Friday, May 4, 2012
Plato and the Undecided Student: Deciding What To
Think About
Peter Shea
Growing up, Socrates was
my hero. I saw him as a guy who would think hard about whatever came up, making
everyday experience interesting and deep. He wasn’t afraid to keep on thinking,
when huge difficulties emerged – to live with uncertainty and doubt; he had no
need to bring every discussion to some simple and satisfying conclusion. Also,
he was willing to move around, taking on friendship, beauty, fighting in armor,
mathematical knowledge. He didn’t let
himself get stuck on some one, intractable problem.
When I went to college, I
majored in philosophy because, to me, that meant not majoring in anything at
all: holding on to my universal hunting license.
Two new influences led me
to write this essay. My students have made it clear to me that the choice of a
major is a very big deal for them, morally and practically. It just won’t do
for me as a teacher to have nothing to offer them with respect to what they see
as the biggest decision of their college careers.
Martha Farah, a
neuro-ethicist, came to speak at the Gustavus Nobel conference. Her closing
remarks provided my most recent incentive to write about the choice of things
to think about. She said:
“If
we all we are is physical stuff, what the heck does anything matter? I mean, do
I care whether one leaf blows east or west, outside on that lawn? No. So why
should I care if you or I happens to get run over by a truck. What does
anything matter? How do you find meaning in a physical world? Steven Weinberg,
who is a physicist, wrote about this and said, ‘The more the universe seems
comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.’ And I think that, if that’s
a problem for physical science, it is even more of a problem in neuroscience…
Even if I am thinking my neuroscience thoughts and viewing it all as a physical
system and at some level it doesn’t matter, the second I step back into my
normal human being mode, I do think things matter.”
It was an odd moment.
Farah realized that she was in front of an audience that had taken pains to
come to this conference, and that she had just told them it was all
meaningless. Stepping firmly back into
her human shoes, she ended her talk with a heartfelt testimony about how
meaningful this conference had been to her.
Her speech reminded me of
the physicists at Los Alamos, waiting for the first nuclear explosion, aware of
arguments that such an explosion would ignite the atmosphere and end life on
earth. I wanted to say to them, “Shouldn’t you at least wait a bit, to do an
experiment that might put an end to physics in the entire universe?” In as
similar way, I was tempted to ask Farah, “Shouldn’t you back off from lines of
investigation that make investigation seem pointless? Isn’t this self-defeating
scholarship?” Her remarks seemed relevant both to my choice of research
projects and to my students’ choices of courses and majors.
The point of this paper is
to ask what help might be found in Plato’s dialogues for thinking about what to
think about and what to avoid. A related question is this: what openings are
present in the Platonic canon, which is the staple of introductory philosophy
courses, for initiating discussions about choices of major, choices of courses,
and choices of intellectual “projects?”
What would Plato say to
the college student trying to choose a major? Are there any areas of study that
Platonic arguments picture as dangerous or self-defeating?
Consider this advice from the Apology, “"…the
greatest good for a man [is] to discuss virtue [excellence] every day and those
other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others,
for the unexamined life is not worth living for men…" 38a
That might argue for a philosophy major, with an ethics
emphasis. In Laches, mediocre offspring
of great men are considering how to educate their own children, so that those
children may surpass them and restore the family honor.
The parents are trying to decide whether lessons in
“fighting in armor” are worthwhile, and they consult three advisors famous
for battlefield accomplishments, two
generals – Laches and Nicias – and Socrates, who is famous for his courage as a
soldier. The generals give conflicting
advice derived from their understanding of the realities of battle. Socrates
suggests that understanding any such matters depends on first understanding
courage, and launches a long, twisty definitional discussion.
What strikes me about this, thinking as a parent who has
made all sorts of similar calls about educational opportunities, is how bizarre
this move is. All of the assembled discussants agree that winning battles is
important. The relevant considerations for deciding about lessons are the
“battlefield” appropriate considerations: does this training make someone an
effective soldier. The overarching discussion of courage may be relevant to
these ground-level decisions in some way, but such decisions can’t wait on the
outcome of debates at the higher level. That’s like saying that questions about
how to cook steak wait on the outcome of debates about vegetarianism. Surely,
if the vegetarians make their case, that will at least diminish the interest of
any reasonable person in cooking meat, but cooking classes can’t wait on the
outcome of animal rights discussions. As the conversation moves further and
further from practical matters, one can imagine the fathers sinking into
despair.
One wants to ask: does Plato expect the reader to accept
this odd substitution and hijacking of the debate? Is that the point of the
Laches? I suspect not, though I am very far from a full account. I am
impressed, first of all, by the care expended on Laches’ and Nicias’ practical
speeches. The generals are shown as resourceful arguers, approaching the
problem of an innovation in training with intelligence and insight. It is
difficult to take the point of the dialogue to be that those arguments just
don’t matter.
