Sophists and Liberals

                               

 

    I re-read perhaps my favorite dialog of Plato yesterday, the Gorgias. In the Gorgias, Plato explores the difference between the rhetoric of those masters of persuasion, the Sophists, on the one hand, which is designed to give those who master it the power to win influence over the assembly (courts and legislature) and thus a key to power in Athens, and Socratic dialog as the primary form of discourse for the lovers of wisdom on the other. This turns out not just to be of academic interest; it goes all the way down.

       The position of Gorgias and his supporters Polus and Callicles is familiar to us: it is the philosophy of advertisers, propagandists, and on a lesser scale of everyday political rhetoric –the part art, and part science of getting people to think like you want them to think, act like you want them to act; or to narrow and amplify their prejudices to use for your own purposes. Just a few of the well-known techniques: well, the list of fallacies in any introductory logic course is a good place to start – attacks against the person, appeals to the crowd, getting off the subject, distorting the opponent's opinions, etc. The more heavy guns are of course building up fear and anxiety, scapegoating, negative stereotyping, subliminal suggestion, spin, creating ‘alternative facts’, disinformation campaigns, and so on. Basically, the rhetorician on this view is like an engineer, like a strip miner looking for the most efficient technical means to get the minerals out of the earth he wants: the human beings to be persuaded are ‘nature’ or ‘raw material’; the rhetorician finds the right technique to manipulate or exploit it to serve whatever human purpose the rhetorician has, even ‘progressive’ purposes.

         Socrates contrasts this, in his view ‘worthless’, means of persuasion to his kind of exploratory philosophical conversation aimed at unveiling as much truth as the conversation partners, being the people they happen to be, can unveil. This turns out to go so deep because it involves two very different and incompatible conceptions of the human soul, human life, and what it means to live a valuable life. And while exploring these differences a kind of moral truth was uncovered, I think to the astonishment of Plato himself. 

        I cannot help but see represented in the Gorgias position the dominant ideology of Western capitalist countries, Lockean liberalism, as Louis Hartz termed it – it includes both ‘conservative’ (e.g. Republican) and ‘liberal-progressive’ (left-Democrat) variations. Not that Lockean liberals consciously identify with the a-morality of Polus or Callicles – the line is drawn for different reasons at violence (and making sure no one becomes a violence-using tyrant) but a deeper affinity does exist (and violence is never far under the surface). It consists of this: the picture of a human being as an autonomous self-forming, like a sovereign nation, a little absolute, with its own purposes and wishes, defining its own needs, its own good – in separation from any overarching conception of community or morality beyond the legal minimum deemed necessary (in Hobbesian logic) for protection. The domination of many people by the few through communication technologies and techniques (in the broadest sense) is defined as part of the freedom of the autonomous self to ‘speech’. As there is no external standard by which to measure truth, reality, the good, justice, and so on, but only the transient agreements among competing and allied autonomous selves, it makes no sense to think of judging these agreements, based on individual acts and decisions, to a higher standard of truth or justice.

         My position on the wars against terrorism is not to be judged by the standards of truth, justice, or prudence but rather just reveals to others of my society who I am, my values, and so on – and that’s it. The way people position themselves on abortion or homosexual marriage, being Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian, on mask-wearing during a pandemic, on religion or secular naturalism, and so on: the different views are not really conceived as different beliefs about what is true and good, open to discussion, but as expressions of identities constructed in opposition to one another, which is to say a way of defining the sovereignty of an individual. To disagree is to reject the person, to put oneself in opposition to a person. Each side sees the other as either ignorant or wicked. The discourse is correspondingly one of war by other means. It is not a matter of getting deep insight into the truth of these matters, or honestly examining oneself, but self-identification against some other autonomous self, and self-assertion in the marketplace of autonomous selves. Gorgias is the right teacher for both groups; neither would have much use for Socrates. (In the Trump era, even basic facts are now located in the sphere of one’s autonomy; not only the determination of the right and the good, but the real is something people decide for themselves – and the Gorgias’ of today attempt to influence.)  

