MCCOY, laughing: Well, I’m going with that last one, just as long as you add that it’s the kind of insane that makes right-thinking Americans the world over want to smack you upside the head.
PLATO: It comes sometimes to reactions even more violent. My friend, the best of men, was charged with the crime of doing nothing more than practicing philosophy as best as he knew how. He was found guilty and executed.
MCCOY: Where was that, Texas?
PLATO: No. It was in Greece, though many years ago.
MCCOY: I’m sorry to hear about your friend’s ordeal, but I have to ask you a question: What was he doing to tick people off so much?
PLATO: It is a good question.
MCCOY: Since you apparently don’t know me, you don’t know that I only ask the one kind of question, and that kind is good. So unless your friend was prosecuted under that military junta you Greeks had going on back there in the late sixties, early seventies—
PLATO: He was brought to trial by our democracy. And in fact it was by popular vote that he was condemned to die, even though the Delphic oracle had declared that there was no person who was wiser.
MCCOY: Yeah, well, I have two Peabodys. Listen, not to disrespect the memory of your friend, but there’s got to be more to the story than what you’re saying. You’re spinning, and I’m calling you on it. We don’t call this the No Bull Bin for nothing. See, democracies don’t go around bumping people off just for being annoying types who think they know better than everybody else, which, from what I can gather, is what you philosophers specialize in. In fact, I have to say, Plato, I haven’t spoken to you two minutes and you’re already beginning to irk me. But we live in a democracy that protects everyone’s right to be a royal pain.
PLATO: Progress has been made.
MCCOY: Debatable.
PLATO: I am impressed by the progress.
MCCOY: Then maybe your initial expectations were too low.
PLATO: Maybe they were.
MCCOY: You sure you’re a philosopher? You seem a little too ready to change your mind. Or maybe you just don’t have the courage of your convictions.
PLATO: I would prefer the courage of my questions.
MCCOY: Okay, I’m getting the picture. The pixels are depixelating. Maximum questions, minimum convictions. I don’t have to ask you on which side of the political divide you stand. I’m glad we got that one sniffed out early. Although really, what else should I have been expecting? Philosophy. It’s one of those we-don’t-have-anything-to-teach-so-we’ll-just-lecture-you-on-and-on-about-our-own-moral-superiority subjects. Here’s the setup in your so-called higher education. You’ve got your humanities on the one side, and your sciences on the other.
PLATO: I cannot see it that way. They must both be on the same side, or there is no knowledge at all.
MCCOY: It’s like I’m saying. Your humanities get off on saying there are no answers to anything, while your sciences get off on saying that they have the answers to everything. And you know what I say? I say a pox on both their houses.
PLATO: If it were truly as you describe, I would join you in your condemnation.
MCCOY: Yeah, well, it is as I’m describing. The humanities say no one can know anything, the scientists say that they know everything. I’ve had some of the scientists here in the No Bull Bin when they were hawking their atheist books, and they made a poor showing of themselves. I haven’t been able to get a single one of them to even explain to me how you get the tides to work without the Deity stepping in to keep it all going.
PLATO: The tides?
MCCOY: Yeah, the tides. You must see plenty of tide action down your way in Greece. The tides come in and the tides go out, and the scientists can’t explain it. There’s never a miscommunication.
PLATO: Never a miscommunication among the scientists?
MCCOY: No, among the tides. Not one scientist I’ve had on the show could explain to me how they seem to know all on their own when to go out and come back in. They do it day after day—
PLATO: In fact, twice a day, roughly every twelve hours—
MCCOY: Nothing rough about it. It’s like the Marines, a precision operation all the way. Still, at least they have something to show for themselves.
PLATO: The tides? The Marines?
MCCOY: No, the scientists. Where do you even start, what with the smartphones and all the other whatsits and whichits that make it impossible for me to keep the attention of anybody on my staff for more than two minutes at a time? They’re all ADD, but science provides the cure for that, too. There’s no end to the benefits pouring out of science, whereas I don’t see you philosophers putting any merchandise on the market.
PLATO: And when we speak of the parerga—
MCCOY: Parerga? What’s that? Some new smartphone?
PLATO: I meant only the by-products of science, among which let us not forget the computer—
MCCOY: Yeah, I noticed you carry yours around like your blankie—
PLATO: —and the Internet, and Google’s cloud with the vast amounts of information that it stores, even though in no particular place, and which we can summon, exactly what we need, to our own personal devices because of an algorithm, powerful and secret, but nevertheless the outpouring of human minds inflamed by the Promethean fire.
MCCOY: Okay, let’s not break out into strains of poetry here. We’ve established that science has got some useful stuff to show for itself.
PLATO: The technology is wondrous—
MCCOY: Except when it breaks and you’re on the phone for an hour and a half with someone whose first language is definitely not English—
PLATO: But it’s not in such usefulness that science demonstrates its true worth, but rather in answering to the power in the soul that is of a nature to love truth and to do everything for its sake (Republic 527b–c; Philebus 58b–d).
MCCOY, laughing: What, you want to praise useless knowledge?
PLATO: Yes.
MCCOY: Is that the title of the book you want me to plug? In Praise of Useless Knowledge?
PLATO: No.
MCCOY: Well, it’s a good title, even if it’s a stupid idea. Why would anyone want useless knowledge?
PLATO: I only meant that the most desirable knowledge isn’t desirable because of its instrumental value in yielding such by-products as those of which we’ve just been speaking—
MCCOY: Zero of which you’ve been able to show for yourself—
PLATO: But rather the most desirable knowledge is useful in the search for the beautiful and the good. Otherwise, if pursued for any other purpose, it is useless (Republic 351c).
MCCOY, laughing: The beautiful and the good? How’d we suddenly get to the beautiful and the good? One minute we’re speaking about the tides coming in and going out, the next you’re off and running on about the beautiful and the good.
PLATO: Because the reason that will most please you, in your search for the best explanation for the tides, is the same reason that most pleases the world itself. You and the cosmos are as one.
MCCOY: I’m as one with the cosmos?
PLATO: In your search to understand it.
MCCOY, laughing: There are pinheads who accuse me of having an inflated ego, but I’m not about to equate myself with the whole frigging cosmos. I’m not that delusional. Are you?
PLATO: It was not the assertion of an equation between you and the cosmos, but rather an affinity.
MCCOY: You mean that the cosmos likes me? Okay, I’ll go with that. That’s my take on the situation.
PLATO: Here is what I had in mind: You, in your search to understand the cosmos, are most satisfied with the most beautiful reason; and so, too, is the cosmos. You will find the most beautiful reason to be the one that most elegantly does justice to your notion of intelligibility, which form is given by none other than mathematics; and so, too, will the cosmos. In that sense, you and the cosmos have an affinity with each other, in your recognition of the beautiful. The force of the good has taken ref
uge in an alliance with the nature of the beautiful. For measure and proportion manifest themselves in all areas as beauty and virtue (Philebus 64e).
MCCOY: Listen, I’ve already warned you once about that flowery stuff. We tell it like it is on this network. And I don’t know where to even begin to attack all the nonsense you’re trying to spin here. First off, the last place I’d look for a beautiful reason is in mathematics. I hate math, except when my accountant uses it to give me good news. In the second place, the cosmos isn’t looking for its reasons in math either, because the cosmos isn’t looking for any reasons at all. The cosmos doesn’t do any looking. We’re the ones who do the looking.
PLATO: Of course, the cosmos doesn’t look for any reasons. The cosmos has already found the best reason, which is what has made it exactly what it is. The cosmos is full of reasons, which are the very ones you seek. It is in this sense that the saying “all things are full of gods” is entirely right and sufficient (Laws 991d).
MCCOY: Full of gods! Oh boy. Most of you academics we get passing through here aren’t willing to give me one God. You want to give me a whole cosmos full of them. Is it so hard for you big thinkers to get the number right? It’s either one, or it’s blasphemy.
PLATO: I meant no blasphemy. In fact, it seems to me that, in speaking now of the forms with which the world becomes intelligible, both to itself and to us, we speak of what things a person is to learn about reverence towards the gods and how he is to learn them. When you hear what it is, you will find it strange (Laws 989e).
MCCOY, drily: No doubt.
PLATO: I say its name is astronomy (ibid.).
MCCOY: Listen, if you somehow think that going out on a starlit night and staring up at the Big Dipper beats going down on your knees and praying to the Deity, then okay, what can I say? People find all sorts of ways of getting out of going to church. But let’s just clear up this confusion about any so-called gods. It’s God, singular, not plural. Just because something is good that doesn’t mean that you improve the situation by bringing in multiples of the thing. You don’t go making the situation any better by multiplying gods. That’s kind of the biggest no-no there is. Have we got that squared away?
PLATO: That there is a unity that binds together all the diverse best reasons: who would want to dispute this? The person who learns in the right way always fixes his or her eye, as we say, on unity. Every diagram and complex system of numbers, and every structure of harmony and the uniform pattern of the processes of nature, are in the end, a single thing applying to all these phenomena. To one who studies these subjects in this way, there will be revealed a single natural bond that links them all. But anyone who is going to pursue these studies in any other way must “call on good fortune for help,” as we also say. For without them, no one in cities will ever become happy. This is the right way, this is the upbringing, these are the studies. Whether they are difficult, whether they are easy, this is the way we must proceed (Epinomis 991e).1
MCCOY: Sounds to me like you want to set up your own No Bull Bin, buddy. Only you wouldn’t let in anybody but the math nerds. I’d like to see them running our cities when they can’t even manage to put on two matching socks in the morning. What was that some sort of grand theory of everything that you were spinning there a moment ago.
PLATO: There is always the vision of such a unity guiding those who think rightly on these subjects. The beauty toward which we are led could only be one that would unify all.
MCCOY: Some kind of E=mc2 magic bullet, only stronger?
PLATO: And even deeper and even more beautiful, the expression of the elegance that the cosmos itself gives as its own reason for being whatever way it is. In this way, the world becomes intelligible to us when we grasp how the world is intelligible to itself.
MCCOY: Yeah, only here’s the difference, pal. The world can be intelligible to me but that doesn’t mean it’s intelligible to itself, because—and here’s the Network News Alert—I’m an intelligent being and that’s how I come to know so much, but the cosmos knows squat. There’s intelligence behind it, all right, but not in it. Got that? Behind, not in. You seem to be a guy who puts a lot of stock in math stuff. Am I right?
PLATO: You are right.
MCCOY: Well, then, if the cosmos is so smart, how come it doesn’t know any math? It doesn’t even know how to count!
PLATO: It knows that the very thing that it teaches us and that we learn is number and how to count. If it did not know this, it would be the least intelligent thing of all. It would really not “know itself,” as the proverb goes (Laws 988b).
MCCOY: But that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you! It doesn’t know itself! It’s just dopey mindless matter. Just because it’s huge doesn’t mean it’s smart. Just take a look at the federal government.
PLATO: Is it because these physical processes are unalterable that you deny them intelligible reasons? Do you see intelligence in humans—
MCCOY: The few who aren’t pinheads—
PLATO: —but not in the cosmos because humans are unpredictable, whereas the cosmos isn’t? But it is their very intelligibility that renders the workings of the cosmos so unalterable. Not even adamant could ever be mightier or more unalterable (Laws 982c).
MCCOY: You actually got an institution of higher learning to fund you for spinning this stuff?
PLATO: I founded the Academy.
