Seth Benardete: Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 23, Number 1, Fall 1995. Republished with permission.

 

Professor Benardete has been around long enough to have established a reputation. His writings are reputed to be hard to understand. This reputation has led to certain worries. ‘He is so difficult. He commits philology. He gives me a headache; Socrates never gets a headache; Benardete makes me feel un-Socratic. Must I read Benardete?’ By no means. But you may want to, anyway. His commentary on Plato’s Republic consists of thirty-nine chapters, each one of which contains at least one reason for reading the book.

Socrates’ second sailing means the Socratic turn in philosophy from the attempt to understand nature directly, in the Anaxagorean manner, to the recognition that one must understand oneself, the would-be understander of nature. The need for this turn proceeds from the need to know the good. the attempt to see the good in nature by considering nature directly founders on the problem of teleology. If the good is somehow independent of the series of events or developments that lead up to the good, then why is the series necessary? And if the good is somehow the amalgamation of lesser goods within the series, do we not need to know the entire series in order to know the good, or even to know that the lesser goods really are good? Yet we do not know the supreme good of nature in this way because nature continues to percolate: Where will it end? Socrates resets the ship’s compass and sails again by considering his own life as a philosopher, as a would-be understander. He is forcefully brought to see that there are two opposing opinions about himself: the opinion of the majority of his fellow Athenians—an opinion whose telos (end) is the cup of hemlock conceived as punishment—and his own opinion, whose telos is also the cup of hemlock, but not conceived necessarily as a punishment for him in certain circumstances. Same ‘fact,’ but radically different proposed meanings of that fact, and the dispute is over ‘What is the good?’ Socratic philosophy looks not at things, initially, but at opinions about things, to determine whether those opinions are fragmentary or whole, self-contradictory or coherent. This procedure involves pairing opinions (in the case of the Republic, opinions about the just) with other opinions, for comparison. The procedure also involves parting, setting questions about the just apart from other things, for contrast.

Benardete has many things to say about the long course of the arguments Socrates and his interlocutors make in the Republic. With Spartan-like austerity, I shall restrict myself to identifying one insight or set of insights per chapter.

1. The form of the Republic—a dialogue narrated by Socrates—fits the substance of the Republic—the teaching that the thought of the one best regime “guides one’s understanding of political life even if it never shapes one’s actions” (9). “Socrates is himself and plays all the parts,” just as the best regime, whether or not ‘concretely’ realizable, “comprehends the manifold of all inferior regimes” (9).

2. Socrates tells Cephalus that those who make things tend toward over-fondness for their productions: poets for their poems, fathers for their children, moneymakers for their money. “Socrates after all is the maker of his own city, and perhaps he is too fond of it” (14). But perhaps not: “When the poets are finally banished in Book X, perhaps Socrates the poet goes into exile with them” (14). What gives each citizen a claim to rule—the good thing he produces for the city—also inclines him to excessive ‘pride of authorship’ with respect to the production, and with respect to the city in which that production is deemed essential. Socrates must liberate himself from such self-regard while working through it.

3. To show that justice is patriotism—benefitting the city’s friends and harming its enemies—then one must first prove that the city is good (assuming that the city’s reputed purpose, justice, is a good, or a part of the good). “[I]n philosophy, the ideality of things must precede the reality of their good” (17). Yet if justice is an art, a kind of knowledge, it is not clear that justice is good. Is knowledge ever anything more than, as one says today, ‘value-neutral’? The best doctor is the best poisoner, thanks to the same knowledge. Is the most just man therefore potentially the most unjust?

4. Thrasymachus gives every appearance of being a most unjust man. Yet “Socrates soon forces him to face the difficulty that he cannot win for himself any pupils if they believe his sole consideration is his own advantage” (21). Socrates’ irony, although denounced by the apparently indignant Thrasymachus, does not stop his interlocutors from discovering the truth about the good. “Thrasymachus sees no difficulty in combining law and knowledge; but we are made to wonder whether his savagery is not due to his belief in their perfect compatibility” (22). If no good lies outside the lawgiving city, the real and the shamming enragés who leap to the defense of the law will finally know no lawful limits. Thrasymachus represents religiosity without the gods; the departure of pious old Cephalus marks great danger as well as philosophic opportunity.

5. Thrasymachus and Socrates agree to the principle of specialization, that for every doable task there is or can be some natural or artificial instrument whose function is to perform that task. “Does the city have a function?” (30). If so, is the city the best instrument to perform that function? Even if philosophy is not the city’s function, it might be that philosophy is a byproduct of the city, that the city is both necessary to the discovery of philosophy and an impediment to the full exercise of philosophy.

6. Glaucon “prepares the way for a confrontation between the philosopher and the city” (42) by restating Thrasymachus’ argument in terms of the story of Gyges. Gyges’ ring, which makes its wearer invisible when he twists it in a certain way, “stands for the veil the law wraps around the foundation of the city” (37). The foundation of the city is adultery and murder. Why not Realpolitik, if one is wise? Glaucon’s brother, Adimantus, “prepares the way for renewing the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy” (42) by noting that the gods, who see more than men, can be propitiated with material things, bribed. So why not keep one eye on clever injustices, another on camouflage for them?

