Today I speak with Earl Fontainelle of the Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast (SHWEP). 

I don’t understand Plato. Partly this is because he never writes in his own voice and partly it’s because I can’t even always tell when Socrates is joking or even what he’s talking about. The divided line? The Myth of Er? The tyrant being exactly 729 times less happy than the philosopher? These are all weird things in the Republic that are still mysterious to me. 

Earl suggests that perhaps the reason Plato is so difficult to understand is because he was writing esoterically. Perhaps the dialogues contain secret messages directed to an initiated few and the weird passages I complain about actually contain wisdom of a higher order. Perhaps. 

In this long and wide-ranging conversation, we talk about why so many readers of Plato believed he wrote esoterically, the secret meanings he may have been hiding, and a lot of the mysterious Plato math that I complained about in the Republic series. 

References:  

SHWEP episode on the Esoteric Plato

SHWEP episode with Maya Alapin on mathematical structures in Plato’s republic

Wiki on the divided line with diagram

Maya Alapin The Philosophical Implications of Interpreting Plato through Musical Analysis

James Adam The Nuptial Number of Plato 

Robert Brumbaugh Plato's mathematical imagination; the mathematical passages in the dialogues and their interpretation

Francis Macdonald Cornford (trans.) The Republic of Plato

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