Selective Breeding

and the

Birth of Philosophy

Costin Alamariu

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Breeding

Breeding and Human Inequality

The Argument in this Book

A Brief Detour into Politics

A Brief on Philosophy and Tyranny

I. The Problem of Tyranny

II. Origin and Statement of Thesis

CHAPTER ONE:

BRIEF PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE

PREPHILOSOPHICAL POLITICAL LIFE

Introduction to Chapter One—

I. General Features of the Prephilosophical

Political Mind

a) Strauss, Hume, and Nietzsche on

Necessity of Study of the Prephilosophic;

Terror as Matrix of Prephilosophic Society

b) prephilosophic ubiquity of ancestral

nomos; religious character of nomos

c) early society as a “fundamental democracy”;

the impotent character of early kingship, the reduction

of all primitive regime forms to “totalitarian democracy”

II. Emergence of the Idea of Nature out of Greek

Aristocratic Morality

a) The Aristocratic Principle as Distinct from the

Primitive “Fundamental Democracy”; Historical Origins of

the Aristocratic Principle in the Greek World and Elsewhere

Appendix on Nature and Animal Similies in Homer

CHAPTER TWO:

THE IDEA OF NATURE IN PINDAR

I. Introduction: Pindar’s Place in a Brief

History of “Nature”:—

II. Nature as the Body

III. Nature and the Body as Blood and Heredity;

Heredity as Truth

IV. Phusis as Heredity is Opposed to Nomos

V. Irrepressible Character of Nature as Opposed to Convention

VI. The Wise and Wisdom in Pindar

VII. The Possible Connection of Wisdom,

the “Inborn Arts,” to Kingship or Leadership

CHAPTER THREE:

COVERT TEACHING OF TYRANNY

IN PLATONIC POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

I. Introduction: Concealment of Association

Between Tyranny and Philosophy in Plato and the

Meaning of “Political Philosophy”—

II. The Defense of Philosophy Against the

Charge of Tyranny in the Gorgias—

a) An Introduction to the Gorgias and

Callicles’ Radical Antinomianism

b) Structure of Gorgias and Callicles’ Introduction

of the Standard of Nature; Escape from Convention—

c) Socrates’ bizarre replies to Callicles;

the radicalization of Calliclean “political philosophy”—

III. Brief Note on Platonic Rhetoric and the

Platonic Defense of Philosophy—

a) Restatement of the Rhetorical Aims of the

Gorgias; the Inconsistency Between the View Presented

on Rhetoric in the Gorgias and that in Other Dialogues

b) Birth and Meaning of Platonic Rhetoric Exposed

in the Hippias Major

IV. Summary of this Chapter and Some Additional Circumstantial Evidence

from Antiquity Regarding the

Platonic and Philosophical Association with Tyranny—

CHAPTER FOUR:

NIETZSCHE ON THE ORIGIN OF

PHILOSOPHY AND TYRANNY IN

THE DECAY OF ARISTOCRATIC REGIMES

I. Introduction—Nietzsche’s Fundamental Concern; Nietzsche’s Rhetoric

and Esotericism

II. Nietzsche on Aristocracy and the Decay of

Aristocratic Regime as Preconditions for High Culture, Philosophy, and

Tyranny—

a) Aristocratic physical culture as precondition of philosophical life

b) Aristocratic regime and dissolution as precondition of philosophy; origin

of the type of the philosopher and tyrant

III. Nietzsche on Platonic Political Philosophy

Appendix: Nietzsche in the Strauss-Kojeve

Debate on Tyranny and Philosophy

a) Strauss on the problem of nature

and history in Nietzsche

b) Strauss vs. Kojeve on nature and history

CONCLUSION

List of Abbreviations

Bibliography

Notes

I dedicate this book to my friend

David Sidorsky

PREFACE

A doctoral dissertation is usually read only by the student’s advisors.

In general this is just, because even when a thesis has good ideas, it’s not

enjoyable to read. This thesis is enjoyable to read: I know because many

friends and acquaintances, some of exacting taste, have greatly enjoyed it

and been entertained by it. In this way I can justify its publication. I would

guess that most who read it will be entertained by the ideas and even by the

presentation. And I like to entertain.

This is a thesis about Nietzsche. My obsession with Nietzsche started

when I was sixteen years old. Inspired by Nietzsche, I went back to Homer

and to Plato and read them through Nietzsche’s provocations. These

provocations also inspired me to learn Greek. I would guess I thought

through the ideas behind this thesis around the time I was twenty-two years

old. The fundamental problem that motivated me then as it does now: what

is life as opposed to death, and what is life as full of life, as opposed to life

as diminished life.

Forgive my theatrical statement: I remember as a small boy playing in

parks and being fascinated by the different animals and insects I found. I

was also fascinated by humans who I perceived as another kind of this

perplexing animal life, and who for my boyish perception ranged from

radiant and awesome to deeply repulsive. I don’t want to speculate or

psychologize, but I grew up in a place and time where in retrospect it was

obvious to everyone that the public morality was a sham and where

“everything was ending.” I didn’t experience this as pain though. I

remember my childhood very fondly. There was incredible freedom in this

decay. And unlike what I found when I came to the West, I had freedom

inconceivable to children in big cities today. Whereas I and my friends were

mostly wild and allowed to be. We had the entirety of a big city to explore

and wreak mischief in, in the 1980’s of Bucharest. I have fond memories of

excitement, discovery, mischief and subversion against authorities and a

despicable stuffed shirt government. I remember from my earliest memories

being attracted to what is dirty and forbidden.

The media attention and political hysteria surrounding the general

complex of ideas treated in this thesis: eugenics, breeding, “regimes of

marriage,” etc. the perpetual hysteria since 1950 which has culminated in a

fevered obsession lately on “Nietzschean vitalism” and the like, convinced

me it is time to publish this dissertation for a broader audience. I am also

motivated to publish because this thesis has been lied about for years;

including recently in so-called mass media articles. The reader can evaluate

my words for himself. I changed very little from the original; some minor

cosmetic changes, adding a sentence here and there to clarify, never really

subtracting anything. At times I moved a footnote to the main text where I

thought it was right to do so. I also added a long introduction to explain

more clearly what this thesis is really about: the problem of biology,

breeding, and eugenics in the discovery of the concept of nature by Greeks

some 2600 years ago. I could not openly say these things when I submitted

this thesis, but I can now.

There are parts of this thesis that, had I full freedom at the time of

submission, I would have done differently. You will notice a few awkward

moments: for example, some disclaimers here and there that the opinions

expressed are not my own. This is simply because of the political and

professional constraints of academia, and it’s something I accepted would

happen when I joined an academic program in America in the condition that

it’s been for the last twenty or thirty years. Even in 2015 the situation was

already quite charged: the Plato chapter made my main advisor intemperate,

and he may have called me a Nazi and so on. I found this amusing; I didn’t

mind adding some disclaimers. Even so, I was given considerable freedom;

although I do suspect that had I waited another year to submit this thesis, I

might not have graduated. Aside from this you will notice maybe some

Straussian language and stuffy Straussian affectations, as well as maybe

references to that author and his intellectual progeny that at times may feel

forced or contrived. I myself am not a Straussian and would have preferred

not to do this, but I felt I had to again out of professional loyalty. While it

would greatly amuse me to claim now that I learned all my naughty ideas

from my advisors, and that there is a secret Straussian finishing school for

people like me of unusual persuasion, I think even they don’t deserve this.

I’ve learned everything I care about on my own and certainly not from any

professors. It’s not arrogant of me to say this, but the truth.

There’s been much nonsense written about Leo Strauss and the

Straussians since at least the early 2000’s. The Straussians’ paranoid and

hysterical detractors, and the Straussians themselves are wrong and

deceitful. On one hand there are people like Shadia Drury who want to

present the school as Fascist conspirators, or hard right schemers, who exert

tremendous power and influence in American government and academia.

Paul Gottfried and others on the right say something similar. On the other

hand many prominent Straussians themselves, while disputing these

accusations, do not actually dispute them. They enjoy the notoriety and the

implication that they must be very powerful operators, or Machiavellian

eminences-grises. This is much better than the thought that they are an

ineffectual ladies’ reading group. They are so powerful that they’ve been

almost completely eliminated from the few positions they once held at

prominent universities. Other Straussians deny these claims but engage in a

different outlandish self-flattery where they view themselves as preservers

of classical philosophy and the light of freedom of thought, republican

moderation, and so on…and other pieties of this kind. None of these things

are true.

What is true is that until recently the Straussians, for all their faults,

had the virtue of at least being generally tolerant of unusual points of view.

Not all of them, but some. This is why I went to study with them in the first

place. They were generally tolerant: they knew I wasn’t one of them, but

still treated me well, and were welcoming of my studies. It’s hard for people

now to imagine, but I was reading Jünger and Mishima and talking about

them in 2009 or 2010, and at that time these weren’t on anyone’s danger

radar. I remember even being condescendingly encouraged: “Oh I see you

like some of the reactionary authors…but that’s OK!” This was acceptable

to me, even welcome. I didn’t seek approval, and I wouldn’t have received

toleration from anyone else. In this sense I’m grateful to the Straussians.

They are a powerless minority in fact, although a pretentious one; but being

pretentious isn’t cause to hate them. Whatever their faults, one shouldn’t

hate or pick on powerless tolerant minorities. Their recent elimination from

prominent academia isn’t going to improve anything.

I’ve said that I am publishing this dissertation because it is entertaining

to read, and because it has been lied about in the media and I’d like there to

be a permanent record of it so the distortions stop. I think the ideas I present

here are in an inadequate format, the academic format…but I think the ideas

here are important and novel. In one sense I think I’m just representing

Nietzsche’s own reading of the Greeks; but I would like to think I find

something in the Greeks and about the birth of philosophy, that Nietzsche

pointed at, but perhaps didn’t fully explain.

That the Western philosophical tradition as it came down to our time, I

mean in the form of the Platonic-Socratic tradition; or what Nietzsche

called the Socratic-Alexandrian scientific civilization… I mean that it was

born in an act of rhetorical obfuscation and conservative cowardice: this is

one claim of this dissertation. I don’t explicitly lay it out; much like the

Greeks themselves, because I couldn’t. Critias, Socrates’ student, was the

Hitler of the ancient Greek world. He and his friends established a regime

based on atheistic biologism so to speak; on “Sparta radicalized,” a eugenic

antinomian dictatorship. He was maybe what Hitler’s most hysterical

detractors claim of him today. Critias killed more Athenians in his short rule

than died in the decades of the war with Sparta. He expelled almost

everyone from the city, and burned the docks, which were the perceived

source of democratic power. He wasted all the priests of Eleusis for being

tedious religious moralists. He saw the purpose of the Spartan constitution

as the creation of one “supreme biological specimen,” and Critias sought to

found a state based on such ideas. He and his friends were overthrown quite

quickly. Against this catastrophe, carried out in the name of philosophy and

nature (of biology) there was a predictable reaction. Socrates’ other

students, most of them at least, as well as Isocrates and others, went out of

their way to distance themselves from Critias and what he was perceived to

stand for: “We are not like that guy. We are good boys. Philosophy isn’t

actually about that. We’re doing something different. We’re socially

responsible good guys.” Does this sound familiar?

It doesn’t matter if someone like Critias represented a distortion of

philosophy as it existed at the time, or a distortion of the idea of nature as

biology and eugenics. The reaction against him, and the eagerness of other

prominent members of his “tribe” to distance themselves from him caused

an equal distortion in the opposite direction. And so Western philosophy

was born in an atmosphere of hysteria and disavowal of a “Hitler,” just as

much as there is hysteria and distortion around notions of biology and

nature in our own time because of the events of 80 years ago. Plato and

many others of the time therefore concealed much: because they had to. In

contrast to later thinkers, they were aware of the importance of what they

were concealing. They thought this was an important matter. They thought

the problem of biology, to put it in our words, would never be forgotten.

The problem is they concealed too well. And so eventually the truth about

the meaning of “nature” really was obscured. When eugenics is obscured

there is good chance that you get dysgenic results. And dysgenics as

opposed to eugenics combined with modern technology —another product

of Socratic-Alexandrian scientific civilization—leads to mechanized and

universalized dysgenics. I am trying to explain some of the implications of

the work of Nietzsche for a world in which he is still the only prophet, and

will remain so for some centuries.

These are big questions. I feel somewhat ashamed that such big

questions are presented in this very inadequate format; that of my doctoral

dissertation. I wish at some point to turn this into a real book, in which I

will treat other authors such as Theognis. That said, I think there is value to

publishing it now as it is; and as I say, I think it’s reasonably enjoyable even

for a non academic audience because it’s not written in the tedious fashion

other dissertations are. It is “full of sparks and fire,” as Harvey Mansfeld,

one of the readers, told me in private. I am publishing it because I want the

ideas and claims in it to be widely known and discussed.

INTRODUCTION:

BREEDING FOUNDATION OF ALL LAW

One might conclude that it is therefore precisely ancient anthropology that would lead to mass‐

training and eugenics.

-Alexander Kojeve

BREEDING

The sexual market is the pinnacle of every other market. Men in

particular are motivated to do only what it takes to secure sexual intercourse

with mates of their choosing, and in many cases certainty over the issue of

intercourse, which is offspring. At least for average men under average

circumstances, they’re not motivated to work for anything more than this,

though of course this isn’t the only drive. For both men and women the

striving for access to sexual intercourse, to mates of one’s liking, and to

opportunities to father or bear children, determines every other economic,

political and social regime.

Knowledge of this fundamental not-so-secret about human nature was

the cornerstone of every great and lasting state, religion, or order from

antiquity.

Many traditions claim that mythical founders paid attention to

marriage or breeding laws first and most of all, or otherwise make clear that

this act of foundation is more fundamental than any other. Cecrops, the

divine half-snake founder of Athens, who rose out of the earth, is said to

have first of all created its laws of marriage.

[i]

Solon, legendary founder of

Athens, reformed its laws of marriage to ensure that pairings would happen

not for personal gain or financial purposes, but for what we might call

“eugenic” reasons, to ensure citizen quality. Some of the laws even

regulated the number of times intercourse had to minimally take place, to

ensure harmony of the household.

[ii]

Rome begins with an act of planned rape, or marriage-by-abduction,

carried out by its warlike founder Romulus and his warband of outcasts and

misfits. The rape of the Sabine women is simultaneously the founding act of

the Roman people and the foundation of Roman marriage law and of

relations between Roman men and women.

[iii]

The Emperor Julian, writing

of Rome’s legendary lawgiver Numa Pompilius,

[iv]

praises him as the

founder of Rome, a man who communed with goddesses in the wilderness,

in the purity of his heart; Julian explicitly mentions, using a common

traditional formula, that Numa first of all created Rome’s laws of temple

worship, that is, that the foundation of religion was subsequent to the

establishment of the city through rites of marriage and breeding. But

Numa’s religion itself was based on a more primordial “marriage” between

the sovereign king and the local goddess. At the foundation of the Empire,

or, as some might have it, at the refoundation of the Republic with Caesar

Augustus, Octavian’s most important legislation, on separate occasions

during his reign, had to do with the reestablishment of marriage law.

[v]

In the Bible three of the Ten Commandments deal specifically with

this matter: do not covet another man’s wife, do not commit adultery, and

honor mother and father; the last is the first “substantial” commandment

that doesn’t directly involve honoring God but that concerns human

behavior as such, and for this reason among others Nietzsche believed it

was the constitutive goal of the Hebrews, the striving that defined them as a

people. In Judaism during the holiest day of Yom Kippur the prohibition

specifically against incest at Leviticus 18 is traditionally repeated, which, as

Leo Strauss mentions, agreeing with Nietzsche, is the precondition for

honoring mother and father. But the language of Leviticus 18 with its list of

sexual prohibitions is especially powerful, contrasting the new laws of the

Hebrews with those of the Egyptians and with others who came before

them, who defiled the land, and who were vomited out by the land.

[vi]

God had previously attempted to establish his rule with the first man,

Adam, or what we could maybe in jest call “ideal man,” and failed. He then

attempted to establish his rule with universal man after Noah, and that also

failed. The failure of God’s plan for Adam, and thereafter the debacles of

the generations following Adam that led to the flood, all had to do with

matters of sexual transgression or of misbreeding. After his failures first

with ideal man and then with universal man after Noah God decided to

establish his law within a tribe or nation.

[vii]

And the cornerstone of this

foundation is the set of laws that has to do with breeding, marriage, and

management of sexual relations. The Hebrews believed these laws to be

constitutive of themselves, and outsiders felt this way too, even if they may

have expressed it at times unfairly. Much later, a hostile Tacitus, a Roman

who highly valued monogamy, deplored its loss among the civilized, and

praised it among the ancient tribal Germans, sought to distinguish the Jews

most of all by their sexual and marriage habits or laws.

[viii]

Social conservatives, among others, often remark on ancient man’s or

at least on the Bible’s care for these matters, but reduce it very frequently to

the formula “the family is the basic unity of society.” Even if this were true,

it is not the ultimate reason ancient legislators among the Hebrews,

Romans, or Greeks—three unusually monogamous societies in the ancient

world—but also others, paid such attention to these types of laws. If an

average man’s natural desire were to be a good husband and father, then

their work would have been easy. But in early Rome, for example,

bachelorhood had to be forbidden by law.

[ix]

The problem with the view of

the social conservative is that it assumes a man’s duty to his wife and

children is more natural, and therefore more easily enforced, than it actually

is. They often do not see the immense work that had to go into making men

good husbands or fathers, nor the great privileges through which men had to

be enticed to accept these duties; still less do they see or dare to mention the

great work—some would say oppression—that had to be exerted to make

women faithful wives and mothers.

[x]

Social liberals and feminists make the same mistake. They assume the

problem is that men desire patriarchy and ownership over the wife and

family, that men desire dominion over wife and children. They do not see

these are, in part, methods some civilizations resorted to in order to induce

men to accept the responsibilities of father and husband. Men deprived of

patriarchy have no reason to accept duty or responsibility, nor the loss of

freedom that goes with family life. Modern societies are faced with men

who either reap the fruits of sexual liberation through easy copulation, or

men who for any number of reasons won’t or can’t put up with the stress of

this chase and instead become apathetic, at least so far as women are

concerned. The problem, as social liberals and feminists are finding out,

isn’t that men seek by nature or education to dominate wives or children,

but that men simply don’t care.

[xi]

It is very telling that, to solve this problem, both social conservatives

and some feminists are resorting to shaming men into accepting the

responsibilities of father and husband. Both often exhort, and even hector,

unmarried men to “man up”; this happens so often that it’s become a

running joke or cliché in some circles.

[xii]

The prospects of their

successfully shaming men into the duties of husband and father are,

however, very slim as things stand. Octavian, as Emperor, tried to

reestablish family life among the patrician class in Rome with far greater

insight, far more power to shame, and far greater latitude to give rewards.

But he failed. Alas, simply shaming men into being fathers and husbands is

never going to work. Those who seek to shame men into accepting

fatherhood have it backwards: they believe, wrongly, that men primarily

seek status or praise and that they would be willing to accept praise or

status without the rewards of praise or status. Men seek status above all

because it is attractive to women and results in intercourse or breeding—in

fact, in social animals, where status and hierarchy clearly exists, status

serves precisely this purpose. Only males of high status breed.

[xiii]

Men

can’t be induced through shame or through praise into accepting the

nominal status without the natural rewards of status, into accepting duties

without commensurate rewards.

Who wins in the sexual market as it is formed in a particular society,

who gets to breed, is closely related, nearly identical to the question of how

the next generation in that society is to be constituted. The question of the

sexual and breeding laws is therefore identical to the question of regime,

constitution, or foundation as such.

So far we have briefly mentioned the Bible, the Romans, and the

Greeks to see that the question of marriage or breeding law was the most

important foundational act in these societies, but so many other examples,

from all across the world, abound. Many of these examples point to darker

and uncomfortable truths we have suppressed.

In the Law of Manu the laws of marriage, breeding, sex, the proper

behavior of women, the production and status of mixed castes, is discussed

with great intensity and in minute detail. It is, following reverence for the

Gurus, the first really substantive mention of the laws to be treated. The

third chapter deals entirely with these matters of marriage and proper

breeding, and with the crucial problem of mixed castes. The sexual

apartheid and breeding rules that are listed are the cornerstone of the entire

society in question. The Sudra is at the lowest rung of society and therefore

may only wed other Sudra. As you go up the ladder of castes, the men are

allowed wives from lower rungs. And yet also, with some apparent

inconsistency, the direst consequences are to befall an Aryan man or

Brahmin who fathers a child with a Sudra.

[xiv]

After the Manchus took over China they were acutely aware of what

had happened to other previous conquerors and how they had been

ultimately assimilated by the subordinate native population. They resolved

to prevent this from happening to themselves and enforced, as in the Law of

Manu, a caste- and race-based system of sexual apartheid.

[xv]

They were

distinguished from the native Han in many other respects that, from some

higher-minded point of view, one can say are more important: for example

in their political orientation they were expansionist and thought in

geopolitical terms alien to Chinese tradition. But whatever other ways of

life or ideals they may have eagerly held to, they were also aware that

without a next generation of Manchus there would be no one to carry forth

these ways of life or teachings, or rather, to embody them. For this reason

among others every people and every founder of a people has had to pay

attention to these type of laws first, at times despite themselves.

Although a devoutly Christian society, pre-modern colonial Spain

employed a roughly similar racial casta system. The founding groups were

the peninsulares, or those born in Iberia and Europe, criollos, or Spaniards

born in the colonies, the native indios, and the Africans. In Cape Verde, one

of the first colonial ventures, the Portuguese deliberately created a mixed-

race population to manage the slave trade. In the New World colonies there

were pictorial guides, denoting the particular look, trade, and place in

society of each mixed group—a mestizo, the issue of a criollo and indio,

had a different place in society and function from a castizo, or the issue of a

mestizo and criollo. There were ways to regain criollo or Spanish status but

only by “breeding up” the casta ladder. A similar situation persisted in the

American South, for example in South Carolina, where an octoroon was

considered legally white—few realize that, e.g., the “one drop rule,” was a

Northern device, not a Southern. As concerns the situation in the Spanish

colonies, the racial caste system was not felt to contradict the teaching of

Christianity regarding man or marriage, but regardless—it was seen as

necessary. Although the casta system is no longer used in Latin America, it

has affected marriage choices arguably to this day; it has shaped and

continues to shape the social stratification, the nature of the elites, the

culture as a whole in these countries.

[xvi]

The subject of sexual and marriage law, of breeding law, in a devoutly

Christian society may seem unusual or surprising. In Christianity we see a

religion that may seem to contradict much of what was said so far. Its

prophet did not father children, its scriptures are explicit that the perfect

Christian is to be chaste; its heroes, holy men and—at least in its two largest

branches—its hierarchy, are to be chaste or at least celibate. Nevertheless it

is very clear in so many ways that it is through its laws of marriage and

breeding that Christianity affected European society and political life most

of all.

First, precisely through the ideal of chastity, and the grudging

concessions made therefore to monogamy alone, it is possible that

Christianity stabilized family life and thereby promoted in many cases a

salutary and steady but not Malthusian increase in population.

But one need not speculate about how the Church exerted its power

throughout medieval Europe, which was precisely through its control over

marriage. It is through its power to carry out marriages and therefore

through its effect on inheritance, among other things, that the priesthood

was able to exert such temporal power. How disputes over the Church’s

control over marriage led to later disruptions and cleavages within

Christendom is well known, a subject of considerable attention, and treated

already by others elsewhere.

There is a second and very important way in which Christianity can be

shown to have effected the most profound consequences in Europe

precisely through its control over sex, marriage, and breeding. The Church

disapproved of arranged marriages and in most of Europe it forbad cousin

marriage. In the northwest of Europe in particular, under the manorial

system, the Church entirely did away with the types of cousin marriage that

would allow for the perpetuation of tribes or clans. Accordingly there

developed a de facto practice of outgroup marriage in certain parts of

Europe, which did away with clan identity and which encouraged broader-

based political identities, universal morality, and altruistic orientation

toward non-family strangers.

[xvii]

Others have made the related point that in England, Holland, and

Denmark, among a few other areas of northwest Europe, family formation

and structure has worked much the same way it does now in the

Anglosphere, at least since the 12

Century. Contrary to the stereotype that

premodern family life is characterized by early marriage and by the

extended family, it appears that in premodern England and Holland the

ideal was the nuclear family, late marriage, adult children leaving the family

home, and romantic love as opposed to tribal arranged marriage.

Shakespeare’s audience empathized with the troubles of Romeo and Juliet

who fulfilled the English ideal of romantic marriage, encouraged in

northwest Europe by the manorial system and by the Christian religion.

[xviii]

The social and political consequences of the change described in the

last two paragraphs are profound. Modern liberalism and capitalism,

modern universal ethics or morality, are latecomers and piggyback on the

fundamental and centuries-long work done by the manorial system and

Christianity in reshaping and perhaps rebreeding European man—for there

is strong evidence that many of the behaviors described, such as altruism

toward strangers, are by now hereditary in certain populations. The culture

of civility on which liberal, private society is built is inconceivable without

this preparatory work done by Christianity, and which was carried out most

effectively at the root, determining who married who, and therefore what

kind of children were to be born. Thus it is arguably precisely through its

marriage and breeding laws that Christianity shaped the modern world.

Friedrich Nietzsche thought likewise, and in this book we are going to

see the same argument regarding Christianity that has just been made, but

from a different, and hostile, point of view. For Nietzsche, Christianity laid

the groundwork for the calamity of modern liberalism, modern democracy,

and modern socialism, which threatened to destroy, maybe permanently, not

only the possibility of philosophy, but of life in the full sense of the word.

And yet this same phenomenon was for Nietzsche a great opportunity. The

root of all of Nietzsche’s concerns about the possibility of the rebirth of

philosophy, and about the future of mankind, is his “strange concern with

breeding,” which according to a recent interpreter he “inherited” from Plato

and not from any of his contemporaries—although surely this can’t be

completely true…at the very least it would have also been motivated by the

need to respond to Darwin’s lifting of the veil from this matter.

[xix]

It would

be more accurate to say that Nietzsche and Plato are prominent in having

explicitly brought out the fundamental problem of human life, political life,

and of nature itself, which, indeed, does have to do with breeding. This is

what this book is about.

The treatment of the problem of marriage and breeding in political

philosophy, especially classical political philosophy, has been a lot more

explicit and matter-of-fact than it was in the religious traditions we briefly

looked at. Throughout the works of Xenophon the preoccupation with

marriage, matchmaking, and breeding is very marked: for example, at the

beginning of his short treatise on hunting with dogs, he tells a story about

how the centaur Chiron, a brother of Zeus and a demon of the wild, taught

hunting and other skills to heroes and demigods, and arranged for them

fortuitous marriages—the marriages from which issued the noble bloodlines

of the Greeks. The text itself is of course much concerned with the

breeding, grooming and training of dogs. In his Economicus, which is

literally “the art of household management,” the principal concern seems to

be the estate holder’s relationship with his wife, including their meeting and

courtship. Xenophon begins the Constitution of the Spartans with the laws

regarding the begetting of children—in quite technical, even biological

detail—and the laws of marriage even only after that.

In a famous passage Aristotle explains the end of the Spartan

constitution, the decline of Sparta, specifically by showing fault with its

laws that regulated the conduct of women, of marriage and of inheritance.

[xx]

The result was a misbreeding, or rather absence of breeding, that led to

the downfall of the regime: “the want of men was their ruin.” In general,

although Aristotle famously says that the city is prior to all other

partnerships and to us, yet on the other hand by many such concrete

examples, he nevertheless shows the primacy of marriage and breeding law

to the constitution of the city. Of all human partnerships that are formed by

necessity, Aristotle names first that between man and woman. Reflections

that we might properly term “eugenics theory,” such as at what ages a man

is most likely to beget strong offspring, and many similar insights, abound

in Aristotle.

[xxi]

It is almost a commonplace to mention Plato’s preoccupation with

breeding and eugenics, but it is just as common to misunderstand it or not

really take it seriously. The best regime, the Republic, is a eugenic state,

crafted exclusively with a view to eugenics, and its downfall is because of

dysgenic unions. No one has so far really understood why Plato has this

concern; no one has given a convincing treatment of why he presents this

view the way that he does. This book aims at a correction. I offer, I believe,

the first comprehensive account for Plato’s eugenic teaching. It is a view, in

the end, not so different from Socrates’ other student Critias, who wrote a

treatise on the Spartan constitution and intuited the meaning of it as a

project for the breeding of a supreme biological specimen. Plato’s relatives

were known for their special interest in breeding ornamental and other

animals—a persistent concern, an obsession even, of almost all Western

aristocracies in history, down to Charles Darwin, member of the Gentry and

well-known as a fanatical breeder of fancy pigeons.

[xxii]

In one way or another, the concern with marriage and specifically with

biological breeding has never disappeared from the Western philosophical

tradition. The Abbé Sieyès proposed during the French Revolution the

creation of half-human worker castes, bred from unions between humans

and various apes, which would take care of different types of manual labor

and free mankind from this necessity.

[xxiii]

A book, a very exciting book,

could be written on the history of the problem of breeding in Western

philosophy. That will have to wait. In what follows I aim for the more

fundamental question: I aim to show, among other things, why this

question, the problem of breeding, is in many respects identical to

philosophy, or at least identical to political philosophy. This is an

admittedly unusual claim to make, and may be shocking to some, but the

historical and textual record is, I believe, very clear. Ignoring this question

because it is unpleasant and because it offends contemporary moral

commitments—by whatever other name they may happen to go—is not

going to be an option in the next few years given the very rapid progress of

genetic research.

BREEDING AND HUMAN INEQUALITY

The social and political meaning of breeding, even the word breeding

itself, is all very uncomfortable: it is a question that is deeply painful to

mankind at all times, and that therefore has been treated, by both religions

and great philosophers, with circumspection and reserve. But it is a subject

especially unpleasant to us moderns. It touches on many things modern

people thought had been settled or best no longer talked about. It is a

question almost identical to the question of human superiority and

inferiority. It is easy to see that this is so from two points of view, the

classical and the modern.

From the classical point of view, once one accepts the necessity of this

question of the centrality of human breeding, for example as the founder of

a political state, or the founder of a religion, or as a lawgiver, it becomes

intimately tied with the second. For it is of greatest importance which

qualities a wife also selects for in husband, what types of men are rewarded

and given chance to have a posterity. It concerns the next generation of

citizens or subjects. How they are to be raised, provided for, educated, what

kinds of men and women they are to become. But most importantly, who is

to be born. Many ancient traditions assumed that human pairings are not, or

should not be, random: they assumed, unconsciously or not, the hereditary

nature of various qualities, and therefore assumed that great care must go

into matchmaking. In political philosophy starting with the Greeks this

question becomes explicit. A point of view like that implied in John Rawls’

Veil of Ignorance, or any idea of “accident of birth,” would have seemed

absurd for the simple reason that neither marriages nor births are random or

incidental. Indeed, both men and women, and, in the classical case,

governments, put the greatest care in this question above all.

Nevertheless from the modern point of view this orientation seems

cold, uncongenial, remote, inauthentic and authoritarian. It denies the

intrinsic worth of everyone and also the absolute freedom to be whatever

we want to be—two articles of modern faith, at least in theory. It subsumes

our most cherished intimacy to requirements of religion or state, blots out

our intrinsic human worth in favor of something worse than utilitarianism,

at least from the sound of it—it blots us out in favor of biology, even; or

animal husbandry. It seems to reduce us to livestock. It reminds some,

rightly or wrongly, of Nazism to think of human beings this way. It offends

the modern moral sense on both right and left, though each wants to blame

the other for views of this kind.

From the classical point of view, the modern objection is not so much

immoral or dangerous, as it is self-defeating. Consider the following

especially unpleasant and tangential comparison: authoritarian regimes are

blamed for inducing women to have forced abortions or even committing

murder—“euthanasia”—for eugenic or political reasons. North Korea will

forcibly abort the fetus of any woman if the child is to be born half Chinese.

[xxiv]

Nazi Germany of course is notorious for its programs to euthanize the

mentally impaired or disabled—and the added justification that it was to be

done out of compassion is seen as especially grotesque. This may be so.

And such actions are today seen as the pinnacle of evil by the modern

liberal West. But parents or mothers in the modern liberal West are

eliminating the existence of people with, for example, Down’s syndrome,

by aborting a very great percentage in the womb. Freedom and modern

science has allowed a far more “humane” method of eugenics, and also a

far more thorough-going one, than could have ever been carried out by Nazi

Germany—although not a more efficient or effective one.

[xxv]

It’s easy to

guess what will happen if, say, genes correlating with homosexuality are to

be discovered soon with any certainty.

[xxvi]

There is an old saying, “if you

cut off the left side of a log, it will still have a left side.” What we call

“eugenics” with moral alarm is going to happen one way or another. The

only question is which way one prefers it to happen—moderns have chosen

a decentralized form that, through the morality of liberalism and through

the methods provided by the latest science, puts this power in the hands of

parents or mothers. That is fine, it may be superior: but recognize that,

whichever way you have it, it will still happen.

It is the same in general with the problem of sex, marriage, and

breeding. Substituting the remote and “political” classical orientation with

the modern individualist and subjective orientation will still result in

arrangements that are in the end, not egalitarian, not random, not a chance

result of absolute individual freedom. It will still result in group-based

patterns of mating and childbearing that will affect society as a whole and

change its structure in fundamental ways. Sexual choices of “free

individuals” will still result in inequality, although not necessarily eugenic

inequality.

Followers of Marx have understood, even if indirectly, this great

problem. One great weakness of Marxism is that even if the End State of

freedom from material necessity were achieved, scarcity in the sexual

market would remain, and would be, like it always has been, the

fundamental cause of social division and political upheaval. Given freedom

from labor and infinite access to goods, humans would be faced with

scarcity of sexual access to the most desirable males and females. That

Marxists intuited this great problem, which would remain even if family,

property, and monogamy were abolished, is reflected in the great measures

some later thinkers undertook to correct for it: for example with the claim

that the End State would be a condition of “polymorphous perversity.” So

much work to arrive at an insight Aristophanes frankly and humorously

manifested 2500 years ago—the fundamental desire in a revolution is not

for access to goods or leisure or honor, but for sexual access to the

desirable.

[xxvii]

Modern regimes have nominally experimented with something called

sexual liberation, or, alternatively, with the liberation of women from

domination by men and by traditional institutions. This is true not just of

liberal regimes in the West—the Soviet states and the Eastern Bloc were in

some ways even more advanced in this regard.

[xxviii]

But what has resulted

is not freedom, but rather despair, loneliness and confusion. This isn’t a

matter of defending traditional morality—this book, as you will see, takes a

very mercenary view of traditional morality—but rather of pointing to the

fact that this question of sexual access and romantic success has no easy

solutions: pain, exclusion, inequality, oppression, will be the result no

matter what. Abandoning conventional and traditional hierarchies that were

no doubt oppressive has brought pain because modern man now comes face

to face with a more primordial hierarchy, one that is inescapable and

uncanny.

No question is more painful for young people today.

[xxix]

No subject

seems to inflict more emotional scars and batter more egos than one’s worth

on the sexual market, the degree to which one is desirable to mates of one’s

choosing, or what are one’s opportunities in life for romance or intercourse

or committed relationships, if not for family. It is a question in which all

theoretical musings on equality or inequality, on freedom or lack of

freedom, become concrete and embodied, become supremely personal and

very immediate. Look at the pages of any popular magazine, and you see

the youth, both men and women, and not just the youth, cast adrift in

confusion and pain. Freedom from socially- and legally-enforced

monogamy—one boy for every girl, and vice versa—has led not to equality

and happiness, but laid bare the unadorned and brutal hierarchy of nature.

The most desirable males and females, who are in a minority, have lives full

of sexual and romantic opportunities, adventures, the choice for excess, and

numerous options should they decide to marry and have a family life. For

the rest—for both men and women, the vast majority—there is lack of

fulfillment, even desolation in youth, and, later on, unsuitable options and

unhappy, very late marriages marred by resentments and dashed hopes.

Often there are no marriages, nor any long-term pairings after a certain age.

Transposed into the modern, individual, subjective perspective, there

still remains then the identity of these two problems, of sex and breeding on

one hand and of human inequality on the other. The books of Michel

Houellebecq, and especially Whatever and The Elementary Particles,

express better than any other modern text the desolation that the sexual

revolution has brought to the lives of most average people, and the

fundamental natural inequality that has surfaced as a result of the changes

in the 1960’s and after. The few premodern and ancient examples briefly

covered above are surely alienating and even frightening, with their weird

caste- and race-based forms of breeding and marriage laws, whether it be

Sparta’s alien eugenics or the Bible’s harsh sexual prohibitions. Something

like the Law of Manu or Plato’s Republic may well seem to come out of a

science fiction dystopia. But it’s been replaced, in our age, by just a

different kind of hierarchy and inequality. This isn’t a matter of deciding

which is better or worse, or advocating for one or another, but of realizing

the substance of this claim, that breeding practices and human inequality

are connected at the root.

It is possible that the sexual hierarchy and de facto breeding laws of

our time are more just than those others. But it is a hierarchy and inequality

nonetheless. The difference is that something like the Law of Manu, or the

breeding and marriage laws of Sparta, were consciously crafted with a view

to breeding a certain type of man or citizen who would embody the driving

goal of the regime or society. The laws were meant to harmonize or

“coordinate” man’s intense desire for sexual love and for posterity with the

regime’s overarching goals and its needs. They were meant to promote

certain qualities that were seen to be, and probably were, hereditary, and

which the regime intended to promote in the population. We are now driven

instead by a different and more primitive “law,” and this, in combination

with poorly-thought-out government programs, is creating a certain type of

man and society as well, only no one yet knows exactly what. Some few,

like Charles Murray, have put a lot of thought into this and have painted for

our age an emergent dystopia in which assortative mating is causing a

bifurcation of society into mutually hostile castes that hate and

misunderstand each other.

[xxx]

Maybe so, or maybe something good will

come out of it instead. But with us, as with Sparta or the ancient Hebrews,

our sexual and marriage laws result in inequality and the establishment of

concrete social and demographic patterns, whether we intend it to be so or

not. It is also very likely that medieval Christianity—which exerted

powerful long-term effects on Europe by essentially breeding a new kind of

European man—also did so unintentionally. But it did so nevertheless,

despite itself, because the question of sex and breeding will continue to be

at the center of social and political life, whether nations and lawmakers are

aware of this fact or no.

The question then arises of whether a society is aware of this problem

of breeding, which is to say, whether it is aware of nature.

The ancient Greeks embody more than any other nation in history the

profound connection between attention to breeding laws or practices on one

hand and the development, even exaggeration, of human inequality on the

other. Their culture is the subject of so much interest now, and, rightly or

wrongly, they are recognized as the foundation of Western civilization.

Nietzsche understood, however, that a modern would shudder if he were to

perceive the real root of Greek civilization. We don’t appreciate the

immense cruelty and suffering that was necessary to create the serene, light-

filled culture that gave birth to our artistic, literary, and philosophical

traditions. The alien harshness that was a precondition for Greek culture

was noted by, among many, the historian Jakob Burckhardt; consider this

passage about the splendor of the Ionian aristocracy:

An important difference between that age and our own consists in their having (somewhat as

the French still do) more respect for quality than for size of population. Besides, when full

democracy emerged, it consisted in reality of an aristocratic minority as opposed to the metics

and the slaves. It is only in modern times that men earn as much money as possible to support

the maximum number of children, no matter what the privation and drudgery involved and

however the quality of the population may suffer in the process; we have already spoken of

the means, ruthless as they were, that the Greeks adopted to limit numbers. In any case,

this society was a splendid one to contemplate; the poet of the Homeric hymn to Apollo can

say of the Ionians (151-5) as they appeared at the festival of Delos: ‘He who meets them all

assembled would say that they are immortal and ageless, he would see how graceful they all

are and would rejoice in his heart when he saw the men, and the women finely clad, and the

swift ships and their many riches.’ Then follows special praise for the maidens of Delos and

their song, which set the seal of perfection on this magnificent existence.

[xxxi]

This magnificent existence depended on ruthless methods of population

control and pruning. Burckhardt, writing in the 19

Century, adds that a

modern has no clue about the immense hardship, cruelty, and pain that had

to happen to create this radiant type of human. Simply put, behind this

image of human flourishing lie generations of attention to citizen quality

rather than quantity, which is to say, to eugenics, with all its cruelty, an

orientation that never left the Greek world. Behind this innocent-sounding

formula lie all manner of exclusionary, forceful measures: the removal from

the city rolls of citizens who don’t live up to the moral, physical, and

intellectual standards befitting a member of the polis; the ruthless

subsuming of village life to city life; eugenics, infanticide, sexual apartheid,

“classism,” “racism”; the intense physical and moral discipline and rigor

entailing mercilessness towards both others and oneself. Finally, and most

chilling for a modern audience, force and violence: slavery on one hand,

and training for war on the other, as the absolute prerequisites of this type

of society and this type of man.

Friedrich Nietzsche, speaking of the different goals of different

peoples, states of the Greeks,

“You shall always be the first and excel all others: your jealous soul shall love no one, unless it

be the friend”—that made the soul of the Greek quiver: thus he walked the path of his

greatness.

[xxxii]

The pursuit of excellence, the desire to be proven the best compared to all

other men, is the foundation of all of Greek culture. Victory in the contest

or agon is taken to be the demonstration of such excellence and superiority.

The clearest and most manifest exhibition of this superiority was in physical

contest, in victory in physical contest, and in the exhibition of bodily

beauty:

The aim was now to develop the body to the highest perfection of beauty, a purpose for which

each individual had to submit to a methodical discipline just as severe as training in the arts,

denying himself any personal manifestations of ‘genius’.

[xxxiii]

The central institution of the polis was the gymnasium—the gymnasium

was the center of Greek social life in the cities. The original meaning of

virtue or arête is precisely this type of excellence in which superiority over

others is manifested in various struggles, whether athletic or intellectual,

but both having their origins in the military training of the citizen.

The corollary to all of this is that the Greek state or polis, which today

we are likely to imagine as the origin of our democracy, was in fact nothing

more or less than a breeding project for superior specimens. Such, again,

was how Critias saw the Spartan constitution.

[xxxiv]

And Plato’s Republic,

as we will see, is argued by Nietzsche, and not only by Nietzsche, to be the

“best regime” or idealization of the Greek city with everything non-

essential removed, so that it is shown, in its final manifestation in speech, to

be a project for the breeding and production of genius.

[xxxv]

Greek culture is

thus “universal” in the sense that it is the first culture which, with

awareness of nature, that is, of biology, undertook to cultivate and breed

itself into a higher form.

Again we recoil from such language and such projects. But what is

important here is not to morally approve or reject: the point of this book has

to do with an argument that awareness of nature—the prerequisite of

philosophy and later of science—is identical with awareness of breeding or

what we might crudely term “eugenics.” Whether this is a good or bad thing

is another matter. Indeed there are thinkers who reject or want to condemn

Western history precisely because they partially intuited that it is based on

this principle.

[xxxvi]

That is fine: only, one must understand what is in play.

Behind the Greek obsession with citizen quality, with excellence, with

personal and generational biological improvement, lies the converse, a

depreciation of the life of the slave, or, more generally, of the type of man

who lives only to live, who is willing to survive at any cost, or who is

willing to accept subservience to avoid death. To speak of superior and

inferior ways of life is necessarily to deny that every form of life has

dignity or meaning. But, in particular, the net effect is to deny that mere life

has any worth.

If one can speak of one type of life being superior and another being

inferior, it’s only a few steps to this conclusion. For this reason Nietzsche

begins his early essay on the Greek state by pointing out that the Greeks

would have rejected as vile lies and cant our modern ideas of the dignity of

human life and the dignity of labor. Labor, as the mere maintenance or

preservation of mere life, has no value in and of itself, because mere life has

no value. The fundamental Greek insight is the “nihilistic” insight of

Silenus: “Better never to have been born, and if born, to die as soon as

possible.”

[xxxvii]

Mere life, a drudgery and bleak terror, is not worth the

trouble. This is fundamentally where speculations about breeding, about

human inferiority and superiority, ultimately lead. And it may be argued,

maybe by a cynic, that this is maybe the most profound reason that

speculations about human inequality are so painful to modern people, and

outrage our moral sense.

The second and related reason ideas of human breeding and human

inequality make us feel uncomfortable is easier to understand and has

already been mentioned: it is a radical denial of every principle on which

we base our morality of egalitarianism and our democratic politics. It

reminds one, worst of all, of Nazism. The postwar international liberal

order is built on the back of the Nuremberg trials, and correspondingly our

image of Satanic evil is the Third Reich, with its supposed ideals of

breeding humans like livestock, culling human herds through genocide, and

its teaching of fundamental biological inequality. It certainly won’t do to

point out that most of these ideas were inherited by the Nazis from

progressive and liberal Protestant Anglo-American thought—I mean

specifically Darwin, Galton and their followers. Nor will it do to point out

that the electoral success of Nazism, as of other fascist movements in

interwar Europe, had little or nothing to do with a platform based on these

or similar ideas. These ideas, rightly or not, are tainted by this association,

which is a big reason they are so taboo today. In a book such as I present

here, about human inequality and human breeding as the foundation of

Western thought and of philosophy, this is a question I must briefly and

explicitly address. I do so at the end of this introduction in the form of a

“political detour,” an appendix that explains the relationship between the

argument here and events in our decade and the next.

THE ARGUMENT IN THIS BOOK

The problem of human inequality is sometimes discussed, especially

by some few conservative intellectuals and some academics, especially of

the Straussian school. But it is always immaculately and clinically limited

to considerations of the superiority of certain human individuals. The

discussion of the natural inequality of human groups is strictly forbidden.

Being suspected of holding a belief that some individuals are superior is

likely to get one called an elitist, or an eccentric. Saying the same about a

group, with regard even to a limited quality, is going to get one called a

racist and destroy one’s career.

[xxxviii]

Therefore, those few who do question

modern egalitarianism, who talk about virtue, and who even dare to bring

up the natural inequality of individuals, always “politely” stop at the

question of human groups.

The problem with this view is easy to see: the old truth, natura non

facit saltus. Define superiority in whatever way one will, and it will be clear

that the individual or quality thus defined doesn’t have a random

distribution across human groups. It occurs with greater frequency, often far

greater frequency, in some groups than in others. One can’t fail soon to

notice that such groups correspond roughly to historically concrete

populations, whether nations, tribes, or races.

[xxxix]

Since an individual

doesn’t just appear full-born from Zeus’ thigh, but has parents and

ancestors, it is also clear to any honest student that whichever quality one

denotes as “superior” will often be seen more frequently in some families

than in others. And indeed this is the problem we are talking about at

bottom, because many historical nations, tribes, and even races can be

loosely defined as a very extended family. In the case of some peoples, like

Icelanders, or Ashkenazi Jews, this is very obvious—almost all Ashkenazi

Jews, for example, are related to each other at around the level of fifth

cousins.

[xl]

In the same way, Darwin’s family was especially prominent in

its production of great minds, and Darwin himself saw eugenics as a logical

consequence of his discoveries.

[xli]

Those who care about human excellence and its cultivation can’t

therefore ignore the problem of human groups, because individuals don’t

arise randomly out of vats, but are born and bred, come from long-

established groups, with long-established marriage patterns and long-

established physical, intellectual, and behavioral traits. The discussion of

natural differences or excellences of individuals is therefore not so easily

separable from the discussion of natural differences between groups, and

indeed in some cases of human groups “traditionally defined,” historically

known and concrete groups, that is, tribe, phyle, nation, ethnos, race, kin,

genos, and so on. Modern conservatives would very much like to get

around this by emphasizing “education,” and in particular the

universalizing, civilizing effect of a classical education. But it is strange

that so many of the sources in that classical education, so many of the great

authors, don’t think education is nearly capable of this much, and seem to

emphasize that inborn qualities, breeding, and so on, matter at least as

much.

This book was composed first with a view to explaining the emergence

of maybe the first two dazzling, uncanny, and magnificent types of

humanity, the type of the philosopher and the type of the tyrant. Nietzsche

describes the philosopher as the “crown” of a culture. They seem to appear

together, around the same time, in the most magnificent and dazzling

culture of which we know, that of the ancient Greeks, specifically in the age

of the Archaic Greeks or in what Nietzsche calls “the Tragic age” of the

Greeks. The precondition for the emergence of philosophy is widely

acknowledged to be the idea of nature, which, up to that time, was

unknown entirely outside the Greek world, and, long thereafter, was the

preserve only of the Roman and Hellenistic world, that is, of the world that

inherited it from the Greeks. Could there be a connection not only between

the philosopher and nature, but also the tyrant and nature? The philosopher

is a student of nature, a lover of wisdom who seeks the truth—and what is

the tyrant?

Philosophers and tyrants were both perceived by the cities of the time

as kindred criminal spirits. So often philosophers were attacked as teachers

of tyranny, tyrant’s lickspittles or companions, associates of tyrants. The

great concern some, and especially Plato and Xenophon, had in arguing

precisely against this accusation against philosophy, as if they thought it

was more dangerous or more frequent than any other, is especially telling.

Their arguments are especially bad, maybe intentionally so. This book

started with a thought experiment in which I wanted to take the ancient

accusation of the cities—that philosophy and tyranny were the same thing,

or were closely related—as seriously as possible.

I found the most developed argument for the identity of philosophy

and tyranny in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. After a long study of all his

works I offer here what I believe is the definitive exposition of Nietzsche’s

political teaching, of the meaning of his thoughts on philosophy, on

Platonism, and on the trajectory of the West since the time when the idea of

nature was first discovered, or, maybe, revealed and manifested. This book

presents an entirely new argument for the emergence both of the idea of

nature and of philosophy itself, out of an awareness of biology or breeding.

This idea was developed with reference specifically to the breeding of

animal stocks that is likely to be the special preserve of, first, a pastoral

society, and second, an aristocracy that developed out of such a society

through an act of conquest.

In the rest of the introduction, and indeed in the rest of this book, I will

often speak “in Nietzsche’s voice,” so as better to elucidate these ideas. I

make no apologies in doing so, but believe that, as unpleasant as they may

sound to modern ears, it is necessary to restate them here for historical

understanding. This is as a warning so that I don’t have to tediously repeat

at every point “in Nietzsche’s opinion” or “in Plato’s opinion.” It goes

without saying that such thinkers had ideas deeply repugnant to modern

readers, but, again, it is necessary to understand this position even if one

will dismiss it.

The question of aristocracy is central to this book because it is from a

certain kind of aristocracy that the idea of nature uniquely emerges, and

therefore that the possibility of philosophy can uniquely emerge. The

historical origins of the first aristocracies and the meaning of aristocracy as

such has been my driving concern throughout this book: the argument I

make here is that the precondition for philosophy is the decay of a certain

type of aristocracy. For with Nietzsche, and, I believe not only with him, the

argument is made that both philosophy and tyranny develop in late or

declining aristocracies, as a kind of refinement, abstraction, or

radicalization of the aristocratic way of life and of the principle that

underlies aristocratic life and the aristocratic worldview. This is the

principle of blood or breeding which, intellectualized and abstracted, is

nothing other than the idea of nature. Indeed this is the origin of the idea of

nature, without which it could have never dawned on mankind.

The four main chapters of this book recapitulate this same argument

from four different points of view, in chronological order.

When the idea of nature first emerged, it did so in opposition to

convention or “custom.” Cows graze, wolves hunt by nature; but different

tribes of men deal differently with the dead—cremation, burial, etc.—by

custom or convention. It is a distinction roughly similar to our own “nature

versus culture” or “nature versus nurture” or “nature versus social

construct.” The question of what was “by nature” or “by convention”

animated much of Greek intellectual life, and had important political

meaning, for example, with the aristocratic party generally favoring the side

of nature, and the democratic generally favoring the side of convention.

[xlii]

In the first chapter I try to explain how a rudimentary idea of nature

could have emerged out of the “primitive” or “prehistoric” mind, out of the

mind as ruled exclusively by ancestral convention or custom. Books like

Marcel Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the World have continued an

interest, among academics and among the public at large, with the

“prehistoric” mind, or with “primitive” communities, an interest that has

persisted from at least the middle of the 20

Century. The attempt to

recapture the elements of primitive human life, before the arrival of

recognizable civilization, has been a special focus of attention for both the

right and the left, as well as simply for students of history or of human

nature. My study of prehistoric life, or of the human mind as it existed

before the idea of nature was discovered and therefore before philosophy or

science was known, relies heavily on George Frazer, whose work is being

slowly rehabilitated.

[xliii]

Based both on George Frazer’s Golden Bough and on various other

observations drawn from many sources, both ancient and modern, I draw

the conclusion that primitive tribal life can be characterized as a

fundamental democracy or more accurately a gyno-gerontocratic

democracy, a fundamental democracy that is administered by elders and

councils of elders; that it is ruled by ancestral custom or nomos, in an

absolute and “totalitarian” way, ruled by tribal conventions, laws, and

myths that regulate almost every aspect of life, allow no individual

distinction, and ruthlessly quash any form of intellectual questioning or

dissent. It is in a fundamental sense ruthlessly egalitarian, authoritarian and

collectivist, even when there might be functional social distinctions. This

kind of “default” mode of humanity, rule by ancestral custom or by

convention, homogenizes all life and all thought. How could for the idea of

nature to emerge out of such life?

The answer is that it could not. The momentous discovery of nature—

the precondition for both philosophy and science—is the preserve of one

very unusual people, the ancient Greeks, and, for long thereafter, those parts

of Europe where Hellenistic civilization was promoted, first by Rome, and

later in a considerably modified form by Christianity and various Christian

states that had inherited some of the Roman institutions. It is the birth of

this concept among the Archaic Greeks, however, that has been entirely my

focus in this book, and in the first chapter I try to understand how it could

have possibly dawned on them.

If primitive communal tribal life, ruled by elders and ancestral

convention, could never have allowed an “out” toward the discovery of

nature as it exists apart from human customs, how then did this idea ever

possibly dawn on mankind, and in particular on the Greeks? I try to answer

this question in the second half of the first chapter. Only through external

conquest could a principle different from, and antithetical to, the

totalitarian, homogenous, and egalitarian primal nomos have emerged in

some society. In particular, an act of conquest where the conquering group

continued to exist apart from the conquered long thereafter, and was freed

both from the necessity to care for mere life, as well as afforded the

possibility of a cosmopolitan, outward-looking worldview. The Greeks,

with their hungry curiosity for other peoples, for their histories, ways,

excellences and foibles—an absolute prerequisite for the discovery of

nature, which abhors petty parochialism—possessed the outlook of a

“conquering people.”

[xliv]

It is within the way of life, regime, or intellectual outlook of certain

aristocracies that we begin to see the idea of nature in a rudimentary form.

In particular the knowledge of biological breeding, as it was available in

general to pastoral peoples or aristocracies with a pastoral origin in their

remote history, is the likely source for the idea of nature. The observation

that certain qualities, physical traits, and even behaviors are passed through

the breeding of various animal stocks is the source of the realization that

there exists a principle apart from tribal custom or convention, that endures

through generations entirely apart from the oral transmission and social

enforcement of customs, and that operates entirely apart from education or

indoctrination simply. As we will see, all of the earliest mentions of nature,

and certainly all the elaborations of the idea of nature, are entirely

biological, and have to do with the physical body, with biological “vitality,”

and especially with blood or, again, breeding, eugenics, and heredity. As

uncomfortable as this may be for modern ears, it is nevertheless crucial to

understand the origin of the idea of nature in breeding or heredity—without

this it is impossible to understand the history of Western thought, therefore

history in general—and it is impossible to understand what nature still

means.

The first real elaboration of the idea of nature, which exists entirely as

a product of Greek aristocratic thought, is to be found in the victory odes of

Pindar, the subject of my second chapter. Pindar, a Dorian poet from

Thebes, is almost never studied today outside classics departments, and

certainly never in treatments of political thought. This is unfortunate, not

only because Plato and other political philosophers so often refer to Pindar,

but because in this poet we have maybe the purest exposition of the outlook

of the Greek aristocracy at its height, the full elaboration of its worldview,

its yearnings.

[xlv]

As such it is an invaluable anthropological document, and

in Pindar’s discussion of nature we see its first real, and, maybe to us,

shocking meaning. The odes are composed to memorialize athletic

victories, and it is precisely in the exaltation of the body to its heights that

nature becomes manifested as a principle of biology, breeding, blood, and

what Nietzsche would later call life. In the emergence of the aristocratic

athlete’s body and character—the two are the same—from the dark

collective murk into the enduring radiance of immortal fame, Pindar sees

the principle of blood, heredity, or nature fully manifested. And he

explicitly connects this with other political, social and philosophical

questions that are likely to be of interest to any student of antiquity, of

political life, or of the history of Western thought since Plato.

Plato is full of references to Pindar, and Plato’s special “preoccupation

with breeding” is likely inherited from Pindar along with the entire Greek

and aristocratic conception of nature. My third chapter is on Plato and on

Platonic political philosophy. It is true that Plato, along with other

philosophers, refines or abstracts this idea of nature, and cleanses it of any

specific class consciousness or other specifically cultural accouterments—

philosophers “intellectualize” or radicalize the idea of nature and bring it

closer to something more like what we understand today by the word.

Nevertheless, Plato fundamentally preserves the meaning of nature hinted at

so far, so that in fact Plato’s strange preoccupation with breeding is one and

the same with his strange preoccupation with nature, or, which is the same

in this case, with political philosophy or the role of the philosopher as a

type in political society. For Plato, the tyrant and the philosopher are “twin”

human types, the only true “men of nature.” And the purpose of Plato’s

work, as I interpret it following Nietzsche, is to preserve at all costs the

possibility, independence, and in a way the supremacy of the philosopher as

a type. Plato wants to preserve nature, the principle of nature, of heredity,

blood and breeding. Plato is an environmental protection activist who wants

to preserve a virtual “ecological reserve” within political society.

Plato’s attempt to save the possibility of philosophy and to “save

nature,” was motivated and inspired by two developments within the Greek

world of his time. The first such development was the decline of the Greek

polis, the Greek city or aristocratic regime type—the kind of city that

Nietzsche would later call an “aristocratic hothouse” and an aristocratic

“breeding project.” The second development, related, was the attack on the

philosophers, which culminated with the execution of Socrates his teacher,

and which threatened to wipe out the possibility of philosophy as a way of

life. Faced with these momentous threats, Plato adopted a strategy of

concealment, a practice of esoteric writing, that was itself to have

tremendous consequences, and which he explains most of all in the

Phaedrus. Plato was hardly the only philosopher to use this practice at the

time, but he does seem to have been the ablest master of this art.

Plato’s fundamental political orientation and strategy as regards the

future of philosophy appears in his dialogue Gorgias, on rhetoric. This

dialogue is ostensibly about Socrates’ arguments with three orators, but the

dramatic and philosophical peak of this piece is in the speeches of the

Athenian Callicles, who may be an invention of Plato. Callicles’ speeches

are exciting, shocking if read in the right way, and sound decidedly modern

and “Nietzschean”—he has been called an advocate of “might makes right,”

and worse. He sounds like an advocate of tyranny, and in any case, he is a

passionate advocate of nature against the claims of “the many” and of

convention, which is the creation of the many. My own interpretation of the

Gorgias is that Plato’s real political teaching is nearly identical to Callicles’.

There has been a lot of interest recently in this dialogue, with a few

academic books on it published since 2005 or so.

[xlvi]

The third chapter can

be read as an implicit criticism of recent commentary on the Gorgias, which

I briefly treat there. I am not sure what inspired so many people to write

about the Gorgias, but I do have a suspicion: interest in this dialogue was

likely motivated by lack of confidence in modern democratic theory, in

modern liberalism, and in the foundations of modern liberalism. Certain

academics, among many others, are desperately groping for some moral

justification of modern liberal democracy and of egalitarianism. Karl

Popper already attempted to find this in the Gorgias. They will not find it in

the Gorgias no matter how hard they look. What haunts all recent academic

commentary on the Gorgias is precisely an unwillingness to take seriously

the claims of its central character, Callicles. Indeed most seem to have been

written with an assumption that “of course Callicles is wrong, because…”

Callicles is certainly offensive to modern ears, but unwillingness to take

what he says seriously prevents one from understanding not only this

particular dialogue, but Plato’s meaning in general. Any undergraduate who

reads the Gorgias without excessive traditional respect or piety for the

character of Socrates comes away thinking that Callicles has the better

argument. Indeed Socrates is made to look so moralistic, pedantic,

indignant, and ultimately ridiculous, that an objective reader might be left

thinking that Plato wanted Callicles to have the superior argument. On

closer reading, Socrates, or rather Plato, modifies it only with respect to

tactics. Many other clues led me to believe that the true teaching of Plato is

the “tyrannical” teaching of Callicles just with makeup on—made “polite”

and presentable for political society. For Callicles is the voice not just of

tyranny, but of the defense of philosophy.

Plato’s task of making philosophy respectable in the Greek world was

a work of genius that had limited reach within his own time but ended up

changing the course of Western thought and history in the long run. In his

own time it seems the rivals of Plato and Platonism attacked him and his

students as pretenders to tyranny and lickspittles or companions of tyrants.

[xlvii]

Among the Academics were counted men who indeed later became

tyrants, and this took place both during Plato’s time and after. These, plus

Socrates’ execution specifically for teaching anti-democratic and radical

tyranny—a mention in a court case decades later casually refers to

“Socrates the sophist who you executed for being the teacher of Critias and

Alcibiades who tried to put down the democracy,”

[xlviii]

indicating this was

common knowledge among the people in the jury—these are clues that the

ancient image of philosophy was quite different from our own. Plato’s task

of reforming the image of philosophy was not successful in the short run,

but came into its own with the emergence of Hellenistic kingship after

Alexander, and exerted a strong influence long thereafter.

[xlix]

Plato’s program of “public relations” was to turn the image of the

philosopher from one of criminal, outcast, and potential tyrant, to that of

spiritual counselor and defender of virtue. The master-stroke of genius in

this is not just its perversity, in which the truth is turned upside down, but

that he saw a great opportunity in the special condition of the Greek cities at

the time. The decline of the Greek polis was synonymous with the decline

of its aristocracy, their institutions, customs, their regime or way of life—

they faced disorder, anarchy, not only externally, as a result of the

Peloponnesian War and its convulsions, but within themselves, in the

disorder of their instincts, the lack of political, cultural, or intellectual will

to preserve their way of life. The old aristocratic regime, the harsh self-

discipline, the program of breeding and grooming for physical, military and

intellectual excellence, had ceased to have any force. It was replaced by

what, from their point of view, or from the point of view of any traditional

conservative, is dissolution: pleasure-seeking, vulgarity, violence, and all

kinds of self-abasement that comes through these. It was a time roughly

similar to the shift from early republican Rome, with its stern virtues, to

imperial Rome, a time of relative democratization and liberalization, where,

as Camille Paglia points out, great pleasure was taken in the ritual mockery

and transgressions against republican personae and moral virtues. Many

rough, not quite accurate, but illustrative parallels can of course also be

drawn to periods in our own time, such as Weimar Germany, or 1960’s

America, among others.

In this environment where the elite of the time faced danger and

dissolution from all sides, Plato invented the image of the philosopher as

defender of moral virtue, in other words, invented the image of the

philosopher as priest. After Plato the philosopher begins to put on the mask

of the priest. The philosopher came to the aristocrat and promised to

reestablish his life of virtue, to bring a new pillar to a life that had none of

its traditional confidence and that was in many ways “biologically spent.”

The philosopher offers to reestablish virtue, but this time to reestablish

moral virtue on the basis of reason. The philosopher as supposedly the man

of reason, or at least its ablest wielder, would therefore be the new

aristocrat’s spiritual advisor, reason becoming the cure or salve to a late

aristocracy’s self-dissolution and internal loss of vitality, purpose, and

excellence. This is the reason Nietzsche says that Plato and the Socratics

were taking “emergency medical measures” in the Greek world with their

bizarre identification of virtue, reason and happiness, and with their moral

obsessions. The philosopher was to be spiritual advisor, perhaps priest,

perhaps doctor or psychologist to the new elite. In this way the status of

philosophy would be secured in an alliance with at least two principal

regime types of the ancient world—there was a somewhat different, though

similar, role for the philosopher at the court of the new kinds of kings that

would arise in the Hellenistic period. And, one might add, not only of the

ancient world—in more than one way Plato’s vision was far-seeing and

secured the safety of philosophy as best he could in the circumstances.

In the final chapter of the book I discuss the philosophy of Nietzsche,

which, again, is the animating purpose of this book, and through which I

have tried to understand antiquity, the origin of philosophy, and the

meaning of nature. At one point Leo Strauss is supposed to have said that

he was glad to be born in our time, because we are allowed the books of

Plato, which include the most comprehensive vision of existence, and the

books of Nietzsche, which include the most comprehensive criticism of that

vision. When another commentator says that Nietzsche shared specifically

with Plato a “strange preoccupation with breeding,” I see in this innocent

remark a great reflection of my main argument in this book. Because, just

as Plato chose, for entirely tactical reasons, to begin the masking of the true

meaning of nature, in the same way Nietzsche, also for tactical reasons,

thought it was time to unmask it and reintroduce the original understanding

both of nature and philosophy. Both Plato and Nietzsche were

fundamentally motivated by the same thing, the defense of the freedom of

thought and of the possibility of philosophy, and therefore, at bottom, the

preservation of nature, nature in the original, Pindaric sense, nature as

blood and breeding. The investigation of human nature is impossible

without an investigation principally of heredity, and this has been true

throughout the whole of Western philosophy, no matter how indirectly

thinkers have often had to express themselves. This is true especially of

political philosophy.

Nietzsche chooses to “unmask” the original meaning of philosophy or

of nature for a few reasons—one big reason is the public propagation of

Darwinism beginning in his time. Darwinism is this same teaching, or this

same idea of nature, albeit, from the philosophical point of view,

considerably distorted and simplified. But there is another more sinister and

dangerous reason that Nietzsche thought it was time to reveal the true

meaning of “nature.” Although Plato’s reinvention of philosophy was a

monumental achievement he could not have foreseen, according to

Nietzsche, the coming of Christianity and thereafter of modernity.

Christianity, for its own purposes, adopted much of the Platonic dogma but

in doing so entirely forgot about, or entirely obscured, the original meaning

of nature that was still lurking in the background of Platonic teachings so

long as they were animated by a living school. Thereafter Christianity,

having taken spiritual hold of Europe, but having no knowledge of the

secret foundational art—the knowledge of breeding and its significance for

marriage law—misbred man through the promotion of dysgenic unions,

with the result being the modern “misbegotten” human that is so much the

object of Nietzsche’s, and not only Nietzsche’s, scorn, the modern man, the

man of democracy, socialism, feminism, the Last Man. The calamity that

Nietzsche saw in this event was a universal and homogenous

reestablishment of the ancient commune, the original totalitarian democracy

where philosophy and genius would be made impossible, and indeed nature

and life would be permanently botched.

My reading of Nietzsche rejects almost all recent scholarship on this

thinker, which refuses to take his political thought seriously, and considers

him either to have been a secret democrat or leftist, or otherwise holds that

his political thought is irrelevant to the rest of his ideas. Given that life is

short, I “outsource” my direct criticism of scholarship on Nietzsche to some

excellent recent commentaries that ably dispense with the views just

expressed.

[l]

In short I could add here that in principle most modern

academics would ignore Nietzsche if they could. Because of his immense

influence on the arts, on literature, and on politics, they are forced to study

him, and some have made a career out of writing books about how he was

really “just joking.” These transparent attempts to dismiss the core of his

thought in the service of an apology for political and moral commitments,

do serious students no good at all. It is one thing to dismiss Nietzsche

because one disagrees, another to misrepresent his thought through

convoluted justifications about how he “didn’t really mean it.” Nietzsche

meant his political statements literally, even if his ultimate aims were not

merely political.

In this final chapter I hope to clarify many of Nietzsche’s otherwise

puzzling preoccupations—his statements on women, love, and sexual

passion; the meaning of his defense of “aristocratic radicalism,” his

opinions on the Greeks, on Plato, on philosophy, and on Christianity (for

which he has a lot more sympathy than is usually credited). But this isn’t

merely a thesis about Nietzsche as such, but about the content of his ideas,

and therefore about nature and its meaning in political and social life.

Therefore I hope that this last chapter, and the book as a whole, will be of

interest to those, of whatever moral persuasion, who want to understand the

great importance that the idea of nature as breeding and heredity has had in

philosophy and in political life.

The book ends with a short appendix in which I present a friendly

criticism of the work of Leo Strauss. Although this book obviously shares

many of Strauss’s concerns, I can say that I conceived of no part of it as a

result of my study of Strauss. If there are implicit links here to the ideas of

Strauss, it’s because Strauss was also a student of Nietzsche and shared

Nietzsche’s concerns. Indeed, I read Strauss as a fairly orthodox

Nietzschean throughout his life, who never really deviated from the

doctrines of his master. Insofar as Strauss’ thought differs from Nietzsche, it

has to do with his attempts to transplant it to America, and in particular to

make this thought attractive to a certain type of academic, that is, the

difference has to do with presentation and tactics. Much of this is connected

to the circumstance of the Cold War and what Strauss was trying to achieve

in the context of a very peculiar global conflict that he believed would last

much longer than it did. I trust my treatment of his work will be of interest

to all, not just to students of Strauss, because it concerns the possibility of

the reintroduction of nature in intellectual and academic life in general.

The conclusion of the book deals precisely with this matter, the

possibility of the study of human nature in the social sciences, the

inevitability of the reform of the social sciences as a result of new findings

in the fields of genetics, and the likely political and social consequences of

this development.

A BRIEF DETOUR INTO POLITICS—

Shockingly to many, the ideas of the far right seem to have been

regaining some currency in our time. Indeed so many are in a moral panic

or confusion about the so-called “alt-right,” that I think it’s necessary to

explain the origin of this book, and to say a few words about how it might

help the reader understand what is happening. With some reluctance I

briefly move away from the historical and philosophical concerns at the

core of this book to address contemporary politics, so as to avoid possible

misunderstandings about what I’m writing here and what inspired this book.

What follows for the next few paragraphs is a discussion I would have

rather avoided, but that I feel forced on me by the current political situation

and the fact that, if I don’t deal with these matters directly, I will be accused

of having written this book to give intellectual support to the “alt-right” or

some other such thing. In fact my thesis was completed in the spring of

2015 and the core of this book was written long before that, around 2004 or

so. But the matter can’t just be left at this.

The concerns of liberals, mainstream conservatives, and particularly

journalists and pundits—as they are the ones most responsible for the scare

or worry that “racism” or the “far right” is returning—are legitimate or at

least easy to understand. But it has nothing to do directly with the populist

or nationalist movements currently enjoying some success in the West. It

has to do with a large contingent of disaffected youth, many of them in high

school or college, or recent graduates, who have even before 2015 taken to

social media and challenged or relentlessly mocked journalists and pundits,

provoking them with explicitly racist imagery, ideas, allusions, and facts or

claims about facts. Much of this has originated in the online board 4chan

and there have been considerable treatments of this in the press, and in

several recent books, among them especially Angela Nagle’s Kill All

Normies.

[li]

Some of these books are quite good treatments, but all are

incomplete and in one way or another limited or biased.

These youth, who seem to be racially and culturally diverse, and

relatively well-educated, have done what youth always love to do, which is

to shock and epater la bourgeoisie. And the establishment “bourgeois”

culture and education of our time is “liberal,” or rather, anti-racist, feminist,

anti-nationalist. These young people have loved nothing more than to

offend journalists and pundits, who are the most vocal gatekeepers of this

establishment “bourgeois” morality of our time.

To be sure, the provocations here in question haven’t been driven only

by a spirit of contrarianism. Young people, and certain kinds of young

people, are excited and seduced by all “forbidden knowledge,” and have a

positive and keen interest in this forbidden knowledge. Through its

demonization not only of “Nazism,” but actually of frank discussions about

human nature, about group differences, about the role heritability and

genetics play in human behavior and societies, the elite of our time have

made such knowledge and such ideas irresistible to the young.

Several things have happened since the early 1990’s to intensify this

interest and also to “weaponize” it against the current establishment. The

most important, at least to understand the origin of our current moral panic,

has to do with the change in education in the United States and the West

since the 1980’s. Simply put, classical education—which even the Soviet

Union and the Eastern Bloc never tried to do away with—has been replaced

in favor of ideological indoctrination in both colleges and primary schools,

of a particularly aggressive sort. Criticisms of education, from

conservatives and non-conservatives alike, in the early 1990’s or late 1980’s

focused on the “relativism” implicit in new educational programs, or on the

adoption of “postmodernism” and “deconstructionist” ideas, which replaced

the classical canon with a debunking enterprise. This debunking enterprise

was meant to expose implicit systems of domination by straight white males

in the history of thought, and to replace classical education with one based

on exposing patterns of oppression based on class, but primarily on race and

gender.

What most conservative and a few other commentators missed was

just how aggressive and intolerant this new educational program was. There

was nothing “relativist” about it, nothing laid-back about it at all. The

militant, hectoring style that professors now have to deal with from young

students on college campuses comes from those who have absorbed, and

conformed to, the education now given in the primary schools. It is

arguably an education far more ideological in content, and in style far more

aggressive than what existed in the Eastern Bloc, at least in the 1980’s. By

contrast, the youth who are provoking journalists and pundits on social

media with “alt-right” or “racist” ideas or facts are the youth who are

reacting against this drastic change in education since the 1990’s and who

have experienced education from primary school as authoritarian and

oppressive. For those who agree with the content of this new moral

education or think it is right, some reflection is nevertheless in order over

what effects moral education is likely to have on naturally rebellious youth,

especially in a society that still idolizes rebellion and transgression in the

abstract.

The second great change is a revolution in the field of the biological

sciences that took place over two decades starting in the 1970s, and which

has gone almost completely unreported. It came about from the

convergence of two explosive empirical findings. The first is that not only

all human behavior, no matter how complex, has a genetic basis, but that

genetic differences are directly linked to behavioral differences: In other

words, whether it be individuals, families, ethnicities, or races, the farther

apart they are genetically, the more different they are across all behaviors.

This is as well-established and uncontested a fact now as gravity, but it is

unknown or outright denied outside genetics departments.

The second finding came thanks to the very rapid development of

human population genetics, in large part due to new DNA sequencing

techniques that were not available before. Here, the titanic work of Cavalli-

Sforza above all definitively killed Lewontin’s Lie: the mendacious cliché

that there is more genetic variation within races than between them. We

now have a very minute understanding of the considerable genetic diversity

between historical population groups. Black Africans, in particular, are so

divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold

commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries. A

revelation as shocking as it is by now indisputable.

Sforza’s 1994 magnum opus, The History and Geography of Human

Genes, will likely prove to be a watershed work. Together with the

discovery of the genetic correlation of behavior, this represents the most

thorough and unanswerable vindication of the idea of nature produced by

modern science.

Since then, further studies have fleshed out the minutiae of heritability

of intelligence and complex behaviors such as political preferences. New

and major books are appearing and about to appear on these subjects.

Intimidation and other coercive tactics will not succeed for much longer in

confining knowledge of this revolution to scientists. It will become

increasingly untenable to deny the reality of human nature and particularly

of heritability of qualities, behaviors, and even modes of thought. Holdouts

are no doubt going to remain in some academic departments and at some

publications, but young people will ignore them. For the most part it will

not be possible to ignore these findings; for those on all sides, it will be

necessary to engage them.

There had been several attempts since the 1950’s—Leo Strauss is a

great example—to resurrect the idea of nature in academic discourse. The

method before has always been to return to classical literature, and in

particular classical philosophy, which “lives or dies” by the idea of nature.

And therefore the method has always been an apologia or “rediscovery,”

maybe in some cases correct, but at all times necessarily convoluted, for re-

embracing the tradition of Western philosophy, or Western letters,

depending on the writer’s point of view. In the early 1990’s we see a new

attempt to resurrect the idea of nature in literary, historical, artistic and even

political criticism, on the part of Camille Paglia, which gathered some

attention with the book Sexual Personae and some of her journalism. The

book itself is full of insights and stylistic verve, but I believe one great

reason her ideas gained some currency were her constant references to the

biological sciences, for example to the effects different hormones have on

physique, behavior, and thought, and to the way they are present in males

and females at different levels. In the 2000’s others writing about similar

matters

[lii]

also referred to studies from neuroscience that indubitably show

great variance between the sexes and therefore point to a biological basis of

sexual differences. So a change occurred since the 1990’s where the idea of

nature was now no longer defended simply by pointing to examples from

classical literature or philosophy, or from common sense, but to the

biological sciences as such, to scientific studies showing natural differences

between groups.

The disaffected and rebellious youth that journalists have confused for

the “alt-right” have predictably been excited by such new findings that

seem to make a mockery of the orthodoxy of our time, with which they

were hectored and aggressively indoctrinated. No one will say that an

average seventeen- or even twenty-year-old will have a deep understanding

either of genetics, population genetics, or of human nature, but they have

used some of the most striking findings or studies to step on the toes of both

liberal and conservative journalists, who seem to know even less. This has

alarmed academic, educational and literary authorities. They have at times

denied the new science, and tried to second-guess and historicize its

assumptions. Or, finally, seeing that none of this works, some have lately

attempted to “correct” people’s opinions about the new findings in genetic

science, occasionally wading into ideas such as “epigenetics,” of which

they have no knowledge nor expertise. It’s not even right to say that the new

findings in question are going to “chip away” at assumptions made by

modern Western intellectual elites. There is an avalanche or torrent of

knowledge that will very soon entirely do away with the social-

constructionist paradigm that liberalism has adopted as the basis for the

education of the young.

A confusion is then at the center about the panic over the “far right,”

and it masks serious and genuine problems that should be of concern to all.

The confusion lies from having conflated three distinct and for the most

part unrelated things. There is the populist and nationalist political

movement that is now, for the moment at least, ascendant in the United

States, most of Europe, but also parts of the rest of the world, and which

rests on genuine and unaddressed concerns of citizens regarding mass

immigration, declining living standards, perpetual wars and failed

interventions, loss of national identity, and loss of democratic governance.

There is an older “white supremacist” or “white nationalist” movement that

is genuinely racist, driven by a “positive” and clear-cut racist ideology,

which involves much role-playing and fantasizing, which is very small, has

no political power or influence, but which receives great media attention.

Finally, and I would say most importantly in the long run, is the youth

rebellion.

The nascent youth rebellion is international, remarkably broad-based

among high-school students and others somewhat older, and it is, like all

youth rebellions, contrarian and nihilistic. But it has genuine, substantial

criticisms of the egalitarian world-view. These young people are attracted in

general to knowledge of human nature that was made “forbidden” to them

by the educational and moral establishment of our time. Without engaging

or being able to engage the new scientific body of knowledge that is coming

out at an increasingly rapid pace, readers, of whatever moral or political

conviction, will simply lose the plot.

The attempt to conflate these three different and I would say mostly

unrelated political and social phenomena, and in particular to identify all of

them with “neonazism,” with the nebulous “alt-right,” or even to call them

all “far right,” is an attempt grounded in political wishes, it is a species of

political smearing, or short-term tactics. It’s not going to work and will

leave those who have fallen for this tactic confused, unable to deal not only

with the political problems of our time, but to speak in any convincing way

to the youth, or at least the most intellectually intense parts of the youth.

The “radicalization” of youth is happening not because of neonazi

indoctrination, nor because of Russian plots, but because of the inability of

our intellectual establishment, right or left, to provide a fair and convincing

education to young people. The radicalization of the youth follows upon the

complete collapse of Western intellectual life that has rendered our

authorities, not dangerous, immoral, or “degenerate,” as they think their

opponents consider them, but boring, authoritarian, and stupid. Jacques

Barzun, among many others, warned of this when he mentioned that the

“intellectual shadowboxing” he witnessed in academia and the press could

not take place much longer without a revolt.

When I began to write about the ideas in this book I had my own

personal and particular interest in them, and was driven by no public or

“responsible” program one way or another. Nevertheless, the ideas that so

many fear are returning, the fundamental questions of human inequality, of

whether and to what extent human qualities and behavior are inborn, of

whether there exist unequal individuals or groups, of the political and moral

significance of all this—those seeking to understand why those questions

are permanent and inescapable will, I believe, find much to gain from

reading what follows.

In particular it has been my conviction for some time that students of

classical philosophy, and of the tradition of political philosophy—readers of

the “canon” or of classical authors—must learn to engage the new and

emerging body of knowledge about human biology, human groups, and

human nature. I believe that classical political philosophy knew about these

“new” insights and findings at least in their fundamental meaning,

understood them in light of the wholeness of human nature, and understood

the problems inherent in this knowledge in ways perhaps superior to our

own. But a frank engagement with, say, Plato’s understanding of heredity or

nature in this sense has been made exceedingly difficult, first of all by the

fact, referred to above, that when it came precisely to this question of

matters of biological breeding and of the biological definition of nature,

both religious tradition and philosophy often became more reticent and

allegorical even than usual. Because these subjects are, again, likely to

cause great pain to humans at all times if discussed openly. Discussion of

these matters as they appear in the tradition of Western philosophy has

furthermore been made very difficult because of our own egalitarian and

equalist prejudices, by which we would like to radically deny any serious

consideration of natural human inequality, especially as it applies to groups,

and because of a reaction to Nazi and other eugenicism, which made all

such ideas very taboo. And so these ideas, even when encountered in the

great thinkers of Western philosophy, were usually either ignored or

otherwise merely denounced and therefore misunderstood.

This book will hopefully serve as a correction to this deliberate “hole”

in our knowledge of the classics. It is also a beginning attempt to engage the

new biological sciences from the point of view of the tradition of Western

philosophy. I do not do so with any great thoroughness in detail, but only

with attention to the great foundational problem of nature itself. The

fundamental question of this book—the very origin of the idea of nature

and therefore ultimately of philosophy in the observation of biological

breeding—is likely to be of interest to those who are engaged with, or want

to engage, the new findings. And I add, again, that precisely those who are

morally or intellectually offended by such ideas would nevertheless have

much to gain from understanding why they are likely here to stay, where

they come from, and from understanding why philosophy has always had

this orientation.

A BRIEF ON PHILOSOPHY AND

TYRANNY

…You put to death Socrates the sophist, fellow citizens, because he was shown to have been the

teacher of Critias, one of the Thirty [Tyrants] who put down the democracy…

—Aeschines, Against Timarchus

Tell my friends and companions that I have done nothing weak or unworthy of philosophy

—message sent to the Academy by Hermias

tyrant of Atarneus, upon his execution

That is the turbulent and uncanny thing about Greek history…With the Greeks, things go forward

swiftly, but also as swiftly downwards…What took place with the Greeks (that each great thinker,

believing he possessed absolute truth, became a tyrant, so that Greek intellectual history has had the

violent, rash, and dangerous character evident in its political history) was not exhausted with them…

—Friedrich Nietzsche,

Human all too Human, “Tyrants of the Spirit”

I. The Problem of Tyranny

What is tyranny? On one hand this question seems natural to political

life and has accordingly been asked and answered almost as long as

political thinking has existed. But in the tradition of political philosophy,

and especially in its beginnings, it becomes a vital concern, almost a

fixation. At the very birth, not of “political thought,” but of political

philosophy, if not of philosophy itself, stands the gruesome and seductive

person of the tyrant as an x that must be somehow condemned with

rhetoric, dissolved in argument, or papered over with sophistries. Among

the early Socratics in particular this question assumes a menacing

significance and is treated with special urgency: the descriptions of Plato

and Aristotle still remain perhaps the most famous treatments. But why

does early political philosophy show such an intense interest in this

problem?

Scholarship on tyranny in the 20

century has, for many reasons,

ignored this last question. To understand this apparently casual omission, I

look briefly at the three principal ways in which the (relatively recent)

literature has tended to treat the problem of ancient tyranny. These three

ways correspond roughly to three scholarly disciplines, of the historian, the

political scientist, and the political philosopher, although there is obviously

some overlap, especially between the last two. This will also serve as a

general introduction to the origin of the problem I plan to treat in my

dissertation.

Modern historians have for the most part treated the question of “what

is tyranny” in the predictable ways: tyranny is reduced to the problem of its

emergence; and in particular the focus is on the impersonal and “historical”

forces or trends that are to account for its emergence.

[liii]

The three trends

most often invoked have been: economic developments, innovations in

military organization, and sociological changes peculiar to the Greek world.

The economic argument, originally based on the mistaken assumption that

coinage arrived in the Greek world prior to the rise of tyrants, holds that a

growing commercial class in the seventh and sixth centuries nursed

resentment against the traditional landed nobility and raised up one of its

own as a champion.

[liv]

The argument based on military innovation is

generally that the switch from cavalry to hoplite warfare resulted in a power

shift to the middle classes (which formed the backbone of the phalanx) and

that these in turn, lacking political traditions, again, raised up one of their

own against the mounted nobility.

[lv]

Finally, the sociological argument is

based on the idea that tyranny was a consequence of ethnic strife between

Dorian and non-Dorian populations in the Greek cities.

[lvi]

More perceptive historians have noted that these theories have serious

and specific flaws of chronology, etc., and, as should be obvious to anyone

remotely familiar with the ancient literature, are unconvincing at face value.

Ancient sources emphasize the hubris and peculiarity of the tyrant; they say

nothing about the causes alleged by modern scholars. In modern words the

tyrant would be a highly individualistic “egotist,” concerned with his own

glory and riches, and driven by philotimia, by the love of honor. Although

“false consciousness” could conceivably be argued even in the case of men

like Periander and Clearchus—to the point of parody perhaps—some

historians have remained truer to the ancient descriptions, and to the

available historical evidence, by focusing on the motivations and methods

of the tyrant himself, rather than on impersonal historical “trends.” For

example Robert Drews, in a brief and excellent article on the first tyrants,

has made a strong case that tyranny became a common phenomenon when

ambitious, honor-loving individuals, inspired by the example of Lydian and

Carian usurpers in Asia Minor, decided to effect coups in various Greek

cities with the aid of foreign adventurers and mercenaries equipped with the

newly-developed hoplite technology.

[lvii]

There is no need to resort to

impersonal abstractions and historical “forces”: “philotimia, the examples

of Gyges and Psammetichus, and the availability of hoplite epikouroi may

suffice to explain the first tyrants in Greece.”

[lviii]

The point to remember is

that in the scholarship that remains most faithful at least to the surface of

the ancient sources, the focus is shifted to the tyrant’s motivations and his

peculiar methods and “role models.”

The situation of “tyranny” in political science is more limited than it

should be. Modern political scientists have traditionally had little interest in

the general subjects of my dissertation: ancient tyranny and its treatment in

the ancient literature. There are several important reasons for this. On one

hand, the general assumption in the early 20

century, but even after World

War II, was that classical tyranny was a thing of the past. Modern

phenomena that might be called tyrannies were, and still are, categorized

rather as forms of totalitarianism, dictatorship, etc., and classified according

to abstract criteria such as “authoritarianism”; as such the modern definition

of the tyrant is frequently unlike the ancient—according to one observer,

some modern regimes are called “dictatorships” that should rather be called

“tyrannies,” and some regimes are called “tyrannies” that should rather be

called “postconstitutional rule.”

[lix]

The analysis of such contemporary

political phenomena is almost always, like the corresponding historical

scholarship on ancient tyranny, in terms of impersonal forces, be they

economic, sociological, and so on. But the unelaborated assumption is that

ancient tyranny belongs to a different historical horizon and that studying it

would tell us little about our own situation; and that, in any case, even with

the best historical methods, information would necessarily be limited. A

similar assumption holds regarding the treatment of tyranny in ancient (or

even modern) political philosophy: political scientists assume that what

Plato or Machiavelli might have to say about tyranny is colored by an

agenda, or is limited by a narrow historical horizon and political situation.

Accordingly little more than a formal nod in the name of “historical

interest” is ever given either to ancient tyranny as such or to its treatment in

traditional political philosophy.

The situation is further confused by the academic treatment of the

subject of modern totalitarianism, and whether it is a phenomenon distinct

from ancient tyranny. The “classic” modern case for why totalitarianism is a

new phenomenon may be found in the work of Hannah Arendt.

[lx]

Totalitarianism is perceived as a novel form of regime based on the twin

application of ideology and terror; the former, defined as the “logic of an

idea” that unfolds in history as a movement, is understood to be specifically

modern in character and unknown to the tradition of classical political

philosophy. Arendt emphasizes in this respect the “scientific” character of

modern ideological tyrannies

[lxi]

(or totalitarianisms). Other modern

treatments that directly address the possible difference between modern and

ancient varieties of tyranny similarly tend to focus on the specifically

“scientific” character of modern tyranny, its origin in the attempt to conquer

nature.

[lxii]

More important even than ideology in constituting modern

tyrannies is the institution of the Party, that is, the permanent and aggressive

mobilization of society through a one-party state; something unknown in

antiquity in practice if not in theory. To this end, modern treatments of

tyranny that are especially useful include Samuel Huntingon’s Political

Order in Changing Societies,

[lxiii]

wherein praetorian regimes with

relatively weak basis in society and weak institutions are contrasted to

revolutionary regimes of mass society, which tend to have extensive grass-

roots penetration of society by a party apparatus. In this respect, however,

modern tyranny or totalitarianism is somewhat different in character from

ancient tyranny, and the modern totalitarian despot a different type from the

ancient tyrant; and while modern totalitarianism may reflect the character of

modern science to a certain extent, it is of no explanatory value in

understanding the emergence of ancient philosophy, which is the subject

that ultimately interests us here.

An attempt, however minor, to restore the power of classical political

philosophy, and a major challenge to the way of thinking just described,

appeared in 1948 when Leo Strauss published On Tyranny. This

commentary on Xenophon’s Hiero, in the present edition

[lxiv]

published

together with a debate (and correspondence) with Alexander Kojève, is also

in part the inspiration for this thesis. Very broadly speaking, the attempt

was to show that what classical political philosophy had to say about

tyranny is still very relevant to our own time—and perhaps that Xenophon

described modern tyrannies better, that is, in a more fundamental and

political sense, than does modern political science, with its new categories

or definitions. It is very interesting, then, that the particular focus of

Strauss’ inquiry, as also of Kojève’s response, is again the motivation and

aim of the tyrant, the tyrant as a type.

[lxv]

This is then in broad agreement

with what I would take to be the most advanced and accurate historical

scholarship on the subject, briefly discussed above. Both agree that the

issue at hand is the motivation and the method of the tyrant himself. To take

a step back for a moment: it would seem that precisely here, in the study of

“tyranny” it is impossible to reduce human agency to an impersonal force

or to the milieu; the study of “tyranny,” more so than any other political

phenomenon perhaps, is not separable from the human actor, in this case the

person or persona of the tyrant.

II. Origin and Statement of Thesis

If then inspired by Strauss one is to turn to classical political

philosophy for understanding the problem of tyranny the following rather

straightforward and superficial observation could be made. The casual or

conventional answer as to why political philosophy had a preoccupation

with the problem of tyranny, inspired in part by the historical circumstances

of the late 5

century Hellenic world, by the actual rhetoric of the

philosophers themselves, by the elaborations of their disciples both ancient

and modern, and by simple credulousness, would seem to be the following:

tyranny represents a special and critical “disease” of political life. It was,

furthermore, a widespread and virulent disease at the time that the first

political philosophers began their work. So it is only natural that the

Socratics, for example, would be especially concerned with the origin of

this disease and would, in a spirit of love for their fellow citizens, give free

peoples advice for how to avoid the disaster. Or that they would exhort to a

different and more virtuous life those able political men who might be

tempted to pursue tyranny.

[lxvi]

This “answer,” already marked in the

Platonic corpus, culminates in a particular philosophic genre, highly

developed by late Hellenistic and Roman times: the famous exhortation

given by the philosopher to the just king, to avoid tyranny and embrace a

lawful monarchy of justice.

[lxvii]

On closer inspection of the texts, however, it becomes clear this was

not the opinion of the cities regarding the relationship between philosophy

and tyranny, at least not in the beginnings. Rather the ancient prejudice was

instead that philosophy was somehow associated with tyranny as such—

perhaps in the sense that tyrants so often seemed to have received part of

their education from philosophers. Or perhaps in the sense that both seemed

so free, dangerously free, of conventional moral notions and conventional

piety—free to the point of criminality. This is part of what made

philosophers highly suspect figures at least when they first appeared. The

quotation with which we began, from Aeschines’ speech Against

Timarchus, delivered before a large audience, in which he casually refers to

how “you put to death Socrates the sophist, fellow citizens, because he was

shown to have been the teacher of Critias, one of the Thirty [Tyrants] who

put down the democracy,” is rather more revealing of what the ancient

prejudice was.

That is to say, before political philosophy, or philosophy, became

established as a tradition, the answer to the question “what is tyranny” was

somewhat different. And it is this pre-philosophical political understanding

that I aim to recapture and also elaborate in my dissertation. The connection

between philosophy and tyranny at bottom has to do with the necessities of

educating the first philosophers. Such an education, in an era in which

philosophy does not exist established as a tradition, that is, when

philosophy is in its beginnings, necessarily risks the production instead of a

tyrant—it depends on encouraging a political orientation that is tyrannical

from the point of view of the polis; and it trains certain skills and abilities

that are “tyrannical.” This thesis is fundamentally an attempt to show that

there was something true to the ancient prejudice that considered

philosophy as suspiciously and fundamentally associated with tyranny.

In this connection, it may be useful to note that there have been a few

recent studies published already on the link between reason and tyranny or

philosophy and tyranny; these tend to focus, however, predictably on Greek

drama—the Oedipus cycle has been especially important in such

interpretation. Inspired, as is also this dissertation, by Leo Strauss’ insights

on the fundamental tension between reason and tradition, the philosopher

and the ancient city, such studies have looked at the connection between

tyranny and reason in terms of a common antagonistic relationship to the

past, to tradition and convention; and a countervailing faith in the usurping

power of reason to reshape man’s relationship to society and the universe.

[lxviii]

It is in the work of Nietzsche, however, that we find the most explicit

and profound reflections on how philosophy and tyranny are related at their

very roots, and on how the philosopher and the tyrant are in fact the same

“type.” According to Nietzsche the decline of an aristocratic regime—the

decline in particular of the Greek polis—leads to the emergence both of

tyranny and of philosophy. An era that gives birth to philosophy is

necessarily one where the danger of tyranny is ever-present. This

Nietzschean idea of the birth of philosophy and tyranny, as twins, out of the

spirit of aristocracy is quite strange. In what sense can it be said that

“aristocracy” or an aristocratic regime is the precondition for philosophy?

And what precisely is the relationship of these to tyranny? A third striking

question follows upon these: since both Nietzsche and Strauss, as well as

the tradition of political philosophy, agree that philosophy stands or falls by

the discovery of the idea of nature and therefore that the discovery of nature

is the proximate precondition for the emergence of political philosophy—in

what way then does nature emerge as an idea or as a standard out of the

aristocratic regime? What, in the end, is the meaning of “nature,” of

“human nature,” at the very beginnings of political philosophy?

This thesis, as a defense of the ancient city’s prejudice against

philosophy and its criminal associations with tyranny, is therefore also an

attempt to find the historical, literary, and philosophical sources, in

antiquity, for Nietzsche’s striking idea that philosophy and tyranny are

somehow radically connected. Such a study then may be of interest, not

only to students of the political thought of Nietzsche himself, but also to

those concerned with the meaning and origins of aristocracy as a regime,

with the relationship of philosophy to political society, with tyranny as

such; it may also be of interest to those concerned with the thought of Leo

Strauss, in that it represents a possible alternative—Nietzsche’s take, or

Nietzsche’s hypothetical response—to the same subjects that drove Strauss’

own investigations.

In fine, then, a provisional version of the thesis will now be stated:

This thesis is an attempt to show that the aristocratic regime, and

aristocratic morality, is the origin of the idea of nature; that, at the point at

which a historical aristocracy starts to decline, its defenders, in abstracting

and radicalizing the case for aristocracy in the face of its critics, come

upon the teaching of nature and the standard of nature in politics. It is

precisely this teaching of nature, so corrosive of all convention and all

morality, that is politically explosive, and that explains the deep connection

between philosophy—the criminal study of nature outside the city and

outside the myths and pieties of the regime—and tyranny—the criminal and

feral regime of rule outside and above all law and all convention.

I have now used somewhat poetic or extreme language. This is a

consequence of the fact that here, as elsewhere in the thesis, I alternatively

adopt the voice of the ancient city—according to which, for example, the

study of nature is indeed criminal—or the voice of the author whose case I

am making. This is done partly for convenience, but more so for the sake of

understanding and making clear ideas that are by necessity very foreign to

us. Much of this thesis is devoted to investigating Nietzsche’s claims and

ideas regarding aristocracy, tyranny, philosophy, and so forth; much of it—

for example the chapter on Plato—is an attempt at a “Nietzschean” reading

of Plato, as an alternative or answer to Strauss’ reading of Plato. It is then

important, for the sake of clarity, to state in as matter-of-fact a manner as

possible ideas that may often therefore be disturbing or even shocking from

a modern point of view.

But if we are to truly understand the ancient city’s objection to

philosophy, it is important to try, as far as is possible, to tunnel into the

worldview of the ancient city and temporarily adopt this worldview for our

own. Similarly, if one is to follow Nietzsche’s guidance and investigate the

roots of the idea of nature in aristocratic regime and ethics, one would do

well to make an effort—even if it is ultimately fruitless or at least very

difficult—to attempt to conceive of aristocracy as it conceived of itself, that

is, before philosophy and before the abstractions inherent in political

philosophy. To understand the emergence of philosophy out of the pre-

philosophical world one must make an attempt to understand the

prephilosophical regime as it understood itself—without the aid of

philosophical or of modern notions. Therefore the reader is informed that,

throughout this thesis, on account of this very attempt at a

“phenomenological” or inner understanding of certain political phenomena,

in the course of trying to adopt the ancient city’s worldview for our own,

premodern and often uncomfortable ideas will be restated in a matter-of-

fact manner, without either approbation or condemnation.

The thesis is divided into three parts, in the course of which the same

idea is repeated and developed in three different ways. The first part treats

the emergence of the standard of nature out of the prephilosophical mind:

the beginning is a brief attempt at a phenomenology of the ancient, indeed

prehistoric mind generally, while the second half of the first chapter focuses

more on the problem of aristocracy and in particular of Greek remote

antiquity or pre-history. It is argued and concluded that the enigmatic idea

of nature—the necessary precondition, as we are to see, for both philosophy

and for tyranny—emerges uniquely out of the way of life and morality of a

certain type of aristocracy. The second part of the thesis, consisting of

chapters two and three—on Pindar and on Plato—is an attempt to show,

from Greek literature and from philosophy (in particular from the Socratic

school) how the standard of nature was elaborated as a defense for the

aristocratic regime and how, when radicalized, it explains the connection

between the philosopher and the tyrant as types, between the philosophical

and tyrannical orientations toward the city. It turns out that from the point

of view of the ancient city, the difference between the tyrant and the

philosopher collapses almost to nothing. Whether this view is ultimately

“correct” or not is a different matter; it is surely a limited view; there is

inherent value, however, in understanding why the ancient city came to this

conclusion, why the ancient prejudice against philosophy existed.

The last part and final chapter of the thesis is on Nietzsche, who

presents the most comprehensive and clearest theoretical and historical

elaboration of the idea. A new interpretation is given for features of

Nietzsche’s thought—the brutality of some of his rhetoric, the reason for his

turn to “physiology” and the body, his questionable statements on Plato—

that should already be familiar to scholars as well as casual readers of

Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s thought and in particular his rhetoric, his politics, is

understood as a response to the crisis caused by the collapse of the Platonic

project—the argument is made that Nietzsche saw an extreme response as

necessary in his own time because he believed that the possibility for

philosophy stood in the balance. Nietzsche, in any case, makes the clearest

possible connection between philosophy and tyranny, and the root or

ground of both of these in the aristocratic regime and its character as an

attempt to cultivate human nature.

CHAPTER ONE: BRIEF

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE

PREPHILOSOPHICAL POLITICAL

LIFE

Introduction to Chapter One—

This chapter is a study of the prephilosophic mind out of which the

idea of nature first emerged. It is divided in two parts, the first treating the

prephilosophical mind generally, the second being a rudimentary attempt at

a “phenomenology” of aristocracy or at a prephilosophic understanding of

Greek aristocracy. The aim is to show how the idea of nature—and

therefore the precondition for philosophy—emerges out of aristocratic life

or an aristocratic ethos. The origin of this claim is in Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s

own actual and full elaboration of this claim—that philosophy and also

tyranny uniquely emerge out of a certain type of a decaying aristocracy—

will be studied in the last chapter of the thesis.

The first claim I seek to establish in this chapter is that the

prephilosophic political mind and political society is characterized by a

form of primitive and totalitarian democracy, provisionally defined here as

the undisputed rule and sovereignty of a historically concrete people or tribe

through the ubiquity and supremacy of collective ancestral custom.

Ancestral custom—nomos—is ubiquitous and all-powerful. Therefore it

will be argued that one must not confuse the prephilosophic early chieftain

or king for anything other than a servant or slave of the convention and of

the needs of the collective. It is to be established in the second part of the

chapter that the introduction of a principle antagonistic to the fundamental

primitive democracy or collectivism is possible only through conquest by a

foreign tribe that continues to exist in some sense outside and above the

collective of the conquered, and consequently that this is the origin of most

if not all aristocracies that have existed.

Accordingly, the second part of this chapter treats the origin of

aristocracies and is a rudimentary attempt at a “prephilosophical”

understanding of aristocracy, particularly of ancient Greek aristocracy. The

claims I try to elaborate here are the following: a) that the Greek world is,

from as early as we can tell, stratified into a conquering and a conquered

people, an aristocratic element and a “banausic” or serf-like element. And

that the conquering or aristocratic caste already contains, from the

beginning, certain peculiar institutions that I will later show to bear directly

on the problem of tyranny and philosophy—in particular the institution of

an independent warrior class composed of youths; b) that these two features

of Greek life, namely the top-down imposition of order by a conquering

elite and the separate and independent status of the warrior class, is likely

what allows for a principle different from the fundamental democracy or

fundamental collectivism to emerge, albeit one still understood

“prephilosophically,” i.e., through the prism of myth; c) that this principle

consists, not in the preservation of a people or a collective, but in the

struggle for individual superiority, understood as a matter of the supremacy

of one’s “blood,” with direct analogy to the animal world, and which is

manifested through physical supremacy, vitality, and battle prowess, and in

the consequent acquisition of an “undying fame.”

It is this principle of aristocratic life or aristocratic morality, as

understood in the most primitive and even barbaric sense, that Nietzsche

believes is the origin of philosophy. In the following chapters we will see

how this standard, in fact the standard of nature, is first elaborated and

finally abstracted and radicalized first in Pindar, and later in Plato;

Nietzsche’s reading of antiquity will thus be considered from various points

of view in order to try to understand the substance of the enigmatic and

perhaps shocking connection he posits between philosophy and tyranny. In

this chapter the method is to look at the “primitive” mind—in particular the

Greek mind—as it existed before the emergence of philosophy and tyranny,

and to show how these developed in parallel out of certain common features

—prephilosophic forms of political organization and prephilosophic forms

of understanding the world.

I. General Features of the Prephilosophical Political Mind

a) Strauss, Hume, and Nietzsche on Necessity of Study of the

Prephilosophic; Terror as Matrix of Prephilosophic Society

It is not only in Nietzsche that one finds a concern with the elements of

the prephilosophical mind out of which philosophy develops. Much has

been written on this since, and recently; it suffices to mention the work of

Marcel Gauchet. This latter is in some ways characteristic of contemporary

concerns with the problem of “primitivism,” however, in that in his pursuit

of a genealogy of modern secularism and modern democracy out of the pre-

modern mind, he ends up basing many of his substantive insights on

Nietzsche himself, or on Nietzsche through Heidegger.

[lxix]

Gauchet does

this even while he criticizes Nietzsche perhaps for not going far enough on

Nietzschean grounds, and while disagreeing with Nietzsche’s political

opinions or orientation. Regardless, as to the substance of most

contemporary arguments, for understanding one would do well to turn to

their ultimate source in Nietzsche and to study Nietzsche himself.

Nietzsche’s view may be better understood by first considering the

alternative against which Nietzsche argued at some length, and which may

be provisionally called the “English” view of the history of morality or

religion. Nietzsche challenges this view while at the same time preserving

certain of its substantial insights. An important exception to the

aforementioned contemporary studies of the “premodern” mind, which is

based on an awareness both of the Nietzschean claims and of its

alternatives, may be found in the work of Leo Strauss. Leo Strauss’ chapter

three from Natural Right and History, “The Origin of the Idea of Natural

Right,” has been called the best interpretation of ancient conventionalism,

[lxx]

and contains an accessible and clear explanation for why the study of

the prephilosophic mind is important in the first place:

To understand the problem of natural right one must start, not from the “scientific”

understanding of natural things, but from their natural understanding, i.e., from the way in

which they present themselves in political life, in action, when they are our business, when we

have to make a decision…the first philosopher was the first man who discovered nature. The

whole history of philosophy is nothing but the record of the ever repeated attempts to grasp

fully what was implied in that crucial discovery which was made by some Greek twenty-six

hundred years ago or before. To understand that discovery in however provisional a manner,

one must return from the idea of nature to its prephilosophic equivalent.

[lxxi]

The beginning of Strauss’ chapter may indeed remind one of

Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s attempts to go back to the very beginning of

philosophy and discover the pre-philosophical matrix out of which it

emerged. But the language in the passage above does not really hark back to

Nietzsche or Heidegger, except in a negative sense; rather, it alludes to an

alternative and somewhat older source, namely, the beginning of David

Hume’s Natural History of Religion, which is as follows,

On the other hand, if, leaving the works of nature, we trace the footsteps of invisible power in

the various and contrary events of human life, we are necessarily led into polytheism and to

the acknowledgment of several limited and imperfect deities… We may conclude, therefore,

that, in all nations, which have embraced polytheism [i.e., the oldest, original and most

universal religious ideas], the first ideas of religion arose not from a contemplation of the

works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the

incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind.

[lxxii]

That Strauss may indeed be alluding to this passage is further

supported by the following two considerations. First, in his early work on

Spinoza,

[lxxiii]

Strauss points out that Epicurus and Epicurean philosophy in

general—the “most important” source of the 17

century criticism of

religion—had an explicit and immediate desire or motivating ground in

quelling fear of the gods. This must be considered not only in light of

Hume’s reference above to primitive religion being rooted in “incessant

fears,” but also to his more elaborate statements further on in the same

section, to the same effect, that the ground of primitive religion was

the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of

revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries. Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature,

especially the latter, men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes,

and examine the various and contrary events of human life.

In other words, if we are right in reading these passages from Hume

and Strauss together, and take account also of what Strauss wrote regarding

the motivating ground of Epicurean philosophy in Spinoza’s Critique of

Religion, it is fear, terror, the near-nihilistic experience of a void world that

in fact constitutes, at the deepest level, what Strauss dryly calls the “natural

understanding” or the prephilosophic understanding of the world “that is

our business,” and out of which philosophy or the discovery of nature arise,

perhaps in opposition. The world of political life, or action and commitment

that requires action, at least as it existed before its modification by

philosophy and the doctrine of nature, was grounded, maybe, in the

fundamental fear or vision of fundamental chaos out of which early

paganism or polytheism arose as salutary salves. This view finds more

support when we consider Strauss’ words at the end of City and Man,

where Fustel de Coulanges is mentioned:

We would have great difficulty in doing justice to this remote or dark side of the city but for

the work of men like Fustel de Coulanges above all others who have made us see the city as it

primarily understood itself as distinguished from the manner in which it was exhibited by

classical philosophy: the holy city in contradistinction to the natural city…the pre-philosophic

city…which sees itself as subject and subservient to the divine or looks up to it. Only by

beginning at this point will we be open to full impact of the question which is coeval with

philosophy although the philosophers do not frequently pronounce it—the question quid sit

deus.

[lxxiv]

What is the “remote or dark side” of the prephilosophic city? In this

connection note one more piece of evidence that supports the general idea

that Strauss is leading the reader to an intimation, not especially discussed

openly anywhere, of a connection between the primitive religious

imagination and the feeling of terror. In Natural Right and History in the

middle of a discussion on Weber, Strauss makes a case that would appear to

back up this provisional interpretation: Weber is presented as a “noble

nihilist,” whose theory of the distinction between facts and values, which

leads to “complete chaos,” to an abyss of nihilism, is itself grounded in the

realization that commitment to causes or ideals—political life, that “matters

to us”—requires religious belief, and that such belief is understood primally

as an irrational decision or bridge spanning the fundamental chaos, abyss or

meaninglessness of existence.

[lxxv]

Strauss, with a politic turn, backs away

from such serious if not Nietzschean- and Heideggerian-sounding

speculations, but the ground is already laid for the suggestion, which

Strauss hints at elsewhere as well, that modern historicism, the parallel of

ancient conventionalism, which rejects the possibility of philosophy, does

so because it is motivated by a vision of “complete chaos” or the abyss out

of which only “gods or the gods” can save us. That is, modern radical

historicism, the parallel of ancient pagan conventionalism, is understood,

like that pre-philosophical conventionalism, to be motivated by the

experience of fundamental terrors against which gods or the religious sense

arise, “not from a contemplation of nature but from regard to the events of

Life, of incessant hopes and fears…”

Thus the Humean view is that the most fundamental experience of the

prephilosophic or premodern mind is terror or fear, and that the religious

experience that precedes conventions arises out of this matrix of fear. But is

this the Straussian view? Or is it more likely that Strauss is here in

characteristic fashion drawing out the two alternatives and calling attention

to the crucial issue on which Nietzsche and Hume differ? It is precisely on

this subject of the relationship of the religious nature to morality that

Nietzsche and Hume fundamentally differ. In his own essay on Nietzsche,

Strauss quite explicitly contrasts Nietzsche with Hume on this matter:

The fifth chapter [of Beyond Good and Evil]—the central chapter—is the only one whose

heading (“Toward the natural history of morality”) refers to nature. Could nature be the theme

of this chapter or even of the whole second part of the book? …Nietzsche makes a distinction

between nature and life, just as, on another occasion he makes a distinction between nature

and “us” (human beings). The opposite of life is death which is or may be no less natural than

life. The opposite of the natural is the unnatural: the artificial, the domesticated, the

misbegotten, the anti-natural, i.e., the unnatural may very well be alive.…When stating the

case for an empirical study, a description, of the various moralities Nietzsche states at the same

time the case against the possibility of a philosophic ethics, a science of morals which teaches

the only true morality. It would seem that he makes higher demands on the student of religion

than on the student of morality. This is perhaps the reason why he did not entitle the third

chapter “The natural history of religion”: Hume had written an essay entitled “The Natural

History of Religion.”

[lxxvi]

Here there is again in the words of Strauss a distinction between

“nature” and “life” or “nature” and “us,” just as in the words of Hume there

is a distinction between conceiving of things from “contemplation of the

works of nature” on one hand, and “concern with regard to the events of

life, and incessant hopes and fears,” for us, on the other. Yet, though Strauss

himself, in his own voice, echoes this distinction in Natural Right and

History, here he very explicitly contrasts Nietzsche’s position with Hume’s.

The disagreement between the two thinkers obviously has to do with how

they understand religion—including ancient, pagan religion—and the

relationship of religion to science on one hand, and to morality on the other.

Let us briefly summarize these two different approaches—the “English,”

and the “Nietzschean”—before proceeding to the demonstration of the main

claims made in the introduction to this chapter.

For Hume a natural history of religion is possible because religion, and

specifically primitive religion, though it has a root in the passions,

nevertheless can be understood rationally, that is, on broadly utilitarian

grounds. Action rooted in the passions may itself be “irrational,” but it can

nevertheless be comprehended rationally. The examples of irrationality that

Hume invokes in his essay represent a series of logical mis-steps or errors

by early man who, finding himself in a dangerous, confusing world, and

living in insecurity and fear for his life, makes entirely wrong but entirely

plausible mistakes about the character of natural forces, his relationship to

them, and the possibility of assuaging them as they become personalized in

the form of gods and demons. This “English view” is much the same as the

position of the later James George Frazer, whose monumental work on the

elements of the prehistoric and prephilosophical understanding is to be

considered below.

[lxxvii]

In this way of thinking, although the character of

early religion is understood as irrational because based on passions,

nevertheless these appear somehow to be available to rational

comprehension, or calculation, because ancient man wanted much the same

things as modern, civilized man. And it is possible to judge the character of

religious belief scientifically, as it were, or naturally, that is, reducing it to a

calculation comprehensible to scientific reason, even if, at bottom, the

original calculation should be based on logical mistakes regarding the

character of natural phenomena, and on passionate desires. These desires

themselves are available to natural or scientific analysis. Which is to say, an

external position may be taken to understanding the character of early

religion and therefore of early convention. And so religion itself seems to

grow out of morality, perhaps as an idelogical superstructure for moral

needs—if only a utilitarian or hedonistic morality.

Nietzsche rejects this vision as “English.”

[lxxviii]

As Strauss points out,

Nietzsche does not believe in “a science of morals which teaches the only

true morality,” and this specifically includes rational or utilitarian morality:

rather for Nietzsche what is natural is only the binding or burdening of man

to precisely unnatural and unreasonable laws. “Over and against the ruinous

permissiveness of anarchism Nietzsche asserts that precisely long lasting

obedience to unnatural and unreasonable nomoi is the ‘moral imperative of

nature.’ Physis calls for nomoi while preserving the distinction, nay,

opposition of physis and nomos.”

[lxxix]

Nietzsche’s rejection of a rational

morality is based on his rejection of a utilitarian morality; it is precisely the

binding of man to arbitrary, even absurd laws, to laws which serve no

particular benefit, that is the character of morality. Religion, premodern

polytheism then, cannot emerge out of a utilitarian morality as in the model

of Hume. Peoples themselves are the result of the founding acts of creative

prophets; much as in Rousseau, Nietzsche believes such prophets or

founders—legislators in the highest sense—are the origin therefore of

mores and conventions by which peoples live. In this task the founder uses

religion, but the religious experience of such founders, and by extension

religious experience in general, is therefore not reducible to calculation of

benefit or of self-interest. And even in cases where a primitive tribal

morality emerges out of the necessities of daily life, it’s not possible to

reduce this only to the satisfaction of rational material desires or needs

because man is often more motivated instead by pride, by the need for

distinction, by the need for superiority over neighbors, by the need to

subsume individual to group, and often to do so for entirely irrational

reasons that merely reaffirm morality for the sake of morality. Hence

Nietzsche’s famous example of Kamchatka natives at Dawn 16 where

useless commandments are emphasized; or his more famous treatment of

the non-utilitarian origin of all enduring moral codes in Zarathustra “Of

The Thousand and One Goals.”

In fine, although according to Strauss, it appears that in some limited

sense both Nietzsche and Hume agree that the experience of fear or terror is

the “original” primitive experience, they differ substantially on how early

man responded to this experience. The matter of prephilosophic mind and

religion is straightforward for Hume and in general for “English

psychologists” because it has a basis in a rational, preservationist, utilitarian

morality; but it is a complicated matter for Nietzsche because it cannot be

determined by such calculation. Nietzsche, while appreciating the cynicism

and the “shoving the partie honteuse of our inner world into the

foreground” of the English psychologists

[lxxx]

believes they on one hand do

not go far enough in revealing the shameful, irrational, and even violent

origins of morality; while, on the other hand, they are incapable of

understanding the variety in human nature and therefore the heights (and

depths) that human nature can reach. This is in part because of their

commitment to a utilitarian (and therefore already a democratic) morality,

and in part because of their lack of a “historical sense,” which makes the

English historians of morality incapable of producing accurate genealogies.

[lxxxi]

They assume that premodern men were similar to modern Englishmen

in their passions, not seeing that different men desire different things, and in

particular that the desire for glory is fundamentally different from the desire

for comfort. They therefore misunderstand the prephilosophic mind,

believing it to be fundamentally motivated by self-interest, benefit,

calculation, comfort, tit-for-tat reciprocity.

What follows is a short genealogy of the idea of nature out of the

prephilosophic mind—the fundamental task, at least, which Nietzsche, the

“English,” and Strauss all agree must be undertaken. Both Nietzsche and

the “English” view—in particular the insights of Frazer—must be

considered in order to arrive at a more complete view of the ancient mind.

The ubiquity of ancestral convention or nomos, the religious character of

this nomos, and the character of primitive society as a fundamental

“totalitarian” democracy will be considered in turn.

b) prephilosophic ubiquity of ancestral nomos; religious character of

nomos

The general feature that Strauss attributes to the pre-philosophical

society is the following: the ubiquity, or if one may exaggerate in a manner

uncongenial to Strauss, the totalitarianism of nomos, “custom” or “way”

both as explanatory principle of human behavior in general, and as

authoritative principle or standard for behavior in one’s own tribe. In the

example that Strauss gives, “barking and wagging the tail is the way of

dogs, menstruation is the way of women, the crazy things done by madmen

are the way of madmen, just as not eating pork is the way of Jews and not

drinking wine is the way of Moslems.”

[lxxxii]

The more general definition

that Strauss gives to go along with these examples is that prior to the

discovery of nature “no fundamental distinction was made between customs

which are always and everywhere the same and customs or ways which

differ from tribe to tribe.”

The first corollary of this basic definition is that it is not just a kind of

“law” or “custom” or “convention” that is in question here, but something

far more fundamental and all-encompassing. It has been noted by others

that it is a mistranslation and therefore gross misunderstanding to see nomos

simply as “law,” as is often done. This mistranslation allows for

inappropriate comparisons between what is meant by “rule of law” in

classical times and in modern times. Nomos is a word that encompasses far

more than “law” and indeed far more than “convention,” a word with

vaguely contractarian overtones, mean to us today. Carl Schmitt makes the

point that,

As long as the Greek word nomos in the often-cited passages from Heraclitus and Pindar is

transformed from a spatially concrete, constitutive act of order and orientation—from the ordo

ordinans into a mere enactment of acts in line with an ought and, consistent with the manner

of thinking in the positivistic legal system, translated with the word law—all disputes about

interpretation are hopeless and all philological acumen fruitless. Matters are further

complicated by the fact that most philological interpreters obviously have no sense of how

totally the word law was functionalized by late 19

century jurists into the positivistic legal

system of the modern state apparatus, until legality had become merely a weapon used at any

given time by those legislating against the part excluded from legislation. In reality the words

of Heraclitus and Pindar mean only that all subsequent regulations of a written or unwritten

kind derive their power from the inner measure of an original, constitutive act of spatial

ordering. This original act is nomos. All subsequent developments are either results of and

expansions of this act or else redistributions (anadasmoi)—either a continuation on the same

basis or a disintegration of and departure from the constitutive act of the spatial order

established by land-appropriation, the founding of cities, or colonization.

[lxxxiii]

Nomos is an all-encompassing primordial act of foundation. It is worth

considering the historian Burckhardt’s own congruent words on the dignity

and power of the ancient meaning of nomos as opposed to most modern

usages of “law,” “convention” and even “constitution”:

There was also another sense and another form in which the polis regarded itself as an ideal

whole, and that is in its nomos, a word used to embrace the laws and with them the

constitution. Nomos is the higher objective power, supreme over all individual existence or

will, not satisfied merely to protect a citizen in return for taxes and military service, as in

modern times, but aspiring to be the very soul of the whole polis. Law and the constitution are

hymned in the most sublime phrases as the invention and gift of the gods, as the city’s

personality, as the guardians and preservers of all virtue. They are the “rulers of the cities,”

and Demaratus the Spartan seeks to explain to Xerxes that his people fear King Law (despotes

nomos) more than the Persians fear their Great King. The officials in particular are, as Plato

puts it, to be the slaves of the law. The lawgiver therefore appeared as a superhuman being,

and the glory of Lycurgus, Solon, Zaleucus and Charondas sheds a reflected light on much

later men, so that for instance, as late as about 400 BC the Syracusan law refomer Diocles

received heroic honors and even a temple after his death (Diodorus 13.35).

[lxxxiv]

Law or nomos retained this character for the city even to the end of the

Classical period, and was understood to have an all-pervading power to

determine daily life and thought; and even during the convulsions of the

Peloponnesian War, with its murderous civil strife between factions, it was

understood—at least for the purposes of lip service—that nomos as an

original constitutive act was something that lay quite outside the self-

interest of parties, let alone that of the individual—a permanent

“convention” constitutive of the citizen as such, and therefore outside the

vagaries of day-to-day political (let alone economic) interests:

Above all, nomos must not pander to the transitory interests and caprices of the individual or

of those who happen to be in the majority. It was strongly felt, at least in theory, that old laws

should be retained; indeed, customs and manners which were even older than laws, and had

perhaps been in force from the very foundation of the city, were recognized as having a vigor

of which the laws were only the outward expression. And even inadequate laws, as long as

they were strictly observed, seemed a better guarantee of stability than change would be.

Alcibiades said as much in the conclusion of his great speech in favor of the expedition to

Sicily. In certain states boys had to learn the laws by heart, set to a tune or cadence, not just to

fix them in the memory but to ensure that they became unalterable. (The Greek word nomos

has the double meaning of law and melody.)

[lxxxv]

These statements on the supremacy of nomos or custom receive strong

support from a famous primary source, the statement of Herodotus where

he quotes Pindar on the matter of the nomos basileus:

I hold it then in every way proved that Cambyses was quite insane; or he would never have set

himself to deride religion and custom. For if it were proposed to all nations to choose which

seemed best of all customs, each, after examination, would place its own first; so well is each

convinced that its own are by far the best. It is not therefore to be supposed that anyone, except

a madman, would turn such things to ridicule. I will give this one proof among many from

which it may be inferred that all men hold this belief about their customs. When Darius was

king, he summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them for what price they would

eat their fathers’ dead bodies. They answered that there was no price for which they would do

it. Then Darius summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and

asked them (the Greeks being present and understanding through interpreters what was said)

what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he

should not speak of so horrid an act. So firmly rooted are these beliefs; and it is, I think, rightly

said in Pindar’s poem that custom is lord of all.

[lxxxvi]

It is interesting that one of the few examples of “nomos” that Strauss

gave in his initial definition included “the crazy things done by madmen are

the way of madmen”; and that he followed this rather strange example with

one regarding different religious restrictions on diet. We see now that

Herodotus presents his famous example of the nomos basileus (concerning

religious differences on burial and—diet) after explaining the “mad acts” of

the Persian king Cambyses against his subjects: the three examples

Herodotus names are one of desecration of graves and two of desecration of

temples. Which is to say, according to Herodotus quite explicitly the

decisive meaning of custom or nomos—as Strauss himself later reveals—

has to do more with what today we would casually call the specifically

religious dimension of human life. If one can deduce anything from

Strauss’ strange reference to the “way of madmen,” it would be, when

compared to Herodotus’ own account of Cambyses’ complete disregard for

nomos or “way,” that there are certain beings whose way is opposed to way

as such, that there is a nomos that is fundamentally anti-nomos. Let us leave

this speculation behind for a moment. It becomes clear from Herodotus’,

Schmitt’s, and Burckhardt’s accounts, that nomos refers perhaps to beliefs

and laws shrouded in antiquity, the divine, and so on, that regulate behavior

regarding everything in daily life—menstruation, copulation, drinking, and

so forth.

The power of nomos for the prephilosophical mind, its unified and

undisputed political and religious power, is vouchsafed by its ancestral

origin. As Burckhardt hints already, nomos is supreme because it is

ancestral; and, as Strauss adds, it is “our own” because it belongs to “our

ancestors.” That is, consequent upon the totality of custom is the

identification of the way or custom of one’s own tribe with the good, and

from this follows the identification of the ancestral with the good and of

what is one’s own with the good:

“Our” way is the right way because it is both old and “our own,” or because it is both “home-

bred and prescriptive.” Just as “old and one’s own” was originally identical with right or good,

so “new and strange” originally stood for bad. The notion connection “old” and “one’s own” is

“ancestral.” Prephilosophic life is characterized by the primeval identification of the good with

the ancestral.

[lxxxvii]

Furthermore, one must note that Strauss maintains that the ancestral is

accepted as the source of the right, or is accepted as authoritative and

superior to us, because it is identified with the gods: the ancestral customs

are superior and authoritative because at some point in the most remote

antiquity they were established by gods, the sons of gods, or pupils of gods.

[lxxxviii]

One is reminded, casually, of Lycurgus the founder of the Spartan

constitution, who was a pupil of Apollo, and of the Spartan kings who were

said to be descended from Zeus, the sons of Heracles; of Cecrops, the

legendary half-reptile founder of Athens, who chose its patron goddess and

who instituted its most sacred rites regarding marriage and worship; of

Numa Pompilius, who established Roman laws, including especially

Roman marriage laws;

[lxxxix]

and so on.

Strauss is single-minded in the pursuit of the means by which

philosophy or the philosophers refine the understanding of the ancestral, on

entirely logical grounds, in order to arrive at an understanding of nature. As

this thesis attempts to present an alternative view of the origin of the idea of

nature—out of the same elements, however, that Strauss himself considers

as constitutive of the prephilosophical mind—we must now depart

somewhat from Strauss as a source. For Strauss presents a plausible and

entirely reasonable means by which philosophy or philosophers themselves

refine prephilosophical ideas. But for Nietzsche the question, as we will

see, is what allows for the emergence of philosophy itself or the idea of

nature itself. And in this case the motivation for philosophizing is in large

part inseparable from the substance or content of that very philosophizing—

a concept that Strauss himself accepted at least for the case of the Epicurean

philosophy.

[xc]

For it is not at all clear, from what has just been said, how

there can ever be an “out” from a situation in which ancestral nomos rules

with such ubiquitous and undisputed power. There are therefore

intermediary steps that are necessary for the very emergence of the idea of

nature, let alone for the emergence of philosophers. This is all the more so

since primitive societies that are ruled by nomos seem to have the character

of a homogenous and fundamental “democracy,” perhaps totalitarian in

character, that allows for no free thought. Let us then move to a

consideration of this “totalitarian democracy,” and then of the intermediary

steps by which an idea different from and even antagonistic to nomos can

emerge in the first place.

c) early society as a “fundamental democracy”; the impotent character of

early kingship, the reduction of all primitive regime forms to “totalitarian

democracy”

In the work of Rousseau we find a simple but excellent discussion

of primitive religion, which somewhat parallels Strauss’ own, though it

makes certain important elaborations and additions that will be useful:

At first men had no kings save the gods, and no government save theocracy. They reasoned

like Caligula, and, at that period, reasoned aright. It takes a long time for feeling so to change

that men can make up their minds to take their equals as masters, in the hope that they will

profit by doing so.

From the mere fact that God was set over every political society, it followed that there

were as many gods as peoples. Two peoples that were strangers the one to the other, and

almost always enemies, could not long recognise the same master: two armies giving battle

could not obey the same leader. National divisions thus led to polytheism, and this in turn gave

rise to theological and civil intolerance, which, as we shall see hereafter, are by nature the

same… The fancy the Greeks had for rediscovering their gods among the barbarians arose

from the way they had of regarding themselves as the natural Sovereigns of such peoples. But

there is nothing so absurd as the erudition which in our days identifies and confuses gods of

different nations. As if Moloch, Saturn, and Chronos could be the same god! As if the

Phoenician Baal, the Greek Zeus, and the Latin Jupiter could be the same! As if there could

still be anything common to imaginary beings with different names!

If it is asked how in pagan times, where each State had its cult and its gods, there were no

wars of religion, I answer that it was precisely because each State, having its own cult as well

as its own government, made no distinction between its gods and its laws. Political war was

also theological; the provinces of the gods were, so to speak, fixed by the boundaries of

nations. The god of one people had no right over another… [This religion,] which is codified

in a single country, gives it its gods, its own tutelary patrons; it has its dogmas, its rites, and its

external cult prescribed by law; outside the single nation that follows it, all the world is in its

sight infidel, foreign and barbarous; the duties and rights of man extend for it only as far as its

own altars. Of this kind were all the religions of early peoples, which we may define as civil or

positive divine right or law.

[xci]

Rousseau makes roughly the same judgments that Strauss does, but he

extends the discussion somewhat—not only with vivid examples, but by

emphasizing the extreme particularity of the prephilosophic mind, which

naturally created such a gulf between different peoples.

[xcii]

Rousseau says

that in the beginning there was something akin to a perfect theocracy where

man had no kings and where the gods—or what he calls “positive divine

right or law”—held sway. This is similar to Strauss’ claim that nomos or

custom initially had absolute authority, and all authority derived from the

ancestral, with no reference to kingship or rule by men. The difference

between Strauss and Rousseau, however, comes from the fact that Rousseau

does refer to “the doctrine that ancient kings had, that they were descended

from gods,” a doctrine that Rousseau obviously believes to have arrived

later than the original and perfect theocracy (rule by divine law), but before

world-changing innovations such as philosophy, or, later, Christianity.

In this connection, the work of James George Frazer

[xciii]

in The

Golden Bough is most useful for understanding the transitional steps

through which the early theocracy of laws turns into a kingship. Frazer’s

work agrees with the views presented so far from Strauss, Rousseau, Hume,

and Burckhardt in several key ways. For example, Frazer understands early

religion to be based on two forms of magic, which on closer inspection are

but logical misunderstandings regarding the workings of nature. Yet these

misunderstandings are in a sense very “reasonable,” and contain the seeds

for later refinement into science and logic; this view posits that philosophy

(or science) evolves from and preserves certain elements of the

prephilosophic mind—itself in a sense a “resonable” if misguided attempt

to understand man and nature. Frazer’s account, however, is much more

thorough than what we have considered so far, and he pays very close

attention to the transition only hinted at by Rousseau—the transition

between a “total” regime of laws, and one where there is at least a form of

“sacral” or ceremonial kingship. The key insight to establish here is that

according to Frazer this early regime of laws is in fact a kind of “totalitarian

democracy.”

No human being is so hide-bound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage; in no

state of society consequently is progress so slow and difficult. The old notion that the savage is

the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master,

but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death,

and rule him with a rod of iron. What they did is the pattern of right, the unwritten law to

which he yields a blind unquestioning obedience. The least possible scope is thus afforded to

superior talent to change old customs for the better. The ablest man is dragged down by the

weakest and dullest, who necessarily sets the standard, since he cannot rise, while the other

can fall. The surface of such a society presents a uniform dead level, so far as it is

humanly possible to reduce the natural inequalities, the immeasurable real differences of

inborn capacity and temper, to a false superficial appearance of equality. From this low

and stagnant condition of affairs, which demagogues and dreamers in later times have lauded

as the ideal state, the Golden Age, of humanity, everything that helps to raise society by

opening a career to talent and proportioning the degrees of authority to men’s natural abilities,

deserves to be welcomed by all who have the real good of their fellows at heart.

[xciv]

The fundamental democracy of the primitive system to which both

Strauss and Rousseau refer in rather abstract terms, or rather the democracy

they imply, becomes very clear in this passage. Frazer is not alone in having

made such observations. One is reminded of course of Nietzsche’s rather

contemptuous remark that the earliest form of social organization, the most

primitive form, is the democratic and socialist commune.

[xcv]

Frazer adds

that the character of this original democracy is a despotism more absolute

than what we can imagine under any modern state: “For after all there is

more liberty in the best sense—liberty to think our own thoughts and to

fashion our own destinies—under the most absolute despotism, the most

grinding tyranny, than under the apparent freedom of savage life, where the

individual’s lot is cast from the cradle to the grave in the iron mould of

hereditary custom.”

[xcvi]

Over and against this fundamental and original democracy of sorts,

Frazer attempts to explain how it was that rule and kingship first developed.

It was the tribal sorcerer or magician who was able to use deceit to enhance

his own position that represents the earliest form of the king, or indeed,

which here seems to be the same, of the man who could in some way

escape nomos by manipulating it:

But in savage society there is commonly to be found in addition what we may call public

magic, that is, sorcery practised for the benefit of the whole community. Wherever ceremonies

of this sort are observed for the common good, it is obvious that the magician ceases to be

merely a private practitioner and becomes to some extent a public functionary. The

development of such a class of functionaries is of great importance for the political as well as

the religious evolution of society. For when the welfare of the tribe is supposed to depend on

the performance of these magical rites, the magician rises into a position of much influence

and repute, and may readily acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king. The profession

accordingly draws into its ranks some of the ablest and most ambitious men of the tribe,

because it holds out to them a prospect of honour, wealth, and power such as hardly any other

career could offer. The acuter minds perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother and

to play on his superstition for their own advantage. Not that the sorcerer is always a knave and

impostor; he is often sincerely convinced that he really possesses those wonderful powers

which the credulity of his fellows ascribes to him. But the more sagacious he is, the more

likely he is to see through the fallacies which impose on duller wits. Thus the ablest members

of the profession must tend to be more or less conscious deceivers; and it is just these men

who in virtue of their superior ability will generally come to the top and win for themselves

positions of the highest dignity and the most commanding authority.

[xcvii]

Frazer adds that it is precisely these “counter-virtues” so to speak, of

deceitfulness, knavery, wiliness that are most needful in a condition where

tradition and custom weigh down heavily on the human mind; indeed, the

mind itself is only liberated through such “immorality”:

The pitfalls which beset the path of the professional sorcerer are many, and as a rule only the

man of coolest head and sharpest wit will be able to steer his way through them safely. For it

must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put forward by the

magician as such is false; not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or

unconscious. Accordingly the sorcerer who sincerely believes in his own extravagant

pretensions is in far greater peril and is much more likely to be cut short in his career than the

deliberate impostor. The honest wizard always expects that his charms and incantations will

produce their supposed effect; and when they fail, not only really, as they always do, but

conspicuously and disastrously, as they often do, he is taken aback: he is not, like his knavish

colleague, ready with a plausible excuse to account for the failure, and before he can find one

he may be knocked on the head by his disappointed and angry employers.

[xcviii]

The issue at hand is the manipulation of custom and tradition by one

man for the purposes of energetic and intelligent rule. This brings us to the

main point of Frazer’s chapter, the necessity of the development of kingship

(as opposed to rule by divine law) for the emergence of “liberty in the best

sense,” that is, liberty to think one’s own thoughts, and the liberty to pursue

disinterested knowledge. These are but end-products of a process through

which the tyranny of ancestral nomos is overturned by an energetic,

deceitful man. The necessity of deceit, usurpation of convention, and finally

of the conquest of neighbors—these are all preconditions for the

development of what Frazer calls civilization and for the development of

science.

The general result is that at this stage of social evolution the supreme power tends to fall into

the hands of men of the keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous character…. Once

these elevating influences [of the magician/man of intelligence] have begun to operate—and

they cannot be for ever suppressed—the progress of civilisation becomes comparatively rapid.

The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry through changes in a single

lifetime which previously many generations might not have sufficed to effect…Even the

whims and caprices of a tyrant may be of service in breaking the chain of custom which

lies so heavy on the savage. And as soon as the tribe ceases to be swayed by the timid and

divided counsels of the elders, and yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind,

it becomes formidable to its neighbours and enters on a career of aggrandisement, which at an

early stage of history is often highly favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress.

For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker

tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some

classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of

devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most

powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man.

[xcix]

If we look past the rhetorical element of this presentation, with which

one may or may not agree, and perhaps if we manage for a moment to

restrain a desire to dismiss this passage as an example of fin-de-siecle

optimism regarding the progress of civilization, we then consider Frazer’s

main point here, which is that the early despot, inseparable from the figure

of the early magician, is perhaps one of the only means of breaking with the

absolute totality of nomos and tradition over every aspect of life and

thought: and that the rival to the rule of Custom is the sorcerer’s or the

king’s intelligence, which first may be expressed only through its

manipulations of popular belief in magic, magic meaning manipulation of

“natural” forces for profit. How precisely does this early kingship emerge

and what is its opponent?

The opponent of intelligence is the rule of the elders, the institution

through which the rule of custom, the rule of the ancestral, is made

concrete. For Frazer at least, it is clear that one of the ways kingship

develops is through an intelligent individual’s manipulation of the “public

profession of magic”: but how exactly does this happen? The magician’s

opponent in general is Custom and tradition. But this opponent is made

concrete and in-the-flesh through the elders who actually rule primitive

societies. The council of elders, or what Frazer calls the oligarchy of elders,

is the typical institution of rule in many tribal societies and exemplifies

concretely what Strauss calls the supreme authority that derives from the

ancestral. Elsewhere Frazer adds that,

These savages [in Central Australia] are ruled neither by chiefs nor kings. So far as their tribes

can be said to have a political constitution, it is a democracy or rather an oligarchy of old and

influential men, who meet in council and decide on all measures of importance to the practical

exclusion of the younger men. Their deliberative assembly answers to the senate of later times:

if we had to coin a word for such a government of elders we might call it a gerontocracy…

[c]

By contrast, in other parts of the world magicians and medicine men

manage to make a relatively complete break with the rule of elders and the

totality of custom; it is worth considering the wealth of colorful examples

that Frazer brings to support his claim of how precisely nomos is overcome

by the wily manipulator of magic and superstition:

In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings… According

to a native account, the origin of the power of Melanesian chiefs lies entirely in the belief that

they have communication with mighty ghosts, and wield that supernatural power whereby they

can bring the influence of the ghosts to bear… Still rising in the scale of culture we come to

Africa, where both the chieftainship and the kingship are fully developed; and here the

evidence for the evolution of the chief out of the magician, and especially out of the rain-

maker, is comparatively plentiful. Thus among the Wambugwe, a Bantu people of East Africa,

the original form of government was a family republic, but the enormous power of the

sorcerers, transmitted by inheritance, soon raised them to the rank of petty lords or chiefs. Of

the three chiefs living in the country in 1894 two were much dreaded as magicians… Again,

among the tribes of the Upper Nile the medicine-men are generally the chiefs. Their authority

rests above all upon their supposed power of making rain… In Western as well as in Eastern

and Central Africa we meet with the same union of chiefly with magical functions. Thus in the

Fan tribe the strict distinction between chief and medicine-man does not exist. The chief is

also a medicine-man and a smith to boot; for the Fans esteem the smith’s craft sacred, and

none but chiefs may meddle with it… Throughout the Malay region the rajah or king is

commonly regarded with superstitious veneration as the possessor of supernatural powers, and

there are grounds for thinking that he too, like apparently so many African chiefs, has been

developed out of a simple magician… The Dyaks of Sarawak believed that their famous

English ruler, Rajah Brooke, was endowed with a certain magical virtue which, if properly

applied, could render the rice-crops abundant. Hence when he visited a tribe, they used to

bring him the seed which they intended to sow next year, and he fertilised it by shaking over it

the women’s necklaces…

[ci]

In all these cases the manipulation of natural powers, in particular the

belief that the chief may control the vital powers of regeneration and

rebirth, having of course to do with crops and the condition of livestock,

begins slowly to trump the absolute rule of Custom or nomos. In a

humorous analogy or prefiguration of the power of the philosopher—a

humorous analogy that we should certainly not take too far—the sorcerer

gains power over the tribe and manages to escape the shackles of

convention by convincing his fellow men that he understands and can

control “the things in heaven and under the earth.”

Slowly, however, the magician-chief or –king begins to assume an

office that is more secure and that we can recognize historically in the great

Oriental despotisms: slowly, that is, the concept of divine kingship begins to

form, or the idea that the king is an incarnate god—of which Rousseau

earlier made mention. Frazer explains it in the following way:

But the great social revolution which thus begins with democracy and ends in despotism is

attended by an intellectual revolution which affects both the conception and the functions of

royalty…the magician gives way to the priest…it is often imagined that men may themselves

attain to godhead, not merely after their death, but in their lifetime, through the temporary or

permanent possession of their whole nature by a great and powerful spirit. No class of the

community has benefited so much as kings by this belief in the possible incarnation of a god in

human form.

[cii]

We can see from this last passage that the religious function of the

king, or the unity of priestly and kingly offices, which one would maybe

otherwise casually assume to come from the very earliest stages of

superstition, are in fact relatively “late” developments of relatively civilized

and complex societies. Several stages of development are necessary

between the primitive “rule by divine law” or “absolute authority of the

ancestral” to put it in Rousseau’s and Strauss’ words respectively, and the

later institution of dual priestly-kingly rule.

On the other hand early kingship, though it can often be characterized

as a despotism, is itself “bound” to custom in often severe ways. The power

of the early king is not so great, and often devolves into a merely

ceremonial, indeed, a sacrificial function. In this case nomos remains all-

powerful and the council of elders, the keepers of ancestral right, maintain

or reassert absolute control over the community: the king diminshes into a

sacrificial figure, sacrificed for the preservation of the tribe. Indeed, the

entire purpose of Frazer’s book is to explain a primitive Roman ritual where

a cultic “king of the wood,” lacking in all civil power, is “sacrificed.” While

this may indeed be an extreme example, it must be emphasized that

traditional kingship, whether of the divine form (where the king is a living

god) or of the sacral form (where the king rules by the grace and sanction of

a god) is by no means absolute rule, and that indeed the king may be

heavily burdened with extreme duties deriving from inherited custom—

Frazer’s sacrificial “king of the wood,” or the much-discussed West African

“scapegoat” sacrificial kings

[ciii]

being especially telling cases. Here are

some especially vivid examples of what primitive “kingship” actually

consists of:

The king of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, bears the title of Samorin or Samory. He “pretends

to be of a higher rank than the Brahmans, and to be inferior only to the invisible gods; a

pretention that was acknowledged by his subjects, but which is held as absurd and abominable

by the Brahmans, by whom he is only treated as a Sudra.” Formerly the Samorin had to cut his

throat in public at the end of a twelve years’ reign… There are some grounds for believing that

the reign of many ancient Greek kings was limited to eight years, or at least that at the end of

every period of eight years a new consecration, a fresh outpouring of the divine grace, was

regarded as necessary in order to enable them to discharge their civil and religious duties. Thus

it was a rule of the Spartan constitution that every eighth year the ephors should choose a clear

and moonless night and sitting down observe the sky in silence. If during their vigil they saw a

meteor or shooting star, they inferred that the king had sinned against the deity, and they

suspended him from his functions until the Delphic or Olympic oracle should reinstate him in

them. This custom, which has all the air of great antiquity, was not suffered to remain a dead

letter even in the last period of the Spartan monarchy; for in the third century before our era a

king, who had rendered himself obnoxious to the reforming party, was actually deposed on

various trumped-up charges, among which the allegation that the ominous sign had been seen

in the sky took a prominent place… That a king should regularly have been put to death at the

close of a year’s reign will hardly appear improbable when we learn that to this day there is

still a kingdom in which the reign and the life of the sovereign are limited to a single day. In

Ngoio, a province of the ancient kingdom of Congo, the rule obtains that the chief who

assumes the cap of sovereignty is always killed on the night after his coronation. The right of

succession lies with the chief of the Musurongo; but we need not wonder that he does not

exercise it, and that the throne stands vacant. “No one likes to lose his life for a few hours’

glory on the Ngoio throne.”

[civ]

In the passage above the role of the Brahmans as hereditary priests

could be seen as roughly analogous to the that of the primitive “council of

elders” in prephilosophic societies; similarly so for the ruling body that

could depose a Spartan king after eight years. It must be concluded then

that primitive society is a kind of totalitarian democracy, the rule of custom

is absolute and levels all, and “kingship” is originally in fact more of a

ceremonial or sacrificial function. One could almost observe a general rule

where the further the kingly office moves away from cultic and religious

trappings, the more actual power he has and vice versa. To consider yet

another example, although chieftainship and kingship are “well developed”

in Western Africa, and the chief certainly does wield power through the

channels Frazer indicates, he is in practice not only hamstrung by infinite

duties and inherited customs, but it could be argued that all effective power

is in fact in the hands of communal secret societies, often with cultic

foundations.

[cv]

Thus although Frazer’s account is very useful in explaining

how in many cases the notion of rule begins to distinguish itself out of the

fundamental or primitive “democracy,” one should not imagine that in

every case there is a linear development to Egyptian-style divine kingship

or Babylonian-style sacral kingship. In all cases, even including these latter

ones that form our archetypes of absolutist Oriental despotism, traditional

kingship is still heavily bound to custom; so much so that in some places

the kingship degenerates back into a cultic office, or even a ritually

sacrificial one.

[cvi]

Philosophy, as Strauss notes, can only be born once the concept of

nature appears. But it appears that the concept of nature itself can only

appear after the rather late institutions of sacral and divine kingship exist,

indeed after several other conditions are satisfied; and that, indeed, nature—

the “source” simultaneously of both philosophy and tyranny, as argued in

this thesis—really appears not as a rational concept, or by rational analogy

to abstractions, but rather as a manifestation or, one could go so far as to

say, a revelation. Its appearance, it must be emphasized, is late, it is rare,

and only follows the emergence of a certain kind of early kingship and

indeed the emergence of a certain kind of aristocracy that, unlike the early

sacral king, manages to free itself entirely from the absolute “rule of the

ancestral.” In the next section, we consider this matter in the context of the

development of Greek aristocracy.

II. Emergence of the Idea of Nature out of Greek Aristocratic Morality

a) The Aristocratic Principle as Distinct from the Primitive “Fundamental

Democracy”; Historical Origins of the Aristocratic Principle in the Greek

World and Elsewhere

In this section I show, first of all, that a principle of rule, or way of life,

different from that of primitive nomos, or the “fundamental democracy”

briefly described in the previous chapter, can likely only develop when a

native population is conquered and subdued by a foreign elite. That this

foreign, top-down imposition, most often by a pastoral population on top of

a farming population, is the origin of all genuine aristocratic morality,

which can for now be provisionally reduced to the dual ideas of liberty and

of breeding—the latter to be taken very literally. And that the elements

inherent in this early conquest are preserved within and fundamentally

constitute the aristocratic principle even after the two original populations

have fused ethnically or racially and the fact of conquest is forgotten. I

furthermore show that this model describes the Greek case, the origin and

character of Greek aristocratic morality.

Now, it should not be clear, from the account given above, how a

principle could have at all developed that was different from the “absolute

authority of the ancestral,” the primitive “perfect theocracy,” the early

“fundamental democracy” and domination by elders—whichever

formulation we should choose for the early “totalitarianism” of nomos.

From Strauss’ and Rousseau’s accounts at least it is not to be seen how,

given the situation they describe, a principle different from this could have

developed on its own. The primitive nomos is all-encompassing. The

individual in the tribe has no concept outside of the traditional tales and

customs handed down by which to understand the world, one’s entire

perception is dominated by magic rites under the control of the community;

life is a struggle for survival and the mind is dominated by frightening

natural forces that have to be propitiated communally, for example, to

guarantee the crops. To question tradition, or to show interest in the gods of

neighboring tribes, is, as Rousseau states, criminal and it is treason to begin

with. There are arguably tribes in our time, not to speak of historical times,

that never abandoned this condition. It is not clear how a tribe, considered

by itself, would be able to leave this condition.

It is true that Strauss goes into some detail to show how philosophy

preserved certain elements of the primitive worldview and how in some

way it can be seen as a logical refinement and “thinking through” of these

early perceptions and assumptions; but he by no means shows why and how

such an alienation from the primitive and all-encompassing collective mind

could have occurred in the first place. After all, many tribes have a simple

remedy for such signs of alienation and questioning: death. Strauss claims

that the idea of nature is partly conceived of as the result of the fundamental

distinction that could be drawn between “the things made by man, and the

things not made by man.”

[cvii]

But this is obviously a strange remark: for it

is clear that one must be able, and allowed, to see this distinction as

fundamental in the first place. But under “the absolute rule of the ancestral”

such considerations are blasphemous and treasonous. Nomos prevents such

questioning to begin with, even within one’s mind. Indeed, one can go

further here and say that for philosophy to be practiced and for the idea of

nature to appear, one must be able to see “the things not made by man” as

superior and worthy of investigation in the first place. But for the primitive

mind what lies outside the village boundaries and its tales is worthless or

frightening.

The historical rarity of philosophy and of the idea of nature alone

[cviii]

is cause enough to consider the possibility that the precondition of

philosophy is something rare and special, and not a merely abstract thinking

through of features common to all conventions or all tribes as such.

Obviously the alienation, but also the confidence and the intellectual

sophistication to question tradition in the first place, plus a certain amount

of freedom, must precede the precise form of questioning; Strauss, perhaps

for good reason, only deals with the form the questioning takes. But it is not

conceivable that Thales could have come upon the concept of nature, let

alone publicly expounded it, in a society that was under the total and

absolute rule of one ancestral custom and that lived in permanent terror of

magic.

The only way a principle different from this form of early democracy

(or communitarianism or collectivism if one wishes) can be introduced is

through conquest by a foreign tribe or elite. This is not to say that all

conquest results in the development of an aristocratic ethos. But where this

latter exists—where, that is, there exists not merely a ruling class, but a

principle of rule and “ideal” or, more precisely, a way of life different from

and not responsible to the “fundamental democracy”—it is most probably

the result of a foreign imposition by conquest, in particular conquest by

tribes whose social, military, and economic organization is very different

from that of the conquered to begin with. It is very difficult to imagine that

a true aristocracy can rise on its own out of the primitive “rule of the

ancestral.”

Frazer’s account would seem to contradict this claim, but in fact it

does not. It is true that Frazer’s book gives a relatively satisfying story

about how a culture begins in the early collectivist-democratic condition,

then possibly progresses to one where superstition and magic-men rule,

[cix]

then evolves to one where divine and sacral kings rule; that this is followed

by the development of religion, later of science, and so on. But, even if one

should believe that knowledge progresses chronologically according to this

pattern in the case of every culture, a closer look at Frazer’s own words will

show that his book supports, indirectly at least, the claim regarding the

origins of an aristocratic way of life or ethos. A local king or magician may

rise to prominence and rule; but he will be at most able to pass on his power

to his heirs. He will not be able to create a ruling class with a way of life

fundamentally different from that of the ruled. There are historically many

cases where a king, or even a bureaucratic mandarin class, exists, that

nevertheless has an entirely managerial function and does not represent a

morality or virtue different from that of the ruled population—it is only a

managerial extension of this same population.

[cx]

The sacral or sacrificial

kings discussed above are an excellent example, but similar cases exist even

in technologically advanced societies. Even Frazer seems to realize this,

because in his account he adds, at one crucial point, that

as soon as the tribe ceases to be swayed by the timid and divided counsels of the elders, and

yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind, it becomes formidable to its

neighbours and enters on a career of aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is

often highly favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress. For extending its sway,

partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community

soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual

struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that

disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to

ameliorate the lot of man.

[cxi]

The crucial step then in the progress from the early society to one in

which some classes are relieved “from the perpetual struggle for bare

substistence” is the conquest of one’s neighbors, the imposition of one’s

own society on top of another, following which both still continue to exist

somehow separately. One need not take the extra step with Frazer and claim

that this event alone is sufficient for a devotion to the “disinterested pursuit

of knowledge,” or that the purpose of knowledge is betterment of man’s

estate; one need only concede that philosophy is not possible in the

Rousseauean “city of pigs,” and that Glaucon is a prerequisite for the later

development of philosophy—a claim for now to be left as a suggestion, but

which is to be elaborated in later chapters. Regardless it is clear that even in

Frazer’s own evolutionary model, the imposition of an aristocratic caste on

top of a sedentary population is a crucial prerequisite for the development

of the intellect or of science, even if he should not elaborate or dwell on this

particular event.

Wherever we find in the real world a truly “aristocratic attitude” or

morality, it seems to have been imposed from outside by a conquering tribe

or elite. A very vivid image, that is especially useful for the argument

developed here, appears in the Congo-born Pierre L. van den Berghe’s

recent study of the history of Tutsi-Hutu relations in Rwanda,

One thing, however, that Rwanda clearly lacks is nationhood. Rwanda is a sharply

hierarchized society divided into three quasi-caste groups: the dominant Tuzi who, until the

revolution of the early 1960’s made up some 17% of the population, the Hutu peasantry with

some 82%, and a small pygmoid group, the Twa, making up 1% of the total. The monarchy,

established by the pastoralist Tuzi conquerors who came down from Ethiopia in the 16

century, was entirely the political instrument of the Tuzi as an ethnic ruling elite…The Tuzi,

who are Nilotic pastoralists similar in physical features to the Galla and other peoples of

Ethiopia, are a racially and socially self-conscious ruling group, deliberately use the state

machinery they monopolize (except at the lowest village level), to dominate and exploit the

Hutu peasantry. They developed a genuine racist ideology, taking pride in their slender, tall

stature (some 15 cm taller than the Hutu, and 30 cm taller than the Twa on average) and their

distinctive facial features (such as their aquiline nose) and looking down on both the Hutu and

the Twa as coarse, ugly, and inferior…The Tuzi regard themselves and are regarded by others

as intelligent, astute in political intrigue, born to command, refined, courageous, and cruel.

The Hutu are viewed by their Tuzi masters much as peasants are all over the world. They are

seen as hardworking, not very clever, extrovert, irascible, unmannerly, obedient and physically

strong…These attributes are regarded as inherent in the nature of each group, though

somewhat modified by learning; i.e., Rwanda developed a genuine brand of indigenous

racism. Each group has its fixed, defined place in the social order. The Twa are a small pariah

caste of hunters, potters, iron-workers, and archers in the Tuzi army. They are strictly

endogamous and looked down upon by both Tuzi and Hutu. The Hutu till the land, tend the

cattle owned by the Tuzi and are the source of the surplus production on which the Tuzi live

parasitically. The Tuzi, headed by the Mwami (king) are the ruling aristocracy. They specialize

in warfare and administration, despise manual labor and endeavor to spend as much of their

lives in conspicuous leisure as possible. Tuzi women spend their time playing music, weaving

fine artistic baskets, and supervising domestic servants. Both Tuzi men and women avoid even

walking long distances; instead they are carried in basketry litters by their Hutu or Twa

servants….The basic relationship between the Tuzi lord and the Hutu peasant is a feudal,

paternalistic one. Underlying the political structure, there is, much as in medieval Europe or

Japan, a vast network of patron-client ties that link individuals in private contracts where

protection is exchanged for loyalty…

[cxii]

This passage is quoted at length because it is a typical, indeed

archetypal, case of how an aristocratic class develops through conquest of

an indigenous population: the parallels in attitude and behavior to what one

could call “true aristocracies” across the world, and indeed to the ancient

Greek case in particular, are very striking. Indeed these parallels extend to

matters that may not at first sight be obvious or important. To begin with,

the way the Tutsi are said to be seen by themselves and by others

—“intelligent, astute in political intrigue, born to command, refined,

courageous, and cruel”—could be said of aristocracy (as distinct from a

mere elite, or even a mandarin elite) generally. In particular the two

essential qualities mentioned—political ability or intelligence, and military

courage—could be directly translated as phronesis and andreia, the two

primal qualities of the Greek aristocrat in Homer or Pindar: the ability to

give good counsel in assembly, and manliness or prowess in battle.

[cxiii]

The

parallel even extends to the past-times of aristocratic women—the

persistence of political character, even in details, across time and cultures is

truly remarkable—as the Homeric ideal seems to be a woman who weaves

(fine cloths, not baskets, in the Greek case) and sings beautifully; the

literary image that includes both elements and therefore must have appealed

most to Homer’s audience was that of Penelope.

[cxiv]

The disdain for

manual labor, and in particular for farmwork, is also universal, as we are

about to see.

The matter of contempt for farming and manual labor is crucial. In the

Greek world one of the most emphatic statements containing an attitude

similar, maybe identical, to that in the passage above exists in the archaic

drinking song occasionally called “The Song of Hybrias,”

My wealth is my great spear and sword

And the good rawhide shield, bulwark of hide.

With this I plough, with this I reap,

With this I drink sweet wine from the vine,

With this I have gotten the name “Lord of the serfs”.

Those who have not the courage to wield a spear and sword

And the good rawhide shield, bulwark of hide,

All of them fall and kiss my knee,

Calling me “Lord” and “Great King.”

[cxv]

This emphasis on martial virtue as a replacement for the drudgery of

farm-work and as proof of the holder’s vitality, freedom from the

responsibility for the cares of life, and of his superiority to lesser men who

must eke out a paltry living from the earth is, again, fundamental and

universal to the development of aristocratic morality. The mentality here

consists in a lack of equality to a lower class of people, who are felt to be

not merely alien ethnically, but who are seen as radically different in way of

life, in particular as tied to the earth and to the preservation of mere life, to

servile domesticity, in a way that the aristocrat is not. This characteristic

contempt of farmwork and of mere life understood as drudgery and

preservation appears also in Tacitus’ description of the early Germanic

tribes; these still lived a non-agricultural, semi-nomadic life, when he says

of them that,

Nor are they as easily persuaded to plough the earth and to wait for the year’s produce as to

challenge an enemy and earn the honour of wounds. Nay, they actually think it tame and stupid

to acquire by the sweat of toil what they might win by their blood…Whenever they are not

fighting, they pass much of their time in the chase, and still more in idleness, giving

themselves up to sleep and to feasting, the bravest and the most warlike doing nothing, and

surrendering the management of the household, of the home, and of the land, to the women,

the old men, and all the weakest members of the family…. The master requires from the slave

a certain quantity of grain, of cattle, and of clothing, as he would from a tenant, and this is the

limit of subjection. All other household functions are discharged by the wife and children.

[cxvi]

Like the Tutsis described above, the Germanic tribes were still

pastoralist at this stage, and not primarily grain eaters: “Their food is of a

simple kind, consisting of wild fruit, fresh game, and curdled milk.”

[cxvii]

This attitude is instantly recognizable to any reader of Homer or one who

remembers the beginning of Thucydides’ Histories, where he says of the

early Greeks that

For in early times the Hellenes and the barbarians of the coast and islands, as communication

by sea became more common, were tempted to turn pirates, under the conduct of their most

powerful men; the motives being to serve their own cupidity and to support the needy. They

would fall upon a town unprotected by walls, and consisting of a mere collection of villages,

and would plunder it; indeed, this came to be the main source of their livelihood, no disgrace

being yet attached to such an achievement, but even some glory. An illustration of this is

furnished by the honour with which some of the inhabitants of the continent still regard a

successful marauder, and by the question we find the old poets everywhere representing the

people as asking of voyagers- “Are they pirates?”- as if those who are asked the question

would have no idea of disclaiming the imputation, or their interrogators of reproaching them

for it. The same rapine prevailed also by land.

And even at the present day many of Hellas still follow the old fashion, the Ozolian

Locrians for instance, the Aetolians, the Acarnanians, and that region of the continent; and the

custom of carrying arms is still kept up among these continentals, from the old piratical habits.

The whole of Hellas used once to carry arms, their habitations being unprotected and their

communication with each other unsafe; indeed, to wear arms was as much a part of everyday

life with them as with the barbarians. And the fact that the people in these parts of Hellas are

still living in the old way points to a time when the same mode of life was once equally

common to all.

[cxviii]

Thucydides’ reference to Homer indicates the remote antiquity of this

piratical, nomadic attitude. To this end Thucydides could have perhaps

quoted that part of Odysseus’ speech, where he refers proudly to a certain

way of life that must have been instantly recognizable to his audience:

“Work was never a pleasure for me, nor home-keeping thrift, which

nourishes good children. But for me oared ships were always a pleasure,

and wars, and well-polished spears and arrows.”

[cxix]

Not merely the love of

war and adventure, but the rejection of work, of home-keeping domesticity,

the raising of children, the rejection of the whole world of preservation and

mere life around which the primitive nomos is oriented. All later

aristocracies, indeed, even if they did not go to the extreme of valuing

pillage and piracy, maintained an antagonistic attitude to the peasant, the

serf, the tiller of the soil and the preservation of mere life. The famous

motto of the Roman aristocracy was “Bellum et Otium”; in marked

distinction, of course, to the later Christian “Ora et Labora.”

[cxx]

Related to this disdain for farming and constitutive of the aristocratic

morality in an important way is the often pastoral origin of a conquering

elite. The examples just mentioned are few among many similar others that

suggest aristocracy is imposed on a native, static farming population by a

mobile pastoral tribe. Many reasons have been suggested to explain this

phenomenon, and there is possibly some truth in all of them. In an argument

that consists of simple biological determinism, it has been noted that a

pastoral diet of milk, meat, cheese, and occasional wild fruit—much like

Tacitus ascribed to the then still semi-nomadic ancient Germanic tribes—is

far healthier than a diet of grains and will produce a taller, larger, more

robust class of warriors. Many purely historically farming populations in

the world have not even developed lactose tolerance, and therefore can only

receive protein and calcium from limited sources, or rather, populations

with the ability to easily digest unfermented dairy have a more available

and plentiful source of high nutrition; a tribe that subsists mainly on milk

and dairy enjoys advantages in height, strength, and overall health.

Consequently as a matter of physical anthropology, the skeletons of steppe,

mountain, or hill-dwelling populations have been far more robust than those

of farmers who live in valleys and fertile plains or river basins.

Gracilization of the skeleton develops after a population settles down into

an agricultural way of life, whether because of diet or other reasons.

[cxxi]

To explain the martial dominance by pastoral peoples over farming

peoples, other writers have focused on the fact that among pastoral

populations, wealth (measured in herds, head of cattle, etc.) is highly

mobile and therefore easy to steal and rob; the “cattle raid” becomes a

central “institution” of pastoral existence, and therefore the development of

a warlike and piratical way of life is encouraged, for purposes of both

defense and offense.

[cxxii]

A life on the move, often in difficult country, in

any case encourages the development of physical and moral qualities that

are conducive to martial prowess; for which likely reason plains-dwelling,

farming populations have always recognized their hill- or mountain-

dwelling neighbors as more formidable warriors—whether one considers

century India, or 3d century BC Rome.

[cxxiii]

Possibly related, and in any case very revealing at least of the

“pastoral” attitude alone, is the high value that Biblical morality seems to

place on the simple, pure way of life of the pastoralist, as opposed to the

corrupt way of life of the city-dweller and the farmer, whose art is a

necessity for the city. God accepted the pastoral offering of Abel, not the

farmer’s offering of Cain—and the descendants of the latter are the

founders of cities and the arts.

[cxxiv]

The attitude among primitive Indo-

European peoples is similar, especially in areas of Afghanistan where

primitive attitudes have persisted as if fossilized, nearly to our day. The

following passage is very revealing regarding the connection between

pastoral way of life, and the aristocratic sensibility that I am trying to

explain,

The Nuristanis [prior to Islamization 100 years ago] had managed for centuries to preserve

their traditions and status-enhancing activities like feasting and head- or trophy-hunting,

keeping alive beliefs and ceremonies, some of which may be compared to those of Vedic

India. Traditionally there are two social classes of Nuristanis in the Waigal valley: the ruling

class of landowning livestock herders…and the socially low-status, formerly enslaved, artisans

and servants. The ruling class formed a basically egalitarian society with a strong emphasis on

rank, corresponding to merit achieved by warfare, social competence, and feast giving.

[cxxv]

…the world system as the Kafirs [Nuristanis] saw it was characterized by a radical dualism of

sacred and profane, or pure and impure, and consequently male and female, high and low,

right and left, animal husbandry and field work. Everything in the valley is subject to this

concept. The mountain tops are considered more pure than the valleys, wild goats more than

domestic animals…The world was thus divided between sacred-pure versus the profane-

impure…The specific polarity of male-female…was closely associated with upper-lower,

mountain-valley, right-left, light-dark, cold-hot, raw-cooked…The high, light-filled zones of

the world, in proximity to the deities with their “pure” animals…were considered the male

realm, while the “impure” low zones of the valleys and streams were regarded as the female

spheres. Accordingly a rigid division of labor assigned the tending of animals, especially

goats, dairy productions, and, naturally, all the public, religious, and martial duties to men.