7. The need to found a city in speech arises from the inability to find justice directly: by introspection or by contemplation of the cosmos. A founded or made city does not pose the dilemma of an origin given by someone else whose intentions may be obscure. “Making in speech cuts out time and place, both of which are indispensable to becoming” (47). In founding the city in speech, the dialogue, the Republic, “is the philosophic city in which Socrates is already king” (47). Glaucon’s disdain for the simple, healthy city, which he calls the city of pigs, and his preference for what Socrates calls the feverish city, the city whose citizens eat meat and recline on couches, make possible both war and philosophy—both of which require delaying the satisfaction of such desires as may be granted instantly or easily.

8. Thumos (the spiritedness of the human soul) is a Homeric word, fallen into disuse by Socrates’ time; Socrates “first confronts” Homer by “taking over from him this old-fashioned word” (55). Although “the philosopher’s best friends are his opponents” (57), Glaucon doesn’t know that. The philosopher-dogs or guardians-called-philosophers appeal to Glaucon, attaching him to the city in speech. “The heart, says the heart, is the mind” (57). It is enough now for Glaucon to be less mindless. “Political philosophy has become political” (58) for the sake of inducing the very political, hearty Glaucon to begin to see that the mind has secrets unknown to the heart.

9. “The Republic is a story that slips into Glaucon in the form of a story about stories” (58), that is, an account of the stories appropriate to guardians. Their education apparently transforms thumos into eros, for the edification of Glaucon, although one notices that the story itself is told with the help of Adimantus. The problem with existing, Homeric, stories is a moral one. Homer and the epic poets generally begin in the middle of things, in contrast to the moral book, the Bible, which begins at the beginning. Beginnings are humbling to man, glorious to God. Morality requires a beginning, a middle, and an end, but Homer, it is regrettable to say, “has the beautiful determine the very sequence of events” (62). Homer and the other poets are insufficiently moral and insufficiently immoral, for they allow Zeus to live on after inventing Athena, their representative. Their city in speech is accordingly ill-founded, a self-contradictory mixture of old and new.

10. Socratic theology comports with Socratic education of the guardians. This is not an education through suffering. The gods are not to be represented as dispensing evils to men, as poets would have gods do. The Socratic gods “are as indifferent to friendship as they are to enmity,” “models of self-sufficiency” rather than cosmic cops or “models of care” (64). “Perhaps they are beautiful but invisible statues” (64), a thought that makes one wonder at Socrates’ previous criticism of Homer as an amoral esthete. Be this as it may, the guardians must not be taught fear, and potential philosophers must not suppose fear of the Lord to be the beginning of wisdom.

11. Socrates and sober Adimantus exile tragic and comic poetry from the city. “The language of death is to cease to be affective and become neutral,” like an art (67). “Life is mere life”: extreme moderation, as it were, yields equality and freedom. Freedom is a problem for the city because “the city… in duplicating its own freedom and self-sufficiency in its warriors cannot help but detach them from the city,” making each warrior “a city unto himself” (67). And therefore unequal to other citizens?

12. Mimesis means both emulation and imitation. If the city in speech is to inculcate the opinion that every man has his own natural job, the poet, who imitates everyone while emulating no one, presents a problem. But the city is also a problem. In the city, “Education sets out to produce the integral self—no one can be anyone else—and ends up by producing the anonymity of knowledge on the level of corporeality,” of mere opinion (72). Therefore, “The city impersonates wisdom. It is the sophist of all sophists” (72).

13. Musical education moderates the soul by separating “love of one’s own (philein) from the love of the beautiful (eran)” (73). One loves the beautiful but cannot have it, cannot make it one’s own, cannot direct filial love at it. Most souls cannot sensibly want to defend the beautiful to the death, to act thumotically with respect to it. This therapeutic teaching complements the teaching about gymnastic, medicine, and the body—the latter of course being the thing that is most one’s own. It is all very well to perform a severe and effective therapy upon a body that is diseased but fundamentally healthy. But to sustain a body diseased through and through for year after year, a body whose maintenance requires too much of the soul’s attention: this is not what Socrates’ “statesmanlike” Asclepias has in mind.

14. The noble lie yokes together being and opinion. One’s being or nature is said to coincide perfectly with the good of the city. The lie has two parts, autochthony and natural division of classes. The first incorporates Polemarchus’ view of the distinction between us and them, citizens and foreigners. The second incorporates Thrasymachus’ view that there are rulers and ruled. “The first part of the lie naturalizes the law, the second legalizes nature” (77); “the soil makes the city one, the metals structure it” (78).

15. Problem: “justice and happiness do not go together,” as happiness consists of “good the core of which is not justice” (79). A solution of sorts: the members of the dialogic city are happy while contemplating justice.

16. An “idealizing excursion into foreign affairs” (81) induces Adimantus to succumb to a sort of idealizing or ‘Platonizing’ in domestic affairs, overemphasizing music education’s effectiveness as the crucial determinant in the perpetuation of the regime.

17. “Moderation is the virtue of knowers who acknowledge the right of those who have only opinion to rule them” (87). As for justice, it is “that principle which adjusts the rulers’ soul-structure to that of the other two classes” (91). The city’s justice is not identical to the ruler’s justice; the ruler has “no justice that is not identical with his wisdom” (91). The city’s justice is a compromise with the auxiliaries and artisans.

