Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  26Among the discarded, for example, was phlogiston, the substance of fire; those items that burn have phlogiston in their composition, which is released as fire, which is why one is often left, after a conflagration, with a mere pile of ashes. Phlogiston, as an explanatory hypothesis, was eliminated by the theory of oxidation, which was established by Lavoisier’s carefully weighing objects before and after burning. Caloric fluid, which was meant to explain heat, was another theoretical entity that was given up; this elimination was accomplished by the identification of heat with molecular motion.

  27Only fragments have come down to us of these earliest philosophers, who appeared to have written short prose pieces or, in some cases, oracular poetry, setting forth their views. Our knowledge of these first philosophers comes largely from the accounts given of them by secondhand commentators, who may or may not have had direct access to their writings. Prominent among these commentators is Aristotle, who writes about other philosophers in his Metaphysics.

  28Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), p. 24.

  29His crime was distributing pacifist literature during the First World War. Hitler caused him to later renounce his pacifism, to the point that he wished he were younger so that he might don a uniform himself. See Russell, Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 438 ff.

  30The Greeks colonized all around the Mediterranean basin, and their “Hesperia,” or Land of the West, was known as Magna Graecia, Greater Greece. Pythagoras, too, though born on the Aegean island of Samos, eventually settled on the eastern coast of Italy in the city of Crotona. Plato was to spend some time in Italy among the Pythagoreans, and their mathematics-marinated mysticism deeply penetrated his thinking.

  31The Greek proscientific idea of organisms attaching to other organisms to create new life forms, some better suited for survival than others, has a counterpart in modern molecular biology. Consider mitochondria, organelles found in the cells of all animals which use glucose to generate ATP, our fuel source. Mitochondria, one of the most essential parts of life forms, used to be free-living organisms. They got swallowed up by the single-cell ancestor of all animals but resisted being digested and maintained their integrity, making complex life possible. The chloroplasts that make plants green and allow them to photosynthesize have a similar history.

  32Besides Leucippus and Democritus, ancients who held to a corpuscular theory of matter included Epicurus and Lucretius, who put this philosophy into magnificent poetry in his De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things. The chance survival of Lucretius’ poem was the subject of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), which, as the title announces, tries to stake for this poem a pivotal role in Europe’s once again picking up the secular-humanist trail that was first laid out in antiquity.

  33The sciences were known as natural philosophy until well into the nineteenth century, when the word “science,” derived from the Latin for knowledge, entered the lexicon.

  34For Socrates’ spurning of what we can now call protoscientific questions see the Apology 19c and 26d and the Phaedo 96a–100a. See also Xenophon, Memorabilia, I.1.12–16. On our sources for Socrates, who published nothing on his own, see appendix A.

  35Apology 29d.

  36Plato described the advanced civilization, destroyed by a natural disaster and swallowed up by the sea, in the Timaeus. “Some time later excessively violent earthquakes and floods occurred, and after the onset of an unbearable day and a night, your entire warrior force sank below the earth all at once, and the Isle of Atlantis likewise sank below the sea and disappeared” (25c–d). There is geological and architectural evidence that Plato, in relating what he calls “an old-world story” (21a), was relying on a thousand-year-old cultural memory of the lost Minoan society that had existed on Crete and other islands, including the ancient Thera, whose brilliant civilization (including indoor plumbing!) sat on a volcano that erupted around 1500 B.C.E. The Santorini archipelago, with its massive deposits of pumice, is what remains of what was once the single island of Thera. The tsunamis that were unleashed by the volcano—which is now thought to have been second only to the 1815 volcanic eruption in Tambora, Indonesia—might have been responsible for the destruction of the wealthy and advanced Minoan culture on Crete. See Richard A Lovett, “ ‘Atlantis’ Eruption Twice as Big as Previously Believed, Study Suggests,” National Geographic News, August 23, 2006. The theme of civilization ending in cataclysmic doom might well have resonated with Plato’s historical pessimism, perhaps intensified as he grew older. (Timaeus is typically classified as one of his later dialogues.)

  37See chapter ι below.

  38Josiah Ober uses the notion of “epistemic democracy,” but in a different sense: He argues that Athenian democracy was knowledge-based, its principles of political and social organization sensitive to evidence. See his Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  39See Debra Nails, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002). This book gives thumbnail histories of the many real personages who people Plato’s writings.

  40For the argument that the dialogues were intended for serious performance, see Nikos G. Charalabopoulos, Platonic Drama and Its Ancient Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also the review of Charalabopoulos by Emily Wilson, in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (December 2012), http://www.bmcreview.org/2012/12/20121262.html. And see also Ruby Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  41See chapter ε for more on the extraordinary Alcibiades, who wreaked such havoc on Athens and the greater Greek world.

