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.