18. The principle of non-contradiction has as its illustration the spinning top that moves on its axis but whose axis does not, in the imaginary/geometrical sense, move. In nature a real top’s axis does move. “The principle of non-contradiction helps meet the objections of the captious and evade the difficulties of understanding the nature of things,” and Socrates knows this (95). “Socrates has replaced nature with syntax,” philologist Benardete observes (96). “An analysis of soul, if done imprecisely, leads to a proliferation of ideas, for it takes its bearings by language. Speech, because it admits of greater precision than fact, produces greater imprecision about facts. Political philosophy would seem to be caught in this paradox, and its imaginary republics subject to Machiavelli’s strictures.” (96) Benardete at his most shocking sublimates the philology his accusers complain of.

Machiavelli is an unusually thumotic or leonine philosopher, as well as a vulpine one. Socrates approaches the theme of thumos through the tory of Leontius, whose name Benardete uses as the title of this chapter. “Anger generates syntax; it needs to understand things eidetically, for it knows nothing of nature or the body” (99). Anger refuses to give in, “denies the existence of the body” (100). Oedipus, a greater Leontius, knows what man is through eidetic analysis but does not know himself. Machiavelli evidently claims to know himself as the prince of war, not the prince of peace, implying that the prince of war is the prince of princes, the lord of lords. Yet Machiavelli rejects eidetic analysis and prefers the sense of touch to the sense of sight and also to the sense of hearing, which brings words into the soul. Perhaps some of Machiavelli’s strictures are wiser than others?

19. In the city in speech the warriors ally themselves with the rational, governing the moneymakers. Without reason or desires of their own, “they are the core of the city because they belong to it as a particular city” (104). Therefore, “The core of the city is alienation” (104), a radical denaturing.

20. To gaze at dead bodies is shameful; to gaze at live bodies, particularly those of wrinkled old men, seems ridiculous. But the conventional sense of the ridiculous must be overcome in a regime requiring communism of women among the guardians. The nakedness of legally required coeducational gymnastics counterpoints the concealment from the guardians of knowledge of nature. “The essential communicability of knowledge misrepresent the reality of its secretiveness…. The tension between the city and philosophy is ultimately due to the philosopher’s selfishness. He does not measure up to the idealism of opinion. He minds his own business.” (111) The philosopher devotes himself to what is truly his own, the truth (hence ‘philo-sophy). For the philosopher, unlike the lover of the beautiful, what is truly one’s own is not the body. This is why philosophy is learning how to ‘die.’ The philosopher is reluctant to denature himself for the city’s sake. This is the central chapter of Benardete’s book.

21. This city requires, then, a kind of radical equality among the members of its guardian class. To achieve equality, human nature must be atomized and then reunited along communistic lines. This operation of the city of speech is philosophically crucial because it “puts in question any simple teleology and radicalizes the issue of nature” (117). The political logic culminating in communism forces Socrates’ second sailing, “the search for truly intelligible species”—rather than merely conventional ones—”and the whole to which they belong” (117). The radical questioning of conventional divisions entailed in overcoming one’s feeling that coeducational gymnastics is unthinkably silly makes the philosopher see that he cannot have confidence in the belief that he has “immediate access to the nature of things” (117). “Without the twin sophistries of art and the city, the descent of philosophy would be as unnecessary as the ascent of philosophy would be impossible. The divergence from the truth converges with the truth only through the city” (117).

22. “The city may ultimately make its citizens, but it will never make the philosopher. Nature in the form of chance frustrates the true city.” (119)

23. The discussion of community shift to a discussion of war (hatred of barbarians) and faction (hatred of Greeks). The discussion of faction is especially pertinent because it shows how a unity (Greekness) can nonetheless split apart, have tensions within it. The same danger obviously threatens any city, no matter how communal. “Socrates’ intent… seems to have been to show how the massive contradictions in the city come to light in practice” (122).

24. “The dialogic city”—that is, the city constituted by dialogue itself—”is already real and Socrates is its king” (123). The city in speech constructed by the interlocutors within the dialogue is another matter, and a city in existence physically is another matter still. A philosophic writer, Plato, can attempt to “maintain the survival of the dialogic city,” but as for the other two cities, Thrasymachus “cannot be banished from that whose essence he is” (124). “Philosophy is not a means for realizing the impossible; it is a means for ridding Glaucon”—”the disaffected offspring of a regime,” democracy, “that renders everything feasible unattractive”—”of the desire to realize the impossible” (126). In doing so Socrates must lyingly or, shall we say, mythologically transform philosophy into an image of “perfect wisdom” so that “it can exert enough influence on Glaucon for him to remain content with Athens as it is” (126). “Socrates pulls philosophy out of the dialogic city into the city in speech in order to make it manifest; but it is unlikely to be, as manifest, the same as what it was when it was invisibly at work. Socrates is the king of the dialogic city, he is not the philosopher-king of the city in speech.” (127) Even in the city in speech, “the coincidence of political power and philosophy requires a miracle; but the gods, who are beautiful and good, do not listen to prayers” (129).

25. “[T]he philosopher cannot put into the city the order of his soul…” (129). This is true even of the city in speech. In the dialogic city, the analysis of the difference between knowledge and opinion is a matter for eidetic analysis. In the city in speech, by contrast, the analysis is carried out in terms of being and nonbeing. The city in speech talks in the language of being and knowledge. In order to realize the city in speech one would have to replace eidetic analysis with metaphysics. This cannot be done, inasmuch as the city as city must engage in hypcoristics, those endearing names or euphemisms “uttered everywhere and always to disguise the love of one’s own” (138). “The discovery of the difference between knowledge and opinion is a discovery of philosophy… (138). Can the philosopher, having “detached unreal subjects from real predicates,” then “re-attach real subjects to them” (139)?

