Here's Virginia Postrel on the Kass Council:

This sort of indirect genetic evidence for human evolution is going to pile up until it resembles the overwhelming geological case against believing the earth is a few thousand years old. More important, and more interesting, will be how understanding the genetic origins of brain functions lets us affect how our minds work. With the Kass Commission hot to talk about brains, can proposals for new criminal laws against neuroscience be far behind? After all, that research might threaten classical conceptions of the mind. And if they were good enough for Plato, they're good enough for us.
(via Glenn Reynolds.)

But seriously, I don't think that "classical conceptions of the mind" are really the problem.

Rather, the problem is "Kassical conceptions of the mind"! Our argument is not with Plato, it's with Kass as Plato's spokesman. Unless Kass knows more about Plato than Plato himself, I don't recall reading anything in Plato which gave Kass permission to summon him from the dead, stuff words in his mouth, and then bootstrap that into big government edicts which We Must Live By.

(And die by!)

Plato was a classical thinker, but there were many others. Thought did not stop with ancient philosophers -- much less any particular one. They died, though, and their thoughts reflected the sum total of knowledge available to them during the times in which they lived. While we stand on their shoulders philosophically (please read my cautionary essay about not throwing the classical baby out with the medieval bathwater), their words and thoughts do not bind us. Reading them is a great way to gain great insight, but I think they ought to be allowed to speak for themselves, and be evaluated accordingly. Kass has no monopoly on ancient thought.

What I do not like about Leon Kass is that he is not just an ordinary classics teacher with odd opinions. He sits in an elevated position of authority -- waiting for the next opportunity to tell us what to do. And to do that, he invokes the ancients, not to encourage the pursuit of such things as wisdom and truth, but to set rules and limits.

Plato was a student of Socrates, who was the first to admit that he knew very little, but questioned a great deal. This picking and choosing of Plato and Aristotle reminds me of the Quotations from Chairman Mao. I think it is a perversion of ancient thought.

Take the notion of immortality, for example. Leon Kass would have us believe that because flowers die, and because he is an expert on Plato, that immortality is bad. Although Plato and Socrates did not agree on immortality (Socrates tended towards the view that the soul was not immortal -- his "agnosticism about the soul’s fate after death in Apology 40c may reflect that dialogue’s emphasis on the avoidance of unjustified claims to knowledge"), Aristotle, on the other hand, thought that the pursuit of immortality was a good thing:

Aristotle did not take up the Platonic project of proving the soul’s immortality or of providing eternal rewards for virtuous conduct. Indeed, by defining the soul as the ‘first actuality of an organic living body’ (On the Soul II 1), he seems to have precluded the possibility that any soul can survive the dissolution of the body whose actuality it is. Two lines of thought complicate this story and seem to make room for some immortal element in the soul. The first is the caveat, stated twice (On the Soul I 1, II 1), that the continued existence of any part of the soul in separation from the body is impossible, unless there is some activity of the soul that is not a complex activity of the soul and body: thinking is explicitly offered as a possible example of this, in contrast to such activities as feeling fear or anger, which clearly involve psycho-physical cooperation. The second and related complication is that in his analysis of intellect and intellectual thought (On the Soul III 4–5), Aristotle refers to a mind that is ‘immortal and eternal’ and is somehow involved in human thought. If we connect these two strands together, we may conclude that we have found something like the rational part of an individual human being’s soul and that we are being assured of its immortality. However, another line of interpretation will make this immortal and eternal mind (what later tradition calls the ‘active intellect’) a force external to the individual, whether a divinity that may be personal in its own right or a reservoir of impersonal thinking power. On views of this sort, what Aristotle is offering us falls far short of anything that might be considered personal survival (see Aristotle §§16, 19).

Nor does Aristotle make use of the arguments we found in Plato that a certain form of life is to be preferred because of its consequences in the hereafter. It is true that he argues for the superiority of the life of philosophical contemplation on the grounds that the philosopher will most resemble the gods, be dearest to them and be most likely to earn their favour (Nicomachean Ethics X 8). But these benefits belong to this life, not the next. So too when his advocacy of contemplation culminates in the call to ‘be immortal, to the extent possible’ by employing our reason, the divine element in us (Nicomachean Ethics X 7). There is nothing about the afterlife in this appeal, only a striking shift of meaning. Immortality has here come unmoored from survival after death or eternal existence and now simply denotes a kind of activity that a participant may share in for finite, even fleeting, periods of time.

On the other hand, Aristotle’s commitment to the literal immortality of the gods is unequivocal (see Aristotle §16). The heavens and earth are eternal in past and future, and the eternal movements of the heavens are the result of the eternal activity of gods who keep them in motion (Physics VIII 6; Metaphysics XII 7–8; On the Heavens I 3)