Lovers of Sophia

by Jason Reza Jorjani

  However, he notes that in other dialogues such as Statesman, Plato does acknowledge the double meaning of pharmakon, though for

  Plato, even in its ‘positive’ sense, a pharmakon is only a medicine to be employed when all else fails and the stakes are life or death.

  Most interestingly, Derrida notes how though Plato seems to insist

  on taking pharmakon negatively, he often describes Socrates as a pharmakeus or “sorcerer”, one who administers the pharmakon.

  Derrida quotes one such instance as follows:

  Cebes: Probably even in us there is a little boy who has these

  childish terrors. Try to persuade him not to be afraid of death as

  though it were a bogey. –What you should do, said Socrates, is to

  say a magic spell over him every day until you have charmed his

  fears away. –But, Socrates, said Simmias, where shall we find a

  magician who understands these spel s now that you are leaving

  us?70

  It is very significant that this quote comes from Phaedo. For, as Derrida notes, the supposed ‘hemlock’ that Socrates drinks in

  70 Ibid.,

  Phaedo: 77e.

  77

  lovers of sophia

  the death scene is referred to by Plato in only general terms – as

  a “pharmakon.” Derrida does not clearly draw out the implications of all of this, limiting himself instead to subtle suggestions. As the conclusion of my interpretation, I dare to suggest that the dramatic

  character Socrates, as he appears in the dialogues, was indeed

  conceived by Plato as a kind of pharmakeus, a “witch doctor” or black magician, who administers the pharmakon of Platonic idealism –

  the wel spring of the entire history of occidental rationalism with all of its consequences.

  Plato removes himself from this shady figure because he knows

  that in one sense he is poisoning people, but only in order to cure

  them of a far greater evil: the blinding epidemic of Homeric myth.

  In his study Preface to Plato, Erick Havelock interprets the Republic as an attack by Plato on the poetic experience of his time as mimesis (imitation or simulation [of reality]).71 Plato is obsessed with the

  psychology of the audience’s response to the arts and he uses the

  word mimesis to describe the entire “poetic experience”, thereby refusing to differentiate between different genres or the role of

  creator (poet), actor (reciter), and audience (listener-viewer). In his time, poetry was something very different from what it is today. Fifth century Greece was a “semi-literate” society. The new technology

  of writing had been invented for some time. However, only certain

  elites were literate. Even this limited literacy was not universalized.

  There were different styles of writing, and spelling and mechanics

  were somewhat arbitrary. Though the new technology had already

  been conceived, the people of an essential y tribal society were still in the unreflective mindset of the oral tradition – one that had been

  ingrained in the cultural consciousness for thousands of years.

  Amidst this setting, poetry was not the thought-provoking art that we know it as today. More practical than aesthetic, it acted as a means to preserve and pass on cultural and moral authority and as a giant

  encyclopedia and history, when no other means existed. Havelock

  sees the passages in the Iliad and Odyssey that descriptively enact practical tasks such as shipbuilding, the historical documentation of

  71 Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Belknap Press, 1982).

  78

  jason reza jorjani

  the “catalogue of ships”, or the behavioral paradigms exemplified by

  Greek heroes as the primary content of those works, with the epic

  narrative as a secondary means of delivering the former into the

  consciousness of society. This means of deliverance is particularly

  potent when one considers how in the enactment of epic poetry, the

  message is literal y embodied in the dramatic physical movements

  of the bard who recites and its paradigms are thereby hardwired into

  the physiology of the audience, thus literal y composing the social

  fabric. Contemporary rap music of the “gangsta” variety might not

  be a bad analogy.

  A long treatment was needed, as long as western history itself, and

  for this, a very potent pharmakon was required. While Heraclitus and Parmenides understood the truth for themselves and condemned the

  Homeric tradition, they were not concerned about freeing masses of

  people from it. Their cryptic styles of writing make it clear enough

  that they in fact intended to conceal their pearls of wisdom from

  the sight of swine. The historical Socrates, Plato’s teacher, did try to shake Athens out of Homer’s spell and was swatted dead as a gadfly.

  The stakes were indeed life or death, and so the administration of

  the pharmakon seemed to Plato to be justified. He intended the exoteric content of his texts to be directly engaged by the intellectuals of his and following ages, while at the same time he hid an esoteric

  teaching between the lines more thoroughly than Heraclitus ever did

  – dropping a hint here and there for those initiated.

  In conclusion, I will consider one final hint, the only other

  one that belongs in the same class as “...I believe Plato was il ”. It is also from the Phaedo, when after a lifetime of condemning art as mimetic, in his last days Socrates has taken to writing poetry, because as he explains to Cebes:

  I did not compose [the poetry] to rival either [Evenus] or his

  poetry...I did it in the attempt to discover the meaning of certain

  dreams, and to clear my conscience, in case this was the art

  which I had been told to practice. It’s like this, you see. In the

  course of my life I have often had the same dream, appearing

  79

  lovers of sophia

  in different forms at different times, but always saying the same

  thing: “Socrates, practice and cultivate the arts [ musike].” In the past I used to think that it was impelling and exhorting me

  to do what I was actual y doing; I mean that the dream, like a

  spectator encouraging a runner in a race, was urging me on to

  do what I was doing already, that is, practicing the arts; because

  philosophy is the greatest of the arts, and I was practicing it.

  But when my trial had taken place, and this god’s festival was

  delaying my execution, I decided that, in case it should be this

  popular form of art that the dream intended me to practice, I

  ought to compose and not disobey... I reflected that a poet...

  ought to work on stories, not discourses; and I was no story-

  writer. So it was the stories that I knew and had handy which I

  versified – Aesop’s, the first ones that occurred to me.72

  Like the “...I believe Plato was il ” comment, we find the same

  juxtaposition of an earthshaking revelation delivered in an ‘Oh and

  by the way...’ tone. Socrates, the paragon of Philosophy’s rationalistic opposition to artistic mimesis is on the verge of death, and what!?

  – he doubts whether his entire life has been a betrayal of his cal ing

  ?!?! And he’s going to make up for it – how?! – by versifying a few of Aesop’s fables ?!?!

  The keen reader should pause here with the same heart-sinking

  feeling as Plato’s other billion dol ar clue demands. Something is

  very wrong with this picture. It is a terribly tragic image, precisely because of the benign tone with which Plato presents
it. It is a sad,

  even miserably forlorn scene. The ‘philosophy of Socrates’ is a lie that he has been living from one dialogue to the next... a noble lie, but a lie nonetheless. His calling was to be a great artist; Plato is one. His metaphysics is a pharmakon, one whose side effects have only just begun to wear off... but from the beginning, the poison hid the cure

  within itself. Plato’s metaphysics does not need to be deconstructed,

  for it has in the course of history always already been working itself as its own dialectical reversal.

  72 Hamilton,

  Collected Dialogues of Plato, Phaedo: 60e–61b.

  80

  BUILDING THE THEATER OF BEING

  According to the well-established scholastic tradition,

  Aristotle views the human being as one type of being

  among others – a rational species of animal – and he

  thinks that merely human affairs, such as Politics, are

  neither first in the order of being nor first in the order of knowledge.

  In the context of the Nicomachean Ethics, this view is strongly supported by two passages in Book VI, Chapter 7. The first one

  reads: “...it is absurd for anyone to believe that politics or practical judgment is the most serious kind of knowledge, if a human being

  is not the highest thing in the cosmos.”1 Closely following it is this passage, which explicitly asserts that a human is not the “highest”

  being: “And if it is the case that a human being is the best in

  comparison to the other animals, that makes no difference, for there

  are also other things that are much more divine in their nature than

  a human being, such as, most visibly the things out of which the

  cosmos is composed.”2 These passages suggest that Aristotle failed

  to recognize any fundamental ontological difference between the

  being of humans and that of other beings, no matter how celestial y

  rarefied.

  Nevertheless, in what follows, I argue that Aristotle already

  had the intellectual resources to conceive of humans not as beings

  alongside other non-human beings within the world, but as beings

  1 Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (New York: Penguin Books, 1971), 1141a21-23.

  2 Ibid., 1141a21-23.

  81

  lovers of sophia

  whose socio-political existence is constitutive of a ‘God’ that is not only the sustainer (as is usual y thought), but also the creator of

  the world (in the sense of perpetual creation). In fact, whether he

  realizes it or not, at times Aristotle seems to be doing just that and such a reading is required in order to resolve the basic contradiction in his system.

  Aristotle’s metaphysics is riddled with a deep internal

  contradiction. A God whose nature is pure thinking on thinking has no place in a world constituted by beings defined as substances that

  are each a particular this. God cannot be a unique this on account of his thinking for two reasons. First, man also has thinking as

  his essence. Aristotle proposes two distinct conceptions of human

  thinking. One of them, which more ordinarily characterizes

  human intellectual activity, seems wed to biological structure in

  a functionalist manner. While in this respect human thinking is

  different from that of God, we will see that Aristotle has another

  conception of human thinking that mirrors divine contemplation,

  and it is the latter faculty that Aristotle takes to be essential for

  human beings as such – even though it is rarely exercised. Second,

  since Matter is merely the potentiality for a specific form – and a

  substance is specifical y formed matter – if God is pure Actuality

  then God is all forms and not any given specific form. This would mean that God, as thinking on thinking, is not a substance (at least

  in the same sense as other substances), and thus is not subject to the four causes of substances. This raises the further problem of how an

  immortal human soul whose essence mirrors that of God as eternal

  thinking, and thus by definition is not subject to the four causes

  of substance, can be co-mingled with a body that is substantial y

  defined by these causes.

  Aristotle needs two premises in order to restore coherence

  to his Metaphysics. These two premises are: 1) God is identical

  to the essence of Man; 2) God is not only the sustainer, but also

  the creator, of all beings. This would resolve the metaphysical

  contradictions discussed above. God and man could share the same

  essence, and yet man would have a substantial form whereas God

  82

  jason reza jorjani

  would not, because God would simply be the essence of Man or an

  ‘interiority’ (conceived non-spatial y) of Man – a level of being more fundamental than that of the human substantial form. God could

  be conceived of within a world-picture of substances, since God is

  beyond the four causes defining Being ( ousia) only in that (as the essence of Man) He grounds the four causes defining each and every

  substance as a particular this.

  Even Aristotle’s conception of “the gods” does not compromise

  this interpretation. This hierarchical view of degrees of being

  ‘human’ – culminating in “god-like” philosophers – does, however,

  establish a radical inequality between citizens in respect to their

  relationship to civil law. Certain of Aristotle’s remarks on techne qua art and scientific craft suggest that these “god-like” thinkers whose

  task it is to set the tone of the polis, to establish its architectonic, are the master craftsmen responsible for building something like a

  ‘theater of Being.’ Their exercise of the active intellect may be seen as a condition for the possibility of pure potentialities in Nature

  manifesting as the beings that we encounter in our world.

  1. ‘God’ as the Creative Intellect of Man

  Before going on to specifical y treat God and the essence of Man, let

  us review Aristotle’s notion of how substance is defined in terms of

  the four causes, and in terms of potentiality and actuality. Aristotle’s metaphysics is a teleological one. It attempts to understand Being by

  discerning the causes of beings. By ‘cause’ ( aition) Aristotle actual y means the ‘explainer’, ‘why’ or ‘because’ of substances. The word

  should not be confused with its meaning in the modern conception

  of chains of material causes and effects manifesting as point-events.

  At 1013a24–1013b29 in his Metaphysics and 194b16–195a27 in his Physics, Aristotle defines the four causes of a substance as: 1) the

  “form” ( eidos) of the thing, which is not simply its shape but also its essence, its capacity for the use for which it was designed; 2) the “final cause” ( telos) or the actual usage that is the end or “that-for-the-83

  lovers of sophia

  sake-of-which” ( to hou heneka) it was designed and which is beyond the choice of even an intelligent organism (we can however choose

  to improperly fulfill our ends); 3) the “efficient cause” ( arche tes kineseos), that which is responsible for the movement of a substance, either from place to place or its movement in place (i.e. change, for

  example, the turning color of leaves); 4) the “matter” ( hule) that has the capacity to receive form, that cannot exist apart from some form

  because it is merely a potentiality for a certain form.

  In Book 7 ( Zeta) of his Metaphysics, considered by many to be the core of Aristotle’s thought, Aristotle argues that substance is

  wh
at is ontological y basic or ‘most real’. He categorizes four different candidates that claim to be “substantial”, finding that the essence, the universal and the genus of beings all satisfy its ‘whatness’ and can be collectively referred to as Form, while its aspect as a subject captures its ‘thisness’ and can be referred to as its Matter. Final y, he unifies these aspects of substance by equating Matter with “Potentiality”

  and Form with “Actuality”. Both are further divisible into two types:

  Matter is a first potentiality (this would be the clay of a bowl);

  Form is the first actuality (the bowl being appropriately shaped by

  a potter) and also the second potentiality (for use); the End or For-

  Which is a second actuality (the bowl actual y being used). In sum, a

  “substance” is now defined as: matter that has a certain form or end

  that gives it the cohesiveness that is so important for it being a this.

  There are two types of substances: 1) those made by nature ( phusis), which each have their own inner teleology, and those made by craft

  ( techne), which require human initiative.

  Now, bearing the terms of the Aristotelian definition of

  substance in mind, let us turn to examine God in its light. Aristotle’s idea of ‘God’ appears to differ radical y from the way we ordinarily

  conceive of God. He is the ultimate sustainer and ultimate good, but on most interpretations he does not seem to create the world as a

  product of techne (craft). God seems to explain the world not as an efficient cause, but as its final cause. It is what the whole world is towards or ‘for the sake of’. God does not act on the world. Rather,

  he only thinks and his thinking is not even about the world but

  84

  jason reza jorjani

  about himself. He thinks on his thinking. We see this in 1074b34

  of the Metaphysics. Thus Aristotle’s Prime Mover imparts end-

  directedness unto beings in the sense that they strive to partake in

  the eternity of his self-contemplation. In 415a27 of On the Soul we see how the threptic or “nutritive” soul reproduces to partake in the eternal and divine. The notion of reproduction as a means to the

  eternity of a species composed of perishable individuals is also seen

  at 731b18 of the Generation of Animals. In 279a25 of On the Heavens Aristotle claims that all things are for the sake of the eternity of God, we also see this at On the Soul 415a28. God himself is eternal on account of being completely actualized energeia, without any unfulfilled potential. Aristotle clearly states this in two vital passages at Metaphysics 1050b1-5,15-20 and 1071b20: