Activists: Questions for Liberals and Conservatives

A few months ago, I took offense at the implication in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that the words Law and Justice are essentially coterminous. I’m halfway through the Politics now, and he’s addressed this issue, clarifying it to some extent, but it’s left me with a whole new set of questions. Here’s what he says:

Suppose we say the people is the supreme authority, then if they use their numerical superiority to make a distribution of the property of the rich, is not that unjust? It has been done by a valid decision of the sovereign power, yet what can we call it save the very height of injustice?
(III.10)

So the laws of the State must be subject to some higher authority, although Aristotle is a little fuzzy on what that authority is and how we should access it. But the important thing is that he makes it clear that the law is not always just, and III.10 ends with an outright declaration of the distinction:

It might be objected too that it is a bad thing for any human being, subject to all possible disorders and affections of the human mind, to be the sovereign authority, which ought to be reserved for the law itself. But that will not make any difference to the cases we have been discussing; the law itself may have a bias towards oligarchy or democracy, so that exactly the same results will ensue.

He doesn’t say it in these exact words, but obviously his point is that the law is a man-made institution rather than something handed down verbatim from an outside authority, and therefore any objections one makes about human rule must also be made about the law itself.

So who has sway? The rulers or the law? Predictably, Aristotle suggests a balance. On the one hand, “the laws enunciate only general principles and cannot therefore give day-to-day instructions on matters as they arise” (III.15); however, “On the other hand, rulers cannot do without a general principle to guide them; it provides something which, being without personal feelings, is better than that which by its nature does feel” (III.15). Aristotle privileges the law slightly, as he recommends that rulers “only depart from the provisions of the law in cases which the law itself cannot be made to cover” (III.15).

But then he throws a wrench into the gears. As I discussed in an earlier post, for Aristotle, the human soul is divided into two sections: the intellect (strong) and the will/passions (weak). So when he equates the Law with the intellect and human rulers with the passions, we’re back to the drawing board:

he who asks Law to rule is asking God and Intelligence and no others to rule; while he who asks for the rule of a human being is bringing in a wild beast; for human passions are like a wild beast and strong feelings lead astray rulers and the very best of men. In law you have the intellect without the passions.
(III.16)

So we’re back to Law and Justice being coterminous, and the question still stands: Who makes the Law, if it’s not handed down to Aristotle from Mount Sinai?

My question for my readers: How does this schema relate to so-called “activist judges” on the Supreme Court? Should the law—the general principle, in other words—be changed based on changing times, or when the specific situation would require a complete overhaul? The political right seems to see the law as sacrosanct, the left as a general principle. I think Aristotle falls into the former camp, but thankfully we don’t have to accept his word as—no pun intended—law.

So if you’re a conservative, I want to know why the Constitution is a sort of quasi-divine document that Supreme Court Justices can’t change without suffering the slings and arrows of “activism” (and more recently, “empathy”). If the people who wrote it were human beings, why can’t the Constitution be wrong?

And you’re a liberal, I want to know how much we can change the Constitution before we stop having a guiding principle for our government? If the Law is supposed to hold true in general cases, how much can we change that Law without having nothing on which to rest our society?

I have no answers, myself.

Does Democracy Rot Your Soul?

When I was a secretary for an academic department a few years ago, the professors were a little surprised to learn that I—apparently unlike many other secretaries they’d had—was perfectly willing to bend my will to theirs. My anti-authoritarian streak began early, it’s true, but by the end of my undergraduate years, it had to a large extent died out. This happens, I suppose, as a person grows up. Or at least it’s supposed to.

“Some people,” said one of the professors, “take ‘All men are created equal’ to mean that we’re all on the same level in a practical sense.”

“Well, of course not,” I replied. “We’re all created in equal in terms of ontological value, but obviously your job is higher than mine and I shouldn’t pretend we’re on the same social level.” The problem, as I saw it then and as I continue to see it, is that somehow we’ve equated who we are as people with what we do—deep down, I think Americans believe that if you have a better job you’re worth more as a human being. That, for obvious reasons, leads to the attitude “You can’t tell me what to do.”

One thing that surprised me when I first started reading Plato was that he’s no friend of democracy. The ancient Greeks, after all, invented the form. I learned this fact in middle school, and I can’t remember if my teacher bothered to tell us that the most notable of them hated it with the depth of their beings.

In The Republic, Plato places it at the very bottom of his analysis of political systems, warning that if people aren’t careful, their societies will slide into it. “Democracy,” he says, “originates when the poor win, kill or exile their opponents, and give the rest equal civil rights and opportunities of office, appointment to office being as a rule by lot” (557a). This is a nightmare for him because poverty makes a person incapable of choosing correctly. Democracy becomes an exercise in smoke and mirrors, and if people like it, they like it in the way that “women and children [like] gaily coloured things” (557c).

His language here makes it easy for us to dismiss him. The poor are human beings like everyone else, and they’re not in all cases or completely responsible for their poverty. Marx has told us the ways in which the system creates its own caste system and that the dream of social mobility is to a large extent a lottery rather than a meritocracy. And the sexism of the ancient Greeks (way worse than the sexism either of the Hebrew Bible or of the New Testament) just doesn’t work in a modern world. But we should still take his remarks on democracy seriously, especially when he talks about its effects on the soul.

Before we look at those remarks, though, I should say a word about Greek opinions on the nature of the soul. The common opinion, best I can gleam from reading Plato and Aristotle, is that the soul is composed of two elements, the reason and the will. The reason sits in natural authority over the will—the rational over the emotional. Aristotle uses this schema to justify any number of things, including the rule of men (rational) over women (emotional), but we need not accept that implication to recognize the wisdom of a natural hierarchy of character traits.

So under a political system of democracy, the individual character begins to become democratic, which is to say that the emotional elements of the soul begin to rebel against the rational elements:

For the rest of his life he spends as much money, time and trouble on the unnecessary desires as on the necessary. If he’s lucky and doesn’t get carried to extremes, the tumult will subside as he gets older, some of the exiles will be received back, and the invaders won’t have it all their own way. He’ll establish a kind of equality of pleasures, and will give the pleasure of the moments its turn of complete control till it is satisfied, and then move on to another, so that none is underprivileged and all have their fair share of encouragement. (561b)

It’s hard to ignore this warning given the current economic crisis, which is built from people of all levels of society allowing their pleasures, their unnecessary desires, to rule over their rational minds. Why should a CEO who’s completely trashed his company receive bonuses of millions of dollars? On the other end of society, why should someone who makes $6 an hour—or worse, who lives off of Welfare—own two or three televisions and a satellite dish?

The answer is the same: We’re to a large part controlled by our pleasures. Poor Jimmy Carter tried to tell the country this in the late 1970s and was crucified it: Living with your means requires sacrifice; it requires allowing the rational element of your soul to rule over the emotional element. Unfortunately for Carter, democratic people naturally rebel against this instruction.

Additionally, we begin to believe that no one can rule over us. “Every man is a king,” claimed Huey Long, the populist Louisiana senator, and Lord knows this is what Americans believe at the core of their beings. If it’s true, though, we need to start worrying, lest we end up with one of the two kings given in Aristophanes’ The Knights: the vicious, wicked Cleon, and Agoracritus, the idiot sausage-seller. (It’s true that in Aristophanes’ play, Agoracritus ends up being a pretty good ruler. I think most of us will agree it wouldn’t happen that way in real life.)

