Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity

1 The Republic as Prologue

1 the republic as prologue If it’s possible to regard the Western philosophic tradition as a series of footnotes to Plato, then it’s at least as plausible to regard the history of political philosophy as a series of footnotes to the Republic. And no more so than where political philosophy looks at the soul. In the present study our attention will be given more to the footnotes than to the Republic itself. We begin with that dialogue, though, because a certain awareness of it—of what it does and what it is thought to do—is useful for understanding the texts that will be occupying us. Nietzsche means to accomplish in and with Beyond Good and Evil something comparable to what Plato did (as Nietzsche sees it) in and with the Republic. Thus Nietzsche orders his book in accordance with the architecture and dimensions of Plato’s. Or so I will try to establish. Rousseau gives us to understand at the start of what he took to be his best and greatest book that he regards the Republic as a revered source and a kind of model. What the Republic has done in the public sphere, he tells us, his Emile will do in the adjoining private or domestic sphere. Yet it becomes clear before long that the two spheres more than adjoin, they overlap; and so Rousseau, too, offers a direct response to Plato: he propounds a teaching that both rivals and supports the teaching of the Republic. Even Plato’s Symposium, the major focus of Part One, can be fruitfully approached by way of a preceding encounter with the Republic, the depths of that shorter, lovelier dialogue, including its political depths, coming all the more clearly to light by virtue of first having looked at eros through the eyes of the city, as the Republic leads one to do. The Symposium isn’t a response to the Republic, let alone a footnote; rather, the two dialogues are complementary. Each in some vital ways completes the other by highlighting what is only quietly present in it. The Symposium is the primary Platonic document with respect to the soul-force it calls eros. The Symposium, as I will try to show, is the dialogue that affords the most direct and probably the most comprehensive insight into eros. But if the Symposium is first in this sense, our approach to it 16 the republic as prologue will nevertheless be aided by a prior if brief reckoning with the Republic, which is primary in a different sense: the Republic, it seems to me, shows us eros as it most typically comes to light objectively, that is, for those who set out to understand it and who are not already intoxicated with or otherwise invested in it. It may seem odd for a dialogue whose perspective is so thoroughly political to do this. Isn’t eros an apolitical thing? And doesn’t the political perspective therefore distort our view of it? It may indeed, but only if our typical view of eros is already distorted. For the Republic’s political perspective is in key respects our perspective, the perspective of political beings . To be more precise: The Republic looks at eros from a political perspective, from the perspective of the city and its concerns, casting light thereby not only on eros but also on the particular and partial character of the political perspective itself. The political perspective as it regards the soul is notable for three features in particular. First, it tends to conceive of the soul in almost tangible terms, using physical language, most especially the language of structure or parts—or, to use a more political term that Socrates himself uses, factions. Hence its conception of the soul as a tripartite structure. As evidence that the structural or tripartite view belongs specifically to the political perspective , consider that in the Republic the soul is at first viewed as embracing multiple forms and is only said to have parts once the focus of the conversation has become the action of these forms or parts and the relations among them, that is, when the conversation has turned to intrapsychic politics.1 Second , the political perspective tends to regard eros with suspicion and a certain obtuseness on account of eros’ antinomianism and its connection to the body, the body being the one thing that will always resist the city’s attempts to achieve the unity that it sees as its greatest...