For most people the Alt-Right is a pejorative term wielded by leftists and the liberal establishment who then label their opponents with it with anti-polite society connotations. The Alt-Right is racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, sexist, in order to bypass any substantial or concrete engagement with the Alt-Right. Even alternative “conservative” media misrepresents the Alt-Right, like what Prager U, National Review, and others have done in their hatchet jobs against the Alt-Right. Prager U, for instance, tries to tell you that because the Alt-Right, and fascism, deal with “the state” and “identity” that they’re somehow leftwing. Anyone with philosophical knowledge or intellectual honesty knows this is not true. And they can’t bring on a credible philosopher, so they resort to brining on podcasters and dolts like Dinesh D’Souza as if they are somehow credible because of clever cosmetic ploys they make in their own works to convince you of the connection between Nazism and the Democratic Party.

Insofar that the left-right paradigm is worth keeping, then we will have to examine it from a philosophical and metaphysical sense. The dichotomy of left-right is, thus, divided between the metaphysics of hierarchy and, therefore, particularity and difference (i.e. no equality) on the Right and the metaphysics of egalitarianism and, therefore, sameness (i.e. equality). Fascism and the Alt-Right, and other “far-right” movements that Prager U will try to tell you is “leftwing” are, by definition, Right.  Whether leftists consider liberals left is an incidental concern because liberalism, metaphysically, does affirm equality even if leftists think it doesn’t actualize it in the real world.

So, what is the Alt-Right? Where do they come from and who are they? To answer this, I will begin by answering in a shallower way before moving into the substantive answer which the rest of the lecture deals with. In the basic and most shallow sense, the Alt-Right is a loose collection of dissident online digital writers and activists who utilize the medium of alternative media to propagate their “non-politically correct” or “thought crime” ideas through the internet. The movement is generally male-oriented; that is, tech-savvy young men between the ages of 20-40. This is not to say there are no women, but it is a predominately white male movement on the internet. The tech-savvy nature of the Alt-Right, their use of memes, and internet presence are all visible at the exoteric level, but we wish to understand more deeply and more concretely this movement. I highlight the tech-savvy and internet orientation of the movement now for a latter reflection on digital media later.

To explain the Alt-Right in greater detail I am primarily going to be drawing on Sigmund Freud and the triad mind: Id, Ego, and Superego and how these three agents, distinct yet united – like the Holy Trinity in Christian thought – come together in unity to provide the basis for identity. And as all know, one of the core pillars—the core pillar—of the Alt-Right is its philosophy of identity which is a philosophy of consciousness or, as I am going to be contending, the unconscious. Because if you know you’re Freud well you will recall how the ego and superego, while existing in the realms of the conscious, also have roots into the unconscious which is the pure domain of the id. Let us equally be clear that the move that Prager U and other mainstream conservative outlets that try to connect Alt-Right identitarianism with left-wing identity politics is pure false equivocation. In philosophy the association of orange and apple is regarded as a logical fallacy known as the false equivalence, and this is what the publications that embodied the ethos of the beautiful losers try to do. That said, we can say—definitely—that the Alt Right has a pillar of identity to it; and, frankly, unless you’re a mind-numbingly blind ideological classical liberal masquerading as an “American conservative”, identity is at the essence of just about everything and we should be weary of anyone telling us to transcend “identity” which would be tantamount to nihilism and also embodies a weird sort of Gnosticism—but that’s another issue altogether. The Alt Right has a major interest in identity.

Therefore, I will be examining the Alt Right from a certain mytho-poetic revision of the Freudian psyche: The interplay of the id, ego, and superego. I will also be tying the Freudian psyche to mythological reality. As a philosopher I do not use the term myth, or mythology, in any pejorative or antagonistic manner as do people like Sam Harris who is also, in my mind, a (pretty) shallow intellectual himself; perhaps the crème de la crème of shallow intellectuals in a cesspool of intellectual narrowmindedness which makes him come off as seemingly bright and astute. I do not hold that opinion of Harris as anyone with a substantive background in comparative mythology, philosophy, and theology, along with history, should have. Myth in its tradition understanding is simply a story, myth means proclamation; it is a story of origin and destiny which gives identity and meaning to a people.

Anyone who has studied the relationship of orality and social bonding knows the importance of myth to the opening of the human mind, not the closing of it; a la Harris and Dawkins. This is even captured in many films—perhaps most pristinely captured in the third Mad Max film: Beyond Thunderdome, where the goodness of orality (the purity and truth of language) is exhibited by the lost tribe of children which stands in dialectical contrast to the corruption of orality (the negation and self-centered use of language, sometimes called sophistry) reflected by Barter Town. Many philosophers have dealt with the philosophy of language and, again, this is not the place to go into that here; other than to say philosophers like Aristotle said to speak falsely of that which is, is to speak falsely of it and, with more clarity, St. Augustine asserted that language serves two masters: Truth or Falsity which is the same thing Aristotle said in more fanciful language. Myth, simply put, is story; it is a story that tries to make sense of the self, from which incidental outgrowths emerge such as cosmogony. We have since displaced those ancient cosmogonies but as Joseph Campbell said, the epistemological battles we wage today is not between “science” and “religion” or “mythology” but the science of modern myth and the science of ancient myth; the science of the present vs. the science of the past which was incidentally, not essentially, tied to religion. In this sense we have our myths today: The New Atheist myth of a rational man fallen into superstition who is overcoming this darkness and becoming rational (once again) over time; the Whig Myth of Historical Progress, and other such metanarratives of progress and the movement away of superstition and darkness to rationality and enlightenment peddled by pedantic new atheists and progressive politics are all “myths” in the truest etymological sense of the word.

***

To begin we need to begin with Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis which will be our gateway into the Alt-Right psyche. According to Freud, the id is the erotic, or desire; ego is intellect (i.e. the “soul”); and superego is law (of right and wrong). The superego calls us to our higher plane of moral existence, but id is that which comes more “naturally” to humans as it is unconscious, built-in, desire. In many ways, however, Freud’s triad notion of the mind is nothing but a secularization of the Christian image of the Trinity in its traditional Augustinian formulation: memory (Father), intellect (Son), and will (Spirit) where memory is linked to knowledge of good and evil (i.e. the Law), will is desire (i.e. id), and the intellect (soul) is that mediating bridge between the two. For Augustine, memory, intellect, and will constitutes the total person.

In Freud, the id, ego, and superego are all tied to identity; id is the unconscious and desire—unconscious desire which moves us without awareness. The superego is social order, tied primarily to the realm of the unconsciousness but existing partially in the realm of consciousness. The ego, meanwhile, is the true seat of the conscious self; tugged by desire and pulled by superego and the ego tries to make understanding of itself being caught in this dynamic between the superego call to social order, the moral community, and the “sky father” over and against the id seduction to the erotic, self-gratification often to the point of sadism, and the “earth mother.” The Alt-Right psyche identifies itself with the ego and superego, as you would expect a conservative to reactionary psyche to do; but where I would contend the conservative psyche identifies more with superego the reactionary or romantic psyche identifies more with the ego which I believe to be the case of the Alt-Right psyche in its estranged relationship within this trifold Freudian schema.

This is very important to understand, and we need a certain historical consciousness to make sense of this phenomenon. Until the 1960s the superego—the social order—to which the “Western” ego would have found home in was the European superego. It is very particular; just as the Japanese ego would have found home in the post-Meiji superego, or the Chinese ego having found home in the Chinese superego, the Alt-Right ego identifies with the superego of the long morphological growth of Greece, Rome, and Christianity; we might also add Scandinavia or Germania: The various pillars of Western culture and thought. Some Alt-Rightists may have a special bond to one more than the other, but they all share this attachment to the superego that emerged from these cornerstones. This would have been taken as a given without much controversy, even 50 years ago—only those blind to the realities of history have an apoplectic and outrageous reaction to such claims screaming Eurocentricity or racism. But Eurocentricity here, is the point—the ego to ego encounter as established by Johann Fichte leads to the formation of the superego through the eradication of the natural, the id, by which moral community—the social order of the superego—comes into being. That ego-to-ego-to-superego dialectic just didn’t come into being because of immigration. Which is another point the Alt-Right stresses. I will return to this phenomenon of Eurocentricity later as it is somewhat ahistorical, but we will push on. This does mean that the superego, however, that the Alt-Right ego attaches itself to is a Western construct which the Alt-Right ego attaches itself to.

The ego, as the source of the self, identifies with the superego because it is the superego which provides a sense of stable, secure, and meaningful identity to the ego. This is what the Alt-Right means when they speak of “social trust,” the social trust that egos have to each other exists only in the space of the superego. Trust involves consciousness; there is no trust in the realm of id.

Here I am diverging slightly from Freud and adding more Fichte to the Freudian analysis than Freudian purists would accept. While Freud saw the ego in a tug-of-war between the superego and id hoping to stabilize itself to embody self-conscious identity where the id, which is tied to ego, wants to fulfill animal or bodily desire like sex and food and, at times murder, which is it sinks into until awoken by the pull of the superego reminding the ego of the better angels of its nature and pulls it back into the realm of ethical order and social life which can, hopefully, still fulfill bodily appetite without the baseness of pure id. The Fichtean ego encounters the subjective other (another ego) and is brought into contestation with how to relate to the “Not-I” (the Nicht-Ich). In this interplay of the I and Not-I, a dialectical dynamic rooted back in at least Johann Hamann but brought to prominence by Fichte which never left all subsequent German philosophy, the ego and ego begin to synthesize together: Two become One, which produces the superego of the social order or, as Fichte called it, the moral community. It is in this moral community that a meaningful life, and therefore identity, is found.

