Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  This literary ploy of Plato’s makes it difficult to distill out of the dialogues what is historically true of Socrates, the man who wandered barefoot through the Athenian agora in a not terribly clean chitōn and persistently asked questions whose points were difficult to grasp, creating a crowd of onlookers around him as he went about thwarting every proffered answer, a busker of dialectics, a philosophical urban guerrilla. Plato is not the only Athenian who wrote Socratic dialogues following Socrates’ execution.10 But he is the only writer of Socratic dialogues who is a philosophical genius. Plato’s attitude toward “his” Socrates doesn’t remain static over the course of his long life, any more than his ever self-critical philosophical positions remain static. Tracing the shifts in his attitude toward the philosopher whose death turned him to philosophy is perhaps a way of trying to bring the remote figure of Plato closer to us as a person.

  It’s hard, not to say presumptuous, to approach Plato as a person. No philosopher more discourages such an approach. Plato seemed to have little sympathy for the merely personal. We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and less about the smallness that is us. Plato often betrays a horror of human nature, seeing it as more beastly than godlike.11 Human nature is an ethical and political problem to be solved, and only the universe is adequate to the enormous task.12 The Laws, which features three old men in conversation, twice unflatteringly compares humans to puppets,“though with some touch of reality about them, too,” as the Athenian says. The old man from Sparta responds to this, “I must say, sir, you have but a poor estimate of our race,” and the Athenian doesn’t bother to deny it.

  Plato’s bleak despair regarding “our race” might have grown more pronounced in his old age, but I suspect Plato took a dim view of humanity even when he was younger. Socrates’ fate at the hands of the democracy—his death sentence, like the guilty verdict, was the result of popular vote—might have had as much to do with his dim view of humanity as it did with his turning to philosophy in the first place. Whereas Socrates might laugh out loud at the vulgar jokes of the comic writers, even when he was made the butt of them,13 Plato’s more characteristic reaction toward the riotous and ridiculous aspects of human nature was, I suspect, a shudder. His love for Socrates helped him to repress the shudder. Socrates was, for him, a means of reconciling himself to human life, deformed as it is by ugly contradictions. Socrates, so very human—as Plato takes pains to show us—himself embodied these contradictions. Because there had been such a man as Socrates, Plato could convince himself that human life was worth caring about. But I suspect that for him it did take convincing.

  By writing as he did, Plato created a morass of interpretive confusion. But he also created philosophy as a living monument to Socrates. The word “philosophy” has love written into it. It translates as love of wisdom. Love of wisdom is an impersonal sort of love. So it bears mentioning that a very personal love—Plato’s love for Socrates—was working itself out in the man who created philosophy as we know it.

  All of this adds an element of paradox to the style in which Plato wrote, especially given what Plato will say about philosophical love replacing personal love (the source for our degraded notion of “Platonic love”). But even this tension is put to philosophical use. Plato worries about so many dangers tripping us up in our thinking, and one of these dangers is that our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself. He aims to keep our thinking from becoming thoughtless, and to that end he is never averse to the destabilizing effects of paradox.

  The expository chapters of this book alternate with anachronistic dialogues in which Plato himself is a character, taking up our contemporary questions, which are continuous with ones that Plato first raised. The questions in each dialogue are related to ones raised in the expository chapter immediately preceding.

  These are, quite literally, dialogues out of time. But there is a way in which the dialogues that Plato wrote are also dialogues out of time. They wrench a person out of time, as Plato believed philosophy must do. In the Phaedo, which presents Socrates’ death, Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die. (Oddly, philosophy departments have forgone turning this into an enrollment-boosting slogan.)

  When I was a child I was addicted to science fiction, and my favorite science fiction required the reader to accept just one preposterous premise, and then everything else made sense. That is what the dialogues of this book ask of the reader. Just accept the one preposterous premise that Plato could turn up in twenty-first-century America, an author on a book tour, and everything else, I hope, makes sense. So here he is at Google headquarters, in Mountain View, California, discussing with his media escort and a software engineer whether crowd-sourcing can answer all ethical questions. And here he is on a panel of child-rearing experts in Manhattan, including a psychoanalyst and a “tiger mom,” discussing the question of how to raise a child so that it will shine. And here he is helping out an advice columnist on some of the trickier questions concerning love and sex and revealing the shallowness of our notion of “Platonic love.” And here he is on cable news discussing with an aggressive interviewer whether reason has any useful role to play in our moral and political lives. And here he is in a cognitive neuroscience laboratory at a prestigious university, volunteering to have his brain scanned, and discussing with two scientists whether the problems of free will and personal identity can be solved by brain imaging.

