The sovereignty of the good isn’t challenged by pointing out all the ways in which reality could be improved. The view isn’t challenged by such horrors as childhood leukemia, shifting tectonic plates, or wild fires. Such tragedies loom large in the human point of view. Reality doesn’t take the human point of view, and it can’t be expected to. The sublimity that had to burst into existence is not one that particularly concerns itself with us. Such a human-constrained goodness would not pack the ontological wallop required to bring forth existence. Benedictus Spinoza points out the irrelevance of the human point of view at the grand metaphysical scale, remarking that “the perfections of things is to be reckoned only from their own nature and power; things are not more or less perfect, according as they delight or offend human sense, or according as they are serviceable or repugnant to mankind” (Ethics I, Appendix).20 Plato makes a similar argument in the Book X of the Laws (903c).
The view of an intelligible reality that shows no tilt toward human welfare strikes many as cold and inhuman. Well, it is cold and inhuman. What I ought to have said is that the view strikes many as repugnant as a consequence of being inhuman. It is no wonder that when Platonism met monotheism—in the Jewish thinker Philo and the Christian thinker Augustine—a user-friendly substitution was made in the tenancy at the top story of the explanatory scale. The good moved out, and God moved in. The new tenant was reputed to be nearly as interested in us as we are interested in us. From the point of view of Plato (or Spinoza), this substitution at the top level carries us back in the direction of the cave and its self-aggrandizing ideology. From the point of view of a Plato or Spinoza, the overvaluation of the human point of view is itself an ideology.
AND BACK INTO THE CAVE YOU GO
But so far the notion of agathon explored is of a sort to have far more appeal to a physicist than to an ethicist. How can this highly theoretical agathon have any implications for the way we’re supposed to behave? Plato isn’t going to demand—ethically—that we all become cosmologists, is he?
Not quite, but almost. The good that structures reality has specific normative consequences. This, too, is implied by the Myth of the Cave. It’s only because the former prisoner has encountered the good and understands its supreme explanatory role in existence that she remembers the prisoners left behind. She doesn’t want to have to go back into the cave to attend to them. She’d far more rather calculate the beautiful equations describing matter in motion. But the very beauty of those equations has been impressed into her own being, and because of this impression she feels a responsibility toward those still staring pathetically at their ideologically generated images, rewarding one another with meaningless prizes.
In the myth, those prisoners, shackled and distracted, present no threat to her so long as she remains outside the cave. In the myth, she can just ignore them and go on in her thrilling explorations. In the myth, it’s not her own self-interest that forces her back into the cave but rather a kind of altruism. But in the real world of the polis it’s a different story. In the real world of the polis it’s very much in the interest of those who wish to be allowed to figure out reality to try to eradicate any ideology, religious or secular, that would prevent their free inquiries. In the real world, Socrates ends up questioning ideology and he gets himself killed for it. So it’s in the self-interest of the thinker to try to change the polis for the better, to try to make the world safe for her thinking.
But that’s not the way Plato presents the situation in the myth. The myth does justice to the entire reality of values Plato finds out there beyond the cave, and that reality of values includes responsibilities to others.
The value-laden nature of impersonal reality causes a shift in a person’s moral psychology, the harmony and proportionality that structure reality settling over a person’s own psychic reality and transforming it for the good.21 This is what the just person is: someone whose inner reality is congruent to outer reality. This is why Plato has the guardians of the Republic studying mathematics for several decades in preparation for statesmanship. Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in them to try to reform the polis for the better.
But why should they want to? That’s the question. Why shouldn’t the former prisoner stay as far away from the ideologues as she can and just get on with her thinking, which is hard enough for her to do? (Though apparently—and unsurprisingly—not for Plato. For him, at least, it’s all “unmixed pleasure,” as he puts it in the Philebus.) Why should she risk the mockery and wrath that will greet her when she descends again into the darkness—a wrath that Plato presents as nothing less than murderous (517a)?
Agathon, impersonal and theoretical as it is, has implications for aretē, the human excellence that makes a life worth living. Aretē cannot mean putting only your own structural soundness in order while giving no thought to the well-being of others. That anonymous knower of the myth was herself initially dragged “up the rough, steep path,” by another who didn’t let go until he had pointed her in the direction of the sunlight. In retrospect, that aspect of the myth seems significant. Somebody who had attained life outside the cave ventured back in to help someone else out.
The agathon that Plato contemplates, as his philosophical life deepens, has no regard for our mortal welfare. It is even more indifferent to us than the old Greek gods. Still, we are morally improved by the contemplation of it and our moral improvement turns us into better citizens of the polis. Radical objectivity, purged of human concerns, turns out to be the best antidote for the smallness of human nature. Simply to attain this vision of objectivity requires us to overcome the deformities of our natures, the overprivileging of our own identities and their perspectives. It requires us to dismantle whatever ideology imprisons us, almost always because it flatters our own sense of self-importance. To fall in love with the impersonal beauty of objectivity, which doesn’t love us back, is moral achievement in itself.