26. The philosopher-king is in-Socratic. He descends from the beings, “bear[ing] an uncanny resemblance to the Homeric gods” (139). Socrates, in contrast, ascends from the particulars to the beings, and brings  back little that is useful, when he must descend. He minds his own business. “‘I can’t be bothered’ is the philosopher’s version of morality” (142). Moderation and courage are “trivial consequences” of his nature (143). Books VI and VII contain a “rival account of philosophy and at the same time contain Socrates’ refutation of it” (148).

27. When the philosopher-king enters, can Adimantus be far behind? Glaucon intervenes with challenges, Adimantus with ‘wait-a-minute.’ Philosophers are such oddballs—how could they ever rule a city? “Adimantus is vaguely aware that justice is the dyad of philosophy and city, and that conjunction can never become an equation” (144). For Adimantus’ sake (or perhaps for Socrates’ sake) “Socrates convinces Adimantus that the pre-Socratic Socrates”—the Socrates who aspired to direct knowledge of nature—”should rule” (146). Socrates “convinces Adimantus that pre-Socratic philosophy is competent to do what it never dreamed of doing. The Anaxagorean rule of mind over body was as far as it had gone. Socrates has never been wittier.” (146) The philosopher conceived as one who knows nature and benefits his city by coming down from the realm of being with this knowledge that he somehow makes useful to his countrymen: what adamantine respectability is this! the people should positively beg him to rule them, but far be it from him to impose. He is such a gentleman. And rather a technocrat, too: Thrasymachus himself will submit to his beneficent sagacity. Of course, “the pleasures [the city] knows it attributes to the body, and the virtues it promotes it believes are of the soul” (146). Indeed, “A city whose motto was ‘A life not passed in examination is not worth living’ could not be happy” (147). Therefore, “Justice and injustice are necessarily co-present in the city” (146). “Any attempt to root out injustice will take justice with it. For Glaucon and Adimantus, who have not followed this argument, the doctrine of the ‘ideas’ is an easy way to inculcate the same lesson. It is an instrument of political moderation and not only of political moderation.” (146-147) Even the best regime, the city in speech, the highest politics, cannot make even one philosopher. Nature does that. Socrates daimonion or guardian spirit kept him out of politics.

But not out of the city. The city does serve the young philosopher’s purposes precisely by impeding his progress, dragging him down, making his quest difficult, thwarting his ascent to the clouds, Evil is “the toughening element of the good, and the innocence of the good nature is the same as its ignorance of good and evil—and a forteriori of its own nature and limits” (150). Because “the sophist is the spokesman of the city,” the philosopher must converse with him, he who calls necessity ‘morality’ and ‘freedom’ (150). Socrates knows that the city is “necessary for all men and cannot make any man happy” (153). Because he knows this about the city, Socrates knows that he does not know the whole, for he knows that the city necessarily thwarts his attempted ascent from the city. In so knowing, Socrates differs from those who deny that philosophy can exist, claiming that the city’s conventions are all-encompassing. The city is “the place where the true difference between the necessary and the good can be discerned, and where the question of man’s good and the question of the whole coincide” (153). Hence the necessity of constructing the city in speech.

28. While “morality is idealistic, happiness is not” (153). Happiness is realistic. Every man really wants the good, which alone can make his soul happy. In addition to knowing the city, Socrates really knows that it is good to know the good, although he also knows that no one has adequate knowledge of the good. Socrates’ knowledge plus Socrates’ ignorance add up to Socrates’ self-knowledge.

The good is the measure of the beings and the conventions with regard to their usefulness for someone or some thing. Theoretical and prudential wisdom share in the good. The good makes it possible for the beings to be parts of the whole; it also and equally makes them detachable, knowable as parts without some impossible knowledge of the whole or omniscience. One does not need an omni-science to know something. Both fox and hedgehog really know part of the whole. “What Nietzsche calls the optimism of Plato may not unreasonably be connected with this double claim for the good” (156). It is, Benardete immediately adds, a limited optimism.

29. Socrates’ images of the sun, the divided line, and the cave do not suggest that the conventions of the city are anything but snares and delusions. Where does this leave political philosophy? “At the center of the Republic stands an account that is alien from its own setting. It pretends to be prior and is posterior to the discovery of political philosophy. It is the second sailing in the guise of the first sailing” (161). Political philosophy acknowledges that the many, contradictory opinions are the foundation from which “one begins the ascent to the unity of the idea” (162). In the cave, however, “Our waking life is a dream, and everything is inside our heads” (171), puppetry by firelight. “The cave thus represents the city as if the noble lie had succeeded completely” (171)—the noble lie with the nobility subtracted. In this me-and-my-shadow world, “man is the self-ignorant measure of all things” (172). Law and art unite to keep nature out.

The imagery represents pre-Socratic philosophy. Socrates agrees with his predecessors in distinguishing nature and convention. The pre-Socratic however, believes he can replace conventions with “their true originals” (174): four elements, or ‘strife,’ or ‘love,’ replace the gods. To the pre-Socratic, “The city has mislabeled the beings, it has not misidentified them” (174). The pre-Socratic “horror of unreality begs the question of the goodness of the real that the denizens of the cave, Glaucon and Adimantus, are at least aware of” (175). That is why descent is as important as ascent, why a second sailing is philosophically needed after the philosophically needed first sailing. It looks at the first sailing’s sailors in the spirit of gratitude as well as in the spirit of correction.

30. “There is no science of wonder” (179). Philosophers can be produced neither by habituation nor by art. Philosophy is a conversion, an abrupt and radical break. “It is the practice of dying and being dead”(179). Philosophy is not concerned with the life of the city, with ruling. “Socrates startles us into this realization: no one has a nature designed to rule in the city” (181). The philosopher can, but does not want to. “‘Philosopher-king’ rejects in its very formulation the principle of one man/one job” (180), and is therefore unjust—to the philosopher. While the descent or return to the cave may be philosophically necessary, ruling the cave is not.

31. Where is the human to be located? Poetry, especially tragic poetry, locates the human in the pre-political and the pre-Promethean. Poetry is an art about something prior to the arts. Political philosophy is at least initially mathematical, not poetical. Mathematics itself is pre-philosophic; “all the arts of the city make use of number”(182). Mathematics and the city may lead to philosophy because contradiction inheres in both. The city has its contradictory opinions. Mathematics features the contradiction of the one and the many; it rests on the problem-laden perception that the many different fingers are all one thing, ‘finger.’ Arithmetic makes this problem apparent by treating each item counted as a ‘one,’ undifferentiated from every other ‘one.’ Thinking about mathematics (as distinguished from thinking mathematically) is periagogic. Anticipating the coming discussion of democracy, one might observe that democracy poses this problem of the one and the many by treating each one as undifferentiated from, equal to, every other one. Both philosopher and sophist, to say nothing of the tyrant, see that one can be worth more than ten thousand if he is the best.

32. If ‘philosopher-king’ is a sort of contradiction, and the best city is impossible, how will justice ever come to sight in its real context? Or must an erotic young man like Glaucon choose the unjust life in order to be happy? A new defense of the city is needed, and, because the rational city has been shown to be infeasible, it will need to be a new kind of city, a city fallen away from political perfection. This city will not be rational but religious: hence the renewed discussion of poetry.

33. On Socrates’ tour of regimes and their geneses, Benardete remarks, “Virtue in itself is not the principle of any actual regime; it is always a retrospective interpretation of those who come later and who, having fallen further, ascribe it to motives that have ceased to be intelligible to them” (195). Political life depends upon nostalgia.

34. In order for the just man, Socrates, to become manifest, timocracy must decline into oligarchy and oligarchy into democracy. Democracy in its multi-colored variety brings out all the souls, the better to be seen and studied. In treating each citizen as equal, democracy brings out individuals. This is why democracy doesn’t last long. Unfortunately for democracy, “evil and power are to it unreal” (200); its “failure to enforce its decisions and protect itself parodies philosophy, for which everything is open to revision” (200).

35. The tyrant comes into being as the punisher of the rich, who stand in the way of full equality even in a democracy. The tyrannical soul will always condemn ‘economic royalists’ while clearing the way for its own supremacy. “[T]he truth of the thumoeidetic comes to light slowly by the gradual casting off of the Leontius story, which denied that thumos and desire are ever in alliance against reason” (204). On the contrary: “The tyrant is the embodiment of all democratic wishes—he does whatever he wants—and the object of all democratic desires. He is Eros.” (205) The tyrant “is the true believer in the lie of the city stripped of everything that made it noble and good”; his is “the bestiality of unalloyed patriotism” (207).

36. The tyrant “represents the complete politicization of desire” (208). “Anger and love are one” in his soul (208). Glaucon had started out like that. Socrates has cured him. It is in that cure, and not so much in any doctrine or in any city in speech, that justice may be found in the Republic.

The tragic poet teaches the democratic/tyrannical man “to grieve for his unsatisfiable longings” (208). By contrast, the philosopher has no self-pity. He has a longing that is partially unsatisfiable, but sheds no tears over it.

37. Poetry “is interested less in courage as the repository of all lawful opinions than in envy and willfulness, and less in the socially useful love of money than in the polymorphism of desire” (214-215). Its piety contradictorily supports and subverts the laws. It is in between, “outside the city but not outside the cave” (218). It prefers justice and beauty to the good.

The rational response to grief is to recognize pain as “an impediment to deliberation” and misfortune as an evil accident. This being the case, “one can pick oneself up and go on, for one can determine on one’s own what is best” (221).

38. Glaucon is not a philosopher. He “needs the immortality of the soul because he needs injustice to be altogether terrifying” (224). As for Socrates, he prefers to concentrate on the good.

39. “To figure out the best life is the best life” (229).

Benardete reports that Socrates’ Second Sailing began as a review of Leo Strauss’s book The City and Man. The review was the lead article in the 1978 number of The Political Science Reviewer. Setting Benardete’s commentary next to Strauss’s chapter on the Republic, it appears that Strauss is somewhat more open to the possibility that the philosopher might also be a lover of his country.

 

Julien Benda: The Betrayal of the Clerks. Richard Aldington translation. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1959 [1928].

Originally published in The Rumson Reporter, January and February 1994.

 

The Intellectuals’ Self-Betrayal

Since the late 1960s, the word ‘disinterested’ has come to be used to mean ‘uninterested,’ indifferent. The original meaning of ‘disinterested’ has nearly disappeared from public debates. We are told that no one is or can be disinterested or impartial. We’re all partisan, self-interested. Perhaps as a result of believing this claim without qualification, many of us really are disinterested in the newer sense: Withdrawn from public debate, bored by it, and distrustful of it, refusing even to vote in elections. With their typical profundity, politicians and pundits attempt to solve the problem by making voter registration easier. If people don’t want to vote, why register them? If registered, why vote?

