Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  The historical Socrates had perhaps taught that human virtue is a kind of knowledge, a view that Plato took sufficiently seriously throughout his life to be constantly probing it. Sometimes he endorses it (as in the Protagoras), and sometimes he challenges it (the tripartite theory of the soul he puts forth in the Republic amounts to a challenge of it). But that knowledge is the most potent form of ethical transformation that we have, does seem to be, in one way or another, a continuous aspect of Plato’s thinking, another strand of the Sublime Braid. Ethical progress requires knowledge, even if that progress may require something in addition to knowledge, a kind of surrender to that knowledge that is a kind of love. The best among us are those who have allowed the abstract knowledge of the True-the Beautiful-the Good to subdue what is mean-spirited in us, banished from our thoughts what is unworthy of minds privileged enough to behold what it is they behold. And though this doesn’t mean that the very intelligent are necessarily good—an easily falsifiable proposition—it does seem to suggest that the very good must be very intelligent. Knowledge, though perhaps not sufficient for virtue, is necessary.

  And in this last proposition, Plato might already have hit a live nerve in your moral fiber. I hope so. I hope you’re thinking something like this: How dare Plato suggest—or this author suggest that Plato had suggested—that goodness requires an intelligence for abstractions? Ridiculous! People can’t help the degree of intelligence with which they were born. That obviously doesn’t mean that they can’t be good people, often far better than the arrogantly smirking specimens strutting their stuff at the far end of the bell curve. Perhaps that was Plato’s problem! In any case, there’s obviously something abominably wrong with either Plato’s reasoning or with this author’s interpretation of Plato’s reasoning, to have allotted any attention at all to a conclusion so morally repellant. If this is how the truth is supposed to reform our sense of goodness, then I’ll stick to my own unreformed sense, thank you very much. I have far more faith in my own moral sense than in these admittedly metaphysical intuitions.

  If you are reacting in some such way, perhaps even at this moment considering why you have so much more faith in your own sense of goodness (quite different, of course, than the sense of your own goodness), than in Plato’s claims about how knowledge might better reform that sense of goodness—then Plato has succeeded in his larger aim, which is to engage us in just these kinds of questions, as rigorously as we know how and always on the lookout for the unexamined preconceptions that are in need of vigorous rattling. His belief that we can make progress of this sort was a kind of prediction that itself comes out of the tangle of views—metaphysical, epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical—of the Sublime Braid. If Plato is correct in a big-picture sort of way, then we should be able to look back at him and see ways that we’ve left him behind, not only scientifically but philosophically and ethically. Can we? That’s one of the questions that Plato bequeaths to us. And there are many more.

  It’s Plato’s questions, or successive iterations of them as they have arisen in response to changing circumstances and growing knowledge, that subtend many of our most raucous contemporary disagreements. Here are just a few:

  When we disagree over whether the 1 percent really contribute more to society than the 99 percent and whether, if they do, their contributions should be recognized in the form of increased privileges or increased obligations, then Plato is there.

  When we argue over what the role of the state is, whether it is there to protect us or to perfect us, then there is Plato.

  When we worry about the susceptibility of voters to demagoguery and the dangers of mixing entertainment values with politics, then there is Plato.

  When we wonder whether professional thinkers who come out of our universities and our think tanks should have a role to play in statesmanship, or whether their expertise is useless or worse in the practical political sphere, then there is Plato.

  When we argue over whether ethical truths are inextricably tied to religious truths, then there is Plato.

  When we wonder whether all truths—even the scientific—are no more than cultural artifacts, then there is Plato.

  When we wonder whether reason is sufficient—or even necessary—to guide us through life, or whether there are occasions when we should abandon reason and go with our hearts, then Plato is there.

  When we ponder the nature of romantic love and whether there is something redemptive or rather wasteful about the amount of attention and energy we’re prepared to sacrifice to it, then Plato is there.

  When we wonder over the nature of great art and whether it is able to teach us truths we can’t otherwise know, then there is Plato.

  When we wonder whether we should instill in our children a discontent with the ordinary so that they will be inspired to be extraordinary, then there is Plato.

  When we wonder whether there is a real difference between right and wrong, or whether we’re only making it up as we go along, then there is Plato.

  When we wonder how, if we do know the difference between right and wrong, we come to know it, then there is Plato.

  When we wonder how we can teach the difference between right and wrong to our children, whether it is through storytelling or reason or threats or love, then there is Plato.

  When we wonder why virtue so often seems to go unrewarded, with good people suffering while bad people prosper and get tenure, then Plato is there.