Besides, even if it were a good thing for every man to be king, it’s simply not plausible. Long devised the slogan and its accompanying song not to elevate every man into his own ruler but to become their ruler. Americans are told from childhood that anyone can become president—we’ve heard this a million times over—but it’s simply not true. By the time you finish college (and possibly even by the time you enter it), you know if you have a shot of being president—and the overwhelming majority of people don’t. And it’s a good thing.

But there’s a tendency to hold onto this myth, to believe that it’s some stroke of luck and not your native ability that keeps you from ruling the world. And that’s where the anti-authoritarianism comes in. That’s where democracy begins to rot your soul—there’s no reason to listen to the people in charge, since we’re all capable of doing it. You may as well secede.

I’m just kicking this idea around, so I’ll present a few caveats before people start to think I’m advocating some kind of dictatorship or suggesting that there’s never a time to overthrow oppression:

(a) I’m a Protestant, which means my Catholic and Eastern Orthodox friends have every right to point out my hypocrisy here. Protestantism is built upon the notion that we can all be our own priests, and in some of its forms, it completely negates Church hierarchy. Presbyterianism happens not to be one of those forms, but it does suggest a sort of hermeneutic self-rule: Anyone can read the Bible and come up with the correct meaning, and we’re not dependent upon the Church to tell us if we’re right or wrong. The Orthodox are fond of saying that the Protestant Reformation removed the Pope and created billions of little popes.

(b) Plato is unable to come up with a political system that’s more appealing or realistic than the ones he condemns. He essentially advocates the society in Brave New World, with a small group of Guardians ruling over everyone else. No one owns anything, not even his family; women and children are shared equally by all. He somehow believes that the Guardians won’t take advantage of their situation and grow rich off of the fat of the land.

Aristotle rightly condemns aspects of Plato’s republic and advocates instead his typical Golden Mean—not too much tyranny, not too much democracy. I am not far enough into the Politics to evaluate this system.

(c) There’s no doubt that there are leaders, democratically elected and otherwise, who are just plain bad, who drive their societies into the ground and who oppress their people. I have little problem with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s plot to kill Hitler, for example. (Of course, Hitler was democratically elected and for the most part did what he did with the approval of the masses.) So I have not yet worked out what we should do with tyrants, that is, when submission should stop and self-rule should begin.

(d) Finally, I recognize that I’m as much a product of democratic thought as the rest of us and that our political system is not going to go away any time soon. Further, I don’t particularly think that’s a bad thing. I wouldn’t like going back to a monarchy or an oligarchy or (God forbid) Plato’s republic.

What I’m interested in, I guess, is finding a way to have the political advantages of democracy without its corrosive effects on the individual. What do you guys think? Does political democracy necessarily lead to the democracy of the soul and to the selfish and lazy citizens that believe it’s all owed to them? Is there any way out?

What's Good for the Nation Is Good for the Soul

In an odd twist of fate (and my very convoluted and complicated self-mandated reading schedule), I ended up in the middle of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics at the same time. Nietzsche, of course, is one of the few Western philosophers who has little to no respect for either Plato or Aristotle, and in fact, from my understanding, he spearheaded the campaign to bring the pre-Socratics back into flavor. (I’m not sure of the degree to which that mission was accomplished.)

One chief argument between Nietzsche and Aristotle revolves around the function of the individual in society. I suspect that this argument is in a broader sense between the modern and ancient worlds, but Nietzsche and Aristotle will do for representatives of the two.

According to Aristotle, the absolute good is that which is pursued for its own sake—it’s the ultimate good, that which, in pursuing it, we pursue all other goods. To twist one of Aristotle’s own examples: To be a good archer, we need to know not only how to draw back the bow and hit the target, but when to shoot and when not to shoot.

The absolute good belongs in the sphere of “the most sovereign and most comprehensive master science, and politics clearly fits this description” (I.ii). This puts the society over the mere individual, but it’s not quite that simple. Aristotle takes what will eventually be called an Arnoldian view of culture—he believes that “the end of politics [which we can also translate as society or culture] is the good of man” (I.ii). So it wraps back around. The individual seeks the good of the culture, which translates back into the good of the individual.

Nietzsche, predictably, disagrees. Or more accurately, he agrees with Aristotle that ethics are designed for the good of society, but they part ways when it comes to the notion that what is good for society is good for the individual: “one would have to notice that virtues . . . are usually harmful for those who possess them” (I.21). Social “virtues” are thus not only not the same thing as the virtues of the individual—they are out-and-out hostile to them.

I’m much more sympathetic to Aristotle than to Nietzsche here. In fact, I imagine I am generally much more sympathetic to Aristotle than to Nietzsche, who often comes across as a petulant and aging wunderkind. (More accurately, I suppose, I follow Kierkegaard, who notes that the ethical is higher than the aesthetic, the universal higher than the individual, except where specific revelation from God dictates otherwise. I have argued that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are closer than we might imagine, but I’m not sure to what extent I really believe that.) But, however unpleasant and egocentric Nietzsche may be, Aristotle is not as easy to agree with as one might suppose.

The problem comes in when he seeks to define the term justice. Aristotle has what appears to me an odd idea of the relationship between the lawful and the just. He claims that “Since a lawbreaker is, as we saw, unjust and a law-abiding man just, it is obvious that everything lawful is in a sense just. For ‘lawful’ is what the art of legislation has defined as such, and we call each particular enactment ‘just’ ” (1129b). But does that necessarily follow? It must assume either (a) cultural relativity, that is, that justice is not only defined but is different under different sets of laws; or (b) the universality of Athenian law.

Certainly almost no modern Americans would claim that lawful and just are synonyms. The right would argue that abortion, while legal, is in no sense just; and the left would argue that gay marriage is unjustly illegal. Am I misreading Aristotle, or were times that different? After all, if legal and just are in any sense synonyms, then there’d be no reason to refine and change the legal system—and I can’t imagine anyone would argue that principle.

And he takes it even further in the next section, claiming that “ ‘unfair and ‘unlawful’ are not identical but distinct and related to one another as the part is related to the whole; for everything unfair is unlawful, but not everything unlawful is unfair” (1130b). Not only does the law subsume virtue, it also creates it: “What produces entire are those lawful measures which are enacted for education in citizenship” (1130b). This becomes something akin to a worship of law—I just do not understand, with my 21st-century brain, how Aristotle can possibly believe this kind of thing.

I’m not a scholar of Aristotle; I’ve now read On Rhetoric and about half of the Nicomachean Ethics, and Politics still lies in my future. Am I misreading him? Was the concept of the State just that different in ancient Athens? Does he clarify this later in the Politics? And more pressingly: Is there a tertium quid? Is there a way to believe that what’s good for the State is ultimately good for the Individual without engaging in law-worship?

I need answers, folks.

Know Thyself, Pt. 1

This post is to a large extent informed by multiple conversations with the Great Nathan Gilmour, who consistently expands and corrects my understanding of Plato (and everything else).

As time and my academic career have progressed, I've moved further and further away from the poststructuralism that I embraced in the late years of my undergraduate education, a philosophy that I think is ultimately nihilistic. My Great Books project has instead made me into a humanist (although I'm a humanist heavily informed by Existentialism, a philosophy that is at its base considerably less nihilistic, despite the nihilism of some of its practitioners). I believe in literature and in its power to change both the individual and society. I believe the canon has something to teach us, despite its much-criticized exclusion of women and racial minorities; and I sometimes wonder what critical and cultural theorists think the purpose of literature is.