  42Olympiodorus the Younger lived c. 495–570 C.E. and was a Neoplatonist philosopher. Teaching after the emperor Justinian’s decree of 529 C.E., which closed Plato’s Academy in Athens and all other pagan schools, Olympiodorus was the last to uphold the Platonic tradition in Alexandria. After his death the school of Alexandria converted to Christian Aristotelianism and was moved to Constantinople. Among Olympiodorus’ Platonic writings was a Life of Plato.

  43http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/the-maze-of-moral-relativism/.

  44http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/does-philosophy-matter/.

  45In fact, Plato himself presents Adeimantus suggesting something similar to Fish’s complaint in the Republic 487a–e.

  46Of course, a presupposition that stands behind this process is that there is, at least for many questions, such a thing as a true answer. This is a presupposition that Fish, a baton-twirling cheerleader for relativism, spiritedly denies.

  47Some Freudians, though not necessarily Freud. “What psychoanalysis called sexuality was by no means identical with the impulsion towards a union of the two sexes or towards producing a pleasurable sensation in the genitals; it had far more resemblance to the inclusive and all-preserving Erôs of Plato’s Symposium.” Sigmund Freud, “Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” 1925. Reprinted in Collected Papers: Character and Culture (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 258.

  48G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (1940; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 123–124.

  49Kurt Gödel, “What Is Cantor’s Continuum Problem?,” American Mathematical Monthly, 1947, reprinted in Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings, ed. Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 271.

  50Karl Giberson, “The Man Who Fell to Earth: An Interview with Roger Penrose,” Science and Spirit Magazine (March–April 2003).

  51Die Grundlagen der Arithmetic (Breslau: W. Koebner, 1884). Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), section 96.

  52Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 466.

  53Myles Burnyeat argues that Plato
raises the question of the precise ontological status of mathematical objects in the Republic, only to decide to leave it unresolved. See his “Plato on Why Mathematics Is Good for the Soul,” Proceedings of the British Academy 103 (2000): 1–81, especially pp. 33–35. Plato also raises the question explicitly in the Timaeus, again leaving it largely unresolved. See especially 51c–52c.

  54According to Burnyeat, Plato doesn’t present the specialness of mathematical truths in terms of their necessity, but rather of their context-invariance: “Regardless of context, the sum of two odd numbers is an even number. It is not the case that in some circumstances the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal, while in other circumstances it is unequal, to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Pythagoras’ theorem, whoever discovered it, is context-invariant. It is important here that Plato does not have the concept of necessary truth. Unlike Aristotle, he never speaks of mathematical truths as necessary; he never contrasts them with contingent states of affairs. Invariance across context is the feature he emphasizes, and this is a weaker requirement than necessity; or at least, it is weaker than the necessity which modern philosophers associate with mathematical truth.” Burnyeat, “Plato on Why Mathematics Is Good for the Soul,” pp. 20–21.

  55Quoted on Nova, The Elegant Universe, “Viewpoints on String Theory,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/view-weinberg.html.

  56Cf. Phaedo 97b–d, Timaeus (passim), Philebus 27–30, and Laws X. Leibniz is often credited with first formulating the question of why is there something rather than nothing? But here, too, Plato beat everyone to it—including Spinoza, who also wrestled with the question, a precedent that I imagine both Spinoza and Leibniz readily acknowledging.

  57Ethics I, Appendix. Trans. R. H. M. Elwes, 1883. Revised edition (London: George Bell and Sons, 1901).

  58“Intelligible” is no more meant to entail “intelligible to us humans” than “good” is meant to entail “good for us humans.”

  β

  PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX1

  (illustration credit ill.2)

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Cheryl, media escort

  Marcus, software engineer

  Rhonda, narrator and Cheryl’s friend

  The other day, I came into the city to meet my friend Cheryl for a drink and—her expression—a little tête-à-tête-ing. Cheryl and I are both New Yorkers transplanted to the West Coast. That’s one of the ties between us. It might be the only tie between us, but somehow we’ve fallen into the habit of being friends. We met at a pricey hotel bar on Nob Hill that’s decorated like an Italian bordello, with heavy red velvet drapery and gilded statuary. But it is—again Cheryl’s expression—quiet as a vault, which means you can hear yourself talk, even though, as usual, Cheryl did most of the talking. You can’t altogether blame her, given the interesting people she’s constantly meeting. She’s my own personal version of Gawker, a way of my getting a glimpse into the lives of the famous, the near-famous, and the willing-to-do-anything-short-of-landing-themselves-on-death-row-in-the-hopes-of-someday-being-famous.

  She was late, which was my first tip-off that something was up with her. Cheryl is super-organized, which is something you have to be in her line of work. Here’s how organized she is: while she was parking her Lexus, she called me and told me to order her a Long Island Iced Tea, which is a far stronger mixed drink than our usual Chardonnay.2 The drinks were just being brought to the table when Cheryl arrived, amid all the jangling of the large silver bangles she was wearing. Cheryl is always in full Tiffany armor.

