(bright music) - Welcome, Michael.

Thanks for joining us on this warm Saturday.

- Happy to be here.

- Yeah, good, so I'd like to pick up on a topic of conversation that we've kind of started, but not really gone anywhere with.

And so originally this, our meeting today began in a question that I had about alternative lives that each one of us has a kind of alternative life or two that he would've led if he hadn't become a tutor.

Mine was, I wanted to be David Attenborough, right?

That was my other career.

But I was really provoked and fascinated by hearing from you that you almost were a chef.

And to hear that the gastronomic life was your alternate life, provoked my thinking about how you thought about the relationship between, say, the good life and food, or the life of philosophy even, and food.

And so thinking about that, I then asked you what we should, what you wanted to start with in this conversation.

And you pointed to Plato's lesser known dialogue, "The Charmides."

C-H-A-R-M-I-D-E-S, for those who haven't read it.

So "The Charmides" is not a dialogue that many people know.

Could you say something about what it is, what it's about?

- Well, most generally, I want to think about how to live the best life possible for a human being.

And Socrates for Plato seems to present that model.

And two virtues, which may look at first at odds with one another, are moderation and courage.

If you think about things too much on the battlefield, you'll, you probably won't make it off the battlefield.

And so that there might be some tension between a kind of pausing and thinking things through and the virtue of courage.

With Socrates, I think they're perfectly blended.

And that has to do with knowledge of ignorance.

There's a courage to keep on pursuing the truth, even though you know that you're very limited, and you'll never quite get there.

So this particular dialogue is about moderation or sophrosyne.

And it's strange, it doesn't talk much about what we normally understand as moderation, which means limitations on food, drink, and sex.

It's about, it's ultimately about self-knowledge.

But issues of moderation do come up in this dialogue, not on the level of the argument, but on the level of the action.

For example, Socrates gets very aroused when he sees a young boy, and he's taken by surprise.

So he's overcome in a way that makes it look like he has no moderation.

But that moment somehow leads him to a pursuit of what it means to live a moderate life.

And the dialogue is fascinating for me in that way.

- Hmm, hmm, now, this word "moderation" translates the Greek word "sophrosyne."

- Which, you know, so to be modest is to be sophron.

And sophrosyne really comes from, well, it means something like safe or preserve, preserving mind.

So it's a very hard word to translate.

- Yeah.

- And so, but it's about somehow, ultimately it's about how to preserve the mind in such a way that you are always saying goodbye somehow to your private self, the opinions.

So somehow you have to disregard the self in order to somehow preserve the mind at the same time.

It's a strange and difficult journey in this dialogue to figure out what that means.

Letting go of who you are in order to be able to gain some sort of self knowledge, which is a very difficult thing.

At the core, there may be no self.

This comes up in the dialogue.

We might be completely derivative.

Everything about us might be about our parents and our society.

So when we keep asking questions about it, and we shed that, those appearances aside, we wonder what if anything is left.

And I think this dialogue is attempting to preserve or discover what is there at the core, even though we might not be able to ever fully articulate it.

- Mhm, mhm.

So that word "sophrosyne" that part of that word is "phragm."

- Mine.

- Yeah, mine.

But phragm is also like the, literally the diaphragm.

- Right.

- Part, you know, so the ancient Greeks didn't locate the mind in the brain.

- Right.

- But somewhere here.

So it's more of, it's as much an affective center as it is a cognitive center, as I understand it.

- That's right.

- Yeah.

- And I think that's important in Plato because I don't think Plato, as many people do read Plato, there's a distinction between mind and body.

I think for Plato, the body is, the body is a thinking thing.

We think with our senses.

We think with our passions.

It's not something that's purely cognitive.

Touch has, and there's a great deal of talk about touch.

Touch has a cognitive aspect to it, which, so it's about the whole body and not something.

- Yeah, yeah.

Like when we don't touch a flame, for example, that is, that's also the phragm.

You don't think about it.

- Right - Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating word and one that we don't consider that much, right?

'Cause I'm thinking of the richness of this word.

Well, we see it in Sophocles, right?

In the tragedians, sophrosyne is one of the prime virtues, and it's posed against hubris, right?

And hubris is not, is not pride as is often translated in modern text.

You know, the man is hubristic and so, and so he falls, but hubris is excess, now, as you say.

- Right.

- You know, letting yourself go wild.

- Right, and that's Socrates.

- Yeah.

- I mean, he's somehow moderate while being hubristic at the same time.