The most important lesson we can learn from the humanities, as best I can tell, involves man's contingency, our position somewhere other than the center of the universe. This is the great lesson of the Greeks, of course, particularly the playwrights. It goes without saying that terrible things happen to tragic heroes, things beyond human control, things inflicted upon us by the capricious gods who stand in for a cold and uncaring natural world. Sometimes, as is the case in Oedipus Rex, these things happen as a sort of punishment. But often they happen for no real reason. Such is the case in many or most of Euripides' plays. Heracles kills his family even though he is a national hero, and he does so because Zeus cheated on Hera. Hippolytus may have strayed from the Golden Mean in terms of abstinence, but he probably doesn't deserve to die; he dies because of the actions of his stepmother, and there's no bringing him back from the dead.

Where the playwrights are negative, Plato is more positive. His Republic is a detailed breakdown of how society should work (although he recognizes that it's never actually going to work that way). The Republic is built upon a very detailed system of social strata. Famously, everyone's talents and abilities will be clearly delineated sometime in early childhood, and every citizen will be assigned a particular role, be it Guardian or Gold or Silver or whatnot. The important thing here is not which group you're put in; it's your ability to accept your lot in life:

We said that if any child of a Guardian is a poor specimen, it must be degraded to the other classes, while any child in the other classes who is worth it must be promoted to the rank of Guardian. By this it was implied that all the other citizens ought individually to devote their full energy to the one particular job for which they are naturally suited. In that way the integrity and unity both of the individual and the state will be preserved. (423d)

Plato is often misunderstood. He is a tyrant, it is true, and his Republic is essentially a caste system with little (but not zero) chance for advancement. But he posits such a system not merely out of nationalism. The State is probably more important than the individual, but The Republic's caste system is meant to benefit the individual as well. When a citizen submits to his role in the State, he makes himself whole somehow. And his role is not arbitrarily assigned. It is based on his talents and abilities--it is presumably decided based on what will be best for both the individual and the State.

Aristotle suggests something similar in On Rhetoric. Happiness--which does not carry the modern connotation of emotional fulfillment, but rather the Good or the True--is to a large extent dependent upon contingencies. He makes a list of the components of happiness:

good birth, numerous friendships, worthy friendships, wealth, good children, numerous children, a good old age, as well as the virtues of the body (such as health, beauty, strength, physical stature, athletic prowess), reputation, honor, good luck, virtue. (I.v.4, 1360b)

Some of these components, it is true, are in our control; but many of them are not. If happiness is at least partially and perhaps largely out of our hands, we must recognize this fact. And recognition of one's relatively helplessness is submission to it.

In his wonderful The Nature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr sets forth two guiding philosophies of the Western world: the Christian and the Classical. He suggests that they are at least partially incompatible but they were merged in the Medieval Church and in the secular and religious Renaissance. The point of this merger is the mutual recognition of

The obvious fact . . . that man is a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes, compelled by its necessities, driven by its impulses, and confined within the brevity of the years which nature permits its aried organic form, allowing them some, but too much latitude. The other less obvious fact is that man is a spirit who stands outside of nature, life, himself, his reason and the world.

Even man's transcendence, however, involves contingency to some extent because it involves alienation, the essential characteristic of man and one that sets him apart from God, the world, other men, and himself. What could better demonstrate man's subjugation to his fate?

In the second post of this series, I will examine the biblical attitude toward man's position in the universe; in the third, I will examine where we went wrong. Stay tuned.

I Need a Love to Make Me Happy

As I'm sure many others did, I went through college with the simplistic notion that Aristotle was the opposite of Plato. That idea is true to some extent, of course, but I'm fifty pages into On Rhetoric (my first Aristotle), and it's already obvious to me that Aristotle doesn't so much push against Plato as build off of him. He takes Plato's definition of rhetoric, for example--an art that is not an art, since it doesn't impart specific knowledge--but turns it around on itself and treats it as a good thing.

Likewise, he agrees with Plato on the meaning of life. Socrates takes it as a given that all men desire first and foremost to be happy (Euthydemus 278E), and if he posits virtue as the most important factor to happiness, he never doubts that happiness is the ultimate goal. Aristotle both expands and refines this concept:

Both to an individual privately and to all people generally there is one goal at which they aim in what they choose to do and in what they avoid. Summarily stated, this is happiness and its parts . . . Let happiness be defined as success combined with virtue, or as self-sufficiency in life, or as the pleasantest life accompanied with security, or as abundance of possessions and bodies, with the ability to defend and use these things. (On Rhetoric 1360B)

George A. Kennedy, who translated my copy of the book, suggests that Aristotle privileges the first definition of happiness there (“success combined with virtue”), and I've got no reason to doubt him. But I am more interested in the “parts” of happiness:

good birth, numerous friendships, worthy friendships, wealth, good children, numerous children, a good old age, as well as the virtues of the body (such as health, beauty, strength, physical stature, athletic prowess), reputation, honor, good luck, virtue. (1360B)

What strikes me about this catalogue of needs is how many of them are uncontrollable. Of these, only virtue is under the control of the individual (although friendships, wealth, health, and reputation have some element of controllability).

Thomas Aquinas famously combines Aristotle and the Bible to come up with his theology, and I have to wonder what he does with this portion of On Rhetoric. That's because I don't see any way to combine Aristotle's viewpoint with St. James'. Now, I've elsewhere made my peace with the Greek concept of happiness as the chief end of man, but it's the uncontrollability of happiness that sticks in my craw. James seems to claim willful, that is, controllable, happiness, opening his epistle with his famous exhortation to “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance” (1:2). The image is of a person forcing himself to be happy (or joyful--I never bought my youth group's distinction between happiness and joy).

The real reason for the discrepancy between Christian and Aristotelian thought on this matter comes down to one little compound word: “self-sufficiency.” If man is autonomous--if happiness indeed comes from being enough on his own--then of course the elements of that happiness are going to be beyond man's control. But James' happiness springs from the knowledge that man is not in fact sufficient unto himself. James is able to turn rocks into bread because he knows that his poor circumstances have a relational purpose, that they stem from his dependence upon God.

So Nathan--as the world's only Thomist Protestant (and the only reader of this blog), I'm sure you have the answer to my question. How does Aquinas reconcile these two disparate viewpoints?

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet: Plato and the American Renaissance (Pt. 1)

James Kibler, who teaches my Southern Literature course, has assigned William Gilmore Simms' Poetry and the Practical, a forgotten treatise by a nearly forgotten poet. When Simms is remembered at all, it's as a rabidly pro-slavery ideologue and the author of The Sword and the Distaff, one of the first novels written in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Yet Simms was a true antebellum Renaissance man, a trial lawyer and state congressman who wrote more than two thousand poems in the W.C. Bryant mode and many now-forgotten novels that echo Edgar Allan Poe (who once called Simms America's greatest novelist). I have not read these novels, so I can't agree or disagree with Poe, but Poetry and the Practical is at the very least an interesting and original argument.

Kibler himself wrote the introduction to the book, and in it and in class he spends a good deal of time arguing for Simms' philosophical affinities with Poe. He overstates his case, in my opinion. Poe, after all, famously says in "The Philosophy of Composition" that "Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem," rejecting moral readings and anticipating Oscar Wilde, the decadents, and their off-quoted "art for art's sake." But Simms wrests Poe's work away from its author's intentions: "Their [poets'] instincts . . . peculiar to their gifts, have always made them, more or less willingly, so many moral teachers." No, Simms sounds less like Poe and more like another "P"--Plato, whom I've written about so often that even I am sick of him. (Maybe this will be the last time he comes up. Probably not.)

