Mary P. Nichols: Socrates and the Political Community: An Ancient Debate. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.
Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Vol.ume 17, Number 2, Winter 1989-90.
If the name ‘Socrates’ means ‘rule of wisdom,’ small wonder Athenians finally put him to death. That he survived so long attests to his failure to put anything in writing. That his memory survives, however, attests to the writing of others, who portrayed him as the archetypal philosopher, the one whose way of life raised the question of philosophy’s relation to the polis. Theories may or may not directly affect political life, but theorizing does. If you make people think, they will not act while they are thinking; after they finish (if they do) they may act differently than before. Good citizens have known to find this infuriating.
Nichols’ book has three main parts: on Aristophanes’ Clouds, on Plato’s Republic, and on the second book of Aristotle’s Politics. Although many might believe these books thoroughly discussed by others, Nichols has other ideas. Fortunately, she is right, and the conflicts between some of her interpretations and those of Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, and Paul Friedlander may do her readers the favor of returning them to the original text with renewed eyes.
Nichols’ careful reading of the Clouds does not entirely diverge from Strauss’ account in Socrates and Aristophanes. Their emphases differ. She is more down-to-earth about clouds: “Whereas Strauss’ Aristophanes considers “the old-fashioned… no less laughable, no less unreasonable, than the newfangled,” Nichols more measuredly calls Aristophanes “a conservative who sees the limitations of what he is trying to conserve.” She never suggests that Aristophanes wants to be a god. She regards the Just Speech hypocritical but not mistaken in his words. Rather, she describes the Unjust Speech, Socrates, and Phidippides (Strepsiades’ son)as erroneously imagining nature to be “composed of absolutes, unrelated to [other] things in nature, and uninfluenced by time.” The attempt to bring convention into line with this misconceived nature yields young men fit for no action except father-beating. Nor are they fit for thought, and here she comes close to Strauss:
“Seeking the universal or the unlimited [she writes], Socrates turns to nonhuman nature and to man only insofar as he resembles nonhuman nature. Socrates loses sight of the human, aware only of the movements of matter…. Socrates, seeking freedom in universality, discovers only that man is a slave to his own body. Caught in contradiction, Socrates is laughable.”
Nichols finds Aristophanes convincing up to a point, but she sees the limitations of his conservatism. A clever defense of ordinary life, of normalcy, cannot account for the fact that “it is in ordinary life that the desire for completeness,” including philosophic eros, “arises.” “How long can laughter check desire and prevent tears?” With this question she turns to the Republic.
This interpretation forms the bulk and the core of the book. Here Nichols takes issue with Strauss and especially with Bloom on the significance of the philosopher-kings. She argues that they represent the culmination of a profoundly un-Socratic argument led by Socrates but energized by Glaucon’s desire for perfection,” a desire that is not so much erotic as spirited. Whereas Bloom contends that the spirited man endangers himself and others because his love of his own closes his mind to reason, Nichols contends that both love of one’s own and philosophy can bring the illusion of independence from the city, if they are ill-mixed. The philosopher-kings exemplify this. They are finally creatures of the city—orthodox, un-Socratic, unquestioning. They attract Glaucon, who “does not pursue knowledge so much as the certainty knowledge affords.” “Ultimately, the city offers knowledge of simple and eternal ideas as a substitute for the uncertain understanding necessary in a world of complex and changing objects.” Philosophy does not lead men to the unnatural unity of communism; politics does, in its anti-erotic quest for changeless order and control. Reason is reduced to a merely disciplinary force that serves the ‘ideally’ self-sufficient ‘manly’ man. Instead of “Socratic political philosophers,” the city in speech is ruled by a “mathematical philosophy” that prepares the brightest youths “for tyranny over the city,” an enforced homogeneity within each of the three classes.
“In contrast to these philosophers, for whom the city is a cave they escape, Socrates gains clarity within the city…transcend[ing] his own political community in ways the philosophers of the cave image do not.” The erotic Socrates does not need to be dragged from the cave. Nor does he need to be dragged back to it. “What is needed is not the ridicule of philosophy that Aristophanes offers but a philosophic understanding of the city’s legitimate needs, as well as of its dangerous tendencies. Philosophy must be political in order to avoid being politicized.” The truly just man is “the lover of learning” who lives in the “dialogic community.”
Socrates’ regime typology is not the kernel of a political science, as Bloom contends; there is no room for choice, deliberation—for statesmanship. Regimes decline inevitably, here. “Plato describes no decent politics in the Republic to which men can give their attention and loyalty…. Because the Republic offers knowledge of the perils of political action rather than knowledge useful in guiding politics, Aristophanes would find it unsatisfactory. As long as knowledge yields no more fruit than this”—the knowledge that one does not know and a consequent moderation in all things, including politics—”he might ask, why is knowledge better for men than the forgetting that comedy is intended to encourage?” Nichols now turns not, as one might expect, to Plato’s trilogy on knowledge and statesmanship, the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman, nor to the other philosopher who wrote Socratic dialogues, Xenophon, but to Aristotle. This surprising turn more than suggests that Nichols has intends her book not merely as a scholarly investigation but a philosophic one.
“Whereas Socrates founded political philosophy by undertaking a philosophic examination of human affairs, Aristotle founded political science by directing philosophy to political action”—”constitut[ing] an implicit defense of philosophy against Aristophanes’ criticism and of politics against Plato’s.” Against Aristophanes, Aristotle teaches that politics can and must “incorporate diversity.” Thus “thought and action correct each other,” with statesmen, and particularly lawgivers, providing “the bridge between thought and actual regimes.” Unlike Socrates, Aristotle does not direct his political teachings to the young. He is “the philosophic teacher of statesmen.” “Far from constituting a threat to the city’s unity, the philosopher can share in political life.” For Aristotle, politics is not based on a lie.
There may be some problems with Nichols’ discussion of the philosopher-kings. For one thing, Socrates says so little about them as philosophers. their mathematical education does not make them un-Platonic (as distinguished from un-Socratic); the Academy itself is said to have warned away unmathematical souls. Moreover, Nichols believes that Socrates’ account of love as indiscriminate is obviously and deliberately wrong: A wine-lover does not love every kind of wine, as Socrates claims, as no one loves a bad wine. “The city’s communism could be successful, only if Socrates’ account of love were true: only if the guardians love all the members of a class” and therefore no individuals within it. But Nichols confuses kinds with intensity, here. A true wine lover loves all kinds of wine, but not poor specimens of those kinds; nor need he love all kinds equally. Socrates may be more kingly than Nichols says. Plato also teaches that a tyrannical soul may have been a potentially philosophic soul, now spoiled; tyrants and philosophers are opposites, but in another sense twins.
The extent to which such reservations refute Nichols’ overall argument may be questioned. Only an exceptionally dogmatic soul could fail to learn from her book, and such souls are not the intended readership.
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