Arguing With Socrates
Against Dualism
It’s 4 in the morning and I can’t sleep. I’m bloody uncomfortable. The temperature is 78 inside my house, but I don’t want to turn on the A/C. There’s sweat on my pillow cases. I check my phone. Everything is doom scrolling, because everyone is pricing out chaos.
I’ve been following Ted Gioia’s advice, finally. I have reawakened my Auden Project, finally. It’s because I have just about exhausted my patience with The Content. We have an embarrassment of worthless riches. Even Star Wars isn’t good any longer. I hate to sound like a grumbly old man, but there’s nothing on the idiot box, and while I can satisfy myself by stumbling through the opening bars of Bach’s BWV 645, I just figured out I’ve been playing it in the wrong key. Ironically, I now know what “Wachet Auf” means, finally.
Yesterday I got to that part in the audiobook of Plato’s Last Days of Socrates in which Socrates argues with Phaedo that all true philosophers want to die. And Phaedo keeps mumbling on in assent, step by excruciatingly annoying step. And I found myself getting pissed at Phaedo for walking down into this inescapable black hole.
It’s the dualism.
The argument goes like this. Socrates, resigned to his fate and preparing to drink the poison, is surrounded by his crying friends. Hell, he says. Double my portion if you are worried I might suffer. BTW, We’re all going to Hell anyway, why do you make such a fuss? Don’t you understand that once my soul leaves my body that I’ll be able to understand all things better? After all, the body is just a jumble of wants and desires and it’s always giving me boners, and shivers, and hungers and distracting my mind from the understanding of pristine truth. All true philosophers should actually want to be rid of this idiot mortal coil, right? I mean the gods will recognize that we’ve been the most disciplined and earnest in trying to understand their creation, so there’s a special place in Hell reserved for us. It’s only logical.
Yes, Socrates didn’t know how right he was. As this strange argument goes forth, I’m driving around through freeway traffic trying to get to the doctor’s office to get the Spousal Unit a free sample of Ozempic, and I veer out of the backed up lane disregarding the instructions Siri has given my truck’s computer. So I do that thing I periodically do in my head with various historical figures. I use my mental time machine so we can have a fight.
Most of the time when I play this game with myself, I bring said historical figure into the present with my mental time machine. For some strange reason, perhaps having to do with my desire to slap the shit out of Phaedo, I send myself back to death row in ancient Athens. Now I have to explain why Socrates, who in this case is the literary sock puppet of Plato, is abusing his reputation. I mean, it’s hard not to like Socrates. He’s a very chill dude, but in this regard he is so wrong. Not because he’s not courageous, but for the implications of his mind/body dualism. Doesn’t he know what this is going to do to Christianity? No he can’t, we’re centuries ahead of that.
So my strategy is to explain to the assembled crowd that this line of thinking makes for a false line of certainty. There’s stuff in the excluded middle that is material. I realize that we’re even ahead of the time of calculus so they cannot understand that they are living in a world of false precision - that there are irrational numbers like Pi and the square root of two. Everything isn’t just odd or even. In fact there are an infinite set of irrational numbers between two and three, and Socrates is going down this bullshit path talking about how the numbers two and three, are essentially odd or even and how fire chases away snow. This is why the body and the soul are separated after death and that the soul is ‘lifefullness’ and its opposite is ‘deathness’ and they can never inhabit the same thing at the same time. And somehow by this inescapable logic, the soul must be immortal.
I know somehow that this critique of dualism and the idea of the immortal soul is supposed to make me lose all faith in faith, but that too is dualistic thinking. Canon law and secular law can coexist. They have to. Once you have a critical mass of humanity, that forces you to recognize that all of humanity cannot understand all of humanity in the exact same way. That’s the truth of the atomic age. All we can do is put forth our best game theoretic approximations. We have to live with uncertainty. We have to live with the understanding that we cannot box the gods into our puny minds’ limited capacity. We can only pretend that there is nothing between the numbers two and three.
Of course, this is lurking in the back of my head, but it’s not what I tell Socrates. Instead, as I now am taking my wife to the supermarket via my iPhone and I am showing her the quality of the tomatoes in the grocery section, I try to explain chemistry to Socrates.
What I’m trying to do is explain that as a time traveler, that we admire and appreciate Socrates and Athens many hundreds of years into the future. I try to explain that our appreciation of what he has done has inspired natural philosophers for generations. We’ve created this methodology called science and one of the sciences is chemistry. Chemistry allows us to understand the nature of things like fire and snow. But moreover there are tools we have made with chemistry that extend our senses. You keep telling Phaedo that the body is limited and the soul is unlimited. But it’s not the soul you nonce, it’s the mind. The realm of mind is what gives us tools to give our senses far greater reach than you can even imagine. Because we have built tools that extend our ability as humans, there are even children who understand things better than you, Socrates.
Ah. I think I’ve got his attention. Was that an eyebrow he raised?
Chemistry allows us to make iron into steel. Steel allows us to build machines that harness the energy of fire and makes vehicles that can go faster than your fastest horse, and even faster than birds can fly. If you ask a child from my time, they will have had the experience of flying in an airplane, which goes further and faster than you have ever conceived. But then I get bogged down when I try to explain exothermic reactions by using the example of the energy of a flying splinter ejected from breaking the leg off a chair. I thought I could extend that metaphor to explain nuclear fission, but then my wife selected a group of tomatoes and I got frustrated trying to open up a plastic bag with one hand on my iPhone. Sometimes these brilliant tools make us incompetent. Which is rather the point.
We have inherited a great deal of knowledge and built tools to extend our capacities. The result is that we give great powers to fools and children who haven’t got the slightest clue about the principles that make the tools work in the first place. As I attempt to explain that to Socrates, I realize that I don’t remember enough chemistry my damned self. I stop my time machine and get in line at the checkout.
As I pack the 8 bags of groceries into the truck, I make sure that I put the Ozempic under the frozen meatballs. I know it’s supposed to be kept cold. I head back home but I’m still frustrated with myself and Phaedo. That was about 36 hours ago, 6PM on the day before somebody tried to shortcut our democracy with a rifle. Fools with tools indeed.
How do we stop dualist philosophers from keeping the earnest Phaedos of the world from sliding down the slippery slope of their bounded logic? We are not simply made of body + soul. We are not simply fire or snow. We are not just Red or Blue. We are not essentialist irreconcilable opposites and we shouldn’t be grouped and counted that way. We have uncountable infinities between our twos and our threes. We’ve got to consider that. We have Richard Dedekind and Georg Cantor to thank for the mathematical proofs of high density of the infinite set of real numbers.
Yet I know tomorrow there will be fools who will go to extraordinary lengths, as they sit ready for a double dose of hemlock, to convince us that one of our mutually exclusive ideological sensibilities is in love with death. This is a hill they will desire to die on. This is the dualism they are committed to. Perhaps it is because the infinity between their twos and threes frightens them. Perhaps it is because they can only see the fools with tools, but not the chemistry. I’m not afraid to say I don’t know. I guess that makes me a bit like Socrates, but I’ve got fresh tomatoes and I’m taking care of my body. I think I should go back to bed now. I’ve got a lot of living to do.
