Plato on Proportionality or a Word About Contemporary Politics

Something striking in reading Plato is his love of mathematics. Famously, the rulers of his ideal republic would be educated for decades in math. As we observe the world through the principles of mathematics, we conform ourselves to the realities of this world, submitting to its rules and regulations as well as its beauty and sublimity. In attaining this level of mathematical sophistication, Plato's philosopher-kings would enter the world of the agathon, or the good itself, and be able to rule justly for this knowledge.

When combined with Plato's redefinition of arete, a word translated straightforwardly in English as "virtue," but which used to be combined with the more martial notion of kleos (glory), Plato's philosopher-kings, the escapees of the cave of this world, are called back into the mud and the muck of the world. For the good of the world. They work to free others, to point others to agathon and arete. 

The good itself and virtue help us to achieve proportionality in our lives, for one of the great beauties of mathematics is the proportionality of the universe. We are able to rightly order our passions in what St. Augustine called the ordo amoris, in which everything is loved in the proper way. This proportionality goes beyond our own moral sense, though, and sweeps up the relationship between ourselves and others. We ought to desire our lives to be in proportion to each other.

In the  Platonic dialogue Gorgias, Socrates is talking with Callicles, a man who argues that we all want to accrue the most good for ourselves and will get away with everything we possibly can. Socrates replies:

"Yes, Callicles, wise men claim that partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world-order, my friend, and not an undisciplined world-disorder. I believe that you don't pay attention to these facts, even though you're a wise man in these matters. You've failed to notice that proportionate equality has great power among both gods and men, and you suppose that you ought to practice getting the greater share. That's because you neglect geometry."

There is a world in that paragraph. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein comments on this passage that "[a]nyone with a proper appreciation of proportion can't fail to appreciate that one's own self shouldn't be in disproportion to everyone else. . . So many ideologies come down, in the end, to ways of justifying our sense that we ought to get the greater share." True wisdom, true submission to the agathon, reveals to us how hollow this view of reality makes our lives.

I believe that any sense of proportionality has gone right out of the window on both sides of our political aisle. Both national parties are entirely in the tank to big business and big banks and everything that wrecked our economy several years back and undoubtedly is cooking up the next big bubble as we speak (shoot, it might be housing again). We have no way to stand up against this because our cultural elite hold all of the chips.  But our proportionality is all out of whack. Our body politic has turned into a caricature, with an outsized head and a comically small body. Say what you will for caricatures, but nobody has ever called one beautiful. And as Plato taught us 2500 years ago, things that aren't beautiful are not participating in truth. 

Hebrews vs Greeks

From Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's engaging philosophical apologia, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, riffing on the two primary ways in the West of achieving immortality:

So there were the (pre-philosophical) Greeks, pondering ways of endowing their limp slivers of mortality with a stiffening coating of mattering, and there were the Hebrews, considering a similar project, though they ended up with quite a different approach. The Hebrews offered a transcendent answer in terms of a god: the Greeks offered a secular answer in terms of the possibilities for enlarging a life in strictly human terms; this Greek pre-philosophical answer was incorporated into, and refined by, secular philosophy; and Western culture has been wildly oscillating between these approaches--the Hebrew and the Greek--ever since.

I like this way of framing things. I do think Goldstein is right to see this tension still active in our world. I feel this tension in myself. I want to be great, to achieve the kleos (glory) that the Greeks pursued. But I also want to love the mundane, appreciate the small, significant moments that will not thunder down through eternity. We are, all of us, caught between these two worlds.

But the Hebrew perspective is better. The Greek perspective leads to the glory of Athens at its height, but it kills Socrates for challenging the system. It leads to the fierce and noble honor culture of the Middle Ages, but it also leads to the Crusades and feuds and oceans of blood. It leads to Southern gentility, and to the Civil War.

The Hebrew perspective--that our lives are made meaningful by a teleology-giving God--imbues us with the requisite humility necessary to not fall into the trap of self-seeking glory.

L'Appel du Vide

Right after finishing my undergraduate studies at CSU, my family went on a Caribbean cruise. There is a lot I remember from the trip: my inaugural scuba-diving sessions, sunburning my thighs so badly I teared up while putting on pants for dinner, gaining 10 pounds, subsequently realizing just how fat our country really is, the tour guide driver on St. Thomas who took us to a grocery store and a bank before getting on to the sites. Great times!

But one thing I remember and that has stuck with me since (and a sensation that I have felt at numerous times in the succeeding decade) is one that is hard to articulate without people thinking I'm crazy. While standing on the balcony of my parent's suite the first night of the cruise I had an unmistakable and non-suicidal urge to fling myself off the boat and into the water. 

Both of my adjectives are imperative there. Unmistakable in the sense that I really wanted to do that thing. It first started while taking pictures from the balcony and having this instant urge to chuck my camera into the water. I then thought/felt (let's not bring rationality needlessly into this), Why not chuck my whole self into the middle of the sea? I really felt it; really, almost, contemplated it.

