Ressentiment and the Republic, Book 1

In Section 13 of the First Essay in the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche tells the fable of the lamb and the eagle. This is the tale of how “the subject” comes into existence as an effect of ressentiment. While ressentiment will eventually end up being a self-poisoning hatred of oneself (via Pauline Christianity), it starts out as a desire on the part of the weaker for those in power to stop preying upon them. Because the weaker can’t match strength with strength, they seek other means of self-preservation. The lamb cannot by itself stand up to the eagle and fight it off with a greater display of strength. So what is the lamb to do? It must convince the eagle that the eagle need not be an eagle. For Nietzsche, this is the moment when the “doer” is separated from the “deed” and “the subject” is born. He uses the image of lightning to explain:

For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so…. no wonder if the submerged, darkly glowering emotions of vengefulness and hatred exploit this belief for their own ends and maintain no belief more ardently than the belief that the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey is to be a lamb — for thus they gain the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey. (45)

The creation of the subject as the separation of the doer from the deed is something that the weak do to the strong. They try to convince the strong that they can choose to not exercise their strength. This starts as a belief that arises from “vengefulness and hatred.” Belief is crucial to Nietzsche’s understanding. From this “belief that the strong man is free to be weak” emerges the ability to hold the eagle accountable for being an eagle. By the end of this section, we have not only the birth of the subject, but the birth of “the soul” (46).

Subjectivity is, therefore, foisted upon the strong by the weak, and it is the first movement in the birth of ressentiment. It starts with a certain cleverness on the part of the lamb: when the lamb realizes that it can’t match strength with strength, it invents a more subtle game by trying to convince the eagle to separate its deeds from its intentions. If convinced, the eagle will make itself accountable for its actions; in other words, the eagle will somehow see itself as voluntarily intending to eat the lamb. For Nietzsche, that separation is historically significant and is the beginning of a morality based on good versus evil. The weak eventually will understand themselves to be good and the strong are thus seen as evil. But it is more than that. The weak must make the strong believe that their strength can be an expression of evil and that they are capable of making themselves accountable for the use of their strength. The strong must voluntarily make themselves weak as a way to overcome their inherent evilness.

For this reversal of the strong into the weak to happen, strength must become a topic of discussion between lambs and eagles. But this cannot be only a discussion of strength in itself. Talking only about strength as an intentional force controlled by the eagle would remain a purely academic matter if it does not introduce another topic into the discussion — justice. In the discussion of strength, the lamb must eventually ask the eagle to justify its use of strength. As the eagle is made to justify itself, the eagle is transformed into a kind of subjectivity that is capable of having this discussion. This is no easy feat and requires several historically significant moves to occur at once.

First, as I’ve already said, strength and justice must become abstract topics. They must become something about which both the eagle and the lamb can hold a discussion. Rather than pure instinct, strength and justice must be named so as to become objects of knowledge. What is strength? What is justice? How do they work? Are they related? If they are related, what is the nature of the relationship? If we treat these as eternal human questions, we miss the opportunity to understand how the mechanics and dynamics of human language affect how we are changed by these questions. In order for them to arise, the very structure of a “what is” question must become possible, and this requires that the interlocutors modify and adapt themselves to the real demands of this type of discussion.

Second, this discussion must become agonistic (to use Lyotard’s term) because it is a game of power between the lamb and the eagle. The lamb will need to carry out reversals and deconstructions as the lamb seeks to turn the eagle’s strength into its moral weakness and the lamb’s weakness into its moral strength. This will require the emergence of binary oppositions as the basic structure of the discussion. Justice will be opposed to injustice as its opposite. Strength will be opposed to weakness as its opposite. We must not assume that these binaries are natural and eternal. Nor should we assume that the concepts of justice and strength require that they have related terms that represent their opposites. These oppositions will not be discovered in these discussions: they are effects and inventions of the agonistic discussion which depends on “cleverness”: “A race of men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer than any noble race; it will also honor cleverness to a far greater degree: namely, as a condition of existence of the first importance….” (GM 1.10, 38-9)

Third, these discussions will appear as games to the interlocutors and their witnesses. As games, the rules will be a topic of conversation as the players work out how to have this discussion, which is new and without precedent. To be sure, discussion is always a game of power and resistance — this will not be new — but we are talking about new ways to play the game. Differends (Lyotard) and aporia (Plato) will frequently emerge and become quite visible before they become normalized and thus invisible over the course of history. We can, as attentive readers, “bear witness to the differend” (as Lyotard advocates) by finding these moments in the historical record and finding them in our own lives.

Fourth, the rules of the game must transform the participants. To speak about strength and weakness and about justice and injustice is to speak about oneself and one’s motivations. What was merely the eagle’s unconscious and unreflective instinct must become conscious and subject to self-reflection that becomes self-control. The lamb will entice the eagle to gain a consciousness of its will to power that becomes a will to understanding the truth of its own motivations. The eagle comes to see its actions as the flash caused by its lightning. In spatial terms, a gap must open up within oneself between intentions (as causes) and actions (as effects). This gap must be understood as a new experience of time — the time of self-development and improvement; the time between impressions, assent, impulse and action to use Stoic terms. The control of time will be essential to the subject’s experience of itself. The human becomes an animal bred to make and keep promises and thus experiences itself as spread across a present and a future to which it can owe a debt (GM 2.1). This is what Nietzsche means when he says that through this process “man was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense — the ‘sense-less’ — he could now will something” (GM 3.28).

Fifth, belief becomes the central focus of a morality of good and evil. It works like this: in order for the topics of justice and strength to land at the level of motivations, and in order for those topics to become objects of discussion, beliefs become critically important. Beliefs become, simultaneoulsy, the representatives of our motivations and the possibility of motivations being spoken. An example: to take something that belongs to someone else can now be seen as motivated by something that the taker believes to be true about the situation. Maybe he felt he deserved it; or maybe the original owner might harm someone with it. No matter. The taker can be asked why he did what he did, and his answer can only come in the form of what he believed to be true about the situation. His beliefs, therefore, are subject to new binary oppositions: true beliefs vs false beliefs and knowledge vs ignorace. In so far as his actions hurt or harm others, justice vs injustice will force its way into the discussion of what the perpetrator believed and intended in his action.

This is, in fact, the very process we can see playing out in Polemarchus’ aporia in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic. The discussion has proceeded through a proliferation of binaries that map friends versus enemies onto good versus bad and truly good onto truly bad and justice onto injustice and useful onto useless and finally to guarding versus stealing. In each case, a reversal occurs such that the negative term is made to take the positive position, which is unacceptable to Polemarchus. Thus aporia arrives as a problem of belief:

SOCRATES: It seems, then, that a just person has turned out to be a kind of thief…. Isn’t that what you meant?

POLEMARCHUS: No, by Zeus, it isn’t. But I do not know anymore what I meant. I still believe this, however, that benefiting one’s friends and harming one’s enemies is justice. (334a-b)

I will return to Book 1 later, but for the moment it is enough to note that Polemarchus’ aporia occurs as a result of a mismatch between what he believes and what he can articulate as knowledge using the binaries Socrates has laid out. This happens because of Socrates’ continual insistence — his cleverness — in getting Polemarchus to embrace binary oppositions as the mode of argument. In fact, Polemarchus did not introduce the term enemies into the discussion. Socrates did: it was his response to Polemarchus articulating a definition of justice as “friends owe something good to their friends” (332a). There is no hard requirement to differentiate friends from enemies to clarify this definition. To posit the existence of a friend does not require the concept of an enemy. Yet it is Socrates that insists on making this move: “Now what about this? Should one also give to one’s enemies whatever is owed to them?” (332b). Once Polemarchus buys into the binary opposition his road to aporia begins in earnest.

Finally, as we see in the last point, it is not just that the lamb must invent binary oppositions to effect its reversal of strength and weakness. Binaries must be “mappable” onto each other as positive versus negative comparisons. Famously Nietzsche will show how weakness and strength were mapped onto good and evil. Plato will map justice/injustice onto wisdom/ignorance, which will map onto good/bad, which will map onto useful/useless, which will map onto true-belief/false-belief. This layering will go on ad infinitum as a game without end — though the promise of an ending will always be present yet never arrive. How does this happen? The “what is” questions (of justice and of strength) will always fail to be answered because the attempt to answer will dissipate across the ongoing mapping of binaries — which is Plato’s point. The “what is” shape of truth simply starts the process of an infinite mapping and creating of oppositional binaries. This process will rarely let the “what is” question arrive at a definitive answer. Is the question in itself unanswerable or is the structure of answering “what is ______” making it nearly impossible for the answer to arrive?

