Plato at the Googleplex Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Rebecca Goldstein

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint from previously published material are listed following the bibliographical note.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goldstein, Rebecca, [date]

  Plato at the Googleplex : why philosophy won’t go away / Rebecca Goldstein.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  HC ISBN 978-0-307-37819-4 EBK ISBN 978-0-307-90887-2

  1. Plato—Influence. 2. Philosophy—History—21st century.

  3. Imaginary conversations. I. Title.

  B395.G4435 2014 184—dc23 2013029660

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket design by Pablo Delcán

  v3.1

  FOR HARRY AND ROZ PINKER

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  α Man Walks into a Seminar Room

  β Plato at the Googleplex

  γ In the Shadow of the Acropolis

  δ Plato at the 92nd Street Y

  ε I Don’t Know How to Love Him

  ς xxxPlato

  ζ Socrates Must Die

  η Plato on Cable News

  θ Let the Sunshine In

  ι Plato in the Magnet

  Appendix A: Socratic Sources

  Appendix B: The Two Speeches of Pericles from Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliographical Note

  Index

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  PROLOGUE

  A book devoted to a particular thinker often presumes that thinker got everything right. I don’t think this is true of Plato. Plato got about as much wrong as we would expect from a philosopher who lived 2,400 years ago. Were this not the case, then philosophy, advancing our knowledge not at all, would be useless. I don’t think it’s useless, so I’m quite happy to acknowledge how mistaken or confused Plato can often strike us.

  Plato is surprisingly relevant to many of our contemporary discussions, but this isn’t because he knew as much as we do. Obviously, he didn’t know the science that we know. But, less obviously, he didn’t know the philosophy that we know, including philosophy that has filtered outward beyond the seminar table. Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of tortuous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge. Such leakage is perhaps more common as regards the questions of morality than other branches of philosophy, since those are questions that constantly test us. We can hardly get through our lives—in fact, it’s hard to get through a week—without considering what makes specific actions right and others wrong and debating with ourselves whether that is a difference that must compel the actions we choose. (Okay, it’s wrong! I get it! But why should I care?)

  Plato’s ruminations, as profound as they are, hardly give us the last word on such matters. European thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, coming two millennia after Plato, had much to add to our shared conceptions of morality, particularly as regards individual rights, and we have learned from them and gone on.1 This is why it is impossible for us to read Plato now without occasional disapproval. It’s precisely because he initiated a process that has taken us beyond him.

  So Plato hardly did all the philosophical work. And yet he did do something so extraordinary as to mark his thinking as one of the pivotal stages in humankind’s development. What Plato did was to carve out the field of philosophy itself. It was Plato who first framed the majority of fundamental philosophical questions. He grasped the essence of a peculiar kind of question, the philosophical question, some specimens of which were already afloat in the Athens of his day, and he extended its application. He applied the philosophical question not only to norms of human behavior, as Socrates had done, but to language, to politics, to art, to mathematics, to religion, to love and friendship, to the mind, to personal identity, to the meaning of life and the meaning of death, to the natures of explanation, of rationality, and of knowledge itself. Philosophical questions could be framed in all these far-flung areas of human concern and inquiry, and Plato framed them, often in their definitive form. How did he do it? Why was it he who did it? This is a mystery I’ve always wanted to unravel. But how do you get close enough to Plato to even attempt to figure him out? Drawing conclusions about which doctrines he meant to assert—or even whether he meant to assert any doctrines at all—is difficult enough, much less hoping to get a glimpse into the soul of the man.

  Though Plato is (at least for many of us) an easy philosopher to love, he is also a deucedly difficult philosopher to get close to. Despite his enormous influence, he is one of the most remote figures in the history of thought. His remoteness is not only a matter of his antiquity, but also of the manner in which he gave himself to us by way of his writings. He didn’t create treatises, essays, or inquiries that propound positions. Instead, he wrote dialogues, which are not only great works of philosophy but also great works of literature.

  His language is that of a consummate artist. Classical scholars affirm that his Greek is the purest and finest of any of the ancient writings that have come down to us. “The lyrical prose of Plato had no peer in the ancient world,” writes one scholar in his introduction to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s extraordinary translation of Plato’s Symposium, the great Romantic pouring his own lyrical gifts into the text.2 But, more to the point, Plato’s vivid characters discuss philosophical problems in so lively and natural a manner that it is difficult to catch the author’s point of view through the engagement of the many voices with one another. His dialogues allow us to draw a little bit closer to many of his contemporaries—including Socrates—while Plato holds himself aloof. Some readers of the dialogues interpret the character of Socrates, who is often the character who gets the most lines, as a stand-in for Plato, much as Salviati speaks for Galileo in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and as Philo speaks for David Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion; but this pastes too simple a face over an interpretive chimera.3 It is almost as naive to reduce the dialogic Socrates to a mere sock puppet for the philosopher Plato as it is to reduce Plato to a mere notetaker for the philosopher Socrates. Plato floats fugitive between these two reductions.

