What leads a man in remote antiquity, 2,600, 2,700 years ago, to start something called philosophizing and present to the world in speech or a writing book, a claim that this universe is made out of water or that things like coming to be and passing away are impossible, or that things like being are impossible, that they're the only thing that is and being does not exist, but that all is made of fire and many such thing, and to explain the world otherwise in terms of earth, water, fire, such things as Empedocles did, and then lust, love, and strife between the elements as they come together in a part that this makes the world. And many such other theories, which are attempts of early geniuses to understand universe, explain it to others,

and to see things outside of any religious tradition and without appeal to textual or other authority, but merely by referring to perception of world and phenomena to the senses and ability to reason about them and for themselves in particular to live for insight and discovery about the world and entirely for the pleasure of this, the pleasure of discovery, the lust for many knowledge. And I wonder how such a being comes about because they appear to us almost suddenly fully formed in the persons of Thales, first of all, the first philosopher And then immediately, men like Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides. If there were precursor types who were, let's say, rougher than them, not as well formed, it's not possible to know. But there don't seem to be. There is no rumor of it anyway.

These seem to appear suddenly, magnificently, fully formed from the beginning, almost like a miracle. Each man, totally different, fully developed and complex. each showing not just a very different vision of the world, but one that in each case was united with the thinker in character and in the way of life. It's just something that should perplex you how this comes about if you know ancient world and how everywhere else there was just universal total rule of custom and religion and ensuing homogeneity of human types, that actually you don't need to go to ancient world. you see that around you now. I mean, go to Panama also now. The world around you is too familiar and you think there is actual variety of types. Go to Panama. No offense to my Central American friends, but go there.

See the dull look in the eye of the roboticons that inhabit, imagine a world made of Chinese grandmothers on the other hand and philosophy or anything similar coming out of that. It's not even to say, well, to think outside the religion custom that would be blasphemy and so that would be impossible in a world totally ruled by religion, but even more so, even prior to this, that the human types write the raw material, the independence, the mental vivacity, imagination, the manliness and courage to step outside, the confidence and let me be for a moment a Marxian language, the material conditions to step outside and chart your own way, this was unthinkable. It could only ever take place in a particular kind of society and culture that's very rare, a very special one.

What do I mean by material conditions? I don't mean just money or resources, although you have to assume some level of sophistication and material plenty to even get to the level where you get some men like this. They are a great luxury. They are the crown of a culture, as Nietzsche calls them. They don't exist in a subsistence economy of fishermen. But even aside from money or luxury, when you look, for example, to medieval Europe, you may have heard of Boccaccio's Decameron. And this man, Boccaccio, he mocked and criticized priests in this book and many such things with satire. But he had nobles who defended him, who felt confident enough. I mean, society was decentralized to an extent, and there were aristos who felt confident

enough to say, no, we like him, and you priests cannot do this, we find him funny. And I think in general very few societies in history where a writer or let's say comedian could ever have such freedom, someone to protect him, and many such preconditions must exist, maybe even more unthinkable because again I'm perplexed when looking at the antiquity of that time. To think how someone like Anaximander could have emerged, let's say he born 610 BC to about 550 or 540 BC is when he lived. I've heard people say the same about Jesus, that the teaching of Sermon on the Mount is so different and alien to the culture of the Mediterranean of the time in which Jesus lived, that it must have been some kind of miracle. I think Victor Davis Hanson says this.

And whether or not it's true, in the case of these early Greek philosophers who tried to deduce everything from material, natural forces, and furthermore design all kinds of new innovations, right, because philosophy is indistinguishable here from natural science. So they design ways to measure time, divide time, predict equinox or predict eclipses as in the case of Thales, or predict seasonal variation, where Thales famously chose a people that he was not just an absent-minded philosopher who fell into a well, he bought the olive presses in advance when he knew there was a good season of harvest, when this was coming, and Anaximander had similar innovations, for example the claim that the earth is spherical is attributed to him as first one, or sometimes to Parmenides.

But anyway, again, if you look at the general and quite uniform type of man and tribes and civilizations of the time and their preoccupations, and how self-effacing most were and how much actually lack individuality, in the same way most non-Greek art also, right, the statues lack all individuality, they are hieratic, formulaic, often beautiful. You take a gigantic oceanic Polynesian mask or some kind, it can be beautiful, but they're all very formulaic, even when the formulas are nice, as in that or Egyptian art, it's still all formulaic. Should I start wearing eyeliner, by the way? I don't intend actually ever to face fag, but if I do, for example, as people are encouraging me now to have an Anthony Bourdain, Anthony Bourdain-style travel cuisine show, and should

I wear eyeliner in Egyptian fashion. I'm a pharaoh. Call me pharaoh. But whereas with Greek statues you start to get, I mean, you start to get individual character. And I think it reflects the same where suddenly and for reasons not understood. You have types like these early philosophers who are almost 19th century, very flashy novel and not even, even more that well-defined strong individual personalities who appear as the most vivid and self-absorbed even individuals that almost have ever existed. So you have to wonder where this comes from. I see much more relation anyway between this drive for self-distinction and, well, as it did not exist in the Orient or in Babylon where actually some science and engineering did exist, but the ever self-effacing Asiatic, you know, that's a thing.

And the Greek desire for self-distinction, on the other hand, for kleos, fame, that you see in Homer. It must come from Homer, and ultimately then it's shared not only with the North Europeans who had a similar tradition of warrior heroic epic bard celebrating individual glory, but with the great steppe of Eurasia, where this same ethos existed among various other tribes. There were, for example, Turcoloides and the Yeniseians and others who had the same ethos, but that's for another time. It's just miracle to me that you get, it's as if the first novelist who ever existed is a fully formed stand-on, or the first painter you know of is already a Michelangelo. Although to be fair, in early Renaissance, you did have very impressive painters already

in early Renaissance, but they required a tradition of crafts that you can see precede them in a rougher form. But you don't know anywhere of a rougher form of Thales, the first philosopher, for example. You don't know of a prior rougher form of Thales, and granted that little is known of these men, in some cases only very short fragments, but that's actually the point. As Schopenhauer says, for philosophers, the stakes of fame are the highest, because they They made such an impression in their lives that their name, the shape of their character has come down over millennia very vivid, even when there is in fact very little material. It shines through that and through the anecdotes and such that they left behind.

But what preceded philosophers like this, where do they come from so suddenly? This concerns me. Some say the Greeks took, that they appropriated from the Orient, from the Babylonians or Egyptians or many such. And it's half forgotten by now, but one of the early cultural war academic scandals when Martin Bernal in late 1980s, early 1990s, this was the height of political correctness craze very soon after this. Camille Paglia come up with her book and then her cultural commentary. So you know, wokeness, absolutely nothing new, it was in full force, in fact, back then. But this Martin Bernal wrote Black Athena about how the Greeks supposedly took appropriated much from Egypt and the Levant. Some of this is indisputable, like the alphabet from the Phoenicians, but he goes much farther.

Most scholars today, for example, would deny that the Greeks took their pantheon, for example, from the Egyptians, which was a common belief in ancient Greece itself in some quarters. Oh, our gods come from Egypt. They have a pantheon that's like ours, they're much older, more venerated civilizations than us. We must have gotten it from them, but their own awe, the Greek awe, at some of the more ancient civilizations, doesn't make these suppositions real. In fact, they did not get their pantheon from, and I mean, even when the Greeks held them. But again, this Martin Bernal goes much farther, which is odd, I mean, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, of what he thinks about calling the Phoenicians black, black Athena, because the Phoenicians

and the Egyptians supposedly were black. I don't think so. A recent genetic study I saw just a week or two ago show ancient Egyptians clustered closely, for example, with the Copts. These are the Egyptian Christians, a very ancient community. This was already known that the Copts were the descendants of the ancient Egyptians. Or they clustered close to some Yemenites, I think, or some Arab tribes from that area. So you can see quite plainly what Copts look like today, by the way, if you want to look at their faces. But anyway, it was only one of many arguments in this direction that the Greeks appropriated from other cultures, which, you know, just such thoughts were actually common in the 19th century as well, as you see in a moment.

