Q: How is a Philosopher-King Like a Proctologist? The Issue of "The Good" in Republic and Nichomachean Ethics

A: They're both concerned with the good of the (w)hole!

Alternate A: They both like looking up other people's butts.

Excluding slavery, wine, polytheistic sacrifice, right triangles, and homoeroticism, there were few things that the ancient Greeks appreciated better than a steaming hot cup of philosophy. In the days before George Stephanopoulos signed with ABC News, the Greeks had only their lovers-of-wisdom to serve as national superheroes, and though they were occasionally sentenced to grim and brutal deaths, these cerebral heavyweights were generally allowed to live long enough to lay down some solid ideas. Because they knew all too well that they were vastly more intellectually advanced than any of those other forerunners of Western civilization - indeed, they were right, as today's public libraries are lucky to boast even a very small Sumerian philosophy section - every so often, Greek philosophers took a siesta from their rampant lovemaking and slave-whipping to ponder the higher questions in life, some of which remain relevant today. Among the most pressing of their concerns was the ethical conundrum presented by ethics. Although I think we know a little more about 'the good' than did the Ancient Greeks (Goldfish Crackers = good. Stuffed animals = good. Tears for Fears = good. Culture Club = not good), it is marginally helpful in this age of anxiety to revisit some of our forefathers' ideas on the subject, if only to examine the disparities between the era's various more prominent opinions on the matter. Contrary to current popular belief, while all of the Greek philosophers dressed exactly alike, they did not think exactly alike. Socrates and Aristotle, often lumped into the group of Smartest Men Ever along with Jesus, Gandhi, and Kenneth Sacks, had some unique respective ideas, and by examining the latter's Nichomachean Ethics alongside of Plato's Republic we as lit-blogger (does this stuff not count as literature? Ohwhatever.) can gage the differences between the two. 

Book II of that timeless tome The Republic opens with a question, an intellectual call-to-arms of sorts, put forth by that cheeky little whelp of a protégé Glaucon, The Shining One. Never one to beat around the bush, Glaucon asks his bud Socrates outright if there is any point in maintaining a code of personal decency. Glaucon argues that the importance placed on 'justice' is entirely a human construct, a social contract upheld not of some sort of sick altruism, but rather out of selfishness and fear. He calls justice "a mean between the best - doing injustice with impunity - and the worst - suffering without without possibility of requital". In essence, Glaucon here is invoking what I like to call the sticky-poko scenario. In a lawless society devoid of a fundamental justice triple con (construct -> concept -> contract), if Groucho pokes Chico with a stick, Chico is entirely welcome to poke Groucho back, and then Zeppo, watching the altercation from his dark little corner, is 100% entitled to shank each of them with some sticks of his own; therefore, to avoid the otherwise inevitable extinction of comedic genius, MGM puts the kibosh on sticky-poky altogether. Glaucon further develops this idea when he whips out his Ring of Gyges story, telling of a man - considered by himself and by his community alike to embody the quintessence of the "just" - who finds the Ring of Sauron in the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie and subsequently goes on a whirlwind seduction-and-killing spree due to his nascent invisibility 'n shit. Glaucon asserts that, with "impunity" assured, a 'just' man will default to the thoroughly unjust factory settings. Perhaps just to further to rankle his mentor, Glaucon then dreams up theoretical "perfectly just" and "perfectly unjust" men. He then places these dudes in a philosophical vacuum, a world of extremes in which the "perfectly just man" is completely self-sacrificing and his antithetical counterpart cunning as Fantastic Mr. Fox (which is pretty damn cunning). The plebs in this dystopia are a tough crowd, to say the least, and in this scenario the "perfectly unjust man", appearing (through wily deception!) to be the just one, is hailed for his dastardly ways, while the "perfectly just one" is kicked to the curb time and time again. This is an example of what I have dubbed "The Buttons and Mindy Complex" (after the characters in the long-running Animaniacs sketch, naturally). At the start of each episode, Buttons, a loyal cartoon collie, is charged with minding Mindy, a she-toddler with a penchant for mischief. After Mother departs, Mindy proceeds to systematically wreak havoc on everything in sight, leaving Buttons to clean up her mess. Of course, Buttons gets blamed every single time, while Mindy gets off scot-free on the basis of her apparent innocence and goshdarn cuteness. Remarkably, each season, Buttons continues to try to do the right thing, often at great personal cost. Although Glaucon might view the cur's actions as laudable, he questions the benefits of such attempted altruism, and and would cite Mindy's successes and Buttons' repeated failure as examples of its potential detriments. 

Glaucon's question, at the heart of it, is "WHAT'S THE FREAKIN' POINT?" It's a challenging query to address, especially following all his mad convincing rhetoric. But God knows the Ancient Greeks loved them some challenges, and sure enough, Socrates calmly lets Glaucon's frenetic argument wash over him and comes up with an answer right quick. 

After two hundred and fifty-some odd pages of largely one-sided "discussion", Socrates puts a stop to the harangue by employing that time-honored favorite among Greek philosophers and pre-school educators: the "let's draw a picture" approach. Socrates instructs his young friend to imagine a metaphorical structure of the psyche, consisting of one part "many-headed beast", one part fearsome lion, and one part cowering, week little man, ALL welded TOGETHER like some kind of Burton-esque circus freak. He then proceeds to ask Glaucon his own set of leading question, deftly ensnaring the supple young philosopher-in-training. The "many-headed beast", you see, is meant to represent desire; the lion, will; the man, reason and rationality. Therein lie the hook, line, and sinker; Socrates knows firsthand that no self-respecting Greek philosopher can resist the promise of the two R's. A real man, asserts Socrates, is in control of his will, and he uses it rationally to trim the many-headed weeds in his garden of desire. Like a city, says Socrates, a man must establish his own constitution and adhere to it if he wishes to take part in larger society. And if he doesn't - well, that's just embarrassing (we built this city on oration, goddamnit!). It's a little bit exploitive, this argument, for how could Glaucon possibly retort? "No, I'll just let my garden get out of hand." Not bloody likely!

So there we have the Socratic answer - not bad, for a man of his age and extraordinary ugliness. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, either. Had Glaucon felt testy that day, he could have perpetuated the discourse with a snide remark about weed killer or something, but as it were, he laid it to rest.

For the time being, that is. It wouldn't be too long before another sage Hellenic would crack open the case file. 

Aristotle, as a general rule, tends more toward the loquacious than does Socrates. Book II of The Republic may last three hundred pages, but Glaucon seems chiefly responsible in that case, with his teacher only stopping him to kick in the occasional "hmm" or "no kidding". Socrates' M.O. was to let his mentees prattle themselves blue in the face for a while, and then spring the trap with a brilliant argument at the last minute, once they were all worn out and stuff. Aristotle preferred a didactic setting in which he alone played the didact, his students reduced to note-taking pencil pushers. Had Aristotle's been the chiton to which Glaucon had directed his line of inquiry, TR would have come out much, much longer than it already is (which is quite long). 

But his chattiness isn't the only thing that set Ari apart from his predecessor. Aristotle shared Socrates' fascination with the soul, and he, too, divvied it up into three parts, only his were a little bit different. Aristotle believed that the soul was comprised of emotions, capacities, and dispositions, rather than lions and heads and whatnot. Emotions were pretty much emotions; capacities, "our ability to experience the emotions"; dispositions, "how we react - well or badly - to the emotions". Aristotle argues that emotions are neither virtues nor vices, and that same goes for capacities, but the lattermost division is a little bit trickier. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were mercilessly teased by their peers, and this made them angry, that much we know, and we certainly can't hold them accountable for it. Because they were hormonal teenage boys and MMORPG addicts at that, they probably had a higher-than-average capacity for feeling this anger, which, although not necessarily a designation to wear proudly on one's sleeve, we can hardly blame them for either. But had the ghost of Aristotle been wandering the halls of Columbine High School the morning of Tuesday, April 20, 1999, he would have harbored zero sympathy for the murderers even given all of this because (and only because) of how they chose to act on their emotions and capacities. Although the two three-part soul-structures hardly align, Aristotle's concept of the disposition is roughly analogous to Socrates' idea about reason; according to Aristotle, a cow (f'r'instance) cannot be judged on the basis of its actions because a cow doesn't come equipped with reason (and therefore, the power to mould a disposition) like a human does. 

