A Fictional Letter to the Financial Times:
Sir, the name of Thucydides, Son of Olorus, has appeared in the Financial Times three times in the last eight days. Three times it has been accompanied by grave errors interpreting the relevance of his thought to the current European situation, which I will address in chronological order.
I usually post about books I have read or I am currently reading. So here’s a first: a book that I’d definitely like to and need to read. New in paperback, from Princeton University Press, The Symptom and The Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece, by Brook Holmes. If you are a Foucaultian, Platonist, or Thucydidean, this is probably going to be an enlightening argument. A quote from the introduction:
I explore and defend the claim that the physi cal body plays a pivotal but unacknowledged role in ideas about the human in the fifth and early fourth centuries, as well as in the formation of a new kind of ethical subjectivity centered on practices of caring for the self. I explain the strength of its influence in terms of its dual identity. On the one hand, the physical body is a model of intelligibility: although its workings are hidden, a physician trained in the medical tekhnē, “science” or “art,” may reconstruct them through reasoning. Doing so allows him both to intervene in disease and to manage health. On the other hand, that body is an untrustworthy and unfamil iar thing: it is prone to disorder, largely estranged from consciousness, and ani mated not by intentions but by impersonal, asocial powers. Its very strangeness, I argue, encourages ancient thinkers to take an increasing interest in the psukhē as the locus of the person.
As with all PUP book, the intro is freely available. Scroll down to pages 24-5 and you’ll see some thoughts on the role that the body plays in Thucydides’ account of the politics of the plague and presentation of the Funeral Oration of Pericles. Biopolitics in Ancient Greece is worth attention, hence the project on “Periclean Biopolitics” that I’ve been saying is “the next project” for a couple of years now. Anyways, based on the introduction, Holmes looks to have written a very interesting and important book.
It’s probably useful to list them all, in all their variants, in one place. Begin with Diogenes Laertius, compare the changes in Xenophon and Plato, as Strauss suggested on the first page of his Xenophon’s Socrates.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives 2.5.40:
The affidavit in the case, which is still preserved, says Favorinus, in the Metron, ran as follows: “This indictment and affidavit is sworn by Meletus, the son of Meletus of Pitthos, against Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus of Alopece: Socrates is guilty of refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state, and of introducing other new divinities. He is also guilty of corrupting the youth. The penalty demanded is death.”
Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.1:
I often wondered by what possible speeches those who indicted Socrates persuaded the Athenians that he deserved death from the city. For the indictment against him was something like the following: Socrates commits an injustice by not believing in the gods which the city believes and by bringing in new and different divine things; he commits an injustice also by corrupting the young.
Xenophon, Apology of Socrates to the Jury, §10:
And [Hermogenes] affirmed that Socrates said that, this being his view, when the plaintiffs accused him on the grounds that he did not believe in the gods in whom the city believes but brought in other strange daimonia and corrupted the young…
Plato, Apology of Socrates, 24b
It is something like this: it asserts that Socrates does an justice by corrupting the young, and by not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other daimonia that are novel. The charge is of this sort.
Plato doesn’t report this part of his biography, though Diogenes Laertius does:
Justus of Tiberias in his book entitled The Wreath says that in the course of the trial Plato mounted the platform and began: “Though I am the youngest, men of Athens, of all who ever rose to address you”–whereupon the judges shouted out, “Get down! Get down!”
Xenophon, of course, couldn’t have spoken at the Trial of Socrates because he was busy leading 10,000 Greeks out of Asia, or something. One wonders what would have transpired if Xenophon rose to speak, and not Plato. That begs the question of whether Xenophon would have ever risen to speak in the same way.
In closing, compare Aristophanes’ charges against Socrates with Socrates’ charges against Gorgias.
Insofar as my ongoing interest in the moral consciousness conforms to a “plot”, it thickens. I love Plato’s Symposium, which I know is rather cliche. I came across this remark from Allan Bloom’s famous “Ladder of Love” essay:
The study of the soul had become such a part of Catholic Christianity that its destruction in the name of something like consciousness seemed a necessity. But the Christian teaching was about a specific version of the soul characterized by separability from the body and immortality, great miracles that defied common sense and reason. (p.195)
Okay, so classical political philosophy is about the soul and nomos, while modern political philosophy is about the moral consciousness. Hmm….
From paragraph #171 of Natural Right & History, in the discussion of the mutability and immutability of natural right:
The Thomistic interpretation is connected with the view that there is a habitus of practical principles, a habitus which he call “conscience” or, more precisely, synderesis. The very terms show that this view is alien to Aristotle; it is of Patristic origin.
“It is of Patristic origin” or perhaps, “it is of the Patristic, Origen”. See his homilies on Ezekiel. One cannot emphasize this point enough: the moral conscience is apparently not a Greek invention. Is this invention the crisis of classic natural right? Is this what allows Thomas to so easily turn natural right into natural law? What about the comparison between the Nichomachean Ethics 1134b and Rhetoric 1.13.2? To the Kuzari? But first:
The doctrine of synderesis or of the conscience explains why natural law can always be duly promulgated to all men and hence be universally obligatory. It is reasonable to assume these profound changes were due to the influence of belief in biblical revelation. If this assumption should prove to be correct, one would be forced to wonder, however, whether the natural law as Thomas Aquinas understands it is natural law strictly speaking, i.e., a law knowable to the unassisted human mind, to the human mind which is not illumined by divine revelation. (p.163, emphasis not in original)
I’ll note only two circumstantial coincidences. The Platonic chariot appears in a dialogue that occurs outside of the city walls. Maimonides notes that the Account of the Chariot (III 6) implies an understanding of its audience as being outside the city: comparing two mean, one from a settle population and another from desert nomads, “the former knew that city people know in what state the ruler rides, [Isaiah] did not describe that state, but said only: I saw the ruler…whereas the people of Exile required these details [from Ezekiel].” The biblical Chariot, like the Platonic one, is outside the city. The biblical Chariot is a picture that is only possible outside of the Second Table, outside of the “minimum requirements for society” (NRH 158). The second circumstance: I usually write in this space in the dead of night, seeking the morning sun; at this moment, I am writing in the middle of the afternoon awaiting the evening dusk.
p.s. Origen postulates a parallel between Ezekiel and Christ on the basis of Luke 3:23, Matthew 3:13, and Luke 3:21. See the Scheck translation, p.32-3.
p.p.s. There are many, many, benefits to the current fashionable love for habitus, doxa, and field in my academic community. But much, much more resides on the surface of these concepts than their first impression admits. And the first impression is already powerful.
I’m currently treading water trying to make sense of Aristotle’s political philosophy, on account of my preference for the Rhetoric and of my inability to set aside my curiosity regarding the doctrine of the moral conscience. Of course, how can one set either of these aside given the current climate’s love for recent iterations of habitus? Soon, very soon (I alway say this don’t I?) necessity will force itself upon me and I will get to return to Thucydides’ History. This time, however, “time” will be on my mind as I read. Thucydides uses the “natural” calendar of summers and winters to chronicle the war. Strauss (CM, 227n88) provides some hints for understanding Thucydides’ hints. Some attention will also be paid to what I can only very clumsily call the “Periclean biopolitics” of the plague and stasis.
A gentle reminder for my future self. Compare Machiavelli’s Epistle Dedicatory in il Principe with Thucydides’ Possession for Everlasting, 1.22, or his famous statement on methodology. Machiavelli’s Prince lacks superfluous ornaments; Thucydides’ History, avoiding the story telling of patris, will “perhaps seem less enjoyable for listening.”
While reading Seth Benardete’s essay Socrates and Plato: The Dialectics of Eros I stumbled across the most fantastic quote. Quote: “…negation is always the other of the other (Sophist 258a4-5). Philosophy therefore tends to become conspicuous at the boundaries of things, where it binds together what seems to be apart and separates what seems to be together.” Someday soon I hope to formulate some thoughts on Being, inside/outside, and philosophy being “on the line”. Perhaps while discussing the quid sit of securitas? Securitas is a freedom from anxiety – freedom from angst – or composure. It is also the name of a minor Roman Goddess or personified as the “tutelary goddess of the Roman state”. Security and Political Theology always, always, go hand in hand. To wit: ti esti nomos?
p.s. Confer Saint Jerome’s translation of Maccabees 11:30
p.p.s. Blushing is the surface that reveals the heart of things.
p.p.p.s. Is philosophy the seaming of seemingness?
the surface of things 