Review of George Friedman: The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Founded in 1923 in Frankfurt Germany, the Institute for Social Research “developed a unique and powerful critique of modern life,” providing “the basis of much of the student movement of the 1960s” (13). Its luminaries included Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and (most famously) Herbert Marcuse; thinkers closely associated with the Frankfurt School included Walter Benjamin and Erich Fromm.
George Friedman wrote this book under the guidance of the late Werner Dannhauser, that witty and humane scholar whose mastery of Nietzsche must have proved helpful, inasmuch as the Frankfurt School pioneered the appropriation of Nietzsche’s thought by the ‘Left.’ This was a move by no means obvious to make, but the technologized horrors of the First World War convinced many socialists that Marxian social-class analyses could not adequately explain the modern world. By the time Adorno and Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, revulsion against Nazi and Communist mass-murder had convinced anyone with eyes to see that the great diagnostician of nihilism spoke more immediately and more profoundly to the crisis of the West than anything Marx had to say.
On a visit to Auschwitz, I saw the remains of a small death factory. Nearby, at Birkenau, I saw a vast space where the Nazis undertook murder on a truly industrial scale. And all so meticulously organized. “In our time,” Friedman writes, “we have discovered the darker side of reason. We have found that along with great triumphs, reason has also brought great brutality. The Frankfurt School set itself the task of defining the relationship between reason and brutality” (13-14). From Machiavelli, who advises the prince to pull back from all beliefs and sentiments in order to master Fortuna, to Bacon, who would harness experimental science in order to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate, and culminating in Hegel, who claimed that the course of events itself unfolded rationally, ‘dialectically,’ and had reached its logical conclusion in his own system of thought—replacing philosophy or the love of wisdom with sagacity, wisdom itself—”modern philosophy… is marked by a radical self-confidence” (14). It “believes that all things could be as they ought to be,” that “the real and the rational had become one” (14).
But had it? Reason understood as modern rationalism has indeed given human beings power over nature. But given that power, how shall we use it? The world wars and the concentration camps show that scientific, world-transforming rationalism can serve the purposes of insane tyrants as well as humane democrats. Hegel pointed to the administrative state as the means of making societies rational, but Auschwitz deployed the science of administration in a slaughterhouse for humans. “Auschwitz was a rational place, but it was not a reasonable one” (15). “It was this unreasonable rationality, this modern paradox, that was the great concern of the Frankfurt School,” whose members saw in Auschwitz the abandonment of critical reason (16). To make social science ‘value-free,’ as social scientists had tried all too successfully to do, left social science intellectually and morally powerless against the use of social science by tyrants.
Accordingly, “the Frankfurt School denied modernity’s complacent certainty of its progressive excellence”—its claim that the course of events or ‘History’ unfolds logically to a good conclusion–while nonetheless “affirm[ing] modernity’s confidence that all things human could be known, or at least sensed, however dark their origins.” These scholars “condemned modernity’s sense of itself without denying its project”—which is probably why Friedman carefully avoids using the fashionable term ‘postmodernism’ to describe them (16).
The Frankfurt School followed a longstanding line of modern thought, beginning with Rousseau, which directs its ire at the characteristic modern social class, the bourgeoisie. In the Anglophone world alone, we have seen the Romantic poets, Victorian essayists like Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Arnold, and Ruskin, down through the ‘counterculture’ writers of the second half of the twentieth century, alit with loathing for the materialism and pedestrianism of bourgeois life. Frustratingly for these thinkers, the working class upon which anti-capitalists pinned their hopes have continually sided with the bourgeoisie, because the bourgeoisie delivers the material goods that the workers want every bit as much as the businessmen do. And so the central dialectical clash of post-Rousseauian modernity has turned out to be not the bourgeoisie against the proletarians (as Marx and his followers expected) but the bourgeoisie against the ‘intellectuals’—very often the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, rebelling against the boring banality of life dedicated to comfortable self-preservation.
“The Frankfurt School took on as its political project an attack on bourgeois philistinism,” understanding that the real struggle was esthetic, not economic, a matter of sensibility not sense (18). Marxism in both its dictatorship-of-the-proletariat, Bolshevik form and its democratic-parliamentarian social-democracy form had failed by valorizing the same mindless ‘work ethic’ touted by the bourgeois. Bourgeois or modern-liberal thought had aimed its ire at religious fanaticism; in taming religious passion, it had gone a long way to conquering not just nature but the human sense of the sacred, making of religion into mere moralism.

Following Heidegger, the Frankfurt School approached philosophy through textual explication or “critical theory,” but “under the apparently dispassionate exegesis moved a radical purpose: to comprehend modernity in order to undermine it,” and to recover, through what seems at first an esthetic project, “a politics of principle rather that of mere effectiveness” (20)—”to formulate a theoretical exegesis of the sociocultural crisis of the contemporary world and to prepare the theoretical ground for practical activity” (22) freed from the morally neutral inability to exercise moral judgments which enabled the tyrannical enormity of Auschwitz to occur. Not in foolishly optimistic progressivist historicism but in a return—Friedman calls it “nostalgia”—to the ideational roots of modernity and even (in Benjamin’s case) to the pre-modernity of Judaism we can think and feel our way out of the “brutal catastrophe” of Marxist and other historicist rationalisms (25). The Frankfurt School urged modern man to move away from rationalist utopianism back, but also forward, to a renewed Messianism; “they craved the Messianic from the bitterest roots of historical despair” (26).

Friedman divides the body of his book into three parts: a nine-chapter section on the philosophic roots of the Frankfurt School (in which Heidegger appears as the central figure); four chapters on the problem of modernity; and three chapters on the “solution” to that problem, which is most emphatically not a ‘final’ solution in either the straightforward, Hegelian and Marxist sense of an ‘end of history’ or in the sinister genocidal sense we associate with Nazism. Indeed, the Frankfurt School’s distinctive break from the ‘Left’ philosophies and ideologies which they had imbibed may be seen in this refusal of historical finality, which they had come to associate with the tyrannies now described (following Mussolini) as ‘totalitarian.’ Out of “the complex of antibourgeois thought that emerged from the nineteenth century” (29), they “appropriate[d] the criticism of the mass”—the esthetic and political culture of democracy or egalitarianism—”for the Left” (30) (italics added). At the same time, they opposed the old Left, the Marxist Left, because “they did not share Marx’s idea that the perpetual rationalization of the human condition is a good and inevitable thing” (31).

What would later become known in the United States and elsewhere as the New Left selected a few thoughts from Marx while eschewing Marx’s proudest claim, to have discovered laws of historical development modeled on those of Hegel—complete with the notion of an unfolding ‘dialectical’ clash of opposites leading inevitably to the end, the purpose of that conflict. Having learned from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud, “they simply were no longer Marxists in any ordinary sense” (37). They regarded Marx’s deterministic laws of history as themselves products of late capitalism, “not an insight into the nature of human history but rather an attitude of a corrupted age,” “humanly false and evil” (38). While retaining some of Marx’s class-based analysis of social development, they rejected the actual self-understanding of proletarians, which they regarded as bourgeois-too-bourgeois. Instead of claiming that proletarians and the middle classes would lose their false consciousness by their decline into impoverishment, as class divisions under capitalism widened, the Frankfurt School expected these classes to confront an ever-increasing sense of the meaninglessness of lives devoted to comfortable self-preservation. Socialism will occur not because social change will lead to psychic transformation but rather psychic transformation will spur social change (41). This line of argument eventually appealed less to proletarians than to the disaffected sons and daughters of the middle classes, now at university en masse. It also dovetails with the growing ‘environmentalist’ movement of the 1960s; “the conquest of nature becomes the ratification of repression rather than the preface to heroism”; “a rationalized existence is antithetical to a free one,” they averred, in their “most profound break with Marx” (48). Marx had supposed that fully-instantiated human rationality would both construct and deconstruct, both affirm ‘History’s’ progress and cunningly advance it. But “to the Frankfurt School, reason had become affirmative”—justifying the worst crimes—”and seemed to have lost its cunning” (48), and indeed its common sense.

Nor did the critique of Marxism lead them back to Hegelianism, although they shared Hegel’s obsession with “the problems of history and reason”(51). They rejected Hegelianism on four grounds: Hegel’s dialectically unfolding Absolute Spirit leads to a final synthesis of opposites, an affirmation of “the prevailing social order” with no room for any further negation or critique of that order; his claim that the Absolute Spirit proceeds according to rational laws embodied in the sociopolitical institutions of each historical epoch; his “positive faith in the dialectical certainty of history”; and his “actual social and political prescriptions”—most notably, his esteem for modern, statist bureaucracy animated by the spirit of the science of administration (51). To put it in the language of modern philosophy, which distinguishes sharply between the thinking ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ the thinker thinks about, the attempt of Hegelian rationalism to make the thinker’s logical/dialectical thought objective, to fully instantiate that thought in the world around him via the science of administration, destroys human freedom; at the moment this project is realized, it “makes itself and what it rules unfree by forcing them into its necessarily formal confines” (55). A fully rationalized world leaves no place for human freedom, but ossifies into a ‘totalitarian’ structure that leaves no room for criticism. For the Frankfurt School, “the rationalized world [of the administrative state] constituted the gravest threat to authentic being” (60). Enlightenment, culminating in Hegelianism, “had not driven away darkness; it had caused the darkness to descend more thoroughly than ever” (61). Less metaphorically, “Reason, which had existed to discover authentically true horizons, had succeeded only in abolishing the old and false ones. Reason had become its own horizon, and the formal and objective requirements of the logic of reason had supplanted an authentically useful horizon” (62), leaving only two possibilities remaining: positivism or a retreat to some outmoded metaphysics.

Nietzsche and Heidegger to the rescue—remarkably, to the rescue of the Left. Nietzsche’s slashing attack on all of the “transcendental and antisensual moralities” had “made real the possibility of the sensually erotic life, which was the true intention of the Frankfurt School” (63). Reason or Enlightenment rationalism had merely established itself as a new myth, but one without content, “incapable of supplying anything but facticity and doubt” (63). Fully-developed Enlightenment rationalism (and indeed, Nietzsche argued, reason itself, beginning with Socrates and his enunciation of the principle of non-contradiction) “must deny the autonomy of any part [of the world] excluded from its reality,” most notably the “autonomous will” of the thinking subject” (64). But to give oneself over entirely to ‘objectivity’ one must deny self-consciousness; since the self-conscious or self-knowing subject is the ground of reason, “reason, in order to conclude its own conquest must regress, since it must deny the one thing that would allow will: consciousness” (65). Positivism or brute facticity then reigns supreme; what began in mindfulness drowns in a sea of mindlessness. “Reason, therefore, must deny what it had initially promised: freely realized humanity”; “modernity is catastrophic for man” (65).

Mass culture exemplifies this mindlessness. The high culture of the old aristocracies has become subordinate to “the demand of the social mechanism” (65), the philistine tastes of an egalitarian society. Nietzsche excoriates this as decadence. Adorno called upon the few persons of taste now remaining “to withdraw from the culture that makes one ill—which is illness” (67). However nostalgic this may seem, the Frankfurt School rejected the path of Romanticism, believing, with Nietzsche, that there is no road back to high culture. Nor, of course, did they return to the historical teleology of Hegel or Marx, these being manifestations of the rationalism which caused the problem in the first place. Rather, they followed Nietzsche in the willed rejection of all systems, valorizing negation or critical thinking. They most emphatically did not follow Nietzsche (and indeed seemed to ignore Nietzsche’s teaching) in claiming that deep inside every individual there is a small but ineluctable core of fatum, of fatality. Rather, more optimistically, they contended that the right response to the banality of mass culture is to negate, negate, and negate again, to exercise critical rather than positivist thinking.

Most tellingly, the Frankfurt School refused to follow Nietzsche in his radical individualism. Unlike Nietzsche, they could not bring themselves to reject compassion or to deny the social circumstances in which they lived. They endorsed revolution, not the Superman. Centrally, they turned to Heidegger (Marcuse had been his student), but turning him politically leftward, away from fascism. Heidegger takes from Marx the concept of the alienation of modern man in the face of unlivable social conditions, and the resultant search for authenticity. Marx and Heidegger adopt, but also adapt Hegelian historicism—the latter following Nietzsche in rejecting the rationalist dimension of all previous forms of historicism.  “The Frankfurt School occupies the nexus connecting the two giants” (72), Marx and Heidegger—rejecting Marxist rationalism while accepting Marx’s socialism, rejecting Heidegger’s national socialism or Nazism while accepting his emphasis on authenticity as non-rational. Whereas historicist rationalism succumbs to the error of positing a fully rationalized world that leaves no room for the human subject, its will and its consciousness, Heideggerian irrationalism refuses “to allow Being to become identical with a being in the world” that would at the same time reserve to itself the power to criticize or negate elements of the world (74).  What is invaluable in Heidegger is his acknowledgment that the human subject is a historical being, not a natural being; Heidegger in this sense not only remains a historicist but radicalizes historicism; and he does this without abstracting the human subject from its authentic, non-rational essence, without making the subject a rationalist, Cartesian ego cogito, a being which imagines its ability to think proves that it exists. In the eyes of the Frankfurt School, “Heidegger’s search for being was the search for an authentic whole” (74). He failed because he “grasps at an illusion,” namely, “a Being radically free of its social context” (75). “He fails to place Being into practice” (76), succumbing instead to the uncritical endorsement of the existing social condition of his time and place, Nazism.

To avoid the error of his teacher, Marcuse pointed to the individual as the ground of the future revolution: “The revolution begins with the individual and ends with his transformation” (77). “Narcissism” or “self-realization” retains Nietzschean/Heideggerian individualism while remaining cognizant of, and more ambitiously aiming at the radical transformation of society, too. This is Marcuse’s “aestheticization/eroticization of being” (77). Because Heidegger and Marcuse “both render the individual radically important” in their own ways, both must “face the radicalized problem of death,” given the mortality of each individual life (77). Owing to his estheticism and eroticism, Marcuse valorizes art, high culture against low or at least art-as-negation of mass culture; owing to his individualism, he valorizes “a life without metaphysical solace” or “existentialism (78).

These moves led the Frankfurt School to its fascination with the thought of that odd yet highly suggestive thinker, Oswald Spengler, whom they considered “a great, if limited, prophet” (79). In The Decline of the West, Spengler describes “the dual character of the Enlightenment”—its promise of human liberation via the conquest of nature and its actual “Caesarism,” which was Spengler’s term for a worldwide, scientistic-administrative rule and its “static culture,” all of which meant “that the West would necessarily revert to a barbarism” (80). As we have seen, “these three insights formed the crux of the Frankfurt School’s vision of the West in late modernity” (80). Spengler even saw the function of the communications media within this system, predicting “the coming of Caesars of world-journalism” (81)—William Randolph Hearst and the other ‘press barons’ whose rise complemented that of the ‘robber barons.’ Spengler’s book was “the origin of [the Frankfurt School’s] critique of technology and the culture begotten by technology” (84); in the fully rationalized but unreasonable machine-age, man becomes the object and the machine becomes the subject, destroying human creativity—as seen in a thousand science-fiction novels and as analyzed in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. Finally, Spengler warned that the money-cultural, mass-cultural, machinist, prison would find opposition in the bloody horrors of barbaric, technology-driven war, as spirited men rebelled violently against the enclosing, soul-deadening embourgeoisement. “It was Spengler, more than Marx” (or Hegel) “who gave the School their sense of the future” (85). “The crisis is whether any way to breakout can be found” (85), and the Schoolmen entertained few hopes for that, beyond the kind of psyche-transforming revolution they held out in some desperation.

For investigation of the psyche, the Schoolmen turned to Freud, whose psychoanalytic theory describes the profound tension between reason and desire and speaks of the malign effects of rational and social repression of desire. Freud thus offers a dimension of human life hitherto neglected by the Left, and by the Marxian Left above all. Starkly, “Marx’s failure to consider psychology in a way paved the way for the Russian terror” because “failing to consider subjectivity in a revolution opens the door to reification and tyranny” (88). The inhuman shallowness of Marxist revolution led it first to the violent brutality of state-sponsored terror and then to a philistinism more bourgeois than that of the bourgeoisie, as seen even a century later wherever the remains of Soviet-era architecture pimple the landscape of eastern and central Europe. Marxism leaves no real place for Eros; as such, it must remain fundamentally bourgeois and psychically repressive, as when Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev fulminated like a fundamentalist preacher at the dancers when he visited the Hollywood set where the movie Can-Can was being produced.

Freud saw something the economic determinist Marx could not see: even with material abundance, “the scarcity of nature constituted a permanent and transhistorical reality” (90) because our erotic desires will remain frustrated even as we eat pineapples on the moon. “The real intention of the School is to deepen the possibility of liberation” to include the erotic desires of the human psyche. This means that the rationalist conquest of nature cannot liberate us. Only the unleashing of “libidinous energy” against the tedious and painful labor commended by both the bourgeois and proletarian work-ethics will do this. Only such a transformed inner, psychic world can satisfactorily transform the social world. By “turn[ing] the revolution inward” (91) as the initial step, the Schoolmen would solve the Marxian problem of alienation in a non-Marxian way by appropriating elements of Freud for their own revolutionary purposes.

Heidegger and Spengler flirted dangerously with contempt for Jews and Judaism, associated as they were in the minds of their enemies with money and cosmopolitanism. Before and especially in the wake of the Holocaust, the Frankfurt School utterly rejected this aspect of these thinkers. Here Friedman turns particularly to the thought of Walter Benjamin, a somewhat marginal figure (he never actually joined the Institute) but an important voice on the non-Marxist Jewish Left. Benjamin and to some degree the core of the Schoolmen understood that supplementing Marx with Freudian psychology would not suffice; the “Jewish Question,” upon which Marx had written and which Hitler had answered with murderous fanaticism, could find no answer in either Marx or Freud. With regard to Freud, it might well be replied that the satisfaction of erotic desires comport quite well with the rule of the administrative state; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World comes to mind, as does Tocqueville’s description of soft, democratic despotism in Democracy in America. To Marx, “The practical side of Judaism, the god of commerce, had overwhelmed and obliterated he sacred possibilities of man” (93). The answer to the Jewish Question was the abolition of capitalism; the advent of communism—after the seizure of the state by the proletariat, its use to abolish all social classes, and the consequent withering-away of the state itself—amounted to an atheist Messianism: “Marx’s preoccupation with the abolition of Jews has about it a strange and not quite expressed Jewishness” (93). European Jews had embraced the Enlightenment, but Enlightenment liberalism had failed to provide them the protection it had promised. The Schoolmen saw that Marxism didn’t protect Jews, either; Friedman doesn’t mention it, but Stalin eventually came for the Jews, too. The road to liberation could not lead through statism, much less through statist terror, but that is where Marxism-Leninism had tried to lead it.

In view of concentration camps built by both the tyrannical Right and the tyrannical Left, the Left needed to rethink the Jewish Question. Benjamin understood that the Fifth Commandment, requiring the Israelites to honor their parents, serves as the fundamental bond of society under the Mosaic Law. “The redemption by the son of the promise of the father is what inextricably makes one a Jew” (94). The redemption of Israel and humanity as a whole (for which Israel will serve as the light unto the nations) will require divine intervention in the form of the Messiah. Crucially, the Messianism of a Creator-God, of a Holy Spirit, differs fundamentally from the Messianism of Marxism or of any historicist thinker. Hegelian historicism posits an Absolute Spirit, not a Holy one. The Absolute Spirit is immanent in all things; the cosmos itself is nothing other than the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, over time. Marx takes the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit and gets rid of the spirituality, positing an entirely materialist theory of historical development. In radical contrast to these theories, the Creator-God of the Bible, holy (that is, separate from and utterly superior to His creation), creates the cosmos not out of Himself but out of nothing. Thus the Messiah-substitute of Marxian communism issues from rationally knowable laws of History, the predictable development of class conflict; Walter Benjamin knew Judaism teaches that “the Messiah may enter at any moment,” redeeming the sufferings of the parents and all the ancestors, but according to the will of God, not the supposed laws of History. The will of God is knowable to human beings only insofar as God chooses to reveal it to them, and He has not chosen to reveal the time of the coming of the Messiah.

Benjamin “saw in the Messiah the metaphor for the historical problem” (96). Until now, history has been profane; escape from profaneness cannot come via the historical dialectic, whether Hegelian or Marxist, but only through the unpredictable irruption of a Messianic event. Accordingly, “Benjamin turns Marxism into a Jewish event” (95), an event that can be invoked not through the dictatorship of the proletariat in control of the state but (in a way paralleling a religion of the Holy Word, a religion of the Book) via language. “The intention of the revolutionary, like the Kabbalist, is to discover the formula that will invoke the sudden and miraculous intrusion into history of an exogenous force, thereby shattering the structure of time and opening the path to redemption” (97). The language needed to free humanity from the chains of profane history is not the manipulative language of political rhetoric or propaganda seen in late-modern politics. Again paralleling the Bible, the language needed is the language of naming, seen first in the divine command to Adam in the Garden of Eden. “The name incorporates the thing into the structure of language” (96); what the American scholar Harry V. Jaffa called “the miracle of the common noun” consists in the human capacity (in the Bible, given by the God who creates Man out of dust) to see the commonalities amongst many particulars, to see and express the commonality among the many red oaks as the identifiable species, ‘red oak.’ But the language of naming can only go so far, because it cannot incorporate a thing or a being that exceeds the human capacity to describe. And so God’s name is not to be spoken. Similarly, it will take the advent of the Messiah “to remake the very structure of time in such a way as to redeem the past by annihilating the suffering that constituted its moment” (97). The character of the future Zion, the future ‘Heaven on Earth,’ is as ineffable as the character of God. “Profane language cannot speak without having something to speak of. In the speaking of the triumph, the language of history is unfree. The conquest of nature is the preface to redemption, but only the preface, because the second problem is not solved Language must turn to itself through naming in order to be purged of the profane” and thus at least prepare the way for the unpredictable coming of the Messianic event that will issue in the ineffable Zion.

Such a language cannot be scientific or rationalist. It must be metaphorical, an indirect expression or suggestion of something that cannot yet be humanly defined. “Only the metaphor frees us from identity but roots us in reality” (98). For example, if I say “God is love” I have spoken of God, but I have not defined God, inasmuch as God is not only love. “Jews speak of God and redemption metaphorically. Identity and abstraction are catastrophic to them. So, too, Benjamin and Adorno speak metaphorically. But where the Jewish conception of redemption is a metaphor of a thing unimaginable—redemption—the Frankfurt School’s is a metaphor for a metaphor. They use the Jewish formulation of language to explain their own epistemological dilemma: language is the ground of freedom but simultaneously of imprisonment. Redemption requires the Messiah who would cut the dialectical knot.” (98) For them, the advent of communism is the Messiah-substitute for the Biblical Messiah. “The point of Communism is that it is a radical break with the past—a Messianic break” (99). Benjamin understood that this parallels the Biblical condemnation of idolatry. He “chooses a Jewish metaphor for Communism because his alternative is a Greek image“—one thinks of the picture of communism painted by William Morris in News from Nowhere. “An image is, however, on a continuum with the original and is thus dialectically bound up with it” (99). An image of the future Zion, the world of communism, would amount to an idol, and idolatry anticipates the error of rationalism, especially in its historicist form, the error of demanding lawful predictability from Being, the error of believing that reality is fully ‘enlightenable’ or knowable, humanly controllable.

As Friedman quietly understates the matter, “The problem is the leap from metaphor to reality” (99). Historical dialectic had been exhausted in bureaucratization; “neither damned nor redeemed, history exhausted itself, suspended between hope and horror” (100). One can only hope for “the Messianic intervention into seamless time,” an intervention “blast[ing] that moment and that time into nonexistence, thereby redeeming its suffering” (99). To prepare for this moment devoutly to be wished, the Schoolmen identified “the political task of Critical Theory [as] establish[ing] the prismatic formula through which the Messianic entity could be invoked and identified” (100). Almost pitiably (I remark), they searched for a “revolutionary subject” outside the course of modern history: these included the peoples of the ‘Third World” (that is, outside the ambit of either the bourgeois West or the communist East), peoples of color living inside the sphere of the liberal West, and even, by the 1960s, the students of the New Left, who had given themselves over to the Dionysian ‘counter-culture’ of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll—all in conjunction with a politics of communitarianism.

To their credit, the Schoolmen understood that these reeds were quite likely weak. The odds of finding a Moses in those bulrushes seemed very long to them. In the intellectual dimension of their project, Critical Theory resembled the Midrash: “the profane hermeneutic of the utterly sacred” (101). “Both are the attempt of the unredeemed to glean visions of redemptions from the words that mediate between the sacred and the profane” (101).

Friedman concludes the section on the ideational origins of the Frankfurt School by clearly distinguishing them from the Old Left of Marxism. “Marx was no solution. Indeed, in many ways, he was the heart of the problem. To industrialism, he could juxtapose only more industry; the reason, only more rationalization.” All of this resulted in “the towering emptiness [the Babylon?] that accompanied Communism” (104-105). The Right, which did oppose modernity without availing itself of modernity’s conceptual tools, also failed because it was ‘reactionary,’ attempting to return to an irrecoverable past. Would the Frankfurt School prove to be “the redeemer or the executioner of the teleological hopes of the Enlightenment” (106-107)? With this, Friedman turns to the second section of his book, in which he examines the Schoolmen’s statement of the problem of modernity in their own terms, not in the terms of the thinkers they drew upon.

“The centerpiece of modernity faith is its belief in Enlightenment,” in the “demystification” of all remaining mysteries, the dispelling of all shadows of ignorance. The Schoolmen trace the Enlightenment to Homeric Greece, to “the myth of Odysseus,” the man who assumes “that through reason or cunning, the natural can, somehow, be known to man” (111-112). Reason has its place, but only in the form of criticism or negation of the given, never as “positivity” or construction, which only leads to tyranny (113). By denying the rational subject’s power to know the essence of a thing, the ‘thing-in-itself,’ Enlightenment rationalists inclined to denying essence altogether, dismissing it as a pseudo-problem on the shaky assumption that if the rational subject cannot understand the essence of a thing, if Enlightened reason cannot shed its light upon it, essences may as well not exist at all. In the rational attempt to remove all contradictions the Enlighteners dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their ideas: “the idea becom[es] identical with the thing” (116). This leads either the identification of reason with whatever exists—Hegel’s error—or, as seen in the ‘totalitarian’ tyrants, the identification of reason with whatever must be forced to exist, according to the tyrant’s systematic plan. Either way, the result is the denial of critical reason, the denial of the human capacity to negate the fact in favor of the essence. “Reason, under the rule of Positivism, stands in awe of the fact” (118), losing “true subjectivity” (120) or the capacity to judge the fact. Reason comes to “recognize no standard beyond the fact” (121). This illusion perpetuates itself easily because positive, instrumental reason does succeed in delivering economic goods and because it is logically consistent with its own anti-essentialist premises. To “break out of its self-satisfaction,” this form of rationalism “requires an act of self-conscious will rather than dialectical movement” (123), which would only confirm the premises with which it begins. No logical system can overcome the problem of systematization itself. Only critical theory—purposely unsystematic or “prismatic”—can enable philosophy to escape its self-made cage.us

If Enlightenment yields materialism; materialism yields the criterion of quantifiability as the test of truth; quantifiability characterizes modern science and lends itself to technology; and technology aims at the conquest of nature, overriding the essence of things, then the conquest of nature implies the self-deification of man. Because man is not really a god, this means that the result of Enlightenment ‘demystification’ of the world is a myth, that the “Enlightenment is itself a myth” (130). Like the mythical Odysseus, that “human Prometheus” (130), “with real and imagined suffering and with authentic cunning,” the rational man “roams the world slaying whatever is enchanted, eluding and deluding those magical things that can only be dealt with so” (130-131). Enlightenment “never escapes mythology but recapitulates myth in rationalistic form” (132); like the magicians of antiquity, it fears what it cannot see, namely, the essences of things. Anything that “did not conform [was] ruled out of existence,” and those elements that did conform were integrated into a precreated structure of thought” (133). What began as a critique of mythology and barbarism ends in a new myth and a new barbarism.

The Enlightenment thus precipitates a crisis of culture. Against rationalism, the Frankfurt School upheld esthetic sensibility; “our tastes determine our experience of the world” (139). Culture “consistently subjects itself to analysis and criticism” precisely because it has this esthetic criterion of judgment. “The critic’s role is pivotal in relation to culture” (139)—never allowing culture to ossify into a supposed ‘end of history.’  “The root of the cultural crisis is the failure of the work of art in this age to take a critical stance. Rather than upholding the beautiful as a historical alternative to the ugly irrationality of the world, the work of art either lapses into historical irrelevance or into a positive affirmation of the world as it is” (141)—useless abstraction or pointless concretion” (143), art-for-art or artful propaganda. Art becomes either a commodity, as under capitalism, or an instrument of political control, as under ‘totalitarianism.’ Against this, the Schoolmen deployed critical textual exegesis in an attempt to “conjure the radical possibilities embedded in the tradition without falling into reaction” (154). Exegesis keeps truth rooted in language, not in the distorting objectivism of Positivism.