When there is a crisis of identity in the ego this is because the ego has become detached from superego which its identity is attached. In this confrontation of the ego and id in order to reach the superego, the id must be demolished and crushed because the id represents chaos and instability which threatens the superego. When the superego is threatened the ego is threatened because it becomes cut-off from the superego.

For those involved in brain science, and again unlike the constructionists there is much essentialism in the hard sciences that leftists don’t want to acknowledge because it would otherwise shatter their weltanschauung. The male brain is much different from the female brain and vice-versa. It is because of this essentialist reality that many prominent Alt-Right figureheads and writers are, in fact, male. And Jack Donovan and Rollo Tomasi, in their own ways, capture this dynamic. The male brain, according to the most recent tests done by Stuart Ritchie, have higher brain volumes than women in every subcortical region which includes the hippocampus (which plays broad roles in memory and spatial awareness), the amygdala (emotions, memory, and decision-making), striatum (learning, inhibition, and reward-processing), and thalamus (processing and relaying sensory information to other parts of the brain).[1]

The biological reality of brain science, coupled with the Freudian triad, helps make sense of the connectivity between the frontal lobe which controls memory, attention, and motivation (the Augustinian Memory), insular cortex which controls consciousness, self-awareness, and interpersonal experience (Augustinian Intellect or Logos/Christ), and cingulate gyrus which is next to the thalamus which is tied to many of the more animalistic and vegetative bodily needs (Augustinian Will). So, in the brain we have a perfect realization of the Freudian and Trinitarian Image playing itself out. This is important, again, to understand as it relates to men and why many of the Alt-Right leaders and adherents are men.

Male identity is much more precarious than female identity. And this is borne out in the social problems that the West is facing today, which is, in large part, a male social problem. Men have been robbed of their identity and are now narrowly walking a fence with the abyss on both sides and they can fall off any time. That is, a monster is waiting on both sides of the man as he navigates this dissipated social order that he no longer finds himself welcome in, capable of participating in, or altogether cut-off from. This is the ego’s uneasy slipping away from the superego which is causing a crisis of identity in men more than women and this manifests itself in various different ways.

In the United States almost all mass shootings are undertaken by estranged, alienated, males who have no social skills as they’ve been detached from the social order and, having also had their id stripped away, are empty robots with no life in them. In the UK the stabbing crisis is also a male crisis because these young men, though admittedly not Alt-Right and generally African and Muslim unlike alienated white men or young black men in the U.S., is not because of their race or religion but because of the ego’s estrangement from the superego. They lack an identity and engage in violent and homicidal behavior because man, separated from law and justice—the superego—is the worst of animals; the libido he has been repressing finally overwhelms him and he snaps. This is recognized in all cultures and all stories going back to the Epic of Gilgamesh.

This snapping of the ego and the crisis of identity leads to men to either become homicidal and violent or causes man to seek after a corrupt form of the superego, often in the form of gangs which promise everything to the ego that the estranged superego cannot provide: A sense of identity, meaning, and companionship. Gangs are an attempt to create a superego in which the ego can attach itself to; but gangs equally engage in violent and destructive behavior which perpetuates the further estrangement of the ego. This dynamic that I have hitherto described is related to civilization and its discontents, the animal urges of the ego moving into the realm of unconscious id, violence and chaos, which is exhilarating especially to animals who have not experienced the liberating exhilaration of the flight or flight libido for some time, with the developed ego’s need for identity and stability found in the social order offered by the superego.

Now how does all this tie back to so-called White identity in the Alt-Right psyche? Again, we have understood the historical circumstances and particularities of Western History. “White western man,” if we wish to use that term, and the Alt-Rightists do, finds itself in the European superego that has been constructed over 2,000 years. This superego is now under threat, it is dissipating, and in its dissipating is causing the ego’s estrangement from it leading to a crisis of identity.

There is a delicious irony here in that the rise of “White identity” is the outcome of the shattering of the Anglo-Saxon cultural superego which can no longer take in a multiplicity of different ethnicities. European history, the very idea of Europe, is a modern and alienated construct of the 20^th century. Go back into European history and you will not find a European superego in the manner invented by the Alt-Right. You will find a Greek superego. A German, or Teutonic, superego. You will find a French superego. An English superego, and even these are somewhat contentious as these terms Greek, German, French, and English already carry with them a homogenization that sublates smaller ethnicities that were composed alongside with its larger parent. The estranged Alt-Right ego is searching for a superego and has, in some ways, done some rather remarkable in transforming parochial superegos: whether it be Anglo-Saxon, French, Spanish, Italian, or German, into a larger homogenous superego as if the previous iterations of superegos I have just described came to an apoplectic end in the 20^th century wherein the alienated egos of the West following the world wars engaged with each other to, in the Fichtean manner, create a new superego (Europe or White) to find the security and identity denied to it by the failure of parochial superegos from the 19^th century and back.

Oswald Spengler becomes a favorite, even if misunderstood, intellectual for the Alt-Right (especially at Radix and Counter Currents) for being the first to engage in the sort of “homogenizing” of the ego when he described what we call “European civilization” in the singular as Faustian civilization in the particular. The Alt-Right ego finds its roots in this shattered genus of the Europe of nations, but that Europe of nations didn’t provide the effective superego for the ego. That new “European” superego which bound the United States and Europe together in the Cold War and binds the United States to Europe because of genealogical colonization, is now collapsing; it is under threat. This European, Trans-Atlantic, superego which is under threat causes the reformed ego of the Alt-Right to feel anxiety which is leading it to be detached from the superego. The ego is now uprooted and detached from the superego causing it to feel a crisis in its identity.

The Alt-Right psyche, principally through the ego, intentionally or accidentally, recognizes the crisis it is feeling is attached to the ego’s separation from the superego. This is why the Alt-Right comes off as combative and defensive—indeed, conservative or reactionary—in its associative defense of the superego which is being threatened. For it is in the superego that the ego finds a home; this same dynamic is partly responsible for the statism inherent to fascism and fascism’s glorification and protection of the state for the fascist ego locked arms around the imagined fascist superego which would shelter it, protect it, and give it meaning and identity against the turbulent vicissitudes of history. The same phenomenon is playing out with the Alt-Right, though the Alt-Right is very far from fascism as any scholar of fascism knows. The estranged Alt-Right ego is seeking to defend the superego against the threatening id which the Alt-Right seems to identify as feminism, Islam, and non-European peoples in migration and immigration.

***

Now this moves us from Freud to the realm of mythological reality. And it is an interest flag to raise here how much Alt Right literature, speeches, podcasts, even pseudonyms, have a mythological, or esoteric, nature to them.

The very origin of myth, as we discussed briefly earlier, is an attempt to establish an identity for people. For myths have their origin story, where the seed of the self is planted, and these myths are teleologically oriented to a destination, where the seed of the self will develop. Mythological consciousness is not merely the end to the theological imagination, as in Christianity, but the very root to self-consciousness itself (and, therefore, self-identity) as Friedrich Schelling outlined in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology.

Because myth is the first verbalization, and grammar, of the psyche it is unsurprising that the Alt Right has a certain baseline mythopoetic language and embodiment to it once you analyze the movement from Freudian lenses. In fact, the Freudian triad schema, owing to its roots in the theological imagination of Christianity, and the general truths embedded in myth though articulated in fanciful story-telling, is a mythological construct in-of-itself. The ego, which is the self, is the hero of mythology. The id, uncontrollable desire and the erotic, is the femme fatale, the chaos monster, the earth mother of mythology. The superego, the social order, is the sky father, the rational god, the ordering principle which, in its confrontation with the id, secures the basis for the ego’s development; thus securing the ego to the superego and the hero to the father whom the hero will eventually have to settle out away from in the hero’s journey before cycling back in eternal recurrence to the father to once again know who his identity is. The parable of the Prodigal Son in the Bible is perhaps the most famous and still well-known story that deals with this basic narrative structure though the story of Christ’s incarnation, death, descent, resurrection, and ascension also follows this pattern of the hero (son) venturing away from the Father to truly come to know himself and fulfill his mission/quest whereby he returns to the Father filled with new life and understanding. The hero’s journey is the reintegration of the ego with the superego whereby the ego once again has a clear understanding of itself in relationship with the superego and the community therein.

This mythological reality is attached to Freudian id, ego, and superego for these reasons. The id, the chaotic water monster, or monster archetype more abstractly, is that which threatens the aging superego which propels the ego, the hero, into action.

But even at a deeper level where the id is the earth mother and the superego the sky father, the hero, the ego, is the byproduct or offspring of the superego and id, the sky father and earth-mother like Uranus is to Aether and Gaia in Greek mythology. Now this wasn’t always the case. In Theogony, Hesiod has the titans born from Gaia alone—reflective of pre-rational times where the worship focused on mother and entailed a wet cosmogony of chaos. As Greece solidified and codified itself, becoming more rational, and the rational being associated with the male, the separation of Gaia from her children through the emergence of the sky father is an important development; for the stars, the sky, is the ordering and rational principle following fixed and mathematical laws. It became necessary to have a deity superior to the wet chaotic primordial goddess that was Gaia, and thus Aether emerges and it is from Aether’s substance which falls to earth which gives constitution to Gaia before the birth of Uranus who, though god of the sky, is not god of the pure upper sky. The superego provides security, stability, and reliability to the hero who, without these provisions of the superego, would be lost in a sea of id; perhaps being consumed by the chaotic god or goddess of absolute eros. This is, in fact, an ancient mythological trope going back to Ishtar in Epic of Gilgamesh where she presents herself to Gilgamesh but part of his refusal of her advances was his recognition that all her former lovers are dead. This causes her to fly into a rage, as she herself is denied a place in the social order, thereby seeking destruction upon it.

