Bulletin 50 – December 2016

Chapter Two describes the victimary culture of ancient Athens and Greece more generally. Particularly of interest to readers of Girard will be the discussion of the pharmakos ritual, whereby prisoners (maintained at the city’s expense) are periodically tortured and killed by the city at large. Tyrrell points out that prior to their torture the pharmakoi were housed in the Prytaneum; readers of The Apology will recognize this place from the second speech of Socrates. The Prytaneum functioned as the central hearth for Athens and was used to house foreign dignitaries and to reward citizens who were worthy of great honor. In The Apology, when he has been asked to recommend a punishment, he recommends being given free meals in the Prytaneum. The chapter concludes with a short discussion of “Socrates as pharmakos” that builds off the Prytaneum remark and prepares the way for future discussions.

Chapter Three offers a close reading of Aristophanes’ Clouds. According to Tyrrell’s reading, Aristophanes offers us a “Satanic Socrates” who seduces others into violating prohibitions and taboos thereby precipitating a mimetic crisis. The Clouds tells the story of a dull-witted father and son, who enroll as students of Socrates to escape paying debts. Socrates teaches them how to argue out of debts, and perhaps more importantly, that there is no need to worry about divine retribution for dishonesty and other vices. The result of Socrates’s teaching is disastrous: it breaks down the hierarchical relationship between father and son, culminating in the son beating the father and arguing that one can licitly beat one’s mother. Aristophanes’ Socrates unleashes desire, destroys difference and is ultimately killed: the father, Strepsiades, gathers the town together and sets fire to Socrates’s house. Burning Socrates alive restores the differences his teachings collapsed; The Clouds readily lends itself to being read in terms of mimetic theory.

Chapter Four is the most complicated and subtle chapter in the book; Tyrrell’s reading of The Apology distinguishes between twenty different voices. He argues that Plato’s depiction of the trial and death of Socrates both victimizes and absolves Socrates. While maintaining that Socrates was innocent of the charges levied against him (corrupting the youth and not believing in the gods of the city), Plato nevertheless uses the death of Socrates to condemn the demos and to found his own philosophy as an alternative (94). Socrates’s reference to the Prytaneum is discussed here at length in some very illuminating pages. As already noted, it was where the pharmakoi were fed, but it was also made available to Olympic victors; Tyrrell notes that the public care of the victors was meant to domesticate them and prevent the victor’s kudos from tyrannizing the population. So, he concludes, “Plato sets up Socrates as a tyrant” (132). This is an important and suggestive point for any student of Plato: the problem of tyranny is central to The Republic and Socrates’s claim that only the wise should rule could easily sound tyrannical to the people of Athens (133). Plato (according to Tyrrell) is well aware of the danger Socrates presents to Athens: to the extent that Plato’s Socrates seeks to lead men away from mimetic rivalry (125) and to the extent that Athenian culture is defined by such a rivalry (as argued in Chapter One), Socrates’s goal is nothing other than a fundamental transformation of Athenian culture. One wonders if this claim doesn’t undermine the purported innocence of Plato’s Socrates and suggest a similarity with the destructive effects of Aristophanes’s version of the man. In fact, even in Plato’s texts, the innocence of Socrates is less straightforward than it is often taken to be. Whether or not Socrates is guilty depends on whether it is right that traditional Athens be destroyed (139). One way of taking the bulk of Plato’s political philosophy is as arguing that traditional Athens was severely deficient on a number of points and thus, Socrates was right in undermining it. In this way, Socrates’s death at the hands of the Athenians becomes the founding murder of Plato’s philosophy (147). Indeed, in The Phaedo, Socrates’s death no longer appears as an end but a beginning: the beginning of his soul’s escape from the body, and the beginning of philosophy more generally. It transforms Socrates into an external mediator the imitation of whom releases one from quotidian mimetic rivalries.