  As often as I can, I interweave passages from his writings into the conversations he has with our contemporaries, giving the citations. His words sound natural in conversations that will be familiar to the reader, and this is a testament to the surprising relevance he still has—but not because his intuitions always ring true to us. His relevance derives overwhelmingly from the questions he asked and from his insistence that they cannot be easily dispensed with in the ways that people often think. One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions. Sometimes these failed solutions are scientific, and sometimes they are religious, and sometimes they are based on what is called plain common sense. Plato composed some of the most definitive rebuttals of uncomprehending answers to philosophical questions that have ever been made, and one can (and I do) fit these smoothly into conversations he has with neuroscientists and software engineers, not to speak of a bumptious cable news anchor. But I rarely give him the answers, and this I think is true to the man. The thing about Plato is that he rarely presented himself as giving us the final answers. What he insisted upon was the recalcitrance of the questions in the face of shallow attempts to make them go away. His genius for formulating counter-reductive arguments is at one with the genius that allowed him to raise up the field of philosophy as we know it.

  I do make him a quick study, and he has much catching up to do, as much in ethics—what, no slaves?—as in science and technology. This is as it should be if the field he created has made progress. A major contention of this book—and it is a controversial one—is that it has, and that its progress extends beyond the seminar table. In his conversation at the Googleplex, his media escort, a practical-minded woman with little use for the examined life, is able to overwhelm him with the kind of ethical intuitions that she takes for granted and of which he never dreamed—though once she states them he immediately gets the point.

  If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why—unlike scientific progress—is it so invisible? This is a question that runs throughout the book, in the expository chapters as well as in the dialogues. Ruminating on Plato—the ways in which he’s still with us and the ways in which he’s been left behind—offers an answer to this question. Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely share
d intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don’t see it, because we see with it.

  * * *

  1The important point—that the Greek philosophers lacked the idea of individual rights as it was developed by thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—is discussed by Stephen Darwall. See his “Grotius at the Creation of Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Honor, History, and Relationship: Essays in Second-Personal Ethics II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  2The Symposium of Plato: The Shelley Translation, edited and introduced by David K. O’Connor (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002).

  3See Who Speaks for Plato: Studies in Platonic Anonymity, edited by Gerald A. Press (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). The eleven contributors to the volume all argue against the view that Socrates, or any other character in the dialogues, is a mouthpiece for Plato.

  4Proposed candidates have included a death-faking Christopher Marlowe; Francis Bacon; Walter Raleigh; Edmund Spenser; Lord Buckhurst; Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford; and William Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby.

  5Philosophers use the word “normative” to refer to any propositions that contain the word “ought,” as in “You ought to consider the interests of others as well as those of yourself,” and “You ought to be rational and consider all the facts, not only those that support your favored hypothesis.” Though many normative propositions deal with ethical matters, not all of them do, as my second example demonstrates. In particular, epistemology, which examines the conditions for securing knowledge, raises normative issues. Religion, of course, addresses normative issues, but so, too, does secular philosophy.

  6Aristotle was born in Stagira, near Macedonia, but came to Athens to study in Plato’s Academy. He stayed to eventually found his own Athenian school, the Lyceum.

  7Telemakhos, whose father, Odysseus, hasn’t been heard from since he set sail after the sacking of Troy, mourns a fate he describes as far worse than death. “The gods have made him invisible. If he were dead, I would not grieve for him so much—if he had been killed at Troy, or died in the arms of friends after the war. Then, the Greeks would have made a tomb for him, and he would have won great glory for me, his son, as well as for himself. Instead, the storm fiends have snatched him away and left no word of him. He has perished unseen and unheard of” (Iliad I.235ff). That phrase “unseen and unheard of” contains all the terror of a life that, in the end, amounts to nothing.

  8A good many scholars now seem to think the Seventh Letter is authentic; but even if it isn’t, scholars agree that it was written by someone who was well informed about the private details of Plato’s life.

  9Plato’s dialogues are traditionally divided into the Early, the Middle, and the Late, though there continue to be disagreements on aspects of the chronology, and there are scholars who dispute the entire idea of a set chronology. Plato might well have gone back and edited dialogues until almost the time of his death, somewhat like Henry James rewriting earlier works in his later style. Traditionally, the early dialogues are accepted as most representative of Socrates’ practices and preoccupations, and these are confined to moral questions and often end in the impasse of aporia, a conceptual dead-end. It is only in the middle dialogues that Plato raises questions of metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, cosmology, philosophy of language, and so on.

  10Aristotle writes in his Poetics (1447b) of an established genre of Socratic literature, Sōkratikoi Logoi, all of which were written after Socrates’ death. See Appendix A.

  11In the Phaedo, he indulges in a riff on the inhuman forms that most people will take after they die—becoming donkeys “and other perverse animals,” or predators, “like wolves and hawks and kites,” while the “ordinary citizens,” the upright and uptight bourgeoisie, will be transformed into busy little bees and ants (81e–82b). It’s an amusing passage, as well as telling.

  12Such a view—setting the universe itself to the task of making us humans better—tends to meld together subjects that we keep resolutely apart. So it is impossible to speak of Plato’s ethics or political theory or aesthetics without also speaking of his cosmology, metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology. Our division of domains is foreign to Plato’s thought. “Metaphysics, Ethics, and Psychology would have seemed to Plato a meaningless classification and he would certainly have protested against its application to himself. Each of these terms he would have thought to include all the others.” G. M. A. Grube, Plato’s Thought: Eight Cardinal Points of Plato’s Philosophy as Treated in the Whole of His Works (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. viii.

  13Socrates was often featured in the dramatic works of his Athenian contemporaries, most notably in those of the comic playwright Aristophanes, though also in other comic writers whose works did not survive. Aristophanes featured Socrates in three of his extant plays: Clouds, Frogs, and Birds. Clouds came in third at the Athenian literary festival in 423 B.C.E., trailing yet another play that featured a barefoot Socrates. Although his character is mercilessly lampooned—in Clouds he hangs from a basket in midair and perorates with impressive absurdity, offering solecisms on how to avoid repaying one’s debts and urging the young to beat their know-nothing parents into philosophical submission—Socrates himself is reported to have found his notoriety good fun. In his Moralia, Plutarch, the first century C.E. philosopher and historian, quoted Socrates as having said, “When they break a jest upon me in the theater, I feel as if I were at a big party of good friends.”

  α

  MAN WALKS INTO A SEMINAR ROOM

  (illustration credit ill.1)

  Plato was born in ancient Athens in the month of Thergelian (May–June) of the first year of the eighty-eighth Olympiad, which would make it the year 428 or 427 B.C.E. by our reckoning, and he died some eighty or eighty-one years later. His antiquity removes him to a time and a sensibility that some have argued are all but irrecoverable to us. And yet, despite the historical distance, Plato could stroll into almost any graduate seminar in philosophy, seat himself at the elliptical table around which abstractions and distinctions would be propagating with abandon, and catch the drift in no time at all.

  First off, Plato would have little trouble recognizing the techniques being employed: the laborious constructions and deconstructions of arguments; the intense inspection of intuitions, drawing out their implications and prodding and palpitating them for contradictions and other unwelcome consequences; the counterexample tossed in the face of proposed generalizations; the endless attempts to get a grip on slippery terms, to separate out multiple senses that get merged under single expressions.

  And then there are the thought-experiments often couched in wildly imaginative terms: Suppose that somewhere out in the universe there’s a planet just like ours—let’s call it Twin Earth—on which there’s a molecule-by-molecule clone of everything and every person, with just one exception. They have something that looks and behaves just like water only it’s not H2O. It’s something with an entirely different chemical constitution; let’s just call it XYZ. And we’re talking a few hundred years ago, so scientists on Earth and Twin Earth can’t know about the chemical compositions. Both Earthlings and Twin Earthlings use the word “water,” and for all they know, for all that’s in their heads when they use the word “water,” it means the same thing on Earth and on Twin Earth. But does it mean the same thing, and if it doesn’t, then doesn’t that prove that meanings are not in the head?1

  Or maybe the issue being argued is the ethics of abortion, and someone, wanting to set aside the whole irresolvable question of whether the fetus is a person or not, proposes the following thought-experiment: You wake up in a hospital bed and find yourself surgically attached to a famous violinist. You’re told that you, and you alone, being a perfect match for him, can keep him alive for the nine months he requires in order to be viable on his own. There’s no question that you’re both persons, and he’s an important one at that. But still, do you have an ethical obligation to put you
r life on hold and remain surgically attached to him?2

  I mention these famous contemporary thought-experiments not in order to endorse them one way or the other, but simply as examples of what often takes place around philosophy’s seminar table. The point I want to make is that, even though the scenarios would be alien to Plato, the techniques employed by the disputants round the table would be largely familiar to him. Plato was himself a master of composing elaborately counterfactual thought-experiments,3 and we could expect Plato to soon enter the philosophical fray, no doubt dominating the table before the seminar was well under way.

  And it wouldn’t be the techniques alone that would give Plato the distinct feeling of been here, done that. Many of the questions being batted around the table would be owned by Plato. Moral relativism? You mean to tell me you people are still arguing about whether there are any objective facts about right and wrong or rather whether it’s all relative to specific cultures, so that in, say, the militaristically regimented city of Sparta, a society I actually admired in many respects, the murder of puny and otherwise unpromising babies, who would only drain the state’s resources without reciprocally contributing, is a moral obligation, whereas in other societies, perhaps less ruthlessly rational and more prey to sentimentality, infanticide is morally condemned? By Zeus, we were battling that moral relativism rot out with sophists back in the day when Alexander the Great wasn’t even a gleam in Philip and Olympias’ eyes!4