Can this work? Under contemporary conditions, human beings are entertaining themselves to death; “amusement replaces art as the principle of mass culture” (163), as we doze in a relaxing hot tub of uncritical bliss. “Television takes this [inauthentic or pseudo-art] to radical extremes” (161); by penetrating the home, it makes the rightly private, erotic quest of art into a public spectacle. The entertainment industry “must maintain itself and thereby maintain the system it is a part of” by eschewing the critical function of genuine art. “It does this by abolishing the distinction between the cultural product and life. Life becomes like a movie, and movies tend to recapitulate life” (164). The Schoolmen did not live long enough to view ‘reality television,’ and Friedman published his book decades before its invention, but they would see it as the culmination of the phenomenon they abhor.

The modern crisis extends, therefore, into the human psyche itself. The abolition of scarcity accomplished by the conquest of nature has not abolished the problem of alienation, as Marx had supposed. “Clearly, something had gone wrong with the consciousness of the masses” (169). As we have seen, the Frankfurt School turned to Freud as the great explorer of the unconscious and the repressive Superego, while rejecting Freud’s naturalism as too conservative, ahistorical. For the Schoolmen, “scarcity is historical and not natural” (172). They also rejected Freud’s theory of the death wish, which tends to deny the possibility of Messianic irruption. “Freud’s pessimism, moderated through Marx, becomes optimism” (179). Having conquered nature, we should now be able to liberate our repressed desires, which had to be repressed while we conquered nature but are no longer repressed for any good reason. “The greater the potential for liberation from material want, the less possible is freedom from psychic distortion” (185). It is easy to see why the comfortable, middle-class university students of the 1960s found all of this so appealing.

“The overarching crisis” of modernity is a crisis of history, “the failure of history to transcend itself—the freezing of history at an inhuman moment” (186). If “the essence of humanity is in its negativity,” in its capacity to say ‘no’ to the factual conditions in which it finds itself, in “its standing against the affirmations of everyday life, in the rejection of the demand to be a member of the group”—that Freudian Superego—then “the attack on [the] private sphere,” the attack on the human subject, whether by commercial capitalism or ‘totalizing’ modern tyranny, “is the essence of the historical crisis” (188). In the United States, capitalism uses technology to seduce; in Nazi Germany, the regime uses technology to terrorize. The Soviet regime, too, “sprang from the same ground of Enlightenment as the West” (198), so it could never fulfill its self-proclaimed Messianic mission. Like anti-imperialist Third-World guerrillas, the ideational warrior of Critical theory carried on “the warfare of irregular against regularity itself” (203).

Friedman devotes the third section of his book to elaborating the Frankfurt School’s “search for the solution” (205)—again, never to be an ominous, dehumanizing ‘final’ solution. The Schoolmen proposed three interdependent solutions: exegetical, political, and Messianic.

The exegetical solution, Critical Theory, arose out of their conviction that Marx was mistaken, or at least no longer correct in his demand that philosophy bend itself to the practical purpose of advancing the proletarian revolution or, to put it more grandly, that theory and practice could achieve unity at the end of History. Bolshevism, Social Democracy, and Fascism had each “given the lie to the promise of philosophy” (208). On the contrary, reality will not come to embody philosophy in any predictable way—that is, as the result of any supposed laws immanent in History itself. For now, philosophy must become contemplative and (especially) critical again. “The opposition between appearance and reality, which was an essential element of ancient philosophy, constitutes the core of Critical Theory” (209). More, Critical Theory returns “to what is both the most concrete and the most metaphysical element of the philosophic: the text,” to language, because “what was true in the universe came to man not directly but rather mediated through the word” (210)—an insight embodied in both the Bible and the Platonic dialogues. Even if the noetic perception of Being is wordless, “prior to all that [is] profane,” we live enmeshed in the profane; we can approach “philosophic and religious truth” “only through the words of those who had captured the truth in the web of language, whether Moses or Plato” (212).

Critical Theory addresses the condition of human beings as they exist now, offering a critique of that condition and “pointing to” (without attempting foolishly to delineate) “the next moment in time” (213); it does so by “negat[ing] the existent untruth, at least in theory” (214). Philosophy is not ideology, not merely the expression of the interests of a given ruling class; it has a transhistorical element, which enables just this ‘pointing beyond.’ And beyond that, Critical Theory “conjures up images of authentic being that are rooted not in time but in the unrealized possibilities inherent in men” (213). In this form of exegesis, “the text as a whole is not treated as sacred; rather, elements of the text, little chips of the sacred (or more precisely, the prophetic) embedded in a complex of the profane, are conjured from the circumstances that defile them” (216). The significance of Spengler (for example) “was in what he knew and not in who he was or what he accomplished” (215), but the Schoolmen also persisted in identifying his contradictions. That is where reason, and even a sort of Socratism, come in. This philosophic approach follows from the characteristic style of Nietzsche, as opposed to Hegel: the critical insight encapsulated in an aphorism, not as a building block in some grand system. The word “conjures” makes sense, as the critical selection made from any text amounts to a “Messianic mediation” which prepares the actual, unpredictable Messianic moment by making “the sacred sensually real” (219) through metaphoric rather than rational, imagistic, and discursive system-building or “positivity” (219). “The historical can no longer tolerate the burden of being systematized,” inasmuch as “the systematic stance would be to abandon the struggle against the system” (223). Auschwitz was simply too stark and crushing, too much an event of “awesome singularity” (even if, sickeningly, replicated many times in the twentieth century) to be explained away as just another dialectical incident in the march of historical progress. This is true, one surmises, even if, as Hegel had remarked, the dialectical clash of opposites can be described as a slaughter-bench. “History has become such that the particles of experience can no longer be understood if they are forced into the unnatural categories of eternally unchanging systems” (222). Transcendence via contemplation, not immanence via dialectics is the only approach that holds out the promise of breaking free from the stultifying system of the World State. “The ultimate hope is for the transfiguration of being itself into a realm of utter negativity and autonomy” (225).

The Frankfurt School never loses sight of the political aim of its contemplative and critical approach. “Just as the goal of Critical Theory in dealing with texts had been to transcend the textual material, so the goal of the Critical Theory in dealing with the world was to transcend the practical” (226). This transcendence, again, is not immanent in any historical process but Messianic, to be revealed in a catastrophe of history and not in some mythical historical telos. Here is where the Schoolmen pin their hopes on ‘Third World’ peoples, American blacks, and students, which they take to be “strangely archaic” forces outside of the tentacles of Enlightenment historicist systematizing. “If the Enlightenment turned the world profane, the revolutionary act would make it divine again—more fully than before” (242), as “the revolutionary act puts man in contact once more with the roots of his being and sensibility,” with the sensuously erotic subject rather than the abstractly conceived object (246). But the political revolution is not the Messianic moment itself. That is rather “the transfiguration of Being” (248).

Like Jews, and even a bit like Marx in his saner moments, (in admitting he could not delineate the exact character of life after the withering-away of the state, life under communism), the Frankfurt School eschews any firm knowledge of the future. Still, some things can be guessed at, negatively. Just as a strict Jew will describe God’s attributes negatively (God is not lacking in loving-kindness, not lacking in justice, and so on), the condition brought about by the Messianic event will betoken the negation of the struggle against nature and the disappearance of the death wish from the psychic landscape. To say any more than that, the Schoolmen had recourse to mythic language. So, for example, Marcuse would replace the figure of Prometheus with those of Orpheus and Narcissus, personifications of “the joy of gratification” and of “self-gratification” (257). “Marcuse rediscovers the individual in the age of the mass in the privacy of the erotic” (261). Consistently enough, the Frankfurt School sympathized with the drug use popularized in the Sixties because “the faculty of fantasy shatters the power of the reality principle,” fantasy being “perpetually indifferent to reason” (264-265). Drugs, dreams, art, and play all can serve to “forge a space between the powers of Positivism and [Heideggerian] existentialism” (266). The man of the Messianic age will be the Last Man, not the aristocratic Superman: but he will spend his time fantasizing and playing, not working as a drone in the industrial beehive.  The whole body will become sexual/erotic, not just a few erogenous zones. Perpetual progress will give way to “perpetual gratification” (276). As Friedman wittily and accurately puts it, this is “the spirit of Nietzsche turned egalitarian” (261). This is a point that cannot be emphasized too much. It is Tocqueville’s soft despotism reconceived not as a place of industrious herds but as self-gratifying individuals. One may well consider it an implausible notion, but many daydreaming university students took it as a realizable vision of Paradise.

Friedman offers his own criticisms of Critical Theory in his concluding chapter. The Frankfurt School’s (and most especially Marcuse’s) vision of a world o erotic gratification runs into two problems: administration and death. However eroticized human life may become, we will all still die. In such an intensely pleasurable life, “death comes not as a relief but as a tragedy” (281). Death’s prospect “will sour such a life, every time the individual thinks of it. Nietzsche answered the problem of death by calling a good death “the consummation of life, the greatest and deepest act of will,” but Marcus cannot do that. “To see virtue in the negation of Eros is to see virtue in the negation of gratification,” to tear Orpheus to pieces (283). “Marcuse founders on the heart of his problem: joy cannot have eternity” (283). Adorno tries to solve the problem by waving it away, by claiming that fear of death is bourgeois, all-too-bourgeois. The problem, he declares, is “null and void” (286). Brave words from the brave new worldist, but how plausible? Not to Friedman: “The Frankfurt School’s love of life makes it impotent against life’s universal and inevitable negation” (286-287). To negate that negation, you need the God of the Bible, a genuinely divide intervention. “What Adorno never answers is how satiety in socialist society would be less boring and troublesome” than it is in bourgeois society (289). He recapitulates the very problem he sees in the administrative state organized by the social democrats. Yes, work will be abolished, but why will a life of perpetual play satisfy human beings? His “radically childlike” vision of life would freeze men and women in a condition of perpetual infantilism. “In a way, the Frankfurt School attempted to do metaphysically what Trotsky and Mao attempted politically: to institutionalize revolution by making it permanent” (296). In this, they partook of the modernity they opposed, inasmuch as “modernity has always tried to abolish the distance between being and becoming by somehow rooting being in the practice of becoming”—quite unlike the erotic quest seen in Plato’s Republic, or the God-fearing, prophetic quest of the Biblical prophets. Recall that it was Machiavelli who condemned “imaginary republics.” “The Frankfurt School is, in the end, most praiseworthy for he thing that they failed to accomplish, for by failing, they demonstrated the bankruptcy of modernity” (301).

The Frankfurt School thus offers us an astounding mixture of insight and bosh.

Nalin Ranasinghe: Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgias. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009.

If a political man might identify the love of fame as the ruling passion of the noblest minds, what is the ruling passion of the best minds? It is `philo-sophia,’ the love of wisdom, Socrates maintained. But unless defined carefully, neither the love of fame nor the love of wisdom encompasses goodness in the moral sense of the word, virtue or strength of soul. (And even virtue might be redefined immorally, as Machiavelli does with his virtù).

Nalin Ranasinghe argues for an understanding of Socrates as a man whose love of wisdom reinforced virtue. Contemplating the cosmos, its nature, need not result in amoral estheticism or scientism, let alone immorality. The philosopher who considers the nature of human beings and the human place in nature as a whole will find that the wisdom he loves strengthens his courage, moderation, and justice. The Gorgias, Plato’s account of Socrates’ dialogues with the most eminent Sophist of his day, the Sophist’s disciple, and an impassioned, highly intelligent immoralist, highlights the virtue of Socratic philosophy by plunging Socrates into an underworld of political intrigue and educational corruption.

Ranasinghe begins by remarking that “many close readings of the Gorgias suggest that Plato uses his text’s many moral impasses to indicate the impotence and inadequacy of Socratic ethics” (1). The “backdrop” of the dialogue—”the long and brutal Peloponnesian War”—itself lends itself to nihilism, even as the First World War and the Holocaust would do, centuries later. But on the contrary: “I will contend that the true focus of the Gorgias is the instrumental perversion of speech introduced by its namesake. Although the trajectory of the dialogue moves away from the sophist himself, Socrates’ extended debate with Callicles employs indirect communication and reductio ad absurdum argumentation to show the itinerant Gorgias the long-germ result of his manipulative technique and moral irresponsibility—effects extending into our own times” (4). Good as his word, Ranasinghe illustrates many points in the dialogue with parallels between Gorgian sophistry and what has come to be called ‘postmodernism,” with its claim that human beings either manipulate or are manipulated by the verbal tropes they invent.
Against this, “more than any other [Platonic] dialogue, the Gorgias vividly depicts the great value that Socrates and Plato attached to the soul’s freedom and integrity” (4). And even this isn’t strong enough; Ranasinghe’s interpretation finds Socrates and Plato discovering that freedom and attachment, not merely `attaching value’ to it. “The passionately written Gorgias militates against the separation of moral from intellectual virtue and requires that its readers souls be integrated and fully engaged by the labyrinthine work before it” (5). By this act of intellectually erotic integration, our souls re-enact and recover “the Socratic vision of a morally governed cosmos that eventually provided both the language and concepts by which the sublime message of Christianity spread throughout the Hellenized world and gave birth to Western Civilization” (6).

Socratic philosophy counteracts the nihilism that finds its most courageous expression in Nietzsche, its most democratized expression in the writings of our contemporary disciples of Derrida. But unlike Leo Strauss, who also praised Socrates as the philosopher who stands at the core of the West, Ranasinghe points to the Gorgias, not the Republic, as the Socratic-Platonic dialogue we most need now. In Strauss’s lifetime, the crisis of the West consisted first and foremost of the attack on human nature seen in modern tyranny, usually called (but not by Strauss) ‘totalitarianism.’ As Strauss understood it, the Republic gives its careful reader a devastatingly ironic account of the evil and folly of a political regime that attempts to order human lives as if they were ideas. Today, however, “nihilism replaces totalitarianism as the main challenge facing humans” (7). Ideas in the Platonic sense are not abused; they are dismissed, rejected as nonsense, as `mere rhetoric.’ With its unmasking of the blandishments of sophistic rhetoric, the Gorgias becomes the Platonic dialogue to study now. Strauss was right to recover Platonic political philosophy, but as the political circumstances under which we live differ from those Strauss faced, our ‘point of entry’ into that philosophy should change.

The dialogue is anything but a history, an account of a series of events that really happened. Even Socrates’ most vehement interlocutor, Callicles, may well be an invention of Plato. But the diplomatic mission of Gorgias to Athens, his successful persuasion of the Athenians to make war on Syracuse on the side of his own embattled city, Leontini, did indeed occur, and the Gorgias “has to do with Socrates’ efforts to heal the effects visited by the plague of rhetoric on the city. In other words, while the Republic warns us against tyrants trying to supplant politics, the Gorgias depicts the contrary danger of a demagogic political regime that would transcend gods and nature and eventually leave everyone alienated from reality” (8). Wars don’t make nihilism; nihilists and their sophistries do. “Gorgias, [who] valued victory over truth, answers over questions, and satisfaction over learning,” who taught men “to use language in an opportunistic or instrumental way,” thereby “corrupted Greek culture and denied humanity the interrelated experiences of participation in the logos and the cosmos,” a severance that “slowly poisons the soul itself” wherever it becomes the regnant “attitude toward life” (8).

Although not a history, the dialogue has its own order or “interior proportions” (9). These are geometrically exact: four sections of equal length: Socrates’ interrogation of Gorgias; Socrates’ victory over Polus; Socrates “spirited discussion” with Callicles; Socrates’ speech about the underworld. The number 4 parallels the four principles that order the cosmos: earth, air, fire, water. Socrates’ art imitates nature. The imitation of nature by the philosophic artist contrasts sharply with an interpretation of the Platonic dialogues Strauss himself unearthed, namely, the claim by medieval Islamic theologians that “all philosophers are atheists and that ethics merely serves as an exoteric pretext for helping friends and harming enemies” (11). In this, the theologians opposed religious bellecism to philosophic eroticism. But this charge should have been directed at the sophists, not the philosophers; in Plato’s Philebus “Protarchus claims to have heard Gorgias insist that persuasion is superior to all the other arts because it enslaves all of them by their own consent” (12)—just the sort of thing an enterprising immoralist would want to do. Gorgias also anticipates postmodernism by claiming “that in the absence, inaccessibility, or inexpressibility of Truth our reality is held together by a worldwide web of persuasive words” (13). Far from strengthening democracy, sophistry ancient, modern, and postmodern warps the soul into a being incapable of self-knowledge, forgetting its natural place in the cosmos and viewing itself instead “as the measure of reality” (14). Severing the souls of citizens from reality causes democracies to choose their wars foolishly and fight them blindly, sending ignorant armies to clash by night.

As previous commentators have observed, the word polemou—”war” or “battle”—begins the dialogue. Ranasinghe provides the account of the Leontine embassy to Athens written by Diodorus Siculus, who says that the Athenians were susceptible to Gorgias’ eloquence for two reasons: they “are by nature clever and fond of dialectic,” and so Gorgias’ speech filled them with “wonder”; they had long “been covetous of Sicily because of the fertility of its land” (16). This puts an important limit on Ranasinghe’s gloss—”the gods deluded the Athenians into exchanging much gold (and priceless blood) for a few brazen words of flattery” (17)—because it indicates what really happened: Gorgias was telling them what they wanted to hear, giving them an excuse for their land hunger, rather in the manner that some American orators told their fellow citizens that a continental empire was their “Manifest Destiny.” While the corruptive power of sophistic rhetoric must not be underestimated, it works best with those already somewhat corrupt, given to wishful thinking and even fantasy because their desires are so strong.

Ranasinghe is especially alert to Platonic play with Greek legends. “Gorgias” sounds a bit like “Gorgon,” and sure enough, Socrates parodies Odysseus’s “deadly fear of the Gorgon’s deadly beauty” (held to turn men into stone) by arriving late to Gorgias’ display-speech. Indeed, Callicles, the host, effectively calls Socrates a coward for arriving late to the battle, a jab he will come to regret having made. Far from cowardly, Socrates will soon put Gorgias himself on display, and not in the most flattering light. But Gorgias begins the battle with supreme confidence, rather as the Athenians will invade Sicily. Socrates’ friend, Chaerephon, had once asked the Delphic Oracle whether there existed any man wiser than Socrates; here “it is Gorgias himself who plays the role of the eminent Oracle,” who promises to answer any question put to him (19). Gorgias supplants a god. “With his feigned omniscience, Gorgias—an intellectual molehill—has made the oracles, and indeed the gods, redundant” (19). Socrates “is not responsible for bringing this strange new god or post-theological phenomenon into the Agora,” but he will meet the invader in battle.

But Gorgias first sends out an expeditionary force, his student Polus, to test the mettle of the challenger. “It seems that Gorgias is not merely omniscient, [but] also capable of transferring his wisdom to anyone” (20); “it is striking that Socrates was never known to have claimed Chaerephon was his student” (24). This can only occur because to Gorgias and his students ‘omniscience’ derives from their nihilism, their very belief that there is nothing that can be known. If so, omniscience consists in the ability to say anything others can be brought to believe, and no real “religious and moral bonds” to restrain them (20). “For Gorgias the questioning process ends not with truth, or zetetic insight, but in the termination of the wonder that gave rise to the question and its replacement by the satisfaction or pleasure of the questioner. To this way of thinking democratic citizens were but a herd of auditory animals ruled by desire, ignorance, and passion.” (20) By contrast, “Socrates will oppose this bid to draw nihilistic conclusions from what must be seen as conditions for the possibility of human freedom and excellence” (21). Gorgias “bases his claims to omniscience on his power to reduce human diversity to a generic uniformity of need and desire through flattery and obfuscation” (23); he “creat[es] democratic truth, by saying whatever he believes his audience needs and wishes to hear” (25). To Gorgias’ self-deluding delusiveness, Socrates will oppose self-knowledge, the foundation of self-government. To democracy’s tendency toward political arithmetic—counting heads without regard to what is in them, identifying the good with majority opinion, and in our day taking polls the way an invalide imaginaire takes his own temperature—Socrates will oppose geometry, “the art dealing with ratios between naturally unequal entities” (21). He will oppose human freedom to the sophistic/democratic inclination to treat human beings as “free to be bought, sold, and counted like money” (21). In this sense he anticipates philosophically what Abraham Lincoln expressed politically in his debate with Stephen Douglas: natural right against undiluted popular sovereignty.

For his part, Gorgias enters the fray with such supreme confidence that he agrees to answer Socrates’ questions briefly, not with the long, winding speeches for which he is famous. After all, His Omniscience surely masters discourses long and short. More, he “is so much in love with his cleverness that he displays the naked truth of his art—in the hope of gaining greater acclaim” (26). ‘I am so good at what I do, I can tell you what I am doing to you and still do it.’ And why not, if one conceives of learning not as the noetic perception of reality, of nature, of being, but as an experience of word alone? “The rhetorician only learns from experience to speak eloquently on these very subjects through the experience of speaking frequently on them” (28). “For Gorgias the art of rhetoric is not embodied in or related to nature but rather represents the power of the eloquent will to create a realm of meaning that is independent of elusive or hostile nature” (28-29). Although a Leontine on a mission for his home city, as a sophist Gorgias is a traveling man. Here today and gone tomorrow, scouring the cities of Greece for new audiences and especially clients, he “will inevitably experience and portray reality as thoroughly fickle and changeable” (29). If modern science aims at conquering nature, in manipulating it for human advantage, at least it assumes that nature is really ‘there’ and knowable, even if scientists need to ‘torture’ nature with their ‘experiments’ so as to force her to reveal her secrets. But sophistic rhetoric, ancient and post-modern, operates through language alone, exercising “a pseudo-scientific power that seems to order or conquer nature” with words alone (29), a power to rule in one’s own city or in any city one passes through. “However, as Socrates soon points out, Gorgias and his students do not see that rule of the temperate man over himself, as opposed to the power to rule over others—even if this is limited to the populace of one’s own city—is the greatest human action” (29). Without that, the rhetorician catches himself in the self-contradiction seen in Gorgias’ own way of life: this cosmopolitan undertakes a mission in the service of his own city because even a cosmopolitan needs some physical and political platform upon which to speak. To put it in current-day terms, as I sit peacefully typing these letters onto a computer screen, I may imagine myself as free of nearly all constraints, physical and political. Am I not now entirely a ‘citizen of the world,’ preparing my thoughts for presentation to any reader who happens by, whether next door or in Myanmar? The answer is ‘no.’ I am in fact sitting in a chair, safely at home in a building that does not collapse, protected by police and fire departments, in a country that defends my right to freedom of speech and the press. I am firmly located in nature and in political life, whether I think about it or not. But if I don’t think about those realities, they may well change, and not to my advantage. The apolitical politics of sophist rhetoricians will otherwise deceive me, and them. Or, as Ranasinghe puts it (more forcefully), “a freedom that is created by speech alone tends to threaten to supplement and annihilate the ethos that gives it meaning” (31). The God of the Bible can create something out of nothing by the power of His Word, but I cannot, and even Gorgias cannot. There is “a subtle difference between rule over oneself and self-persuasion”; to ignore it is to engage in “the very delusory act of persuading [one]self that he is engaged in self-creation”  (32). The attempt at self-creation ends in self-destruction. Even God does not create Himself.

Sophists can manipulate a political community, but they cannot establish one. Ranasinghe asks “how sophists can genuinely interact with each other” (32). As he has learned from Augustine, even robber gangs need to maintain honor amongst themselves. But like the three Gorgons, the three sophists in the Gorgias do not “persuade or converse with one another”; “genuine interaction between avowed relativists and flatterers is impossible” (32-33). They may form alliances, but the friendships upon which social and political life depends cannot exist among them. Socratic philosophy, which openly admits that it know that it doesn’t know, “does not necessarily hurl us to the depths of non-being” or nihilism, the night in which all cows are black and no friends can be found; “prudentially mediated human truth is available in the metaxy or in-between realm, where we ‘participate’ in reality without having creative mastery over it” (33-34). To say that reality or nature is not fully transparent, that full ‘Enlightenment’ is impossible, is not to say that we do not glimpse nature and come to some understanding of it, even if that understanding is limited. Self-knowledge and knowledge of other persons is also limited, but sufficient for strengthening the virtue of souls and friendships among those souls. Sophistic rhetoric blocks these things from happening because it prevents self-correction and shields us from correction by our friends. Socrates can feel gratitude to the one who refutes his argument, but a sophist can feel only resentment, “growing in thumos rather than eros” (37).

Gorgias does exhibit a sort of prudence; he wants to bail out of his sinking rhetorical ship. Having been forced to choose “between being exposed as a knave or as a fool”—an untrustworthy nihilist who doesn’t believe in the justice to which he must appeal or an incompetent speaker who pretends to supreme technical mastery of speech— he decides that when the going gets tough, the tough get going—right out of town. Or at least out of the conversation. He is rescued from continued embarrassment by his disciple, Polus, who intervenes by attempting to shame Socrates into a like silence. But Socrates proves difficult to shame, inasmuch as he has nothing to be ashamed of.

Polus attempts a more open defense of rhetoric. Eschewing the appearance of justice, he thinks that “the inherent weakness of human nature makes it possible and necessary that rhetorical power should rule openly over man, nature, and the arts” (45). Socrates slows him down by asking what he thinks rhetoric is. Socrates challenges him to defend himself from the charge that rhetoricians qua rhetoricians do not understand politics at all; they have mastered only “a semblance of a branch of the art of politics” (46). The distinction between what is real and what only seems to be real begins to put rhetoric in its place. Socrates then gets Polus to admit two particular instances of that distinction: the real and only ‘seeming’ health of the soul and the real and only ‘seeming’ health of the body. But if so, Polus owes his interlocutors, and indeed himself, an account of why “the power and glory” that rhetoric brings to the rhetorician is good for anyone, first of all himself. Socrates then names four “false” arts—cookery, cosmetics, sophistry, and rhetoric—false because “they guess at the pleasant without concern or regard for what is best” (48). Cooking with lard results in a tasty cake, but the cook evidently doesn’t care much about my cholesterol count. Similarly, sophistry and rhetoric produce “phantasms” which “supplant natural phenomena and blind us to reality” (48).

Ranasinghe observes that although victory-loving Polus takes all of this sourly, his mentor Gorgias gets interested in Socrates’ argument, to the extent of breaking his self-imposed silence and asking a question or two. He is at least open to learning. This raises a very good question: “The absence of clear and definite knowledge, especially with regard to nature and the gods, is partly responsible for the prevalence and proliferation of flattery, but this being the case, how can we account for one man becoming a Socrates”—who never flatters without irony—”and another a Gorgias”—who flatters with an eye to power and profit? (49). This directs us to considering “the soul and the foundational moral experiences constituting it” (49). What is good for the soul, that thing sophists, rhetoricians, and philosophers alike must attend to?

What Ranasinghe considers the second quarter of the Gorgias “begins with Polus indignantly asking Socrates whether he thinks that rhetoric is but flattery” (50). Socrates deflects what he rightly considers a ‘rhetorical question,’ then denies Polus’ assertion that rhetoricians enjoy great power in the city. In so doing, he does points the young man to a more careful understanding of what power is; “the word translated power, dunamis, means ‘potential’ and is not considered something desirable in itself… Raw potential needs to be realized and actualized as energeia; otherwise happiness (eudaimonia) will not result” (51). Rhetoricians may or may not succeed in manipulating public opinion, but they lack real power because they depend upon their audience. And even when they succeed, they fail, because “tyrannical acts of this kind defeat the purposes inherent in human action itself to desire and do what is best” (52). Power exists for a purpose; it is not an end in itself. To treat power as if it were a purpose “only destroys the deliberative capacity essential to making something turn out for the best” (53). “Power should not be purchased at the cost of self-knowledge” (54), as the Delphic oracle might say.

Socrates goes on to make his celebrated, radical argument that suffering evil is better than doing evil. “To Polus’s way of thinking, the interior (the intellect) is a calculating infrastructure that exists purely for the greater glories of one’s image and passions” (58). The tyrant Archelaus is his hero—Archelaus, who not only sustained his tyranny but burnished his reputation by patronizing Euripides, thus doing “all he could to ensure that his legacy was spun to the best extent possible” (58). But Socrates is the last person to allow himself to be swayed by image-makers and the favorable public opinion they inspire. “This Archimedean Point of personal integrity”—this refusal to ‘go along to get along,’ much less to warp one’s perceptions in order to bring oneself into accord with what ‘everybody else says’—”represents an understated reference to what is surely terra incognita to Polus: the human soul” (59). Socrates found in himself the strength of soul to resist public opinion up to and including its verdict of death upon Socrates. “While Polus regards the soul egotistically as a power capable of triumphing in the shadow games played out on the wall of the cave, Socrates’ soul exists in another dimension of reality—one where moral principles are not created by necessity but rather guide the actions of free men” (59). “Socrates does not claim that unjust or excessive punishment is good; it would not be good for a minor offender to be delivered into the hands of sadistic and vicious judges. We may well contrast the strikingly different manner in which Jesus and Socrates were executed. It is also significant that Socrates viewed the relatively mild manner of his death as a sign of great divine favor” (61). It is also significant that Socrates never implied that he was God; he was charged with the impiety of denying the existence of the gods, not of claiming to be God.

Socrates undermines Polus’ self-assurance by inducing him to admit that although “it is worse to suffer injustice than to inflict it,” it is also “more shameful or ugly (aiskion) to do injustice than to suffer it” (63). But if so, then there must be some way to define the noble and the shameful, to distinguish them, and thus to account for our feelings of shame at doing injustice. Committing a shameful act is not physically painful, as suffering injustice often is, but then our discomfort must stem from some sense that injustice is bad for us. The soul has something in it that feels bad when it does bad things. “Doing injustice is worse than suffering it” (64) because doing injustice troubles the soul, whereas suffering injustice pains the body.

Although Polus concedes the truth of this, Ranasinghe remarks that a man “ruled by shame” might still commit injustice if he knew his crimes would go undetected. If Polus could make himself invisible, would he still avoid wrongdoing? To truly come around to Socrates’ view, Polus would need to see “why what is shameful and bad, is bad for him” (64), whether or not others knew his crimes. This is the weakness of the rhetorician’s soul, dependent upon public opinion, partly resentful of its sway and attempting to manipulate it, but finally bowing to it. This is why Socrates next suggests that of the three kinds of baseness—poverty, disease, and “defects of the soul”—the latter is worst because it alone brings “moral repugnance” in its train (66). This “psychic account of evil,” this understanding of evil as damaging to the soul of the evildoer, stands as “one of the deepest insights provided by the Gorgias” (66). If the remedy for poverty is money-making and remedy for disease is medicine, the remedy for defects of soul is “the art of justice” (67). The demi-art of rhetoric won’t cure a defective soul. “The true arts… connect the self to reality, rather than knack-like methods for excessive material accumulation or thumotic display without any moderating form or limiting principle” (68). The tyrant Archelaus terrorizes and image-builds adroitly, but why should one envy him his soul? “Human flourishing or happiness occurs in a setting requiring the individual soul to interact with others in the world through speeches and deeds…. [T]his is precisely what an unjust life cannot allow since it seeks to make itself the center or omphalos of being. Accordingly it sets out to warp everything, including the perception of other humans, around its singular and diseased perspective on reality” (70). Nor should we admire the democrat. “The chronic democratic temptation to pursue ‘freedom for oneself and hegemony over others’ ignores the crucial Archimedean point of self-rule” (70).

Socrates seldom speaks in public. He practices his dialectic on individuals in private. This comports with his insistence on the importance of the souls of his interlocutors. He does not seek to shame them in public, although he may cause them to blush in shame in front of a small circle of friends and relatives. Public shaming does not reach into the individual soul. Shaming by public rhetoric will not cure the soul so shamed. Shaming by private dialectic leads the individual soul to convict itself, and thus to desire to cure itself. “Our ignorance about what is positively just is unavoidable as long as the state, rather than the soul is viewed as the origin of virtue”; “a true regime of virtue can only be founded in the soul; it can never be imposed on [or, in any thoroughgoing way, by?—WM] any larger unit” (75). “Socrates teaches Polus, a professional rhetorician, to see the limitations of this outlook by helping him to understand that speech and truth, rather than being derivative from manipulated appearances, were founded on the moral quality of the soul and the reality of the world. In other words, Polus is shown the intentional structure immanent in speech itself; he also sees how this order reflected the self-evident teleology of the human desire for what was truly noble and good” (76). “Rhetoric works through breaking down the unity of the human soul into a great many unruly and needy desires”; this is to say that rhetoric ‘democratizes’ the soul, persuades it to imitate the desirous clamor of assembly and marketplace (76). “Conversely, Socrates’ art sets out to restoratively recollect the integrity of the individual and the genuine plurality of the citizenry,” while also “restor[ing] the self-knowledge of the soul and the self-evidence of the kalon [the noble]”—a restoration indispensable to both man and citizen.

Seeing that Polus began to lose the argument when he admitted to the experience of shame, Callicles jumps into the dialogue with an assertion of his own proud shamelessness. “Far more of a hedonist and nihilist” than Gorgias or Polus, Callicles proves “far harder to educate than either of the other two men” (77). He speaks “for the blinded and speechless desires” (78). Socrates accordingly replies by describing the two loves in the souls of the two men: Socrates loves Philosophy and Alcibiades, Callicles the Athenian people and Demos, son of Cleinias. But this means that Socrates loves the intelligent, Callicles the unintelligent. And Callicles confuses himself by claiming that his twin loves are really expressions of his own version of natural aristocracy, namely, the strength of his soul needed to pursue one’s desires without moderation. “Unlike Polus, who prefers to be one of the manipulators of shadows in the cave, Callicles desires to be powerful and shameless enough to charge into the cave like a rampaging lion and terrorize its hapless denizens” (84). To him “philosophy is the earliest and lowest stage on the intellectual ladder that culminates in tyranny” (85); he advises the aged Socrates to quit acting like a child. Anticipating the advice of the ‘postmoderns,’ Callicles would make philosophy into “a language game that future leaders must learn to play so that they may lie fluently to the masses when it’s time to go down to the cave and preside over the shadows” (87). “According to Callicles’ upside-down realism, men can only grow up when they become just as unjust, irrational, and power-driven as reality itself” (88).

How can Socrates reply to such a man? In the dialogue’s third part, “the obstacles Socrates faces in his agon with Callicles are quite unlike those he encountered with Gorgias and Polus? (94). Recalling the tripartite division of the soul outlined in the Republic, Ranasinghe finds the dialogue with Gorgias to have been “abstract and cerebral”—a battle fought by reasoning “on the chessboard of ideas” (94). The dialogue with Polus centered on thumos or spiritedness, with Socrates showing him that the very nature of logos or speech, the rhetoricians’ stock in trade, did not lend itself to the satisfaction of the “personal pursuit of political power and glory” (94). But Callicles valorizes the third ‘part’ of the soul, the desires; his “cultivated shallowness ensures that his pursuit of hedonism cannot be interrupted either by pure intellectual speculation or by practical reflections within himself concerning the compatibility between his methods and his long-term goals” (94). “Libido ergo sum is his intemperate motto,” as he “aspires to be the strongest beast amid chaos” (94-95). More, “Callicles’ shameless words, once acted on, will help to create the chaos in which he expects to thrive” (95). Callicles combines the teachings of Callicles with the lawless and tyrannical ethos of wartime Athens, the Athens of the Thirty Tyrants.

But this combination cannot sustain itself, any more than the Athenian empire could. If Callicles would dominate chaos, he himself must remain resolute, not chaotic. But if the chaotic ‘many’ who rule in democracy are the stronger, and they legislate for equality, then must they not be the truly natural men, not Callicles? Socrates thus shames the shameless Callicles, “making [him] feel an interior dimension that he most manifestly cannot control through violent power, a cave whence he cannot storm out like an unchained young lion” (98). “Callicles’ chaotic reality is much like ours; peopled by ungrateful freedmen, it is like Plato’s Cave without anyone in charge of the shadows” (101). Once again, in a way Socrates himself does not win the argument; logos does. Socrates “starts to triumph over Callicles the moment he forces his adversary to describe his infinite desire in words” (105).  Callicles tries to escape into silence, but it is too late. Returning the favor that Callicles had done him when he had tried gracefully to bow out of his own dialogue with Socrates, Gorgias intervenes to urge Callicles on—for his, Gorgias’, sake and for the sake of the argument. Gorgias understands that in refuting the arguments and assertions of his students, Socrates embarrasses the master rhetorician himself, the man whose career depends upon never being ‘shown up.’

Radical hedonism requires its devotee to refuse “solidarity with the rest of reality” but instead to use it as if the cosmos were a peach to be sucked dry by the hedonist (112). Ranasinghe criticizes Devin Stauffer for regarding Callicles’ hedonism as inconsistent because he praises prudence and courage, arguing that for Callicles these virtues are merely instrumental to his pursuit of pleasures. Similarly, he criticizes Stauffer for claiming that Callicles’ professed admiration for certain prominent Athenian statesmen bespeaks a “commitment to something beyond glory and hedonism” (114 n. 25). Callicles is more likely to (mis)understand such statesmen in the manner characteristic of Callicles’ assumptions: as instances of Athenian glory and dominance. “Conversely, a Socratic would attach great value to the Athenian discovery of the connection between logos and the cosmos” (114 n. 25). It might have been better to have written “discover great value in” rather than “attach great value to.” However that may be, “Callicles’ problems stem from knowing too much about his desires and too little about his soul” (115); “one who lives by desire cannot see his soul as anything but a nexus for the continued enjoyment of pleasure” (116). Gorgias, who is not nearly so far gone in mindlessness, watches and listens, and maybe learns. But Ranasinghe does not contend, as Stauffer does, that Gorgias will ever truly befriend Socrates because “there is a fundamental difference between rhetoric and philosophy”: “Dialectical speech is ruled by its ends and cannot proceed by the sophistical devices of exploiting ignorance and creating false certainty. While Gorgias pushes ignorance, Socrates’ eloquence comes from his being pulled towards a cosmic order that he will soon describe” (118 no. 29).

In politics, Callicleanism plays out as a quest for Athenian glory by means of the cultivation of the strong amidst the chaos of the weak. The shameless, hedonic master spirits will thrive in the democratic chaos of Athens, rule the stupid and spineless many, and thereby turn Athens among the cities into the kind of ravening lions they are, among the Athenians. Like themselves, Athens will prove voracious, rapacious, and dominant. Socrates opposes his ‘theory of the ideas’ to this because the ideas or forms are “not simply creatively imposed from above” but “discovered” as the self-definitions of nature. Reasoned speech, guided by the principle of non-contradiction, describes the nature of which it is a part; to be governed by reason is the soul’s true nature. Just as “physicians generally allow healthy people to satisfy their desires, but do not extend such freedoms to the sick—presumably because their desires are in disarray,” so the soul, when “filled with vices… must not be permitted to indulge its desires and perform actions other than those which will improve it” (119). This is “why just punishment—even including death—may be preferred to living on with a diseased and untreated soul” (119). Socratic ‘idealism’ is “more realistic” than Calliclean ‘realism’ (122).

The final part of the Gorgias consists of Socrates’ own speech, his own rhetorical performance, as he tells a myth that illustrates what he has argued dialectically in the first three parts. Ranasinghe observes that Socrates, having defeated each of his three would-be conquerors, has left himself to deliver a “sort of internal dialogue” (123) in fact, he does not call this a myth at all, but a logos, clearly implying that he regards his speech as an extension of his reasoned argument. Unlike the sophistical rhetoricians, “the philosopher will emphasizes causes and ends rather than effects and means; he also privileges the recovery o erotic being over the sophistical aim of creative dominion over godforsaken becoming” (124).

Socrates has argued that the good is superior to pleasure, that the good means the presence of virtue in the soul, and that virtue means right order. Right order in the soul is by nature, but this natural order can be improved or deranged. Philosophy improves it, sophistry deranges it. “The very nature of the incomplete but erotic human soul seems to necessitate that it choose and actualize its own virtue from within itself, albeit in circumstances that inspire it toward transcendence with a vision of the nobility and beauty of the cosmos” (124). Happiness “is an internal state of flourish that is not dependent on external events” (125); eudaimonia “literally means having a happy guiding spirit” (125). Old, henpecked, poor, ugly Socrates is a happy man because he loves wisdom, opens his soul to the order of the cosmos and orders his soul so as better to understand the cosmic order. His reason rules him, and so his soul does not oscillate between prickly, honor loving thumos and self-contradictory physical desires. By contrast, the tyrant’s deranged, badly ordered, soul cannot trust others because it cannot trust itself; it cannot trust itself because it whipsaws from one tormenting desire or fear to another (128).

This rightly-ordered soul comports with the well-ordered cosmos. In perceiving, partially understanding, and teaching others about the cosmos the man of this always limited, but always growing wisdom serves as a kind of daimon or messenger from the cosmic order to his fellow-men; the order of his soul, conveyed by his speaking and reasoning, his logos, improves the orderliness of their souls. In so doing, he adds a bit to the good order of the cosmos of which all human beings form a part. “This cosmic flourishing is neither a divinely granted revelatory dispensation… nor is it a wholly human creation” (130). It is an act of “non-coercive erotic authority” (131). “God is neither dead to the world nor a double-predestining, doom-dealing puppeteer”; to believe so is to reject the metaxy, that in-between position “where participation [in the cosmic order] occurs,” which “cannot be over-determined” (131). “What Socrates has described is a partnership between the human and the divine that allows god to be god and man to be man” (131). There cannot be “perfect knowledge of all that ever will be,” nor can there be “perfect technical knowledge over human souls” (133). And this is good news for human beings and for the cosmos itself. The modern-philosophic promises to achieve such mastery over nature “through the existence of technical power” (133) are both impossible and bad. “Socrates’ point is that instead of being based on selfish calculations regarding probable events in the future quite beyond man’s (or god’s) control, human beings should instead be ruled by the ideas of justice and temperance,” a condition of the soul that puts it “into harmony with the cosmic order” (134). The philosopher is the daimon who brings this message (or, to use another Socratic metaphor, the midwife who delivers), this modestly improved orderliness to human souls by bringing them to imitate the cosmos instead of trying vainly (in both senses of the word) to master it. Friendship can then replace manipulative rhetoric and tyranny. In his final comment to Socrates, Callicles indicates that he “now knows what Socrates was talking about, even though his body is un-persuaded by this non-rhetorical reasoning” (141). He will never philosophize, but he can be brought to think, a little. This is one modest achievement of Socrates’ “true political art” (142), and the limitations of the achievement underline Socrates’ ready insistence that human speech can only go so far in its effects. When a radio quiz show host asked witty Dorothy Parker to use the word ‘horticulture’ in a sentence, she famously replied, “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.” Socrates would say you might be able to, but just barely. Both the ugly old man and the beautiful young men and women will discover that limits to their erotic attractiveness. If Socrates goes before a jury in Athens, he already knows what the likely verdict will be.

Socrates final logos describes the cosmic order in terms of the god Kronos and his sons Zeus (a god of the sky, the air), Poseidon (a god of the earth and the sea), and Pluto or Hades (a god of the underworld). The “underworld” of Ranasinghe’s title refers to Hades, and the actual underworld Socrates is “in” is the city, the Cave of the Republic and specifically the city of Athens; in each of these three underworlds, the “denizens have ‘no-idea’ (a-eidos) of who they are, but see and know themselves only as shadows,” manipulated by “orators, poets, and politicians” (149). Although Zeus is the god of the sky, he is not the sky itself. “The mysterious distinction between the sky and the gods is better understood when we take the sky to represent a realm of eternal unchanging ideas to which even the gods are subject; this issue was notably examined in the Euthyphro—where the virtues are recognized by the gods and cannot be whatever the arbitrary deities happen to fancy. The further implication of this is that the gods themselves are but time-bound representatives of the Platonic forms or ideas” (150).

Similarly, human beings come from the earth, but are not the earth. They are down-to-earth political animals, but also capable of navigating by the stars in the sky. Socrates, the messenger who mediates between sky and earth, gods and men, is guiltless of the charge the Athenians bring against him, the charge of impiety. He did not introduce “strange deities” to replace the gods of Homer; “rather, he is upholding the higher timeless principles that the sky represents in his model of the four-fold [cosmos]” (151). In the Gorgias he “provides a logos of psychic interiority to support its after-worldly mythos (152). In so doing, he would replace the warrior-gods of Homer (who have misled Athenians into believing they can fight the Peloponnesian War as if they were Achilles and Odysseus at Troy) while resisting the blandishments of Dionysus, “the demi-god of drunken democracy” (158), at whose shrine ambitious young Athenians like Callicles are inclined to burn the candles of their souls. “Socrates overthrows the blood-stained Olympian tyrant and replaces him with a regime of virtue” (156), a regime strong enough to resist the insurgent Dionysians, as well.

The Socratic regime or “way of life” rests on five tenets: “fear doing injustice more than suffering it”; “value being good in private and public over seeming good”; “see that goodness comes first with just punishment next”; “flee all flattery”; “take care that rhetoric should be used only to serve justice” (160). The “true political art” or statecraft founds this new regime of the soul’s self-knowledge, against the bad regime of a soul corrupted by those who “pander pleasure and pain” (161). In the larger realm of city politics, Athens must “disgorge her vast imperial acquisitions,” the winnings “of the grandiose imperialism of Cimon and Pericles” (161). “The future of the School of Hellas must be found in thought rather than deed,” as “the torch of Prometheus is passed from Pericles to Plato,” from whom it will eventually “blaze open a path that will carry the imperishable logos from Jerusalem, through the Hellenized World, all the way to Rome” (161). Ranasinghe thus modestly points the reader toward his own Catholicism, often held to combine Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation.

In his epilogue, Ranasinghe recalls Gorgias’ “triple denial of Truth’s existence, its know-ability, and its speak-ability” (162). Socrates rejects both Gorgias’ claims about nature and (consequently) his “way out of the abyss by persuasive manipulation of democratic opinion” (162). “Like the Gorgon’s head, seductive sophistry has the power to kill souls by placing them in a this-worldly Hades” (162). Socratic dialectic liberates souls from this cave or underworld. “Since Christianity has altered Socrates’ model by externalizing good and evil and placing the complementary concepts of an omnipotent merciful God and original sin, like a good and bad angel, on either side of us, the resultant synthesis is unequal to the task of confronting the problem of evil unless the soul’s power to choose between good and evil is taken very seriously” (163). One does so by seeing the parallel between the natural order of the soul and the order of nature itself, the homology of man and cosmos which the daimon/philosopher can show us by his dialectical arguments. “Socrates suggests that it is within the power of the human soul to deliberate well and prudently when confronted with the many dyadic categories (freedom and necessity, good and evil, nobility and vice) that operate on it” (164). Socrates proved this to be possible by living the philosophic way of life, embodying the self-knowing, soul-ordering regime of philosophy.  Contra Machiavelli, who teaches that men must learn not to be good in order to survive in a dangerous world, Socrates shows that “good humans do their polity a priceless service by constantly proving that virtue is immune to the false necessity of vice” (167). Such humans can be true friends, and true friendships strengthen the political community. “Socrates’ inspiring example suggests that true happiness is gained neither through ‘spinning’ vain fabrications in the void nor by being envied in the cave-like abyss of non-being”; eudaimonia can only be earned by using the `enduring power’ of the human soul to participate in the beauty of the cosmos” (168).

In considering the interpretations of Devon Stauffer and Nalin Ranasinghe, one sees that both scholars recover the Socratic understanding of the philosopher as a man of both intellectual and moral virtue. Stauffer emphasizes Socrates’ efforts at reforming rhetoric, at teaching Gorgias how his art might be put to better use if it observed the virtues of justice and moderation. Ranasinghe pays more attention to Socrates’ use and understanding of Greek myths as a way of showing the connection between the distinctive feature of human nature, logos, and the larger nature or cosmos which our logos perceives and attempts to describe. In rightly delineating the limits nature sets on human beings, the philosopher’s way of life finds its home in the cosmos. But this ‘cosmopolitanism’ respects the political order that human speech and reason also generate, by arts that can do a better job of aligning that order with nature than sophists and rhetoricians have been inclined to do, then and now. Both of these studies prove to be good companions in the sociable, political philosophy Socrates inaugurated.