The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (7 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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It’s easy to laugh at their innocence, but Pythagoras has rolled an engine of war into the camp to stand alongside Anaximander. What is the status of such mathematical objects as a triangle? The Greeks were too enthusiastically discovering the laws of geometrical objects to relegate them to mere human invention, the tics of certain minds in flight from the “real” world. When Euclid showed how you can prove the theorem of Pythagoras by constructing a set of parallelograms, with only a straight-edge and a compass—that is, with no
numerals and no calibration
—and by the rules of strict reason, he did not believe he was dissecting an unreality. More than that. He knew he had shown with absolute certainty that the theorem was correct, although neither Pythagoras nor he had ever seen or could ever see a line of infinitesimal thinness, or a circle exactly circular, or a right angle that was just right.
 
After Socrates had needled his fellow Athenians for claiming to know what they had only heard, his pupil Plato strove to discover how we could come to certain truth, rather than accept convention or give up altogether. Naturally, then, he turned, as Immanuel Kant much later, to mathematics. But Plato did not make the tremendous error that has kept much of modern philosophy bottled up in symbolic logic and linguistic analysis. Plato didn’t assume that everything had to be demonstrated in the same way as the Pythagorean theorem was. Instead he asked about the nature of various kinds of objects, including mathematical objects, and about the various ways we have of knowing them, some more reliable than others. That’s why, according to one ancient account, he caused a sign to be hung over the door of his Academy: “No one ignorant of geometry may enter here.”
19
 
Plato saw that the knowledge we have of a triangle was knowledge of a genuine thing, not a figment of the imagination. Such knowledge lay waiting for discovery. It was also knowledge of a universal. When we prove Pythagoras’ theorem, we know something about all right triangles, not just this one or that one. That led Plato to consider a mysterious property of language and the world. We say “cat” and “tree” and know that we are not talking necessarily about any particular cat or tree, or any cat or tree we have materially seen. We mean something other than “Tabby” or “the oak tree in front of my house.” But how can this be? What does the term “cat” denote? There are many cats, but what do I mean when I say “cat,” if I don’t intend any particular one, dead or alive?
 
Plato concluded that knowledge could not be simply of matter, because we have knowledge of immaterial objects such as triangles, and because such words as “cat” are universal in their signifying, and not particular. Plato concluded, as had Anaximander, that material causes were not sufficient to explain the world or even to speak intelligibly about the things in it. So he developed his theory of the
Forms
or
Ideas
, universal, intelligible, immaterial, and immutable. We may see all the horses in the world, but unless we conceive of the idea of What It Is Essentially to be Horse, then we don’t know what a horse is.
20
 
The universal Good
 
We can then, he argued, apply the same insight to morality, aesthetics, and politics. We may see this or that good deed. We agree that it is prudent for Themistocles to persuade the Athenians to use their new-found money to build a navy, and that it is courageous of Leonidas to stand with his small Spartan contingent to delay the Persians at Thermopylae. But what makes these actions good? What is the form of the good?
 
 
 
Politics Before Polling
 
But in other things [Pericles] did not comply with the giddy impulses of the citizens, nor quit his own resolutions to follow their fancies, when, carried away with the thought of their strength and great success, they were eager to interfere again in Egypt, and to disturb the King of Persia’s maritime dominions.
Plutarch
,
Life of Pericles
 
 
Pericles was more than a politician: he was a leader, a manly yet modest ruler of a people that had the power to overrule him if their orators could carry the day. He knew what the people wanted, yet always did what he believed was best. But there were no pollsters back then.
 
 
A college student I met once gave me the politically correct answer in a startlingly politically incorrect form. “There is no such thing,” she said, and then gave an example. “What was good for the Nazis, was good for the Nazis. It’s all a matter of opinion.”
 
That was the single falsehood Plato gave his life’s work to put to rout. Is good simply a matter of material advantage—of the survival of the
fattest
? As we saw in
Oedipus at Colonus
, Theseus should welcome the aged Oedipus into the holy grove, because Oedipus is a man humbled by unimaginable suffering. So Theseus does, though he knows the Thebans will hate him for it. The good cannot depend on what gives most pleasure to the greatest number of people at the lowest cost of suffering, since the good directs what we should find pleasure in, not the other way around. Handsome Alcibiades wants to make love to Socrates. He wouldn’t be harming anyone by it, and besides, he might gain a little wisdom. But Socrates knows it would be better for Alcibiades if he learned to desire things nobler than sexual pleasure. “For anything that had happened between us when I got up after sleeping with Socrates,” says Alcibiades, “I might have been sleeping with my father or my elder brother” (Plato,
Symposium
219d).
 
