If we do not understand Plato, we do not understand the programming language of philosophy. […] The study of philosophy begins with the study of the works of Plato; the study of philosophy originates in the study of works of Plato; the study of philosophy ends with the study of the works of Plato; there’s enough here for a lifetime. Accordingly, one can — I’ll generalize here. This is a program for geniuses. For a simple, ordinary philosopher, it is possible to take one of Plato’s dialogues. If I take the Cratylus [for instance], and live my life with the Cratylus, by the end of my life, the clarity of the Cratylus will be total. For students, the matter narrows. Let us take a separate saying of Plato and try, in the course of some extent of time, to live it through. Even that will be enormous, because Plato is philosophy. Accordingly, if we talk of philosophy, we talk of Plato. […] If we want to familiarize ourselves with that matrix on the basis of which das Politische, the sphere of the political, and the sphere of that homology, is formed, or with those fore-concepts with which we deal, if we want to understand where politics comes from, what its structures are, and how it is crystallized and manifested through the political, we must study Plato. […] So the first things we must get to know are Plato’s writings.
2.
Deconstruction of Democracy
The Concept of “Democracy” Is Not Neutral and Not Self-Evident
Democracy today cannot be discussed objectively. It is not a neutral concept: behind “democracy,” as a political regime and corresponding value system, stands the West, Europe and the USA. For them “democracy” is a form of secular cult or a tool of political dogmatics, thus, to be fully accepted into society in the West, it is necessary by default to be “for” democracy. One who calls it into question falls out of the field of political correctness. Marginal opposition is tolerated; but if it is more than marginal, democracy sets its machines of oppression against its alternatives like any regime, any ideology, and any dominant religion. It is not possible to talk about “democracy” impartially. That is why in discussions about democracy we must say at once whether we are completely for or completely against it. I’ll respond with extreme candor: I’m against it, but I’m against it only because the West is for it. I’m not prepared to accept anything thoughtlessly and uncritically on faith, even if everyone believes it, and all the more so if this is accompanied by a concealed (or clear) threat. You suggest that I rely on my own reason, no? I’ll begin with the fact that reason advises me to reject all suggestions [predlozheniy, offers, proposals]. No one can give us freedom. It either is or it is not [we either have it or we don’t]. A slave will convert even freedom into slavery, or at least into swinishness, and a free person will never be a slave even in fetters. From his time enslaved Plato did not become either less Plato or less free, while we still pronounce the name of the tyrant Dionysus with contempt, so which of them is a slave? At any rate, as a popular textbook on technical analysis says, “the majority is always wrong.”
Only such critical distance in relation to “democracy” provides a field for its conceptual comprehension. We call “democracy” into doubt, into question, and challenge it as a dogma. We thus win the right to distance, but only in that way can we come to a valid and well-founded result. Not to believe in democracy does not mean to be its opponent. It means not to be its captive, not to be under its hypnosis and its suggestion. Starting from such unbelief and doubt, it is entirely possible that we’ll conclude that democracy is something valuable or acceptable, or we might not. We should reason in exactly the same way about all other things. Only that is philosophy. There is no a priori evidence for a philosopher. It is exactly the same for a political philosopher.
It is worth recalling that democracy is not a self-evident concept. Democracy can be accepted or rejected, established or demolished. There were splendid societies without democracy and detestable ones with democracy, but there was also the opposite. Democracy is a human project, a construction, a plan, not fate. It can be rejected or accepted. That means it needs justification, apologia. If there won’t be apologias for democracy it will lose its meaning. A non-democratic form of rule should not be taken as obviously the worst. The formula “the lesser evil” is a propagandistic ruse. Democracy is not the lesser evil … maybe it isn’t evil at all, or maybe it is evil. Everything demands reconsideration.
Only from these two assumptions can we examine democracy carefully. It isn’t a dogma, its imposition only repels one from it, and it has possible and entirely relevant and effective alternatives.
Elevating it into a dogma and denying its alternatives closes the very possibility of free philosophical discourse.
Demos in “Democracy”: Aristotle’s Etymology
Let us turn to the etymology of the word “demos,” since “democracy” means “the rule of the demos.” This word is most often translated by the word “narod.” However, in Greek there were many synonyms of the word narod: “ethnos,” “laos,” “phule,” etc. “Demos” was one among them and had specific connotations. Initially “demos” described inhabitants, that is, people living in a concrete and entirely definite territory. As cities broadened, these territories began to be carved up inside the city, like today’s regions or old-Russian city-parts [gorodskiye kontsy], so the inhabitants of one or another region were called a “demos.”
In Julius Pokorny’s Indo-European Etymological Dictionary, we see that the Greek “demos” stems from the Indo-European root dā (*dǝ-) meaning “to divide,” “to separate.” With the formant “mo-” this makes the Greek “demos,” and with the formant “lo-” the German teilin (divide) and Russian delit’.
