The political, in its classical sense, is the ordering of human community toward a vision of flourishing. Whether that vision is conceived first by one or a few, it must come to be shared in sufficient measure by the community in order to be effective. The vision may be articulated in an explicit account supported by rational arguments; it may be compressed into evocative myths of wise founders who, after a heroic struggle, hand down a sacred document. Often enough in history, both modes have come into play in securing the cognitive and emotional assent needed for coordination. In late modernity, however, the development of the political, so understood, has been one of pronounced failure. The failure has many symptoms across the venues of public life, from government to business, newspapers, film, television and, above all, the unending turbulence that is social media. In all of its manifestations it is marked by a certain unmooring of language and reason. The issues of the day arrive on the shores of our awareness like storms from the sea, arising from and guided by powers we do not see. We discuss the issues seriously and frivolously, soberly and wildly, calmly and angrily, astounded by the delusions of our fellow citizens, by their inability to see the obvious—just as they are astounded in regard to us. If this condition of epistemic disorder were limited to popular discourse one might be tempted to dismiss it as an unfortunate but inevitable condition of an imperfect world—has it not always been thus? But it is not so limited: we see the same unmooring coming acutely to pervade academia, elite media, and government, and the phenomenon seems to become more widespread and intense over time.
It is therefore apt to look again at language, reason, and the conditions that allow them to operate well. Fortunately, philosophy in its beginnings addressed just this question. It can help us to understand better our present situation and perhaps even see beyond it. Socrates contended that the needful conditions had to do with logos pursued in dialogos with others and—perhaps most puzzlingly to modern ears—ordered to the good. It is worth exploring the possibility that the heart of our troubles lies in the strong propensity of modern tendencies of thought to reject these conditions in both theory and practice. Beginning with Machiavelli, modern thinkers have grown ever more wary of the good, deeming it an untrustworthy guide for human practice. Many would deny the very existence of a good for humans beyond one so thoroughly socially constructed as to be arbitrary.
When in modernity reason, that prodigal son, left the house of its father, it did not intend to fall into weakness. No, it intended to march through nature like Xenophon with his ten thousand. For long, if one did not look too closely or think too deeply, it seemed to do so. Do we not fly across continents? Have we not split the atom? Has humanity not set foot on the moon and returned to tell the tale? When reason is constrained to a utilitarian instrumentality, reduced to—as Hume relates—a slave of the passions, it would seem to become a most formidable slave. Perhaps we should simply embrace Heidegger’s Gestell, the positionality of detached technique that now enframes our lives.
Alas, there comes a day when the son, far from his father’s house, begins to feel the consequence of wasting his substance with riotous living. Language is the outward expression of reason and the foundational bond of human life. The instrumentalization of reason drags language in its wake: reason detached from the good produces language detached from the truth. Such language, when it becomes a social norm, swiftly breaks down social trust. While reason so instrumentalized may seem to be strengthened in one dimension, as a jackhammer is more powerful than a pickaxe, it becomes highly vulnerable to attack in others. Postmodern thinkers have often embraced critiques of rationality and explored the non-rational sources of modern culture and institutions. With no little irony, these thinkers, beginning with Nietzsche, have often singled out Plato as a source of the problematic construction of reason, where they might well have looked to him for resources of repair. In Plato’s account, the things of the world are part of a larger whole, and reason must be ordered to the whole, like a well-designed building that seeks, as Christopher Alexander and others have put it, to “repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole.”1 Late modernity is working out the consequences of abandoning such an integrative perspective.
Technology
The disposition of reason bears directly on the development of technology. Following Machiavelli, Bacon elaborated a vision of reason in which its exercise precedes consideration of the whole and is instead directed from the start to utility. Separated from its ordering to the whole, reason undergoes an ironic transformation, becoming stronger in its narrowed channel and weaker in its integrative breadth, like flowing water constrained in a pinched hose. The knowledge it produces in the natural sciences becomes productive of technological power and the servant of social power. Specialized expertise in a limited domain delivers on the promise of power in that domain, while becoming incapable of grasping the whole. Indeed, the whole is now occluded, creating the illusion that such expertise extends to all there is.
Technology is developed to great effect to solve the material aspect of problems while providing no understanding of either itself or the problems it is summoned to solve. To give just one of many examples, psychiatric medications are often used to address problems of social dislocation that are poorly understood. When technology is wielded by and welded to social power to form technocracy, it follows the sophist in reducing reason to manipulation. The will to power that drives such manipulation reflects not an inflation of reason but its degeneration. When his curtain is pulled back, the Wizard of Oz is exposed not as a genius puppet-master but as a bit of a fool. We need only think of the prevarications of public health officials, whose expert claims are directed to aims other than truth often enough to render postmodern critiques superfluous.
