jurnal.eidotomic

Nassim Nicholas Taleb constructs his Platonicity in a dual cascade of ever shorter, more concise, explanatory definitions, out of which a third explicatory flow has grown, too. For want of space, on my part, and lacking any additional information, on the part of its author, I’m not going to refer to, or, for that matter, quote, this latter (and later, too, as it only appears at the end of the book) supplement excrescence.

The first cascading definition of his Platonicity, which plummets to the bottom of its solid conclusion, is necessarily longer, as it concentrates most of its noetic down-flow, and it reads like this:

What I call Platonicity after the ideas (and personality) of the philosopher Plato, is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined “forms,” whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like utopias (societies built according to some blueprint of what “makes sense”), even nationalities.

(Prologue, XXV, Plato and the Nerd)

The second one is what necessarily touches the ground beneath, and its more to the point formulation consists of the noetic splashes it produced at touchdown:

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do.

Probably one of the most striking examples of exterior Platonicity, as those commented upon by The Black Swan’s author, is that which critically analyzes the use, and importance, of breast-feeding:

Doctors in the midst of the scientific arrogance of the 1960s looked down at mother’s milk as something primitive, as if it could be replicated by their laboratories – not realizing that mother’s milk might include useful components that could have eluded their scientific understanding – a simple confusion of absence of evidence of the benefits of mother’s milk with evidence of absence of the benefits (another case of Platonicity as “it did not make sense” [my italics] to breast-feed when we could simply use bottles). (pp. 54-55)

That which doesn’t make sense thus becomes the norm of things and, accordingly, we should expect not to know what we do know. In spite of making no sense, when it has never ceased to be available as a traditional form of the norm, feeding babies with milk bottles is always the current form of the norm.

The special kind of Platonicity is the interior one, and is to be found in Plato himself, namely in Socrates’ general attitude to death, as it is evinced in the Apology (29a), and in the Phaedo, (67d-e; 116e-117b), where he expects “quite cheerfully” his upcoming demise, as well as in his particular attitude to death, of which how he reacted to Crito’s plea to accept to be saved by his friends is a characteristic example. Socrates serenely rejects this idea, all too in-human, and, I might say, fear-proof and, indeed, fear-free.

Instead of reacting to his condemnation to death in a more human, sense-making way (thus, in a Platonicist fashion), he promptly rejects being saved by his friends and begins talking about the obvious “philosophical” shortcomings of such a plan. In doing so, he exhibits no human emotions at all, and doesn’t make any sense from an etymologically aesthetic point of view, proving to be, at least in this respect, exactly how he defined himself merely a month ago, in the Apology, when he said of himself, half modestly and half conceitedly, but both modesty and conceit being theatrical, that he was “superior”:

For it is generally believed, whether it be true or false, that in certain respects Socrates is superior to the majority of men (35a).

This particular case of interior Platonicity stands against the larger background-like Platonicist modus vivendi of Socrates, according to which he is the wisest of men in that he knows too well he doesn’t know anything:

What is probable, gentlemen, is that in fact the god is wise and that his oracular response meant that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and that when he says this man, Socrates, he is using my name as an example, as if he said: “This man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless” (23b).

At least perfunctorily, this statement of his proves to be nonsensical, if, de-constructed in a Socratic fashion, one thinks unworthy of oneself the very knowledge one bases one’s very lack of knowledge upon in the first place.

I wonder whether, in coining his Platonicity, and in so devising it theoretically, its author had in mind, as a starting point, these examples, among the likely many others taken from the textual corpus that this intellectual construct has been named after.