Lesson 8, Part 2: The Myth of Glaucus. This is Glaucus, the sea god. I thought that Poseidon was the sea god, you say. Hey, ocean's a big place. Just because Aqua Man is the only undersea superhero in the Justice League doesn't mean there's only one god in the sea. Makes sense. Like I said, this is Glaucus, the sea god. Well, okay, you say, but I can't really see him. When you drew Poseidon, you drew the whole guy. Are you getting lazy, Professor Holbo? Alright, I'll just cut and paste Poseidon's tail on, it fits. That's better, you say. Now, he's sort of snaky. I'm fascinated by snakes, I've got snakes on the brain. But I still can't really see him. Draw the rest of him, draw the rest of him. I'm getting to that. Plato was going to give us an image of the soul as being like Glaucus. And the point is we can't see him, not well anyway. So here's the story. In fact, we can't be sure which version of the story Plato was relying on our readers to know. Maybe some version that we don't even know. Aeschylus, ancient playwright, wrote a play Glaucus. That is lost. Oh well, best guesses are what we got, I guess. Once upon a time, there was a mortal fisherman named Glaucus. He ate a magic herb of immortality, went crazy, dove into the sea, and became a prophetic sea god. In other versions, he's a sailor or a diver, part of Jason's crew on the Argo. The common denominator of most of these stories seems to be mortal who becomes divine. Yet in the process of becoming high than a man, also becomes lower, more beast-like, fish-like. In the water, he is a man in beast's form. He's consistently described as a powerful prophet as well, more than a man. Now Plato. At this point in Book 10, I'm skipping ahead, obviously. We've gotten an argument that the soul is immortal and indestructible. Never mind what the argument is, just grant me immortality, for argument's sake. Now, a puzzle. We know, or think we know, that Plato thinks the soul is a three-part compound. The soul is tripartite. It's got a rational part, an honor loving part, and a competitive part. We've been over this. But now, Socrates makes the point: things that are compound can be broken down. If the soul were complex, it could decompose. So it wouldn't be immortal. Or at least, not unchangeably indestructible. So which is it? Is the soul indestructible or is it tripartite? Let's read some Plato, shall we? Here's Socrates explaining how we're going to address this little dilemma. But to see the soul as it is in truth, we must not study it as it is while it is maimed in its association with the body and other evils, which is what we were doing earlier, but as it is in its pure state. That's how we should study the soul, thoroughly and by means of logical reasoning. We'll then find that it is a much finer thing than we thought, and that we can see justice and injustice as well as the other things we've discussed far more clearly. What we've said about the soul is true of it as it appears at present. But the condition in which we've studied it is like that of the sea god Glaucus, whose primary nature can't easily be made out by those who catch glimpses of him. Some of the original parts have been broken off, others have been crushed, and his whole body has been maimed by the waves and by the shells, seaweed, and stones that have attached themselves to him, so that he looks more like a wild animal than his natural self. I've got ivy left over from that other graphic I made about Plato being all covered with ivy. We'll just pretend it's seaweed. There. Now, that's Glaucus. All transformed and half submerged and encrusted with shells and covered with weeds, so we can hardly see the guy. Let's read on. The soul, too, is in a similar condition when we study it, beset by many evils. That, Glaucon, is why we have to look somewhere else in order to discover its true nature. To where? To its philosophy, or love of wisdom. We must realize what it grasps and longs to have intercourse with, because it is akin to the divine and immortal and what always is, and we must realize what it would become if it followed this longing with its whole being, and if the resulting effort lifted it out of the sea in which it now dwells. Reading on, and if the many stones and shells, those which have grown all over it in a wild, earthy, and stony profusion. Because it feasts at those so-called happy feastings on Earth, or hammered off of it. Then we'd see what its true nature is and be able to determine whether it has many parts or just one. And whether or in what manner it is put together. How simple is it going to get? Our soul? I don't know, this is Plato. We can't rule out the conclusion that essentially we, our souls, are something very pure and abstract, according to