The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (42 page)

SOCRATES
: It is not impious to criticize the gods, Chaerephon, but rational. Hermes thinks so too, for what it’s worth . . .

PLATO
: [
Scribbles, ‘It is not impious to criticize gods.’
]

CHAEREPHON
: Well, even if the god is right about those two ‘overarching concerns’ of stasis and improvement, each city holds its respective concern
only for itself.
It has no ambition to impose it on anyone else. So, although Athens chooses to race forwards while Sparta chooses to tie itself down, and although these choices may logically be ‘opposite’, how can they possibly be a source of
enmity
?

SOCRATES
: My guess is this. The very existence of Athens, however peaceful, is a deadly threat to Sparta’s stasis. And therefore, in the long run, the condition for the continued stasis of Sparta (which means its continued
existence
, as they see it) is the destruction of progress in Athens (which from our perspective would constitute the destruction of Athens).

CHAEREPHON
: I still do not see specifically what the threat is.

SOCRATES
: Well, suppose that in future both cities were to continue to succeed with their overarching concerns. The Spartans would stay exactly as they are now. But we Athenians are already the envy of other Greeks with our wealth and diverse achievements. What will happen when we improve further, and begin to outshine
everyone in the world
at
everything
? Spartans seldom travel or interact with foreigners, but they cannot keep themselves entirely in ignorance of developments elsewhere. Even going to war gives them some inkling of what life is like in other cities that are wealthier, and freer, than they. One day, some Spartan youths visiting Delphi will find that it is the Athenians who have the better ‘moves’ and the greater skill. And what if, in a generation or two, Athenian warriors have developed some better ‘moves’
on the battlefield
?

PLATO
: But, Socrates, even if this is true, the Spartans are unaware of it! So how can they fear it?

SOCRATES
: They need no prescience. Do you think that a Spartan messenger, on reaching Athens, does not gasp in admiration like
everyone else when he sees what stands on our Acropolis?
*
And, however much he may mutter (perhaps justly) about our hubris and irresponsibility, do you think that he does not reflect, on his way home, that his city can never and will never attract that sort of admiration from anyone? Do you think that the Spartan elders are not at this very moment worrying about the growing reputation of
democracy
in many cities, including some of their allies?

By the way, we ourselves should be at least as wary of democracy as I think the Spartans are of bloodlust and battle rage, for it is intrinsically as dangerous. We could not do without our democracy any more than the Spartans could do without their military training. And, just as they have moderated the destructiveness of bloodlust through their traditions of discipline and caution, we have moderated the destructiveness of democracy through our traditions of virtue, tolerance and liberty. We are utterly dependent on those traditions to keep our monster under control and on our side, just as the Spartans are dependent on
their
traditions to keep
their
monster from devouring them along with everyone else in sight. We might do well to put up a statue of
democracy chained
, to symbolize the fundamental safeguard of our city.

PLATO
: [
Scribbles, ‘Democracy is a monster, dangerous if not chained.’
]

SOCRATES
: The Spartans – and many others who do not understand us – must also be wondering every day how we Athenians can possibly be holding our own against them at the one thing in the world at which they are the best, namely warfare. This despite the fact that at the same time we are excelling more than ever at philosophy and poetry and drama and mathematics and architecture and all those other fields of human endeavour that the Spartans seldom if ever bother with.

PLATO
: [
Scribbles,
‘
Spartans are world’s best at warfare but suck at everything else
.’]

SOCRATES
: They need not know the reason if they can see the fact. But the reason is: we can improve because we are constantly striving to; they hardly ever improve, because they are trying
not
to! That is the Achilles’ heel of Sparta.

PLATO
: [
Scribbles,
‘
Sparta’s Achilles’ heel is that they don’t improve.’
]
So all they need is
philosophers.
With philosophers, they’d be invincible!

SOCRATES
: [
Chuckles
.] In a sense, that is the case, Aristocles. But –

PLATO
: [
Scribbles, ‘Socrates says that, with philosophers, Sparta would be invincible.’
]

CHAEREPHON
: [
Worried
.] Then should we really be discussing this here at a public inn? What if someone overhears and tells them the secret?