And in such a frame of mind, someone like Thales, who was himself of Phoenician ancestry by the way, or an axiomander, but if you think of it this way, they are merely maybe enterprising Bourdain-like, live-love-laugh travelers. Maybe they are the idol son of a commercial family who, on returning from self-discovery and drug-strip to Babylon, come back with these novel doctrines, man, and in the somewhat more liberal and loose world of the Greeks. I don't believe this, but so the thinking would go. By ancient standards, at least, the more liberal world of the Greeks in that more individualistic world where maybe a variety of cults and open disbelief even was at times entertained, not to speak of the lust for fame and also just plainly desire for entertainment and for beautiful

speeches that in such a place they could, you know, somewhat longer oriental wisdom that they picked up on a wee journey to Babylon or Egypt and invent so to speak philosophy for a Greek audience. So the thinking might go. It's very wrong I think and to show you how far back arguments like Bernal's go and this kind of debunking and you know this mindset of I'll find the root origin of such and such belief or discovery and prove that it's actually something else. And let me just read from Nietzsche's famous early essay on philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks, which I think was a lecture course of him from when he was still briefly a professor. It's an essay I think you should all read. I'm using for this episode in part to talk about Parmenides and so on, but here I read

from Nietzsche. It has been pointed out assiduously to be sure how much the Greeks were able to find and learn abroad in the Orient, and it is doubtless true that they picked up much there. It is a strange spectacle, however, to see the alleged teachers from the Orient and their Greek disciples exhibited side by side. Zoroaster next to Heraclitus, Hindus next to Eliatics, Egyptians next to Empedocles, or even Anaxagoras amidst the Jews, and Pythagoras amidst the Chinese. As to specifics, very little has been discovered by such juxtaposition. As to the general idea, we should not mind it if only its exponents did not burden us with their conclusion that philosophy was thus merely imported into Greece rather than having grown and developed there in a soil natural and native to it.

Or worse, that philosophy, being alien to the Greeks, it very likely contributed to their ruin more than to their well-being. Nothing would be sillier than to claim an autochthonous development for the Greeks. On the contrary, they invariably absorbed other living cultures. They appropriated. The very reason they got so far is that they knew how to pick up the spear and throw it onwards from the point where others had left it. Their skill in the art of fruitful learning was admirable. We ought to be learning from our neighbors precisely as the Greeks learned from theirs, not for the sake of learned pedantry, but rather using everything we learned as a foothold which will take us up as high and higher than our neighbor. The quest for philosophy's beginnings is idle.

For everywhere, in all beginnings, we find only the crude, the unformed, the empty, and the ugly. What matters in all things is the higher levels. People who prefer to spend their time on Egyptian or Persian philosophy rather than on Greek, on the grounds that the former are more so to speak original and in any event older, are just as ill-advised as those who cannot deal with the magnificent, profound mythology of the Greeks until they have reduced it to the physical trivialities of sun, lightning, storm and mist which originally presumably gave rise to it. They are the people also who imagine they have found the purer form of religions than that of the Greek polytheism when they discover the good old Aryans restricting their worship to the single vault of heaven.

Everywhere, the way to the beginnings leads to barbarism. Whoever concerns himself with the Greeks should be ever mindful that an unrestrained thirst for knowledge for its own sake barbarizes men just as much as a hatred of knowledge. The Greeks themselves, possessed of an inherently insatiable thirst for knowledge, controlled it by their ideal need for and consideration of all the values of life. Whatever they learned, they wanted to live through immediately. They engaged in philosophy as in everything else, as civilized human beings and with highly civilized aims, wherefore, free of any kind of autochthonous conceit, they forbore trying to reinvent the elements of philosophy and science. Rather they instantly tackled the job of so fulfilling, enhancing, elevating, and purifying

the elements they took over from elsewhere, that they became inventors after all, but in a higher sense and a purer sphere. For what they invented was the archetypes of philosophic thought. All posterity has not made an essential contribution to them since. All other cultures are put to shame by the marvelously idealized philosophical company represented by the ancient Greek masters Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Ampedocles, Democritus and Socrates. These men are monolithic. Their thinking and their character stand in a relationship characterized by the strictest necessity. They are devoid of conventionality, for in that day there was no philosophic or academic professionalism. All of them, in magnificent solitude, were the only ones of their time

whose lives were devoted to insight alone. They all possessed that virtuous energy of the ancients, herein excelling all man's sins, which led them to find their own individual form and develop it through all its metamorphoses to its subtlest and greatest possibilities. For there was no convention to meet them halfway. Thus all of them together form what Schopenhauer, in contrast to the Republic of Scholars, has called the Republic of Creative Minds. Each giant calling to his brother through the desolate intervals of time, and undisturbed by the wanton noises of the dwarves that creep past beneath them, their high spirit converse continues. Of this high spirit converse, I have resolved to tell the story." And so he goes on and he does this, and I encourage you to read this book,

and especially the beginning sections, many good things are the meaning of philosophy and its relationship to high culture, what the culture really means. And it's important, I think, then to see that the culture out of which the Greek philosophers emerge is one that already honored genius and intelligence. It was exciting, exploratory, luxurious, and increasingly secular. So this image, again, from Nietzsche, why don't I read now to give you this image? Other peoples have saints, the Greeks have sages. That important line I will repeat. I am very fond of this line because it revealed much. Other peoples have saints, the Greeks have sages. It has been rightly said that a people is characterized not as much by its great men as by the way in which it recognizes and honors its great men.

In other times and places, the philosopher is a chance wanderer, lonely in a totally hostile environment which he either creeps past or attacks with clenched fists. Among the Greeks alone, he is not an accident. When he appears in the sixth and fifth centuries, among the enormous dangers and temptations of increasing secularization, walking, as it were, out of the cave of Trophonius straight into the midst of the lavish luxurias, the pioneer freedom, the wealth and sensuality of the Greek colonies, we may suspect that he comes a distinguished warning voice to express the same purpose to which the tragic drama was born during that century and of which the Orphic mysteries hint in the grotesque hieroglyphics of their rites.

The judgment of those philosophers as to life and existence in general means so much more than any modern judgment, for they had life in lavish perfection before their eyes, whereas the feeling of our thinkers is confused by our split desire for freedom, beauty and greatness on the one hand, and our drive toward truth on the other, a drive which asks merely, And what is life worth after all? The philosopher's mission, when he lives in a genuine culture which is characterized by unity of style, cannot be properly derived from our own circumstances and experiences, for we have no genuine culture. Only a culture such as the Greeks possessed can answer our question as to the task of the philosopher." Yes, do you like this?

I will be right back to discuss two such early dazzling and pure philosophical types, Anaximander and Parmenides. I will be right back. This novel by Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, it has great passage at the beginning about racehorse of genius, the modern urge to quantify, to find certainty, to dismiss what can't be quantified for the brute mind of the people. It leads the protagonist of this novel, Ulrich, who has ambitions of intellectual and spiritual creation, and he sees this phrase in a newspaper, a racehorse of genius, and he becomes demoralized. A racehorse of genius, a phrase of society that has no actual taste for genius, for true spiritual insight or appreciation of artistic creation. But you know, you can't be demoralized by things like this, I think.

to some extent was always like this because mankind is wretched and botched as a whole. Nietzsche points out that the first edition of Schopenhauer's great book, The World as Will and Representation, which was so important for so many artists and writers since, let's say 1850 or 1860, and the first edition was turned into mulch. He points this out in a passage where he explains that the vast majority of ancient literature now is gone. In fact, the better part of it is gone. Not just the majority in quantity, but actually maybe the better part of it is gone in quality. No Heraclitus, no Empedocles, and Democritus, whose antiquities as Plato's equal are also not there. The vast majority of mankind is unspeakably perverse, stupid, and yes, they will turn the greatest works

to mulch and for the last 100 or 150 years this dead weight has had preeminence in the world because of the ingenuity of a European man. It has allowed this dead weight to multiply and the false doctrine of human rights and empathy has not allowed it to be called in the way it would have been called in antiquity. So maybe yes it's worse now but I say it's always been somewhat like this, the racehorse of genius, but anyway, this book, an angsty book written about the world right before World War I, set in Habsburg in Vienna, and Musil himself seems to have been one of these angsty, he wrote also The Confusions of Young Torliss, by the way, which I recommend you start with that one. That's a kind, a story about a boarding school I've mentioned before, a kind of dominated

by Doug's story, and apparently he tried to introduce it to Freud or to Freudians and and they hated him for it and so on. But Musel appears to have been one of the angsty, individualist liberals who stood against both right and left collectivism type of thing. And to me, at that time, that's maybe a kind of affectation, but an artist's value isn't determined by his political positions anyway. I prefer Stefan Goerge, if you want a third way between right and left of the time, so to speak. In any case, the man without qualities, And you can tell even from the title that, yes, the main character Ulrich, he embraces a kind of apathy, a kind of malleability, passivity to the outside world, while maintaining a kind of core. But there's another way in which this phrase then has interested me,

which it's implicit in the book overall as well, but what I mean is I've never really wanted to become anything definite. Because once you do that, even if you do it well, a thousand different pads become close to you. And I could never get over this. There's an irritability, you know. Once you decide on a course, and it's like you're in this car, you're looking out the window, and then you're seeing all the pads and white domains that are being lost to you, that could have been. And I get so restless when I see that. And even if in the back of the mind, you know that probably you'd not be good at most of those pads, or you wouldn't like them, you'd be unhappy in them, and that if you don't do it, you might well become nothing. You might not even be allowed to become a bug,

like the main character in Notes from Underground say. But listen, I have a bigger audience now than I expected, and many of you are young, and this isn't show, this episode especially, I'm not giving you life advice. I'm just telling you what I'm like, that's all. And it's not to be followed necessarily. My existence has been mostly precarious in part of this, because of this irritability and this constant longing and claustrophobia, because what I love most of all is precisely having wide v-stars, open horizon for motion, and not being hemmed into something, even extending to small practicalities of day-to-day life, when one of my favorite cities in the world is Buenos Aires, simply, even though I knew I didn't need it, but simply because there I know I can escape

to three or four different countries in under 24 hours, sometimes well under 24 hours, without paperwork. And I would have duffel bag with everything I needed inside and I would sometimes get up at 4.30 in the morning, 3 a.m. in middle of night, take a cab to train station and back or take a cab to no-name hotel. Downtown there are cheap hotels. They don't take documents or anything, you just pay, nobody knows where you are, complete hiding. And I don't like feeling handed into something I can't get out of, so I choose to live in no place even now and to have many different aliases in day-to-day life and to pretend to be many different people. It's possible there's nothing there, you see. Well, I'm taking it too far, but I mean precisely because I feel there's something there

that I want to protect and to preserve the energy, the primal energy that can turn into maybe many things and that I don't want to crystallize and turn into only one limited thing. So I want to pounce on the right thing at the right time. And I admire above all men like Isao Inuma, the main character in Mishima book Runaway horses, this samurai cadet who is a militarist driven by such purity of purpose, who is one thing and nothing else, and who applies to this with divine vehemence. But I feel he was doing it in the path of a godly cause, so you know, it's more like no fap, like preserving your vital essence so that after 10,000 years you can have a final and definite and glorious explosion that destroys the universe.

And I believe this, I believe your ejaculation can literally destroy the universe. I knew a man on a forum who claimed that by not masturbating for several years, Pluto got downgraded from a planet to some kind of asteroid, and he said it was entirely happened because he did no fap. That's amazing to me. But I think his name was Mencius. But I am not Mencius Mollbach, this is a different Mencius. He used to go and scream at the kind of nude people in Portland, Oregon. They have nude bikers at night and this ex-hippie who became a Nazi, excuse me, he used to go scream at them. He didn't like me very much either though. But I'm being a bit poetic so I'll tell you why, and this isn't necessarily what the protagonist

of Musel novel, Men Without Qualities, means, but it's because in acquiring qualities you you also acquire, there's an end there, there's a restriction. And I'm so claustrophobic that it feels somewhat like death. And indeed, anything you see in the world that has a definite way of being, that has qualities, it's on its path to death in some way. It could be on its path to acne, but also on its path to death. And with this poetic preamble, I mean to show by analogy what part of the thought of Anaximander, this one of the first philosophers, maybe the second philosopher after Thales. He was also from Miletus on the Ionian, this western coast of Anatolia, now Turkey, right? What he means, okay, because the content of Thales' claim that all is water, that all existence is water

in various states of being. You find this may be absurd, may laugh at it, but again, he was also a man of science, Thales was. Like Anaximander, both of them developed notions of natural science and mathematics or engineering to divert a river or things of this type. So Anaximander, by the way, also had somewhat evolutionary theory of life, saying that man evolved from fishes in the sea and many such things. But Thales, I'm telling you, besides their natural science orientation, he took this extra step which is not warranted by empirical experience or perception or anything, but of positing that one thing determines all existence and speculating in this direction something material and perceptible, or at the very least not divine, not inherited from some tradition or attributed to God,

God being traditional or not. And so in this positing of the oneness of existence, Thales being the first philosopher already take big steps there. I'm saying that it should not be dismissed even if you find idea of saying, well, that water is principle of all existence to be absurd, but Anaximander, you can say the second philosopher ever, he continues in this, in positing a oneness behind all existence. But he doesn't say it's water or fire or any such things, he calls it the aperon, literally the unbounded or the borderless or without qualities, the undefined. And out of the undefined, with a capital U, out of this aperon, he uses it as a principle to explain what means all coming into being, all generation and all passing away. And it was these things that concerned him above all.

Whence is it that things come about and why they pass away? And Anaximander saw passing away as a rebuke. If you had the right to exist, you wouldn't pass away. Is very Schopenhauerian or maybe Schopenhauer is very Anaximandrian. All this multiplicity of phenomena in the world that you see before you, the wild divergence of things many things you see the fact that they end and well you then say the proper measure with which to judge any and all human beings is that they are all really creatures who should not exist at all who are doing penance for their lives by their manifold sufferings and their death what could we expect of such creatures are we not all sinners under sentence of death we do penance for having been born first by living and then by dying That's from Schopenhauer now.

But with a similar line of thinking exists, I'm saying, an aximander, where the source of all being and all things is in this thing, the indefinite, which can only be known to men negatively this way, and which again is source of all things, not just because it is infinite or inexhaustible in power, but because it lacks qualities. And whatever takes qualities is a kind of doom. It commits a kind of apostasy from this primeval and untarnished wholeness of all life. It enters the stream of life and enters the kind of what you would call in Buddhism samsara, and I'm not saying these men had the same motivation that Buddhism or Hinduism have. I'm sure some of you familiar with those things see similarities and so on.

But whatever enters the stream of life and existence, exists in self-contradiction. This self-contradiction is finally manifested in its death. And Nietzsche has beautiful quotes speaking through the mouth of a supposed Anaximander, how he understands it. He says, what is your existence worth? And if it is worthless, why are you here? Your guilt, I see, causes you to tarry in your existence. With your death, you have to expiate it. Look how your earth is withering, how your seas are diminishing and drying up. The seashell on the mountaintop can show you how much has dried up already. Even now, fire is destroying your world. Some day it will go up in fumes and smoke. But ever in the new, another such world of ephemerality will construct itself.