Language
All technologies—and especially those that relate to our use of language, which is so closely bound to our humanity—exert a force that, if not skillfully controlled, displaces us from that humanity. Writing is the paradigmatic example of such a technology. Socrates’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus has sometimes been misunderstood as a cultural bias against writing; rather, it is an analysis of the characteristic ways in which communication can break down in reading the written word. This critique is therefore worth considering as preparation for any examination of more advanced technologies of communication.
Socrates observes that writing is not logos, the “living and breathing word of him who knows” (Phaedrus, 276a). Instead, writing works by creating an image of logos that necessarily becomes dissociated from the human who produces it. The image, being fixed, is like an uneducated servant who can only deliver a message by rote.
Every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it. (Phaedrus 275d-e)2
If a speaker is the parent of words, the writer is a kind of absentee landlord of them. Even if he has written carefully, he is no longer present with them to guide their reception. Worse, because he is not present to the reader, he faces a greater temptation to form his words without care for the recipient. Thus, writing, so powerful a tool when used as a reminder of what we know (278a), can instead become a tool that induces a kind of forgetting (275a).
These dangers of writing only become magnified in modern social media, which can be understood as a kind of hyper-writing. Because they are widely and quickly shared, writings in social media are not merely individual acts of communication but give rise to a media ecology.3 Advances in media technology continue to “annihilate time and space,” in Marx’s colorful phrase, reducing the latency of communication while rendering it less embodied, less modulated by voice, facial expression, and the physical presence of a partner in dialogue. Social media thus tends to weaken regard for discretion and care in the formation of words. Its native modes of communication are conducive to faction, quite apart from external interventions or attempts at manipulation. When these tendencies are allowed to flourish, social media becomes a resonant locus for the malady that Socrates diagnosed as logos-hatred.
Logos-hatred
In the Phaedo, Socrates identifies and warns of a particular mode of failure for dialogue and reasoning. He gives it the name misologia, or logos-hatred, a distrust of verbal, explanatory accounts that culminates in contempt for them. Socrates declares that logos-hatred is the greatest evil that a human can suffer (Phaedo 89d). This stark judgment rests of the relation of logos to human nature. Humans are distinct from other animals in their use of language, and it is through language that they can engage with each other and the world in a higher way. Language is not merely a form of social signaling, although it is also that. Bound up with thinking, it is the human means of expressing reality, both to oneself and to others. As Heidegger poetically puts the matter, “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.”4 Hence, the corruption of one’s relation to language corrupts one’s very humanity. Logos-hatred is the worst of evils because it combines the evils of subjectivism (Phaedo 83c) with those of misanthropy (89d). With logos-hatred, one comes to hate not merely other humans but the very capacity that makes one human. Such contempt for the reasoned use of language quickly turns to its manipulation, first in the many forms of prevarication, great and small, then in outright lying. Yet however far such mendacious speech progresses, it always remains parasitic upon truth. Through logos-hatred, the prisoners in the cave chain themselves, yet the shadows that dance on the walls are still cast by realities.
Those who suffer from logos-hatred do not lack the capacity for logos. On the contrary, they often retain great skill in the use of language, which often gives rise to the unhappy circumstance of speaking both artfully and falsely. Socrates considered this possibility as the heart of sophistry. Aiming at persuasion rather than truth, the sophists use words to cast a spell that blocks access to reality while generating a convincing illusion (Sophist 234c). They use speech to generate, as it were, a virtual reality. Sophism is not pursued at random but for the sake of power. For this reason, it frequently employs flattery and conduces in the end to tyranny.
Far from merely a weakness of the individual psyche, in our time logos-hatred has become culturally entrenched and reinforced, even intellectualized. In this stronger form, it is worse than a lack of knowledge or even acuity. It attacks the means of distinguishing the reasonable from the unreasonable and comfortably denies that there is a need to do so. It is not disturbed by holding contradictory positions. All the while, it is not embarrassed to claim to be as reasonable as anyone else. One should not imagine that logos-hatred plainly and consistently renounces reason. On the contrary, it is happy to appeal to reason when it suits a present cause and just as quickly abandon it when it does not. Reason is treated like a courtesan whose services are gladly accepted in the moment but with no greater loyalty. Logos-hatred can alternate between dogmatism and relativism in quick succession because reason can be suspended upon demand. When it wishes to present an acceptable face, it casts itself as a pragmatism, although one in which understanding is valued only for its uses. More often, it deprecates philosophy as not merely as missing the mark but as being essentially “fake.” Faced with any painful political problem, it denies that the problem might involve logos-hatred itself. In late modernity, logos-hatred has come to be systematized in the coordination of media for political propaganda and commercial advertisement. Such intense and broadly disseminated manifestations of logos-hatred place those subjected to it in a cave beneath the cave.
What is Logos?
To understand more fully what Socrates means by logos-hatred, one must inquire into the meaning of logos. Although it is often translated simply as “reason,” it does not mean “reason” in the senses that came to dominate modern thought, which often seek skeptically to curtail the acceptable domains of knowledge. Logos, as Socrates uses the term in Plato’s dialogues, requires a faith in the reality of the good and the ordering of the human psyche to it. Without such an ordering, there could be no logos in the relevant sense. Heidegger notes that the etymological sense of logos is “gathering,” which suggests the collecting of thought by the thinker. In Plato’s Theaetetus and Sophist, logos allows for the meaningful communication of ideas. It forms the heart of inquiry, enabling the ascent from ignorance to knowledge. In the Republic, the highest epistemic state (noesis) requires a grasp of and the ability to express a logos of the ultimate cause, the pattern of the good (Republic 511b, 534b-c).
Logos, then, is an explanatory account, verbally expressed. It is a deliverance of reason rather than the capacity for reason, which it presupposes. To use a simple word of Anglo-Saxon derivation, we could translate it as “reckoning,” taken as a noun. Logos does not automatically or infallibly grasp the true and the good; it is the means by which one can search for and attain the true and the good. Hence, logoi themselves can be right or wrong. Right logoi play a central role simultaneously in ethical and epistemic life. The virtuous person “keeps his pleasures and pains harmonious with and following the right logoi” (Laws 696c). The right logos is both prescriptive, stating that something is good, and explanatory, giving an account of what makes it good in terms of the human telos. Aristotle characterizes the human as zoon logon echon, the animal that possesses logos (Nichomachean Ethics 1098a3-5), which is what makes it possible for the human also to be zoon politikon, the animal of the polis. Logos-hatred thus undercuts the latter possibility.
The Good and the Psyche
Plato holds that the good is the basis for reason and the explanation of human knowledge. He critiques conceptions of reason not ordered to the good as leading to the fragmentation of thought. From this perspective, the proper response to logos-hatred lies in the reorientation of reason to the good. Plato describes the good as that “which must bind and hold all things together” (Phaedo 99c), pointing to its relation to the whole. To understand a part fully, one must understand the whole in which it is found, just as to understand a whole, one must understand its parts. Reason is ordered to the good when it is comprehensive in its concern for the whole in both space and time. A design is defective when it pursues particular concerns in isolation from the whole.
When it comes to Plato’s eidos—literally a “look” or “appearance,” but conventionally translated as “form” or “idea”—Christopher Alexander’s notion of a “pattern” can help us understand what Plato meant by it. Contrary to Nietzsche, Plato’s eidei are not things existing in some other world, a supposed “Platonic heaven.” Rather, they are the true patterns of the things of our familiar world, changing and imperfect as it is. The analogy of the divided line (Republic 509d–511e) is not a doctrine of multiple worlds but a theory of the patterns that characterize and explain the one world. Understanding eidos as pattern opens a window on Plato’s language. He tells us that an eidos is the explanation (aitia) of the things that participate in it and that the eidos of the good is the ultimate explanation of all things. Reason, in his view, is a kind of knowing desire for the pattern of the good.
In the Republic, Plato unfolds the relation between reason and the good by dividing the psyche into three parts. Each of these parts combines a distinct kind of knowing and desiring, and is distinguished by its characteristic objects of desire. Thus, conflicts within the psyche are conflicts among different kinds of desire, not between desire and a reason lacking desire. Reason itself is the highest of kind of desire, namely desire for the good pursued through knowledge of truth.
The lowest part of the psyche (ephithmetikon) desires bodily ends such as food and sex. The middle part (thumoeides) desires social ends such as honor and is responsible for reactions such as anger. The highest part is the logistikon or “reckoner,” and it is also characterized by its desires. It is the lover of learning (philomates) and the lover of wisdom (philosophon) (Republic 581b9). Its overarching desire is for the good. In fact, the desire for the good itself, pursued by means of logos, just is this highest part of the psyche. Whereas the lower parts of the psyche are concerned with the good of some part of human life, bodily or social, the logistikon is concerned with the good of the whole, encompassing all of life and ultimately the cosmos. It is this whole on behalf of which it reckons. The lower parts of the psyche must be properly trained to be able to follow reckoning (Republic 2-3), while reckoning itself must be trained by philosophy (5-7). Knowledge of the good, the pattern of things, provides this capability (6). Reckoning comes to rule over the psyche when one learns to act upon its apprehension of the good.
Ascent and Descent
The Republic’s account of dialectical ascent to the pattern of the good (Republic 6-7) is paralleled by Diotima’s account in the Symposium of erotic ascent to the pattern of beauty (Symposium 210a-211d). Just as the ascent in the Republic is led by a single desiring part of the psyche (logistikon), Diotima’s ascent involves a single desire (eros) directed progressively upward, from the beauty of bodies to that of the psyche, to social institutions, to knowledge, and finally to the pattern of beauty. Eros is the desire for union to which beauty is the guide, and though it begins with the biological, it is most perfectly achieved in the vision of beauty itself. The dialectical ascent in the Republic takes place in the same way. Knowing and desiring work hand in hand. The desires of the lower parts of the psyche are never superseded but come to be regulated by reckoning through intra-psychic persuasion. Philosophy acts as an askesis or spiritual training for the reckoning and the lower parts of the psyche alike, enabling all the parts to work harmoniously together and so transforming one’s life.5 The images of the phenomenal world do not disappear, but they are now understood as images and not mistaken for ultimate realities. Thus the erotic ascent of the Symposium and the dialectical ascent of the Republic are one and the same ascent of erotic reckoning.
Because reason is embedded within a context ordered to the good, logos is one form of askesis alongside others. The most important truths must both be articulated in explanatory accounts and demonstrated in action. Conversely, every human action is implicitly a claim regarding some aspect of the good. Logos-hatred can only be answered by a logos that is enfolded in action. Logos is like a building whose architectural design should not be an isolated abstraction but one that coheres internally in form and externally with its surroundings. Each of Plato’s dialogues is architected in this sense, arranging arguments into the enacted whole of a drama. Philosophy is unveiled in that drama, through the action of the characters. To read the dialogues adequately requires both watching what the characters do and considering what they say. This consideration applies above all to Socrates. The final act of the philosopher is the return to the cave, as Socrates in the Republic goes down to Piraeus, bringing a vision of the good.
In the vision of philosophy as askesis, theoria and praxis are not in opposition. The pursuit of theoria, the elaboration and vision of the good, is itself an essential part of praxis, contributing to one’s transformation. The desire for the good of the whole is not an effort to change reality so much as to conform oneself to it. This effort is not easy; on the contrary, “the noble is always difficult” (Republic 435c). More broadly, praxis encompasses the deliberate cultivation of protected social spaces in which the pursuit of logos can flourish. Plato’s Academy, originally personal, informal, and not much like an institutional school, was such a space. Philosophy, which bears so closely on community in its study of ethics and politics, can only be pursued well in community. To reach its ultimate ends, dialectic requires not only interlocutors but friends.
First Critical Theory
Socrates’ critiques of writing and sophism are critical theory in nuce. The production of images of logos has only become a greater problem in our day. The late-modern institutions and technologies of the culture industry6 have amplified the negative aspects of writing and other human-generated imagery, producing the spectacle at industrial scale.7 Employing these social technologies and symbiotic with them, we now have a hypertrophy of sophism structurally embedded and amplified in the institutions of our economy, encompassing news, entertainment, social media, and many instruments of government.
Yet, for all its scale, sophism has only become less, not more, persuasive to those who seek the good, and they will find that Socratic philosophy remains incisive in its diagnosis of sophism and its prescription. Socratic philosophy is critical from its first instance, beginning with the critique of opinion (doxa) as received from communities and moving toward knowledge by means of logos. Any attempt to step apart from the belief systems constructed and propagated by the institutions of one’s society, if it seeks the good of the whole and not merely a different exercise of power, is at least incipient philosophy. The Republic, in this sense, is both critical and philosophical. The ascent from the cave, with its movement from positioned images to unconcealment (aletheia), is at once educational, practical, and social. Socratic philosophy, as developed by Plato and Aristotle, is a powerful if difficult guide to navigation at many levels, from the personal to the political.
In the last hours before his death, Socrates recounted his youthful intellectual turn away from the enthusiastic study of material causes that he had pursued until he realized that they could not explain “what is good for all in common” (Phaedo 97b-98b). He then undertook what he called his “second sailing,” seeking through logos the pattern of the good (98c-99d). If we wish to address the failure of the political and the hobbling of reason, we too must undertake the second sailing of erotic reckoning, the first and true critical theory.
Notes
- Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), xiii.
- Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Greek with translation by Harold N. Fowler. Loeb Classical Library 36. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982 [1914]).
- Neil Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum,” in High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, ed. A. C. Eurich (New York: Pitman Publishing, 1970), 160-168.
- Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings: Nine Key Essays, plus the Introduction to Being and Time, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 193.
- Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercise from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1995).
- Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin S. Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002).
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014).