However, he notes that in other dialogues such as Statesman, Plato does acknowledge the double meaning of pharmakon, though for
Plato, even in its ‘positive’ sense, a pharmakon is only a medicine to be employed when all else fails and the stakes are life or death.
Most interestingly, Derrida notes how though Plato seems to insist
on taking pharmakon negatively, he often describes Socrates as a pharmakeus or “sorcerer”, one who administers the pharmakon.
Derrida quotes one such instance as follows:
Cebes: Probably even in us there is a little boy who has these
childish terrors. Try to persuade him not to be afraid of death as
though it were a bogey. –What you should do, said Socrates, is to
say a magic spell over him every day until you have charmed his
fears away. –But, Socrates, said Simmias, where shall we find a
magician who understands these spel s now that you are leaving
us?70
It is very significant that this quote comes from Phaedo. For, as Derrida notes, the supposed ‘hemlock’ that Socrates drinks in
70 Ibid.,
Phaedo: 77e.
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the death scene is referred to by Plato in only general terms – as
a “pharmakon.” Derrida does not clearly draw out the implications of all of this, limiting himself instead to subtle suggestions. As the conclusion of my interpretation, I dare to suggest that the dramatic
character Socrates, as he appears in the dialogues, was indeed
conceived by Plato as a kind of pharmakeus, a “witch doctor” or black magician, who administers the pharmakon of Platonic idealism –
the wel spring of the entire history of occidental rationalism with all of its consequences.
Plato removes himself from this shady figure because he knows
that in one sense he is poisoning people, but only in order to cure
them of a far greater evil: the blinding epidemic of Homeric myth.
In his study Preface to Plato, Erick Havelock interprets the Republic as an attack by Plato on the poetic experience of his time as mimesis (imitation or simulation [of reality]).71 Plato is obsessed with the
psychology of the audience’s response to the arts and he uses the
word mimesis to describe the entire “poetic experience”, thereby refusing to differentiate between different genres or the role of
creator (poet), actor (reciter), and audience (listener-viewer). In his time, poetry was something very different from what it is today. Fifth century Greece was a “semi-literate” society. The new technology
of writing had been invented for some time. However, only certain
elites were literate. Even this limited literacy was not universalized.
There were different styles of writing, and spelling and mechanics
were somewhat arbitrary. Though the new technology had already
been conceived, the people of an essential y tribal society were still in the unreflective mindset of the oral tradition – one that had been
ingrained in the cultural consciousness for thousands of years.
Amidst this setting, poetry was not the thought-provoking art that we know it as today. More practical than aesthetic, it acted as a means to preserve and pass on cultural and moral authority and as a giant
encyclopedia and history, when no other means existed. Havelock
sees the passages in the Iliad and Odyssey that descriptively enact practical tasks such as shipbuilding, the historical documentation of
71 Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Belknap Press, 1982).
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the “catalogue of ships”, or the behavioral paradigms exemplified by
Greek heroes as the primary content of those works, with the epic
narrative as a secondary means of delivering the former into the
consciousness of society. This means of deliverance is particularly
potent when one considers how in the enactment of epic poetry, the
message is literal y embodied in the dramatic physical movements
of the bard who recites and its paradigms are thereby hardwired into
the physiology of the audience, thus literal y composing the social
fabric. Contemporary rap music of the “gangsta” variety might not
be a bad analogy.
for this, a very potent pharmakon was required. While Heraclitus and Parmenides understood the truth for themselves and condemned the
Homeric tradition, they were not concerned about freeing masses of
people from it. Their cryptic styles of writing make it clear enough
that they in fact intended to conceal their pearls of wisdom from
the sight of swine. The historical Socrates, Plato’s teacher, did try to shake Athens out of Homer’s spell and was swatted dead as a gadfly.
The stakes were indeed life or death, and so the administration of
the pharmakon seemed to Plato to be justified. He intended the exoteric content of his texts to be directly engaged by the intellectuals of his and following ages, while at the same time he hid an esoteric
teaching between the lines more thoroughly than Heraclitus ever did
– dropping a hint here and there for those initiated.
In conclusion, I will consider one final hint, the only other
one that belongs in the same class as “...I believe Plato was il ”. It is also from the Phaedo, when after a lifetime of condemning art as mimetic, in his last days Socrates has taken to writing poetry, because as he explains to Cebes:
I did not compose [the poetry] to rival either [Evenus] or his
poetry...I did it in the attempt to discover the meaning of certain
dreams, and to clear my conscience, in case this was the art
which I had been told to practice. It’s like this, you see. In the
course of my life I have often had the same dream, appearing
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in different forms at different times, but always saying the same
thing: “Socrates, practice and cultivate the arts [ musike].” In the past I used to think that it was impelling and exhorting me
to do what I was actual y doing; I mean that the dream, like a
spectator encouraging a runner in a race, was urging me on to
do what I was doing already, that is, practicing the arts; because
philosophy is the greatest of the arts, and I was practicing it.
But when my trial had taken place, and this god’s festival was
delaying my execution, I decided that, in case it should be this
popular form of art that the dream intended me to practice, I
ought to compose and not disobey... I reflected that a poet...
ought to work on stories, not discourses; and I was no story-
writer. So it was the stories that I knew and had handy which I
versified – Aesop’s, the first ones that occurred to me.72
Like the “...I believe Plato was il ” comment, we find the same
juxtaposition of an earthshaking revelation delivered in an ‘Oh and
by the way...’ tone. Socrates, the paragon of Philosophy’s rationalistic opposition to artistic mimesis is on the verge of death, and what!?
– he doubts whether his entire life has been a betrayal of his cal ing
?!?! And he’s going to make up for it – how?! – by versifying a few of Aesop’s fables ?!?!
The keen reader should pause here with the same heart-sinking
feeling as Plato’s other billion dol ar clue demands. Something is
very wrong with this picture. It is a terribly tragic image, precisely because of the benign tone with which Plato presents
it. It is a sad,
even miserably forlorn scene. The ‘philosophy of Socrates’ is a lie that he has been living from one dialogue to the next... a noble lie, but a lie nonetheless. His calling was to be a great artist; Plato is one. His metaphysics is a pharmakon, one whose side effects have only just begun to wear off... but from the beginning, the poison hid the cure
within itself. Plato’s metaphysics does not need to be deconstructed,
for it has in the course of history always already been working itself as its own dialectical reversal.
72 Hamilton,
Collected Dialogues of Plato, Phaedo: 60e–61b.
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BUILDING THE THEATER OF BEING
According to the well-established scholastic tradition,
Aristotle views the human being as one type of being
among others – a rational species of animal – and he
thinks that merely human affairs, such as Politics, are
neither first in the order of being nor first in the order of knowledge.
In the context of the Nicomachean Ethics, this view is strongly supported by two passages in Book VI, Chapter 7. The first one
reads: “...it is absurd for anyone to believe that politics or practical judgment is the most serious kind of knowledge, if a human being
is not the highest thing in the cosmos.”1 Closely following it is this passage, which explicitly asserts that a human is not the “highest”
being: “And if it is the case that a human being is the best in
comparison to the other animals, that makes no difference, for there
are also other things that are much more divine in their nature than
a human being, such as, most visibly the things out of which the
cosmos is composed.”2 These passages suggest that Aristotle failed
to recognize any fundamental ontological difference between the
being of humans and that of other beings, no matter how celestial y
rarefied.
Nevertheless, in what follows, I argue that Aristotle already
had the intellectual resources to conceive of humans not as beings
alongside other non-human beings within the world, but as beings
1 Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (New York: Penguin Books, 1971), 1141a21-23.
2 Ibid., 1141a21-23.
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whose socio-political existence is constitutive of a ‘God’ that is not only the sustainer (as is usual y thought), but also the creator of
the world (in the sense of perpetual creation). In fact, whether he
realizes it or not, at times Aristotle seems to be doing just that and such a reading is required in order to resolve the basic contradiction in his system.
Aristotle’s metaphysics is riddled with a deep internal
contradiction. A God whose nature is pure thinking on thinking has no place in a world constituted by beings defined as substances that
are each a particular this. God cannot be a unique this on account of his thinking for two reasons. First, man also has thinking as
his essence. Aristotle proposes two distinct conceptions of human
thinking. One of them, which more ordinarily characterizes
human intellectual activity, seems wed to biological structure in
a functionalist manner. While in this respect human thinking is
different from that of God, we will see that Aristotle has another
conception of human thinking that mirrors divine contemplation,
and it is the latter faculty that Aristotle takes to be essential for
human beings as such – even though it is rarely exercised. Second,
since Matter is merely the potentiality for a specific form – and a
substance is specifical y formed matter – if God is pure Actuality
then God is all forms and not any given specific form. This would mean that God, as thinking on thinking, is not a substance (at least
in the same sense as other substances), and thus is not subject to the four causes of substances. This raises the further problem of how an
immortal human soul whose essence mirrors that of God as eternal
thinking, and thus by definition is not subject to the four causes
of substance, can be co-mingled with a body that is substantial y
defined by these causes.
Aristotle needs two premises in order to restore coherence
to his Metaphysics. These two premises are: 1) God is identical
to the essence of Man; 2) God is not only the sustainer, but also
the creator, of all beings. This would resolve the metaphysical
contradictions discussed above. God and man could share the same
essence, and yet man would have a substantial form whereas God
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would not, because God would simply be the essence of Man or an
‘interiority’ (conceived non-spatial y) of Man – a level of being more fundamental than that of the human substantial form. God could
be conceived of within a world-picture of substances, since God is
beyond the four causes defining Being ( ousia) only in that (as the essence of Man) He grounds the four causes defining each and every
substance as a particular this.
Even Aristotle’s conception of “the gods” does not compromise
this interpretation. This hierarchical view of degrees of being
‘human’ – culminating in “god-like” philosophers – does, however,
establish a radical inequality between citizens in respect to their
relationship to civil law. Certain of Aristotle’s remarks on techne qua art and scientific craft suggest that these “god-like” thinkers whose
task it is to set the tone of the polis, to establish its architectonic, are the master craftsmen responsible for building something like a
‘theater of Being.’ Their exercise of the active intellect may be seen as a condition for the possibility of pure potentialities in Nature
manifesting as the beings that we encounter in our world.
1. ‘God’ as the Creative Intellect of Man
Before going on to specifical y treat God and the essence of Man, let
us review Aristotle’s notion of how substance is defined in terms of
the four causes, and in terms of potentiality and actuality. Aristotle’s metaphysics is a teleological one. It attempts to understand Being by
discerning the causes of beings. By ‘cause’ ( aition) Aristotle actual y means the ‘explainer’, ‘why’ or ‘because’ of substances. The word
should not be confused with its meaning in the modern conception
of chains of material causes and effects manifesting as point-events.
At 1013a24–1013b29 in his Metaphysics and 194b16–195a27 in his Physics, Aristotle defines the four causes of a substance as: 1) the
“form” ( eidos) of the thing, which is not simply its shape but also its essence, its capacity for the use for which it was designed; 2) the “final cause” ( telos) or the actual usage that is the end or “that-for-the-83
lovers of sophia
sake-of-which” ( to hou heneka) it was designed and which is beyond the choice of even an intelligent organism (we can however choose
to improperly fulfill our ends); 3) the “efficient cause” ( arche tes kineseos), that which is responsible for the movement of a substance, either from place to place or its movement in place (i.e. change, for
example, the turning color of leaves); 4) the “matter” ( hule) that has the capacity to receive form, that cannot exist apart from some form
because it is merely a potentiality for a certain form.
In Book 7 ( Zeta) of his Metaphysics, considered by many to be the core of Aristotle’s thought, Aristotle argues that substance is
wh
at is ontological y basic or ‘most real’. He categorizes four different candidates that claim to be “substantial”, finding that the essence, the universal and the genus of beings all satisfy its ‘whatness’ and can be collectively referred to as Form, while its aspect as a subject captures its ‘thisness’ and can be referred to as its Matter. Final y, he unifies these aspects of substance by equating Matter with “Potentiality”
and Form with “Actuality”. Both are further divisible into two types:
Matter is a first potentiality (this would be the clay of a bowl);
Form is the first actuality (the bowl being appropriately shaped by
a potter) and also the second potentiality (for use); the End or For-
Which is a second actuality (the bowl actual y being used). In sum, a
“substance” is now defined as: matter that has a certain form or end
that gives it the cohesiveness that is so important for it being a this.
There are two types of substances: 1) those made by nature ( phusis), which each have their own inner teleology, and those made by craft
( techne), which require human initiative.
Now, bearing the terms of the Aristotelian definition of
substance in mind, let us turn to examine God in its light. Aristotle’s idea of ‘God’ appears to differ radical y from the way we ordinarily
conceive of God. He is the ultimate sustainer and ultimate good, but on most interpretations he does not seem to create the world as a
product of techne (craft). God seems to explain the world not as an efficient cause, but as its final cause. It is what the whole world is towards or ‘for the sake of’. God does not act on the world. Rather,
he only thinks and his thinking is not even about the world but
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about himself. He thinks on his thinking. We see this in 1074b34
of the Metaphysics. Thus Aristotle’s Prime Mover imparts end-
directedness unto beings in the sense that they strive to partake in
the eternity of his self-contemplation. In 415a27 of On the Soul we see how the threptic or “nutritive” soul reproduces to partake in the eternal and divine. The notion of reproduction as a means to the
eternity of a species composed of perishable individuals is also seen
at 731b18 of the Generation of Animals. In 279a25 of On the Heavens Aristotle claims that all things are for the sake of the eternity of God, we also see this at On the Soul 415a28. God himself is eternal on account of being completely actualized energeia, without any unfulfilled potential. Aristotle clearly states this in two vital passages at Metaphysics 1050b1-5,15-20 and 1071b20: