Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  Greek philosophy is always included among these great normative paradigms of the Axial Age. But also included should be the Greek Homeric ethos that was the precursor to Greek philosophy. Like the approaches we now call religious or spiritual, the Ethos of the Extraordinary emerged out of a confrontation with the brevity and impermanence of human life. It does nothing to deny or mitigate these conditions. The only solace it offers is itself brief and impermanent. Kleos. What is most startling about it is the clarity of its non-transcendence. It accepts the general indifference of the cosmos, and what solace it has to offer is given in strictly human terms: do something outstanding so as to attract the praise of others, whose existence is as brief and impermanent as your own. That’s the best we can do to enlarge our lives:

  And two things only

  tend life’s sweetest moment: when in the flower of wealth

  a man enjoys both triumph and good fame.

  Seek not to become Zeus.

  All is yours

  If the allotment of these two gifts

  Has fallen to you.

  Mortal thoughts

  Befit a mortal man.18

  This is from one of the epinician odes of Pindar, the greatest of Greece’s lyrical poets. Pindar was born in the sixth century B.C.E., and his poems are seen as shedding light on the values that attended the transition from the archaic into the classical age. The epicinian odes were composed to honor the victors in the Panhellenic games—the Isthmian, Nemean, Pythian, and of course Olympian—and they are chock-full of expressions of the Ethos of the Extraordinary. (The word “epinician” derives from epi, upon, and nikê, victory. I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter “Nike” and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.) The greatest lyric poet of his day didn’t disdain casting his immortal poetry at the feet of a grunting discus thrower or mesomorphic wrestler. Why should he, since to win glory at these games was to demonstrate your standing as outstanding? It doesn’t matter that the achievement of the kleos-worthy life exposes that life to more dangers than an ordinary life:

  Great danger

  does not come upon

  the spineless man, and yet, if we must die,

  why squat in the shadows, coddling a bland

  old age, with no nobility, for nothing?19

  The odes are fascinating for the dark thoughts and intimations of death that constantly wreathe themselves together with the laurels:

  But he who has achieved a new success

  basks in the light,

  soaring from hope to hope.

  His deeds of prowess

  Let him pace the air,

  while he conceives

  plans sweeter to him than wealth.

  But the delight of mortal men

  flowers,

  then flutters to the ground,

  shaken by a mere

  shift of thought.

  Creatures of a day!

  What is someone?

  What is no one?

  Man: a shadow’s dream.

  But when god-given glory comes

  A bright light shines upon us and our life is sweet.20

  Though the gods are incessantly mentioned, this ethos presents a life worth living in terms that are drawn far more from the world of men. What is desired is not the attention of the immortals, but rather the attention of one’s fellow mortals. The gods come prominently into the picture because they either promote or prevent this good—that is, the achievement that brings fame—from being attained, but the good itself isn’t defined in terms of the gods. The good belongs to the world of mortals; it’s their attention and acclaim one is after.

  In fact, as most of the tales of the gods attest—going back to the Iliad—it’s far better not to attract the immortals’ attention, which more often than not results in disaster. Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound is a long meditation on just how undesirable it is to attract the attention of the gods. The play opens with a demonstration of how little humans count to Zeus. He despises us so much that he horribly punishes the Titan Prometheus for the love he showed the “creatures of a day” by having given them the gifts of fire and of hope. Without those two gifts the race of men would have perished, which was Zeus’ genocidal wish. In retribution, the parvenu tyrant of a god—“tyrant” is used repeatedly to describe Zeus—has arranged that Prometheus be chained to formidably inaccessible cliffs, an eagle swooping down daily to treat his liver as so much foie gras. And then the tormented young Io comes wandering onto the stage, in the midst of her own torment. She can find no rest and is not only being driven across the globe but into raving madness, tormented by a swarm of biting insects. The poor child had done nothing to deserve her agony other than being so lovely as to invite Zeus’ rape, and now his jealous wife, Hera, is wreaking her revenge on the girl.

  The Chorus of Oceanides, who have come to pay a condolence call on the Titan, has this to say:

  For me, when love is level, fear is far

  May none of all the gods that greater are

  Eye me with his unshunnable regard;

  For in that warfare victory is hard

  And of that plenty cometh emptiness.

  In other words, the last thing any mortal needs is the attention of a god.

  I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that Greek religion wasn’t an overwhelmingly important presence throughout all the city-states. Religion came in many forms, both public and secret, both Panhellenic and specific to individual poleis. And like everything else having to do with the Greeks, the matter of their religious practices is both complicated and controversial; it’s still keeping scholars busy. Again, none of these complexities and controversies are mine to sort out. All I wish to affirm is that, whatever psychological, intellectual, social, and political purposes Greek religion served—and it served all of these—it did not address in any profound way the existential concerns of the Axial Age. This is why what survives for us from the ancient Greeks isn’t their polytheistic religion. There are no multitudes of people who revere Zeus or Apollo or Athena, as there are those who revere Jehovah, or seek their life’s purpose in the teachings of the Buddha or Confucius or Lao Tzu. What survives for us from the Greeks is what their thinkers made of the secular approach to the existential dilemmas, a secular approach that was pre-philosophically implicit in the Ethos of the Extraordinary. Greek religion, per se, didn’t minister to the will to matter, except insofar as helping to strengthen group identity within the polis, observing both its public religion and its mystery rites.

  There is a big jump to get from the kleos-centered conception of a life worth living to the sort of reasoned life of Plato’s vision, though both kinds do require enormous exertion. (The extraordinary doesn’t come easily, unless it’s physical beauty, which, being a form of the extraordinary, counted for a great deal to the Greeks.)21 For Plato, the kind of exertion that is required to attain the best of lives is philosophy itself. It’s in the light of philosophy that one is to make oneself over. It’s in the light of the truth, arduously attained, that one’s inner being is transformed and true aretē attained, with the kleos conferred by the multitudes firmly filed away as beside the point.

  Aretē is an important word in the history of philosophy, since, with the modifications to it that Socrates and Plato introduced, it comes close to what we mean by our word “virtue,” which is the word that Benjamin Jowett substituted for aretē throughout his famous translations of Plato’s dialogues. The philosopher Alexander Nehamas, himself a superb translator, mildly admonishes Jowett for his treatment of the term, pointing out that “virtue” doesn’t quite capture all of the nuances of aretē. After all, the word is applied not only to people and their actions, but to things like horses and knives. Can one speak of the virtue of pinking shears? Nehamas also stresses the social aspect to the term aretē: the response of one’s social circle is part of the very meaning of the term: “We could do no better, I suggest, than to think of it as that quality or set of qualities
that makes something an outstanding member of the group to which it belongs. Aretē is the feature that accounts for something being justifiably notable. Both suggestions, which come to the same thing, involve three elements: the inner structure and quality of things, their reputation, and the audience that is to appreciate them. And this is as it should be. From earliest times, the idea of aretē was intrinsically social, sometimes almost the equivalent of fame (kleos). That dimension of the term is clear in the Homeric epics, but it survives in the classical period as well.”22

  Our term “distinguished” comes a bit closer to this notion of aretē. When we call, say, a philosopher distinguished, we are not just saying that she is worthy and not just saying that she is recognized, but we are saying that she occupies the intersection of both—that she’s recognized and worthy; even that she’s recognized because she’s worthy. In the case of aretē, the direction of the “because” can seem a little vaguer, so that it can sometimes seem almost as if someone is regarded as worthy because they are recognized. The recognition isn’t just a measure of the worthiness but the worthiness itself. (The contemporary analogue is found in those who see celebrity as an end in itself.) But in any case, the social aspect, as Nehamas put it, is an intrinsic element of the notion.

  And it is this social aspect of aretē that both Socrates (almost certainly) and Plato (certainly) would see gone from the notion. For Plato’s Socrates, there is no contradiction in saying that someone has aretē even though it goes unrecognized and unappreciated. The acclaim of others is irrelevant. So, for example, Socrates says in the Apology that the city can do him no harm, even if their disapproval of him is so great that they sentence him to death, which is exactly what they did. They can’t deprive him of what it is that makes a person truly worthy, the sort of outstandingness that he has earned from the kind of life that he has lived, even though his fellow citizens condemn that life as death-worthy. Plato has Socrates repeating such statements throughout the dialogues, assertions of the kleos-independence of aretē. Here is how the point is put in the Gorgias: “And yet I think it better, my good friend, that my lyre should be discordant and out of tune, and any chorus I might train, and that the majority of mankind should disagree with and oppose me, rather than that I, who am but one man, should be out of tune with and contradict myself” (482c). Aretē, in other words, has nothing to do with kleos; the kind of true distinction to be achieved has nothing to do with being regarded as distinguished.

  There were some philosophical precedents for Socrates and Plato’s philosophical deviation from the more general conceptions of outstandingness, though these didn’t amount to the rejection of kleos as its measure, but rather a protest that philosophers ought to be accorded more kleos, as the sixth-century Xenophanes complained:

  If a man were to win a victory by speed of foot

  or by performing the pentathlon, there where Zeus’s

  precinct is

  beside Pisa’s stream at Olympia, or by wrestling

  or by sustaining boxing’s painful bouts

  or that terrible contest that they call the pankration,

  he would, in that case, be more glorious for his

  townsmen to gaze upon,

  and he would win the right to sit in the front row in full

  view at assemblies,

  and he would be given meals at public expense

  by the city, and a gift that would be for him as an

  heirloom—

  even if he won in the chariot race, all these things

  would fall to his lot,

  though he would not be my equal in worth; for superior to

  the strength

  of men and of horses is the expertise that I lay claim to.

  But thought on this point is very haphazard, and it is not

  right

  to give preference to strength over serviceable

  expertise.

  For neither if the people should have a good boxer among

  them,

  nor a man good at the pentathlon or at wrestling,

  nor yet again in speed of foot, which is most honored

  of all the deeds of strength which men perform in

  contests,

  not for that reason would the city be any better

  governed.

