Patrick J. Coby: Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment: A Commentary on Plato’s Protagoras. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 17, Number 2, Winter 1989-90. Republished with permission.

 

Intellectuals: What to do with them? With one foot in the cave, one foot out, they urge the citizens within to chain-breaking liberation, charge philosophers beyond with uncaring detachment. Neither fully underground nor above, they would rather lead than think, and thus risk a trampling—voilà, historicism.

In ‘synthesizing’ politics and philosophy, historicism denies that philosophers see beyond their time and place, even as it holds out the prospect of revelations ‘progress’ will bring. Patrick J. Coby demonstrates the falsehood of this denial, showing that Socrates conceived something very like one of the lower versions of modern utilitarianism, commending it lukewarmly to a sophist it might have tamed. Coby thus uses history to refute historicism, showing that Plato’s Socrates both formulated and implicitly criticized a well-known philosophic doctrine, more than two millennia before ‘its time.’

Coby fits his commentary to the order of the dialogue, beginning at the beginning and working his way through. The dialogue itself fits its topic—Protagoras, or the nature of sophistry—in being “a war of words.” Perhaps alone among commentators, Coby emphasizes the importance of one silent auditor of the conversation—Alcibiades, here a combative young man attracted by Socrates’ combativeness, in whom Socrates may wish to awaken an erotic attraction to wisdom. A combative soul will want to know how to conquer; it may not know, but merely presume, the worth of conquest. “The difference between knowing [a] doctrine and knowing its worth is the difference between —technē [artistry] and sophia [wisdom],” the wisdom Socrates may want Alcibiades to love. The sophist, preeminent vendor of technē, might easily seduce a spirited young man. Socrates would convince Alcibiades that sophistic technique cannot withstand the manly assaults of philosophy, which enables those possessed by it to wield certain superior techniques along with their superior understanding.

Despite his apparent spiritedness, Protagoras lacks the true conqueror’s soul; he seeks pleasant safety. “Protagoras is both safe and famous”—or so he believes. “It will be Socrates’ purpose in the dialogue to show him why safety and fame are mostly incompatible.” Socrates does this initially by exposing the contradiction between the sophist’s praise for democracy and the undemocratic character of sophistry itself, which offers a technique for ruling the many, a technique that finally consists more of coercion than of persuasion. The ‘virtue’ Protagoras professes to ‘teach’ amounts to a technique of political control.

“Justice to Protagoras is what human beings declare it to be.” Socrates undertakes to pull Protagoras away from his conventionalism and toward a low-level appreciation of nature, specifically of pleasure. In doing so, Socrates must centrally prove—not by words but by action—that he can walk away from his audience. That is, he shows his independence from his listeners’ desires, even as Protagoras, despite his boasts of control-techniques, betrays his own subservience. Socrates forces Protagoras to accept short speeches, dialectic, and to eschew rhetorical declamation.

Protagoras accepts the philosophic form of speech, but tries to escape into the thickets of literary criticism—a move that should amuse readers today who’ve seen much the same strategy at work on college campuses. In fairness, the sophistic, posturing Protagoras does have rather more nobility in him than our ‘deconstructionists’; he at least vaguely senses the appeal of tragedy, of heroic struggle. Socrates responds by citing the example of the Lacedaemonians, an example not likely to move many academics today, but effective in ancient Greece. (Historical relativism does apply to rhetorical appeals, shaped as they are to the character of the audience. Does historicism’s desire to lead, which necessitates the conflation of logic and rhetoric, ‘naturally’ incline its devotees to relativism? That is, does not historicism result ‘logically’ from the intellectual’s libido dominandi?) Socrates claims that those admirable citizens the Lacedaemonians secretly partake of philosophy; “what seems to the world like courage is in fact wisdom.” An esotericism so effective none but Socrates ever suspected it: This “elaborate jest” forms one part of Socrates’ thoroughgoing effort to “intellectualize” the virtues. In its most extreme formulation, this means that virtue is knowledge (easy to practice once you know what it is), vice ignorance. This resembles Protagoras’ notions, with a significant exception: Protagoras only knows his techniques, not nature. Perhaps this accounts for the deficiencies of Protagorean technique; a tool designed for the rule of human beings will fail in the hands of one who does not understand human being. Poetry, being imaginative, more easily lends itself to manipulation by clever technicians than does the logical apprehension of nature.

Protagoras misunderstands human nature not only in the abstract but in the particular. He will teach, or claim to teach, anyone who pays, regardless of the student’s nature. Socrates would redirect Protagoras’ attention to an art whose primary purpose is perception, not manipulation: “The art of measurement,” better known to readers now as the utilitarian calculus of pleasures and pains. The knowledge this art brings does not reach the heights (or the depths) of human nature; intellectuals, in their ‘middling’ circumstance of soul, cannot stretch so far. But the art does induce them to measure man instead of unwarrantedly supposing man the measure. Knowledge, however narrow, and pleasures, however unrefined, will replace the will to power, and the susceptibility to worship power, so noticeable in sophists generally—a will and a susceptibility that finally issued in historicism.

Socrates prefers a different solution to the problems of political life and heterodox thought present to each other. By exoteric speech, the philosopher “endeavors to protect the body politic rom indiscriminate rationalism while at the same time making it tolerant of philosophy.” Socrates can indeed befriend political men—at one extreme, the flamboyant Alcibiades, on the other, Crito—and they him. Unfortunately, citizens may mistake the philosopher for a sophist and make him poison himself. The prospect of this inconvenience requires the philosopher to “confront his fellow intellectuals,” to help them deplore the closing of the Athenian mind in some way suited to their own capacities and defects.

Socrates may harbor some sympathy for the sophistic intellectual, in one sense. The sophist, caught between cave and sunlit fields, in his own way imitates human being, with its “in-between, daemonic nature,” bestial and godlike. Like Nietzsche, Socrates sees the difficulty in tightrope-walking; unlike Nietzsche, Socrates foresees no godlike overcoming of this activity, at least not for any other than the rarest of humans. (Too, Socrates conceives of no creativity in godliness, the creativity that intensifies Nietzsche’s ambition.) Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment presents or suggests these issues with a sober, thoughtful precision that enables readers to think more clearly about the problem of thinking in regimes in which popular opinion rises to dominance.

Mary P. Nichols: Socrates and the Political Community: An Ancient Debate. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Vol.ume 17, Number 2, Winter 1989-90.

 

If the name ‘Socrates’ means ‘rule of wisdom,’ small wonder Athenians finally put him to death. That he survived so long attests to his failure to put anything in writing. That his memory survives, however, attests to the writing of others, who portrayed him as the archetypal philosopher, the one whose way of life raised the question of philosophy’s relation to the polis. Theories may or may not directly affect political life, but theorizing does. If you make people think, they will not act while they are thinking; after they finish (if they do) they may act differently than before. Good citizens have known to find this infuriating.

Nichols’ book has three main parts: on Aristophanes’ Clouds, on Plato’s Republic, and on the second book of Aristotle’s Politics. Although many might believe these books thoroughly discussed by others, Nichols has other ideas. Fortunately, she is right, and the conflicts between some of her interpretations and those of Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, and Paul Friedlander may do her readers the favor of returning them to the original text with renewed eyes.

Nichols’ careful reading of the Clouds does not entirely diverge from Strauss’ account in Socrates and Aristophanes. Their emphases differ. She is more down-to-earth about clouds: “Whereas Strauss’ Aristophanes considers “the old-fashioned… no less laughable, no less unreasonable, than the newfangled,” Nichols more measuredly calls Aristophanes “a conservative who sees the limitations of what he is trying to conserve.” She never suggests that Aristophanes wants to be a god. She regards the Just Speech hypocritical but not mistaken in his words. Rather, she describes the Unjust Speech, Socrates, and Phidippides (Strepsiades’ son)as erroneously imagining nature to be “composed of absolutes, unrelated to [other] things in nature, and uninfluenced by time.” The attempt to bring convention into line with this misconceived nature yields young men fit for no action except father-beating. Nor are they fit for thought, and here she comes close to Strauss:

“Seeking the universal or the unlimited [she writes], Socrates turns to nonhuman nature and to man only insofar as he resembles nonhuman nature. Socrates loses sight of the human, aware only of the movements of matter…. Socrates, seeking freedom in universality, discovers only that man is a slave to his own body. Caught in contradiction, Socrates is laughable.”