  His elusiveness is comparable to that of another protean writer of whom it is difficult to catch a glimpse through the genius of the work, William Shakespeare. In both, it’s the capaciousness and vivacity of points of view animating the text that drives the author into the shadows. In the case of Shakespeare, the remoteness of the author has provoked some otherwise sober people to contend that the actor born on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, who left school at fourteen and never went to university and married an already pregnant Anne Hathaway, to whom he willed his “second-best” bed, was merely a front man for the real author—even a whole committee of authors.4 In the case of Plato, the remoteness makes itself felt not only in the difficulties of disentangling Plato from Socrates, but, even more dramatically, in the mutually incompatible characterizations that have been foisted upon him.

  It has been claimed that Plato was an egalitarian; it has been claimed that he was a totalitarian. It has been claimed that he was a utopian, proposing a universal blueprint for the ideal
state; it has been claimed he was an anti-utopian, demonstrating that all political idealism is folly. It has been claimed he was a populist, concerned with the best interests of all citizens; it has been claimed he was an elitist with disturbing eugenicist tendencies. It has been claimed he was other-worldly; it has been claimed he was this-worldly. It has been claimed he was a romantic; it has been claimed he was a prig. It has been claimed that he was a theorizer, with sweeping metaphysical doctrines; it has been claimed he was an anti-theorizing skeptic, always intent on unsettling convictions. It has been claimed he was full of humor and play; it has been claimed he was as solemn as a sermon limning the torments of the damned. It has been claimed he loved his fellow man; it has been claimed he loathed his fellow man. It has been claimed he was a philosopher who used his artistic gifts in the service of philosophy; it has been claimed he was an artist who used philosophy in the service of his art.

  Isn’t it curious that a figure can exert so much influence throughout the course of Western civilization and escape consensus as to what he was all about? And how in the world can one hope to draw closer to so elusive a figure?

  He was an ancient Greek, a citizen of the city-state of Athens during its classical age. How much of Plato’s achievement in almost singlehandedly creating philosophy is explained by his having been a Greek? The Greeks have fascinated us for a good long while now. Even the Romans, who vanquished them militarily, were vanquished from within by the fascinating Greeks. After the millennia of obsession, is there anything new to say about them? I think so, and it is this: the preconditions for philosophy were created there in ancient Greece, and most especially in Athens. These preconditions lay not only in a preoccupation with the question of what it is that makes life worth living but in a distinctive approach to this question.

  The Greeks were not alone in being preoccupied with the question of human worth and human mattering. Across the Mediterranean was the still-obscure tribe called the Ivrim, the Hebrews, from the word for “over,” since they were over on the other side of the Jordan. There they worked out their notion of a covenantal relationship with a tribal god whom they eventually elevated to the position of the one and only God, The Master of the Universe who provides the foundation for both the physical world without and the moral world within. To live according to his commandments was to live a life worth living. Our Western culture is still an uneasy mix of the approaches to the question of human worth worked out by these two Mediterranean peoples, the Greeks and the Hebrews. But even they weren’t alone in their existential preoccupations. In Persia, Zoroastrianism presented a dualistic version of the forces of good and evil; in China, there was Confucius and Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu; and in India, there was the Buddha. Each of these approaches adds to the range of choices we have for conceiving the life worth living.

  The philosopher Karl Jaspers baptized this normatively5 fertile period in human history—which was roughly 800 to 200 B.C.E.—the “Axial Age,” because visions forged during that period extend out into our own day, like the axials of a wheel. These ways of normatively framing our lives still resonate with millions of people, including secularists, who are the inheritors of the Greek tradition.

  The Greeks themselves can hardly be called secularists. Religious rituals saturated their lives—their gods and goddesses were everywhere and had to be propitiated or something terrible would happen. Their rituals were, by and large, apotropaic, meant to ward off evil. There were public rites associated with the individual city-states and others that were Panhellenic; there were secret rites that belonged to the mystery cults. But what is remarkable about the Greeks—even pre-philosophically—is that, despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an individual human life worth living they didn’t look to their immortals but rather approached the question in mortal terms. Their approaching the question of human mattering in human terms is the singularity that creates the conditions for philosophy in ancient Greece, most especially as these conditions were realized in the city-state of Athens.

