Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (49 page)

One day in the 1980s I had dinner with a famous speculator, a hugely successful man. He muttered the hyperbole that hit home: “much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.”

To this day I still have the instinct that the treasure, what one needs to know for a profession, is necessarily what lies outside the corpus, as far away from the center as possible. But there is something central in following one’s own direction in the selection of readings: what I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember.

CHAPTER 17
 

Fat Tony believes that they were totally justified in putting Socrates to death.

This chapter will allow us to complete the discussion of the difference between narrated, intelligible knowledge, and the more opaque kind that is entirely probed by tinkering—the two columns of
Table 4
separating narrative and non-narrative action. There is this error of thinking that things always have a
reason
that is accessible to us—that we can comprehend easily.

Indeed, the most severe mistake made in life is to mistake the unintelligible for the unintelligent—something Nietzsche figured out. In a way, it resembles the turkey problem, mistaking what we don’t see for the nonexistent, a sibling to mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

We’ve been falling for the green lumber problem since the beginning of the golden age of philosophy—we saw Aristotle mistaking the source of Thales’ success; now we turn to Socrates, the greatest of the great masters.

Plato expressed himself chiefly through his use of the person who no doubt became the most influential philosopher in history, Socrates the Athenian, the first philosopher in the modern sense. Socrates left no writing of his own, so we get direct representation of him mainly through Plato and Xenophon. And just as Fat Tony has, as his self-appointed biographer, yours truly trying to satisfy his own agenda, leading to distortions in his character and self-serving representation of some of the said author’s ideas, so I am certain that the Socrates of Plato is a more Platonic character than the true Socrates.
¹

In one of Plato’s dialogues,
Euthyphro,
Socrates was outside the courthouse, awaiting the trial in which he was eventually put to death, when the eponymous Euthyphro, a religious expert and prophet of sorts, struck up a conversation with him. Socrates started explaining that for the “activities” with which he was charged by the court (corrupting the youth and introducing new gods at the expense of the older ones), not only he did not charge a fee, but he was in perfect readiness to pay for people to listen to him.

It turned out that Euthyphro was on his way to charge his father with manslaughter, not a bad conversation starter. So Socrates started out by wondering how charging his own father with manslaughter was compatible with Euthyphro’s religious duties.

Socrates’ technique was to make his interlocutor, who started with a thesis, agree to a series of statements, then proceed to show him how the statements he agreed to are inconsistent with the original thesis, thus establishing that he has no clue as to what he was taking about. Socrates used it mostly to show people how lacking in clarity they were in their thoughts, how little they knew about the concepts they used routinely—and the need for philosophy to elucidate these concepts.

In the beginning of the
Euthypro
dialogue, he catches his interlocutor using the word “piety,” characterizing the prosecution of his father as a
pious act and so giving the impression that he was conducting the prosecution on grounds of piety. But he could not come up with a definition that suited Socrates. Socrates kept pestering the poor fellow as he could not produce a definition of piety. The dialogue continued with more definitions (what is “moral rectitude”?), until Euthyphro found some polite excuse to run away. The dialogue ended abruptly, but the reader is left with the impression that it could have gone on until today, twenty-five centuries later, without it bringing us any closer to anything.

Let us reopen it.

How would Fat Tony have handled the cross-examination by the relentless Athenian? Now that the reader is acquainted with our hefty character, let us examine, as a thought experiment, an equivalent dialogue between Fat Tony and Socrates, properly translated of course.

Clearly, there are similarities between the two characters. Both had time on their hands and enjoyed unlimited leisure, though, in Tony’s case, free time was the result of productive insights. Both like to argue, and both look at active conversation (instead of TV screen or concert hall passivity) as a main source of entertainment. Both dislike writing: Socrates because he did not like the definitive and immutable character that is associated with the written word when for him answers are never final and should not be fixed. Nothing should be written in stone, even literally: Socrates in the
Euthyphro
boasts for ancestry the sculptor Daedalus, whose statues came alive as soon as the work was completed. When you talk to one of Daedalus’ statues, it talks back to you, unlike the ones you see in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Tony, for his part, did not like writing for other, no less respectable reasons: he almost flunked out of high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

But the similarities stop somewhere, which would be good enough for a dialogue. Of course we can expect a bit of surprise on the part of Fat Tony standing in front of the man described to him by Nero as the greatest philosopher of all time: Socrates, we are told, had looks beyond unprepossessing. Socrates was repeatedly described as having a protruding belly, thin limbs, bulging eyes, a snub nose. He looked haggard. He might even have had body odor, as he was said to bathe much less than his peers. You can imagine Fat Tony sneering while pointing his finger at
the fellow: “Look, Neeero, you want me to talk to … 
dis
?” Or perhaps not: Socrates was said to have a presence, a certain personal confidence and a serenity of mind that made some young men find him “beautiful.”

What Nero was certain of was that Fat Tony would initially get close to Socrates and form his opinion on the fellow after some olfactory investigation—and as we said, Fat Tony doesn’t even realize that this is part of his modus operandi.

Now assume Fat Tony was asked by Socrates how he defined piety. Fat Tony’s answer would have been most certainly to
get lost—
Fat Tony, aware of Socrates’ statement that not only would he debate for free, but he would be ready to pay for conversation, would have claimed one doesn’t argue with someone who is ready to pay you to argue with him.

But Fat Tony’s power in life is that he never lets the other person frame the question. He taught Nero that an answer is planted in every question; never respond with a straight answer to a question that makes no sense to you.

No doubt Fat Tony would have taken Socrates of Athens further down his own road and be the one doing the framing of the question:

Without waiting for Socrates’ answer (only suckers wait for answers; questions are not made for answers):

Then, looking at him patronizingly, with a smirk, very calmly:

You can see that what Fat Tony is hitting here is the very core of philosophy: it is indeed with Socrates that the main questions that became philosophy today were first raised, questions such as “what is existence?,” “what are morals?,” “what is a proof?,” “what is science?,” “what is this?” and “what is that?”

The question we saw in
Euthyphro
pervades the various dialogues written by Plato. What Socrates is seeking relentlessly are definitions of the essential nature of the thing concerned rather than descriptions of the properties by means of which we can recognize them.

Socrates went even as far as questioning the poets and reported that they had no more clue than the public about their own works. In Plato’s account of his trial in the
Apology,
Socrates recounted how he cross-examined the poets in vain: “I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them. I am almost ashamed to speak of this, but still I must say that there is hardly a person present who wouldn’t have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves.”