The Pre-Socratics

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek.

Thank you for bearing with our abnormal release schedule that facilitated a vacation for David and me to Switzerland that we’ve been looking forward to for seven years. We finally got to go, so thank you for being patient with us. We’ve taken a little recording hiatus and we’re coming back strong with the presocratics, to be specific Heraclitus and Parmenides, who you may have heard of.

Heraclitus would be famous for the saying “You can’t step in the same river twice,” which was co-opted by Disney’s Pocahontas, which is still one of the best illustrations of the platonic chaos/order dialectic that has ever been illustrated. I would not let my daughter watch Pocahontas until she’s a fair bit older.

I’ve never watched Pocahontas.

I don’t recommend it.

It has very catchy music, but is unfortunately very…

It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen and I don’t think it’s going to poison any child’s mind. It’s just that once you’ve read a little bit of Plato it’s like, “Oh, I see what you’re doing here. That was neat.” So let’s move on from Pocahontas.

Moving on, we have been looking at the presocratics, who were by and large Milesian and Ionian. That is they came from what we call Asia Minor or Turkey today. These were gentlemen in the sense that they didn’t have to work a whole lot. They could sit around and think stuff and write stuff and go exploring and wandering, and when they were all done they came back with these profound statements.

Thales said, “All is water,” and Anaximenes said, “All is air,” and Anaximander said, “All is…” and he uses a word ‘apeiron,’ which means boundless, infinite, unlimited…whatever those undefined terms mean. Then Heraclitus says, “All is fire.”

As we saw last time, a number of modern historians, having praised these gentlemen to the skies, then turn around and point out some things that are fairly obvious like none of this is science. There’s no way empirical investigation gets you to “all is…” anything.

Things don’t act the same as the others.

“And you haven’t been anywhere. In fact, you’ve hardly been past Egypt, or Babylon if you’re lucky. You ask a lot of questions but you don’t pursue it in anything that we today would consider a scientific manner. And most of your conclusions were wrong. And in terms of practical stuff you handed down to us, first of all a lot of your empirical observations you kind of borrowed from the Chaldeans and Egyptians,” which in Thales’ case allowed him to cash in on some grain sales because he could predict certain astronomical things that were happening.

None of this got passed on in any useful form to anybody, so in terms of giving us something simple like a steel plow or a windmill or electricity, these guys failed across the board.

Is that the measure of success?

If that’s what you’re looking for. They did not produce technology. They were guessing wildly without any kind of empirical evidence to back up their guesses.

The thing that historians value them for was that they turned to reason, except that the modern historians are thinking post-enlightenment, man’s reason as some kind of autonomous mathematical machine computer that analyzes data in a neutral fashion and spits out analysis.

The presocratics still lived in a religious world, self-consciously religious, where reason was simply one aspect of divinity. To follow your reason was to enjoy, in very simple words, being God. These men dismissed Homer’s and Hesiod’s Olympian deities as not worthy of being worshiped, but they didn’t eliminate the idea of multiple gods.

We’re going to talk briefly about Xenophon, the closest that the Ionians ever came to monotheism. He talked about a great god, the greatest god, a really powerful god who can move the world by his own thoughts, so he is unmovable himself. He doesn’t need to move because, wow, what Zeus could do with a nod of the head he does just by thinking, and he’s infinitely good apparently.

The problem with Xenophon’s god is that he’s located someplace. He’s not omnipresent. He’s not immanent in the sense of being everywhere. He’s immanent in a place, in that he lives someplace, apparently around the world, literally.

In a sphere.

Yes. Imagine going out from the earth in all directions and you would run into this god. He just stays there and governs things. His existence though does not mean that there are not other lesser deities or other deities of some sort, so Xenophon does not try to eliminate other deities. He just has one really great god who’s much greater than anything Homer ever had, and a lot more moral.

How does he exercise this morality?

It’s kind of vague. Again we’re dealing largely with fragments. We have a little bit from Xenophon. One of the last lines in his fragments allows to, “All this stuff I’ve talked about is so far beyond us, and this god is so far beyond us. I don’t even know whether or not we’re right or can understand anything.”

All right, then.

