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Reading Alcibiades as an Appropriative Self
Boris Rodin Maslov
In an oral talk he gave in 1982—often read as a
conspectus of his book on the "technologies of the self," which he never
completed—Michel Foucault went back to the sources of "the care of the self"
(epimeleia heautou), a concept central to his interpretation of the
Late Antique ethics. Here Foucault points to the importance of the spurious
Platonic dialogue Alcibiades as "the point of departure and a program
for all Platonic philosophy" and for the classical pedagogical tradition (23).
In Foucault’s account of the metamorphoses of the Greco-Roman subjectivity, this
work assumes pivotal significance: its articulation of the relationship between
Socrates and Alcibiades becomes the model for the proper tactics both in
education and in philosophical conceptualization of the self. This paper aims to
contextualize this large-scale ethical shift in the anxieties of classical
Athens. I will focus on the diverse literary and cultural models of identity
(heroic, sympotic, tyrannical) associated with the figure of Alcibiades, and the
reactions to the new conception of the self that it embodied.
But first, what does epimeleia heautou refer to?
Foucault points out that as a pedagogical principle it involves "a dialectic
between political and erotic discourse": the transition to active life in the
political sphere for Alcibiades is implicated with his passage from being an
eromenos (passive voice participle, corresponding to the English
"beloved") to asserting himself as an erastes ("lover"):
Concern for self always refers to an active political and erotic state.
Epimelesthai expresses something much more serious than the simple fact of
paying attention. It involves various things: taking pains with one’s holdings
and one’s health. […] It is used with reference to the activity of a farmer
tending his fields, his cattle, and his house, or to the job of the king in
taking care of his city and citizens, or to the worship of ancestors and gods,
or as a medical term to signify the fact of caring. (Foucault 25)
The figure of Alcibiades, then, embodied a radical revolution
in the thinking about public success in relation to inner well-being. The self
is no longer conceived of as an effect of social environment, but becomes an
object of the reflective activity of continuous education. This activity
constituted the field in which the Socratic philosophy positioned itself. It
demands introspection, self-tending, Socrates teaches, rather than conformance
to social norms and proper standards of behavior, to ensure the soundness of
one’s soul. One way to approach epimeleia heautou is to relate it to the
principle of the examination of one’s life, as it is articulated in Socrates’
speech in the Apology.
This ethical project of introspection did include the
dichotomy of the body and the soul, yet not in the Christian sense of the "evil"
vs. "good" binary but rather as the opposition of the exterior (coded as
"inessential") and the interior ("essential"). Notwithstanding this (and other)
historical overlaying, this project was carried on enthusiastically in the
modern age. Yet as the Apology testifies, the Socratic principle
"unexamined life is not worth living" was not sympathetically received in the
democratic Athens. The main charge brought against Socrates—that of "corrupting
the youth"—points to his profession as a teacher, and thus to the other aspect
of his ethical program, that of tending the self (in this case, not just one’s
own). It was this practice that provoked most resentment on the part of his
fellow-citizens.
Alcibiades’ biography mirrors the narrative of Socrates’
trial: not a theorist, but a practitioner of new ethics, he was one of the
Athenian youths, "corrupted" by the Socratic philosophy of the self (recall that
he was Socrates’ student). Despite the fact that he was the most admired
politician in contemporary Athens, he was, like Socrates, condemned by the
demos. I would contend that it is the revolutionary model of the cultivated self
embodied by Alcibiades—the other side of the Socratic coin—that proved most
provocative for his contemporaries. Indeed, it continues to haunt modern
imagination. Consider an example. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, one of the
preeminent critics of German Enlightenment, engaged in the humanistic project of
recovering the Individual, appealed to Alcibiades in an ode of the same title.
Lessing undertook to rewrite Alcibiades’ notorious flight to Sparta—for his
Athenian compatriots, plainly a betrayal of the fatherland—as an expression of
positive, "interiorized" patriotism. What is more, as a modern scholar remarks,
Lessing was modeling his own attitude on the hypothesized precedent of
Alcibiades (Barner 36).
