Tags
21st century, autobiography, G.W.F. Hegel, James Doull, Karl Marx, Nicholas Thorne, Plato, Socrates, Thrasymachus, Thucydides
My oldest friendship is with Nicholas Thorne, whom I met in the 1970s. That’s not a typo, even though he and I are in our mid-40s; the friendship began, so our parents say, when he crawled up to my house’s doorstep, before we were old enough to walk. He is probably the one who most sparked my interest in philosophy, when he studied in James Doull’s Hegelian department at Dalhousie University and was delighted by what he found. It was through him that I found my lifelong interest in Hegel. Eventually, both of us got our PhDs in philosophical fields but, as is so typical for our generation and those after, neither of us found long-term full-time faculty work.
Nevertheless, we both kept up our passion for philosophy and kept writing. I’m delighted that Thorne has now published a book, Liberation and Authority, and I’m pleased to review it here.
Liberation and Authority is a detailed and precise monograph on three classical Greek texts, not intended for the casual reader. It is well worth a read for anyone with a deep interest in Thucydides, Plato, or (especially) both. But I think more casual readers might still be interested in the book’s basic thesis, which, while it is about these classical texts, has more general ramifications.
In my reading, the name most notable by its absence from the book is Hegel’s – but I think this absence is a clever one. In the acknowledgements, Thorne notes his debt to Doull and his students; and I think the book’s argument is an extremely Hegelian one, which is exactly what one would expect from a student of Doull’s. But Hegel’s own name never appears. I suspect the reason is that Thorne does not want to be accused of illegitimately reading Hegel into the classics. He makes his claims entirely on the evidence of the texts themselves – and I think this strategy works well. It allows us to see how Hegel himself might have drawn a great deal of his own approach from his avid readership of the classics.
Thorne’s most striking section titles are “How Callicles Is Good” and “How Thrasymachus Is Good”. To readers familiar with Plato, these titles are counterintuitive at the least. Callicles and Thrasymachus are normally viewed as the bad guys of the Gorgias and Republic respectively, who articulate a nihilist, tyrannical view opposite to of the one Plato attributes to his hero Socrates. Thorne doesn’t dispute that Socrates and Plato see something deeply wrong with Callicles’s and Thrasymachus’s positions. Yet at the same time, these two antagonists have discovered something of crucial importance, something necessary for reaching the truth that is the dialogues’ goal. They thus represent what Hegel would call a negative moment (and what later Hegel scholarship would call an antithesis).
Callicles and Thrasymachus are both worse human beings, less polite, less kind, than are Gorgias and Cephalus, the friendly interlocutors with whom the respective dialogues begin. Yet Callicles and Thrasymachus are in crucial respects smarter. They have thought through their positions more deeply than their predecessors, in ways that bring them closer than their predecessors to the truth. And they are more interested in goodness, in figuring out what it is to be good, than Gorgias and Cephalus are. Cephalus is a very familiar sort of person, one who seeks agreement rather than truth: “The instant Socrates poses a genuinely critical question, Cephalus withdraws.” (233) And indeed, for the Greeks and for us, one purpose of conversation is to maintain social bonds and fellow-feeling; Cephalus’s approach is better suited to such a purpose than Thrasymachus’s is, and even than Socrates’s is. But that approach doesn’t get us any closer to understanding, and may even pull us away from it. We need the new perspectives of Callicles and Thrasymachus if we’re ever going to figure things out.
Where Plato’s texts connect to Thucydides is on the larger political and historical context: they are all addressing the breakdown of a previously unquestioned social-political order, the order of Pericles’s time. Cephalus and Gorgias represent that order; their arguments appeal to established authority, as Thrasymachus’s do not. But this order, it turns out, has failed; it has no intellectual underpinning, it doesn’t make sense anymore.
So, in each of the Gorgias and Republic, Socrates also has a second dialogue partner – Polus and Polemarchus respectively – who represents a middle position between the first and the last. Thorne argues that these middle characters are there to show a development from the first, least intellectually satisfactory, position to the third, more troubling but more reflective, position: a gradual process that allows reflection to emerge. Polus and Polemarchus feel the pull of the older authority but are more unnerved by its inability to “give an adequate account of itself”. And then:
Once such an ambiguous position has been reached, all that is required to produce a Thrasymachus is the combination of unscrupulousness and an intellect active enough to grasp the full consequences of the failure of tradition. For a failure there is: one only avoids all that Thrasymachus represents to the extent that one turns away from thought, accepting the traditional ethical order as given. The whole movement thus tends of its nature toward Thrasymachus: given critical thought, he seems to be the logical endpoint of what precedes him. (235-6, emphasis in original)
All of this, I think, brings us to the world of the late 2010s and early 2020s – a world changing faster than any other time I have known, one in which, in Marx’s words, “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” I think the thesis of Liberation and Authority offers us powerful tools to understand this new world. We are coming out of an old order that was unquestioned, whose presuppositions had ceased to make sense: the kind of order that the Republic represents with the unquestioning Cephalus. A negative moment was needed, one that dispenses with those unquestioned certainties – but one which is far less civil or friendly than the earlier. (Thus we see both Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach on the right and unapologetic defences of looting on the left.)
On such a view one question is left teasingly unanswered: when was the old order? To me, the clearest old order now knocked down would seem to be the world of the 1990s that George Bush the Elder had called the New World Order, an order continued by Clinton, Bush the Younger and Obama: a stable world under liberal capitalism, professing the values of democracy and individual freedom, where the equality of sexes and races was almost universally accepted in principle, and it was assumed to be good that people and money would move freely across national boundaries… but it accepted and continuing the relentless slashing of the welfare state begun under Reagan and Thatcher, since if you were poor and left behind by global capitalism, you clearly had yourself to blame. I didn’t shed too many tears for that world when Trump began sounding its death knell – though I’ve had plenty of occasion since then to miss it.
But Thorne wouldn’t necessarily agree. In one previous conversation, he had told me he thought the closer analogue with Cephalus might be the 1950s, in an order that believed itself universal while denying its benefits to women and nonwhite people – thus leaving itself open to legitimate challenges, which then got taken to extremes in 21st-century identity politics. And I think Doull himself might see the old unquestioned order as something even earlier: for Doull, Hegel’s own time represented a comfortable order that soon fractured into divisions based on ethnic identity and individual self-interest, a process that Doull saw continuing till the time of his death. In his view, our current tensions might be one more moment in a now-centuries-long conflict between ethnic collectivism and individual expression.
I think Hegel himself might endorse the view that there is something to all of these periodizations: new orders of unity attempt to reestablish themselves after negative moments, which then in turn get torn down by new negative moments. (Hegel himself sometimes seemed to think the order he lived in was the end of history – but he surely would have had to rethink that point, in something like the way Doull did, if he had lived to see its dissolution!) And I think that this a pretty profound view: there is always something inadequate and unthought in every comfortable order, one that requires new questionings and upheavals to move to something more adequate. It seems to me that such a view may be a source of comfort in a time of upheaval.
It is only in the last paragraph that Thorne mentions our contemporary context, and the last sentence might be one of the book’s less Hegelian moments: “The realization that these works are so deeply relevant to our contemporary situation cannot be a cause for optimism.” (268) Indeed we do seem to live in a world where shared understandings have fallen apart, leaving us increasingly surrounded by tyrants for whom might makes right. Yet while pessimism was Thucydides’s outlook – the movement from Pericles’s Athens was a loss – it is not so clear that it was also Plato’s. As Thorne rightly notes, Callicles and Thrasymachus bring us closer to an understanding of the truth. Without the clearing away of the old order in Republic I, a clearing away that ends in Thrasymachus, Plato could not lay out his mature understanding in the rest of the Republic. Hegel, certainly, would see negative moments in history as a preparation for a more mature order to come. It is nonetheless the case that those moments still come with their share of bloodshed.
Hi Amod,
I have two comments, one about intellectual history and the other about history itself.
1) Your review of your friend’s book brought to mind Alan Megill’s book Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason. If I remember Megill’s argument correctly (it’s been a few years since I read it), he identifies a crucial transformation in the meaning of dialectic. The Greeks understood it as an intellectual method for approaching, or perhaps reaching, the truth. Hegel, on Megill’s account, turned this intellectual tool into a feature of the real world, of history itself. Cycles of thesis and antithesis did not discover the truth, but produced real changes in Geist. Marx picks up this new notion of dialectic from Hegel, making it materialist. Megill is critical of Hegel’s/Marx’s reconceptualization of dialectic. I’m wondering what you think of Megill’s argument (assuming I’m remembering it correctly)?
2) I agree with your assessment that we seem to be in a time between more settled orders. It’s alarming, to be sure. We can only hope that something better and more stable emerges on the other side.
But are there guarantees that a new, a better, order will emerge? My reading of history suggests that there are lots of cycles, like the ones you alluded to. So maybe a new order will appear. But I don’t think there’s any inevitability about the emergence of something better. Many societies have experienced long-term, even permanent, decline and disorder. Empires, peoples, religions, languages have all disappeared.
But maybe I misread what you were implying about history?
If I may jump in and say what comes to mind about David’s first point above: Much earlier, Karl Popper made (what may be?) a related critique of Hegelian/Marxian dialectic. Popper’s 1940 paper “What is dialectic?” (Mind 49(196), 403–426) has some interesting passages about this and is relatively free of what I consider to be the hyperbole of his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies. (That’s not to say that I endorse the paper entirely. It is mainly interesting as a moment in the development of Popper’s thinking.) Here are a couple of passages from Popper’s 1940 paper:
“It can hardly be doubted that the dialectic triad describes certain developments fairly well, especially developments of ideas and theories, or of movements which are based on ideas or theories.” (405)
After some exposition of logic, Popper recommends a very limited use of the term dialectic “only where no misunderstanding is possible, and where a certain development really proceeds in a very striking way along the lines of a triad.” (413)
Dialectic is, he says, “a way of describing developments; as one way among others, not of fundamental importance, but sometimes quite a suitable one.” (413)
After a mixed appraisal of Hegel’s dialectic, Popper turns to Marx’s dialectical materialism:
“But in discarding its original idealistic basis, dialectic loses everything which made it plausible and understandable; we have to remember that the best arguments in favour of dialectic lay in its applicability to the development of thoughts, especially of philosophical thoughts. Now we are faced blankly with the statement that physical reality develops dialectically—an extremely dogmatic assertion with such little scientific backing that materialistic dialecticians are forced to make a very extensive use of the above-described dangerous method of discarding criticism by denouncing it as being non-dialectical. … In expressing this opinion, I want to stress that although I should not describe myself as a materialist, my criticism is not directed against materialism, which I personally should probably prefer to idealism if I were forced to choose (which, fortunately, is not the case). It is only the combination of dialectic and materialism that appears to me to be even worse than dialectic idealism.” (422)
Toward the end Popper turns from Marx to “orthodox Marxism”:
“Marx and Engels strongly emphasised that science should not be interpreted as a body of finally and well-established knowledge, or of ‘eternal truth’, but rather as something developing, progressive. The scientist is not the man who knows a lot but rather the man who is determined not to give up searching for truth. Scientific systems develop; and they develop, according to Marx, dialectically.
“There is not very much to say against this point—although personally I think that the dialectical description of scientific development is, unless it is forced, not always applicable and that it is better to describe scientific development in a less ambiguous way, for instance, in terms of the trial and error theory. But I am prepared to admit that this criticism is not of great importance. It is, however, of real moment that Marx’s progressive and anti-dogmatic view of science has never been applied by orthodox Marxists within the field of their own activities. Progressive, anti-dogmatic science is critical—criticism is its very life. But criticism of Marxism, of dialectic materialism, has never been tolerated by Marxists.” (425)
I am not enough of a scholar of Marxism to know how accurate those last two paragraphs are, but I don’t see how Popper could be wrong when he complains about the unscientific over-application of the dialectical schema in dialectical materialism. Reality is in a state of flux as Marx emphasized, but there are many ways in which the flux doesn’t take the form of dialectic.
But see also Nicholas Rescher’s critique in his book Dialectics: A Classical Approach to Inquiry (Ontos Verlag, 2007, page 5):
“In his influential essay ‘What is Dialectic’ Karl Popper criticized dialectic for its willingness ‘to put up with contradictions.’ This is an almost perverse misunderstanding of the matter because what dialectical theorizing in all its guises has always maintained is that whenever contradictions and such-like conflicts of consistency come up this must be removed, eliminated, and transcended. The impetus of coherence and consistency is the motive force of any dialectical process.”
What Rescher says is true enough but doesn’t scathe Popper’s complaint about dialectical materialism specifically. Later in the book Rescher softens his critique of Popper and says: “Ironically, there is something decidedly dialectical about Popper’s critique of dialectics.”
I’ve never been very impressed with Popper’s takes on Plato, Hegel or Marx, though I agree the comments here are more reasonable than the one in TOSAIE. (Charles Taylor describes Popper’s interpretations as bearing a “rather distant relation to the truth.”)
In the quotes you put up here, where I think Popper makes a big interpretive mistake is in referring to “the statement that physical reality develops dialectically”. There is no such statement, not in Marx. I think Mao may look at physical reality in such a way in his On Contradiction, but that’s something that makes Mao’s view considerably less plausible than Marx’s original.
The important thing for Marx is material reality, which specifically refers to that reality as interacted with by humans. There’s no dialectic in other solar systems; there was no dialectic in the world before humans, the world that Meillassoux calls ancestral – a world that Marx, as a great admirer of Darwin, clearly acknowledges.
Rather, for Marx as for Hegel, dialectic is a phenomenon of rational human beings in their history; it’s just that Marx recognizes that human beings’ rationality is always instantiated in their material lives. History moves forward in a dialectical process, but whereas Hegel sees that process as refining a more adequate development of ideas, Marx sees it as refining the human relation to the natural and material world, in labour. If there’s any sense in which “physical reality develops dialectically”, it’s in that sense: the physical reality of factories and railroads is a rational reflection on human needs for goods and transportation.
Right, I had to prune out many of Popper’s more dubious assertions when selecting the quotations above.
When Popper referred to “the statement that physical reality develops dialectically”, he didn’t mention Marx by name. When he raised the issue earlier in the article, he referred to Engels, so he may have been thinking of Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, in which Engels posited “dialectical laws” of nature and aimed to show “that the dialectical laws are really laws of development of nature, and therefore are valid also for theoretical natural science.” That’s what Popper most opposes, and for good reasons, I would say. Insofar as dialectic is about (some aspects of) cognition and its effects, and insofar as the term is used carefully, Popper sees “not very much to say against” it.
Popper in his article is not entirely negative about Marx, e.g.: “Everyone learned from Marx that the development even of ideas cannot be fully understood if the history of ideas is treated purely as such (although such a treatment has its merits) apart from the conditions of their origin and of the situation of their originators, of which conditions the economic aspect is of the highest significance.” (423)
Yeah, that’s fair. As I mentioned, Mao does see dialectic in nature; it wouldn’t surprise me if Engels (who was never nearly as smart as Marx) did too. If the criticism is directed at later Marxists rather than Marx himself then it probably stands. (Marx once said “I am not a Marxist.”)
Good points. One of the things about a Hegelian view is it’s very large-scale: a better social order will emerge, but not necessarily in the same society! The decline and fall of the Roman Empire was permanent for the Romans, but it paved the way for a better society in medieval Christendom and then the Germanic world. And if we were to believe what seems to be Doull’s account that there has been a fragmentation and negative moment going on in some sense ever since Hegel’s day, then we may well expect things to keep getting worse – perhaps the societies we’re in degenerating into civil wars, leaving room for something else. The optimistic note in Hegel and Marx – which may have its roots in these classics – is that human beings think and reflect about their orders, question them, and thus move beyond the merely given, in ways that begin as a destruction but eventually turn to construction. But maybe we’ll all be dead by the time a better order arises.
I think that, in turn, is why Hegel and Marx see a dialectic emerging in social relations. To be sure, when Aristotle develops the notion of dialectic he does not use it in that way; he sees history as something lesser than philosophy and the natural sciences, because it trades in particulars rather than universals. But I think what’s interesting about Liberation and Authority for me here is that it argues that what Hegel would call historical dialectic is already going on before Aristotle, in Thucydides and Plato – just not under that name.
To connect this to the comments about Popper above, I imagine what Popper would emphasize is that the statement “a better social order will emerge, but not necessarily in the same society” is an empirical prediction, but a prediction that is too vague for Popper’s scientific interests: “Certainly, prophecy as such need not be unscientific, as predictions of eclipses and other astronomical events show. But Hegelian dialectic, or its materialistic version, cannot be accepted as a sound basis for scientific forecasts.” (“What is dialectic”, 424)
I imagine Popper would find especially objectionable the way the open-endedness of the prediction guarantees to confirm it someday, somewhere, eventually: “the dialectician need never be afraid of any refutation by forthcoming experiences.” (424, emphasis in original)
Thanks, Nathan. Really interesting. I wasn’t aware of Popper’s comments on dialectic, which do sound very similar to Megill’s.
Is Rescher the best place to look for a history and assessment of dialectic through the ages?
Rescher’s book is awesome (I am a fan of Rescher in general) and would provide plenty of insight into your first question. Rescher is a systematic philosopher, so the flavor of systematic philosophy but he covers the history of the philosophy as well.
Thanks for this, Lay-lay.
As regards the notion that the name ‘Hegel’ is missing from the book, I’d say that this is not an Hegelian reading of Plato or Thucydides, but rather a Platonic / Thucydidean reading, one that gives a sense of how great an influence the ancients exerted on Hegel. The notion of negation, which you mention above, is central to Hegel, and though it pops up in various points in the history of philosophy before him, its ultimate origin is a Platonic dialogue, the Sophist.
I’m inclined to think any one of the three possibilities you set out above concerning where Cephalus is relative to our own situation could be right, and a number of others: a departure from a Cephalan sort of standpoint seems to characterise the West since the French Revolution, so there are many periods you could focus on within that time which would show an abandonment, conscious or not, of a merely given, traditional standpoint.
As for the case for optimism in our own time, no doubt philosophical insight will arise as the result of our situation, but since we’re not disembodied philosophical minds, we will have to live through that situation, and in that sense, the Thucydidean aspect will be much more relevant to our daily lives. While I don’t yet expect a ‘total annihilation’ of the sort that found the Athenian army at Sicily, their expedition there is a ominous reminder of just how swiftly and totally things can collapse when a society’s traditional intellectual foundation has disappeared. Just like Plato & Thucydides, we’re living at a time when a traditional framework has lost its credibility, and the situation has now advanced to the point where there seems to be an awful lot of Thrasymachus in our world. So Hegelian or not, I’m tending towards pessimism.
Recently I was reading for the first time Sidney Hook’s book Reason, Social Myths, and Democracy (John Day Co., 1940) and found the following passage in a section titled “Sense and nonsense in dialectic”, which reminded me of the discussion above. (Interestingly, this was published the same year as Karl Popper’s “What is dialectic?”)
“Suppose that we accept for the moment the conception that history develops in periodic or swing rhythm. What, even if taken in conjunction with specific data, can we predict from it? Merely, that no matter how history turns out a time will come when we will be able to construct some periodic classificatory scheme which will illustrate the principle. But our primary scientific interest is in predicting as closely as we can the specific form of the institutions of tomorrow. To do this, we must proceed from a whole cluster of assumptions about (1) the relevant factors that may be now observed at work, and these are always many; (2) the relative weight of these factors; and (3) the historical effects of knowledge and ignorance of (1) and (2). The hypothesis of oscillating rhythms in history enables us to make no predictions except that the civilization of the future, in certain, not too carefully defined respects, will be different from the civilization of today—if there is a civilization.”