There is, I am afraid, no idea of the public intellectual in Plato, and no place for any such idea. Indeed, I am under the impression that there is no place for the idea of the public intellectual in any text written prior to the modern era. The idea of the public intellectual is, I would contend, a distinctly modern idea. It is an idea born in, and inseparable from, the Enlightenment. But as soon as we confront this fact, we recognize how important it is to begin any comprehensive reflection on the idea of the public intellectual by considering precisely the absence of that idea from premodern thought, and especially from Plato. For only thus will we begin to grasp the most important earlier conception of the political responsibilities and social consequences of the life of the mind—the conception against which the idea of the public intellectual rose up in antagonism, or as a replacement.
If we ask what takes the place, in Plato, of the idea of the public intellectual, we notice immediately that at the center of the Platonic stage is the idea, or rather the figure, of the citizen-philosopher, personified in Socrates. More precisely, Socrates, as immortalized in both Xenophon and Plato, is generally acknowledged to have been the first political philosopher, the founder of political philosophy. As such, Socrates is distinguished from his fellow citizens, from the poets, and above all from the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers—along with the Sophists, who followed eventually in the wake of these last. But what substantively distinguishes the Socratic from the pre-Socratic? What is a “philosopher,” in the strict Platonic sense, and why, according to the Platonic dialogues, were the philosophers and Sophists prior to Socrates not civic philosophers? What was it that Socrates initiated, as the first “political philosopher”?
We learn from the Platonic dialogues that philosophy in the strict sense arose when there emerged a quest to uncover the nature of the universe through unassisted reasoning, on the basis of evidence available to man as man. The philosophers sought the lasting causes of all things, particularly humanity and its doings. The philosophers meant to establish the true human good by clarifying those authentic needs whose genuine satisfaction constitute human flourishing. Despite the fact that some of the great pre-Socratics and their Sophist students may have played, from time to time, an active role as citizens and even as leaders in various cities, they were not citizen-philosophers. They were not political philosophers. Why not, or in what sense not?
The Platonic answer may be expressed in a nutshell as follows: the philosophic inquiry into nature as a whole, and into human nature as a part of the whole, convinced the pre-Socratics that the most fundamental beliefs on which any and all civic life must rest are in fact false illusions, having no basis in, and indeed contradicted by, the natural reality of things. In the words of Plato’s Athenian Stranger: “And indeed they declare that some small portion of the political art is in partnership with nature, but most is artificial, and thus the whole of legislation, whose establishments are not true, is not by nature, but artificial” (Laws 889d-e).
Now this perspective is, as the Athenian Stranger and his statesman-inter-locuter Kleinias stress, manifestly subversive of obedience to law. This outlook inevitably subjects its proponents—insofar as they and their doctrines become known—to the danger of understandable persecution, as corrupters of the city and of the family. It is therefore not surprising that, as the first great Sophist Protagoras stresses, in the Platonic dialogue of that name, all his predecessors “used covering wings,” “made concealments,” and “hid” their wisdom “behind veils” (Protagoras 316d6, 316e5). “I myself,” he adds, “have taken other precautions” (317b6–7). As the dialogue proceeds, Protagoras conveys his critique of political life only by way of a richly allegorical “myth.” Yet Protagoras proudly indicates that in this myth, and otherwise, he is much more open than were his great predecessors. And for this daring Protagoras paid a very heavy price. He apparently ended his life fleeing an Athenian court conviction for impiety, and the Athenians made his book on the gods the object of the first public book burning recorded in history. No writing of Protagoras survives, and, indeed, no writing of any Sophist or pre-Socratic philosopher has come down to us. The meager snippets and paraphrases that we do possess come largely from the works of Plato and Aristotle, and their commentators. We find the fullest and frankest presentations of some of the chief features of the anticivic arguments of the pre-Socratics in very special or peculiar texts: in Platonic passages where, in private conversations with Socrates, certain Sophists are so provoked by Socrates that they momentarily “spill the beans” or, perhaps more fully revealing, in Platonic passages where certain young citizens report arguments that they have heard from the Sophists—arguments that these youths find deeply troubling, powerfully attractive, or both.
Thus we find Plato’s brother Glaucon, in the second book of the Republic, elaborating a fuller version of the outlook introduced by the Sophist Thrasymachus in the first book. The Sophists argue, Glaucon reports, that the true nature of civic justice is nothing other than a social contract. The laws and mores that define civil society’s notions of right and wrong do not express what humans are naturally inclined toward, nor do humans find their natural fulfillment in following these moral laws. The moral rules are nothing more than artificial conventions, constructed over time by the mass of men who are individually weak and untalented. They seek through these rules to restrain one another’s natural, mutually exploitative pursuit of selfish goods, as well as to prevent the strong and gifted from exercising their natural capacity to flourish, by dominating or at least using the rest. Justice, or the restraint of the pursuit of one’s own true welfare in order to avoid injuring the welfare of others, is not intrinsically good for anyone, and indeed it blocks access to complete happiness for everyone; such behavior becomes qualifiedly good for the defective majority because it is a kind of mean between doing what is truly best—procuring happiness for oneself and one’s loved ones at the expense of others—and suffering what is worst, namely, injury or neglect at the hands of others who can better succeed in obtaining happiness for themselves and their loved ones. Clear testimony to the truth of this insight is seen in the fact that human beings everywhere reliably obey the laws only when the laws have sanctions—when people are rewarded for obedience and punished for disobedience. Strip a man of his standing in the community and his reputation for justice, including his fame for having made what are called “sacrifices” for a just cause; leave a man with nothing but his having acted justly, at the cost of the conventional rewards for justice—that is, with the loss of his reputation and fame, as well as his life and the security of his property and loved ones—and no one would honestly say that justice was good for such a man.
Furthermore, as Thrasymachus earlier contended, those who make and enforce the laws always do so with a strong bias in their own favor, partly avowed and partly hidden—often even from themselves. When appeal is made to “the city,” or to “the community,” or to the rule of law, as to something that transcends particular interest—when the country is held up as something for the sake of which each citizen ought to be ready to sacrifice himself and his personal interests—what is obscured is the fact that the city is not a natural, let alone an organic, unity. Every human society is composed of rulers and ruled, and the ruling group—be it the majority in a democracy or a minority, as in other regimes—acts as an alliance or a coalition of predominantly self-concerned beings standing over and against the ruled. Human society is surely not like an ant colony or a beehive. The laws or rules may apply to all, and of course claim to be in the interest of all or of the so-called public; but the laws are made and enforced with a view to the interest of the ruling class or group.
Glaucon’s eloquent restatement of the Thrasymachean position is supplemented and deepened by his brother Adeimantus, who stresses the moral incoherence of the typical arguments given by fathers in praise of justice. Adeimantus complains especially about the appeal fathers make to the providential gods, which shows that even or precisely those who preach justice do so, not on the grounds that justice is intrinsically good, but only on the grounds that it is backed up by great extrinsic rewards and punishments.
Civil society’s overwhelming dependence on religious belief, and the city’s preoccupation with worshiping, placating, and beseeching providential deities, is, according to the pre-Socratics, the most massive sign of the illusory character of civic consciousness (see Laws 889eff.). For natural science reveals no evidence whatsoever for such providential gods. On the contrary: natural science reveals a world governed by unchanging and will-less necessities.
These and kindred arguments stem from the so-called Sophists, those itinerant professional teachers of rhetoric who are in Plato the most obtrusive, politically speaking, of the pre-Socratic thinkers. The first man to apply to himself the term “Sophist,” in the sense which subsequently became famous, seems to have been Protagoras. In Plato’s presentation, Protagoras boasts that by thus naming and proclaiming himself, he is declaring openly the project that has been the covert agenda of a long series of duplicitous wise men among the Greeks, starting with Homer and Hesiod and continuing notably with the great lyric poet Simonides. While pretending, on the surface, to be reverent respecters and promoters of the pious tradition, these poets and their intellectual heirs have implanted in their writings a hidden teaching that seeks to woo the best young men of Greece away from allegiance to their elders, and to the ruling elites, to become instead admirers and disciples of the poets themselves, as the avatars of wisdom (Protagoras 316c–317c).
This amazingly bold declaration is muted considerably in response to Socrates’ rather demagogic questioning. In the first place, Protagoras distinguishes himself from other Sophists, who, he says, “corrupt the young” by teaching them science: Protagoras claims that he, in contrast, teaches a student only what the student comes to learn, namely, “good counsel in household affairs, so that he might best manage his own household; and also good counsel about civic affairs, so that he might gain the greatest power” (318d-e). When Protagoras accedes to Socrates’ apparently benign reformulation of this to mean a claim to teach “the political art” and “to make men good citizens” (319a), Socrates springs his trap—laying down a challenge to Protagoras in the name of the basic principles of Athenian democracy. For in democracy every citizen is already presupposed to be a good citizen, and to know sufficiently the political art; elitist, not to say oligarchic, claims to teach special political wisdom, for large sums of money, are highly suspicious. Protagoras seeks to elude this Socratic net by retreating into the beautiful haze of an allegorical myth, which Protagoras then interprets to mean that all he does is teach the sons of the rich a little, tiny supplement to what they have already learned from their parents and schoolteachers—but, Protagoras must remind his clientele in the audience, this supplement is of course worth the enormous sums of money Protagoras charges. In other words, the sly young plebeian Socrates very quickly, and very easily, gets the great, old, but insufficiently cautious Protagoras on the ropes of incoherence. (Or at least that is the story Socrates rushes to tell outsiders immediately after the private indoor confrontation with the great Sophist. For we learn of Socrates’ encounter with Protagoras only through overhearing a narration by Socrates to several nameless, idle, rich, and gossipy associates.) This and the rest of the conversation between the pesky young Socrates and the evasive and increasingly irritated old Protagoras allow us to discern clearly enough Protagoras’s true agenda, an agenda that can be said to be more or less typical of the most prominent Sophists. Protagoras takes over the personally liberating theoretical insights of his poetic and philosophic predecessors, and establishes, on this basis, a practical teaching that guides the exploitative or at any rate self-aggrandizing careers of active political men. In the process, Protagoras wins for himself a comfortable fortune, and a vast fame—as the thinker who has had the manly daring to be the first to speak out as an independent teacher or Sophist.
But as the dialogue proceeds, we see that Socrates leads us to raise this searching question about Protagoras: Does not his passionate pride in his fame as a man of courage, as a Promethean spirit, indicate that his concern to be manly, and to be known as courageous, is not strictly controlled by his prudent wisdom about his own true good? In other words, does not Protagoras slip back into—or has he perhaps never fully escaped—the belief in a virtue which transcends prudent self-concern? But is such a virtue intelligible on the basis of the critique of civic virtue which Protagoras has taken over from the pre-Socratic philosophers? Does devotion to such virtue not entail an exaggerated conception of his own importance in the great scheme of things?
These questions are prompted not only by Socrates’ stunning proof of Protagoras’s self-contradiction on the issue of the unity of virtue, and especially on the separability of courage from wisdom or prudence; the questions are also prompted by the juxtaposition Socrates creates between the career of Protagoras as a Sophist, and the career of what one is tempted to call the Socratic Sophist—Simonides. For in the latter part of the dialogue, Socrates celebrates the sophistic wisdom of the poet Simonides. Socrates agrees with Protagoras’s characterization of the wise Simonides as an esoteric writer, a poet with a complex hidden message. But Socrates suggests that Protagoras is far from having taken the measure of the wisdom and the greatness of Simonides, as expressed in this esoteric poetry. Simonides was at least as free and cosmopolitan a spirit as Protagoras, and as successful at obtaining fame and fortune. But Simonides—at least as Socrates presents him—put no serious stock in these external goods. The wise Simonides valued wealth and glory only as means, as tools, for obtaining a situation in life that would allow him the greatest feasible independence and the fullest access to the most promising young of his own and future generations. For the sake of those young, and for his own satisfaction, Simonides wrote subtle poetry, which Socrates declares he has “studied thoroughly.” The hidden teaching of that poetry, as interpreted by Socrates, adumbrates an account of the fundamental, permanent—and permanently beautiful, if permanently austere—constituents of the human situation. It is this wisdom alone that the Socratic Simonides teaches to be the core of such happiness as is available to man as man: “for,” as Socrates says, summarizing the teaching he attributes to the poetry of Simonides, “this alone is faring badly—to be deprived of scientific knowledge” (345b5). And to secure for himself and other kindred spirits the richly pleasing experience and display and contemplation of this thinking and knowing, Simonides was prepared to perform, when necessary, such unmanly deeds as the flattery of tyrants—without shrinking from the instructive, public, poetic confession of his lack of conventional manliness.
Socrates’ evocation of Simonidean wisdom allows us to glimpse the decisive difference between the sophistic movement, initiated by Protagoras, and the previous philosophic and poetic wisdom on which this sophistry is parasitic. The Sophists would appear to have vulgarized, and, what is worse, rendered confused, the earlier wisdom—by diluting, if not abandoning, the pure passion for knowledge, and by making knowledge, instead, into a tool or weapon for the securing of fame and fortune.
Yet this is not Plato’s last word on the thought of Protagoras. In the Theaetetus and the Cratylus we are shown Socrates in the last days of his life wrestling with the radically relativist and subjectivist teaching that is summed up in the most famous Protagorean remark: “man [meaning to say, each different, individual, human] is the measure of all things—of the things that are, that [or how] they are, and of the things that are not, that [or how] they are not.” What is strange about the entire presentation is this: Socrates succeeds in so thoroughly discrediting this radical Protagorean relativism—by indicating its inner incoherence, by showing how it contradicts all the evidence of common sense, and by showing how it renders Protagoras’s own life as a teacher absurd—that the reader is compelled to wonder why Socrates ever took the teaching seriously, and, what is more, how so intelligent a man as Protagoras could ever have proposed it seriously.
In seeking for an answer to at least the former question, we sooner or later are led to consider the dramatic setting Plato gives to his dialogue Theaetetus . At the end of the Theaetetus, Socrates says he must now go off to appear at his arraignment to answer Meletus’s accusation of him on the charge of impiety. In the dialogue entitled Euthyphro, we learn that, while waiting his turn at the Stoa of the King, Socrates met Euthyphro and carried on with him the famous conversation on piety. In that conversation, Socrates heard from Euthyphro that to the latter it had been revealed, through repeated and unmistakable prophetic inspirations, that the gods, as the supreme powers in the universe, are at war over justice and injustice, and that only he who hears the truth from them can know what is pious and impious, what is right and what is wrong, in the most important respect (Euthyphro 5d–6b). Socrates repeatedly attempts to shake Euthyphro’s confidence in these claims by demonstrating his, or their, incoherence; but the Socratic dialectic proves an almost complete failure in the face of the deeply moving and impressive experiences Euthyphro is convinced that he has undergone. In the Cratylus, whose dramatic date is not made precise, but which—given that the chief interlocutor is Hermogenes—evidently takes place near the time of Socrates’ trial, Socrates reconsiders the Protagorean doctrine, but this time Socrates characterizes that doctrine in an amazing and arresting way: Socrates identifies the Protagorean thesis, and the entire philosophic tradition with which the thesis is associated—and this may mean all the philosophers with the exception of Parmenides, all the philosophers who hold that the universe exists only in motion or as becoming—as a version of what Socrates says he has heard from Euthyphro. In the Theaetetus itself (162d-e), Socrates indicates that the famous “man is the measure” asseveration must be considered together with a second, and almost equally famous—or infamous—Protagorean pronouncement: “I exclude from my speech and my writing the question of whether the gods exist or do not exist.” If we put this evidence together with several other important clues we find in the Theaetetus, I believe we are led to entertain the following possibility: Protagoras sought, through his radical relativism, to bracket or neutralize the challenge to free thinking implicit in the testimony of the experience of revelation about warring gods offered by men such as Euthyphro. On the basis of Protagorean relativism, the truth of the experiences Euthyphro claims to have had may be said not to contradict the truth of the life experience of an honest atheist (such as Protagoras probably considers himself to be). For the truth about the world is, for each, simply however the world comes to sight for each.
If this is indeed the import of Protagorean relativism, it is hard to believe that Socrates regarded such relativism as an adequate response to the challenge of the purported revelation of warring gods. But the Protagorean position may make a serious contribution inasmuch as it expresses the impasse to which rationalism prior to Socrates had been brought by its incapacity to dispose of the challenge of revelation as represented most vividly by a man like Euthyphro. We may surmise that perhaps no one prior to Protagoras had faced so clearly how doubtful the purely theoretical life and the purely theoretical or scientific enterprise must become, in the face of philosophy’s inability to exclude the possibility that the universe has no nature in the strict sense, but is instead the mysterious product of elusive, conflicting, and willful providential deities, who reveal themselves, for unfathomable reasons, to some humans and not to others.
This suggestion makes more intelligible what is perhaps the most important and unforgettable passage in the Theaetetus (172c): the long “digression” in which Socrates interrupts his examination of the Protagorean thesis in order to present his own conception of the character, and the reasons for the superiority, of the philosophic life. This account of Socratic political philosophy makes clearer than any other in Plato, I believe, that the chief purpose of the Socratic “turn” is the successful vindication of the theoretical life, or the reestablishment, on a firm basis, of the enterprise of Socrates’ wise predecessors. The vindication of the theoretical-philosophic life is at the same time the critique of the political life. But the Socratic critique of the city and the civic is a very different kind of critique from that we have in the doctrines of the Sophists. Socrates does not base his critique on a theory or an account of human nature—an account whose basic premises, after all, are always contestable by a man like Euthyphro, or surely by more thoughtful defenders of the city and its gods. By the same token, Socrates does not base his critique solely or chiefly on the evidence afforded by empirical observation of the behavior of cities and citizens, of lawgivers and rulers; in particular, Socrates does not rest his refutation of the civic opinions on the observation that those opinions are contradicted by civic deeds. Socrates does not scorn such scientific evidence, but he does not find it to be decisive. What, then, is the character of the distinctively Socratic critique of the political life?
The Socratic critique proceeds by way of “dialectics,” or what Socrates calls his “midwifing art”—activity that expresses what he calls his “terrible erotic passion for refuting.” Socrates refutes in conversation the articulate young who begin by being firmly rooted in, and guided by, and able to express and argue clearly for, the fundamental civic opinions about justice and nobility. The Socratic refutation—for example, of Polemarchus—proceeds on the basis of those civic opinions, and on the premises underlying those civic opinions. The Socratic refutation succeeds by bringing to light grave contradictions in those opinions and premises. The Socratic critique is an immanent critique, and those who are refuted cannot question the premises of the refutation, because those premises are their own premises. What is most important, however, is not the refutation itself, but rather the consequence for the young person who is so refuted. The young who have the intelligence and the manliness, or strength of soul, truly to follow and grasp the meaning of the refutation undergo a profound change in spirit. The refutation of their opinions about justice and nobility entails or carries in its wake a refutation of their experiences, or of the way things appear to them (see esp. Theaetetus 161e4–8). The young who truly recognize that they have been refuted alter, fundamentally, their conception of the human situation. They become converted to philosophy, or to the conviction that the philosophic way of life and the philosophic vision of the world, or nature, divinity, justice, and nobility, is true. In bringing about and witnessing this conversion, Socrates reproduces, and thus confirms, the conversion that he himself must originally have undergone. And Plato, by preserving in his writings a record of the Socratic process of verification, conveys to future generations of potential philosophers indications of both the path of conversion and the reproducibility of that path.
To be sure, in his account of his own doings in the Theaetetus, Socrates makes it clear that only a very few of the young have the capacity to undergo a true or full conversion. Even among those with whom Socrates can converse at any length, the vast majority wind up refusing to listen—in one way or another. The conclusive confirming evidence that Socrates gathers is thus not copious; and this would seem to explain the fact that even at the very end of his life, Socrates speaks as if his gathering of confirming evidence is not simply a thing of the past. For Socrates, the theological question is never entirely closed, it would seem. This feature of the account in the Theaetetus also prompts us to wonder whether Socrates does not feel the need to gather supplementary evidence from truncated refutations of the unpromising—even, perhaps, refutations of some of the old, who can be assumed to be so settled in their convictions that it would be utterly unreasonable to expect them to undergo the conversion to philosophy. In the Laws, and especially in the opening pages of that long dialogue, we do indeed witness a remarkable theological outcome of a Socratic refutation of two shrewd old statesmen, born and raised in the most traditional and orthodox of all Greek cities. Those statesmen are not, as a consequence of the refutation, converted to philosophy; but they do react by spontaneously abandoning the cardinal theological tenet of their civic creeds.
The old statesmen are rewarded for this wrenching sacrifice by being shown a legal order far more reasonable and noble than any previously known to them, and by being allowed a vision of law-inspiring divinity far purer and more in accord with nature than any of which they have previously heard. This brings us to what we may call the politically constructive aspect of the Socratic critique of politics. This aspect is much more visible in the great political dialogues—the Republic, the Laws, and to a lesser extent the Gorgias. The theme of these dialogues is the “best regime by nature,” or that “true political art” of which, Socrates boasts, he is one of the very few, not to say the only, practitioner in Athens. In elaborating the “best regime” of the Republic, or even the “second or third best regime” of the Laws, the Socratic philosopher brings out the diamonds hidden in the rough of actual politics. The Socratic critique of civic opinion, unlike the pre-Socratic critique, does not lead to the conclusion that the entire realm of civic opinion ought to be simply left behind, as hopelessly deluded. The Socratic critique leads to an immanent ascent within and from the civic, to the trans-civic and trans-moral; the Socratic critique leads to a self-transcendence of the civic rather than an abandonment of the civic. To put it another way: precisely by criticizing civic opinion for being contradictory, Socrates insists that we must try to decide which of the two contradictory premises in each crucial case can and must be maintained, and which abandoned. The ordinary civic opinions prove to be not simply false, but, so to speak, half false—and therefore half true.
This means, of course, that Socrates does not reveal the purer and more consistent notions of justice and nobility and divinity that are embedded in ordinary moral opinion without simultaneously laying bare the tawdriness and incoherence of ordinary moral opinion. Socrates cannot demonstrate why virtue and moral responsibility must be understood as centered on knowledge, and vice on ignorance, of the most important things—without casting severe doubts on retributive punishment and the idea of angry gods. Socrates cannot show that we mean by true virtue an excellence choice worthy strictly for its own sake—without forcing us to confront the extent to which virtue is ordinarily motivated by a sense of shame, desert, and a hope for divine favor. We cannot be brought to recognize that our being is primarily defined by an erotic love of the beautiful that seeks from the start eternity, and that finds consummation in the contemplation of natural order and spiritual grace—without feeling some contempt for the mundane objects of mortal, corporeal need that constitute the main preoccupation of ordinary civic life and action. We cannot appreciate the austere divinities of the Republic without smiling at the childishness of our initial expectations or demands from divinity.
Yet none of this adds up to a program of civic reform. The chief practical implication of Platonic political philosophy is a kind of moderating, or indeed even a chastening, of political zeal, or of the ambitious hopes that animate and often inflame civic life. Even this lesson is not one that is welcome, or that can expect to meet with great success. The same reasons that make most of even the best young people turn away from the Socratic refutations ensure that the vast majority of citizens and statesmen will be unable and hence unwilling to follow very far the Platonic critique of civic life. To be sure, the Laws, and to a lesser extent the Republic, contain important useful general lessons in constitutionalism. For instance, the third and sixth books of the Laws provide the classic justification for, and institutional elaboration of, the mixed regime; the second and seventh books of the Laws, and to some extent the third book of the Republic, outline the classic principles of civic education, and reveal in particular the central role of music, or the fine arts, in such education; to take a final example, the ninth and tenth books of the Laws present a teaching on the principles of penal law that, in accord with the Socratic doctrine that traces virtue to knowledge and vice to ignorance, exemplifies and thereby promotes a tempering of punitive indignation. And everywhere in Plato we find a profound, if profoundly qualified, respect for political life: the Platonic dialogues promote a respect for politics that is centered on, and justified by, the hidden directedness of law toward that which transcends law. According to Plato, the call of citizenship draws men up and out of their narrow concerns for material, personal, and familial security and contentment; the experience of civic life awakens in the best men a longing for greatness, for excellence, for a responsibility and hence a fulfillment and a salvation that will give life meaning and dignity otherwise unknown. Politics centered on the quest for justice gives life seriousness. The political vocation has the potential to provoke in those who hearken to it an intense concern for the truth about the principles and hopes and dreams that inspire and are inspired by political action. But this rich potential, if it is to be fully realized, must encounter the bracing challenge of the philosophic or theoretical life. Only then does the political man begin to discover the cave-like character of civic life, and thus the life beyond the cave toward which civic life unknowingly gropes and which gives to civic life its ultimate high justification—and at the same time, its sense of limits. The ambition to rule does not find a good reason for stopping short of noble but ultimately self-corrupting imperialism unless that ambition is checked by some awareness, however dim or veiled, of the higher dignity and richer satisfaction of the leisured theoretical life. One of the most important ways in which the Socratic-Platonic philosophers have, down through the centuries, sought to inculcate this awareness is by their attempts to influence and modify the theology of their respective communities.
In the preceding, very sketchy suggestions as to the nature of the Socratic idea of political philosophy that takes the place, as it were, of the “idea of the public intellectual,” I have selected especially features that allow one to appreciate the enormous difference between the Socratic conception of the civic role and responsibility of the life of the mind and the competing modern “idea of the public intellectual.” Let me close by attempting to characterize briefly the central concern that is at the heart of the modern departure.
Socratic political philosophy, I have contended, has as its chief raison d’être the vindication of the rational theoretical life, and of the conception of divinity discovered by strict reasoning, in the face of the challenge posed by purported experiences of supra-rational and indeed contra-rational divine revelations and laws. Modern political philosophy, I would like to suggest, has something akin as its fundamental animating goal. But modern political philosophy is born out of a grave obfuscation: a loss of understanding or awareness of the theological import of Socratic dialectics. It may also be the case—but of this I speak with much less confidence-that modern rationalism lost sight, in addition, of the fact that the theoretical or contemplative life is the fullest possible answer to the deepest spiritual needs of human nature. Certainly this much is true: the moderns (with the possible exception of Spinoza) are defined by their conviction that the life of free reasoning and thinking can be vindicated only at the cost of ceasing to advance the claim that this life and this life alone fulfills human nature.
If I may be permitted to focus on the modern whom I know best, Montesquieu, I would try to formulate the modern enterprise in the briefest possible terms as follows. The modems begin from a grand hypothesis to the following effect: the prevalence in the world of belief in supra-rational revelations of contra-rational divine laws is caused, not by the existence of the deities believed to reveal themselves in and through those laws, but instead by pathological political and social and economic conditions. Human beings are by nature largely satisfied by mundane prosperity. Humans turn to imaginary deities who demand the transcendence and even the sacrifice of worldly prosperity, only because worldly prosperity is so uncertain. If men’s lives were made secure, and invested with a modicum of worldly dignity, men might well continue to imagine and worship supernatural deities who would help them assuage the fear of death, but one would find that those supposed deities and their purported commandments would cease to contradict in any significant way, would instead simply support, the rules and practices and institutions that reason showed were necessary for worldly prosperity. Religions and gods and commandments that stood in the way of this “progress” would either disappear or be reinterpreted by their believers so as to become practically unrecognizable shells of their former selves. And philosophy or science can and must be reconceived as politically and socially active in such a way as to direct this transmogrification of the conditions of human existence. As the transformation proceeds, the proof of the hypothesis should become plainer and plainer. But this means that philosophy must cease to present itself, and perhaps even to conceive of itself, as fundamentally theoretical or contemplative. Philosophy must replace the cave with the Enlightenment. Political philosophy must become lawgiving in the deepest sense. But immediately a practical difficulty is encountered: philosophy (in the strict sense) and philosophers (in the true sense) are very, very rare. Philosophy must therefore recruit a kind of spiritual army. Philosophy must debase its own name, lending that name to the officers of the new army—the “philosophes.” The new rationalism must create cultural cadres: lesser lights who will obediently carry forward—not altogether self-consciously—the theological-political struggle of secularizing social transformation and humanistic cultural revolution. This is the deepest significance—the truly world-historical significance—of “the idea of the public intellectual.” And this deepest, world-historical significance of “the idea of the public intellectual” is the important truth that we learn if, and only if, we approach the idea of the public intellectual from a Platonic perspective. There is no more telling sign of the decisive flaw in the Enlightenment and its “idea of the public intellectual” than that the deepest purpose of that idea has been lost sight of by all its living proponents-and that it is only those enlightened by the rediscovery of the undiminished intrinsic intellectual power of its enemies who can still appreciate the theological-political grandeur of the modern project.