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What is the purpose of philosophy?
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Many of the big questions that human beings ask themselves have easy answers in religion.
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Other questions from the past have been answered by science. Art and literature do a fantastic
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job of illuminating and illustrating the human condition. So who needs philosophy? And hey,
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is that itself a philosophical question? If so, do we need to answer it?
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that all
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of Western philosophy was nothing more than a series of footnotes to Plato. From this
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you can gather two things. One, unlike other fields, philosophy does not seem to have made
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that much progress in the last 2000 years. I would argue though that this is not quite
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true. The second thing that quotation tells you is that Plato was a rock star. And indeed,
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while reading Rebecca Goldstein's superb book, Plato at the Googleplex, Why Philosophy Won't
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Go Away, I was struck by what a foundational thinker Plato really was. He asked many big
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questions that still drive philosophical inquiry today and he anticipated insights that were
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given proper shape many centuries later. For example, we think of the social contract as
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a concept that was formulated during the Enlightenment and the field of game theory is something
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that came about in the 20th century. So my eyes almost popped out of my head when I read
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a dialogue of Plato in which Glaucon, elder brother of Plato and a minor character in
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this dialogue, describes what is basically a game theoretic argument for a social contract.
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And Plato's dialogues, as I discovered in Goldstein's excellent book, are full of such
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seemingly modern arguments and insights. Plato at the Googleplex is a book that really
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has two intersecting parts. Half the book is a series of illuminating essays on Plato,
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his times, his philosophy, the impact of his work. The other half is a series of fictionalized
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dialogues of Plato set in current times and modern venues like the Googleplex. And these
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are quite witty and entertaining. Besides introducing us to Plato, the book really makes
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an argument that philosophy is not an arcane academic discipline, but that it actually
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matters in this modern world, in these crazy times that we live in. I spoke to Goldstein
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in December 2018 when she was in Mumbai for the Times Lit Fest. We recorded in a room
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given to us by the organizers and the venue was quite noisy, so please do excuse the quality
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of the recording. Before we get to it though, a quick commercial break.
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IVM20 for a 20% discount at IndianColors.com. Rebecca, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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It's very, very good to be here with you and to be in conversation with you.
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Right. It's kind of intimidating to actually have a dialogue with a woman who's written
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Plato's dialogues as you have in your recent book. I wanted to start by talking about what
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the philosopher Carl Jaspers calls the axial age, which is where you point out in your
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book that between 800 BC to 200 BC, there was a sudden explosion of different quests to
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find answers to the question of what makes a life matter. And it showed up in all the
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different normative religions, the monotheisms that sprang up and in philosophy and Greece.
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But my sort of question was why during this particular period was there this sudden quest?
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Yeah. So when I approach this question of why the ancient Greeks had this massive explosion
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of creative ideas, and they're credited with laying down the foundations of Western civilization,
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it occurs to me that this didn't happen in a vacuum, that this was happening in many
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places on the globe. And that all of the normative paradigms, meaning the paradigms that people
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refer to when they're trying to give meaning and purpose to their lives, whether it's religious
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or secular, were formulated during this period. That was actually a philosopher, a German
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philosopher of the 20th century named Jaspers. He was the first to notice and to name the
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axial age, that there was this great creative normative ferment during this period. And
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so the question is, you know, why did it happen then? And social scientists are just beginning
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to look at this. There hasn't been a great deal of attention given to it. I mean, after
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all, it was one of those things that was pointed out by philosophers that something amazing
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was going on during this period. It seems like the most important variable was that
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simply the people were well fed. Pascal Boyard in France has plotted the caloric intake and
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all over the globe at that time. And indeed, the countries that participated in what we
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call the axial age, which was India, Hinduism and Buddhism and Jainism were formulated during
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this period. China, Confucianism and Taoism were formulated this period. And Greece, philosophy
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and tragic poetry, which was their response to these questions of what it is that gives
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meaning and purpose to our lives. These were all, and also the Judean hills, you know,
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where the Abrahamic approach was formulated. Persia, Zoroastrianism, all of these places
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that participated and forged these frameworks that are still extant today, claiming all
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of us in one way or the other, including someone like me, who's a secularist, you know, and
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so I trace my roots back to ancient Greece. They were all well fed. And what we learned
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from this is- Because of the shift to agriculture around
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the cows in BC. Exactly. Exactly right. And so, you know, what
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we learned from this is, you know, when people don't have to be preoccupied 24-7 and seeing
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another dawn and, you know, just getting enough food in their bellies, they start thinking
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about this question of, you know, here I am and, you know, and what is it that I ought
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to be doing with my life, you know. And so any of these questions have that word ought
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in them. We call normative in philosophy. And it comes very naturally to our species
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as soon as we're freed from the, you know, the constant trials of simply surviving. These
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other features of the- You also pointed out that it correlates
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with urbanization. Exactly. These were highly organized city
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states and they had standing armies. They had coinage. They had slavery. They had trading.
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You know, this is so important, right? So they were mixing with different people, different
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cultures, different ways of thinking, which makes us humans think, well, what's the right
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way of thinking about our lives, right? Here are these different traditions, different
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goals. What's the right way? It comes quite naturally to us. And also in these cities,
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there was more anonymity. I had the great privilege, I don't think I wrote about it
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in the book because I don't think I had yet this experience of visiting one of the last
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of the hunter gatherer tribes, of spending a little time with them in Tanzania, the Hadza.
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And it was very interesting. First of all, they have to really, every day they wake up
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and they have to fulfill their caloric needs. I mean, and it's very difficult, but one
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of the things that was very clear is they lived in great intimacy with each other. Everybody
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clearly mattered in that village, right? It's sort of a, it's a family. It's how,
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this is what we have come from, of intimate village life. And when in these big city states
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and there's more anonymity, this question also, I think is exacerbated. Well, you know,
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who am I? What can I do to achieve some sense of, of mattering in the universe? In the village
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life, you better, you know, it's everybody has their position. So all of these things
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come together. I don't think it's just a matter of caloric intake. I think it's more complicated
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than that, but we see it in all of these places. There was also a scribe class. So there was
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written language in all, you know, there was. And there was coinage, like you've pointed
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out in your book. So yes, there was coinage. Exactly. Which is a way of also increasing
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the sense of sort of anonymity when there's coinage, then there's disparities of wealth.
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But you know, we all have this existential need, even the poor among us, right? Of wanting
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our lives to mean something. They mean everything to us. And the interesting thing about this
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axial age is that most, except one, most of the sort of normative traditions that were
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forming were teleological. You know, they were, they had a god at their center or gods
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or whatever. And the only exception really was the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece.
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Yes. And is it because their gods were very messed up? That's what I think. Their gods
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were really, I'm thinking of, I mean, they were kind of assholes. Can I say that? And
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it was, it was extremely interesting. You know, we think of the Greeks as, you know,
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philosophers. Of course they weren't philosophers. They were not a society of philosophers. There's
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never been a society of philosophers. They gave, you know, certain among them were philosophers
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and they gave birth to this way of approaching the normative questions. But we can never
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forget that it was the Athenian society, which is the best of the Greek city-states, right?
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That put Socrates to death. I mean, there was a democracy that voted, his fellow citizens
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voted to put him to death. So this was not a society of, they regretted it afterwards,
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right? But after his death, we find many little statues of Socrates. They regretted it. But
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because of certain things that had happened after they lost the Peloponnesian war, their
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war with another city-state, Sparta, they didn't have tolerance for Socrates with his
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skeptical questions anymore, asking them or demanding that they question their own normative
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values, which were not philosophical, but rather something that I call the ethos of
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the extraordinary, that what they had produced was this view that in order to really matter,
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you have to make a name for yourself so that knowledge of your life will be replicated
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in future generations or in your contemporaries. And this gives a certain moreness to your
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life, you know, so fame and glory, what they call kleos. And so that this was their way
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of pursuing it. Any way that you could be replicated in the minds of others, what make
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your life worth living? And he was attacking that, Socrates.
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And I found it very interesting how you point out that because their gods are such assholes,
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unlike other peoples elsewhere, you don't want the attention of your god. Instead, you
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want to raise your own renown, like kleos, one way of translating, which I found very
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nice, acoustic renown is how you mentioned, it's read, more people hear of you. So they
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aspire to this ethos of the extraordinary, where they want to do extraordinary things
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so that in their own society, they are famous. Kleos kind of sounds like very Instagram,
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Twitter kind of. Exactly. Yes, it's interesting because, you
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know, in some sense, we are a post theistic society, right? And the more educated we are,
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the more we don't think of our lives in terms of theism. But what we seem to have gone back
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to the default is the pre philosophical Athenian of you, which is to be replicated in the minds
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of others. It's extremely interesting. I'm writing about this in my new book, but you
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know that we are, we're a species that really looks from, for attention, one way or the
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other, right? That this is, and in fact, even the way we've evolved, we can, we have, you
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know, neuroscientists have now shown us that we have special areas of the brain, special
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neurons that are devoted to being able to see when people are looking directly at us,
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those neurons will fire. If people's eyes are directly on us, a few inches, a few centimeters,
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either way, other neurons will fire. So we have this detection system, right, of when
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people are paying attention to us. And I, you know, I've had experience with little
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babies, my own and other years, little babies, such an early age, they are making eye contacts,
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we're so dependent. We're a gregarious species. We're very, very dependent on care of others
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for a very long time. We have a very long childhood and adolescence. It gets longer
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and longer. I know 45 year olds now who are still adolescents, but that's another story.
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But so this dependence on our own kind makes us very susceptible to attention. So what
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we see in the axial age with these gods, that most of, you know, how do we want to feel
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that we matter, in terms of, you know, sort of the gods. But the Greeks were very special
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because the way that their stories of their gods develop, you don't want too much attention
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from these gods. Something bad always happens when a god pays too much attention to you.
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So you want to be glorious, but not so glorious, so that the gods feel that you're competition.
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I think of them because I had older brothers and sisters, you know, that the Greek gods
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are sort of like older brothers and sisters. You know, they want you to emulate them and
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to revere them. But then if you start to surpass them, they're going to slap you back into
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your place very, very quickly. So the Greek gods are something like this. So they develop
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this kind of, it was a highly religious society saturated with religious rituals, but those
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were mostly to appease the gods, you know, to their apotropaic, that is, warning off
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evil. You don't, you know, so don't pay too much attention and I'm paying proper respect
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to you. But in terms of what they wanted, the attention that they wanted to make them
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feel like they matter, it was from fellow citizens and from future generations. So do
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that something big so that the poets will sing of you, which was their social media
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of the day, the poets. And sort of the fascinating turning point, which is also at the heart
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of your book Plato at the Googleplex, is when from Cleos we come to the concept of Areta.
