Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  And yet Plato chose to write in a very different style. He wrote in dialogues, lavishing care on idiosyncratic features of his dialogic characters, many based on real people,39 and showing us how their entire personalities are brought to bear on their philosophical positions and the way they argue for them. Some of his characters are so alive that some scholars have argued that the dialogues were actually intended by Plato to be acted, and that they were, in his Academy.40

  His choice of a form that personalizes philosophical positions is remarkable, since he doesn’t mean to suggest by his stylistic choice that the truth itself is personal. He’s not saying that the most we can say, in confronting an opinion on a philosophical matter, is that that’s the way this particular person happens to think, that’s her “philosophy,” end of story. That was the position of many of the sophists of his day, the teachers of rhetoric who taught their art of persuasion without regard to the truth, and Plato despised the sophists. In fact, it’s largely through his hostility that the word “sophistry,” which derives from Greek for knowledge—sophia, Σοϕια—has taken on its pejorative meaning.

  For Plato, writing about philosophy itself raised philosophical questions. In the Seventh Letter he stunningly asserts that he never committed his own philosophical views to writing: “One statement at any rate I can make in regard to all who have written or who may write with a claim to knowledge of the subjects to which I devote myself—no matter how they pretend to have acquired it, whether from my instruction or from others or by their own discovery. Such writers can in my opinion have no real acquaintance with the subject. I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in future, for there is no way of putting it in words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long period of attendance in instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship, when suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining” (341b–d). Plato didn’t think the written word could do justice to what philosophy is supposed to do. And yet he did write; he wrote a great deal. And the literary form he invented for his writing should give us an indication of what he thought philosophy was supposed to do.

  And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world.

  Toward the end of the Symposium, Plato has the larger-than-life real historical figure of Alcibiades41 declare that philosophical questions, once they take hold of one’s inner life, exert a frenziedly disorienting power that is akin to the intoxications both of wine and of eros: “I am looking at all the others,” Alcibiades declares, and you can feel his dangerously beautiful gaze traveling around the lamp-lit room, the wicks floating in pools of oil to cast their soft glow on the couches drawn into a semicircle, on each of which two men are reclining. They have abstained from drink for the night, at least until this moment when a drunken, laughing Alcibiades crashes in, and have instead gone round the room giving speeches in praise of the god of love, Erōs. They have just heard Socrates give a speech that will spawn the phrase “Platonic love,” a speech in which he passionately urges them to transform the erotic longing that tends to fixate on particular boys into an equally passionate longing for abstract truth. Alcibiades lets his gaze wander from one to the other of the symposiasts. “I am looking at Phaedrus, Agathon, Eryximachus, Pausanius, Aristodemus, Aristophanes and all the others—and should one mention Socrates himself? Every one of you has taken part in the madness and Bacchanalian frenzy of philosophy” (218a–b).

  Philosophy a Bacchanalian frenzy? This might come as a surprise to readers who have taken a philosophy course or two, finding in the sophistication of the hairsplitting techniques precious little that resembles the sort of reckless abandon that Plato has Alcibiades describing, the violence with which these peculiar questions whip through one’s presumptions and certitudes—undermining, overturning, destabilizing, and disorienting. That was how Plato himself experienced the peculiar questions that Socrates had helped him seize upon, and that was how he wanted others to experience them. Their mere internalization is supposed to enact an inner drama, both terrifying and exhilarating, the likes of which can only be compared to the transformations induced by erotic, religious, or artistic inspiration—a comparison that Plato makes in another one of his dialogues devoted to erotic love, the Phaedrus (see particularly 244e–245c).

