Soulmaking and Judgment: An Esquisse

WritingProse

Sep 16

Could this be, in the end, the meaning, or rather the premise, of the Socratic Doctrine? Possibility of the righteous cosmic judgment. And the entity called philosopher attuned to the frequencies and movements of such.

There, in the First Alcibiades, Socrates presents a new model of thought – the same that, much later, eager to get out, Charles Olson would name the Western Box. Could it be that not only does the tradition “consist of a series of footnotes to Plato,” but the whole tradition, the very soil from which our Western white heads spring, is a post-mortem nightmare of Socrates? I would posit that a Platonic Kermess is usually populated by two sets of characters: 1) those fussy voices that have lost their heads, have literally lost their bodies, are disembodied, possessed by 2) the scary, elusive Ancient Ones that use them to exist, to corporate, feed, and generate. Think of them as Lovecraftian characters. Timaeus and The Call of Cthulhu. And Socrates, basically, a Nyarlathotep. In the weird symbiotic relationship he has with the Ancient Ones, he has learned how to float on top, arrogantly looking down on the poor, lost souls of the Kermess, spending his days messing with their heads so the Bosses can have more and more food. He even devised a technique to separate the soul of those soppy humans from their bodies – bodies of a different order of existence, being of no use to the Ancient Ones. His wish finally granted, you will remember how he finally allows himself a moment of the simple pleasures he always yearned for: writing little poems and hanging out with his boyfriends.

His dialogues are all a Kermess, really, and had there been a painter to depict them, they might have looked a lot like a Brueghel feast. What Socrates brought to the party is a psychoanalysis – that is, a taking apart of the soul – though for the sake of convenience we can call it philosophy (I do imagine, though, that for the actual poet-mystics that came up with the word, Socrates’ little act would be outrageous – so we call them Pre-Socratics and bury them under his Kermess). As opposed to poetry, that earlier and no less lunatic a project, preoccupied with the soulmaking, a psychosynthesis. Deleuze smartly viewed the whole Platonic comedy, his gig, as a parody of Penelope and her suitors. They all want to lay their hands on Sophia, but it is Socrates who comes up with something new: he will contest poetry, he will banish it from the city and then there will be no end to Kermess. The Ancient Ones, for the limitless supply of food that he provided them with, would have greatly rewarded the man, made him the Master of Ceremonies and us, what, an eternal afterparty of his Kermess?

This irresistibly charming aspect of Platonic texts has not, to my knowledge, been stressed enough: it’s a fairground fun, a circus troupe in the moments of repose on the dusty road from one town to the next – clowns and jugglers, carnies and freaks. What we are given to read is a pastime from one show to another. What happens on the margins, in the backrooms, during the show? In the Footnotes?... Well, you know what happens. We do.

Socrates as Nyarlathotep. I can imagine one Greek sending a messenger to another to inform him:

Don't fail to see Socrates if he comes to Epidaurus. He is horrible — horrible beyond anything you can imagine — but wonderful. He haunts one for hours afterwards. I am still shuddering at what he showed.

The trickster informs us and is of use. Everybody always knew this. The trouble is with taking the clown’s words literally, which contains exceeding dangers. Could it be that we have truly and utterly forgotten how to read the metaphoric language? The carnie talk.

Socrates to Alcibiades: We are no Spartans, have not th’advantage, and of course, no Persians. Have no Magian lore of Horomazes, its gates shut on us.

In that way, of course, Socratic work is a revolt of the proletarian imagination, and that much is nice and noble. The trouble with our proletarian imagination, our footnoted minds, is that over time an aberration, a retro-myopia took hold, according to which there is no thought before Socrates. Everything before him is either parlor tricks, or pre-himself. Setting up the stage, minor opening acts. But in the First Alcibiades, Socrates talks as an early American would, a provincial from the furthest outpost of the beating heart. He is green, this Socrates, a new thing, and so is the tree he has grown from. He shivers at the boundless depth he beholds around his barely hatched egg. He shivers at the disadvantage. He hardly understands the sound the depths make, but he can describe the terror of the sound because the sound is ancient.

I read in Foucault (and I don’t know where he read it) that epimeleia heautou, "care for the self," was a well-known principle among the Lacedaemonians. Socrates does not tell us where he received it from, but he hints that, as an offspring of a youthful culture, he parasites the lore and practices of those he rivals, biting at the hand that feeds him, as they say. But it could well be that he transforms the civic maxim into a philosophical one. Like a twisted double coil, throughout Alcibiades “care for the self” and “knowledge of the self” are hopelessly entangled.

This First Alcibiades (this, again, is posited by Foucault in his Hermeneutics of the Subject) could be the sole Platonic dialogue where soul is not (almost not) a substance, but an activity, a thing in progress. As all poets have always known or at least sensed, soul is a verb, not a noun.

“Call the world, if you please, the Vale of Soul Making” – for an instant, John Keats appears to us as a shadow of Socrates, his negative capability.

Again, heeding everything I find in Foucault, I suggest it could actually be psychology, not philosophy, that is given birth here. Soul was there, but now it needs a midwife. James Hillman – who stressed for us that what is at stake in psychology is, indeed, psyche, the good old soul – did say, or might have said, that if we are to understand the roots of archetypal psychology, we need to look not only at Freud and Jung but also the works of poets, and that of Plato.

Instead of a poetic form, Plato opts for a dialogue. Drama, not poetry. But this is not yet Aristotle. A dialogue, a play, nearly as much as a poem, leaves empty spaces on the page, spaces between the lines. Look inside a Platonic dialogue and you shall find a cornucopia of archaic worlds (the same that aren’t dreamt of in your philosophy). This wondrous accordion of a cosmology that gets described by Socrates, according to which all things come in layers and strata (or, rather: any thing except the Soul and the Idea is but another layer of something before it), might or might not be accurate of the actual world, but is an accurate description of Platonic texts – every bit of them is inhabited, even haunted by alien, much older ghosts and spirits, every single passage opens up to some earlier, more archaic, richer stratum of knowledge. Could it be that not only is the ensuing “European philosophical tradition” “a series of footnotes to Plato,” but Plato himself stands as a series of opaque, dense footnotes to the earlier mysteries?

Foucault’s assertion – that the core part of the soul that Socrates tells Alcibiades about is nothing but the act, the process of soul-making – remains vague to me. For, had it been so, Soul would not possess that differentiable frontier that Plato entitles it with. If Plato really thought our hands dirty in the soul action, there would be no way of differentiating a carpenter’s soul from what his hand does when he handles the wood. If soul be but this making of itself, how could any act, any happening be other than soul? For, it seems, in the Vale of Soul Making, there is no room for a Platonic dialogue. That Vale being Other than the Republic we are footnoted to inhabit. That Vale is, in fact, the Republic’s Other.

The brother of Iglulik Shaman told Rasmussen: “O greatest peril, human life consists entirely of souls.” And it is this very life that, with Plato, the human definitely and categorically alienates. This life entirely of souls.

In Socrates there is a mechanics at work that asserts everything to be not soul but the rest that outgrows soul. As trees from the soil. We can call them, if you please, less-and-less-souls. The same applies to the objects and creatures of the world: less-and-less-ideas. As if both this world and this life were a waste, a drainage.

In truth, there is a single thing that Socrates teaches Alcibiades: a method we could call discrimination.

By banishing the poets from his Republic, Socrates, of course, does not make them vanish, nor does he disarm them (their arms being of a different order), but one could say he reserves them to the subconscious, in the subterranean and negated (negative) part of his Republic. Henceforth, the poet is a shadow, a negative of the philosopher.

Henceforth, the poet is an outrider, having no say in public affairs, and the knowledge the poet brings is a suspicious knowledge.

The poet Charles Olson, who thought about the things I think about here, about the Republic and about the poet’s place in it, and whose library seems to have contained the volumes of Aristophanes, Athenaeus, Diogenes Laertius, Euripides, Herodotus, Hesiod, Ovid, Pausanias, Plutarch, Theocritus, but not those of Plato or Aristotle, appears to directly address the First Alcibiades in some of his most programmatic poems:

I am no Greek, hath not th’advantage.
And of course, no Roman.

he can take no risk that matters,
the risk of beauty least of all.

or

No Greek will be able

to discriminate my body.
An American
is a complex of occasions,
themselves a geometry
of spatial nature.

and so on.

P.S.: It may be worth noting that this final phrase is said to have been borrowed from Whitehead, the same who told us that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”