  When we wonder whether the scientific image of the human—as subject to the laws of nature as the computer on which I write—has rendered the grander humanist image of us quaintly obsolete, then there is Plato.

  When we ponder the moral shape of history, whether mankind is making moral progress or only finding more efficient ways of expressing savagery and ruthless self-regard, then there Plato is.

  And when we wonder whether we have at last grasped the truth or ought rather to hear further arguments from the other side, then there, too—always—is Plato.

  * * *

  1This thought-experiment was first proposed in a paper by Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of Meaning” (1975), in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Mind, Language and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Putnam used the thought-experiment to argue for a thesis called “semantic externalism,” meaning that meanings aren’t just a matter of what’s in the head, a conclusion to which Plato would more than likely be sympathetic.

  2This thought-experiment was first proposed by Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1971): 47–66.

  3See, for example, the Ring of Gyges, discussed in chapter γ. Even his famous Myth of the Cave can be seen as a thought-experiment, designed to explore the ethical obligations of the person who has knowledge that would be useful to others even though he has reason to suspect that they will violently reject both it and him. See chapter θ.

  4See, for example, Plato’s deconstruction of Protagoras’ declaration that “man is the measure of all things,” in Theaetetus, 152a–172d and 177c–179b; and Protagoras 320c–327c, 329c–d, and 356c–357b. Protagoras’ moral relativism is undermined in the Protagoras, while the Theaetetus blasts away at the epistemological foundations of relativism.

  5Phaedo (98c–99b). See chapter ι, “Plato in the Magnet,” where Plato discusses such an argument with two neuroscientists.

  6Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was a prominent British philosopher and mathematician, the collaborator with Bertrand Russell on the monumental Principia Mathematica, a work which aimed to explicate the rigorous logical foundations of mathematics, and succeeded so well that it took two weighty volumes to get to the point of being able to prove that 1 + 1 = 2. The project was abandoned after volume 3, by which time Kurt Gödel had shown that it could not, in principle, be completed. The quote above is from Whitehead’s Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1979), p. 39.

  7Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, “A Distant Glimpse of Alien Life?” Science
333, no. 6045, (August 19, 2011): 930–932.

  8Ross Anderson, “Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?,” interview with Lawrence Krauss, The Atlantic, April 23, 2012.

  9Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954).

  10Jan Faye, “Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2008 edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/qm-copenhagen/.

  11See the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics first proposed by Hugh Everett in his 1957 Princeton Ph.D. thesis and now, in many variations, one of the mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics, along with Bohr’s. According to the many-worlds interpretation, every possibility represented in the configuration space of quantum events is realized in worlds other than our own. Reality therefore consists of a “multiverse” in which all possibilities are realized. David Deutsch, a proponent, argues that, so far as the multiverse is concerned, the distinction between fact and fiction is illusory. See his Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 294. Hugh Everett, who died in this world in 1982, allegedly believed, on the basis of his interpretation of quantum mechanics, in his immortality. Sadly, his daughter, who committed suicide at the age of thirty-nine, wrote in the note she left behind that she was going off to rejoin her father in a parallel universe. See Eugene Shikhovtsev, Biographical Sketch of Hugh Everett, III (2003), http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/everett/everett.html.

  12This is not to claim that physicists, when they confine themselves to doing physics, need know anything about philosophy of science, any more than they need to know history of science. Richard Feynman quipped, “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” And yet, beside Feynman’s quip, we might place the contrasting view of Einstein: “I fully agree with you,” he wrote to Robert Thornton, a young professor who wanted to introduce “as much of the philosophy of science as possible” into the modern physics course he was teaching and wrote to Einstein for support. “So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.” Einstein to Thornton, 7 December 1944; Einstein Archive control index 61-573.

  13See his Phaedrus, 274d–276b. Plato worried that writing things down would supplant genuine learning. It was conceptual knowledge on which he was focused, and he worried that writing would undermine the sense of what it really is to have mastered such knowledge. To have mastered it is to have it change the very substance of one’s mind; therefore, what need is there to write it down? Some professors have told me that they think of Plato’s misgivings about writing whenever a student asks them what’s the point of learning some idea when it can be accessed on the Internet whenever it’s needed.

  14The word “atom” means “indivisible” in ancient Greek. Democritus, who was influenced by his teacher Leucippus to the extent that it is difficult to distinguish between them, said that reality, including us, consists of atoms whirling about in the infinite void. “They said that the first principles were infinite in number, and thought they were indivisible atoms and impassable owing to their compactness, and without any void in them; divisibility comes about because of the void in compound bodies.” This is from Simplicius’ De caelo (242, 18). Simplicius lived in the early sixth century C.E. and was one of the last of the pagan philosophers. We owe a great deal of our knowledge of the lost writings of the ancients to Simplicius, all of whose writings are commentaries on these earlier writers, mostly of the classical age.

  15The “sooner or later” is meant to remind us that sometimes the scientific revisions take much longer than the empirical evidence warrants. Scientists are just as apt to be bullheaded as other human beings since the fact is that they are human beings; and as such they often hang on to wrong theories, on which their reputations and worldviews are staked, long after “the logic of scientific discovery,” to quote the title of a Karl Popper book, would have them do otherwise. To complicate the matter, there is also a little business known as the theory-ladenness of observation. A person’s holding a theory to be true conditions how the evidence is seen; countervailing evidence will not enter into consciousness, making it all the harder for theories to be falsified. But, though the logic of scientific discovery is not as clear and straightforward as Popper-approving scientists sometimes present it, the elaborate testing and experimentation does provide the means for nature to answer scientists back, sometimes so forcefully and unambivalently that cherished hypotheses and theories are, sooner or later, discarded. The truth of this “sooner or later,” with an emphasis on the later, seems to me the crux of what has survived from Thomas Kuhn’s incendiary book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

  16See, for example, A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, “Judgment Under Uncertainty Heuristics and Biases,” Science 185 (1974): 1124–31.

  17I have expressed elsewhere my own misgivings about Popper’s principle of falsifiability as the absolute criterion for demarcation between science and non-science. See my “The Popperian Sound Bite,” in What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Today’s Leading Minds Rethink Everything, ed. John Brockman (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008).

  18Mathematics, of course, is utilized within the empirical sciences, but in itself it proceeds by a priori methods of proof, which is why mathematics departments are so much cheaper for universities to maintain than departments of physics, biology, or chemistry, with all their subspecialties and cross-hybrids, all of which require huge outlays of funds in the form of laboratories, observatories, particle colliders, and so on. Mathematicians, on the contrary, require only blackboard, chalk, and erasers, as well as generous quantities of caffeine, a well-worn joke being that a mathematician is a machine for transforming coffee into theorems. Another joke: Philosophers are even cheaper to hire than mathematicians, since you don’t need to provide them with erasers.

  19Much of the work that Euclid built on was done at Plato’s Academy. Euclid mentions Theaetetus by name.

  20For a magnificent discussion of this melding see E. A. Burtt’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science. Burtt’s book, which was first published in 1924 and was, outrageously, out of print for some decades, was reissued in 2004 by Dover. This too-little-known work remains as rousingly insightful today as when it was first published, even while some of its flashier spin-offs are badly showing their age. Thomas Kuhn seemed to have been unaware that Burtt was influencing him by way of Alexandre Koyré, whom he does credit. For a discussion of Burtt’s influence on Koyré, see Diane Davis Villemaire, E. A. Burtt, Historian and Philosopher: A Study of the Author of “The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science” Boston Sudies in the Philosophy of Science (Book 226) (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002).

  21Using the Pythagorean theorem, a square with sides of one unit has a diagonal equal to the square root of 2, which is an irrational number. If one tries to write it as a fraction of two whole numbers, one will be able to derive a contradiction. This, more or less, had been Hippasus’ deduction (or so we think).

  22Krauss’s attack on philosophy was precipitated by a review of his book A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (New York: Free Press, 2012) by the philosopher David Albert (who happens also to hold a Ph.D. in theoretical physics) in the New York Times Book Review, March 23, 2012.

  23The Ionian philosophers didn’t bypass observation. Thales’ successful prediction of an eclipse, for example, must have been based on careful observation, as well as access to observational records acc
umulated by the Babylonians. But the full experimental method of setting up conditions to catch nature out had to await the founders of modern science, most notably Galileo.

  24See Holton’s Einstein, History, and Other Passions: The Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), chapter 7, “Einstein and the Goal of Science.”

  25David Hume’s argument concerning the “principle of the uniformity of nature” comes down to an argument that, since science presumes the lawfulness of nature, science cannot non-circularly provide evidence for it. “For all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past and that similar power will be conjoined with similar sensible qualities. If there be any suspicion that the course of nature may change, and the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future, since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance.… My practice, you say, refutes my doubts. But you mistake the purport of my question. As an agent, I am quite satisfied in the point; but as a philosopher who has some share of curiosity, I will not say skepticism, I want to learn the foundation of this inference.” Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, chapter 4, “Skeptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding.”