And he is always challenging and over, trying to overthrow something that he has been somehow pinned down to.

So it's a kind of courage that looks like hubris.

It's how, yeah.

What, is there a good translation of "hubris?"

Something like when you're hubristic you're being a mensch, maybe.

- Being a mensch, yeah.

It's when you go for it, right?

When you let loose.

- Right, yeah.

- So, I know in Homer, hubris is used for like, when a mule goes crazy and starts kicking or when a river overflows, then it's hubrisian, right?

And so when a hero kind of bursts out of convention and kills everyone, that's hubris.

- Right, so how do you put that together with the kind of moderation one needs?

An awareness of just how limited you are?

How, what's the balance between those two?

That's a difficult question, and I think in all of Plato in his examination of Socrates, but I think you're right.

It's there in Homer as well.

And in the plays, in the tragedies.

- Yeah, I mean, I really like the way you described sophrosyne as being to do with preserving your, preserving your mind, right?

It's like not losing your mind.

- Right.

- As you were.

It's a much better way of looking at it than the say, moderation, or sometimes it's translated "restraint," right?

Where it becomes a negative virtue, right?

- Right.

- Yeah.

So it's not, you know, as a negative virtue, it's unsexy.

- Right.

- Right.

- So, I mean, that's the more standard way that people talk about it.

You have to, you have these desires, and they're, they could be bad, and you want to resist them as much as possible.

Somehow with Socrates, it's intelligent mind at work.

It's a whole, it's not simply the intellect against one's desires.

It's desiring intellect.

And somehow your thinking is in accord with the right kinds of desires, which make possible the very best life a human being can live.

- Mhm.

- So it's not being at war with oneself in the way that you have to fight off your urges for sex or for food, or for drink.

- Right, right.

It's having a balanced temperament?

- Something, something like that.

And it's not clear how you get there if you're not already.

- Yeah, right.

- You know, I mean, perhaps it's already established in your nature and it's something you can develop, but not everyone can attain that sort of balance.

- Yeah, yeah.

So some people might be just lucky.

- Some people.

- And have moderation.

But I think the way you described it, it makes it in a way, makes it beyond luck, right?

You know, so if it's moderation.

- Sure.

- Then some people are luckily, you know, are lucky in being moderate by temperament.

But if it's more than moderation, if it's something like keeping your wits about you, or one might say something of mindfulness.

- Right.

- Or being aware, right?

- It's, I mean, ultimately in this dialogue, it's about self-knowledge.

And for Socrates, that means awareness of what you don't know, knowledge of ignorance.

So you have to somehow always be challenging what you think you know because you can never.

- That makes sense.

- Fully know it because what that particular knowledge is about is a part of a greater whole.

And we can never, according to Socrates, have knowledge of that whole, and therefore we can't have accurate knowledge about the parts.

So we're severely limited in what we can understand about the world and about ourselves, and how do you live your life in such a way that doesn't, when you're aware of that, that doesn't bring you down?

What's the point?

I can never know anything.

There's a way in which Socrates is in full of enthusiasm for life.

And I think even on his dying day, he knows that he cannot philosophize any longer.

He cannot be in a body any longer.

And he's 70 when he's being put to death, and he's lived a good life, and I think he knows that it's not gonna get any better.

It's probably just gonna get worse.

So he's fully ready to face death, but he's still, there's a lingering awareness that this is the best thing possible to be having these conversations with my friends, and I won't get to do it any longer.

- Mhm.

So it's a sort of humility, a kind of acceptance of the scale of things, acceptance of where you belong in the scale of things.

- Right, right, yeah.

Yeah, so it's, as a kind of humility, it's a strange virtue.

Once you speak, once you claim to have that virtue, it doesn't sound like you're being humble any longer.

So it's a peculiar sort of virtue.

What happens when you begin to present yourself as someone who is humble?

There's something unspeakable in a way about this virtue which this dialogue tries to get at, I think.

- Mhm, mhm.

That's very interesting.

I found myself thinking a lot recently about the four classical virtues, justice, wisdom.

- Courage.

- Courage, and then sophrosyne.

- Right.

- And again, when you, if one translator is moderation, it's kind of the less sexy than the other three.

And but what you're saying now helps me to make more sense of it in a way.

It's somebody, it's the virtue of somebody who has all their wits about them.

- Right, but we can never have all of our wits.

- We can't yeah, and knows that.

- And the body is, it keeps presenting itself here in blushes, in sexual arousal, right?

Showing you that there, you can never fully have your, there's always going to be surprises.

And in fact, it's those surprises, those accidents, that make learning possible.

So with and without those accidents, there's not real thinking possible.

- Right, right.

- It has to be spontaneous.

And there's something funny about the dialogue.

It's so tightly organized.

How do you, you know, every step of the way is in complete control by Plato.

How do you, how is it possible for Plato?

And I think he does it, and that's part of his brilliance to bring about spontaneity in such a tightly constructed work.

And I think he's able to do that by surprising us with our own prejudices and assumptions that we can then think about on our own.

- Yeah, yeah, so you're saying that part of the humility of sophrosyne is that you don't know yourself?

- Yes.

- Yeah, mhm.

Yeah, yeah.

And the person who thinks he does had better watch out.

- That's right.

- Right?

- That's the most dangerous thing, to think that you know who you are is going to cut you off from being able to understand anything of importance it seems.

- Yeah.

- And so it's really is a, somehow you have to overcome what you think is true about yourself.

Challenge it always.

Some of it may be right, but a lot of it could be quite wrong.

- Mhm, so this is one reason why Socrates keeps bringing his interlocutors to a dead end kind of in their thinking right?

So that they keep crashing down.

- Right, now, it's interesting in this dialogue that he fails in some way.

The other two main characters are, it's Critias and Charmides.

Critias turns out to be one of the 30 tyrants.

Charmides is a blood thirsty tyrant at that time as well.

So these two interlocutors who want to, who seem to take on Socratic philosophy, Critias is a follower of Socrates, but he understands something wrong about, completely wrong about what Socrates is doing.

He sees it as a project of control and power.

So it's finally knowledge of knowledge.

It's this knowledge that stands outside of itself.

And so it sounds as though Plato is suggesting that Socrates is not altogether innocent of the charges of corrupting the young.

He's doing so right here.

It's their desire to understand him, but they understand him incorrectly that leads them to live a life of the tyrant.

- Mhm.

- Completely immoderate, right?

- Right, right.

- The opposite of moderation is something like tyrannical desire.

- Right, to do whatever you want, yeah.

Can you remind me about the 30 tyrants?

Like who were they and?

- Well, they were actually, they were, so after Sparta defeated Athens, the 30 tyrants were sort of puppets of the Spartan government.

And they used their power to get rid of enemies and to benefit themselves in horrible ways that left lots of people dead and poor and homeless.

- Mhm.

Okay, that's helpful.

So just to circle back then to the question of sophrosyne and the other virtues.

Right, so it seems that those four primary virtues, what the Christians call the four pagan virtues, were the classical virtues, justice, wisdom, courage, and sophrosyne, it seems to make sense that anyone we admire has got to have those.

- Yes.

- Right.

- And it's hard to tell them apart in Socrates.

I think finally what Plato shows us is courage properly understood is philosophy.

Moderation properly understood is philosophy.

And so we have this sort of comprehensive and abstract sense of what these virtues are.

But when they're precisely understood, they're only found in certain human beings that we aspire to live up to in some way.

But almost all of us will never be able to.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So let's circle back about sophrosyne.

How does that relate to a good life for you as an embodied being with work, who eats?

Yeah, with pleasures.

- That's a tough, I want to live the good life, and I love living this life.

I love the life I have, but it's very, it's very busy.

I have a family, I have two young boys.

I have friends, I'd like to eat and drink with friends.

Somehow, so I want it all, which sounds maybe tyrannical.

- Mhm.

- And I can't have it all.

So I have to figure out ways to create that sort of balance in my life where I can enjoy all of those things at the same time without diminishing too much what I'm able to compartmentalize.

But a great, a big part of my life is involved in food and drink.

I love, I had a colleague who across the seminar table once said that she doesn't understand people who will spend hundreds of dollars on a good meal with a friend.

She'd rather buy a pair of these beautiful shoes and, you know, you're just wasting your money on.

But for me, sitting in a restaurant or having a meal that I've cooked with a friend is probably the most wonderful experience I think you can have.

And I'm ready to spend hundreds.

So I'm, I can be quite immoderate actually when it comes to the kinds of food that I eat and the places that I go to dine.

But for me, it's one of the most important things in my life.

And so I'm not sure how moderate I am about it, but maybe that's not the kind of thing one should be moderate about.

- Friendship, you mean, not food?

- Friendship and sharing food with a friend and exploring different kinds of foods with that friend.

It's finally, it's all about wanting to understand what's outside of us or what is other than us.

