Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp What would Plato make of the modern world?

More than 2,500 years ago an urgent question arose: why should we matter to ourselves, or anyone else? The existential angst of the Axial Age unleashed a protean intellectual energy. Enter Socrates and his famed pupil. As Rebecca Goldstein sees it, there was no turning back. She tells Joe Gelonesi that if there was ever another place and time for Plato, it’s right here, right now.

Rebecca Goldstein is a fan of Plato. That might be an understatement. It’s been said that all of western philosophy is but a footnote to the Athenian, and this highly accomplished, Ivy League trained philosopher doesn’t doubt it for one minute.

For our crazy, mixed-up times, Goldstein has conducted what amounts to a 400 page thought experiment. It’s proved extraordinarily popular, beyond her expectations, and kept her busy for the better part of a year taking her Plato on a tour of a world hungry for answers, or at the least the right questions.

I was 12 or 13, and when I got to the Plato, little as I understood, it was my first experience of intellectual ecstasy.

Her premise is simple: if Plato could come back, what would he make of it all? In the process, she hopes to prove that the philosophy-jeerers, as she calls them, have wrongly trumpeted a premature death for one of humankind’s most extraordinary enterprises.

Plato at the Googleplex is subtitled Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away. In it she handles Plato with deft hands, placing him in situations known all too well to us moderns: from clamorous cable talk shows to a brain imaging centre, where a neuroscientist declares to Plato that the game is up—science has solved the puzzle of free will. You can feel a soft wrath underneath these fictional whacky situations, from someone fed up with the crassness of a world desperate to move on to somewhere, anywhere, where doubt and uncertainty have evaporated.

Goldstein, though, is not of the anti-science, touchy- feely kind. She understands string theory, evolution and genetics. She gets neuroscience too, sharing the stage on occasion with Antonio Demasio—he of impeccable mind-is-the-brain credentials. It’s just that for her, the technical explanation to life, the universe and everything won’t do on its own.

Read more: Roger Scruton defends western civilisation

The pleasure of Plato came early for Goldstein. Brought up in a religious household where an Abrahamic God watched her every action, it came as an unsettling delight to discover another way of negotiating the world. To this day, telling the story of coming across Will Durant’s classic The Story of Philosophy excites her.

‘I was 12 or 13, and when I got to the Plato, little as I understood, it was my first experience of intellectual ecstasy. I was out of my mind; I had to put the book down for a moment to catch my breath, my heart was beating so quickly.’

This illicit, albeit brief, moment set a life’s course. Although Plato did not have all the answers, he was full of questions, and that was enough for Goldstein.

‘He raised the whole submerged continent of philosophy, like an Atlantis’

The drama of that revelation sits atop an extraordinary moment in human cultural history. Plato was clearly a straight-A student, and his arrival couldn’t have been better timed. The Axial Age, some 2,500 years ago, was given its name by 20th century philosopher Karl Jaspers. For Goldstein it’s a fair reckoning of how consequential this swerve was in human affairs.

‘[Jaspers] noticed that our normative systems—those that deal with how we ought to live—all have their origin in the same period of 800-200 BCE: Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Confucianism, the Abrahamic religions, and secular philosophy.’

We can speculate on what the conditions were for such an eruption, though a safe bet would be around the achievement of material security within the growing polis: once we were fed, clothed and housed, the next layer of non-material needs beckoned. So the mind turned to mattering. This has been a key theme of Goldstein’s analysis of the birth of philosophy, and she has written and lectured much on its centrality to the creation of the modern human.

‘Something happened to make us think, “So many people have come before us, have loved and longed and strived and lost and we don’t know their names, no trace. Why should I think it will be any different for me?” This produces a kind of existential trauma and you start grappling with the question, “what must I do to matter?”’

From this predicament, it’s not too far a leap to religion, and many civilisations took the plunge. For the Greeks, however, a secular path opened up, built on the foundations of the pre-philosophic Homeric period, as Goldstein recounts.

