Suggested reading: Plato was not White

Posted byMassimoPosted insuggested readings

by Nathan P. Gilmour

Another teaching semester is about to ramp up, and as is often the case, I have some Platonic dialogues lined up to teach. I’ve taught at least one dialogue in almost every semester since about 2005, and on the campus of Emmanuel College, where I’ve taught since 2009, people who know about me at all know about me as “that Plato guy.” My sense is that the relatively few people who know about me on the Internet regard me likewise.

Perhaps that professional investment in Plato (personally, I’m more of a postmodern Augustinian with leanings towards MacIntyre’s brand of neo-Thomism) has made me more irritable than I should be when the old Athenian ends up in the crosshairs of well-meaning folks who wish to set right the balance of power and take away the overlordship (I prefer that Anglo-Saxon compound word to the Hellenism “hegemony,” and I grant the irony) from “dead white males.” I think the political questions there are fascinating, but a matter of some historical import gets in the way of the politics, if one isn’t careful: Plato wasn’t White. … (continue at The Christian Humanist)

Published by Massimo

Massimo is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. He blogs at platofootnote.org and howtobeastoic.org. He is the author of How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life.

34 thoughts on “Suggested reading: Plato was not White”

  1. What a strange detour this post is. Massimo, I am baffled by your reading tastes and left wondering what the point is(perhaps I can guess). Your football post was excellent, though I thought in some ways incomplete. Opinions may vary and surely will.

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    1. Peter, surely you will agree that being baffled is a good thing. It pushes you out of your comfort zone. That said, did you have a specific reason to dislike this particular post?

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  2. Hi Massimo
    “surely you will agree that being baffled is a good thing”

    Oh yes, absolutely. I will qualify that slightly. Yes, if it ignites a sense of curiosity, wonder and awe that propels deeper inquiry.

    “pushes you out of your comfort zone”

    Yes, intellectual comfort is a sign of senescence. Now where is DM? I loved him for being a querdenker.

    “did you have a specific reason to dislike this particular post?”

    No, I did not dislike it. It puzzled me. Why were you reading an article by a Christian Humanist? That did seem unlike you. Mind you I am glad you did since he says some interesting things. I am intrigued by his interview with John Haught – God after Einstein, and I wasted no time getting the book.

    This sparked another train of thought, that there was nothing incompatible beween theism and humanism, nor for that matter, between theism and scepticism(note the English spelling). I think that the atheist world has misappropriated these terms. I think they did this because they needed convenient, if pretentious, labels. I am reminded of the way the Communist world misappropriated the terms “democratic” and “people’s”. During my tenure in China I was continuously subjected to a barrage of slogans. I now look back on that time as like being Alice in Sloganland!

    I will say nothing on the racist angle. Living in the heart of racism does not make me an expert on it any more than being a fish in an aquarium would make me an expert on aquariums.

    But keep it up Massimo. Your eclectic posts are always worth the read.

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    1. Peter, I think theism and humanism, as well as theism and skepticism have, shall we say, some tensions. Incompatibility is too strong of a word, but I don’t think they are as compatible as you seem to imply.

      Regarding this particular article, I found it because I was doing some research after an interesting episode. My wife, who teachers English and creative writing at the City University of New York, used Plato and his cave metaphor in one of her classes. A colleague pointed out to her that Plato was “another white dude.” I thought the article makes clear why that sort of superficially critical labeling is, historically and sociologically, nonsense.

      The fact that it was written by a self-professed Christian Humanist was irrelevant to me.

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  3. I believe I caught the conceit without yet clicking through: Plato was not White because the ancient Mediterranean did not have “race” categories that started with the oft-ironically named Age of Enlightenment. That said on “both sides” of an issue that definitely has more than two sides, per Iranian philosopher Idries Shah, he gets treated as White within modern academic teaching and canon wars. We’ll see what the author says about the second part after I click through.