PLATO
: [
Scribbles
,
‘Note to self
:
Don’t tell them!’
]

SOCRATES
: Don’t worry, old friend. If the Spartans in general were capable of understanding that ‘secret’, they’d have implemented it long ago – and there’d be no war between our cities. If some individual Spartan tried to advocate new philosophical ideas, he would soon find himself on trial for heresy or any number of other crimes.

PLATO
: Unless . . .

SOCRATES
: Unless what?

PLATO
: Unless the one who had taken up philosophy was a king.

SOCRATES
: Trust you to find the logical loophole, Aristocles. Theoretically you’re right, but in Sparta, even the kings are not allowed to change anything important. If one were to try, he would be deposed by the ephors.

PLATO
: Well, they have two kings, five ephors and twenty-eight senators. So mathematics tells us that if only fifteen senators, three ephors and one king were to take up philosophy –

SOCRATES
: [
Laughs
.] Yes, Aristocles. I concede. If the rulers of Sparta were to take up our style of philosophy, and were then seriously to embark upon criticizing and reforming their traditions –

PLATO
: [
Slightly distracted, scribbles, ‘Theorem
:
a king who’s a philosopher is the same as a philosopher who’s a king. So, what if a philosopher became king?’
] Or perhaps it’s more likely that
one
benevolent king would have seized power –

SOCRATES
: Whatever.
If
they succeeded in such reforms, then their city might indeed evolve into something truly great. But don’t hold your breath.

PLATO
: [
Scribbles, ‘Socrates says a city with a philosopher king would be truly great.’
] I won’t hold my breath. But, in the long run, how
shall we teach philosophy to kings, Socrates? [
Scribbles, ‘Is the role of philosophers to
educate
kings?’
]

SOCRATES
: I’m not sure that philosophy should be the first step in the education of a leader. One must have something to philosophize
about
. He should know history, and literature, and arithmetic – and, perhaps above all, he should be familiar with the deepest knowledge we have, namely geometry.

PLATO
: [
Scribbles, ‘Let no one unversed in geometry enter here!’
]

CHAEREPHON
: Well,
I
judge a city by how it treats its
philosophers
.

SOCRATES
: [
Smiles
.] An excellent criterion, Chaerephon, with which I had better not quibble! By the way, Aristocles, I am not in the least modest. And, to prove it, I can tell you that Hermes persuaded me that I
am
wise after all – at least in one respect that he especially values, namely that I am aware that
justified belief
is impossible and useless and undesirable.

PLATO
: [
Scribbles, ‘Socrates is the wisest man in the world because he is the only one who
knows
he has no knowledge, because genuine knowledge is impossible!’
] Wait! Justified belief is impossible? Really? Are you sure?

SOCRATES
: [
Laughs loudly, while the
OTHERS
look on, puzzled
.] Sorry, but it’s a somewhat perverse question, Aristocles.

PLATO
: Oh! I see.

[
Smiles ruefully, as do the
OTHERS
when they realize that Plato has just asked for a justification of the belief that one cannot justify beliefs
.]

SOCRATES
: No, I am not sure of anything. I never have been. But the god explained to me why that must be so, starting with the fallibility of the human mind and the unreliability of sensory experience.

PLATO
: [
Scribbles, ‘It’s only knowledge
of the material world
that’s impossible, useless and undesirable.’
]

SOCRATES
: He gave me a marvellous perspective on how we perceive the world. Each of your eyes is like a dark little cave, one on whose rear wall some stray shadows fall from outside. You spend your whole life at the back of that cave, able to see nothing but that rear wall, so you cannot see reality directly at all.

PLATO
: [
Scribbles, ‘It is as if we were prisoners, chained inside a cave and permitted to look only at the rear wall. We can never know the
reality outside because we see only fleeting, distorted shadows of it.’
]

[Note: Socrates is slightly improving on Hermes, and Plato has been increasingly misinterpreting Socrates.]

SOCRATES
: He then went on to explain to me that objective knowledge is indeed possible: it comes from within! It begins as conjecture, and is then
corrected
by repeated cycles of criticism, including comparison with the evidence on our ‘wall’.

PLATO
: [
Scribbles, ‘The only true knowledge is that which comes from within. (How? Remembered from a previous life?)’
]

SOCRATES
: In this way, we frail and fallible humans can come to know objective reality – provided we use philosophically sound methods as I have described (which most people do not).

PLATO
: [
Scribbles, ‘We can come to know the true world beyond the illusory world of experience. But only by pursuing the kingly art of philosophy.’
]

CHAEREPHON
: Socrates, I think it
was
the god speaking to you, for I strongly feel that I have glimpsed a divine truth through you today. It will take me a long time to reorganize my ideas to take account of this new epistemology that he revealed to you. It seems a tremendously far-reaching, and important, subject.

SOCRATES
: Indeed. I have some reorganizing to do myself.

PLATO
: Socrates, you really ought to write all this down – together with all your other wisdom – for the benefit of the whole world, and posterity.

SOCRATES
: No need, Aristocles. Posterity is right here, listening. Posterity is all of
you
, my friends. What is the point of writing down things that are going to be endlessly tinkered with and improved? Rather than make a permanent record of all my misconceptions as they are at a particular instant, I would rather offer them to others in two-way debate. That way I benefit from criticism and may even make improvements myself. Whatever is valuable will survive such debates and be passed on without any effort from me. Whatever is not valuable would only make me look a fool to future generations.

PLATO
: If you say so, Master.

Since Socrates left us no writings, historians of ideas can only guess at what he really thought and taught, using the indirect evidence of his
portrayal by Plato and a few others who were there at the time and whose accounts have survived. This is known as the ‘Socratic problem’, and is the source of much controversy. One common view is that the young Plato conveyed Socrates’ philosophy fairly faithfully, but that later he used the character of Socrates more as a vehicle for conveying his own views; that he did not even intend his dialogues to represent the real Socrates, but used them only as convenient ways of expressing arguments that have a to-and-fro form.

Perhaps I had better stress – in case it is not already obvious – that I am doing the same. I do not intend the above dialogue accurately to represent the philosophical opinions of the historical Socrates and Plato. I have set it at that moment in history, with those participants, because Socrates and his circle were among the foremost contributors to the ‘Golden Age of Athens’, which should have become a beginning of infinity but did not. And also because one thing that we do know about the ancient Greeks is that the philosophical
problems
they considered important have dominated Western philosophy ever since: How is knowledge obtained? How can we distinguish between true and false, right and wrong, reason and unreason? Which sorts of knowledge (moral, empirical, theological, mathematical, justified . . .) are possible, and which are mere chimeras? And so on. And therefore, although the theory of knowledge presented in the dialogue is largely that of the twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper, together with some addenda of my own, I guess that Socrates would have understood and liked it. In some universes that were very like ours at the time, he thought of it himself.

I do want to make one indirect comment on the Socratic problem, though: we habitually underestimate the difficulty of communication – just as Socrates does at the end of the dialogue, when he assumes that each party to a debate necessarily knows what the other is saying, and Plato increasingly gets the wrong end of the stick. In reality, the communication of new ideas – even mundane ones like directions – depends on guesswork on the part of both the recipient and the communicator, and is inherently fallible. Hence there is no reason to expect that the young Plato, just because he was intelligent and highly educated, and by all accounts a near-worshipper of Socrates, made the fewest mistakes in conveying Socrates’ theories. On the contrary, the
default assumption should be that misunderstandings are ubiquitous and that neither intelligence nor the intention to be accurate is any guarantee against them. It could easily be that the young Plato misunderstood everything that Socrates said to him, and that the older Plato gradually succeeded in understanding it, and is therefore the more reliable guide. Or it could be that Plato slipped ever further into misinterpretation, and into positive errors of his own. Evidence, argument and explanation are needed to distinguish between these and many other possibilities. It is a difficult task for historians. Objective knowledge, though attainable, is hard to attain.