‘Socrates’ might mean ‘sure strength’ or ‘rule of wisdom.’ What is sure and strong about the rule of wisdom? Why should reason rule? How can it? The political execution of Socrates concentrates Plato’s mind on these questions.

 

The Euthyphro: What Should a Philosopher Believe?

1. ‘Euthyphro’ means ‘straight thought.’ But the shortest line between two points may be a dark and narrow tunnel. Euthyphro claims to have a pipeline to the gods, but he knows nothing about human beings, who laugh at his pretensions in the Assembly. Straight thought, undialectical, undialogic thought, ignores the soul that does the thinking.

2. “What is piety?” Socrates asks. Euthyphro hastily endorses Socrates’ piety, which is under attack by Meletus and the other accusers, without having a clear idea of what piety is. He does not know what the basis of his own claim to rule is. Straight Thought is stupid.

3. Why does Rule of Wisdom bother to speak with stupid Straight Thought? Because the wise must know the stupid, lest the wise imagine that they will ever be able to rule the stupid in any straight or direct way. (This is also true of the human soul. Reason can rule the stupid appetites, but only if it allies with spiritedness.

4. If piety is imitating the gods, piety is incoherent. There are many gods. They fight among themselves. Olympus is high school in the heavens. How can the gods guide the prophet? Which god will the prophet heed? By what criteria will he choose which one to heed? And even if the gods were reasonable—if they loved the good, the noble, and the just—the wise would not need them for guidance, inasmuch as the wise too are reasonable.

5. Is piety service to the gods? Why do gods need or want to be served by humans? Hegel wasn’t the first to notice the contradiction inherent in the master-slave dialectic—which is a dialectic, and not a straight thought.

6. Euthyphro is at the law court in order to prosecute his own father for a crime that was not, strictly speaking, intentional. The case is not ‘straight’ or clear-cut. Euthyphro wants his piety ‘straight from the gods,’ without the intervening authorities of the family. He governs his piety with self-proclaimed prophecies. He wants to universalize piety, arguing that murder is murder, justice justice, regardless of persons or circumstances. Piety is doing justice regardless of kinship, even as Zeus did in fathering Kronos. But was Zeus doing justice to Kronos? Or was he just doing him in, or down? As the Romans might ask, cui bono?

7. Is piety what all the gods love, a sort of divine consensus, an Olympic common denominator? This cannot be. The loved, by being loved, is not thereby defined by the lover. Socrates enters into a long, logic-chopping argument in order to unstraighten Euthyphro, to jerk him around, to split every hair on his head, to make him dizzy, to make him feel as stupid as he is—he who claims to know so much. Euthyphro wants Socrates to stop. He wants ideas to be stable. But prosecuting your father is usually no way to achieve stability, whether of family, politics, or soul.

8. With respect to the gods, Socrates distinguishes dread from awe. One might dread a disease, but not feel awe. Awe logically encompasses dread, but dread does not encompass awe. Does justice encompass piety, or piety justice? Euthyphro claims that justice encompasses piety; piety is that part of justice that serves gods. Very well then, Socrates replies, what does such service produce? cui bono? Service to the gods produces no benefits for them, who need nothing. Rather, honoring the gods is done with an eye on benefits for the pious who do the honoring. The reader will ask: Perhaps Euthyphro would honor the gods by dishonoring his father in a law court for reasons of personal gain? At this point, Euthyphro remembers that he has business elsewhere and hurries away from the philosopher who has been accused of impiety. Judging from his conduct with Euthyphro, Socrates is guilty as charged. He is impious with regard to Euthyphronic pretensions. But he seems ready to defend the conventional piety of the city, which first of all requires sons to honor fathers.

 

The Apology of Socrates: Philosophy and the Democracy

9. ‘Socrates is an atheist who corrupts our youth!’ So his accusers allege. He came to their attention by questioning their fathers, the local notables: statesmen, poets, educators. Why did he do this? Why did Socrates leave behind his cosmological studies for political philosophy? Perhaps he did so because natural science studies already implicate the beliefs, and thereby the laws, of the polis. If the moon is a rock, it is not a god. If the moon is not a god, are other beliefs of Athenian citizens equally baseless? Where does that leave the city?

10. The Delphic oracle of Apollo told Socrates’ friend Chaerephon that no man is wiser than Socrates. Socrates ups the ante, telling the jury that the oracle called him the wisest (21a-b). Socrates pretends that he intended his conversations with his fellow Athenians to be proofs of his allegiance to an oracular command. There was no command. Socrates’ dialogues with Athenians prove his impiety; he spent the rest of his life testing the truth of the oracle of the god. A pious man would say that gods test us. Only the impious test the gods. Or is Socrates merely testing the oracle, the ‘medium’ of the god? In that case, he wants to question the authority of a person who claims unquestionable authority over the city. What other authorities, divine or human, might such a man dare to question—’in front of the children,’ no less?

11. Socrates’ dialectical tests have made him hated. Statesmen, poets, artisans, and educators do not like to be tested any more than gods and oracles do. To be tested is bad enough, but to fail the test—this injures their claim to rule. Any claim to rule is at bottom a claim that you are virtuous and, particularly, wise—that you know what the good is, and that you know how to get it, maybe from the gods themselves. Socrates tests the wisdom of the most authoritative men of Athens, and finds it to be lacking. Had Socrates any power, he would be a menace. Without power, he is a gadfly who deserves swatting. But this powerless man also talks to the young. Will they question, then overthrow their fathers? That is a real menace. One of Socrates’ interlocutors was Alcibiades.

12. ‘Meletus’ means ‘caring one.’ He speaks for the highest human authorities, the poets, who in turn speak for the gods. Meletus indirectly speaks for the greatest of caretakers, the gods, who care for their own—the earth and the creatures on it. But does young Meletus know what ‘his own’ truly is?

13. Behind the law against impiety, behind all the laws, are the lawmakers. Athens is a democracy; the lawmakers are the people. Athenians want to say, ‘We make the laws here’ and ‘the laws are divinely inspired.’ Vox populi, vox Dei?

14. Meletus calls Socrates an atheist. He also accuses Socrates of believing in new daimonion. The daimonion are either gods or children of the gods, Like the Athenians, Meletus is bifurcated, his accusations incoherent. Socrates easily shows Meletus’ self-contradiction. As for Socrates himself, he appears to be equally divided: The oracle of Apollo leads him to press forward in his dangerous political-philosophic quest, whereas at least in most things his daimonion counsels caution, although never specifically to halt his quest. Perhaps this tension (if not contradiction) amount to two aspects of the same thing: philo-sophia requires daring and prudence, careful choice in philosophic companions. Socrates has his friends, and they have protected him into his seventieth year. They can protect him still, if he will let them.

15. In his dialogue with Meletus, Socrates proves that he could easily slip the noose. But he does not want to. No daimonion holds him back from accusing the people, those envious slanderers (28a). Socrates goes further, making himself a hero, comparing himself to Achilles. A hero fearlessly chooses death; in accusing the people, Socrates chooses death as surely as Achilles did, although he depends not upon divine prophecy but upon his own unassisted powers of reasonable prediction, based on his sure knowledge of human nature. But how can Socrates gain glory by insulting the people, calling them money-lovers, telling Athenians that they are no better than the citizens of other cities, saying that is he god’s gift to them (30e)—no atheist, he!—that he has been sent to awaken them from their intellectual slumber? He tells the people, the rulers of a democracy, that a just man cannot engage in politics at all—the reverse of Pericles’ teaching. What does that make them? He is no Achilles going for glory; he despises the ‘good opinion’ of his fellow citizens. In despising openly, he ensures his execution.

16. The people want the accused to beg for their mercy. But Socrates denies them their Oprahfest. He tells them he deserves not punishment but reward, having been guilty of exhorting them to care for themselves, their true selves, guilty of wanting them to be happy and not only to seem happy. Socrates publicly refuses to substitute the judgment of the people for his own. He will rule himself; they will not. How can he do this? Why is he no pragmatist seeking intersubjective confirmation in the form of consensus among the gods/people? Because, unlike Euthyphro, Socrates has already tested his own wisdom. He has engaged his fellow Athenians in dialectical argument, persistently to the point of nettlesomeness. Human beings seek the good, seek wisdom; “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (38a). But whereas the people love wisdom, they do not love it strongly enough. The people love wisdom with Unsure strength. They supinely rest assured with what they have been told and become indignant when the one of sure strength, strong love of wisdom, the one ruled by wisdom not by hearsay disturbs their repose. The many are neither very good nor very bad. They act and feel at random, swaying one way then another, in accord with their latest passion. Their life will always contradict the philosophic life. Benjamin Franklin, another old roué, wrote, “God grant that not only the love of liberty, but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man, may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my country.” Socrates would reward him and his Enlightenment brethren with one of his ironic smiles.

 

The Crito: The Philosopher and the Few

17. Socrates’ friend is a rich man who likes to be able to ‘fix’ things for his friends. He likes having a reputation for usefulness. He has been around the block. He knows that the few who are rich had better not enrage the people, the many who are not rich. The dilemma of the rich few parallels the dilemma of the philosophic few—the truly rich, so to speak. He tells Socrates that the people can bring “the greatest of evils” upon one: death (44d). Let me pull some strings, get you out of jail and away from Athens. If I don’t, the guys at the club are going to say, ‘Couldn’t you do anything for that old philosopher? What kind of friend are you? Have you lost your touch, old boy?’ Crito is one of the several kinds of friends it is good to have.

18. What is more, Crito continues, Socrates and his friends haven’t stood up and acted like real men during this ‘trial’ business. Don’t be a chump. Don’t die for nothing. When the going gets tough, the tough get going—in this case, right out of town. Crito is a man who knows when he’s outnumbered, when circumspection is the better part of valor. But his admonitions to be both cautious and manly seem somehow ill-mixed.

19. Socrates has a different opinion of courage, justice, and prudence. He depends not upon popular opinion, no matter how it has contrived to sanctify itself. “I, not only now but always, am such as to obey nothing else of what is mine that that argument which appears to me best upon reasoning” (46b). The autarchia of Socrates, the self-government or self-sufficiency of Socrates, consists in his uncompromising exercise of human reason unassisted by public opinion or divine revelation (insofar as those may be distinguished, in a democratic regime).

20. Therefore, Crito, you should not take public opinion as authoritative, though you should take it seriously enough to examine it, to test it. It is the opinion of him who knows the subject-matter that counts. The few who are rich should heed the fewer who know, not the opinions of the people who do not know because they accuse more readily than they question. Socrates does not corrupt the young; the people corrupt the young, turning young Meletus (for example) into a demagogue.

