Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  So there you have it, PhD. I guess I’m a bit more old-school than Plato when it comes to the kind of arrangement you’re talking about here, but even he thinks that you’ve got more to lose than gain by your higher-education shenanigans. And since you seem like the kind of kid who tallies up her wins and losses pretty crassly—whoops, I mean closely—you’d probably best pay attention.

  Margo, philosophically

  Dear Margo,

  I am an academic in a highly demanding and theoretical field. I’m gay (male) and married. My husband complains that I’m too emotionally distant. He says that he feels I married him not to indulge in passion but to escape it. The truth is that he’s right. I have more important things to think about than personal relationships, including my relationship with him. I want that part of my life settled so that I can think about other things. He wants me to think more about him and so is always trying to unsettle things. Who’s right?

  Yours truly,

  Maybe I’m Not Domesticated

  Dear MIND:

  I’m afraid your husband is the one who is right. I am not sure why you married in the first place. It sounds like cruel and unusual punishment to marry to escape passion, and all that goes with it, unless your partner is of like mind—which he clearly was not. Do your spouse a favor and become single again as you think about those more important things. In fact, you might do all gay-mankind a favor by forswearing marriage and devoting yourself, unhindered, to your highly demanding and theoretical field.

  But I decided to run this one by my new consultant, Plato, just because I was pretty certain he would disagree with me, but once again he surprised me:

  “Margo, there is little I have to add to your advice. I can’t but be sympathetic to MIND’s desire to think about his theoretical field. And yet, since love of his husband seems not an option for him, but instead he married so that no personal love would distract him, then I think he must end the relationship. Perhaps if his husband had the same attitude it would be permissible, though even here I must wonder. For activities that would otherwise be perfectly shameful are not so when through them the god of love is moving. The friendship of a lover can bring divine things, but a relationship with one who does not love is diluted by instrumental thinking by means of which one person tries to use the other for his ends. All it pays are cheap, human dividends (Phaedrus 256e). As your passion lies elsewhere, follow it there passionately.”

  Okay, MIND. It sounds like Plato is ordering you to put your passion where your mind is.

  Margo, mindfully

  Margo,

  I wonder if you’ve ever gotten a complaint like this one. I am engaged to a wonderful man, who’s highly successful in his field, which happens to be the same one that I’m in. My problem—if you can call it that—is that my fiancé thinks too highly of me! Somehow he’s gotten an inflated view of how talented and brilliant I am, and no matter how banal a suggestion I make is he infuses it with profound insights. Most of the time these insights are really his own, loosely inspired by some half-baked thing I’ve said. Sometimes he takes “my” opinions so seriously that he uses them to challenge his own views, and ends up proclaiming that only “I” could have seen through his fallacies!

  All of this makes me nervous, most of all because I think that eventually, after his infatuation wears off (which it’s bound to do … right?), he’s going to see me for what I am and feel he’s been deceived—which, of course he has been, even if the deception is really self-deception. On the other hand, I have to admit that it feels great to be so valued, and I’ve gained a lot more confidence from hearing myself praised to the skies by someone I so respect. It feels so good, in fact, that I never correct him and just accept the credit and compliments as if I deserved them.

  What should I do? I love this guy to bits and don’t want to lose him—not now and not in the future when his fog of love lifts.

  Yours truly,

  Teetering on Pedestal

  Dear TOP,

  The idealization of you by your fiancé has several components—not one of which has anything to do with you. Accomplished though he may be, he doesn’t sound as if he has much self-confidence. An offshoot of this is that, to feel important, he must partner with the most brilliant and insightful woman … making you a reflection of his superior taste.

  Now that he has built you up with his compliments, and because you wisely see reality, I think a heart-to-heart is in order about the whole issue. If you initiate it now, you will greatly diminish the chance for him to arrive at these conclusions himself, later on, to your detriment. What I recommend is essentially to set him straight. Admit that it was wonderfully flattering to have him consider you his intellectual and solution-oriented superior, but such is not the case, and you do not want this to go on any longer. Point out that he became a success before you arrived on the scene, and that you really are equals—complementary and inspiring to each other, no doubt, but equals.

  I thought it would be interesting to check what a philosopher had to say about your predicament and went right to the top, TOP, and consulted Plato. And I have to admit, his take is quite a bit different from mine. Here’s what he has to say:

  “The dynamic that you describe, TOP, seems to me altogether characteristic of love. To be in love with a person is to see reflected in that person all the values we most idealize.2 This is how it comes to be the case that, in the lover’s special sight, the one who is loved is bathed in a radiance of significance that sets him or her apart from all other things that exist. Of course, such an incomparable radiance is a delusion, but it is a delusion inseparable from love and love’s desire to want all good to come to the one we love.3

  “Your lover’s perception of an intelligence in you that you yourself don’t recognize is an indication of both his love for you and his love for intelligence, and I think you will agree that both of these are good. But there is even more good to be derived from his loving delusion, since it is, by your own description, mutually beneficial. He is being led on to ever better ideas by perceiving them as coming to him through the filter of you; and you, TOP, are coming more into your own as your confidence grows. This, too, is characteristic of lovers at their best. When they gain their wings, they shall do so together because of their love (Phaedrus 256e).

  “So my advice to you, TOP, is don’t even think about setting him straight and getting him to see you as you really are, since that would be inconsistent with his continuing to love you. Love has no truck with straight seeing, and for this reason is sometimes spoken of as a divine intoxication. Rather, continue to flourish in his tipsy sight so that the unrealistic way in which he sees you corresponds, over time, more and more to the way that you really are.”

  So there you have it, TOP, two very different responses to your quandary, one from the romantic Plato and the other from the pragmatic Margo.

  Margo, realistically

  Dear Margo,

  I’m twenty-eight years old and engaged to be married to an unusual man who’s ten years older than me. He’s the minister of our church, and his preaching is so powerful that we are now bursting at the rafters and are raising money for a gigantic new facility. My family belongs to his congregation, and they think the world of him. In fact, ever since he and I have become engaged, my family has regarded me with new-found respect. Simply being his choice has cast me in an entirely different light in their eyes.

  Recently, and bit by bit, my fiancé has been taking me into his confidence, and this involves his telling me about the special plans he believes God has for him. He told me that he’s known about his “divine destiny” since he was sixteen, and every step of his life since then, including his engagement to me, has served to convince him that he has a unique providential role to play. I am the only person to whom he has made these revelations, and he has told me that every piece of information he has shared with me binds us more closely together.

  On the one hand, I do believe that there have been prophets i
n times past, so why shouldn’t there be people who are in special communion with God now? On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder whether my fiancé is a little bit crazy. The question that’s tormenting me, Margo, is how can I tell the difference? I think my doubts may even be the strongest evidence I have against his “divine destiny,” since if he were truly being led by the hand of God, why would God lead him to a girl who has the doubts I do? Then again, maybe God is testing me to see if I’m worthy to marry such a man.

  So my question is, first of all, how can I tell the difference between a man of God and a lunatic? And secondly, even if my future husband is somewhat delusional, does it really matter? Is there such a thing as a good kind of lunacy that might help a person like him in his special calling?

  Yours truly,

  Doubting Thomasina

  Dear Doubting,

  I suspect people who believe in God also regard their representatives and interpreters on earth as special, and perhaps one step closer to the deity than they are themselves. For this reason I am not surprised that your family sees you in a new light. A halo effect, as it were. (Sorry.) Regarding your fiancé believing God has “special plans for him,” one may assume that many people choosing the clerical life have this feeling. In Catholicism this is referred to as “being called.” I think, for believers, one need not be a prophet to feel in communion with God. Just as there may be a fine line between mad and inspired, there may be just as narrow a difference between grandiose and thinking big. Your intended sounds as though he has Billy Graham–like charisma, hence the growing flock. Should you see him veering off into Reverend Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral territory, then it might be time for you to step in and remind him of his main mission.

  As for your question about divine destiny and God, my understanding of these things is that God does not pick partners for people—one assumes because he is too busy.

  But since this seems to me a question bordering on the trickily philosophical, I turned to my expert consultant on all things philosophical, Plato. He agrees with me that you don’t need to sound the loon alarm just yet, since your fiancé may be, as he puts it, “maddened and possessed in the right way” (Phaedrus 244e). I’ll let him explain: “There is madness which is sickness, leading a person only to confusion and falsity, and then there is madness that is not sickness at all, since it leads to clarity and truth, even though the person struck by such madness can give no account of how he comes to know what he knows. This is why another name for such madness is inspiration, since it is as if the gods themselves had breathed into them, and it is why, in both your English and my Greek, the words “manic” and “mantic” are closely connected.4

  “There are many gifts that come with a touch of madness, if we understand madness in this salubrious sense: that is, the state of knowing of a sudden and without knowing how we know—more possessed by, than possessing, the knowledge. Poets, when inspired, engender passages echoing with unworldly knowledge, so that trained hierophants can consume their lives in interpretation. And yet the poets, when we speak with them, are ordinary people of ordinary knowledge, so that there is no accounting for how they spoke the poetry that they did, and they themselves are at a loss both to say not only how they know but even what they know.5 It is as if they are moved by a spirit greater than their own, their own small person taken over, possessed, by a genius altogether outside them. In all such cases, artistic or not, it is natural to put the experience, so profound and mysterious, in the language of the gods, or of God, as your fiancé does, Doubting, whether one deploys this language metaphorically or not. From what you say, Doubting, it seems that your fiancé deploys the language of God non-metaphorically, but that in itself is not a sign of the bad madness. For whether these unaccountable insights come from sources divine or not is not for us to say.

  “How then can a person tell which is the good madness and which the bad? The person himself who is subject to this experience is in the least favorable position to judge the difference, since both good and bad madness will feel for him equally compelling. This is just as true in romantic as in religious experience, where extraordinary experience explodes into a life and leaves ordinary life shattered. It is for others to judge the difference, based on whether what the person says seems to bespeak only confusion and falsity, on the one hand, or something more worthwhile, on the other, even if wonderous strange. If, Doubting, you, like your parents and the other congregants, feel that there is wisdom and beauty in your fiancé’s madness, then think of him as no more frighteningly mad than a greatly inspired poet. But if your suspicions about your fiancé continue to nag at you, then it does not matter whether he is maddened in the right way or the wrong. Whatever his madness, it is not the right madness for you, since clearly the madness of eros has not entered into your apprehension of him.”

  I think Plato makes an excellent point, Doubting. The line between madness and inspiration, or between, as Plato puts it, bad madness and good madness, may be blurred; but if you find yourself irresolvably uneasy over where on the continuum your fiancé falls, then perhaps this just isn’t the madman for you.

  Margo, maddeningly

  Dear Margo,

  I am a twenty-six-year-old woman, married with three kids. Life is good for the most part, and I am happy as a stay-at-home mom. My husband and I have a great relationship; we are the best of friends, and when we’re doing things together as a couple or a family we have the best time. Our sex life is good, and we’re very happy, for the most part. Here’s the problem: I don’t find him attractive. I think I married him because we were such great friends. He finds me attractive and extremely sexy for a mom of three. I don’t want to end the relationship, and I definitely don’t want to cheat. But I find myself flirting and becoming attracted to very handsome men. Should I stay in a marriage in which I’m not attracted to my partner, or should I try to find happiness with a man I am attracted to? I don’t want to lose my husband as a great friend. I do love him.

  Yours truly,

  Eye Rampantly Roving

  Dear ERR,

  I have redacted the city you live in to avert a stampede of women moving there in hopes of finding your husband. To be in a marriage with a great friend—enjoying a good relationship, great times, a good sex life, and general happiness—is pretty much all there is.

  Take it from me, the handsome thing wears thin. (Plus, low lights—or no lights—often set the scene in the bedroom.) If it takes a therapist to get your head back on straight, go!

  And what’s more, this time I’ve got Plato, philosopher among philosophers, firmly on my side, even though he had a lot to say about how important beauty is.

  “Of all the perfections—wisdom and courage and virtue and temperance—beauty is the only one that makes itself known to the sight, which gives us our keenest sensations coming to us through the body. Wisdom doesn’t make itself known in this way because the sort of clear image of itself that would be required for sight would provoke terrible, loving desires, as would be the case with any other of those perfections we long for. It is beauty alone which has that fate, and thus is the most evident and the loveliest” (Phaedrus 250d).

  So that’s a big yes from Plato as regards the importance of beauty in making us fall for others. But just in case you’re thinking that Plato, being one of those frivolous types who thinks that only looks matter, is giving you permission, ERR, to hustle yourself along in the direction where your roving eye is leading, Plato also has this to say:

  “The beauty of souls is more valuable than that of the body so that if someone who has a becoming soul is not physically attractive, still the person who appreciates this beauty will be content to love him, to take care of him, and with him to search out and give birth to the higher forms of beauty” (Symposium 210c).

  So listen to Margo and Plato, ERR, two wise old birds, and give up the flirting with handsome men. Come back to reality, which for you, lucky girl, is a pretty sweet deal.

  Margo, p
leadingly

  Dear Margo,

  I’ve been in an intense relationship with a guy for a little more than a year now. For a good chunk of this time I couldn’t believe how great things were going, especially since, to be honest, he’s the sort of man I would have thought was leagues out of my league. But lately he’s been making demands on me in the bedroom (and everywhere else, including the kitchen sink) that I don’t feel comfortable with. He says that if this is going to be a long-term deal then we have to keep working on it to keep it interesting, but in my book the stuff he wants me to do is just gross, not to speak of slightly frightening. He’s taken to taunting me for being sexually vanilla, which is the least offensive way he puts it, and has even hinted that if I don’t play along with his idea of fun then he’s going to lose interest in me, which translates to my losing him. Since everything else about him is great—he’s handsome, successful, and a lot of fun, at least when he’s not berating me for being uptight—should I just give in and let him do what he wants (maybe getting good and drunk first)?

  Yours truly,

  Battered Over New Demands And Getting Exhausted

  Dear BONDAGE,

  There is an old rule subscribed to by mentally healthy people: Anything is permissible in the bedroom, including the kitchen sink, if both parties wish to do it. This man’s ideas of “interesting” could escalate into God knows what (or whom) so I would tell him you disagree, philosophically, with his unilateral ideas of good sex, as well as with his lack of regard for your wishes. I would, indeed, lose him, and the sooner the better.

  I was certain that Plato, whom faithful readers of this column know I’ve been regularly consulting on matters philosophical, would agree with me on this one. Not only does he agree, but, as usual, he’s got some interesting theories to back up his advice. Here’s what he has to say: