Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  All of the circumstances that are determining the souls’ choices are, from the point of view of logos-supported aretē, mere accidents of happenstance, and the moral character of a person cannot be a matter of mere accidents of happenstance. This would be a point developed with great force by Immanuel Kant. There can be nothing accidental in a person’s being moral. Whether people are moral must be something within their control—a matter of their will, is the way Kant put it—and so a matter over which they have choice and can be held accountable. And to be held accountable they must be prepared to offer an account for why they behaved as they did. That’s the sense of free will that matters. If I am a respectable specimen of humanity because I happen to have enjoyed the good fortune of having been born into a nice family, which inculcated the habits of behaving well, then, although well-behaved, I am not a virtuous moral agent. Change my circumstances—put me into a family of cheaters and exploiters—and just watch what I’ll become. That is how the returned souls in the Myth of Er behave. They are morally hostage to their circumstances and not moral agents. Not even the thousand years spent either in reward or punishment could transform them into moral agents.

  If there really is to be such a thing as moral accountability, believed Plato and Kant, then a person’s habits of character (our word “ethics” derives from the Greek ethōs, which, as has already been mentioned, means “habit”) must be an intimate part of that person, arrived at deliberately, reflected on and chosen and becoming the habitual manifestation of moral character. One must be in a position to own one’s ethics. Kant argues that only a person making the moral choices for the right moral reasons can be regarded as morally worthy, which, of course, implies that there are right moral reasons, and that it lies within our power both to comprehend their rightness and to act upon them because of their rightness: to let these reasons be the determining factor in our behavior.

  All of these claims can be read into Plato’s Myth of Er. It is a plea for thinking one’s way out of the contingent circumstances of one’s life; even divinely imposed circumstances count in this myth as merely contingent and offer nothing by way of the knowledge we need to live as we should—which is a resounding rejoinder to those who still threaten us, even still, that without the fear of heaven and hell nobody would behave as they should. Plato’s souls actually return from their thousand years of either above or below in no better position to choose the life they ought to live.

  Now it seems that it is here, Glaucon, that a human being faces the greatest danger of all. And because of this, each of us must neglect all other subjects and be most concerned to seek out and learn those that will enable him to distinguish the good life from the bad and always to make the best choice possible in every situation. He should think over all the things we have mentioned and how they jointly and severally determine what the virtuous life is like. That way he will know what the good and bad effects of beauty are when it is mixed with wealth, poverty, and a particular state of the soul. He will know the effects of high or low birth, private life or ruling office, physical strength or weakness, ease or difficulty in learning and all the things that are naturally part of the soul or are acquired, and he will know what they achieve when mixed with one another. And from all this he will be able, by considering the nature of the soul, to reason out which life is better and which worse and to choose accordingly, call a life worse if it leads the soul to become more unjust, better if it leads the soul to become more just, and ignoring everything else. We have seen that this is the best way to choose, whether in life or death. (618c–e)

  Plato is unpacking for us, in his Myth of Er, all that he heard resonating that day in Socrates’ rousing cry to the Athenians that the unexamined life is not worth living; just as Kant will later unpack for us the implications of Plato’s Myth of Er, and as others will unpack for us the implications of Kant’s categorical imperative, in a process that has been cumulative and ongoing, if also excruciatingly halting, with periods when the direction is altogether reversed.

  Anyone who denies this ongoing process, arguing that such normative concerns as Socrates was urging can never make a difference and thus have produced no consequences in the way life has been lived over the centuries, has an affinity with the Athenians that summer day over two millennia ago, unwilling to give Socrates his due, shouting him down as he strived to be heard over their jeers.

  * * *

  1Pericles’ tactic had been to engage the Spartans, who were superior fighters on land, only on sea. Toward that end, he built up the city walls of Athens and extended the long walls down to the port of Piraeus, guarded by the navy, so that goods could be brought in. He had all the Athenians, including those living in the outlying khora, move into the astu. The Spartans could come and burn everything outside the city walls, which is what they periodically did, but, according to Pericles’ plan, the Athenians would not be drawn into a land fight. Pericles knew that the Spartans would not stay away from their own city for long, since they were always wary of a slave uprising. In between the attacks the Athenians could go out and replant their fields. Sparta’s secret ally was the plague, which most scholars believe came by way of boat, perhaps carried by rats—or the flees on the rats—and entered the city by way of Piraeus. The plague broke out three times during the course of the Peloponnesian War, spreading quickly through the overcrowded city. Thucydides, one of the few to contract the plague and live to tell of it, gives a lurid description of plague-gripped Athens. See Appendix B.

  2The Lyceum was a place for exercise and conversation right outside the city walls, on the east side, and was the future site of Aristotle’s school.

  3In the Symposium, however, Socrates and Aristophanes are represented as being on good terms.

  4“Only in Athens, where the traditional forces of family, blood, and religion were at a single blow deprived of political significance, did a genuine political democracy grow up out of the older organization. In the few other democratic states in Greece, the democracies had almost all come into being as the result of outside and usually Athenian pressure and consequently did not count, psychologically, in the eyes of their Greek contemporaries.… This is why Alcibiades attacks democracy in his speech at Sparta as ‘acknowledged lunacy.’ It was a thing virtually unique and Athenian in fifth-century Greece.” David Grene, Greek Political Theory, pp. 35–36.

  5Pericles died in 429. The Second Peloponnesian War, which was the main one, lasted from 431 to 404.

  6Actually, whether there was a formal list drawn up is still debated. Like the Five Thousand, who were said to have been the government after the fall of the the Four Hundred in 411, another brief period of an earlier oligarchy, there may have been no actual list. Rather, in both cases of temporary oligarchy, the larger number might well have pretended to a broader base of oligarchic support than there is reason to credit. Dramatic rhetoric about striking names from a scroll comes decades afterward.

  7Aristophanes had coined lakōnomanein, meaning “to be mad for Sparta,” Laconia, or Lacedaemonia, being the region of the Peloponnesian peninsula of which Sparta was the administrative capital. His other neologism was sōkratein, “to socratize.” The verse reads: “All men had gone Sparta-mad; they went / Long-haired, half-starved, unwashed, Socratified / With scytales in their hands” (The Birds 1281–83).

  8This is, sadly, true of I. F. Stone’s book The Trial of Socrates (New York: Anchor Books, 1989). Perhaps it is no surprise that Stone, whose lifelong orientation was political, would interpret Socrates’ death in exclusively political terms. The conclusion he draws is that Socrates was anti-democratic, rejecting the civic goddess of persuasion, Peitho, as understood by the nature of Athenian democracy.

  9Adriaan Lanni, “Transitional Justice in Ancient Athens: A Case Study,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 32, no. 2 (2010): 551–594.

  10Isocrates, “Against Callimachus,” 31, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0144%3Aspeech
%3D18%3Asection%3D31, and 32). http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0144%3Aspeech%3D18%3Asection%3D32.

  11In chapter 17 of the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides presents the dialogue—whether personally recalled or reconstructed from others’ accounts—between the Athenian envoys and the Melian magistrates. The slaughter that follows the exchange between the adversaries is all the more chilling for the dialogue that went before. The Athenians, with full civility, laid out their realpolitik, explaining that real negotiations can only take place between parties equal in power; otherwise, the stronger will do as they wish—in other words, Thrasymachus applied at the political level. The Melians bring up fairness and the favor of the gods, to which the Athenians respond: “When you speak of the favor of the gods, we may as fairly hope for that as yourselves; neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believe of the gods, or practice among themselves. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear that we shall be at a disadvantage.”

  12Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, chapter 17, vii, 30.

  13In Xenophon’s Symposium, Autolycus is a young boy of astonishing beauty, who sits modestly on the floor near where his father reclines on a couch. “Noting the scene presented, the first idea to strike the mind of any one must certainly have been that beauty has by nature something regal in it; and the more so, if it chance to be combined (as now in the person of Autolycus) with modesty and self-respect.”

  14Debra Nails, “The Trial and Death of Socrates,” in A Companion to Socrates, ed. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

  15This indictment comes to us by way of Diogenes Laertius (third century C.E.), who got it from Favorinus (second century C.E.), who said he saw it in the public archive, the Metroön.

  16The number became 501 sometime around the time of Socrates’ trial. The odd number ensured that there were no ties. The large number discouraged bribery.

  17And surely, it’s telling, too, that having argued the inabilities of such men as Pericles to transmit a knowledge of aretē even to sons, and so, by implication, to the citizens of Athens, Socrates proceeds, in that same dialogue, to demonstrate that, with the right methods, knowledge of mathematics can be drawn forth from a slave.

  18Xenophon also presents Socrates as being indifferent to the mortal danger he was facing. “And now I will mention further certain things which I have heard from Hermogenes, the son of Hipponicus, concerning him. He said that even after Meletus had drawn up the indictment, he himself used to hear Socrates conversing and discussing everything rather than the suit impending, and had ventured to suggest that he ought to be considering the line of his defense, to which, in the first instance, the master answered: ‘Do I not seem to you to have been practicing that my whole life long?’ And upon his asking ‘How?’ added in explanation that he had passed his days in nothing else save in distinguishing between what is just and unjust, and in doing what is right and abstaining from what is wrong, which conduct, he added, ‘I hold to be the finest possible practice for my defense’ ” (Memorabilia VIII, 8–9).

  19He is indeed excellent. He’ll be among the mathematicians whom Euclid cites in his Elements. Other sources on whom Euclid drew are Leon and Theudius, both of whom were fourth-century mathematicians who spent time in the Academy; and also Eudoxus, with whom Plato also had significant contact. See Burnyeat, “Plato on Why Mathematics Is Good for the Soul.”

