Leon Craig: The War Lover: A Study of Plato’s Republic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Remarks delivered at a roundtable discussion of The War Lover at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, San Francisco, California, August 29, 1996. Sponsored by the Society for Greek Political Thought and chaired by Professor Mickey Craig of Hillsdale College, discussants included Michael Poliakoff of Bloomsburg University, Christopher Nadon of Trinity College, Mark Blitz of Adelphi University, and Leon Craig of the University of Alberta.
This is a leonine book. It is leonine in three ways. It is Leon’s: Who else could have given it to us? And it is both spirited and Straussian.
The most widely distributed commentary on Plato’s Republic is Allan Bloom’s. Bloom’s ruling theme is eros. How can the man of eros, on second sailing, negotiate his ship ‘amidst these storms,’ the storms fomented by spirited or thumotic men—demagogues, tyrants? Bloom’s heuristic challenge, within the academic regimes of his day, was to persuade the mildly thumotic souls of Plato’s professional guardians—some might say custodians—to fall in love again, to look anew with fresh and desiring eyes, to stop defending old assumptions and to open themselves to a Plato who writes very differently than his modern guardians suppose.
Craig’s ruling theme is thumos itself. His challenge is to show how thumos might be an avenue in the soul toward philosophy, not a Berlin Wall against it. If a thumotic man could be a philosopher, what then? Nietzsche? Would not such a man re-try Socrates, and find him guilty of corrupting that noble youth, Plato? Why approach the love of wisdom via the love of war? How?
Professor Craig replies as follows: If “Socrates” means “Sure Strength,” and he is surrounded by men with such names as “Dauntless,” “War-Lord,” and “Bold Fighter,” perhaps the philosopher exhibits thumos as much as eros, and maybe Plato knows that, answering Nietzsche two millennia in advance. Plato, Professor Craig says, is not ‘Platonic’ in the conventional sense; his characters, even if they are ‘types,’ are not abstractions, lifeless forms, but “full-blooded, multi-colored, three-dimensional” (xxviii). And what do real men do when they get together, if not drink, talk, and fight?
One thing they do, or try to do, is rule. They try to rule each other; they try to rule themselves. “He who could be king over himself must learn to think before he laughs,” Professor Craig reminds us (340, n. 25). This, in response to old Kephalos’ complaints about the (for him, exhausting) war of the soul, the psychomachia, whose source may be seen in Socrates’ classification of the “parts” of the soul: logos, thumos, eros. In ruling himself—pace, I. F. Stone—Socrates is neither aristocrat nor democrat but so-crat. That is, he is ruled by wisdom, by sophia, in ruling himself. Professor Craig translates autarches as “self-sufficient.” More literally it means self-ruling. The rule of wisdom is Socrates’ version of the slogan, ‘The personal is the political.’ For Socrates, to be a so-crat is to be an auto-crat. The lack of self-rule or self-sufficiency results in the need for political life among others. If all men were philosophers, there would be no need of external government. Relax, politicians: That will never happen.
Logos, thumos, and eros differ, but they compose a whole, and share a common characteristic, namely, desire—or, if you prefer, ‘Eros’ with a capital ‘E.’ Logos is wisdom-loving, eros (small ‘e’) gain-loving. Professor Craig argues that thumos desires not one but at least two things: honor and victory.
The timocrat or honor-loving man will degenerate, as his virtue need only seem to be splendid in order to be honored. He will ask too anxiously, ‘What will people think?’ and is therefore likely to be corrupted by his mother. (Recall Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Christian re-write of the Republic, Crime and Punishment.)
It is not the thumotic man of philotimia but the thumotic man of philonikia, the man who would win the great contest “that concerns becoming good or bad,” the man who is not tempted by honor, money, ruling office or poetry (608b, reference in Craig, 39-41), who can withstand the blandishments of mom and demos, follow his own course no matter what others may think, withstand public ridicule and scorn. (Marx quoted Dante on that point. I wish he had more rigorously followed it.)
As seen in the Phaedrus, the soul has two horses, two spirited animals within it. Socrates says to the young soul animated by philonikia, put your money on the right horse in the race, the torch-race on horseback. Philosophers are breeders, trainers, and handicappers all at the same time; they know the odds, because they have inside knowledge on the human soul.
Question: Why should this man, this victory-loving man, become a philosopher? Why would he not prefer to become someone like Aristotle’s great-souled man, who demands great honors out of justice to himself, but has no guarantee of receiving them, and may despise the givers?
The answer is complicated by the knowledge that the nikophile has more than one love. He loves victory more than honor, but he does love honor, as well as music, listening, ruling, gymnastic, and hunting. Love too is complex: one kind of love is neediness; another is partiality (as in ‘I like the guy’); yet another is passionate and selfish; another is selfless and friendly. There are some 31 varieties of philia or selfless/friendly love, alone. These include philo-sophia and philo-pseude, the love of lies—the latter being the sort of love a philosopher indulges when he’s getting in touch with his feminine side, as in ‘If truth is a woman, what then?’
Speaking (again) of Nietzsche, Professor Craig leoninely (although in this case perhaps not Straussianly) suggests that Plato anticipates the claim that philosophers want not so much to know the world as to create it, and then rule their creation. Or, as thumotic souls would say when I was a boy, ‘Wanna make something out of it?’ Yes, but Professor Craig: out of nothing? For Hamlet, who would quarrel at a straw, if honor’s at the stake. Surely not in Plato, however? This points also suggests a certain divergence from Strauss with respect to the relationship of thumos to eros (cf. The City and Man, pp. 110-112).
According to Professor Craig’s account, the man of philonikia most assuredly does not become a man of philo-sophia ‘out of nothing.’ Rather, he comes to philosophy by “coming to see the pursuit of wisdom as the greatest challenge of all, one calling for the finest virtues and greatest exertions” (79). As Edward King writes, “My mind to me a kingdom is,” the realm of philosophic autarchy. Milton’s thumotic Satan says, Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. Socrates rejoins, Better to rule oneself and do it well, than to give way to the pretense of rule over the many.
In the Republic, Plato links thumos and logos in the word thumoeides—suggesting to Strauss that the ‘theory of ideas’ is a rhetorical substitute for theo-logy or god-talk. Speaking of gods: the ring of Gyges story is moral and theological, inasmuch as an entirely invisible person is a god, known only through his voice and his works, insofar as he chooses to manifest either voice or works as his own. Or perhaps an entirely invisible person is also a writer, known only through the voice that comes through his works. Why should such power not lead to tyranny? In a writer, there is no problem, because he can enforce his ‘works only by persuading others that he speaks for a god. But what about those men whose works are more than merely verbal, men who might enforce their works, philosopher-kings?
Why should power not corrupt them, not lead them to tyranny? Glaucon may wish that it would. That it need not, and that the philosophic life is more attractive than tyranny, may be seen in Socrates. Who is Socrates? What is a philosopher, this self-governing, rule-of-wisdom man?
He is, for one thing, a man who sees that the “natural punishment” for a crime is a “disorderly and diminished” soul (182). A disorderly and diminished soul would be either excessively tough or masculine—a warrior without music—or excessively soft or feminine—a lady without gymnastic. Even if truth is not a woman, philosophy is. She must be toughened if she is to govern herself. Shifting to his polemical or war-loving mode, Professor Craig teaches that philosophy is a guy thing. Lady Philosophy is for “real men and mannish women,” not for “women and effeminate men” (232). He soon relents, saying, “the finest psychic regime is beyond either simple masculinity or femininity” (235). The polemical or ‘office of corrections’ point here is that philosophy as a way of life requires not only intellectual strength but spiritual strength—”megalothumos.” In the passage Professor Craig cites, Socrates actually says “gentle and megalothumos” (375c). Professor Craig knows this, and wants only his incautious readers, his excessively thumotic readers, not to know it. Thus he exhibits feminine wiles even as he seems to thump the drum of the wild man.
Speaking of knowledge, if knowledge, as Professor Craig says, is “the root of the political problem” for Plato (260), then self-knowledge must be the root of the problem of autarchy. What is this self, this soul? It exists in sharp contrast to the body; that much is clear. It governs the body, and the reasoning part of the soul governs those parts of the soul that might incline to serve the body. In so doing, logos makes allegiance with the better part of thumos, which then plays the role of good cop, justly governing both the bad-cop side of thumos and the cop-hating and misologistic desires. In the real world outside the city in speech, the world in which soul must contend with bodies, ‘philosopher-king’ means the genuinely self-governing man or woman.
As for the inner life of the philosopher—what he thinks when philosophizing—this leads to Professor Craig’s discussion of such complex Platonic doctrines as the Cave, the Sun, and the Divided Line. Not being a philosopher, and no longer (if ever) the sort of youth Professor Craig wants to address, but only a poor, broken-down, middle-aged man easily exhausted by erotic and thumotic encounters alike, I shall leave discussion of Professor Craig’s treatment of these important issues to my more virile and virtuous colleagues.
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