Aristotle continues to display shades of Socrates when he defines the "function of mankind" as "activity of the soul in accordance with reason". This all sounds very well and good, but what does it really mean? How can we as men (and ladiezzz) really be sure that we're all sufficiently reasonable and the like?

According to the A-Man, we need to be asking ourselves if we're hitting the mean? Not the arithmetic mean of the population, but the mean relative to us personally.  Take Harris and Klebold. They had some serious capacity for anger, and so squeezing a stress ball probably wouldn't have done much to help their cases - but, in the end, neither did shooting up their high school. Maybe they ought to have punched a wall, or shot a squirrel - hell, even pulling a full-on Donnie Darko would have been a better choice, so long as they made sure it was an actual pedophile whose house they were burning down (hey, it's Ari's advice, not mine). The point is that, for somebody else - one of those Christian girls they killed, for example - the mean for anger resolution would have fallen somewhere very different on the spectrum, maybe someplace between ten Hail Mary's and a rebellious extra sip from the Cup of Salvation. "Know thyself." It's an Ancient Greek aphorism - some folks attribute it to Socrates, but either way, you can bet your bottom dollar that Aristotle would have been well familiar with it. 

But back to Glaucon's original question. For Aristotle, being virtuous was more like being a virtuoso (mistranslation by way of Latin, perhaps?) than being a moral person. He thought that if you were 'virtuous' you excelled in what you did - which, if you were a man, was supposed to be chipping away at that "function of mankind" stuff. Therefore, for Aristotle, "activity of the soul in accordance with reason" was... good. So 'what's the point'? What do you mean, what's the point (pun intended?)? For the Ancient Greekies, few things were more shameful than a lack of virtuoso status. Had Aristotle been ready with his answer a few decades earlier, he could have owned Glaucon right on the spot.

But didn't Socrates say the same thing, to a certain extent? Certainly, he loved reason every bit as much as did Aristotle (and don't you forget it!). And, of course, the ability to keep one's 'weeds' in check is a skill set reserved for the virtuoso gardener. Of course, by attempting to model Socrates' and/or Aristotle's idea(s) of the well-kempt soul, vice will be eliminated, but only as byproduct. It's not like Socrates and Aristotle were cynical vice-lovers or anything (no more than you or I, at least), but, on their most basic levels, their soul blueprints didn't directly discuss the supposed evil inherent in what we call 'vice'. This stuff was pre-Christian, in a serious way.

So maybe those two crazy kids weren't so irreconcilable after all. And maybe the Greeks were more than sweaty, bronzed, olive-branch-toting pagans. They may have poisoned some of their great thinkers, but - to the best of my pitiful knowledge - they never had to worry about production codes or school shootings, either, so they must have been doing something right. So the next time you're down in SoCal and you decide to drop by The Habit for a quick bite, read that quote on the wall and stop and thank your Mediterranean forefathers. And above all, remember to keep your behinds hidden when consorting with philosopher-kings. 

Much love and xenia,

Ur Pal,

LK!

Sex, Drugs, & Palm Fronds (ew?): Less Than Zero + Imperial Bedrooms

"Set in a Los Angeles in the early 1980s, Less Than Zero has become a timeless classic. The coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a city devoid of feeling or hope."

"Bret Easton Ellis delivers a riveting, tour-de-force sequel to Less Than Zero, one of the most singular novels of the last thirty years.
Returning to Los Angeles from New York, Clay, now a successful screenwriter, is casting his new movie. Soon he is running with his old circle of friends through LA's seedy side. His ex-girlfriend, Blair, is married to Trent, a bisexual philanderer and influential manager. Then there's Julian, a recovering addict, and Rip, a former dealer. Then when Clay meets a gorgeous young actress who will stop at nothing to be in his movie, his own dark past begins to shine through, and he has no choice but to dive into the recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal."

I have to say, I don't reckon it's too bad of a gig, writing those book jacket blurbs. You get the [vaguely anonymous] honor of being the one to summarize the plot while tossing in some of your own analysis, and you're allowed to use ten-dollar words like "proclivity" without sounding like a total douche. I used to think that blurbing fell to the authors of the books themselves, but now I realize that there's a whole league of nameless writerly demigods (emphasis on the 'demi') toiling away for little pay and even less respect (can you imagine how the BJ* crowd would have been fared in the turbulent social waters of Fran Leibowitz's "Writing High"?), selflessly dedicating their services out of nothing but the goodness of their hearts and the feverish love of the text and all text before it? Okay, so I'm not doing a very good job of selling it, but I'm guessing it could be worse (watch "Dirty Jobs", you'll see what I mean).

I got into Ellis because I was a punky smart-ass teenager who liked riding in cars and going to parties at my rich friends' houses and listening to Crystal Castles and acting tragic. This was when I was 17, and now that I'm 18 and have the benefit of perspective I'm allowed to analyze myself in this way. More specifically, I wanted to start with Less Than Zero because I was having all kinds of bicoastal identity issues and trying to make sense of the seven years I myself spent growing up as a confused lass in La-La-Land (in the early 2000s, but same difference, really). Also, I won't pretend that the whole bit about Ellis having published the goddamn thing while 21 and still in college didn't seriously arouse my interest. I'm a jealous sucker for a literary prodigy any day.

Here is what I think you have to concede about Less Than Zero: it packs a wallop. It's gritty. It's disturbing. At times, it's unexpectedly, intensely powerful, and even, I would argue, startlingly well-written. Here is what I expects its critics - and God knows they are a bountiful bunch - would say: it's a little ridiculous. A writing teacher I had in back in high school (you know, like, three weeks ago) once described his beef with Ellis as rooted in the writer's fundamental way of conglomerating already uncommon experiences into even more literally incredible characters and scenarios. Flipping back through LTZ, I can see that he has a point. Clay's experience go from bad to worse on the disturb-o-meter as he retreats further into the shady web of "nihilism" and "disaffection" that seems to define his experience, his dark entanglements reaching a fever pitch somewhere around P. 190 of 208 (we're talking First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, June 1998), when our noble protagonist walks in on his buddies alternately playing Atari and having their way with a roofied and rashed 12-year-old girl tied to a bed before heading back to rubberneck rumors of a dead body dumped behind a popular club. Okay, so maybe in retrospect the whole scenario here is a tad far-fetched, but the point is that you really don't notice how over-the-top it is when you've been with Ellis since page one. Having read a lot of mediocre-verging-on-shitty work produced by the under-40 set (an embarrassingly large portion I shudder to have to claim as my own), I have to say that pre-legal Ellis is indisputably masterful when it comes to pacing and tone. He may be a manipulative bastard, but that's part of what makes him kinda great. Furthermore, Ellis's treatment of the subject matter plays, perhaps unconsciously, right into the hands of two distinct audiences: the common man, ever-yearning for an escapist roller-coaster ride, and the Über-rich of whom he writes. Think about it: most Americans never even stray near enough to rub shoulders with the kind of lifestyle Ellis describes in his books. While it's easy enough for them to dismiss the whole thing as a sick fantasy of depravation, Ellis writes with such compelling coolness, ne'er lapsing into narrative hysteria, not even when the going gets particularly gory, that they can't help but want it to be true, at least a little bit, so they're inclined to believe in spite of themselves. What works for the rich is that it is true that little bit. My ol' writing teacher put it best when he said that "certain elements ring true for certain people, but nobody's life is completely like that", but what you have to understand is that he wouldn't even have spotted those "certain elements" if he didn't teach in a school catering primarily to the spawn of the top tax bracket, in one of the wealthiest geographical locales in the country. He's seen those elements first-hand - we all have, in our community - and that's what keeps us reading. Ellis had me from his choice of epigraph - a quote from the song "The Have-Nots", by the 80s band X - "This is the game that moves as you play." Spend some time as an adolescent trying to find your way on the Beverly Hills party circuit (or the Hamptons party circuit, for that matter) and you'll be hard-pressed to find a more fitting description of the experience.

My suspicion is that Ellis probably gets a lot of flak nowadays because our culture is literally permeated with stuff like LTZ, but what you have to remember is that Ellis is the paradigm inadvertently responsible for all that stuff's coming into being in the first place. I mean, you can trace it as far back as you like (following the angsty-wandering-adolescent thread back to Salinger, or even Twain), but the Brat Pack gets its own Wikipedia page because it introduced a significant overhaul in the literary world. A bifurcation, if you will. You need only learn that Clay's ex-girlfriend is named Blair to realize that Gossip Girl owes a helluva lot to Bret Easton Ellis. And James Franco might be cute, but just because he can write a book about kids up to no good in the Southland doesn't necessarily make him better than any other practitioner of Ellis fan-fiction (yeah, I went there). Calling LTZ trite is like calling that Buffy episode where everybody turns into their Halloween costumes overdone (WHERE DO YOU THINK THAT TROPE ORIGINATED, PEOPLE?); proclaiming Palo Alto a groundbreaking work is like praising Midnight in Paris for its originality (yeah, I went there).

So. I finished Less Than Zero and lent it to the friend of mine whose life most closely resembles those detailed in it (sans all the kiddie rape), only to have her come at me with Imperial Bedrooms several months later. I don't know how I missed the fact that Ellis's latest work was this 2010 sequel, but I have to say, I was a little uneasy about cracking it. LTZ had been, for me, such a powerful portrait of a place and time and group of people that I wasn't sure I wanted to go back to revisit that group of people, and that place, in a different time altogether. I didn't really want it to change my perception of this particular branch of the Ellis-verse, but I ultimately decided that foregoing it would be a treasonous renunciation of canon and therefore actually essentially a big F U to the Ellis-verse. I generally steer right clear of series (serieses?) and so I never know what to expect when I'm handed a sequel. Naturally, Ellis went and mindfucked me right there on Page 1.

Most brilliant conceit for a sequel ever: the first-person narrator in the first book isn't who you thought he was. Hell, the first book isn't what you thought it was. For those of you not following the text at home, basically the idea is that one of Clay's friends - presumably someone we met in LTZ (or thought we met) - is supposed to have appropriated his identity for the purposes of penning LTZ, which - get this - exists (and actually makes an appearance as a tangible object towards the end [in IB's own fever-pitch scene, this one involving a brutally perverted weekend spent in Palm Beach with a boy and girl prostitute]) in the IB universe. It's at once so bizarre that it takes you a minute to get your head around it and so simple that you can't believe no author has thought of it until now. This set-up also allows Ellis to incorporate the 1987 Robert Downey Jr. film version of LTZ into the canon, accounting for discrepancies in its events in one fell swoop by telling us what we should have realized long ago - it's was a movie, based off a work of fiction, based off of true events. See what I mean about the beautiful simplicity of it all? I don't care what the post-modernists have to say - meta-narration is clearly alive and thriving within the work of Bret Easton Ellis.

Whereas LTZ was a disturbing portrait of adolescent activity and generational ennui, IB might fall into the categories of thriller, character study, and - perhaps above all - cautionary tale. Again, it's at times a little much to swallow, but the uncertainties inherent in the idea of first-book's-events-as-fiction raise questions about ownership, authorship, and truth that actually help to smooth over some of the unbelievability issues. Furthermore, the concept expertly accounts for the quarter-century-wide gulf in writing styles between the then- and now-Ellises - it implies that the works were written by two different people, and, in a way, they were. Although Ellis has clearly matured in a lot of ways, the sequel lacks the raw, biting teenage honesty that characterized its predecessor. Ellis is clearly confined by the temporal constraints of the thriller genre, and so his pacing, while still impressive, feels pretty consistently forced. Still, the sensitivity and perceptiveness of the old Ellis shine through in places, and particularly in IP's last paragraph:

"There are many things Blair doesn't get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know, and there would always be a distance between us because there were too many shadows everywhere. Had she ever made promises to a faithless reflection in the mirror? Had she ever cried because she hated someone so much? Had she ever craved betrayal to the point where she pushed the crudest fantasies into reality, coming up with sequences that only she and nobody else could read, moving the game as you play it? Could she locate the moment she went dead inside? Does she remember the year it took to become that way? The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away - I now want to explain these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I'm afraid of people."

Beautiful, right? Catch the way he referenced the X song again? That, my friends, is pretty fucking laudable.

I'm off to go put these puppies back on the bookshelf. Have fun, and remember - "la cocaina no es buena para tu salud."

Jussayin', is all.

-- LK!

*book jacket, sickos!