Let’s Have a Dialogue

Credit Mike McQuade

‘Plato at the Googleplex,’ by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

By ANTHONY GOTTLIEBAPRIL 18, 2014                 

            

Plato has begun to appear in some unexpected places. On the first track of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s hip-hop album, “Watch the Throne” (2011), you can pick out the line, “Is Pious pious cause God loves pious?” This, as classicists will instantly recognize, is an allusion to a dilemma posed in Plato’s dialogue “Euthyphro,” in which Socrates asks, “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” In Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book, “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away,” Plato turns up not only at the search engine’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., but also with the obstreperous host of a cable news talk show, as a consultant to an advice columnist, and in several other places a long way from ancient Athens. In Goldstein’s neat finale, the pupil of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle eagerly disappears into the magnetic bowels of an fM.R.I. scanner to have his brain probed.

Goldstein is a novelist and a teacher of philosophy whose previous nonfiction book, “Betraying Spinoza,” was in effect a love letter to the 17th-century Dutch thinker described as “the renegade Jew who gave us modernity.” Now she has written a love letter to Plato, whom she regards as having given us philosophy. He is, in her view, as relevant today as he ever was — which is to say, very. To demonstrate his continuing hipness, her expository chapters on his writings and milieu alternate with Platonic-style dialogues set in ­present-day America, where Plato is on a book tour. The old chap adapts wonderfully to his unfamiliar surroundings. Presented with a Chromebook computer, he becomes addicted to Googling, and enrolls in online courses to brush up on ­neuroscience.

It’s diverting to speculate on which aspects of the Internet would be embraced by time-traveling ancient thinkers. The epigrammatic Heraclitus would surely have appreciated the enforced brevity of Twitter. Diogenes the Cynic, who made a spectacle of himself in order to heap scorn on conventional values (to which end he allegedly masturbated in public), would presumably have relished Facebook — until his selfie-strewn account was deleted. Diogenes Laertius, an infamously undiscerning historian, would have gleefully reposted every hoax and rumor to be found in cyberspace. It’s harder to swallow the idea that Plato would be such a Googler, given his insistence on the chasm between mere information and genuine wisdom. Aristotle, a keen collector of biological oddities, is the more plausible hoarder of facts.

But this is not a criticism. Quite the reverse: Goldstein’s resurrection of Plato actually works, which is no mean achievement. His avid Googling is slightly puzzling precisely because her character is recognizably the real thing — or rather, a plausible reconstruction of his mouthpiece, Socrates. When the rejuvenated Plato gently probes the loud certainties of Roy McCoy, Goldstein’s invented cable-news pundit, on the subjects of happiness, virtue, success and religion, we hear authentic Platonic arguments brought nicely up to date.

Plato never speaks under his own name in the old dialogues. We are told in them that he was present at the trial of Socrates and absent at his death, but otherwise we hear nothing about him. Giving Plato his own voice has been tried a few times before, notably in “The Mask of Apollo” (1966), a historical novel by Mary Renault, and in “Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues” (1986), by the British novelist-philosopher Iris Murdoch. Murdoch’s Plato was dogmatic and impatient in one dialogue (“Oh what nonsense you all talk!”), and an emotional and tiresome youth in another. Goldstein’s Plato seems to have been modeled on the character of Socrates, because he is unfailingly modest and polite — and is thus quite unlike the “philosophy-jeerers” among scientists with whom she wrestles at various points in the book. 

One of the most raucous jeers against philosophy in general, and Socrates in particular, was delivered in Plato’s own time, by the comic playwright Aristophanes. Nowadays, it is most often scientists who lead the taunting: Some physicists seem especially to have gotten under Goldstein’s skin. I’m not sure the ones she cites are worthy opponents. They are tone-deaf to philosophical reasoning and mistakenly suppose that the defect lies in the music rather than in themselves. Such uncomprehending hostility is an intriguing phenomenon, which perhaps in part reflects the narrowness of scientific specialization these days. Einstein and several of the founders of quantum mechanics were enthusiasts for philosophy, possibly because they benefited from a broader education than today’s laboratory pundits.

In the 1920s, the wife of an Oxford don once assured a dinner companion that a student with a first-class degree in classics “could get up science in a fortnight.” Today, the situation is reversed: It is some scientists who think they can grasp the fundamentals of another discipline by thumbing a few pages and having a quick ponder. Hence, for instance, the burgeoning literature by some neuroscientists and their fans in which the problem of free will, or some other venerable source of fascination, is breezily dispatched in a trice. (In some of the liveliest argument in this book, one such overconfident neuro-sage is masterfully needled by Goldstein’s Plato.)

Yet there is a problem, or at least a puzzle, about the nature of progress in philosophy, which the continuing relevance of Plato underlines rather than resolves. As Goldstein puts it: “If philosophy makes progress, then why doesn’t Plato at long last just go away?” Science makes cumulative advances, but philosophy can seem stuck in a loop — a situation made all the more embarrassing by the fact that many of its most famous practitioners, from the 17th century onward, keep announcing that now, at last, they have found the way forward (yet again). Goldstein’s response is somewhat gnomic. She claims progress in philosophy is real but “invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. . . . We don’t see it, because we see with it.” Yet if that were so, shouldn’t Plato now be old hat to us? He would only be telling us things that, thanks partly to him, we have come to already know.

A more apt approach to the enigma of philosophical progress may be to question the question. Should we really regard philosophy as a dog-eared crossword puzzle, first published some 2,500 years ago and still pored over by enthusiasts who, after 100,000 rainy Sundays, have managed to fill in only a handful of clues? Another way to see it is as a fountain of eternally youthful questions, with which we shall always be grappling because they expose unresolvable tensions in our beliefs and concepts, and stimulate our intellectual appetites. Wouldn’t it in fact be rather disappointing to stop asking fundamental questions? If philosophy is not something we’d like to see all sorted out and put away, there will always be a place for Plato, because he was so remarkably good at it.

PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX

Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away

By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Illustrated. 459 pp. Pantheon Books. $29.95.

Anthony Gottlieb is a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is writing a sequel to his book, “The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy From the Greeks to the Renaissance.”