Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  This is the view—pick your metaphor—that Krauss was proposing when he diagnosed why philosophers feel so threatened, as he put it, by the growing power of the sciences, and in particular physics, that they treated his proposed answer to the classic philosophical question Why is there something rather than nothing? with less than universal ovation, insisting that, though the cited physics is terrific, it doesn’t address the specifically philosophical question.22 And whether or not the philosophers were correct about Krauss’s proposed answer to this specific philosophical question, still there is his larger point that philosophy’s main contribution to the growth of knowledge is in providing cold storage. The history of philosophy is, after all, rife with philosophers going after questions that would eventually receive their answers from science.

  So take the very first philosophers you will find listed in a history of Western philosophy. Philosophy is said to have begun, toward the latter part of the seventh century B.C.E., not in Greece proper, but on the coast of Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey, in the Greek settlements that constituted Ionia, in rich trading cities that had contacts not only with the rest of Greece but with the older, more established civilizations of Egypt and the Near East. The earliest philosophers—men like Thales and Anaximander, both residents of the Ionian city of Miletus, which is therefore duly recorded as the official birthplace of philosophy—were protoscientists, asking questions, and sometimes even guessing at semi-accurate answers, which Q&A would eventually be taken over by physicists and cosmologists, who minimized the intuitive guesswork, and got to work at experimentally engaging reality to respond.23

  These first Ionian philosophers would themselves have made excellent scientists. They were bursting with the right kind of curiosity about the physical world, and their inclinations were thoroughly materialist—they intuited that there is some fundamental kind of stuff that’s uniform throughout all the myriad phantasmagoria that we perceive—as well as naturalist—they intuited that a small number of fundamental laws underlie all the ceaseless changes. Actually, we retrospectively dub it “intuiting” (a verb philosophers call a “success term” and linguists a “factive”), rather than just “imagining,” because those Ionians turned out to be right in their intuition that there was some fundamental material principle that constituted everything in the universe (E=mc2 is a materialist principle). And they were right in their intuition that there was an intelligible regularity underlying nature. They were right that physical events are not the outcome of the capricious antics of larger-than-life gods, but rather that they fit into patterns that are lawlike, or, as modern philosophers of science put it, nomological, from the Greek nomos, for law. Of all the conceptions that made science possible, none is more essential than what the physicist and historian of science Gerald Holton called “the Ionian Enchantment”: the intuition that nature is governed by a small number of laws which account for all the vast complexity that we observe in the physical universe.24 This enchantment, if enchantment it be, ensorcels all of science. Once the Ionians posited this intelligibility, the next question became what is the proper form for conceiving of this intelligibility, and this question continued as a divisive one throughout the Greek classical age. It’s this question that forms the crux of the opposition between Plato and Aristotle, with Plato opting for mathematical structure as providing the form of intelligibility and Aristotle opting for teleology.

  Science simply cannot subject the Ionian nomological intuition to doubt and still remain science. Should an observation clash with what scientists have heretofore believed was a law of nature, the scientific response is never to consider the possibility that we’d gotten the Ionian intuition wrong; rather, the scientific response is that we got that particular natural law, or cluster of laws, wrong. Scientists may even decide, as they appear to have done, that the laws governing the motions of the subatomic particles of matter are irreducibly statistical. This is a radical rethinking of the nature of natural laws, but not so radical as the negation of the Ionian intuition would be; that possibility is scientifically unthinkable. It is a fundamental condition of doing science that nothing that we could possibly observe would count as a violation of the Ionian Enchantment, at least that part of the Ionian Enchantment that posits the nomological character of physical reality. Nothing would count as evidence that our physical reality is ungoverned by physical laws. Rather the scientific response would be that we hadn’t formulated the laws correctly.25

  The Ionians happened on other important aspects of what would eventually become incorporated into the scientific method. Anaximander, who wrote a long and long-lost poem entitled On Nature, small fragments of which have come down to us, hypothesized the existence of what contemporary philosophers of science would classify as a theoretical entity or theoretical construct: something that one can’t directly observe, as the quantum fields can’t be directly observed, but which is conceptualized in the context of an overall theory meant to explain as many observations as possible. Many theoretical constructs have been framed and many have been discarded along the way of scientific progress.26 The most abstruse reaches of theoretical physics are still in the business of doing the sort of thing Anaximander first attempted, the big difference being that these theories must somehow be connected with observable consequences, or predictions, by which they might be tested. Genes are a theoretical construct that has allowed the explanatory power of biology to increase by orders of magnitude, a success which should remind us that calling an entity a theoretical construct doesn’t mean that we don’t know it to exist (at least those of us who are scientific realists). It just explains how we came to know the particular thing in question to exist, which wasn’t through direct observation but because of how it functions in a scientific explanation.

  Anaximander called his theoretical construct the apeiron, or the boundless, a basic something or other which is indefinite in itself, subtending all possible qualities, reconciling in its boundlessness all opposites, out of which precipitates the great abundance of this world. Anaximander’s apeiron is a first approximation to our modern concept of matter.

  Anaximander’s conception of the fundamental material principle was a giant leap forward in imaginative theorizing, especially compared to that of his teacher, Thales, who holds the official title of “first Western philosopher.” Thales, also proceeding on the first-rate intuition that there is a material unity behind the diversity, had settled for water, though some have argued that Thales’ reference to water was a metaphor. If it was, it was lost on Aristotle,27 as well as on Bertrand Russell, who writes:

  In every history of philosophy for students, the first thing mentioned is that philosophy began with Thales, who said that everything is water. This is discouraging to the beginner who is struggling—perhaps not very hard—to feel that respect for philosophy which the curriculum seems to expect. There is, however, ample reason to feel respect for Thales, though perhaps rather as a man of science than as a philosopher in the modern sense of the word.28

  I had the good fortune to have Russell’s History of Western Philosophy assigned by my professor for my first course in philosophy, and my admiration for its verve and clarity has never dissipated. My literary agent once tried to convince me to take Bertrand Russell on and write a new History of Western Philosophy, extending it to philosophers who came after John Dewey, Russell’s last entry. I dismissed the suggestion for two obvious reasons, both involving comparisons between Lord Russell and me. The first comparison is the obvious one, Lord Russell being one of the preeminent thinkers of his age, and the second is that the long stretch of time that allowed Russell to undertake the tome was granted him by a stay in prison.29 It has been a lifelong goal of mine to stay out of prison. So I offered my agent a counterproposal: a history of western philosophy in limericks, a task for which I might even be better qualified than Lord Russell, and which would in any case be quicker. Here is my first entry, which works best, if it works at all, when read with a New York acc
ent:

  From the beginning philosophy sought for

  The order behind the disorder

  Thales sipped cheap wine

  And in this did divine:

  “Why it’s nothing at all but pure water!”

  The reader will be relieved to learn I abandoned the project.

  Anaximander, though demoting water metaphysically, kept the element prominent by proposing that it had once covered the surface of the earth, with all life having originated out of a primordial mud, and with humans developing—or evolving, as we might put it—from fish. (Anaximander might have had recourse to fossils in hypothesizing so happily; we don’t really know.)

  Another fifth-century philosopher who also fits the mold of a protoscientist in search of an empirical methodology was Empedocles of Acragas, a city not in Ionia but in Greek-settled Sicily.30 Empedocles pluralistically listed the basic material elements as four—earth, air, fire, and water—and he speculated that all changes were regulated by two immanent forces, which he named Love and Strife, but which we could advance to scientific respectability by de-anthropomorphizing them into attraction and repulsion. Out of these four elements and these two forces the universe had been generated, including living forms, though not as we know them, but rather in the form of detached organs, which, propelled by the attractive force of Love, merged themselves with other organs to form whole organisms, some of which were monstrous and too unfit to survive, a chain of reasoning that brought Empedocles of Acragas intriguingly close to propounding a protoscientific theory of natural selection.31

  So Democritus, a philosopher who formulated a theoretical construct (the atom) which was to prove to be the linchpin of modern conceptions of matter,32 falls into a deeper tradition in philosophy, of thinkers who asked the kinds of questions that, at a later stage in Europe’s history, would be taken up by people like Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. Only this time around, a methodology of experimental testing under carefully controlled conditions would be brought to bear, supplemented by instruments specifically designed for the task, and this methodology would decisively remove these questions from the domain of speculative philosophy and deliver them into the province of the empirical sciences, that ingenious arrangement whereby reality is afforded the opportunity to answer us back.33

  This mini-history of philosophy’s origins can be marshaled as some evidence for the larger point that some philosophy-jeerers are trying to make, which is that the activity of posing scientific questions prematurely is the most useful thing of which philosophy can be accused. But once the appropriate scientific theory develops, which most essentially includes the means for testing itself, then philosophy’s usefulness is over, and questions that have been subjected to philosophy’s futile gnawings and naggings and nigglings for unconscionable amounts of time, without any progress being made on them, are suddenly propelling us forward into knowledge, the Real Thing at last. Philosophy’s interrogatory irrepressibility means that philosophers regularly pose questions that eventually get appropriated by disciplines of science as they emerge: physics and cosmology and chemistry and biology, and (emerging somewhat later) psychology and logic and linguistics, and (emerging even later) computer science and cognitive science and neuroscience. As scientific disciplines emerge, the number of philosophical questions—the left-behinds—shrinks. If cold storage is all that philosophy can provide, then the natural course of scientific progress will eventually empty out the cold storage room until all that is left are those permanent non-starters of the soundless-or-not-falling-trees-in-the-forest ilk.

  This prediction can be formulated mathematically (a book centered on Plato ought to have at least one equation):

  The Fate-of-Philosophy Equation:

  which means that as time t approaches infinity ∞, the set of philosophical problems ϕ equals the null set Ø.

  Krauss was, in effect, propounding the Fate-of-Philosophy Equation, though, as the Jake joke suggested, it takes a certain amount of philosophy—philosophy belonging to “the worst part of philosophy,” philosophy of science—to make the equation intelligible. But if the philosophy-jeerer can abide that small bit of philosophy, then the Fate-of-Philosophy Equation might just possibly be true.

  The question of whether the Fate-of-Philosophy Equation is true is an overriding concern of this book. A millennium and a half have passed since Plato inherited a subset of philosophical questions from an extraordinary character of his acquaintance named Socrates, a man who hung around the agora of Athens and engaged anyone he could—from statesmen to sophists (teachers of rhetoric) to poets to artisans to schoolboys to slaves—in philosophical discussion. Socrates’ occupation, as innocuous as it might seem, eventually got him into serious trouble, and he was put on trial, convicted, and executed for the crime of persistently posing his peculiar questions; the formal charges were impiety and corruption of the young. Socrates explained at his trial, at least according to Plato, that he was not interested in the sort of questions posed by Thales and Co.—precisely those questions that we now, looking back, can dub “protoscientific”—but rather was only concerned with questions that helped a person determine what kind of life is worth living.34 Socrates called the sphere of this concern epimeleia heautou, care of the self.35 For Socrates, these were the paramount philosophical questions. And these questions, he maintained, were not to be answered by the inquiries of Thales and Co., although, he affirmed, they also have objective and discoverable answers.

  Having received from Socrates a few of these peculiar questions, Plato went on to swell the sphere of philosophical questions beyond those that Socrates posed, formulating questions not just in ethics but in metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of art, philosophy of law, philosophy of religion, philosophy of education, and philosophy of history. Grasping the essential peculiarity of Socrates’ peculiar questions, he was able to raise up the entire continent of philosophy, like the lost continent of Atlantis hoisted from the depths, which is an especially apt metaphor given that the first recorded allusion to Atlantis comes from Plato himself.36

  But, as I said, it’s been twenty-four hundred years. The inquiries of Thales and Co., now become the mature natural sciences, have ventured into spheres undreamt of by the scientists of fifty years ago, much less a man who spoke the Ionic dialect of ancient Greek. It’s not just physics and cosmology in whose name a philosophy-jeerer can claim to be at last answering age-old philosophical questions with which philosophers have long wrestled. Of perhaps even more pressing relevance are the new sciences of the mind, evolutionary psychology and cognitive and social and affective neuroscience, which have together so ramped up the explanatory powers of how the mind works that both ethics and philosophy of mind have fallen into the sights of science, including the sights of functional magnetic resonance imaging.37 And then there is the technology represented by the computer, allowing not only for untold access to information, but also forcing us to rethink the very nature of knowledge, and so of epistemology, and of the entity which knows, namely the mind, and of the philosophical study of that entity, the philosophy of mind. Metaphysics-busting cosmology, ethics-and-philosophy-of-mind-busting neuroscience, epistemology-and-philosophy-of-mind-busting computer technology: What would Plato say about any of this? Would anything he had to say still have philosophical relevance? And if it did, wouldn’t that be stunning proof that philosophy—the frozen-hard bits of it still left in cold storage—never makes progress?

  Plato’s persistence might be all very well for Plato and his reputation, but it doesn’t appear to do the case for philosophy any good. To put the point bluntly: If philosophy makes progress, then why doesn’t Plato at long last just go away?

  There is, however, one aspect of what takes place around philosophy’s seminar table that would be different for Plato. Chances are he won’t find anybody there writing dialogues. None of the
papers presented at the seminar will do what Plato does, which is to enfold philosophical points of view into characters. Why should one waste time on such a project, mere frills around the argument, when it’s the argument that counts for everything in philosophy, and the argument is hard enough to get one’s head around? Isn’t the need to get clear about the argument the very point of Plato and hasn’t his point dictated the bare-bones-of-the-argument style of writing that philosophy has adopted, its rigor and impersonality?

  Oh, sure there will be plenty of spirited dialogue around the seminar table, a veritable clamor of dialogue. “Several objections come to mind.” “There seem to be two possible interpretations of what you have just said. Can you tell me which you mean?” “It’s true that if you assume A, then B follows. But doesn’t your assumption of A depend on the condition C and can’t we imagine circumstances in which C won’t hold? For example, consider D.” The sort of endless give-and-take—which Plato is at pains to dramatize in his dialogues—is alive and well, just as Plato would have it. But still the style of writing philosophy is quite different, in the following sense: There are no characters to be found—not in the writing, that is. There are characters aplenty sitting around the seminar table. But the voice that is aimed at is impersonal and precise, even in the comments hurtling around the seminar table, and there is good reason for this, again traceable back to Plato and his formative views on the nature of the field.

  There will be different points of view sitting around the seminar table, all of them coming at the same arguments, analyzing them, criticizing them, reaching for the grounds good enough to compel acceptance no matter what the personal differences. Progress in philosophy consists, at least in part, in constantly bringing to light the covert presumptions that burrow their way deep down into our thinking, too deep down for us to even be aware of them. Some of these presumptions are societal, spread among us by successful memes. (One of the most successful of recent memes is the notion of memes itself.) Some will veer toward the more personal and eccentric, rooted in one’s history and psychology. But whatever the source of these presumptions of which we are oblivious, they must be brought to light and subjected to questioning. Such bringing to light is what philosophical progress often consists of, as Plato himself asserts in what is probably the most famous passage in all his writings, if not in all of Western literature. This is the passage of the Republic in which Socrates describes a group of chained prisoners inhabiting a cave, on the back wall of which shadows are being projected by a fire burning behind them. One prisoner frees himself and manages to get out into the light. We’ll return to the metaphor or Myth of the Cave (Plato calls it a muthos) in a later chapter. Plato presents the journey to the light as a largely solitary one, though some unseen person does yank the prisoner out of the cave; but the format of the dialogues (as well as his having founded the Academy) encourages the view that, on the contrary, Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better. This is why discussion round the table is so essential. This is why philosophy must be argumentative. It proceeds by way of arguments, and the arguments are argued over. Everything is aired in the bracing dialectic wind stirred by many clashing viewpoints. Only in this way can intuitions that have their source in societal or personal idiosyncrasies be exposed and questioned. When it came to political democracy, Plato was not a big fan—at least not democracy as he saw it practiced in Athens—but the field he created honors a kind of democracy. It’s an epistemic democracy that rules out the appeal to special privilege.38 There can be nothing like “Well, that’s what I was brought up to believe,” or “I just feel that it’s right,” or “I am privy to an authoritative voice whispering in my ear,” or “I’m demonstrably smarter than all of you, so just accept that I know better here.” The discussion around the seminar table countenances only the sorts of arguments and considerations that can, in principle, make a claim on everyone who signs on to the project of reason: appealing to, evaluating, and being persuaded by reasons. The whole style of philosophizing has been dictated by Plato’s own view about the possibilities for using the project of reason to find our way out of the illusion-haunted cave.