Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel [1st ed.] 9783030521264, 9783030521271

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Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel Vicky Roupa

Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel

Vicky Roupa

Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel

Vicky Roupa Department of Philosophy The Open University Milton Keynes, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-52126-4    ISBN 978-3-030-52127-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52127-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Vicky Roupa This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Many individuals have helped me develop the ideas presented here and have offered comments on drafts of earlier versions of this book. I would like to thank colleagues and faculty at the University of Sussex where my research for this project started. I am particularly grateful to Alison Stone and Tanja Staehler for their careful reading of my work, their encouragement, and valuable comments. Thank you to the philosophy department at the University of Hertfordshire for offering me the opportunity to lecture on Plato’s Republic and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and for engaging with my research, especially Brendan Larvor, John Lippitt, Jane Singleton and Daniel D. Hutto. I am also thankful to the philosophy faculty at the Open University, and especially the Head of Department, Manuel Dries, for extending resources that allowed me to complete my research and writing. Earlier versions of portions of this book have been presented at various conferences and colloquia. An earlier version of Chap. 2 was delivered at the 2015 ‘Thinking in the Open’ Open University philosophy conference. Chapter 4 was presented at the 2005 Hegel Society of Great Britain annual conference on ‘Hegel and the Greeks’. Chapter 5 has been presented at the Social and Political Thought graduate/faculty seminar at the University of Sussex, and Chap. 6 has been presented at the conference ‘Hegelian Philosophy: A Renaissance?’ at the University of Sheffield. I would like to thank the organisers and participants of these conferences for their helpful comments, especially Thom Brooks, Fabian Freyenhagen, Allegra de Laurentiis, Stephen Houlgate, Alfredo Ferrarin, Kimberly Hutchings and Maureen Eckert. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A big thank you to my editor, Brendan George, for his support of this project, and to the publishing team of Palgrave Macmillan for their efficiency and hard work. Finally, my gratitude goes to Persephone for challenging me and for many discussions on this book, on life, on everything.

Contents

1 Articulations: Of Nature and Politics  1 Part I Redefining the Natural: Language and Logic  21 2 Naming as Techne ̄ in Plato’s Cratylus 23 3 Producing the Categories of Being: The Sophist 43 4 Producing the Categories of Being: The Science of Logic 63 Part II Redefining the Natural: Society and Politics  93 5 The Question of Nature in the Republic 95 6 Between Two Paradigms of Politics129 7 Embodying the Political153

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Contents

8 Conclusion: Towards Finitude and the Fragility of Sense175 Index187

Abbreviations1

Writings by Hegel GW  Gesammelte Werke, ed. the Academy of Sciences of North Rhineland-­Westphalia in association with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1968 ff). W  G. W. F. Hegel: Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969–1972). References to this edition are given in the form W 5: 20, indicating volume and page number. Brown  Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825–6, ed. Robert F. Brown, trans. R.F. Brown and J.M. Stewart with the assistance of H.S. Harris. 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). EL  Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T.F.  Geraets, W.A.  Suchting, and H.S.  Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991).

1  References to Plato’s dialogues are given parenthetically to the standard Stephanus pages. All Greek cited has been transliterated. I have employed ē for eta, ō for omega and i for iota subscript. References to Hegel’s works are given by paragraph number (§) wherever applicable, otherwise the page of the English translation is given first, followed by the page number in the German edition. Remarks are cited ‘R’, additions ‘A’.

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ABBREVIATIONS

Haldane & Simson  Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S.  Haldane and Frances H.  Simson. 3 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). HHS  Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–6) with Commentary, ed. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983). LFA  Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). LNR  Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right, trans. J.  Michael Stewart and Peter C.  Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). LPR  Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. P.C. Hodgson, R.F. Brown, and J.M.  Stewart with the assistance of H.S.  Harris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). ‘NL’ ‘On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, on its Place in Practical Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Right’ in Political Writings, ed. Laurence Winant Dickey, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). PM  Philosophy of Mind, trans. A.V. Miller and W. Wallace, revised with introduction and commentary by Michael Inwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). PN  Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V.  Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). PR  Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H.B.  Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). PS  Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). PSS  Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, ed. and trans. M.J. Petry. 3 vols. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978). PW  Political Writings, ed. Laurence Winant Dickey, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). SL  Science of Logic, trans. A.V.  Miller (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969).

 ABBREVIATIONS 

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Writings by Fichte FNR SW

Foundations of Natural Right, ed. F. Neuhouser, trans. M. Baur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre [1796] in Fichtes Werke, Bd 3, ed. I.H. Fichte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971). This is a reprint of J.G.  Fichte’s Sämmtliche Werke, Bd 8, ed. I.H. Fichte Berlin: Veit & Comp, 1845–1846.

Writings by Kant CPR MM

Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M.  Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Writings by Marx Early Writings, trans. R.  Livingstone and G.  Benton, with an Introduction by Lucio Coletti (London: Penguin, 1975). MEW Marx Engels Werke, ed. the Institüt für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1981). EW

CHAPTER 1

Articulations: Of Nature and Politics

1   Introduction In phonetics to ‘articulate’ means to speak, to use the mouth, tongue and jaws to utter meaningful sounds. But ‘articulation’ also refers to the act or process of jointing, the state of being jointed, a mode of jointing or junction. In thus venturing to speak about two philosophers that have profoundly shaped some of the basic concepts of philosophy, this book takes up the project of charting the diverse ways in which nature and politics come together, buckle on to each other, or get jointed, and by the same token, disjointed as well. But why this particular choice at this particular moment in time? What does it mean, today, to bring ‘nature’ and ‘politics’ together, in so intimate a proximity? It no longer seems feasible to distinguish neatly between politics and nature as belonging to discrete chains of signification that include human, artifice, culture, on the one hand, animal, plant, elemental force, on the other. Instead of remaining apart, intact, these two chains appear, like a DNA helix, to entwine inexorably, their trajectories bound together more than at any other point in history. But equally, the basic categories of conceptually organising the world no longer seem self-evidently ‘natural’. At a juncture when our cultural horizon is narrowing in on the post-human, the blurring of the distinctions between ‘man’ and ‘machine’, ‘natural’ and ‘prosthetic’, ‘creativity and ‘technique’ seems to be calling for abandoning the age-old schemas that have defined Western philosophy. Nature itself is in the process of dying, or, if not that, then certainly of morphing into something beyond © The Author(s) 2020 V. Roupa, Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52127-1_1

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recognition. The centuries-old alliance between nature and politics, an alliance premised on the belief that the basic political categories were, in some important sense, natural categories, is receding fast. And yet, at a very fundamental level, and despite the helicoid transformation of nature to include aspects of the categories it was seen until very recently as being in opposition to, nature continues to haunt our political discourses in multiple ways. First of all, it has now become imperative to have a politics for nature. If policies that contain climate change and global warming are to be enunciated, then environmental issues and concerns must come to the forefront of political decision-making. But already, we see in this type of discourse, necessary and urgent as it is, a re-emergence of age-old categories that we thought we had left behind. Concerns about human genome editing, for example, often derive from a reluctance to alter what is ‘natural’ as natural things are generally thought to be healthier and better than artificial things.1 Such debates indicate a real split at the heart of contemporary thinking about nature, between on the one hand, the eclipse of a ‘pure’ concept of nature, which precedes and circumscribes its derivatives (e.g. technology, history, culture), and on the other, the persistent re-appearance of ‘nature’, not, perhaps, as a master-narrative that provides meaning to political practices and institutions, but through its effects on discourses and modes of political engagement.

2   Nature, the Inescapable Horizon of Politics So we are still entitled and indeed have a responsibility to ask: what do we mean by ‘nature’ today? How is ‘nature’ constructed as a concept, and why does it make a re-appearance at critical junctures of our political discourse? A consistent attempt to answer these questions shows, I believe, that ‘nature’ was never an incontestable concept, whose meaning was clear and secure, and whose boundaries with other concepts were safely drawn. To put it simply, the question of nature was never settled once and for all. Like those terms in the Platonic dialogues desperately in need of explication, of a common denominator that will draw together their diverse meanings into a single regimen of signification (e.g. virtue, courage, piety), but which no interlocutor is ever able to define, ‘nature’ has always been an elusive term—a concept that was necessitated by others (e.g. technē, technology), but incapable of being defined independently of those others. Even the most cursory glance at a dictionary definition of ‘nature’ will flag up the essential negativity of the word: ‘nature’ refers to the

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physical world and the processes and laws by which this world is governed, as opposed to humans and human creations, or independently of them. But this decisive addition, ‘independently’, in fact conceals a crucial dependency: it suggests that ‘nature’ is understood through its network of relations to other concepts, for example the ‘human’ (or ‘human creations’), to which it is bound even as it is supposed to exclude them. And at the same time, of course, it is questionable whether nature truly excludes the human. Aren’t human beings also ‘natural’ beings? If we go back to the history of philosophy—and it is one of the contentions of this book that a return to the history of philosophy is necessary— we will find that the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘politics’ have been closely intertwined from the start. In fact, politics per se has been claimed to be the corollary of the distinctive nature of humans that come to the world needy and vulnerable in a double sense: on the one hand, like all natural beings, humans are not self-sufficient but need many things, according to the celebrated formulation of the Republic. On the other hand, however, unlike other natural beings, humans come to the world naked and unequipped to ward off the elements, fight off their enemies and secure their preservation. According to the myth of Epimetheus, which Protagoras narrates in Plato’s dialogue of the same name, powers and abilities were distributed among animals until they were all used up, and there was nothing left to give to the human race, which thus had to go ‘naked, unshod, unbedded and unarmed’ (321c). Two gods took pity on this race, first Prometheus (who, as we know, incurred the wrath of Zeus and paid a high prize for the compassion he showed humans), and subsequently Zeus himself, who commissioned Hermes to bring ‘justice and a sense of shame to humans so that there would be order within cities and bonds of friendship to unite them’. To Hermes’ question whether he should distribute these attributes selectively or to all without exception, Zeus replied: ‘To all’. ‘For cities would never come to be if only a few possessed these’ (322c–d). This egalitarian vision of politics is part of a broader argument put forward by Protagoras that civic virtue can be taught and learnt, but there is no denying the intimate link it establishes between nature and politics. According to the myth, humans are political beings by virtue of the gift Zeus gave them, but also by virtue of their common heritage from a race (to anthrō pō n genos) that was denied armoury and protection, and had to make up for it by living communally and founding poleis. Two elements jointed together therefore: an essential and insurmountable vulnerability

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inherent in the human condition, and a divine gift which defines from that moment onwards what it is to be a zoon politikon. With the advent of modernity, the link between nature and politics will be further complicated. With Thomas Hobbes we have the first attempt to think through the notion of a ‘natural right’ (as different from the Thomistic lex naturalis) in the shape of a fundamental entitlement, encroachment upon which is unjustifiable under all but the most extreme circumstances. At the same time, however, the double significance of nature is sharpened: while it may be the case that rights are conferred to humans ‘by nature’, natural—i.e. non-civic or non-political—forms of association are deemed incapable of securing the most fundamental natural right, the right to life, hence Hobbes’s entreaty to exit the state of nature so that the rule of law can apply and civic relations be established. In this latter sense, nature figures as a negative condition for politics; the state of nature stands at the opposite pole of the civic state, and politics stands to nature as to its negation, even though—and here’s the greatest paradox—it is by reference to nature itself (‘natural rights’) that politics justifies itself. Notwithstanding the emphasis placed on rights, subjective freedom and individuality by the moderns, there are important continuities between the ancient and the modern tradition of thinking about the political. For both traditions, I argue, nature is an inescapable horizon that frames and conditions politics. On the one hand, nature figures as a negative condition for politics; it is because humans are naturally needy and vulnerable that they get together and form political communities. In other words, ‘nature’ signifies a lack in the human condition for which politics is meant to compensate. Politics in this sense is at the service of life and self-­ preservation, and channels the energies of the community towards the satisfaction of needs. On the other hand, however, politics also has another sense which lends it a ‘higher’ ethical significance; this sense comes to the fore when the link that connects politics to self-interest, the immediate satisfaction of needs, and the continuation of life gets loosened up, and politics is done sovereignly, in ways that go beyond or may even be at odds with the perceived individual or collective interest. This notion of politics will be fleshed out in the course of the book; for the moment let us underscore the fact that in the tradition from Thucydides to Hegel it has been associated with war and death, with disregard for life and material possessions, but also with generosity and the gift. Though in many ways antagonistic to the concern for self-preservation, this kind of politics is no less a

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natural offspring, inasmuch as it is the very nature of the zoon politikon, to use Aristotle’s term, that makes it possible.2 Thus, politics emerges before us as a highly contradictory thing: it is intimately connected to the management of need, which in turn gives rise to an economy of exchange and to forms of association that serve primarily the function of securing life. Life, the sheer preservation of life, is affirmed as the reason for founding communities by philosophers as disparate chronologically as Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes. At the same time, however, politics cannot be reduced to a cool-headed calculation of the potential gains and losses as prescribed by economic logic; the decision to enter into and affirm the common bond (and even more, to die for it) requires a ‘leap of faith’, a moment of uncalculated irrationality, because there is no guarantee that what one gives to the community will be remunerated or redeemed at a later stage. This ‘leap of faith’, this act of giving without a predetermined payback date is, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, the ‘excess of the specific nature of the zoon politikon, its excess with respect to the social organisation of relations that benefit the partners’.3 In other words, politics proper turns out to be what transcends the more primitive community of need and calculation of benefits, and inaugurates a higher ethical order in which people, instead of expecting to receive and giving only grudgingly, are ready to give freely. Two politics then: a politics of need and self-interest, of calculation, of expected reciprocity, a politics intimately connected to human beings as ‘natural’ beings with needs and vulnerabilities; and then another politics, a politics of excess, of the incalculable and the gift, a politics also linked, however indirectly, to ‘nature’, albeit a notion of nature that is assumed to be peculiar and unique to humans and detaches them from the expanse of natural life around them.

3   Plato and Hegel in Pursuit of Nature This book traces the development and, in effect, ‘re-invention’ of this multitudinous concept of nature in the political thought of Plato and Hegel. Plato’s pivotal role in shaping the landscape of political theory cannot be overestimated; he not only altered radically our understanding of what it means to live in political communities but, moreover, did so in pursuit of a politics that would be in accord with ‘nature’. ‘Nature’ in the Republic figures as an ineluctable horizon for political practices and proposed institutions, providing justification for those and ensuring their plausibility.4 The very origin of political association is imputed in that

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dialogue to the fact that humans are not self-sufficient, but have many needs, which cannot be satisfied in isolation, but require a coming-­ together in the context of a polis. The subsequent development of this polis in the dialogue leads to a political constitution whose basic structure mirrors the nature of the human psyche. It is no wonder, then, that Plato is seen by many as foregrounding the close link between nature and politics, and as providing a rubric for a constitutional framework in accord with what, he believed, were the basic tenets of human nature. Whether a utopian social engineer of totalitarian intent, as Karl Popper saw him, or an adherent of natural right in search of a final solution to the political problem, as Leo Strauss did, there is no doubt that Plato posed the question of the relation between nature and politics with great urgency and acuity.5 Yet, the very presence of such a wide range of interpretations of Plato’s work is evidence that his thought cannot be neatly pigeonholed into a single categorial framework. In fact, the main argument of this book is that Plato both sets up and subverts the main oppositions that have marked off Western thought since its inception, e.g. nature vs. technology or nature vs. convention. Although he certainly did not invent these oppositions, but rather borrowed them from the debates and arguments taking place around him, Plato stages them, as we shall see, in a way that both gives them the form of an antinomy (‘either-or’) and seeks a ground beyond that antinomy. Plato therefore puts in place a tradition that has stamped the way we think about nature to the present day (for example, through its antithesis to technē, which we will examine in more detail in Chap. 2), yet, at the same time, provides resources for escaping the calcified ‘either-or’ schemas of the tradition. What these resources are, how they complicate the simple opposition between nature and its ‘others’, and how they point towards a concept of nature with continuing relevance today is the topic of this book. The choice of Hegel seems less obvious in that in his work ‘nature’ has lost its privileged status and instead figures as one instance amongst others within a broader system. However, his thinking on nature is worth revisiting because Hegel offers a powerful lens through which to re-envision the concept of nature and reconsider its articulations with politics. This lens is the notion of ‘speculative words’, which Hegel defines as words that incorporate two opposite meanings. ‘[I]t is certainly remarkable’, says Hegel, ‘to find that a language has come to use one and the same word for two opposite meanings. It is a delight to speculative thought to find in the language words which have in themselves a speculative meaning’ (SL 107

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/ W 5: 114). ‘Sense’, for instance, Hegel says in the Aesthetics, is ‘this wonderful word which is used in two opposite meanings. On the one hand, it means the organ of immediate apprehension, but on the other hand we mean by it the sense, the significance, the thought, the universal underlying the thing. And so sense is connected on the one hand with the immediate external aspect of existence, and on the other hand with its inner essence’ (LFA 1: 128–129 / W 13: 173). This duplicity of ‘sense’, however, should not be seen as a linguistic accident, but rather as a symptom with philosophical significance;6 it is an indication that, though apparently exclusive of each other, the ‘organ of immediate apprehension’ and the ‘universal, essence, or thought underlying the thing’ are in fact intimately connected such that each of them will inevitably suffer some kind of unrest, a movement which will cause it to cross the limit assigned to it by its concept and mutate into its opposite.7 It is not only ‘sense’ that displays this dialectical movement; a number of words exhibit the same duplicity of meaning and are therefore associated by Hegel with speculativity, most famously the word aufheben, variously translated as ‘sublate’, ‘sublimate’, ‘supersede’, ‘cancel’ or ‘annul’. My argument is that ‘nature’, though not in Hegel’s list of speculative words, shares some of their essential features and is subject to a very similar dialectical operation. Now, if we look more carefully at the notion of nature as outlined earlier, we can see that it incorporates two distinct conceptual strands; the first strand is organised around needfulness and the preservation of life; in this guise ‘nature’ displays an intrinsic link with sensuous being. Not all natural beings are capable of actively perceiving through the senses (which is reserved for animal and human life), but all such beings have in common that they give themselves over to the senses and sensible intuition. Natural being is essentially sensuous being. In his Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel writes: [i]n the practical relationship which man establishes between himself and nature, he treats it as something immediate and external; he is himself an immediately external, and therefore sensuous individual. (PN §245, my emphasis)

We are well aware that sensuousness has been much maligned in the history of philosophy. We are familiar with Socrates’ definition of philosophy in the Phaedo as meletē thanatou (preparation for death) which requires of the philosopher to relate to his body in a different way from ordinary

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people because ‘everywhere in our investigations the body is present and makes for confusion and fear, so that it prevents us from seeing the truth’. Instead, ‘if we are ever to have pure knowledge, we must escape from the body and observe things in themselves with the soul by itself’ (66d–e). Although Plato uses the word psuchē, and not nous or dianoia (mind, intellect), to denote the organ through which knowledge is attainable, there is no doubt that he has instituted a distinction that will stamp philosophy right up to the present day. Sensible apprehension is not, according to Socrates, suitable for attaining real knowledge; for that, it is necessary to approach things through the intellect. This suspicion of sensuousness extends to politics, aligning it with a slavish, self-interested activity on the model of Thrasymachus’s conception of justice (developed in Book I of the Republic) as the advantage of the stronger. At the same time, however, a very different conceptual strand co-exists with sensuousness under the same roof. ‘Nature’ in that sense denotes the index of a being’s inherent potentialities, and, according to André Lalande, signifies the principle which produces the development of a being and realises in it a certain type.8 Under this rubric, ‘nature’ refers to a being’s ‘essence’, i.e. to that which makes it what it is, not currently but ideally, and thus figures as a matrix of all the future possibilities attainable by that being. Nature in this guise represents a limit: it spans an area of possible positions which a being can occupy from the ‘lowest’ to the ‘highest’. Getting too close to the limit, either the ‘lowest’ or the ‘highest’, can jar. There would be something comical, for instance, in the image of a quadruped aspiring to walk on two legs. At the same time, a human being that approximates excellence in a certain area (by exhibiting, say, ‘super-human’ courage) may inspire admiration, a desire to emulate that person, or a sense that that person has stepped beyond the merely human towards the saintly or the divine. The association of nature with ‘essence’ is not a recent development; on the contrary, it is as old as philosophy itself.9 In his ‘Genesis of the Conception of “Nature” as Norm’, A.O. Lovejoy offers a survey of the meanings of the word in Greek philosophy and literature noting that while initially referring to ‘the visible characteristics of the person or object under consideration’, and thus, we may add, to what is available to the senses, the word had already in Sophocles developed its distinctive sense of ‘inherent’, ‘real’, or ‘permanent nature’, in contrast with ‘superficial, transitory, or merely apparent characteristics’. ‘In these and other passages’, Lovejoy continues, ‘it is evident that the word was one which a

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Greek writer of the fifth century tended to employ when he had occasion to make the distinction between reality and appearance’.10 Both Plato and Aristotle draw on this sense of the word quite heavily; thus, the ideal polis in the Republic is such to the extent that it is established according to nature. Aristotle respectively defines nature as the end [telos] of a thing and qualifies it as what is ‘best’.11 In this conception, the two strands of nature, ‘sensuousness’ and ‘essence’, stand as opposites (just like the two conceptions of politics outlined earlier): in order to get to know the essence of a thing one has to go beyond sensuousness which signifies appearance and, by extension, deception. Moreover, nature as ‘essence’, far from being antagonistic to law, is another name for law, more specifically a primordial kind of law on which particular human laws have to be modelled if they are to bring justice to human affairs. Nature, in this guise, denotes a kind of divine or cosmic order which provides the measure for judging all things human and assessing their divergence from the ideal. How did the notion of nature as ‘essence’ come to be extricated from the sensible or visible, the merely transitory and the deceptive? Lovejoy explains this transmutation by reference to the combined effect of two factors, a linguistic and a socio-historical one, on fifth-century Greek culture: ‘While phusis had by the fifth century, and probably earlier, come to signify, in the vocabulary of cosmology and metaphysics, the objective qualities or independent realities of the external world, and hence to express also the abstract concept of objectivity, nomos had come, as the result of another long process of semasiological development, to signify not only ancient rules, established custom, accepted moral standards, and positive law, but also “prevalent but erroneous opinion” and “merely subjective appearance”.’ It also appears that by the second half of the fifth century, the Greek poleis had grown increasingly dissatisfied with those traditional moral rules and existing laws. This dissatisfaction, Lovejoy says, fuelled the quest for new criteria which could furnish principles of objective and universal validity. ‘But if the nomoi, purely as such, were open to the suspicion of mere subjectivity, where and how was an objective norm to be discovered? Here the linguistic facts outlined above came to have crucial importance. The recognised antithesis to nomos was phusis; […] The desiderated norm was therefore described as that which is good or right or just “by nature” or “according to nature”.’12 Lovejoy calls this transmutation of the meaning of the ‘nature’ a ‘historical accident’, and believes that it is perfectly conceivable that instead of

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‘nature’ some other word, ‘much more inert and colourless and less ambiguous’, could have been picked out. In this case, ‘the history of European thought in many fields would doubtless have had a very different course’.13 Furthermore, he believes that a different development would have been more desirable since it is doubtful whether ‘nature’ can provide a substantive moral standard.14 It is my contention that however historically accidental this transmutation might have been, once established, it locked two quite distinct and, indeed, opposing ideas (‘appearance’ or ‘deception’, on the one hand, and ‘essence’ or ‘objectivity’, on the other) into a single word, ‘nature’. This interlocking, however, should not be seen as a simple conjoining of two different meanings which could in principle be separated again by means of rigorously purging language of its ambiguities.15 On the contrary, it leaves traces on the interlocked ideas (sensuous being, appearance, needfulness, essence, realisation, etc.) and it becomes itself a trace of the history of these ideas in their philosophical evolution. So much more when one of the constituent ideas, ‘sense’, is itself a speculative word! The task, therefore, (and it is notable that Hegel saw it precisely in this way) is not to dismiss this interlocking as the result of confusion and sloppiness, but rather to delve deeper into its meaning, regarding it as the effect of an inherent instability, tracing out its contours and attempting to identify fault lines. To understand the speculativity of nature, then, its essentially and necessarily elusive and antinomical character, its alliance with a logic that reinstates ambiguity instead of excising it, is the project of this book.

4   Overview Methodologically, the present study diverges from other readings of Plato’s and Hegel’s political philosophies in two ways; first, I preface the discussion more narrowly focused on political philosophy with a close analysis of texts dedicated to language and logic. Thus, Part I examines the conceptual transformation of ‘nature’ as evidenced in two Platonic dialogues, the Cratylus and the Sophist, and concludes with an analysis of the first chapter of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Although politics is not the topic of these texts, it is one of the contentions of this book that the thought of the kallipolis in Plato develops in tandem with a certain reconceptualisation of nature that situates nature squarely within Plato’s metaphysics, and that Hegel is receptive and responsive—though not uncritically—to this reconceptualisation. The themes that will be developed in Part I

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therefore—naming, technē, being and not-being, nous or mind as the guiding principle of the world—represent aspects of a thematic that pervades the problematic of nature in its articulation with politics. It is significant that Plato himself approaches the question of nature through Cratylus’s theory of ‘naturally correct names’, which, according to some commentators, leads us back to Heraclitus and his own metaphysical theory about the nature of reality.16 As we shall see, this metaphysical theory has broader implications for the ideal polity inasmuch as it envisions a radical transformation of social and political institutions (e.g. systems of kinship or gender roles) in accordance with the dictates of ‘nature’.17 It is one of the aims of this book to trace out these broader implications by referring them back to an originary moment of genesis within Plato’s metaphysical thought that develops in dialogue, and often disagreement, with his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. This equally applies to Hegel: from the early writings to the mature system, Hegel elects to place his theory of the state within a systematic whole which cannot be ignored when looking at recognisably political themes, such as natural law or the theory of the monarch. The motifs that Hegel takes over from Plato and analyses in his logical and encyclopaedic works (by which I mean not only the various editions of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences but also the earlier drafts he penned at Jena, for instance), such as the nature of reality, questions around the Parmenidean thesis of the origin of the world, and the critique of naturalism have repercussions for his political works. I also diverge from other approaches to Hegel’s reception of Plato in not prioritising the Lectures on the History of Philosophy as the key text where this reception is articulated. In this, I follow Hegel’s own dictum that the ‘disposition and activity of our and every age is to apprehend the science that exists, to make it our own, and, just in that process, to develop it further and to raise it to a higher level’.18 His relation with Plato’s philosophical thought, therefore, is not confined to the series of lectures Hegel delivered on the history of philosophy for the benefit of a student body. On the contrary, the history of philosophy is here viewed as permeating and impregnating Hegel’s philosophical practice in a much more fundamental and sustained way. Thus, although the Sophist is not mentioned explicitly in the first chapter of the Science of Logic, the category of being which that dialogue articulates is the only one suitable for the presuppositionless beginning Hegel thinks is necessary for the Logic. In addition, the memory of the discovery that Plato made in the Sophist, namely that being

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and non-being have an equal right of citizenship in the realms of thought and logos, is taken up by Hegel contra the tradition which maintained that ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing). Hegel’s analysis in the Logic, therefore, can be seen as an attempt to recapture a line of thought which, though by no means lost, was not dominant in the tradition either. My strategy in dealing with the Hegel–Plato connection, therefore, is to keep the Lectures on the back-burner, and instead focus on the texts that Hegel prepared for publication himself, identifying the areas where the philosophical thought of Plato appears to have impacted Hegel’s. A further, potentially controversial, decision needs to be mentioned at this point. Though Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences) is referenced in the present study, it is not the object of analysis in a separate chapter. The reason for this is that though for many years neglected and dismissed, Hegel’s philosophy of nature has now been recognised as an integral part of the Hegelian system, and has received much critical attention and discussion with a substantial body of scholarship already in existence.19 For the purposes of this book, therefore, I opt to accentuate certain other themes of Hegelian philosophy (e.g. the question of nature in Hegel’s early philosophy of law and the state) that help shed further light on aspects of his problematic of nature whilst also bringing to the fore underappreciated connections between facets of the system (e.g. between Hegel’s theory of signs and the politically liminal figure of the monarch). In view of the above, Chap. 2 focuses on the technicity or artificiality of names in Plato’s dialogue Cratylus. The dialogue examines whether names are the result of agreement and convention or whether they have to conform to some kind of ‘natural appropriateness’ if they are to be names at all. Looking at some of the key arguments advanced in the dialogue, especially the idea of language as tool, I argue that Plato uses the issue as a sounding board for testing the basic premises of Cratylus’s naturalist metaphysics and its attendant concept, imitation or mimesis, i.e. the theory that names are imitations of things, and are intended to impart knowledge about those things. Whilst in principle committed to some version of naturalism, Socrates is sceptical of Cratylus’s theory of ‘naturally correct’ names as it requires a crude naturalism ordaining that the properties of things be reflected in the phonetic structure of their names. Socrates shows that this variety of naturalism fails because meaning cannot be a simple function of the affective qualities of the elements that make up words (just as the letter ‘l’ is supposed to convey smoothness). If a realist account of

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knowledge is to be retained, therefore, a new variety of naturalism is required, one that reconfigures ‘nature’ as ideality. The ideal character of this new concept of nature has far-reaching consequences for politics as well inasmuch as it involves—tacitly, at this stage—a radical restructuring of social relations and institutions (e.g. kinship or political leadership). Chapter 3 examines the development of these themes in Plato’s dialogue Sophist. The dialogue marks a renewed commitment to language on Plato’s part, i.e. to the idea that we learn about things and reach agreement through logos—verbal explanation. However, and herein lies Plato’s greatest worry, logos is also a vehicle of deception used by sophists to convey untruth and embed knowledge in a structure of power. In other words, logos is not politically disinterested but can be harnessed to spurious ends. Plato’s aim in the dialogue is to separate these two strands—truth from untruth, honesty from deception—and establish a procedure that will cleanse language of its inherent tendencies to lead astray, thus disarming sophistry of its essential weapons. However, if this aim is to be achieved, a further variety of naturalism has to be confronted, namely Parmenides’ stipulation about the identity between thought and being. Though markedly distinct from Cratylian naturalism and its metaphysical commitments, Parmenidean naturalism also stipulates a coincidence between being and language inasmuch as it calls upon the inquirer to desist, in the interests of truth, from trying to say or think that which is not. I discuss the portion of the dialogue that deals with Parmenides’ stipulation and conclude the chapter with some remarks about the intricacy of the relation between language and being as established in the Sophist. Chapter 4 serves two purposes; one, to establish the continuities between the problematic of the Sophist and Hegel’s own version of dialectic, and two, to identify the distinctively Hegelian strategy of dealing with the problem of language as a medium that both reflects and occludes the structure of being. The chapter discusses the issue of naming in Hegel’s lectures at Jena (1805–1806) with reference to the emergence of national languages in Europe. It then proceeds to examine the first chapter of the Science of Logic where Hegel lays out the passage from being to nothingness to becoming. Whilst arguably presuppositionless and in theory available to all thinkers, Hegel’s dialectical operation, I contend, cannot be completed in thought alone but instead requires, and is made possible by, language. Strictly speaking, ‘becoming’ is not a thought but a word, or rather a thought that can be had once a word is placed in the space opened up by the concept’s logical possibility. I discuss the implications this has

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for Hegel’s broader philosophical project, and conclude the chapter with some comments on the resistance natural languages display towards the expression of philosophical truths. Part I is concluded with some more general comments on the continuities between Plato’s and Hegel’s conceptions of nature. Part II considers three more explicitly political texts in light of the analysis of Part I: Plato’s Republic, Hegel’s early ‘Natural Law’ essay, and the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The focus of Chap. 5 is on the Republic, and more specifically, the portion of the dialogue in Book II where Socrates discusses the so-called ‘first city’, a proto-political formation built entirely on natural principles. The chapter notes the puzzlement this episode has inspired in the secondary bibliography and considers some of the questions raised; why is the city abandoned in favour of diseased or ‘inflamed’ forms of political organisation? Did Plato really think this city could ever exist or did he devise it merely to highlight some unattractive human traits that make this political arrangement impossible? I look at important discussions of the ‘first city’ in the secondary literature (notably that of Leo Strauss) and dispute the reading that equates ‘human nature’ with a set of stable attributes that allow for certain political arrangements whilst foreclosing others. I then propose a different mode of articulation between the psychological and the political, arguing that the passage from the ‘first city’ to the kallipolis (or best polity) in Plato’s thought is coincidental with a trauma. This trauma is to be understood both in political terms (the possibility of civil war) and in personal/psychological terms (the impact of Socrates’ death). I conclude the chapter with some comments on the philosopher’s reluctant involvement with politics (which arises precisely out of this traumatic experience)—an involvement that is excessive inasmuch as it goes beyond the strict ‘give and take’ of politics. Chapter 6 situates Hegel in the junction between two paradigms of politics, the ancient and the modern. The starting point for this chapter is the concept of ‘rights’, which, it is often said with some justification, ancient philosophers did not possess because their starting point was the whole, not the individual. In the first part of the chapter I offer an analysis of Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right, which provided a strong impetus for Hegel to engage critically with the social and political philosophy of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. I argue that Fichte’s theory of ‘natural right’ (which was developed in response to Kant’s) is characterised by a split between the moral law (Sittengesetz), which commands categorically, and the law of right (Rechtsgesetz), which

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is only permissive and does not command. To safeguard this separation (which Fichte thought was necessary in order to protect both the categorical character of the moral law and the essentially permissive character of ‘rights’) Fichte had to reconceptualise the modern state in naturalistic/mechanistic terms. I consider Hegel’s critique of Fichte in his early essay on ‘Natural Law’ arguing that far from reverting to the political theory of an earlier era, as some commentators have argued, Hegel makes use of the conceptual apparatus of the ancient philosophers, especially the Platonic view that justice is always and foremost political, in order to bring out the one-­sidedness and inadequacy of modern political theories. Chapter 7 addresses the question of nature and natural instances in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. My starting point in this chapter is the dichotomy between nature and spirit, or body and mind, that epitomises much of modern philosophy’s conception of the political. I discuss how Hegel takes up this dichotomy in his mature work (Elements of the Philosophy of Right and Lectures on Natural Right) and how he complicates it through his notorious theory of the hereditary monarch. Viewed by many as philosophically untenable and possibly a concession to Prussian absolutism, this theory has been a source of disappointment for readers of Hegel because it appears to accentuate a natural instance, the monarch’s body, in a way that sits at odds with Hegel’s philosophy of history and his theory of the state. I look at the young Marx’s critique of the Hegelian sovereign, before I proceed to make the argument that Hegel’s theory of the monarch be viewed not as an aberration within an otherwise rational system, but rather as revealing an essential aspect of politics, namely the need to bring the realm of spirit to bear upon the realm of nature. The monarch’s body, I argue, is the plane where these two realities intersect, and has to be seen as a condition of possibility for their articulation. I conclude with some more general comments on the articulations of nature and politics in the dialectical tradition. I argue that Plato’s alignment of sensuousness with a Thrasymachean conception of justice is not strictly necessary, nor was Plato himself entirely consistent in proposing such an alignment. On the contrary, his positive appraisal of sensuousness in certain contexts (e.g. in the ‘first’ or ‘healthy’ city) suggests a more nuanced and complicated account of the sensible. Hegel affirms and reinforces this appraisal by interpreting ‘sense’ speculatively and thus opening up a path for returning nature to concrete particularity without divesting

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it of its ideality. Such a philosophical re-instatement of the sensuous, I argue, instigates possibilities for a re-thinking of nature that puts finitude at its core. Hegel, I argue, needs to be re-read today not as the reigning philosopher of absolute idealism, who brings philosophy, and indeed politics, to a close, but instead as the thinker of finitude and the fragility of sense.

Notes 1. See, for example, the discussion of ‘enhancement’ in The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, ‘Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance’ (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2017), 138–139. 2. It might be objected that this second notion is more classical than modern. However, not even the staunchest individualist can deny that the civic bond cannot survive without any sort of attachments that go beyond the strict pursuit of self-interest. 3. See Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch’, trans. Mary Ann and Peter Caws, Social Research 49, no. 2 (1982): 481–516. 4. Glaucon, for example, in his feigned defence of injustice in Book II of the Republic, invokes ‘nature’ as the reason why humans ‘desire to outdo others and get more and more’; it is because their ‘nature’ ‘naturally’ pursues this as ‘good’ (359c). Socrates will also appeal to nature whilst countering this defence of injustice; when he proposes that women, too, be part of the city’s guard, he does so on the basis that their ‘natures’ are the same as those of men in the crucial respect of the qualities needed for guardianship (456a). 5. Popper’s appraisal of Plato’s political philosophy was proposed in The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, The Spell of Plato (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1945), especially chapters 6 and 9. A survey of interpretations of Plato as a proto-totalitarian thinker and the retorts can be found in S. Sara Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 30. Strauss discusses Plato in a number of works including in his Natural Right and History where he makes the claim that the ‘whole galaxy of political philosophers from Plato to Hegel, and certainly all adherents of natural right, assumed that the fundamental political problem is susceptible of a final solution’. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 35–36. 6. See EL §96A: ‘This ambiguity [Doppelsinn] in linguistic usage […] cannot be regarded as an accident nor yet as a reason to reproach language as if it

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were a source of confusion. We ought rather to recognise here the speculative spirit of our language, which transcends the “either-or” of mere understanding.’ 7. Hegel says about the speculative union of ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ that it is a union which ‘can only be stated as an unrest of incompatibles, as a movement’ (emphasis in the original). See SL 91 / W 5: 94. 8. Lalande adds that this appears to be the fundamental meaning of the word of which he gives no less than eleven meanings. See André Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, 6th ed. (Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), 667–673. 9. See also Sallis: “The doubling of nature in this question—say, in the question ‘What is the nature of nature?’—can express the positing of an idea or essence of nature beyond nature, the placing of the truth of nature beyond nature in its dispersion and its singularities. The fact that the word ‘nature’ commonly has this double sense in the modern European languages, that it can signify both the manifold of natural things and the essence of something, even of something not natural—as when one speaks of the nature of art, for instance—attests to the force and consistency with which philosophy has determined nature precisely by projecting it beyond itself, by positing a nature beyond nature.” John Sallis, Platonic Legacies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 132–133. 10. A.O.  Lovejoy, ‘Genesis of the Conception of “Nature” as Norm’, in A Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas, ed. Gilbert Chinard et al. (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935), 104. 11. See Politics 1253a 1–2: ‘For what each thing is when fully developed, we call its nature, whether we are speaking of a man, a horse, or a family. Besides, the final cause and end of a thing is the best’. 12. Lovejoy, ‘Nature as Norm’, 106–108. Naddaf, who examines the development of the concept of ‘nature’ in the pre-Socratics, also affirms this meaning of the term: ‘When we turn to the first occurrence of the word in a pre-Socratic, Heraclitus DK22B1, it is clear that phusis means not only the essential character of a thing, but also how a/the thing originates and develops and thus continues to regulate its nature. In sum, phusis must be understood dynamically as the “real constitution” of a thing as it is realised from beginning to end with all of its properties.’ Gerard Naddaf, The Greek Concept of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 3. 13. Lovejoy, ‘Nature as Norm’, 110. For an illuminating discussion of more recent debates between natural law theorists and positivists see Catherine Kellogg, ‘Ideas of Justice: Natural and Human’, in Law and the Humanities: An Introduction, ed. Austin Sarat, Matthew Anderson, and Cathrine O. Frank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 141–160.

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14. Thus: ‘To identify the objective ethical norm with those rules of conduct which are valid “by” or “according to” nature gave no logical answer to any concrete moral question; it was merely another way of saying that whatever is objectively right is objectively right, or that what is normal is normal’. Lovejoy, ‘Nature as Norm’, 109. Lovejoy is here in agreement with John Stuart Mill, who in his essay ‘Nature’ puts the normative signification of the word ‘nature’ down to a plain misunderstanding or failure to think through the logical implications of this notion. If, Mill says, one denotes by ‘nature’ the entire system of things with all their properties, it is absurd to demand that one should emulate nature since one is subject to natural laws anyway and can do very little to alter the fact. If, however, one understands by ‘nature’ the ‘spontaneous course of things’, one ends up with an irrational and immoral doctrine. ‘Irrational, because all human action whatever, consists in altering, and all useful action in improving, the spontaneous course of nature’, and ‘[i]mmoral, because the course of natural phenomena being replete with everything which when committed by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, any one who endeavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course of things would be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men’. J.S. Mill, Three Essays on Religion (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1874), 64–65. Thus, both authors are in agreement regarding the legitimate sense of the word ‘nature’ and what became an illegitimate (Mill) or a confusing and unfortunate (Lovejoy) extension of this sense. 15. This had been the endeavour of Christian Wolff, a mathematician who exerted enormous influence on German philosophy in the years before Kant. As Michael Inwood explains, Wolff believed that philosophy should be presented with mathematical rigour and clarity. ‘When a term is introduced, it must, on his view, be clearly defined, and it must not be used subsequently in a sense other than that originally assigned to it. We must not use two or three terms synonymously; apparent synonyms must be given distinct, well-defined senses’. Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1992), 10. 16. See also Thomas Wheaton Bestor, ‘Plato’s Semantics and Plato’s “Cratylus”’, Phronesis 25, no. 3 (1980): 307–308. Bestor argues that in his so-called ‘critical period’ Plato realised that questions relating to Forms could not be decided independently of questions relating to semantics. On Heraclitean flux in the Cratylus see Matthew Colvin, ‘Heraclitean Flux and Unity of Opposites in Plato’s “Theaetetus” and “Cratylus”’, The Classical Quarterly (New Series) 57, no. 2 (2007): 759–769. 17. The view that Plato’s Cratylus is not merely an analysis of names but has broader implications is shared by a number of commentators; Levin, for instance, sees Plato’s critique of naming in the Cratylus as ‘a central

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component of a larger project’ with implications for philosophy’s claim to ‘govern content and priorities with respect to values’. Susan B. Levin, The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 80–81. 18. G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, ed. T.M. Knox and A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 10–11. This also touches on another issue highlighted by Eckert, namely ‘the question of “which Plato” we are contrasting with Hegel’s when assessing his work’. By directing our attention solely to the Lectures, we risk losing sight of issues surrounding Plato interpretation in general, especially in light of developments in Plato scholarship both immediately after Hegel’s death (with the emergence of stylometric studies), and more recently with the discussion of issues concerning chronology, the ‘developmental’ view of Plato, and Plato’s Socrates. See Maureen Eckert, ‘This Site Is Under Construction: Situating Hegel’s Plato’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 53 (2006): 1–3. 19. See Stephen Houlgate, ed., Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 1998). which contains essays by, among others, William Maker, Edward Halper, Kenneth R.  Westphal, Richard Dien Winfield and Cinzia Ferrini on Hegel’s philosophy of nature; Alison Stone, Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004); Sebastian Rand, ‘The Importance and Relevance of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Nature”’, The Review of Metaphysics 61, no. 2 (2007): 379–400; Kenneth R.  Westphal, ‘Philosophizing about Nature: Hegel’s Philosophical Project’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Frederick C.  Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 281–310; Edward C. Halper, ‘Hegel’s Criticism of Newton’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Frederick C.  Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

References Bestor, Thomas Wheaton. 1980. Plato’s Semantics and Plato’s “Cratylus”. Phronesis 25 (3): 306–330. Colvin, Matthew. 2007. Heraclitean Flux and Unity of Opposites in Plato’s “Theaetetus” and “Cratylus”. The Classical Quarterly (New Series) 57 (2): 759–769. Eckert, Maureen. 2006. This Site Is Under Construction: Situating Hegel’s Plato. Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 53: 1–23.

