Plato

I learned from my living teachers‑Jeff Wallin, Harry Jaffa, Bill Allen, Bill Rood, and Harry Neumann, among others.  The most important thing they taught me was how to read.  That made it possible to learn from other teachers‑Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, among others.  One of the reasons that I became enchanted with the biosocial sciences is that this branch of modern science deepened, enriched and confirmed all that I had learned from all of the above. 

Tonight, while reading about the early evolution of living organisms, I returned to thinking about Plato.  Unlike Aristotle, who has been largely recognized as the founder of biology, Plato is still usually regarded as a philosophical dead end.  Yes, his moral thought is interesting, but his metaphysics is a joke. 

I think that the dismissal of Plato is altogether wrong.  The argument about justice in the Republic presents for the first time the elements that make up the basis of modern sociobiology.  I won’t go into that here.  Instead I will focus on the most famous Platonic idea, the one that most responsible for his poor reputation.  I mean, of course, the theory of ideas. 

The textbook interpretation of the theory goes like this: Plato believed that there were ideas, or forms, laid up in heaven.  These ideas are perfect and eternal.  All visible objects are visible and comprehensible because they somehow “participate” in these ideas; that is to say, they are expressions of them.  That sounds pretty air-headed, and so it is usually dismissed as such. 

To so whether this judgment is just, we need to see how and why Plato (or Plato’s Socrates) developed this doctrine.  Consider the difference between a painter and a craftsman.  The painter looks at a three-dimensional object and produces a two-dimensional image.  The image may be altogether realistic; however, it is only the image of an image.  It shows us one perspective on the object but lacks the reality of the original. 

The craftsman, by contrast, looks at the object and produces another object that is real.  It is somehow connected to the original and yet it is another thing.  Philosophy and its offspring science cannot hope to reproduce all the objects that they are investigating; they can, however, attempt to gain the same understanding as the craftsman.  The philosopher wants to know not just what the object (a tree, justice, beauty, etc.) looks like but what it really is.  How do we understand the difference?

Consider what it is like to approach a tall tree from a distance.  At first, the tree looks very small.  You can cover it up by raising your hand.  So, the tree is smaller than your hand.  That is what your eyes are telling you.  Now walk towards the tree.  It grows in size as you approach it.  When you are near, it is very large and your hand can no longer conceal it.  The tree is much smaller than your hand.  That is what your eyes are now telling you.  Your eyes are confused, but your mind is not.  You recognize that the tree hasn’t really changed in size.  What has changed is your perspective.  From this, Plato’s Socrates concluded, we do not perceive actual objects with our eyes at all.  We perceive them with our minds.  This tree right here is not in fact visible to the eye. 

If we stipulate that individual, living, three-dimensional trees do in fact exist, then we have to agree with Plato.  We depend on extrasensory perception to be aware of them.  Now walk around the tree.  It looks different from each direction.  Yet these different images all are produced by a single object‑the one individual tree‑that is apprehended by the mind.  No one image is truer than another, yet all are true enough. 

Plato took a leap here.  If this is what happens when we perceive an individual tree, what happens when we recognize a second tree as in some sense the same thing?  Plato’s Socrates suggested that just as one individual tree exists behind the various images it casts as we approach it and walk around it, so the idea of the tree must exist behind all the individual trees that we encounter.  Just as our mind perceives the individual and so integrates our various images of it, so our mind perceives the idea of the tree and so allows us to recognize a general category.  Just as the individual tree changes in our perception of it, so trees come and go but the idea of tree remains the same. 

I say that Socrates “suggested” this because he is very careful in the dialogues.  He frequently says only that it is something like this.  He is also very uncertain as to what should be included in the realm of ideas.  Is it complex objects like trees or simpler concepts like mathematical forms?  There must be something more permanent and comprehensible than the objects we perceive if we can hope to understand anything.  Plato, of course, was right. 

Our ability to categorize species of plants and animals is imperfect.  That we can do it at all is possible because we can perceive something that is more enduring that the individual organisms.  We are perceiving, if only dimly, an object that extends across space and backward in time: the history of a species. 

I submit that biology is pregnant with Platonic forms.  Consider the difference between a jellyfish and a catfish.  The jellyfish has a top and a bottom, but not left and right or a back and front.  This is called radial symmetry.  A catfish has a top and a bottom, a back and a front, and a left and right.  These are Platonic forms. 

I am not sure whether the Platonic forms are laid up in heaven or not.  I am sure that these forms are real and preexist the creatures that participate in them.  You probably have to get bilaterians (creatures with a right and left) before you get mobile creatures and eyes.  There are only so many possible forms in organic design space. 

The first bilaterians probably crawled along dense, bacterial mats harvesting their food.  Eventually, some of them discovered that the decaying bodies of their kind were rich sources of the nutrients they sought.  Then some of them discovered that their living fellows were an even richer source.  This evolutionary trajectory, which made possible creatures such as ourselves, was the result of organized life exploring the avenues made possible by a Platonic design space. 

A Reply to Scott James

I was honored to have Scott M. James comment on my paper.  I thoroughly enjoyed and profited from his book on Evolutionary Ethics.  I only wish that more commenters took their job as seriously and did as competent a job as he did in this case.  I especially liked the way that Scott suggested that he agreed in some unspecified respects with my paper (I think I heard him say that at the panel) but was less than persuaded on other counts.  He then put the larger part of his criticisms in the mouth of “less sympathetic critics,” which allowed him to be as snarky as he wanted without having to take responsibility for that.  Do not suppose that I am complaining about this.  I am in the presence of genius!

We certainly agree on the problem.  It is increasingly difficult to ignore the evidence that the higher human capacities‑morality and politics, art, poetry, and religion, have a basis in natural phenomena.  All of these capacities depend on the human brain and brains are biological in origin.  At the same time, if we try to naturalize these capacities, that is to explain them in terms of “the same biological forces that shaped all organismic life” we run the risk of explaining them away. 

If we happen to succeed in leaving the non-naturalistic behind, in formulating hypotheses in exclusively naturalistic terms, won’t we be abandoning the very thing we sought to explain, viz., our normative nature? 

This problem is behind the pious fears that are perennially expressed in criticisms of “scientism.”  If we let the scientists come into the parlor with their lab coats on, they’ll ruin the carpet, deconstruct the portraits, undermine the architecture, and murder the gods. 

I respect these concerns but I do not share them.  I was trained by Straussians in the interpretation of Socratic political philosophy.  I see the world much as Plato and Aristotle saw it.  From this point of view, nature and the human things are not in opposition.  As Hans Jonas put it, if Darwin showed that human beings and all living things emerge by way of the same forces that move nonliving matter, he simultaneously showed that nonliving matter was always potentially alive. 

So when Scott cautions me about “confusing science with…the ideology of science” and “read[ing] ideologies into the natural record, rather than read[ing] observations out of it,” I would say only that I look at the natural record with some mode of interpretation in mind.  If there is any other way to approach nature, I do not know of it. 

When he accuses me of essentialism, I am reminded of the old story about Satan caught cheating at cards.  I’m the Devil.  What did you expect?  Having confessed to Platonism at the beginning, should you be surprised if I commit essentialism?  Essentialism was rightly rejected by modern biology in so far as “essences” seemed to be something like little ghosts in the biological machine.  If evolutionary biology is correct, Amy the Amoeba and Andy from Amherst differ only in degree; they are not, essentially, different.  This doesn’t prevent species from being real.  Amy and Andy are unlikely to have offspring.  Nor does it prevent rather Platonic patterns from appearing at every point.  The law of gravity is the same on earth as on Mars, as is the periodic table of elements.  Natural selection is the same for the mongoose as for the snake.  I argue that autonomy is the same for the slime mold amoeba as for the scientist looking at it down a microscope. 

I relied heavily on a biological concept of autonomy that is prominent in the philosophy of biology: “the property of a system that builds and actively maintains the rules that define itself, as well as the way it behaves in the world.”  Organisms are individuals that have an agenda.  They are trying to maintain themselves and reproduce.  In the case of most organisms, this does not at all imply conscious intent.  It means only that you have to recognize the agenda to understand the organism.  Scott responds with this challenge:

It’s not hard to identify an individual with an “agenda of its own”—that’s “up to something,” “trying to maintain itself”—but that fails to count as either biological or autonomous, at least in light of my own intuitions.  My refrigerator, my laptop, my car.  As complex systems, they are designed to process information in quite sophisticated ways and respond intelligently.

I am tempted to point out that the autonomy of these machines is as derivative from the autonomy of their maker as a beaver’s dam is from the beaver.  The dam is, in certain respects, self-maintaining; but the agenda is visible only in so far as the system includes the furry fellow. 

However, there is a logical error in this criticism.  To say that autonomy is a necessary condition for organic life doesn’t mean that it is sufficient.  This is best illustrated by reference to a similar problem (it may be the same problem!) in the philosophy of mind.  Functionalists interpret mind as an information processor.  Information comes in.  It is processed and the output is either more useful information or behavior.  This is a plausible account of animal minds, but it seems to be too broad.  What about a thermostat?  It processes information about temperature and turns on the furnace.  The functionalist is happy to admit this, but then he confronts the zombie problem.  A person who is sleep walking can walk, engage in conversation, or even drive a car, thus being fully functional but, apparently, without being conscious.  Doesn’t that mean that consciousness, which is mind writ large, is more than just function?

The obvious solution (as it seems to me) is to say that human minds are more than mere information processors but they are at least information processors.  Consciousness is a feature of the minds of a vast range of animals, or so I suppose.  This means that such animals may enjoy their lives or not, independently of whether they flourish and reproduce.  However, functionality is a necessary feature of organic minds at all levels.  It is difficult to do anything human if you can’t wake up or distinguish your wife from a hat. 

Human autonomy surely involves much more than the mere resistance to external conditions that is all that the Amy the Amoeba has to contend with.  But at the very least it involves the same kind of resistance: the preservation of the individual against the outside world. 

Scott poses this object to my argument:

Bioethicists routinely invoke a patient’s autonomy in justifying the right to refuse medical assistance or even to secure assistance in dying prematurely.  We think that individuals in such cases have the right of self-rule to determine what counts as a minimally acceptable quality of life, and some will choose not to maintain themselves, not to resist dissolution.  But these decisions are plainly grounded in an individual’s autonomy.

There are two issues here, one shallow and one deep.  To address the shallow one, I merely note that adaptive behaviors are frequently maladaptive in certain circumstances.  If you don’t believe me, ask any mouse caught in a mouse trap.  Human beings, like other animals, often destroy themselves by behaving in ways that generally led to successful reproduction for their ancestors.  Otherwise, natural selection would not work. 

The deeper issue is that natural selection produced animals that are reproductively successful precisely because they pursue agendas of their own.  A bull elk isn’t trying to get his genes into the next generation; he is trying to beat the snot out of some other bull, following which he will mate with all the cows.  Like the elk, we human beings are not primarily interested in our genetic heritage.  We want to live satisfying lives.  Individual autonomy has kept our species in business; otherwise, it would not exist.  That doesn’t keep us from making the kind of choices described above, especially since they often come after Darwin has had his due. 

I will address one final objection:

Blanchard maintains, based on the work of the biological anthropologist Chris Boehm, that “individual human autonomy is the driver of [the evolution of human morality]”.  Unless I have failed to fully grasp Blanchard’s central conception of autonomy (and that is undoubtedly possible), I think Boehm’s work shows just the reverse: early hominids were driven to autonomy or self-rule by the intense moral sanctioning of conspecifics within a group. 

Boehm argues that hunter gatherer societies are egalitarian because the group polices the behavior of bullies and big men.  When some member of the tribe gets too big for his loin cloth, the others collectively discourage him.  Eventually, all the members of the group internalize the rules: don’t be boastful, don’t take more than your share, share when you bring back a big kill. 

Does this mean that the “early hominids were driven to autonomy?”  Driven by whom?  The group is just a lot of sets of asses and elbows.  Before individuals could learn to fear the group, they had to become the group.  Individuals had to resist the bully and learn to join together to resist him.  What was their motive in that dangerous business?  They were trying preserve their own autonomy. 

Whenever a group of individual organisms joins together, the problems of justice arise.  I will contribute so long as I get a share.  Cheaters must be discouraged.  Precisely because individual autonomy is involved, moral rules are required.  Why must bullies be suppressed?  First, because each individual wants to benefit from the association.  Second, because the group can only act as a unit if cheating is suppressed.  As I said in my paper, the drawing of boundaries, internal and external, is how autonomy evolves.  Me and everyone else becomes us and them only if us has a place for me.  If morality emerges because the members of the group internalize the rules of the game, that is a perfect example of self-legislation. 

Scott urges me to distinguish between autonomy and smautonomy, the autonomy of the amoeba and the autonomy of human beings, thus preserving the dualism that so much of modern thought labors under.  I am grateful for his shrewd comments, but I must decline.  I think that the moral and political autonomy that concerns human beings is more than the autonomy that is present in every genuine organism.  But I also think that it is at least the same autonomy that is what it means to be alive. 

Pross Proves Plato

It is a commonplace in the academy that we learn as much or more from intelligent errors than from the modestly correct.  Addy Pross’ book What is Life? has utterly failed to convince me that the title of his penultimate chapter is correct; i.e., that biology is chemistry.  What he has convinced me of is that Plato was closer to the truth than Aristotle. 

The basic problem that Pross addresses is how to reconcile our understanding of non-living, non-replicating nature (governed by the second law of thermodynamics) with our understanding of organisms and their prebiotic (but replicating) chemical ancestors.  Pross finds the solution in a distinction between two kinds of stability: static stability and dynamic stability.  Water molecules are statically stable: they remain stubbornly what they are over long periods without change.  Bacteria are dynamically stable.  They remain what they are by a process of constant change that keeps bringing the form back into existence. 

Just as the second law of thermodynamics is the driving force that governs all chemical reactions, so all dynamically stable systems like organisms and replicating molecules are governed by a similar law:

Replicating chemical systems will tend to be transformed from (dynamically) kinetically less stable to (dynamically) kinetically more stable.

Once diverse populations of replicators get going in the history of life, more dynamically stable replicators out compete less dynamically stable competitors.  This law governs the evolution of all life up to the present and, presumably, for the duration. 

Here’s where Aristotle and Plato come in.  While they had no viable chemistry, they were very good at thinking about biological form.  Aristotle famously rejected his teacher’s theory of forms as independent entities in favor of the view that form is an abstraction from existing organisms.  How do we understand a horse?  This horse, here, is the real thing.  It consists of a certain collection of materials that realize a certain form.  The form of the horse is an abstraction from really existing horses, but it allows us to sort horses out from other organisms.  Thus it is a species form. 

Aristotle was later drawn to the view that the real thing is not the individual horse but the species, since the one comes and goes but the latter persists.  What persists over time is more robustly real than what does not.  Still, the form is an abstraction from something really embodied now (and always) whether the embodied thing is a horse or all the horses.  The laws that govern the existence and development of each species are specific; there is nothing more general than the species that controls their natures. 

Plato looked at the problem the other way round.  Form was primary; individual organisms (and presumably populations of organisms) are derivative.  Plato’s view was rooted in an analysis of human intelligence.  When we view a tree from a great distance, it looks very small.  As we approach it, it seems to grow larger.  Near the tree, it is very large indeed.  Yet the tree has not changed; what has changed is our perspective.  There is one thing, the individual tree, behind the shifting perspectives and that one thing is more real than the appearances. 

Plato’s great innovation was to extend this analogically to understand what a species is.  When we move from one tree to another, we recognize both of them as in some sense the same thing‑different examples of tree, just as we recognized the various views of a single tree as the same objective thing.  Perhaps this is because there is one thing behind all the individual trees that our minds are getting a dim grasp of.  That is the idea of a tree and it is more real than individual trees because it is not susceptible to change or decay.  It defines what a tree is for all actual trees and for all trees that may or may not come to be in the future. 

This account has been subject to a lot of derision over the millennia, but Plato’s Socrates was always careful to advance it as provisional.  It is not necessarily this, he would say, but something more or less like this.  It is unclear whether he really believed in the idea of a complex object like a tree, or whether the true ideas were more like mathematical principles. 

It strikes me that Pross’ law of dynamic kinetic stability looks a lot like a Platonic form.  It is not a mere abstraction from actual organisms or populations.  It is a logical rule that (if valid) governed all the emergence of all replicators from the Ur-replicating molecules to the replicating elephants.  It will govern all organisms that emerge in the future. 

Aristotle laid down a very good foundation for biology.  I have argued that modern biology is now coming round to his view on a lot of things.  It may be, however, that Plato’s view was correct at a deeper level. 

Arnhart & Forbes on Disappointed Platonism

Larry Arnhart engages Steven Forbes on the questions of “Darwinism vs. (Disappointed) Platonism” on his blog.  The two presented papers on a panel at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago.  I plan to explore this topic more fully after I have digested the two papers, but I have a few comments to offer now. 

Here are two paragraphs of Larry’s blog post:

Most Platonists today are disappointed Platonists--people with Platonic expectations that are unfulfilled, because they accept Darwinian evolution as true, and therefore since all living forms have evolved, they cannot be eternal as conforming to Plato's intelligible realm of eternal Ideas.  Moreover, if everything has evolved, this must include moral and political order, and thus there is no eternally unchanging Idea of the Good by which we can see absolute standards of right and wrong.  Consequently, there are no moral absolutes, and we must accept moral relativism or nihilism.  Darwinism is "true but deadly" (as Nietzsche said).  And thus these disappointed Platonists become nihilists.

But if you do not have Platonic expectations, you will not be disappointed by the Darwinian conclusion that everything has evolved, and therefore human beings have evolved.  Without the Platonic assumption that morality must be grounded in a moral cosmology, you will be satisfied with a Darwinian explanation of morality as grounded in a moral anthropology.  Even if morality has no eternal grounding in a cosmic God, a cosmic Nature, or a cosmic Reason, human morality can still have an evolutionary grounding in human nature, human culture, and human judgment.  And thus in contrast to the disappointed Platonists, the satisfied Darwinians are not nihilists.

I weigh in as a satisfied Platonist.  Plato’s Socrates advanced a very bold interpretation of the world as it appears to common sense.  To mention only two general ideas, we can know a tree is because, just as there is one tree behind the various images of any tree that we encounter (an oak looks small at a distance but big up close), so there must be an idea tree behind all the various trees that we encounter.  Likewise, we can know the general rules of geometry without having been taught them because we were born knowing them.  Socrates advances these arguments as tentative, however.  He only claims that it is something like this. 

I hold that modern science presents us with a Kosmos that is intelligible because it is ordered by a number of eternal ideas.  What is the periodic table of elements if not statement of basic Platonic forms?  Plato’s Socrates was right, I suggest, in holding that we are born knowing the basic principles of geometry.  Darwinism confirms this, if it presents a rather different interpretation of reincarnation that is suggested in Plato’s Meno. 

It may be true that the laws of cosmology writ large do not include moral principles.  Perhaps the sun doesn’t warm the earth because it is good that it does so.  However, moral principles may well arise from laws governing organic nature generally and human nature specifically.  Human beings are part of the cosmos and so human nature is part of a complete account of cosmology.  If it turns out that the idea of the good plays a much more restricted role in cosmology than Plato’s Socrates supposed, that does not mean that it plays no role. 

Arnhart has this on his blog post:

Socrates teaches us that to know what is truly good, we must transcend the visible realm of Becoming in ascending to the invisible realm of Being, and finally ascending to the Idea of the Good.  But it's not clear that this answer is fully convincing or satisfying.  Socrates concludes the Republic with the myth of Er--a mythic story about eternal rewards and punishment in the afterlife.  The problem with this myth is that it's only a myth, and so it's not clear why we should believe it.  But the earlier answer--the Idea of the Good--is so incomprehensible that it's not clear why we should believe it either.

I agree that the myth of Er is just a myth‑a noble lie suggested for folks who are not philosophically inclined.  I do not agree that the Platonic idea of the good is incomprehensible.   

Socrates became Socrates (as opposed to one more philosophical conventionalist) when he realized that the cosmos can be comprehensible if and only if the principles that characterize it are, at least roughly, commensurate with the principles of our own common sense understanding of things.  That is why Socrates returned to the city and (initially at least) abandoned direct investigations into natural phenomena.  The keys to understanding nature lie in the opinions and especially in the contradictions between the opinions of ordinary people. 

The idea of the good is central to ordinary human understanding of such things as justice, beauty, and truth.  Socrates supposed that the good has to be part of our understanding of the larger cosmos or else that cosmos is beyond our understanding altogether.  That looks like a mistake, although it is too soon to rule it out.  Some of the scholarship on the origin of life has dealt with the immense improbability of that emergence by chance alone by supposing some kind of “unintentional forcing” operating in the physics of the earth just before life emerged.  If that turns out to be a viable hypothesis, Plato’s idea of the good may have a new cosmological purchase. 

There are two ways in which morality may be said to have natural foundations.  One is that human beings are by nature moral creatures, endowed by their evolutionary origins with a pallet of moral passions.  Forde apparently acknowledges that this is true, but somehow supposes that this but somehow seems to think that it cannot be the basis of genuine morality.  Is it because we get no moral credit for our instincts but only for free choices we make?  The second way in which morality can be natural is that moral behavior makes for the natural human good.  Human beings who choose to do what is right live better lives and help their family and fellows to live better lives.  There is plenty of room for choice here and every reason to suppose that Darwinian biology allows for it.  The idea of the good is necessarily part of any account of human morality.  

This Platonist is not yet disappointed.