Running with the Pack (24 page)

One does not have to believe in the gods of Olympus to see the significance of this passage, any more than one need believe in the God of the Old Testament to understand the significance of the book of Genesis. God or gods — they are metaphysical distractions. In each case, it is what the story shows rather than what it says that is important. There is an important truth embodied in this passage, but also an equally important error.

First, there is the truth. The Greeks ‘transferred to Olympus what should have been realized on earth'. The life of a god is a representation of what an ideal human life — a life ‘freest and most sublime' — would look like. The ideal life is one released from ‘every aim, every duty, every care'. What would one do to fill a life such as this? To spend this life working, one would have to be a god touched by madness. Anything you might obtain through work, you can now obtain through a click of your divine fingers. The gods did not work — they played. They were immortal — what else were they going to do?

Well: I suppose sex springs to mind. An immortal creature released from every aim, duty and care — surely they would spend a lot of time having sex? It is well known that the gods were not averse to sexual encounters with each other and with
mortals. But even these they tended to turn into a game. The eye of Zeus, let us suppose, has been taken by a comely mortal — Alkmene, Antiope, Danae, Dia, Elare, Europa, Eurymedousa, Kallisto, Kalyke, Kassiopeia, Lamia, Laodameia, Leda, Lysithoe, Niobe, Olympias, Pandora, Protogeneia, Pyrrha, Phthia, Semele or Thyia. Zeus had a lot of time on his hands, and his eye was frequently taken by comely mortals. There are certain advantages to being the most powerful of the gods, but also certain disadvantages. Zeus would not experience the thrill of the chase, or the agonizing of the will-she-won't-she variety. Yes, she will, if that is what he decides because he is the most powerful of the gods and she will ultimately have no choice. Consequently, Zeus turned many of his sexual encounters into games. He seduced Alkmene by disguising himself as her husband. He assumed the form of a satyr to seduce Antiope. For Europa, he took on the form of a bull — though the game here was hardly one of seduction. He assumed the form of a fellow Olympian, Artemis, in order to seduce Kallisto. The form of a swan was his preferred vehicle for the seduction of Leda. Most idiosyncratically of all, he assumed the form of an ant to impregnate Eurymedousa. She bore him a son named Myrmidon — ‘ant man'. In his seductions, conquests and, it has to be said, rapes, Zeus liked to adopt an inefficient means of achieving his desired goal. He voluntarily chose to make things difficult for himself. As Bernard Suits would have put it, Zeus brought a lusory attitude to the achieving of his pre-lusory goals. Zeus liked to play, and the reason is clear: once you took away the game, all that would remain for Zeus in his sexual encounters would be a pleasant sensation in the loins. That is not to be dismissed, I suppose, but neither is it something to be making the cornerstone of one's immortal existence.

Second, there is the error contained in Schiller's claim.
Zeus is a moral monster and the same is, in general, true of his fellow Olympians. The error in Schiller's claim is to suppose that the alternative to a life of work is ‘idleness and indifference'. To play is, of course, hardly to be idle. But Zeus does exhibit a notable indifference or callousness in his dealings with others. His moral failures all stem from an inability, or perhaps an unwillingness, to see intrinsic value in all the places it exists. For Zeus, intrinsic value is to be found in the game. Mortals have value to the extent they play a role in his games. Apparently, he had his moments — brief and terrifying flashes of illumination they might have been for him — when he suspected that mortals might be more than this, and at these times he would go to great lengths to protect a mortal consort. But by and large they were merely pawns — they had instrumental value only.

Today, it seems we have travelled a very different path, a mortal furrow that the gods of Olympus would find difficult even to understand. We are happy to recognize that mortal humans have intrinsic value. And we are, of course, absolutely right to do so. Some think — I am one of them — this recognition should be extended to some mortals that are not human; but the individual human being is the clearest locus of intrinsic value. The fundamental assumption underlying the ethical and political systems of the West is that all human beings are born equal: they are all equally valuable, and this value is intrinsic to them. People should not be treated as pawns in a game, merely a means to an end. People are, as Immanuel Kant — the eighteenth-century German philosopher — put it, ‘ends-in-themselves'. Play, on the other hand, is typically thought of as a relatively unimportant aspect of life. Of course, one should make a little time in one's life to play: but not too much, and only when one has
taken care of life's more important and pressing demands. This is not simply due to the contingencies of industrial and post-industrial life where, for most of us, it is necessary to work in order to live. The attitude runs deeper than that. Hard work is something for which a person might be legitimately praised. Play is something one merely does. To spend one's life playing — if one is fortunate enough to never have to work — is something that would draw disapprobation. We might say, of such a person, that they ‘never grew up' — and that would be intended as an insult. Hard work is edifying, ennobling. Play is merely a distraction. We are, undoubtedly, morally better than the gods of Olympus. Nevertheless, at the same time, we have forgotten something that the Greeks knew, just as we came to forget what we knew when we were children. The Greeks understood that in Utopia we would play games. In Utopia, it is play that would redeem life, would make it ‘worth the trouble'. But utopia is, when it is accurately portrayed, the best life a human can live. It seems we must conclude that the Greeks regarded play as an essential component of the best life a human can live. It is play, and not work, that is intrinsically valuable in life and so play, and not work, that makes life ‘worth the trouble'.

Plato was the pre-eminent philosopher of the first half of fourth-century-BCE Athens and arguably the greatest philosopher ever. The safest general characterization of Western philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead once claimed, is a series of footnotes to Plato. Plato built his entire philosophical system around the existence of what he called
eidos
, or what today tend to be known as ‘forms'. The form of something is its essence — what it really is. Today we talk about someone's running form — their technique. This is an echo of Plato:
the better your form, the closer you are to the perfect runner. In a slightly different sense, we might describe an athlete as being in good or poor form, or in form or out of it. Plato is very much with us today in the language we use. Even on my good days — when I am ‘in form' in the second sense — I am a very long way from the form of a distance runner. Haile Gebrselassie and Kenenisa Bekele, to take two obvious examples, are both much closer to this form — indeed, of all humans, living or dead, these two might be as good approximations to the form of the distance runner as anyone. But even Gebrselassie and Bekele, Plato would claim, are not perfect. Nothing in the physical world is. What makes anyone a runner is their resemblance to or, as Plato often put it, their participation in, the form of the runner. Their status as a runner is dependent on the relation in which they stand to the form of the runner. But the form is what it is — it depends on nothing for its status. This is true more generally. Everything that exists in our world is what it is only because it bears certain relations to one or more forms. I am a man because of my (imperfect) resemblance to the form of the man. Hugo is a dog because of his resemblance to the form of the dog, and so on. But there is no converse dependence: the forms do not depend on the things that instantiate them for their existence.

The most important of the forms, and the most real, Plato argued, is the form of the good — ‘The Good'. All good things — acts, rules, people, institutions and so on — count as good because they resemble or participate in The Good. The goodness of all these things is, therefore, dependent goodness. They are good to the extent they stand in the appropriate relation to something outside of them — The Good. But The Good is goodness itself, good in itself. In short, according to Plato, everything has a form. These
forms belong to a non-physical realm of supra-sensible things, and in this realm they make up a pyramid of ascending reality. At the apex of this pyramid is the form of the good — the most real and most valuable thing there is.

I believe very little of this. A non-physical world of essences organized into a pyramid of ascending reality and worth: I take these claims about as seriously as I take claims about the gods of Olympus or the God of Genesis. Philosophy is a rather strange discipline where being, at least arguably, the greatest is compatible with being wrong about almost everything — and I think Plato was wrong about almost everything. Sometimes, when we discover something, an idea that we intuitively, instinctively, sense is very important indeed, we tend to lose the run of ourselves, and dress it up in metaphysical clothing that is overly extravagant and more than a little disingenuous. Religion — whether of the Olympian or Judaeo-Christian variety — is perhaps the most obvious example of this. But Plato was by no means immune to this basic human tendency. In all these cases, religious or metaphysical, what is important is not what the doctrine says, but what it shows: something important and true that is to be found crawling out diffidently from between the lines of untruth.