MCCOY: That explains a lot. Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re saying that the cosmos, by which you mean stuff like the tides coming in and going out in military formation, and the sun rising and setting so that you can set your clocks to it, and rain becoming snow if the temperature falls below freezing, and all the rest of it, you’re saying that these things, these dumb physical things, actually know what they’re doing? You’re saying I could walk up to the tides and ask them “So how the heck are you doing that?” and they’d be able to tell me?
PLATO: Is that not what our men and women of science have always been doing, pressing the processes of nature so that they yield up the reasons why they are as they are?
MCCOY: But they’re just dumb physical things that are moving around! And I don’t just mean the scientists here, but the things the scientists are studying, the tides and what all. And any scientists who question the tides and think they hear them answering back ought to be medicated.
PLATO: Their movements speak the language of mathematics.2
MCCOY: No, pal, we speak the language of mathematics. Or at least some of us do. Others of us would rather go get a colonoscopy. The tides aren’t saying a thing. They just keep going in and out, never a miscommunication, just like I keep trying to tell you.
PLATO: That is exactly right. Never a miscommunication because they speak the language of mathematics. Hence, they are unalterable. You yourself keep repeating the answer, as repetitive as the tides.
MCCOY: Are you trying to tell me that you can actually hear the tides talking to you? And you started out this conversation complaining that people call you insane?
PLATO: I did not complain of it. I only reported it.
MCCOY: Well, is it any wonder? I mean, the rest of us go to the shore and hear splish, splash, but you hear … Well, I don’t know what the hell you’re claiming to be hearing. The Pythagorean theorem or something or other. Splish, a, splash, b, splish, equals, splash c.
PLATO: a2 + b2= c2. In right-angled triangles the square on the side subtending the right angle is equal to the squares on the sides containing the right angle.3
MCCOY: Show-off.
PLATO: But the Pythagorean theorem is not the mathematics relevant to the tides, but rather the lunar gravity differential field at the earth’s surface, the primary cause of the equipotential tidal bulges that account for the two daily high tides.
MCCOY: Okay, I told you before, pal, that this is the No Bull Bin, and that means speaking so that people can understand you, so just cut that out, otherwise I’m going to have to cut your mic.
PLA
TO: Still, in another sense you are very right about Pythagoras, friend of number, who guessed the secret long ago that the most difficult task of reconciling the realm of change with the realm of the eternal necessities could happen only by way of mathematics, running between the two realms, like winged Hermes. It is number and measure that provide the structure of all that comes to be; in this way the limitless possibilities are rendered intelligible by the exactitude of number (Philebus 25c–d, 30c; Timaeus, passim).
MCCOY: Did you say Pythagoras was a friend of yours? That guy and his stupid theorem made my life a living hell in seventh grade. And you can tell him that for me personally when you see him.
PLATO: It would dismay him to hear it.
MCCOY: Good. Let him be dismayed by all the trouble he’s inflicted on defenseless children through the ages. Boy, talk about useless knowledge. You think that in all the years that I’ve been able to achieve so much—writing best sellers and winning awards for excellence in broadcast journalism and having the biggest audience on any cable network—you think I ever once had to think about the Pythagorean theorem? I should have known you’d be friends with a killjoy like that.
PLATO: He did not kill our joy but showed us the painless path to it, the path that avoids the pains that cannot be avoided in seeking other pleasures, for the pleasures of learning are unmixed with pain (Philebus 52b)—
MCCOY: Maybe for you, pal.
PLATO: It is the pleasure you yourself seek as you ask the tides to yield up their explanations, seeking the best of reasons—
MCCOY: Those, of course, ultimately residing in the inscrutable will of the Deity—
PLATO: Not inscrutable at all, but expressed in the most perfect of mathematical formulations, itself an expression of intelligence—
MCCOY: Okay, you got that right, if what you mean is intelligent design, that being the Deity’s—
Plato at the Googleplex Page 44