And once such a vision has been attained, other meritorious consequences follow. The vision induces an awe that puts our own self-centered concerns into the widest perspective possible, with the result of removing those self-centered concerns from our sights. The sense of proper proportion that settles over our inner lives not only allows for self-control and judicious choices, the “nothing in excess” praised by the excessive Greeks. It also produces the sense of proper proportion between ourselves and others. Once the distortions in our perspective are corrected, we’re confronted with the “proportionate equality” that ought to reign no less in the world of people than in the cosmos itself. In the Gorgias, Plato has Socrates arguing with Callicles, according to whom all that any of us wants is to get our own way in everything, and that’s exactly what we’ll all do if we can get away with it. Tyrants lead the happiest lives of all. In the course of the discussion Socrates remarks, “Yes, Callicles, wise men claim that partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world-order, my friend, and not an undisciplined world-disorder. I believe that you don’t pay attention to these facts, even though you’re a wise man in these matters. You’ve failed to notice that proportionate equality has great power among both gods and men, and you suppose that you ought to practice getting the greater share. That’s because you neglect geometry” (507e–508a). Anyone with a proper appreciation of proportion can’t fail to appreciate that one’s own self shouldn’t be in disproportion to everyone else. The beauty of proportionality that has led one on, because one loves it, would cause one to abhor a situation that would bring one into disproportion with everyone else. There is an entire moral theory contained in this passage.
“You suppose you ought to practice getting the greater share.” So many ideologies come down, in the end, to ways of justifying our sense that we ought to get the greater share. And so people who have managed to get themselves out of the cave, having achieved a life worth living, must have
no illusions that they’re entitled to that life any more than anyone else. If they gloat about their personal accomplishments, then they haven’t achieved anything worth the achieving. And if they have, then they have no choice but to make their gains a boon for all, trying to better the polis, as distasteful as that might strike them.
And judging from the Laws, Plato did find the task distasteful, undertaken not as a pleasure but as an obligation. The Laws is his last book, written when he was an old man. Socrates is altogether gone, and three old men—one named Spartan, one named Cretan, and an anonymous Athenian—take their morning constitutional together, discoursing, along the way, on politics and jurisprudence. The anonymous Athenian of the Laws goes off topic and can only by force of will pull himself away from the exhilarating contemplation of the mathematical perfection of the ordered cosmos to think about the dreary business of how best to order the affairs of humans, whom he compares to puppets. When the Athenian makes the unflattering comparison a second time and the Spartan calls him on it, the Athenian apologizes and explains he’s been thinking of the gods. And then, as if assuming the vantage point of the gods themselves—the gods who, whether described frivolously by Homer or with all the solemn beauty of mathematics by Plato, never place man at the center of their attention—the Athenian concedes, “However, if you will have it so, man shall be something not so insignificant but more serious” (804b) and, with a sigh of resignation not hard to imagine, gets back to work on designing laws for a polis in which we can do each other the least harm possible.
We achieve a life worth living by understanding how the cosmos achieved an existence worth existing. That’s the notion of aretē at which he arrives. The impersonally sublime is internalized into personal virtue. “But now we notice that the force of the good has taken refuge in an alliance with the nature of the beautiful. For measure and proportion manifest themselves in all areas as beauty and virtue” (Philebus 64e). What is required is that our cultivated sense of beauty lay us open to “the best of reasons” that give the very shape to reality, and that we be overcome by reality’s otherness and beauty. For him, this is having reverence for the gods, and it’s why he names astronomy a kind of religious experience in the Timaeus. But astronomy isn’t the only way that “measure and proportion manifest themselves” to overtake us. As mentioned in chapter ζ, he allows that music (of the right kind) and poetry (of the right kind) can also do the trick, just so long as we regard them as intimations of transcendence such as to give us our true measure in the world, which is—as all finite things are when measured on the scale of the sublime—immeasurably small. (It was Leibniz who introduced the term “infinitesimal.” Plato would have loved the calculus.) These are the ethically transformative measures. Only once our grandiosity has been decimated—by the shock of reality’s otherness and beauty—can we achieve a life that isn’t a tissue of degrading lies and laughable illusions.