Who is there that could redeem you from the curse of coming to be? Do you like this? I mean, even in what I just read, the really ingenious part of what I just read for you is that Nietzsche connects Anaximander, some of his famous observations from what most Most people would consider natural science, in this case, evolutionary theory of life, or of the fact that at one point mountains were under the sea so that you could find fossilized sea creatures on mountains, Anaximander talked this and such things. And he connects this biological, or whatever you want to call it, paleontological observation of Anaximander's to Anaximander's broader, what you'd call metaphysical, but really his own very personal insight into the source of all life and all existence, which is tied

into the ultimate questions of ethics after all also, the worth of existence or not. And obviously such a man is bound to be very unusual in his own life and to stand out in other ways in day to day, which Anaximander did in his clothing, his gestures, his self-dramatizing persona and grandiose pronouncements to where his fellow Milesians, they honored him by making him the founder of a colony on the Black Sea, Apollonia, or maybe they were trying to get rid of him, there is this joke, this would have been, you know, sometime in the first half of the 500s BC. But in this concern over what means coming to be and passing away and the ephemerality of phenomenal existence. Anaximander opened a big door and two men, Heraclitus of Ephesus, also coast of Asia

Minor, and Parmenides of Elea, a colony in Italy, they were to take very different paths. As I talk Heraclitus on episode in past, I will talk soon on Parmenides. I need to take a break. As you can see, they are trying to confuse my words in my mouth. They do this to my tongue. I will take Theoden and come right back. Shimpout continues in the Middle East. You have to endure months of this now, weeks, at least, of people with creamed humus dripping out of the sides of their mouths, talking about the wretched tribal conflict. How much care of this can you take on the... When I was a small boy, maybe eight or nine years old, I was in a certain country with my parents. We were on our way to America. I was in this hotel okay. This cheap hotel we were in and a certain,

I don't want to get into it, a certain country in Europe, we were a cheap hotel. I was shocked, horrified at the size of the cockroaches. There were no cockroaches of such size in the East block where I had grown up, not at the time. Of course, now they've been imported, but I was just terrified of these new gigantic cockroaches in strange country, which I still, however, remember the excitement of it in general, the thoughts and inspirations it put on me to look at the horizon of that city from this cheap hotel. But anyway, there were these Arabs in this hotel. I don't remember where they come from. They may well have been Palestinians. And this particular family of Arabs, these kids were, I think, my age, they were annoying me.

I don't remember why, but I think they were slightly annoying, although I may be retconning that memory. to confess I was a sadistic little boy in some ways. There was a Polish kid my age in this hotel, I think a year older than me, we were friends but it was a very sadomasochistic type of friendship. Don't get me wrong, there was no, ok we were both I think 8 or 9 years old but he was this blonde Polish boy from like the scenes from Pink Panther with the Chinese mancer with and Inspector Clouseau, where they just randomly and senselessly ambush and fight each other. I think I was, I don't remember, I think I was eight, and it was like this was me and this Polish friend, just constant friendly, you can say friendly but it's not really friendly,

it was really sadomasochistic, constant fighting and wrestling, quite brutal at times and reciprocal. And most people who saw me thought I was a sensitive young boy but I was actually just very violent wrestling and fighting with him and doing other pranks in the city both when I was even smaller in my country of birth I was doing quite unpleasant pranks on people and training dogs to attack old people. I'm setting this up as a preamble so you know the kind of environment I was used to. I quite enjoyed our fighting but these Arab kids they were just so annoying and I guess they weren't used to this. So in the elevator once, I caught him alone and I really didn't like his face. So I start, there were two of them okay, but I punch him in the stomach, I'm provoked.

And then he turns around, he doesn't fight back, he really turns around to protect himself and I just keep punching him in the back, you see. I feel so constrained when I got later to America where I was told you get reported and suspended from school if you get into fights. And no one fought. At my school nobody fought in the United States and I didn't want also to disappoint my My mother, you know, because getting suspended from school, I thought it was a big deal and I hated it. I hated how utterly controlled everything in suburban United States was. Kids would tell on you if you played a prank, you know, hated every minute of it. But anyway, yes, I punched this Arab kid and then later that night at our shitty hotel

room I hear knocks on the door and my mother goes to answer this fat Arab bitch mother with the, it was not a burqa, but you know the head covering, right, and she's just yelling and she's yelling and ululating and she's showing her kids back, you know, that supposedly there were bruises and this kind of thing and that's always my memory of these people. Okay, now in that case, they weren't the aggressors, so maybe, or maybe they were and I'm editing out of my mind to make myself the aggressor, but this is what they always do, they want to scream and bluster and they attack. And then when they get roughed up a little, and it was far less than what I did with my Polish friend in Sado-masochism, okay, where it got really, you know, and their mother

comes and ululates to your mother about the injustice of it all. You know, I mean, you see the same thing on TV now. I had never seen anything, by the way, like this in the East block. It was considered unheard of to involve parents in fights and such. But you understand what I mean? Look up the casualty reports for Grozny in Chechen wars, Chechen war, first and second Chechen wars. And look up also Idlib in the Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war, and Raqqa and Aleppo, but Idlib. And look up, you see the same kind of loudmouth kvetching. You bomb hospital. It's always, oh, you bomb the hospital, you bomb a refugee center. It's always the same thing, you know, and I'm tired of hearing it. And then I'm also tired of hearing the Israeli kvetching as well, just cut everyone off.

You know, it's interesting there are Israelis who want America to disengage, to cut off all the funding and just to leave the area. And there are very few to know Palestinians who want this, which about shows you the configuration of things. But I thought as Trumpists we were supposed to be the non-interventionists and to use this opportunity maybe to argue for non-intervention and for migration restriction, and instead on the so-called dissident right at the moment, especially the big face faggot, face faggot Jason, the currency of a lot of people, weirdly enough, repeating the policy position of Bush Elder, the Bush administration from 1990, and the arguments and attitudes and even the precise rhetoric of the old DOD, the American Department of Defense, about the need to provide

stability for the region and restrain both sides, and so on. What happened to non-intervention? It's rather weird, no? Oh, hi, I'm a based populist Trumpist dissident. I'm a dissident rightist. Here is me sounding like Brent Scowcroft. General William Odom was my friend, and I'm very well acquainted with the language of all this, and I will talk it on next episode, maybe. You will not mind my personal detour in my experiences beating Arabs and such in hotel elevators. Other things that happened this past week was the 100th anniversary of the declaration of the secular Turkish Republic under Kemal Ataturk. And I wanted to congratulate my Kemalist friends in Turkey where I have a large leadership because they recognize certain common elements.

They share Kemalism, they share with my book I mean. And so much in discussing the longhouse, everyone uses this phrase now I guess to mean something exclusively with women but it is forgotten that it's also a criticism of traditional elderly religious society and as much as it is of feminism in fact and the rule of women in fact in many cases the two are very that's a whole other talk and I will I may write article about it and I can't do anything about the reduction of this idea of longhouse which I really got from Nietzsche also through other readings I did on the archaeology of the time not actually through gimbutas who weirdly enough I've attacked for years but people who don't read me think I'm talking about gimbutas because it vaguely sounds like that

to them and that's the only thing they know about prehistory that sounds kind of like what I'm talking about. It's just so retarded. You see, I don't want to talk to any pundits. Pundits are the dead. I am alive. I do not talk to the world of pundits. I talk to something else. I talk to future and I talk to my friends. But yes, I sent my greetings to Kemalist friends and I was surprised to learn, not shocked but surprised, that the same thing is going on in Turkey as is happening in Israel with Judaism and as is happening with Christianity in much of Europe and America. And I mean that religious authorities, in the case of Turkey's religious leading government Erdogan, the peasant demagogue Erdogan, I thought he was only using Islam to mobilize local Anatolian dumps.

The secular republic, Kemalism, was the creation of a Rumelian or white Turks from the European part of Turkey and from Istanbul. But again, they wanted a kind of manly, secular, scientific-facing republic of sorts. But again, the demographic changes, the ease of life that they created, the Anatolian Browns multiplied, and they're into the old-timey religion about, you know, you have the local imam tell you with how many fingers you can wipe your ass. I'm sorry to make it graphic, but these religions are deeply unpleasant, and Erdogan is their guy, you know. So I thought he only represented the racial revolt within Turkey alone, but no, apparently, it is what all Muslim, Mohammed first, say Mohammed is king. The politics, in other words, of the Ummah, the community of believers,

which is necessarily international, and it's used in Turkey for the same thing. It's being flooded by Arabs and African Muslims, And then there's the base ideology of political Islam, which again makes me wonder when you look at Israel and the lives of the rabbis, and you look at Europe and America and the lives of the priests and the pastors about the religions there, and that everywhere the religions of the Bible are used to mix and mingle peoples today and to import, let's say, other peoples who are not up to the part of modern civilization. These religions are used as vehicles for the dissolution of populations into a beige mass. And this seems to be the case everywhere, everywhere these religions are present, including, so, Baptiste was aware that South Korea

was importing, was having, importing immigrants, essentially, was having replacement migration, and he thought it was, oh, there's an American base there, and it's because of American influence. It very well could be. They are also, I think, the Baptist Church, very popular there. Arguments about Nietzsche's view of religion aside, about how Christianity changes over the centuries and the Middle Ages versus modernity, these considerations aside, but it seems for whatever reason, our age, this is the main thrust of all these religions when they're made politically active. Pope Thagat promoting migration into Europe and America. The Bible, a friend says this is not my thing, but he's accurate, I think, in saying that the Bible ends up acting as a funnel of Africa into Eurasia.

And whether it will be remembered as something else is up to the genuinely religious friends I have to ponder. It may have something to do with how these religions get filtered when you have a democratic mass, I don't know. But again, maybe that's for another time, where was I? I return now to schedule programming regarding Parmenides. But first, I will take short break. Yes, this was short segment. I have designed a way to cure an egg yolk. I don't necessarily recommend it. But you take high quality clean egg, you separate the yolk from the egg whites, and then you put in a kind of tray the egg yolks, and you sprinkle high quality flake salt on top of the egg yolk. And you leave them overnight in the refrigerator. Not like a lot of salt. You don't want to solidify or cover them.

But enough for a taste. and that it make a very kind of tasty snack. I like to put in spoon and just eat the best snack even. Be careful, please. I will be right back. I hope you enjoy this palate cleanser interlude segment. I will be right back. Egg time, priest of ice, maybe a philosopher of icy abstraction. Nietzsche compares him to man of ice as opposed to Heraclitus, man of fire. Forgive me, this is my belief that radio, primarily entertainment medium, and my purpose here is entertainment. Discussion or deep discussion of philosophical arguments not appropriate on a radio, my opinion. And for that I direct you to an essay I've been reading from Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Or otherwise in the case of Parmenides, Heidegger has a famous lecture on him too

that was apparently very influential on post-modernists who follow Heidegger. Although you know my opinion about this thinker and everything in Heidegger, you know, he's always, it feels like he's about to tell you something profound, but it never actually comes. And then where you can put into plain words what he's actually saying is not that profound in my opinion and I'd say the same for his post-modernist followers. And if I'm wrong and you are a Heideggerian, then fine, you should prove it. All great and true philosophies have artistic even propagandistic valets and proclaimers, and I never pretended to be more than a herald of Nietzsche, and there have been many writers, from Wagner to Tolstoy to Joseph Conrad, who

saw themselves as heralds of Schopenhauer, who sought to put into novels and action the ideas of Schopenhauer, in the case of Wagner and Tolstoy, at least at the end of their literary careers, very much so, and I hear Thomas Hardy is same, and DH Lawrence, at least inspired, but you know, go ahead and be like that for Heidegger. I don't know of any, which confers me in my suspicion that like Hegel, he's just a windbag. Otherwise, there would be artists, you know what I mean. But anyway, you can also check Wikipedia, and you can follow links to find yourself actual fragments of Anaximander and Parmenides, but I cannot on this episode, and I don't want to go through exposition or reasonings and arguments about their positions, because it would be tedious both to me and to listener.

Although I will read part of Parmenides' beautiful poem, the part in the beginning about his philosophical mission which survives, and it's a great testament to the singing voice of philosophy. She still wrote in verse. Parmenides was from Elia, a Greek colony in southern Italy. It was the home of the Phocaeans, who I wrote about them in an article for Men's World. I think the title of this article is The Great Step of the Sea. I will retweet it and repost it soon. They are a very impressive Greek people, again from the coast of Asia Minor, present-day Turkish coast, and they were the first Greeks to undertake long sea voyages, according to Herodotus, having designed a new type of ship. They founded colonies, trading depots, very far. Massilia or Marseille is one of their colonies.

They left no trace there, but they sailed beyond that, into the Atlantic, up the coast of Europe. I think they visited England, coast of France, and also down coast of Africa. The king of Tartessos loved them so much. This is in southwest Spain, Iberia also, and he saw that they were in danger from the Persian encroachment. So he tried to, he loved them so much, he tried to invite them to settle in Iberia. And when they refused, he gave them money for a big strong wall. But it was not to be, the Persian Empire was too strong and the Ionians not strong enough to resist walls or not. So instead of living under Persian sovereignty and they wanted to keep freedom, they politely tricked the Persian general, who was besieging their city, and at night they left in their ships. They snuck out.

After many wanderings around the Mediterranean, including aborted attempt to settle in Corsica, they settled in southern Italy. Elia was named, also called Velia, south of Naples, I think somewhat north of where the foot region of the peninsula begins. Like many of the Greek colonies in Greater Greece, Magna Graecia, which is Italy, Southern Italy and Sicily, these colonies became very rich, became important trade port and later they were, like many of the Greeks in that area, they were friendly to Rome. I think during Roman times, Elia was a kind of aristocratic vacation spot for Romans. I am sure, however, the leading families of Elia moved to Rome and mixed with the Romans at some later point. And that said, on this aside, it's interesting that philosophy seems often to be born in

rich commercial cities. Miletus was the Athens of its day. It was a big commercial, very prosperous Ionian city, again, coast of Asia Minor, and both Thales and Anaximander, the first and second philosophers, were from there. And then in Italy, again, many great Greek minds came from the rich and luxurious world of the Greeks in Italy. Sicily and Italy were like America for the Greeks, a kind of western across the sea, rich colonial extension of the Greek world. So you can find many examples. Gorgias, the orator, is from Leontini in Sicily. Pythagoras is from Samos off the coast of Asia Minor again, a Greek island, but he too He moved to Italy and many such things. And by the way, so did the playwright Aeschylus and also Simonides moved to Sicily, the poet,

and even Herodotus moved to Turi in Italy. And then Elea, this Phocaean settlement, the resettlement really of the entire city of the Phocaeans, it gave its name to whole school of thought, the Eleatics, which includes certainly Parmenides and his student Zeno, who you know was the famous paradoxes of Achilles and the tortoise and many such, which he designed to prove the truth of his master's teaching. I'll talk maybe in a moment, but I find this interesting and it's not that rich or commercial cities necessarily create philosophical life. In fact, I'm sure as such they don't and may even militate against it. You can find commercial people who have absolutely no taste, no talent for philosophy, and aren't...

You look at the Lebanese Maronites, they're a gifted commercial people, but life in a Maronite family, I am told, it's all pressure to succeed financially, either at direct financial commercial pursuits or at very highly paid professional jobs like doctor, lawyer, and so on. But while these people often become very wealthy, if you look at Lebanese in Central and South America, whether Maronite or in some cases Muslims, by the way, they're very capable, but they don't seem to put much importance on intellectual distinction for its own sake. And it's the same with Armenians and a few others, I would count Chinese in such group also. Commercial, capable, but ultimately sterile intellectually and artistically, much more

so than the Levantines, by the way, or the Armenians, who some do become artists. And that said, if you look at flourishings of philosophy, one of the frequent things does seem to be, it takes place in commercially successful cities with commercially successful peoples. If you look at the Scots, for example, giving rise to Scottish enlightenment and so on. The Scots are, according to Mark Twain, even more commercially astute than the Jews. Or in Greece, in places like Ionia, Miletus, Ephesus, and then Athens, and then Sicily and South Italy, it's actually places in the Greek world that were very commercial and rich, but philosophy was less so in places that were not like this. Even, maybe even the famous German taste for philosophy. Yes, Schopenhauer dedicated his main book

to his Hanseatic League father, who ran a commercial trading house. Which again, I don't want to make pronouncements on this matter of whether there is a relationship in Germany in general between commercial life and the flourishing of culture and philosophy. I mean, Weimar was surely a wealthy and impressive city, but was it so because it was especially commercial? I don't know, I'm just speculating here. But in the case of Schopenhauer, you don't need to speculate. He just openly says that it's because of his family's business acumen and success that he was able to lead the life of a philosopher and write his books, and he dedicated his main work to his father again. Certainly, it's not one-to-one correspondence,

as, yes, do I need to repeat, you have many commercial peoples with no philosophy and little culture. And conversely, I imagine you can have philosophy without commercial ferment, although a liberal in the old sense, a liberal and cosmopolitan atmosphere like Weimar, commercial or not, that is conducive to having men like Goethe around, you know. But I felt the need to go on this tangent because whatever the general rule may be for the Greeks in Italy, this was very much the case. The kind of culture, the kind of life that was typical of an Italian Greek. It was very conservative culture, very opulent, very luxury-oriented, trade-centered culture. The life of an aristo in this area would have been based on military training, athletics, hunting as the main pastime, partying in symposia

as the main pastime, probably enjoyment of numerous luxuries that Greeks from the mainland, especially let's say those who admire the asceticism, they would often attack Sicilian luxury and wealth saying that nothing good could grow there morally. That's obviously not true, but this is where the word Sybaritic comes from, right? The city Sybaris, a very wealthy colony on the very, you can think of the sole of the foot of the Italian peninsula founded very early in the 700s BC but also destroyed early in the late 500s BC. Greeks always looked down on direct commercial activity. If you're a gentleman you are not supposed to engage in it but that was true of economic activity in general especially physical labor. But commerce was certainly still undertaken even using modern capitalist

techniques and so on you put capital in the voyage and you got the return on it But it was often run, managed by women, by wives and slaves. And I agree with this, you can put up an investment but having to count pennies and run books and this kind of thing, you know. But then of course when you outsource it to someone else you can get taken advantage of. I don't know, this terrible movie with Matt Damon, The Last Duel, makes fun of this. Because the wife of the aristocrat, Matt Damon's wife, the wife of the knight, looks at the books and realizes just how money he was failing to collect to collect in the rent and so on. It's a disgusting scene in that movie where you are expected to spit on him, to say what an idiot British knight and look at his smart wife,

she's got a real head for business, you know, and this kind of thing. So you know, many such in Europe, nobles often left such affairs in the hands of Jews, but not just of Jews, also other middlemen, merchant minorities, because Sicilians, Florentines, others played a similar role throughout Europe of a kind of merchant middleman minority. The case of Florence and Venice is an interesting exception to what I said. Camille Paglia emphasizes this, that Venice, of course, was the most commercial republic and it didn't have philosophy, it had art, but it didn't have the kind of philosophical excitement and ferment you find in Florence. But Florence itself was run by a banking family, so I don't know. Anyway, look, this is the kind of opulent

aristocratic conservative world that Parmenides would have grown up in, I mean what I described earlier with the life of the typical Sicilian Greek aristocrat. Probably he was born quite soon after the foundation of Elia by the Phocaeans. But Parmenides, yes, like Heraclitus, he follows Anaximander in the main concern, which is this question of what it means to be generated, what it means to pass away, what is the meaning of being and becoming, coming to be and perishing or changing. And where Heraclitus famously said, there is no such thing as being, everything is in a state of flux and of becoming, you can't step into the same river twice and many such things. But Parmenides resolves this question in the other direction, that there is no such thing

as change, that all becoming is only apparent, it's a delusion of the senses. But in reality, there is only one immovable, perfect, self-sufficient being, spherical, unmovable again, unchangeable. Both could be called monists if you want to be pedantic, but they say there is a oneness to being or the source of being as Anaximander also said. In Parmenides, this oneness, the indivisibility, unmovable, unchangeable character of being, Such a paradoxical claim that conflicts the senses where actually in your day-to-day life you see only change and perishing and transformation. And Nietzsche says that no one can reconstruct exactly how Parmenides came to this insight. But he has a beautiful speculation I read now.

Perhaps it was the concept of an old man finally settled down, one before whose souls had appeared after all the mobility of his wanderings and after all his restless learning and looking, The highest and greatest thing of all, a vision of divine rest, of the permanence of all things within a pantheistic and archetypal peace." It's very nice, this image of imperturbable calm, high airy calm that you get from Parmenides, both in the content of his conclusions and style of his famous, it's the style also, the style of his poem he wrote in verse, which I will read for you now. I am reading Parmenides' famous philosophical poem. The steeds that bear me carried me as far as ever my heart desired, since they brought

me and set me on the renowned way of the goddess, who with her own hands conducts the man who knows through all things. On what way was I born along? For on it did the wise steeds carry me, drawing my car. And maidens showed the way, and the axle glowing in the socket. for it was urged round by the whirling wheels of the axe-end. Each gave forth a sound as of a pipe, when the daughters of the sun, hastening to convey me into the light, threw back the veils from off their faces and left the abode of the night. There are gates of the ways of night and day, fitted above with a lintel and below with a threshold of stone. They themselves, high in the air, are closed by mighty doors, and avenging justice keeps the keys that open them.

Her did the maidens entreat with gentle words and skillfully persuade to unfasten without demur the bolted bars from the gates. Then when the doors were thrown back, they disclosed a wide penning when their brazen hinges swung backwards, and in the sockets fastened with rivets and nails. Straight through them on the broad way did the maidens guide the horses in the car, and And the goddess greeted me kindly and took my right hand in hers and spake me these words, Welcome noble youth that come to my abosed on the car that bears you tended by immortal charioteers. It is no ill chance but justice and right that has sent you forth to travel on this way. Far indeed does it lie from the beaten track of men. Meat is it that you should learn all things as well as the unshaken heart of persuasive

truth as the opinions of mortals in which there is no true belief at all. Yet nonetheless shall you learn these things also, since you must judge approvedly of the things that seem to men as you go through all the things in your journey. Come now, I will tell you, and do you hearken to my saying and carry it away. The only two ways of search that can be thought of, the first, namely, that it is, and that it is impossible for anything not to be, is the way of conviction, for truth is its companion The other namely that it is not and that something must need not be that I tell you is a wholly untrustworthy path For you cannot know what is not that is impossible Nor utter it for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be

Yes, do you like this is a one of the most shocking parts actually of Parmenides? Earlier thought that Nietzsche indicates characterizes his early life and which I suppose you can deduce use from description of Parmenides in various other sources than what I just read for you. Diogenes Laertius, for example, the biographer of the Greek philosophers, has a short entry on Parmenides. But elsewhere too is the shocking claim that he was likely making before he came to this mature thought that I am talking now about the unchangeability of the being and the non-existence of nothingness. But his earlier thought, which is that nothingness is part of our world in the form of the negation of being, that is the negation of certain qualities like light, so for example dark

is the negation of light, lightness is being, darkness is nothingness, the masculine is being, the feminine, the negation of the masculine is nothingness, lightness as in weightlessness is being, its negation is heaviness and heaviness is nothingness, warm is being, cold is negation is nothingness. So you have this highly dualistic system in which the heavy, dark, cold, feminine and so forth aspects of this world are actually shockingly literally nothingness and their opposites are what is, what has been. And I remember reading somewhere that the Nuristani tribesmen in Afghanistan prior to their conversion to Islam some hundred years ago, they had a very similar dualistic system of thought where the high mountainous light filled areas of the world close to the gods

and their animals, these are places of purity. Whereas what is feminine and domesticated, part of village life, part of the valleys, part of the low areas of the world, what is darker and heavier, what is cooked as opposed to raw and so forth, they actually have somewhat different dualities than those I enumerated in Parmenides, but most seem to be the same and there are so many similarities in this world view that you have to wonder. I have special friend who I think will one day write masterpiece on just in such a direction. I hope he do this soon. It is his insight. But I think even if Parmenides did have such insights originally, let's say, that he perceived them from a primordial priestly Arian religion that he had some access to, maybe by being a hereditary priest of Apollo.

