least just using this tiny piece of information, he is not a magnanimous magna, right? A great-souled being. He's a micro magus, a little tiny souled giant. And therefore, empty book knows nothing. He's just topping around doing junk.

SPEAKER_03 19:22

I like that tiny soul, big-bodied guy.

SPEAKER_04 19:25

Right at the beginning, Voltaire at least seems to I mean it could be sarcastic. That's the hard part with Voltaire is you never know. But he does say his name was Micromegas, an appellation admirably, admirably suited to all great men, and his stature amounted to eight leagues in height. By eight leagues I mean four and twenty blah blah blah. Uh so I mean, at least denominated the story as saying that he is a great man. That that is a name suitable for a great man.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

I have this favorite quote of Voltaire's that I have it's been a favorite of mine for a long time. And I just want to read it because it seems relevant here. I'm reading it so that I don't butcher it. But with regard to him being a great man, this is Voltaire. Uh to succeed in the world, it is not enough to be stupid. You must also be well mannered. That's uh that's pretty good. Oh wait. So I Yeah. That may not be relevant here, but at least that's something I've enjoyed from Voltaire for a long time.

SPEAKER_04 20:31

Yeah. That seems to work. I don't want to assume too much, but also don't want to uh run off in some direction that Voltaire is clearly not intending me to with his thoughts. He seems very willing to mock empiricists.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:51

Right. The religious is just assumed to be ridiculous. But he's included. And then he moves on to the uh ridiculous materialists.

SPEAKER_03 21:03

Yeah, he mentions the saint. He mentions that the people are gonna put their faith in some explanation of a saint or something like that.

SPEAKER_04 21:11

And the the Empyrean was not seen. There's a one part where he mentions that fooled by appearances, as often happens, or something like that.

SPEAKER_03 21:20

So this had two two of my favorite portions of the entire thing were back to back with each other, and I've got them here. There's they're talking about philosophical matters, and somebody quotes something in Greek and then gives a translation of it in Latin. I do not understand Greek very well, said the giant. Neither do I, said the philosophical mite. Why then, the Syrian retorted, are you citing some man named Aristotle in the Greek? Because, replied the savant, one should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least. Which was amazing, and I loved that, and I want to talk about it. And then the very next thing, I love this too. The Cartesian took the floor and said, The soul is a pure spirit that has received in the belly of its mother all metaphysical ideas, and which, leaving that place, is obligated to go to school and to learn all over again what it already knew and will not know again. And so there's this really beautiful image of trying to give category to man's ability to emerge into and disappear out of a state of meaningful beholding of such vast and mysterious things as a it's always true of you, you're just remembering and forgetting, right? I I love that. That was so beautiful. But what is so I don't even understand what is so clever about this. I just know that it tickles my brain. Because, replied the savant, one should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least. I understand it's like in a flourish, right? You know, if you're losing a fencing fight, you might want to flick your wrist out and really put a lot of English on it and get a nice big whopping wide arc of the tip of your blade to try to defend a certain amount of your space as you evade and run away. Is this, you know, but there's also, I don't know, it feels like there's something more clever underneath it. And I wanted to know if anybody else liked that passage as much as I did.

SPEAKER_02 23:37

I cannot help there's something in me that wants to come to the defense of these philosophers, almost all of them.

SPEAKER_04 23:44

And I think that especially somebody like Heidegger would say you actually do have to go to the Greek to understand, like I think Heidegger would say you should learn the Greek, though.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

Right. Well, but he would say that we actually have a false understanding of what the Greeks were thinking, and so the scholastics had a false understanding of, for instance, the nature of time and of being. Yeah, and then because the scholastics had a false understanding of it, the Enlightenment thinkers had a false understanding of it, and we've built a yet more false understanding on all of that, and you have to excavate all the way down into the original language. Why did Aristotle use this specific word? What was the real philosophical insight that Aristotle had that maybe you can dig up from the language? And then if you get it right, you don't have to build a bunch of contradictory nonsense on top of it. So, like this guy saying you should always cite what you don't understand at all in the language you understand the least, that might be pretty wise to be like, actually, maybe we've built.

SPEAKER_03 24:57

I mean, okay, this guy is probably just doing a rhetorical trick, right?

SPEAKER_02 25:04

This guy is like, I cite Aristotle because nobody understands it and therefore nobody can attack me. Sure. I I I guess. But I don't know, he could be a Heidegger.

SPEAKER_03 25:15

So is that the equivalent of if you and I are on a cliff face and things are beginning to get precarious, and I get a grappling hook and I sling it, and I fling that puppy up clear, out of sight of us, and over the lip of this mountain, somewhere that we can't see, and that's our anchor, right? We're appealing to a higher and further away and more secure place to get purchase. And you're talking about citing this language that is the most esoteric to force you to force the conversation to most poignantly acknowledge we are now in a place where we're dorking around with the things of the things, or we're talking about the things derived from the things, and it's important to remember that this once was produced by a thing, and you know, that that framing mechanism. So language is doing that.

SPEAKER_04 26:14

In the in the Summa Theologica, there's a famous quote uh that's used, you know, put it on a t-shirt kind of quote, and it's the argument from authority is the weakest kind of proof, as Boethius says. Yeah. And the funny thing is, yeah. So the funny thing is, I had heard people quote that at St. John's, and I never looked it up. Aquinas takes that argument and he puts it in the uh the what's it called? The you know, he does the four arguments and then the contra arguments, and then he approves the thing. That's in the contra arguments. So like the silly quotation of authority begging to authority is the side that Aquinas isn't on. And I think that's what's going on here. I don't think there's a lot of depth here. I think Voltaire's mocking these guys.

SPEAKER_00 27:18

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. And also when I come to a contradiction, to appearances, a contradiction, or deep conflict that I can't overcome between multiple passages of the Bible, my typical process for that is that I do as much as I can to understand what each of the parts is trying to say. And then I come to it, usually when it happens, I come to a conflict, and the conflict is something like, these two don't mesh. And so my strategy is I believe them both until I'm different enough that they mesh. Right. And so I'm I like Matt's interpretation that that's approximately what's being said here, is that there is a familiarity that is lacking. And by quoting the most alien version of it, by not just quoting it, but by having that at the ready and using that as a thing to refer to, the alien becomes less alien. But I think Dwight's right that that's not what Voltaire is saying.

SPEAKER_03 28:24

Well, so the Saturnian dwarf, who is the companion that in Kaidu to Mikros is Gilgamesh, that guy falls for the Lockean argument so hard that he like kind of like crushes on the guy a little bit and is all you know agreeing in the corners with those guys. So he's of the type of the category of the larger, and yet some of these arguments are appealing to him as well. So he is both a member of the party that is making fun of and teasing the humans, the small little philosophers, but he's also subject to having his heart swayed by the reason of Locke and things like that. If he is making fun of it and yet showing that it's effective, then the message is that we at all levels of intelligence and wisdom are prone to falling for these little collapses of meaning into a little pattern that we you know latch on to, and we we should have a slightly wider frame, but at all levels of intelligence were susceptible to the case.

SPEAKER_02 29:38

I just I sort of want to have an interpretation of this where I'm allowed to go, who is this guy from Sirius? What does what does being big have to do with anything? Okay, he can see a lot of colors, so can like mantis shrimp and butterflies, and they're dumb. Like, you know, I guess there's an example given where he proves the first fifty propositions of Euclid on his own through sheer mental power.

SPEAKER_05 30:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:12

So maybe he's smarter than us, but he doesn't argue with any of these philosophers to the end. He doesn't ever actually argue at all. He doesn't argue at all. He's not doing philosophy with them. And I don't know. I want to be like just because you make a character and he's really big, and then he's from far away, and your local religious guru says that your home planet is the most important planet, and that guy who's from far away and is really, really big laughs about it. Therefore, that religious guru must be ridiculous. Well, this this guy might be a provincial idiot. They've got monarchy where he's from, he's not even allowed in the court.

SPEAKER_05 31:03

Right.

SPEAKER_04 31:03

I don't know. Yeah, he got kicked out of the court for 200 years or whatever.

SPEAKER_03 31:07

Well, I mean, in that sense, it's very redolent of the garden and of Satan showing up. And, you know, who knows but that this is just another echo of that allegory.

SPEAKER_00 31:19

So one of the quirks here is that Voltaire didn't make the aliens the same size. And one of the things that means is that we're able to put beings on a rational scale by size, and look at whether or not Voltaire intended to do this, I'm saying we can. Look at the differences between Micromagus and his Saturn person, what their differences of opinion are compared to us. I'll throw in a couple of things here. A small partisan of Locke was nearby, and when he was finally given the floor, he said some things that he said. And the animal from Sirius, so the biggest one, smiled. He did not find this the least bit sage, while the dwarf from Saturn would have kissed the sectarian of Locke were it not for the extreme disproportion. So they have a disagreement there, right? And apparently the Locke person finds it valuable. Right? He says, here's how I see the world. The next bigger one from Saturn goes, Wow, that's really good. And then the biggest one goes, eh, I don't care. And so if I were to try to shoehorn an interpretation that way to what you were saying, Matt, I would say that it is arguable that Voltaire is saying that Micromagus' size is actually to his detriment. They were surprised at how shrewd the little ones were at measurements external. And when Micromagus says, since you know what is exterior to you so well, you must know what is interior even better. Tell me what your soul is and how you form ideas. And there's no hint in that, in my reading of it, that Micromagus is being antagonistic or anything else. He may be sincere. Oh, I thought he was being insincere. I I can see that reading if he's sarcastically saying, well, since you know so well what the exterior is, the problem is they actually do know so well. He might be trying to trap them and say, Well, but I'll catch you on the part you don't know. But it doesn't actually hint that explicitly to me. I think I have to bring that in.

SPEAKER_03 33:35

So there is another point of legitimate recognition on the part of the aliens of human physics and metaphysics, which is their establishment of the ratio of weights between gas, water, and gold. And so the fact that they have managed to not just figure out how much one thing weighs, but have managed to find that bridge of value, that ratio that spans through multiple different categories of matter, that's when they go, oh, crud buckets, these guys might not be total dimwits.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

They might even more, this attornian at that point wants to accuse them of witchcraft. Sure. Knowing something through some arcane hidden knowledge that he himself finds difficult to grasp, right?

SPEAKER_02 34:24

Yeah. I mean, I do still think that McCromagus is trying to trap them because with the part about the weight of the air, it says Macromagus he thought he had caught them. Uh-huh. Like he's he is trying to catch them with the questions about physics. But also, let me put this forward, which I think is in broad support of what you're saying, which is aren't these philosophers physically braver than Micromagos and the Saturnian? The Micromagos did not make a difficult journey to get to Earth, right? Everything in his journey is how easy it is. He can hope just riding comets and flying down the Aurora Borealis in his ship like it's nothing. Whereas these philosophers are on a ship that's coming from the Arctic, where they might have, you know, died. So I think maybe it's designed to look in the first glance like he's making fun of them. But like maybe when you look a little deeper and think about what actually happens, it's like actually these philosophers are pretty great. And McRomagus does not put them in their place, and he doesn't know anything they don't know.

SPEAKER_04 35:45

He never he never argues with them and wins. He doesn't leave them with a book that you know shows them what their soul really is.

SPEAKER_00 35:54

Just uh there's a note on that particular line you had, Matt, that says he thought that he had caught them, right? Uh-huh. Um the footnote I have is from the translator. The edition, I believe, to be the original, same thing as before, reads, put them off. And caught them might mean here something more neutral than motivation. He thought he might have caught them up or, you know, gotten them off tilter or something. I'm not making a strong argument there. I think he does seem at least condescending and maybe antagonistic. My uh micromagas does, I mean. But I'm just pointing out that that particular one there was a note that had changed a little bit. Yeah. And since I didn't understand French, I thought I should cite a translation of an older version. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 36:40

No, you should quote it in French, so since you understand it less than the English. It seemed to me like that sentence was a a weird way of saying he thought he had found something that they were incapable of calculating. You know, because it took him a second, I think. Or I I don't know, maybe he thought that he was asking his most difficult physical question. Uh but I thought maybe it was he asked them and then it took him a second, and then he was like, but yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 37:12

So the narrator does tell us what the Syrian and the Saturnians think that they're doing when they're questioning the philosophers. It says, It suddenly took the Syrian and the Saturnian's fancy to question these thinking atoms to learn what it was they agreed on. Because they just said, you just asked, if you're not killing each other for money, like all these soldiers and armies and stuff, what does occupy your time? And they said, we dissect flies, we measure lines, we gather figures, we agree with each other on two or three points that we do not understand.

SPEAKER_05 37:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:52

And then he quizzes them about the lines and the figures. And then I guess he starts quizzing them about the points that they don't understand. I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 38:00

Ah, mine says we dispute upon two or three thousand, which we do not understand.

SPEAKER_02 38:07

Oh, that's very different. Yeah, mine said agree.

SPEAKER_04 38:10

Oh, wait, we agree upon two or three points, which we understand. Okay, and we dispute on two or three thousand, which we do not understand. Okay, I think you said that.

SPEAKER_02 38:18

I just Oh, so there's like an extra sentence there that you've got?

SPEAKER_03 38:22

Yeah, it's just a I'm reading it Dwight's way from now on. So it seems like if Leywin Hook just came out with microscopes recently, then this is a fun little story about how, hey, we're humans and we just discovered first principles of life and cellular natural philosophy through this lens. What are some things that a huge alien might learn should they ever take the time to develop the technology to transduce their perception down to a scale that can fit us and scope to us? Um at the beginning of the story, it talks about how they are gonna go on a little walkabout because they realize and recognize the universal value of the philosophical expedition, right? Jesus does it, Plato does it, everybody does it. You gotta go out on the little quest, right? You gotta go do your philosophy on a quest, you gotta run into people and argue with them. That's that seems to be the fundamental unit of making collective wisdom and truth, isn't it? Is there a universal shape to how philosophy gets done that Voltaire is trying to appeal to? Or is he just kind of tongue-in-cheek describing these two aliens doing something very local, namely doing this little walkabout thing? And let's face it, he's describing very human earth-like beings that just happen to be really huge. Um, so I don't know if I'm tearing away at the edges of the conceit or if I and asking an invalid question, but he's talking about aliens of a greater scope who show up and actually learn something from us and with us.

SPEAKER_02 40:15

Can I bring in a passage that might help? Yeah. So chapter two, conversation between the inhabitant of Sirius and that of Saturn. So this is when they have just met and become friends. After his excellency, which is Micromagos, laid himself down to rest, the secretary, who's the Saturnian, approached him. You have to admit, said Micromagos, that nature is extremely varied. Yes, said the Saturnian, nature is like a flower bed wherein the flowers uh, said the other. Leave off with flower beds. The secretary began again. Nature is like an assembly of blonde and brown haired girls whose jewels what am I supposed to do with your brown haired girls? said the other. Then she is like a gallery of paintings whose features certainly not, said the voyager. I say again that nature is like nature. Why bother looking for comparisons? To please you, replied the secretary. I do not want to be pleased, answered the voyager. I want to be taught. Tell me how many senses the men of your planet have. We only have 72, said the academic. And then they get down to brass tacks, and he starts explaining what life is like on Saturn, how many colors, how many senses, how long the lifespan is, how many properties matter has extension, impenetrability, mobility, gravity, divisibility, and all the rest. Yeah. So I think can we interpret the encounter with the human philosophers as that of a being who refuses to reason by analogy? Like he is the ultimate empiricist. He won't reason about what he has not seen. He's going all over the place to see things. He's not thinking about what they would be like if he could go and see them.

SPEAKER_00 42:12

He's also not willing to reason in that snippet. He's not willing to reason about things that he has seen that aren't the thing he's trying to reason about. Right. That is, yeah. I would change the language of that from empiricism, this is nitpicking as I'm exploring the idea, to something like dual measurement at the end.

SPEAKER_04 42:34

Yeah, ratio is real real big in this story. It's all very set. You know how tall he is, so you know how big his planet is. You know how big his uh member is, so you know how tall he is.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

Yeah. There's a propriety to a being of a certain size being on a planet of a certain size. Which holds all the way because while we would say a whale is significantly bigger than us, they would not. Right? They would say it's slightly bigger. Yeah. But there is nothing on our planet that is proper to one of their planets. Though I don't know if there are smaller things on their planets. Like there could be humans on their planets that they've never noticed.

SPEAKER_04 43:21

Right. But they do have the microscope, so Yeah. It seems like they would have at least heard of it. Heard of it.