  Their human approach to the question of human mattering meant that the tragic point of view—in fact, several versions of the tragic point of view—were agonizingly distinct possibilities. It is no accident that Athens was the home not only of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle,6 but also of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Their approach to the question of what makes a human life worth living created not only the conditions for the great tragic dramatists but also the audiences for them. Those audiences didn’t shrink from confronting the possibility that human life, tragically, is not worth living. Perhaps we don’t matter and nothing can be done to make us matter. Or, only slightly less tragic, perhaps there is something that must be done in order to achieve a life worth living, something that will redeem that life by singling it out as extraordinary, and only then will it matter. It is only an ordinary life—with nothing to distinguish it from the great masses of other anonymous lives that have come before us and will come after us—that doesn’t matter. There is a pronounced pitilessness in this proposition, and there was a pronounced pitilessness in the Greeks. One must exert oneself in order to achieve a life that matters. If you don’t exert yourself, or if your exertions don’t amount to much of anything, then you might as well not have bothered to have shown up for your existence at all.

  How many of us harbor something like this attitude, whether vaguely or not, that the ordinary souls among us—by definition, the overwhelming majority of us—don’t matter as much as the extraordinary ones do? So, too, did a great many Greeks, at least those among them who had the luxury of worrying over such existential quandaries, Greeks who not only wrote the tragedies but were moved to pity and terror by them. I call their attitude the Ethos of the Extraordinary. It is only by making oneself extraordinary that one can keep from disappearing without a trace, like some poor soul who slips beneath the ocean’s waves—an image that called forth an intensity of terror for the seafaring Greeks.7 One must live so that one will be spoken about, by as many speakers as possible and for as long as possible. It is, in the end, the only kind of immortality for which we may hope. And, of course, we are still speaking about the ancient Greeks, especially the extraordinary ones among them, of which there were so many.

  Plato shared, with radical modifications, in the Ethos of the Extraordinary, and it led him to create philosophy as we know it. The kind of exertion that is required if one is to achieve a life worth living is philosophy as he understood it. It is our exertions in reason that make us matter—make us, to the extent that we can be, godlike. And if such exertions don’t win the acclaim of the masses, so much the worse for the masses. The kind of extraordinary that matters is likely to go undetected by them—so, in a certain sense, though not in all senses, they really don’t matter. This is a harsh statement, but, as already noted, harshness didn’t much faze the Greeks, and Plato is no exception here.

  Plato opened up his dialogues to many different kinds of people, including those who didn’t conventionally count for much in Athenian society. He did the same in the Academy that he established in a grove outside the city center and which became the prototype for the European university. It is reported that even women could study there, which accords with what he has to say about female intellectual potential in the Republic and the Laws. Nevertheless, his philosophical version of the Ethos of the Extraordinary left many stranded outside of the mattering class, namely all those who aren’t able, or inclined, to do philosophy, to do reason. When, in the Apology, his rendition of Socrates’ trial in 399 B.C.E., he has Socrates declare that the unexamined life is not worth living, he is both endorsing the Ethos of the Extraordinary shared by many in his culture and, at the same time, modifying it sufficiently to outrage his fellow Athenians. (That trial did not end well for Socrates.) A widely shared Greek presumption slips unexamined into his thinking. It will be pried out when European philosophers, after the centuries of encasing the question of h
uman worth in religious thinking, return once again to consider the question of what makes a human life matter in secular terms, as the Greeks had done.

  Here is an irony: the unexamined presumption that led Plato to create philosophy as we know it would eventually be invalidated by philosophy. That’s progress. The progress to be made in philosophy is often a matter of discovering presumptions that slip unexamined into reasoning, so why not the unexamined presumption that got the whole self-criticial process started? Plato, I would think, could only approve.

  But thinking about Plato in these terms only gets us so close to him. Yes, he was an Athenian and, as an Athenian, imported certain preoccupations and preconceptions into his thinking. But that is only part of drawing closer to the remote figure of Plato. The other part is Plato’s relationship with Socrates.

  We know precious little about the personal life of Plato, but this we do know. The drama of Socrates’ life—the true meaning of which was given, for Plato as well as for others, in his death—was personally transformative for Plato. It convinced him to devote his life to philosophy—he tells us this himself in his Seventh Letter8—which he did with singular effect. His response to the trauma of Socrates’ execution by the democratic polis of Athens, when Socrates was seventy years old and Plato was in his late twenties, was to create philosophy as we know it, formulating its central questions, questions far beyond any that had, in all probability, occurred to Socrates himself.9

  But almost until the very end of his life, he kept the figure of Socrates at the center of his work. Plato wrote about philosophy with misgivings. He worried, for one thing, that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations, for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute. (Philosophy, still, is an unusually gregarious subject.) Having agonized no less about the best way to write (and teach) philosophy than about philosophy itself, Plato created his dialogues, all of which have come down to us. (No commentator ever mentions a work of Plato that we don’t have, in contrast to the works of Aristotle.) Twenty-five out of his twenty-six dialogues feature the character of Socrates, who, whether he is carrying the thrust of the argument forward or not—and often he isn’t—is central to Plato’s conception of philosophy. Socrates is altogether absent only in the Laws, written when Plato was an old man, almost a decade older than Socrates had been when he died. But even in his absence, Socrates is significant.