I've been kicking around the subject of this post for a good long time, and Simms merely provides me with an excuse to finally write it up. The bulk of Poetry and the Practical is a Sidney-esque defense of art--he actually takes the difficult position that the poet is the most practical of all men. Plato, of course, is at the very best ambivalent about art; his theory of forms will not allow him to praise mimetic art, that copy of a copy of a copy, and poetry, built as it is on emotion rather than logic, disturbs him. He excludes the poet from his Republic on the grounds that he

can use words and phrases as a medium to paint a picture of any craftsman, though he knows nothing except how to represent him, and the metre and rhythm and music will persuade people who are as ignorant as he is . . . Strip [poetry] of its poetic colouring, reduce it to plain prose, and I think you know how little it amounts to. (Republic 601A-B)

And so it baffled me for a long time as to why Simms' fellow Romantics so revere Plato. Emerson is typical in his praise: "Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories." Emerson (and the other Romantics) classes Plato as a philosopher rather than a poet, but he also calls him "almost literature" and a "great artist," and he clearly believes the Greek to be on his side. But Emerson, Coleridge, and the rest would be left shivering outside the gates of the Republic. What gives?

Well, for one thing, Plato isn't as consistent in his critique/rejection of art as we might assume him to be. Socrates loves Homer--who for Greeks of the era was not only the composer of the national epic but also a religious figure. He quotes the blind sage more than he quotes anyone else, and when he does so, it's so he can appeal to his authority. Further, Plato dedicates an entire dialogue to something resembling literary criticism. In the dialogue bearing his name, we meet Ion, a rhapsode. Trevor J. Saunders explains in his introduction to the Penguin edition:

What did rhapsodes do? Gorgeously attired, they recited the works of Homer and other poets, apparently in some sort of chant, and usually without the musical accompaniment employed by earlier Homeric singers. Their performances were dramatic: they threw themselves into the part of whatever character Homer was depicting, and acted his scenes.

Additionally, their acting has an interpretative/critical element to it. Socrates classes the rhapsode with the artist, and here, at least, that's a compliment; after all, the rhapsode ends up as an intermediary between the Author and the Reader, and as such he operates by a "divine power" (533D).

Now: Saunders claims a dialogic consistency here--that is, he says that Plato uses the rhapsode to criticize the poet, rather than using the poet to define the rhapsode:

The question it poses is: "Do poets know what they are talking about?" Socrates, clearly thinks, the answer is "no"; indeed, he believes that poets are ignorant fellows who can write poetry only in a state of madness.

Strictly speaking, Saunders is correct. Socrates says that poetic inspiration can come only when the poet goes out of his head. But Saunders' tone is all wrong. I know nothing about him, but I suspect from his error that he approaches this subject through the Enlightenment, the period in which the fool stopped being holy and started being insane. (There's more to it than that, of course, and you can get it all from Foucault's seminal Madness and Civilization.) As late as the Renaissance, madness was all right; as Shakespeare says, "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends" (A Midsummer Night's Dream V.i.4-6).

Shakespeare, I'll allege, is of one mind with Plato, at least in the Ion. The evidence too difficult to explain away, try as Trevor Saunders might:

All good epic poets recite all that splendid poetry not by virtue of a skill, but in a state of inspiration and possession. The same is true of good lyric poets as well: just as Corybantic worshippers dance without being in control of their senses, so too it's when they are not in control of their senses that the lyric poets compose those fine lyric poems. But once launched into their rhythm and musical mode, they catch a Bacchic frenzy: they are possessed, just like Bacchic women, who when possessed and out of their senses draw milk and honey from rivers--exactly what the souls of the lyric poets do, as they say themselves . . . A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him. No man, so long as he keeps that, can prophesy or compose . . . the god relieves them of their reason, and uses them as his ministers, just as he uses soothsayers and divine prophets--so that we who listen to them may realize that it is not they who say such supremely valuable things as they do, who have not reason in them, but that it is the god himself who speaks, and addresses us through them. (533E-534D)

So it's not poetry that Plato objects to; it's uninspired poetry, poetry written by man instead of by the gods.

With this in mind, the Romantic affection for Plato comes shining through, in ways I will explain in the next edition.

In Which the Libertarians Make Me Long for 'The Republic'

Libertarianism has probably never had a higher profile in U.S. politics than it has this year, thanks in large part to the flaccid and doomed "Ron Paul rEVOLution," in which literally dozens of college students donated their parents' money to an obstetrician who wanted to disband the FDA. (Actual quote: "I don't think we'd all die of unsafe food if we didn't have the FDA. Someone else would do it.") Paul technically ran on the Republican ticket, but his overwhelming support in the libertarian community and the calls for him to run in Harry Browne's place should make it clear where his loyalties really lie.

I know a little something about libertarianism, having considered myself part of the movement when I was an idiot 18-year-old with neither book nor life learnin'. I listened fanatically to Atlanta talk-show host Neal Boortz, argued for the free market at every chance I got, actually voted for Harry Browne for president, and used the phrase "You can't legislate morality" as often as I possibly could. I gave up on the philosophy after my first U.S. history course, around the time I started working and realized that minimum wage was a-okay.

I can't help but think of libertarianism as I read Laws, Plato's last and longest dialogue and something of a sequel to the The Republic. It doesn't make much sense to apply labels like "conservative" and "liberal" to Plato; he exists on a totally different spectrum, perhaps one akin to the proposed Nolan Chart, one that adds libertarianism and totalitarianism into the mix. And in fact, one thing to admire about Plato is the way he stands for everything Nolan, Boortz, Ron Paul, and those dozens of college students hate. He does so righteously, furthermore: the Republic's Guardians rule because they are best suited for the job, not because they crave power (as is unfailingly the case in modern socialist states). Plato's dictatorship has a moral purpose, and if it sounds sinister to modern ears (and does it ever), that's because he assumes an objective truth that we as secular Westerners simply do not.

Plato agrees with the libertarians that life is a zero-sum game ("everyone [is] an enemy of everyone else in the public sphere" [Laws 626D]), but--as evidenced by the socialist streak in the Republic--he'd be horrified by their social Darwinism. We don't all have equal abilities, much less the "equal opportunities" fiscal conservatives sometimes crow about, but there's a place for everyone in Plato's schema, and no one gets crushed by the cogs. (In this, his state resembles FDR's New Deal.) Libertarians--even more so than Republicans--are content to let the free market have its way, even when that way necessarily crucifies a certain percentage of the populace. There's no free market in The Republic; people are forced by their predetermined jobs to manufacture certain things, and the state gives them the rest.

Plato breaks from the libertarians again in terms of anthropology. The libs and the modern socialists have one thing in common: They assume that people are inherently good and that society in some form (government for the libertarians and capitalism for the socialists) corrupts them. Plato assumes, it's true, that what the Christian world calls sin is an unwillful intellectual error (read about that here), but both the Republic and the Laws make it clear that there are upright people and there are evil people and that the former must rule the latter:

Wherever the better people subdue their inferiors, the state may rightly be said to be "conquerer of itself," and we should be entirely justified in praising it for its victory. (Laws 627A)

Further, he suggests that "evil citizens will come together in large numbers and forcibly try to enslave the virtuous minority" (627B), so the will of the masses, loved by libertarians (Paulist "sheeple" talk aside) and liberals alike, is clearly not a concern.

And therein lies the surprising moral imperative behind the Platonic dictatorship. Plato's point behind subdoing the idiot and evil masses--the point behind his entire complicated and sinister schema--is not to violently eliminate the wicked but to make them good:

Which of these judges would be the better, the one who put all the bad brothers to death and told the better ones to run their own lives, or the one who put the virtuous brothers in command, but let the scoundrels go on living in willing obedience to them? And we can probably add a third and even better judge--the one who will take this single quarrelling family [i.e., the State] in hand and reconcile its members, without killing any of them; by laying down regulations to guide them in the future, he will be able to ensure that they remain on friendly terms with each other.

So, contrary to the libertarian mantra that "you can't legislate morality," Plato suggests that morality is in fact the only thing you can legislate. The libertarians talk out of both sides of their mouths here anyway. Their value system is based on the concept of individual rights, which for some reason they don't view as a moral structure. But why should we respect individual rights? Because it's right to do so and wrong not to, which is a moral imperative. The government must necessarily legislate morality; indeed, that's the purpose of government, to protect us from one another.

Now, all this is not to say that I am some sort of Platonist totalitarian. I am not. I'm a moderate liberal, I suppose, which is to say that I recognize that the Guardians, too, can be evil and that in fact everyone is to some extent. So the government must protect us from ourselves, and we must protect the government from itself--which is what the American system of checks and balances is all about. We must legislate morality in order to keep our citizens from engaging in self- and socially destructive behavior, but in our pluralistic society that morality must be determined by the democracy, even if the minority may disagree with it.

I've not studied political science, and so I may have some of this wrong. Oh, and also: For awhile there, Ron Paul fans had a nasty habit of seeking out blog posts like this one and spamming the comments section. Not that I think anyone other than Nathan actually reads me, but don't bother spamming me. Any RON ROOLZ comments will be deleted.

St. Paul Cleans the Mirror

Just a brief and undeveloped post today, since I haven't formulated an actual theory about what I'm talking about here.

I've complained elsewhere about the neo-Platonist influence on Christianity and how I feel those two systems to be basically incompatible. Ever the contrarian (and ever confusing), St. Paul has confuted me and exploded my binary pair by converging with Socrates. First, Plato:

By our bodies and through perception we have dealings with coming-to-be, but we deal with real being by our souls and through reasoning . . . Being always stays the same and in the same state, but coming-to-be varies from one time to another. (Sophist 248A)

Compare that to Paul:

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I also have been fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:12, NAS)

So apparently the neo-Platonist streak has been present in Christianity from the very beginning. But I'm more interested in the verse that immediately follows:

But now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13)

I wonder if 1 Corinthians 13 is in some way a response to Platonic idealism (expressed most clearly in Phaedo and Sophist). I imagine that Paul would agree with Plato's debasement of bodily pleasures in favor of the soul, and perhaps he'd even teeter on the edge of Plato's body/soul dualism.*

What's interesting to me is the way Paul sets up the noetic effects of love. We've all heard the "faith, hope, and love" verse a million times, but until today I never made the connection between it and the "glass darkly" verse that immediately precedes it. Is love, for St. Paul, a remedy for Platonic dualism, for not being able to trust our senses (and perhaps our ostensibly rational conclusions, although Paul is less of a rationalist than Plato)? Is love one of the "first fruits of the Spirit" (Romans 8:23), a glimpse of the sanctified new earth to come? What I'm getting at: Can we believe the things we learn in love in a way that we can't under Plato's system? Does love take some of the dirt off the mirror?

---
*Dualism is a sticky subject in Christian theology, of course. St. Paul sets the spirit against the flesh in Galatians 5, but it's in no way a given that "flesh" means "physical body," and credible theologians have fallen on either side of that debate for two thousand years. One thing is clear: The orthodox Christian cannot fall into the traps of either Gnosticism (the body is evil, and the soul is divine) or Manichaeism (the force of good is equaled by the force of evil); if St. Paul does mean "the body" when he says "the flesh," he cannot mean that the body is itself evil. After all, at the end of time, we are promised new bodies for the new heavens and the new earth. The issue with any body/soul dualism we may find in St. Paul is an issue of the old earth vs. the new earth.

Why Plato Is Right

The most common conflict in Plato's dialogues is between Socrates and a given sophist, whom, of course, is utterly decimated in the verbal tangle. Sophist as a word has moved from negative to positive in the intervening 23 centuries, as the English word sophisticated attests. But for Socrates the sophist represents all that's evil in the world; the sophist has no standards, no beliefs.

One thing I like about Socrates is that he claims a moral purpose for philosophy (and, by extension, for education itself). Our modern conception of the philosopher is of a man who loves puzzles and is stuck in his own head; our culture finds little value in philosophy (as, apparently, did Plato's). So it's refreshing to see the teleological impetus for Plato's work:

No one may join the company of the gods who has not practiced philosophy and is not completely pure when he departs from life, nobody but the lover of learning. It is for this reason . . . that those who practice philosophy in the right way keep away from all bodily passions, master them and do not surrender themselves to them. (Phaedo 82B-C)

So education was meant to purify us, to allow us to ascend to a higher moral and spiritual plane. It doesn't always do that today, but it didn't always in Plato's day, either. That's what the conflict between Socrates and the Sophists is all about: They take something holy and make it venal. Plato's attacks on them are akin to Christ's clearing of the Temple.

So what is the modern equivalent of the sophist? First, Plato's definition:

Doesn't the kind of wage-earning that actually earns money, though it claims to deal with people for the sake of virtue, deserve to be called by a different name? . . . I think we've found the sophist. I think that's the name that would be suitable for him . . . It's the hunting of rich, prominent young men. (Sophist 223 A-B)

I see two basic options for our modern-day sophist:

(a) The relativism movement, including the language-destabilizing poststructuralists. This group, after all, continues the work that Heraclitus began, except that moral relativists take his views on the physical world and apply them to the spiritual world. (Plato was not a moral relativist, which is why he can hold Socrates up as better than the people he debates.) Add to this the leftist sanctimony adopted by the Academy elite and the impressive salaries they command, and it's easy to imagine Socrates as a penniless adjunct crushed beneath the wheels of the system. (I smell a film version!) It's not so true anymore, but twenty and maybe even ten years ago, Theory (always capitalized, just like God) had a stranglehold on the Academy, effectively replacing the hegemony it railed against. That sounds like the sophists in Plato's early dialogues, asking for questions but refusing to answer them.

(b) The education-as-big-business trend, wonderfully documented in this article by John H. Summers. I see this attitude in my own students (although, mercifully, less than I expected to), and while I can put some of the blame on the high-school guidance counselors who instruct all but the lowest achievers to go to college, thus upping the number of BAs issued, I also know that my professional existence depends on that huge influx of (possibly undeserving) students, many of whom, perhaps, deserve lower grades than I assign. And so I am culpable in the system I've designated modern sophistry.

I've got plenty of problems with Plato--and you can read about a few of them here--but I'm beginning to appreciate his absolutism and his elitism. Or at least I think a dose of them might cure some of the Academy's problems. His absolutism is arguably mitigated by his insistence on using dialogue to discover those absolutes, but it's there, whereas the academic relativists lack both absolutism and dialogism. His elitism, on the other hand, so disturbing in books like The Republic, could go a long way to solving the crisis of the university, provided we balance the scales with good old-fashioned American egalitarianism.

See, the problem is that we've convinced ourselves that people are created not only equal in the eyes of God but equal in abilities. But that's not true. Some people are smarter than other people, and if we extend the idea of intelligence to include skills (as does Plato, you'll notice), everybody is smarter than everybody. And while I'm not too keen on forcing people into particular roles, I do like the idea of naming all vocations, from mechanic to research scientist, as noble. Some people belong in college; some people don't; some people might a decade from now. Let's stop making a bachelor of arts a requirement for being a barista; let's treat people as they are: We're all human beings, but it doesn't mean we're all capable of the same thing.

Oh my God. I think I'm a conservative.

The Itch Plato Can't Scratch

I'm beginning to tire of reading Plato, but I've only got four or five dialogues (including The Laws) left to go. I'd like to plow through and finish them all before the semester starts. We'll see if that happens.

I'm in the middle of Philebus right now, in which Plato claims that pleasures and pains can be true or false to the extent that they are "based upon realities" (40D). Socrates manages to convince his debate opponents, who by this time in Plato's works are becoming less and less of real people and more of cardboard stand-ins to tell Socrates "yassuh"--or maybe all of Athens was tired of Socrates by this time and agreed merely to shut him up. I, at any rate, am unconvinced.

Plato talks quite a bit about hope and dread as pleasure and pain, so let's use these as examples. I can look forward to winning the lottery, say, and I can plan what I will do with my millions. (Since it's me in this example, I will probably fill a notebook with lists, perhaps color-coded.) But I'm not going to win the lottery, not even if I enter it--that hope, that pleasure is not at all based upon reality. But it's still pleasure. I will still gain satisfaction, however temporary, from my detailed million-dollar budget. When they announce the winning numbers Saturday night, it will become immediately apparent to me that my pleasure was based on a false reality. That doesn't mean it wasn't pleasure.

Likewise, if I panic--as I often do--and fear that I'm going to exhaust my meager resources and overdraw my checking account, the pain and the terror this causes me is no less painful and terrifying for being built on a (usually) false assumption. No, the pain is real, and the reality of the pain (to reiterate, as opposed to the reality of the basis of the pain) only adds to the reality of my pleasure when I check my account balance and find an acceptable number of electronic dollars. Pain and pleasure, emotionally speaking, exist whether or not they are attached to legitimate, that is to say, real, objects. Plato's suggestion to the contrary is an attempt to bend emotion to the intellect--an admirable attempt, but one that's not actually going to lessen emotional pain.

The argument gets stickier when we're talking about physical pain, so let me talk briefly about the physiological and psychological bases for physical pain. (I am no neuroscientist, so bear with me.) The June 30 issue of the New Yorker features a piece called "The Itch," which deals with a young woman who has an itch with no physiological basis. That her pain is not based on a physical reality does not stop her from seeking real comfort and pleasure--she scratches her head so much and so deeply that

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, "this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid" . . . Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night--and into her brain.

M.'s itch, it turns out, is caused by nothing in particular, a variation on "phantom limb pain," in which a person whose arm or leg has been amputated nevertheless feels pressure and, oftentimes, pain on the affected area. I can't think of any better example of real pain caused by nothing in the realm of reality.

Unless it's this: When I read "The Itch," I began itching wildly all over my body. The power of suggestion caused a real pain in me based on nothing in reality. One could, I suppose, respond that I was responding to something unreal. But then there's Samuel Hafenreffer's 1660 definition of "itch," which has apparently not been improved upon in the intervening years: "An unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch." Unreality begets reality.

Plato's Pleasure Principle

Plato's ethics are built on a pleasure system--what is pleasurable is right, and what is painful is wrong, or at the very least, what is wrong causes pain, and what is right causes pleasure. This concept shows up throughout his dialogues, particularly those of the middle period, and they've always rung false to my Presbyterian mind. In Timaeus, however, he gives us a scientific defense of his ethics; in this passage, he deals with the mechanics of taste:

Whenever the composition of the particles which enter into the moist parts is naturally akin to the state of the tongue, they oil its roughened parts and smooth it, contracting the parts that are unnaturally dilated or dilating those that are contracted, and thus settling them all, so far as possible, in their natural condition; and every such remedy of the forcible affections, being pleasant and welcome to everyone, is called "sweet." (66C)

I guess that's not really a defense of his ethics, per se, but we can extrapolate one. What is right has the effect on the soul that sweet things have on the body--it sets it right, and since pleasure is the effect of everything being in its right place, right equals pleasure.

Can the dour Presbyterian mind get behind such a formula? Perhaps, if we tweak it a little. Calvinists believe that everything (yeah, depending on the Calvinist) is predetermined; therefore, God is always already in control of everything; therefore, everything is naturally in its proper place (and proper is always a good word for Presbyterians). Doesn't that produce a certain pleasure (the patriarchs call it joy), even as it may also cause pain? Calvinists are fond of the idea that we do the right thing at the expense of our comfort, but it seems more accurate to say we exchange one (lower) pleasure for another higher one:

Consider it pure joy, my brethren, when you encounter very various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in
nothing. (James 1:2-4, NAS)

St. James modifies Plato, then: Pleasure is not uniformly good, but in its higher, divine form (that knowledge of/faith in God's properly ordering the universe), it can be. It is this knowledge and this faith that properly orders the soul and comforts us, provided we do the right thing through them.

I think this is my first positive post about Plato, and it was going to be negative until I worked this out. Maybe Nathan is right--I should be more open and charitable to him.

Hieroglyphics

I'm wrestling with the Egyptians--or at least with representations of them--tonight.

Plato presents us with some third-hand Egyptians in Timaeus, and I'm wondering if they're trustworthy as Egyptians--that is, if the opinions they express are more or less legitimate Egyptian opinions (and then if those opinions are valid). They call themselves not the oldest civilization but rather the only one that's not destroyed by divine floods like the one in Genesis 7. At any rate, we should accept Egyptian views on history because

in our country neither then nor at any other time does the water pour down over our fields from above, on the contrary it all tends naturally to well up from below. Hence it is, for these reasons, that what is here preserved is reckoned to be most ancient; the truth being that in every place where there is no excessive heat or cold to prevent it there always exists some human stock (22E-23A).

I don't doubt that this was a common Greek view of the Egyptians. Herodotus, for example, makes a similar claim in his Histories--against the views of the Egyptians themselves, he claims them as the oldest civilization:

The Egyptians before the reign of Psammetichus used to think that of all races in the world they were the most ancient; Psammetichus, however, when he came to the throne, took it into his head to settle the question of priority, and ever since his time the Egyptians have believed that the Phrygians surpass them in antiquity and that they themselves come second.

Herodotus is clearly not convinced by the bizarre and ridiculous method Psammetichus comes up with for "proving" which race is older--his implication is that the Egyptians were right in the first place and foolish to believe this bit of snake oil.

Herodotus does not exactly bow before the Egyptians, particularly in matters of religion--"I do not think that any one nation knows much more about such things than any other"--but he puts them ahead of the Greeks in science and in the formation of religion, since they were the first to name the gods and to built altars and idols.

I suspect but do not know that 4th-century-B.C.E. Greek attitudes toward Egypt resembled Victorian attitudes toward Asian cultures (some of which, of course, still exist today): "Here's an ancient civilization, in many ways unchanged since the day of its formation, and while it's still largely barbarian, its advanced age gives it access to knowledge--both scientific and mystical--that we don't have." I suspect, that is, that the Greeks orientalized Egypt and that Plato puts the story of Atlantis in an Egyptian's mouth to give it more credence. What I'd like to know is whether or not the Egyptians held this opinion of themselves.

(By the way, the attitude I suspect Greeks had toward Egypt would reappear in the 1820s, when Jean-Francois Champillon found the Rosetta Stone and hieroglyphics became a cultural big deal. You can read all about it in John Irwin's excellent American Hieroglyphics.)

It's an important question for biblical scholars, who are all but expressly told by the Book to distrust Egypt but who are faced with ancient evidence that suggests that Egyptian sources are pretty reliable, maybe the most reliable. Plato's Egyptians, for example, condemn the Greeks (and by extension the Hebrews and the Babylonians) because "you remember but one deluge, though many had occurred previously" (23B). In some ways, this condemnation still jives with the biblical account; after all, much of Egypt was built on the Nile's flood plain, and so you'd expect them to get a whole load of floods--and all the better if you accept Higher Criticism's hypothesis that Noah's flood was local rather than global.

But Israel does not even register as a civilization--or even as a partial civilization--with Herodotus, even though he devotes quite a bit of space to their oppressors like Babylon and Egypt (among others). What's more, he assigns to Egypt rites and beliefs we associate with Israel:

Pigs are considered unclean. If anyone touches a pig accidentally in passing, he will at once plunge into the river, clothes and all, to wash himself, and swineherds, though of pure Eygptian blood, are the only people in the country who never enter a temple.

I'm not sure why a civilization that holds pigs to be unclean would even have swineherds, but no matter--this next passage is even more damning in its way:

They practice circumcision, while men of other nations--except those who have learnt from Egypt--leave their private parts as nature made them.

It's not as though passages like these spell the end of Judeo-Christian faith--after all, they've existed longer than Christianity has, and generations of believers and scholars have dealt with them--but they do complicate it, cast doubt on it. What does it mean that the Egyptians practice circumcision, the outward sign of YHWH's covenant with Abraham? Are we to believe the Egyptians took genital fashion tips from their slaves? Isn't it more likely that Moses took parts of his law from his oppressors--as he took "articles of silver and articles of gold, and clothing (Exodus 12:35, NAS)--and then justified both theft and sudden exit with a cock-and-bull story about Abraham?

I'm not sure either of these views can be proven; like most aspects of biblical scholarship, it's a matter of willful faith, of reading the hieroglyphics and deciding which Rosetta Stone to translate with.

Open Question

I'm too busy and brain-dead to write an actual post, but I'd like your thoughts on the following question (based, of course, on the horrifying tenth book of The Republic):

What is the purpose of art?

Okay, so I won't leave it at that. Plato says art is horrible in part because it allows us to express the worst parts of ourselves. We appreciate it when grown men cry on the stage but GOD FORBID we ever do that at home; we laugh at jokes we'd never tell; etc. Aristotle, whom I've not read yet (this summer, depending on how the Summer of Hamlet and my Milton course go), says that that catharsis is good and necessary. Why? Does art serve a function beyond emotional manipulation? Is it meant to be a lesson? (Should we then censor all art with an immoral lesson?) Is beauty in and of itself good?

I feel like I'm teaching a Comp class here, but I wanted to post something, and I'm out of ideas for a week or so.

Socrates' Religious Utilitarianism

(Yes, I always picture him as So-Crates Johnson.)

I'm finally almost done with The Republic, which is engrossing in a way that no other Platonic dialogue is and horrifying in a way none of them could ever hope to be. I will avoid talking about the book's implication for totalitarian regimes; if you're interested in that kind of thing, see everything ever written on The Republic. (I did notice all that stuff and took pages and pages of notes to that effect, but I don't have much to add to that conversation.) Instead, I'll do what I do: theology.

Theologians often describe Socrates as a forerunner to Christianity, and it's true in a way--theologians have co-opted his thought for millennia, clear back to St. Augustine and possibly further than that. (I am criminally unread in the patristics.) But was he? Socrates certainly appears to reject a good deal of Greek orthodoxy, which is why he was condemned as an atheist by the Athenian councils. He looks like a monotheist sometimes, as he generally refers to "God" or "god" rather than to "gods." In this, he reminds me of the Rig Veda, which asks, "In the beginning the Golden Embryo arose. Once he was born, he was the one lord of creation . . . Who is the god whom we should worship with the oblation?" (10.121.1). You can be a polytheist and believe in that unknowable but Almighty god, and that's what Socrates seems to believe in.

At least when he believes in anything. One of the reasons why his Ideal State (or State of Ideals) is disturbing is his willingness to lie to its citizens. He suggests the Rulers come up with a "magnificent myth" or a "noble lie" to foist upon people in order to orient them the right way. Desmond Lee, who translated and annotated the Penguin edition of the text, cautions us against viewing Socrates and Plato as noble liars:

Plato has been criticized for his Foundation Myth as if it were a calculated lie. That is partly because the phrase here translated "magnificent myth" has been conventionally mistranslated "noble lie"; and this has been used to support the charge that Plato countenances manipulation by falsehood. But . . . one of Plato's own criticisms of democracy was that its politicians constantly mislead it, governing it by propaganda rather than by reason. (118)

If I hadn't actually read the book, this might have convinced me. But I have, and even in Lee's translation, Socrates sounds like a propagandist; he suggests feeding the Republic

a fairy story like those the poets tell and have persuaded people to believe about the sort of thing that often happened "once upon a time," but never does now and is not likely to: indeed it would need a lot of persuasion to get people to believe it. (414c)

Here, a pseudo-religious myth is used solely to further the Republic. (A word on this myth: Socrates presents three classes of people--the Golden, the Silver, and the Bronze. The Golds are the Rulers of the Republic; the Silver, those who enforce the rulings; and the Bronze, the common people. Children were to be selected in school as one of the three classes and forced into that occupation by this Foundation Myth.) Plato must convince the citizens that they are locked into their station in life. How does this differ from the Indian caste system?

All through the book, Socrates shows interest in religion not because it's true but because it's necessarily to stabilize the State. For example, he wants to censor poets, particularly poets who have things to say on religion: "We must ask the poets to stop giving their present gloomy account of the after-life, which is both untrue and unsuitable to produce a fighting spirit, and make them speak more favorably of it" (386b-c). That "untrue" is almost an aside--he gives no reason why it's untrue but gives plenty of reason why it's unsuitable, and that's really what matters.

I don't see Socrates as any sort of religious believer. Religion in general and Socratic monotheism in particular exists in order to make life in the State easier, and in this sense he is a consummate humanist, bending faith to meet man's needs.

For this reason, he reminds me of the German nun in Don DeLillo's White Noise, who, when asked about her faith, says, "It's for others. Not for us . . . The others who spend their lives believing that we still believe. It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die" (318). The stability of the world (or of the State--Socrates shows zero concern for any non-Greek) is more important than the truth, and Plato is willing both to lie and to censor those who would undermine that stability for the sake of that truth. (I find myself wondering how he'd respond to the Hebrew prophets.)

With his religious utilitarianism in mind, it's a little surprising that Socrates has been so influential on Christian thought over the years. Then again--I get my theology through Sartre, so who am I to accuse anyone?

The Age of Reason

Question of the day: When did Western culture shift from privileging age to privileging youth? Socrates takes it as a given that "the elder must govern, and the younger be governed" (Republic 412c). But look at the discourse surrounding Barack Obama (and Kennedy before him): He's young; he's HOPE FOR AMERICA! (The most common criticism of him, of course, is that he's inexperienced, but that gets lost in the shuffle.) When did youth in and of itself become a positive?

