Posted By BillHeise on February 24, 2009

This morning there is a story questioning whether or not Google is covering up Atlantis.

I have never understood why the Atlantis myth continues to exercise such a powerful grip on the human imagination. I assume it’s because people don’t know that Plato—the only source for this ridiculous story—was making it up.

Why would Plato do such a thing? Here is the answer I gave in my dissertation:

In the Timaeus, Critias gives a suspiciously complex narrative history of how he has come to learn to read nature allegorically. He tells how he heard a story from an old man who, in his youth, had met the poet Solon. Solon had travelled to the Nile Delta district of Sais, where he meets an Egyptian wise man. The wise man tells Solon that, in a figurative sense, there are no wise old men in Greece: the Greeks have no ancient traditions. If they had, then the Greeks would know how to interpret their myths as allegories of natural phenomena. The story of Phaeton, it turns out, “really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth which recurs after long intervals” (22c10-22d3).

The old Egyptian tells Solon that the lack of ancient traditions in Greece means that the Greeks do not even know their own origins. It turns out that they are really descended from an ancient race of Athenians, who were able to defeat the race of conquerors from Atlantis after they had conquered the rest of the known world. Critias tells Socrates that “there will be no inconsistency in saying that the citizens of your republic are these ancient Athenians” (26d3-4).

This story can hardly be exempt from the suspicion that it does not really bridge the gulf between fiction and reality. The complicated narrative framework seriously undermines the credibility of the story. If, as Socrates suggests, poetic fables can be infected by poets’ experiences and so decline from the truth, then there are a number of places where fiction may have crept into this story.

• Solon is a poet, and there must be a hint of suspicion about any account he renders of anything, since his experience may distort what he says.
• The land of Atlantis is not known by experience, but by the Egyptian’s authority. His authority rests on his own claim to be an old man of the sort lacking in Greece in Solon’s time.
• Critias seems to redouble the authority of the story of Atlanteans—of whom no one has ever heard before—by claiming to have heard the story from an old man.

Despite the Egyptian’s seeming guarantee that myth can be allegorized by reference to nature, we are quite removed from natural world of experience at this point. The removal from the natural world in the myth of Atlantis can be contrasted with the removal of Socrates’ ideal state in the Republic, which does not pretend to have an ultimate reference in the world of nature or history.

One of the themes that arises is the theme of natural destruction. The Egyptian suggests that the Greeks have no traditions because natural disasters arise which kill off all the greek city dwellers, leaving only the ignorant shepherd who live in the mountains. The key to good traditions and to indestructible cities, says the Egyptian, is good geographical location, rather than Socrates’ suggestion that we should build the ideal city in the human mind.

As proof of his contention, the old Egyptian cites his home territory. The Nile floods regularly, so that the Egyptians can predict the onslaught of natural destruction. It is no accident, then, that in the Egyptian’s myth the infinite continent of Atlantis is not destroyed by the Athenians or their virtue, but by an absolutely arbitrary natural disaster, as Socrates’ city can never be.

In Plato’s book of natural myth, the Timaeus, nature destroys all ideal cities—whether “fictional” or real—except Socrates’ own imaginative city. The Timaeus allows us to suggest that Plato understands that Socrates city exists only in the endless conversations in which Socrates participates—of which the Republic is simply a single instance—rather than in an ontologically existing world of Forms. Such conversational realm is invulnerable to the assaults of natural reference. To bridge the gap between fiction and reality, as the old Egyptian does in the Timaeus, is to reify a fiction.

This is why I don’t believe that Plato actually believes in the myth of Atlantis. But it seems that everybody else does. Oh well, que sera, sera.

Categories: Philosophy
Tags: Experts, Plato