As to the second adjective, and this is where it gets sticky, I really did not want to die. That is, of course, what kept me from ultimately taking the plunge: the whole inevitable death thing.

I have had this thought numerous times in the succeeding ten years (damn, I'm old). A lot of the times it is in similar high places: the Golden Gate Bridge; the summit of Sunlight Peak; the odd temptation to not follow the road on Red Mountain Pass and sail into the abyss. I have mostly kept this to myself because it is a hard thing to explain. The typical response ranges from outright confusion to outright concern. 

However, while traveling to Kenya a few weeks ago I asked the person next to me a very weird question: if some small part of her doesn't like the idea of a plane crash. (It should be noted here that the inherent creepiness of this question is mitigated somewhat by the fact that I knew this person, a student at my school; this is not the type of thing I go asking random strangers on an airplane however much that would make for an interesting flight.) Expecting incredulity and horror I was met instead with recognition. It is not in the least that either of us wanted to die in a plane crash, but the intensity of experience of knowing that the plane is going down is a feeling we are not entirely opposed to experiencing. 

I'm afraid I've lost some of you. Let me bring science into this for a minute. When I got home I Googled (and fervently hope my work doesn't monitor my Google searches): Why do I want to jump off high places? (One of the real surprises here is that Google auto-filled the latter half of that search query.) A few articles came up referring to an academic study published in 2012 entitled: "An Urge to Jump Affirms the Urge to Live: an Empirical Examination of the High Place Phenomenon." "High place phenomenon" is the American psychological word for this feeling I am talking about. It is not very artful but it does get the basic emotion across. I can't read the full study because my school doesn't subscribe to the database that hosts it, but the title says everything we need to know for the purpose of this post: there is a way in which such desires enhance our willingness to live and our passion for life. They found that people with "no history of suicidal ideation" experience this phenomena at comparable rates as people with more of a temptation to suicide. 

After some more clicking around, I found that the French have a more elegant word for the phenomena: l'appel du vide, the appeal of the void. What a gloriously Frankish way of saying something. This is what I feel; not the desire to die, but the desire to experience the void. To know what it is to fall unrestrainedly and live to feel it intensely. If I could jump off a cliff without dying I would probably do it pretty regularly.

None of this is to say that this feeling isn't at least somewhat unsettling. It is. Most people don't understand it. I don't understand it. It is pre- or sub-rational. It's a feeling. And not one to be acted on. Writing about the concept Sartre reflected that it is unsettling because "it creates an unnerving, shaking sensation of not being able to trust one's own instincts." He's exactly right. But I think the American psychologists are onto something as well. There is something basically life-affirming about this desire. Maybe you should not trust your instincts in all cases (no shit), but every time you stare over a ledge and feel the urge to jump and refrain, you are affirming your commitment to life. And, to me, that is a feeling worth experiencing at odd times.

*I am working on a follow-up post to address the implications for this instinct if you actually do struggle with suicide ideation and depression. I will finish it, fittingly enough, if I do not die climbing Mount Rainier this weekend. L'appel du vide, indeed.

Tomorrow, I Teach

Tomorrow I start my training to be a high school English teacher. The road to this point I have already documented and you can read if you wish. I do not have much more to say on the topic right now. Only that I am very, very grateful.

We have been living in Colorado for just over a month now, out of suitcases in my parent's house. And it couldn't have been better. The weather, the mountains, our families, our friends. I have climbed mountains and run trails, sat outside on cool July evenings and slept under the stars at 11,000 feet above sea level. 

When we first arrived in town I actually got a head start on my teaching experience. My new school had a project starting this summer that my department head thought I would be a good fit for: a Great Books project, or a history of philosophy. We took critical Western thinkers from the past 3,000 years, read their works, and wrote a 4-5 page chronicle of their biography, the themes in their writing, and their legacy in Western life and thought. In my 2+ weeks on the project I covered the following thinkers: Milton (obvs), Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, William James, John Dewey, Dante, Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Horace, and Edward Gibbon. In other words, I was paid well to do what I would have gladly done for free. The goal of the project is to have a Great Books elective for our students and hopefully to use the curriculum we develop in other schools as well. Thus far in my life it is the coolest intellectual project I have ever been involved in. 

I am excited, which is why I am writing at what is typically my bedtime. It is not often in life that everything seems to align perfectly and you understand why it is that you have traveled the road that you have. I spent most of the past four years wondering what in the world I was doing with my life, and now it appears I have my answer: preparing for this. 

Teaching Philosophy

A few of you have asked in conversation about my new teaching position what I wrote about in my Statement of Teaching Philosophy. I mentioned in an earlier post about how the words just flowed out quickly and while I still don't think it is perfect, and it is certainly not polished, here is what I wrote. I was mercifully brief for once in my life:

Teaching Philosophy

I believe that all knowledge, wisdom, and truth emanates from the triune God. As such, all education, whether in mathematics or languages or literature is a striving to know our omniscient God in a deeper way. John Milton put it nicely in his educational tract, written in 1644 (I will colloquialize the language and spelling): “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may be nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.” Milton of course goes on to say how difficult of a process learning is, but that the end is to become like God and so to glorify Him.

I remember reading that passage for the first time in graduate school and thinking of how far my experience of education had been from what the old Puritan divine had in mind for the education of young minds. In my childhood education the subjects were so atomized. What hath Christ to do with Belial? What hath reading to do with science? But when all education and all knowledge and wisdom is under the umbrella of repairing the fall and learning to know God and the things he has revealed to us then it takes on new life again. Science is a way to praise God for his power in creation. Math is a way to marvel at his precision. Literature puts us in touch with the eternal.

For me this realization liberates education. Time spent learning is never time wasted. Given that we spend so much of our lives, especially our early lives, in educational situations this is extremely fantastic news. It is this that I want to impart to the students that I teach: that all knowledge testifies to Jesus. If, as Milton suggests, in our quest for knowledge we unite our studies to love of God and imitation of Christ we will have the type of knowledge that can build up and not the empty sort of knowledge that only puffs up our own egos. 

----

Like I said, short and sweet, at least by my usual long-winded standards. And I mean everything that I wrote and if I had not been intentionally short-winded I would have elaborated on each point. And, of course I quoted Milton. Like I do. However, there is the bare-bones outline for my philosophy both of teaching and learning. The epiphanies I had about education in my mid-20s changed my life and I hope to encourage my students to avoid some of the angst Christians can feel about education as well as to avoid a sacred/secular divide in their views of the subjects. I don't want to create thinkers only, but worshipers who worship our Father in spirit and in truth. 

Multiverse Theory and the Death of Philosophy

Stephen Hawking is that rare creature, a famous physicist. With the runaway success of his popular level treatise on cosmology, A Brief History of Time (1989), Hawking was thrust into the public sphere in a way that eludes most scientists, and, indeed, in a way that most scientists would probably not desire. While never clearly espousing belief in a deity, he included an ambiguous statement in A Brief History that caused speculation on his metaphysical beliefs: “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason--for then we should know the mind of God.” Though the connotation of this statement makes it clear that he is referring to God only in a metaphorical sense, the door seemed left open for belief that Hawking entertained the idea of a God who perhaps had some part in the creation of the universe.

Last year, though, Hawking came out with another popular level book that seemed aimed at forever silencing the notion that belief in a creator God has an explanatory power for the state of the universe or is, in any way, necessary for the cosmos as it exists. Entitled The Grand Design and coauthored with Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking details and attempts to popularize a theory in theoretical physics called M-theory. Basically, what this theory postulates is that there are, in fact, an infinite number of universes. The idea here is to refute the argument for the existence of God based on the fine tuning of our universe, a view held by Isaac Newton who referred to our “strangely habitable solar system.” Given enough universes, anything is possible, and the factor of coincidence decreases sharply so that our distinctly life-allowing “planetary conditions” are “far less remarkable and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us as human beings.” To quote in some length:

According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. They are a prediction of science. Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states at later times, that is, at times like the present, long after their creation. Most of these states will be quite unlike the Universe we observe and quite unsuitable for the existence of any form of life. Only a few would allow creatures like us to exist.

What binds this theory together, for Hawking, is the law of gravity. In an interview with the British daily The Telegraph, Hawking stated that “because there is such a law as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing.”

Let me just say, and this will probably not come as a surprise to anyone, my knowledge of theoretical physics is pretty sparse. My house church co-leader just received his PhD. in Theoretical Physics, so if you can learn through osmosis I have the subject down, but if not I am awash in ignorance. However, Mlodinow and Hawking make another bold statement in their treatise on M-theory and the unnecessary nature of God, and it concerns a subject where I have a little more experience: “Philosophy is dead.” Because the discipline has not kept pace with scientific discovery, “scientists have now become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” How heroic. The problem with this triumphalism is that M-theory falls squarely in the realm of philosophical science. This is like a poet condemning Shakespearian verse in Shakespearian meter. You cannot claim philosophy is dead and then write a book of scientific philosophical speculation.

This is the case because the concept of multiple universes is by very definition beyond the bounds of empirical proof. As John Haldane explains in his review of The Grand Design, “There can be no empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis, nor could it be derived as a necessary condition of the possible existence and character of the only universe of which we have scientific knowledge.”  We can only ever know what is observable to us, according to the scientific method. Everything else has to be taken on some other basis, call it philosophy or faith. Scientific speculation that makes claims beyond proof, whatever it does accomplish, does not make science.