God in Proof. Nathan Schneider

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СКАЧАТЬ to the whispers of a goddess who opened his eyes and moved his pen. But like the philosophers he strove to make no claim without reasons.

      The goddess guided him to divide his poem into two parts: the Way of Truth and the Way of Appearance. The second is a compendium of what he takes to be false opinions that people have about the world; it resembles Pythagoreanism. The first is an all-out attack on common sense, in the name of banishing logical contradiction. Nothing, Parmenides claims, cannot exist. Everything conceivable exists, unchangeably, eternally, in perfect unity, and in the shape of a sphere. What we see in the world that appears to change, to cease to exist, and to differ from other things is all illusion. That anything could not exist is a contradiction; if you conceive of a thing not existing, it then exists in the very conception. In this weird way, the goddess gets him to trust his mind before his eyes. Thoughts are the reality of the world, and logic is its native language.

      Among his fellow Greek sages, such totalizing notions were commonplace. Thales claimed that everything is really water, Anaximenes said everything is air, and Heraclitus answered that everything is like an ever-burning fire. Parmenides was different; a century and a half later, a commentator named Eudemus wrote, “Parmenides would not agree with anything unless it seemed necessary, whereas his predecessors used to come up with unsubstantiated assertions.”⁶

      Human minds make imperfect looms for pure reason. Even when such careful thinking doesn’t turn into an affront to the obvious, as it did for him, it gets tangled up often enough. Philosophy, for me, started to be of interest after forcing myself to go cold turkey on a years-long obsession with Star Trek and the show’s vision of a future made better by human reason. Yet the words of Spock to a precocious younger Vulcan in Star Trek VI seem apropos here: “Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end.” Behind them, in Spock’s quarters, hung a Marc Chagall painting of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise.

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      A hundred years after Parmenides, in the early fourth century B.C.E., the young Plato arrived in Syracuse, Sicily. Athens had only recently executed Socrates, his obstreperous mentor, and Plato had already earned a reputation as a sage in his own right. In Syracuse, he began what would be a decades-long entanglement with the royal court in an attempt to test his ideas in practice, to put philosophy in charge of a whole society. There, he came into contact with followers of Pythagoras and Parmenides, who lived not far away on the boot of Italy, and kneaded their philosophies into his own. If there’s any doubt about the place of abstract reason, of logos, in Plato’s mind, one need only recall the sign over the door to the Academy he founded, just outside the walls of Athens: let no one ignorant of geometry enter.

      Plato, like his predecessors, taught that genuine Truth and Reason—capital T and capital R—aren’t to be found in the visible world. Instead, he believed there are higher “forms,” or “ideas”: eternal, unchanging, and perfect molds from which the stuff that surrounds us is cast. The Timaeus, a dialogue written forty years after his teacher’s death, is Plato’s most ambitious effort to explain the nature of the universe. And there is a proof in it for the semblance of a God, culled from habits of mind he learned in Italy and in the Athenian agora.

      Look around. Everything in the world is always changing and becoming. Then, look inside your mind, to mathematics, logic, shapes, abstractions. These never change. They’re among the ideal forms, fixed inalterably in the universe’s structure. Among the temporal and the passing, notice something else: everything must have a cause. If it exists, and once did not exist, it was created somehow. The dialogue’s main speaker, after whom the Timaeus is named, surmises that there must be a divine creator who makes the world according to a blueprint of preexisting forms. He calls this creator dēmiourgos, meaning “craftsman” or “common worker,” but its nature and identity remain mostly a mystery: “The father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.”⁷ If anything can be learned about the creator, it will be through esoteric proofs, accessible only to philosophers.

      I learned about Plato’s forms from my first philosophy teacher, Ken Knisley, a taxi driver who occasionally taught elective classes at my high school. He had untamable curly hair and a matching beard, ringed with the beads of sweat brought on by his full-body gestures. He also had a show on community access TV, on which he wore a navy blue jumpsuit that said PHILOSOPHER on the breast—except when he wore a toga to act out Plato’s famous cave allegory.

      We all live, says Plato, as if we’re prisoners in a cave. There is a fire at our backs, casting the shadows of objects on the wall before us. Truth is something we’re unaccustomed to seeing; we see just shadows. Visible, transitory things are reflections of an invisible reality.

      What, then, would happen if a prisoner of the cave escaped and climbed up into the sunlight? There, he finds an entirely new kind of light, blinding him at first. With time, though, the prisoner looks up from the shadows and objects and reflections to the sun itself: “He will contemplate him”—this sun god—“as he is.”

      He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold.⁸

      That sun stands for the Good, the highest of the forms, whose light shines on everything that is True, with a capital T.

      It was in Ken’s classes that I first felt the tug of exalted ideas. We read philosophers supposedly too difficult for us, and he pushed us to give an account of ourselves in terms of them. Some days, he would forget the assigned text entirely and, in amazement, tell us stories about his toddler son. He taught the pleasure and the payoff of thinking, and the responsibility each of us has to seek out undying truth. The upshot: I had a job to do, to figure out the universe for myself.

      The philosophy that Ken offered was one of meaning in the face of meaninglessness. Instead of biblical salvation, we learned about Greek drinking parties and German angst. Mention of God would sneak into our discussions only because of how the existentialists mourned God’s death. These readings certainly suited my emotional state. For one homework assignment, I composed a distortion-drenched, power-chord song on my guitar to accompany a passage from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. When I put my recording in the cassette player, Ken leaped to the front of the room and started reciting the text with appropriate vigor: “One must have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star!”

      Some years later, I learned that Ken had died of cancer without much warning. Later still, I came across a makeshift online eulogy, tacked to the comments of a blog he had started in his last days. A friend of his captured a bit of Plato’s eternal forms when she wrote there, “Some conversations, some ideas, really deserve to continue, even when the person who started them . . . ends.”⁹ The shadows of human life pass away, but the ideas that we wrestle with never do. Ken would have liked that. But he also refused the consolation of pure ideas. He titled the blog’s first and only post “No Abstraction.”

      Plato may have looked to ideas beyond, too, but he did so in this-worldly ways. He wrote down his philosophy in dialogues, conversations among people seeking after truths together. For him philosophizing was inseparable from the love between fellow seekers, between student and teacher, and among friends. Through discussion, one’s soul investigates itself. It thinks about thinking. By reaching for eternal ideas, beyond the cave of the material world, human souls can touch divinity.¹⁰ A conversation among philosophers is a council of gods. That was another thing I learned first from Ken: the pleasure of philosophy when done with others. He taught us what was in books, but he also made us his friends. The off-topic talk about his son was on-topic after all.

      Near the end of his life, Plato lost faith in the СКАЧАТЬ