1“Once upon a time in my youth I cherished like many another the hope of entering upon a political career as soon as I came of age. It fell out, moreover, that political events took the following course. There were many who heaped abuse on the form of government then prevailing, and a revolution occurred” (324b–c). The letter then goes on to describe Plato’s experience with the oligarchs. “Some of these happened to be relatives and acquaintances of mine, who accordingly invited me forthwith to join them, assuming my fitness for the task. No wonder that, young as I was, I cherished the belief that they would lead the city from an unjust life, as it were, to habits of justice and ‘manage it,’ as they put it, so that I was intensely interested to see what would come of it. Of course, I saw in a short time that these men made the former government look in comparison like an age of gold.” The letter describes his disillusion with the oligarchs, most particularly his horror when they tried to make Socrates complicit in one of their shameful deeds. “When I observed all this—and some other similar matters of importance—I withdrew in disgust from the abuses of those days. Not long after came the fall of the Thirty and of their whole system of government. Once more, less hastily this time, but surely, I was moved by the desire to take part in public life and in politics” (325a). He then goes on to describe his ultimate disillusionment, the execution of Socrates, which convinced him to give up any thought of entering the political life of his city and to instead devote himself to philosophy.
2It was his friend Chaerephon who had traveled to Delphi and asked the question, not Socrates himself (Apology 21a).
3Besides the instances cited below, see also Apology 31c–d, Republic 496c, and Euthydemus 272e.
4Plato illustrates illicit methods by the example of an orator convincing a jury by manipulating their emotions or appealing to hearsay. “And when a jury is rightly convinced of facts which can be known only by an eyewitness, then judging by hearsay and accepting a true belief, they are judging without knowledge, although, if they find the right verdict, their conviction is correct” (Ibid. 201b–c).
5The dialogue gets bogged down with Socrates’ seeming to poke holes in the idea of an account, but the holes in fact aren’t as serious as Plato judges them. Plato fails to make certain helpful distinctions in this first attempt that future philosophers will come up with, which isolate propositional knowledge (knowledge that some proposition is true) as the paradigmatic form of knowledge. Because he doesn’t do this, the definition of knowledge he offers in the Theaetetus—that knowledge is true belief with an account—seems less promising to him than it really is. Plato is far more successful in the Theaetetus than he gives himself credit for being, the dialogue ending with aporia. Plato’s self-criticism is commendable, even if it sometimes leads him to judge his own breakthrough proposals too harshly.
6Knowledge is, at the least, justified true belief. The “at the least” is added because it is possible to dream up some highly contrived cases (always involving perception) in which a person believes something is true, and is justified in believing that it’s true, but his (good) reasons for believing are unattached to the proposition’s truth, so he doesn’t achieve knowledge. There is still something haphazard in his happening to get it right. These rigged cases are known as “the Gettier counter-examples,” and they indicate that even though justified true belief is necessary for knowledge, it may not be, at least in some very artificial situations, sufficient.
7Even in the Theaetetus, Socrates alludes briefly to his private daimôn, which sometimes warns him against allowing certain young men who have gone astray to return to his guiding friendship (150e), perhaps an allusion to Alcibiades. The irresistible rascal may have charmed his way back into the good graces of everyone else, but for Socrates, enough was enough. (Or Socrates, once burned, was twice shy.)
8What is now known as rationalism had its heyday in the seventeenth century, especially in the figures of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. The best way to understand rationalism is to contrast it with empiricism. The empiricists believe that knowledge of the world—of what exists and what the properties of the things that exist are—requires contact with the world via our sense organs. Just thinking is not going to give us any knowledge of what our world is like. Rationalists believe that there are at least some things we can know about the world through pure thought. Like the controversy between the Reasonables and the Unreasonables, the controversy between rationalists and empiricists is epistemological—it’s about how we know things, how we acquire the justification that distinguishes knowledge from mere belief. Though rationalists and empiricists lived and disagreed with each other long before then, it was only in the nineteenth century that the distinction was explicitly drawn and the terms of the disagreement defined.
9As has been mentioned, not only does Nussbaum make a compelling case for Plato’s state of passion at the time that he wrote the Phaedrus, but she ingeniously parses its language to hazard a guess at the object of his passion: none other than Dion, the uncle of the young tyrant of Syracuse. “This dialogue has the character of a love letter, an expression of passion, wonder, and gratitude.… This is not, of course, to say something so simple as that love made Plato change his mind; for his experience of love was certainly also shaped by his developing thought. The dialogue has explored such interrelationships with too much complexity to allow an oversimple love story; but it does ask us to recognize experience as one factor of importance” (The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 229–230).
10Plato, who loves etymological play, notes the link between manikēs (mad) and mantikēs (prophetic). “It is worth pointing out that the ancient people who gave things their names also believed that madness is neither shameful nor blameworthy; otherwise they would not have connected the word itself with the noblest art, that by which the future is judged” (Phaedrus 244b). Our words “manic” and “mantic” are derived from the Greek.
