Then there are those whom we can call the “Unreasonables,” those whose slogan is the cri de coeur of the seventeenth-century mathematician Blaise Pascal: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. Blaise Pascal was not only an important mathematician, who laid the foundations of probability theory, but a spiritual seeker who wrote a meticulous account of a mystical experience he underwent and sewed it into the lining of his coat, which was discovered after his death. Unreasonables are willing to stamp “known” on certain claims that can give no account of themselves in objective, generalizable terms. One could not remove such an insight from the immediacy of a first-person singular experience and have it retain its life, no more than an eye could be removed from the living creature and still retain its sight.
The controversy between the Reasonables and Unreasonables is an epistemological controversy, a controversy over how we can know. What makes the controversy so irresolvable is that neither of the two sides can, non-circularly, put forward an item of knowledge that solves the underlying epistemological issue. Because neither side gets deep enough down into the underlying epistemological controversy—the very one that took hold of both sides of Plato’s mind—the antagonists, more often than not, talk right past each other. The Reasonables say, I’ll only believe that you can know something without it having to be demonstrated if you can demonstrate that to me. The Unreasonables say, It’s obvious that you can know things without having to demonstrate them—I just know it!
It’s not only religion that pits the Reasonables against the Unreasonables, but also other experiences, including, according to Plato, poetic inspiration and erotic love. In the Phaedrus, in which Plato is in his most Unreasonable-siding mood (so much so that we might suspect, along with Martha Nussbaum, that he was in love9), he explicitly links the three daimōn-haunted domains: religion, romantic love, and poetry. Religious conversion and romantic love and artistic inspiration are, for Plato, at once compelling and suspect. It seems to people who are in the grip of these experiences, which can offer no account of themselves independent of the experiences—unsharable and unshakable—that they are privy to a privileged knowledge, often so irresistible as to produce a major discontinuity in their lives, such that friends and relations will look at them, sadly shaking their heads and saying they have gone mad. At such times people do not take possession of the truth, but rather are possessed by it. “To be possessed” can mean madness, and Plato in fact uses the word manikēs, or “mad,” to characterize such knowledge—that is, if it is knowledge.10 That is the question. It is this question that has Plato halting Socrates in his tracks just after he has made his first well-constructed speech to Phaedrus endorsing a sane and unmaddened love that never loses control of itself, a view Plato has Socrates recanting in his second speech, which itself is struck with the wild madness of poetry. And it is also the very question that has Plato returning again and again to the question of poetic inspiration, often censoring the poets, once expelling them, and sometimes surrendering to the enchantment of their art, allowing his own extraordinary poetic gifts their full voice.
Erotic genius, poetic genius, religious genius, and moral genius of the kind that Plato attributed to Socrates:11 all of these yield non-rationalizable claims to questionable knowledge, knowledge that can offer no account for itself. These types of genius are informed by a singularity of experience that allows for knowing how—how to love, how to produce great art, how to live a virtuous life—without their being able to account for their knowing how. Such unaccountable knowledge marks certain points of view as intrinsically special. Those who know (if they know) cannot render their reasons for knowing so that non-knowers can be placed in the same epistemic position as they. The gap between their knowing how and their knowing that can only be filled, as it were, with the gods, a figurative way of saying that it is utterly mysterious. “We distinguished four parts of the divine type, associated with four gods: Prophetic madness was ascribed to the inspiration of Apollo, the madness connected with the mysteries to Dionysus, poetic madness in turn to the Muses, and the fourth, the erotic madness that we said is the best, to Aphrodite and Erōs. We described erotic passion in, I don’t know, a sort of figurative manner, perhaps touching on something of the truth but also probably being led astray at other points” (Phaedrus 265b–c).
Note the hesitation—“I don’t know, a sort of figurative manner”—resonating with the testimony to dividedness already signaled by the two contradictory speeches Plato had Socrates deliver earlier in the dialogue, clashing with each other not only in their substance but in their style—one tepid, repetitious, and cautious, the other careening in furious recklessness into ever more rapturous poetry that channels its imagery from the sacred mysteries. Athens had its own mystery cult, the Eleusinian mysteries, and these communal rituals had as their aim a singular experience—ecstatic, ineffable, extraordinary.
Plato, even in his most Unreasonable-siding mood, which is where we find him in the Phaedrus, motivated, for all we know, by the transports of erotic passion, cannot altogether loose his grip on his Reasonable-siding reservations. After all, there is good possession, coming from somewhere outside us, dubbed by Plato “the gods” and leading to truth, and then there is bad possession, which is nothing more than the delusions of our own minds having their way with us. And here’s the thing: when we are in the grip of possession we have no means of distinguishing the good possession from the bad and are also in such a state as to dismiss anyone who is not similarly seized, which means, given the singularity of the experience, anyone who is not identical with ourselves. There is only one possible “authority” when it comes to this kind of unaccountable “knowledge,” and this authority, being possessed by the experience, has no way of judging whether the possession is of the good kind or the bad. That is the predicament Plato brings to our attention. And it is still a predicament.
If we are allowed to say that Plato believes anything at all—despite his constant self-criticisms—then I think we can say that Plato believes, deeply, that reality is out there, the same for each of us. This is the one doctrine I’d put all my money on Plato’s believing, rather than any specific doctrines regarding what reality is like. But still, doesn’t the assertion of an objective reality show that the Reasonables are being, well, reasonable in asserting that truth is an equal-access good? Techniques for getting at reality are there for all to study and master. If we let the contents of our minds be determined by the contents of objective reality, as ascertained by techniques that can be universally mastered, under the tutelage of others and subject to corrections, then we can arrive at agreement. And on the authority of that agreement we can dismiss the kinks of an Unreasonable, who clings to the experiential contents of a single point of view, giving credence to oracular voices whispering privately in her ear. Whatever can be known by one person can, in principle, be known by everybody, just so long as they master the techniques for knowing that are most appropriate to a field. If it can’t be generally known, if it is irreducibly embedded in a single and singular point of view, then we can have no good reason to accept it. This is the Epistemology of the Reasonable, and it is one side of Plato’s divided soul and informs not only most of philosophy (with a few kinky exceptions like, possibly, Heidegger) but all of the sciences. Philosophy-jeerers who argue from science are unaware that they are epistemological allies with the bulk of philosophers, and depend on the Epistemology of the Reasonable that philosophers have hammered out for their convenience.
On the other hand, Plato suspects that there are intimations of reality which are given, however vaguely, in ecstatic visions experienced only by the few and which can get at aspects of reality that shared techniques can’t access. Perhaps some truths stubbornly refuse to yield themselves up in objective terms, meaning terms to which many minds can gain access, unattached to any singular point of view. This is the possibility that Plato takes seriously in the Phaed
rus. Does the objectivity of reality—in the sense of a reality existing out there, stubbornly itself no matter what any of us happen to think about it—imply that truth is an equal-access good? These two notions of objectivity—one ontological, the other epistemological—are, after all, distinct. Something might be out there, independently of any of us, and the same for all of us, but we may have no common way of knowing it. William James was in a Phaedrus frame of mind when he remarked in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity.” Again, the call of the kinky.
In the theory of special relativity, the claim that there are no privileged points of view has a highly particular meaning: that the laws of nature must be the same regardless of the frame of reference in which they are being described (where frames of reference differ from one another because they are moving at different constant velocities relative to each other). Should the prohibition against privileged points of view in the theory of special relativity be promoted to a general law of epistemology? Ought we to exclude from our cognitive considerations any that make sense only within particular frames of reference, specially marked by certain subjective features that can make no claim on those whose points of view happen to lack those features? Should we blow off the experiences of people endowed with unique emotions, say, or with singular visions, or those who hear special messages? Should we dismiss the very possibility of extra perceptual equipment, such as the sensus divinitatis, the cognitive organ for sensing God, with which, John Calvin claimed, fully functioning people come equipped, and which at least one contemporary philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, has sought to resurrect?12 Or should we indulge them and their claims of epistemological privilege? The point of claiming privileged points of view is to give a free pass to what is supposedly revealed there. The burden of proof is removed, and instead it is the points of view that lack these special irresistible features that are deemed deficient and put on notice to defend themselves.
There are strong—oh, so strong—reasons to affirm that yes, we ought to exclude privileged points of view as we seek to know the world. No claim to knowledge should be allowed a free pass, getting by without giving an account of itself, a justification, that can appeal to all who sign on to the project of reason, no matter the special features of their subjective points of view. It is not just a matter of the objectivity of reality that motivates the demand for objectivity of knowledge. Far more persuasive reasons arise from the obvious hazards of subjectivity, which is a breeding ground for prejudice, superstition, and egotistical self-aggrandizement. We are too prone to favoring our own particularity and, if we are talented enough, can raise up a cunningly convincing ideology that will shape all the world to fit our particular dimensions. It is a dangerous mistake to allow subjectivity to strut its stuff with such smug thuggishness. Exposing our most cherished beliefs to the rough treatment of multiple points of view—each of which is prone to see the world from the vantage of its own advantage—is our only hope for defeating the hazards of self-serving subjectivity—complacent at best, murderously certain at worst. And so philosophy—as Plato had conceived it with one-half of his divided soul—has typically been saying yes to the exclusion of privileged points of view ever since Plato himself set up perhaps the most powerful image in the history of thought, the Myth of the Cave, one of the highlights of Plato’s Republic. The Myth of the Cave is as strong an endorsement of the Epistemology of the Reasonable as can be found in philosophy.
GET ON OUT OF THAT CAVE
The Myth of the Cave has come up multiple times in this book. Marcus at the Googleplex and Dr. Munitz at the 92nd Street Y both put their own spins on it. There are many spins and a vast literature of interpretation. I offer an interpretation based on the story I have tried to tell of how Plato drew philosophy forth from an ethos that made itself felt in the Greek city-states—and in Athens most of all.
It’s a story of an extraordinary society that believed in being extraordinary, extolling exceptional individuals while at the same time creating a sense of participatory exceptionalism by means of which the extraordinary could be spread around. Athenian ideology was a response to an existential quandary that emerged dramatically during the Axial Age: What is it—if it’s anything—that makes an individual human life matter? What must one be or do in order to achieve a life that matters? The existential quandary resonates no less in our time than it did during the Axial Age. Is it any wonder that the powerful religious traditions that emerged under the force of the existential quandary still resonate with so many today?
But the Greeks took a different approach. Even though religious cults and rites saturated almost every aspect of their lives, they approached the existential dilemma in secular terms. The most important of these terms is the complicated notion of aretē, bound up as it was with kleos. This approach also still resonates today, provoking ambitions to stand out from the great, massive mortal crowd, somehow or other, either individually or collectively.
The Athenian ethos might have nurtured the prerequisites for moral philosophy by approaching the existential dilemma in human, rather than divine, terms. Still, the value structure of Athenian ideology had to be challenged for moral philosophy to emerge. This was the project of Socrates, and he pursued it with his fellow Athenians wherever he found them: at the agora and the gymnasium, at dinner parties and at his trial. They often found his questions unintelligible, and it is little wonder. He was nudging the notion of aretē outside its familiar context, prying it away from kleos and pushing it closer toward a concept that English translators of the dialogues straightforwardly render as “virtue.” Attempts to define this or that virtue organize many of the dialogues. The Republic revolves around the virtue of justice.
The dialogue opens with Socrates, the first-person narrator of the Republic, setting the scene. He has gone the day before, together with Glaucon, Plato’s brother, to the Piraeus, Athens’ harbor, to attend a religious festival surrounding a newly introduced goddess, identified by scholars as the Thracian goddess Bendis. He was eager to see the festival because, he casually mentions, it was being celebrated in Piraeus for the first time (327a). Perhaps this detail gestures toward the theological openness of the Athenians, underlining the hollowness of the charge against Socrates that he introduced new gods? In any case, on their way back, they run into a friend, Polemarchus, who tells them that they must stick around in Piraeus for more festivities to come that evening, and Socrates and Glaucon are persuaded to go to Polemarchus’ house. A crowd of worthies is gathered there, including several famous sophists and rhetoricians. Socrates first pays his respects to Polemarchus’ father, Cephalus, taking the opportunity to ask him what it’s like to be so old. Cephalus responds that one can bear old age so long as one has lived a just life. Wealth is important only because the exigencies of poverty might have tempted one to be unjust, which will make facing death difficult. This leads naturally to a discussion of how to define justice, for both the individual and the polis.
The discussion is long and complicated. Socrates and Glaucon, we can be pretty sure, never made it to the evening’s festivities. Not only political theory, but moral psychology and moral philosophy, metaphysics and epistemology are enlisted in the answer that will eventually be ventured as to the nature of justice, political and individual. Both are a matter of structural soundness. The just city is composed of three parts—the guardians, the army, and the producers—with each part performing the function for which it is best suited, both by temperament and training. A person’s psyche is also composed of three parts—the logistikon, which reasons; the thumos, which wills; and the epithumia, which craves. In the just person each part performs the function for which it is best suited. The just person, like the just polis, has the internal arrangement just right.
The Republic is organized into ten books, and the Myth of the Cave occurs at the
beginning of Book VII. Here is how it is introduced (the respondent is Glaucon):
Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the Cave itself. They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets.
I’m imagining it.
Then also imagine that there are people along the wall, carrying all kinds of artifacts that project above it—statues of people and other animals, made out of stone, wood, and every material. And, as you’d expect, some of the carriers are talking, and some are silent.
It’s a strange image you’re describing, and strange prisoners.
They’re like us. (514a–515a)
These prisoners are huddled together, their state of mind one of eikasia, which is the lowest level of awareness, deceived and ungrounded. The contents of a mind in the grip of eikasia is unconnected with anything having independent existence. It is a sooty, dim, and artificial world, with everything contrived so that the prisoners cannot discover the nature of what they are looking at. It is what we now might call a socially constructed reality. (If there are any thinkers still out there who still hold to the once-fashionable view (circa 1970s–1990s) that all is socially constructed, then they’re going to stop following Plato any further at this point.) There are elaborate props supporting it, and people tending those props. The chained image-observers are prisoners of ideology, though they would prefer not to know it. In fact, they would do anything not to know it. All their questions are answered, and the questions worth asking are never considered. Their false beliefs are mutually validating, but their unanimity counts for nothing so far as truth is concerned. They live together in darkness. Later on in the myth Plato describes “the honors, praises, or prizes among them for the one who was sharpest at identifying the shadows as they passed by and who best remembered which usually came earlier, which later, and which simultaneously, and who could best divine the future” (516c–d). Their celebrations of one another are pathetic, since none manages to attain anything worth winning. Kleos raises none of them above the other, despite what they might think. (But again, if you are a thinker committed to there being nothing but the socially constructed images on the cave’s wall, you’ll likewise recognize no higher standard than the kleos of your community: “The only ‘proof’ of membership is fellowship, the nod of recognition from someone in the same community, someone who says to you what neither of us could ever prove to a third party: ‘we know.’ I say to you now, knowing full well that you will agree with me … only if you already agree with me.”13)
Plato at the Googleplex Page 48