___________

Socrates — the inaugurator of the “what is” question as a way of life — will always begin with “what is.” Yet, he will always need to restart the conversation as the attempts repeatedly fail. He will perpetually end with disappointment that the question was never answered:

THRASYMACHUS: Let that be your banquet, Socrates, at the feast of Bendis.

SOCRATES: Given by you, Thrasymachus, after you became gentle with me and ceased to be difficult. Yet I have not had a good banquet. But that is my fault, not yours. I seemed to have behaved like gluttons who snatch at every dish and taste it before having properly savored the preceding one. Before finding the first thing we inquired about — namely, what justice is — I let that go, and turned to investigate whether it is a kind of vice and ignorance or a kind of wisdom and virtue. Then an argument came up about injustice being more profitable than justice, and I could not refrain from abandoning the previous one and following up on it. Hence, the result of the discussion, so far as I am concerned, is that I know nothing. For when I do not know what justice is, I will hardly know whether it is a kind of virtue or not, or whether a person who has it is happy or unhappy. (Republic, Book 1, 354a-c; emphasis added)

Socrates’ disappointment, feigned or not, is an expression of the very structure of trying to answer “what is” questions by the progressive mapping of binaries — “vice and ignorance” and “wisdom and virtue” and “injustice being more profitable than justice” and “happy or unhappy.” In attempting to get closer and closer to “what is justice,” he moves further and further away.

This is because all that really happens in Book 1 is an ongoing set of reversals. These reversals require opposites: friends need enemies, justice needs injustice, wisdom needs ignorance, the useful needs the useless. The first term always requires the introduction of the second as part of the elenchus, even if Plato’s Socrates needs to force the situation. As an example, let me look closely at how Socrates’ forces the useful/useless binary into the discussion with Polemarchus. From around 332e, Socrates starts to shift their conversation to justice as usefulness. In discussing the use of money, lyres, pruning knives and other useful things, Socrates gets Polemarchus to equate justice with the safekeeping and guarding of these useful things. But Socrates insists on pushing the conversation such that “safekeeping” and “guarding” become not just “not in use” but “useless.”

SOCRATES: And would you also say that when one needs to keep a shield and a lyre safe and not use them, justice is a useful thing, but when you need to use them it is the soldier’s craft [techne] or the musician’s that is useful?

POLEMARCHUS: I would have to.

SOCRATES: And so in all other cases, too, justice is useless when they are in use, but useful when they are not.

POLEMARCHUS: It looks that way.

SOCRATES: Then justice cannot be something excellent, can it, my friend, if it is only useful for useless things. (333d-e)

The move is subtle and certainly clever, but unnecessary. Socrates slides the phrase “not in use” into the word “useless” and gets Polemarchus to accept the move. We don’t need Heidegger’s hammer to see that this is a flawed move. In no way does “not in use” equate to “useless.” Yet Socrates makes physical objects (knives, lyres, money) useless when not in use as well as the virtue of justice useless when not in use.

Ultimately, Plato’s Socrates is interested in mapping each of these binaries back to the ur-binary of good/bad. In this case, useful equates to good and useless equates to bad; but by showing that justice is useless, Socrates brings about a reversal of common sense that Polemarchus cannot accept. This reversal cannot happen unless Socrates is able to introduce binary oppositions where one term is good and the other bad. But more than that, the negative term must be the hard opposite of the positive term. This is a key rule in the Socratic language game of the elenchus as represented by Plato.

Answering “what is” questions with a mapping of binary oppositions onto one another is only one of Socrates’ clever techniques. Framing the topic at hand as techne is equally prominent. The ancient Greek term techne means knowing how to do something like make a lyre, pilot a ship, play music, heal a body. It is a body of practical knowledge that one learns over the course of training and practice and apprenticeship. The framing of techne is well understood in Plato’s Socratic dialogs. Here is how it works. At the heart of techne is an equally important Greek term arete, which is often translated as virtue. As many scholars point out, it is better understood as an ideal state of something. To exercise techne is to understand something’s ideal state and have the know-how and the power to bring the ideal state into existence — a house, a ship, a pruning knife, a lyre, sailors, sheep, dogs, horses.

It is important to emphasize here that living objects, such as sailors and horses and dogs, don’t necessarily understand their own ideal state. Only someone with know-how fully understands the ideal state and how to bring it into existence. Knowledge as techne is power that understands ideal states and shapes the object in conformity with those ideals. A captain understands not only what an ideal ship is, he understands what an ideal sailor is and can lead them to become ideal sailors. A trainer of horses knows what makes a good horse and is able to train the horse accordingly. This is a recurring theme throughout the Socratic dialogs, and is well understood.

In Book 1 of The Republic, Plato spends a lot of time having Socrates establish justice as the object of techne. It is the substance of his examination of the two main interlocutors — Polemarchus and Thrasymachus. The emphasis in this dialog is very specifically on techne as the exercise of power of the strong over the weak. The one with know-how (the craftsman) has the strength to bring about the ideal state of the object, which is necessarily weaker than the knower. Explicitly, techne rules over its objects and is the stronger partner in the binary relationship. Socrates says this repeatedly in Book 1: “Now surely, Thrasymachus, the various crafts rule over and are stronger than that with which they deal?” (342c).

We see here the beginning of the reversal of the strong into the weak that is the first movement of ressentiment. To be clear, by the end of Book 1, the reversal of strong into weak is not complete. Rather, only the first move of ressentiment is complete: the eagle’s strength will be seen as optional and as a conscious and intentional choice. The eagle will not embrace its weakness but will be encouraged to exercise its strength to the benefit of the lamb. This is the force of Book 1: the reversal that Socrates effects makes the exercise of strength something that is done on behalf of the weak. The strong must come to see their strength as something that they control — they become conscious of their will to power — and must also come to see their power as something that they can intentionally wield for the benefit of the weaker. Techne (translated below as “craft”) is crucial to the reversal:

Then it is clear now, Thrasymachus, that no type of craft or rule provides what is beneficial for itself; but, as we have been saying for some time, it provides and enjoins what is beneficial for its subject, and aims at what is advantageous for it — the weaker, not the stronger. (346e)

This statement comes at a key transition point in the examination of Thrasymacus. Socrates’ problem now becomes understanding why the strong would be motivated to learn this knowledge and to wield it on behalf of the weak. Because techne does not provide advantage to the knower/craftsman without some help from another techne (i.e., how to make money or how to satisfy personal ambition), where does the motivation come from? Putting this in Nietzsche’s terms, it is not enough that the eagle resists its desire to eat the lamb, it must become its caretaker. The available motivations — ambition and money making — are not acceptable to Socrates — they are not motivated by “good”: “Well, then, that is why good people won’t be willing to rule for the sake of money or honor [ambition]” (347b). Socrates knows that this is a dead end and thus transitions to his ultimate aim — justice as a way of living a good and virtuous life:

So I cannot at all agree with Thrasymachus that justice is what is advantageous for the stronger. But we will look further into that another time. What Thrasymachus is now saying — that the life of an unjust person is better than that of a just one — seems to be of far greater importance. (347e)

This is a key transition point because ultimately Plato’s Socrates’ aim is to transform the eagle into a subject that sees its strength as optional, intentional and that it should be exercised on behalf of the weak. This is the entire force of Book 1.

To make this clear, it is important to understand Thrasymachus’ understanding of injustice and justice. To say that “justice is what is advantageous for the stronger” is to say that social order depends on displays of strength. A city survives because the strong are able to rule the weak not only to keep them in line, but to fend off enemies. A weak city is vulnerable to enslavement by another. Therefore, strength is its own value and needs no elaborate justification. Strength doesn’t have “meaning” or arete in Thrasymachus’s worldview. His only requirement is that it be a complete and total exercise of itself in order to get more for oneself so that one can rule over others. We need not read this as some sort of knee-jerk Machiavellianism. Instead, it’s just a fact of living in a world where everyone is always on the brink of enslavement by others.

It is worth looking closely at Thrasymachus’s first elaboration of justice:

And each type of rule makes laws that are advantageous for itself: democracy makes democratic ones, tyranny tyrannical ones, and so on with the others. And by so legislating, each declares that what is just for its subjects is what is advantageous for itself — the ruler — and it punishes anyone who deviates from this as lawless and unjust. That, Socrates, is what I say justice is, the same in all cities: what is advantageous for the established rule. Since the established rule is surely stronger, anyone who does the rational calculation correctly will conclude that the just is the same everywhere — what is advantageous for the stronger. (338d-339a, emphasis added)

I’ve emphasized a couple of phrases here to highlight the logic. The function of a city is to be strong, and whatever increases that strength is de facto advantageous. All that justice means here is to further that advantage. As such, justice is something that the ruled owe to the rulers and not the other way around. The rulers are rulers because they are strong and must be kept strong to keep the city in order. Full stop. To be unjust is any behavior that weakens this strength.

Given this understanding of strength and social order, Thrasymachus does not need a notion of injustice as vice or evil. His view is similar to what Nietzsche described as “bad” and “low” in “the noble mode of valuation”:

… it acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks its opposite only so as to affirm itself more gratefully and triumphantly — its negative concept “low,” “common,” “bad” is only a subsequently-invented pale, contrasting image in relation to its positive basic concept — filled with life and passion through and through — “we noble ones, we good, beautiful, happy ones!” (GM 1.10, 37)

There is no evil here. Just low-born and lesser human beings incapable of acting their desires and getting more for themselves. This is exactly how Thrasymachus describes the just. This is not good enough for Plato’s Socrates. He needs motivations to be the ultimate end of the conversation. The entire force of his elenchus with Thrasymachus is to align justice and injustice with virtue and vice, wisdom and ignorance, all as good and bad motivations that can be made conscious and intentional through the elenchus.

Thrasymachus is having none of it. When Socrates tries to get him to say that “justice is a vice” (348c), Thrasymachus replies quite clearly: “No, just very noble naïveté [euetheia, which could also mean stupidity].” When Socrates next tries to get him to “call injustice deviousness,” Thrasymachus resists again: “No, I call it being prudent.” Socrates needs to align justice and injustice with good and bad motivations in order to get the strong to see their strength as something that can be exercised on behalf of the weak. They need to take their motivations as an object of self-knowledge and to see motivations as the cause of their actions. They also need to map these motivations onto the good/bad binary where bad = vice, not just naive, stupid or being weaker than the strong.

Establishing bad = vice is far more important in Book 1 than establishing justice as good/wisdom/virtue. Thrasymachus already has a pretty solid idea of what is good and just — the free exercise of strength as the basis for social order. Socrates won’t have much luck if he simply attacks the notion of justice as deference to strength. He needs to establish the use of strength as potentially bad for those over which it rules. This is why he focuses on the word “advantageous” in his examination of Thrasymachus. It is through that term that Plato is able to eventually get his readers (if not the character of Thrasymachus) to think about justice as a techne that must be exercised by people with good motivations and who use their strength on behalf of those over whom they rule. Justice as techne is to know what true advantage is and to have the know-how to bring it about.

If the weak have not yet become strong and vice versa, we definitely have the opening movement in ressentiment where the eagle is encouraged to see itself as accountable for how it uses its strength. In the end, it is about the goodness or badness of one’s soul as the motivating power for how one lives a just life:

SOCRATES: It is necessary, then, that a bad soul rules and takes care of things badly, and that a good soul does all these things well?

THRASYMACHUS: It is necessary.

SOCRATES: Now, didn’t we agree that justice is a soul’s virtue and injustice its vice?

THRASYMACHUS: Yes, we did agree.

SOCRATES: So a just soul and a just man will live well and an unjust one badly.

Thrasymachus is clearly not authentically participating in this argument but merely playing the game without putting his beliefs at stake. And that is, of course, Plato’s own ressentiment showing up.

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End Note: I’m not at all out of line equating Thrasymachus with Nietzsche’s eagle. This is exactly how Thrasymachus is introduced to the dialog. He is the personification of instinctual power:

Now, while we were speaking, Thrasymachus had tried many times to take over the discussion but was restrained by those sitting near him, who wanted to hear our argument to the end. When we paused after what I had just said, however, he could not keep quiet any longer: crouched up like a wild beast about to spring, he hurled himself at us as if to tear us to pieces. Polemarchuus and I were frightened and flustered as he roared into our midst. (336a-b)

Socrates responds by trying to draw Thrasymachus into the elenchus by flattering him and calming him down, much as Nietzsche imagined the lamb must do to the eagle — by getting him to speak about justice and strength: “Hence is is surely far more appropriate for us to be pitied by you clever people than to be given rough contempt” (336e).