In this mytho-political reorientation of the Freudian psyche the id becomes a far greater danger to the ego because the id fundamentally threatens the superego. This follows the battle of the gods or images analogy in ancient mythology. This is known as the chaoskampf in mythology: chaos struggle, which is necessary before the ego can derive and flourish. I can think of four examples off the top of my head: Marduk vs. Tiamat (which includes the gendered dialectic of the male god of order fighting the female goddess of disorder), Yahweh vs. Leviathan, Zeus vs. Typhon, and Thor vs. Jurmangundr. Male or female, pending the story, the chaoskampf is fully rendered as the Freudian id. The monster, or god or goddess of the deep, is the water monster, the serpent, the dragon-like reptilian-fish, which must be tamed or slayed for ordered life, which incorporates the ego and superego, to come about.

In the specific case of the Babylonian myth, Marduk vs. Tiamut in the Enuma Elish, Tiamut is killed by Marduk who then takes her blood, rubs it into the dust of the ground, and thus creates human and orderly life. The same is implied in the book of Job and the Psalms when God declares to Job that it was He who pushed back Leviathan from which earthly life can have a resemblance of order and prosperity to it. Likewise, Thor must slay Jurmangundr who has grown so large that he can encompass the whole earth around his body which threatens the very existence of the earth. (I would like to note here, just as an aside, that the ancients and medieval knew the earth was round—these stories affirm to the reality of a spherical earth as do medieval icons of Christ the Creator creating the earth in the shape of a sphere; the idea of a flat earth until dispelled by the New Science revolution of the Enlightenment is a lie of the Whig Myth of Progress.)

In all these cases the heroic slaying the chaos monster is a recapitulation of the hero motif. And this ties into the Alt-Right psyche which envisions itself as the heroic struggler, the knight, the warrior, the demi-god, who answers the call of the community, in defense of the superego, threatened by the chaos of the id, the chaos monster, to restore order for the well-being of the superego and ego tied together in the social community. Consider how much Alt-Right “warriors,” the figureheads, the leaders, the knights, speak of “our people” in the collective sense: We must secure a homeland for our people; we must protect our construction for our posterity.

The hero’s quest, which was first identified by Edward Tylor, then made famous by Joseph Campbell, is the call of the ego. The ego, again, is the hero in the realm of the mythological. This is, in fact, borrowed from Fichte who depicted the ego as heroic in its “striving, struggling, and sacrifice” to establish the order of reality. The ego, which is activity, much like the hero’s activity, creates the superego which it loves and seeks to defend as its existence—so long as it exists—brings a level of comfort, meaning, and identity to the ego. Fichte argued the ego, consciousness, is that which harmonizes the world of encounters. And this is, according to Freud, the task of the ego in harmonizing the superego and id. And in myth, the ego as harmonizer is the hero as harmonizer; he who brings order to the world through struggle for the benefit of his people which culminates in the formation of the heroic identity of the hero.

The hero, then, is the white knight, the heroic soldier, the fearless man, who ventures out into the world of chaos to discover himself and, upon success, reintegrate back into community to enjoy the fruits of his successful journey. But the journey of the hero is not complete in the struggle alone; the hero, like the ego, needs to return and reconnect with the community, the superego. The defeat of the chaos monster is not enough; the hero must return to the tribe, the village, the kingdom, with his newfound wisdom and loot for all to benefit from.

In this manner the Alt-Right figureheads are digital heroes. They are the digital knights making battle in the fields of the chaotic internet world. This returns us back to that superficial understanding of the Alt-Right and technology. These digital and avatar heroes brave the maelstrom of darkness that is the Huffington Post, Twitter, 4Chan, and the “dark web” to advance the cause of the defense of the Alt-Right superego threatened by a myriad of forces arranged against it.

The Alt-Right’s interest in Friedrich Nietzsche rests on this account. Prager U was deceitful in presenting Nietzsche as the favorite philosopher of the Alt-Right. He most certainly is not. He is, for the most part, a more peripheral figure overshadowed by the likes of René Guénon, Julius Evola, Carl Schmitt, and others. Nietzsche’s relationship to the Alt-Right psyche has to do with the hero motif. For the heroic ego is Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or overman. Max Stirner, who influenced Nietzsche, was influenced by Fichte; Stirner’s the Unique One is Fichte’s ego of consciousness which is synthesized in Nietzsche’s Übermensch who realizes the single law of life: life is the struggle for life.

And this is what the hero’s quest is about: the struggle for life. The hero is called to adventure by the threat posed to his community and the need to find his identity. Players of recent fantasy games or readers of fantasy novels should immediately recognize the importance of the hero’s quest, the adventure, with the discovery of one’s identity. Aragorn is the chosen one, but it is through his adventure with the Fellowship of Nine that he discovers his identity and embraces it. The player in Elder Scrolls Skyrim embodies the same mythological trope: the unknown chosen one who embarks on the adventure to discover he is the Dragonborn. The hero’s journey is a journey to the discovery of identity because the hero’s journey is intrinsically spiritual in nature. It is spiritual in nature on at least two historical accounts: The first being the obvious relationship between myth and religion; the other being how the formation of distinctive and particular introspective identity emerged with Neoplatonic Christianity—any reader of Augustine’s Confessions would know how the discovery of the self simultaneously is, also, the discovery of God.

In Freudian terms that discovery of the self, ego, and the discovery of God, superego, is that moment of reintegration of the ego to the superego which ends the identity crisis in the person.

Thus, the interest in Nietzsche, purely his idea of the overman, in the Alt-Right psyche is because of the Alt-Right’s psyche identification with the ego which is the hero which is the Nietzschean overman. Given the phenomenon of the Alt-Right as a largely English-speaking issue, it is also unsurprising that Nietzsche, rather than Fichte, is the figure known to illiterate Alt-Right persons since much of Fichte’s works remain only in German and he is, as such, a trivial and difficult read even though Fichte is by far the more influential and consequential philosopher than Nietzsche. Most of Nietzsche’s works are translated into English, making him more accessible in the Anglosphere than Fichte; plus, many alienated egos gravitate to Nietzsche thinking he has the answer to their nihilistic plights even though Nietzsche was an anti-nihilist.

Continuing with the structure of the hero’s quest the hero reaches that threshold which is the point of no return. While many on the Alt-Right are shallow themselves, therefore drawing from pop culture and entertainment rather than philosophical and comparative mythological works that explain these motifs, the Alt-Right has its threshold which has become a well-known meme in its own right: The getting red-pilled meme drawn from the film The Matrix. This threshold of red-pilled is the point of no return; it is also the point wherein identity and consciousness is discovered. To use the memetic language, “get woke.” Awakening. For it is in the hero’s passing of the threshold that he begins the journey to the abyss struggling against forces arranged against him: The Twitter mobs, defriending on Facebook, death threats, the mob protesting at your house or dinner table, etc. The crossing of the threshold now places the hero into the pit of contest.

This trope is equally seen in film. Perhaps the most famous explicit depiction is in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, where Luke enters the cave in Degobah where an imaginary Darth Vader appears and they do battle ending in Luke decapitating Vader only to see his head under the mask: A foreshadowing of the darker descent into the abyss in Bespin where that moment of revelation occurs with Vader telling Luke he is his father. But this trope of mythology captured in Star Wars also points to Luke’s true identity: The son of Anakin Skywalker, and this coming to terms with his identity is essential for his progression for the rest of the film and the series.

It is in this journey that the hero achieves his quest through one of two primary means: the death and rebirth wherein the death is represented by the shedding of the old (abandoning, say, “mainstream conservatism” in the case of the Alt-Right hero) and rebirth—that moment of being “woke” which is his embrace of his true identity: White racial consciousness to borrow from Taylor and everyone associated with the Alt-Right movement. The other means by which the hero is successful is the slaying motif, where the hero vanquishes the foe and is therefore able to make a safe return to the superego which, no longer threatened, allows for the ego’s heroic and triumphant reintegration whereby the ego finds its sense of self, security, and stability and no longer suffers from that crisis of identity. It is in this struggle to find identity that the ego’s relationship to the superego and id appears; the triad mind is united in a hypostasis of consciousness, from the unconscious id to conscious ego to transformed consciousness and security in the superego. To the Alt-Right consciousness reigns as the supreme reality of the essence of life. And to be conscious, to be “woke”, is to be conscious of one’s identity.

The digital knights of the Alt-Right face many dragons, many Tiamuts, many trials and temptations which exist to deter the hero from achieving his quest. The hero cannot reason his way through this quest; the quest involves, admittedly, some degree of violence. This is what leads to the Alt-Right’s rejection of libertarianism, classical liberalism, and compromise “cuckservatives” who think dialogue, reason, and compromise can solve things. It can’t solve anything other than slowly delay the demise of the superego.

This, I contend, helps explain the combative and militant tone of the Alt-Right psyche, whether in physical and concrete terms like at Charlottesville, or in the digital manner online: Whether a YouTube podcast or Twitter trolling. The hero must do battle. He cannot sit on the sidelines. He cannot cheat or reason his way passed the dragon. Even if he does, like Bilbo, the dragon—the id—figures out it has been cheated and takes flight after it has been spurned; much like Ishtar fleeing to heaven to beg her father to release the Bull of Heaven to wreak chaos on the superego below. You see this militant tone and embodiment in everyone from older Alt-Right figures like Richard Spencer to younger such names like Nick Fuentes. Admittedly it is often a verbal militancy in their speech, but anyone who has watched their speeches and podcasts knows that they also embody, in their mannerisms and gestures, a quasi-military nature. They may not be slaying dragons or monsters today, but in another way, they are: They are slaying the dragon of political correctness, multiculturalism, mass immigration.

The hero’s quest has many historical examples in real life history: The Crusades, the Puritan errand into the Wilderness, the frontier spirit of settlement, colonization, and so on.

This call to adventure also contains in it the reality of conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is the psychology of duty. Those familiar with Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson, psychologists who are not as ideologically driven as most psychologists who are involved in what Christian Smith calls the “sacred project of sociology,” note in their studies that those that show the highest levels of conscientiousness are those who identify as conservative or those whom, if given a political questionnaire, be regarded as conservative.

And contra Prager U, the Alt-Right belongs to the political right, which includes conservatism because conservatism is metaphysically rooted in hierarchy and community not equality and individualism like they facetiously promote (and American “conservatism” is really nothing more than a variant species of liberalism; especially those liberal creatures who belong to the Never Trump movement). The Alt-Right tie their psychological conscientiousness with their sacred consciousness of white identity. In fact, the word piety, pietas in Latin, means duty. A sense of duty, which is the sense of conscientiousness, is really the sense of piety.

In the Alt-Right psyche you have a perfect recapitulation of the classical archetypes of mythology, especially the Hero’s journey. In the completion of this struggle, of the journey, the hero returns to his kingdom, his homeland, his people, having secured their future, and is welcomed with open arms whereby he comfortably integrates himself. He knows who he is. He knows who his community is. He was, and remains willing, to lay down his life for his superego because it is the superego, in this recontextualization, the provides the meaning for the ego. To quote Richard Spencer, “To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror. We build, we produce, we go upward … For us, it is conquer or die … And it is appropriate because within us, within the very blood in our veins as children of the sun, lies the potential for greatness.”

The best way to really understand the Alt-Right is not to read the New York Times, Guardian, listen to CNN, or Prager University. It would involve significant and serious study with psychology, philosophy, mythology, theology, and history; these reflections on the Alt-Right I have just given is after nearly a year and a half of on-and-off reading, engagement, and listening to and with Alt-Right venues, combined with my own educational background in economics, history, philosophy, theology, mythology, and serious lay interests in psychology and the biological sciences. This psychoanalytic profile of the Alt-Right, which is what this reflection is: a psychoanalytical reading of the Alt-Right and not a political reading of the Alt-Right because mere politics as all know is deeply anti-, if not un-, intellectual.

Such a psychoanalytic profile of the Alt-Right gives better perspective on the Alt-Right and the Alt-Right individual. In concrete politics this Alt-Right psyche manifests itself in opposition to immigration, first and foremost, as that which is pure id—completely alien and unconscious—posing a threat to the superego which, in turns, causes the ego’s estrangement from the superego leading to a crisis of identity and the call to the hero’s quest from the Alt-Right Psyche.

The ego, the self, who is hero, embarks on the slaying journey to impose order and authority over the id which threatens the self by threatening the superego where the ego finds its home. But the eradication of the id ends the exhilaration that is the hero’s journey—like Nietzsche’s true overman who must destroy even the beautiful things he creates to always perpetuate self-overcoming—which is the real meaning embodied in the ego. This is also a more Freudian grounding of the ego and superego relationship; the ego needs to break free from the superego to be itself. The creative spirit of ego is through the hero’s journey, the joy of seeking an identity and coming to understand oneself, not the end-product which is the last man by any other name.

At the end of the day, the Alt-Right knight, after embarking on his adventure of conscientious consciousness, returns home to the tribe a welcomed hero. The hero’s journey is completed only after victorious return. In this return the hero settles into a life to enjoy the fruits of his labor. But is this not settling down into the superego of the Last Man?

[1] Stuart Ritchie et al., “Sex Difference in the Adult Human Brain,” Cerebral Cortex 28:1 (1 August 2018): 2959-2975.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher, statesman, and man of letters. He wrote numerous philosophical tracts and political treatises, as well as hundreds of letters. He happens to also be the subject of my current thesis on political aesthetics. I have made mention of him in various posts on politics and aesthetics here on this site. But I’ve also written about him and his thought professionally:

Edmund Burke on constitutional theory and history: Why Edmund Burke Would Oppose Constitutional Originalism. In this essay I examine the irony of American “conservatives” lionizing Edmund Burke while holding the exact opposite views concerning the nature of constitutional law and organ development. As such, this essay explores Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Letters of a Regicide Peace to explain how Burke understood constitutions and laws as living and organic entities that are best when not given a fixed and formalized understanding.

Edmund Burke contra Ben Shapiro: A Deep Dive into Ben Shapiro’s Book. In this essay, that doubles as  book review of Ben Shapiro’s The Right Side of History, I pit Edmund Burke’s conservatism against Ben Shapiro’s so-called and self-professed conservatism, to highlight the disparity and gulf between Shapiro’s classical liberalism masquerading as conservatism against the conservatism of Edmund Burke, Adam Müller, and G.W.F. Hegel. There is also commentary dealing with Greek philosophy, Christian theology, and Leo Strauss (my areas of philosophical expertise and focus apart from political philosophy).

Edmund Burke and the aesthetics and psychology of totalitarianism: Burke’s Aesthetics Formed the Core of His Politics. In this essay, published 30 June, 2019, in advance of the fourth of July and the storming of the Bastille (July 14), I explain Burke’s aesthetic psychology of totalitarianism by tying together his Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful with his political writings, including: Reflections on the Revolution in France, “Speech on Reconciliation with the Americans,” and Letters on a Regicide Speech. Charles Dickens also makes a surprise inclusion!

*All essays were published by the online political journal Merion West, where I’m an infrequent contributor writing on political philosophy and theory. Consider reading what they have published on topics ranging from philosophy and art, to political opinion and theology.

Edmund Burke and the irrational passion of totalitarianism: The Totalitarian Irrationalism of the Left. In this essay/op-ed, I draw primarily from Edmund Burke to explain how leftwing movements corrupt language and are often emboldened by the passion of the zeitgeist to control, dominate, and destroy others and are consumed by the rage and lust to see all things “purified by blood and fire.”

*This piece was published by The American Thinker. It is a less substantial essay compared to the other three given its publication by a news/opinion outlet.

Homer’s Iliad is the defining epic of Western literature. Its heroes live on in lure and our collective and individual consciousness. Most of Greek—and Roman literature—is indebted to the epic and its characters. Even modern English literature owes much to Homer’s monumental and heroic poem. Indeed, all Western literature owes to the wellspring of Homer. Even literary … Continue reading Homer’s “Iliad”: From Strife to Love

Michel Foucault is a famous French postmodernist. He is derided by opponents as a thorough-going Marxist. He is derided by Marxists for not being a Marxist. He started out on the revolutionary left, politically, but pivoted to being the godfather of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s before dying of AIDS. What few people know about Foucault, apart from orthodox leftists, is that Foucault became an apologist for capitalism precisely on account of his homosexuality.

Foucault’s most important work is his multivolume History of Sexuality. Foucault’s magnum opus earned him the ire of the Marxist Left for doing several things. First, he rejected the thesis of sexual repression under the capitalist economy. Second, he came to embrace capitalism (and its emphasis on technological progress) to advance the cause of sexual liberality. As Foucault openly states early in his book, “it is not a matter of saying that sexuality, far from being repressed in capitalist and bourgeois societies, has on the contrary benefitted from a regime of unchanging liberty, nor is it a matter of saying that power in society such as ours is more tolerant than repressive.”[1]

Setting the stage, Foucault openly rebuts the Marxist argument that capitalism leads to sexual repression. On the contrary, it is exhaustive labor and the formation of civilization which controls—not so much “represses”—sexuality. According to Foucault, sexuality is a danger to social order, the exhaustive demands of agrarian labor, and is something that is enjoyed during leisure time. Thus sexuality, and in Foucault’s case homosexuality, are elite enterprises dependent upon leisure time. While Foucault recognizes that capitalism brought in a new era of labor, he also laid to rest the classical Marxist critique by studying the role of technology in capitalism, leisure, and the liberation of sexual control because of technology and wealth.

John D’Emilio, one of the most prominent Foucault scholars and himself a gay activist, explained Foucault’s insights this way:

In divesting the household of its economic independence and fostering the separation of sexuality from procreation, capitalism has created conditions that allow some men and women to organize a personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their own sex. It has made possible the formation of urban communities of lesbians and gay men and, more recently, of a politics based on a sexual identity.[2]

Foucault was not alone in this “discovery” among gay, trans, and feminist activists and “scholars.” Shulamith Firestone, in her work The Dialectic of Sex (1970), also saw the rise of capitalism and technology as leading to women’s sexual independence, “In the case of feminism the problem is a moral one: the biological family unit has always oppressed women and children, but now, for the first time in history, technology has created real preconditions for overthrowing these oppressive ‘natural’ conditions, along with their cultural reinforcements.  In the case of the new ecology, we find that independent of any moral stance, for pragmatic—survival—reasons alone, it has become necessary to free humanity from the tyranny of its biology.”[3] For Firestone, and even Marx (in The German Ideology), it was never “capitalism” that repressed sexuality but biology itself. It was the sexual division of labor, according to Marx, which was the first instantiation of sexual control under the male family household. Add in the demands of civilization and agricultural labor (both in its slave and feudal epochs), and sexuality was not part of the consciousness of the common person who was toiling away his life and retiring to bed to have sex mostly for the end of children to aid in labor and take care of the family heads in old age.

