Will Morrisey Reviews

Jeffrey Reiman: Justice and Moral Philosophy. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 22, Number 2, Winter 1994-95. Republished with permission.

 

Instability bedevils modern moral philosophy. Whereas Aristotle lends nobility to materialism, ballast to religions, Machiavelli debases the one and poisons the other, yet ends in self-deification. Machiavelli’s morality offers the spectacle of reductive ‘realism’ yoked to overweening ambition. In modern moral philosophizing every Hobbes has his Rousseau, every Hume his Kant, every Hegel his Marx, every Schopenhauer his Nietzsche. With contradictions so acute, syntheses need to be jerrybuilt in unending succession, as hopes for salvation chase an ever-receding horizon called ‘growth.’

Jeffrey Reiman shares the modern philosophers’ materialist naturalism and political atheism. He rejects the irrationalism of the moderns who come after Marx, insisting that “the most important truths of morality can be identified by the natural reasoning faculties of human beings” (ix). Without rationalism, “right becomes indistinguishable from might,” one synthesis that cannot be salvific—at least for morality. Justice is the portion of morality that entails requirements, obligatory force; it therefore both undergirds and enjoys primacy among “other moral ideals” (ix). Morality binds; rational morality replaces that binding that is religion.

Reiman’s investigations discover a tougher version of Rawlsian social contract theory, one well worth considering and far superior to many of its now-fashionable competitors—relativism, the airier Kantianisms, ‘idealistic’ distortions of Marx and democratric distortions of Nietzsche, pragmatisms dappled and motley. Reiman’s theory is not free of problems,, but these issue from modernism itself and are not easy to overcome.

“[A]ll moralities depend” upon the difference between might and right; “if we cannot know this, then we cannot know that the very project of trying to get our fellows to act morally is anything more than just pushing people around” (1). Subjugation is pushing people around, “any case in which the judgment of one person prevails over the contrary judgment of another simply because it can and thus without adequate justification for believing it should” (2). Such justification can only come from reason. Unreasonable beliefs can do nothing in the end but fight it out, appeal to might (if in the guise of providence). The elimination of subjugation is “the inner wisdom of the social contract tradition in moral thinking” (2), a tradition requiring government by consent instead of by force and fraud.

Accordingly, justice is “the set of principles regulating behavior that it would be reasonable for all human beings to accept to best protect themselves against the threat of subjugation each poses to the others” (4). Natural justice applies always and everywhere human beings exist, whether or not they belong to the same civil society; social justice applies wherever people work cooperatively to produce benefits. Justice in both forms requires, involves reasons for restraint—self-restraint and social restraint in circumstances when desires conflict. The need for justice arises on the grounds so forcefully described by Hobbes: Different individuals have conflicting desires and judgments; they act to execute those desires and judgments; therefore, they need a set of principles upon which they can agree, for safety’s sake. “What they do not differ in… is their desire to live according to their judgments, no matter how different”; “only appeal to the principles that it would be reasonable for all to adopt as protection against having their judgments thwarted can answer the call for justification and thus overcome the suspicion of subjugation”(6). As with ‘early modern’ moral thought generally, so long as thinkers do not propose a more ambitious moral program whereby personal safety or “peaceful coexistence” (7) begins to seem a poor substitute for the radical transformation of human nature, collectively (Marx) or in certain individuals (Nietzsche).

In “polic[ing] the border between might and right,” justice’s “task is to determine the things that can be done in the name of other moral beliefs” (8). “Only reason can require in a nonsubjugating way” (8); reason is not only logic, “the capacity to make correct inferences from propositions,” it is also the ability “to size up facts for what they are and what they imply, and to identify the best means to some end, and, in general, to distinguish what we should believe from what we merely do believe” (9). What we call a free or nonsubjugated will is “the capacity to reason about how one should act and to perform an act because this reasoning indicates that this action is what one should do” (10). Justice provides the foundation for all further moral reasoning. Without this foundation, social contract theory floats in the air and can be made to crash—as seen in the many refutations of Rawls. “Justice as reason’s answer to subjugation is unique as a contractarian theory [Reiman observes], because we do not start by characterizing the contracting situation as an imaginary place and then work back to current reality [as seen in modern moral philosophers from Hobbes to Rawls]. We start from current reality and derive the features of the contracting situation from the conditions necessary to pose the question of whether subjugation is occurring currently.” (13) The problem of subjugation entails recognition of the “subterranean political dimension of morality” (14). Reiman never loses sight of the need for individual and political liberty, neither of which implies anarchy. “A true morality spells out the conditions under which human beings may rightly govern other human beings” (14). To Reiman, as to the American Founders, consent always means reasoned assent, assent to coherent conceptual constraints and to the physical constraints derived from them.

Remian believes Descartes to be the founder of modern moral philosophy, the thinker who replaced the “I am” of the Biblical God with the human “I think, therefore I am.” Cartesian doubt replaces faith, as “his own reason becomes a thinker’s highest authority” (25). Perhaps because Reiman does not acknowledge Machiavelli as Descartes’ predecessor, he does not see that Cartesian method replaces human doubt not so much with authoritative discovery as with Godlike production, a willful quasi-creation known because the creator best knows and best rules his own creation. This is so to speak the princely or tyrannical aspect of modern moral philosophy, and it gives modernity its hard-edged carapace as distinguished from its soft and well-fed underbelly.

Be this as it may, Reiman understands Cartesian method as primarily a road to rational assent. Modern social contract theory, inaugurated by Hobbes, attempts to bring this principle of rational assent to politics (27). The problem with Hobbes’s theory is its recourse to a sovereign “whose power is not subject to the rational judgment of his subjects” (32). Locke’s objection, that the sovereign thus becomes a remnant of the state of nature, an agent of war, is vitiated by his recourse to Christianity, a recourse Reiman over-hastily takes to be a sincere “reliance on revelation” previously invalidated by Descartes” (35). This is not the place to squabble with Reiman’s Locke scholarship; suffice it to say that the image of the pious Locke has been seriously questioned by such scholars as Robert H. Horwitz and Nathan Tarcov. The more important question for our purposes here is to ask, “Why did Locke have need for such recourse? If he merely wanted to guard himself against attacks by the powerful and pious of his day (he was not entirely successful), then what does this need (and his middling success at meeting it) tell us not only of his own historical circumstance but of political circumstances always and everywhere? Could it be that rationalism in politics has practical limits, that political atheism therefore has some serious disadvantages, not least of all to the atheist? Or did Locke intend something more by his recourse to Christianity than self-preservation? Could he have viewed with skepticism the likelihood of a general enlightenment or popular political rationalism? His plans for educating the class of gentry differed from his plans for educating others: temporary expedient and first step on the road to universal enlightenment, or permanent arrangement?

Because he takes Cartesian method to be a means of discovery, not of willful production, Reiman can assume that modern moral philosophy aims at an impersonal moral authority independent of the one who makes moral assertions. His equivalent of the state of nature—he calls it “the natural context”—is the state of moral doubt, of “doubt[ing] the validity of claims to moral authority” (42). He distinguishes very sharply between right and might to the extent of distinguishing moral duties or requirements from moral recommendations. An example of a moral recommendation is, ‘Be courageous!’—an imperative that cannot be strictly binding because its enforcement would undermine its very nature as rationally willed risk-taking. This overlooks the morally educative role that force often plays, however. Rigors ‘force’ courage (or cowardice) out of people—the reverse side of the old adage, “Power shows the man.” If your family or country is endangered, is courage not a duty? Sensitive to the moral dimension of political liberty, and far from heedless of the moral dimensions of restraint, including political restraint, Reiman is uneasy with the moral underpinnings of (immediately) non-moral acts such as physical restraint. This comes from his thoroughgoing moral rationalism, his stalwart refusal to accept habituation as a valid moral enterprise. “[T]he Cartesian challenge seems to hurl us into an endless circle: We need political authority because we cannot depend on people’s rational judgments [as in the Hobbesian state of nature], and we can only depend on political authority as if it is subject to people’s rational judgment. The way out lies in showing that we can depend on people’s rational judgments to hit upon the structure of valid moral authority.” (35) There is a ‘low but solid ground’ that is also fully rational, a ground that will underlie a workable social contract consented to by all. Cartesianism requires the sweeping away of all habits, opinions, and conventions, not the rational ascent from them. Cartesianism distrusts habits, opinions and conventions as sources of rational thought, albeit imperfect sources. The modern founding, whether political or ‘intellectual,’ requires a tabula rasa upon which to construct new modes and orders. Reiman may underestimate the willfulness of this project and therefore overestimate its rationality.

Consider, for example, his own recourse to existentialism. Reiman takes it as a fact that human beings have foreknowledge of their own eventual death and that this knowledge “transforms living into a life,” that is, requires us to distinguish between living well and living poorly, goads us to live a life that “compensates for the endless darkness on the other side” (43). This is of course the Aristotelian distinction between mere life and the good life. But it is Aristotle filtered through Heidegger and somewhat the worse for the straining. André Malraux, who spent his life thinking about death in its variety of occasions and senses, concluded that the question of the meaning of life would be no less poignant if man were immortal, although death does give the question some urgency. Life, not death, poses the question. Malraux borrows his most famous novel’s title, La condition humaine, from Montaigne and Pascal; not death but individuality and reason (as defined broadly by Reiman) account for the “natural fact about human beings”: their possession of a “sovereign interest” in “liv[ing] the life they want to live (49). Notice the typically modern voluntarism that now gets into Reiman’s argument, which had subordinated the will to reason. Mistakes in identifying one’s sovereign interest are not objective but only incorrect predictions about what will best satisfy the person as judge of his own desires and author of his actions. “[C]oerced actions cannot really serve my sovereign interest unless I come to embrace them as my own (53). Evidently, reason can identify justice, the moral condition of the rest of morality, but it cannot identify a hierarchy of ends consonant with a human nature or way of life. Citing Aristotle, Reiman declares that “reasoning is being free” and that “reasoning is our being” (58), that the sovereign interest is the “is” that commands our “oughts” (58), the core of subjectivity, the fact that “spans the fact-value divide” (58). Because this reasoning is so to speak situated outside of social and political life (thanks to the Cartesian method, which requires the mental elimination of conventions and opinions), however, the rationality of human nature is foundational only. “As the Greeks well knew, freedom is conformity to reason, not violation of it” (70-71), but the natural scope of reason’s authority is limited to an egalitarian guard against subjugation, against “limit[ing] people in the pursuit of their sovereign interest” (72), self-defined and limited externally only be the requirement that its definition and the actions resulting from it do not interfere with the sovereign interests of others. Reiman senses the problem here, adding that the Platonic virtues (courage, moderation, wisdom, and justice) “amount to the conditions… that best enable everyone to lead the life he judges that he desires” (82). But this may be rather more ambitious, because more egalitarian, than the formulation in Plato, who does not expect a polis full of such prodigies of moral achievement.

Reiman’s egalitarian optimism is at the center of his critique of Hobbes, the victim of his own “assumption of natural moral discord” (87), resulting in the war of all against all. This assumption, Reiman contends, is self-fulfilling. [W]e can undermine Hobbes’ argument if we can replace the assumption of natural moral discord with that of natural moral agreement” (88)—roughly, Rousseau’s project, but with reasonableness substituting for compassion. Only reason provides both the potential solution to conflicting moral assertions and the rigor of requirement morality needs. Other candidates—the sentiment of benevolence, the greatest good of the greatest number, the desire for justice as a means to happiness or the perfection of the individual’s natural capacities, the call for collective self-interest, and the Kantian criterion of universalizability—all lack teeth. They cannot require anyone to desire what he does not immediately desire (and so prevent cheating around the edges). Or, in the case of Aristotelian perfectionism, it presumes a well-articulated, stable human nature that does not exist; human beings, in Reiman’s view, simply do not have essential purposes or functions, only reason, which is instrumental to the individual’s self-chosen and defined sovereign interests. Kantian universalizability is even flimsier: “[A]s if guilt at immorality were no more than regret over committing a logical self-contradiction. Only a philosopher could believe such a thing.” (112).

The reasoning that constitutes morality is more than logic. Moral reasoning recognizes the fact of the sovereign interest not by logical analysis but by the cognitive (not sentimental) act of imagining oneself into other human subjects, all of which equally share a sovereign interest even if each particular sovereign interest differs from one human subject to another. “Morality is reason’s passion” (113), that is, a rational eros that enables us to enter into other human subjects and know them to be beings like ourselves in this crucial respect. “The plurality of persons implies that there are facts one can only comprehend in an undistorted way by identifying with them,” by imaginatively having the “first- person experiences” of other human subjects, by “feeling the sovereignty of the other person’s sovereign interest” (115). To be reasonable involves logic and “acting as far as I can in light of the real nature of the facts,” whose nature, in the case of human beings, can only be approached through imaginative participation in their subjectivity (116). Reiman calls this act of moral reasoning “respect” (116). It is a democratic or egalitarian argument: “Those who, like Nietzsche, think that without God there is no morality fail to see that without God there is still human reason. Without the judge, the jury of peers remains.” (118). But without God or a natural hierarchy, how might one distinguish between, say, a jury of peer and a jury of pears, that is, skulls full of mush that judge Socrates to be their peer? More pertinently because more in Reiman’s terms, why should this imaginative identification with others’ sovereign interests—an identification that, Reiman quickly remarks, does not make those interests one’s own—”make me want to act in light of what matters to us both” (118)? “I endorse the ends of others for them just beyond the boundary of my own ends,” limiting “the imperious claims” of my own sovereign interest (119-120). But why does this induce me to approve of their claims or, for that matter, my own? Why is the “natural equality of all human subjects” seen in the “equal urgency of all the sovereign interests with which I identify (120, emphasis added)? Contentless urgency may not much impress me, particularly if I concede in advance that the various contents are unjudgeable, except insofar as they might tend to subjugate others. “Endorsing the truth of others’ personal imperatives is endorsing the truth of moral right” (124): Yes, but am I not likely to want something more than an assurance that moral right exists in the form of something so indefinite as the results obtained by perceiving the universality moral agency?

With this argument in hand, Reiman revives Kant’s criterion of universalizability. Given the nature of human beings as ends-in-themselves, embodiments of particular sovereign interests, it now makes sense to say that the test of duty is whether or not the maxim of our action can be stated as a universal law without contradiction. I am quite sure that Kant’s categorical imperative cannot be redeemed, even with Reiman’s proviso. It is of course true that the maxim, “Thou shalt not steal,” is a perfectly universalizable maxim. Unfortunately, so is the maxim, “Thou shalt steal.” Reiman argues that to permit stealing would be permit others to steal from me, and this “would bring my will into contradiction with itself” (134). Not at all. To say, “Thou shalt steal,” is not to say, “Thou shalt prevent others from stealing from thyself.” Rather, it is to rival the highest flights of communist morality: “From each according to his inability to protect his property, to each according to his ability to steal.” I have heard that cadets at one of the American military academies routinely steal one another’s hats, and have great sport at it—perhaps a civilized imitation of the plundering Spartan boys were encouraged to undertake. Without endorsing Nietzsche’s suggestions that the war of all against all might be a great and species-improving joy, one can say that it could surely be a logically consistent one, especially given unanimity of respect for sovereign interests. Perhaps too much so: Reiman says, “One can respect one’s adversaries or even one’s enemies without having sympathy for their ends or actively adopting them,” by “making way for the other to promote his ends rather than by actively promoting them oneself” (136). But if the ends of the other make him my enemy, why should I make way? And if his ends are innocuous, why would he be my enemy, or even my adversary? “[R]espect is a certain honor paid to the other’s values because they are his” (136). Why is this a reason to respect or honor something? Why does the mere possession of a “value” require anyone to honor it—even the possessor?