21. Although Socrates may have been unjustly accused and punished, would it be just for him to escape punishment? No, he says: That would be returning injustice for injustice. To escape would be to violate an implicit contract between Socrates, the stay-at-home Athenian citizen, and the laws of Athens. To injure the law is to injure the city. A political philosopher is a citizen-philosopher. Of course, it is not clear that Athens has not, by electing to kill Socrates unjustly, thereby failed to hold up its end of the deal, effectively abrogating the implied contract. But Socrates doesn’t say that to Crito. Why?

22. Socrates invents the accusatory speech for the laws. ‘We provided you, Socrates, the matrix for your own begetting–the marriage laws—and for your own nurturing, your own education. A fatherland is therefore an even more honorable parent than a father or mother.’ (51a-b) This is no mean or despicable argument. Unless a regime is very defective, it does put its citizens in its debt in a thousand ways. This is why it is just that the laws, the city, require citizens to fight in wars to defend the laws, the city. Yet does not war involve returning evil for evil? Is the city unjust to Socrates’ own criterion? Socrates does not say that to Crito, either. Why?

23. Problem: The laws themselves did not condemn Socrates. The people did. True, the people also wrote a law against impiety that puts Socrates at risk, more or less reasonably assuming that the gods would suffer no derogation. But perhaps the people misapplied that law by misjudging Socrates, goaded by the gadfly’s annoying buzz. Would Socrates’ escape injure the laws, or merely rebuke the people in their error? How unjust would his escape really be? Socrates does not say that to Crito. Why?

24. There is no way to demonstrate why Socrates says what he says, leaving other crucial things unsaid. Plato writes dialogues, Socrates undertook dialogues; dialogues are very deliberately not demonstrations, geometrical proofs, deductions from first principles, specimens of the natural philosophy Socrates stopped practicing. Dialogues invite their readers to think about ideas and the persons who ‘have’ ideas, to consider things with a view to souls and not only ideas.

The following suggestions, then—open to dialectical testing:

a. For all its vices, the democracy permitted the rarest of the few, the philosopher, to go about his self-appointed rounds for a long time. How many cities other than Athens would have tolerated Socrates for so long? How many were democracies, allowing such a rich variety of human souls to flourish, to be examined and understood by Socrates?

b. Socrates knows that his ever-helpful friend, Crito, soon will not have Socrates around to advise him. Is it not better to leave Crito, who will never be a philosopher, in the hands of the laws, which are relatively stable, of surer strength, than ever-shifting public opinion? The few who are rich know enough not to enrage the many who are not, but if they bribe too many officials the stable laws that protect them may be destroyed., replaced by an openly and self-consciously tyrannical majority. The wise govern, insofar as they can govern, as if the laws are adequate guides to the good life.

c. Socrates chooses to die in Athens in order to preserve the Socratic enterprise there, that is, in a democracy. Crito will tell others how law-abiding these philosophers are. Those others will include the writer, Plato. Word will get around, not so much among the people as among the potential philosophers, the philosophers of the future, who will now know how not to resent the people and how to respect the laws in the right way—which is not to say that they will respect the laws unqualifiedly. The philosophers of the future will have before them the example of one who accepted the rule of laws over his body, which was well protected by those laws and never really injured by them. As for his soul, he does not accept the rule of law, which is after all ‘only’ a more stable form of public opinion. That is the point: The law is more stable than day-to-day public opinion.

 

The Phaedo: What Does a Philosopher Know?

25. The story of Socrates’ last day is narrated by a Pythagorean to Pythagoreans. The most mathematical/deductive, undialectical, and non-prudential philosophers cannot resist the charms of Socrates, the least ‘abstracted’ philosopher, the philosopher who embodies philosophy as a way of life, not a method or a doctrine or a formula. A mathematical philosopher deduces reality from principles. He is a secular version of Euthyphro. (So is Kant, with his noumenalist project of deducing a legalistic system of morals from a categorical imperative.) Although these philosophers are a lot more intelligent than Euthyphro, they are just as ‘straight’/deductive, and maybe not much ‘smarter’ in terms of prudence. Plato’s readers have seen Socrates taking a different road, the winding road of dialectic.

26. The philosophic life consists in the practice of dying. Socrates means that a genuinely human life corrects animal life. The soul corrects the body. The senses, the body’s information gatherers, can give only partial and often deceptive perspectives on the world. The soul—specifically, the mind—organizes sense data, discovers meaning in the information the senses perceive. Without logos there is no knowledge. Logos begins with opinions understood as opinions, not with certitude. Wisdom is knowing that you don’t know. It is a rationalism that is not afraid of uncertainty. To bring the logoi closer to the truth, to improve opinions, the bodily passions must be moderated; they will otherwise bend the mind back toward the bodily, the merely perspectival. The ‘soul’ in its noēsis never simply transcends the ‘body,’ but it does get the ‘body’ away from its own self-preoccupation. (Socrates would say of Foucault: What an earnest, loveable, but naïve young philosopher, seeking certainty by mortifying his flesh, by hypostasizing his pleasure and pain, by seeking bodily ‘limit-experiences’; he must remain imprisoned thereby in his own pansomaton).

27. Why not suicide, then” asks logical Cebes (a potential philosopher). Kill the body, set the soul free to find the truth beyond this mortal coil. Suicide is a mistake because the body serves the same function as the laws of the city. It too is a prison from which we must not escape; it affords a foundation for living philosophically. But why not die and live wisely on the Blessed Isles for all eternity, rather than merely loving sophia from afar? Because—sotto voce—I know that I do not know what death will bring. I do not fear it, or I do not fear it enough to stop philosophizing and take the sleep-inducing sedatives offered by the poets. But I do not really know that my ‘soul’ will survive the death of my ‘body,’ either. And so I rush neither to nor from death, committing no suicide but committing myself to no life of unthinking subservience to questionable opinion, either.

28. Socrates recounts his own philosophic life. He began it in the investigation of nature, of generation and decay, the stuff of life and death as such. But this investigation had its limitations, specifically, the problem of causation. Materialism in physics is inadequate for the same reason that sensualism is inadequate in what much later writers would call ‘epistemology’: It precludes understanding (including self-understanding). The turn to political philosophy is as much a necessity in physics as it is in epistemology. At the same time, Socrates resists natural teleology, the claim that nature as a whole tends toward some end. He investigates human nature, the nature of ‘souls,’ in order to supplement his understanding of ‘bodies.’

29. The soul is teleological. It aims at what it considers to be good for itself. To find the best way of life, live as if your soul is immortal. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but live that way in order to winnow out the things that go stale. Living as if your soul is immortal means discovering and cultivating the nature of the soul, its virtues or strengths. These are moderation, justice, courage, wisdom. Shed the soul’s foreign attire, such as the passion for objects. To live so is to take care of your true self, the part of you that could go on as it is forever, without surfeit, if it does. This alone is genuine self-preservation. Bodily self-preservation alone fails to preserve the true self, fails to care for the soul by loving wisdom.

30. Political philosophy is philosophy that takes account of the soul, in the sense that the political philosopher does not forget (as mathematicians and today’s ‘political scientists’ tend to do) where perceptions ‘come from.’ Political philosophy starts with opinions, with logos as affected by passions, by the body. Philosophy needs grounding in everyday life, or else it becomes speculation, abstraction, no better than the mythmaking it would supplant. (Is a ‘big bang’ really superior to a creation tale? Perhaps it is inferior.) If you fail to see that there is no thorough did-embodiment, your opinions are likely to be distorted by passions, including political passions. You will be a Euthyphro of science.

31. Political philosophy provides access to knowledge of nature by affording knowledge of the variety of souls or human ‘types.’ To know that certain human ‘types’ tend to suppose that they perceive different orders in nature is to prepare oneself to consider one’s own biases in the investigation of nature. You will perceive the ‘outside’ more acutely when you perceive your ‘inside,’ when you know yourself. The rule of wisdom means the self-government of the true self, including the self-limitation of wisdom as it deals with stupidity. Prudence or practical wisdom and sophia or theoretical wisdom are complementary. The political philosopher, the only one whose ruling desire is the love of wisdom, will distort the world less than any other human type, without supposing that he does not to some degree distort the world.

32. Socrates tells his young philosophic friends a number of noble lies. His lies or spurious arguments for the immortality of the soul are tests. Will the young men become philosophers? If they believe the lies, they will believe a doctrine that is good for ‘intellectuals’ to believe, and so will be better non-philosophers than they would be if they fell into unbelief. It they disbelieve the noble lies because they have worked through the arguments, they will philosophize, imitate Socrates. As with Crito, but in a different way, Socrates prepares his friends’ souls for his departure. Dare not to think you know, but dare to think, even when your thinking only brings you to the realization that you don’t know. In doing so, you make ‘Socrates,’ the rule of wisdom, immortal—or at least as long-lasting as they human race will be. As for himself, Socrates does not do as the people do, seeking to evade death by prolonging physical life in a somnolent state of believing whatever tales of immortality their parents told them.

 

Conclusion

Political philosophy is ‘politic’ philosophy. It watches its step. It defends itself artfully. It tells edifying tales to the non-philosophic, sometimes improving the stupid and challenging the intelligent. Political philosophy is also genuinely philosophic; it loves wisdom, seeks truth. It seeks to know what virtue is and, in that seeking, becomes virtuous. Inasmuch as virtue and the knowledge of the good are always the base of the claim to rule, the political philosopher stakes the most plausible claim to ruling the city—the city in speech, that is. For a philosopher to seek ‘more’ (less?) than that, to seek to ‘really’ rule, he would need to be too imprudent to be a god philosopher. The one who lives the philosophic life knows his own limits, and the limitations of political life.

Prologue

In Lear the hero says, “Ripeness is all.” In Hamlet the hero says, “The readiness is all.” Aristotle considers ripeness the “all” or end of human life. The telos or end of the human soul consists of the virtues, the highest of which is wisdom, the virtue of the philosopher. Faced with death, the pagan will want to say, ‘I lived well, I was a spoudaios, a good man.’ Nature itself is teleological, each thing aiming at its own “ripeness” or perfection. As that most insightful of Shakespeare’s readers, Michael Platt, has remarked, King Lear lives in pagan or pre-Christian England, and his tragedy is that of a pagan hero, albeit one whose daughter argues like the Apostle Paul in Second Corinthians. Christianity is as it were closing in on Lear and his kingdom.

When confronting death, readiness is the Christian virtue. The soul must be prepared to meet its Maker. For that, it needs grace more than virtue, although it is likely to have virtues, too, among the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Hamlet’s soul struggles between Christian faith and the passions of the political man—the love of honor and of victory, moral indignation and the rage for justice. But his psychomachia consists also of the love of wisdom, philosophy, and the love of a woman and of parents. He is not yet a philosopher, but he is the only character Shakespeare shows philosophizing, thinking through theoretical problems as well as deliberating upon political problems. He is a philosophizing prince portrayed reasoning about theory and practice. (The philosopher Prospero, by contrast, delivers philosophic orations—the ripe fruits of philosophizing. As for Brutus, he is a republican politician in the grips of a philosophic doctrine, Stoicism—not a philosopher at all.) Politics, philosophy, religion: These are the conflicting elements of The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

 

1. Act I: What Is Rotten in the State of Denmark?

Denmark is dark and “bitter cold” (I. i. 7). Denmark is earthy (Horatio and Marcellus are “Friends to this ground” [I. i. 14])—no magic island, no Belmont, no Forest of Arden. Denmark is a grave, containing the stinking corpse of a murdered man, King Hamlet. Danes are decadent, their custom of drunken carousal making the Danes “traduced and taxed of other nations” (I. iv. 17).

“Who’s there?” (I. i. 1): the first line of the play is spoken by a guardian, who needs to know the identity of those who approach, so he can classify them as friends or enemies of the political community. The political man asks ‘Who?’ questions, the most important of which is, ‘Who rules?’ The religious man also asks ‘Who?’ questions; in the Bible to know is to know someone, carnally or spiritually. Who rules? God rules, on earth as in Heaven.

The philosopher asks not ‘Who?’ but ‘What is?’ At first sight, Horatio seems philosophic. The guardians have told him about the ghost, but he will not countenance hearsay; he “will not let belief take hold of him” (I. i. 24). He believes what he sees. When he sees the ghost, he says “It harrows me with fear and wonder” (I. i. 43); there is a conflict in his soul between superstitious dread (fear of ghosts, as distinguished from religious dread, the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom) and the natural and philosophic desire to know. Horatio questions the ghost philosophically, asking “What art thou…? (I. i. 46), not ‘Who are you?’ Yet Horatio’s response to the ghost’s silence is not heightened wonder but an attempt at prophecy: It “bodes some strange eruption in our state” (I. i. 69), he fears. Later, his fear overwhelms his desire to know, as he worries that the ghost will draw Hamlet into madness, “deprive you sovereignty of reason” (I. iv. 73). Unlike Hamlet, Horatio refuses to pursue the ghost, to learn what it wants. Horatio is a student and a good friend; he wants to be a philosopher, but lacks the intellectual intrepidity and the spiritual courage to harrow Hell. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (I. v. 165-166, emphasis added), which is Stoicism. But not in all philosophy. The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, for example, which would have been taught at medieval Wittenberg, accounts for ghosts, holy and unholy.

Horatio is, however, a good political historian, giving an accurate account of Denmark’s political situation. Thirty years earlier (we will learn later that it was Prince Hamlet’s birthday [V. i. 130]), King Hamlet had slain King Fortinbras of Norway, winning territory. The young Fortinbras now seeks to recover that territory by force, and the Danes prepare for war. “[T]his warlike state” (I. ii. 9) often does that; as Bellforest relates in his Histoires Tragiques, Danes and Norwegians were pirates and warriors, with kings rivaling one another for glory. But Claudius, King Hamlet’s brother and successor to the throne, prefers negotiation to war, dispatching ambassadors to the Norwegian king in a successful attempt to have young Fortinbras restrained. This suggests that Claudius in some way does not partake of the conventions of his people, particularly their warlike conventions. It will transpire that Claudius secretly rejects many conventions.

Hamlet’s first speeches, including his first soliloquy, concern the philosophic theme, nature, and its relation to Christianity. He identifies himself in relation to King Claudius as “A little more than kin”—now a stepson—”and less than kind” (I. ii. 65)—less than natural, and also less than kindly-disposed to his demi-father, whom Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, has in his judgment married rather too precipitately after the old king’s death. Indeed, “a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer” (I. ii. 150-151). In addition to this unreasonable precipitateness is the incestuous or apparently unnatural aspect of marrying a brother-in-law—a liaison made to look unnatural by the law’s conflation of natural with legal brothers. In his first soliloquy, Hamlet ‘Platonizes,’ wishing that his flesh, his body, would melt; he regrets the canon law against suicide. More moderately, he would ‘abstract himself’ from Denmark and return to university in Wittenberg. His Platonic eros for abstraction issues from his (not-so-Platonic) disgust at the world, at things of the body, which rots. This world is ruled by “Things rank and gross in nature” (I, ii. 136), specifically the bestial rulers of Denmark. To have been so betrayed by his mother is to be forced to confront a major philosophic theme: the genesis of the high from the low, the nobler from the base—a problem lessened in Christianity by the doctrine of the genesis of the high and the low alike from nothing, but by the highest, God. The suspected usurpation of Claudius threatens Hamlet’s own natural and legal/conventional, hereditary accession to the throne; his mother’s suspected part in the suspected usurpation raises questions about his own ‘breeding,’ his own identity. With such parents, who and what is Hamlet?

The theologico-political or ‘identity’ question, ‘Who am I?’ leads to the philosophic or ‘nature’ question, ‘What is man?’ A bad custom in a nation—Danish drunkenness—resembles “some vicious mole of nature” in a person (I. iv. 24), a corruption that breaks down reason and rots nobility, those distinctively human characteristics. There is no tragedy without a tragic flaw, which breaks down reason or philosophy and nobility or the (natural and/or conventional) title to political rule. Hamlet calls the ghost “old mole” (I. v. 161); the ghost’s conception of nature is revenge (I. v. 81), that is, an expression of the thumotic or manly passion Claudius accuses Prince Hamlet of lacking (I. ii. 94). In response to the ghost, Hamlet vows to remember the ghost’s advice: “Thy commandments all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain” (I. v. 102-103, emphasis added). The spirit’s spirited commandment replaces religious commandment; the commands issuing from the ghostly image of the natural father proves more authoritative in the soul of Hamlet than the commands of the Father of fathers. Hamlet has his companions swear secrecy not on the Cross but the sword.

 

2. Act II: The Plot’s the Thing

The ghost is one adviser in a play full of advice; Hamlet’s plot is one plot in a play full of plots. Polonius advises kings; his son, Laertes, advises sister Ophelia; Horatio advises Hamlet; Hamlet advises himself and the actors. Hamlet is the Shakespeare play most full of aphorisms. The best advice is wise; advice, in the memorable form of the well-crafted aphorism, is the intersection of philosophy and politics. The worst advice is like the act of Claudius against his brother and king: poison in the ear.

Plotting is the intersection of politics and drama—as is acting, which is done by both players and politicians. The second act is especially rich in plots. Polonius plots to spy on his hedonistic son (the ‘Epicurean’ counterpart to Stoic Horatio) in Paris. Hamlet sets in motion his own plot—to feign madness—which Polonius misinterprets as the result of disappointed eros directed at Ophelia. Madness is the opposite of philosophy, which obeys the Delphic injunction to know thyself; seeming madness seems to separate Hamlet from “th’understanding of himself” (II. ii. 19). Claudius plots with courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to discover the cause of Hamlet’s madness. Gertrude knows her son so little that she supposes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be his most intimate friends, confusing  childhood friends with a potential philosopher’s intellectual companion. Claudius attempts to root out subversion by knowing the mind of a potential rival, even as a tyrant typically suspects a philosopher or anyone else who shows signs of intelligence. An additional worry is Hamlet’s undeniable nobility, his princeliness: “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go” (II. 185). for his part, Hamlet in his seeming madness, like the fool in his folly, enables him to speak truth to a king and to mock the false wisdom of the king’s adviser, who plots with the king to test Hamlet’s supposed love-madness. The political philosopher who is also a politic philosopher could do worse than feign madness. Philosophers are indeed love-mad in a sense, but their eros aims at wisdom more than women. Wisdom tells them, as Hamlet tells the treacherous false friends, that man seems noble, angelic, even godlike, but is less than he seems (II. ii. 283-298). Playacting and plotting enable Hamlet to be and not to be.

Plotting has one purpose in common with philosophy: discovery. Drama has the same purpose. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hire actors to entertain Hamlet, in an attempt to ‘discover’ him. The actors are tragedians from the city, now exiled by city rulers who have banned plays, perhaps because they, like plots, might subvert the authority of city rulers: goose quills may overthrow rapiers (II. ii. 327-328). Within the actors’ companies themselves, the theme of fathers and sons, rulers and successors, has become as controversial as in Denmark generally (II. ii. 323-340). Swearing by Christ’s blood, Prince Hamlet comments, with Socratic irony, “There is somethin in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out” (II. ii. 346-347). Christ’s blood is more than natural, as Hamlet reminds Polonius, who would do better justice to the players: by “God’s bodkin” (God’s body, Christ), Hamlet exclaims, do “much better” than justice to them, Polonius (II. ii. 498), because sinful men justly deserve only punishment. Christ’s grateful mercy resembles aristocratic largesse: “Use them after your own honor and dignity,” as “the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty” (II. ii. 498-501).

For all his irony, Hamlet is no philosophic atheist. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in pagan philosophy. The ghost may be a demon making lying allegations about Polonius’ guilt, tempting Hamlet to commit a damnable crime. Hamlet’s plot will discover the king’s real nature, and not incidentally the ghost’s true nature. “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (II. ii. 571-572). Ancient tragedy, according to Aristotle, makes plot central; Hamlet is a play or plot about plotting, but the purpose of plotting is to discover nature, both in the ‘What is? and the ‘Who is?’ sense. A religious man would pray to god to reveal knowledge about the ghost. Hamlet reasons. Hamlet is a play about reasoning, about philosophizing and the conditions of philosophizing, that is, loving wisdom and pursuing it ardently. To plot a play about philosophizing, one must see that philosophy has its own ‘drama,’ dialectic.

 

3. Act III: Being and Not-Being

According to the Saxo Grammaticus, Prince Amleth feigned stupidity and madness so that his murdering uncle would not murder him; “none could open the secret lock of the young man’s wisdom.” [1] Guildenstern complains to Claudius of Hamlet’s “crafty madness” which cloaks his knowledge (III. i. 8). Polonius tells his king, “‘Tis too much proved, that with devotion’s visage / And pious action we do sugar o’er / The devil himself” (III. i. 46-48). Claudius already knows this—of himself, whose “painted word” resembles the cosmetics on a harlot’s face (III. i. 53). Both goodness and evil—religion, philosophy, and criminality—may at times go in camouflage, protecting themselves from hostile rulers or laws. This play about a philosopher or potential philosopher does not overlook the conditions of philosophizing; for Hamlet, the chief condition of philosophy is privacy, which enables him to soliloquize, to think things through on his own.

Camouflage or subterfuge is a seeming, a kind of not-being. Hamlet’s second soliloquy begins, “To be, or not to be, that is the question….” (III. i. 56). Death is the most radical camouflage or not-being, final proof against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But there is a problem, the problem of the first soliloquy, and also the problem posed by the ghost: To die is to sleep, but to sleep may be to dream. Is there life after death? Is Hell real? Unlike dogmatic atheists who call themselves philosophers, Hamlet regards death as “the undiscovered country” (III. i. 79). Opposing God’s bodkin is the “bare bodkin,” the dagger of the suicide (III. i. 76); bareness or nakedness or nature contrasts with the concealedness of the Biblical God, who, like the persecuted philosopher and the prosecuted criminal, keeps His own counsel. [2]  The would-be suicide, if not a faithful materialist, stays his hand; “conscience does make cowards of us all” (III. i. 83). without conscience and prudence—intuitive knowledge and practical reasoning—human life would be simple enough; thumotic passion, spiritedness, the promptings of the ghost or unholy spirit, “the native,” natural “hue of resolution” (III. i. 84) would prevail over the desires. But spiritedness is “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (III. i. 84-85). Thought “puzzles the will” (III. i. 80). Nietzsche will call Christianity and reasoning alike diseases of the will; man is the tightrope walker who must fall, a sick animal to be overcome. Hamlet is more cautious, in a way more philosophical, more did-passionate. He knows truth is not a woman. His duplicitous mother taught him that; catching Ophelia in a lie (III. I. 127-129) confirms that finding.

Although truth is one thing most needful, truth is weak. “[T]he power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness” (III. i. 111-113). Even Christianity, preaching that the truth shall set you free, does not claim that truth is immediately powerful on earth at all times. Christianity therefore honestly holds out martyrdom as a prospect for Christians. The philosopher or wisdom-lover also knows his own weakness in the world. Judging from the example of Claudius, truth in a political man is weaker still against the power of bodily eros. A political man’s weak truth falls victim to his desire for beauty; to gaze at Aspasia, one had better be Socrates than Pericles. Hamlet, whom Ophelia rightly calls “the observed of all observers” (III. I. 130), a man of “noble and most sovereign reason” (III. I. 153), under the watch of a most ignoble sovereign, must act—not directly and with manly openness, but in the sense of a play-actor. He must plot, disguise himself, seem, not-be, commit a faked suicide, a sacrifizio d’intellectio, in order to act justly, punish the murderer. He must become both philosopher and king. His famous, supposed ‘irresolution’ or hesitation—which has burdened his reputation with comparisons to such as Adlai Stevenson and Mario Cuomo—reflects the daunting difficulties of being both philosopher and king.

Hence Hamlet’s wise or non-Polonian advice to the lesser actors, the lesser tragedians. Here is Hamlet at his most philosophic, in public. The actors are, we recall, in the throes of political difficulties including exile and a crisis of succession—which in politics is always a crisis of legitimacy, striking like a dagger at the heart of political rule or authority. Hamlet speaks to them as if he were an Athenian Stranger, a legislative reformer. Hamlet tells them to fit their gestures to their speeches—to make action congruent with words. They must also avoid the other extreme, not be “too tame” (III. ii. 14). Moderation requires prudence and a degree of autarchia, self-sufficiency: “Let your own discretion be your tutor” (III. ii. 14). Wise playacting in a sense is the natural action; nature is not simple and spirited, but limited, modest. The “purpose of playing” is “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature,” reflecting not merely the “image” or externals but the “feature” (III. ii. 17-20). The stock-image of the fool-philosopher has him holding up a mirror to himself. (And notice “as ’twere”: The philosopher knows he has made an image, and calls attention to his making.) The observed of all observers is also self-observed, playing the fool while being ruled by his wisdom, knowing himself as a philosopher and knowing himself to be among non-philosophers in varying degrees foolish or evil. Hamlet’s final advice to the actors is, don’t let the comedians milk the audience for extra laughs. Too much comedy is as fatal to philosophy as too much tragic gesticulation, interfering with the audience’s reasoning about “some necessary question of the play” (III. ii. 36).

The rule of reason enables Hamlet wisely to advise the actors on how to act wisely. It also enables him to govern his friendship with Horatio. Hamlet calls Horatio a man of justice (III. ii. 45). Horatio’s “blood and judgment”—his spiritedness and his reason—are so well-mixed that he is not “a pipe for Fortune’s finger,” not “passion’s slave” (III. ii. 61-64). Unlike the inconstant Gertrude, the treacherous Claudius, the conniving courtiers, Horatio is to be trusted precisely because he can be encourage to be moderate. Hamlet’s friendship for Horatio is not the only exception to his solitude, but it is the only exception that we see enacted. (Another exception is his love for Ophelia, which we don’t see in the scenes between them.) He needs at least one exception to his solitude to assist in his own rational self-governance. Horatio will observe Claudius during the play the actors will stage, a play governed in word and actions by Hamlet. Hamlet will then have (or not have) corroborative evidence of Claudius’ guilt, of the ghost’s story. “[W]e will both our judgments join,” thus governing their “imaginations” (III. ii. 73-74). Soliloquy must give way to dialogue, to dialectic, lest a tiny mole undermine the philosopher’s judgment, reducing a mountain to a mole-hill.

Before the play, with characteristic false heartiness, Claudius asks, “How fares our cousin Hamlet?” (III. ii. 83). “Excellent, i’ faith, of the chameleon’s dish. I eat the air, / Promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so.” (III. ii. 84-86). Hamlet puns on “fare,” pretending the king means food instead of doing or being, thus concealing his own doing, the actors’ Hamlet-governed action, and his own being or nature, that of a philosophizing prince. A pun is also a play—a play on words. Man is the punning as well as the cunning animal, the one who feeds on words, opinions, promises (hence “i’ faith”: faith is a feeding upon promises). Only dual man, soul and body, who thinks and speaks, speaks and acts, often at once, and is in both senses of being and seeming, that not-being that is also a form of being. For man the play’s the thing. If sufficiently philosophic, the play catches the conscience—even of that heavily guarded soul, the tyrant.

Hamlet’s play begins with a wordless display, a dumbshow re-enacting the murder of King Hamlet. When the actors play Act II, the player-king comments on the brevity of woman’s love, the consequent disjunction between passion and purpose. (“The lady doth protest too much, methinks” (III. ii. 224), comments the real queen on the player-queen.) A purpose born of passion will disappear as soon as the fleeting passions flies away. Only a rational purpose will endure, or perhaps a willful one. If Fortune abuses the passionate and rewards the rational, how can a ruler, that most fortunate of men, discern true friend and lovers from friends and lovers of his fortune? This was evidently King Hamlet’s failure. It will not be the failure of his son. A “hollow” or false friend is put to the trial by “want” or misfortune (III. ii. 192). such misfortunes are likely, as there is a disjuncture between “our wills and our fates” (III. ii. 195). Hamlet is no Machiavelli, tempting us to imagine that we can conquer Fortune, beat her into submission. “Our thoughts are our own, their ends none of our own” (III. ii. 197). Any playwright knows this, as soon as the critics have their say next morning. Hamlet rolls the dice, having prudently shaved one corner. He further improves his odds by playing the critic, calling this tragedy a comedy, a mere jest. Just kidding, my liege; “free souls” will not be offended (III. ii. 224). To Ophelia he puns that women “mis-take their husbands,” exchanging a worse for a better (III. ii. 233). Wives must choose husbands as judiciously as rulers and philosophers choose friends. Gertrude hasn’t. “O wonderful son, that can so stonish a mother” (III. ii. 303): Is this not the cry of the mother of every philosophic man?

After parrying the questions of false friend Rosencrantz, Hamlet delivers his third soliloquy. He reminds himself of how to govern himself in dealing with his mother, the source of his being and the reason for his contemplated non-being. His first two soliloquies were on suicide, self-murder. This soliloquy is on murdering one’s parent, the over-spirited, immoderate, false-noble attempt to destroy low origins. such immoderation would be unnatural, an overstepping of nature’s ‘modesty’ or limits; “O heart lose not thy nature” (III. ii. 362). But nature and religious precept do not preclude the use of punishing words, even in addressing a mother, if she is errant. “I will speak daggers to her, but use none” (III. ii. 363). This is closer to Christ’s bodkin—risen in order to return one day in judgment—not the bare bodkin of self-destruction, of which mother-murder is one form. “My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites” (III. ii. 365), doubling themselves like puns or actors, governing themselves, forcing their vice to pay tribute to their speaker’s virtue. Hamlet’s punishing words will require him to punish words. To fail in this would be to not-be Hamlet, to be Nero, an impassioned tyrant. In a reversal of the Platonic plot, the potential philosopher tries his parent, rather than being tried by that amalgamation of parents that is the city.

Against Hamlet’s virtuous hypocrisy, this noble lying, Shakespeare sets the vicious hypocrisy of the courtiers, and of the tyrant. Guildenstern sycophantically tells Claudius that obedience to the tyrant’s criminal commands expresses a “most holy and religious fear” (III. iii. 8), inasmuch as so many lives depend upon His Majesty. Privately, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fear that His Majesty’s fall would take them down, too. Claudius soliloquizes in seeming prayer that guilt makes a man double, like a pun. A good philosopher in an evil regime is a pun or a double; an evil ruler among a decent, or even somewhat corrupt people is another pun. Claudius’s public duplicity derives from a duplicity of soul. He wants God’s mercy, but mercy comes only at the price of repentance, and repentance would require that he cease being a tyrant, seeming-to-be-a-king, give up his unjustly acquired gain, a sacrifice he will not make. This ruler, who should be a man of action, can no longer act; he cannot even pray, but only seems to. He is the embodiment of a bad pun. Inasmuch as an action’s “true nature” lies “above” (III. iii. 60, 62)—in the sight of God—and “words without thought never to heaven go” (III. iii. 98), a word being the action of a thought, Claudius, better at preying than praying, has doubled over from being the hunter to the hunted, caught by a play titled “The Mouse Trap.”

Polonius also puns in action. Hiding behind the curtain, this seeming-philosopher contrives both to be and not to be present. He listens to the trial of the mother by the son, who shows his philosophic nature by acknowledging the lowness of his origins: “would it were not so, you are my mother” (III. iv. 15). Like the good actors to the king, like the fool to himself, Hamlet holds up a mirror to her nature, which implicates his own. When Polonius foolishly unconceals himself, in words but not in action, imagining he must defend the Queen and imagining still further that words alone could do so, Hamlet mistakes the non-philosopher for the tyrant and kills him. Hamlet’s tragic flaw, his old mole, his spiritedness or thumos, acting on words only, not waiting to see, causes him to kill an innocent old fool, who, now as always, talked too much, thought too little.

Hamlet continues his indictment of his mother. At her age, passion can be no excuse for her misalliance. It must be her judgment that is at fault. Her folly implicates her son, for if a mature woman’s virtue is so changeable, what of the nature, the virtue, of Hamlet, a younger and therefore more passionate person? If truth is a woman, what then? And if the woman in question is the potential philosopher’s mother, what then? Is philosophy then not a passion of the head but the head of a passion, as Marx and Nietzsche contend? At this moment, the ghost reappears. Hamlet sees it. Gertrude cannot see the image of her dead husband; she assumes that Hamlet is mad. But her son, in this play full of advice good and bad, offers advice so sane it is Aristotelian: Do not go to Claudius’ bed; “custom” or habit can improve the soul as well as corrupt it; habituate yourself to virtue by abstaining from vice. ‘Habits’ is another pun; it means custom and clothing. The garment of good habits improves a bare bodkin. Habituation means that acting well, ‘playing good,’ can improve a soul that intends to be good. When it comes to the virtues, moral or intellectual, we must seem before we can be. The ghost here not only steels Hamlet’s resolve but reminds him of the other half of his nature, the natural if imprudent father betrayed by his false brother and inconstant wife, now false father and inconstant mother of Prince Hamlet.

Hamlet’s speech to the queen, his mother, on custom is natural. “I must be cruel only to be kind” (III. iv. 182). His speech, being so natural and so right, has its proper effect. Hamlet now plots with the Queen, discloses his distrust of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his suspicion of the king’s plot to use them to eliminate him. The success of his plot against the king will succeed only if the Queen does not betray her son. She will not. “O, ’tis most sweet / When in one line two crafts directly meet” (III. iv. 213-214). He plots with her, but another two “crafts” will also meet. Claudius’ statecraft will meet Hamlet’s stagecraft, the tyrant’s plot will meet the plot of the philosophizing prince.

 

4. Act IV: Eros Deranged, Thumos Released

Claudius fears Hamlet because Hamlet is “loved of the distracted multitude” (IV. iii. 4). Until now he has been a poor Machiavellian, one who is not thoroughly bad. Machiavelli despises Christianity precisely because it has the effect of making princes inept in their badness. A Christian conscience makes cowards of them. It is “necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn how to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity.” [3]  Now Claudius resolves to eschew halfway measures. “Diseases desperate grown / By desperate measures are relieved, / Or not at all” (IV. iii. 9-11).

Seeming-mad Hamlet openly taunts Claudius. “A man may fish with the worm”—the courtiers, who will escort Hamlet to England, where Claudius intends him to be killed—”that eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm” (IV. iii. 26-27). This is how “a king may go on a progress through the guts of a beggar” (IV. iii. 29). In effect Hamlet tells Claudius to go to Hell (IV. iii. 33). Hamlet verbally dethrones Claudius in accordance with nature and in accordance with religion.

But Hamlet’s old mole, spiritedness, returns. On his way out of Denmark he comes upon young Fortinbras and his army, on their way to war with Poland. Publicly, Hamlet philosophizes on the absurdity of spending blood or treasure either to conquer Polish land or to defend it. Privately, in his fourth soliloquy, in the central scene of Act IV, he persuades himself that his very humanity—his reason and his spiritedness—requires him to take revenge on his stepfather. He admires the “divine ambition” of Fortinbras and his men (IV. iv. 48). “Rightly to be great / Is not to stir without great argument, / But greatly to find quarrel in a straw / When honor’s at the stake” (IV. iv. 33-36). If real men fight for nothing more substantial than honor, can he “let all sleep”—perchance not to dream?—when Claudius has murdered his father and “stained” his mother? “O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” (IV. iv. 65-66). This is a dangerous conflation of reason and spiritedness, though not yet a fatal one. When Hamlet tricks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, justly sending them to the death Claudius meant for him, and returns to Denmark, he writes to Horatio, saying he’s now “naked in your kingdom” (IV. vii. 41-42); his “bodkin” is “bare,” natural, and he himself is also a dagger, an embodiment of spiritedness, aimed at the tyrant. Denmark is now Horatio’s kingdom more than Hamlet’s, its legitimate heir. Hamlet is now too natural to inherit, weak and vulnerable in conventional terms, naked to his enemies, and yet, precisely because natural, also dangerous, deadly to the tyrant.

Ophelia has gone mad, the victim of the love-madness her late father had misdiagnosed in Hamlet, and of grief at her father’s murder by Hamlet’s hand. If her mad speeches are true, she had succumbed to Hamlet’s erotic advances, advances her brother Laertes had warned her against, quite probably after the fact. Laertes had told her that Hamlet’s love for her might be true, but nonetheless futile, as he would be required to marry her not for love but in consideration of “the safety and health of the whole state” (I. iii. 21). Hamlet’s true love is for wisdom and for his intellectual companion, Horatio; yet Ophelia, who understood him as a man of noble and most sovereign reason, and, even more perceptively, as the observed of all observers, might well have made a worthy wife. Hamlet’s plot—to feign madness and mock her love—and his too-quick spiritedness—the accidental killing of Polonius—caused her derangement and her consequent suicide by drowning—water being the opposite of the fire of her brother’s rage against Hamlet (IV. vii. 188).

For Hamlet and Fortinbras are not the only dangerous men now in Denmark. Laertes has returned from Paris at the news of his father’s death, full of vengeful spirit, his epicureanism purged. A messenger tells Claudius: “The rabble call him lord, / And as the world were now but to begin, / Antiquity forgot, custom not known, / The ratifiers and props of every word, / They cry, ‘Choose we, Laertes shall be king!'” (IV. v. 100-104). Antiquity forgot, a new world, the rabble call him lord: Laertes returns like an avenging Christ, but with no Christlike mercy. Less prudent than Hamlet, he wants revenge even if it means going to Hell. Ophelia’s madness enrages him further, and Claudius easily redirects that rage away from himself and onto Hamlet. In plotting Hamlet’s destruction with him, Claudius tells Laertes of a Norman named Lamord, that is, Death. Lamord is such an excellent horseman that it is as if he “grew into his seat… demi-natured with the brave beast” (IV. vii. 83-86). This centaur-like personage is from The Prince Chapter XVIII, “In What Mode Faith Should Be Kept by Princes.” A prince who proceeds faithfully will lose to a rival who knows “how to get around men’s brains with astuteness.” A prince must “know well how to use the beast and the man,” force as well as law; hence “ancient writers”—Machiavelli does not forget antiquity, finding it useful—”wrote that Achilles, and many other ancient princes, were given to Chiron the centaur to be raised, so that he would look after them with his discipline. to have as teacher a half-beast, half-man means nothing more than that a prince needs to know how to use both natures; and the one without the other is not lasting.” [4]  Claudius is Machiavelli’s disciple, using the man and particularly the beast in Laertes, exploiting Laertes filial love and outraged justice in order to get him to murder a dangerous rival. This adds to the weight of Hamlet’s first complaint about his mother, that a beast would have waited longer to remarry; Claudius pursued this same Machiavellian strategy to her, too, using both the beast and the woman in her to destroy a rival prince.

 

5. Act V: Duel and Dialogues: The Readiness Is All

There are no soliloquies in the final Act. The clowns’ dialogue apes or ‘puns’ a scholastic/philosophic one. They dispute the question, Why should Ophelia, a suicide, receive a Christian burial? They draw the conclusion of a philosopher of the Cynic school: Ophelia receives a Christian burial because she was a gentlewoman.

Horatio and Hamlet also dialogue. Horatio observes that custom or habit has made the clown-gravedigger easy in his business. Hamlet’s reply ironically recalls the leisured condition of philosophizing: “The hand of little employment hath a daintier sense” (V. i. 62). In considering the skull the clown casually shovels up, Hamlet, like the clowns, finds that the consideration of death leads to a critique of aristocratic convention: “Here’s a fine revolution” (V. i. 81)—from politician or courtier, keening on honor, to a skull unceremoniously tossed by a clown. “Mine ache to think on’t” (V. i. 82-83)—he who had steeled himself to quarrel over honor as the sign of his identity as a son, a man, and a prince. The clown reinforces this identify, with his ‘doubled’ speech, his puns, as he speaks to Hamlet of Hamlet, another doubling that focuses Hamlet’s identity for Hamlet. The clown’s speech elicits Hamlet’s ‘Ubi sunt?’ speech on Yorick’s skull. “To what base uses we return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till ‘a find it stopping a bung-hole?” (V. i. 180-181). Horatio, no real philosopher, gets queasy: “‘Twere to consider too curiously to consider so” (V. i. 183); to non-philosophers, philosophers will always appear too curious, in both senses of the word. After the cold air of the early sciences, the fire and water of the central scenes, the drama has come down to earth. These four elements make up nature as a whole, which, for humans, consummates in bodily death physical non-entity. In view of one person’s death, ‘Who is?’ and ‘What is?’ are the same question.

The most observed of all observers watches Ophelia’s “maimed rites” (V. i. 195), unobserved. Overhearing Laertes blaming him for causing Ophelia’s madness, Hamlet fatally reveals himself, puts an end to all the play, the concealment and disguising and doubling. The flaw that makes Hamlet a tragic hero instead of a philosopher-king is his thumos. His thumos reveals itself in his guilty recognition of an erotic failure, his botched wooing of Ophelia. (The Iliad, rich epic source of so many tragedies, also concerns thumotic conflict over a woman who allows herself to be stolen from her husband.) Hamlet and Laertes fight in the grave, the image of Denmark. [5]  Leaping into the grave is returning to warlike Denmark, the philosopher’s return to the cave—but here too precipitate, a voluntary act of anger, not the reluctant act of the mature thinker; philosophy is learning how to die, but the learning is not so sudden. In so doing, however, the near-philosopher confesses his eros, his love for Ophelia, claiming he loved her more than her brother did. He asserts natural love and attack a man he sees as a symbol of the incestuous love exhibited by his beast-mother and tyrant-stepfather. In leaping, Hamlet later admits he “forgot myself” in the “tow’ring passion” of indignation (V. ii. 76-79). But in the grave, as he also sees, he meets Laertes, mirror of himself, who brings him to himself, the beginning of the end of all his doubling. Why are Hamlet and Laertes doubles? Because each is an Epicurean. Laertes represents the superficial side of Epicureanism: the love of pleasure, of Paris. Hamlet represents the philosophic side of Epicureanism, what Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy calls Dionysianism: the claim that beneath the glimmering and seductive surface of the world all is nothing but matter in motion, kings metamorphosing into worms.

Separated by bystanders, Hamlet and Laertes agree to a duel. Hamlet says of his thumotic leap, “Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well; / When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us / There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.” (V. ii. 8-11). What is man? A sub-plotter. Divinity—God for Christians, Nature for philosophers?—”shapes our ends,” provides the telos for human beings. For Aristotle, a wise man can in large measure shape his own end; in Machiavelli, a man of virtù can shape the ends of a people, control Fortuna herself. In Hamlet’s more modest and more nearly Christian and classical-philosophic view, human beings act like gardeners rough-hewing a shrub, an attempt that interferes with but does not prevent the providential or natural end from coming out. You can’t drive out God and nature with pitchforks or pruning shears. Hamlet knows this, even though, among men, he is a master-plotter or playwright (V. ii. 31), having re-written Claudius’ commands to the English, sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the death intended for himself. The play, as any playwright (indeed any writer) knows, is only as good as the last edit. Written commands may lose their author’s intention thanks to editors judicious or injudicious; the final editor, God or nature, has the last word in any event.

Regicide is unnatural, but tyrannicide is natural. It is therefore crucial to know the difference between a king and a tyrant. The tradition inaugurated by Machiavelli contends that tyranny is but monarchy misliked. Claudius is a fine exhibit against this opinion. He is an unnatural, incestuous ruler who interrupted the divine/natural right of succession: “And is’t not to be damned / To let this canker of our nature”—of human nature—”come / In further evil?” (V. ii. 68-70), Hamlet rightly asks. Claudius plots to use Laertes to kill Hamlet in the duel with ‘doubled’ weaponry—a poisoned rapier and poisonous drink. The duel is also a “trial” (V. ii. 156). with Claudius’ plot to kill Hamlet, Hamlet plays the editor, counterplotting Claudius’ killing. In considering the risks of the duel, he chooses the Christian side of the philosophic matter: “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it [death] is now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.” (V. ii. 199-202). If you cannot out-plot your enemy, and if (as is surely true) you can’t out-plot God, you can at least make ready to meet Him. If evil mars human ripeness, setting problems for Aristotelians, it has more difficulty preventing human readiness—although, as the ghost has told Hamlet, it can surely do that, too, especially if one fails to account for the existence of evil. The philosopher who teaches readiness is Montaigne, in “Of Physiognomy,” his essay on human identity wherein he holds up the mirror to the human face. But Montaigne’s conclusion—that the least premeditated death is best—contrasts with Hamlet’s considered and Christian stance.

Choice of weapons, gentlemen! Foils and daggers are Laertes’ choice, which Hamlet accepts, but the daggers, instruments symbolic of corporeal nature, will remain unsheathed. The tyrant’s real weapon, now as before, is poison, which acts by means of treachery, deception. “Foil” is a pun, both a dueling weapon (a dual dueling weapon, for play-combat) and a gem-setting. This duel of duality, this conflict of rival likenesses, a dialogue-in-action, results in death by poisoned pun, a tragic joke, an uncreating word. A tyrant is a god in reverse; his words do not create but kill. Claudius oversees a duel/trial that is a play, but a deadly play, a play that isn’t enacted ‘in play,’ although it seems to be.

Hamlet begs Laertes’ pardon—a gentleman’s pardon, not a Christian’s. Hamlet blames the tragic outcome of his plot on his madness, which was faked, except in the sense that his rage made him hastily kill Polonius. Hamlet was indeed an angry or ‘mad’ man, playing a madman. Hamlet’s madness is “poor Hamlet’s enemy” (V. ii. 218). Hamlet now separates his rage from himself, even as he had told his mother to separate her vice or tragic flaw from herself. Hamlet has stopped ‘multiplying,’ doubling himself, and now starts subtracting from the sum of his parts. (The problem with so much of philosophy that came after Shakespeare is precisely that it never stops ‘multiplying’; it ‘synthesizes’ opposites when self-subtraction would be wiser, and it unphilosophic followers end by ‘subtracting’ all too many human lives in the in the quest of the final ‘synthesis.’ Modern tyrants or ‘totalitarians’ are political/thumotic men in the grips of certain modern doctrines which do not let them know when to stop; as thumotic men, they very much need such limits.) Appealed to as a gentleman, Laertes replies as a gentleman. Imitating the philosophic act of separating, he replies that his nature accepts the apology but his honor does not; he courteously or conventionally awaits the king’s permission to stand down, which of course he does not receive, inasmuch as the king is neither philosopher nor gentleman. The gentleman will always be vulnerable to the tyrant, if not advised by a philosopher—living or dead—who sees the profound unconventionality of the tyrant, an unconventionality mirroring the philosopher’s own conventionality. Absent such advice (philosophers are rare), religious counsel may suffice. In the circumstances prevailing in Denmark, such counsel appears to be absent.

Claudius uses the appearance of a just rule of law in setting down the rules for the duel/trial. To win at odds, in twelve passes the expert Laertes must touch Hamlet three times more than Hamlet touches Laertes. This seems an arrangement of equal justice, except that the real odds are: touch him just once, and he loses everything. Hamlet tells Claudius: “Your Grace”—he hasn’t given up one kind of ‘doubling’ speech, irony—”has laid the odds o’ th’ weaker side” (V. ii. 240). Socrates-like, Hamlet prepares to make the weaker argument the stronger; tyrant-like, Claudius intends to make the potential philosopher and potential king drink hemlock. When unphilosophic Gertrude drinks the poison instead, when Hamlet kills Claudius with the poisoned rapier and (for good measure) doubles the action with poisoned drink, this completes the rough-hewn justice done by the mutual killing of the ‘doubles,’ Hamlet and Laertes.

In Christianity, mercy (a form of grace) supplements justice. The dual duelists now forgive one another in more than gentlemanly fashion; gracious exchange in speech replaces conflict in speech and action. But to leave things there would be merely to moralize. Justice and mercy alone do not solve the grave dilemma of Denmark. For that, prudence is needed—one final plot. Hamlet charges his friend Horatio with rightly telling of Hamlet and his just cause. Stoic Horatio says he’ll commit suicide instead, multiply his friendship unto death. He is “more an antique Roman than a Dane” (V. ii. 326), and ancients do not eschew suicide. Horatio’s ‘Stoicism’ is emotional, all-too-emotional. The (erstwhile) antic Dane stops him, lest Hamlet’s “name” be “wounded.” Hamlet does this with gentle iron: “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart / Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, /To tell my story.” (V. ii. 331-334). Do not be an Epicurean in your Stoicism by killing yourself—a fine refutation of both Epicureanism and Stoicism, and one that needs no Hegelian/synthetic dialectic to formulate. Has Hamlet also learned not to be Stoical in his Epicureanism?

“The potent poison quite o’er crows my spirit” (V. ii. 338). The cock’s crow chases the ghost, the old mole; the cock’s crow, in Christian symbolism, represents Christ’s Word. Hamlet prophetically anoints Fortinbras, whose name means strong-arm, a foreign king for the Danish people. Hamlet gives the election to the good prince, rather than to some inferior, drunken, home-grown lord, and plausibly so, because Hamlet is the people’s favorite. But if Prince Strong-Arm is to be a good king, he will need an education. It cannot be a philosophic education, at least not directly. Fortinbras is no potential philosopher or philosophizing king, as far as we know. The aphoristic, old-fashioned ‘philosophy’ of Polonius served old King Hamlet poorly; the real philosophy of Wittenberg served young Hamlet well, but proved difficult when it came time for the prince to re-enter the cave. Yet philosophy cannot be discarded, either, lest gentleman-kings leave themselves vulnerable to tyrannic usurpers. The scene Fortinbras and the English commanders come upon is full of woe and wonder, tragedy and philosophy, Horatio says (V. ii. 348).

Nor can politics be discarded. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. The sycophants who make tyranny possible are punished justly in accordance with Hamlet’s plot, one plot that worked very well. This is a forceful reminder that not all plotting is futile. Without knowing this, one would conclude that prudence and the statecraft prudence supports are utterly impotent. One would veer from Machiavellian hubris to quietist providentialism—either way, inviting the sway of tyrants. To understand political life one needs to understand the plot, and plotting. Not aphorisms but political history will impart political wisdom to a political man. Horatio will speak, bear witness now, “Even while men’s minds are wild, lest more mischance / On plots and errors happen” (V. ii. 378-379). This very wildness or freedom from custom and habit tragedy brings, imitating for the decent, nonphilosophic, but political and warlike mind an effect philosophizing brings peacefully to the philosophic or philosophically-disposed mind. Tragedy thus makes political mind, the minds of strong-armed men, impressionable to a better mold. Horatio’s story will be the completion of the political education of Fortinbras, whose strong arm had been too inclined to strike untimely. Political history, the history of plotting, teaches the just timing a statesman needs. Horatio’s role is not to be a philosopher but to be a political historian, full of non-aphoristic but practical wisdom for the foreign warrior-king. That is why the play is not a tragedy but a “tragicall historie.” After telling it, might Horatio become for Fortinbras what he might have been for KIng Hamlet II—a wise and faithful friend and counselor, no suicide?

Fortinbras gives Hamlet “The soldier’s music and the rite of war” (V. ii. 384). In Plato, the soldier’s music educates the guardians to share rule with the philosopher-kings. In Hamlet, the soldier’s music is the public sign that the potential philosopher, reluctant to act, would have made a fine king, would have “proved most royal” (V. ii. 383). In recognizing this (or, at least, in seeming to recognize it, as he has yet to hear the whole story), and in making sure that Hamlet receives no maimed rites, Fortinbras shows that he is ready—not so much for death, as for life, and not for any life, but the life of a genuine king. Fortinbras says that the many bodies—of bodkins, embodying nature—belong on a battlefield, not at court. Fortinbras is a warrior who has put a limit on his warring by turning to his civil side, where the ruler puts everything into its just place.

 

Epilogue

Hamlet begins with the political and religious question: Who’s there? Hamlet ends with a good answer: Fortinbras and Horatio, governed by the spirit or ‘ghost’ of Prince Hamlet, are there. They are ruling Denmark. Prince Hamlet, freed from his tragic flaw, from the imprudent-in-life, thumotic-in-death spirit of his father, rules Denmark from the grave. Is that not the only way philosophers ever become kings?

