9. It’s difficult to get you excited. YES (about the things that concern most people)
10. It is in your nature to assume responsibility. YES
11. You often think about humankind and its destiny. YES
12. You believe the best decision is one that can be easily changed. NO
13. Objective criticism is always useful in any activity. YES
14. You prefer to act immediately rather than speculate about various options. NO
15. You trust reason rather than feelings. YES
16. You are inclined to rely more on improvisation than on careful planning. NO
17. You spend your leisure time actively socializing with a group of people, attending parties, shopping, etc. NO
18. You usually plan your actions in advance. YES
19. Your actions are frequently influenced by emotions. NO
20. You are a person somewhat reserved and distant in communication. YES
21. You know how to put every minute of your time to good purpose. YES
22. You readily help people while asking nothing in return. YES
23. You often contemplate the complexity of life. YES
24. After prolonged socializing you feel you need to get away and be alone. YES
25. You often do jobs in a hurry. NO
26. You easily see the general principle behind specific occurrences. YES
27. You frequently and easily express your feelings and emotions. NO
28. You find it difficult to speak loudly. YES
29. You get bored if you have to read theoretical books. NO
30. You tend to sympathize with other people. NO
31. You value justice higher than mercy. YES
32. You rapidly get involved in social life at a new workplace. NO
33. The more people with whom you speak, the better you feel. NO
34. You tend to rely on your experience rather than on theoretical alternatives. NO
35. You like to keep a check on how things are progressing. NO
36. You easily empathize with the concerns of other people. NO
37. Often you prefer to read a book than go to a party. YES
38. You enjoy being at the center of events in which other people are directly involved. NO
39. You are more inclined to experiment than to follow familiar approaches. YES
40. You avoid being bound by obligations. NO
41. You are strongly touched by the stories about people’s troubles. NO
42. Deadlines seem to you to be of relative, rather than absolute, importance. NO
43. You prefer to isolate yourself from outside noises. YES
44. It’s essential for you to try things with your own hands. NO
45. You think that almost everything can be analyzed. YES
46. You do your best to complete a task on time. YES
47. You take pleasure in putting things in order. YES
48. You feel at ease in a crowd. NO
49. You have good control over your desires and temptations. YES
50. You easily understand new theoretical principles. YES
51. The process of searching for a solution is more important to you than the solution itself. NO
52. You usually place yourself nearer to the side than the center of the room. YES
53. When solving a problem you would rather follow a familiar approach than seek a new one. NO
54. You try to stand firmly by your principles. YES
55. A thirst for adventure is close to your heart. NO
56. You prefer meeting in small groups to interaction with lots of people. YES
57. When considering a situation you pay more attention to the current situation and less to a possible sequence of events. NO
58. You consider the scientific approach to be the best. YES
59. You find it difficult to talk about your feelings. YES
60. You often spend time thinking of how things could be improved. YES
61. Your decisions are based more on the feelings of a moment than on careful planning. NO
62. You prefer to spend your leisure time alone or relaxing in a tranquil family atmosphere. YES
63. You feel more comfortable sticking to conventional ways. NO
64. You are easily affected by strong emotions. YES25
65. You are always looking for opportunities. NO
66. Your desk, workbench, etc., is usually neat and orderly. YES
67. As a rule, current preoccupations worry you more than your future plans. NO
68. You get pleasure from solitary walks. YES
69. It is easy for you to communicate in social situations. NO
70. You are consistent in your habits. YES
71. You willingly involve yourself in matters which engage your sympathies. NO
72. You easily perceive various ways in which events could develop. YES
* * *
1This wonderful phrase comes from Daphne Merkin, “The Truth Shall Set You Free,” New York Times Book Review, January 27, 2002.
2The Greek title of Plato’s work is the Politeia. The title of the Republic is derived from the Latin res publica, which means “public things” or “public affairs.” The term came, during the Roman period, to refer to a form of government that wasn’t headed by a king and in which at least some part of the populace—whether the people as a whole or an aristocracy—got to choose the government. Plato’s ideal polis—what he calls his kallipolis, his beautiful city—is headed by a philosopher-king, and so doesn’t qualify as a republic.
3The pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, born c. 515 B.C.E., was much obsessed with working out the logic of nothingness. From his fundamental tautology that what is not is not, Parmenides proceeded to ponder the question of what can truly be thought of the nonexistent. His conclusion: nothing.
4It is said that engraved on the doorway to the Academy were the words mèdeis ageômetrètos eisitô mou tèn stegèn, which translates: Let no one ignorant of geometry come under my roof. It was only the later Neoplatonists, coming a full ten centuries after Plato, who report this academic graffiti, for example Joannes Philoponus, a late Neoplatonic Christian philosopher who lived in Alexandria in the sixth century C.E., and Elias, another sixth-century Christian Neoplatonist, also of Alexandria. Aristotle, who studied at the Academy for twenty years, never mentions this engraving, at least not in his extant works (much of Aristotle is missing), even though, interestingly, Aristotle does use the word ageômetrètos in his writings. In his Posterior Analytics, I, xii, 77b8–34, the word is used five times within a few lines. See Bernard Suzanne, Plato and His Dialogues, http://plato-dialogues.org/plato.htm.
5Annie Lowrey, “Big Study Links Good Teaching to Lasting Gain,” New York Times, Jan. 6, 2012.
6See, for example, “Get Rich U,” by Ken Auletta, The New Yorker, April 30, 2012.
7Cf. The Seventh Letter, 344a–b.
8David Brooks, “The Campus Tsunami,” New York Times, May 3, 2012.
9In the Meno, Plato ponders an old sophistical puzzle, according to which nobody ever seeks to learn something new, since if they don’t know it, they don’t know to seek it. Plato solves the puzzle by his doctrine that all learning is recollection, or anamnesis, having Socrates propound: “All nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything, so that when a man has recalled a single piece of knowledge—learned it, in ordinary language—there is no reason why he should not find out all the rest, if he keeps a stout heart and does not grow weary of the search, for seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection” (81d). Right after this, Socrates singles out one of Meno’s slaves and soon has him deducing a geometrical proof.
10It’s not clear that Plato shares Sophie’s low opinion of the primitive communal city. Socrates never endorses Glaucon’s judgment that it is a society fit for pigs. Plato’s Laws ranks the primitive communal society the best—though unattainable.
11Republic 514a.
12Dr. Muni
tz’s rendition of Plato’s Myth of the Cave is imperfect. So, for example, the one prisoner does not free himself but rather is freed and almost involuntarily dragged out of the cave. She is concerned to highlight the lonely heroics of the truth seer.
13“You know, don’t you, that the beginning of any process is more important, especially for anything young and tender? It’s at that time that it is most malleable and takes on any pattern one wishes to impress on it. Then shall we carelessly allow the children to hear any old stories, told by just anyone, and to take beliefs into their souls that are for the most part opposite to the ones we think they should hold when they are grown up?” (Republic 377a–b). Among the storytellers whom Plato censures in the passages that follow are Hesiod, Aeschylus, and, above all, Homer. Plato takes Homer to task for presenting Achilles as indulging in behavior unbecoming for a hero—in particular his “slavishness accompanied by the love of money, on the one hand, and arrogance towards gods and humans, on the other” (Republic 391c).
14L. Brandwood in his A Word Index to Plato lists over sixty citations in the Republic to the noun variants of paideia and to the verb form paideuein in reference to education/culture and the educational process. The references to play/game(s) in its noun form—paidia—occurs over twenty-five times, and in its verbal form—paidzein—over eight times in the Republic. Both terms are linked with the education and activities of children—pais and paides—but also with the education of philosophers. The three terms paideia, the word for education/culture; paidia, the word for play/game/pastime/sport; and paides, the word for children, have the same root. See “Play and Education in Plato’s Republic,” by Arthur A. Krentz, http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Educ/EducKren.htm.
15See pp. 358–359 below.
16“[A]re these not the best of all the citizens? And will not these women be the best of all the women? Is there anything better for a state than the generation in it of the best possible women and men?”
17I’m not sure whether Plato is just managing Munitz here or is really implying that she’s guardian material. Needless to say, he didn’t have anything like psychotherapists in mind when he spoke about his guardians.
18Plato’s inner conflicts over art, and most particularly poetry, are flung across several of his dialogues, including Ion, Phaedrus, Republic (most especially Books III and X), and Laws. His conflicts form the theme of The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, by Iris Murdoch (New York: Viking, 1990). Murdoch’s final verdict is that Plato thinks our response to beauty too ethically important for the artists, unformed by philosophy, to be permitted to manipulate it as they will. “Plato wants to cut art off from beauty, because he regards beauty as too serious a matter to be commandeered by art” (p. 17). Murdoch is not denying the important epistemological and metaphysical and ethical role that beauty plays for Plato—our sense of beauty leading us to the truth because beauty is embedded in the truth. But she thinks that Plato has no faith that artists will use their sense of beauty to get to the truth.
19See the Symposium, Diotima’s speech, 209a–212e, which includes this passage: “And if, my dear Socrates, Diotima went on, man’s life is ever worth the living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty.” (Notice the language of “life-worthiness.”)
20“Then if it is appropriate for anyone to use falsehoods for the good of the city, because of the actions of either enemies or citizens, it is the rulers” (Republic 389b–c). See also Republic 414b–415d, for the famous, so-called “noble lie.”
21Plato spoke of Solon rather than of the American founders: “You also honor Solon because of the laws that are his offspring, and there are other men in many places who are honored for other reasons. Among both Greeks and barbarians are men who have produced many beautiful works, bringing forth aretē of every sort. Many shrines have been dedicated to men because of this sort of children, but none at all because of their human children” (Symposium 209d–e).
22The child was, in fact, a slave. Plato, fast study that he is, has learned to leave all allusions to slavery out of his conversations with our contemporaries.
