The Globe and Mail
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto whose latest book is Question Authority.
In the relentless stream of outrages that we call the news cycle, you might have missed a small item about Plato. Martin Peterson, a professor at Texas A&M University, was told by administrators that he was no longer permitted to teach Plato’s dialogue Symposium in his ethics class. According to state authorities, following federal direction, the ancient Greek material violates rules against teaching “race and gender ideology” and must be canned.
The offending passage is well-known. While discoursing on love, Aristophanes cites a myth that humans were once doubled-up roly-poly people, with four arms, four legs, two heads, and two sets of genitals. They are so happy in this state, bowling along through life, that the jealous gods split them in two, condemning us mortals to an endless search for our lost other halves. The dialogue is silent on whether trans athletes should be able to play women’s basketball, but it does suggest that homosexuality and gender fluidity might be part of the natural order. Yikes!
The school was quick to point out that Plato was not banned everywhere, just in this context. That’s cold comfort to those alarmed by the ban’s violation of academic freedom and free speech. And this selective ban – like any such encroachment – only invites further depredations in the classroom. After all, one could use the same justifications to expunge almost all the celebrated dialogues attributed to him, especially his depiction of the caustic ironist Socrates, from the current political landscape.
Consider, for example, the discussion of justice in the first book of Plato’s Republic. There, Socrates encounters an arrogant sophist, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon. A hard-edged political realist, Thrasymachus scorns any moral basis for social order. Justice, he insists, is nothing other than “the advantage of the stronger.” Might makes right, and anything else is just eyewash.
Visitors walk behind the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library Center on the campus of Texas A&M University in December, 2018. Professor Martin Peterson was told he is no longer allowed to teach Plato’s Symposium in his ethics class.Scott Olson/Getty Images
Socrates quickly gets the better of the blustering rhetorician – it’s Plato’s party, after all. But beyond defending justice as a virtue, he notes a subtle point of self-contradiction in realpolitik: even those who seek power without end desire something. Their pursuit of “advantage,” however perverse, is still beholden to some idea of value. The real problem is that they don’t have true purpose, a sense of what their strength is for.
The Republic is typically read as a defence of the philosopher-king, but readers have stumbled over internal evidence that complicates this straightforward takeaway. The text is more likely a warning for philosophers to stay out of politics, safeguarding their own souls, combined with a wish that people who want to rule should get some therapy immediately.
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Plato argues that the tyrant, who rules by capricious whim, is a dangerous criminal lunatic, especially if he commands thuggish ICE stormtroopers, I mean, high-spirited guardians. But such tyranny is just the inevitable endgame of all psychotic, pleasure-driven democratic politics – that is, politics without justice. The tyrant is an addict-in-chief who can’t perceive the true good. He badly needs professional help: an intervention, probably psych-ward commitment, plus a watchful eye on his cynical henchmen.
The paradox here is that only those who already value philosophical wisdom can see its value. The first step to true understanding is admitting that you don’t know something – hardly a recipe for success in our world. No authoritarian wants to hear that. So ban it all! Not just at A&M, or in Texas. Let the bans roll from sea to sea. This insistence on reason as the proper ruler of the soul is dangerous talk by itself, especially in an age devoted to immediate happiness, product placement, and maximum return on investment. Surely, a nationwide ban seems warranted.
Why stop there? Even that cornerstone of Plato’s system – the idea of transcendent goodness – is obviously elitist nonsense. Really, the whole appearance-versus-reality business, the escape from Plato’s famous shadowy cave, is little more than nostalgia and inherited privilege, no? We all know that “my truth” overrides evidence, logic, and public reason in service of truth. And come on: we don’t really want radical criticism of our ideas about gender, power, authority, and beauty.
The good news is that a global ban on Plato would generate immediate cost savings. Alfred North Whitehead said that the safest generalization about Eurocentric philosophy is that it “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Take away the primary text and those footnotes are left homeless, floating free of reference or relevance. This would put me and most of my academic colleagues out of business, sure, but we’ve been busy doing that ourselves for a long time. Good riddance, eggheads.
But the even better news is that official prohibition would have an unintended consequence: making these crazy works more popular than ever. Instead of boring canonical tomes, required and resented, they could enjoy new life as samizdat, passed from hand to hand – or screen to screen – like old-timey zines or agitprop. In an age where everyone has a Substack, podcast, and e-mail newsletter, a current of underground intellectual excitement might prove more subversive, and essential, than ever.
When the Athenians understood the threat that Socrates’s puckish questioning posed to power, they put him on trial for impiety and corruption. There, he argued that his punishment should be, as Olympic athletes received at the time, free meals for life. They didn’t get the joke: he was executed by poison. But his example survives, maybe better outside the classroom than in.
Censorship always reveals more than it can ever conceal. The anxious exercise of power to restrict speech ironically speaks loudest about the limits of power.