Will Morrisey Reviews

Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024. 

Lecture 5: “Nietzsche Becomes Nietzsche.”

Lecture 6: “Nietzsche’s Philosophic Poetry.”

 

In the spirit of full disclosure, Lampert writes, “My Nietzsche lectures reflect my debt to Nietzsche and my alignment with Nietzsche, and the way that both Strauss and Plato further that alignment.”

Like Plato and Plato’s Socrates, Nietzsche “laid claim to an ontology, an understanding of the being of beings,” and crafted an exoteric philosophic poetry. Nietzsche became Nietzsche, the philosopher Nietzsche as it were, in consultation with eight previous philosophers: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. “Whatever I decide,” he wrote at the end of Human, All Too Human, “think through for myself and others, upon these eight I fix my eyes and find theirs fixed on me.” Lampert cautions that Nietzsche “does not mean that he takes his thinking from them”; his thinking “through” them, before coming to his own philosophic decisions, for “Nietzsche’s thinking is wholly his own.” Nietzsche (and Lampert) count themselves among those rare thinkers “who want to know exactly how they differ from everyone else in their thinking: they ‘go down’ to examine others and they ‘go inside’ to know themselves”—that is, “they do what Socrates did.” For example, the philosopher does “not feel the standard effects of tragedy, which are pity and fear” and, while understanding that “tragedy remains tragedy,” that life itself remains tragic, tragedy strikes the soul of the philosopher differently than it does in the souls of others, causing a different sound in him.

As to the philosopher’s public response to the tragic character of life, Nietzsche judges that modern men need a new teaching, a new philosophic poetry. This teaching “will not lie about suffering by inventing or endorsing some comedy of a purpose to existence that gives suffering meaning,” as Plato did. “The philosophic tradition of exoteric noble lying comes to a self-conscious end with Nietzsche,” even or perhaps because “the eyes of his underworld judges,” his eight philosophic companions remained fixed upon him. 

The first step of Nietzsche’s “turn to the philosophic life” occurred in 1876, and consisted of freeing his mind from conventional opinions, including opinions that had become conventions by the art of philosophers. Five years later, in the fourth chapter of The Gay Science, he took the next step, which consisted no longer so much of a critique of human culture, the history of philosophy, and modern science as an effort to show “what the free mind can come to know,” what it can bind itself to, rightly. In his 1881 notebook, and indeed in his earlier book, Daybreak, he had rejected the moral claim that egoistic actions are bad, altruistic actions good. Rather, he claimed that “all human actions, including moral actions, are based on drives or passions that are in principle egoistic or self-serving.” Love (for example) amounts to “a passion to possess and to possess all of the desired object”; this suggests that the agapic love of the Christians and the erotic love of the pagans are at root identical. But all drives are not equal, as “the highest of the drives is the passion for knowledge,” the passion that Nietzsche “recognized as his own most powerful passion,” the most intellectual one. Further, “within the individual soul the drives exist in a constant war with one another for supremacy, or for rule.” As in Plato, what holds for the individual soul holds for “the actions of all things”; psychology (at its best, self-knowledge) “expands” to biology (to “all aliveness”) and to physics, since “the same common property is the ultimate explanation of what is at work” in everything. This common property is the will to power. The will to power encompasses not only the desire to have but the desire to overcome; in Socratic-Platonic terms it is both appetitive and thumotic or spirited—rational, too, but only at the highest level, in some human souls. “What is ultimately at work in all things is force that always exists within a field of forces.” Nietzsche calls this force the will to power “because what it is is its need to discharge the excess of force against resistance which is itself force.”

Nietzsche compares the will to power to sea-waves. “The waves are an image for what we are.” But how so? What is the “secret” that we share with the waves? Nietzsche highlights two words he did not publish: Habsüchtigen, German for “possession addicts,” and Wissensgierigen, those who are “greedy to know.” The waves are “greedy” for the shore; if sufficiently powerful, they devour it, overcome it, causing a new shoreline to appear. This is the waves’ “way of being.” Even knowing is a kind of overcoming, an overcoming of ignorance, “the highest or supreme drive of the human way of being.” “The two words name the drive of all beings and of the highest being.” 

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche publishes his discovery of the will to power and adds his second discovery, the eternal return. In introducing a new instance of philosophic poetry, Nietzsche “knew that he faced the founder’s abstract problem of introducing novelty into a culture that had already incorporated a different view,” a different poem. By “incorporating” Nietzsche means “taking in” to the corpus, the body. He extends the scope of the word to include geistig, which means “spiritual and intellectual.” “To be a mature human being is always already to be formed or stamped by the inescapable processes of incorporation that have made us,” body and soul. Nietzsche’s first step in the philosophic life, freeing his mind from conventional opinions, was precisely the arduous act of freeing himself from “the necessary errors of cultural incorporation”—necessary because they culture is for all those who live within its sway, most of whom are not philosophers, and none of whom begins as a philosopher. These errors “can be changed because they have all been taught, and it is possible to teach different ideals and values.” The eternal return consists of thinking a new moral principle, one that “says to the world now known: that’s what I want, I want that world, the world as it is, and I want it again, and I want it all an infinite number of times again exactly as it is—because I want my life just as it is again.” The eternal return reorients human desire, redirecting it from resentment of the evils of this world, its ineluctable tragedy, and longing for a different world, whether the Bible’s Heaven, Plato’s City in Speech, or any of the moderns’ utopias, toward the most intense “Yes to life”—to life as it is. The steadfast, impassioned longing for life, which is at its core the will to power, provides a moral/poetic, exoteric doctrine that will affirm the philosopher’s more fundamental discovery and the way of life that enabled him to discover it. The exoteric, poetic account thus may be said to register the esoteric, philosophic insight, protect the philosopher and his insight from censorious eyes by fitting non-philosophers with opinions that are not the same as, but do not contradict, the insight.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche shows the transition that he wants the free spirits, the contemporary atheists to make when he has his prophet sing “The Dance Song,” “abandon[ing] his skeptical ‘Wild Wisdom,'” his belief that “life or being is unfathomable,” for the conviction that life is indeed fathomable as will to power. Having learned this, Zarathustra calls upon the free spirits to join him, armed with the exoteric doctrine of the eternal return, to build “the house yet to be built,” the one that will “house future human beings, or be incorporated into future human beings.” The will to power is the insight for the few, “those with the most powerful passion to know”; the eternal return is the teaching for all. Will to power is philosophy, eternal return philosophic poetry. 

Both doctrines “assert the sovereignty of becoming,” not timeless Ideas or the eternal God. “Both assert that there is direction “in ever-self-renewing activity“—that the will to power is not random or aimless. And both assert that the “discharging of energy or force” of each individual, each particular part of nature, encounters similar discharges of energy from all other parts, which strive to overcome one another in the “total field of such relations,” which is “all that is.” This means that the striving to overcome honest human souls, requires self-overcoming, a grinding-off of weaknesses.

Whereas “Plato’s language of eros is attractive and affirmative,” Nietzsche’s “language of will to power is less attractive,” harsher because he would overcome Platonic-Christian “word-tinsel,” which has by now covered over the reality of the world, softening human souls, rotting them with sentimentality. Lampert says that this difference obscures “the fundamental kinship of understanding shared by Plato and Nietszche,” since “genuine philosophers are genuine kin.” At this, the end of Lampert’s first lecture on Nietzsche, an auditor might think of Platonic dialectic—driven by love, a passion for truth but hardly soft or sentimental—as this possible underlying understanding.

Lampert then turns, however, not to Nietzsche’s philosophy but to his philosophic poetry as the basis of this kinship. “Genuine philosophy generates philosophic poetry, a teaching that can be lived.” Plato and Nietzsche, genuine philosophers, each generated philosophic poetry is intended to enable human beings to live under the circumstances of the times and places in which those philosophers lived. In Nietzsche’s time, the “free mind” had arrived at “epistemological skepticism,” the Kantian skepticism concerning the conviction “that anything can really be known.” Nietzsche charges that the “hidden motive” behind that skepticism is moralism, Voltaire’s “seek[ing] the true only to do the good” or perhaps, to stay with Kant, to live by the “categorical imperative.” But this assumes that “the true and the good must coincide,” an assumption that “curbs” those philosophers’ “search for the true, making skepticism about knowledge an appealing fallback position protecting their view of the good,” which now consists, in their mind, with equal rights and the end of suffering. You may not know the true, but “you can keep on believing in the good, the modern good”; “skepticism gives permission to place morality above knowing.”

Free minds should become skeptical about their skepticism, re-open the quest for the true. Modern men do in fact claim to have some knowledge of the true, however tentative; this is the truth gained by the scientific method, which begins with hypothesis, tests the hypothesis with experiment, then arrives at a provisional conclusion, the proviso being that further experimentation may disprove the conclusion. Nietzsche challenges free minds with his own hypothesis, namely, that mechanistic physics (Newton, Descartes) are “effects of will.” That is, the “mechanics of cause and effect” upheld by modern physics may exist within an overall field of force. To test his hypothesis, he further challenges free minds to an act of Cartesian introspection, a sure Cartesian method will not offend the modern free minds, supplemented by close observation of other persons and things, again a method that modern science endorses. Can the “instinctual life” of human beings, be explained, first, “as different forms of Habsuch, the addiction for having?” Can this addiction or drive then explain all life forms, or “organic functions”? If, then, the will to power does indeed explain the whole realm of living things, “then” [Nietzsche writes] one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power.” The investigator will find that the hypothesis of the will to power offers him the most comprehensive explanation of all living phenomena. Without undertaking these experiments of introspection and observation, free mind will remain unfree, stuck in modern moralism. If they do undertake these experiments, they will recognize that “their good of perpetual peace at the end of history in a paradise of equality of rights and the end of suffering is neither attainable nor true.”

This will leave them directionless, and therefore incapable of directing the permanently unfree minds of ‘the many.’ They will become nihilists, free minds who think “that nothing is truly of worth.” But such a “world-denying” mindset only reprises the world-denying mindset of Plato and of Christianity; it is the last vestige of moralism. Nietzsche counters (to use the language of Christian morality) that what you thought of as God is evil, anti-life, and what you thought of as the Prince of Darkness, the Lord of this world, symbolizes the divine, the life-force, the will to power that animates everyone and everything. Nietzsche “makes his free-minded atheist friends ask, What is a god?” More, why speak in Biblical terms, “in the popular way,” at all? Aren’t you free thinkers, free minds? As Lampert puts it, Nietzsche “stays with religion while suggesting that, no, his philosophic view does not refute God but vindicates God, properly understood”—God understood as will to power. A religion based upon a doctrine consistent with the will to power is necessary because “religions are good for, necessary for, any social order,” incorporating into the young “guidance to what is good and bad, noble and base, what is worth living for and what is necessary to reject.” “The problem is not gods as such, the problem is the god of revelation,” the eternal changeless ‘Platonic’ God of the Bible. The doctrine consistent with the will to power Nietzsche offers is the eternal return, a “transvaluation of values,” the values of the older morality. In so offering, Nietzsche “is not driven by a need for a new morality or a new religion.” As a philosopher, he is driven by “the need to understand,” not the drives of the moralist or the prophet. But the comprehensive affirmation of ‘this world’ by human beings “makes the philosopher possible, because the world generated a spectator who is rational, self-conscious, knowing fragment of the knowable whole.”

To replace Jesus, the God of the Bible, Nietzsche recommends Dionysus, the “tempter-god,” the “philosophizing god” of antiquity, and his mate, Ariadne, “the god of femaleness or womanliness,” who “does not philosophize” because “in some more fundamental sense she already knows,” possessing “the thread that leads out of the mystery at the heart of the labyrinth,” and being the one who actually gives birth. Dionysus and Ariadne are “the universal gods of earthly reproduction given local or Greek names.” This mated pair generate life, “belong[ing] together in their difference” as both “the war between the sexes and the love between the sexes.” If Dionysus is the tempter-god, he resembles Satan more than Adam; it is as if Eve rejected that dull fellow the God of the Bible matched her with and preferred the bad boy (as women are sometimes known to do). 

So, you freethinking atheists, see “the necessity of religion,” a necessity that your Voltaire completely misses, and which his epigoni tried to meet with their inane ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’; instead of that niaiserie, see “the universal naturalness of Dionysus and Ariadne as gods of life,” then build your religious institutions for ‘the many’ upon them. One way to do that, Lampert argues, is to embrace what’s now called ‘ecology.’ “Nietzsche is the first Western philosopher to teach a comprehensive ecological philosophy; his is a comprehensive moral and political teaching based fundamentally on love of the earth.” As we now notice, an ethics of ecology ‘goes down’ more easily into modern throats, digests better in their stomachs, and can be incorporated readily into their bodies and minds. Ecology also teaches something of the limits that of the modern scientific project, the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, a conquest for which modern science can set no limits. Modern science’s inability to set limits for its own activity threatens the nature it seeks to understand in order to ‘conquer’ or manipulate. Leo Strauss “warns against the conquest of nature as the conquest of human nature through the modern ideals of equality of rights and the end of suffering,” and (Nietzsche would add) the unreality of both those ideals. Nietzsche sees that “modern conquest of nature would mean the end of philosophy on earth, because philosophy depends upon the recognition and encouragement of an order of rank and the continuation of suffering properly understood, understood as the human struggle to attain the high, most especially knowledge; that known suffering from a lack can be remedied only through sacrificial struggle—subordination of every drive to the drive for knowledge.” The “ministerial” character of Nietzsche’s philosophic poetry “assigns limits to the modern conquest of nature out of the love of nature, a love expressed in the highest ideal that the whole of nature return just as it is an infinite number of times.”

The Cartesian-introspective dimension of the Nietzschean challenges works through a characteristic feature of modern philosophy, individualism, while “mov[ing] out beyond the exclusiveness of egoism and out beyond the feeling of altruism and to broader fields beyond the I and the other.” Only this can bring “progress in morality by aligning it with the true,” being a “better reorganization of the drives,” one that “fosters stronger and more noble specimens of the human species,” more alive, and therefore more consistent with all of nature. Human beings strive; they have drives. “Drives always strive for something.” “Incorporation” or enculturation “train[s] us to strive in this direction and not that direction.” Nietzsche’s “new process of incorporation” aims to “redirect striving in order to foster the new I-feeling, leading to the new feeling for the you and for the all.” It redirects us away from mere possessiveness (British-all-too-British), away from the prestige found in commanding others (will-to-power in the vulgar sense), toward (in Nietzsche’s words) “Letting us be possessed by the things (not by persons) and by the largest possible range of true things,” “to let the true things be the things they are” in us, “in their continuous becoming and decaying, in their natural order of rank, and in all the other facets of their naturalness.” The conquest of nature can be limited by nature, if human beings incorporate as much of it as they can into themselves—ultimately, possessed neither by God or Satan and his demons. If possessed by things, not persons, Nietzsche writes, “we become farmland for the things”—fertile, generative, fulfilling the Biblical God’s command to be fruitful not by obeying a command ‘from above’ but by integrating nature, the ‘ecosystem’ into ourselves. From this fertility, human beings, by nature “the making beings,” will forge the “images of existence” of philosophic poetry, “within which human beings will dwell on the earth.” “Philosophers rule by legislating the images”—Nietzsche’s version of one activity of Plato’s philosopher-kings, but evidently intended without the irony Plato deploys. In Nietzsche’s judgment, it was Christianity that overlooked the irony of Platonism, attempting to enforce otherworldliness. Continuing to block any return of Platonic irony while sweeping a weakened Christian civilization aside, Nietzsche rejects any image of “eternal fixity” or of monotheism or of Christian virtues or of the virtues of secularized Christianity. In their place he puts change, the cyclical change of the eternal return and a “transvaluation” of Platonic, Christian, and ‘christian’-Kantian virtues. 

Thus, Nietzsche’s “story ends in the human love of the earth as it naturally is and a love of the human as it naturally is, or as it can be, beyond the rule of images of existence that teach unnatural ideals wreaking vengeance on life as it is. His whole story ends in ecology, in knowledge of the interconnectedness of life on earth that generates the human imperative to be true to the earth.” Lampert happily predicts that “seeing” Nietzsche as “the founding thinker of an already popular movement that appeals to late modern people,” the ecology movement that “is bound to get stronger as the evidence becomes ever more undeniable that environmental disasters are caused by human-initiated climate change” will be good for politics and good for philosophy.

Leaving aside the claim that humans have initiated climate change and considering Lampert’s more important observations, it is noteworthy that he has replaced the will to power, with which Nietzsche replaced both Platonic and Christian love, with love—this time, love of the world, love of the earth. Nietzsche’s ‘realism’ has been softened. Why? It might be that, looking back on the catastrophic political consequences of the will to power, which was not so nearly esoteric a doctrine as he has said it is, Lampert considers it judicious to push it into the background more thoroughly than Nietzsche did. A doctrine that was so easily discerned, and so readily vulgarized, by the German military officers in the run-up to the First World War, by Benito Mussolini, and by throngs of warrior-spirits, Right and Left—a supposedly esoteric doctrine that has achieved far more ‘popularity’ than its intended exoteric cover, the eternal return—bespeaks a massive failure of philosophic poetry. Nor does the ‘ecological’ interpretation or application of the doctrine impress; yes, ecology sets limits on the conquest of nature, but in reality, Nietzsche’s predicted ruling class, his “global aristocracy” (unmentioned by Lampert), which would run the ecological show will never be aristocratic in any Nietzschean sense. It will be administrative, bureaucratic, which is to say dull and graceless. Not very Nietzschean.