23“It is hard for a city composed in this way to change, but everything that comes into being must decay. Not even a constitution such as this will last forever. It, too, must face dissolution. And this is how it will be dissolved” (Republic 546a). The rest of Book VIII traces the progressive degeneration from a more superior government to a lesser one, always because the ruling class itself becomes degraded. So too much honor-seeking among the aristocrats degrades the government into a timocracy (548–550), in which people of thumos take precedence over truth-lovers, and the timocracy degrades into an oligarchy when its rulers fall prey to the lust for riches, finding their honor in being the wealthiest and then making wealth itself a condition of political power (550c) and creating a society in which the poor are not only powerless but despised, with the result that “such a city should of necessity be not one, but two, a city of the rich and a city of the poor, dwelling together, and always plotting against one another” (551d). An oligarchy encourages moneylenders, and many will lose their fortunes to these capitalists and will seethe with resentment. The next step after that is a tyranny, the worst of all governments.
24M. F. Burnyeat, “Philosophy for Winners,” The New York Review of Books, November 1, 2001.
25This response might come as a surprise, but not to those who have studied Plato’s Phaedrus.
ε
I DON’T KNOW HOW TO LOVE HIM
Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Socrate arrachant Alcibiade du sein de la Volupté (Socrates Tears Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasure). Oil on canvas, 1791. (illustration credit ill.6)
One who is incapable of participating, or who is in need of nothing through being self-sufficient, is no part of a polis, and so is either a beast or a god.
—Aristotle, Politics
’Twere best to rear no lion in the state.
But having reared, ’tis best to humor him.
—Aristophanes, The Frogs
Inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where the god’s own oracle sat on her tripod at the omphalos, the navel of the world, and issued the prophesies that people from all over Greece and even beyond came seeking, were two warnings. “Nothing in excess”—mēdèn ágan—warned one of the inscriptions. This was echoed by “Know yourself”—gnôthi seautón.
The presence of both warnings at such a solemn site, in the antechamber in which one waited before going in to keep one’s appointment with Apollo, as channeled through the hierophants who “interpreted” the oracle’s ravings, seems to show how central to the Greek worldview these two sentiments were. “Nothing in excess,” in particular, is often offered as a summation of what is distinctively Greek—which is odd when you look at how they actually carried on.
Some scholars interpret the Delphic messages on the wall as having more limited application, as offering nothing more than instructions on how to behave in the presence of the god. Don’t ask for anything in excess, but rather limit yourself to requesting exactly the information you need. “Know yourself” reaffirms the same point. Examine what you really need to know and then formulate your question extremely carefully.1 The two together were practical instructions of just the sort meant to counteract the carelessness that provides the plot of fairy tales we tell our children, where three wishes are granted and the last of them must be used to cancel out the mistakes made in the incautious wishing of the first two.
Still, those two Delphic warnings do capture a truth beyond mere instructions on how to behave when seeking answers from an oracle. They are prescriptive, not descriptive. “Nothing in excess” is not a general observation on the nature of Hellenic behavior but rather a warning against the outcome toward which that behavior tended. And “know yourself” shouldn’t be understood as recommending the kind of self-analysis that supports the mental-health industry and makes best sellers out of self-help books. Essentially a restateme
nt of “nothing in excess,” “know yourself” is a monition against self-delusion, which tends to take the form of our thinking too well of ourselves. That, at any rate, is how Plato reads the warning. In the Philebus, he has Socrates use “know yourself” to cite the three ways in which it is most often violated. People may delude themselves about how rich they are, and about their physical attractiveness, thinking themselves more handsome and tall than they really are. But by far the greatest number, he says, are mistaken as regards the “state of their souls,” thinking themselves more virtuous and wiser than they are (48e–49a). This observation seems right. Shakespeare’s Richard III may undeludedly declare in the privacy of his opening soliloquy, “I am determined to prove a villain,” but most people, even the most villainous, have ways of presenting themselves to themselves in far more generous moral terms. We are our own best defense attorneys, determined to believe the best about ourselves. That, at any rate, is how Plato chose to interpret the famous warning, putting his own psychologically astute spin on the inscription.
Together, the Delphic messages captured an admonishment that the Greeks, perhaps knowing themselves, knew that they needed. Exhortations against excess and overreaching make sense in a culture in which excess and overreaching are a constant danger given the underlying ethos. So, too, does the horror of hubris make sense in such a culture, enforced by a religion that interprets misfortunes as a comeuppance earned by overreaching and intertwines the notion of hubris with a whole slew of others, such as phthônos (divine jealousy) and nemesis (divine indignation). All the restraining supernaturalism was necessary, as the story of Herostratus bears out. He was the nobody who tried to be a somebody by burning down the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus in 356 B.C.E. All he wanted was for his name to become known. Kleos. And it worked. Chaucer has Herostratus explain himself in The House of Fame:
“I am that ylke shrewe, ywis,
Plato at the Googleplex Page 29