Education without encyclo-paideia.
Plato: our educational contemporary
Note: this is a summary excerpt from the final chapter of Badiou and Plato: and education by truths. It seems apropos to revisit this work given the contemporary state of the education situation - which, as everyone can see, is not at all ‘an education’ but an effect of state: the capitalist state of the situation. Especially apropos as we are forced - by what we lack - to bear impotent witness to the powerful effects of an incipient and grotesque sophistry, a pedagogy of the ‘state’, animating, instructing, legitimating and effectively determining the ignorant, conceited, brutal and commercial conduct of the Israeli state in it’s barbaric occupation and genocide of Palestine. A pedagogy, lets not forget, which extends way beyond Israeli pedagogical institutions as the pedagogical norm of the so called west. What supports this savage state of affairs never was and is not education.
A.J. Bartlett.
1. In chapter 1 we established the distinction between the Athenian situation and the state of this situation. For Plato, the state of the Athenian situation was sophistic. Under the injunction of what we called the Protagorean ethic ‘Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are and of the thing that are not, that they are not’ (an ethic which Plato extended to include the poet ‘educators of all Hellas’, Homer, Hesiod et al, the contemporary tragedians and comics, the patrons of the flux such a Heraclitus, and ultimately father Parmenides who refused to consider the ‘path of the undiscernible’ thinkable as such) sophistry set up its (well paid) school.[1] We determined that this ethic was one that supported an understanding of knowledge based in particular interest. Plato characterises the sophist as a merchant peddler in goods who doesn’t distinguish between his produce but hopes to sell them on the premise that they are all equally beneficial (or not). The extent of this logic is articulated by Anytus in the Meno and Meletus in the Apology when they claim that any Athenian citizen, being by definition a good man is therefore an educator to the youth of Athens. A virtuous circle of transmission is thereby established wherein, to quote from Chapter 1,
education is seen as the proper pursuit of the individual subject’s interest in accord with the rule of the state. For the latter, interest is the object of reflection proper to any ‘educated’ subject. To know, in short, is to be properly instructed in an interest in interest. In other words, the sophistic teacher is one who represents the interests of the state to the youth as ‘in their interest’. Its Protagorean ethic can be stated as ‘the limits of my knowledge are the limits of my interest’. The expectation is that this interest in interest will lead to an increase in value for both.
For Plato, such an exchange of interests was anathema: a) because it guaranteed the false division of the state into classes predicated on particularities that had utility but no truth; b) because there could be no equation between education and money. For Plato, these teachings were predicated on an excessive conceit regarding what constitutes knowledge. Ultimately, what we were able to show was that the measure of sophistic conceit was unknown to sophistry and that in fact its conceit was at its limit in presuming that what it knew was what there was to know. This excess became ‘visible’ when sophistry singled out Socrates as the only non-educator in all Athens. If Socrates was a non-educator, then there existed in Athens the limit point of a sophistic education — for had he been a proper educator he would be a good citizen of Athens who, for Plato, despite the claims of Anytus and Callicles to the contrary, so long as they remained within the encyclopaedia of conceit, were nothing but ‘sophists’ anyway. Thus if the present state of society is sophistic, as Plato affirms in the Republic (492a-d), and thus to be educated therein is to have a sophistic education, then to not be an educator is to not be a sophist. Socrates marks the limit of sophistry – the singular or local point of its reverse. Whatever it is that Socrates does, and the state knows he does something, it is not a state education. Of course, if the state is sophistic this means that it doesn’t know what it professes to know. It is not only ignorant in regard to what it knows – a problem that can be fixed – but conceited in regard to this ignorance – a problem that must be forced because it knows nothing of its lack of knowledge. Instead, it is in its interest that what it doesn’t know must not be. Thus is Socrates’ fate sealed. However, in this context Socrates is the index of that which inexists for sophistry. He is not, as Plato makes clear, the sum of non-sophistry. Socrates functions as the negative term of a sophistic education such that he signifies that what exists in this situation indiscernibly so is the ‘lack of a non-sophistic education’. Socrates exemplifies what is not sophistry and as such he names what insists in Athens ‘the lack of a non-sophistic education’. Its existence as such is in excess of the knowledge of this state – it occupies the immeasurable space between Athens qua situation of presented multiples without discernment and the state which presumes to know the multiple form of all Athens. The name Socrates (and thus the statements that belong to him alone) has no referent in the Athenian state. It marks only what is indiscernible there. In this way we can see that the Apology is already in dialogue with the Republic for this indiscernible condition of Athens will recur as such in the (Socratic) Republic of the Republic.
