From the Athenian Condition to the Human Condition

I want to start this meditation with a close reading of Nietzsche’s account of the birth of “the subject” in the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 13. In this section, Nietzsche offers the example of the bird of prey and the lamb. The lamb looks at the bird of prey from a position of relative weakness and envisions the bird of prey as evil. But the bird of prey is merely doing what it does — it eats lambs to survive. The lamb is not evil for the bird of prey. In fact “nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.” There is no moral intent on the part of the bird of prey. On the contrary, the lamb’s weakness and ressentiment leads it to think that the bird of prey has moral intent and can choose to be other than it is. This amounts to the absurdity of the weak demanding that the strong choose to be weak. Here we see how the formidable power of this ressentiment creates “the subject” — the human capacity to separate out the deed from the doer and to ascribe causal power to the doer: “no wonder if the submerged, darkly glowering emotions of vengefulness and hatred exploit this belief for their own ends that the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb — for thus they gain the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey” (45).

For Nietzsche, this is not a Darwinian tale. There is no necessity that the subject as the “sovereign individual” (who is in control of his deeds) came onto the world stage: “no one could have promised its appearance” (Second Essay, Section 3, 60). To see this as an evolutionary tale where biological processes are the cause and the subject is its effect is merely to write large the same historical narrative as if it were natural and inevitable.

Central to this birth of the subject is the use of language to tame raw power as “drive, will, effect” (45). This needs some unpacking and my reading will get to the heart of what power is for Nietzsche. Let’s look at the passage closely:

A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect — more, it is nothing other than this driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a “subject,” can it appear otherwise. (45, emphasis added)

First thing to call out is Nietzsche’s insistence that “drive, will, effect” are self-contained and self-causing. There is no “doer” (cause) of the “deed” (effect). Deed is all that there is: “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything” (45). The fiction is the product of ressentiment and the ascetic ideal. It is born of the hatred of the weak who want to turn the power of the strong into a choice and to hold them accountable for choosing to be so.

Second thing to call out is that if there is any driver of history for Nietzsche, it is the pure plasticity of “drive, will, effect” (to borrow Deleuze’s characterization of the will to power.) Nietzsche is not so stupid to smuggle back in a subject-driven cause and effect — a doer of historical deeds — by ascribing any sort of cause sitting behind drive, will, and effect. There is no Oedipus complex that is the doer of the deeds of the subject. There is no class struggle that is the doer of the exploitative deeds of capital over labor. There is no natural selection that is the doer of the deeds of evolution. Nor is there a “selfish gene” as Richard Dawkins’ more sophisticated version of the Darwinian tale. It’s not that these dynamics are not true in some way; it’s just that for Nietzsche, they must be seen as historically specific sublimations of drive and will taking specific forms in response to other drives, wills, effects. They exist — evolution is true, class struggle does exist — but all of human history is not reducible to them. If there is anything original at the heart of history, there is action understood as drive, will, effect — what Nietzsche will later in the Genealogy codify as the will to power. This is what he has to mean when he writes, “A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect — more, it is nothing other than this driving, willing, effecting.”

Third thing to call out is the power of language to do work — to create the reality of the subject. Language is not reducible to its representational power. It is an actor on the stage and a material part of the production. It is a seductive power that entices us to believe that the logic of cause and effect is real, that doers are accountable for their deeds because they will their deeds. As such, language “petrifies” drive, will, effect by making them accountable to “reason.” To be sure, this is not a purely negative tale for Nietzsche. This is not another long-range meta-narrative of good and evil. We must recall that this process of ressentiment and its ability to create the sovereign individual who can reflect on his actions — who can make himself into the doer of deeds — made man “interesting” and democratized power. To totally and completely demonize the emergence of “the subject” as the intentional author of its deeds is to play a good versus evil game. It is to make “the subject” evil, thus requiring eradication and annihilation, which is something Nietzsche had no interest in promoting.

Fourth, if the subject is something that comes into being (but not because there is a Godlike “doer” driving its creation and/or evolution) and this being comes into existence through the use of language, we ought to be able to find evidence of this birth of the subject in the written historical record. Nietzsche was a trained philologist, which means he had to have a deep understanding of the power of language as more than a representational medium. Language does work, and it is a key instrument in the channeling of the energy of ressentiment into the birth of our ability to be self-reflective and “sovereign.” For example, Evagrius’ Praktikos announces in its very title that the words contained in the book should not be understood as merely representations. The words are exhortations to undertake the praktikos that they describe. The words do work by exhorting the reader to direct his attention to his thoughts in order to change them and, thereby, to change himself:

1. Christianity is the dogma of Christ the savior. It is composed of praktike, of the contemplation of the physical world and of the contemplation of God.

Christianity is a doctrinal Truth, but that doctrine is not reducible to a representational statement about that Truth (as in, say, the Nicene Creed). The doctrine must be adopted, lived and internalized as a set of practices (praktike) that define the way of life. The practices bind one to the Truth and vice versa. By writing them down, Evagrius’ words are doing more than representing or describing the praktikos. The words are the vehicle for internalizing the Truth for the author and the reader and bringing about a radical transformation of what you become.

Finally, a kind of animal that is “bred to make and keep promises” is bound to time and cannot be understood primarily in spatial terms. The subject now has a sense of itself existing across a span of time such that the now of the promise projects a future that the subject believes he can control. Memory and the techniques of making people remember things (mnemotechnics) also imposes temporality on the subject:

How can one create a memory for the human animal? How can one impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind, attuned only to the passing moment, in such a way that it will stay there? (Second Essay, Section 3, 60; emphasis added)

It would be easy to read the temporarily of this passage in the opposite way that I read it because the obtuse and flighty mind is “attuned only to the passing moment.” This is the only explicit mention of time in this passage. But we must be more careful readers. We must pay attention to the word “only.” The flighty mind is “attuned only to the passing moment” — not to past moments or future moments. Only the present moment is experienced unless some mnemotechnic forces the human animal to create a memory. Of course, for Nietzsche, the threat and reality of violence are efficient and effective mnemotechnics: “Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself… all this has its origin in the instinct that realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics.” We have, therefore, a subject that is created from the mnemotechnics that force “a few ideas … to be rendered inextinguishable, ever-present, unforgettable, ‘fixed,’ with the aim of hypnotising the entire nervous and intellectual system with these ‘fixed ideas’” (61).

The subject, as Nietzsche historicized it, is born of intensity — the intensity of pain and pleasure, the intensity of torture and the threat of violence, the intensity of ressentiment. It is also a subject that must experience itself in the unfolding of time. It is “bred” through the mnemotechnics of memory creation and the credit-debit relationships that require the ability to keep and make promises (Second Essay, Section 5, p. 64). It is pretty easy to see how Nietzsche gets from these breeding techniques of the modern subject to concepts of guilt and conscience. I won’t go further into this, but will save that for a later meditation.

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I am now returning to Plato’s early Socratic dialogs because I want to use Nietzsche’s lens to re-read these early dialogs perhaps to find historical evidence of this breeding and birthing of the sovereign individual. As I read the Genealogy, I find my mind working over this thought: the making of belief into something that can be verbalized hadn’t yet happened at the time of Plato’s early dialogs. In other words, in reading the early Socratic dialogs alongside the Genealogy, am I able to witness an episode in the birth of the will to truth? If subsequent Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato, it is not because we are still trying to understand the Forms and learning as recollection — both are unbelievably weak concepts taken on their own. It is because Plato’s Socrates sits near the beginning of this history as the philosopher who gave shape and direction to a will to truth that would become, in the hands of the “neoplatonists” and the early Christians, the ascetic ideal.

Let me focus my return to Plato’s Socrates with a simple question: What problem was Plato trying to solve when he wrote these early Socratic dialogs? It is a mistake to think that he was trying to solve primarily epistemological problems. He was trying to solve a problem of ethically dysfunctional citizens. Plato’s Socrates’ exhortation that his fellow citizens should “care for their souls” is the encapsulation of that problem, and it is why he is so seemingly obsessed with the teachability of virtues — how they are passed on by one generation of citizens to another. By seeing the primary problem as care of the soul, it is possible to see how the epistemological and metaphysical concepts of “recollection” and “Forms” emerged from within the ethical problem. In this sense, philosophia for Plato must be understood as a prescription for how one turns attention to oneself and, in so doing, turns oneself into something to be worked on. I make no claims about Plato (or Socrates for that matter) as the originator of this form of laborious attention. (There is plenty of evidence for it in the fragments we have from Heraclitus.) I don’t have that historical depth of knowledge. However, I do see historical evidence of the breeding of this prescription — of this laborious attention to oneself — in his Socratic dialogs. In this meditation, I want to spend some time with those moments that stand out for me as particularly important in the birth of the subject as Nietzsche formulated it in the Genealogy.

