Strategy, the Byzantine Empire, Socrates and Thucydides

In this interesting video Edward Luttwak discusses his book, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire.

Luttwak makes some fascinating insights into the nature of Byzantium; the many reasons for its longevity – which, for him, comes down to a culture of strategy; and the policy lessons contemporary strategists could learn from the Eastern Roman Empire, asserting, for example, that America should become more like Byzantium.

Coincidentally, I've been thinking quite a bit about 'strategy' recently, how the philosophy of strategy is far more effective in describing and navigating the intricacies of human affairs than traditional moral and ethical philosophy.

These thoughts have come to me as I've been reading Pierre Hadot's book, What is Ancient Philosophy? which asserts that philosophy is no more and no less than a way of life, a means, through permanent struggle, criticism and self-criticism, to find some kind of spiritual peace, involving a pursuit of 'wisdom without ever achieving it'.

Hadot's book is interesting and focuses a great deal on the figure of Socrates.

Now, Socrates, and his methodology, is someone I've always had trouble with: I've never been convinced, for example, that you can cure ignorance by merely pointing out to an ignorant person that they are, in fact, deluded, deranged, ill-informed or misguided. Ignorant people have a habit of insisting on their ignorance, otherwise they would not be ignorant in the first place. Anyway, my point is really this: reading Hadot's book has confirmed my feeling that when it comes to describing and navigating the intricacies of human affairs, I find Thucydides – the greatest theorist of Grand Strategy – far more illuminating than Socrates.

Chaos and goodness: from Hesiod and Plato to Christianity and Nietzsche

What does Nietzsche mean when he says: ‘Christianity is Platonism for the masses’? An interesting essay, Chaos corrected: Hesiod in Plato’s creation myth, by E.E. Pender, gives us an idea.

The subject of the essay is Plato’s attempt, particularly in the Timaeus but also in the Republic, to establish a new creation myth for the Greeks that would supplant Hesiod’s Theogony, which Plato objected to on the grounds that it wasn’t sufficiently edifying and, indeed, that Hesiod’s depiction of the gods and their role in creating the universe was fundamentally wrong.

In particular, according to Pender, what Plato wants to correct in Hesiod is the ‘moral chaos’ of the Theogony, in which the gods are often portrayed as jealous and spiteful, engaged in plotting, deception and violence. For Plato, god is incapable of malevolence. He is by nature good and his motive in creating the universe is to advance goodness.

‘Unlike Hesiod’s Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus, Plato’s supreme god is not seeking to create a world order that will allow him simply to gain and then hold on to power. This god and those he creates are themselves good and their aim is to create further goodness.’

Furthermore, Pender says, into Hesiod’s universe, in which chaos is the primal force and strife and power politics define the relationship between the gods, Plato wants to interject a benign and rational being – a demiurge or craftsman-father – able to impose harmony and rationality. Whereas Hesiod identifies a universe permeated by disorder, out of which an ordered cosmos can never fully emerge, Plato sees a world infused with goodness, always striving to achieve perfectibility.

Plato also wants to correct Hesiod when it comes to defining the attributes of the Muses, the goddesses that inspire in the creation of art and the pursuit of knowledge. In Hesiod, the Muses exist to soothe grief and help men forget their troubles; but in Plato they lose their psychogogic qualities and acquire a more transcendental and metaphysical role, which is to guide the human soul (through philosophy and philosophical exercises) towards divine harmony and reason.

In Plato’s creation tale, then, Pender concludes, ‘the principle of goodness is eternally present, the triumph of order and reason is assured by design, human beings have the means to become like gods’.

In which case, to return to Nietzsche and his ‘Christianity is Platonism for the masses’ – a statement, it’s worth stressing, intended to insult Christianity, Platonism and the masses; we can now see that it is not a long road to travel to get from Plato’s ‘eternally present principle of goodness’ to Christianity’s depiction of God as the epitome of goodness; from Plato’s ‘triumph of order and reason assured by design’ to Christianity’s God the Creator and Jesus the embodiment of divine logos; or from ‘human beings [that] have the means to become like gods’, to Christianity’s belief in transfiguration, in which man, innately good (i.e. even if not born good, then always capable of it), aspires, via communion with God or redemption through Jesus, to become suffused by the divine.