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  4. Per the larger picture, I like when you post on art exhibits. (I don’t know how much you listen to, live or otherwise, classical music.) I’m not in New York, but Dallas was long ago called the “New York City of Texas” (and that wasn’t necessarily meant as a compliment!). Between the Dallas Museum of Art, and Kimball (with its architectural history, too) and the Amon Carter in Fort Worth, I can get my fill — I’m about 70 miles away. And, in Denton, just 35 miles, there’s a decent-for-the-population museum. I just got my first live classical since COVID with the Fine Arts Chamber Players November concert last month.

    Besides, aesthetics IS traditionally a branch of philosophy!

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    1. “I just got my first live classical since COVID with the Fine Arts Chamber Players November concert last month.”

      Ahh, you are such a fortunate fellow. By contrast think of my stuation. We are without electrical power for six to eight hours a day. In my city we have had no running water for the last eight days. Our public health system is in a state of complete collapse. Our police services are controlled by gangsters. The civil service is riddled with corruption from top to bottom. Hit squads routinely take out political opponents. We have become one of the most violent societies on the planet and I carry the scars on my body as evidence of this. And then my daughter was gang raped.

      So what is the relevance to our discussion about ‘whiteness’? Well, it wasn’t always like this. Consider this. We did the first heart transplant in the world. We had a world class health system. 22 years ago our electricity generation system was rated the best in the world. Failures in the water distribution system had never happened. And then in an act wholly without precedent we ceded power to our opponents.

      And now the future we feared has happened. Except that it is much worse than anything we feared. What can one do except bury our dead, reach into the depths of one’s character, and call up all one’s reserves of hardiness and resilience, coping as best one can. I think it is called Stoicism.

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    2. I’m of course terribly sorry to hear about your situation and especially what happened to your daughter. But are you suggesting somehow that the Apartheid regime was justified by the guarantee of electricity and running water?

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  5. “ A colleague pointed out to her that Plato was “another white dude.””

    And this was presumably a well educated academic. Which just goes to show that bias and prejudice is a natural human condition that cuts across all classes and that education seemingly does little to mitigate. All that changes is the excuse we use to activate this condition.

    Full marks to your wife for teaching Plato in an English class.

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  6. Massimo,

    “ I think theism and humanism, as well as theism and skepticism have, shall we say, some tensions.”

    That all depends on whose account of theism you read. It encompasses a vast range of beliefs. A common technique that atheists use is is to characterise theism by its weakest and most extreme arguments and then exclaim “Aha, see how weak and deluded theist arguments are”. Of course it is a horribly dishonest form of argument. But hey, who cares when you are waging a rhetorical war.

    I think what really opened my mind was to engage with two Jesuit philosophers and to discover the great sublety, depth and nuanced nature of their arguments. Never look down on your opponents. The Jesuit order has serious intellectual depth.

    The principle is simple. If you want to attack opposing belief systems you must engage with their best proponents and examine their best arguments. Nothing else will do.

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    1. Peter, sorry, I’m fairly familiar with sophisticated theism, and I still think it’s a non starter and fundamentally incompatible with the scientific view of the world. Deism may be compatible, but then why bother?

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  7. “and fundamentally incompatible with the scientific view of the world.”

    And I fundamentally disagree. The scientific view of the world is one of the strongest arguments for theism.

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    1. Of course you would disagree. But I’m very familiar with both theism and the scientific worldview, and I’m having a really hard time imagining how you get to your conclusion.

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  8. “fundamentally incompatible with the scientific view of the world”

    I have to say that this is a familiar atheist trope but it always dissolves when subjected to close examination. It is not for nothing that the Catholic Church has an entire academy devoted to the examination of science. Their point of view is simple, science is the preeminent, indeed final, arbiter in matters of factual truth and they see no contradiction between science and sophisticated expressions of religion.

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    1. They see no contradiction *now*. Historically they burned at the stakes those who suggested a contradiction. But they now no ,longer have the power to do so, therefore they have changed their mind.

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  9. “Of course you would disagree.”

    No, no Massimo. That is not an argument but a rhetorical gesture.

    “I’m having a really hard time imagining how you get to your conclusion.”

    I will be happy to examine your arguments/evidence for the fundamental incompatibility of theism and science(your claim, after all). I am confident they can be easily answered.

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    1. Peter, mine is no more than a rhetorical gesture than yours. Did I miss an actual argument on your part? Moreover, as you know very well, we are simply not going to convince each other on this, so I suggest we drop the thread.

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  10. “But they now no ,longer have the power to do so, therefore they have changed their mind.”

    And you know their motivation? How? It is a bad tactic in a debate to assign the worst motivation to your opponent. A better and entirely more charitable explanation is that they actively learn and adapt as times change.

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    1. Peter, I don’t need to read minds, I can read the historical evidence. And please stop telling me that I’m making bad rhetorical moves and engaging in uncharitable interpretations. It just doesn’t help moving the debate forward, which is what you claim you want to do.

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  11. “I’m of course terribly sorry to hear about your situation and especially what happened to your daughter.”

    Thanks Massimo.

    “But are you suggesting somehow that the Apartheid regime was justified by the guarantee of electricity and running water?”

    No, not at all. It inflicted horrible abuses and should have been ended. But I will say we were efficient and effective. For example we developed nuclear weapons with ease. Contrast that with the slow difficult development in Iran.

    This has nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture. Cultures are the aggregation of values within certain boundaries that delineate them. These boundaries can be regional, linguistic, geographic or ethnic, etc. The boundaries do not define the culture but confines it and are merely markers that we use for ease of reference. Some cultures are infiltrated by and permeated with toxic value systems. That is a simple historical fact but what is not simple is why this should be so.

    Then this is complicated by the time element, the isolation element and the corrosion element

    The time element means that it take a fairly long time for beneficial values to seep into a culture from neighbouring cultures.

    The isolation element means that boundaries can retard the seepage of beneficial values into a culture.

    The corrosion element means that competing cultures may erode host cultures in toxic ways before the beneficial values take hold.

    Here in SA the host culture is the result of all three problems and we have a toxic outcome. When I say ‘toxic’ that means I am judging it from the point of view of Western values, which seems natural to us. They will reply, and indeed do so, that we are subjecting them to mental colonisation by expecting Western outcomes and judging them by Western values.

    For example, the slogan within the ANC(the ruling African party) is that “it is our time to eat”. They mean this and see nothing wrong with that. Bribery and corruption are simply their means of claiming back what we owe them. They are especially vocal about our ‘Western’ justice system, seeing it as an unfair imposition, calling instead for an ‘African’ justice system. By this they mean the right to make political appointees from within the party ranks to all judicial positions. In this way they can get the outcomes they desire from the legal processes. This is called ‘cadre deployment’ and is offical governmental policy.

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    1. Thanks for the clarification. As you know, I’m a Stoic and humanist, so I don’t believe in Western vs African justice. I think there is human justice, and then there is the sort of self-serving parochialism that both Westerners and Africans so easily fool themselves into calling “justice.”

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  12. Back to the original issue. I find it difficult to disagree with the article, surprised as I was by its title. Critics of the Canon cannot *at one on the same time* tell us that race is a social construct, and *also* that Plato counts as white. There is of course a way of framing Plato that both the author of this article, and at least one well known classics professor (Padilla Peralta), want to go extinct, and we could certainly use a conversation about what we should do instead. I am reminded of your recent post about seeing classical sculpture with its original colouring

    A side issue; I have great discomfort with the term “white”. if we use that classification, it would certainly apply to me,and yet I am old enough to remember a time when the English Channel was all that separated me from people who would have killed me because I was *the wrong kind* of white.

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  14. Massimo, that was a nice piece and I agree.

    “being “equal parts vampire and cannibal.” At a conference at the Society for Classical Studies in 2019 he said: “I want nothing to do with [the classics]. I hope the field dies … and that it dies as swiftly as possible.””

