Our Progress since Plato

I mentioned in my last post the summer I spent studying at Cambridge. I was there to study philosophy, and it was fantastic. I love philosophy in any form, on any topic, and I was delighted to spend a whole summer just studying it. I couldn’t help but feel, though, that we were kind of missing the point of it all.

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In this post, I want to talk about one instance in particular. My professor had just explained that because everything you do can be accounted for entirely in physical terms, human thought and decision has no place in our explanations of our lives – and, of course, God is not needed for explanation of the life of the universe. As Stephen Hawking put it, “science makes God unnecessary… The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a creator.”

My mind was brought back to this passage in the Phaedo, a Platonic dialogue cataloging Socrates’ final moments with his disciples. It’s a beautiful work discussing the nature of the soul, death, wisdom, and courage. It also happens to have something to say about causality.

Socrates describes his journey as an inquisitive young natural scientist who hears of a great researcher who claims to explain the universe using principles of order and mind. An eager young Socrates makes the trip to see this great scientific thinker.

What expectations I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher* altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities.

I might compare him to a person who began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he endeavored to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have joints which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture–

That is  what he would say, and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is, that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia–by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, of enduring any punishment which the state inflicts.

There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this.

 It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition, which the many, feeling about in the dark, are always mistaking and misnaming.

And thus one man makes a vortex all round and steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives the air as a support to the earth, which is a sort of broad trough. Any power which in arranging them as they are arranges them for the best never enters into their minds; and instead of finding any superior strength in it, they rather expect to discover another Atlas of the world who is stronger and more everlasting and more containing than the good;–of the obligatory and containing power of the good they think nothing; and yet this is the principle which I would fain learn if anyone would teach me.

But as I have failed either to discover myself, or to learn of anyone else, the nature of the best, I will exhibit to you, if you like, what I have found to be the second best mode of inquiring into the cause.**

This is the point in the movie where, after wandering around the woods for several hours, one of the adventurers says, “Wait a second, I recognize this place. We’re going in circles; we’re lost!” We’re rehearsing the same defective arguments we had in 399 BC, and yet we consider ourselves progressive.

I won’t belabor the point except to offer some of my other posts. Socrates found the second best mode of inquiring into the cause of the world. The best mode made it to Athens a few hundred years later.

*In Socrates’ day, science was a branch of philosophy – “natural philosophy.”

**Plato. The Works of Plato (Kindle Locations 21661-21682). Kindle Edition.

“Roman bust of Socrates” by david__jones is licensed under CC BY 2.0