  Small is the joy that a city would get from such a man

  if he should be victorious in the games beside the banks of

  Pisa,

  for not in this way are the city’s storehouses fattened.23

  But the Socratic/Platonic deviation from the more common use of the word aretē is far more radical than Xenophanes would have it. It entails a major revision of the dominant normative ethos—so radical that Socrates could quite rightly be regarded as a heretic in regard to his society’s values. His use of the word aretē moves it far closer into the range that we would call ethical. A number of writers before Socrates had used the word and its associated vocabulary in ethical contexts, but Socrates was probably the first to identify aretē with what is—in terms of a person’s moral makeup or moral character—analogous to the health in that person’s body. A person doesn’t have to be recognized as healthy in order to be healthy, and so it is with Plato’s Socrates’ aretē. In the myth of the Ring of Gyges, presented in the Republic, Plato argues that even if a person could get away with all manner of wrongdoing while maintaining a good reputation because of a magic ring that renders him invisible, still he should not do any of these awful things, since by destroying his aretē the man will destroy himself. Aretē then is entirely independent of social regard. And in the Gorgias, Socrates is presented as asserting something so radical that his hearers think it has to be a joke. He would, he says, rather be treated unjustly than treat others unjustly (469c). But if aretē is conceived of as analogous to the health of the body, then Socrates’ statement is hardly absurd. The injustice that we do involves us far more intimately than the injustice that we suffer. I don’t only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I lie, for example, even if I’m not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are. You become the person who could commit such an act, and how you are known in the world is irrelevant to this state of being. (The Picture of Dorian Gray is a very Platonic book—except that Dorian’s great love of beauty ought to have induced in him such a revulsion at his characterological ugliness as to forestall his immoral actions. That is Plato’s great hope: that love of beauty can, when rightly cultivated and educated, battle immorality.)

  These Socratic/Platonic departures from the kleos-centered notions of aretē, which carry with them a sophisticated moral theory, signal a limit to the control that others—that a whole polis of others—can exert over your sense of your life and what it’s ultimately about. No wonder that 501 Athenian jurors could be convinced that Socrates was a serious threat to their values. He as much as told him so by saying that nothing they could do to him would harm him, thus firmly setting aside the social aspect of their notion of human excellence.

  But before moving on further to the way in which Socrates and Plato diverged from their society’s kleos-centered version of the Ethos of the Extraordinary, let’s consider that unregenerate version a bit more, if only to better appreciate how Socrates and Plato departed from it.

  The first question—leading to a whole series of questions—is why did the Greeks develop such a demanding ethos in the first place, one which foisted on them the quasi-paradoxical requirement of becoming habitually extraordinary? Aren’t there easier ways to assure oneself that one can achieve mattering? Couldn’t they have devised a religion—or adapted the religion that they already had—so that it could better minister to the kind of existential exigencies that erupted so forcefully in the Axial Age? And yet their religion, as important as it was in other regards (most particularly in supplying a sen
se of identity, both Panhellenically as Greeks and as citizens of the individual poleis), remained, as far as the existential questions are concerned, inert. Perhaps (speculating wildly here) their Ethos of the Extraordinary itself stymied the growth of a more existentially sophisticated religion. Their existential answers derived from a different aspect of their culture.

  There is a historical contingency that seems relevant. The Greeks of the Iron Age, which was when the Homeric tales were composed, lived among the ruins of a dauntingly superior society, the Mycenaean palace societies of the Bronze Age. These Bronze Age Greeks are the heroic protagonists of the Homeric tale. It’s they, the superior predecessors, who travel to Troy to retrieve the Mycenaean queen, Helen, stolen by the prince of Troy, Paris. (And this because of some typically irresponsible behavior on the part of the immortal Olympians. Those gods!) The Bronze Age civilization—fabulously wealthy and cultured and literate (they wrote in Linear B)24 had been mysteriously destroyed, and the Homeric tales were composed during the regressed and chaotic period that followed. The Homeric tales that form such a substantive part of to hellēnikon, or hellenicity, were composed at a time that represented a giant step back from what had been; and it was a time that saw itself in those inferior terms, which is why its attention is fixed on the heroic past. The calamity—or, more likely, series of calamities—that destroyed the palace economies had plunged the Greek world into a state of darkness, shattering stability along with the knowledge of writing, which would have yielded us some evidence for what had really happened to the powerful Mycenaean civilization, which had traded with people across the Mediterranean.25 Their architecture was so formidable that it came to be called by the peoples who walked among the ruins “Cyclopean”: How could mere humans have built such edifices without the participation of the one-eyed giants? The engineering that went into the extraordinary beehive-shaped shaft graves of the royals, originally packed with magnificently wrought golden objects, is still capable of leaving us gaping in wonder today, an attitude to which I, who recently gaped in wonder, can attest. The lintel stone over the entrance to the gravesite in Mycenae known as the Treasury of Atreus, also sometimes called the Tomb of Agamemnon (misidentified as such by Heinrich Schliemann), weighs 120 tons. Is it any wonder that the relatively primitive people of the succeeding period would stare at these remains, often inscribed with writing that they couldn’t read, and form stories of heroes who exceeded anything that they could ever have known, stories that provoked wonder at the extraordinary forms that human life could achieve—at least at one time, though not in theirs. They lived among the daunting physical evidence of such superior possibilities.