The Exactness is a Fake: Whitehead’s Platonic Footnotes and Beauty as a Rebirth Canal

This morning I joined Danielle A. Layne and Eli Kramer on the Platonic Mysticism podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about how I situate myself within the Platonic tradition, how Whitehead and Schelling inherit and transform it, and why the Timaeus and Sophist remain among the most generative texts ever written. What follows is a summary of the ideas we explored that tracks very closely with the transcript. The conversation itself will be available soon!

Danny opened by asking how I see myself fitting within the philosophical tradition, and the Platonic tradition broadly construed. As a Whitehead scholar, I can’t but agree with him that all of Western philosophy is safely characterized as a series of footnotes to Plato, so I see myself within that broader lineage. But more particularly, the dialogues function for me not just as philosophical exercises in the art of thinking, but as a kind of scripture, really—texts that can open a portal into other ways of seeing and other ways of being. Like any scripture, there are multiple levels at which one can read them. There are arguments, and one can train one’s intellect by studying them. But there is also a path of transformation in the dialogues, one that can be read as a recipe for bringing the soul and the spirit across the threshold of sensible experience into another type of intuitive experience: communion with a world that is not other than the sensible world, but that is nonetheless usually hidden from our merely sensory perception. The dialogues help activate a way of knowing that grants us access to the deeper textures of experience. So yes—I am happy to call myself a Platonist.

Danny, a self-described card-carrying Platonist who admitted to sometimes holding back the “woo-woo” so the tradition is taken seriously, asked for a personal anecdote of the moment when my relationship to the philosophical text became something more reverential and initiatory. I remembered being assigned the Republic as an undergraduate. It was a very flat teaching of the dialogue, as though this were literally Plato’s plan for a city, a blueprint to actually implement. At some point I just thought: some of these suggestions are so absurd, this almost feels like comedy. But as a nineteen-year-old I wasn’t yet able to give myself permission to have an alternative reading from my professor. My first introduction to the history of philosophy had been Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy—Russell treats Plato well enough, but with a rather anachronistic reading of that history. It wasn’t until years later that I realized my sense that there is some comedy, and maybe some tragedy too, going on in the Republic was almost on the surface of the text: that the dialogue is more about the formation of the just soul than the creation of the just city, that there is irony in all of the dialogues, and that they are to be read dramatically just as much as intellectually. To recognize how hilarious Plato could be was a major breakthrough.

Danny then asked whether Schelling and Whitehead share this playful irony. I confessed I couldn’t remember Schelling ever making a joke. To be fair, he suffered a lot of loss in his life, and it definitely shaped his philosophical outlook. Whitehead, though, is pretty witty. In Modes of Thought he observes a mother squirrel at his summer house who, after frantically moving her babies to another nest, cannot be sure she has gotten them all—because she can’t count. This comes in the context of his claim that mathematics signals the transition into civilization, so at least some squirrels, he notes, have not crossed the line. I wouldn’t call him a comedic genius, but he sprinkles in humor here and there.

Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas begins with a historical and sociological section in which Whitehead traces the gradual ingression of the idea of freedom—which in ancient Egypt was not even a glimmer in the eye of Pharaoh, and which even in ancient Greece, where democracy was beginning to take shape, coexisted with slavery taken more or less for granted. It takes thousands of years for this Platonic ideal to become realized; the social and material conditions had to ripen before the idea could adequately ingress. Even today, it remains only partially realized. Whitehead is a kind of Platonic realist—his eternal objects can’t just be understood as historical or social constructs—but he is also sensitive to evolutionary processes, to the sense in which ideas exist in habitats and need to be sheltered by environmental contexts that allow them to achieve realization. The Platonic idea of participation is really important for Whitehead, but he inverts Plato’s account of it. Rather than the ideas being the really real, more actual than anything we experience in our embodied lives, for Whitehead what is really real are actual occasions of experience—though those occasions only have the definiteness they do because they are drawing upon and participating in forms accessible in a way that is perpendicular to the horizontal flow of time. Ideas are just as necessary in Whitehead as in Plato, but they are not the preeminent actualities. They are the palette that actuality paints with.

Danny called the Timaeus one of the most important Platonic dialogues for supporting process, generative, and relational philosophies. It tells the likely story of a demiurge who desires to make something good entering into collaborative relationship with the receptacle, which demands what Timaeus calls a form of “bastard reasoning.” It’s hard to choose a favorite dialogue, but I also find the Timaeus so generative for all the reasons Danny suggested. And it is where I think Plato most obviously invites us to think beyond easy caricatures of “Platonism.” One could easily read the Timaeus in a flat preformationist way as the original archetype of intelligent design: the engineering god who molds a dead mechanical world out of clay. But that reading ignores all the interesting details, dilemmas, and false starts in the text that undermine any such simple story. The whole point of the dialogue is that such a story of creation is too simple-minded—that there is a collaborative effort described here, and that the relationship between the intelligible and the sensible, or form and matter, is not at all one of activity on one side and passivity on the other. Nor can the “motion of matter” be understood independent of soul, of life.

Schelling, studying the Timaeus at about seventeen years old in his early essay, reads it in a Kantian way, revealing another layer: how the rational mind tries to make sense of the intelligibility of nature and what that assumption requires. And Whitehead reads the Timaeus as a kind of proto-evolutionary account of how a new form of order, a new cosmic epoch, takes hold. That makes the Timaeus actually more valuable as a speculative cosmology than, say, Newton’s Scholium, which is very precise in providing a mathematical model for a particular form of motion—but precisely because of that specificity, quickly shows its limits when you take in the whole of the cosmic process. The broad perspective outlined in the Timaeus remains relevant for thousands of years because of how much it includes in its picture. There is plenty of mathematics in the Timaeus too, but at the level of ratios rather than specific predictions. It is a testament to Plato’s genius and insight into the nature of things, which is so much more enduring than any special science could ever be. He is doing metaphysics in a way that remains nourishing for our minds despite all of modern science. Whitehead has a great section in Process and Reality on how Plato would have been enlightened by our understanding of evolution—given the almost embryological account of the birth of the universe he gives—and on how Plato’s understanding of the elements is a kind of precursor to quantum theory and our understanding of the physical world in terms of mathematical pattern.

Danny confessed that the Timaeus did not initially blow her skirt up—it was the opening enigma, “one, two, three, but where is the fourth?”, that eventually broke the dialogue open for her. It was John Sallis’s book Chorology that first really allowed me to dwell on just these first few lines to begin to understand this missing fourth.

The fourth interlocutor who couldn’t be present is described as having been ill—surely he would have been there if he were able. It strikes me that this is Plato gesturing at one of the important themes of the dialogue: the nature of contingency, and the ways our reasoning is limited by the fact that we are embodied creatures. We can get sick, and that can prevent us from participating in the process of knowing. The missing fourth is in a way analogous to the receptacle itself, which can’t quite be named—the form of formlessness, absent in its very presence and present only as absent, the matrix that any shape presupposes but which doesn’t itself have a shape. This is a dialogue about limits, about the meeting of the limited and the unlimited, and the missing fourth is a tip of the hat to precisely that thought: the place where reason meets its limit, which is also its power. I also can’t help reading it alongside Jung’s account of the Trinity as incomplete, needing a fourth to bring completeness to the unstable triadic movement—a fourth that for Jung includes not only materiality but the feminine, darkness, even evil, everything left out of the usual Trinitarian story.

Notes on Carl Jung's Psychology of the Trinity

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September 19, 2024

In part five of his essay “A Psychological Approach to the Trinity,” titled “The Problem of the Fourth,” Carl Gustav Jung turns to Christian, Gnostic, and Hermetic religious symbolism for clues about…

Danny offered socio-historical support for the psychoanalytic reading: women’s names could not be spoken in public Athenian contexts, and the language of sickness used at the opening recurs later when Timaeus discusses women’s wombs and menstrual cycles. She feels that the missing fourth is a woman philosopher, and connected this to the Khôra’s demand that we take even what we regard as evil and find a way to transform it, to make it beautiful again.