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Halper, Edward C. 2008. Hegel’s Criticism of Newton. In The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Frederick C. Beiser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1985. Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Ed. T.M. Knox and A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Houlgate, Stephen, ed. 1998. Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press. Inwood, Michael. 1992. A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell Reference. Kellogg, Catherine. 2010. Ideas of Justice: Natural and Human. In Law and the Humanities: An Introduction, ed. Austin Sarat, Matthew Anderson, and Cathrine O. Frank, 141–160. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lalande, André. 1951. Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie. 6th ed. Presses Universitaires de France. Levin, Susan B. 2000. The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lovejoy, A.O. 1935. Genesis of the Conception of “Nature” as Norm. In A Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas, ed. Gilbert Chinard, George Boas, Ronald Salmon Crane, and A.O. Lovejoy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Mill, J.S. 1874. Three Essays on Religion. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Monoson, S. Sara. 2013. Plato’s Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Naddaf, Gerard. 2006. The Greek Concept of Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1982. The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch. Trans. Mary Ann and Peter Caws. Social Research 49 (2): 481–516. Popper, Karl. 1945. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, The Spell of Plato. London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd. Rand, Sebastian. 2007. The Importance and Relevance of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Nature”. The Review of Metaphysics 61 (2): 379–400. Sallis John. 2004. Platonic Legacies. Albany: SUNY. Stone, Alison. 2004. Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press. Strauss, Leo. 1965. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine. 2017. Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2008. Philosophizing About Nature: Hegel’s Philosophical Project. In The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Frederick C.  Beiser, 281–310. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART I

Redefining the Natural: Language and Logic

CHAPTER 2

Naming as Technē in Plato’s Cratylus

1   Introduction Plato’s ambivalence towards technē is well known. As art and especially poetry, technē is politely but firmly driven out of the ideal polis for fear that it will set a bad example for the republic’s future guardians. As fabrication or technique, by contrast, technē not only helps provide sustenance for the city’s population, but, more importantly, it offers a tangible and convincing way of broaching the theory of forms. Surely, a carpenter intent upon constructing a shuttle will have to look to the form of the shuttle (rather than singular instances of shuttles) in order to make one. In this chapter I examine the case of naming which, according to the Platonic dialogue Cratylus, also falls under the jurisdiction of technē.1 Like a functioning shuttle, a well-given or aptly chosen name is the product of good craftsmanship. Once in place, however, names do not remain unchanged, but can be ‘embellished’ and ‘ornamented’ with the result that they become more like artworks than implements of utility. I discuss the problems this raises for Plato’s theory of naming and inquire as to the possibility of clearly distinguishing and setting apart the two meanings of technē present in naming, craftsmanship and artfulness. Although the dialogue deals exclusively with ontological and epistemological matters, Plato’s analysis has far-reaching consequences for his conception of politics because politics is a technē too.2 As such, it shares the fundamentally ambiguous character of all technai, in other words, it can be like the technē of the carpenters and the physicians which is socially useful and necessary, © The Author(s) 2020 V. Roupa, Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52127-1_2

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or it can be like the technē of the poets and painters which is suspect and pernicious for the polis’s vital interests. The dialogue is an exchange between Socrates and his two interlocutors, Hermogenes and Cratylus. Hermogenes holds out for the conventionalist thesis, namely that names are the result of convention and agreement, whilst Cratylus maintains that names are related to the things they name through a natural appropriateness. It is a puzzling dialogue, as so many Plato interpreters have observed, not only for its topic but also for its unsatisfactory denouement, which leaves the reader not knowing where to stand, with Socrates apparently siding in the first part of the dialogue with Cratylus and in the second with some version of conventionalism.3 Despite the puzzlement the dialogue often generates, however, the Cratylus, I argue, is crucial not only for elucidating Plato’s philosophy of language but also for its remoulding of the notion of ‘nature’ to fit Plato’s philosophical project. The key concept in that dialogue is that of ‘imitation’ or ‘mimesis’, mimesis of natural sounds by means of the tongue, but also the mimesis that occurs in painting, music, and other forms of art, and finally mimesis of things, onta, by means of names. By focusing on some crucial turns of the argument, I attempt to bring to the fore the integral link between this concept of mimesis and an idea of philosophy as that which takes us beyond mimesis. As it emerges in that dialogue, philosophy, I maintain, is shown to be synonymous with a promise, namely that the drab cycles of imitation can and will, at some point, engender their opposite, that imitation will breed an inimitable act of freedom, which—and this is the truly paradoxical moment—will arise out of mimesis at the same time as it defies mimesis. This moment has gone down in the history of philosophy by different names. In the Republic it is the ep’ archēn anupotheton, a first principle which is not itself a hypothesis even as the soul makes its way there by means of other hypotheses. In Hegel, it is the ‘Absolute Knowing’ that concludes the Phenomenology, a moment which has its analogue in the Encyclopaedia in the reference to Aristotle’s noēsis noēseōs. In each case, it will be shown to be a question of thought, nous, or spirit shaking itself free from the clutch of images and intuitions, from the deception of art, in a word, from sensory representation, which lies at the heart of imitation and always threatens to cut short the upward movement of spirit. It will also be shown that the meaning of the two terms on which the discussion significantly turns, namely ‘nature’ and ‘technē’, is never steady but suffers

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continuous sea changes from one position to the next until one no longer knows which designation befits them. Thus, ‘nature’, while initially attached to sensibility, and therefore to that which impedes the movement of thought, quickly turns out to be that which guides thought towards a proper grasping of the essence of things. Furthermore, not only does nature not exclude technē, but rather requires it if it is arrive at its true designation. At stake in this is not simply a certain theory of names but the very task of philosophy as Plato conceives it, namely to make language adequate to thought by reconceptualising ‘nature’ as normativity.

2   The Denouement of the Cratylus The first plateau in the argument occurs with Socrates moving rapidly to demolish the Hermogenian thesis that names are the product of random agreement and convention.4 Socrates’ argument is that names, if we are to be able to do things with them, must naturally suit the thing they name just as each type of weaving requires the type of shuttle that is naturally suited to it (389c–d).5 Names, then, are like tools: not only is it necessary to pick out the appropriate tool for each job, but they also require the services of an adept artificer, the name-giver or onomatourgos, just as other tools require specialised craftsmen with the knowledge and ability to construct and repair them. Thus, by analogy to tool-making and craftsmanship, Plato orchestrates the move to the form of the name: Suppose, says Socrates, the shuttle breaks while [the carpenter] is making it. Will he make another looking to the broken one? Or will he look to the very form [eidos] to which he looked in making the one he broke? […] Hence whenever he has to make a shuttle for weaving garments of any sort […] mustn’t it possess the form of a shuttle? And mustn’t he put into it the nature [apodidonai tēn phusin] that naturally best suits [kallistē epephukē] it to perform its own work? (389b–c)

Similarly, the rule-setter of names must know ‘how to embody [tithenai] in sounds and syllables the name naturally suited to each thing’. And ‘if he is to be an authentic giver of names’, he must, ‘in making and giving each name, look to what a name itself is’. Now, it doesn’t matter ‘if different rule-setters do not make each name out of the same syllables’. Blacksmiths, too, sometimes make use of different iron even when they are making ‘the same tool for the same type of work’. What matters is that

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‘they give it the same form—even if that form is embodied in different iron’ (my emphasis), and in that case ‘the tool will be correct whether it is made in Greece or abroad’ (389d–e).6 The word ‘embodied’, by which the translator of the dialogue, C.D.C. Reeve, renders the cognates of the Greek word tithenai (‘to set’, ‘put’, ‘place’), introduces with its reference to ‘body’ a nuance that is missing from the original text.7 The choice, however, is not altogether inapt; the idea of embodied instances of a thing or name, which encapsulate its form but are not to be confused with it, certainly appears to underlie the argument in our passage; as Gérard Genette puts it in his commentary on the dialogue, “[p]roperly speaking, the act of naming, or the act of fabricating the name will consist in imposing this ideal form on linguistic matter, or on ‘sounds’ and ‘syllables’.”8 In other words, Socrates’ point is that individual instances of a thing can and have to match the form of the thing if they are to be recognised as such, i.e. as instances of this thing, even if their embodied manifestation differs. This idea, however, which at first seems to be just a staple of the Platonic diet, will lead us to a problem right at the heart of the theory of forms. Before I get on to this, let me offer some more background on the development of the dialogue. At Hermogenes’ request to say more about the natural correctness of names and what it consists in, Socrates replies that he will seek instruction from Homer. He now has to defend his thesis from two objections thrown at it, namely how to account for (a) the existence of more than one word designating the same thing or person, and (b) the existence of more than one language, idiom or dialect. The exemplary case on which the dialogue will focus in 392b–393b is that of a poetic character, Hector’s son, who in the Iliad is called by two names, ‘Astyanax’ and ‘Skamandrios’. But which of the two names is the correct one?

3   Natural and Literary Paternities We now come to a crucial, for our purposes, point in the dialogue where ‘natural’ paternity will be shown to be at the root of ‘naturally correct’ names. As we shall see in a minute, however, the question of who or what is a ‘natural’ father is disputable; for the moment, let us underscore the fact that the issue of the correct name comes down to a question of paternity, biological or physical paternity, but literary paternity as well. After all, wasn’t it Homer who gave Hector his name (393a)? As in the Republic, it will once again be a question of fatherhood according to nature, only this

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time it is not a matter of placing the young in the class to which they ‘naturally’ belong but one of giving them the right or correct name, the name that belongs to them by nature. Here’s Socrates on this: At any rate, it seems to me that it is right to call a lion’s offspring a ‘lion’ and a horse’s offspring a ‘horse’. I’m not talking about some monster other than a horse that happens to be born from a horse but one that is a natural offspring of its kind [tou genous ekgonon tēn phusin]. If, contrary to nature, a horse gave birth to a calf, it should be called a ‘calf’, not a ‘colt’. And if something that isn’t a human offspring is born to a human, I don’t think it should be called a ‘human’. And the same applies to trees and all the rest. (393b–c)

As in the Republic, here, too, Plato interprets the ‘natural’ to mean something other than what we today would term the ‘biological’. In other words, naturalness is not determined by the giving of birth, and the natural offspring (the phusin ekgonon), is not necessarily what has been born to a member of a certain kind. Once again, the primacy of nature is affirmed; but the step that Plato crucially takes away from naturalism opens a whole new can of worms: once birth is no longer a sufficient indication of natural kinship, the need arises for other criteria in order to ascertain whether the progeny in question is ekgonon according to nature or contrary to it. At stake here is what Genette calls the ‘eponymy of the name’;9 the habit of giving the child the name of the father (tou tekontos tēn epōnumian), and not of the kind (genous) (394d) to which he or she really belongs, can cloud the difference between ‘natural’ and ‘un-natural’ relations and simulate a natural kinship where there is, in fact, none. By contrast, if the rule Socrates lays down is to be adhered to from now on, ‘those who are born according to nature should be given the same names as their fathers’. But as regards the ones that are born ‘contrary to nature’, those that are ‘some form of monster’ as, for instance, when a good and pious man has an impious son, ‘the latter shouldn’t have his father’s name but that of the kind to which he belongs just as in our earlier example of a horse having a calf as offspring’ (394d).10 Leaving aside the complex question of what the form of a monster might be—or indeed whether there can be one—let us concentrate on the question of paternity and patronymics that underlies this passage. Why is it the father with whom the naturalness of the bond has to be warranted rather than the mother? Apart from issues of embeddedness in an arguably

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phallocentric socio-historical context, there are, I think, also other, more substantive reasons for this preference, which, if analysed, could give us the key to the philosophical move under way here. Thus, the fact that paternity is never secure but always contestable, a relation that is not verifiable by, say, a witness who actually saw the birth, makes the father-son relation particularly well-suited for the transition Plato prepares, namely to detach the conception of nature from tokos,11 i.e. from what would be a sensible and sensibly verifiable bond manifested in the giving of birth, in order to attach it more securely to genos, that is to say, a form of kinship related to the father.12 At stake, here, is a structure that occurs in more than one Platonic dialogue and more than one setting: nature as lack, which here denotes the absence or irrelevance of sensible evidence and testimony, turns into nature as an ideal, more specifically, the ideal that nature will be once its lack has been made good by technē. Thus, in choosing the correct name, the name that truly encapsulates the son’s nature, the father has crafted a relationship that is supposed to be deeper and more genuine than the act of engendering implies. Though at this stage a re-modelling at the level of language, the operation under way will have wider social and political consequences inasmuch as it delegitimises presumed ‘natural’ social relations (e.g. forms of kinship) in favour of new ones forged in the furnace of the mind. The function that the name is called upon to perform is warrant the naturalness of this mysterious relation, which is never capable of being attested to by the senses, but always remains precarious and requiring what Christian philosophers and theologians will later call ‘the witness of the spirit’. And that is why naming, in this case giving the correct name, belongs to the domain of technē, and requires if not a certain ability and skill, at the very least an insight into the kind to which beings really belong.13

4   The Guard at the Truth of Being Socrates’ argument so far relies heavily on the analogy drawn earlier between naming and craftsmanship; just as carpenters have to look to the ‘form’ of the shuttle in order to construct a working shuttle, the competent ‘namer’ has to look to the ‘form’ of the name to give the appropriate one. And just as blacksmiths can use any iron they find readily available to construct their tools, ‘namers’ can use any combination of sounds or syllables to encapsulate the ‘naturally correct’ name. But how do we know which of these names are correct as opposed to those which, even

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assuming they were once correct, have been distorted over time by some people’s tendency to ‘dress them up’ and change them? (414c). Names are promissory of designation; we rely on them to make distinctions and receive instruction as to the being of beings.14 But in this capacity of theirs, names carry the risk of dissimulating the thing, thus dimming the difference between the name and the thing named. Plato would certainly like to retain as sharp a distinction between the two as possible. That is why he issues a call for a ‘wise supervisor’ [epistatēn] that will keep watch over names and counter the tendency of some people ‘who think nothing of the truth, but only of the sounds their mouths make’, and ‘keep embellishing the first names, until finally a name is reached that no human being can understand’ (414d–e). Unfortunately, this distinction is very hard to sustain because a name is both a signifier that refers to a thing in the world, and itself a compound of sensible elements, sounds or syllables, that are regretfully subject to embellishment, with the result that the initially transparent connection between the name and the thing named gradually darkens. And yet, such transparency is necessary if names are to be able to give us instruction about things, which is what logos promises to do. In turn, according to the strict naturalist thesis held by Cratylus, this promise hinges drastically on the possibility of a coincidence between the referring function of the name, its ability to single out a thing in the world, and its signification or semantic content, i.e. the meaning it attaches to or information it conveys about the bearer of said name.15 Let us recall that the dialogue begins with a disputation: Cratylus refuses to accept that ‘Hermogenes’ is really Hermogenes’ name ‘even if everyone calls [him] by it’, in contrast to ‘Cratylus’ or ‘Socrates’, which are ‘truly’ the names of the individuals bearing them (383b). Presumably, Hermogenes’ failure to be worthy of his name has to do with the analytical structure of that name, which means ‘offspring of Hermes’ (god of wealth). But Hermogenes is poor; as Genette points out, it is like calling a poor man Mr. Rich, which is obviously unfitting, in contrast to ‘Dionysus’, given to the god of wine, since the latter means precisely ‘giver of wine’. In Cratylus’s view, that is, the meaning of a name (or that of its constituent elements) acts as a significatory constraint upon the capacity of that name to refer, i.e. single out an item in the world.16 ‘In other words’, Genette concludes, ‘in addition to its designative function’ (i.e. its ability to refer to a thing in the world), “one can discover a true signification in the proper name as revealed by the ‘etymological’ procedure; its correctness consists exactly of an agreement

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based on suitability between designation and signification (between the designated and the signified), the second acting as it were to reduplicate, reinforce, confirm the first—in a word, to motivate and justify the proper name by giving it a meaning.”17 In conformity to this premise, Socrates and Hermogenes set about analysing a number of proper names, such as the names of gods, and also abstract nouns, such as ‘wisdom’, ‘comprehension’, and ‘justice’, in order to ascertain their correctness or appropriateness to the things they name. We are on our way to another plateau in the argument where, after having discussed the etymologies of a number of Greek names, Socrates and Hermogenes come to the realisation that this process cannot get them very far unless they infer the existence of primary names, of which the ones analysed are derivative, and whose function it is to make the nature of things as clear as possible: If primary names are indeed names, they must make the things that are as clear as possible to us. But how can they do this when they aren’t based on other names? (422d-e)

Evidently, this process cannot go on ad infinitum; analysis will have to stop somewhere.18 At this point, Socrates introduces the hypothesis of naming as mimesis: If we hadn’t a voice or a tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn’t we try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present? (422e)

From which it follows that, The only way to express anything by means of our body is to have our body imitate whatever we want to express. … It seems to follow that a name is a vocal imitation [mimēma phōnēi] of what it imitates. (423b)

One has to be wary, however, of confusing naming with the kind of imitation that occurs when people mimic the bleating of the sheep, for instance. Naming, Socrates warns us, is not an imitation of the sound of things or their colour; this is rather the domain of music and painting. Naming proper, by contrast, imitates not the sensible qualities of the thing but rather its being or essence:

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So, if someone were able to imitate in letters and syllables this being or essence that each thing has, wouldn’t he express what each thing itself is? […] And if you were able to identify the person who is able to do this […] what would you say he is? I think, answers Hermogenes, he’s the namer [onomastikos], the one we’ve been looking for from the beginning. (423e–424a)19

Once this much is established, the investigation of the primary names can proceed unhindered. ‘l’, ‘g’, ‘r’, and other sounds are put under the microscope, and the names containing them are tested to check whether they conform to the rules established by Socrates and Hermogenes. And yet, somewhere in the background a worry remains, a worry that is momentarily put to one side, but will re-surface later at the leg of the dialogue where Socrates converses with Cratylus. The worry is the following: if primary names are indeed imitations meant to give expression to the essence of the things they name, doesn’t that mean that such names are ideal entities in which the true nature of things is encapsulated? And if this is so, aren’t we led to conclude that it is in the name itself that things have their being or essence? Up until this point, names and their nominata stand as separate entities; this separateness appears to be corroborated by the identification of naming with mimesis, which of necessity involves a relation between two distinct items. Furthermore, towards the end of the dialogue Plato has Socrates say: it’s clear we’ll have to look for something other than names, something that will make plain to us without using names which of these two kinds of names are the true ones—that is to say, the ones that express the truth about the things that are. (438d)

of which the corollary and climax is: It must be possible to learn about the things that are, independently of names [dunaton mathein aneu onomatōn ta onta]. (438e)

This is directed against the Cratylian thesis that names are correct or they are not names at all, which Socrates shows is untenable. Not all names currently in use can be shown to be faultless and transparent mirrors of the forms of things, as the strict naturalist thesis requires. ‘Sklērotēs’, for instance, meaning ‘hardness’, contradictorily incorporates not only the ‘r’ required by its nature, but also an ‘l’, which, however, according to the

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rules previously established, means smoothness or softness. A single ill-­ formed word deals a decisive blow to the Cratylian hypothesis, and, by the same token, drives a wedge between the name and the thing named. And yet, this wedge does not represent a knowledge that we have (a knowledge about things and a different knowledge about names), but a desire that things not get mixed up with their names, so that we can hold on to the promise of a transparent, ideal name, i.e. a name that would give us access to the essence of the thing immediately and by virtue of its very form. This form, however—and herein lies the break that Socrates effects with regard to Cratylian naturalism—cannot be the name’s sensible form, as Cratylism requires, i.e. the sum of natural elements of which it is composed, the sounds and syllables, the ‘g’s, and ‘l’s and ‘r’s. Thus, we come to the following paradoxical conclusion: a truly natural language, i.e. a language that would manifest the essence of things in its immediacy, can only be a language that has rid itself of its natural substratum, the phonic elements through which it imitates reality. What we have here is technicity finally arrived at its destination, i.e. as pure form devoid of material content, just as the father-son relationship is the natural relationship par excellence because it has gotten rid of the impurities of sensibility. Thus, through the imitation of things by means of phonic elements, i.e. elements formed in the cavities of mouth and received by the ear, philosophy is led to posit the possibility of a language that goes beyond mimesis towards a perfect nature which philosophy can envisage even though it cannot bring forth solely out of its own resources. The operation under way in the Republic will show itself to be part of a similar structure; there, it is a question of bringing forth a polity quite unlike any actual polis by means of selective mimesis, i.e. imitation of approved examples that will keep the young away from the corrupting influence of ‘bad’ mimesis.20

5   Sensibilities and Idealities To summarise the argument we have been able to establish so far, the name represents a point of contact between two different realms, the realm of sensible objects which are in themselves deprived of sense (i.e. they are bearers of meaning only in so far as they have been invested with such), and that of the things that are or onta. In so far as it is made of physical elements (sounds and syllables), the name necessarily partakes of the first realm and is itself a sensible thing, a sound produced by the throat and tongue or an image inscribed on stone, wood, papyrus or paper. At

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the same time, however, and in contrast to other merely sensible objects, the name is also a thing that signifies, and in so doing it throws a bridge between sensible things and their natures or essences. Despite the initial affinities that Socrates’ theory of names appears to have with Cratylism, a break is effected when Socrates convincingly shows that in dealing with names one has to make allowances for transmutations accrued to words through usage.21 It is hopeless, claims Socrates, to expect meaning to be transparently present in and immediately extractable from the word’s phonic components (its being composed of such-and-such sounds and syllables).22 Like the true son who may not physically resemble his father, the name does not derive its meaning from its sensible constituents but incorporates an ideality of which Cratylus fails to take sufficient notice. His naturalism therefore fails inasmuch as it entails literalism, i.e. the view that it is the literal meaning of the name (or its constituent elements) that makes it a name. For Cratylus, there is no meaning outside literality. Socrates, on the other hand, sympathetic as he may be to the Cratylian dream of the perfectly transparent name, is more attuned to the difficulties involved in this conception. He has already made clear that such an intimate link between the name and its nominatum cannot be traced to the mental associations or particular psychic affects that certain sounds evoke (just as the sound ‘l’ is thought to evoke softness). If one were to take one’s cue from actually existing names, one would have to make allowances for regional variations and distortions accrued to words through usage, and would therefore have to despair of ever stumbling upon a name capable of perfectly encapsulating the essence of the thing across time. In other words, if one is to hold on to the thought of an ideal or truly natural name, one has to look elsewhere, and not in the current fund of distorted and embellished names. And yet, names necessarily have a sensuous element which simply cannot be discarded—names just are these words here with their affectionate ‘l’s and their brutal ‘r’s anarchically incorporating letters they shouldn’t be and displaying the greatest disrespect for Cratylus’s system of classification of sounds and meanings. But then, the question of actually existing names becomes all the more pressing—how is one to deal with those? Embellished and deformed as they are, aren’t these names all we have in our quest for the essence of things? Undoubtedly, they are not everything, as original (or ideal) names would have been. But they are not nothing either. Going back to the problem of two different names referring to the same person or thing, it could be claimed that this is not only a difficulty for the

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naturalist thesis, but also a promising possibility. In order for two different words to be able to designate the same person or thing, even as they share very few, if any, of their sensible components, they need to share in a structure of ideality which allows the passage from sensuous manifestation to meaning, from the different to the same, from the sensible to the supra-­ sensible, from what is otherwise simply a sensible thing (a log of wood, a piece of cloth smeared with paste, a compound of sounds and syllables) to a thing that signifies (a sculpture, a work of art, a name). And, the crucial thing is, it is names as they now stand, the ‘Hectors’ and ‘Astyanaxes’, that allow philosophy to think of an ideal name and an ideal form that a thing must have if we are to be able to identify it as that thing. Admittedly, this is not a conclusion that Plato reaches (or, quite possibly, a conclusion that he would want to reach). The purity of the forms at least as envisaged in Plato’s middle period can only be compromised by its touch with the sensible realm. Hence the problem of chō rismos that has troubled Plato scholarship ever since Aristotle, namely whether forms have an independent existence in a transcendent realm, unaffected by the contingency and changeableness of sensible things. This problem is further complicated if we concede the close link between eidē and names given the danger that names represent, namely of introducing sensuousness into the purity of forms. Undoubtedly, if we proceed on the assumption of naming as mimesis, forms must have an existence outside of names since imitations are analytically distinct from that which they imitate. But unless we see any sense in imagining eidē to be inhabiting a world that exists separately from the sensible one, i.e. the one that we, thinking and speaking beings, inhabit, what good would they be outside our speech by means of which we reach out to things? In the name, the mind seeks to gain access to the essence of things. In other words, the name is the point of contact between thought and the being of beings, the point where thought reaches out to things and attempts to grasp them in their essence. ‘Wasn’t it thought [dianoia]’, asks Socrates in 416c, ‘—whether divine or human or both— that […] caused each of the things that are to be called by a name?’ The attribution of the first names to an originary onomatourgos, which seems to be shared by both the Platonic and the Judaeo-Christian traditions, has to be seen in this context. The craftsman of names is not someone, divine or human, who coined names and handed them down to subsequent generations of language-users. Rather the originary onomatourgos is a sensible figure for thought, which, strictly speaking, is neither divine nor human

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but, let me venture the suggestion, is that in the human which exceeds the simply human. At stake in all of this is the very task Plato feels philosophy has to assume as a debt in the face of truth, which here comes down to distinguishing between good and bad imitations. Hence Plato’s preoccupation with art, which, as we know, he finds particularly unreliable and untrustworthy. Evidence of this mistrust can be found in numerous dialogues, for example, in the Republic where the painter is relegated to a position at third remove from the truth, below the god who made the bed ‘in nature’ [phusei] and the carpenter who makes beds. And whereas the carpenter is elevated to the position of a maker [dēmiourgon] even though he does not make the form (and is thus not the ‘real maker of the truly real bed’ [klinēs poiētēs ontōs ousēs], but only ‘a maker of a bed’), the lowly painter is not even that but only ‘an imitator of what the others make’ [mimētēn] (597c–e). This mistrust is structurally similar to Plato’s scepticism as regards actually existing names: on the one hand, such imitations are ‘bad’ insofar as they have been embellished by people who care more about ‘the sounds their mouths make’ (or, we may add, in the case of art, people who care more about sensuous beauty) than about truth. On the other hand, we have no access to the being or essence of things other than by means of imitations, i.e. individual, embodied instances, be it artworks or names. In other words, the technicity of names is always at risk of degenerating to art—the shady twin of technē—which threatens to weaken and eventually sever the link between the name and the thing named. Now, if we could have access to the forms independently of their embodied instances, a possibility that philosophy envisages but in no way secures, then technē would be a simple procedure of applying a set of pre-given rules and guidelines. But we do not have such access;23 all we have are singular instances of well- or badlyconstructed implements, from which we infer a projected rule, universal or eidos. Hence the constitutive unhappiness that the Cratylus induces; we can feel this unhappiness in Socrates’ retort to Cratylus ‘it must be possible to learn about the things that are independently of names’, a possibility that, as the word ‘must’ testifies, philosophy envisions but cannot bring about. A very similar unhappiness makes itself felt in that other Platonic dialogue that famously deals with forms, the Parmenides, in which an aged and respectable Parmenides patiently but relentlessly guides the young Socrates through the difficulties, and indeed the contradictions and aporias, involved in the latter’s theory of forms. Without going into these in detail,

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let us underscore the main point to emerge from that dialogue, namely that despite the objections that forms invite (such as that they are unknowable since they do not pertain to things of this world), one still has to allow for their possibility, otherwise one ‘won’t have anywhere to turn [one’s] thought’, and in this way one ‘will destroy the power of dialectics [dialegesthai] entirely’ (135c). Similarly, Cratylus shows that neither of the two theses advanced, conventionalism and natural correctness of names, is in itself tenable but each, when examined, leads to and invokes the other, thus generating a never-ending circle. Plato’s philosophical contribution, I maintain, is not to side with one thesis against the other but rather to recognise the antinomical character of both and seek an exit from their dialectical skirmishes, a higher ground from which to survey the whole and, as the Parmenides puts it, ‘achieve a full view of the truth’ (136c). The dialogue in which this higher ground is reached for is the Sophist which takes up the problematic of the Cratylus afresh and attempts to establish the kind of philosophical reasoning that would allow us to learn of things not independently of actually existing names but through a philosophical critique of them.

Notes 1. I use the translation of C.D.C.  Reeve in Plato, Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). Where other translations have been consulted, this is indicated in the notes. For the Greek text I rely on Plato, ‘Cratylus’, in Oxford Classical Texts: Platonis Opera, ed. E.A. Duke, W.F. Hicken, W.S.M. Nicoll, D.B. Robinson and J.C.G.  Strachan, vol. 1 (Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 2. See Republic 342e where Socrates characterises the ruler as a kind of craftsman that seeks out what is advantageous to his subjects. 3. An assimilation of the Socratic to the Cratylian thesis on names has resulted in what Genette calls a ‘mimologist’ tradition which assumes ‘rightly or wrongly, a relation of reflective analogy (imitation) between “word” and “thing” that motivates, or justifies, the existence and the choice of the former’. See Gérard Genette, Mimologics, trans. Thais E. Morgan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1995), 5. Recent commentary on the dialogue, however, has questioned Plato’s alignment with Cratylian naturalism in favour of a more nuanced approach not inimical to conventionalism. Examples of this approach include Thomas Wheaton Bestor, ‘Plato’s Semantics and Plato’s “Cratylus”’, Phronesis 25, no. 3 (1980): 306–330;

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Julia Annas, ‘Knowledge and Language: The Theaetetus and the Cratylus’, in Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to G.  E. L.  Owen, ed. Malcolm Schofield and Martha C.  Nussbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 109; Susan B. Levin, The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 89–94; Rachel Barney, ‘Plato on Conventionalism’, Phronesis 42, no. 2 (1997): 143–162 and Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus (London: Routledge, 2001); Francesco Ademollo, The Cratylus of Plato: A Commentary (Cambridge University Press, 2011), esp. chapter 8. 4. Discussing the difficulties around translating the Greek term onoma by the English ‘name’, Gold notes that onoma in Plato is often used much like the English word ‘word’, ‘since nouns, verbs, and adjectives are all considered onomata (names) by Plato in the Cratylus. Jeffrey B. Gold, ‘The Ambiguity of “Name” in Plato’s “Cratylus”’, Philosophical Studies 34, no. 3 (1978): 223. See also Gail Fine, ‘Plato on Naming’, The Philosophical Quarterly 27, no. 109 (1977): 291; D.N. Sedley, Plato’s Cratylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4; Richard J.  Ketchum, ‘Names, Forms and Conventionalism: “Cratylus” 383-395’, Phronesis 24 (1 January 1979): 133; Georgios Anagnostopoulos, ‘Plato’s “Cratylus”: The Two Theories of the Correctness of Names’, The Review of Metaphysics 25, no. 4 (1972): 693. 5. Implicit in Socrates’ argument, therefore, is a reference to a standard of objectivity that the name has to satisfy. See also Barney, Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus, 25. 6. Barney gives an example of how this thesis could apply to both Greek and non-Greek speakers. Thus, the name ‘Demeter’ is the correct name for the Greek earth goddess inasmuch as it incorporates the appropriate Greek word mētēr, ‘mother’; the name of the earth goddess of a foreign people would be correct if it incorporated the word for ‘mother’ in their own language. Barney, 24–25. 7. Plato, Complete Works, 101–156. Fowler also translates ‘embody’; Plato, Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias, trans. H.N. Fowler, Loeb Classical Library, vol. IV, Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 27. Jowett prefers the more neutral ‘put’. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Cairns Huntington, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 428. The French translator Méridier (whose translation Genette used) translates imposer (‘impose’). See Platon, Cratyle (Œuvres complètes. Tome V, 2e partie), trans. Louis Méridier (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1931), 59: ‘le nom qui est naturellement approprié à chaque objet, notre législateur ne doit-il pas savoir l’imposer aux sons et aux syllabes’.

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8. Genette, Mimologics, 9. See also Cratylus 390a: ‘Don’t you evaluate Greek and foreign rule-setters in the same way? Provided they give each thing the form of name suited to it, no matter what syllables it is embodied in [en hopoiaisoun sullabais], they are equally good rule-setters whether they are in Greece or abroad.’ 9. Genette, 16. Bestor also attributes to Plato of the ‘middle’ or ‘critical’ period an ‘eponymy thesis’ (alongside a ‘naming’ and a ‘stating’ one): ‘general words hook up to the sensibles they refer to only derivatively, eponymously, in virtue of the especially intimate relation those sensibles have to the named Forms’. Bestor, ‘Plato’s Semantics and Plato’s “Cratylus”’, 327. 10. A shift is to be noted in the dialogue between physical qualities (e.g. a horse giving birth to a calf) to moral ones (such as piety and goodness). Neither Hermogenes nor Cratylus seem to notice this or call Socrates to task for illicitly shifting from sensible qualities which should be easy to verify (e.g. a being that resembles a calf being born to a horse) to moral qualities which take time to develop and are open to question. 11. The lexical resource on which Plato is drawing appears to have been well established in Greek at least since Homer. Thus, a connection is evinced in the Iliad between genos and the father, while tokos retains a closer link with the giving of birth, and therefore commonly with the mother. In 6.209 Homer talks about the ‘genos paterōn’, but for Alcmene’s child in 19.119 he uses the word ‘tokon’. Plato’s innovation was to thematise this notion by lifting it from the contingency of customary linguistic practice and inserting it into a philosophical discourse on paternity and patronymics. Interestingly, in the Symposium Plato has Diotima discuss birth with Socrates using the word tokos, however, as Sandford notes, she uses the word kuein, meaning ‘to be pregnant’, for both males and females. For an in-depth analysis of the relevant passages see Stella Sandford, ‘“All Human Beings Are Pregnant”: The Bisexual Imaginary in Plato’s Symposium’, Radical Philosophy 150 (August 2008): 24–35. 12. Even then we would have to be clear that the kind of genos Plato is keen to defend is the ideal genos of the ‘true’ father/kinsman, not the biological one. On the question of Plato and genos see Stella Sandford, Plato and Sex (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), chapter 1. 13. But of course actual names are most often given ‘because they are the names of ancestors, and some of them are wholly inappropriate. Many, too, are given in the hope that they will prove appropriate’ (397b), therefore these names must be left aside in an examination of naturally appropriate names.

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14. Cf. 388b: ‘Don’t we instruct each other, that is to say, divide things according to their natures?’, and a few lines further down: ‘A name is a tool for giving instruction, that is to say, for dividing being [diakritikon tēs ousias]’. 15. Cf. Genette, Mimologics, 16: ‘A proper name, as is well known, theoretically has no “signification” but only a designative function. Hermogenes is an acoustic aggregate that designates or, rather, serves to designate the (supposedly unique) individual who “bears” this name’. ‘But it is another thing to ask why Hermogenes is called Hermogenes: in other words […] to ask whether or not this name is really Hermogenes’ “true name”—that is to say, whether it well chosen (or well borne)’. Emphasis in the original. 16. It is important to stress that the Cratylian thesis does not admit of degrees of correctness in names; thus, it cannot be the case, on this account, that a name be partially correct (as an artefact can be better or less well made), nor that a distinction be made between, as Smith puts it, ‘correctness’ and ‘successful reference’ (such as can occur when speakers of a language understand the meaning of a proposition, e.g. ‘Hermogenes is sitting on a horse’, even if the name ‘Hermogenes’ is not the correct name for the intended referent). See Imogen Smith, ‘False Names, Demonstratives and the Refutation of Linguistic Naturalism in Plato’s Cratylus 427d1–431c3’, Phronesis 53, no. 2 (2008): 125–151. 17. Genette, Mimologics, 16, emphasis in the original. 18. Annas notes that when we reach the elements, i.e. the smallest bits of names, we cannot proceed by further analysis, but ‘must do it in some other way’; the way Socrates proposes is through mimesis. Annas, ‘Knowledge and Language’, 106–107. 19. A ‘double requirement’, therefore, and a ‘double restriction’, as Genette puts it: ‘on the side of the signified, the spoken word will imitate not just anything but solely the essence of each object; on the side of the signifier, it will imitate not through just any sound but solely through phonemes’. Genette, Mimologics, 21. 20. Cf. Republic 395b–d: ‘Our guardians must be kept away from all other crafts so as to be the craftsmen of the city’s freedom, and be exclusively that, and do nothing at all except what contributes to it, they must neither do nor imitate anything else. If they do imitate, they must imitate from childhood what is appropriate for them, namely, people who are courageous, self-­controlled, pious and free, and their actions. They mustn’t be clever at doing or imitating slavish or shameful actions, lest from enjoying the imitation, they come to enjoy the reality [ina mē ek tēs mimēseōs tou einai apolausōsin]. Or haven’t you noticed that imitations practiced from youth become part of nature [phusin kathistantai] and settle into habits of gesture, voice and thought?’

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21. We recall that Socrates refutes conventionalism by claiming that doing things with words requires taking account of their ‘nature’ in the same way that the craftsman has to take account of the ‘natures’ of the particular materials he is using if he is to succeed at the task at hand. 22. In Anagnostopoulos’ felicitous formulation, ‘[i]n such a language [as that envisaged by Cratylus] each term would wear its semantic import on its sleeve’. Georgios Anagnostopoulos, ‘The Significance of Plato’s Cratylus’, Review of Metaphysics 27, no. 2 (1973): 327. I am largely in agreement with Anagnostopoulos’ account of the Cratylian view as presupposing an ‘ideal’ language and a ‘one-to-one correspondence between language and the world’, with the proviso that this ‘ideal’ language hinges on something ‘real’, namely its articulation with the ‘natural’ connotations of phonic elements. 23. In his Introduction to Balansard’s Technè dans les dialogues de Platon Luc Brisson makes a very similar point with regard to poetry. See in particular p. xii where he says that ‘[c]ontrary to all expectation, this technè does not involve a set of rules capable of being taught’. Anne Balansard, Technè dans les dialogues de Platon  : l’empreinte de la sophistique (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2001).

References Ademollo, Francesco. 2011. The Cratylus of Plato: A Commentary. Cambridge University Press. Anagnostopoulos, Georgios. 1972. Plato’s “Cratylus”: The Two Theories of the Correctness of Names. The Review of Metaphysics 25 (4): 691–736. ———. 1973. The Significance of Plato’s Cratylus. Review of Metaphysics 27 (2): 318–345. Annas, Julia. 1982. Knowledge and Language: The Theaetetus and the Cratylus. In Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to G. E. L. Owen, ed. Malcolm Schofield and Martha C.  Nussbaum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Balansard, Anne. 2001. Technè dans les dialogues de Platon : L’empreinte de la sophistique. Sankt Augustin: Academia. Barney, Rachel. 2001. Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus. London: Routledge. ———. 1997. Plato on Conventionalism. Phronesis 42 (2): 143–162. Bestor, Thomas Wheaton. 1980. Plato’s Semantics and Plato’s “Cratylus”. Phronesis 25 (3): 306–330. Fine, Gail. 1977. Plato on Naming. The Philosophical Quarterly 27 (109): 289. Genette, Gérard. 1995. Mimologics. Trans. Thais E. Morgan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska.

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Gold, Jeffrey B. 1978. The Ambiguity of “Name” in Plato’s “Cratylus”. Philosophical Studies 34 (3): 223–251. Ketchum, Richard J. 1979. Names, Forms and Conventionalism: “Cratylus” 383–395. Phronesis 24: 133–147. Levin, Susan B. 2000. The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plato. 1997. Complete Works. Ed. J.M.  Cooper and D.S.  Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1995. Cratylus. In Oxford Classical Texts: Platonis Opera, ed. E.A. Duke, W.F.  Hicken, W.S.M.  Nicoll, D.B.  Robinson, and J.C.G.  Strachan, vol. 1. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1939. Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias. Trans. H.N. Fowler. Loeb Classical Library. Vol. IV. Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———, ed. 1961. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Cairns Huntington. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Platon. 1931. Cratyle (Œuvres complètes. Tome V, 2e partie). Trans. Louis Méridier. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Sandford, Stella. 2008. “All Human Beings Are Pregnant”: The Bisexual Imaginary in Plato’s Symposium. Radical Philosophy 150: 24–35. ———. 2010. Plato and Sex. Cambridge: Polity. Sedley, D.N. 2003. Plato’s Cratylus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Imogen. 2008. False Names, Demonstratives and the Refutation of Linguistic Naturalism in Plato’s Cratylus 427d1–431c3. Phronesis 53 (2): 125–151.

CHAPTER 3

Producing the Categories of Being: The Sophist

1   Introduction The Cratylus’s aporetic ending inevitably raises the question whether this is Plato’s last word on names or whether the issue is explored further in another dialogue where a more positive outcome is reached. The aim of this chapter is to show that the dialogue where Plato carries forward the programme of the Cratylus is the Sophist.1 Although it is sometimes argued that the Sophist breaks new ground completely unanticipated in the Cratylus, there is an area of shared concern between the two dialogues that warrants, I believe, reading the Sophist as a development of the Cratylus.2 This area is marked, in the first instance, by the methodological approach adopted; the two interlocutors—it is set down early on in the dialogue—will strive to reach agreement not only as regards the name but, first and foremost, as regards the thing itself. Thus, the Eleatic Visitor, who leads the discussion in the Sophist, claims in 218c to have only the name (‘sophist’) in common with his discussant Theaetetus at this stage, but this is not enough because ‘in every case’ they ‘always’ need to be in agreement ‘about the thing itself [pragma auto] by means of verbal explanation [dia logo ̄n], rather than doing without any such explanation [choris logou] and merely agreeing about the name [tounoma]’. So, the aim of the dialogue is to achieve an understanding of the sophist that goes beyond the un-stated assumptions that each of the discussants has about the sophist. Already the dialogue’s agenda carries echoes of the Cratylus; remember Socrates’ admonition in 438e to learn about things that are © The Author(s) 2020 V. Roupa, Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52127-1_3

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independently of names. The programme of the Cratylus is here reformulated as the aim of the dialogue is to learn about things through verbal explanation—logos, which signals a realisation, on Plato’s part, that language and philosophy are inseparable. But if this is the case, as the two interlocutors of the Sophist will soon find out, a further variety of naturalism needs to be confronted, namely Parmenides’ stipulation concerning the identity between being and language (or that which is and that which we say). This stipulation becomes all the more pressing in the case of that which is not [me ̄ on], which, Parmenides maintains, we ought to refrain from articulating. Before we get on to this, let me give some background on the development of the dialogue.

2   A Model of Conceptual Analysis The dialogue offers a model of conceptual analysis that attempts to define and grasp its object by ‘producing’ it in thought rather than by tracing, collecting, sorting out and generalising from its various sensible manifestations. We will see in the course of this chapter what such a ‘producing’ of the object consists in. For the moment let us underscore the fact that the object of this dialogue is in many ways unique amongst the other objects Plato has dealt with and requires resources that far exceed the kind of analysis performed elsewhere. At stake here is not an investigation into a specific issue as is usually the case in the so-called ‘Socratic’ dialogues, such as, for instance, into piety (Euthyphro) or virtue (Meno) where Socrates applies the method of elenchus (interrogation and cross-examination) to refute his interlocutor. In those dialogues a typical instance of the use of elenchus consists in Socrates asking a question, usually of the ‘what is x?’ sort (for instance, ‘what is virtue?’ or ‘what is courage?’) to which his interlocutor gives an answer in which a positive thesis p is maintained. However, as Irwin explains, after further questioning the interlocutor agrees that he also believes q and r, and is soon made to see that the consequences of those beliefs are incompatible with p. “Finding himself in this situation he is ‘at a loss’ [aporein] about what to believe”.3 The Sophist also differs from the so-called ‘positive’ dialogues, i.e. those in which Socrates presents a positive view (e.g. the Republic), in terms of the difficulties that its subject matter presents. Unlike other craftsmen that can be identified by the particular expertise they possess, the materials they work with, and the kinds of objects they produce, the sophist deals in dialectics, i.e. the method of bringing out inconsistencies and aporias in a

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person’s beliefs, just as Socrates himself does. Plato had provided a demonstration of Socratic as opposed to sophistic dialectics—or eristics—in his dialogue Euthydemus, in which Socrates invites two itinerant know-alls, who profess to teach virtue, to show off their skills. In that earlier dialogue sophistic dialectics was not conceptually defined but viewed ‘in action’: Socrates and the two sophists take turns to persuade a young man to apply himself to the cultivation of ‘wisdom and virtue’ (278d). As Sprague remarks in her Introduction to the English translation of Euthydemus, the structure of the dialogue is intimately connected with its purpose, with each of the Socratic scenes being sandwiched between two instances of sophistic eristics. ‘When Socrates is in command, a young man, Cleinias, makes steady and even astonishing progress towards the conclusion that the choice of wisdom is a necessary means to happiness; the logical antics of the sophists, however, are represented as being of no educational value whatsoever. By the way he has juxtaposed the two methods, Plato has forced a comparison between them’.4 Therefore, although the Sophist is by no means the first of Plato’s dialogues to deal with sophistic dialectics, it is the first one to attempt to grasp the sophist conceptually. What is sought here is the essence of the sophist, a prototype by which both current and subsequent manifestations of the sophist can be identified.5 The sophist that will emerge from the dialogue is not a real or fictional human, whose ruses and tricks are brought to light and his method exposed; he will not be Protagoras, Gorgias, or Euthydemus and Dionysodorus (the two stars of Euthydemus), nor an abstraction made of the combined characteristics of these men together. The method to be employed in the Sophist is thus very different from the inductive method; rather than starting off with real instances of sophists and gradually coming to build a complete profile of the sophist, Plato seeks to reach agreement on definitions first. Remember that the occasion for the dialogue is Socrates’ query concerning the Eleatics’ views about sophists, statesmen and philosophers: did they think that these make up ‘one kind of thing or two [hen … he ̄ duo]? Or did they divide them up into three kinds corresponding to the three names [kathaper ta onomata tria, tria kai gene ̄] and attach one name to each of them?’ (217a). In these words of Socrates which occur almost at the beginning of the dialogue we can see Plato taking up the problematic of the Cratylus anew: can names be trusted to offer an insight into the being of beings? Are beings to be classed according to the names people have attached to them? Or do we need an investigation into things that will reveal their essential

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attributes independently of names? Obviously, the former course is forestalled by the conclusions established in the Cratylus; if we are to study things as they are, we cannot afford to take our cue from currently existing names because these have been embellished by people unmindful of the truth, or because names signify different things for different language users (as the early exchange between the Visitor and Theaetetus suggests). And yet, there is no other way in which this investigation can be carried out than by means of language. Note that the requirement placed by the Visitor upon the procedure to be followed is not only that things themselves, rather than names, be investigated, but also that the investigation be carried out through ‘verbal explanation’ [dia logo ̄n]. Notice the juxtaposition: Name (onoma) Without verbal explanation (choris logou)

vs. vs.

