The title of this post is inaccurate if you don't consider the ancient Greeks to have been white. But that's probably not a discussion I want to get into right now. Anyway, today we're discussing my ancient philosophy course from last semester, or more precisely, my Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle course.
There are two main points I'd like to articulate: (1) if philosophy has made objective advancements in the last 2,400 years, why should we care what philosophers thought 2,400 years ago, and (b) man, I had a really annoying classmate in my ancient philosophy class. In essence, I'm wondering whether it was worth it to take this class, just as I had similar concerns about the value of paper writing in my philosophy in literature class from last spring.
To think about the first point, there are two paths you can go down. First, you can go the "philosophy is the mother of science" route and wonder where that leaves philosophy nowadays. That is, there used to be essentially no distinction between being a philosopher and a scientist. Science is a relatively new word, and people like Newton were referred to as "natural philosophers." Science was just doing philosophy about nature rather than philosophy about justice or god or what have you.
The usual argument you see here is that philosophy birthed the sciences we're familiar with today, and where it's done so, philosophy is obsolete and the science is all that's left. There are still philosophers of physics today (after all, I took a class on that, too), but they're not doing physics. Philosophers of physics no longer ask whether the world is made of four fundamental elements, or if all matter is composed of atoms, or if the planets travel in perfect circles, because physicists have definitively answered those questions (no, depends, no).
So the domain of philosophy has shrunk. Where philosophy about the natural world is still relevant, it's in asking questions about physical models, rather than coming up with the models themselves. (Metaphysicists might disagree, but a lot of modern philosophers don't hold metaphysics in particularly high regard, as I understand it.) Similar shrinkage has occurred in the other sciences, with psychology being one of the latest disciplines to squeeze philosophy further.
Here I want to look at a particularly egregious example from my ancient philosophy course, Plato's tripartite soul. Plato reasoned that a statement and its contradiction cannot both be true at the same time. This is reasonable and one of the foundations of classical logic. Take a statement like, "The sun is yellow." Either that statement is true, or the statement, "The sun is not yellow" is true. They can't both be true, because one implies a contradiction of the other.
So then let's look to the soul. We've all had the experience of simultaneously wanting and not wanting the same thing. "I want to eat that chocolate cake" and "I don't want to eat that chocolate cake" are thoughts we can have at the same time. In the first instance, it's our carnal desire for the cake, but in the second instance, it's our willpower that's talking. But if the law of non-contradiction holds, it can't possibly be true that we can both want and not want a piece of chocolate cake simultaneously.
...unless we have a divided soul, as alluded to above. Plato identifies three different competing interests in the human psyche that can produce contradictory desires. Roughly, these are the appetitive, passionate, and rational parts of the soul. They are distinct and incompatible, Plato argues, otherwise the law of non-contradiction is contradicted.
And that's all well and good, and proceeds from some reasonable assumptions, but it's baloney as far as modern neuroscience and psychology are concerned. What a hundred years of research into the brain have taught is that the brain is really complicated, possibly the most complicated three pounds in the universe, and it's decidedly not true that you can chop it up into distinct, one-pound chunks.
(I've cleverly switched from talking about the soul to talking about the brain, but a distinction between the two was not necessarily important to Plato, and science says that "the mind is what the brain does.")
There are two main ways in which Plato's tripartite soul fails as a theory. The first is that there are probably many components to the human psyche, far more than three. The second is a subtle problem that has plagued philosophers for thousands of years, which is that it's possible for words and concepts such as "want" to have different meanings depending on the context. So you can want something, and you can want* something. The former may mean "desire enough to actively pursue," whereas the latter might be "like thinking about but have no inclination to pursue." In that case, you can not want something, and also want* it, and there is no contradiction.
This is a tricky problem that crops up all over the place, which is why analytic philosophers spend large chunks of their time trying to tease apart just what we mean when we talk about seemingly plain concepts such as free will or beauty or truth.
But if all we have to go on is what remains of a large, sometimes disjointed collection of Plato's writings, it's easy to find flaws in his logic. His work cannot defend itself. It's also possible that those old, dead white guys were just wrong about stuff. They had a limited amount of data and lacked the thousands of years of philosophical tradition (that they began) to draw upon.
Which brings me to my annoying classmate. During lecture, he frequently raised his hand and asked the instructor questions such as, "But doesn't that produce a contradiction?" and "But wouldn't that mean nothing is beautiful?" and "But didn't Plato condone slavery?" And every single time, the instructor would engage with him and answer his questions in a thoughtful manner.
