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 longestablished groups, with long-established marriage patterns and longestablished 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 20th 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 selfdiscipline, 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.