Thing itself (pragma auto) Verbal explanation (dia logo ̄n)

‘Name’ is here opposed to ‘thing itself’; but the name is also linked to the term underneath it, choris logou (‘without verbal explanation’), which is opposed to dia logo ̄n. Obviously, this is not intended to affirm a fundamental difference between logos and name, but it does suggest that repeating names mindlessly, without attempting to clarify their meaning by means of argument and explanation cannot help towards grasping the essential attributes of things. A thorough investigation into the chosen subject-matter, by contrast, requires logoi, i.e. some course of verbal explanation, argument, reasoning, deliberation and reflection. Plato is here faced with what seems like an impossible task; what he has the Visitor propose is to use language to go beyond the customary use of language. The difficulty lies in this: if things are to be grasped dia logo ̄n, aren’t names going to be an essential part of these logoi? Surely, names do not comprise the entirety of language; they do comprise, however, a substantial part of it, bearing in mind that ‘names’ in Plato’s usage represent, according to D.N.  Sedley, a ‘loose linguistic category understood as including common nouns and adjectives as well as proper names’.6 Consider the first item the Visitor and Theaetetus investigate, the ‘angler’, which is defined—after a relatively long process of dividing up different methods of hunting—as an expert in striking performed with a hook directed to the prey’s head and mouth and pulling it upwards from below with rods or reeds (221a). Don’t names crop up everywhere in this lengthy

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definition? Is it possible to establish a process that will eliminate ambiguities and private assumptions from all of these words? Isn’t there, on the contrary, the danger of running into a vicious circle inasmuch as the definition of terms crucial for the discussion will depend on the meaning of other words, and so on ad infinitum, without ever getting to the very bottom of language? Indeed, it seems that linguistic analysis resembles those axiomatic sciences, such as geometry, about which Plato says in the Republic that they are ‘forced to investigate from hypotheses, proceeding not to a first principle but to a conclusion’ (510b). If this is the case, it is doubtful whether analysis dia logo ̄n can assist philosophy in grasping the true being of beings by making the leap from axiomatic analysis to presupposition-less analysis because it seems that it will never be able to ‘touch bottom’, i.e. find and independently define the most primary of names. In a nutshell, the problem facing Plato is how to reach agreement as regards definitions without ultimately relying on the habitual usage of at least some names. Needless to say, the problem cannot be resolved by retreating into a realm of ineffable truth where the sense of things is communicated directly and intuitively. Plato is suspicious of language because language is the stuff of rhetoric and sophistic dialectics used in forums of public deliberation and in the courts of law, sometimes with the intention not of promoting the course of justice but of subverting it. But he cannot get out of this problem by recommending a suspense of language because ‘if we were deprived of [speech] we’d be deprived of philosophy—to mention the most important thing’ (260a). Nor can he protect truth by scrutinising the credentials of each individual speaker, because it is not the intentions of the speaker (or his oratorical prowess or the gullibility of his listeners) that allow this to happen, but the endless possibilities for subversion present in language itself;7 one need only read a few sections from the Euthydemus to see how the two sophists exploit the double meaning of words in order to throw their interlocutor into confusion and silence him.8

3   Dividing Up Being Once agreed to investigate the sophist dia logo ̄n, the Visitor and Theaetetus embark on the mission of pinning down the sophist. Along the way they are going to engage in a kind of work that resembles that of the botanist or the entomologist, the only difference being that while the latter deals in natural kinds, our two interlocutors deal in words. Yet, the procedure

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they are going to follow is not completely different from that of the naturalist: treating words as if they were butterflies or insects that need to be identified and classed, they will remove them from the hustle and bustle of everyday usage and insert them in a ‘scientific’ system of signification. This resemblance in method is not perhaps an accident; like their opposite numbers in natural science, the two interlocutors will attempt to follow the contours of things taking advantage of a method, diairesis, that aims to respect and reflect their natural boundaries.9 Diairesis, then, turns out to be a techne ̄ in its own right; just as the carpenter has to look to the eidos of the shuttle when attempting to repair a broken one, so the lovers of wisdom have to look to how the thing itself is in order to decide about its kind (genos). The outcome of this effort—it is hoped—will lead to them holding concepts in common [koine ̄i]. How do the two interlocutors go about this formidable task? They agree to start from an easier target first in order to practice their method of hunting before they apply this method to the more difficult target of the sophist; they are going to attempt to define an ‘angler’. Now, it is obvious to everybody that an angler is a kind of fisherman that catches fish by means of a reed or rod, or at least that would be the dictionary definition of the term. For Plato, however, this is not good enough because such a definition does not satisfy the requirement to agree on the thing itself dia logo ̄n. First of all, the dictionary definition of ‘angler’ relies on other names, namely ‘fisherman’, ‘rod’, ‘reed’, etc., whose meanings have not been investigated yet. Such a definition does not solve the problem of how to agree on things without relying on names, but merely relegates it to a more basic level of analysis. Second, such a definition would remain vulnerable to the sophistic attack which, as we have seen, consists in exploiting the double meanings of words, in which case Plato would have failed blatantly in his primary aim to pin down the sophist. To avoid this, the Visitor follows a very different procedure: he produces the chain of kinds (eide ̄) to which the angler belongs. He begins with the most general characteristic of the angler, namely that he is an expert at something. Then, instead of picking out examples of expertise and figuring out which one describes the expertise of the angler most adequately, the Visitor divides expertise into two kinds: (a) farming, or any sort of caring for mortal bodies, and (b) caring for things fabricated. ‘The right thing’, he adds, ‘would be to call all those things by a single name’ (219b), which is that of ‘production’ [poie ̄tike ̄n] since all these activities aim at bringing into being a thing that wasn’t there before. By contrast,

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those instances of expertise that do not create anything fall under the category of ‘acquisition’ [kte ̄tike ̄] (219c). I skip the detail of the next few steps of the analysis; it is argued that expertise in acquisition respectively falls into two types, namely expertise in mutually willing exchange through gifts, wages and purchase, and taking possession. Taking possession in turn falls into combat and hunting, with hunting dividing into two parts, the hunting of lifeless things and that of living things, and so on and so forth until the interlocutors get to distinguishing between hunting with stationary nets and hunting with striking. A further spurt of division occurs with strike-hunting being divided into further sub-categories until the investigation finally arrives at a species of strike-hunting which is done ‘with a hook’ (not with nets or any other kinds of enclosures), ‘not to just any part of the fish’s body but always to the prey’s head and mouth’ (unlike striking with spears that is directed anywhere on the fish’s body), ‘and pulls it upward from below with rods or reeds’ (unlike spear-hunting which strikes downward from above) (219d–221a). How does the definition reached by means of the Visitor’s long-winded process differ from the dictionary definition? In two ways: first, in contrast to the dictionary definition whose validity we must take on trust, the definition achieved here relies on a previous production of the categories on which it logically depends. In this case, the primary category is ‘expertise’; instead of tacitly assuming the customary definition of ‘expertise’, the Visitor anticipates the logical areas in which this category is internally differentiated, and only then does he seek to match these sub-categories with existing names. So, agreement is first and foremost sought with regard to logical categories, not names. Second, the method seeks to explore the internal divisions of the thing exhaustively before proceeding to attach names to them. Its aim therefore is to thoroughly investigate the logical depth of each of the categories considered and grasp it in accordance with its internal configuration without overly relying on currently existing names. We can already see the differences between the method favoured here and that of the Cratylus; there, the analysis of names consisted in an etymological procedure that relied on the customary meanings of words or their constituent elements. The procedure, therefore, had to presuppose customary meanings and associations, which is not the case here. The interlocutors thus create a grid of logical types,10 and in each of the boxes they insert a name which—it is to be noted—is not necessarily drawn from common usage as there may not be any such name to be drawn upon. Sometimes the names inserted are invented ad hoc, such as

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‘soul-wholesaling’ [psuchemporike ̄s] (224b), which is used to describe dealing in and transporting from city to city ‘paintings and shows and other things for the soul’ (224a).11 At other times the box is left blank when there does not seem to be any suitable name to describe the type agreed (225c and 226d). The Visitor does not think this is a problem because ‘the method aims at acquiring intelligence [noun], so it tries to understand how all kinds of expertise [paso ̄n techno ̄n] belong to the same kind [to sungenes] or not’. And ‘as far as that’s concerned, it doesn’t matter to our method which name would seem to be the most appropriate [euprepestaton] (227b–c).12 In this sense, the method represents a sustained attempt for a consistent analysis of concepts as it aims to formalise a method that allows the breaking down of broad classes (such as ‘expertise’) into their logical constituents.13 However, the method also marks the beginning of a rift between language and thought, indeed the possibility of an ineradicable difference between words and things. Things (at least as they are conceptualised by means of the analysis proposed by the Visitor) precede names not only existentially or in the order of creation (in the sense that names were invented in order to communicate things, which thus exist prior to names), but also logically or in the order of necessity (in the sense that a thing, or concept, is necessary, whereas a name can be exchanged for a more appropriate one). Paradoxically, it is language (in its guise as logoi) that helps us come to the realisation about the priority of things over language (in its guise as names).

4   Parricidal Philosophy Diairesis, i.e. the method of dividing things by kinds appropriately without conflating the same with the different or the different with the same, is claimed by the Visitor to be exercisable only by someone with ‘expertise in dialectics’ [dialektike ̄s episte ̄me ̄s], which in turn requires a person with ‘a pure and just love of wisdom’ [katharo ̄s te kai dikaio ̄s philosophounti] (253d–e). In recent times, doubts have been raised as to whether this method is indeed integral to dialectics, and whether it can yield important philosophical insights.14 However that may be, there can be little question that the sections that follow the presentation of the ‘angler’ represent the ‘heavy artillery’ of Plato’s assault on the sophist, and mark a development in his conception of dialectics. The Visitor and Theaetetus take up diairesis again, this time with the intention of tracking down the sophist. Without

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going into the details of their discussion, let us take note of the fact that the sophist turns up in the grid at no less than six different places; six different kinds of expertise are claimed by a single authority, the sophist. Thus, the sophist is agreed to be an expert in hunting in the land (as opposed to the angler who hunts in the sea), who hunts tame animals, i.e. young people, and does this by persuasion, not force; he does this in private and with the aim of earning money. But he is then also agreed to be an expert in acquisition through exchange, and in particular selling; his type of selling is the wholesaling of things that are aimed at the soul, and is done through the medium of words and learning.15 In short, the sophist does not belong to a single genus as other professionals (like the angler) do, but appears at several different grid boxes at once. This is seen as a problem because it indicates a certain confusion in the analysis; either the expert in question is not in fact an expert in all the things he claims expertise in, or, alternatively, the various kinds of expertise he claims belong to a more comprehensive genus, which analysis needs to bring to light.16 In other words, the issue articulated at this point concerns the essence of the sophist and may be summarised as follows: if the sophist has expertise of many kinds, we should be able to assign a name to each of these kinds even if this were an ad hoc name (such as ‘soul-wholesaling’—remember that the dialectician is the one who has expertise in distinguishing between various kinds without conflating the different with the same). If, by contrast, these kinds of expertise belong together, we should be able to unearth the genus to which they belong. This task, however, involves complications previously unanticipated. It could be that the sophist does not have any real knowledge but only apparent knowledge. In that case, the expertise he claims to possess and to be able to impart to other people is not of real things but of copies, and the sophist is no more than ‘a cheat and an imitator’ [goe ̄ta … mime ̄te ̄n] (235a). Worse, he might be compared to a practitioner of the ‘appearance-­ making’ art [phantastike ̄n], who constructs copies of things by distorting the proportions of the original so that the image may appear beautiful from a distance, but is far removed from the truth because its maker does not care about the real proportions of the thing (235e–236c). And yet, just as we seem to be getting close to the final end of the investigation, a difficulty of gigantic proportions crops up; dare tell the sophist that his expertise concerns only copies and not real things, and he will laugh in your face and remind you of father Parmenides, in whom he finds an unlikely ally.17 We recall that one of Parmenides’ most important

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contributions had been his forewarning to never even consider that ‘that which is not may be’ [einai me ̄ eonta] (237a). Surely, if the sophist can be said to be expert in something, this has to be some one thing, and not no-­ thing, therefore his expertise has to be in some way real and of things that are. The sophist is here taking advantage of the confusion that surrounds these issues [mesta aporias], and the extreme difficulty the Visitor highlights of saying ‘what form of speech’ should be used to say that ‘there really is such a thing as false saying or believing, and moreover to utter this without being caught in a verbal conflict [enantiologiai]’ (236e–237a). The sections that follow this point in the dialogue might be described either as of supreme dryness and density or of exotic beauty—depending on one’s taste in philosophy; doubtless, they have stamped our ways of doing philosophy irrevocably and, as we shall see in the next chapter, they have provided the impetus for Hegel’s own conception and use of dialectics. The main things to be gathered from this discussion are the following: 1. The phrase that which is not [me ̄ on] leads thought to aporias and contradictions; as soon as it is uttered, an accumulation of contradictions ensues, so dense that it does not let the thinker pass through.18 The Visitor explores numerous ways in which this phrase might be articulated consistently, and each time he fails and is forced to concede defeat. See, for instance, what happens when one speaks about that which is not as if it were one: if that which is is applied to some one thing, that which is not has to be respectively applied to nothing (in Greek me ̄den, i.e. ‘not even one’). But that means that we are attributing number to that which is not (even though it be by means of a negative statement), which is contradictory. We could try to avoid this by using the phrase those which are not instead; but then we would be applying numerical plurality to me ̄ on, which would again be against the stipulation that me ̄ on not be applied to a being, let alone many of them. It seems that the very grammar of language has conspired to prevent us from thinking through that which is not; grammar-wise, things are either one or many; that which is not, however, is neither. The challenge, therefore, that that which is not issues to thought is to conceptualise it outside the customary categories of grammar, which is impossible. The conclusion of this section is that ‘it is impossible to say, speak or think [dianoe ̄the ̄nai] that which is not itself correctly by itself. It is unthinkable, unsayable, unutterable and unformulable in speech [alogon]’ (238c). Note the extraordinary

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force of this statement: that which is not escapes thought, refuses to give itself over to thought, it is unthinkable; thought has become stalled: it goes round and round in circles, and finally grinds to a halt like a broken machine. So, it seems that Parmenides had been right to caution us against trying to think that which is not on the model of that which is, i.e. as if it applied to a thing, even if that thing were no-thing. 2. We also notice, however, that the confusion surrounding that which is not has offered the sophist an ideal refuge. We remember that the discussion that concludes with the illogicality [alogon] of that which is not succeeded the attribution of false belief to the sophist. But ‘false belief’ entails believing that which is not or, more precisely, that that which is not in some way is. Why this is a problem will become more apparent if we consider the issue at the level of proposition or statement. As Michael Frede explains, for a statement to be a statement at all ‘it has to manage to say something’, i.e., there has to be some thing or being that gets said by it. ‘Yet what is not being’, Frede continues, ‘does not seem to be something that is there to get said. Hence it would seem that there is nothing that gets said by a false statement. But in this case it fails to be a statement. So it seems that there can be no false statements.19 A false statement, therefore, is one which attributes being (of some description) to that which is not, which runs counter to Parmenides’ saying. But then, it follows that false statements are impossible and the attribution of false beliefs to the sophist cannot stand its ground. The theoretical advance made in this section is that Parmenides’ saying, though enunciated in the interests of truth (to safeguard thought from getting embroiled in confusion and contradiction), has now become a weapon in the hands of the sophist; the latter uses it to avoid giving an account of himself and answering the charge that his expertise consists simply in disseminating falsehoods. Thus, the ground is prepared for the parricidal scene: in the interests of truth, the father has to be killed off.

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5   Against Naturalism A detailed discussion of the remaining sections where Plato demonstrates how false statements are possible is beyond the aims of this chapter. What I would like to do, instead, is conclude with some comments on the question of names and language. One of the most interesting things to come out of this dialogue is the interrogation of the relation between language and thought that Plato undertakes. Running contrary to the view that language merely expresses the categories of thought, the Sophist disrupts the belief that language provides a transparent vehicle for thought or that thoughts can be expressed in language unproblematically (assuming that if they aren’t, this is due to an infelicitous choice of words or a certain awkwardness with language which could be put right in theory, if not in practice). The reading of the dialogue proposed here has shown that such a facile and straightforward connection between thought and language has to be rejected. The interrogation undertaken in the dialogue appears to be pushing in different directions at once. On the one hand, names were shown to be of a different order from things; they could be invented for the purpose or agreed upon by fiat. On the other, speech was agreed to be—in perhaps one of the most famous passages in the history of philosophy—the silent dialogue of the soul with itself, an act of the soul speaking to itself albeit without voice (263e). According to this passage, thought is speech, only without sound. And yet, this pronounced identity between thought and logos, these words that are only signs or de ̄lo ̄mata of things, this desired transparency, all this stands on shaky foundations. We have seen that one of the arguments the Visitor uses to show the difficulty (nay, the impossibility) of articulating that which is not without contradiction is that the grammar of the Greek language makes us impose number on things and speak of them as if they were one, two, or many.20 And yet, if we try to speak of that which is not according to those rules, we find ourselves in front of an aporia: in short, language betrays our thought. We are going to find that Hegel registers a very similar complaint with regard to the speculative proposition, which also beats against the confines of grammar. For the moment, let us limit ourselves to recording the enormous theoretical advance made by Plato in the space that separates the Sophist from the Cratylus. Already in the earlier dialogue it was established that names cannot be the transparent mirrors of things Cratylus wanted them to be, because names are by default amenable to distortion and alteration but also because the idea of an originary rule-setter who fabricated

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names is shown to be a figure for thought and not a real craftsman, divine or human.21 Where the Sophist goes further is in suggesting a way of solving the issue of conventionalism that lingers on after Cratylus: yes, we can decide names by fiat inasmuch as we have insight into the true nature of being, and can then assign names that allow this nature to shine through. But, it will be objected, names such as ‘soul-wholesaling’ are able to accurately describe the nature of the things they refer to only at a secondary level; psuchemporike ̄ is a combination of two other names, psuche ̄ (‘soul’) and emporike ̄ (wholesaling), but what about psuche ̄ and emporike ̄ as stand-­ alone words? Do they accurately capture the intrinsic qualities of the things they refer to? The answer is that in the context of the Sophist this is no longer the problem that it was in the Cratylus, because it has already been shown in the earlier dialogue that residues of convention will always seep through the formation of words; no matter how fierce the protestations of the ‘purists’, we simply have to accept this as a fact about language, namely that language has a history that we cannot deny or attempt to excise from words.22 We simply have to accept the fact that we always start in medias res—in the middle of the story—and take it from there.23 The Sophist completes the Cratylus also in another sense, namely in finalising Plato’s critique of naturalism as manifested in the naturalism of his predecessors, Cratylus and Parmenides.24 Despite the very different metaphysical commitments of those two (Cratylus had been a disciple of Heraclitus and his doctrine of flux, whereas Parmenides had espoused the doctrine of the unchanging One), one can detect a strong similarity in their approach to language. Cratylus had claimed that badly formed or ‘naturally’ incorrect names are incapable of referring to the person or thing they are supposed to name; in other words, the ‘natural’ malformation of such words (the English word ‘brutal’ would be badly formed on this account as it incorporates the letter ‘l’ to refer to something harsh) causes them to lose their connection with the world of things. Parmenides similarly argued that what we say either refers to a thing in the world or it is nothing at all, it is non-sense or non-speaking, and thus, that thinking is (or should be) being. The common ground that these two otherwise metaphysical adversaries share, therefore, consists in the idea that if we manage to say something, that which we manage to say expresses things as they are. If it does not, then we have not said anything, only made meaningless sounds with our voice. Parmenides’ position in this instance invokes a variety of naturalism not unlike that of Cratylus inasmuch as he, too, ascertains a necessary and substantive correspondence between words and

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things. I call this a ‘naturalist’ position because it assumes that logos has a structure that matches that of being (on) and disallows it from referring to non-being, a non-entity, or to nothing at all. On this view, grammar is seen as having a necessary relation to the world of things; when we fail to articulate a grammatically correct utterance (such as, for instance, when we try to say the phrase me ̄ on attributing to it grammatical singularity), that should serve as an indication that something is wrong with our utterance. In other words, grammar, for Parmenides, reflects the basic ontology of the world; it is because the world is organised in such-and-­such a way that our speech has the kind of internal structure and rules that it does. Between word and world there is a one-to-one correspondence. As before, here too, Plato shatters this black-and-white picture to introduce shades of grey in language’s relation to the world. Driven by concerns that Parmenides’ stricture could serve as a cover for the sophistical perversion of language, he problematises the link between ontology and grammar. Though not a conventionalist in the vein of Hermogenes or an anti-naturalist—he, too, believes that the world has an ontological structure that is objective and independent of us—Plato projects the possibility of a partial ‘fit’ between world and word. It is possible for names to describe the world partly accurately, or indeed, in the case of statements, falsely; for example, and to reverse the issue that sets off the Cratylus, it is possible for ‘Hermogenes’ to be Hermogenes’ name even though the latter blatantly fails to live up to that name’s description (‘offspring of Hermes’, suggesting a rich, crafty person). More radically, instead of this being an aberrant position or an exception, it is the default position for names. Similarly, the reinstatement of that which is not in the Sophist suggests a relation between language and the world such that meaning and reference articulate on to each other but do not fully coincide. If they were to fully coincide, we would not have been able to formulate the expression that which is not in the first place as that expression refers to no-thing, and therefore has no nominatum. The fact that this expression has been formulated, and that language users understand it when uttered (just as they understand that the name ‘Hermogenes’ refers to this particular individual despite his being so unlike the legendary Hermes), indicates not a particular kind of linguistic transgression, but rather that language articulates to the world in a more subtle and complex way than Cratylus and Parmenides thought. Plato’s innovation, therefore, with regard to earlier versions of naturalism was to complicate the link between language and reality reserving for

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philosophy the task of exploring this link truthfully, projecting the possibility of a full coincidence between world and word, but in the knowledge that such coincidence is never simple or unequivocal but always at risk. Provisionally, this task appears to have been accomplished in the Sophist as the dialogue ends on a positive note having established the possibility of false saying and false belief, and therefore managing to categorise the sophist as an appearance-maker and a demagogue, belonging to the ‘insincere and unknowing sort’, that is to be distinguished from both the philosopher and the statesman.

Notes 1. I thus follow the interpretative approach of Fine and Barney both of whom reject a sharp distinction between the analysis of the Cratylus (which is aimed at the level of the name) and that of the Sophist (which is aimed at the level of the statement or sentence). See Gail Fine, ‘Plato on Naming’, The Philosophical Quarterly 27, no. 109 (1977): 289–294; Rachel Barney, Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus (London: Routledge, 2001), 170–172. This view is reinforced by Kahn: ‘The contents of the Cratylus on the theory of naming, the problems of flux, Protagorean relativism and the paradox of false statement, all point ahead to discussion of these topics in the Theaetetus and Sophist’. Charles Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 364. See also R.M. van den Berg, Proclus’ Commentary on the Cratylus in Context: Ancient Theories of Language and Naming (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 8–13. 2. The proponents of this view see in the Sophist a radical break in Plato’s thinking because in it Plato offers an account of language at the level of the sentence or statement rather than that of the name. The distinction between name and statement is not made in the Cratylus, nor is there any recognition in the earlier dialogue of the importance of syntax for the truth value of a proposition. See Barney’s summary of this view (which she calls the ‘syntactical reading of the Sophist’) in Barney, Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus, 170. 3. Terence Irwin, Plato’s Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 7. 4. See the Translator’s Introduction to Plato, Euthydemus (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), viii. 5. See Mary Louise Gill, ‘Division and Definition in Plato’s Sophist and Statesman’, in Definition in Greek Philosophy, ed. David Charles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 179–182.

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6. D.N.  Sedley, Plato’s Cratylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4. 7. Adorno puts this beautifully: ‘Dialectics—literally: language as the organon of thought—would mean to attempt a critical rescue of the rhetorical element, a mutual approximation of thing and expression, to the point where the difference fades. Dialectics appropriates for the power of thought what historically seemed to be a flaw in thinking: its link with language, which nothing can wholly break’. See Theodor W.  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B.  Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1973), 56. 8. Cf. Socrates’ speech to Cleinias, which is intended to help him recover after the brutal treatment he has received at the hands of Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, but also comments on this inherent feature of language: ‘In the first place, as Prodicus says, you must learn about the correct use of words; and our two visitors are pointing out this very thing, that you did not realise that people use the word “learn” not only in the situation in which a person who has no knowledge of a thing in the beginning acquires it later, but also when he who has this knowledge already uses it to inspect the same thing […] Now this, as they are pointing out, had escaped your notice—that the same word is applied to opposite sorts of men, to both the man who knows and the man who does not” (277e–278a, my emphasis). 9. See Joseph Keim Campbell, Matthew H. Slater, and Michael O’Rourke, eds., Carving Nature at Its Joints: Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). Brown, however, notes a difference between the ‘taxonomic, classificatory’ method Plato uses in the Phaedrus, and the method employed here whose aim is predominantly ‘definition, not taxonomic classification’. Lesley Brown, ‘Definition and Division in the Sophist’, in Definition in Greek Philosophy, ed. David Charles (Oxford University Press, 2010), 154. 10. On this point see Gilbert Ryle, ‘Plato’s ‘Parmenides’ (II.)’, Mind 48, no. 191 (1939): 316. 11. We might, following Ademollo, call such names, i.e. names that convey a certain informational content about their referents, ‘transparent’, ‘portmanteau’ names. See Francesco Ademollo, The Cratylus of Plato: A Commentary (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 12. 12. Note that ‘appropriate’ as used here has quite another sense than when we used it to refer to the natural correctness of names in chapter 1. The word in the original is a derivative of ‘euprepe ̄s’ (more specifically, its superlative form), which means ‘decent’, ‘comely’, ‘seemly’. This is meant to address an earlier complaint that some of the names inserted are ‘ridiculous’ (geloioi,̄ 224b, geloia, 227a).

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13. For how the analysis of the Sophist represents an attempt to go beyond the shortcomings Plato saw in his earlier theory of Forms see Ryle, ‘Plato’s ‘Parmenides’ (II.)’, 315–317. 14. Ryle, for instance, thinks that this method has ‘almost nothing’ to do with dialectics (which he sees as an expansion of the Zeno’s antinomian operations), nor does he take it to be a particularly ‘powerful philosophic instrument’. See Ryle, 321–322. For an alternative view, see J.L.  Ackrill, ‘In Defence of Platonic Division’, in Essays on Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 15. Brown summarises the six appearances of the sophist thus: ‘(D1) a paid hunter of young men who purports to teach excellence; (D2) a traveling salesman of knowledge; (D3) a stay-at-home retailer of products for the soul, whether produced by others, or (D4) by himself; (D5) a combative controversialist who deals in disputation for money; (D6) an educator who separates better from worse, revealing contradiction through cross-­ questioning’. There is a seventh appearance of the sophist that occurs after the section on falsehood as ‘(D7) a producer of images in men’s souls, an imitator of the wise person, who is aware of his own ignorance when teaching via private cross-questionings.’ See Brown, ‘Definition and Division in the Sophist’, 152. 16. See 232a: ‘Suppose people apply the name of a single sort of expertise to someone but he appears to have expert knowledge of lots of things. Isn’t it obvious that if someone takes him to be an expert at many things, then that observer can’t be seeing clearly what it is in his expertise that all of those many pieces of learning focus on—which is why he calls himself by many names instead of one?’ Cf. also 244c: ‘Surely, it’s absurd for someone to agree that there are two names when he maintains that there’s only one thing’. 17. Cf. 235b: ‘now it’s our job not to let the beast escape. We’ve almost hemmed him in with one of those net-like devices that words provide for things like this’. The playfulness of these lines makes one wonder whether the earlier discussion of hunting and its sub-spieces was intended seriously or as a comedic preparation for hunting down the sophist. The possibility of a humorous intent has been considered in relation to the etymologies in the Cratylus but not, to my knowledge, in relation to the Sophist. For a defence of the parodic function of the etymologies, see Timothy M.S. Baxter, The Cratylus: Plato’s Critique of Naming (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), 87, 95–96. For an alternative view, see Sedley, Plato’s Cratylus, 39–41. 18. We recall that aporia literally means ‘a- (privative) poros’, i.e. ‘no way through’.

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19. Michael Frede, ‘Plato’s Sophist on False Statements’, in The Cambridge Companion to Plato (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 397. The demonstration that false statement entails false belief is given at 261a–264b. 20. Unlike many modern European languages, Greek had, in addition to the more customary singular and plural, a separate mode of declining nouns, the ‘dual’. 21. See Cratylus 431d–e and 438a–c. We see that the same thread of thought that leads to the supposition of an originary onomatourgos also leads, if followed through, to the conclusion that such an onomatourgos is impossible. We always start is medias res, seeking a thread that, we are led to believe, must have been there at the beginning of time but somehow was lost. The knowledge that Plato brings is that there is no point in seeking the thread in some ‘golden past’ before the current stock of men took hold of truth and maligned it. 22. In D.N. Sedley’s formulation, names are like ‘time capsules’. See Sedley, Plato’s Cratylus, 23. 23. That we always start in medias res and never from the beginning is confirmed in another Platonic dialogue, the Timaeus, which does not start from the beginning but from a recounting of the previous day’s discourse. On this point see John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 13. 24. On the influence of the historical Cratylus upon the young Plato see Sedley, Plato’s Cratylus, 16–17.

References Ackrill, J.L. 1997. In Defence of Platonic Division. In Essays on Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ademollo, Francesco. 2011. The Cratylus of Plato: A Commentary. Cambridge University Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B.  Ashton. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. Barney, Rachel. 2001. Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus. London: Routledge. Baxter, Timothy M.S. 1992. The Cratylus: Plato’s Critique of Naming. Leiden: E.J. Brill. van den Berg, R.M. 2014. Proclus’ Commentary on the Cratylus in Context: Ancient Theories of Language and Naming. Brill: Leiden. Brown, Lesley. 2010. Definition and Division in the Sophist. In Definition in Greek Philosophy, ed. David Charles, 151–171. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Campbell, Joseph Keim, Matthew H. Slater, and Michael O’Rourke, eds. 2011. Carving Nature at Its Joints: Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fine, Gail. 1977. Plato on Naming. The Philosophical Quarterly 27 (109): 289–301. Frede, Michael. 1992. Plato’s Sophist on False Statements. In The Cambridge Companion to Plato. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gill, Mary Louise. 2010. Division and Definition in Plato’s Sophist and Statesman. In Definition in Greek Philosophy, ed. David Charles, 172–199. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irwin, Terence. 1995. Plato’s Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kahn, Charles. 2008. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato. 1993. Euthydemus. Trans. R.K. Sprague. Indianapolis: Hackett. Ryle, Gilbert. 1939. Plato’s ‘Parmenides’ (II.). Mind 48 (191): 302–325. Sallis, John. 1999. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sedley, D.N. 2003. Plato’s Cratylus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Producing the Categories of Being: The Science of Logic

1   Introduction In this chapter I explore Hegel’s response to Plato and the critique of naturalism that gets developed in the Cratylus and the Sophist. My aim in this is to highlight the continuities between Plato’s problematic and Hegel’s, whilst at the same time identifying the distinctively Hegelian strategy of dealing with the problem of language as a medium that both reflects and occludes the structure of being. We saw in the previous chapter that Plato disrupts the ontological continuum between world and word that Parmenides had sought to establish; I suggest that Hegel engages with this issue with an earnestness and astuteness that has not been sufficiently acknowledged in the secondary literature, partly because Hegel himself sometimes writes as if the problem regarding the articulation of world and word were trivial. Thus, in his Preface to the second edition of the Science of Logic [1831] he writes that the ‘forms of thought are, in the first instance, displayed [herausgesetzt] and stored [niedergelegt]’ in human language, and that everything that the human being has ‘transformed into language and expresses in it contains a category—concealed, mixed with other forms or clearly determined as such’ (SL 31 / W 5: 20). It would be misleading to interpret this passage as suggesting that language is a more or less transparent vehicle for thought, or that grammar and syntax do not hamper the expression of speculative truths.1 To do this would mean losing sight of what is for Hegel an essential aspect of thought, namely its mediated character, which requires an equally mediated © The Author(s) 2020 V. Roupa, Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52127-1_4

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language.2 Neither of these instances is stable or unproblematically given to us so that we could balance the one against the other or use it as a solid footing in our philosophical endeavours.3 In addition, such a view oversimplifies Hegel’s rich and complex relation to his contemporaries that had reflected and written on language, especially Herder, who had influenced Hegel with his view that thought is dependent on and bounded by language.4 As I show below, Hegel not only takes sides with Plato against Parmenides in the Logic but also articulates a thinking about language that is subtle and perceptive, taking account of contemporaneous accounts of language. The main bulk of this chapter will comprise a commentary on chapter 1 of Book 1 (‘The Doctrine of Being’) of the Science of Logic, with emphasis placed on the concerns raised in the last chapter. We have seen in the Sophist the beginning of a rift between language and thought; we know that the very structure of language (in the first instance, its grammatical structure) precludes an immediate rendering of thoughts into statements that transparently reflect the structure of being. At the same time, it is clear that Plato does not for a moment consider the possibility of an intuitive and immediate communication of truth outside of language;5 language has to be made worthy of philosophy and not only of truth-subverting rhetoric, even if this requires stretching the bounds of thought beyond what was deemed to be possible, i.e. to include that which is not. The accomplishment of this programme, however, leads to a realisation that is bittersweet: the enormous intellectual effort required to bring the Sophist into being is only a temporary refuge, not a lasting protection against sophism, i.e. against the susceptibility of language to rhetoric and the possibility of subversion. To put it in language inspired by Monty Pythons’ inimitable take on philosophical football, the Sophist marks a penalty in favour of the philosopher but it is not the end of the game, nor an all-out win. As we shall see, Hegel allows the strife between the philosopher and the sophist—which is also the strife between thought and language—to develop further by showing how language points inexorably towards truth even as it, at the very same stroke, gives itself over to rhetoric and deception. There are a few other reasons in favour of reading the Science of Logic against the backdrop of the Sophist: Hegel considered that ‘what is first in the science had of necessity to show itself historically as the first. And we must regard the Eleatic One or being as the first step in the knowledge of thought’ (SL 88 / W 5: 91, emphasis in the original). Recent philological

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research has shown that this is not entirely accurate as Parmenides’ One came after Heraclitus’ flux, not before;6 however that may be, it is clear that for Hegel ‘being’ constitutes the most fundamental logical category and the only suitable one with which to make the ‘absolute’ beginning he feels is necessary for the Logic (SL 70 / W 5: 68), so in a sense it is legitimate to read the whole of chapter 1 of the Logic as an extended meditation on Plato’s Sophist.7 Furthermore, Hegel’s own theory of becoming is hugely indebted to Platonic dialectic as expounded in the three dialogues which deal extensively with the issue of being and non-being, Parmenides, Sophist and Philebus.8 As has been convincingly shown by de Laurentiis and Halper, the dialectical movement that takes place in the Parmenides stamps Hegel’s own version of the dialectic decisively.9 Hegel’s reading of the Parmenides has been discussed extensively elsewhere, so, for the purposes of this chapter, I will focus on Hegel’s engagement with the Sophist and the thinking that emerges from it.10 Historically, the memory of the discovery that Plato made in the Sophist, namely that being and non-being have an equal right of citizenship in the realms of thought and logos, had at times been at risk of being obliterated, as for instance in the philosophical lineage associated with the dictum ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing);11 in light of this, Hegel’s analysis in the Logic represents an attempt to re-capture a thread which, though by no means lost, was not dominant in the tradition either. Finally, the importance Hegel attributed to the Sophist is evident in the fact that he counts it among the three dialogues (along with the Parmenides and the Philebus) where Plato gives his mature account of dialectics, and discusses it in some detail in the relevant section of the Lectures. It is not an accident that even in the 1825–1826 cycle of lectures (where the section devoted to the Sophist is considerably shortened) he chooses a quote from that dialogue as a summary statement of the whole of Platonic dialectics.12 Hegel thought that the Sophist treats dialectic ‘in its higher signification’, and expresses ‘the abstract speculative Idea in its pure Notion’ (Haldane & Simson 2: 56 / W 19: 69). For all these reasons, the choice of reading the Sophist as an accompaniment (indeed, a prequel) to Hegel’s Logic is, I believe, both sound and tenable.

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2   Naming as a Work of Art Hegel’s first extended treatment of language occurs in the lectures he gave at the University of Jena in 1805–1806, now known by the name Jenaer Systementwürfe III. The section entitled ‘Spirit According to its Concept: Intelligence’ begins with an analysis of language viewed as the ‘name-­ giving power’ [Nahmengebende Kraft]. There, as in the Cratylus, the issue of names boils down to a question about the relation between sensuousness and signification, in other words, between things as sensible objects, and things that, apart from their sensible attributes, also have a further quality, namely their ability to signify. In a passage closely resembling, albeit in condensed form, the discussion in §445–§464 of the Encyclopaedia, Hegel comments on the movement from intuition and the image to internalisation, Erinnerung, memory, and the name. This time, philosophy will not shy away from positing a coincidence between the name and the thing named; for Hegel, the truth of being is in language.13 When I say a ‘lion’ [Löwe], or a ‘donkey’ [Esel], he says, ‘it is not merely something yellow, having feet, etc., something on its own, [existing] independently. Rather, it is a name, a sound made by my voice, something entirely different from what it is in being looked at [in der Anschauung]—and this is its true being’. Hegel then addresses the objection that the name of a thing is insubstantial or secondary to the thing itself: ‘[We might say:] This is only its name, the thing itself [Ding] is something different; but then we fall back onto sensory representation. […] By means of the name, however, the object [Gegenstand] has been born out of the I [and has emerged] as being [seyend]’ (HHS 89 / GW 8: 189–190, emphasis in the original). And then comes a strange line which puts the terms in question the one next to the other without the punctuation one might have expected, thus marking a deep and intimate relation between them: λόγος Vernunft Wesen des Dings und Rede, Sache und Sage, Kategorie. Der Mensch spricht zu dem Dinge als dem seinigen, und diß ist das Seyn des Gegenstandes. (HHS 90 / GW 8: 190)14

Hegel’s account of naming in this passage appears to have much in common with Cratylism insofar as it posits an identification between the being of a thing—or its essence—and its name. Should we take that to suggest that we have now moved beyond the Platonic rift between language and thought? Has the dream of a perfectly transparent language finally

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been realised? Evidently, if it is in the name that the object has its being, we must assume it is in the name as it currently stands, in the Löwe and Esel that Hegel mentions in his passage. And yet, at precisely the moment when philosophy appears to be finally abandoning its youthful dreams and resigning itself to ‘hard reality’, a distinction between name and thing, or word and concept, is felt to be needed more than ever. In the stretch of time that separates Hegel from Plato a momentous event occurred, namely Babel. I am not referring, of course, to the Biblical Babel, but rather to that which swept through Europe with the formation of the modern nation-states and the ensuing rise of national languages, literatures and cultures. The philosophical and theological problems associated with this development are well known.15 On the philosophical front, the difficulty is one of squaring the universal character of concepts with the particularity of the language in which these concepts are expressed, a problem sometimes referred to as that of ‘philosophical nationalities’. Not unrelated to this are the theological questions around the translation of the Bible from Latin into the emergent national languages. Such translation should not be seen primarily as a problem of finding appropriate words and phrases in which to render the original, or of coining them where they do not exist; first and foremost, it is an issue bordering on sacrilege: if Latin is the consecrated language of the church, then each word in the Latin Vulgate has the status of a proper name, a transparent and untranslatable word, because in it, designation and sensuous manifestation coincide.16 We already hear echoes of the Cratylus reverberate across Latinic Europe: far from being solely a sensible vehicle or medium of expression without much input on the content of what it is meant to express, each word in the holy text is a unity of meaning and sensibility, audibility and designation. In other words, something closely resembling a work of art. Can you translate a Rubens into another language, another medium, another diction? But, as Hegel would probably have it, a Rubens that no longer speaks to your heart is no better than a canvas randomly smeared with paste. According to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the great achievement of Luther was translating the Bible into German: This, then, is the great principle [of the Reformation], that all externality [Äußerlichkeit] disappears at the point of the absolute relationship to God. All self-estrangement [Entfremdetsein], with its consequent dependence and servitude, therefore disappears. Praying in a foreign tongue or having [divine] science in a foreign tongue is proscribed. It is in language that we

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are conceptually productive. The first outward expression [Äußerlichkeit] that humanity gives to itself is by means of language; […] This first [outward] form becomes something fragmented and alien if we have to receive and express in a foreign tongue what affects our highest interest. […] To be here at home with self and in our own domain [bei sich selbst in seinem Eigentum zu sein], to speak, think, and represent in our own language, likewise belongs to the form of liberation.’ (Brown 3: 97; see also Haldane & Simson 3: 150 / W 20: 105)

This passage, straightforward as it may seem at first, on closer inspection reveals formidable difficulties. On the one hand, we are told that at the point of absolute relation to God all ‘externality’ disappears. A few lines earlier, commenting on the precept of ‘good works’, Hegel has made clear that these are ‘nothing without conviction, without the presence to self of the spirit [Wirklichkeit des Geistes in sich] that is at home with itself’ (Brown 3: 96). On the other hand, however, such presence to self, such disappearance of externality, does not come to pass outside of language. Rather it is in language, and by means of language, that spirit comes to be at home with itself. As Hegel makes plain, language is the first outward expression, the first externality humanity gives itself. But if it is to be such, doesn’t it necessarily have to share the fate of all externality, which, as we saw, disappears in the absolute proximity to God? If it is in language that the human being relates to his or her God, even if it be a language one understands and feels close to heart, isn’t the presence to self that Hegel seeks always at risk of being compromised, always slipping through one’s fingers at the very moment one thought one had finally secured it? Underlying these difficulties is a conception of language as a medium or vehicle capable of expressing thought transparently and without remainder, i.e. without leaving behind traces that language fails to capture and express. In the passage above, we notice that Hegel uses a single word, Äußerlichkeit, to cover two distinct meanings; on the one hand, by virtue of its proximity to Entfremdetsein in the next sentence, Äußerlichkeit is associated with estrangement and alienation i.e. with that which is or could potentially be foreign to us (or foreign to spirit). On the other hand, this association is missing from the second occurrence of Äußerlichkeit a few lines further down, which the translator correctly renders as ‘outward expression’, thereby minimising the sense of ‘estrangement’. This is not to suggest that the issue would have been averted had Hegel exercised more caution in his choice of words; as we know, for Hegel any outwardness or

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externalisation of the inner world can potentially lead to alienation and estrangement. Rather the problem is rushing from this to the conclusion that language is a medium or vehicle on which a fully-fledged thought is impressed as if on wax. That this is not Hegel’s conception of language and its relation to thought, that it is instead an over-simplification of a much subtler connection, will become obvious, I hope, from the analysis of chapter 1 of the Science of Logic I propose below.