I suspect it was during the Romantic era, with its elevation of childhood, or else during the 1960s, when age became a signifier of The Man. You can't trust anyone over thirty, after all.

This continued and expanded in the popular culture of the 1980s and '90s. Michael Medved (whom I usually can't stand) points out in Hollywood vs. America that films of the era--particularly children's movies--feature kids who are far more noble than their parents. Think about Disney's The Little Mermaid, in which Ariel is intelligent and open-minded, while King Triton is an unpleasant bigot who opposes interracial marriage. Family sitcoms of the era feature an idiot father and his brilliant kids, The Simpsons being the worst offender. (The only post-Cosby Show counterexample I can think of is King of the Hill. Hank is clearly the most level-headed and intelligent character, and his son needs a good deal of guidance.)

(When we discussed this earlier today, V. pointed out that most sitcoms are now vehicles for male comedians, who play up this boneheaded angle. But Cosby was a comedian, too, and he was never dumb on his show--he was silly, but he was a great father figure, the kind of father most of us would appreciate. I suspect part of that was that because it was a "black" sitcom that featured upper-class African-Americans, he felt he had to be an example.)

Asian cultures, we're told, esteem and revere the elderly. I wonder if this system is changing in Japan with the influx of American pop culture. The fact of the matter, though, is that age doesn't make you The Man and that authority is not necessarily a bad thing. I'd definitely rather be sixty than nineteen, which, as the Old 97's tell us, "is not the age of reason." No offense to the nineteen-year-olds reading this (and I know a good deal of intelligent and thoughtful nineteen-year-olds), but it's the age of confusion, the age of incompetence, or at least the age of inexperience. Plato was right: Let's let the aged lead us, and let's stop making youth something to hold onto forever.

Old 97's, "Nineteen"

My Sister Never Made Love to Anybody Else but Me

Pierre is not a canonical Melville novel, at least not to the lay reader, who's maybe read "Bartleby the Scrivener" and at least knows Moby-Dick's reputation as a Great Book. But Pierre is forgotten for the most part, or if remembered, it's labeled at best a noble failure. (Even Hershel Parker, a name so synonmous with Melville studies that I even imagine he looks like him, put out an edition with entire chapters excised for cohesiveness.) This criticism is not unfounded. If Moby-Dick is a glorious mess of a novel, four or five smaller books tossed together without caution, Pierre is just a mess. The language is purposely obfuscating, the plot is simultaneously horrifying and boring, and the book's organization is nonexistent. Parker reveals that Melville was midway into the novel when the Moby-Dick reviews started pouring in and claims that the savaging that book received essentially drove him nuts, at which point he inserted a bunch of incongruous material about Pierre's foundering career as a writer. Regardless of the reason, though, the book flat does not work as a novel.

Philosophically, on the other hand, it's interesting. It's my contention that Melville fashioned Pierre as a direct attack on Ralph Waldo Emerson, certainly the most prominent American intellectual of the time. Emerson, in his early writings especially, was a consummate optimist; he clearly belives that mankind is essentially good and will eventually be close to perfect and that society is moving forward. Melville, to put it gingerly, does not share his sentiment.

I suspect much of this argument boils down to religious upbringing. Emreson was a Unitarian--ever the most liberal of the Protestant denominations--and so man can trust himself; he is not exactly fallen--more like confused--and Christ becomes the great Example rather than the Savior. Emerson's essays bleed with Unitarian thought, diluted though it is with Eastern Pantheism. Melville, on the other hand, was raised Presbyterian, that dour, dark, and fatalistic Calvinist sect that sees man as totally depraved and unable to help himself. This is not to say, mind you, that Melville was all that great of a Calvinist, particularly in terms of total depravity. He subscribes to the notion of the noble savage in Typee and Moby-Dick (always the least racist of the 19th-century authors, his most evil characters are always white), and Billy Budd is remarkably free from the taint of sin. But he believes in evil in a way that Emerson does not seem to--witness the sinister joy in the way the sailors disembowel whales or Claggart's horrifying obsession with Billy.

Emerson and Melville's argument may also have to do with a hermeneutic disagreement. Both men admired Plato, and I'm sure neither of them missed the discussions of depravity in Protagoras and Meno. Socrates does not believe that man has an evil streak; he does not knowingly or willingly do wrong:

Simonides was not so ignorant as to say that he praised all who did no evil voluntarily, as if there were any who did evil voluntarily. For myself I am fairly certain that no wise man believes anyone sins willingly or willingly perpetuates any evil or base action. They know very well that all evil or base action is involuntary. (Protagoras 345d, e)

Meno modifies his disbelief, however:

Isn't it clear then that this class, who don't recognize evils for what they are, don't desire evil but what they think is good, though in fact it is evil; those who through ignorance mistake bad things for good obviously desire the good. (77d, e)

Socrates says that man does not willingly desire evil. (I'd love to hear a conversation between him and Dostoevsky, whose Underground man desires both evil and unhappiness just because he can.) Instead, man desires the good but sometimes cannot differentiate between the two. I suspect both Emerson and Melville agree with this diagnosis; their difference lies in their opinions on man's capacity for differentiation.

In "Self-Reliance," Emerson famously expands Socrates' most famous maxim so it reads "Trust thyself":

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind . . . What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? My friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.

Emerson's pan(en)theism later contradicts this--if we all share an Oversoul, then doing as you please is ultimately following mankind as a whole--but no matter: "Follow your bliss" is a common enough theme in Emerson's work, and it is to this theme that I think Melville responds.

And so Pierre opens in medias res of the conflict between Emerson and Melville, with a glorious Emersonian paean to transcendent Nature:

There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose.

This sets up Pierre as an Emersonian hero, pure and innocent and ready to commune with God and Nature. But the plot of the book subverts Emerson. Pierre's idyllic country life is shattered when he discovers that his saintly father sired an illegitimate daughter. For some bizarre reason, he decides the best course of action is to leave his angelic fiancee mere days before their wedding, pretend to have married his sister, and move to Greenwich Village. Disaster, as you might expect, ensues.

It's important here that Pierre clearly believes he's doing the right thing; all the pain he will suffer "seemed to him part of the unavoidable vast price of his enthusiastic virtue," and he even codes his actions as a search for God. He follows Emerson's advice here; he does what his heart tells him to do without worrying whether his heart belongs to God or to the devil. But his actions bring ignominy both to him and his family--I won't give away any specific details, but suffice it to say that everyone's life is ruined. He's picked the dumbest of all possible options, and what's more, he knows this on an intellectual level:

But this last distrust [of himself] was not of the heart; for heaven itself, so he felt, had sanctified that with its blessing; but it was the distrust of his intellect, which in undisciplinedly espousing the manly enthusiast cause of his heart, seemed to cast a reproach upon that cause itself.

Pierre (and his inspiration, Emerson) privileges emotion over reason, the heart over the head; he shares Socrates' apparent optimism regarding human nature but ignores Matthew Arnold's famous warning to "Firstly, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness." And Melville punishes him dearly for it.

But, philosophically interesting as it may be, Pierre is a mess of a novel. It reminds me of a severe version of my problem with Walker Percy's fiction: he's a great philosopher with no talent for telling a story. Except that Melville could once tell a story, and he would be able to again. I'm not sure what kills Pierre as a novel--whether it's the negative reviews of Moby-Dick or whether it's the heaviness of the subject and the vitriol with which Melville approaches it--but I'm filing it under imperfect nonclassics.