Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  PLATO: And yet it might be the case that the truth first enters our minds as something strange and unsettling, our minds slowly coming to terms with its strangeness and reconfiguring themselves so that the sense of strangeness itself alters.

  MCCOY: Which reconfiguring requires, I suppose, a prolonged stay in your private academy, so that by the time the bilked students graduate they’re convinced that they can hear the tides whispering sweet theorems in their ears and that they see gods splashing around in the Milky Way. That’s just elitist crap. And maybe that’s the reason you don’t want to influence too many people, because then it wouldn’t be for the elite few anymore. It would be tarnished by being in too many heads, and you’d have to go come up with some other totally bizarro assertions to set you apart from the masses. It’s like when the soccer moms started getting themselves tattoos, which made the hipsters go get theirs lasered off.

  PLATO: The more people there are who have minds reconfigured by the truth, the better it will be for all of us.

  MCCOY: So then you do want to influence people. You do want to change their minds. You’re contradicting yourself!

  PLATO: I would draw a distinction between influencing and persuading.

  MCCOY: Just like you drew a distinction between information and knowledge. More academic spin.

  PLATO: The two distinctions, between information and knowledge, on the one hand, and influence and persuasion, on the other, are not unrelated.

  MCCOY: You bet. They’re related by empty semantics.

  PLATO: I think I can perhaps best explain the difference between influence and persuasion by speaking of seduction.

  MCCOY: You mean like sexual seduction?

  PLATO: Yes.

  MCCOY, laughing: Be my guest. My ratings just shot up.

  PLATO: There is a difference, you would recognize, between someone who takes others by force, mounting others in the manner of a four-footed beast and sowing his seed (Phaedrus 251a)—

  MCCOY: Easy there, pal. This may be cable but not everything goes.

  PLATO: —and someone who genuinely seduces. He who acts in the first way takes hubris as his companion, and does not seduce, but rather violates the other, who is only overpowered and deprived of any chance to give consent or to withhold it. In fact, the overpowered is not treated as a person at all, since the will of this person is rendered inoperative. But what we call seduction takes no power away from the one who is seduced but rather empowers him or her to surrender of his or her own will.

  MCCOY, laughing: He, she. Him, her. Someone sure got painted by the political-correctness brush.

  PLATO: No, not painted but rather persuaded. That is my very point. When the case was made to me, by Cheryl, my media escort at the Googleplex, that my language was sexist, I considered the case she made and I saw that it was sound. The power was mine to refute it or concede. And so it is that seduction and persuasion are similar.5 Both involve surrender, but it is not surrender to another person, for there would be no dignity in that. Rather, when I am seduced I surrender to love, and when I am persuaded I surrender to truth.

  MCCOY: You make a pretty speech, Plato, you’re a regular rhetorician, but I think you’re just playing with words again. You may say that you aren’t personally trying to influence anybody, just trying to get them to “surrender to the truth,” but really it amounts to the same thing. Whether you want to deny that you want clout or not, you’re still going after unanimity, trying to trample out differing points of view in the name of your one and only truth. You said it yourself just a little while ago: my way or the highway.

  PLATO: I said that?

  MCCOY: We’ve got it on tape and can play it back to you if you deny it. “This is the right way, this is the upbringing, these are the studies.” If you could have your own No Bull Bin the way I do, where I get to decide when people are playing hard and fast with the truth and, if need be, tell them to shut up or I’ll cut off their mic, you’d jump at the chance.

  PLATO: Only if I wished myself the greatest harm. I couldn’t help feeling some grief for Aristotle, a talented student of mine, who at a certain point in time suffered the misfortune of becoming the authority for a powerful institution, whose members simply took to referring to him as “the philosopher,” as if there had never been nor would ever be another philosopher, and converted all his opinions into dogma.

  MCCOY: I know all about Aristotle from my high school. He was the pagan of choice. Thomas Aquinas loved him, and we loved Thomas Aquinas. You’re telling me it doesn’t gall you to have your own student so outshine you that he was called “the philosopher” as if you didn’t count for anything? He totally eclipsed your sun, and you’re telling me you didn’t resent it? You’re telling me you don’t wish that you had the clout he had or that I have now with my fan base?

  PLATO: For my part, I think it’s better to have my lyre or a chorus that I might lead out of tune and dissonant, and have the vast majority disagree with me and contradict me, than to be out of harmony with myself, though I’m only one person (Gorgias 482a).

  MCCOY: Again with the flowery speeches! Look, pal, I’m not out of harmony with myself just because I’m in perfect harmony with my fan base.

  PLATO: You speak to the people who are like you in character, so that you can give expression to what they delight to hear.

  MCCOY: You bet I do. And I have the ratings to prove it.

  PLATO: You mutually gratify one another. What you say gives them pleasure, and their pleasure in you gives you pleasure.

  MCCOY: Okay, you can put it like that, even though it’s a little bit creepy.

  PLATO: Each group of people takes delight in speeches that are given in its character and resents those given in an alien manner (Gorgias 513c).

  MCCOY: Well, obviously. That’s why I have to tell the pinheads to shut up. And my audience loves me for it. It’s just the way they want the pinheads to be treated.