* Chaos corrected: Hesiod in Plato’s creation myth is contained in the book Plato and Hesiod, which you can download as a PDF from here.

Castoriadis on the objectivity of the Greeks

Just to go back to a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Thermopylae, the Persian invasions and Greek triumphalism, in which I insisted that the pride and sense of superiority characteristic of Greek culture was tempered by self-criticism and objectivity, this idea is found in Cornelius Castoriadis’ essay, The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy (in Politics, Philosophy, Autonomy), from which the following is an excerpt:

‘Hannah Arendt has rightly said that impartiality enters this world through the Greeks. This is already fully apparent in Homer. Not only can one not find in the Homeric poems any disparagement of the “the enemy”, the Trojans, for example, but the truly central figure in the Iliad is Hector, not Achilles, and the most moving characters are Hector and Andromach. The same is true for Aeschylus’ Persians – a play performed in 472 BC, seven years after the battle at Plataea, with the war still going on. In this tragedy, there is not a single word of hatred or contempt for the Persians; the Persian queen, Atossa, is a majestic and venerable figure, and the defeat and ruin of the Persians is ascribed exclusively to the hubris of Xerxes. And in his Trojan Women (415 BC), Euripides presents the Greeks as the cruelest and most monstrous beasts – as if he were saying to the Athenians: this is what you are. Indeed, the play was performed a year after the horrible massacre of the Melians by the Athenians (416 BC).’

The Philosophers' Football Match

Above is the Monty Python sketch The Philosophers' Football Match, featuring teams from Greece and Germany. The sketch was originally part of two shows Monty Python made for German television in 1972 – Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus – and was also included in the film Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl.

You will notice in the sketch that Socrates scores the winning goal for the Greek philosophers. This is deeply ironic (and prophetic) since 10 years later, Sócrates – or Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira, to give him his full name – was captain and one of the star players of the Brazilian national team in the World Cup finals held in Spain; a team which, as well as Sócrates, included Zico, Falcao, Junior, Eder, Leandro and Cerezzo, and is regarded as the most thrilling and aesthetically satisfying footballing side of all time – even more so than the Brazil team that won the World Cup in Mexico in 1970. The 1982 Brazil side did not win that year's World Cup, getting knocked out by the eventual winners Italy 3-2, in one of the greatest upsets (and disappointments) in football.

As a player, Sócrates was renowned for his grace and guile, while off the field he is regarded as the most intelligent Brazilian ever to put on the famous yellow shirt, with doctorates in medicine and, of course, philosophy. Below is the magnificent goal he scored against the USSR in the group stages of the 1982 World Cup.

The revenge of the slave class

‘And now we should not conceal from ourselves what lies hidden in the womb of this Socratic culture! An optimism that thinks itself all powerful! Well, people should not be surprised when the fruits of this optimism ripen, when a society that has been thoroughly leavened with this kind of culture, right down to the lowest levels, gradually trembles with an extravagant turmoil of desires, when the belief in earthly happiness for everyone and in the possibility of such a universal knowledge culture, gradually changes into the threatening demand for such an Alexandrian utopia and into the plea for a Euripidean deus ex machina!

‘People should take note: Alexandrian culture requires a slave class in order to be able to exist over time, but with its optimistic view of existence, it denies the necessity for such a class and thus, when the effect of its beautiful words of seduction and reassurance about the “dignity of human beings” and the “dignity of work” has worn off, it gradually moves towards a horrific destruction. There is nothing more frightening than a barbarian slave class which has learned to think of its existence as an injustice and is preparing to take revenge, not only for itself, but for all generations.’