2. For Badiou, any ‘historical situation’ – such as the Athens of the dialogues – will present an element none of whose elements will be presented in turn. This is a singular or abnormal multiple. It harbours within it the ‘peril of the void’ (BE, 98/115), the very threat to the state which the state qua inclusion or representation exists to preclude. For the state, this abnormal element, which we know of as the site, has nothing further to present and as such what belongs to it will be included as ‘nothing’. This is to say that, what is of the education-site is nothing to the state. It is axiomatic for sophistry that what is not known is nothing: to ‘express the inexpressible’ is the height of irrationality and impiety.[2] This is not to suggest that Socrates expresses the inexpressible per se. What the site marks is the inexpressible existing ‘gap’ between the situation and its state. On this gap turns the difference between the sophistic state and the ideal city. As Plato insists, education decides the correct trajectory. This gap therefore is the problem of the state, for it shows that what the state knows is not all. It is an encyclopaedia devoid of that which it professes most. Socrates marks the real existence of this gap – whose name is the site – between what is presented and what is represented in the sophistic discourse of what presents. It is the very existence of an education which is not sophistic that determines that education be understood as a site. Plato seeks the proper form for its expression.
3. As we saw in chapter three, it is over education that sophistry and its model repeatedly clash. The importance of this is twofold: following the axiom of the void, what is unpresented for a situation is a part of every element of that situation. In other words, the site presents the (as yet uncollected – so indiscernible) set of that which is nothing to sophistry. And of course what is nothing to sophistry – as it makes clear in its conviction of Socrates – is the lack of a non-sophistic education. The second thing to note is that education, as the name of the site invokes this commonality. Each element of Athens, beneath the force of representation and as such despite it, shares in the lack of a non-sophistic education. In other words, every one shares the capacity for reason. Recall that Plato’s definition of justice is that ‘friends have all things in common’. The ‘work of love’, the ‘doctrine of fair shares’, in other words is ‘for all’. Note that this is not an ascription but the designation of how this ‘lack of a non-sophistic education’ will subjectively appear. If education is the lack of sophistry, then, as the site it is what remains unpresented in Athens as common to all. In our case education, marking the point at which the state is minimally disassociated from what it represents, is the fundamental constituent of the procedure of thinking into being a new situation, a situation other than that which is subject to the sophistic encyclopaedia. Education is therefore the point of minimal difference which separates the knowledge of sophistry from the immanent yet indiscernible ‘world to come’, whose inconceivable name is the Republic. To intervene at this point and to decide for that which is not sophistry is to begin the procedure of elaborating, on the basis of ‘nothing’, an education ‘for all’ – what Plato refers to as the only education worthy of the name. We can see that as Plato, dialogue by dialogue, articulates this minimal distinction between sophistry and non-sophistry to be at the heart of all enquiries, he is anticipating the place wherein the full capacity of the latter will be find its veridical expression. The very Idea of the Republic, void yet conceived as such, (which is to say, immanent to the name ‘Socrates’) animates the very procedure which will constitute its discursive form.
