Benjamin Saltzman

a conversation, right, about it might be useful or helpful.

Yeah.

I mean, I want to be careful not to suggest that like the ancient past was a kind of golden age of –

sort of proper moral attention.

But it was definitely a question, right, that was facing philosophers and poets and artists.

And so, one of my favorites comes from Plato's Republic.

And there's an anecdote that Socrates tells about this man, Leontius, who is walking along one day and encounters a pile of corpses next to an executioner.

And he undergoes this struggle within himself.

He notices them first and then he sort of backs away and turns away and then he

covers his eyes and struggles, and then he eventually gives in and looks and then yells at himself and condemns himself.

He says to his own eyes, take your fill of that beautiful sight.

And it's doing a particular thing at this moment in the Republic.

But one of the takeaways, I think, is that this struggle about whether or not to one should look is real.

It

reflects a kind of broken a breaking of the self it's a it's a sort of struggle within the self um and um and yeah so that it it signals that there's something important going on there the other thing that's happening is is like a tension between the impulse and the performance um which might also kind of get at some of the questions you're asking right like do

Is he, are we, turning away in that moment, covering our eyes because we are like impulsively not wanting to look?

Or are we doing it to perform for others around us because we think we shouldn't look?