Ping Pong: or a brief history of apologism; Or where to now for Virtue?
The aim of this rant, which is the first in a series, is to present a brief (and highly selective) genealogy of the idea of Virtue (and its links to power and knowledge). My aim is never to give an exhaustive account (which it would take several books to fully achieve), but rather to follow a single thread through various twists and turns, and at each point to show why these debates from philosophy’s past still very much matter today.
Perhaps is was not really Socrates’ fault, but he is the first person, in Western thought at least, to be credited with saying both that one ought to analyse all one’s thoughts and motives (as the unexamined life was not worth living), and also that truth and virtue are one and the same. - Two formulas that might appear odd when baldly stated, and yet which form the base rock of much of the way that we understand what we are, both in themselves, but also in the sense of what thoughts were subsequently was built up from these formulas. It is worth quickly illustrating the second of these formulas, and showing the sense in which we in the West are Socratian, before one turns to how the argument then developed.
After all, if Socrates really was the first person to say this, it means that everyone who makes a direct equation between explaining and solving a problem, is asserting the value of the second of these formulas. That is, that truth and virtue are the same, and so explaining to a child what they have done wrong, is all that is necessary to make them Good; Likewise the criminal or the ‘poor’, can be reformed, if only they can be educated to move beyond their folly. Hence the mantra of the liberal classes is effectively ‘wrong doing needs not to be punished, but should rather be patronized’, as condescension is in many ways the worst form of punishment. This much appears perhaps, innocent enough. And yet the proposition is also routinely inverted. That is - I assume that because I know more than you, I am somehow better. Or to put it slightly differently, that because my knowledge is more effective at changing the world (and therefore more demonstrably true), that then automatically gives me a moral superiority over anyone who lacks this know how. An assertion which has of course, over the course of history, led to some of the darkest of acts, lying at the base of the ‘moral’ case which was presented for slavery, imperialism or in the modern era, the ‘fight for democracy’.
Likewise the first of Socrates’ formulas, the claim that an unexamined life is not worth living, is very much the slogan of our time. We are not at any point merely content to act, and be done with it. On the contrary, all our actions are endlessly dwelt upon, and twisted into new meanings and new formulas. This demand for self examination, is made first and foremost on the personal level. Thence we are exhorted to ‘understand ourselves’ and our own motivations, and promised that such understanding is its own reward, by not just a galaxy of therapies, but also in our everyday language and friendships. Not to examine oneself, not to be reflexive, is therefore held up to be as being somehow imperfect and incomplete. But the demand that we look to ourselves, is caught up in a more complex and larger scale formulation. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to claim that advertising is essentially rooted on this exhortation to self examination. After all, the essence of advertising lies in making people re-look at what they are, and thereby encouraging them to think of themselves otherwise (so as to allow for the product being sold). Or again the way we justify to ourselves, the peculiar merits of democracy, essentially comes down to an act of self examination. We are all meant to look at ourselves, at where we are, and what and how our own lives might be different (given a different government) and vote accordingly. If then humans were not capable of such self examination, or rather if they were only capable of it incompletely or at certain points (and unable to judge in the round), then the entire rationale for such a democracy would be lost…
The very apparent naïveté of the Socratian formulas should make us blink. Perhaps they only appear naïve to us because they have percolated so far into our conceptions about who we are, and what we are, that we feel that we understand them right away, and know the world to be more complex; that these ideas did not solve everything, however much we followed them. Be this as it may, what is certainly true (and it was a point made in Socrates’ lifetime, by his opponents), the formulas which he gives to thought are very easily taken up and warped into justifications for numerous both large and small scale oppressions. The legacy which he left thought was therefore to attempt to work out how and why this was.
This challenge was then taken up very directly by Plato in ‘The Republic’. At the start of ‘The Republic’, Plato attempts to isolate the politics of power from the politics of knowledge. He therefore has a sophist assert the formula that ‘justice is the will of the most powerful’ and that it is they, therefore that need to be given the right to govern. Plato’s Socrates himself counters this argument is various ways (for example he questions exactly who the powerful are, and how their rights to govern would be given) and yet does not simply dismiss it. It is rather the case that he attempts to catch up the argument about the nature of the powerful, with an argument about the nature of knowledge. The truly powerful are, therefore, he suggests those who have power over themselves, and this power only comes with knowledge. Plato thereby synthesizes not only the two distinct Socratian formulas into one idea, but includes within those formulae, the problem of power - now understood in terms of self power. The powerful are therefore those who are best able to examine (and therefore know) their own motivations, and thereby become able to control them (that is, to be virtuous): Power and virtue are synonymous, not because the powerful set the agenda of what is and what is not virtuous, but rather because one can only be truly powerful if one is first truly virtuous.
Once again this formula is still alive and kicking. The West simply asserts very directly, the moral equivalence of power and virtue, and a certain sort of self examination. We therefore claim not only that the fact that we are more powerful than other people (both personally and collectively) means that we must be more virtuous than them (the Western way of life is ‘morally superior’). But we also assert that part of the problem with these other people is that their culture or political system is somehow immature, and thereby tie up political and social problems within a problem of moral (rather than social) development. Thence the West asserts that it is not only the material ‘end of history’ but also its moral terminal point as well, and that all people who have not realized this, have merely failed to examine themselves aright. Ideas which on the face of it, appeared to be couched in terms of moral quest and individual examination and liberation, are thereby rather easily warped into pompous self justification. Whence follows the anomaly that the distinctly new countries of the West, allow themselves the right to patronize as immature, the far older states of say Iran and China…
Once again this criticism was more than evident in Plato’s lifetime. All the more so because Plato got himself caught up with the fate of Dion, a tyrant in Sicily, whom he attempted unsuccessfully to instruct, and did so, in preference to engaging with political life inside Athens itself. This leads to the problem that knowledge itself or an abstract notion of virtue, or even the Good, was not enough to ward the mind from the temptation of its inclination to tyranny. This being so, it leaves open the question as to who then, should be allowed to be virtuous, and who should be allowed to govern; that is, where are the virtuous if they cannot be found in the philosophers?
This question was one that Aristotle took up, and answered by presenting a formula that asserted the power or efficacy of the middle. His argument ran, that the problem with Plato is that he wants to tie knowledge and the Good up within an extreme quest, which only a very few individuals could follow. Virtue, power and the good were thereby asserted, and yet most people were denied the right to them. It is far better, he argues to rethink where virtue is, and to do this, what better starting place he suggests, than the natural world. In that world, he argues, it is very clear that the most comfortable place for any individual to be is always in the middle of the range that they can tolerate. Hence one wants to be neither hot nor cold, or have soil that is too hard or too soft, or have too little or too much rain. Thence, by analogy, virtue is to be truly found within everyday life. Or more particularly it is to be found in those things that allow our everyday life to be good, be those things material prosperity, personal freedom or mental equilibrium. To be virtuous is therefore to be a slave neither of one’s passions nor yet of one’s divinely inspired quest after metaphysical (and quite possibly empty) knowledge. It is far better to be grounded within the hustle and bustle of running a small holding, and deal with one’s fellow men (and in the Aristotelian formula it is just men). Hence Aristotle renders Plato’s abstract formula about the nature of self-government into something very practical and grounded. The self governing are not the philosophers, but those who have the power to run their own lives in their own manner.
Once again this move echoes down into modernity. It would no doubt be an exaggeration to claim that Aristotle was amongst the advocates for libertarian laisse faire philosophy, and yet he is clearly one of its ancestors, in that he advocates the virtue of self sufficiency, and individual choice. However at this point, a telling difference is clear. Where Aristotle will turn to monarchy to ground his states, is where modern laisse faire government looks only to freedom. Perhaps underlying this difference lies the desire to take different things from Plato. Aristotle, having fought to avoid in his own thought, an appeal to a metaphysical nature (and power) beyond the rights and virtues of the middle, therefore needs to look to an external agency that has the power to ensure that everyone can indeed lead the Good life. Therefore Aristotle lauds the efficacy of a well run monarchy in ensuring that citizens have such a life. Aristotle thereby distances himself from any too easy assumption that the ‘best’ or the good govern. To govern is one thing, and to be good is another (it would be possible, if unlikely, that one is a Good king and a bad man). Two thousand years later or so, laisse faire thinkers feel no scruple in borrowing from Plato, the equation of power with virtue. The Good are therefore the ones who ought to be powerful and are the ones who are virtuous, that is those members of the middle classes equipped to follow the Good life.
