Plato at the Googleplex

  ZEE: Yes, I agree with you, Dr. Munitz, oh, I just completely agree with you! Dr. Munitz stares fixedly at her, her eyebrows merging into a heavy line, as if trying to decide which category in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual to apply. I think it might even be the end of the species! Why would parents even have children if they couldn’t lay claim to them as their own children? The species would just end!

  BURNS, smiling: What do you say to that, shall we say, spirited question, Plato?

  PLATO: Yes, there is truth in what Professor Zee says, that the reason people are motivated to have children, and feel so strongly about their children, is bound up with themselves, with their own existence, and even with their desire to extend themselves beyond their limited existence into the future.

  MUNITZ: Exactly. Narcissism.

  PLATO: No, not exactly. Narcissus stared only at his reflection, an image, an eidôlon that partook of even less reality than he himself. What is of even more significance is that this love for the mere image did not pull forth anything from him, nothing that reached beyond himself. His was a love that gave birth to nothing.

  MUNITZ: That was better. At least he did not bring people into the world—autonomous people with a right to their own existences—whom he would only regard as extensions of himself.

  ZEE: Just because you love your children because they’re yours doesn’t mean you see them only as extensions of yourself! You’re equating the two things, and they’re just not the same!

  MUNITZ: I am not equating them. Yes, one loves one’s children because they are one’s own, that much is trivial. If you’ll remember, I wasn’t even addressing my comment to you, but to Plato, to his statement that one’s love for one’s children is a desire to extend one’s own existence. That is what I called narcissistic.

  PLATO: Then, on that understanding of narcissism, which seems to me a perverse one, you are right. Mortal nature seeks as far as possible to be eternal and immortal, and this is one way, by producing offspring, that it is able to do so, through leaving behind another, a young one, in place of the old (Symposium 207d).

  ZEE: You’re not saying everybody has to have children, are you?

  PLATO: Oh, no, not at all. There are many kinds of offspring. People are envious of Homer, Hesiod, and the other good poets because of the offspring they left behind, since these are the sort of offspring that, being immortal themselves, provide their procreators with an immortal glory and an immortal remembrance (Symposium 209d). And then there are those children left behind by the American founders, the laws they framed that continue to live to this day and bring justice to the state. These are children that bring far more glory to their parents than human children.21

  ZEE: Exactly, that’s exactly what I’ve been saying! What we want for our children is that they be people who bring forth these even greater children, which will bring far more glory.

  MUNITZ: Glory to you.

  ZEE: No, to them! What we want is for our children to live lives that are ultimately worth the living. That’s what we’re trying to figure out here. All parents want it for themselves, the life worth living, but they want it even more for their children. Or, at least, they feel like they have more control over creating the circumstances that will give it to their children.

  MUNITZ: Yes, precisely. You are right. It is not narcissism. It is fascism.

  BURNS: Fascism, Dr. Munitz?

  MUNITZ: What would you call a point of view that distinguishes some lives as worth the living and others not. And these ones that are not: what shall we do with them? Shall we just round them up then and gas them? An audible gasp from the audience. Burns is looking uncomfortable, sensing he might be losing control of the event.

  PLATO, very quietly: I think you misunderstand what Professor Zee was saying, Dr. Munitz. She was not implying that the people who are living those lives which are perhaps not worth the living are themselves worthless. It is precisely because they are human beings, and therefore things of worth, that it is so important that their lives be worth the living.

  ZEE: Exactly! Just what Plato said! I mean, imagine some child who’s just raised in a tiny little cage, just kept alive in there but given nothing else. The reason that’s so tragic for a child, as opposed to, say, for a chicken, is that it’s a human being. I mean I’m not saying that factory farming is perfect, chickens have rights, too, but we just don’t feel as awful when we hear that a chicken is living a life not worth living as when we hear that a person isn’t living a life that’s worth living.

  MUNITZ: And I submit to you that to raise a child according to your methods, imposing on them the iron demands that they be off the charts, is to put them in a tiny little cage.

  BURNS: Extracurricular activities! Why don’t we talk about extracurricular activities? It’s a question that every parent I know faces, and Sophie, you certainly put a lot of time and effort into your kids’ extracurricular activities.

  Zee nods her head vigorously.

  BURNS: And we all know that colleges, at least here in the U.S.—I don’t know how it is in your Academy, Plato—put a lot of emphasis on extracurricular activities, with the top-tier colleges, which you might think are geared more in the intellectual direction, looking—as every parent here who’s been through this anxiety-producing process knows—for a certain ideal of the perfectly well rounded applicant. In fact, sometimes the ideal applicant seems so well rounded they remind me of that myth that you put into Aristophanes’ mouth in your Symposium, Plato, that we’d all started out as sort of two people fused together so that we were perfectly round and could roll ourselves anywhere. Audience laughs. Burns addresses audience. Really, if you haven’t read his Symposium I urge you to do so. Plato has Aristophanes trying to explain why it is that we fall madly in love with a particular person, and he comes up with this myth of a two-person fusion that gave us such completeness and hubris that the gods got angry and punished us by cleaving us down the middle. And so now we’re all obsessed with finding our other halves—gays the person of their own sex they were once fused with, heterosexuals the person of the opposite sex—and when we find them we just want to fuse all over again with them, so much so that we’d rather stay, well, fused, physically fused, than eat or do anything else. Audience laughs again. Yes, it’s a great dialogue, the whole thing, and I guess the source of our expression “Platonic love.” But anyway, I’m getting off track. The point I was going after was that those colleges seem to want candidates that are so well rounded that they’d have to be two different people fused together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung-ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists. You get the picture.

  Now you, Plato, are, among everything else, the head of a famous university, really the prototype of all universities, and you’ve already mentioned how important you consider both athletics and music to be in raising children. Given what an intellectual you are—and let’s face it, your idea of the exceptional child is basically someone who will grow up to be an intellectual—this emphasis on sports and music seems surprising. In particular, it’s pretty amazing just how many pages of the Republic and also of the Laws, your later work, you devote to sports. Professor Zee, you certainly didn’t encourage your children to pursue sports, as I remember.

  ZEE: Well, no more than to keep them fit. I certainly didn’t have any intention of ever becoming a soccer mom!

  PLATO: Professor Zee’s attitude seems reasonable to me. Children, even those who will grow up to be intellectuals, must be encouraged to acquire the habit of keeping fit, so that they possess a sound body to support a sound mind, but I also did not encourage, in my program of child-rearing, the extreme devotion to sports required of the professional athlete (Republic 407b).

  BURNS: But you do spend a lot of time talking about sports. There seems to be something more than just sound minds in sound bodies that you’re concerned with, or am I reading too m
uch into it?

  PLATO: You’re right that I see something formative in sports, which fortunately also are, for most children, a natural form of play. But sports also provide lessons in the pleasures of self-mastery and self-discipline—something that Professor Zee, as a warrior mother, stresses. A child who is not naturally proficient in sports can usually attain a certain level of competence simply by putting in the hours. And because sports demonstrate that self-discipline is not incompatible with play, it’s a model of what all learning ought to be.

  BURNS: Even the highest learning? The kind of learning of a genuine intellectual?

  PLATO: Even the highest. What is an intellectual but someone who has so disciplined his or her mind that he or she can take extreme pleasure in the free play of ideas?

  BURNS: So you see this interplay of discipline and play as proceeding all the way up the scale? Instead of pay as you go, it’s play as you go.

  PLATO: The best thinking is always playful.

  BURNS: That doesn’t sound very warrior-like to me. What do you say, Sophie? Is Plato a little too frivolous for you?

  ZEE: Plato … frivolous? She giggles and the audience laughs along with her.

  BURNS: No, but seriously, the tactics you employ as a warrior mother mainly consist in discipline. There’s a lot of enforced practice involved, and there are even threats and punishments to get your kids to put in the hours of practice for their schoolwork and their music. And yet here’s Plato telling us that true accomplishment is seriously playful.

  ZEE: I agree with him entirely! It has to be fun and it has to be play. But nothing is fun if you’re not good at it, and you can’t get good at it unless you practice enough, and then it will be fun. The experience of mastering something that you thought you couldn’t do is very empowering and it feels fantastic. But there’s punishing work until you can get there.

  MUNITZ: Which for a warrior mother like you justifies any extremes of enforced learning, including punishments and threats.

  PLATO: I would hope not, and I do not think that Professor Zee really disagrees with me here—

  ZEE: No, I don’t! I agree with you entirely—

  PLATO: Because of the important place she gives in the rearing of her children to music. Unlike you, Dr. Munitz, I did read The Warrior Mother’s Guide to Producing Off-the-Charts Children, and I was impressed by how much time she devotes to the musical training of her children. For a warrior mother, raising her warrior children, music is essential. I, too, stressed that my future warriors must have a musical education. They must have sports to strengthen their natural spiritedness, and music to soften it, so that their pronounced thumos does not harden into something vulgar, harsh, and savage (Republic 410b–412a).

  MUNITZ: But don’t you see that a warrior mother just transforms music lessons into a form of competition, an agon, and so turns it into something that not only is vulgar, harsh, and savage but also likely a genuine agony for her kids? It’s just one more way for her kids to beat out other kids—put their musical accomplishments on their résumés and use them to push themselves ahead of the crowd? For her, music is really no different from team sports, which is why she doesn’t need any sports to strengthen her warrior children’s thumos. She uses music, which is far classier and, in her social circle, brag-worthy, toward the same end.

  PLATO: But the music will enter in just the same, and that is what is important. Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul on which they fasten (Republic 401e–402a). Music enters in and with it the sense of a beauty that stands in no need of any justification beyond itself. To be touched by this beauty which ends in itself, existing apart from that which can be made use of in the cause of self-advancement, is particularly beneficial for warrior children being raised by warrior mothers.

  MUNITZ: Professor Zee is a lawyer, not a warrior.

  PLATO: They are the same. First time Plato gets a hearty laugh, which he ignores. I mean by warriors simply those who respond most strongly to the sense of distinguishing themselves in victory and who revel in the thrill of competition. The teaching of the warriors, who constitute a far larger class than the class of intellectuals, must appeal, above all else, to the desire for recognition. And just as there is an important place in any society for the warriors, whether soldiers or lawyers or other specialists in fighting, so there must be pedagogical methods that quicken their thumos, appealing to their love of recognition and glory.

  MUNITZ: And again, I repeat, self-recognition and self-glorification, which dubious goals are only strengthened if you quicken their thumos.

  PLATO: All the more important, then, for them to have some music in their lives! For what should be the end of music if not the love of beauty? (Republic 403c). And what else is there to break the single-minded attachment to the self and its ambitions, occluding the sight of anything beyond the self and its ambitions, if not the love of beauty? If there is a tender spot within them, then music will find it and sink in. Any child who responds to music is responding to beauty, and any child who responds to beauty can be educated. Conversely, a child who is altogether indifferent to beauty cannot be educated, but fortunately there are few such children.

  BURNS: It’s surprising to hear you emphasize beauty so much. Most of the artists I know are too self-conscious to even utter the word “beauty.” It’s a word that’s lost respectability in artistic circles.

  PLATO: Artists embarrassed to appeal to beauty? I hardly know how to respond to such a situation. It seems beyond comprehension. My experience with the artists is that they are so besotted by beauty that they let it overwhelm them, and so lack that love of truth that Dr. Munitz so forcefully exemplifies. But artists who do not value beauty? What can be the good of them?

  BURNS: Well, that’s a topic for another dialogue as well. Meanwhile I’m intrigued how often you mention beauty in relation to raising the exceptional child. It’s already come up a dozen times at least.

  PLATO: The object of education is to cultivate the love of beauty. A teacher is charged with bringing his or her student into contact with the beauty that answers to that student’s type of character and mind.

  BURNS: So an educator is a kind of matchmaker. Breaks into song: “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch.” Audience laughter. Sorry, Plato. Maybe I’m getting carried away with your claim that thinking is playful.

  PLATO: Quite right. Have you heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator?

  BURNS: No, I can’t say that I have.

  MUNITZ: Well, I have, of course. It’s a psychometric questionnaire based on Carl Jung’s personality typology, which, depending on the answers you give to some questions that probe the way you perceive the world and make your decisions, will categorize you as a certain type of personality.

  PLATO: Yes, that is it exactly. I find it fascinating.

  BURNS: You took the test?

  PLATO: Of course, I took the test. You can do it entirely for free on the Internet.

  MUNITZ: Let me guess: you came out an INTJ. Turning to Burns. That means an Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging Type.

  PLATO: Dr. Munitz is right. I am an INTJ.

  MUNITZ: The type which is characterized as a Mastermind.

  BURNS: Well, that’s hardly surprising! If Plato isn’t a Mastermind, then who is? But tell me, Plato, are you bringing this up because you think that these personality types are correlated with different possibilities for learning, or I suppose I should say, putting it into your language, susceptibilities to different types of beauty?

  PLATO: Yes. And what has furthermore fascinated me about these personality types is their degree of heritability. I had had a very dim—which is to say non-quantitative—grasp of the hereditary aspects of personality, for which the metallic composition of the three classes of people I referred to in my so-called noble lie was an exceedingly crude metaphor. According to the modern researc
hers, the hereditary input accounts for about half of the influence on variations in personality. The rest of the influence, they theorize, is due both to the environment, in which I should hope they include how they were educated by parents and teachers, and what they simply dub “randomness.”

  BURNS: So you’re suggesting that there is an innate aspect about which beauty a particular child can love and therefore be educated about?

  PLATO: Some are suited to be lovers of the beauty of sounds and of colors, of the words and the meanings of poets, of human faces and bodies, of the laws enacted by a just government or the laws that govern the celestial motions. Some are suited to be lovers of mathematical beauty and of moral beauty, to be lovers of the most abstract beauty that is inscribed in the necessity of being.

  BURNS: And what you’re saying is that you wouldn’t force these various kinds of beauty on those who aren’t innately suited to them?

  PLATO: Certainly not. To what end? Forcing beauty is erroneous. Beauty is that which provokes desire and love. But we are not all the same in regard to the beauty that it lies within us to desire and love.

  BURNS: So let’s say you have a child who is impervious to, say, mathematical beauty. I think I probably qualified as such a child. Audience laughter. In fact, I don’t know, I hear you say the words “mathematical beauty” and I’m sure you mean something by it, but really I have no idea what. Audience laughter.