Terrible, right? Provoking the instructor into discussing philosophy with us. Well, yes. We had two lecture periods and one discussion period per week, and he brought up his objections during the lecture period. His interruptions were so frequent that there was material we were never able to cover in class. And all of this was possible because, yes, duh, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle were wrong about stuff. It was very frustrating, but I suspect I'm coming off as kind of petulant here, so let's go back to Plato for a moment.
While Plato did divide the mind into three different parts, he had particular affection for one of those parts: the rational mind. It was through employing the rational mind in dialectic that truth could be revealed. This is where Plato's allegory of the cave comes in. Plato conceived of a metaphor where the reality we perceive is just shadow puppets lit by torchlight that we are forced to watch in some kinky Clockwork Orange setup.
Philosophers, however, have broken out of the cave and can see real objects illuminated by the pervasive, powerful sun. So there's a distinction between the ever-changing, distorted, and 2-dimensional shadows we think of as reality and the constant, colorful, 3-dimensional objects that actually compose reality. When we see a chair, we are only seeing an indistinct, imperfect shadow of a chair that does not fully encompass the essence of true chairness.
At first blush, this whole idea seems patently ridiculous. We all accept that our eyes can deceive us and that reality is maybe actually electrons and protons, but it seems laughable to suggest that in some eternal, unchanging realm there exists the true forms of the objects we behold here. Where is this realm? Is there a form of the electric fan there, the cell phone, the credit card offer?
Well, it's unclear how diverse Plato intended his realm of forms to be, but he almost certainly thought it was populated by mathematical objects. Many ancient Greeks (including Plato) took math and geometry as the model of a priori knowledge, knowledge we could come to know just by thinking logically and without relying on evidence from our senses. To Plato, this meant accessing Platonic forms.
So there's some ideal triangle out there, as well as a perfectly straight, infinitesimally thin line, and also the true form of the number 5. Again, this sounds plainly absurd. But let's look at a particular number, such as the ratio between the circumference and diameter of a circle: π.
In a little over a month, it will be Pi Day, which means the internet will be stuffed with memes about π pies and whether ϕ is the true constant and how π is a magical number that contains everything in the universe.
That last one relies on a conjectured property of π, that it is a normal number. A normal number is one that has an endless sequence of digits in a non-repeating pattern that are distributed perfectly randomly, with no particular numeral being more likely than any other. Assuming that’s true, then if you peer deep enough into the digits of π, you will eventually find your telephone number, or a bitmap of your face, or your life story written out in ASCII code.
But you'll also find a lot of nonsense, and there's no way to tell the true from the false, so this is more like Borges' Library of Babel than, say, the Encyclopedia Galactica. It’s true that highly random data has a lot of information in it, but there’s nothing profound about that; that’s numerology, not number theory.
Additionally, it turns out that almost all (real term) the real numbers are normal, but it's not easy to pick out any particular number and say that it's normal. Currently, there is no proof that π is normal, although the evidence suggests that it is.
But what if there is no proof? What if it turns out to be impossible to demonstrate rigorously that π is a normal number? (You can often prove that it's impossible to prove something in math, but maybe a proof is just never found.) In math, a statement is only taken to be true if can be proven via deductive logic. So if there is no proof that π is normal, is it normal?
Well you're probably thinking, it's either normal or not, duh. Its being normal doesn't depend on whether or not we're smart enough to prove it. The Earth was four and a half billion years old long before we were able to show, scientifically, that it was. But look what's happened here. We've asserted that π has definite properties independent of our conception of it. That is, we're saying π is real, as real as the Earth, and that it has a form beyond our crude and incomplete perceptions.
So perhaps Plato's forms are not as crazy as they sound. Now, I'm not arguing that Plato is correct and that numbers are "real." This is a lively debate in the philosophy of mathematics (a subject I'll have more to say about at the end of this semester), with the other positions being "idealist" and "anti-realist." But Plato originated (or was the best, earliest articulator of) one tradition in this philosophical debate.
Which brings me back to my annoying classmate. If instead of a philosophy course, this had been a course on the history of Ancient Greece, at no point during the lecture would a classmate have interrupted the instructor with, "But teacher, weren't the Athenians wrong to butcher and enslave whole cities?" Of course they were wrong! That is clearly not up for debate. What's interesting, however, is why the Greeks did what they did, and how their actions propagated through history. That is, I want to understand the legacy they left behind, the traditions they began.
And that's how I look at an ancient philosophy course. To me, it's not primarily about finding all the myriad logical inconsistencies in the thoughts of some old, dead white guys, but in understanding how their thinking shaped humanity for millennia to come. In some cases, their ideas are obsolete and need to be discarded, while in others they represent the seeds of debates still flourishing in philosophy now. The greatest difference I see is that philosophers today strive for precision and nuance so as to avoid falling into the same old traps. But we couldn't have gotten here, couldn't have learned that lesson, without first falling in.
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