SPEAKER_00 43:28

Yeah. In that sense with the microscope, there's an asymmetry. So quick digression, but when I found myself when I find myself reasoning about the natures of things, my own mind tends to go towards symmetries and asymmetries. And there's an asymmetry here, which is there's a natural advantage to seeing things bigger and disadvantage to seeing things smaller. And that positions the

SPEAKER_03 44:00

humans in an advantageous position for knowledge compared to arguably yeah there it seems like there is this preferential or this bias to reality itself to where humans are more natural, more likely to produce the microscope whereas aliens that are bigger than us are more likely to be preoccupied with the bigger and bigger things that are bigger than them. Whereas because we're smaller, we'll be interested in the smaller and smaller things smaller than us.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

I would have said, let me think here. I would have said that there was equal that you're blind to the things that you're blind to at the same relative scale. So let's say you don't notice something you know a tenth of a percent your size or a thousandth of a percent your size. So microomagus doesn't notice things as big as a whale generally they're right at the liminal level. And we don't notice things as big as a gnat. They're as right at the edge of the liminal for us. A mite. Sure. And so I we both actually do have microscopes in the story. Micromegas and humans have microscopes. So but the advantage is if I'm looking at the world around me, either for Voltaire things get infinitely smaller and there's like beings that are really tiny to us and even tiny to them and tiny to them you know important here's a who type of deal or there's some bottom like there's some smallest thing right if it's the case that there is some smaller realm that living things don't go down below a certain level then in some way we have an advantage to knowledge because we can behold the universe kind of nakedly and see more in a manner of speaking than Micromegas can. I had the thought by the way earlier speaking of smallest things I unfortunately the times didn't work but I would love to know what Voltaire's interpretation of a Planck's distance would be.

SPEAKER_02 46:11

Alright can I put forward an answer an attempt at an answer to Josh's question. Please do why is the book blank? Yes. The book is blank because Micro Megas prefigures Nietzsche's Ubermensch in his refusal to contend with metaphysics of any kind and his insistence on only accepting the senses.

SPEAKER_00 46:41

Whose refusal? Micromegus or Voltaire?

SPEAKER_02 46:43

Micromegus and Nietzsche's Ubermensch saying all philosophical systems are bad. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 46:54

Well inherently they're tools that we as beings are prone to abuse ourselves and shackle ourselves unto rather than use like the second we get a whiff of any kind of structure we'll be weak and pathetic and we'll it will come over us and you know infect our minds and we'll believe that it's real just because we heard it and grew up under it.

SPEAKER_02 47:22

But anyway keep going what were you saying that no that's it okay just this is the point of this piece is to say something like we're developing these tools of microscopy and telescopy and science is extending our reach in what we can see we are becoming bigger and as we approach the ultimate bigness we are going to become more and more empirical or have more and more refusal to accept metaphysical explanations for things.

SPEAKER_00 47:59

So there's one part in the story that caught me for this let me see if I can find it really quickly. I could be wrong but I think it's the only part it's the only part I noticed in the story where the voice of the author I'm intentionally saying that instead of saying Voltaire whoever the author is where the voice of the author makes a value statement which is the narrator the narrator that works. Ah here it is the animal from Sirius smiled. He did not find this the least bit sage the discourse while the dwarf from Saturn would have kissed the sectarian of Locke were it not for the extreme disproportion. But there was, unfortunately, a little animal cule in a square hat. So this is where the uh the religious person, the Aquinas guy comes in. I don't remember seeing anywhere else where the narrator says something is you know positive or negative but it's unfortunate that this guy was there. And Sigbird and he has what seems to be the strongest held uh philosophical framework and the most rejected sure yeah if we take the reference to Homer and the scene from the Iliad to be correctly interpreted by whoever made the footnote then it's as though the priest is handicapped.

SPEAKER_03 49:28

Yeah well and it also means that the religion that the priest forges and pumps out is a weapon that is being put into the hands of a power figure in a power system and so what he represents is the armaments the material and armaments of the kingdom.

SPEAKER_04 49:49

Let's share with each other exactly what he was saying. It's not just some nebulous Christianity he's saying that the entire universe is made including these giant beings who up to this point lar size is virtue. The more you have of it the more virtuous you are and he says the absurd thing that was all made by the Demiurge for the use of man us, the little tiny morons and that's what made them laugh.

SPEAKER_00 50:20

Right now I will just first of all I don't want to gloss over that Dwight I want to come back to that but I think this adds to it that he actually says one more layer that's really important. He said that he knew the secret that everything would be found in the Summa of St. Thomas that's such a this is a guy who is on the expedition ship. This is a guy who's traveling around and it's not that everything will be found in the Bible right this is post-Lutheran post-Luther it's that everything will be found in the Summa I assume Summa Theologica of St. Thomas that's like that combined with the everything's made for us is a really powerful statement to Michael Magus who is traveling the stars looking around and all these things and this guy is saying one of ours has already discovered what there is to discover about you know meaning and such it's the it's like the ultimate definition of ideology this is what an ideology is this one book has said that the purpose of anything that you care to name can be can be given in regard to me me personally which seems to be the same caliber of mistake as in the Library of Babel believing that there's no such thing as absurdity anywhere in the library because everything is at least a cryptographically related token to some other set of meaningful tokens or whatever. What's the mistake here? I'm gonna ask you to defend that it's a mistake. Well whatever it is good question.

SPEAKER_04 52:04

It is interesting that the suma itself is incomplete St. Thomas himself stopped and said nah I can't remember exactly what he said but basically this is not the task I'm to complete.

SPEAKER_03 52:21

So in the Babel thing the argument is that you've got a universal way of traversing across and dipping into any piece of reality within the library and making meaningful related granted hashed but related meaning from these characters to those characters. So the faith is in this universal hashing algorithm. Whereas the Summa theologica issue is you believe that the Summa theologica is the universal hash key and that somehow this Suma Theologica is by virtue of its inherent information content whatever somehow that weird Venn diagram of necessary and sufficient that it is the thing that will be the key to understand all others. You're like no dude no that's just some piece of one work of systematic theology right it is not a universal hashing token just because you said that you dealt with the content of the universal hash key doesn't mean that you made the universal hash key. You just talked about it. It also doesn't mean that he didn't right fairly logically speaking you made a valid point logically speaking you're right.

SPEAKER_02 53:47

Well I mean I'll add this for Sir Robert if in fact there was some planet that everything in the universe was made for the sake of that one planet and you were not born on that planet.

SPEAKER_03 54:02

You were born very very far away at a very different scale from that planet like Chinese people sorry go ahead keep going what do Chinese people have to do with anything they had to travel a long way to get to Jesus they were far away from Jesus where he was born that's a metaphor.

SPEAKER_02 54:18

That's true like the Magi I wrote a novel about this um not about Chinese people. So but so let's say that you were in this situation now if you were like Micromagan and you were unwilling to reason from analogy or to reason about anything that you can't see right in front of you, you would not be capable of detecting if you had finally arrived on the planet that everything else had been made for. Yeah yeah that's right.

SPEAKER_00 54:52

There's a stratum of reality that's invisible to you must be invisible for as long as you're unwilling to reason in a different way. By the way Dwight you just brought up and it's a surprisingly good parallel to what Matt just said which is that Aquinas stopped writing any of his works because he had a a sort of ecstatic religious experience during a mass like a spiritual something and it paused him from writing and then he just didn't resume and when asked about it he said he should not write anymore. Everything he had written up to that point seemed as straw to him and then he died a year later just with nothing he said there's no point.

SPEAKER_04 55:40

All my writings and everything were just so much fluff and that was or in the completely opaque to me Latin mietur ut palea I see or what's the last word buried palia palea healed I think that's the straw uh you know p pale maybe something uh anyway I was quoting the Latin because I didn't understand it okay I thought the Palius was like health healing he stated that he could no longer write because quote all that I have written seems to me nothing but straw unquote compared to what had been revealed to him.

SPEAKER_00 56:22

This seems to me to be parallel to Paul saying things he saw things unutterable by men or perhaps which men are not permitted to tell the reason that that's super interesting is well there's a couple of things but the one that I was going for is this Aquiniasian whose it's unfortunate that he was present and interrupted um seems to behold Aquinas's writing the Summa as not the true things themselves because they have to be searched right so it's that this guy this priest doesn't see the true things but he sees a cherub who sees them and that cherub is the Summa.

SPEAKER_03 57:05

I'm saying that because arguably with what Matt is saying he has a level of seeing that Micromegus can't perhaps he has the seeing of faith right Micromegas has that not at all so there there is that that he's literally the only person mentioned in the whole thing who has any faith. He even has a sense of transcendence if that's what you mean by faith then yeah the others do not seem to have a sense of transcendence they have a sense they have a sense of scale transcendence is scaleless right hmm interesting that they are the two ways of grokking that which is so much bigger than you either by throwing a concept out that is bigger than the limit of the thing that's too big for you to get around or having a way of moving forward into it conceptually far enough that you can imagine getting to the other side of it.

SPEAKER_04 58:01

Real quick, let me read into the record what the partisan of Locke said because we just said that he said something we didn't and y'all check and see if y'all's additions is the same as mine. There's a little partisan of Locke chance to be present and when he was asked his opinion on the same subject I do not know by what power I think but well I know that I have never thought without the assistance of my senses that there are immaterial and intelligent substances I do not at all doubt. But that it is impossible for God to communicate the facility of thinking to matter I doubt very much. I revere the eternal power and it would ill become me to prescribe bounds to it. I affirm nothing and I am contented to believe that many more things are possible than are usually thought so and that's what made the Syrian smile and the Saturnian want to kiss him.

SPEAKER_03 58:56

Yeah it's very noncommittal it's very safe like it makes some walls that truth can like pile up against it doesn't go out and pin truth down and put a collar on it.

SPEAKER_02 59:07

It seems like it would be the closest to us saying don't tell me what nature is like tell me what nature is would be he did not find it sage.

SPEAKER_04 59:19

And yet he didn't find it sage yeah but he I think it's because he's still kind of talking about what it's like you know he's accepting the existence of of immaterial and intelligent substances. Yeah but he doesn't want to talk about them at all.

SPEAKER_03 59:37

It struck me how Micromegas and his commitment to only explain nature through the lens of other aspects of nature is similar to the Christian with a good hermeneutic who only interprets the word of God according to the word of God.

SPEAKER_02 59:56

No is the isn't he the opposite that he won't interpret nature according to some other part of nature.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:02

Well he only he won't interpret it with a simile or a metaphor if he if you're going to talk to him about nature explain it with another part of nature don't go outside of nature to explain nature explain nature with nature sure right in the same way when you're studying the word of God explain the word of God with other at portions of the word of God.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:26

I mean I say that because the sort of stance that Micromega is taking is one of the solutions to the problem of hermeneutics that philosophers do take. So the if the problem is you know we have this word called soul or spirit or mind and a skeptic asking us what is that show it to me we can give them no really good answer. We can say oh it's an entelechy well what's an intelechy I don't know it's a Greek word that I don't understand.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:02

Or it means exactly what I need it to or it's a clock that that my soul the hand of a clock that tells the time and my body rings like a bell like can I read that passage real quick it is answered the Leibniz the hand of a clock that tells the time while my body rings out or if you like it is my soul that rings out while my body tells the time or my soul is the mirror of the universe and my body is the border of the mirror all that is clear.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:35

What a wild what I'm saying what I'm saying is that when you're talking about these things you get into this hermeneutics problem where how do you find out what a word means well you have to look at a bunch of other words and what do they mean? Well you have to look at some more words and you're going to books to find the meaning of other books and then you have to find other books to get the meaning of those books and it never ends.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:59

And because it never ends language ready to go to work in that like the things being in French like the giant is talking to the people in French Latin and Greek all come up so this notion of multilingualness in as one of the tools that's necessary for knowledge is that's part of it too but but Micromegas is implementing one of the possible solutions to that which is to say I don't care what you call it just give it a name and tell me what its properties are what what is it what are its properties show it to me.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:39

So and yeah let me ask then there's two little bits that I don't understand about Micromagus's worldview. One of them is and there's two statements that are like right next to each other that say it one of them is they've just measured both of the aliens heights and then it says so Micromagus delivered these words I see more than ever that one must not judge anything by its apparent size. What is the meaning of the word apparent there? Like what's the weight of that? What is it doing there? That's really different than something purely empirical and the other one is they had a conver the conversation went on he explained finally that there are animals that are to bees what bees are to man and so forth. And little by little the conversation became interesting right so okay eventually it became interesting and Micromagus spoke thusly oh intelligent atoms in which the eternal being desired to make manifest his skill and his power you must no doubt blah blah blah. So Micromagus here has done two things that I don't understand the point of one is he says that these tiny creatures have an apparent size perhaps implying that there's some other thing happening there, some other kind of size. And the other is that he seems to be affirming some sort of deity a creator um yeah a creator desired to make manifest his skill yeah so that would be the creator part.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:12

So the apparent size thing for me is not that there is another size but rather that at whatever size you've got there's also the issue of the accompanying scale of density of senses and intelligence. Number like raw number of senses and IQ points seem to and then size seem to be the three spectra of existence for these aliens. And so for us we are at a crazy intersectional spot of those three fields like we skew way higher in terms of density like how in real life the smaller you are the faster you're able to run your reaction and evasion controls in your brain like so small things like hawks can react like 50 times in a second to new inputs whereas we can't because we're bigger we have you know too many neurons it's too takes too long. So you get this similar surprising phenomenon with us. He thinks I'm not bringing it up because I'm arguing he's alluding to it.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:30

I'm just a nerd he thinks that human beings are possibly purely immediate like angels or hamsters devoid of reflective capacity and yet having intelligence. So we must not we must be pure. Where does he say that we're devoid of reflective capacity? I'm interpreting it in the word pure doesn't he say pure taste the pure joys of your planet?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:59

Yeah. For having so little matter and appearing to be entirely spirit, you must live out your life thinking and loving the veritable life of the mind. You have so sm so little body, you're basically a spirit.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:15

Yeah. I mean, think about it this way. What if we heard a bacterium talking? We were listening to a bacterium and we were able to figure out its language.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:27

I then we challenged it. It wouldn't stop self-flagellating.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:33

We challenged it. We said, well, if you're actually intelligent, you know, measure me. How tall am I? And it did some, it climbed up somewhere and it did some calculations with some little tiny bacterium instruments, and it said, You're six foot two inches tall. I might say, Wow. I might say something like this. Like, wow, you have no brain. Where's the brain? How can you must be a spirit because you have no brain and yet you are intelligent?

SPEAKER_03 1:07:05

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:07

So maybe Micromagos thinks, maybe he's questioning them because he thinks that they might be the proof for the existence of the soul.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:16

Well, there's there's other places where it's obvious that McCromagos and his buddy and all others like him are generally susceptible to certain follies of epistemology. Like his Saturnian bro starts just kind of popping off about things that he would or wouldn't believe and does or doesn't find credulous. And it felt like the author was putting words in this guy's mouth that were not entirely admirable. He was not a duttering idiot, but he was, you know, not right about everything either. You know? So hmm.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:56

You want to talk about Plato's dream? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:00

Twas a silly story.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:01

The monster mash.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:03

Alright.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:04

Can somebody give me your understanding of the expletive at the end?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:10

Hmm. Because in the beginning he tells us that this is a dream, and then at the end it's like, this was the doctrine Plato taught his disciples. One of them, when he finished his harangue, cried out, and then you awoke because it's just a dream. So what's that?

SPEAKER_04 1:08:27

Um, I listened to it, and I assumed that there was a question mark at the end, but it's just.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:35

Yeah. And so you then awoke?

SPEAKER_04 1:08:38

Gotcha. My my text version just has a period.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:41

Yeah, so I just wanted to read the next to last paragraph in the last paragraph. In your several performances, there is both good and bad, because you have a great share of understanding, but at the same time, fall short of perfection. Your works will not endure above a hundred millions of years, after which you will acquire more knowledge and perform much better. It belongs to me alone to create things perfect and immortal. This was the doctrine Plato taught his disciples. One of them, when he had finished this harangue, cried out, and so you then awoke? So then you woke up. So this explanation of the universe is our world is subpar because somebody doing a glorified science fair project was responsible. They meant well, they were armed with some amount of systematic knowledge and inspiration and pluck, but ultimately what they created was not as good as what the teacher or someone of real great caliber could have created. Um, I don't know. There's part of me that feels frustrated with that explanation. You know, I it feels like Tolkien's narrative of A and the Eru or whatever, and all these angelic beings that harmonize together with music and they make something. That's coherent. This is everybody gets to make a planet and we see who makes a good one. And so making life itself, making life is an experiment. So that I get. Now we're starting to get into the territory of a critique or a philosophical statement that isn't just, hey man, life's pretty whack. What if somebody who wasn't good at it did it? So you see what I mean? I'm curious to know what is it about this? Is there anything valid to this critique existentially? Is or is it just kind of, hey man, life's cruddy. Doesn't it look like somebody bad at their jobs did it?

SPEAKER_04 1:10:49

Um it sounded to me the first time I listened to it like Voltaire wanted to create a parable. You know, you have but he doesn't want to use Jesus as his you know direct, so he goes with Plato. And you have different people each given different levels of sort of the parable of the talents, but uh Voltairized.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:14

Interesting, you're right. It is more like the parable of the talents, yeah. Because the Demogorgon and the others get a collective review. You're right. There's there's a lot of overlap with that. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. So biblically, there's a certain amount of automatic sincerity and an automatic hit that registers with this because Adam did what he did, the world is broken, and now any man with observation and a true pen can record some fair and true criticisms of the state of things as we've inherited them.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:52

I mean, it is what I have been told is the Gnostic answer to the great trilemma that has a name which escapes me right now, but where if you have a good God who is also benevolent, then how are there bad things?

SPEAKER_03 1:12:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:08

And this answer is there is a good God, and he is benevolent, but he gave the power to make this particular world to beings who are not as powerful as him, in not being in as intelligent.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:22

Which is interesting that it includes the part of the Christian worldview, like the divine counsel and the fact that what God is doing is on display and his glory is at stake, but it is entirely lacking the person and work of Jesus Christ and any redemptive capacity at scale.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:41

For anybody wondering, it's the Epicurean paradox. Epicurean, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:45

I think the problem of evil. The problem of evil.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:50

Yeah. Demogorgan blushed. He was sensible. There was much moral and physical evil in this affair. But still, he insisted, there was more good than ill in it.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:02

I this starts with a reference to the symposium. Which means we're thinking about we're thinking about the cosmos and why it is the way that it is, and we're thinking about our powers and our experience, the entire world having been remade because of our hubris, right? Including our own bodies. I'm not sure what to make of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:34

Almost Mormon. Tell me what exactly you're not sure what to make of.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:39

So it's clear that the author does not want me to actually think that the demi-urgos elected the demo gorgon to create the planet Earth, and that that is why there are poison plants that I have to avoid, and animal and spiders that will sting me and hurt me, right? It's meant to say something else besides what it's actually saying. And there seems to be a key to that in naming Plato and in mentioning the symposium and then the republic, and putting this, saying this is what I'm giving you is something like the Republic and like the Symposium, trying to answer big questions, trying to tell you about the nature of the entire universe and the world. The facial reading of that is something like maybe the world was just made by an idiot. And the same way as your country is messed up because your government is full of idiots, and the planet Earth is messed up because all the rulers of the countries are idiots. Maybe the entire universe is messed up because all the planets were made by idiots.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:58

It's interesting that there's still the ultimate creator that isn't an idiot, and he's just too far away or something.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:06

Right. And what I'm saying is that this doesn't feel satisfactory to me as the moral of the story. Yeah. You mean Voltaire's or Plato's? Voltaire's. Okay. Does Voltaire really is he really suggesting stop worrying about the problem of evil because probably the world. I mean, maybe he is. Was this before the theory of evolution? Yeah. I don't know, but like science is starting to uncover all these things, and it's going to tell us that the real reason is something that has nothing to do with your happiness or your sense of meaning in the world. It was just a dumb art project, and you know, maybe it'll get thrown in the trash in a hundred million years.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:50

So a couple of things. The demiurge is actually Plato in a Platonic worldview, kind of like. Right, and it's not God, right? No, it's the creator of all things material, but is because it's the creator of material things, it's lesser than a god character who is more like the upper side of the divided line. In some versions of that demiurge, the in some versions of that way of thinking, the demiurge was a malevolent figure and was making a corruptible and corrupt version of the incorruptible ideal, you know, divided line stuff, right? So on a face reading of this, Voltaire is having Plato talk about an account of why things are as they are from a historically valid-ish Platonic view, right? He's not saying something that would be seen as completely foreign to the way Plato could write something. So Voltaire, it seems to me, is either articulating the Platonic view so that we can understand it and have some sympathy with it and go, okay, that makes sense. I don't think that's what he's doing. Or he's differentiating from the Platonic view, probably because Plato's held in high esteem. And so he's saying something like, there's all this awfulness, and it can't just be this kind of foolishness that Plato dreamed about. I want to throw out one thing that I found strange in Micromagus that is relevant to this, which is when Micromagus told the philosophers and people, y'all are so amazing, you must be pure spirit, you know, whatever, whatever. Pretty close. Their response was no, no, we've got either too much matter or too much spirit, depending on where evil comes from. There are a hundred thousand men right now killing another hundred thousand men and blah blah blah. He is doing what I've seen more or less all materialists do, almost all, not maybe not all. You got like mouth and stuff, but which is they're saying this is tragic even though it's meaningless.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:06

And yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:08

I suspect that's Voltaire's position for some reason, but I don't actually know why.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:16

What if, let me let me hazard a guess. Maybe the answer to my question is in the word dream. So maybe he's saying, look, Plato gave a couple of different accounts of the cosmos that can offer some sort of answer to the problem of pain, and they were all just dreams. And here's another dream which is equally valid. There's nothing, there's no difference, there's no way to choose between the dream I'm about to tell you and the other dreams, because they're all just fantasies. And in this one, your life doesn't have a meaning. The story is a challenge to us to provoke us to try to answer the question: why do we prefer the philosophical dream where love is an important cosmic force, like in the symposium, or where the forms and the shapes of entities are real and important facets of the cosmos in some divine way, like the Republic, versus this philosophical dream where nothing means anything and it's a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:33

Yeah, I mean, there's the phrase dreams were all in vogue then, which really invites you to receive the entire story in light of, yeah, I mean, a lot of people have been into and out of a lot of things over time. This is one such story. So this is basically word for word Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, about like in the beginning, God created everything, and everybody thought that God had really screwed up by doing so, and God made more, and this was generally regarded as a bad move. A bad move, right? Dimmi Gorgon had for his lot the lump of mold which we call the earth, and having formed it such as it now appears, he thought he had executed a masterpiece. He imagined he had silenced envy herself and expected to receive the highest panegyrics, even from his brethren. But how great was his surprise when at his next appearing among them they received him with a general is. So there's envy and arrogance and pride here in the heart of the creator of this earth. So he's dragging back in all of the classical Christian elements of why and how it all went wrong, namely arrogance and pride. So it's interesting that after going through such laborious hoops to recreate life, the universe, and everything, he arrives at the same place of what's actually going wrong. He's just told Genesis with some Hellenistic characters for the felt puppets on the board. Or is there a big difference? Is there a fundamental difference between this and the Christian accounting of it that I'm missing? Because it seems like it's still just pride. I don't know. It must be pride. And we're jamming up on the end of the line here, folks. We hope that you've had a solid one-hour, two-hour drive with us on WKBP. We got Wolfman and Lightning coming up next with a crazy set of questions to help you know if your man is cheating. Until next time, this has been Rizzler and the Twango signing off.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:39

Are you okay?

SPEAKER_03 1:21:40

No, I think I had a stroke there.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:42

What's even happening?

SPEAKER_03 1:21:43

Well, I was trying to hearken back to the bit I was doing at the beginning of us being a AM radio shock jock, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:51

I remember. I appreciate it, Josh.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:53

Yeah. I appreciate the effort. Well, thank you, Matthew. I appreciate the insincere. You can.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:01

So the final line, and so then you awoke. Is that Voltaire saying, and this is the real story? We're in it. You didn't. This is the dream. The dream is the reality.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:13

Oh, interesting that and then you awoke? Huh.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:18

No. No, I never awoke. Here we are.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:22

Yeah, that's interesting. That's a weird question. Is that is it just popping the bubble? That's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:30

Why does my translation of this, tell me if yours said something different? The sentence right before that, Dwight? Actually the same sentence, but the part right before the quote. One of them, when he had finished his harangue, cried and so then you woke up. Does yours say harangue?

SPEAKER_04 1:22:47

No, mine says when he had ceased to speak, one of them said So it's not clear who the he is. Is it it says this is what Plato taught his disciples. When he had ceased to speak, one of them, so one of them is the disciples. I'm assuming he is Plato. Yeah. Plato tells them this dream, and we stop in the middle. We don't get an answer. Yeah. We're not given an answer anyway. It's just weird to me. I don't quite get it.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:16

I don't either. To point out at the top, Voltaire gives a summary, I don't know if it's fair or not, of Plato's positions on things. He dreamt that mankind was formerly double, that seems fair. That's straight up one of the dialogues. He undertook to prove that there can be no more than five perfect worlds because there are but five regular mathematical bodies. I don't know if that's true or not. The Republic was a principal dream. He dreamt, moreover, that watching arises from sleep and sleep from watching, and that a person who should attempt to look at an eclipse other than in a pail of water will surely lose his sight. Dreams were at that time in great repute. Here follows one of his dreams. So the rest of it is this dream he's having. But I want to two things about that are he dreamt, moreover, that watching arises from sleep, and sleep from watching. I don't know exactly what that means, although I have a few guesses, but um and then it says he goes and he tells them this dream as one of his many dreams, which is an account of the world. This is the doctrine Plato taught. The fact that it's doctrine here is a really strong word for what we would call a dream. That's incongruous to me, but that's the thing. And then one of the students cries out at the end of being taught a doctrine, and then you what woke up? What? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:43

I think the narrator is just straight up of the opinion that Plato dreamed stuff up randomly in his head, and it has no other meaning than that, and then taught those things as philosophical doctrines.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:02

I think so too. And I think my reading of this, and this could be just the well being heavily poisoned by the age in which I live. My reading of this was that this is a prototype of the sort of tired trope that we have, where at the end of a novel or a movie or whatever, the protagonist wakes up and it was all a dream.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:21

But we don't know that, right? We don't get that. You could restate it to, so did you wake up?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:28

Well, we do actually know one thing, which is he doesn't just tell the dream, the narrator, I mean. The narrator tells us that Plato had many dreams, and here's one of them. Right. And this one, you know, we have read The Republic, and it might or may not be coherent with the Republic, but my impression is that the narrator holds Plato in low regard, sort of broadly, and that that this story disparages him as a natural philosopher. A philosopher, not so much a natural philosopher.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:11

So Voltaire then leaves us with a blank book with which will describe his worldview.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:17

Bon Mo. And that's four minutes past the hour. Our advertisers stopped paying us four minutes ago, folks. I've got kids in soccer practice I gotta go pick up. This has been Twanglo and the Rizzler with some Voltaire coming at you on WKVP. Join us next week. Who's got the reading next week? Matt.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:35

It's me. I originally had a plan where I was going to offer you guys the choice between a novel and some short stories, but I did not prepare to be able to assign any short stories, so I'm assigning a novel. Okay. Big step, but I think we can do it. Please read for our next meeting, The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald. I am not picking this because I understand it. There's a class of novelists who I describe British female mysterious novelists, and they write these books. Muriel Spark is another one, and they write these books that there's obviously something going on. There's something compelling in these novels, and I cannot figure out what it is, but I know it's there. Yeah, this particular one, The Gate of Angels, is the most sensical. It is the one that I can make the most sense of among these this sort of tiny genre of authors. So yeah, I think it's a really interesting, enjoyable read. And uh I hope to talk about it with you guys in two weeks.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:02

Then I'm sure we will find the same to be true. And I look forward to reading it. Thank you for the opportunity.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:09

And there'll probably only be one edition of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:12

I think there I think there are two editions.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:14

Ah. Great. We'll probably each have one of these.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:17

I'll feed the novel into AI and have it regurgitate a uh enjoyed it so much every other time I've ever done it.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:27

No, you have to read the actual thing. You can listen to it if you want. You're not my supervisor. Oh, fair enough.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:34

Be our fifteenth caller to get tickets to Fleetwood Mac Recreation Band.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:40

Thank you for joining us for this discussion. You are dismissed with the following valediction from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now the hungry lion roars, and the wolf behowls the moon, whilst the heavy ploughman snores, all with weary task foredone. Now the wasted brands do glow, whilst the screech owl screeching loud, puts the wretch that lies in woe in remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night that the graves all gaping wide, every one lets forth his sprite in the churchway paths to glide, and we fairies that do run by the triple heckett's team, From the presence of the sun, following darkness like a dream. Now our frolic not a mouse shall disturb this hallowed house. I am sent with broom before, to sweep the dust behind the door.