Stephen Clouse
Jul 25, 2017 · 2 min read

What do you make of Leo Strauss’s conception that the philosopher-king is actually a contradiction? That the collapsing of kratos and sophia into one individual is not possible for the philosopher will not want power and the philokratos will not think they need sophia?

My own take (drawn somewhat from Allan Bloom) is that Plato is pointing to the inability to establish absolute justice with the human desire for contingent things — Glaukon’s need for “relishes” in Book II. That the best we can do is align the individual soul properly. But beyond this, since it is a work on political philosophy, the capacity to change the polis lies in the muthos, not in the nomos. That the ability for the sub-philosopher to aspire to justice is through the newly constructed Platonic myths that replace the Homeric. That the best we can hope for is to direct the people toward better behavior through a new myth of the afterlife, but that to desire the collapse of kratos and sophia is to spell disaster; the fight against the tyrant in Book 9 would be for naught if the goal was to establish an ideological authoritarian. That the limit for philosophers to influence the polis is in undermining the immoral myths of the city and replace them with new noble lies — in a sense, what Nietzsche praises of Moses and Jesus in their ability to subvert the morality of their age and replace it with their own. Or Machiavelli’s love of new princes establishing new modes and orders (see Harvey Mansfield, “New Modes and Orders.”)

Your concern with Sharia and the insidiousness of the tactics used by Sharia apologists is worth preaching from the mountaintops. The foolishness of so many well meaning moralizers on the Left and their never ending drive to make all things a projection of identity, an expression of will, leaves them open to be the Trojan horse of theocratic tyranny. The combination of such insidiousness, do-goodery, and cultural relativism is truly a threat to the West. Whitehead’s notion that Western thought is a footnote to Plato rings with both clarity and danger — the Platonic method of dialectic used inappropriately points to nihilism just as it used correctly points to Truth. Nietzsche’s festival of the ass at the end of Zarathustra mirrors Aristophanes warning to Socrates — the method of undermining beliefs without something as rigorous to replace it leads to comedic efforts to supplant old myths with new. Unfortunately, Sharia is no laughing matter and the eschatological yearnings of its apologists pose profound danger to the Enlightenment and the establishment of a culture predicated on seeing the world as it is, not as authority tells us it is. In this sense, a culture predicated on the positive attributes of aporia but willfully ignorant to the dark side of perplexity.

Stephen Clouse

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Political Philosophy PhD candidate. Writes about politics, culture, education, and the private life. “The character of man is destiny." Heraclitus, Fragment 111