In the Beginning Was the Logos : Reason and Revolution (2023)

In the Beginning Was the LogosReason and Revolution1 Paul Allen Miller But before being reined in and tamed by the kosmos and order of truth, logos is a wild creature, an ambiguous animality. —Derrida, Dissemination 1162 Socrates in the Apology says that the jurors who voted to convict him and will shortly vote to kill him probably won't believe it when he says it is not an option for him to remain silent, that he cannot live a quiet life. It is not that Socrates is especially chatty. He is not your common gossip or bavard. It is a specific kind of conversation he has in mind. "I say that this is the greatest good for a human being, each day for arguments/words to be made about excellence (poieisthai logous peri aretēs) and the other things about which you hear me conversing (dialegomeou), examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not liveable for a human being" (38a8). This is of course a very famous passage. In many ways it is the foundational passage of the western philosophical tradition. It says that a life without logoi, a life in which we do not have conversations about the things that are most important to us, a life where we therefore do not examine and test ourselves with and in the presence of others, where we do not produce accounts of what the world might be, is one not worthy of human beings. It might not be too strong to say the concept of western reason originates in this passage, that we are here witnesses at the birth of the logos, as that which makes sense out of our world of things and experience. But even as this may be true as a genealogical matter—or true enough, since such births are always multiple and at least partially abortive. As Socrates famously describes himself in the Theaetetus, he is a midwife who delivers his interlocutors of thoughts that are but partially conceived (148e–151b). Yet, I would also want to argue, that Socratic reason is no longer our reason, that ours has become impoverished. It has become incapable of speaking to our experience in a way that moves and convinces people. The reconstruction of reason, I want to argue, is an urgent political and existential task. The logoi (and the plural is important) for which Socrates is willing to give his life do not, in fact, limit themselves to the forms of rationality that are predominant [End Page 11] within our postcartesian, scientific, and neoliberal world: the objective, the repeatable, the quantifiable. The recognition that reason has a history, that reason as a singular unity does not exist, but rather there are and always have been a plurality of reasons is, I would contend, the necessary first step toward a reconstruction (rehabilitation?) of the rational not as a border guard that determines the admissable, not as a wall to keep out the impure or unclean, but as a tool for living, as a way of thinking differently, as a project to remake ourselves and the world. In what follows, I want to look at two key moments in the history of Western reason, the Socratic and the Ciceronian, not as emblems of a lost Golden Age to be recovered nor of a timeless standard to which we must adhere, but as two moments in the history of thought that are germane to the world we live in and yet offer possibilities for understanding truth and reason that have been marginalized in our current situation. The present essay, then, is offered as a genealogical endeavor. As Paul Veyne wrote of Michel Foucault's study of Christian and Stoic ethics at the end of his life: From one age to another, problems are not similar, anymore than is nature or reason: the eternal return is also an eternal departure … only successive valorizations exist. In a sempiternal new deal, time endlessly redistributes the cards. Foucault's affinity with ancient morality is reduced to the modern reappearance of a single card in a completely new hand. (Veyne 226) In a modest way, through an examination of expanded, partial...