Wreckoning

the perfect moment of “Platonic political philosophy”: the moment when the philosopher is both forced to become political as a matter of self-defense, and the moment when, in the Straussian sense now, philosophy becomes “political,” when it begins to put on a mask and to become a rhetorical project of apologetics intended to portray the philosopher as a man of “justice” and a “good citizen.”

the final result of Socrates’ “educational” project is not passivity, but anarchic and destructive violence: there is a debate about the beating of parents followed by a mob uprising and arson against Socrates’ own school. One is reminded possibly, and in this case half-anachronistically, of Alcibiades, also Socrates’ student, and his involvement in the destruction of the herms and the profanation of the Eleusinian mysteries, events that the people of Athens took to be precursors to a plot for the violent suppression of democracy. Not that philosophy teaches ineffectual passive nihilism and anomie then, but that it is supremely dangerous because it makes young men lawless and violent, and possibly antidemocratic and tyrannical: this seems to have been the concern about philosophy. 

Wealth is widely powerful, whenever a mortal man receives it, blended with pure excellence, from the hands of fortune, and takes it as a companion that makes many friends.

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Wise men are better able to bear even god-given power. Great prosperity surrounds you, as you walk with justice. First, since you are a king of great cities, your inborn eye looks on this as a most revered prize of honor, united with your mind; and you are blessed even now, because you have already earned the boast of victory with your horses from the renowned Pythian festival, and you will welcome this victory-procession of men, a delight for Apollo.

The wise man possesses a great eye--an “inborn eye.” He is on the hunt for prey, for truth or insight about the world, which is snatched up in one bold move from afar, from high up, or hit from afar as an archer hits his target. The art of seeing, of bringing out forgotten truths into the radiant light, in short, wisdom, is an inborn art, it is knowledge by nature or by the blood. By contrast those who have learned--whether it be the mass of the many who need interpreters--or their representatives, the “learned,” the mathontes, the pursuers of the didaktai aretai, that is, the try- hards and intellectuals who are utterly demotic and conventional; these produce mere chatter. Wisdom is a matter of silent insight from afar, an inborn skill; it is not a matter of discussion, endless words, the boisterous chatter of the envious.

“Two high-haired men, sons of the earth-shaker, who, obeying their inner valor,” could not resist Jason’s call for adventure and danger of death.

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No law or regime could ever restrain excellence, nor really ever be responsible for its having emerged. Areta and by extension the biological fundamental phusis from which it emerges is beyond all convention, all law, all regime, and can co-opt, prosper under, or take over any; it is the only thing that is “regime- independent” or “convention-independent”: “Under all laws the straight- spoken man excels, whether by the side of a tyranny, or whenever the furious mob, or when the wise watch over the city.”

If a man has devoted his whole spirit to excellence, sparing neither expense nor toils, it is right to grant the boast of manliness to those who achieve excellence, with an ungrudging mind.

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The highest type of man is the product of a breeding program, and not of an educational program of nomos. The boast of manliness, andreia, is alone granted to such a man; other males are not men, andres, but mere anthropoi, indistinct beings with anthropoid form.

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It is right for a man to follow straight paths, and strive according to his nature. For strength manifests itself in action, and intelligence in counsels, for those who have the inborn skill of foreseeing the future.

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A man with inborn glory has great weight; but he who has only learned is a man in darkness, breathing changeful purposes, never taking an unwavering step, but trying his hand at countless forms of excellence with his ineffectual thought. 

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Nature, the truth about the world and about man, erupts into being, into radiance, or the light of knowledge, from the obscurity of the primordial darkness and forgetfulness in which mortal anthropoi are doomed to live. The coming-about of such a nature, or body, is by physical breeding, and its training is a re-wilding, carried out beyond the walls of the city and of convention.

Odysseus is shipwrecked on the island Phaeakia. He has been stripped of literally everything, including his clothes. The princess Nausicaa is on the beach with her consorts engaged in the age-old renewal and purification ritual of washing and airing out clothes. Odysseus boldly approaches her completely naked; the servants are frightened and run, but he manages, naked and stripped of every outward mark of power and wealth, to reconstruct his kingly status through the power of aristocratic speech and of his bearing. The true measure of the man, his nature, is in all these cases revealed: heredity and blood become apparent in body. Reduced to mere body, to utter destitution, a shipwreck, or, in the case of his father Laertes, to an unkempt tiller of the soil, the blood of a king, and the fact of heredity--the phusis, nature, the truth about a being--reveals itself precisely in this reduction to bare biology.

There is the elevation of this vehement being, blood, or will, silent and effective in real men, extolled and memorialized in splendid songs--and that exists in distinction to the chatter, the word-obsessed envy, the darkness of the many. Bred phua is more real than other bodies, which are shrouded in darkness. These men are apparent and manifest in their great deeds; the watchful eye of the seer, the poet, picks these out and preserves the deeds in words to make them apparent, visible, through time, to make their fame or being endure.

The first simile compares the gleam of the army’s bronze to the shining of a fire consuming forests on top of mountain. The second simile refers to the broad movements of the host: they are compared to tribes - ethnea - of geese that fly backwards and forwards and then settle with a thunder on some Asian meadow; in just such a way the many tribes – same word – flowed from the ships to the Skamandrian plain, and made the earth thunder with their feet and the hooves of the horses. Another two-line simile follows comparing now their number – rather than their motion – to the number of leaves and flowers in their season, of spring. The fourth simile compares the shape of the squadrons to the many tribes – same word, ethnea – of close-packed flies that gather in season of spring around the milk in the shepherd’s station: in just such a way do the Akhaian tribes – again, same word – gather in the field eager to shatter the Trojans.