It is a secret fantasy of countless philosophy graduates to rewrite Plato’s masterpiece, The Republic, for a modern audience. For his first movie, playwright Conor McPherson got to the third word of the opening line “I went down yesterday to the Piraeus…” and wisely left it there. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is not so sensible.
In Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, she brings Socrates’ famous disciple back to life, relocating him to the US for a lecture circuit 2,400 years after his death. It’s the kind of project that has a tinge of madness about it, but then – as Newberger Goldstein details in one of a series of Platonic dialogues re-imagined for today – madness and philosophy are close cousins. An image she returns to time and again is that of the enlightened philosopher – from Plato’s allegory of The Cave – who returns to the dark underworld to be treated as a dangerous lunatic.
Newberger Goldstein has a doctorate in philosophy from Princeton and made her name as a novelist. By her own admission, she was goaded into writing this book by “philosophy-jeerers” such as Lawrence Krauss, an atheistic cosmologist who argues that “science progresses and philosophy doesn’t”. Convinced that Plato has great relevance to thinkers today, Newberger Goldstein has nonetheless sufficient independence of mind to ask: “If philosophy makes progress, then why doesn’t Plato at long last just go away?”
One answer she readily gives is: “Progress in philosophy consists, at least in part, in constantly bringing to light the covert presumptions that burrow their way deep down into our thinking…” She spends the next 400 pages, however, giving a much more considered, colourful and multi-faceted response. The dialogues she creates between Plato and various contemporary characters, including a marketing agent, a Google employee, a Tiger Mum, a radio host, and a neuroscientist, convincingly demonstrate the value of continuing the job that Socrates started in ancient Greece. But they also show just why Plato would struggle to be heard today.
For example, she imagines him taking part at New York event for “foremost thought leaders”, chaired by a folksy Malcolm Gladwell-type called Zarchary Burns. Here Plato is talking about the purpose of society, and whether it should “protect us or perfect us”:
PLATO: We must ask, first and foremost, for it to protect us – protect us from our outside enemies and also from the worst that we can do to one another.
BURNS: Call me a cockeyed optimist – my wife often does – but why can’t we ask both of those things from society, ask that it both protect and perfect us?
PLATO: I suspect your wife would call me a cockeyed optimist too.
BURNS: Yes! That’s what I wanted to hear from you! Because your beautiful city is meant to do both, isn’t it?
PLATO: It is meant foremost to protect us. But by demanding that the best among us perform this task – and they are the best among us precisely because they would also protect us from themselves – it demands the program of perfecting.
BURNS: So the perfecting is the icing on the cake.
PLATO: Where I come from, we call it the honey on the baklava.
Newberger Goldstein has a nice comic touch but there’s an alien quality to these conversations that highlight the unreality of her project. Reading her book produces a nagging sense that if Plato came back today he would almost certainly be ignored. That’s partly because some of his ideas were barmy – such as confiscating children from birth and educating them by guardians – and partly because people really don’t have the patience for his type of slow, meticulous argumentation.
The latter is a reflection on us, not Plato, and certainly not on Newberger Goldstein who writes with delightful verve and imagination. Carefully researched, her book captures the full scope and spirit of Plato’s dialogues, and while she may try too hard at times to blend antiquity and modernity (the title being a case in point) she injects real life into old arguments.
Joe Humphreys is an Irish Times journalist and author of Unthinkable and other works.
