For Fixed Cross: Thales as political philosopher.

Below is an excerpt from Lampert's latest book (What a Philosopher Is: Becoming Nietzsche, pp. 103-112), which Fixed Cross asked me to post here when I told him about it in a very succinct and introductory manner. In it, Lampert is presenting entries from Nietzsche's workbooks from 1875 (KSA 8 6 [6-49]). I find the narrative fascinating and very important, and present it here as an offering, meant to atone for my previous desecration of this Temple.

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After a brief summary of his [projected] book [on the history of ancient Greek philosophy] in five numbered items [6], Nietzsche listed some of the characteristics of his book, putting two issues of style and content first:

There is also a way of relating this history ironically and full of sadness. I will in any case avoid the earnest even tone.
Socrates throws the whole thing over, at a moment in which the truth had been most nearly attained; that is especially ironic. [7]

Avoiding the earnest, even tone of mere philology, Nietzsche's history would make its sad outcome prominent, with its most ironic, saddest event occurring as it approached its peak. Subsequent entries show that near-peak to be Democritus's achievement viewed as a natural outcome of the whole line of previous scientific and wise thinkers but not yet their ultimate attainment: Socrates threw that whole line over at that high but not highest point, blocking its natural fulfillment in a thinker and actor now barely imaginable, a now irrecoverable type whose loss is the greatest sadness. [...]
After another list of the philosophers, this time itemizing the "dangers intrinsic to Greek culture" [12], Nietzsche asks, "How did this age die? Unnaturally. Where then did the seeds of ruin lie?" [13]. The first of a series of answers runs: "The flight of the better out of the world was a great misfortune. From Socrates on: the individual at one stroke took himself to be too important"—took himself out of a concern for Greek culture into a concern for his own soul. Entry [14] expands this claim. "The older Greek philosophy is the philosophy exclusively of statesmen"; with them one did not see "'the loathsome pretention to happiness' as from Socrates onward." With Socrates philosophy turned to the pursuit of a private happiness foreign to the statesman’s concern for public well-being, among the Greek philosopher-statesmen, a concern to preserve Hellenism with its unique emphases on philosophy and art. With them it was "not the case that everything turned on the condition of their soul." [... Entry [27]] begins: "I no longer believe in the 'natural development' of the Greeks: they were far too gifted to be gradual in that step by step manner," a judgment that nevertheless allows him to continue to see in the philosopher-statesmen a chain of progress.¹ His next sentence shows that a major alteration in his view of Greek history came from recognizing the importance of politics: "The Persian wars are the national misfortune: the success was too great, all the bad drives broke free, the tyrannical appetite to rule all Hellas transformed individual men and individual cities." The success that was too great is "the hegemony of Athens" won after the wars; Athens eclipsed other centers of culture that Nietzsche saw as potentially superior to it: "Miletus was for example much more gifted, Agrigento too," Miletus being the city in which philosophy first arose, Agrigento the city of Empedocles. "With the hegemony of Athens (in spiritual matters) a throng of forces was crushed; think only on how unproductive Athens was in philosophy for a long time." A list follows of figures of high achievement—Pindar, Simonides, Empedocles, Heraclitus—whom he finds unimaginable in Athens. The author of The Birth of Tragedy goes so far as to say that "Athenian tragedy is not the highest form that one can think. The Pindaric is too much lacking in its heroes." Then, curtly, "How awful it was that the fight precisely between Sparta and Athens had to break out—that can not be considered deeply enough." Thinking of the detrimental effects of Athenian hegemony and reading Plato against the background of Thucydides, Nietzsche assigns primary blame to imperial Athens for that Greece-crippling war; a later entry refers to "the horrifying dialogue of the Athenians with the Melians in Thucydides!” His example is the Athenian speech to the Melians on the gods:² “With such a mentality, the Hellenic had to go under, through anxiety on all sides” [32]. For Nietzsche such a mentality is not false, but it is disastrous as public policy. [...]
Paragraph 3 of [48] begins by asking whether one should take seriously the proposition that "Water is the source and womb of all things." "Yes," he answers, "and for three reasons." First, the proposition expresses something about the origin of things and leaves Thales within the company of the religious and superstitious. Second, by expressing its view without image or mythic fable, the proposition takes Thales out of that company and shows him to be the first investigator of nature. Third, by expressing a version of "Everything is one," it makes Thales the first Greek philosopher. In his summary conclusion Nietzsche says, "In Thales for the first time scientific man is victorious over the mythical and the wise man over the scientific." Thales took the two indispensable steps into philosophy, into scientifically grounded wisdom.
The next paragraph is not numbered and the editors treat it as a separate entry [49], but in the workbook the new paragraph simply continues on the same page without skipping a line; the new paragraph is a continuation of paragraph 3 that extends Nietzsche’s thought on Thales in a remarkable way—the first of the Greek philosophers, a scientific and wise thinker, was a statesman who looked to politics, an element wholly lacking in the Thales of the 1873 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. "How is it at all possible that Thales said good-bye to myth! Thales as statesman!" Something must have happened, Nietzsche says, to cause this statesman, this leader of a polis, to abandon myth, knowing its importance to the polis: "To abandon myth means as much as abandon the polis." Why would a Greek thinker-statesman abandon the polis given its historic role in Greekness? We know, Nietzsche says, that Thales tried to establish a confederacy of cities but failed—failed because of the power of myth in the polis: a confederation of cities would compromise the purity of local myth, and the conservatism of religious superstition would not permit it. The statesman Thales had good reason to risk the radical step of abandoning the polis for a confederation: "He had a presentiment of the immense danger Greece faced precisely because the power of myth kept the cities separated. In fact, had Thales accomplished his confederacy of cities, Greece would have been spared the Persian war." The threat of the Persian colossus forced the first Greek philosopher-statesman to advocate a confederation of cities—he knew that Greekness was independent of and more important than Greek myth and the Greek polis that were the deepest attachments of most Greeks. Nietzsche completes his sentence by adding that Greece would also have been spared "Athenian victory and supremacy"—Athenian hegemony being part of the "national misfortune" described by entry [27]. Nietzsche extends his point that philosophy’s first exemplar understood that philosophy had a political task: "All the ancient Greek philosophers concerned themselves with altering the polis-concept and creating a panhellenic mentality." One of them went beyond even the panhellenic: "Heraclitus even seems to have torn down the barrier between barbarian and Hellene in order to create greater freedom and to bring narrow points of view forward" (for criticism). Philosophy as such leads to a recognition of shared humanity across all local difference: Nietzsche’s Greek models were partly responsible for his politics of "good Europeanism" amid the growing fanaticisms of European nationalism during these decades, most especially the German nationalism Nietzsche deplored. The entry ends on a note that at first looks curious: "—The meaning of the water and the sea for the Greeks.” It is not curious: he is discussing Thales, and his proposition about water leads to this final point; the physical geography of Greece with its old mainland cities and its more dynamic, experimental colony cities across the sea east and west, north and south, is relevant to understanding the Greek achievement: to understand the Greek models in their novelty, one must pursue all the influences on their thinking, including geography and the role seafaring played in their culture with its resultant exposure to a variety of different cultures.

¹ The philosopher-statesmen being the pre-Socratics: the development for which they were too gifted for it to happen naturally was the development of pre-Socratic into Socratic philosophy.
² "Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear that we shall be at a disadvantage." (Thucydides 5.105) This mentality is what made the Athenians need Socrates: "Socrates understood that everyone needed him,—his remedy, his regimen, his personal artifice of self-preservation... Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy; everywhere one was five steps away from excess: the monstrum in animo [monster in the soul] was the universal danger. 'The drives want to become tyrants; one must invent a counter-tyrant which is stronger'..." (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "The Problem of Socrates", section 9.) That counter-tyrant was reason, applied to "the health of the soul"—i.e., to private happiness.

