Tag: Plato

Raphael’s School of Education

Posted on by Scott Samuelson

by Scott Samuelson

Raphael, School of Athens (1509-11). Detail of Plato and Aristotle. Click here to see the whole image.

Once I’ve hung a picture on the wall, I pretty much never look at it again. It goes right from the forefront of my mind to the background of my room. It’s only when a guest comments on it that I bother to see it again.

A similar thing can be said for iconic works of art. We see them so often that we don’t bother to look at them anymore. A good example is Raphael’s School of Athens, especially its central scene of Plato and Aristotle in conversation. It’s used to illustrate pretty much every article concerning philosophy in the popular media. When we see it, we think “philosophy” or maybe “classics” and move on.

Art historians aren’t much better. They love the game of guessing who each figure in the School of Athens is modeled on or is supposed to represent. Instead of seeing “philosophy,” their great advance is to see “Michelangelo” and “Heraclitus.” As fun and minorly informative as the guessing game can be, it still sees the painting as a cheap allegory.

I started taking a fresh look at the School of Athens when I had to teach it as part of a study abroad course to Rome. The more I looked at it, the more I started to see it as a compelling and comprehensive philosophy of education. To my surprise, I’ve found that it illustrates the complexity of what I aspire to as a teacher. Read more »

Sunday, January 11, 2026

Making the Invisible Visible: Plato and Jung on Archetypes

Posted on by Gary Borjesson

by Gary Borjesson

Carl Jung, c. 1935

It is the first week of the new year, a time traditionally given to reflecting on the year past and the year to come. Reviewing, summing things up—all those top 10 lists—and making resolutions. Having slowly gained more knowledge of what is stable in my disposition (for better and worse), I’m less tempted to dream of radical reinvention or even self-improvement. Depending on my mood, this can feel like self-acceptance or defeat.

One way of describing the situation is to say that I’m getting to know what Carl Jung described as the archetypal aspects of my psyche. Jung acknowledged that his account is a paraphrase of Plato’s description of the psychic patterns that structure our experience. For Jung these emerge from the collective unconscious, a realm beyond immediate conscious awareness. Plato’s Socrates locates them in an analogous place, the Underworld. These archetypes guide our lives in some respects, but they’re not the only forces at work. For Socrates and Jung, we exercise our power to be truly self-determining through getting to know the patterns that guide our lives, but do not determine our fates.

In honor of the birth of a new year, I want to share the story Socrates tells at the end of the Republic, about how souls come to choose the lives into which they’ll be reborn. For those familiar with depth psychology, this myth of Er (as the story is called) will be strikingly resonant.

A friend once told me he’d spent years trying to make himself into a scholar, and by the world’s eyes he had succeeded. But it never felt like a fit to him. Eventually he realized that, whatever his conscious intentions, he had the instincts and desires of an artist. (His academic articles kept wanting to become stories!) Denying this part of himself had generated internal conflict. So, rather than work against his natural wiring, he started finding ways to be an artist in his work and life. Read more »

Tuesday, December 30, 2026

The Pluribus Utopia

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

The recent show Pluribus has got me thinking differently about the kind of ideal state that might be a laudable direction and how to get there. The show is overtly about a hive mind interconnection, that started with a lab-leaked experiment, which affects almost all of the world except for 13 people who have natural immunity. We follow the trajectory of one of these anomalies, Carol, who gives them their titular name, not for “many,” a direct translation, but as her own invention: “the plural of succubus.” 

There will be no significant spoilers here; this isn’t about the show specifically, but about its depiction of a perfectly efficient and seemingly happy and altruistic society. Is Carol the last one left in the cave, or is she the only one who’s on the outside? 

The hive all works together effortlessly as one, with a prime directive to do no harm, as they distribute food worldwide with the utmost equity. They don’t step on bugs or swat flies. They will eat meat if it’s already dead, but they won’t kill it themselves. They also won’t pluck an apple from a tree. They don’t interfere with life. They can’t lie overtly. It’s all very pleasant. The hive won’t harm a living body; however, they didn’t mind obliterating the human spirit of 8 billion people without explicit consent, rendering their ethics questionable.

Connections to the show have been made with AI and Covid, so it may be useful to keep in mind that the show was originally written over ten years ago. If looking for authorial intent, those aren’t necessarily parallels. At that link, the lead of the show, Rhea Seehorn said she originally asked if it’s about addiction, and it’s not that either. There’s an element of just exploring human nature and what brings us happiness, and she likes journalists who “want to talk about philosophical questions about what this is bringing up for them. And we’re hearing all these different things. It’s wonderful.” I’m game! Read more »

Sunday, December 14, 2025

The Barren Midwife: On Socratic Method and Psychotherapeutic Art

Posted on by Gary Borjesson

by Gary Borjesson

I’ve rarely regretted holding my tongue during a session. I’ve rarely regretted drawing out what’s on a patient’s mind instead of offering some (apparently) juicy insight or interpretation of my own. Holding myself back is sometimes a matter of willpower, but mostly a matter of art. The root of this art is the Socratic method.

In broad terms, the Socratic method can be used to teach law and other technical subjects, but these aren’t psycho-therapeutic in the way that Socrates was, that Plato’s dialogues are, or that a psychotherapist is. Law professors are not examining a student’s unconscious feelings, thoughts, or beliefs. Rather, the student has taken in a teaching, and their grasp is tested by Socratic-style questioning. But Socrates and Plato themselves are concerned with making what’s latent in the mind conscious, as are psychoanalysts and other depth therapists.

Socrates distinguishes the deeper, more therapeutic potential of his method by calling himself a midwife. This ‘maieutic’ metaphor has become synonymous with his method, as the accompanying definition shows. I want to unpack the meaning of Socratic midwifery and how this is reflected in psychotherapeutic art. The parallels are naturally of interest to me, having spent the first half of my career as a philosophy professor before leaving academia to become a psychotherapist. But more than that, the wisdom folded into the metaphor of midwifery sheds light on how to pursue an aim shared by philosophy and psychotherapy: getting to know oneself. Read more »

Sunday, November 23, 2025

Plato’s Defense of the Humanities

Posted on by Scott Samuelson

by Scott Samuelson

Billy and Benny McGuire, listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s heaviest twins. For a while, they worked as professional wrestlers.

I was a freshman in college when I first read Plato’s Apology, his version of the event that probably made the biggest mark on him: his city’s trial and condemnation of Socrates.

I recall how a fellow student in Humanities 101 was skeptical of the claim in the Apology that the unexamined life is not worth living. He asked about the worth of the lives of the world’s two heaviest twins, the ones pictured on Honda motorcycles in the Guinness Book of World Records (an image emblazoned on all our minds). Regardless of if they led examined lives, he asked, didn’t they seem to be living well, zooming around the country together?

We ended up debating if philosophy is just one way of having a good life, or if it’s a necessary ingredient in all lives. I don’t remember where I landed (in fact, I’m still making up my mind), but I vividly remember thinking that all of us have bottomlessly deep lives, and that all human lives are worth examining, especially those of the two brothers on their Hondas.

I went on to major in philosophy and eventually to teach philosophy in a wide variety of venues—not just liberal arts colleges, universities, and community colleges, but houses of worship, bars, prisons, and even online. I’ve often had occasion to assign the Apology and debate the merits of the examined life.

In my experience, readers of the dialogue are inevitably struck by how Socrates doesn’t seem to care about winning his case. So, what’s he really up to? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about in light of higher education’s current predicament, where the academic humanities are fighting for their existence against powerful economic, cultural, and political forces. What should I as a defender of the humanities be doing? What can I learn from Socrates at his trial?

Having just reread the Apology, this time for the Catherine Project with a group of especially sharp readers, I’ve drawn nine lessons from how Socrates, in a far more perilous situation than our current one, presents and defends the humanities. Read more »

Friday, October 17, 2025

Friendship Begins at Home

Posted on by Gary Borjesson

by Gary Borjesson

To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment—whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test. —Carl Jung, lecturing on Nietzsche

L’amitie, Pablo Picasso, 1908. Permission of the State Hermitage Museum, US.