Even if what we delight in is innocent, it might prevent us from knowing the good. A man may spend his days jittering his fingers at a video game, or playing checkers with his friend Cleon. If he does little more, he is hardly a man, and no judge of the good. It would be better for him to master an art, and even better, to pursue wisdom. That is both a moral and an aesthetic judgment: as a man who throws the javelin in the fields against well-trained opponents will have a more beautiful, well-proportioned body than one who indulges himself always in the low pleasures of drink and ease.
 
The good of man, for both Plato and his brilliant pupil Aristotle, must involve perfection, the result of difficult moral training. This holds true for the State as well as for the individual. Here again we touch upon lessons that modern man has forgotten—lessons that Sophocles attempted to remind his fellow Athenians to heed. When, in the
Republic
, Plato’s Socrates is asked to define justice, he contends that an analogy must be drawn between the
microcosmos
of an individual man and the
cosmos
of the city. He notices that there are three principal faculties in man: the intellect, by which man judges what is true; the “spirit” or “drive” by which he is moved to possess and enjoy what is noble and beautiful, and the appetite, by which he desires what seems good at the moment, such as food or sexual release.
21
 
Now in a virtuous man these faculties must cooperate in a hierarchical harmony. No slovenly egalitarianism here. The appetite should not govern, since it does not look ahead, and does not judge the better and the best, but only seeks to gratify itself with what is present. The intellect must rule, but it cannot rule effectively without the energy of the ambition and the appetite. The “spirit” is the passion that bridges intellect and appetite. It is a reason-loving movement of the heart, full of fire and zeal.
 
So if you’re going to raise a virtuous child, you must not only teach him what happens to be good, you have to train him to long to possess the good. You fire his imagination with accounts of noble deeds. You set before his sight a beautiful soul: Achilles thirsting for glory, Socrates thirsting for the beautiful. Such training in virtue must prevail in the just state. Eros must be enlisted not in the pursuit of a Helen of Troy, or the wealth of Croesus, or the power of the Persian king, Xerxes. It must be enlisted in the pursuit of the justice that knits together all the classes of the state: those spurred mainly by appetite, who produce goods to buy and sell; those spurred by glory, who become valiant warriors or “guardians”; and those rare few who long for wisdom, the philosophers, who must govern the workers and merchants by means of the guardians.
 
The curse of democracy, as Plato saw it (and de Tocqueville, and the Adamses, as we shall see), is that the appetite may come to rule, both in the State and in the common people. We misunderstand him if we conclude that he does not believe in a vibrant civic life. Democracy, untempered by higher ideals, will rot the pith and marrow from civic life, as its tendencies are to efface all exclusive institutions—clubs, families, guilds—and leave the arena naked of anything but State power and individual will. Freedom and the franchise are not the same thing.
 
 
 
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read:
 
Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath; New York: Encounter Books, 2001.
 
Classicists now “privilege,” “uncover,” “construct,” “cruise,” “queer,” “subvert,” and “deconstruct” the “text.” Titles abound with the words “construction,” “erotics,” “poetics,” “rhetoric,” and “discourse” randomly joined by the preposition “of ” to the following
 
(it makes little difference which):
 
“manhood,” “the body,” “masculinity,”
 
“gender,” and “power.” (136)
 
 
A brave defense of the impressive accomplishments of the Greeks, overcast by a certain sadness that anyone should have to be reminded of them. It is also a savagely funny exposé on contemporary teachers of the classics, who seem to loathe what they study, and who despise all but the most intelligent of the students they are paid to teach.
 
 
Yes, Plato was an elitist, but that does not mean he would favor government by graduates of Harvard. It all depends on how you choose your governors: “elite” means nothing else but the object of discriminating choice. I do not love Plato’s ideal republic (which, let’s note, he confesses to be impossible), but surely he is right to see something self-destructive in pure, appetite-driven, egoist democracy. Its people will lack the patience to be corrected by traditions and laws that delay or prohibit the gratification of their desires. They will be too shortsighted for visions of beauty or justice. Such things matter little when the wallet, or the boudoir, calls: “How superbly [democracy] tramples down all such ideals, caring nothing from what practices and way of life a man turns to do politics, but honoring him if only he says he loves the people” (
Republic
8.558b). Besides, the rulers in Plato’s imaginary republic are not supposed to be cleverer than everyone else, but wiser, more deeply in love with the good, the true, and the beautiful. That would rule out our academic elites, who cannot be in love with those things, because they do not believe they really exist.
 
On the dark side, we see in Plato the first inventor of a Utopia, and, not coincidentally, the first man to suggest, it is hard to tell how seriously, that the State should take over all childrearing and should officially recognize no differences between the sexes. But Plato’s critique of democracy, bolstered by the ineptitude of the Athenian demagogues who parlayed incomparable prestige and wealth and naval might into a surrender from which Athenian democracy never recovered, underlies all later criticisms of the liberal, secular, and soulless state.

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