  PLATO: So when you, who share the character of your audience, say what they themselves would like to say, you gratify them. You gratify them so much that they will never go to listen to anyone who offers reasons to question what they would like themselves to say. The pleasure of hearing you is so great because the harmony is so great.

  MCCOY: I’m getting pleasure just hearing you describing the situation.

  PLATO: Orators who have much to gain by gratifying the people will be careful in what they say, treating the people like children, not speaking to them of anything which will cause them the pain of doubt. If there is something the people would need to hear in order to get the whole picture but which would cause them pain, such orators choose to leave it out, even if justice would demand it be included. They are to justice what pastry makers are to health (Gorgias 465c).

  MCCOY: Pastry makers! Did I just hear you say “pastry makers”? Or was it hasty wasters, as in haste makes waste? Or are you talking about those pasties that strippers wear? You know, with you it could be anything.

  PLATO: It was the pastry makers of whom I was speaking. Who is it that can better tell you what is good for the body, the pastry maker or the doctor?

  MCCOY: What kind of dumb question is that? Don’t you dare condescend to me.

  PLATO: Because it is so obvious that the doctor can better treat the body, understanding how to promote its health, whereas the pastry maker simply delights the body, knowing how to give it pleasure without thought as to what is best for it. Pastry making has put on the mask of medicine, and pretends to know the foods that are best for the body, so that if a pastry maker and a doctor had to compete in front of an audience of children, or in front of people just as foolish as children, who were to determine which of the two, the doctor or the pastry maker, had expert knowledge of good food and bad, the doctor would die of starvation. And so it is that the orator is like the pastry maker, both knowing well the knack of gratifying. And what is this knack? With the lure of what’s most pleasant at the moment, it sniffs out folly and hoodwinks it, so that i
t gives the impression of being most deserving. I call this flattery, and I say that such a thing is shameful because it guesses at what’s pleasant with no consideration for what’s best (Gorgias 464d–645a, though scrambled).

  MCCOY: Yeah, only here’s the justice in the situation that makes it not shameful at all. The guys on the other side are doing exactly the same thing. They’ve got their audiences who they gratify by serving up exactly the pastry that their audiences find finger-licking good. That’s the way it works, you’ve got pastry makers on both sides, with pastry eaters on both sides gobbling it up and patting their tummies with pleasure. So maybe some people like their cinnabons and others their mousses or tiramisu. It’s a free country and you’re free to go get your goodies from whoever you like. And yeah, it mainly all works on the free-enterprise system, which goes hand in hand with democracy. The two of them go marching down the aisle together far more naturally than your virtue and happiness do, which is just plain unnatural. So yeah, there’s going to be a profit to be gained in gratifying your audience—I get to live the way I do because I gratify a certain sweet tooth in a whole bunch of people—but that’s okay because both sides are doing it, and it’s all out there in the great American mall, cinnabons and tiramisu, cream puffs and whoopee pies, and people can go gratify themselves however they see fit. That’s democracy, pal, the kind of democracy we taught the world to love.

  PLATO: But even if it’s all out there in the great mall, people are only going to the stalls that serve them their favorites. The one who likes cinnabons will go there, and the one who likes tiramisu goes there.

  MCCOY: As I said, it’s a free country. And by the way, the same goes for that Internet of yours that you’re so in love with.

  PLATO: I am very sorry to learn that. I’d hoped that so much information being made available demonstrated a great desire not only for information but maybe even for knowledge.

  MCCOY: Just because all that information is out there doesn’t mean that anybody’s going to access it all. I mean, how could they? It’s overwhelming. So you got your nothing-better-than-apple-pie types going to our site or to the Drudge Report, your caramelized froufrou fritters going to Moveon.org or the Huffington Post.

  PLATO: So it becomes a fight to get attention.

  MCCOY: Exactly. Attention is the resource everybody’s after, and sometimes there are huge sums of cash that are connected with that attention—

  PLATO: But even when there aren’t the huge sums, the attention alone is motive enough.

  MCCOY: Right you are. Attention is power. So you’ve got all the specializing pastry makers out there on the Internet, baking up a storm. Anybody with a blog is a pastry maker.

  PLATO: I am sorry to hear it.

  MCCOY: There’s nothing wrong with putting more pastry makers out there, all of them perfecting their own particular confection. Like I said, that’s democracy. You’ve got a problem with it, then you’ve got a problem with democracy.

  PLATO: And to me the situation seems precisely the opposite, for if the situation is as you describe it, I wonder how your democracy can continue to function.

  MCCOY: What, you want government regulations sticking their big noses in so that only your they-may-taste-like-dirt-but-boy-are-they-good-for-you desserts are going to be forced on us whether we want them or not? Or are you for taking all our yummies away from us altogether? Or maybe your idea is to let the masses feast until their eyes glaze over on Dunkin’ Donuts while you and your kind just run the show. Which is it, Plato?

  PLATO: None of those. For if we stop the pastry makers from deciding for us what is good for us, we don’t thereby necessarily deprive ourselves of pleasure.

  MCCOY: Okay, what kind of awful-tasting pleasure are you going to try to sell me on? One of those stinky French cheeses that proves what a sophisticated palate you have?

  PLATO: It is the kind of pleasure that one can only attain if one isn’t going after pleasure in the first place. For this is one of the great paradoxes of pleasure:6 if pleasure is one’s goal, then it eludes you, like a shimmering feather you are chasing, the wind that you generate in your chase hastening the prize from your grasp. It is only when you cease to chase after it that the feather may drift down and settle onto your lap.

  MCCOY: And does that precious pleasure that you can’t chase have anything to do with that precious knowledge that you can’t use?7

  PLATO: Everything. As it has also everything to do with the unmixed pleasure that you were certain you didn’t want.

  MCCOY: And I’m still certain that I don’t want it. And what’s more, I’m pretty certain you don’t want me to have it, either.

  PLATO: Oh, no, you are quite wrong. I would wish, were that but possible, for all to have it. And for you, with your vast influence, I would wish it most of all.

  MCCOY: Believe me, I start going after your useless knowledge and I’m not going to have my vast influence.

  PLATO: And so you would not want it.

  MCCOY: But meanwhile I do. I want it and I have it, and I’m going to use it right now to say that I may not want to eat your taste-like-dirt desserts, Plato, or chase after your bird feathers, but you do have to give me kudos for not turning off your mic. It’s been a real experience—for me and I hope for all of you out there who have been watching The Real McCoy.

  * * *

  1Epinomis is, as the name implies, an addition to the Laws, which is Nomoi in Greek. Epinomis features the same three old men reconvening at some unspecified time after their first conversation in the Laws. The words Plato speaks above, from “Every diagram and complex system of numbers” until the end of the paragraph, are verbatim. Translation by Richard D. McKirahan Jr. in Hackett 1997.

  2It was a Galileo inspired by Plato (and, most particularly, by the Timaeus, which was the one dialogue of Plato’s still read in the centuries of Scholasticism) who wrote: “Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes—I mean the universe—but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.”

  3This is how it is stated in Euclid’s Elements (I, 47). As was mentioned earlier, Euclid collated and formalized a great deal of mathematics that had been done before, including by mathematicians at Plato’s Academy.

  4This is repeated in many dialogues, including the Republic: “Every soul pursues the good and does whatever it does for its sake” (505e).

  5In the Phaedrus, Plato makes what seems a somewhat abrupt transition from speaking of seduction to speaking of rhetoric (257c). The ostensible reason is that the three speeches that are being compared to one another all had erōs as their subject, but there are deeper reasons for why the discussion of the right way of seducing and the right way of persuading are combined into one dialogue. People in love and people persuaded by the truth allow themselves to be overtaken by something larger than themselves. In the Timaeus (51e), Plato says that only the person open to reason is open to persuasion. An orator who simply wants to have his way is similar to a lover who simply wants to have his way.

  6In the first of her Whitehead Lectures, “Pleasure, Knowledge and the Good in Plato’s Philebus,” delivered at Harvard in spring of 2013, Verity Harte connected Plato’s views on “idle pleasures” to the “paradox of Hedonism” that she attributed to Sidgwick, citing this passage from Methods of Ethics: “Here comes into view what we may call the fundamental paradox of Hedonism, that the impulse towards pleasure, if too predominant, defeats its own aim. This effect is not visible, or at any rate is scarcely visible, in the case of passive sensual pleasure. But of our active enjoyments generally, whether the activities on which they attend are classed as ‘bodily’ or as ‘intellectual’ (as well as of many emotional pleasures), it may certai
nly be said that we cannot attain them, at least in their highest degree, so long as we keep our main conscious aim concentrated upon them” (Methods of Ethics, I.4, pp. 48–49). Compare also the following quote attributed to C. P. Snow: “The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you’ll never find it.”

  7In the second of her Whitehead Lectures, Harte went on to connect up Plato’s notion of “idle pleasures” and “useless knowledge.”

  θ

  LET THE SUNSHINE IN

  (illustration credit ill.11)

  THE DAIMŌN MADE ME KNOW IT

  I’ve claimed a lot for Socrates’ performance before the packed crowd in 399 B.C.E. There must have been a lot to his performance, given its effect on Plato (as well as on so many other writers of Socratic logoi). We don’t need to rely on the authenticity of Plato’s Seventh Letter to believe that the violence Socrates suffered transformed Plato.1 We simply have to look at the output of his life.

  In the Symposium, Plato has Alcibiades allude, rather mysteriously, to the one time when he had glimpsed Socrates, whose “whole life is one big game—a game of irony” (216e), stripped bare of his irony. What a sight it was to behold him in his undraped sincerity, a sight, Alcibiades confesses, to have made him permanently susceptible to shame (although apparently not quite susceptible enough). “I don’t know if any of you have seen him when he’s really serious. But I once caught him when he was open like Silenus’ statues, and I had a glimpse of the figures he keeps hidden within: they were so godlike—so bright and beautiful, so utterly amazing—that I no longer had a choice—I just had to do whatever he told me” (216e–217a).