FIRST PART HERE
On Apollonian Temperance
Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnothi seauton): “Know yourself.” These words connected to the Delphian Apollo are, above anything else, a recommendation about the assumption of one’s mortal condition, hence about the awareness of one’s limits against any ὕβρις (hybris, “excess”); thus too the Delphic lemma: Mηδὲν ἄγαν (meden agan), “Nothing in excess,” also connected to Apollo.
Not only was moderation the core teaching of Ancient-Greek tragedy: awareness of one’s limits was also required from the citizen of any Greek polis. There is no exaggeration, then, in affirming that, in one way or another, Ancient-Greek education and practical reason – to put it in Kantian terms – turned around the words of Apollo, whose meaning was epitomised in the term σωφροσύνη (sophrosyne).
This means that sophrosyne is both “soundness of mind” and, as it was translated into Latin, “temperance.” Like Heraclitus, Plato regards it as a fundamental virtue: sophrosyne is the main subject of the Charmides, and in Phaedrus 237c−238e it is presented as the intermediary between the appetitive and the rational parts of the soul, i.e. between sensibility and reason. Put differently: it is sophrosyne that permits self-restriction and composure – the typical Apollonian values.
An Excursus on Speculative Anatomy
A clarification is in order here. Why does Plato distinguish between an appetitive and a rational part of the soul?, and why does he posit the existence of an intermediary part between them?, are these distinctions valid today? Similarly, is it still possible to speak of self-restriction and composure?, is this not likewise obsolete? And, put together, does not all this lead one to think, inevitably, in old-fashioned hierarchical terms, as though there ought to be something that rules and something ruled?
Perhaps. But only perhaps. For (1) is it not necessary to somehow distinguish between our immediate desires and the considerations that they may eventually arise in us. And if this is granted, (2) can we not say that there is something that, figuratively speaking, must be placed there where desires and considerations succeed to co-incide when they do to make possible a particular action? If we remove from it the démodé language, it is this – we think – that Plato means by the different “parts of the soul.” Plus he fancies too – should we blame him for it? – that (3) a desire that turns into an action is not as good as a desire that turns into an action after having been conveniently pondered. Therefore he regards the “rational part” of the soul as being not only fundamental for any action, but also the one that somehow ought to take the lead in it.
The etymology of the term sophrosyne confirms our guess. Sophrosyne is connected to φρήν (phren). Phren is the “midriff” or the “chest,” which the Ancient Greeks understood to be the “seat” of “mental activity,” of the “mind” and the “spirit.” Thus φρoντίζω (phrontizo) means “to consider, reflect, worry, be concerned”; φρονέω (phroneo), “to be minded, think, and be wise”; φρόνιμος (phronimos), “sensible, wise”; and ἄφρων (aphron), to be “out of one’s mind, foolish.” The connection to the chest is important. In contrast, νοέω (noeo) is “to meditate, observe, think, devise, have in mind”; and νόος/νοῦς (noos/nous) the “mind” in that sense. In this case the connection is to sight and, by extension, to the fact of having something present in the mind as if it were visible to it, including the capacity to foresee something in the sense of having some kind of purpose about it. Consequently, it is not difficult to suppose a scenario in which one:
(i) feels (in the chest) the desire to attack an enemy
(ii) figures out (with the mind) a plan for it
(iii) feels (in the chest), by realising it and hence thinking it (with the mind), that the moment to launch the attack has come;
(iv) launches the attack with the cooperation of desire and reason.
This is an example of a sophrosyne act.
On Christian Asceticism
Christian asceticism is entirely different from Ancient Greek sophrosyne and from the Hellenistic ἐπιμέλεια ἑαυτοῦ (epimeleia eautou) or “care of oneself.” For these are about restricting rationally something that was never viewed in Greece as being bad per se. Conversely, Christian asceticism is about repressing something considered evil. The passions of the body and soul, in both cases.
Greek culture knew that the passions cannot be, and indeed should not be, repressed or ruled out: they just need to be ruled (rationally), in the sense that we will immediately explain. Conversely, Christianity needs them to run free so as to be in position of redeeming and/or repressing them, depending on the circumstances. Were it not for our evil and uncontrolled inclinations, and for the fact that we never succeed in giving them up no matter how hard we try, Christ’s saving role would be superfluous, and so too would be the mediation of the Church as Christ’s representative on earth; plus Christ’s own passion, which he himself voluntarily underwent to redeem humankind from its sins, shows that, for Christianity, passions are the “engine” of human history (to paraphrase Marx and Engels).
Plato’s Educational Ethics
As we saw in a previous post, the “good” is in Plato that which everything is moved by and that which is natural for it to aspire to, since it is both that towards which its ἔρως (eros, “desire”) inclines itself and that which attracts it. Thus, in the Symposium (one of Plato’s most beautiful dialogues), Diotima says: οἱ ἄνθρωποι τἀγαθοῦ ἐρῶσιν (hoi anthropoi tagathou erosin), “all men desire the good.”
Furthermore, the fact that our desires can be – as Plato often insists – rationally ruled without being ruled out, only means that they can be rationally assessed and channelled. For even though we desire the good, the good, as an “idea” (εἶδος eidos), belongs in the reason. And it is the latter – the reason – that can be educated. Educating it therefore amounts to affirm our desires’ natural tendency towards the good and to help them to fully reach it. Again, only in this way it is possible to educate: by presupposing that we are not only in disposition to learn about the “good,” but also to desire it. Plato’s ethics is all about this.
