Lee Kuhnle

He's a wonderful philosopher to read, in part because he actually started his career wanting to be a playwright, wanting to basically be an author, and meets this guy Socrates who changed his mind and he becomes a philosopher.

But his philosophy is really literary.

And he uses a lot of literary examples.

He has some kind of allegory in which men and women were like conjoined creatures back a long time ago, and then they offended Zeus, who split them in half, and that's why we're always longing for something we don't have, etc., etc.

But these were allegories.

They were metaphors.

They were never meant to be taken literally.

It would be like if I said to you, hey, you know, look at Superman as an example.

You know Superman is a fictional character.

I know you know that.

You know I know that.

But later, should somebody uncover some kind of digital version of this podcast or a clip of it later, you know, 100, 500 years in the future, they're like, who's this Superman guy?

Maybe this is for real.

And that's exactly what happened with the Atlantis myth, which was just basically an allegory about why Athens is great.

And it's already after Plato's death.

People, as you say, are like, well, was it metaphor?

But then there's the Renaissance where, you know, goodness, we'll skip over a thousand and a half years of European history and collapse and stuff like that.

It's fine.

Well, kind of, right?

But then they...