Mary P. Nichols: Socrates and the Political Community: An Ancient Debate. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, November 4, 1987.

 

In politics and scholarship, feminism contradicts itself. Identifying certain virtues and vices traditionally regarded as masculine—courage and cruelty, philosophy and empty abstraction, spiritedness and immoderation—or as feminine—patience and fearfulness, intuition and emotionalism, sensitivity and irresolution—feminists cannot decide how to judge these in any consistent way. They cannot agree among themselves whether to exalt all ‘feminine’ traits and degrade all masculine ones, or to concoct some synthesis of the old virtues and commend this to men and women equally, or to deny that masculinity and femininity have any basis at all in human nature. Indeed, many deny that human nature itself exists in any morally or politically relevant way, a strategy that would resolve the contradictions rhetorically if ever it could be made plausible.

Professor Mary P. Nichols understands these quandaries. That is to say, she rises above them. In writing on the relation of politics to learning, of the city to philosophy, she brings traditionally feminine insights to bear on the work of three ancient Greek political writers and their modern commentators. And she does more than that: This study of the poet Aristophanes and the philosophers Plato and Aristotle proceeds from an femininity thought through. Whereas feminism can never intelligently understand masculinity, and thus fails to understand femininity—remaining an ideological or merely partisan and partial view of human life—Nichols’s femininity opens her mind instead of closing it, letting her see women and men with a rare, systematic clarity.

Aristophanes’ comic drama the Clouds, Plato’s dialogue the Republic, and the second book of Aristotle’s treatise the Politics all address problems raised by the conflict between Socrates and his city, Athens, and by implication the conflict between philosophy and politics. Aristophanes represents Socrates rather as Socrates’ wife Xanthippe might have regarded him, had she possessed wit. An irresponsible stargazer suspended in a giant basket, simultaneously ignoring the needs of his body yet describing the cosmos as mere matter-in-motion; coming to earth, he serves as and elderly ringleader of scraggly homosexual youths who blithely ignore the decent requirements of family, politics, and religion. Socrates pursues freedom but finally ruins himself and all who foolishly heed his counsels. “Caught in contradiction,” Nichols writes, Aristophanes’ Socrates “is laughable.” Philosophy deserves ridicule, and ridicule checks men from victimizing themselves with philosophy.

Plato’s Socrates reverses this charge. Not philosophy but politics, the city, leads men to chase dreams into the abyss. The political rage for absolute justice causes men willfully to trample nature, including the differences between men and women, to lie to others and to themselves, and eventually to commit the worst injustices and to do so blandly, in complacent disregard for the cruel ways in which they pursue justice. In conversations with such perfervidly manly types as tyrannical Thrasymachus and militant young Glaucon, Plato’s Socrates deftly shows the danger of politics to human character.

Not the least of these dangers threatens reasoned thought, the distinctively human part of human nature. Not only does Nichols see that Socrates intends his famous description of the ‘City in Speech’ ruled by philosopher-kings as a supremely ironic construct—more comical than any Aristophanean drama—but she argues that the philosopher-kings themselves do not compare to the genuine philosopher, Socrates himself. The philosopher-kings are what we today would call ideologues; their political passions shape their thought, preventing them from actual philosophizing. Their reason controls their appetites but has no desire of its own. It is self-sufficient but closed. It can dictate but it cannot learn. The walls of the city determine its horizon. It cannot love its own, as a woman loves her children or as a moderately political man loves his country, but neither can it love what transcends family and country.

This absolutizing of politics leads to self-destructive communism. By denying the natural differences between men and women, by insisting on equality defined merely as sameness, the City in Speech “ultimately denies nature.” But nature generates men and women, human life itself. The philosopher-kings absurdly order all citizens above the age of ten years out into the country; here Nichols, perhaps influenced to much by evil acts in our own century, speaks of the inevitability of “mass murder” to achieve this unliberating exodus. Yet Plato’s Socrates retains his comic balance here as elsewhere. There is no one to enforce the proposed exile, so logic immolates the Republic‘s City in Speech as thoroughly as stage-fire does the Socratic think-tank in the Clouds. 

In the Republic, logic does what ridicule does in the Clouds. It sets the limits. Thus Plato can rescue philosophy, thought guided by logic or reason, with reason itself—by the very act of philosophizing—whereas Aristophanes can only laugh, nervously, limiting philosophy by appeals to custom or ‘normality.’ Plato invites us to think about politics, and about thought, about what each can and cannot do. Justice is not so simple as politicians and ideologues believe. Plato finds it in the complex human needs both for the world as it is and for the world as it can be remade, realistically, for human life.

For Nichols’s Plato, justice finds expression not in politics but in the small circles of philosophic friends Socrates wisely rules. Socrates knows he does not know, and this knowledge of his own, and others’, ignorance dampens political fires. Nichols finds this a too-negative justice. In Aristotle’s Politics she finds not only Socratic skepticism but some prudent answers.

Against Plato, Aristotle insists that political life can incorporate some diversity, cultivate some openness. Against Aristophanes, Aristotle argues that a certain kind of philosophic thought can guide political life. Building upon the naturally-generated unit of the family, Aristotle rejects the Platonic contention that politics absolutized must yield communism, because he denies that communism is political at all. The strictly political relationship, seen in the household itself in the relationship between husband and wife, consists of ruling and being ruled, not in one-way command. On that natural basis, Aristotle’s political science aims at guiding active prudence or statesmanship, particularly lawgivers, who form “the bridge between thought and actual regimes.” “The philosopher can share in political life by advising statesmen.”

Nichols’s womanly critique of manly spiritedness does not disdain either spiritedness or men. That would be to commit the very error of spiritedness itself, by treating ‘the other’ as a target. Instead, she achieves a balance, finding her intellectual counterpart in Aristotle—just the sort of man mere feminists never appreciate, but whom intelligent women, along with their manly partners, can readily esteem.

Jenny Teichman: Pacifism and Just War: A Study in Applied Philosophy. London: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, November 25, 1987.

 

Contemporary British philosophers often believe ethics and politics sub-philosophic. Although philosophy began as an attempt to give a rational account of the whole of nature, these philosophers finally can only throw up their hands at human choices, private or public. Choices, they claim, are ‘subjective,’ a matter of irrational feelings or historically-given conventions. Ultimately, logic is irrelevant to choice. As A. J. Ayer claims in his well-known book Language, Truth, and Logic, we may use reason to clarify secondary issues, so we don’t choose contradictory means to an end. But we cannot reasonably choose the end itself. ‘The Good’ remains beyond (some would say beneath) rational thought. Philosophers can offer no serious help when we ask ‘should’ questions.

Unfortunately for this view, some people, not all of them philosophically incompetent, in fact persist in trying to think rationally about what is good for them. And if one asks, ‘What’s good for me?’ it’s hard to avoid the question, ‘Who am I?’ From there, the questions ‘What is a human being?’ and ‘What is good for human beings as such?’ are not far behind.

Jenny Teichman is a British philosophy professor trained in the familiar techniques of analytical logic. Unlike her immediate predecessors, she takes ‘should’ questions seriously. Pacifism and the Just War represents an heir of Ayers’ intelligent effort to come to terms philosophically with the good—and with moral and political life, which aims at the good. She does so without availing herself of the absolutist language of rights—as distinguished from right. She pointedly remarks, “If one tries to reduce all moral questions to matters of rights one ends up in various impasses that were not there when one began.”

Teichman begins by defining pacifism not merely as opposition to violence (a pacifist might spank his children) but as “anti-war-ism,” “a principled objection to the violence of war.” She fails to define ‘war,’ thereby injuring her argument. To define war, she would need to discuss war’s purpose, instead of merely asserting that it is “victory.” She would need to think politically, to move beyond “applied” philosophy to political philosophy. She would need to think about what pacifism—literally, ‘peace-ism’—is for, not only what it is against. As things stand, “anti-war-ism” is merely the negation of a shadow, and this becomes obvious when she writes, “War without death is logically impossible.” Not so: although war without death has been well-nigh impossible so far, logically it’s easy to conceive of a war in which enemy troops, rulers, populations are incapacitated, political objections gained without any deaths at all.

Teichman attempts to ground her study in practical reality. She does this by presenting brief, competent histories of pacifist doctrine (“it comes to us from Christianity”) and of conscription. But she doesn’t fully integrate her historical knowledge with her philosophic thought; again, only a political understanding would enable her to do that.

For example, she rightly says that some advocates of the ‘just war’ theory confuse war with civil punishment. Sovereign states consist in part of a civil authority that sets laws and punishments, but in war, she observes, no overarching authority exists.

This is right as far as it goes, but it omits two points that Augustine, author of the Christian version of the just war doctrine, would insist upon. First, wars are ordered by civil authorities. Just wars are governed by such authorities, and this distinguishes them from piracy and terrorism. Political life consists neither of world government nor of anarchy. Second, Augustine considers God the overarching ruler, albeit not now here on earth, or at least not simply so. Given the close association of politics and religion throughout most of human history, a philosopher who overlooks the one may well overlook the other.

Not only Augustine but his decidedly non-Christian predecessor Cicero would take strong exception to Teichman’s contention that “the questions as to who or what is an authority logically capable of initiating and waging a just war rest ultimately on facts about inherited customs and institutions… and on facts about Realpolitik (such as the actions of Palmerston, of Robespierre, and of Lenin); for it is these things that determine the identities of rulers and the boundaries of political units.” A true civil authority, just-war theorists agree, consists not only of conventions and power, but of right. Political justice does not reduce to a set of facts originating in accident and human conventions.

This mistake accounts for Teichman’s otherwise surprising agreement with Thomas Hobbes, a somewhat less gentle soul, in arguing that one may rightfully resist any attack on one’s life, “whatever the rights and wrongs of the original quarrel.” If so, then Stalin has the right to resist an assassination attempt. But why does he?

War, “is, of course, evil intrinsically and essentially” because it is “a test of might and is therefore inherently incapable of settling questions of right.” True: But war is capable of defending natural right or justice, as secured (if imperfectly) in existing practices, even if it cannot tell us what justice is. Teichman sees this, more or less, when she disagrees with pacifists, reminding them that although war is evil it is not therefore the worst evil. She sees this with less clarity when she restricts just war to defense against genocide or some equally “dreadful catastrophe.” Prudent statesmen might well reply that small offenses can lead to large ones, and a small war (say, over control of the Rhineland in 1936) might be preferably to a large one (say, the Second World War). that we are left with necessarily imprecise judgments, often made by incompetent men, may be a melancholy fact. It is also an inescapable one, at least so far.

Teichman wishes to escape it. “We might well say that the point is not to justify war but to abolish it.” The political question remains: On what terms? Philosophically, it also remains to be seen whether and to what extent analytical logic (as distinguished from other kinds of reasoned thought) suffices to illuminate politics. Given Professor Teichman’s intellectual integrity and distaste for cant, she may have some exceptionally interesting things to say on that subject. She will need to think more about politics, and political philosophy, before saying them.

Pierre Clastres: Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein translation. New York: Zone Books, 1987. [Published in France in 1974].

Review originally published in the New York City Tribune, July 4, 1988.

 

Generally a tedious lot, anthropologists slog through rain forests trying to understand obscure tribes, returning to academia where they preach ‘cultural relativism’ and accuse one another of ‘ethnocentricity.’ As none but a few of their colleagues can actually observe the phenomena they purport to describe, humbug goes undetected for years—viz. the notorious case of Margaret Mead and her swinging Samoans, hostages to mod-lib ideology.

These efforts might make some sense if anthropologists worked to uncover human nature. Most prefer the intellectually safer but morally more dangerous course of denying that human nature exists at all, thus dismissing their only conceivably raison d’être. Why read anthropology at all?

Because, despite the self-imposed blinders, at time anthropologists do glimpse human nature, as in the research of Pierre Clastres, late Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Clastres undertook the study of South American tribes, not out of some aimless ‘interest’ but to learn something about the relation of human society to politics. He denies that politics, conceived as the exercise of ‘power,’ exists “in man as a natural being.”  Nonetheless, as a political anthropologist, Clastres sought answers to such perennial questions as, ‘Who rules?’ and ‘What is the end of political life?’ Human beings are political, just not in the way ‘we moderns’ define politics. This insight took him well beyond the conventional relativism of his trade.

Modern political philosophers—beginning with Machiavelli, subtly, and continuing through Marx and Nietzsche, baldly—define politics as coercion, conquest, command, and obedience. Aside from the Incans, whose political regime somewhat resembled the modern authoritarian state, the South American tribes have yet no such experience in their daily lives. In war, yes—necessarily. In peace, no: “If there is something completely alien to an Indian, it is the idea of giving an order or having to obey.” For an Indian, “the political is determined as a domain beyond coercion and violence, beyond hierarchical subordination.” “It is not evident to me,” Clastres writes, “that coercion and subordination constitute the essence of political power in all times and all places.”

Each tribe has a chief, to be sure. He acts not as a commander; instead, he moderates disputes, distributes his own (not others’) goods, and orates. He remains entirely dependent upon the group, his public speech ritualistic, not dictatorial. He reaffirms traditional ways, issuing no commands. Political power stays within the society itself, whose members prevent tyranny by simply ignoring any chief so presumptuous as to command them. “Most Indian societies in America are distinguished by their sense of democracy and taste for equality.” They allow a chief to command only in times of war. Clastres pauses to tell the comic-poignant story of Geronimo, the North American chief who wasted much of his life vainly urging the Apache to wage war against Mexico. As a wiser chief told a Spanish explorer (in unknowing contradiction of Machiavelli), “I prefer to be loved and not feared.”

Indians care “to constantly keep power apart from the institutions of power, command apart from the chief.” Clastres admires this solution to the problem of rulership. He does not overlook its severity. “Primitive society… is a society from which nothing escapes, which lets nothing get outside itself, for all the exits are blocked.” The means of blockage are cruel. Tribes initiate young men not by schooling but by torture. Society literally “imprints its mark on the bodies of the young people,” symbolically “inscribing the text of the law on the surfacing of their bodies.” This ferocious egalitarianism teaches, “You are worth no more than anyone else; you worth no less than anyone else.” Coercion, then, does not disappear from these societies; they ‘front-load’ it, reserve it for childhood or youth, counting on the lessons learned then to carry over for a lifetime. If this “prohibition of inequality that each person will remember” prevents tyranny, it also prevents philosophy. It is a “pedagogy” without dialogue; the initiate silently consents. The Thirty Tyrants could not concur, but neither could Socrates. The public rule of coercive state force and the private rule of wisdom are equally impossible.

Clastres’ observations confound Marxist pseudo-explanations of ‘History,’ particularly those regarding ‘surplus value.’ Primitive societies were not and are not subsistence economies, awaiting much-needed evolution into more advanced types. They are sedentary, not nomadic, thanks to the richness of the landscapes they inhabit. Indeed, the first Europeans in Brazil fretted at the Indians’ conspicuous leisure: “Obviously, these people were deliberately ignorant of the fact that one must earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow. It would do, and it didn’t last: the Indians were soon put to work, and they died of it.” Pace, Marx: Work is the opiate of the masses. Or, as Clastres writes, “the economic derives from the political.”

Feminists will find no more comfort in Clastres’ research than Marxists. Men and women perform separate functions, the men hunting and gathering, the women consuming and tending the household. Men are the humans of the bow, women the humans of the basket—one sex the masters of the forest, the other mistresses of the encampment. Taboos match practice: “A hunter could not bear the shame of carrying a basket, whereas his wife would be afraid to touch his bow.” Women sing of pain, anguish; they give birth and mourn the dead. Men sing of their own glory, each one to himself alone, pouring their (highly elevated) sense of themselves into “the hymn of their freedom,” the one activity in which their individuality is not strictly limited by the social laws etched into their skin. ‘Song of Myself,’ indeed!

Clastres would explain the transition from statelessness to state rule not by some natural or even historical evolution but by the pressures of population density. Tribes in the tropical forests of America range from between forty and several hundred persons. With more people, a society survives only with recourse to the unifying power of a state. Here Clastres succumbs to his own inadequate conception of human nature, which cannot distinguish between animal and human biology. Because he only conceives of speech in terms of command, or solitary song, or prophetic oratory, but never as a means of rational deliberation, Clastres cannot identify the distinctively human characteristics. He cannot see how government develops out of the tribe, naturally—that is, by human nature’s exercise. For this insight one must still read that earlier and greater political anthropologist, Aristotle.

A sort of latter-day Rousseau, Clastre does not entirely overcome modern thought any more than Rousseau did. He does correct that thought in telling ways, as Rousseau did. Like Rousseau’s, his work stands as a thorough refutation of the utopian dream which combines this-worldly community with humanitarian tenderness.