1. Friendship Born of Self

It is commonly, and truly, said that you can only love someone as well as you love yourself. For many of us, myself included, this is a hard teaching. As Jung says in the epigraph, we hope that we can love others without figuring out how to love ourselves, but eventually “it comes back on us.” The love I’m talking about is friendship. (It should come as no surprise that philosophers and psychologists haven’t looked to familial or romantic relationships as exemplars of enlightened love!) I want to explore how this curious relation between befriending ourselves and befriending others works. Along the way I show how we can use our discoveries to become better at both.

The notion that loving others depends on loving ourselves is not new. Aristotle discusses how the kind of friend we are to ourselves will be reflected in the kind of friendships we have with others. Where there is “internal conflict,” where, as he puts it, “souls are divided against themselves,” they will not be able to love themselves, or others. I think of people I’ve known who end up in therapy because a friend or partner made it clear that the relationship would be over if they didn’t address their depression or anxiety or addiction—examples of how internal discord causes troubles for others.

2. It’s Mutual, Actually

But friendships don’t just reflect who we are. Who we are, and how we show up in relationships, depends also on how we have been treated by others. If you grew up with a hypercritical rejecting mother, your attachment pattern and personality will reflect this. In other words, our way of being with others is informed by the way others have been with us; in particular, by how attentive and attuned (friendly) early caregivers were. Read more »

Sunday, October 20, 2024

Forget Turing, it’s the Tolkien test for AI that matters

Posted on by John Hartley

by John Hartley

With CAPTHCHA the latest stronghold to be breeched, following the heralded sacking of Turing’s temple, I propose a new standard for AI: The Tolkien test.

In this proposed schema, AI capability would be tested against what Andrew Pinsent terms ‘the puzzle of useless creation’. Pinsent, a leading authority on science and religion asks, concerning Tolkien: “What is the justification for spending so much time creating an entire family of imaginary languages for imaginary peoples in an imaginary world?”

Tolkien’s view of sub-creation framed human creativity as an act of co-creation with God. Just as the divine imagination shaped the world, so too does human imagination—though on a lesser scale—shape its own worlds. This, for Tolkien, was not mere artistic play but a serious, borderline sacred act. Tolkien’s works, Middle-earth in particular, were not an escape from reality, but a way of penetrating reality in the most acute sense.

For Tolkien, fantasia illuminated reality insofar is it tapped into the metaphysical core of things. The the artistic creation predicated on the creative imagination opened the individual to an alternate mode of knowledge, deeply intuitive and discursive in nature. Tolkien saw this creative act as deeply rational, not a fanciful indulgence. Echoing the Thomist tradition, he viewed fantasy as a way of refashioning the world that the divine had made, for only through the imagination is the human mind capable of reaching beyond itself.

The role of the creative imagination, then, is not to offer a mere replication of life but to transcend it. Here is the major test for AI, for in doing so, it accesses what Tolkien called the “real world”—the world beneath the surface of things. As faith seeks enchantment, so too does art seek a kind of conversion of the imagination, guiding it towards the consolation of eternal memory, what Plato termed ‘anamnesis’. Read more »

Friday, July 26, 2024

Akrasia and the divided will: The crisis of moral choice and the goal of human existence

Posted on by John Hartley

by John Hartley

Augustine ponders the stolen pear

“To err is human,” observed the poet, Alexander Pope. Yet, why do we consciously choose to err from right action against our better judgement? Anyone who has tried to follow a diet or maintain a strict exercise regime will understand what can sometimes feel like an inner battle. Yet why do we stray from virtue, choosing paths we know will lead to inevitable suffering? Force of habit? Addiction? Weakness of will?

This crisis of moral choice lies at the heart of Western philosophy, as the Ancients crafted their doctrines to explain why individuals often fail to realize their good intentions. “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” Observed St Paul, “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing.”

Akrasia in ancient thought

Homer’s Iliad paints a poignant portrait of humanity, ensnared in a cycle of necessity. This relentless loop can only be broken by wisdom and self-knowledge, encapsulated in the Delphic maxim “know thyself.” Socrates, however, argued that true knowledge of the good naturally precludes evil actions (If you really know what is right you will not do wrong!) He contends that misdeeds arise not from a willful defiance of the good but from flawed moral judgment—a tragic aberration, mistaking evil for good in the heat of the moment.

