Altruism and the Art of Writing: Plato, Cicero, and Leo Strauss.

AuthorAltman, William H. F.
PositionEssay

H. A. Prichard changed the course of Plato's Anglophone reception in his 1928 lecture "Duty and Interest" with the claim that Socrates' defense of justice in the Republic is based entirely on self-interest as opposed to disinterested moral obligation. (1) Following this lead, M. B. Foster identified the just guardian's return to the Cave as the sole exception to Prichard's claim, thereby attributing two distinct errors to Plato: the original mistake of defending justice only in relation to consequences accruing to the agent's own advantage, (2) and then failing to see that a just guardian's unselfish return was inconsistent with this utilitarian project. (3) J. D. Mabbott attempted to absolve Plato by arguing that the return to the Cave was only inconsistent with Foster's utilitarian approach. (4) But W. H. Adkins strengthened Foster's second claim by denying that a guardian would return to the Cave, (5) while David Sachs, building on Prichard, sparked a new round of debate by denying that Plato's self-interested just man would actually be just in any commonly accepted sense of that term. (6) In addition to debating about Sachs, (7) many have attempted to save Plato's consistency by showing why it is in the guardian's self-interest to go back down into the Cave. (8) Bearing witness to the enduring influence of Sachs, whom he rejects, and Foster, whom he echoes, Terry Penner has recently argued that since the defense of justice in the Republic is purely egoistic; any suggestion that the guardians will voluntarily sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of others by returning to the Cave reflects "a certain unresolved tension" in Plato's thought. (9)

Against Penner, I claim that this "unresolved tension" is deliberate on Plato's part and that it reflects an essential feature of Platonic pedagogy, aptly described by Cicero as Socrates' multiplex ratio disputandi ("multilayered method of disputation"). (10) This article therefore constitutes prolegomena to an altruistic (11) reading of the Republic in which (1) a philosopher's disinterested decision to return to the Cave will be presented as the paradigm of just action thereby revealing the altruistic essence of justice that Plato is persuading or rather provoking (12) his philosophic reader to imitate but (2) that a voluntary return to the Cave cannot and was not intended to be justified in relation to the internal definition of justice presented in Book IV. (13) The need for prolegomena to such a reading arises from the fact that I must first set forth the pedagogical basis for my claim that, while the text's surface deliberately encourages an egoistic account of justice such as Penner's, Plato qua teacher intended to reveal the altruistic paradigm of justice to those who could "read between the lines." This manner of speaking calls attention to the influence of Leo Strauss, who made a distinction between exoteric surface and esoteric essence in his 1941 "Persecution and the Art of Writing." (14) Despite the fact that Leo Strauss's own reading of Plato's Republic is anything but altruistic, (15) the contrast he identified is, in a modified or pedagogical form, crucial for explaining the gap that I am claiming Plato deliberately created between a self-interested account of justice in Book IV and Glaucon's accurate statement in Book VII that the guardians will sacrifice self-interest because the obligation to return to the Cave involves "imposing just commands on men who are just" (521e1; Paul Shorey translation).

These prolegomena will be organized into three connected sections. The first involves the historical and philosophical basis of Strauss's brand of exotericism: I will show why it was antithetical to Strauss's project to discover an esoteric altruism beneath the surface of any ancient text. A post-Straussian (16) or pedagogical conception of exotericism will then be applied to Cicero in the second section: methods reminiscent of Strauss's will lead to conclusions quite the opposite of those he reached. Cicero's writings are particularly useful here because he proclaimed himself to be a Platonist, openly admitted that he considered it Socratic to conceal his own views, and allowed a skeptical character called "Cicero" to preside over the surface of several of his dialogues. Revealing a philosophical altruism between the lines of Cicero's writings is made easier by the fact that Cicero explicitly praised and practiced altruism in his well-documented political life. Given the fact that Cicero follows and indeed copies his master, the parallels between Cicero's Republic and its Platonic exemplar are therefore useful for bringing to light Plato's own esoteric altruism, the literary basis of which will then be sketched in Section 3 in relation to several passages in Plato's Republic that open the door to the altruistic reading I propose to develop and elucidate more fully elsewhere.