When staying with the animals on the high mountain pastures the men believed they went

through a purifying phase, ridding themselves of the pollution down in the life of the

communities, a life full of strife and refuse, permanently exposed to disruption and

contamination. Women had to stay in the villages and valleys to perform household chores and

farming. Sacred areas, houses, and objects, as well as goats were taboo for them and for

members of the lowest classes, especially the “impure” outcast and slave-like bari and

shuwala.

[cxxvi]

Few things better reflect the complex of concepts or ideas underlying

the aristocratic disdain for the sedentary, valley-dwelling, impure,

effeminate and unmartial farmer beholden to everyday necessity and the

drudgery of life, than the primitive attitude of the Nuristani male pastoralist.

The specific “pastoral” attitude represented in the passage just quoted

was preserved almost to the letter in Greek aristocratic orientation as well.

Furthermore it bears directly on an important element of the philosophic

and tyrannical type that will be discussed in more detail in the following

chapters. There is a very striking way in which this specifically pastoral

origin of the “aristocratic prejudice,” to put it in Kojeve’s words, is

preserved through centuries of Greek history. The contempt for settled life

“in the valleys” and the city, accompanied by a sense that the man who

sojourns in the wild outside the bounds of the city by himself communes,

not only with sacred powers, but specifically with a purifying, liberating,

revitalizing primal force reappears in Greek myth and in Greek aristocratic

attitude in several characteristic ways. Machiavelli himself famously

comments on how it was “secretly taught to princes by ancient writers, who

describe how Achilles and many other princes of old were given to the

Centaur Chiron to nurse [in the wilderness], who brought them up in his

discipline; which means solely that…they had for a teacher one who was

half beast and half man.”

[cxxvii]

A more vivid and revealing image of this

principle regarding Achilles specifically, but also others, appears, as we will

see, in the poetic work of Pindar. Plato’s Socrates, as discussed in the

following chapters, is also repeatedly referred to as agrios, “of the

wilderness” and exhibits, both in Plato and Xenophon, untamed, “unsettled”

and “uncitylike” behaviors and attitudes that are elsewhere attributed to

wild and uncivilized tribesmen and beings of the wilderness.

It is only out of an ancient intuition or inherited assumption of some

kind that a superior principle of life and being existed outside the city

bounds and human enactments, outside nomos, that the concept of nature

could be born in the first place: the first mention of phusis is as regards the

nature of a herb hidden deep in the wilderness, revealed to Odysseus only

by the god Hermes, a nomad and transgressor of boundaries.

[cxxviii]

(That

the first reference of phusis is as regards a healing herb in the wilderness is

especially telling: Pindar, indeed, identifies no other than the horse-man

Chiron as the originator of the knowledge of the healing arts among men).

[cxxix]

The aristocratic-pastoralist contempt for the limitations of city life or

communal life as such, and therefore of nomos, is what possibly allowed for

the development of the idea of nature, understood first as a primal, secret

knowledge outside the bounds of the city and of nomos, to be revealed by

demonic beings, beast-men or horse-men, inhabiting the hills and

mountains.

In this connection, there is still another great reason why the pastoral

way of life is important to the aristocratic morality, and to the emergence of

the idea of nature. This has to do with the matter of breeding. Aristocrats of

pastoralist origin would be especially sensitive to the reality of breeding

stocks, to the principles of animal husbandry and of the necessity of eugenic

measures for the improvement of herd or specimen quality. Such attitudes

and knowledge are likely to persist for the longest time even after the initial

conquering population has “settled down” among the conquered, and

perhaps even fused with them: it is likely to be passed down at least as part

of an ancestral “aristocratic sensibility,” much like horse-riding had been

passed down from the remotest antiquity among aristocrats, whether in

archaic Greece or medieval Europe, for example. Thus we find that Greek

aristocrats in Plato’s time enjoyed especially the past-time of breeding

animals—

The selective breeding of sporting and ornamental animals was one of the characteristic

hobbies of an Athenian gentleman. Glaucon, Plato’s brother, was an enthusiastic breeder of

animals; Plato’s step-father Pyrilampes was renowned for his peacocks. Once it is accepted

that the analogy of animal breeding has a relevance to the procreation of mankind, it begins to

seem paradoxical that human eugenics are so neglected, and reason suggests a new society

should embody some eugenic provisions. These, however, clearly cannot be made effective

without some firmness on the part of the rulers of the polis, a firmness, which, however,

conceals itself with secrecy…

[cxxx]

There will be plenty of opportunity to consider this side of Plato later.

One may also add copious examples from Xenophon on this same

fascination with and knowledge of breeding animals.

[cxxxi]

The idea of breeding is then possibly the one great, decisive way that a

principle different from that inherent in the “fundamental democracy” of

primitive society develops in the first place. The principle behind the

primitive “fundamental democracy” is rather one of taming. Where the

early “democracy” is based on the leveling of all human differences under

the absolute law of the ancestral, where the question is one of the

preservation of the community, and therefore law or regime is synonymous

with the taming of human nature, by contrast within aristocratic culture of

pastoral origin, a principle different from the preservation of mere life

begins to take shape concretely in the attempt to breed different human

types and “improve” the stock, or more precisely, to breed one perfect

human specimen. “Biological” preservation is replaced by “biological”

improvement of quality. That an animal breeder and caretaker sees also

yearly, in the births of new specimens, that there are behaviors and

characters “in the blood,” or passed down and known somehow by a

principle different from tribal education—this must also come as a crucial

realization, even with the thrilling feeling of revelation at first.

I hold it as partly established then that the only way that a principle

different from and antagonistic to the early “fundamental democracy” could

have developed is through conquest by a foreign tribe. And that such a

principle develops most easily when this tribe is warlike and pastoral,

whereas the natives are sedentary farmers. Certain members of the

conquering tribe henceforth raise themselves above the needs of providing

for mere life, and introduce a principle of hierarchy among human types, a

principle according to which the conquered are associated with mere life

and everything that symbolizes this, and the conquerors with freedom from

the fear of death, from the need to provide for daily life, and on the positive

side with leisure, military power, and glory. That, in its final development,

this principle takes the form of an analogy to animal breeding, in distinction

to the native morality that was founded on leveling, cultivation to hard labor

and field work, docility, self-preservation, and therefore could be

understood as an analogy to taming. Like the Tutsi nobles in our own time,

such aristocracies see themselves typically as “intelligent, astute in political

intrigue, born to command, refined, courageous, and cruel,” an attitude

much refined in the aristocratic Greek virtues of phronesis and andreia.

[cxxxii]

The phenomenon of aristocracy-formation through foreign conquest is

possibly much more widespread than it appears to be, if indeed it is not

universal. This is because in many cases the conquering elite probably went

to some length to hide its foreign origins, and adopted instead convoluted

mythologies of ethnogenesis and unity with the conquered. This is true even

in a case like India, where the Law of Manu sought to preserve racial

differences as far as this was possible; yet the foreign origins of the

conquerors were hidden under a network of religious myths that justified

the caste system, including, brazenly, its probably racial measures.

[cxxxiii]

In a few cases, such as Rwanda, where conqueror and conquered were

initially so different and where no attempt seemingly was made to cover up

this difference, the conquering elite continued to rule outside the society of

the governed and, despite some mixing at the edges—talented Hutu were

probably allowed to marry into the Tutsi nobility—a marked ethnic

difference between ruler and ruled has persisted. But as the history of that

country shows, this is a politically risky choice for the nobility. By contrast

Portuguese colonial policy deliberately promoted a myth of miscegenation

and multiculturalism as a legitimation of rule, well-known by the name of

lusotropicalism; but, as the case of Angola among others shows, the

population that was actually mixed never exceeded the 2-3% mark, and this

population remained in an intermediate managerial social position between

the native ruled and the largely colonial rulers.

[cxxxiv]

Nevertheless, the

powerful myth served for the maintenance of public peace, and although

former Portuguese colonies in some cases, like Brazil, continue to be

racially very stratified, they experience relatively low levels of ethnic or

racial conflict. By contrast, in the case of Guatemala, where the ruling

population kept a very distinct ethnic and racial identity from the ruled and

where no public myth of unity or multiracialism (or anything else) was

promoted, the result was a long and bloody ethnic civil war where many

died on both sides.

[cxxxv]

A similar state of affairs may develop in Bolivia,

where the central government, now in the hands of the native majority,

aggressively declaims against the historical depredations of the “colonial”

element, while the largely Spanish minority in the rich city of Santa Cruz

just as aggressively now demands its autonomy, or even hints at secession.

[cxxxvi]

The persistence across large periods of time of a consciousness of a

separate origin among the ruled on one hand, and the rulers on the other, is

of course possible even in cases where the rulers attempted to justify their

position in the most creative ways. The Normans, as a hostile elite in many

places across medieval Europe, famously had recourse to the most

convoluted mythologies regarding national origins, in order to erase their

foreign provenance and legitimize their rule. Yet as successful as this task

was in many cases, the persistence of an antagonistic Anglo-Saxon

consciousness on the part of the conquered as late as the American

Revolution

[cxxxvii]

and as late as the novel Ivanhoe, nevertheless shows how

difficult it is for an aristocracy to erase the fact that it must almost always, if

not always, be “grafted” on top of a native population. But even in those

places where the aristocracy manages to erase its foreign origin, or when

this origin is forgotten simply by passage of time,

[cxxxviii]

the very

convoluted and distinct mythology of some national cultures betrays the

original act of “foundation” rather as one of conquest and usurpation.

[cxxxix]

One could say that it is not relevant how Greek aristocratic morality

developed; its existence by the Archaic and Classical age, by historical

times, is not debatable, and it is possible to understand its important

elements simply by studying Homer, Pindar, and later political philosophers

who comment on the same matter. But although this dissertation does cover

such texts, the particular and peculiar origins, in prehistoric times, of the

Greek aristocratic mentality are also important. The reason these origins are

important is because in the “radicalization” of Greek aristocratic morality

that I claim is at the bottom of the emergence of both philosophy and

tyranny, certain very primitive elements and attitudes resurface, elements

which had perhaps been tempered or previously restrained by city life and

by compromise with alternative customs, in particular the prior, native, non-

aristocratic morality. So it is important to look, even if briefly, at the very

earliest development of Greek aristocracy and its peculiar features that may

have served as prerequisites or preconditions for the emergence either of the

idea of nature or actually for the possibility of the philosophical life.

So far we have considered the general attitudes, qualities, and way of

life common among aristocracies of a pastoral origin, to try to understand

how an alternative to the original “totalitarian democracy” of the primal

nomos could have developed. We have also considered briefly the

possibility that it is through the interest and practice of breeding (beginning

with breeding livestock, but also horses, dogs, and other animals), that a

standard different from and even opposite to the nomos of the “primitive

commune” could have developed. Now let us briefly consider a third and

even more specific institution of pastoral aristocratic society that could

have, again, presented a model or principle of life separate from and even

antagonistic to nomos or convention. This is the institution of the warband,

or the warrior band of youth.

Nearly all pastoral societies with a tradition of war and raiding, and

certainly those of Eurasia—whether Turkic or Indo-European—have a

unique institution known as the warband. It is found in no other cultural-

linguistic complex: it consists of an independent military class, in particular

one composed of bands of unmarried youths.

[cxl]

Tacitus describes aspects

of this institution that had survived among the Germanic tribes of his day,

which he renders in an especially vivid way:

Admirably adapted to the action of [running alongside the cavalry] is the swiftness of certain

foot-soldiers, who are picked from the entire youth of their country, and stationed in front of

the line. Their number is fixed — a hundred from each canton; and from this they take their

name among their countrymen, so that what was originally a mere number has now become a

title of distinction… If their native state sinks into the sloth of prolonged peace and repose,

many of its noble youths voluntarily seek those tribes which are waging some war, both

because inaction is odious to their race, and because they win renown more readily in the

midst of peril, and cannot maintain a numerous following except by violence and war. Indeed,

men look to the liberality of their chief for their war-horse and their bloodstained and

victorious lance. Feasts and entertainments, which, though inelegant, are plentifully furnished,

are their only pay. The means of this bounty come from war and rapine.

[cxli]

He adds, especially concerning of a custom among the Chatti’s

comitatus, or war band, that,

To begin the battle always rests with them; they form the first line, an unusual spectacle. Nor even in

peace do they assume a more civilised aspect. They have no home or land or occupation; they are

supported by whomsoever they visit, as lavish of the property of others as they are regardless of their

own, till at length the feebleness of age makes them unequal to so stern a valour.

[cxlii]

Tacitus’ account is hardly the only example, though. The same

institution existed arguably in very early Rome—Romulus’ comitatus was

such a warband—and in the most primitive period of Greece.

[cxliii]

The war

band of youths who live outside the rest of the tribe is associated across

cultures with the totemic symbol of the wolf—Romulus’ and Remus’ being

reared by a wolf is not unique by any means—and in general with “wolfish”

images or themes.

[cxliv]

An image of this phenomenon exists in the Iliad in

the form of Achilles’ war band, especially in Book XVI, where they are

compared to a band of wolves.

[cxlv]

Sparta, which was likely founded by a

Dorian warband and which existed to support such a warband parasitically,

had for its founder Lycurgus, the “wolf-worker.”

This then is yet another cultural feature by virtue of which the Greek

mind was able to move beyond the strictures and absolute rule of ancestral

nomos, beyond the primitive “rule of elders” that characterizes all early

society, and that, again, seemingly provides no “out” from within. The

comitatus was independent and not under the control of tribal elders—it

represents an important, and perhaps unique, exception to the ubiquity of

ancestral nomos or custom that we have seen both Frazer and Strauss

describe in some detail. Furthermore the warband was understood to be

essentially lawless, and of the wilderness—initiation into the warband

meant life with companions in the wilderness. The youths saw themselves

as wild dogs or wolves, and inhabited by the wilderness, outside the bounds

of tribal convention. The warband was mythically associated with shape-

shifting, “exernality,” the transgression of boundaries between the dead and

the living, and so on.

[cxlvi]

In fine, it represented in every way a

transgression of nomos and its bounds as such, it enthusiastically embraced,

not the preservation of mere life, but in fact death and a vital, martial,

orgiastic element that was believed to reside in the wilderness, outside the

boundaries home and of the tribe.

[cxlvii]

This dangerous cultural institution, that could become a calamity for

the tribe itself at any time—could it be that, aside from offering, as such, a

model for “life outside convention” or a principle that is opposed to

convention—could it be that it also forms the cultural prototype for the

philosophical school or sect?

[cxlviii]

And also forms the prototype for the

piratical tyrant and his bodyguard or war band, above all law and all

responsibility to home and hearth? Certainly it appears that Plato himself

connected the tyrant to the “wolfish man,” and in turn both to the fraternity

of young warriors.

[cxlix]

Finally, it should be mentioned that a recent historical study of the

remotest Greek antiquity and pre-history also supports the model presented

above regarding the character of the Greek aristocracy and in particular

regarding the matter of how it came already “equipped” with certain

attitudes and orientations that made possible the emergence of a principle

opposite to and above primeval nomos.

In his remarkable book The Coming of the Greeks

[cl]

Robert Drews

makes the case for a takeover of the Greek mainland around 1600 BC by a

small Near Eastern charioteering elite (analogous e.g., to the better-

documented case of the mountain-dwelling Kassites who took over

Mesopotamia around the same time, again owing to their charioteering

skill). The book is interesting for the development of our argument here

because it contains certain striking passages regarding the origins of the

proto-Greeks and, by comparison with other Near Eastern military

aristocracies, the character of their rule; I quote here merely some of his

conclusions:

Their bones show that the men buried in the shaft graves at Mycenae were big men, taller and

broader than the typical inhabitants of Middle Helladic Greece. The men were also

charioteers…Possession of horse and chariots seems to have been not an incidental, but a

fundamental feature of Shaft Grave Mycenae, enabling to Myceneans to do whatever else they

did. …The shaft-grave princes [at Mycenae] belonged to an international elite. The same was

true of the charioteers who took over lands in the Fertile Crescent. The Indo-European and

Hurrian princes in the Levant maintained surprisingly close connections with each other over

distances of hundreds of miles, exchanging not only lavish gifts but also daughters and sisters

in marriage. Similarly, the Kassite aristocracy of southern Mesopotamia, held together by gifts,

correspondence, and an interest in chariotry, was also assiduous in cultivating personal and

diplomatic relations with the rulers of lands as far away as Egypt. The hyksos rulers in Egypt,

at the beginning of the sixteenth century BC, seem to have been in touch with Crete as well as

with Mesopotamia and, of course, the Levant. (In contrast, Mesopotamian and Egyptian kings

in the eighteenth century BC were relatively parochial: in the voluminous documentation for

Mesopotamia in the Age of Hammurabi there is no mention of Egypt.) The rulers of Mitanni

and the imperial kings of Hatti likewise had close personal and diplomatic ties with their peers

in other lands. James Breasted fittingly named the Late Bronze Age “The First International

Civilization.” …In utter contrast with the provincialism of Middle Helladic Greece, the

shaft-grave dynasties [the first Greeks] delighted in the foreign and the exotic…In

addition to the influences and imports from Crete, Egypt, Anatolia, and the Fertile Crescent,

there is the gold. There are no gold mines in the Argolid, and the gold buried in the shaft

graves necessarily came from far away, undoubtedly exchanged for more utilitarian

commodities that the dynasts had squeezed from the subject population of the Argolid. The

tastes of the new rulers at Mycenae have with reason been characterized as vulgar and

barbarous, but they were indisputably cosmopolitan …Nevertheless, we may still suppose that

when PIE speakers took over the best parts of the Greek mainland—a land that seems to have

had almost no political organization, and a populace that seems to have set little store by

military prowess—they controled an alien population perhaps ten times as large as their own.

Such was the ratio of helots to Spartiates at a much later time, and even the Greeks who took

over a relatively well-organized Knossos ca. 1450 BC may not have numbered over a tenth of

their Minoan subjects.

[cli]

This account rather specifically supports the claims presented above

regarding the origins of an aristocratic way of life or morality in the

imposition of order from above, an imposition carried out by an alien,

numerically smaller elite on a numerically much larger population, which is

unmartial and parochial; this passage furthermore emphasizes that the

conqueror and the conquered have—or actually did have, at least in the

Greek case—very different origins, language, and way of life to begin with.

It even provides a historical origin for the “cosmopolitan” hankering and

delight “in the foreign and the exotic,” without which, even according to

Strauss, the relativity of custom from tribe to tribe, the relative and hence

limited character of nomos, does not even begin to dawn on the human

mind. Without this precise type of aristocracy as a social precondition, an

extreme parochialism reigns, and there is no looking and no ability to look

beyond the boundaries of one people’s nomos to begin with.

Drews’ account here and in the rest of his book is especially

interesting in the way it provides a new and fresh means of considering

Homer’s already famous exposition of aristocratic morality. Drews’

explanations of the myth of the “return of the sons of Heracles” and of the

Catalog of Ships from the Iliad are especially relevant to my thesis here,

namely as concerns the unsettled, wild, and “alien” origins of aristocratic

morality even much later in the historical Greek world. The mainstream or

textbook historical account of Greek history that now enjoys prominence

both among scholars and the public begins with Mycenean palace

bureaucracy, followed by collapse and the (still-unexplained) Dorian

invasions, followed by a Dark Ages dominated by petty kinglets or basileis,

then the rule of aristocracies and oligarchies, the rise of the polis, the

transition in some cases to democratic rule, and so on. This appears then as

the story of the successive transitions of a native people from order to

collapse to the reestablishment of order, and it therefore gives the

impression that settled life was the primordial norm to which later Greeks

looked back longingly; and in particular the common impression is that the

Greek aristocracy of Homer’s own time and later, of the Archaic Age and

the later Classical Age, was, both in its social existence and morality, a

rather late development—a development “by chance” out of the social,

economic and political upheavals of the Dark Ages that followed the

collapse of settled Mycenean civilization.

The model here presented, to the contrary, argues and brings

considerable evidence to establish that the “primordial norm” to which the

later Greek aristocracy looked back was one of wild, heroic, unsettled life;

that the origins of the aristocratic ethos of the Classical Age can be found at

the very beginning of Greek history,

[clii]

and Homer’s tale, the story of the

Trojan War, which was so constitutive of the Greek aristocratic mind indeed

throughout the history of that entire civilization, is not really the story of the

Mycenean palace kingdoms at all.

Rather the oldest memory that the Greeks seem to have, at least as

regards life in their new homeland, harks back not to the civilized Near-

Eastern-type palace bureaucracies like Mycenae, Pylos, etc., not to speak of

Knossos, but to the plains of Thessaly—a “wild” and lawless location if

there ever was one in the ancient Greek mind. Thessaly, the home of Mt.

Olympus, appears prominently in Greek mythology, and Drews offers an

interesting explanation for this fact. Basing his claims on archaeological

and linguistic evidence, and evidence drawn from poetry and from Homer

himself, Drews argues that the Thessalian plain is the “point of arrival,”

where the intruders he described above first made their incursion. It was at

the time (around 1600 BC) thickly settled, and richly productive

agriculturally, but inhabited by a native population having, as he mentions,

no apparent political organization or military tradition, and therefore easily

exploitable. From their Thessalian “base,” the invaders, soon to become the

Proto-Greeks, proceeded to take over the southern plains and coastal sites

along the Peloponnese. Here in the southern areas they established palace

elite regime-types, on the Near Eastern Bronze Age model, but in the

Thessalian “homeland” the bulk of the invading population remained, and a

more primitive tribal way of life endured. The Homeric sagas, and in

particular the sack of Troy, is not the story of the palace-based princes of

Mycenae or Pylos, but rather an early Iron Age raid carried out by barons

from Thessaly—perhaps consisting of no more than fifty ships—and not by

the now-ossified palace bureaucratic elite of the Mycenean world. Indeed, it

has been remarked by others how incongruous Homer’s depiction of the

aristocratic-piratical way of life is with what we now know of Mycenean

life.

Thessaly [is] something of a Hellenic cradle [in Greek mythology]. Here the original Hellas

was located, and it was here that Prometheus begat Deucalion, Deucalion begat Hellen, and

Hellen begat Aeolus, Dorus, and Xuthus…a great many myths have Thessalian connections,

and some must have originated in Thessaly (for example the Titanomachy, the battle between

the Lapiths and the Centaurs, the expedition of the Argonauts). It is from Thessaly that many

of the heroic genealogies proceed, and, of course, it was Thessaly’s Mt. Olympus that the

Greeks regarded as the home of the gods….There is then some reason to believe that the great

Thessalian plain (far and away the largest plain in all of Greece) was the initial destination of

the PIE speakers who came to the Greek mainland, and that from Thessaly the PIE speakers

went on to subjugate the plains further to the south…If Thessaly was the original “home of the

heroes,” we would expect to find that during the Mycenean Age there was a greater

concentration of Greek speakers in Thessaly than elsewhere. Unusually good evidence to that

effect comes from what is widely regarded as the earliest extant piece of Greek literature: the

Catalog of the Ships, in the second book of the Iliad. In the catalog, which seems to have been

composed when the geography of Mycenean Greece was still a living memory, almost one-

quarter of the Achaeans’ ships…come from Thessaly…We may say with some confidence that

early in the Dark Age the Greeks recalled that during the Age of the Heroes, more warriors

had lived in Thessaly than anywhere else…

[cliii]

Thus what is preserved in Homer, and admired by his aristocratic

audience both in the Archaic age and later, does not reflect a nostalgia for

the settled cities and palaces of the Mycenean world, but for the more

primitive, “feral” way of life preserved in the Greek “homeland” (or

actually initial point of arrival and conquest) in the heroic wilds of

Thessaly. Indeed, later migrations and disturbances within the Greek world,

and especially the Dark Ages, can be explained by the repeated raids carried

out by this original population, overthrowing their now-settled “cousins” in

the Mycenean palaces and revitalizing thereby, as it were, the original

“wild” or “barbaric” (to use a very inappropriate word) piratical ways of

this people. So far from being understood as a series of repeated attempts to

reestablish order and settled life, Greek history, especially Greek

aristocratic history, should rather be understood as a series of raids and

incursions that seek reestablish the opposite. The original “antinomian”

aristocratic orientation is repeatedly revitalized.

The myth of the “return of the sons of Heracles” in the Peloponnese is

then to be understood after this fashion. The proto-Greek tribes from

Thessaly, who had maintained a more primitive “aristocratic” war-band

based form of social organization, invaded the Peloponnese anew after they

destroyed the Mycenean palace regimes, marking the beginning of

“Dorian” rule:

…the evidence would support a thesis that the Dorians “took over” a population whose first

language was something other than Greek, and whose ancestors had been at the lower levels of

Mycenean society. The legend of the Return of the Heraclidae may therefore have a basis in

fact. As a charter myth, it bestowed legitimacy on those who told it: the Dorians are the

descendants of Heracles, whose sons were wrongfully expelled from the Peloponnese. This

legitimizing element in the legend is as fictitious as Heracles himself. However, the story that

the newcomers in three divisions established three regimes in the Peloponnese—one in

Laconia, one in Messenia, and one in the Argolid—can not be explained as a charter myth.

The Dorians did establish themselves in these places, they did so by force (there is, as we have

seen, no persuasive alternative), and they may have come to all three regions at about the same

time. As has recently been pointed out, the legend of the return does not depict the Dorians as

destroyers, nor as founders of a new way of life, but as conquerors (who, for example, merely

displaced the ruling house in Messenia and coexisted with the rest of the Messenian

population). If we imagine small companies of Dorians taking over the most profitable parts of

the Peloponnese, we shall have no difficulty at all in explaining why other small companies

went as far as Crete and even Rhodes: they went not in search of land that they themselves

could cultivate, but in hopes of taking over an agricultural population inured to service.

[cliv]

Based on some interesting linguistic evidence, Drews attempts to

prove that the majority of the Spartans’ subjects did not even speak Greek

perhaps as late as into historical times.

[clv]

Indeed, the persistence of certain

forms of sociopolitical organization, cultural practices and attitudes, and,

most of all, myths from this early period well into the Greek Archaic period

and after is remarkable, and especially relevant to my claims. Sparta was a

“fossil,” preserving very early customs and regime form; and is therefore

especially valuable in understanding what is fundamental or original to the

Greek aristocratic orientation.

[clvi]

The importance of Sparta and other

Dorian-type regimes for the aristocratic Greek value system, and

particularly in the work of Plato and Xenophon, is a commonplace in the

literature. But what it appeared to have consisted in, yet again, is the

imposition and preservation of a “wild,” war-band based, martially

regimented but, most of all, unsettled way of life on top of a servile,

provinicial, settled way of life. The latter is only prized insofar as it gives

greater freedom and intensity of expression to the former.

Nomos as universally exists among primitive cultures is already, from

the beginning of Greek history, understood only as valuable insofar as it

provides service for a higher and external principle. The polis—what

Nietzsche calls “the aristocratic commonwealth” of breeding—is unique

because of how it was able to accommodate and elevate what has been in

this chapter called the “aristocratic” or “pastoral” way of life within the

bounds of static, settled life; it represents a compromise between a “lower”

and a “higher” that are of alien origin to each other. But in this compromise

or fusion it is decidedly the “aristocratic” element that is determinative and

constitutive of the new order. And it is this element of absolute unmooring

from the settled, democratic rule of the ancestral customs that, when the

actual aristocracies are in political and social decline in the late Archaic

age, is radicalized, recovered, refined, and made abstract, not only by the

philosophical way of life and its discovery of nature, but by the way of life

of the tyrant.

Appendix on Nature and Animal Similies in Homer

In the following chapters of this thesis we will turn from speculations

as to the prehistory or remote origin of Greek aristocracy and look at the

texts—in particular those of Pindar and Plato—where, e.g., a poet who has

been called the voice of the Greek aristocracy explains the elements of

aristocratic virtue in his own words and from where we can learn, in a very

direct fashion, about the origin of the idea of nature (and therefore the

precondition for philosophy) precisely in this aristocratic teaching of virtue

or in aristocratic life and morality.

This first chapter has been necessary, however, in order to attempt to

understand, even if perhaps in a very rudimentary way, the most primitive

conditions or elements out of which even a poetic and unphilosophical

intimation of nature could come about in the first place. For, again, it is by

no means clear how, given the accounts of Strauss or Rousseau regarding

the condition of early prephilosophical man, there is even the possibility for

even thinking of something like nature. Nomos is by far too powerful, and

too ubiquitous at this stage of civilization, if it can be called civilization.

Furthermore there is no account of why it should have been precisely the

Greeks who came up with the idea of nature, which is otherwise, even

according to Strauss, unknown in any other historical civilization or culture,

save those that have come into contact with Greek learning; Oriental

despotisms also had city life and arts, but no word for nature and no concept

of nature.

It has been argued in this chapter that such an understanding possibly

first came about as a result of the peculiar way of life of an aristocracy of

pastoral origin that has installed itself on a quite different farming

population, which is thereafter reduced to the status of serf or banausic.

That, out of the primitive attitudes of this aristocracy toward the primeval

nomos, out of their experiences and way of life, out of their peculiar

institutions—such as the warband of youths—and in particular out of their

long experience with livestock and the breeding of horses and dogs for

hunting, that the idea of nature could have developed out of these

“primitive” sources, even if in a very basic and rudimentary form. Before

we look at the first serious elaboration of the idea of nature, which is in

Pindar, let us first consider briefly the appearance of nature in Homer.

The way in which this principle of individual distinction and

superiority is manifested in Homer is in one’s standing out among, and

therefore leading, many armed men: and in turn this is done by exhibition

of battlefield prowess, and of good counsel in assembly. These two primal

Homeric virtues—andreia and phronesis—are, as we will see, later refined

and abstracted, but not lost, in Plato and Pindar. But the fundamental

principle of breeding as the foundation for this personal distinction—the

low valuation, that is, of the idea that true virtue can be taught and therefore

the low valuation of nomos as mere instruction, leveling, or indoctrination

—is what must be emphasized, even in Homer. Therefore the discussion of

magnificence and superiority in Homer is often presented with direct

analogy to animal life and with similes depicting animal powers.

The character of the Homeric kings is peculiar. It is clear that we are

dealing technically with a case of sacral kingship, at least technically

speaking (kingship as bestowed by divine favor): this is obvious not only

from the divine ancestry of many of the Homeric heroes but also from the

various Homeric titles used for them, one of the most direct being

Diotrephes, “fed, nourished, fostered by Zeus.”

[clvii]

And yet it is also clear

we are dealing here with kings who are not derived from magicians or

manipulators of superstition as per Frazer’s model, but with kings whose

power is derived from their military might. Thus at one point Achilles is

enjoined to obey Agamemnon because, although he is clearly the stronger

man (karteros), Agamemnon is superior because he leads more warriors—

he is pherteros.

[clviii]

It is telling that in aristocratic Greek language and in the language of

Homer there are quite a few ways to express the fact that one man is better

than another. But none of these comparatives—karteros, iskhuroteros,

pherteros, ameinon, beltion, and especially not the agathos aner or esthlos

that aristocrats even at the time of Pindar used for themselves—none of

these refers to virtues of piety or ability to tell divine laws, or ability to

foretell oracles, and the like. Manipulation of magic, prayers to the gods,

religious activity, etc., is not prized in this fashion; the shaman is not an

impressive specimen and not in the running for rank. And so, although the

seer Kalkhas is a man of great repute among the Akhaian host, and

consulted on the most important divine matters, Agamemnon dismisses him

(and also the local priest of Apollo) in the most contemptuous way, without

any fear of incurring punishment from anyone.

[clix]

These are kings who,

though they indeed receive title to rule in a circuitous way by reference to

“ancestry”—they have, after all, divine pedigrees—nevertheless receive the

most legitimacy and honor from objective and manifest qualities or virtues:

chief among these being, the possession of a large war band, personal

courage in battle, and ability to give good counsel in the assembly of armed

men. It is not that birth is not important; it might be that one’s lineage

comes into question, however, if one does not exhibit such qualities. It is

the spurned ire of one of these Conans, not of an aggrieved priest or

magician, that drives the plot of the Iliad. And Achilles, though born of a

goddess, does not hold the greatest authority among the Akhaians by

convention—it is the mortal Agamemnon who arguably does—but proves

to be the best instead because of his innate excellences or aretai.

Indeed, it has been speculated that the initial quarrel between Achilles

and Agamemnon is a quarrel between nature and convention in embryo, so

to speak. Agamemnon holds the royal scepter, indicating conventional and

ancestral title to rule; but in challenging him Achilles, recognized by all to

be the stronger and more excellent hero, swears an oath on a scepter of

nature, a sprouting tree branch—this is incidentally the second and only

instance of a word with the same root as phusis in the whole of Homer.

[clx]

Clearly even here, before the elaboration of the standard of nature by

philosophers, we have at least in its infancy a principle antagonistic to the

primitive “democracy” that expressed itself in the “totality of nomos,” rule

by the ancestral, rule by divine law, etc., as described by Strauss, Rousseau,

Frazer, and others above. Kingship here, that is, the just or right kingship,

depends as much on proven and manifest martial and even intellectual

prowess as on ancestral traditions and pedigrees; indeed these are perceived

as inseperable, and what binds them, we will see, is precisely nature, that is,

heredity, blood.

In this connection, consider only the series of similes that precedes the

famous Catalog of Ships.

[clxi]

The entire passage is riveting: it begins when,

a meal ending, Nestor, the eldest of the kings, enjoins Agamemnon to delay

no longer, but to call the heralds to gather together the army, and for the

kings to go through the camp themselves and “awaken sharp Ares.” The

Zeus-nurtured kings gather around Agamemnon, speeding swiftly on their

chariots through the camp and among them appears white-eyed Athena,

bearing the aegis, encouraging the Akhaians: she awakens strength in the

heart of each man to make war and fight, “and to these war became sweeter

than to sail back in their hollow ships to the land of their fathers.” Heroic

warrior kings together with their patron goddess make the men forget the

ancestral in favor of the excitement of battle abroad and the prospect of

future glory. At this point Homer begins his similes that describe the

transformed host of men.

The first simile compares the gleam of the army’s bronze to the

shining of a fire consuming forests on top of mountain. The second simile

refers to the broad movements of the host: they are compared to tribes

[ethnea] of geese that fly backwards and forwards and then settle with a

thunder on some Asian meadow; in just such a way the many tribes (same

word) flowed from the ships to the Skamandrian plain, and made the earth

thunder with their feet and the hooves of the horses. Another two-line

simile follows comparing now their number (rather than their motion) to the

number of leaves and flowers in their season (of spring). The fourth simile

compares the shape of the squadrons to the many tribes (same word,

ethnea) of close-packed flies that gather in season of spring around the milk

in the shepherd’s station: in just such a way do the Akhaian tribes (again,

same word) gather in the field eager to shatter the Trojans.

One is reminded here of Strauss’ first words about the idea of

convention or way, in which the word nomos is used interchangeably for the

characteristic behavior of animal species and also for the characteristic

customs of human tribes. As becomes rather vivid in these similes,

however, it should be clear that the analogy between human and animal

“tribes,” went, for the prephilosophic mind at least in this case, quite a

ways beyond a merely conceptual and abstract similarity. The behavior of

human tribes is understood in Homer in much the same way as the behavior

of animal packs, flocks, etc., not only in the sense that each has a certain

characteristic behavior of its own that may be called with the same word

“way,” but also, and maybe more significant, in the sense that the human

tribe is understood to have the same natural existence and cohesion as the

animal one: both are understood as “natural” and organic groups. The

human tribe and hierarchy is as fitting as the hive and the hierarchy in the

hive. Even more so, in transformed states, men are understood to directly

“inhabit” animal powers and strengths. If there should be a doubt about this

consider only the fifth and final simile in the series:

And even as goatherds separate easily the wide-scattered flocks of goats, when they mingle in

the pasture, so did their leaders marshal them on this side and on that to enter into the battle,

and among them lord Agamemnon, his eyes and head like unto Zeus that hurleth the

thunderbolt, his waist like unto Ares, and his breast unto Poseidon. Even as a bull among the

herd stands forth far the chiefest over all, for that he is pre-eminent among the gathering kine,

even such did Zeus make Agamemnon on that day, pre-eminent among many, and chiefest

amid warriors.

[clxii]

Human hierarchy, graced and intensified by the god, becomes as

manifest as the hierarchy of a chief bull in a herd of cattle. It is again by

observation of the animal world, and perhaps even through the long practice

of breeding livestock, that an alternative principle of hierarchy coupled

with an alternative principle of ancestry—observed descent of concrete

physical qualities by blood and breeding as opposed to the authority of

ancestral stories and laws—could have developed. This is not the only place

where Homeric heroes are compared to animals: it suffices to bring up the

recurrent similes comparing them to lions on the hunt or being hunted, for

example Diomedes at the beginning of Book V when he is experiencing his

aristeia, or moment of highest glory.

[clxiii]

Such similes seem to occur when

a statement is made on the opposition of the one superior individual to the

inferior many, or when a statement is made regarding hierarchy of men in

terms of natural excellences, or when a statement is made regarding the

opposition of tribes to each other.

[clxiv]

The conclusion one can provisionally draw from this is that nature, as

a standard different from and ultimately antagonistic to the “fundamental

democracy” of “rule by the ancestral,” seems to erupt into consciousness or

to manifest itself first of all as animal power and as animal hierarchy. And

it is with reference to this and similar phenomena that early aristocracy

understands itself and justifies itself. We now therefore consider the full

elaboration of this concept of nature—the prerequisite both of the

philosophical and the tyrannical life—in Pindar’s poetry.

CHAPTER TWO: THE IDEA OF

NATURE IN PINDAR

In rams and asses and horses, Cyrnus, we seek the thoroughbred, and a man is concerned therein to

get him offspring of good stock; yet in marriage a noble man thinketh not twice of wedding the bad

daughter of a bad sire if the father give him many possessions, nor doth a woman disdain the bed of a

bad man if he be wealthy, but is fain rather to be rich than to be good. For ’tis possessions they prize;

and a noble man weddeth of bad stock and a bad man of noble; race is confounded of riches. In like

manner, son of Polypaus, marvel thou not that the race of thy townsmen is made obscure;

[clxv]

’tis

because the noble are mixed with the bad.

—Theognis 183-92

“Under all laws the straight-spoken man excels, whether by the side of a tyranny, or whenever the

furious mob, or when the wise watch over the city.”

“I bring the teaching of Cheiron.”

—Pindar

I. Introduction: Pindar’s Place in a Brief History of “Nature”:—

Pindar (~522-443 BC), a Greek lyric poet from the city of Thebes, is

not often considered as a political thinker. Of his considerable opus of

dithyrambs, hymns, paeans, only the four books of epinikia, or victory odes,

have survived in full. These odes are composed on the occasion of athletic

victories at four athletic competitions—the Olympic, Nemean, Pythian, and

Isthmian games—and were commissioned by the victor or by his family.

Accordingly the odes—some quite short, some in the range of a few

hundred lines—necessarily reflect the tastes, interests, and sensibilities of

Pindar’s aristocratic patrons and of the aristocratic audience, since these

works were composed to be performed in public. Among Pindar’s patrons

were the Sicilian tyrants Hiero and Theron, who, however, made a

considerable effort to conform to aristocratic mores and cannot be

considered tyrants of the demotic type. Both Pindar and Theognis are the

source of much of Nietzsche’s understanding of Archaic Greece, and by

him were called the voice or even the “mouthpiece” of the Greek nobility.

[clxvi]

The work of Pindar is then an indispensible source for trying to

understand ancient Greek aristocracy in the way it understood itself, and

indeed for understanding the general features of aristocratic regimes as

such.

[clxvii]

A restatement of the main argument in this thesis on political

philosophy would at this point be useful, as the following chapter for the

most part treats one author—Pindar—whose writings are not recognizably

either directly political or philosophical. Nevertheless, his contribution to

the development of the idea of nature, or phusis, is such that a treatment of

his work is indispensible to understanding the fundamental connection that

I claim exists between tyranny and philosophy. This connection was

understood somehow intuitively by the people, by the city, and therefore

explains so much of the initial and thereafter sporadic hostility toward the

philosopher as a type, the general suspicion of philosophy as a way of life,

especially on the part of democracies. Much of this thesis is devoted to

proving that this intuition and suspicion on the part of the people was

justified.

Philosophy and tyranny both appear as the characteristic forms of

decay of an aristocratic republic. And so, to restate the thesis in a brief

historical form, the default condition of a primitive tribe, if not all primitive

tribes, might be called a “fundamental democracy” characterized by the

ubiquity of ancestral law, or nomos. In the previous chapter I have tried to

demonstrate that an ascending aristocracy establishes itself almost

exclusively from the outside, by foreign conquest, on top of a sedentary

population, and usually is erected by a pastoralist warrior elite that

continues to rule, at least in the beginning, as a separate tribal group. A

principle of nature, phusis, emerges from the exigencies of the way of life

of the conquering elite. Though mentioned only twice in Homer, the

principle of nature acknowledges for the first time a reality that exists

outside human law, tradition, and convention—outside and in opposition to

nomos—and which is somehow associated with biological observations

regarding breeding or blood—in the case of Homer both references are

botanical, to be precise. An aristocracy in decline, in danger, its members

faced with imminent extinction of their liberty—if not of their lives—but,

more pertinently, with the decline and decay of their traditions, severe laws,

in sum, of their regime understood quite literally as a form of training, diet,

gymnastic both of the body and spirit: this decline and danger produces the

two closely related types, the philosopher and the tyrant. The means by

which this happens is through a radicalization of the standard of nature, that

is first undertaken as it were ideologically, in defense of aristocracy.

The decline in question is both internal and external. Externally, the

aristocracy faces frequent challenges to its material power and,

ideologically, to its claim to rule. These challenges are made in the name of

the commons or of democracy but, as is almost always the case throughout

history, it is not “the people” themselves who are acting as a political force

—a jacquerie is not a revolution and is generally easily put down—but

other disaffected aristocrats, intellectuals, merchants, and various elite

factions who are claiming to represent the people. In the period of decline

of an aristocratic order such challenges become more frequent, and more

frequently successful, the power of the aristocrats is diminished and

sometimes erased in bloody revolutions, and, ideologically, the legitimacy

and right to rule of the aristocrats is questioned or dismissed. In defense of

the legitimate claims of aristocracy to rule appear poets, and later

intellectuals, who invoke the idea of nature. It is most significant that in

their defense of aristocracy these writers—in the case in question consider

Pindar and Theognis—do not refer only to “tradition,” to family genealogy,

or to the divine provenance of existing laws and social forms. Rather, they

share the argument that the aristocracy rules because it is physically,

intellectually, and spiritually supreme, that such virtue or arete cannot be

taught, and that it is a matter of blood, of birth and of nature.

There is something very “unstable” about this defense of aristocratic

rule. If the standard for rule is virtue and ultimately nature (phusis) then

what guarantee does one have that the traditional ruling classes of any

particular city are really in congruence with the natural order of rank

between man and man? This tension between nature and tradition, or phusis

and nomos, is, as we have seen, unique to the Greeks, and may be said to

have at least implicitly existed from a very early time in the Greek mind.

Again, to bring up the crucial Homeric examples, did not Achilles, aristos

Akhaion, the son of a goddess, the most beautiful of the Achaians and the

best warrior, challenge that mediocrity Agamemnon, who was merely king

by ancestral right and convention? Agamemnon, although recognized as

having the supreme authority, has recourse to custom, to nomos, when he

speaks holding the ancestral royal scepter. But Achilles swears an oath on a

sprouting branch, on a scepter of nature:

[clxviii]

in fact, this is one of only

two instances of the word phusis in all of Homer’s opus.

[clxix]

The other

instance, to remind the reader, is at Odyssey 10.303, when Hermes shows

Odysseus the secret phusis of a healing plant. Phusis exists as a standard

apart even from the divine, and outside the power of the divine; nature

exists apart from both the divine and from convention and could be argued

to be superior in power even to the divine. Agamemnon has recourse to

nomos and to ancestral, i.e., divine right; but Achilles invokes the superior

right of greater virtue and excellence, of nature, which is also inborn, but

clearly different than genealogy as such.

Pindar and Theognis therefore are right, from their point of view, to

attack the egalitarian pretensions of the demos and to defend aristocratic

right with the argument from nature. But this argument, though justifying

perhaps some aristocracy, is potentially in tension with the defense of

existing hierarchies and traditions. There is then an entirely internal logic

by which the “traditionalist” defense of aristocratic orders in the Greek

world would or could lead to another and very different defense of

aristocracy. In the following chapters, and in the work of Plato, we will see

the means by which Pindar’s defense of nature was radicalized and made

abstract precisely in such a way—not only by sophists and various

intellectuals, but by the Socratics themselves. It is this particular abstraction

of nature that explains the ideological kinship, in some way even twinship,

between early philosophy and tyranny.

There is a different way also in which the decay of an aristocratic

republic produces both the tyrant and the philosopher as related types—this

last phrase in italics being a simplified but not inaccurate statement of this

thesis as a whole. The decline is not only external but internal. The “internal

decline” of an aristocracy will be more precisely defined and elaborated on

later, particularly by Plato and by Nietzsche, but for now I offer a brief

explanation, trusting in the generosity of the reader to accept language and

words that, for the moment, will seem imprecise. Arete, virtue, excellence,

is what undergirds an aristocracy’s claim to rule, and excellence is defined

first most concretely as prowess in battle and ability to give good political

counsel, or to put it in Greek traditional language, andreia (manliness,

bravery) and phronesis (prudence, practical wisdom). As we have seen in

the previous chapter these two qualities are prized by a variety of warrior

elites or aristocracies throughout the world and history, and are not unique

to the Greek case. Two elements are required for arête to come about:

nature or bloodline being the first, most important, and most indispensible;

but second, also, training. It must not be forgotten that, although nature first

appears as a principle “opposed” to convention or tradition, early aristocrats

are not intellectualized philosophers, nor are they tyrants, but are

themselves a historically concrete people or tribe, and therefore themselves

live by their own tradition and nomos. Indeed, part of aristocracy’s claim to

rule is that its members are the most faithful preservers of ancient customs,

genealogies, esoteric religious knowledge, and so on.

[clxx]

The point made

regarding the rather “unstable” or paradoxical relationship between a

traditional aristocracy and the standard of nature is not that aristocrats are

secretly antinomian radicals who reject all historical traditions and appeal to

nature or natural right—this is something that comes much later precisely

with the decline and end of an actual aristocracy—but that aristocratic

traditions and conventions point in a way to something above and outside

the mere preservation of a tribal collectivity. That is to say, aristocratic

traditions are distinguished from the traditions of the commons or of a

primitive egalitarian tribe by the fact that these traditions consist of a

breeding and training regime, to be understood in both cases quite literally.

The purpose of this regime of breeding and training is the production of a

specimen that biologically embodies arête, excellence, and possesses

contempt for death as well as for mere life. Whereas, by contrast, the nomos

of the subject population, and of all “default” populations whatsoever, is

entirely directed to the preservation of mere life.

Nevertheless as regime, diet, training, aristocratic traditions must

remain in large part the same as any other traditions in requiring of its

members conformity, in requiring them to be bound, and in requiring

discipline and obedience—perhaps the strictest discipline. For such an

aristocracy must remain ever vigilant not only against outside threats, but

also against the likely prospect that one of its own impressive and ambitious

members doesn’t grab power and end their liberties. When an aristocracy is

in internal, as opposed to merely external, decline (the case indeed that is

most interesting to us in the production of both the tyrant and the

philosopher as types) these bonds and discipline are loosened. The immense

energy, pressure, spiritual tension built up over generations is released, the

conformity and regularity of republican personae is replaced by an effusive

proliferation of degenerate types,

[clxxi]

both high and low, among who

appear, finally, the tyrant and the philosopher as embodiments of biological

arête—breeding for war and for reason—freed from all convention, all law,

all binding, religion, and all piety. In the following chapters we will see

how sophists, Socratics, and Plato himself, unbound the concept of nature

in precisely this fashion and precisely for the purpose just stated, or, in other

words, radicalized and made abstract the ultimate principle of the

aristocracy while abandoning all actual, historical aristocratic orders and

traditions. This chapter on Pindar, however, is an attempt to exhibit the

stage just before the philosophical or sophistic revolution. This is an earlier

stage in which appears the voice of an embattled but supremely confident

aristocracy. The work of Pindar is indispensible for understanding the

aristocracy’s view of itself from the inside, or, as it were, for providing a

phenomenology of aristocratic thought—here nature is not intellectualized

or abstracted, but understood still in “the old way,” organically connected

with aristocratic traditions and beliefs about the divine. As unstable, and

indeed ultimately as explosive, as this combination would later prove to be,

in the work of Pindar these ideas still exist together as the foundation of

aristocratic life and identity. It is accordingly exceedingly difficult for us

moderns to understand the idea of nature in Pindar as he understood it,

because the unity of tradition, the divine, and the natural seems so

paradoxical. Nevertheless we must make the attempt.

II. Nature as the Body

Pindar has long been recognized as “the voice of the early Greek

aristocracy,”

[clxxii]

and the following passage from Werner Jaeger’s Paideia

summarizes, as an introduction, a good way to appreciate the significance

of his odes in celebration of athletic victories:

When we turn from Theognis to Pindar, we leave the fierce struggles of the nobility…to

defend its place in society, and mount to the calm, proud, inviolate life of early Greek

aristocracy. At this height we can forget the problems and conflicts of Theognis’ world [i.e.,

the aforementioned decline of the aristocracy and its defense], and be content to marvel at the

power and beauty of that noble and distant ideal. Pindar shows us the Hellenic ideal of an

aristocracy of race in the hour of its noblest transfiguration, when, after centuries of glory

extending from the mythical past to the hard modernity of the fifth century, the nobility could

still draw the gaze of all Greece upon its exploits at Olympia and Pytho, Nemea and the

Corinthian Isthmus, and could still transcend all regional and racial dissidences in the

universal admiration of its triumphs. It is this aspect of Greek aristocracy that we must study if

we are to see the part that it played in the shaping of the Greek character was more than the

jealous preservation of class-privilege and class-prejudice, and the cultivation of a relentlessly

intensified code of ethics based on property. It was the true creator of the lofty ideal of

humanity manifest to this day—though more often admired than understood—in the Greek

sculptures of the archaic and classical periods. The athlete whom these works portray in the

harmonious strength and nobility of this utmost perfection lives, feels, and speaks for us again

in Pindar’s poetry, and through his spiritual energy and religious gravity still affects us with

the strange power which is given only to the unique and irrecoverable achievements of the

human spirit. For it was a uniquely precious moment when the God-intoxicated but human

world of Greece saw the height of divinity in the human body and soul raised to a perfection

high above earthly powers, and when in those gods in human shape the effort of man to copy

that divine model through which artists had realized the law of perfection, unattainable but

imperious, found its purpose and its happiness.

[clxxiii]

This is all very good, if a bit high-flown, and will be as far as this

thesis will go in explicit so-called appreciation of Pindar. This should be

interpreted, however, as a sign of respect or even awe for his writings, and

an awareness of the inadequacy of any attempt to render the beauty of his

poems to the reader in English. This is also because Pindar is for the most

part untranslatable.

[clxxiv]

What follows will therefore be a pedestrian—and

therefore distorted—and very literal account of only those elements in

Pindar which are needed to render to the reader with some clarity the

peculiar notion of nature as it is first elaborated. And in fact on this point

Jaeger himself above refers to the particular significance of Pindar and

Theognis’ thoughts on later innovations in political thinking and political

philosophy:

The essentially aristocratic idea that a race must be preserved by inbreeding and special

training [to be found in Pindar and Theognis] was worked out in Sparta above all, and also by

the great educational theorists of the fourth century…it is enough meanwhile to say that both

in Sparta and in the theories of Plato and Aristotle this ideal was extended beyond the limits of

one class, and became part of the general Greek ideal that the city-state is the educator of all

its citizens.

[clxxv]

While, for reasons that will become clear in subsequent chapters, this

thesis does not completely agree with Jaeger on the last point he makes (the

truth is rather the very opposite) the passage just quoted is itself an echo of

the main argument here presented—to be found in developed form in the

work of Nietzsche, who himself began as a scholar of Pindar and Theognis

—the argument that later political philosophy, and maybe philosophy itself,

is but a radicalization or abstraction of the same understanding of nature

inherent in the Greek aristocratic way of life, and as expounded especially

by Pindar. And hence the importance of understanding his thoughts on

nature, leadership, and authority, however inadequately the attempt may

here be made.

[clxxvi]

Whereas the word for nature appears only two times in the whole of

Homer’s opus, it appears in Pindar’s surviving poems approximately

seventeen times by my count.

[clxxvii]

What this word means in Pindar is hard

to figure out; it doesn’t correspond directly to most modern understandings

of “nature,” and, given the fact that our own word is a term of distinction

that comes exclusively from the Greek source (transmitted through Roman

intermediary), in both its casual and philosophical uses, it may be fruitful to

consider its precise meanings at the very beginning—an effort that has been

made in the case of Homer, as we have seen above, but not as far as I’m

aware, in Pindar’s much more significant elaboration.

Pindar’s own explicit uses of the word “nature”—phusis—and

associated forms of the verb from which phusis itself is derived, namely the

verb phuein, and the noun phue, (or phua in this Doric) seem at first sight to

have multiple meanings, not directly related. The verb is usually translated

in English as “to grow,” while the noun, phue, is translated as “growth” and

also as “stature.” These translations, however, are limited and somewhat

misleading. Both phusis and phue in Pindar have a different meaning than

the conventional translation—I will continue to render both as nature, with

the warning that it is not yet clear what significance or meaning this term

carries for Pindar. But there is one fundamental meaning we can be sure of.

Nature, phusis, phue, refers first of all, and always, and above all, to a

concrete material reality, to a biological reality that means very plainly: “the

body.” And this meaning should never, in all future refinements of the

definition of nature, be forgotten or abstracted away from. All later attempts

to further understand phusis in intellectualized or philosophical form, for

example as “essence” and so on, or even as heredity or inborn character,

may or may not be legitimate; but whatever other meaning this word will be

shown to carry—and indeed it does carry further meaning—it always also

means a concrete body, flesh and blood, a biological entity.

Now, first of all, Greek does have another word for body, with which

the reader may be better acquainted, namely soma. And Pindar does use the

word soma five times by my count. In all but one case, the reference is

exclusively to the dead body, to corpses.

[clxxviii]

This is in keeping with the

Homeric use of soma. When Pindar speaks of a body that is alive he uses

the word phue. Thus, already in this distinction there is an important clue as

to the full meaning of phusis.

In truth this hint was already dormant in Homer’s limited use, although

it would have been hard to draw the conclusion from a mere two examples;

nevertheless, there is a botanical association in both Homeric usages of

“nature.” The branch on which Achilles lays his great oath is said to be

sprouting, and is contrasted to the dead wooden scepter in Agamemnon’s

hands, which stands for the authority granted from mere convention. In

Pindar as well, we see this same “bare” or old meaning of phusis in two of

the seventeen examples: in one case where there is a reference to a statue

“carved from a single piece of wood” [monodropon phuton]

[clxxix]

—the

unusual choice of word here may be inspired by the fact that the object in

question is a religious idol consecrated to a god housed in a rustic altar, and

therefore vibrant with demonic energy. The other example where nature has

an explicitly botanical meaning is introduced in a prophecy that the centaur

Chiron gives to Apollo, wherein a queen and future bride of Apollo is said

to be given the land of Libya, “not unblessed by trees bearing all kinds of

fruit,” [oute pankarpon phuton nepoinon] and not “unknowing of wild

beasts.”

[clxxx]

The context of this latter reference, in which a god who is

traditionally himself associated with prophecy and knowledge of the future

nevertheless defers to Chiron the wild centaur for knowledge in particular

of whether a breeding, in this case to a mortal woman, is lawful and will

result in good issue for the land and for the people is especially significant,

as we will shortly see.

The botanical associations of the meaning of nature or “body” are

furthermore hinted at indirectly in a third example that is especially

beautiful. This is in the first Olympian Ode, written for Hieron tyrant of

Syracuse in honor of his victory in the single horse race. In retelling the

myth of Pelops, Pindar writes of the time “when he blossomed with the

stature of fair youth, and down darkened his cheek”; in truth this is

somewhat of a poetic translation because the original [pros euanthemon

d’hote phuan, lakhnan min melan geneion erephon] does not include the

words “of fair youth”: the meaning is that Pelops’ phue, or stature, or body,

was blossoming or literally well-flowering, euanthemon. The time when a

young man’s beard first appears is taken to be the finest point of his beauty

also elsewhere in Greek literature.

[clxxxi]

The context of this reference is

again very significant, and it might be best to render here the whole passage

about Pelops, again keeping in mind the inadequacy of any English

translation:

And when he blossomed with the stature of fair youth, and down darkened his cheek, he

turned his thoughts to an available marriage, [70] to win glorious Hippodameia from her

father, the lord of Pisa. He drew near to the gray sea, alone in the darkness, and called aloud on

the deep-roaring god, skilled with the trident; and the god appeared to him, close at hand. [75]

Pelops said to the god, “If the loving gifts of Cyprian Aphrodite result in any gratitude,

Poseidon, then restrain the bronze spear of Oenomaus, and speed me in the swiftest chariot to

Elis and bring me to victory. For he has killed thirteen [80] suitors,

and postpones the marriage

of his daughter. Great danger does not take hold of a coward. Since all men are compelled to

die, why should anyone sit stewing an inglorious old age in the darkness, with no share of any

fine deeds? As for me, on this contest [85] I will take my stand. May you grant a welcome

achievement.” So he spoke, and he did not touch on words that were unaccomplished.

Honoring him, the god gave him a golden chariot, and horses with untiring wings. He

overcame the might of Oenomaus, and took the girl as his bride. She bore six sons, leaders of

the people eager for excellence. [90] Now he has a share in splendid blood-sacrifices, resting

beside the ford of the Alpheus, where he has his attendant tomb beside the altar that is

thronged with many visitors. The fame of Pelops shines from afar in the races of the Olympic

festivals, [95] where there are contests for swiftness of foot, and the bold heights of toiling

strength. A victor throughout the rest of his life enjoys honeyed calm, so far as contests can

bestow it. But at any given time the glory of the present day [100] is the highest one that

comes to every mortal man.

[clxxxii]

The matter in question, as in the example mentioned before regarding

Apollo and Cheiron, is in this case one of finding a proper marriage the

issue of which results in a race of heroes, leaders of the people, who are

eager for fine deeds that win acclaim. The rest of the passage, referring to

Pelops’ desire to find such a marriage only as part of his search for danger

and glory, in which utter contempt for mere life is expressed as a matter of

course, is entirely in keeping with the fundamentally aristocratic meaning of

nature. That is, this desire for glory comes upon him at the moment of the

very blossoming and emergence of his phue, his body or his nature.

To summarize so far, first of all phue is meant as standing in contrast

to the dead or passive corpse, soma; second, as having a particular affinity

for “botanical” meanings, especially those having to do with bounty, with

being all-fruitful, with energy; in the last example mentioned, Pindar makes

the metaphorical connection between the botanical meaning and Pelops’

body or phue. So far then, the meaning of nature is purely in reference to

the physical body on one hand; yet, on the other, it is already a term of

distinction, referring only to particular types of bodies, or bodies in a

particular condition. There are already strong hints that the word carries

more pregnant meaning. Let us for now note the remainder of the instances

where Pindar uses phue to refer to the body as we understand it, or to purely

immediate physical attributes.

In praise of a wrestling victor at the Isthmian games who has particular

skill and ferocity but is slight of frame, Pindar says that

…in the toil of conflict he resembles the spirit of loud-roaring lions in boldness, while in

wisdom he is like the fox, who forestalls the swoop of the eagle by falling on her back. And it

is right to do anything to blot out [maurosai literally: darken/make dim] one’s enemy. For

Melissus was not allotted the nature of Orion; he is negligible to look at, though heavy to

grapple with in his strength. And yet once there went from Thebes, Cadmus’ city, a hero short

in stature but unflinching in spirit…

[clxxxiii]

The description here refers to Melissus’ body in particular, and in a

particularly restricted sense. The meaning here appears entirely material,

“physical,” even just having to do with size, and entirely at the “surface”

level. Melissus’ phusis is contrasted to Orion’s presumably much more

impressive phusis. It is unclear if this phusis includes Melissus’ great

strength, his fighting spirit, or his animal characters of lion and fox—the

context of Pindar’s words at first sight would seem to imply that phusis

does not contain these meanings; but let us hold off judgment for a moment.

At the very least what we see is that nature (here actually in the full form as

phusis) can refer almost exclusively to the body in the simple context of its

frame and size. The meaning is fundamentally concrete and material. Still

even so what is apparent is that even in this limited usage there is a note of

distinction, or intensity in the meaning implied. It could be loosely

translated as “Melissus does not have a body as impressive and large as

Orion’s.” Pindar could have used the word “size,” but he chose phusis, and

the comparison made is to a mythical hunter of great skill; Melissus’ stature

or phusis is in question because it is surprisingly small for a victor of such

strength and skill. Finally, let us note here for the moment another

important clue, a concept which will come up again: in the context of

discussing Melissus’ special skills, strength, and phusis at the moment of

his victory, i.e., at the very moment of Melissus’ phusis emerging, and

emerging into the light, Pindar says that it is right to do anything to blot out,

or literally to darken, to dim [maurosai] one’s enemy.

In another special emphasis on the purely material and concrete

meaning of phusis/phue, Heracles in a prayer to Zeus asks that Telamon’s

son Aias have a nature or body as indestructible as the skin of the Nemean

lion:

And Heracles stretched his invincible hands up to heaven and said, “Father Zeus, if you have

ever heard my prayers with a willing heart, now, now with divine prayers I entreat you to grant

this man a brave son from Eriboea, a son fated to be my guest-friend. May he have a body

[phue] as invulnerable as this skin that is now wrapped around me, from the beast whom I

killed that day in Nemea as the very first of my labors. And may he have spirit to match. When

he had spoken, the god sent to him the king of birds, a great eagle. He felt thrilled inside with

sweet joy, and he spoke like a prophet: “Telamon, you will have the son that you ask for.

Name him after the bird that appeared: wide-ruling Aias, awesome in the war-toils of the

people.

[clxxxiv]

Thus phue here refers merely to the physical body; and the spirit—to

be understood here not as a metaphysical soul, but as the fighting spirit or

anger of a lion—thumos, is considered something quite apart. But again,

although the word refers “merely” to body, it refers to the body in a

particularly significant context: a prophecy regarding the issue of a child,

with the surety of a deity, who will be as indestructible in body as the skin

of the Nemean lion. This hide being an object of untamed power and energy

that Heracles through his efforts subdued in struggle, making human

civilization possible.

[clxxxv]

Thus even in the most casual references to

“merely” material bodies or the properties of bodies, phusis and phue

always appear endowed with religious gravity, with reference to great

energy, skill, or strength, to the fruitfulness or titanic powers of untamed

nature, and in connection often with marriage and breeding.

Yet another significant reference to phua that fits just this pattern

occurs in the great Pythian Ode 4 for Arkesilas, king of Cyrene, winner in

the chariot races at the Pythian games, a poem I will have occasion to return

to later. For now, the reference to phua in this poem is superficially entirely

“material” and concrete, referring to the “strong sides” of a team of

demonic oxen that Aeetes, father of Medea, has presented as a challenge for

the Argonauts: if their captain is able to plough the land with these giant

beasts, the golden fleece will be theirs. Jason sets his great strength against

the “strong-sided bulk” (epipleuroi phuai) of these animals, yokes them,

and achieves the great task, to the dismay of Aetees. In this case, as in the

reference above to Melissus, phua seems to refer to mere size, bulk. But

just as in that example the comparison of size, nature, body, phua, was to

Orion, the great hunter, here it is used to refer to a team of demonic and

magical beasts of great strength. Even more significant is how Jason is

actually able to overcome this challenge. For prior to this feat, Pindar

explains how

Aphrodite of Cyprus brought the maddening bird to men for the first time, and she taught the

son of Aeson skill in prayerful incantations, so that he could rob Medea of reverence for her

parents, and a longing for Greece would lash her, her mind on fire, with the whip of

Persuasion. [220] And she quickly revealed the means of performing the labors set by her

father; and she mixed drugs with olive oil as a remedy for hard pains, and gave it to him to

anoint himself. They agreed to be united with each other in sweet wedlock…

[clxxxvi]

Thus again, whenever phua or any version thereof is mentioned

appears the same fateful connection to the arts of love, to wedlock,

breeding, or intercourse. The connection to the example of Pelops above

should be quite clear. In both cases a great hero embarks on an adventure of

danger and death, showing contempt for mere life

[clxxxvii]

and a desire to

win a great renown on the occasion of the blooming of his own phua.

Pelops calls upon the help of a god to win a glorious bride from a mad

father who kills suitors as part of a ritualistic challenge. He wins the bride

and the kingdom by his strength, one might say by using the lion. The foxy

Jason calls on the help of another god, Aphrodite in this case, to seduce and

trick Medea who will betray her father and show Jason the way to

overcome her mad father’s challenge: the reward is the fleece, Medea, and

“everflowing renown” for a great deed throughout all time. In both cases a

young adventurer bests an aboriginal king, marries or seduces his daughter,

and wins great renown or founds a great line of leaders. Thus we are alerted

in both cases to the special and full meaning of phua, body, nature. It is

concrete, material, biological body; and it is much more. In both cases it

seems to have to do with the emergence of a body in supreme condition into

the enduring radiance of fame—of being—and with the perpetuation of a

divine bloodline.

The following example better illustrates just what kind of “body” is

meant by phua or phusis, and the relationship of such body indeed not just

to blood, but to truth and to being itself. In celebration of a victor of the

pankration, a kind of free-for-all mix of boxing and wrestling similar to

modern mixed martial arts, Pindar praises the winner, from his own native

Thebes, in the following terms; first, after briefly recounting some of the

most notable moments of Thebes’ glorious past, he says,

But since ancient grace sleeps, and mortals are forgetful of whatever does not reach the

highest bloom of skillful song, joined to glorious streams of words, [20] then begin the victory

procession with a sweet-singing hymn for Strepsiades; for he is the victor in the pancratium at

the Isthmus, both awesome in his strength and handsome to look at; and he treats/holds

excellence [areta] as not uglier/more shameful/inferior to body [phue]. He is made radiant by

the violet-haired Muses, and he has given a share in his flowering garland to his uncle and

namesake, [25] for whom Ares of the bronze shield mixed the cup of destiny; but honor is laid

up as recompense for good men.

[clxxxviii]

The contrast here made is explicitly between virtue or excellence

(areta) on one hand, and phue on the other; it should be mentioned that

many traditional translations of the passage above have rendered phue as

“beauty,” as in “and he holds excellence as no worse a possession than

beauty.” A translation that in my view is not justifiable if one is trying to

understand the particular and literal meaning of nature as Pindar himself

understands it, and which lacks the frankness and strangeness of the

original; but that in the context of this passage is nevertheless superficially

defensible. The translator, in other words, has herself recognized that phue

as Pindar uses it is always a term of distinction, and that while it indeed

refers to a concrete material body or to a “stature” or a physique, it is

always in the sense of its outstanding condition: in this case rendered as its

“beauty.” Yet, if we are to accept this conventional translation even

temporarily, we must add that this is a beauty pregnant with violent power

and energy, “beauty as power,” something akin to Michelangelo’s Moses.

Strepsiades is said to be marvelous or terrible in his strength (sthenos)—the

word used is striking: ekpaglos, a form of “outstanding” that carries

connotations of physical violence and terrible power.

[clxxxix]

Strepsiades is

said to be idein morphaeis, shapely to look at, well-formed, with the same

adjective used of sculpted statues. The reference to phue is entirely in this

context, and “body” must be understood only in this context and this

condition.

As for the strange phrase agein t’aretan ouk aiskhion phuas, the literal

translation is, as I’ve rendered it above, “he considers/holds/believes

excellence to be not uglier/more shameful than his body (phue),” that is to

say, Strepsiades, endowed with such an awesome physique and violent

power, holds the doing of great deeds (areta) in equal reverence as his own

impressive nature or body. But the gentlemen—the agathoi for whom honor

is laid up as recompense for great deeds in the last line quoted—will always

hold reverence for their own phua and inner strength, or literally their

bodies; one of their particular qualities is to be “in awe” and reverent before

this, literally obedient to and heedful before its physical calling much like

Pelops was on the blooming of his own phua. This obedience is expressed

as their being ever ready to abandon safety and mere life for the danger of

death and the winning of a great renown; but the point would seem to be

that phua literally carries some compulsory or irresistible power that orients

and propels them to deeds of areta. Recall how the ode above starts, with an

enumeration of Thebes’ great glories, of which people are forgetful. Mortals

—not men, andres—but mortals, anthropoi, people, are forgetful of great

deeds. They live in darkness, forgetting, for they themselves are dim and

dark, ignorant, or envious. Their envy and ignorance covers up reality. They

cover up reality under a stream of falsehoods and words. Real men, andres,

have being, or have more being. They have reverence for their being, or

body, and listen to its vehement calling—they can’t help but listen, or obey

in this case. Everywhere in Pindar there is the elevation of this vehement

being, blood, or will, silent and effective in real men, extolled and

memorialized in splendid songs—and that exists in distinction to the

chatter, the word-obsessed envy, the darkness of the many. Bred phua is

more real than other bodies, which are shrouded in darkness. These men are

apparent and manifest in their great deeds; the watchful eye of the seer, the

poet, picks these out and preserves the deeds in words to make them

apparent, visible, through time, to make their fame or being endure.

Strepsiades’ phua or intensified reality is what makes him become “radiant”

and emerge from a primeval and undifferentiated darkness. This is truth and

reality, and this is nature. This may sound rather impressionistic or high-

flown for now; but a further consideration of Pindar’s use of the idea of

nature will show that the meaning of this word is quite precise, and

precisely quite strange and alien for moderns.

III. Nature and the Body as Blood and Heredity; Heredity as Truth

Nature is body and blood and is therefore hereditary. Knowledge of

breeding and heredity is, again, to be expected among a pastoral or

originally pastoral people who have long experience with livestock breeds.

Furthermore, when war and hunting are highly prized, there is also an

emphasis on the breeding of horses and of dogs, which we know to have

been of special interest to the Greek aristocracy.

[cxc]

In the athletic games

the prize for the winning chariot team or in the contest of the single horse

race was given to the patron—that is, the breeder of the horse—and not to

the driver of the chariot or the jockey. It is most interesting that a 19

century British commentator on Pindar’s odes mentions that the custom for

horse races in England was exactly the same: the credit belonged to the

owner and developer of the horse breed, a custom that, as far as I know, was

developed independently in England and not inherited from the Greeks.

[cxci]

The most comprehensive reference to nature in the context of heredity

in Pindar concerns, however, not a comparison to livestock or animals, but,

yet again, to the world of plants and crops. A fourth instance where Pindar

compares phusis to the generational flowering of the trees, plants, and crops

is in the sixth Nemean Ode and especially instructive:

There is one race of men, one race of gods; and from a single mother we both draw our breath.

But all allotted power divides us: man is nothing, but for the gods the bronze sky endures as a

secure home forever. Nevertheless, we bear some resemblance to the immortals, either in

greatness [5] of mind or in nature, although we do not know, by day or by night, towards

what goal fortune has written that we should run. Even now Alcimidas gives a great sign

to be seen that his inborn is like the fruitful fields, which, in alternation, [10] at one time

give men yearly sustenance from the plains, and at another time gather strength from

repose. He has come from the lovely games of Nemea, the contest-contending boy who,

pursuing this ordinance of Zeus, has shown that he is a successful hunter in the wrestling ring,

[15] by planting his step in the tracks of his grandfather, his blood-relative.

[cxcii]

Let us leave for a moment the explicit mention of phusis in the passage

above—wherein men are said to resemble the gods in nature or in greatness

of mind, for that is quite mysterious—and focus first on the question of

heredity, here rendered literally as “the inborn,” to sungenes. The view just

expressed of the technicalities of heredity is quite sophisticated and entirely

in keeping with modern knowledge of the inheritance of certain congenital

qualities—whether diseases or advantages. That is, there is the question of

regression to the mean on one hand, or of certain hereditary qualities

“skipping a generation” on the other—in keeping with well-known

Mendelian rules for trait inheritance. Children of very tall people, for

example, will tend to regress to the mean of the population in question—

Socrates’ sons were nonentities. This mechanism explains how it may be

that inborn excellence will exhibit itself in one generation of an aristocracy

but not in another. Nature hides, lays dormant, occasionally manifests itself

in explosive actions. Pindar repeats exactly this same idea at Nemean 11,

even claiming to see evidence of cross-breeding; where, however, instead of

the word phusis or phua, or inborn, he just directly uses the matter-of-fact

“blood,” haima; as clear an indication as any about what “nature” and the

nature of a man or a being

[cxciii]

means in Pindar:

Truly, it was easy to recognize in him the ancient blood of Peisander of Sparta, who came from

Amyclae with Orestes, [35] leading here a bronze-armored host of Aetolians, and also the

blending of his blood with that of his mother’s ancestor Melanippus, beside the stream of the

Ismenus. But ancient excellence yields strength in alternate generations of men; the dark

fields do not give fruit continuously, [40] nor are trees accustomed to bear an equal

wealth of fragrant flowers in every circling year, but in alternation. And thus the race of

mortal men is led by Fate. But no clear sign comes to mortals from Zeus. Nevertheless we

embark on bold endeavors, [45] longing for many deeds, for our limbs are bound by shameless

hope, while the streams of foresight lie far away. But we must hunt for due measure in our

love of gain. The madness of unattainable desires is too sharp.

[cxciv]

At first sight this may also look like a preemptive apology on the part

of someone making the argument for aristocracy. The justification for

aristocracy being that “the best rule,” the immediate and common objection

is that the sons of aristocrats who may display great abilities or skill are

often themselves average or below average. And that therefore there is no

justification to aristocracy in reality. In any case, a counterargument to the

democratic objection raised is that exemplary natural qualities will not

exhibit themselves in every generation, but that blood is “like the fruitful

fields, which, in alternation, [10] at one time give men yearly sustenance

from the plains, and at another time gather strength from repose.” If it is

true in the case of crops, where fields need to lie fallow occasionally, it may

also be true in the case of men.

Such an interpretation of Pindar’s intentions in these two passages,

however, is not only rather vulgar, but also likely wrong. These odes were

not written for performance in front of the mob, of democratic parties, or of

factions representing them, with the purpose to convince them of the

rightness of aristocratic rule. These were meant for private exhibition for an

aristocratic audience that didn’t need “extra reasons” to believe in its own

legitimacy.

[cxcv]

Most of the individuals for whom Pindar wrote these odes

lived in states—Thebes, Aegina, Syracuse, even Thessaly—that maintained

a firm aristocratic or at least oligarchic form of government quite late.

[cxcvi]

These were not men who in any case felt the need to justify themselves, or,

as we will see, “to come with five reasons ready” to justify their position—

such an attitude was held to be in bad taste, and to be held under suspicion.

One has authority, one commands, one doesn’t need to give reasons;

reasons, justifications, rationalizations—these are for plebeians and the

envious.

Finally and most important, we see across the world a variety of elites

and ruling classes that, if they ever did have to explain their position in

society to themselves or to others, could refer simply, more easily, and

exclusively to obeisance to ancestral law, to the divine as the ultimate

source of ancestral law, to convention, to their status as the faithful carriers

of custom or interpreters of the divine law, or even to their function as

public servants who fulfill their public functions dutifully; to purely

religious doctrines such as karma, and so on. No ruling class needs the

concept of phusis or of the inborn to justify itself, or of the alteration of

eruption of excellence in the different generations of a bloodline, and

indeed the Greek aristocracy seems to have been unique in this regard. The

notion of nature and heredity here presented should then be considered on

its own terms, and not as an apologetic exercise. Heredity and nature here

don’t mean just genealogy or hereditary conventional right.

If we look more closely at the passage above then, we see the

remarkable phrase “Alcimidas gives a great sign to be seen that his inborn”

qualities are like the fruitful fields: for although his father was not

distinguished, he is similar to his blood-relative, his grandfather (literally

homaimos, same-blooded). His grandfather won at boxing at the games five

times. And his grandfather himself in turn “put an end to the obscurity of

Socleides,”—the phrase used is epause lathan, literally “put a stop to the

forgetfulness”—that is, redeemed the memory of a previous and more

remote ancestor whose exploits had been “dormant” in the intervening

generations. What is inborn, nature, is said to give a “sign to be seen,” or a

visible mark. It is in overt action that nature is revealed. The word here used

is tekmar, and it is of special significance: it refers to a concrete, manifest

visible mark or sign, evidence that impresses itself directly on the

perception in action or image, not something explained in logos or speech

or logically deduced. This sense of nature becoming apparent or emerging

into the light is reinforced when Alkimidas is later described as enagonios,

which above I have rendered quite literally as “contest-contending” or

“loving contests,” but which also carries meanings of “vivid, apparent,

energetic.” The fact that this last word has the double meaning—both “one

who loves the agon, the contest” and “something vivid, vehement, apparent,

energetic”—is by itself quite revealing. Nature of man only manifests itself

in great deeds and in victory in contests. The aristocracy’s understanding of

itself, and for itself, was entirely dependent on the flowering or

manifestation of areta, of excellence, of power that bests others in contest. It

is the body, the blood in the totality of its struggles and victory: nature and

heredity may lie fallow for a generation or two, but if they exist, they only

manifest and prove themselves in great deeds that overwhelm the

perceptive observer as an outward visible sign. Aside from this there is only

convention, “tradition,” empty speech, chatter.

The rather mysterious beginning of this ode then now begins to make

more sense:

But all allotted power divides us: man is nothing, but for the gods the bronze sky endures as a

secure home forever. Nevertheless, we bear some resemblance to the immortals, either in

greatness [5] of mind or in nature, although we do not know, by day or by night, towards what

goal fortune has written that we should run. Even now Alcimidas…

[cxcvii]

What justifies the change of topic here—from man’s lack of

knowledge of his own future and condition to Alkimidas’ exhibition of the

inborn qualities of his bloodline? Men are said to bear some resemblance to

the gods in nature (phusin) or in greatness of mind (megan noon). The

qualifier of “great” is not seen, here or elsewhere, as ever necessary to

describe phusis—phusis is itself great by definition. By contrast, noos is not

necessarily intellectual power but may be translated as intent, or

intentionality, the mind as a “purpose.” Thus in great striving or grand

intent on one hand, and in nature or body on the other, men are in some

sense like the immortals. To find out in what way (some) men are the same

as the immortals, first ask, then, in what way are men different? Unlike the

immortals who endure forever in the bronze sky, men live in obscurity and

darkness, quite literally. Obscurity, forgetfulness and ignorance being two

sides of the same coin: in darkness, as in, ignorant of their fate, goal, and

future; and in darkness also as in, forgotten, not known, not apparent or

manifest, not having being, or more precisely, intensity of being and of

body, not having phusis. Alkimidas has phusis. He has manifested it in

victory; it became revealed, as in a sign, tekmar, visible proof. He has raised

his bloodline once again from obscurity and forgetfulness and darkness and

into the radiant light of renown, which is like the enduring bronze sky that

is a surety for the endurance of the immortals. The implication here should

be quite clear, the converse of all this should be clear: most people do not

have phusis. Phusis is not a reference then merely to inborn character,

specific orientation in the abstract, inclination and so on—though it is that

as well: but crucially, because most alien to our understanding—there is a

question here of intensity. Some beings are more than others; they have

more being, more nature. Phusis, the truth or the knowledge of a being, is

not “discovered” by deduction, but only manifests itself in action if the

being in question should have enough phusis. The question here is not

moral, or not necessarily just moral, but one having to do with the meaning

of nature itself, of what nature or truth is. It is not just a question of beings

having “different natures” or inclinations, but more fundamentally, of

having “enough nature,” enough intensity that the truth of the being may

become differentiated from the fundamental and indistinct darkness.

Accordingly we see that the truth of what a man is may not be revealed

until the end of his life, if that is when his victory only finally comes.

Pindar says, of an older contestant, with grey hairs ironically “growing”

[phuontai]

So, by trial, Erginos, the Argonaut, was saved from the reproach of the Lemnian women.

Unsuccessful before, he won the race in armor, and said to Hypsipyle as he went after the

crown: “This is what I am in swiftness. My hands and heart fully match my feet. The race is

for the young, but I am younger than my seeming. Gray hairs grow often on young men before

the time. The final trial is the test of mortals.” Psaumis had every virtue but success; now this

is added. So Erginos was a man of might, of courage; now he has shown his speed.

[cxcviii]

It has been said about this passage, “The final test is the true test.

Success may be slow in coming, but when it comes it reveals the

man.”

[cxcix]

This, again, should not be interpreted merely as a moral, let

alone as a rhetorical, claim. The meaning should be taken quite literally:

Psaumis, like Erginos, have finally shown who they are: phue, phusis, body

only becomes apparent, real, only possesses being, and bloodline is only

proven at the hour of its triumph in contest, during the exhibition of a great

feat of excellence, of great physical strength, of victory in battle, of violent

victory over an opponent, or over a challenge as in the case of Pelops or

Jason. It is in this that truth, being, reality, are known, literally become

apparent at all.