3   Language and Thought in the Logic In his commentary on chapter 1 of the Logic, Houlgate describes thus the passage from being to nothing to becoming: ‘The thought of pure being only disappears into the thought of pure nothing because it is the wholly indeterminate thought of pure and utter being. However, the very disappearance of pure being and pure nothing into one another undermines the pure and immediate difference between the two and causes them to collapse into one’. And importantly, ‘[i]f we are no longer able to think of being as pure being, therefore, we are no longer forced by that thought to think its constant, restless disappearance into its immediate opposite. Rather we are led by the very disappearance of pure being into pure nothing (and of nothing into being) to give up the idea that each is purely what it is and utterly different from the other … and to think both thoughts together as a single unity.’17 What I propose to do in the remainder of this chapter is attend to this disappearance of being and nothingness into becoming, and enquire into the condition that makes it possible. If we think about it carefully, this is a strange requirement: to think two thoughts together, not the one after the other in rapid succession (so rapid that, the hope is, the two thoughts will eventually merge), but in a single unity. What is it that makes possible the holding together of two thoughts as different from each other as being and nothing? My aim in what follows is to show that the condition for satisfying this requirement is to make the passage not from one thought to another thought (from the thought of being-disappearing-into-the-thought-of-nothing to the thought of becoming), but from a thought to a word: ‘becoming’. In other words, my argument is that the disappearance of being and nothing into becoming requires something extra, which, though present in the earlier two moments, i.e. the disappearance of being into nothing and the attendant oscillation between the two thoughts, manifests itself with full force only in the third moment, i.e. becoming. I will argue that this solicits a passage

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from thought to language; as we shall see, it is by means of a word, weighed down—as all words are—with sensuousness, that this passage is possible. 3.1  The Interface Between ‘Being’ and ‘Nothing’ Chapter 1 of the Logic starts with a discussion of being: Being, pure being [Sein, reines Sein], without any further determination. […] [Being] has no diversity within itself nor any with a reference outwards. It would not be held fast [festgehalten] in its purity if it contained any determination or content which could be distinguished in it or by which it could be distinguished from another. It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. (SL 82 / W 5: 82, Hegel’s emphasis)

Below I offer a brief commentary on this passage focusing on the movement between thought and word. The commentary is based on a phenomenological reading of the passage, and, as such, will observe what happens in the reader’s mind when she reads those words of Hegel’s.18 The reading proposed here, therefore, will attempt to capture not only Hegel’s ‘meaning’, but also show how this meaning is co-extensive with a certain experience of language that the reader has when she reads the Logic. The reason this is important is because the Logic for Hegel requires the reader’s active co-operation in the attainment of its truth, and is in this sense very different from a technical compendium whose knowledge need only be communicated to its reader as an accomplished fact.19 So, to start with our phenomenological reading of the book, what is it that we do when we think ‘is’ or ‘being’? Is it a thought we have or is it a word we silently utter (remembering Plato’s silent dialogue of the soul with itself)? Is it possible to have the thought ‘is’ without the word? And if it is, what kind of thought is it exactly, and how do we hold fast to it? We can try repeating the word ‘is’ (to prevent our mind from straying), and attend to what crosses our mind. We will find that it takes more than a passing acquaintance with meditative techniques to be able to hold fast to this little thought which constantly eludes and escapes us. And when we reflect on this process, we realise that what we have been thinking of all along is nothing. Nothing crosses our mind when we think ‘being’. Here’s Hegel on this: ‘There is nothing to be intuited [anzuschauen] in it […] Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or it is equally only this empty thinking [leere Denken]’ (SL 82 / W 5: 82–83). Thus we move from one word, Sein, to another word, Nichts. Hegel draws our attention to this in

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the passage by putting the two words in italics. Notice that with the exception of reines, these are the only words that have been put in italics in section A. Why doesn’t reines lead us to stray from the task of attending solely to the interface between Sein and Nichts? Because reines is as empty as Sein, since it denotes that which is without any determining mark. Obviously, there are other words in this passage surrounding our two main words—why don’t these lead us astray? The intention, I suggest, is to read these words as cue words, props, or stage directions meant to direct attention to the main action happening onstage where the only words uttered, silently or not, are Sein and Nichts. They might as well not exist in the script, which would then read: A. Sein, reines Sein

[pause] Nichts [full stop]

So, what Hegel is inviting us to do here is attend a performance he has set up for us, the only difference with a real theatrical performance being that in this case we are both actors and spectators. Respectively, the script for Section B gives us: B. [pause]

Nichts, das reine Nichts Nichts ist Sein

[full stop]

The stage directions read: ‘To intuit or think nothing has therefore a meaning; both are distinguished [unterschieden; we’ll see the importance of this shortly] and thus nothing is (exists) in our intuiting or thinking; or rather it is empty intuition and thought itself, and the same empty intuition or thought as pure being’ (SL 82 / W 5: 83, emphasis in the original). Firstly, let us note the phrase ‘nothing is’: affirming the existence of nothing, conjoining that which is not with that which is or existence with the complete obliteration of existence puts Hegel firmly in Plato’s anti-­Parmenidean camp (and by the same token, in the anti-ex nihilo nihil one).20 Secondly, the emphasis placed on ‘emptiness’ invites

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the question: is to think nothing or intuit nothing an empty thought or a thought of emptiness? My answer is that what was according to the Parmenidean conception supposed to be an empty thought or, more properly, a non-­thought, now becomes a thought, albeit a thought of emptiness. Thus, we make the move from the thought of something positive (‘is’) to that of something negative (‘nichts’, ‘not’, ‘nothing’). Equally, however, we move from the thought of something negative (a ‘non-thought’) to that of something positive (the thought ‘nothing’, which, though of nothing, is still a thought). Thirdly, and importantly, Hegel not only takes sides with Plato against Parmenides here, but also makes an advance in relation to Plato by showing that the movement from Parmenides to Plato is a dialectically necessary one. The theoretical gain made in the Sophist was secured through a barrage of argument against the Parmenidean conception, but the impetus for that gain had been provided by the one-sidedness of the original theory itself. What was deemed to be a non-thought, and therefore a thought that we must commit to banishing from the realm of legitimate thoughts (which was what Parmenides urged) was shown by Plato to be our only protection against the mimicry of the sophist. Hegel is here in agreement with Plato that the banished thought, like psychoanalytic repression, will of necessity stage a come-back from where it had been displaced. As a result, the solution to the disquiet thinking experiences in its encounter with a nonthought cannot be to exile the ‘guilty’ thought into a realm where it can no longer affect us;21 in contrast to bounded physical space, thinking does not admit of boundaries, and the displaced thought will soon come back to haunt us. So, our only hope of resolving this struggle is to give the repressed thought right of residence in our thinking and attend to its operations. 3.2  The Word Is the Thought Hegel goes on to show that there is a further moment in the dialectical movement from being to non-being, i.e. the passage to becoming. Let us look at the script Hegel has prepared for us:

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C. Das reine Sein und das reine Nichts ist also dasselbe nicht dasselbe, absolut unterschieden jedes in seinem Gegenteil verschwindet das Werden

A much meatier text in comparison to what we got in sections A and B. From it we learn that pure being and pure nothing are the same, but also that they are absolutely different (or distinguished). Let us see what other help we can glean from the stage directions. The first thing to strike us is a line very near the beginning of the section where it is asserted that being ‘does not pass over but has passed over into nothing [nicht übergeht, sondern übergegangen ist]’ (SL 82–83 / W 5: 83, my emphasis). This has important ramifications: if we, phenomenological observers, can’t notice the passage taking place, or put our finger on it the precise moment it happens, it follows that this passage has taken place at another place and another time, or that it has ‘always already’ taken place. One implication of this is that we can never ‘master’ the dialectical process described here. Hegel has frequently been described as a philosopher with an obsession for ‘ownership’ or ‘mastery’; although a point-by-point confrontation with that interpretation cannot be undertaken here, the reading I propose will help throw some doubt, I hope, on such an understanding of his work. If the passage from beingto-nothing to becoming has always already taken place, this means that it is something thought ‘suffers’ rather than something which it controls and over which it can acquire mastery. In this sense, it would probably be fair to describe dialectics as the passion of thought (as we say, ‘the passion of Christ’), while keeping firmly in mind that the origin of this passion is not something external to thought involving an agent or a source of will that inflicts the suffering. Thought suffers ‘at the hands of’ dialectics, but dialectics is thought’s own innermost nature, not an external cause of its torment. But, it might be objected, isn’t this thought we have been discussing someone’s thought? What right have we to speak of ‘thought’ in general, as if it didn’t matter whether someone thinks these thoughts? At the very minimum, it is the thought of those that read the Logic and attend to the dialectical movement playing itself out in the book. Surely, in writing the Logic Hegel must have been addressing himself to potential readers of his work; he must have appealed to their thought. Further, what sense does it

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make to assume that ‘we’ all, readers of Hegel’s work, are united in what we think when reading these pages? Is ‘our’ thought a universal thought, as is implied when using the word ‘thought’ without qualification, and is the bearer of that thought an all-inclusive ‘we’ that defies cultural and linguistic particularities? Hegel obviously thought that there are legitimate grounds for speaking about thought tout court, i.e. without any qualification or determination of who is having these thoughts or their grounding in particularity. It might further be argued that the Science of Logic hinges drastically on precisely such an obliteration of difference, on the one hand among its various readers, and on the other between author and reader or narrator and narratee. In the Science of Logic the occupants of all these roles are meant to commune, the difference with a Eucharistic session being that this communion here is based not on a mystical foundation but on a logical requirement, i.e. that Logic make an absolute, presuppositionless beginning.22 We recall that ‘being’ is a suitable starting point because it is ‘pure indeterminateness and emptiness’, in a word, it is content-less.23 We are all meant to think exactly the same thing when we think ‘being’, which is made possible by the fact that none of us brings in any individual determination in order to think this thought, any particular skill, knowledge, wisdom, or lack thereof: we are all completely equalised before this terrible emptiness of the ‘is’ whose serene blankness is completely and utterly undisturbed; we are hollowed out from any personal history, identity, aspiration or desire we might bring to bear on the text.24 And yet, difference enters even here, where determinations are absent. Says Hegel: But it is equally true that [‘being’ and ‘nothing’] are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct [absolut unterschieden]. (SL 83 / W 5: 83)

Wherein lies their distinctness? Being and nothing seem to be pretty much the same, a vast blankness whose emptiness is undisturbed even by the slightest suspicion of a cloud. The answer, I submit, is that their difference is in the name; ‘being’ is not ‘nothing’, ‘Sein’ is not ‘Nichts’. It is in the name that we are able to hold on to the thought steadfastly; without it, we might be able to have a vague and indistinct notion of being and nothing, but we would not be able to hold the thought (of ‘being’, ‘of nothing’, of ‘being-turning-into-nothing’) in common. However, this word through which a thought manifests itself, becomes palpable and

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‘common property’, is a very strange thing indeed. Like a human body, the word has a sensuous aspect as it is a particular configuration of letters and syllables. And just as the skin tissue of a human body points to another reality within (a physical reality: a network of veins, a bone structure, the musculature), the word also points to another reality beyond its immediate sensuous presence.25 One has to be careful here: the point is not that the word’s sensuousness points to something not-sensuous, i.e. something mental or spiritual. It does that as well; the word quite obviously has a meaning, which is part of its being a word. But just as the reality to which the human skin points is partly material (a mass of tissues) and partly ideal (an inside that never becomes fully visible), similarly the reality to which the word refers is neither exclusively material nor exclusively ideal. We are used to juxtaposing realities; ever since Plato’s Phaedo and Descartes’ Meditations, we tend to divide realities along the lines of material-­corporeal and mental-spiritual, without allowing them to intermingle. It might be tempting to read Hegel in this way too, and assume that he views the name in terms of a divide between its designative function, i.e. the faculty of referring to an absent thing (a material item, a concept, a state of affairs), and its sensuous presence. Such a reading, however, does not accord well with the overall tenor of Hegel’s thought. Rather, for Hegel each level of being from the most basic material formation to the most highly differentiated organism is lifted up not immediately to its opposite (mentality or spirituality) but to a certain level of ideality, so that it reveals within itself another array of possibilities, other worlds which are and are not of the same order as it. Hegel’s theory of the sign is premised on this inherent capacity of the sensuous to give itself over to ideality, to allow itself to be touched, lifted up, and carried forward by ideality.26 Similarly with the word; ideality operates already on the sensible components of the words, on the Ss, Es, Is, and Ns that make up Sein, for instance. And, importantly, this is the condition of possibility of translation. The possibility of positing an equivalence between, say, Sein, being and einai despite the fact that there is little physical resemblance between these three words (or despite their physical resemblance, if such exists, or a common etymological origin), hinges precisely on such a ‘lifting up’ of the ‘pure’ sensuousness of the word, which is, consequently, never quite ‘pure’; already the putting together of ‘S’, ‘E’, ‘I’ and ‘N’ points both to a meaning that is irreducible to the sensible components of the word, and to other possible configurations of sensible elements that could designate the same thing.27

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The centrality of the word becomes even more pronounced in the attainment of Werden which completes the previous two moments. The crucial question here is: how is it possible for two distinct thoughts (‘being’ and ‘nothing’) to be thought together in a single unity? What allows the passage from the passing-over-of-being-to-nothing and of nothing-to-­ being to becoming? The answer to this will again be found, I suggest, if we focus on what it is we do when we think ‘becoming’. Let us retrace our steps to the point in Hegel’s script where being and nothing each vanishes into its opposite. Now notice that however fast this vanishing movement takes place, however close ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ get to becoming indistinguishable, they are still two distinct thoughts not quite held in a single unity. This single unity, I argue, which allows the rapid movement of being and nothing to slow down and the two thoughts to be conceived as one is a word: ‘becoming’. In ‘becoming’, ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ have disappeared, they have been aufgehoben, which means that when one utters the word Werden, one no longer has to think ‘being-passing-over-into nothing’ simultaneously with ‘nothing passing-back-over-into being’. As words, neither Sein nor Nichts figure in Werden; and yet, they are there, they have become ideal moments preserved in the thought of Werden.28 And, importantly, one does not have to think these thoughts consciously when one says ‘becoming’; it is enough that ‘becoming’ concentrates these two thoughts in a single unity whether the language user is aware of it or not. Werden, in other words, carries within it the history of its coming-to-be, even if this is not immediately obvious to its users. Thus, the dialectical conception manages to cancel out the interminable circuitous movement of Sein and Nichts, but at a cost, namely by introducing the contingency of the sensible world into the realm of pure logic by inserting a word from ordinary language as bearer of a logical category. Is this a problem for Hegel (as it was for Plato)? We shall return to this question in the last section of the chapter.

4   From Word to Proposition Let us now consider some of the ways in which ‘werden’ is used in German. werden im Werden natürliches Werden

to become shall, will (auxiliary) in progress evolution

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We can see that ‘werden’ conveys the sense of ‘progress’, ‘process’, ‘development’, also of that which is not now but will be in the future. In this guise, it carries within it the two categories that marked the beginning of the investigation, ‘being’ and ‘nothing’. ‘Werden’ is also an auxiliary verb used to form the future tense of verbs (e.g. ‘ich werde bleiben’, ‘I will stay’ ‘ich werde geblieben habe’, ‘I will have stayed’). These two uses in combination give ‘werden’ an inflection as that which opens out on to the future. If Sein and Nichts are unbounded because they are radically indeterminate, Werden is equally indeterminate but in a different way, namely inasmuch as it involves the sense of opening out to another state (that which I am not now but will be), and another time (when I will be that which I am now not). This assertion, however, is not, strictly speaking, accurate. To claim that that which is not now will be in the future—besides introducing a temporal element which Hegel would want to keep out of the Logic—also implies an absence of that which is not from the present and an analogous absence of that which is from the future.29 This is against the tenor of the dialectical conception—and yet, it is the structure of language itself that is responsible for this misuse. Similarly, to say that ‘being and nothing are absolutely the same’ is incomplete, says Hegel, because in thus phrasing the relation between the two terms ‘the emphasis is laid chiefly on their being one and the same, as in judgements generally, where it is the predicate that first states what the subject is’ (SL 90 / W 5: 92). Thus comes to the fore Hegel’s complaint about the syntax of language first broached in the Phenomenology. There, it was a question of revisiting the relation between subject and predicate such that the movement taking place at the level of the concept be allowed to shine through ordinary grammatical categories (PS §60–63 / W 3: 57–60).30 The issue is further developed in the second of the long Remarks following the presentation of Werden in the Logic. Very briefly, the problem as analysed in that Remark is that the form of judgement (A is x) is not suitable for speculative truths because it assumes that a judgement is ‘an identical relation between subject and predicate’. However, if the content is speculative, says Hegel, ‘the non-identical [Nichtidentische] aspect of subject and predicate is also an essential moment, but in the judgement this is not expressed’. In the proposition ‘being and nothing are the same’, for instance, the moment of identity between the two terms comes across, but not that of their difference. (SL 90–91 / W 5: 93)31

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It might be supposed that this defect could be made good by also asserting the opposite of the above proposition, namely ‘being and nothing are not the same’. This, however, would not remove the difficulty because, as Hegel explains, in this guise the two propositions appear as unconnected, and therefore exhibit their content ‘in the form of an antinomy whereas their content refers to one and the same thing’ (SL 91 / W 5: 94). The problem in other words, is that the form of the proposition, which, due to syntax restrictions, can express either an affirmative or a negative statement does not match the content of the proposition, which affirms both the identity and the non-identity of the two terms; as a result, the sensible form of the proposition is at odds with its speculative content, or natural language is at odds with philosophy.

5   A Technical Language for Philosophy? The question I am going to consider in this section is whether philosophy requires a technical or artificial language to allow it to overcome the restrictions set upon it by the syntax and structure of natural languages. Before I get on to that, let me summarise the conclusions established so far. It is now clear that language, far from being an epiphenomenal reality whose function is to merely express an already fully-fledged thought, instead buckles on to thought in a number of different ways: 1. on the one hand, language allows thought not simply to be uttered or communicated but to be had at all. We have seen that naming the thought (‘being’, ‘nothing’ ‘becoming’) is a condition of possibility for having the thought, which otherwise would only be conceived in a very indistinct and unclear manner, if at all; 2. on the other hand, language is also a condition of possibility for having the thought in common. This power of language allows the Science of Logic to be far more than a text written with the intent of communicating an already concluded theoretical discovery; instead, it gives us the chance to participate in this discovery—a discovery which is, strictly speaking, not Hegel’s, as it is not ‘mine’, ‘yours’ or ‘ours’ either. Each reader makes the discovery for herself, with Hegel as a companion along the way.32 However, given the difficulty of expressing speculative truths by means of ordinary grammar and syntax, the question naturally emerges as to why

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Hegel does not consider constructing an artificial language on the model of Leibniz’s ‘universal characteristic’,33 designed so that speculativity be impressed upon and be immediately perceivable from its sensible features. This language might include propositions such as this: the same being and nothing are different

and its purpose would be to graft on to space (and thus offer to spatial intuition) the kind of a-temporal simultaneity that pertains to the dual propositions ‘being and nothing are the same’ and ‘being and nothing are different’. However, in the section on ‘Imagination’ [Einbildungskraft] in the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, Hegel is scathing about Leibniz’s project; Leibniz was ‘led astray’ in believing that a symbolic system on the model of hieroglyphics would be a desirable medium for communication between peoples and particularly among scholars. The reasons Hegel gives for this are interesting because they bring into relief his conception of the ideality of language. A language such as that envisioned by Leibniz, claims Hegel, would be incapable of expressing the dynamic nature of meaning which changes in line with the ‘progressive logical development’ concerning ‘the inner relationships’ of signs (PSS III §459R). In other words, relations among signs are not static but dynamic, and the syntactical structure of language should be able to reflect this. Hegel is here making a point similar to that made by Socrates contra Cratylus to the effect that time has an essential share in shaping language, and this share cannot simply be dismissed as an inessential element excisable at will. In the domain of Logic, now, where the element of time is not supposed to enter, Hegel’s criticism could be reformulated as affirming both the sensuous and the ideal aspect of language as equally important. To suppose that language could be made to exhibit meaning transparently on its body, as it were, in effect entails two parallel operations: on the one hand, a complete annihilation of the sensuousness of language as something distinct from, and partially resistant to, meaning, and on the other hand, a complete annihilation of the ideality of language as something not fully reducible to sensuousness. The first operation would make of sense something entirely ideal since a mere look at a proposition would inform any

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inhabitant of this earth of its meaning, immediately and without remainder, thereby depriving that ‘wonderful’ word, Sinn, of one of its two senses, i.e. as ‘organ of immediate apprehension’. The second operation would make of sense something entirely sensuous since it would make meaning a simple function of a particular combination of sensible elements, thereby depriving Sinn of the other of its meanings, ‘the significance, the thought, the universal underlying of the thing’. Thus, to realise the programme of Leibniz (which, it is easy to see, is in effect the programme of Cratylus, i.e. the dream of a language that transparently and faultlessly exhibits reality) would strip language of its essentially dual nature, i.e. its consisting of ‘senseless externalities’, [sinnlose Äußerlichkeiten], which at the very same stroke point to another reality laden with sense (PSS III §459R). The Logic, by contrast, manages to put across speculative truth even though this truth is not, strictly speaking, present in each individual proposition of which the text is composed. The operation at work here is very similar to the one we noticed with regard to the word and the letters of which it is made; like the sensible constituents of the word ‘Sein’ which point towards another order, namely that of ideality, the constituent propositions of a text, say the Logic (which is, in this regard, exemplary) point towards another order, namely that of speculativity, even if they are not in themselves speculative. This allows the philosopher to circumvent the problems present in natural language, not by fabricating a new, artificial one, but by making use of possibilities already latent in natural language.34 We might thus say that Hegel repeats the Platonic incorporation of conventionalism as performed in the Sophist: the quest for a logos that will produce its concepts rather than receive them uncritically from ordinary language involves receiving as well: it is a reception and acceptance of words that have been made adequate to the Concept. By figuring in Hegel’s Science of Logic, by receiving Hegel’s philosophical treatment, these words are no longer the ‘natural’ words they were before. And yet, in a sense, they haven’t changed at all; they are exactly the same words, just as Plato’s words in the Sophist are not re-fashioned (for example, by dropping certain consonants) to bring them closer to Cratylus’s phonic requirements. And yet, they are new words, removed from the ‘naturalness’ of pre-philosophical practice, and allowing the passage from contingent usage to philosophy and speculativity.

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6   Conclusion to Part I Thus, we see Hegel repeating against Leibniz the argument Plato had made against Cratylus some twenty-two centuries earlier.35 We need to insert this priority of natural languages—which Hegel made repeatedly— in the context of a certain naturalism which reinterprets ‘nature’ speculatively. Here we are going to try and distinguish ‘nature’ as encompassing a distinct ontological plane with its own laws and rules of engagement (the domain of ‘natural’ things) from the notion of nature as that which forms the essential character of a thing, be it a ‘natural’ thing or an ‘artificial’ one. We notice, first of all, a considerable extension in the notion’s field of application; whereas ‘nature’ as the domain of a certain type of things applies to a subset of the totality of things, i.e. the so-called ‘natural’ ones, ‘nature’ as essential character can apply to any thing whatsoever. This second meaning of nature (which is in accord with the pre-Socratic conception of nature as ‘totality’) is related to the first meaning in a multitude of ways;36 like the Platonic eidos or Form which is intelligible, yet as word is derived from the Greek verb ‘to see’, and thus denotes that which gives itself over to our vision, ‘nature’ as essential character attains an ideality— the aggregate of possibilities which pertain to the constitution of a thing— without losing its rootedness in sensuous being. And again, like the verb ‘to see’ itself which Plato strips of its sensible aspect and turns into a metaphor for noetic vision—a kind of seeing which is not done with the eyes and is not necessarily available to all who can see—‘nature’ loses the primary meaning of sensuous being, and becomes instead a normative concept that designates how a thing should develop in accordance with its inner structure. This will turn out to be crucial in the next chapter where Plato’s ideal polis in the Republic is discussed; as we shall see there, ‘nature’ represents a guiding force which pushes thought to conceive of the thing, in this case, the political community, not as it is but as it should be in accordance with its concept. Central to this re-thinking of nature is the notion of ‘intentionality’ that occurs in technē. As we saw in chapter 2, craft as intentional activity that produces its object through a kind of mental or noetic envisioning provides the model for Plato’s analysis of names. We recall that Socrates refutes Hermogenian conventionalism on the basis of an analogy between names and tools. It is because names are like tools that have a certain use value and enable us to do things with them that we cannot accept the thesis that any name can be correct. But if this is so, then names must have

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a certain ‘nature’ just as tools have, i.e. they need to incorporate in their construction a set of rules which are independent of the craftsperson’s wishes. This introduces, as a number of commentators have noted, the divine (as master-craftsman) in the construction of names, and by extension, the universe and all things human. Such a development will no doubt appear as controversial, even undesirable, to some; whereas pre-Socratic philosophers had succeeded in eliminating divine causes from the functioning of the universe, thus paving the way for purely naturalistic forms of explanation, Plato seems to be taking a step back by re-introducing divinity (theos) in the story of how things were made.37 However, it is crucial that this philosophic theos not be confused with the gods and goddesses that populated the Greek mythic mind; in fact, Plato’s divinity is not even a subject in the sense of an agency motivated by the mental states it experiences towards goal-oriented action. Instead, Plato’s divinity should be viewed as the intentionality built into the very act of crafting; what matters when crafting is not the random cognitive states of this or that craftsperson, e.g. their level of knowledge or their beliefs, not even their willingness to bring forth the intended object, but rather the very act of producing that object in accordance with its envisioned form.38 In addition, as we saw in chapter 3, the master-­ craftsman type of intentionality proposed in the Cratylus is set aside in the Sophist in favour of a dialogical production of the object of enquiry based on diairesis. Plato’s critique of pre-Socratic naturalism has to be seen in this context; rather than retreating into a pre-philosophical model of explanation which puts extraneous causes at its centre, Plato reconfigures naturalism to incorporate intentionality, thus moving the boundary between nature and technē and offering resources that may be used today to subvert the opposition between natural things and fabricated ones.39 Crucially, this type of intentionality is also present in politics inasmuch as Plato understands political leadership as itself a sort of technē; as we shall see in the next chapter, this might be the bad political craftsmanship of the tyrant who cunningly guides the populace towards implementing his schemes, or the good political craftsmanship of the politically tasked philosophers who strive for the good of the whole. Hegel takes over the Platonic re-interpretation of nature and sharpens it. Thus, he defines ‘physical nature’ as the ‘other’, the Platonic heteron, ‘taken solely as such’, ‘in its own self’ [an ihm selbst] (SL 118 / W 5: 126–127), or as he puts it in the Encyclopaedia, as ‘externality’ [Äußerlichkeit] (EN §247).40 This externality, however, is not fixed or

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inert; on the contrary, there is an initial contradiction in nature between, as Stone explains, ‘its pure materiality and the fact that this pure materiality is, in some sense, already conceptual’.41 Nature as pure externality, then, has a similar structure to the word; just as the word is a composite of material elements which are, however, not purely material but point towards another order, that of meaningfulness, so nature shows itself not to be purely material but incorporates a conceptuality that is essential to it. The outcome of this process, the unification of thought and matter, whereby matter ‘no longer subsists in independent antagonism to the conceptual’, but has become ‘completely structured and organised by thought’, provides the key to the transformation of the concept of nature that Hegel performs.42 Just as pure being and pure nothing pass over the one into the other because as purely indeterminate they are the same, so ‘physical nature’, which Hegel identifies as otherness in its determination as ‘other’, of necessity passes over yet again into its other, i.e. conceptuality or thought. Practically, this means that the concept of nature supersedes its initially bounded shape, i.e. its determination as the domain of natural things in opposition to artificial ones, and comes to encompass all things. However, it does not do so as ‘physical nature’, but as a kind of nature that is akin to conceptuality/thought. Similarly, things lose their earlier one-sidedness, their being ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’, and instead attain a more inclusive identity; whether natural or artificial, all things can be said to have a ‘nature’, an array of possibilities that structures their very core.

Notes 1. See also Allegra de Laurentiis, ‘Not Hegel’s Tales: Applied Concepts, Negotiated Truths and the Reciprocity of Un-Equals in Conceptual Pragmatism’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 33, no. 1 (1 January 2007): 88: ‘It is well known that for Hegel language either betrays the singularity of sensory experience by virtue of its generalising nature or sunders what actually belongs together, as in the speculative proposition.’ 2. On language as internally mediated see the Editor’s introduction to Jere O’Neill Surber, ed., Hegel and Language (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 11. 3. This is the very problem at the heart of Hegel’s speculative proposition. Cf. Malabou: ‘As a philosophical proposition is normally understood, the subject of the proposition is thought of as a fixed instance: it is given predicates from outside, and is not able to produce them itself. “To exclude rigidly the usual way of relating the parts of a proposition” implies a recon-

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ceptualising of this relation, which is now to be understood as a process of substance’s “self-determination” (Selbstbestimmung). Substance’s relation to its accidents changes from one conception to another; and this Hegel interprets as the transition from the predicative proposition to the speculative proposition.’ Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005), 11. See also Catherine Kellogg, ‘The Three Hegels: Kojève, Hyppolite, and Derrida on Hegel’s Philosophy of Language’, in Hegel and Language, ed. Jere O’Neill Surber (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 201. A point made by Halper is also highly relevant here: ‘Plato’s dialectic is negative in the sense that the movement of thought, negation, lies outside the form’; but Hegel aims to overcome the distinction between ‘a form or category’ and the ‘dialectic that arrives at or springs from it’. Edward Halper, ‘Positive and Negative Dialectics: Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik and Plato’s Parmenides’, in Platonismus im Idealismus: Die platonische Tradition in der klassischen deutschen Philosophie, ed. Orrin F. Summerell and Burkhard Mojsisch (München und Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2003), 213–214. 4. See Michael N. Forster, German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. chapter 5; Daniel J. Cook, ‘Language and Consciousness in Hegel’s Jena Writings’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 10, no. 2 (April 1972): 200–201. For a summary of the criticisms made by post-Kantian thinkers, such as Hamman, Maimon, and Herder, of Kant’s critical philosophy as relying on a particular and empirically contingent language for its expression, see Jim Vernon, Hegel’s Philosophy of Language (London: Continuum, 2007), 6. 5. In the Seventh Letter it is stated that there is a kind of knowledge that cannot be put in words, thus suggesting the possibility of an ineffable kind of truth (341b). It is doubtful, however, that we can attribute such a view to Plato, first because the authenticity of the Seventh Letter is a matter of controversy, and second, because the precise meaning of that statement is unclear. For a discussion of this point see Richard Kraut, ‘Introduction to the Study of Plato’, in The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 21–23. Also cf. Barney’s discussion of knowledge as a logos in Rachel Barney, Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus (London: Routledge, 2001), 166–167, where she denies that knowledge for Plato could ‘include some further, mysterious, non-propositional content’. 6. As Kahn points out, ‘Parmenides’ poem was almost certainly unknown to Heraclitus, although it may have been composed during his life time’, so the Heraclitean theory of the unity of One and Many can’t have been a response to Parmenidean ontology. See Charles H.  Kahn, The Art and

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Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 317. 7. In an important paper Klaus Düsing argues that Hegel identifies the Platonic ‘being’ or on with ‘determinate being’ [Dasein] or, more specifically, ‘something’ [Etwas], both of which are more complexly developed than Sein. Indeed, Hegel refers to Plato’s heteron or ‘other’ in his discussion of Etwas which forms part of chapter 2 of the Logic. However, Hegel’s point in that particular reference to the Platonic heteron seems to be more related to the aspect of Dasein as ‘other’, i.e. as ‘isolated’ [isoliert], or ‘in relation to itself’ [in Beziehung auf sich selbst], contrary to its aspect as the ‘same’ [dasselbe] with Etwas, which Hegel develops in the preceding paragraph. As isolated from ‘something’, the Platonic heteron is assigned, in Hegel’s view, ‘a nature [Natur] of its own’; an example of such an ‘other’ in its determination as other is, according to Hegel, ‘physical nature’. (SL 118, W 5: 126–127). See Klaus Düsing, ‘Ontology and Dialectic in Hegel’s Thought’, in The Dimensions of Hegel’s Dialectic, ed. Nektarios Limnatis (London: Continuum, 2010), 107–108. See also the discussion of this point in Halper, ‘Positive and Negative Dialectics’, 217 n. 8. For Hegel’s appreciation of Plato’s Parmenides see Allegra de Laurentiis, Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World: On Hegel’s Theory of Subjectivity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 97. On the importance of Platonism in motivating Hegel’s dialectic see Angelica Nuzzo, ‘Vagueness and Meaning Variance in Hegel’s Logic’, in Hegel and the Analytic Tradition (London: Continuum, 2010), 62–64. On Hegel’s evaluation of Plato’s dialectic in the ‘aporetic’ and the later dialogues see Maureen Eckert, ‘This Site Is Under Construction: Situating Hegel’s Plato’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 53 (2006): 10–12. 9. The positivity of the dialogue consists in this, namely that the destructive process to which the positing of an unchanging form gives rise to is by the same token the constructive process through which that form can be known. Cf. de Laurentiis: ‘The Parmenides, then, would tacitly imply that “truly infinite,” self-reflexive objects of thinking may actually be made intelligible precisely by the dialectic contradictions of which the dialogue shows only the negative results’; de Laurentiis, Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World, 96. Also, Halper: ‘The same dialectic that undermines the understanding’s grasp of the One is the dialectic through which reason grasps the One’; Halper, ‘Positive and Negative Dialectics’, 218. 10. For discussions of Hegel’s reading of the Parmenides see de Laurentiis, Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World; Halper, ‘Positive and Negative Dialectics’; Allegra de Laurentiis, ‘The Parmenides and De Anima in Hegel’s Perspective’, Hegel Bulletin 27, no. 1–2 (ed 2006): 51–68; HansGeorg Gadamer, ‘Hegel and the Dialectic of the Ancient Philosophers’, in

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Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976). On how Hegel’s dialectic differs from Plato’s see Halper, ‘Positive and Negative Dialectics’, 214, 220–226. 11. See SL 84 / W 5: 85. Hegel says about this proposition that it is an ‘empty tautology’, an ‘abstract identity’. He also associates it with the ‘abstract pantheism of the Eleatics’; although Parmenides is not mentioned by name, elsewhere Hegel explicitly associates the Eleatics with the belief ‘that only Being is, and non-being is not’ (Haldane & Simson 2: 65 / W 19: 72). See also the discussion of this point in Nuzzo, ‘Vagueness and Meaning Variance’, 69. 12. ‘Plato says definitively that what is other—to heteron—is also the same [tauton] or the self-identical, and what is the same (self-identical) is the other too […] This is the main characteristic of the dialectic that is peculiar to Plato’. See Brown 2: 201. 13. On Herder’s influence on the Hegel of the Jena period see Forster, German Philosophy of Language, 150–151. 14. Rauch translates: ‘Logos, reason, the essence of the thing and of speech, of object and talk, the category—man speaks to the thing as his. And this is the being of the object.’ 15. Problems which the Greeks could never have anticipated unattentive, as they had been, to languages other than their own. See R.  Harris and T.J. Taylor, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure (London: Routledge, 1989), xiv: ‘Greek culture was linguistically self-centred and monoglot. Although they were well aware that other civilisations had other languages, the Greeks took little interest in studying them. They were, however, very conscious of the dialectal varieties of Greek itself.’ 16. Similarly, the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek had been accompanied by similar anxieties, hence the myth of the 72 translators who, the story goes, were able to produce the same text word for word despite working in seclusion from each other, as though an ‘invisible prompter’ had been dictating to them. See G.L. Bruns, Hermeneutics, Ancient and Modern (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 88–89. 17. Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 33, emphasis in the original. 18. The emphasis in a phenomenological reading is on the experience of reading. See Tanja Staehler, Hegel, Husserl and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), 9–10: ‘The phenomenology of Spirit is the experience which Spirit makes of itself.’ 19. An important paper that discusses the progression of the logical categories in Hegel’s thought is John W. Burbidge, ‘Hegel’s Conception of Logic’,

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in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Burbidge convincingly shows that Hegel’s Logic does not presuppose ‘psychologism’, i.e. the view that tries to justify standards of logical validity by appealing to the way people actually think. The phenomenological reading proposed here does not rely on ‘psychologism’ in that it does not derive the meanings of the key terms of the Logic from the random thoughts that its readers happen to have when they read the book. Rather, it attends to the inherent movement of the terms themselves, and how this movement is received by, and in turn shapes the reading of, those readers irrespective of the random psychological connections and inferences they may make. 20. On Hegel’s critique of Parmenides see also Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic. From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2006), 43–44; Nuzzo, ‘Vagueness and Meaning Variance’, 68–69. 21. Nor is it sensible to assume that any such banishment will secure philosophy from forces inimical to it. Discussing repression in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud comments on the mechanisms patients sometimes resort to in order to avoid giving a full account of their thoughts and feelings. Here is how he describes one of these mechanisms and his own response: ‘A man whom I can only describe as of the highest intelligence kept silence […] for weeks on end about a intimate love affair, and when he was called to account for having broken the sacred rule [that nothing should be held back from the analyst], defended himself with the argument that he thought this particular story was his private business. Analytic treatment does not, of course, recognise any such right of asylum. Suppose that in a town like Vienna the experiment was made of treating a square such as the Hohe Markt or a church like St. Stephen’s as places where no arrests might be made, and suppose we then wanted to catch a particular criminal. We could be quite sure of finding him in the sanctuary’. Like the criminal in Freud’s example, the sophist has taken refuge in the asylum offered by Parmenides’ saying; like the analyst, Plato has hunted him out of it. Hegel’s contribution has been to recognise and describe the dialectical necessity according to which the banished (or ‘repressed’) thought comes back to haunt the legitimate one. See S.  Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey and A. Freud, vol. 26 (1916–1917) (London: Vintage, 2001), 288, my emphasis. 22. Strictly speaking, this beginning is not presuppositionless as it presupposes the results of the Phenomenology. Here’s Hegel on this: ‘The beginning is logical in that it is to be made in the element of thought that is free and for itself, in pure knowing. It is mediated because pure knowing is the ultimate, absolute truth of consciousness. In the Introduction it was remarked that

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the phenomenology of spirit is the science of consciousness, the exposition of it, and that consciousness has for result the Notion of science, i.e. pure knowing. Logic, then, has for its presupposition the science of manifested spirit’. ‘With what must science begin?’ (SL 68 / W 5: 67), emphasis in the original. 23. On the problem of beginning in philosophy and that of the Phenomenology as offering such a beginning see Staehler, Hegel, Husserl and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds, 6–10. On the issue of circularity that beginning entails see de Laurentiis, Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World, 50. 24. And it is in this sense that the Logic does not entail ‘psychologism’. Note also that the language of rights will be premised on a very similar emptiness, only this time it will be the abstraction from any individual characteristics, abilities, merits or failings. 25. See Hegel’s discussion of the aesthetic value of the human body in LFA I: 146–147 / W 13: 194–195. See also Stone’s discussion of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, esp. the point about how natural phenomena signify: “in Hölderlin’s poem ‘The Nook at Hardt’ a group of trees becomes beautiful because it recalls or points to something else […]. Adorno thus distinguishes between perceptible natural phenomena in their ‘literal’ (buchstäblich) existence (in this respect, a group of trees is no more than that) and as they ‘signify’ (bedeuten) or ‘present’ (vorführen) something else.” Alison Stone, ‘Adorno and the Disenchantment of Nature’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 32, no. 2 (1 March 2006): 245. 26. Hegel makes this point graphically in an Addition to the PN: ‘Nature is […] only implicitly [an sich] the Idea, and Schelling therefore called her a petrified intelligence […]; but God does not remain petrified and dead; the very stones cry out and raise themselves to Spirit. (PN §247A, my emphasis). 27. As we saw in the Introduction, in the Aesthetics Hegel celebrates the word Sinn [sense] as a ‘wonderful’ word which is used in two opposite meanings, to denote, on the one hand, the ‘organ of immediate apprehension’, and on the other, ‘the sense, the significance, the thought, the universal underlying of the thing’. What comes after this is crucial for our purposes: ‘a sensuous consideration does not cut the two sides apart at all; in one direction it contains the opposite one too, and in sensuous immediate perception it at the same time apprehends the essence and the Concept’. LFA 128–129 / W 13: 173. 28. In the “Remark: The Expression ‘To Sublate’,” which concludes chapter 1, Hegel discusses the two opposite meanings that the German word aufheben incorporates, and defines ‘moment’ as something ‘reflected’, i.e. something that has been removed from immediacy and has entered into unity with its opposite. See SL 107 / W 5: 114.

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29. On the exclusion of time from chapter 1 of the Logic cf. SL 83–84 / W 5: 84–85, where, discussing popular proverbs that bring together death with birth, Hegel notes that they express ‘at bottom’ ‘the same union of being and nothing’, but they differ from the development that occurs in the Logic because they ‘are held apart in time’, they ‘are not thought in their abstraction’, and consequently ‘not so that they are in themselves absolutely the same’. 30. On this see also Judith P. Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), xi: ‘If we are to read Hegel, what will this reading do to a grammar that is preconceived to express logical relations […]? One reads along in the Phenomenology with the assumption that a stable reality is being described only to come up against the obduracy of descriptive language itself. We think we know at any given textual moment what negation “is” and what it does, only to find out by following the course of its action, indeed, by reading it, that our former convictions were unfounded’. 31. In the speculative proposition, by contrast, ‘predication’, as Vernon explains, ‘is not the mere attaching of unrelated terms, but the immanent interrelation of linguistic content in its self-unfolding’. ‘Thus, the speculative sentence reveals not only the inner workings of any given proposition, but the nature of speculative thinking itself’. Vernon, Hegel’s Philosophy of Language, 121. 32. But of course, this is a particular language—German—with its own lexis and syntax. Hegel’s celebration of the speculative expressions to be found in the German language implies that the articulation of natural languages and speculative thought is marked by a certain degree of contingency and unpredictability. 33. A comprehensive discussion of Leibniz’s views on language can be found in Donald Rutherford, ‘Philosophy and Language in Leibniz’, in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Jolley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). In that article Rutherford suggests that there is disagreement as to the aim and character of this philosophical language envisioned by Leibniz. Some believe that the key to the ‘universal characteristic’ is the idea that ‘it is possible to represent the logical relations among concepts or propositions) while ignoring the actual content of the concepts themselves’. For others, the significance of the ‘universal characteristic’ is in its role as a lingua philosophica capable of precisely expressing the ‘content of an encyclopaedic knowledge of reality’. Rutherford, 226. In either case, the ‘universal characteristic’ would be an artificial language offering scholars the chance to formulate basic philosophical insights liberated from the ambiguities of natural languages.

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34. See also Nuzzo’s suggestion that there is a ‘speculative spirit of language’ that is ‘integral to Hegel’s method’, and that ‘the language in which Hegel’s philosophy is written is constitutive of the dialectical method that structures speculative philosophy as system’. Nuzzo, ‘The Language of Hegel’s Speculative Philosophy’, 77. Nuzzo also distinguishes between the ‘language of the concept’ or the ‘language of the gods’—which the Logic speaks—and the ‘language of representation’ or the ‘language of the humans’—which ‘owes its merely illusory concreteness to representation’. The ‘language of the gods’ vs. the ‘language of humans’ is mentioned by Hegel in, amongst other writings, the second Preface to the Encyclopaedia [1827], and is a reference to Plato’s Cratylus, where the distinction is first made. See the discussion in Nuzzo, 84–85; Nuzzo, ‘Vagueness and Meaning Variance’, 65. 35. Hegel’s logic had been criticised a few years earlier by Johann Wilhelm Andreas Pfaff who wrote to Hegel to complain about the supposed presuppositionless-­ness of the categories of the Logic with arguments that echo those of Leibniz’s. One of Pfaff’s points had been that no philosophical system can be proven because the philosopher would have to begin ‘by using a natural language presupposing a whole battery of concepts and assumptions not yet proven’. The artificial notation of mathematics, by contrast, ‘permits strict control over the number of postulates and premises’, and the mathematician thus moves ‘in a straight line’. Though Pfaff favours the methods of mathematics over Leibniz’s hieroglyphs, we can see that the substance of the argument is the same; natural languages presuppose a lexis and a rich complex of relations, both grammatical and syntactical, which intrude upon and hinder the philosophical effort. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 266; Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic, 72. 36. Gerard Naddaf, The Greek Concept of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 1. 37. See Naddaf’s Introduction in Naddaf, Greek Concept of Nature. 38. Cf. the juxtaposition of voulēthēi—epephukei in Cra. 389c: ‘ouch hoion an autos voulēthēi, all’ hoion epephukei’. It is notable that Aristotle appears to share Plato’s notion of intentionality in this instance. See the discussion of craft in Aristotle as an analogue for his conception of nature in Sarah Broadie, ‘Nature, Craft and Phronesis in Aristotle’, Philosophical Topics 15, no. 2 (1987): 35–50, esp. 43–44, where Broadie refutes the claim that cognitive states are essential in craft-intentionality. 39. On this see also Arnaud Macé, ‘The new frontier : philosophy of nature in platonic studies at the beginning of the XXIth Century’, Plato – The

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Internet Journal of the International Plato Society, no. 9 (2009), https:// gramata.univ-paris1.fr/Plato/article89.html. 40. For an analysis of nature as externality see Alison Stone, Petrified Intelligence  : Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 32–40. 41. Stone, 35. 42. Stone, 52.

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———. 2006. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic. From Being to Infinity. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Kahn, Charles H. 1981. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kellogg, Catherine. 2006. The Three Hegels: Kojève, Hyppolite, and Derrida on Hegel’s Philosophy of Language. In Hegel and Language, ed. Jere O’Neill Surber. New York: State University of New York Press. Kraut, Richard. 1992. Introduction to the Study of Plato. In The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Laurentiis, Allegra. 2005. Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World: On Hegel’s Theory of Subjectivity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2006. The Parmenides and De Anima in Hegel’s Perspective. Hegel Bulletin 27 (1–2): 51–68. ———. 2007. Not Hegel’s Tales: Applied Concepts, Negotiated Truths and the Reciprocity of Un-Equals in Conceptual Pragmatism. Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (1): 83–98. Malabou, Catherine. 2005. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic. Trans. Lisabeth During. London: Routledge. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2006. The Language of Hegel’s Speculative Philosophy. In Hegel and Language, ed. Jere O’Neill Surber. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2010. Vagueness and Meaning Variance in Hegel’s Logic. In Hegel and the Analytic Tradition. London: Continuum. Rutherford, Donald. 1995. Philosophy and Language in Leibniz. In The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Jolley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Staehler, Tanja. 2016. Hegel, Husserl and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International. Stone, Alison. 2006, March 1. Adorno and the Disenchantment of Nature. Philosophy & Social Criticism 32 (2): 231–253. Surber, Jere O’Neill, ed. 2006. Hegel and Language. Albany: State University of New York Press. Vernon, Jim. 2007. Hegel’s Philosophy of Language. London: Continuum.

PART II

Redefining the Natural: Society and Politics

CHAPTER 5

The Question of Nature in the Republic

1   Introduction There is no doubt that the concept of nature plays a pivotal role in the Republic. The counterpoint to Socrates’ view of justice, namely, that justice is not only good for its own sake but also for its consequences, is provided in the form of an account of human motivation according to which humans naturally pursue injustice as it affords them more benefits, but are driven against this natural tendency by law [nomō i] which forces nature ‘into the perversion of treating fairness with respect’ (358e–359c). Socrates’ subsequent attempt to defend his theory of justice against the challenges issued by Adeimantus and Glaucon makes recourse to nature at several key junctures; division of labour is justified on the grounds that each of us is ‘naturally suited’ to do different things; women’s participation in guarding and presiding over the city is justified on the basis of an argument about female and male natures which differ from each other as the natures of bald and long-haired men differ from each other, i.e. in respects inconsequential to the task at hand; types of government—tyrannies, aristocracies, democracies—are construed on the basis of an analogy between these governments and human ‘natures’ or ‘souls’ that exemplify similar traits. As a result of this emphasis on ‘nature’, the Republic has sometimes been read as a treatise in political psychology, its attempt to define justice firmly rooted in the psychological profiling of humans, with a specifically political form of justice either non-existent or ancillary to the justice of the individual.1 Plato, it would seem, presents us in the Republic © The Author(s) 2020 V. Roupa, Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52127-1_5

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with a clear notion of how humans are ‘naturally’, and on this groundwork he erects a political structure that is ‘just’ and ‘appropriate’ because in accord with human nature.2 The implications of this reading for our understanding of the Platonic political project are grave. If legitimate political practice derives from ‘nature’ (or, to be precise, from a certain construal of humanity, which hierarchises humans on the basis of ‘natural’ aptitudes), then a number of conclusions follow: first, Plato’s response to the political events that lead from the peak of Athenian democracy to the Peloponnesian war and the imposition of the rule of the Thirty Tyrants upon the city is an essentially traditionalist one whereby political ills can be remedied by recourse to an elitist, anti-democratic political system where those alleged to possess knowledge are the obvious beneficiaries of political power.3 Second, the subversive insights offered by Plato in more targeted contexts (e.g. gender equality in assuming the tasks of governance) lose their radicalism by being appropriated for the purposes of political stability and the welfare of the whole.4 And third, the book offers support and ammunition to those political theorists who dispute the potential of emancipatory social forces to reshape society on the grounds that the kind of society they seek to establish is against ‘nature’ and is, therefore, at best impracticable and at worst downright dangerous.5 The reading I propose in this chapter calls into question this mode of articulation between the psyche and the community. My aim is not to doubt the tight knot Plato ties between the two; on the contrary, it is my belief that Plato’s most incisive contribution to the problem of the political is to argue for an intimate connection between politics and the soul. How we read these notions, though, and how we see them pivot on that other, most ambiguous of concepts—nature—is a matter for debate. My main argument is that interpreters who read the dialogue as advocating a socially stratified polity premised on a regimented view of humanity— whether out of sympathy for Plato’s assumed political sensibilities or in a spirit of critique—misinterpret the concept of ‘nature’ as it occurs in the text and instead use it as a canvas on which they project their own meanings—meanings that are not necessarily Platonic and may be odds with other textual possibilities present in the dialogue. Taking my cue from Leo Strauss’s reading of the Republic in The City and Man—a text that made forcefully the case for understanding the dialogue as a rejection of political idealism on the grounds that such idealism is ultimately against nature—I aim to complicate the reading of ‘nature’ that the dialogue invites, by

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questioning some of the key interpretative assumptions commentators have made. My contention is that the alignment between the psyche and the polis that Socrates proposes in the dialogue is not premised on a set of hierarchised relations, where the tripartite self provides the model for an equivalent political division; rather it is a calibration based on co-­ production and mutual adaptability where each reality—the soul and the polis—calls forth and shapes the other. I also argue that ‘nature’, the reality that politics has to serve if it is to produce practicable results, does not figure in the Republic as a limiting factor, a set of stable traits and propensities, whose precise constitution it is the task of philosophy to know and apply upon the political body; instead, nature figures as a normative but open-ended concept that guides thought to the proper grasping of things. The Republic, I suggest, has value for us today not because it structures political institutions on a pre-determined ‘human nature’—a project which is hardly Platonic—but rather inasmuch as it disrupts politics as administration to inaugurate a conception of the political as therapeia. To make this argument I stage a confrontation between the so-called ‘pig city’ episode in the Republic and the reading of this episode offered in The City and Man. Strauss’s commentary serves the purposes of this chapter well because he puts the question of nature at the heart of his reading. Indeed, for Strauss, the Republic is seminal for political philosophy because it envisages a political order that would be in accord with ‘nature’, and would therefore embody a right different from and higher than positive right.6 Furthermore, Strauss’s reading, though idiosyncratic in certain respects, is emblematic of a certain interpretation of the dialogue which views a hierarchically structured ‘nature’ as forming the backbone of the kallipolis’ constitution. I dispute this reading by offering my own close analysis of the ‘pig city’ episode, and propose a different mode of articulation between the psychological and the political, advancing the hypothesis that the passage from the ‘first city’ to the kallipolis (or best polity) via the ‘inflamed’ city is coincidental with a trauma. This trauma is to be understood both in political terms (the possibility of civil war) and in personal/ psychological terms (the impact of Socrates’ death). Finally, I return to the overarching concerns of the book by showing how the Republic generates two types of politics at the same time; one based on individualistic self-­ interest and the principles of economic exchange, and another politics which exceeds that exchange and inaugurates a higher ethical order of ‘freedom and true friendship’, as Plato puts it in 576a.

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2   Kairos: The Time of the Thing In line with a familiar interpretation of the Republic which sees Plato’s project as an attempt to map the basic institutions of the polis on the tripartite division of the human psyche, Strauss defines the meaning of ‘nature’, ‘natural human good’, or ‘natural polis’ in the following manner:7 To determine what is by nature good for man or the natural human good, one must determine what the nature of man, or man’s natural constitution, is. It is the hierarchic order of man’s natural constitution which supplies the basis for natural right as the classics understood it. […] The good life is the perfection of man’s nature. It is the life according to nature. One may therefore call the rules circumscribing the general character of the good life ‘the natural law’. The life according to nature is the life of human excellence or virtue.8

and, In order to reach his highest stature, man must live in the best kind of society, in the kind of society that is most conducive to human excellence.9

Does the Republic fulfil this promise? Is the city that Socrates constructs with the help of his interlocutors ‘most conducive to human excellence’, and, therefore, a city that has no other end than the perfection of the individual, the ‘natural’ city par excellence? Strauss explains that having been founded in response to the needs of the body, i.e. needs which cannot be satisfied in isolation, the requirement arises that ‘everyone work for his living in such a way that he exercises only one art’. This requirement accords with nature insofar as ‘men differ from one another by nature’ or ‘different men are gifted for different ends, and the nature of the work to be done requires this “specialisation”.’10 Going back to the relevant passage of the Republic, we find Socrates asking his interlocutor whether the best way of organising work in the city would not be by arranging things so that each person contributes his work to the common use of all: That certainly wouldn’t be surprising, for even as you were speaking it occurred to me that, in the first place, we aren’t all born [phuetai] alike, but each of us differs somewhat in nature [diapherō n tēn phusin] from the others, one being suited to one task, another to another. […] Second, does one person do a better job if he practices many crafts or—since he’s one person

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himself—if he practices one?—If he practises one.—It’s clear at any rate, I think, that if one misses the right moment in anything [ergou kairon], the work is spoiled.—It is—That’s because the thing to be done won’t wait on the leisure of the doer [tēn tou prattontos scholēn] but the doer must of necessity pay close attention to his work rather than treating it as a secondary occupation. (370a–b)

A careful reading of this passage reveals that there are two arguments at work here: whereas the first reason for introducing division of labour is that people tend to be better at some tasks than at others, (an argument which is not in itself sufficient to demonstrate the strict necessity of the ‘one man one job’ principle but only the necessity to take account of the suitability of each before assigning tasks), a further reason is then adduced, which in effect precludes any other arrangement: it is absolutely essential that the craftsperson direct her whole attention to the task at hand because if the ‘right moment’ is missed, ‘the work is spoiled’. Interpreters of the dialogue have tended to focus on the first argument (the human aptitude for certain tasks as opposed to others), but, again there is a sense that the second argument weighs more heavily than the first: we can envisage someone being good at more than one craft even if this was exceptional, but we would have far more difficulty envisaging a situation where the craftsperson would not have to accommodate herself to the time of the work to be done. Strauss reinforces this with the following remark: ‘[i]f Asclepius’ sons combine the two heterogeneous arts of medicine and war (408a1–2), one begins to wonder whether the strict separation of the men devoting themselves to the art of war from all other artisans (374a3–d6) is Socrates’ last word’. We surmise, then, that if a task did not impose its own constraints upon the craftsperson, it is unlikely that Plato would insist on a strict application of his ‘one man one job’ principle. Quite the contrary; as Strauss reminds us, ‘the rulers of the best city must combine the two heterogeneous activities of the philosopher on the one hand and of the king on the other’.11 One would, then, have to draw the conclusion that the so-called ‘one man one job’ principle derives from two sources (human aptitude for certain tasks, the requirements of the work to be done), but its strict practical necessity follows from the priority that the time of the thing takes over the time of the doer. It then follows that the principal reason for introducing the specialisation principle is a pragmatic concern with efficiency in a political context whose primary aim is that of the servicing of human

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needs.12 If this is right, we have to concede that what appears to dictate the structure of the polis at this point is not a basic fact about human nature, but rather the preponderance of the time constraints that the task imposes upon the doer, which Plato denotes here with the significant word ‘kairos’.13 Viewed under this rubric, the specialisation principle is shown to derive from a survival calculus that urges the craftsperson to make her technē the epicentre of her world to ensure the sufficiency of the whole.14 Thus, polis and time, or more appropriately, the right time or timeliness, are closely connected from the start, although one needs to keep firmly in mind that the time meant here, the time that regulates the rhythm of the polis, is that of the ergon to be accomplished, the time of work: we are on our way to a politicisation of the economy (whose productivity depends upon the right political principles), and a concurrent economisation of politics (whose purpose, it seems here, is the effective management of the technai). Once again, nature and technē are shown to be not polar opposites but allies; the naturalness of the city appears to depend on the all-­ powerful presence of the crafts and of the time constraints that their processes dictate.

3   (In)harmonious Nature Notably, the reading that puts the emphasis on human nature is led to posit the idea of an inexplicable harmony given the felicitous conjunction between the nature of the city-dwellers (that ‘differ from one another by nature’) and the ‘nature of the work to be done’ that requires the said specialisation. Rather than antagonising each other (a possibility that one could legitimately take up and interrogate as to its consequences for the construction of the healthy city), these two natures appear to work in tandem to produce the opportune result. Such a remarkable alliance induces the idea of a harmony, almost a pre-established one, given that the nature of the human being so admirably suits that of the work to be done. Here’s Strauss on this: ‘The healthy city is a happy city […] There is also perfect harmony between what is good for the individual (his choosing the art for which he is best fitted by nature) and what is good for the city: nature has so arranged things that there is no surplus of blacksmiths or deficit of shoemakers’.15 Here, Strauss invokes nature in yet another sense, this time not as the special constitution that differentiates humans from other beings, nor as the nature of the work to be done, but in a clearly metaphysical sense: nature figures here as providence, making sure that the healthy city

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will not experience any imbalance causing it to relinquish its perfection. But is this concept of nature anything more than a foreign imposition upon the Platonic text? Instead of marvelling at the miraculous coincidence of the two natures, on the one hand the human, and on the other that of the work to be done, might we be closer to Plato’s intent if we read human ‘nature’ as adaptable and ‘plastic’, able to accustom itself to the requirements of the work to be done, i.e. to the requirements of a poiesis which from the start puts its stamp on the human being and thus inescapably defines what it is to be human?16 Such a reading of the dialogue allows us to catch a glimpse of the impending catastrophe simmering beneath the surface of the ‘perfect balance’ that Strauss thinks he discerns in the healthy city: to the initial group of ‘four or five men’, which is ‘the essential minimum for a city’ (369d), more and more craftsmen are added, merchants, who ‘take care of imports and exports’, retailers, who will carry out the exchange of products (371a–c), and, finally, ‘servants’, ‘whose minds alone wouldn’t qualify them for membership in our society [ta men tēs dianoias mē panu aksiokoinō nētoi] but whose bodies are strong enough for labour. These sell the use [chreian] of their strength for a price called wage and hence are themselves called wage-earners (371e). It may be expected that with these additions the polis is now self-sufficient and self-contained; yet, it is these final additions that, as I show below, threaten to upset the balance of the whole. What is striking in this passage (apart from the remarkable similarity of Plato’s definition of the wage-earner with Marx’s) is that dianoia or intellect should figure as a precondition for participating in the polis. Did not Plato initially stipulate that the reason for entering into an association (koinō nia) with others is merely our needful nature and lack of self-­ sufficiency?17 Surely, need does not derive from the mind, it derives from the body; as Plato himself notes, the kinds of needs that drive people ‘to live together as partners and helpers’ are the needs for food, shelter and clothing. One is therefore led to assume that it is the needful nature of men and women that drives them to associate in a koinō nia, and also that this should be enough to qualify them for membership in this koinō nia. Plato, however, now tells us that there is a category of people who are unworthy of ‘membership in our society’ on account of their intellect. We can assume, then, that these are people incapable of mastering any other art or technē than the wage-earning art that Plato mentions earlier (346c) as a technē separate from the other technai, such as medicine or sailing a ship. Seen in this way, a dēmiourgos, craftsperson or artisan, is someone

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who practices two technai: on the one hand, the art that is proper or peculiar to her, say medicine, and on the other, an art that she practices in common with others, i.e. wage-earning (346a–d).18 But again, it is unclear why being unable to master more than one technē, and in particular any other technē apart from the wage-earning one, should be such a terrible disability. Would Plato consider as equally infelicitous the alternative possibility, namely, that one be able to master a technē, say medicine, but unable to master this other kind of art, and so fail to earn wages from her practice?19 Let us leave this question pending for now, and go back to the account of the first city in the dialogue. We are getting to the point where Glaucon’s outburst interrupts Socrates’ idyllic descriptions of what life will be like for the inhabitants of the healthy city which famously involves feasting and simple pleasures; ‘If you were founding a city for pigs, Socrates, wouldn’t you fatten them on the same diet?’, to which Socrates remarks, ‘it isn’t merely the origin of a city that we’re considering, but the origin of a luxurious city’ (372d–e).

4   The Dialectics of the Natural and the Political This turning point in the dialogue, which marks the transition to the founding of the Platonic polis proper by way of the ‘inflamed’ city, has been invariably interpreted in the way Strauss suggests above, namely as the outcome of corruption or decay in the city which Socrates calls ‘healthy’, which itself stems from the unleashing of desire for unnecessary things. Apart from the simple furnishings and pleasures that the dwellers of the healthy city were given to enjoy, the dwellers of the new city will also require, in Socrates’ words, all sorts of ‘delicacies, perfumed oils, incense, prostitutes and pastries’, and also ‘painting and embroidery’ and ‘gold, ivory and the like’ (373a). Inevitably, the city must be enlarged ‘for the healthy one is no longer adequate’, and ‘then we’ll have to seize some of our neighbour’s land if we’re to have enough pasture and ploughland’ (373d). The neighbours, respectively, may also want to seize some of the city’s land if they, too, have ‘overstepped the limit of their necessities’, and it is not difficult to foresee that what will follow is war and, therefore, the need for an armed guard to protect the city from its enemies. All this is so well known that one will be excused for wondering why repeat it once more. It seems to me, however, that there is one question that interpreters of the dialogue have on the whole failed to answer

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satisfactorily, a question that could provide a key for much of the development of the Republic: what is it that causes the change in the outlook or the psychology of the city dwellers, why is it that they no longer restrict themselves to the simple pleasures that the healthy city affords them, but ‘overstep their limits’ and ‘surrender to the endless acquisition of money’? ‘Plain human nature’, is the common answer. But then, what is the catalyst that pushes these rather unfortunate human traits to the fore and thus transforms the character of the healthy city? And why do these traits exert their transformative influence upon the city (causing it to become ‘inflamed’) at this point but no earlier? Secondary literature on the Republic notes some perplexity on this point. Why does Plato introduce the healthy city when its role is not at all apparent in the development of the argument? And second, why is this city abandoned almost without argument despite Socrates’ assertion that in his opinion it is the ‘true’ city (372e)? An influential interpretation—which accords well with Strauss’s reading in considering the first city perfect and complete—maintains that the perfection of this city would leave Plato open to the charge of utopianism if he were to persevere with it, refusing to take into account the defects of actual cities.20 This, however, does not explain why introduce the first city at all, given its uncertain role in the development of the dialogue; if the first city is an idealised picture of human society, but is itself impossible and, in fact, completely imaginary, one would have to question its place in the overall economy of Plato’s argument. A not altogether dissimilar interpretation, which Barney labels ‘moral nostalgia’, emphasises Plato’s purported yearning for ‘a more virtuous Before’, marked by ‘religious tradition, moral unreflectiveness and austere economic conditions’ as the key to his political philosophy.21 However, as Barney notes, Plato’s indictment of Athenian statesmen of the stature of Pericles, or even Themistocles, Miltiades and Cimon, as equally responsible for the current bloating, festering condition of the city, suggests that this interpretation cannot possibly stand.22 Annas also voices reservations about the interpretation which aligns the first city with a ‘Golden Age’, noting that the original city was built on the basis of self-interest, i.e. hardly a ‘glorious way of presenting ideal human nature’.23 Indeed, the ‘Golden Age’ interpretation, at least as articulated by Strauss, owes more to a biblical supposition of a before and after the Fall—where ‘nature’ is another name for divine providence, whilst knowledge of good and evil is necessary for virtue—than it does to a careful consideration of the Platonic text and its intellectual milieu.24

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Barney’s and Annas’ criticisms of the ‘Golden Age’ interpretation give us sufficient clues to attempt a reconstruction of the role that the first city plays in the broader context of the Republic. As Annas notes, although the first city fulfils ‘only necessary needs’, ‘even this leads to the existence of trading and marketing, which Plato regards as a function of the lowest side of human nature; the corruption of the luxurious city differs only in the type of needs satisfied’.25 Following this suggestion, the reading proposed here notes that the first city displays precisely those expansionist elements that typify the malaise of the ‘inflamed’ city and that the kallipolis is designed to provide a check on. Though social differentiation is not fully developed, by the time we get to the end of the episode, the ‘pig city’ already presents in embryo the kind of conflicts and antagonisms that stamp the ‘inflamed’ city and require the formation of a distinct political class whose task is to regulate conflict in a rational way. At the economic level, we have moved beyond the initial group of four or five men who originally came together, and the polis now includes a wide variety of craftspeople who service more than the bare necessities of life. In fact, social diversification has progressed to such a degree that it is fair to say that the ‘pig city’ represents a step in the direction of what Polanyi has called the ‘disembedded’ economy, i.e. a type of economy that is no longer embedded in noneconomic institutions (e.g. status) but requires the existence of an ‘institutionally separate and motivationally distinct economic sphere of exchange’, i.e. a market.26 In his seminal article ‘Aristotle Discovers the Economy’ Polanyi credited Aristotle with being the first thinker to conceive of the economy in this ‘disembedded’ sense; if the interpretation we are proposing here is correct, however, Plato’s ‘pig city’ already presents the first inklings towards this.27 Already before Glaucon’s interjection, Socrates depicts the initial city of farmers, builders, weavers and cobblers as having been boosted by cowherds, shepherds and herdsmen, and augmented by categories of occupations that do not aim to produce useful things but serve the role of intermediary between people and products.28 The city has a marketplace [agora] and a currency [nomisma]—because how else will the city-dwellers ‘share the things that each produces’ (371b)?—and, additionally, retailers [kapēlous] who make it their job to ‘establish themselves in the marketplace’ and provide the service of ‘buying and selling’ (371c–d). In other words, the first city is on the way to fully developing its economic functions by requiring occupations that bring it further and further away from a simple, needs-based community.

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Thus, far from being an exercise in political imagining that soon turns out to be futile and irrelevant for the complex societies that had emerged by Plato’s time, the ‘pig city’ represents a sustained attempt to understand how a disembedded economy may arise from a simple, needs-based community built on natural principles. Further, assuming that the primary aim of all political units is that of servicing human needs, the first city shows how a disembedded system of economy will inevitably arise given a certain level of social diversification of those needs and a framework that allows such diversification to expand outwards (through imports and exports). In other words, what Plato discovers is that need is not primarily a ‘natural’ category even though it has a natural origin; instead, the development of the first city demonstrates that, given a social nexus of roles and occupations that allows further diversification of expertise to the point where exchange of goods is detached from their production, human needs will become themselves increasingly diversified and complex, leading to tendencies that threaten to tear the community apart.29 These tendencies are epitomised, at one end of the scale, in the traders and merchants, who open up the city to the outside world, and, at the other, in the wage-­ earners, who are no longer directly engaged in producing useful things, but sell the use of their labour power to others. Though their role in the developed system of economy is quite different, these categories mark the end of the city’s embeddedness in a crafts-based economy, and the beginning of an era where the economy separates itself from the needs that brought it to life and instead produces itself new—social—needs. Interestingly, this process of autonomisation affects not only social roles and occupations but the very fountain of political life, the soul. To summarise the argument we have been able to establish so far, the reading of the Republic proposed here differs from interpretations that pin the blame for the first city’s demise on ‘human nature’ in that it reverses the order of cause and effect thought to apply in the transition from first city to inflamed city. According to these interpretations, the first city is abandoned because its austere character makes it undesirable for the majority, who—the assumption is—are dominated by their appetites.30 But if this is the case, then Strauss’s overall appraisal of the kallipolis as impossible is inevitable because the kallipolis, too, is an austere city, at least for its guardians. If, by contrast, we see the over-bloating of the appetitive part of the soul not as the cause but as the fallout of tendencies unleashed within the first city, then we can see why Plato finds it important to highlight the link between politics and the soul: not because the soul will

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forever be a stumbling block for a politics of reason, but because the soul—its trials, desires, and passions—is the ultimate object of politics, whose aim it is to act therapeutically upon that afflicted soul. We shall see some ways in which politics may so act in the final section of this chapter; for now, let us try to identify what a ‘pig city’ politics may look like.

5   Socratic vs. Thrasymachean Politics Having established the episode’s integral role in the development from ‘healthy’ city to ‘inflamed’ city, we now need to consider how politics enters the needs-based community. Up to this point, the polis has been wholly consumed by its economic function, lacking a distinct political sphere separate from and irreducible to the economy. In addition, given that the city-dwellers need to direct all their attention to their work to avoid missing the critical moment, it is difficult to see how they could find the time for holding political office, assuming that this, too, requires its own kairos, and won’t wait upon the leisure of the citizens. Indeed, there does not seem to be room in the city for a distinct political time, a time when the city-dwellers leave their craft aside and devote themselves to the common good; if there is justice at all in the ‘pig city’, this should be sought in what the city-dwellers do for themselves, i.e. in practising their craft, and not in what they do for the whole. In fact, such a view of justice seems surprisingly modern; not only has Plato come to discover the ‘disembedded’ economy, but in addition, his account of how the overall well-­ being of the city is promoted through the self-interested activity of the craftspeople seems to be peculiarly like Adam Smith’s! The difference, of course, is that, in Plato’s view, the tendencies unleashed by the socialisation of need trigger a range of social ills—greed, poverty, aggression towards other cities, war—that cannot be remedied by means of the resources available within the ‘pig city’ (nor, obviously, within those of the ‘inflamed’ one). What is needed is the introduction of a distinct political class that will make it its job to attend to the common good and devote itself exclusively to political time. And yet, there is an important way in which the dwellers of the first city demonstrate a sharp political acumen that comes as a surprise amidst the scenes of pastoral enjoyment and festive abandonment; ‘they’ll enjoy sex with one another but bear no more children than their resources allow, lest they fall into either poverty or war’ (372b–c).

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In the late eighteenth century, a similar view was put forward by Malthus who, intent on uncovering the causes of poverty and misery among the lower classes of the population, discussed the possibility of a ‘strong check on population’ that arises from the effects of a brute fact about human existence, namely that ‘food is necessary to the life of man’. Since the volume of food cannot increase as rapidly as populations do, Malthus reasoned, population growth must be kept in check otherwise poverty and famine will inevitably ensue.31 On the author’s own admission, this was not an original view. ‘The poverty and misery arising from a too rapid increase of population’, he remarked in the Preface, ‘had been distinctly seen, and the most violent remedies proposed, so long ago as the times of Plato and Aristotle’.32 What was original in the argument was the rather unusual theory that Malthus proposed, namely that while populations, if left unchecked, can increase at a geometrical ratio, the supply of food can at most increase at an arithmetical ratio, thus producing a divergence the consequences of which for the lower classes of the population it is not difficult to guess. In contrast to Malthus, Plato does not have a theory of ratios linking the increase of population to the availability of means of subsistence. His conception of the causes of war, however, resembles some of Malthus’s formulations so strikingly as to suggest a common anxiety lurking at the background of their thought. As we have already seen, war ensues when ‘our’ city or any of the neighbouring cities ‘have overstepped the limit of their necessities’ and require more land in order to cater for the excess. Could that excess, however, derive not simply from a particular human characteristic, appetite or greed, but from a more complex set of factors that accompany the transition from the simple, needs-based economy to a more evolved and occupationally diversified type of city? And if that’s right, doesn’t it follow that the dwellers of the first city have to shoulder a political function in addition to their purely economic functions, namely to modulate population growth in line with available resources? If we are right in advancing such a hypothesis, we will then be in a position to explain the political significance of the intellect in the healthy city: an excess of luxury, which Socrates, as we have seen, associates with the sophistication of urbanity, signifies a paralysis of the intellect, a loosening of the grip, a lapse of the policing function of the mind or what we might call, after Plato, the calculative part of the soul (logistikon).33 Thus arises the need for a separate class that takes over the tasks that in the healthy city are normally assumed by each citizen individually by virtue of her intellect

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or reason. But how will this political class differ from that of fourth-­ century Athens—a class which Plato saw as corrupt, without knowledge of the good, but only with a passion for ruling and an ability to speak persuasively imparted through sessions with sophists who were more interested in getting their students’ money than instilling virtue in them? If a city is diseased, so are its rulers. How to break this vicious circle? Once again it will be a matter of craft or craftsmanship, but whereas the crafts we have considered so far in this chapter concern the production of things, i.e. tangible items that are useful, the political craft concerns animate beings, not inanimate ones. A second difference concerns the ergon or function and result of the craft; as Parry explains, whereas some crafts aim at producing (e.g. food), other crafts aim at a kind of therapy, just as medicine does.34 Like medicine, the political craft promotes a therapeutic effect on its object; unlike medicine, however, whose success is demonstrable in the patient’s recovery, the political craft has far more difficulty demonstrating its own therapeutic effect, especially when the ‘patient’, i.e. the populace, have lost their ability to tell the healthy from the diseased.35 Plato’s solution to this conundrum relies on a doubling of craftsmanship—in this instance, of the bad political craftsmanship exemplified by Thrasymachus’s model-ruler, who unwittingly provides the means for arriving at a conception of good political craftsmanship as exercised by the guardians of the kallipolis.36 The profound difference between these two kinds of craftsmanship should not blind us to the fact they have something in common; both rely on abstraction from real-life examples to arrive at the essential features of the ‘ideal’ ruler. We recall that in Book I of the Republic Thrasymachus angrily interrupts the investigation carried out by Socrates and Polemarchus, and provides his own definition of justice as the advantage of the stronger. To Socrates’ objection that rulers sometimes order what actually furthers their advantage and sometimes not, Thrasymachus replies that qua rulers, rulers always order what is to their advantage; if they fail to do so, it is because they have made a mistake, but in this respect—i.e. in their fallibility—they are not really rulers at all. In other words, Thrasymachus’s argument makes recourse to an ‘ideal’ ruler, abstracted from the faults of actual rulers, that typifies the ruler’s ‘excellences’, i.e. those aspects of his rulership that make him worthy of the name.37 It doesn’t matter that Thrasymachus’s ruler is a ‘bad’ craftsman of the justice or welfare of the whole provided he acts consistently in accordance with the prescribed rule, namely to maximise his advantage. A ruler therefore is a ruler only when he orders ‘what is best for himself’ (341a).

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This seems like a clever move on the part of Thrasymachus as it enables him to thwart Socrates’ objection that rulers occasionally err, however, as we shall see, the argument soon turns against him. What Socrates seeks and Thrasymachus fails to provide is an account of the craft of ruling that does not rely on a goal introduced to it from considerations extrinsic to the craft. Thrasymachus’s account is unsatisfactory—not because it is suitable for sycophants who wish to ally themselves with the powerful, but because it presupposes a definition of justice based on empirical facts, namely that rulers act, or try to act, in ways that maximise their advantage. Thrasymachus’s argument in 338d–e (‘Don’t you know [ouk oisth’] that some cities are ruled by a tyranny, some by a democracy, and some by an aristocracy? […] And each makes laws to its own advantage’) relies on such a generalisation from experience.38 When he subsequently recasts his argument to account for Socrates’ objection, however, he straddles two different modes of justification at once, empirical justification (but don’t you see that all rulers—whether tyrannical, democratic or aristocratic—act in this way?) as well as Socrates’ mode of reasoning about craft which aims to understand rulership in accordance with its concept. So far craft has been allied with knowledge; ability to explain its procedure; care for the craft’s object.39 Thrasymachus’s definition, however, does not draw on any of these aspects of craftsmanship, nor on any others that could be agreed upon to model what is essential to craft. Instead, he introduces into his account his own definition of justice, which is an observation drawn from how rulers generally act. His admission, however, that the ruler qua ruler is infallible and is only fallible when he fails to act in accordance with criteria that are intrinsic to his craft puts him precisely where Socrates wants him to be, i.e. in a position where he has to admit that crafts have criteria that derive from their concept and not from what is imputed to them by empirical rulers (e.g. maximising advantage).40 If that is right, then Thrasymachus’s account of justice fails even if it is indeed the case that rulers act most of the time in ways that maximise their advantage.41 Whether they do so or not, is irrelevant to the nature of ruling because that nature does not derive its content from what people tend to do most of the time (or even all of the time), but from completely different considerations, namely from the intrinsic requirements that the task (in this case, ruling) imposes upon the practitioner of the craft.42 We are now beginning to see how Socrates’ response to Thrasymachus’s definition of justice is structurally similar to his refutation of Hermogenian conventionalism;43 Socrates’ argument in the Cratylus was that the rules of

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name use have an objective element (‘natural correctness’) that is independent of the wishes or intentions of language users. The fact that slave owners can call their slaves by whatever name they choose (which is how Hermogenes illustrates the conventional character of naming) is not a good example for elucidating the nature of language, just as the fact that rulers can get away with promoting their own advantage at the expense of the whole is not a good example for investigating the nature of justice.44 We can see that in both instances Plato advocates a certain naturalism premised on the idea that craft involves an objective, normative standard; thus, Plato denies that craft, whether in the crafting of names or in crafting the city’s welfare, can be adequately defined by means of subjective cognitive states, i.e. the intentions, beliefs, wishes, or thoughts of the individual practitioners of that craft. However, this naturalism does not draw upon a supposedly ‘fixed’ human nature whose unalterable features determine the institutions of the kallipolis, as the psychological reading of the Republic maintains.45 As we have seen, the specialisation principle is only partly based on a fact about human psychology, namely that humans tend to be better at certain tasks than at others, the stronger requirement being that craftspeople need to direct all their attention to their work, otherwise the work is spoiled. Crucially, we have seen the adaptability and plasticity of human ‘nature’ in the transition from ‘pig city’ to ‘inflamed city; this transition is marked by the preponderance of a human trait, the desire for unnecessary things, however, this trait only comes to the fore under certain conditions of socialisation of need, and not before. If that is right, it follows that far from mirroring a pre-existing psychic structure, the political philosophy of the Republic needs to be read as attending to how the psyche and politics co-produce each other. Although the Republic is generally thought to pre-date the Sophist, we can also see how some of its conclusions are consistent with the analysis in the latter dialogue. Each addition to the city (for example, the guardians) is derived not from what happens to be the case in actual cities but from the internal requirements of the concept of a city. For example, the city guard is instituted when the ‘pig city’ gives way to the ‘inflamed’ one and ‘we need to seize some of our neighbours’ land’, however, guardians soon turn out to be not aggressors but those who maintain the city’s unity. Unlike the Sophist, where the investigation concerns itself only with definitions, the investigation in the Republic needs to also draw on input from experience; thus, the possibility of a savage and gentle ‘nature’, as required by the concept of the guardian, is sought in the real world and found in

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the ‘nature’ of a dog. Like the Sophist however, where the investigation aims to reflect and respect the natural boundaries of the thing investigated, the construction of the city in the Republic proceeds along paths ordained by the inner logic of its object, i.e. by what a city is. It is this inner logic that constitutes the ‘nature’ of the political thing, the res publica, and provides the basis for the kallipolis’ politics. Crucially, diairesis, the key method used in the Sophist, makes a cameo appearance in the Republic when discussing one of the more controversial proposals of the dialogue, the suitability of women to act as guardians. There, upon considering the objection that this proposal goes against the founding principles of the city—as it cannot be denied, according to the dialogue, that ‘a woman is by nature very different from a man’ [pampolu diapherei gunē andros thn phusin] (453b)—Socrates cautions his interlocutor against falling unwittingly under the spell of the ‘craft of disputation’ [antilogikēs technēs], and quarrelling when they think they are having a conversation, as happens to many ‘against their will’: They think they are having not a quarrel but a conversation [ouk erizein alla dialegesthai], because they are unable to examine what has been said by dividing it up according to forms [kat’ eidē diairoumenoi to legomenon]. (454a)

Many people, therefore, unwittingly fall into the sophistic practice of erizein because they are unable to perform the kind of analysis that the Eleatic Visitor will perform in the Sophist, namely divide the thing under investigation in accordance with its inner logic. It follows that to argue against women’s participation in the tasks of guardianship is a kind of sophistry, albeit an unwitting one. Socrates and his interlocutor should make sure they do not themselves fall into this practice and ‘pursue mere verbal contradictions of what has been said [kat’ auto to onoma]’ (454a). They have indeed fallen into disputation when discussing the issue; here’s what Socrates has to say on this: We’re bravely, but in a quarrelsome and merely verbal fashion [kata to onoma], pursuing the principle that natures that aren’t the same must follow different ways of life. But when we assigned different ways of life to different natures and the same ones to the same, we didn’t at all examine the form of natural difference and sameness [eidos to tēs heteras te kai tēs autēs phuseō s] we had in mind or in what regard we were distinguishing them. (454b)

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The formal requirements that mark out the analysis of the Sophist are concentrated in this paragraph; Socrates and his interlocutor unwittingly engaged in eristics when they pursued an examination of the matter in accordance with the ‘name’. We have already seen in the Cratylus that an analysis based on names cannot hope to bring out the inner ‘nature’ of the thing because names have been embellished by people unmindful of the truth and cannot therefore act as reliable guides to the essences of things. It is possible, however, for the two interlocutors to learn about things independently of names inasmuch as they tap into the power of logos or dialectics, which will allow them to examine the ‘form’ of ‘natural difference’ and ‘sameness’ unperturbed by eristics. It is this ability to examine the ‘form’ without conflating the different with the same or the same with the different that will lead Socrates to lay down the law that women participate in the tasks of guardianship and undergo the same education as men guardians, as there is ‘no kind of proof that women are different from men’ with respect to the requirements of guardianship (454d–e).46 The exclusion of women from politics is, therefore according to Socrates, an instance of bad logic which fails to understand what female ‘nature’ really is (i.e. capable of the tasks of guardianship), and instead imputes to it traits and propensities that do not belong to it inherently but are rather drawn from the conventions of fourth-century Athens.47

6   Politics as Therapeia Having established how cities come to life, how they interweave their social functions with their natural origins, and how they give rise to the thought of the kallipolis out of the pathologies of their ‘inflamed’ traits, we also need to consider how cities die. This section therefore will, in the first instance, concern itself with a political death, that of Socrates. Why call Socrates’ death ‘political’? Not only because the motivation of those who pressed charges against him was political, but more importantly, because his death creates a forever inappropriable and endlessly re-appropriated political capital. Of course, Socrates’ death is not only political, at least if by ‘political’ we are to understand the economic give-and-take that constitutes the key life imperative in the ‘pig city’. In fact, his death would not be political at all if it were pursued—and we know that Socrates was perfectly capable of this contradiction, namely not just to ‘suffer’ his death but to take it on, in some way even to precipitate it—with a simple motivation of avoiding the ills and decrepitude of old age. In a way, nothing is

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gained from this death; but in another, everything is; politics, philosophy, the soul, all burst on to the scene because of this death that is ‘assumed’ rather than simply allowed to happen. Indeed, with his death—itself an interruption of natural death or death as a natural occurrence—with his showing himself capable of choosing his death and delivering it in his own time, Socrates institutes a kind of politics that is different from that of the ‘inflamed’ city—which here is none other than fourth-century Athens— and a pre-condition for the politics of the Republic.48 Such political capitalisation is not external to the project of interpreting the Republic, nor to political philosophy as a whole. It might be objected that it suffices to read the dialogue to give a summary of the institutions and practices proposed in it. But the author does not figure in the dialogue; to all intents and purposes, the political theory developed therein could be one that Plato himself repudiated or abhorred. So, who is the one that is doing the proposing? The absence of the author from the dialogue should caution us against reading it as a straightforward and unproblematic statement of opinion. In addition, the choice of characters (in addition to Socrates, whose fate is well-known, Polemarchus, Lysias, and Niceratus would become victims of an unjust government) may suggest a certain intent.49 It could be that Plato wanted his readers to be reminded of the fate of his main characters whilst reading their statements in the dialogue, thus adding a layer of meaning that is hard to recapture when reading the dialogue in the present day. Again, this is not necessarily extrinsic to the development of political philosophy; it is the profound injustice of Socrates’ death that makes it a traumatic event for his contemporaries and forces a re-consideration of the question ‘what is justice’.50 After Socrates’ death this question can never be discussed lightly or in a purely theoretical manner. And so, Socrates’ death becomes a traumatic event for his contemporaries, and the trauma (which by definition is that which is turned inwards, festers and suppurates but without necessarily being visible from the outside) defines the political history of Athens from that point onwards. It is interesting that ‘trauma’, a concept most commonly used in relation to the psychic life of the individual, to that which is private and hidden, and largely inaccessible to others, occurs here in the form of a major public event. ‘Trauma’ occurs in a very public manner and dominates political life for years. But trauma is also that of which we do not speak. Once we start speaking about it, the wound begins to suppurate once more and psychic life begins to unravel. Trauma retains its almost magical

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hold to the extent that it is not directly spoken about. Plato’s strategy in dealing with Socrates’ death both reinforces and escapes the general logic of dealing with trauma by ‘simultaneously call[ing] attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect[ing] attention from it’.51 Thus, in the majority of the dialogues Socrates’ death is left to dangle over the exchange without being directly referenced, whereas its impact to the student, the disciple, the ‘true son’, is never spoken about. Yet, the effect of that death is not pushed inwards, with Plato’s attempt at healing—if indeed healing is what he ultimately sought—taking the form of a distinctive form of philosophical therapy. And so, the question of justice is turned into a philosophical question, the construction in dialogue of a polis where ‘never again’ shall a traumatic event of this magnitude be allowed to happen. Why call this a political capitalisation of Socrates’ death? Because politics is both that which can be offered in exchange for something else and that which exceeds the exchange. Socrates could have offered his judges the possibility of a settlement according to a politico-prudential logic that expects both parties to gain something/lose something. Thus, Socrates might have engaged in the kind of bargaining that has its place in the courtroom: the plaintiffs would have saved face as Socrates would have in effect admitted (some degree of) guilt; the judges could then boast of an impartial review keeping both sides satisfied; whilst Socrates would have deferred his death hoping to make a comeback at some future time. But Socrates refuses to play according to this singularly ‘inflamed’ political logic, and if he does make a comeback at all, it is only as a character in Plato’s dialogues. Was such second-guessing part of Socrates’ strategy at his trial? This is unlikely, and yet, Plato seems to want to make a strategy out of it.52 By refusing to engage in a logistical calculation about potential gains and losses, a calculation that obeys a conditional imperative of the type ‘if I wish to achieve x, then I need to do y’, Socrates disrupts the ‘politics’ of his opponents who hope to get him to enter into a bargaining and possibly a compromise. Such calculation, if he had indeed engaged in it, would have been ‘political’ in the same way that the politics of the inflamed city is political, i.e. not in the ‘proper’ sense, but as a form of management of the city’s inflammation. So, we observe three stages in the development of politics: in the first, needs-based community, politics as a separate sphere is virtually non-existent, with the city-dwellers taking upon themselves the elementary tasks of civic administration, through exercising enkrateia and

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family planning. We don’t get to know much about the inflamed city over and beyond the fact that it requires a city guard to conduct war on the neighbours or protect the city from them, but we probably don’t need to know more as the inflamed city is everywhere around us. The third city is the city where politics emerges in accordance with its concept. This city has been supposed to be the ‘best’ because it relies on a perfect correspondence between human ‘nature’ and political institutions. And yet, we have seen Plato constantly going against the grain of fourth-century opinion as to what is to count as ‘natural’ and what isn’t. The account of the guardian community, for example, flouts all notions of ‘natural’ relationships as they must have been understood in Plato’s time, and even as they are widely understood today. Here’s how Sallis describes this community: The community to be fabricated among the guardians, all having all in common, is to supplement the natural community, the familial community […] indeed so thoroughly that it will even come to be taken as the natural community, each thus regarding all as his actual kinsmen. The most telling index of this supplemental replacement and displacement of nature is its inevitably introducing into the community something utterly contrary to nature, namely, incest. According to the fabricated kinship system, one will inevitably mate with one’s kin, indeed in every case, since each is the kin of all; all mating will be tainted by incest.53

Of course, the ‘incest’ described here is such in theory rather than in practice, premised on the notion that all guardians are kin; nevertheless, it does illustrate how the ‘natural’ system of kinship is supplanted by a fabricated one—a system that would undoubtedly be perceived as ‘unnatural’ by Plato’s contemporaries, but accords with Plato’s definition of ‘true’ kinship. We can now see another similarity with the thematics of the Cratylus; just as the ‘true son’, the one who is worthy of the father’s name (tou tekontos tēn eponumian), is not necessarily the person who has been born from a certain union, here, too, the real guardian is not necessarily the one who has been born from a union of guardians, and the guardian community constitutes not a ‘natural’ community but a strict meritocracy. In this way, the kallipolis provides the political framework that complements the analysis of names performed in the Cratylus; in the kallipolis, social relationships are reconfigured according to the law that no ‘false’ son (or daughter) ever be deemed worthy of the father’s name, but only the ‘true’ one. The doubling of nature that occurs here—‘bad’ nature as

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manifested in social customs and perceptions versus ‘good’ nature which assigns roles according to real aptitude—is at the root of what we are to understand by the ‘political’ in the Republic. Politics is what reduplicates social categories—kinship, social functions and expectations—and remoulds them in accordance with how things are in ‘essence’, which, for Plato, is synonymous with how things would be according to nature.54 Did Plato think that ‘good’ nature might come to supplant ‘bad’ nature in reality? Strauss thinks not because this is ‘against nature’: It is against nature that there should be a ‘cessation of evils’ […] It is against nature that rhetoric should have the power ascribed to it: that it should be able to overcome the resistance rooted in men’s love of their own and ultimately in the body; […]. The just city is against nature because the equality of the sexes and absolute communism are against nature. It holds no attraction for anyone except for such lovers of justice as are willing to destroy the family as something essentially conventional and to exchange it for a society in which no one knows of parents, children, and brothers and sisters who are not conventional. […] Or to state this in a manner which is perhaps more easily intelligible today, the Republic conveys the broadest and deepest analysis of political idealism ever made.55

And yet we can see how politics has already assumed the task of remoulding ‘natural’ enmities and friendships in at least one instance, the conduct of war. As Derrida explains in response to an argument by Schmitt about ‘natural’ enmities in politics, it is recommended in the dialogue that the ‘Greeks behave towards their enemies’—so-called barbarians—‘as they behave today among themselves’.56 ‘This prescription’, Derrida continues, ‘is laid down like a law: ‘I, [Socrates said], agree that our citizens ought to deal with their Greek opponents in this wise while treating barbarians as Greeks now treat Greeks. Let us then lay down this law also, for our guardians, that they are not to lay to waste the land or burn the houses’.57 Thus, if all relations between humans are based on the model of ‘true’ or ideal kinship—which has to be extended to include non-Greeks—the law that Socrates lays down suggests that all war is civil war, and that the aim of politics is not that war never happens—because that’s not entirely up to the guardians to ensure—but rather, even in the event that war does break out, to endeavour to heal the trauma by resolutely avoiding to commit acts that will turn this into total war, where the possibility of future friendship would be rendered impossible and unthinkable. Such a friendship

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goes decisively against the idea of ‘natural’ friend and enemy, in fact it remoulds the notion of the ‘natural’ friend to include potentially all humans and all human communities, which it is the job of the politically tasked community of philosophers to bring to fruition. That this continues to be an imperative for modern international politics testifies to the strength of Plato’s vision.

Notes 1. Plato’s argumentative strategy at  this point has attracted considerable debate. It might be argued, for instance, that political justice should be sought in the laws and institutions that apply in a particular city, and in the type of relations that apply between that city’s residents. Plato, by contrast, appears to be making justice a determinant of the particular configuration those residents’ ‘souls’, a move that has been criticised on more than one ground. See Nickolas Pappas, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Plato and the Republic (London: Routledge, 1995), 191–195. On conflating the distinction between political justice or the political aspect of the dialogue and the ethical goal of consideration of the individual see Norbert Blössner, ‘The City-Soul Analogy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, ed. G.R.F.  Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 345–385. 2. The translation used is that by G.M.A. Grube, as revised by C.D.C. Reeve, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. J.M.  Cooper and D.S.  Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). For the Greek text I rely on Plato, ‘Republic’, in Oxford Classical Texts: Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet, vol. IV, Tetralogia VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902). 3. This view is associated with Karl Popper who juxtaposes the egalitarianism of the sophistic movement to Plato’s and Aristotle’s theory of the ‘biological and moral inequality of man’. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, The Spell of Plato (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1945), 58–59. Nature in Plato represents, according to Popper, a principle of inequality used to justify the ‘natural prerogatives of the “noble” or “elect” or “wise” or of the “natural leader”.’ Popper, 61. However, the view that Plato’s political programme is ‘rooted in the past’, and is at bottom the ‘rationalisation and justification of Reaction’ was very much in vogue already in the 1930s. For a critical discussion of this line of interpretation see Rachel Barney, ‘Platonism, Moral Nostalgia and the City of Pigs’, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 17, no. 1 (2001): 207–227. For an alternative to the Popperian view of

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Plato (and Hegel) see Thom Brooks, ‘Plato, Hegel, and Democracy’, Hegel Bulletin 27, no. 1–2 (2006): 24–50. 4. This issue has generated considerable controversy amongst feminist scholars. Annas makes the point that Plato’s proposals about women are proffered not out of a concern for women’s needs and rights but for the resulting benefit to the state. See Julia Annas, ‘Plato’s Republic and Feminism’, Philosophy 51, no. 197 (1976): 307–321. Saxonhouse is similarly unconvinced about Plato’s concern for the emancipation of women but on different grounds; she argues that by elevating women to the status of rulers as de-sexed subjects, Plato ignores their peculiar natures, and thus undermines the perfection of the kallipolis. Arlene W. Saxonhouse, ‘The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato’, Political Theory 4, no. 2 (1976): 195–212. A more nuanced approach that complicates the Platonic operation in the Republic and reinstates the feminine element into the very structure of the kallipolis is offered in Wendy Brown, ‘“Supposing Truth Were a Woman…”: Plato’s Subversion of Masculine Discourse’, Political Theory 16, no. 4 (1988): 594–616. Whilst she agrees that Plato’s ‘quarrel with the Athenian construction of masculinity is rooted in a concern with its consequences for an ethical politics and philosophy, not its consequences for women’, Brown emphasises that his aim is not ‘to establish an opposition between male and female, politics and philosophy’, but rather to ‘reduce the distance between them and thereby subvert the conventional standing of masculinity, politics, and political discourse, a standing predicated upon distance from qualities identified with women and femininity’. Brown, 599. Emphasis in the original. 5. This is the view famously held by Leo Strauss who argues that in the Republic Plato deploys irony to subtly make the point that the ideal polis he has Socrates describe is contrary to nature and therefore impossible. Bloom similarly argues that Plato places the women among guardians in Book V ‘not because they have the same capacities as men, but precisely because they are different, because they can bear children and the men cannot. To treat dissimilar persons similarly is unjust and unnatural.’ Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 383. A more refined position is held by Rosen who rejects both the view that the human being has a fixed nature and that it has no fixity at all. Instead, Rosen argues, human nature is ‘partly open’, which, as applied to Plato, also means that ‘human nature is partly divided against itself’. See Stanley Rosen, ‘Remarks on Human Nature in Plato’, in Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension: In Celebration of Erazim Kohák, ed. Robert S.  Cohen and A.I.  Tauber (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), 152.