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Yes, yes. And so Areta is, you know, what excellence, our word aristocracy, you know,
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comes from, from this world, the rule of the excellent, which is what it is. Benjamin Javert
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translated it as virtue, but as you pointed out, that doesn't capture all its
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Exactly. So it originally had meant this, you know, sort of excellence. You could, you
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could talk about the Areta of a knife or of a horse, you know, so that was the excellence
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of this thing in ancient Greek. And it's really the influence of the philosophers, of Socrates
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and of Plato, where they're, how it becomes to, how it comes to mean virtue rather than
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any kind of, of excellence. Because part of the attack of the philosophers on the normative
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framework of their society, why Socrates was put to death, was that the claim is, you know,
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not just any kind of Cleos will do the trick. It has to be, Areta has to be true excellence.
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And what they argue for is that true excellence consists in knowledge, wisdom, virtue, justice,
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courage, you know, the virtues. So the term undergoes this transformation. And, you know,
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by the time we get to the gospels, you know, written in Greek, Areta simply means, you
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know, virtue. It just means virtue. It does. And this is the transformation that these
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philosophers who are writing, well, not Socrates, he didn't write, but Plato, Aristotle and
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the philosophers who follow them, that this was a transformation of the word.
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In fact, you point out how, you know, Plato Socrates is sort of begins to take Areta away
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from Cleos, or the recognition, and sort of shows that it can exist independent of recognition,
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that you can be virtuous, even if no one else sees your virtue. And I want to quote a great,
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very nice passage that kind of illustrates that from your book. Start quote, in the Gorgias,
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in the Gorgias, Socrates is presented as asserting something so radical that his hearers think
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it has to be a joke. He would, he says, rather be treated unjustly, then treat others unjustly.
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But if Areta is conceived of as analogous to the health of the body, then Socrates's
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statement is hardly absurd. The injustice that we do involves us far more intimately
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than the injustice that we suffer. I don't only act out of character, my character reacts
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to my actions. Yeah, so this is, it gets transformed in
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the Socratic, Platonic attack on their own society's values into, yeah, it's something
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internal. It's not the applause. It's not outer attention. In fact, you know, you may
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be getting no applause whatsoever. You may be getting a brimming cup of hemlock as Socrates
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got, you know that. And yet, it's this, if your character is being transformed in the
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right direction, this is what counts. And then the whole question becomes, well, what
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is the right direction? What are the virtues? How do we know? How do we judge? What are
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the right virtues? You know, which becomes a central theme of philosophy. And what is
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really knowledge becomes a central theme of epistemology. So philosophy is often running
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with this transformation of, you know, from the attention and approbation of your fellow
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citizens to know that that's not a reliable means of judging whether you're living your
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life as you ought to live it. And in fact, it's something far more private, something
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that takes a tremendous amount of striving, but not striving just to be replicated in
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other people's minds. In fact, you may be in the eyes of your fellow citizens, a nobody,
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a failure, a loser, to use one of the favorite phrases of our current president. It stays,
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you know, loser, everybody's a loser. You know, and yeah, so this is a very good example.
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I mean, I somehow, you know, being American, everything nowadays comes back to Trump, right?
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He colonizes our minds in a terrible way. But yet you look at this life, I mean, this
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is a person who is after Cleos' attention, outward attention, in the biggest way possible.
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He has to be thought of by every citizen on the globe, and he is. Is this a successful
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life? By Greek standards, yes. You know, by pre-philosophical, the Homeric, ethos of the
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extraordinary, yes, he's an extraordinary person, right? He is replicated in all of
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our minds. You know, what would Socrates and Plato have to say about him? We know what
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Socrates and Plato would have to say about him. And the fact that so many of us would
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echo Socrates and Plato's opinion of this kind of Cleos, this outward domination of
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the world consciousness, shows how much philosophy has, in fact, infiltrated our minds. This
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is one of the themes. You know, the subtitle of this book is Why Philosophy Won't Go Away,
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and this is an ongoing argument I have in my background, isn't science? I come from
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a science, you know, from physics and mathematics. Most of my friends and all of my husbands
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have been themselves scientists. And so this question of what is philosophy adding here?
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And it's very hard to see philosophical progress because it's the progress with which we see,
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you know, those of us who are judging a person like Trump to be, you know, a failure. He's
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calling everybody a loser, but that he's a loser himself in the true sense, in the
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biggest sense, a waste of the human life and a waste of tremendous privilege and resources.
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Why are we doing this? I mean, this is a kind of progress that was begun with Socrates and
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Plato's argument with the values of their own society. And that has, you know, continued
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and infiltrated all of us. In fact, a very funny illustration of this progress of philosophy
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in your book, where you have all these dialogues with Plato in modern settings, is when he's
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at the Googleplex and he is surprised to learn that slavery is no more. And he is charmed
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and beguiled by the arguments against slavery that the person who is with him gives him.
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Yes. And she, of course, you know, I made her, it's a little bit of comic relief, right?