More generally, Lampert’s approach to philosophy—that political philosophy is ‘politic,’ only, a form of poetry, that political regimes may teach citizens ‘out of’ philosophic discoveries but have nothing to teach philosophers—may be questioned. If human beings are political animals, political in their nature, then political life does not simply impede philosophic noēsis. It provides a window, if a far from transparent window, through which  a philosopher might approach the truth. 

 

 

 

Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche: Philosophy and Its Poetry. Lectures 3 and 4: “Socrates Philosophic Poetry” and “Socrates Becomes Socrates.” Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024.

 

In his first two lectures, Lampert, following Leo Strauss, distinguishes between philosophy and philosophic poetry. In times of religious crisis, when the gods of the polis are no longer credible, especially among the youth, the future rulers of the polis, the activity of philosophy itself might come under threat. Under this circumstance, a philosopher might make a ‘politic’ intervention, proposing a new or at least reformed or reinterpreted myth, one that will convince the young and incline them to friendship toward philosophy and philosophers. In his second pair of lectures, Lampert considers Plato’s strategy in more detail, to some extent still through a ‘Straussian’ lens but very much with his own eyes.

How did “Socrates become Socrates,” a philosopher but also a political philosopher? This occurred in two steps: Socrates first became a philosopher, one who understands “the fundamental truths of being and knowing, nature tout court and human nature, and only then a political philosopher, “a teacher of a theological-political view” that will prove edifying in his time and place. Lampert takes these matters in reverse order, devoting his first of the two lectures to “how Socrates became the political philosopher he became.”

Of the 35 Platonic dialogues, 26 are performed, amounting to scholars now call ‘closet dramas,’ plays intended to be read, not performed. Nine dialogues are narrated or reported, six by Socrates, three by others. Lampert selects three of the Socrates-reported dialogues: the Protagoras, the Charmides, and the Republic. These dialogues reveal not only what Socrates was thinking at the time he wrote the dialogue but what Athens, his polis, was doing in Socrates’ time, and what Athenians were thinking and feeling. That is, they show the philosopher thinking about what philosophic poetry he might make that would prudently address the political circumstances of Athens, very much in view of how those circumstances might injure those few Athenians who love wisdom so much that they devote their lives to that love.

The arguments and actions Socrates reports in the Republic (in the Greek, Politeia or Regime) occur in early June of 429 BCE, the third year of what would become a twenty-year war between Athens and Sparta, the second summer of the devastating plague described so graphically by Thucydides. One of the participants in the dialogue refers to the feast of Bendideia; this feast honored Bendis, a foreign goddess whose consort was a healer-god. In the experience of all those alive at the time, this was the first time a foreign god was honored by Athens. What is worse, under the pressures of war and disease, but not only of war and disease, some Athenians suffer from “a spiritual crisis” that Thucydides also described. Plato sets the Charmides only a month earlier, upon Socrates’ return from a foreign polis, having spoken not to a healer-god but to a doctor who taught him “new things.” Finally, the Protagoras‘ dramatic date is before the war, about 434 BCE, when “the great city of Athens [was] at the very height of its power and glory.” Lampert accordingly begins with an interpretation of the Protagoras.

In his dialogue with the 65-year old Protagoras, then called Greece’s wisest man, “the founder of the Greek enlightenment,” Socrates, nearly thirty years his junior. “steps forward to restrain and redirect” the great man. In Socrates’ estimation, Protagoras is “too outspoken,” “not cautious enough.” Being so, he “puts the whole enlightenment at risk with his inadequate exotericism,” his “failure to hide adequately his own skeptical views,” which “has led the younger generation to mistrust their gods.” In leading the young to mistrust their gods, Protagoras “seem[s] to them to destroy the reasons for living a moral life, a life of justice.” What is more, Socrates hopes to “attract and win as his own student the young Alcibiades,” one of the witnesses to the dialogue, who is “the most promising young Athenian of all those who aspire to political glory and greatness.” [1] If he abandons morality, and especially if he abandons justice, very bad consequences could ensue for Athens and possibly for philosophers in Athens. Recognizing that Alcibiades will never become a philosopher, Socrates intends to win his political friendship, thereby “maintain[ing] in Athens a public spirit friendly to philosophy.” 

Five years later, Socrates returns to Athens after serving in the Athenian army during the early years of the war. In the Charmides, Plato refers to Homer’s Odyssey, the story of another return, “the return of the wise king Odysseus” to his home in Ithaka. During his odyssey, Odysseus has learned many things, including things about nature (specifically, the nature of the moly root) and the many regimes that rule the poleis. Following the interpretation offered by Seth Benardete in The Bow and the Lyre, Lampert writes that Homer’s odyssey is “his gradual learning of the wisdom that is philosophy and the wisdom that is political philosophy”—theoretical and practical wisdom. The two are distinct but related. The moly root is given to Odysseus by the god Hermes in order to protect him from the magic of the witch, Circe, who has imprisoned Odysseus’ friends in her palace. One might say that men are readily ‘bewitched’ by the unnatural, by the spells cast by rhetoricians, priests, and sophists, but knowledge of nature can save them, if they or a friend of theirs has such knowledge and uses it for that purpose. After this adventure, Socrates returns to his home, prudently disguised as a beggar. After observing the circumstances prevailing in his household, in which his enemies, the suitors, have been held at bay by his wife’s own prudent policy, “Homer has Odysseus reveal himself in a series of recognition scenes, thereby winning the allies he needs to kill his enemies and restore his rightful household regime.” In founding or refounding his regime, Odysseus needs to consider not only how to regain his rule but to consider how to perpetuate the regime, how to establish an orderly succession in the future, a succession that will provide “wise rule without wise rulers,” wise men like Odysseus being exceedingly rare. To do so, he must “establish a new teaching about the gods,” a “religious founding” which will back up his political founding by reinforcing his succession plan. 

In Athens, Socrates is “the new returning Odysseus.” By this parallel, Plato invites his reader “to think of Socrates as returning with a founding deed that is a theological-political program.” In the dialogue, the handsome young wrestler Charmides needs Socrates as a physician—a physician of the soul, not the body. As it happens, Socrates himself had consulted a physician “of Zalmoxis,” who was “a god who teaches that to cure the body the soul must also be treated and that the soul can be treated only with incantations which are ‘beautiful speeches'”; more, the doctors of Zalmoxis also “teach that the soul is immortal” and that there is only one God. The doctrines of monotheism and the immortal soul have made the people who believe these teachings, the Getae, “the most courageous and most just of people, the only people to effectively resist the Persian invaders”—exactly the virtues Athenians will need if they are to trust one another, unite, and win the war against Sparta. What Hermes is to Odysseus, the doctor of Zalmoxis has been to Socrates; what the doctor has been to Zalmoxis, Socrates intends to be to young Charmides and to other Athenian youths with whom he will dialogue. The topic of the Charmides is moderation. Before the war, Socrates had taught Critias, who is actually his main interlocutor in the Charmides. During the course of his conversation with him now, Socrates sees that he had earlier taught Critias “a view that would eventually turn him into a notorious Athenian criminal, a most immoderate sophist and tyrant in the Athenian civil war.” Socrates inadvertently had corrupted Critias; now and in the future, he must alter his exoteric teaching. Corrupting the youth will be one of the charges laid against Socrates, years later, at his trial before the Athenian jury. Socrates was indeed guilty as charged, if unintentionally. Well before the trial, he acts to correct his own actions.

In the Republic, a few days later, readers hear that, according to the myth Socrates proposes, in the afterlife the soul of Odysseus chooses “the life of Socrates” for his next life. That is, he chooses “the business of philosophy and everything it entails to protect itself and advance itself.” “Plato in the Republic makes the returned Socrates of the Charmides the thinker who recognized in himself the soul of Odysseus,” the soul that “carries on and advances the tradition of Greek wisdom that began before wise Odysseus, before Homer, and was passed on after improvements by Homer, and is passed on to Socrates, that ‘son’ of Homer who improves,” or, rather, adapts and adjusts, “Homeric wisdom and passes it on to his ‘sons’ after him.” Plato suggests that “a wise man knows who he is and he knows where he is and he learns what he must do because of who he is and where he is.” Whereas the Athenians are introducing a foreign god whose consort is a healing-god, Socrates, “on that very night,” introduces his own teachings, his own “incantations” or philosophic or natural religion, which he says he learned from another foreign god. The young gentlemen in this dialogue, Adeimantus and Glaucon, “have been exposed to the Greek enlightenment and learned the teaching of teachers like Protagoras, teachings that seem to them to destroy the reasons for living a moral life, a life of justice.” They are experiencing “the crisis of the death of the gods,” a crisis “similar to what Nietzsche would call nihilism.” His rival in this dialogue is another sophist, Thrasymachus, who is even less moderate in his teaching than Protagoras was, openly asserting that justice is only the advantage of the stronger—the “real and radical position of enlightenment teachers.” The sophists have shaken the young gentlemen’s belief in the gods; what will happen if they spoil their sense of justice, upon which the survival of any polis depends? 

Socrates adopts three strategies for dealing with the Athenian crisis of the death of the death of the gods. First, he attempts to make the sophist Thrasymachus his friend, despite Thrasymachus’ attempt to compete with Socrates for the allegiance of the young gentlemen. Socrates had “learned a new strategy,” replacing the one that “did not succeed with Protagoras” or with Alcibiades. He offers teachings on the soul, on ‘epistemology,’ and on the gods—all “anti-Homeric teachings foreign to the Greek tradition, teachings meant to persuade and cure young men like Adeimantus and Glaucon.” Socrates teaches them that the soul has three “parts”: logos or reason; thumos or spiritedness; and the appetites. If reason exercises its rightful rule over spiritedness, and spiritedness exercises its rightful rule over the appetites, the young gentlemen will learn civic or political courage, not the raging, Achilles-like warlike courage that has entangled Athens in a war they will not win. He also teaches them that the soul is immortal, with Hades a place of reward and punishment for acts committed in this life. “The returned Socrates’ teaching on the soul’s afterlife is most clearly a teaching that he learned while he was away, from the doctor of Zalmoxis—or, Plato suggests, perhaps from Herodotus, the Greek historian who reports the teachings of Zalmoxis and their salutary or beneficial effects, and who says that the people of Zalmoxis are most courageous and most just.”

Socrates’ new teaching on knowing reality or ‘being,’ his ‘epistemology,’ consists of his doctrine of the ideas. Strauss forthrightly contends that “no one has ever succeeded in giving a satisfactory or clear account of this doctrine of ideas,” showing that “the doctrine is an exoteric teaching that can easily persuade non-philosophers who have been raised to believe in glorious gods like Nike and Dike, the gods of victory and justice.” But Socrates aims not at a rigorous philosophic proof; he rather intends to persuade young Athenian skeptics that while the goddess, Justice, does not literally exist, the idea of justice “has a permanent independent reality that can be known by humans.” Such a notion assuages their disappointment in no longer being able to believe in the existence of eternal gods, gives them instead an account of a principle of justice that is at least rationally conceivable if not rationally demonstrable as an idea, as an eternal thing, an idea easily acceptable to souls inculcated by religious doctrines about eternal gods. That is, “Socrates’ teaching on the eternal, transcendent ideas is a teaching consciously tied to its time, the time of the death of the Homeric gods.” It is poetic, a making, not a proof, but it is philosophic poetry.

Strauss placed his account of Socrates’ new teaching on the gods in the center of the chapter on the Republic in The City and Man. The philosophic lawgiver of the City in Speech “lays down two new laws for the gods”: they only cause good, never evil; they never change shape or lie. In each instance, the gods are quite unlike Homer’s Olympians. “A crucial part of making the gods more moral than Homer had made them is what Socrates adds in Book 10: he makes the gods ultimately responsible for punishing or rewarding the soul after death in Hades.” After all, the soul is immortal and receives reward or punishment for its actions in this life, and if the standard of good and bad (for political men, and young political aspirants, especially justice and injustice) is impersonal, an idea or set of ideas, then who will enforce the ideas, who will make them rule the immortal souls? 

Socrates adds another novelty about the gods. If the idea of the good is the sovereign idea, the idea that sets the standard for all others, including justice, then “Socrates moves toward the monotheism of Zalmoxis.” This is one reason why Nietzsche regarded Plato’s account of Socrates as a teaching that “opened the way for the successful introduction of Christianity,” a religion about which Nietzsche expresses some well-known reservations, indeed animadversions. While “the Athenian introduction of Bendis failed to do anything to change the ultimate fate of Athens, Socrates’ introduction of his new teachings succeeded in changing the fate of philosophy in Athens and, ultimately, in changing the fate of Western civilization,” making him into “what Nietzsche said he was, ‘the vortex and turning point of so-called world history.'” And just as Homer’s Odysseus needed to kill the 108 suitors of Penelope in order to re-found his regime in Ithaka, just as Socrates “kills” Homer by “taking Homer’s place as the ultimate authority,” so too will Nietzsche, in this way following the lead of Machiavelli, ‘kill’ Plato in order to found a new spiritual regime adapted, as Nietzsche supposed, to the new circumstance in which both the transcendent God and the transcendent ideas are ‘dead,’ no longer believed, in need of substitution. Although Socrates ‘kills’ Homer exoterically, he “honors Homer as his own teacher” esoterically. Nietzsche ‘kills’ Plato, but only “the exoteric Plato whose teaching ultimately led to a cultural disaster,” Christianity. The esoteric Nietzsche “honors Plato as Plato honored Homer,” as what Nietzsche calls “the most beautiful growth of antiquity.” “Times change, gods die, and politic wisdom must change with the times by teaching new gods.” 

Before turning to a fuller discussion of Nietzsche, Lampert devotes his fourth lecture to how Socrates became Socrates—a philosopher. That Socrates changed, that he changed his exoteric teaching, he has shown. How he changed may be seen not so much in the Protagoras, the Charmides, and the Republic as in a second trio of dialogues, dialogues reported by witnesses, not by Socrates himself. These are the Phaedo, reported by Phaedo, the Parmenides, reported by Cephalus, and the Symposium, reported by Apollodorus. These are the only ‘reported’ dialogues in which Socrates appears that Socrates himself does not report. [2] Lampert remarks that these dialogues form not only a sequence in time but a logical sequence, Plato’s way of depicting “Socrates’ progress in thought” toward “the deepest insight that a philosopher can attain.” His “calculated presentation of the exoteric Socrates is intended to lead his most interested reader to the esoteric Socrates” even as he makes it possible “to date these steps in the life of Socrates against the background of the life of Athens.” One might say that he thus beckons his young Chinese listeners to think for themselves, just as Socrates thought for himself.

The Phaedo is named after its narrator, who is telling the story of Socrates’ last day to Pythagoras in the polis of Philia—a conveniently named site for such a story, if ever there was one. On that day, Socrates had been talking to two young Pythagoreans who had begun to doubt the Pythagorean doctrine of the immortality of the soul. One of them, Kebes, has raised an objection to that doctrine which requires Socrates to reconsider “the cause at work in the whole of nature, the whole of becoming.” This will be “the last argument of his life,” but before he makes it, he recurs “to his first philosophic experiences in order to tell the story of his becoming a philosopher from its very beginning.” As a young man, he began with wonder, animated by the intellectual eros that desires knowledge of nature. Early and then-contemporary Greek philosophers had explained natural causes naturalistically, that is, without recourse to explanations depending upon claims about the gods. He found none of these explanations satisfactory, he recalls, until he heard the theory that Mind causes natural changes, that “everything in nature is what it is because it was for the best that it be that way, as judged by mind.” Strauss calls this Socrates’ “teleotheology.” But in examining the works of Anaxagoras, the philosopher who proposed the theory, Socrates found that the doctrine of Mind was an “exoteric and salutary teaching” that “cover[ed]” Anaxagoras’ “esoteric naturalism.” So, Socrates remained dissatisfied, thinking that natural/material causes “cannot explain human things.” As proof of this, he argues that the cause of his sitting in prison, awaiting death, cannot be fully explained by the actions of his body; the “human opinion” that commanded his death sentence as more important. But if natural causes do not suffice to account for causation, and Anaxagoras himself didn’t believe that Mind accounts for it, what then? This led to the philosophic adventurer’s “second sailing” under the banner of thinking that if the things to be explained don’t explain themselves, if that wind doesn’t fill the sails of the philosophic boat, then you, the philosopher, must row, turning to speeches (logoi) and ideas in order to attempt to understand causation.

The ideas he discusses in this dialogue, the Beautiful, the Good, and Bigness are themselves unchanging. Change occurs, however, in the natural phenomena according to whether or not the “participate” in one or more of the ideas. Socrates then “uses the ideas to prove that the soul is immortal,” and Kebes accepts the proof. Since no one has ever quite explained what it means for a thing to participate or fail to participate in an idea, the whole doctrine is suspect. Lampert simply remarks that this was Socrates’ next step in his philosophic odyssey, and that he was content if young gentlemen like Kebes took it as their last step. 

The Parmenides takes Plato’s readers back to Socrates in 450 BCE, at age 19, when the philosophers Parmenides, then 65 years old, and Zeno, then 40 years old, visited Athens and conversed with him. By then, Socrates had already rejected materialist naturalism, discovered and questioned the adequacy of teleology, and turned “to the speeches and to the ideas as cause.” Socrates was “a philosophic prodigy, a young genius in philosophy who by age nineteen had thought through the whole history of Greek philosophy before him and arrived at his own novel solution to the problem of cause, his view of the ideas.” In arguing for it, he presents it “in the way a nineteen-year-old philosophic innovator would present it: he is proud, competitive, victory-loving; he is eager to prove that these two famous philosophers are wrong and that he, only he, solved their great problem, the problem of cause.” Far from being indignant at the upstart, Parmenides and Zeno very much like the young man, for “they saw in the young Socrates a man of their own kind, a great rarity of the kind a philosopher always seeks.” Parmenides gently “suggests” to Socrates “that there is way too much love of victory riving him” because he cares too much about the “opinions of men.” He has nonetheless “made the fundamental step of philosophy and learned for himself that things have natures“—even as Odysseus had learned the nature of the moly root—that “each thing belongs to a kind, a natural kind: that is what the ‘idea’ of a thing means.” If no such thing as a “kind” exists in nature, then understanding itself, the telos of philosophic inquiry, is impossible and nature is unknowable. The philosopher himself exemplifies a “kind” of the human, itself a “kind” in nature. Parmenides effectively challenges Socrates to show whether or not he can “discover and show others the grounds of the possibility of philosophy.” 

Lampert suggests that in the Parmenides Plato has written a dialogue that “is only for the passionately interested few, nameless future travelers from afar, potential philosophers.” “This is how Plato thinks the tradition of philosophy works, how Socratic philosophy will be passed down: the essential esoteric Socrates is embedded in the preserved conversations of the exoteric Socrates.” Further, a comparison of the Parmenides with the Phaedo shows how, “on the last day of his life, at age seventy, in the last argument of his life, Socrates teaches young Pythagoreans the very view of the ideas that he himself, fifty years earlier, learned from Parmenides was rationally indefensible.” He does this because Phaedo and Socrates’ other young friends are not philosophers; “they are not of Socrates’ kind.” He gives them the doctrine of the ideas in order to save them from their doubts about the gods and their fears of death, and perhaps even more to make philosophy “publicly defensible as morally trustworthy.” It is political philosophy, philosophic poetry, ministerial poetry. (In modern China, too, surely philosophy needs to be seen as morally trustworthy.)

The last dialogue in this series is the Symposium. Strauss calls it the only dialogue that takes “praise of a God,” who happens to be Eros, Love, as its topic and the only dialogue named for the occasion upon which it takes place—a “drinking party at which wine loosens tongues and things are said that might otherwise not be said.” In this dialogue, those things are profanations of the religious mysteries; “it tells what it is a crime to tell, a secret about the gods and what they know.” It was Alcibiades who had been accused of having profaned the mysteries in 416 BCE, seventeen years before this party, just prior to the time of Socrates’ trial. Socrates was accused of corrupting the young, including Alcibiades. This year, 399 BCE, “was a time of fervent religious purification” in Athens, a movement or change, a change of public opinion, “to which Socrates fell victim.” It was also the year when the oracle at Delphi supposedly said that there was no wiser man than Socrates, effectively designating him as a worthy successor of Protagoras. That is, the religious purification of Athens, leading to the death of a most eminent philosopher, contradicted the judgment of the highest religious authority in Greece. This must mean that Athenian public opinion must not understand the judgment of the religious authority it acknowledges as authoritative. How so?

And if Socrates is indeed wise, how did he become so, what caused his change from unwisdom (where we all begin and most of us end) to wisdom? “In the Symposium we hear Socrates tell the genuine story of his wisdom.” The Symposium profanes not the Delphic mysteries, as Alcibiades was accused of doing, but reveals “the most hidden truths of philosophy that Plato will ever reveal, an unveiling of the mystery of Socrates’ being as a philosopher that is at the same time an unveiling of the mystery of being itself.” Like the Delphic mysteries, hidden by human beings from human beings, nature itself hides, as pre-Socratic Heraclitus revealed. Although the mystery of being or nature “can be divined,” it can be divined only “in a way that is itself mysterious, true to the hidden ways of nature.” At this point, we know from the Protagoras that Socrates “had already completed his philosophic education” before the year of the dialogue, 434. His philosophic education predated his political-philosophic education. Now, in 416, he claims to be ignorant, except for “the things of eros,” things more likely to be revealed during the course of a drinking party, as the inhibitions ingrained by conventions weaken. 

Socrates converses with Agathon, a young poet who writes tragedies, and introduces a memory of Diotima, whom he met in 440. “Diotima” means “honor the god”; a prophetess, she was said to have delayed the onset of the plague in Athens by recommending that they make a sacrifice. In her discussion with Socrates, she refuted Socrates’ opinion, shared by Agathon, “that Eros is good and beautiful and wise.” On the contrary, Eros is none of those things. But neither is Eros bad, ugly, or ignorant. Eros “is a between.” Eros desires what a soul takes to be good, beautiful, wise. Diotima leads the young philosopher to self-knowledge, to recognition of his own nature as an erotic being of a certain kind, one passionate for wisdom. The philosopher begins his inquiry with “correct opinion”; his soul must at least be pointed in the direction of the good, beautiful, and wise; it not be misled by incorrect opinion, which points the soul to the bad, ugly, and ignorant. This is why philosophers take care to craft philosophic poetry, not only to incline the polis to a regime that will let philosophers philosophize but to give the few potential philosophers a better chance of becoming real ones. Socrates recognized himself in Diotima’s portrait as an erotic man of the type she described.

Philosophy, “driven erotically” in the right direction and knowing itself as erotic, “can best think the reality that lies between those abstractions of permanence and flow”; he recognizes nature as a whole within himself as a particular instance of nature. “The philosopher can come to know by knowing himself.” When Socrates asks Diotima what kind of power eros has, she calls it the power of “ferrying,” of “mediating or carrying things between the immortals and the mortal.” One is reminded also of the god who ferries souls from life to the realm of the dead.

And who, Socrates asks, are Eros’ father and mother—that is, “what are the origins of eros?” Shockingly, Eros is not a god at all and it has no parents. It turns out that eros is self-making, self-generating; “eros as self-generating power never simply is but is always coming into being as a result of its own activity and always slipping out of being as a result of its self-expenditure, its dying away in [is?] its expressing itself.” Intellectual eros and physical eros behave exactly the same way because they are both part of nature. “The deep structure of eros always disappears into the concrete experience that it enables,” “masked in the particular that it always disappears into.” It is dynamic, relational, temporal, “directed by its very nature to fulfillment or satisfaction, and its fulfillment always drains away and revives seeking fulfillment.” And that is what nature as a whole is, too. So, when Socrates says he is ignorant of everything but eros, “he seems to make a modest or moderate knowledge claim” but in fact makes “the largest of all possible knowledge claims,” that he knows “the character or way of all that is,” what Strauss calls “the nature of nature.” The nature of nature may be seen at the top of Diotima’s famous ladder, which the philosopher and the philosopher alone reaches. At the top of the ladder is a beholding, a beholding of the erotic character of being, but, like eros itself, the beholding also engenders, makes; it makes philosophic poetry. This is the coming into being and the slipping out of being, the slipping out of being involving what Socrates in the Republic calls the return to the Cave, the polis, the place of convention, where philosophic poetry can replace the shadows of idols no longer taken as real by the citizens. 

Lampert calls attention to the rational character of the knowing the prophetess reveals. The trajectory of Socrates’ philosophic way of life, his regime. He wanted to know the answer to “the question of cause concerning generation and destruction as a whole,” not only of the human things but of all things. His second sailing brought him to the idea of the Ideas as the cause of generation and destruction, but Parmenides refuted this with his “proof of the rational impossibility of transcendent ideas.” The third stage came when Diotima taught him that causation lies between the “pure flow” (asserted by Heraclitus) and the permanence of what are often miscalled Platonic ideas. Rather, “everything that is has the dynamic, relational, temporal character of eros.” The Delphic command, “Know yourself,” is exactly what the philosopher must do, if he is to know the nature of nature. In this way, Socrates may be said to ‘profane’ the mysteries not in the sense of betraying them but in the sense that he “prepares an initiation into them” which is “available for all future Agathons, for you and me,” my Chinese auditors. 

As Strauss remarks, Nietzsche replaces Platonic eros with the will to power. The way in which Nietzsche became Nietzsche is the topic of the final two lectures.

 

Notes

1. The importance of Alcibiades’ presence is remarked by Patrick J. Coby: Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987). See “Plato’s ‘Protagoras'” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
2. The “Young Socrates” or Socrates the Younger, also a philosopher, whom Plato’s readers meet in the Statesman. 

 

Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche: Philosophy and Its Poetry. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024. Lecture 1: “Strauss Recovers the Tradition of Philosophic Poetry”; Lecture 2: ” Strauss, Nietzsche and the Philosophic Poetry of the Future.” Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024.

 

In 2015, the eminent political philosophy scholar Laurence Lampert was invited to lecture at Remain University, Beijing by Professor Liu Xiaofeng, who had read his book, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. This “turned out to be the best intellectual experience of my life,” as Lampert found the Chinese students to be attentive, exceptionally well-versed in classical Western philosophy, and eager to engage in dialogue. For his part, Lampert carefully honed his talks in view of the needs of philosophy students living under the regime in China. His topic was the relationship between the philosophic intentions of Plato, Nietzsche, and their astute interpreter, Leo Strauss. In his first two lectures he considered Strauss’s account of Plato and Nietzsche, in the second pair he considered Plato’s account of Socrates, and in the third pair he considered Nietzsche’s account of Plato and of Plato’s Socrates.

Lampert began with Strauss’s (now familiar) rediscovery of the techniques of exoteric writing as practiced by Plato and Xenophon. In a series of letters to his friend Jacob Klein, written in 1938-39 as the twin tyrannies of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ menaced the liberal republics of Europe, Strauss expressed his delight “at discovering what the philosophers had written as if it were just for him, which in a way it was“—just for someone like him, a Jewish thinker with family members who would soon would perish in the Holocaust, a thinker who might well be alert to techniques of literary legerdemain practiced by writers who needed to protect themselves from persecution. Strauss told Klein that he had noticed something in Moses Maimonides, no stranger to the hazards of expressing heterodox views in a political regime hostile to heterodoxy and the heterodox. Ten years earlier, Strauss had taken Maimonides as “a believing Jew,” just as Maimonides evidently wanted to be taken by the majority of his readers. Upon more careful reading, Strauss noticed that Maimonides actually regarded the world as eternal, a heterodox view indeed. Maimonides further defined Judaism as a tradition of law, with Moses as the lawgiver. “In Plato,” Lampert writes, following Strauss’s argument, “Plato the philosopher is the ideal lawgiver.” Maimonides accepts the ‘ontology’ of the philosophers along with the politics of the great political philosopher. Strauss saw that Maimonides points his readers to the heterodox core beneath the orthodox shell of his writings by leaving marks on the shell, directing his most alert, ardent, and tenacious readers to look within. The esoteric core of the exoteric teaching hides that teaching “in plain view, if you know how to look.” 

In their youth, Strauss and Klein had shared a fascination with Nietzsche, a fascination not at all uncommon among young European ‘intellectuals’ before and after the First World War. Nietzsche too understood the need for exotericism, remarking three “true but deadly” doctrines that previous thinkers had often concealed: in Nietzsche’s words, these were “the sovereignty of becoming, the fluidity of all concepts, types, and kinds; and the lack of any cardinal difference between man and the animals.” These truths are deadly to political society because they are “deadly to the beliefs on which society to depends for its health.” That is, Maimonides, Plato, and Nietzsche all saw the need for philosophers to be ‘politic,’ prudent in the presentation of their teachings, the publication of which might harm the regimes under which they live and invite harm to themselves by those regimes. In the presentation of Socrates, both Plato and Xenophon hinted at, but did not fully disclose, that Socrates was “a kind of ruler and a kind of founder,” the founder of “a new kind of empire,” the “empire of a philosophic ruler” who questioned the moral conventions that prevailed in his polis, Athens, conventions upheld by the man of kalokagathia, the good and noble man, “the Greek gentleman, the pillar of civic life in the Greek civil order.” Whereas for the gentleman the virtue of moderation meant temperance tout court, including obedience to the laws of the polis, for the philosopher moderation means “controlling and guarding what you say or write”: “Philosophic moderation means in part continued use of the old moral words but understanding them in a radically different way,” a way that departs from legally sanctioned (and sanctioning) conventions. Philosophic moderation guards not an indiscriminate set of passions but a particular passion, the passion to know. “Exotericism protects society from philosophy and protects the philosopher from society.” It also provides a means by which young persons who might come to be philosophers can be tempted in both senses of the term: led by their curiosity to philosophizing, tested for their capacity to philosophize. 

Perhaps even more remarkably, Strauss found exotericism in a poet, Hesiod, who, as Strauss wrote to Klein, taught that “the first things are not the gods but such things as earth, sky, stars, ocean which at one place are expressly distinguished from the gods simply.” As Lampert summarizes, “Learning what the unborn things are illuminates what the Olympians are; it shows what the gods who care about the human things are: the inventions of wise poets like Hesiod. and this enlightenment shows what wisdom is: wisdom is the knowledge of nature and human nature, and knowledge of what a god is.” Following Strauss’s hint, one of his students, Seth Benardete, would later show that “the founding poet of Greece,” Homer, was also a philosopher, indeed Greece’s “founding philosopher.” He, too, knew nature and human nature and what a god is. Strauss, Lampert remarks, “regarded the Symposium—which he called the most beautiful, thus the most poetic, of the dialogues—also as “the most important” of them “because it reveals the real secret of the [Delphic] mysteries,” the “secret truths about philosophy and the philosopher.” Maimonides learned that truth by exactly that careful reading, which requires the reader to infer conclusions that the philosopher he is studying only suggests. To understand what a philosopher thinks “you have to earn it, you have to work” at it, following his argument to its center, its core—sometimes located in the physical center of the book he has written. 

In his essay on the Republic in The City and Man, Strauss makes his central paragraph a discussion of the education Socrates proposes for children in his “regime in speech,” an “education through poetry, a most important word.” The gods and heroes depicted in stories for children “teach the right kind of behavior and warn against the wrong kinds of behavior.” Socrates, Strauss writes, “lays down two laws” concerning the depiction of the gods in these stories; Lampert tells his audience that this means “Socrates is a legislator,” one who “lays down laws for the gods”—an ambiguous phrase, inasmuch as it can mean laying down laws for how poets shall depict the gods and/or laying down laws that the gods must obey. To presume to do the latter suggests that the gods are man-made, not really gods at all. This matters, because “the untrue stories the citizens [of Athens] absorbed as children are what the grown-up citizens believe: what is taken in during one’s childhood is what one continues to believe and act on as an adult”—the laws underlying the laws citizens make for themselves and their own children. This matters not only for the city generally but for Socrates’ interlocutors, which include some young Athenian gentlemen, Adeimantus among them.

Adeimantus “was beginning to experience a death of the gods,” that is, disbelief in the gods. The Homeric gods often behave badly, unjustly. If the very gods behave unjustly, why should he not do so, too? As a “decent and noble young gentleman,” Adeimantus “dearly wants to continue being decent and noble,” but “why should he take that hard and difficult way himself,” when the gods set such a bad example? Adeimantus and his brother, Glaucon entertain such doubts because they “have been brought into touch with the Greek enlightenment,” that is to say, the Greek philosophy of nature, which throws conventional opinions about the gods, opinions fostered by the poets, into question. Strauss observes that Plato’s Socrates doesn’t say what, or who, the gods are at any point in the Republic. Why not? Because Adeimantus is neither a philosopher nor a potential philosopher; he hasn’t asked ‘What is a god?’ but only ‘Why the gods aren’t more just, more moral, more trustworthy than they are.’ Socrates accordingly turns to the question, ‘What is justice?’ That is, Plato’s Socrates takes care to understand and respond to the circumstance in which he speaks, both the character of his interlocutors and the moral and political ‘atmosphere’ of the polis, Athens. “At the time of the Republic, Homer’s and Hesiod’s gods were in crisis. Socrates in the Republic sets out to be a philosophic ruler during the crisis time of Homeric religion when Homer’s gods were dying.” With his dialogues, Plato writes “philosophic poetry.” Nietzsche understood this, going so far as call Socrates “the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history”—so called, it might be added, by Hegel and his historicist followers, who may or may not be writing philosophic poetry with their claim to find reason, dialectics, in history. Chinese scholars, living in a regime animated by Marxist historicism, might be led to wonder how much of Marxism is philosophy, how much poetry.

Poēsis means making. If philosophic poetry is something philosophers make, what or who is the philosopher? And what is “the understanding of being or nature that lies behind” these poetic, theological-political efforts? And if philosophic poetry concerns the gods, the question of what a god is is a “question about being,” a question about what “the highest possible being” is. Adeimantus wants to know a principle that can guide his practice; the philosopher wants to know the answer to a theoretical question. The philosopher’s exoteric teaching is the moral, the theological-political answer; his esoteric teaching is his theoretical answer to a different question. There is a relation between the two kinds of answer because the nature of the gods has bearing on human practice, and therefore “legislating what a god is is in part an instrument in the philosopher’s rule” in Socrates, Plato, and Nietzsche. In the center of the Republic, Plato has Socrates say that unless philosophers become kings, or unless kings adequately philosophize, cities on earth will remain troubled, unjust. Socrates will never rule Athens; indeed, Athens kills him.  But “Strauss shows how Socrates the philosopher actually ruled: a philosopher rules by laying down new laws for the gods; a philosopher rules by ruling the view of the gods that will rule the minds of the young men.” In the final book of the Republic, Plato has Socrates make the gods “the moral judges of human behavior” and “makes the soul immortal, living out is next life in reward and punishment for its actions in this life.” He quite literally re-forms the gods of Homer and Hesiod, reaffirming the decent, noble inclinations of the young gentlemen. Strauss calls this not only philosophic poetry but “ministerial poetry”—ministerial in the sense that it serves the regime, which has now become the regime in speech of the philosopher insofar as decent and noble young gentlemen may well become sympathetic to philosophy because kindly old Socrates, defender of decency against cynical Thrasymachus, has won their minds and hearts. Ministerial also because it is therapeutic, “giv[ing] aid and comfort to those like Adeimantus who suffer spiritually from the loss of their beliefs in justice and in the gods.” In the regime not of speech but of practice, the Athenian regime, philosophy and philosophers have not always flourished; Socrates will die at the hands of outraged citizens. Given time, the Athenian regime might have become more friendly toward such a man as Socrates, if Adeimantus and his fellow gentlemanly youths rule it.

Nietzsche famously denounced Socrates and Plato because Platonism (specifically, the theory of the ‘ideas’ or ‘forms’) made Christianity possible by preparing the minds of Europeans to accept a holy god, a god who transcends nature just as the ideas transcend the ‘cave’ that represents the conventions of the polis. Lampert considers Strauss’s presentation of Nietzsche in his second lecture to the Chinese scholars. Strauss placed his chapter, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” in the center of his book, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, following the chapter titled “Jerusalem and Athens.” “Strauss seems to be saying quietly: in the study of Platonic political philosophy, Nietzsche now occupies the central place, just after Jerusalem and Athens.” Now: after Nietzsche’s forthright challenge to Christianity and to the Platonism he claims to have spawned it. Just as the Symposium is Plato’s most beautiful dialogue, according to Strauss, so is Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche’s “most beautiful book,” a well-made example of “the exoteric art” in form, intention, and reticence. Nietzsche charges Plato with the “fundamental error” of inventing, in poetically making, the ideas—particularly the ideas of “pure mind” and “the good in itself.” In the Symposium, Socrates discloses what Delphic Diotima told him, that “human beings can only strive for wisdom or philosophize” but “gods do not philosophize” because they are wise. This is the supposed secret of Delphi that Socrates “blabbed.” On the contrary, Strauss’s Nietzsche counters. “Nietzsche divulges after the proper preparation the novelty, suspect perhaps especially among philosophers, that gods too philosophize.” As Lampert points out, in other dialogues (the Sophist and the Theaetetus) Plato suggests that the gods do philosophize, and further suggests that “the gods who philosophize are the philosophers themselves“—a blasphemous thought in any religion. If so, then Plato and Nietzsche may not be such antagonists as Nietzsche exoterically says they are. “Strauss suggests to a reader who is paying attention that Plato thought what Nietzsche thought but found it desirable to teach something different through Diotima.” Nietzsche himself ‘blabs,’ divulging “the secret about the gods philosophizing by introducing the philosophizing god Dionysos.” Qua philosopher, Socrates, Plato, and Nietzsche each knows the secret about the god, Diotima’s “noble lie about the gods that serves Plato’s political purpose for philosophy”; moreover, “Nietzsche, Strauss may also suggest, may divulge that secret “in order to serve his political purpose for philosophy.” Both Plato and Nietzsche “platonize in the service of philosophy,” having interpreted “the spiritual situation of their times” and having taught “what the times required for the well-being of philosophy.” 

Strauss ends his chapter by contrasting the teachings of Plato and Nietzsche on the virtues, “one of the themes of the second main part of Nietzsche’s book,” where he attends especially to “the virtues of the philosopher of the future.” Nietzsche’s nature—aristocratic, “noble nature,” with its hierarchy of rank—”replaces nature as Plato taught it, nature and the super-natural that transcends it.” (Although Lampert says that Socratic eros is “the good in itself,” Strauss says it is “the striving for the good in itself.”) For Nietzsche, “the world is will to power and nothing else”; “will to power is Nietzsche’s name for the being of beings, the nature of nature.” Both nature as eros and nature as will to power endanger the polis. In that sense, Platonic eros and Nietzsche’s life principle, the will to power, are “deadly” truths, even if life-giving in the more comprehensive sense. Or, as Nietzsche puts it in his thirtieth aphorism, “What serves the higher type of human being as nourishment or refreshment has to be nearly poison to a very different and lesser type”: hence esotericism and exotericism. Thirty-three, the age of Jesus Christ when He died, is the number of the aphorism in which Nietzsche cautions against “devotion”—to God?—and “sacrifice for our neighbor”—that is, Christ’s Great Commandment, the sum and substance of God’s Law. Nietzsche calls such “feelings” seductions to be resisted. It is Platonism, with its City in Speech, that inclines Europeans to posit a world beyond nature, a City of God, the God Who is Logos— speech and reason. To posit, as Plato seems to do, a disembodied Mind to go along with his disembodied Ideas takes the path taken “consciously or unconsciously” by every advocate of God. Today’s philosophers ought to be more suspicious of the claim that Mind leads them to a truth, or even that the truth is more to be esteemed than appearance, an assumption Nietzsche treats as “a moral prejudice” in Aphorism 34. Life itself would not exist “if not on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances”; a disembodied Mind contemplating a disembodied Idea would be lifeless, and he who attempted to live, so seduced, would soon perish (as Machiavelli also says of Christianity and of Platonism). Truth and neighbor-love are very far from being the same. When a Voltaire (whom Nietzsche quotes in the aphorism immediately following) says that “he only searches for the truth in order to do good,” “I bet he finds nothing!” Life is harsher than that, imposing an order of rank that puts the free minds, the undeluded ones, above the suckers. The real nihilists are those who believe in the Ideas and/or God—those nothings, according to Nietzsche. 

Lampert guides his readers to look at Aphorism 36 and Aphorism 37. “Aphorism 36 is reasoning; it is philosophy. Aphorism 37 is only a kind of corollary because it follows the reasoning with something that is not reasoning but that belongs to religion.” It is an example of Nietzsche’s version of “philosophic poetry.” Lampert judges the reasoning to combine “the strictest philosophical logical seriousness and play,” presenting a “strictly logical inference about what the mind can know of the self, the other, and the world of the whole,” namely, that it is “will to power and nothing else.” He promises his audience that he “will look at the reasoning in my last Nietzsche lecture,” but there is nothing wrong with looking at it now. 

Nietzsche begins with a somewhat Cartesian move, with introspection, his well-known “method.” For Descartes, introspection is the surest way to know what we can know, inasmuch as the world presented to us by our senses, thoughts, and passions may be illusory, very much including what words may be said to reveal to us about God. “Supposing nothing were ‘given’ as real besides our world of desires and passions, that we could go down or up to no other ‘reality’ than simply the reality of our drives—since thinking is only a relation of these drives to one another—: is it not permissible to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this given or something like it is not sufficient for understanding even the so-called mechanistic (or ‘material’) world?” This is more than permissible; “the conscience of method demands it.” Must we not then “recognize the will as efficient?” If so, and if (as the free spirits of the modern Enlightenment, including Voltaire himself) maintain that human beings are no different essentially from animals and the rest of nature, is not everything animated by “will force”? “The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’—it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else.—”

How strict is this logic, really? Is thinking “only a relation of [our] drives to one another”? In making this ‘thought-experiment,’ I incline to doubt that it is. If, for example, I think ‘2 +2 = 4’ I must have some “drive” that makes me want to think that more than anything else I might otherwise have on my mind, but the thought itself isn’t reducible to a drive or concatenation of drives. Yet that is the premise of Nietzsche’s argument. Lampert calls his argument “a comprehensive rational conclusion about the nature of nature, about what philosophy ultimately seeks,” but I think otherwise.

Lampert then turns to Aphorism 37, in which Nietzsche draws “a kind of corollary or inference” from his philosophic argument. This corollary is directed to “the free minds that Nietzsche is training,” minds that, though ‘enlightened’ in accordance the Machiavellian-Cartesian-Baconian modern project, retain the Voltairean squeamishness about abandoning the moral teachings of Christianity. “What?” they exclaim, “Does this not mean, using a popular expression: God is refuted but the devil is not—?” Nietzsche answers immediately, “On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends!” Lampert calls the addressees of this exclamation, Nietzsche’s friends, the free minds, who are experiencing “a deeply human reaction to philosophy’s rational conclusion.” Even if they are free of religion, notional deniers of God and the devil, they have yet to abandon the Christian morality in which they were imbued since childhood. But if the God of the New Testament, “the transcendent God of Christianity,” has “condemned the world as the kingdom of darkness, as the place of the devil from which he would redeem us,” and if nature is life force, will force, will to power and nothing else, then “that God, the refuted God, is the devil, the refuted devil.” Nietzsche’s will to power has a place, not for that God, but for “gods” of a different sort. “Nietzsche’s ontology introduces a new way to think about divinity, about what a god is,” and “Strauss has led his reader into the heart of this temptation“—the reference to Genesis being salient—that Nietzsche has formulated for him. More, “Strauss had suggested that Nietzsche and Plato may not differ on what a god is,” that both take “the philosophizing god Dionysos” to be the god of the philosophically-minded. This talk of divinity might confuse atheistic minds, minds ‘free’ of the belief in God, but Strauss points to passages where Nietzsche argues that human beings cannot live “without gods” of some sort; they are “necessary for a healthy social order.” Life itself justifies belief in gods, just not belief in life-denying gods. The God of the Bible does in fact give life, indeed offer eternal life, but those teachings must be false, according to Nietzsche and his “friends,” the free spirits. Real life does not transcend life as we know it on earth. Accordingly, Aphorism 57 clears the way for a new religion, “a new poetry of divinity for humans whose world can turn only around a god”—now, according to Nietzsche, the real, living god of the will to power. This is Nietzsche’s philosophic-poetic replacement for Plato’s philosophic poetry.

The exoteric doctrine, the public teaching of the new religion is the eternal return. The eternal return is “a new ideal” for human beings, just as Plato’s Ideas were a new ideal replacing the dead or dying Olympian gods. Instead of world-denying Platonism or the world-denying Christianity that, according to Nietzsche, gained traction thanks to the doctrine of Ideas, the eternal return unqualifiedly affirms life. In Strauss’s word, it is “the eternal Yes-saying to everything that was and is.” Among the Stoics, the first to give a full account of the eternal return, the cosmos undergoes periodic cycles of destruction and rebirth; for them, the moral imperative is to endure this, as a past, ongoing, and future reality, without sniveling. Christian writers denounced this as a denial of God’s promises. Nietzsche’s new religion adjures the free spirits neither to merely suffer it, nor to deny it, but to embrace it as life itself, the supreme manifestation of the will to power. As Lampert puts it, “eternal return is not a vicious circle but, on the contrary, the virtuous circle of life made eternal, made god in some sense,” “the making divine”—notice “making,” as this is an act of poēsis —of “the whole natural cycle of things,” one in which you, free spirit, will return, with the same nature and the same life experiences, as you have undergone, undergo, and will undergo in this cycle of life. “Eternal return is a non-theistic vindication of God,” an answer to what theologians call the problem of evil. It also vindicates God’s promise of eternal life. Philosophy says, “to be is the to be will to power and nothing else”; the new religion, the “political philosophy or philosophic poetry” Nietzsche makes from that insight is this “new highest ideal, the affirmation of the world as it is,” leading “to a vindication of god”—now, in the lower case—of “what alone can make a world possible for humans.” Nietzsche founds this new religion because it meets the needs of certain human beings, the free spirits, who, like the young gentlemen of Socrates’ Athens, are experiencing the ‘death’ of their own beliefs about divinity. In a sense, this parallel is a (willed) example of the eternal return.

The new religion propounds a new morality, “beyond good and evil,” as Nietzsche puts it. The “new teaching on human virtue arises out of Nietzsche’s new understanding of nature”; that is, it derives from Nietzsche’s philosophy, even if it seems to come from the new religion. “Nietzsche went beyond seeing human nature, to act on what he saw.” Human nature has been led astray by Christian de-naturing, but that isn’t the most urgent dilemma now, in Nietzsche’s time. Belief in Christianity is dying, indeed already dead in the minds of the free spirits. But Machiavelli, Descartes, Bacon and their followers have proposed the conquest of fortune and of nature by means of modern science. Modern science uses the experimental method to torture nature into revealing her secrets and then, with those secrets in hand, to invent technologies that will beat her down, conquer and master her. But, as Strauss writes, “there are no assignable limits to this conquest.” It could extend to the conquest of human nature, as “the direct result of modern virtue.” By modern virtue, Nietzsche evidently does not mean the real modern virtue, Machiavelli’s virtù, but the secularized Christian virtue of Voltaire, the attempt to remove suffering and inequality. Lampert quotes Strauss, looking at aphorisms 237 and 257: “Suffering and inequality are the prerequisites of human greatness,” including philosophy, the greatest human greatness. Aphorism 237 is an attack on what would come to be called feminism, the attempt to make men and women equal, a project Nietzsche deems contra naturam; Aphorism 257 is an attack on democracy, another form of egalitarianism. “Every enhancement so far in the type ‘human being’ was the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be this way again and again: a society that believes in a long ladder of rank order and value-difference between one person and another and in some sense requires slavery.” On this, Lampert claims, “Strauss’s point is Nietzsche’s point: the limitless conquest of nature threatens to bring about the end of philosophy.” One might add that this is exactly what Strauss says in his own voice in his exchange with the Hegelian Communist, Alexandre Kojève. [1]

Philosophers make arguments, but they also take actions. “The actions of the highest natures, the history-making philosophers,” consist of “postulat[ing] as true what they see as beneficial to philosophy and humanity in their times.” All of these postulations, all these claims, are “acts of the will to power on the part of the highest natures.” Nietzsche’s legislation, his act of the will to power, his postulation of the eternal return, “is not fundamentally a description of the way the world is, although it may be lived that way by most people”; it is really “a statement of desire, the desire of a lover” of nature who seeks to limit the conquest of nature, which “is not to be conquered through alteration but celebrated as it is.” Lampert calls this “the first comprehensive ecological philosophy.” Nietzsche is the first ‘post-modern.’ 

Or at least in part. “Nietzsche embraced the scientific aspects of the modern revolution while modifying or assigning limits to its technological aspects.” Modern philosophers “tamed Christianity with their philosophic poetry, their modification of Christianity’s other-worldly promises into worldly promises promising a paradise at the end of history through a scientific technology applied to nature.” This has begun to threaten human nature itself, including the highest manifestation of human nature, the philosopher. This Nietzsche seeks to prevent; evidently, the religio-poetic doctrine of the eternal return cloaks the possibility that human nature might destroyed permanently, if a philosopher does not stand up to set a limit on the conquest by calling upon free spirits to turn against the remnants of Christian morality, against the humanitarian compassion, the spirit of ressentiment that seeks revenge upon the world as it is. In becoming friends of philosophy (if hardly philosophers themselves), the free spirits will help philosophy, the activity of the highest persons on nature’s order of rank, to continue philosophizing.

What relevance has this account of Strauss have for Chinese scholars? What does Lampert’s account of Strauss’s accounts of Plato and Nietzsche bring to the Chinese? Several things, perhaps. Strauss’s account of exoteric writing and esoteric teaching would surely interest thinking men and women living in a regime in which persecution of heterodoxy is not unknown. A thoughtful Chinese might already have thought heterodox thoughts, and Plato’s critique of the gentleman, Nietzsche’s critique of the free spirits, might give encouragement to young persons among China’s ruling class to persist in thinking for themselves. If philosophers know and love nature and human nature, where does that leave Hegel, Marx, and other historicist thinkers, who suppose that nature can be triumphantly mastered? (With its air and water heavily polluted, will not an “ecological philosophy” prove healthful, live-giving?) If they do so persist, if they experience the death of the ideological ‘gods’ of their time and place, even as the young Athenian gentlemen and the modern free spirits experienced the death of gods in theirs, what gods will they put in the place of Maoist Marxism? With his account of ‘how Strauss became Strauss,’ Lampert suggests to any young potential philosopher, and to the much larger class of young free spirits, how one might become a philosopher, and how many others could become friends of philosophy, the activity of the true gods. Such persons will surely not believe that a political ruler is a true god, inasmuch as philosopher-kings rule spiritually, leaving practical politics to others. They do not believe that theory and practice can be unified, much less embodied in a human being like Stalin. Finally, there is the theme of temptation, testing by an effort at seduction. The late Professor Lampert was quite the old charmer, if his death notices are to be believed. His lectures make the claim plausible.

 

Note

1. Leo Strauss: On Tyranny. Revised and expanded edition. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. On this website, see also: “Strauss’s Critique of Hegel,” “Historicity and Reason,” and “The Philosopher-King: A Contradiction in Terms?” all under the category, “Philosophers.”