  After she’d made her little joke about the waiters, who all act as if there were stiff entrance requirements enforced to get in here, including letters of recommendation from your high school math and English teachers, she settled down to tell me about her latest adventures escorting authors from one media event to another. Since everybody’s writing books these days, Cheryl gets to meet politicians, movie stars, all sorts of has-beens, alcoholics, and junkies, and even some authors who do nothing but write books. She’s got the knack, she says, so that people open up to her, and if she ever retires and writes a tell-all memoir she’ll need her own media escort as well as a good lawyer.

  Boy, did I have an experience today, she launched in with little preamble. My author was a philosopher, which I just figured was going to be awkward and tedious. And he uses just the one name Plato, which struck me as not a little off-putting, as if he were on a par with a Cher or a Madonna. From the start I figured it was going to be one very long day, but I had no idea.

  She took a long sip of her drink.

  No idea at all, she continued. Plus his event was one of those Authors@Google things and that place always puts me on edge. It’s hard to breathe in the congested self-congratulation up there at the Googleplex. When somebody tells me that they work hard and play just as hard, which I hear every frigging time I go there, then I make it a point to roll my eyes … hard.

  Cheryl rolled her eyes as she said this. Her coming down so hard on the Googlers for their high self-esteem is funny, in its way. If I had to escort the high-and-mighty the way Cheryl does, I’d be so intimidated I wouldn’t open my mouth unless absolutely necessary. I’m intimidated at one remove, just hearing about Cheryl’s authors. But no matter who Cheryl is escorting, she doesn’t know from awe. On the contrary, if you know what I mean. So it’s funny how irked she is by other people’s little gestures of self-importance.

  Of course, there is the food there, she was saying. I always make it a point to take my authors to lunch there first. I’ve told you about the food there, right? I mean it’s gorgeous. Yoscha’s Café is my favorite. It’s huge and airy, and they’ve got dozens of food stations with different gourmet food so lovingly prepared you can just imagine the doting caretakers who sent their darlings out into the world. And of course it’s all free, as I explained to Plato. That’s the first thing to know about the food here, I said to him. They get breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever, absolutely free. It’s feeding on demand.

  I’d hate that, I told Cheryl. I’d gain ten pounds in a week.

  Yeah, well, apparently that’s a “problem”—she air-quoted—which they complain about in their bragging sort of way. We work hard, play hard, and eat hard, which makes us exercise hard. Oh, my goodness, can you possibly grasp what a bunch of superior people we are? Cheryl was rolling her eyes again. Anyway, she went on, Plato was listening to me very intently—it’s almost disconcerting how intently he listens—even though I was just rambling on, kind of free-associating, just trying to make conversation because I could tell this guy’s skills at small talk were not the highest. You know, very ivory tower, though with extremely good manners, almost something aristocratic about him. Also he makes eye contact, unlike a lot of these types. In fact, he makes serious eye contact. His stare is penetrating to the point of aggravating. Anyway, when I finally stopped to take a breath, he asked me: And what is the second thing to know about the food here? You see, he’s got this very logical mind. If you say to him, here’s the first thing to know about something, then you’ve also got to give him a second thing to know about it. So I said, well, I guess the second thing is that it’s yummy. And of course it’s local and organic and all those other kinds of things that people around here are into.

  And he asked me, have you ever heard of the Prytaneum?

  No, I answered, what’s that, some hot new restaurant?

  He sort of smiled, which he tends to do more with his eyes than his mouth, and said, in a manner of speaking, yes, it is hot. The sacred fire of the city is kept going there at all times, its flame carried to any new colony established by the metropolis.

  Well, of course, I had no idea what he was talking about, though I vaguely sensed he was making some kind of a joke. He comes from Athens, I forgot to tell you that, and even though I’d been to Greece on that cruise with Michael before the kids were born, the more Plato spoke, the more I realized that Michael and I hadn’t seen the real Greec
e. I mean, you have no idea of how different they do things over there, at least to listen to Plato describe it. Anyway, he told me, the Prytaneum also serves free meals.

  So I said to him, no kidding! That’s quite a deal. How can they afford to stay in business?

  It is run by the city, he answered, and the meals are mainly for those who have rendered extraordinary service to the city.3 I had a friend who got into some very unfortunate legal trouble. Socrates was charged on two counts, impiety and corruption of the youth.

  Corruption of the youth? That sounds pretty dark. Was he some sort of pedophile? I asked him.

  Not in the sense that you are most likely thinking, he said, though he loved youth.

  Well, I hope not in the sense that I’m thinking! I said right back at him, which made him kind of wince.

  The charge was more a matter of his not accepting the moral values of his society and his encouraging the young to question them as well. And he was right to question them and to get us younger men to question them. As proof of how corrupt the society was, the jury ended up convicting him.4