And so we, a good friend of mine will go to a nice restaurant and try to explore foods that we've never had before because we wanna understand the world.

And at the same time, we're talking about these great books.

And it doesn't get much better than that, I think.

- Yeah, yeah.

I remember once a friend of mine subscribed to the magazine, "Bon Appetit" for me and.

- I subscribe to that too.

- You subscribe?

- When I was a kid.

- Okay yeah, and you remember there was, there's one section of it that was an interview with, usually with some celebrity chef, and one, actually it was a celebrity actor or celebrity thing, yeah.

And they would ask the question, things like, what was your most memorable meal, right?

And everyone would say, well, it was at, you know, Maxim's in Paris, or you know, some other famous restaurant and Chef X did the cooking, and we had this and this and this and this, and it was completed with this wine.

And it was all like boring to me right?

And until one day I read this thing, this interview with a 90 year old French perfumer.

And the interview took place in his chateau, and they asked him what was the most memorable meal of his life.

And so you expected something like Maxim's, but he said, well, it was after World War I.

And fruit was very hard to come by in those days, and my mother made a strawberry tarte for me.

- Mhm.

- Yeah, and that was where the, and the kind of sophrosyne where the elements were balanced, right?

It was not only the food.

- Right, and I worry about that with me and with our culture.

It's all available to us.

We don't really question it that much.

And we don't appreciate how much work and how fortunate we are to be able to eat the kinds of things that are readily available to us.

And sometimes, I wonder that even for myself, there's gonna be one day when I feel like I've tasted everything.

- Mhm.

- There's not much more.

It's all so available that you can, you don't have to travel the world anymore to get some of these exquisite cuisines.

But then I have the books, and they're, they will always be exotic to me, the books that we read here and.

- Yeah.

- I'll always appreciate how fortunate I am to be able to spend my life talking about these books with other people.

- Mhm.

- Yeah, but that's a poignant story about the tarte.

- Yeah, it's so moving to me.

Yeah, yeah, so this, it seems that, like professionally we live a very immoderate life, right?

The pursuit of truth, the pursuit of wisdom, the pursuit of beauty.

There is no mean to it, right?

You want more.

- Yes, you always want more.

- You always want more, and it's a good thing right?

You can't have a moderate pursuit of truth.

- That's right.

- Right?

And so I wonder if like, our pursuit of pleasure or our pursuit of refined pleasure, especially in food, also is immoderate in that the only thing, the only limit that's built into it is not feeling sick after you've eaten too much right?

You want more.

I mean, there's no point at which you'll say, I've had enough good food.

I've had more than my fair share of good food in life.

I don't need anymore right?

- Your health though is right?

- Yeah.

- I mean, that's, we're limited by, so I have found that I've had to be very moderate with what I eat.

The older I get, even exercise can't combat the inevitable process of aging.

- Mhm.

- And you, it's not just about being sick.

It's about wanting to remain here and appreciate and be able to appreciate all the things outside of food that you have, such as friends and family.

I'm not sure if I'm.

- Yeah, no, I mean, it is, right.

I mean, I'm wondering if it's, if that, what you're describing sounds like prudence in the service of immoderation, you know, so it's, which is different from sophrosyne.

- That's right.

So it makes me wonder whether, so in this dialogue, again, he doesn't talk about limits on food, sex, that's not really the issue.

Maybe real moderation is not to be found in, maybe it's just a kind of vulgar moderation.

- Right, mhm.

- That's used as a means to have more.

- Have as much as possible.

Yeah, yeah.

I find as it's been about 20 years since I've eaten so much that I felt bad, and when I, but when I was young, I'd do it a lot.

Right, and so at some point I decided I don't like this feeling.

And so then I've been trained to know when, if I go past this point, it's going to be bad.

- Yeah.

- And so then I stop.

But I wonder what is that?

Is that, that's a kind of habituation through repeatedly encountering one's limits, right?

But it's not the kind of balanced, harmonious character that is sophrosyne, right?

- Right, and I think, you know, for me, again, that makes it clear that what we're talking about is a way of life.

- Yeah.

- And it's about thinking and self knowledge.

- Right.

- And these other things are sort of, they can be shadows of that, but there's a way in which there's a permanent gap because it's so, it's the eating, it's about a fear of consequences.

That's something that you've experienced over and over again.

It's not really for the right reasons.

It's not for rational reasons.

It's fear, right?

- Yeah, right, right.

- Right.

(piano music) (upbeat chime)