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But she's the meteor escort when a writer is on a book tour, somebody meets them in
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each city and takes them around to all of their events. And they tend to be usually,
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you know, very amusing people and, you know, charming, but, you know, not, not intellectuals
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really. And I saw my media escort in this. And it's kind of telling how this very flaky
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kind of person is actually giving such a solid philosophical argument, which has come from
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Plato himself. Exactly. In some sense, because how does philosophy make progress? We don't
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make progress in terms of experiments or, you know, laboratory empirical. It's not
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an empirical science, clearly. But the way we make progress here is, you know, we keep
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seeing the implications of commitments that we've already made and the strongest being
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commitments to our own life that we ourselves feel that we matter. In any case, we want
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to matter. It matters to us whether we matter. That is what it is to pursue a life. Your
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life has to matter to you in order just to pursue it. What follows from this? And so
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many times we don't see what follows from this and we're inconsistent. And that's exactly
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how philosophy makes progress by looking at things that we've already committed ourselves
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to that we can't live our lives without committing ourselves to and seeing how we are inconsistent,
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this has consequences, logical consequences, and, you know, we don't see them. And that's
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in fact, this is why the reductio ad absurdum, this form of argument, was the favored form
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of Socrates, right? He developed this, you know, here you're committed to this, here
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are your premises, and yet you're not committed to this. Do you see the inconsistency? And
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he would point out to people their inconsistencies, which didn't win him great popularity. And
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it didn't work out well for the poor guy. And part of the reason why it didn't work
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out well for him is because the Athenian sense of arita was tied up with the state. You had
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to have the validation of the state. And there's another quote, which, you know, if you replace
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Athenian with say American, the court might still make sense. Start quote, Athenian superiority
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drew itself to more superiority, intensifying its sense of its own exceptionalism, which
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typically happens with imperial powers. Stop quote.
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Yes, exactly. Yes. So this is, you know, it was a great, if you have a society whose normative
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framework is built on, you know, everybody has to be exceptional. Well, the big problem
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is, of course, most of us are not exceptional, right? We're perfectly, I mean, by definition,
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we're ordinary most of us. And so what, you know, what did you do? Well, you call it participatory
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exceptionalism. You know, you're participating in an exceptional city state. And of course,
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Athens was the most, it was a given premise, a firm premise among all of the ancient Greeks
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of no matter what city state, that they were the best in the world, right? This comes very
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naturally to our species. And, you know, in fact, their word for a foreigner is barbarian
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because and it comes from their word for blah, blah, blah, what, you know, just is bar, bar,
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bar, you know, you can't understand what they're saying. So they're barbarians, right? And
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it simply meant not Greek speakers. And so, but there was that that kind of implication
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lesser, there are lesser people. And then among these exceptional Greek speakers, the
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most exceptional, the creme de la creme were the Athenians, right? And it was an imperial
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power. They were an imperialist over their fellow Greek city states. And they were also
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a great draw for their, for all of the most creative people. So, you know, Aristotle was
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not born in Athens, he came to Athens, he came to Athens to study in Plato's Academy,
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the first European university that was founded by Plato. And so there was this, this sense
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that the way you can achieve something big and extraordinary is by being a citizen of
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an extraordinary state. So there's this nationalist fervor that is so strong because the whole
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existential longing to make something of your life was tied up in this. And this is a way
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of course that we all, it's a way we all try to do it by the group we belong to, you know,
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that this is a way of rather than the values that we cultivate within our soul, the group
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And where Plato's Socrates kind of moved away from this was by saying that it was in a sense
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by rejecting the Athenian notion of arete and saying that virtue comes not from belonging
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to an exceptional state, but from knowledge. And I found it very fascinating where you
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talk about the sublime braid, which is a connection between truth and beauty and virtue and the
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notion that from knowledge arises virtue. Can you, can you explain that to me?
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So it's, yeah, the truth, beauty and goodness are entwined with each other. This is so fundamental
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in Plato. One of the reasons I like Plato, although I do not think that everything he
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said was right, clearly not right. But again, how could I think that philosophy makes progress
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and think that everything Plato said was right? No, we can, we've made so much progress we
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can look back at Plato and say, no, you were wrong about this, this and this, but, and
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many other things. But something that's very fundamental about him, he changed his mind
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many times. And this discipline that he really founded for us is a very self-critical. It's
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reason, but everything is open to reason. Everything has to be justified. And so there's
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a great self-critical capacity that has to be cultivated in order to be a philosopher.
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I feel that any philosopher who hasn't changed her mind many times over the course of her
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life isn't really not being a good philosopher because this is, this is, this is critical,
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this self-criticism. So, but one of the things that stays permanent with him is that what
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I call the sublime grade, the intertwining of these three most important things for him,
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truth and beauty and goodness. And that they all are connected, they're embedded with each
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other. You can't achieve any one without the other. So for example, how can we tell that
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something is true? It has to be a beautiful explanation. So if we have, you know, two
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or more explanations that are, that can accommodate all of the things that we're trying to explain,
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all of the evidence, we go with the most beautiful one, the most elegant one, in some sense the
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simplest one, but there's an aesthetic evaluation of that as a, as a criterion for truth. Now,
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it comes from a background in physics and that's, that is very, very apparent in physics.
