360 Platonism

This seminar was hosted by Joe Lightfoot here in Chiang Mai.

In the talk, I reprised some ideas I shared in a post a few years ago (below).

I approach Plato not just to offer a scholarly treatment of his arguments but as a teacher of how to live and die as a human being. For the ancients, philosophy wasn’t word games or logical analysis but a way of life, a spiritual path. Plato wrote dialogues, not doctrines: nowhere does he say “this is my view,” and many of the best criticisms of Plato’s ideas are Plato’s own. The dialogues are spiritual exercises that put the soul in a state of tension, stretched between the intelligible realm of ideas and the physical realm of sensory embodiment. His is not that these are separate realms, but that we exist somehow in the tension between them. What I am calling “360 Platonism” is a training of the imagination so that it might become an organ of perception, perceiving ideas not in another world beyond this one but incarnate ideas, inhabiting, forming, shaping this world. Five dialogues carry us in a circle.

The Phaedo: philosophy is practice for dying—dying in our soul before our body dies, living our life backward from the fact of our death, building the death ship of the soul.

The Republic: to study the soul, it’s best to blow it up to the size of the city. Plato’s “city in words” is less a serious political program than a comeditragedy of how difficult, maybe impossible, it is to bring rationality to bear on our shared collective life (he has Socrates say democracy is a drunken pleasure cruise). The divided line ascends from sensations and opinions through hypotheses and models to intuitive participation, where there is no longer a knower separate from what it knows—thou art that. The cave allegory is a 360-degree maneuver, not a 180: Socrates doesn’t just turn around and leave, he goes back in. Once you’ve really seen the light, the Sun is no longer just a ball of gas but the Good itself, source of the light that conveys truth and reveals beauty.

The Symposium: eros is the engine of ascent, and when beautiful bodies are perceived as icons rather than idols, the woundedness of mortal love can be transmuted.

The Timaeus: a likely story, told when the intellect reaches the end of what logic can know and must resort to myth. The demiurge cannot explain where matter came from, and so can only persuade, not coerce, the khôra (the receptacle, the wet nurse, whose winnowing dance is as creative as the demiurge). Plato’s cosmogony is the story of order arising at the edge of chaos, sustained by the cosmic life of the world-soul. It is Plato performing the impossibility of a final theory. Plato suggests that, with our physical eyes, we see the wandering planets and their epicycles as the back side of an embroidered pattern. Only by growing a new, higher organ of perception can we intuit the heavenly motions right side up, as the weaver intended. Plato also describes the human being an upside-down plant, with roots in the sky, as if the brain were a radio antenna receiving the rhythms of the celestial spheres.

The Phaedrus: Plato, master of the alphabet, critiquing writing as a pharmakon, both cure and poison. The alphabet creates the appearance of wisdom where no wisdom may be present. Further, you can’t ask the written word questions. The letters remain identical and indifferent. LLMs are built atop the alphabet, and now, it seems, the written word can answer back. But LLMs are a copy of a copy of a copy—our language, already a copy, is copied again and fed back to us. The alphabet is now easily mistaken for an autonomous mind. But to treat an LLM as if it had a mind of its own is idolatry, I would say. Some people call it functionalism. To relate to LLMs iconically is to let them point beyond themselves to the extended collective intellect in which we participate. So whether this new technology (running on an old alphabetic platform) is poison or cure depends may depend upon the dosage and the manner of use.