Understanding Plato with Pierre Grimes

[Music] thinking aloud conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove hello and welcome I'm Jeffrey Mishlove our topic today is understanding Plato with me is philosopher Pierre Grimes who is the author of philosophical midwifery and other titles including the portable Pierre and a dialogue in heaven between Socrates and Jesus welcome Pierre thank you it's a pleasure to be with you once again thank you I know that you have had probably throughout your entire adult life a great passion for Plato quite true quite true what is it in Plato that has so fascinated you and drawn you to study him decade after decade Plato is part of our wisdom tradition the whole enix really represents the Golden Age of Western culture we ignore that I'm attracted to it mm-hmm I think it exhibits pure wisdom and it can compete with any other spiritual system but it is not taught that way it as taught as a secondary intellectual system without any intrinsic spiritual words and often for people who are basically antiquarians that's true enough it's sort of like dusty old books from thousands of years ago that are mostly irrelevant to the problems of today and on my part I say excuse me same problems man is caught in the same kinds of problems the techniques and our technology are different but we are the same and therefore we must experience the same and anew just as they discovered a new way and so there's a sense in which the ancient Greek philosophers in Plato and in particular who founded the Academy the first real I suppose equivalent to what we might call a university we're able to given the conditions of their day and age get a grasp on some of the fundamental dilemmas of being human yes and the biggest one is to recognize at what point we are ignorant and why we need philosophy which is really waking up to one's ignorance and transforming it into wisdom that's the goal I have heard it said for example that philosophy ought to be about understanding the meaning of life and it is degenerated into understanding the meaning of meaning and one must go further than meaning and discover why meaning is there and why it we are attracted to it because you have to discover what are the conditions for meaning where where must where must we be in order to participate in meaning and go beyond it to seek wisdom that step is essential well it's let's talk a little bit about Plato the man good he was a human being just like you and me I gather he originally wanted to become a playwright died yes yes the tradition is that he once wanted to be a tragedy director writer of tragedies and instead he ended up he produced many dialogues it's as if his philosophical works have a kind of theatrical quality to them indeed yes they represent a way of life each dialogue is self-contained he puts philosophical ideas into the mouths of the different characters in his dialogues and you get to understand their personalities as well and contrast sometimes their personalities with the ideas that they are expressing that's true it's an amazing quality to being able to represent not just the personality but they represent a set of eyes which are always present and can always be questioned and therefore he's able to bring out both the person holiday and there are theoretical viewpoints and presented to us as the listeners and readers and the most prominent of these personalities of course is Socrates that's true that's the that's the man and it's ironic in a way because Socrates is regarded by some as as the epitome of wisdom and and yet we have none of his effect I don't suppose he even wrote anything at all well then as in the last dialogue of Plato's is the Phaedo and when he's in jail that's when the only note is when he decides to write down poetry mm-hmm yes so that's the only expression that we know about Socrates writing anything mm-hmm so we know about Socrates because Plato and others described him in their writings which are survived yes there are multiple sources that that man must have lived so we have this concept it's very important I think in our culture of the Socratic dialogue but we learn of it mostly through Plato that's true and they're different and that difference is a very interesting difference the difference between the cite the Socratic dialogue and the Platonic dialectic yes yes Alcibiades and Socrates is great dialogue the symposium appears at the end of the symposium where everybody is talking about the nature of love and he says wait a man I'm not going to compete with that theme but I'm going to use my talent to tell you something we're going to talk about that man Socrates and it's his speech about Socrates that we learn things that allow us to make the distinction between Plato and Socrates because at that point Alcibiades says hey you know the kind of dialogues that Socrates had were with Tanner merchants we don't find any dialogue of Plato's dealing with tanners or workmen second he said he had such dialogues within it Athey it the broad participants to to be in a state where they were crying and being upset and wrapped up in all kinds of states of mind he said there were people around him who then imitated him they became in history called the Socratic of which we know nothing because all the records have been destroyed how interesting yeah so that Plato therefore is different in Socrates because his dialogues you don't read them and find that people are so upset and they dead into more complicated or he in fact even an elevated states of mind he often ends where the individual recognizes the nature of their own ignorance and he leaves it a thought Plato does Plato not chakra but Socrates does almost the opposite he he goes to working-class people yes'm how do you do what you do and they they can't always tell him and yet he begins asking questions to bring out the fact that they actually can articulate aspects of their art their trade their profession that they prior to that weren't able to articulate that that's right that's why he calls philosophy and ours mm-hm see one of the most important dialogues it's called the ion that's a very short dialogue but ended again he engages with a chap by the name of ion who goes around and gives great talks about Homer he's a rap so it as they call him mmm-hmm soccer's he says by the way do you have enlarged why does he ask that it turns out that the idea of are the central to Plato mmm-hmm and that is jan order to have an art a presupposition a knowledge that can benefit a subject when it is applied to the and that way they become better than they were before that's central to the idea of knowledge mm-hmm like you can have a knowledge of many many things that don't benefit the subject that is to say they don't become better in themselves yeah they may fix this they may fix that doctors have see they approach an art equally with philosophy the philosopher has the art of making a diagnosis of a person's condition as a doctor does and then he then goes on to try to show them where they are stuck in their understanding and life and their puzzles of life and tries to draw that out to benefit them mm-hmm therefore the whole idea of philosophy presupposes this art that Plato shows and Socrates is exhibited well we all have a tendency to get in our own way I think it's true of every human being there's a voice in which we block ourselves by truth and usually it's something we're unconscious of there's that curious mm-hmm I mean the thing we most need to know and make visible is our ignorance about which we don't suspect and it's only by inquiring about what we do in our lives that we discover where we are stuck and it's only at that time that there can be an art that can then benefit them as they can then participate in it that's true philosophy so to distinguish between Plato and Socrates that Plato has developed a dialectic and art form to help people learn what it is that they don't know yeah Socrates has developed a dialogue that helps people articulate things that they know but they don't know that they - yes that's the de fundamental basic difference hmm and there may be certain dialogues where that doesn't take place but within it he demonstrates that the people has suffered that same plight I'm thinking alike of the symposium where he's exploring the idea of love but Agathon and Agathon realizes he doesn't know what he's talking about he's brought to that point of ignorance so then Socrates then says excuse me to continue this dialogue I must tell you about my teacher and he mentions a woman by the name of gia tema and so the rest of the dialogue he recalls a dialogue and a teaching of his teacher deity that then unfolds the very nature of beauty and the variations and degrees of reaching different states of mind of beauty until it reaches the ultimate expression of beauty and an Enlightenment state now this I presume would be an example of Plato putting his own thoughts into the words of Socrates that's right that's when he's most close to Socrates mm-hmm yes that's well said mm-hmm and if we look at the whole body of Plato's work it's not so different I suppose from the ancient Rishi's of India who are talking about states that of spiritual enlightenment yes that's exactly what it is whereas Socrates seems to be a more down-to-earth II practical guy yes he's and and that's his way of life because he existed in the Agora in the marketplace and who took on everybody mm-hm and therefore he didn't have a select group of people though he loved to talk to those who are more prominent in society his art went to everybody mm-hmm by the way he said in order to understand my arts as Plato's view of Socrates Socrates has said than to have said I'm really a midwife my my mother was a midwife one of the most renowned midwives in town he said because she could spot from the earliest stage as a woman's pregnancy helped her through all the travails of birth and especially he said she had won our which is most important she could tell whether it was a true and genuine birth or not so he said that art I have only I don't treat women who are pregnant I treat men who are pregnant in the mind and they needed your birth of their ideas they don't know they have this sounds like the origin of your book philosophical midwifery oh your God is that's where it comes from yeah so you're really carrying on that tradition of Plato and Socrates that's true and my work develops it and its implications as an art form again why is it an art form because it approaches people's problems it manifests them it shows them that brings them into existence and then deals with them so they can be resolved that's a benefit yeah well many people would say that you can't address UN problems at the level of the intellect at the level of philosophy that these problems have to be dealt with it the emotional level that requires a catharsis it requires perhaps a hypnotic state or dream work that just trying to logically people can logically understand what they need to do and still not do it that's true I've heard it many times but my work is demonstrated that that can be challenged and rejected mm-hm and in the book by the way my work on midwifery dr. Ileana psychologist did a validation study that's included in the book and she comes to the conclusion in the book that this in principle does away with that belief who's not very belief that the that the intellectual way of trying to approach human problems is outdated mm-hmm and in fact today we see large important schools of psychotherapy based on cognitive processing matter of fact my work and the we're talking about the eighties now it's becoming never as much if the great hostility when I first came out with that book but now psychology is beginning to approach some of the similar ideas when they move in the direction of cognitive functions but they haven't yet crossed that happened crusto iíve given demonstrations in public and showed that the thing about this this method is effective it's a platonic variation of lehder dialectic as midwifery again and again and you know I've