Castoriadis on Plato, the Greeks and living without hope

In a previous post, I looked at Plato’s disavowal of Hesiod’s depiction of a universe underpinned by chaos in favour of a view of the world permeated by goodness and noted the far-reaching ontological and philosophical implications this had, especially in the formation of Christianity.

Cornelius Castoriadis  is also interested in Plato’s break with the classical Greek vision of the world. For Castoriadis, the Greek perception of Being as Chaos – at the heart of which is the tragic imaginary showing that ‘not only [are] we not masters of the consequences of our actions, but we are not even masters of their meaning’ – is substituted by Plato with a religious or quasi-religious ontology in which Being equals the Good equals Wisdom equals the Beautiful. Thus, Plato, Castoriadis says, rejects the ‘nucleus of the Greek imaginary’ – in which there is an absence of order for man – and replaces it with a theological and unitary ontology that presumes an underlying harmony and rationality in the world.

Castoriadis describes Plato’s innovation as a ‘philosophical monstrosity’ and argues that it has parallels with other theological and unitary ontologies, such as Hebraico-Christianity (with its belief in the Promised Land, resurrections, messiahs and the afterlife), and liberalism and Marxism, with their belief in progress and human perfectibility.

Castoriadis illustrates Plato’s rupture with the classical Greek vision of the world by looking at how the latter would have addressed Kant’s three fundamental questions of philosophy: What can I know? What should I do? and What am I allowed to hope?

On the first two questions, Castoriadis says, the Greeks initiated an illimitable discussion that precluded ever arriving at a categorical ‘Greek answer’. However, on the third question, What am I allowed to hope? the Greeks did provide ’a definite and clear answer, and this is a massive and resounding nothing’.

Castoriadis goes on that hope

‘is not to be taken here in the everyday trivial sense – that the sun will again shine tomorrow, or that a child will be born alive. The hope to which Kant refers is the hope of the Christian or religious tradition, the hope corresponding to that central human wish and delusion that there be some essential correspondence, some consonance, some adequatio, between our desires and decisions, on the one hand, and the world, the nature of being, on the other. Hope is the ontological, cosmological, and ethical assumption that the world is not just something out there, but cosmos in the archaic and proper sense, a total order which includes us, our wishes, and our strivings as its organic and central components. The philosophical translation of this assumption is that being is ultimately good. As is well known, the first one who dared to proclaim this philosophical monstrosity clearly was Plato – after the classical period had ended’.

As for the pre-classical and classical Greeks, Castoriadis says, their denunciation of hope and robust belief that the world can never be fully ordered (that the only order that exists is the order Anaximander describes, which is order through catastrophe, Being as creation and destruction), has profound implications for the way they did politics and philosophy:

‘For Hesiod, hope is forever imprisoned in Pandora’s box. In pre-classical and classical Greece, there is no hope for an afterlife: either there is no afterlife, or if there is one, it is worse than the worst life on earth – as Achilles reveals to Odysseus in the Land of the Dead. Having nothing to hope from an afterlife or from a caring and benevolent God, man is liberated for action and thought in this world.’

Wisdom in the era of Donald Trump

Above is a talk by Victor Davis Hanson on the reasons behind Donald Trump’s unexpected US presidential election triumph in 2016. Hanson, a classicist and not so much a Trump supporter as a critic of leftist-liberal visions and versions of American history and destiny, employs Demosthenes, Aristotle and Euripides to explain why he thinks Trump – a repugnant figure to Hanson in many ways – was able to win the White House.

In the case of Euripides, Hanson uses the quote from the Bacchae, in which the playwright states, via the chorus, τὸ σοφὸν δ᾽ οὐ σοφία, to demonstrate that while Trump and his supporters were often castigated for being stupid – a basket of deplorables, in Hillary Clinton’s infamous phrase – and those who opposed Trumpism were regarded – or regarded themselves – as possessors of superior knowledge or education, wisdom, in fact, comes in many forms and does not always equate to intellect.  Sometimes, according to Hanson, it can come in the form of ‘animal cunning’ – which Hanson attributes to Trump; what is most useful to a society – such as workmanship, physical expertise and manual skills; and, ultimately, the recognition by society of the boundaries that cannot be crossed and by humans of their limitations.

Τὸ σοφὸν δ᾽ οὐ σοφία has been translated into English as ‘that which is wise is not wisdom’ or here as ‘wisdom is not cleverness’. In his talk above, Hanson suggests Euripides is making a distinction between ‘who is wise and who is a wise-ass’ and, in this article, he translates the playwright as saying, ‘cleverness is not wisdom’.  The latter – ‘cleverness is not wisdom’ – is the translation I prefer.

Hanson begins his piece:

‘At the height of the sophistic age in classical Athens, the playwright Euripides asked an eternal question in his masterpiece, the Bacchae: “What is wisdom?” 

‘Was wisdom defined as clever wordplay, or as the urban sophistication of the robed philosophers in the agora and rhetoricians in the assembly?

‘Or instead was true wisdom a deeper and more modest appreciation of unchanging human nature throughout the ages, which reminds us to avoid hubris, tread carefully, always expect the unlikely, and distrust the self-acclaimed wise who eventually prove clever fools? At the end of the play, a savage, merciless nemesis is unleashed on the hubristic wise of the establishment.

‘Euripides would have appreciated the ironies of the 2016 election.’

Nothing in excess

I should have written this post about excess before Christmas; but never mind.

When the Greeks said Μηδὲν ἄγαν (Nothing in excess), they meant in all aspects of life – in politics, ethics, aesthetics, culture, art, architecture, psychology and so on – defiance of which invited hubris, discord and catastrophe and amounted to the repudiation of what the Greeks aspired to more than anything – living with beauty and truth.

Nevertheless, it was Nietzsche who pointed out the essential deceit of the Nothing in excess maxim – carved into the temple of Phoebus Apollo at Delphi – and asserted the root of Greek art and life is not rationality and moderation but strife and pain, and that only a people – like the Greeks – who experienced an ‘excess of strength and courage to gaze into the horror of individual existence and not be turned into stone by the vision’, who were familiar with the ecstatic dream world of Dionysiac art, would have dared to unravel the mysteries of beauty and truth.

‘What suffering [the Greek] race must have endured to reach such beauty [in their culture],’ Nietzsche says at the end of The Birth of Tragedy.

Here’s another view of excess, from Odysseas Elytis, as expressed in his poem The Sovereign Sun, in which he prefers to extol the virtues of moderation, praise the man who has few needs in life and pity the tragic fate of those – like the Greeks – who create modest paradises and then find themselves at the mercy of the avaricious, the envious and resentful, of those whose needs are excessive and malicious.

There’s nothing much a man may want
but to be quiet and innocent

a little food a little wine
at Christmas and at Easter time

wherever he may build his nest
may no one there disturb his rest.

But everything has all gone wrong
they wake him up at break of dawn

then come and drag him to and fro
eat up what little he has and lo

from out his mouth from out of sight
and in a moment of great delight

they snatch his morsel in an evil hour.
Hip hip hurrah for those in Power!

Hip hip hurrah for those in Power
for them there is no ‘I’ or ‘our’.

Hip hip hurrah for those in Power
whatever they see they must devour.

Aristotle’s Lagoon

 

In the two years between leaving Plato’s Academy – where, following Plato’s death, he had been overlooked for the top job in favour of Plato’s nephew Speusippus – and being employed by King Philip the Great of Macedon to tutor his son, Alexander, Aristotle lived on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos, studying and categorising the island’s fauna and in the process inventing biology and zoology. Above is a BBC documentary, Aristotle’s Lagoon, in which Professor Armand Leroi looks at Aristotle’s Mytilenean sojourn and his methods and discoveries. It’s well worth watching.