We should not dismiss Lessing’s reading of Alcibiades as a
mere anachronism: it may be derived from Alcibiades’ self-representation—or,
more precisely, from the representation of his self-representation in
near-contemporary sources. In fact, Lessing may be paraphrasing his model’s own
words. The following quotation comes from the speech Alcibiades delivered after
landing in Sparta, as it is reported by Thucydides:
I claim also that none of you should think the worse of me if, in spite of my
previous reputation for loving my country, I now join in vigorously with her
bitterest enemies in attacking her. […] The Athens I love is not the one which
is wronging me now, but that one in which I used to have secure enjoyment of my
rights as a citizen. The country that I am attacking does not seem to me to be
mine any longer; it is rather that I am trying to recover a country that has
ceased to be mine. (469)
The remarkable twist of Alcibiades’ argument, readily embraced
by Lessing as that of a patriot at heart, depends on the essentially Socratic
dichotomy of the "interior" (and thus more genuine) vs. "exterior" affiliation,
even though, perversely, it is expressed in the language of lost and regained
citizenship. The overt, and unprecedented, egotism of Alcibiades’ words is
grounded in a paradigm of the cultivated self that seems to invert Socrates’
(and Foucault’s) emphasis on the tending of the inner world of the soul as
opposed to paying vain attention to the "exterior," or the body. In my view,
however, Alcibiades’ case points not to an inversion or perversion but rather to
a radically broad application of the principle of the tending of the self: it
covers every aspect of personality, including political reputation, social
status, demeanor, bodily appearance, etc. It is the consistency with which
Alcibiades’ rhetoric and attitudes, as read by his contemporaries, refer to his
editing of self as a means of realizing certain political aims that allows us to
relate it to the concept of epimeleia heautou, as it is elaborated in
Plato’s Alcibiades.
An example will help to clarify the point. Alcibiades’
flagrant manipulation of identity was clearly the most discomforting
characteristic for those men who wrote about him in antiquity: it marked him as
attractive and repulsive at the same time. As Plutarch tells us in the Life
of Alcibiades, the primary reason for Alcibiades’ popularity among the
Spartans was his "adopting Spartan customs in his everyday life":
Thus, in Sparta he was all for physical exercise, the simple life, and an
appearance of forbidding austerity; in Ionia for luxury, pleasure, and
indolence; in Thrace he could drink with the best; in Thessaly he was never out
of the saddle, and when he found himself in the company of Tissaphernes the
satrap, he surpassed even the magnificence of the Persian in his pomp and
extravagance. (267)
What made these transformations possible, I would argue, is
Alcibiades’ skillful deployment of various cultural models of the self. In what
follows, I would like to consider several literary allusions that, taken
together, suggest a strategy—which, given the kind of evidence we possess, most
likely represents a combined result of Alcibiades’ self-presentation and the
cultural efforts to account for it. This brings about remarkable semantic
effects, such as the oscillation of positive and negative connotations in
metaphors whose origin we can no longer securely establish.
Let us begin with an image Plutarch uses in his description of
the adaptive nature of Alcibiades: he could
assimilate and adapt himself to the pursuits and the manner of living of
others and submit himself to more startling transformations than a chameleon.
Even the chameleon cannot take on the colour of white, but Alcibiades was able
to associate with good and bad alike, and never found a characteristic which he
could not imitate or practise. (267)
The comparison with a chameleon is generic and represents a
strongly positive notion of duplicity. It finds its paradigmatic expression in a
passage of Theognis (ll. 213-18), who commends the ability of the octopus to
change its color as a marker of a clever (rather than treacherous) man. We
encounter the same image in Pindar’s fragment 43:
Child, likening your mind most to the skin of a sea beast, living in the
rocks, consort with all cities: willingly praising the one who is present, think
different sorts of things at different times.
(Translation is my own.)
Notably, the hypothetical context of Pindar’s fragment, given
the figure of address to the "child," is the same as that of the lines of
Theognis: it is a didactic admonishment addressed by an older man
(erastes) to the boy (eromenos) at the symposium. We can
therefore read the image of the chameleon-like self as an integral part of
sympotic identity. Alcibiades, who, both as a boy and as a grown man, lived an
aristocratic life of debauchery and excess in Athens, must have associated with
the vestigial tradition of sympotic wisdom. As Thucydides tells us, the
resentment of the demos against Alcibiades was provoked by the outrages reported
to take place at the parties in which he took part: as a matter of fact, he was
sentenced to death for profaning Eleusinian mysteries at one such party.
Precisely because the sympotic mentality was antidemocratic,
it is hard to evaluate Plutarch’s use of the chameleon simile. It allows for
several interpretations: it can be read as a negative characterization of
Alcibiades’ duplicitous personality (as antidemocratic), as an image that serves
to exonerate him of a charge of duplicity (because the image has aristocratic
connotations), or, most temptingly, as a representation of Alcibiades’ identity
as he himself pursued it.