4. In common with all dialogues, the Republic begins with an encounter. These staged encounters manifest the Ideal and so Real encounter between the ‘exemplary figure of thought’ and the ‘exemplary figures of interest’ – non-sophist and sophist. This event, in Badiou’s words, is the index of the void of the (Athenian) situation for which this event is an event. What the event opens up to the situation is what the situation has hitherto recognised as nothing: the indiscernible or the generic. The event exposes the very form (whose constitution is hitherto lacking) for the constitution of the ‘thought-institution’ named the Republic. Although these encounters take place, their evental status depends on the decision which decides on the basis of a pure undecideability that what happens by chance belongs to that situation. This decision marks the intervention of the subject instituted as such by this very decision. When Plato decides that the encounter between the sophistic state and the singular non-sophist is an event he authorises the legitimacy of the name Socrates. We noted that this nomination under sophistic rule was illegal. The trial of Socrates as recounted in the Apology – the only ‘public dialogue’ – criminalised this name in direct reference to the education of youth. Plato in turn reaffirms the immanent conjunction between the education of the youth and the name Socrates. Such an affirmation is without support and is subtracted from the state for which Socrates and, crucially, that which he indicates as existing therein, must be seen to be qua education as nothing at all. In other words, there is no knowledge in the Athenian sophistic state of Socrates as educator. Socrates, quite obviously is without the encyclo-paideia. Consequently, what Socrates does know is nothing of this. Given that Socrates is never an educator ‘after their [sophists] pattern’ he then names for Plato the very encounter between sophistic ‘teachings’ and that which is not sophistry. Recall, he is not the encounter itself. This illegal name is however, present at each such encounter and all enquiry takes place with reference to this name – even if this name is substituted with the more generic term ‘Stranger’. Within the dialogues Socrates is the name which institutes the work of the subject. Even if the Platonic corpus is the subject-body which sustains (beyond the individual life-time of Platocrates) the truth of the Socratic encounter within the unfolding drama of the dialogues themselves, the name Socrates articulates the variousness of the couple event/subject. He does not unify these but articulates their conjunction. In the dialogues, Socrates is the living body of enquiry even as he is the dead figure that necessitates the Platonic corpus which gives body to his now absent praxis. Socrates is a name which serves the dialogues in three ways:
1. It marks the encounter between sophistry and non-sophistry over education.
2. It stands, as the name of that education which is not sophistic, which is nothing other than the indiscernible capacity shared by every inhabitant of the Athenian situation. Socrates is the indexical name of that which is nothing to sophistry: He is a stranger to that place, an internal exile.
3. In naming what is not sophistry he names within this situation the possible ‘impossibility’ of the world to come. Socrates is the present name in Athens of the ‘Republic’ – an unknown name.
Further, a central argument of the Republic is concerned with establishing the coherence between the constitution of the individual and its proper state. On the very premise, established by sophistry itself, of Socrates’ constitutional singularity, Plato establishes as universal state the Republic, whose singular universality is such that it is the only state worthy of the name (R. 422 e), just as Socrates is the only non-sophist of Athens.
The constituents of the Republic have a twofold provenance. On the one hand any element of the Athenian state, any inhabitant in other words is already capable of being connected for a fidelity to the name of the event and thus being recollected subject to enquiry, such that they will have formed a properly constituted generic part of Athens: a part whose veracity depends on the situation to come. This ‘already capable’ refers to their shared but indiscernible connection to that which is nothing to sophistry. But as Plato makes plain, and as Badiou confirms, if not by the same means, this capacity must be acted upon – both from without and from within. Precisely because this shared capacity is nothing to the sophistic state, to its knowledge in general, to what it knows of itself as a state, and of what it is to know of oneself as a part of that state, it is by no means obvious that this capacity either exists or is of any value at all. The state puts this manifest capacity in the shape of Socrates on trial, showing precisely that it is worse than worthless (as Callicles notes) and is in fact traitorous, and that being as it is fundamentally irrational and incommensurable with the proper discourse of the state it must therefore ‘not be’. The show trial of the Apology makes it universally known that such a thing as a ‘non-sophistic education’, the ‘law of the subject’, makes no sense to the state and can be no education at all. It is the mark of something ‘foreign at work’. Plato must then produce this inexistent capacity. He must follow the Socratic interruptive injunction – know thyself as the truth of all[3] – and open the situation to enquiry – sophist by sophist, youth by youth, demagogue by demagogue in order to establish by subtraction the ‘generic set’ made from all those elements connected to it on the basis of their non-sophistic capacity for an education by truths. Each element that presents itself on the basis of this shared condition undergoes ‘the trial of its subtraction’ from the knowledge of sophistry. Socrates, as the midwife of knowing nothing that sophistry knows, stands to orient all enquiries under the injunction peculiar to him but not his alone. This knowing nothing is not knowledge of what nothing is (and this is why, despite Plato’s attempts, a curriculum is not what is at stake here): Rather, it is an axiomatic statement that (the) nothing is. It is a declared conviction which concretises the break with all sophistic predication, with all forms of sophistic argument, logic or teaching. It asserts the real separation between the world of sophistry as it is and the ‘world to come’ on whose basis all Socratic enquiries take place. Subject to enquiry, under the injunction that one does not know what sophistry knows – which ultimately is to declare oneself not to be a citizen of this state and thus to suffer the consequences that ensue[4] – the inhabitants of Athens are tested for their fidelity to the break with sophistry.
We have seen that across the dialogues they are a rare few who decide for (the non-knowledge of) the ‘world to come’. However, the universal address of non-sophistry always already includes all inhabitants despite their conviction, given that the capacity for reason – to be subject to an education by truths and to constitute the very elements of a situation wherein this education is known and practiced as such – is shared equally by all. It is simply a fact of existence that nothing compels an inhabitant of sophistic Athens to subject themselves to the type of enquiry which results in them declaring themselves partisans of that which is properly indiscernible. Indeed, everything consequent on submitting to the determinant of the encyclopaedia, wealth, the privileges of citizenship, interests, honour, and the virtue that accompanies them, suggests it is realistic to disavow the Socratic injunction, to deny the extension of the event, to refuse all enquiry into the constitution of the situation and to consider ones education as conditional on this very state alone. It is obvious that even as this attitude of submission is anathema to Plato’s good state, where, as we see, all these disavowed practices are put into practice to think the very constitution of the good state, there nevertheless remains in the Republic a majority of citizens whose fidelity is partial. Nevertheless for Plato, there is one proviso for this state which cuts across all particularities, all claims to interest and judgment, and that is what is good (or true) of the good state is only that which is good for all. As Badiou provocatively puts it, ‘the individual, in truth, is nothing’ (TC, 101/144).[5]
In light of Plato’s insistence that friends have all things in common, such a statement is provocative only if one remains intuitively sophistic. The coercion at stake in the Republic is the extreme obverse of that which we see in the State. Badiou notes that in the State, ‘this coercion consists in not being held to be someone who belongs to society, but as someone who is included within society’ (BE, 107/ 124). In the Republic, despite one’s identification as man, woman, guardian, artisan or philosopher, despite one’s reflexive inclusion, that is to say, what work one does or how one participates, each one belongs to the truth that animates such identifications. This inversion, coupled with Plato’s own comment on the matter (R. 422e; above) authorises us to nominate the Republic as the ‘ideal non-state’. For Plato, then, the Idea (of Justice, in the case of the Republic) displaces the representative state insofar as it secures the egalitarian ‘consistency’ already guaranteed by presentation (BE,105/122). The free citizen of the Republic therefore is subject to the truth of the idea and not to the state. This immanent and absolute separation between the Idea and the state is Plato’s ‘Socratic invention’ which a history of ‘political-philosophy’ has forgotten to notice.
5. In Chapter 5 we altered our approach in order to attempt to subtract an understanding of the affinity between Socrates and Plato from contemporary knowledge. Our insistent point was that Plato and Socrates form something of an ‘originary Two’.[6] In Badiou’s schema it is love which forms the supplemental basis for any Two. At the point of an encounter, each declares themselves as for the other. Under this condition, verifying the truth of this declaration will form the work of the Two. Clearly, Plato declares himself for Socrates and Socrates, in both the Apology and the Phaedo, noting those who could bear witness for him, declares himself for such (becoming) ‘philosophical’ associates. We have covered enough ground and demonstrated the links between the event and the series of subjective enquiries or dialogues to show this. We have even demonstrated how the Republic is the institution constituted entirely on the thought and practice of the figure of Socrates and, as such, on the work of love. In other words Plato, on the basis of the non-relation this work of love sustains, invents a Socratic city; the kind where such a figure could very well take part in the politics that go on there. As we suggested, Socrates is not simply the name for the Republic in Athens but is more the mark of the Republic in exile