However such a ‘modern’ synthesis of Plato and Aristotle twists into a new and highly problematic formation, a dimension that was critical to these thinker’s argument: Namely that the ‘Good’ either did not want to govern or did not actually govern. For Plato what made one good was the quest to a world beyond that of lived experience (living the Good life would therefore never be enough). It followed of course that the rulers in the Platonic Republic did not ever want to govern. They accepted it as a duty, and no more. Likewise Aristotle lauded the Good life, and the rights of the middle classes to be good, and yet argues that goodness was something apart from government. Our very modern synthesis, by contrast naively twists these two arguments into the claim that the true governors are those able to follow the Good life (that is the well off, self sufficient middle classes), and that their quest for wealth and prosperity is effectively synonymous with the philosopher’s quest for moral purity. If such individuals are naturally suspicious of government, they are so because from their superior ‘philosophical’ perspective they ‘know’ that true government rests with them (as its true philosophers). They thereby look to government as a ‘necessary evil’ (much as the Platonic philosopher did), and seek to restrict its aims and purposes, to those things which cannot be done by the individual alone (a distinction which of course rests upon Aristotle’s division of state and individual).
And yet, as Ancient Greece knew so very well, this distinction is easier to state than it is to carry out. The great economic historian Karl Polyani pointed out fifty years ago or so, that if you look at the statute book, all laisse faire governments actually impose more levels of government, than do those motivated by other intentions.
The free market, far from being anything at all natural or endemic in human nature, needs constant protection from the vagaries of that nature. And yet the result of all this interference is that the interests of one particular group - the followers of the capitalist ‘Good Life’ are trumpeted over all other groups in society. In spite of all its high ideals, and pretences to metaphysical perfection, the free market is thereby twisted (as the ideas of the philosopher kings were, or the doctrine of the good life) into an apologism which seeks to justify the power (and virtues) of one group of society at the expense of all the others.
Moreover this last point was very well known in Ancient Greece, where it was common place for free market arrangements to turn into differing forms of oligarchy and monopoly (both Plato and Aristotle present histories of just this move, and see their own thought as the answer to this problem). In antiquity this problem led, from Aristotle’s time onwards, to a crisis in confidence in the power of political philosophy. Maybe, as Epicurus suggested, one needs not to understand the universe through the gaze of the political philosopher (and their necessary assumptions about the position of humans in the world order). Maybe it would be better to propose a schema where humanity is utterly decentred from the forces that make the universe: a mere accidental effect, rather than a central cause. Any claims to a metaphysical foundation for the Good Life will thereby be lost. What really matters is that one makes the life that one does indeed have as Good as possible in the circumstances that one finds oneself in.
In making this move, perhaps Epicurean (and even more, Stoic) philosophy fulfils the same role as the so called New Age Philosophies of today, in that both seek to replace political philosophy with an ethic of self development. In doing so, they of course seek to return to the original Socratian formulae, and rid themselves of the political overtones that accompanied such thoughts. Moreover, the two are at one, in that in making this move both are effectively looking beyond the western tradition (there are clear links between Epicurus and Buddhism, and Stoicism became readily confused with Christianity, which also came from the east). This move was then as now rather readily caught up in a commericalization of belief (Rome was full of endless sects, offering self development for cash), and is so in spite of the doctrines which are purported to be being followed.
Perhaps it is the deepest problem in philosophy that it is written down in books. Ideas therefore never simply disappear. They linger on in texts. A presence that will allow them to haunt later thoughts both directly, as the ideas they advocate remain in public debate, but also indirectly as various formations are taken up by subsequent times and twisted into new (and often highly paradoxical) synthesises. The Past might be a palimpsest of thought, with each thought lying on top of the last, and yet at the same time, no layer has been simply lost, but will rather demand echoes of its own within modernity. To talk of virtue and to link it to power and knowledge is therefore to also be caught up within the language of Plato, and Aristotle, and their reactions to that equation. And the real problem is always to remain nimble footed enough to avoid any too simplistic or too easy synthesis of these myriad voices.
. Thus far these voices have led one from an equation of personal and public, to a divorcing of one from the other. In next week’s Rant, the reverse journey inaugurated by Christianity, will be traced, and the modern consequences for that argument developed.
