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Source: Winter Oak
WHAT SPECTRE HAUNTS WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT?
by W.D. James
Marx and Engels famously begin The Communist Manifesto (1844) with the provocative invocation: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.” To stick with the Marxist-Hegelian terminology, I think this is just one manifestation of a more enduring spectre or ghost or spirit that has haunted us for a very long time.
The Organic Radicalism website presents a vision of a longed-for social reality that conforms to human nature, freedom, and is conducive to human flourishing. It hearkens to a latent tradition of world thought that has articulated this vision or social imaginary.
It characterizes that vision as ‘organic’ in the double sense that it understands society as a ”social organism … consisting of horizontal relationships and exchanges between free human beings” and in the sense that “human beings are also understood to be part of nature, to belong to the natural world.”
It is ‘radical’ also in a double sense. First, because it proposes to make “fundamental change to society” and in the etymological sense that it aims to get to the ‘root’ of the issues involved. The beloved community of the organic radical tradition is likened to Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft (holistic community).
The Intellectual Roots of Organic Radicalism
As a contemporary intellectual formulation, Organic Radicalism seeks to recover a primordial memory of natural human sociality and project a healthy human future informed by this vision. Paul Cudenec has done an admirable job of connecting the dots between a myriad of thinkers across the ages and across the world who have hearkened to a vision something like this (see especially his The Stifled Soul of Humankind).
Nevertheless, this tradition has not existed in a self-aware, consistent, and cohesive line of thought on the surface of dominant thinking. Thinkers like Lao Tzu, Thomas Müntzer, Peter Kropotkin, and René Guénon did not present themselves as ‘organic radicals’ and probably only had the foggiest of notions that they might be operating in the same intellectual universe. For this reason, I think speaking of what unites these sort of thinkers in terms of a spectre, or spirit, seems to make sense.
In an attempt to sure up the assertion that such a tradition even exists, we might ask when and where does it make its first appearance in the history of political thinking. Confining ourselves to ‘the West’ (for purposes of the limited scope of this essay), I would assert that it was there at the beginning: in Plato. It is customary to accord Plato’s Republic the honor of being the first text in Western political philosophy. It is at least the first major and substantive grand theory of politics we possess. Hence, it is to that work that we will turn.
Plato’s Two Cities
When we think of the Republic, what comes to mind is probably the society Plato outlines with its hierarchical class structure with Philosopher-Kings (heaven help us) on top, supported by the military class of guard-dog like Guardians, resting on and directing the mass of the population who carry out economic functions which he terms Drones.
This hierarchy is sacramental in that by participating in it, every member is connected to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, best perceived by the Philosopher-Kings, in whatever capacity he or she is naturally fitted to. This is the fundamental structure of all hierarchies rooted in a moral and metaphysical vision (versus mere domination through power) whether the traditional Hindu caste system, the Catholic Church, or an idealized conception of European Feudalism (the Estates). In contrast, most modern hierarchies are rooted in either political, military, or economic power and would be anathema to the likes of Plato.
Yet, what is often overlooked, neglected, or forgotten, is the fact that this is the second society (or ‘city’ or polis, as he calls it) that Plato describes in that work. But isn’t the Republic about the ideal society? Isn’t it the origin of all Utopias, literary and actual? Doesn’t Plato intend to give us an ‘ideal-type’ account of what all societies really are and seek to become? Doesn’t it present the societyness of all societies just as the ideal table presents the tableness of all tables in its purity? Yes, indeed it does. And he does this in the first society he outlines, not the second.
Plato’s Natural Society
So, what does this first society look like and what is its relationship to the more familiar second society? To understand what Plato is on about here, we need to look to the context in which he gives his account. Book I of the Republic centers on a dialogue between the character of Socrates (Plato’s actual teacher, but here more of a literary character representing The Philosopher) and a guy named Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus is a Sophist, a teacher of rhetoric, who in Plato’s eyes represents using ideas to gain power through persuasion, versus seeking the truth.
The issue at stake is which is more fundamental to politics: justice or power. In formulating this question, Plato has done us the service of helping us understand the fundamental metaphysical issue at stake in politics: does power determine all, including what will count as ‘just’ or is justice more fundamental, determining what will get to count as a good society or regime?
Thrasymachus defends the former position in asserting that “The Just is nothing else than the advantage of the stronger”. It is the job of the character Socrates to defend the latter position. To some extent, he does so over the remaining nine books of the Republic.
Or, maybe, he finishes that task in the second book and the remaining eight are to an extent superfluous. That actually would not be unlike Plato. In Book II, Socrates argues that justice is what is needed in human societies for people to be happy and that power is to be evaluated by whether it serves justice or not.
What is ‘justice’ then? Socrates says it might help us to see it better if we imagined a society coming into being “through speech”; that is, he and his interlocutors will talk through an imaginary good city coming into existence.
For Plato, as a philosophical idealist, creating something “in speech” is not a second-best or arm-chair way of approaching something. Human speech is how the Logos manifests itself in our world. Or, perhaps more accurately, our speech is informed by the Logos as is everything else.
Logos for Plato is the underlying logic, or reason, or structure of everything that exists and why there is naturally order and not chaos. This is the Greek analogue to the Chinese Tao and the Hebrew ‘Word of God’ (in fact, when the Gospel of John describes Jesus as the Word, the word it is using in Greek is Logos).
When we let the Logos flow, and talk through the ideal city, what does it tell us? Socrates says, “a city [or society], as I believe, comes into being because each of us isn’t self-sufficient but is in need of much”(369b).* That is, our “need”, our interdependence, is what makes society (369c).
Further, Socrates sees a natural basis for a rudimentary, organic division of labor in the simple fact of human diversity: we aren’t all the same and nature seems to set it up so that our differences help us meet one another’s needs (370b).
What does the natural society look like? Socrates says it will tend to be small. The basic division of labor is between farmers and skilled craftspersons. Given that people might need some things that aren’t easily grown or manufactured locally, there will also arise a need for traders and navigators (if the society is by the sea). That’s about it. In comparison to the second city he describes, what is notable is the lack of any rulers, warriors, or really any hierarchy at all. People’s roles are defined by how they can be of mutual benefit to one another (370a-371e).
What does Socrates say their lives will be like? He says they’ll “make bread, wine, clothing, and shoes” for themselves. They will vary their labors in accordance with the seasons and dress as nature dictates; shoeless and lightly clad in the summer heat and adequately protected in the winter.
They will bake “noble loaves” and their feasting will consist of figs, beans, berries, acorns and good wines. They and their children will enjoy these simple pleasures “crowned with laurels” (indicating each person is a champion, or a king, or more importantly, a poet—a maker) and “sing of the gods”.
They will keep all things within measure and keep “an eye out against poverty and war” (372a-b). Socrates concludes: “And so they will live out their lives in peace and health, as is likely, and at last, dying as old men, they will hand down similar lives to their offspring” (372d). Clearly Plato is drawing upon some similar ancestral memory to understand what an organic, natural, Gemeinschaft type of society would be like.
And to the question of what is justice? Essentially Socrates says justice is rooted in the needs we have of one another and mutually meeting these needs. The classic Greek understanding of justice was to give to each their due. Socrates has illustrated how this would play out in a natural, organic, society geared toward human wellbeing.
Here we have no class hierarchy where some benefit off of the exploitation of others. Here things are organized toward mutually and freely (through exchange) satisfying people’s natural needs, including their needs to raise families, be engaged in their culture, and have some sense of the overall sacred order within which they move and breath. Justice.
So, why then does the Republic not end here and go on for eight more books? Because Glaucon and other of Socrates’ interlocutors object. Glaucon is an Athenian aristocrat and Plato’s real-life brother. He objects that the society Socrates has described is only fit for “sows” (372d), basically because the members of the society will not have padded couches to lie around on while having drunken orgies and enjoying luxury goods.
Socrates insists that the society he has described is the “true” city and the healthy city (372e). That is, that this vision is the one that is in accordance with Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and the Logos.
The remaining eight books are Socrates’ attempt to redeem what he calls a “feverish city”; one given over to indulgence of all the (unnatural) passions of people and to the “acquisition of money” (374e-373d). Pursuing this path is going to lead to war and strife (in the individual and societal competition to acquire wealth and prestige, and even within the individual soul as the passions seek dominance). Hence, we will need warriors and political leaders, etc…
So, the society we are familiar with from the Republic is actually, and explicitly, Plato’s attempt to outline how a society gone wrong might be redeemed. But he is also clear in later sections of the text that such a scheme cannot endure and the society will naturally deteriorate. Ultimately, when it reaches bottom, where is it? In Tyranny says Plato (564a).
Haunted
There it is. The founder of Western political philosophy’s vision of the good and natural society. And it gets rejected, shunted aside, repressed, submerged, and marginalized from the beginning, right in the text itself. But there it is. It hovers over all the arguments that fill out the rest of the book’s pages, which are ultimately presented as being essentially futile. And, I would suggest, it hovers over (or else bubbles up from below) the whole history of Western thought. There it sits: present to our memory, challenging us, perhaps calling us.
Why doesn’t it just ‘win out’ right at the beginning of political philosophy? Because, Plato is showing us, it does not accord with some powerful people’s desires and interests. It will not be allowed to carry the day. But it is still there. If Plato did not ‘mean it’, surely, he would have just left it out. But it’s there.
Plato was a great mythologist and analyst of the soul, including the subconscious (Freud’s theory of the Id, Ego, and Superego is clearly built on Plato’s account of the Passions, Spirited Element, and Rational Element). Plato realizes that when he is at his best, he is never inventing or creating from whole cloth; he is channeling the Logos.
A spectre is haunting us. Perhaps from deep within nature. Perhaps from within our subconscious or our collective unconscious. But it is there. We may ignore it, attempt to banish it, or discredit it. We can say it is not real or attempt to repress it by force or propaganda. But our ideals haunt us. And as Plato attempts to show, they are not ephemeral, but rooted in nature and in our human nature.
Perhaps this shadowy tradition of organic human solidarity that keeps bubbling up from below, pushing in from the margins, or just nagging at our imaginations is best thought of in these terms of a spirit on our trail.
Anyway, there it is in Plato. Back at the beginning. With us, if just in its felt absence, all along the way. Poking, challenging, disturbing, and calling to us.
[* All quotations from the Republic are from the translation by Allan Bloom, Second Edition, Basic Books, 1991. References are using the standard Stephanus number notation of the works of Plato.]
W.D. James teaches Philosophy in Kentucky, USA.
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