within Athens. If Plato can add Socrates to Athens then what he achieves is the Republic. This was his goal all along. As we noted, each enquiry is a retrial – not of Socrates per se but of sophistic Athens. In the Apology, Plato’s Socrates gives the jury instruction in what is proper to judgment. A jury ‘does not sit to dispense justice as a favour, but to decide where justice lies’ (Ap. 35c-e). Obviously sophistry, inherently inconsistent in judgments as Socrates here explicitly notes, is incapable of finding justice but the decision as to ‘where justice lies’ is exactly what is at stake in the Republic. The verdict for Plato is that without Socrates Athens is sophistic and it is only with Socrates that it has the chance to force the re-collection of the capacity immanent to it for a non-sophistic education. The Republic is this new state, the subjective result of Plato’s fidelity to Socrates. This fidelity is not to the death of Socrates. The guilty verdict and the sentence of execution do not constitute an event for Plato. As each dialogue shows, it is the life of Socrates, the figure who day after day intervenes in the smooth running of the sophistic polis and forces therein Athens to know itself as the place that knows nothing of the lack of a sophistic education, which Plato decides for and configures anew.[7] In this way the Republic is Socrates as universal singularity: When, for example, he declares in the Apology that he refuses to speak to no-one and that any and all may hear him and for no fees this is translated by Plato into the universal condition of the ideal state. The truth of non-sophistry becomes the constitutional discourse of the ideal city – built by Plato’s fidelity to Socrates, the singular, insistent, immanent and anticipatory figure it evokes.[8]
Thanks to the establishment of his (non-sophistic) pattern Socrates is seen in retrospect in all his consistency and coherence. His animating ethic is that the subjective process of recollection carried out with confidence is open to all. Every soul contains the basis of truth as its generic capacity. What is needed for this truth to come to knowledge is the encounter with the orientation of thought that can generate its recollection. To associate with Socrates is to participate in a forcing of new knowledge or the forcing of the lack of a non-sophistic education. As the presumed truth of the Athenian situation, the supposed mark of the generic capacity, the Republic is proposed as that which truly institutes the thought of all. This is the true radicality of the Socratic figure as exemplary figure of thought. What we see here is that Plato has truly altered the encyclopaedia. What the Republic makes
apparent is that in truth these placements and differentiations did not have a legitimate grounding in the being of the situation. A subject is thus also that which measures the possible disqualification of a presented multiple. And this is very reasonable, because the generic, or one-truth, being an indiscernible part, is subtracted from the determinants of knowledge, and it is especially rebellious with regard to the most artificial qualifications. The generic is egalitarian, and every subject, ultimately, is ordained to equality (BE, 408-9/ 447).
The killing of this figure of incommensurable equality who introduces not only the incommensurable act – to know what one didn’t know (corruption) – but the very concept of incommensurability as a fundamental trope of every intervention (impiety) is the sophistic response to this very introduction.
6.  That the Republic exists is the very idea of the subjective procedure; that it insists is the result of forcing the truth of this idea into the situation as the condition of its thought. The knowledge of this truth must be forced into existence by the subject. All that the subject has to hang on to, so to speak, is the belief that it can be forced, such is why this Socratic procedure is fragile, limited, and under attack. It is why we have aporia, the failure of validation at a point in the process, and it is why each dialogue restarts the procedure as an instance of what it is to continue. To continue is to pursue with courage what we don’t know, knowing only that we can come to know. The Republic names all this which Socrates names.
