Review: Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Pantheon (March 4 2014)

ISBN-10: 0307378195

ISBN-13: 978-0307378194

Is there any value in philosophy for us today? Science answers our age-old questions about matter, time, and the origin of the universe. For guidance in living we turn to religious faith and newspaper columnists. Plato at the Googleplex is an attempt by philosophy professor Rebecca Goldstein to plead the case for philosophy using a novel approach, imagining Plato resurrected from ancient Athens, plunked down in our world, and participating in five dialogues on contemporary issues. The result is both entertaining and stimulating, and shows that many of the issues taken up by Plato three thousand years ago even today require philosophical solutions.

While touring the Google campus, Plato draws one of the techies into conversation. At first the philosopher is thrilled to learn of the vast amount of information gathered on the Google servers—virtually all the world’s knowledge in one place. How odd, he says, to find all knowledge so localized, but how wonderful that it resides “in the cloud,” just where he always said it must be! And surely, with their privileged access to all the world’s knowledge, the Google staff must be the modern equivalents of the philosopher-kings of his Republic. His excitement fades, however, when he asks whether the giant database includes knowledge of what makes life worth living. Yet the question itself opens a lively Socratic question-and-answer session about how one might determine what makes the best life. One suggestion is that perhaps each person knows what’s best for them. Or maybe not—people like Lindsay Lohan and Michael Jackson do not seem to know. Perhaps there’s no “knowledge” of what’s best, no truth involved at all, just personal preference; everyone makes up their own mind. But do we really believe that Ghandi merely preferred to live the way he did, and there’s no qualitative difference between his life and Rasputin’s? Finally the techie proposes a crowd-sourcing solution. Everyone’s opinion could be recorded and weights could be assigned to each opinion, with the final answer extracted by a Google-like algorithm, the way top results are produced for a search query. A few pointed questions from Plato makes it clear that any weighting system has to be biased with its own presuppositions about what makes the best life. Plato’s role in these dialogues is not to reveal ancient solutions that modern people have forgotten. In fact, what he argues for here is the entirely unconvincing idea of letting a coterie of high-minded philosophers decide the issue for everyone else. Like the original Socrates, Plato’s purpose is to expand the thinking, not bring it to a stop, to demand clarity, challenge easy answers, draw inferences, offer illuminating analogies. Politely but doggedly he works to tug the conversation into deeper waters. If philosophy is conceived of that way, as a tool kit for sharpening the reasoning process, it’s hard to deny its usefulness.

In a second dialogue we see that careful thinking about what makes the best life is no armchair exercise, as Plato joins a public debate at the 92^nd Street Y on the topic of child-rearing. On one side is a psychiatrist, for whom childhood is a crime scene with the young as traumatized victims of the narcissistic expectations of their parents; on the other a tiger mom, for whom childhood is a boot camp preparing the young to battle for the world’s prizes. The two enter a lengthy, heated exchange, with Plato commenting mildly from the sidelines, until finally he details how in his idea of the best society  the state will identify his specialist-philosphers in early childhood and train them for their high calling. The others denounce him, of course, as an antidemocratic elitist, a stooge for tyranny, etc. His theory gets no credit. Yet in the dialogue’s interplay of ideas we see that in the raising of our children we do take a position on the philosophical question of what makes the best life and that, by uncovering our assumptions and holding them up to the light, as philosophy tries to do, we can only improve our understanding.

In another dialogue, moments before he is to undergo a brain scan, Plato engages a neuroscientist in conversation about how persons are related to neuron behaviour. The scientist vigorously expounds the proposition that mental life is simply brain activity, no more. Plato responds with key questions: When you have described all the firing of neurons that underlie, for example, Socrates’s decision to drink the hemlock, have you really given a full explanation of why he did it? Is neuroscience just a repeat of  the old mechanistic view of life in which choices, intentions, and free will are nullified?

Despite its subtitle, only half the book consists of dialogues illustrating the relevance of philosophy. The result is a rather curious hybrid work. Preceding each chapter of dialogue is a chapter at least equal in length providing extensive historical background about how Plato developed his views. There are  detailed, scholarly commentaries on the complex relationship between Plato and Socrates, on Greek pre-history, the cultural effects of the Persian wars, the Athenian weltanschauung at various points in the city’s history, and much more. While highly interesting on its own, much of this material seems at odds with the main thesis about the usefulness of philosophy today. Learning more about the purpose of Socrates’s relentless buttonholing of his contemporaries and how his withering logic exposed the shallowness of their beliefs does seem to help establish the enduring value of philosophical analysis, but an etiology of Plato’s fanciful notions and discredited theories does not.

The dialogues of Plato at the Googleplex are entertaining and thought-provoking, the historical chapters are enlightening; both are well worth reading. As a whole, however, they make for book that is like a door slightly off its hinges.