In its course the play has answered ‘Who is?’ questions: Claudius is a murdering tyrant; Gertrude is a bad or at least weak wife and a mother at last faithful to her son; Hamlet is a potential philosopher who would have made a philosophic king; Fortinbras is a warrior who will make a good king; Horatio is a faithful friend and political historian who, thanks to the philosophic instruction of his friend, likely to be a wise adviser, far better than Polonius. ‘Who?’ questions lead to ‘What?’ questions: What is a tyrant, a wife and mother, a philosopher, a king, warrior, a friend, a historian? In a drama, ‘What?’ questions turn back into ‘Who?’ questions, as they are answered by example rather than by definition. This ‘turn’ serves political justice and the life of philosophy. Political philosophy is political because it governs the political passion, thumos, in accordance with the philosophic ‘passion,’ logos. Philosophers who philosophize on political life never forget that they are persons thinking about persons; they ascend to realm of ideas, outside the cave of opinions and conventions, but they return with the knowledge that the philosophic ‘way of life’ plays out among non-philosophers.

Diana J. Schaub: Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Lanaham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 24, Number 1. Republished with permission.

 

“Sex is a theme hardly mentioned in the thought underlying the American founding,” the late Allan Bloom complained. [1] America is ‘Lockeland,’ and John Locke was not a notably sexy man. The education of his young gentleman includes no hearty recommendation of a jaunt to Paris. Preservation, not procreation; fear, not love; a leveling shove to a deadening common denominator where men and women remain upright with both feet fully on the ground: these features comprise the Lockean heritage in America for Bloom, who could not bring himself to love it. America’s gallant defender might point to Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Maria Cosway, or to the gleam in Ben Franklin’s eye; or even to the startling pace at which Americans populated most of a continent in the decades subsequent to the founding; the defender might deny that America is ‘Lockeland.’ The larger question remains: Can modern liberalism, so considerably shaped by Locke, Smith, Bentham, Mill, challenged and supplemented by a phalanx of stern and dutiful Germans beginning with Kant, all issuing in the decidedly unerotic consummation that is John Rawls—can this liberalism account for eros in any way superior to Darwinian population studies or some other low Victorianism?

But then there are the French. They, too, have their bores, the ones who want to ideologize sexuality in some misguided imitation of German system-building (Jean-Paul de Beauvoir, the grim Foucault), or mechanize it, in a misapplication of Newtonian mechanics (Voltaire, the philosophes generally). Still, liberalism is also Montaigne, Montesquieu, Tocqueville.

Montesquieu is among the sanest of the moderns, one who never lets one nation, or one obsession, dominate his thought. The first thing he does, when he wants to write of France, is to introduce his readers to Persia. Two Persians have lived in his home, he tells us. This was an opportunity for him to learn, because persons transplanted from distant lands “no longer have any secrets” (The Persian Letters, Preface). They regard their host as so foreign that they have no need for the usual social caution, the white lies and dark concealments, that society invites and compels its members to make. Secrets are the obverse of the public, social bonds; secrets assert liberty and bespeak vulnerability. The Enlightenment would make what had been secret public, in the names of equality and liberty. Montesquieu contributed to a great Enlightenment project, the Encyclopédie, but with his own pointed correction. He contributed an article on “taste,” which he knew the project needed, rather than the articles on despotism and liberty which the editor had supposed it needed.

That telling anecdote is one of many brought to light by Diana J. Schaub in Erotic Liberalism. She brings to her task a mind well matched to her subject: stocked with useful learning; sensitive to details, but with a strength that never lingers too long on the surface; not unfamiliar with the uses of both secrecy and display, indirection and flourish. The Persian Letters has found a reader of esprit.

In Montesquieu she finds “a liberalism responsive to circumstances, history, and national differences, while avoiding the perils of relativism and historicism” (Erotic Liberalism, xii). A genuinely erotic liberalism would never love humanity but hate people, as some philosophes were wont to do. Sexuality reminds of the particular even as a universal trait. Montesquieu writes on subjects much in vogue now: diversity, sexuality and ‘sexual politics,’ the multiplicity of cultures. But he never gets lost in mere différence, nor allows his readers to give themselves over to self-righteous thumotic passions. Schaub shows herself to be alert to the political atmosphere of her own times, using the ‘Montesquieu our contemporary’ motif to invite, charm, attract those readers now marching to the brassy notes of the regnant conform-anarchism. Like her man, she wants her readers not only to read but to think. Thinking imperils orthodoxies; Schaub is a very subversive writer. At the same time, and just as pertinently, she shows how critic of current orthodoxies might proceed in a manner less direct, less overtly challenging, less ‘masculine’ and gadfly-like than that of Bloom—in a more serpentine and indeed Lockean manner. In this she has recent precursors, Mary P. Nichols and Catherine H. Zuckert. Against intellectual tyrants with powerful foreign regimes behind them, some combination of Socratism and Churchillian statesmanship makes sense. Against the high priests and priestesses of egalitarianism, backed not by armies but by a deus semi-absconditus called modern bureaucracy, a less manly approach may in the end prove more effective—at least in some circumstances and in some respects, as Montesquieu would not hesitate to add. Strategically, we are all Gramscians now.

Montesquieu, Schaub writes, carefully distanced himself from “the younger philosophes” and their “polemicization of philosophy” (EL, p. 8). Such polemicization, she invites readers to see, can only defeat the tolerance that ‘multiculturalism’ seeks to encourage. “The prosecutorial method”—shared by thumotic personalities always and everywhere—”may not be the best way to ascertain Montesquieu’s intention” (EL, p. 8), or indeed the best way to open anyone’s mind, including one’s own.

Politically, the “erotic foundation” of Montesquieu’s liberalism affords a place for the building blocks of the polity, family and property, both “rooted in a particular disposition of sexual passion” (EL, p. 9). “Montesquieu’s poetry may be in the service of the bourgeoisie,” the class that gives modern politics its energy and stability, “in a way that Rousseau’s does not” (EL, p. 9). This is nonetheless every bit a form of modern poetry; the epistolary novel is “a new vehicle for the new philosophy,” one that organizes the drama less around arguments (and, by implication, reason) than the dialogue forms does, and more (though not exclusively) around the passions of the characters and of the reader. Montesquieu rejects the supposed Platonic notion that ideas are “positive things” (“Essay on Taste,” quoted in EL, p. 161, n. 41). He is anti-‘abstraction,’ more ‘bodily,’ concerned with the “feminization of philosophy” (EL, p. 11) for the new, predominantly female audience of novel-readers. The Montesquieuian political philosopher rejects the ‘masculine’ approaches to “the philosopher’s relationship to the political community” (EL, p. 11), whether Platonic (the ideas, the triumph in speech over the city’s destruction of Socrates’ body) or Machiavellian (the entirely non-abstract, but regrettably tyrannical ambition to master the woman, Fortuna).

An epistolary novel is as dramatic as a dialogue, as much an imitation of conflict. Contradiction first requires separation, and the Persian Letters is nothing if not a study of separation—of the separation of self-exiled Persians from their country, of the Persian Usbek from his wives, of Usbek’s Enlightenment head from his possessive heart, and even the philosophic part of his head from the social-emulative-political part of his head. Not only does Usbek’s professed reason for leaving Persia, “a desire for knowledge” (PL, no. 1), contradict his more physical and political reason, the need to evade his enemies, but the very word he uses for “desire,” “l’envie,” may hint that his desire is not pure eros for knowledge as such, but mixed with a certain concern for social status. Too, there is the separation of the creator from the created, in this sense, the disappeared god, Usbek, from the eunuchs he has created (PL, no. 2) and from the women the eunuchs are to guard. Why should a genuine creator-god need to seek knowledge? This deus absconditus has not merely disappeared; he does not really exist as a god, at all. As the sixty-fourth letter shows, the priests secretly rule ‘god,’ that is, they rule in place of a god who effectually does not exist. The Persian Letters deserves its reputation as a masterpiece of atheism, an attack on “the claim common to the three great revealed religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” (EL, p. 17). “Montesquieu’s overarching purpose in the Persian Letters is to disorient—to dis-Orient Christianity, France, and the patriarchal family” (EL, p. 17), to  get them away from the ‘Oriental’ ethos of absolutist monarchy, of despotism, and of an abstracted but still commanding god (whose priests are ventriloquists), and to reconnect human beings to nature.

To do so, Schaub observes, Montesquieu understands just as acutely as Hegel that philosophy can no longer begin with nature, or with political conventions that are so simple that they still reflect nature, as they did in antiquity. Philosophy must begin “amidst human history and human convention” (EL, p. 20). Hence Montesquieu’s reputation as the father of sociology. Political liberty at best will still be a somewhat looser, more comfortable unfreedom, because men are fish caught in nets made up of laws that either chafe irritatingly (despotism) or give them sufficient room to ignore their capture. Despotism is a certain pattern of law-nets, not so much a reflectionof the tyrannical soul, a natural soul perverted, as seen by the ancients. Despotism is a net woven from the fabric of doctrines, not of soul-types. It is woven of such doctrines as Biblical religion and Hobbesian natural right. These doctrines share an appeal to fear, whether fear of God as the beginning of wisdom or fear of violent death, threatened by the ‘absolute’ monarch who settles all controversies in order to impose a peace that precisely and pointedly does not pass all understanding (or even the meanest understanding).

Why not a renewal and adaptation of that estimable moderate, Aristotle, then? Montesquieu remains a modern, a man of impassioned individuality. Moderation and prudence are recoverable (perhaps the better word is ‘simulated’) “not on the grounds of classical virtue but on the grounds of security and liberty for the individual” (EL, p. 25). This is moderation ‘from below’—from the passions—not ‘from above’—from a reason that rules through thumos. (Usbek’s Enlightenment rationalism is impotent as it attempts to rule the passionate wives by means of the thumotic eunuchs; Montesquieu satirizes Plato’s tripartite regime of philosopher-kings in this, as well as his claim that reason can rule the passions by allying itself with thumos within the human soul.) The fundamental human passions are capable of such ‘moderate’ or tamed expression because they are not thumotic. Unlike absolute-monarchist Hobbes’s war of all against all, Montesquieu’s state of nature is peaceful. Men are naturally timid and needful. “The prayers of natural man are directed not to God but to natural woman” (EL,p. 26); it is not clear to whom natural woman prays, or if she does. Warlike passions arise in Persia or in Paris, in fear-based despotism or honor-bound monarchy-aristocracy. Warlike men do not pray to women; they seize and incarcerate them in harems or nunneries of various sorts. The harem, the regime of castration of guardian-eunuchs and claustration of women-possessions shows “most starkly the results of an attempt to realize virtue in the face of natural opposition” (EL, p. 38). Schaub pauses to remind readers that “Montesquieu turns individuals away from such life-denying ethics as ancient manliness and Christian martyrdom, but not, like Hobbes, by directly advocating cowardice. An at least residual admiration for human high-heartedness may be quite indispensable to political life” (EL, p. 39). The wives at last rebel, openly, after years of discreet rebellion.