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You know that when we, for example, turned away from the geocentric view that the heavens
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all revolved around the earth and moved the Copernican revolution to the heliocentric
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universe, both systems could accommodate all of the empirical evidence, the movements of
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the planets and all of this, but one of them was really messy. You had to keep adding more
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and more epicycles. It was mathematically grotesque, right? And one, all you had to
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do was change the orientation and make the sun the center with the earth moving and everything
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became, the explanation itself became beautiful, became mathematically simple. We still, this
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is still the case, you know, so for, you know, all the way, you know, with relativity theory,
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when Einstein proposed the general theory of relativity, he had very little empirical
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evidence for it. What he had was beautiful mathematics. The mathematics is stunning.
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The theory itself is stunning. And when it, he was proposed, the general theory was published
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in 1915, had to wait until 1919 until he had any empirical evidence for it. They needed
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a complete eclipse, a solar eclipse so that they could see whether or not, I won't go
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I get that connection between truth and beauty that a certain truth about the universe is
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expressed beautifully by E is equal to MC square, say, but how does knowing that translate
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To virtue. So here is what Plato believed. He believed that if we really assimilate truth,
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which takes, first of all, that itself takes virtue. It takes taming of the ego, right?
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Because we have a great tendency to believe what's true, what, if it most flatters ourselves,
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our place in society, our place in the universe. I mean, why did we think that the earth had
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to be the center of the universe while the heavens revolving around us, right? It flatters
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our sense of importance in the cosmos, you know. So just to be able to attain the truth
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means you have to subdue the ego somewhat, right? But then also when we see the truth,
#
our perspective is so broadened. We see ourselves in this greatest perspective, grandest perspective,
#
and that itself, you know, expands our virtue, gives us a tolerance and we don't take ourselves
#
so damn seriously, right? I mean, this is the aim of ethics. We see ourselves in some
#
perspectives in regard with other, our fellow citizens and fellow creatures and our planet
#
itself, our cosmos itself. This is what it is to be virtuous. So yeah, so that's how
#
these things all become intertwined. I just wanted to say this one thing that Einstein
#
had said when he finally was brought the evidence for the general theory of relativity that
#
the, yes, light, the mass of the sun actually did shift light in the way that he had predicted.
#
It was a huge, you know, success for this theory. And so a philosopher of science, Hans
#
Reichenbach, asked him, how did you feel when you finally got news that your theory had
#
been vindicated? And he said, no, I already knew it had to be true because it's so beautiful.
#
The empirical evidence just didn't even matter so much. So, you know, this, and this we can
#
trace all the way back to Plato.
#
On that elegant note, we'll take a quick commercial break. We'll be back in a minute.
#
Hello, everybody. Welcome to a great week on IBM Podcast. If you're not following us
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to filling out the survey, please do. And we'd really appreciate that.
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On Cyrus's, Cyrus's guest is policy professional, Meghnaad, as Meghnaad sheds light on working
#
with parliamentarians, some trivia about our laws and his new podcast, How to Citizen.
#
On How to Citizen, we're on chapter six, understanding our criminal justice system. The guest for
#
the episode is comedian Aishwarya Mohanraj. The host and Aishwarya ponder the inequalities
#
of justice and what would be a way to put it right.
#
On Simplify, Chuck and Sreeket take another look at Brexit and the predicaments in store
#
Our Pulya Bazi, the host, is in conversation with Dr. Alok Shukla, who served as deputy
#
election commissioner to investigate the Indian electoral process. On the Habit Coach podcast,
#
Aishwin talks about how the technique of box breathing helps fight anxiety. And with that,
#
let's continue with your show.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. You know, one of the most revelatory points while
#
reading your book was that way back then, when all the other normative religions were
#
sort of taking root, you had Socrates basically demolishing the notion of God by asking Uthipro,
#
I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Uthipro. Uthipro. Yes. Uthipro. Yeah. This fantastic
#
question where he says, quote, is what is holy, holy because the gods approve it or
#
do they approve it because it's holy? Yeah, this is, this is fantastic. It's one of Plato's
#
early dialogues. And the argument that Socrates puts forth there, or that Plato has Socrates
#
putting forth there, is, has been repeated by free thinkers throughout the ages. You
#
know, Spinoza, who's a great favorite philosopher of mine, a 17th century Jewish rationalist
#
philosopher, very much following in the footsteps of Plato, you know, it's repeated by him and
#
in our own day, Sam Harris, you know, repeats this argument and people don't always attribute
#
it to Plato, but he's the one who first formulated this extremely elegant argument. Just for
#
the listeners, I'll kind of quickly explain what it's essentially saying is that if there
#
are normative moral codes that you follow because a god tells you to follow it, are
#
you doing that because he, like, is he telling you to do good things because there is reason
#
for those to be good, in which case those reasons are enough in themselves. You don't
#
need the god. Exactly. And if there are no reasons, then why do it? Then why do it? I
#
mean, if it's simply a caprice of God, you know, a whim, you know, do this, you know,
#
give charity to the widow and to the orphan rather than, you know, persecute them. There's
#
no, there's no additional reason that dictates this moral choice. Does that really answer
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the question we're asking when we want to know what makes good actions good? What makes
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evil evil? Just the whims and caprices of an immoral god. So no, we feel not, you know,
#
we feel no, there's a reason God wants us to do this rather than that. Well, then if
#
there's a reason, that's the reason and God is redundant. It's a very elegant argument.