  For Plato, this inner drama is the essence of philosophy’s doing its work, which is perhaps the most important of the reasons Plato had in choosing to present his philosophical ideas in the form of cerebral dramas. Greek drama was, of course, brimming with violence, and there is a kind of quiet violence in philosophy’s work. Philosophical thinking that doesn’t do violence to one’s settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all. Plato himself is always doing violence to his own settled mind, from dialogue to dialogue. (It’s instructive to contrast the political stability he thought ideal, though unlikely, with the philosophical turmoil he is constantly inflicting. Keep the state rigid, so that the mind can range free.) And Plato had a contemporary readership, which stayed abreast with what the esteemed founder of the Academy had seemed to argue in his previous dialogues, and could therefore itself witness the constant challenges to philosophical stability that Plato churned up. These attentive readers had perhaps become convinced, by reading his Republic and his Phaedo, of what he’d urged about the real existence of the Forms, those exemplars that are the referents of abstract universals like Justice, Truth, and Beauty, and maybe even Saltiness, Sleaziness, and Squalor (whether such less-than-lofty universals have referents is one of the worries of the Parmenides). And perhaps Plato’s contemporary readers felt as if the ground had opened up beneath them when they read his Parmenides, which features a time-regressed Socrates unable to answer the challenges to the Theory of Forms posed by the older metaphysician Parmenides. And Plato keeps mum as to what conclusion he means his readers to draw. Should they believe in the Forms, for which he’d argued so well in the Republic, or shouldn’t they, considering what he’s now writing in the Parmenides? A reader is left at sea without an author-issued raft. Plato gave great thought to how to inspire the philosophical drama in all of us who will never have the incomparable benefit that he enjoyed and without which he perhaps couldn’t have imagined himself becoming the philosopher he became: exposure to the force of Socrates’ personality.

  His ancient biographer, Olympiodorus,42 tells us that Plato had originally set his heart on being a playwright, either tragic or comic. Whether there’s any truth in this or not, he did become a dramatist of a sort, creating his dialogues as dramas of philosophical thought. To inspire the inner drama that is philosophical thinking in those of us deprived of the living Socrates, Plato turned his artistry away from writing the kind of stage plays the dramatists wrote, and instead created a new art form, the philosophical drama, which is what his dialogues are.

  In some of these dialogues, you might feel that Plato is telling us what we ought to think. But in a great many of his dialogues we are decisively not told what to think. Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience.

  Knowing how unsettling this inner drama can be, how disorienting it is to feel our certitudes crumbling beneath us, he seduces us with an abundance of aesthetic delights, with metaphors and allegories and wordplay and wit. (There are other reasons, too, for these aesthetic flourishes, as we’ll soon see.) There are characters whose pride and prejudice get in the way of their making progress; their feints can be amusing, but we’re never meant to let amusement at others overtake self-criticism. Watching their flailing against the masterful moves of re
ason, we are supposed to apply the obvious lessons to ourselves. If you read these arguments without internalizing them, turning them uncomfortably against yourself, then you might as well not bother. That’s Plato’s attitude. Although philosophical argument is personalized by the dialogue form, the characters are shaped by the philosophical work that they must perform. Narrative technique and artistic flourishes are never allowed to get in the way of the all-important philosophical argument. Plato, it is often pointed out, is an artist of consummate skill, despite the hostile words he sometimes casts at artists, and most especially at the dramatists. But unlike in a novel or short story or theatrical play, the characters are not allowed to take on lives of their own. If characters sometimes are flattened and broadened to the point of yes-men or stereotypes, the point to bear in mind is that this is artistic philosophy rather than philosophical art. This is a distinction—and apology—to which I would like to lay claim in chapters β, δ, η, and ι. The characters who will converse with Plato are created to serve the dialogue, rather than, as in genuine fiction, the dialogue being created to serve the characters. The freedom of characters in a philosophical dialogue is constrained. They can never move beyond the arguments, though I hope the reader might sense a certain growth on the part of my characters as they interact with Plato. Perhaps it will seem to the reader that the characters become less one-dimensional and more fully personlike. I hope so, and I think the reader will be able to guess why I hope so. The taking on, the taking in, of the questions that Plato urges on us adds to our internal dimensions.

  Another aspect of Plato’s dialogues for which, to the extent that I reproduce it, I must beg the reader’s indulgence, is their digressiveness. Plato’s view of the normativity of reality—that is, that we are morally improved by knowing what is what—has the consequence of merging together fields that we keep resolutely apart. Big questions require answers to other big questions, and the resulting dialogues are not master classes in brevity. Rather his dialogues are assertively discursive, as he himself occasionally points out, appropriating the free style as itself expressive of the freedom of philosophers, that they may take all the time that they need to follow the criss-crossing traceries of questions. If I try to give some mild sense of Plato’s expansiveness in the dialogues that follow, I hope it will not overly try the reader’s patience. Occasionally in his dialogues Plato will even let loose his bliss-seeking lyricism, though bliss comes in many varieties, and Plato is suspicious of almost all of them (probably because he’s susceptible to almost all of them). But when Plato lets loose, he can blast us open with ecstasy. The artistry of the writing is meant to stir the whole of our person, since it’s the whole of that person who must feel the force of philosophy and be changed as a consequence.

  A few years ago the philosopher Paul Boghossian published an article, “The Maze of Moral Relativism,” in the New York Times, in its ongoing feature “The Stone.” Boghossian attacked moral relativism as internally incoherent.43 Stanley Fish, a professor of English to whom Boghossian had paid special attention for being, allegedly, incoherently relativist, wrote a rousing reply, called “Does Philosophy Matter?”44 In arguing that it doesn’t, Fish wrote, “[P]hilosophy is not the name of, or the site of, thought generally; it is a special, insular form of thought and its propositions have weight and value only in the precincts of its game. Points are awarded in that game to the player who has the best argument going (“best” is a disciplinary judgment)…. The conclusions reached in philosophical disquisitions do not travel. They do not travel into contexts that are not explicitly philosophical (as seminars, academic journals, and conferences are), and they do not even make their way into the non-philosophical lives of those who hold them.”

  These lines from Fish might have come straight out of one of Plato’s nightmares. Picture Plato waking all of a heart-pounding sudden on an airless Athenian summer night, these words thundering in his head: Philosophy doesn’t travel. Were these the words of some doom-declaiming oracle or fragments of his own internal doubts? Plato might very well have written with such misgivings because what Stanley Fish claimed was true in the early years of the twenty-first century was precisely what Plato had feared in the fourth century B.C.E. He feared that the conclusions reached around philosophy’s seminar table might stay around philosophy’s seminar table.45 He had tried to devise a written form that might prevent this from happening. (His founding the Academy probably resulted from a similar effort.)

  It’s these philosophical dramas, the dialogues, which he offers up as a substitute for the oracular poetry that many of his predecessors—including Parmenides, whom he held in high esteem, to judge by the dialogue bearing his name—had used to transmit their insights, and the medium is at least partly the message. Truth cannot be transmitted from one mind to another, the pouring out of the full flask of a master into the passive receptacle of a student. Truth-seeing comes from the violent activity of philosophy, a drama enacted deep in the interior of each of us and which manages, in its violence, to deprive us of positions that may be so deeply and constitutively personal that we can’t defend them to others. This violent activity is personal even as it leads one in an impersonal direction, where interpersonal agreement is possible.46 The dialogues are meant to instigate the strenuous activity of many points of view clashing against one another so that what is personal or cultural—and unable to provide any independent grounds for itself outside of the personal or the cultural—can be extirpated, which is how Plato conceived of philosophy and how philosophy has continued to conceive of itself, though it writes itself so differently now. No written form could take the place of the strenuous activity that ensues when different points of view try to go about convincing one another. This is best pursued in lived conversation, minds in intercourse with minds, a relationship so intimate that sexual relations are a metaphor for it, rather than, as some Freudians would have it, the other way round.47

  But if Plato wrote his dialogues as a way of launching us into philosophy by not telling us what to think, then what are we to make of his eponym? If Plato was so deliberately withholding concerning “the subjects to which I devote myself,” then how can philosophers hold forth on the content and merits of “Platonism”?

  And yet philosophers do speak of a view they call Platonism, with fierce arguments over its claims particularly apt to erupt when the discussion round the seminar table concerns the nature of mathematical truths. There is a position in philosophy of mathematics that needs naming, a position held by many philosophers and perhaps by even more mathematicians, and “Platonism” has historically supplied the name. As the acquaintance I quoted in the prologue had put it: “Arguments over Platonism raged the entire time.” This position in the philosophy of mathematics is connected to broader issues that are raised by Plato regarding the status of abstract truth.

  Here are what are taken to be three classic statements of the Platonic position in philosophy of mathematics, the first by the mathematician G. H. Hardy, the second by the mathematical logician Kurt Gödel, and the third by the mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, three famously brilliant thinkers: