A lot of ancient philosophers weren't that keen on reading

There’s a Great Books blog I find pretty cringe, because it traffics in very broad generalizations about the past, and it uses vaguely neo-reactionary terminology that I think does a disservice to the complexity that’s actually in the books. I wouldn’t say I “hate-read” it, because my hope is always to find something interesting, but in truth I disagree with the entire mindset and approach.

I think over time I’ve become much more sympathetic to the notion that the Great Books are not merely the apex or acme of a certain culture—they are also books that arose in opposition to that culture.

In the linked blog-post, for instance, he draws an implicit connection between Socrates and Nietzsche, and implied that they both advocated a life of contemplation. But Nietzsche, famously, hated Socrates—he thought that Socrates was a sign of Athens’ decadence, and of its loss of the Dionysian energies that had marked its heights (cursory students of the GBs might forget that the death of Socrates in 399 BC came a few years after their loss of the Pelepponesian Wars marked the end of their empire—the height of Classical Athens as a political power predates Plato and Aristotle by a hundred years). Nietzsche reviled the kind of priestly culture that this blog post is extolling: he thought it led to a culture that overly emphasized purity and taboo.

And don’t we see exactly that tendency in the blog post? People who work for a living are reviled as slavish or slave-like, and we are exhorted to remove slavish tendencies from ourselves. But the horror of slavery, both for ourselves and for the ancients, was that it was not voluntary. Slavery was a social death from which no amount of nobility of spirit could free you. Murphy claims that, to the ancients, the harried businessman would’ve been seen as leading a lower life than the tradesman who studies Plato by night. But what examples are there, in the ancient literature, of praiseworthy tradesmen? Does Plato have any tradesmen in his dialogues? No—Socrates taught the children of the rich. To aristocratic philosophers, having to work for a living was inherently demeaning, just as having to take orders was inherently demeaning.

What Justin Murphy wants is to be citing the quietist philosophies: Cynicism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism. But you cannot wrap these philosophies into a neat bundle. Cynicism and Epicureanism were more democratic than Stoicism, and, as a result, they were less invested in quiet contemplation and study. Cynicism freed its adherents (who included women and slaves) by advising them to hold their lives cheaply: to own nothing, desire nothing, and give obedience to nobody. Epicureanism advises people to live for pleasure (albeit of a very limited, very achievable form) and to eschew politics—the opposite of what Murphy seems to be calling for, with his dismissal of “usefulness”. Both the Cynic and Epicurean free themselves from their base condition by acknowledging that their base condition is actually realer and truer than any claim to nobility. The Cynic and the Epicurean refuse to play the game of pretending to be better than others.

Stoicism, in contrast, has both a democratic and an aristocratic wing. It was famously founded by a freed slave, Epictetus, and although Stoicism didn’t advise eschewing politics or study, the prime focus was on achieving virtue. Regardless of your circumstances you could still be good. But of course ultimately one wonders, “To what end? And by whose standards?” The problem with being a “good” slave is that it is very difficult to hold onto your own sources of value when your society has a vested interest in corrupting and demeaning you. To their credit, aristocratic philosophers recognize it’s just very hard to hold onto your own beliefs when you’re reliant on someone else for your living. Nor did the more democratic philosophers disagree—that’s why the focus for both the Cynics and Epicureans was on reducing your own needs as much as possible.

But when a philosophy is focused on personal virtue, it is difficult for adherents of that philosophy to achieve power under a democratic system, because the very core of their philosophy is that they are better than the mass of people. And ultimately stoicism became very wedded to aristocratic power: Marcus Aurelius was literally an Emperor, Seneca was Nero’s chief minister, and Cato and Cicero were both members of the aristocratic party in the Senate. They absolutely would've looked down upon the writer of a paid substack. They might not have thought, as we do, that wisdom or learning frees us from the inherent servility of having to earn a living.

I suppose what I am saying is that the life we live today, all of us, every single one, is absolutely the kind of life that many of the writers of the Great Books would’ve hated. Socrates famously refused payment for his lessons—to do otherwise would’ve rendered him a sophist. What would he have thought of someone who lived by the pen? Nietzsche thought studying the Greeks would lead someone to ruin and decadence--what would he have thought of someone throwing him in willy-nilly with Plato? Philosophers throughout history, including Socrates, Lao Tzu, and Nietzsche, have been very negative about book learning itself, for the ways it leads to misinterpretation and lazy thinking. As Great Books proponents, we do not stand outside of history, able to pick and choose from the world’s wisdom and imbibe it pure: our very method is historically contingent, with assumptions that the ancients never would’ve shared (i.e. about the worth of book-learning and/or paid labor), which we need to defend on their own merits, without a simplistic invocation of the past’s imaginary authority.

We can’t just elide this disagreements by creating simple binaries between “moderns” and “ancients”. It’s just silly to pretend that this entire enterprise of learning from the philosophical literature of the past isn’t intensely problematic, and that it doesn’t involve serious (though not fatal) contradictions. There’s no simple lesson to be drawn from the Great Books even when it comes to the value of studying the Great Books themselves.