from Socrates himself, that eros or “erotic love” is the only thing that he real y understands!
A review of the egregious flaws of logic in the dialogue Alcibiades, which Plato obviously intended to be cross-referenced with
Symposium, attests to the truth of many of Alcibiades charges that Socrates is actual y a Great Deceiver and Seducer – a satyr playing
enchanting flute tunes. With reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s
analysis of Apollonian and Dionysian archetypes in The Birth of
Tragedy, I work to undermine Nietzsche’s own view of ‘Socrates’ as an Apollonian figure responsible for the degeneration of Dionysian
dramatic art. Instead, I interpret the closing of Symposium as a call for a new art form, namely Philosophy, which would strike a
dynamic balance between the Dionysian and the Apollonian.
Alcibiades compares being seized by Socrates’ philosophy
to being bitten by a poisonous snake. In ancient Greece, snake
poison was among a class of dangerous medicinal cures known as
pharmakea. The person who administers a pharmakon – which is a poison but can be a cure in the right dosage and at the right time
– is a pharmakeus, a “witch doctor” or “black magician.” Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s treatment of this question in his essay “Plato’s
Pharmacy”, I build on what has already been elaborated to push
beyond where even Derrida dares to go. I conclude by suggesting that
Plato’s entire philosophical project may be a pharmakon – a poison that is also a cure, and that the history of occidental rationalism may have been set in motion as one man’s attempt to deliberately mislead
people so as to force them to develop certain latent mental faculties.
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In the end, I return to the question of Plato’s Homeric context,
situating his opposition to the poetry and art of his time in the
context of its all-pervasive mimesis – an unreflective and imitative embodiment of traditional views, customs, and values. In light
of the essay’s argument as a whole, one is led toward the startling
realization that far from being an enemy of art, this man who began
his career as a tragic poet, was combating an uncreative and stagnant
traditional ‘art’ form with an avant-garde Art of his own creation.
Philosophy, as it began with Plato, is a fundamental y different endeavor than the naively earnest Truth-seeking of Heraclitus, or
Parmenides, or any number of Oriental sages.
1. The Historical Backdrop of Platonic Thought
One cannot understand Plato without recognizing his complex
appropriation of Heraclitus and Parmenides, and to that end, it is
necessary to first consider the doctrines of these two thinkers in
their own right. Yet in order to appreciate the dawn of Philosophy
among the pre-Socratics we need to take the even more preliminary
step of briefly envisioning the Homeric age of the Greeks, which
stands as its backdrop. This will also be important for our ultimate
evaluation of Plato’s motives for composing his dialogues in the
diabolical y deceptive manner that he did.
In Greece of the second millennium BC, we see a culture
completely absorbed in an ancient mythology whose origins are lost
in the dark ages of man. It is a grim mythology where the might
of heroes makes right, and man is always trying to find reprieve
from the jealousy and wrath of feuding gods by offering sacrifices
of animals and riches of gold and jewels up to appease them. As is
well known the pantheon of ancient Greek Gods was a dramatical y
exaggerated reflection of the realm of mortals, replete with sexual
and feudal intrigue, murder and war. More disturbing is that,
especial y in the Iliad, this human drama has a particularly soulless 32
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quality.3 In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes notes that Greek words like psyche, phrenes and noos that much later develop the connotation of “mind”,
“heart” and “soul” are rendered anachronistical y as such by modern
translators. They have a more physical sense in the older language
of the Iliad. No one, neither mortal nor god, could escape Fate, and a ‘god’ intervenes whenever a mortal must make a crucial decision.
Jaynes argues that we would be making a mistake to interpret
these incidents as metaphorical, for the subtlety involved in the
use of metaphor was not yet grasped by the Greeks of the late 2nd
millennium BC. Rather, we ought to take the absolute power of fate
and the constant intercession of the gods as evidence of a startling
lack of a sense of personal agency and rational deliberation.4 The
ultimate Fate consigned to archaic Greek man was death conceived
of in the earliest traditions as a passage to Hades, the eternal abode of shades. It was an underworld of shadows where good and bad
would wander equal y bereft. In light of this woeful end the only
purpose of life, brilliantly fulfilled by heroes, was to win a fame
that would promise immortality through dramatic deeds worthy
of remembrance in the songs of poets. In short, we find a society
completely mesmerized by its reflection in the distorting mirror of
its own mythology.