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6. See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). 7. Current interpretations of the dialogue are for the most part in accord with Strauss’s reading of the Republic in at least one respect, namely that the structural arrangements of the Platonic polis reflect or correspond to the hierarchical order of the human soul, with the result that the political theory enunciated in the Republic has been taken as a mere complement of Plato’s psychological theory. Nickolas Pappas’ appraisal of the book as possibly not a work of political philosophy at all on the grounds that Plato’s ‘political system gains much of its value by being based on his psychological theory, rather than the other way around’ highlights this approach. See Pappas, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Plato and the Republic, 192. On this reading, Plato’s relevance for political philosophy stands or falls with the plausibility of his tripartite division of the human soul; once this is problematised, it becomes exceedingly difficult to see how Plato could have any resonance for a modern thought of the political. 8. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 127. 9. Strauss, 135, my emphasis. 10. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 94. 11. Strauss, 101. Rancière and Silvermintz also question the ubiquity and provenance of the specialisation principle in the ‘first city’; see Jacques Rancière, ‘The Order of the City’, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 269–272; Daniel Silvermintz, ‘Plato’s Supposed Defense of the Division of Labor: A Reexamination of the Role of Job Specialization in the Republic’, History of Political Economy 42, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 747–772. 12. See also Annas: ‘[Plato] is not interested in efficiency as such, only efficiency in an association where people’s lives are interdependent, and they do not merely “feed side by side like animals” as Aristotle later put it’. Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 74. 13. A seminal concept in ancient Greek culture, kairos carried a number of meanings including, as Sipiora explains, ‘symmetry’, ‘propriety’, ‘occasion’ and ‘due measure’ among others. ‘In some critical ways, kairos is similar to another master term, logos, in that both concepts generated many significant definitions and interpretations and carried strategic implications for historical interpretation’. Phillip Sipiora and James S.  Baumlin, eds., Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 1. 14. The integral connection between time and labour is central in the development that takes place in 369–371. Cf. 369e: ‘For example, will a farmer

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provide food for everyone, spending quadruple the time and labour [chronon te kai ponon] to provide food to be shared by them all? Or will he not bother about that, producing one quarter the food in one quarter the time, and spending the other three quarters, one in building a house, one in the production of clothes, and one in making shoes, not troubling to associate with the others, but minding his own business on his own?’ Also, cf. 371c: ‘If a farmer or any other craftsman brings some of his products to the market, and he doesn’t arrive at the same time [chronon] as those who want to exchange things with him, is he to sit idly in the marketplace, away [argēsei] from his own work?’ 15. Strauss, The City and Man, 94, my emphasis. 16. I use ‘plastic’ in Malabou’s sense of ‘plasticity’ which refers to the ‘dual ability to receive form (clay is plastic) and give form (as in the plastic arts or plastic surgery). Catherine Malabou, Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 63. See also the more detailed account of ‘plasticity’ in Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005), 5–12. 17. Cf. Republic, 369b–369c: ‘a city comes to be because none of us is self-­ sufficient [chreiai], but we all need many things’. As a result of this, ‘many people gather in a single place to live together as partners and helpers. And such a settlement is called a city’. 18. On Plato’s conception of the money-making art as distinct from the other technai see Arendt’s analysis in Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, ed. M. Canovan, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 128–129. 19. This reinforces the view that the introduction of the ‘one man one job principle’ has more to do with the time constraints to which craftspeople are subject than human natural aptitude for a specific job as it implies that technites will have to master at least two crafts, the one that allows them to do their job and also wage-earning. 20. See Pappas, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Plato and the Republic, 63–64; C.D.C. Reeve, Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 178; S.  Sayers, Plato’s Republic: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 30. 21. Barney, ‘Moral Nostalgia’, 207. As Barney notes, Popper’s reading is an extreme and idiosyncratic version of this line of interpretation. Barney, 208, n. See also Kasimis, who sees the Popperian interpretation of the Republic as resting on a reading that bypasses ‘the role that genealogy historically played [in Athens] in questions of democratic citizenship’. Demetra Kasimis, The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 94.

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22. Barney, ‘Moral Nostalgia’, 211. 23. Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, 77–78. 24. A comment by Barney reinforces the un-Platonic aspect of this reading by disputing the role that knowledge of good and evil allegedly plays in Plato’s thought. Thus, Barney brings the example of a good judge whose job is, according to Plato, to cure unhealthy souls; to perform this task, his soul must ‘remain pure and have no experience of bad character while it’s young’. Barney, ‘Moral Nostalgia’, 215. By contrast, evil plays a central role in Strauss’s political thought. In discussing this role, Armon notes that ‘Strauss believed that the Soviet Union, the despotism of the East, had drawn a clear line between Communism and the West, exposing the nature of humanity and of politics—i.e., that evil in society cannot be overcome and that any attempt to do so is bound to fail and may lead to tyranny’. Also, ‘[t]he position that Strauss presents here is hyper-realistic and antiutopian. Evil and malice exist and therefore cannot be severed from the need for politics, law, and order.’ Adi Armon, Leo Strauss Between Weimar and America, trans. Michelle Bubis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 157. 25. Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, 78. 26. Karl Polanyi, ‘Aristotle Discovers the Economy’, in Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, ed. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957), 68–70. On how the ‘pig city’ gives rise to the concept of an economy, see also Malcolm Schofield, Saving the City: Philosopher-Kings and Other Classical Paradigms (Florence: Routledge, 1999), 67; Rancière, ‘The Order of the City’, 269. 27. This contradicts Moses Finley’s view that, as Schofield puts it, ‘there is no economic analysis in classical antiquity, and indeed no concept of the economy to promote interest in economic analysis’. See Schofield, Saving the City, 66. 28. ‘It’s almost impossible to establish a city in a place where nothing has to be imported.’ ‘So we’ll need further people to import from other cities whatever is needed.’ (370e). 29. Browning also highlights the social dimension in Plato’s thought. In his view, a key aspect that unites Plato’s thought and Hegel’s is the emphasis ‘upon the social foundations of experience and the extent to which they locate an individual’s thought-patterns, values and attitudes within a social setting.’ For both Plato and Hegel, ‘self-awareness and personal integration are social rather than natural attributes.’ Gary K. Browning, Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 16.

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30. It has recently been proposed that Socrates’ praise for the first city should be taken as an indication that this, and not the kallipolis, is Socrates’ preferred city. See Christopher Rowe, ‘The City of Pigs: A Key Passage in Plato’s Republic’, Philosophie Antique, no. 17 (2017): 55–71; Mark E. Jonas, Yoshiaki M. Nakazawa, and James Braun, ‘Appetite, Reason, and Education in Socrates’ “City of Pigs”’, Phronesis 57, no. 4 (2012): 332–357. Whilst I agree that the first city plays a more important role in Plato’s argument than it is sometimes acknowledged, I cannot agree that it is Socrates’ preferred political form inasmuch as it represents a stage in social differentiation that, if allowed to develop unchecked, will inevitably give rise to the inflamed city. 31. T.R.  Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. D.  Winch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 14–15. 32. See the Preface to the 1803 edition in Malthus, 8. 33. In addition, what might be a transitory lapse that the dwellers of the first city are initially able to modulate effectively becomes a more serious impediment given the presence of those members of the polis whom Plato deems suitable only for labouring. 34. Both examples are derived from Parry’s analysis of the crafts in Richard D.  Parry, Plato’s Craft of Justice (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 1995), 14–15. 35. See also Browning, Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy, 29: ‘an individual’s values and aspirations are shaped comprehensively by the political community he inhabits. The “natural” habitat for Plato’s “democratic” man is the democratic state’. 36. For a discussion of how ‘doubling’ operates in the Symposium see Sarah Kofman, Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 13–18. 37. We find that once again it is a question of appropriate naming: ‘I think that we express ourselves in words that, taken literally, do say that a doctor is in error, or an accountant, or a grammarian. But each of these, insofar as he is what we call him [ho prosagoreuomen auton], never errs, so that according to the precise account [akrivē logon] […] no craftsman ever errs’ (340d–e). 38. See also Gerasimos Santas, ‘Methods of Reasoning about Justice in Plato’s Republic’, in The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 39. Parry, Plato’s Craft of Justice, 15–16. 40. We now see why Plato found it necessary to distinguish between crafts, such as medicine, and the money-making craft which a craftsperson needs to master separately; it is because the content and skills involved in money making cannot be derived from the concept of those other crafts, but

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obeys its own intrinsic requirements. In his discussion of Plato’s notion of technē, and in particular the money-making art, Foster notes that Plato ‘had no conception that economic wants exhibited a form of reason in being subject to the operation of economic laws’. By contrast, the analysis performed here aims to show that Plato did have such a conception, and this is the reason why he considers mistharnētikē a technē. See M.B. Foster, The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 20. 41. As Chu puts it, ‘it is important that we do not confuse a person with the role of the expert that a person may choose to assume’. Antonio Chu, ‘Thrasymachean Rulers, Altruistic Rulers and Socratic Rulers’, in Pursuing the Good: Ethics and Metaphysics in Plato’s ‘Republic’, ed. Douglas Cairns, Fritz-Gregor Herrmann, and Terrence Penner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 63, emphasis in the original. 42. See also Chu, 66. We can also see now why Plato needs the distinction between crafts such as medicine or sailing a ship and that special kind of craft which ‘benefits the craftsmen by earning them wages’ (346c); if these were not kept apart, it would be hard to distinguish between the intrinsic requirements of a craft, say medicine—which is concerned solely with healing—and the quite different requirements that the craft of earning wages makes upon the craftsperson. 43. The chronological place of the Cratylus in relation to the Republic is disputed. Kahn places the Cratylus in the group of dialogues that include the Symposium and the Phaedo and that immediately precede the Republic. See Charles Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 38–48. This dating is followed by, among others, Levin and Ademollo. See Susan B.  Levin, The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4; Francesco Ademollo, The Cratylus of Plato: A Commentary (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 20–21. Barney follows those proposing a later date of composition before the Theaetetus and the Sophist based on the convergences of theme and motif, especially flux, Protagoreanism, stoicheia and falsehood. See Rachel Barney, Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus (London: Routledge, 2001), 3–4. I am here in accord with Baxter who follows the first grouping of scholars adding that this ‘dating is consistent with Plato looking both forward to the later “critical” dialogues and back to the Socratic works’. Timothy M.S.  Baxter, The Cratylus: Plato’s Critique of Naming (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), 3. 44. In fact, we might reconstruct Socrates’ argument at this point as an elucidation of the implicit premises of the Thrasymachean position. As Browning puts it, ‘[i]n his immediate response to Thrasymachus, Socrates does not

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construct a theoretical account of justice himself, but concentrates upon disturbing Thrasymachus’ theoretical position by eliciting the contradictory assumptions upon which it is founded’. Gary K. Browning, Plato and Hegel: Two Modes of Philosophizing About Politics (New York: Routledge, 2012), 33. 45. Cf. Kasimis’ excellent analysis of the ‘noble lie’ in the Republic, which draws attention to its narrative framing and argues that the idea that one’s political ‘kind’ (genos) ‘expresses a pregiven, stable nature’ is presented in the dialogue as a ‘regulatory fiction’. ‘In these scenes’, continues Kasimis, ‘Socrates contrives the noble lie as an “artifice” (mēchanē [414b]) by which regimes, including the Athens of the dialogue’s setting, found and reproduce membership status as a naturalised category’. Kasimis, The Perpetual Immigrant, 84, my emphasis. On this view, the myth of the metals, far from obeying a logic that aims to re-instate ‘natural’ status and age-old citizenship distinctions, is mobilised by Plato as a textual strategy that conforms to and promotes the dialogue’s ‘denaturing argument’. Kasimis, 23. 46. Nicholas Smith is right, in my view, to defend the seriousness of Plato’s sexual egalitarianism against Bloom and Saxonhouse, who maintain that Plato cannot have meant his egalitarianism seriously. Where I disagree with his analysis is in tracing the roots of this egalitarianism in Plato’s belief in metempsychosis, which permits women to be reborn as men and vice versa. Although this belief might have played a role in Plato’s development of the sexual egalitarianism thesis, the view proposed here emphasises the reconceptualization of ‘nature’ as a process of determining what is essential to the sexes. See Nicholas D. Smith, ‘Plato and Aristotle on the Nature of Women’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 21, no. 4 (1 October 1983): 467–478. 47. On this issue see also the brilliant analysis of Stella Sandford who denies that Plato is or could be drawing on a difference based on the category of ‘sex’ in this section as the word genos used to refer to the difference between men and women is not equivalent to the English word ‘sex’: ‘The word is never used (indeed, it cannot be used) as a singular term to refer to a distinction in kind covering both men and women or male and female. That is, it is never used as the general term “sex” is used in English. And although the concepts of “male” and “female” seem to be unproblematically recognisable in the Greek arren and thēlus, the absence of any concept of sex as a general term that designates what kind of categories “male” and “female” are would suggest that arren and thēlus are not identical with the English “male” and “female”.’ Stella Sandford, ‘Thinking Sex Politically: Rethinking “Sex” in Plato’s Republic’, South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 4 (2005): 620–621.

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48. Socrates engages in this kind of politics not only with his death but with his life, too; as Kamtekar notes: ‘Approaching Socrates’ politics as politics in some extraordinary sense, consisting of critical and oppositional activity focused on individual intellectual transformation, has the advantage of reconciling Socrates’ claim that he does not participate in politics (Apology 31d) with his claim that he alone of all the Athenians undertakes the true political expertise and engages in political affairs (Gorgias 521d): there is a sense, a special Socratic sense, in which Socrates’ moral engagement with individuals is political; yet this is not politics in the ordinary sense at all’. Rachana Kamtekar, ‘The Politics of Plato’s Socrates’, in A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Ryan K Balot  (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 340. Barney also reinforces this point by reminding us that near the end of the Gorgias Socrates claims to be ‘the only practitioner of the art of politics’. Barney, ‘Moral Nostalgia’, 211. 49. Strauss, The City and Man, 63. 50. Compare this to Socrates’ juxtaposition between ‘those who call themselves judges here’ and ‘those true [alēthō s] judges who are said to be in judgment’ in Hades at Apology 41a. In his own Apology Xenophon mentions the reaction of Socrates’ disciple Apollodorus who says ‘But for me Socrates, the hardest thing to bear is that I see you dying unjustly’. Xenophon, Memorabilia, trans. Amy L.  Bonnette (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), xxii. 51. See Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence  – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 2nd edition (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 1. 52. In the Apology Socrates claims to foresee that in a ‘short time’ the members of the jury will acquire the ‘reputation and guilt’ of having killed ‘a wise man’ (38c). The theme of guilt also appears in Xenophon’s Apology, though not in connection with a deferred time when the import of Socrates’ death of Socrates will be made clear. 53. John Sallis, Platonic Legacies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 36. 54. We might draw a parallel between the inflamed city and the ‘dysfunctional’, as Barney calls it, linguistic community where ‘neither rhetorician not public knows, quite literally, what they are talking about’. See Barney, Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus, 10. 55. Strauss, The City and Man, 127. 56. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 57. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 90. The reference is to Rep. 471b–c.

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References Ademollo, Francesco. 2011. The Cratylus of Plato: A Commentary. Cambridge University Press. Annas, Julia. 1976. Plato’s Republic and Feminism. Philosophy 51 (197): 307–321. ———. 1981. An Introduction to Plato’s Republic. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Ed. M. Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Armon, Adi. 2019. Leo Strauss Between Weimar and America. Trans. Michelle Bubis. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Barney, Rachel. 2001a. Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus. London: Routledge. ———. 2001b. Platonism, Moral Nostalgia and the City of Pigs. Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 17 (1): 207–227. Baxter, Timothy M.S. 1992. The Cratylus: Plato’s Critique of Naming. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Bloom, Allan. 1991. The Republic of Plato. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books. Blössner, Norbert. 2007. The City-Soul Analogy. In The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, ed. G.R.F. Ferrari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, Thom. 2006. Plato, Hegel, and Democracy. Hegel Bulletin 27 (1–2): 24–50. Brown, Wendy. 1988. “Supposing Truth Were a Woman…”: Plato’s Subversion of Masculine Discourse. Political Theory 16 (4): 594–616. Browning, Gary K. 1999. Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2012. Plato and Hegel: Two Modes of Philosophizing About Politics. New York: Routledge. Chu, Antonio. 2007. Thrasymachean Rulers, Altruistic Rulers and Socratic Rulers. In Pursuing the Good: Ethics and Metaphysics in Plato’s ‘Republic’, ed. Douglas Cairns, Fritz-Gregor Herrmann, and Terrence Penner. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso. Foster, M.B. 1935. The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Herman, Judith. 2015. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books. Jonas, Mark E., Yoshiaki M. Nakazawa, and James Braun. 2012. Appetite, Reason, and Education in Socrates’ “City of Pigs”. Phronesis 57 (4): 332–357. Kahn, Charles. 2008. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kamtekar, Rachana. 2009. The Politics of Plato’s Socrates. In A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Ryan K. Balot. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Kasimis, Demetra. 2018. The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kofman, Sarah. 1998. Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levin, Susan B. 2000. The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malabou, Catherine. 2005. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic. Trans. Lisabeth During. London: Routledge. ———. 2011. Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity. Malthus, T.R. 1992. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Ed. D.  Winch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pappas, Nickolas. 1995. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Plato and the Republic. London: Routledge. Parry, Richard D. 1995. Plato’s Craft of Justice. Albany: State University of New York Press. Plato. 1902. Republic. In Oxford Classical Texts: Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet, vol. IV. Tetralogia VIII. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1997. Complete Works. Ed. J.M.  Cooper and D.S.  Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett. Polanyi, Karl. 1957. Aristotle Discovers the Economy. In Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, ed. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson. Glencoe: Free Press. Popper, Karl. 1945. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, The Spell of Plato. London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Order of the City. Trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker. Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 267–291. Reeve, C.D.C. 1988. Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic. Indianapolis: Hackett. Rosen, Stanley. 1998. Remarks on Human Nature in Plato. In Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension: In Celebration of Erazim Kohák, ed. Robert S. Cohen and A.I. Tauber. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Rowe, Christopher. 2017. The City of Pigs: A Key Passage in Plato’s Republic. Philosophie Antique 17: 55–71. Sallis, John. 2004. Platonic Legacies. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sandford, Stella. 2005. Thinking Sex Politically: Rethinking “Sex” in Plato’s Republic. South Atlantic Quarterly 104 (4): 613–630. Santas, Gerasimos. 2006. Methods of Reasoning About Justice in Plato’s Republic. In The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Saxonhouse, Arlene W. 1976. The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato. Political Theory 4 (2): 195–212.

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Sayers, S. 1999. Plato’s Republic: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schofield, Malcolm. 1999. Saving the City: Philosopher-Kings and Other Classical Paradigms. Florence: Routledge. Silvermintz, Daniel. 2010. Plato’s Supposed Defense of the Division of Labor: A Reexamination of the Role of Job Specialization in the Republic. History of Political Economy 42 (4): 747–772. Sipiora, Phillip, and James S. Baumlin, eds. 2002. Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis. Albany: State University of New York Press. Smith, Nicholas D. 1983, October 1. Plato and Aristotle on the Nature of Women. Journal of the History of Philosophy 21 (4): 467–478. Strauss, Leo. 1964. The City and Man. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1965. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Xenophon. 2001. Memorabilia. Trans. Amy L.  Bonnette. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Between Two Paradigms of Politics

1   Introduction The concept of ‘rights’, by which is meant a set of fundamental ‘entitlements’, encroachment upon which is unjustifiable under all but the most extreme circumstances, has without a doubt shaped modern political philosophy more profoundly than any other. This concept has given rise to what many believe is the most important guiding principle in modern politics, the idea of ‘human rights’, and distinguishes the modern era from antiquity and the Middle Ages. The decisive step in the direction of associating right explicitly and exclusively with the idea of ‘entitlement’ was taken by Hobbes. It was Hobbes who consistently distinguished between the Latin terms ‘ius’ and ‘lex’ and their English equivalents ‘right’ and ‘law’. In one of the most famous passages of the Leviathan, Hobbes argued in favour of a clear distinction between these terms which had been confounded up to that time, ‘because RIGHT, consisteth in liberty to do, or to forbeare; Whereas LAW, determineth, and bindeth to one of them: so that Law, and Right, differ as much, as Obligation, and Liberty’.1 The idea that there is a kind of fundamental right (‘liberty to do, or to forbeare’) to which every human being is entitled furnishes the problem that modern political thought is called upon to resolve: if all humans are entitled to the same right or rights, how can they be free to exercise those rights and still continue to live peaceably alongside one another without the conflict and escalation of violence that such a co-habitation will inevitably entail? Violence is bound to erupt for a number of reasons, for © The Author(s) 2020 V. Roupa, Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52127-1_6

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instance because different people may want, or have a right to, the same thing under conditions of scarcity. As Hobbes puts it, ‘if any two men desire the same thing, which neverthelesse they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End […] endeavour to destroy, or subdue one an other’.2 The problem, in other words, is one of devising a set of political arrangements capable of securing rights while at the same time preventing the exercise of those rights from escalating into war and threatening the civil bond. The aim of this chapter is to situate Hegel between two paradigms of politics: modern politics, as defined by the theory of rights, and classical politics, which—it has been claimed—was not based on a clear conception of rights, as its starting point was the whole, and not the individual.3 My focus is on Hegel’s notion of ‘ethical nature’ or ‘sittliche Natur’ as developed in his essay on ‘Natural Law’, published in 1802–1803 in the Critical Journal of Philosophy, which Hegel co-edited with Schelling. Though not the only philosopher to engage deeply and consistently with the thought of the classics, Hegel belonged to a generation of scholars, poets, and philosophers who enthusiastically endorsed the Hellenic ideal and attempted a sustained confrontation between the classical world and modernity, exposing modernity’s blind spots, and examining modern issues from the point of view of classical thought.4 This is of relevance to the present study first, because the thought of the classics does not reach us in a pure form regardless of the reception of those who reconnected with it at an earlier stage and carried it forward; and second, because Hegel—at least in his early period, and possibly under the influence of Schelling—chose to use the notion of ‘nature’ as a key to a radical re-­ thinking of modern philosophy’s deficiencies. I begin with an analysis of Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right, which reformulated the notion of ‘natural right’ in the 1790s and provided a strong impetus for Hegel to engage critically with the social and political philosophy of Kant and Fichte. I then consider the criticisms of Fichte articulated by Hegel in his essay on ‘Natural Law’. I argue that far from reverting to the political theory of an earlier era, as has been argued (notably by Manfred Riedel), Hegel makes use of the conceptual apparatus of the ancient philosophers in order to bring out the one-sidedness of modern political theories.

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2   Fichte and the Separation Between Right and Morality In his 1796 Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte sets about to tackle the problem of the relations between morality and right, which is to serve as the founding principle of the modern state. The impetus for this work was provided, as Luc Ferry points out, on the one hand by the surge of interest stimulated by the works of Rousseau and Kant, and on the other by the French revolution and the politico-legal questions it threw up. In clarification of the context in which Fichte’s ideas developed, Ferry explains that Kant’s work had led to the development of theories of jurisprudence which assumed that right is a branch or special application of morality, the difference between the two being that the former is enforceable and therefore punitive, whereas the latter is a more or less private affair having to do solely with the individual’s conscience.5 All the same, the two domains were thought to exhibit adequate continuity in terms of sharing a common ethical content, which precluded the individual from experiencing conflict between his duties as a citizen and the dictates of his moral conscience. Thus, it is both immoral and unrightful to commit murder, engage in fraud or violate the terms of a contract on which one has put one’s signature, and the relevant agencies, the state on the one hand, and one’s conscience (which gradually replaces the church), on the other, have to make sure such behaviour is discouraged, and, where it occurs, punished. Thus develops a division of labour along the lines of inner/outer: the state undertakes to discipline the transgressor in the interests of public safety and security, but its legitimate field of operation is defined in terms of the act of transgression which is observable and clearly recognisable as such. Conscience, on the other hand, is more concerned with the motive or complex of thoughts and emotions that led the moral agent to perform the immoral act or consider it in the first place.6 Perhaps the clearest formulation of the jurisdiction of the two domains is Kant’s celebrated distinction between morality or ethical lawgiving, on the one hand, and legality or juridical lawgiving, on the other, as defined in his Metaphysics of Morals: That lawgiving which makes an action a duty and also makes this duty the incentive [Triebfeder] is ethical [ethisch]. But that lawgiving which does not include the incentive of duty in the law and so admits an incentive other than the idea of duty itself is juridical [juridisch]. (MM 6: 219, emphasis in the original)

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Fichte, however, was quick to realise that a conception of the moral law as uncompromising as Kant’s, to which he, too, subscribed, could not be easily reconciled with the reciprocity that the law of right requires.7 First of all, the kinds of laws involved in each case have a completely different status. As he points out in the Foundations: The concept of duty, which arises from the moral law, is directly opposed to the concept of right in most of its characteristics. The moral law [Sittengesetz] commands duty categorically: the law of right [Rechtsgesetz] only permits, but never commands that one exercise one’s right. Indeed, the moral law very often forbids a person to exercise his right, and yet—as all the world acknowledges—that right does not thereby cease to be a right. (FNR 50 / SW 3: 54, my emphasis)

This idea of ‘permissiveness’, which for both Kant and Fichte is central to the conception of right, does not only provide a formal criterion by which to distinguish right from the moral law, but also implies that the former is limited to a certain sphere, beyond which it cannot be binding. Indeed, Fichte claims that the law of the state holds for us to the extent that we freely commit ourselves to co-habiting with other rational beings in a certain commonwealth. But should we decide to abandon said commonwealth, its law will have no binding force on us whatsoever. It is not the same with the moral law. In contrast to right and the laws of the state, the moral law makes an absolute claim on us: its validity is not confined to a particular territorial expanse marked by the boundaries of the state nor is it at the discretion of the individual to conform to it. In contrast to relations of right which rest on each keeping his side of the bargain, moral obligations bind the agent irrespectively of what others may or may not do. But, then, one has to admit that the requirements of the law of right and the commands of the moral law follow different trajectories and that, therefore, there is, at least potentially, a conflict between them. If this is the case, however, it is difficult to see the state as a basically moral force, which deals a blow to some traditional ways of thinking about punishment and transgression. First of all, it challenges the widely held view that punishment is something that criminals deserve on moral grounds. On Fichte’s premises, it is misguided to think that punishing someone by, say, incarcerating or putting them to death is an ethical act. Although the body politic has a legitimate right to defend itself against

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transgression, it does so purely in the interests of public safety and security, not in those of promoting so-called ‘public morality’. In this sense, the administration of justice serves solely to foster social cohesion, i.e. to secure the citizens’ adherence to the social contract and avoid regression to generalised violence. In so doing, however, the state does not act in any ethical capacity. Fichte is quite clear on this, especially with regard to handing down the death penalty: The moral law absolutely prohibits intentional killing in every case ….Thus, a private person may not kill; he must sooner put his own life at risk. Not so for the state, considered here as a police force which, as such, is not a moral person, but a juridical one. The regent may indeed be permitted, and can in certain cases be morally obligated, to put his own person in danger qua human being; but he may not endanger the lives of others, and still less the life of the state, i.e. the life, security, and the rightful constitution of all. (FNR 244 / SW 3: 281–282, my emphasis)

What are the implications of this separation between morality and the law of right? Does it not lead to a thinking that divests legal reasoning from all ethical content—apart, that is, from issues of utility—and therefore leads to a species of juridical positivism? If the protection of the state from subversion becomes the exclusive aim of the law and this protection is divorced from any ethical consideration, are we not led to an identification of politics with the proper functioning of the state machine to which the realisation of right is entrusted? Thus interpreted, Fichte’s philosophy appears to come close to those positivist theories of law which align jurisprudence with considerations of a purely pragmatic character.

3   The State–Machine Although his formulations about the separation between morality and right clearly point towards the possibility of a conflict between the law of right and the moral law, Fichte was reluctant to draw this conclusion. Rather, he was eager to minimise the potential conflict between the two domains. Thus, he writes that ‘[f]or a species of perfected moral beings there is no law of right’, nor is there need for one since ‘what ought to happen in accordance with the law happens without it’, which indicates an

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attempt to ease the tension between the two laws (FNR 132 / SW 3: 148). In his view, the law of right functions as a compensatory mechanism for the moral weakness or imperfection of human beings by ensuring that the dictates of the moral law are conformed to whatever the intentions and moral attributes of the people who are subject to this law. The law of right thus becomes something like a safety net for a ‘nation of devils’, i.e. a people where each individual would be eager to exempt himself or herself from the moral law and act against the dictates of his or her conscience.8 This touches upon a wider issue, namely, whether the principle of reciprocity and therefore the law of right is in general conceivable from the standpoint of the categorical imperative. If the law of right is complementary to the moral law, the latter must have a wider sphere of applicability of which the law of right is only a part. If this is so, legal precepts ought to be directly derivable from the moral law, which is indeed what Kantian jurists such as Hufeland and Schmid attempted to do. If, by contrast, reciprocity is shown to be extrinsic to the moral law, then one would have to admit that the possibility of an ethical politics is in trouble. Now Fichte is not very clear on this. On the one hand, he claims that a morally perfect being would not transgress the law of right, which is solely reserved for morally weak beings such as humans. On the other hand, in the Introduction to the FNR he writes: ‘[i]t is absolutely impossible to see how a permissive law should be derivable from the moral law, which commands unconditionally and thereby extends its reach to everything’ (FNR 14 / SW 3: 13). Could there be a separate deduction of right from the moral law? Fichte considers this possibility at one point but dismisses it on the grounds that such a deduction would not be part of the doctrine of natural right. ‘In the domain of natural right, the good will has no role to play. Right must be enforceable, even if there is not a single human being with a good will; the very aim of the science of right is to sketch out just such an order of things. In this domain, physical force—and it alone—gives right its sanction’ (FNR 50 / SW 3: 54, my emphasis). Fichte also writes: When it comes to morality, no human being can or ought to judge another. The only purpose of civil punishments, and the sole criterion for determining their severity, is the possibility of public security. A person who harms public security simply for the sake of harming it is to be punished more severely than someone who harms it for personal gain, but not because his offence displays a higher degree of immorality. Morality is unitary and does not admit of degrees: it is to will duty simply because it is discerned as duty. (FNR 230 / SW 3: 265, my emphasis)

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Thus, the aim of the penal system is not to provide a sanction for the moral norms of society but to reinforce rightful behaviour by deterring crime. This is achievable on condition that the state turns itself into a quasi-natural force that, says Fichte, operates ‘with mechanical necessity to guarantee that any action contrary to right would result in the opposite of its intended end’ (FNR 127 / SW 3: 142). This identification of the state with a natural-mechanical force will provide the grounds for Hegel’s critical reception of Fichte during his time in Jena, and will remain with him, I argue, throughout his philosophical career despite the rapprochement with Kant’s and Fichte’s politico-legal thought that takes place later.

4   Sittlichkeit in Hegel’s ‘Natural Law’ Essay Hegel develops his concept of Sittlichkeit at least in part in response to Fichte’s separation of right from morality and the ensuing ‘mechanisation’ of the state. Thus, he argues that by rending asunder right from ethics Fichte produces two distinct (and potentially conflictual) sets of laws that fail to capture the connectedness of the ‘practical’, i.e. the intricate complex of relations that mark out human relations with nature and with one another. The young Hegel feels that the separation of the law of right from morality fails to do justice to the rich tapestry of relations that operate within the framework of the state and sustain the living-in-common that occurs in politically organised communities. As a result, neither morality itself nor right (Recht) are understood adequately for themselves and in their articulation.9 While this has been acknowledged in the secondary literature, it has been claimed by Manfred Riedel that in order to contest Fichte’s view Hegel regresses to a pre-modern concept, that of ‘ethical nature’, which, it is suggested, he derives mainly from the Greeks. Riedel claims that the first phase of Hegel’s work (which includes the ‘Natural Law’ essay and the incomplete manuscript System of Ethical Life), is dominated by the concept of ‘nature’ and, more specifically, that of ‘ethical nature’, which “is employed in two ways: (1) as totality in the sense of Spinoza’s ‘God or nature’, and (2) as ‘essence’ in the sense of Aristotle’s doctrine that the polis is ‘according to nature prior’ to the individual”.10 This idea serves as a basis for criticising the modern theories of natural law which, according

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to Hegel, fall into two groups: the ‘empiricist’ theory, represented in the main by Hobbes; and the ‘critical’ theory of Kant and Fichte. The thrust of Hegel’s argument in ‘NL’ is that despite their differences, these theories have something in common, namely the ‘negation of nature’, which is consistently perceived to be the negative of law and the antithesis to the civil condition. In order to overcome this negative evaluation of nature, Riedel argues, Hegel is ‘compelled to revert to an earlier time’s natural theory of law and society’, which is none other than ‘the traditional teleological one’, exemplified in ‘classical political theory’.11 ‘Thus it is’, he concludes, ‘that in the first phase of his developing philosophy of right, Hegel submits modern natural law theory to devastating criticism from the standpoint of classical politics. The employment of Spinoza’s metaphysics radicalised this criticism, but more importantly also prevented Hegel from achieving a historically adequate understanding of modern theories of natural law’.12 Whilst it is true that Hegel’s views on the state develop towards a closer affinity with Kant and Fichte in the works of maturity, Riedel’s reconstruction entails the risk of disguising an important connecting thread that runs through Hegel’s thought from Jena to Berlin; this thread is Hegel’s understanding of the state as a fundamentally ethical force, and not a mechanical one, as conceived by Fichte.13 What is crucial in understanding the impetus of Hegel’s critique in this respect is to see that it develops on two different fronts simultaneously: on the hand, as a criticism of the mechanistic model of nature as applied to state theory and jurisprudence; and on the other, as a criticism of the dualism between the law of right (which Fichte conceives on a purely naturalistic basis), and the moral law (conceived on the model of the Kantian notion of freedom). Hegel’s task, as he views it at this point in his philosophical development, is to resolve this dualism by defending a theory of nature as not incompatible with human freedom and morality (hence his use of the seemingly contradictory term ‘ethical nature’), without losing sight of the specifically modern political and economic issues of his time.14 In section (a) below I show that Hegel’s critique of Kant’s conception of the moral law derives not from a fascination with the pre-reflective ethics of antiquity but from Hegel’s insight that this conception fails to deliver on its promises, i.e. furnish a ‘pure’ morality undetermined by empirical grounds. In section (b) I outline Hegel’s distinction between what he calls ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ ethical life, and show how this distinction bears on Fichte’s notion of the state-machine. Finally, in the last section I discuss how Hegel is connected to Plato and his conception of the polis and at the same time

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how he is firmly situated in modernity with its own distinctive ethico-­ political issues. 4.1  The Threat of Positivism Riedel claims that Hegel’s main aim in ‘NL’ is to present a conception of the political opposed to Kant’s and Fichte’s, and that to do so Hegel takes recourse to a classical notion of politics according to which the state is by nature prior to the individual. What this interpretation fails to sufficiently acknowledge, however, is that part of Hegel’s motivation in ‘NL’ derives from his belief that Fichte’s notion of Naturrecht entails the danger of sliding to positivism. Hegel’s principal target is the idea of a ‘moral world-­ order’ [moralische Weltordnung] towards which human beings constantly strive without ever attaining, which forms the basis of the distinction between Sein and Sollen or what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’. Now, if Sein were to become Sollen, politics would be absorbed in ethics and would, as a result, become redundant. The distinction between the two means that although politics is not fully ethical, it is nevertheless informed by ethical considerations, and more specifically, by the moral world-order to which it aspires. The interposing of an irreducible distance between these two realities acts, according to Kant and Fichte, as a check against lapsing to positivism. Never to be content with what is; never to mistake it for the ideal: this is the necessary condition for maintaining a critical stance towards things as they are. It is well known that Hegel rejected the distinction between Sein and Sollen; what is less well understood, I believe, is his motivation for doing so. In contrast to interpretations that put the onus on Hegel’s preoccupation with ‘power’ or ‘mastery’ and his desire to complete and close off the modern project of mathesis universalis, I argue that Hegel’s main reason for challenging this distinction was that he doubted it could actually check positivism.15 The idea of a ‘pure will’ standing aloof from the world of experience and dictating its own laws to itself without paying heed to natural or other necessities, becomes an object of suspicion. Can an entirely formal law, such as the one Kant envisaged, avert the danger of mistaking what ‘is’ for what ‘ought to be’? Hegel thought that it could not, and made this point with especial force in the section of ‘NL’ that deals with ‘critical philosophy’. His objections centre around Kant’s notion of a ‘pure will’, i.e. a will stripped of any empirical inclinations or motives, and concern the capacity of pure practical reason to avert

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determination by empirical and, therefore, non-rational material. According to Hegel, the formality of practical reason, far from being a guarantee against the contamination of the will by empirical determining grounds, on the contrary, results in a surreptitious conditioning of the will by the very empirical material the formality requirement is supposed to exclude. As a result, Kant and Fichte fail in their programmatic aims, which were ‘to rise above the subjective and empirical and to justify the absoluteness of Reason, its independence from common existence [Wirklichkeit]. […] Thus, although these philosophies do battle with the empirical, they have remained directly within its sphere’.16 In order to bear out these claims, Hegel considers the famous case of the deposits that Kant discusses in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. There, someone finds himself in the dilemma whether to appropriate a deposit someone else has entrusted to him. Kant resolves this dilemma by invoking the notion of contradictoriness that befalls the moral agent should he decide to keep the money: on the one hand, he will be taking advantage of the habit or institution of deposits; on the other hand, if the maxim on which he acts becomes universal, it will destroy itself because it will result in no deposits being made. ‘But’, asks Hegel, ‘what contradiction is there in no deposits being made?’ (PW 125 / W 2: 462). If deposits were to suddenly disappear, this would certainly contradict other institutions or legal provisions complementary to deposits, but this is of no consequence in the moral examination of the matter. The decision whether or not to embezzle the fund cannot and should not depend on the kind of institutions that happen to be in place because it may well be that these institutions are ‘unethical’ and so prompt immoral action if relied upon to provide a yardstick. Thus, the accidental presence or absence of an institution or legal provision, such as the making of deposits or the existence of private property, would result in adopting antithetical maxims, each of which would be moral only in the relevant framework. Thus understood, moral agents will forever take their cue from institutions that are only contingently and not rationally valid without being able to pass judgement on the ethical status of those institutions. But this is unsatisfactory to Hegel who thinks that ‘the interest [at stake] is precisely to prove that there must be property’ (PW 125 / W 2: 463). Thus, the formalism of the moral law and the emphasis on ‘pure’ concepts untainted by experience has the following paradoxical consequence: instead of ensuring that the concepts formed in this way will truly correspond to right and morality, what, in actual fact, happens is that the

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content of the concepts is borrowed from the ethical relations that happen to be in place. Take, for example, the Formula of Universal Law (FUL), i.e., Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative: ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’. On the one hand, the moral law does not pass judgement on those ethical relations like private property, since it lacks content and is articulated in a formal manner. On the other hand, moral agents are invited to test the maxims on which they intend to act for consistency with FUL. The maxim tested through FUL, however, not only has a content but in addition to that, it makes reference to a specific institutional or ‘ethical’ context which, therefore, also enters the test. As a result, when a maxim passes the test, it is not only the content but also this context which is sanctioned by FUL. But, Hegel thinks, this is an illicit assumption. Once the maxim passes the test, the ‘absolute form’ that pertains to the moral law is conferred on the maxim as well regardless of the fact that the maxim can never be anything more than a ‘conditioned thing’ [ein bedingtes]. In this way, the form—which is ‘absolute’ since it commands categorically—is applied to a singular situation and gives rise to a maxim which is thus elevated to ‘absolute’ status. ‘Through this confusion of the absolute form with the conditioned material’, says Hegel, ‘the absoluteness of the form is imposed by stealth on the unreal and conditioned character of the content, and this inversion and sleight of hand lies at the heart of the practical legislation of pure reason’ (PW 126 / W 2: 464).17 So, under the guise of the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ or between ‘pure’ and ‘empirical’ concepts, there lurks a positivity all the more insidious in that it masquerades as the very thing that blocks the movement to positivity. Thus Hegel turns on its head an accusation often levelled against him, namely that his notion of Sittlichkeit implies an attitude of uncritical acceptance of the ethical norms currently in place. A Hegelian’s response to such an accusation would be that the standpoint of morality does not afford us a truly critical stance either: in setting itself up as absolute judge over and above the world of institutions and customary practices, it does not realise that the content of the judgements it passes is not absolute but, on the contrary, informed by the very reality it wants to negate.

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4.2  Absolute vs. Relative Sittlichkeit The alternative Hegel offers to what he sees as the positivistic threat inherent in Kant’s and Fichte’s shared theoretical framework involves a distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ ethical life.18 Before we proceed to examine this distinction, it will be helpful to explore in a little more detail Hegel’s objections to the view of freedom defended by Kant and Fichte. As is well known, Kant (and also Fichte, who is here following Kant closely) identified freedom with the self-legislating capacity of the rational being, i.e. the capacity of that being to subject itself to no other law than the one it gives itself. Thus, by virtue of its rationality, the human being escapes the heteronomy that would befall it should it follow a law laid down by a foreign agency, be this agency God (whose commandments descend upon the human being from an exterior origin, and therefore represent, as Hyppolite puts it, a ‘reality irreducible to pure thought’), or nature (whose causality constitutes a universe antagonistic to the causality of reason).19 Heteronomy, however, is only truly averted when the rule or maxim according to which the human being acts is ‘fit for the giving of universal law’ and is, therefore, as noted above, purged of any empirical determining grounds of the will (CPR 5: 27). In order for a rule or maxim to be so fit, it is necessary that it not contradict itself. Thus, in the case of the deposit Kant discusses in the second Critique, the dilemma whether to withhold the deposit or not originates from the maxim the agent has adopted to increase her wealth by every safe means. Is the embezzlement of a deposit in accord with such a maxim on condition that the moral agent suffers no penalties in consequence of his action? No, answers Kant, because if such a maxim were to be made a practical law, namely, that ‘everyone may deny a deposit which no one can prove has been made’, it would ‘annihilate itself since it would bring it about that there would be no deposits at all’ (CPR 5: 27). Hegel criticises thus this conception of freedom as choice between two opposing possibilities of action: That view of freedom which regards it as a choice [Wahl] between opposite determinacies (so that if +A and −A are given, freedom consists in determining oneself either as +A or as −A, and is completely tied to this either-or) must be utterly rejected. Anything resembling this possibility of choice is purely and simply an empirical freedom, which is the same thing as ordinary empirical necessity and is completely inseparable from it. Freedom is rather the negation or ideality of the opposites, of +A as well as −A, the abstraction of the possibility that neither of the two exists; something external would

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exist for it only if freedom were determined solely as +A or solely as −A. But freedom is the direct opposite of this: nothing is external to it, so that no coercion [Zwang] is possible for it. (PW 136–137 / W 2: 476–477)

Hegel’s argument is very puzzling indeed; surely, if I am in possession of a fund, the only options open for me are either to withhold it or not; what other option is there if I am to reject both these possible courses of action as equally unfree? And how is one to understand (and, importantly, act upon) the supposition that true freedom would require the negation of both +A and −A? This rather peculiar notion of freedom can begin to make sense if we bear in mind that, in Hegel’s view, freedom based on choice is only available and meaningful within the context of the relation of right (Rechtsverhältnis) as outlined by modern natural right theory. The Rechtsverhältnis, however, does not exhaust the ethical relations occurring within the context of the state; relations based on right (Recht) are only a moment of ethical life and, according to Hegel, they should be subordinate to what he terms absolute Sittlichkeit (‘absolute ethical life’) (PW 140 / W 2: 480). The reason for this is that in contrast to Fichte and the ‘social contract’ tradition, Hegel does not think that the purpose of the state is all about regulating the dealings of self-interested individuals whose attachment to the common bond derives solely from considerations of utility. Instead, he sees the state or ‘ethical individuality’ of a people (Volk) as the bond which permeates and determines the ethical life of the individual. As a result, Hegel refuses to make the Rechtsverhältnis the founding principle of the state, but, instead, assigns to it a well delimited sphere, which has its place within the ethical totality but does not dominate it. This sphere comprises: physical needs [Bedürfnisse] and pleasures [Genüsse] which, in turn posited for themselves in their totality, obey one single necessity in their infinite complications, and form the system of universal mutual dependence [das System der allgemeinen gegenseitigen Abhängigkeit] with regard to physical needs and the labour and accumulation which these require; as a science, this system is what is known as political economy. (PW 141 / W 2: 482)

For Hegel, this system has a decidedly ‘negative’ significance; it must ‘remain negative and may not become a fixture’; it must be prevented from ‘constituting itself on its own account [für sich]’.20 Hegel once again

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emphasises the aspect of totality to which this sphere must be subordinated: ‘the ethical whole must ensure that this system remains aware of its inner nullity’ (PW 142 / W 2: 483). Hegel’s concern is that if allowed to grow uninhibited, this sphere will swallow up all other realities and considerations, that is why he introduces the notion of an absolute or ethical sphere, which is higher than the sphere of the real or practical. He also stipulates that the individual should at any moment be ready to ‘prove his oneness [Einssein] with the people’, the mark of Einssein being willingness to incur the danger of death. This willingness plays a double role in Hegel’s thought: on the one hand, it manifests the degree of allegiance individuals display towards the state; on the other, it becomes the basis for a certain philosophy of history: peoples that cling to their habitual ways of life and refuse to let go of what Hegel thinks is the inessential, will be incapable of moving on, hence his notorious defence of war as that which ‘preserves the ethical health of peoples in their indifference to determinate things [Bestimmtheiten]’ (PW 141 / W 2: 482). At this point, Hegel introduces social classes as ‘formed in accordance with the absolute necessity of the ethical’; indeed, for Hegel, classes do not come to be accidentally but in accordance with an inner necessity dictated by social and economic life. Thus, the class of ‘need and work’, which in the sphere of right and justice is the class of ‘possession and property’, corresponds to this system of mutual dependence. Complementary to this is the class of those who work the earth. Crucially at this point, through a direct reference to Plato and Aristotle, Hegel introduces the notion of the ‘class of the free’ (or ‘universal class’), i.e. the class whose members live for the whole, and whose work is directed ‘towards death’: Aristotle defines the proper business of this class as what the Greeks called politeuein, which means living in and with and for one’s people, leading a universal life wholly dedicated to the public interest, or philosophising, while Plato, with his superior vitality, does not wish to regard these two activities as separate but as indissolubly linked. (PW 147 / W 2: 489)

It is not uncommon to attribute Hegel’s frequent references to Greek philosophers (for example, in passages such as this) to a fascination with the ‘beautiful’ ethical life of the Greeks and their unreflective ethics, which Hegel supposedly wished to validate at the expense of reflection and self-­ examination prevailing in modern societies. It is to be noted, however,

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that Hegel does not criticise the modern paradigm of politics because of a romantic preference for the richer texture of a form of ethical life long gone. Rather his motivation has to be sought in his view that on its own the Rechtsverhältnis cannot secure the solidity of the civil bond. We have already seen that from the ethical point of view the Rechtsverhältnis captures but one of the relations sustaining the politically organised community. It remains to be seen whether it can secure living-in-common from a purely political point of view. Hegel shows that it cannot, by focusing on the notion of ‘mutual coercion’, which, in Fichte’s model, is supposed to ensure the harmony between the individual wills that make up the civil union. Here’s Hegel on this: The supreme task in an arrangement that works with mechanical necessity so that the activity of each individual is coerced by the general will is one which presupposes an opposition between the individual will and the general will […]. Oneness with the general will consequently cannot be understood and posited as inner absolute majesty, but as something to be produced by an external relation, or by coercion. But in reality, in the process of coercion and supervision which must in this case be posited, one cannot continue in infinite series and make a leap from the real to the ideal; there must be a supreme positive point from which coercion in accordance with the concept of universal freedom originates. (PW 132–133 / W 2: 471, my emphasis)

We are going to see in the next chapter that the solution to the problem of the ‘supreme point’ (which Hegel finds missing from Fichte’s model) is given in the Philosophy of Right by the figure of the monarch. For the moment, let us underscore the fact that Hegel’s critique has, once again, to do with the failure of the model to deliver on its own promises. In other words, the argument is that there is a contradiction between the idea of mutuality on which Fichte’s model rests (each will is coerced equally and no will is coerced more or less than any other, otherwise the ‘supreme point’ would become transcendent to the system) and the requirement that the will be active. Activity requires an excess of power, thinks Hegel, otherwise ‘action and reaction, stance and resistance, are equally strong [and] the power on both sides is reduced to equilibrium; thus, all functions, actions and expressions of will are annulled’ (PW 133 / W 2: 471). Hegel’s argument thus is that the intricate arrangements Fichte envisions for moderating the power of the government and putting checks on the

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possible arbitrariness of state officials depends on a schema that does not in practice work. We could also formulate Hegel’s point here as a criticism of the naturalistic presuppositions implicit in Fichte’s model of mutual coercion. The textual indication for that is the reference, when discussing this issue, to the ‘perpetuum mobile’, a device whose parts move one another in such a way as to achieve—the idea was—perpetual motion.21 Fichte’s notion of the state relies, in Hegel’s view, on precisely such a model; conceived as a system whose laws operate like the laws of gravity—which keep the planets in orbit and prevent the planetary system from collapsing on itself—the state requires that the ‘general will’ coerce the individual wills, but that it, in turn, be coerced by them, ‘for any point within this universal system of coercion which were not itself coerced would depart from the principle [of the whole] and become transcendent’ (PW 133 / W 2: 472). This conception is problematic, Hegel thinks, because ‘one cannot continue in infinite series and make a leap from the real to the ideal’, thus making an implicit reference to a familiar theme in his own thought (and Schelling’s), namely that infinite regress or progression is, as Inwood puts it, ‘vicious, intellectually incoherent and practically self-defeating’, leading to ‘bad infinity’.22 What is rather needed for this system to work is, as we saw above, ‘a supreme positive point’, ‘from which coercion in accordance with the concept of universal freedom originates’ (PW 132–133 / W 2: 472). This supreme point is opposed to the Fichtean conception because the latter requires ‘that the system remains wholly immanent’ (PW 133 / W 2: 472). Such a conception, however—which was supposed to work like a ‘perpetuum mobile’—instead achieves equilibrium in the opposite way, namely in ceasing to move and becoming a ‘perpetuum quietum’ (PW 134 / W 2: 473). Thus, on a humorous note, Hegel criticises the Fichtean conception as unworkable. To summarise the argument we have been able to establish so far, Hegel’s notion of the ‘system of needs’ corresponds to the network of relations obtaining among citizens in the context of an association entered into for the purposes of life. It is usually agreed that this notion derives from Hegel’s readings of the political economists, especially Ferguson, Steuard and Adam Smith.23 While this is no doubt correct, the system of needs also evokes Plato’s account of the origin of the city which comes into being because humans are not self-sufficient but need many things.24 We have seen how Plato overcomes the inflammation (actual or potential) of this city by instituting a form of political justice that underlies and is a

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condition of possibility for the individual’s attaining genuine justice.25 As Plato understood, it was only in a broader political context that personal ethics was possible.26 In addition, this context was coupled in his thought with a conception of nature as the guiding principle of the kallipolis, and therefore as not extraneous to the innermost interests of the human being. Hegel mobilises these insights in his critique of Kant and Fichte, and in particular of the idea that morality can be defined in abstraction from the ethico-legal context that frames moral action. Showing that FUL illicitly introduces content from the practices already in place, he aims to highlight the strong connection between those practices and the moral choices agents are called upon to make. The higher ethical standpoint, he maintains, is not, in fact, about choices at all—even though empirical individuals do find themselves in the position of having to make them. Hegel does not dispute that; what he disputes is that making a certain choice is equivalent to the ethical standpoint. As he puts it in ‘NL’: ‘But it is one thing to impose determinacies on the individual under the form of infinity, and another to impose them absolutely’ (which is presumably what Kant and Fichte do by reducing morality to a choice between +A and −A—a choice that determines the moral agent ‘absolutely’).27 ‘Determinacy under the form of infinity is thereby superseded, and the individual exists [ist] only as a free being’. He is ‘the absolute indifference of these determinacies, and it is in this that his ethical nature formally consists’ (PW 137–138 / W 2: 478). This is crucial in determining the thrust of Hegel’s political philosophy; bringing together the two forms of causality that critical philosophy had sought to keep apart, namely the causality of reason that frames morality and the causality of nature that operates mechanically, Hegel points both to the existence of a contradiction and the resolution of that contradiction. It is inevitable that moral agents will be called upon to make choices; however, individuals also can and will, at same point, raise themselves above the framework of determinacies in which these choices emerge, and it is in this that they are free beings, not in the sense of the ‘empirical freedom’ afforded them when choosing +A or −A (PW 136 / W 2: 477). We can therefore see that Hegel, rather than trying to resurrect a form of ethics and politics that belongs to a different era and is incompatible with the requirements of modern life, is instead making selective use of aspects of ancient thought in order to work out a conception of politics that adequately captures modern Sittlichkeit.28

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Notes 1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, Revised Student Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91. 2. Hobbes, 87. It is interesting (and relevant to Plato’s view of nature that emerged in the previous chapter) that Hobbes does not attribute this possibility of violence to the innate character of individuals although he acknowledges that some may suppose themselves superior to others, want to be allowed everything, and demand more honour for themselves than others have (a mark of an ‘aggressive character’, as he says in De Cive); however, as Tuck notes, ‘even this man owes his aggression not to an innate disposition, but to his fear of other people’. Richard Tuck, Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 130–131, my emphasis. 3. See Phillip Mitsis, ‘The Stoic Origin of Natural Rights’, Philosophical Inquiry 28, no. 1–2 (2006): 159–178. See also the illuminating discussion in M. F. Burnyeat, ‘Did the Ancient Greeks Have the Concept of Human Rights?’, Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 13, no. 1–2 (1 January 1994): 1–11. On the issue of the ‘Quarrel’ or ‘Querelle’ between the ancients and the moderns see the Editor’s Introduction in Reginald Lilly, ed., The Ancients and the Moderns (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 4. See Jessica N. Berry, ‘The Burden of Antiquity’, in The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Michael N.  Forster and Kristin Gjesdal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). In his introduction to a recent collection that discusses the profound influence of Plato on German philosophers, Kim highlights the importance of Plato by arguing that the term ‘German Platonism’ names not a tradition but a ‘syndrome’: ‘German philosophers develop their philosophies by arguing over and with Plato. Thus, what we think of as the German philosophical tradition is not merely rooted in Plato’s philosophy; in many cases it is an elaboration of it, and, in a few exceptions, a radical reaction against it. Alan Kim, ed., Brill’s Companion to German Platonism (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 1. Writing in the same volume, Surber argues that Hegel ‘was arguably the first philosopher of the modern period who both engaged in a detailed study of Plato’s writings and incorporated its results as an essential element of his own philosophical project’. Jere O’Neill Surber, ‘Hegel’s Plato: A New Departure’, in Brill’s Companion to German Platonism, ed. Alan Kim (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 131. 5. Luc Ferry, ‘The Distinction Between Law and Ethics in the Early Philosophy of Fichte’, The Philosophical Forum XIX, no. 2–3 (1987–1988): 182–196. Ferry notes that between 1795 and 1797 a dozen theories of

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natural law appeared in  Germany; ‘amongst all these authors, the three greatest, Schelling, Fichte, and Kant, agreed in drawing a distinction between law and morality, thereby opposing the reigning philosophy of the Kantian jurists such as Hufeland and Schmid, who tried to achieve a “deduction” from the moral law regarded as containing the foundation of law and the determination of its scope’. 6. Cf. Foucault’s descriptions of the profound transformations concerning the intent of punishment which occur with the advent of the modern era. M.  Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1977), 127. Foucault quotes Blackstone who in 1766 argued thus: ‘As to the end or final cause of human punishments. This is not by way of atonement or expiation for the crime committed; for that must be left to the just determination of the supreme being’. 7. See also Vicky Roupa, ‘Review of Foundations of Natural Right, by J.G. Fichte’, trans. Michael Baur, Studies in Social and Political Thought, no. 7 (September 2002): 129–135. 8. The expression ‘nation of devils’ was used by Kant in his essay ‘Perpetual Peace’, where it is said that ‘the problem of setting up a state can be solved even by a nation of devils (so long as they possess understanding)’. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 112. Fichte had read this essay and mentioned it approvingly in the ‘Introduction’ to the FNR. See FNR 13–14 / SW 3: 13–14. Philonenko sees ‘Perpetual Peace’ as a turning point in the development of Kant’s thought on the political. See Alexis Philonenko, Théorie et praxis dans la pensée morale et politique de Kant et Fichte en 1793 (Paris: Vrin, 1996), 24; comparing this essay with Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, written nine years earlier, Philonenko writes that in 1793 Kant abandoned his earlier ethico-political point of view and separated clearly the political problem from the ethical problem that he had confounded in 1784. Wood places this turn earlier, in 1786, when Kant critically reviewed the theory of Hufeland, who ‘derived a theory of right from Wolffian perfectionism’. Allen W. Wood, Fichte’s Ethical Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 255. 9. Or, as Hegel puts it, ‘neither legality nor morality is absolutely positive or truly ethical’. PW 131 / W 2: 470. 10. Manfred Riedel, Between Tradition and Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation of Political Philosophy, trans. Walter Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 82. 11. Riedel, 81. 12. Riedel, 84.

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13. In his Platon et l’idéalisme allemand, Vieillard Baron claims that ‘the study of renaissance of Plato at the end of eighteenth century, and of its blossoming in the grand philosophical interpretation given by Hegel in Berlin, clearly shows that the impact of the Kantian philosophy on the German idealism […] is strongly overestimated. Certainly, the essay on negative magnitudes, the dialectic of pure reason, and even the notion of synthesis as par excellence instrument of cognition, and the role of the imagination in the transcendental schematism are known, and reflected upon, by Schelling and Hegel. But they contribute to the systematic formation of Hegelian thought to an equal degree as the Platonic idealism with its speculative theology of the Parmenides, the ascending dialectic and the absolute dialectic as autonomous movement of the Ideas, nature as God’s son and the theory of the state’. Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron, Platon et l’idéalisme allemand: 1770–1830 (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1979), 380, my translation. 14. Dickey’s work on the young Hegel highlights the development of his views from Württemberg to Jena; central to this development, Dickey writes, is the cumulative impact of Hegel’s study ‘of the fiscal policy of the Bernese oligarchy and his reading of various Scottish writings on political economy as well as his awareness of the foreclosure of opportunities for political reform in Württemberg after 1798’, which ‘convinced him that his initial understanding of Sittlichkeit had been rather naively formulated’. The project of reformulating Sittlichkeit is carried forward at Jena with the essay on ‘Natural Law’ and the System of Ethical Life. See L.W.  Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 205. 15. Jacques Taminiaux is the main representative of this line of interpretation. Thus, in his ‘Hegel and Hobbes’ he argues that in ‘NL’ Hegel’s most persistent interlocutor is Hobbes, not Kant and Fichte. He also suggests that Hegel’s purpose, ‘hidden under the guise of classical references’, could well be ‘to establish better than Hobbes the majesty of the great Leviathan’. The point of proximity between Hegel and Hobbes, Taminiaux argues, is the issue of ‘power’ or ‘mastery’, an issue that derives its specificity from the method that, according to Taminiaux, equally characterises modern science and modern philosophy, namely mathesis universalis. This method, whose aim is to re-mould natural science and philosophy on the model of geometry, prescribes that we can only know what we ourselves make. The result of this, claims Taminiaux, is a radical break with the Aristotelian notion of nature which bases itself on a distinction between poioumena and phusika, i.e. between ‘things as they are produced by man and things as they emanate from nature and are manifested from themselves’. The collapse of this distinction, which effectively means that there is phainomenon

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only as poioumenon, further implies ‘a commandment that being not appear, not be phenomenal, except in conformity to a project that fashions it in advance and that in a definitive way owes nothing except to itself’. Now, the issue of power or mastery has to be understood within this context: for both Hegel and Hobbes it is a matter of dominating or subjugating nature. In Hegel, in particular, this subjugation takes place in two ways: as a theoretical duplication of nature occurring through language and the naming of objects, and as a practical imposition upon nature by means of a ruse that consists in putting it to work for human ends through the tool and the machine. Thus, in Taminiaux’s view, Hegel’s philosophy constitutes the culmination of the project of mathesis universalis: by substituting for Hobbes’s ‘methodological productivism’ an ‘ontological productivism’, i.e. a total subordination of nature to Spirit’s absolute self-production, this philosophy radically suppresses all ‘otherness’ or ‘difference’. See Jacques Taminiaux, ‘Hegel and Hobbes’, in Dialectic and Difference: Modern Thought and the Sense of Human Limits (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International Inc., 1985), 8–19. 16. G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, ed. W. Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany: SUNY, 1977), 63. 17. See also Sedgwick’s analysis of ‘NL’ and her examination of counter-­ arguments in defence of Kant’s theory of morality. Sedgwick concludes that ‘[i]n charging that Kant presupposes content, Hegel hopes to direct our attention to the long list of substantive philosophical commitments Kant relies on in his applications of the supreme moral law. He thereby hopes to reveal the particularity of the very system of practical obligation Kant insists is universally and necessarily valid. Hegel’s larger objective is to call into question the Kantian thesis that we possess a faculty of pure reason that can rise above history and bind us unconditionally.’ Sally Sedgwick, ‘Hegel on the Empty Formalism of Kant’s Categorical Imperative’, in A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 278. 18. A summary of the areas of agreement between Kant and Fichte is provided in Wood, Fichte’s Ethical Thought, 257–258. 19. Jean Hyppolite, Introduction à la philosophie de l’ histoire de Hegel (Paris: Marcel Riviere, 1968), 43. 20. As Dickey explains, Hegel ‘never quite came round to subscribing to modernising mercantilism because he balked at “economising” politics, at reducing questions of political value to the managerial perspective of effective regulation of the economy’. Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 206. 21. Hegel revisited the mathematical and mechanical problems associated with the pendulum and the perpetuum mobile at several points in his career. See

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Michael John Petry, ‘Classifying the Motion: Hegel on the Pendulum’, in Hegel and Newtonianism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993). 22. Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1992), 140. Bourgeois adds to this point by suggesting that the contradiction between the universal and the singular individual would exist only if individuality were the simple ‘also’ [aussi] of determinations. Bernard Bourgeois, Le Droit Naturel de Hegel (1802–1803): Commentaire (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 292. 23. Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, especially chapter 5. 24. Dickey recognises that the notion of ‘courage’ [Tapferkeit] introduced a bit later on in ‘NL’, leads back, through Rousseau, to Plato: ‘Seen in this light Rousseau’s understanding of courage seems to have a “portable quality” about it: it can serve a political as well as a military end. In this, Rousseau’s view of courage is not unlike that of Plato’. Dickey, 222. Also: ‘In Natural Law Hegel used Tapferkeit in just this way; and in juxtaposing it with the bourgeois conception of ethical life it is obvious that he meant to challenge the view that collective solidarity could be measured solely in terms of reciprocal socioeconomic relations. Truly human cohesiveness, Hegel felt, had to have an explicit political dimension.’ Dickey, 225. 25. Cf. Hegel’s positive comment on this point in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy: ‘It was great force of insight that really led the ancients to the truth; and what Plato brings forward as merely simplifying the difficulty, may, in fact, be said to exist in the nature of the thing […] for in the state alone is justice present in reality and truth.’ (Haldane & Simson 2: 91 / W 19: 107) 26. Browning emphasises this aspect of Plato’s thought. See Gary K. Browning, Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 17: ‘The urgency in the argument of the Republic arises out of its recognition of the individual’s dependence on the community, coupled with the insight that in the prevailing social atmosphere even the best individuals are corrupted and prevented from realising their potential.’ 27. As Bourgeois explains, ‘it is only the absolutisation of the determinations with which the I identifies, contradictorily in its universality or indeterminacy, which is negated by freedom’. Bourgeois, Le droit naturel de Hegel, 293, my translation. Cf. also PW 122 / W 2: 458–459, where Hegel makes a general assessment of critical philosophy as having derived its key opposition from ‘empirical consciousness’, which finds ‘within the self’ both division and pure unity. ‘Nor can there be any question’, says Hegel, ‘of denying this point of view’ [of critical philosophy]; rather the problem

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with it is that ‘it is not the absolute point of view’ it imagines itself to be, and presents ‘negative absoluteness or infinity’ as ‘the genuine absolute’. 28. I am therefore largely in agreement with Ilting’s assessment of Hegel’s debt to ancient political philosophy—a debt which though ‘most easily proved from his early writings’ extends to his mature concept of the state as well. See K-H. Ilting, ‘The Structure of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”’, in Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Z.A. Pelczynski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 100–101.

References Berry, Jessica N. 2015. The Burden of Antiquity. In The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Michael N.  Forster and Kristin Gjesdal. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourgeois, Bernard. 1986. Le droit naturel de Hegel (1802–1803): commentaire. Paris: Vrin. Browning, Gary K. 1999. Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Burnyeat, M.F. 1994. Did the Ancient Greeks Have the Concept of Human Rights? Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 13 (1–2): 1–11. Dickey, L.W. 1987. Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferry, Luc. 1987–1988. The Distinction Between Law and Ethics in the Early Philosophy of Fichte. The Philosophical Forum XIX (2–3): 182–196. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Faith and Knowledge. Ed. W.  Cerf and H.S.  Harris. Albany: SUNY. Hobbes, Thomas. 1996. Leviathan. Revised Student ed. Ed. Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hyppolite, Jean. 1968. Introduction à la philosophie de l’ histoire de Hegel. Paris: Marcel Riviere. Ilting, K.-H. 1971. The Structure of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”. In Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Z.A. Pelczynski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inwood, Michael. 1992. A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell Reference. Kant, Immanuel. 1990. Political Writings. 2nd ed. Ed. H.  Reiss and Trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kim, Alan, ed. 2019. Brill’s Companion to German Platonism. Leiden: Brill. Lilly, Reginald, ed. 1996. The Ancients and the Moderns. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mitsis, Phillip. 2006. The Stoic Origin of Natural Rights. Philosophical Inquiry 28 (1–2): 159–178.

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Petry, Michael John. 1993. Classifying the Motion: Hegel on the Pendulum. In Hegel and Newtonianism. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Philonenko, Alexis. 1996. Théorie et praxis dans la pensée morale et politique de Kant et Fichte en 1793. Paris: Vrin. Riedel, Manfred. 1984. Between Tradition and Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation of Political Philosophy. Trans. Walter Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roupa, Vicky. 2002. Review of Foundations of Natural Right, by J.G. Fichte. Trans. Michael Baur. Studies in Social and Political Thought 7: 129–135. Sedgwick, Sally. 2011. Hegel on the Empty Formalism of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. In A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 263-280. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Surber, Jere O’Neill. 2019. Hegel’s Plato: A New Departure. In Brill’s Companion to German Platonism, ed. Alan Kim, 131–145. Leiden: Brill. Taminiaux, Jacques. 1985. Hegel and Hobbes. In Dialectic and Difference: Modern Thought and the Sense of Human Limits. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International Inc. Tuck, Richard. 2000. Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vieillard-Baron, Jean-Louis. 1979. Platon et l’idéalisme allemand: 1770–1830. Paris: Editions Beauchesne. Wood, Allen W. 2016. Fichte’s Ethical Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Embodying the Political

1   Introduction In the Western philosophical tradition, the problem of the political has very often been identified as that of constructing a space, a topos separate from and opposed to the other spheres of human existence, in particular work and domesticity. Ever since the institutions of fifth-century Athens invested natural spaces with specific political and judicial functions, politics has been inextricably linked with a notion of space, which is bounded and circumscribed in more than one sense: a terrain on which political discussions can be held and decisions taken—a terrain whose natural properties now recede into insignificance—but also a space occupied by bodies: the bodies of the public actors or citizens who take part in such deliberations and procedures. On this model, politics emerges as the articulation of two distinct realms, the natural and the juridical/artificial. Much as it incorporates and invokes both realms, however, politics has been consistently identified with the latter; politics is on the side of reason, its intimate connection with the natural realm disparaged or lost sight of. And yet, of course, we have seen ‘nature’ occupy a double role; on the one hand, it is the condition that needs to be annulled for politics proper to arrive on to the scene; on the other, once this transformation has taken place and politics has weaned itself off of its natural origin, ‘nature’ reappears as something bigger than politics, the ultimate arbiter and bestower of meaning and legitimacy.

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Plato and Hegel occupy an ambiguous position in this model. Though critics of naturalism strictly understood (i.e. of the philosophy that seeks to find in nature the requisite properties of the ‘true’ language or the just polity), they, at the same time, resist the eradication of nature that a fully ‘positive’ conception of politics and law would entail.1 And yet, this resistance manifests itself through a peculiar logic where nature and natural instances re-appear at critical junctures of the system, just where you would expect them the least. If, in other words, we were expecting nature—perhaps under the influence of a certain schematic interpretation of Marx’s ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’—to provide the foundational ground on which a fully ideal edifice can be erected, we would be in for a surprise. Because what happens instead is that politics, though constituted by means of a hierarchy which subsumes the natural world (the pre-political, the animal, the machine) under the aegis of nous or mind, inevitably reaches a limit beyond which it cannot proceed without returning to its origins, namely the natural or pre-political elements from which it started out. The aim of this chapter is to trace out and highlight this peculiar logic in Hegel’s writings on natural law and state theory produced later in his philosophical development: the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), and the lectures he delivered in Heidelberg in 1817–1818 and then in Berlin in 1818–1819 (published in English under the title Hegel’s Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right). The entry point to this logic will be provided, for the purposes of this chapter, by the criticisms and reconstructions that Hegel’s theory of the sovereign invited—criticisms from those who engaged with Hegel’s thought deeply and profoundly, and that largely hinged on a perceived tension between the rationality of the philosophical doctrine he espoused and what they considered to be the irrationality of the institution of monarchy. Chief among those is Marx, who in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right expressed bitter disappointment at Hegel’s notion of the sovereign even though this disappointment was intermixed with other criticisms of Hegel’s conception of the state. Marx’s criticisms are worth considering not only from the point of view of Marx’s own subsequent philosophical development, but also because the issue he highlights is the foremost political problem since Plato, namely the problem of competing interests and antagonisms, in a nutshell, the problem of conflict and war, especially civil war: war within the polis, but also war within the individual, war as conflict of the parts of the soul, and as conflict between the identities of the modern subject, the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘citoyen’ (or homo

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œconomicus and homo politicus). Marx’s critique will allow us to consider more generally the tension between nature and spirit, or body and mind, taking into account contributions from contemporary thinkers whose engagement with Hegel has helped re-calibrate the question of the political.

2   Constructions of Nature in Hegel’s Later Political Thought Hegel’s Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science begin with some clear definitions: in §1 he defines ‘natural right’ as opposed to ‘positive right’, and in §2 he swiftly moves on to the question of the ultimate grounding of right, which is not, Hegel insists, ‘nature’: The sphere of right is not the soil of nature—certainly not of external nature, but also of subjective human nature, insofar as human will, determined by human nature, is in the sphere of natural needs and instincts. On the contrary, the sphere of right is the spiritual sphere, the sphere of freedom. It is true that nature also has a place in the realm of freedom, to the extent that the idea of freedom expresses itself and gives itself existence [Existenz], but freedom remains the foundation, and nature only enters in as something dependent. (LNR §2)

We might read this passage as indicative of a rapprochement with Kant’s theory of freedom—and not without reason. Hegel certainly seems to be opposing the sphere of nature to the sphere of freedom which alone pertains to the state. The state is not founded either on ‘subjective human nature’ (the ‘natural needs and instincts’ in the passage), or on external nature—the sphere of mechanical forces and chemical or organic processes. And yet, there is an important way in which ‘nature’ enters the equation, a way that might seem secondary and unimportant right now, but will receive its due significance when we discuss the sovereign. This is the idea that in order to express itself and give itself existence, freedom must register in the sphere of nature, it must have tangible effects in the world of objects. A freedom that does not make itself apparent in the sensible world—such as, for example, an act of taking possession which does not result in a physical disturbance or rearrangement of objects—would be taking possession in theory only but not in actuality. It is this necessity, as we shall see, that re-instates the legitimate rights of nature (‘external’ or,

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as Hegel calls it elsewhere, ‘immediate’ nature) upon the sphere of the ethical. In other words, nature will show itself relevant to the sphere of law and the state not because it was historically ‘first’ or ‘prior’ to Spirit (as the concept ‘state of nature’ has been taken to mean), but because law without effects is tantamount to no law at all. What are the implications of this for a thinking of the modern state that seeks to dissociate law from the fiction of a supposed ‘state of nature’? Hegel is scathing in his critique of this notion; thus, he continues in the exposition to this paragraph: The term ‘natural right’ or ‘natural law’ [Naturrecht] ought to be abandoned and replaced by the term ‘philosophical doctrine of right’ [philosophische Rechtslehre] […] The expression ‘nature’ [Natur] contains the ambiguity that by it we understand [(1)] the essence [Wesen] and concept [Begriff] of something, (2) unconscious, immediate nature as such. So by ‘natural law’ has been understood the supposed legal order valid by virtue of immediate nature […] Rather is it the case that a state [Zustand] that could be described as a state of nature would be one wherein there were no such things as right and wrong because spirit had not yet attained to the thought of its freedom.2

Hegel does not here elaborate further on the consequences of this ambiguity that the expression ‘nature’ presents us with. Could it be that he considered it a ‘wonderful’ word, on a par with ‘Sense’ or ‘Aufhebung’? Or might he have hoped that ‘nature’, alone of these words, could be clarified and refined, its ambiguous meaning leading to much unfortunate confusion in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law? There is not much to lead us on in this passage; what we can ascertain, however, is that Hegel views nature and spirit as two discrete spheres whose precise mode of articulation presents us with a number of distinct difficulties: on the one hand, each of these spheres is external to the other, each encompassing a domain which in the first instance appears self-subsisting.3 For example, ownership as a legal category is purely ideal, and has its being and justification in spirit and ethical life, even though it becomes manifest through registering its effects in the physical world. On the other hand, externality does not mean un-relatedness; thus, we might say that a deed, such as, for example, the transference of property, is possible and meaningful within a certain legal framework, yet, it also maps onto the physical world through its presuppositions (bodies that sign the relevant paperwork at a certain

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place, e.g. a solicitor’s office) and consequences. This mode of relationality provides the paradigm of how legal and ethical categories clasp on to each other in the movement of the Philosophy of Right; on the one hand, the dialectical movement proceeds in a similar way to that noted in the Philosophy of Nature, where the discrepancy each natural form experiences between its externality—which, we recall, is the key characteristic of all of sensuous nature—and its conceptuality, i.e. its mediated relation to its ‘other’, namely that which is not purely natural, moves it to a more complex form. Similarly here, simpler categories of right give way to more complex ones, as we can see, for example, in the transition from ‘physical seizure’—which ‘from the point of view of the senses’ is ‘the most complete mode of taking possession’, but is also ‘merely subjective, temporary, and extremely limited in scope’—to possession through giving form, which supersedes the limitation inherent in physical seizure, as it does not require that a person be present ‘in this time and space’ (PR §54–§56). At the same time, each category developed in the Philosophy of Right is shown to presuppose not only the one immediately preceding it but also the ones succeeding it such that the overall structure depends for its final validity and justification on the attainment on the whole. We might say that each new category that is added on to the previous one animates the preceding category, lending it the vitality without which that category would be lifeless and useless. And yet, the body seems to evade this systematic, dialectical deduction of the categories of right, instead being opposed to spirit in stark antithesis, where spirit does not progressively come to imbue it but rather takes possession of it directly: In so far as the body is immediate existence [Dasein] it is not commensurate with the spirit; before it can be the spirit’s willing organ and soul-inspired instrument, it must first be taken possession of by the spirit. (PR §48)

We could see in this the comedic complement to the drama of being and not-being discussed in Chap. 4. The act of signing a contract, for example, could be described in terms of physical motion within a confined space; this motion acquires a completely new significance, however, once we view it within a framework of rightful relations which transform the movement of fingers strategically placed around a pen into a legally and socially significant act with material consequences for those named in it. Comedy aside, one might want to raise the question of how this process maps onto and alters the physical geography of bodies whose movement

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around space belongs to the sphere of ‘unconscious’, ‘immediate’ nature, and is therefore distinct from the sphere of spirit. Based on the analysis presented so far, we might say that the body is the locus where different spheres intersect: on the one hand, the body refers to ‘unconscious, immediate nature’ inasmuch as it is a complex of forces (physical, chemical and organic) which give it its precise natural constitution. At the same time, the human body is, according to Hegel, the locus of agency inasmuch it is capable of being ‘taken possession of by spirit’, becoming ‘the spirit’s willing organ’ and thereby the ‘soul-inspired instrument’ of the will which constitutes the principle of the practical realm (PR §48). But this possibility of ‘being taken possession of’ suggests that the body also has this other significance, namely that of passivity, i.e. of being affected by the acts of spirit, or the acts of others, rather than solely being the author and cause of effects upon the physical world. Passivity is the chief characteristic of the body, which is subject to the liminally mutilating or destructive activity of spirit,4 but it is also, as we shall see in the next section, a key characteristic of the sovereign because the sovereign, too, is identified by Hegel as a ‘body’.

3   Articulations of Sovereignty in the Philosophy of Right It is the precise mode of articulation of the realms that constitute ethical life in PR that Marx singles out as problematic, especially the family and civil society in their subsumption to the state. Marx’s concerns hinge precisely on the mode of relationality highlighted above, namely, the externality that marks out the connection between family and civil society (as the spheres of particular interests), on the one hand, and the state (as the sphere of general interest), on the other. How do these spheres manage to feed into and harmonise with each other, asks Marx, despite the fact that ‘in the event of conflict’ the interests of the family and civil society ‘must give way to the “laws” and “interests” of the state’—as is the case with ‘empirical conflicts’—but also, more importantly, as regards the ‘essential relationship [wesentlichen Verhältnis] of these spheres themselves’ (EW 59 / MEW 1: 204)? In other words, if ‘subordination’ and ‘dependence’ are the key characters of this essential relationship, doesn’t that suggest the presence of a certain ‘estrangement’ that troubles the unity of these discrete spheres in their relation to the state and gives rise, in Marx’s view, to

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an ‘unresolved antinomy’ [ungelöste Antinomie] (EW 60 / MEW 1: 204) that mars the connectedness of the ethical? If Hegel’s aim was to sketch out a model of modern society as capable of harmonising the particular interests of individuals—interests that find expression in the family and civil society and are modulated by abstract right—with the general interest of the whole, then, according to Marx, this aim has not been achieved in the PR model. Marx’s well-known complaint at this point is that ‘it is always the same categories which are made to supply now one sphere and now another with a soul’, exactly the same transition in the Logic ‘from the sphere of Essence to that of the Concept’, and in the Philosophy of Nature ‘from Inorganic nature to Life’ (EW 64–65 / MEW 1: 208–209). Marx thinks, possibly under the influence of Feurerbach at this point, that Hegel reverses the priority of subject and predicate, and turns the ‘genuine, real subject’ into the ‘predicate’ (EW 65 / MEW 1: 209). However, we might extend Marx’s critique in a slightly different direction, too; if the relation between the key institutions modelled in the PR is ‘externality’ (which, we recall, is the key character of nature), then we must accept that nature provides the paradigm for the transitions between the various institutions and spheres of the state. We might counteract this by the fact that, according to Hegel, the state is the family’s and civil society’s ‘immanent end’ (PR §261, quoted by Marx in EW 59 / MEW 1: 204); but, Marx argues, this term does not provide a resolution, instead it merely supervenes upon the ‘unresolved antinomy’ to give the semblance of a resolution or the ‘appearance of a mediation’ [Erscheinung einer Vermittlung]. If we are right in hypothesising the irrepressible presence of nature in Hegel’s transitions—a hypothesis which Marx reinforces with his suggestion that family and civil society ‘appear as the dark ground of nature [Naturgrund] from which the light of the state emerges’ (EW 61 / MEW 1: 205)—then we have to see nature not only as a metaphor that helps visualise the relation between the various spheres in the PR but also, and more importantly, as an interstice that marks the institutions of ethical life irretrievably despite the fact that Hegel insists on the distinctness between nature and Spirit. From a certain point of view, Hegel is, of course, right; there is nothing natural in the institution of property, or the other institutions of the modern state, and if we were to view these institutions as somehow ‘natural’, then we would be reverting to a historico-genetic mode of justification, such as that espoused by Hugo and Savigny, which, in fact, does not justify anything; instead, it merely presupposes the validity of institutions that happen to be in place at a particular point in time,

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having derived them in an ad hoc manner from the supposed necessities of historical development.5 Indeed, if there is anything natural at all about the institutions of the modern state, this, according to Hegel, concerns not their historico-genetic origin but their rational character; Naturrecht refers to that which can be justified at the court of reason and not that which is derived from supposedly primordial habits and institutions.6 Marx’s critique is obviously not enunciated from a place of sympathy for the proponents of nobility, such as Savigny; it does highlight, however, an issue with Hegel’s philosophy of right; that is, that a type of justification that proceeds front-to-back (i.e. from the end-point of the development, the Concept or Idea, or in this case the state, to earlier and simpler forms of development, such as the family and civil society) ignores the concrete exigencies of these earlier and less complex realities, downplays the possibility of potentially irresolvable conflicts between them, and ultimately posits a teleology that is hardly justified by the actual process of development of these realities. The same can be said about the evolution from nature to spirit: if the conceptuality operative in nature is not the idion of nature but a ‘borrowed’ conceptuality, so to speak, then the development to more and more complex natural forms does not occur as a result of their inner dynamic but rather of the logical necessity that there be a predetermined terminus: spirit. Applied more specifically to the domain of the state, Marx’s question is: can we see the family and civil society, as they currently stand, leading organically to a harmonisation of interests in the broader context of the modern state, or is the state, on the contrary, always at risk of being torn apart by the conflicts of interest within its subordinate spheres, the family and civil society? Hegel thought that such a harmonisation was indeed possible through the articulation of the various spheres of the state, which allow individuals to exercise their freedom within a broader framework of ethical institutions and practices. Hegel also emphasises the role of the universal class—a class that is not encumbered by the conflicts of interest that occur within civil society but devotes itself to the service of the government and has the ‘universal’ as the ‘end of its essential activity’ (PR §303).7 We might see this as a nod to Plato’s class of the politically tasked philosophers; crucially, however, Hegel adds another element that is missing from Plato’s kallipolis structure, and that is the hereditary sovereign, whom Hegel describes in the following terms:

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Sovereignty, which is initially only the universal thought of this ideality, can exist only as subjectivity which is certain of itself […]. But subjectivity attains its truth only as a subject, and personality only as a person […]. This absolutely decisive moment of the whole, therefore, is not individuality in general, but one individual, the monarch. (PR §279, Hegel’s emphasis)

We can almost predict Marx’s objections: instead of recognising a certain quality (e.g. subjectivity) as predicated of the subject (which is, therefore, prior to its predicate), Hegel posits the logical priority of subjectivity, which then expresses itself in an actual subject, the monarch. But in addition to this criticism, there is a further worry that hinges on the naturalness of the monarch, i.e. the fact that, being ‘essentially determined as this [dieses] individual in abstraction from every other content’, the monarch is determined in ‘an immediate and natural way’, i.e. by his ‘natural birth’. (PR §280, Hegel’s emphasis). Marx is scathing in his contempt for this notion: Hegel imagines he has shown that the subjectivity of the state, sovereignty, the monarch, is ‘essentially characterised as this individual, in abstraction from all his other characteristics, and this individual is raised to the dignity of monarchy in an immediate, natural fashion, i.e. through his birth in the course of nature’. Thus sovereignty, the dignity of monarchy, comes about through birth. The body of the monarch determines his dignity. At the apex of the state mere physicality [die bloße Physis], and not reason, is the deciding factor. Birth determines the quality of the monarch as it determines the quality of cattle. (EW 91 / MEW 1: 234–235)8

The satirical undertones of this passage notwithstanding, Marx here seems to be adopting, contra Hegel, a hyper-rationalist position, according to which the apex of the state should be epitomised by an intensification of reason, not a weakening of it.9 But, we may raise the question, is there a philosophical reason which requires that at the top of the state edifice we should find nature and sheer bodily presence instead of the Idea? In other words, is there a necessity that Hegel’s construction of the sovereign obeys, and which is not just a mystification of the actual relation that pertains between the political state and its subordinate spheres (family, civil society), as Marx thought?10

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4   The Monarch as a Pure Sign In her exchange with Judith Butler on the section on Lordship and Bondage in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Catherine Malabou begins her contribution by raising the question of the body: ‘is (servile) attachment always the truth of detachment? Can dialectics both admit and produce the possibility of an absolute detachment from life and from the body?’11 We might also raise this question—with especial pertinence, I believe—with regard to the body of the sovereign in the Philosophy of Right. The question would then become: can dialectics both admit and produce the possibility of an absolute detachment of the political from that which constitutes the ‘body’ in politics, especially the ‘sovereign body’, that of the monarch? For the young Marx, it definitely seems that it can and that it should; if it hasn’t produced that possibility in the PR, it is because, according to Marx, Hegel’s investment in delivering the Idea blinded him to the actual stakes involved in modern life. Is Marx right in this? As Malabou says in response to her own question, the ‘answer is difficult to determine’, and in a sense, it is both ‘yes and no’.12 With regard to our own question, the answer might be, on the one hand, yes, inasmuch as Marx’s critique of Hegel helps him formulate a radical empiricism—an empiricism not of the epistemological type that presumes to provide a criterion for knowledge based on its legitimate sources, but rather a return to the primordiality of sense and the irreducibility of actual persons to the interplay of forces that seek, in their sweeping movement, to turn those persons into irrelevancies.13 It is through this route that Marx arrives at a conception of democracy as the political formation in which ‘the formal principle is identical with the substantive [materielle] principle’, in contrast to the monarchy, or even the republic, where the ‘political man leads his particular existence [besonderes Dasein] alongside the unpolitical man [unpolitischen], the private citizen’ (EW 88, MEW 1: 231–232). But also, on the other hand, no, because this radical empiricism requires a break with the hyper-rationalist position on the state, a position which, as Abensour has shown in his careful reading of Marx’s early works, is most prevalent in the texts and essays Marx produced in 1842 and the beginning of 1843,14 but which, after the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung (whose editor Marx was), recedes to reveal a shift of focus from political revolution to a radical form of revolution, from ‘political criticism’ to a ‘criticism of politics’.15 Key in this transformation is the move away from questions surrounding ‘the nature, the form, the

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constitution and the composition of power’, towards ‘the organisation of all the elements of life in society’.16 Marx’s critique, therefore, shifts from a critique of monarchy as a constitutional principle which is emblematic of, and compounds, the suffocation of the modern state by the nobility and the church, to a critique of the Hegelian sovereign as a politico-philosophical principle that encapsulates the possibility of reconciliation of antagonistic forces at the very apex of the state. But what if Hegel’s monarch was not intended as, or not merely as, the principle of just such a reconciliation? What if the monarch plays a different role in the system, other than being part of the safeguards protecting civil society from turning in on itself and tearing itself apart under the strain of economic antagonism? We might indeed consider such a possibility if we notice that of the three elements in which the political state is divided in the PR, namely the legislative, the executive, and the sovereign (PR §273), only the former two are absolutely indispensable in a modern state, while the third one, the hereditary monarch, seems to be relatively inconsequential from a political point of view. Hegel justifies this element as being ‘the ultimate decision of will’, however, this has left many commentators unconvinced, so much so that some have described the Hegelian monarch as not an integral element to the Philosophy of Right at all, but a concession to Prussian absolutism.17 It is now time to reconsider this issue shifting focus away from the constitutional role of the monarch towards a more philosophical/metaphysical question: what is it in Hegel’s conception of the political that requires the enthronement of a monarch at the apex of the state? Jean-Luc Nancy’s intervention in the debate hinges on a question that brings together the juridical and political aspects of the modern state. ‘How do things stand’, asks Nancy, ‘with regard to the minimal articulation between the juridical and the political which is the articulation of the effectuation of the law (droit)—not of its execution or of its application as a practical or material process, but of the decision which makes the law effective?’18 ‘This decision’, he continues, ‘is itself an act of law, but it is not in the order of the generality of the law, it inheres in the order of the particularity of its employment’. This, in a nutshell, is the riddle that the Hegelian monarch poses to us: on the one hand, the order of the generality of the law; on the other, the order of the particularity of its employment, and, we may add, that of bringing the law into existence and making it operative with real effects and consequences in the here and now. I have discussed the premises and implications of Nancy’s account of the Hegelian

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monarch elsewhere.19 What I would like to do here is raise the question of this logic for a thinking of law and ethical life as distinct from, and in certain ways antagonistic to, nature. The question that concerns us here is the following: what are the conditions of possibility for law—which according to Hegel derives not only its legitimacy but its very being from the sphere of spirit—to have tangible effects in the real world? To answer this question we need to go back to PR where the monarch is shown as largely uninvolved in the day-to-day running of the state. Thus, Hegel depicts this process as devolved to individuals with ‘knowledge [Kenntnis] of the content and circumstances, and the legal and other grounds for determination’ (PR §284). At the same time, there is a certain degree of ambiguity concerning the extent of actual power the monarch possesses; it is the job of state officials to ‘submit to the monarch for his decision the content of current affairs of state, or the legal determinations made necessary by present needs’ (PR §283). Should we take this to mean that the monarch can refuse to authorise decisions his advisers have submitted? Or is it simply a matter of saying ‘yes’ and dotting the ‘i’ s, as Hegel has notoriously put it in the Addition to PR §280?20 My view is that this ambiguity can be resolved if we consider the monarch’s office from the point of view of power as such, and not from that of the particular decisions he is called upon to authorise. Constitutionally, it is not impossible that there be instances of less than complete agreement between the monarch and his advisers (although in a well-constituted state such instances should hardly occur, or, in the event that they do occur, there should be an appropriate constitutional mechanism for resolving them). Politically, however, the reason for the existence of the monarch’s office is not that there never be such instances, or that they be regulated when they occur, but rather that there be a highest instance of decision which effects decision itself, thus resolving the issue Hegel had identified in ‘NL’ between the various powers of the state that are at risk of cancelling each other out. Note that this instance of decision is necessary irrespective of whether there is agreement between the monarch and his advisers or not. In other words, even in the event of complete agreement between the monarch and the executive, it is still necessary that there be a highest instance to sign off the proposals submitted by the executive and thus bring them into existence. The philosophical implications of this are far-reaching; on the one hand, we notice that the powers that uniquely belong to the monarch are emptied out of any particular content. Thus, the moment of decision is about decision itself, not this or that particular decision; the apex of political

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power is about power itself, not power in any specific or modulated sense. So the schema we identified earlier with regard to Marx (the rationality of the state cannot be realised in a hyper-rationalist state) applies here too: the ‘ultimate moment of the will’ cannot be realised in a wilful individual; the monarch is the moment of decision not by making decisions of his own but precisely by not making his own decisions.21 It appears, therefore, that in order to satisfy the requirements of the highest office of the state the monarch must embody and act out the moments of will and decision in their purest form, i.e. as will and as decision, and not wilfulness or arbitrary choice. But if this is the monarch’s office—an office that fully coincides with the being of the monarch, in contrast to other state officials whose jobs are separate from their person—it follows that the monarch has the status of a pure sign.