Whilst I have the highest respect for studiousness, I cannot bring myself ever to read ABOUT Nietzsche.

But thank you. For the offering. I don't remember you. Who are you again? Was I here?

Anywho, for what I did read, I'm sure Fixed relates a lot to the narrative of Socrate killing a thing that was just being born. I only realized by talking to Fixed how short the story of Greek philosophy really was, which is amazing.

But I have the highest respect for Plate. He was ambitious, ambitious ambitious. Not his fault nobody was able to touch him.

He was cavernous. Which is what matters in Greece. His cavern was perhaps too clean, but no way to know that right then.

I respect vanquishing, even if in this case he vanquished maybe the greatest thing ever put forth by man. Or almost put forth. BEgan to be put forth.

In my mind, though, Nietzsche himself, as a philosopher, makes up for the loss.

The only thing I regret about Nietzsche is that I didn't get to get there first. But then, considering the enemies he pointed out, maybe I would never have... That was maybe the point of Nietzsche. Who knows?

Plus, the bounty's good. Nietzsche done well.

Now that I think of it, I think I remember at least one Heraclitus aphorism that talks very philosophically about Zeus. Zeus was a philosophical fact for Heraclitus (and any serious man).

Did I say 'make up for the loss?" I meant "picked up the thread."

Which, like a good wine ketp carefully in a barrel, aged beautifully. Beautifully, I say.

And no, fuck no, it was not about nationalism. This is so laughable it makes a nigga wanna dance. Dance and laugh. At your shit. About nationalism. Fool.

Oh, wait, I AM a nationalist. Well no, I just think it's important to maintain a strong USA as a ballast against the crazies. Mostly nationalists.

If you think of it, as Trump would say, Plate is a testament to the vast power of the Greek philosophers, an object of pride for them. As soon as one of them vanquished the others, it took the world over 2000 years to come up with Nietzsche. And then, Plate was still an ingredient that propelled Nietzsche higher than any of those guys. Nietzsche, of course, fed far more from good enemies than good friends. Or grew far more.

He made Nietzsche so much that he had to reach back before all of the Greeks to come up with Zarathustra. And here we are. Looking at a thousand years from now.

No, I like Plate.

Wait, I'm just realizing this now, did you just mention German Nationalists in the same body of text as Nietzsche?

Do you also eat off the ground?

Ugh. You're gross man.

Good Europeanism was not some conscious construct made from Greek whatever. It was something he noticed. Notice how he named Jesuits as the first to attempt to loose that bow. Can anything be less Greek? No, it was just something he noticed.

And anyway, ultimately, it failed. The only good Europeans left are pirates.

And anybody who's loyal to Trump. Which is mostly pirates. Only pirates?

Well, there's another group. But I won't do them the insult of mentioning them in this disgusting context.

Oh shit sorry and the French. But the French consider themselves superior to Europe. And they are correct.

The French are not good Europeans, just good frenchmen.

I can't easily read about Nietzsche either - I asked Elaia to post this in relation to it connecting things Thales had said.

I had already said that Lampert would probably make me angry, and he agreed then.

My interest always is in Thales and his view that everything is full of gods, and his psychedelic nature in general - Thales who used only a stick to prove that the Earth is round, a millennium before astronomers came to the same conclusion.

Im interested in the way philosophers make our world smaller and greater. Plate did make it much smaller, turning away from the rage and ferocity of the gods into a secluded temple of geometrical form. Socrate was  too jealous of the gods to allow them, too vain to recognize anything beyond himself.

There was nothing in life which he valued beyond himself, no reason to overcome himself - the end of the line. He couldn't help being born, so in this sense, his happiness to die was proper, and not an insult. Life is also better off without him. How comically tragic that the opposite was picked up as the meaning.

Quote :

The statesman Thales had good reason to risk the radical step of abandoning the polis for a confederation: "He had a presentiment of the immense danger Greece faced precisely because the power of myth kept the cities separated. In fact, had Thales accomplished his confederacy of cities, Greece would have been spared the Persian war."