The diagnosis of this problem was made in France and published in 1927 by the philosopher Julien Benda. Translated as The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, La trahison des clercs, enjoyed some popularity in the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War. It is no longer much read today, least of all by those who’d most benefit from it: journalists, academics, and other soldiers in today’s culture-wars.

Those wars are characteristically bitter. Political hatred is nothing new, Benda observes. Intellectuals, also, have been with us for some time. But “the intellectual organization of political hatreds” is new, a product of the late nineteenth century that reached its apogee in the twentieth.

Looking at a Europe beginning to be populated by followers of Mussolini and Lenin, men who throve on the exacerbation of national and class struggles, Benda found it both astonishing and ominous that poets and professors had joined their ranks. “One cannot imagine the Roman Republic feeling that the moral support of Terence and Varro was of value to it during the war with Carthage or the government of Louis XIV finding that the approbation of Racine and Fermat gave it additional strength in the war with Holland.” Not only did the new dictators require such support, the new intellectuals gladly offered it.

For centuries, intellectuals had embodied a universal culture, both religious and secular. This culture extended throughout Europe, and did not exclude study of the civilizations of Asia. It exhibited a fascination (if a somewhat naïve one) with Amerindian societies as well. It was not ‘internationalist’—both capitalists and communists were that—nor was it ‘cosmopolitan’ or dilettantish. The universal culture was humanistic in the original meaning of the word—founded upon the recognition and cultivation of human nature seen as always and everywhere the same.

This conception of the universality of human nature was shared by the Christian Bossuet and the atheistic Voltaire, although each of course had sharply different ideas about what constituted the good for human nature. From Judaism on, religionists insisted on the universality of human nature even as they contended bitterly over what human beings should believe and how they should behave. Philosophers who contested each others’ theories and fully recognized the immense variety of customs and beliefs in the world never supposed that there was no identifiable core of attributes that are distinctively human, nor that foremost among these is the capacity to reason, which makes philosophy possible.

That is how thought could be disinterested or impartial. Thought was conceived as the quest for the truth about things transcending particular political societies: God, the cosmos, human beings. Benda calls this “disinterested intelligence,” and he deplores its near-disappearance in the twentieth century.

Even the most cynical politicians of the past never claimed to be doing more than working for their own or their country’s interests. Politicians might violate morality but they did not attempt to change it. The new politicians were more pretentious. They claimed that their antagonisms were apocalyptic, that partisan struggle determines not merely a political but a moral succession. In this respect, the ‘Master Race’ of fascists is indistinguishable from the ‘New Man’ of communism. Whether the struggle is over nationality, race, class, or some other particularism, the universality of human nature is scorned as a myth.

Benda does not so much deplore political men holding up such idols. He deplores intellectuals who salute them, even fashioning them for political use. As a result of such efforts, “humanity is heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world, whether it is a war of nations, or a war of classes.”

Can we say we had that war, the Second World War? And can we say we survived it?

Benda Today

In the Second World War an alliance of commercial republics and a leftist tyranny defeated an alliance of rightist tyrannies and a theocratic empire. Benda had witnessed representatives of all these political orientations in the France of 1927—parliamentarians, communists, and that odd combination of fascistic and theocratic beliefs called Action Française, whose spokesman was the writer Charles Maurras. (It isn’t too much to call Action Française the French Catholic equivalent of Japanese imperialism, so long as one understands that many French Catholics vehemently opposed the Maurrasiens.

After the defeat of the totalitarians and imperialists of the ‘Right,’ there remained the totalitarians and imperialists of the ‘Left.’ Their confrontation with the commercial republics in Europe, North America, and elsewhere threatened a still greater and more nearly perfect war. In this confrontation Benda, who lived until 1956, surely would have recognized the continuation of the disease he had diagnosed in the 1920. Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France numbered among hundreds of intellectuals-turned-ideologues, apologists for tyranny. In the commercial republics there was also a subordination of intellect to practical aims the Cold War made necessary, from planning to polemics, although in those regimes dissent didn’t land you in prison.

In the Soviet Union the tyranny eventually collapsed, resoundingly, only to be replaced by a sort of elective monarchy. The ‘Left’ remains in power on mainland China, well-financed after having relieved itself of Maoism and more dangerous to the rest of the world for it.

Benda’s critique stands. Some modern political regimes have changed, but modern intellectuals have not. Careerism, materialism, and the organization of political passions, secular beliefs urged with a fervor once reserved for religiosity (Benda calls this “divinized realism” in which “the State, Country, Class, are now frankly God”), the scorn for reasoned argument, the demand for ‘activism’ for social-justice warfare: All are familiar to us today, wherever ‘the politics of race, class, and gender’ replaces the simpler doctrines of nationalism and class-war. Religion still gets into the act, too. Yesterday’s Action Française finds its echo in today’s Catholic-leftist ‘Liberation Theology,’ a moderate form of which finds itself raised to the apex of the Vatican. And then of course ‘Islamism’ ardently seeks the explosion of its many enemies.

