~by David Aiken~
The mainstream canon of Western thinking includes a certain number of ‘lost’ texts and authors, as well as a certain number of ‘hidden’ texts. Examples of lost texts and authors, for example, might include Homer and the Iliad or Odyssey and Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian War. At issue in the ‘lostness’ of authors and texts, is when an interpretative tradition surrounding those authors and their texts becomes so established and so weighty, so mainstream, that the actual texts of the author are only seldom considered or their meanings radically transformed in order to make them agree with the mainstream interpretative spin.
But this is only really a problem when there is disagreement between the ‘reading’ offered by the interpretative tradition, and the ancient texts themselves. Such is the obvious case, for example, with Homer, who is considered an ancient mythologizing poet, but never an historicizing poet—it is obvious to All & Sundry, after all, that the world that unveils in his poetry cannot be an historical world (reflecting real human experience), so it must therefore be a mythological world (storytelling). But this interpretation is not Homeric, which is to say that it does not derive from the writings of Homer; rather, it belongs to later interpreters of Homer for whom Homer’s world has no existential resonance.
Scholarship surrounding Thucydides, and the mainstream interpretation by modern scholarship of Thucydides as a rationalist historian, has a similar weakness, as Phrontisterion has argued in “History Undone. The Appropriation of Thucydides” (Brill, 2005).
In the middle of the last century and in the person of J.B. Bury, modern historiography explicitly ratified for posterity the view that Thucydides composed History in an existential void. Because the rationalist historian ratifies experiences of the world against the standard of ratio, the Story he composes is as though born out of season and into “a lifeless world”, and he himself judges his world “as if the series of years [he] lives through would not slowly wash over him.” To continue to appropriate Ferge’s (2001, 55) phenomenological turn of phrase, if Bury is correct, Thucydides found himself “in a lifeless world born of reason, in which the experience of time plays no part.” In a series of lectures given under the auspices of the Classics Department of Harvard University, Bury (1958, 75) argued that although Thucydides had learned "to consider and criticize facts" in sifting through his source material, it was nevertheless his studied opinion that the fifth century Athenian historian was engaged in the critical process of crafting History "unprejudiced by authority and tradition.” To be sure, Bury's conclusion is problematic, even when situated against the backdrop of classical philology's traditionally provincial approach to language, history, and History; for its assumption is pure Vico (1993, 82): “Tous les commencemens des histoires barbares sont fabuleux.”
Perhaps more problematic, however, is that this type of a priori assumption should continue to receive relatively uncritical endorsement in historiographical circles. Nevertheless, keeping in mind the axiomatic nature of all History, which is to say that "elle a pris le parti d'un certain mode de connaître,” the popularity of the purely rationalist re-constitution of the historical past attests only to the stubbornness of the rationalist presuppositional framework ensconced in the field of historiographical studies, and not necessarily to the historical 'truth of the matter.' For what does Bury mean, precisely, when he makes the claim that Thucydides was "unprejudiced by authority and tradition"? Clearly, he means that Thucydides did not 'buy into' the mythopoetic Weltbild of his peers or predecessors, and that in this respect his writings are completely different from –and for historiographical purposes, far more significant than—the writings of a Homer or a Hesiod or even a Herodotus, which are replete with elements of a mythopoetic nature. Given this type of first proposition, Bury then argues quite logically that the historian Thucydides not only and in fact successfully separated himself from his culture's irrational (poetic? mythic?) paradigm, but that in so doing, he also laid the foundation for a new, rationalist tradition of reading and interpreting the world of past-time.
Unlike most ‘lost’ texts, on the other hand, ‘hidden’ texts, are those kinds of historical documents that present themselves at face value, but whose truth is hidden precisely behind the fact that they are actually two-faced. Sometimes this may have been done by an author deliberately, such as is the case with Plato, and sometimes it may just be that in the mists of time we moderns have lost the key to ‘reading’ specific documents. We have continued to read them as children read—at face value; but such texts as these were written for adults and were intended to be read from an “adult” point of view. The Bible, Plato’s Republic, and Machiavelli’s The Prince are all illustrations of such hidden texts.
It must first be said, that as a document, the New Testament is clearly a case-study on the question of lostness, because the fact of the matter is, that there is no one (single) document called the New Testament, nor even a single text called the Bible. Rather, the ‘Bible’ is no Book whatsoever, but is in matter of fact an entire library, composed and/or compiled by multiple authors, in multiple languages, over the course of 800 years. Dating for the different books of the Hebrew Bible ranges from the 8th to the 3nd centuries CE (including additional, deuterocanonical works); and the dates for the New Testament letters are linked to a variety of authors from the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.
Just for the extra icing on the cake, by way of adding mystery—or hiddenness, to lostness on the question of the New Testament—there are many different nods to levels of meanings and possible understandings of various NT letters, which suggests that the New Testament may also be comprised of hidden texts. In other words: the literal reading, or reading the texts at face value, will most often fail to yield the truth intended by the authors of those texts. For instance:
· Jesus, as written by Matthew (11:15):
He who has ears to hear, let him hear…
· The author of the Letter to the Hebrews, 5:11-14:
11 Concerning [the Son, a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek] we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.
12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary * principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food.
13 For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant.
14 But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.
· Peter, in the 2nd Letter of Peter, 3:16:
as also in all his [Paul’s] letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the unlearned and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.
· Or in a series of exhortations from the Revelation, (ex. 2:7)
7 'He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God.'
In his Seventh Letter, which certainly precedes chronologically the texts of the Christian New Testament, Plato makes repeated claims to the effect that his teaching cannot be contained by words, or, effectively, he insists that his philosophical teachings are hidden:
(344d-345a) Anyone who has followed this discourse and digression will know well that, if Dionysios or anyone else, great or small, has written a treatise on the highest matters and the first principles of things, he has, so I say, neither heard nor learnt any sound teaching about the subject of his treatise; otherwise, he would have had the same reverence for it, which I have, and would have shrunk from putting it forth into a world of discord and uncomeliness.
Other arguments concerning Plato’s unwritten, or hidden doctrines have been extensively and authoritatively developed and presented by representative thinkers from the Tübinger Platonschule.
This takes us, of course, to Plato’s Republic, which is regularly taught in university political philosophy courses as though it were some kind of treatise on political thought. In an essay entitled “Noble Lies and Failures of Character,” Phrontisterion made the following argument about hidden texts, and about Plato’s Republic specifically:
At the risk of sounding adamant, let us just say it right out in the open: Plato’s Republic, one of the perennial great works in the corpus of world literature, which has resided for centuries in the intellectual domain of political philosophers and theorists, is not really about a republic, ideal or otherwise. In the same way that war movies are not about war, i.e., their Subject is not “war,” but rather about Men’s Character and Human Action framed situationally around the thematic of war, so also, when Plato dramatizes a conversation with Socrates around a political thematic, it does not mean that the Subject of the work is political in nature or even anything that is remotely concerned with political thinking. Plato’s Republic is framed around the idea of the City; the City, in turn, is built in the image of Human Ontology, and seeks to answer the question – what is a man? How should a man act? What role does right education play in the evolution of the human mind and soul? As the soul goes, so goes the City.
If we fail to grasp this distinction between the Subject of a work and its opportunistic framing or narrative thematic, then with works such as Plato’s Republic or Machiavelli’s The Prince, once they are construed as political and philosophical earnestness, we who come after are obliged to construct interpretations that correct other interpretations, because we have inadvertently created a whole new set of interpretative problems by committing to read literally, and failing to read metaphorically.
For example, by committing to a political interpretation of Plato’s Republic, we create an antique Frankenstein in the person of the great Socrates, thereby “disappearing” this invaluable thinker behind a political interpretative persona. This tradition’s earnestly political “read” of the Republic includes almost all the great thinkers, except Augustine, from Aristotle to Machiavelli, and, in the contemporary political philosophical arena, from Karl Popper to Leo Strauss. And, yet, this telling also transforms the story’s hero, the Socrates of the history of philosophy, into the much more well-known Franken-Socrates, once-upon-a-time master teacher of the life of the Just Man, who seems, all irony aside and in great seriousness, to be making the case for Justice and the Just Man by promoting the practice of euthanasia, social classism based on racial purity, selective breeding, and telling noble lies to motivate people to act well in the City. Really?!
The “Bible,” Thucydides, Plato…
For reasons this essay has been considering, I stopped teaching Machiavelli's (1469–1527) The Prince in my Humanities courses a certain number of years ago. The Prince is traditionally included in all Humanities curricula and academic readers, just as it has been included in the collection of Great Books of the Western World (Vol. 23) since the inception of that series in 1952. The problem? For the most part, Machiavelli's The Prince is presented in Humanities and Political Theory readers literally and uncritically, as representative of a proto-form of Henry-Kissinger-in-the-bud realpolitik. Therefore, when this text is taught in our undergraduate university classrooms, it should not really come as a surprise that it is simply presented at face value. But this is, precisely, the problem! Because the true 'face' of Machiavelli's The Prince is hidden; and when we teachers present the 'mask' as the true face, we are essentially handing our students, uncritically, a textbook study of fascism and the fascist attitude as representative of the human 'way of things'. And they will of course, in turn, 'go out and do likewise.'
And yet The Prince simply cannot be a true, face-value 'political' treatise; because when it is interpreted in this common and naive way, it goes against the entire tenor of Machiavelli's life and all of his other writings. Therefore, any reading of The Prince requires from all its interpreters, both the student reader and the teacher of this text, much more real knowledge of Machiavelli's thought world, and therefore much more complexity and nuance. After all, why should teachers of Humanities continue to teach a fascist text in the context of Western universities, unless of course we are interested in teaching fascism to our students?! Unless, that is, we have been interpreting Machiavelli too simplistically... too lazily... incorrectly?
MACHIAVELISME, (Hist. de la Philos.) [Histoire de la philosophie] Diderot2
MACHIAVELISME, s. m. (Hist. de la Philos.) espèce de politique détestable qu'on
peut rendre en deux mots, par l'art de tyranniser, dont Machiavel le florentin
a répandu les principes dans ses ouvrages.
Machiavel fut un homme d'un génie profond &
d'une érudition très - variée. Il sut les langues anciennes & modernes. Il
posséda l'histoire. Il s'occupa de la morale & de la politique. Il ne
négligea pas les lettres. Il écrivit quelques comédies qui ne sont pas sans
mérite. On prétend qu'il apprit à régner à César Borgia. Ce qu'il y a de
certain, c'est que la puissance despotique de la maison des Médicis lui fut
odieuse, & que cette haine, qu'il étoit si bien dans ses principes de
dissimuler, l'exposa à de longues & cruelles persécutions. On le soupçonna
d'être entré dans la conjuration de Soderini. Il fut pris & mis en prison ;
mais le courage avec lequel il résista aux tourmens de la question qu'il subit,
lui sauva la vie. Les Médicis qui ne purent le perdre dans cette occasion, le protégèrent,
& l'engagèrent par leurs bienfaits à écrire l'histoire. Il le fit ;
l'expérience du passé ne le rendit pas plus circonspect. Il trempa encore dans
le projet que quelques citoyens formèrent d'assassiner le cardinal Jules de
Médicis, qui fut dans la suite élevé au souverain pontificat sous le nom de
Clément VII. On ne put lui opposer que les éloges continuels qu'il avoit fait
de Brutus & Cassius. S'il n'y en avoit pas assez pour le condamner à mort,
il y en avoit autant & plus qu'il n'en falloit pour le châtier par la perte
de ses pensions : ce qui lui arriva. Ce nouvel échec le précipita dans la misère,
qu'il supporta pendant quelque tems. Il mourut à l'âge de 48 ans, l'an 1527,
d'un médicament qu'il s'administra lui-même comme un préservatif contre la
maladie. Il laissa un fils appelé Luc Machiavel. Ses derniers discours, s'il
est permis d'y ajoûter foi, furent de la dernière impiété. Il disoit qu'il
aimoit mieux être dans l'enfer avec Socrate, Alcibiade, César, Pompée, &
les autres grands hommes de l'antiquité, que dans le ciel avec les fondateurs
du christianisme.
Nous avons de lui huit livres de l'histoire de
Florence, sept livres de l'art de la guerre, quatre de la république, trois de
discours sur Tite - Live, la vie de Castruccio, deux comédies, & les
traités du prince & du sénateur.
Il y a peu d'ouvrages qui ait fait autant de
bruit que le traité du prince : c'est - là qu'il enseigne aux souverains à
fouler aux piés la religion, les règles de la justice, la sainteté des pactes
& tout ce qu'il y a de sacré, lorsque l'intérêt l'exigera. On pourroit
intituler le quinzième & le vingt - cinquième chapitres, des circonstances
où il convient au prince d'être un scélérat.
Comment expliquer qu'un des plus ardens
défenseurs de la monarchie soit devenu tout - à - coup un infâme apologiste de
la tyrannie ? le voici. Au reste, je n'expose ici mon sentiment que comme une
idée qui n'est pas tout - à - fait destituée de vraisemblance. Lorsque
Machiavel écrivit son traité du prince, c'est comme s'il eût dit à ses
concitoyens, lisez bien cet ouvrage. Si vous acceptez jamais un maître, il sera
tel que je vous le peins : voilà la bête féroce à laquelle vous vous
abandonnerez. Ainsi ce fut la faute de ses contemporains, s'ils méconnurent son
but : ils prirent une satyre pour un éloge. Bacon le chancelier ne s'y est pas
trompé, lui, lorsqu'il a dit : cet homme n'apprend rien aux tyrans. Ils ne
savent que trop bien ce qu'ils ont à faire, mais il instruit les peuples de ce
qu'ils ont à redouter. Est quod gratias agamus Machiavello & hujus modi
scriptoribus, qui apertè & indissimulanter proferunt quod homines facere
soleant, non quod debeant. Quoi qu'il en soit, on ne peut guère douter qu'au
moins Machiavel n'ait pressenti que tôt ou tard il s'éleveroit un cri général
contre son ouvrage, & que ses adversaires ne réussiroient jamais à
démontrer que son prince n'étoit pas une image fidèle de la plûpart de ceux qui
ont commandé aux hommes avec le plus d'éclat.
J'ai oui dire qu'un philosophe interrogé par un
grand prince sur une réfutation qu'il venoit de publier du machiavelisme, lui
avoit répondu : « sire, je pense que la première leçon que Machiavel eût donné
à son disciple, c'eût été de réfuter son ouvrage ».
Phrontisterion References for Dr. Aiken’s research:
Theoretical and methodological considerations :
Several Practical Applications :
Reprised and reworked from an original Phrontisterion essay published in April, 2016.