In sum: Socrates the manly, the gadfly, yes. But also Socrates the midwife, who “swears by Hera rather than by Zeus,” anthropos rather than aner, human rather than manly (EL, p. 42). Still, Montesquieu’s Socratism goes only so far. Montesquieu’s woman-oracle is Roxane, who speaks of her desires and the laws of nature, the passions, not Diotima, who “speaks of eros and immortality” (EL, p. 43). The ruling passions of the noblest Montesquieian minds aim at bodily pleasures, although not bodily pleasures basely understood. “[N]ature is body, not the sunlight of truth” to be seen outside the cave (EL p. 47). And—one hopes the ghost or esprit of Foucault listens—such pleasures are ruined by the introduction of despotic power-politics into the harem by the excessively manly Usbek. This brings out counter-despotic thumos in the women (they are not “entirely creatures of the body,” Schaub notes [EL, p. 54]) and defeats the purpose of the family, which is procreation and the rearing of progeny. “Under the dynamic of despotic jealousy, Usbek gives no thought to either the continuance of life or the commodiousness of life” (EL, p. 53). In Europe, this critique of infecundity would result in the liberalization of divorce laws, and far less frequent recourse to the cloister and the monastery. In this, English Protestantism is wiser than French Catholicism, producing Jane Austen heroines instead of Eloise or Emma Bovary. Tyranny (and here Schaub says tyranny, not despotism) of fathers heavenly and earthly—the separation of men from women, the possession of other property by central state and central church, insufficiently separated—yields population decline, the prevention of life by celibacy and the destruction of life by unnecessary poverty and wars. (Whispered to feminists: abortion is no more to be encouraged, for the same reason [EL, pp. 67-68]).

To say it another way, Montesquieu is a philosopher of esprit. He commits a sin against the Holy Spirit by making Him an ‘it’ and identifying it with the proselytizing spirit, thus the imperial spirit, thus the attempt to conquer nature. Nature returns to break the priestly pitchfork by revolutionizing the despotic, ‘Oriental’ regimes, animated by the ‘spirits’ of the Bible and the Koran. But note: Satan’s pitchfork will also break. Machiavelli’s militant, proselytizing, imperialist atheism, to say nothing of the Hegelian spirit to come, with its insane tyrannical deformations ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ will fail for the reason Charles de Gaulle identified: They are unnatural, unattractive, finally impossible to maintain. De Gaulle thought of the statesman not as a conqueror but as a farmer. Montesquieu, Shaub recalls, made his living from vineyards—a sort of farming that suggests the symposium of philosophy more than sober statesmanship, but farming nonetheless. Montesquieu’s moderated Machiavellianism entails, among other things, an atheism that does not contradict itself by deifying itself. It does not fall victim to the disease Schaub calls impotence tyrannus. Just as eunuchs are alienated from the generative part of their own nature (and as monks are so alienated by their celibacy, anticipated in much milder form by the Jewish practice of circumcision [EL, p. 79]), rechanneling their desires to domination, so the despot alienates himself from his own nature as a man even as he strives thumotically for ‘manly’ dominance. The power-man is the man of impotence; the jealousy of the jealous god or husband is really impotence, ungodliness, unmanliness. With a perhaps too-cruel pun, Schaub writes, “Usbek cuts rather a sad figure” (EL, p. 88). Enlightenment alone will not do.

Fecundity results in wealth and variety. “The importance Montesquieu attaches to the need for variety cannot be underestimated” (EL, p. 98). There is one bad regime, despotism, but many good regimes, in the many circumstances in which human beings live. The non-holy esprit of Montesquieu is “the spirit of laws and the general spirit of nations” (EL, p. 98). Again, one might note the contrast with the Bible, where the chosen nation [and later, the individuals chosen by the Holy Spirit] is separated from the mere nations, the gentiles.) Esprit is “a capacious word” meaning with and wisdom, spiritedness and mind; the human at its best (EL, p. 98. Montesquieu’s other Persian, Rica the one who readily adopts to things Parisian, tells the story of a philosopher-queen who refounds the regime of a despotic husband in the spirit of “spiritedness in defense of political liberty” (EL, p. 103), the regime of variety. Such stories are satirical, but this is a satire of a non-Juvenalian kind, inviting readers to smile at themselves. “Ridicule becomes a goad to self-examination, rather than an instrument of scorn and separation” (EL, p. 103), too easily an instrument of despotic narrowing of the range of human possibility. In another enlightening story, one of Montesquieu’s writers has recourse to the original religion of Persia, Zoroastrianism, a natural religion “in which the sacred law affirms the inclination of nature” (EL, p. 105), including marriage of equal partners and, not incidentally, the fecundity of commerce. Nature brings persons and things together, unlike the ‘founding separation’ seen in both Biblical creationism and classical philosophy, with its ascent from the cave and its talk of idea. These myths, Montesquieu implies, are dangerous, as is entropic Hobbesian physics. Montesquieu’s “dis-Orienting” is a remixing; nature mixes, blurs, presents distinctions whose edges are not clear cut. Story-themes of incest and androgyny, cross-cultural fertilization, and procreative sex, of commerce in the most comprehensive as well as the usual sense of the word, all convey this claim. Republicanism is part of it: Rica writes to Usbek that fear, the foundation of despotism, has only one language, whereas nature is multiform. This conception of nature is a ‘feminine’ insight. Rica, though a young man, has a woman’s name (EL, p. 113); he is receptive, not dominating, and one wonders if his mother, who misses him and accuses Usbek of stealing him (PL, no.8), suspects that her son has been made Usbek’s catamite. At any rate, “Despotism, it seems, exaggerates or absolutizes sexual differentiation; liberty, by its encouragement of individuality, erodes it. The facts of nature doubtless remain, but their social bearing is far from ossified” (EL, p. 119). Eros takes different shapes in different regimes. Under despotism, where women are objects of luxurious accumulation, eros is pleasure, that is, a kind of selfishness that separates while coupling. Under despotism, not only fear but eroticism itself divides men so as to make them conquerable. In republics, with their reciprocity or commerce, and their taste in literature for the pastoral romance (seen in Hellenistic Greece, Renaissance Italy, and England), eros is love. In monarchies, where women rule behind the scenes as orderers of luxury, eros is gallantry. Montesquieu’s France moves toward republicanism from its current combination of monarchy and despotism; this may be seen in its taste for badinage, boudoir talk in public, “the opening up of the private to the public” (EL, p. 119). (The use of this practice in today’s commercial republican regimes may be seen on television; philosophers who would understand contemporary America may start their day with breakfast with Regis and Kathie Lee and their embourgeoisement of badinage.) “Women are consummate consumers” (EL,p. 121); to please their consuming women, aristocrats must learn to work for a living, and thereby step toward a new regime, leaving warlike pride or machismo (Greek thumos or Machiavellian virtù) for productive pride or vanity. “[P]erhaps France is salvageable,” even if Persia is not (EL, p. 135).

“Vanity is a kind of socialized fear—not the natural, dissociative, Hobbesian fear that culminates in despotism, but a man-made, communicative, opinion-based fear that renders human beings interdependent” (EL, p. 136). Nature fluctuates as water can; the attempt to restrict it too rigidly, too despotically, leads to broken dikes and dams. Respect it, and it can become tamer, rechanneled into, and by, formal institutions that will not break. Commercial republicanism and despotism both rely on the passions, but commercial republicanism does so intelligently, effectively. Liberty replaces virtue. Virtuous republicanism self-destructs because a regime founded upon public opinion cannot at the same time adhere consistently to virtue conceived as self-renunciation (a problem unseen, one might note, by such American progressives as Woodrow Wilson). Commerce will satisfy human passions, pacifying as well as stimulating them. One of Montesquieu’s more attractive characters lives in Venice, the commercial republic that governs water liberally. “[I]t is commerce not religion”—variety, not oneness—”that effectively inspires good faith,” by observing contracts among men “rather than the covenant with God” (EL, p. 140).

As in his politics, so in his writings: “The disjointed and open-ended quality of Montesquieu’s writing is a call to self-government,” to his reader’s reasoning capacities,to the ability to make sense of the writer’s complex universe (EL, p. 145). Montesquieu is not a deus absconditus; he is present in every line he writes. But, like nature, he wants to intermingle with his readers. “In Hobbes, reason panders basely to the passions; in Montesquieu, passion is the divine consort of reason,” the most perfect, the noblest, the most exquisite of the senses (EL, p. 144).

Perhaps any liberalism based upon Enlightenment, the bringing of reason to the many, requires eros of some sort, not only because it involves liberty conceived as the liberation of the passions, but because reason is itself erotic, desirous. A philosopher who wants only an Enlightened despot may take nature, and human nature, as entropic; human beings are atoms, colliding, separating fearfully, made to cohere by the one man who artfully and forcefully consolidates them, who pulls the net tight. But if nature is erotic, or at least more erotic than entropic, the net can be looser. Montesquieu evidently differs from Plato not so much in his eroticism but on the issue of sensuality or materialism. Materialism appears to lend a more egalitarian cast to his thought; the despotic materialists of this century unwisely tried to mix thumos with their materialism, spawning ‘leaders’ who dreamt of master races and vanguard classes. The newer, post-‘totalitarian’ ideologues commit the same error, incoherently wanting uniformity of opinion amidst diversity of ‘cultures,’ bodies, and bodily combinations. Can the pharmakon of Montesquieu cure them of their illusions, enlighten them?

Taken by itself, the Persian Letters cannot. It is not clear how erotic liberalism could defend itself, except over the very long run, and then only intermittently. Perhaps that is all Montesquieu hopes for. But perhaps not: He went on to write The Spirit of the Laws. As the writer of letter 86 suggests, law can settle the very thumotic disputes that disappointed love provokes. True law is the law of reason, and must be administered by the few who are reasonable. The few who are reasonable and who administer the law are judges. They are an anomaly within the commercial republic (unless they are bad judges of the sort who ‘follow the election returns’). Nonetheless, a commercial republic needs more than good laws and wise judges. It needs, in terms Montesquieu uses, executive dispatch and resolve. This involves thumos. De Gaulle and others have seen that commercial republicanism needs more than a moderated Machiavellianism to defend it. There is a need for thumotic republicanism, too, in some complex mixture with the erotic kind.

 

Endnote

1. Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 187.