The social contract consists of those principles all individuals would be reasonable to accept, not all those they do in fact accept. The social contract therefore limits our actions “at the point at which all can pursue their sovereign interests to the maximum compatible with the same for everyone” (141-142). It enables human beings to establish what Kant calls the “kingdom of ends,” “the systematic union of rational beings through common laws” (144). The Golden Rule in either its negative or positive formulation is “a nearly universally accepted test of morality” (147), and this fact “answers the Hobbesian challenge: The trust upon which human society is based is well-placed” (153). To borrow one of Reiman’s ripostes, only a philosopher could believe such a thing. It is surely more likely that social trust rests on natural needs for child-rearing, food-gathering, and self-defense from other human societies, rather than on some maxim of morality that real people too often admire from afar.

This abstraction from nature (albeit in the name of nature) leads Reiman to overemphasize liberty. This may be seen in his description of the first of his five “principles of natural justice”: “compatible liberty” (157). Compatible liberty combines noninterference—each allows in others the same degree of liberty he wants for himself—with self-defense against violations of noninterference. One might suppose this prohibits abortion, inasmuch as adults, having once been born themselves, cannot consistently deny that right to others. But, having emphasized the possession of a consciously-held sovereign interest as the foundation of morality, Reiman argues tat only those who have a “caring awareness” of their own lives enjoy the right to life” (165). “The loss of the fetus’s life is not and cannot be the loss of something that matters to the fetus” (166); it has arrived at no sovereign interest and is therefore not a person. Consistent with this, Reiman admits that infants too have no “natural moral right to life” (169), although in their case he generously hastens to think of some social reasons not to allow them to be killed. To claim that a human life is valuable because an individual embodies certain valuable traits, Reiman argues, will not do. We then would have to increase the number of human lives ad infinitum, banning not only abortion but contraception and sexual abstinence. We also could replace an individual with one of equal value, leaving individuals with no protection. Neither of these contradictory arguments withstands a moment’s examination, as it is obvious that the mass proliferation of human beings would result in deaths sooner or later, and there is no precise way to establish that any one human being is of equal value to another. Reiman also advocates euthanasia for “the irretrievably comatose” (169), a point recalling the fact that fetuses and infants are not irretrievably comatose and therefore might well not be treated like those who are.

Reiman’s treatment of the other four principles of natural justice are more realistic. “Private ownership of the body is the nerve of liberalism” (171); hence liberals’ rejection of sumptuary laws, corporal punishment, and invasions of privacy. Of external things, possessions supporting the needs of the body, as long as those things do not injure others’ bodies, are justly protected. The principle of trustworthiness is essential to enabling everyone to pursue his sovereign interest, although it is permissible to lie to an evildoer in order to prevent him from violating the sovereign interests of the innocent. The principle of intergenerational solicitude, obligating us to care for the young and the old, rests on our debt to those who cared for us in childhood and will care for us in old age. Finally, and most impressively, Reiman describes the principle of just punishment, which is sternly retributivist. It combines the lex talionis with deterrence. No sentimental humanitarian, Reiman calls the lex talionis “the law enforcement arm of the Golden Rule” (195)—doing unto others as they have done unto you. Only retribution “can restore lasting relations of mutual respect” between the criminal and his victim by annulling “the criminal’s assertion of authority over”—his subjugation of—”his victim” (193-194).

Social justice poses difficulties that parallel those of natural justice. Society consists of a set of legal, political, and economic structures, “channels into which [the individual] must fit his normally rationally self-interested behavior” (214). These are forms of force, and therefore to be suspected of subjugation. Just social structures are those “it would be reasonable for all people to agree to in the natural context” (213).

Social contractarianism assumes that human beings have the ability consciously to change society. This assumption comport with the modern opinion that “all of nature [is] a great machine to be made over in the service of human goals” (226). Cartesian method applies to society, and reform begins not with thought about existing institution but with thought that escapes these institutions: exposing society-as-second-nature as conventional and changeable, then thinking about how natural justice can best be brought into a social context.

Natural justice cannot be ‘socialized’ intact. Any social contract legislates for a particular society, not all mankind. The restriction imposed by a social contract will go beyond those of natural justice, but, to be just, restrictions must compensate citizens with benefits not available in the state of nature. The negative liberty of the natural condition will be supplemented by the positive liberties of the social condition.

Reiman concentrates on economic structures, evidently regarding the best legal and political structure to be, in most instances, “constitutionally limited majoritarianism” (236) of one sort or another. He finds the currently available economic structures much less satisfactory and discusses them at some length. Neither contemporary capitalism nor contemporary socialism comes sufficiently close to natural justice and avoids subjugation. His “labor theory of moral value” states that “economic distributions should first be considered neither as distributions of goods or money but as distributions of the labor that has gone into producing those goods, to which money then gives the bearer title” (244). The moral dimension here is that labor is “life itself spent” (246), and therefore a major element of each person’s sovereign interest. Capitalism offers freedom of commodity exchange but does not in practice liberate individuals from subjugating social relations. Neither, in practice, has state socialism. Capitalism is “unprecedentedly liberating” in the struggle against nature, as Marx himself admits (257). State socialism has been much less impressive, fouling the environment more while producing fewer goods and poorer services. Socialism would be superior to capitalism “if and when people are actually capable of controlling their political agencies so effectively that public control of property does not become a means of worse oppression than private control” 257). Reiman accordingly endorses a more ‘participatory’ form of democracy than now exists anywhere. This again comports with his Enlightenment egalitarianism.

Reiman weakens his argument on economics by accepting Marx’s absurd theory of ‘surplus value’ (248-249), which claims, in effect, that capitalists do not labor and which ignores the experience embodied in business structures and practices followed by capitalists. Precisely these structures enable capitalism to work better than state socialism. To his credit, Reiman leaves it open as to whether a less coercive economic system could exist.

All existing forms fall short of social justice, which Reiman conceives as a modified form of John Rawls’s “difference principle.” The difference principle holds that any social inequalities are justified only insofar as they benefit the least advantaged. “An inequality is only justified if the shares of the worst off cannot be improved by increasing it” (262). The difference principle wins consent via Rawls’s famous thought-experiment, “the veil of ignorance,” which asks us to imagine ourselves into an “original condition” in which we do not know what our own convictions, abilities, and class will be within civil society; without knowing these things, Rawls claims, we will prudently guarantee our own survival by positing the difference principle as the sine qua non for entering society. Rawls’s argument falls victim to the obvious objection that it assumes each would-be contractor to be rather a mouse, timidly protecting himself against the worst while eschewing the possibility of winning the stake and becoming top dog in a hierarchic structure. The late Allan Bloom laughed that Rawls had formulated a first philosophy for the Last Man.