The displacement effected in the procedures of the generic – event, intervention, operator of fidelity, enquiry – and by the law of forcing if achieved, show that that which is not in the new situation was already lost to the original situation. ‘No information can be extracted from the [indiscernible] set a which was not already present in M [the fundamental (sophistic) situation]’ (BE, 416-7/455-6). Affirmation and not destruction is the accomplishment of a truth procedure and thus an education by truths is conditioned not just by the poem but is equally conditioned bythe demands of the matheme, the work of love and the politics of fair shares. The only education is that which addresses the generic ‘capacity for reason’ whose disavowal is the constitutive condition of the sophistic state. Surely the formalisation of this address is Plato’s singular and decisive in(ter)vention. What this Socratic taking place makes manifest is simply that the sophist cannot educate, that what one receives in exchange for ones ‘callous cash payment’ is not an education but a calculated return on ones investment and a stake in the regime predicated on the conceited yet powerful knowledge of what – at all costs – must not be. In the Republic – the decided place of philosophy, constituted by a thoughtful, subjective transformation – a place where sophistry cannot be for all, it cannot be simply because it never was an ‘education by truths’.        Â
NOTES:
[1] We have mentioned that Plato likes to insist on the money paid to the sophists. We should note that Plato only refers specifically to those who were well known. Many set up as sophists who didn’t do so well. This only reinforces the position of Plato that Athens was dominated by sophistic knowledge. The eagerness of others to cash in is indicative. Laches remarks that any poets who fancy they are able to write a good tragedy quickly make their way to Athens, ‘as is the natural thing to do’, for that is where the money is (La. 183b).  All histories of the sophistic movement tell us the same thing: the sophists travelled widely but all, at one time or another, ended up in Athens. Kerferd makes the claim extensive, saying that for the last sixty years of the 5th century Athens was the centre of the sophistic movement (The Sophistic Movement, p.15). He says that the transition of Athens’ political economy from city-state to empire occasioned the influx. Thus any who fancied themselves with wisdom to sell found their way, like any other trader, to Periclean Athens. As Kerferd notes, despite what the demagogues say, the organisation of the Athenian polis as a place which ‘presupposed in the average citizen the faculty of speaking in public, and for anyone ambitious for a political career this was indispensible’ meant that the sophists supplied a ‘social and political need’ (The Sophistic Movement, p.17: citing J. B. Bury’s The History of Greece Waterfield puts it like this: ‘There was a need for a new morality, for political theory, for the ability to speak persuasively, and for an education that both went further than the current one[1] and had the ability to explore some topics in depth’.[1] For Waterfield it is through the social need of Athens as newly emerged empire, experimenting with a restricted but direct democracy, and a growing leisured ‘bourgeoisie’ that we can best understand the rise of the sophist (The First Philosophers: The Pre-Socratics and the Sophist, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. xxix).Lastly, Rankin notes that one effect of the sophists was to free the youth from a traditional morality enabling them to pursue ‘success without remorse of conscience’ (Sophists, Socratics and Cynics, p.14.). Thus the state qua set of social relations issues the demand that the sophists arrived to meet. Education, a commodity form like anything else, had to be placed within the re -form of the democratic-state.
[2] The grammar check on the software I am using to write this thesis cannot even recognise the correctness of a sentence in which knowing nothing is presented in a positive sense. The link between ancient mysticism and contemporary grammarian logic is re-established in the epoch of the planetary reign of technology.
[3] See the Apology, where Socrates claims that the god is not speaking of him but is simply using his name as an example such that what the god really says is that, ‘the wisest of you men is he who has realised, like Socrates, that in regard to wisdom he is really worthless’ (Ap. 23b). In the Theaetetus he says ‘the god works through him’ (Tht, 151e). Cf. (L.713e) where the Athenian, in objecting to sophistic cities, says, ‘we should run...our cities in obedience to what little spark of immortality lies in us, and dignify these edicts of reason with the name of ‘law’.
[4] Socrates several times makes it clear that he cannot take part in politics as it is constituted in Athens. When he does, it is a singular disaster. In arguing for something like a sophistic constitution Barbara Cassin says, ‘Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis is arresting in its intelligence: ‘we [. . .] can hardly help finding it striking and perhaps exasperating that Plato and Heidegger, when they entered into human affairs, turned to tyrants and Führers. This should be imputed not just to the circumstances of the times and even less to preformed character, but rather to what the French call a ‘deformation professionnelle’. Cassin, ‘From Organism to Picnic, which consensus for which city?’ p. 33. However, at least in regard to Plato this is totally sophistic, (in the sense that to falsify for rhetorical gain is the presumed right of all speakers and must be protected above all – especially over claims to truth) for two reasons. Plato was entirely aware that Dionysus was a tyrant. He didn’t turn to him but went to ‘turn’ him. In truth, Plato staked his hopes in Dion and not Dionysus. ‘I became acquainted with Dion, then a young man and without knowing it began to work for the overthrow of a despotism, by telling him what I thought was best for mankind and to act upon it… he determined to live for the future a different life from that of the Greeks in Italy and Sicily, preferring virtue to pleasure and luxury. So he continued…, earning thereby the dislike of those who led the usual despots life’ (LVII, 327a). Secondly, as the following exchange shows, turning to the politics of one’s city was near impossible for the philosopher – precisely because he had no care for honours or money, the things that overthrow the good order of the soul/city – and so, unlike Heidegger, Plato did not align himself with his cities tyrants. Glaucon says; ‘If that’s his chief concern, [avoid the dictates of interest] he won’t be willing to take part in politics. Socrates replies; ‘Yes, by the dog, he certainly will, at least in his own kind of city. But he may not be willing to do so in his fatherland, [a convenient translation] unless some divine luck chances his way’ (R. 592a: emphasis added). The idea is to found a city wherein one could do politics as justice demands and not as interests permit. It is the latter which engenders tyrants and Führers. Even though Heidegger may have approved of Hitler and lent his philosophy to the latter’s crusade, it was not Heidegger who engendered the Nazi despotism but the liberal-democratic, representational regime of the Weimar Republic in all its ‘arresting intelligence’. It is sheer idiocy, though not uncommon, to suggest, implicitly or otherwise, that the philosopher is somehow responsible for the despot or tyrant. Cassin goes onto note that Arendt, like Protagoras, preferred the title of professor to that of philosopher. For Badiou’s discussion of Arendt and an Arendtian style ‘political philosophy’ see (M, 10-25).