Thus, in the very etymology of “demos” lies reference to something divided, cut into separate fragments and arranged on a certain territory. The closest in meaning is the Russian word population [naselenie] but by no means narod, since narod implies a cultural and linguistic unity, a community of historic being, and the presence of a certain destiny. A population (theoretically) can manage without that. “Population” refers to anyone who has settled or been settled on a given territory, but not one who is connected to that land by roots or the mark of citizenship [i.e. there are three distinct notions here: belonging by roots, belonging by the mere fact of settlement, and belonging through citizenship].
Aristotle, who introduced the concept of “democracy,” regarded it extremely negatively, having in mind precisely this entirely Greek shade of meaning. According to Aristotle, “democracy” is practically identical with “mob rule,” “ochlocracy (rule of the crowd),” since the population of a civic region consists of everyone without distinction. Aristotle opposes “democracy” as the worst form of rule not only compared with monarchy and aristocracy, corresponding to the rule of one or the best, which he regards, by contrast, positively, but also to “politeia” (from the Greek “polis,” “city”). Like “democracy,” “politeia” is the rule of many — not everyone without distinction, but the qualified ones, the rule of conscious citizens, differing from the rest by cultural and genealogical, as well as social and economic, indicators. Politeia is the self-rule of the citizens of the city, relying on traditions and foundations. Democracy is the chaotic agitation of a rebellious mob.
Politeia assumes the presence of cultural unity, a common historico-religious and cultic basis among citizens. Democracy can be established by an arbitrary collection of atomic individuals “distributed” into random sectors.
Aristotle, it is true, also knows other forms of unjust rule besides democracy: tyranny (rule of a usurper) and oligarchy (rule of a closed group of rich and corrupt scoundrels). All negative forms of rule are interconnected: tyrants often depend on precisely “democracy,” just as “democracies” often appeal to oligarchy. Integrity, so important to Aristotle, is on the side of monarchy, aristocracy, and politeia. Division, fragmentation, partition into atoms, is on the side of tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.
The Metaphysical Foundations of Democracy: The Hypotheses of t
he Parmenides
Let us turn to the metaphysical foundations of democracy. For this we will draw on the Platonic dialogue Parmenides. It is customary to distinguish two theses and eight hypotheses in it. The first thesis affirms the One. Four hypotheses follow (true, the Neo-Platonists added a fifth, but right now that’s not crucial). The first thesis about the One and the four hypothesis following from it can be applied to the description of a republic [gosudarstvo, the word used to translate the dialogue by Plato called Republic in English; gosudarstvo can sometimes mean state in the narrow sense or, as in Plato, regime in the broad sense] based on hierarchy, stemming from the idea, the higher principle. The world built on affirmation of the One is built from top to bottom, from the One to the many. The same is true also of the republic, which reproduces the structure of the universe. At the head of such a republic are the monarch and priests, as servants of the One. Such a holy monarchy is simultaneously a model of the cosmos and a basis for the arrangement of the republic [gosudarstvennogo ustroystva]. The thesis about the One, and the hypotheses that follow from it, describe for us the spectrum of political models of traditional society, where the principle of integrity, the authority and sacral nature of power, and divine law predominated.
Sociologist Louis Dumont called such an approach based on the first thesis and four hypotheses “methodological holism,” since the understanding of society is based on conviction in its organic, integral nature.
The second thesis in the Parmenides, and the second four hypotheses, stems from affirmation of the Many, other than the One. Here, at the basis of the perspective on the world, lies not unity, but plurality, atomism, and the play of fragments. Such a perspective leads to an atomistic perspective on the cosmos (the theory of Democritus) and to the justification of political regimes of precisely a “democratic” type, i.e. built not downwards from above, but upwards from below, not on the basis of the transition of the One into the many, but, on the contrary, in the opposite direction. Plato himself regarded the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus as a “heretical” teaching, and according to some sources, even encouraged the burning of their books in his Academy. In the Platonic understanding of the world, the society built on the principle of the Many (non-One) can similarly be regarded as a “political heresy.”
Precisely this second thesis of the Parmenides, and the four hypotheses following from it, interest us now. Taking into account the first four, which relate to the monarchic cosmos, it is customary to call these the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th hypotheses of the Parmenides. If we consider them carefully, we will get four types of democracy, which are easy to discover in theory or practice in our surrounding world.
The Hypotheses of the Parmenides and Types of Democracy
The fifth hypothesis of the Parmenides is built on the assertion that although the One does not exist and the Many does, the One can be thought, realized, through relations within the Many. This can be interpreted simplistically as follows: although we begin with a plurality of atomic individuals, they can create something whole that would nevertheless be composite, collective, constructed. In political philosophy we see the classic example of socialism or social-democracy (in extreme form, communism) as a theory proposing to assemble out of separate individuals a solidary, “integral,” but artificially integral, society, which in this case will be primary in relation to the individual and will educate this individual and form him. Both socialists and the first sociologists (Comte, in particular) thought of the political goal this way. The slogan of this approach can be the well-known motto: Ex pluribus unum.