Capitalism and the Industrial, or Technological, Revolution changed all of that according to Foucault. The growth of wealth and the rise of technology making labor easier meant that humans now had greater time to indulge in leisure activities, especially pleasure activities. Sexuality was, and remains, for Foucault, all about pleasure. So only in an epoch of wealth, technology, and transition, could sexuality truly be “liberated.” The repression of wealth, technology, and the movement back toward an agrarian ideal—which orthodox Marxism entails in the dissolution of the material dialectic—was therefore harmful to sexual liberality. In the bath houses of San Francisco, Foucault had this epiphany. Like the sodomites in Mesopotamia and the aristocratic pederasts in ancient Athens and Rome, it was the urban, wealthy, and technological centered environments and people who were always free to express and indulge in their sexuality. Anything that threatened this reality would prove harmful to homosexuals and to women (according to Firestone).

Paradoxically, Foucault looks to the Victorian age to prove his point. He acknowledges that there were conservative sexual mores in place. However, he also uncovered the great degree of sexual licentiousness during the Victorian era. Nineteenth century Britain was a sexually decadent island precisely because it was wealthy and capitalist. However, the Christian mores and revivalism of the nineteenth century also meant that the sexual edifice could not be tossed away (as of that time). Therefore, the Victorian age gave the impression of sexual repression but was, in reality, an age of tremendous sexual decadence and “exploration.”

While there was great concern over sexuality, the reason for this concern over sexuality was because sexuality was entering a new era wrought by political radicalism, capitalism, and the technological revolution. There was, in Foucault’s words, a “steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex – a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onwards…an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more: a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endless accumulated detail.”[4] The end result of this new species of sexuality was the homosexual man, “The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case study, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle… The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”[5]

In his study of the history of sexuality and the birth of the new species of human: the homosexual, Foucault concluded several things which ring true for the educated and prescient observer of today. First, the homosexual is a product of modernity. More specifically, the homosexual is a product of capitalism and technology. Second, homosexuality and other forms of alternative sexualities flourish in wealthy cities where leisure is readily accessible. Third, homosexuality and other forms of sexual liberality are dependent on high degrees of wealth and technological transformation making labor easier and, therefore, leading to greater leisure time. Fourth, homosexuality emerged in the upper and middle classes which benefited from the economic and technological revolution.

What is implied in Foucault’s thought is that upward mobility would lead to greater sexual liberality. In this he has undeniably been proven right. The vast majority of LGBTQI+ persons are of middle-class or upper-class backgrounds. Moreover, the LGBTQI+ lifestyle requires wealth.

Toward the end of his life, Foucault put his sexuality first. His politics followed from his sexuality. Foucault made a Faustian bargain with Wall Street and the San Francisco techies. Since homosexuality and sexual liberality required wealth, urbanization, and technologization, Foucault abandoned the vestiges of his tepid anti-capitalism and embraced capitalism whole-heartedly. The true revolution was never going to be proletarian. It was going to be sexual. When we look at the Left today we see this reality. The Left has all but abandoned traditional working-class economic politics. It has immersed itself in sexual politics and sexual liberality instead.

[1] Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 8

[2] John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 100-101.

[3] Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. 175.

[4] Foucault, p. 18.

[5] Ibid., pp. 42-43.

Plato was a master story-teller, perhaps that is why Christians took so fondly to him as Jesus was also a master story-teller. While most of Plato’s famous allegories are contained in The Republic, one of the most famous of Plato’s allegories that escaped the confines of The Republic is the Allegory of the Chariot (or soul) in Phaedrus. There Plato paints a grand portrait of the human odyssey likened to a charioteer with two horses.

“First the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome.” The charioteer, the noble horse, and the wayward horse constitute the tripartite nature of man according to Plato. The charioteer is, of course, the human. The two horses represent the two contrasting motivating impulses in the human: the rational impulse (the noble horse) and the carnal impulse (the wayward horse).

The noble horse, the rational appetite of the soul, is directed to transcendent things: The Good, The True, and the Beautiful. This horse, though noble, is in contest with the wayward horse, the ignoble horse, the horse of carnal appetite or non-rational desire. The wayward horse is captive to the passions and has its sights directed to purely material things to satiate its bodily organs. The charioteer is caught up in this contest between justification and concupiscence.

The noble horse is symbolically colored white. The wayward horse is symbolically colored black. Unlike pathetic Marxist and anti-racist deconstructionists who read into modern prejudices of racism and racial oppression, the colors symbolize purity and nobility (white) and death and destruction (black). Only an idiot could read racism into the colors of the horses and proves they have no knowledge of the Greek symbolic tradition of art and colors. To follow the wayward horse, the black horse, is the highway to hell. To be led by the noble horse is the ascent up Mount Purgatory to the celestial realm to understand and see the world in all its splendor and glory.

It is important to remember that Plato maintained that the soul was the seat of the rational intellect, directed to the Forms to understand and actualize. Plato’s soul, then, is the same burning soul of St. Augustine which longs after the consuming fire which grants eternal rest and felicity, and the energized soul of St. Thomas Aquinas which is directed to the goodness and beauty of God to become a divine instantiation of divinity in its actualized potentiality. The chariot is potential, after all.

The chariot sits in the intermediate state of the celestial divine above and the dark hell below. The charioteer, the human soul, burns with passions—the noble passion after Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, and the irrational passion of the appetites. Thus, we either go up or down. There is no third road.

To steer with the noble horse is difficult. It takes much effort and is extremely tiresome. However, the reward of this tiresome effort is far greater than taking the easy road to hell. G.K. Chesterton wrote that the Christian life isn’t tried because it is hard. Thus, most people choose the path of hell because it is wide with many easy roads to walk on. The same notion is being communicated by Plato. To steer the noble horse is the most difficult path to take in life. It demands constant fighting against the carnal appetites which lust after the things easy to consume in the world—but which, while temporarily satiated in that moment, rears itself back to “life” against shortly thereafter. The easier path, the easier road, the easier life, is give up the reins and allow the wayward horse to control you because you’re just along for the ride.

It is important to recognize that the wayward horse of carnal appetites also has a relationship of objectification in the world. The wayward horse sees everything as an object to consume or gain pleasure from. It doesn’t see the world through the lens of subjectivity, intelligibility, or beauty. Everything is mere instrumental objects for fuel and self-pleasure. The noble horse, however, along with the rational soul, is directed to higher goods, higher things, transcendent things; ultimately, the noble horse and rational soul are directed to subjectivity, diversity, and beauty—the enlightenment of the noble soul is not an object orient ontology but a subject-subject world of encounter and revelation.

Among other famous chariot stories in ancient Greek history and lore, it is also the case that Plato is combating the story of the Fall of Phaeton. Phaeton was moved by his desires, his appetite, his lust to show himself worthy of seizing his father’s chariot and claim his divinity. He acted irrationally and fell to his death which awaits all of us, like the charioteer who allows himself to be driven by the wayward horse. However, if we run the race, struggle to the bitter end, the reward is that which eluded Phaeton and eludes most people who take the easy path to death.

*

As is common with Plato’s dialogues, his famous myth has many layers to it. Since Plato was an ethicist and political philosopher, one should also see how this myth is related to the drama of the political. How a polis, in being steered by the noble or wayward horse, will suffer the same fate as the individual rider as portrayed in the myth.

A political society, a political body, that is overcome by its carnal appetites is a political body that is controlled by the wayward horse. As such, that polis will descend to death. It will become a decadent and hedonistic society crashing down in fire, like Phaeton, to its doom as all who follow their carnal appetites do. A political body, however, that struggles to rein in the wayward horse and be guided by the noble horse ascends to the celestial realm of immortality and perfection.

The polis, in this myth, finds itself in a transitionary or intermediate state of being. It is between the destructive fire of darkness below and the light of immortality, perfection, and beauty above. It has two paths to follow at this point: the path of the soul and rational control of the appetites, represented by the noble horse, or the path of carnal lusts and out of control desires, represented by the ignorable horse. This is a choice.

The drama of the soul is the drama of the political because man, who is soul, is defined by his political nature in Plato. There is no way to escape it. Plato presents, in many ways, what St. Augustine would reflect more deeply upon in The City of God. There are two cities. Two men. Two societies. There is the city of lust and death—the ignoble horse, which is falling. Then there is the city of the soul, of reason and love—the noble horse, which is ascending. We find ourselves part of this eternal drama. Plato passes the torch onto us: What horse, what city, what character, of this cosmic drama will you be part of?

The decline of cultural Christianity, along with intellectual Christianity, has brought with it a debased Atheism without consciousness, inspiration, or stories. It has also been met by a renewed and vigorous neo-“paganism.” The romantic mind of these new pagans, many associated with the so-called Alt-Right, present the portrait of a redeemed paganism that was—ironically—the product of Christianity. Anyone with a true familiar with the pagan classics would know that their gods were not these wondrous beings painted in naked glory by the likes of Catholic painters during the Baroque period and the height of the Counter Reformation.

Theogony: Sexual Violence and The Lust for Domination

The oldest account of the Greek gods comes from the pen of the poet Hesiod, who happens to my namesake alias. Theogony, a short but incredibly vivid and image-soaked poem, literally means “birth of the gods.” Or the genealogy of the gods. Because that is what the work does; Hesiod gives us an account of the origins of the gods and alludes to, or contains, even if just a half sentence or single sentence, many of the Greek classical myths.

There are two lines of gods presented in Theogony. One line self-propagated without sex. The other line, born from the sexual intercourse of Uranus and Gaia, produce the titans and, eventually, the Olympian deities. Needless to say, the line of gods born from sex—and often violent sex—engage in their own lust for domination throughout the poem leading to castration, filicide, and rebellion.

Uranus’ birth from Gaia’s fertile womb leads to the conjugal union of the two and the forced copulation of the primordial deities which will eventually produce the line of Titans and Olympians of mythological fame. The song of the muses which Hesiod opens with sets the pattern for future Greek poems; “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” Homer’s opening may be more famous, but Hesiod’s is equally poetic and memorable:

Muses of Helicon, let us begin our song with them, who hold the great and holy mountain of Helicon, and around its violet-like spring and altar of exceedingly strong Cronus, dance on dainty feet, and who, after bathing their soft skin in the Permessos or the spring of the Horse or holy Olmeios on the peak of Helicon, form their dances, beautiful

dances that arouse desire, and they move erotically (Theog. 1-8).

That Hesiod opens with the muses of songs of praise, but transitions to celebrate erotic dance and sex, also sets the tone for the rest of the poem. The gods of whom the muses of Helicon sing their praises of, are gods of lust, rape, and patricide. Moreover, Hesiod’s poem is about the gods. Man factors not in his theogony. Homer’s two epics, by contrast, deal with men—though the gods are always and everywhere present and interfering with the affairs of men because men are, in the pagan outlook, mere puppets of the gods as Plato said.

The opening eighth of Hesiod’s poem sings the praises of Zeus; but it is slowly revealed that Zeus has usurped his throne in the heavens by “conquering his father Cronos by power” (73). Cronos, too, had conquered Uranus by power as the poem goes on to tell. In sum, the singing of the muses to the gods is a celebration of unadulterated ambition and power. Gods who meekly submit, remain in the place of their birth, and do not struggle to attain power for themselves, are gods unworthy of being gods! Hesiod’s poem reflects the Thrasymachian worldview of dog-eat-dog power dynamics. Above all, he celebrates it!

Peter Paul Rubens, “The Fall of the Titans,” ca. 1638

Concerning the first line of gods that come into being, there are Chaos, Eros, Gaia, and Uranus, along with lesser primordial deities like Thalassa, the primordial goddess of the sea who goes unmentioned. Most of the lesser primordial deities are born from Gaia’s uncontrollable wetness which shoot out of her like fertilized eggs waiting to give birth to life; “She bore the large mountains, pleasant haunts of the goddess / Nymphs who dwell up along the woody mountains, / and he produced the unplowed / open waters raging / with swell, Pontos, without philotês” (129-132).

But it is the copulation between Gaia and Uranus that gives birth to some of the other gods like Tethys, the goddess of fresh water who is seductively beautiful and a prefiguration of white-foamed and naked Aphrodite who will burst forth from Thalassa’s womb in rapturous and energetic birth. From the “wide bosom” of Gaia and Uranus will also come the titans, and from them, the future Olympians of whom the muses—and Hesiod—sing their praises of.

The marital union of Gaia and Uranus is a cruel and vicious one at that. Uranus constantly penetrates into Gaia at will, then hides their children deep within her tummy which causes her ceaseless pain. Uranus is terrified of his children and what they might do to his kingship over the cosmos so thinks that by keeping them locked up in Gaia’s womb they will not pose a threat to him. However, “cunning” Gaia fashions for his children a sickle to overthrow their “reckless father.” Only the titan Cronus, who is the eventual father of Zeus, obeys.

Seizing the sickle fashioned by his mother, Gaia, Cronus ascends to the world and is hidden by his “monstrous” and “laughing” mother who just as much wants to kill Uranus as Cronus. The ascension of Cronus to the kingship of the gods is through an act of patricide. Something that was common in the ancient Greek and Roman world at the same time as the later human philosophers and historians praised the importance of filial piety and pater familias; you have in the account of the gods and the account of the philosophers two far different visions of the good life and what humans should honor. And just as Cronus will seize his throne by patricide, he will lose his throne by patricide.

Waiting for Uranus like a crouching tiger waiting to ambush its prey, Cronus attacks his father at his first opportune chance:

Great Uranus came, bringing the night, and spread out around Gaia, desiring philotês, and was extended. His son reached out from ambush with his left hand, and in his right he held the sickle, long and serrated and the genitals of his father he quickly reaped and threw them behind his back to be carried away. But they did not flee from his hand fruitlessly. As many drops of blood spurted forth,

all of them Gaia received (176-184).

The blood which spurted forth onto Gaia’s fertile body gave birth to the giants and other monsters of antiquity which the demi-god heroes like Hercules and Bellerophon would slay. But even more graphic is the birth of Aphrodite; the first of the Olympian gods fathered by Cronus’ act of sexual violence and Uranus’ chopped off penis which fell through the aethereal air and into Thalassa’s open bosom—which is the sea—where it swirled about from which the frenzied movement of blood-drenched sperm  impregnated the primordial goddess of the deep sea:

As soon as Cronus lopped off the genitals with the sickle, they fell from the mainland into the much-surging sea, so that the sea carried them for a long time. Around them a white foam from the immortal skin began to arise. In it, a maiden was nurtured. First, she drew near holy Kythera, and from there she arrived at Kypros surrounded by water. From within, a majestic and beautiful goddess stepped, and all around grass grew beneath her slender feet. Aphrodite [foam-born goddess and fair-wreathed Kythereia]

gods and men call her because she was nurtured in foam (187-197).

The reality of the “birth of the gods” from Hesiod’s poem is one of complete bloodshed, of sexual violence, and divine rape.

George Cruikshank, “Venus Rising from the Froth,” 1880; still idealized, but Cruikshank’s painting captures more of the dark and chaotic drama involved in Aphrodite/Venus bursting forth from the chaos of the sea and white foam entailed in her birth from the chopped off penis of Cronus which had fallen into Thalassa’s open and fertile body than most other idealized portraits.

Olympus may have subsequently been assumed by the titans, by their funny-business in birthing the Olympian gods comes full circle. What was seized in sexual violence and patricide will be lost in sexual violence and patricide. The Olympians, led by Zeus, convene a war council where “their spirit craved war” (665). War erupts, and violence falls over the whole earth:

They moved wretched battle, all of them, females and males, on that day, Tritan gods and those who were born from Cronos and those whom Zeus from Erebos beneath the earth brought into light. These were dreadful and strong, possessing excessive force. A hundred arms shot forth from their shoulders, for all of them alike, and each had fifty heads grown out from their shoulders on sturdy limbs. Then, they settled themselves against the Titans in the dire fray, holding huge rocks in their sturdy hands. From the other side, the Titans strengthened their ranks eagerly, and both sides were revealing the works of forceful hands, and the boundless sea resounded dreadfully, and the earth screamed loudly, and wide Uranus groaned when heaved, and from the foundations lofty Olympus shook beneath the fury of the immortals. The heavy pounding of their feet reached murky Tartaros, as did the shrill screams of the terrible pursuit and powerful missiles. Thus they hurled mournful darts at one another. The sound of both reached starry Uranus

as they cried out. They clashed with a great war cry (666-686).

While the earth cried aloud in the tumultuous battle being raged, the victorious Olympians ascend to their thrones on Olympus in displacing the old gods. Hesiod’s poem is a triumph of the depraved imagination. It is the triumph of the lust for domination born by sexual violence and vengeance. Conceived in blood and hatred, that primordial original sin infects and taints all the Olympian deities who engage in their bloodlust, wanton sexual advances, and divine rapes and alluring of men and women to their sexual demise.

Peter Paul Rubens, “Saturn Devouring His Son,” 1636. Before Zeus overthrew the Titans, Cronus, fearful of his children, ate them in an act of filicide appropriate for someone who had engaged in patricide. Fearing his sons might turn on him, he turned on them first before Zeus killed his father and seized his throne. Saturn is the Latin equivalent of Cronus.

From Pious Fatalism to Divine Decree

Hesiod’s account of the gods is remarkable for its brutal realism. Hesiod isn’t bothered with offering any defense of the immorality of the gods. He celebrates it. He, and the muses, sing the praises of the strong gods who overcame their lot at birth to ascend to power. Saint Augustine might have realized that these stories—in their Roman form—were about the sanction of sexual violence through authoritative power, “Have I not read in you of Jupiter at once both thunderer and adulterer? Of course the two activities cannot be combined, but he was so described as to give an example of real adultery defended by the authority of a fictitious thunderclap acting as a go-between” (Confessions, i.xvi.25),[1] but contemporary and succeeding generation of Greek poets and chroniclers tried to shelter and augment the open depravity of the gods into tales of pietistic fatalism (Homer) or the inescapable sanction of divine decree (Pseudo-Apollodorus).

Unless your knowledge of the Iliad is from the Wolfgang Peterson’s epic Troy (2004), you have a very poor understanding of the rich mythology and theodicy in Homer’s epic. The “rage of Achilles” is not simply because of his exploits in war; it is because of his demi-god status. Indeed, the fact that Achilles has divine lineage running through his blood makes him a rage-filled killer like the rest of the Olympian gods. The Gods are everywhere in Homer’s epic. The human characters whom we may identify with, like Hector or Andromache, are mere playthings to the desires and jealous rivalries of the gods.

The origin of the Trojan War is through the Judgement of Paris, but there is more to it than that. Concerning the very genus of the war, the Olympians were celebrating the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. These gods who are obsessed with sex intend to have wanton sexual pleasure in the celebration of a sexual union. All but the god Eris is invited because Eris is the god of strife. There is a certain irony in Eris being denied an invitation. All the gods are mischievous and cause strife. So why should Eris be denied?

Eris is so outraged at his spurning that he tosses the “Apple of Discord” into the banquet where Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite quarrel with one another over it. Taking the apple to Zeus to decide who is the most beautiful and desirable of the goddesses, Zeus balks at this responsibility knowing his decision will cause enmity between him and the two goddesses not chosen. Denying this providential responsibility, he passes the decision unto the great Trojan womanizer Paris, who is hardly the dashing and handsome Orlando Bloom portrayed in the film.

Paris’ decision to choose Aphrodite was because Aphrodite promised him Helen of Troy. Paris got to satisfy his carnal lusts which sizzled within him like crackling oil in a frying pan. But with Athena and Hera spurned, they conspire against Aphrodite by taking their vengeance out on Paris.

The gods who ally with the Greeks against the Trojans did so not so much to crush the Trojans but to get revenge on Aphrodite and her cohorts. Athena and Hera are beautiful goddesses too, but Aphrodite is the most voluptuous and consuming of all the beautiful gods. Her beauty is the classic femme fatale. Her beauty is not only seductive, it is deadly. Those who fall into her bosom die to themselves as they are consumed by her.

Herbert Draper, “The Pearls of Aphrodite,” 1907.

Homer’s Trojan War is not a mere contest between earthly powers. It is a divine rivalry moved by jealousy and the need for revenge. In killing Paris, destroying Troy, and depriving Aphrodite of her human judge and lover, Athena and Hera believe they will complete their revenge on Aphrodite.

The outcome of the Trojan War was the utter destruction of Troy—though Aeneas and a band of wayfaring pilgrims manage to sail their way to Carthage, Sicily, and finally to Livinian shores to found Rome. But the burning of Troy was horrendous even in Greek memory. While it is from the pen of the Roman poet Virgil that we get the most graphic of the descriptions of the fall of that great city, the violence unleashed in rage as Aphrodite and her party is defeated is all consuming. It made Sodom and Gomorrah look tame by comparison.

If Homer’s account of the gods was unsatisfactory as it relied on the virtues of a pious fatalism accepting, with humility and spilled loins and ripped out hearts, that humans were the puppets of the gods, Pseudo-Apollodorus’ chronicling of the Greek myths show us the continue advancement of the Greek stories and the human relationship with their violent gods. Pseudo-Apollodorus was a 1^st century A.D. chronicler whose anthology of Greek stories is only remembered to us thanks to Christianity—and Christianity’s relationship to the Greek gods is something I will briefly touch on at the end of this discourse.

Moving from Hesiod’s open celebration of unrestrained violence, rape, and filicide, to Homer’s pious acceptance of the battles of the gods, Pseudo-Apollodorus’ account of the origins of the gods and Trojan War sees the final exhaustive movement of the theogony and theodicy given to us by those most venerable of Greek poets. Instead of concentrating on the bloodlust and sexual violence as in Hesiod, or the pious fatalism of Homer, Pseudo-Apollodorus’ anthologized stories of the Greek myths and gods indicate an impasse at the pious fatalism of Homer but the development of a rich but unconvincing theodicy akin to supralapsarian Calvinism.

Returning to the Judgement of Paris, Pseudo-Apollodorus’ anthology tells us that in the three naked goddesses displaying themselves in front of Paris’ eyes in all their glory each gave him a promise. Athena promised Paris that she would grant him victory in war. Hera promised Paris that she would grant him a universal kingdom stretching over all men. But Aphrodite’s promise of Helen to Paris was the only thing that could quench Paris’ need to ejaculate into a woman’s vagina or mouth. Paris chose Aphrodite because only she offered him an outlet for his sexual deviancy.

However, just prior to this judgement Pseudo-Apollodorus informs us that the choice of Aphrodite was necessary for Zeus to enact his divine will to depopulate the earth and destroy Troy. This indicates a wrestling with the immorality of the gods which Saint Augustine also reflected upon in Confessions and City of God when he engaged in his cultural criticism of the pagan deities. The Greeks, however, did not go the route that we know Saint Augustine went in seeing the stories for what they were: openly violent, sexual, and bloodthirsty tales of grand displays of male libido and female seduction which sanctioned the actions of the powerful and absolved them of their sins. Instead, the Greeks double-downed in their theogony and developed a blood-sanctioned theodicy since they couldn’t do away with their gods.

Rather than absolve the gods, however, this development makes them even more contemptible and condemnable. Athena and Hera are blatant liars to Paris. They cannot offer him the things they promised because it is not Zeus’ will. Aphrodite is to be chosen as the most beautiful to set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that will lead to a seven year war, the death of tens of thousands, the destruction of a city, and the chucking of the infant Astyanax from the walls of Troy as he falls down to the rocks below and cracks his head and insides to prevent him from seeking revenge for the death of Hector. This is made tragic given that Hector, the human embodiment of piety and filial warmth, offered up a prayer to the gods to watch over his son. It wasn’t to be.

Georges Rochegrosse, “Andromache,” 1887.

Sanctioning the Rule of the Powerful

It is obvious to any reader of the Greek classics that the story of the Greek gods is highly anthropomorphized. Their gods are radically different from the metaphysical and ontological God of the philosophers and of Christianity. Their gods are humans with human emotions, sexual needs, and faults; the difference being their place of authority over us and their super-human strength which Saint Augustine noted was the cement which sanctioned the abuse of power and the free display of lusts.

We know why the gods had to subdue Aphrodite and Zeus’ will be satisfied: Because the Greeks had defeated the Trojans. In the same manner, as the story of the gods moved from Athens to Rome, we know why Aphrodite (Venus) turned out to be the victor over Hera (Juno) and Minerva (Athena): Rome had defeated Greece and become the power over the Mediterranean. In the same way this story of human power is seen in Aeneas causing the death of Dido and slaying Turnus. Dido, reflective of Carthage, is in fact killed by Aeneas for Dido thrusts his sword into her breasts as she collapses on a burning pyre while cursing eternal vengeance onto his children. It is a beautiful moment in which Virgil, with the benefit of hindsight, ‘foretells’ the defeat of Carthage and her burning at the hand of Rome. Likewise, Turnus, who has Greek lineage, is slayed and is therefore a foreshadowing of what the fate of Greece will be in her contest with Rome.

The Greek (and Roman) gods who are depicted in their naked beauty and charms by Catholic and later Romantic painters are not the gods of the Greek classics. Anyone who has read the classic poetry and tragedies of the Greek writers knows this. But debauched and uneducated neo-“pagans” of today are so far removed from the gods they romanticize it is hard not to find irony in their anti-Christianity since their view of the gods is the baptized, beautified, and Christianized spirits of deification. Looking at Titian’s Venus or Rubens’ Venus may strike us as something charming, remarkable, and indeed beautiful. But that’s because the Christian emphasis on subjectivity and beauty as a gateway to God took away the blood, castrated penises, and predatory sexual advances and scheming found in Hesiod, Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Pseudo-Apollodorus.

Those who wish to opine for a return to the old gods ought to know what the old gods were like. Not the docile and tamed versions of flowing hair, milky breasts, and perfect pigmentation bequeathed to posterity by Christianity when they painted tamer portraits of the Greek gods. The Greek classics are rich in many ways; but one thing that stands out is the centrality of bloodshed, sex, and violence. As Fustel de Coulanges showed in his grand study of antiquity, The Ancient City, the ancient city was indeed dark, hollow, and filled with blood in the streets. The Greek theodic tradition in poetry and tragedies affirms this in a spectacular imagery of divine violence.

[1] Confessions citation and notation is from Henry Chadwick’s translation.

Aristotle’s political theory is grounded in two principal cornerstones: that man is a political (or social) animal, and that the end of human existence is happiness.   Thus, humanity’s essential social character cannot be separated from his existential character.  The separation of humanity from society will not produce the happiness he seeks.  Likewise, a politics that does not produce arête (excellence) and other associated virtues that come with knowledge will also not sufficiently produce the happiness that he seeks.

I have examined Aristotle’s virtue ethics and how his action theory is related to knowledge and happiness in this post, and I have also provided a summary of some of the highlights of Aristotle’s basic political thoughts in this post.  Now I am moving into a more focused summary of Aristotle’s political thoughts as it directly relates to human happiness and the concept of the political.

Politics, for Aristotle, is an art.  It is a craft.  It cultivates excellence.  It demands knowledge.  It demands, in other words, reason.  Politics is the art of the reasonable because the reasonable would lead to happiness.  (Politics is not the “art of the possible,” whatever that means – which is nothing more than a quietistic justification for “the ends justify the means.”)  As Aristotle also famously retorted, reflecting his own intellectualism, “the Law is the rational.”  But what, then, is the main problem of politics?

The simple answer is knowledge and virtue, since the two go together in Aristotle.  Cicero, for instance, goes on and on about the crisis of education – specifically moral education – as it pertains to the breakdown of constitutions and their devolution into anarchy and tyranny.  Cicero drew from Aristotle, and Cicero’s comments that “the very nature of public affairs often defeats reason” is essentially Aristotelian even if Aristotle doesn’t use that phrase.  Thus, the struggle of politics is the unitive struggle for knowledge by which virtue follows.

For Aristotle, art – in all its forms, especially in phronesis (practical wisdom of daily work and living for particular people) – points to the Law.  Law is fundamentally a dictate of reason for Aristotle.  That art points to Law means that Law embodies prudence.

Prudence is the highest manifestation of the dictate of reason because prudence is the ultimate embodiment of knowledge of the mean.  Without prudence one doesn’t really know – one is either given entirely over to the control of emotion and passion which leads to excess, or one has not cultivated habit from what he knows which leads to deficiency and lack of arête.  The two extremes represent the two poles that tug at humanity: unrestrained desire (excess) which is ultimately is the root of the lack of knowledge, or lack of habitual action which is more a reflection of the suppression of our social animus.  The former is associated with recklessness, itself unreasonable, while the latter is associated with what St. Augustine calls the incurvatus in se – or the inward curve to the self, which is essentially an atomized individualism where one only cares about oneself and is therefore suppressing his social animus which equally leads to catastrophic problems for man and also society.

Drawing upon analogies of artisans and other works, and considering Aristotle’s condemnation of latitudinal commercialization, he shows the problem of why art itself is not the rational but can only be a sign of the dictates of reason.  The artist paints, and while he has this gift and ability, it does him no good unless he is in community.  The phronesis that he has cultivated by a coming to understand the nature of beauty and then applying that knowledge to creating masterful works of arts, can only lead to a limited happiness unless he is able to share with others.  Likewise, the carpenter suffers the same problem.  He can craft a great chair, but it is better to be able to extend this gift unto others.  Thus, to fulfill their natural desire for happiness, as well as to continue cultivating their own practical excellence, people come into community with one another to fulfill the two cornerstones of Aristotelian ontology: social animus and happiness.

The problem now becomes one of prudence, or moderation.  In this community there is a dialectical confrontation between the artist and the carpenter.  This must be regulated by Law.  If not, then the latitudinal confrontation goes on and on and one without end.  There is no teleology at all.  There cannot by an end to latitudinal metaphysics – it is, by its own definition and thought process, a complete denial of nature itself and the ends to which natural is directed through final cause (teleology).  This is the problem of commercialization for Aristotle, we begin chasing after something outside of us.  This is, of course, a result of ignorance of nature and being, but it primarily an ignorance of nature and being because such a view presupposes unlimited acquisition as what is good for humanity.  But unlimited acquisition cannot be satisfied.  It does not lead to prudence (or moderation) it only ever leads to more self-seeking gain.  It is, once again, the inward curve of deficiency whereby man is also (implicitly) detaching himself from society.

This is also Aristotle’s critique of the Epicureans and other hedonists.  He disagrees with them on their fundamental materialist ontology and metaphysics.  The experiential, which is what bodily hedonism entails, denies soul, and in denying soul, it denies knowledge since soul is principally mind.  At the same time, it also denies hylomorphism.  It rejects, in its own materialism, the unity of form and matter by only embrace the matter.

Thus, we are at endless war with ourselves as we chase after fleeting happiness that can never be satiated because hedonism requires no cultivation of virtue and prudence, which is to also say it requires no pursuit of knowledge at all.  It is also individualism writ large within a materialist framework as I’m only ever out for myself and use others to try and derive happiness – but at every level of this philosophy of life I’m confused since (1) I seek happiness (which is an implicit recognition that happiness must be part of nature and is therefore within you), (2) I don’t understand this nature by principally seeking happiness in things outside of myself, and (3) in seeking happiness outside of myself I implicitly recognize the other part of my nature which is social animus.  The glue that brings this all together is philosophy from which prudence is understand and in this understanding the cultivation of excellence can begin whereby I move toward the mean either from previous deficiency or excess.

We can add then, the fourth confusion in that even the Epicurean hedonist still embodies his fundamental natures of want for happiness through social animus even though he goes about all the wrong ways of seeking happiness because he has fundamentally denied knowledge in his materialist ontology.  I must have a balance of self-happiness with social happiness. Thus, I do, in fact, need prudence which comes from knowledge which is the dictate of pure reason.  Until I am at rest with my nature – and all that my nature is – I can never truly be happy (or virtuous and knowledgeable for that matter), which is to say I need to have a harmony of my hylomorphic nature, a harmony of knowledge and virtue, of knowledge leading to action.  We can see, then, in Aristotle, why knowledge becomes important.  Without proper knowledge we are left confused and unhappy, at war with ourselves which is not only at war with our nature but also the end to which nature aims for.

Prudence and moral virtue go together then, as should be clear from reading Nicomachean Ethics.  According to Aristotle, prudence and moral virtue are infused together as part of our hylmorphic nature.  Prudence is principally contained in the form (knowledge) while moral virtue is contained in matter (through actions in the material world).  The best life, then, is the life that is completely devoted to understanding (form) and from this understanding virtue is acted out upon in the world (matter).  Therefore, the struggle of knowledge is also the struggle for virtue – they are integrally intertwined in our hylomorphic nature.  You cannot have one without the other.

Thus, it also becomes pertinent to understand what the nature of a city is – since the city is the highest calling and manifestation of social animus which necessarily means it is tied to happiness which we have just situated as the result of prudence and moral virtue.  The city is the collective society of individuals who have cultivated practical wisdom (the low order of prudence) that are now bound together through the high of prudence which is civil law which regulates all actions and, through the dictate of reason, directs all activities toward the end of moral virtue from which happiness flows.  Law is fundamentally and unequivocally hierarchal then, as any law that embraces latitudinal ideals can never cultivate virtue and never be truly rational since it fundamentally denies the first principles of human nature and nature more generally.  The city, then, is like a collection of families or households bound together in common cause.  This becomes the common good that Cicero identifies as necessary for any republic.

The common cause of the city is also the common cause of all persons, namely happiness – which is why happiness is the highest good.  As Leo Strauss notes in reviewing Aristotle, “The highest good of the city is the same as the highest good of the individual.  The core of happiness is the practice of virtue and primarily of moral virtue.”  You can think of the city in a pyramid where the top is moral law which the regulated side of the pyramid (which has form) is the Law that pushes up toward that top goal.  The wide base of the pyramid is the multifaceted nature of the city with all its different peoples and their practical practices which sustain their livelihoods but also allows them to cultivate their own virtues to derive happiness.  In this sense, like so many other ancient philosophers, Aristotle sees plurality as only being possible in a hierarchy of difference.  Difference, by definition, is plural.  Sameness, which is what monism entails in oneness, cannot, by definition, be pluralistic.

Therefore, each person strives for happiness from his practicality and through the cultivation of his particular phronesis.  This is where Aristotle pivots to an understanding of envy and why democracy is a perverse form of constitutionalism (which is to say democracy destroys the Law of Reason which promotes virtue and returns us to the abyss of non-virtue).  Democracy is the rule of the poor and the envious, those who have not cultivated practical wisdom or virtue, and therefore hold those who do in contempt.  Rather than lift themselves up, they would rather drag those above them down.  This is the politics of resentment.  Democracy was, in Aristotle’s eyes, fundamentally anti-intellectual and non-virtuous by its very own definitions and practices.

Democratic “rights of man” of universal rights, so to speak, are the equivalent to universalist ethical egoism which devolves law and politics to the lowest common denominator in all persons: self-survival and nothing more than this.  Self-survival does not require knowledge or virtue, it only requires brute strength.  Democracy is the greatest reflection of brute strength because it is the coming together of large masses of ignorant animals – “brute animals” – united in “action.”  The “man of action” which Aristotle speaks of in Book VII of Politics is the activist animal united with his legion of cohorts who, in their envy, tear down the wisdom, virtue, and success of others in their folly.  They strip others of their happiness and remain unhappy themselves since they are not virtuous and knowledgeable people.

The struggle of politics is more than just the struggle for virtue in Aristotle.  Cicero draws extensively from Plato and Aristotle, but many of Cicero’s ideas which he puts to pen and paper are implicitly contained in Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics.  The struggle of politics is, in fact, the struggle for virtue, but in it being the struggle for virtue it is the struggle for wisdom and knowledge.  It is the struggle for embodying and living out one’s hylomorphic nature which seems to be at war with itself: “flesh and spirit” to use the language of St. Paul, between the virtue of the flesh (matter) and the wisdom of the spirit (form) that unite together and produce the virtuous happy man at peace with his nature and with those around him in his sociality.  (This is precisely why Christians and Hellenized Jews sought to integrate Aristotle with their ideas too – they are essentially the same just communicated through different prisms.)

Aristotle differed from Cicero insofar that Cicero’s cycles of constitutional evolution/devolution are cyclical.  Aristotle’s art of political dialectic is wholly hierarchal.  It goes up, or it goes down.  Only a wise and virtuous city is the happy city, which is to also say it is the city with the happiest of citizens.  An unwise and unvirtuous city is the tyrannical city; it is the city that is at war with itself and members of itself – it is the chaotic and unorderly city that doesn’t even permit for basic living as it is at war with itself.

For Aristotle, dialectical struggle is not as Hegel and Marx envisioned.  It is not “us” vs. “them,” per se, it is myself vs. myself, it only becomes “us” vs. “them” when I reject my own nature and give up on the internal struggle for wisdom and virtue and lash out at others who are wise and virtuous – but upon whom I craft accusational blame on to justify my envy.  In this sense Aristotle’s politics is not all dissimilar from Plato.  The dialectical nature of politics in Aristotle is the struggle for knowledge and virtue (high end) from which happiness is derived, and insofar that this is the peak that politics seeks, politics is also the struggle against all things that would drag such a politics down into the abyss of ignorance, egoism, and the Cave of tyranny.

This was originally published on Hesiod’s Corner, September 22, 2017.