Tyrrell’s reading of the trial and death of Socrates is fascinating and provocative. It raises as many questions as it answers. To conclude I will mention a few further questions, not as criticisms but as potential lines for future research. First, can this method of reading be extended to other Platonic texts, e.g., The Republic? Second, while Tyrrell convincingly shows that Plato is aware of the sacrifice of Socrates, is Platonism equally aware? Is the sacrifice forgotten in later texts or by later more metaphysically inclined Platonists? Third, does this re-evaluation of Plato entail a re-evaluation of Girard’s criticisms of Plato and philosophy more generally? Fourth, how does this re-reading of Plato affect our interpretation and evaluation of Platonic political philosophy? Fifth, given the illuminating comparisons Tyrell draws with Girard’s reading of the passion narratives, does this reading of Plato force us to reconsider Girard’s claims about the uniqueness of the Bible’s preference for victims? Answering any of these questions would take a book in its own right, and one ought not to expect answers from Tyrrell’s book; it is to the credit of The Sacrifice of Socrates that they can be formulated.

Ranieri’s book is important, therefore, not only because it offers a deeper understanding of Strauss and Voegelin and their perspectives on the Bible, but also because of the contribution it makes to a dialogue between philosophy and mimetic theory. Given limitations of space, I will focus mainly on Ranieri’s critique of Strauss, even though Ranieri spends more time on Voegelin. Strauss, in my opinion, is a much more important interlocutor for Girard. More than any other major contemporary thinker, Strauss has placed the tension between philosophy and revelation at the heart of his reflections. Moreover, Ranieri shows himself to be an especially good reader of Strauss, whose often enigmatic texts seem to have been deliberately crafted to veil his most heterodox thoughts to all but the most attentive readers. Ranieri thus takes a place alongside such other distinguished readers of Strauss as Laurence Lampert and Heinrich Meier, who are skeptical of Strauss’s ostensibly agnostic accommodations to religious belief (see Lampert’s Leo Strauss and Nietzsche and The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss; also Meier’s Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem).

For Strauss, there are two fundamentally opposed ways of life that correspond to the philosopher and the religious believer: the life of free inquiry and the life of humble obedience, an opposition that Strauss routinely designates with the metonymy Athens and Jerusalem. These two ways offer irreconcilable conceptions of the highest possibility for human being qua human. When philosophy appears within a political community, as it did in ancient Greece, it provokes a crisis, since the health of political communities depends on obedience to laws and customs that are ultimately based on nothing but received opinions about what is good and just. To use Girard’s language, we could say the opinions sustaining social order pivot around “the always arbitrary but culturally real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence” (Things Hidden 128). Strauss further agrees with Girard that societies have traditionally sought sacred warrants for the social order. The philosophers of ancient Greece, as well as philosophers within the medieval Jewish and Islamic milieu, practiced a form of esoteric writing that was designed to create a false impression of harmony between philosophy and the social order, leaving its religious underpinnings unchallenged while discouraging superstitious excesses and counseling political moderation. Modern philosophy abandoned this classical moderation. However, as Ranieri persuasively argues, Strauss uncovers the real roots of modern political excess in one strand of the biblical tradition, albeit one that Strauss chooses not to highlight in his own biblical exegesis.

Ranieri believes that Strauss’s reading of the Bible places an undue emphasis on law, punishment, and judgment—those aspects of the biblical teaching most useful to safeguarding the social order—at the expense of the prophetic-messianic tradition with its vision of a coming world-transformation, the legacy of which Strauss believes is the ultimate source of our contemporary crisis. Strauss is very aware of the prophet-messianic tradition, but may have been motivated to downplay it because he believed it was politically dangerous. At the same time, Strauss presents life under the guidance of revelation in what Ranieri suggests is a deliberately unattractive light, portraying the biblical God as an authoritarian, capricious tyrant and offering “an exaggerated, highly fideistic understanding of revelation in which belief is divorced from intelligence” (107). Consequently, Strauss reads the Bible as the record of Israel’s encounter with an inscrutable deity who imposes severe limits on human autonomy, an interpretation that leaves no place for the revealed anthropology and epistemology—the fusion of reason and faith in the “intelligence of the victim”—that Girard finds in the same text.