        This gets deep because it raises the questions that so astound Polus and Callicles:  Socrates’ convictions that good and evil are absolute and completely beyond the competence of mere nature or the human will; that the virtues such as justice and wisdom require truthfulness and the willingness to submit yourself to philosophical dialogue in order to form the mind and heart not to infantile or adolescent nature but to adult, moral nature – human nature seen through the clearer lens the mind that loves truth and virtue rather than the mind that wants to strip mine it or define itself by its basest desires;  the discovery that human beings are limits to the will like nothing else in nature, the distinctive terribleness of wrong others. In this understanding of our humanity, our desires, and self-definitions are not self-authenticating, and thinking of them as part of your ‘identity’ doesn’t change that. The self is in truth not analogous to a sovereign nation with rhetoric and its ministry of propaganda; the self is fundamentally ignorant, a never-ending work-in-progress, but open to a reality that is more wonderful than those who see nature as a war of all against all can imagine.

 

 Morality, the Soul, and the Body in Plato 

          The ring in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings made me think about this, and reminded me of the first time I thought of it with the ring in the story offered by Glaucon in Plato’s Republic.  This being the essence of morality. Glaucon was basically demanding a justification of morality or goodness from Socrates – for the reader the reference is clear: given that Socrates, who was poor and powerless, – and the wisest and most just – was executed for being a corrupter of the youth, and those with the power to execute him were considered good and just, what good is the good? What good is justice? In the tale a certain Gyges gains possession of a ring which makes him invisible, making it possible for him though deceit, theft, and murder to gain unlimited power to fulfill his desires. Deceit is necessary for power as it allows for the control of the minds of others, of what they see things as; this, in turn, enables the power man to also control people’s ideas of him and those such as Socrates: Gyges is the contrast to Socrates. Gyges has not only the unlimited power to fulfill his every desire, but controls even more absolutely than Donald Trump over his crowd of worshippers his ‘image.’ He is thought to be very good, while Socrates was thought of as absurd at best, corrupt and corrupting at worst; Gyges was thought ‘happy’; Socrates was executed in disgrace. Why be good when you can have everything you want by being evil with the ring, remaining invisible and unpunished? Why is wanting what you should, what is worthy of a human being, better than getting what you want? Doesn’t power make you happy if it is the power to get anything you want? Isn’t, if we are ‘realistic’, the only thing standing between us and great happiness the lack of the power to get what we want? The argument for the ring is simple: if we can only be ‘happy’ when we get what we happen to want, and if the ring would give us that power, then the ring would make us ‘happy.’ Injustice facilitates happiness, if one has a ring.

            For Plato, Gyges is the most pitiable of men, and Socrates the most blessed. That seems paradoxical, but a man is blessed only when he strives for that with is worthy and which he needs. (A dog of a friend once pulled down a whole plate for bourbon balls and ate every one; the dog spent the rest of the evening miserable and vomiting.) Happiness or blessedness is a state of soul. The needs of the soul: justice, courage, wisdom, love, and truth. A soul deprived of nourishment will weaken and decay. And now the crucial point: the kind of desires that Gyges could fulfill with the ring of invisibility were not those of the soul, but the unending appetites of the body – like an addict, the fulfilling of these desires is like trying to fill a sieve up with water.

            I do not accept the identification of the desire for the power to get what you want with the body. Tolkien’s ring story helps me here, and the Catholic Christianity that nourished his imagination. In Catholic (and most Christian) theology, God is love. Thus God cannot be a radically singular ‘I’ as an isolated ‘I’ could not really love. Love is a relationship, and God is a community for Christians, symbolized by the Trinity. Sauron is a pure will-to-power. Sauron’s ring radically cuts its bearer off from relationship, from community with the Creation and other living creatures. The bearer is alone with the eye. There is no room for an ‘other’, for two ‘I’s’. It isolates its bearer in its radical ‘autonomy’, giving the bearer the power to create good and evil, to determine what ‘justice’ is. This has nothing fundamentally to do with the body, though the body becomes, like the rest of nature, an object to be exploited, ‘property’ if you will. The elevation of the self at the expense of the reality of other selves and nature, the severing of essential connections and relations – that is the origin of corruption, and not the body. The body is not the enemy, but our allowing our ‘self’ to become absolute.