What was the purpose of reading all the stuff that you wrote?

That’s the funny thing. So many ancient books and resources, there’s just not a lot to work with once you get down to the actual manuscripts, if there are manuscripts. They might just be scraps.

Yes. Most of what we have for the presocratics are in fact that, or more often they’re quotes by people who lived two or three or four generations later. They’re quotes by Aristotle or by someone who’s analyzing Aristotle yet more generations later. And judging the scraps that we do have against what Aristotle says, you’re not always sure that Aristotle was paying attention. And yet for a few centuries now the historians have been telling us these were the guys. They got it. This is the beginning of modern science. This is the beginning of rationalism, of naturalism.

Now naturalism, when anyone after the enlightenment – or at least after the death of romanticism, if it ever died – says naturalism we’re thinking of atoms in motion. If they say naturalism or have a concept similar, they would mean the divine essence that fills the universe.

It’s closer to animism than empiricism.

Yeah, or pantheism. It’s not the same thing at all, and to try to read our worldview into theirs is silly and not worthy of scholars, except that these modern scholars really are blinded. They have been fed the same lies that they now promulgate.

I don’t know that they do so deliberately, but these scholars are supposed to be intelligent. They should be able to spot a presupposition when they see one and say, “Wait. We’re making some huge assumptions about how they thought and what they meant. Why don’t we go back and see from their point of view what they actually meant.”

Very few have done that. I think some of the more recent writers are kind of leaning that way, of actually letting the text speak more for themselves.

Part of the problem is the writers of history books are not necessarily specialists in any particular area, let alone this one, so they’re repeating what they’ve been told.

This is most certainly true.

This brings us to the two men you mentioned earlier, Heraclitus and Parmenides. We have a few more scraps and poems from them. With Heraclitus it’s mostly proverbs and obscure sayings. What was the one that one of you mentioned?

“You can’t step in the same river twice.”

“Everything always changes. All is flux. All is change.” In order to prove this he simply pointed to the world around him. “Look, the river that is here today is not the river that was here yesterday. The waters keep passing by. New waters come, and the very shape and course of the river over time changes. It can shift its banks. You can point at any phenomena in the natural order and it’s not what it was.” To him this was self-evident proof.

Now, leaving that empirical observation he then proceeds to go beyond empirical observation into pure speculation and says that all is fire, sentient fire, living fire, being kindled and unkindled, going in and out. The sentience he gave the word ‘logos’ to.

Now we know logos from the New Testament, and that has led some liberal theologians to say, “See, John was just checking out the logos theology that began with Heraclitus and moves on through the Stoics and such. Nothing new here. It’s just John harping on thinly-veiled Greek philosophy.”

Except that he changes the definition of the word by using it.

Completely changing it, completely redefining it, just enough of a nod that there’s a reason he uses logos, which means a word, an ordering principle, or wisdom would be the Hebrew word.

And he certainly would have known about the Stoics and their philosophy. He’s not speaking into a vacuum or void.

No. So this is what we have with Heraclitus. He said ‘living fire.’ Probably the closest thing that our generation or the one just after us would have would be the Force in Star Wars, an energy field generated by all living creatures. It both controls and can be controlled – that. That’s all it is.

He said ‘fire’ because that’s the word he had. We would say energy that is governed by some kind of logical rational principle or structure or something that shapes reality. All we can do is try to conform to it, and maybe therein lies some kind of happiness. He didn’t offer a whole lot more than that.

He's been used by Dr. Cornelius Van Til as the premiere example of someone who favors the many, the particulars – chaos, diversity, change – over against unity, order, oneness. For that we now turn to Parmenides.

This is easy to remember because his name sounds more like permanent.

There you go. He said that all is one. One what? It doesn’t exactly say. Just one. All reality is real. I love his argument because as you listen to it you stop and say, “Wait, what?” because it almost makes sense. His first line is this: “What is, is.”

We can agree about that.

“What isn’t, isn’t.”

We can also agree about that.

Be careful. Watch for the trap. “Being exists. Non-being does not exist.”

There’s no such thing as non-being, by definition. It’s that which isn’t there. So there is no place where you will encounter non-being. You will not walk into a room and say, “Wow, there is literally nothing here,” because nothing doesn’t exist. There’s something there – air, space, whatever you want to call it. There’s something in this room. There’s never, strictly speaking, any kind of emptiness, any kind of void.

To put it in different language, a language more familiar to the Greek philosophers, the void does not exist. Even as late as one of the textbooks we use in our school – I think it’s called Matter in Motion – it speaks of matter in the void, atoms moving through space. What Parmenides is saying is there’s no space, there’s no void, there’s no emptiness. Wherever there is something, there is some thing, not nothing.

Now here it gets cute. Because of this there are no empty spaces into which anything can move, which means nothing moves. Just forget what your eyes tell you. Nothing moves. Because all change depends upon motion, nothing changes. Again your senses may tell you otherwise. Your senses are lying to you. That’s all illusion. Matter, reality, being is and that’s it. It can’t be divided from itself by non-being because non-being doesn’t exist. You can’t divide being with being because that would be more being.

As far as I can tell he doesn’t talk about the nature of being – that is, does it come in different flavors and colors and shapes and textures or, as we would say, elements on the periodic table – but it doesn’t matter a whole lot because we’re back to “and there is no emptiness between it that counts for anything” so it’s still stuck and it still doesn’t move and things still don’t change, and thus all is one – total oneness, unity, the universe. The universal is concrete, it’s the universe, and the universe is just stuck in mud as it were and not going anywhere. But in order to believe this we have to get rid of all of our preconceptions about how our senses work and get rid of any trust in empirical evidence or central evidence.

I assume that Parmenides would look both ways before he crossed the street to avoid being hit by a chariot or something akin to it moving at high speeds, despite his assertion that things don’t move.

Well, this seems to be pretty typical of all philosophers, that they assert something with great vehemence and nonetheless practically in their day to day lives, like crossing the street, don’t pay attention to it a whole lot. Suddenly they are concerned.

I would guess Parmenides did look both ways before crossing the street, whether he justified it as, “The illusion is great, but then me turning my head is also part of the illusion so no big deal there.” It’s all a loose area.

What do Hindus do with that when they see a car bearing down on them? Do they look both ways? Do they get out of the way or do they just stand there and say, “It is real. I and the car are one.”

“Well, you’re about to be.” I don’t know.

One other thing. If you study calculus or precalculus you’re going to run into one of Parmenides disciples, a man named Zeno. He has another great way of showing that change and motion are illusory. It’s called – and I hope I get this right; someone will tell me if I don’t – Achilles and I believe it’s the hare.

I thought it was the tortoise. I think I always heard the tortoise.

All right, we’ll go with the tortoise. I always get confused and I forgot to look. It amounts to this. These two are going to have a race. Of course, Achilles is the fleet-footed of the Iliad, and the tortoise is slow, but we’re going to give the tortoise a head start and that’s crucial here.

The tortoise is going to start out, and after he’s gotten far enough – whatever it is, it doesn’t really matter – Achilles will go after him, but here’s the thing. As Achilles reaches where the tortoise was, the tortoise has moved on. And as Achilles continues and he gets to the next place where the tortoise was, the tortoise has moved on, and this continues indefinitely. Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise because whenever he gets to where the tortoise was, the tortoise has moved on.

We look at this say, “But that’s ridiculous” and he says, “Exactly. Your senses tell you so; therefore, obviously the problem, since it can’t be with my rational argument, must be with your eyes. You’re imagining things and you’ve convinced yourself they’re real, when in fact trusting your eyes leads to contradictions. Achilles can never catch the tortoise.”

The reason it shows up in precalculus and calculus is that this is a limit problem. As Achilles gets closer and closer, the amount of distance he is traveling becomes smaller and smaller until it becomes infinitesimally small.

Compare the problem of the frog jumping halfway to the pond, then halfway again, then halfway again and halfway again. There comes a point where that next halfway, he’s going to fall in the pond because he’s larger than infinitesimally small and he will in fact cross that limit, and there’s a question of time.

If you give the tortoise a long enough lead it may take Achilles quite a while to catch up to where he was the first time, less the second time, then less still, and eventually it’s going to be microseconds and nanoseconds that we’re talking about. Time is vanishingly slow. Distance is vanishingly slow.

If you’ve done precalculus or calculus you know about limits and you know there comes a point where we pass a limit and reality picks up again and the clock starts ticking, but mathematically until Newton came along about 1200 years later there was no mathematical or scientific response to Zero’s paradox. People just said pretty much what the average teenager would say, “That’s stupid,” and then went on with it.

Which was sufficiently obvious.

Because it was sufficiently obvious. Are you going to trust your eyes or not?

This is all background for the three great Greek philosophers: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Let’s set the ground a little bit for Socrates without fully getting into his campaign, if you can call it that – his attack on Athens, because that’s how people saw it.

Athens was becoming a democracy. We hear a lot about Athenian liberty, Greek liberty and democracy and all that. That was for a generation or so, but it was at a very key time because this democracy amounted to the rule of citizens, who were about 30% of the population, male property owners over whatever the age of majority was for Athens. In other words, it did not include most people. It certainly did not include women, and a good amount of the people living in Athens were slaves. So much for Athenian liberty.

Women mostly stayed at home and stayed out of the way. The older historians basically look at the Greeks as treating their women as slaves. Modern writers are kind of rewriting that, thinking that maybe women have always been women and wouldn’t put up with that very much, but certainly they didn’t hold political office of any sort.

True democracy – and this is something that Americans don’t understand – means you’re all in the same room and you’re all voting in person, and 50% + 1 carries the day. Under such circumstances it becomes very important to win arguments, because what the assembly decides that day may affect your business interests, your fortune, your future, all kinds of things, so you’ve got to win the argument.

The issue here is not to present a logical argument, except when logic happens to be a good way of winning this particular argument. You want to win, and if that means cheating, using all kinds of fallacies that first-year logic students could spot, or whatever – you win the argument. You learn both logic and rhetoric as means of convincing people to see it your way. This was not something that a dad usually could teach a son. You needed specialized teachers for this. It's at this point that along come a bunch of wise guys.

The sophists?

The sophists. Sophist means those who pursue wisdom. Sophia is the name of the goddess of wisdom. The word sophistry has taken on different connotations today. It means word trickery, and this is in part due to Socrates because he encountered these guys and called them on the carpet anytime they went for this, or at least so Plato says in his various dialogues.

So we have these men offering their services and they were itinerant teachers. They would take on disciples and teach them the fine arts of rhetorical combat so they could win arguments, so that their families and their family businesses could get ahead. There can’t be any problem with this. We do it all the time in America, don’t we?

It’s into this that Socrates stumbles, and I’m trying really hard not to take us there, since we really didn’t prep for Socrates.

There’s a lot to say about Socrates so we’re saving that for next time.

Yes, but I will ask you ladies this. Do you remember the TV detective Columbo?

Yes.

Yes, though I never saw any of it.

You must!

I’ve heard you talk about it.

My parents enjoyed it.

Rachel, really, call one up – probably not the first one because in the first one they were still finding their feet, but after that. He wears a raincoat, because you never know.

You have to say the most important thing about him, which is that he is the grandfather from the Princess Bride.

Oh yes, there you go.

Was it before or after Princess Bride?

Well before. The grandfather character actually does things that are alluding to Columbo.

Like patting his pockets as he’s about to leave.

“And just one more thing…”

We never know for sure what his first name is. He has a wife whose name is Mrs. Columbo. He comes across as lower class, although he’s not because he has a real job and a house and a wife and a college education, but he seems slow, almost to the point of stupidity, garrulous, won’t shut up, won’t go away, keeps showing up the next day with more questions.

He’s not slick or sophisticated.

No, very much the opposite. He’s a little short. He has a big basset named Dog. He has a car that no self-respecting teenager would ever be seen driving, and he doesn’t carry a gun. I think in one episode he’s supposed to qualify at the range and I think he asks somebody else to do it for him or something because he does not do those things. This is a Socrates sort of character. He shows up and he’s usually working with the rich, the powerful, the famous, the beautiful people, one of whom has committed a murder.

One thing that was unusual about the Columbo series is originally it appeared as a rotating mystery movie once a week. They showed you the criminal commit the crime up front, so this was not a whodunit. You’re shown right up front who did it and how they did it, and it's always slick and intelligent. The question then becomes how is Columbo going to figure out how this guy did it, and then how is he going to prove it so that it sticks in court?

From there on Columbo does very much the kind of thing Socrates would do, as we’ll see. He begins asking questions. Some of them are irrelevant, some of them are annoying, some of them are pointless – stories about his wife, and his wife’s uncle’s nephew and things like that – and it throws the bright and beautiful people completely off-guard. They’re ready to answer all questions and talk and take him into their confidence, even to help solve the murder, until they begin to realize he’s getting awfully close. In the end we realize, wait, he’s known what he’s doing the whole time. As we come to Socrates we’re going to see that. We’re going to see a character very much like Columbo.

For anybody listening who wants to get ready for next week, read Plato’s Apology. It’s the one thing we have that probably is the best representation of how he actually spoke and thought. He didn’t write it. His disciple Plato wrote it, but it was early in Plato’s career before he just started putting Socrates in every single story he told.

Socrates was a character that Plato made up to some significant extent. It’s hard to prove just how much or how little.

But if there’s any truth in anything he wrote it will be in the Apology. Socrates is eventually brought to trial for two crimes – corrupting the youth and teaching gods unsanctioned by the state – and he defends himself. So if you want to find out who this Socrates person is, read Socrates’ Apology by Plato. You can find it online.

He’s not apologizing. He’s defending himself.

Yes, the old sense of apology, defending himself in court.

I ask you to do this and I challenge you to listen to what Socrates actually says. The verdict of the historians and of enlightenment thought has been this is a philosopher who was persecuted and prosecuted just for having serious critical opinions of a society that needed help. Poor man, he suffered, just like Jesus.

You should read it for yourself and see what Socrates actually says because Socrates is slippery. He is cagey. There are things that he does not address and that he slips around really fast, and you’re left with this folksy Columbo-like character, and yet something else is going on here. So there we go.

The other thing we leave you with is this concept of universals and particulars that we see in Heraclitus and Parmenides. This is in many ways the basic philosophical conflict that runs through the ages in all of the dialectics. You mentioned chaos and order. Aristotle is going to describe the Greek dialectic as form and matter. With Aquinas it’s nature and grace. With the enlightenment it’s freedom and nature.

The basic conflict is constantly between the universals that pull everything together – truth, meaning, the oneness of things – over against the particulars, the individual things. If the individual things have nothing to pull them together, then they don’t have meaning.

You mentioned Princess Bride. “Well, the thing, and the other thing.” If we don’t have names for things, if we don’t have categories that can pull them together – that’s a mast, that’s a sail – what makes that a mast? What makes that a sail? Definitions and likeness extends throughout the world. A sail is a sail everywhere. A mast is a mast everywhere. A boat is a boat everywhere.

Where do those universals come from? Are they just things we’ve invented? Are they mere names or is there something more? Philosophy veers back and forth between emphasizing the individuals and their individual significance or autonomy, but as we do so we lose their very meaning. Or we try to emphasize the meaning and the unity and we lose the individuality and the freedom and the significance of the individual things. This is the back and forth.

We’re going to have a discussion in a few weeks on this very thing, but I’m laying it out here in advance. Keep your eyes open. Keep your ears open. One and the many, universals and particulars, unity and diversity, meaning and truth versus autonomous facts. How do you blend them together? Or to put it in theological terms, is God one or is God many?

Trick question, but we’ll talk more about that.

If I can throw out one illustration from the last century of politics it’s the radical individualization both of theology and of politics, where it’s your individual choice, your individual definition of yourself, your individual concept of yourself that is so fundamental. And yet once you’ve reached that point you realize, “But I need someone else to be like me. I need this concept.”

Of course, the LGBTQ+ community noticed that they need a community. They need someone else to recognize their own self-conception. It’s all over this. It’s about identity, your individual self-defined identity, but it needs a name that connects to something else.

Yes, we want names, we want labels, we want to be recognized.

We want a group identity. We want to be represented by a group.