#
And you know, I've been sometimes against my will in certain debates with theists who
#
want to argue there can be no morality without God. And you know, this is an argument that
#
I've had to face so many times. And when you, you know, you give them, for me the best
#
response is Plato's argument, you know, 2400 years ago, pre-Christian, pre-Jewish, pre,
#
you know, but that it's, yeah, it's a very, very elegant argument. And this brings me
#
to my next question, which is really puzzling, which is that you have this outbreak of what
#
we would call rationality in this period where Socrates and Plato and Aristotle are doing
#
well. Yeah. And then you have this long sort of interval until the enlightenment in the
#
18th century before you have that. And the rest of the time is all, all of those religions
#
those monotheistic cults, all of that thinking you should have, you would think would go
#
away with Plato's question. At least the rationalism would survive, but it disappears for several
#
hundred years. Why is that? Why is that? Well, you know, partly, you know, one of the problems
#
with, with this religion of reason, you could almost call it, right, or a normativity of
#
reason is that it requires a lot of hard work. It requires education. You don't get the most
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comforting answers from it, right? You know, it's, it depends on us. It's very human centric.
#
It makes the universe a kind of cold and uncaring place and impersonal place. It's not surprising
#
it broke out in, in ancient Greece, given what they thought of their gods, which were
#
their downright, you know, hostile to us. But it's, it doesn't, we're as the, you know,
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the Judeo-Christian Muslim view, which captured the world, is that it's very powerful. It
#
gives us a sense of cosmic significance. Now I, I myself had started out that way. I was
#
born into an extremely religious family. I know what it feels like to make the transition
#
of feeling, you know, that God is watching everything I do, which is terrifying because,
#
I mean, it's creepy. Really, there's no privacy whatsoever. And also, you know, he's a very
#
stern God. He's judging. If you do, and, you know, Judaism, which was my birth religion,
#
it's, you know, there are laws for absolutely everything, laws specifically for women to
#
keep them in their place. And these rankled me very much. These did not go down well with
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me. But, but one thing you never doubt in is that, is that you matter. I mean, because
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you matter to the Lord of the universe. He created you intentionally. He has designed,
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you know, he created you rather than somebody else. So you have your place in the universe.
#
You know, what I was saying about that village, that, you know, that predates the axial age
#
in some sense, it makes the universe a village, you know, that we all have, I've never thought
#
of that before, actually, but that we all have our place, you know, with the head chief,
#
you know, is there. And he had a really... Always a man. Always a man. Always a man.
#
And he had, you know, he has, he has designs on us and it's, it's, it's a comforting and
#
it sort of replicates, you know, what, where we came from, that tribal village life. So
#
it's, it is our default, I think. And reason is pushing against that. And so I think it
#
was such a powerful replication of the village intimacy, only on the cosmic scale that was
#
presented to the world. It's not, not surprising. Also, it promises us an afterlife. I mean,
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it makes us extremely, you know, it assuages some of our deepest fears, which is that,
#
you know, in the great scheme of things, we're really not so, so very much. No, we don't
#
want to feel that. We've heard death, all of these things, and it really palliates our
#
and speaks to our deepest fears.
#
Well, one of the interesting points that you, the arguments that you address in the introduction
#
to your book, in fact, is about how people often say that philosophy even today is just
#
a set of footnotes to Plato, for example, and people therefore make the argument, including,
#
I'm sure some of your scientist friends, that science has progressed so much. You know,
#
no one would say that science is like footnotes to Pythagoras or whoever. And, but with philosophy,
#
we keep going back to Plato and finding it very relevant and you can actually begin an
#
argument there. What do you have to say to that?
#
Several things. I think that, you know, it was Alfred North Whitehead, a 20th century
#
philosopher and logician, who had said that the truest thing you could say about Western
#
philosophy is that it consists of a series of books to Plato. And this is a very good
#
soundbite, but like most soundbites, it's a gross oversimplification. What you can say
#
about Plato, and the reason he's so very important, is that he had a real sense for what the philosophical
#
questions were and what answers a philosophical question and what doesn't answer a philosophical
#
question. And he found philosophical questions lurking in every area. So he lays out the
#
landscape of philosophy that we can say, the different areas, you know, philosophy of religion
#
that we spoke about a little bit and, you know, and theory of knowledge, epistemology,
#
moral philosophy, political philosophy, you know, all these different, but that there
#
are always these philosophical questions that arise that are not one with the fields themselves,
#
they're meta questions. They're about the field of philosophy of science, you know.
#
So it's not that he laid out all of the answers. As I say, we can look back and see how many
#
mistakes he made. I mean, his theory of forms, I don't know anybody who holds by this philosophy
#
of language. He asked the important questions and he proposed his theory of form. What is
#
a meaning? How does a word acquire meaning? And he had this theory of forms. We have philosophy
#
of language now, very complicated, very sophisticated. It's not platonic, right? It's not, Plato's
#
answers are not the answers, but Plato's questions, time and again, are the questions. But we've
#
made progress with them. The other thing is the more scientific progress we make, the
#
more philosophical questions are churned up by the scientific progress. And so, you know...
#
In fact, as you say, philosophy raises the proto-scientific questions.
#
Yes. So often, philosophers will first ask the scientific question that kind of motivates
#
the science and finally the methodology emerges that could answer these questions. But that's
#
not its only role. It also looks at what science, you know, the current science of the day is
#
telling us and helps to determine what it's answering and what it's not answering. So
#
for something like, for example, neuroscience. So we've learned so much more about consciousness,
#
you know, through cognitive science and through neuroscience. We can map the brain and see
#
where different aspects of consciousness, where they're located. And, you know, I think
#
neuroscience has made it extremely probable that consciousness is a brain process, right?
#
That it is a material physical process. Has it thereby eliminated the notion of agency,
#
that we are actually in control of our actions? Has it shown that we can possibly be free,
#
that the sense that we have of actually making choices, of just deliberating and deciding
#
is an illusion? So this is a philosophical question. So look at what science has so far
#
established and then see what it implies, what it doesn't imply, what's still open.
#
Scientists are often very eager to interpret their findings in the broadest way possible.
#
So you'll find many neuroscientists saying, you know, I mean, we've answered all of these
#
philosophical questions and that's where people trained in philosophy. You know, they have
#
to look, know the science, be trained in the science, but as the philosophical question
#
does really entail what the scientists are saying that it entails. I mean, in physics,
#
which is the scientific field that I'm most interested in, and most studied in university,
#
there is, you know, we have this very strange theory, quantum mechanics, and we don't quite
#
know how to interpret it. And, you know, when I was taking my physics courses, there was
#
one view, you know, about quantum mechanics, which is, was associated with Niels Thorpe,
#
it was called Copenhagen interpretation, which is that, you know, things don't exist until
#
you measure them. So to ask where is the particle before it's measured, where, you know, where
#
had it been before, is a meaningless question. Now, this is a philosophical view. And what
#
happened was philosophers began to examine this view and say, look, here's quantum mechanics.
#
Here's what you found. The interpretation of quantum mechanics, this is philosophical.
#
There's a good philosophy. And they're the ones who really prodded physicists so that
#
they came up with other interpretations as well. There's the Bohmian interpretation.
#
There's the multiverse interpretation. These things were first proposed by philosophical
#
thinking. So this is another way in which the more progress we make with our science
#
and getting into stranger and stranger things to see what it implies and what it doesn't
#
imply. And that is, that's the work I think very much of philosophy. What philosophy is
#
after is to maximize our overall coherence, to see what we know and what other possibilities
#
that leaves open, closes off, to try to make us as consistent and coherent that it's always
#
been the role of philosophy ever since Socrates was wandering around asking his annoying questions
#
of his fellow citizens. And just speaking of those annoying questions and what the task
#
of philosophy is, there's another great passage from your book I'd like to quote, which is
#
quote, truth cannot be transmitted from one mind to another, the pouring out of the full
#
flask of a master into the passive receptacle of a student. Truth seeking comes from the
#
violent activity of philosophy, a drama enacted deep in the interior of each of us and which
#
manages in its violence to deprive us of positions that may be so deeply and constitutively personal
#
that we can't defend them to others. This violent activity is personal even as it leads
#
one in an impersonal direction where interpersonal agreement is possible. Stop quote. And this
#
kind of also sort of describes a Socratic method of how he did his dialogues and asked
#
questions and got down to the essence of everything. So my question to you is, would Socratic dialogue
#
therefore be effective today in this polarized age?
#
Oh, I certainly, I certainly think so.
#
He would get torn apart on Twitter, for example.
#
Yeah. So, you know, yeah, one of the things that I think is very true of the philosophical
#
enterprise is the dialogue is extremely important. You know, it began with the dialogue. Socrates
#
never even wrote anything down because he believed in the lived conversation. It has
#
to be minds clashing with other minds. And that's the way these deep intuitions that
#
we don't even realize we have because they're so deep down within us that they can be brought
#
to the floor and other people who don't share your intuitions will say defend them, account
#
for them, tell us why I ought to believe in them. And then, you know, sometimes you realize
#
you really have no reason whatsoever. And that's how progress is made. One of the wonderful
#
things that's happened in our own day is that, you know, more and more people are brought
#
into this conversation. A person like me, a woman, would not have been part of this
#
conversation for very long. And I have seen over the course of my lifetime how this has
#
changed when I entered into philosophy. I was the only woman in the room, especially
#
because I did philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics. These were really considered
#
unfeminine, right, areas of philosophy. I was the only woman in the room. I'm not anymore,
#
right? There are many women. And this itself has brought philosophical questions into the
#
conversation that were invisible to men, such as raising children, you know, questions about
#
what is the right way. Children have been care for the planet. I mean, the ecological
#
concerns have become, you know, in general, for all of us, a very, very important part
#
of philosophy, but more applied, what we call applied ethics, rather than just grand theories
#
of ethics, applied ethics, you know, really specific questions that are facing us have
#
become much more prominent. Like the trolley problem applied to autonomous cars, for example.
#
Yes, yes, things of this sort that have, for some reason, you know, that women have found
#
this, less grand theories and more applied ethics, you know, that are, you know, so ecology,
#
family ethics, medical ethics. You find many, many women in medical ethics. So this is interesting
#
to watch. And even the analogies that are, you know, we are always, one of the things
#
that we do to test our intuitions is to do thought experiments, you know, and they're
#
pretty wacky, often, with the trolley problem. This is an example of a thought experiment.
