Platão nos anos 2000

"Plato at the Googleplex" (2014) é um livro difícil, com algumas partes hilariantes que ajudam a ultrapassar as mais densas, mas que em essência me fizeram compreender de que é feita a filosofia que há tantos anos leio com entusiasmo. Neste trabalho Goldstein dá conta da atualidade das ideias de Platão, ao trazê-lo para os anos 2000, colocando-o a debater questões que continuam sem resposta desde a Antiga Grécia, evidenciando que apesar da evolução do conhecimento científico, a forma da filosofia continua atual. Nesse sentido, a dialética é a base, é ela mesma a própria filosofia. Importa o processo de argumentação e contra-argumentação, e não propriamente a meta, a resposta final. As grandes discussões assentam em paradoxos ou em equilíbrios de partes contraditórias, pelo que a discussão pode ser infinita, com Goldenstein a afirmar que o progresso é “invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. . . . We don’t see it, because we see with it.”. Ou seja, a filosofia é uma forma de análise e compreensão da realidade, não centrada na busca de respostas, mas antes no crescimento do indivíduo, na afirmação da virtude humana.

 

A estrutura do livro assenta num conjunto de Diálogos que são entremeados com textos de contextualização filosófica e histórica. Sendo que esses textos ganham por vezes uma densidade que me pareceu excessiva, afastando os menos treinados na área como eu. Por outro lado, os diálogos são bastante acessíveis, colados às problemáticas dos nosso dias. Temos Platão na Google a discutir os benefícios da internet e a moral das massas, pondo em evidência o problema da definição da moral. Depois Platão discute com a Mãe Guerreira (decalcada da Amy Chua) e a anti-guerreira, pondo em evidência não apenas o problema da educação, mas o da cultura versus natureza. A seguir temos o diálogo com um típico apresentador de televisão americana conservador (decalcado de Bill O’Reilly), em que se discute a relevância da academia, dos especialistas, e a diferença entre entretenimento e conhecimento. E por fim, como não podia deixar de ser, a discussão com um neurocientista sobre o livre-arbítrio.

Ao longo do livro Goldstein coloca em evidência a eterna luta entre as humanidades e as ciências, nomeadamente entre a filosofia e o método científico, apontando a evolução de ambas pela sua interdependência. Muitas questões começaram na filosofia e foram solucionadas, mais tarde, pelo método científico, por outro lado, muita evolução da ciência tem servido para transformar o próprio debate filosófico. É errado afirmar que a filosofia está no mesmo ponto em que estava na Antiga Grécia e é errado afirmar que só o método científico permite o progresso — como já ouvimos Neil deGrasse Tyson ou Richard Dawkins dizer — já que a base da evolução do conhecimento assenta exatamente na capacidade crítica de colocar questões e não apenas de dar respostas.

Pasteleiros e Saúde

"PLATO: Who is it that can better tell you what is good for the body, the pastry maker or the doctor? (...) it is so obvious that the doctor can better treat the body, understanding how to promote its health, whereas the pastry maker simply delights the body, knowing how to give it pleasure without thought as to what is best for it. Pastry making has put on the mask of medicine, and pretends to know the foods that are best for the body, so that if a pastry maker and a doctor had to compete in front of an audience of children, or in front of people just as foolish as children, who were to determine which of the two, the doctor or the pastry maker, had expert knowledge of good food and bad, the doctor would die of starvation. And so it is that the orator is like the pastry maker, both knowing well the knack of gratifying. And what is this knack? With the lure of what’s most pleasant at the moment, it sniffs out folly and hoodwinks it, so that it gives the impression of being most deserving. I call this flattery, and I say that such a thing is shameful because it guesses at what’s pleasant with no consideration for what’s best (Gorgias 464d–645a, though scrambled).

Argumentos contra a Mãe-Guerreira

"MUNITZ: The question is not whether I, or even whether most of us—who have been subjected to the psychopathology of everyday parenting—have a driving need to achieve, as an alcoholic has a need for the bottle or an addict a need for the needle, in order to feel, at least temporarily, the high of believing ourselves the superior person our parents made us feel we were absolutely required to be in order to be loved. That is not the question. The question is whether that is how people ought to feel. Again, the normative, the moral question. And here I answer unequivocally that it is not.

Let us consider the child abuse that is involved here. Yes, I do not shrink from the charge of child abuse. The child’s need for a parent’s love is overwhelming. A parent who stresses achievement is irresistibly imposing on the child the idea that its being loved is conditional upon its performing well the tasks that the parent holds up before the child’s desperate eyes as the gateway to love. In this way, the child is conditioned to consider only the parent’s own desires for it, so urgent is its need to win this love, and in time the child will even lose the sense of any conflicting desires it has for itself, which, of course, is a situation much to the parent’s liking, since it makes its project for the child—the project that is the child—all the easier.

And I would add, by the way, that this projectification of the child has only increased with the liberation of women. Ambitious women, who have invested so much in their education and careers, are required to make sacrifices to their own advancement by the obstruction that is a child. And so these mothers will require of that child that it really be worth the sacrifice, worth the slowing down of their own scramble up the ladder of success. And so the pressure on the child to be off the charts is only intensified. 

I think it is no accident that the author of this book which I have not read is herself a practitioner in a fiercely competitive field. For such a woman, a child is so substantial a setback to her own ambition that, in order to offset the setback, the child must earn back its existence by being so exceptional as to add to, rather than subtract from, the ambitious mother’s tallying of her successes. So feminism, I am sorry to say, has only intensified the projectification of children.

Now let me just say that this projectification will certainly get positive results in good grades, admission to brag-worthy schools, and other tricks of the little performing monkey, but at what price? A person raised by an organ-grinding mother—which I suggest as a more suitable epithet for the warrior mother, stripping her of the pseudo-heroics of your phrase—will forever conflate self-worth with surpassing others and garnering external signs of success, which will forever be confused with love, though of a most distancing and unsatisfying sort. One is raising a person who will forever be appraising others as possible competitors and so will feel profoundly isolated, knowing only the quick fix of personal achievement to temporarily dull the pain of being shut up in the small cold space of her own eternal need to justify her existence by excelling.

And this quick fix of achievement, mind you, is pursued not for the sake of the excellent work achieved, but rather for the sake of being regarded as excellent, whether there is true excellence there or not. Shortcuts to approval will be sought, methods of self-promotion will take precedence over the devoted hard work of true excellence, which, I might add, often goes unrecognized precisely because it is authentically superior. The author of this book, which has so much dictated tonight’s agenda, says that there is a happiness in the approval of others because it is a signal that true excellence has been achieved, but let me assure you on the basis of my years of therapeutic work that this is not accurate. It is the approval that is desperately sought, not the achievement itself. In fact, such a person has little feel for the integrity of the work itself, just as she has no sense for the integrity of the self, and shoddiness will do just as well, if not better, so long as praise is attained.

In short, this is a prescription for lifelong anxiety, loneliness, and, in the end, mediocrity. So if that is what you would like for your child, then here is indeed the recipe to raise such an exceptional child."