him. Okay, you say, that was an okay story. Colorful. I got kind of bored at the end when the guy turned into a circle. But did you get the point? What it means that Glaucus, our soul, could maybe rise up like that, according to Plato. It's like in the Matrix, you need to wake up, see what's really real. Tear back the veil of illusion that has encrusted the world. Hell, it's like The Lego Movie, surely you understood that at least? The special has arisen? And you're like, I think I got it. But just in case, tell me the whole thing again, I wasn't listening. Okay. The question, you will recall, is how you can skip reading Haidt and Green if you want to be lazy. That is what's the gist of all this. For those of you who are just beginners. Suppose we accept this Platonic picture of the soul that's Glaucus the sea god. What's the mind like? It's ancient. Mostly animal, primitive, mostly invisible to view, extremely empirically complicated, not very rational. There's maybe a little flash of divinity on top, but let's not go overboard. Most of the beast is below the surface. So far, so great, as far as Haidt is concerned. If Plato stopped there, he and Haidt would be best buddies. They would just plain agree. But it doesn't stop there, does it? Here's where it goes absolutely wrong, by Haidt's standards. There isn't some pure, rational bit of the soul that you can winch out of the sea as it were. And for sure, we can't do it by pure reason. People can't be purified like that. It's false that those other bits were not really us, just some alien matter, barnacles and stuff that got encrusted on us. Those other bits that Plato despises. That's right. That is the difference between Haidt and Plato. But, most of Haidt's arguments are of the following form, so consider. From the fact that Plato hallucinates that our soul is truly this, somehow. It must be possible to refute him with the empirical evidence that we're really more like this. Our minds are these murky ancient complicated things that build up through a process of empirical accretion. But obviously, this isn't an objection to Plato, this is what he thinks is true. And another thing. Haidt doesn't think that you can raise people out of the water, as it were, scouring them clear of a bunch of garbage so that you can see what they really are. But he thinks you can do that for rational accounts. You can't do it to people, but you can do it to rational theories. Haidt is a scientist. He studies psychology. Largely, the study of psychology consists of rationally, systematically scraping away all the wrong garbage that people have said about psychology in the past. We've always had glimmers of our real natures. But seriously, we've been wrong about a lot. The mind as a general purpose computer? Don't get me started. Behaviorism? A lot of dead ends. So scrape away the dead matter, and what shines forth is a mature view of humanity's psychological essence. And to the extent that you're merely adding new data, do so in a rigorous well-founded, rational, scientific manner. In short, as a portrait of basically rational human psychology, this is lousy. People aren't basically rational. That's just false. But as a portrait of the rational human discipline of psychology, this is pretty good. Accounts of human psychology can be raised up rationally, that is scientifically. We actually do have superior knowledge of human nature and of the human good, thanks to the good work folks have done in the lab, clearing up the confusion and learning new stuff. This is Haidt's feud. The distinction between these two things, let me say it slowly. Basically, rational accounts of psychology. That's okay. Accounts of psychology is basically rational. That's not okay. The distinction between these things is fine, but it's seriously easy to get confused about who is standing where in this debate. [BLANK_AUDIO] Let's pull these first two videos together. Am I just too fond of Plato for my own good, such that I'm compelled to defend him against Haidt and insist that Plato got there first, whenever anyone else makes a good point? probably. But I'm trying and I'm trying to do better. Haidt does really interesting work, and I think that he's right about more than he's wrong about. In a sense, since I'm introducing him, I ought to just accentuate the positive, but I'm also trying to demonstrate the usefulness of Plato, so I'm being kind of negative. Seeing if I can give Haidt's philosophy a rational scouring, not to destroy it, but so we can see the good bits shine forth more clearly for what they really are. Maybe that sounds passive-aggressive. Probably reading too much Plato has made me passive-aggressive, like Socrates. Oh well. I'm doing my best, as should we all. [BLANK_AUDIO]