For six centuries, from at least the Trojan War in 1230 BC to
Hesiod’s Theogony in 650 BC, we see essential y no change in the mythic world-view of the Greeks. Hesiod’s “Theogony”, which
according to Jonathan Barnes had “no serious rivals”, is a genealogical story that sees the world proceed from Chaos and Earth. On the one
side Chaos gives birth to Night and Erebos, which in turn produce
aether and day. On the other side, Earth produces heaven, mountain
and seas, which in turn give rise to a series of Gods (Oceanus,
Thethys, Theia, Hyperion, Kreios, Eurybie) that in union with each
other produce the Rivers, Sun, Moon, and Dawn. Final y, the union
3 Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (New York: Mariner Books, 1990), 69-71.
4 Ibid., 67-84.
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of Dawn and Astraios (a grandchild of sea and earth) produces the
wind and stars.5 There were other less significant, perhaps more
natural, cosmological speculations contemporary to the one above
recounted by Hesiod. However, as classicist M.L. Mil s notes, these
speculations were very primitive:
...physical speculation existed in Hesiod’s time. It seems,
however, to have been limited to the interpretation of man’s
immediate environment. Man is earth and water. Thunder and
lightening are somehow caused by wind. Rain and moisture are
drawn up from the rivers [by a god] and conveyed across land
by the wind. Ask what the stars are, and the only answer is that
they are children of Eos and Astraios. Ask about night and day:
Night is the daughter of Chaos, the sister and wife of Erebos, the
mother of Aither and Day, death and sleep, and various others.
Night and Day go in and out of a certain house, in turn, crossing
a great bronze threshold, at appointed times. What is the sun
made of, or makes it rise and set? No answer.6
By “Philosophy” I understand most basical y an inquiry into the
Truth concer
ning the ultimate nature of reality or the structure of existence [Metaphysics/Epistemology] in order to discover the
principles of the good life in accordance with this Truth, or how people may live ‘rightly’ rather than ‘wrongly’ [Ethics/Politics]. On
that definition, the first metaphysical and ethical thinker of ancient Greece, whose own work has come down to us, is Heraclitus of
Ephesus. All we have left of his writings are Fragments. 7 Piecing them together, we arrive at something like the following worldview.
The thought of Heraclitus begins in a rejection of the folk
understanding of the polytheistic gods and traditional mythological
5 Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (New York: Penguin Books, 1971), 203-204.
6 M.L. Mil s, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford: Carendon Press, 1971), 204-205.
7 Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
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answers to fundamental cosmological and ethical questions, like
how the world was created, why, how we should live with each other
in it, and what lies beyond it. More daringly, he rejects the authorities that embodied these views and the regimes that sanctioned them
(and whose rule was sanctioned by them) – i.e. the priesthood and all contemporary forms of government (be it the oppression of the
people by the undeserving few or the tyranny of the mob over the
deserving few). Heraclitus did not reject these pat answers and
schemes in order to replace them with new ones. Rather, he chose
to leave fundamental questions open, either by evoking a mysterious
terminus to understanding, or by offering deliberately contradictory
answers that try to force one beyond the limits of rational thinking.
In this first metaphysical vision of the Greeks, the world is
comprehended as an abstract process of Becoming, whose closest
tangible analogy is that of an Eternal Fire. This Becoming is one
with Being, as the manifested expression of its ineffable potentiality, and also as one with the Nothingness of Death, which is what Being
would be reduced to if Becoming did not shelter it. Again, in this
we do not see the world as an effect of some primordial cause or
causes (as it would be portrayed in Mythology or Religion), rather
it has always come forth from itself and always wil . The Eternal Fire is a Oneness that is Plurality and all of the discordant strife of the dimension of plurality generatively conceals a deeper harmony of
cosmic communion. The right-order of the cosmos – the Logos –
is an expression of a supreme Intelligence that Heraclitus cal s “the
Wise One” and that is the Consciousness of Being.
This Metaphysics is the ground for an ethics that revolves
around Conscience. Heraclitus rejects moral Law, which in his time
was intimately bound up with ritualism. The notion of Conscience
is fundamental y different from morality or religious duty and is
absent from the most ancient Greek Mythology. It is concerned with
the greater concept of “soul”, which is equal y absent from ancient
mythologies that speak only of a “spirit” more or less equivalent
with the breath ( pneuma). For Heraclitus, the phenomenological experience of the world’s presence nakedly shining-forth like an 35
lovers of sophia
eternal revelation (a Sun “which never sets”) should compel one to
thoughts, words and deeds that accord with each other in a perfect
honesty that personal authenticity. Human beings should not
deceive themselves and each other by hiding in their own fanciful
thoughts and opinions. This would be an affront to Being, which
lays itself out before us without reservation. Yet precisely because
the Sun of Truth is so scintil ating in its presence, it hides itself by making us want to turn away so as not to be blinded.
Ultimately, Being is even one with us (our source and end), and
moreover, since it is conscious and intelligent, there is a sense in
which it perceives our deceitfulness from within. This discerning
presence of Being within us, which perceives our own fol y of deceit
before it, is the Conscience. We sense it as an almost visceral feeling of inner discord (a burning of the heart) because the right order is
deep within ourselves, but our lack of self-transparency blocks its
manifestation. By the same token, if we open and clear conscience
through authenticity, the agency of Being within us will align us with the right-order that it sustains throughout the cosmos. Thus at the
dawn of Philosophy, we have a metaphysical truth that consists in
the phenomenological experience of the world’s presencing, and an
ethical notion of the opening of conscience through a truthfulness
synonymous with ruthless honesty before oneself and others.
Responding directly to the Heracliteans, in his Way of Truth8
Parmenides of Elea follows a profound urge to sever Being from
Becoming, regarding the former alone as an all-pervasive “One”
that is inherently posited by consciousness while denying the latter
as total il usion. “Thinking and the thought ‘it is’ are the same” –
this is his basic axiom. Parmenides also severs the mind from the
body and urges us to use the former in order to transcend the latter’s depraved delusions and know the unseen ideal. Here, for the first
time, we have an epistemological conception of ‘Truth’, one that
consists in a knowing subject and a non-sensible object from which
it is separated by the veil of il usion that is the sensible realm. This discrepancy between what lies before one’s eyes and what exists in
8 Parmenides of Elea, Fragments (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).
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an unseen reality within the grasp of Reason, opens the door to the
dialectical arguments or proofs which come to characterize Western
Philosophy after Parmenides.
That Parmenides’ move is indeed an idealist and rationalizing
revolution is attested to by the fact that it effects a fundamental
change in the pseudo-scientific speculations of the Pre-Socratics.
Before Parmenides these “natural” speculations were implicitly
grounded in a phenomenological conception of Truth epitomized
by Heraclitus. What is was taken for granted as ‘true’ so that all of the elements conjured up to explain the creation and composition
of the world were transmutations of various substances actual y
existing in the world of experience: water, earth, fire and air in their manifestations as primordial oceans and mud or as the fiery stars
and aether. We see this in Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and
Xenophanes.
Suddenly, after Parmenides philosophical thought is redefined
in terms of abstraction. Zeno’s tract of Paradoxes consists of a set of ad absurdum proofs rational y demonstrating that common-sense phenomenological notions of ‘space and time’ do not possess
absolute reality and because what is relative does not possess
‘Being’ – they possess no reality at al . Anaxagoras tel s us of eternal qualities which cannot be seen (or hardly even conceived) but
which nonetheless give rise to the forms of the world by impressing
themselves upon the primordial mass of Chaos through motion.
Empedocles banishes the Intellect as unnecessary in this
process,
replacing it with the “random combination of elements of which
some are purposive and capable of life”.
From here it is only a short step to the apex of idealist
abstraction in Atomism. Responding to Zeno’s paradox of motion
Democritus argues that for there to be Being at all it must not be
infinitely divisible because otherwise it would col apse into Not-
Being. Thus Being is reduced to a plurality of indivisible units.
Democritus explains that these “atoms” hover in eternal motion in
infinite space, forming things by “purposeless causality”. We do not
perceive much of what is perceptible (in the atomic realm) because
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our senses are not suited for it. Our impressions are mediated, they
do not reach our eyes directly but only via refraction and distortion
by air atoms, our eyes then also further modify the image. Similarly,
sound is a delusion that arises from the rapid motion of air atoms.
Both the proto-Platonic metaphysics of Anaxagoras and the proto-
Aristotelian empiricism of Democritus share common roots in
Parmenides’ conception of an ideal dimension beyond the il usory world of the senses but within the grasp of the intellect.
2. Crafting the Forms Between Being & Nothingness
Aristotle tel s us that in his youth Plato studied with a Heraclitean
teacher and that he maintained the Heraclitean world-view that he
accepted at that time throughout his life. According to Aristotle, it
is based upon an acceptance of the Heraclitean view pertaining to
the sensible world of becoming, that Plato proposed his Theory of
Forms. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle writes of his own teacher: For as a young man Plato was original y an associate of Cratylus
and Heraclitean opinions, to the effect that all perceptible things
were in a permanent state of flux and that there was no knowledge
of them, and these things he also later on maintained.9
Now the starting point for those who came up with the Theory of
Forms was a conviction of the truth of the Heraclitean considerations
to the effect that all perceptible objects are in a permanent state of flux, so that a condition on the very possibility of knowledge and
understanding was the existence in addition to the perceptible ones