[5] Toscano translates ‘L’individu, à vrai dire, n’est rien’ as ‘The individual, truth be told, is nothing’. We prefer the above.
[6] In an interview (published May 31, 2009) Badiou speaks once more about his film project on the life of Plato (see also i.e. Feltham, Live Theory, p. 139). He says that in his script Plato and Socrates will be played by the same actor (Brad Pitt). He envisions that the two characters will become indiscernible. We have already noted this under the portmanteau word Platocrates and noted also Derrida’s fascination with the strange portrait of a writing Socrates behind whom stands the figure of Plato. Derrida reads this motif as one which interrupts all norms in regard to genealogy and generation. For the most part the effort to disassociate the two is more a reflection on the pseudo-politics of the contemporary world than anything of real philosophical importance. Even the intricate and detailed analysis carried out in some of the scholarship is ultimately only at the service of some strange self-reflexive desire to prove historically that Socrates is not Plato. The anxiety seems to be that if one can ensure this separation one can identify with Socrates and not be tainted by too close a contact with Plato. Of course, this left-over Socrates is so hollowed out that all that remains of him is what these desiring scholars put in – themselves.
[7] Note again, Letter VII: ‘No writing of Plato exists or ever will exist, but those now said to be his are those of a Socrates become beautiful and new’ (L.VII. 341c).
[8] What of the noble lie whose truth is not for all? This is a very difficult question which the scholarship has failed to account for one way or another. Is it an admission of totalitarian tendencies? An aporia in the constitution of any state –similar to the difficulty Rousseau has. Is it simply a frank admission that all states are founded on a lie – democracies especially, but no less oligarchies, timocracies and tyrannies; even as their lies may not be exactly the same. In admitting this lie is Plato telling a higher truth as the term noble suggests. Bloom, for example, takes Cornford to task over this. The former accusing the latter of dissembling by trying to fudge the translation and to gloss the centrality of the lie by claiming, perhaps with unconscious irony, Plato didn’t mean what he said he did. Cornford tries to claim that the concept is contradictory and not consistent with Plato’s commitment to truth. Bloom, on the other hand, accepts it as a sort of fait accompli for those who take power – inevitably, for the good, they must tell some lies. He thereby situates it within the morality of responsibility of those who lead – despite his distaste for morality. But this would align truth and power, an alignment by no means necessary and with no sufficient condition for an alignment no matter how much power would assume it so. Is this lie not the very example of the weakness of truth? Constrained as it is to cover itself in fiction so as not to find itself enslaved by the state or executed at its behest? Surely the sufficient and necessary condition of any lie is the truth of which it is a lie. As we have seen, this truth cannot be known, only pursued so as to make it manifest. As a proposition, this lie might have no more status than the claim that it be investigated so as the truth it fictions come to be the central concern of those to whom it matters. Is the noble lie the aporetic condition of the good state, an unnameable point which insists so as to be intervened upon at some future time when the resources for the enquiry it demands are no longer lacking? Has Plato, not necessarily in all consciousness, but intuitively or by force of the twists and turns of the dialectic insisted on this point, all the better to force the ideal state to be free from the certainties of tyranny and the excesses of democracy?
From the River to the Sea