I think that Plato is playing a trick on the reader of the
Laches. He is getting that reader to empathize with the parents, to doubt the
relevance of philosophy, and then, in a very subtle way, making a modest point
about the usefulness of philosophic education – as valuable for Laches and
Nicias and also for the young boys.
The reader’s anxiety, as the dialogue progresses, comes
from the inconclusiveness and abstractness of the discussion: how will this
discussion ever lead back to “fighting in armor” or any other concrete teaching
question? But does the discussion need to reach some conclusion, to be useful?
Suppose one remembers, as any informed Athenian would remember, the disasters
that befell Laches and Nicias later on. Laches failed to recognize the value of
strategic retreat, and failed to stand up to the demands of his soldiers for
action: he marched his army out of safe cover to confront a superior force,
when reinforcements were on the way. Nicias failed to effectively stand up to
his fellow citizens, in opposing the Syracuse campaign and the impossible team
selected to lead it. Both, in other words, imagined courage in too a narrow
way: as consisting of standard successful moves on the battlefield.
I take
Plato to be saying something like this, in the Laches: “I freely admit that
philosophic discussions can go on a long time without reaching a resolution,
and also that they are sometimes quite distant from practical concerns. But
suppose that Laches and Nicias, in their early years, had been invited to take
even the first steps on the philosophic path, to notice that their central
virtue, their reason for living, was broader and more diverse than they had
thought, encompassing many behaviors, in different circumstances, and involving
relations not just with enemies but with fellow citizens. The first steps of
Socrates’ investigation take them already beyond the mistakes that cost them
their lives. ” On this view, Laches is a defense of a little philosophy – of
the power of even simple lines of investigation to shake people out of
dangerous assumptions. It suggests, concretely, that the boys need a philosophy
tutor. (Perhaps the Laches is part of the recruiting campaign for the Academy.)
So Laches supports at least the idea that one should minor
in philosophy, whatever one’s major. The first steps of philosophic progress
are valuable, even to practical people.
Is there an argument in the
dialogues for majoring in philosophy? I think there might be one in the
Theaetetus, but it is a limited argument. Theaetetus
begins with the story of a young man coming home, dying, having fought well. It
then flashes back to show Theaetutus as a boy, a very promising mathematics
student whose estate has been mismanaged and wasted by his trustees. There’s an
odd interlude at 10e5 where Socrates mistakenly claims that Theodorus, a
mathematician and Theaetetus’ teacher, is the trustee of Protagoras’ estate.
Theodorus corrects him: “It’s not I but rather Callias, the son of Hipponicus,
who’s the trustee in charge of Protagoras’ things. I turned away a bit too soon
from bare argument to geometry.” Callias is notorious for wasteful expenditure:
Protagoras and Theaetetus are both badly served by their trustees.
What
does this move in the dialogue mean? One possibility occurs to me: the dialogue
is criticizing Theodorus for turning from bare argument to geometry – for
switching his major from philosophy to mathematics, leaving an important
“estate” to the care of a supremely careless man. What is the estate: the whole
question of the possibility of knowledge as opposed to opinion, of
investigation as different from persuasion. The objections that Protagoras
raised needed an answer, for public reasons: in the absence of some public
ideal of truth, people will come to regard debate as simply a persuasion
contest. The sorts of foolish and wasteful military campaigns in which good
young men are killed result from a debased intellectual climate. Theodorus
stands convicted of betraying Protagoras, and Athens, and, ultimately, men like
Theaetetus, all for not persisting in his philosophy major. (It is important
that the young Theaetetus meets Socrates, who could initiate him into
philosophy, shortly before Socrates’ death. The responsibility for training
Theaetetus falls to Theodorus, who can only teach him mathematics. The line of
philosophic transmission forward from Protagoras and Socrates is broken.)
If
this reading is right, the dialogue argues for a particular major – but only
for a particular sort of person. Theodorus is talented; he could have helped to
unravel the problems raised by Protagoras. He could have continued and passed
on the tradition of philosophic inquiry. There was an important public reason
to do so: Athens needed a sound epistemology as it confronted the problems of
democratic government. Theodorus had the responsibility to take on the
important problem of his time, and he did not rise to the occasion.
This
is a promising suggestion, for the undecided student. One’s choice of a major
is not just a personal choice: one should think about what one can contribute
to the world and about the particular needs of the world into which one becomes
an adult.
Are there any majors that
Plato rejects? There is the unargued claim in Republic that the desire to look
at corpses is a base appetite contrary to reason (which might keep people out
of mortuary science and forensic medicine). There is also an argument in
Republic against teaching dialectic to young people that may contain the germ
of a more general rejection. At 538c, Plato pictures a young man who has grown
up respecting certain guidelines of action, without having thought about them
very hard. This young man has immoderate desires, which he restrains out of
respect for the principles he has learned. Then someone questions him about his
beliefs and “reduces him to the belief that this thing is no more beautiful
than it is ugly, and the same with what is just and good and the things he
honored most.” This person will then give way to his desires, since he no
longer respects the guidelines that have held them in check, and will descend
thereby into what Plato elsewhere describes as a kind of madness. Only
carefully selected people who have been through rigorous training can, at the
age of thirty, be trained in dialectic and trusted to use it to find the truth.
In particular, at that age, they can be trusted to keep at the search for the
requisite five years, and not wander off skylarking after they finish day one
of the “chastity” unit: “arguments against.”
A philosophy major is not
safe for the sanity of most students – and perhaps other majors, like
anthropology and sociology, are dangerous in the same way: they validate ways
of life different from the one that maintains the young person’s sanity. Like
the Theaetetus recommendation, this advice is particular: to students of a
certain age, whose principles are not well established.
This comes close to
Farah’s suggestion that certain lines of thought leave one with the sense that
nothing matters. Plato here argues that moral dialectic is one such line of
thought, at least for those under the age of thirty.
Finally, we come to the closest
point of contact between Plato and Farah, Socrates’ autobiographical remarks in
Phaedo about his reasons for turning away from the natural sciences, in
particular anatomy and physiology. Two passages seem to me to sum up his
reasons. The first responds to, specifically, an account of his remaining in
prison in terms of some causal story involving his bones and muscles, “These bones and sinews would long
since have been off in Megara or Boeotia, impelled by their judgment of what
was best, had I not thought it more just and honourable not to escape and run
away, but to submit to whatever penalty the city might impose.” 99a
The
point seems to be that causal accounts
of the kind one could hope for from natural science would explain some human
behavior, but not behavior like “remaining in prison to face execution when one
has the option of fleeing to comfortable exile in Megara.” This would be a
pretty straightforward argument: natural science cannot explain the most
interesting phenomena – in fact, it predicts the opposite of what sometimes
happens. (This seems to be actually a problem for neuro-ethics: the accounts of
the evolution of sacrificial behavior work far better for limited sacrifice,
like that involved in child raising or food sharing, than for martyrdom on
principle.)
There’s
an interesting feature of this example: the action that is inexplicable
(remaining to face execution) is the product of a sophisticated train of
thought, the fruit of a lifetime of philosophic reflection. If Socrates had
pursued physical science, this counter-example might well not have existed. The
decision to seek accounts other than physical causes for action brought about
the behavior that physical causes cannot explain.
The
Phaedo’s second objection to the pursuit of natural science accounts of human
action seems to be this: “To call these things the reasons for my actions,
rather than my choice of what is best, and that too though I act with
intelligence, would be a thoroughly loose way of talking.” 99b
So
what is wrong with loose ways of talking? Surely, whatever accounts the
neuroscientist gives of the course of a human life are going to be different
from accounts given in ordinary terms. Someone diagnosed with Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder might say: “I wanted to be sure whether I had turned off
the stove. Each time I left the house, I couldn’t quite be sure I had turned it
off, so I returned to the kitchen again and again.” The neuroscientist Norman
Doidge, describing the brain states involved,
writes, “Because the caudate didn’t shift the gear automatically, the
orbital frontal cortex and the cingulate continued to fire off their signals,
increasing the mistake feeling and the anxiety.” It turns out that, in this
case, when people describe their obsession in the looser way suggested by brain
imaging, this description enables them to take control of the process and end
the compulsive episode. (They say, “That’s my OCD kicking in” and shift their thinking
away from the problem ‘Did I turn off the stove?’ to some distracting and
pleasant memory.)
Perhaps
what Socrates is saying here is just that some phenomena, like people acting
for the best, are so interesting that any investigative method that obscures
such phenomena is unacceptable. Or he might be saying that the normal ways of
talking about the interesting phenomena like the choice of the best, are good
enough and do not need to be supplemented. Or perhaps he just doesn’t have
access to examples in which natural science accounts are illuminating, in the
way that the neuroscience account of obsessive behavior is both illuminating
and helpful in therapy, so he doesn’t see what use there could ever be for a
looser account of human action.
It
is not clear how close the objections in the Phaedo come to Farah’s worry, that
complete accounts will lead to a sense that nothing matters. One can take
Socrates to be saying that some kinds of accounts are just inadequate to moral
facts, like choice of the best, or that they are useless for a discussion of
such facts. But that is different from saying that one will cease to think that
anything matters if one studies natural science. There is, however, this
possible link: to the extent that one attends to those phenomena that natural
science explains best, one may come to forget about moral choice, perhaps also
to forget to make moral choices. And that may be equivalent to: coming to think
that nothing matters. Socrates the natural scientist might have no reason to
attend to moral thinking, and might not live the sort of life that provides a
difficulty for natural scientific accounts.
I
want to conclude by saying something about the ethics of teaching. It seems
important that teachers of philosophy validate the intellectual problems
confronted by students, encouraging them to respond to arguments within the
tradition. In my experience, the most pressing decisions undergraduate students
face are decisions about what to think about: what courses to take, what majors
to pursue, what careers to enter. It is important that philosophy teachers
identify points of access to the introductory canon, points at which those
works address student concerns. This paper is one preliminary contribution to
that project.
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