done it in many countries I've had tended different conferences I've done it for 50 years now it's time that maybe someone take a look at it and said maybe maybe you had a look at what that guy is doing well to come back to the distinction between Plato and Socrates when we're describing earlier you mentioned that in the in the dialogue without sivaiah T's he talks about how the common working people that Socrates engaged with were very moved one way or another maybe angered or maybe brought to tears by having a dialogue with Socrates who and that did not happen with the played platonic dialectic never why not well I think primarily Plato's vision I think he saw in society the danger of rhetoric and rhetorician we call people and public relations PR they're really the role of Sophists mmm-hmm and I think he saw the price that his teacher Socrates paid by being victims and critics of these Sophists and I think when when you see an ethos which is described in one of the dialogues you see he sees that these people were hostile to philosophy and they chose to therefore put Socrates to death so Plato I think singled out the soft I made them subjects of his dialogue to show their own stupidity and their own intellectual confusion how would you define a surfaced oh the person who thinks they know when they do not know and eloquently talk about their ignorance as if it were a hollow truth and gathered they were very common in ancient Athens around my neighborhood as well one of the dialogues is the theaetetus and theaetetus is young man who happens to be a student with his teacher and his teachers happens to be gorgeous i'ma find me his teacher happens to be protagonist so behind this dialog that Socrates has with the adidas looms the figure Pythagoras who had that great view which is so common today relative everyone has their own personal view who's to say who is right or wrong whatever I say is true to me what you say is true to you who can tell whether that anything is true independent of personal belief that view is taken apart uh-huh this is the most popular view you can find in today's society yes you hear it all the time people respond I see people responding in the comments section of these videos with that very same comment when I say for example we ought to pay attention to facts and people say no everybody has an opinion there is no such thing as a fact no that's but Socrates takes that takes the position doesn't argue that way he says excuse me if your viewers right it doesn't it follow them that way the way each person perceives things is private and true to them is when someone walks away from you we do not agree they become smaller and smaller until they disappear but that's the way it appears does it not when the Sun Goes Down and you finally see advanced well it really does go down doesn't it I mean you see us and of course according to your theory if everything you see is personal and true to you then you must believe such things as we're talking about is it true that anything that seems true to me is actually true on the basis of perception where perception turns out to be an illusion that's what he does he assumes the person's view was right never disagrees with it draws out from their position the absurdities inherent in it gives it back to the person and says look here is this what you mean now they have to judge their own theory yeah so this is where they are left confronting their own ignorance that's right yeah and that leaves them not in a state of great excitement or anger or sorrow but in a state of puzzlement he goes for puzzlement Socrates goes for transformation mm-hmm yes but isn't the goal of the overall project of Plato to bring people to a state of enlightenment well you see while that is true in principle there are there aren't dialogues that reveal that well he talks about the one self understanding the self that's right that see everything we say about plato's work we have to hold back when we get into the Parmenides which is the very dialogue you're talking about am referencing because that is so demanding that if anybody tries to understand it completely all of the difficulties they have in their own understanding will become manifest and they will have to deal with it or toss the book away hmm that very process is getting rid of one's personal ignorance and that is in viewing and and the progress of enrollment of a wisdom or wisdom experience which is enlightenment so that that dialogue I think is Shepherd from the other dialogues and you're talking about Parmenides yes that's the name of the dial yes that's a magnificent dialogue but everywhere you see everyone all the translations exclude the idea of the self yet it appears there hundreds of times yes and it starts with there his basic hypothesis of Parmenides is that the highest concept the highest vision is the one self mm-hmm all translators call it the one hmm but the idea of the self is central to all of Plato's dialogues and it's missing we have to get it back I know you have written an essay called the betrayal of philosophy that somehow and we've lost that and I know one of your teachers the great philosopher Allen Watts wrote a book called the book on the taboo of knowing yourself I Ryan it's as if this is a taboo that has been going on now for thousands of years and it's I suppose because the Sophists and and their enterprises find it convenient to have a docile population of worker bee humans who who are philosophers who aren't struggling to know themselves because if everyone was in the quest for self knowledge society wouldn't work the same as it now does I think it would challenge every religion because every the Abrahamic hydronic religions Christianity Judaism in Islamic all presuppose there is this thing called God and he's separate powerful all knowing of which you must believe but once you get into the idea of the self there's no lead to believe if self is an ultimate turn there's no place for faith you don't have to believe you have a faith I mean you don't have to believe