The opening of the Timaeus is an exercise in humility—the Greeks are like children relative to the Egyptians, and even the Egyptians inherit from an earlier civilization. Knowledge has a historical element, and anamnesis, recollection of the past, is an essential element in its production and reproduction. Danny asked what I make of the myth of Atlantis. I was reminded of my first anthropology course as an undergraduate, when it fully sank in that Homo sapiens has been around for at least 300,000 years—a number that keeps getting pushed back. You’re telling me we only started doing this whole language, writing, and civilization thing a few thousand years ago? What the hell were we doing for the other 290,000 years?! Multiple ice ages have passed in the history of our species, and with the glaciers coming in and going out, any evidence of prior civilizations would have been wiped out. So if we try to read Atlantis as a literal historical thing, I can’t rule that out. But if this is at the level of mythopoeia, I think it’s inevitable that we imagine an ancient source of knowledge as pushed back temporally toward an origin—rather than thinking in terms of archetypal anamnesis, where what comes in is actually a vertical dimension, arriving not from the deep past necessarily but from the womb of potential within which we are immersed. Atlantis is both a vision of what a highly advanced civilization could be and a warning about the hubris that stems from that advance: the very sense of pride in being so modern and enlightened might be the source of our fall. I’ll never forget reading William Irwin Thompson’s Darkness and Scattered Light (1978), which references this very myth and its hubris in connection with the World Trade Center towers—suggesting that if the myth is archetypally resonant, it wouldn’t be surprising if those towers came crashing down. That was decades before 9/11. Whether historical or mythical, this is a powerful idea for thinking how civilizations rise and fall even today.

Eli observed that people who approach Whitehead from the Principia Mathematica often assume he is obsessed with logical foundations and a perfectly unified science of everything—when in fact the mature Whitehead holds logical perfection as a rigorous aspiration while acknowledging that no speculative system has ever or could ever achieve it. I acknowledged here my friend Ben Snyder, who has an impressive, expert-level understanding of Whitehead but tends to read him for his congruence with the analytic tradition and with Russell, the continuity of his methodology going back to the Principia. Ben is always trying to make Whitehead seem less strange, more logical—to domesticate his philosophy a bit, to say he’s basically saying what Russell is saying. And I love him for it. But I’m always trying to move in the opposite direction, pointing out all the ways Whitehead resists Russell’s approach. Their motivations were distinct even at the beginning of the Principia project, which was inaugurated by Russell’s discovery of a paradox in what Frege thought he was about to complete. They wanted a formalist or logicist account of the origins of mathematics, and what they ended up discovering is that mathematics has an irreducibly intuitive aspect. You just can’t escape it. My impression is that Whitehead was liberated by that discovery, and Russell was devastated.

Whitehead was liberated into applied mathematics—right as the relativity and quantum revolutions were happening—and drawn from the foundations of mathematics into the foundations of physics, then into the philosophy of nature, then into metaphysics proper. By the end of his career, in his final essay, he declares that “exactness is a fake.” Here is this preeminent logician saying that formal methodology leaves something out, and maybe leaves out the most important feature of reality: the aesthetic. Whitehead says in Process and Reality that rationalism is an experimental adventure in which even partial success has importance. There is no perfection, no completing the system—but you don’t need that for the formal, mathematical approach to be valuable. It’s a matter of recognizing, as the Pythagoreans and Plato did, that mathematical truth is a function of harmony. There is an irreducibly intuitive dimension to these truths, and aesthetics—our appreciation for the beautiful—is not a side issue in philosophy but the core. The beautiful is the one idea that straddles the sensible and the intelligible: it is the portal into the intelligible. We might call beauty the rebirth canal. That is how you achieve metanoia: you go toward the beautiful.

Eli recommended Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh’s The Mathematical Experience here, noting that when you actually study how mathematicians work—historically, even in evaluating a candidate’s solution to a problem—what they attend to is the aesthetics of the moves, the dance of the inquiry, more than the mere solution. Axioms are an integration after inquiry, not a deductive starting point. Danny tied this to Plato’s unwritten doctrines of the one and the indefinite dyad, and to the dialogues’ proliferation of methods as the never-ending invention of ways to see form.

The Sophist is a dialogue I’ve come to love—not because of the almost boring unfolding of the method of division, but because of the way, as Whitehead points out, Plato gives non-being the status of one of the highest kinds. It’s not just a nothingness; it’s a determinate other-than-what-is, and it functions in its absence in a really potent way, much like the khôra. And the Sophist is the dialogue Whitehead is always referencing for the definition of being as power: the ability to affect or be affected—to be in relation, in other words. Danny developed this beautifully: non-being as relational, dynamic being, always moving toward its other, animating being through that very dynamism—a love affair between the principle of unity and the principle of generative relation.

Eli noted that the Sophist helps explain why Whitehead thinks eternal objects are worth postulating at all: not as some “really real” out there that can’t be proven, but as what makes the conditions of transformation intelligible. I agreed—whether we call it power or non-being, we are talking about potentiality and its role in the process of actualization, or individuation if you like. Eternal objects are a stumbling block. I experienced this myself when I first came to Whitehead, expecting it to be all process all the time, and then banging my forehead against these eternal objects: what are these doing here, in this supposed process philosophy? But Whitehead makes very clear that permanence and flux go together like peanut butter and jelly—they are essential for one another’s meaning. If you want a dynamic understanding of reality, you need potentiality, and you need definite potentiality. Non-being isn’t just nothingness with no distinction; there are specific kinds of non-being, specific ways that what is not actual is absent. There is a definiteness to the realm of potentiality, a structure to it. And where is that structure, and what is it, if it’s not actual? You’ve got to have some doctrine of the forms. Plato defends the idea of ideas—and all the best arguments against it are also in the dialogues, so no one is pretending this is easy. But if you try to account for what’s actual without making reference to what’s possible, you run into even more intractable problems. We need eternal objects. I will defend them—not that they need defending. They’re solid on their own!

Asked about my current research, I said I can’t help but think about artificial intelligence and large language models—every class and group of students I sit with mentions it now—and what this is doing to academia, to human consciousness, thinking, knowledge, and research. What does it mean if intelligence can be mechanized? Or was our intelligence always already artificial in different ways, in the sense that it has been mediated by technological extensions? The alphabet is one such extension, and Plato has a lot to say about it: his whole discussion in the Phaedrus of writing and its effects on memory, creating the appearance of wisdom where there is not actually any wisdom. You could lift those arguments and concerns right out of Plato’s time into our own and apply them directly to large language models. You don’t even need to update the language; it’s immediately relevant.

So I wrote a book on this—Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence—with lots of Whitehead and lots of Plato in it. I think of philosophy as always having marshaled an emergency response in these moments of mutation between dominant media technologies. As philosophers and as Platonists we have a role to play in avoiding two extremes: the Luddite extreme—let’s break into the server farms at night and smash the machines—and the transhumanist extreme, on which we biological human beings are just the boot code for the more supreme form of intelligence that will replace us. There is a middle path we can carve here, and I want to help my students navigate it. It’s one thing for academics who already learned how to write; my teachers had typewriters, card catalogs, whiteout. But students now can get through university never having actually had to write a paragraph by themselves, never feeling what it’s like to begin from a blank page. Writing is being transformed, and our consciousness is being transformed with it—and I don’t yet know what to tell my students about how to deal with this situation. It’s all hands on deck right now: an exciting time, and a perilous moment. I thought of the last line of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey about being the last generation that will know how to write. That is our situation.

My concern isn’t simply with the technical details of transformer architectures. It’s that popular culture is at real risk of succumbing to a kind of advertising that these machines are already conscious, or could become conscious. That story is profoundly disempowering for human beings—because if the machines are already conscious, then that means we ourselves are also just machines. Philosophy needs to resist that story. But we need a better story, one more exciting and alluring than what the big tech companies are foisting upon us.