Not everybody wants this best of all lives as Plato describes it. Perhaps the only ones who want it are those who are capable of attaining it. Perhaps the best measure of the capacity for it is the desire for it. That would make the restrictiveness somewhat fairer. For restrictive it is. A philosopher whose conception of the best life demands so much sheer intellectual power is no egalitarian. The recognition that not one of us is more entitled than another to a life worth living doesn’t entail that all of us have it in us to achieve that life. It only carries the obligation that those who have achieved that life will do what they can to help others achieve it, as best they can. The demiurge of the Timaeus, as much as he wished to model the created world in the image of eternity, had to make his peace with the recalcitrance of physical nature (47e–48a); and those who achieve Plato’s aretē, as much as they wish to help others achieve it, have to make their peace with the recalcitrance of human nature.
Plato was of such a nature to think that the concept of aretē at which he had arrived, by way of agathon, would yield not only a life of virtue but also one of rarest pleasure. “Then we may say that the pleasures of learning are unmixed with pain and belong not to the masses, but only to a very few” (Philebus 52b). It’s an unmixed pleasure that has been attained precisely because one hasn’t been seeking one’s own pleasure at all, as undoubtedly those “masses” can’t help but do.
The paternalist strain is undeniable.22 It’s a strain that some have reveled in, triumphantly identifying with the “very few.” My sense of Plato is that he didn’t revel in it at all. I think it grieved him and he would have had it be otherwise, but he nevertheless thought the paternalism necessary. How could it not be necessary for a man who described the sense of sight as our most valuable sense because it allows us to know the astronomical revolutions? “The god invented sight and gave it to us so that we might observe the orbits of intelligence in the universe and apply them to the revolutions of our own understanding. For there is a kinship between them, even though our revolutions are disturbed, whereas the universal orbits are undisturbed. So once we have come to know them and to share in the ability to make correct calculations according to nature, we should stabilize the straying revolutions within ourselves by imitating the completely unstraying revolutions of the god” (Timaeus 47b–c).
Plato hasn’t exactly eased up on the requirement that we strive to be extraordinary, has he? So I hope he’d be impressed by some of the progress that we’ve managed, collectively, to make. After all, among those beliefs that I think we can attribute to Plato was the belief in philosophy’s power to persuade.
MANY PLATOS
Down through the ages there have been many Platos, and there still are.
There has been the Plato of the religionists, who found it necessary to replace his idea of the good, the ordering principle immanent within the cosmos, with a cosmos-transcendent God—a conception first arrived at by a small tribe living obscurely across the Mediterranean from the Greeks of Plato’s day. That tribe had lacked a robust sense of the afterlife. But the Plato of the Phaedo found his way into its monotheism as it spread itself into the Greek world, most especially by the followers of Jesus, and the marriage between Abrahamic monotheism and the Plato of the Phaedo proved strong for all of Abraham’s children—Jewish, Christian, and Moslem. The hereafter, thereafter, became one of the most cherished components of the Abrahamic faiths.
There has been the Plato of the mathematicians, for whom the realms of infinite mathematical structures are far more real than the blackboards on which they write their equations, and who describe themselves as Platonists accordingly; and there has been the Plato of the physicists and cosmologists, going back to Galileo, who found in Plato’s mathematical aesthetics a form of explanation to topple the entrenched Aristotelian science of the time, and who are still prepared to follow their sense of mathematical beauty anywhere it leads, taking us vast distances away from the level of reality revealed to us by our senses, perhaps all the way to the multiverse.
There has been the Plato of the political theorists, a highly contentious lot. Some of them read Plato as utopian, while others argue that he was so vehemently anti-utopian that his analysis of justice must actually be read as a demonstration that no justice at all is possible and political idealism is itself a mirage. And then of course there is his paternalism, which some argue was merely a function of the Athens of his day, which he was trying to reform, and which others embrace wholeheartedly, endorsing the justice of a “natural aristocracy.”
There has been the Plato of the poets, willing to overlook his occasional insults to their art for the sake of the transcendence of his language and visions, his love of beauty and belief in its redemptive powers.
And among the philosophers, there are too many Platos to enumerate.
All that I can do is try to give you mine. My Plato is an impassioned mathematician, a wary poet, an exacting ethicist, a reluctant political theorist. He is, above all, a man keenly aware of the way that assumptions and biases slip into our viewpoints and go unnoticed, and he devise
d a field devoted to trying to expose these assumptions and biases and to do away with any that conflict with commitments we must make in order to render the world and our lives maximally coherent. Because he created this field, we can look back at Plato and see where his own assumptions and biases sometimes did him wrong. If we couldn’t, the field that he created would have proved a colossal disappointment to him, the faith he had put in self-critical reason unfounded.
Above all, my Plato is the philosopher who teaches us that we should never rest assured that our view, no matter how well argued and reasoned, amounts to the final word on any matter. And that includes our view of Plato.
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Plato at the Googleplex Page 50