In this course we study the ancient, Socratic art of blowing up your beliefs as you go, to make sure they're built to last. We spend six weeks studying three Platonic dialogues - "Euthyphro", "Meno", "Republic" Book I - then two weeks pondering a pair of footnotes to Plato: contemporary moral theory and moral psychology. Platonic? Socratic? Socrates was the teacher, but he said he never did. Plato was the student who put words in his teacher's mouth. You'll get a feel for it. We have a book: the new 4th edition of "Reason and Persuasion", by the instructor (and his wife, Belle Waring, the translator.) It contains the Plato you need, plus introductory material and in-depth, chapter-length commentaries. (Don't worry! John Holbo knows better than to read his book to the camera. The videos cover the same material, but the presentation is different.) The book is offered free in PDF form - the whole thing, and individual chapter slices. It is also available in print and other e-editions. See the course content for links and information. The course is suitable for beginning students of Plato and philosophy, but is intended to offer something to more advanced students as well. We seek new, odd angles on old, basic angles. Tricky! The strategy is to make a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach. Lots of contemporary connections, to make the weird bits intuitive; plus plenty of ancient color, still bright after all these years. So: arguments and ideas, new possibilities, old stories, fun facts. Plus cartoons. The results can get elaborate (some book chapters and some lesson videos run long.) But each video comes with a brief summary of its contents. The lessons progress. I put them in this order for reasons. But there's no reason you can't skip over and around to find whatever seems most interesting. There are any number of self-contained mini-courses contained in this 8-week course. You are welcome to them. Plato has meant different things to different people. He's got his own ideas, no doubt. (Also, his own Ideas.) But these have, over the centuries, been worn into crossing paths for other feet; been built up into new platforms for projecting other voices. (Plato did it to Socrates, so fair is fair.) So your learning outcome should be: arrival somewhere interesting, in your head, where you haven't been before. I wouldn't presume to dictate more exactly.
Lesson 7 Part 8: The Epimethean Script?
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Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues By Plato
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National University of Singapore
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Moral Psychology
We're done with Plato! Well, not really. The point is to prove we'll never be done with him! But we're moving on to contemporary moral psychology. This lesson is on moral psychology. How does the moral mind think – work, function? The moral brain. (Psychologists are natural scientists. They figure your mind is your brain although that identification can get puzzling, we shall see.) I discuss one figure in particular: Jonathan Haidt. A popular writer, with good ideas. Also, some bad ones (I say) so that makes it livelier. He knocks Plato. I try to knock back, sometimes on Plato’s behalf. Plato is obviously very concerned with moral psychology. So many colorful, mythic images of all that! Haidt ventures more than a short distance into philosophy, when he sallies forth to correct philosophers, ancient and modern, for doing bad psychology. All very interesting. And I hope, like me, you find having a bit of Plato under your belt, at this point, helps you to organize your thoughts, see positions and patterns. In the first lesson I compared studying Plato to learning chess gambits. No one knows how to win, outright. But some strategies are more ... winning. (But there are always standard defenses.) l A lot of scientific progress has been made in the study of the human mind. But there are a lot of deep, stubbornly un-dissolved conceptual mysteries hereabouts. That means a lot of ancient debate patterns – same old lines, same old counters to the old lines - stay relevant. It’s important to be able to say: hey, we learned something new today! But also: ah, this debate is a version of that old thing we’ve been batting back and forth for centuries! (Even though it’s got new stuff stuck on – fMRI data, or what have you.) Being able to see the old and the new isn’t everything, but it’s a start. Let’s get started.
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John Holbo, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT of PHILOSOPHY
Lesson seven, part eight.
The Epimethean Script?
This is the last video of the lecture.
I'd better start pulling it together.
Going way back to video two, we have a dispute.
It seems clear cut.
Is Passion king and reason, the slave?
Is the Hume Haidt view or is reason the king, the
philosopher king, who governs the passions for the sake of reason?
That seems to say it all.
Passion over reason, reason over passion.
Pretty stark opposition, but then again, not so clear.
Why not?
Well because this is in part clearly a metaphysical dispute.
Hume thinks that his version of the picture is
not just empirically but in some sense conceptually necessarily true.
But we don't need to go down that rabbit hole, not
just because we've got enough animals metaphors already, thank you very
much, but because although this is a metaphysical picture, it's not
clear that Haidt's dispute with Plato is a properly metaphysical dispute.
Somehow, it's an empirical dispute, because it's supposed to
be settled by empirical discoveries in cognitive science and psychology.
It's not clear how, or in what sense.
Why not?
Well, because it's an empirical is that's somehow
tangled up in some kind of an ought.
If you just ask the question, do people tend to be ruled by their passions?
You won't get any disagreement between Hume and Plato, or Haidt and Plato.
Yes, people are ruled by their passions, normally, sad to say.
But if you ask them, ought people to be ruled by their passions?
You get very different answers.
Haidt says, not sad to say.
He says it's actually a good thing.
Plato says, sad to say, people are ruled by their passions.
How can empiricism settle an ought question, especially since empiricism may
be an Hume's view seems to hold the view that there no is ever implies an ought?
How do Hume and Haidt get from reason is
typically normally in the median or modal case a slave to the passions.
How do they get from that to and it ought to be that's a good thing?
While staying on the cognitive science side
of the line, such that Plato is somehow
properly refuted on his side of the line, but is that a metaphysical side now?
It gets worse.
What do they even disagree about even at the level of ought?
Both Plato and Haidt offer a rational, scientific
account that tells us how happiness comes from between.
As a function of a kind of
cross-level coherence at the individual and societal level.
It gets worse still.
Chapter two of Haidt's book, as I said in the last video, starts with these quotes.
"The whole world, the whole universe is change,
and life itself is but what you deem it."
Marcus Aurelius.
What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, And our present
thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.
Buddha.
These quotes can be taken in a pop psych sense.
Taken in that sense, it's highly doubtful that Plato would bother disagreeing.
If you're happy, the world looks happy to you.
If you're sad, it looks sad.
Psychologists may be able to refine this sort
of insight in various ways, but on some
levels it's kind of obvious so there's no
particular reason to think it isn't obvious to Plato.
These quotes can also be taken literally, which
would tend to make them highly metaphysical and controversial.
We could have a metaphysical cave to rival Plato's own.
A cave in our own mind, we are trapped in, with no hope of
escape to the light of true reality and maybe that's not a bad thing.
But, as I emphasized, it doesn't seem plausible
that Haidt wants to take it that way.
He quotes Dale Carnegie agreeing with Marcus Aurelia, Aurelius.
Haidt calls Carnegie the world's most popular success writer.
He doesn't say he's a world class metaphysician.
I would guess Haidt strongly agrees with
Plato's metaphysical picture, but Haidt doesn't think
cognitive science has refuted it and, and
opposes it with a different metaphysical cave.
He isn't setting up an alternative metaphysical picture.
Quote from Haidt.
This comes at the end of his chapter two.
The epigraphs that opened this chapter are true.
Life is what we deem it, and our lives are the creations of our minds.
But these claims are not helpful until augmented by
a theory of the divided self, such as the rider.
Which is the subject of chapter one, which I skipped over.
But let's now turn back to chapter one, say a bit more about those animal
metaphors, in the hopes of clarifying what
exactly the dispute is between Haidt and Plato.
Metaphors for the Mind.
Here's how his book starts.
"Throughout recorded history, people have lived with and tried to
control animals, and these animals made their way into ancient metaphors.
Buddha, for example, compared the mind to a wild elephant."
"In days gone by, this mind of mine used to
stray wherever Selfish desire or lust or pleasure would lead it.
Today this mind does not stray and is under the harmony
of control, even as a wild elephant is controlled by the trainer.
Haidt spins this into a general question.
Why do people keep doing such stupid things?
Why do they fail to control themselves and continue
to do what they know is not good for them?
Well, the picture kind of tells you the answer, but if you
can't figure out what the picture means, the next slide should help.
Elephants, they're kind of hard to steer.
Alright, that answers the question.
Why do I keep doing such stupid stuff?
I'm mostly elephant.
Elephants are hard to steer.
But now, I come up with another question.
Why don't people do more stupid things?
That, in a way, is the more puzzling thing, given just how elephanty we are.
Now, Haidt doesn't emphasize this because it, he's sort of leaving the buddha beyon,
behind at this point, but the answer would seem to be something like this.
Elephants, they're pretty stable, they're pretty reliable.
At this point, I should clearly replace my elephant graphic
with something a little less alarming, but you get the picture.
Elephants aren't just things that need to be controlled.
They're things that you can rely on.
And [UNKNOWN], unlike Buddha, emphasizes the, the reliability of animals.
Even without our help.
To put it another way, Buddha and David Hume don't seem to agree.
David Hume.
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and
can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
Back to Buddha.
Is he saying that reason should be a slave to the passions?
That is, the writer should be the servant of the elephant?
It doesn't sound to me like that's what he's saying.
Let's just read again to make sure.
"In days gone by this mind of mine," the writer, "used
to stray, wherever selfish desire or lust or pleasure would lead it.
Today this mind does not stray and is under the harmony
of control, even as a wild elephant Is controlled by the trainer.
Note, courtesy of Wikipedia, I'm showing you what the tools
of the elephant trainer are, chains and goads, sharp pointy bits.
It doesn't sound to me like the rider is the slave to the elephant.
But rather the elephant is the slave to the rider.
Look at these two images.
In the one case, we have a
kind of transcendent rising elephant with its' rider.
And the other we have an elephant literally chained to the ground.
It's not clear to me that Haidt is quite right to align
his message with the Buddha's in the way that he would like to.
Let's try another angle.
Plato's image of reason as charioteer controlling the dumb
beasts of passion may overstate not only the wisdom.
But also the power of the charioteer.
The metaphor of a rider on an element fits more closely.
Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior.
It's a quote from Haidt.
He actually quotes the Plato Dialogue.
You might wonder what image of the charioteer is this?
It's from a dialogue called the Faedras, which
Haidt quotes, and I'll read that bit to you.
The horse that is on the right, or nobler side,
is upright in frame and well-jointed with a high neck.
And a regal nose.
He is a lover of honor with modesty and self-control.
Companion to two, true glory, he needs no
whip, and is guided by verbal commands alone.
The other horse is a crooked, great jumble
of limbs, companion to wild boasts and indecency.
He is shaggy around the ears.
Deaf as a post.
And just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined.
Hise act, Haidt actually omits a further detail that I have included in my cartoon.
Plato describes the horses as winged, or sometimes winged.
It's rather a long and involved figure in the original dialogue.
Sometimes their wings fall off, I won't share you the story about that.
I've compromised by settling for one set of wings.
I did so by way of emphasizing how wrong Haidt
seems to be about Plato overstating the chariot at his control.
Admittedly, I make him look calm, he's reasoned.
But this whole mode of transportation is
the most spectacular accident waiting to happen.
Isn't that obvious?
What a dumb way to get around.
No one would sell you insurance to derive this thing.
So why does Haidt think Plato is selling us
insurance, by selling us this picture of the soul?
You're going to fly up, only to crash hard.
You're going to run in circles.
In short, it's like Plato's known you all his life.
You sign up for 20 Coursera courses,
planning to become an expert on everything.
That's the horse on the right, seeking honor.
You want all those certificates of completion.
But then, you end up just sitting on the couch playing mind craft.
Your hairy, shirtless chest slowly getting crusted over with cheeto dust.
That's the horse on the left.
Oh the shame of it.
And reason keeps telling you this doesn't make sense.
Keeps lashing you to get up.
Put the controller down, go get some work done.
Oh, the humanity.
To put it another way, Plato's image
is actually closer to Haidt's image than Buddha's.
They both have a dream of this kind of crazily rising transcendent animal and
apparent defiance of gravity, a form of
transport that's half human, half heavy beast.
So what's the difference between Plato and Haidt?
Let's go back to our dogs.
Here's a quote from the original paper, The Emotional Dog and His Rational Tail.
Remember, this is moral judgment, it's mostly emotion.
Little bit of strictly cosmetic reason up there.
Here's a quote, incidentally, along the way that rather contradicts that.
People may at times reason their way to a
judgement by sheer force of logic, overriding their initial intuition.
In such cases reasoning truly is causal and cannot
be said to be the slave of the passions.
However, such reasoning is hypothesized to be rare, occurring primarily in cases
in which the initial intuition is weak, and the processing capacity is high.
That is to say, mostly tails don't wag dogs.
But actually, sometimes the tail can wag the dog.
Haidt himself admits it, just in passing, but that's rather a significant omission.
Let's think about that.
To be fair, Haidt is attacking a fellow psychologist named
Kohlberg who advanced a highly rationalistic picture of on which it
is indeed, normal, for the moral tail to wag the
rational tail to wag the, the moral dog of moral judgment.
Colberg you might say, sees getting up and leaving the cave, for a
more rational life to be a normal part of the human maturation process.
But Plato, we all know this, obviously doesn't think so.
Plato admits that such reasoning would lead
you out of the cave is exceedingly rare.
That's what makes it so valuable.
So arguing against Coleberg, which I
actually think is quite reasonable of Haidt.
Is not tantamount to arguing against rationalism generally.
Plato would be perfectly happy to admit that
it's extremely rare for the tale of reason
to wag the dog of the emotions of
society general people don't usually listen to philosophers.
That's why he says it's rare indeed for those prisoners
in the cave to get up, turn around, and leave.
If both Haidt and Plato agree that sometimes the tale can wag the dog, Reason
can override the passions and emotion, what exactly are they disagreeing about?
Let's find once more to find a clear difference between Haidt and Plato.
Maybe Plato is taking this metaphysical matrix business too far, you might say.
Not just in a metaphysical escape from the
cave sense, but in a practical ethical sense.
He thinks there's a red pill in it, blue pill, and he can
know things in a new and pure way if he takes the right pill.
That is, Plato's hero is Neo.
Well, strictly, that's short for neocortex.
Here's a quote from Haidt, from chapter one, where he talks
about some of the newer parts of the brain and the old.
The neocortex is one of the new parts.
Quote.
The front portion of the neocortex is
particularly interesting, for parts of it do not
appear to be dedicated to specific tasks,
such as moving a finger or processing sound.
Instead, it is available to make new
associations and to engage in thinking, planning, and
decision making, mental processes that can free an
organism from responding only to an immediate situation.
You are thinking, "Yeah, that's me."
I am that guy.
The guy who's mind is free from responding to an immediate situation.
I'm cut out for management.
There you are sitting in the cool corner office of your mind right above your eyes.
You press a little button on your desk."
Ms. Olympic, please cancel all my fighter flights responds this morning.
I've got a long term problem I need to work through in a rational sort of way".
Yes sir, Mr. Neo replies the obedient secretary, Ms. Limbick.
I'm joking a little bit here.
Okay, back to Haidt.
The growth of the frontal cortex seems like a
promising explanation for the divisions we experience in our mind.
Perhaps the frontal cortex is the seed of reason.
It is Plato's charioteer.
It is Saint Paul's spirit, and it has taken over control.
Though not perfectly from the more primitive limbic system.
Plat's bad horse, Saint Paul's flesh.
We can call this explanation the Promethean
script of human evolution, after the character
in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the humans.
In the script, our ancestors were mere animals
governed by the primitive emotions and drives of
the limbic system until they received the divine
gift of reason, installed in the newly expanded neocortex.