The default condition of nature then is that it lies concealed or

dormant, especially in intervening generations, but that it explodes or erupts

with irresistible power in the world and impresses itself on the observer

with equal violence. In almost every case where Pindar refers to the

hereditary and inborn property of nature, there is some reference also to a

word indicating manifestation, revelation, the bringing out of something

from the forgotten or concealed into the realm of the visible, and so on. At

Pythian 8, Pindar relates a prophecy of “Amphiaraus the son of Oicles

spoke[n] in riddling words, when he saw, in seven-gated [40] Thebes, those

sons standing by their spears, when they came from Argos on that second

march, the Epigoni. Thus he spoke, while they were fighting: ‘By nature the

genuine spirit of the fathers [45] is conspicuous in the sons…’ ” The Greek

for the last phrase is “phuai to gennaion epiprepei ek pateron paisi lema,”

and the crucial verb epiprepei could be translated roughly as “becomes

conspicuous” but also “stands out upon,” “is fitting upon.” It is a verb used

with similarly pregnant meaning when at Odyssey 24.252, Homer’s

Odysseus, meeting his father Laertes who is working as a gardener, remarks

that, although unkempt, uncared for, poor, malnourished, the old man “does

not stand conspicuous to the sight as in any way a slave in form or

greatness” [oude ti toi douleion epiprepei eisorasthai eidos kai megethos]

but rather has the true bearing of a king. He recognizes his father’s nature—

it is revealed to the eye despite all outward and conventional signs to the

contrary—just like Amphiaraus the prophet sees the “genuine spirit”

[gennaion lema] of the fathers stand out in the sons “by nature,” or literally,

“by body,” by stature and bearing [phuai]. One might also add, in the case

of Odyssey, the parallel episode, both comic and powerful, and relevant to

our case, when Odysseus is shipwrecked on the island Phaeakia. He has

been stripped of literally everything, including his clothes. The princess

Nausicaa is on the beach with her consorts engaged in the age-old renewal

and purification ritual of washing and airing out clothes. Odysseus boldly

approaches her completely naked; the servants are frightened and run, but

he manages, naked and stripped of every outward mark of power and

wealth, to reconstruct his kingly status through the power of aristocratic

speech and of his bearing.

[cc]

The true measure of the man, his nature, is in

all these cases revealed: heredity and blood become apparent in body.

Reduced to mere body, to utter destitution, a shipwreck, or, in the case of

his father Laertes, to an unkempt tiller of the soil, the blood of a king, and

the fact of heredity—the phusis, nature, the truth about a being—reveals

itself precisely in this reduction to bare biology.

IV. Phusis as Heredity is Opposed to Nomos

Body, blood, biology differs from man to man so phusis differs from

man to man, both in the vehemence of its manifestation, and in the

particular inclinations and character produced. Thus for example it is said,

Each of us differs in nature [phuai d’hekastos diapheromen] for we were each allotted a

different life. [biotan] [55] One man has this, others have something else; but for one man to

win the prize of complete happiness is impossible.

[cci]

In this the concept of phusis explains human variety in an alternative

way to that of nomos or convention—nomos may perhaps (but only maybe)

explain the difference between tribal behavior, let us say, the wedding

ceremonies of one tribe as opposed to another. It may also arguably explain

the different function and behavior of different men within a tribe, which it

has led, either by command or by instruction, to different occupations or

arts. The standard of nature, of the body or the blood, introduces a different

understanding of variety and a different way to measure it: the body itself,

with its innate inclinations and desires, is not the product of human speech

or laws. Where law and teaching can suffice for the mass of men with less

nature or less reality—it has its place in ensuring the public peace and the

humble dignity of the commons—convention can’t explain the highest

achievements, highest areta or highest arts, for it has little or no part in the

ultimate cause of these. Nomos or convention homogenizes and equalizes,

this is its purpose: if behavior at its peak, however, is primarily explained

by inheritance and blood, this necessarily decreases not only the

explanatory power of nomos regarding human behavior and variety, but its

authority and dignity.

If a man has devoted his whole spirit to excellence, sparing neither expense nor toils, it is right

to grant the boast of manliness to those who achieve excellence, with an ungrudging [45]

mind. For it is an easy gift for a wise man to speak words of praise in recompense for labors of

all kinds and thus to promote the common good. Different wages for different deeds are sweet

to men, to the shepherd and the ploughman and the bird-trapper, and the man whom the sea

nourishes. Every man is intent upon keeping persistent famine from his belly. [50] But he who

wins rich renown in the games or in war receives the highest gain: to be well spoken of by his

fellow-citizens and by strangers, the choicest bloom of speech.

[ccii]

The purpose of nomos is to “keep persistent famine from the belly”—

preservation of mere life. When nomos or convention outsteps this or

pretends to, when it is forgotten that “he who wins rich renown in the

games or in war” belongs to a different reality and owes his origins to a

different principle, then nomos becomes something else, it becomes a

systematic and perverse covering-up of nature, party to the forgetfulness of

nature and the hierarchy between man and man that exists in nature. The

highest type of man is the product of a breeding program, and not of an

educational program of nomos. The boast of manliness, andreia, is alone

granted to such a man; other males are not men, andres, but mere anthropoi,

indistinct beings with anthropoid form.

[cciii]

This man is driven by the

impetus of his blood with such vehemence that all the common laws, all of

nomos, would for him be a Procrustes’ bed: it is best for such a man to

follow the inclinations of his nature and not nomos. The product of his

action is areta, loosely translated as virtue or excellence.

[25] Various men have various arts. It is right for a man to follow straight paths, and strive

according to his nature [phuai]. For strength manifests itself in action, and intelligence in

counsels, for those who have the inborn [sungenes] skill of foreseeing the future.

[cciv]

Men pursuing high achievement should strive according to nature

[marnasthai phuai] and not be misled or “educated” by convention or

teaching. The “standard” high achievement for a man is to possess areta—

and let us remember that “virtue” here refers ultimately to the ability to be a

good leader in war, namely to possess andreia and phronesis, battle prowess

and ability to give good war counsel: “strength manifests itself in action,

and intelligence in counsels.” Convention, speech, can’t mandate or teach

this. Like the art of the wise man, Pindar’s own art, which is analogous to

the art of the king—more on this shortly—it is inborn. Though a certain

kind of training may be necessary to cultivate it, this is not primarily a

matter of being taught, and certainly not being taught by nomos or custom,

but of being bred. The primary function of nomos is “social control,”

homogenization, taming, tribal survival, the continuation and preservation

of mere life—through a regime of commands, speech and teaching that

covers up and suppresses nature. Excellence, virtue, on the other hand, is a

matter of nature, of blood, and it cannot be taught.

[ccv]

Maybe the climax of

Pindar’s thoughts on nature are revealed in this explicitly negative attitude

to teaching, the taught, what we might call the “try-hards”:

A man with inborn [sungenes] glory has great weight; but he who has only learned is a man in

darkness, breathing changeful purposes, never taking an unwavering step, but trying his hand

at countless forms of excellence [areta] with his ineffectual thought.

[ccvi]

Areta, excellence, or virtue, is the matter at hand here. The prerequisite

is that it must be inborn, or rather, that an orientation and ability for areta is

inborn; it is not learned. And, more significantly given the discussion

above, the word here used for those who have merely learned is psephenos:

the dark, obscure, dim. This same thought is echoed in another ode where

Pindar repeats,

That which is inborn/by nature [phuai] is always the best; but many men strive to win glory

with excellence that comes from training. Anything in which a god has no part is none the

worse for being quelled in silence. For some roads [105] lead farther than others, and a single

occupation will not nourish us all. The paths to skill are steep; but, while offering this prize of

song, boldly shout aloud [110] that this man, by the blessing of the gods, was born with

deftness of hand and litheness of limb, and with valor in his eyes and at the banquet of Aias

son of Oileus he laid his victorious garland on the altar.

[ccvii]

The men who learn only, who seek didaktais aretais, “learned

excellences,” are men in darkness and in silence. Men who have not just a

different nature, but who have sufficient nature, who have more nature,

more reality, are revealed, become apparent or emerge to the sight of the

seer as if from a primordial and undifferentiated swamp or morass. This is

the world of nomos, the world of the many—it should be clear from

Pindar’s depreciation of conventional learning or training (“those who have

only learned,” “learned excellence”) that by corollary nomos itself,

whatever utilitarian value it may have in maintaining an illusion of common

good or common peace, has no value when it comes to the most important

thing, virtue itself. For nomos stands or falls by teaching, conventional

training, inculcation. But it cannot teach virtue, the arts of leadership,

physical strength and daring, or wisdom. Indeed, convention likely has a

negative value insofar as it is an expression of collective ignorance and

forgetfulness, not privy to the light of truth: this last only emerges as in a

flash through phusis, body, blood, biological breeding made apparent

through great action.

There is a sense in which Pindar does approve of training—it would be

absurd for an observer of athletic life to do otherwise.

[ccviii]

But this is a

very particular kind of training, and when we look more closely, the kind of

training Pindar extols only reinforces the impression so far regarding the

relationship between phusis, nomos, nature and the city’s arts, breeding and

taming:

…let Hagesidamus, victorious as a boxer at Olympia, offer thanks to Ilas, just as Patroclus did

to Achilles. [20] With the help of a god, one man can sharpen another who is born for

excellence, and encourage him to tremendous achievement. Without toil only a few have

attained joy, a light of life above all labors.

[ccix]

The phrase above, “born for excellence” is rather more concrete that

this in Greek: phunt’aretai, perhaps quite literally “grown for areta,” or

rather bred for areta as one might breed a plant or stallion for a particular

purpose. For a man indeed who has this nature or blood, a good trainer is

indispensible, for he can “sharpen” or “excite” him [thexais]. This is similar

to the terms in which Pindar praises another trainer elsewhere as a “Naxian

whetstone”

[ccx]

for sharpening athletes. There is for now only a hint as to

the general kind of training this concerns, and we can be sure it is not

“conventional” training of any kind. For the “ultimate” trainer and teacher

in Pindar’s work—indeed the only instance where the word “teaching,”

didaskalian, is used with positive meaning—is Chiron the Centaur.

The passage quoted above where “inborn glory” is contrasted with

“those who have learned” precedes a mention of Chiron, and should really

be quoted in full:

A man with inborn glory has great weight; but he who has only learned is a man in darkness,

breathing changeful purposes, never taking an unwavering step, but trying his hand at

countless forms of excellence with his ineffectual thought. But golden-haired Achilles, staying

in the home of Philyra as a child, played at great deeds, often [45] brandishing in his hands a

javelin with a short blade; swift as the wind, he dealt death to wild lions in battle, and he slew

wild boars and carried their panting bodies to the Centaur, son of Cronus, first when he was six

years old, and afterwards for all the time he spent there. [50] Artemis and bold Athena gazed

at him with wonder, as he slew deer without the help of dogs and crafty nets; for he excelled

with his feet. I have this story as it was told by earlier generations. Deep-thinking Cheiron

reared Jason under his stone roof, and later Asclepius, [55] whom he taught the gentle-handed

laws of remedies. And he arranged a marriage for Peleus with the lovely-bosomed daughter of

Nereus, and brought up for her their incomparable child, nurturing his spirit with all fitting

things, so that when the blasts of the sea-winds sent him [60] to Troy, he might withstand the

spear-clashing war-shout of the Lycians and Phrygians and Dardanians; and when he came

into close conflict with the spear-bearing Ethiopians, he might fix it in his mind that their

leader, powerful Memnon the kinsman of Helenus, should not return to his home. From that

point the light of the Aeacids has been fixed to shine far. [65] Zeus, it is your blood and your

contest at which my song aimed its shot, shouting the joy of this land with the voices of young

men.

[ccxi]

Chiron is responsible not only for the raising and training of heroes—

he teaches them, most significantly, the gentle remedies of natural

plants

[ccxii]

—but also for their breeding; for he has arranged Achilles’ very

conception. The word used to describe Chiron in another ode is agroteron,

of the fields, or “beast of the wild”

[ccxiii]

—a term that, as we will later see,

Plato uses to describe Socrates himself at a crucial point in the Gorgias (and

elsewhere as well). This is not an accident. Chiron is the teacher of heroes

for a reason; he is the ultimate trainer or cultivator or “sharpener” of inner

breeding and nature. This training can only take place outside the city—this

is not education by convention or by the city. The reader may be reminded

of Machiavelli’s own esoteric interpretation of this fact:

You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the

first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not

sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince

to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man. This has been figuratively taught

to princes by ancient writers, who describe how Achilles and many other princes of old were

given to the Centaur Chiron to nurse, who brought them up in his discipline; which means

solely that, as they had for a teacher one who was half beast and half man, so it is necessary

for a prince to know how to make use of both natures, and that one without the other is not

durable.

[ccxiv]

One doesn’t need to accept the whole of Machiavelli’s interpretation to

see here that the question impressing itself on any reader’s mind is why it

should be necessary for heroes to have, as their archetypal trainer, a half-

man half-beast who lives outside cities and is called agroteros, of the wild,

a wild beast. Pindar at least has made it clear in the longer passage quoted

above that this is pretty much the only kind of training and teaching that is

legitimate. And of course, whatever other reason there may be on top of

this, the basic conclusion must also be Machiavelli’s conclusion, that the

law, convention, nomos is insufficient, that it fails in the crucial respect,

which, in Machiavelli’s case, is the education of princes and captains of the

people. Regardless, we need not and cannot concern ourselves with what

precisely it is that Cheiron taught his charges, which is what any good

trainer must do to sharpen and excite the inborn nature of his student. The

basic message is obvious, that such training consists, at least from the point

of view of nomos, in a re-barbarization, and a de-civilization or de-“nomo-

fication.”

It could be said that Pindar, like Machiavelli, even goes so far as to

explain which animal natures a man of nature must raise up from within

himself to succeed. It is most interesting that Machiavelli continues above,

A prince, therefore, being compelled knowingly to adopt the beast, ought to choose the fox

and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend

himself against wolves. Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion

to terrify the wolves. Those who rely simply on the lion do not understand what they are

about. Therefore a wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be

turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer.

[ccxv]

Of course Pindar himself refers to just this example of the fox and the

lion, and more than once. For example, at Olympian 11, where he says that

neither the loud-roaring lion, nor the fiery fox change their “ingrown

character” [emphues ethos]. This is in the context of discussing the noble

stock of the victor, Hagesidamus of Western Locris, who hails from a race

[genos] that is hospitable, beauty-loving, and, crucially, both akrosophos—

most wise—and aikhmetes—warlike. And, moreover, a people of whom

Pindar is giving the Muses a surety that their bred character will not change,

that is, change in the crucial respect of having both the fox

(wisdom/prudence) and the lion (warlike spirit/strength).

[ccxvi]

Even more

strikingly, Pindar uses the example of the lion and the fox in the fourth

Isthmian Ode to the fighter Melissus, already considered several times in

this chapter. The context is especially significant given Machiavelli’s

claims:

…if one says something well, that saying goes forth speaking with an immortal voice. And the

radiance of fine deeds, forever unquenchable, has crossed the fruitful earth and the sea. May

we win the favor of the Muses and kindle that torch of song, a worthy garland from the

pancratium [45] for Melissus, too, the scion of the race of Telesias. For in the toil of conflict

he resembles the spirit of loud-roaring lions in boldness, while in wisdom he is like the fox,

who forestalls the swoop of the eagle by falling on her back. And it is right to do anything to

blot out one’s enemy.

This concerns a race of leaders who have bred both the lion and the

fox—war-spirit and wisdom, andreia and phronesis—within themselves and

for their offspring. Breeding and education to nature is then literally a re-

wilding, an animalization, a beastliness, a breeding of beastly character.

This by corollary is and must be an escape from nomos, the conventions of

the city and the many, from pious and mediocre platitudes and moralisms,

from the conventions of peace. Nature, the truth about the world and about

man, erupts into being, into radiance, or the light of knowledge, from the

obscurity of the primordial darkness and forgetfulness in which mortal

anthropoi are doomed to live. The coming-about of such a nature, or body,

is by physical breeding, and its training is a re-wilding, carried out beyond

the walls of the city and of convention.

V. Irrepressible Character of Nature as Opposed to Convention

For Pindar, whatever part human envy, the many, and convention has

in covering up the truth and suppressing or distorting nature—whether

through active suppression, through miseducation, or by some other means

—nature is always by far the stronger part, and, unlike Plato, who is in so

many other things his student, Pindar seems to remain confident that the

wild and overweening nature of his aristocrats will never fail to express

itself and emerge in great and violent deeds. This is because, to repeat the

crucial fact that must be realized about the idea of nature at its conception,

it is not only a matter of kind or quality—i.e., not only a matter of

inclination or orientation to certain activities or objects of desire—but

primarily one of intensity. The adjective Pindar most often uses to call the

noble, the esloi or esthloi, comes directly from the verb esthai, “to be.” This

should be read quite literally: they are organisms who have more being; it is

a question of having sufficient amount of nature within oneself. Nietzsche’s

words on this matter, which we will have occasion to consider at greater

length in a future chapter, should nevertheless be reproduced here as well,

They call themselves “the truthful,” above all the Greek nobility…The word developed for this

characteristic, ἐσθλος [esthlos: fine, noble], indicates, according to its root meaning, a man

who is, who possesses reality, who really exists, who is true. Then, with a subjective

transformation, it indicates the true man as the truthful man. In this phase of conceptual

transformation it becomes the slogan and catch phrase for the nobility, and its sense shifts

entirely over to mean “aristocratic,” to mark a distinction from the lying common man, as

Theognis takes and presents him…

[ccxvii]

Pindar maintains the earlier meaning of “noble,” of esthlos, of an

organism that has more being, more reality. The nature or breeding of

Pindar’s heroes and aristocrats is so vehement as to be almost not

suppressible. This attitude appears vividly in one of the most beautiful

passages from his opus, the assembly of adventurers known as the

Argonauts—one of the longest, if not the longest, myths recounted in all of

Pindar, and a proper recapitulation of the entire drama of phusis-nomos,

which we will see again repeated with special force in certain of Plato’s

dialogues.

Jason returns to his homeland to reclaim his rightful place as king.

Asked who he is by a stranger he says, most strikingly, that he has come to

bring “the teaching of Cheiron”:

“I say that I am going to bring the teaching of Cheiron; for I come from his cave, from the

presence of Chariclo and Philyra, where the holy daughters of the Centaur raised me. Living

twenty years without [105] having said or done anything shameful in their house, I have come

to my home to recover the ancient honor of my father, now held improperly, which once Zeus

granted to Aeolus, the leader of the people, and to his sons. For I hear that lawless Pelias,

yielding to his empty

mind, [110] violently robbed it from my parents, who were the rulers by

right.

[ccxviii]

Jason had been given to Cheiron when the usurper Pelias took power.

A series of “crafty” trickeries follow this introduction—Jason, as we have

seen, is well-trained by Cheiron in the mode of the fox and will seduce

Medea with his knowledge to achieve his task—wherein Pelias claims that

he will give up the royal power if Jason returns the golden fleece.

[ccxix]

What follows is one of the most rousing episodes in Greek literature (as

always, very inadequately translated here), in which Jason calls upon his

companions—he calls them knights, hippotes—to embark on a great

adventure of danger and glory:

And Jason himself at once [170] sent messengers everywhere to announce the voyage. Soon

there came the three sons, untiring in battle, whom dark-eyed Alcmena and Leda bore to Zeus

son of Cronus; and two high-haired men, sons of the earth-shaker, obeying their innate valor,

one from Pylos and the other from the headland of Taenarus; you both achieved [175] noble

fame, Euphemus and wide-ruling Periclymenus. And from Apollo the lyre-player came, the

father of songs, much-praised Orpheus. And Hermes of the golden wand sent two sons to take

part in the unabating toil, Echion and Erytus, bursting with youth. Swiftly [180] came those

that dwell around the foothills of Mount Pangaeon, for with a smiling spirit their father

Boreas, king of the winds, quickly and willingly equipped Zetes and Calais with purple wings

bristling down their backs. And Hera kindled in the demigods an all-persuasive sweet longing

[185] for the ship Argo, so that no one would be left behind to stay by his mother’s side,

nursing a life without danger, but even at the risk of death would find the finest elixir of

excellence together with his other companions.

[ccxx]

This is a recreation of the primeval Mannerbund, morya, comitatus or,

in Greek, kouros, ephebes, hetairia, the society of young warriors,

mentioned already in the first chapter—the raw material or most basic form

from which, as we will see, the philosophical brotherhoods and schools of a

later time will take their form as from an archetype.

[ccxxi]

The story that

may be recounted here regarding the relationship of phusis and nomos

would be roughly as follows: conventional society is built on the lies of a

usurper (Pelias in this case, Agamemnon in the Iliad; both stand-ins for

nomos, the tribe, the collectivity, the many and their lies about good and

bad). A young man of wild nature—Jason, or Achilles—who has been bred

for power and trained in the wilderness by Cheiron the man-beast, returns to

claim his place as ruler by superior right—superior physical power and

daring, and superior prudence, or counsel in war.

[ccxxii]

The false king, the

suppressor and usurper of nature—Pelias, Agamemnon, king nomos—

through trickery, perfidy or cowardice casts out the hero and his

companions from the realm. The hero and his young companions are now

an independent society of warriors or pirates on the outskirts of society,

superior by nature, but outside all law and custom. They undertake many

hard tasks and adventures, loving danger and exhibiting contempt for mere

life and for death. They return to take power as rightful rulers of their

society or become rulers of a new society, which they take by superior

physical force and by trickery, often winning the daughters of the false

kings. Is it possible that in this drama of Jason or Achilles, and of quite a

few others, we see the survival in mythical form of the kinds of stories that

actual bands of young warriors—cast out from their tribes and societies in

the ritual of the comitatus that existed in the deepest Greek pre-history—

told among themselves to explain their outcast condition, their experiences,

and even their final success after they became founders of new states?

[ccxxiii]

But it was for precisely this reason that in a previous chapter it was

speculated that the concept of nature itself originates in part with this

institution that uniquely, first existed outside law and convention and

subsisted by a principle totally different from this.

The most striking phrase in this entire passage just quoted, however, is

regarding the “two high-haired men, sons of the earth-shaker, who, obeying

their inner valor,” could not resist Jason’s call for adventure and danger of

death. The actual phrase is aidesthentes alkan, and would be more literally

translated as “in awe/ashamed of their own great daring.” This is entirely in

keeping with the earlier passage from Isthmian 7 discussed above, wherein

“Strepsiades… is the victor in the pancratium at the Isthmus, both awesome

in his strength and handsome to look at; and he treats/holds excellence

[areta] as not uglier/more shameful/inferior to body [phue]. He is made

radiant by the violet-haired Muses…” The power of phua is irresistible, its

calling must be obeyed. The “divine blood” in the aristocrats that Pindar

claims could not “sit still.” He maintains the older understanding of “noble”

that Nietzsche mentions—the noble, the esthloi, are simply those that have

more being, more reality, more vehemence, who emerge from the obscure

darkness of mortal men into the radiance of eternal fame through great

deeds of areta. They are in religious awe—aideomai is a verb often used

with reference to divine or religious objects and totems—of their own inner

violence or daring and can’t resist its call. This impetuousness is precisely

what they were bred for. For this reason maybe he believed that no law or

regime could ever restrain excellence, nor really ever be responsible for its

having emerged. Areta and by extension the biological fundamental phusis

from which it emerges is beyond all convention, all law, all regime, and can

co-opt, prosper under, or take over any; it is the only thing that is “regime-

independent” or “convention-independent”: “Under all laws the straight-

spoken

[ccxxiv]

man excels, whether by the side of a tyranny, or whenever the

furious mob, or when the wise watch over the city.”

[ccxxv]

VI. The Wise and Wisdom in Pindar

A well-known objection that Socrates makes about the poets, in

particular dramatic poets, is that they “hide” themselves in their works.

Pindar most emphatically doesn’t hide himself. He makes frequent

references not just to himself but—especially relevant in the context of the

debate here hinted at—also to his art, his wisdom, and the relationship

between his wisdom and that of others, or of conventional wisdom. But can

one from this alone deduce that Pindar himself is a philosopher? The

answer must be that he is not; he refers to the wise and perhaps to himself

as wise (sophos) but not to himself as a lover of wisdom. Nevertheless his

place in the famous “war between philosophy and poetry,” already

prominent in Plato and frequently commented on by many recent and

insightful readers of Plato who are concerned with the relationship between

the philosopher and the city—Pindar’s role in this “war” is necessarily quite

ambiguous. This is not only because, unlike, say, Aristophanes, he

frequently points to himself, his art and also to the relationship of wisdom

to learning, of wisdom to convention, and so on—but also because, as we

have seen, he frequently speaks of nature. Now, a crucial and frequently-

quoted passage in the discussion of the war between philosophy and poetry

comes from Aristotle, wherein he says that the philosophers are the first to

think about nature (phusis) whereas those who came before philosophers

did not, but rather thought and talked about tales or myths—they were not

philosophoi, whose existence stands or falls by the discovery of nature, but

philomythoi.

[ccxxvi]

What then to make of Pindar’s place in all this, who

both talks endlessly about myths and frequently about nature? But doesn’t

Plato do the same?

Before we speculate on the particular relationship Pindar has to the

philosophers and to philosophy—for now I would provisionally repeat my

own thesis, that philosophy and tyranny are radicalizations of the

aristocratic worldview of Pindar—let’s look at Pindar’s own explicit words

on wisdom and on the origins of his own art. Most significant and entirely

in keeping with what we have seen so far as regards the relationship

between learning and excellence—in this case the excellence specifically of

wisdom—Pindar says,

I have many swift arrows in the quiver under my arm, [85] arrows that speak to the initiated.

But the masses need interpreters. The wise man knows many things by nature, while those

who have only learned chatter with violent and indiscriminate tongues in vain like crows

against the divine bird of Zeus. Now, bend your bow toward the mark; tell me, my mind,

whom are we trying to hit [90] as we shoot arrows of fame from a gentle mind? I will aim at

Acragas, and speak with true intent a word sworn by oath: no city for a hundred years has

given birth to a man more beneficent in his mind or more generous with his hand [95] than

Theron.

[ccxxvii]

The wise man knows many things by his nature, in his blood or body

—sophos ho polla eidos phuai. Those who have merely learned produce

just a lot of chatter—in particular violent, indiscriminate chatter that covers

up with its boisterous sound and superiority in number the calm and

elevated, but veiled, truth that the wise man speaks to the initiated. The

image of the chattering crows who gang up against the divine bird of Zeus,

the eagle, is especially important—as clear as possible an image of the

ubiquitous demotic darkness of nomos attempting to cover up the

emergence of phusis and its elucidation by the wise man. The eagle, lone,

solitary, watchful, all-seeing, inhabiting the high, radiant cold air of the

enduring gods, free from the gravity and cares of mere life; against the

social, chattering, cackling birds who try to overwhelm with noise and

number. This image reappears elsewhere. The eagle is a totem of Pindar and

appears again at significant occasions: “The eagle is swift among birds: he

swoops down from afar, and suddenly seizes with his talons his blood-

stained quarry; but chattering daws stay closer to the ground.”

[ccxxviii]

The

wise man possesses a great eye—an “inborn eye.” He is on the hunt for

prey,

[ccxxix]

for truth or insight about the world, which is snatched up in one

bold move from afar, from high up, or hit from afar as an archer hits his

target.

[ccxxx]

The art of seeing, of bringing out forgotten truths into the

radiant light, in short, wisdom, is an inborn art, it is knowledge by nature or

by the blood. By contrast those who have learned—whether it be the mass

of the many [to pan] who need interpreters—or their representatives, the

“learned,” the mathontes, the pursuers of the didaktai aretai, that is, the try-

hards and intellectuals who are utterly demotic and conventional; these

produce mere chatter. Wisdom is a matter of silent insight from afar, an

inborn skill; it is not a matter of discussion, endless words, the boisterous

chatter of the envious. This latter is the province of the undifferentiated and

ignorant many and their flatterers, this is the darkness of nomos that seeks

to drown out with its violence and sound the radiance of wisdom, to

suppress the wise man, to suppress phua.

[ccxxxi]

Pindar is even more specific about the way in which “the wise man

knows many things in his blood.” When he refers to his own art and ability,

or to the arts of prophecy and poetry more generally, he calls them

sungonoisin tekhnais, “inborn arts,” using the same word, sungenes, inborn,

that we have seen repeatedly above. This following passage is important on

many counts, especially when we keep in mind the myths about how

Socrates himself came to his “art”:

By nature the genuine spirit of the fathers [45] is conspicuous in the sons. I clearly see

Alcmaeon, wielding a dappled serpent on his blazing shield, the first at the gates of Cadmus.

And he who suffered in the earlier disaster, the hero Adrastus, now has the tidings of a better

[50] bird of omen. But at home his luck will be the opposite. For he alone of the Danaan army

will gather the bones of his dead son, by the fortune sent from the gods, and come with his

people unharmed [55] to the spacious streets of Argos, the city of Abas.” So spoke

Amphiaraus. And I myself rejoice as I fling garlands over Alcmaeon and sprinkle him

with song, because this hero is my neighbor and guardian of my possessions, and he met

me when I was going to the songful navel of the earth, [60] and he touched on prophecies

with his inborn arts. And you, Apollo, shooting from afar, you who govern the glorious

temple, hospitable to all, in the hollows of Pytho, there you granted the greatest of joys.

[ccxxxii]

The navel of the earth is Delphi, where Pindar received “the greatest of

joys” from Apollo and he learned from the spirit of a previous prophet how

to muster his “inborn arts.” Pindar’s arts, the skills of the wise man, are

inborn, are not taught. The origin of wisdom, like all areta, is ultimately

divine, and appears as a divine gift; Pindar is quite explicit on this in other

places as well: “All the resources for the achievements of mortal excellence

come [ephun] from the gods; for wisdom, or having powerful arms, or an

eloquent tongue.”

[ccxxxiii]

However, as we have seen above on so many

occasions, this is so only in the sense that the genealogies of blood and

body in which such excellences are transferred are ultimately traceable back

to a divine or semi-divine progenitor, who engendered a new race or who,

like Cheiron, set up a fortuitous marriage for good breeding: the word used

here for “come” is ephun, again from phuo: are grown, bred from the gods.

It should not be imagined that such claims are directly “magical” or

“oracular” in the pejorative sense used by certain modern commentators on

Plato, e.g., Karl Popper or his followers. Socrates as well is said from

numerous sources—not just Plato—to have received his entirely rational,

satirical, sarcastic mission of “gadfly” and indeed his entire assembly of

“logical” arts from a divine source; whether this is, as in the case of Pindar,

Apollo at Delphi, or otherwise a much darker and more titanic force.

[ccxxxiv]

In both cases the claim may be interpreted as an argument against the

conceit that wisdom, like courage or manliness, can be learned or is a

matter of convention or of “education by the city.” They are divine gifts,

ultimately gifts of the blood.

Let us summarize for a moment Pindar’s thoughts on wisdom and

knowledge, and the relationship of these to nature and convention. While

Pindar may be somewhat vague and mysterious about the way in which

“the wise man knows many things by his nature,” as opposed to those who

have merely learned, who live in darkness and produce deafening,

obscuring chatter, nevertheless a few obvious observations relevant to my

main argument can now be made: Wisdom, like the other true virtues or

areta, can’t be taught, but is a matter of the blood. The wise man—and

later, by extension, the philosopher—is not taught or nurtured so much as

he must be bred; at most he is a lucky accident. His education, insofar as it

is at all possible, takes place “outside the city,” whether under the tutelage

of a god who reveals to the philosopher (or the wise man) his mission and

his “inborn arts,” or under the tutelage of a being like Cheiron, who is half-

man half-beast and who Apollo himself must consult on matters of nature

and breeding.

[ccxxxv]

This education in other words must consist, again, of a

“de-nomofication,” a de-civilization and “rewilding.” To be frank, of a

barbarization, at least as seen from the point of view that identifies

civilization with domesticity.

[ccxxxvi]

By contrast in this process nomos,

convention, and its representatives as embodied in those who have learned,

if it does have any purpose, it is to thwart the growth and to cover up

genuine insight into nature—knowledge as the result of the “hunt” for

“prey”—and its transmission, and to replace it with an entirely sham and

shadow “knowledge,” with cant that only has the purpose of the self-

preservation of the many.

Finally, the object of investigation of the philosopher—nature, phusis,

by which philosophy itself stands or falls—is itself at its origin only

apparent as blood. That is, it emerges from the ubiquity and homogeneity

and darkness of convention, becomes apparent to the perception of the wise

man as a fact of biological breeding. In this it has rather the character of a

revelation or a manifestation to the immediate perception, rather than a

discovery by logical deduction. Nature is made manifest to the seer and

poet through the observation of botanical or animal life, and through the

persistence of inherited qualities across generations.

VII. The Possible Connection of Wisdom, the “Inborn Arts,” to

Kingship or Leadership

Pindar himself makes an overt connection between his own arts—

between wisdom—and the other “inborn” virtues and nature in an even

stronger way than we have seen so far. And furthermore Pindar makes a

connection to kingship or leadership that, while mysterious in character,

nevertheless should be considered here in the conclusion, however briefly.

We have already seen part of the following passage in which Pindar in close

succession uses both the words phua and sungenes:

It is his lot to have noble friends to bring against his slanderers, like water against smoke. [25]

Various men have various skills. It is right for a man to follow straight paths, and strive

according to his nature [phuai]. For strength manifests itself in action, and intelligence in

counsels, for those who have the inborn [sungenes] skill of foreseeing the future.

[ccxxxvii]

The last phrase is important because it connects the “inborn” art of

foreseeing the future [essomenon proidein]—Pindar’s own inborn art, the

art of the wise—with both physical strength that is manifested in action and

with phren or phronesis, which is manifested in good counsels. This is a

restatement of the old Homeric formula we have seen repeatedly—virtue or

areta as andreia and phronesis, the virtues of leadership in war, the modes

of the lion and the fox, most prized by the aristocrats, and the end to which

the aristocratic breeding project is specifically directed. But it is not clear

what Pindar is hinting at here; it is not clear from the language used what

the connection here is to the art of foreseeing the future. One obvious

reading is that wisdom is just another of the great excellences that are bred,

much like physical strength, beauty, or prudence; and that the wise man is

the close kin or brother of those other excellent men, but that each has his

own “art” or specific kind of excellence, and it is best for each to struggle

according to his own specific nature [marnasthai phuai].

[ccxxxviii]

But there is a more interesting interpretation, encouraged not only by

Pindar’s list here, but by similar phrases he uses elsewhere. First of all,

although this list appears as a “list of the various excellences different men

should, by their different natures, strive for according to straight paths—

whether strength, or prudence, or the foreseeing of the future”—there is

obviously some sense in which at least the first two, strength and prudence,

are “twins” or should be, if possible, connected in the same person in the

best-case outcome. We have already seen how as early as Homer, and surely

before, these two, battlefield prowess and the giving of good counsel in war,

are the virtues of leadership or kingship and should ideally exist together in

the same king. It may be that Nestor is better at counsel and Aias or

Diomedes better at andreia and strength, but all are expected to possess

both to some extent, and the supreme gentlemen, Achilles and Odysseus,

are good at both. Now, in the Iliad, the mantic Kalkhas, who had the gift of

knowing “the things that were, that are, and that will be” and who is

possessed in his trances by Apollo, is used by Achilles in the assembly

when giving counsel to make his case to the other kings. Thus in Homer the

“inborn gift” of prophecy appears as helper or “adviser” to the rightful king,

who does not himself, however, possess this. Nor, conversely, does the seer

or prophet or mantic ever rule directly. Kalkhas, holder of the areta of

wisdom perhaps, is threatened by Agamemnon, but Achilles, holder of the

areta of manliness and prudence, immediately steps in to protect him. In

this dramatic early form we already have the arrogant and self-serving

mediocrity of convention threatening the insight of the wise, who must then

be protected by the gentleman Achilles, holder of the remaining two

“kingly” virtues. The “inborn skill” of knowing, or the virtue of wisdom in

its most “primitive” form, thus appears as an ancillary branch of the

“breeding regime” previously mentioned. Together with andreia and

phronesis—the twin virtues of the king—the sungenes skill of essomenon

proidein, of second sight, appears as a deliberate means of producing “the

wise,”

[ccxxxix]

who will act as helpmeets and advisers to the king, and who

will in turn protect the wise.

A second possibility, however, is that Pindar believes the last-named

art, the knowing of the future, the skill that is the product of the virtue of

wisdom, is a distillation of the other two, especially the last—prudence—or

perhaps that it itself can be united with the other two in the same person.

And we see that Pindar indeed at other times in his odes implies this last-

named skill, the skill of the wise man, will be united with the other two in

the same person, to create, as it were, as super-king, or a king or ruler who

is also “wise” in the sense used. Consider the following two instances

where Pindar refers to a mysterious “eye” or an “inborn eye” belonging to a

leader. In one case he praises Arkesilas, “king” of Cyrene,

Wealth is widely powerful, whenever a mortal man receives it, blended with pure excellence,

from the hands of fortune, and takes it as a companion that makes many friends. [5] Arcesilas,

favored by the gods, from the first steps of your famous life you seek for it with glory, by the

grace of Castor with his golden chariot, [10] who, after the wintry storm, sheds calm on your

blessed hearth. Wise men are better able to bear even god-given power. Great prosperity

surrounds you, as you walk with justice. [15] First, since you are a king of great cities, your

inborn eye looks on this as a most revered prize of honor, united with your mind; [20] and you

are blessed even now, because you have already earned the boast of victory with your horses

from the renowned Pythian festival, and you will welcome this victory-procession of men, a

delight for Apollo.

[ccxl]

Arkesilas is implicitly referred to as both “wise” [sophos] and he is

also said to have an “inborn eye” [sungenes ophthalmos]. What could this

last reference mean? Let us take another strange or mysterious reference to

an “eye” from Pindar’s odes, a similar introduction to a “king,” in this case

Theron of Akragas:

Songs, rulers of the lyre, what god, what hero, what man shall we celebrate? Indeed, Pisa

belongs to Zeus; and Heracles established the Olympic festival, as the finest trophy of battle;

[5] and Theron must be proclaimed because of his victorious four-horse chariot, Theron who is

just in his regard for guests, and is the bulwark of Acragas, the strength of the city, the choicest

bloom of illustrious ancestors, who labored much with their spirits [thumos], and won a sacred

home by the river, and were [10] the eye of Sicily, their allotted lifetime attended them,

bringing wealth and grace to their inborn excellence [gnesiais aretais].

[ccxli]

Let me speculate then on Pindar’s meaning here regarding an eye, an

“inborn eye”—clearly related to the “inborn arts” of foresight—and wisdom

as refers to rulers. What kind of rulers are these, and where are they?

Now of course Theron is a tyrant, not a king, and in some sense the

same may be said of Arkesilas, who, although not the first in his generation

of rulers, does not have, in Libya, the same legitimacy that a Greek king has

in Greece. They are tyrants, even if tyrants of a particular type—Sicilian

tyrants in particular have been said to have made “considerable effort” to

“conform” to aristocratic culture and standards.

[ccxlii]

In both cases then

Pindar is not praising a traditional basileus in any sense. He is praising a

new type of ruler. In particular he is praising dynamic

[ccxliii]

and powerful

rulers of multiple cities, outside the Greek mainland and on the periphery of

Greek civilization, who are engaged in existential colonial wars with non-

Greek natives and competing Carthaginian or Phoenician interests. Theron

and in particular Hieron are praised elsewhere for being the salvation of

Greek civilization against the Carthaginian barbarian.

[ccxliv]

The general

reader may be more acquainted with the famous Thermopylae as a

landmark battle in the conflict between Greek and barbarian, or, in

retrospect, West and East, Greek civilization—with its attendant cultivation

of philosophy and the arts—and oriental barbarism and despotism. But the

Greeks themselves considered the Sicilian battle of Himera equally

important, where, traditionally on the same day as Thermopylae, Theron

and his ally Gelo tyrant of Syracuse defended themselves against a war of

extermination and broke the Carthaginian power in Sicily for a century, and

arguably for good. This battle was seen traditionally as part of the same

campaign as the Greco-Persian wars, part of a defensive war against a

Persian-Punic global effort to annihilate Greek civilization.

[ccxlv]

In other

words, the gravity of the situation on the periphery of the Greek world was

acutely felt by Greeks even well before the coming of the Persian invasions;

the realities on this periphery seemed to make necessary a particular and

new kind of rule, a form of non-traditional kingship, or form of “dynamic”

one-man rule, expansive, energetic, ever-watchful, ever-ready to anticipate

both turns of fortune and the enemy. I see no other way at least to interpret

Pindar’s explicit use of “wise” for Arkesilas, and unprecedented explicit

reference to both Arkesilas’ “inborn eye” and the bloodline of Theron as

“the eye of Sicily.” These are forms normally used for the art of prophecy,

of foretelling, or “second sight” that belongs to the wise, or to artists, who

are usually not rulers. One has then to speculate that Pindar is claiming this

is a new type of ruler who unites all the separate traditional virtues that the

aristocracy bred for—andreia, phronesis, and now, in unprecedented way,

sophia

[ccxlvi]

—into one man. We might call this a man of genius. One ruler

who, one might say, is a fortuitous and fortunate “accident” of the breeding

regime, who stands in vigilant watch over the periphery and is ready to

defend it with energetic action as the “strength of the city.”

If we accept even part of this reading, we see that Pindar himself,

though living firmly in the aristocratic world and at the height of the

aristocratic world, recognizes in some preliminary way that an aristocracy

in great danger or at the point of its “decline”—on the edge of the civilized

world and ever at risk of losing its liberties—produces, under emergency

conditions as the final product of its program of breeding and education, a

tyrant. That is, a ruler who, unlike a traditional king, is outside all nomos,

[ccxlvii]

all traditional law and restraint and who, although embodying the

chief aristocratic virtues in their “distilled” form—perhaps, we could say a

genius—is not himself an aristocrat

[ccxlviii]

and not bound by the limitations,

customs, traditions, or orientations of any particular class. He is, in other

words, aristocratic phusis “radicalized” and unbound. This is the origin of

the genius, bred for war. In much the same way as the philosopher, his twin,

will be shown to be in the following chapters, and for much the same

purpose.

CHAPTER THREE: COVERT

TEACHING OF TYRANNY IN

PLATONIC POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

I. Introduction: Concealment of Association Between Tyranny and

Philosophy in Plato and the Meaning of “Political Philosophy”—

In this chapter I seek to show that Plato himself makes the case that

philosophy and tyranny are fundamentally connected, or that the

preconditions necessary for philosophy to exist and perpetuate itself are

also the preconditions for tyranny. The preservation of philosophy and

training of philosophers necessarily risks also the training for tyranny and

the production of a tyrant. The philosopher and the tyrant are kindred types:

the same type, the same youth, who uniquely becomes a philosopher also

may become a tyrant.

Provisionally this may actually be described as the position of the

character Callicles from Plato’s Gorgias. The innovation here made in the

reading of Plato is that Plato is shown to agree with Callicles at least insofar

as the fundamental orientation toward the city is concerned. A question

remains, as we will see, regarding the extent to which Plato refines and

spiritualizes Callicles’ brutal political teaching, or the extent to which Plato

merely prettifies this teaching by covering it up and reframing it for

“political presentation” with much wiliness. But before this may be

decided, much of this chapter is a thinking-through of Callicles’ position in

the Gorgias—Callicles being, as Strauss himself points out, a crucial source

for Nietzsche’s understanding of classical political philosophy.

[ccxlix]

Accordingly in what follows, especially in the introduction, Callicles’

“teaching” will be presented and summarized in a terse and matter-of-fact

way. There is much in this view that is frightening and even abhorrent to us,

especially when it is thought through to its “biological” foundations;

nevertheless, for the purposes of understanding, this view must here be

presented before the full “Platonic” revision or answer to it can be

considered. The conclusion reached in this chapter is that in the final

analysis Plato himself, at least politically is close, uncomfortably close

perhaps, to the Calliclean position.

Since it is the same type of man who is to become either tyrant or

philosopher, it turns out then that, according to Callicles, this type in the

final analysis is the thing: in this reading the salvation and training of this

biological type that provides “raw material” for both the philosopher and

the tyrant is Plato’s fundamental political concern. The production—the

breeding—and training or protection of this biological specimen—the

production of genius—is the original and fundamental function of political

philosophy on one hand, and of tyranny on the other. Philosophy and

tyranny are alternative methods to “preserve nature” or “save nature.”

These might be called “emergency medical measures” or maybe, in jest, but

not inaccurately, “environmental protection measures.” Philosophy and

tyranny are means of carving out, within the life of the city, “game

preserves” for the preservation of nature: the ancient aristocratic breeding

project now unbound from the identity of any historical class or tribe and

made abstract, is preserved by political philosophy as a kind of fossil.

These are strange claims to make about Plato and about the meaning of

political philosophy, and might appear especially perverse in light of Plato’s

well-known attack on tyranny in Republic and in the Gorgias. Nevertheless

a quite strong case can be made from Plato’s own writings that this is his

meaning, and it is from the Gorgias itself, where Socrates moralizes so

against tyranny and for “justice,” that we can draw out the strongest

evidence. But if Plato really did believe such things, he couldn’t have said

any of this openly or directly. And so the case to be made in this chapter

will be indirect, and will rely on a reading of Plato as rhetoric. That is to

say, Plato conceals such views, and often conceals them under opposite

views: he conceals, for example, the fundamental kinship between

philosophy and tyranny under a most vehement attack on tyranny. This

Platonic rhetoric is itself, quite literally, “political philosophy”: it is

philosophy not only as investigation, but as spiritual warfare, presented

with the intention of justifying and defending the place of the philosopher

in the city, with presenting philosophy as a good citizen, with preserving

philosophy within the confines of the polis and keeping it safe from

physical harm and from corruption.

This view of political philosophy and its relationship to rhetoric will

no doubt be familiar to the reader: it is almost a commonplace, in the wake

of the revival of classical political philosophy by Leo Strauss and by his

school, that political philosophy in its beginnings is not just the

philosophical study of politics, but also philosophy itself become political.

That is, political philosophy is philosophy aware of its position in the city

and therefore aware of the dangers it faces—aware of its need for self-

preservation. The drive for self-preservation on the part of philosophers and

their friends was the result of persistent persecution. Such persecution

began at some point—at least as early as Anaxagoras—but intensified with

Socrates’ execution, and was carried out primarily by democratic regimes.

Philosophy, in the beginning the “study of the things in the heavens and

under the earth,” was therefore forced to orient itself away from natural

science and toward social life and in particular toward apologetics, a

defense of philosophy as socially harmless or even beneficial in the face of

persistent claims that it is harmful or dangerous. This apologetic and

rhetorical project may be seen as one provisional definition of “political

philosophy.” This is philosophy oriented toward the polis, justifying its

position in the polis, philosophy with a “politic” face. The study of political

philosophy therefore makes special demands on the reader: he must read it

also, if not primarily, as rhetoric, and therefore read between the lines, with

special attention to means of concealment and dissimulation.

This view of political philosophy at least in its broad outlines will be

adhered to in this chapter; and I agree with this means of reading

philosophy also as rhetoric, with special attention to its arts of dissimulation

and of speaking to multiple audiences at the same time. The only thing I

add is that the apologetic project in question was especially directed toward

disproving the notion, held by the people at the time, that philosophy or

philosophers encouraged violent suppression of the democracy, and

specifically that philosophy encouraged tyranny, or that it trained tyrants. It

is precisely in trying to defend philosophy against this charge that Plato

reveals, on closer reading, just how true it is. Plato’s “exoteric” project of

defense and apology for philosophy was successful.

[ccl]

In his rhetorical

success, however, he concealed some rather dark truths about the matter.

Political philosophy in this sense is as we will see an alternative or

substitute to the physical force and violence of actual tyranny, but,

according to Callicles, intended to achieve the same purpose: the

preservation of nature.

This view of Plato’s apologetic project or of the purpose of “political”

philosophy is a bit different from the one usually presented by students of

Leo Strauss who have focused on the matter.

[ccli]

It may therefore be good

to present here the case usually made about why a defense of philosophy

was necessary and about the intention of Plato’s apologetics. According to

the somewhat better-known view, philosophy was under attack because in

studying “the things in the heavens and under the earth” according to nature

and reason, it undermined the conventional or traditional myths and stories

about such things, and thereby destroyed the piety and religious faith that

necessarily is the foundation of every state, and certainly of every ancient

state.

So philosophy is said to be dangerous because by considering the

things in the heavens and under the earth according to the standard of

nature, it lessens belief in the divinities that are understood, according to the

particular tradition in question, to be the sources of the political community

and of the right way of life. Greek wisdom, philosophy in the famous words

of Halevi, bears flowers but no fruit.

[cclii]

It speculates beautifully on natural

and political matters, but it throws everything important into doubt and

confusion. It may make elegant speculative theories but cannot therefore

support a right way of life or a determined action. But practical life or right

action requires firm conviction in settled and unquestioned principles.

[ccliii]

A community cannot abide for long, at least not in a healthy way, if its

founding principles are always publicly in question, and it is the character

of philosophy to throw all fundamental principles in question. According to

this view, philosophy is dangerous because it plants doubts in the hearts of

men, perhaps the most able men in the community, regarding their way of

life. It lessens attachment to the particular way of life of the political

community, and may become a cause of apathy if not of outright treason.

For this reason “philosophy” and “philosopher” became terms of abuse in

the world of medieval Islam, of Judaism, and of Orthodox Christianity, as is

well known.

[ccliv]

Two observations should now be made regarding this well-known case

for why philosophy had to embark on a project of self-defense, apology, or

had to “enter politics.” First of all, while the allegations just repeated

certainly constitute the core of the case against philosophy in medieval

times in e.g., Cordoba, it is not clear that Greek religion or “theology” had

the same orientation as Muslim or Jewish theology or that it felt itself under

the same kind of specific threat. This is not to say that the Greeks were

atheists, or that they were more “relaxed” about religion, or that their states

required religious foundation any less than medieval Jewish or Muslim

states, but rather that the political expression of Greek religion was

considerably different. This is because although something akin to

“revelation” did exist in the Greek world—for sure prophecy and oracles

existed, functioned, and often had political purpose—nevertheless the

character of such revelation was not legalistic in the same way that Jewish

and Muslim revelation is. Orthodox Muslim and Jewish life require an

adherence to a body of law that is revealed. Such law guides practice day to

day and maybe minute to minute. Now, nomos in Greek life, law, custom,

convention—the same word for all three—was likewise revealed or said to

have its ultimate origin in divine ordinance, and similarly regulated all

aspects of day to day life. Nevertheless, there is a considerably different

way in which Greek (or Roman) nomos commands and medieval Talmudic

or Koranic law commands. This difference may be intuited from the fact

that the Greeks not only never had “priestly” rule but never had any such

thing as “rule by judges,” i.e., rule by legal interpreters of a revealed body

of divine law. This form of rule—the rule by the shofet in Biblical times

(sopet for the Carthagianians and Phoenicians), or rabbinical or clerical

authority in medieval Jewish and Muslim societies—never existed in

Greece or in Rome. That philosophy was held to be a danger in both times,

that it was felt that philosophy somehow undermined or attacked the life of

the city is certainly true. But the specific threat from philosophy was in

these two cases maybe felt to be quite different.

That is, while the danger that philosophy presents to the city or to life

was in the Muslim or Jewish model held to be that it engenders a kind of

anomie, inactivity, or inability to sustain the faith and reverence required to

fulfill daily commandments and therefore sustain right practice, by contrast

in the Greek case philosophy was held to be dangerous because it taught

dangerous activity and lawless violence.

Consider for a moment Aristophanes’ Clouds. This text is often used

as a stock example in the case for why the ancient city had contempt for

philosophy. There is some superficial similarity to the case said to have

been made by medieval Jewish and Muslim theology. Indeed we do see

Socrates and his students idling about, studying useless theoretical inanities

—

Socrates:

So think about it—

if your small gut can make a fart like that,

why can’t the air, which goes on for ever,

produce tremendous thunder. Then there’s this—

consider how alike these phrases sound,

“thunder clap” and “fart and crap.”

[cclv]

And in general the philosopher is shown as ineffectual and ridiculous.

In the famous “debate” between the Superior and Inferior Arguments the

latter, representing the new tribe of the sophist and the philosopher, is rather

shown to be destructive of “principles of right action” in a sense. The

product of the sophist’s education is depicted as physically and morally

lame, as opposed to the vigorous and vital student of the superior argument.

But the final result of Socrates’ “educational” project is not passivity, but

anarchic and destructive violence: there is a debate about the beating of

parents followed by a mob uprising and arson against Socrates’ own school.

One is reminded possibly, and in this case half-anachronistically, of

Alcibiades, also Socrates’ student, and his involvement in the destruction of

the herms and the profanation of the Eleusinian mysteries, events that the

people of Athens took to be precursors to a plot for the violent suppression

of democracy. Not that philosophy teaches ineffectual passive nihilism and

anomie then, but that it is supremely dangerous because it makes young

men lawless and violent, and possibly antidemocratic and tyrannical: this

seems to have been the concern about philosophy. Camille Paglia rightly

refers to the episode from Plutarch’s life of Alcibiades, where the old

conservative men are absolutely scandalized not only by Alcibiades’ open

lasciviousness and promiscuity, but by his putting Eros with a thunderbolt

on his shield; and Alcibiades—very possibly the real-life model for

Callicles—was hardly a man of anomie and aimlessness in life, but a danger

because he threatened to set up a tyranny in Athens again. And other of

Socrates’ students of course ended up doing just that. A casual remark in

Aeschines’ Against Timarchus, uttered during a court trial in the mid-fourth

century, at least fifty years after Socrates’ execution, and uttered with the

casual expectation that the audience is in agreement, makes clear what the

tradition was among the people regarding “the danger of philosophy”:

…You put to death Socrates the sophist, fellow citizens, because he

was shown to have been the teacher of Critias, one of the Thirty

[Tyrants] who put down the democracy…

[cclvi]

II. The Defense of Philosophy Against the Charge of Tyranny in the

Gorgias—

[cclvii]

a) An Introduction to the Gorgias and Callicles’ Radical Antinomianism

Both Plato and Xenophon are concerned to show that Socrates did not

teach tyranny. The very fact that they both devote so much energy to

refuting this charge supports the case that this was the main accusation, or

at least the most fatal accusation against philosophy and against the Socratic

school in particular. Some shorter examples of this effort include

Xenophon’s Apology and his Memorabilia, as well as certain passages in

Plato’s Apology; in these the authors attempt to show not only that Socrates

in no way taught young men to be tyrannical, but that in fact he did not

teach anything. Actually Xenophon’s and Plato’s arguments in these works

are dubious, evasive, and weak and never establish the case that Socrates

did not teach and that he did not teach tyranny; these arguments, being so

obviously weak and even approaching the ridiculous, call into question the

sincerity of their apologetics.

[cclviii]

But the chief text in which Socrates is

apparently defended from a charge that he could have ever taught tyranny

or “injustice” of any kind is the Gorgias. And it is in precisely in the

Gorgias where the deep and fundamental connection between tyranny and

philosophy comes to light in Plato’s work.

The Gorgias is a strange dialogue. It is roughly divided into three parts

in which Socrates in turn argues with the orator Gorgias of Leontini, and

then with his students Polus and Callicles, only the latter of whom is an

Athenian. Ostensibly about the meaning of rhetoric, the dialogue veers off,

for no obvious reason, into a discussion on what might be called “moral

philosophy” and then erupts into the passionate and modern-sounding

speeches of Callicles. This radical character is almost unique in Plato; more

eloquent and more incisive than the “parallel” might-makes-right advocate

Thrasymachus from Republic, Callicles appears to teach the “right by

nature” of the stronger to rule over the weaker. And he appears to attack

Socrates and philosophy itself in a new and radical way. The traditional

“Christian” interpretation of the Gorgias—in which the moral philosophy of

the text is seen as a prefiguration of the moral teaching of Christianity, or as

progress toward a more humane modernity—and which appears also to be

supported by liberal readers of Plato such as Karl Popper, seems to be that

the Gorgias represents a landmark “moment” in the “progress of morality”

since in the middle section—Socrates’ argument with Polus—“for the first

time” the case is made that it is better to allow harm to come to oneself than

to inflict harm on others.

[cclix]

Others have noticed by contrast that

Callicles’ speeches stand out in all of Plato’s opus for their intensity and

passion and vividness, and that this indicates that Plato must have shared

some special personal kinship with this radical character of the Gorgias.

These latter agree with my interpretation that follows below insofar as they

recognize the speeches and character of Callicles (and not Polus or the

“moral philosophy” section) to be central to Plato’s meaning in the Gorgias.

But they disagree with my presentation insofar as in the end they revert to

the same conclusion as the traditional interpretation: Callicles’ “teaching,”

for all the “temptation” it must have held for a “young” Plato, is

nevertheless evil or vulgar and is “refuted” by Socrates, who, standing in

for Plato, makes the case for morality and for justice and against tyranny.

[cclx]

My own case is rather different: I aim to investigate the possibility that

Callicles’ speeches are in fact Plato’s own teaching; that Plato agrees with

Callicles on all the substantial problems or on ends, but disagrees only so

far as strategy and means are concerned. Plato in no way can avow such an

agreement in the open. The means by which he shows his covert meaning

is, first of all, of course, through Callicles’ own speeches (and to some

extent through allusions to other Platonic dialogues), through the dramatic

setting of the dialogue, and especially through Socrates’ replies to Callicles.

Socrates’ replies to Callicles can be classified in two categories. These

replies are either terribly inadequate and illogical, and de facto leave the

superior argument to Callicles, or, when they are not, they do not contradict

but rather radicalize and double-up on Callicles. In other words, when

Socrates effectively “refutes” Callicles, this is only because he out-Callicles

Callicles. In the Gorgias we see the aristocratic standard of nature, Pindar’s

teaching from the previous chapter, the “teaching of Cheiron,” but here

made abstract, radicalized. And at this point of abstraction is revealed the

covert kinship between the tyrant and the philosopher, always suspected by

the people. In the Gorgias we have, I argue, the perfect moment of

“Platonic political philosophy”: the moment when the philosopher is both

forced to become political as a matter of self-defense, and the moment

when, in the Straussian sense now, philosophy becomes “political,” when it

begins to put on a mask and to become a rhetorical project of apologetics

intended to portray the philosopher as a man of “justice” and a “good

citizen.”

Let us begin then with what is exciting and vivid before we move to a

closer consideration of the Gorgias as a whole: Callicles’ frank, passionate,

and radical first speech culminates in the following dramatic passage,

For by what manner of right did Xerxes march against Greece, or his father against Scythia?

Or take the countless other cases of the sort that one might mention. Why, surely these men

follow nature—the nature of right—in acting thus; yes, on my soul, and follow the law of

nature[nomos phuseos]—though not that, I dare say, which is made by us; we mold the best

and strongest amongst us, taking them from their infancy like young lions, and utterly enthrall

them by our spells and witchcraft, telling them the while that they must have but their equal

share, and that this is what is fair and just. But, I fancy, when some man [aner] arises with

enough nature [hikanen phusin], he shakes off all that we have taught him, bursts his bonds,

and breaks free; he tramples underfoot our codes and juggleries, our charms and “laws,” which

are all against nature; our slave rises in revolt and shows himself [epanastas anephane] our

master, and there shines [exelampse] out the full light of the right by nature [tes phuseos

dikaion]. [483e-4b]

The reader will be reminded in Callicles’ speech immediately of the

numerous parallels to the words and ideas of Pindar.

[cclxi]

A man—not

anthropos, but aner, a word pregnant with meaning—with “enough nature”

[hikanen phusin]

[cclxii]

arises in revolt out of the primordial and constraining

and homogenized darkness of nomos to manifest [anephane] himself as a

master: in this event shines out the right by nature, shines out [exelampse]

the truth as opposed to the lies of the many. In this passage four such

“Pindaric” words follow one upon another in quick succession: anephane,

exelampse, endeiknusthai, tekmairomai,

[cclxiii]

all invoking images of a

vivid truth that arises into the light and manifests itself out of something.

Convention is chatter and darkness and false speech over against which the

bare biological fact of superior breeding—the possession of “enough

nature”—manifests itself with force as the only vivid truth; even the image

of the lion in this context must be Pindaric, although the sinister suggestion

here made that convention can smother and suppress nature, particularly the

nature of a lion, does not really exist in Pindar. Also seemingly

unprecedented is the phrase “law of nature,” [nomos phuseos] a

commonplace in our time, but a seeming contradiction in terms during pre-

Platonic or pre-Socratic antiquity. This is, as far as is known, the first

instance of this phrase in history. It is in any case without doubt that Plato is

having Callicles invoke Pindar in this speech and particularly even in this

phrase of “the law of nature,” especially since Callicles actually quotes

Pindar in the very next line of his speech:

And it seems to me that Pindar adds his evidence to what I say, in the ode

where he says—

“Law the sovereign of all,

Mortals and immortals,”

which, so he continues,—

“Carries all with highest hand,

Justifying the utmost force: in proof I take

The deeds of Hercules, for unpurchased”

—the words are something like that—I do not know the poem well—but it

tells how he drove off the cows as neither a purchase nor a gift from

Geryones; taking it as a natural right that cows or any other possessions of

the inferior and weaker should all belong to the superior and stronger.

[484b-c]

The “law” in this quotation, which is “the king of all mortals and

immortals,” should not be interpreted in the traditional meaning of nomos,

that is, convention as we have seen it so far, but as “the law of nature” that

Callicles had just mentioned before, to which both mortals and immortals

are subject.

[cclxiv]

Regarding this quotation of Pindar see also Marian

Demos’ interesting reference to Libanius’ claim that at Socrates’ trial his

prosecutor Anytus accused Socrates of using this very line from Pindar to

teach the youth of the city lawlessness and violence. There is a debate as to

Libanius’ sources for this claim, but, regardless of whether such an

accusation was actually brought up at Socrates’ trial, it is most significant

that there existed a tradition that it had been brought up, a tradition that

survived as late as Libanius. Of course here in the Gorgias we see Plato

show Callicles, the supposed “anti-Socrates,” invoke this radical poem, and

Socrates instead is presented as the pious defender of conventional justice,

turning the rumor about Socrates on its head. But in fine, Callicles does

appear, on first sight during his first dramatic speech, to be “radicalizing”

the teaching of Pindar with an explicit justification of the tyranny of the

man of superior nature. The full light of the “right by nature” [phuseos

dikaion] shines out when the man of enough nature breaks free of

convention and becomes our master [despotes].

b) Structure of Gorgias and Callicles’ Introduction of the Standard of

Nature; Escape from Convention—

Let us step away from Pindar for a moment and consider Callicles’

claims in the speech quoted above more closely. And therefore we must

consider also Callicles’ role in the Gorgias as a whole. If we should pay

close attention to Callicles’ words in the passage above it will become clear

that there is one and only one thing that concerns him beyond everything

else: liberation from nomos or convention. A more detailed consideration of

his two speeches and of their position in the Gorgias confirms the

impression drawn from the climax of his presentation. Callicles is the

crucial figure in the Gorgias, and the issue that drives him is the crucial

issue of the dialogue.

Callicles’ speeches are central to the dialogue in every way. Callicles’

first speech, 482c-486d, is in the very physical center of the Gorgias; and it

is the first long speech in the dialogue by a character other than Socrates. It

introduces a new competitor in the dialogue, Callicles, who for the

remainder of the text, the whole second half, will remain Socrates’ only

competitor—before 482c there had been frequent changes in speakers.

[cclxv]

Further there is something substantially peculiar about the nature of

Callicles’ speeches. Callicles not only now but also later at 491e-492c

ignores what had been a repeated insistence of Socrates’ since the very

beginning of the dialogue, namely that his interlocutors avoid long

speeches. [449b] Socrates, however, does not chide his fellow Athenian

interlocutor for speaking at length, as he did Gorgias and Polus earlier, but

on the contrary repeatedly praises his freedom of speech or frankness,

[parrhesia] that for which Athens is most famous. [461e] Another

peculiarity is that Callicles is not only literally the central speaker but that

he also opens the dialogue Gorgias (with the words “of war and battle,”

addressed to Socrates) and his name, in the vocative O Kallikleis, closes the

dialogue. Furthermore, again, Socrates considers him his best opponent,

superior to Gorgias and Polus. Callicles, as Socrates’ first, central, last, and

best opponent is the key to understanding the Gorgias; the moral argument

that starts with Polus, for which this dialogue is most famous—that doing

wrong is worse that suffering it—is not only secondary to understanding the

meaning of this text, but completely misleading. It is, as I will show later, a

rather transparent rhetorical device. The central issue is not moral as such,

but specifically political.

Two things, one general and one particular, impel Callicles to enter the

argument in the way that he does. Or, we could call one impetus necessary

to the course of the argument, and the second impetus a peculiar and

particular provocation that Socrates makes to Callicles ad hominem, and

which guides the dialogue in an unexpected direction. Callicles’ speech is

motivated in general by an attempt to take up the argument after the failures

of Gorgias [449a-461b] and Polus [461b-481b]. In his argument with

Socrates, Gorgias failed because he was ashamed to admit that he cannot

teach justice. Polus then failed because he was ashamed to say that

suffering wrong is more shameful than doing it. In other words, Socrates’

opponents keep failing because of their shame [aiskhune], a judgment in

which Socrates and Callicles agree, and to which Gorgias and Polus, who

are present, do not object. Shame, indeed, will turn out to be crucial to

understanding the rhetorical structure of the Gorgias.

Callicles’ speech, however, is motivated in particular by Socrates’

provocation at 481d, an unusual, playful “introductory provocation” in the

Gorgias. Socrates does not make such an introductory provocation,

complete with biographical reflections on his interlocutor, and with an

illustration of his specific opposition to the interlocutor, anywhere else in

the Gorgias when speakers changed or when new speakers were

introduced. The longer second half of Callicles’ first speech contains a

rather unusual attack on philosophy, to which I referred briefly above, and

which we will consider in more detail below. The form of Callicles’

response—the fact that he “needs” to attack the philosophical life in the

second half of his speech—is then understandable in terms of Socrates’

provocation, which contrasted the philosophical life of Socrates with the

political life of Callicles. But it is not so easy to understand why Socrates

chose to make this provocation. The direction the dialogue takes from this

point may be called peculiar because there are no external substantial signs

that the argument necessarily had to proceed to a consideration of the

difference between the philosophical and the political life. The introduction

of this theme is therefore “forced,” artificial or “contrived.” At this point it

is also relevant to note that although Callicles attacks the philosophic life in

a certain sense, he nowhere repeats or explicitly agrees with the distinction

Socrates makes between the philosophic and political lives.

A most revealing statement occurs at the very beginning of Callicles’

speech. He says that, “you are such, O Socrates, as to lead the conversation

to the demagogic

[cclxvi]

and base things—when asserting you are pursuing

the truth—to the things that are not noble by nature, but by convention.”

[482e] Callicles repeats this same idea later in his second speech, when he

uses the same expression again: “the truth, O Socrates, that you assert

[fancy] to be pursuing…”

[cclxvii]

[492c] This idea is a repetition of the

opposition between truth [aletheia] and nature on one hand and the

common establishments [sunthemata] on the other. These statements show

that for Callicles shame [aiskhune], the base things [aiskhra], the demos,

and convention stand together on one side while on the other we have truth,

nature, and the noble things. Gorgias and Polus failed because Socrates

shamed them, that is, he mired them in the conventional notions that are

somehow allied with shame. Callicles, as both he and Socrates keep

repeating, admirably lacks shame, and possesses frankness in the highest

degree.

The argument that Callicles uses at the beginning of his speech already

reveals much not only about himself but also about the true nature of his

battle with Socrates. For Callicles does not claim that Socrates is himself

beholden to nomos,

[cclxviii]

but that he uses nomos to his advantage in

argument, just as he uses phusis when it suits him. [482d-e] But a man who

knows how to use these things in argument and to confuse others about

them surely knows the distinction between the two; he may even be called a

master of this distinction. It is for this reason that Callicles claims Socrates

speaks to the demos [demegorein] when he argues against Gorgias and

Polus so successfully. But the very fact that Callicles concedes that Socrates

won against two extremely skilled orators by speaking not things he

believes to be the truth, but by “speaking to the people,” that is, by using

rhetoric, already invalidates Callicles’ and Polus’ repeated claims that

Socrates would not know how to defend himself in public by using rhetoric.

[486a-c, 469-70, etc.] Callicles knows Socrates is no fool. If in a “moral”

debate the two opponents are set on accusing each other of being

demagogues, [481d-e, 482e, 492c, etc.] we have every right to suspect that

their disagreement has to do with something other than what appears in the

open.

Leaving this question aside for a moment, I continue with a

clarification of Callicles’ main concern. Callicles reaches the dramatic and

radical conclusion that the right by nature only shines out when convention

is suppressed and violently broken. According to Callicles, nature is

systematically hidden by convention.

[cclxix]

It is covered up by the somehow

related forces of nomos, demos, and shame [aiskhune]. The means by which

convention upsets and covers up what is right by nature is the crucial part of

Callicles’ speech. It is his main point of interest, the dramatic and emotional

peak of his presentation, and occupies the central and longer part of his

speech. Callicles’ concern for liberation from convention is the crux, so

much so that by 484b Callicles makes the amazing claim that truth itself

and the just by nature will shine out only in the escape or revolt from

convention, and in the trampling of it. The just by nature therefore, the truth

about nature, although observed from many occurrences in nature [483d5],

is not the default case in nature, but depends on a revolt against convention.

How then does convention suppress the natural way? This question,

and not the clarification of what would be the best life or “the advantage of

the stronger,” is what takes up most of Callicles’ time and passionate

rhetoric. It is the tyranny of convention over superior human specimens that

most concerns Callicles. Now, to start with, it is interesting that absent from

his description of suppression by nomos is the mention of any physical

force. The issue is slightly confused for us because in Greek, the word

nomos stands not only for convention, but also for way, positive law,

specific custom, even specific musical melodies. We are accustomed to

think of political order, control, or suppression as consisting in positive law

enforced by physical power or threat. Indeed earlier Polus had described

exclusively physical threats against the tyrannical man who seeks to usurp

the polity. [473c5] In that passage Polus used the word diaphugon, “running

away through,” or “escaping,” in the sense of the tyrant’s escaping physical

punishments. But when Callicles describes the way the superior man

escapes enslavement from nomos and becomes tyrant or despot

[cclxx]

with

the same word, diaphugon, he never mentions anything about escaping

physical punishment. What then does the superior man escape? He escapes

our “enslaving speaking” [katadoulometha legontes, 484a]. Just as earlier

not lack of knowledge, but lack of daring, stood in the way of the

manifestness of nature or truth, so now not lack of physical power or

knowledge, but lack of “a sufficient nature” [484a] stands in the way of the

shining out of the just by nature—the superior man becoming a despot. This

is Callicles’ surprising and radical conclusion: nomos controls not by

physical power, but by a kind of speaking or “education.”

[cclxxi]

The nomos, or human convention, is “set up” by “us” against the just

by nature, or even, Callicles boldly announces, against the nomos or way of

nature. [483e] In describing how our nomos is set up, Callicles does not

refer to any physical act, but only to forming or “educating” men. He uses

the word plattein, “to form” or “to mould,” the same word that Plato uses in

the Republic, and elsewhere, when describing the way nomoi form the

opinions and souls of the young citizens.

[cclxxii]

It is not therefore just the

positive laws, hoi nomoi, that enforce convention, but our moulding the

strong from childhood [plattontes…ek neon] a kind of education achieved

through speaking. For at 483b-c, the positive laws, nomoi, are paired

together with praises [epainoi] and blames [psogoi]; and at 484a5 the nomoi

are paired with written codes or formulas [grammata], trickeries

[manganeumata] and incantations [epoides]. The laws, hoi nomoi, are only

mere tools of convention, nomos, as such. The more general nomos, or

convention in general, consists of many other tools, all in speech. It is

generally a ubiquitous regime of formative myths—Callicles uses words

with magical connotations. Nomos depends on lies and fantasies, “all

against nature” [484a] and therefore against truth. If this reminds us of the

famous “noble lie” of Socrates at Rep. 414b, then we are on the right track

to understanding Callicles’ point—so long as we see there is nothing noble

or worthwhile about the existing conventions in Callicles’ opinion. But the

mechanism works the same way: the nomos works through formative

myths, through “witchcraft in speech”—Callicles uses here for bewitchment

the word goeteuein, a word that occurs only rarely in Greek literature and

mostly in Plato, and a word that Socrates uses several times at Republic 413

just before introducing the idea of the noble lie. Socrates uses the word here

in connection with the mechanism by which opinions are changed or

formed: bewitchment changes the opinions of men by deceiving or

terrifying. Terrifying [ekphobein] is also a word Callicles uses in describing

how the myths of the nomos corrupts the minds of the more superior men.

Callicles is deeply concerned with the corruption of the superior men

—the erromenesteroi, a peculiar word we will closely consider in due time

—at the hands of nomos: he never speaks of how or if nomos forms or

educates anyone else. This reading of Callicles’ main speech is further

supported by his statements during his second speech, from 491e to 492c.

Pressed by Socrates to make his position more precise, Callicles expresses

with great emphasis that the just and noble according to nature is equivalent

to a man’s living the correct or right way […orthos biosomenon, 491e].

Within that speech, the conventions and, again, praises [epainoi] of men all

are deceptions and mental obstacles to the superior living rightly. [492c]

Praise and blame are the tools of nomos that Callicles mentions most

frequently: as these have to do with the management of shame, this explains

the close relationship Callicles maintains between shame [aiskhune] and

nomos. In conclusion, to repeat, the escape of the erromenesteroi, the

healthy human specimens, from the enslaving grasp of convention is at

once the emotional focus for Callicles’ passion, as well as the substantial

and dramatic crux of both his speeches. By contrast, his elucidation of what

in fact the life of the erromenesteroi would be after their liberation is only

briefly treated, and he remains unclear at best on that point. This is a lack of

clarity Socrates will soon exploit, perhaps unfairly so.

Could it be that Callicles represents, in unvarnished form, the political

doctrine of pre-Socratic philosophy? To understand the meaning of this

question consider again the ubiquitous persecution of philosophy even

before Socrates. The pre-Socratic philosophers were accused, probably

correctly, of being atheists. They were in agreement regarding the

conventional character of human notions of the good, and regarding also the

conventional character of all human association in general.

[cclxxiii]

Now it is

this last claim, which, if made public, is extremely dangerous. Its danger is

clear if we are able to understand that by making such a claim without

positing the possibility of a city by nature, the pre-Socratics were

essentially saying that all human cities are arbitrary associations without

any conceivable power to bind its superior citizens. In fact the question of

atheism versus belief in “some god” in the abstract or as such is here not so

relevant, so long as the entirely provisional character of public law and

morality is considered. But discovering the fact that the city’s customs and

ways are merely conventional, a lover of truth would gladly retreat to the

very rewarding study of nature in private. A mental liberation from the

notions of his city and a practical liberation from its political demands on

his life is a prerequisite for such a philosopher, and such a liberation is

indeed possible only with the insight that these notions and claims are

merely conventions, common decisions and decrees of the fellow citizens

without true binding power. Heraclitus’ kingly self-sufficiency is the most

famous example of this pre-Socratic attitude toward political life. But, a

certain way of thinking goes, a Callicles will draw a rather different

conclusion from this insight, from the distinction between nature and

convention. The interest in knowledge or the love of truth certainly cannot

be taught, while the insight that there is a distinction between nature and

convention may arguably be very easily taught in the abstract. According to

this way of thinking, this distinction is indeed necessary for the philosopher,

who will retreat into Epicurean contemplation, living on the edge of the city

as a harmless parasite, but will be most dangerous in the hands of men who

seek power and do not wish to be encumbered by moral restraint in their

careers. I would like to indicate why such a way of thinking is not correct.

We have no reason to take the Epicurean at his word, without further

testing, when he claims that his insight or hermitry is harmless, and that if it

is invoked by criminals, then it is merely being abused. In fact the

Calliclean option, or the pursuit of tyranny, is itself a genuinely

philosophical conclusion, and, again, could be argued to be the pure and

open political doctrine of pre-Socratic philosophy itself. It is not, I claim,

merely the abuse of the name and methods of philosophy by cynical people

who are only interested in political advantage to start with.

To see why this is so, and to try to tunnel into Callicles’ mind for a

moment, consider that the pre-Socratic insight has two closely related,

perhaps initially inextricable components: that there is a nature that is the

same everywhere; and that human association is arbitrary or based on

chance and circumstance. If a talented, ambitious, and erotic young man

hears this and understands all of this to be true, liberation from the city’s

ways becomes a necessity. To conform to the city’s ways cannot be

acceptable, because it has been agreed that the city as such consists only in

the common decisions of the many. These common decisions lack all

justification besides the word of the many, which is no justification at all.

There is neither a legitimate divine claim to cleave to the city’s ways—for

the divine, at least the popular divine, is merely a matter of convention—

nor is there a natural reason to do so, because, again, according to pre-

Socratic philosophy, there is no natural reason that men come together. In

fact this possibility is hardly considered. There might be derivative

expedient reasons to live as an obedient member of the community, but

these clearly can only have binding power to those to whom it is actually

expedient and useful to do so.

To say that all human association is conventional is, again, to say that

man is not a political animal, that to be political is not in his nature, but that

political communities have come about merely a matter of arbitrary

decision or accidental circumstance. If he is not a political animal, then man

is a private animal. If so, there must be only a secondary or derivative

reason for people to have come together, to have formed particular

conventions. This reason may be found, as the Epicureans from Lucretius to

Hobbes would have it, most easily in the desire of the many to protect

themselves from the forces of nature, from oppression by stronger men; or

it may have been just a matter of random historical processes that brought

men together and “socialized” them, which is another common modern idea

that derives from Epicurean thought. Compare, broadly, the genesis of

human society in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences with that

of Lucretius’ in On the Nature of Things. In all these cases, the political

community—any political community—loses all its claim to bind those

who think they can follow their desires outside the city, for example by

studying nature. But it also loses all claim to bind those who think they can

actually take power by force. In fact, one may make a case, as Callicles

indeed does, that the young man who could become a philosopher, i.e., who

has insight into the primal philosophical distinction between nature and

convention, not only has a right but even a duty to become tyrant. Such a

duty may even be called properly philosophical, literally guided by the love

of truth. Callicles reaches this conclusion in the following way.

Immediate slavery or possible freedom is in the balance. The question

is deeply personal to Callicles: at 481c-2c Socrates has just provoked him in

a deep way, deep not only because Socrates implicitly calls Callicles a

demagogue, which to a man like Callicles must be very insulting; but also

because in mentioning philosophy, Socrates plays on Callicles’ very recent

and very important concerns. Callicles is just embarking on a political

career [515a] and has seriously considered in what way he should best live

or best pursue his education in youth [487c-d]. His serious consideration of

how far he should have pursued philosophy indicates that he had doubts

about how he should live, or at least about how he should spend his youth:

doubts that were only recently settled. These doubts had to do with the

choice between two things: the philosophical and the political life. Callicles

still enjoys philosophy and even Socrates. [458d] A dalliance in one’s youth

with philosophy does not yet make a philosopher; Callicles may be

supposed to be just a sophist who uses philosophical insights for personal

gain. But several facts must convince us that this is not the case.

First of all, the distinction between philosopher and sophist is not as

clear as we would like to think, and it is only the tradition since Plato that

provides for us a clear distinction between the two, a distinction probably

based on rhetorical devices.

[cclxxiv]

Second, again, it is Socrates and not

Callicles who distinguishes clearly between the philosophical and political

lives. Although Callicles attacks the political life, he nowhere says

explicitly that he has chosen between the political and philosophical lives.

Further and beyond this consideration is the fact that Callicles’ engagement

with philosophy is not merely casual and insubstantial. It is as a result of his

embrace of the fundamental and indispensable philosophical insight that

Callicles has chosen the life he has, and it is in the name of this insight that

he earnestly, frankly, and passionately endorses the life he has chosen.

There is no indication at all in the text that Callicles has from the start been

merely a political and ambitious youth who cynically uses certain methods

of the philosophers to forward his career. As much as we would like to

believe this is the way of the sophist, Plato nowhere implies this is the case

with Callicles, though it would have been easy to do, and though it would

have definitely given Socrates the clear superiority in argument. Plato’s

failure to provide us with such information is a clear sign that the argument

concerns a deeper issue than the misuse of philosophy by crassly political

men. Callicles’ rejection of the philosophical life and pursuit of tyranny, is,

I cannot repeat enough, a conclusion he has reached from serious

philosophical reflection, perhaps too-earnest reflection. Callicles is in fact a

philosopher who has discovered that the radical philosophic insight must

consist in a rejection of the anachoretic and private philosophical life. He is

not the voice of the city or the political community, less still merely of a

gentleman, an “Attic Junker.” He is the voice of pre-Socratic philosophy

become political.

I offer the following speculative reconstruction of Callicles’

“philosophical” reasoning in favor of the pursuit of tyranny. Callicles’ chief

concern is the salvation of the “better-turned-out” from corruption by the

nomos and the liberation of such specimens from nomos. In this salvation

and liberation is expressed at the very least the precondition for truth or the

search for truth: but actually, I would claim, in this is expressed also truth

itself. That is, the manifestation of truth in the world, “the shining out of the

right by nature,” the “law of nature,” is the “better-turned-out” freeing

himself from and trampling on convention or nomos. Truth or right express

themselves in the preservation and emergence into the light of phusis or

nature. In this context it is most significant that the word used by Callicles

(and by Socrates) all along in their discussion for the “better-turned-out” is

erromenesteros, a word with biological connotations. This word comes

from rhonnumi, to have strength, might, to be in good health; this word, the

same that Plato uses in the Republic (sungeneia erromene, emphasizing

inborn might and health at Rep. 491c; at 491d he uses the word in relation

to botanical [phuton] or animal [zoon] growth) to describe the potential

philosopher, is often otherwise used to indicate vigor, vigorous growth,

vehemence. The preservation of the “superior breed” or biological

specimen is the preservation of nature in the world and therefore the

guarantee of the emergence of truth about the world. Callicles might say,

“The natural, original activity of the erromenesteros is philosophy—it is

what the erromenesteros gladly pursues in his childhood and youth—but it

didn’t work; it leads to men like Socrates being killed; it leads to the

extinction of breeding and therefore of the knowledge of nature in the

world; for nature and truth to preserve and manifest themselves the

‘philosophers,’ or rather the erromenesteroi, the men of ‘sufficient nature’

from whom the philosopher would under ideal circumstances organically

emerge, must take power in the cities and grasp for a tyranny.” It is the

“spiritual tyranny”

[cclxxv]

of pre-Socratic philosophy become politically

active under emergency conditions of persecution and turned into the

pursuit of actual tyranny.

According to Callicles one may restate the relationship between

philosophy and the erromenesteros in this way: the distinction between

nature and convention is inextricably tied to the distinction between

superior and inferior human natures. Convention only originates and

consists in the common decisions of the inferior to protect themselves from

the superior, and convention or myth and false speech is the only element

that covers up nature and truth. It is the superior human specimens or the

erromenesteroi who have the unique access to the distinction between

nature and convention, and they only have this access in the best

circumstances; they are ever in danger of being corrupted, enslaved,

smothered by nomos. It is the issue of the erromenesteros that is central in

the Gorgias. The word erromenesteros

[cclxxvi]

represents the raw natural

element of superiority, as opposed to words such as phronimos, kreitto,

beltion,

[cclxxvii]

and so on, which all indicate a particular direction in which

the native superiority has been trained. Callicles’ definition of the superior

as erromenesteros is the only one that Socrates does not attack later. The

interest of the erromenesteros drives all of Callicles’ speeches and explains

his passion and the sense of immediate or impending doom in his words. It

is critical to realize that Callicles believes Socrates himself is a man with

“sufficient nature,” or one of the superior. He refers to him repeatedly as “of

noble nature,” [485e] or “well-natured” [485d, 486b]; but he does this

mainly in the context of stating that no matter how well-natured or superior

a man is, the excessive practice of philosophy will corrupt [diaphtheirein]

him and make him worse [486b]. This is of course the same word in the

famous charge of the city against Socrates, as in Plato’s and Xenophon’s

Apology, where the court’s indictment is reproduced; its use by Callicles,

however, only serves to emphasize the stark difference between the two

meanings of corruption or degeneration, the conventional meaning on one

hand, the natural meaning of the other. Callicles uses the natural meaning of

corruption, and this is precisely the unavoidable issue that binds the tyrant

and the philosopher, as we will have the occasion to see in this study. A

man who practices philosophy late into life will be kept in a state of

permanent childhood—at least this is the main point of Callicles’ discussion

at 485a-c; in other words, the lion will not be able to break free.

Now, the breaking free of the lion is for Callicles the manifestation of

truth.

[cclxxviii]

It is significant that in the model just sketched out, the primal

truth is a manifestation of natural superiority in the world. Truth, nature,

and nobility or physical-mighty beauty, all one and the same, are manifest

for Callicles. By contrast speech is used for deception, speech belongs to

convention, and truth is hidden only by the false and deceptive speech of

convention. Convention, shame, [aiskhune] and the inferior many, are one

and the same—they use deception in speech to cover up manifest truth. It is

in this sense that in Callicles’ speeches the escape from convention through

the assertion of raw superior nature over the many is a philosophical act, for

it literally expresses the love of truth, or even more literally, is the only

genuine expression of truth, the only moment when truth is uncovered and

“unforgotten.” The love of the liberation of the erromenesteros is the love

of truth, for this and only this is the manifestation of truth. For Callicles,

Socrates’ impending execution by a lower form of man, by a mokhtheros

[486b-c] is the best example of how philosophy, which was born with the

discovery of nature and thereby with the awakening of the superior human

specimens, is completely unable to actually provide for their advantage, but

works instead for their corruption, enslavement, and destruction.

Paradoxically, it is not philosophy that is the liberation for the superior

human natures even though philosophy is in some sense the “original”

activity of such natures. It is only rhetoric or tyranny won through the art of

rhetoric that can provide the means to liberation and defense for

philosophers: philosophers merely practicing philosophy are thereby

committing suicide, and the suicide of philosophy at the hands of the many

or of convention is the covering-up of truth, quite literally. Philosophers

must become rhetoricians and tyrants; this itself is, in a convoluted way,

“philosophical activity.” I will have more to say on the relationship between

Callicles’ philosophical nature and his pursuit of tyranny later; for now it is

necessary to consider what Socrates has to say about Callicles’ attack on

conventional justice.

[cclxxix]

c) Socrates’ bizarre replies to Callicles; the radicalization of Calliclean

“political philosophy”—

It is to be seen that Socrates in fact doesn’t challenge any of Callicles’

fundamental political orientation. Socrates merely shows that Callicles, in

his youth, is naïve about politics—he confuses nomos with politeia, or

rather misses the point that ultimately it is physical force and not speech

that constitutes political society—and doesn’t truly understand the key, the

special kind of rhetoric or strategy that will really make philosophy, not

only safe in the cities, but “rule in the cities.” Callicles’ frankness, his

parrhesia, to which Socrates repeatedly refers throughout the Gorgias, is

his shortcoming. Callicles is not sufficiently “de-civilized” enough, for he

has not learned at the hands of a Cheiron in the woods—his teacher has

been the urbane orator Gorgias, and not a “wild” man like Socrates, who is

repeatedly called agroikos in this dialogue. He knows neither the lion nor

the fox. He’s accordingly even still too conventional—he believes too much

in the power of words, and clumsily overt words at that. Socrates doesn’t

just believe in the power of words, but also of force. It was Socrates, not

Callicles or Polus, who reminded both that the true power in the cities lies

with he who holds a hidden dagger. [469d] So Socrates does disagree with

Callicles; but it is a disagreement about tactics, and it is in any case not the

disagreement of the pious moralist that the tradition has held Plato to be in

this dialogue.

Now, Socrates’ replies to Callicles in the Gorgias are weak and

inadequate to the point of absurdity; they lack any power to convince

anyone reading this text freshly and without an overbearing prejudice in

favor of Socrates or in favor of conventional morality. Socrates in a sense

wins the argument, since Callicles is reduced to silence after a certain point.

But it is not clear if this victory is merely rhetorical, or even what “merely

rhetorical” would mean in this case. It is not clear why Plato would have

Socrates make the arguments he does or why Socrates would make these in

the order that he does to this particular audience—an audience of orators

seemingly unwilling to accept any of his premises.

Socrates’ answers to Callicles’ challenge are disjointed and winding.

We should therefore keep several key points always in mind when we

consider the labyrinthine path on which Socrates takes us, and by no means

trust that he is doing what he says he is doing or what he appears to be

doing. We should always keep in mind Callicles’ specific claims and the

nature of his main concern—and the fact that he doesn’t agree with the

distinction between the political and philosophical lives as Socrates presents

it. What Socrates appears to be doing is clear enough, and everyone who

reads this text will at first agree with the traditional interpretations. Socrates

seems to be doing with Callicles what he did earlier with Gorgias and Polus.

He seems to be defending justice against the cynical and tyrannical attacks

and sophistries of the rhetors. In his argument with Gorgias, Socrates

introduced the question of justice at a point at which it was by no means

necessary to do so to continue the discussion. Indeed, it was plainly rude on

the part of Socrates to embarrass his interlocutor in this way.

[cclxxx]

In his

discussion with Polus Socrates seems again to defend the cause of justice to

the extreme against Polus’ claims that the art of rhetoric supplies raw power

to do what one will, to become a tyrant in one’s own city. Now in his

answer to Callicles’ radical attacks on the conventional notions of justice

Socrates seems to be doing the same thing: he appears to be defending

common justice and decency against the attacks of an extreme and

tyrannical man. Socrates appears also—and this is the crux of the ruse—to

be allying philosophy on one side with justice, even conventional justice,

against, on the other side, rhetoric and the licentious and unjust political

life, or more particularly the life of the tyrant. However, if we consider

Socrates’ conclusions more carefully we see that he nowhere disagrees with

what we decided were Callicles’ main concerns and conclusions. In fact

Socrates only makes Callicles’ position, from the conventional point of

view, even more cynical and extreme, if that is possible.

It is my aim here to explain the meaning of Socrates’ main conclusions

and of their location in the dialogue. As this is not intended to be a

complete commentary on the Gorgias, it is not necessary to embark on a

close analysis of every single argument Socrates uses, though each of these

is revealing in a special way. I will, however, consider closely the first

argument, because it is representative of Socrates’ broader aims in the

dialogue, as well as of his methods. In his first substantial argument with

Callicles, Socrates reaches the conclusion that nature and convention agree

with respect to justice and that therefore nature and convention are not

opposites. This would seem to be a straightforward defense of conventional

notions of justice against Callicles’ immoderate praise of the individual’s

ambitious pursuit of liberty and tyranny in the name of nature. Socrates says

“it is not only by convention that doing wrong is more shameful than

suffering it, and having one’s equal share is just, but by nature also.” [489b]

But if we look at how Socrates reached this conclusion, then it cannot be

said to be Socrates’ real opinion. The conclusion is based on the premise

that the stronger in purely physical force is the better, [488c, 488d5] which

is not a premise that Socrates, or even Callicles, accepts.

Now, why would Socrates be making an argument in which he does

not believe? One could answer, in the traditional vein, that Socrates is using

Callicles’ own premises to trip him up. This would force Callicles to make

his definitions more precise, and in the process Callicles would transcend

his original position. But the following considerations show that while there

is some truth to this way of thinking, it is in the end unlikely.

In his first speech Callicles spoke often of the better or superior men

by using the word beltion.

[cclxxxi]

The beltion is a generic term for

superiority in goodness. But Callicles also used the word kreitton, almost

interchangeably. And kreitton is also a word for “better” but with clear

connotations of strength, bravery, and might. In his first argument Socrates

introduces another word: iskhuroteron, [488c] which is a word for

superiority in brute force or strength, but without even the moral

connotations of kreitton. Callicles did not use this word in his first speech.

As soon as Callicles agrees that all of these terms are interchangeable,

Socrates is easily able to point out that the many together are clearly

stronger [iskhuroteroi] than the one; therefore supposedly by Callicles’ own

standards they are also better, therefore their ordinances are nobler, and so

on.

Callicles, however, had used the terms interchangeably in his speech

and had agreed to Socrates’ inclusion of the term iskhuroteron in the

definition of the “superior” for a clear reason that has little to do with the

way in which Socrates misuses it. In the “state of nature” to which both he

and Glaucon in the Republic [358e] refer, the one is stronger than the many

who are not yet united. They unite and form conventions precisely because

they are weaker and less manly than the few stronger, and because they

wish to curb the advantage of these. [483c, 492a7] Socrates is referring to

strength, pure physical force in numbers, that is, after convention has

already been established. In other words, he is, as Callicles charged earlier,

again using words with natural meanings in a conventional sense, and vice-

versa, when it suits his argument. Callicles is exasperated by this ruse. He

points out that the equality between terms must move in both directions and

not only in one direction. Socrates attempted to obscure the issue when he

emphasized merely in the direction of “physical force.” Socrates replaced

kreitton, a word with moral (or more plainly speaking, behavioral)

connotations, with iskhuroteron, a word with no moral connotations or

connotations of quality, and a word that was for a very good reason absent

from Callicles’ first speech. Callicles seems exasperated already at

Socrates’ unwillingness to understand what he means when he uses several

different words for “superior.” The idea that the many, when put together,

have an advantage in brute physical strength is a political non-argument,

because the many are a political nullity in this sense. They do not lead

themselves—a jacquerie, again, is never a revolution, and it is historically

easily put down. Callicles believes that the practice of rhetoric is what gives

the power of rule to an elite in a democracy; he is simply more cynical

about the ambitions of those who claim to speak for the people.

Further still, Callicles’ failure in the first argument would not have

been completed had he not agreed to a certain other key dubious claim. For

example, the notion that the ordinances [nomima] of the better are noble by

nature is to be found nowhere in Callicles’ original speech either explicitly

or as a consequence of anything that he says. As such the argument is

specious and a non-sequitur: and it is essentially the same argument that

Thrasymachus falls for in the first book of the Republic when he seems

oddly unwilling to say that the superior or stronger can make mistakes in

the laws they frame.

But Callicles’ acceding to Socrates’ casual claim is

especially strange in light of the fact that the whole notion of truth or

nobility through speech or decree is entirely absent from Callicles’ first

speech. In this speech truth is manifest only in action and practice.

However, Callicles does not challenge Socrates’ reference to ordinances or

nomima, but by his silence at this point, and by an explicit reference soon

after [489c7], shows a certain respect for this word.

In any case, these elements in Socrates’ first argument against

Callicles are revealing for the following reasons. Socrates does not trip up

Callicles by playing on Callicles’ own premises, but by subtly moving the

conversation in a new direction, by introducing new notions. The notion of

iskhus or pure force is, as I have already pointed out, absent from Callicles’

first speech.

[cclxxxii]

Socrates achieves his ends not by referring clearly and

honestly to Callicles’ own conclusions, but instead by emphasizing one half

of an equivalence while obscuring the other, proceeding question by

question and step by step in an entirely new direction. Finally, Socrates

achieves his end by making a claim that was neither present in his

opponent’s speech nor the consequence of anything his opponent said—that

the ordinances of the superior are also superior—but that he knows will be,

for certain reasons, attractive to this particular opponent. These reasons are

not yet clear.

Exasperated by Socrates’ sophistic demands that Callicles identify the

superior, Callicles declares at 491d, “But I have really told you already that

[they are] the prudent [phronimoi] in the matters of the city and the manly

[andreioi]. These should rule the cities, and right is this, that they should

have more than the rest, the rulers than the ruled.” [491d] The superior are

decided to be the prudent with regard to political matters and the manly.

The latter is a quality Callicles especially emphasizes by adding that these

men will not falter through effeminacy of soul [dia malakian tes psukhes].

[491b] We have already seen that manliness is an absolutely indispensable

quality in Callicles’ first speech. But Socrates has played a small trick in

forcing this definition out of Callicles. He has covertly moved the

conversation away from Callicles’ main focus, which is the lion cub

enslaved by convention. The conversation has moved instead toward the

lion cub who is already becoming mature. The question for Callicles was

the enslavement of the superior by conventional notions of justice (an

enslavement facilitated by the corruption of manliness that philosophy

effects in the souls of the superior). If a man is already prudent in politics,

phronimos, and manly, andreios, then he has for the most part already freed

himself from the two dangers. He already does rule and does follow his

advantage, or is in the process of doing so, according to Callicles. Therefore

it is the superior who should become these two things but are not

necessarily so to start with—this is not, according to Callicles’ original

position, their ability to begin with, and it is not therefore an appropriate

definition. In moving the discussion toward the “end product” and away

from the critical issue of the erromenesteros, the “raw” material for the

superior by nature who has not yet undergone any training, Socrates is

moving the discussion away from the raw element of superiority that

Callicles hopes will become a tyrant but claims might regrettably also

become a philosopher, and that Socrates elsewhere hopes might become a

philosopher but claims might regrettably also become a tyrant. [Rep. 495-6]

Socrates moves the question away from the most fundamental issue on

which philosophy and tyranny meet, even though this was Callicles’ main

concern in his speech.

[cclxxxiii]

But whatever we may say about Socrates’ ambiguous remarks on the

nature of the superior—he mostly leaves Callicles’ definition untouched for

the rest of the dialogue or abrogates it for himself—it is very clear that his

long attack on the “having more”

[cclxxxiv]

component of Calliclean natural

right must be taken with a grain of salt. In the famous anti-hedonist portion

of the Gorgias [491d- 510a], Socrates is on the surface praising temperance

[sophrosune] and attacking licentiousness [akolasia]. But we can take none

of Socrates’ answers or claims in this section at face value. No matter how

often Socrates repeats his accusations of licentiousness and no matter how

often he praises temperance, he makes certain seemingly off-hand but in

fact absolutely key statements that, unless we should be unreasonable and

ignore them, change the entire meaning of his discussion.

Socrates starts the attack on “having more” by turning the question of

rule over others to the question of ruling oneself. This is a surprising and

unnecessary turn that Callicles does not at first understand. [491d] When

Callicles expresses confusion and asks what he could mean by ruling

oneself, Socrates answers that he means “nothing very colorful, but just as

the many [say], to be temperate and in possession of power over oneself, to

be ruling the pleasures and the desires in oneself.” [ibid] This is the first

remark to which we must pay attention. The words “but just as [according

to] the many” [all’hosper hoi polloi] cannot be taken in the context of the

Gorgias merely as a casual statement. The entire argument Socrates makes

against rhetoric in the Gorgias [521e, 464b, etc.] requires a depreciation of

the opinion and judgment of the many in order to make any sense. Socrates

tells Polus that he has nothing to say to the many. [474a] In particular

Callicles, with whom he is presently arguing, entered the discussion by

calling Socrates a demegores, a speaker to the demos, and of speaking only

demegorika, things addressed to the many, things to which Callicles

elsewhere refers as fooleries or stupidities.

Therefore at the very least, the addition of the statement referring to

the many in Socrates’ definition of self-rule is a rhetorical provocation

against Callicles, who does indeed shortly proceed into his second speech,

an impassioned speech if not a tirade against temperance and in praise of

licentiousness. But in being a provocation it is also therefore a deeply

rhetorical statement that cannot reveal Socrates’ real position. There is no

reason that a philosopher who believes in self-rule and temperance as a

matter of justice or simple truth should have to refer to the opinion of the

many on the subject, especially if this someone is a Socrates who said the

things he said earlier about the multitude, and who is supposedly trying to

convince a Callicles who believes the things he does about the many. The

statement is intended as a provocation at this particular point in the

dialogue, made against an exasperated and annoyed Callicles, and it is

intended to elicit from him the inordinate praise of licentiousness (and

thereby of “tyranny”) he actually embarks upon from 491c-492e. Socrates

is then able to use this extreme speech to stump Callicles in a particularly

vulgar way.

Receiving an answer from Callicles that the satisfaction of all of one’s

desires is indeed what leads to a happy life, Socrates uses an excited oath

and twice praises Callicles for not being bashful or ashamed

[apaiskhunthenai] to admit such a thing. [494c] He asks Callicles if

someone who scratches himself perpetually and thereby satisfies a desire

will also be leading a happy life. The dramatic peak, which is also the

comic peak, of the dialogue is approaching: the next few exchanges, in

which Socrates again ironically praises Callicles’ manliness and his lack of

shame, are absolutely critical to understanding the Gorgias:

Callicles

What an odd person you are, Socrates—an unskilled demagogue

[demegoros]!

Socrates

Why, of course, Callicles, that is how I upset Polus and Gorgias, and struck

them with bashfulness/shame [aiskhunesthai epoiesa]; but you, I know, will

never be upset or abashed [aiskhuntheis]; you are such a manly [andreios]

fellow. Come, just answer that.

Callicles

Then I say that the man also who scratches himself will thus spend a

pleasant life.

Socrates

And if a pleasant one, a happy one also?

Callicles

Certainly.

Socrates

Is it so if he only wants to scratch his head? Or what more am I to ask you?

See, Callicles, what your answer will be, if you are asked everything in

succession that links on to that statement; and the culmination of the case,

as stated—the life of catamites—is not that awful, ugly, [aiskhros] and

wretched? Or will you dare to assert that these are happy if they can freely

indulge their wants?

Callicles

Are you not ashamed, [aiskhunei] Socrates, to lead the discussion into such

topics? [494d-e]

The shaming of Callicles

[cclxxxv]

is predictable given his character and

also his position on natural right—only a bit earlier in his latest definition of

the superior he had emphasized manliness [andreia] and attacked

effeminacy of soul [malakia tes psukhes].

[cclxxxvi]

It is on account of its

deleterious effects on manliness that Callicles attacked philosophy in his

first speech and temperance in his second. Manliness is in every way central

to Callicles’ understanding of liberation from convention or of the

appearance of the right by nature. Socrates has shamed Callicles by

bringing up the example of the most unmanly men

[cclxxxvii]

and suggesting

somehow that they too would satisfy Callicles’ criteria for happiness or

liberation.

But to understand Socrates’ rhetorical defeat of Callicles, we have to

pay close attention to the theme of shame in the Gorgias, a theme Callicles

made central to his initial speech, and a theme that resurfaces everywhere at

critical points. Note that after Callicles’ first speech, Socrates praised his

frankness [parrhessia] and the fact that he lacks shame [aiskhune]. Socrates

agrees with Callicles that Gorgias and Polus only lost the argument because

they were shamed, and therefore tacitly accepts Callicles’ notion that shame

stands in the way of truth. This is uncontroversial enough, for now. But as

Socrates says, “if you can bear me out in any point arising in our argument,

that point can at once be taken as having been amply tested by both you and

me, and there will be no more need of referring it to a further test; for no

defect of wisdom or access of modesty [aiskhune] could ever have been

your motive in making this concession, nor again could you make it to

deceive me: for you are my friend, as you say yourself. Hence any

agreement between you and me must really have attained the perfection of

truth.” [487e] Therefore according to Socrates’ own claim, we can only be

sure that the conclusions he reaches will possess truth or will be in need of

no further testing if in fact Callicles will at no point be encumbered by

shame [aiskhune]. But we have just seen this is not the case, but that at the

crucial point, Callicles is encumbered by shame. Callicles is ready to admit

that the scratcher fulfils his criteria, but too ashamed to consider the

example of the catamite. Therefore we can be sure that whatever explicit

conclusion Socrates reaches together with Callicles, either here or in the

future, will in fact be in need of further testing, or that it does not

necessarily possess truth, or, which is the same thing, that Plato, in having

Socrates defeat Callicles in this manner, exhibits to us the essentially

rhetorical character of the entire discussion in the Gorgias.

[cclxxxviii]

Socrates’ victory over Callicles has little to do with the truth or falsehood of

the matter being discussed. It is for show, or display: a display of something

other than dialectical truth. In fact the entire Gorgias is “for show”; it is a

sinister dialogue, marked by a sinister and even buffoonish theatricality in

which all the characters come masked. There is no one we know of by the

name of Callicles.

After being compared first to an eternal bird defecator [494b] and next

to a passive homosexual, Callicles is shamed or annoyed and remains

relatively silent for the rest of the dialogue. On several occasions he wants

to end the conversation.

[cclxxxix]

This allows Socrates to push through some

points that, in light especially of what we have just considered, should at

least raise eyebrows. At the end of his attack on intemperance, Socrates

makes seemingly the most extreme case in favor of conventional morality

and of convention in general. This is all supposedly against Callicles’ praise

of natural tyranny and licentiousness.

Socrates says that “the soul’s arrangements and orders are lawfulness

[nomimon] and law [nomos], from whence [men] become law-abiding

[nomimoi] and orderly: these are justice and temperance.” [504d] This is the

acme, as it were, of Socrates’ praise of nomos. But nomos means not just

convention but also law or way: Callicles had earlier referred to the nomos

of nature. [483e] And if we should read the statements that precede this

seemingly inordinate praise of conventional justice and temperance, we see

that Socrates is not in fact defending common morality, but likening the

lawful soul to the healthy body or to the well-turned-out work of art. As

examples of nomima Socrates does not refer to any good men and good

souls, not to speak of good laws, but only to the productions of consummate

craftsmen and to natural objects. Therefore even here it cannot be said that

Socrates is in truth defending “what the many say” are justice and

temperance against Callicles’ attacks on these conventional notions. But

finally, the very limited or merely rhetorical and ad-hominem nature of

Socrates’ argument against “having more” or in favor of temperance

becomes clear if we consider the following statement Socrates makes at the

end of his presentation:

Isn’t it the case that the filling of one’s desires—such as if one is hungry, to eat as much as he

wants, or if thirsty to drink—when one is in health the doctors do allow with respect to many

things, but when one is worked-out, so to speak, they never allow to fill oneself with what one

desires? …and regarding the soul, O best one, is it not the same way? So long as it should be

in pains, being unthoughtful and intemperate and unjust and unholy, it is necessary to bar its

way of desires and not let it turn toward anything except that of which it might become

better… [505b]

Now this analogy, though Socrates does not really follow it up, and

although a bored Callicles does not address it, qualifies the entire preceding

discussion. The fact that it is only expressed once does not matter. It is in

fact an incoherent admission even as it stands, since licentiousness

[akolasia] was earlier understood as the filling of one’s desires at will.

[491e ff.]

[ccxc]

Yet here Socrates is saying both that the filling of one’s

desires at will is allowed when one is healthy, and also that the same thing,

licentiousness [akolasia], is a symptom of a sick soul in pains. Now clearly

we must resolve this tension in the following way, and realize that

licentiousness itself is not an evil but absolutely a positive good when the

soul is healthy, and that it is only an evil when the soul is sick. For

philosophy itself appears in the Gorgias [481d-e] but also elsewhere in the

Platonic corpus—the Symposium is only the most explicit and best known

example—as a matter of freely entertaining the most intense eros, the most

intense desire imaginable.

[ccxci]

The philosopher’s temperance and justice

are merely side-effects, and if they exist at all, are for show. They only

appear to the public as primary causes or as attachment to morality, that is,

to law and convention. The philosopher arrives at this condition, however,

not by restraining anything but by filling the desires of a healthy soul. The

merely moral man, the man restrained by temperance and justice as a matter

of habit and convention, lives under a tyrant and wishes to be a tyrant—as

we learn from Socrates himself at the very end of the Republic. [619b-d]

There could in truth be no greater agreement between Socrates and Callicles

on the tyrannical and enslaving character of conventional justice and

restraint as opposed to the liberating character of eros and even of

licentiousness in healthy souls.

Callicles, who is not a sick soul and does not have an inordinate desire

to become a perpetual scratcher, defecator, or catamite, is bored and

annoyed by what must seem to him like Socrates’ disingenuous and pious

moralizing. He all but drops out of the argument, which forces Socrates to

embark on perhaps the most lunatic and most exasperating portion of the

dialogue: a question-and-answer session with himself. (It is difficult to see

how any reader can take Socrates seriously at this point and not see this as a

Platonic parody of the Socratic method.) But Socrates then suddenly

switches focus and for the rest of the Gorgias attempts a different argument,

one that plays more closely to Callicles’ character and to the concerns he

revealed in his two long speeches.

[ccxcii]

Callicles comes alive again when

Socrates changes topic and asks,

Now what can be the art of providing so that we suffer no wrong, or as little as possible? See if

it seems to you as it does to me. For to me it seems like this: either one must rule [arkhein]

in the city or be a tyrant [turannein], or else be a companion of the existing regime

[politeia]. [510a]

This immediately appeals to Callicles for two clear reasons. First of

all, in his first speech but also later Callicles had repeatedly advised

Socrates on what measures he must take to protect himself from suffering

wrong. The sense of Socrates’ impending destruction at the hands of

inferior men—a concern in which Callicles is proven right, as we know—

reappears throughout the dialogue. Second, Socrates uses here the same

words Callicles used during his second speech, when he said that

temperance would be a vice for whoever already has or can procure an

arkhe or turanneia in the city. [492b-c] Socrates’ sudden concession that

the political life can provide power or at least safety excites Callicles. But

characteristically, Socrates has introduced an entirely new concept and word

into the Gorgias. This is the first instance of the notion of the regime, or the

word politeia. This is the means by which Socrates radicalizes the message

of Callicles’ first speech: in light of Socrates’ subsequent discussion of the

primacy of the regime, Callicles’ opinions on the supremacy of convention

or nomos seem limited and naïve. Socrates replaces nomos with politeia:

the regime, politeia, is, as it were, the actualization of convention, it is

nomos made concrete through physical force, which was absent from

Callicles’ story.

The issue of the primacy of the regime is in truth closely related to the

strange title of the Gorgias, an issue we would do well to look at before we

consider Socrates’ argument. We have already noted that Callicles and not

Gorgias is the center of the dialogue in every way. Why is a man like

Callicles at the center of a dialogue on political rhetoric titled the Gorgias?

Is it because he exhibits the practice of political rhetoric in a revealing way?

No doubt this is the case, but this is not a satisfying answer. Note, however,

that for Callicles the precondition of the just or noble life by nature is

political power, in particular tyrannical power over the city. [492b, 484a,

etc.] But Gorgias says that the virtue of rhetoric is to provide such power to

men within their cities. [452d] Polus seconds this claim repeatedly

throughout his argument with Socrates. Gorgias’ student Meno echoes this

claim in another dialogue.

[ccxciii]

There should be no surprise then that a man like Callicles, who

embodies and defends the tyrannical political life, should appear at the

center of a dialogue on political rhetoric. But the point seems to be that

Gorgias’ and Callicles’ understanding of power or rule is politically limited

and naïve. I have already remarked on how Socrates introduces the question

of physical power or force into his argument with Callicles, whose

understanding of political control and political action was entirely in terms

of speech. The introduction of the issue of physical force into the argument

already foreshadows the direction Socrates is to take. The absence of force

from Callicles’ first speech, and the naïvete Polus exhibits on this subject,

already indicates the politically limited understanding of the traditional

orators. Socrates at one point hints at the great difference between the actual

physical power of the tyrant and the power in speech of the orator. [469d]

Did Archelaus [470d ff.] achieve his power through rhetoric?

[ccxciv]

Can

Gorgias teach a kind of rhetoric—perhaps a private rhetoric—that can sway

men like Archelaus?

[ccxcv]

Is not the Gorgianic version of tyrannical power

through public rhetoric limited to cities that actually have public

assemblies, and assemblies of a certain kind?

[ccxcvi]

Callicles’ interchangeable use of demos and nomos [482e] is key,

because it shows radically that his horizon and therefore his critique of

convention is limited to the democratic regime. He is not able to consider or

attack “convention” in all its aspects, because he has only been able to

attack Athenian convention. Or, which is the same, his understanding of

convention is mediated by his experience of the Athenian regime. In a

certain sense he is correct theoretically. Socrates elsewhere says that it is

impossible for the demos to philosophize.

[ccxcvii]

A philosopher must free

himself from convention, and it is possible to maintain in theory an

essential relationship between nomos and demos, as Callicles clearly does.

Callicles may be right that the demos is the source of all convention, but

only considering the genesis of convention out of the state of nature. But in

practice Callicles has chosen the political path of liberation, and in practice

the regime is the concrete actualization of convention and enforcer of

conventions. In actual practice, Callicles’ following statement is politically

limited to democracy:

…The makers of the laws are the weaker sort of men, and the more numerous. So it is a view

to themselves and their own interest that they make their laws and distribute their praises and

blames; and to terrorize the stronger sort of folk…they tell them that…having more is

shameful and unjust… [483b-c]

Can such a thing be said about the conventions in Sparta or Egypt? It is

possible to maintain that in some way such things can be said about any

regime: that despite its form, mass rule, or oligarchic, or even one-man rule,

that in the end it is all still for the benefit of the multitude and set up for

their sake. And Callicles is not a Spartan sympathizer. The politeia is that

which is in fact the source of the convention; the many, the people, are

arguably the source of convention or conventions only in a democratic

regime—even here it is likely the flatterers of the people who originate the

nomos. The lack of awareness of the power and primacy of the regime is

characteristic of the orators, who imagine that they rule when in fact they

must accommodate themselves to the beast and serve it. [466b-e, 510a-d,

513b, Rep. 493a-d, 495a] At least this is the Socratic argument in the

Gorgias. That all of this is a consequence of the orators’ misplaced trust in

the power of a certain kind of rhetoric that is weak, limited, and even so

applicable only to certain types of regimes.

Whatever way one may decide on these questions, it is the case that

as Plato presents him, in being a student of Gorgias Callicles has an

inordinate respect for the power of speech.

[ccxcviii]

It is on account of this

fact that his understanding of enslavement by convention lacks any mention

of force. Socrates’ introduction of force [iskhus, 488c] into the discussion of

political control points to the crucial difference between Socratic and

Gorgianic politics. A basic impression of this difference is available

through the consideration of another Socrates-Gorgias pair, this time in

Xenophon’s Anabasis. There one may compare Xenophon, the student of

Socrates, with Proxenus, the student of Gorgias. The chief difference has to

do with political acumen. Proxenus is limited to influence only among the

gentlemen. But Xenophon possesses the ability to communicate easily

among all classes of men and with all regimes.

[ccxcix]

The difference

between the two—the fact that Xenophon is “tougher and wilier” than

Proxenus—reflects the fact that Socrates is “tougher and wilier” than

Gorgias.

[ccc]

Socrates introduces the element of force in the discussion of

convention, and thereby the concept of the actual political regime, politeia,

the reality through which nomos becomes actual and concrete. The politeia

is at once the work of the law-giver, the nomothetes, literally the establisher

of convention, and the source and sustainer of all particular nomoi.

[ccci]

The

politeia brings the consideration of assimilation and enslavement of the

superior into a more immediate and concrete sphere of action than was

available in Callicles’ politically limited horizon.

According to Socrates, Callicles pursues political life but does not

realize it is the political regime, the polis and its rulers, who enslave

through convention. Socrates points out that a man who will want to be in

such kind of power as is required for Callicles’ version of the just or best

life will have to assimilate himself or homogenize himself with respect to

the ruler, to the regime. [510d, 511a] He plays on Callicles’ fears of

enslavement and desires for liberation, on account of which Callicles had

chosen the political life in the first place, to make him avoid political life as

the orators practice it. Callicles had it all wrong in his model of liberation—

conformity and literally homogeneity,

[cccii]

not revolt, is the means to

power, particularly when one seeks power through public speaking in a

democratic regime. Callicles will have to praise and blame the same things

as the regime does [510c]—exactly the same words Callicles used twice in

regard to how the convention establishes itself and enslaves the souls of the

superior. [483c, 492b] He will have to accustom himself out of his youth [ek

neou, 510d] to the ruler or the valuations of the regime, just as in Callicles’

account the superior are taken from their youth [ek neon, 483e] like lions

and formed to be in accord with the valuations of the nomos. With no

knowledge of what is actually noble, the man who seeks the rule that is a

necessary prerequisite to Callicles’ best life or to what is just by nature, will

have to conform to the conventional notions of the noble: and if these are

not in fact noble by nature, then the superior man will corrupt himself in the

process. [511a] Worse still, the demos, the regime on which orators depend

and which, as we have seen, is for Callicles intimately related to the idea of

nomos, [482e] will ultimately destroy the superior men it uses or who cater

to it. [519a-b, 520b, etc.]

The means by which the superior men are corrupted and even killed

by the regime are, in Socrates’ words, therefore remarkably similar to the

means by which, in Callicles’ speech, they were corrupted by the nomos.

Socrates does not therefore challenge, but even radicalizes Callicles’

hostility to nomos in this second argument.

[ccciii]

Both Callicles’ tyrannical

and Socrates’ philosophical life are based, from their respective points of

view, on a similar attitude toward the existing regimes or existing human

conventions. Socrates presents this more convincing argument—and

concession to his kinship with Callicles—after a lot of boilerplate

mythologizing about the justice of popular and conventional notions. As if

maybe to say, “No—not I! I’m certainly not for tyranny or intemperance or

any of these bad and nasty things that you executed by pupil Critias for!”

The discussion in Book VI of the Republic, 491a ff. only supports this

claim. In fact the use of the word erromenesteros in that passage is parallel

to Callicles’ use of the word in his first speech in the Gorgias. In both cases

a rare or superior natural specimen is corrupted by human convention or by

the conventions of the regime. The corruption takes place in the soul,

whether by means of imitation of the regime and its conventions, or as a

result of bewitchment by these conventions; in both cases the corruption

enslaves the superior, and finally obscures from them their proper liberation

and hence the just by nature.

It is difficult to see then by what reasoning Socrates is said to have

“refuted” Callicles in this dialogue. The two seem to agree on the fact that

the erromenesteros and his salvation and preservation is what matters; that

without this, there is neither philosophy, nor tyranny, nor the “original” and

raw, wild biological matter from which each uniquely grows. And the

character of Socrates’ “refutation” even seems to confirm that Callicles’

choice of tyranny was itself motivated by the same desire for the

“preservation of nature,” that is, of breeding. The only serious refutation in

their exchange has to do with Socrates’ criticism of Callicles’ political

naïvete. Overt tyranny in the name of nature and breeding—like Socrates’

student Critias attempted—is not possible and causes an even greater

conventional or democratic counter-reaction. Which is exactly what

happened with Critias and his friends tried to set up such a regime. Callicles

is too “caught up” in conventional assumptions and a conventional frame to

properly challenge, or to manipulate, convention. He doesn’t have the

necessary remove from convention to really understand how to seduce and

subdue it in the long term. He doesn’t understand the new rhetoric that Plato

teaches: that is, I would claim that not only do Socrates and Callicles agree

fundamentally on the “problem”—the salvation of the erromenesteros and

thereby of phusis from convention—but even on the ultimate solution,

which is “to rule in the city.” It is only that Plato is much wilier about how

to achieve this and that, in fully understanding the requirements of rule and

therefore of legislation in the highest degree, he realizes Callicles’

aristocratic radicalism must be spiritualized; and similarly the form of

(rhetorical) warfare for which Callicles is eager must be spiritualized, or

intellectualized.

III. Brief Note on Platonic Rhetoric and the Platonic Defense of

Philosophy—

a) Restatement of the Rhetorical Aims of the Gorgias; the Inconsistency

Between the View Presented on Rhetoric in the Gorgias and that in Other

Dialogues

Why are Socrates’ replies to Callicles so bizarre? In light of the

preceding considerations, several questions must force themselves on any

reasonable reader. Why would Socrates choose to make his case in this

round-about way? What is he trying to achieve in pretending to side with

conventional morality while he rhetorically distances himself from his close

cousin, Callicles? Why not just come out with it? Why does Plato choose to

exhibit the radical connection between the tyrant and the philosopher only

by the evasions, omissions, and rhetorical tricks of two interlocutors in a

dialogue? Why does this dialogue exhibit instead, on a first or careless

consideration, only the starkest possible contrast or opposition between the

tyrant and the philosopher on one hand, and endless repetitions of

conventional moralizing on the other, both types of statements revealing an

unstable or contradictory nature only on a closer consideration of the

arguments?

The answer has to do with the nature of Socratic rhetoric itself, and

with the nature of the Platonic project in general. But we would do well to

start with the obvious. In the Gorgias but also in the Republic the

opposition between the philosopher and the tyrant is made in the most

extreme way. The passage in the Republic is more famous because it is

more elaborate, more explicit, and more beautiful. But in both cases the

opposition is possible only because of the most systematic repression of the

subject of eros, or because of the most inordinate attack on intemperance.

The very different discussion of eros and therefore of desire in the

Symposium, however, indicates that Socrates clearly is not telling the full

story in the Gorgias and the Republic.

[ccciv]

The thing on account of which

he is so extreme in his attacks on the tyrant also characterizes the

philosopher, and characterizes him especially well.

[cccv]

This is a

provisional indication that the emphasis on the opposition between

philosophy and tyranny is rhetorical in nature. This means that it may either

contain only a limited truth, or may be outright false.

Plato’s desire to present philosophy and tyranny as opposites is

understandable in the wake of Socrates’ trial and execution. But it also

makes sense, again, if one considers the condition of philosophy at the time

generally. The death of Socrates was not an isolated event. The earlier

imprisonment of Anaxagoras, the persecution of Protagoras, the affair of

Aristotle later, and so on, are all examples of a general persecution of

philosophers taking place around the time of the very birth of philosophy in

the Greek world. I have already discussed the nature of this attack, the

attack on philosophy in the name of the political community. Philosophy

faced the danger of being extinguished at its very birth, by political states

based on divine law. Later, after a brief revival in the Islamic and Jewish

world it was in fact extinguished by such types of states. The charge against

Socrates in particular was motivated by the perception that he taught young

men to be tyrannical. The understanding that Socrates was guilty above all

of having taught Alcibiades and Critias, murderous and tyrannical traitors to

the regime, remained, as we have seen, current for a long time after the trial

itself. And in fact it is clear that the charge was not narrowly against

Socrates the man as a particular political actor, but against philosophy itself

in general. It was understood that his very philosophical activity, or

philosophical activity in general, somehow encouraged tyranny.

But by now it is clear why Plato as well as Xenophon and some other

of Socrates’ students would want to present tyranny and philosophy as

complete opposites. In the context of a defense of philosophy in the cities,

this is an absolute necessity. Not merely to speak about, but to actually

show, in a theatrical setting, a Socrates attacking tyranny and defending

justice against the cynical, ambitious, and impious claims of opportunistic

orators and political men, all in the presence of young students, as in the

Gorgias; or to show Socrates leading two youths to the cause of justice and

temperance, as in the Republic, when these are precisely the types he was

accused of corrupting and encouraging toward tyranny—all of this has great

value with respect to the apologetic project, with respect to making

philosophy, previously despised, publicly defensible and even respectable

in the cities: “the philosopher does not teach tyranny; he teaches piety and

justice.”

[cccvi]

As part of this apologetic interpretation of the Socratic dialogues, note

that Callicles is directly likened to Alcibiades in the Gorgias. [e.g., 519a]

We should not forget how absolutely central and potent the corruption of

Alcibiades was in the charges made against Socrates.

[cccvii]

And so it is

clear that, in showing Socrates in the process of trying to reform a young

man very much like Alcibiades, in the process of trying to lead him away

from tyranny and toward self-restraint, Plato is addressing directly one of

the major accusations against his mentor.

[cccviii]

Now in this light it becomes clear why Plato would not wish to present

the kinship between philosophy and tyranny overtly, even if such a kinship

existed, as I maintain here that it does. If Socrates’ corruption of Alcibiades

—the charge that he led Alcibiades away from the gods of the city, from

convention, and toward tyranny—was one of the principal illustrations of

the evils philosophy works in the state, we should not expect that Plato

would openly exhibit Socrates agreeing with the Alcibiades-like Callicles

on the central points on which they do in fact agree. Such an agreement

would not be spelled out but rather would be shown in action, in the manner

I have indicated above, by implications, omissions, tacit agreements,

inconsistent or contradictory statements, and other such things. Such an

insight would only be available to the careful or philosophical reader, who

could actually profit from discovering it, and who could profit even more

by observing how Plato obscures it for rhetorical or political purposes. But

on the surface the apologetic nature of the dialogue, the peculiar form of

rhetoric that defends philosophy before the tribunal of the city, before the

conventional political opinions of decent citizens, would be at all costs

maintained.

In fact, if a philosopher is on one hand concerned with communicating

to potential philosophers the true way to liberation, the precondition for

philosophy itself, that must consist in a radical departure from convention

and from the regime; and yet if, on the other hand he is concerned with

exonerating his mentor or philosophy itself from accusations and opinions

such as we know were entertained against Socrates; then he will be forced

to present both the case for and the method of such liberation only in the

context of an overt if rhetorical defense of conventional justice and a

condemnation of tyranny. Only in this way will he be able to pre-empt the

charge that the philosopher’s wild nature, his agroikia, his departure from

convention, is ipso facto an encouragement for tyranny. And his

presentation of the idea of a new and wily political rhetoric on behalf of

philosophy must likewise take place only in the context of the most

indignant opposition against the popular rhetoric of the orators, the type of

rhetoric looked down upon by all decent men.

In connection with the last claim I make also the following hypothesis.

The presentation in the Gorgias is not meant merely to achieve the twofold

aim, but a third and more important one. This twofold aim would be, again,

on one hand to advise potential philosophers on the necessity of liberation

from convention. And on the other hand it would be to do so only in the

context of assuring the cities that this liberation would not encourage

tyranny or injustice, or, indeed, not to even make it look like a liberation.

But I think Plato goes much farther. He makes philosophy not only

compatible with, but the apotheosis of, justice, and he claims the

philosopher is the true possessor of the political art. [521c] The philosopher

appears almost divine.

[cccix]

In showing just how the philosopher liberates

himself while forming a political alliance with convention, Plato aims, I

say, for a third goal beyond the two just mentioned. This would be the rule

of philosophy in the cities, the foundation of political philosophy literally,

as a politically active philosophy, and not merely as reflection on the

political things—and not just politically active, but actually ruling. It would

be to achieve Callicles’ aims—the aims of pre-Socratic political thought—

by other means. Clearly then the practice of a new kind of rhetoric is the

key tool.

Now in considering the view on rhetoric, we see immediately that

Socrates’ overt and most famous position on rhetoric in the Gorgias is itself

limited, contradictory, and all but a ruse. In his discussion with Polus

Socrates condemns rhetoric absolutely and without qualification, as a form

of flattery, as definitely not an art, and as powerless. He calls it the phantom

image of the true art of caring for the soul, which is justice, and which is

analogous especially to medicine, the art of caring for the body. [464b-

465e] But later Socrates claims that there is a good type of rhetoric, and he

also claims he possesses the true political art. [520a-521c] To say that this

represents a refinement of the earlier statement is not sufficient, because

Socrates at no point defines two types of rhetoric; his first condemnation of

rhetoric is not a condemnation only of the common political oratory used in

courts and assemblies, but, again, a condemnation of rhetoric without any

qualification. Furthermore, his comments on rhetoric in the Gorgias

explicitly contradict his comments on the same subject in the Menexenus on

one hand and in the Phaedrus on the other. For example in the Phaedrus

rhetoric appears as the analogue of medicine in the soul,

[cccx]

where in the

Gorgias it is said to be the opposite of this. And while Pericles is

completely depreciated in the Gorgias, he appears in a positive light in the

Phaedrus, where Socrates admits that he possessed the art of rhetoric in a

high degree, indeed that he is the most perfect orator. This concession is

especially important because in the Phaedrus Pericles’ possession of the art

of rhetoric is attributed to his training, not by any traditional teacher of

rhetoric, but at the hands of Anaxagoras, a philosopher of nature.

[cccxi]

And

Socrates’ early attachment to Anaxagoras is well known.

[cccxii]

Furthermore, where in the Gorgias Socrates distances himself most clearly

from Pericles, whom Callicles admires, in the Menexenus Socrates

indicates, not only his admiration for Pericles and his rhetorical ability, but

also the fact that the two men had the same teacher of rhetoric in Aspasia.

[cccxiii]

In other words, where in the Gorgias Socrates makes every effort to

have philosophy appear the opposite of political rhetoric, in the two other

dialogues a very strong kinship between the two is maintained. Where in

the Gorgias philosophy appears the ally of justice or medicine and rhetoric

appears the ally of tyranny and intemperance and sickness of soul, in the

Phaedrus rhetoric is the medicine of the soul and the highest science of

human souls. Where in the Gorgias Socrates distances himself from

political men and in particular from Pericles, in the other dialogues on

rhetoric a close relationship between the two is maintained.

The Platonic defense of philosophy in the cities has, in light of these

reflections, a deeper and more significant meaning. It is not merely a

defense of philosophy: it is not merely an apology for the Epicurean

retirement of the philosopher. It is a project far more ambitious, a project

that seeks active political aims in the city on behalf of philosophy. The

animus against Callicles’ imprudent praise of tyranny and imprudent

advocacy of the advantage of the erromenesteroi, an advantage which is

clearly also Socrates’ concern as we have seen at Republic 493a-494e,

represents not merely an ingenuous way to defend philosophy against the

accusations of the polis in theory but indeed an entirely new political

program with the final aim for rule, for holding arkhe. In the following I

only suggest the general features and motivations of this program.

To be faced with death or banishment personally, and with the

extinction of one’s way of life generally, sharpens the political issues for a

keen mind. The decision over what orientation to take with respect to

political society was a sharp and pressing issue for philosophers at the time.

The path of Callicles amounts to an open declaration of war by

philosophers upon the cities. The fates of Socrates and others, and possibly

of Callicles himself, if he existed, indicate that no matter how excellent the

dialectical skill and political acumen of such men, the cities were winning

the war. Socrates’ argument with Callicles, and his attempt to reform

Callicles represents not merely a prudent defense of the philosopher before

the common accusations of the polis. It represents not merely the attempt to

show that there is a political danger in making the prerequisites for

philosophical life public, because these might be cynically abused by

ambitious and tyrannical men for their own gain. In light of my previous

reflections on Callicles’ essentially philosophic nature or character,

Socrates’ argument, or Plato’s exposition in the Gorgias as a whole,

represents an attempt to reform the political attitudes of philosophers

themselves. It represents, arguably, an exhortation to philosophers and

sophists—who are not, at the time, the opposites of philosophers in any

sense—to abandon their radical rhetoric and their attempt to violently usurp

power in the cities, and to pursue a different means for this same end.

The Platonic project as exhibited in the Gorgias and elsewhere—most

of all in the Republic—is a total revolution with respect to the philosophers’

political orientation. In the Republic, as is clear from the reflections above,

Socrates uses the same tools of convention that Callicles claims enslave the

superior to the city, to make the city instead submit to the superior. The two

cannot be brought together on the common ground of the superior: the

many do not philosophize.

[cccxiv]

The way to the supremacy and the safety

of philosophy—the two are the same, it is admitted in the Gorgias—is not

to openly reject convention, but slowly to insinuate oneself as its ally and

reform it from within. The way of the future would no longer be rabid and

absolute anti-conventionalism, but the reform of convention itself and of

political regimes themselves, from within, by using the wiliest rhetorical

techniques, by accepting the premises and limitations of convention in

politics, and by fashioning an alliance of sorts, if only an expedient or

rhetorical one, between philosophy and the city’s conventional justice. This

means also being the reformer of religion or the founder of a new religion.

Nietzsche says Plato wanted to found a new religion but was unable to for

the Greeks—was he able to for someone else?

Such an alliance would supposedly be good not only for the

philosophers, but also for the cities. Philosophers, as allies of civic virtue,

and as paragons of moral virtue in the open—or rather as actors pretending

to moral virtue—would benefit the cities: this is the birth of political

philosophy, that is at once for the political benefit of philosophy in the

cities, and for the political benefit of the cities themselves.

[cccxv]

For now, let us temporarily agree with this salutary Platonic image. In

the Gorgias, for example, there is a clear illustration of this idea. Socrates

suppresses the identity of tyranny and philosophy on the subject of eros or

“having more,” as we have seen. Now this is not merely a ploy to defend

philosophy, though it is this as well. It is also an indication to philosophers

that to make their fundamental character public and to defend it, or to

defend animus against convention publicly, as Callicles does, leads not only

to the encouragement of tyranny but to the general dissolution of any state

and to the proliferation of moral decadence. It would lead to conditions in

which not only philosophy, but any kind of political health or dynamism

would be impossible. Only in the case of men of great ability and will

would the public defense of “having more” or of licentiousness lead to

something good—it is only good for “healthy” souls; in the general case,

presumably of botched souls and insufficient natures, it would lead merely

to decay, weakness, and wretchedness. The accusation that “having more”

leads to the life of the catamite is clearly not directed against Callicles—no

sane reader would believe that such a life was ever on Callicles’ mind in his

defense of licentiousness. This accusation is an indication to philosophers

that to make their erotic character public and to defend it, in the Calliclean

manner, will lead to general political and social decay—for as Nietzsche

says, there is no congruence between the sensuality of the artist and of the

people.

The suppression of this identity between philosophy and tyranny as to

their unique erotic character, is then undertaken not only for the defense of

the philosophy, but for the sake of the city. In the 20

century, in the work

of, e.g., Andre Gide, we have a comic fulfillment of what Socrates implies

would happen when philosophers take the Calliclean approach. Gide, and

others, use Nietzsche’s open avowal and defense of philosophic

unconventionalism, his Calliclean genealogy of morality, precisely to

defend in public the cause of sexual liberation. Whatever one’s opinions

may be for or against such a program, it is a misunderstanding of Nietzsche

(or of Callicles) to use their particular kind of antinomianism for this end.

[cccxvi]

But it is a predictable outcome of imprudently having made the

philosophical nature public. Where, like Callicles, Nietzsche was hoping

that by doing so he was defending the interests of the superior against the

ubiquitous modern egalitarianism, his insights have become, by our time,

the tools of the most extreme egalitarianism that seeks to deny all nature

and to justify the very life of the “Last Man” that Nietzsche denounced.

[cccxvii]

The inevitable misuse of the philosophical case for licentiousness

and against conventional restraint is already evident in Socrates’ shaming of

Callicles at 494d. Philosophers must defend the virtues of the many—

chiefly, self-restraint, sophrosune, and justice—if they are to rule, and if

they are to have anything to rule at all.

b) Birth and Meaning of Platonic Rhetoric Exposed in the Hippias

Major

[cccxviii]

A good illustration of Plato’s “rhetoric for philosophers,” of his

exhortation to “clean up their image,” to make themselves political and

presentable, and also an illustration of how this may be done can be found

in his Hippias Major, a dialogue most pertinent to my main argument here

about philosophy achieving rule in the cities through oratory; to which we

may now briefly turn.

The Hippias Major is an unusual dialogue; its authenticity has been

questioned. It may or may not be true that someone other than Plato wrote

this dialogue. But even if this is true, it will make the dialogue in some

ways more useful for our purposes. This is because, whoever wrote it, the

dialogue has been accepted as part of the Platonic tradition. This means that

it was seen by ancient readers to have sufficient similarity to the rest of the

Platonic corpus as to be authentic. If indeed it was written by someone

other than Plato, then its educational purposes to us may be greater than if it

were written by Plato himself because it may be therefore a simpler and less

nuanced Plato. But this is a good thing, especially in a dialogue about

rhetoric and the political uses of rhetoric. It means that this dialogue

represents in a more or less obvious way, the Platonic view of rhetoric and

its political power: that is, it may be “ersatz Plato,” and therefore easier for

a modern reader to understand “Plato’s intention” as ancient readers and

Platonists understood it. From the point of view of this thesis, having such

information would be more valuable than what we could gain from reading

Plato’s work alone.

The beginning of the Hippias Major is important and will immediately

resonate with the reader, who will kindly recall what was said above

regarding the status of “pre-Socratic” philosophy with respect to the city

and politics:

Socrates

Hippias, beautiful and wise, what a long time it is since you have put in at

the port of Athens!

Hippias

I am too busy, Socrates. For whenever Elis needs to have any business

transacted with any of the states, she always comes to me first of her

citizens and chooses me as envoy, thinking that I am the ablest judge and

messenger of the words that are spoken by the several states. [281b] So I

have often gone as envoy to other states, but most often and concerning the

most numerous and important matters to Lacedaemon. For that reason, then,

since you ask me, I do not often come to this neighborhood.

Socrates

That’s what it is, Hippias, to be a truly wise and perfect man! For you are

both in your private capacity able to earn much money from the young

[281c] and to confer upon them still greater benefits than you receive, and

in public affairs you are able to benefit your own state, as a man must who

is to be not despised but held in high repute among the many. And yet,

Hippias, what in the world is the reason why those men of old whose

names are called great in respect to wisdom—Pittacus, and Bias, and

the Milesian Thales with his followers and also the later ones, down to

Anaxagoras, are all, [281d] or most of them, found to refrain from

affairs of state?

Hippias

What else do you suppose, Socrates, than that they were not able to

compass by their wisdom both public and private matters?

Socrates

Then for Heaven’s sake, just as the other arts have progressed, and the

ancients are of no account in comparison with the artisans of today, shall we

say that your art also has progressed and those of the ancients who were

concerned with wisdom are of no account in comparison with you?

Hippias

Yes, you are quite right.

Now, it is true that in one sense the Hippias Major is a dialogue strictly

about the beautiful: the word kalon outnumbers every other word of

substance in the text, and even most prepositions, pronouns, and articles;

and the discussion of the beautiful occurs at the very center of the text. But

more than the first fifth of the text is concerned with political matters, and

political considerations reappear even in the middle of the theoretical

discussion of the kalon. In particular the way the dialogue enters into this

discussion of the kalon is very interesting.

Hippias thinks he is a maker of beautiful public speeches. The

discussion of the kalon in the Hippias Major occurs well into the text, after

Hippias mentions the beautiful speech he has just prepared—for public

rendition in Sparta and Athens—regarding the proper education of young

men. [286a] In responding to this claim, Socrates makes us understand that

his confusion over the nature of the kalon is rooted in his own consideration

of beautiful and ugly speeches. The theoretical discussion on the kalon for

which this dialogue is most famous then follows. [286e ff.] But Hippias’

last statement in the dialogue, after the theoretical discussion on the nature

of the kalon has ended, is that Socrates’ questions all amount to “mere

shavings and scrapings of discourse,” and that what is truly beautiful is the

ability to make beautiful speeches in public for one’s own interest or

advancement: in other words that Socrates’ speeches are ugly, but that

traditional political rhetoric is what is truly beautiful. [304a] Socrates’

speeches are ugly and politically powerless, but rhetoric is beautiful and

powerful. The theoretical discussion of the kalon in the Hippias Major is

therefore framed by the kalon as it is found in political rhetoric.

Accordingly, Hippias, echoing Gorgias at Gorg. 452d, and especially

Callicles at 491e-2c from the Gorgias (as well as Meno, Gorgias’ student,

from Meno 73c), defines the beautiful as having power in political affairs

and one’s own state. [296a] Hippias is both the typical orator and sophist,

wanting power through rhetoric in public life, and pay in private for the

teaching of virtue. The first and central issue of the introduction is the

relationship of the wise man to political life: it is presented as a contrast

between the older generations of wise men, who stayed away from matters

of state, did not speak to the public and did not exact money for wisdom in

private; and Hippias’ generation, who do speak to the public and ask money

to teach virtue. Of which kind is Socrates?

The discussion on the kalon that follows the political introduction

consists of various claims as to what may be the kalon itself, all of which

are refuted. Not all of these claims interest us, but many are considered in

the same words that we have seen before: the beautiful as the useful

[khreston] or the beneficial [ophelimon] as at Gorgias 474e and Republic

401c-d; the beautiful as that which is pleasant, as in Gorgias 474e, and in

particular pleasant through the eyes and ears, as in Republic 401c. But all of

these claims are rejected as somehow incomplete or self-contradictory. As it

is the political dimension that interests us here, we will not consider the

arguments by which these claims are refuted, but merely add again that

these are claims Socrates endorses in the two other texts named, i.e. in the

Gorgias and the Republic—claims with specifically political import in

political contexts. Why does Socrates refute definitions of the kalon in the

Hippias that are used to great political effect in the Gorgias and Republic?

[cccxix]

For it is clear that the kalon is not used for any straightforward

“substantial” political purpose in the Hippias Major. It is said at one point

[295d] that laws [nomoi] and practices [epitedeumata] may be beautiful—

the same pairing in the Gorgias at 474e. But unlike the treatment of

beautiful laws and practices in the Gorgias, the treatment of this political

issue within the discussion of the kalon is very obscure. Socrates asks

Hippias to consider if perhaps the kalon of laws and practices is not the

aesthetic pleasure through the eyes and ears. [298d] This last puzzling

possibility is refuted as well, which allows Hippias to make his final

definition of the kalon in terms of political rhetoric. This is the definition of

the kalon with which we first encounter in the Hippias at 286a, and this is

the definition with which we leave the dialogue as well.

It is this last point then that may provide the key to deciphering the

relationship between the kalon and the political in the Hippias Major. Given

the strange obscurity of the overt theoretical or “substantial” link between

the kalon and the political in this text, we should focus on what may be the

clearer “dramatic” relationship between the two and see if this throws any

light on our concern. Hippias is an orator who believes he rules in public

life through beautiful speeches and that he can teach beautiful virtue to the

young through beautiful speeches. In showing his ignorance, and more, his

total helplessness with regard to this very point, to what the beautiful in fact

really is, the Hippias Major seems at first sight to take the wind out of the

orators’ claims to political power through beautiful speech and their right to

teach the young the beautiful or noble pursuits in private for pay. Socrates

uses the beautiful to expose Hippias’ total lack of political acumen: not only

is he not able to tell what makes the laws and practices beautiful, but he is

used as an old woman by the Spartans, [285e] whom he can only please, but

not teach or rule. Like the rhetoric at Gorgias 464b-466a, Hippias’ rhetoric

only aims to please and therefore has to cater to the pleasures of others.

Hippias is a man who knows nothing of what is beautiful by nature, but

instead slavishly memorizes names to please others with old wives’ tales.

He thinks he rules, but he is really being used as a clown.

As much truth as there may be to this view, it is not a complete or

satisfying view; strictly speaking the refutation of Hippias explodes his

claims to knowledge. But is he in fact powerless? Is Socrates’ reference to

Hippias’ competence, a claim that occurs at 304b in the last statement of the

dialogue, merely ironic, or is Hippias actually powerful in his home city

and in cities abroad after all? A closer consideration of the means Socrates

uses to refute Hippias raises some troubling questions. Most importantly,

Socrates uses what has been called an “alter ego” to drive his discussion

with Hippias. This is a literary device that is unique to the Hippias Major

and that Plato uses nowhere else.

[cccxx]

This device of the alter ego has

reasonably been interpreted as a rhetorical means to flatter Hippias’ status

and pride: a vain Hippias could not endure a Socrates asking him such

questions in the open.

[cccxxi]

This is of course true, but not complete. For in

using an alter ego, Socrates sets himself up as very different from the alter

ego. He does not merely speak for the alter ego, but sets himself against the

alter ego, and argues against him. [298d-e] Where the alter ego is a rough

man, base, ugly, impious, violent [293a, 288d-9e, 292a] who cares only for

the truth [288d, 298d-e], the Socrates we see is more beautiful and gentle—

and clearly does not care only for the truth. He also cares about luring

Hippias into continuing the conversation by appealing to his vanity and to

his notions of gentlemanly or noble propriety. [292c] In using the alter ego

as a rhetorical device Socrates shows himself as devious and careful of

conventional notions [298e-299d], even deferential to conventional notions,

in a way that his alter ego is not. His alter ego cares only about nature, not

convention.

The difference between Socrates and his “alter ego” reaches the peak

of its significance in the very last passage of the text. In responding to

Hippias’ final definition of the beautiful as political rhetoric, Socrates does

not refute it. Rather he says that he has been convinced of this definition

numerous times, but that his “alter ego” always reviles him in private for it.

Socrates is reviled by both men like Hippias and men like the “alter ego”:

he has benefited from his conversation with both Hippias and the “alter

ego.” And in comparing this statement with the introduction 281-283, the

supposition forces itself on us: could the alter ego represent the old

philosophy from the introduction as the opposite to Hippias’ new public

philosophy? Could it be then that the “alter ego,” always refuting, ugly,

base, hitting people with a big stick, is Socrates as a pre-Socratic, Socrates

still a student of Anaxagoras [281c, 283a], the student of physics, the

Aristophantic image of Socrates, on account of which Socrates was accused

at his trial?

[cccxxii]

Is he Socrates as a “pre-Socratic,” or pre-Platonic,

Socrates who only cares for the naked truth and who has no respect for the

opinions of convention, but only for nature? [298d-e ff.] In his impious,

violent and boorish discussion of the kalon, is the ugly alter ego the old pre-

Socratic philosopher who is ignorant of the great power and uses of the

kalon? It is only in private that the real Socrates—the rude, wild “alter ego”

who cares about nothing but truth and nature—makes his appearance and

can hector the new, public mask of Socrates.

Socratic rhetoric is never simply rhetoric as such, but rhetoric that also

points to the truth.

[cccxxiii]

It is possible that Socrates’ flattery of Hippias is

not merely ironic or rhetorical but points to something perhaps true: that

Socrates maybe really thinks he can learn something from Hippias—it is

Socrates who starts the dialogue and Socrates who restrains Hippias a

number of times when the sophist wants to leave. [292c, 295a, etc.] Perhaps

Socrates is not merely being ironic at the end when he tells Hippias that he

has benefited from the discussion. The surface Socrates is perhaps

something in between the wise men of old times—the original pre-Socratic

philosophers—who kept out of public affairs and only cared about truth or

nature, and men like Hippias who are determined by their public lives and

know nothing of the truth apart from convention, or maybe who don’t care

about it—but who nevertheless know something about how to manipulate

the cities through their knowledge of convention.

[cccxxiv]

Is the surface

Socrates the new “beautiful” public face of the old philosophy? He is

certainly not, like Hippias, a sophist whose mind is determined by the polis

and whose desires are determined by money. [283b] But would it be

plausible to interpret the more beautiful surface Socrates, the Platonic

Socrates, as the pre-Socratic philosopher become political—and not only

political, but, unlike Callicles and the brutal Critias, also politically astute—

the old philosopher with a political surface, with a politic face or mask, with

knowledge of real rhetoric? Where the old philosophy, as represented in the

alter ego, only refutes and shows the hopeless limitations and contradictions

in the conventional or plausible notions of the kalon—and thereby even

comes close to considering the kalon as a matter of human convention with

no basis in nature—the new political philosophy, informed by men like

Hippias, the new Platonic Socrates, uses these very notions

[cccxxv]

in the

Gorgias and especially the Republic to reform the education of the cities

and to give the philosopher the title to the best life and the supreme justice:

and if not the absolute political rule in the city, then at least the spiritual

rule. Where the former philosophy was private and politically weak and did

not know rhetoric, the new philosophy is informed by the “beauty” and

power of political rhetoric, is public and ambitious, it has benefited from an

encounter with men like Hippias:

Hippias:

Decidedly. Now other things, Socrates, testify for us that this is so, but

especially political affairs: for in political affairs and in one’s own state to

be powerful is the most beautiful of all things, but to be powerless is the

most disgraceful of all.

Socrates:

Good! Then, for Heaven’s sake, Hippias, is wisdom also for this reason the

most beautiful of all things and ignorance the most disgraceful of all things?

—Hippias Major, 296a

IV. Summary of this Chapter and Some Additional Circumstantial Evidence

from Antiquity Regarding the Platonic and Philosophical Association with

Tyranny—

In conclusion, to summarize the argument and different sections of this

chapter: first, that it is obvious from the smaller apologetic dialogues and

works of Plato and of Xenophon that the charge of teaching tyranny was a

special concern of Socrates’ defenders, and that this implies this accusation

against philosophy was the most important; and that their refutation of this

charge is weak and unconvincing—based on the claim that Socrates did not

teach anything, and that he is unskilled at rhetoric.

[cccxxvi]

Second, that the

most thoroughgoing effort to show Socrates both did not teach tyranny and

also condemned rhetoric is to be found in the Gorgias; but that a close

reading of this dialogue leaves us with ambiguous feelings at best about

Socrates’ sincerity, and, in my opinion, a near certainty that he in fact does

agree with Callicles on the fundamental political problems. He agrees with

Callicles both that the fundamental problem is the salvation of the superior

specimen—the erromenesteros, a term that connotes biological vitality and

breeding

[cccxxvii]

—from the clutches of nomos and also that achieving rule

in the cities is the ultimate means to this salvation. Insofar as he disagrees

with Callicles or refutes him, Socrates only does this by showing that he

himself is far more liberated from convention, far wilder, far more prone to

consider “the way of force” and of physical violence—i.e., he outdoes

Callicles in his “tyrannical” political orientation and he outdoes Callicles in

“vulgar” or “shameful” rhetoric. Socrates refines and elaborates only

Callicles’ means of saving philosophy and “saving nature”: Callicles is

politically naïve because he sees only nomos but does not understand the

regime, the politeia which unites nomos with physical force and through

which nomos becomes actualized. Socrates seems to suggest, from a

comparison of the Gorgias with the “sister” dialogue on rhetoric Phaedrus,

and other minor dialogues, that the true means to achieve Callicles’

tyrannical ends is through a revised understanding of rhetoric. Contra

Callicles, who represents possibly the political thought of pre-Socratic

philosophy—philosophy when it first turns to its own self-defense and

embraces tyranny as the only salvation in an emergency situation—Socrates

recommends the practice of a new kind of oratory instead, which will both

allow the philosopher to remain philosopher and, in the long run, give him

spiritual dominion in the cities. In the Hippias Major we see this same

argument or image from a different point of view, as the “pre-Platonic”

philosophy, violent, wild, and crude, learns from orators like Hippias how

to hide its true character and also achieve power in the city. And the

philosopher will do so while blaming men like Hippias as sophists and

opportunists and presenting the philosophers as defenders of common

justice, decency, and restraint. We see in this dialogue the philosopher

putting on his “priestly” mask.

It is useful to mention now in passing that the double view here

expressed, that Platonic political philosophy is deceitful or “hypocritical”

and that it tends to tyranny or to associations with tyranny, is by no means

my own innovation or invention, but was common knowledge in the ancient

world. We have already seen how, fifty years after Socrates’ execution, and

despite Plato’s efforts, the Athenian people still understood the Socratic

school as fundamentally prone to tyranny, lawlessness, licentiousness and to

violent repression of democracy.

[cccxxviii]

Besides this, we also have rather

overt testimony from some of the lesser-known disciples of Socrates that

there exists an association between philosophy and tyranny. The views of

Socrates’ “other” students are useful because men like Aristippus were

Socratics without being Platonists—that is, they either did not care to, or

did not know how to dissimulate as well as Plato did. For example if we

look at some of the sayings of Aristippus, student of Socrates, consort of

tyrants, and the founder of the hedonist school from Cyrene, we will not fail

to see the “political teaching” to nature that I have discussed so far,

expressed in a rather frank way:

At another time he was asked what advantage philosophers had over other men; and he

replied, “If all the laws should be abrogated, we should still live in the same manner as we do

now.”

Being asked once what advantage he had derived from philosophy, he said, “The power of

associating confidently with everybody.”

[cccxxix]

Strange things indeed, from the “traditional” point of view, to claim as

the chief advantages and the chief teachings of philosophy, strange things to

have learned from Socrates. Aristippus is a Socratic, but he is not Platonic;

that is, he does not take part in the Platonic project alluded to above, and

therefore his attitude does not come down to us through the obscuring or

beautifying filter of a masterful oratory. Aristippus openly associated with

tyrants and was famous for having made his career and fortune in

association with tyrants. The advantages he speaks of above reflect, for

sure, his answers to non-philosophers, and therefore reflect only the

“external” advantages of philosophy: but it is precisely the orientation of

philosophy toward other men and toward the polis in particular that is the

issue here; for it matters little to the cities if philosophy directly or

indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, lets loose desires, orientations

and abilities that reach for usurpation, treason, and tyranny. The connection

between the sayings of Aristippus and Plutarch’s famous statement about

the tyrant-pretending Alcibiades, also a student of Socrates, should be clear:

One colour, indeed, they say the chameleon cannot assume: it cannot itself appear white; but

Alcibiades, whether with good men or with bad, could adapt himself to his company, and

equally wear the appearance of virtue or vice. At Sparta, he was devoted to athletic exercises,

was frugal and reserved; in Ionia, luxurious, gay, and indolent; in Thrace, always drinking; in

Thessaly, ever on horseback; and when he lived with Tisaphernes the Persian satrap, he

exceeded the Persians themselves in magnificence and pomp…

[cccxxx]

This is most significant should one summarily consider the similarities

of Aristippus’ career—his association with tyrants—with Alcibiades’. Now

Aristippus is a full-blown philosopher, and not, like Alcibiades, a statesman

who aspired to tyranny directly. Yet what binds the two, and indeed the

distinguishing characteristic of the two, is their versatility, their “regime-

independence” and “nomos-independence,” their ability to associate with all

men in all regimes, which all of course must presuppose a radical

unmooring from their native regime and its conventions, and a

corresponding ability to manipulate and seduce conventions or regimes of

different kinds. This is what they learned from the wild man, Socrates.

Indeed Aristippus openly admits what I have claimed so far: that

philosophy, so far from being a “civilizing” education, is a form of de-

civilization and “re-barbarization,” a “return to the wild,” to the “teaching

of Cheiron,” an escape from the taming morality of nomos:

He was asked once in what educated men are superior to uneducated men; and answered, “Just

as broken horses are superior to those that are unbroken.”

[cccxxxi]

Philosophy is liberation from nomos and return to nature and therefore

to the “teaching of force,” the teaching of the beast—the lion and the fox—

which is “regime-independent.” The advantage of the philosophers over

other men, and the advantages philosophy supplies, are, according to

Aristippus’ statements, in fact shared to the full by Alcibiades, the pretender

to tyranny, if not exemplified by him. It is in this very direct sense that

philosophy and tyranny are uniquely related, in their common and unique

orientation versus the political regime or political life in general, and in the

fact that Plato, and possibly Socrates, could teach his students special skills

for manipulating convention and manipulating regimes. From the point of

view of the classical regime, indeed from the point of view of any particular

or sovereign regime and therefore, from the point of view of political life as

such, this orientation is treasonous and dangerous, it is tyrannical.

Accordingly we see throughout antiquity casual references to the

licentiousness, the love of luxury, the violence, and the turn to tyranny that

not only Socratics like Aristippus exemplified, but indeed also the

Academics, i.e., Plato’s own intellectual progeny. So that, much later,

Athenaeus, who otherwise is concerned with attacking Aristippus’

hedonism, adds about the Academics themselves:

For Euphraeus, when he was staying with king Perdiccas in Macedonia, was not less a king

than the other, being a man of a depraved and calumnious disposition, who managed all the

companionship of the king in so cold a manner, that no one was allowed to share in the king’s

meals unless he knew something about geometry or philosophy; on which account, after

Philippus obtained the government, Parmenion, having caught him in Oreus, put him to death;

as Carystius relates in his Historical Commentaries. And Callippus the Athenian, who was

himself a pupil of Plato, having been a companion and fellow-pupil of Dion, and having

travelled with him to Syracuse, when he saw that Dion was attempting to make himself master

of the kingdom, slew him; and afterwards, attempting to usurp the supreme power himself,

was slain too. And Euagon of Lampsacus (as Eurypylus says, and Dicaeocles of Cnidus, in the

ninety-first book of his Commentaries, and also Demochares the orator, in his argument in

defence of Sophocles, against Philon) lent his native city money and took its Acropolis as

security. Afterwards, being unable to recover the money, he attempted to seize on the tyranny,

until the Lampsacenes attacked him, and repaid him the money, and drove him out of the city.

And Timaeus of Cyzicus (as the same Demochares relates), having given largesses of money

and corn to his fellow-citizens, and being on this account believed by the Cyzicenes to be an

excellent man, after having waited a little time, attempted to overturn the constitution with the

assistance of Aridaeus; and being brought to trial and convicted, and branded with infamy, he

remained in the city to an extreme old age, being always, however, considered dishonoured

and infamous.

And such now are some of the Academics, who live in a scandalous and infamous

manner. For they, having by impious and unnatural means acquired vast wealth by

trickery, are at present highly thought of; as Chaeron of Pellene, who was not only a

pupil of Plato, but of Xenocrates also. And he too, having usurped the supreme power in

his country, and having exercised it with great severity, not only banished the most virtuous

men in the city, but also gave the property of the masters to their slaves, and gave their wives

also to them, compelling them to receive them as their husbands; having got all these

admirable ideas from that excellent Republic and those illegal Laws of Plato.

[cccxxxii]

These are accusations made by an enemy of the Academics and

therefore ought to be taken with a grain of salt; but the wealth of sources

Athenaeus quotes, in addition to what we have considered so far, makes it

likely that at least some of the accusations are true, or at the very least that

the people thought them to be true. The reputation of Plato in antiquity was

nowhere near so “pure” as it is in our time.

In fact the personal lives or careers of Plato and Xenophon themselves

also bear out my main claim, at least as partial demonstrations. I will not

embark here on speculations about Plato’s dealings in Syracuse, as this

subject has been treated extensively elsewhere, but will make only a single

observation. Plato’s adventures in Syracuse indicate the connection between

tyranny and philosophy not directly, that is, not in the crude sense that the

regime he had intercourse with was tyrannical. It is rather the very fact that

Plato would leave his native state in an attempt to pursue his advantage and

to improve another, that betrays the connection I speak of here. In the case

of Xenophon we have an even clearer illustration of the corruption

philosophy will work on the souls of the best, that is, if by this we mean

corruption considered from the point of view of the city:

Xenophon seems to indicate by the plan of the Memorabilia that Socrates attached a greater

importance to self than to the city. This is in accordance with Xenophon’s distinction between

the man of excellence and the benefactor of his fellow citizens. Xenophon himself was

induced to accompany Cyrus, an old enemy of Athens, on his expedition against his brother by

the promise of Proxenus, an old guest-friend of his, that he would make him a friend of Cyrus

if he would come. Proxenus, a pupil of Gorgias, of a man who had no fixed domicile in any

city, explicitly stated that he himself considered Cyrus worth more to him than his fatherland.

Xenophon does not say in so many words that he might conceivably come to consider Cyrus’

friendship preferable to his fatherland; but he certainly was not shocked by Proxenus’

statement, and he certainly acted as if he were capable of sharing Proxenus’ sentiment.

Socrates had some misgivings about Xenophon’s becoming a friend of Cyrus and he advised

him therefore to consult Apollo about the journey; but Xenophon was so anxious to join Cyrus

or to leave his fatherland that he decided at once to accept Proxenus’ invitation. Even after

everything had gone wrong with Cyrus’ expedition, Xenophon was not anxious to return to his

fatherland, although he was not yet exiled. If his comrades had not passionately protested, he

would have founded a city “in some barbarian place”; not Xenophon, but his opponents, felt

that one ought not to esteem anything more highly than Greece. Later on, he did not hesitate to

accompany Agesilaus on his campaign against [his native] Athens and her allies which

culminated in the battle of Coronea.

[cccxxxiii]

The similarity between this career and what Plutarch said above of

Alcibiades’, is too obvious to comment on. There is difference only in the

form of public expression. But the basic heartlessness and tyrannical nature

of these examples, all consequences of the teaching on nature or the

fundamental philosophical orientation, is evident if we should take

seriously the horizon of the political regime, and adopt its point of view for

our own. We must do this at least for a moment, at least to gain a proper

understanding of the original and pre-philosophic political orientation.

According to this orientation, this kind of “cosmopolitanism” and return to

nature is not just treason, but it is cruelty and tyranny.

In fine, I close both this section and this chapter with yet another

accusation against Plato and the Platonists, this time coming from another

philosopher—from Epicurus—who, in his mockery, attacks the Academics

both for their tyrannical drive and for their deceitful rhetoric, the two

elements I have tried to explain here throughout:

How malicious philosophers can be! I know nothing more venomous than the joke which

Epicurus permitted himself against Plato and the Platonists: he called them Dionysio-kolakes.

The literal meaning of that, what stands in the foreground, is “flatterers of Dionysius,” hence

accessories of tyrants and lickspittles. But the phrase says still more than that—“they are all

actors, with nothing true about them” (for Dionysokolax was a popular description of an

actor). And that last part is the real maliciousness which Epicurus hurled against Plato: the

magnificent manners which Plato, along with his pupils, understood, the way they stole the

limelight—things Epicurus did not understand!—that irritated him, the old schoolmaster from

Samos, who sat hidden in his little garden in Athens and wrote three hundred books—who

knows?—perhaps out of rage and ambition against Plato?—It took a hundred years until

Greece came to realize who this garden god Epicurus was.—Did they realize?

[cccxxxiv]

This is the Epicurean criticism of Plato as relayed by Nietzsche.

[cccxxxv]

The Platonists were both tyrant’s lickspittles and also masters of

oratory, hypocrites, pretenders, actors. In the Platonic corpus we see both

the fundamental connection between philosophy and tyranny on one hand,

and the concealment of this original identity on the other. Both appear

together as “political philosophy,” as a refinement of Callicles’

antinomianism and drive to tyranny and violent atheism, in which these are

covered up by a pose and mask of piety, justice, asceticism. Nature—the

fundamental ground on which both tyranny and philosophy meet—is

concealed, not from the philosophers themselves, but beneath the public

mask of philosophy, which henceforth becomes a pose of piety, of

righteousness, which henceforth becomes moralistic. It is through this

rhetoric that Platonic philosophy becomes tyrannical—quite literally. The

rival Epicurean school, by contrast, which did not have this knowledge or

means of self-defense, fell into disrepute as nihilistic atheism, and Plato is

said to have taken efforts to burn Democritus’ scientific books.

[cccxxxvi]

In Plato we have both the salvation of philosophy from persecution

and its “concealment” under a political mask, its coming forth into the

world under the mask of the moralist and the “priest,” under the mask of the

“good man.” As someone else said, the Platonic project—both for the

masking of philosophy and, through this masking, for its “rule in the cities,”

for its attainment of the ultimate power—has been “all too successful.”

Nietzsche relays Epicurus’ sarcastic mockery of Platonism and the Platonic

project at its very beginnings for very good reason: for, as we will see in the

next chapter, it is Nietzsche himself who, in modern times, faced by

emergency—no, by imminent catastrophe—felt the need to criticize and

overturn the entire Platonic project and re-expose, as it were, the origins of

philosophy in something more fundamental, in an ancient understanding of

nature. This same Platonic project, of which I have offered a brief study in

this chapter, had become “too successful” and threatened to extinguish not

only philosophy, but the cultural preconditions of philosophy, and therefore

the possibility of philosophy itself. The time was needful to expose the pre-

philosophical roots of philosophy, to expose the original meaning of

“nature” as the cultivation of blood and breeding, in which philosophy and

tyranny share a kinship or a twinship. It is in this sense that Nietzsche’s

vitalism and his “Calliclean” language must be understood; the modern

Nietzschean argument, which strips away exoteric Platonic rhetoric and

mise-en-scene to show the identity between tyranny and philosophy is

ultimately at its source an attempt to revitalize philosophy itself, an attempt

to which I now turn in the next chapter.

CHAPTER FOUR: NIETZSCHE ON

THE ORIGIN OF PHILOSOPHY AND

TYRANNY IN THE DECAY OF

ARISTOCRATIC REGIMES

I. Introduction—Nietzsche’s Fundamental Concern; Nietzsche’s

Rhetoric and Esotericism

In Nietzsche

[cccxxxvii]

appears the most direct, explicit and clearest

exposition of my main argument in this thesis, namely that philosophy and

tyranny are in some sense deeply connected, perhaps identical at their

origins. There is a historical process through which Nietzsche reveals this

connection to the reader, a sort of “natural history of morals.”

[cccxxxviii]

The

decline or decay of a type of aristocracy allows for the “distillation,” the

abstraction, or the “radicalization” of the aristocratic ethos, of the principle

underlying aristocratic life—which, as has been argued in the previous

chapters, is to be reduced to the classical standard of nature. This

radicalization results in the tyrant and the philosopher as twin or

complementary types. The appearance of philosophers, and the birth of

philosophy itself in the sense of the intensity of the philosophical way of

life, is historically not separable from the production of potential tyrants.

According to Nietzsche these represent, to put it provisionally, the

aristocratic type as unmoored from the strictures of aristocratic morality,

from attachment to any particular historical regime. To put it even more

bluntly: the prerequisite for both the tyrant and the philosopher is the

genius, and although the emergence of any one particular genius is a matter

of chance and not something that can be planned in precise crossbreedings

by states, classes, or even families, the types of cultures and conditions of

culture in which specimens of genius are produced are, if not something

that can be planned, something that can be understood—general

conditions…the patterns of which are historically similar.

The ultimate origin of this identity is in what Nietzsche calls high

culture, and which might be understood literally as the cultivation of human

nature, a cultivation that is by necessity of long duration, strict, and

difficult; a cultivation that might also go by the name of “regime.” As such

the question of philosophy and of high culture in Nietzsche is not entirely to

be separated from the Platonic political problem par excellence, the

problem of the classical regime. And it is in Nietzsche also that, according

to more than one careful reader, the most comprehensive criticism of the

Platonic political project is to be found. Nietzsche interprets the Platonic

project to be at once a radicalization—an abstraction—and a distortion of

the aristocratic project as embodied in the polis: the regime of the ancient

city state with its intense, generations-long program of promoting arête or

virtu through both breeding and training. Much attention has been paid to

the Nietzschean criticism of Plato or of the Platonic project; less so to the

fact that Nietzsche himself is likely better understood as a reformer of this

project, which in the end amounts to nothing else but the revival and

preservation of philosophy as a way of life.

According to Nietzsche the long-cultivated energies unleashed, and the

“tropical” proliferation of human types made possible by the political

weakness and social turmoil that take place during the decline of a

particular type of aristocracy allows for the emergence of the “genius of

culture,” which Nietzsche also tellingly elsewhere calls the Gewaltmensch

der Kultur, the violent man of culture.

[cccxxxix]

Nietzsche’s acceptance of the

label of “aristocratic radicalism” as an apt description of his own doctrine is

therefore important in the context of this thesis. Aristocratic radicalism, the

radicalization of the aristocratic standard at the moment of the decline of a

historical aristocracy, is the unique and necessary prerequisite of both

tyranny and philosophy, as it is the prerequisite of high culture generally—

the philosopher being “the crown of culture.” For Nietzsche, as we will see,

the cause of high culture is not separable from the cause of philosophy.

It is important to emphasize in all that follows that Nietzsche’s chief

lifelong task and concern is not politics, morality, the well-being of this or

that community or people, the well-being of the abstraction “the

individual,” or anything else of the sort: Nietzsche’s chief concern, insofar

as his public or political teaching is concerned, is the preservation or

resurrection of philosophy. This can be demonstrated in many different

ways, direct and indirect, from his published writings as well as his notes

and letters. A few telling examples should suffice.

Consider first Nietzsche’s early essay “Schopenhauer as Educator.”

Nietzsche is often perceived as a hostile critic of Schopenhauer. It is true

that Nietzsche at one point refers to the substance of Schopenhauer’s

teaching as the “greatest psychological counterfeit” in history; and that he

makes many similar criticisms regarding Schopenhauer’s moral

interpretation of the world. It is therefore all the more revealing that,

precisely when it comes to a thinker with whom he disagrees so completely,

he should have devoted an early essay to him in the course of which

Schopenhauer is praised as the revival of a “truly ancient” and truly

classical model of the philosophical life. There is much in this essay, which

is dedicated fundamentally to understanding the philosophical life and

Schopenhauer as a model of this life—there is much here that gives an

important clue about how we should read Nietzsche in general and

understand his intention in general. For example, Nietzsche emphasizes

courage or in fact quite literally manliness, andreia, as the most necessary

quality for the philosopher to possess before all others, as the indispensible

prerequisite for the philosophical way of life. Then also, in discussing this

“resurrection” of an ancient or classical understanding of philosophy,

Nietzsche goes so far as to compare Schopenhauer to Napoleon, another

“classical man” who appeared, as he says, as an untimely and unexpected

comet or meteor, totally out of place in an age of modern men and

mediocrity. That is, precisely in an essay devoted to trying to understand the

philosophical life and praise the philosophical life, we see Nietzsche at his

most “stereotypically Nietzschean”: on one hand he mentions

uncompromising manliness, on the other he starts talking about Napoleon.

But Nietzsche’s concern is not manliness as such or Napoleon as such, nor

assertion; it is philosophy.

If Nietzsche had made a statement about Napoleon alone, the reader

could perhaps be safe to dismiss it as more Nietzschean “great man

worship” or rhetoric against modern democracy. But, leaving aside the fact

—pointed out already by Kaufmann among others—that Nietzsche is not in

general interested in extolling the likes of Genghis Khan, Agathocles of

Syracuse,

[cccxl]

let alone the machtpolitik of imperial Germany of his time,

of which he is instead quite critical

[cccxli]

; leaving all this aside, the

reference to Napoleon is in an essay about a philosopher, Schopenhauer, not

vice versa, and in the context of the resurrection of an ancient or classical

understanding of philosophy, not manliness, and the prerequisites for

philosophy. Nietzsche’s admiration of Napoleon—who, it must be recalled,

was not just a warlord but admired by and served as the inspiration for

some of the greatest artists and literary minds of the 19

century

[cccxlii]

—

should be understood as part of his concern with high culture and with

philosophy. But conversely, the connection hinted at between Schopenhauer

as the revival of classical philosophy and Napoleon as the revival of the

classical statesman (or tyrant), gives a clue about what Nietzsche

understands to be the ground or prerequisite of both high culture and

philosophy. That is, one must look past the rhetoric of assertion, manliness,

Napoleonic greatness, and try to tunnel into Nietzsche’s statements to

understand the riddle of why, precisely in the middle of talking about the

resurrection of philosophy—his central concern—he should find it

necessary to bring up the “brutal” language and subjects for which he is

otherwise better known.

That Nietzsche’s chief and lifelong concern is “high culture” or what

he otherwise calls “the overall development” of mankind should not, in any

case, be a controversial idea, since, again, he repeats it in a variety of ways

in both published writings and letters. He says at one point that “the great,

the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest” is the

problem of psychology of the “improvers” of mankind.

[cccxliii]

Nietzsche’s

ultimate concern, however, is not just high culture but philosophy as such.

In an early essay, “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,”

Nietzsche laments that philosophy in our own time has no home and no

power: he connects the problem of philosophy with the problem of high

culture in a direct and certain way that carries great weight for my own

argument in this chapter—

A period which suffers from a so-called high general level of liberal education but which is

devoid of culture in the sense of a unity of style which characterizes all its life, will not quite

know what to do with philosophy and wouldn’t, if the Genius of Truth himself were to

proclaim it in the streets and the market places. During such times philosophy remains the

learned monologue of the lonely stroller, the accidental loot of the individual, the secret

skeleton in the closet, or the harmless chatter between senile academics and children. No one

may venture to fulfill philosophy’s law with his own person, no one may live philosophically

with that simple loyalty which compelled an ancient, no matter where he was or what he was

doing, to deport himself as a Stoic if he once had pledged faith to the Stoa. All modern

philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academies, custom, fashion, and

human cowardice, all of which limit it to a fake learnedness. Our philosophy stops with the

sigh “If only …” and with the insight “Once upon a time …” Philosophy has no rights, and

modern man, if he had any courage or conscience, should really repudiate it. He might ban it

with words similar to those which Plato used to ban the tragic poets from his state, though

reply could be made, just as the tragic poets might have made reply to Plato. If forced for once

to speak out, philosophy might readily say, “Wretched people! Is it my fault if I am roaming

the country among you like a cheap fortune-teller? If I must hide and disguise myself as

though I were a fallen woman and you my judges? Just look at my sister, Art! Like me, she is

in exile among barbarians. We no longer know what to do to save ourselves. True, here among

you we have lost all our rights, but the judges who shall restore them to us shall judge you too.

And to you they shall say: Go get yourselves a culture. Only then you will find out what

philosophy can and will do.”

[cccxliv]

Nietzsche is consistent throughout his writings about this connection

between high culture and philosophy; and therefore in what follows we

would do well to keep in mind that when Nietzsche is talking about the

prerequisites of high culture he is also talking about philosophy. Whether

the case to be made for this connection is sound is beside the point, and

possibly the subject of another book on Nietzsche; the only matter at hand

is Nietzsche’s understanding of the preconditions of philosophy, in

particular the political preconditions as they relate to the main argument of

this thesis. The case here to be made is that the preconditions for tyranny

are identical or nearly identical, and that therefore a regime or a culture that

cultivates philosophy necessarily risks also the cultivation of tyranny—the

same claim that, in a previous chapter, I argued Plato also makes, albeit in a

veiled and rather more restrained version than the one we find in Nietzsche.

The passage just quoted reveals an important and related element of

Nietzsche’s understanding of philosophy, which is that philosophy is a way

of life. The understanding of philosophy as primarily a way of life, and not

just a discipline of learning, let alone the substance of any one particular

teaching or ideology, remains consistent throughout Nietzsche’s writings.

And so above we see that he complains that in his own time “no one may

venture to fulfill philosophy’s law with his own person, no one may live

philosophically with that simple loyalty which compelled an ancient, no

matter where he was or what he was doing, to deport himself as a Stoic if he

once had pledged faith to the Stoa.” Elsewhere he repeats this same idea

when he remarks that the great writer and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist

committed suicide because of what he learned from Kant’s philosophy; and

that while this self-destruction of a great mind is to be lamented, it

nevertheless indicates an intensity and seriousness regarding philosophy

that doesn’t exist in Nietzsche’s own time: Kleist made Kant’s philosophy

his own and lived it. His greatness as an artist is arguably inseparable from

this seriousness.

The great problem Nietzsche faces then, in talking about the

preconditions of philosophy, is that he is in fact talking about the

preconditions for a Kleist. If philosophy is not a mere discipline or sphere

of learning, but the crown of high culture, and a way of life, the problem of

the resurrection or salvation of philosophy becomes infinitely more difficult

and more complicated. If the question is not one of the perpetuation of a

philosophical school that already exists, but of the birth of philosophy itself,

or its resurrection, the answer must turn on a study of the preconditions for

the emergence of philosophy to begin with, on a study of Greek philosophy

or the earliest philosophers. It is in this study, which includes Plato, that

Nietzsche chances upon the complex of ideas that came to be called

“aristocratic radicalism”—a description Georg Brandes coined for his

thought, of which Nietzsche approved, and described as most clever.

[cccxlv]

Does the fact that Nietzsche’s chief and lifelong concerns are high

culture, philosophy, the “overall development” of mankind and the

psychology of those who attempted to “improve mankind”—does the fact

that Nietzsche’s concerns seem to be the intellect and the “arts of peace”

mean then that we should read his more questionable and violent statements

and images “metaphorically” or “spiritually”? Are Nietzsche’s famously

dangerous politics a “metaphor” for purely intellectual or spiritual matters?

Some have read his books in this way. Faced with Nietzsche’s brutality,

with his shocking and reckless statements on democracy, aristocracy, his

seeming praise of cruelty and vitalism, some have insisted these only have

significance as a metaphor for internal or spiritual states; or that this is a

form of literary irony.

[cccxlvi]

There is some truth to each of these “schools”

of interpreting Nietzsche, but in refusing to take him at his word, and in

refusing to take his political ideas seriously, much that is interesting is lost.

The distinction that may lead to a more fruitful reading of Nietzsche is not

between metaphorical or ironic on one hand and literal on the other, but

between exoteric and esoteric. Nietzsche not only knew of this distinction

but said it was part of the “uncanny problem” that he had been pursuing the

longest.

[cccxlvii]

What would it mean then to read Nietzsche with attention to the

distinction between esoteric and exoteric? And what does this have to do

with his politics, and his intemperate rhetoric? When a thinker like

Nietzsche, who makes use of this distinction between esoteric and exoteric

writing, is said to have both a surface and a hidden meaning, this doesn’t

mean that the surface meaning is merely false or merely misleading or mere

rhetoric. The exoteric meaning even in Plato is never merely rhetoric or

mask. The exoteric program explains the public function of the philosopher

whether as, in the case of the Phaedo and Crito, in his moral bearing, or

otherwise, as in the Laws and elsewhere, in his public function as advisor to

the lawgiver or as lawgiver himself. That is, whether or not the ultimate or

esoteric meaning of this political program is the preservation of philosophy,

the outward, immediate or exoteric meaning is still meant in earnest. It is

precisely to make this outward teaching politically effective that is the heart

of the matter, for only in so doing, and in reforming the soul of man,

religion, and the constitutions of states, will philosophy, in the long run, be

made “safe in the cities.” To put it in Nietzschean terms, exotericism is a

form of spiritual warfare. This is so even in a case like the Platonic political

philosophy where, as has been argued in the previous chapters, and as

others have elsewhere made the case at greater length, the preconditions or

elements of daily philosophical life, the “esoteric” meaning, may actually

be at odds with the moral and political program openly or exoterically

pushed for.

[cccxlviii]

Nevertheless this latter is not mere deflection, but is still

meant in earnest because its adoption by states or societies at large is what

makes philosophers safe. These philosophers furthermore, themselves in

their external discipline of sobriety, temperance, justice, piety, may also be

at odds with what actually motivates them: the philosophical erotic hunger

for knowledge, lust for forbidden knowledge, for frankly criminal

considerations; but this doesn’t make their exoteric stance any less real, let

alone “metaphorical.” It is a double teaching that recognizes that what is

necessary in political life may be entirely different from what is necessary

for the philosopher’s function. Dealing with this difference with respect to

the circumstances of one’s own time is the purpose of the esoteric-exoteric

distinction, and arguably the purpose of political philosophy in the first

place.

But then in Nietzsche’s work the political and moral philosophy carries

the same import and is to be taken seriously. Nietzsche also is attempting to

do what Plato did—that is, the esoteric aim, the preservation of philosophy,

is the same—but the means are different because the time is different.

Morality and politics is entirely instrumental. The concern is what is most

salutary in the given circumstances to philosophy or high culture. In reply

to his readers above, Nietzsche might say, “Yes my statements have also a

spiritual meaning besides the overt one, but this spiritual meaning will not

carry any weight, and will be ineffective, until the reader is also able to take

the overt meaning quite literally—until, indeed, the souls of modern men

are reformed according to this overt and plain meaning.” In line with what

we have seen in the previous chapters, Nietzsche’s attempt for the

“rebarbarization” of the human spirit is to be taken in earnest and to be

taken seriously: especially so when we see, as we will, that according to

him the effect of the Platonic project has been an all-too-successful taming

and denaturing of European man.

To say that in Nietzsche’s exoteric moral and political program we find

ultimately the defense of philosophy is then not to search for “irony” or

“metaphors,” but to understand the concept of spiritual warfare: precisely

in achieving his political and moral aims in earnest, if he is able to do so,

will philosophy find the ground, the spiritual and cultural preconditions

from which it can once again flourish. Nietzsche breaks with the Platonic

project and points back to the “dark roots” of philosophy because he shares

Plato’s ultimate aims. They disagree only as to tactics. It is the crisis of

Nietzsche’s time, a crisis in large part created by the failure of the Platonic

project, that compels him to think it necessary to break entirely with the

Platonic project of “political philosophy.” The failure of political Platonism

forces the thinker who cares about the preservation of philosophy to

abandon the “politic mask” that was discussed in the previous chapter, the

mask of the philosopher as good and pious citizen, and of philosophy as a

support for moral life. It was time to bring “Callicles”—the original

political voice of philosophy, or the political thought of preSocratic

philosophy, unedited and unvarnished—out in the open again. Indeed, it

was maybe needful to intensify Callicles’ rhetoric as a way to counter our

too-tame age.

In this connection an analogy may be useful to understand the

distinction between the esoteric and exoteric in a doctrine in general and in

our case in particular. Certain religious teachings, for example Sufism,

speak quite openly of this distinction, as do “heretical” sects of Islam in

general.

[cccxlix]

Now, Sufism is often taken to be a “mystical” or spiritual

interpretation of Islam. And in the West a certain claim has become popular

in the press that, e.g., jihad means “spiritual struggle,” is a metaphor for

inner spiritual struggle, and that the outward meaning of war on unbelievers

is merely metaphorical or should be interpreted “spiritually.” That is, that

jihad means primarily inner spiritual struggle. This reading has some

superficial truth to it, but fails precisely in the same way the above-

mentioned interpretations of Nietzsche fail. This reading—almost

exclusively drawn from schools like Sufism and Ismailism, or from Islamic

philosophers, all of whom avowedly speak of the distinction between an

overt and a hidden teaching—fails to take into account what exotericism

actually means. Exotericism doesn’t mean “irony” or “metaphor,” and it is

never just mask or mere rhetoric. What could be the purpose of that?

Accordingly we see that throughout its history Sufism has never in practice

opposed jihad as physical war on unbelievers, but embraced it, even within

our own time.

[cccl]

This is because the image from Sufism as to how this

distinction should be interpreted—especially important for our purposes

here—is not of inner truth and outward “metaphor” or of inner truth and

outward lies;

[cccli]

rather, the image invoked by the Sufi mystic is between

the inner garden tended by the initiate on one hand, and the outer walls

manned by the defenders of the faith on the other. These latter make the

former safe and make the life of the mystic possible; the “spiritual struggle”

is dependent on its being defended by the outward physical struggle, which

is real and meant in earnest. The mystic, tending the inner spiritual garden

and the ultimate truths, has a parallel task to encourage and support the

defender of the faith, to make his faith strong and the outward walls

powerful.

This is in simplified form the distinction between the esoteric and

exoteric teaching of a doctrine. The exoteric has reality and has force even

if, in some cases, it has only provisional or “political” truth. Political truth

means that it must have truth for the layman or for “the many,” or for the

politically significant part of the regime. Politically effective truth is not the

same as truth as such. Each has a sphere and dignity of its own. Thus a

fruitful way to read Nietzsche is to be able to consider his most vehement or

questionable statements, not as metaphors with a “spiritual” meaning, but as

an exoteric, that is, public and political teaching, which, however, is but

another instrument or weapon in the context of his overall strategy—this

being indeed “spiritual” in the sense that philosophy and its preservation is

his chief concern.

II. Nietzsche on Aristocracy and the Decay of Aristocratic Regime as

Preconditions for High Culture, Philosophy, and Tyranny—

a) Aristocratic physical culture as precondition of philosophical life

It may be useful to recall at this point, however briefly, the definition

of an aristocracy, and the fact that an aristocracy is distinct from other kinds

of elites. It has already been remarked repeatedly in the previous chapters

that an aristocracy is generally defined as a regime of virtue, and that the

two chief virtues of primitive Homeric aristocracy were andreia and

phronesis, standing originally for prowess in battle and ability to give good

counsel in assembly. These two virtues, geared toward action and war-

making, are valued also by other aristocracies throughout history and across

the world—the example of the Tutsi has been given in the first chapter, who

similarly understand themselves as brave in battle, politically sophisticated,

refined, and cruel.

The discussion of virtues, however, must not only be abstract but

should be made concrete in some images. This is especially so in the

ancient Greek case because according to Nietzsche, and arguably according

to ancient Greek aristocrats themselves, the virtues are much more matter of

fact and physical than we like to think and than one gathers from the body

of work left behind by the Socratic schools—which are a late phenomenon,

which “spiritualized,” intellectualized, or moralized the virtues, and,

according to Nietzsche and others, which were in any case the minority

position for most of antiquity.

[ccclii]

To see aristocracy again for how it

actually saw itself is a difficult task, which has been considered already

from various points of view in this thesis. Let us then again, as a reminder,

take one limited, but very physical, colorful and instructive example to

draw out the difference between an aristocracy and other kinds of elites: the

matter of tanning. It is taken for granted by many modern historical

scholars and journalists that to be tan has historically been a mark of the

lower classes who had to work outdoors all day, whereas the upper classes

avoid tanning as a marker of status, i.e., supposedly to show off their

freedom from having to do labor.

[cccliii]

This is, however, not the ancient

Greek view. There are two striking passages, one from Plato, one from

Xenophon, where this is made clear.

Plato in having Socrates discuss oligarchy and its deficits—as distinct

from aristocracy—at Republic 556d says that “it is often the case that a

lean, tanned, poor man is ranged in battle next to a rich man, reared in the

shade, surrounded by a great deal of alien flesh, and sees him panting and

full of perplexity… How can he avoid drawing the conclusion that men like

him are only rich because no one has the courage to despoil them? And

when they meet in private will not people be saying to one another ‘Our

warriors are not good for much?’” It is significant that Plato is discussing

here the means by which an oligarchy is overthrown by the people. Then

also, Socrates says that such a man, “makes war like an oligarch, with a few

of his troops, is defeated most of the time, and stays rich.” [Rep. 555a]

Similarly, as a matter of distinguishing aristocracy from oligarchy,

Xenophon has a parallel image in his Agesilaus, when he discusses a

Spartan king leading his aristocratic contingent before a battle with the

Persians:

Thereupon it was a sight to see the gymnasiums thronged with warriors going through their

exercises, the racecourses crowded with troopers on prancing steeds, the archers and the

javelin men shooting at the butts. Nay, the whole city in which he lay was transformed into a

spectacle itself, so filled to overflowing was the market-place with arms and armour of every

sort, and horses, all for sale. Here were coppersmiths and carpenters, ironfounders and

cobblers, painters and decorators—one and all busily engaged in fabricating the implements of

war; so that an onlooker might have thought the city of Ephesus itself a gigantic arsenal. It

would have kindled courage in the breast of a coward to see the long lines of soldiers, with

Agesilaus at their head, all garlanded as they marched in proud procession from the

gymnasiums and dedicated their wreaths to our Lady Artemis. Since, where these three

elements exist—reverence towards heaven, practice in military affairs, and obedience to

command—all else must needs be full of happy promise.

But seeing that contempt for the foe is calculated to infuse a certain strength in face of

battle, he ordered his criers to strip naked the barbarians captured by his foraging parties,

and so to sell them. The soldiers who saw the white skins of these folk, unused to strip for toil,

soft and sleek and lazy-looking, as of people who could only stir abroad in carriages,

concluded that a war with women would scarcely be more formidable. Then he published a

further order to the soldiers: “I shall lead you at once by the shortest route to the stronghold of

the enemy’s territory. Your general asks you to keep yourselves on the alert in mind and body,

as men about to enter the lists of battle on the instant.”

[cccliv]

In Xenophon’s example the Persians are stand-ins for the oligarchic

man, and the contrast between tan (Spartan-Greek) aristocracy and pale,

untanned (Persian-Oriental) oligarchy is therefore made apparent in a very

direct way. Aristocracy is not aristocracy without its members possessing

and exhibiting virtue, of which, for example, a strong body and tan skin is a

marker. And so let us emphasize again that virtue here is to be interpreted in

a very concrete and “primitive” way: qualities, both physical and spiritual,

necessary for or indicative of action, war, adventure, and nothing more. The

inherent physicality of ancient Greek aristocracy, its orientation toward

action and war, must be kept in mind if only to remind oneself, in the most

concrete way, of the meaning of aristocratic regime as a severe program,

strict and intolerant, over many generations; a program of breeding and

training. The constitution of the Spartans, for example—which served as

the model for the political thinking of so many ancient philosophers, Plato

included

[ccclv]

—unwritten, not enforced by judges, is therefore not well

understood through comparisons to modern constitutions. It was not a

purely legal document of rights and procedures, and it was certainly not a

declaration of moral sentiment or ideological doctrine. It is better compared

to an athlete’s physical, dietary, and spiritual training regimen.

It is facile but not entirely incorrect to connect the physicality of the

ancient aristocratic program or regime to the birth and practice of

philosophy—the contemplation of phusis, nature. Both Nietzsche and Plato

himself might agree on this one point. And here already we see a way in

which—apparently according to both Plato and Nietzsche—the aristocratic

regime exists as a prerequisite of the philosophical life. In the dialogues of

Plato we see infinite invocations of the art of the trainer of athletes (and

horses), and of gymnastic exercise generally, as an analogy to or model of

moral or political training, and even philosophical training. In the previous

chapter we have seen Socrates in the Gorgias make repeated comparisons

of the arts of gymnastics and medicine to the legitimate “arts of the soul,”

such as legislation.

[ccclvi]

There is strong indication that a similar

comparison can be made, not only between athletic training and moral

training, but between athletic enterprise and the philosophical life itself.

The philosopher thus appears as an athlete of the intellect or the spirit—

requiring similar generations of breeding and of the strictest personal

regime and training if he is to achieve his aim. Plato’s dialogue Lovers is

maybe the most vehement attack on “mere learning” or on intellectuals in

the tradition of political philosophy, perhaps even more vehement than what

is to be found in Nietzsche’s own work. In the depiction of an erotic contest

in a gymnasium, Socrates goes so far as to side with a young athlete over a

youth who is learned—a typical “intellectual.” The argument is roughly that

the athlete’s method of training and lived practice is a lot more akin to the

philosopher’s way than the learning of the striving intellectual, which is

superficial, incidental or arbitrary, accumulated for no clear reason except

perhaps the pursuit of status or recognition, and serves to make its carrier

weak and hobbled rather than strong. Although Nietzsche similarly mocks

the middling intellectual and the purposeless accumulation of knowledge, I

am aware of nowhere in his writings where he goes so far as to elevate

simple physicality or athleticism over intellectual aspiration; even when he

mocks the neurasthenic intellectual’s inability to appeal to women,

Nietzsche is arguably talking about a social or spiritual skill, the skill of

seduction, and not mere physical ability and training, as Plato does in

Lovers. This is not to say that Plato “secretly agrees” with Nietzsche on

every point, but that on this problem of learning versus philosophy as a way

of life, as an embodied principle, Plato seems rather more direct than even

Nietzsche. Philosophy here, in a sexually charged erotic contest, sides with

the physicality and training of the athlete over the erudition and way of life

of the learned, of “those who have merely learned,” to put it in Pindaric

language. Aristocratic physical and athletic culture is, according to Plato,

the closest model for philosophical training and culture.

Nietzsche agrees with this understanding of aristocratic athletic

enterprise as a prerequisite for the philosophical life. In trying to explain

how the “plebeian” Socrates was able to seduce the Athenian nobility to

philosophy and dialectics, Nietzsche talks about athletic competition and

the aristocratic desire for the agon:

I have explained how it was that Socrates could repel: it is therefore all the more necessary to

explain how he could fascinate. That he discovered a new kind of contest, that he became its

first fencing master for the noble circles of Athens, is one point. He fascinated by appealing to

the competitive impulse of the Greeks — he introduced a variation into the wrestling match

between young men and youths. Socrates was a great erotic.

[ccclvii]

He goes on to claim that the Platonic philosophy itself was a

spiritualization of Greek physical culture and of this same aristocratic

competitive impulse:

Schopenhauer speaks of beauty with a melancholy fervor. Why? Because he sees in it a bridge

on which one will go farther, or develop a thirst to go farther. Beauty is for him a momentary

redemption from the “will” — a lure to eternal redemption. Particularly, he praises beauty as

the redeemer from “the focal point of the will,” from sexuality — in beauty he sees the

negation of the drive toward procreation. Queer saint! Somebody seems to be contradicting

you; I fear it is nature. To what end is there any such thing as beauty in tone, color, fragrance,

or rhythmic movement in nature? What is it that beauty evokes? Fortunately, a philosopher

contradicts him too. No lesser authority than that of the divine Plato (so Schopenhauer himself

calls him) maintains a different proposition: that all beauty incites procreation, that just this is

the proprium of its effect, from the most sensual up to the most spiritual. Plato goes further. He

says with an innocence possible only for a Greek, not a “Christian,” that there would be no

Platonic philosophy at all if there were not such beautiful youths in Athens: it is only their

sight that transposes the philosopher’s soul into an erotic trance, leaving it no peace until it

lowers the seed of all exalted things into such beautiful soil. Another queer saint! One does not

trust one’s ears, even if one should trust Plato. At least one guesses that they philosophized

differently in Athens, especially in public. Nothing is less Greek than the conceptual web-

spinning of a hermit — amor intellectualis dei [intellectual love of God] after the fashion of

Spinoza. Philosophy after the fashion of Plato might rather be defined as an erotic contest, as a

further development and turning inward of the ancient agonistic gymnastics and of its

presuppositions. What ultimately grew out of this philosophic eroticism of Plato? A new art

form of the Greek agon: dialectics…

[ccclviii]

In this limited way then Nietzsche and Plato seem to “agree” on high

culture and philosophy being rooted in aristocratic life. Socratic dialectics

has its necessary prerequisite in one of the chief institutions of the

aristocratic regime, in the competition of the agon, and very plainly in the

physical agon, in wrestling and athletic competition, which was a fixture of

aristocratic life. Even more than this: Platonic philosophy requires that there

be beautiful youths in Athens. It doesn’t just require a specific institution or

practice, let alone words or beliefs: it requires that there be beautiful

physical specimens. Platonic philosophy has its chief prerequisite in the

emergence of the “final result” or “end result” of the breeding and training

program of the aristocratic regime—this being energetic physical beauty,

which was only produced by a generations-long physical culture, itself

ultimately geared to military training and war.

Camille Paglia makes a similar point when she talks about the origin

of early Greek sculpture, and the first steps toward naturalism in Greek art.

She speaks of the “discovery” of the iliac furrow, and the excitement over

the new knowledge of such previously unknown muscle groups; such

muscles would only appear with any regularity in a culture devoted to

physical and athletic development.

[ccclix]

Which once again underscores the

connection earlier made, that knowledge of the body, of medicine, of

livestock breeding techniques, of athletic regimen and training techniques,

and so forth, developed over a long period, is likely the source of the idea of

nature, very literally, as “physical” knowledge.

Nietzsche elsewhere is quite direct about how the physical beauty of

the Athenian youth, which inspired or impressed thinkers and philosophers

from Plato to Cicero,

[ccclx]

had to be the product of a careful, centuries-long,

deliberate breeding project:

Beauty no accident—Even the beauty of a race or of a family, the charm and perfection of all

its movements, is attained with pains: like genius it is the final result of the accumulated work

of generations. Great sacrifices must have been made on the altar ol good taste, for its sake

many things must have been done, and much must have been left undone—the seventeenth

century in France is admirable for both of these things,—in this century there must have been

a principle of selection in respect to company, locality, clothing, the gratification of the instinct

of sex; beauty must have been preferred to profit, to habit, to opinion and to indolence. The

first rule of all:—nobody must “let himself go,” not even when he is alone.—Good things are

exceedingly costly:; and in all cases the law obtains that he who possesses them is a different

person from him who is acquiring them. Everything good is an inheritance: that which is not

inherited is imperfect, it is simply a beginning. In Athens at the time of Cicero—who

expresses his surprise at the fact—the men and youths were by far superior in beauty to the

women: but what hard work and exertions the male sex had for centuries imposed upon itself

in the service of beauty! We must not be mistaken in regard to the method employed here: the

mere discipline of feelings and thoughts is little better than nil (—it is in this that the great

error of German culture, which is quite illusory, lies): the body must be persuaded first. The

strict maintenance of a distinguished and tasteful demeanour, the obligation of frequenting

only those who do not “let themselves go,” is amply sufficient to render one distinguished and

tasteful: in two or three generations everything has already taken deep root. The fate of a

people and of humanity is decided according to whether they begin culture at the right place—

not at the “soul” (as the fatal superstition of the priests and half-priests would have it): the

right place is the body, demeanour, diet, physiology—the rest follows as the night the day….

That is why the Greeks remain the first event in culture—they knew and they did what was

needful. Christianity with its contempt of the body is the greatest mishap that has ever befallen

mankind.

[ccclxi]

A problem, however, appears at this point: for it is not clear yet how

and why an aristocracy as such should produce high culture, let alone

philosophy. After all, Sparta is the aristocratic regime that fits the model

discussed so far par excellence and yet it produced no high culture to speak

of, and no philosophy; and, tellingly, managed to suppress its tyrannical or

great men—among whom, Pausanias, Lysander, Brasidas, Clearchus.

[ccclxii]

Critias, Socrates’ criminal, tyrannical, and mad student, is said to have

written an abstraction or radicalization of the Spartan constitution, which he

understood to have as its purpose the breeding of a “physically supreme

specimen.”

[ccclxiii]

The Spartan regime is perhaps enough to produce this

intended result, and maybe a magnificent—or terrible, according to one’s

taste—political culture; but let us recall that Nietzsche’s concern is not as

such the production of a “physically supreme specimen” or of a strong

polity, but of high culture and of philosophy. Which Athens had, but Sparta

did not, though it too had a physical culture, and possibly an even more

thoroughgoing aristocratic regime.

b) Aristocratic regime and dissolution as precondition of philosophy; origin

of the type of the philosopher and tyrant

The process through which an aristocratic regime produces high

culture, genius, the types of the philosopher and the tyrant, is complicated

and likely to please neither the partisans of aristocracy nor the partisans of

democracy. For on the one hand, as impressive as certain aristocratic states

were, they never managed to produce great philosophers or artists, at least

not in any number—Nietzsche has, as we are about to see, great respect for

the polities of Rome and Venice, for example, but says of the former, in

comparison to ancient Greece, that it was a case of the stalk growing

overstrong at the expense of the flower.

[ccclxiv]

He has tremendous respect,

as we will see, for the maritime and commercial patriciate of Genoa, but

nowhere speaks of the great cultural output of Genoa (though some of it

was arguably considerable).

Thus one must make a distinction between Nietzsche’s reflections on

certain types of aristocracy as such, and, on the other hand, the kind of

aristocracy that actually produces philosophy, which is our concern here.

Not all aristocracy is the cause of philosophy. Conversely, however,

aristocracy does seem to be a necessary, though not sufficient, prerequisite

for at least the birth of philosophy and high culture. While it is true that

Nietzsche associates the flowering of culture and of philosophy with

political weakness, and, as we are about to see, with the ending or loosening

of actual aristocratic regimes—and therefore with what might roughly be

called liberalization or democratization—nevertheless the inner features of

high culture, and in particular of the philosophical life, “carry over”

aristocratic attitudes, institutions, presuppositions. These represent an

abstraction or “radicalization” of aristocratic regime.

The mechanism in general follows the pattern just presented regarding

physical culture, athletics, and beauty: in that case we have seen Nietzsche

argue that, on the one hand, Socratic dialectics itself was a spiritualization

or “abstraction” of the Greek agon. And, on the other, that the inspiration

for the Platonic philosophy had as its prerequisite the actual existence of

beautiful Athenian youth, which again in this case, even more strikingly,

presupposes not just an aristocratic “idea” or institution, but one of the

actual end-products of the aristocratic regime, which was so focused on

physical breeding and training from its conception. Thus although as we are

about to see, the flowering of high culture does require a “liberalization” of

sorts, it is not the liberalization itself that is the cause of high culture either:

this is valuable only insofar as it “frees up” aristocratic energies and

redirects them toward the life of the intellect. Let us consider in some

further detail then how Nietzsche believes that aristocracy is a precondition

for the production of high culture.

To understand Nietzsche on the meaning of “the noble” it is necessary

to read him in an entirely unsentimental and un-rhetorical fashion, and to

try to grasp the historical argument he is making—it is therefore necessary

to understand “the noble” coldly, as he himself says it must be understood;

that is, to abandon rhetorical or moralistic conceptions of nobility. The

aristocratic regime is originally intended for one thing: self-defense, self-

perpetuation in the face of danger. It is a community geared toward war and

interested in perpetuating the qualities necessary for war. So far this thesis

has repeatedly argued that the original and “universal” basic aristocratic

virtues are phronesis and andreia. This is entirely in keeping with the

observations just made regarding Greek physical culture and the breeding

and training for beauty. For this physical culture itself, the culture of the

gymnasium and so forth, originally had a military function, which indeed it

kept right up to the end of Greek civilization proper. Nietzsche, however,

tunnels somewhat more deeply than this: the aristocratic regime requires

something more fundamental, certain orientations or attitudes that precede

what we might consider to be the virtues. These are intolerance, cruelty, and

what Nietzsche calls the pathos of distance. Intolerance is absolutely

necessary: it is a certain severity against others and against oneself; indeed

Nietzsche goes so far as to point out that intolerance itself is considered a

virtue by many historical aristocracies. In what could be considered a

perverse joke, cruelty and pathos of distance replace the two “social”

virtues from Plato—temperance and justice—

Every enhancement in the type “man” up to this point has been the work of an aristocratic

society — and that’s how it will always be, over and over again: a society which believes in a

long scale of rank ordering and differences in worth between man and man and which, in some

sense or other, requires slavery. Without the pathos of distance, the sort which grows out of the

deeply rooted difference between the social classes, out of the constant gazing outward and

downward of the ruling caste on the subjects and work implements, and out of their equally

sustained practice of obedience and command, holding down and holding at a distance, that

other more mysterious pathos would have no chance of growing at all, that longing for an ever

new widening of distances inside the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more

distant, more expansive, more comprehensive states, in short, simply the enhancement in the

type “man,” the constant “self-conquest of man,” to cite a moral formula in a supra-moral

sense. Of course, where the history of the origins of aristocratic society is concerned (and thus

the precondition for that raising of the type “man”—), we should not surrender to

humanitarian illusions: truth is hard. So without further consideration, let’s admit to ourselves

how up to this point every higher culture on earth has started! People with a still natural

nature, barbarians in every dreadful sense of the word, predatory men still in possession of an

unbroken power of the will and a desire for power, threw themselves on weaker, more

civilized, more peaceful, perhaps trading or cattle-raising races, or on old, worn cultures, in

which at that very moment the final forces of life were flaring up in a dazzling fireworks

display of spirit and corruption. At the start the noble caste has always been the barbarian

caste: its superiority has lain not primarily in physical might but in spiritual power — it has

been a matter of more complete human beings (which at every level also means “more

complete beasts”).

[ccclxv]

The connection that Nietzsche attempts to establish between higher

culture and cruelty appears in many places in his writing, is well-known,

and almost a commonplace. In the following passage he exposes cruelty—

not even especially towards others, but cruelty toward oneself—as the

foundation not just of high culture but of intellectual rigor, of philosophy:

Almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization and intensification

of cruelty—this is my proposition; the “wild beast” has not been laid to rest at all, it lives, it

flourishes, it has merely become—deified. That which constitutes the painful voluptuousness

of tragedy is cruelty; that which produces a pleasing effect in so-called tragic pity, indeed

fundamentally in everything sublime up to the highest and most refined thrills of metaphysics,

derives its sweetness solely from the ingredient of cruelty mixed in with it….Consider, finally,

how even the man of knowledge, when he compels his spirit to knowledge which is counter to

the inclination of his spirit and frequently also to the desires of his heart—by saying No, that

is, when he would like to affirm, love, worship—disposes as an artist in and transfigurer of

cruelty; in all taking things seriously and thoroughly, indeed, there is already a violation, a

desire to hurt the fundamental will of the spirit, which ceaselessly strives for appearance and

the superficial—in all desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty.

[ccclxvi]

Aristocratic cruelty and the pathos of distance—cruelty against slaves,

and, internalized, against the lower orders of one’s own soul—is argued to

be the foundation of higher cultural and intellectual life.

Nietzsche’s words on cruelty and pathos of distance have a directly

political and historical interpretation that is most relevant for the argument

presented here. Historically cruelty and force is the indispensible ingredient

for the foundation of the polis, the Greek city, the aristocratic polity that is

the main object of study of classical political philosophy. One of the sources

of Nietzsche’s historical understanding of ancient Greece was almost surely

the work of Jacob Burckhardt.

[ccclxvii]

Burckhardt, himself a 19

century

liberal, nevertheless emphasized the tremendous suffering and cruelty that

was necessary for the creation of the polis as an entity. Namely, the ruthless

extirpation and subsuming of all pre-polis, literally subpolitical life: the

extirpation and eradication of village life, the reorganization, by force, of

tribal, ethnic life into the city, into the aristocratic commonwealth we know

as the polis. This wholesale and painful change in the life of the Greeks is

somewhat lost to us today when we speak of the polis in the abstract.

Burckhardt emphasizes the cruelty and intolerance inherent especially in the

polis’ orientation toward citizen quality and opposed to quantity: which

necessarily entailed the severest requirements for participation in citizen

life, and the severest sanctions against those who weren’t able to maintain

their position.

[ccclxviii]

When Leo Strauss speaks of political life being

superior to all subpolitical life, of having a precedence over these, of the

classical conception of the city as natural to man, of man conceived of in

classical political philosophy as a political animal—and when he

furthermore adds that according to classical political philosophy, in

distinction to modern, force is not unnatural—it is possible, even likely, that

he has in mind not only abstract, ahistorical reflections on human nature,

but this basic historical development to which Nietzsche, through

Burckhardt, is alluding. It appears once again that without the aristocratic

commonwealth of the polis and the cruelty and “pathos of distance” at its

foundation, nature, and finally philosophy, have no opportunity to exhibit

themselves. Neither philosophy nor nature are known in Socrates’ tribal,

subpolitical Rousseauean “city of pigs” in the Republic. The aristocratic

severity Nietzsche is describing is necessary for the foundation of the polis

on top of and at the expense of, subpolitical life.

The cruelty and pathos of distance—the feeling of rank between man

and man—that are the physical and spiritual preconditions for the

aristocratic commonwealth of the polis constitute also the inner features of

the aristocratic regime or way of life: the severity and strictness against

oneself to which Nietzsche so often alludes. This regime consists in the

pruning, difficult and painful, over many generations, of traits,

characteristics, “virtues” that are useful for the continued political existence

of the aristocratic class in question. It is danger, political pressure, that is

responsible for the continued existence of aristocratic morality, which, as

morality, must serve to bind the members of the community together and to

homogenize them. Thus aristocracy and by extension the polis in general

can only exist under the pressure of great danger:

A species arises, a type becomes established and strong, under the long struggle with

essentially unchanging, unfavourable conditions. By contrast, we know from the experience of

breeders that species which receive an ultra-abundant nourishment and, in general, an increase

in protection and care immediately tend towards variety in the type in the strongest manner

and are rich in wonders and monstrosities (as well as monstrous vices). Now, let’s look for a

moment at an aristocratic commonwealth, for example, an ancient Greek polis or Venice, as an

organization, whether voluntary or involuntary, for the purpose of breeding. There are men

there living together who rely upon themselves and who want their species to succeed mainly

because it has to succeed or run the fearful risk of being annihilated. Here there is a lack of

that advantage, that abundance, that protection under which variations are encouraged. The

species senses the need for itself as a species, as something which, particularly thanks to its

hardness, uniformity, simplicity of form, can generally succeed and enable itself to keep going

in the constant struggles with neighbours or with the rebellious oppressed people or with those

who threaten rebellion. The most varied experience teaches them which characteristics they

have to thank, above all, for the fact that they are still there, in spite of all the gods and men,

that they have always been victorious. These characteristics they call virtues, and they

cultivate only these virtues to any great extent. They do that with force — in fact, they desire

force. Every aristocratic morality is intolerant in its education of the young, its provisions for

women, its marriage customs, its relationships between young and old, its penal laws (which

fix their eyes only on those who are deviants)— it reckons intolerance itself among the virtues,

under the name “justice.” A type with few but very strong characteristics, a species of strict,

war-like, shrewdly laconic people, united and reserved (and, as such, having the most

sophisticated feelings for the magic and nuances of society) will in this way establish itself

over the succession of generations. The constant struggle with unvarying, unfavourable

conditions is, as mentioned, the factor that makes a type fixed and hard.

[ccclxix]

The danger can come from outside, from below, but finally also from

within, from one of the members of the aristocracy itself. This political

morality is therefore finally characterized by an inner tension wherein it

must simultaneously breed and train warlike, wily, independent, supremely

egotistical instincts and at the same time restrain these and subsume them to

the benefit of the aristocratic community. The problem the polis faces is

how to simultaneously spur on and also at the same time restrain such

citizens. This restraint or this binding is what characterizes aristocratic

morality in tandem with the sharpening of virtues and ambitions that are, by

necessity, politically dangerous. This balance—maintained by severity,

cruelty, intolerance—is only maintained so long as there is great danger.

Nietzsche repeats and enlivens this idea with reference to Venice and Rome,

which lived

five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true

psychologically if by “tyrants” are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the

maximum of authority and discipline against themselves; most beautiful type: Julius Caesar.

This is true politically too; one need only go through history. The peoples who had some

value, attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that

made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own

resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First

principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong. Those large

hothouses for the strong — for the strongest kind of human being that has so far been known

— the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly

in the sense in which I understand it: as something one has or does not have, something one

wants, something one conquers.

[ccclxx]

External as well as internal danger is the source of both the origin and

the maintenance of the severe aristocratic ethos: internal because, on

account of the particular types of military and political virtues that are

cultivated, an aristocracy always faces danger, as Nietzsche emphasized,

from one of its own. Aristocracy and aristocratic freedom is thus always

coexistent with the danger of tyranny, which such a regime must take every

precaution to prevent, yet always must keep as a necessary risk. The drive

or desire to tyranny is a necessary consequence of aristocratic education, on

account of its cultivation of politically dangerous abilities and ambitions.

The dream of every Greek, as Plato knew, was to become tyrant.

[ccclxxi]

This

atmosphere of the “political hothouse” is what accounts for the aristocratic

regime—for its strictness or severity extended in two directions. On one

hand, in the direction of cultivating bodily and spiritual (or political)

abilities under the strictest discipline for centuries; on the other hand, in the

direction of restraining such men to a common goal and common type.

It is the moment when this political and spiritual tension, pent up over

centuries, is finally released, that is most salutary for the production of high

culture. I repeat once more that Venice and Rome, as high a praise as

Nietzsche seems to have for them, are not especially distinguished in terms

of the production of high culture, or at least of philosophy. There is then an

extra step, not yet discussed, that is necessary before a flowering of high

culture is possible. This step is “liberalization,” a loosening of the

aristocratic regime—even if Nietzsche should call it political weakening,

degeneration, or decadence. Political weakening is good for culture. The

political good is not the same as the highest good. High culture flourishes at

the moment of liberalization or, from the aristocratic point of view, of

decadence. The “immense power” built up over generations by the

aristocratic regime for the benefit of political life alone is now, at the

moment of political decline, free to flow into different directions and

toward different ends. He calls this a “fortunate time”:

Finally, however, at some point a fortunate time arises, which lets the immense tension ease.

Perhaps there are no more enemies among the neighbours, and the means for living, even for

enjoying life, are there in abundance…Variation, whether as something abnormal (something

higher, finer, rarer) or as degeneration and monstrosity, suddenly bursts onto the scene in the

greatest abundance and splendour; the individual dares to be individual and stand out. At these

historical turning points there appear alongside each other and often involved and mixed up

together marvellous, multifaceted, jungle-like growths, an upward soaring, a kind of tropical

tempo in competitiveness for growing and an immense annihilation and self-destruction,

thanks to the wild egoisms turned against each other and, as it were, exploding, which wrestle

with one another “for sun and light” and no longer know how to derive any limit, any restraint,

or any consideration from the morality they have had up to that point. This very morality was

the one which built up such immense power, which bent the bow in such a threatening

manner — now, at this moment, it has become “outdated.” The dangerous and disturbing

point is reached where the greater, more multifaceted, and more comprehensive life lives over

and above the old morality…the genius of the race brimming over from all the horns of plenty

with good and bad, a catastrophic simultaneous presence of spring and autumn, full of new

charms and veils, characteristic of young, still unexhausted, still unwearied depravity. Once

again there’s danger there, the mother of morality, great danger, this time transferred into the

individual, into one’s neighbour and friend, into the alleyways, into one’s own child, into one’s

own heart, into all the most personal and most secret wishes and desires.

[ccclxxii]

And so we see what Nietzsche means when he says that “all great ages

of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always

been unpolitical, even anti-political.”

[ccclxxiii]

As long as the political work

of the regime has already been carried out for generations, if not centuries,

and as long as the regime has managed to cultivate “immense power,”

“virtues”—in particular the political “virtues” consequent on the pathos of

distance—a time of sudden decline, a loosening of political pressures,

dangers, and an unbinding of the strict morality developed to deal with

these dangers, such a time of political weakness may indeed be salutary for

high culture. But in order to take advantage of such an event, there need be

present those wild egoisms that aristocracy has bred and nurtured along

with wild abilities and political sophistication. It is thanks to the presence of

such natures that, now in a time of freedom, there is a hankering after the

new, strange, and exotic in the first place. Nietzsche explicitly connects the

Italian Renaissance, with its desire for the new and strange, its belief in

progress and science, its exploratory spirit, to the selfish egoisms of the

urban patriciate, in particular to the aristocratic mores of, for example, the

rulers of Genoa, who were now free and had grown tired and bored of all

old authority.

I have looked upon this city, its villas and pleasure grounds, and the wide circuit of its

inhabited heights and slopes for a considerable time. In the end I must say that I see

countenances out of past generations - this district is strewn with the images of bold and

autocratic men. They have lived and have wanted to live on - they say so with their houses,

built and decorated for centuries, and not for the passing hour: they were well disposed to life,

however ill disposed they may often have been towards themselves. I always see the builder,

how he casts his eye on all that is built around him far and near, and likewise on the city, the

sea, and the chain of mountains; how he expresses power and conquest with his gaze: all this

he wishes to fit into his plan, and in the end make it his property, by its becoming a portion of

the same. The whole district is overgrown with this superb, insatiable egoism of the desire to

possess and exploit; and as these men when abroad recognised no frontiers, and in their

thirst for the new placed a new world beside the old, so also at home everyone rose up

against everyone else, and devised some mode of expressing his superiority, and of

placing between himself and his neighbour his personal infinity.

[ccclxxiv]

Each one

established a home for himself by overpowering it with his architectural ideas and

refashioning it into a house that was a feast for the eyes. When we consider the north, one is

impressed by the law, and the general delight in lawfulness and obedience that is apparent as

one contemplates the way the cities are built. One is led to guess at the ways in which people

fundamentally regarded themselves as equal and subordinated themselves; that must have been

what was dominant in the souls of the builders. But what you find here upon turning any

corner is a human being who knows the sea, adventure and the Orient; a human being who

abhors the law and the neighbour as a kind of boredom and who measures everything

old and established with envious eyes. With the marvelous cunning of his imagination he

would like to establish all of this anew – at least in thought – and put his hand and meaning

to it – if only for the moments on a sunny afternoon when his insatiable and melancholy soul

does for once feel satiated and only what is his and nothing alien appears to his eyes.

[ccclxxv]

At the point of the most acute decline of the aristocratic project, when

the danger of the greatest “exhaustion” appears: Nietzsche claims in a

remarkable passage that precisely at this moment is when the most amazing

specimens can emerge. Nietzsche finally explicitly connects what the reader

by now may have suspected: the ages he speaks of, the ages of the birth of

high culture and of philosophy are necessarily also those ages when the

tyrannical type can ascend. This is so for two reasons. First of all because

the aristocratic morality that is now declining, the political power that is

now lessened, had as one of its principal objects the restraint of potential

tyrants. One of the great “dangers” urban aristocracies face is the prospect

of one of their own reaching for tyranny; such an event is therefore far more

likely in an age of political and moral weakening or “liberalization.” But

there is a second and more profound reason Nietzsche gives for the

relationship between high culture and tyranny. The same spiritual

confusion, and even confusion of the blood, that comes with political

weakening and that, in the general case, results in moral and spiritual

exhaustion, this same “anarchy” of the instincts, or danger of being

internally tyrannized by wild impulses, results, in the case of rarer and

fortuitous natures, in an enhancement or strengthening. There is then an

inner kinship or likeness between the tyrannical type that appears in late

aristocracy and the artist or thinker that appears at this same time. Both are

related to each other in that they are able, by similar inherited and acquired

internal defenses, to overcome the decadence and general weakness of the

time—

The man from an age of dissolution, which mixes the races all together, such a man has an

inheritance of a multiple ancestry in his body, that is, conflicting and frequently not merely

conflicting drives and standards of value which war among themselves and rarely give each

other rest — such a man of late culture and disturbed lights will typically be a weaker man.

His most basic demand is that the war which constitutes him should finally end. Happiness

seems to him, in accordance with a calming medicine and way of thinking (for example,

Epicurean or Christian), principally as the happiness of resting, of having no interruptions, of

surfeit, of the final unity, as the “Sabbath of Sabbaths,” to use the words of the saintly

rhetorician Augustine, who was himself such a man. But if the opposition and war in such a

nature work like one more charm or thrill in life — and bring along, in addition to this nature’s

powerful and irreconcilable drives, also the real mastery and refinement in waging war with

itself, and thus transmit and cultivate self-ruling and outwitting of the self, then arise those

delightfully amazing and unimaginable people, those enigmatic men predestined for victory

and temptation, whose most beautiful expressions are Alcibiades and Caesar (— in their

company I’d like to place the first European, according to my taste, the Hohenstaufen

Frederick II), and, among artists, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They appear precisely in the

same ages when that weaker type, with its demands for quiet, steps into the foreground: both

types belong with one another and arise from the same causes.

[ccclxxvi]

Herein appears the same pattern discussed above regarding the way in

which aristocratic regime functions as a precondition for the emergence of

“high culture”—in this case, unlike in the discussion on Genoa and on the

Italian Renaissance, the concern is not just with the emergence of high

intellectual and artistic culture or the intellectual desire for the new, but

with the emergence of new, frankly tyrannical, if brilliant, types of men.

The mention of Alcibiades is particularly interesting for our argument,

[ccclxxvii]

given his connection both to Socratic philosophy and to the

association made in antiquity between Socrates and tyranny. But we don’t

need to speculate very much further on this point, for Nietzsche himself

explains explicitly and in some detail the connection between the

emergence of the tyrannical type just mentioned—the type of Alcibiades—

and of philosophy. He goes so far as to call philosophers, the earliest

philosophers, “tyrants of the spirit”:

Tyrants of the spirit….These philosophers had a firm belief in themselves and in their “truth,”

and with it they overcame all their neighbors and predecessors; each of them was a combative

and violent tyrant. Perhaps the happiness of believing oneself in possession of the truth was

never greater in the world, but neither was the severity, arrogance, tyranny, and evil of such a

belief. They were tyrants, which is what every Greek wanted to be, and which each one was, if

he was able. Perhaps only Solon is an exception: in, his poetry he tells how he despised

personal tyranny. But he did it out of love for his work, for his lawgiving; and to be a lawgiver

is a sublimated form of tyranny. Parmenides, too, gave laws, probably Pythagoras and

Empedocles as well; Anaximander founded a city. Plato was the incarnate wish to become the

greatest philosophical lawgiver and founding father of a state; he seems to have suffered

terribly that his nature was not fulfilled, and towards the end, his soul became full of the

blackest bile. The more Greek philosophy lost power, the more it suffered inwardly because of

this bile and need to slander. When various sects finally fought for their truths in the streets,

the souls of all these suitors of truth were completely clogged with jealousy and venom; the

tyrannic element raged like a poison in their bodies. These many petty tyrants would have

liked to devour one another raw; there was not a spark of love left in them, and all too little joy

in their own knowledge. The tenet that tyrants are usually murdered and that their descendants

live briefly is also generally true of the tyrants of the spirit. Their history is short, violent; their

influence breaks off suddenly. One can say of almost all great Hellenes that they seem to have

come too late, thus Aeschylus, Pindar, Demosthenes, Thucydides; one generation follows

them-and then it is always over forever. That is the turbulent and uncanny thing about Greek

history…With the Greeks, things go forward swiftly, but also as swiftly downwards…What

took place with the Greeks (that each great thinker, believing he possessed absolute truth,

became a tyrant, so that Greek intellectual history has had the violent, rash, and dangerous

character evident in its political history) was not exhausted with them…

[ccclxxviii]

Thus Greek political history is said directly to parallel Greek

philosophical history, not in its substance, but at the very least in its inner

character—the way of life of the philosopher, the tensions and egoisms of

his soul, requires the exact same preparatory work as the life of the tyrant,

and though directed to very different ends, the two share an inner kinship.

The same complex of contradictory drives and instincts that Nietzsche

described in Alcibiades, the same inner conflict of the late-stage aristocratic

“monster”: this inner tension is “spiritualized,” that is, intellectualized and

transposed into the desire for truth in the case of the philosopher. The

highest creation of Greek culture—what Nietzsche elsewhere calls “the

crown of culture”—the philosophical way of life, or the variety in types of

the philosopher, is, as we can see from the words used, itself an

internalization of the same severity, pathos of distance, cruelty towards

others and oneself that was essential to the aristocratic regime. In these two

passages, from different books at different times in Nietzsche’s life,

[ccclxxix]

we see precisely the same idea: the philosopher and the tyrant are the same,

at least in their beginnings. Philosophy and tyranny, the types of Plato and

Alcibiades, are characteristic late outgrowths of aristocratic regimes on the

point of collapse—they are “radicalizations” of this regime.

Let us in the conclusion of this section summarize Nietzsche’s

argument. An aristocratic regime has its origins in necessity, in particular in

the danger of annihilation. Barbarians, feral men, impose themselves on

top of a sedentary or possibly more civilized population and have to

maintain their position under the threat of constant danger, first of all from

below and from abroad. Faced with relentless pressure they are forced to

sharpen and intensify those qualities, and only those qualities, that are

favorable to their continued survival and the maintenance of their position:

these qualities they call virtues. Such virtues can in general be summarized

as martial ability and political ability: the Homeric andreia and phronesis,

or roughly, courage and practical wisdom. Together with these is intensified

a closely related but separate set of “virtues” that may with some humor be

called the “social” virtues, for they replace the Platonic justice and

temperance; but instead Nietzsche emphasizes intolerance, and the

associated qualities of cruelty and of pathos of distance. It is only through

the latter that the former “substantial” qualities can be inculcated over many

generations, in what Nietzsche calls a program of breeding and training—

indeed he calls the aristocratic polity as such a program of breeding. Such a

regime tends to a homogeneity of type, again under the pressure of

necessity: deviations are not tolerated because there is no luxury and no

time for them under conditions of permanent pressure.

The aristocratic regime furnishes the “raw material” for the further

development of high culture, and in particular of philosophy, in two closely

related ways. First of all in the institutions, practices, strictures, and pre-

rational sentiments inculcated by its education or training. For example, the

sentiment Nietzsche calls pathos of distance—the feeling or instinct for

variations in rank, for the chasm that exists between slave and free man, for

the talent in obedience and command—is a prerequisite for “longing for an

ever new widening of distances inside the soul itself, the development of

ever higher, rarer, more distant, more expansive, more comprehensive

states,” that is, for the enhancement of humanity or development of higher

aspirations and high culture. Or, to take another example, the agon, an

aristocratic institution of competition, especially athletic competition—but

which Nietzsche elsewhere also calls the inner engine of the Greek political

life—is refined by Platonic philosophy into dialectics.

Second—and this is the more radical point that is harder to accept—

the “raw material” for philosophy is furnished by the aristocratic regime in

a much more direct and literal way, in that only the impressive specimens

bred over generations by such a regime can become philosophers in the

beginnings of philosophy, or receive philosophy at its beginnings. This

point is made in a somewhat limited way, but for our purposes, most

clearly, when Nietzsche discusses the incredible work that had to go into

cultivating physical beauty in Athens—itself originally just the

consequence of a physical culture geared toward athletics and thus at

bottom toward warfare. The physical beauty that impressed thinkers and

philosophers, and that in particular was the fertile ground and inspiration

for Platonic philosophy, was one of the end-products of the breeding

program inherent in the aristocratic regime.

The same reasoning applies more generally for other qualities that

result in “high culture,” and in particular the same reasoning or pattern

applies to explain the origin of philosophy. As these virtues are cultivated

and sharpened, the aristocratic regime faces very soon an internal danger,

the danger of tyranny. Much of aristocratic “social” virtue, the homogeneity

of which Nietzsche speaks, is then directed toward self-defense against such

an event: against one of their own “beautiful monsters”—Nietzsche

mentions Caesar—or deviants taking over from the inside. One is reminded

of the old guard gentlemen in Athens outraged at Alcibiades’ antics, in

particular his using an emblem of Eros with a thunderbolt on his shield—

the aristocratic taste fears and abhors such extravagant displays among its

members, and for good reason. And yet an aristocracy can’t do without its

own at least being tempted in such a direction: it was the secret dream of

every Greek to be a tyrant, and this desire is likely a natural consequence of

training men, to paraphrase Machiavelli, to be very strong in mind and

body, of teaching them dangerous political skills, and of encouraging the

“wild egoisms” and ambition that goes along with such skills.

When, finally, the “fortunate moment” of political weakness comes,

the previously-enforced homogeneity breaks down and the long-pent-up

tension in the regime bursts free. The homogeneity is replaced by a

“tropical” proliferation of “monstrous” types, most of them weakened or

deficient, but a few luckily enhanced. The qualities or virtues, the inner

states, that are the result of aristocratic breeding and education are now

“liberated” to take their paths in new and unexpected directions, in

directions no longer constrained by the necessity for political survival.

There is indeed a taste for the new as such, and a taste for transgression, a

boredom with the law and with equality: much like, for example, in

imperial Roman times, there seemed to be a constant joy in the mockery

and transgression of the old aristocratic republican personae and mores.

Among these new specimens may be “amazing” enigmatic types like

Alcibiades or Caesar—tyrannical men—or otherwise artists like da Vinci.

Or, more specifically and most relevant for the argument here, the early

Greek philosophers, who Nietzsche also describes as tyrannical types and

who, like the characters just mentioned, embody simultaneously a freedom

from the strictures of aristocratic morality and an intensification of the

virtues, sentiments, and abilities that the aristocratic project cultivated—

again whether by training or actually by breeding. Nietzsche emphasizes

this last point by explicitly saying that mixture of classes, and therefore of

races, during times of political dissolution, may give an extra impetus to

men like Alcibiades, in the form of yet another inner conflict to overcome.

Thus the age of the dissolution of aristocratic republics is the age most

amenable to high culture generally and to philosophy in particular. A claim

that seems to be echoed, surprisingly maybe, in Machiavelli. He says that it

was during Roman imperial times, during the reign of the five good

Emperors, that the world was in all its glory, that the greatest thinkers had

finally the freedom to think and to write what they pleased. Of course we

tend to think of the Empire as authoritarian and “imperial,” but it was in

fact a time of liberalization and democratization compared to republican

Rome—of general weakness, dissolution, decadence, to use Nietzsche’s

language. This double historical detritus of the aristocratic republic or the

Greek polis—on one hand the production of genius and of philosophy, on

the other hand, the decay of political and social life—is the background and

the circumstance of the Platonic project, to which we now again briefly

turn.

III. Nietzsche on Platonic Political Philosophy

The Platonic project can be understood as an “emergency medical

measure” against the decay of the Greek world—the perceived decline and

dissolution of aristocratic political and social institutions, in particular the

decline of the polis itself. It was also simultaneously an attempt to save or

preserve philosophy. The outer or exoteric meaning of Platonic political and

moral philosophy was an attempt to “cure” Greek decadence, just as its

inner or esoteric meaning was to make philosophy safe and even powerful

in the cities—a comprehensive moral and political program, a work of

“legislation” in the highest sense. In the long run this project was both a

great success and a great failure. Nietzsche finds himself in the wake of the

failure of a millennia-long moral, philosophical, political project—the

failure of the Platonic project to preserve the possibility of philosophy. The

Platonic project, originally conceived to preserve or perpetuate the

philosophical life regardless of regime, ends up, through a significant

modification, destroying the possibility of philosophy itself by destroying

or corrupting nature. Nietzsche’s exposure of the dark or primitive roots of

philosophy, its original or primeval identity with deviant and criminal

tyranny, is an attempt to recover nature.

An age of decadence or dissolution is, despite the occasional and

colorful brilliance, nevertheless still decay and degeneration—words that

Nietzsche attempts to use in an extra-moral sense.

[ccclxxx]

This is an age of

breakdown in political institutions and social relations characterized by war,

chaos, anarchy, and the spiritual exhaustion, or desire for peace, that

inevitably sets in during such times. Nietzsche typically, and, one might

add, in typical Platonic fashion, has a discussion of the inner states of the

soul or spirit that parallel this external political condition. An Alcibiades or

Plato is a rare “monster” of such an age; the rule, the general case, the

interesting case, is different and opposite: weakness, exhaustion, desire for

rest and peace, and ultimately, mediocrity. Recall that in the same passage

where Nietzsche discusses Alcibiades, Caesar, da Vinci, he mentions that

these are exceptions, while the rule is

The man from an age of dissolution, which mixes the races all together, such a man has an

inheritance of a multiple ancestry in his body, that is, conflicting and frequently not merely

conflicting drives and standards of value, which war among themselves and rarely give each

other rest—such a man of late culture and broken lights will typically be a weaker man. His

most basic demand is that the war which constitutes him should finally end. Happiness seems

to him, in accordance with a calming medicine and way of thinking (for example, Epicurean or

Christian), principally as the happiness of resting, of having no interruptions, of surfeit, of the

final unity, as the “Sabbath of Sabbaths,” to use the words of the saintly rhetorician Augustine,

who was himself such a man.

[ccclxxxi]

Nietzsche repeats this same idea when he mentions that, at the point of

the decay of an aristocratic order, precisely that time he calls “most

fortunate” and most likely to produce high culture and philosophy, there

arises a new type of morality, a late-stage morality of exhaustion:

What will the moral philosophers who emerge at such a time now have to preach? They

discover, these keen observers and street loafers, that things are quickly coming to an end, that

everything around them is going rotten and spreading corruption, that nothing lasts until the

day after tomorrow, except for one kind of person, the incurably mediocre. Only the mediocre

have the prospect of succeeding, of reproducing themselves—they are the people of the future,

the only survivors, “Be like them! Become mediocre!”—from now on that’s the only morality

that still makes sense, that people still hear.—But it is difficult to preach, this morality of

mediocrity!—it may never admit what it is and what it wants! It must speak about restraint and

worth and duty and love of one’s neighbour—it will have difficulty concealing its irony!

[ccclxxxii]

He relates this condition—the condition of spiritual chaos and

exhaustion, and the accompanying emergence of new moral notions that

attempt to explain or manage this phenomenon—particularly to the Greek

world of Socrates’ time. Socrates cleverly saw the cause of the decadence

of Greek life, and saw also his own case as the “cure”:

But Socrates guessed even more. He saw through the noble Athenians; he saw that his own

case, his idiosyncrasy, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was quietly

developing everywhere: old Athens was coming to an end. And Socrates understood that the

world needed him — his method, his cure, his personal artifice of self-preservation.

Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy, everywhere one was within sight of excess:

monstrum in animo was the common danger. “The impulses want to play the tyrant; one must

invent a counter-tyrant who is stronger.” After the physiognomist had revealed to Socrates

who he was — a cave of bad appetites — the great master of irony let slip another clue to his

character. “This is true,” he said, “but I mastered them all.” How did Socrates become master

over himself? His case was, at bottom, merely the extreme case, only the most striking

instance of what was then beginning to be a epidemic: no one was any longer master over

himself, the instincts turned against themselves. He fascinated, being an extreme case; his awe

inspiring ugliness proclaimed him as such to all who could see: he fascinated, of course, even

more as an answer, a solution, an apparent cure for this disease. When one finds it necessary to

turn reason into a tyrant, as Socrates did, the danger cannot be slight that something else

threatens to play the tyrant. Rationality was hit upon as a savior; neither Socrates nor his

“patients” had any choice about being rational: it was necessary, it was the last resort….

[ccclxxxiii]

According to Nietzsche Platonism, Plato, corrupted by Socrates’

plebeian moralism, picked up on this “cure.” The “cure” was common to all

the Socratic schools in that it consisted of moral philosophy, moral

exhortation, the general purpose of which was to have a taming or calming

effect through the application of reason. The purpose of Platonic moral

philosophy then—and it must be emphasized that so far we are talking only

of its exoteric or public function—was to bring order to the “anarchy” of the

instincts, to try to reestablish virtue, inner order, on a new foundation. The

older, surer foundation of aristocratic breeding and education, which formed

the instincts themselves in a salutary direction, was now lacking—the

instincts were at war with themselves. This new foundation was reason,

through which therefore the philosopher as the man of reason, suitably

decked out in a mask of piety, temperance, justice—supposedly now the

opposite of the intemperate, lustful, criminal tyrant—becomes the guarantor

or virtual priest of moral life and good citizenship. The philosopher

becomes doctor of the soul to the Greeks; this was Plato’s great

achievement in finding a new foundation for the virtues on “reason,” or

rather, in finding a way to use reason to restrain and tame the “decadence of

the instincts” that Greeks suffered from at the end of their culture. The

philosopher’s “ascetic mask” is the creation of Platonism, the wily and

salutary public lie that was to guarantee the safety and even supremacy of

the cause of philosophy in the Hellenistic and later Roman world.

Platonism was successful in its project in antiquity; the safety of the

Socratic schools, as well as other philosophical schools, was assured

through the end of Hellenistic (Roman) civilization. But an unforeseen

historical development derailed and warped the Platonic project. What Plato

and his followers didn’t count on was the emergence or eruption of an

international missionary religion, based on revealed truth. The final result

of the Christian project, which is also the final result—surely unintentional

—of the Platonic project, is the misbreeding of modern European man.

Christianity was “Platonism for the people,” or, which is the same thing, an

entirely exoteric Platonism. A Platonism with a priesthood that no longer

understood nor cared for the fact that the outward moral and political

orientation was meant as a protective outer wall for an inner garden where

nature itself was nurtured and preserved. The quasi-Platonic priesthood of

medieval Christianity, for all its spiritual profundity, was incompetent when

it came to the needful task of caring for the “overall development” of man

or the cultivation of human nature—a nature they denied:

Finally, of course, to evaluate the opposing bad effects of such religions, as well, and to bring

to light their sinister danger, there is always an expensive and fearful price to pay when

religions prevail, not as a means of cultivation and education in the hand of philosophers, but

as some inherently sovereign power, when religions want themselves to be the final purpose

and not a means alongside other means…We have to thank them for something invaluable, and

who is rich enough in gratitude not to become poor in the face of everything which, for

example, the “spiritual men” of Christianity have done for Europe up to this point? And yet…

what…they have done…amounts, in fact and truth, to the deterioration of the European

race… …Suppose we could survey with the mocking and disinterested eye of an Epicurean

god the strangely painful comedy of European Christianity, as crude as it is refined, I believe

we would find no end to our amazement and laughter. Does it not seem that for eighteen

centuries there has been ruling over Europe a will to turn the human being into a sublime

monstrosity? However, anyone who, with the opposite needs, no longer Epicurean, but with

some divine hammer in his hand, were to approach this almost voluntary degeneration and

decay of a human being, like the Christian European (Pascal, for example), would he not have

to cry out with fury, pity, and horror, “You fools! You arrogant, pitying fools, what have you

done here? Was that a work for your hands? What a mess you’ve made, ruining my most

beautiful stone! What have you presumed?” What I wanted to say was this: Christianity has

been the most disastrous sort of arrogance so far. Men not lofty and hard enough to be

permitted to shape men as artists; men not strong and far-sighted enough to allow, with a

sublime conquest of the self, the foreground law of thousand-fold failure and destruction to

prevail; men not noble enough to see the abysmally different rank ordering, the gulfs

separating ranks between man and man:—such men have, with their “equal before God,” so

far ruled over the fate of Europe to the point where finally a diminished, almost ridiculous type

has been bred, a herd animal, something obliging, sickly, and mediocre—the contemporary

European. . . .

[ccclxxxiv]

The reference to Pascal is especially significant, and pointed: a sign

that Nietzsche is saying philosophy and philosophers won’t be possible in

the new Europe. The Platonic project, founded to protect and preserve

philosophy—this was the only purpose, ultimately, of Platonic moral

teaching—ends up destroying, in the long run, the preconditions and

therefore the possibility for philosophy.

[ccclxxxv]

There are two reasons the Platonic moral project ultimately fails. One

reason is “forgivable,” if one may use moral language, in that it is incidental

to Platonism: the coincidence of Christianity, a global, missionary religion

is, again, not anticipated by Plato or by the Socratic schools. While it is true

that Nietzsche famously calls Christianity “Platonism for the people,” he

also adds on various occasions that such “Platonism” serves a different

purpose for the rabble than it did for the gentlemen and philosophical

schools of antiquity. The motivation for an attraction to “otherworldliness,”

to a moral interpretation of the world, to asceticism, and so forth, is entirely

different in the two cases.

[ccclxxxvi]

Furthermore the failure of Platonism in

this regard is in fact entirely separate from any substantial teaching or

doctrine: as is apparent in the passage just quoted, the problem is when

religion oversteps its bounds and becomes sovereign, as opposed to its

being a useful tool of the statesman or the philosopher. This overreach, the

possibility for this kind of priestly authority, is rooted in the peculiar origins

of Christianity as a revealed religion and in the historical peculiarities of the

late Roman world that adopted this new faith. On this count then it can’t be

“blamed” on Platonism, however much the Socratic schools may have “laid

the spiritual groundwork” for the later acceptance of clerical revealed

religion.

But, one may speculate, there is a second reason that Platonism or the

Platonic project ultimately fails, which is not incidental. This is the very

“otherworldliness” or moralism itself—as long as one understands this

problem in the right way. There is a lot written on Nietzsche’s criticism of

“otherworldliness” or asceticism in Plato or in Christianity, or his criticism

of asceticism. One could even argue that Heidegger’s criticism of the

tradition of Western metaphysics stretching back to Plato is lifted entirely

from Nietzsche, despite his deflection that Nietzsche was himself a

representative of the most destructive branch of that tradition.

[ccclxxxvii]

There is an attempt even—scholarly as well as on the part of popular

writers—to make the case that Nietzsche’s concern was on behalf of the

cause of libertinism or “pleasure”; which would strangely turn Nietzsche’s

critique of Christianity itself into a moral condemnation and his program

into a moralistic doctrine on behalf of moral or sexual “liberation”—you

should carnally enjoy yourself, this time on principle, and as a matter of

setting right historical wrongs. This way of reading Nietzsche has been

especially successful in America. It entirely misses the point of Nietzsche’s

criticism both of Platonism and of Christianity.

According to Nietzsche Platonism was in a way quite correct to exhort

a kind of asceticism. In times of decadence there is an “anarchy” of

instincts, a tyranny of destructive and self-destructive impulses. Trusting

one’s own instincts, one’s body, in such a situation is a grave mistake.

[ccclxxxviii]

Restraint of the impulses is a necessity and a “cure,” and

Platonism was supremely crafty in its attempt to base this cure on “reason”

and therefore to make the philosopher the spiritual patron or doctor of the

ancient gentlemen—he repeatedly refers to Socrates as a “physician.” This

may not have been the truth as such, for the philosopher himself was

secretly the most “decadent” type of this period. But it was an effective

political truth that served an important public function—it was Socratism or

tyranny by that point, there was no possibility of the restoration of the

vitality of Archaic Greece, for the human material was there no longer. The

Platonic mask of the philosopher, of philosophy’s public function as

guarantor of morality and good citizenship through the doctrine of reason,

was then an effective pia fraus, a noble lie. Platonism’s distrust of the

senses, of “the body,” instincts, was entirely justified in the historical

circumstance in which Platonism found itself—and not only in that

particular circumstance. It was entirely adequate as a means of perpetuating

philosophy as a tradition once it already existed. The problem with

Platonism’s proscription of “the body,” its spiritualization of nature—that

is, its intellectualization and rationalization of the idea of nature—was that

through this counterfeit actual knowledge of nature and of the body is

eventually lost. In particular the truly needful knowledge—the knowledge

Plato himself knew but which he hid—of the supremacy of the prerational

over the rational and therefore of the necessity of knowledge of breeding in

statecraft, was eventually lost. The existence of a regime, the Christian

regime, that took the Platonic exoteric teaching more seriously and was able

to enforce it more comprehensively than Plato himself could ever dream of,

and to do so in a historical epoch for which it was fundamentally

inappropriate, was something the Platonic project did not, and perhaps

could not, account for. Let us remember that the Platonic teaching is

profitable to a late-stage civilization and therefore entirely inappropriate to

the cultural and spiritual life of barbarians who are just about to be civilized

for the first time. In this case Platonic morality, as interpreted by

Christianity, corrupts, stunts, misbreeds, tames. Nietzsche could not be

clearer on this point:

It is decisive for the lot of a people and of humanity that culture should begin in the right place

— not in the “soul” (as was the fateful superstition of the priests and half-priests): the right

place is the body, the gesture, the diet, physiology; the rest follows from that. Therefore the

Greeks remain the first cultural event in history: they knew, they did, what was needed; and

Christianity, which despised the body, has been the greatest misfortune of humanity so far.

[ccclxxxix]

Plato himself was aware of the true meaning of nature as well as the

necessity of training and especially breeding the appropriate pre-rational

sentiments and orientations. He shows an awareness that this problem is

coeval with the political problem and the problem of philosophy in the

Republic when, in the process of constructing the regime that cultivates

human nature at its peak, pride of place is given to a eugenic program. The

Republic itself fails when the knowledge of breeding new generations is

forgotten. In the best-case scenario, that is, that could only ever come about

by chance, philosophy is the kingly art, the supreme political or

architectonic art, because it is “knowledge of the soul,” “erotic knowledge,”

knowledge of nature and therefore of the art of breeding. By contrast the

Platonic moral philosophy is exoteric in that it is provisional and

historically contingent: it is at best a successful emergency medical measure

appropriate to late regimes and which, only with considerable deceit and

distortion, manages to secure the place of philosophy in such regimes.

Nietzsche is quite direct both on the matter of Plato’s knowledge of the true

meaning of nature and on his use of exotericism, or of the noble lie in

covering up such knowledge. Indeed he says it is the problem he has been

pursuing the longest.

[cccxc]

Ultimately the disagreement between Nietzsche and Plato is one of

tactics, not of ultimate aims or even of general strategy. Nietzsche believes

Plato’s exoteric project, his “regime,” his pia fraus, has by our time failed,

in part for historical reasons that in no way represent a fundamental

problem with the Platonic method. Nietzsche is quite explicit on Plato when

it came to the esoteric meaning of the relationship between philosophy and

the state. In an early essay on the Greek state, Nietzsche concludes with a

reflection on the true meaning Plato’s moral and political program that is

most relevant for this chapter and indeed for this entire thesis. The inner

purpose of the Platonic politics is “the Olympian existence and ever-

renewed procreation and preparation of the genius—compared with which

all other things are only tools, expedients and factors towards realization.”

Nietzsche’s essay on the Greek state begins with a reflection on the

self-serving but perhaps temporarily salutary lies that “we moderns” believe

in as regards the “dignity of labor” and the “dignity of man.”

[cccxci]

The

Greeks didn’t believe in these because they didn’t believe that mere life had

any value. What Nietzsche calls the foundation of Greek knowledge is

profoundly “nihilistic” from a modern point of view: it is the wisdom of

Silenus. The Greek frankness regarding slavery is unacceptable to moderns:

“we must accept the cruel sounding truth that slavery belongs to the essence

of a culture: a truth, of course, that leaves no doubt as to the absolute value

of existence.” Absolute value of existence is nil, and man as such has no

dignity and no value: mere life is repudiated by itself. Human nature

doesn’t exist in the state of nature: the human in the “state of nature” is a

botched animal, a mistake of nature. Indeed there hasn’t as yet been a

natural humanity.

[cccxcii]

What has value is nobility, higher life, which

requires the subsuming and exploitation of mere life, in the same way the

Greek state and higher Greek culture required slavery,

[cccxciii]

and in the

same way the polis required the absolute subsuming of all pre-political or

subpolitical forms.

If the polis requires force for its existence; if the city or the closed

aristocratic commonwealth is necessary for the development of high

culture; and if, finally, human nature is actually fulfilled or reached, not in

the “state of nature,” which is generally just squalor and mere life, but in

higher culture, then nature itself uses, not only slavery, but also more

generally force, and power as a means, a circuitous means, to its own

development or fulfillment. Much as a certain type of vegetation needs to

use force, exploitation, parasitism, to ascend to the top of the canopy and

therefore fulfill its nature while trampling on other vegetation—an image

Nietzsche elsewhere and much later explicitly invokes precisely in this

context: “Its fundamental belief must, in fact, be that the society should

exist, not for the sake of the society, but only as a base and framework on

which an exceptional kind of nature can raise itself to its higher function

and, in general, to a higher form of being, comparable to those heliotropic

climbing plants on Java—people call them sipo matador—whose tendrils

clutch an oak tree so much and for so long until finally, high over the tree

but supported by it, they can unfold their crowns in the open light and make

a display of their happiness.”

[cccxciv]

Therefore if nature is made manifest in

high culture, the brutality and force of the state is a necessary precondition,

and the political instinct, the instinct for the state, is but a circuitous means

that nature uses to reach her aims in secret: the polis, or a people, is nature’s

circuitous route to its manifestation, the production of high culture or of

genius. Mankind then has an “instinct” for the state, whereby force and

power “attracts” humans instinctively “as if by magic”:

Here again we see with what pitiless inflexibility Nature, in order to arrive at Society, forges

for herself the cruel tool of the State-namely, that conqueror with the iron hand, who is nothing

else than the objectivation of the instinct indicated. By the indefinable greatness and power of

such conquerors the spectator feels, that they are only the means of an intention manifesting

itself through them and yet hiding itself from them. The weaker forces attach themselves to

them with such mysterious speed, and transform themselves so wonderfully, in the sudden

swelling of that violent avalanche, under the charm of that creative kernel, into an affinity

hitherto not existing, that it seems as if a magic will were emanating from them. [Greek State]

Man is a “political animal” in a very literal and direct way then: not

merely in the sense of human nature being fulfilled in the polis but also

from the other direction, nature achieves this end through an instinct that

binds the lower classes to the growing power of the state precisely on

account of its force, power, and violence. There is an instinct to be attracted

to these—a chilling idea perhaps, and not one that ancient Socratic political

philosophy would have discussed with such frankness at the very least.

More disturbing still, Nietzsche believes that the state either exists or ceases

to exist insofar as the possibility for war is present. “Through war and in the

profession of arms is placed before our eyes an image, or even perhaps the

prototype of the State.” Originally conceived in war and for the purposes of

waging war, the state as such, the “prototypical” state, the pure state such as

Sparta, has as its internal program only one thing, the production of military

genius:

In the highest castes one perceives already a little more of what in this internal process is

involved at the bottom, namely the creation of the military genius-with whom we have become

acquainted as the original founder of states. In the case of many States, as, for example, in the

Lycurgan constitution of Sparta, one can distinctly perceive the impress of that fundamental

idea of the State, that of the creation of the military genius… [ibid]

It is then entirely to this purpose that the Greek state is directed and

therefore this purpose—the creation of military genius—is in some sense

the original “intention” of nature. The “return to nature” is an “ascent to

nature,” to the nature of the genius, originally of the military genius.