11I knew someone I would describe as a moral genius. He died when I was around the same age as Plato was when Socrates died. Subjecting him to the kind of questions a philosopher asks always resulted in disappointing answers. But watching him do what he knew how to do was inspiring. He seemed never to err.
12See Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
13Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 176.
14Plato has, just before introducing the Myth of the Cave, presented the famous Divided Line, which separates the world into various metaphysical levels, which are also epistemological levels. The major divide is between the non-intelligible realm, passively presented to us, and the intelligible realm, actively grasped through reason, and this corresponds to the distinction between opinion and knowledge. The levels of the Divided Line proceed from the imagined, to the perceived (both of these situated beneath the main divide), to the mathematical (the portal into the intelligible), to the forms, the abstractions that lie behind universal terms. Socrates mentions (517b) that the Divided Line should be used to understand the stages the prisoner must pass through in the Myth of the Cave. But that myth adds a normative emphasis to the Divided Line. The prisoner’s ascent entails changes of values. This is what explains Socrates’ otherwise strange response to Glaucon, regarding the lowest level, eikasia, “They’re like us.” Compare M. F. Burnyeat, “Plato on Why Mathematics Is Good for the Soul”: “Socrates instructs us to apply the prisoner’s upward journey to the soul’s ascent into the intelligible region of the Divided Line.… But the surrounding narrative, about the journey back to the cave, would suggest a different solution. For the examples mentioned in the story are values.”
15In the Timaeus, Plato presents abduction as essential to scientific reasoning.
16“Wouldn’t it be said of him that he’d returned from his upward journey with his eyesight ruined and that it isn’t worthwhile even to try to travel upward? And, as for anyone who tried to free them and l
ead them upward, if they could somehow get their hands on him, wouldn’t they kill him?” (517a).
17For a look at contemporary thinkers—physicists, philosophers, and even a novelist—contemplating this question, see Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story (New York: Liveright, 2012). Two of those whom Holt interviews describe themselves as Platonists in their approach to the question Holt poses them: the physicist Roger Penrose, who concentrates on mathematical Platonism as the answer to the ultimate metaphysical problem of why there is anything, and the philosopher John Leslie, who develops what is called “extreme axiarchism,” or the rule of values.
18The Timaeus’ denial that time is absolute, its making it a function of motion, portends ideas that would come to fruition in the theory of special relativity.
19Brian Greene, “Welcome to the Multiverse,” Newsweek, May 21, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/20/brian-greene-welcome-to-the-multiverse.html.
20Spinoza further continues: “To those who ask why God did not so create all men, that they should be governed only by reason, I give no answer but this: because matter was not lacking him for the creation of every degree of perfection from highest to lowest; or, more strictly, because the laws of his nature are so vast as to suffice for the production of everything conceivable by an infinite intelligence, as I have shown in Proposition 16” (Appendix to Part I, Ethics). In other words, for Spinoza, the infinite ontological fecundity, itself a measure of its perfection, spills out into a reality with aspects both pleasurable and painful for sentient creatures such as us. Our being those particular creatures makes us overestimate the significance of these pleasurable-for-us and painful-for-us aspects. Such overestimation indicates insufficient distance from the cave.
21“And the motions that have an affinity to the divine part within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. These, surely, are the ones which each of us should follow. We should redirect the revolutions in our heads that were thrown off course at our birth, by coming to learn the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, and so bring into conformity with its objects our faculty of understanding, as it was in its original condition. And when this conformity is complete, we shall have achieved our goal: that most excellent life offered to humankind by the gods, both now and forevermore” (Timaeus 90d).
22Compare: “These (people with the best natures) are not easily produced, but when they are born and are nurtured and trained in the necessary way, it is absolutely right for such people to be able to hold the inferior majority in subjection by thinking, doing, and saying all that concerns the gods in the right ways at the right times, not hypocritically performing sacrifices and purification rites for violations against gods and humans, but in truth honoring virtue. In fact, honoring virtue is the single most important thing for the entire city. Now we hold that this segment of the population is by nature best suited to authority and is capable of learning the noblest and finest studies, if anyone will teach them” (Epinomis 989c–d).
ι
PLATO IN THE MAGNET
(illustration credit ill.12)
But our creators, considering whether they should make a longer-lived race which was worse, or a shorter-lived race which was better, came to the conclusion that everyone ought to prefer a shorter span of life, which was better, to a longer one, which was worse; and therefore they covered the head with thin bone, but not with flesh and sinews … and thus the head was added having more wisdom and sensation than the rest of the body, but also being in every man far weaker.1
—Timaeus
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
DR. DAVID SHOKET: The Eugene and Eunice Quant Professor of Neuroscience at Olympia University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator; Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences; Fellow of the Neuroscience Research Program.
AGATHA FINE: Third-year graduate student in cognitive science at the university. Agatha has been working with Dr. Shoket to learn the tools of modern cognitive neuroscience.
Shoket walks through a door into a windowless conference room. Agatha is sitting at a small round table, filling in some paperwork.2
SHOKET: Agatha! You’re looking particularly radiant today.
AGATHA: Thank you. The subject is a male Caucasian, highly educated, born in Greece but fluent in English, 2,400 years old, with no detectable signs of dementia.
SHOKET: Something’s different. Is that a new lab jacket?
AGATHA, absentmindedly glancing down: No. I’ve already explained the tasks we’ll be asking him to perform while he’s being scanned. He got the point of them quickly.
SHOKET: So not the typical undergrad we see in here. Not to speak of our violent felons, druggies, and other upstanding specimens of humanity.
Shoket laughs, and Agatha smiles perfunctorily. Shoket’s laugh is loud and distinctive, reminiscent of an elephant seal’s mating call.
Shoket’s current research is in differences in the mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway implicated in individuals with a high degree of impulsivity. His preliminary model is that highly impulsive individuals, such as those that end up as addicts and felons, are characterized by diminished availability of midbrain autoreceptors, which potentiate dopamine release in reward pathways when the brain is exposed to novel, salient, or appetitive stimuli. Highly impulsive individuals are flooded with dopamine, which means they experience intense cravings, while their prefrontal cortex, the seat of higher-order mental processes, including self-control, remains, as a result, minimally activated.
SHOKET: Did you say the subject is 2,400 years old? He whistles contemplatively. Is he alert enough to be of any use?
AGATHA: He’s very alert. I rated him a full 5 in mental acuity.
SHOKET: I’ll spend a little extra time with him before we put him in the magnet,3 just to double-check he’s compos mentis. I don’t want the jackbooted thugs from the Human Subjects Committee goose-stepping into my laboratory and shutting us down.
Shoket laughs loudly, and Agatha smiles perfunctorily.
AGATHA: The subject has already signed the release forms.
SHOKET: He knew what he was signing?
AGATHA: You’ll see for yourself. I’d pit his compos mentis against my own.
SHOKET: Uh-oh. Should I be worried about you?
Shoket laughs. Agatha smiles.
AGATHA: It’s Plato, the famous philosopher. I read him in college. You must have read him yourself at some point.
SHOKET: He’ll be able to follow directions?
AGATHA: That’s his Chromebook over there. He’s done his research, and he’s eager to learn more. And, as I said, he’s a famous philosopher.
SHOKET: You mean he’s still a philosopher?
AGATHA: As far as I know. I don’t think it’s something a person can stop being.
SHOKET: Like being Jewish!
Shoket laughs. Agatha smiles.
SHOKET: I didn’t even know there were still philosophers around. They have them on the faculty here?
AGATHA: Of course.
SHOKET whistles contemplatively: Live and learn. Do they share the same building with the astrologers and the alchemists?
Shoket laughs. Agatha smiles.
AGATHA: We have philosophers of mind at the Cognitive Science Center. They collaborate with us.
SHOKET: What’s the point?
AGATHA: You could ask Plato that.
SHOKET: Right. I’m going to ask a two-thousand-year-old man to tell me something I don’t know. It’s like that old Mel Brooks–Carl Reiner comedy sketch. “Were you there when they prepared the cross for Jesus?” “Yeah, it was a hell of a lot easier to put together than the Star of David.”
Shoket laughs. Agatha smiles.
SHOKET: You don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you?
Agatha shakes her head.
SHOKET: You kids! What do you know from humor? All I can say is that it’s a good thing that you got yourself over to my lab. It shows real sense on your
part.
Shoket laughs. Agatha smiles.
AGATHA: He’s just changing now. He knew that there was a danger of any metal heating up in the scanner, so he arrived in a chiton.
SHOKET: What’s that?
AGATHA: A kind of toga.
SHOKET: A kind of toga? What is that, a joke? Are you the one being politically incorrect now?
AGATHA: It was a logical choice. No zippers, snaps, or metal buttons. But I told him that it’s standard procedure to change, just in case there are any invisible metal filaments woven into the fabric.
SHOKET: And right you were. We don’t want any spontaneous combustion of human subjects. Doesn’t look good on the NSF grant reports.
Shoket laughs. Agatha smiles. Plato enters, wearing blue scrubs. Agatha, whose job it is to handle the test subjects, takes charge.
AGATHA, smiling: Dr. Shoket, this is Plato!
SHOKET: Yes, I’m Dr. Shoket. Please be seated. Agatha has explained to you what we’ll be asking you to do while we’re taking the functional magnetic resonance images of your brain, but if you have any remaining questions, feel free to ask me now.
PLATO: It is an honor to meet you, Dr. Shoket, and to be allowed to participate, in however small a way, in your research.
SHOKET: You understand, though, that you’re just going to be a human test subject today. We’re not going to be collaborators! This isn’t the Cognitive Science Center! Laughs.
AGATHA, hurriedly: Thank you so much for agreeing to change into the scrubs. I realize they’re not very dignified. They’re comfortable, though, aren’t they?
PLATO: Very comfortable indeed. Perhaps I can purchase a pair for myself?
AGATHA: Oh, I think we can let you have those as a little memento of your visit to the Shoket Laboratory. Can’t we, Dr. Shoket?
SHOKET, smiling: Well, we may have to take it out of your stipend, Agatha. Laughs. Yes, of course, the scrubs are yours.
Plato at the Googleplex Page 51