  20The framing drama is set in 391 (see Nails, The People of Plato, pp. 274–278), eight years after the internal drama. The battle in which Theaetetus is fatally wounded would have been fought during the Corinthian War. Nails calculates that he would have been twenty-four, remarking, “Theaetetus is thus no exception to the rule that mathematicians do most of their creative work while very young” (p. 277).

  21The word “nihilism” has an interesting history. It was coined by Heinrich Jacobi, who formulated it in the context of his attack on the Enlightenment, and most specifically his attack on all philosophers for attempting to ground moral truths on reason alone, without regard to theism. Jacobi put Spinoza (dead for a hundred years by this time) front and center in his attack on the Enlightenment. Indeed Spinoza’s magnum opus, The Ethics, was one of the first attempts, after the long period in which Christian thought dominated Europe, to return to the project of placing ethics on a firm secular foundation. See my “Literary Spinoza,” in The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, ed. Michael della Rocca (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

  22Though perhaps he did. Xenophon’s account of Socrates’ trial differs in many important respects from Plato’s, and there were apparently other accounts of Socrates’ trial in circulation. Since part of the rationale for the apologetic Socratic literature was a concern for the long view, rather than a journalistic record of what had happened, the historical accuracy of Plato’s Apology is a matter of continuing debate.

  23Interestingly, Ruby Blondell, who argues with great force and persuasiveness that it is a “basic methodological mistake” to assume or even infer “the equivalence of any of Plato’s characters with the voice of the author,” and that we therefore must be extremely wary of attributing any doctrines to Plato, holds it to be hard not to believe that Plato himself believed in the immortality of the soul “in some shape or form.” Blondell, Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues, p. 18. I confess I don’t find it hard to question whether Plato believed in the soul’s immortality. The notion of our personal identity inhering in “something” that could survive the body’s death was a doctrine of the Pythagoreans, and Plato gives it a sympathetic hearing in the Phaedo, as well as using it as an element in many of his “myths.” But there is a contrasting view of personal identity—and the possibilities (or not) for personal immortality—to be read out of Plato, one that places him far closer to his Greek ethos than to the Christianity to come, namely that it is our attainment of the extraordinary—for Plato, attained by way of reason—in this incurably mortal life that allows us whatever participation in immortality is possible. This idea will be taken up in the remainder of the chapter.

  24In “Phaedo, Socrates, and the Chronology of the Spartan War with Elis,” E. I. McQueen and Christopher J. Rowe establish that the story is at least—as had been disputed—possible, since there was a Spartan-Elis war, in which Athens became involved. The defeat of Elis could then have been the occasion of Phaedo’s being made a captive and sold to an Athenian brothel. Diogenes also reports that Phaedo founded a Socratic school of philosophy in his native Elis. He cites eight titles written by Phaedo, though none are extant.

  25Plato uses this vision of a soul able to survive the death of its body in various of his myths, including the myths that end the Republic and the Gorgias.

  26A beloved friend of mine—the mathematician Bob Osserman—recently died. As his family and friends gathered around him, he said, “Well, this is the funniest thing I ever did!” Bob died in much the same spirit as Plato’s Socrates, with just the same sort of cheerful dispassion.

  27Consistent with its vision of an “attenuated immortality,” the Timaeus suggests a non-dualist view of the human soul. Not only is our thinking a matter of the “marrow” inside our heads, but even our moral characters can be located there. (Timaeus 86c–d. See chapter ι, below.)

  28M. F. Burnyeat, “The Impiety of Socrates,” in The Trial and Execution of Socrates, ed. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 138.

  29The translations in this paragraph of the Apology are by Hugh Tredennick, from P
rinceton University Press, 1961.

  30See L. B. Carter, The Quiet Athenian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  31For example, the citizens who conspired to mutilate the herms the night before the fleet sailed to Sicily belonged to a sunōmosia.

  32There are other places in which Plato has Socrates flaunt his non-involvement in Athenian politics, for example, in the Gorgias, “I’m not one of the politicians. Last year I was elected to the Council by lot, and when our tribe was presiding and I had to call for a vote, I came in for a laugh. I didn’t know how to do it.… I do know how to produce one witness to whatever I’m saying, and that’s the man I’m having a discussion with. The majority I disregard” (473e–474a).

  33Of course, it would take several social and political revolutions to expand “the many” so as to include such groups as women and the impoverished. And even now this issue of just how many? isn’t altogether closed, even in the United States.

  η

  PLATO ON CABLE NEWS

  ROY MCCOY: Okay, so they tell me you’re a big deal in philosophy, Plato. I’m going to tell you up front—because that’s the kind of guy I am, up-front—that I don’t think much of philosophers.

  PLATO: Many don’t. The term attracts a wide range of reaction, from admiration to amusement to animadversion. Some people think philosophers are worthless, and others that they are worth everything in the world. Sometimes they take on the appearance of statesmen, and sometimes of sophists. Sometimes, too, they might give the impression that they’re completely insane (Sophist 216c–d).