The critique of philhellenism
21 June 2024
[NOTE: This is the second in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the next in the series, click here.]
It was not until the end of the nineteenth century, almost a hundred years after the dawn of European philhellenism, that anyone realised how mistaken it was. The first generation of philhellenists, especially Byron and Shelley, had naively assumed that the categories of Athenian thought, such as democracy, free speech, and republicanism, could simply be transposed from Ancient Greece to modern Europe or America. They failed to grasp the full extent of the rupture that separated the modern world from that of the ancients, which rendered null and void any simple attempt to recast modern institutions as reincarnations of ancient Athenian ones.
In reality, the modern parliamentary systems of Britain and the United States have almost nothing in common with Athenian democracy, and the nation state nothing in common with the Greek polis. These differences do not lie merely in the contrast between a system in which millions of people elect a few hundred representatives to vote on their behalf, and the direct democracy of Ancient Greece, in which all the citizens could assemble in the town square to discuss their policy options and then select one by voting themselves. On the contrary; they lie far deeper, in the very ontology of their respective universes.
The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century had destroyed the teleological structure of the classical universe and replaced it with a soulless, mechanical one, devoid of any ultimate purpose. In the absence of any objective telos, human beings would have to invent their own, and each individual was free to decide his own purpose for himself. The industrial revolution had then ushered in the mass society, which by dint of sheer numbers ruled out the kind of participatory politics described by Aristotle. Other changes — less obvious but no less significant — had further alienated modern man from the classical world of Socrates and Pericles. To use classical terms such as democracy, republicanism, or even politics, to describe the modern world was therefore so misleading as to be downright delusional. And the philhellenists had constructed precisely such a delusion in their nationalist ramblings and liberalist bunkum.
It is no coincidence that the two people who first realised, both that free speech was almost impossible in a mass society, and that the only hope for recreating the conditions for free speech lay in a return to the authentic culture of Ancient Greece — Freud and Nietzsche — were both thoroughly immersed in the scholarship of late nineteenth century Germany. For it was there — above all, in the rise of archaeology and philology — that the tools were developed for an accurate reassessment of classical antiquity and a corresponding revision of all that we thought we knew about this period. Freud and Nietzsche exposed the utter failure of philhellenism to grasp the true spirit of the age and the consequent misunderstandings that it perpetrated of Socrates, Homer, Sophocles, and Euripides. Freud and Nietzsche both put this failure down to the pernicious influence of Judaism and Christianity — and here they erred, by ignoring the much greater weight of the scientific and industrial revolutions. Though they dimly intuited the all-consuming nature of these social deviations, they should have read Marx more closely. Nevertheless, they both saw that the only remedy for modern man’s alienation — for repression and banalisation — lay in disinterring the ruins of classical Greece.
There could be no simple going back, of course, but there remained the possibility of a return, in the sense in which Lacan returns to Freud — that is to say, of a careful yet radical reinterpretation of the Athenian legacy which would allow for a space where free speech could reawaken after its two-millenia long hibernation, and the long vanquished master morality of the Homeric heroes could triumph once more over the slave morality of Christians.
Nietzsche saw the problem more clearly than Freud, but it was Freud who found a solution — a new kind of free speech, involving a new kind of dialectic, in a new kind of public space: the consulting room of the psychoanalyst. It is no criticism of Freud to observe that he discovered the solution almost by accident, in the course of trying to cure his patients of psychiatric symptoms; many other scientific discoveries have been equally serendipitous. But the origins of psychoanalysis in the context of medical practice would certainly become a stumbling block for Freud’s disciples who, like Plato, mostly failed to grasp their master’s point. It fell to Lacan to do for Freud what Nietzsche did for Socrates — to point out what a wily trickster the old bugger was. And thus it was only Lacan’s followers who were able to take Freud’s medicine and cure themselves of the modern world.
For the next article in this series, click here.