Unfortunately, as [UNKNOWN] goes on to point out,
there is a flaw in the Promethean script.
It assumes that reason was installed in the frontal
cortex but that emotion stayed behind in the limbic system.
In fact, the frontal cortex enabled a great expansion of emotionality.
In humans.
[UNKNOWN] clinical data.
But it's also intuitive why this would be right.
Freedom from responding to emot, to
immediate situations doesn't mean being rational.
It could mean being emotional about things that aren't immediate.
You could get angry at the past, obsessed over the future.
You can need to be reminded to live your life day by day, because you're so
emotionally involved in the past or the future,
and distant things that aren't here right now.
Something no animal has has ever needed to be reminded of before.
This here now is important.
Your fight or flight impulses aren't cancelled, you've just got more
things you can respond to, potentially, on a nervous sort of way.
You can get caught in the headlights of life in more distant
ways that are more complicated than any lowly deer ever dreamed of.
It may be no coincidence that Pandora's
Box containing so many miseries, peculiar to
the human condition was sent by Zeus
as part of Prometheus' punishment for stealing fire.
Speaking of Pandora's box, it wasn't actually Prometheus who opened it.
It was his brother, Epimetheus.
And it wasn't the first time that Epimetheus screwed up.
Let me tell you about the first time.
This is a myth we have courtesy of exactly one ancient author.
a certain fellow named Plato in a dialogue called Protagoras.
And I think Heidt might like it if he doesn't happen to know it.
He might say, the Epimethean script, that's an even more perfect way
to put my anti-Plato point than My idea of the Promethean script.
How so?
Okay, let me tell you a bit about Prometheus.
Do you know what Prometheus's day job was before he
became a thief of fire and was punished for it?
Well, I'll tell you.
He was commissioned by Zeus himself to equip mankind for survival.
Meanwhile, Epimetheus, his brother was in charge
of equipping the other animals for survival.
Prometheus name means forethought by the way.
Epimetheus means afterthought.
That is doing things, thinking later.
Which has about the results you would expect.
Epimetheus takes all the good bits Zeus gave the
two of them to build all this good stuff.
The teeth, the claws, the fur, so forth.
All the stuff that's actually going to keep.
Anything alive and he uses it all.
And then Prometheus comes back and he's like dude where's all the stuff.
And Epimetheus is like whoa dude I used it all.
And Prometheus is like Epimetheus I ought to.
So.
In order to protect mankind, there was nothing left over that he could
use to help them, Prometheus went to steal fire to give to man.
Because man literally had nothing else.
We were these helpless blank slates.
But then thanks to Prometheus, we
became powerful blank slates equipped with reason.
I can almost hear Haidt saying that's perfect, that's exactly the blank slate
mind as a general purpose computer view that I've been fighting all these years.
He'd say I'm not surprised that Plato holds this crazy view.
The view I want to combat is not so much
the Promethean script, the view that we are like gods.
It's more the Epimethean script, the view that we are nothing like animals.
Essentially, because the truth is, now we're speaking for Haidt again, it's
the elephant in all of us that keeps us alive most days.
It's not true that Epimetheus ran out of stuff, we're
all packed with animal goodness right up to the top.
There's just a little shaving of reason on top of all that.
Reason is just the puny little rider helping us around the edges.
Unfortunately, it's not so clear that Plato disagrees with that.
In the dialogue, it's Protagoras who tells this myth, not Socrates.
And it seems like one of the reasons Socrates doesn't
accept it, which he doesn't, is exactly the reason Hecht would.
It kind of downplays the animal in us too much in an unrealistic way.
Pythagoras has some somewhat naive views of politics as a result.
He thinks you can just teach men virtue in this verbal sort of way.
Socrates is not so sure, I think for
reasons Haidt would more or less agree with.
Gosh, I said I going to tell you what the differences
between Plato and Haidt There has to be a difference.
I mean they literally have the opposite view, and yet we don't seem to
be able to put our finger on the sense in which they are opposite.
I guess we'll just have to wait until next week.
Okay that's just ridiculous building up suspense is one thing but I'm being down
right intellectually counter productive here's what's causing
the trouble and here's the solution to it.
Haidt would say he's an intuitionist Plato is a rationalist this is sort
of right but sort of wrong that's
what's causing the problem there both rationalists.
rationalist in what sense?
Well, in Haidt's sense, I'm using his own sense against him.
What's his sense?
I'm quoting from his book, The rat, The Righteous Mind.
I'll the use the word rationalist to describe anyone who believes that
reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.
Well, not I'm going to quote from the happiness hypothesis.
How can I find a sense of meaning and purpose?
This is, here I'm quoting again, a question
of fact that can be examined by scientific means.
That second claim is really strong.
I haven't ripped it out of context and made
it sound stronger or more ambitious than Haidt really means.
Anyone who really believes that second thing and
Haidt does is a rationalist by Haidt's own standards.
So when Haidt says there must be
something beyond rationalism and then proposes his view.
Turns out, the thing beyond rationalism is more rationalism.
Although, admittedly, maybe a slightly different flavor of the stuff.
Now, consider an option, but maybe the elephant
knows more about morals than the writer does.
We could argue about this, but I don't think so.
The elephant has a lot of beliefs
and attitudes, true beliefs and sound attitudes, mostly.
But true belief is not knowledge.
It's just a kind of heuristic.
The elephant is a very heuristic beast.
Insofar as we really know anything about morality Morality as opposed
to just having pretty good instincts about it, which we do.
It's mostly thanks to science, thank you very much.
I think this is Haidt view.
So, on we go.
What's the difference between the two flavors of rationalism?
Let me be brief.
Plato believes in the possibility of
rational accounts, that is, saying rationally writing
a book that contains true knowledge of what morality is and how it works.
He believes in the possibility of rational
accounts, and in the possibility of rational persons.
There is rational knowledge and rational knowers.
Just not very much of the former and rather few of the latter.
Haidt only believes in rational accounts.
There aren't any really rational people.
What do I mean by there aren't any rational people?
Well let's take Haidt, Haidt is an example of a person.
Haidt would say that he was about 1% writer, 99%
elephant before he wrote his book offering his best rational
scientific arguments about the writer and elephant, their true natures,
and their real relationship and what we should do about it.
After he worked through all that he was still
- envelope please - 1% right, or 99% elephant.
That is, he hadn't changed, even though he had offered a rational account.
This is just a hint, although it's really
pregnant hint, with, with significant differences down the line.
But at least I finally gave you a hint.
I'll give you one more and then we'll be done.
Happiness comes from below?
Reason, the rider can, though it usually doesn't, of course, examine by
scientific means what the conditions for finding meaning and purpose in life are.
But those conditions don't come down from on high from the form in the good.
They're in the elephant.
States of being and flow, feeling of elation The highest
in us is a function of the lower in us.
Haidt would say, that is, if the elephant is low and the rider is
high, we couldn't rise up, make ourselves
more truly happy by transcending our animal natures,
not just because we can't in fact,
sublimate ourselves into pure rational beings, but
because even if we could that would bring us closer to the sources of happiness.
It would take us away from them.
I think the visual metaphor of Haidts cover maybe by sheer
coincidence of the genius of the designer really gets at it.
The heavy animal isn't a weight dragging us.
Its like a cork rising in the water.
Its the condition for the possibility or rising.
Intuitionism is then a thesis about where are value comes from?
Not how it's known.
So intuition, intuitionism is consistent with rationalism.
Rationalism and intuitionism in Haite sense are not really opposed.
Nor more so then the rider and elephant.
Haidt finds this so intuitive, I think, that
he never really gets rationally clear about about it.
Plato would find it so disturbing and abhorrent
that I don't think he ever really considers it.
Buddha wouldn't like it either.
But I think it sounds kind of right.
There, I ended on a positive note and tried
to tell you something true instead of just making puzzles.
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