‘Ancient Greece was a thoroughly religious society drenched with rituals, but these rituals were apotropaic: they were meant to ward off the attention of the gods. What you wanted was the attention of other people. You wanted to do something big and extraordinary so your name would live on with acclaim, glory and fame.’

Enter Socrates and his famed pupil, timed perfectly for a culture steeped in its own exceptionalism.

For the Athenians, kleos, mattered more than anything, according to Goldstein.

‘Kleos is fame: it’s the deed that brings fame, it’s the poem that sings your triumphs, it’s having your life replicated in other minds, acquiring a kind of moreness, a kind of secular immortality. ‘

It’s an idea that feels strangely familiar. For Goldstein, it isn’t a surprise to see a recontextualisation of kleos for our times, especially as that other Axial Age solution crumbles in the face of a pneumatic modernity.

‘To lose religion is to realise that you've lost a great source of mattering,’ says Goldstein. ‘I think that’s what’s happening in the west. Monotheism doesn’t hold as it once did. It can’t reconcile with the advances we've made in science. We’re looking again for the sources of our mattering, and how very interesting that we’ve reverted to the ideas of the ancient Greeks—the very ideas that Socrates was rejecting and challenging.’

Listen: Theories about the City of Atlantis

Goldstein’s firm belief is that Socrates was put to death not so much for impiety but for challenging the hubris of a civilisation in love with its special status, inured to kleos.

For Goldstein, if there were ever a time and place for the wise Hellenic it’s the modern day of social media, brain scans, reality TV, and tiger parents: a world overheating with matters of mattering.

Her Plato enters these realms of self-absorption and, in a calm and detached way, tries to reason his way through the confusion. The results are both comical and arresting, pinpointing the hopes, dreams, and unsaid assumptions of a citizenry at war over the spoils of modern-day kleos.

Perhaps this occurs in sharpest relief when Goldstein drops Plato into the middle of a TV talk show debate on tiger parenting. Could there be a more burning issue in the modern middle class parlour?

‘So I have him in Manhattan at the 92nd Street Y,which is the hip centre of intellectual discussion. He’s on this panel on to how to raise the exceptional child. There’s a hidden assumption there that I want my Plato to examine. Do we want to raise the exceptional child? Is that the be all and end all?’

‘Again, it’s about what is it to live the life that matters. Do we want them to be exceptional, to do big things and be known about, or do we want them to perhaps just have good values and be good people? Now there’s a quaint idea.’

A Plato for modern times Listen to this episode of The Philosopher's Zone to find out more.

Plato, of course, has much to say about the upbringing of children and their place in the life of the polis. He was not against exceptionalism, but only for those who could excel. Goldstein plays on this theme through a rugged on screen debate between a modern tiger mum and her nemesis: the let-them-be child psychologist.

The fictional tigress Sophie Zee is author of the best seller The Warrior Mother’s Guide to Producing Off-the-charts Children. You could say she bears a resemblance to Amy Chua, who wrote the controversial The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the book that set off the real-life dispute. As it turns out, Goldstein is an acquaintance of Chua. They remain friends, even after Goldstein’s Plato has a field day on Chua’s assumptions.

In the end, Plato’s reanimation is to salve a sore point. It should serve to show that pronouncements like those of physicist Stephen Hawking on the death of philosophy are ill-advised. In the self-absorbed age of the selfie, science alone cannot tackle questions of meaning and mattering. For Goldstein, however, it’s even more fundamental, cutting to the very core of the modern liberal project.

‘Plato didn’t want philosophy to be written down to become doctrinaire,’ she says. ‘It had to be lived with points of view brought into conflict and thrashed out to arrive at some sort of truth that would work for us all, wherever we are in the cave lit by our own fires of self-interest and mattering. This kind of conflict is absolutely essential to making human progress.’

The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.