Look, perfect. Thales was a value ontologist, he understood that entities enforce themselves through forming a specific type of grouping, namely one where structural autonomy is maintained, but a looser superstructure is allowed to come into being in part naturally, in part through the synchronized self assertion of the individual entities.

Europe could be such a place.

i see the word “lampert” and immediately an image of a lazy pretentious fat dude in a dirty t-shirt comes to mind. but that’s probably also informed by the little i’ve seen of his writing, which were like trying to cram schizophrenia into a quickly painted china tea cup.

Yeah, Thales was cool.

But, and this is my point, not as cool as Zarathustra.

Did you see the sequels to my video? Did you hear the part about the cool machine?

Maybe it's irrelevant.

Al great Greeks loved and feared, in short worshipped, the gods. It was an unimaginable weakness not to. Except in Plate. In him it was strength. But only the strength to deny life, unwittingly, out of pure strong strength. Plate could carry a 100 worlds on his shoulders. And did. It's just that none of those worlds were real. So Zarathustra scoffs.

Quote :

"In Thales for the first time scientific man is victorious over the mythical and the wise man over the scientific." Thales took the two indispensable steps into philosophy, into scientifically grounded wisdom.

Yes, which then Plato reversed.
His approach to mathematics as an idealism quite missed the point.
Intuitively I was drawn to Thales directly upon VO; his approach is to the world as a plurality of distinct but not systemically numbered forms; the world in Thales' view is a monster of energy, where if only a few strong parts manage to be coherent with one another, they become the head of this monster.

This is what I try to do with philosophers, and what should be done with Europe.

Pezer wrote:

But, and this is my point, not as cool as Zarathustra.

Did you see the sequels to my video? Did you hear the part about the cool machine?

Maybe it's irrelevant.

Ill get to it at leisure.

Quote :

Al great Greeks loved and feared, in short worshipped, the gods. It was an unimaginable weakness not to. Except in Plate. In him it was strength. But only the strength to deny life, unwittingly, out of pure strong strength. Plate could carry a 100 worlds on his shoulders. And did. It's just that none of those worlds was real. So Zarathustra scoffs.

But there is still too much Plate in Zarathustra, and too little Thales.

Thales was the last free man. Maybe also the first, but I highly doubt it. No, he was just the last of a kind that sometimes occurred, and of which there may have existed a few dozen at once at a fortuitous time.

I am only of the politics of the strong. I realize most of Plate's consecuences were a geometrical hell weilded by lower men. I only listen to the early Plate, the rest was him just following through with his consequences on the world of the weak. This, which ruled the last 20000 years, doesn't interest me. Only Wittgenstein got something of a glimpse of the Plate I see. When he jacked off thinking of him at night in his bed. The real Plate belongs to an Arena that is not of these weak men in this weak world.

Thankfully, Nietzsche was of my kind of politics. He gave us Zarathustra, and the overman.

Such men must exist again! I am such a man.
But I am not yet a type.

Pezer wrote:

Only Wittgenstein got something of a glimpse of the Plate I see.

Phaer enough.
Wittgenstein made the same beautifying mistake, the one N laughs at as voluptuous nonsense.

What did Zarathustra want?

To do away with the rulership of the weak, but also over the weak. And it is weakness to will a portion of humanity such as the weak simply away.

I am not of this politics either, I guess. Too selfish, too shelfish. Neither was Nietzsche really, and come to think of it, it was Zarathustra gave us the overman, not Nietzsche.

What would Thales say of an overman? Nothing, he was one. And Plate? He was something terrifyingly else. I have also been this terrifyingly else, and so has Nietzsche.

Though we are, also, overmen. For we overcome and self-overcome for sport. But our ambitions... Our ambitions are other.

Z wanted to see a healthy man.
Im convinced thats all he wished. Why the tale starts with the sun, the heart of health, which wants to behold itself in living beings.

And by other I mean something higher than higher, so I can't say higher. Lower? Maybe.