That still doesn't characterize the fullness of his thought, which takes place, I think, In a different tradition, the philosophical tradition of Steles and Anaximander and Heraclitus, his twin of fire, and this is not a religious tradition. And at some point later in his life, Parmenides likely had a realization of some annoyance to him, some embarrassment to him, which again you may remember from the end of what I just read to you, this poem now, that what is is and what is not is not. It's a kind of tautology, but one where you realize that no, nothingness literally doesn't exists, there is only being. And prior to this, he understood change and transformation in the phenomenal world as the interplay between being and nothingness through mechanism of eros and strife and satiety.

And Diogenes Lertius says he, for example, understood fire as the maker or fashioner or craftsman of the world, the demiurge, and earth as its material, and that man proceeded from the sun and many such opinions. But that at some point he seems to have gone in a very different direction and have concluded that nothingness by definition literally cannot exist. And he instead conceived that there is one unchangeable immovable whole. That the world is literally pure being and that because nothingness cannot exist then change also cannot exist. That motion for example cannot exist. And this is the interesting thing about Zeno's paradoxes, they were designed to prove this teaching of his master correct. For example, the famous one with Achilles and the tortoise, where the tortoise, much

slower than Achilles, gets a head start. But actually, if you think about it, Achilles can never catch up to it because he needs to transmit, yes, he needs to run halfway and then in the remaining interval he needs to pass the halfway point of that and so on to infinity which means that he could never catch up to it and this is Zeno's way of showing that infinity cannot exist because if it did that would mean nothingness can exist and that motion actually cannot in fact exist. Again if motion could exist then nothingness could exist, you can maybe see the connection between these claims intuitively, I'll just leave it at that because again a radio not proper medium for going through logical syllogisms, but for example, empty space between two things cannot exist, that would be nothing.

But to reach such a stunning conclusion from logical reasonings of language alone, Parmenides had to take an extra and very fateful step, which somewhat sunders history of philosophy in two, even before Plato and Socrates come along that is, so that you can maybe speak of philosophy, pre-Socratic philosophy, before and after Parmenides, because he again takes this extra fateful step that would forever change philosophy, including, yes, in Plato and all his followers, change it probably for the worst. She said that the senses lie and deceive, and that the knowledge you get from the senses isn't real. And he didn't just stop there, which would maybe result in a kind of thoroughgoing skepticism. But he took the extra step of saying the sense is lie and the only truth you have you will

only have from abstract concepts and from reasoning. And this one step really that he had to take because ultimately all his conclusions about being a nothingness are a result of the most bloodless abstract reasonings and logical conclusions about words. So he had to take this step, this one step had very maybe deleterious influence on future thinkers, maybe. You can see the same tendency, for example, in Euclid. Euclidean geometry is extremely abstract, bloodless, because it explicitly founded on the distrust of the senses and on the distrust of the imagining faculty in man. So Euclidean proofs are just strings of syllogisms, much like Parmenides' reasoning. But the Pythagorean theorem, this is a favorite example of mine because it's so simple.

The Pythagorean theorem has a simple visual proof that you can see drawn out or imagined in your mind if you build squares of the sides of the triangle. I don't want to get into it here, but you can easily see geometrically in your mind or on a piece of paper, someone can show you why it is true. Whereas if you just see the Euclidean proof of it, you can be certain that it's true, but you will never understand why it's true. You won't have an intuitive, really understanding vision of it. And that's because, again, Euclidean mathematics of this type, Euclidean geometry took place at a time when a Parmenidean-style distrust of the senses was most pronounced in that school of thought. And to be clear, Nietzsche doesn't think this had anything to do with, let's say, a moral rejection

of the physical world of the senses. He says, whatever you do, do not be guided by your dull eyes is now Parmenides' imperative, nor by your resounding ears, nor by your tongue, but test things with the power of your thinking alone. Thus, he accomplished the immensely significant first critique of man's apparatus of knowledge, a critique as yet inadequate, but doomed to bear dire consequences. By wrenching apart the senses and the capacity for abstraction, in other words, by splitting up mind as though it was composed of two quite separate capacities, he demolished intellect itself, encouraging man to indulge in that wholly erroneous distinction between spirit and body, which, especially since Plato, lies upon philosophy like a curse.

All sense-perception, says Parmenides, yield but illusions. And their main illusoriness lies in the pretense that the non-existent co-exists with the existent, that becoming too has being. All the manifold, colourful world known to experience, all the transformations of its qualities, all the orderliness of its ups and downs are cast aside mercilessly as mere semblance and illusion. Nothing may be learned from them. All effort spent upon this false, deceitful world which is futile and negligible is therefore wasted. When one makes as total judgment as does permenities about the whole of the world, one so ceases to be a scientist and an investigator of any of the world's parts. One's sympathy towards phenomena atrophies.

One even develops a hatred for phenomena including for oneself, a hatred for being unable to get rid of the everlasting deceitfulness of sensation. Henceforth truths shall live only in the palest most abstracted generalities, in the empty husks of the most indefinite terms, as though in a house of cobwebs. And besides such truths now sits our philosopher likewise as bloodless as his abstractions in the spun-out fabric of his formulas. A spider at least wants blood from its victims. The Parmenidean philosopher hates most of all the blood of its victims, the blood of the empirical reality which was sacrificed and shed by him. And this was a Greek who flourished approximately during the outbreak of the Ionian revolt.

In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an overabundant reality as though it were by the tricky scheming and imagination, and to flee not like into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop of the world creator feasting one's eyes on the unblemished, unbreakable archetypes, but to flee into the rigor mortis of the coldest, emptiest concept of all, the concept of being. Let us be exceedingly careful not to interpret such a remarkable event according to false analogies. The Parmenian escape was not the flight from the world taken by the Hindu philosophers. It was not evoked by a profound religious conviction as to the depravity, ephemerality, and accursedness of human existence. Its ultimate goal, peace in being, was not striven after as though it were the mystic

absorption into one all-sufficing ecstatic state of mind, which is the enigma and vexation of ordinary minds. Parmenides' thinking conveys nothing whatever of the dark intoxicating fragrance of Hindu wisdom which is not entirely absent from Pythagoras and Empedocles. No the strange thing about this philosophic feat at this period is just its lack of fragrance, of colour, soul, and form, its total lack of blood, religiosity, and ethical warmth. What astonishes us is the degree of schematism and abstraction in a Greek above the terrible energetic striving for certainty, in an epoch which otherwise thought mythically and whose imagination was highly mobile and fluid. Grant me, you gods, but one certainty runs Parmenides' prayer, and if it be but a log's

breath on which to lie, on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that comes to be, everything lush, colourful, blossoming, illusory, everything that charms and is alive. Take all these for yourselves, and grant me but the one and only poor and empty certainty." And I was reading now from Nietzsche, and yes, I think this right take on Parmenides, what his thought was, his thought, despite its focus on logic and abstraction this way, But I mean despite this, you can see how it has a certain seductive light field, a kind of ethereal, mystic, pantheistic effect on you in its content. Even though that's not its content, it's not its intention, but just the general feel of it. The focus on this one immovable being, all the changes you think you see isn't real and

so on. And this has inspired many, like Heidegger, to contemplate, to speculate on all kinds of – look, even my friend, I tell you, he believes there's some remote religious origin to these insights, is what I'm saying. And the book I read most recently on this, although I didn't read it carefully, but it's Peter Kingsley's In the Dark Places of Wisdom. This is a book written recently. Kingsley is an interesting character, he's a scholar, or was, could have been a mainstream scholar, has all the credentials of a good scholar and such, but he left academia and And he himself claims he was always a mystic, I think, or interested in mysticism. But the book I say here, The Dark Places of Wisdom, it's written in this very dramatic emotional personal style.

And he has positioned very opposite from Nietzsche in all this. He believes that the rationality, even the perversely abstract rationality of Parmenides' thought, is actually only one side of a deeper mystical, yes, a Western mystical tradition that were not really acquainted with anymore but a mystical tradition, nevertheless, that Plato and the Socratics, and in this judgment maybe he agrees a little bit with Nietzsche, but that Plato and the Socratics obscured for later generations this mystical tradition and sundered the rationalist and the logical abstract part of it from its true intention, which he claims in the case of Parmenides the intention of this thought was one of mystical

Union with the divine and of psychic spiritual healing and the evidence he brings it's hard for me to say Now to to judge this evidence, but there's I think not enough of it I read with most interest this Kingsley book a particular the chapters on how Parmenides was Yatro mantis literally that means a prophet doctor or a mantic healer Which is very possible that actually Parmenides was a kind of shamanic mystical healer, or that he came from such a family tradition. And of the connections between some of Parmenides' language and images to similar shamanic healers' language and images from as far as Central Asia, Peter Kingsley also very interesting on such connections. He has some reflections on the cult of Apollo from the area called Caria, this is the area around which Phocaea,

Elia's original location, the location of its inhabitants came from there, right? And so the practice there was of incubation in a chamber underground where you went and you lay completely still in darkness to receive divine visions and such. And he claims to see the same traditions passed on in Eliya where Parmenides was from and claims to see them in Parmenides' philosophy in his poem and so forth. It's all very poetically stated, this book. I again don't know how much real evidence he brings, but it's a compelling mystic image of this ice philosopher. I read also with great excitement Kingsley's interpretation of that preamble of Parmenides' poem that I read for you, where if you remember he talks about how the goddess, right, the goddess Parmenides mentions, who grabs his right hand.

He says that in what I read for you, Parmenides is actually going to the underworld, and the goddess he meets is Persephone, the queen of the dead. For this, I think he does have quite strong evidence. I much enjoyed his reading of that passage. If it's true that Parmenides, according to himself, gets his own philosophical mission from Persephone, I think this is very significant, but again, must think through the full meaning of this. It must be left for other times. Kingsley has, if you remember my show on Heraclitus, I think perhaps I mentioned also connection to Orphic imagery and certain rites of underworld, but again, such speculations of what they fully mean, I must leave for another time. But Kingsley's book has this smell about it, of mysticism and of encounters with the dead.

And in this regard of Persephone, Kingsley has an aside. I didn't know that most of the imagery about the Virgin Mary was borrowed from the Sicilian Italian cults of Persephone, that the holy maiden Persephone so venerated, especially in that area of the world, the queen of the dead, that her imagery was transferred to the cult of Mary. It's all very interesting. I can even say this though, it could all be true, everything he's saying, and yet I still think what I read for you from Nietzsche is more correct to understand Parmenides, and I'll tell you why Kingsley does extremely interesting considering Parmenides in terms of his location, the cultures of his time, his tradition, the religious traditions that

he may have been exposed to that led to these shocking views about the nature of reality, the unchangeability of being, the non-existence of becoming and of nothingness. But Parmenides was a highly unconventional man, like every other philosopher. what sets philosophers apart. And there's not a single mention in Peter Kingsley's book on Parmenides, again I read it quickly so I may be wrong, but there is no mention at all of Anaximander or Heraclitus. So I would ask Kingsley what about Parmenides' obvious conversation with such men, especially his predecessor Anaximander. Is all philosophy then a derivative of an Apollonian priestly tradition of some type, or is it possible that, because I could even think Parmenides himself could have been a

a priest of Apollo and even practiced very ancient forms of meditation. It's entirely possible, and yet still everything Nietzsche says about him could be true. In fact, I believe this, you know, that it's a kind of insult to men like Parmenides to consider them in relation only to mystical traditions and to religious rites and so on, which after all, whether they're true or not, are ultimately also learned from other men. No, but not in relation to the man that obviously in conversation with. Why don't you consider that side of it too, Mr. Kingsley, or to anyone else who likes to engage in such speculations about where this philosopher was actually conversant with the secret mystical tradition, or Isaac Newton was actually a deeply religious man, which he was,

and engaged in these deeply religious speculations, So, therefore, the part of his thought that survives to Ardei and which he really distinguished himself in, the scientific part must also be somehow coming out of that religious conviction. But is it not possible that the religious conviction is his past time and while it may have had some relationship with his other researches that they don't necessarily come out of that, but I think you do men like Parmenides, Heraclitus and Aximander, whatever their engagement may be, even if they come out of a priestly line themselves, whatever their engagements may be with a religious tradition, you are somewhat insulting them because I think who they really prize and who they really admire are their philosophical brothers who they

converse with, again across the desolate wastes of time as it is put. Why not consider them also in this conversation with each other too, which is not possible? For example, people take Rousseau and they say he was influenced by this and that minor character during his own lifetime and so on, but why not consider that Rousseau was much more in conversation with Plato than with his immediate contemporaries, or since we're on the subject of magic and magicians and sorcery and such, you know, Rousseau practiced magic tricks, he knew forms of divination, and then you can go down that path, you can try to find out where he learned the art of magic from and try to say that his philosophy is actually a form of the coming out of that school of magicians into the world and it's

a psychological operation and so on. I'm being a bit crude here with that word, but my point is why not consider such men and take them at their word that they're actually conversing with their philosophical brothers? But in any case, Kingsley is highly interesting information regardless of all this, although the chapters on Parmenides as yatromantis, in other words, as coming out of a tradition of shamanic mystic healers, there's not so much evidence on that and the shamanic ecstasy chapter as I would have liked. He has that there is one word or two shared with traditions from Tibet and Central Asia, but that's not enough in my opinion. But very nice nonetheless, and I hope to talk Peter Kingsley's interesting mystical books on future episode.

But for now I close episode with nice reflection from Nietzsche on what Greek philosophy actually was not. I am reading now. On the other hand, the Greeks knew precisely how to begin at the proper time and the lesson of how one must start out in philosophy they demonstrate more plainly than any other people. Not to wait until a period of affliction, as those who derive philosophy from personal moroseness imagine, but to begin in the midst of good fortune at the peak of mature manhood as a pursuit springing from the ardent joyousness of courageous and victorious maturity. At such a period of their culture the Greeks engaged in philosophy, and this teaches us not only what philosophy is and does, but also gives us information about the Greeks themselves.

For if they had been the sober and precocious technicians and the cheerful sensates that the learned Philistines of what they imagined they were, or if they had been floated solely in a self-indulgent fog, reverberating with heavy breathings and deep feelings, as the unscholarly fantasts among us like to assume, the wellspring of philosophy should have never seen the light of day in Greece. At most, it would have produced a rivulet, soon to lose itself in the sands or evaporate in a haze. It never could have become that broad, proud stream which we now know as Greek philosophy. And on that note, on what philosophy was not, on the fact that Greek genius goes well beyond optimistic, technical rationalism, or on the other hand, purely, let's say, heaving bosom

mysticism, that it is actually neither of these things. On that note, I leave you until next time. Very good. Until next time, BAM out.