The huge public and private bureaucracies that attempt to ‘manage’ the modern societies complicate the intellectuals’ situation still more. Today’s bureaucracies rule by claiming to serve. They ‘deliver’ goods to customer/constituents who are less citizens than they are ‘consumers.’ In these structures intellectuals serve their masters as wizards of data and conjurors of images. The bureaucracies often find opposition among academic and ‘counterculture’ intellectuals, but as often they coopt or manipulate them; protest songs of the ‘Sixties end up as ad jingles.

The greatest and most perfect war need not involve violence at all. This war may turn out to be a mind-battle of rival culture-networks, powered by computers. Were he still alive, Benda might warn that the so-called culture wars rarely concern true culture, the cultivation of human nature. In the names of equality and liberty (both misunderstood as self-satisfaction) the antagonists race toward human nature’s systematic debasement. As a handicapper, I put my money on the dim, plodding corporate tortoise, not the hare-brained, erratic erotics of academe.

Benda traces the origin of the intellectuals’ self-betrayal to G. W. F. Hegel, the great philosopher who replaced contemplation of the eternal with the apprehension of the history of thought. “Need I point out that this conception inspires the whole of modern thought” Benda asks, rhetorically. Hegel presented a well-articulated historicism that ranged from concrete particulars to the most abstract generalities. His leftist inheritors (Marx in particular) vulgarized historicism, made it into a form of materialism, and therefore made it popular, a political instrument in an age of democratic politics. Hegel’s rightist inheritors rejected materialism at first—Nietzsche despised it so much he called it English—but eventually succumbed to mass-movement politics as well.

‘Left’ and ‘Right’ came to exalt action over contemplation, willing over thinking. This encouraged the militant personality—the bellecist general and the pacifist ‘demonstrator’ alike. The genuine intellectual disappears; his “defeat begins from the very moment when he claims to be practical.” If humanism ‘goes political’ in a thoroughgoing way, the logical result will be the world-state, a universal bureaucracy ruling a humanity united in order to exploit the earth: “But,” Benda writes, “far from being the abolition of the national state with its appetites and its arrogance, this would simply be its extreme form…. Humanity would be united in one immense army, one immense factory, would be aware only of heroisms, disciplines, inventions, would denounce all free and disinterested activity, and would cease to situate the good outside the real world, would have no God but itself and its desires…. And History will smile to think this is the species for whom Socrates and Jesus Christ died.”

Thomas L. Pangle, ed.: The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Dialogues. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 21, Number 3, Spring 1994. Republished with permission.

 

Perplexingly inconclusive, Plato’s short Socratic dialogues appear to offer little promise to those who ask, How did the founder of political philosophy understand his own enterprise? The suspect genealogy of the dialogues makes scholarly neglect seem all the more reasonable. Is there really anything to learn here?

As it happens, there is, and this collection of careful translations and commentaries makes the learning easier to begin and, better, harder to conclude. “To confront, to take seriously, to become captivated by, these shorter dialogues,” Professor Pangle writes, “is to discover a Socrates who shakes the foundations of many of our conventional assumptions about what and how Socrates and Plato might have thought.” It might be noted that some of the scholarly refusal to take these dialogues seriously as authentic Platonic works may stem from a reluctance to take seriously certain Socratic challenges to conventions. Whatever the historical evidence may be, a willingness to read these dialogues as authentic begins to separate thoughtful or potentially thoughtful students from ‘pure’ scholars. The contributors to this volume combine scholarship with thoughtfulness.

Allan Bloom finds in the Hipparchus a confrontation between a philosopher and a democrat—the latter no fanatic, but simply an ordinary man who loves money in a ‘decent’ or law-abiding way. The dialogue shows how such decency poses a serious threat to the philosopher’s way of life. Both democrat and philosopher love gain. They differ radically in their conceptions of what is truly gainful.

The conventional decency of law, upon which money rests, concerns Socrates in the Minos. Leo Strauss shows that law, associated with opinion but also intended to guide opinion, is highly problematic with respect to knowledge. At the same time, “The Minos raises more questions than it answers,” thereby offering readers not so much knowledge as doubt and wonder, neither of which conduce to lawmaking in any ordinary sense.

This leads one to the quest for knowledge, a quest that cannot be sustained without a love of knowledge. Christopher Bruell emphasizes the distinction, in the Lovers, between the noble, which attracts the well-born, honor-loving, youths of Athens, and the good, associated more with the useful. Political philosophy requires study of the noble, although the study itself is more good than noble. When the noble know their own nobility, they transcend mere nobility; political philosophy constitutes “a needed preliminary to philosophizing.” In this sense, decent political life provides the necessary but not sufficient ground for philosophic life, which nonetheless is in tension with it.

Given this dispensable indispensability of decent political life, can a philosopher or anyone else promote that life by teaching virtue? The Cleitophon, in Clifford Orwin’s words, depicts one of “those surprisingly rare occurrences in Plato, an encounter with a practicing statesman.” The statesman charges Socrates with the inability to teach citizen virtue. Orwin finds in the dialogue tension “between doing what is good for oneself and doing what is good for others.” Socrates avoids answering Cleitophon’s charge; this is “one of the few” dialogues “that never mentions philosophy,” perhaps because Cleitophon’s certitude with respect to the unmitigated goodness of justice cannot, and in a sense should not, be shaken. He requires clarity, answers, while Socrates would raise perplexities, questions. If a sound political regime provides the needed foundation for philosophic life, should a philosopher induce an able practitioner of the political life to philosophize, to examine his own moral guideposts?

Does wisdom consist of answers or of questions? Thomas L. Pangle considers the Theages, one of the two central dialogues in the collection. the Theages depicts a private conversation, held in the portico of Zeus the Liberator, between Socrates and a father who is also a democratic statesman, understandably worried that his son wants “to become wise.” As Pangle remarks, wisdom may tempt men “to try to escape from the constraints of conventional fair play.” Theages, the son, soon reveals himself as a would-be tyrant; traditional democratic statesmanship has ‘naturally’ brought forth a child who threatens the tradition and the democracy. Socrates tactfully shows that philosophy, the love of wisdom, cannot offer a science of politics to would-be rulers. It can nonetheless strengthen the necessary pieties of political life by showing “how the traditional virtues can be made more consistent, intelligible, and self-conscious” in the face of democracy’s tendency to undermine itself by unrefined eroticism and immoderate ambition. The Theages is the Platonic answer to Aristophanes’ charges in the Clouds.

The erotic and ambitious young democrat par excellence was Alcibiades. In the Alcibiades I Plato “depict[s] the profound transformation of an interlocutor in the course of a single conversation”—an event “almost unique among the dialogues,” in the words of Steven Forde. Socrates takes a thumotic soul and arouses its latent eroticism, particularly “to get [Alcibiades] to care earnestly for his self-perfection.” The private, though still social, “peering into the soul of another” yields self-knowledge, which includes moderation or good order of “soul and body and the parts of the soul within itself.” Statesmanship, by analogy but also by contrast, “is the proper ordering of the things belonging to many.” Forde regards this apparent resolution as questionable, given “the questionable proof of the soul” that are its foundation, and given the political career of Alcibiades, whose less-than-Socratic eroticism fascinated then repelled the Athenian demos.

Thumos again figures in the Laches, the dialogue on courage. James H. Nichols, Jr., observes that Laches’ “commonsense, political conception of courage… rests on preserving the opinion that ridicule and disgrace, above all for not fighting bravely for the city, are more terrible than the risk of death.” Political courage thus differs profoundly from philosophic courage, which risks the city’s antagonism by unflinchingly challenging regnant opinion. Nonetheless, because “we humans are complex beings, compounded of soul and body, faced with varying situations in life,” we need to know how to apply intellectual virtue. True courage requires both natural bravery and prudence; political courage, substituting venerable opinions for prudence, will not always suffice. Neither philosophic nor political, divination—the product of “anxious forethought”—will not suffice for either the philosopher or the statesman.

A discussion of prudence leads naturally to the topic of lying, one way of attempting to be prudent. Lying also relates to poetic myths. In his discussion of the Lesser Hippias, James Leake notes that “To regard lying as morally defensible or necessary to bring about the good, one must recognize that the good is of limited efficacy”—a recognition resisted by earnest youth of all ages—”not simply triumphant in human affairs or the cosmos.” This knowledge of limits, an instance of prudence and of moderation, forms “a necessary part of the art of politics or ruling insofar as it enables one to deal with those who are incapable of listening to reason”—enemies and friends alike. In this philosophy needs to be politic.

Is beauty a kind of lie, or deception, and truth (like Socrates) ugly? It would be Epicurean to say so. One might read David R. Sweet’s commentary on the Greater Hippias as a suggestion that Plato anticipates Epicurus to some degree. In the dialogue, the unnamed stranger, who is Socratic, distinguishes precise speech and knowledge from conventional speech and “knowing beautifully.” “Hippias knows precisely how to speak beautifully”—and that is all he knows. The charm of beautiful things “acts as a deterrent to knowledge and prevents a man such as Hippias from seeing beneath the surface of things to the intelligible structure beneath.” The dialogue serves as “a chastening supplement to the Symposium,” which shows how beautiful things can lead the soul ‘upward.’

Allan Bloom writes the collection’s last commentary, framing a book to which so many of his former students have contributed. One of the funniest dialogues, the Ion presents the spectacle of an utterly conventional cosmopolitan; panhellenic opinion of antiquity, like ‘global thought’ today, may well guide itself by a rather low common denominator. Bloom describes  the rhapsode Ion as book-bound; by questioning him, Socrates tests the claims made for authoritative books, specifically Homer’s books, as worthy educators of the Greeks. Socrates tests “the Greek understanding of things, particularly of the gods.” His “divine possession” argument amounts to “a tale designed to appeal to Ion’s needs and wishes”; small wonder Shelley took it seriously. In fact poetry is an art, an intelligible activity concerned with intelligible objects. Ion’s self-misunderstanding somewhat resembles that of political men. Like so many political men, people voice their fears and desires, especially with respect to their own futures. “Overcoming this concern with oneself” is philosophy’s precondition. Philosophy requires a concept of nature, permitting meaningful general speech. Philosophy permits the mind to see a cosmos or harmony, a kind of peace. Poetry, a veil for chaos or war, ultimately stops at the political level, the highest particularism.

Plato’s Socrates carefully distinguishes the city from the philosopher. Gain-as-moneymaking versus gain-as-learning; decent laws versus knowledge, wonder, and doubt; citizen virtue versus questioning; politics versus self-perfection; political courage versus philosophic courage; poetic lies versus prudent lies; apparent beauty versus intelligibility; divine possession versus reason: Socrates explores these antinomies, defending philosophy while never forgetting the need for the city.