A Tutorial in Platonic Political Philosophy.

Here's a translation of a tutorial I wrote in the Autumn of 2015. One may want to compare my "The West. A Straussian Metanarrative."

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1. Introduction.

What is political philosophy? The usual conception is: as philosophy is the love of wisdom, so political philosophy is the love of political wisdom. But one can also conceive it differently: not as the love of political wisdom, but as the political love of wisdom...

What does this mean? It means that the love of wisdom, philosophy, has become political--not so much in the narrower sense, of "being in politics"--although Francis Bacon for example was Lord Chancellor--, as in the broadest sense, of political activity in general--for example the publication of a political manifesto. Political-philosophical writings are basically manifestos for the benefit of philosophy, written by philosophers who felt they had to rise up for philosophy. Or rather, descend. Thus the first word of Plato's Republic is katebên, "I went down". Political philosophers are philosophers who, at least now and then, leave their height in order to involve themselves personally with its foundations.

But why then is the usual meaning of the term "political philosophy" the love of political wisdom, and not the political love of wisdom? This is itself an effect, indeed a success, of political philosophy. For Plato, the first Westerner who indisputably practised political philosophy, ostensibly lets his Socrates go among the people in order to determine what is political wisdom--but the latter really does so only in order with his feigned naivety and objectivity to actualise the implications of his own political wisdom!

His own political wisdom? Was Socrates then wise? How can a philosopher be a wise man or vice versa? How can someone at the same time possess and desire one and the same thing?--Instead of answering this question, we should rather make the following distinction here. Philosophy basically seeks natural revelation--although it would not spurn divine revelation, either. But until the essence of things has revealed its true nature, i.e. until we possess true wisdom, true knowledge of existence, the most rational thing we can do is: search for true wisdom. And given this, that a life in the service of philosophy is the best life, at least until we possess true knowledge of the best life, one can certainly reason out what is the best political order: namely that political order which makes philosophy prosper the most.

But with this, we're still missing a second premise. The first is that a life in the service of philosophy is the best life. But one can only draw a conclusion regarding the concretely best political order if one also knows in what sort of social conditions one lives. These are dependent on time and place. This is the reason why, in broad lines, I distinguish not one, but four political philosophies in the history of the West.


2. Homer.

The first political philosophy I distinguish is the Homeric. The culture whose first literary works are ascribed to Homer was the culture in which Western philosophy arose: the natural philosopher Thales of Miletus is usually considered the first Western philosopher. But in his forelast book, How Philosophy Became Socratic, Laurence Lampert already refers repeatedly to the work of Seth Benardete, a student of Leo Strauss's: he suggests that Homer's Odysseus is more or less to Homer himself as Plato's Socrates is to Plato himself--and one could add to this: "and as Nietzsche's Zarathustra is to Nietzsche himself." And in his latest book, The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss, he devotes an entire chapter to Benardete's The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey. That chapter is titled: "Extending the History of Philosophy Back to Homer: Seth Benardete's Odyssey". It starts with a quote from one of Strauss's letters to Benardete:

"Some day my belief that Homer started it all and that there was a continuous tradition from Homer until the end of the 18th century will be vindicated."

Now I've read Benardete's book, and it's one of the most difficult books I've read, which is certainly saying something. To give an idea of how Benardete reads the Odyssey, I'll quote a partially paraphrased passage from it. It concerns the episode in which Odysseus and his men are trapped in the cyclops Polyphemus's cave.

"[Polyphemus] asks Odysseus where he moored his ship. [... Odysseus lies] that Poseidon smashed his ship. [...] Polyphemus does not reply to Odysseus's lie; instead, he eats two of his comrades. [... It does not] occur to Odysseus that if Polyphemus believes they cannot get away they have to be disposed of in some way if the order of his cave is not to be disturbed. There is no room here for the permanent stranger. Cannibalism is the strict consequence of Cyclopean tidiness: Polyphemus cuts up the men neatly and leaves not a scrap behind. Nothing in the narrative suggests that cannibalism is anything but a one-time supplement to Polyphemus's [vegetarian] diet."

Benardete goes on to interpret this as the Homeric lesson that order, for example a juridical order, does not yet amount to justice. And cannibalism is in his reading a very important and hence often recurring subject in Homer. It seems that the Homeric political turn was among other things aimed at eradicating cannibalism.

This quotation only gives a glimpse of how dense the greatest part of Benardete's book is, by the way.

Anyway, whatever may have been the exact social conditions that drove Homer to effect his political turn, that turn was aimed at guaranteeing a certain minimum of civilisation--a minimum on which, whether this was intended or not, even philosophy could prosper. If I've understood Benardete en Homer well enough, the mechanism by means of which this was effected was the following. First another quotation from Benardete's book:

"Homer [...] gives the impression that the Sun punished Odysseus's men; but we are later told that the Sun cannot punish individual men; he can withdraw his light from gods and men equally, but he needs Zeus to carry out what alone would satisfy him. Homer does not mention Zeus.[!] If we may distinguish between cosmic gods like the Sun—gods whose possible existence is manifest to sight—and Olympian gods, about whom there is only hearsay, then Homer begins [the Odyssey] with a cosmic god who punishes human folly, but he is at once corrected as soon as the Muse takes over and introduces Homer and us to Poseidon, Zeus, and Athena."

What Homer did with regard to the gods was this: he promoted the Olympian gods to the highest rank and demoted the cosmic gods to a lower rank. With this, the invisible gods became the most important gods. (By "invisible" I do not mean that they weren't depicted or even enacted, by the way; just that one couldn't see them in their true form.) This was crucial in order to civilise man, as the next short quotation may serve to illustrate:

"Hades distinguishes man from everything else. Men go to Hades, all other animals just die. This distinctiveness of man, whether exaggerated or not, imposes on man certain constraints. The prohibition against cannibalism takes the form of a general prohibition, whether it be through inhumation or cremation, against man being consumed by any wild beast."

A man who eats another man is of course a wild beast in a sense. The Greek name for Hades, by the way, is Aïdes, originally Avides, "the Unseen one", "the Invisible one".

What Homer introduced was the notion of invisible gods who saw all your shameful deeds and punished you for them in Hades, if not already here on earth. Thus Benardete writes:

"The [sacrificial] cow, [Homer] says, came from the field, Telemachus'  comrades came, the blacksmith came, and Athena came. Athena came in just the way the cow did. That the men of Pylos see the one and not the other makes no difference."

Considering the context in which he writes this, and after pondering it a lot, my conclusion is really very simple: a juicy piece of beef suggests the nearness, indeed, the favour of the goddess! But because everyone can see that shameful people often enough have plenty to eat whereas honourable people do not, there was still need of belief in a Hades in order to impel people to live honourably.

Contrary to Christian culture, which is a guilt culture, the Homeric culture was a shame culture. As a rule, punishment in Hades was no corporal punishment, like in the fires of Hell, but a spiritual punishment: the pain of knowing that people didn't respect you. Except for those who directly harmed or tried to harm the gods, the Homeric reward was honour and the Homeric punishment was dishonour. The recipient par excellence of the Homeric reward was Achilles. Thus Benardete writes:

"[I]t is [Achilles'] tomb that makes him conspicuous both now and in the future. Achilles dies but not his name. Hades is needed in order that Achilles may enjoy, if only counterfactually, the reality of his name."

Upon his death, the soul of Achilles went to Hades, where the recently deceased and the occasional visitor to Hades would inform him of the fact that he was still considered the greatest warrior here on earth, that his impressive tomb site was still swarming with pilgrims every day and his feats were still the stuff of legend. In this way, people were encouraged to behave according to a moral code--a code of honour.


3. Plato.

In my introduction, I said that Plato's Socrates goes among the people solely "in order with his feigned naivety and objectivity to actualise the implications of his own political wisdom". But this basically only goes for the older, the wiser Socrates. The younger Socrates does go among the people in order to determine what is political wisdom, so without knowing it in advance. For originally, Socrates was no political philosopher but a natural philosopher, like Thales of Miletus. This is the Socrates who is sharply criticised by the oldest of our three direct sources, the great comic poet Aristophanes. In his comedy, The Clouds, Aristophanes depicts Socrates as a sophist, a scientist of the Greek enlightenment. About this enlightenment, Lampert writes (in his forelast book): "it actively schooled the best Athenian young in a lightly veiled skepticism about the gods while mocking ancestral or paternal submission to them and counseling its students on just how to make the best use of the piety of others." This is precisely Aristophanes' reproach of Socrates, and in fact Socrates, from that time on, begins his so-called "second sailing". His first sailing was his journey into the clouds, that is to say, his quest for the true nature, or true cause, of natural phenomena. His second sailing is his return journey, his return to the earth, to the world of men. On Socrates as he's described by the second of our three direct sources, the historian Xenophon, Lampert writes (in his latest book):

"Socrates' turn to the human taught him that the humans in charge, the males in charge, judge nature to act unbearably toward humans, like a sea always in motion, always threatening humans and human constructs with destruction, always failing to distinguish worthy from unworthy. Xenophon's images bring to light Socrates' insight into the male need to master feared and hated nature, to conquer nature. They show Socrates, the student of nature and human nature, learning that he will have to persuade ruling males of what he learned they would dearly want to believe, that nature is not what she seems but wholly otherwise, end-directed for human benefit by caring gods who ensure that the worthy benefit and the unworthy suffer. Socrates has no quarrel with nature, but he teaches a fiction to make it appear that the male quarrel with nature misunderstands nature."

I repeat: "end-directed for human benefit by caring gods who ensure that the worthy benefit and the unworthy suffer". This is what Lampert calls Socrates' "teleotheology": a teleological theology, that is to say a theology which teaches that the ways of God may be unfathomable, but that there absolutely is a plan behind them--a master plan whose success is guaranteed: the good will be rewarded and the wicked be punished, perhaps not yet in this life, but certainly in the hereafter. And the rewards and punishments will not consist in the knowledge that one has a good or a bad name in this world, but in direct experience of the enjoyments of heaven or the horrors of hell, respectively. I'm putting it in Christian terms, and indeed, Platonism is proto-Christian. Thus Nietzsche called Christianity "Platonism for the people."

Platonism for the people is simplified Platonism. For example, Christianity has a single deity whereas Platonism, just like the Homeric religion, has many. The difference from the Homeric religion in this respect is in the following. The Homeric gods often disagreed with each other: thus in the Iliad they are divided between the Greeks and the Trojans. According to Platonism, on the other hand, the gods are wholly of one mind, because they are all wise and therefore cannot disagree with each other.

It doesn't really matter if there be a single deity, or multiple deities who are wholly of one mind. But Plato had to stick with polytheism, because his intended audience happened to be used to that. Thus Lampert, in his forelast book, writes:

"[S]peaking as a theologian, [Socrates] promulgates laws for gods who resemble the gods Adeimantus already knows from Homer and Hesiod but are moral models fit for human imitation. Socrates uses Adeimantus's beliefs about the gods to instil the old gods with new virtue."

Platonism, then, sticks to the invisibility of the most important gods, but changes their norms and values, and thereby the idea of Hades. Now Hades no longer in the first place serves to enable one to hear whether one's good or bad name lives on on earth, but to enable one to enjoy or suffer from things within Hades itself. This change is accompanied by the transformation of a shame culture into a guilt culture.

But even within a guilt culture there are people for whom shame and honour are more important than guilt and a good conscience. Plato flatters these people with the notion that they are philosophical because they love what they know and hate what they don't know. For, seeing as such loyal and vigilant dogs constitute the axis around which society turns, and are for that reason highly esteemed by the people, philosophy acquires a better name if they call themselves philosophers.


4. Machiavelli and Nietzsche

In the third political philosophy I discern, Machiavellian political philosophy, such people once again have a key role. With this I jump to the Machiavellian age, since I can best explain the key role they fulfil in the Platonic age by comparing it to their later role.

In the Middle Ages, as in classical antiquity after Plato, political philosophy basically remained Platonic. But although Christianity--and Judaism and Islam, likewise--was a form of Platonism, this only applied to the spiritual world. As regards the physical world, not Plato but Aristotle was in the right, according to the Church. Thus in the Middle Ages, Christian theology got almost inextricably tangled up with Aristotelian natural science. And when, after the high point of the Renaissance, philosophy was acutely endangered by religious zeal--religious wars, the Inquisition, the persecution of Galilei, the burning of Giordano Bruno--, then Machiavelli got the brilliant idea to use that entanglement against the Church. Yet the unworkability of Aristotelian natural science was only an assumption on the part of Machiavelli, and it wasn't until Descartes that that science was vanquished by the scientific revolution made possible by the latter's mathematised natural science. Enter Francis Bacon. As Lampert writes in his latest book:

"Bacon introduced an experimental science that, granted time, would make the implied cosmology of the Bible as evidently untrue as the cosmology of Aristotle. To gain time, the new science had to equip itself with what Bacon knew to be rhetoric: he transformed the Bible's promise of paradise forever in the next life into the promise of paradise forever in the human future through work in the world now and for generations--his truly Napoleonic strategy. By converting minds like Descartes's and influencing the minds of many, to establish the Royal Society for instance, Bacon advanced [...] natural science."

In his New Atlantis, which was the direct inspiration for the founding of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, Bacon advertises a social order in which scientists and inventors are praised and rewarded for enhancing the people's well-being. The scientists and inventors are the people for whom shame and honour are more important than guilt and a good conscience. And even as in Baconism, which is basically scientific Platonism, a lover of wisdom took care that lovers of honour voluntarily took to serving the lovers of ease, by making discoveries and inventions for them, so did in religious Platonism a lover of wisdom take care that lovers of honour voluntarily took to serving the lovers of ease by teaching a gospel which they themselves lived--to which belongs the myth that the philosopher has a mind's eye for the Ideas, that the priest has a mind's ear for the word of God...

The purpose of Platonism was to allow philosophy to continue to flourish in the shadow of religion. But under Christianity, philosophy became the handmaiden of the religion. According to the Medieval philosopher Alfarabi, such an absorption was inevitable unless there was always at least one philosopher among the high priests. By seeing to that, the life-cycle of the society would remain at its high point instead of coming to an end. But after this, too, had failed in the Middle Ages, at least in the Christian world, if not in the Islamic and the Jewish world as well, then Machiavelli thought of a new way to avert that fate. He realised that the fact that such life-cycles naturally come to an end could be undone by virtue of a "conquest of nature". This conquest would specifically not be natural-scientific so much as politicological in nature: Machiavelli did not regard the last possible phases, but the middle phase of such a natural life-cycle as the high point: according to him, the high point of the whole cycle was not a scientific or philosophical high point, but a political high point. Science was to be put in the service of politics, and philosophy as metaphysics was to be completely abolished. It was with this, and really only with this, that philosophy became science, modern science, and as such the new religion. In Lampert's words:

"The Machiavellian strategy succeeded in its one great aim ["to crush Christianity's spiritual tyranny"]; but by adopting its enemy's means and conscripting science into the service of propaganda, it caused philosophy to fall prey to a new tyranny, the tyranny of supposed enlightenment via science." (Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche.)

The Baconian scheme, in which science serves the common good, was so successful that the unreasonableness of such utilitarianism was almost completely obscured by it; today, virtually everyone considers democracy's absolute superiority a self-evident fact (though not everyone may find things are sufficiently socialist or anarchist yet). Near the end of 2012, I saw a nice example of how much people regard certain moral values as self-evident, and science as the vehicle of those values. It's an imaginary postcard sent to religion by science, in the week that skydiver and BASE-jumper Felix Baumgartner jumped from the stratosphere in a stunt sponsored by Red Bull.

Dear Religion,

This week I safely dropped a
human being from space while
you shot a 14 year old girl in the
head for wanting to go to
school.

I kinda feel like you need a
better hobby....

Yours,
Science

I won't say much about this other than that the idea behind it seems to me to be the following: "We over here in the West are, thanks to our scientific enlightenment, already able to employ science for the purpose of excitement and sensation, whereas you over there in the Middle East haven't even used it to guarantee peace and security!" For these, I think, are the two value sets which are met by the Machiavellian strategy. A student of Leo Strauss whom I haven't yet mentioned, Harry Neumann, may express the truth behind this even better than Lampert and Strauss. Thus he writes:

"Sometimes I ask students if any real restraints, limits set by something like nature or gods, exist to curb scientific experimentation. Can science, for example, make men immortal or transform them into eagles? Most students deny that anything is intrinsically impossible. They acknowledge that some things probably will not happen tomorrow or even in a century, but, in principle, nothing prevents anything imaginable from happening at any time. Like good liberal democrats, these same students usually cling to a groundless faith that science's uncurbed experimentation ought to be used for liberal democratic goals--to promote freedom rather than slavery, peace rather than war. As if that made any difference in the nihilist world revealed by science! The faith that science's omnipotence can be restrained in the name of some non-arbitrary moral obligation is unscientific. It is relapse into the philosophic illusion from which science liberates itself. Interpreted scientifically, any such relapse, any moral-political commitment, springs from the tyrannic decision to have it so: all moral-political demands are efforts to tyrannise over reality, to replace nature or truth with the propaganda dearest to one's heart." (Neumann, Liberalism.)

"The philosophic illusion from which science liberates itself" is the illusion of  "a universe in which [the philosopher] and what is good for him exist as something more than nihilist experience" (Neumann, ibid.). So not only are the said value sets valuable only insofar as people insist on their being valuable, but man himself only exists insofar as he insists that he exists... The latter idea, that beings exist only insofar as they value themselves, is of the essence of value ontology. But since we're talking about political philosophy, not about metaphysics, I won't go into that too deeply. Suffice it to say the following. Democracy exists owing to the fact that the people who want it to exist together are more powerful than the people who do not want that. These, however, are people with relatively weak wills: hence they must be with a great majority. That their individual wills are weak may be appreciated from the fact that most of them at least cannot acknowledge the aforesaid; they have to believe that their values are universal, that they are not driven by will to power but by moral sense. Nietzsche's philosophy, on the other hand, indeed, all esoteric, that is to say actual philosophy, is scientific: it is the most spiritual will to power, the tyrannical drive to the creation of the world... Thus Nietzsche wants the world to be will to power and nothing besides, and therewith as hierarchical, not egalitarian. Thus Neumann writes:

"Although the past was responsible for the present egalitarianism detested by Nietzsche, for the most part it was characterised by the inequalities dear to him. However, lack of awareness of nihilism's threat formerly led men to take those inequalities for granted, to interpret them as necessary consequences of natural or divine justice. Modern thinkers culminating in Nietzsche made men aware that human creativity or technology was not limited by anything. Nietzsche feared that contemporary egalitarians would employ this unlimited power to create a world of universal peace and equality. He yearned for a superman whose will to overpower nihilism and egalitarianism would use modernity's immense power to create the eternal return of the past's inequality and wars. Then there would be no wars to end all wars." (ibid.)

Allow me to explain. Inequality was dear to Nietzsche because it leads to spiritual growth into the heights; likewise crises like war, because suffering and danger bring out the best, namely the strongest, in people. With the aid of science, however, we could arrange the world in such a way as to no longer be able to be struck by natural disasters or diseases, and we could even alter human neurochemistry and genetics in such a way that we would no longer be capable of suffering and aggression! This is exactly what certain prominent transhumanists advocate.

Nietzsche's superhumanism wants the opposite thereof: the eternal recurrence of all inequality and all suffering. For with that, at least in the enormously distant future there will be inequality and suffering again. But it's well-nigh inconceivable that, if time is not yet a circle, we could so to say bend it into a circle; let alone that we could ever know that we'd succeeded. And indeed, this is not the principal meaning of the eternal recurrence. The eternal recurrence is the ideal of a man who values his life and everything that preceded it so much that he wants it all to return; but this also means that he would strongly prefer the time between the present and for instance the return of the Big Bang to not be essentially different. With the eternal recurrence, then, he also wants historical recurrence: to speak with Mark Twain, not just that history repeats itself, but also that it rhymes.

It's highly improbable that man could ever cause a new Big Bang; but a new Great Flood is already much more probable... Lampert suggests that, even as Nietzsche had Machiavelli as his predecessor, and Machiavelli had Plato, and Plato had Homer, so Homer, too, had a similar predecessor: Tiresias. But contrary to Homer, Plato, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, Tiresias is someone we know nothing about, content-wise; there's a break in the tradition immediately before Homer. Therefore, couldn't we bring about another such a break? After which a new Homer might appear, and a new Plato, a new Machiavelli and a new Nietzsche? The Machiavellian and Platonic turns, and possibly the Homeric turn as well, were aimed at preventing such a break from occurring; but whereas the Homeric and Platonic turns sooner or later led to the threat of a new break, the Machiavellian turn, conversely, has led to the threat of stagnation: the stagnation of man in the single ideal--"the last man".

Yet although the Nietzschean turn stimulates precisely such a break, it can paradoxically lead to continuity. For, besides stagnation and interruption, there is yet another alternative: a spiral. This would mean that, at the end of this Machiavellian age, an even more advanced age should dawn, but one which as regards its value system will correspond to the pre-Homeric age--which must have been an animistic age. Upon this, in turn, a new Homeric age could then follow, that is to say one which as regards its value system will correspond to the Homeric age, but which will be even much more advanced than ours. I regard Fixed Cross and myself at least as pioneers of the coming age.

Chapter 1

Kylie Springtime was no ordinary girl. She was short, hardly over five feet; but her blond hair was long, running all the way down to her waist. She always dressed in black. She was in her early twenties, but still lived at her Mother's. As a rule she only left the house to go to university, and to a Metal concert once in a while. She could stand the latter only under the influence of alcohol, which she considered a drug and therefore disapproved of—not morally, but healthwise. And as for university, she studied Philosophy, because she was in love with Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche. The name invoked associations with Nazism, but Kylie liked that; she liked to provoke, even to offend. But her Nietzsche was no Nazi, and so Nazism ultimately left her cold. There was, however, something in connection with it that inspired her. This was Savitri Devi: the woman who, at least in a sense, fell in love with Hitler without ever having met him, and was perhaps most deeply in love with him after his death. Not only was this somewhat analogous to her own situation, but moreover, some of Devi's ideas were very applicable to it.

Most applicable perhaps was Devi's idea of men "in Time", "above Time", and "against Time". The men "in Time" were in their element in time, like demons in the fires of Hell. The men "above Time" lived beyond time, in their minds, for as Milton wrote, "The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." But the men "against Time" were like fallen angels, yearning for a Heaven but living in a Hell. Their happiness depended on something outside their minds—something that was not there.

Now Kylie understood herself as a woman "against Time". Devi always spoke of men "in Time", "above Time", and "against Time", but Kylie interpreted this in the light of the word Übermensch: though usually translated as "Superman" or "Overman", it did not necessarily refer to male human beings. She aspired to greatness, to Supermanhood, but no matter what heights she might attain, she considered herself condemned to be "against Time". For her soulmate, her one true love, had died ninety years before she was even born.

How had she fallen in love with a man she'd never met? In part it was not all that extraordinary; people fell in love over the internet all the time. It was not even necessary to see images of each other, or hear each other's voice. But what was exceptional about this case was that the guy did not address her specifically, and that she could not respond to him at all. In fact, the latter was her big problem, even bigger than the lack of physical intimacy. Abelard and Heloise had been lucky compared to them!

Yes, compared to them: them both, for she did not believe Nietzsche had been happy. Thus there was this letter of his that moved her to tears, a letter addressed to Lou Salomé in which he anticipated her coming to a forest abode where he was staying at the time. She later cancelled the meeting, and they never met again. If only it had been Kylie instead of Lou! Never would she have cancelled it, she would have come and stayed there with him forever if possible. She was the rightful recipient of his affections as well as of his teachings. Although, speaking of his teachings...

If Nietzsche had one teaching, it was his teaching of eternal return. This was the notion that time be a circle, that all that happened had happened before and would happen again an endless amount of times. But this was precisely the teaching that Kylie found hardest to bear: Nietzsche would be born, live, and die again, then there would be ninety years of white noise, and then she herself would be born, live, and die again, followed by ninety zillion more years of white noise, after which Nietzsche would be born again... But wait, did that not give her an opportunity to communicate with him? Could she not speak to him across ninety zillion years, even as he spoke to her across ninety?

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Chapter 2

Groan. Kylie Springtime woke up at dusk, as usual. She was surrounded by her many stuffed animals—her "teddies", as she called them—, but these could not ward off the overwhelming feeling of waking up on her own, without her soulmate again. Last night, or rather morning, just before she went to sleep, it had been easy and comforting to think of bridging the ninety zillion years between them; but now it seemed like a joke, a cruel joke wrought upon her by fate. With great reluctance she got up, put on her hooded cat bathrobe, and went to the kitchen.

In the kitchen, a bunch of her countless younger half- and step-siblings were bickering, as usual. Ignoring them, she walked to the fridge to see if there was some chicken in it. Halfway there, however, she stopped dead in her tracks. That smell! And then she realized: her Mother was making fish for dinner! YUCK!! Kylie found fish "icky"; as far as she knew, she was the first cat to do so. But she would not be the last! She was a pioneer in that regard, too... As best she could, she with one hand got the small amount of chicken left in the fridge and some pieces of fruit, while holding her nose with the other. Then, she scurried out of the kitchen, her cat ears bobbing on her head and her tail quite literally between her legs.

Back in her room, which was painted completely black, she sat down on the side of the bed and started eating her breakfast. She remembered she had a Political Philosophy class the next morning, which meant she would have to stay awake until it started, and then some. Well, it was already evening, and she would still have to do her work-out—which mostly consisted of her running in circles in her room—, do some studying, do some chores... EEK!! She'd suddenly spotted a pretty large spider on the floor, much too close to her bare feet. She'd already fled onto the bed, and moving as far away from the spider as possible without losing it from sight, she looked for something to squish it with. It was a gross thing to do, but less gross than the thought of the spider roaming free in her room, and her possibly swallowing it in her sleep.

"And this slow spider which creepeth in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and thou and I in this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must we not all have already existed?/—And must we not return and run in that other lane out before us, that long weird lane—must we not eternally return?" That was from her favourite book, Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, which she had in a translation by a guy ironically named Common—and with which she had just squished her spider. Sitting on the floor with the open book in her hands and the dead spider beside her, she silently lamented: how could any message she might send to Nietzsche not be squished like her spider? She herself might be squished in an accident tomorrow on the bus to university, or at any time by an earthquake or a meteor. How could anything survive ninety zillion years?

According to the general scientific consensus, the universe as we know it had begun with a "Big Bang"; and for that Big Bang to happen again, there would first have to be a so-called "Big Crunch", in which everything would be squished. But even if Big Bang theory were false yet eternal return a fact, the idea of sending Nietzsche a message seemed preposterous. Our solar system would be destroyed and created anew, and indeed so would the whole visible universe at any one time. And yet it was the only way. As Zarathustra also said, "Not backward can the Will will; that it cannot break time and time's desire—that is the Will's lonesomest tribulation. [...] That time doth not run backward—that is its animosity. 'That which was': so is the stone which it cannot roll called./And thus doth it roll stones out of animosity and ill-humour, and taketh revenge on whatever doth not, like it, feel rage and ill-humour."

Kylie Springtime was full of rage and ill-humour. She wanted to kill people. She had already killed a rat in cold blood, catching it outside and bringing it to her room in the dead of night, where after torturing it for a while she had finally cut off its head. Even her fellow cats were not safe from her, though thus far the worst she has done was torment them with catnip. Still, she could not be positive that she would never kill one. And in any case, she would kill herself when she had reached her intellectual peak—her "zenith", as she called it. She also felt a desire to sit in a white bathtub filled to the brim with blood. Actually, though, the latter suggested a third alternative to her silly, girlish side and her dark, morbid side.

Kylie herself called her two sides her "childish" side and her "morbid" side; but maybe it was more accurate to say "infantile" instead of "childish". For both sides were pathological: it was as if she'd never become a woman, but had instead developed a morbid side to make up for the fact that she was retaining her girlhood. She'd never really developed a female body shape. Well then, all this was reminiscent of the "Triple Goddess": on the one hand there was the White Goddess, the Maiden, the not-yet-fertile; and on the other, there was the Black Goddess, the Crone, the no-longer-fertile; but in between there was normally the Red Goddess, the Mother, the fertile. And though Kylie was no longer a maiden in the sense of pre-menstrual or even virginal—she had lost her virginity in a stupor after a Metal concert—, she had never become true to her last name, but had instead split into Kylie and Kali.

Ironically, the Sanskrit name Kali did not just mean "the Black Lady", but also "Lady Death" by way of "Lady Time". Time brought all things to an end, and Kylie wanted to bring all things to an end out of ill will against time. But even if a Big Crunch happened tomorrow, and from it there followed a Big Bang exactly the same as the one at the beginning of our universe, that would bring her no closer to her soulmate, for our universe was billions of years old, and in any case, she would then be dead. So she used her black side as a shell to protect her white side; hardly anyone knew of her teddies or her being a kitty or any of the other silly things about her. Instead, she tended to present herself as cold, hard, and hostile—a "malicious succubus", as a fellow female student had once called her. She took pride in that name, at home as she was in everything from Medieval folklore to the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. But it was only half of who she was.

::

Chapter 3

The next morning she was still awake, sitting on the bus to university. She always sat in the back of the bus, as she'd read it was safer there—less chance of being squished. She was sitting in the aisle seat, with her backpack on the window seat. But the bus was getting fuller, and soon she could no longer ignore the people looking for seats without drawing attention to herself, so she moved onto the window seat. It was not that she was shy; she was just introverted. As Hans Eysenck had said, introverts turned inward because they were highly sensitive and therefore easily overstimulated. Moreover, she knew that any person she encountered might draw a weapon and kill her. She hoped the person next to her would leave her be.

When she got to the lecture hall, it was already quite full, mostly with people her age. But she could not relate to them; they were no free spirits, but enslaved to their appetites, their morals, their vanities. She despised them, and would have nothing to do with them. If possible, she always sat by herself, and if it was too crowded for that, she just ignored whoever sat next to her. But the latter often enough took conscious effort on her part, so she was glad to see there was still an isolated spot left. She sat down and waited for the professor to arrive.

"What is political philosophy? The usual conception is: as philosophy is the love of wisdom, so political philosophy is the love of political wisdom. But one can also conceive it differently: not as the love of political wisdom, but as the political love of wisdom...

"What does this mean? It means that the love of wisdom, philosophy, has become political—not so much in the narrower sense, of 'being in politics'—although Francis Bacon for example was Lord Chancellor—, as in the broadest sense, of political activity in general—for example the publication of a political manifesto. Political-philosophical writings are basically manifestos for the benefit of philosophy, written by philosophers who felt they had to rise up for philosophy. Or rather, descend. Thus the first word of Plato's Republic is katebên, 'I went down'. Political philosophers are philosophers who, at least now and then, leave their height in order to involve themselves personally with its foundations.

"But why then is the usual meaning of the term 'political philosophy' the love of political wisdom, and not the political love of wisdom? This is itself an effect, indeed a success, of political philosophy. For Plato, the first Westerner who indisputably practised political philosophy, ostensibly lets his Socrates go among the people in order to determine what is political wisdom—but the latter really does so only in order with his feigned naivety and objectivity to actualise the implications of his own political wisdom!

"His own political wisdom? Was Socrates then wise? How can a philosopher be a wise man or vice versa? How can anyone at the same time possess and desire one and the same thing?—Instead of answering this question, we should rather make the following distinction here. Philosophy basically seeks natural revelation—although it would not spurn divine revelation, either. But until the essence of things has revealed its true nature, i.e. until we possess true wisdom, true knowledge of existence, the most rational thing we can do is: search for true wisdom. And given this, that a life in the service of philosophy is the best life, at least until we possess true knowledge of the best life, one can certainly reason out what is the best political order: namely that political order which makes philosophy prosper the most.

"But with this, we're still missing a second premise. The first is that a life in the service of philosophy is the best life. But one can only draw a conclusion regarding the concretely best political order if one also knows in what sort of social conditions one lives. These are dependent of time and place. This is the reason why, in broad lines, I distinguish not one, but four political philosophies in the history of the West.

"The first political philosophy I distinguish is the Homeric. The culture whose first literary works are ascribed to Homer is the culture in which Western philosophy arose: the natural philosopher Thales of Miletus is usually considered the first Western philosopher. But in truth, Homer started it all, and there was a continuous tradition from Homer until the end of the eighteenth century. What has changed since then is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that Nietzsche, writing a century later, did not consider Kant and Hegel philosophers but only philosophy scholars: what has changed is that philosophy scholars are now considered philosophers, whereas actual philosophers are usually looked down on as 'amateurs'."

Nietzsche... The professor had mentioned Nietzsche! Until then, Kylie had just passively made notes, diligent as always but without enthusiasm; but now, she sat up in her chair, her face beaming as the professor continued: "This is ironic, however, as the word 'amateur' literally means 'lover', and a philosopher is literally a lover of wisdom; whereas so-called 'professional philosophers', professors of philosophy, are often dry as dust, academics without any real passion. And yes, I'm aware of the irony in my saying that.

"Anyway, let's get back to Homer. Whatever may have been the exact social conditions that drove Homer to effect his political turn, that turn was aimed at guaranteeing a certain minimum of civilization—a minimum on which, whether this was intended or not, even philosophy could prosper. The mechanism by means of which this was effected was the following. Homer promoted the Olympian gods to the highest rank and demoted the cosmic gods to a lower rank. The cosmic gods were the gods whose possible existence was manifest to sight, like the Sun, whereas the Olympian gods were invisible. By 'invisible' I do not mean that they weren't depicted or even enacted, by the way; just that one couldn't see them in their true form. Well then, what Homer introduced was the notion of invisible gods who saw all your shameful deeds and punished you for them in Hades, if not already here on earth.

"Contrary to Christian culture, which is a guilt culture, the Homeric culture was a shame culture. As a rule, punishment in Hades was no corporal punishment, like in the fires of Hell, but a spiritual punishment: the pain of knowing that people didn't respect you. Except for those who directly harmed or tried to harm the gods, the Homeric reward was honour and the Homeric punishment was dishonour. The recipient par excellence of the Homeric reward was Achilles: upon his death, the soul of Achilles went to Hades, where the recently deceased and the occasional visitor to Hades would inform him of the fact that he was still considered the greatest warrior here on earth, that his impressive tomb site was still swarming with pilgrims every day and his feats were still the stuff of legend. In this way, people were encouraged to behave according to a moral code—a code of honour.

"Now I will answer some questions."

Kylie immediately had her hand up as high as it could go, thereby eclipsing any other, wavering students. "Yes?"

"You said Nietzsche considered the philosophers from after 1800 not philosophers at all but only academics. But didn't he despise all the philosophers from after the fifth century BC? Didn't he only respect the pre-Socratics? And didn't Plato already found an academy?"

"That's a very good question. The thing is that Nietzsche had only an inkling of the esotericism of his predecessors. It's true that something changed drastically with Socrates—this will be the topic of next week's lecture. But it was only a political change and not a philosophical change; I contend that men like Plato and Descartes, for all their apparent errors, were no less great philosophers than Heraclitus and Nietzsche. What changed around 1800 was simply that the art of esoteric reading was lost. Yes?"

The professor had moved on to the next question, but Kylie wasn't listening anymore. Plato and Descartes as great as Nietzsche?? And as Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher Nietzsche most admired?? Plato, with his "Good-in-itself", and Descartes, with his "proof of God"?? The professor was insane. And what had he said about esotericism? Nietzsche had had only an inkling? Her Nietzsche had no mere inklings!

The class ended, and Kylie strode outside. She was furious. And yet, in spite of herself, she had this uneasy feeling that there was something to what the professor had said. She was just in time to catch her bus, and on the ride home she read back her notes. Homer as a political philosopher... To be sure, Nietzsche greatly admired Homer, but as a naive poet, not as a philosopher. Then again, the professor had spoken of "feigned naivety" with regard to Socrates—probably a reference to the latter's famous irony. Could Homer's naivety then also be feigned?

::

Chapter 4.

Back in her room, a cold shower and a hot meal later, it all seemed considerably less uncanny. Even if Homer had been even greater than Nietzsche had thought, and Plato had somehow been equally great—things she still considered quite unlikely—, what did that really matter to her? Even if Homer had been some kind of Nietzsche, and she should fall in love with him instead, all that really changed was that it reduced the ninety zillion years by at most three millennia... Still, she was actually looking forward to the next lecture—if only to antagonize the professor.

The rest of her week was uneventful, as usual. Sure,


[That's all, folks! The vague plan I had for the rest of the story was that the rest of my tutorial would be featured in subsequent classes she would attend; that this would teach her about historical as distinct from eternal recurrence; that she would thus come to see that she might only need to bridge a couple of millennia in order to reach the Nietzsche of the next cycle (although her message might be quite fragmented if the next cycle were to begin with a cataclysm¹). And if Homer was some kind of Nietzsche, she might not even need to reach the next Nietzsche, but just the next Homer! And what about the professor himself?...

¹ Compare: "proverbs are said to be 'relics, saved by their conciseness and cleverness when ancient philosophy perished in the widespread destruction of mankind'." (Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, "Religion and the Cyclical View of History", quoting Aristoteles/Aristocles, On Philosophy, frag. 8 Ross.)]