The Good of Plato is goodness-in-itself. Stripped of its metaphysical excesses, The Good of Plato is that which is valuable for its own sake, rather than for the sake of anything else. In other words, The Good of Plato is intrinsic value. There is no world of forms — at least I strongly suspect there is not. But there is intrinsic value. It is found in this world, not some other one; found in our lives and the things we do in those lives. In this life, it is only worth loving The Good — understood not as some otherworldly form, but as things that are intrinsically valuable. Instruments — things that are good
only for the sake of something else that they might bring you — they are life's trivialities. You might want them, covet them, you might need them desperately; but you should not love them because they are not worthy of love. The love of money is the root of all evil, the Bible tells us. Or in some, more plausible, translations: the love of money is the root of all
kinds of
evil. In this, I think the Bible is absolutely correct. But this is merely a restricted version of a more general truth: love is an appropriate relation to bear to things that are intrinsically valuable. To treat things that are not intrinsically valuable as if they were intrinsically valuable — that is the root of all kinds of evil: evil lives, evil social and political systems and, often, evil people. Only intrinsically valuable things are worth loving. One of life's most important tasks is to surround oneself with things that are worth loving — and to be able to distinguish these from things that are not.

Then there is, the perhaps apocryphal, Pheidippides. According to Herodotus, Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta — a distance of 152 miles — to request help when the invading Persian army landed at the beach at Marathon. Other accounts, their origins and veracity unclear, claim that, following the battle, Pheidippides ran twenty-six miles from Marathon to Athens with news of the Greek victory. This, reportedly, was as much as he could take: he died immediately after uttering the words, ‘We conquer!' Whether Pheidippides was a real person or not, he became associated with the origin of the race we now know, for obvious reasons, as the marathon.

For Pheidippides his run was something that presumably had only instrumental value. Some general presumably said to him: ‘Pheidippides: off you go to Athens, and be quick about it. What do you mean, horse?' He was running for the
sake of something else — to spare himself whatever consequences there were for disobeying orders or occasioning a commanding officer's displeasure. When someone starts running, or takes it up after a long absence, it might well have everything to do with consequences. Certainly, that's how it was with me, although I suppose the largely lupine-based consequences were a little idiosyncratic. My life of running as an adult, therefore, had instrumental origins.

However, no matter what instrumental reasons one has for doing it, running has a non-instrumental essence — a form — and this has a tendency to slowly reassert itself. At least, that is what it did to me. When I started running with Brenin, I was a poorly paid assistant professor of philosophy and I could not afford a bike. Running was the cheapest solution available to a pressing need: to dissuade Brenin from eating all my things. However, as life proceeded and my salary crept slowly upwards, eventually I could afford one. Indeed, a few years later, when I had moved to Ireland, I bought a rather nice mountain bike. But I used this only when injury prevented me running with my, by then, markedly expanding canine pack. By this point, running had me: the essence of running — what I came to think of as the heartbeat of the run — had established its control over me. As the pack grew old and weakened, their destructive atrocities diminished, I invented new instrumental reasons — little mythologies is really what they were — to explain to myself what I was doing. I run, I told myself, because of the clarity of thought it induces. But I now realize the truth: I was done for. Despite my inventions and protestations, less and less was I running to keep a pack of canines chilled, less and less was I running for the quality of cognition that came with it. And more and more I was running simply to run.

Sometimes I like to imagine Pheidippides undergoing a similar transformation. The long run of Pheidippides slowly leaves its instrumental origins behind; step by step, breath by breath, Pheidippides becomes drawn into the beating heart of his run. Does he make bargains with himself? Just get me to the crossroads at Mycenae, and then you can walk for a while. Does Pheidippides become the duplicitous master, the maker of promises meant to be broken? Does Pheidippides thereby learn to spend time with his mind and so, perhaps, as Cicero would later claim, learn how to die? Does he then journey deeper into the run's beating heart? Do thoughts that come from nowhere dance for Pheidippides the way they dance for me? Does he travel deeply enough into the run's heartbeat that he eventually comes to understand that he is beyond the authority of reasons? These are the experiences of the run's beating heart. These are experiences of The Good. They are experiences of intrinsic value — one of the ways in which intrinsic value can show itself in a human life.