    When someone uses such emotive and tendentious language I severely doubt everything he has to say. Because it is then evident that his fine intellect is being held hostage by overriding emotions when in fact the intellect should be overriding the emotions.

    This phenomenom is more common than you might think. I saw this all the time in the corporate world. When people acquire status, position and power it loosens their control over their emotions. They feel empowered to express their emotions strongly and publicly because they feel shielded by their power and they think their power commands respect for all their utterances. But they demean themselves.

    For me it is very simple. One must clearly separate the content of utterances from their originator and they should be studied separately, on their own merits within their own context. Study of the orginator is a legitimate interest in historical, sociological and biographic works and can be very interesting for that reason, provided that we don’t fall into the pernicious trap of presentism.

    Of course the ancient world was riven with injustices and cruelty. That was always true everywhere. What is remarkable is that such works of great intellectual insight and clarity could have arisen in such environments. They should be celebrated for their extraordinary genius.

    When I see a beautiful plant growing out of stony, hostile and infertile soil I am doubly amazed. And I don’t judge the plant by the soil it was planted in. That would be plainly stupid.

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    1. Massimo, Peter (if I may), the ellipses are misleading and more context is called for. This from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html

      One panelist tried to interject, but Williams pressed on, her voice becoming harsh and staccato as the tide in the room moved against her. “I believe in merit. I don’t look at the color of the author.” She pointed a finger in Padilla’s direction. “You may have got your job because you’re Black,” Williams said, “but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”

      Discordant sounds went up from the crowd. Several people stood up from their seats and hovered around Williams at the microphone, seemingly unsure of whether or how to intervene. Padilla was smiling; it was the grimace of someone who, as he told me later, had been expecting something like this all along. At last, Williams ceded the microphone, and Padilla was able to speak. “Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”

      I have not read Peralta’s critique in detail, so will not venture a further opinion on it, but do not think it should be rejected merely because of such a misleadingly truncated brief quotation

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    2. Paul, I read the NYT article, and I’ve read Padilla himself. That comment about “you got a job because you are Black” was despicable. But that doesn’t help Padilla’s argument one iota, I think.

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    3. “Paul, I read the NYT article, and I’ve read Padilla himself.” I did not intend to suggest otherwise. I still think, however, that the ellipses invite an oversimplified judgment.

      This conversation sent me back to Bertrand Russell’s introductory remarks on Plato in his History of Western Philosophy. “It has always been correct [i.e. socially approved of] to praise Plato but not to understand him.… My object is the opposite. I wish to understand him, but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism.”

      This obviously is the way to go. However, to blame Plato for forms of totalitarianism that owe nothing to what Plato actually said, is the worst form of presentism.

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  15. Paul,
    “I have not read Peralta’s critique in detail, so will not venture a further opinion on it, but do not think it should be rejected merely because of such a misleadingly truncated brief quotation”

    All right, then, let’s leave Peralta out of it. In principle, should we judge an utterance on its intrinsic merit or on the merit of the speaker? Does a black skin lend an utterance greater merit? If not, does a white skin detract from the speaker’s merit? Once we begin on this path we are forced to embrace ever more absurd positions. The only way out of this ever increasing absurdity is to return to a basic first principle, that merit is not a skin colour. It is not a colour at all. It is instead the transcendant clarity and luminosity of compelling insights

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    1. The problem is that Peralta insists on the false narrative that the Greco-Romans are somehow linked to modern Colonialism and racism. They are not. What is true is that a distorted view of the Greco-Romans has been misused by a number of modern nazi-fascists. But as a scholar of antiquity himself he has absolutely no excuses for making that mistake.

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  16. “ but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism.”

    Perhaps Russell had a little too much reverence for himself.

    “However, to blame Plato for forms of totalitarianism that owe nothing to what Plato actually said, is the worst form of presentism.”

    Especially when one considers that totalitarianism and slavery were common conditions through most of recorded history. These forms of behaviour probably evolved quite naturally in response to the societal problems that accompanied the transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies.

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