Outside the Polis

Interesting article from the Politics of Well-Being blog:

The way the Greeks first invented and imagined the 'separate self' was through the figure of the exile, the outcast or refugee. This figure was a nightmarish prospect for the Greeks, because they did indeed have a very strong communal sense of the self. Their identity was, as MacIntyre says, defined by their membership of the polis.

And yet people could be thrown out of the polis. They could be ostracized, sent into the wilderness. And that terrifying prospect haunted them like a nightmare. It raised the question, which niggled at them and would not go away: 'who am I when I am outside the polis?'

And we see this question addressed in some of the greatest tragedies of the fifth century BC. Two of the last plays that Sophocles wrote, for example - 'Philoctetes' and 'Oedipus at Colonus' - have as their heroes people who have been thrown out of their societies to wander in the wilderness.

For sure, both characters feel this exile as a sort of death. They feel like shadows, not fully 'there'. And yet they live on, they face this situation. They continue to exist outside of the polis. And by confronting this situation through drama, the Greeks were forced to recognize there was some thing, some 'self' or 'person', that carried on existing beyond the confines of the polis.

It is from this sort of imaginative confrontation with the figure of the exile that Greeks began to ask: does law and justice only exist within the confines of the polis? Are these purely communitarian concepts? What if we are wrongly and unjustly thrown out of the polis, as Philoctetes was? Is there no higher law we can appeal to?

It was Sophocles, in fact, who in some ways invented the idea of 'natural law' - the idea that there are higher laws of nature which a person can appeal to, even when they are at loggerheads with their tribe, as Philoctetes is, as Oedipus is, as Antigone is.

So with this invention of the idea of natural law comes the idea: I, as a person, might be right when my tribe is wrong. I might be 'closer to nature', closer to natural law, than my corrupt society.

So the relationship between the individual and their society becomes much more critical, more problematic, more fraught.

About 50 years or so after Sophocles, this idea of the self-as-exile gets turned into a philosophy by Diogenes the Cynic. Diogenes was an exile, he was thrown out of his native Sinope. He comes to Athens, and sets himself up in the market-place, living like a tramp.

Diogenes asserts his personhood outside of the polis. He says: 'I am not the citizen of any polis. I am a citizen of the world (cosmopolites)'.

Diogenes also develops the idea of the separate self being closer to 'nature' than the corrupt polis. The conventions of society corrupt us, Diogenes says. We should drop out and 'live according to nature'. Now, his idea of living according to nature is quite morally rigorous, and involves a sort of ascetic training. But it also involves embracing counter-cultural practices like free love, nudity and so on.

The Stoics, heirs to the Cynic tradition, were much less ostentatious in their rejection of conventional values. But they also absolutely had a sense of the self separate from the specific tribe or community. Again, the figure of the exile is key. Marcus Aurelius describes himself as a 'stranger' from his society, an 'alien' with very different values.

Like the Stoics, the Hebrew prophets were exiles from their society. Like Philoctetes, they wandered in the wilderness. Yet their wisdom was later made the mainstay of their society. A society that does not produce prophets and philosophers, outsiders and exiles, is doomed to stagnation and death. What Kevin MacDonald calls "the culture of critique" began with Abraham and Socrates, and is what distinguishes Judea from Egypt and Hellas from Persia. In other words, it is what distinguishes the Occident from the Orient, the 300 from the thousands upon thousands.

This is not to say all critics, all exiles, are to be idolized. Lenin should never have been let back into Russia. Critique that passes into resentment is poisonous. The exile should not be lawless, but loyal to natural law. Natural law is incarnate in positive law to varying degrees. When it is barely incarnate in positive law at all, the exile emerges to live and think out the distinction. We are living in such a time today. We need exiles, we need a community of exiles. Unfortunately it is not to be found in the descendants of Judea and Hellas, broken-down temples and moth-ridden philosophy departments.