Yes. Going back a century earlier, it’s impossible to understand the Civil War in the United States, or the War Between the States, or the War of Southern Secession, or the American War for Independence, without wrestling with this concept of the one and the many.

Was the Union a union? Was it one nation or was it many states who could come and go as they like? Or was there something else? That takes us back to the Constitution. What did the Constitution create? And here we could talk about the Federalist Papers. Was the United States intended to be a nation as we take that today, or was it a federation or league of states, or was it something else?

The Federalist Papers go a long way to argue this is a new animal. Whether we got it right or not, we were trying for something different. And to the degree that you differ from it you’re going to have problems, which the history of the new few decades bore out, leading up the Civil War.

It used to be “these United States,” recognizing the true diversity and plurality. Now it’s “the United States.” Something changed. You need to understand the place that Transcendentalism and Unitarianism play theologically and philosophically in the coming of the war to make sense of this.

Again we’re talking about what seems to be ridiculous abstractions by silly people who have nothing better to do than to make up word games, and yet these people have changed the world to a good degree.

A lot of people died.

A lot of people died, and they continue to.

My wife is currently working on a project for a friend of ours. She’s looking at the letters and diaries of Sophie Scholl, who was a leader in the White Rose organization in Nazi Germany, opposing Nazi tyranny. She was a young teenager.

What my wife has seen is not that Sophie had a vast theological grasp of the issues, but she was influenced by Germany Romanticism, which has its roots in Hegel and the philosophers who came afterwards, with an emphasis upon experiencing nature and the beauty there. A lot of what Sophie writes is, “Went out for a walk. Isn’t the world beautiful?”

I mentioned Naziism and said it was Romanticism with a machine gun, because they were both disciples of Hegel but in different directions. One took it in the individual, “Isn’t the world beautiful? Isn’t nature important? God manifests himself in nature.” The other says, “He manifests himself in the state, which is the pinnacle of nature, and therefore you must submit and you must obey.”

Again it’s easy for people who don’t think on these terms to blow it all off, and it’s not everyone’s job to pursue this stuff, but apparently God has given it to us to talk about it and to see who wants to listen, because some of these ideas are of vast importance and will continue to be so into the next century or more.

So next time we will pick up with Socrates. Before we go, do we have some recommendations to share?

Rachel, you said you had all kinds.

Yes. While David and Emily were taking a vacation, I was listening to a number of other podcasts and reading some other books and things like that. I think the first thing that I’ll recommend for this week is a documentary that our friend Wendy gave to me, and I did also find it’s available through YouTube. It’s called Let My People Go.

It’s primarily created and hosted by a man named David Clements, who has done a lot of work since the 2020 election, trying to uncover the fraud and things like that in our election system. The movie is also focusing on the imprisonment of a lot of people based upon the January 6 incident, so there’s an interesting combo there.

The reason I most recommend the movie is because his solution is to say, “I’m a Christian and the Bible tells me that we all need to look around and we all need to repent of the sins of our nation, and we need to beg God to heal our land, because that’s why we’re suffering all these things.” I really appreciate his conclusion and answer to all the problems that he sees, so that’s my recommendation.

I recommend a vacation to Switzerland. Like I said, we’ve been planning this trip for about seven years. This was my first time being off the continent.

Really? I didn’t realize you’d never gone before.

Yes, I had never gone. I knew what I did not want to do was to do an educational whirlwind tour, where you see everything and remember nothing. I said I want to go and enjoy being in a nice place. That is my idea of a vacation.

We rented two different houses. One was in a more touristy area and the other was in a less touristy but still very pleasant area. We stayed a week and a half in each place and it was very relaxing. I would absolutely do another trip to Europe. Honestly, that’s kind of the way to do a trip to anywhere, in my opinion now. Just sit for a week and a half. It’s long enough that you get comfortable, but not so long that you get bored, and take some good friends with you.

It was very valuable to me. I was struggling with morning sickness a lot this time around, and it kept going and going and going. I was much sicker than I was when I was pregnant with Gretchen. Just getting actual rest worked wonders. I’m sure I didn’t actually have to go to Switzerland to do it, but it helped.

When you look out the window and see Switzerland as you’re resting.

It looks better than all the pictures, and all the pictures look great.

I saw a number of pictures that your husband took. He did a slide show for us at our friends’ home and he left every picture on about 4 seconds, which was perfect for me. I’m not studying these to remember details. I just wanted to see the pretty sights. I want to see the cathedrals and the bridges and the coffee shops and all that. It almost made me wish I’d gone.

I do generally tell people that Switzerland is one of those places that is unique to itself in its beauty and peacefulness. I did find going up to the Banff area of Canada to be similar, so that’s a less expensive version. But there’s nothing like Switzerland for all that it has.

Did you have any trouble with the language?

A little bit. As I said, the first place we stayed was a little bit more touristy. It was near Interlochen, which is a very popular holiday spot. Interestingly, the village where we stayed a little bit outside of there was more Japanese tourists than American. But pretty much everyone we needed to interact with at that location spoke English or enough English to get by.

Our second stay was closer to Italy. It was still in Switzerland, but across the lake from Milan – Lake Maggiore – and there very few people spoke English. I had enough French to get us pastries at the local patisserie.

We wanted to order pizza one night. I’m like, “We’re close to Italy, I’m sure there’s pizza.” There is. There’s pizza everywhere, absolutely everywhere.

A lot of things we encountered in Europe were like, “You know, America has some things figured out, like air conditioning. That’s nice.” But this thing that we discovered, we were like, “America does not have it figured out. What we need is this.” It’s a food truck that cooks the pizza on its way to your house and delivers it to your house. We were like, “Whoa, that’s next level.” But the problem was we called them and they didn’t speak any English so we couldn’t use their services, so that was a little bit tragic, but we had enough cobbled-together French and English.

The numbers and please and thank you are pretty much what you need for commerce, so we picked up enough Italian to get by there and had a great time.

With my wife’s help I recommend cats who are nice as pets.

An important qualifier on that.

Important qualifier. Sane also should probably fit into that definition someplace. It also helps, I understand, if you get two kittens together at the same time so they grow up together and like each other.

I’ve done this.

Then try really hard not to inherit your children’s pets when they move out because your future son-in-law is allergic to them.

Pets are lovely things. They’re part of God’s order. I don’t know how many times my wife has looked across and seen a cat pass and just said, “Do you realize that we have animals living in our house and this is like Eden!”

“Yes, it’s like Eden.”

My daughter Emily constantly says, “Are you sure that animals can’t sin? I think cats can sin, because you look right at them and tell them what not to do, and they look at you and understand you completely and do it anyway.”

Tell us about Poe, Rachel.

Oh. He was a great cat, but he was too smart for his own good and was very good at using punishment of me to get me to do what he wanted, generally in the form of peeing on things.

He was a psychopath. I thought we said sane cats.

But he was also very, very smart and could open doors.

So are many psychopaths.

He was generally very, very sweet to me, but he did scare a lot of people because he was so big.

I take it back – sociopath, excuse me.

So we are actually hoping to get a new black cat in about two weeks.

In the light of my recommendation do you think this new black cat will fit in with your existing cats?

We are hoping so. We have been able to observe him enough to know that he seems laid back and very sweet and has a mama cat who is known for her very, very sweet disposition, and all the kittens that she has had are all very easygoing kittens and a lot of fun, so we’ll see.

We look forward to future updates on the integration of this cat into your family.

I have to tell you guys before we go then about the twin cats that I adopted when I was a youth. You’ll love this because they were twins. That’s why we got two. My dad hates cats. We have a theory that when he was a firefighter he didn’t get very much sleep, so he would sleep through conversations while having them, and that’s how we ended up with him agreeing to get two cats instead of one.

These kittens were twins, born in the same sack. They were both tortoiseshells and we named them Bubble and Squeak and they were great, though one of them was insane.

Which a good deal of our audience will not get.

It’s a food, right? Anyway, on that note, thank you both so much for this conversation. I look forward to the next one about Socrates.

Thank you, listeners, so much for participating, for listening, for your emails, which I hope you will send to us at [email protected].

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Thanks also to our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband, David Maxson.

Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next time.