THE PHILOSOPHER’S CITY has only one real enemy, a character held in low regard: the parvenu. That is another reason why the philosopher is the best ruler, for he is the only one for whom the exercise of power is not a promotion. Even in the best of cases, the dyeing of the warriors does not compare with contemplating essences.
Still, it is necessary to preserve the radical purity of philosophy from all forms of corruption and counterfeit, since parvenus prowl around the philosopher, too. Worse still, perversion inheres in duality and the philosopher-guardian is necessarily a double being. The contemplation of essences and the guidance of the human herd do not let themselves be reduced to a single occupation.
One can distinguish, of course, between a time for contemplating the essence of the true and a time for applying it to the government of the city. But the question of application is more complicated since the philosopher cannot seek power. Others must call upon him to exercise it, and their arguments [raisons] are not exactly those of the philosopher. How will they distinguish the philosopher from his imitations? And how will the philosopher himself resist their arguments? How will the educator avoid being educated by those he should lead? How will the ship’s pilot counter the oarsman’s arguments, whether these be mild or violent?
The mild version concerns the corruption of the people’s favorites, which is how one of Socrates’s best pupils, the traitor Alcibiades, became lost. The violent concerns the “reeducation of intellectuals,” which is how Alcibiades’s teacher and alleged corrupter perished.
Like the two of them, the philosopher-guardian, the man who knows truth and lying, is always doubly menaced—from the side of truth, which excludes him from the city of the artisans, and from the side of lying, which includes him in it. In order to repel technological imitation [l’imitation technicienne], the ruling philosopher is obliged to become an imitator himself, and every imitator is a manufacturer, a polytechnician. To evade that destiny and maintain the simplicity of nature in ruling the city, the philosopher must separate the kind of imitation and lie specific to him from all artisanal productions. But this demonstration must always be done a contrario. It entails the perpetual refutation of the philosopher’s living counterfeit—the artisan of lies, the intellectual jack-of-all-trades [bricoleur] whom the mob confusedly equates with the philosopher: the sophist. The sophist is a lie from head to foot because he, like Hippias, is an artisan from head to foot—because he has spent too much time fabricating shoes and speeches to spare a moment to learn the dialectical game of draughts in which the philosopher’s superior nature is made manifest.
All the uneasiness aroused by the kinship of truth and lying is exorcized in the antagonistic figure of the sophist. The latter does not know how to lie for the very good reason that he is wholly immersed in lying, in ignorance of the truth. And he is there by reason of nature, by reason of birth. For the sophist is not just anyone. He is the parvenu par excellence, the man whose activity encapsulates all the features of counter-nature, the servile worker who inflates himself to the point of claiming the freedom of the born philosopher.
For it is now plainly a question of freedom and slavery, of souls and bodies that bear the marks of the one or the other. The passion of book VI of the Republic culminates with the description of a usurpation, a crime violating the dignity of philosophy:
Some dwarfish people, observing that the place is unoccupied and full of fine titles and beautiful appearances, act like men who escape from their chains and take refuge in temples. They joyfully abandon their trade and plunge into philosophy, those who happen to be the most cunning in their little craft. For in comparison with the other arts, the prestige of philosophy retains a superior dignity even in its present low estate. This is the ambition and aspiration of that multitude of pretenders unfit for it by nature, whose souls are bowed and mutilated by their vulgar occupations even as their bodies are ruined by their manual arts and crafts. … Do you see much of a difference between these people and a newly rich tinker, a little baldheaded man who has just been freed from his shackles, has had a bath, is wearing new clothes, has got himself up as a bridegroom, and is to marry the daughter of his master who has fallen into poverty and abandonment?1
The subtle Adimantus will certainly not allow himself to see any difference there. And he will not return to a question that had been settled already concerning the capacities or incapacities linked to the presence or absence of hair on one’s head. It had been granted that the issue is irrelevant to the craft of shoemaking. But if shoemaking is wide open to those who have hair, it does not at all follow that philosophy is open to baldheaded men. Here, as nowhere earlier, Plato deliberately piles up the physical characteristics of an inferior nature: dwarfishness, baldness, and above all the mutilation of the body and the soul by manual labor. The figure of the parvenu now takes on a new dimension. Earlier he was the highroller, the entrepreneur using his economic and social power to play a role in the city, but now he is the manual laborer as such.
Plato carefully avoided starting out from a social hierarchy of noble or lowly tasks. He expunged the aristocratic imagery of straight or stooped bodies that mark by contrast the analyses of an Aristotle or a Xenophon. But now, when the matter of the philosopher’s identity is at issue, that imagery reappears in its full measure. No physical criterion was retained to exclude shoemakers from the warrior class; it sufficed to remark that war was too difficult and demanding an occupation for shoemakers to practice it in their spare moments. But when it concerns philosophy, paradoxically, these physical markings indeed appear.
The reason for this is simple enough. Philosophy cannot justify itself as a post within the division of labor; if it did so, it would fall back into the democracy of trades. Hence it must exacerbate the argument from nature, giving it the shape of a prohibition marked on bodies. It is not a question here of evoking Socrates’s plebeian origins or his Silenus face, or of contrasting, as Alcibiades does in the Symposium, the coarse exterior with the precious figure within.2 There simply are bodies that cannot accommodate philosophy—bodies marked and stigmatized by the servitude of the work for which they have been made.
Servitude in the strict sense. Here Plato broadcasts what he does not allow himself to say elsewhere: manual labor is a servile labor. The artisan who presumes to meddle in philosophy is more than a newly rich worker; he is a fugitive slave akin to those who take refuge in the temples. And the smith’s baldness is not an accidental difference prey to a malicious sophism, the one inquiring after the number of hairs that determine whether or not one is bald. It is the tonsure of servitude, which knows nothing of the more or less.
Servitude receives here a paradoxical status with regard to all economic or social rationality. Shuttles do not require slaves. The necessity of servitude has nothing to do in this context with the division of labor. Indeed the latter can be argued for only on the grounds of the equality of functions. If servitude is now necessary, it is in order to preserve the dignity of the philosopher, who articulates a division of labor in which his own position cannot figure at all. It is for the sake of the philosopher, not the city, that one must postulate a radical break between the order of leisure and the order of servile labor.
Slavery is a metaphor, of course, but not just any metaphor. What does the philosopher complain about at the end of book VI of the Republic? About people attempting to flee the bonds of slavery in the temple of philosophy. But what, then, will be his concern at the start of book VII? To free people chained from birth with their backs to the light. And we know what his complaint will be then—that the inhabitants of the cave do not want to be freed and led to the abode of philosophy.
Do they desire wrongly? Or are they wrong in not desiring to be freed? The reply, of course, will be that it is not the same philosophy that is sought for or rejected in each instance. The fugitive slave is attracted by the glitter of what shines above the low wall in the cave: fine titles, beautiful forms, and new clothes. That, of course, is not the way leading up to the invisible sun of the Idea.
But if philosophy is a road and not a refuge, then the philosopher capably could guide the fugitive who is, after all, in search of different kinds of prestige from those hallowed by the voice of popular opinion. The philosopher certainly gets to go and select from the cave prisoners who ask nothing of him.
There precisely is the difference. The philosopher chooses by hand those he wants to take. The order of philosophy is the order of selection and constraint, not of vocation. The excellence of natures manifests itself here through the askēsis of renunciation. Warriors and guardians prove themselves worthy of their hegemony in renouncing the advantages of ownership. And if the city is obliged to give power to the philosopher, this is because he is the only one who does not desire it and exercises it only out of compulsion. The philosopher, in turn—forced to accept this violence to prove his identity—will keep from leading onto the path of philosophy those who most aspire to it. He instead will try to identify men who, in pursuit of other goals, reveal the kind of nature best suited to philosophical constraint.
In this game of “loser takes all,” the surest loser is always the man about whom it will be said that he has “nothing to lose but his chains.” If he gains only through exchange, it is clear that he can be motivated solely by the love of profit. It would be futile for him to protest his disdain for hard currency. In laying such heavy stress on the earnings of the worker-philosopher Hippias, Plato would have us see that the artisan has no choice about the money in which he is to be paid. He has no right to symbolic pleasures [ jouissances]. Destined for the iron of work and the gold of capital, the artisan confirms in his very aspirations for philosophical prestige only the native infirmity of his body and spirit.
Even before the story of the cave shows us the difference between educated and uneducated natures, the counter-story of the fugitive slave already has done the sorting. It has separated those who should be educated from those who should not, those entitled to have access to thinking from those whose access to it necessarily would be a violation. At the very least, their access would be an adultery that can give birth strictly speaking only to bastards—the very offspring that the bald smith has in his power to give the fallen princess. “And so when men unfit for education approach philosophy and consort with her unworthily, what sort of ideas and opinions shall we say they beget? Will they not produce what may in very deed be fairly called sophisms, and nothing that is legitimate or that partakes of authentic thinking?”3
It is definitely no longer a question of labor and classes in the city, but a question of the philosophical legitimacy that defines the right to thinking. Here the discourse about birth is quite singular. In the fiction of the autochthonous city and the three metals, “birth” was avowedly an artifice. And in the story of the birth of Eros, the fraudulent coupling of Penia (poverty) and Poros (wealth) was excused in terms of the right of the indigent reflecting the beggarly nature of love. But the audacity of the smith in love with philosophy cannot be accorded any such right. It represents the absolute outrage, the primal scene of philosophical purity under siege.
The problem, however, is that this purity will never be able to prove itself except through the designation of bastardy. The dignity of philosophy comes at the price of a logic that is as absurd as it is rigorous: there are people who are not born for philosophy because the manual labor to which this birth defect has condemned them has marked their bodies and souls with an infirmity, the best proof of which is their desire to approach the philosophy of which they are not worthy.
Such is the harsh necessity of the proof a contrario, the scandal of a philosophical legitimacy identified with the chance of birth and established by bastardy’s testimony against itself. Bastardy alone is the “cause” of the legitimacy, the ignoble cause of the noble. The birth mark indicates what is at stake. It is not simply a matter of opposing the authenticity of the highborn philosopher to sophist artifices. One must also produce a difference of bodies that cannot be reduced by any moral medicine. This bodily difference expresses something completely different from mere aristocratic disdain for the artisan. Marking the distance between justice and health, it supports philosophy’s claim to be a discourse irreducible to all technologies of moral hygiene. Philosophy is not a medicine but a second birth.
Starting from this point, we can reconsider the question of the keys to this passage. Commentators have been divided in wondering whether the denunciation was directed at the cynics through the bastardy of Antisthenes (who was born of a Thracian mother) or at the sophists either through the artisanal prowess of Hippias or the woodcutter’s trade attributed to Protagoras.