Besides social democracy, the same principle applies to the political form of Hobbes’s Republic [or State], his “Leviathan.” Hobbes himself does not make anything more precise about the form of the political regime of the Republic [or State] because he was limited by the assertion that it is created through a social contract of persons striving to prevent the otherwise inevitable war of all against all. This principle — the One as a product of the agreement of the Many — thus also lies at the basis of modern theories of the Republic [or State]. It is clearest in social democracy. The conception of “État-providence,” dear to the heart of the modern European, or the American “Welfare State,” synthesizes both concepts (Republic [State] and sociality).
The sixth hypothesis says that the Many exists, and the One does not exist in itself or in its relations. This rejection of the construction of the One (artificial, collective, and mechanical) comprises the essence of another type of democracy, liberal democracy. It is characteristic of liberal democracy that it contests both the suggestion of the creation of a normative model of society insisted upon by socialists and social democrats, and (in the long term) the very existence of the Republic [or State]. We should not make from out of the Many One (ex pluribus unum); that is not at all necessary. The Many can fully remain Many, and the atomic individual can fully enjoy his complete freedom; thus, the Many rejecting the One gives us liberalism.
The seventh hypothesis of the Parmenides says: the Many exists, and through relations in it there is another Many. In other words, separate atoms, fragments, can ground the existence of other atoms, fragments, through relations among themselves. This gives us social and political models based on dialogue and communication. The One in this case is not constituted by a social contract, but instead a plurality of atoms constructs another plurality of atoms, which is thereby endowed with being; thus arises the problem of the “Other,” dialogue with [the other], and relations with [the other], who is today an extremely important center of a philosophical problem. “The Other” [noun] and “the Other” [adjective] appear from the relations of the Many. This model of “democracy” can be called “understanding democracy” or “democracy of dialogue.” It can full well be liberal, i.e. in contrast to socialism, and not recognize society as a constructed One. Instead of society, there can exist a communicational network, structured in dependence on the spontaneous trajectories of free dialogues of separate individuals with one another in the field of “open society.” This is the model of “civil society.” It is approximately how representatives of the Chicago School of sociology imagine the state of affairs (Mead in particular, with his symbolic interactionism).
Finally, the eighth hypothesis is the most “beastly.” It says: the One does not exist, but the Many does not create “another” Many and does not construct it even in the process of relations inside the Many. Here we get an extreme form of liberalism, repudiating altogether the figure of the “Other.” In political philosophy it corresponds to the “objectivism” of Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan, the most extreme forms of dehumanized individualism (characteristic of many Russian liberals). De Sade’s concept of the “sovereign individual,” studied by Bataille and Blanchot, belongs here. In this hypothesis there is only “the singular” and its private property; everything else not only does not have being, but is also not constructed artificially.
It is significant that Plato emphasized that these last four hypotheses are speculative and that the Many cannot exist without the One. That is, the first thesis contains truth and the second falsehood, based only on a game of the intellect.
The transition from traditional society to modern society, to modernity and to democratic, modernized republics [or states] is from a philosophical perspective the transition from Plato’s first thesis to the second thesis, from the first four hypotheses to the second four. From every perspective — philosophical, sociological, culturological, etc. — modernity is based on the cult of “methodological individualism” and opposed to “methodological holism” (the first thesis and first four hypotheses). Precisely this rejection of the One, and acknowledgment of the primacy of the Many, is the basic dogma of the contemporary, the main postulate of modernity. In contemporary postmodernity precisely this approach is never contested. Postmodernity represents a hypertrophied, extravagant version of the last hypotheses of the Parmenides, the eighth in particular.
Political
Platonism
The Platonic hypotheses help us understand the code of contemporary political philosophy. In the final analysis, all eight hypotheses can be regarded as fully rational models of the world and society and if we remove ourselves from the hypnotic suggestions of progress, we can fully make a conscious choice in favor of any of these hypotheses.
This means that we can select democracy, and any version of democracy, taking the position of the second thesis, or we can choose non-democracy, taking the position of the first thesis and acknowledge the One. What is interesting is that this choice can be made not only today, for it also stood before the people of Ancient Greece, who chose between Atlantis and Athens (the Platonic dialogue Critias), Athens and Sparta (the Peloponnesian War, praised by Thucydides), and the philosophy of the monarchists Plato and Aristotle and the liberal-atomists Democritus and Epicurus. While man remains man, he carries in himself, even if vaguely and distantly, a capacity for philosophy. That means that he carries in himself freedom of choice. Man can choose democracy, and one of its forms, or he can reject it.
At the same time, if we take the position of Plato and Platonism, then on the basis of the juxtaposition of democracy and the theses of the Parmenides we come to the conclusion that we live in a cosmos that cannot be: in a society built on an absolutely false dogma. Everyone today is regarded by default as a supporter of democracy. It would not be bad for those “by default” persons to become aware of the philosophical principles to which they are automatically (i.e. without being asked) ascribed.
Political Platonism- the Philosophy of Politics Page 2