What's Wrong with Mud, Dirt, and Hair?

Socratic Virtue Reconsidered

There has been a good deal of scholarly effort devoted to the question: just how fine-grained, exactly, did Socrates, and then Plato, and, later still, the various figures we call ‘Platonists’, mean for their respective conceptions of ‘Form’ to be?  At the one extreme, characteristic of the neoplatonists, there is only one Form, that of the Good or, tellingly, the One.  At the other extreme, we have reason to think that at least mathematical entities and moral concepts, and perhaps even natural kinds and animal species, deserve their own Form. 

In the Parmenides Plato has Socrates make a rare statement concerning what certainly does not qualify for membership in the realm of the Forms:

Are you also puzzled, Socrates, about cases that might be thought absurd, such as hair or mud or dirt     or any other trivial and undignified objects?... Not at all, said Socrates.  In these cases the things are     just the things we see; it would surely be too absurd to suppose that they have a form (Parmenides  130d).

Why is Socrates less than enthusiastic about the suggestion that mud, dirt, and hair might deserve their own Forms?  And why not a form for excrement?  Fingernails?  One could argue that hairiness is always already taken care of by the form of whatever hirsute creature we may consider; thus a Form of hair is unnecessary just because there are forms for each and every kind of hairy thing.  But what about dirt?  Dirt is not a feature of some other thing, like hair is of hairy creatures.  Dirt is one of the basic ingredients of the world.  Perhaps, one might suggest, the reason why there is not a Form of dirt is the same as the reason why there is not a Form of ugliness: ugliness is not a thing itself, just a deprivation of beauty.  But dirt and ugliness, even if we disdain them equally, are not alike ontologically, in this respect.  For if anything, cleanliness is the member in the ‘dirtiness-cleanliness’ opposition that we obtain through deprivation, i.e., through the removal of dirt. 

Perhaps there is in fact no better reason to be adduced for the exclusion of mud, dirt, and hair from the realm of Forms than the one Socrates himself offers, namely, that they are, so he thinks, trivial and undignified.  But this reason may itself be of tremendous importance; indeed, it might fairly be called the originary exclusion by which the proper domain of philosophy, or at least the main stream of philosophy, was defined for millennia to come. Philosophy is born the moment the body and its excretions, along with their immense humor and ritual potential, get screened out of the public sphere.  As Nietzsche recognized, “Philosophy says away with the body, this wretched idée fixe of the senses, infected with all the faults of logic that exist, refuted, even impossible, although it be impudent enough to pose as if it were real.”

Yet In addition to the dignified man of the Parmenides, we have also inherited another, very different picture of Socrates, on which he is not in the least bit concerned with dignity, on which he enthusiastically breaks down the most solemn myths about the divine causes of natural phenomena by comparing them to the most undignified bodily functions.  Consider this famous statement made by the character, ‘Socrates’, in Aristophanes’ Clouds:

First think of the tiny fart that your intestines make.  Then consider the heavens: their infinite farting is thunder.  For thunder and farting are one and the same.

Scholars have widely agreed that it will never be known to what extent the Socrates of the Clouds was seen by Aristophanes as representing the true Socrates. They have, moreover, agreed, that to the extent that Plato’s account is to be believed, Aristophanes’ depiction of the events is to precisely that same extent to be doubted.  Arrowsmith maintains that Socrates serves in this play simply as a “convenient comic representative of the sophistic corruption which is the play’s real subject.”   Brickhouse and Smith note that Socrates was perceived by Aristophanes as characteristic of the “new intellectualism” that was displacing the traditional forms of Athenian culture, including the classical Greek comedy. What is important for us, in any case, is the historical fact that Socrates was perceived in this way, that he was able to serve as a representative of the ancient Athenian radical myth-debunkers Aristophanes so liked to lampoon.  The presumably incorrect account of Socrates’ teachings in Clouds appears to have later motivated the official accusation against him of, as reported by Plato, meddling “in the matters of heavens and the earth below.”

What are we to make of these two different pictures of Socrates?  On the one hand, we have the Socrates of Clouds, the Aristophanic Socrates who denies Athens’ gods, subverting the social order with his purported explanations of the Athenian cosmos as based in mere convention, and as explicable in strictly ‘naturalistic’ terms (to use an anachronism) by those wise enough to perceive the arbitrariness of the conventions.  On the other hand, we have the Platonic Socrates who explicitly denies forms to some of the most basic ingredients of nature, on the grounds that they are undignified, and who, significantly, identifies the soul as something altogether separate from nature, not thunder or a vapor or anything of the sort, but something absolutely immaterial, and most fully in its element when freed of the body.   

The anthropologist Mary Douglas maintains that a complex social system with strict rules of conformity tends to result in the requirement of strong bodily control for the individual, and in a tendency, as she writes, to disembody or etherealize one’s actions in a social context, screening out, as much as possible, all unintended or irrelevant organic processes. Douglas identifies this tendency in complex social systems as the ‘purity rule’, and has extensively examined how it relates to the concept of pollution in African cultures.  While we do not have any space here to go into detail about the distinctive characteristics of fourth- and fifth-century Athens, it is fair to say, and easy to verify from other sources, that this society qualified, if any ever has, as ‘complex’ in Douglas’ sense.  As she writes:

A complex social system devises for itself ways of behaving that suggest that human intercourse is disembodied compared with that of animal creation.  It uses different degrees of disembodiment to express the social hierarchy.  The more refinement, the less smacking of the lips when eating, the less mastication, the less the sound of breathing and walking, the more carefully modulated the laughter, the more controlled the signs of anger, the clearer comes the priestly-aristocratic image.

If the official indictment of Socrates recorded by Plato originated in Aristophanes’ depiction of Socrates, as Arrowsmith maintains, and it does genuinely reflect at least one side of Socrates’ philosophy, as Burnyeat maintains, then perhaps it is time to give the Aristophanic Socrates some consideration, and also to ask why we tend to simply assume that the jury at Athens was so far off in its verdict.  The simplest answer is that we have chosen one version over another, namely, the one that corresponds best to the values of our complex society, which, other than occasional outbursts over the past couple thousand years, has to the extent possible screened the body out of its official proceedings.  But this screening-out is not something inherited from Socrates; on the contrary, Socrates’ legacy had to be modified in order for him to be seen as a defender of the etherealizing tendency identified by Mary Douglas. 

If we go back early enough in the history of Socrates’ legacy, we see that some of his followers were inspired to move in quite the opposite direction.  One extreme sect of Socrates’ followers, the Cynics, developed a Lebensphilosophie devoted almost entirely to the ostentatious resistance to the pressure to screen out the body.  They believed that they were following the Socratic dictum that virtue is the sole requisite for happiness by, in effect, taking their social dissent to an unsurpassable extreme in the public flaunting of their socially irrelevant organic processes.  Their philosophical convictions were expressed, for the most part, not in writing, but in gesture.  Allow me briefly to comment on the difficulties this poses the historian of philosophy in his effort to pin down exactly what counts as an element of philosophical Cynicism. In her book on Hellenistic ethics, The Therapy of Desire, Martha Nussbaum excludes the Cynics, on the grounds that there is “far too little known about them and their influence, and even about whether they offered arguments at all, for a focus on them to be anything but a scholarly quagmire in a book of this sort” (8).  She is, no doubt, right. We have just a few, fairly uninformative letters of the original Greek cynics, in particular, Diogenes and Crates, who were near contemporaries of Plato.  These convey very little of what would later be attributed to the Cynics.  Diogenes acknowledges wearing a cloak, using his cupped hands to drink from a well rather than lugging a cup around with him, and other such subtle features of a pared down, virtuous life.  In the first century CE, there is a proliferation of pseudepigraphic, Cynical epistles, which attribute to Diogenes some rather more extreme behavior: public eating, public defecation, in sum, a treatment of the public space as though it were his own home.  Diogenes Laertius, in his 3rd century CE survey of the Lives and Opinions of Famous Philosophers, reinforces this picture of the shameless Diogenes of Sinope.  In the Roman imperial period, the Cynics had become transformed into a stock literary type, with schoolchildren forced to memorize chreiai about the shameless deeds of Diogenes.  In short, we may have to rest content with attributing to Diogenes the person the same dubious status in the history of philosophy that we attribute to, say, Pythagoras: a representative of a position, or, even more loosely, of a way of looking at things, that may or may not have ever been instantiated by an actual historical figure.  If we go along with a certain strain of interpretation current in 20th-century academia, this is what we’re always doing anyway when we attach names to positions defended in centuries-old texts.

Michel Foucault writes of the Cynics:

The high value which [they] attributed to a person's way of life does not mean that they had no interest in theoretical philosophy, but reflects their view that the manner in which a person lived was a touchstone of his or her relation to truth -as we saw was also the case in the Socratic tradition. The conclusion they drew from this Socratic idea, however, was that in order to proclaim the truths they accepted in a manner that would be accessible to everyone, they though that their teachings had to consist in a very public, visible, spectacular, provocative, and sometimes scandalous way of life. The Cynics thus taught by way of examples and the explanations associated with them. They wanted their own lives to be a blazon of essential truths which would then serve as a guideline, or as an example for others to follow. But there is nothing in this Cynic emphasis on philosophy as an art of life which is alien to Greek philosophy.

I take this last point to indicate that it was not the Cynics’ view of philosophy as a fundamentally practical activity that constituted a subversion of accepted Greek values, but only the particular practices they saw as issuing from the ultimately theoretical, Socratic view that one need only to be virtuous to be happy.  Rules of conduct are irrelevant to eudaimonia. And indeed, Foucault continues, “the Cynic attitude is, in its basic form, just an extremely radical version of the very Greek conception of the relationship between one's way of life and knowledge of the truth. The Cynic idea that a person is nothing else but his relation to truth, and that this relation to truth takes shape or is given form in his own life —that is completely Greek.”   What exactly is the scandalous component of the Cynics’ total commitment to the truth?  To cite a few examples, Diogenes reasoned that since he satisfied one bodily function, eating, in the marketplace, there was no reason why he should not also masturbate in public.  He is even reported to have “wished it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly.” They also enjoyed eating flatulence-causing legumes before attending public lectures, in order to disrupt the speaker and disturb their audience.   

Precisely the sort of meddling for which Socrates was found guilty, which posits a fundamental likeness between the human body and the phenomena of nature, and denies as mere convention the explanation of either in terms of mythology, is picked up by the Cynics and interpreted by them as the most important element of Socratic moral philosophy.  In A. A. Long’s words, “of all the routes by which Socrates’ philosophy was transmitted to the Hellenistic world, that followed by the Cynics was the most startling and, in certain respects, the most influential.”   In other words, whether Socrates was in fact first and foremost a meddler in nature and a debunker of myths, and thus also a subverter of the dominant values of his polis, as a matter of historical fact there has been a strain of thought that took Socrates as its hero and set about vigorously debunking and subverting, in the name of Socrates.

For the Cynics, all social rules imposed an excessive somberness on the way in which people in society went about fulfilling their needs, all involved too much false and pretentious dignity; knowledge of the truth brings with it the knowledge that a life in keeping with nature need be encumbered by no somberness at all.   Thus, for them, the goal of philosophy, conceived as the task of disconcealing the truth, was to publicly violate these ultimately arbitrary, and thus, in their view, untrue, rules.  They did this by sleeping in the street, masturbating and copulating in public, and farting when the spirit moved them. If we follow Foucault’s explanation, their intention is not as juvenile as it may seem on the surface.  The Cynics developed a practical philosophy that consisted, we could almost say, in nothing more than a gross and unacceptable display of their bodily functions, precisely in order to demonstrate, through action rather than argument, their disdain for a particular, self-deceiving conception of the human being as something other than bodily. 

While, again, there is no room to go into any great detail concerning the social-historical context in which Socrates and the Cynics lived, other than to say it met the criterion of ‘complexity’, it is worth noting that the Cynics were, for the most part, from the aristocratic class.  Like the spoiled children of wealthy parents who go to expensive colleges, and end up growing dreadlocks and eating expensive organic food and going to elite yoga studios, the Cynics belonged to an elite minority that developed an intense interest in living in accordance with nature, without evidently developing any awareness of just how difficult it is to will oneself out of one’s own, largely inherited social position.  It may be that the greater disciplinary constraints on children of the elite, the greater pressure to behave ‘properly’, plays a role in the emergence of the desire among elites to expose the ‘proper’ as an arbitrary convention through subversive behavior and appearance. Douglas notes:

Socialization teaches the child to bring organic processes under control.  Of these, the most irrelevant and unwanted are the casting-off of waste products.  Therefore all such physical events, defecation, urination, vomiting and their products, uniformly carry a pejorative sign for formal discourse.  The sign is therefore available universally to interrupt such discourse if desired.

The Cynics were inspired by Socrates, we might say, to interrupt the business-as-usual discourse of their social milieu.  A large part of their discontentment with their society stemmed from the pressure it placed on its members to keep their appetites in check, and they accordingly made use of the available signs to disrupt the discourse of their retentive society.

Interestingly, the Cynics’ renunciation of earthly luxuries was seen by early Christians as a precedent for Christian asceticism.  As Derek Krueger notes, Origen pointed to Diogenes to defend the poverty of Jesus, and John Chrysostom drew on widespread appreciation of Diogenes’ simple life to justify Christian monasticism. Some commentary on the Cynics can’t but call to mind Jesus’ most basic message, e.g., Arian writes: “A rather nice part of being a Cynic comes when you have to be beaten like an ass, and throughout the beating you have to love those who are beating you as if you were a father or brother to them” (Discourses of Epictetus 3.22.54).  It is noteworthy, to say the least, that a pagan advocate of public masturbation and defecation is invoked by the Church fathers to buttress their defense of a particular interpretation of the Christian life.  And this may lead us to wonder just how much the ultimate renunciation of the ascetic monks differs from the dog’s life of the Cynic.  Was the Cynic message first and foremost that one should seek the satisfaction of one’s bodily pleasures above all else?  I think the willingness of the Church fathers to invoke Cynicism suggests otherwise. 

I propose that Diogenes’ consumption of food in the marketplace, very much against the mores of ancient Greece, etc., should not be seen as a sort of wanton abandonment of the self to the indulgence of the bodily pleasures.  Rather, his actions were meant as a radical demonstration of the conviction that the body and its demands are easily taken care of: you don’t need money to hire a prostitute: you’ve got your own two hands; you don’t need money to buy a meal: the garbage is filled with perfectly decent food.  So quit worrying about your cursed body’s incessant demands and focus on what matters, namely virtue.  For virtue, as Socrates taught, is the sole requisite for happiness. 

    But is virtue something simply negative, the absence of distractions or hang-ups?  The short answer is, for Socrates, as for the Stoics, and, in their radical version, the Cynics, “yes”.  Virtue is that state of the self that opens up the possibility of ataraxia, a positive state of indifference, lack of dependence on externals that are hard to come by.  In Socrates’ terms, wisdom and virtue are the same, and both of these are nothing other than the approximation of death.  What the Cynics offer is a demonstration of how, practically speaking, this state can be attained so long as we are all imprisoned, to go back to the Pythagorean language, in desiring bodies.  The obscenity of the Cynics was not mere actionism à la Rudolf Schwarzkögler, it was meant to show, in extremis, that what might be proposed as an objection to Socratic moral teaching, namely that we are all embodied earthly creatures with desires that get in the way of our pursuit of virtue, could be easily dealt with.  If their methods are received as radical, they are so only in the sense that they disrupt a social order so far from virtue as Socrates conceived it.  If their point were genuinely accepted by their society, they could ipso facto rest content that they no longer need make it, that they no longer need, e.g., eat flatulence-causing legumes before attending public lectures, which, while a thrill, certainly must have grown tiresome after a while.  But isn’t this always the case for radicals?  If Cynicism is to be seen as anything more than a mere vulgar stunt pulled off by imbalanced members of the social fringe, then we must understand it as a radical interpretation of Socrates’ teaching that virtue is the sole requisite for happiness, where virtue is nothing other than an ataraxia-informed wisdom, realized against the background of a society, not so different from ours, that was far, far from true virtue, and presumably also from true happiness.  From what I have understood of the historical context of the Cynics, there is no reason not to see them in this way. 

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