In a sense, there is no need to choose. Amalgamation is one of the techniques of the Platonic dialogue. The parvenu could be just as well the jack-of-all-trades Hippias, who plays at being a philosopher; or the manufacturer and democrat Anytus, the denouncer of Socrates who confuses his genius with the commerce of Hippias; or the misbegotten Antisthenes, who democratizes both Hippias’s rhetoric and Socrates’s virtue. But the hierarchy of urgencies determines the meaning of the amalgamation. The denunciation of the sophists in itself does not justify the physiological phantasmagoria of the text, but the opposition of bastards and legitimate children takes on its full meaning if what is at issue is a question of heritage—the heritage of Socratic thought in this instance. And here the adversary is definitely Antisthenes, the propagator of a popular Socrates who made dialectical conversation into the means of public instruction and preached everywhere a notion of virtue assimilable by the common people. This would be virtue-askēsis, virtue-health appropriate to a state fit only for pigs and acquired through techniques of the soul that resemble a gymnastics without music: all these signifiers are gathered together at the end of book VII. There philosophy is once more forbidden to crippled spirits and bastards who wallow like swine in a morality that rejects science—twisted souls fit for human gymnastics but not for divine music. The congenital defect of these pigs-bastards-cripples, insofar as philosophy is concerned, is always recognizable through the same touchstone: they do not clear the bar of the lie that leads to the science of good and evil. Like the sophist Hippias, the bastard Antisthenes reserves his hatred for the voluntary lie, the ruse that imitates truth. And he fails to recognize the radical lie, the lie of ignorance. But ignorance is too weak a word here: their amathia is a will to know nothing of science.4
For all we know of it, such is the Socratism of Antisthenes and the cynics, an ascetic morality cut off from initiation into science. Overturning philosophy’s hierarchy of virtues, cynicism claims to give philosophy to everyone. Science must be even more on its guard against this simplicity than it is against sophist artifice. True simplicity is a divine privilege, a matter of initiation. Thus the wholesome and democratic simplicity of cynic virtue must be likened to sophist fraud. Or rather, both must be relegated to the vice that is the very basis of the city’s perversion, the power of the people.
For this astonishing book VI also tells us that the enemy so tirelessly pursued throughout Plato’s dialogues does not really exist. If it is the people who believe in the fable hawked and peddled by the parvenu Anytus—the corruption of Athens’s finest young folk by the arguments of the sophists—this belief, however, is totally hypocritical. In fact, there is only one sophist and one corrupter, the people themselves who instruct the sophists when their boos and applause drown out the voice of reason in assemblies, courts, and theaters.5 The people alone, by turning politics into an art of flattery, corrupted the souls of the tyrant Critias and the traitor Alcibiades, souls that had a gift for philosophy. Like the tyrant, the sophist is a child of democracy. And the democratic man is himself the child of oligarchy, of the kingdom of parvenus who made work and thrift the dominant virtues.
So everything fits together in the kingdom of bastardy. The detractor of wealth, Antisthenes, puts philosophy in the power of the squalling brats who make up the democratic party of the capitalist Anytus. And Anytus, on the pretext of hunting for sophists, makes himself the champion of the common people who are themselves the greatest sophists of all and the corrupters of the philosophers of the aristocracy. It is a perfect circle of anti-philosophy, against which must be drawn the circle protecting and prohibiting philosophical sanctuary.
As we have already seen, this approach defines an egalitarianism of its own. It denies philosophy to the disguised slaves who actually are free artisans. But once before, already, it looked for an authentic slave belonging to the Thessalian Meno to prove that every soul contains within itself the principles of mathematical truths. By rediscovering “all on his own” the formula for the doubling of the square, Meno’s slave proves two things—that science is possible, but not just any sort of science. To awaken that drowsy science, what is needed is the torpedo of dialectical provocation reserved for the elect, not the lessons of the democratic sophist Protagoras or the people’s philosopher Antisthenes. The boy-slave (pais) is purely the subject of an experiment, a demonstration of paideia. Taken at this early moment when the power of free knowing is still the pure virtuality of a soul chained to ignorance, he shows how knowledge is released, and how he or anyone else could become learned if he needed to be. Once the experiment is over, he can be returned to his nothingness.6 If, for a brief and crucial moment, this young worker could play the one chosen by the supreme science, the reason is that he is not a social subject, a personage of the republic. He has no position from which to approve or censure discourses or spectacles. And the power of intellection attributed to him could not possibly be his own. The slave who is not master of himself bears witness to a science that could not be transmitted the way properties are. He helps to hollow out the distance prohibiting any democratic teaching of virtue, any popular Socratism. There is nothing the popular philosophers could transmit to artisans; the loftiest knowledges are already present in the soul of any slave. And no educator can teach the virtue of the free man underlying the prudent action of the private individual or politician. Thus the sophist professors of virtue and Anytus, the partisan of paternal education, all can be dispatched since practical virtue is right opinion, a matter of inspiration rather than learning.
A stroke of genius. In Meno’s slave Plato invented one of the most durable and formidably effective figures of our own thinking: the pure proletarian whom one can always, as need demands, oppose to the artisan or slide under his image; the man for whom the possibility of losing his chains exists only by philosopher’s decree, who thus will never lose them except within the rules; the absolute dispossessed whose infinite possibilities should discourage the mediocre and artisanal aspirations of others; the pure autodidact whose virtual omniscience disqualifies the twaddle of workingmen’s doxa and bars the road to autodidacticism’s jacks-of-alltrades. By now they should know that all their efforts can only take them away from the knowledge that sleeps within them. Wisdom is not achieved by the self-accounting, the moral askēsis, that the cynic preaches to artisans. All askēsis is conversion, the work of the philosopher who turns the gaze of the elect to the blind spot of his knowledge.
Even before the division of the three orders, the dialogue between the philosopher and the young slave effected a first linking of the philosophical to the social order—a certain connection between the question of freedom and the question of knowledge. For there had been too much play in the knot joining the two, and we know those responsible for this looseness: the popular philosophers who are always hanging around artisans, explaining to them the necessity of being educated in the virtue that liberates. Even a certain Socrates, it is said, despite Critias.
To settle this matter between Socrates and the artisans, it takes both a young slave and Socrates himself, who is called upon to refute formally what public rumor and the competing schools attribute to him—and called upon to settle the question in the most radical way. There is no virtue that can be taught to the people, for the simple reason that virtue cannot be taught. It is a matter of nature or second nature, of gift or of dyeing. That is how the virtues of the first two classes are acquired. For Socrates the virtue of the philosopher is a divine election, an initiation for the one whom the philosopher chooses to release from his chains and whose gaze he chooses to transform. Whereas the virtue of the warriors is divine inspiration in the ordinary city, in the ideal city it is the dyeing of the philosopher—the virtue of right opinion that its possessor can neither comprehend nor transmit.
Thus the question of servitude and freedom is settled at the same time. On the one hand, there are kinds of knowledge that should be unleashed. On the other hand, there are the right opinions of practical life that should be chained down by science; otherwise, they will run away and escape like fugitive slaves. In other words, they will become deceptive like the works of an artisan—like the statues Daedalus endowed with the illusion of movement.7
There is neither a virtue specific to the artisan folk, nor one that could be taught to its members. There is no education of the multitude, and the artisan is always just another face in the crowd.
And so the divisions of the social order and the division of the order of discourse are brought into harmony. In the city there are three classes and no slaves. In the order of discourse there is freedom or servitude. While one discourse, in seeking freedom from its chains, can only sink down into its servility, another ensures its freedom even as it remains enchained.
Nothing else. A popular philosophy, indeed every democratic utterance, is constrained by that division. It can be only an imitation of a living discourse subjected in its fabrication to the servile technologies of writing—subjected in its reception to the law of the crowd whose suffrage is nothing more than the noise of the Many.
To make this division of discourse understandable, another tale about a philosopher-king is in order. This time it is an Egyptian tale rather than a Phoenician one. The god Theuth, master of techniques, comes to King Thamus to offer his latest invention, writing. He tells Thamus it will make the Egyptians more capable in matters of memory and science.
But the king turns the argument around. Possessing the science of ends, he sees the perversion of the medium. Writing will not improve the memory of the Egyptians; it will make them more forgetful. In place of memory, they will have to rely on external marks, and in place of science they will obtain only appearances. A doxosophy rather than a philosophy; a science of appearances, pretensions, and discords. Those who think they are truly knowledgeable will soon prove themselves “burdensome.”8
To begin with, writing is mute discourse. Like the pictures of a painter, the “external marks” of written discourse seem to be intelligent until you ask them something. Then they reveal their true nature as simulacra. They do not know how to answer questions. Unlike living discourse, written discourse cannot “defend itself.” It is content to say the very same thing over and over.
It seems quite evident that this is not simply opposing the oral to the written, but the living discourse of the dialectic method to the fabricated discourse of rhetoric. The living speech of the dialectician, who uses writing only for amusement or as an aid to memory, if at all, is opposed not only to the written treatises of the sophists, the rhetoricians, or Antisthenes, but also to their spoken discourses. For these latter, too, are made up of mute markings, fabricated discourses incapable of defending themselves when the dialectical game of draughts comes to interrupt their phrases.
But this mute discourse is also too loquacious. The text cannot defend itself but, once unleashed, can drift all over the place: “It can get into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people and not the wrong people.”9
This defect seems to be contrary to the one that Plato regularly attributes to rhetoric, that it is a kind of cuisine that cares only about the satisfaction of its customers. Here the issue is more serious. This mute discourse, which knows neither its audience nor their needs, can transmit anything anywhere. It does not know to whom it is speaking, to whom it should speak, who can and cannot be admitted to a sharing [partage] of the logos. The living logos of the philosopher, the science of truth and lying, is also a science of speech and silence. It knows the right time for keeping quiet. Written discourse, on the other hand, is as incapable of keeping quiet as it is of speaking. Mute in the face of philosophers’ questions, it cannot restrain itself from speaking to the uninitiated. The uncontrolled democracy of this discourse-at-liberty makes philosophy’s fine titles and beautiful appearances sparkle before the eyes of our too-clever artisans. Its infirmity is bastardy. It puts the logos at the disposal of men whose work has damaged their bodies and mutilated their souls.
It would hardly do for artisans to become “burdensome.” Even more importantly, one must not efface the lines separating those who are made for the banquet of discourse from those who are not. There must be some legislation on the legitimate and the illegitimate—a legislation concerning appearances that cannot be a simple opposition of the true to the false.
Indeed, it is by beginning with idols that one arrives at the Ideas, by beginning with the play of reflections that the adhesion of doxa to the sensible world begins to fail and one sets out on the road to the intelligible One. That is the road which must be protected. The legitimacy of pure thought passes through legislation on everything that divides into two, on everything that copies, repeats, reflects, or simulates. World of doubles, world of imitators. The world of techniques and technicians must be prevented from interfering with the play of appearances that governs the road to the Idea. There isn’t a true world and another world of appearances. There are two lives, and everything must be cut into two.
This is a philosophical truth, not a social truth. The philosopher of the Phaedrus is not a king. He does not separate classes; he decides between modes of discourse. With respect to the kind of discourse allegedly at risk of wandering away, he shows that in fact this discourse cannot wander, that everything not the askēsis of philosophy’s elect is simply immobile movement upon itself, the play of the Many with itself.
Such is the case with rhetoric, brought in here with reference to a discourse by Lysias, son of Cephalus and spokesman for the shoemakers and democracy. The point is to show that rhetoric only mirrors the relationship of the rhetorician with his public. It is certainly true that the rhetorician does not know to whom he is speaking. He is not a “psychagogue” dialectician familiar with the nature of the souls he is addressing and the means of conducting them where he wishes. But he does not need that kind of knowledge because he does not want to conduct souls. He simply wants to hold his public, and he needs to know only this about it: that it is number, the motley multitude that delights in spicy stew. It suffices to please his public, and for that it suffices merely to reflect back its pleasure. And so the logographer, the man of the written word and the people, will begin his eulogy by writing “It has pleased the people …”10 A tautological discourse, a self-demonstration signed in advance by the only self-demonstration of popular suffrage: the applause that is the law of the Many, the pure beating of number.
This analysis is reassuring, which is another function of Plato’s criticism of rhetoric. His argument dissipates anxieties evoked by the sophist’s panourgia (which is capable of mingling its reflections with those of the Idea), and those evoked by the unforeseeable wanderings of the discourse through which the science of the initiated could reach the uninitiated. The criticism of rhetoric makes it possible to solve the problem by restoring the discourseat-liberty to its purely instrumental function. Alongside philosophy there can be only this art of persuasion, which is capable of destroying philosophers but incapable of troubling with its technical flourishes the mysteries of philosophy. It would be formidable, indeed, if this art were a technique that could be put at the disposal of technicians. But Socrates shows Phaedrus what he had shown Callicles: that rhetoric is less a technique than merely a routine, a kind of cuisine served not to producers but consumers who always choose the same food.
Thus the discourse-at-liberty is put back in its place as, simply, a discourse that one holds with one’s “fellow slaves.”11 It is not really an illusion but only a receipt. It does, in short, its own business. It separates rather than mingles. Its tricks are limited to an imitation of sōphrosunē, a virtue that gets along quite well on its own imitation.
There is a touchstone with which to judge this discourse and mark its radical heterogeneity to the freedom of the discourse that remains in chains. It does not know delirium; it does not know being in love. The starting point for the conversation in the Phaedrus is a discourse by Lysias on love—a discourse that intends to be paradoxical. Love’s favors, he explains, should be reserved not for the lover, who is always unreasonable, but for someone not in love, who will treat you always in a manner conforming to reason.
This is a technical discourse whose ultimate purpose is simply to carry the day. Put another way, it is a discourse fabricated to demonstrate the power of its fabricator, who is capable of saying anything and of producing whatever effect he wants—the discourse of someone who is always master of himself directed at someone who wishes not to be had [ne veut pas se faire avoir].
Here we find the division formed in the narrative by the waters of the Illissus. Socrates’s genius will prompt him suddenly to recross the river to mark the distance separating love from the practices of sōphrosunē. For love is precisely the privilege reserved to those willing to let themselves be had, to be possessed. Love is a divine delirium forbidden to shoemakers and their orator because they forbid it to themselves. They know nothing of love’s delirium but only the successful stroke of technique and the routine of reproduction. The people’s orator makes discourses on love the way shoemakers make love, which is in fact the way they make shoes.
Passionate delirium is the touchstone that enables us to assign a proper place to the discourses of the people’s orators and, through them, to those of the cynic philosophers who propose a moral hygiene purged of that madness.12 On the one side we have those possessed by the divine. On the other we have men of common sōphrosunē, thrifty men who save and are praised by the people for the praises they lavish on these same virtues of servitude.13 Socrates told Callicles that there are two kinds of love, the love of the people and the love of philosophy. But the love of the people is merely a hatred of love. Eros divides reproductive men from those possessed by the divinity.
For a second time, then, the way is barred to artisans. With their orators and their philosophers, they are securely shut up in the kingdom of the useful. The law of delirium authorizes the division of discourse by dividing up the world of imitations that bars and guards access to it. There are two types of imitators. On the one hand are the inspired imitators who have been called upon by the deity; they have been allowed to glimpse a reflection of the divine splendor and endeavor to imitate it. That is what is done by the chosen poets. And that is what is done by the dialectician-philosopher who is also the supreme imitator, as we are reminded in the Laws: “We are ourselves authors of tragedies, and, insofar as possible, of the best and finest tragedy. For our whole constitution is an imitation of the best and finest life, which we truly consider to be the truest tragedy.”14
On the other hand, we have the false poet, the “counterfeit” poet (atēlēs) who makes use of his art as a “reasonable” (sōphron) man.15 Such is the painter who uses the artisan’s techniques to remake creation, or the sophist who can imitate everything the painter can. All such people practice an art of imitation that always comes down in the last instance to recipes like those of the rhetorician.
And so begins to change the apparent symmetry between the denunciation of the poet and the sophist. It may well happen that a poet is in fact a sophist, but never that a sophist is a poet. The honest sophist Protagoras is not invited to the banquet where the vain Agathon and the malicious Aristophanes receive Diotima’s message and join Socrates in celebrating the god, Love. For Protagoras, theoretician of technology and democracy, delights in demystifying poets. And in opposing him, Socrates does not hesitate to come to the defense of the dubious Simonides.16 As against the sophist illusion that remains the work of an artisan (even of a cook), poetry’s illusion takes us from the universe of fabrication to that of reflections and divine transports.
We thus can comprehend the eschatology of the Phaedrus, which has often been thought eccentric. The souls that fall from the procession of the gods are incarnated in a hierarchy of characters corresponding to the more or less complete vision they have had of intelligible beauty. The first soul mingles with the seed of a man called upon to become a friend of knowledge or beauty, an adept of the Muses or of Love. The second soul mingles with that of a strong and just king. The third with that of a statesman, a businessman, or a trader. The fourth with that of an athlete or doctor. The fifth with that of a seer or priest, and the sixth with that of a poet or any other imitative artist. Then comes the turn of the artisan or farmer, and the only ones even lower are the sophist, the demagogue, and (down at the very bottom) the tyrant.17
To be sure, there is no obvious reason for putting the trader before the seer, or the athlete before the poet (indeed, the trader seems to be there simply as a joke). There is, nevertheless, a clear order overall. In a hierarchy that could be modified, categories three to six represent men who are governed alike by a higher law; they are men of right opinion or inspiration. But between the poet and the producer the line is drawn separating daimonic from demiurgic men. The artisan occupies a place from which it is no longer possible to climb back toward the divine. On the road where souls may reascend, he is stopped at the barrier of poetic imitation. In seeking to cross it, he can only fall back lower into the rhetoric of sophists and demagogues.
The crucial thing that Eros introduces is a hierarchy of imitation. In this imagined population one character is missing—the warrior, which is to say, the supreme hunter. He would be misplaced here because the three-handed play of the artisan, the hunter, and the imitator is reversed. The “true” imitators, the philosopher and the inspired poet, are those who now define the superior nature of men possessed by the divinity. On the other side of the bar are the false imitators, who really are nothing but hunters—of gifts, votes, or bodies. In its own way the Sophist tells us the same thing. The thousand instruments of sophist panourgia are nothing more than the attire worn by rich young men for a hunting party that departs from the people’s cuisine in its clientele but not in principle.18 A hunter is only a cook on campaign.
On the subject of the artisan the philosopher has made a clean sweep. Divine delirium has put order into the world of imitation. On the one side is the rhetorical double, which is always reducible to the law of the same and confined to a cuisine of persuasion in which the gods of Heraclitus do not partake. On the other side, the image is only the divine splendor’s small change, the signal attracting chosen souls to the askēsis that leads sensible forms back to the intelligible One. In a sense, to say that there are two imitations is to say that there is no imitation. The world of imitations divides itself on the subject of the artisan, leaving to the philosopher the guarding of appearances.
Or, at least, it should divide itself. For there remains a problem, a point of contact between inspiration and technē: the displays of the theater.
As we suspected earlier, the question of the warriors was far from being the toughest. The poets’ most perverse accomplishment is not recounting indecent fables about gods to the warriors, but introducing confusion between divine productions and artisanal fabrications, putting at the disposal of the crowd music whose laws serve as models for order and disorder in the city. Theatrocracy [la théâtrocratie] is the mother of democracy. We learn this in the Laws, which reminds us that there was a happy time when the authority to pass judgment on music was left neither to “the catcalls and discordant outcries of the crowd” nor to the clapping of the audience, but to the educated people, men of paideia who “made it their rule to hear the performances through in silence, whereas boys, their pedagogues, and the rabble were called to order by the official’s rod.”19
How could the power of the men of paideia have passed to the people and their pedagogues? Precisely through the divorce inherent in music. Music is at once the reproduction of the immutable order and the trance mediating between the divine and the human, the One and the Many. The musician does not possess the reason of his possession; he does not know how to judge music. In turning himself into a judge, he will give the common people jurisdiction over his art. The artists’ power is the precursor of the power of the people: “Afterwards, over the course of time, authority in the matter of transgressions against music passed to composers, who undoubtedly had a poetic nature but were ignorant of the justice of the Muse and its laws … They inculcated in the common people false musical principles and the audacity to consider themselves competent judges. As a result, the theaters, which had been mute, became loquacious; and a fatal theatrocracy succeeded the musical aristocracy … Starting with music, there grew the opinion that all are competent in everything, as well as the rejection of laws. And liberty has followed in their train.”20
Things would be simple if the fight against this anarchic principle came down to regulating spectacles and restoring to the friends of the Muse their power over music. The problem is that the Muse’s justice is connected to delirium. The power of the musician, the tragedian, or the rhapsodist is a divine power. Even the stupid rhapsodist Ion has his share of it. He need only be beside himself [hors de lui], his eyes filled with tears and his hair standing on end as he relives the misfortunes of Troy, for his public, too, to be beside itself, the crowd of artisans mixing itself up with the inspired chain of chorus members that, by means of rhapsode and poet, leads back once more to the god who conducts souls where it will.
If Ion is truly inspired, the disorder is irremediable. Fortunately, the likelihood is that he is not. A wink in the dialogue allows us to assume this. It is undoubtedly true that Ion is possessed, that he believes in Troy and that tears escape uncontrollably from his eyes. Socrates asks him: Don’t you realize you produce the same effect on your audience? Yes, says Ion, I can see the tears in their eyes and their hair standing on end. But he does not take his eyes off them because his interest is at stake: “For if I set them weeping, I myself shall laugh when I get my money, but if they laugh, it is I who have to weep at losing it.”21
Socrates does not react to this. He departs saluting Ion as a “man divine” but leaves us with the thought that Ion really may be just a cook—or, what amounts to the same thing, that Ion may be a “man divine” for the satisfaction of people who want their money’s worth. So the philosopher is reassured that we are still within the circle of rhetoric. Ion, the inspired voice of the shoemakers, can see only through the eyes of his clients. And these “lovers of spectacles” who react in everything as if “they had been paid,”22 perhaps offer no spectacle other than that of their own mass. The noise of number—the very custom of applauding, imported from Italy—is what has created theatrocracy.23 Power is not so much in the spectacle itself as in the racket that it authorizes. In its noisy applause the multitude expresses only its own essence. In short, nothing here is imitated.
This theory of “popular aesthetics” is reassuring as a tautology. For if the people are lovers of spectacles, the simple reason is that they, as number, are enemies of the non-sensible unity of the Idea. That is what is laid out in book VI of the Republic. The people cannot possibly love the Beautiful in itself but only beautiful things. Thus, for Hippias the sophist, the beautiful is a beautiful girl—an occasion for performance, an instrument of reproduction. The multitude never really admires anything but itself in the motley assortment of beautiful things. It simply reveres the productive and reproductive Many as its own essence. The law of applause expresses its self-satisfaction. The matter again becomes a question of regulating spectacles.
Which is to say that the analysis can be read the other way around—as the other side of a commandment. The tautology of the Many applauding themselves is merely the confirmation of the circle in which philosophy, mingling its cause with that of the city, has confined the artisan. This phenomenology of the spectacle, in which the pleasure of the masses boils down to the beating of number, is the inverse of the theory of work governed by the “nothing else” of specialization. The “sociology” is coupled with an “aesthetics” that puts the One and the Many strictly in their places, reserving to the philosopher the legislation and even the poetry of the double. The shoemaker or carpenter must be merely one of the polloi who make up the noisy multitude. As if this were a matter of exorcizing the phantasm of an even more formidable anarchy: suppose the shoemaker or carpenter had forgotten the difference between a useful work and a simulacrum, and decided to occupy himself not with judging theater but—supreme folly—the Beautiful in itself. This would be improbable sociologically, of course, but the “sociology” is merely the division between philosophy and anti-philosophy. Shoemaker is the generic name for the man who is not where he ought to be if the order of estates is to get on with the order of discourse. Given that starting point, anything is possible. There already is a true bastard, Antisthenes, who scatters to the four winds what he claims is Socrates’s teaching.
The great phantasm of the Republic—philosophy invaded by dwarfish interlopers—finds its muted echo in the sylvan revery of the Phaedrus. The dialogue pauses in the midst of its criticism of the ridiculous logographers who eagerly write “It has pleased the people …,” and we may be tempted to see such pauses as efforts to provide “repose” for readers worn out by the aridity of the reasoning. Yet it is not a question of repose but of leisure. More precisely, it is the very concept of leisure that is in question when Socrates draws Phaedrus’s attention to the singing of the cicadas in the midday sun.
The “philologist” Phaedrus was anxious to know which discourses provide true pleasures. Not the pleasures of the body or the people, not those that concern the relief of suffering, the filling of a void, or the gratification of some need. He was interested, rather, in the gratuitous pleasures that are wholly opposed to the slavish ones associated with need, fatigue, and pain. The search promises to be a long one, but Socrates says they have the leisure for it.
We must realize that leisure is also a duty. Socrates and Phaedrus are obligated not to rest, not to let themselves be lulled to sleep by the midday sun and the singing of the cicadas. For that is precisely why the cicadas sing. They are the descendants of a race of song lovers who were so intoxicated with divine music that they forgot to eat and drink, and eventually died as a result. Messengers of the Muses, the cicadas sing to identify those lovers of leisure and the Muses who are capable of resisting the hypnotic power of their midday concert. As Socrates reminds Phaedrus: “If they were to see us two behaving like the multitude at midday, not conversing but dozing lazy-minded under their spell, they would rightly laugh at us, taking us for a pair of slaves who had invaded their retreat like sheep, to have their midday sleep beside the spring.”24
Multitude, slaves, refuge: this sylvan scene transposes a play with which we are already familiar. But here the defense of philosophy also solves the question of the theater. The friends of the Muses are transported by the very same singing that drives the laboring people away. The chorus of cicadas traces the circle that isolates free dialectic from the occupations of those whose vigilance merely follows the curves of fatigue and heat. Phaedrus was quite right in dragging the city-loving philosopher far away from the shoemakers and carpenters with whom Critias would forbid him to associate. His theater of the green world, the inverted image of the people’s theater, is also the sanctuary of philosophy. It preserves the privileged relationship, the Two of dialectic and divine friendship, from the familiarity of the Many who produce and reproduce. The fact of being incapable of resisting sleep can be used to detect the presence of servile natures among those who are neither bald nor lame nor bastards. As the Laws tell us, it is disgraceful for a master to be awakened by his servant.25 The philosopher is the master par excellence, the man who should not sleep, someone whose free speech should not be interrupted. That is also what dialectic means: an endless conversation with disciple and deity, an activity as unceasing as vocational training and the guardianship of the city. If the philosopher-initiator and the lover of discourse were both to fall asleep, that would be the end of philosophical legitimacy. And who then could forbid artisans from mingling their discordant voices with the chorus of cicadas?
The myth of leisure establishes the natural link between the law of labor and that of the theater. Just as the lovers of spectacle were only the Many shouting here and dozing there, the artisan folk must be governed solely by the alteration of work and sleep so that the philosopher-cicada may preserve his sanctuary. And this sanctuary is both the refuge of the wise man outside the motley city of artisans and the temple of the guardians who oversee the ants of divided labor. The cicadas’ singing anticipates the justice of Hades separating the heavenly destiny of the “men divine” from the honest recompense promised to temperate men who, having cultivated the virtues of moderation (sōphrosunē) and justice (dikaiosunē), will be reincarnated as some species of political animal: as bees, wasps, or ants.26
This separation of music and politics marks perhaps the ultimate contradiction of the philosopher-king. The “man divine” is not a political animal but a musical animal made to be the eulogist (if not the marionette) of god rather than to watch over city censuses and regulations.27 The population of this city is urged to delight itself incessantly by chanting in unison its immutable principles to rhythms fixed by the ruler.28 Too much emphasis has been placed on this desire as the dream of the “totalitarian” philosopher. It should be seen, rather, as the pointing up of a contradiction and as a futile effort to solve it, an attempt to give to each person the share of music and divine play of which he is capable. The laws and choirs of the city will never be more than a feeble imitation of the divine music. And if the philosopher devotes himself to that, he does so first of all to protect his retreat. Music will be able to unite the citizens only if it has already isolated him from their choirs.
The singing of the cicadas allows the order of delirium to be cut by the barrier of leisure. Socrates’s and Phaedrus’s visit to the country gives the exclusion of imitators its artful twist of meaning. Haven’t these latter been chased out of the productive city so that they might better prepare, outside the walls, the divine retreat, the private banquet where the philosopher gets on well with poets (even the bad ones) and lovers of discourses (even the simple ones) by excluding artisans (especially the cunning ones)?
Poets are needed, and then again they are not. There is no need for poets in that they populate the people’s theater with actors whose resonant voices compete with the tragedy of the philosopher-guardian. But poets are needed if the philosopher-guardian is not to remain simply a master swineherd. So their exclusion becomes complicity, a private party or banquet far from the roar of the theater where the philosopher meets with lovers of fine forms and beautiful discourses. The philosopher leads them to realize that the principle of their passion has nothing to do with techniques of fabrication and cuisines of flattery. In return, the equivocal society of these superficial men guarantees for the lover of truth that all pleasures—from the mists of intoxication to the company of courtesans—are divided in two. Pausanias’s “rhetorical” discourse thus tells the truth of Diotima’s inspired discourse: there are two kinds of love, each of which is double in itself. As Socrates says to Callicles: “Both of us are in love: I with Alcibiades son of Clinias, and philosophy; and you also with two, the Athenian demos, and Demos son of Pyrilampes.”29 At the end of the Symposium, Alcibiades returns the compliment in describing the arguments of his beloved Socrates as enveloped within discourses of “pack asses, blacksmiths, shoemakers and tanners.”30
For everything to be cut in two, a final birth myth is needed—one that introduces division into the order of illegitimacy as well. It took only a slave boy to disclose the vanity of all those aspiring to knowledge. Now it takes only one poor little girl, Penia, and one bastard, Eros, to bar the door to illegitimate lovers of the Idea, thereby completing an order in which the sociology of functions finds itself entirely recuperated by the genealogy of values.
As concerns the demiurge, the man of the people and labor, everything is cut in two. The Delphic oracle says to the philosopher “Know Thyself,” and to the artisan “Nothing to Excess.” For the one, memory is reminiscence; for the other, mnemotechnics. Discourse is the dead letter of rhetorical imitation or the winged song that imitates the divine. The love of theatrical figures is the beating of tool-wielding hands or of wings in remembrance of beauty. The love of bodies is a pretext for the reproduction of shoemakers or the starting point for the askēsis of elect souls. The pathway of the Idea is guarded by these appearances that divide themselves in two, each time throwing off to the wrong side of the process the artisan who would like to do something other than his own business.
It would be quite a boorish trick for philosophy to build itself up through a simple exclusion that makes it impossible for manual laborers to know the truth of the soul. The philosopher is not afraid that men of iron will get hold of the truth; he is afraid that artists will get hold of appearance. To elevate the lover of the true to his proper dignity, the shoemaker must be excluded from the world of appearances. The philosopher locks the door on him twice. First he does it with the division of labor, which excludes imitators and keeps artisans in “their” place; he then does it a second time with the delirium of inspiration that carries out the doubling of appearances. Or, if you will, the philosopher-king invents two sciences: a sociology that dismisses appearances from the universe of useful functions, and an aesthetics that causes the appearances guarding philosophical legitimacy to recoil before the functionaries of the useful. On either side of the artisan, then, two figures are distributed: the sophist whose negativity gathers into himself the effects of illegitimacy specific to the artisan who departs from his role, and the poet, the philosopher-king’s companion in delirium or, perhaps better, his buffoon. Once the seriousness of his work as an artisan has disqualified him as a master of wisdom, the philosopher can enlist in his own service this specialist in appearances and genealogies, this accomplice conjurer and denier of any beauty or truth in which shoemakers might claim to have a part.
The provocative power of Plato lies in the extraordinary frankness with which he expresses what future epistemologies and sociologies will try to obscure: that the order of the true can no more be grounded in a science of science than the social order can be grounded in the division of labor. The social relation and the order of discourse depend upon one and the same fiction, the fiction that chases the artisan from the realm of fiction. What is excluded is the lie of art, the lie that is practiced unwittingly. At the juncture of the philosophical order and the social order only one lie may proceed, the noble lie of nature.
As opposed to the artisan who lies as he works, the philosopher claims to found the legitimacy of his own lie in the science of the true. But the situation of the lie is really the opposite, since it is the legislation of simulacra that founds philosophical legitimacy simply by decreeing its own genealogical myths.
Philosophy is fundamentally genealogy, a discourse on nature as a discourse on nobility. It should not be understood as a “proslavery” discourse designed to justify an inegalitarian social order or to shut men up in the “totalitarianism” of its idea. Its concern is less to lock others up than to protect itself from them, less to impose its truth than to safeguard its appearance. Nobility, we know, consists of that first and foremost.
Plato’s order and delirium express neither philosophy’s compromise with the established political orders nor its stubborn attempt to impose its own truth on the disorders of the city. They express, rather, the paradox of its very institution. Philosophy can trace the circle of its own autonomy only through an arbitrary discourse on nature and nobility, a discourse that makes possible its own tension by imitating its telos, perfect nature. But this imitation is forever destined to border on its own caricature. The philosopher-king is doomed to live with his apes.
The philosopher of Zarathustra will once more encounter this logic and this menace in the hopes and fears of the socialist age, but only at the price of speaking them against Plato. When Nietzsche glorifies the lie of life and the noble passion for appearance against the Socratic and plebeian passion for truth, he may only be prolonging the wrath of the philosopher-king against the plebeian Socrates of Xenophon the agrarian landlord, and against Antisthenes the popular philosopher. That truth derives its legitimacy only from the noble lie that distinguishes highborn souls from those born for the hammering of forges and the uproar of assemblies—this is the Platonic lesson that Nietzsche confirms.
But not without paying his own tribute to modernity by transporting the “Mediterranean” distinctions of the Greek myth to Bizet’s Spain, and Agathon’s banquet into the midst of the toreadors, soldiers, and female tobacco workers who frequent Lillas Pastia’s tavern in Carmen. The essential thing, as we learn in the seguidilla dance, is that the tavern is at the foot of the rampart. Recall that the naïve (or wily?) Antisthenes had accused philosophers of refusing the protection of their rampart to the artisan folk, even though it had been built to protect them.
From what exactly, then, are the tobacco factory’s workers supposed to protect the philosopher in the age of democracy and socialism? By what reversal does the factory come to work against the artisan, and the Venus of the crossroads to save the philosopher-artist’s stake? If Bizet, contra Wagner, is to become the philosopher of Zarathustra, the reason is not simply that Carmen’s dance is lighter than the Mass of the Knights of the Grail, but that there is something, perhaps, even more intolerable than the silly bombast of warriors such as Parsifal, Siegfried, and Lohengrin: namely, the modest poetic pretension of the shoemaker Hans Sachs.