Let’s start with the separation of the doer and the deed. This, I believe, is fundamental to how Plato tried to solve the problem of dysfunctional citizens. This separation has been so ingrained and so pervasive that it easily goes unnoticed. We just assume that all of us are responsible for our actions. It always has been that way and always will be, or so we think. The invisibility of this separation is what makes us read Plato as an epistemologist or a metaphysician rather than an ethicist. All of the time and space he spends in the dialogs working on this separation is lost on the modern reader who just takes this separation for granted. But when Plato’s Socrates insists that his mission is to get his fellow citizens to “take care of their souls,” he’s arguing for something new. This is crucial to understand because it elevates the dialog (as genre) to a vital aspect of Plato’s work. In fact, the dialog — as elenchus — is designed to permanently change the interlocutor through the exercise. Specifically, the elenchus insists on a form of attention that is ultimately disorienting for the interlocutor because it is separating the doer from his deeds.

The Phaedo is a good place to look for how this separation of doer from deed occurs in the elenchus. At the end of Socrates’ life, he spends his final hours talking to his friends and followers about the immortality of the soul. I’ve already meditated at some length on the way that the mind/body dualism that is on display in that dialog is really about the philosophical work of overcoming false confidences and false beliefs inherited from unexamined traditions. As such, this mind/body dualism is not merely an original human condition, but something to be achieved by “practicing philosophy in the right way.” It cannot be underemphasized how much Plato’s Socrates asserts throughout the Phaedo that his purpose in this dialog is how to live philosophically — how to “practice philosophy in the right way.” All of the metaphysical and epistemological propositions that he asserts — the immortality of the soul, the pursuit of Truth as the pursuit of abstract eidos — must be understood within his insistence that philosophy is fundamentally a set of ethical practices — how we should care for our souls.

In the key moments of the dialog where Socrates is arguing for the mind/body dualism, he is really talking about how one achieves the dualism as an effect. Separation is achieved by focusing one’s attention on abstract Truths so as to expose one’s beliefs to scrutiny. In the section after his account of his disillusionment with Anaxagoras, Socrates discusses the genesis of his method. In this discussion he uses “the Beautiful” as an example:

I no longer understand or recognize those other sophisticated causes, and if someone tells me that a thing is beautiful because it has a bright color or shape or any such thing, I ignore these other reasons — for all these confuse me — but I simply, naively, and perhaps foolishly cling to this, that nothing else makes it beautiful other than the presence of, or the sharing in, or however you may describe its relationship to that Beautiful that we mentioned, for I will not insist on the precise nature of that relationship, but that all things are beautiful by the Beautiful. That, I think, is the safest answer I can give myself or anyone else. And if I stick to this I shall never fall into error. This is the safest answer for me or anyone else to give, namely, that it is through Beauty that beautiful things are made beautiful. (100d-e; emphasis added)

Here we have an explicit statement that the Form of the Beautiful is a technique for investigating opinion and belief. When someone asserts that they know what makes something beautiful, Socrates responds by asking them what they mean by Beauty. This has the effect of making his interlocutors “say what they think” (parrhesia) and to keep them focused on it over an extended period of time. The abstract nature of the technique is essential to sustaining the interlocutor’s attention on the abstract definition that can only be articulated in terms of what he believes about arete, courage, beauty, piety, et cetera. If we focus only on the epistemological and ontological dimensions of what makes something Beautiful, we miss how important the dimension of time is to “practicing philosophy in the right way.” Beauty is understood in eternal terms: it is a fixed idea that is not at all subject to time because it never changes. It is eternal in the sense that time is utterly irrelevant to what makes something beautiful.

But if we understand the Forms as techniques for focusing attention on what one believes beauty is, then we start to see the temporal dimension and the birth of the subject more clearly. I want to dwell on this for a moment. If Socrates just let his interlocutors get away with citing examples of things that are beautiful, the discussion fails to do what he wants it to do, which is to break through false beliefs. By having to make every example and counter-example fit into an abstract and comprehensive definition, the interlocutor is effectively exposing his beliefs to scrutiny through the elenchus. This exposure happens when the honest interlocutor “says what he thinks” (parrhesia) for a long enough time that he reaches aporia.

There are two important ways that the elenchus and aporia are temporal. First comes the frustration that one can’t say what beauty (or courage or arete or piety) is though they have tried many times. The “starting over” moment is well understood in the Socratic dialogs. The second way that temporality comes into play occurs when the interlocutor realizes that he has been living his life “up to this point” (to quote Nicias from the Laches) with a false confidence in what he believes to be true. The entire life as it has been lived and how it will be lived going forward becomes the focus of the interlocutor’s present and future attention. For Nietzsche, this was Socrates’ true power and what made him an “overman” — someone who could bring about a society-wide revaluation of all values. This power was purchased at the expense of giving us all souls that we must take care of and not just those who are the doers of heroic deeds that benefit the city.

Further clarity on the importance of temporality for Plato’s Socrates comes when we ask where these false beliefs come from. We don’t just inherit false beliefs at the moment of birth. If there is an Original Sin in Plato’s worldview, it unfolds over time:

But I think that if the soul is polluted and impure when it leaves the body, having always been associated with it and served it, bewitched by physical desires and pleasures to the point at which nothing seems to exist for it but the physical, which one can touch and see or eat or drink or make use of for sexual enjoyment, and if the soul is accustomed to hate and fear and avoid that which is dim and invisible to the eyes but intelligible and to be grasped by philosophy — do you think such a soul will escape pure and by itself? (81b, emphasis added)

If we focus on the mind/body dualism as an original condition, we lose the temporal sense of how the impurity of the soul — its being held prisoner by the body’s desires as if it were in a cage (82e) — occurs over time by long association and becoming “accustomed” to its dominance. Philosophy is the practice of undoing these accustomed and ingrained habits (see also 81c). But for Socrates, this cannot be literal — or at least it is not literal until physical death occurs. If it isn’t literal, then the body must be a metaphor or a vehicle for something else that is dominating the soul. Plato’s Socrates is clear that the body and its pleasures and pains are the source of our opinions and beliefs:

The soul of every man, when it feels violent pleasure or pain in connection with some object, inevitably believes at the same time that what causes such feelings must be very clear and very true, which it is not. (83c)

Socrates goes on a few lines later:

Because every pleasure or pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together. It makes the soul corporeal, so that it believes the truth is what the body says it is. As it shares the beliefs and delights of the body, I think it inevitably comes to share its ways and manner of life and is unable ever to reach Hades in a pure state…. (83d)

Here we have Plato’s Socrates explicitly aligning the body with false beliefs that are driven not only by pleasure and pain, but by an unreflective and knee-jerk acceptance of pleasure and pain as indicators of truth. This knee-jerk acceptance is how false belief and false confidence become built-in habits and a “manner of life.” Here the connection to Nicias’ explanation of the value of aporia in the Laches is unmistakeable. To be clear, we are dealing with a process of construction — nailing and riveting — that occurs over the long haul of a life. To separate the soul from the body is not literal (suicide would make it literal and Socrates is explicitly against suicide) but neither is it metaphorical. It is practical and happens by “practicing philosophy in the right way.”

To return to Plato’s primary problem of the ethically dysfunctional citizen, we see that the doer must separate himself from the deed through philosophical practice. How does this work? There are a few things to touch on here. First, beliefs are motivators of actions. Whenever Socrates confronts an interlocutor in the dialogs, it is always in relation to some action that the interlocutor is about to undertake. Crito wants to bust Socrates out of prison. Hippocrates is seeking instruction from Protagoras. Euthyphro is on his way to bring charges of murder against his father. Lysimachus and Melesias (Laches) are seeking advice on how to teach courage to their boys. Even Meno wants to know how arete (virtue, excellence) can be taught. Actions are always the starting point for the dialogs. Crucially, Socrates gets his interlocutors to talk about the beliefs that are driving the actions. For arete to be teachable, Meno must first talk about what he thinks it is. For Laches to be seen as a proper teacher of courage, he must first be able to define courage. The same goes for Euthyphro and the definition of piety. The elenchus proceeds by the interlocutor offering examples only to have Socrates offer counter examples that complicate the definition. He keeps pushing them to a definition that is so abstract that all past, present and future examples of courage (in the case of the Laches) fit within the definition. The process is doomed to failure. But the failure is, as I argued in an earlier meditation, a failure of false confidence. Laches, for instance, thought he knew what courage is, but “I am getting really annoyed at being unable to express what I think in this fashion.”

I still think I know what courage is, but I can’t understand how it has escaped me just now so that I can’t pin it down in words and say what it is. (194a-b)

The annoyance that comes from the inability to “pin it down in words” is the erosion of self-confident beliefs that the early dialogs seek. We’re seeing here a form of attention that uses abstract definitions (what is courage?) as a technique for getting one to say what they believe. By striving for the increasingly abstract, all-encompassing and stable definition, Laches’ so-called knowledge is exposed merely as his individual opinions and beliefs.

So we have, in the early dialogs, a sustained attempt by Plato to create a causal relationship between beliefs and actions such that our beliefs cause our actions. We are always the authors of our actions, and the actions are manifestations of what we believe. This will be the heart of Stoicism only a handful of generations later, but it is also the moral psychology of action that we live with today. Doers are always assumed to be the author of their deeds because what the doer believes is manifested in their actions. Our judicial, penal, and educational systems wouldn’t be able to function unless we actively breed this type of human subject.

Here we have the second thing to consider in the separation of the doer from the deed. Beliefs get their value by being aligned with Truth. This is a subtle but important point to suss out. Let’s look at the reverse for clarity. Prior to a conceptual separation of doer from deed such that the doer is the intentional author of the deed, the deed is the truth. Exploits on the battlefield or compelling arguments in politics or other highly public deeds that benefit the city are, in themselves, the source of truth. Plato is explicitly complicating this, if not outright reversing it. Let me take another moment from the Laches. At 181a, Socrates is finally introduced to the discussion about how best to educate Athenian boys in the virtue of courage. His introduction is framed as what qualifies him to speak about such an important topic. It is clear that both Laches and Lysimachus recognize Socrates’ authority because of “close family ties” to Lysimachus’ family and, more importantly, “He [Socrates] marched with me [Laches] in the retreat from Delium, and I can tell you that if the rest had been willing to behave in the same manner, our city would be safe and we would not then have suffered a disaster of that kind” (181b). Socrates’ deeds on the battlefield at Delium during the Peloponnesian Wars qualify him to speak on this topic. The truth of what Socrates will have to say about this topic does not start from what he believes but from what he has done. In Nietzchean terms, Socrates speaks as a “blonde beast” who makes his own values and is his own truth through the deeds he has done and the reputation he has earned. Beliefs have nothing to do with truth, only actions are true. If there is a truth lurking behind the deeds, it might be that the doer is favored by the gods or that the doer is a higher order of human being. In either case, the relationship of the courageous deed to the knowledge and truth of courage is tenuous and unnecessary to the value of the doer’s deeds to the city.

Much of the work of the Laches is to realign belief, truth, and action. It starts when Socrates asks Laches to define courage. At 190c, Socrates rhetorically asks the crucial question that begins the unraveling of the old order of deeds as truth: “And what we know, we must, I suppose, be able to state.” The move here is subtle but decisive. Socrates assumes that sitting behind the deeds is knowledge — the doer must know something about courage in order to do courageous things on the battlefield. The knowledge of courage is now something different than the courageous act itself. This is dramatized in the dialog by Laches offering examples of courageous deeds only to come up short when Socrates offers counter-examples that don’t fit with Laches’ limited definition. The deeds are no longer good enough in themselves: they no longer stand alone as courageous acts. Rather, they are “examples” of a True Courage that unites them all. So, before we get the separation of the doer from the deed, Socrates gives us (in the unfolding of the dialog) the long, slow separation of the deed from its truth. The deed is stripped of its self-contained truth: it has become a mere representative of something that defines it and exists apart from it. How abstract Truths like courage are connected to their representative deeds will be the epistemological question that drives Plato’s later work (Timaeus, Parmenides in particular). But in the early dialogs, he doesn’t care about how the connection is made, as we saw above in his discussion of Beauty in the Phaedo.

To get to the separation of the doer from the deed, we also have the separation of knowledge from truth. This separation takes the form of doxa (belief and opinion). All that Laches can verbalize is what he thinks he knows about courage. This doesn’t rise to the level of knowledge because he fails repeatedly to say what true courage is, which leads to his aporia. In that aporia is the moment of separation of the doer from the deed:

I am ready not to give up, Socrates, although I am not really accustomed to arguments of this kind. But an absolute desire for victory has seized me with respect to our conversation, and I am really getting annoyed at being unable to express what I think in this fashion. I still think I know what courage is, but I can’t understand how it has escaped me just now so that I can’t pin it down in words and say what it is. (194a-b, emphasis added)

Laches’ disorientation occurs because Socrates is making him realign the relationships among his deeds, his beliefs and his words. His words get their meaning by being expressions of his beliefs, not because of his deeds on the battlefield. This is the effect of this “unaccustomed” kind of argument. We have the subtle but disorienting shift that moves from deeds as the qualification to speak authoritatively to deeds as evidence of something that you know. Why is this disorienting? If this were just a debate about the definition of courage, we wouldn’t have disorientation and aporia. We would have different speeches being given by the interlocutors offering their definitions of courage. The courageous deeds of the speakers would be their qualification to speak. (Plato uses this specific literary technique in both the Symposium and the Protagoras, and probably in other places. So it is not like this wasn’t a possibility for him.)

We don’t have that here. The disorientation arises from Laches not being “accustomed to arguments of this kind.” The form of the dialog itself is turning Laches’ own beliefs, thoughts and words into the real subject of the dialog. It is disorienting because his identity is being remade through the process of the elenchus. He’s being asked to take on a new way of speaking — responding to questions by saying what he thinks about a topic that he is supposed to be knowledgeable about. Why is being asked what you think about an important civic virtue something new? To us it is not new, but for Laches, it is. But what is new and disorienting about it? This brings me to the second level of disorientation. When Laches says that he’s “annoyed at being unable to express what I think,” he is showing us the effects of this kind of argument. By making him say what he thinks (parrhesia) and by aligning parhessia with the abstract truth of courage, we see that the disorienting effect of the dialog arises from the attempt to properly align one’s beliefs with the rights words that express the right truth of the topic at hand.

The doer is separated from the deed once the deed is separated from its truth and truth is separated from our ability to know it and to speak it. Plato’s Socrates needs to maintain the connection among these things, however tenuous, otherwise nihilism is his only option. The connection between words and beliefs is crucial to maintaining this connection that keeps nihilism at bay. What staves off nihilism in particular is the moral intention of “saying what you think” (parrhesia). To say what you think is to link words to beliefs, but more than that, it is to make the words yours and to make the beliefs yours. The doer of the deeds is now also the speaker of his beliefs.

All of this seems so obvious to us moderns — so obvious that we easily read over and ignore important moments in the Laches like the pact of parrhesia that starts the dialog. Why is it so important that Lysmachus insists that everyone “says what they think” before anyone even knows why they’ve been invited to the scene? It is important because, as I’m arguing, the Laches (and other early dialogs) is painstakingly working out the new connections between the doer and his deeds, between the doer and his beliefs, between the doer and his words. The doer becomes the primary locus of all of this — he needs to be able to answer for his actions, and his answers are reflective of his beliefs, which need to be aligned with truth. To “take care of your soul” is to maintain these connections and to work on ensuring that they are strengthened over time. The birth of the subject isn’t easy, but once it is done, the signposts of its birth become virtually invisible because they are taken for granted.

To return to the right to speak authoritatively: Socrates flips Laches’ assumption on its head. Laches grants Socrates the right to speak authoritatively about courage (but not about other things) based on his deeds at Delium. Socrates does not grant Laches that same version of authority. Rather, Laches’ right to speak authoritatively comes not from his deeds and reputation (which are somewhat questionable in the history of Athens) but from what he is presumed to know. It is hard to underestimate the power of this Socratic maneuver. The best that Laches (or any other honest interlocutor) can do in this situation is say what he thinks that he knows. The effect will be merely the expression of belief and opinion, which will come up short in being an adequate and total definition of courage. One’s deeds are now expressions of his beliefs, which can be evaluated as either true of false. The doer is now the bearer of beliefs that underwrite his actions.

The third thing to call out in Plato’s separation of the doer from the deed is that the doer is more important than the deed. As a repository of beliefs that drive actions, the doer is seen as the originator of his actions, which are now demoted as mere expressions of beliefs. Another way to put this is that actions get their value and meaning from the doer and not the other way around. If there is a separation of the doer from the deed in the worldview of the blonde beasts, the deed gives meaning to the doer — in the form of “reputation.” Again, Lysimachus and Laches grant Socrates the right to speak because of this deeds that underwrite his reputation. His significance for them and his authority to speak on the topic of educating future Athenian citizens come from his reputation on the battlefield. As we approach Laches’ inevitable aporia, we are witnessing and experiencing this reversal, which is utterly and completely disorienting for the interlocutor. As Nicias had warned Laches (and us), this will not be a process that is easy to handle. The interlocuter will not only realize that he doesn’t know what he thought he knows, but he will question his entire “manner of life” and “will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life.” The elenchus will always end up being about the doer — not because the doer is already there and has been hiding, but because the doer (as “the subject”) must be created as the outcome and effect of the elenchus.

With this established, it is useful to revisit this famous passage to see how the conversation is the means by which the doer is called onto the historical stage as the author of his deeds. In the elenchus, the focus moves from discussion about a topic to the speaker’s manner of living:

NICIAS You don’t appear to know that whoever comes into close contact with Socrates and associates with him in conversation must necessarily, even if he began by conversing about something quite different in the first place, keeps on being led about by the man’s arguments until he submits to answering questions about himself concerning his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto. (187e)

Let’s follow the thread of this passage. It starts with a conversation about some topic and, over time, ends up being about one’s manner of life. This is no mere abstract discussion about how you’re feeling today. This is a perplexing and disturbing process that involves a great deal of redirecting of attention away from examples to abstract truths that encompass all conceivable examples. But the only way for this to work is for the interlocutor to keep saying more and more about what he thinks he knows — beliefs and opinions (doxa) — until he is undone in the process. A new identity emerges from the process, not just new beliefs.

The fourth thing to point out is Socrates’ precarious relationship to Athens and its citizens. It is easy for us to see Plato’s Socrates as making an argument about the human condition. He is not. He is making an argument about the Athenian condition. This is easy to understand when we take seriously Socrates’ refusal of Crito’s offer to flee Athens. If Socrates mission — to have us take care of our souls — was a human mission, then why not flee to Megara or somewhere else to continue the mission. If Athens is ready to accept his mission, surely other cities will do?

“For, by the dog, I think these sinews and bones could long ago have been in Magara or among the Boetians, taken there by my belief as to the best course, if I had not thought it more right and honorable to endure whatever penalty the city ordered rather than escape and run away” (99a, emphasis added).

Here Socrates demonstrates 1) that his life’ mission is bound to his citizenship — they are inseparable — and 2) that to escape would have been a false belief that betrays that essential relationship between himself and his status as an Athenian citizen. The city and his role as a citizen, in other words, are the fundamental moral grounds of his philosophical practice.

The precariousness of this relationship is seen not just in terms of his condemnation to death by a vote of his fellow citizens. This precariousness is most clearly seen by how Plato’s work lived on well after the decline of Athens. While Socrates was explicitly defining an Athenian condition, the Stoics, Cynics, Epicureans, so-called middle and neo-Platonists, Christians, Jews, and Muslims all found practical ethical value in Plato’s work well beyond the Athenian context. There is a simple reason for this: Plato’s Socrates implicitly democratized “the subject” and made it available to others as a generalized human condition. Once the doer is separated from the deed and once the causal relationship between our opinions and our actions is established, we have a generalized human condition that cannot be contained by Athens. This is what makes Plato something that many people can read today and get value from it. It may be what Alfred North Whitehead meant when he made his “footnote” comment about Plato and western philosophy. It is what made it possible for the early Christians from Origen to Evagrius to Augustine to move Christian writings beyond mere “apologetics” to codified, systematic practices focusing on the alignment of one’s beliefs with Christian Truth.

Put succinctly, Plato’s Socrates’ separation of the doer from the deed implicitly disconnects the individual from the city as source of values (e.g., courage, piety, temperance, et cetera). At this point, the individual (who now bears his own soul) can go a couple of different ways. He can move back toward the city as a citizen, but equally viable is a deliberate withdrawal to cultivate the soul in isolation. Monkish anachoresis becomes a very real possibility. From its very beginnings, the soul hovers on the margins of the city. It is yours and you can do with it what you like. If it doesn’t find meaning as a citizen, then it will find it some other way. Now that the will exists as the possession of the doer, it must continue to will something even if it is nothingness and nihilism.

Plato thus introduced nihilism as an ever-present problem when he separated the soul from the city and sent it on a search for meaning. Where would this meaning come from? The fact that Plato’s Socrates focused on the virtues expected of an Athenian citizen keeps the search for meaning tied to the obligations of citizenship. But his solution to the dysfunctional citizenship of Athens was to humanize the situation as a problem of individual souls. At this moment, meaning conceivably could be found elsewhere, not simply from the values of the city. Christianity will walk squarely through this door and find virtues beyond the city in the eternal values of a revealed God. Stoicism will seek virtue as a personal endeavor where citizenship can waver between tangible participation in the ruling of the Empire or (failing that) in the abstract connection with a commonwealth of man. The anachoresis of the monks of the Egyptian desert in the fourth century is deeply indebted to Plato’s Socrates: Evagrius in particular was very much an Origen-inspired Neoplatonist. Walking away from the city as a way to care for your soul is a very real possibility.

We should not lose sight of how important attention is for Plato’ Socrates. Plato makes attention into the human capacity to align and coordinate beliefs with truth, actions with beliefs, and to sustain this coordination over the duration of a lifetime. Thus taking care of our souls is not only Socrates’ mission but a mission required of all Athenian citizens. It requires a new way to manage attention, which is arguably Plato’s great and lasting contribution to the last 2500 years. To make your soul into something you take care of over a lifetime because it is the cause of your actions is to make attention on oneself into something new and in need of a champion and a teacher.

Plato wittingly or unwittingly introduced a human condition by insisting that we take care of our souls. While great deeds were the mark of a great citizen, Plato gave everyone a soul to take care of, and citizenship became one among many possible sources of values. By separating doer from deed and making the doer’s beliefs the drivers of his actions, he democratized a moral psychology of action that does not fundamentally require citizenship as its irreducible context. The citizen is first and foremost a human subject — a doer of deeds that is responsible because his deeds reflect his beliefs. This is not the exclusive condition of nobles. Rather than being of a different order of humanity, they are fundamentally one of us, just with more political and cultural responsibilities.

__________

In sum, in Plato’s Socrates we see evidence of the birth of the will to truth and the modern subject. His insistence on “practicing philosophy in the right way” in the Phaedo and his insistence with Laches that “what we know, we must, I suppose, be able to state,” usher in a practice of guiding our attention in a wholly new way. The result is a way of seeing ourselves as doers who are responsible for our deeds. To be made responsible in this way requires us to align our beliefs with truth by being able to give clear statements about the reasons for our actions.

This requires a clear set of practices that foster sustained attention on the origins of our beliefs through parrehsia, elenchus, and a relentless attempt to drive particular examples to a universal definition. The result of these practices is the creation of a kind of self that understands its beliefs as the driver of its actions. This, I believe, is what Plato’s Socrates was driving at in the early dialogs. These early dialogs are the textual evidence of the birth of “the subject” that Nietzsche discusses in the Genealogy. To see one’s actions (as a citizen) as the result of what one believes (true or false) creates the separation of the deed from the doer by making the doer’s beliefs into the source of his actions. The Phaedo in particular provides the historical evidence of “the subject” as something that needs to be created through philosophical practices that allow one to step back from their actions and talk about why he does what he does. Socrates discussion of “the Beautiful” is merely an exercise that trains one to do this work on one’s self. The stakes are higher when the topic is piety (Euthyphro), arete (Meno, Protagoras), courage (Laches), et cetera. We miss this visibility when we ignore the dialog form and when we ignore all the obfuscations and equivocations Plato offers to the epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical propositions he offers. The energy of the text is not on those propositions. It is in the insistence that philosophical endeavor is a practice that has certain effects — effects that create a form of self-attention hitherto non-existent. Put differently, those forms of self-attention may have existed, but Plato’s Socrates insistence on the intensity of this particular technique of self-attention as essential to the health of the individual’s soul and the health of Athens is, I believe, wholly new.