you have herself you don't need to have faith in yourself other than you can believe that there's of those are better vision of yourself you need but that doesn't require a belief in something supernatural so this is one of the great points of distinction between the ancient Greeks and their worldview and the Abrahamic traditions options central absolutely central and therefore the more we are exploring philosophy in terms of the self Christianity Judaism Islamic can of course exists but it's indifferent to philosophy well you have to admit now that all of these ancient cultures interacted and mingled with the Hellenic not sure there's a great amount of influence that goes back and forth Oh between them and and we are the inheritors of all of these and now we have to reclaim them see that's one of my goals you try to reclaim what we have ignored or have forgotten our age has to be recalling the ancient wisdom and provided to ourselves and to one another that's our goal that should be our goal now you've studied Buddhism extensively you are a lineage Bearer that's true I'm a drama successor of a great sin master the l-bomb mm-hmm and there was really fun working with him I worked with him through several years and one day he said beer here's a stick and it was a Dharma stick mm-hmm he said you're a teacher now I gave him back the stick I said no I'm not I'm not a teacher he suggested well he said i'll prove you're a teacher come every Thursday night and I will make a translation of my own on the Diamond Sutra and you give a talk on I only show it to you five minutes before you go on hmm so I did that for the entire thing and by gosh he made his point I recognized I was able to handle it in such a way it with which he accepted as exceptional handling of the Diamond Sutra and I said okay I'm a teacher he won that battle now tell me how you would compare the wisdom of the Diamond Sutra which is and many people would say it's at the very core of Buddhism oh yeah and the teachings of the Buddha himself and the teachings of Plato one word they know the self mm-hmm that's all you need to say that's in essence the Diamond Sutra in other words the very heart of these Buddhist teachings and the very heart of Plato I would say are orthogonal to each other is that the term orthogonal mm-hmm as a matter of fact with me oppa I had a we made a deal I said I'll do this with the Diamond Sutra if you give talks on Plato's Parmenides and for one reason rather that didn't work out but he accepted it mm-hmm but it didn't take place I whatever so I lost so this the fact that Plato himself is very much akin to the great wisdom traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism is kind of lost in our Western academic philosophical understanding of Plato you see the hundred great books published of course by University of Chicago are pushed by University of Chicago and I was subject of it the Western intellectual Canon there's one book ended by Adler and in it he does it well he said we are in a separate conversation European intellectuals aren't a separate intellectual tradition a separate conversation and that's why he never included any oriental literature mm-hmm that's a that that is true and that's its problem mm-hmm it doesn't want to include anything other than an indigenous people in Europe and they want the continuation of their own thought so it's completely centric and therefore ego bound it's really a sad picture it's it seems to me it's mistaken also in the sense that the the Greek language is part of the indo-european language family in basically part of the same peoples who originated many of the traditions of Asia yeah that's true except for that one the idea of knowledge is central yeah the idea that knowledge should bring about a benefit to those join them it is applied and the profound understanding of the self mm-hmm by the way is equally a profound understanding of the self in Tibetan literature yes and it does occur in one of the apana shards but it isn't the central center in two of the intellectual expression understanding of a dialectical understanding of the soul so you is a person who is a Dharma teacher and who has studied extensively with the Masters of various Asian philosophies including Tibetan Buddhism and and some of the Hindu traditions of Vedanta and so on still find Plato to be the great philosophical teacher that you prefer that's true and you see I went to those people because when I experienced what I did through the hundred great books program they lost the wisdom tradition so I wanted to see where was I went to Joe Campbell who was a friend of mine we used to have coffee in Greenwich Village the great mythologist yes mm-hmm I have interviewed I said Joe where is real fast to be going on he said Pierre it doesn't but I have a friend of mine Alan watch in San Francisco who started one of these new schools were all the teachers are native native philosophers I said why he said yes I said to by him mm-hmm next day I had done in my 1935 convertible LaSalle and sped off to San Francisco to find this man since he had native teachers expressing each of their philosophies indigenous to them I said this is where I want to be I want to see Buddhism Hinduism Taoism Tibetan thought they were the center of it mm-hmm and Alan Watts himself bridged both Eastern and Western how many lessons truly amazing that he has opened up so many people to the depth of the human being of what they are yes you used quite a remarkable man well I hope we can have a further conversation just about Alan Watts all right but Fernando Pierre Grimes thank you so much for sharing with me your love your passion and your profound understanding of Plato oh I thank you for the opportunity to talk with you it's my pleasure and thank you for being with us [Music] [Music] you

Channel: New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove

Views: 40,358

Keywords: Socrates, Mortimer Adler, 100 Great Books, Buddhism

Id: NWWspx11mvc

Length: 33min 12sec (1992 seconds)

Published: Fri May 04 2018