Reiman sees the point and avoids it by ruling out gambling in the original condition, on the grounds that gambling “undermines the capacity of the contract to yield principles that exclude subjugation,” which is itself excluded by reason (272). Adding the prohibition against gambling to his labor theory of moral value, Reiman redeems Rawls’s theory from its fuzzy egalitarianism. The labor theory of moral value helps to accomplish this end by recognizing that not all labor is created equal: Some people are more talented, more productive, than others, and they are entitled to greater rewards, so long as the rewards they earn also result in a net advantage to their inferiors. That is, a productive individual may require from the les productive a greater amount of labor in exchange for more goods. This will satisfy the less productive person, not subjugate him, if he receives more goods from the productive individual than he did before. As economists and politicians say, it is a ‘win-win’ situation. It differs from the free market exchanges of capitalism in that it permits only the smallest incentive (in return for labor) to the more productive that produces a benefit (return in goods) for the less productive. The revised difference principle is “neutral between capitalism, socialism, and communism”; whichever is just at a given time and place will depend upon the degree to which a society has triumphed over scarcity. Politically, the issue turns on the degree to which a society has triumphed over subjugating hierarchies, the degree to which each citizen’s share in sovereignty (of which wealth is one element) has been maximized.

Despite these improvements, it is hard not to hear the echo of Allan Bloom’s mot. “I am convinced that eventually the worldview of natural science will be accepted as a complete ontology,” that is, “a fully reductive materialism” will prevail (309). As for a major competing “worldview,” Reiman gives it what he takes to be its due: The Jews are indeed a ‘chosen’ people—’chosen’ by nature, “selected because the survival value of mutual trust is greater even than the possession of political power” (311). Naturalism can sustain reverence if we identify “the sacred” with the omnipresent and omnipotent “natural universe itself” (312) (as per Spinoza). But if materialism is true, and trust is the true survivalism, does this not tend to collapse the distinction between might an right by making right merely a more cunning form of might? And if we are to believe the natural universe sacred, does this not mean that, given the Second Law of Thermodynamics, God is dying? Nietzsche’s insistence that God is dead will then by followed by Malraux’s insistence that man is dead, or dying. Both moral judge and moral jury are out, or on the way out, a process surely hastened by a political egalitarianism that mimics the entropy of the cosmos even as it claims to be mastering nature—a nature it calls “sacred.” Spinoza is more consistent; he does not traffic in reverence or respect.

Ontology aside, Professor Reiman has written with considerable intelligence and care, refurbishing social contract theory at a time when rationality, particularly the concept of reasoned assent, is pilloried by posturing opportunists in and out of academia. It is refreshing to hear some kind words for Descartes, Hobbes, and some of the other great founders of modern moral philosophy, men far superior to their supposed critics (and unwitting successors) of today. If there are some problems with the project the first moderns founded, the necessary ameliorations may need to come from sources other than themselves, and much less from so-called post-moderns. Reiman has performed the important service of presenting modern moral philosophy in a most sophisticated manner, integrating moral ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ more successfully than Rawls.

 

Leon Craig: The War Lover: A Study of Plato’s Republic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.

Remarks delivered at a roundtable discussion of The War Lover at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, San Francisco, California, August 29, 1996. Sponsored by the Society for Greek Political Thought and chaired by Professor Mickey Craig of Hillsdale College, discussants included Michael Poliakoff of Bloomsburg University, Christopher Nadon of Trinity College, Mark Blitz of Adelphi University, and Leon Craig of the University of Alberta.

 

This is a leonine book. It is leonine in three ways. It is Leon’s: Who else could have given it to us? And it is both spirited and Straussian.

The most widely distributed commentary on Plato’s Republic is Allan Bloom’s. Bloom’s ruling theme is eros. How can the man of eros, on second sailing, negotiate his ship ‘amidst these storms,’ the storms fomented by spirited or thumotic men—demagogues, tyrants? Bloom’s heuristic challenge, within the academic regimes of his day, was to persuade the mildly thumotic souls of Plato’s professional guardians—some might say custodians—to fall in love again, to look anew with fresh and desiring eyes, to stop defending old assumptions and to open themselves to a Plato who writes very differently than his modern guardians suppose.

Craig’s ruling theme is thumos itself. His challenge is to show how thumos might be an avenue in the soul toward philosophy, not a Berlin Wall against it. If a thumotic man could be a philosopher, what then? Nietzsche? Would not such a man re-try Socrates, and find him guilty of corrupting that noble youth, Plato? Why approach the love of wisdom via the love of war? How?

Professor Craig replies as follows: If “Socrates” means “Sure Strength,” and he is surrounded by men with such names as “Dauntless,” “War-Lord,” and “Bold Fighter,” perhaps the philosopher exhibits thumos as much as eros, and maybe Plato knows that, answering Nietzsche two millennia in advance. Plato, Professor Craig says, is not ‘Platonic’ in the conventional sense; his characters, even if they are ‘types,’ are not abstractions, lifeless forms, but “full-blooded, multi-colored, three-dimensional” (xxviii). And what do real men do when they get together, if not drink, talk, and fight?

One thing they do, or try to do, is rule. They try to rule each other; they try to rule themselves. “He who could be king over himself must learn to think before he laughs,” Professor Craig reminds us (340, n. 25). This, in response to old Kephalos’ complaints about the (for him, exhausting) war of the soul, the psychomachia, whose source may be seen in Socrates’ classification of the “parts” of the soul: logos, thumos, eros. In ruling himself—pace, I. F. Stone—Socrates is neither aristocrat nor democrat but so-crat. That is, he is ruled by wisdom, by sophia, in ruling himself. Professor Craig translates autarches as “self-sufficient.” More literally it means self-ruling. The rule of wisdom is Socrates’ version of the slogan, ‘The personal is the political.’ For Socrates, to be a so-crat is to be an auto-crat. The lack of self-rule or self-sufficiency results in the need for political life among others. If all men were philosophers, there would be no need of external government. Relax, politicians: That will never happen.

Logos, thumos, and eros differ, but they compose a whole, and share a common characteristic, namely, desire—or, if you prefer, ‘Eros’ with a capital ‘E.’ Logos is wisdom-loving, eros (small ‘e’) gain-loving. Professor Craig argues that thumos desires not one but at least two things: honor and victory.

The timocrat or honor-loving man will degenerate, as his virtue need only seem to be splendid in order to be honored. He will ask too anxiously, ‘What will people think?’ and is therefore likely to be corrupted by his mother. (Recall Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Christian re-write of the Republic, Crime and Punishment.)

It is not the thumotic man of philotimia but the thumotic man of philonikia, the man who would win the great contest “that concerns becoming good or bad,” the man who is not tempted by honor, money, ruling office or poetry (608b, reference in Craig, 39-41), who can withstand the blandishments of mom and demos, follow his own course no matter what others may think, withstand public ridicule and scorn. (Marx quoted Dante on that point. I wish he had more rigorously followed it.)

As seen in the Phaedrus, the soul has two horses, two spirited animals within it. Socrates says to the young soul animated by philonikia, put your money on the right horse in the race, the torch-race on horseback. Philosophers are breeders, trainers, and handicappers all at the same time; they know the odds, because they have inside knowledge on the human soul.

Question: Why should this man, this victory-loving man, become a philosopher? Why would he not prefer to become someone like Aristotle’s great-souled man, who demands great honors out of justice to himself, but has no guarantee of receiving them, and may despise the givers?

The answer is complicated by the knowledge that the nikophile has more than one love. He loves victory more than honor, but he does love honor, as well as music, listening, ruling, gymnastic, and hunting. Love too is complex: one kind of love is neediness; another is partiality (as in ‘I like the guy’); yet another is passionate and selfish; another is selfless and friendly. There are some 31 varieties of philia or selfless/friendly love, alone. These include philo-sophia and philo-pseude, the love of lies—the latter being the sort of love a philosopher indulges when he’s getting in touch with his feminine side, as in ‘If truth is a woman, what then?’

Speaking (again) of Nietzsche, Professor Craig leoninely (although in this case perhaps not Straussianly) suggests that Plato anticipates the claim that philosophers want not so much to know the world as to create it, and then rule their creation. Or, as thumotic souls would say when I was a boy, ‘Wanna make something out of it?’ Yes, but Professor Craig: out of nothing? For Hamlet, who would quarrel at a straw, if honor’s at the stake. Surely not in Plato, however? This points also suggests a certain divergence from Strauss with respect to the relationship of thumos to eros (cf. The City and Man, pp. 110-112).

According to Professor Craig’s account, the man of philonikia most assuredly does not become a man of philo-sophia ‘out of nothing.’ Rather, he comes to philosophy by “coming to see the pursuit of wisdom as the greatest challenge of all, one calling for the finest virtues and greatest exertions” (79). As Edward King writes, “My mind to me a kingdom is,” the realm of philosophic autarchy. Milton’s thumotic Satan says, Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. Socrates rejoins, Better to rule oneself and do it well, than to give way to the pretense of rule over the many.

In the Republic, Plato links thumos and logos in the word thumoeides—suggesting to Strauss that the ‘theory of ideas’ is a rhetorical substitute for theo-logy or god-talk. Speaking of gods: the ring of Gyges story is moral and theological, inasmuch as an entirely invisible person is a god, known only through his voice and his works, insofar as he chooses to manifest either voice or works as his own. Or perhaps an entirely invisible person is also a writer, known only through the voice that comes through his works. Why should such power not lead to tyranny? In a writer, there is no problem, because he can enforce his ‘works only by persuading others that he speaks for a god. But what about those men whose works are more than merely verbal, men who might enforce their works, philosopher-kings?

Why should power not corrupt them, not lead them to tyranny? Glaucon may wish that it would. That it need not, and that the philosophic life is more attractive than tyranny, may be seen in Socrates. Who is Socrates? What is a philosopher, this self-governing, rule-of-wisdom man?

He is, for one thing, a man who sees that the “natural punishment” for a crime is a “disorderly and diminished” soul (182). A disorderly and diminished soul would be either excessively tough or masculine—a warrior without music—or excessively soft or feminine—a lady without gymnastic. Even if truth is not a woman, philosophy is. She must be toughened if she is to govern herself. Shifting to his polemical or war-loving mode, Professor Craig teaches that philosophy is a guy thing. Lady Philosophy is for “real men and mannish women,” not for “women and effeminate men” (232). He soon relents, saying, “the finest psychic regime is beyond either simple masculinity or femininity” (235). The polemical or ‘office of corrections’ point here is that philosophy as a way of life requires not only intellectual strength but spiritual strength—”megalothumos.” In the passage Professor Craig cites, Socrates actually says “gentle and megalothumos” (375c). Professor Craig knows this, and wants only his incautious readers, his excessively thumotic readers, not to know it. Thus he exhibits feminine wiles even as he seems to thump the drum of the wild man.

Speaking of knowledge, if knowledge, as Professor Craig says, is “the root of the political problem” for Plato (260), then self-knowledge must be the root of the problem of autarchy. What is this self, this soul? It exists in sharp contrast to the body; that much is clear. It governs the body, and the reasoning part of the soul governs those parts of the soul that might incline to serve the body. In so doing, logos makes allegiance with the better part of thumos, which then plays the role of good cop, justly governing both the bad-cop side of thumos and the cop-hating and misologistic desires. In the real world outside the city in speech, the world in which soul must contend with bodies, ‘philosopher-king’ means the genuinely self-governing man or woman.

As for the inner life of the philosopher—what he thinks when philosophizing—this leads to Professor Craig’s discussion of such complex Platonic doctrines as the Cave, the Sun, and the Divided Line. Not being a philosopher, and no longer (if ever) the sort of youth Professor Craig wants to address, but only a poor, broken-down, middle-aged man easily exhausted by erotic and thumotic encounters alike, I shall leave discussion of Professor Craig’s treatment of these important issues to my more virile and virtuous colleagues.

Seth Benardete: Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 23, Number 1, Fall 1995. Republished with permission.

 

Professor Benardete has been around long enough to have established a reputation. His writings are reputed to be hard to understand. This reputation has led to certain worries. ‘He is so difficult. He commits philology. He gives me a headache; Socrates never gets a headache; Benardete makes me feel un-Socratic. Must I read Benardete?’ By no means. But you may want to, anyway. His commentary on Plato’s Republic consists of thirty-nine chapters, each one of which contains at least one reason for reading the book.

Socrates’ second sailing means the Socratic turn in philosophy from the attempt to understand nature directly, in the Anaxagorean manner, to the recognition that one must understand oneself, the would-be understander of nature. The need for this turn proceeds from the need to know the good. the attempt to see the good in nature by considering nature directly founders on the problem of teleology. If the good is somehow independent of the series of events or developments that lead up to the good, then why is the series necessary? And if the good is somehow the amalgamation of lesser goods within the series, do we not need to know the entire series in order to know the good, or even to know that the lesser goods really are good? Yet we do not know the supreme good of nature in this way because nature continues to percolate: Where will it end? Socrates resets the ship’s compass and sails again by considering his own life as a philosopher, as a would-be understander. He is forcefully brought to see that there are two opposing opinions about himself: the opinion of the majority of his fellow Athenians—an opinion whose telos (end) is the cup of hemlock conceived as punishment—and his own opinion, whose telos is also the cup of hemlock, but not conceived necessarily as a punishment for him in certain circumstances. Same ‘fact,’ but radically different proposed meanings of that fact, and the dispute is over ‘What is the good?’ Socratic philosophy looks not at things, initially, but at opinions about things, to determine whether those opinions are fragmentary or whole, self-contradictory or coherent. This procedure involves pairing opinions (in the case of the Republic, opinions about the just) with other opinions, for comparison. The procedure also involves parting, setting questions about the just apart from other things, for contrast.

Benardete has many things to say about the long course of the arguments Socrates and his interlocutors make in the Republic. With Spartan-like austerity, I shall restrict myself to identifying one insight or set of insights per chapter.

1. The form of the Republic—a dialogue narrated by Socrates—fits the substance of the Republic—the teaching that the thought of the one best regime “guides one’s understanding of political life even if it never shapes one’s actions” (9). “Socrates is himself and plays all the parts,” just as the best regime, whether or not ‘concretely’ realizable, “comprehends the manifold of all inferior regimes” (9).

2. Socrates tells Cephalus that those who make things tend toward over-fondness for their productions: poets for their poems, fathers for their children, moneymakers for their money. “Socrates after all is the maker of his own city, and perhaps he is too fond of it” (14). But perhaps not: “When the poets are finally banished in Book X, perhaps Socrates the poet goes into exile with them” (14). What gives each citizen a claim to rule—the good thing he produces for the city—also inclines him to excessive ‘pride of authorship’ with respect to the production, and with respect to the city in which that production is deemed essential. Socrates must liberate himself from such self-regard while working through it.

3. To show that justice is patriotism—benefitting the city’s friends and harming its enemies—then one must first prove that the city is good (assuming that the city’s reputed purpose, justice, is a good, or a part of the good). “[I]n philosophy, the ideality of things must precede the reality of their good” (17). Yet if justice is an art, a kind of knowledge, it is not clear that justice is good. Is knowledge ever anything more than, as one says today, ‘value-neutral’? The best doctor is the best poisoner, thanks to the same knowledge. Is the most just man therefore potentially the most unjust?

4. Thrasymachus gives every appearance of being a most unjust man. Yet “Socrates soon forces him to face the difficulty that he cannot win for himself any pupils if they believe his sole consideration is his own advantage” (21). Socrates’ irony, although denounced by the apparently indignant Thrasymachus, does not stop his interlocutors from discovering the truth about the good. “Thrasymachus sees no difficulty in combining law and knowledge; but we are made to wonder whether his savagery is not due to his belief in their perfect compatibility” (22). If no good lies outside the lawgiving city, the real and the shamming enragés who leap to the defense of the law will finally know no lawful limits. Thrasymachus represents religiosity without the gods; the departure of pious old Cephalus marks great danger as well as philosophic opportunity.

5. Thrasymachus and Socrates agree to the principle of specialization, that for every doable task there is or can be some natural or artificial instrument whose function is to perform that task. “Does the city have a function?” (30). If so, is the city the best instrument to perform that function? Even if philosophy is not the city’s function, it might be that philosophy is a byproduct of the city, that the city is both necessary to the discovery of philosophy and an impediment to the full exercise of philosophy.

6. Glaucon “prepares the way for a confrontation between the philosopher and the city” (42) by restating Thrasymachus’ argument in terms of the story of Gyges. Gyges’ ring, which makes its wearer invisible when he twists it in a certain way, “stands for the veil the law wraps around the foundation of the city” (37). The foundation of the city is adultery and murder. Why not Realpolitik, if one is wise? Glaucon’s brother, Adimantus, “prepares the way for renewing the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy” (42) by noting that the gods, who see more than men, can be propitiated with material things, bribed. So why not keep one eye on clever injustices, another on camouflage for them?

7. The need to found a city in speech arises from the inability to find justice directly: by introspection or by contemplation of the cosmos. A founded or made city does not pose the dilemma of an origin given by someone else whose intentions may be obscure. “Making in speech cuts out time and place, both of which are indispensable to becoming” (47). In founding the city in speech, the dialogue, the Republic, “is the philosophic city in which Socrates is already king” (47). Glaucon’s disdain for the simple, healthy city, which he calls the city of pigs, and his preference for what Socrates calls the feverish city, the city whose citizens eat meat and recline on couches, make possible both war and philosophy—both of which require delaying the satisfaction of such desires as may be granted instantly or easily.

8. Thumos (the spiritedness of the human soul) is a Homeric word, fallen into disuse by Socrates’ time; Socrates “first confronts” Homer by “taking over from him this old-fashioned word” (55). Although “the philosopher’s best friends are his opponents” (57), Glaucon doesn’t know that. The philosopher-dogs or guardians-called-philosophers appeal to Glaucon, attaching him to the city in speech. “The heart, says the heart, is the mind” (57). It is enough now for Glaucon to be less mindless. “Political philosophy has become political” (58) for the sake of inducing the very political, hearty Glaucon to begin to see that the mind has secrets unknown to the heart.

9. “The Republic is a story that slips into Glaucon in the form of a story about stories” (58), that is, an account of the stories appropriate to guardians. Their education apparently transforms thumos into eros, for the edification of Glaucon, although one notices that the story itself is told with the help of Adimantus. The problem with existing, Homeric, stories is a moral one. Homer and the epic poets generally begin in the middle of things, in contrast to the moral book, the Bible, which begins at the beginning. Beginnings are humbling to man, glorious to God. Morality requires a beginning, a middle, and an end, but Homer, it is regrettable to say, “has the beautiful determine the very sequence of events” (62). Homer and the other poets are insufficiently moral and insufficiently immoral, for they allow Zeus to live on after inventing Athena, their representative. Their city in speech is accordingly ill-founded, a self-contradictory mixture of old and new.

10. Socratic theology comports with Socratic education of the guardians. This is not an education through suffering. The gods are not to be represented as dispensing evils to men, as poets would have gods do. The Socratic gods “are as indifferent to friendship as they are to enmity,” “models of self-sufficiency” rather than cosmic cops or “models of care” (64). “Perhaps they are beautiful but invisible statues” (64), a thought that makes one wonder at Socrates’ previous criticism of Homer as an amoral esthete. Be this as it may, the guardians must not be taught fear, and potential philosophers must not suppose fear of the Lord to be the beginning of wisdom.

11. Socrates and sober Adimantus exile tragic and comic poetry from the city. “The language of death is to cease to be affective and become neutral,” like an art (67). “Life is mere life”: extreme moderation, as it were, yields equality and freedom. Freedom is a problem for the city because “the city… in duplicating its own freedom and self-sufficiency in its warriors cannot help but detach them from the city,” making each warrior “a city unto himself” (67). And therefore unequal to other citizens?

12. Mimesis means both emulation and imitation. If the city in speech is to inculcate the opinion that every man has his own natural job, the poet, who imitates everyone while emulating no one, presents a problem. But the city is also a problem. In the city, “Education sets out to produce the integral self—no one can be anyone else—and ends up by producing the anonymity of knowledge on the level of corporeality,” of mere opinion (72). Therefore, “The city impersonates wisdom. It is the sophist of all sophists” (72).

13. Musical education moderates the soul by separating “love of one’s own (philein) from the love of the beautiful (eran)” (73). One loves the beautiful but cannot have it, cannot make it one’s own, cannot direct filial love at it. Most souls cannot sensibly want to defend the beautiful to the death, to act thumotically with respect to it. This therapeutic teaching complements the teaching about gymnastic, medicine, and the body—the latter of course being the thing that is most one’s own. It is all very well to perform a severe and effective therapy upon a body that is diseased but fundamentally healthy. But to sustain a body diseased through and through for year after year, a body whose maintenance requires too much of the soul’s attention: this is not what Socrates’ “statesmanlike” Asclepias has in mind.

14. The noble lie yokes together being and opinion. One’s being or nature is said to coincide perfectly with the good of the city. The lie has two parts, autochthony and natural division of classes. The first incorporates Polemarchus’ view of the distinction between us and them, citizens and foreigners. The second incorporates Thrasymachus’ view that there are rulers and ruled. “The first part of the lie naturalizes the law, the second legalizes nature” (77); “the soil makes the city one, the metals structure it” (78).

15. Problem: “justice and happiness do not go together,” as happiness consists of “good the core of which is not justice” (79). A solution of sorts: the members of the dialogic city are happy while contemplating justice.

16. An “idealizing excursion into foreign affairs” (81) induces Adimantus to succumb to a sort of idealizing or ‘Platonizing’ in domestic affairs, overemphasizing music education’s effectiveness as the crucial determinant in the perpetuation of the regime.

17. “Moderation is the virtue of knowers who acknowledge the right of those who have only opinion to rule them” (87). As for justice, it is “that principle which adjusts the rulers’ soul-structure to that of the other two classes” (91). The city’s justice is not identical to the ruler’s justice; the ruler has “no justice that is not identical with his wisdom” (91). The city’s justice is a compromise with the auxiliaries and artisans.

18. The principle of non-contradiction has as its illustration the spinning top that moves on its axis but whose axis does not, in the imaginary/geometrical sense, move. In nature a real top’s axis does move. “The principle of non-contradiction helps meet the objections of the captious and evade the difficulties of understanding the nature of things,” and Socrates knows this (95). “Socrates has replaced nature with syntax,” philologist Benardete observes (96). “An analysis of soul, if done imprecisely, leads to a proliferation of ideas, for it takes its bearings by language. Speech, because it admits of greater precision than fact, produces greater imprecision about facts. Political philosophy would seem to be caught in this paradox, and its imaginary republics subject to Machiavelli’s strictures.” (96) Benardete at his most shocking sublimates the philology his accusers complain of.

Machiavelli is an unusually thumotic or leonine philosopher, as well as a vulpine one. Socrates approaches the theme of thumos through the tory of Leontius, whose name Benardete uses as the title of this chapter. “Anger generates syntax; it needs to understand things eidetically, for it knows nothing of nature or the body” (99). Anger refuses to give in, “denies the existence of the body” (100). Oedipus, a greater Leontius, knows what man is through eidetic analysis but does not know himself. Machiavelli evidently claims to know himself as the prince of war, not the prince of peace, implying that the prince of war is the prince of princes, the lord of lords. Yet Machiavelli rejects eidetic analysis and prefers the sense of touch to the sense of sight and also to the sense of hearing, which brings words into the soul. Perhaps some of Machiavelli’s strictures are wiser than others?

19. In the city in speech the warriors ally themselves with the rational, governing the moneymakers. Without reason or desires of their own, “they are the core of the city because they belong to it as a particular city” (104). Therefore, “The core of the city is alienation” (104), a radical denaturing.

20. To gaze at dead bodies is shameful; to gaze at live bodies, particularly those of wrinkled old men, seems ridiculous. But the conventional sense of the ridiculous must be overcome in a regime requiring communism of women among the guardians. The nakedness of legally required coeducational gymnastics counterpoints the concealment from the guardians of knowledge of nature. “The essential communicability of knowledge misrepresent the reality of its secretiveness…. The tension between the city and philosophy is ultimately due to the philosopher’s selfishness. He does not measure up to the idealism of opinion. He minds his own business.” (111) The philosopher devotes himself to what is truly his own, the truth (hence ‘philo-sophy). For the philosopher, unlike the lover of the beautiful, what is truly one’s own is not the body. This is why philosophy is learning how to ‘die.’ The philosopher is reluctant to denature himself for the city’s sake. This is the central chapter of Benardete’s book.

21. This city requires, then, a kind of radical equality among the members of its guardian class. To achieve equality, human nature must be atomized and then reunited along communistic lines. This operation of the city of speech is philosophically crucial because it “puts in question any simple teleology and radicalizes the issue of nature” (117). The political logic culminating in communism forces Socrates’ second sailing, “the search for truly intelligible species”—rather than merely conventional ones—”and the whole to which they belong” (117). The radical questioning of conventional divisions entailed in overcoming one’s feeling that coeducational gymnastics is unthinkably silly makes the philosopher see that he cannot have confidence in the belief that he has “immediate access to the nature of things” (117). “Without the twin sophistries of art and the city, the descent of philosophy would be as unnecessary as the ascent of philosophy would be impossible. The divergence from the truth converges with the truth only through the city” (117).

22. “The city may ultimately make its citizens, but it will never make the philosopher. Nature in the form of chance frustrates the true city.” (119)

23. The discussion of community shift to a discussion of war (hatred of barbarians) and faction (hatred of Greeks). The discussion of faction is especially pertinent because it shows how a unity (Greekness) can nonetheless split apart, have tensions within it. The same danger obviously threatens any city, no matter how communal. “Socrates’ intent… seems to have been to show how the massive contradictions in the city come to light in practice” (122).

24. “The dialogic city”—that is, the city constituted by dialogue itself—”is already real and Socrates is its king” (123). The city in speech constructed by the interlocutors within the dialogue is another matter, and a city in existence physically is another matter still. A philosophic writer, Plato, can attempt to “maintain the survival of the dialogic city,” but as for the other two cities, Thrasymachus “cannot be banished from that whose essence he is” (124). “Philosophy is not a means for realizing the impossible; it is a means for ridding Glaucon”—”the disaffected offspring of a regime,” democracy, “that renders everything feasible unattractive”—”of the desire to realize the impossible” (126). In doing so Socrates must lyingly or, shall we say, mythologically transform philosophy into an image of “perfect wisdom” so that “it can exert enough influence on Glaucon for him to remain content with Athens as it is” (126). “Socrates pulls philosophy out of the dialogic city into the city in speech in order to make it manifest; but it is unlikely to be, as manifest, the same as what it was when it was invisibly at work. Socrates is the king of the dialogic city, he is not the philosopher-king of the city in speech.” (127) Even in the city in speech, “the coincidence of political power and philosophy requires a miracle; but the gods, who are beautiful and good, do not listen to prayers” (129).

25. “[T]he philosopher cannot put into the city the order of his soul…” (129). This is true even of the city in speech. In the dialogic city, the analysis of the difference between knowledge and opinion is a matter for eidetic analysis. In the city in speech, by contrast, the analysis is carried out in terms of being and nonbeing. The city in speech talks in the language of being and knowledge. In order to realize the city in speech one would have to replace eidetic analysis with metaphysics. This cannot be done, inasmuch as the city as city must engage in hypcoristics, those endearing names or euphemisms “uttered everywhere and always to disguise the love of one’s own” (138). “The discovery of the difference between knowledge and opinion is a discovery of philosophy… (138). Can the philosopher, having “detached unreal subjects from real predicates,” then “re-attach real subjects to them” (139)?

26. The philosopher-king is in-Socratic. He descends from the beings, “bear[ing] an uncanny resemblance to the Homeric gods” (139). Socrates, in contrast, ascends from the particulars to the beings, and brings  back little that is useful, when he must descend. He minds his own business. “‘I can’t be bothered’ is the philosopher’s version of morality” (142). Moderation and courage are “trivial consequences” of his nature (143). Books VI and VII contain a “rival account of philosophy and at the same time contain Socrates’ refutation of it” (148).

27. When the philosopher-king enters, can Adimantus be far behind? Glaucon intervenes with challenges, Adimantus with ‘wait-a-minute.’ Philosophers are such oddballs—how could they ever rule a city? “Adimantus is vaguely aware that justice is the dyad of philosophy and city, and that conjunction can never become an equation” (144). For Adimantus’ sake (or perhaps for Socrates’ sake) “Socrates convinces Adimantus that the pre-Socratic Socrates”—the Socrates who aspired to direct knowledge of nature—”should rule” (146). Socrates “convinces Adimantus that pre-Socratic philosophy is competent to do what it never dreamed of doing. The Anaxagorean rule of mind over body was as far as it had gone. Socrates has never been wittier.” (146) The philosopher conceived as one who knows nature and benefits his city by coming down from the realm of being with this knowledge that he somehow makes useful to his countrymen: what adamantine respectability is this! the people should positively beg him to rule them, but far be it from him to impose. He is such a gentleman. And rather a technocrat, too: Thrasymachus himself will submit to his beneficent sagacity. Of course, “the pleasures [the city] knows it attributes to the body, and the virtues it promotes it believes are of the soul” (146). Indeed, “A city whose motto was ‘A life not passed in examination is not worth living’ could not be happy” (147). Therefore, “Justice and injustice are necessarily co-present in the city” (146). “Any attempt to root out injustice will take justice with it. For Glaucon and Adimantus, who have not followed this argument, the doctrine of the ‘ideas’ is an easy way to inculcate the same lesson. It is an instrument of political moderation and not only of political moderation.” (146-147) Even the best regime, the city in speech, the highest politics, cannot make even one philosopher. Nature does that. Socrates daimonion or guardian spirit kept him out of politics.

But not out of the city. The city does serve the young philosopher’s purposes precisely by impeding his progress, dragging him down, making his quest difficult, thwarting his ascent to the clouds, Evil is “the toughening element of the good, and the innocence of the good nature is the same as its ignorance of good and evil—and a forteriori of its own nature and limits” (150). Because “the sophist is the spokesman of the city,” the philosopher must converse with him, he who calls necessity ‘morality’ and ‘freedom’ (150). Socrates knows that the city is “necessary for all men and cannot make any man happy” (153). Because he knows this about the city, Socrates knows that he does not know the whole, for he knows that the city necessarily thwarts his attempted ascent from the city. In so knowing, Socrates differs from those who deny that philosophy can exist, claiming that the city’s conventions are all-encompassing. The city is “the place where the true difference between the necessary and the good can be discerned, and where the question of man’s good and the question of the whole coincide” (153). Hence the necessity of constructing the city in speech.

28. While “morality is idealistic, happiness is not” (153). Happiness is realistic. Every man really wants the good, which alone can make his soul happy. In addition to knowing the city, Socrates really knows that it is good to know the good, although he also knows that no one has adequate knowledge of the good. Socrates’ knowledge plus Socrates’ ignorance add up to Socrates’ self-knowledge.

The good is the measure of the beings and the conventions with regard to their usefulness for someone or some thing. Theoretical and prudential wisdom share in the good. The good makes it possible for the beings to be parts of the whole; it also and equally makes them detachable, knowable as parts without some impossible knowledge of the whole or omniscience. One does not need an omni-science to know something. Both fox and hedgehog really know part of the whole. “What Nietzsche calls the optimism of Plato may not unreasonably be connected with this double claim for the good” (156). It is, Benardete immediately adds, a limited optimism.

29. Socrates’ images of the sun, the divided line, and the cave do not suggest that the conventions of the city are anything but snares and delusions. Where does this leave political philosophy? “At the center of the Republic stands an account that is alien from its own setting. It pretends to be prior and is posterior to the discovery of political philosophy. It is the second sailing in the guise of the first sailing” (161). Political philosophy acknowledges that the many, contradictory opinions are the foundation from which “one begins the ascent to the unity of the idea” (162). In the cave, however, “Our waking life is a dream, and everything is inside our heads” (171), puppetry by firelight. “The cave thus represents the city as if the noble lie had succeeded completely” (171)—the noble lie with the nobility subtracted. In this me-and-my-shadow world, “man is the self-ignorant measure of all things” (172). Law and art unite to keep nature out.

The imagery represents pre-Socratic philosophy. Socrates agrees with his predecessors in distinguishing nature and convention. The pre-Socratic however, believes he can replace conventions with “their true originals” (174): four elements, or ‘strife,’ or ‘love,’ replace the gods. To the pre-Socratic, “The city has mislabeled the beings, it has not misidentified them” (174). The pre-Socratic “horror of unreality begs the question of the goodness of the real that the denizens of the cave, Glaucon and Adimantus, are at least aware of” (175). That is why descent is as important as ascent, why a second sailing is philosophically needed after the philosophically needed first sailing. It looks at the first sailing’s sailors in the spirit of gratitude as well as in the spirit of correction.

30. “There is no science of wonder” (179). Philosophers can be produced neither by habituation nor by art. Philosophy is a conversion, an abrupt and radical break. “It is the practice of dying and being dead”(179). Philosophy is not concerned with the life of the city, with ruling. “Socrates startles us into this realization: no one has a nature designed to rule in the city” (181). The philosopher can, but does not want to. “‘Philosopher-king’ rejects in its very formulation the principle of one man/one job” (180), and is therefore unjust—to the philosopher. While the descent or return to the cave may be philosophically necessary, ruling the cave is not.

31. Where is the human to be located? Poetry, especially tragic poetry, locates the human in the pre-political and the pre-Promethean. Poetry is an art about something prior to the arts. Political philosophy is at least initially mathematical, not poetical. Mathematics itself is pre-philosophic; “all the arts of the city make use of number”(182). Mathematics and the city may lead to philosophy because contradiction inheres in both. The city has its contradictory opinions. Mathematics features the contradiction of the one and the many; it rests on the problem-laden perception that the many different fingers are all one thing, ‘finger.’ Arithmetic makes this problem apparent by treating each item counted as a ‘one,’ undifferentiated from every other ‘one.’ Thinking about mathematics (as distinguished from thinking mathematically) is periagogic. Anticipating the coming discussion of democracy, one might observe that democracy poses this problem of the one and the many by treating each one as undifferentiated from, equal to, every other one. Both philosopher and sophist, to say nothing of the tyrant, see that one can be worth more than ten thousand if he is the best.

32. If ‘philosopher-king’ is a sort of contradiction, and the best city is impossible, how will justice ever come to sight in its real context? Or must an erotic young man like Glaucon choose the unjust life in order to be happy? A new defense of the city is needed, and, because the rational city has been shown to be infeasible, it will need to be a new kind of city, a city fallen away from political perfection. This city will not be rational but religious: hence the renewed discussion of poetry.

33. On Socrates’ tour of regimes and their geneses, Benardete remarks, “Virtue in itself is not the principle of any actual regime; it is always a retrospective interpretation of those who come later and who, having fallen further, ascribe it to motives that have ceased to be intelligible to them” (195). Political life depends upon nostalgia.

34. In order for the just man, Socrates, to become manifest, timocracy must decline into oligarchy and oligarchy into democracy. Democracy in its multi-colored variety brings out all the souls, the better to be seen and studied. In treating each citizen as equal, democracy brings out individuals. This is why democracy doesn’t last long. Unfortunately for democracy, “evil and power are to it unreal” (200); its “failure to enforce its decisions and protect itself parodies philosophy, for which everything is open to revision” (200).

35. The tyrant comes into being as the punisher of the rich, who stand in the way of full equality even in a democracy. The tyrannical soul will always condemn ‘economic royalists’ while clearing the way for its own supremacy. “[T]he truth of the thumoeidetic comes to light slowly by the gradual casting off of the Leontius story, which denied that thumos and desire are ever in alliance against reason” (204). On the contrary: “The tyrant is the embodiment of all democratic wishes—he does whatever he wants—and the object of all democratic desires. He is Eros.” (205) The tyrant “is the true believer in the lie of the city stripped of everything that made it noble and good”; his is “the bestiality of unalloyed patriotism” (207).

36. The tyrant “represents the complete politicization of desire” (208). “Anger and love are one” in his soul (208). Glaucon had started out like that. Socrates has cured him. It is in that cure, and not so much in any doctrine or in any city in speech, that justice may be found in the Republic.

The tragic poet teaches the democratic/tyrannical man “to grieve for his unsatisfiable longings” (208). By contrast, the philosopher has no self-pity. He has a longing that is partially unsatisfiable, but sheds no tears over it.

37. Poetry “is interested less in courage as the repository of all lawful opinions than in envy and willfulness, and less in the socially useful love of money than in the polymorphism of desire” (214-215). Its piety contradictorily supports and subverts the laws. It is in between, “outside the city but not outside the cave” (218). It prefers justice and beauty to the good.

The rational response to grief is to recognize pain as “an impediment to deliberation” and misfortune as an evil accident. This being the case, “one can pick oneself up and go on, for one can determine on one’s own what is best” (221).

38. Glaucon is not a philosopher. He “needs the immortality of the soul because he needs injustice to be altogether terrifying” (224). As for Socrates, he prefers to concentrate on the good.

39. “To figure out the best life is the best life” (229).

Benardete reports that Socrates’ Second Sailing began as a review of Leo Strauss’s book The City and Man. The review was the lead article in the 1978 number of The Political Science Reviewer. Setting Benardete’s commentary next to Strauss’s chapter on the Republic, it appears that Strauss is somewhat more open to the possibility that the philosopher might also be a lover of his country.