Nichols finds Aristophanes convincing up to a point, but she sees the limitations of his conservatism. A clever defense of ordinary life, of normalcy, cannot account for the fact that “it is in ordinary life that the desire for completeness,” including philosophic eros, “arises.” “How long can laughter check desire and prevent tears?” With this question she turns to the Republic.

This interpretation forms the bulk and the core of the book. Here Nichols takes issue with Strauss and especially with Bloom on the significance of the philosopher-kings. She argues that they represent the culmination of a profoundly un-Socratic argument led by Socrates but energized by Glaucon’s desire for perfection,” a desire that is not so much erotic as spirited. Whereas Bloom contends that the spirited man endangers himself and others because his love of his own closes his mind to reason, Nichols contends that both love of one’s own and philosophy can bring the illusion of independence from the city, if they are ill-mixed. The philosopher-kings exemplify this. They are finally creatures of the city—orthodox, un-Socratic, unquestioning. They attract Glaucon, who “does not pursue knowledge so much as the certainty knowledge affords.” “Ultimately, the city offers knowledge of simple and eternal ideas as a substitute for the uncertain understanding necessary in a world of complex and changing objects.” Philosophy does not lead men to the unnatural unity of communism; politics does, in its anti-erotic quest for changeless order and control. Reason is reduced to a merely disciplinary force that serves the ‘ideally’ self-sufficient ‘manly’ man. Instead of “Socratic political philosophers,” the city in speech is ruled by a “mathematical philosophy” that prepares the brightest youths “for tyranny over the city,” an enforced homogeneity within each of the three classes.

“In contrast to these philosophers, for whom the city is a cave they escape, Socrates gains clarity within the city…transcend[ing] his own political community in ways the philosophers of the cave image do not.” The erotic Socrates does not need to be dragged from the cave. Nor does he need to be dragged back to it. “What is needed is not the ridicule of philosophy that Aristophanes offers but a philosophic understanding of the city’s legitimate needs, as well as of its dangerous tendencies. Philosophy must be political in order to avoid being politicized.” The truly just man is “the lover of learning” who lives in the “dialogic community.”

Socrates’ regime typology is not the kernel of a political science, as Bloom contends; there is no room for choice, deliberation—for statesmanship. Regimes decline inevitably, here. “Plato describes no decent politics in the Republic to which men can give their attention and loyalty…. Because the Republic offers knowledge of the perils of political action rather than knowledge useful in guiding politics, Aristophanes would find it unsatisfactory. As long as knowledge yields no more fruit than this”—the knowledge that one does not know and a consequent moderation in all things, including politics—”he might ask, why is knowledge better for men than the forgetting that comedy is intended to encourage?” Nichols now turns not, as one might expect, to Plato’s trilogy on knowledge and statesmanship, the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman, nor to the other philosopher who wrote Socratic dialogues, Xenophon, but to Aristotle. This surprising turn more than suggests that Nichols has intends her book not merely as a scholarly investigation but a philosophic one.

“Whereas Socrates founded political philosophy by undertaking a philosophic examination of human affairs, Aristotle founded political science by directing philosophy to political action”—”constitut[ing] an implicit defense of philosophy against Aristophanes’ criticism and of politics against Plato’s.” Against Aristophanes, Aristotle teaches that politics can and must “incorporate diversity.” Thus “thought and action correct each other,” with statesmen, and particularly lawgivers, providing “the bridge between thought and actual regimes.” Unlike Socrates, Aristotle does not direct his political teachings to the young. He is “the philosophic teacher of statesmen.” “Far from constituting a threat to the city’s unity, the philosopher can share in political life.” For Aristotle, politics is not based on a lie.

There may be some problems with Nichols’ discussion of the philosopher-kings. For one thing, Socrates says so little about them as philosophers. their mathematical education does not make them un-Platonic (as distinguished from un-Socratic); the Academy itself is said to have warned away unmathematical souls. Moreover, Nichols believes that Socrates’ account of love as indiscriminate is obviously and deliberately wrong: A wine-lover does not love every kind of wine, as Socrates claims, as no one loves a bad wine. “The city’s communism could be successful, only if Socrates’ account of love were true: only if the guardians love all the members of a class” and therefore no individuals within it. But Nichols confuses kinds with intensity, here. A true wine lover loves all kinds of wine, but not poor specimens of those kinds; nor need he love all kinds equally. Socrates may be more kingly than Nichols says. Plato also teaches that a tyrannical soul may have been a potentially philosophic soul, now spoiled; tyrants and philosophers are opposites, but in another sense twins.

The extent to which such reservations refute Nichols’ overall argument may be questioned. Only an exceptionally dogmatic soul could fail to learn from her book, and such souls are not the intended readership.

 

Catherine H. Zuckert, ed.: Understanding the Political Spirit: Philosophical Investigations from Socrates to Nietzsche. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

This is a combination of two reviews, originally published in the New York City Tribune, January 30, 1989 and in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 17, Number 1, Winter 1989-90.

 

Rhetoric, election campaigns, even coups d’état and wars: Anger and ambition feed political life, sometimes intoxicating it. Catherine Zuckert reminds us that the Greek philosopher saw spiritedness or thumos as “the psychic origin of distinctively political action.” Political men seek justice, especially justice for themselves and ‘their own’family, friends, country. Politics often first comes to sight as self-defense, “the need people experience to defend their lives, lands, and liberty from the dominating desires of others.” The classical political philosophers understand the necessity, the benefits, the charms, and the dangers of politics.

In association with reason, spiritedness makes man a political animal. Classical political thought asks, What shall we do with the wrath of Achilles? Without spiritedness or thumos, you have a city of pigs; with too much of it, you have civil war or tyranny—the self-destruction of the city. The destruction of Rome marked the end of the classical efforts to moderate thumos; neither Christianity nor modern political philosophy have ‘managed’ it in an entirely satisfactory way. Perhaps the most troublesome part of the human soul, thumos seeks not to be managed but to rule.

Catherine H. Zuckert introduces this instructive collection of essays by observing that moderns “tend to take an economizing view of politics,” aiming at securing private rights and desires, emphasizing our individuality. Christianity contributed to this emphasis on the individual by replacing thumos with will; in Christianity punishment is a function o God, or of God’s instrument, the pagan magistrate. The old use of politics to form character declined, with character formation now centering in a different kind of political community, the Church; eventually, the very notion of character came to seem overly stern. Blocked from disciplining the desires, spiritedness rules the intellect, producing ideology—the use of ideas as weapons, instruments of conquest. The desire for a mental conquest of human beings drives totalitarian politics.

Zuckert harbors no nostalgia for ‘the ancients’; the Aristotelian triumvirate of honors (distributive justice), friendship, and family requires small communities, and these tend to fight among themselves. As soon as one community finally wins the fight, a military imperialism rises, declines, and falls.

The contributors to this volume discuss three ‘ancients’—Homer, Plato, Aristotle—and five ‘moderns’—Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The book’s one essay on non-philosophers considers the American Founders.

Arlene Saxonhouse recounts Achilles’ discovery of the limits imposed on spiritedness by death, which he had hoped to overcome by achieving everlasting fame, a share of the immortality reserved for the gods. But “under the principles of universal equality in which no distinctions are made according to worth”—each of us equally must die—”the spirit of Achilles is not only moderated, it is killed.” Achilles’ love of Briseis, his measured acts of public honor for his dead friend Patroclus, and his reconciliation with Priam all reestablish a middle place for human being between gods and beasts.

Mary P. Nichols writes that “Plato joins Homer in teaching the need for man to moderate his spiritedness,” although in a very different way. As does Homer, Plato sees that spiritedness rebels against death. In doing so, it defends but also threatens the city by its willingness to sacrifice and even life itself for the city’s sake—dealing out the very death it rebels against. Spiritedness also commits the soul entirely to the city, “against the truth that man needs something for his satisfaction that goes beyond the city, beyond what he can create and control.” Nichols recapitulates the argument of her book, Socrates and the Political Community, that the guardian-philosophers of the regime-in-speech of the Republic are more guardians than philosophers. Socrates, by contrast, “makes spiritedness gentle,” and takes account of the individuality of his interlocutors. This point should perhaps be qualified by noting that Socrates’ interlocutors for the most part represent human types, not individuals in the modern sense of the word, as a comparison of Plato’s characters with those of Dickens will show.

Ann P. Charney relates courage to prudence, as understood by Aristotle. “Spiritedness combined with intellect is needed to philosophize in the face of knowledge of one’s ignorance about the gods.” Spiritedness also helps the intellect to moderate the appetites and fortifies the intellect in its quest for the truth behind and above conventions and opinions. The discovery of natural right allows men of strong intellect and character to act for the sake of the noble, and not merely for the sake of pleasing public opinion, whether popular or oligarchic. Aristotle carefully substitutes natural right for divine justice. Statesmen, too, can benefit; while carefully taking account of public opinion, the classical statesman can also resist it, and the classical political philosopher teaches him why he ought sometimes to resist. Charney may overestimate the place of friendship in this enterprise. Friendship cannot be “the core of political justice”; Aristotle explicitly teaches that friends do not treat each other with strict justice, instead inclining to ‘cronyism.’ But she is surely right to say that Aristotle’s great-souled man “replaces the Homeric heroes” and thereby makes political life more stable than Achilles could.

Machiavelli is the first of the ‘moderns.’ In a witty and sobering essay, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. calls Machiavelli “the first writer on politics to use the word ‘execute’ frequently and thematically in the modern sense”—or, as Mansfield soon notes, its two modern senses. Mansfield contrasts seven characteristics of the modern Machiavellian executive with the classic Aristotelian statesman. Machiavelli downplays the role of deliberation, practical reasoning, in politics, and praises the use of force and fraud. He replaces the Aristotelian concept of political friendship with the concept of political conspiracy. “Primal fear” becomes “the first mover of politics”—not natural right and most assuredly not divine providence. Spiritedness rules Machiavellian politics, albeit with cleverness; conquest is the aim.

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke progressively soften Machiavellian politics, without abandoning it. Hobbes shares Machiavelli’s cynicism about human nature but, as Timothy Fuller shows in a characteristically thoughtful essay, he finds the rule of law a better means to attain spirited ends. The very idea of the rule of law signifies to Hobbes “that mankind has been set free from divine tutelage and supposes that freedom and reason are mediated by human [not divine] will.” Spiritedness now inheres in law-abidingness; honor (spiritedness high-toned) and self-restraint combine to uphold law’s rule, and to preclude ‘personal’ rule. Civil liberty replaces natural liberty under the covenant or social contract. “The covenant is not, finally, a unique event but the paradigm of a lifetime of rational willing, the test of the enduring capacity for self-overcoming in civil association.” In this, Fuller offers the reader a more austere Hobbes than the cynical materialist of morals we normally view.

John Locke tames spiritedness still further. David Lowenthal observes that for Locke, “conquest is never justified.” Locke’s state of nature is not so much a state of war, as in Hobbes, but a state of scarcity. In Locke, ‘economic man’ begins to come into his own. “With this sweeping contradiction of Hobbes, Locke lays the basis for thought on war that became the common sense of twentieth-century liberal societies,” with their “concepts of aggressor nations, reparations, wars of national liberation and national self-determination….” Lowenthal cautions that this project can endanger itself in two ways. If a liberal regime becomes too narrowly commercial and forgets to defend itself, it will perish by attack from other regimes that have not forgotten the martial spirit. And if a regime embraces the Lockean concept of national self-determination without Locke’s constitutional safeguards—a commercial economy, representative government—it will become a worse tranny than the traditional, ‘authoritarian’ regime it overthrew. Spiritlessness and excessive spiritedness both threaten the liberal regimes.

Contemporary intellectuals decry the undramatic, ‘bourgeois’ virtues and vices of commercial republics. In this they imitate some of the late-modern political philosophers, the greatest of these being G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. Michael Gillespie contributes a substantial essay on Hegel’s remedy for ’embourgeoisement.’ “Hegel doubts… that homo economicus can ever free himself from his desires and truly rule.” Left alone, bourgeois man will only sink deeper into decadence. If ‘History’ is not to grind to a halt before reaching its proper end or purpose, bourgeois man must be overcome, dialectically. Hegel proposes a serious, modern version of Socrates’ playfully constructed ‘republic.’ The bourgeoisie replaces the artisan class, soldiers replace the guardians, and bureaucrats replace the philosopher-kings. Not commerce but war “is the only viable restraint upon bourgeoisification and political degeneration,” strengthening “the rationality of the state by evoking the latent general will and community spirit of the citizenry.” War overcomes bourgeois individualism without returning to the tiny, now defenseless polis of antiquity. In the Hegelian dialectic, right makes might because that modern state which is the most autonomous and rational will prove stronger than its less advanced antagonists. Gillespie quite prudently judges Hegel over-optimistic about modern war and modern philosophic rationality.

Nietzsche does not marry war and reason at shotgun-point. He celebrates “wild wisdom”—thought set free from logic, even from that most ambitious logic of Hegel. He dismisses moderation. Werner Dannhauser writes that Nietzsche exalts spiritedness over the other dimensions of the souls because only the most extreme spiritedness can affirm life even while embracing Nietzschean nihilism. “Courage is the quality of mind most needed by the mind as it faces the utter and comprehensive meaninglessness of life. That meaninglessness must be affirmed, lest the spirit of revenge corrode us and we face a hostile”—perhaps the better word is indifferent—”world with bitterness and resentment.” Dannhauser judges Nietzsche’s project humanly impossible, and rejects Nietzsche’s claim that man may overcome his own humanity.

The deficiencies of late-modern political philosophy may prompt a reexamination of modernity’s most successful regime. Nathan Tarcov brings to this task a profound understanding of the Lockean political philosophy that influenced the American Founders more than any other. Locke, he observes, is not so ‘bourgeois’ as his critics contend. To assert rights, one makes “a spirited claim that there are duties both to respect others’ rights and to vindicate one’s own rights.” Some Thoughts Concerning Education “leaves room for properly educated spiritedness.” Pride in this combination of liberty and rationality forms the basis of morality; at the same time, love of dominion, that part of pride that spurs tyrants’ immorality, must be corrected and rechanneled. “Locke attempts to control the proud desire for mastery over others by satisfying the proud desire for liberty and mastery over oneself,” a mastery that wins the esteem of one’s fellow men and women.

Tarcov compares the moral principles of the Declaration of Independence with Lockean morality. There is a major similarity: Both teach that the spirited by rational assertion of liberty “alone secures political happiness.” There is also a difference. To the Signers, spiritedness is “part of what entitles one to liberty,” and relates to honor—that  is, “gratitude to ancestors and responsibility to future generations.” This is why the Declaration culminates in a pledge of sacred honor among the people’s representatives, not among the people themselves; this is how would-be rulers show the virtue that will enable them to rule well. As for the people, consent is the key concept. Lack of popular spiritedness yields mere acquiescence; excess spiritedness fuels fanaticism. Consent—moderately spirited and reasonable—hits the mean between the extremes and provides a solid foundation for that rare thing, a politics of moderation in modernity.

This highly instructive collection of essays would have been improved by the inclusion of a more thorough discussion of thumos as a psychological concept—this, perhaps, in the introduction or in an essay immediately following it. A comparison and contrast of the Platonic view of the soul with the Christian view would have added a needed dimension to the study, as well. The writers do an excellent job in showing how modern political philosophers have come full circle since Machiavelli liberated spiritedness from the intellectual apprehension of, and the ethical respect for, nature—how first they tamed spiritedness, then tamed it again. The moderns denied reason’s capacity to rule, yet insisted on overturning traditional customs and opinions. The results have not been encouraging. These studies clarify the reasons for these results, and thus invite further consideration of a perennial political problem.