A similar hermeneutic aporia will confront us when we turn to
another cultural metaphor, used to circumscribe the phenomenon of Alcibiades. In
Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades, Alcibiades is represented as a paradox
of Greek cultural masculinity: he is at once an effeminate man, ruled by
passions and lacking self-control, and an epitome of the Athenian citizen who
would never suffer to be subjected to another’s power: "He was a man of many
strong passions, but none of them was stronger than his desire to gain the upper
hand over his rivals" (246). To illustrate this ideological oxymoron, Plutarch
adduces a remarkable incident that supposedly happened to Alcibiades as a
boy:
Once, when he was hard pressed in wrestling, rather than allow himself to be
thrown, he set his teeth in his opponent’s arms as they gripped him and held on
so hard he would have bitten through them. The other let go his hold and cried
out, "Alcibiades, you bite like a woman!" "No, like a lion," was his
reply. (246)
To uphold his status as an unimpeachable and impenetrable man,
Alcibiades has recourse to a quite womanly way of defense (in fact, his
opponent’s exclamation casts the whole scene as a metaphor of a failed sexual
assault). In countering the charge of unmanliness, Alcibiades displays his
dexterity in shifting cultural identities. The comparison with a lion is marked
as belonging to the concept of epic hero (specifically, it is elaborated in
extended similes of Achilles in the Iliad).
Alcibiades’ self-designation as a lion exhibits his aspiration
for the Homeric model of masculinity, which, however, is not entirely
unproblematic in the context of classical Athens: it was probably coded as
elitist and aristocratic, and may have served as an indication of Alcibiades’
tyrannical inclinations (Wohl 351). According to Plutarch, the feeling of the
demos for Alcibiades, in harmony with that of the Athenian political leaders (to
whom his behavior "suggested the habits of a tyrant" [258]), "have been very
aptly expressed by Aristophanes […] in the guise of a metaphor:
Better not bring up a lion inside your city,
But if you must, then humour
all his moods. (258-59)
In these two lines, the lion simile assumes hubristic
connotations, while the Homeric overtones of the word are suppressed. The
sentiment conveyed in the lines of Aristophanes is akin to the anxious
expectation of the tyrant in Theognis (ll. 39ff.), where the city is said to
give birth to a man "who will set straight our evil hubris": a terrible
retribution for the presumptuous behavior of the aristocratic oligarchs in
charge of the city. Thus, the lion metaphor can be read both as belonging to
Alcibiades’ own construction of his identity and as a sign of cultural anxiety
surrounding his personality; most likely, it is both.
The pattern of literary allusion in the representations of
Alcibiades suggests that the philosophical and ethical paradigm of epimeleia
heautou can be related to a concomitant cultural development: the concept
of the self embodied by the figure of this scandalous Athenian politician. Our
evidence does not suffice to posit the latter either as a deviant product of
Socratic ideals or as a provocation that influenced the conceptualization of
subjectivity in Platonic (and post-Platonic) thought. As far as our
reconstruction goes, however, Alcibiades can be viewed as an instantiation of
what I would term the appropriative self—a personality generated through the
shuffling of cultural and social identities and affiliations. Significantly, we
are unable to locate the work of cultural construction, clearly underway on the
ideological site that was the figure of "Alcibiades": was it a part of the
self-positioning of the historical Alcibiades, or a mediated expression of
anxieties surrounding the (democratic) subject in classical Athens? This
question will probably remain unanswered, yet the hermeneutic challenge it
contains itself testifies to the existence of a social reality, which provided a
background to the large-scale ethical shifts investigated by Michel
Foucault.
Works Cited
- Barner, Wilfried. "’Vaterland’ und ’freywilliges Elend’: Uber Lessings
Alcibiades." Poetik und Geschichte: Viktor Zmegac zum 60. Geburtstag.
Ed. D. Borchmeyer. T¸bingen: M. Niemeyer, 1989. 22-36.
- Foucault, Michel. "Technologies of the Self." Technologies of the Self:
a Seminar with Michel Foucault. Eds. L. H. Martin et al. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. 16-49.
- Plutarch. The Rise and Fall of Athens. Nine Greek Lives: Theseus, Solon,
Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Lysander.
Trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960.
- Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. Rex Warner.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972.
- Wohl, Victoria. "The Eros of Alcibiades." Classical Antiquity 18 (1999):
349-85.