[cccxcv]

Human nature is “achieved” or manifested in the production of genius. The

martial state, the Spartan state, is the prototype of the state: in its being

dedicated to the production of military genius it lays the precondition, or

presents the model, for the state as dedicated to the production of genius

more generally, for the state as the cultivation of human nature or as the

staging ground of higher culture. “The absolute man possesses neither

dignity, nor rights, nor duties; only as a wholly determined being serving

unconscious purposes can man excuse his existence.” Man as such is matter

or raw material for the work of the legislator or founder. Nietzsche ends the

essay with a reflection, perhaps a shocking reflection, on the inner meaning

of the Platonic project precisely in the preservation of this idea of the state.

Plato “saw through” to the inner meaning of the Greek state and attempted

to save or preserve its program precisely in its hour of decline. Or, in other

words, Plato, at the moment of the decline of the Greek aristocracy, sought

to abstract—to save and radicalize—the principle of the aristocratic regime.

The inner or esoteric program of Platonism, on account of which the overt

moral and political teaching is only a means, is the salvation or preservation

of nature, or, to put it in other words, the “existence and ever-renewed

procreation and preparation of the genius,”

Plato’s perfect State is according to these considerations certainly something still greater than

even the warm-blooded among his admirers believe, not to mention the smiling mien of

superiority with which our “ historically “ educated refuse such a fruit of antiquity. The proper

aim of the State, the Olympian existence and ever-renewed procreation and preparation of the

genius,-compared with which all other things are only tools, expedients and factors towards

realisation-is here discovered with a poetic intuition and painted with firmness. Plato saw

through the awfully devastated Herma of the then-existing State-life and perceived even then

something divine in its interior. He believed that one might be able to take out this divine

image and that the grim and barbarically distorted outside and shell did not belong to the

essence of the State: the whole fervour and sublimity of his political passion threw itself upon

this belief, upon that desire-and in the flames of this fire he perished. That in his perfect State

he did not place at the head the genius in its general meaning, but only the genius of wisdom

and of knowledge, that he altogether excluded the inspired artist from his State, that was a

rigid consequence of the Socratian judgment on art, which Plato, struggling against himself,

had made his own. This more external, almost incidental gap must not prevent our recognising

in the total conception of the Platonic State the wonderfully great hieroglyph of a

profound and eternally to be interpreted esoteric doctrine of the connection between

State and Genius. What we believed we could divine of this cryptograph we have said in this

preface. [ibid]

That the Platonic exoteric program, influenced by Socratism, and

necessarily limited by the political and social conditions of his time—

conditions of dissolution, anarchy, and decay—overtly claims something

rather different, and that on account of the limitations of this exoteric

program the esoteric intention ultimately could not be carried through, is an

entirely different matter. The aim in this and the previous chapter has been

to make the case for why the Nietzschean reading of Plato can’t be

summarily dismissed—for why and how, indeed, the “esoteric” intention of

Platonic political philosophy carries an awareness of the fundamental

identity or at least close kinship, of tyranny and philosophy.

Appendix:

Nietzsche in the Strauss-Kojeve Debate on Tyranny

and Philosophy

Leo Strauss’ essay On Tyranny and his subsequent discussion with

Alexander Kojeve on the relationship of philosophy to state power can be

interpreted alternately as a retort to or an elaboration of the ideas presented

in the previous sections of this chapter. Kojeve goes so far as to claim that

the philosopher and the tyrant are the same. More interesting is the question

of how far Strauss himself can be said to “agree” with the view just

presented on Platonic political philosophy—with Nietzsche’s view of the

“esoteric” doctrine of Platonic political philosophy. A book on Strauss, not

Nietzsche, would be necessary in order to answer this question with any

certainty. I would like to suggest, however, that Strauss agrees with

Nietzsche on the inner meaning of Platonism far more than is commonly

acknowledged. Strauss’ response to Kojeve, while not overtly or apparently

a commentary on the Nietzschean claim regarding Platonism, is in fact a

profound elaboration of the Nietzschean position.

[cccxcvi]

a) Strauss on the problem of nature and history in Nietzsche

Since much of the debate between Strauss and Kojeve hinges on the

discussion of history and of the place of philosophy or nature in history, it is

profitable to consider for a moment what Strauss has to say on Nietzsche’s

view of history. In his essay on Nietzsche in Studies in Platonic Political

Philosophy Strauss makes some remarks on Nietzsche’s view of nature and

of history that are either patent exaggerations—maybe even “lies”—or

otherwise very mysterious. Strauss, while conceding that Nietzsche attacks

historicism, nevertheless claims or appears to claim at one point that for

Nietzsche history replaces nature. It is well-known that the common

Straussian view—the view of many of Strauss’ students at least—on

Nietzsche is that he is in fact the most radical historicist, that he preserves

the historicist assumption about philosophy and nature. This is a view that

is rightly based on many explicit statements Strauss himself makes about

Nietzsche. Yet other statements Strauss makes seem to contradict this view,

or at least to make the claims on Nietzsche’s supposed historicism very

unclear—in particular, when Strauss quotes Nietzsche on his belief in a

certain kind of “return to nature,” or “ascent to nature,” and when he ends

the essay in question with the mysterious phrase Die vornehme Natur

ersetzt die gottliche Natur. But in what sense does a historicist speak of

vornehme Natur, of noble nature, of human nature as any kind of standard at

all? Strauss’ essay on Nietzsche ends with nature, not with history. What is

Strauss trying to say?

A cursory glance at Nietzsche’s statements on nature quoted in this

chapter alone shows that, if he was a historicist, he was a strange kind of

historicist indeed. In fact he was not a historicist in any way. If the

fundamental historicist insight is that all thought is historically relative,

limited to its own horizon, that there is no transhistorical truth, then it is

difficult to see how Nietzsche says many of the things he is shown to say

above—including what he says about how he is able to divine the

cryptographic teaching of Plato regarding the esoteric relationship between

the State and culture or the State and genius. Which, Nietzsche makes clear,

still holds in his own time. Nietzsche goes so far as to dismiss historicism—

the milieu theory—as a neurotic’s prejudice.

[cccxcvii]

He emphasizes that

there is a fundamental disconnect between men like Alcibiades and

Leonardo da Vinci and their own times—they are not men determined by

their own time, they represent or embody something older and stronger that

is in some sense “out of place” in its own time and can therefore overcome

an age of decadence. While this same age of decadence is in an indirect way

the “cause” or the opportunity both for the emergence of Alcibiades and of

his weaker and decadent contemporaries, Alcibiades is not determined by

these or by their horizon in his life or action, let alone in his thought: “Great

men are necessary, the age in which they appear is accidental; that they

almost always become masters over their age is only because they are

stronger, because they are older, because for a longer time much was

gathered for them. The relationship between a genius and his age is like that

between strong and weak, or between old and young: the age is relatively

always much younger, thinner, more immature, less assured, more

childish.”

[cccxcviii]

So far then from Nietzsche believing that thought or

philosophy is determined or limited by the historical horizon, he doesn’t

believe that this historical horizon limits even the way of life or the

opportunities for action; the time doesn’t even limit or determine great

statesmen or adventurers—let alone the content of the thought of someone

like Plato.

Precisely in discussing the aphorism on Caesar and Alcibiades Strauss

seems to point to Nietzsche’s fundamentally anti-historicist message.

Prior to the victory of the democratic movement to which, as Nietzsche understands it, also the

anarchists and socialists belong, moralities other and higher than the herd morality were at

least known. He mentions with high praise Napoleon and, above all, Alcibiades and Caesar.

He could not have shown his freedom from the herd morality more tellingly than by

mentioning in one breath Caesar and Alcibiades. Caesar could be said to have performed a

great, historic function for Rome and to have dedicated himself to that function-to have been,

as it were, a functionary of Roman history, but for Alcibiades Athens was no more than the

pedestal, exchangeable if need be with Sparta or Persia, for his own glory or greatness.

[cccxcix]

Strauss mentions Alcibiades’ using of the Spartan or Persian regimes,

with apparent ease, as stepping stones in the pursuit of his own glory or

greatness. But how is Alcibiades able to do this? Nietzsche doesn’t mention

this particular ability of Alcibiades’ in the passage that Strauss describes,

nor his moving from one regime to another. It is Strauss who therefore

emphasizes Alcibiades’ “regime independence,” his ability to transcend

regime and convention and therefore make use of a variety of regimes. This

versatility and ability to live in and make use of a variety of regimes has

been shown, in the previous chapter, to be a point of pride of some of the

less discreet Socratics. Strauss therefore attributes to Alcibiades even more

explicitly than Nietzsche does a freedom, not just from “herd morality” in

the abstract, but from the historical horizon of his own regime. In fact,

although Strauss pretends that Nietzsche is talking about “herd morality”

here, Nietzsche nowhere mentions herd morality in this aphorism at least.

What Nietzsche does talk about, quite explicitly, is breeding—he

specifically mentions mixing of blood—a topic Strauss pointedly does not

touch upon. Strauss, in elaborating on Alcibiades’ peculiar talents and

explaining why Nietzsche chose Alcibiades as an example, points

emphatically to Nietzsche’s criticism of historicism at the same time—on

the same page—that he appears to claim that Nietzsche replaces nature with

history. But it is precisely Alcibiades’ superior nature, according to

Nietzsche, that made him overcome his time and entirely free himself from

the horizon of his own regime. Strauss’ elaboration on Alcibiades’ career

helps Nietzsche’s own claim, and does not support Strauss’ overt criticism

of Nietzsche as a “historicist.”

To understand why Strauss may be doing this, let us tunnel for a

moment into Nietzsche’s conception of nature. The historicist claim is

essentially that human nature doesn’t exist. If human nature existed, then

there would be access to a transhistorical and substantial truth about human

life. To be a historicist and believe that all thought and all life is limited by

the historical horizon is to believe in the malleability of the human species

to a high or almost infinite degree: custom or convention or the political

regime conditions human thought and action at every level, or at least at all

significant levels.

Now, it should be clear from what has been said above that this is very

far from Nietzsche’s view. The fact that Nietzsche believes human nature is

amenable to cultivation, that is, to breeding (or to taming and corruption),

and therefore to limited change in particular directions, doesn’t mean that

Nietzsche denies human nature or that he subsumes it to “history.” It means

he has a realistic, that is, a naturalistic, view of human nature. To talk about

human nature means to be able to consider man one of the animals—

something that classical philosophy, including Socratic philosophy,

emphatically did. But then one must admit that humans can be bred just like

animals can be bred—no one would say that a dog breeder “denies dog

nature” because he studies dog breeds and methods of breeding, and knows

that therefore dog nature is not homogenous, that, within certain bounds, it

varies from breed to breed, that it changes in certain ways over time; or who

could say that a trainer of horses denies horse nature? Rather these are the

keenest observers and students of the nature of these animals. Strauss

certainly knew of the intense and keen interest of the ancient gentleman in

the matter of breeding dogs and horses—he points to Xenophon’s texts on

such matters

[cd]

—and knew for sure also of the ancient tendency to

understand human nature in an analogous way. I do not see by what

reasoning one claims that to believe in human nature, or even in nature as a

standard of judgment, one has to believe in a completely unchanging nature

that exists in the abstract and is entirely intellectualized, or that is entirely

homogenous. This may be a Godly nature—these are the words Strauss

uses at the end of the Nietzsche essay—but it is not human nature in

practice, nor the nature of any animal we know of. Supposedly in the

middle of claiming that Nietzsche replaces nature with history, Strauss

references an aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil (213) wherein

Nietzsche doesn’t even mention history; he mentions instead, blood and

breeding. In particular, the necessity for inherited virtues. However much

one may twist that very carnal and literal conception of nature into a

“historicization of nature”—by which rights Pindar and Plato as well would

be historicists—such a serious claim, if meant in earnest, surely can’t be left

as-is without any argument or elaboration.

The low or ignominious origin of the state or of the aristocratic

commonwealth in barbarism and conquest doesn’t negate either the nobility

of the virtues that are later cultivated, nor the fact that they are natural—

indeed Nietzsche repeatedly emphasizes that they are natural, a matter of

blood and body, of physical gesture even. Much commentary on Nietzsche

twists itself into convoluted arguments to make the claim that Nietzsche

attempts to replace the standard of nature with some other standard—

whether history or the Eternal Return or the past—either because it does not

see or does not want to talk about Nietzsche’s actual thoughts on nature.

It may finally be argued that, even if Nietzsche believes that human

nature exists, he is still a historicist because he evidently believes human

nature is changeable. And if human nature is changeable it therefore cannot

function as a “standard”; the virtues that Nietzsche seems to value then,

including nobility as such, are a product of “history” and therefore

Nietzsche is a historicist because his standard is drawn from history. There

is no fixed or natural standard that can function as a goal of human

aspiration and cultivation. The goal appears to be a historical accident and a

matter, at best, of human decision. This is, again, as if someone claimed a

horse or dog breeder, or someone who believes in natural and artificial

selection, is a “historicist.” Such a claim overstates the degree of

Nietzsche’s supposed belief in changeability, and it overstates the degree

also to which the excellences or virtues are said to be “accidents.” In fact

Nietzsche does not call them accidents, he merely points to their

“ignominious” origins in barbarism and cruelty—but for Nietzsche this is

not a moral condemnation. The horse breeder and trainer is able to

understand the way and degree to which a horse’s nature is “changeable” or,

more accurately, the degree to which it can be improved: the particular

excellences possible for a horse are apparent even in the mediocre or

unenhanced varieties with which the breeder might have to begin. These

excellences that are pursued in a breeding program are not a matter of

“decision” in the sense that is meant by a critique of Nietzsche as a

“historicist”; this is why a breeder does generally not try to breed a horse

with the particular excellences of a dog, or vice versa. It would seem that

the criticism of Nietzsche as a historicist is based on an understanding of

nature that denies or would like not to talk about observable nature.

More important—especially for understanding Strauss’ own

elaboration in his discussion with Kojeve—the criticism of Nietzsche as a

historicist on account of his belief in the “changeability” or the variability

of human nature, or the way in which standards are supposedly drawn

“from history,” overlooks the specific way in which he believes such

change takes place. He repeatedly speaks, as we have seen, about the

misbreeding of modern Europeans on account of the medieval clerisy’s lack

of knowledge of human nature, of the body. At another point he speaks of

the “improvers of mankind” as those who used techniques of breeding and

taming, and employed the weapon of the noble lie, to improve the human

specimen. At other times he emphasizes the ambition of philosophers, like

Plato, to be legislators, and he repeatedly speaks of the founders of peoples

in the same language that previous philosophers from Aristotle to Rousseau

had used about the legislator.

[cdi]

In other words, much of the historical

change Nietzsche speaks of originates in the minds of founders of peoples

or of great legislators. This is quite different from what is normally meant

by historicism, which assumes change on account of impersonal “forces”—

economic, technological, linguistic, and so forth—and which normally

assumes that the emergence of a people is in a bottom-up “organic” process

rather than in the political work of a great founder. The founders are

necessarily not determined by their time, but determine the horizon of a

people; they stand outside this horizon and have nature as a guide much in

the same way a horse breeder does. The legislator is the “greatest artist,”

and human nature is his material; he is as such limited by what he can

achieve with that material. The origin of apparent variability in human

nature, of the variety of virtues and excellences in the behavior of different

peoples or historical castes, is not just chance or history, and not the product

of emergent impersonal forces, but the deliberate work of “founders of

peoples,” who therefore had to possess knowledge of human nature and use

it as a standard while working with the material they actually had. Whatever

this may be, it is not a “historicist” position, nor one that replaces nature

with history as a standard.

It is to be supposed that Leo Strauss is aware of Nietzsche’s thoughts

on nature, but does not want, maybe for good reason, to openly talk about

them. He is, however content to hint. The last line in Strauss’ strange essay

on Nietzsche is on the vornehme Natur. This is often translated as “noble

nature”—the title of the chapter Strauss is talking about is “What is

Noble”—but Strauss goes out of his way to emphasize that Nietzsche uses

for “noble” the word vornehme and not simply “noble.”

[cdii]

Strauss never

really explains in English why Nietzsche uses this word; he only hints that

it is because “it is inseparable from extraction, origin, birth.” Strauss

therefore plays the same double joke: he encourages most of his readers to

see Nietzsche as a “historicist”; for, after all, isn’t the mistake of the

historicist that he confuses a phenomenon for its origin and its beginnings?

And yet the last word—birth—points emphatically to nature, nature in even

a literal or crude sense, as Nietzsche understands it. The vornehme is the

word for well-born: it is a form of the word “noble” that points, not to

“origin” in the abstract, but to nature and the noble as biological breeding.

If Strauss had discussed this matter openly, if he had attempted to refute

Nietzsche on this one matter openly, then one could say that his criticism of

Nietzsche, such as it is said to be, was comprehensive or at least genuine.

But to repeatedly avoid this problem, when it is so central to Nietzsche’s

understanding of nature, is a very strong suggestion that Strauss is pointing

here to something he’d rather not discuss but that is nevertheless of the

greatest import. Nietzsche’s resurrection of the ancient Greek conception of

nature is, I would claim, entirely genuine and not based on historicist

assumptions. It is the resurrection of the ancient idea of nature, the ancient

idea of the legislator, together with an explanation for why Platonism had

somewhat to “edit” and mask this idea as part of its exoteric moral and

political program. Strauss pretends that Nietzsche is a historicist, but the

telling part is that he avoids talking about the core of Nietzsche’s actual

ideas on nature while hinting at them. Strauss’ last word on Nietzsche is, in

German, vornehme Natur—well-born nature, begotten nature, bred nature.

b) Strauss vs. Kojeve on nature and history

A similar pattern holds when we look at Leo Strauss’ debate and

correspondence with the Hegelian Alexander Kojeve in On Tyranny. Strauss

and Kojeve, beginning from an analysis on Xenophon’s Hiero, talk about

philosophy and the problem of tyranny. Much of the discussion turns on

the position of philosophy and therefore on the problem of human nature in

society and history. Let us consider briefly Kojeve’s main argument and

Strauss’ response to it. In fact Kojeve explicitly at one point claims that the

philosopher and the tyrant are one and the same.

With some simplification, the main argument Kojeve makes is that

philosophy only has history, material history, as the surety of its search for

truth. Carried out in private, philosophy is not only ineffective, but deprives

the philosopher of the opportunity to test the truth of his conclusions, and

therefore to distinguish philosophy from madness. Carried out in any type

of “cloistered” group, among an elite for example, erases the danger of

descent into madness, but nevertheless still does not make for philosophy:

like a true historicist Kojeve essentially claims that the truth is that which

unfolds in the history of a society or in the history of mankind as such; that

what is true at one time may not be true at another, and that therefore any

philosophical elite or sect that does not interact with political society or

large or attempt to test its ideas in the course of history will study at most an

obsolete or ahistorical “truth,” and therefore not a truth at all. Since both

private and “elite” philosophizing is as such impossible, this leaves only

one option: philosophy can only be true philosophy when it is public, when

it is politically powerful and effective. It is only as a public and universal

educational enterprise that philosophy can affect history and therefore “test

out” its truths: history and society are the “laboratory,” so to speak, the

surety of philosophical investigation.

Such a public philosophy is necessarily indistinguishable from

political power, even tyrannical political power. The true philosopher seeks

political power or access to it in order to put his ideas into practice. He is

driven to this task by the desire for recognition: the desire for the broadest

possible recognition is not distinguishable from philosophy as the search for

truth. The philosopher and the tyrant are ultimately the same because their

function is indistinguishable from the desire for recognition, a desire that

can only be satisfied by the broadest possible recognition, if not universal

recognition; a recognition that, in both cases, can only be achieved by

political power, if not absolute political power.

Strauss, in opposition to Kojeve, holds to what Kojeve somewhat

caustically describes as the “ancient tradition” of philosophy. Strauss speaks

of human nature, which Kojeve, as a historicist, denies: humans, as opposed

to animals, have no fixed nature. In a letter to Strauss, Kojeve says the

following, maybe with the intention, half tongue-in-cheek, to provoke:

…I can only keep repeating the same thing. If there is something like “human nature,” then

you are surely right in everything. But to deduce from premises is not the same thing as to

prove these premises. And to infer premises from (anyway questionable) consequences is

always dangerous. Your Bible quote about the land of the fathers is already most problematic.

From it one can of course deduce a condemnation of collectivization in the USSR and

elsewhere. But with it one also justifies permanently preserving a Chinese peasant’s animal-

like starvation-existence (before Mao-Tse-Tung). Etc. etc.

But all this is hardly philosophy. The task of philosophy is to resolve the fundamental

question regarding “human nature.” And in that connection the question arises whether there is

not a contradiction between speaking about “ethics” and “ought” on one hand, and about

conforming to a “given” or “innate” human nature on the other. For animals, which

unquestionably have such a nature, are not morally “good” or “evil,” but at most healthy or

sick, wild or trained. One might conclude that it is therefore precisely ancient anthropology

that would lead to mass-training and eugenics.

[cdiii]

Kojeve in his actual essay connects this “ancient anthropology” and

ancient philosophy precisely with what he terms an “aristocratic prejudice”

and accuses Strauss of sharing the “aristocratic prejudice” of ancient

philosophy. In talking of the ancient tendency of philosophical sects to

“withdraw” into a small “elite” that excludes the “uninitiated,” Kojeve

outright says that,

Here again Strauss seems to follow Xenophon (who conforms to the ancient tradition) and to

justify this kind of behavior. The wise man, he says, “is satisfied with the approval of a small

minority.” He seeks only the approval of those who are “worthy,” and this can only be a very

small number. The philosopher will therefore have recourse to esoteric (preferably oral)

instruction, which permits him, among other things, to select the “best” and eliminate those

“of limited capacity” who are incapable of understanding hidden allusions and tacit

implications. I must say that here again I differ from Strauss and the ancient tradition he would

like to follow, which, in my opinion, rests on an aristocratic prejudice (perhaps characteristic

of a conquering people).

[cdiv]

In these two passages, Kojeve all but accuses Strauss of sharing

precisely the Nietzschean view I have tried to explain in this chapter.

Ancient philosophy, especially in its educational and public practices, rests

on an “aristocratic prejudice” characteristic of a “conquering people”;

Kojeve explicitly connects the origin of ancient philosophy (of which he

does not approve) to an act of primitive conquest and therefore the

exploitation of a subject people. The philosophical practice of esotericism,

and the very idea of the philosophical school in search for truth outside the

city is connected by Kojeve not only with the exclusivity of aristocracy, but

with its violence. The “anthropology” of this ancient philosophy based on

“aristocratic prejudice” is precisely what leads to “mass training” and

“eugenics”—Kojeve here uses markedly Nietzschean language and

imagery. He says the problem, given the ancient conception of nature, is not

of good or evil, but of “healthy or sick, wild or trained.” This is Nietzschean

language.

[cdv]

The element that connects the two is the standard of nature or

teaching of nature, which is “the fundamental question” for the task of

philosophy. If nothing else, then Kojeve at least seems aware that, prior to

Strauss, Nietzsche made entirely similar claims regarding the relationship

between nature, philosophy, esotericism, and in turn of these to the state and

to society.

Strauss does not answer the provocation; he nowhere answers Kojeve

on either of these two points, nor does he directly address Nietzsche on the

dark roots or primitive preconditions for the philosophical life. Strauss

speaks resolutely and single-mindedly of this philosophical life, and not of

its precondition. In closing it may be profitable to consider one point where

Strauss, in trying to refute Kojeve, says,

…the philosopher as such is concerned with nothing but the quest for wisdom and kindling or

nourishing the love of wisdom in those who are by nature capable of it…insofar as the

philosopher…becomes concerned with being recognized by others, he ceases to be a

philosopher…the concern with recognition detracts from the singleness of purpose which is

characteristic of the philosopher. It blurs his vision. This fact is not at variance with the other

fact that high ambition is frequently a sign by which one can recognize the potential

philosopher. But to the extent to which high ambition is not transformed into full devotion to

the quest for wisdom, and to the pleasures which accompany that quest, he will not become an

actual philosopher.

[cdvi]

Expressed in reasonable and calm language, this is nevertheless

entirely in keeping with Nietzsche’s own opinions on the relationship

between the philosopher and the world—the emphasis on the singleness of

purpose is telling—and also Plato’s words on the potential philosopher at

Republic 491a ff ; the word used, again, for the nature of the potential

philosopher is the erromenesteros, a vehement and overweening nature, and

the same nature that, if corrupted, will become the tyrant. That Strauss,

unlike Nietzsche, chooses not to tunnel into this phenomenon, or at least not

to expose the effects of his tunneling to others, that he chooses not to pry

further into what is necessary that there may exist those who are “by nature

capable” of receiving the joys of philosophy—that, perhaps, he trusts in the

innocence and copiousness of nature to provide for what is needful—may

be a result of that famous Straussian discretion, the Xenophontic or Austen-

ian sense that “it is noble to remember the good.” And this Straussian turn,

at least as a matter of rhetoric, may have something to do with the perceived

failure of Nietzsche’s own exoteric project. Nietzsche’s hopes for a revival

of the arts and of philosophy appear, after all, to have been thwarted.

Strauss’ departure from the Nietzschean defense of philosophy may, in the

end, also have something to do with Strauss’ explicitly and perhaps strictly

educational enterprise—on account of which an overemphasis on the

“preconditions” of philosophy, not to speak of its brutal or dark beginnings,

would actually take away from the display of the practice of philosophy, a

display that serves as such the function of enticement or seduction to

philosophy. One is left to wonder, however, in light of the failure of the last-

ditch Nietzschean project of revitalization—to what extent Strauss himself

believed a revival of philosophy as such was possible in the modern world.

For, as he makes clear in his exchange with Kojeve, he is well aware that

there will be no philosophy in the universal and homogenous state, or in

anything like such a state. There are, after all, preconditions for philosophy

to exist and therefore also limits to the emergence of the philosophical

nature.

CONCLUSION

The chief intention of this study has been to offer an explanation for

why the ancient city perceived philosophers as dangerous and as associated

with tyrants—to argue that there was something to the ancient prejudice that

philosophy was associated with tyranny. I believe I have more than

established that the ancient city, for all its primitive obscurantism, at least

had a point in suspecting philosophy of associations with tyranny and with

criminal political doctrines. For it is immaterial from the point of view of

political life understood in the ancient sense whether philosophy merely

risks or actually intends the production of tyrants.

In attempting to establish the reasonableness of the ancient judgment

regarding tyranny and philosophy, a subordinate task has been to provide an

alternative history for the emergence of both tyranny and political

philosophy—alternative, that is, both to the classical view and to the

modern restatement of the classical view as appears in the books of Leo

Strauss. Since tyranny, or at least philosophy, is acknowledged to have the

idea of nature as the indispensible precondition for its emergence, the thesis

has therefore focused on the origin of the idea of nature. And it has been

part of the task here to find this origin in the way of life, mores, or standard

underlying aristocratic regimes, and in subsequent intellectual refinements

of this standard. At the most general level this approach can be described as

an attempt to replay Nietzsche’s reading of antiquity, to find the ancient

sources for Nietzsche’s understanding of the origins of philosophy, and to

understand Nietzsche’s political thought as such. But in the process of

trying to think through Nietzsche’s political claims and read his sources—

one can only hope that some justice has been done to the remarkable depth

of his teaching—some novel contributions have, I believe, been made.

First of all, the thesis has connected two separate claims—on one hand

the claim by Nietzsche that philosophy (and tyranny) has its origin in a

decaying aristocratic regime; on the other the claim, by Strauss and by

classical political philosophy, that philosophy has the idea of nature as its

indispensible precondition. The link between these claims has been to read

the origin of nature in what Nietzsche calls the breeding and training

practices of the aristocratic regime. The idea of nature and ultimately

philosophy itself is argued then, through Nietzsche, to arise out of a

primitive understanding of nature as breeding or biology. Accordingly a

second and closely related contribution of this thesis is a novel reading of

Pindar: the concept of nature is seen to have its origin in the political

regime of Archaic Greek aristocracy, and indeed to represent an abstraction

or “distillation” of the standard underlying the aristocratic regime. In this

context an entirely new reading of Plato is also offered—a “Nietzschean”

reading as an alternative, not only to contemporary academic readings of

Plato and of the Gorgias, but to the Straussian account of the intention

behind Plato’s esotericism. Platonic exotericism is understood to be a

protective armor that, however, hides and protects a Calliclean conception

of nature and of the place of the philosopher in political society.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BGE: Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann

Vintage Press 1999; trans. Ian Johnston, electronic edition:

http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/beyondgoodandevil_tofc.htm

GB: Frazer, James George, Sir. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan,

1922; Bartleby.com, 2000

GM: Nietzsche, F. Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and RJ

Hollingdale, Vintage Books 1989; and trans. Ian Johnston electronic

edition: http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/genealogytofc.htm

GS: Nietzsche, F. The Gay Science trans. Walter Kaufmann Random House

1991; trans. Thomas Common, Digireads Press 2009

IPP: Strauss, Leo. Introduction to Political Philosophy ed. Hilail Gildin

Wayne State 1989

NRH: Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. University of Chicago,

1953

OT: Strauss, Leo. On Tyranny: Including the Strauss-Kojeve

Correspondence. ed. Gourevitch U. of Chicago 2000

SCR: Strauss, Leo. Spinoza’s Critique of Religion U. of Chicago Press

1997

SPPP: Strauss Leo, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. University of

Chicago, 1983

TCM: Strauss, Leo. The City and Man. U. of Chicago 1978

TWI: Nietzsche, F. Twilight of the Idols trans. Walter Kaufmann Penguin

Press 1977 and trans. R.J. Hollingdale Penguin Press 1990

Translations from the Greek, whenever they have been used, have often

been changed considerably by me for greater clarity.

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NOTES

[i]

Athenaeus Deipnosophists xiii “But at Athens, Cecrops was the first person who married a man to

one wife only, when before his time relationships had taken place at random, and men had had their

wives in common. On which account it was, as some people state, that Cecrops was called διφυὴς

['of double nature'], because before his time people did not know who their fathers were, by reason of

the numbers of men who might have been so…"

[ii]

Plutarch, Life of Solon 20

[iii]

Plutarch Life of Romulus has a long central section 14-20 covering this event, in which it is clear

that the ethnogenesis of Rome—the union of Romulus’ warband and the Sabine people—is in the

abduction of the Sabine women and subsequent conciliation at the place called Comitium “the

coming together.” This is also the establishment of Roman marriage rites and marriage ideals, see,

e.g., Robert Brown, “Livy's Sabine Women and the Ideal of Concordia” Transactions of the

American Philological Association (1974-) Vol. 125 (1995), pp. 291-319; see also Livy Book 1.9-13,

especially chapter 13 where the Sabine women bring the two peoples together.

[iv]

See also George Frazer, The Golden Bough ch. 13 “The Kings of Rome and Alba”: “Such a

spring is said to have gushed from the foot of the great oak at Dodona, and from its murmurous flow

the priestess drew oracles. Among the Greeks a draught of water from certain sacred springs or wells

was supposed to confer prophetic powers. This would explain the more than mortal wisdom with

which, according to tradition, Egeria inspired her royal husband or lover Numa. When we remember

how very often in early society the king is held responsible for the fall of rain and the fruitfulness of

the earth, it seems hardly rash to conjecture that in the legend of the nuptials of Numa and Egeria we

have a reminiscence of a sacred marriage which the old Roman kings regularly contracted with a

goddess of vegetation and water for the purpose of enabling him to discharge his divine or magical

functions.”

[v]

See Suetonius Life of Augustus 34, Tacitus Annals 3.23-9 on the Lex Pappia Poppaea and the

other leges Iuliae

[vi]

Leo Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” The Rebirth of Classical

Political Rationalism U. Chicago Press 1989; interesting that, remarking on Strauss’ words on

Nietzsche and the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem, Susan Orr says of this passage, “It is of

interest that the singular thing that most think of as the Jewish contribution to civilization is not

mentioned by either Nietzsche or Strauss, i.e., their insistence that their God is one and absolute. The

polytheistic nature of other ancient religions is not an unimportant distinction. Yet Strauss does not

refer  to  this.  Our  first  view  of  Jerusalem  and  Athens,  therefore,  fails  to  mention  either  reason  or
revelation  and  instead  refers  to  what  appear  to  be  secondary  considerations  of  friendship  and
family.”  Jerusalem  and  Athens:  Reason  and  Revelation  in  the  work  of  Leo  Strauss  Rowman and
Littlefield 1995, p. 43; my emphasis added.
[vii]
 I learned this view from David Sidorsky, unpublished draft on “Poetic Justice in the Hexateuch”
[viii]
 Tacitus Histories V.2-5
[ix]
 See note 5 above; also F. Roger Devlin Sexual Utopia in Power, to whose profound analysis of
modern marriage I am much in debt: “Traditionally, a man has been expected to marry. Bachelorhood
was positively forbidden in some ancient European societies, including  the  early  Roman  republic.
Others offered higher social status for husbands and relative disgrace for bachelors. There seems to
have  been  a  fear  that  the  sexual  instinct  alone  was  inadequate  to  insure  a  sufficient  number  of
offspring. Another seldom mentioned motive for the expectation of marriage was husbands’ envy of
bachelors: ‘Why should that fellow be free and happy when I  am  stuck  working  my  life  away  to
support  an  ungrateful  creature  who  nags  me?’  Strange  as  it  sounds  to  modern  ears,  the  Christian
endorsement  of  celibacy  was  a  liberalization  of  sexual  morality;  it  recognized  there  could  be
legitimate motives for remaining unmarried. One social function of the celibate religious orders was
to give that minority of men and women unsuited for or disinclined to marriage a socially acceptable
way of avoiding it.”
[x]
 See Bruce Thornton Eros:  The  Myth  of  Ancient  Greek  Sexuality  Westview  Press  1997,  pg.  72
where the common ancient Greek view that women are “fuck-crazy” (in words of Aristophanes) is
explained.
[xi]
 Paraphrasing Allan Bloom’s  view  on  this  matter,  especially  at  Closing  of  the  American  Mind
Simon & Schuster 2008 pgs. 129-31
[xii]
 This is the view of Kay Hymowitz in “Manning Up: How the Rise of Women has Turned Men
into Boys,” Basic Books 2012, and of Charles Murray in many public statements. It’s the view of an
older generation of social conservatives who would like to place the blame for the current collapse in
the marriage market exclusively on the shoulders of men. The comprehensive criticism of this view
may be  found in F. Roger  Devlin’s “The  Sexual Counter-Revolution and  Its Limitations” with  his
review of Wendy Shalit’s “Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not
Bad to be Good” Random House 2007
[xiii]
 This is almost the definition of status in animal ethology for social animals.
[xiv]
 Law  of  Manu  Buhler  trans.,  see  ch.  1.112 for  the  first  mention of  substantive laws  after  the
initiation to the Veda; all of ch. 3; also Chitra Tiwari “Sudras in Manu” Delhi 1963
[xv]
 “Ever suspicious of Han Chinese, the Qing rulers put into effect measures aimed at preventing
the  absorption  of  the  Manchus  into  the  dominant  Han  Chinese  population.  Han  Chinese  were
prohibited  from  migrating  into  the  Manchu  homeland,  and  Manchus  were  forbidden  to  engage  in
trade or  manual  labor. Intermarriage between  the  two groups was  forbidden.  In  many government

positions a system of dual appointments was used—the Chinese appointee was required to do the

substantive work and the Manchu to ensure Han loyalty to Qing rule.” Robert L. Worden, Andrea

Matles Savada and Ronald E. Dolan, editors. China: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the

Library of Congress, 1987

[xvi]

Recent treatments of this matter, some good, some bad, are too many to count. For example, see

María Elena Martinez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial

Mexico. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2008

[xvii]

See the collected papers of W.D. Hamilton on the evolution of social behavior and altruism;

Hamilton W.D. (2005) Narrow roads of Gene Land, vol. 3: Last Words (with essays by coauthors, ed.

M. Ridley). Oxford University Press, Oxford, and the excellent commentary on his work by the

anonymous commentator “@hbdchick” who is now being cited by various studies, e.g., Akbari,

Mahsa and Bahrami-Rad, Duman and Kimbrough, Erik O., “Kinship, Fractionalization and

Corruption” (June 30, 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2847222 ; much of the

commentary here and in the next paragraph also depends on John Hajnal’s seminal 1965 paper on

marriage patterns in Europe, Glass; Eversley, eds. (1965). "European Marriage Patterns in

Perspective". Population in History, Essays in Historical Demography. London: Edward Arnold, the

origin of the idea of the “Hajnal line.”

[xviii]

For discussion of ideas in this paragraph, and of matters important to my general case here,

see the Hajnal paper referenced in the previous note, and also especially Gregory Clark’s two books

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton University Press 2009 and The

Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, Princeton University Press 2015.

[xix]

Walter Kaufmann Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist Princeton University Press

1972, pg. 305, “If one looks for a philosophic precedent for Nietzsche’s strange concern with

breeding one will have to seek it not in his German predecessors, but in Plato...” Kaufmann is made

very uncomfortable by this passage from Nietzsche: “There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of

blood. (I am not speaking here of the little word "von" or of the Almanach de Gotha [Genealogy

reference book of the royal families of Europe.]: parenthesis for asses.) When one speaks of

‘aristocrats of the spirit,’ reasons are usually not lacking for concealing something; as is well known,

it is a favorite term among ambitious Jews. For spirit alone does not make noble; rather, there must

be something to ennoble the spirit.— What then is required? Blood.” Will to Power 942 but

Kaufmann’s apologetic efforts that follow become a little hard to believe. Actually the point of view

Nietzsche expresses in this note, in which a natural hierarchy is contrasted to the conventional one is

a very precise restatement of the “aristocratic radical” attitude one could likely attribute to Socrates’

student Critias (as well as to Socrates’ interlocutor Callicles in the Gorgias), which I treat in an

appendix to Chapter 3 of this book.

[xx]

Aristotle Politics bk II

[xxi]
 Aristotle Politics  bk  VII,  16; significant  that  it  is  in  the  Politics  that  Aristotle  takes  up  this
matter, as the concern of the legislator.
[xxii]
  H.D. Rankin, “Plato’s Eugenic Euphemia and Apothesis in Republic Book V” Hermes 93 4
1965,  p  417,  in  “The  selective  breeding  of  sporting  and  ornamental  animals  was  one  of  the
characteristic  hobbies  of  an  Athenian  gentleman.  Glaucon,  Plato’s  brother,  was  an  enthusiastic
breeder  of  animals;  Plato’s  step‐father  Pyrilampes  was  renowned  for  his  peacocks.  Once  it  is
accepted that the analogy of animal breeding has a relevance to the procreation of mankind, it begins
to seem paradoxical that human eugenics are so neglected…”
[xxiii]
  Unpublished  note  in  Roberto  Zapperi,  ed.  Ecrits  politiques  (1985),  p.  75,  see  e.g.  at
http://www.indiana.edu/~b356/texts/Sieyes%20notes.html  ;  William  H.  Sewell,  Jr.,  A  Rhetoric  of
Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and "What Is the Third Estate?". Durham: Duke University
Press, 1994 at p. 153 considers this a serious compromise with the “democratic energy” of Sieyes’
argument in the pamphlet.
[xxiv]
  See  e.g.  https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/891299/North-Korea-news-latest-defector-
abortion-prison-human-rights-abuse-united-nations
[xxv]
 Individual and free-market “eugenics” can happen, and does happen with high frequency today
by  the  social  mechanism  described  here,  but  it  results  possibly  ultimately  also  in  dysgenics.  For
example, allele linked with schizophrenia may also increase creativity in some cases—unknown for
now  one  way  or  another;  similarly  alleles  linked  with  criminality  may  have  other  important
functions. From the point of view of an individual mother it may make sense to refuse to select out
such  with  abortion  or  embryo  selection,  but  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  group  important  and
valuable qualities would gradually be lost, resulting in a dysgenic stolidity. And so forth. But this can
and would of course happen under state-directed “eugenics” also.
[xxvi]
  see  e.g.,  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/12/07/genes-linked-homosexuality-
discovered-scientists/ but this is likely only the beginning.
[xxvii]
  Herbert  Marcuse’s  Eros  and  Civilization  promises  a  society  much  like  the  post-putsch
situation in Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen. The demand for equality can’t simply stop at the equal
distribution of material goods according to need, but must extend necessarily to sexual satisfaction,
the greatest “material” (and more than material) need of all, which, however, can only be satisfied by
access to what is necessarily a minority, the desirable. The attempt on Marcuse’s (and others’) part is
to solve this, or obscure this, by diffusing the sexual instinct with regard to practice and object.
[xxviii]
 A well-known matter, but see e.g., the discussion at the beginning of Agadjanian, Victor. “Is
‘Abortion Culture’ Fading in the Former Soviet Union? Views about Abortion and Contraception in
Kazakhstan.”  Studies  in  Family  Planning,  vol.  33,  no.  3,  2002,  pp.  237–248.  JSTOR,  JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/3181116
[xxix]
 The accounts in mass media and elsewhere are countless, but for an excellent recent example,
that received much attention, consider Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” in the Dec. 11 2017 issue of

the New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person
[xxx]
 The argument, already in The Bell Curve, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Free Press
1994  is  further  fleshed  out  in  Coming  Apart,  Crown  Forum  2012;  see  also
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/29/new-academic-study-links-rising-income-
inequality-to-assortive-mating/
[xxxi]
 Jacob Burckhardt The Greeks and Greek Civilization, trans. Stern, St. Martin’s Griffin 1998, p.
162
[xxxii]
  F.  Nietzsche,  Zarathustra  “On  the  Thousand  and  One  Goals,”  trans.  Kaufmann  in  The
Portable Nietzsche Penguin Books 1982, p. 170
[xxxiii]
 Burckhardt The Greeks and Greek Civilization, p. 161
[xxxiv]
  Clement Miscellanies  VI 9, as appears in Sprague, The Older Sophists 1972
[xxxv]
  The  end  of  Nietzsche’s  early  essay  on  The  Greek  State,  see  e.g.,  a  new  translation  at
http://www.academia.edu/7507299/Introduction_to_The_Greek_State_followed_by_translation_of_
Nietzsche_The_Greek_State_
[xxxvi]
 This at least is my understanding of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer Stanford 1998, which
essentially  makes  the point  that  the  understanding  of  nature  I  present  in  this  book  is  the  “secret”
behind  all  of  Western  politics  since  Aristotle,  and  that  it  culminates  in  Auschwitz,  with  the
concentration camp as the “hidden nomos” of the West. I may be exaggerating—and it is certain that
Agamben’s understanding of bios and zoe are quite different from what I cover here as phusis—but
the “ideological” thrust of his argument is nevertheless this. The same point is made in a different
way by many others, including, e.g., Kojeve in the quotation that heads this introduction, and most
recently,  in  a  very  different  way,  by  Mark  Zuckerberg’s  sister  Donna  Zuckerberg  planned  book,
which makes the argument that the Classics are behind “white supremacy” and that Classical studies
has a “Fascism problem.”
[xxxvii]
 The third chapter of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy includes an important discussion of this
figure, and the idea lurks also behind his essay on the Greek state.
[xxxviii]
 James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure DNA, had to sell his Nobel prize and was fired
from  the  lab  he  built  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2853855/Scientist-discovered-DNA-
forced-sell-Nobel-prize-shunned-inflammatory-race-comments.html  after  saying  that  differences
grounded in biology exist between human races. He was furthermore ritually denounced by others in
his  field  in  a  manner  reminiscent  of  what  happened  to  Soviet  scientists  who  didn’t  submit  to
Lysenkoism.
[xxxix]
 This may be so even when a race is not “traditionally defined,” which is to say, the traditional
definitions  of  race  may  be  slightly  off,  but  the  natural  cleavages  exist  between  populations  that,
before  1492,  had  long  been  separated  by  natural  barriers  that  were  for  the  most  part  unpassable
(oceans, the Sahara desert, the Himalayas being the three great examples). A comprehensive list of

studies on racial differences in immunity, metabolism, and other nontrivial physical qualities would

be tedious and beyond the scope of this introduction, but excellent compilations for beginners can be

found in Nicholas Wade’s Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, Penguin Press

2014, and also in Cochran and Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization

Accelerated Human Evolution, Basic Books 2010; see also David Reich’s Who We Are and How We

Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

[xl]

See, e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/science/10jews.html and the two studies cited.

[xli]

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man; and Selection in Relation to Sex, Vol. 1 London: John

Murray 1871 p. 56-7, 168-9, 174, 216 as well as many of his private letters include passages that

would horrify modern people who think Darwin didn’t mean for his theory to be applied to mankind,

and specifically to human races. His cousin Francis Galton is the founder of modern eugenics.

[xlii]

Donald Kagan The Great Dialogue: History of Greek Political Thought from Homer to

Polybius Praeger 1986 makes this point in the opening chapters; this book also is the source of the

observation (to be found in Burckhardt as well, in his chapter on the Agonal Age in the book cited

above) that Greek tyrants, especially from Sicily, felt strong pressure to conform to aristocratic

ideals, and don’t fully fit our image of the tyrant as the champion of the people against the nobility.

[xliii]

Luc de Heusch’s “The Symbolic Mechanisms of Sacred Kingship: Rediscovering Frazer,”

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol 3. no. 2 1997:

“Though it appears in diverse historical forms, sacred kingship always has a common theme: the

body‐fetish of the chief or king articulates the natural or social orders. It is a body condemned to be

sacrificed before its natural end, and which, in the event of calamity, will be society’s scapegoat. It is

just as Frazer envisaged it.”; see Joan Piggott, The Emergence of Japanese Kingship Stanford 1997;

see the recent “Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty” Alexei Yurchak

Representations Vol. 129, No. 1 (Winter 2015) (pp. 116-.‐ 157) p. 131 and note 73 where Frazer’s

enduring legacy and the legitimacy of his observations are briefly mentioned.

[xliv]

This is Kojeve’s formulations of the origins of philosophy in his debate with Strauss in their

correspondence On Tyranny U. Chicago 2000: “I must say that here again I differ from Strauss and

the ancient tradition he would like to follow, which, in my opinion, rests on an aristocratic prejudice

(perhaps characteristic of a conquering people).”

[xlv]

Consider the beginning of Burckhardt’s chapter on the Agonal Age, from The Greeks and Greek

Civilization: “The time we shall describe as the period of the agon extends from the end o f the

Dorian migration almost to the end of the sixth century b . c .; it might well be called the Middle

Ages of Greek history. The division is arbitrary, like all divisions, but will prove useful to us; we are

obliged to organize our material and select categories as best we can. This period is generally

characterized first by the alternating domination of the polis by aristocracy and tyranny; secondly,

along with the firm belief in breeding, by the peculiar ideal of kalokagathia, the unity of nobility,

wealth and excellence as the distinguishing mark of the Greeks, heralded by Pindar. The nobility

reigned everywhere, even in the states that were not transformed by the Dorian migration. The right

of the overlords was founded on superior blood, greater landed wealth, skill in arms, and knowledge

of the sacrifices and the laws. The banausic, that is tilling the soil, crafts, shopkeeping, commerce

and the like, was despised. The only occupation fit for a nobleman was the practice of arms or work

for the games or the state, not work concerned with the necessities o f life. Masses yearning to be free

were encouraged to emigrate to the colonies where they became aristocrats in their turn. This nobility

was neither a scattered rural squirearchy (Junkertum) nor a military caste (Rittertum); it was more

nearly comparable to the patriarchate in mediaeval cities, particularly the Italian - a social group

living together in the city and taking an energetic part in its administration, while at the same time

constituting its society; the ethos of the agon would have sufficed to unite such a group even in the

absence of other factors.” The importance of the worldview of this aristocracy for the later

development of political philosophy was at times noted, see, e.g. “The essentially aristocratic idea

that a race must be preserved by inbreeding and special training [to be found in Pindar and Theognis]

was worked out in Sparta above all, and also by the great educational theorists of the fourth

century…it is enough meanwhile to say that both in Sparta and in the theories of Plato and Aristotle

this ideal was extended beyond the limits of one class, and became part of the general Greek ideal

that the city‐state is the educator of all its citizens.” Werner Jaeger Paideia Oxford U. Press 1939 and

1967 trans. Highet

[xlvi]

Among them, the treatments of Tarnopolsky, Stauffer, and Ranasinghe are all shown to be

based on an unwillingness to deal with Callicles’ arguments, and on the assumption that he must be

wrong, missing also Callicles’ allusions, and the dramatic peak of the dialogue as a whole. They are,

in my view, exercises in wishfulness, wishing that the pious Socrates must be right and that our

fundamentally egalitarian politics must therefore have philosophical support. The dialogue does show

egalitarianism to have, or to need, religious support.

[xlvii]

The most dramatic statement, full of meaning, is to be found in Nietzsche’s claim at Beyond

Good and Evil 7 about Epicurus’ thoughts on Plato and the Platonists: 7. How malicious

philosophers can be! I know of nothing more stinging than the joke Epicurus took the liberty of

making on Plato and the Platonists; he called them Dionysiokolakes. In its original sense, and on the

face of it, the word signifies "Flatterers of Dionysius"—consequently, tyrants' accessories and lick-

spittles; besides this, however, it is as much as to say, "They are all ACTORS, there is nothing

genuine about them" (for Dionysiokolax was a popular name for an actor). And the latter is really the

malignant reproach that Epicurus cast upon Plato: he was annoyed by the grandiose manner, the mise

en scene style of which Plato and his scholars were masters—of which Epicurus was not a master!

He, the old school-teacher of Samos, who sat concealed in his little garden at Athens, and wrote three

hundred books, perhaps out of rage and ambitious envy of Plato, who knows! Greece took a hundred

years to find out who the garden-god Epicurus really was. Did she ever find out?”

[xlviii]

Aeschines Against Timarchus

[xlix]
 The argument, as I will show, is implicit in Nietzsche, but for some recent unrelated treatments
see, e.g., William Desmond Philosopher-Kings of  Antiquity  Bloomsbury 2011 ch.3  “From Plato  to
Plutarch”
[l]
 Especially Renato Cristi, Nietzsche on Theognis of Megara University of Wales Press 2015, which
takes on all the main “anti-political” readings of Nietzsche in turn.
[li]
 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the
Alt-Right, Zero Books 2017
[lii]
  See,  e.g.,  Harvey  Mansfield  Manliness  Yale  University  Press  2006,  which  makes  use  of
neuroscience and other studies.
[liii]
  For  the  general  outline  of  this  literature  review  I  am  indebted  to  Robert  Drews,  “The  First
Tyrants in Greece,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1972), pp. 129-
144 an article I cite again below.
[liv]
 Percy Neville Ure, The Origin of Tyranny Cambridge 1922
[lv]
 See e.g., Claude Mossé La Tyrannie dans la Grèce antique Paris 1969; Drews cites M. Nilsson in
a 1929 article for the modern statement of this claim, but in my opinion it is more interesting to note
here that both Aristotle, Politics  IV  and more  recently  Victor  Davis  Hanson, The  Western  Way  of
War:  Infantry  Battle  in  Classical  Greece  Univ.  of  California  Press  2000  (see  also,  Warfare  and
Agriculture in Classical Greece), consider the shift to heavy infantry as a precondition for middle-
class  republican  constitutions;  but  one  could  argue  perhaps  that  “tyranny”  represented  an
intermediate stage.
[lvi]
 A. Andrewes The  Greek  Tyrants  Prometheus  1956;  it  should be  noted that  in a  very general
sense  these  theories  somewhat  support  the  Aristotelian  model:  the  tyrant  is  the  champion  of  the
people  against  the  nobility  become  arrogant;  and  indeed,  as  Drews  points  out,  late  19
th
  century
scholarship had the overt intention of supporting the Aristotelian model, albeit in a very simplified
version I would add.
[lvii]
  Drews  also  makes  a  convincing  case  that  currency  was  invented  as  a  means  for  the  new
usurpers to effect a regular payment of precious materials to his mercenaries.
[lviii]
 See Drews 1972 (note 1) for the insights summarized in this paragraph. He also cites Berve
Die  Tyrannis  bei  den  Griechen  Munich  1967  and  notes  that  he  “quite  rightly  reminds  us  of  the
seventh and sixth century texts which characterize the tyrant as an egotist lusting after great wealth
and power and as the epitome of hubris.”
[lix]
 See, e.g., Juan Linz Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes Boulder 2000 for a typical modern
approach,  although  countless  similar  examples  could  be  noted.  For  a  deterministic  (economic)
account of the development of modern dictatorship, the standard today is Barrington Moore, Social
Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy Cambridge 1966; for the latter distinction on the confusion
of modern definitions, see Leo Strauss On Tyranny 2000
[lx]
 Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1973

[lxi]
  ibid  chapter  13  “Ideology  and  Terror:  A  Novel  Form  of  Government”  p.  468  where  the
connection to scientific character is explicitly made.
[lxii]
  Such,  for  example,  is  the  recent work  by  Waller  R.  Newell,  Tyranny:  A  New  Interpretation
Cambridge  University  Press,  2013;  Newell  similarly  places  the  ultimate  origins  of  modern
totalitarianism, which he likewise argues is distinct from ancient tyranny, in the modern attempt at a
conquest of nature. Insofar as he focuses on the motivation of the tyrant—the focus of the ancient
approach—Newell  makes  the  case  that  the  modern  tyrant  is  characterized  by  an  overwhelming
measure of thumos,  as opposed to the covetous, lustful  ancient  tyrant  motivated  by  eros. It  is  not
clear, however, that this  distinction can fully be made in the case of ancient tyrants. While in  this
thesis the role of eros both for tyrannical and philosophic motivation is treated at length, yet on the
other hand one can think of several ancient examples of tyrants—the Spartan general Clearchus, for
example—who  by  far  seem  possessed  by  spiritedness  rather  than  lust  (see  below,  Xenophon  and
Diodorus on Clearchus). It is not clear that this alone is enough to account for the difference between
modern and ancient tyrannical types.
[lxiii]
  Samuel  Huntington  Political  Order  in  Changing  Societies  Yale  U.  Press  2006;  Linz  also
addresses Huntington’s work in making the case for modern authoritarianism based on mass party
mobilization.
[lxiv]
 Leo Strauss, Alexander Kojève On Tyranny U. Chicago 2000
[lxv]
 Strauss and Kojève focus on the “desire for recognition,” of Hegelian fame. The original and
less democratic word would be philotimia, love of honor, etc., and the desire to win kleos, fame, the
motivation of the heroes in the Iliad.  The  idea that  this is  a universal  desire would,  I think,  have
seemed strange to an ancient audience.
[lxvi]
 This is the line, perhaps ironic, taken by Strauss in On Tyranny, see especially his response to
Voegelin’s  review,  remarks  on  “post-constitutional”  or  Caesaristic  rule  and  why  ancient  political
philosophers would not have even mentioned this category, for prudential reasons.
[lxvii]
 See e.g., Stephen A. Stertz, “Themistius: a Hellenic Philosopher-Statesman in the Christian
Roman Empire,” The Classical  Journal, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Apr. - May, 1976), pp. 349-358; although
this tradition is well-known, no citation should be necessary; it is connected to the list of imperial
virtues. See also Kantorowicz, The King’s Two  Bodies 1957 on the development of the king as the
“embodied law.”
[lxviii]
 For a good example of this see Arlene W. Saxonhouse, “The Tyranny of Reason in the World
of the Polis,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 1261-1275
[lxix]
 Marcel Gauchet, The  Disenchantment  of  the  World,  Princeton  1999  and  L’Avènement  de  la
démocratie, Gallimard 2007; see the review by Francis Fukuyama in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 77, No. 3
(May - Jun., 1998), p. 131, where the reliance on Nietzsche and Heidegger is emphasized, and see
Gauchet’s own vol. II of Gallimard 2007, The Crisis of Liberalism, p. 43 where Nietzsche is at once
mentioned as the writer who first predicted the crisis of liberalism and also criticized for not going

far enough in ridding himself of a religious orientation. Nietzsche’s heirs, Husserl and Heidegger, are
similarly criticized for  an attempt  to recapture the vitality or  authenticity of  the pre-modern mind.
Gauchet seems concerned about neopaganism,  or the attempt to return to paganism,  as a potential
threat to liberal democracy. The political motivation of his project—an overt political project of some
kind  is  very  common  in  almost  all  contemporary  studies  of  the  “premodern”  mind—is  the
preservation of the modern French left-liberal order, a motivation he is quite explicit about. In this
connection most relevant is Gauchet’s debate with Pierre Manent, as discussed by Warren Breckman,
“Democracy between Disenchantment and Political Theology: French Post-Marxism and the Return
of Religion,” New German Critique Duke U. No. 94, (Winter, 2005), pp. 72-105, see especially p.
100-2:
The  history  of  the  disenchantment  of  the  world  served  as  a  vehicle  for  Gauchet  to  express  a
generation's disenchantment with its former political commitments…Gauchet's reply [to Manent] had
less  to  do  with  the  relative  historical  merits  of  their  respective  positions  than  with  contemporary
politics: “a sober view of democratic development, conducted on the base of a religious genealogy,
permits the simultaneous rebuttal of ultra-democratic optimism, blind to the obstacles that lie in its
route,  and  of  conservative  pessimism,  obsessed  exclusively  by  the  factors  of  dissolution  and  the
inviability  of  an  individualist  order.”  …Here  a  religious  genealogy  serves  the  normalization  and
stabilization  of  a  liberal  democratic  order…He  directed  his  argument…against  modernist  and
postmodernist  celebrations  of  paganism…The  ideological  reorientation  of  French  intellectual  life,
which  began  with  the  rejection  of  Marxism…melts  into  the  claim  for  a  left-liberal  consensus…
Gauchet’s ambitious book confirmed that “the revolution is over.”
[lxx]
 Vander Waerdt 1994 pg. 277
[lxxi]
 NRH 81-2
[lxxii]
 Hume Natural History of Religion, section II “Origin of Polytheism”
[lxxiii]
 SCR 38-41
[lxxiv]
 TCM 240-1
[lxxv]
 NRH p. 73-6 see end, “let us hasten back from these awful depths to a superficiality…”
[lxxvi]
 SPPP p. 182
[lxxvii]
  Frazer  indeed  begins  his  investigations  into  the  character  of  the  primitive  mind  from  an
example emphasized by Hume himself regarding the King of the Wood at the Temple of Diana at
Aricia: “In the temple of Diana at Aricia near Rome, whoever murdered the present priest was legally
entitled to be installed his successor. A very singular institution! For, however barbarous and bloody
the common superstitions often are to the laity, they usually turn to the advantage of the holy order.”
Hume History Section IX
[lxxviii]
 Nietzsche BGE 252, Hume (along with Locke) is a “debasement” of philosophy. It is well
known that Nietzsche’s ire is drawn especially toward the English history  of morality and  English

biology,  while  nevertheless  acknowledging  that  the  English  psychologists  are  the  only  other  ones
who have approached this crucial problem; see also e.g. GM Prologue 4, 7 and I.1 “These English
psychologists, whom we have to thank for the only attempts up to this point to produce a history of
the origins of morality—in themselves they serve up to us no small riddle…”
[lxxix]
 SPPP 183
[lxxx]
 GM I.1
[lxxxi]
 GM I.2
[lxxxii]
 NRH 82-3
[lxxxiii]
 Schmitt Nomos of the Earth 2006 p. 78
[lxxxiv]
 Burckhardt 1999 p. 59
[lxxxv]
 Burckhardt 1999 59-60
[lxxxvi]
 Herodotus History 3.38. My emphasis. For a description on customs differing with respect to
drunkenness see the description of the Scythians vs. the Greeks at Plato Laws I 637
[lxxxvii]
 NRH p. 88 ; note that Strauss tacitly agrees with Nietzsche that the “English” reduction of
the origin of “the good” to calculation or benefit is wrong. This does not mean, however, that Strauss
agrees  with  Nietzsche’s  own  genealogy  of  “the  good”  in  aristocratic  morality;  but  he  does  not
explicitly  or  even  implicitly  argue  against  this  either.  See  also,  “The  emergence  of  philosophy
radically  affects  man’s  attitude  toward  political  things  in  general  and  toward  laws  in  particular,
because it radically affects his understanding of these things. Originally, the authority par excellence
or  the  root  of  all  authority  was  the  ancestral.  Through  the  discovery  of  nature  the  claim  of  the
ancestral  is  uprooted;  philosophy  appeals  from  the  ancestral  to  the  good,  to  that  which  is  good
intrinsically, to  that which  is good  by nature.  Yet philosophy uproots the claim of the ancestral in
such a manner as to preserve an essential element of it…” NRH 91
[lxxxviii]
  “An  illiterate society  at  its  best  is  a  society  ruled  by  age-old  ancestral  custom  which  it
traces  to  original  founders,  gods  or  sons  of  gods  or  pupils  of  gods…”  Strauss  “What  is  Liberal
Education,” An Address Delivered  at the Tenth Annual Graduation Exercises  of the Basic Program
of Liberal Education for Adults  June 6, 1959
[lxxxix]
  See  Plutarch  Numa  Pompilius:  “and  then  Numa,  leaving  the  conversation  of  the  town,
betook  himself  to  a  country  life,  and  in  a  solitary  manner  frequented  the  groves  and  fields
consecrated to the gods, passing his life in desert places. And this in particular gave occasion to the
story about the goddess, namely, that Numa did not retire from human society out of any melancholy
or disorder of mind, but because he had tasted the joys of more elevated intercourse, and, admitted to
celestial wedlock in the love and converse of the goddess Egeria, had attained to blessedness, and to
a  divine  wisdom.”  See  also  Emperor  Julian  Against  the  Galileans  bk.  I,  who  appears  to  quote
Plutarch and also preserves the more ancient view, yet after the establishment of philosophy in the
cities: “But when after her foundation many wars encompassed her, she won and prevailed in them
all; and since she ever increased in size in proportion to her very dangers and needed greater security,

then Zeus set over her the great philosopher Numa. This then was the excellent and upright Numa
who dwelt in deserted groves and ever communed with the gods  in  the  pure  thoughts  of  his  own
heart. . . . It was he who established most of the laws concerning temple worship.”
[xc]
 See, again, SCR 38-42, especially p. 41 first paragraph where this is discussed explicitly.
[xci]
 Rousseau Social Contract IV.8 “Civil Religion.”
[xcii]
 He also hints at one distinguishing characteristic of the Greeks, “the way they had of regarding
themselves as the natural Sovereigns of such peoples,” an attitude that affected also their theological
notions.
[xciii]
 Frazer’s work was temporarily ignored or dismissed by many academic anthropologists in the
second half of the 20
th
 century, but there has been much recent interest in his book, and a belated
acknowledgment  that  much  of  his  research  is  based  on  sound  anthropological  observations.  See
especially Luc de Heusch’s “The Symbolic Mechanisms of Sacred Kingship: Rediscovering Frazer,”
Journal  of  the  Royal  Anthropological  Institute,  vol  3.  no.  2  1997:  “Though  it  appears  in  diverse
historical forms,  sacred kingship  always  has a common  theme:  the body-fetish of  the  chief or king
articulates the  natural  or  social  orders.  It  is  a body  condemned  to  be  sacrificed before  its  natural
end, and which, in the event of calamity, will  be society’s scapegoat. It is just as Frazer  envisaged
it.”; see Joan Piggott, The Emergence of Japanese Kingship Stanford 1997; see the recent “Bodies of
Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty” Alexei Yurchak Representations Vol.  129,
No.  1  (Winter  2015)  (pp.  116-157)  p.  131  and  note  73  where  Frazer’s  enduring  legacy  and  the
legitimacy of his observations are briefly mentioned.
[xciv]
 GB p. 47
[xcv]
 Nietzsche GM I.5
[xcvi]
 Frazer GB 3.4 p. 48
[xcvii]
 Frazer GB 3.4 “The Magician’s Progress”
[xcviii]
  ibid;  The  last  part  of  this  paragraph  in  particular  should  be  compared  with  Strauss’
interpretation of Xenophon’s  Anabasis,  in  particular  on  Xenophon’s  deceptive  use  of  oracles;  See
Strauss SPPP 105-37 esp. p. 129, where Xenophon (in the Anabasis) is shown to conceal unfavorable
oracle.
[xcix]
 Frazer GB 3.4 “The Magician’s Progress”
[c]
 Frazer GB VI “Magicians as Kings”
[ci]
  ibid;  For  a  remarkable  parallel  note  that  the  very  first  Japanese  emperors,  understood  to  be
“children  of  the  sun,”  held  as  one  of  their  principal  offices  the  distribution  of  sacred  rice  during
planting  time,  see  Manabu  Waida,  “Sacred  Kingship  in  Early  Japan:  a  Historical  Introduction”  in
History of Religions, May 1975, 15.4 ; the actual power of these emperors was severely curtailed by
entrenched custom, however.
[cii]
 ibid

[ciii]

See especially the discussion in the aforementioned Luc de Heusch’s “The Symbolic

Mechanisms of Sacred Kingship: Rediscovering Frazer,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological

Institute, vol 3. no. 2 1997; see also Robert Carlson “Hierarchy and the Haya Divine Kingship: A

Structural and Symbolic Reformulation of Frazer's Thesis,” American Ethnologist Vol. 20, No. 2

(May, 1993), pp. 312-335; but the best source for such varied information from across world cultures

is in Frazer himself.

[civ]

Frazer GB XXIV. “The Killing of the Divine King” section 3. “Kings Killed at the End of a

Fixed Term”; see also Vladimir Petrukhin, “Sacral Kingship and the Judaism of the Khazars,” Studia

Medievalia Septentrionalia, Vienna, 2013. P. 291-301; where the accounts of Ibn Fadlan and al-

Masudi regarding the entirely similar sacral and sacrificial kingship of the Khazar khagan are

discussed. The power in the Khazar Empire lay with the bek, a military ruler similar to the Japanese

shogun, while the khagan, the older function, had an entirely ceremonial position. It should be noted

however that originally the position of khagan probably did have the energetic kingly and military

power that Frazer praises, but later regressed to what appears in fact to be the “default” position of

kingship as such, which is merely sacral or ceremonial, and devoid of actual power.

[cv]

See e.g. West African Secret Societies by Capt. F.W. Butt-Thompson 1929 London, a book

intended as a practical manual for colonial management and therefore much concerned with the form

and exercise of actual power and influence on the ground in West Africa—power that lay in large

part with the secret societies; also West African Religion, Geoffrey Parrinder, New York 1970 and

also Parrinder “African Ideas of Witchcraft” Folklore Vol. 67, No. 3 (Sep., 1956), pp. 142-150 where

witchcraft is discussed in relationship to cultic secret societies. Most interesting in the context of

Frazer’s discussion of the rule of elders would be “Secret Knowledge as Property and Power in

Kpelle Society: Elders versus Youth” William P. Murphy Africa: Journal of the International African

Institute Vol. 50, No. 2 (1980), pp. 193-207 where the focus is explicitly on the use of the secret

societies for the benefit of the social, political, and economic control by the primitive gerontocracy at

the expense of the youth.

[cvi]

Such considerations apply also to the much more recent distinction between medieval kingship

and modern bureaucratic states, whether democratic or not. Medieval kings were indeed bound by

infinite constraints—the heavy weight of custom, the power of competing nobles, of relatives, of the

Church, not to speak of the limitations of technology—that are not shared by modern regimes of

whatever form; indeed it has been argued that the modern democracy is able to exert a far greater

control over life and liberty than any medieval king could have dreamt of. Consider only the simple

example of military mobilization: a medieval king could never hope to mobilize a national army

through a draft. The modern centralized state, whether it is democratic or dictatorial in form is able to

exert a far greater power than any medieval king. As Tocqueville pointed out,

The old localized authorities disappear without either revival or replacement, and everywhere

the central government succeeds them in the direction of affairs. The whole of Germany, even

the whole of Europe, presents in this respect the same picture. Everywhere men are leaving

behind the liberty of the Middle Ages, not to enter in a modern brand of liberty but to return to

the ancient despotism; for centralization is nothing else than an up-to-date version of the

administration seen in the Roman Empire. [From Tocqueville’s letters, as quoted in Bertrand

de Jouvenel’s On Power 1976, pg. 285]

To this remark, Jouvenel adds in his own words that,

The history of the West, from the time of Europe's fragmentation into sovereign states, shows

us an almost uninterrupted advance in the growth of governmental Power. The only way of

failing to see it is to fix exclusive attention on the forms which Power takes: a picture of pure

fantasy is then formed, in which monarchs appear as masters to whose exactions there are no

bounds, to be succeeded by representative governments whose resources are proportionate to

their authority, until in the end democracy succeeds and receives from a consenting people

only what it choose to give to a Power which is its servant. [Jouvenel, On Power 1976 pg.

140]

[cvii]

Strauss NRH p. 88

[cviii]

Recall that Strauss himself begins “The Origin of the Idea of Natural Right” by pointing out

that Hebrew has no word for nature (NRH p. 81); indeed the word exists only in Greek and in

languages—Latin—that have been exposed to Greek philosophy. While Strauss may have good

reason to ignore or pass over the special preconditions that allowed the concept of nature to emerge

apparently only among the Greeks in all of human history, it is the purpose of this thesis to

investigate precisely these special preconditions.

[cix]

It is interesting that Nietzsche himself considers superstition to be an individualistic

development in a culture, a sign of relative advancement; the following section much agrees with

Frazer’s own thoughts on “magic” and superstition:

The superstitious man is always much more of a "person," in comparison with the religious man, and

a superstitious society will be one in which there are many individuals and a delight in individuality.

Seen from this standpoint superstition always appears as a progress in comparison with belief, and as

a sign that the intellect becomes more independent and claims to have its rights. Those who

reverence the old religion and the religious disposition then complain of corruption… [GS 23]

[cx]

Tocqueville, that great thinker on the problem of democratic despotism noticed that in his own

time the philosophes’ hankering and admiration after the Chinese model was no accident, and hints at

the purposes of the “meritocratic” model of assigning offices; and in this interesting passage explains

also the great difference between a hereditary aristocracy, such as Europe had, and a bureaucratic

mandarin meritocracy, such as existed in China, and which is in fact a tool of despotism:

They were quite familiar with the form of tyranny which we call democratic despotism, and

which had not been conceived in the Middle Ages. No more social hierarchies, no distinctions

of class or rank; a people consisting of individuals entirely equal, and as nearly alike as

possible; this body acknowledged as the only legitimate sovereign, but carefully deprived of

the means of directing or even superintending the government; over it a single agent,

commissioned to perform all acts without consulting his principals: to control him, a public

sense of right and wrong, destitute of organs for its expression; to check him, revolutions, not

laws; the agent being de jure a subordinate agent, in fact a master: such was the plan. Finding

nothing in their neighborhood conformable to this ideal of theirs, they went to the heart of

Asia in search of a model. I do not exaggerate when I affirm that every one of them wrote in

some place or other an emphatic eulogium on China. One is sure to find at least that in their

books; and as China is very imperfectly known even in our day, their statements on its subject

are generally pure nonsense. They wanted all the nations of the world to set up exact copies of

that barbarous and imbecile government, which a handful of Europeans master whenever they

please. China was for them what England, and afterward America, became for all Frenchmen.

They were filled with emotion and delight at the contemplation of a government wielded by an

absolute but unprejudiced sovereign, who honored the useful arts by plowing once a year with

his own hands; of a nation whose only religion was philosophy, whose only aristocracy were

men of letters, whose public offices were awarded to the victors at literary tournaments. It is

generally believed that the destructive theories known by the name of socialism are of modern

origin. This is an error. These theories are coeval with the earliest economists. While some of

them wanted to use the absolute power they desired to establish to change the forms of society,

others proposed to employ it in ruining its fundamental basis. [Tocqueville On the Old Regime

1856 p. 198]

[cxi]

Frazer GB 3.4

[cxii]

Van den Berghe 1987 pg. 72-5

[cxiii]

See the following chapter on Pindar for a detailed discussion of the two heroic-aristocratic

virtues.

[cxiv]

See especially Steven Lowenstam “The Shroud of Laertes and Penelope's Guile” The

Classical Journal Vol. 95, No. 4 (Apr. - May, 2000), pp. 333-348, “The story of Laertes' shroud,

which Penelope weaves during the day and unravels at night, is the only narrative that is told almost

verbatim three times in Homer (Od. 2.93-110, 19.137-56, 24.129-48) and Maria C. Pantelia

“Spinning and Weaving: Ideas of Domestic Order in Homer,” The American Journal of Philology

Vol. 114, No. 4 (Winter, 1993), pp. 493-501

[cxv]

H.W. Smyth Greek Melic Poets London 1900 p. 53 as quoted in “The First Tyrants in Greece”

by Robert Drews Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte Bd. 21, H. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1972), p 142

[cxvi]

Tacitus Germania 14

[cxvii]

ibid 23

[cxviii]

Thucydides History 1.5-6

[cxix]

Homer Odyssey XIV.222-225; see Drews 1972

[cxx]

See Nietzsche GS 329

[cxxi]

Regarding the claims in this paragraph, especially as concerns gracilization of sedentary Neolithic farmers’

skeletons as opposed to the more robust “primitive” features of the steppe pastoralists and hunters consider the following:

Arthur J. Robston, (2010). “A bioeconomic view of the Neolithic transition to agriculture.” Canadian Journal of

Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique 43(1): 280–300:

Adoption of agriculture at the expense of hunting and gathering was the dramatic precondition for all modern civilization.

Recent data suggest that, because of this transition, humans initially were more disease prone, smaller, less

nourished, and shorterlived. To explain why individuals chose agriculture over hunting and gathering, this paper

develops a simple model of the evolution of preferences over the quality and quantity of children, as would have been

generated by our long history as a species. These preferences would have induced the choice of agriculture, but also

would have led to these otherwise puzzling health effects.

Helen M. Leach, (2003). “Human Domestication Reconsidered.” Current Anthropology 44(3): 349–368:

In scientific usage, “domestication” has come to mean the process by which humans transformed wild animals and plants

into more useful products through control of their breeding. Certain physical and behavioural changes have been

identified as criteria of domestication. They include morphological changes affecting the skeletons of early Middle

Eastern domesticates (e.g., reduction in size and skeletal robusticity, cranio-facial shortening, and declining tooth size).

These changes also occur in some human populations starting in the Late Pleistocene. “Unconscious selection”

pressures are increasingly invoked in explanations of both sets of data. The long-established paradigm of human control

over domestication through artificial selection has meant that parallelism in these changes is seldom noted and few

inclusive explanations have been attempted since the early 1900s. Recently, only symbolic and social domestication has

been accepted for Homo sapiens. This article proposes a preliminary case for human biological domestication based on

the effects of the built environment, decreased mobility, and changes in diet consistency associated with increasing

sedentism…As human mobility, both logistic and residential (Holliday and Falsetti 1995: 149–50), declined in the

early Neolithic period, activity levels of the domestic herd animals might be expected to have followed. They no longer

needed to flee the approaching human or carnivore predator, and their feeding range became confined to the territory

controlled by the household or the village.

Vaclav Vancata, & Martina Charvatova, (2001). “Post-palaeolithic Homo sapiens evolution in central Europe: Changes in

body size and proportions in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age” Anthropologie, 39(2–3): 133-152:

The Early Bronze Age population from Bajc is similar to other Bronze Age groups with the exception that the tibia is

significantly longer in the Bajc sample. One of the important questions is which changes, if any, in body build and

proportions emerged after the Neolithic to Bronze Age transition. Early Bronze Age population males are relatively

tall and robust, while the females are significantly smaller than the males but still are relatively tall and robust in

comparison to the females of the Linear Band Pottery Culture and Lengyel Culture [these are canonical European

Neolithic farming cultures]. We have found marked similarities among Ûnětice early Bronze Age Culture, Bell Beaker

Culture and Corded Ware Culture populations with the exception of Corded Ware Culture females that are somewhat

more gracile…

See also David Anthony Princeton 2007 p. 349:

Usatovo covered about 4–5 ha. A stone defensive wall probably defended the town on its seaward side. The settlement

was largely destroyed by modern village construction and limestone quarrying prior to the first excavation by M. F.

Boltenko in 1921, but parts of it survived (figure 14.2). Behind the ancient town four separate cemeteries crowned the

hillcrest, all of them broadly contemporary. Two were kurgan cemeteries and two were flat–grave cemeteries. In one of

the kurgan cemeteries, the one closest to the town, half the central graves contained men buried with bronze daggers and

axes. These bronze weapons occurred in no other graves, not even in the second kurgan cemetery. Female figurines were

limited to the flat–grave cemeteries and the settlement, never occurring in the kurgan graves. The flat–grave cemeteries

were similar to flat–grave cemeteries that appeared outside Tripolye villages in the uplands, notably at Vikhvatinskii on

the Dniester, where excavation of perhaps one–third of the cemetery yielded sixty–one graves of people with a

gracile Mediterranean skull–and–face configuration. Upland cemeteries appeared at several other Tripolye sites

(Holerkani, Ryşeşti, and Danku) located at the border between the steppes and the rainfall agriculture zone in the forest–

steppe.

Mallory 1991, p. 191 “The great number of burials also provides considerable evidence for the physical type of the

Dnieper-Donets [steppe] population. They are predominantly characterized as late Cro-Magnons with more massive and

robust features than the gracile mediterranean peoples of the Balkan Neolithic.”

[cxxii]

This is the general argument in Cochran & Harpending 2010 p. 177-86

[cxxiii]

The reference is to the feared Gurkhas and Samnites respectively; “martial races” of the hills;

on the former see Lionel Caplan “’Bravest of the Brave': Representations of 'The Gurkha' in British

Military Writings” Modern Asian Studies Vol. 25, No. 3 (Jul., 1991), pp. 571-597

[cxxiv]

See e.g., Strauss IPP p. 279-80 on Cain and Abel

[cxxv]

Note again the exact parallel to the Homeric virtues of andreia (warfare, manliness in battle),

phronesis (social competence, political acumen, giving good advice in assembly); as for feast-giving

in the Iliad, this requires little comment.

[cxxvi]

Almuth Degener, “Hunter’s Lore in Nuristan,” Asian Folklore Studies vol. 60 no. 2 2001, pgs

337-8; emphasis added.

[cxxvii]

Machiavelli Prince XVIII

[cxxviii]

At Odyssey 10.303; I discuss this and the parallel and revealing mention of phusis in the

Iliad, below; furthermore the fact that the Greeks assumed Mt. Olympus was the seat of their gods,

who were also associated with the sky, the sacrality of mountain peaks in general, marks them apart

from pre-Greek “old European” chthonic deities of the Earth, hearth, and agrarian village, who had

been  defeated  and  subdued  by  the  Olympians.  This  is  roughly  the well-known  view  of  Gimbutas
regarding the religion of “old Europe.”
[cxxix]
 Pindar Nemean 3; see the next chapter
[cxxx]
 H.D. Rankin, “Plato’s Eugenic Euphemia and Apothesis in Republic  Book  V”  Hermes  93  4
1965, p 417
[cxxxi]
 Especially relevant is the beginning of Xenophon’s treatise On Hunting With Dogs:
Game and hounds are the invention of gods, of Apollo and Artemis. They bestowed it on Cheiron
and honoured him therewith for his righteousness. And he, receiving it, rejoiced in the gift, and used
it.  And  he  had  for  pupils in  venery  and in  other  noble pursuits—Cephalus,  Asclepius, Meilanion,
Nestor,  Amphiaraus,  Peleus,  Telamon,  Meleager,  Theseus,  Hippolytus,  Palamedes,  Odysseus,
Menestheus, Diomedes, Castor, Polydeuces, Machaon, Podaleirius, Antilochus, Aeneas, Achilles, of
whom each in his time was honoured by gods… Peleus stirred a desire even in the gods to give him
Thetis and to hymn their marriage in Cheiron's home… Castor and Polydeuces, through the renown
that they won by displaying in Greece the arts they learned of Cheiron, are immortal. Machaon and
Podaleirius, schooled in all the selfsame arts, proved in crafts and reasonings and wars good men…
In  other  words,  as  we  shall  see  also  especially  in  Pindar,  the  wild  man  centaur  Chiron  is  a
matchmaker  (breeder)  and  educator  or  trainer  of  military  genius.  Much  of  Xenophon’s  treatise  of
course  is  also  much  concerned  with  the  proper  breeding  and  training  of  dogs.  The  connection
between the two programs of breeding and training seems to be quite explicit.
[cxxxii]
 See below, Chapter 2 on Pindar, where the “primitive” heroic aristocratic virtues are refined
and elaborated in the context of a teaching on nature.
[cxxxiii]
 See Nietzsche TWI “On the Improvers of Mankind” 3-5, see also Chitra Tiwari Sudras  in
Manu Delhi 1963
[cxxxiv]
 Gerald Bender, Angola Under the Portuguese, 1978, pp. 1-51; this book in general contains
a good, if hostile, discussion of the “Machiavellian” strategy of lusotropicalism used by Portuguese
colonialism.
[cxxxv]
 The rebel army “Guerilla Army of the Poor” had its social base in the indigenous Maya. See
also Rosemary Thorp, Corinne Caumartin and George Gray-Molina “Inequality, Ethnicity, Political
Mobilisation and Political Violence in Latin America: The Cases of Bolivia, Guatemala and Peru”
Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Oct., 2006), pp. 453-480
[cxxxvi]
  The  conflict  is  well-known  but  see  e.g.,  Bret  Gustafson  “Manipulating  Cartographies:
Plurinationalism, Autonomy, and Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia” Anthropological Quarterly Vol.
82, No. 4 (Fall, 2009), pp. 985-1016
[cxxxvii]
 Jefferson wanted to put Hengist and Horsa, the legendary Saxon settlers of Britain on the
first seal of the United States, with an engraving “Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom

we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we

have assumed.” As quoted in Laura Kendrick, “The American Middle Ages” in The Middle Ages

after the Middle Ages in the English Speaking World ed. Alamichel, Brewer 1997 pp. 125-6:

Jefferson had already used the Saxon precedent to argue for the natural right under universal law of a

people to leave their native land and set up a free government elsewhere…The writer of the

Declaration of Independence wanted to restore and revitalize, in the new American setting, pre-

eighth-century Saxon laws he believed had been corrupted over the course of subsequent British

history, beginning with the imposition of feudal law at the Norman Conquest. Toward the end of A

Summary View Jefferson rejected as “inappropriate” the application of post-Conquest British law in

America, on the grounds that “America was not conquered by William the Norman, nor its lands

surrendered to him, or any of his successors.” Jefferson was not alone in the belief that America

offered a chance to do history right this time by preserving Saxon liberty and democracy.