Ranieri is most impressive when unpacking Strauss’s often understated critique of the legacy of biblical religion in the modern world. Strauss emerges as someone who is much more hostile toward Christianity than many of his readers imagine, but who refrained from a direct attack out of prudence, convinced that non-philosophers will always require some sort of religious teaching to cement their loyalty to the civic order. Strauss famously claimed that we moderns occupy a “second, much deeper cave” than the cave of pre-theoretical opinion in Plato’s Republic. Many readers have taken this second cave to be modern historicism or relativism, but Ranieri makes a persuasive case that the construction of the second cave was the work of Christian scholasticism, which, by integrating philosophy into the study of theology, claimed to possess a rational warrant for its beliefs and robbed philosophy of its proud independence (23; see also Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, 1921-1932, 215). Worse still, this second cave made philosophy the servant of humanity’s practical needs, deflecting it from its proper business of contemplation and paving the way for the activist spirit of modern philosophy.

On Ranieri’s telling, the chief culprit in Strauss’s narrative of the spiritual tribulations of the modern world is what Strauss calls the “extreme (‘theological’) virtue of charity” (162; Strauss, Philosophy and Law 136). This phrase appears in a relatively inconspicuous location—a long footnote in Strauss’s 1938 book Philosophy and Law—but Ranieri takes it as the starting point for an exegetical tour de force through Strauss’s writings on modern philosophy that culminates in a particularly rich and insightful reading of the famous debate between Strauss and the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève that appeared in latter editions of Strauss’s On Tyranny. Strauss, according to Ranieri, “never accuses the Bible directly, but the cumulative effect of his presentation in On Tyranny and elsewhere is to establish a strong association, if not a direct causation, between the Bible’s teaching and the worst features of the modern world” (180).

Modern philosophy, according to Strauss, turned away from the proud and disinterested contemplation of eternal verities (or permanent problems) practiced by the ancient philosophers, and adopted instead an active or “charitable” concern with “the relief of the human estate,” promoting a new natural science that aimed at the conquest of nature and a new political science that eschewed political idealism and attempted to deploy lower human passions in the service of attainable goals. Unfortunately, this project—“this politicization of philosophy” (Strauss, Natural Right and History 34)—had the unintended consequence of spawning all those dangerous modern ideologies that have been emboldened by their supposed philosophical pedigrees to mimic the pious cruelty and persecutory zeal of historical Christianity. Ranieri agrees that charity has been elevated to first rank in the modern world, but, following Girard, he insists that the excesses of modernity result from a distortion, rather than a faithful application, of the biblical teaching. Strauss proposes classical moderation as an alternative to the cruelty of the “extreme” virtue of charity, but Ranieri argues that Strauss’s virtue is hardly innocent either, since it is predicated on an acceptance of the necessity of violence to preserve the fragile civic order.

Ranieri’s discussion of the Strauss-Kojève debate focuses on the contrast Strauss draws between admiration and love. Love depends entirely on the opinions of others, but the wise man cares nothing for the love of the unwise. However, he does welcome the admiration of those who are like him in wisdom, since it confirms his own excellence. Love can be obtained in ways unconnected with one’s virtue, for example by bestowing benefits on others, but the admiration sought by the wise man is always secondary to his pursuit of self-perfection. Ranieri shows that Strauss regards love as always seeking or requiring some form of reciprocation, never seriously considering the possibility of a love that is wholly unconditional. Ranieri also challenges Strauss’s appraisal of admiration, arguing that “[t]he desire for admiration is intensely mimetic…in a way that can easily lead to an endless, empty pursuit of prestige” (174).

Yet even in disagreeing with Strauss, Ranieri shows that many of the insights associated with mimetic theory are not entirely alien to Strauss’s philosophical framework. For example, Ranieri notes that Strauss’s alarm at the collapse of traditional hierarchies under the influence of modern egalitarianism is not mere “snobbery,” but stems instead from his “deep unease about the loss of social differentiation” and his recognition of the heightened potential for rivalry and conflict that results when all people confront each other as equals (180-1). That Strauss should have such a keen understanding of mimetic dynamics should not come as a great surprise, since we find many insights into mimetic desire and rivalry in the philosophers he studied most closely, such as Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau. And, of course, Strauss’s preference for those aspects of the biblical tradition concerned with law or “sacred restraints” reflects his recognition of the role of religion in helping to manage the potential for conflict always present in our mimetic passions (Strauss, On Tyranny [1999] 192).

Like Strauss, Voegelin believes that biblical prophecy and eschatology prepared the way for the dangerous ideological excesses of modernity, yet he also credits the Bible for offering resources that can help us to resist those excesses, such as the ideal of mutual respect or the idea that human beings are created in the image of God. The legacy of the Bible, for both Strauss and Voegelin, is thus twofold, containing disruptive and therapeutic dimensions.

Ranieri’s final chapter, in which he openly advocates for Girard, is centered on challenging the supposed “myth of philosophy’s innocence,” the belief that the exercise of reason in general and the practice of philosophy in particular are elevated activities, rising above the mimetic fray and thus not directly implicated in society’s violence (206; 238). Reading this chapter, however, one gets the feeling that Ranieri has stacked the deck in his own favor. For instance, he criticizes Strauss and Voegelin for accepting a certain amount of violence as necessary to the social order, but ignores the fact that Girard also seems to have judged some acts of violence as necessary and warranted. Writes Girard in The One By Whom Scandal Comes, “I myself am not an unconditional pacifist, since I do not consider all forms of defense against violence to be illegitimate” (131, n. 13).

The heart of Ranieri’s argument for philosophy’s culpability is his interpretation of certain texts of Plato, which he believes show that “[t]he justification of scapegoating is inscribed in the narrative of philosophy’s founding” (237). In the Crito, for instance, Socrates recounts the “Speech of the Laws,” which argues that it would be unjust for him to escape from prison to save his life. Yet Ranieri rashly assumes that Socrates “goes to his death convinced by the Laws that such is the will of the gods” (238), overlooking the pertinent fact that Socrates had, in that very same dialogue, explicitly repudiated the tacit assumption of the Laws on which the practice of scapegoating ultimately rests, namely, that retribution can ever be justified. Thus there is no compelling reason to suppose that Socrates endorses all of the arguments of the Laws, let alone that he intends to justify scapegoating.

It is disappointing that someone like Ranieri, so sensitive to the layers of Strauss’s text, should be so deaf to Socrates’ irony in the Crito, but perhaps not too surprising given Ranieri’s aims. Girard’s unique contribution to Christian apologetics is his argument that there is a true anthropology revealed in the Bible, one that can be empirically verified but not empirically discovered without the aid of revelation. Yet if Girard had read the Platonic dialogues with the same sensitivity to dramatic nuance that he brought to the plays of Shakespeare, he might have discovered in this Greek philosopher many of the same insights that he believed were present in the Bible. Unfortunately, Ranieri does not explore how Strauss’s rediscovery of the practice of esoteric writing in the texts of Plato and other classical writers—in particular, how the action of the Platonic dialogues can illuminate the meaning of their explicit arguments—might enable a reading of the dialogues that reveals significant convergences between Plato and mimetic theory that Girard’s reading of the dialogues overlooked. Of course, if insights into the mimetic sources of rivalry and the hidden violence underpinning the social order can be found in Plato, who presumably did not have the benefit of revelation, then Girard’s apologetic enterprise becomes, at the very least, much more complicated.