Plato, 427 – 348 BC

Plato linked wisdom and necessity to the duality of good and evil. He envisions self-realization and ordered integration as pathways to the good (inefficiency and unrealized potential signify malevolence). For Plato, good and evil are not external forces but internal currents: one flowing with love and altruism, the other emanating greed, envy, and malice.

The ascent to goodness, according to Plato, hinges on self-mastery and moral transformation, guiding one’s life towards the ideal form of goodness. Stoicism, of course, has experienced something of a resurgence of late, owing to Gen Z influences advocating extreme self discipline and heightened personal responsibility. Read more »

Monday, October 5, 2020

Trump Won the Debate Big

Posted on by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

The first of the US Presidential debates between incumbent Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden is complete, and from the looks of the political landscape after Trump’s positive COVID test, it may be the only debate for this election cycle. Most who watched the debate called it a ‘food fight,’ a ‘brawl,’ or worse. Trump interrupted Biden, there was too much crosstalk, there were insults, and Biden even told the President to “Shut up, man!” Anyone who tuned in to see two candidates for America’s highest office exchange well-reasoned arguments, hold each other accountable to challenge, and answer each other’s questions was sorely disappointed.

But the reality is that debates never have been that idealized exchange. For sure, many debates have better resembled it than this more recent one, but no debates have been close to that aspirational posit. Rather, the debates are more simultaneous campaign events, where the candidates can recite clips of their stump speeches, drop practiced one-liners, and play at having rapport with the moderator when being held to the rules of the debate. What makes them important in this argumentative regard, then, is how well they enact their brand within the rules of the forum. It’s along these lines that we think that Trump is right that he won the debate.

Biden’s brand is that he is the moderate who can beat Trump. Trump’s brand is that he is the powerful disruptor, the one who is so strong that no rules can constrain him. Seen from this perspective, the debate was wholly a case of Trump’s singular dominance. He, again, interrupted Biden, he derailed Biden’s argument about his disparagement of the military with a shot about Biden’s younger son, he squabbled with the moderator about whether the rules were right, and he consistently went over his allotted times. He indeed was a disruptor, one to whom the rules do not apply. He was consistently and manifestly on-brand. Read more »

Monday, July 8, 2019

Under The Spell of Iris Murdoch

Posted on by Thomas O'Dwyer

by Thomas O’Dwyer

Under the NetvvvvvMother’s friend departed after their weekly get-together for tea, cakes and gossip, but she forgot to take her book. It was a slim hardback with the blue and yellow banded cover of a subscription book club. It lay on the arm of the sofa for ten minutes and then, before anybody noticed, it vanished – relocated to my bedroom. I was fifteen, and this would be the first adult novel I had ever read. Its title was Under the Net by Iris Murdoch. Iris was my “first” – first adult novelist and first woman writer, and she has remained fixed in my affections over the decades. Under the Net was also Murdoch’s first novel, published in 1954. I was so naively charmed that I made a precocious promise to myself to reread it fifteen years later to see if its appeal lasted. I already knew that in the coming years I would not be rereading my previous favourites, my childhood book collections of Just William, Biggles, Billy Bunter and John Carter’s adventures on Mars. Unlike them, Under the Net had mysteries and ideas I did not yet fathom, but would need to discover.

Dame Iris Murdoch would be 100 years old this July 15 if she had lived to celebrate it, but her brilliant mind faded away in the fog of Alzheimer’s disease and she died twenty years ago in 1999. A recent article in The New York Times lamented that her reputation has also faded with time. “Distressingly, her posthumous reputation is in semi-shambles. Many of her novels are out of print. Young people tend not to have read her. She is seldom taught,” wrote Dwight Garner. Literary reputations are like the actors on Shakespeare’s stage of life, they have their exits and their entrances, but unlike the actors, they can be born again. It is difficult to say if Murdoch’s star is set to rise any time soon. Like many of her 20th-century contemporaries, her novels can seem as ancient as the Victorians. They live in a lifetime before digital watches, never mind computers and the rest of our electronic universe. Few of her characters in their whiteness, snobbery, and obtuseness are people we would find dominant in the streets or cafes of London today. Read more »

Monday, April 10, 2017

Critique of the Smiley Face

Posted on by Emrys Westacott

by Emrys Westacott

The ubiquitous yellow smiley is the perfect representation of our culture's default conception of happiness. It signifies a pleasant internal state of mind. Right now, life is fun, it says. I'm enjoying myself. Don't worry–be happy. Unknown

This is a subjectivist conception of happiness. It's all about how one feels, and it tends to be applied to relatively short periods of time: minutes, hours, days.

When discussing happiness with my students, I sometimes describe Barney the Couch Potato. Barney inherited enough money not to have to work for a living. He spends the bulk of his days lounging on the sofa playing video games, watching reruns of old TV sitcoms, smoking weed (it's legal where he lives), and drinking a few beers. He gets off his sofa just enough to stay more or less healthy. Friends drop by often enough to keep him from feeling lonely.

Is Barney happy? When I ask my students this question, nine out of ten invariably say yes. "Maybe I wouldn't want to live like that," they say, "but hey, if that's what he wants, and it makes him feel good, then I guess he's happy."

This response supports my suspicion that a subjectivist conception of happiness is dominant these days, at least in the US. What else could happiness be, after all, but lots of pleasure without too much pain? And what is pleasure if not an enjoyable subjective state?

One way of gaining a critical perspective on this view of happiness is to contrast it with the view of happiness found in ancient Greek philosophy, particularly in the thought of Plato, and Aristotle. Interestingly, their more objectivist notion of happiness, while it has been somewhat displaced, is still with us to some extent; so what they say does not sound utterly alien. Let's consider what it involves.

Read more »

Monday, May 30, 2016

The Prescriptivist’s Progress

Posted on by Ryan Ruby

by Ryan Ruby

PilgrimsprogressbookThis month, two minor controversies revived the specter of the “language wars” and reintroduced the literary internet to the distinction between prescriptivism and descriptivism. One began when Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian won the Man Booker Prize and readers took to their search engines en masse to look up the word “Kafkaesque,” which had been used by the book's publishers and reviewers to describe it. Remarking upon the trend, Merriam-Webster noted sourly: “some argue that ‘Kafkaesque' is so overused that it's begun to lose its meaning.” A few weeks before, Slate's Laura Miller had lodged a similar complaint about the abuse of the word “allegory.” “An entire literary tradition is being forgotten,” she warned, “because writers use the term allegory to mean, like, whatever they want.”

When it comes to semantics, prescriptivists insist that precise rules ought to govern linguistic usage. Without such rules there would be no criteria by which to judge whether a word was being used correctly or incorrectly, and thus no way to fix its meaning. Descriptivists, by contrast, argue that a quick glance at the history of any natural language will show that, whether we like it or not, words are vague and usage changes over time. The meaning of a word is whatever a community of language users understands it to mean at any given moment. In both of the above cases, Merriam-Webster and Miller were flying the flag of prescriptivism, protesting the kind of semantic drift that results from the indiscriminate, over-frequent usages of a word, a drift that has no doubt been exacerbated thanks to the internet itself, which has increased the recorded usages of words and accelerated their circulation.

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Monday, October 12, 2015

Love and Sensibility

Posted on by Dwight Furrow

by Dwight Furrow

Abstract artIn matters of love we have a Euthyphro problem (so-called because an early version of the problem is raised by Plato in his dialogue Euthyphro). Do I love my wife because I think she's beautiful or do I think she's beautiful because I love her? Replace beauty with any other virtue and the question remains. If I think my wife is beautiful (or kind or smart) because I love her, then what explains my loving her? It can't be her beauty, kindness, or intelligence because my belief that she possesses these virtues is antecedent to the love, not a prior judgment. It is peculiar to think there is no reason why we love what we love. However the second horn of the dilemma is no more promising. If I love my wife for her beauty, kindness, or intelligence, it would seem that I should love someone else who is equally virtuous. But, of course, I don't. Those particular general qualities seem inadequate as explanations for love since there are any number of people possessing them that I do not love.

Philosophers have come down on either side of the dilemma. Luminaries such as Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, Hume, and Kant have tried to argue without much success that beauty or sexual attraction are the precursors of love. But we can surely love things that are not beautiful or sexually attractive; in fact we often love what is ugly. More recently, Harry Frankfurt has argued that love is a kind of brute fact. We love things for no reason—it's just a fact that we do so and bestow value then on the things we love. For Frankfurt, things have value because we care about them and thus their value cannot be a justification of why we care on pain of circularity.

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Monday, June 8, 2015

A Modern Mystic: Agnes Martin, Tate Britain, Until 11th October, 2015

Posted on by Sue Hubbard

by Sue Hubbard

“Beauty is the mystery of life, it is not just in the eye. It is in the mind. It is our positive response to life.” —Agnes Martin

010Over the last few years Tate Modern has paid homage to a number of important women artists including, amongst others, Eva Hesse, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Marlene Dumas and Sonia Delaunay. That the psychodrama of Frida Kahlo and Louise Bourgeois, the theatre of Kusama and the eroticism of Marlene Dumas should have had wide public appeal is not surprising. All provide the means for the viewer to identify with the artist, to ‘feel her pain' and be drawn into her emotional maelstrom and visual world. But the current exhibition of work by Agnes Martin is an altogether more difficult affair. It makes demands on the spectator who, if willing to engage, will be rewarded by moments of Zen-like stillness and clarity.

To sit among Martin's white paintings, The Islands I-XII, 1979, is akin to being alone with Rothko's Seagram paintings. Though while Rothko is chthonic, the colours womb-like and elemental as he wrestles with the dark night of the soul, the subtle tonalities of Martin's pale paintings are, in contrast, Apollonian. She is Ariel to Rothko's Caliban. Full of light and air, her paintings quieten the busy mind, provide space, tranquillity and silence. Yet each of these silences is subtly varied, broken by differing accents and rhythms. The tonal shifts, the small variations and delineations of the sections of the canvas demand attention and mindfulness. These works offer not so much an experience of the sublime – that form of masculine awe and ecstasy – as a dilution into nothingness, an arrival at T. S. Eliot's “still point in a turning world.” Here we find stasis, where everything, as in meditation, has been stripped away, so that we are left with nothing more than the rhythm of the world, with what simply IS.

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Monday, January 6, 2014

A Belated Reply to Plato

Posted on by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Plato

Plato is among the most famous critics of democracy. His criticism is relatively simple, but potentially devastating. It runs as follows. Politics aims at achieving justice, and so political policy must reflect the demands of justice. Only those who know what justice is and have the self-control to enact what justice requires are capable of doing politics properly. Alas, the average citizen is dumb and vicious. Hence Plato's conclusion is that democracy is a fundamentally corrupt form of politics; it is the rule of those who neither know nor care about justice. In The Republic, Plato's Socrates argues for a philosophical monarchy, the rule of the wise and virtuous.

Citizens of modern democracies naturally tend to recoil at Plato's argument, and his positive proposal that philosophers should rule is often met with understandable ridicule. And yet Plato's crucial premise that the average citizen is too dumb and undisciplined for democracy is widely embraced, especially among those who find themselves on the losing side of a democratic vote. For one example, consider a common reaction among social and fiscal conservatives to Barack Obama's re-election in 2012; it was routinely claimed that the People had been “duped” and “mislead.” Furthermore, it seems that a second crucial Platonic premise – namely that a proper political order must place those who have knowledge and integrity in charge – is also widely endorsed. Consider here the popular criticisms of President Bush that fix upon his alleged lack of intelligence.

So we must ask: Could Plato be right?

We should begin by noting that many philosophers, including us, hold that democratic citizens ought to take seriously Plato's criticisms. There is nothing anti-democratic about earnestly confronting democracy's critics, and arguably there's something on the order of an imperative to engage with democracy's smartest detractors. As John Stuart Mill once argued, “He who knows only his own side of an argument knows little of that.”

Now, there are several responses to Plato, and we'd like to survey a few popular rejoinders before sketching our own. First, one may respond to Plato by denying that politics has anything at all to do with ideals so lofty as wisdom and justice. Politics, the response continues, is not about discerning truths, but producing stable government. And stability is not a matter of getting things right, but getting things done in ways that prevent revolution, and that's what a democracy accomplishes.

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