# Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy  ## Metadata - Author: [[Costin Alamariu]] - Full Title: Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy - Category: #books ## Highlights - The fundamental problem that motivated me then as it does now: what is life as opposed to death, and what is life as full of life, as opposed to life as diminished life. ([Location 68](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=68)) - That the Western philosophical tradition as it came down to our time, I mean in the form of the Platonic-Socratic tradition; or what Nietzsche called the Socratic-Alexandrian scientific civilization… I mean that it was born in an act of rhetorical obfuscation and conservative cowardice: this is one claim of this dissertation. ([Location 116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=116)) - Critias, Socrates’ student, was the Hitler of the ancient Greek world. He and his friends established a regime based on atheistic biologism so to speak; on “Sparta radicalized,” a eugenic antinomian dictatorship. He was maybe what Hitler’s most hysterical detractors claim of him today. Critias killed more Athenians in his short rule than died in the decades of the war with Sparta. ([Location 119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=119)) - He saw the purpose of the Spartan constitution as the creation of one “supreme biological specimen,” and Critias sought to found a state based on such ideas. He and his friends were overthrown quite quickly. Against this catastrophe, carried out in the name of philosophy and nature (of biology) there was a predictable reaction. Socrates’ other students, most of them at least, as well as Isocrates and others, went out of their way to distance themselves from Critias and what he was perceived to stand for: “We are not like that guy. We are good boys. Philosophy isn’t actually about that. We’re doing something different. We’re socially responsible good guys.” ([Location 123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=123)) - Plato and many others of the time therefore concealed much: because they had to. In contrast to later thinkers, they were aware of the importance of what they were concealing. They thought this was an important matter. They thought the problem of biology, to put it in our words, would never be forgotten. The problem is they concealed too well. And so eventually the truth about the meaning of “nature” really was obscured. ([Location 132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=132)) - The sexual market is the pinnacle of every other market. Men in particular are motivated to do only what it takes to secure sexual intercourse with mates of their choosing, and in many cases certainty over the issue of intercourse, which is offspring. At least for average men under average circumstances, they’re not motivated to work for anything more than this, though of course this isn’t the only drive. ([Location 147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=147)) - In the Bible three of the Ten Commandments deal specifically with this matter: do not covet another man’s wife, do not commit adultery, and honor mother and father; the last is the first “substantial” commandment that doesn’t directly involve honoring God but that concerns human behavior as such, and for this reason among others Nietzsche believed it was the constitutive goal of the Hebrews, the striving that defined them as a people. ([Location 170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=170)) - the language of Leviticus 18 with its list of sexual prohibitions is especially powerful, contrasting the new laws of the Hebrews with those of the Egyptians and with others who came before them, who defiled the land, and who were vomited out by the land.[vi] ([Location 175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=175)) - The failure of God’s plan for Adam, and thereafter the debacles of the generations following Adam that led to the flood, all had to do with matters of sexual transgression or of misbreeding. After his failures first with ideal man and then with universal man after Noah God decided to establish his law within a tribe or nation.[vii] And the cornerstone of this foundation is the set of laws that has to do with breeding, marriage, and management of sexual relations. The Hebrews believed these laws to be constitutive of themselves, and outsiders felt this way too, even if they may have expressed it at times unfairly. ([Location 179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=179)) - If an average man’s natural desire were to be a good husband and father, then their work would have been easy. But in early Rome, for example, bachelorhood had to be forbidden by law.[ix] The problem with the view of the social conservative is that it assumes a man’s duty to his wife and children is more natural, and therefore more easily enforced, than it actually is. They often do not see the immense work that had to go into making men good husbands or fathers, nor the great privileges through which men had to be enticed to accept these duties; still less do they see or dare to mention the great work—some would say oppression—that had to be exerted to make women faithful wives and mothers.[x] ([Location 190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=190)) - Men deprived of patriarchy have no reason to accept duty or responsibility, nor the loss of freedom that goes with family life. ([Location 200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=200)) - The problem, as social liberals and feminists are finding out, isn’t that men seek by nature or education to dominate wives or children, but that men simply don’t care.[xi] ([Location 203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=203)) - Octavian, as Emperor, tried to reestablish family life among the patrician class in Rome with far greater insight, far more power to shame, and far greater latitude to give rewards. But he failed. Alas, simply shaming men into being fathers and husbands is never going to work. ([Location 209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=209)) - Men seek status above all because it is attractive to women and results in intercourse or breeding—in fact, in social animals, where status and hierarchy clearly exists, status serves precisely this purpose. Only males of high status breed.[xiii] Men can’t be induced through shame or through praise into accepting the nominal status without the natural rewards of status, into accepting  duties without commensurate rewards. ([Location 213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=213)) - Who wins in the sexual market as it is formed in a particular society, who gets to breed, is closely related, nearly identical to the question of how the next generation in that society is to be constituted. The question of the sexual and breeding laws is therefore identical to the question of regime, constitution, or foundation as such. ([Location 217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=217)) - the question of marriage or breeding law was the most important foundational act in these societies, but so many other examples, from all across the world, abound. Many of these examples point to darker and uncomfortable truths we have suppressed. ([Location 220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=220)) - After the Manchus took over China they were acutely aware of what had happened to other previous conquerors and how they had been ultimately assimilated by the subordinate native population. They resolved to prevent this from happening to themselves and enforced, as in the Law of Manu, a caste- and race-based system of sexual apartheid.[xv] They were distinguished from the native Han in many other respects that, from some higher-minded point of view, one can say are more important: for example in their political orientation they were expansionist and thought in geopolitical terms alien to Chinese tradition. But whatever other ways of life or ideals they may have eagerly held to, they were also aware that without a next generation of Manchus there would be no one to carry forth these ways of life or teachings, or rather, to embody them. For this reason among others every people and every founder of a people has had to pay attention to these type of laws first, at times despite themselves. ([Location 230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=230)) - a mestizo, the issue of a criollo and indio, had a different place in society and function from a castizo, or the issue of a mestizo and criollo. There were ways to regain criollo or Spanish status but only by “breeding up” the casta ladder. ([Location 244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=244)) - Although the casta system is no longer used in Latin America, it has affected marriage choices arguably to this day; it has shaped and continues to shape the social stratification, the nature of the elites, the culture as a whole in these countries.[xvi] ([Location 254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=254)) - precisely through the ideal of chastity, and the grudging concessions made therefore to monogamy alone, it is possible that Christianity stabilized family life and thereby promoted in many cases a salutary and steady but not Malthusian increase in population. ([Location 261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=261)) - It is through its power to carry out marriages and therefore through its effect on inheritance, among other things, that the priesthood was able to exert such temporal power. ([Location 264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=264)) - The Church disapproved of arranged marriages and in most of Europe it forbad cousin marriage. In the northwest of Europe in particular, under the manorial system, the Church entirely did away with the types of cousin marriage that would allow for the perpetuation of tribes or clans. Accordingly there developed a de facto practice of outgroup marriage in certain parts of Europe, which did away with clan identity and which encouraged broader-based political identities, universal morality, and altruistic orientation toward non-family strangers.[xvii] ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=269)) - Modern liberalism and capitalism, modern universal ethics or morality, are latecomers and piggyback on the fundamental and centuries-long work done by the manorial system and Christianity in reshaping and perhaps rebreeding European man—for there is strong evidence that many of the behaviors described, such as altruism toward strangers, are by now hereditary in certain populations. The culture of civility on which liberal, private society is built is inconceivable without this preparatory work done by Christianity, and which was carried out most effectively at the root, determining who married who, and therefore what kind of children were to be born. ([Location 281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=281)) - For Nietzsche, Christianity laid the groundwork for the calamity of modern liberalism, modern democracy, and modern socialism, which threatened to destroy, maybe permanently, not only the possibility of philosophy, but of life in the full sense of the word. And yet this same phenomenon was for Nietzsche a great opportunity. The root of all of Nietzsche’s concerns about the possibility of the rebirth of philosophy, and about the future of mankind, is his “strange concern with breeding,” which according to a recent interpreter he “inherited” from Plato and not from any of his contemporaries—although ([Location 289](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=289)) - Nietzsche and Plato are prominent in having explicitly brought out the fundamental problem of human life, political life, and of nature itself, which, indeed, does have to do with breeding. ([Location 296](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=296)) - Throughout the works of Xenophon the preoccupation with marriage, matchmaking, and breeding is very marked: ([Location 300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=300)) - Xenophon begins the Constitution of the Spartans with the laws regarding the begetting of children—in quite technical, even biological detail—and the laws of marriage even only after that. ([Location 306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=306)) - The best regime, the Republic, is a eugenic state, crafted exclusively with a view to eugenics, and its downfall is because of dysgenic unions. ([Location 317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=317)) - the problem of breeding, is in many respects identical to philosophy, or at least identical to political philosophy. ([Location 330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=330)) - From the classical point of view, once one accepts the necessity of this question of the centrality of human breeding, for example as the founder of a political state, or the founder of a religion, or as a lawgiver, it becomes intimately tied with the  second. For it is of greatest importance which qualities a wife also selects for in husband, what types of men are rewarded and given chance to have a posterity. It concerns the next generation of citizens or subjects. How they are to be raised, provided for, educated, what kinds of men and women they are to become. But most importantly, who is to be born. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=339)) - From the classical point of view, the modern objection is not so much immoral or dangerous, as it is self-defeating. ([Location 354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=354)) - parents or mothers in the modern liberal West are eliminating the existence of people with, for example, Down’s syndrome, by aborting a very great percentage in the womb. Freedom and modern science has allowed a far more “humane” method of eugenics, and also a far more thorough-going one, than could have ever been carried out by Nazi Germany—although not a more efficient or effective one.[xxv] It’s easy to guess what will happen if, say, genes correlating with homosexuality are to be discovered soon with any certainty.[xxvi] ([Location 360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=360)) - One great weakness of Marxism is that even if the End State of freedom from material necessity were achieved, scarcity in the sexual market would remain, and would be, like it always has been, the fundamental cause of social division and political upheaval. ([Location 375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=375)) - an insight Aristophanes frankly and humorously manifested 2500 years ago—the fundamental desire in a revolution is not for access to goods or leisure or honor, but for sexual access to the desirable.[xxvii] ([Location 380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=380)) - Abandoning conventional and traditional hierarchies that were no doubt oppressive has brought pain because modern man now comes face to face with a more primordial hierarchy, one that is inescapable and uncanny. ([Location 388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=388)) - Freedom from socially- and legally-enforced monogamy—one boy for every girl, and vice versa—has led not to equality and happiness, but laid bare the unadorned and brutal hierarchy of nature. The most desirable males and females, who are in a minority, have lives full of sexual and romantic opportunities, adventures, the choice for excess, and numerous options should they decide to marry and have a family life. For the rest—for both men and women, the vast majority—there is lack of fulfillment, even desolation in youth, and, later on, unsuitable options and unhappy, very late marriages marred by resentments and dashed hopes. Often there are no marriages, nor any long-term pairings after a certain age. ([Location 396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=396)) - It is possible that the sexual hierarchy and de facto breeding laws of our time are more just than those others. But it is a hierarchy and inequality nonetheless. The difference is that something like the Law of Manu, or the breeding and marriage laws of Sparta, were consciously crafted with a view to breeding a certain type of man or citizen who would embody the driving goal of the regime or society. The laws were meant to harmonize or “coordinate” man’s intense desire for sexual love and for posterity with the regime’s overarching goals and its needs. ([Location 411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=411)) - Note: Directing the complex system of human genetic propagation towards a specific goal - Nietzsche understood, however, that a modern would shudder if he were to perceive the real root of Greek civilization. We don’t appreciate the immense cruelty and suffering that was necessary to create the serene, light-filled culture that gave birth to our artistic, literary, and philosophical traditions. ([Location 429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=429)) - Burckhardt, writing in the 19th Century, adds that a modern has no clue about the immense hardship, cruelty, and pain that had to happen to create this radiant type of human. Simply put, behind this image of human flourishing lie generations of attention to citizen quality rather than quantity, which is to say, to eugenics, with all its cruelty, an orientation that never left the Greek world. ([Location 444](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=444)) - Friedrich Nietzsche, speaking of the different goals of different peoples, states of the Greeks, “You shall always be the first and excel all others: your jealous soul shall love no one, unless it be the friend”—that made the soul of the Greek quiver: thus he walked the path of his greatness.[xxxii] The pursuit of excellence, the desire to be proven the best compared to all other men, is the foundation of all of Greek culture. Victory in the contest or agon is taken to be the demonstration of such excellence and superiority. ([Location 454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=454)) - The original meaning of virtue or arête is precisely this type of excellence in which superiority over others is manifested in various struggles, whether athletic or intellectual, but both having their origins in the military training of the citizen. ([Location 467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=467)) - Greek culture is thus “universal” in the sense that it is the first culture which, with awareness of nature, that is, of biology, undertook to cultivate and breed itself into a higher form. ([Location 476](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=476)) - awareness of nature—the prerequisite of philosophy and later of science—is identical with awareness of breeding or what we might crudely term “eugenics.” ([Location 479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=479)) - Behind the Greek obsession with citizen quality, with excellence, with personal and generational biological improvement, lies the converse, a depreciation of the life of the slave, or, more generally, of the type of man who lives only to live, who is willing to survive at any cost, or who is willing to accept subservience to avoid death. To speak of superior and inferior ways of life is necessarily to deny that every form of life has dignity or meaning. But, in particular, the net effect is to deny that mere life has any worth. ([Location 484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=484)) - Note: Mere existence vs living it thriving. Those exercising Netizche’s will to power are living. Those going through the motions are just existing and thus not really living - Nietzsche begins his early essay on the Greek state by pointing out that the Greeks would have rejected as vile lies and cant our modern ideas of the dignity of human life and the dignity of labor. Labor, as the mere maintenance or preservation of mere life, has no value in and of itself, because mere life has no value. ([Location 489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=489)) - The second and related reason ideas of human breeding and human inequality make us feel uncomfortable is easier to understand and has already been mentioned: it is a radical denial of every principle on which we base our morality of egalitarianism and our democratic politics. ([Location 496](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=496)) - Define superiority in whatever way one will, and it will be clear that the individual or quality thus defined doesn’t have a random distribution across human groups. It occurs with greater frequency, often far greater frequency, in some groups than in others. ([Location 515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=515)) - Could there be a connection not only between the philosopher and nature, but also the tyrant and nature? The philosopher is a student of nature, a lover of wisdom who seeks the truth—and what is the tyrant? ([Location 543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=543)) - The great concern some, and especially Plato and Xenophon, had in arguing precisely against this accusation against philosophy, as if they thought it was more dangerous or more frequent than any other, is especially telling. Their arguments are especially bad, maybe intentionally so. ([Location 547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=547)) - This book presents an entirely new argument for the emergence both of the idea of nature and of philosophy itself, out of an awareness of biology or breeding. This idea was developed with reference specifically to the breeding of animal stocks that is likely to be the special preserve of, first, a pastoral society, and second, an aristocracy that developed out of such a society through an act of conquest. ([Location 554](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=554)) - When the idea of nature first emerged, it did so in opposition to convention or “custom.” Cows graze, wolves hunt by nature; but different tribes of men deal differently with the dead—cremation, burial, etc.—by custom or convention. It is a distinction roughly similar to our own “nature versus culture” or “nature versus nurture” or “nature versus social construct.” ([Location 570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=570)) - I draw the conclusion that primitive tribal life can be characterized as a fundamental democracy or more accurately a gyno-gerontocratic democracy, a fundamental democracy that is administered by elders and councils of elders; that it is ruled by ancestral custom or nomos, in an absolute and “totalitarian” way, ruled by tribal conventions, laws, and myths that regulate almost every aspect of life, allow no individual distinction, and ruthlessly quash any form of intellectual questioning or dissent. It is in a fundamental sense ruthlessly egalitarian, authoritarian and collectivist, even when there might be functional social distinctions. This kind of “default” mode of humanity, rule by ancestral custom or by convention, homogenizes all life and all thought. How could for the idea of nature to emerge out of such life? ([Location 586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=586)) - The observation that certain qualities, physical traits, and even behaviors are passed through the breeding of various animal stocks is the source of the realization that there exists a principle apart from tribal custom or convention, that endures through generations entirely apart from the oral transmission and social enforcement of customs, and that operates entirely apart from education or indoctrination simply. ([Location 609](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=609)) - In the emergence of the aristocratic athlete’s body and character—the two are the same—from the dark collective murk into the enduring radiance of immortal fame, Pindar sees the principle of blood, heredity, or nature fully manifested. ([Location 627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=627)) - For Plato, the tyrant and the philosopher are “twin” human types, the only true “men of nature.” And the purpose of Plato’s work, as I interpret it following Nietzsche, is to preserve at all costs the possibility, independence, and in a way the supremacy of the philosopher as a type. Plato wants to preserve nature, the principle of nature, of heredity, blood and breeding. ([Location 636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=636)) - tyranny—a mention in a court case decades later casually refers to “Socrates the sophist who you executed for being the teacher of Critias and Alcibiades who tried to put down the democracy,”[xlviii] indicating this was common knowledge among the people in the jury—these are clues that the ancient image of philosophy was quite different from our own. Plato’s task of reforming the image of philosophy was not successful in the short run, but came into its own with the emergence of Hellenistic kingship after Alexander, and exerted a strong influence long thereafter.[xlix] ([Location 680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=680)) - In this environment where the elite of the time faced danger and dissolution from all sides, Plato invented the image of the philosopher as defender of moral virtue, in other words, invented the image of the philosopher as priest. After Plato the philosopher begins to put on the mask of the priest. The philosopher came to the aristocrat and promised to reestablish his life of virtue, to bring a new pillar to a life that had none of its traditional confidence and that was in many ways “biologically spent.” The philosopher offers to reestablish virtue, but this time to reestablish moral virtue on the basis of reason. ([Location 698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=698)) - This is the reason Nietzsche says that Plato and the Socratics were taking “emergency medical measures” in the Greek world with their bizarre identification of virtue, reason and happiness, and with their moral obsessions. The philosopher was to be spiritual advisor, perhaps priest, perhaps doctor or psychologist to the new elite. In this way the status of philosophy would be secured in an alliance with at least two principal regime types of the ancient world—there was a somewhat different, though similar, role for the philosopher at the court of the new kinds of kings that would arise in the Hellenistic period. And, one might add, not only of the ancient world—in more than one way Plato’s vision was far-seeing and secured the safety of philosophy as best he could in the circumstances. ([Location 704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=704)) - there is another more sinister and dangerous reason that Nietzsche thought it was time to reveal the true meaning of “nature.” Although Plato’s reinvention of philosophy was a monumental achievement he could not have foreseen, according to Nietzsche, the coming of Christianity and thereafter of modernity. Christianity, for its own purposes, adopted much of the Platonic dogma but in doing so entirely forgot about, or entirely obscured, the original meaning of nature that was still lurking in the background of Platonic teachings so long as they were animated by a living school. Thereafter Christianity, having taken spiritual hold of Europe, but having no knowledge of the secret foundational art—the knowledge of breeding and its significance for marriage law—misbred man through the promotion of dysgenic unions, with the result being the modern “misbegotten” human that is so much the object of Nietzsche’s, and not only Nietzsche’s, scorn, the modern man, the man of democracy, socialism, feminism, the Last Man. The calamity that Nietzsche saw in this event was a universal and homogenous reestablishment of the ancient commune, the original totalitarian democracy where philosophy and genius would be made impossible, and indeed nature and life would be permanently botched. ([Location 724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=724)) - Through its demonization not only of “Nazism,” but actually of frank discussions about human nature, about group differences, about the role heritability and genetics play in human behavior and societies, the elite of our time have made such knowledge and such ideas irresistible to the young. ([Location 783](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=783)) - At the very birth, not of “political thought,” but of political philosophy, if not of philosophy itself, stands the gruesome and seductive person of the tyrant as an x  that must be somehow condemned with rhetoric, dissolved in argument, or papered over with sophistries. ([Location 903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=903)) - Ancient sources emphasize the hubris and peculiarity of the tyrant; they say nothing about the causes alleged by modern scholars. In modern words the tyrant would be a highly individualistic “egotist,” concerned with his own glory and riches, and driven by philotimia, by the love of honor. Although “false consciousness” could conceivably be argued even in the case of men like Periander and Clearchus—to the point of parody perhaps—some historians have remained truer to the ancient descriptions, and to the available historical evidence, by focusing on the motivations and methods of the tyrant himself, rather than on impersonal historical “trends.” ([Location 928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=928)) - There is no need to resort to impersonal abstractions and historical “forces”: “philotimia, the examples of Gyges and Psammetichus, and the availability of hoplite epikouroi may suffice to explain the first tyrants in Greece.”[lviii] ([Location 938](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=938)) - Other modern treatments that directly address the possible difference between modern and ancient varieties of tyranny similarly tend to focus on the specifically “scientific” character of modern tyranny, its origin in the attempt to conquer nature.[lxii] More important even than ideology in constituting modern tyrannies is the institution of the Party, that is, the permanent and aggressive mobilization of society through a one-party state; something unknown in antiquity in practice if not in theory. ([Location 965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=965)) - in the study of “tyranny” it is impossible to reduce human agency to an impersonal force or to the milieu; the study of “tyranny,” more so than any other political phenomenon perhaps, is not separable from the human actor, in this case the person or persona of the tyrant. ([Location 991](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=991)) - the ancient prejudice was instead that philosophy was somehow associated with tyranny as such—perhaps in the sense that tyrants so often seemed to have received part of their education from philosophers. Or perhaps in the sense that both seemed so free, dangerously free, of conventional moral notions and conventional piety—free to the point of criminality. This is part of what made philosophers highly suspect figures at least when they first appeared. ([Location 1008](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1008)) - studies have looked at the connection between tyranny and reason in terms of a common antagonistic relationship to the past, to tradition and convention; and a countervailing faith in the usurping power of reason to reshape man’s relationship to society and the universe.[lxviii] ([Location 1027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1027)) - Note: Reason seeks tyranny over nature in the realm of knowledge. Tyranny seeks control over man and nature politically and socially - This thesis is an attempt to show that the aristocratic regime, and aristocratic morality, is the origin of the idea of nature; that, at the point at which a historical aristocracy starts to decline, its defenders, in abstracting and radicalizing the case for aristocracy in the face of its critics, come upon the teaching of nature and the standard of nature in politics. It is precisely this teaching of nature, so corrosive of all convention and all morality, that is politically explosive, and that explains the deep connection between philosophy—the criminal study of nature outside the city and outside the myths and pieties of the regime—and tyranny—the criminal and feral regime of rule outside and above all law and all convention. ([Location 1047](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1047)) - To understand the emergence of philosophy out of the pre-philosophical world one must make an attempt to understand the prephilosophical regime as it understood itself—without the aid of philosophical or of modern notions. ([Location 1063](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1063)) - Ancestral custom—nomos—is ubiquitous and all-powerful. Therefore it will be argued that one must not confuse the prephilosophic early chieftain or king for anything other than a servant or slave of the convention and of the needs of the collective. ([Location 1097](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1097)) - this principle consists, not in the preservation of a people or a collective, but in the struggle for individual superiority, understood as a matter of the supremacy of one’s “blood,” with direct analogy to the animal world, and which is manifested through physical supremacy, vitality, and battle prowess, and in the consequent acquisition of an “undying fame.” ([Location 1111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1111)) - We may conclude, therefore, that, in all nations, which have embraced polytheism [i.e., the oldest, original and most universal religious ideas], the first ideas of religion arose not from a contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind.[lxxii] ([Location 1151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1151)) - the same section, to the same effect, that the ground of primitive religion was the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries. Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature, especially the latter, men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. ([Location 1161](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1161)) - commitment to causes or ideals—political life, that “matters to us”—requires religious belief, and that such belief is understood primally as an irrational decision or bridge spanning the fundamental chaos, abyss or meaninglessness of existence.[lxxv] ([Location 1187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1187)) - the Humean view is that the most fundamental experience of the prephilosophic or premodern mind is terror or fear, and that the religious experience that precedes conventions arises out of this matrix of fear. ([Location 1196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1196)) - For Hume a natural history of religion is possible because religion, and specifically primitive religion, though it has a root in the passions, nevertheless can be understood rationally, that is, on broadly utilitarian grounds. Action rooted in the passions may itself be “irrational,” but it can nevertheless be comprehended rationally. The examples of irrationality that Hume invokes in his essay represent a series of logical mis-steps or errors by early man who, finding himself in a dangerous, confusing world, and living in insecurity and fear for his life, makes entirely wrong but entirely plausible mistakes about the character of natural forces, his relationship to them, and the possibility of assuaging them as they become personalized in the form of gods and demons. ([Location 1219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1219)) - Nietzsche’s rejection of a rational morality is based on his rejection of a utilitarian morality; it is precisely the binding of man to arbitrary, even absurd laws, to laws which serve no particular benefit, that is the character of morality. Religion, premodern polytheism then, cannot emerge out of a utilitarian morality as in the model of Hume. Peoples themselves are the result of the founding acts of creative prophets; much as in Rousseau, Nietzsche believes such prophets or founders—legislators in the highest sense—are the origin therefore of mores and conventions by which peoples live. In this task the founder uses religion, but the religious experience of such founders, and by extension religious experience in general, is therefore not reducible to calculation of benefit or of self-interest. And even in cases where a primitive tribal morality emerges out of the necessities of daily life, it’s not possible to reduce this only to the satisfaction of rational material desires or needs because man is often more motivated instead by pride, by the need for distinction, by the need for superiority over neighbors, by the need to subsume individual to group, and often to do so for entirely irrational reasons that merely reaffirm morality for the sake of morality. ([Location 1245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1245)) - the desire for glory is fundamentally different from the desire for comfort. They therefore misunderstand the prephilosophic mind, believing it to be fundamentally motivated by self-interest, benefit, calculation, comfort, tit-for-tat reciprocity. ([Location 1269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1269)) - prior to the discovery of nature “no fundamental distinction was made between customs which are always and everywhere the same and customs or ways which differ from tribe to tribe.” ([Location 1286](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1286)) - Note: No distinction between instinct and developed custom, nature and nurture. It’s all intrinsically part of life - There was also another sense and another form in which the polis regarded itself as an ideal whole, and that is in its nomos, a word used to embrace the laws and with them the constitution. Nomos is the higher objective power, supreme over all individual existence or will, not satisfied merely to protect a citizen in return for taxes and military service, as in modern times, but aspiring to be the very soul of the whole polis. Law and the constitution are hymned in the most sublime phrases as the invention and gift of the gods, as the city’s personality, as the guardians and preservers of all virtue. They are the “rulers of the cities,” and Demaratus the Spartan seeks to explain to Xerxes that his people fear King Law (despotes nomos) more than the Persians fear their Great King. The officials in particular are, as Plato puts it, to be the slaves of the law. The lawgiver therefore appeared as a superhuman being, and the glory of Lycurgus, Solon, Zaleucus and Charondas sheds a reflected light on much later men, so that for instance, as late as about 400 BC the Syracusan law refomer Diocles received heroic honors and even a temple after his death (Diodorus 13.35).[lxxxiv] ([Location 1313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1313)) - Above all, nomos must not pander to the transitory interests and caprices of the individual or of those who happen to be in the majority. It was strongly felt, at least in theory, that old laws should be retained; indeed, customs and manners which were even older than laws, and had perhaps been in force from the very foundation of the city, were recognized as having a vigor of which the laws were only the outward expression. And even inadequate laws, as long as they were strictly observed, seemed a better guarantee of stability than change would be. Alcibiades said as much in the conclusion of his great speech in favor of the expedition to Sicily. In certain states boys had to learn the laws by heart, set to a tune or cadence, not just to fix them in the memory but to ensure that they became unalterable. (The Greek word nomos has the double meaning of law and melody.)[lxxxv] ([Location 1331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1331)) - nomos is supreme because it is ancestral; and, as Strauss adds, it is “our own” because it belongs to “our ancestors.” ([Location 1370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1370)) - “Our” way is the right way because it is both old and “our own,” or because it is both “home-bred and prescriptive.” Just as “old and one’s own” was originally identical with right or good, so “new and strange” originally stood for bad. The notion connection “old” and “one’s own” is “ancestral.” Prephilosophic life is characterized by the primeval identification of the good with the ancestral.[lxxxvii] ([Location 1374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1374)) - the ancestral is accepted as the source of the right, or is accepted as authoritative and superior to us, because it is identified with the gods: the ancestral customs are superior and authoritative because at some point in the most remote antiquity they were established by gods, the sons of gods, or pupils of gods.[lxxxviii] ([Location 1379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1379)) - it is not at all clear, from what has just been said, how there can ever be an “out” from a situation in which ancestral nomos rules with such ubiquitous and undisputed power. There are therefore intermediary steps that are necessary for the very emergence of the idea of nature, let alone for the emergence of philosophers. ([Location 1395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1395)) - No human being is so hide-bound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage; in no state of society consequently is progress so slow and difficult. The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron. What they did is the pattern of right, the unwritten law to which he yields a blind unquestioning obedience. The least possible scope is thus afforded to superior talent to change old customs for the better. The ablest man is dragged down by the weakest and dullest, who necessarily sets the standard, since he cannot rise, while the other can fall. The surface of such a society presents a uniform dead level, so far as it is humanly possible to reduce the natural inequalities, the immeasurable real differences of inborn capacity and temper, to a false superficial appearance of equality. ([Location 1445](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1445)) - Frazer adds that the character of this original democracy is a despotism more absolute than what we can imagine under any modern state: “For after all there is more liberty in the best sense—liberty to think our own thoughts and to fashion our own destinies—under the most absolute despotism, the most grinding tyranny, than under the apparent freedom of savage life, where the individual’s lot is cast from the cradle to the grave in the iron mould of hereditary custom.”[xcvi] ([Location 1460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1460)) - Frazer adds that it is precisely these “counter-virtues” so to speak, of deceitfulness, knavery, wiliness that are most needful in a condition where tradition and custom weigh down heavily on the human mind; indeed, the mind itself is only liberated through such “immorality”: ([Location 1481](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1481)) - the sorcerer who sincerely believes in his own extravagant pretensions is in far greater peril and is much more likely to be cut short in his career than the deliberate impostor. The honest wizard always expects that his charms and incantations will produce their supposed effect; and when they fail, not only really, as they always do, but conspicuously and disastrously, as they often do, he is taken aback: he is not, like his knavish colleague, ready with a plausible excuse to account for the failure, and before he can find one he may be knocked on the head by his disappointed and angry employers.[xcviii] ([Location 1488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1488)) - The general result is that at this stage of social evolution the supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous character…. Once these elevating influences [of the magician/man of intelligence] have begun to operate—and they cannot be for ever suppressed—the progress of civilisation becomes comparatively rapid. The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry through changes in a single lifetime which previously many generations might not have sufficed to effect…Even the whims and caprices of a tyrant may be of service in breaking the chain of custom which lies so heavy on the savage. And as soon as the tribe ceases to be swayed by the timid and divided counsels of the elders, and yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind, it becomes formidable to its neighbours and enters on a career of aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is often highly favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress. For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man.[xcix] ([Location 1500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1500)) - Note: Wow, the Machiavellian man is what DRIVES society out of the pre historical state, ruled by custom and tradition. He must be intelligent and WILLFULLY deceitful, and it is through his will alone that the wheels of change begin to turn for his tribe after generations of tradition fixed in stone - the early despot, inseparable from the figure of the early magician, is perhaps one of the only means of breaking with the absolute totality of nomos and tradition over every aspect of life and thought: and that the rival to the rule of Custom is the sorcerer’s or the king’s intelligence, which first may be expressed only through its manipulations of popular belief in magic, magic meaning manipulation of “natural” forces for profit. ([Location 1514](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1514)) - In all these cases the manipulation of natural powers, in particular the belief that the chief may control the vital powers of regeneration and rebirth, having of course to do with crops and the condition of livestock, begins slowly to trump the absolute rule of Custom or nomos. ([Location 1550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1550)) - In a humorous analogy or prefiguration of the power of the philosopher—a humorous analogy that we should certainly not take too far—the sorcerer gains power over the tribe and manages to escape the shackles of convention by convincing his fellow men that he understands and can control “the things in heaven and under the earth.” ([Location 1552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1552)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Slowly, however, the magician-chief or –king begins to assume an office that is more secure and that we can recognize historically in the great Oriental despotisms: slowly, that is, the concept of divine kingship begins to form, or the idea that the king is an incarnate god—of ([Location 1555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1555)) - the religious function of the king, or the unity of priestly and kingly offices, which one would maybe otherwise casually assume to come from the very earliest stages of superstition, are in fact relatively “late” developments of relatively civilized and complex societies. Several stages of development are necessary between the primitive “rule by divine law” or “absolute authority of the ancestral” to put it in Rousseau’s and Strauss’ words respectively, and the later institution of dual priestly-kingly rule. ([Location 1563](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1563)) - The king of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, bears the title of Samorin or Samory. He “pretends to be of a higher rank than the Brahmans, and to be inferior only to the invisible gods; a pretention that was acknowledged by his subjects, but which is held as absurd and abominable by the Brahmans, by whom he is only treated as a Sudra.” Formerly the Samorin had to cut his throat in public at the end of a twelve years’ reign… There are some grounds for believing that the reign of many ancient Greek kings was limited to eight years, or at least that at the end of every period of eight years a new consecration, a fresh outpouring of the divine grace, was regarded as necessary in order to enable them to discharge their civil and religious duties. Thus it was a rule of the Spartan constitution that every eighth year the ephors should choose a clear and moonless night and sitting down observe the sky in silence. If during their vigil they saw a meteor or shooting star, they inferred that the king had sinned against the deity, and they suspended him from his functions until the Delphic or Olympic oracle should reinstate him in them. ([Location 1579](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1579)) - Note: The origin of term limits in presidencies. The ruler has “lost the favor of the gods” and must be scapegoated so that the tribe can find a new ruler who is in the gods’ favor - One could almost observe a general rule where the further the kingly office moves away from cultic and religious trappings, the more actual power he has and vice versa. ([Location 1598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1598)) - Philosophy, as Strauss notes, can only be born once the concept of nature appears. But it appears that the concept of nature itself can only appear after the rather late institutions of sacral and divine kingship exist, indeed after several other conditions are satisfied; and that, indeed, nature—the “source” simultaneously of both philosophy and tyranny, as argued in this thesis—really appears not as a rational concept, or by rational analogy to abstractions, but rather as a manifestation or, one could go so far as to say, a revelation. Its appearance, it must be emphasized, is late, it is rare, and only follows the emergence of a certain kind of early kingship and indeed the emergence of a certain kind of aristocracy that, unlike the early sacral king, manages to free itself entirely from the absolute “rule of the ancestral.” ([Location 1609](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1609)) - Note: When freed from the ancestral, the aristocracy is able to reason about its virtues and values in the abstract. “Rational” justifications for irrational traditions form - a principle of rule, or way of life, different from that of primitive nomos, or the “fundamental democracy” briefly described in the previous chapter, can likely only develop when a native population is conquered and subdued by a foreign elite. ([Location 1621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1621)) - for philosophy to be practiced and for the idea of nature to appear, one must be able to see “the things not made by man” as superior and worthy of investigation in the first place. ([Location 1650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1650)) - the imposition of an aristocratic caste on top of a sedentary population is a crucial prerequisite for the development of the intellect or of science, ([Location 1692](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1692)) - The Tuzi, headed by the Mwami (king) are the ruling aristocracy. They specialize in warfare and administration, despise manual labor and endeavor to spend as much of their lives in conspicuous leisure as possible. ([Location 1711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1711)) - Note: The aristocracy traditionally specialized in management and conquest. Building systems and gaining spoils. Analogy for business - to be successful you need to be able to manage and to create/build (which is conquering a market) - The mentality here consists in a lack of equality to a lower class of people, who are felt to be not merely alien ethnically, but who are seen as radically different in way of life, in particular as tied to the earth and to the preservation of mere life, to servile domesticity, in a way that the aristocrat is not. ([Location 1744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1744)) - Not merely the love of war and adventure, but the rejection of work, of home-keeping domesticity, the raising of children, the rejection of the whole world of preservation and mere life around which the primitive nomos is oriented. All later aristocracies, indeed, even if they did not go to the extreme of valuing pillage and piracy, maintained an antagonistic attitude to the peasant, the serf, the tiller of the soil and the preservation of mere life. ([Location 1780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1780)) - The contempt for settled life “in the valleys” and the city, accompanied by a sense that the man who sojourns in the wild outside the bounds of the city by himself communes, not only with sacred powers, but specifically with a purifying, liberating, revitalizing primal force reappears in Greek myth and in Greek aristocratic attitude in several characteristic ways. ([Location 1839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1839)) - The idea of breeding is then possibly the one great, decisive way that a principle different from that inherent in the “fundamental democracy” of primitive society develops in the first place. The principle behind the primitive “fundamental democracy” is rather one of taming. Where the early “democracy” is based on the leveling of all human differences under the absolute law of the ancestral, where the question is one of the preservation of the community, and therefore law or regime is synonymous with the taming of human nature, by contrast within aristocratic culture of pastoral origin, a principle different from the preservation of mere life begins to take shape concretely in the attempt to breed different human types and “improve” the stock, or more precisely, to breed one perfect human specimen. ([Location 1879](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1879)) - Tags: [[blue]] - distinction… If their native state sinks into the sloth of prolonged peace and repose, many of its noble youths voluntarily seek those tribes which are waging some war, both because inaction is odious to their race, and because they win renown more readily in the midst of peril, and cannot maintain a numerous following except by violence and war. ([Location 1959](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=1959)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The polis—what Nietzsche calls “the aristocratic commonwealth” of breeding—is unique because of how it was able to accommodate and elevate what has been in this chapter called the “aristocratic” or “pastoral” way of life within the bounds of static, settled life; it represents a compromise between a “lower” and a “higher” that are of alien origin to each other. But in this compromise or fusion it is decidedly the “aristocratic” element that is determinative and constitutive of the new order. And it is this element of absolute unmooring from the settled, democratic rule of the ancestral customs that, when the actual aristocracies are in political and social decline in the late Archaic age, is radicalized, recovered, refined, and made abstract, not only by the philosophical way of life and its discovery of nature, but by the way of life of the tyrant. ([Location 2124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2124)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Heroic warrior kings together with their patron goddess make the men forget the ancestral in favor of the excitement of battle abroad and the prospect of future glory. ([Location 2208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2208)) - Tags: [[blue]] - nature, as a standard different from and ultimately antagonistic to the “fundamental democracy” of “rule by the ancestral,” seems to erupt into consciousness or to manifest itself first of all as animal power and as animal hierarchy. And it is with reference to this and similar phenomena that early aristocracy understands itself and justifies itself. ([Location 2248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2248)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In rams and asses and horses, Cyrnus, we seek the thoroughbred, and a man is concerned therein to get him offspring of good stock; yet in marriage a noble man thinketh not twice of wedding the bad daughter of a bad sire if the father give him many possessions, nor doth a woman disdain the bed of a bad man if he be wealthy, but is fain rather to be rich than to be good. For ’tis possessions they prize; and a noble man weddeth of bad stock and a bad man of noble; race is confounded of riches. In like manner, son of Polypaus, marvel thou not that the race of thy townsmen is made obscure;[clxv] ’tis because the noble are mixed with the bad. ([Location 2255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2255)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the period of decline of an aristocratic order such challenges become more frequent, and more frequently successful, the power of the aristocrats is diminished and sometimes erased in bloody revolutions, and, ideologically, the legitimacy and right to rule of the aristocrats is questioned or dismissed. In defense of the legitimate claims of aristocracy to rule appear poets, and later intellectuals, who invoke the idea of nature. ([Location 2305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2305)) - Tags: [[blue]] - they share the argument that the aristocracy rules because it is physically, intellectually, and spiritually supreme, that such virtue or arete cannot be taught, and that it is a matter of blood, of birth and of nature. ([Location 2310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2310)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Agamemnon has recourse to nomos and to ancestral, i.e., divine right; but Achilles invokes the superior right of greater virtue and excellence, of nature, which is also inborn, but clearly different than genealogy as such. ([Location 2330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2330)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Arete, virtue, excellence, is what undergirds an aristocracy’s claim to rule, and excellence is defined first most concretely as prowess in battle and ability to give good political counsel, or to put it in Greek traditional language, andreia (manliness, bravery) and phronesis (prudence, practical wisdom). ([Location 2347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2347)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Two elements are required for arête to come about: nature or bloodline being the first, most important, and most indispensible; but second, also, training. It must not be forgotten that, although nature first appears as a principle “opposed” to convention or tradition, early aristocrats are not intellectualized philosophers, nor are they tyrants, but are themselves a historically concrete people or tribe, and therefore themselves live by their own tradition and nomos. Indeed, part of aristocracy’s claim to rule is that its members are the most faithful preservers of ancient customs, genealogies, esoteric religious knowledge, and so on.[clxx] ([Location 2351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2351)) - Tags: [[blue]] - aristocratic traditions are distinguished from the traditions of the commons or of a primitive egalitarian tribe by the fact that these traditions consist of a breeding and training regime, to be understood in both cases quite literally. The purpose of this regime of breeding and training is the production of a specimen that biologically embodies arête, excellence, and possesses contempt for death as well as for mere life. Whereas, by contrast, the nomos of the subject population, and of all “default” populations whatsoever, is entirely directed to the preservation of mere life. ([Location 2361](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2361)) - Tags: [[blue]] - it was a uniquely precious moment when the God-intoxicated but human world of Greece saw the height of divinity in the human body and soul raised to a perfection high above earthly powers, and when in those gods in human shape the effort of man to copy that divine model through which artists had realized the law of perfection, unattainable but imperious, found its purpose and its happiness.[clxxiii] ([Location 2406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2406)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Great danger does not take hold of a coward. Since all men are compelled to die, why should anyone sit stewing an inglorious old age in the darkness, with no share of any fine deeds? As for me, on this contest [85] I will take my stand. May you grant a welcome achievement.” ([Location 2492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2492)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A victor throughout the rest of his life enjoys honeyed calm, so far as contests can bestow it. ([Location 2498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2498)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The rest of the passage, referring to Pelops’ desire to find such a marriage only as part of his search for danger and glory, in which utter contempt for mere life is expressed as a matter of course, is entirely in keeping with the fundamentally aristocratic meaning of nature. That is, this desire for glory comes upon him at the moment of the very blossoming and emergence of his phue, his body or his nature. ([Location 2503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2503)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In both cases a great hero embarks on an adventure of danger and death, showing contempt for mere life[clxxxvii] and a desire to win a great renown on the occasion of the blooming of his own phua. ([Location 2583](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2583)) - Tags: [[blue]] - full meaning of phua, body, nature. It is concrete, material, biological body; and it is much more. In both cases it seems to have to do with the emergence of a body in supreme condition into the enduring radiance of fame—of being—and with the perpetuation of a divine bloodline. ([Location 2590](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2590)) - Tags: [[blue]] - if we are to accept this conventional translation even temporarily, we must add that this is a beauty pregnant with violent power and energy, “beauty as power,” something akin to Michelangelo’s Moses. Strepsiades is said to be marvelous or terrible in his strength (sthenos)—the word used is striking: ekpaglos, a form of “outstanding” that carries connotations of physical violence and terrible power.[clxxxix] Strepsiades is said to be idein morphaeis, shapely to look at, well-formed, with the same adjective used of sculpted statues. The reference to phue is entirely in this context, and “body” must be understood only in this context and this condition. ([Location 2615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2615)) - Tags: [[blue]] - that phua literally carries some compulsory or irresistible power that orients and propels them to deeds of areta. ([Location 2633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2633)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Mortals—not men, andres—but mortals, anthropoi, people, are forgetful of great deeds. They live in darkness, forgetting, for they themselves are dim and dark, ignorant, or envious. Their envy and ignorance covers up reality. They cover up reality under a stream of falsehoods and words. Real men, andres, have being, or have more being. They have reverence for their being, or body, and listen to its vehement calling—they can’t help but listen, or obey in this case. ([Location 2636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2636)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nature is body and blood and is therefore hereditary. Knowledge of breeding and heredity is, again, to be expected among a pastoral or originally pastoral people who have long experience with livestock breeds. ([Location 2651](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2651)) - Tags: [[blue]] - ancient excellence yields strength in alternate generations of men; the dark fields do not give fruit continuously, [40] nor are trees accustomed to bear an equal wealth of fragrant flowers in every circling year, but in alternation. ([Location 2688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2688)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One has authority, one commands, one doesn’t need to give reasons; reasons, justifications, rationalizations—these are for plebeians and the envious. ([Location 2708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2708)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What is inborn, nature, is said to give a “sign to be seen,” or a visible mark. It is in overt action that nature is revealed. The word here used is tekmar, and it is of special significance: it refers to a concrete, manifest visible mark or sign, evidence that impresses itself directly on the perception in action or image, not something explained in logos or speech or logically deduced. ([Location 2725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2725)) - Tags: [[blue]] - noos is not necessarily intellectual power but may be translated as intent, or intentionality, the mind as a “purpose.” Thus in great striving or grand intent on one hand, and in nature or body on the other, men are in some sense like the immortals. ([Location 2750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2750)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Phusis is not a reference then merely to inborn character, specific orientation in the abstract, inclination and so on—though it is that as well: but crucially, because most alien to our understanding—there is a question here of intensity. Some beings are more than others; they have more being, more nature. Phusis, the truth or the knowledge of a being, is not “discovered” by deduction, but only manifests itself in action if the being in question should have enough phusis. The question here is not moral, or not necessarily just moral, but one having to do with the meaning of nature itself, of what nature or truth is. It is not just a question of beings having “different natures” or inclinations, but more fundamentally, of having “enough nature,” enough intensity that the truth of the being may become differentiated from the fundamental and indistinct darkness. ([Location 2762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2762)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It has been said about this passage, “The final test is the true test. Success may be slow in coming, but when it comes it reveals the man.”[cxcix] This, again, should not be interpreted merely as a moral, let alone as a rhetorical, claim. The meaning should be taken quite literally: Psaumis, like Erginos, have finally shown who they are: phue, phusis, body only becomes apparent, real, only possesses being, and bloodline is only proven at the hour of its triumph in contest, during the exhibition of a great feat of excellence, of great physical strength, of victory in battle, of violent victory over an opponent, or over a challenge as in the case of Pelops or Jason. It is in this that truth, being, reality, are known, literally become apparent at all. ([Location 2780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2780)) - Tags: [[blue]] - at Odyssey 24.252, Homer’s Odysseus, meeting his father Laertes who is working as a gardener, remarks that, although unkempt, uncared for, poor, malnourished, the old man “does not stand conspicuous to the sight as in any way a slave in form or greatness” [oude ti toi douleion epiprepei eisorasthai eidos kai megethos] but rather has the true bearing of a king. He recognizes his father’s nature—it is revealed to the eye despite all outward and conventional signs to the contrary—just like Amphiaraus the prophet sees the “genuine spirit” [gennaion lema] of the fathers stand out in the sons “by nature,” or literally, “by body,” by stature and bearing [phuai]. One might also add, in the case of Odyssey, the parallel episode, both comic and powerful, and relevant to our case, when Odysseus is shipwrecked on the island Phaeakia. He has been stripped of literally everything, including his clothes. The princess Nausicaa is on the beach with her consorts engaged in the age-old renewal and purification ritual of washing and airing out clothes. Odysseus boldly approaches her completely naked; the servants are frightened and run, but he manages, naked and stripped of every outward mark of power and wealth, to reconstruct his kingly status through the power of aristocratic speech and of his bearing.[cc] The true measure of the man, his nature, is in all these cases revealed: heredity and blood become apparent in body. Reduced to mere body, to utter destitution, a shipwreck, or, in the case of his father Laertes, to an unkempt tiller of the soil, the blood of a king, and the fact of heredity—the phusis, nature, the truth about a being—reveals itself precisely in this reduction to bare biology. ([Location 2797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2797)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Where law and teaching can suffice for the mass of men with less nature or less reality—it has its place in ensuring the public peace and the humble dignity of the commons—convention can’t explain the highest achievements, highest areta or highest arts, for it has little or no part in the ultimate cause of these. Nomos or convention homogenizes and equalizes, this is its purpose: if behavior at its peak, however, is primarily explained by inheritance and blood, this necessarily decreases not only the explanatory power of nomos regarding human behavior and variety, but its authority and dignity. ([Location 2829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2829)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If a man has devoted his whole spirit to excellence, sparing neither expense nor toils, it is right to grant the boast of manliness to those who achieve excellence, with an ungrudging [45] mind. For it is an easy gift for a wise man to speak words of praise in recompense for labors of all kinds and thus to promote the common good. Different wages for different deeds are sweet to men, to the shepherd and the ploughman and the bird-trapper, and the man whom the sea nourishes. Every man is intent upon keeping persistent famine from his belly. [50] But he who wins rich renown in the games or in war receives the highest gain: to be well spoken of by his fellow-citizens and by strangers, the choicest bloom of speech.[ccii] ([Location 2836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2836)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The purpose of nomos is to “keep persistent famine from the belly”—preservation of mere life. When nomos or convention outsteps this or pretends to, when it is forgotten that “he who wins rich renown in the games or in war” belongs to a different reality and owes his origins to a different principle, then nomos becomes something else, it becomes a systematic and perverse covering-up of nature, party to the forgetfulness of nature and the hierarchy between man and man that exists in nature. The highest type of man is the product of a breeding program, and not of an educational program of nomos.  The boast of manliness, andreia, is alone granted to such a man; other males are not men, andres, but mere anthropoi, indistinct beings with anthropoid form.[cciii] This man is driven by the impetus of his blood with such vehemence that all the common laws, all of nomos, would for him be a Procrustes’ bed: it is best for such a man to follow the inclinations of his nature and not nomos. The product of his action is areta, loosely translated as virtue or excellence. ([Location 2842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2842)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Men pursuing high achievement should strive according to nature [marnasthai phuai] and not be misled or “educated” by convention or teaching. The “standard” high achievement for a man is to possess areta—and let us remember that “virtue” here refers ultimately to the ability to be a good leader in war, namely to possess andreia and phronesis, battle prowess and ability to give good war counsel: “strength manifests itself in action, and intelligence in counsels.” ([Location 2861](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2861)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A man with inborn [sungenes] glory has great weight; but he who has only learned is a man in darkness, breathing changeful purposes, never taking an unwavering step, but trying his hand at countless forms of excellence [areta] with his ineffectual thought.[ccvi] ([Location 2876](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2876)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Areta, excellence, or virtue, is the matter at hand here. The prerequisite is that it must be inborn, or rather, that an orientation and ability for areta is inborn; it is not learned. ([Location 2881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2881)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The men who learn only, who seek didaktais aretais, “learned excellences,” are men in darkness and in silence. Men who have not just a different nature, but who have sufficient nature, who have more nature, more reality, are revealed, become apparent or emerge to the sight of the seer as if from a primordial and undifferentiated swamp or morass. This is the world of nomos, the world of the many—it should be clear from Pindar’s depreciation of conventional learning or training (“those who have only learned,” “learned excellence”) that by corollary nomos itself, whatever utilitarian value it may have in maintaining an illusion of common good or common peace, has no value when it comes to the most important thing, virtue itself. For nomos stands or falls by teaching, conventional training, inculcation. But it cannot teach virtue, the arts of leadership, physical strength and daring, or wisdom. Indeed, convention likely has a negative value insofar as it is an expression of collective ignorance and forgetfulness, not privy to the light of truth: this last only emerges as in a flash through phusis, body, blood, biological breeding made apparent through great action. ([Location 2892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2892)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Chiron is the teacher of heroes for a reason; he is the ultimate trainer or cultivator or “sharpener” of inner breeding and nature. This training can only take place outside the city—this is not education by convention or by the city. ([Location 2944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2944)) - Tags: [[blue]] - You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man. This has been figuratively taught to princes by ancient writers, who describe how Achilles and many other princes of old were given to the Centaur Chiron to nurse, who brought them up in his discipline; which means solely that, as they had for a teacher one who was half beast and half man, so it is necessary for a prince to know how to make use of both natures, and that one without the other is not durable.[ccxiv] ([Location 2947](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2947)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It could be said that Pindar, like Machiavelli, even goes so far as to explain which animal natures a man of nature must raise up from within himself to succeed. It is most interesting that Machiavelli continues above, A prince, therefore, being compelled knowingly to adopt the beast, ought to choose the fox and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves. Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves. Those who rely simply on the lion do not understand what they are about. Therefore a wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer. [ccxv] ([Location 2964](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2964)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This concerns a race of leaders who have bred both the lion and the fox—war-spirit and wisdom, andreia and phronesis—within themselves and for their offspring. Breeding and education to nature is then literally a re-wilding, an animalization, a beastliness, a breeding of beastly character. This by corollary is and must be an escape from nomos, the conventions of the city and the many, from pious and mediocre platitudes and moralisms, from the conventions of peace. Nature, the truth about the world and about man, erupts into being, into radiance, or the light of knowledge, from the obscurity of the primordial darkness and forgetfulness in which mortal anthropoi are doomed to live. The coming-about of such a nature, or body, is by physical breeding, and its training is a re-wilding, carried out beyond the walls of the city and of convention. ([Location 2988](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2988)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For Pindar, whatever part human envy, the many, and convention has in covering up the truth and suppressing or distorting nature—whether through active suppression, through miseducation, or by some other means—nature is always by far the stronger part, and, unlike Plato, who is in so many other things his student, Pindar seems to remain confident that the wild and overweening nature of his aristocrats will never fail to express itself and emerge in great and violent deeds. ([Location 2998](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=2998)) - Tags: [[blue]] - They call themselves “the truthful,” above all the Greek nobility…The word developed for this characteristic, ἐσθλος [esthlos: fine, noble], indicates, according to its root meaning, a man who is, who possesses reality, who really exists, who is true. Then, with a subjective transformation, it indicates the true man as the truthful man. In this phase of conceptual transformation it becomes the slogan and catch phrase for the nobility, and its sense shifts entirely over to mean “aristocratic,” to mark a distinction from the lying common man, as Theognis takes and presents him…[ccxvii] ([Location 3011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3011)) - Tags: [[blue]] - still.” He maintains the older understanding of “noble” that Nietzsche mentions—the noble, the esthloi, are simply those that have more being, more reality, more vehemence, who emerge from the obscure darkness of mortal men into the radiance of eternal fame through great deeds of areta. They are in religious awe—aideomai is a verb often used with reference to divine or religious objects and totems—of their own inner violence or daring and can’t resist its call. ([Location 3080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3080)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Let us summarize for a moment Pindar’s thoughts on wisdom and knowledge, and the relationship of these to nature and convention. While Pindar may be somewhat vague and mysterious about the way in which “the wise man knows many things by his nature,” as opposed to those who have merely learned, who live in darkness and produce deafening, obscuring chatter, nevertheless a few obvious observations relevant to my main argument can now be made: Wisdom, like the other true virtues or areta, can’t be taught, but is a matter of the blood. The wise man—and later, by extension, the philosopher—is not taught or nurtured so much as he must be bred; at most he is a lucky accident. His education, insofar as it is at all possible, takes place “outside the city,” whether under the tutelage of a god who reveals to the philosopher (or the wise man) his mission and his “inborn arts,”  or under the tutelage of a being like Cheiron, who is half-man half-beast and who Apollo himself must consult on matters of nature and breeding.[ccxxxv] This education in other words must consist, again, of a “de-nomofication,” a de-civilization and “rewilding.” To be frank, of a barbarization, at least as seen from the point of view that identifies civilization with domesticity.[ccxxxvi] By contrast in this process nomos, convention, and its representatives as embodied in those who have learned, if it does have any purpose, it is to thwart the growth and to cover up genuine insight into nature—knowledge as the result of the “hunt” for “prey”—and its transmission, and to replace it with an entirely sham and shadow “knowledge,” with cant that only has the purpose of the self-preservation of the many. Finally, the object of investigation of the philosopher—nature, phusis, by which philosophy itself stands or falls—is itself at its origin only apparent as blood. That is, it emerges from the ubiquity and homogeneity and darkness of convention, becomes apparent to the perception of the wise man as a fact of biological breeding. In this it has rather the character of a revelation or a manifestation to the immediate perception, rather than a discovery by logical deduction. Nature is made manifest to the seer and poet through the observation of botanical or animal life, and through the persistence of inherited qualities across generations. ([Location 3175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3175)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One has then to speculate that Pindar is claiming this is a new type of ruler who unites all the separate traditional virtues that the aristocracy bred for—andreia, phronesis, and now, in unprecedented way, sophia[ccxlvi]—into one man. We might call this a man of genius. One ruler who, one might say, is a fortuitous and fortunate “accident” of the breeding regime, who stands in vigilant watch over the periphery and is ready to defend it with energetic action as the “strength of the city.” ([Location 3291](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3291)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The production—the breeding—and training or protection of this biological specimen—the production of genius—is the original and fundamental function of political philosophy on one hand, and of tyranny on the other. ([Location 3330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3330)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Philosophy and tyranny are means of carving out, within the life of the city, “game preserves” for the preservation of nature: the ancient aristocratic breeding project now unbound from the identity of any historical class or tribe and made abstract, is preserved by political philosophy as a kind of fossil. ([Location 3334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3334)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This view of political philosophy and its relationship to rhetoric will no doubt be familiar to the reader: it is almost a commonplace, in the wake of the revival of classical political philosophy by Leo Strauss and by his school, that political philosophy in its beginnings is not just the philosophical study of politics, but also philosophy itself become political. That is, political philosophy is philosophy aware of its position in the city and therefore aware of the dangers it faces—aware of its need for self-preservation. The drive for self-preservation on the part of philosophers and their friends was the result of persistent persecution. ([Location 3348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3348)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Not that philosophy teaches ineffectual passive nihilism and anomie then, but that it is supremely dangerous because it makes young men lawless and violent, and possibly antidemocratic and tyrannical: this seems to have been the concern about philosophy. Camille Paglia rightly refers to the episode from Plutarch’s life of Alcibiades, where the old conservative men are absolutely scandalized not only by Alcibiades’ open lasciviousness and promiscuity, but by his putting Eros with a thunderbolt on his shield; and Alcibiades—very possibly the real-life model for Callicles—was hardly a man of anomie and aimlessness in life, but a danger because he threatened to set up a tyranny in Athens again. And other of Socrates’ students of course ended up doing just that. ([Location 3430](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3430)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The reader will be reminded in Callicles’ speech immediately of the numerous parallels to the words and ideas of Pindar.[cclxi] A man—not anthropos, but aner, a word pregnant with meaning—with “enough nature” [hikanen phusin][cclxii] arises in revolt out of the primordial and constraining and homogenized darkness of nomos to manifest [anephane] himself as a master: in this event shines out the right by nature, shines out [exelampse] the truth as opposed to the lies of the many. ([Location 3510](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3510)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In his argument with Socrates, Gorgias failed because he was ashamed to admit that he cannot teach justice. Polus then failed because he was ashamed to say that suffering wrong is more shameful than doing it. In other words, Socrates’ opponents keep failing because of their shame [aiskhune], a judgment in which Socrates and Callicles agree, and to which Gorgias and Polus, who are present, do not object. Shame, indeed, will turn out to be crucial to understanding the rhetorical structure of the Gorgias. ([Location 3583](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3583)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Callicles reaches the dramatic and radical conclusion that the right by nature only shines out when convention is suppressed and violently broken. According to Callicles, nature is systematically hidden by convention.[cclxix] It is covered up by the somehow related forces of nomos, demos, and shame [aiskhune]. ([Location 3629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3629)) - Tags: [[blue]] - when Callicles describes the way the superior man escapes enslavement from nomos and becomes tyrant or despot[cclxx] with the same word, diaphugon, he never mentions anything about escaping physical punishment. What then does the superior man escape? He escapes our “enslaving speaking” [katadoulometha legontes, 484a]. Just as earlier not lack of knowledge, but lack of daring, stood in the way of the manifestness of nature or truth, so now not lack of physical power or knowledge, but lack of “a sufficient nature” [484a] stands in the way of the shining out of the just by nature—the superior man becoming a despot. This is Callicles’ surprising and radical conclusion: nomos controls not by physical power, but by a kind of speaking or “education.”[cclxxi] ([Location 3651](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3651)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Callicles is in fact a philosopher who has discovered that the radical philosophic insight must consist in a rejection of the anachoretic and private philosophical life. He is not the voice of the city or the political community, less still merely of a gentleman, an “Attic Junker.” He is the voice of pre-Socratic philosophy become political. ([Location 3777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3777)) - Tags: [[blue]] - According to Callicles one may restate the relationship between philosophy and the erromenesteros in this way: the distinction between nature and convention is inextricably tied to the distinction between superior and inferior human natures. Convention only originates and consists in the common decisions of the inferior to protect themselves from the superior, and convention or myth and false speech is the only element that covers up nature and truth. It is the superior human specimens or the erromenesteroi who have the unique access to the distinction between nature and convention, and they only have this access in the best circumstances; they are ever in danger of being corrupted, enslaved, smothered by nomos. ([Location 3806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3806)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It is only rhetoric or tyranny won through the art of rhetoric that can provide the means to liberation and defense for philosophers: philosophers merely practicing philosophy are thereby committing suicide, and the suicide of philosophy at the hands of the many or of convention is the covering-up of truth, quite literally. Philosophers must become rhetoricians and tyrants; this itself is, in a convoluted way, “philosophical activity.” ([Location 3846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3846)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Socrates doesn’t just believe in the power of words, but also of force. It was Socrates, not Callicles or Polus, who reminded both that the true power in the cities lies with he who holds a hidden dagger. [469d] ([Location 3864](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=3864)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Callicles had it all wrong in his model of liberation—conformity and literally homogeneity,[cccii] not revolt, is the means to power, particularly when one seeks power through public speaking in a democratic regime. Callicles will have to praise and blame the same things as the regime does [510c]—exactly the same words Callicles used twice in regard to how the convention establishes itself and enslaves the souls of the superior. [483c, 492b] He will have to accustom himself out of his youth [ek neou, 510d] to the ruler or the valuations of the regime, just as in Callicles’ account the superior are taken from their youth [ek neon, 483e] like lions and formed to be in accord with the valuations of the nomos. With no knowledge of what is actually noble, the man who seeks the rule that is a necessary prerequisite to Callicles’ best life or to what is just by nature, will have to conform to the conventional notions of the noble: and if these are not in fact noble by nature, then the superior man will corrupt himself in the process. [511a] Worse still, the demos, the regime on which orators depend and which, as we have seen, is for Callicles intimately related to the idea of nomos, [482e] will ultimately destroy the superior men it uses or who cater to it. [519a-b, 520b, etc.] ([Location 4204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4204)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The way to the supremacy and the safety of philosophy—the two are the same, it is admitted in the Gorgias—is not to openly reject convention, but slowly to insinuate oneself as its ally and reform it from within. The way of the future would no longer be rabid and absolute anti-conventionalism, but the reform of convention itself and of political regimes themselves, from within, by using the wiliest rhetorical techniques, by accepting the premises and limitations of convention in politics, and by fashioning an alliance of sorts, if only an expedient or rhetorical one, between philosophy and the city’s conventional justice. This means also being the reformer of religion or the founder of a new religion. Nietzsche says Plato wanted to found a new religion but was unable to for the Greeks—was he able to for someone else? ([Location 4391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4391)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Like the rhetoric at Gorgias 464b-466a, Hippias’ rhetoric only aims to please and therefore has to cater to the pleasures of others. Hippias is a man who knows nothing of what is beautiful by nature, but instead slavishly memorizes names to please others with old wives’ tales. He thinks he rules, but he is really being used as a clown. ([Location 4534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4534)) - Tags: [[blue]] - would it be plausible to interpret the more beautiful surface Socrates, the Platonic Socrates, as the pre-Socratic philosopher become political—and not only political, but, unlike Callicles and the brutal Critias, also politically astute—the old philosopher with a political surface, with a politic face or mask, with knowledge of real rhetoric? Where the old philosophy, as represented in the alter ego, only refutes and shows the hopeless limitations and contradictions in the conventional or plausible notions of the kalon—and thereby even comes close to considering the kalon as a matter of human convention with no basis in nature—the new political philosophy, informed by men like Hippias, the new Platonic Socrates, uses these very notions[cccxxv] in the Gorgias and especially the Republic to reform the education of the cities and to give the philosopher the title to the best life and the supreme justice: and if not the absolute political rule in the city, then at least the spiritual rule. Where the former philosophy was private and politically weak and did not know rhetoric, the new philosophy is informed by the “beauty” and power of political rhetoric, is public and ambitious, it has benefited from an encounter with men like Hippias: ([Location 4582](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4582)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This is most significant should one summarily consider the similarities of Aristippus’ career—his association with tyrants—with Alcibiades’. Now Aristippus is a full-blown philosopher, and not, like Alcibiades, a statesman who aspired to tyranny directly. Yet what binds the two, and indeed the distinguishing characteristic of the two, is their versatility, their “regime-independence” and “nomos-independence,” their ability to associate with all men in all regimes, which all of course must presuppose a radical unmooring from their native regime and its conventions, and a corresponding ability to manipulate and seduce conventions or regimes of different kinds. This is what they learned from the wild man, Socrates. Indeed Aristippus openly admits what I have claimed so far: that philosophy, so far from being a “civilizing” education, is a form of de-civilization and “re-barbarization,” a “return to the wild,” to the “teaching of Cheiron,” an escape from the taming morality of nomos: He was asked once in what educated men are superior to uneducated men; and answered, “Just as broken horses are superior to those that are unbroken.”[cccxxxi] ([Location 4663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4663)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Philosophy is liberation from nomos and return to nature and therefore to the “teaching of force,” the teaching of the beast—the lion and the fox—which is “regime-independent.” The advantage of the philosophers over other men, and the advantages philosophy supplies, are, according to Aristippus’ statements, in fact shared to the full by Alcibiades, the pretender to tyranny, if not exemplified by him. It is in this very direct sense that philosophy and tyranny are uniquely related, in their common and unique orientation versus the political regime or political life in general, and in the fact that Plato, and possibly Socrates, could teach his students special skills for manipulating convention and manipulating regimes. ([Location 4676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4676)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This is the Epicurean criticism of Plato as relayed by Nietzsche.[cccxxxv] The Platonists were both tyrant’s lickspittles and also masters of oratory, hypocrites, pretenders, actors. In the Platonic corpus we see both the fundamental connection between philosophy and tyranny on one hand, and the concealment of this original identity on the other. Both appear together as “political philosophy,” as a refinement of Callicles’ antinomianism and drive to tyranny and violent atheism, in which these are covered up by a pose and mask of piety, justice, asceticism. Nature—the fundamental ground on which both tyranny and philosophy meet—is concealed, not from the philosophers themselves, but beneath the public mask of philosophy, which henceforth becomes a pose of piety, of righteousness, which henceforth becomes moralistic. It is through this rhetoric that Platonic philosophy becomes tyrannical—quite literally. The rival Epicurean school, by contrast, which did not have this knowledge or means of self-defense, fell into disrepute as nihilistic atheism, and Plato is said to have taken efforts to burn Democritus’ scientific books.[cccxxxvi] ([Location 4750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4750)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The ultimate origin of this identity is in what Nietzsche calls high culture, and which might be understood literally as the cultivation of human nature, a cultivation that is by necessity of long duration, strict, and difficult; a cultivation that might also go by the name of “regime.” As such the question of philosophy and of high culture in Nietzsche is not entirely to be separated from the Platonic political problem par excellence, the problem of the classical regime. ([Location 4792](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4792)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The case here to be made is that the preconditions for tyranny are identical or nearly identical, and that therefore a regime or a culture that cultivates philosophy necessarily risks also the cultivation of tyranny—the ([Location 4877](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4877)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The understanding of philosophy as primarily a way of life, and not just a discipline of learning, let alone the substance of any one particular teaching or ideology, remains consistent throughout Nietzsche’s writings. And so above we see that he complains that in his own time “no one may venture to fulfill philosophy’s law with his own person, no one may live philosophically with that simple loyalty which compelled an ancient, no matter where he was or what he was doing, to deport himself as a Stoic if he once had pledged faith to the Stoa.” ([Location 4882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4882)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The great problem Nietzsche faces then, in talking about the preconditions of philosophy, is that he is in fact talking about the preconditions for a Kleist. If philosophy is not a mere discipline or sphere of learning, but the crown of high culture, and a way of life, the problem of the resurrection or salvation of philosophy becomes infinitely more difficult and more complicated. If the question is not one of the perpetuation of a philosophical school that already exists, but of the birth of philosophy itself, or its resurrection, the answer must turn on a study of the preconditions for the emergence of philosophy to begin with, on a study of Greek philosophy or the earliest philosophers. It is in this study, which includes Plato, that Nietzsche chances upon the complex of ideas that came to be called “aristocratic radicalism”—a description Georg Brandes coined for his thought, of which Nietzsche approved, and described as most clever.[cccxlv] ([Location 4890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4890)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nietzsche’s attempt for the “rebarbarization” of the human spirit is to be taken in earnest and to be taken seriously: especially so when we see, as we will, that according to him the effect of the Platonic project has been an all-too-successful taming and denaturing of European man. ([Location 4939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4939)) - Tags: [[blue]] - a fruitful way to read Nietzsche is to be able to consider his most vehement or questionable statements, not as metaphors with a “spiritual” meaning, but as an exoteric, that is, public and political teaching, which, however, is but another instrument or weapon in the context of his overall strategy—this being indeed “spiritual” in the sense that philosophy and its preservation is his chief concern. ([Location 4976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4976)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the two chief virtues of primitive Homeric aristocracy were andreia and phronesis, standing originally for prowess in battle and ability to give good counsel in assembly. These two virtues, geared toward action and war-making, are valued also by other aristocracies throughout history and across the world—the ([Location 4984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=4984)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In Xenophon’s example the Persians are stand-ins for the oligarchic man, and the contrast between tan (Spartan-Greek) aristocracy and pale, untanned (Persian-Oriental) oligarchy is therefore made apparent in a very direct way. Aristocracy is not aristocracy without its members possessing and exhibiting virtue, of which, for example, a strong body and tan skin is a marker. And so let us emphasize again that virtue here is to be interpreted in a very concrete and “primitive” way: qualities, both physical and spiritual, necessary for or indicative of action, war, adventure, and nothing more. The inherent physicality of ancient Greek aristocracy, its orientation toward action and war, must be kept in mind if only to remind oneself, in the most concrete way, of the meaning of aristocratic regime as a severe program, strict and intolerant, over many generations; a program of breeding and training. The constitution of the Spartans, for example—which served as the model for the political thinking of so many ancient philosophers, Plato included[ccclv]—unwritten, not enforced by judges, is therefore not well understood through comparisons to modern constitutions. It was not a purely legal document of rights and procedures, and it was certainly not a declaration of moral sentiment or ideological doctrine. It is better compared to an athlete’s physical, dietary, and spiritual training regimen. ([Location 5027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5027)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the depiction of an erotic contest in a gymnasium, Socrates goes so far as to side with a young athlete over a youth who is learned—a typical “intellectual.” The argument is roughly that the athlete’s method of training and lived practice is a lot more akin to the philosopher’s way than the learning of the striving intellectual, which is superficial, incidental or arbitrary, accumulated for no clear reason except perhaps the pursuit of status or recognition, and serves to make its carrier weak and hobbled rather than strong. ([Location 5052](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5052)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Aristocratic physical and athletic culture is, according to Plato, the closest model for philosophical training and culture. ([Location 5062](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5062)) - Tags: [[blue]] - He goes on to claim that the Platonic philosophy itself was a spiritualization of Greek physical culture and of this same aristocratic competitive impulse: Schopenhauer speaks of beauty with a melancholy fervor. Why? Because he sees in it a bridge on which one will go farther, or develop a thirst to go farther. Beauty is for him a momentary redemption from the “will” — a lure to eternal redemption. Particularly, he praises beauty as the redeemer from “the focal point of the will,” from sexuality — in beauty he sees the negation of the drive toward procreation. Queer saint! Somebody seems to be contradicting you; I fear it is nature. To what end is there any such thing as beauty in tone, color, fragrance, or rhythmic movement in nature? What is it that beauty evokes? Fortunately, a philosopher contradicts him too. No lesser authority than that of the divine Plato (so Schopenhauer himself calls him) maintains a different proposition: that all beauty incites procreation, that just this is the proprium of its effect, from the most sensual up to the most spiritual. Plato goes further. He says with an innocence possible only for a Greek, not a “Christian,” that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if there were not such beautiful youths in Athens: it is only their sight that transposes the philosopher’s soul into an erotic trance, leaving it no peace until it lowers the seed of all exalted things into such beautiful soil. Another queer saint! One does not trust one’s ears, even if one should trust Plato. At least one guesses that they philosophized differently in Athens, especially in public. Nothing is less Greek than the conceptual web-spinning of a hermit — amor intellectualis dei [intellectual love of God] after the fashion of Spinoza. Philosophy after the fashion of Plato might rather be defined as an erotic contest, as a further development and turning inward of the ancient agonistic gymnastics and of its presuppositions. What ultimately grew out of this philosophic eroticism of Plato? A new art form of the Greek agon: dialectics…[ccclviii] In this limited way then Nietzsche and Plato seem to “agree” on high culture and philosophy being rooted in aristocratic life. ([Location 5072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5072)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Platonic philosophy requires that there be beautiful youths in Athens. It doesn’t just require a specific institution or practice, let alone words or beliefs: it requires that there be beautiful physical specimens. Platonic philosophy has its chief prerequisite in the emergence of the “final result” or “end result” of the breeding and training program of the aristocratic regime—this being energetic physical beauty, which was only produced by a generations-long physical culture, itself ultimately geared to military training and war. ([Location 5093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5093)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nietzsche elsewhere is quite direct about how the physical beauty of the Athenian youth, which inspired or impressed thinkers and philosophers from Plato to Cicero,[ccclx] had to be the product of a careful, centuries-long, deliberate breeding project: Beauty no accident—Even the beauty of a race or of a family, the charm and perfection of all its movements, is attained with pains: like genius it is the final result of the accumulated work of generations. Great sacrifices must have been made on the altar ol good taste, for its sake many things must have been done, and much must have been left undone—the seventeenth century in France is admirable for both of these things,—in this century there must have been a principle of selection in respect to company, locality, clothing, the gratification of the instinct of sex; beauty must have been preferred to profit, to habit, to opinion and to indolence. The first rule of all:—nobody must “let himself go,” not even when he is alone.—Good things are exceedingly costly:; and in all cases the law obtains that he who possesses them is a different person from him who is acquiring them. Everything good is an inheritance: that which is not inherited is imperfect, it is simply a beginning. In Athens at the time of Cicero—who expresses his surprise at the fact—the men and youths were by far superior in beauty to the women: but what hard work and exertions the male sex had for centuries imposed upon itself in the service of beauty! We must not be mistaken in regard to the method employed here: the mere discipline of feelings and thoughts is little better than nil (—it is in this that the great error of German culture, which is quite illusory, lies): the body must be persuaded first. The strict maintenance of a distinguished and tasteful demeanour, the obligation of frequenting only those who do not “let themselves go,” is amply sufficient to render one distinguished and tasteful: in two or three generations everything has already taken deep root. The fate of a people and of humanity is decided according to whether they begin culture at the right place—not at the “soul” (as the fatal superstition of the priests and half-priests would have it): the right place is the body, demeanour, diet, physiology—the rest follows as the night the day…. That is why the Greeks remain the first event in culture—they knew and they did what was needful. Christianity with its contempt of the body is the greatest mishap that has ever befallen mankind.[ccclxi] ([Location 5104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5104)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the flowering of high culture does require a “liberalization” of sorts, it is not the liberalization itself that is the cause of high culture either: this is valuable only insofar as it “frees up” aristocratic energies and redirects them toward the life of the intellect. ([Location 5157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5157)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Every enhancement in the type “man” up to this point has been the work of an aristocratic society — and that’s how it will always be, over and over again: a society which believes in a long scale of rank ordering and differences in worth between man and man and which, in some sense or other, requires slavery. Without the pathos of distance, the sort which grows out of the deeply rooted difference between the social classes, out of the constant gazing outward and downward of the ruling caste on the subjects and work implements, and out of their equally sustained practice of obedience and command, holding down and holding at a distance, that other more mysterious pathos would have no chance of growing at all, that longing for an ever new widening of distances inside the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more distant, more expansive, more comprehensive states, in short, simply the enhancement in the type “man,” the constant “self-conquest of man,” to cite a moral formula in a supra-moral sense. Of course, where the history of the origins of aristocratic society is concerned (and thus the precondition for that raising of the type “man”—), we should not surrender to humanitarian illusions: truth is hard. So without further consideration, let’s admit to ourselves how up to this point every higher culture on earth has started! People with a still natural nature, barbarians in every dreadful sense of the word, predatory men still in possession of an unbroken power of the will and a desire for power, threw themselves on weaker, more civilized, more peaceful, perhaps trading or cattle-raising races, or on old, worn cultures, in which at that very moment the final forces of life were flaring up in a dazzling fireworks display of spirit and corruption. At the start the noble caste has always been the barbarian caste: its superiority has lain not primarily in physical might but in spiritual power — it has been a matter of more complete human beings (which at every level also means “more complete beasts”).[ccclxv] ([Location 5175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5175)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the following passage he exposes cruelty—not even especially towards others, but cruelty toward oneself—as the foundation not just of high culture but of intellectual rigor, of philosophy: Almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty—this is my proposition; the “wild beast” has not been laid to rest at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has merely become—deified. That which constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; that which produces a pleasing effect in so-called tragic pity, indeed fundamentally in everything sublime up to the highest and most refined thrills of metaphysics, derives its sweetness solely from the ingredient of cruelty mixed in with it….Consider, finally, how even the man of knowledge, when he compels his spirit to knowledge which is counter to the inclination of his spirit and frequently also to the desires of his heart—by saying No, that is, when he would like to affirm, love, worship—disposes as an artist in and transfigurer of cruelty; in all taking things seriously and thoroughly, indeed, there is already a violation, a desire to hurt the fundamental will of the spirit, which ceaselessly strives for appearance and the superficial—in all desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty.[ccclxvi] ([Location 5193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5193)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Burckhardt, himself a 19th century liberal, nevertheless emphasized the tremendous suffering and cruelty that was necessary for the creation of the polis as an entity. Namely, the ruthless extirpation and subsuming of all pre-polis, literally subpolitical life: the extirpation and eradication of village life, the reorganization, by force, of tribal, ethnic life into the city, into the aristocratic commonwealth we know as the polis. This wholesale and painful change in the life of the Greeks is somewhat lost to us today when we speak of the polis in the abstract. Burckhardt emphasizes the cruelty and intolerance inherent especially in the polis’ orientation toward citizen quality and opposed to quantity: which necessarily entailed the severest requirements for participation in citizen life, and the severest sanctions against those who weren’t able to maintain their position.[ccclxviii] When Leo Strauss speaks of political life being superior to all subpolitical life, of having a precedence over these, of the classical conception of the city as natural to man, of man conceived of in classical political philosophy as a political animal—and when he furthermore adds that according to classical political philosophy, in distinction to modern, force is not unnatural—it is possible, even likely, that he has in mind not only abstract, ahistorical reflections on human nature, but this basic historical development to which Nietzsche, through Burckhardt, is alluding. It appears once again that without the aristocratic commonwealth of the polis and the cruelty and “pathos of distance” at its foundation, nature, and finally philosophy, have no opportunity to exhibit themselves. Neither philosophy nor nature are known in Socrates’ tribal, subpolitical Rousseauean “city of pigs” in the Republic. The aristocratic severity Nietzsche is describing is necessary for the foundation of the polis on top of and at the expense of, subpolitical life. ([Location 5215](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5215)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The cruelty and pathos of distance—the feeling of rank between man and man—that are the physical and spiritual preconditions for the aristocratic commonwealth of the polis constitute also the inner features of the aristocratic regime or way of life: the severity and strictness against oneself to which Nietzsche so often alludes. This regime consists in the pruning, difficult and painful, over many generations, of traits, characteristics, “virtues” that are useful for the continued political existence of the aristocratic class in question. It is danger, political pressure, that is responsible for the continued existence of aristocratic morality, which, as morality, must serve to bind the members of the community together and to homogenize them. Thus aristocracy and by extension the polis in general can only exist under the pressure of great danger: ([Location 5239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5239)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nietzsche repeats and enlivens this idea with reference to Venice and Rome, which lived five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by “tyrants” are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves; most beautiful type: Julius Caesar. This is true politically too; one need only go through history. The peoples who had some value, attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong. Those large hothouses for the strong — for the strongest kind of human being that has so far been known — the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand it: as something one has or does not have, something one wants, something one conquers.[ccclxx] ([Location 5275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5275)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The dream of every Greek, as Plato knew, was to become tyrant.[ccclxxi] This atmosphere of the “political hothouse” is what accounts for the aristocratic regime—for its strictness or severity extended in two directions. On one hand, in the direction of cultivating bodily and spiritual (or political) abilities under the strictest discipline for centuries; on the other hand, in the direction of restraining such men to a common goal and common type. It is the moment when this political and spiritual tension, pent up over centuries, is finally released, that is most salutary for the production of high culture. I repeat once more that Venice and Rome, as high a praise as Nietzsche seems to have for them, are not especially distinguished in terms of the production of high culture, or at least of philosophy. There is then an extra step, not yet discussed, that is necessary before a flowering of high culture is possible. This step is “liberalization,” a loosening of the aristocratic regime—even if Nietzsche should call it political weakening, degeneration, or decadence. Political weakening is good for culture. The political good is not the same as the highest good. High culture flourishes at the moment of liberalization or, from the aristocratic point of view, of decadence. The “immense power” built up over generations by the aristocratic regime for the benefit of political life alone is now, at the moment of political decline, free to flow into different directions and toward different ends. He calls this a “fortunate time”: ([Location 5289](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5289)) - Tags: [[blue]] - we see what Nietzsche means when he says that “all great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political.”[ccclxxiii] As long as the political work of the regime has already been carried out for generations, if not centuries, and as long as the regime has managed to cultivate “immense power,” “virtues”—in particular the political “virtues” consequent on the pathos of distance—a time of sudden decline, a loosening of political pressures, dangers, and an unbinding of the strict morality developed to deal with these dangers, such a time of political weakness may indeed be salutary for high culture. But in order to take advantage of such an event, there need be present those wild egoisms that aristocracy has bred and nurtured along with wild abilities and political sophistication. It is thanks to the presence of such natures that, now in a time of freedom, there is a hankering after the new, strange, and exotic in the first place. ([Location 5316](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5316)) - Tags: [[blue]] - At the point of the most acute decline of the aristocratic project, when the danger of the greatest “exhaustion” appears: Nietzsche claims in a remarkable passage that precisely at this moment is when the most amazing specimens can emerge. Nietzsche finally explicitly connects what the reader by now may have suspected: the ages he speaks of, the ages of the birth of high culture and of philosophy are necessarily also those ages when the tyrannical type can ascend. This is so for two reasons. First of all because the aristocratic morality that is now declining, the political power that is now lessened, had as one of its principal objects the restraint of potential tyrants. One of the great “dangers” urban aristocracies face is the prospect of one of their own reaching for tyranny; such an event is therefore far more likely in an age of political and moral weakening or “liberalization.” But there is a second and more profound reason Nietzsche gives for the relationship between high culture and tyranny. The same spiritual confusion, and even confusion of the blood, that comes with political weakening and that, in the general case, results in moral and spiritual exhaustion, this same “anarchy” of the instincts, or danger of being internally tyrannized by wild impulses, results, in the case of rarer and fortuitous natures, in an enhancement or strengthening. There is then an inner kinship or likeness between the tyrannical type that appears in late aristocracy and the artist or thinker that appears at this same time. Both are related to each other in that they are able, by similar inherited and acquired internal defenses, to overcome the decadence and general weakness of the time— ([Location 5349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5349)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nietzsche himself explains explicitly and in some detail the connection between the emergence of the tyrannical type just mentioned—the type of Alcibiades—and of philosophy. He goes so far as to call philosophers, the earliest philosophers, “tyrants of the spirit”: Tyrants of the spirit….These philosophers had a firm belief in themselves and in their “truth,” and with it they overcame all their neighbors and predecessors; each of them was a combative and violent tyrant. Perhaps the happiness of believing oneself in possession of the truth was never greater in the world, but neither was the severity, arrogance, tyranny, and evil of such a belief. They were tyrants, which is what every Greek wanted to be, and which each one was, if he was able. ([Location 5382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5382)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Greek political history is said directly to parallel Greek philosophical history, not in its substance, but at the very least in its inner character—the way of life of the philosopher, the tensions and egoisms of his soul, requires the exact same preparatory work as the life of the tyrant, and though directed to very different ends, the two share an inner kinship. The same complex of contradictory drives and instincts that Nietzsche described in Alcibiades, the same inner conflict of the late-stage aristocratic “monster”: this inner tension is “spiritualized,” that is, intellectualized and transposed into the desire for truth in the case of the philosopher. The highest creation of Greek culture—what Nietzsche elsewhere calls “the crown of culture”—the philosophical way of life, or the variety in types of the philosopher, is, as we can see from the words used, itself an internalization of the same severity, pathos of distance, cruelty towards others and oneself that was essential to the aristocratic regime. ([Location 5402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5402)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Let us in the conclusion of this section summarize Nietzsche’s argument. An aristocratic regime has its origins in necessity, in particular in the danger of annihilation.  Barbarians, feral men, impose themselves on top of a sedentary or possibly more civilized population and have to maintain their position under the threat of constant danger, first of all from below and from abroad. Faced with relentless pressure they are forced to sharpen and intensify those qualities, and only those qualities, that are favorable to their continued survival and the maintenance of their position: these qualities they call virtues. Such virtues can in general be summarized as martial ability and political ability: the Homeric andreia and phronesis, or roughly, courage and practical wisdom. Together with these is intensified a closely related but separate set of “virtues” that may with some humor be called the “social” virtues, for they replace the Platonic justice and temperance; but instead Nietzsche emphasizes intolerance, and the associated qualities of cruelty and of pathos of distance. It is only through the latter that the former “substantial” qualities can be inculcated over many generations, in what Nietzsche calls a program of breeding and training—indeed he calls the aristocratic polity as such a program of breeding. Such a regime tends to a homogeneity of type, again under the pressure of necessity: deviations are not tolerated because there is no luxury and no time for them under conditions of permanent pressure. The aristocratic regime furnishes the “raw material” for the further development of high culture, and in particular of philosophy, in two closely related ways. First of all in the institutions, practices, strictures, and pre-rational sentiments inculcated by its education or training. For example, the sentiment Nietzsche calls pathos of distance—the feeling or instinct for variations in rank, for the chasm that exists between slave and free man, for the talent in obedience and command—is a prerequisite for “longing for an ever new widening of distances inside the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more distant, more expansive, more comprehensive states,” that is, for the enhancement of humanity or development of higher aspirations and high culture. Or, to take another example, the agon, an aristocratic institution of competition, especially athletic competition—but which Nietzsche elsewhere also calls the inner engine of the Greek political life—is refined by Platonic philosophy into dialectics. Second—and this is the more radical point that is harder to accept—the “raw material” for philosophy is furnished by the aristocratic regime in a much more direct and literal way, in that only the impressive specimens bred over generations by such a regime can become philosophers in the beginnings of philosophy, or receive philosophy at its beginnings. This point is made in a somewhat limited way, but for our purposes, most clearly,… ([Location 5414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5414)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Platonic project can be understood as an “emergency medical measure” against the decay of the Greek world—the perceived decline and dissolution of aristocratic political and social institutions, in particular the decline of the polis itself. It was also simultaneously an attempt to save or preserve philosophy. The outer or exoteric meaning of Platonic political and moral philosophy was an attempt to “cure” Greek decadence, just as its inner or esoteric meaning was to make philosophy safe and even powerful in the cities—a comprehensive moral and political program, a work of “legislation” in the highest sense. ([Location 5476](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5476)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Platonic project, originally conceived to preserve or perpetuate the philosophical life regardless of regime, ends up, through a significant modification, destroying the possibility of philosophy itself by destroying or corrupting nature. Nietzsche’s exposure of the dark or primitive roots of philosophy, its original or primeval identity with deviant and criminal tyranny, is an attempt to recover nature. ([Location 5483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5483)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Platonism was successful in its project in antiquity; the safety of the Socratic schools, as well as other philosophical schools, was assured through the end of Hellenistic (Roman) civilization. But an unforeseen historical development derailed and warped the Platonic project. What Plato and his followers didn’t count on was the emergence or eruption of an international missionary religion, based on revealed truth. The final result of the Christian project, which is also the final result—surely unintentional—of the Platonic project, is the misbreeding of modern European man. Christianity was “Platonism for the people,” or, which is the same thing, an entirely exoteric Platonism. A Platonism with a priesthood that no longer understood nor cared for the fact that the outward moral and political orientation was meant as a protective outer wall for an inner garden where nature itself was nurtured and preserved. The quasi-Platonic priesthood of medieval Christianity, for all its spiritual profundity, was incompetent when it came to the needful task of caring for the “overall development” of man or the cultivation of human nature—a nature they denied: ([Location 5538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5538)) - Tags: [[blue]] - There are two reasons the Platonic moral project ultimately fails. One reason is “forgivable,” if one may use moral language, in that it is incidental to Platonism: the coincidence of Christianity, a global, missionary religion is, again, not anticipated by Plato or by the Socratic schools. While it is true that Nietzsche famously calls Christianity “Platonism for the people,” he also adds on various occasions that such “Platonism” serves a different purpose for the rabble than it did for the gentlemen and philosophical schools of antiquity. The motivation for an attraction to “otherworldliness,” to a moral interpretation of the world, to asceticism, and so forth, is entirely different in the two cases.[ccclxxxvi] Furthermore the failure of Platonism in this regard is in fact entirely separate from any substantial teaching or doctrine: as is apparent in the passage just quoted, the problem is when religion oversteps its bounds and becomes sovereign, as opposed to its being a useful tool of the statesman or the philosopher. This overreach, the possibility for this kind of priestly authority, is rooted in the peculiar origins of Christianity as a revealed religion and in the historical peculiarities of the late Roman world that adopted this new faith. On this count then it can’t be “blamed” on Platonism, however much the Socratic schools may have “laid the spiritual groundwork” for the later acceptance of clerical revealed religion. But, one may speculate, there is a second reason that Platonism or the Platonic project ultimately fails, which is not incidental. This is the very “otherworldliness” or moralism itself—as long as one understands this problem in the right way. There is a lot written on Nietzsche’s criticism of “otherworldliness” or asceticism in Plato or in Christianity, or his criticism of asceticism. One could even argue that Heidegger’s criticism of the tradition of Western metaphysics stretching back to Plato is lifted entirely from Nietzsche, despite his deflection that Nietzsche was himself a representative of the most destructive branch of that tradition.[ccclxxxvii] There is an attempt even—scholarly as well as on the part of popular writers—to make the case that Nietzsche’s concern was on behalf of the cause of libertinism or “pleasure”; which would strangely turn Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity itself into a moral condemnation and his program into a moralistic doctrine on behalf of moral or sexual “liberation”—you should carnally enjoy yourself, this time on principle, and as a matter of setting right historical wrongs. This way of reading Nietzsche has been especially successful in America. It entirely misses the point of Nietzsche’s criticism both of Platonism and of Christianity. According to Nietzsche Platonism was in a way quite correct to exhort a kind of asceticism. In times of decadence there is an “anarchy” of instincts, a tyranny of destructive and self-destructive impulses. Trusting one’s own instincts, one’s… ([Location 5569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5569)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nietzsche’s essay on the Greek state begins with a reflection on the self-serving but perhaps temporarily salutary lies that “we moderns” believe in as regards the “dignity of labor” and the “dignity of man.”[cccxci] The Greeks didn’t believe in these because they didn’t believe that mere life had any value. What Nietzsche calls the foundation of Greek knowledge is profoundly “nihilistic” from a modern point of view: it is the wisdom of Silenus. The Greek frankness regarding slavery is unacceptable to moderns: “we must accept the cruel sounding truth that slavery belongs to the essence of a culture: a truth, of course, that leaves no doubt as to the absolute value of existence.” Absolute value of existence is nil, and man as such has no dignity and no value: mere life is repudiated by itself. Human nature doesn’t exist in the state of nature: the human in the “state of nature” is a botched animal, a mistake of nature. Indeed there hasn’t as yet been a natural humanity.[cccxcii] What has value is nobility, higher life, which requires the subsuming and exploitation of mere life, in the same way the Greek state and higher Greek culture required slavery,[cccxciii] and in the same way the polis required the absolute subsuming of all pre-political or subpolitical forms. ([Location 5637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5637)) - Tags: [[blue]] - an image Nietzsche elsewhere and much later explicitly invokes precisely in this context: “Its fundamental belief must, in fact, be that the society should exist, not for the sake of the society, but only as a base and framework on which an exceptional kind of nature can raise itself to its higher function and, in general, to a higher form of being, comparable to those heliotropic climbing plants on Java—people call them sipo matador—whose tendrils clutch an oak tree so much and for so long until finally, high over the tree but supported by it, they can unfold their crowns in the open light and make a display of their happiness.”[cccxciv] Therefore if nature is made manifest in high culture, the brutality and force of the state is a necessary precondition, and the political instinct, the instinct for the state, is but a circuitous means that nature uses to reach her aims in secret: the polis, or a people, is nature’s circuitous route to its manifestation, the production of high culture or of genius. Mankind then has an “instinct” for the state, whereby force and power “attracts” humans instinctively “as if by magic”: ([Location 5656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJ74D6C5&location=5656)) - Tags: [[blue]]