5   The Metaphysics of the Modern State What is a sign, then, according to Hegel? Hegel’s account of the sign is provided in the Philosophy of Mind, Part Three of his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, and more specifically in the section on ‘Psychology’. This is the last of three subsections which also comprise the ‘Anthropology’—a ‘borderland’, says Hegel’s translator Wallace, ‘where the ground is still debateable between Nature and Mind’—and the ‘Phenomenology of Mind’.22 This notion of the ‘borderland’, which Wallace applies to ‘Anthropology’, is pertinent to our discussion too, inasmuch as it governs not only the transition from nature to mind, or from intuition to the sign, but also the role of the monarch in the PR; as we shall see, the monarch also represents a borderland, that between civil society and law, between the sensuous and naturally affected existence of humans, on the one hand, and the attainment of a higher ideality in the state, on the other. For now, let us go back to the movement which derives linguistic signs from ‘attention’ (a very initial direction of the mind to something out of itself), to ‘intuition’ and ‘representation’—another borderland, which Hegel describes as ‘the mean between intelligence’s immediate finding-itself-determined [Bestimmt-sich-Finden] and intelligence in its freedom, thinking [Denken]’ (PM §448–§451). Thus, through a series of borderlands, Hegel proceeds to derive the sign by way of ‘Recollection’, ‘Imagination’, and ‘Memory’. A detailed analysis of these sections of the PM is beyond the scope of the present discussion and is abundantly on offer elsewhere;23 what is important to keep in focus is Hegel’s attempt to

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produce the sign by means of an onto-genetic process that starts early on in the recesses of the Soul, but which insists on the ‘arbitrariness’ of the sign, its representing ‘a wholly different content from the content that it has for itself’, such that the linkages that attach it to what was initially empirically given to intuition (say, a colour) are completely ruptured, and the sign can mean anything at all.24 This is similar to the emergence of law and right, where the onto-genetic process which corresponds to the ‘external or apparent beginning of states’ is not, by the same token, their ‘substantial principle’ (PSS III §433R), but needs to be brought under the aegis of mind or spirit. Why might we say that the monarch is a ‘pure sign’ in his own jurisdiction? What does he bring together in precisely the same way as the sign? We saw earlier that the monarch represents the moments of will and decision in their purest form, and not mere wilfulness or arbitrary choice, since the monarch does not, on the whole, make decisions for the running of the state but takes the counsel of his advisers. And yet, of course, the monarch is pure arbitrariness; not only does he have it in his power to appoint officials for the highest advisory offices, but also dismiss them, which, according to Hegel, falls within the competence of the ‘unrestricted arbitrary will [Willkür] of the monarch’ (PR §283). ‘The concept of the monarch’, Hegel also says, ‘is therefore extremely difficult for ratiocination’, which ‘stops short at isolated determinations’, and knows only ‘finite viewpoints’. ‘It accordingly presents the dignity of the monarch as derivative, not only in its form but also in its determination, whereas the very concept of the monarchy is that it is not deduced from something else but entirely self-originating’ (PR §279R). The monarch is therefore a borderland where true opposites meet: arbitrariness, and a complete excision of arbitrariness; pure spirit manifesting itself as pure body; an act of will which dresses itself up as complete wilfulness, and yet at no point descends into mere wilfulness. In order to do this the monarch must encapsulate the principles of the natural and the juridical/artificial in their purity, and for that the monarch must encapsulate solely the formal principle of each. He cannot be a particular individual like any other because that would place him squarely within the sphere of civil society, pitting him against other individuals with whom he would engage in certain relations. Similarly, he cannot himself be of the order of law because that would incapacitate him from bringing the law to bear upon the ‘natural material’ of the state. The monarch, therefore, is, in a sense, impossible; he is neither an individual who can participate in the affairs of the state on an equal footing with the

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other state officials, nor an ideal being that exists solely in the plane of pure reason. But then, he is merely an empty placeholder, a receptacle, in the sense that there is nothing in him that is relevant to his office, no skillset or qualification that affects how well (or how badly) he performs his duties. Is this empty placeholder necessary in the modern state? Wouldn’t an elected head of state perform the role and duties Hegel assigns to the monarch as well as Hegel’s monarch, in addition to representing a more popular principle? From Hegel’s point of view, he would not, because such a requirement (that the head of state represent the ‘people’) would compromise the self-grounded and self-determining character of the monarch.25 On the other hand, do modern states with elected heads suffer a crucial diminution of sovereignty compared to a constitutional monarchy modelled on the principles of PR? No, because an elected head of state can act out equally well the moment of decision that brings the entire order of law into existence. And perhaps this is a possibility that neither Hegel nor Marx (in his very early, hyper-rationalist period) envisaged, namely that an elected head of state can play equally well the role of the empty placeholder. But if that is the case, then we should see the metaphysics of Hegel’s philosophy of right—the requirement, that is, that a pure sign be placed at the apex of the state—not as something that Hegel failed to properly think through, or as a concession at a time when censorship was intensifying, but as a more universal symptom of modern politics in general. It is part of the metaphysics of the modern state that it activate the tension between nature and spirit, content and form, onto-genesis and justification, without a discernible path leading organically from the one to the other. Hegel’s conception of the sovereign exemplifies this tension by placing an ‘impossible’ individual at the apex of the state. And this is precisely what caught Marx out; his charge that ‘an empirical person [Existenz] is uncritically enthroned as the real truth of the Idea’ (EW 98 / MEW 1: 241, Marx’s emphasis) is both entirely accurate and at the same time misses the point because no amount of criticism can loosen the metaphysical knot around which modern politics is constituted (as Marx was soon to realise). Hegel’s conception of the monarch thus affords us an insight into the nature of the political, not in the sense that it provides a sustainable constitutional principle for modern states to emulate, but precisely for the opposite reasons, namely for highlighting an affliction that concerns not Hegel’s myopia, as Hegel’s critics would have it, or his subservience to the Prussian state, but the metaphysics of modern politics in general.

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Notes 1. The question of Hegel’s ‘naturalism’ is a contested topic amongst Hegel commentators. Though not the first to raise the issue (McDowell had developed a naturalism of ‘second nature’ in his 1994 Mind and World), Pinkard re-ignited the debate with his claim that Hegel is a ‘disenchanted Aristotelian naturalist’, a claim that hinges largely on the continuity between animal life and human life. See Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). A number of scholars responded to Pinkard’s argument with varying degrees of agreement or disagreement. Papazoglou discusses the question of naturalism in Hegel (with special emphasis on McDowell’s reconstruction of it), and concludes that Hegel does not qualify as a naturalist because he sees the intelligibility of nature as subordinate to that of Geist. Alexis Papazoglou, ‘Hegel and Naturalism’, Hegel Bulletin 33, no. 2 (2012): 74–90. Stone considers the question more specifically with regard to Hegel’s philosophy of nature, and, on the basis of a methodological approach that naturalism and anti-­naturalism are not polar opposites but positions on a spectrum, argues that Hegel sits in the middle of that spectrum. Alison Stone, ‘Hegel, Naturalism and the Philosophy of Nature’, Hegel Bulletin 34, no. 1 (2013): 59–78. Peters revisits the debate from the point of view of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit and argues that there is an important sense in which Hegel can be considered a naturalist, namely inasmuch as he conceives of nature and spirit as unified without neutralising the differences between the two. See Julia Peters, ‘On Naturalism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24, no. 1 (2016): 111–131. 2. LNR §2, exposition (‘expositions’, according to the editors of the LNR, follow Hegel’s dictated paragraphs and refer to the notes recorded by Hegel’s student Wannenmann. The text of the exposition matches that of §502 in PM, section on ‘Law’. On the fiction of the ‘state of nature’ see also K-H.  Ilting, ‘The Structure of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”’, in Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Z.A. Pelczynski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 91. 3. Marx highlights the theme of ‘externality’ in his critical analysis of the development of the categories in PR. The extant manuscript of the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’ begins with an extensive quote from §261 where Hegel highlights the ‘external necessity’ [äußerliche Notwendigkeit] which marks out the relation between the family and the civil society to the state. See EW 58–60 / MEW 1: 203–205. 4. Cf. PR §47, where Hegel contends that I ‘possess my life and body’ only ‘in so far as I so will it’. Also PR §47R: ‘I have these limbs and my life only

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in so far as I so will it; the animal cannot mutilate or destroy itself, but the human being can’. Hegel’s emphasis. 5. This is, in a nutshell, Hegel’s critique of the historical school of law whose chief representatives were Gustav Hugo and Friedrich Carl von Savigny. See G.  Heiman, ‘The Sources and Significance of Hegel’s Corporate Doctrine’, in Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Z.A.  Pelczynski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Hermann Klenner, ‘Savigny’s Research Program of the Historical School of Law and Its Intellectual Impact in 19th Century Berlin’, The American Journal of Comparative Law 37, no. 1 (1989): 67–80. In his Editor’s Introduction to LNR Pöggeler explains the political and legal background to the philosophical dispute between Hegel and Savigny, highlighting the issue of ‘possession’ which concerned the rights of soon-to-be emancipated peasants at a time of reforms: ‘Savigny with his stress on possession as a fact takes the side of nobility, Hegel that of the middle classes, for whom everything that could be possessed became capable of becoming private property’. Otto Pöggeler, ‘Editorial Introduction’, in Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right: Heidelberg, 1817–1818, with Additions from the Lectures of 1818–1819 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 29–30. 6. As Klenner explains, Hegel thought that ‘mere habit could not be the source of law because mere habit was only the “external, bad existence” of the spirit’. Klenner, ‘Savigny’s Research Program’, 76. 7. It is somewhat unfair to criticise Hegel on the grounds that his theory of the state does not take account of the conflicts generated within civil society. As Abensour notes in his ‘Foreword’ to the Second French edition of his Democracy Against the State, ‘It is with Hegel, a careful reader of the English economists, that the concept of civil society shifts from the political to the economic, though preserving a political character. Civil society becomes the civil-bourgeois society, a system of needs resting on an antagonistic structure, close, to some extent, to the war of all against all’. Miguel Abensour, Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Movement, trans. Max Blechman and Martin Breaugh (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), xxxvii. 8. Jolin and O’ Malley translate more accurately, ‘Thus at the highest point of the state bare Physis rather than reason would be the determining factor’. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy Of Right’, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 33. 9. For Marx, Hegel’s insistence on the bodily aspect of the monarch and his hereditary mode of ascension to the throne seems nothing less than ‘vulgar’; see EW 98 / MEW 1: 241: ‘The fact that a man is born is vulgar in the extreme’; and ‘What is the final, solid distinguishing factor between

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persons? The body. Now the highest function of the body is sexual activity. The ­highest constitutional act of the king, therefore, is his sexual activity; for by this alone does he make a king and so perpetuate his own body. The body of his son is the reproduction of his own body, the creation of a royal body.’ (EW 100 / MEW 1: 242). 10. Cf.: ‘If Hegel had begun by positing real subjects as the basis of the state he would not have found it necessary to subjectivise the state in a mystical way’ (EW 80 / MEW 1: 224). 11. Catherine Malabou and Judith Butler, ‘You Be My Body for Me: Body, Shape, and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, in A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2011), 612. 12. Malabou and Butler, 612. 13. Cf. EW 87 / MEW 1: 231: ‘Democracy is the solution to the riddle of every constitution. In it we find the constitution founded on its true ground: real human beings and the real people; not merely implicitly [an sich] and in essence, but in existence [Existenz] and in reality [Wirklichkeit]’ (emphasis in the original). Also EW 82 / MEW 1: 226: ‘Hegel converts every attribute of the constitutional monarch in contemporary Europe into the absolute self-determinations of the will. He does not say that the will of the monarch is the final decision, but that the final decision of the will is—the monarch. The first statement is empirical. The second twists the empirical fact into a metaphysical axiom’. 14. See, for example, Marx’s letter to Ruge written in March 1842, which Abensour quotes: ‘The central point is the struggle against constitutional monarchy as a hybrid which from beginning to end contradicts and abolishes itself. Res publica is quite untranslatable into German’. Abensour, Democracy Against the State, 15, emphasis in the original. 15. Abensour, 31–32. 16. Abensour, 36. 17. The view that Hegel’s theory of the monarch was an apology for Prussian absolutism can be found in Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx (London: Routledge, 2002), 51. Other interpreters of Hegel maintain critical views of that theory, even when they are not dismissive of Hegel’s philosophy of right in toto. Marx is a case in point. See also Adorno: ‘In the Philosophy of Right […] Hegel makes a pretence of a speculative deduction of monarchy but does not carry it out, and for that reason the results are vulnerable to all manner of criticism’. Theodor W.  Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 129–130. This theory has continued to invite controversy and debate amongst recent commentators of PR; Hardimon, for example, is sceptical of the plausibility of Hegel’s defence of

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constitutional monarchy, arguing that there is an ‘oddness’ about Hegel’s insistence on the subjectivity of the monarch, especially as it comes from a philosopher ‘who has taught us to appreciate the conceivability of forms of subjectivity’ realised ‘by groups’. Michael O.  Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 214–215. 18. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch’, trans. Mary Ann and Peter Caws, Social Research 49, no. 2 (1982): 481. Emphasis in the original. 19. Vicky Roupa, ‘On Politics as Effectuation: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Encounter with the Hegelian Monarch’, Journal for Cultural Research 9, no. 4 (October 2005): 405–420. 20. Knowles points out that there is a tension between Hegel’s own written sections of PR and the Additions attributed to him by his students. Thus, he distinguishes between a ‘hard reading’ that emerges from Hegel’s text and a ‘soft reading’ from the Additions; the ‘hard reading’ emphasises ‘the real power in the contingency of the sovereign act of law-making’; the soft reading, by contrast, emphasises the monarch’s reliance on his expert executive’. Dudley Knowles, Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Hegel and the Philosophy of Right (London: Routledge, 2003), 329. See also Thom Brooks, ‘No Rubber Stamp: Hegel’s Constitutional Monarch’, History of Political Thought 28, no. 1 (2007): 103–104, n. 21. Interestingly, this point hinges on the complex philosophical history of the Wille—Willkür distinction, first clearly made by Kant, who identified Wille with the capacity of the rational being to self-legislate and command Willkür, i.e. a lower faculty of ‘choice’ driven by desire. For a discussion of this distinction in Kant see Henry E.  Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 129–135. On Hegel’s appropriation and re-interpretation of this distinction see Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 122–128; Marina F.  Bykova, ‘Will and Freedom’, in The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel, ed. Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 22. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 15. Hegel also discusses the sign in his Aesthetics but for the purposes of the present discussion, I will limit myself to the Philosophy of Mind. For discussions of the sign in LFA see Paul de Man, ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’, Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 763–766; Kathleen Dow Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 2001), 38–48.

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23. See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 69–108; de Man, ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’; Dow Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit; Tony Burns, ‘The Purloined Hegel: Semiology in the Thought of Saussure and Derrida’, History of the Human Sciences 13, no. 4 (2000): 1–24; John McCumber, The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 1993). 24. Cf. LFA 1: 304 / W 13: 394: ‘Now the symbol is prima facie a sign. But in a mere sign the connection which meaning and its expression have with one another is only a purely arbitrary [willkürliche] linkage’. Hegel famously distinguishes the sign from the symbol: ‘The sign is different from the symbol [Symbol], from an intuition whose own determinacy is, in its essence and concept, more or less the content which it expresses as symbol; in the sign as such, by contrast, the intuition’s own content and the content of which it is a sign, have nothing to do with each other. In signifying [bezeichnend] therefore intelligence displays a freer wilfulness and mastery in the use of intuition that in symbolising’ (PM §458, Hegel’s emphasis). 25. Cf. PR §281R, where Hegel discusses, and dismisses, the possibility of elective monarchy: ‘This view, like the ideas of the monarch as the first servant of the state, of a contractual relationship between monarch and people, etc., bases itself on the will in the sense of the caprice, opinion, and arbitrariness of the many’. Also, ‘the nature of the situation in an elective monarchy whereby the particular will is made the ultimate source of decisions means that the constitution becomes an electoral contract’ (Hegel’s emphasis).

References Abensour, Miguel. 2011. Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Movement. Trans. Max Blechman and Martin Breaugh. Cambridge: Polity. Adorno, Theodor W. 1993. Hegel: Three Studies. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Allison, Henry E. 1990. Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, Thom. 2007. No Rubber Stamp: Hegel’s Constitutional Monarch. History of Political Thought 28 (1): 91–119. Burns, Tony. 2000. The Purloined Hegel: Semiology in the Thought of Saussure and Derrida. History of the Human Sciences 13 (4): 1–24. Bykova, Marina F. 2013. Will and Freedom. In The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel, ed. Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards. London: Bloomsbury.

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Derrida, Jacques. 1984. The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology. In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dow Magnus, Kathleen. 2001. Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hardimon, Michael O. 1994. Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1894. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Trans. William Wallace. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heiman, G. 1971. The Sources and Significance of Hegel’s Corporate Doctrine. In Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Z.A.  Pelczynski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ilting, K.-H. 1971. The Structure of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”. In Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Z.A. Pelczynski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klenner, Hermann. 1989. Savigny’s Research Program of the Historical School of Law and Its Intellectual Impact in 19th Century Berlin. The American Journal of Comparative Law 37 (1): 67–80. Knowles, Dudley. 2003. Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Hegel and the Philosophy of Right. London: Routledge. Malabou, Catherine, and Judith Butler. 2011. You Be My Body for Me: Body, Shape, and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 611–641. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. de Man, Paul. 1982. Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics. Critical Inquiry 8 (4): 761–775. Marx, Karl. 1977. Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy Of Right’. Trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCumber, John. 1993. The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy. Northwestern University Press. McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1982. The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch. Trans. Mary Ann and Peter Caws. Social Research 49 (2): 481–516. Papazoglou, Alexis. 2012. Hegel and Naturalism. Hegel Bulletin 33 (2): 74–90. Peters, Julia. 2016. On Naturalism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (1): 111–131. Pinkard, Terry. 2012. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pöggeler, Otto. 1995. Editorial Introduction. In Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right  : Heidelberg, 1817–1818, with Additions from the Lectures of 1818–1819. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Popper, Karl. 2002. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx. London: Routledge. Roupa, Vicky. 2005. On Politics as Effectuation: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Encounter with the Hegelian Monarch. Journal for Cultural Research 9 (4): 405–420. Stone, Alison. 2013. Hegel, Naturalism and the Philosophy of Nature. Hegel Bulletin 34 (1): 59–78. Williams, Robert R. 1997. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Towards Finitude and the Fragility of Sense

1   Language, Logos, and Forgetting I would like to conclude by raising a series of more general questions about the contribution that the two philosophers we have been discussing in the course of this book, Plato and Hegel, can make towards a contemporary understanding of the political. How does their thought help articulate in a more meaningful way contemporary anxieties and concerns around a politics that seems to disregard the profound degradation of the natural environment at the same time as it continues to view ‘nature’ as the ultimate ground of justification of the established order? And second, how can we draw resources from that thought to challenge this imagined or constructed ‘nature’ that circumscribes social roles and expectations by grounding difference—for example, gender or racial difference—on supposedly inherent characteristics and traits? The key development in this direction takes place with Plato’s critique of naturalism as a reality grounded in the sensuous. We have seen how the name—which in Plato’s Cratylus is investigated as a paradigmatic instance of articulation of sensuousness and ideality—becomes an object of philosophical critique; Socrates’ chief objection to Cratylian naturalism in that dialogue is that meaning cannot be determined by the affective qualities of sounds (such as the sound ‘l’ which is supposed to denote ‘softness’); equally, reference cannot be a function of the literal meaning of a word (such as the word ‘Hermogenes’ which, in Cratylus’s view, can only appropriately be the name of a rich, crafty man). Without wishing to do violence to Cratylus’s © The Author(s) 2020 V. Roupa, Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52127-1_8

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original conception by putting a contemporary slant on it, we might re-­ interpret Cratylism as an operation that ‘naturalises’ meaning by grounding it on the inherent qualities of the constituent elements of words—qualities that are meant to apply across dialects, languages and cultures. Similarly, the belief, in Plato’s time, that women could not take part in public administration on account of their ‘nature’—which differed from that of men—rested on a category mistake which ‘naturalised’ a set of characteristics, some of which were not ‘natural’ at all but rather derived from habitual occupations and roles in fourth-century Athens. Even though Plato’s critique of naturalism must have been motivated by a keen sense of the shortcomings of the Cratylian position, it had wide-­ ranging consequences. We can see this in how Plato conceptualises meaning in contrast to Cratylus; for Cratylus, the articulation between reference and semantic content cannot be broken because it resides at the level of the constituent elements that make up names. For Plato, by contrast, the articulation itself is ideal—it does not reside anywhere. In other words, there is no ‘natural’ or integral link between signifier and signified (to use the concepts of modern linguistics) that can be discovered and stamped on to words once and for all for everyone to see, and speak accordingly. But if that is the case, Plato will have to accept that as word, i.e. as a compound of sounds or letters, the name always runs the risk of returning to meaninglessness, that ultimately, meaning hangs in the air, and that there is no getting to the ‘bottom’ of language in pursuit of the basic building blocks of sense. By implication, if we follow Plato down this route, we will have to envisage the terrifying possibility that people could forget what words mean. This is not a technical or trivial kind of forgetting; given the strong link between politics and logos (both as language–speech and as ground– thought), this possibility signifies the threat of surrendering to the sophistical manipulation of meaning for spurious ends. Cratylus’s account, by contrast, presupposes that in principle meaning is always recoverable because ‘l’ will forever denote ‘softness’ and ‘r’ hardness. As long as there is a psyche that perceives ‘softness’ in ‘l’ and hardness in ‘r’, meaning can always be reconstituted even if temporarily lost. Hence the fascination that Cratylus and his theory of meaning held for Plato, as that theory seemed to provide an effective bulwark against the threat of meaninglessness and loss. And yet, Plato finds himself in the difficult position where he must both criticise, and ultimately dismantle, the Cratylian philosophy of language and hold on to its promise of safeguarding against meaninglessness. We have seen how Plato resolves this

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conundrum by reconfiguring the notion of nature that underlies Cratylian linguistics. Dismissing the idea that names have a ‘natural correctness’ that consists in a particular configuration of their constituent elements, Plato detaches meaning (and by extension ‘natural correctness’) from the sensible components of the word and makes it an entirely ideal affair: names are correct inasmuch as they encapsulate or give access to the ‘form’ of the thing they name. We know that for Plato words cannot accomplish this because they incorporate sensible elements—combinations of sounds or letters—that are subject, in time, to embellishment and distortion, and have thereby lost their primal connection to ‘true names’ (if such ever existed). That is why he takes up the question of language again in the Sophist suggesting a reconfiguration and re-mapping of meaning such that words get to coincide with their true signification. A pivotal moment for philosophy, but also one that occurs in medias res, in the thick of action, and not at the beginning of time or some supposedly glorious past of linguistic purity. Thus Plato puts in motion a process that is in principle repeatable, which means: the task is not over; every generation has to take it up anew, re-discovering for itself the conditions for a more truthful and authentic relation to the world. Thus, ‘nature’ in Plato gets detached from sensibility and becomes a guiding thought for just such a relation. Although this detachment has been the object of philosophical critique from Aristotle to the present-day, it has achieved a remarkable change in how ‘nature’ is to be understood. By grounding ‘nature’ in ideality, Plato allows us to challenge conceptions of the ‘natural’ which are themselves based on a superficial generalisation from experience or from what can be perceived. In fact, Socrates’ treatment of ‘female natures’ in the Republic seems surprisingly modern given his admonition not to be carried away by apparent differences between men and women—differences which are still today ‘naturalised’ and considered to derive from some primordial reality that grounds and determines beings.

2   Are We Done with Nature? But the forms aside, everything in nature also has a sensuous side whose status in Plato’s thought remains ambiguous, at times valued and cherished (such as eros in the Symposium), at other times denigrated and scorned (such as the body in the Phaedo). And so we find the occurrences of ‘nature’ in the dialogues to be burdened by an ambivalence; although

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‘nature’ emerges as a positive value, a guide to lead our pursuit of truth, it is also marked by inherent negativity. The ‘pig city’, for instance, though built on natural principles, is abandoned in favour of fabricated forms of political community—which are better able to protect the polis from inflammation—as if nature suffers from an essential vulnerability, an instability, which requires the services of the political technē to put right. In this fabricated community, ‘natural’ affiliations and kinships are consistently rejected and supplanted by other kinds.1 Similarly, the desire for luxuries in the Republic is taken to be synonymous with an inflammation of the psyche, and an analogous inflammation of political association. Here sensuousness operates in two ways: a necessary and even welcome element in certain contexts (such as, for example, in the ‘pig city’, which allows for ‘relaxation, singing, the enjoyment of sex and children, worship of the gods, and being together with one another in community’),2 sensuousness is also maligned as a peculiar form of tyranny that afflicts people and cities, and finds its expression philosophically in Thrasymachus’s definition of justice as ‘the advantage of the stronger’.3 This ambiguity concerns not just sensuousness but nature itself. Notice that the question ‘what is nature? is not directly raised in Plato’s dialogues.4 This is significant; we might take it to mean that Plato did not think there was a unifying thread connecting all the various instances of the word ‘nature’, which the interlocutors could painstakingly attempt to trace out and bring to light. Or it could mean that pedagogically nature does not serve as well as other concepts (e.g. virtue or courage) as an entry point into the maze of critical enquiry on which Socrates takes his interlocutors. However that may be, the fact that this question is not raised as such suggests a crucial resistance; nature cannot properly become a self-­ referential object. We can, following Aristotle and Hegel, speak of thought thinking itself, making itself the object.5 But can we speak of nature in that way? And if we can’t, what are the implications for those of us who do not think we are ‘done’ with nature, whilst also acknowledging that nature is not a ‘given’ on which we can unproblematically ground our most fundamental political categories? The first thing to keep in focus is that nature’s resistance to its incorporation within a self-referential framework works in two different directions at once. On the one hand, it suggests that the enquiry has not reached its terminus of attaining a single definition of nature that is all-encompassing and complete; on the other, there is no doubt that ‘nature’ continues to inform our discourses about the ontological structure of the world.

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Consider this passage from Stephen Shore’s book The Nature of Photographs: ‘[t]his book explores ways of understanding the nature of photographs; that is, how photographs function; and not only the most elegant or graceful photographs, but all photographs made with a camera and printed directly from the negative or a digital file. All photographic prints have qualities in common’.6 One is struck by how familiar the terms that inform this discourse sound; if something is in the nature of X (in this case, a photograph), then all Xs (have to) have it. If only some photographs were to display a certain property y, then surely y would not be in the nature of photographs. Nature then becomes the principle of classification, because classification is the practice of dividing (recall diairesis) all things according to the rule, ‘what is it that makes X, X (e.g. a dog, a dog)’? But then if things have an essence (presumably made intelligible when we raise the question ‘what is a dog?’; ‘what is a photograph?’; ‘what is virtue?’ etc.), and this essence is disclosed by means of raising the question of the nature of that thing, then nature is that by virtue of which the question of essences can be raised. And that is why nature itself cannot be an ‘essence’, namely because its status is not the same as that of the other terms it helps define (dogs, photographs, etc.), but that by virtue of which the very possibility of such a definition is first broached in the history of Western thought. But of course, the fact that nature is not an essence does not mean that it has escaped essentialism. Every effort to define the content of ‘nature’, however, (for example, ‘human nature’) has led, sooner or later, to a basically restrictive framework of political discourse even though initially, at least, the clarion call ‘Return to Νature!’ may carry a certain liberatory cachet. Part of the reason for this is that a view of nature as contentful ignores the fact we highlighted above, namely that nature does not have an ‘essence’ and therefore differs from the things of which the question ‘What is X?’ can be raised. Plato was aware of this, that is why his references to ‘nature’ at times sound odd; thus, he has Socrates say in the Timaeus, when recounting the account of the kallipolis he had offered the previous day, ‘we even made mention of women. We said that their natures [phuseis] should be made to correspond with those of men [sunarmosteon]’ (18c, my emphasis). The use of a verbal adjective indicating ‘necessity’ (or ‘imperious duty’, as an older-day grammarian once put it)7—sunarmosteon—suggests that these ‘natures’ are not pre-given but are rather a plastic reality. One might view this as evidence of Plato’s engineering intent, as Popper might have done; alternatively, one might see it as part of a

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rationale that continues to be guided by the thought of nature without presuming to derive the institutional architecture of the kallipolis from supposedly inherent qualities of men and women.

3   Nature, the Speculative If we have thus shown how difficult it is to ‘be done’ with nature at the most basic level of ontological discourse—irrespective of whether it recognises itself as such—it still remains to be seen how Hegel re-interprets nature speculatively and transforms it into an interstice where the sensuous and the non-sensuous—the intelligible, thought—can legitimately co-­ exist. We have seen that Hegel endorses Plato’s critique of Cratylian naturalism, and yet, at the same time, revels in the celebration of sensuousness that Cratylism represents. At first sight, this might seem like a plain contradiction; it starts to make more sense once we realise that Hegel’s philosophical terms have been subjected to an operation of resignification that lifts them from their customary associations and endows them with a new meaning without the need for new terms. Thus, ‘sensuousness’ in Hegel is not simply defined by means of its position within an oppositional structure that includes mind or nous at the other end. Much like ‘becoming’, which we examined in Chap. 4, or the human body, which Hegel discuses in LFA, ‘sensuousness’ is determined as a horizon that points towards another reality, mind or nous, not as its exclusionary opposite, but as that which develops at its limit. If to define, therefore, is to delimit, i.e. to establish the conceptual boundaries of a thing, this process is also inevitably a de-limiting, a recognition that the limit is itself malleable, and literally shifts and moves as we approach it. It might be helpful to approach this difficult notion by means of a brief detour via Hegel’s concept of God; if ‘God’ is another name for the Hegelian Absolute, we also need to be clear that in Hegel God does not merely play a religious or theological role; ‘God’ is also that instance in the system that holds the infinite chain of signification in place. Thus, God for Hegel provides a meaning for the births and deaths and the events in history, a history which is not only human, but equally divine: we recall that, according to Hegel, God had to externalise himself by becoming incarnated and experiencing finitude and death. Of course, the event of resurrection marks an important departure from human finitude; however, this departure is not irrelevant to human destiny, on the contrary, it is the condition that makes an otherwise contingent string of events a

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meaningful whole. From a certain point of view, the resurrection escapes history; a merely historical account of the death of Christ cannot do justice to what, for Hegel, this death represents spiritually. But like the law which has to produce tangible effects in the sensible world, the externalisation of God also has to produce such effects and register in history. One might be inclined to question this: is there, could there ever be a witness that actually saw Jesus the moment he came out of the grave?8 But then, what is an event that no one could have ever witnessed? Rather it is an un-historical event, an event that is not and cannot be registered in history. And yet, this event which cannot be directly perceived is also that which, according to Hegel, makes of history something comprehensible despite the violence and brutality with which history has been ravaged.9 This structure, which requires an un-historical event (or, in another version, a ‘supreme point’—let us recall Hegel’s critique of Fichte in ‘NL’ on account of the latter’s conception of the state as one in which all wills remain wholly immanent) suggests a subtle and complex relation between that which is inside the system and that which, being outside it, conditions and completes it. Of course, we know that for Hegel everything is system; this has sometimes been interpreted as a totalising tendency in Hegel’s thought which, by refusing to allow a transcendent instance outside the system, brings philosophy, and indeed politics, to a close. An alternative interpretation would be to attend to how Hegel stages the confrontation between two dialectically opposed elements, for example Platonism and Cratylism. Where another philosopher would see disagreement and strife, evident in the exchange of arguments and the defence of two divergent theses, Hegel also sees what is common to both. Thus, Hegel denies the ‘either/or’ which epitomises much of modern philosophy’s approach, inviting us instead to think the ‘both’—not as a simplistic strategy of escaping the dilemma—but rather as part of the difficult task that requires us to think how something can be both itself and also not itself. It is this aspect of Plato’s thought that Hegel valued; thus, he praises Plato for ‘bringing-together things that in representation are distinct from one another (being and non-being, one and many, and so forth), so that we are not just passing over from one to the other’ (Brown 2: 202). Similarly with Plato’s notion of nature; without wishing to ignore the profound transformation undergone by the concept of nature in the stretch of time that separates Hegel from Plato (most importantly, with the emergence of modern natural science), it is fair to say that Hegel finds in Plato resources that allow him to criticise the modern, one-sided

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conception of nature as mechanical necessity, and therefore as something foreign to human freedom. Crucially, this helps him formulate a notion of nature not solely as a circumscribed region—although such a region does exist and makes its own legitimate claim to be examined in its own right— but as an articulated space where natural and non-natural instances intersect. In this way, nature in Hegel’s thought is both totality or the whole (in the pre-Socratic sense of ‘the all’) and something that is less than the whole (the totality of natural things as studied by natural science). Its unity, in other words, consists in the dynamic co-presence of both opposing realities, not unlike how the soul in Plato strives for unity amidst division and strife. To attempt to erase one side of these realities in the name of clarity or analytical precision would be like seeking to excise desire from the Platonic soul on the grounds that humans would be better off without it. Conversely, to endeavour to eliminate the distance between them would result in a suppression of difference that is as theoretically untenable as it is politically ill-advised.

4   The Sense of an Ending Thus, Hegel incorporates the possibility of meaninglessness as a moment— indeed, a necessary moment—within his system, rather than something that stands outside the system and threatens it with dissolution. We will find evidence of this in Hegel’s conception of Platonic Ideas, which must not be represented, says Hegel, as transcending ‘or lying wholly outside’ the world (Brown 2: 196). For Hegel such transcendence would compromise the necessary relation between multiplicity and the One, pure unity and manifold being;10 and yet, it would also be a facet of an essential aspect of the system that, as we have seen, requires an external point as the system’s condition of possibility. That is why it is important for Hegel to lay claim to Plato’s idealism at the same time as he diverges from it in important respects: metaphysically, the Hegelian system both requires transcendence and demands its Aufhebung. The liminal or borderland figures of God and the monarch, which occur at critical junctures of the Hegelian system, are meant to play precisely this role, namely to ensure that the sphere of nature—i.e. the sphere of sensible testimony and verification, indeed the world of human interests and passions—is not foreign to the sphere of spirit, but rather articulates on to that sphere and is reconciled with it.

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It might be tempting to consider this restoration of the sensible, finite world to its rights as the attainment of a final completion of Western philosophy, which effects, through Hegel’s thought, an Aufhebung of the oppositions with which it started: those between nature and spirit, body and mind, the sensible and the intelligible. But such completion is double-­ edged; isn’t it equally possible to view the Hegelian system not as the end-­ point in a long philosophical and historical development but also as a slow realisation that a world in which meaning is not absolute is by the same token a world in which meaning has to be re-negotiated anew? It might be objected that God in Hegel’s thought is the linchpin that holds the entire system in place; but doesn’t the system demand that God relinquish his exclusivity from the world, fall from grace, and become like all the other instances that inhabit the system—instances that at the limit morph into something else? As Derrida puts it, ‘cannot God of himself fall into the finite, incarnate himself, become his own proper example, play with himself as the infinite becoming finite (death) in order to reappropriate his infinity, to repeat the spirit?11 Such a fall from grace would thus mark an ending, namely the end of a world whose sense is known to us, and, at the same time, the beginning of a process of resignification, which we have no idea at this point how it will play out. Politically, this means that the certainties of the past are now defunct. But the resignification under way does not take place in a vacuum but, like Plato’s Sophist, in the midst of political and existential exigencies that call for thoughtful action and urgent intervention. It is not possible to empty out the ‘old’ concepts from content before a new politics can take shape—and perhaps it is not desirable either. What is possible, however, is to try to judiciously think and act upon the crises of our time without forgetting that what lies at the end of a horizon is not always plain to see. Upon this path, the thought of Hegel will be a valuable companion, because Hegel is no stranger to the anxieties that beset us, indeed because Hegel is, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, ‘the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world’; This world perceives itself as the gray world of interests, oppositions, particularities, and instrumentalities. It therefore perceives itself as a world of separation and of pain, a world whose history is of one atrocity after another, and whose consciousness is the consciousness of a constitutive unhappiness. It is, in every respect, the world of exteriority from which life withdraws, giving way to an endless displacement from one term to the next that can neither be sustained nor gathered in an identity of meaning. Never again can

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this displacement regain the moment of a transcendence that would raise it toward a supreme signification. It knows the possibility of a death which has no inner signification’, that is, the possibility of the death of signification itself.12

Notes 1. On the ambiguities of Plato’s political thought see also Gary K. Browning, Plato and Hegel: Two Modes of Philosophizing About Politics (New York: Routledge, 2012), especially chapter 2. 2. Marina McCoy, ‘The City of Sows and Sexual Differentiation in the Republic’, in Plato’s Animals. Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and Other Philosophical Beasts, ed. Jeremy Bell and Michael Naas (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015), 149. 3. On the tyrannical man, cf. Republic 578a where this man is said to be ‘maddened by his desires [epithumiō n] and erotic loves [erō tō n]’. 4. Notably, Hegel does raise the question ‘what is nature’, albeit in a long Addition that prefaces the beginning of the text in the Philosophy of Nature. See PN, p. 3. 5. Cf. de Laurentiis: ‘It is only when thinking has itself as its object—as in the system-identifying concepts of philosophic theories: idea, nous, god, res cogitans, substance, monad, reason, mind—that Hegel refers to its movement as development. In the 1820 introduction, in particular, he makes it explicit that self-referentiality is the differentia specifica of genuinely speculative thinking over against all other modes of thought’. Allegra de Laurentiis, Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World: On Hegel’s Theory of Subjectivity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 25. 6. Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs: A Primer, 2nd ed. (London: Phaidon Press, 2007), 8. 7. Peter Bullions, The Principles of Greek Grammar: Comprising the Substance of the Most Approved Grammars Extant, for the Use of Schools and Colleges and Academies, 3rd ed. (New York: Robinson, Pratt & Co, 1843), 85. 8. Cf. the following from an anonymous transcript of the 1827 lectures: ‘The overstepping of sensible verification: the church cannot undertake an investigation of it [the history of Christ] in a sensible manner’. (LPR 3: 326). 9. Cf. LPR 3: 326: ‘The history of resurrection and ascension of Christ to the right hand of God begins at the point where this history receives a spiritual interpretation’.

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10. Browning emphasises this aspect of Hegel’s thought in Gary K Browning, ‘Transitions to and from Nature in Hegel and Plato’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 13, no. 2 (1992): 1–12. 11. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 30. 12. Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 3.

References Browning, Gary K. 2012. Plato and Hegel: Two Modes of Philosophizing About Politics. New York: Routledge. ———. 1992. Transitions to and from Nature in Hegel and Plato. Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 13 (2): 1–12. Bullions, Peter. 1843. The Principles of Greek Grammar: Comprising the Substance of the Most Approved Grammars Extant, for the Use of Schools and Colleges and Academies. 3rd ed. New York: Robinson, Pratt & Co. de Laurentiis, Allegra. 2005. Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World: On Hegel’s Theory of Subjectivity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McCoy, Marina. 2015. The City of Sows and Sexual Differentiation in the Republic. In Plato’s Animals. Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and Other Philosophical Beasts, ed. Jeremy Bell and Michael Naas. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2002. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Shore, Stephen. 2007. The Nature of Photographs: A Primer. 2nd ed. London: Phaidon Press.

Index1

A Aristotle, 5, 9, 90n38, 104, 107, 117n3, 119n12, 121n26, 124n46 Aufhebung, 182, 183 B Becoming, 65, 69, 72, 73, 76, 78 Being, 63–66, 68–79, 81, 83, 85n7, 86n11, 86n14, 89n29, 156, 157, 160, 164, 165, 167, 171n21 and non-being, 12, 65, 86n11, 181 See also Nothing Body, 75, 88n25, 155, 157, 158, 161, 162, 166, 168n4, 170n9 C Civil society, 158–161, 163, 165, 166, 168n3, 169n7

D Definition, 47–49, 58n9 Derrida, Jacques, 116, 125n57, 172n23, 183, 185n11 Diairesis, 48, 50 E Economy, 100, 103–107, 121n26, 121n27 Essence, 7–10, 17n9, 25, 30–35, 39n19, 179 Ethical life, 140–142, 150n24, 156, 158, 159, 164 See also Sittlichkeit F Freedom, 4, 136, 140, 141, 143–145, 150n27, 155, 156, 160, 165 as choice, 140 Kantian notion of, 136, 155

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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© The Author(s) 2020 V. Roupa, Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52127-1

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INDEX

G Genos, 28, 38n11, 38n12 Guardian, 110, 115 I Ideality, 75, 81, 175, 177 J Jurisprudence, 131, 133, 136 Justice, 95, 106, 108, 109, 113, 114, 116, 117n1, 124n44, 133, 135, 142, 144, 150n25 L Language, 6, 10, 12, 13, 16n6, 24–26, 28, 32, 34, 37n6, 39n16, 40n22, 63, 64, 66–68, 70, 76–80, 83n1, 83n2, 84n4, 88n24, 89n30, 89n32, 89n33, 90n34, 90n35, 154, 176 artificial, 79, 80, 89n33 ideality of, 79 natural, 78, 80, 81, 90n35 as tool, 12 Law, 129, 131–135, 137, 138, 140, 147n5, 149n17, 154, 156, 163, 165–167, 169n5, 169n6, 171n20 Logic, 63–83 Logos, 65, 80, 84n5 M Meaning, 24, 29, 31, 32, 34, 38n11, 39n16, 46, 47, 56, 67, 70, 71, 75, 79, 81, 84n5, 175, 176, 180, 183 Mimesis, 24, 30–32, 34, 39n18

Monarch, 15, 161–167, 169n9, 170n13, 170n17, 171n20, 172n25 See also Sovereign Morality, 131, 133–136, 138, 139, 145, 147n5, 147n9, 149n17 N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 5, 16n3, 163, 171n18, 171n19, 183, 185n12 Naturalism, 11–13, 27, 33, 36n3, 44, 55, 56, 63, 81, 82, 154, 168n1, 175, 176, 180 Cratylian, 13, 32, 36n3, 175, 180 critique of, 11, 63, 175, 176 Natural law, 154 See also Right Nature, 1–10, 12–15, 16n4, 17n9, 17n11, 17n12, 18n14, 19n19, 24–28, 30, 31, 35, 39n20, 40n21, 55, 73, 80–82, 83n1, 85n7, 89n31, 90n38, 90n39, 91n40, 95–98, 100, 101, 103, 105, 109, 110, 112, 115, 116, 118n5, 121n24, 124n45, 124n46, 130, 135, 137, 140, 145, 146n2, 148n13, 148n15, 150n25, 153–156, 158–162, 164, 165, 167, 168n1, 168n2, 172n25, 175, 177–183, 184n4 concept of, 2, 5, 6, 13, 83, 95, 96, 135, 181 definition of, 2, 178 as essence, 9, 179 human nature, 3, 6, 97, 100, 104, 110, 118n5, 155, 179 as negative condition for politics, 4 state of nature, 4, 156 Nothing, 65, 69–74, 76–79, 83, 89n29

 INDEX 

P Plato, 3, 5–15, 16n5, 18n16, 18n17, 19n18, 23–36, 36n1, 36n3, 37n4, 37n5, 37n7, 38n9, 38n11, 38n12, 39n16, 40n22, 43–48, 50, 54–56, 57n1–5, 58n6, 58n9–11, 59n13, 59n14, 59n17, 60n19, 60n21–24, 63–65, 67, 70, 71, 75, 76, 80–82, 84n3, 84n5, 85n7, 85n8, 86n10, 86n12, 87n21, 90n34, 90n38, 90n39, 95–99, 101, 103–108, 110, 113–117, 117n1–3, 118n4, 118n5, 119n7, 119n11, 119n12, 120n18, 120n20, 121n23–25, 121n29, 122n30, 122n33–35, 122n38–40, 123n41–43, 124n44–47, 125n48, 125n54, 136, 142, 144, 146n2, 146n4, 148n13, 150n24–26, 154, 160, 175–183, 184n1, 184n2, 185n10 Polis, 23, 24, 32, 97, 100–102, 104, 106, 114, 118n5, 119n7, 122n33, 154, 178 Politics, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 14, 15, 23, 96, 97, 100, 105, 106, 110–114, 116, 118n4, 121n24, 125n48, 129–145, 149n20, 154, 167 in accord with nature, 5, 96, 97 ancient and modern, 14, 129, 130, 136 and the conduct of war, 116 and self-interest, 4, 5, 97 Positivism, 133, 137 Psyche, 98, 176, 178 See also Soul R Right, 129–136, 138, 141, 142, 147n8, 155, 156 distinction from law, 129 modern theory of rights, 14, 130 natural right, 4, 6, 130, 134

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S Sense, 3, 7, 8, 10, 15, 17n9, 18n14, 18n15, 32, 34, 47, 50, 55, 58n12, 65, 70, 73, 77, 79, 84n3, 88n27 Sensibility, 177 Sensible, 28–30, 32, 34, 38n10, 66, 67, 75, 76, 78–81, 155, 177, 181–183, 184n8 Sensuous, 33, 35, 67, 75, 79, 81, 88n27, 175, 177, 180 Sensuousness, 7–9, 15, 34, 66, 70, 75, 79, 175, 178, 180 Sign, 156, 164–167, 171n22, 172n24 Signification, 29, 39n15, 48, 65, 66, 177, 180, 184 Sittlichkeit, 135–145, 148n14 Socrates, 24–31, 33–35, 36n2, 37n5, 38n10, 38n11, 39n18, 40n21, 43–45, 58n8, 95, 97–99, 102, 103, 107–109, 111–114, 116, 118n5, 122n30, 122n36, 123n44, 124n45, 125n48, 125n50, 125n52 Soul, 105, 107, 113, 119n7, 121n24 Sovereign, 154, 155, 158, 160–163, 167, 171n20 Speculative, 6, 7, 10, 17n6, 17n7 Spirit, 155–158, 160, 164, 166, 167, 168n1, 169n6 State, 131–133, 135–137, 141, 142, 144, 147n8, 148n13, 150n25, 151n28, 154–156, 158–167, 168n2, 168n3, 169n7, 169n8, 170n10, 172n25

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INDEX

T Technē, 23, 24, 28, 35, 48, 100, 101, 123n40 craft, 39n20, 81, 90n38, 98–100, 106, 108; crafts-based economy, 105; political craft, 108; of ruling, 109 craftsmanship, 23, 25, 28, 82, 108

Thought, 63–66, 68–76, 78, 80, 81, 83, 83n3, 86n19, 87n21, 87n22, 88n27, 89n29, 89n32 Thrasymachus, 108, 109, 123n44 W War, 96, 97, 99, 102, 106, 107, 115, 130, 169n7