Responding to an Objection
Despite its theoretical rigour, Plato’s thought on these matters has not gone unchallenged in the history of Western thought. Arguably, the finest objection to it come from Socrates’s student Xenophon, who puts forward two interrelated arguments: first, one may know what is good and wish something bad instead; second, one may know what is good, wish it, and yet do something bad all the same.
Yet in the 18th century Moses Mendelssohn responded to Xenophon maintaining – as Fred Beiser recalls in a very recommendable book, titled Diotima’s Children – that “the efficacy of an incentive is proportionate to the quantity of good [in question], the quantity of our knowledge of it, and the speed with which the knowledge acts,” so that “[a]lthough we might have a clear and distinct knowledge of some good […], it might be the case that we have an obscure or confused knowledge of a greater good […], or that the force of custom and habit works so swiftly that we do not take the time to think over all the options and their consequences.”(*) But then too, argues Mendelssohn, when we chose to do something bad rather than of good, and when we wish to do some good but happen to do something bad instead, we act out of ignorance, as Socrates had it.
A Note on Ancient-Greek Homoeroticism
The view that we ultimately desire the good, and thereby that which is perfect, explains Ancient-Greek homoeroticism, which was, above all, a statement (like the French structuralist school has taught us to interpret all Ancient-Greek cultural phenomena, from sacrifice to tragedy): the statement that eros needed neither be primarily linked to fertility nor be thereby subjected to heterosexuality, that instead of serving man’s instinctive passions, it could be stirred by the Apollonian qualities demanded from all Greek citizens. Due to the division of labour of its war economy, homoeroticism was the only means to achieve this ideal in Ancient Greece, where women did not generally take part in the public life of the polis, and thus were not regarded as citizens. In such context a citizen loving another citizen meant to love according to reason, i.e. making of the character and personal qualities of a lover the object of desire, instead of desiring anyone out of bodily attraction.
Nietzsche Upside Down
Interestingly, Nietzsche – who is not the first modern author to remember the Greeks: Winckelmann, Schiller, Hölderlin, and Schelling had done it before him – always avoids mentioning Ancient-Greek homoeroticism. He does not like it. He cannot like it. For he is seduced by Schopenhauer, who – in a poor reading of Kant – opposes the world made out of blind will and lowest drives, to how we ideally represent it.(**) Schopenhauer and his Buddhist rapture – and, ultimately too, Schopenhauer’s dark Christian unconscious.
Willing to rebel himself against a number of things: Christian asceticism, bourgeoise hypocrisy, and Prussian order – against which a good number of German philosophers and poets had already rebelled – Nietzsche mistook them all for Apollo, to whose temperance he opposed a likewise misunderstanding of Dionysian frenzy, for neither was Dionysos in Greece the god of unrestricted affirmative will, nor was only Apollo the god of measure. And it is mostly through Nietzsche – with Freud’s permission – that the dialectics of the repression of the will and its wild affirmation (one just needs to substitute desire for will) has become one of the uncritically-assumed frameworks of contemporary thought.
Now, Nietzsche’s Dionysos opposes not only what Nietzsche himself fancies as Apollo but also Socrates and, more exactly, Diotima, whose correlation between eros and the good Nietzsche identifies, it would seem, with philosophical cowardice and effeminateness, ignoring that Dionysos himself, far from being the virile god Nietzsche wants to believe and to make us believe, was seen as “effeminate” in Ancient-Greek culture – thus his bynames: “the womanly one” (Aeschylus), “the womanly stranger” (Euripides), etc. But Nietzsche is too masculine and untamed in his thought to notice it; and thereby he, the critic of all illusions, paradoxically takes a spurious, capricious representation for reality.
Back to Plato and the Greeks
Nietzsche, therefore, fell into Schopenhauer’s trap. And it would seem we have fallen into Nietzsche’s. Will we ever step out of it? It is most unlikely, as far as we do not go back to think with Plato and the Ancient Greeks and, more broadly, with all those philosophers we pretend to have overcome without ever reading them – on behalf of Nietzsche but also Marx, whose dialectic materialism leaves little room for anything beyond the criticism of the given and its economic infra-structure, and pragmatism and utilitarianism, with their reduction of all thought to exchange and convenience.
For philosophy is about one sole thing: how we see things when we see them through such and such ideas, and which ideas allow us to see things in a more rich and complex way. It is not about personal opinions, shared conceptual fashions, partisan ideological disputes, rules established beforehand forever, or whatever it may be in the absence of any rules… It is about thinking with as much “clarity and distinctness” as possible (Descartes) – hence too about the “patience of the concept” (Hegel).
Now, whether we like it or not, philosophy’s roots are Greek, and a plant cannot live without roots: they are not the plant’s past, but that which brings the plant its nutrients.
And Yet…
Is it not that dreaming again with the Greeks, or with anything extra-modern for that matter, is as illusory as it is untimely? This is the final aspect of the taboo, a taboo that goes, therefore, far beyond the modern rejection of Plato. We will write on it soon, and show why it is because of it, for instance, that Deleuze dismissed the late Foucault.
(*) Frederick C. Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 216.
(**) We shall return to the poorness of Schopenhauer’s reading of Kant in a future post, in which we will also criticise today’s not-less poor “anti-correlationist” interpretation of Kant.
CONTINUED HERE
Detail of the Statue of Apollo at the Temple of Zeus in Olympia