#
The kinds of thought experiments that I hear now being proposed are often, you know, sort
#
of coming from a woman's life, from a woman's perspective, a woman's sense of priorities.
#
And so the wider the group that we bring in, people from different cultures, the better
#
because we come, the different cultures, the different life experiences give us such different
#
intuitions that are invisible to the person.
#
But why I brought up the Socratic notion of dialogue in the modern age was, does it worry
#
you, for example, that in the last 10 years, what we've seen with social media and people
#
living so much of their lives online is that people shut themselves off in echo chambers,
#
where they spend a lot of time posturing to raise their status within their in-group,
#
but don't really talk to each other. They just talk past each other.
#
You know, when the World Wide Web, as we used to call it, was first proposed, this seemed
#
the most liberating idea to a person like me. Oh, you know, now I can talk to people in
#
India, I can talk to people, you know, in Afghanistan and in Saudi Arabia. And I do,
#
actually, talk to, I mean, it can be used this way.
#
And the huge net benefit remains.
#
Yes. You know, but what we hadn't foreseen is what happened. You know, human nature,
#
the worst of us asserting itself in this new social media range. And so these echo chambers
#
and you only search out your own opinions, that are so validated and strengthened because
#
everybody you're talking agrees with this. And this is, of course, the exact opposite
#
of what the Socratic dialogue is supposed to be about, which is, again, I, myself, it's
#
interesting because psychologists have shown us that we, there's an endorphin lift, there's
#
a kind of surge. When you hear your own opinions replicated in others, you feel good. And so-
#
So it's healthy to be in an echo chamber.
#
Yes. It feels good. And, you know, as soon as I read this, I started to read publications,
#
you know, newspapers and periodicals that I very much disagree with, right? And yes,
#
I feel angry. You know, I don't feel comfortable reading these things. But, you know, I force
#
myself to and I force myself to think out, well, what are they assuming that I'm not
#
assuming? How do I defend my assumptions against their assumptions? It's a lot of work, right?
#
This is a lot of work. And it's uncomfortable and it doesn't feel so very good. But I think
#
that this is part of what it is to be an enlightened person. To be an enlightened person is to
#
be aware of the things that you're assuming and that they're not necessarily true to
#
other people. And do you really have good reasons? Could you convince them? What's the
#
best that you could give them to try to change their minds? If we did that?
#
Are you generally hopeful that we're moving in the right direction?
#
No, I don't know. Yes, maybe. I don't know. I don't know.
#
I've taken enough of your time. I know you've got to go. So one one kind of final question
#
I've been waiting to ask and you can elude it to it a while back. Do you believe in free
#
will? Because when you talk about virtue coming from knowledge, if you have complete knowledge,
#
can that then make philosophy meaningless and virtue moot?
#
Oh, that's a deep question. You know, I believe in, you know, to believe that we have this
#
ability to look at our own thought processes and be self-critical about them and change
#
our mind about them without believing in that degree of freedom. We can't make any sense
#
out of what it is to be rational. So if we're committed to reason, we have to be committed
#
to some degree of freedom. To at least the illusion of free will.
#
Yeah. Yeah. No, I think we have to be even more. It's like if you say that there really
#
is rational behavior, rational beliefs, justified beliefs, and those which are irrational and
#
unjustified and that therefore ought not to be believed, right? There is a normative presupposition
#
that is enfolded in epistemology itself. To be committed to that, we have to be committed
#
to some degree of freedom. When I see, when I examine my own thought processes, because
#
you come at me with these trenchant questions and I say, well, I really don't know how to
#
answer them. I better go back to the drawing board and rethink it. And maybe I will change
#
my mind. That is, that's a presumption of being a reasonable person at all. So if, you
#
know, what we've learned undermines reason itself, then we have no reason to even trust
#
what we have learned, right? It's a, it's a kind of Pyrrhic victory. It will, it will
#
destroy any claims we have to truth, to knowledge, to reason. So to that degree, I think we have
#
to, we have to countenance free will.
#
Rebekah, thank you so much for coming on National.
#
Thank you. Thank you. I've enjoyed our conversation.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, then you can follow Rebekah on Twitter at
#
Plato Book Tour. All one word at Plato Book Tour. You can follow me on Twitter at Amit
#
Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen
#
at sceneunseen.in and thinkpragati.com. Thank you for listening.
#
Hey, Meghnath, do you know how to citizen?
#
Hey, Shreyas, do you know how to citizen?
#
Hey, Meghnath, do you know how to citizen?
#
Hey, Shreyas, let's just do a podcast about it.
#
Let's do a podcast about it. A podcast is called How to Citizen.
#
In every episode, we get a new guest and discuss one chapter from the eighth grade civics textbook.
#
Think about it as three friends revising before a test and we go back to school. There's
#
nostalgia, there's trauma, there are lunch breaks, there are favourite teachers, there
#
are horrible teachers, there's everything.
#
So, every Tuesday, we bring in a guest on the podcast and we ask them a very simple
#
question. Do you know how to citizen?
#
Meghnath, I think the question is, do you know how to citizen?
#
But Shreyas, I'm asking you this question. Do you know how to citizen?
#
You can listen to the show on the IBM Podcast app or wherever you get your podcasts.