[cxxxviii]

It is interesting how this process is sometimes turned upside down: the Chinese case is

telling. Although the Ming Dynasty is almost the only native Han dynasty in the last millennium—

the rest having been founded by Jurchen, Manchu, Mongol, or other pastoral steppe conquerors—the

famous ability of this civilization to absorb and assimilate the conquerors to the conquered leads to a

situation where, e.g., Genghis Khan is considered a “great Chinese general,” and so forth; or where

Tibet, which enjoyed a feudal relationship of near equality with the last Manchu dynasty is now

considered an ancient and integral part of the Chinese culture and civilization, whereas there was

historically great hostility and often war between Tibetans and Han, the Tibetan warbands at one time

having sacked the Chinese capital Chang’an (“Perpetual Peace”). See Ben Hillman and Lee-Ann

Henfry “Macho Minority: Masculinity and Ethnicity on the Edge of Tibet,” Modern China 2006 32;

251

Female Han Chinese respondents also emphasized physicality in their descriptions of Tibetan men,

whom they described as having strong bodies and as being very manly, handsome, and brave. The

women viewed the Tibetans as bigger, taller, stronger, darker-skinned, rougher, more masculine, and

more loyal than other men… instead of describing the masculine in reference to the feminine,

Tibetan men repeatedly contrasted their masculinity with that of Han Chinese men.

See below, Chapter 4 section II.a where the matter of tanning and physicality is discussed in the

context of Greek aristocratic virtues in terms that are almost exactly the same, and where Greek

aristocrats in Xenophon’s Agesilaus contrast their own manliness to the effeminacy of the untanned,

unphysical, oligarchic Persians.

[cxxxix]

For a recent scholarly treatment of the Greek case see especially Margalit Finkelberg Greeks

and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition Cambridge 2005, where the author

treats a process of ethnogenesis through conquest similar to the one described here. The persistent

Greek myth of the hero-founder who comes from abroad and marries the daughter of the local king,

thereby inheriting the kingship, is given great weight. According to Finkelberg the Greeks, while

acknowledging  rather  explicitly  their  foreign  origins,  nevertheless  managed  to  accomplish  a
relatively  successful  fusion  with  local  elites.  And  while  ethnic  tensions  persisted  over  time,  e.g.,
between Dorian and non-Dorian, the original founding conquest was covered up rather successfully
in the shroud of myth.
[cxl]
 Numerous studies of this institution exist, among which the most prominent are: for the Turkic
and  Mongol  nokod,  “companions,”  see  Boris  Vladimirtsov,  Le  regime  social  des  Mongols;  le
feudalisme nomade Paris 1948 pp. 110-8 and also Thomas T. Allsen, “Guard and Government in the
Reign of The Grand Qan Möngke, 1251-59” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies Vol. 46, No. 2 (Dec.,
1986),  p  513  where  Vladimirtsov  book  is  mentioned  and  the  nokod  is  briefly  discussed  for  the
Mongol case. Dumezil’s own Aspects de  la fonction  guerrière chez les Indo-Européens,  1956;  Stig
Wikander Der arische Männerbund : Studien zur indo-iranischen Sprach- und Religionsgeschichte,
1938; see also Michael Speidel, “Berserks: a History of Indo-European ‘Mad Warriors’” Journal of
World History, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Fall, 2002), pp. 253-290, etc.; the only exception would appear to be
the independent samurai warrior class of Japan, but in fact the latest scholarship in Japan supports a
steppe (mixed Altaic-Scythian) origin for this institution as well, see C. Scott Littleton "Susa-nö-wo
versus Ya-mata nö woröti: An Indo-European Theme in Japanese Mythology," History of Religions,
vol 20 no 3 1981
[cxli]
 Tacitus Germania 6, 14 emphasis added
[cxlii]
 Tacitus Germania 31
[cxliii]
  For  Rome  see  Andreas  Alfoldi,  The  Structure  of  the  Pre-Etruscan  Roman  State  1974
especially chapters on the Lupercalia and the comitatus.
[cxliv]
 For the most comprehensive study of this phenomenon, besides that of Stig Wikander, see the
recent book  by Daniel  Gershenson,   Apollo  the  Wolf-God,  1991  especially  chapters  6  and  7,  “The
Wolf and Death,” and “Werewolf Cofraternities and Wind Evidence,” which have been very useful
for my discussion here.
[cxlv]
  See  also  Olga  Merck  Davidson,  “Dolon  and  Rhesus  in  the  "Iliad"”,  Quaderni  Urbinati  di
Cultura Classica, New Series, Vol. 1, (1979), pp. 61-66
[cxlvi]
  For  a  recent  discussion  of  this  phenomenon  see  David  Anthony  and  Dorcas  Brown
“Midwinter  dog  sacrifices  and  warrior  initiations  in  the  Late  Bronze  Age  at  the  site  of
Krasnosamarskoe, Russia,” December 2012 U. Copenhagen  ; they  connect this  archaeological site
with a ritual described in the Vedas.
[cxlvii]
  See  especially  Gershenson  1991  chapters,  “The  Wolf  and  Death,”  and  “Werewolf
Cofraternities and Wind Evidence”
[cxlviii]
 This is entirely plausible since there is some evidence that the steppe warband served as the
direct basis for monastic life, in particular for Tibetan monasticism. It is then entirely plausible that
as a model of a community of men dedicated to  virtue  outside  the  bounds  of  the  community  and
outside  all  domestic  life,  the  warband  could  have  served  a  similar  “founding”  function  for  the

philosophical sect or school. See Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of

Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton 2009 pp. 151–152:

In the Tibetan Empire, due to the paucity of source material it is difficult to say how long the

comitatus was maintained as such after the adoption of Buddhism, but it seems clear that at least to a

certain extent it was transmuted into a monastic form. The Tibetans' chosen form of Buddhism

emphasized devotion to a spiritual teacher. This devotion was little different from that of the

comitatus members to their lord. When the Tibetan emperor was proclaimed to be a Buddhist ruler—

a dharmarâja 'religious king' or cakravartin 'one who turns the wheel (of the Buddhist law)'—the

monks were ultimately in his service. It is not surprising then to find that monks fought in the army

in the late imperial period. By the end of the Early Middle Ages there was a large monastic

establishment in the Tibetan Empire.

[cxlix]

The case is made explicitly by Barton Kunstler “The Werewolf Figure and Its Adoption into

the Greek Political Vocabulary” The Classical World Vol. 84, No. 3 (Jan. - Feb., 1991), pp. 189-205:

Ritual and mythic patterns belonging to secret male military societies, whose members often

considered themselves werewolves, were used in legend and by Greek thinkers, including Plato, to

describe and analyze the role played by tyrants in the early history of the polis. In addition, the

legend of the Spartan lawgiver and potential tyrant, Lukourgos, is spun out of a traditional pattern of

werewolf behavior in myth and ritual…. Plato opens his discussion of the tyrant in the Republic by

describing the werewolf ritual of Mt. Lukaion in Arkadia, in which human flesh was mixed with

other sacrificial cuts and a group of men partook of the offerings. The one who tasted the human

splangkhna became a wolf (R. 565d-566d). Polybius (7.13.7), Pliny (NH 8.81-82), Pausanias (6.8.2;

8.2.3,6), and St. Augustine (CD18.17) provide further details…..The accounts clearly describe a

werewolf society initiation which Plato used to clarify his analysis of tyranny. Plato structures his

entire account of the tyrant's rise around the character of the werewolf and the ideas that the

werewolf conjured up in the Greek political…As Plato's analysis reveals, the vocabulary of werewolf

rites came to be applied to the tyrants. Political ideas took a long time to emerge, linguistically and

institutionally, from their mythoreligious background. The tyrant, seen as abusing legal and political

institutions for his own ends and reformulating time and dike, could logically be referred back to the

more archaic figure of a werewolf outlaw, an eater of unholy portions of human meat at the sacrificial

table at which a more primitive time was allocated. Both werewolf and tyrant devoured

unconsecrated portions of communal sacrifice and fed off essential human substance…. It was Plato,

finally, who made the equation between werewolf and tyrant explicit, but the legends of the rise of

the early tyrants contain compelling evidence that the Greeks used the vocabulary and structural

patterns of werewolf myth and cult to analyze and characterize the nature of the tyrannies. (194-201)

[cl]
 All subsequent citations and discussion refers to this edition, Robert Drews, The Coming of the
Greeks Princeton 1988
[cli]
 Drews 1988 158-95
[clii]
 And is therefore not a product of socioeconomic pressures following the collapse of Mycenean
civilization around 1200-1100 BC; Drews dates the beginning of Greek history back to 1600 BC, and
it is this primordial “alien” origin of the Greek aristocratic mind that is here emphasized.
[cliii]
 Drews 1988 212-25
[cliv]
 Drews 1988 203-26
[clv]
 ibid
[clvi]
  See  also  below  Chapter  4,  Nietzsche “On  the  Greek State”  regarding  Sparta as  the  original
form of the Greek polis.
[clvii]
 Homer Iliad 2.445, among many instances
[clviii]
 Homer Iliad 1.175, then Agamemnon contemptuously tells Achilles to go back home and lord
it over his Myrmidons (not great in number as Agamemnon’s army)
[clix]
 Homer Iliad 1.105
[clx]
 The other being where Hermes shows the secret phusis of a plant in the wilderness to Odysseus.
This is the reading of Seth Benardete, see first of all “Achilles and the Iliad” Hermes 91. Bd., H. 1
(1963), p. 15
[clxi]
 The following is based on Homer Iliad 2.445-85
[clxii]
 Homer Iliad 2.474-83
[clxiii]
 The passage emphasizes both Diomedes’ descent—his inborn fury is the same as his father’s
—and  compares  him  to  a wounded  lion;  Athena  reminds  him of  his father  and,  as  in  the case  of
Agamemnon  above,  intensifies  his  animal  spirit  and  through  this  intensification  makes  him
resplendent, manifest (ekdelos at Iliad 5.2) among all the host so that he may win himself a true fame
[kleos esthlon] [5.3]
“Be of good courage  now, Diomedes, to fight against the Trojans, for in thy breast have I put the
might of  thy father, the dauntless  might, such as  the horseman Tydeus,  wielder of the  shield, was
wont to have. And the mist moreover have I taken from thine eyes that afore was upon them, to the
end that thou mayest well discern both god and man. Wherefore now if any god come hither to make
trial of thee, do not thou in any wise fight face to face with any other immortal gods, save only if
Aphrodite,  daughter  of  Zeus,  shall  enter  the  battle,  her  do  thou  smite  with  a  thrust  of  the  sharp
bronze.”  When  she  had thus  spoken,  the  goddess, flashing-eyed  Athene,  departed,  and the  son  of
Tydeus returned again and mingled with the foremost fighters; and though afore his heart had been
eager to do battle with the Trojans, now verily did fury thrice so great lay hold upon him, even as
upon a lion that a shepherd in the field, guarding his fleecy sheep, hath wounded as he leapt over the
wall of the sheep-fold, but hath not vanquished; his might hath he roused, but thereafter maketh no

more defence, but slinketh amid the farm buildings, and the flock all unprotected is driven in rout,
and the sheep are strewn in heaps, each hard by each, but the lion in his fury leapeth forth from the
high fold; even in such fury did mighty Diomedes mingle with the Trojans. [Iliad 5.125-45]
[clxiv]
  See  also  Jonathan  Gottschall,    “Homer’s  Human  Animal:  Ritual  Combat  in  the  Iliad,”
Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 278-294 and his subsequent book; this is an attempt at reading
Darwinian  motivations  into  the  “violence”  of  the  Iliad.  This  is  not  a  place  for  a  review,  but
Gottschall’s account, though somewhat useful in applying sociobiological insights to these texts is
limited  by  his  psychologism  and  by  a  simplistic  Darwinian  emphasis  on  competition  for
opportunities at reproduction. Benardete’s account—that the problem of the girl war-prize Briseis is
just  a  pretext  that  Achilles  uses  to  prove  his  own  virtue—is  more  believable  given  the  fact  that
Achilles chooses, in the end, a glorious death over a comfortable domestic life.
[clxv]
  The  word  is  maurousthai,  see  below  on  discussion  of  meaning  of  maurosai,  to  be  made
obscure or blotted out, in Pindar.
[clxvi]
 GM I.5 “…the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis…”
[clxvii]
  The  work  of  Pindar  rather  than  of  Theognis  will  here  be  the  focus,  mostly  because  only
fragments survive from Theognis and it is notoriously difficult to “fit” these together.
[clxviii]
 See above chapter one, appendix
[clxix]
 In the verb phuein, to grow, Iliad 1.66
[clxx]
  Nietzsche  BGE  260:  “art  and  enthusiasm  in  reverence  and  in  devotion  are  the  regular
symptoms of an aristocratic way of thinking and valuing”
[clxxi]
  This  is  a  paraphrase  of  the  Nietzschean  position  that  is  elaborated  below,  see  Chapter  4,
section IIb
[clxxii]
 This is the title of Jaeger’s chapter on Pindar, which is considered below.
[clxxiii]
 Jaeger 1939 V1. 205
[clxxiv]
 Camille Paglia’s words on Pindar are quite apt:
Pindar's  ornate,  visionary  odes  are  untranslatable.  Commissioned  to  praise  athletic  victors  or
memorialize gifts,  they are,  Schimdt says, ''the  extremity of  art,'' moving ''towards timelessness or
abstraction.''  He  calls  them  ''a  texture  of  cross-referencing''  and  ''an  almost  continuous  string  of
metaphors.'' The odes of Pindar's rival, Bacchylides, were lost until a smashed papyrus scroll of his
work was discovered in Egypt in the 1890's and reassembled at the British Museum. After Pindar,
Schmidt  writes,  lyric  poetry  lost  vitality,  and  ''verse  thrived  primarily  in  the  drama.''  In  the  new
Hellenistic world inaugurated by the conquests of Alexander the Great, ''cultural authority'' shifted
from  Athens  to  Alexandria  in  Egypt,  where  poetry  now  ''lived  in  libraries'…  [Paglia  “’The  First
Poets’: Starting With Orpheus” The New York Times August 28 2005]
[clxxv]
 Jaeger 1939 204

[clxxvi]
 There has been, as far as I’m aware, no complete study of the idea of nature in Pindar. All
subsequent citations in this chapter are from Pindar’s Odes, unless otherwise stated, and will be cited
by book name, poem number, and, where appropriate, line number, e.g., Nemean 3.33 refers to the
third  Nemean  ode,  line 33.  Line  number  will  generally not  be  specified  for  longer  passages  in  the
citation, but within the quoted text in brackets. The translation used for context is Svarlien 1990 as
found on the Perseus Project, but considerable changes have been made by me in many cases.
[clxxvii]
 No significance should be attached to the otherwise significant number seventeen, for the
simple reason that we don’t have Pindar’s complete works available to us today, but only a fraction
have survived. Even so, the ubiquity of the word for “nature” in even the limited sample we have,
which  in  its  totality  is  considerably  shorter  than  Homer’s  two  epics  where  it  appears  only  twice,
should indicate the special importance of this strange concept for Pindar. If we are to consider the
four  books  of  victory  odes  as  a  self-enclosed  whole,  then  the  number  seventeen  may  have  some
significance.
[clxxviii]
  In  the  one  case  at  Olympian  6.57  where  soma  is  used  for  a  live  body,  it  refers  to  the
foundling of the baby Iamus, son of Apollo and given the gift of prophecy, founder of a line of priests
at Olympia. One can only speculate about why Pindar uses the word soma here for a living being;
given  that  the  line  translates  roughly  as  “For  it  had  been  hidden  in  the  rushes  and  the  boundless
thicket  his  tender  body  washed  in  the  golden  and  purple  light  of  violets,”  it  may  be  that  Pindar
thought the strength and vitality of phue was inappropriate to describe the fragility of a divine infant
found among flowers.
[clxxix]
 Pythian 5.42
[clxxx]
 Pythian 9.58-9
[clxxxi]
 Consider also Homer’s reference in the context of Iliad 2.445-60 to the phulla  kai  anthea
gignetai  en  horei,  the  generations  of  leaves  and  flowers  that  come  about  in  season,  which  he
compares in number to the tribes of Akhaians streaming out on the Skamandrian plain.
[clxxxii]
 Olympian 1
[clxxxiii]
 Isthmian 4
[clxxxiv]
 Isthmian 6
[clxxxv]
  For  a  reference  from  Pindar  to  Heracles’  labors  as  having  served  just  this  function,  see
Nemean 3:
Still, if the son of Aristophanes, who is beautiful, and whose deeds match his looks, [20] embarked
on the highest achievements of manliness, it is not easy to cross the trackless sea beyond the pillars
of Heracles, which that hero and god set up as famous witnesses to the furthest limits of seafaring. He
subdued the monstrous beasts in the sea, and tracked to the very end the streams of the shallows, [25]
where he reached the goal that sent him back home again, and he made the land known.
[clxxxvi]
 Pythian 4

[clxxxvii]
 For the case of Jason and his warband, in which the contempt for death and desire for great
glory is very emphatic, see the end of this chapter.
[clxxxviii]
 Isthmian 7
[clxxxix]
 We will see shortly that the prefix ek- or “out” is especially significant in all discussion of
nature in its original meaning. Recall Homer saying that Athena made Diomedes ekdelos meta pasin
at the beginning of Iliad 5 at his moment of aristeia; in part by kindling a great fire on his head and
shoulders.
[cxc]
 See, again, beginning of Xenophon’s On Hunting with Dogs, in which Cheiron is mentioned at
length as a teacher of heroes and as matchmaker for their parents. This is understood in connection to
the art of breeding good lines of animals. Also consider his essay on horsemanship. See also above
H.D. Rankin, “Plato’s Eugenic Euphemia and Apothesis in Republic Book V” Hermes 93 4 1965, p
417, in which the tastes of Greek gentlemen are recounted: “The selective breeding of sporting and
ornamental animals was one of the characteristic hobbies of an Athenian gentleman. Glaucon, Plato’s
brother, was an enthusiastic breeder of animals; Plato’s step-father Pyrilampes was renowned for his
peacocks. Once it is accepted that the analogy of animal breeding has a relevance to the procreation
of mankind, it begins to seem paradoxical that human eugenics are so neglected…”
[cxci]
 Gilbert West A Dissertation on the Olympic Games as appears in vol. 2 of The Odes of Pindar
Oxford 1824 pg. 124:
But after all it may seem impertinent to use many arguments with an English reader, to convince him
of the wisdom and justice of a proceeding which is every day practiced amongst us; who have also
our horse races, and prizes for the victor, established originally with the same view as those of which
I  am  now  speaking,  and  under  some  of  the  same  regulations:  particularly  with  regard  to  the
bestowing the prize, which with us, as with the Grecians, is conferred upon the owner of the horse
that wins the race, and not upon the rider…
See also the suggestion at p. 116-7 that the Olympic games were developed initially specifically to
encourage the breeding of fine horses.
[cxcii]
 Nemean 6
[cxciii]
 It must be emphasized again that, as far  as I know, phusis, phua, and  all  variations  of  the
word for  nature  are  exclusively used for living  beings,  whether  plant, animal or  human  in  Pindar.
There is no question of using phusis for nonliving things.
[cxciv]
  Nemean  11.  It  is  no  accident  that  so  many  mentions  of  phusis  in  Pindar  are  paired  with
references to “foresight” or the rare ability to see “the things that will be”; see below, the conclusion
of this chapter, regarding Pindar’s beliefs on wisdom and the wise man.
[cxcv]
 See Nietzsche TWI “The Problem of Socrates” on the ancient Greek aristocrat’s contempt for
self-justification, coming up with “five reasons ready,” etc.

[cxcvi]
 The cases of Syracuse or Akragas, ruled by the tyrants Hieron and Theron respectively, to
whom Pindar dedicates certain odes, are not exceptions, as we will have occasion later to see: these
tyrants “made considerable effort” to conform to aristocratic expectations and norms and can’t really
be considered rabble-rousing “champions of the people” as in the Platonic denigration of tyranny.
[cxcvii]
 Nemean 6
[cxcviii]
 Olympian 4
[cxcix]
 Note to Olympian 4 by Basil L. Gildersleeve,  Pindar: The Olympian and Pythian Odes New
York 1885
[cc]
 I am indebted to Camille Paglia for the reading of this episode.
[cci]
 Nemean 7
[ccii]
 Isthmian 1
[cciii]
 A  distinction  commonly  remarked upon by  Allan  Bloom  and other students  of  Strauss;  see
e.g., Love and Friendship 1993, part 3 “The Ladder of Love”
[cciv]
 Nemean 1
[ccv]
  On  this  precise  point,  that  nature  cannot  be  taught,  that  good  and  bad  can’t  be  taught,  see
Theognis 429-38: “To beget and breed [phusai kai threpsai] a man is easier than to put into him a
noble mind; none hath ever devised means whereby he hath made a fool wise and a bad man good. If
God had given the Children of Asclepius the art of healing a man's badness and base wit, they would
receive wages much and great; and if thought could be made and put into us, the son of a good father
would never become bad, because he would be persuaded by good counsel. But by teaching never
shalt thou make the bad man good.”
[ccvi]
 Nemean 3
[ccvii]
 Olympian 9
[ccviii]
 The trainer in fact is often included at least in a passing mention in many odes, as this was
part of Pindar’s contract; a clear example is at the very end of Isthmian 4, where both Melissus and
his wise trainer are praised in the conclusion.
[ccix]
 Olympian 10
[ccx]
 See at the end of Isthmian 6; the same image of sharpening the spirit is one that Xenophon uses
in the Education of Cyrus 1.2.11 etc.
[ccxi]
 Nemean 3
[ccxii]
Recall that one of the only two mentions of phusis in all Homer is when Odysseus, in a dream,
is shown the secret phusis of a healing plant by Hermes. The knowledge of the healing properties of
plants appears to be a de facto stock example of “teaching nature,” which is the function of Chiron.
[ccxiii]
  From  Pythian  3,  which  begins  with  an  invocation  to  Chiron:  “If  it  were  proper  for  this
commonplace prayer to be made by my tongue, I would want Cheiron the son of Philyra to be alive
again, he who has departed, the wide-ruling son of Cronus son of Uranus; and I would want him to

reign again in the glens of Pelion, the beast of the wilds [5] whose mind was friendly to men…” and
proceeds to an explanation of the arts that Chiron taught Asclepius.
[ccxiv]
 Machiavelli Prince XVIII
[ccxv]
 ibid
[ccxvi]
 In this we also see again how phusis, breeding, blood, is the surety of truth, even for a divine
audience of Muses. It is what persists.
[ccxvii]
 Nietzsche GM I.5
[ccxviii]
 Pythian 4 to Arkesilas; see also below on Pythian 5 to the same king/tyrant.
[ccxix]
  Gamkrelidze  and  Ivanov,  who  have  published  the  most  comprehensive  and,  to  date,
authoritative linguistic account of the origins of Indo-European languages (Indo-European  and  the
Indo-Europeans:  A  Reconstruction  and  Historical  Analysis  of  a  Proto-Language  and  a  Proto-
Culture,  De  Gruyter  Mouton  1995)  claim  in  “The  Early  History  of  Indo-European  Languages”
Scientific  American,  March  1990,  pp.  110-116  that  the  myth  of  the  golden  fleece  had  special
significance for the Greeks; that, indeed, it was the only national memory of their original homeland
in  the  Caucasus,  and  that  the  voyage  of  the  Argonauts  is  in  a  way  an  “inverted”  memory  of  the
sailing voyage from their original homeland to mainland Greece itself.
[ccxx]
 Pythian 4
[ccxxi]
 See, again Beckwith 2009 pp.151-2, who similarly claims that the Buddhist sangha or male
monastic  order  at  least  in  Tibet  has  its  origins  in  the  steppe  institution  of  Mongol  “companions”
nokod that is just the Turkic version of the Indo-European hird/comitatus.
[ccxxii]
 Perhaps to be interpreted, in its most primitive iteration, as ability to set up a good ambush.
[ccxxiii]
 Again, at least Romulus’ luperci did found such a state, see Brown & Anthony 2012 and
Alfoldi 1974
[ccxxiv]
 See above, Nietzsche on the original meaning of straight-spoken, truthful, esthlos, “carrying
being.” “The man of nature excels under all laws, all regimes.”
[ccxxv]
 Pythian 2.86-8
[ccxxvi]
 Aristotle Metaphysics 982b, where, of course, he also says that the lover of myth is in some
way a philosopher, similarly moved by wonder.
[ccxxvii]
 Olympian 2 for Theron tyrant of Akragas.
[ccxxviii]
 Nemean 3
[ccxxix]
 Another instance of a word with root in agra—especially important as we will see later in
the secretly “wild” Socrates of Plato.
[ccxxx]
 The Apollonian associations of the all-seeing archer, who hits his mark as the wise man hits
the mark of truth should not be discounted. Apollo of course is the god of prophecy and second sight;
see below on Pindar’s “inborn arts” of prophecy and the “inborn eye.”
[ccxxxi]
 If there is some emphasis and repetition here on my part this is nevertheless appropriate: for,
as we will see, these same images will appear again in Plato at most significant moments, when the

relationships between the philosopher, convention or the city, and tyranny, are explicitly discussed.
[ccxxxii]
 Pythian 8; I quote a longer passage from earlier, with extension in bold, as it makes it easier
to see how Pindar explicitly connects the wise man and the origin of wisdom with the more general
claims in the first part regarding the persistence of inner nature across generations bred for areta.
[ccxxxiii]
 Pythian 1; note again the two major virtues, having powerful arms [andreia] and having an
eloquent tongue/giving good counsel [phronesis]. To this is now added a third, wisdom.
[ccxxxiv]
 Typhon, see Plato Phaedrus 230a; Typhon is also associated with the “navel of the earth”
and is possibly defeated or incorporated by Apollo himself. See also Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a
Dragon: Aspects of  Indo-European Poetics Oxford 1995 pp. 448-62 on Typhon, which touches on
the Pindaric treatment of the same.
[ccxxxv]
 Pythian 9
[ccxxxvi]
  And  we  must  be  frank.  Both  Pindar  and  later  Plato  do  not  speak  in  the  abstract  of
“escaping conventional opinion” in the carefree sense a modern would. They repeatedly use words
like agroteron or agrios, referring to the wild barbarism of the fields and nature, of beast-men like
Cheiron, or of Machiavelli’s “teaching of force,” images of raw force or violence which will become
especially important in the Gorgias—in an example used by Socrates, not Callicles. As we will see, it
will  be  Socrates  who  brings  up  the  problem  of  physical  force  in  a  “polite”  conversation  about
rhetoric.
[ccxxxvii]
 Nemean 1
[ccxxxviii]
 Nemean 1
[ccxxxix]
 Remember that Kalkhas knew not just the future, but was expert also at knowing the things
that are, and the things that were. He led the Akhaian fleet to Troy, the way having been revealed to
him in a mania inspired by Apollo.
[ccxl]
 Pythian 5
[ccxli]
 Olympian 2
[ccxlii]
 See Donald Kagan The Great Dialogue: History of Greek Political Thought from Homer to
Polybius, Greenwood 1986, pp. 1-50. In distinction to the rabble-rousing demagogues or “champions
of the people” we famously see in Plato’s Republic VIII
[ccxliii]
 Somewhat of a pun here, but Pindar does refer to the dunamis of Arkesilas in a way that he
does not to the dunamis of any traditional aristocrat. And dunamis is at times coupled with the unique
adjective eknomon, outside all law, convention, etc.
[ccxliv]
 On  Hieron see Pindar’s  praise for his  saving Greek  civilization from the  Carthaginians at
Pythian  1:  “I  entreat  you,  son  of  Cronus,  grant  that  the  battle-shouts  of  the  Carthaginians  and
Etruscans stay quietly at home, now that they have seen their arrogance bring lamentation to their
ships  off  Cumae.  Such  were  their  sufferings,  when  they  were  conquered  by  the  leader  of  the
Syracusans—a fate which flung their young men from their swift ships into the sea, [75] delivering
Hellas from grievous bondage.”

[ccxlv]
 A claim that has some merit based on purely ancient sources, if we consider Diodorus Siculus
XI.1.1-2 It is not inconceivable that Persia directed Carthage, “cousin” to the Phoenicians then living
under  Persian  rule,  to  attack  Sicily  simultaneously;  or  perhaps  that  Phoenicians  in  the  Levant
independently suggested so, seeing an opportunity. The Phoenicians were traditional competitors of
the Greeks in the Mediterranean for trade and for colonies. It is perfectly conceivable that by 480 BC,
Phoenicians saw their chance to  get rid of a traditional and dangerous  competitor and coordinated
with  Carthage.  Rome  later  took  up  the  Greek  cause  and  incorporated  it  against  Carthage:  Greek
“culture”  didn’t  make  as  big  an  impression  on  Roman  civilization  as  did  the  Greek  geopolitical
orientation  that  Rome  inherited.  See  Nietzsche  TGS  356  on  how  Greek  culture  made  no  actual
impression at Rome.
[ccxlvi]
 Courage, prudence and wisdom or the art of foresight, the mantic art—the art of “prophecy”
or  of  the  mantic  is  not  merely  the  art  of  telling the  future  by “magic,”  but  an  art  of  “heightened
perception” wherein the realities of the natural world and of biology become vividly apparent to the
awakened  observer.  It  might  be  provisionally  interpreted  here  as  a  “super-phronesis,”  or  “super-
prudence,” the ability to see farther and deeper into nature, into the concrete situation as it appears
immediately to the perception of the wise man (or the leader, in this case). The ultimate political art
as it were, coupled, as we will see, with the ability to expound one’s case to others, or to speak to
multiple layers of an audience as Pindar himself says he does.
[ccxlvii]
  Regarding  the  true  meaning  of  dunamis,  or  power,  recall  that  Pindar  at  Nemean  1.57-8
refers  to  Heracles’  dunamis  in  the  same  phrase  as  his  eknomos  power  or  strength:  often  falsely
translated  as  “supernatural,”  but  actually  “out-conventional,”  outside  the  bounds  of  all  law  and
convention. Dunamis should be understood in this way in this context.
[ccxlviii]
 The tyrant or ruler may well have aristocratic blood, but will not be an aristocrat in any
social or cultural way; he will not be a preserver or defender of ancestral customs and laws, etc.
[ccxlix]
 Strauss IPP 116, note 9, where Nietzsche’s sympathy for “Callicles” is discussed.
[ccl]
 Strauss wonders whether it was not “too successful”; OT 207
[ccli]
 I remain agnostic, for now, on whether Strauss himself would have agreed with any of the view
presented in this chapter and thesis. This is intended to be an alternative reading of Platonic political
philosophy—read, as it were, from the point of view  of Nietzschean-Calliclean sympathies,  which
Strauss himself connects.
[cclii]
 From the poem beginning Devarekha be-Mor Over Rekuhim
[ccliii]
 See Rousseau at Social Contract IV.8 repeating  that there  has never  been a  state without a
religious foundation.
[ccliv]
 See for example Bernard Lewis, The  Assassins  Weidenfeld  &  Nicolson  2001,  p.  39,  where
Hasan-i Sabbah, the founder of the Persian branch of the sect talks about his conversion: “…it never
entered my mind that truth should be sought outside Islam. I thought that the doctrines of the Ismailis
were philosophy [a term of abuse among the pious], and the ruler of Egypt a philosophizer.’”

[cclv]

Aristophanes Clouds 390-400

[cclvi]

Aeschines Against Timarchus 173

[cclvii]

All unspecified citations in this section, and in this chapter, refer to line number from

Gorgias; these will be put in brackets within the text. The translation used for context is the W.R.M.

Lamb 1967 edition, see bibliography; but I have considerably changed this translation in many cases.

[cclviii]

Maybe the best known and most ridiculous argument is Socrates’ claim in Plato’s Apology

that he would never have corrupted his own students because this means he would have turned them

into criminals who might have ended up harming him. Xenophon’s defense as well, in particular that

Socrates “never taught” anyone is internally contradictory. For an adequate discussion of these

examples and of the (apparently deliberate) inadequacy of Xenophon’s arguments consult Donald

Morrison’s “Xenophon’s Socrates as a Teacher,” pgs. 181-208 but also especially pgs. 154-8 in The

Socratic Movement, Paul A. Vander Waerdt, Cornell 1994

[cclix]

Karl Popper The Open Society and Its Enemies Princeton 2013 p. 100 where the Gorgias is

described as having a moral teaching that is both “individualistic” and “altruistic” and that is similar

to Christian moral teaching.

[cclx]

E.R. Dodds, Plato: Gorgias, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1959, especially pages 12-14 in

which Plato’s apparent attraction to and even likeness to Callicles is posited; and it is supposed that

Callicles might represent a Plato that Socrates had not gotten to. Now, however, it should be added

that even if in the final analysis this is the case and if this is Plato’s final opinion about Callicles, it by

no means implies that Callicles’ political orientation toward the city is as such rejected by Plato.

[cclxi]

The reference to the lion cub is an especially dramatic touch if we should see the following

passage from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 720-35, to which Callicles is also possibly alluding:

So a man once raised a lion cub

in his own home. The beast

lacked milk but craved its mother's teat.

In early life the cub was gentle.

Children loved it, and it brought

the old men great delight.

They gave it many things

and clasped it in their arms,

as if it were a nursing child.

Its fiery eyes fixed on the hands

that fed it, the creature fawned,

a slave to appetite.

But with time the creature grew

and its character showed—

the one its parents gave it.

So it paid back those who reared it,

preparing a meal in gratitude,

an unholy slaughter of the flocks,

house awash with blood,

while those who lived inside the home

were powerless against the pain,

against the massive carnage.

By god's will they'd brought up

a priest of doom in their own house.

The image of the lion as irrepressible, ineducable nature, as character that, on reaching age, shows

itself—“the one its parents gave it”—and that results in a bloodbath of violence and doom for the

household, for everyday life and convention: an especially important image for Callicles, as we are

about to see.

[cclxii]

Often translated as “sufficient strength” and said to be a coinage of “Callicles,” that is, of

Plato. But that seems unlikely, given the allusion to Pindar that follows. While Pindar himself never

used this particular combination of words, the idea of “enough nature” was already expressed in

Pindar in several different ways as was shown in the previous chapter.

[cclxiii]

Literally: “up-manifests,” “out-shines,” “in-shows,” and the last, tekmairomai, is quoted

directly from Pindar and is the verb form of tekmar, i.e., to give a visible outward, manifest sign, see

discussion in previous chapter; the explicit connection that Plato draws between Callicles and Pindar

should, in my opinion, incline one against Seth Benardete’s claim that Callicles is in some way “the

voice of Athenian imperial democracy.” See Benardete The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy:

Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus U. Chicago 2009, pgs. 8 and 75, where the impress of Athenian

imperialism on Callicles is argued for. But Callicles is not the voice of any democracy or democratic

sentiment at all, but of Pindar’s aristocratic orientation radicalized: of aristocratic radicalism.

Otherwise, my presentation in this chapter owes much to Benardete’s profound reading of both the

Gorgias and the Phaedrus.

[cclxiv]

There is a great deal of scholarship about Callicles’ quotation of Pindar, most of which is

quite interesting, but very technical and not directly relevant to my argument here. My interpretation

here, that is, the case that nomos as quoted refers not to convention or law in the traditional sense but

to “the law of Zeus” or, more correctly in my opinion, the “law of nature,” is made by Marian Demos

in “Callicles’ Quotation of Pindar in the Gorgias,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 1994 pp.

85-107 who also quotes Harold Lloyd-Jones “Pindar fr. 169” 1972, and Marcello Gigante Nomos

Basileus (1956) who make a similar argument.

[cclxv]

For example at 449a, 461b, 463e, 466a, etc.; after Callicles enters, Gorgias only interrupts

twice, and then not substantially.

[cclxvi]

Demegorika, literally “demos-speaking” or “things publicly addressed to the demos”

[cclxvii]
 phaskon  ten aletheian diokein  in the first case and  tei  aletheiai,  O  Sokrates,  hen  pheis  su
diokein  in  the  second.  The  use  of  phanai  instead  of  legein  in  these  cases  is  already  significant
because  Callicles  is  already  accusing  Socrates  of  being  in  an  assertive,  fanciful,  imaginative,  i.e.,
rhetorical mode.
[cclxviii]
 I will use nomos and “convention” interchangeably, and also phusis and “nature.”
[cclxix]
 Callicles’ notion of the manifestness or, to use an inappropriately Heideggerian expression,
the unconcealedness of truth, is reflected in claims such as the following. He says that nature herself
shows [apophainei] that the right or just [dikaion] is the advantage of the stronger over the weaker
[483c9-d2];  that  dikaion  has  been  decided  to  consist  [kekritai]  in  the  rule  and  advantage  of  the
stronger  over  the  weaker  [483d5];  that  this  is  clear  from  many  instances  in  the  world  [deloi…;
483d2]; that the justice of nature shines out in certain situations [484b], or that it simply is [484c].
[cclxx]
 [despotes…ho doulos, 484a6]
[cclxxi]
  See  also  492c7:  the  covenants  or  common  establishments  [sunthemata]  are  likened  to
“foolish speaking” [phluaria]
[cclxxii]
 See Rep. 377c3, Tim. 88c4, Laws 671c1; see Bloom “Interpretive Essay” 1991
[cclxxiii]
  Plato  Laws  889d7-890d2  as  compared  to  890c1-5  and  967a7  ff.,  Aristotle  Metaphysics
990a-b, as appears in the discussion of Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, “Origin of the Idea of
Natural Right”: “The crucial pre-Socratic text [on the right by nature] is the saying of Heraclitus, ‘In
God’s  view  all  things are fair  [noble]  and  good  and just, but  men  have  made  the supposition that
some things are just and others are unjust.’ The very distinction between just and unjust is merely a
human supposition or human convention.”
[cclxxiv]
  Socrates  defends  sophists  against  the  attacks  of  gentlemen  both  in  the  Gorgias  and
especially Euthydemus. See the end of Strauss’ essay on the Euthydemus at SPPP p. 89 where it is
said, “Socrates was not the mortal enemy of the sophists nor were the sophists the mortal enemies of
Socrates.  According  to  Socrates,  the  greatest  enemy  of  philosophy,  the  greatest  sophist,  is  the
political multitude (Republic 492a5-e6), i.e. the enactor of the Athenian laws.”
[cclxxv]
 See Nietzsche Human All Too Human 261 “Tyrants of the Spirit,” and the discussion of this
passage in the following chapter.
[cclxxvi]
 The comparative of erromenos, the passive participle of rhonnumi,  “to  confirm,  to  make
strong,” usually used in the passive erromai, “to be strong, vigorous, etc.”
[cclxxvii]
 Greek abounds in different words to compare ways in which one man excels over another;
the above three may be provisionally translated as “better, more prudent; better, stronger; better, more
noble” etc.; but erromenesteros, the word that both Callicles uses in the Gorgias, and Socrates uses in
the Republic, refers to the “raw material” for all this: to the end-product of an aristocratic breeding
project that stands opposed to the native egalitarian conventions of the commons.
[cclxxviii]
 See above, and compare 482e to 484b, before the Pindar quotation. Cf. 492c

[cclxxix]

According to Thrasymachus in the Republic and, as we have seen, according to pre-Socratic

philosophers or sophists generally, all right is conventional. Callicles claims that there is such a thing

as natural right. He therefore already represents the philosophic teaching become political, or the

birth of political philosophy. He is arguably the intermediate stage between the apolitical pre-

Socratics and the Socratic moral philosophers. Or rather, he is pre-Socratic philosophy become

political without actually possessing political acumen.

[cclxxx]

It is at this point that Socrates is called agroikos, a country-bumpkin or even worse, wild, of

the fields, or, more directly, wild and not of the city. Socrates’ agroikia or barbaric wildness becomes

quite significant both in the Gorgias and in the Hippias Major, and especially revealing for us; see

above, Pindar on Cheiron where he is called agroteron using a similar word.

[cclxxxi]

The comparative of the Greek agathon, the word for good that we find for example in

kaloikagathoi, “the beautiful [noble] and the good,” the term for gentlemen and aristocrats.

[cclxxxii]

Although he does refer to military ventures to exemplify the way of nature, and the word

for force occurs in the poem from Pindar that he quotes or misquotes, these being the only such

examples in the whole speech, Callicles nowhere remarks on the force used by nomos against phusis,

or the force used to restrain the superior; he is concerned only with the state of mind of the man who

must escape nomos, and even his realization of tyranny does not include any discussion of violence

or force, as opposed to Polus’ earlier remarks on the same subject.

[cclxxxiii]

Furthermore, the quality of phronesis was only implicit in Callicles’ speech as a quality

that belongs to the superior. While it is Callicles who volunteers andreia as a definition without any

help from Socrates, it is Socrates who elicits phronesis as a definition in a significant way. Socrates

does this by alluding to a famous saying of Heraclitus’. [490a] It is the claim that “one man is wiser

than ten thousand and deserves to rule,” that ties phronesis to arkhe, and that alludes to political

prudence as a right to rule. Callicles readily agrees to this claim, although in so doing he allows for

the question to move from the pure advantage of the superior to the advantage of the political

community and the need to justify the rule of the superior in the community. This allows Socrates to

attack the “having more” component of Callicles’ notion of natural right, which takes up the whole of

the argument up to 505d.

[cclxxxiv]

Callicles repeatedly defines the just by nature as the superior “having more” [pleon

ekhein] over the inferior, and also ruling [arkhein] them. I prefer the awkward but literal translation

“having more” to the more common translation of “advantage,” because Greek has other more

appropriate words for “advantage,” and because the concept of actually “having more” of something

is very important in the Gorgias.

[cclxxxv]

This episode is treated briefly in Tarnopolsky’s generally fine and informative Prudes

Perverts, Tyrants: Plato’s Gorgias and the Politics of Shame Princeton 2010; at pages 39-40 and 84

Tarnopolsky explicitly addresses the matter of the kinaidos or catamite and of Callicles’ shaming.

And yet although Tarnopolsky recognizes that Socrates is a superior wielder of shame to Callicles,

Polus, and Gorgias, she does not proceed to consider this fact with respect both to the problem of

nomos and to the passage, discussed on the following page below, at 487e, where Socrates all but

admits that any argument that ends in shame will not have led to the truth. Tarnopolsky concedes that

Socrates doesn’t defeat Callicles through reason or logic, but, again, refuses to consider then the extra

step or possibility that Socrates’ shaming of Callicles is not in fact meant to chastise or better a

tyrannical man, but to hide his own secret kinship with the tyrannical man before a democratic

audience. This is because Tarnopolsky is committed to proving that there is a variety of types of

shame in the Gorgias, some of which can be used profitably in democratic politics. See also Mark

Blitz’s review in Perspectives on Politics Vol. 9, No. 3 (September 2011), pp. 713-715, where some

due is given to Tarnopolskys insights and attention to Platonic rhetorical form, yet where the

conclusion is ultimately that Tarnopolsky does not take the substance of the argument with Callicles

seriously. The divergence between Tarnopolsky’s presentation and my own is at the very root of the

matter: Tarnopolsky assumes that Callicles, as a tyrannical man, is and must be wrong or bad and

therefore that Plato through Socrates is disproving or interested in genuinely chastising Callicles. She

does not seem to consider the possibility that Plato gives Callicles the superior argument.

[cclxxxvi]

The ancient Greek word for catamite is kinaidos, but the modern Greek is malaka.

[cclxxxvii]

Not only unmanly but slavish, since the kinaidos was understood to allow himself to be

wronged and harmed and abused, and also lost political rights, see K.J. Dover Greek Homosexuality

Harvard 1989. According to Callicles this is the distinguishing mark of the slave. [483b, “the

endurance [pathema] of being wronged is not for a man [aner] but for some slave…”; 484b, the

superior man living within convention is called a slave] Escape from slavery to convention was

Callicles’ main point, as I again emphasize, and therefore this example must be especially jarring for

him. The issue of course is whether according to Socrates a kinaidos is reprehensible by convention

only or also by nature. But according to Callicles himself shame is only a matter of convention: this

side is emphasized in the Gorgias. It is in this light that we must understand Callicles’ shaming in the

Gorgias.

[cclxxxviii]

Furthermore, as indicated above, Socrates has repeatedly been called rude to the point of

being agroikos, not of the city. Although Callicles’ statements are the ones that appear most overtly

anti-conventional and radical, the means by which Socrates shames him justifies the description of

Socrates as agroikos: a wild man, not of the city, rude in the extreme. His disconnect from any sense

of shame and therefore from any conventional notions is far more advanced than Callicles’, even if

he should pose as the defender of convention. The rest of the Gorgias, as we will see, bears this out.

[cclxxxix]

e.g., 497b, Gorgias has to reenter the argument to force Callicles to continue. On this

account see Nalin Ranasinghe Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgias South Bend 2009; it

is an account of the myths of the underworld that Socrates uses in the second part of his argument

with Callicles, during much of which Callicles himself is silent. Ranasinghe’s approach is explicitly

theological and is to be prized for taking Plato’s myths seriously, as prefigurations of Christian

doctrine. In many ways his parallels between the sophistic misuse of language and the

“postmodernism” he decries in our own time allow him to make important insights about Gorgianic

rhetoric. Nevertheless, he again refuses to consider that Callicles represents anything other than a

species of moral corruption and therefore doesn’t take the substance of Callicles’ remarks seriously.

Furthermore Ranasinghe perhaps does not see the rather ridiculous figure Socrates cuts in debating

with himself and in mythologizing piously in front of an audience—Callicles, Polus—which likely

only has complete contempt for such things. Is Socrates demegorein?

[ccxc]

For a species of relatively conventional scholarship on the Gorgias that is relevant here

consider for a moment George Klosko, “The Refutation of Callicles in Plato's 'Gorgias'” Greece &

Rome Vol. 31, No. 2 (Oct., 1984), pp. 126-139; Callicles is, yet again, depicted as the punching bag

for Socrates’ supposedly dazzling oratory, although here the excuse is given that Plato “had” to give

Callicles an untenable position and bad arguments in order to allow his mouthpiece Socrates to attack

“a life of physical pleasure.” Again there is an unwillingness to consider the possibility that Callicles

is right, has the superior argument, and even would appear to have the superior argument to an

audience that is not quite convinced of Socrates’ piety or his competence. In particular, the silencing

of Callicles, again, by no means implies that Socrates has won the argument and statements such as

the one quoted above (comparing 505b to 491eff.) where Socrates so blatantly contradicts his own

premises are ignored. This happens because traditional readers of the Gorgias are unwilling to tunnel

into the tyrannical statements of Callicles, and look at the substance. The assumption is made that he

must be as such wrong. Therefore much is missed, including the fact that Socrates would not

necessarily end up looking very good in front of an ancient audience of Greek men with his pious

trances and moralistic mythologizing.

[ccxci]

For this interpretation of the Symposium see Allan Bloom’s interpretive essay in his

translation of Republic Basic Books 1991

[ccxcii]

We must consider Socrates’ arguments about purging licentiousness from the soul baseless

because in the Gorgias, unlike in the Republic, there is never any attempt to define justice. Similarly,

if we compare the argument for the purging of licentiousness in the Gorgias at 492e ff. with the

parallel argument in the Republic 372e-399e, especially 398c-403c (as preliminary to discussion of

justice at 441c-445a), where Socrates uses the same terms and seemingly the same ideas, we at once

must realize the limited and inadequate character of the case Socrates makes in the Gorgias. There is

no attempt, as there is in the Republic, to painstakingly construct a city in speech that would win

Callicles’ loyalty the way Socrates wins Adeimantus’ and Glaucon’s loyalty. Glaucon is Callicles’

“cousin,” on account not only of their erotic characters, but also if we consider Glaucon’s speech at

Rep. 358e ff. in light of Callicles’ speeches in the Gorgias. Glaucon is arguably a Callicles to whom

Socrates got in time.

[ccxciii]

Meno 73c

[ccxciv]
 Polus, in praising the tyrannical power rhetoric supposedly supplies, presented  Archelaus
and not any rhetor as the best example of the tyrant. But Archelaus took power by trickery, murder,
and force, not by rhetoric. It is also amusing and suggestive, though I imagine not convincing to all
readers, to mention that in the Gorgias rhetoric is said to be used for two purposes, namely the ability
to escape or “get away” [diaphugon] with becoming a tyrant, and the ability to escape punishment in
the law courts, in particular Socrates’ ability or inability to escape his foreshadowed prosecution. In
other words, Socrates is tacitly and metaphorically compared to a tyrant who attempts to get away
with usurping power in the city.
[ccxcv]
 Obviously not; Gorgias only claims to teach public rhetoric. The idea of private rhetoric is in
the Socratic tradition, e.g., the end of the Phaedrus.
[ccxcvi]
 Rhetoric was not likely to be very useful even in the public assemblies of Sparta or states
like  Sparta.  Cf.  the  whole  beginning  of  the  Hippias  Major,  but  also,  again,  the  introduction  of
Aeschines’ Against Timarchus, for a confirmation of this view in popular opinion.
[ccxcvii]
 Republic 494a
[ccxcviii]
 Consider the only original Gorgianic fragment available to us.
[ccxcix]
 Xenophon Anabasis II.6.16-20, compare with III.4, etc.
[ccc]
 For a detailed discussion of this difference see Strauss SPPP “Xenophon’s Anabasis” esp. pgs.
110-6
[ccci]
  See  the  very  end  of  Aristotle  Nicomachean  Ethics,    compare  to  remarks  on  legislation  at
Gorgias  520a  implying  the  nobler  quality  of  legislation  [nomothetike]  as  opposed  to  justice
[dikaiosune]
[cccii]
 513b, [ou gar mimeten dei einai all’autophuos homoion]
[ccciii]
  Callicles  is  still  not  persuaded  but  at  least  recognizes  Socrates  is  right,  513c.  In  this  last
passage he even willingly admits he agrees with “the many” on a point where Socrates does not. He
is receptive to and may be swayed by this argument in a way not possible with the former argument
against  licentiousness,  at  least  not as  it is  in the  Gorgias.  But  the  previous  argument  conceivably
supported conventional notions, whereas the present one rejects them more radically than Callicles
does.
[ccciv]
 Again, this is Bloom’s reading of how eros is abstracted away from in the Republic.
[cccv]
 On the philosopher as a teacher of erotics see also the dialogue Lovers, where furthermore in
Pindaric fashion, Plato’s utter contempt for mere book learning and mere intellectuals is on display;
see discussion in next chapter on physicality in Nietzsche’s and Plato’s understanding of philosophy.
[cccvi]
 See Republic 494a-497a
[cccvii]
 Aside from the very clear reference given above from Aeschines’ Against  Timarchus, it  is
obvious that Alcibiades’ lusting after tyrannical power was legendary see Robin Seager “Alcibiades

and the Charge of Aiming at Tyranny” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 16, H. 1 (Mar.,
1967), pp. 6-18
[cccviii]
  But  the  repeated  parallelisms  should  also  indicate  that  if  Socrates  is  ready  to  compare
Callicles to one of the two great loves of his life, 481d, then we can be sure that Socrates cares deeply
for Callicles, a realization that would support my aforegoing reflections and my general claim in this
study.  Socrates  would  not  be  expressing  this  type  of  attachment  to  a  Thrasymachus,  a  “vulgar”
conventionalist who only abuses the philosophical insight for personal gain. Although even the latter
position would be sufficient for my study, if only one realizes that the original philosophical insight
—the  distinction  between  nature  and  convention—is  singularly  easy  to  abuse.  But  I  claim  rather
more, see below.
[cccix]
  See  the  discussion  leading  up  to  504d.  Now,  this  is  all  clearly  a  rhetorical  project  in  the
Gorgias, not only because of what I show above, but, I repeat, because of the crucial fact that justice
is nowhere defined by Socrates in this text. This fact must be considered in light of his argument with
Gorgias about the definition of rhetoric, and with Callicles about the definition of the superior.
[cccx]
 Phaedrus 270b
[cccxi]
 Phaedrus 269e-270a
[cccxii]
 e.g., Phaedo 96-100, Diogenes Laertius, Life of Socrates, etc.
[cccxiii]
 Menexenus 235e; Aspasia was their teacher of rhetoric and possibly of erotics
[cccxiv]
 Republic 494a
[cccxv]
 This is, again, a condensation of Leo Strauss’ view as appears in part, e.g., at OT 205-7
[cccxvi]
  As  Allan  Bloom  put  it,  using  Nietzsche,  or  conceivably  Callicles,  to  challenge  sexual
morality “is like using heavy artillery to take over a molehill.”
[cccxvii]
  This  is  also  the  Straussian  take  on  Schmitt’s  invocation  of  “animal  powers,”  see  his
commentary on Schmitt’s Concept of the Political U. Chicago 2007; again, one need not agree with
the statements  made  here from a  moral point of  view,  and  in fact I  do  not agree with  them as an
interpretation  of  Nietzsche;  but it  is a  good  illustration  of  what a  reader  of  Plato—Strauss in  this
sense,  but  also  Bloom—would  have  to  say  about  the  dangers  of  the  “overt”  defense  of  the
prerequisites for philosophy as is found in e.g., Callicles. Calliclean vitalism leads, if not to violent
tyranny, then at least to egalitarian Last-Man-type lassitude. To what extent Plato himself might have
agreed with both these claims can’t fully be determined, but that he labored to “hide” the roots and
character  of  philosophy  for  political  purposes  and  claimed  a  “salutary”  face  or  mask  for  the
philosopher seems very likely.
[cccxviii]
 In keeping with the pattern of the last section, all citations in brackets in this section are
line number from Hippias Major
[cccxix]
 In the Republic the kalon is at the center of the “pre-rational” (pre-speech) education of the
erromenesteroi  who  will  become  guardians  of  the  philosophical  state.  In  the  Gorgias  Socrates
attempts (with much less success) to use the kalon to teach Callicles that licentiousness is ugly and

lawfulness is “beautiful.” Much of the discussion in the Hippias Major is also overtly (and I would
add hypocritically) concerned with refuting the notion that the kalon or the noble/beautiful could in
any  way  include  licentiousness  (akolasia),  which  is  the  prerequisite  for  tyranny  (but  also  for
philosophy).
[cccxx]
 A very limited exception may occur in the Theaetetus
[cccxxi]
 Tarrant, p. 110-1 comments on Woodruff’s view as found in Vander Waerdt 1994
[cccxxii]
 See Tarrant p. 126 of Vander Waerdt 1994, “The historical Socrates was not more mild than
was  his  alter  ego  in  the  Hippias  major.”  Tarrant’s  view  that  the  “alter  ego”  is  more  than  just  a
rhetorical  device  is  in  my  opinion  correct  and  very  insightful;  but Tarrant  completely  ignores  the
political aspect of the dialogue and therefore possibly does not discuss the real significance of this
device.
[cccxxiii]
 Compare Gorgias 527c to the end of the Phaedrus.
[cccxxiv]
 Hippias continually judges the strength of a claim by its possible appeal to others or the
many, e.g., 292e
[cccxxv]
 Namely the kalon  as the ophelimon,  the  khreston,  the  pleasant  through  eyes,  etc.,  all  of
which were shown empty or incomplete in the Hippias Major not by Socrates proper but by the “alter
ego” Socrates, who cares only for the truth and nothing else.
[cccxxvi]
  For  this  latter  see  also  the  patently  ridiculous  opening  of  the  Apology,  which  directly
contradicts the entirety of the Phaedrus and some of the other dialogues mentioned above.
[cccxxvii]
  Recall  also  the  obvious  fact  from  Republic  that  the  erromenesteros  is  bred,  that  the
philosopher is first and foremost a product of breeding; the state begins to wither when the breeding
project collapses. As this is not a thesis specifically on breeding in Plato and in classical political
philosophy, this very significant fact must only be mentioned in passing here. Nevertheless, it carries
some weight in my argument, since it reminds one yet again that the fundamental precondition for
philosophy is breeding,  i.e.,  phusis,  nature,  understood,  as  we  have  seen,  first  of  all  as  biological
breeding. And that the end-product of this breeding, nature itself, is the erromenesteros: the word that
Socrates uses uniquely for both the “raw material” of the philosopher and the tyrant.
[cccxxviii]
 See above references to Aeschines’ Against Timarchus; I did not make the connection to
licentiousness at the time, but the charges against Timarchus, in which he is compared to Socrates,
are  most  significant,  as  is  the  generally  lawless  and  tyrannical  image  presented  of  Timarchus.
Timarchus  is  also  said  to  be  defended  by  “old  [aristocratic]  generals”  who  speak  in  high-flown
language about philosophy and pederasty.
[cccxxix]
 Diogenes Laertius, Life of Aristippus ch. IV
[cccxxx]
 Plutarch Life of Alcibiades 23.4-6
[cccxxxi]
 Diogenes Life of Aristippus
[cccxxxii]
 Athenaeus Deipnosophists 11.119
[cccxxxiii]
 Strauss OT 101-2

[cccxxxiv]
 BGE 7
[cccxxxv]
 The original source may be apocryphal, but, as I explained above not only does this not
matter, but if Epicurus is only “believed” to have said this, it makes the argument here stronger.
[cccxxxvi]
 Diogenes Laertius Life of Democritus 40
[cccxxxvii]
 All  citations in this  chapter where the  author  is not  specified  are to be  assumed to be
Nietzsche; see list of abbreviations and the bibliography for a list of editions and translations used.
[cccxxxviii]
 The title of a chapter of Beyond  Good  and  Evil  where  the  most  telling  connection  is
made between aristocracy as the prerequisite both of tyranny and of high culture, and where both are
connected to the problem of a decaying aristocracy, see below.
[cccxxxix]
  If  this  should  remind  one  of  the  root  of  the  Platonic  erromenesteros  in  rhonnumi,  the
vigorous or well-born as a man of vehement nature or violent force—which Plato uses at Rep. 491a
ff. to describe the nature of one who would become either a philosopher or, if corrupted, a tyrant,
then this is not a coincidence. It is possibly a literal German translation of the Platonic word.
[cccxl]
 Even in terms as qualified as Machiavelli’s; Nietzsche simply has no interest in power politics
for the sake of politics.
[cccxli]
 Especially telling in the context of this argument is his claim at TWI “What the Germans
Lack,” 4: “Even a rapid estimate shows that it is not only obvious that German culture is declining
but that there is sufficient reason for that. In the end, no one can spend more than he has: that is true
of  an  individual,  it  is  true  of  a  people.  If  one  spends  oneself  for  power,  for  power  politics,  for
economics, world trade, parliamentarianism, and military interests — if one spends in the direction
the quantum of understanding, seriousness, will, and self- overcoming which one represents, then it
will be lacking for the other direction. Culture and the state — one should not deceive one-self about
this — are antagonists: ‘Kultur-Staat’ is merely a modern idea. One lives off the other, one thrives at
the expense of the other. All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally
has  always  been  unpolitical,  even  anti-political.  Goethe's  heart  opened  at  the  phenomenon  of
Napoleon — it closed at the ‘Wars of Liberation.’ At the same moment when Germany comes up as a
great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power. Even today much new seriousness,
much new passion of the spirit, have migrated to Paris…”
[cccxlii]
  See  Nietzsche  on  Napoleon at  BGE  199  where  he says  that  “the  history  of the  effect of
Napoleon  is  almost  the history  of  the  higher  happiness which  this  entire  century derived  from  its
most valuable men and moments”; also on Goethe’s opinion of Napoleon at TWI “What the Germans
Lack” 4 and “Skirmishes” 49
[cccxliii]
 TWI “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind” 5
[cccxliv]
 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks pp. 37-8
[cccxlv]
  One  of  the  first  lecturers on  Nietzsche,  Georg  Brandes  at the  University  of Copenhagen,
coined the phrase “aristocratic radicalism” as a way to describe his thought, which was then for the
most part unknown to the world. In a letter to Brandes Nietzsche approves of this description, calling

it the “cleverest” observation about himself. It is most appropriate that Brandes, who coined this

clever and pregnant description of Nietzsche, should have been also the man through whom

Nietzsche’s name first began to be widely known. It is appropriate because when one looks at the

totality of Brandes’ own work, life and reputation, one sees maybe one of the proper ways of

interpreting “aristocratic radicalism”: Brandes simultaneously rejected modern politics and modern

morality—which includes or included modern power politics, and the “noise” of petty nationalism—

and embraced a concern for the preconditions of high culture, preconditions that Brandes explored

especially in a series of biographies of great thinkers and artists. It is interesting to note that Brandes’

chief concerns were later repeated in the careers of Stefan George and of his GeorgeKreis. Here we

find a circle of avowed Nietzscheans centered around a poet, all devoted similarly to the elaboration

of a new aristocratic ethos and perhaps the foundation of a new aristocracy. It is telling that, like

Brandes, they interpreted this “aristocratic radicalism” as a concern with the preconditions of high

culture, which, under the direction of Stefan George himself, they explored—much like Brandes had

—through the composition of monumental biographies of great thinkers and leaders. Some of the

best-known productions of this school are those of Ernst Kantorowicz on Frederick II Hohenstaufen

and of Friedrich Gundolf on Caesar. See Lawrence Trite, “Plutarch in Germany: the Stefan

GeorgeKreis” International Journal of the Classical Tradition Winter 1995, Volume 1, Issue 3, pp

109-121, where the connection to Nietzsche and the composition of monumental biographies is

explicitly made. Brandes had also himself written a similar biography of Caesar, surely inspired, as in

the case of George and Gundolf, by Nietzsche’s very striking words on Caesar and his relationship to

high culture.

[cccxlvi]

On interpreting Nietzsche’s “violent” language purely as spiritual metaphor see Walter

Kaufmann Nietzsche Princeton 1975 especially chapters 2 and 10; on Nietzsche as “literary irony” or

for an example of the “Nietzsche must have been joking” school of interpretation see Alexander

Nehamas Nietzsche: Life as Literature, the title of which indicates the general approach taken;

Nietzsche, however, certainly did like literature and he also occasionally joked. For a brief

introduction to the postmodernist reading of Nietzsche (which also in large part ignores or dismisses

his political thought) see Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. Clayton Kalb 1990

SUNY

[cccxlvii]

TWI “On the Improvers of Mankind” 5

[cccxlviii]

For example, as Bloom has argued in the previously mentioned interpretive essay on the

Republic, the public and political program of the Republic depends on the “excision” of or

abstraction away from eros, which is, however, shown to be the ground of philosophical activity in

the Symposium (and possibly the Phaedrus.) But both programs or regimes are meant in earnest. The

exoteric program is not merely for self-protection.

[cccxlix]

See for the following discussion Michael J. Sweeney “Philosophy and "Jihād:" Al-Fārābī

on Compulsion to Happiness” The Review of Metaphysics Vol. 60, No. 3 (Mar., 2007), pp. 543-72;

the classic discussion of ketman in Czeslaw Milosz The Captive Mind 1953 chapter 3, itself adapted

from Gobineau is also useful.

[cccl]

The conflict in Chechnya and in general in the Caucasus is run by Sufi networks; see, e.g.,

Michael Kemper, “Khālidiyya Networks in Daghestan and the Question of Jihād” Die Welt des

Islams New Series, Vol. 42, Issue 1 (2002), pp. 41-71

[cccli]

At least the latter distinction—between inner truth and an outward opportunistic lie, a mere lie

—does exist to some extent both in some religions and philosophical schools (e.g., the well-known

taqqiya) and does serve an immediate purpose, one of self-protection. But it is a mistake to believe

that this type is the most significant kind of “esotericism”; in Platonism the outward truth, the

exoteric part, is not just an opportunistic lie for self-protection, but a noble or salutary lie, one that

carries content and that is meant to reform public morality in significant ways. By contrast, the

distinction between inner truth and outward metaphor (or irony) has questionable value for a doctrine

to begin with. It’s not clear what Nietzsche, or any other writer, would be trying seriously to achieve

by employing such a literary device.

[ccclii]

TWI “What I Owe to the Ancients” 2 in which Thucydides is mentioned as the flower of

Sophist culture, over and against which the Socratic schools represent a late an unHellenic

alternative.

[cccliii]

In fact this attitude is likely a middle class or lower middle class phenomenon, not an upper

class one. It is unlikely that the upper classes felt such insecurity in their position or bearing that they

thought they’d be confused for a day-laborer or serf because they were tan; indeed, as we have seen

above, Homer seems to delight in depicting Odysseus as homeless and nude on the beach when he

meets Nausicaa—the aristocratic or kingly man is able to establish his status by his bearing and his

speech even when he’s a homeless, naked shipwreck. The pattern of depicting high-status men as

darker in skin tone than women has a long artistic tradition stretching back to ancient Egyptian art:

the men are shown as tan presumably because they were expected to spend time outdoors in war, in

preparation for war, in hunting, and in similar political, manly high-status activities [see Mary Ann

Eaverly Tan Men/Pale Women: Color and Gender in Archaic Greece and Egypt. A Comparative

Approach The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2013]. By contrast pale men were seen,

much like in Greece, as effeminates who, rather than enjoying aristocratic activities such as hunting,

military enterprise, and training in the gymnasium, spent their days indoors with women and children

(hence the Greek observation, see below, that Persians were paler-skinned than Greeks), or as

banausics who worked at mechanical jobs indoors, slaves who worked in the mines, and so forth.

Such an attitude seems to be almost a constant throughout history, whether it was explicitly

commented upon or not; Machiavelli mentions hunting and outdoors preparation for war as the most

important activity for the energetic prince (Prince XIV). The belief of modern scholars and

journalists that the upper classes avoided tanning because of status insecurity is therefore likely

ahistorical, and quite bizarre, and depends on ignoring evidence from the example of ancient Greek
and similar aristocracies; it requires a different explanation.
[cccliv]
 Xenophon Agesilaus 1.26-8
[ccclv]
 See also Strauss at OT 207 explaining that Plato believed Sparta was superior to Athens.
[ccclvi]
 Plato Gorgias 464b
[ccclvii]
 TWI “The Problem of Socrates” 8
[ccclviii]
 TWI “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man 22-3. For the sake of completeness, note Nietzsche
does go on to say that “Finally, I recall — against Schopenhauer and in honor of Plato — that the
whole  higher  culture  and  literature  of  classical  France  too  grew  on  the  soil  of  sexual  interest.
Everywhere in it one may look for the amatory, the senses, the sexual contest, ‘the woman’ — one
will never look in vain.” This is, however, entirely in keeping with the general point made in this
thesis, since the higher culture of modern France (and therefore of modern Europe), which grew out
of the soil of sexual interest, was itself a noble or aristocratic culture according to Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil 260: “art and enthusiasm in reverence and in devotion are the regular symptoms of an
aristocratic way of thinking and valuing. From this we can without further ado understand why love
as passion — which is our European specialty — must clearly have a noble origin: as is well known,
its  invention  belongs  to the  Provencal  knightly  poets, those  splendidly  inventive  men of  the “gay
saber” to whom Europe owes so much — almost its very self.” This, however, is a later development
that Nietzsche connects to the development of  and  reaction  to  Christianity, and therefore takes us
somewhat outside the topic of this thesis.
[ccclix]
 See also discussion of kouros statuary and the Kritios Boy in 4th chapter of Sexual Personae
Yale 2001, “Pagan Beauty”
[ccclx]
 “What Plato did [on behalf of philosophy] in the Greek city and for it, was done in and for
Rome by Cicero…” Leo Strauss OT 206
[ccclxi]
 TWI “Skirmishes in a War with the Age” 47, Ludovici translation
[ccclxii]
  An  interesting  future  enterprise  would  be  a  study  of  these  four  and  other  minor  similar
figures in late Spartan history, how they were “cultivated” by the Spartan polity, and the means by
which Sparta was ultimately able to neutralize them. Lysander was the first man to be worshiped as a
god  in  the  Greek  cities,  and  was  secretly  aiming  for  a  tyranny  in  Sparta.  Clearchus’  life,  as  we
understand it from the accounts of both Diodorus Siculus (14.12) and Xenophon (who, tellingly, in a
“noble”  fashion,  for  “it  is  noble  to  remember  only  the  good,”  leaves  out  much  of  the  wild  and
atrocious  behavior  of  his  past,  such  as  his  attempts  to  set  up  a  tyranny  on  the  Hellespont  and
wholesale murder  of the  aristocracy in Byzantium), reads like  a Conrad novel. Sparta was able to
create what Nietzsche would call monstrous or amazing specimens as a result of its regime, but this
never  resulted  in  a  flowering  of  high  culture.  This  may  have  something  to  do  with  the  fact  that
Spartan aristocracy never had a period of decay or decline in the sense of the Athenian aristocracy:
the Spartan regime did not have a political collapse, it ended because it simply ran out of men; for

example, after the second Battle of Mantinea, when it was only able to field a few hundred heavy
infantry. The intense focus on citizen quality as opposed to quantity meant that many Greek cities
periodically experienced the problem of oligandria, especially after heavy casualties were sustained.
Aristotle explains in Politics book 2 the social and economic causes of Spartan decline in its marriage
practices and the behavior of its women, who were not subject to the Spartan regime in the way the
men were.  This is, however, an  entirely different form of  “decline” than the  one discussed in  this
thesis; the regime itself never wavered or relaxed its strictures; it just ran out of men.
[ccclxiii]
 Clement Miscellanies VI 9, as appears in Sprague, The Older Sophists 1972
[ccclxiv]
  From  1870-1  note,  “A  state  that  cannot  attain  its  ultimate  goal  usually  swells  to  an
unnaturally large size. The world-wide empire of the Romans is nothing sublime when compared to
Athens. The strength that really should go into the flower here remains in the leaves and stem, which
flourish.” As quoted in The Portable Nietzsche trans. Kaufmann Penguin 1977 p. 32
[ccclxv]
 BGE 257
[ccclxvi]
 BGE 229
[ccclxvii]
 The following discussion is based on Burckhardt The Greeks and Greek Civilization 1999
chapter 2 pp. 13-63, and p. 36, etc. regarding the suffering and violence upon which the polis must be
based.
[ccclxviii]
  It  was  notoriously  easy  to  fall  off  the  citizen  rolls  in  Sparta  for  example.  Burckhardt
mentions p. 162 the passage in the Homeric hymn to Apollo where the Ionians, arriving in their ships
at the festival at Delos, descend in procession looking magnificent, ageless and godlike; he hints at
how much suffering  and  cruelty  was  necessary  for  the  creation  of  such  a  caste,  and  how  modern
historians really forget what the focus on citizen quality in ancient Greece really entailed.
[ccclxix]
 BGE 262
[ccclxx]
 TWI, “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” 38
[ccclxxi]
 Plato Theages 126a—famously even  more so, that  the  dream was to  become  a god. The
Spartan general Lysander was the first Greek to achieve this. Plutarch Life of Lysander 18.3
[ccclxxii]
  BGE  262  and  compare  with  the  similar  idea  expressed  at  Human  All  too  Human  224
“Ennoblement Through Degeneration”
[ccclxxiii]
 TWI “What the Germans Lack” 4
[ccclxxiv]
  Here  is  then  another  way  in  which  the  aristocratic  pathos  of  distance  is  said  to  be  a
prerequisite for science and philosophy; it is apparently also the root ultimately of the hankering after
the new. Nietzsche’s reference to the new world, to Columbus and the spirit of exploration, should be
compared to Strauss’ reference to Machiavelli as a “greater Columbus” at NRH 177
[ccclxxv]
 Gay Science 291 compare to what Nietzsche says regarding the Renaissance as a whole at
Human All Too Human 237; where he again contrasts the Italian love of the new and desire for the
“complete  fusion  of  the  ancient  and  modern  spirit”  to  the  German  “backwardness”  of  the
Reformation  that  stopped  this  salutary  process;  also  see  Twilight  of  the  Idols  “Skirmishes  of  an

Untimely Man,” 37 and 44, where the Renaissance is called a “squandering” and a “finale”: “The

danger that lies in great men and ages is extraordinary; exhaustion of every kind, sterility, follow in

their wake. The great human being is a finale; the great age — the Renaissance, for example — is a

finale. The genius, in work and deed, is necessarily a squanderer: that he squanders himself, that is

his greatness! The instinct of self-preservation is suspended, as it were: the overpowering pressure of

outflowing forces forbids him any such care or caution.”

[ccclxxvi]

BGE 200

[ccclxxvii]

Leo Strauss discusses Alcibiades and this striking aphorism at Studies in Platonic

Political Philosophy pg. 184 but, strangely enough, what he has to say seems at least at surface level

to be entirely matter-of-fact, and somewhat off-point. He brings up the example of Caesar and

Alcibiades from this aphorism only to point out how Nietzsche is obviously free from “herd

morality,” and to show how these two figures, especially Alcibiades, exemplify a different type of

morality. This may be so, but it seems a strange point, as it is not the main contrast Nietzsche makes

here—Nietzsche doesn’t even mention herd morality. The same “freedom” from herd morality is

better illustrated elsewhere in Nietzsche’s writing. The matter becomes even more mysterious when

one notes that Strauss seems entirely to miss the point of Nietzsche’s reflections on the relationship

between breeding, blood, the dissolution of aristocratic morality or political institutions, and the

emergence of types like Alcibiades. Why would Strauss ignore Nietzsche’s main claim in this

aphorism? Given Strauss’ deep knowledge of Nietzsche one should err here on the side of believing

that he knew exactly what Nietzsche was talking about but chose to somewhat distort or tone down

Nietzsche’s argument. See below, appendix.

[ccclxxviii]

Human All Too Human 261. At least regarding the ancient tendency to describe the

founders of philosophical sects in explicitly political terms note that “founder of the constitution” is

the word used by Diogenes Laertius; e.g., the passage VI.15, where Antisthenes is described very

explicitly as autos hupothemenos tei politeiai ta themelia of the Cynic and Stoic schools

[ccclxxix]

…and supposedly different “periods” in his work—for Human, All Too Human is said to

belong to his “middle” stage.

[ccclxxx]

He was certainly not a typical “reactionary,” let alone a social conservative. If that should

not be clear already from material already quoted, consider the passage, well known from Straussian

commentary, “Whispered to the conservatives. — What was not known formerly, what is known, or

might be known, today: a reversion, a return in any sense or degree is simply not possible. We

physiologists know that. Yet all priests and moralists have believed the opposite — they wanted to

take mankind back, to screw it back, to a former measure of virtue. Morality was always a bed of

Procrustes. Even the politicians have aped the preachers of virtue at this point: today too there are

still parties whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs. But no one is free to be

a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward — step by step further into decadence (that is my

definition of modern "progress"). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration,

gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more.” TWI “Skirmishes” 43; see
also TWI “The Improvers of Mankind” 1
[ccclxxxi]
 BGE 200
[ccclxxxii]
 BGE 262
[ccclxxxiii]
 TWI, “The Problem of Socrates” 9-10
[ccclxxxiv]
  BGE 62
[ccclxxxv]
 “…the political action of philosophers on behalf of philosophy has achieved full success.
One sometimes wonders whether it has not been too successful.” Strauss On Tyranny 207
[ccclxxxvi]
 See the differing meanings of the ascetic ideal at GM 3
[ccclxxxvii]
  This  would  be  nothing  new  in  the  case  of  Heidegger.  As  Julian  Young  argues 
[“Schopenhauer, Heidegger, art, and the will”  pp. 162-180 from Schopenhauer, philosophy, and the
arts Ed.Dale Jacquette Cambridge U. 1996] nearly all of Being and Time corresponds to the first part
of  Schopenhauer’s  main  work—Young  almost  calls it  a plagiarism—which  Heidegger attempts  to
cover  up  through  the  most  intemperate  attack  on  and  criticism  of  Schopenhauer.  Nietzsche  and
Schopenhauer,  the  great  philosophical  “outsiders”  of  the  19
th
  century,  who  had  such  a  profound
effect on European literature and art, are recast into the rather more “difficult” academic language of
the German professor, mingled with a late-stage Hegelianism, and put into the service of a national
community and ultimately a state that Nietzsche and Schopenhauer both despised—few have more
caustic words for nationalism and for the Germans in particular than Schopenhauer. While this is not
the place for a criticism of Heidegger’s thought, a rewarding study could be made of how there is in
his books not a single substantial idea that is not already found in either Nietzsche or Schopenhauer.
It represents  an attempt to  “square the  circle” by turning  these thinkers into  court philosophers of
sorts.
[ccclxxxviii]
 TWI “The Problem of Socrates” especially 9, 11
[ccclxxxix]
 TWI  “Skirmishes” 47. It  is for  this reason that  Nietzsche calls  the French (Provencal-
troubadour) spiritualization of sexual love—what he terms “love as passion”—and of woman one of
the  “greatest  triumphs”  of  Europe  over  Christianity.  Through  this  event  nature,  the  body,  the
cultivation of eros could be re-introduced: France found a new basis on which human nature could
once again be cultivated; it is for this reason that Nietzsche believes French culture is the  modern
European culture and that Europe possibly owes “everything” to the Provencal.
[cccxc]
 TWI “On the ‘Improvers’ of Mankind” 3-5; in the context in particular of talking about the
morality of breeding as opposed to that of taming, Nietzsche  mentions  Plato  and  the  pia  fraus  or
noble lie and the problem of the psychology of those who use it as the problem he has been pursuing
the longest.
[cccxci]
  The  following  discussion  is  based  on  “The  Greek  State,”  trans.  Mugge,  ed.  Oscar  Levy
1911;  as  so  often  in  this  thesis,  I  summarize  Nietzsche’s  claims  without  adding  repeatedly,
“according to Nietzsche…”

[cccxcii]
 The primeval barbarian, who Nietzsche sometimes seems to praise, is nevertheless not the
highest, or even a particularly high, form  of human nature. Nietzsche merely calls the barbarian a
more complete human than the vast majority of civilized humans, or humans living a settled life. But
this has to do with the fact that the vast majority of attempts at civilization represent a mere stunting
or  taming  of  primeval  barbarism,  and  not  a  cultivation  of  any  higher  forms  of  life.  That  is,
civilization as such has no value insofar as it consists in the mere taming of the primeval barbarian or
his reduction to a beast of burden. The barbarian at least represents potential, whereas the broken and
civilized slave does not: or, as Strauss politely puts it, classical political philosophy has more interest
in “rustic” early kingship than in forms of post-constitutional rule like Caesarism. The barbarian at
least has energy and vitality, there is enough “raw material” there for cultivation of something higher.
Domestication, by contrast, is corruption.
[cccxciii]
 For sure Nietzsche maintains that the modern state also makes use of slavery. It is just that
the  Greeks  were  rather  more  honest  in  calling  things  what  they  were,  whereas  the  moderns  hide
slavery under homilies of “dignity of labor.”
[cccxciv]
 BGE 258
[cccxcv]
  Strauss  himself  refers  to  Nietzsche’s  return  to  nature  as  an  ascent  to  nature,  but,
significantly, doesn’t at all touch on the example Nietzsche uses to make this point: “Progress in my
sense. — I too speak of a ‘return to nature,’ although it is really not a going back but a going up —
an ascent to the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness where great tasks are something one
plays with, one may play with. To put it metaphorically: Napoleon was a piece of ‘return to nature,’
as  I  understand  the  phrase  (for  example,  in  rebus  tacticis;  even  more,  as  military  men  know,  in
matters of strategy). TWI “Skirmishes” 48
[cccxcvi]
 In this Appendix, works cited where the author is not specified should be assumed to be by
Strauss.
[cccxcvii]
 TWI “Skirmishes” 44
[cccxcviii]
 TWI 44
[cccxcix]
 SPPP 184
[cd]
 Strauss The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism p. 132 and connects precisely his writing
on the training of dogs and horses to his Socratic writings on politics.
[cdi]
 Rousseau himself seems to talk about the pia fraus in his chapter on the Legislator from book II
of Social Contract
[cdii]
 SPPP 190-1
[cdiii]
 OT 262
[cdiv]
 OT 154
[cdv]
  As  much  as,  indeed,  the  words  Massendressur  and  Volkshygiene  allude  to  Nazi  practice,
according to Gourevitch; it’s unclear if Kojeve was being humorous or trying to bait Strauss in the
letter  in  question.  Regardless,  Strauss,  as  we  have  seen,  carefully  avoids  explicitly  treating  this

subject even when he quotes Nietzschean aphorisms that treat the problem of breeding explicitly. It is

unclear why Strauss does so, and a good subject for future investigation. As to Nietzsche’s supposed

connections to Nazism, Strauss’ formulation—the step-grandfather of fascism—is adequate. Note,

however, that fascism is not the same as Nazism. The connection between Nietzsche and fascism is

tenuous and indirect at best, but the connection to Nazism is next to impossible to make. This is not

an apologia on behalf of Nietzsche, however, so this subject must be left for later. Walter Kaufmann

in any case has adequately disproven any connection between Nietzsche’s teaching and Nazism, see

his Nietzsche 1975 chapter 10. It suffices to mention the chapter titled “The Coldest Monster” from

Zarathustra alone to see, in a very direct way, why Nietzschean talk of “breeding” does not entail

any connection to Nazi ideology. The Nietzscheans who lived in the 1930’s were men of the right—

Ernst Junger and Stefan George come to mind—but they were also resolutely anti-Nazi. Junger’s On

Marble Cliffs, written in 1939, is often taken to be a Nietzschean criticism of Hitlerism. Stefan

George left Germany in 1933; members of his Nietzschean secret society tried to assassinate Hitler.

[cdvi]

OT 204