Section 1. Leo Strauss and the Use or Abuse of Exotericism

Exoteric literature presupposes that there are basic truths which would not be pronounced in public by any decent man, because they would do harm to many people, who having been hurt, would naturally be inclined to hurt in turn him who pronounces the unpleasant truths. (17) In his seminal article "Persecution and the Art of Writing," Leo Strauss assumed that the only "basic truths" that an exoteric writer would wish to hide are those that would bring harm to an author who expressed them openly. Strauss's exoteric author is no altruist: the reason given for not harming others is to avoid being harmed by them in return. Such an author probably could not decently be described as a decent man; if an argument could prove that any decent man would wish to pronounce truths "which would not be pronounced in public by any decent man," Strauss doesn't provide it. (18) Certainly such an argument would, on Strauss's terms, presuppose that a decent man is motivated by a concern for his own safety as opposed to the wellbeing of others. (19) It will be noted, then, that Strauss's description applies paradigmatically to a man who refuses to say in public: "there are no decent men; decency itself is a sham," (20) but it does not apply, for example, to the parables of Jesus. In the latter case, it is certainly not to avoid being hurt that Jesus uses exoteric discourses (requiring "eyes to see and ears to hear") about vineyards, shepherds, and the like, in order to convey esoteric truths that, although doubtless unpleasant to some, are clearly truths that many decent men would still be willing to pronounce in public. But then again, Jesus must be admitted to have had a considerable influence on how decency is or has been conventionally regarded, at least among the vulgar.

It was in order to outflank this influence--or, more accurately, to achieve a horizon beyond the revealed tradition (21) of which Jesus was merely an intermediate part (22)--that Strauss, under the influence of Martin Heidegger, (23) returned to the Ancients; (24) this decisive aspect of his thought is embodied in what he called "the second cave." (25) Described in English only once (1948)--albeit with an ominous element of conspiracy added for the first time (26)--Strauss published two accounts of "the second cave" in German (1932 and 1935). (27) But in accordance with the same kind of archeological impetus that led Strauss to develop it in the first place, the best way to understand "the second cave" is in its original form, found in two unpublished manuscripts from the early 1930s. (28)

The keynote of Strauss's second cave is an attempt to recover the natural difficulties of philosophizing. (29) Enmeshed in our tradition--defined by both the Bible and Greek philosophy in the 1930 version--we are trapped in a second cave below the one described by Plato: only by disentangling ourselves from that tradition can we recover our "natural ignorance."

We can begin from the very beginning: we are lacking all polemic affect toward tradition (having nothing wherefrom to be polemical against it); and at the same time, tradition is utterly alien to us, utterly questionable. But we cannot immediately answer on our own; for we know that we are deeply entangled in a tradition: we are even much lower down than the cave dwellers of Plato. We must rise to the origin of tradition, to the level of natural ignorance. (30) What needs to be clearly understood is that the "natural ignorance" to which we must "rise" is the absolute rejection of certainties, especially of the otherworldly kind described by Plato and taught by the Bible. The teaching of Plato's Cave--that the absolute truth, in all its ethical and metaphysical grandeur, is not of this natural world--this teaching is precisely what imprisons us in Strauss's second cave. Naturally this leads Strauss to say little about escaping from the first, i.e. from Plato's Cave, except insofar as it comes to represent vulgar opinion as opposed to those "... basic truths which would not be pronounced in public by any decent man." (31)

But even though Strauss is using Platonic imagery to achieve an anti-Platonic end, there is also a strong anti-Biblical component to what he means by "tradition" in 1930; Strauss emphasizes this component in the recovery of "natural ignorance":

The end of this struggle is the complete rejection of tradition: neither merely of its answers, nor merely of its questions, but of its possibilities: the pillars on which our tradition rested: prophets and Socrates/Plato, have been torn down since Nietzsche. Nietzsche's partisanship for the kings and against the prophets, for the sophists and against Socrates--Jesus neither merely no God, nor a swindler, nor a genius, but an idiot. Rejected are the [theta] [epsilon][omega][rho][epsilon][~.[iota]][nu] and "Good-Evil"-- Nietzsche, as the last enlightener. Through Nietzsche, tradition has been shaken at its roots. It has completely lost its self-evident truth...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT