Carchia

A Peitho relief. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is a small marble Roman relief of Peitho (it is about 15” x 5” wide) of what used to be a larger decorative plate illustrating Helen being persuaded by Aphrodite to accept her husband’s voyage to Troy. The personification of Peitho in the form of a seating lady accompanying Aphrodite is not rare in classical representation, and if we are to follow Friedrich W. Hamdorf’s genealogy, it was actually the norm when it came to visual depiction of the deity [1]. What is striking in this Roman relief of Peitho is precisely the unassuming silence of the figure, who is merely gazing down and touching a dove or bird with her right hand and sunk in thought. Is not this mystical silence what bathes the mythical figure of Peitho, which according to Euripides has no other sanctuary than that of language?

The Peitho relief stands as a fragmentary of an ancient memory where the event of language implicated persuasion instead of commanding; a sensibility of saying instead of legitimate validation; granting space for the poetizing in the world instead of rationalizing, in the advent of the polis and the bios politikos, the transcendental condition of the political community [2]. Peitho will become rhetorical once it has taken the autonomos form of the transaction and the mutilated word by which nothing is ever said except a lethargy of the immanent movement of the logos. In the Roman relief Peitho does not communicate because she dwells in the poetic lacuna of language. 

In fragment 81 of Aeschylus’ Niobe we read a mysterious outline of Peitho: “Death desires no gifts; one can gain nothing by making sacrifice…from him, alone among divinities, Persuasion stands aloof.” The ossification of language in hand with the general autonomization of rhetorical separation, in the words of Gianni Carchia, will mark the destitution of Peitho’s poetic magic allowing death to speak through the fierce instrument of demagoguery and and the production of justifiable certainties [3]. In a world without the irruption of the mythic-magical element personified by Peitho, there is only general declensions towards persuasion as a form of predication: to convince, to obey, to follow, and to concede belief as persuasion was transformed linguistically [4]. It is no surprise that the civilizational decline of the mythos of Peitho coincides with the rise of the rhetorical techné that guaranteed the autonomization of the world (private & public, appearance & truth); but, most fundamentally, the stabilization of the resource of rule-based lexicon as the dominion over exteriority.  

Even the Sophist Gorgias in his Encomium of Helen defines Peitho as “Language is a power ruler who with a tiny and invisible body accomplishes deeds most devine” [5]. The process of deification of language (in the sense of the sources of archê) can topple the divine in order to mobilize all the energies no longer in the “uninterest encounter between souls” (Carchia’s words), but rather by grounding a necessity that, first and foremost, establishes its ontological solvency in the unending rhetorical polemics. As the sensible myth of Peitho withers into organized grammar and rules of predication, it is noteworthy to recall that in the monotheist tradition the organization of the invisible in becomes colored by “faith” in the law. 

This could explain why Saint Paul seemed to have made a conscious attempt to oppose any remnant of the Hellenic persuasion (πειθώ) in favor of “demonstration of faith” (ἀποδείξις). As we read in Corinthians 2:4-5: “My words and proclamation were not based on the persuasion (πειθώ) of wisdom, but on demonstration (ἀποδείξις) of the Spirit and power… that your faith would not be  based on human wisdom, but on the power of God. Indeed, “apodeixis” (ἀποδείξις), the word deployed by Paul, will guarantee persuasion only in revelation and the Christian philosophy of history; meaning that Peitho will remain, like the Roman relief from the First Century, a mute aesthetic artefact and a petty reminder of the expulsion of ethōs from language. 

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Notes 

1. Friedrich W. Hamdorf. “Peitho”, in Griechische Kultpersonifikationen der vorhellenistischen Zeit (Zabern, 1964), 64-65.

2. Francis Kane. “Peitho and the Polis”, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol.19, N.2, 1986, 118.

3. Gianni Carchia. “Eros y Logos: Peitho arcaica y retórica antigua”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Técnos, 1994), 23-24.

4. María Dolores Jimenez López, “‘Persuadir’ en griego: el marco predicativo de peitho”, in Word Classes and Related Topics in Ancient Greek (Peeters Louvain-La-Neuve, 2006), 175-176. 

5. Gorgias. Encomium of Helen (Bloomsbury, 2008), 44.

Thrasymachus, the paradigm of force. by Gerardo Muñoz

Few characters are more memorable in the first book of Plato’s The Republic than the sophist Thrasymachus, whose shadow is still very much looming around us given that it is obvious that today everything in our contemporary world is optimized through force. Thrasymachus’s strict identification of reserve power (potentia) with justice (ius) is in many respects prophetic, since it already subordinates the ideal of justice with practical reason and effective norms, a crowning achievement of modern political power. This is why Leo Strauss could claim in The City and Man that Thrasymachus’ position is ultimately a defense of the thesis of “legal positivism” that brings to fruition the legitimate order and the police powers of the city. In other words, Thrasymachus discovered that the requirements for the permanence of an active social order of a police entails the mediation of the two dimensions of legal authority: obedience and the internal recognition of a secondary rule that liquidates the possibility of raising the question of what is “just” (now internal to the organization of internal powers). If the aim of “justice” becomes the optimal application of effective rules and norms that provide the services of the city, then political rule becomes an infallible and uncontested logic. Politics is ultimately force, and force is the energy organized by politics in the city. 

As Strauss writes: “Thrasymachus acts like the city, he resembles the city, and this means according to a way reasonably acceptable to both…Thrasymachus is the city. It is because he is the city that he maintains the thesis of the city regarding justice and that he is angry at Socrates for his antagonism to the thesis of the city. Thrasymachus’ rhetoric was especially concerned with both arousing and appeasing the angry passions of the multitude, with both attacking a man’s character and counteracting such attacks, as well as with play-acting as an ingredient of oratory” [1]. Well before the general equivalent of contractual commercial relations, Thrasymachus’ rhetorical deployment functioned as a techne alupias against the unwarranted passions of human beings. And, contrary to the common opinion that separates the craft of sophistry from the unity of rational discourse (logos), Thrasymachus’ defense of force presupposes the autonomy of language in the rhetorical construction (very much like modern poetry centuries later) to serve as the hospice of rational pondering in the polis. To make language the exclusive battle ground: even in antiquity it was said of Thrasymachus, “you are just like your name, bold in battle”. And Plato wanted to hold on to this picture. This ultimately means – and it is still at the center of our contemporary predicament – that the coming of the “Social man” in the city is only possible on the condition of a primary transformation of the event of language and the speaking being. This is why if Thrasymachus was the “pioneer of rhetoric and elocution”, as it has been claimed, it is only because his appeal to the pragmatics of political power was mediated by the invention of the ‘mystery of the prose style’; that is, of reducing the non-grammatical mediation to the orderability of a prose adjusted as an instrument to the world [2]. The enslavement of the passions is the commencement of the social prose in which we are forced to act in our alienated roles.

Only when language becomes rhetorical communication it is possible to grasp the world as a case of an entity of legibility and knowability, where reasons (inclusive and exclusive, that is, as what can be delegated for my own interests) and political rule converge without residue. What will become obvious through the cybernetic dominion over “information”, it was first elaborated as the pressure of rhetoric where the logical force of predication took its force to disclaim myth as the unappropriated experience of worldly phenomena. The art of rhetoric does not render “truth” obsolete; it rather incorporates theoretical and systemic deductions – a flattening of logos without myth -, so that the event of truth can no longer stand as the unsurveyed horizon of the intelligibility [3]. The consolidation of force means this much: that Thrasymachus’ prose of the world is not just an exclusive political program of the “fictitious”, as much as a program for the total attainability of the world; a world that by becoming fully accessible and objective, it pays the high price of eclipsing the presence of things, and the event of truth and naming in language. A world without kallipolis that will only distribute and perpetuate ad infinitum injustice as the corollary for the triumph of immanence of force.

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Notes 

1. Leo Strauss. The City and Man (University of Chicago Press, 1964), 78.

2. Bromley Smith. “Thrasymachus: a pioneer rhetorician”, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1927.

3. Gianni Carchia. “La persuasión y la retórica de los sofistas”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1994), 60.

Sobre el Nomos Mousikos. por Gerardo Muñoz

En lo que sigue quiero organizar algunos apuntes de lectura sobre la noción griega de nomos mousikos, y para hacerlo quiero glosar algunos movimientos del último capítulo de The Birth of the Nomos (2019) del estudioso Thanos Zartaloudis, quien ha elaborado la contribución filológica y conceptual más importante del concepto hasta el momento. La noción de nomos mousikos pudiera orientar de manera decisiva la prehistoria de una institucionalidad no necesariamente jurídica, previa a la captura del derecho, y en tanto tal capaz de iluminar la relación entre derecho y forma de vida (ethos). En efecto, Thanos Zartaloudis comienza por recordarnos que en el Fedro Sócrates refería a la filosofía como la “más alta mousikē”, y que, en este sentido, la mousikē era una forma de vida, un ethos cuya exploración experiencial se daba mediante la mousikē [1]. Pero la mousikē tiene una prehistoria o una protohistoria antes del momento platónico, que en realidad es su último momento.

En sus inicios la mousikē constaba de una dimensión experiencial mayor que la technē, pues prepara las condiciones para la realización más educada del carácter (ethos) (341). Y, por lo tanto, se entendía que antes que la polis estaba mousikē, y que no habría vida en la polis sin la necesaria condición de la mousikē. Zartaloudis no llega a relacionar la mousikē con el ideal de la ciudad bella (kalapolis), pero sí nos dice que esa “experiencia” de la mousikē garantizaba un orden; una noción de orden acústico, más ligada a la voz y a la memoria que a una sustancia medible de la vida en la polis.

La mousikē, por lo tanto, apelaba directamente a las Musas, y, por extensión, a una función de la transmisión social de la memoria. Según Zartaloudis se trataba de: “una iniciación con la divinidad, que era saber común, y también poder de la música para instituir un saber común o una comunidad mediante la mimesis” (348). La mousikē constituía una forma institucional mínima, invisible, que tampoco era reducible a la especificidad de la música, sino a la asociación con las Musas. Y con las Musas se hacía posible guardar el silencio de la palabra, que entonces se entendía como un ejercicio fundamental de la paideia del ethos.

Aquí la mousikē asume su condición protofilosófica y especulativa más importante: la mousikē es el nombre que se le da al evento originario de la experiencia lingüística de lo no-lingüístico. Zartaloudis nos dice que la memoria que transfiere la mousikē es siempre de antemano trágica; y es trágica porque en ella se registra, o se intenta registrar, la pérdida de la voz como apertura del logos en la phonē. De manera que la “Musa es, el nombre de un acontecimiento que intenta ser recordado como advenimiento de la palabra, como cosmopoesis musical” (355). La Musa es, entonces, no solo ritimicidad de la mousikē, sino la memoria de la pérdida de toda divinidad que, en última instancia, dispensa la inmortalidad mediante el recogimiento de lo mortal, como sugiere Zartaloudis glosando a Jean-Pierre Vernant.

Las Musas ejemplifican una relación entre la voz y el orden social mediante la dimensión del ritual que Zartaloudis refiere de manera directa al problema de la armonía. Y es mediante este problema que la mousikē se convierte en un tema abiertamente político, o de interés político puesto que: “Armonía no era una cuestión de darle forma al caos, en el sentido de lo medible y lo cuantificable, sino de escuchar el chaosmos y ser capaz de anunciarlo” (362). Por eso ahora se puede entender porqué mousikē eventualmente pasó a ser una forma educativa política del ethos, así como un episteme técnico de las matemáticas y de la filosofía. De manera que mousikē era la forma mediante la cual se podía activar una regeneración del kosmos desde la experiencia de la phonē en el decir. La organización de la mousikē para los griegos poseía un poder cosmopoetico. Y Zartaloudis indica que el fenómeno del kosmos no era otro que el de aletheia en la canción. Se trataría, entonces, de un ritual de la mimesis del orden de lo melódico.

Es probable entonces que el nomos mousikos haya sido el sobrevenido técnico de transponer este problema de la voz como acontecimiento a formas genéricas de la melodía y de la tonalidad (382). Y posteriormente en Platón la mousikē obtiene un carácter jurídico y social, por el cual el acontecimiento queda plasmado en el orden de la legislación estatuaria. O sea, nos encontramos ante una forma temprana de la invención del “costum” como norma escrita. He aquí uno de los misterios que Zartaloudis registra, pero que tampoco logra desentrañar del todo de manera explicita: ¿cómo entender el tránsito del orden musical previo a su dimensión estamental del derecho, y luego su confección en la sutura del nomos mousikos? Zartaloudis cita al estudioso Mittica quien argumenta que dicha transformación es de orden de la analogía, y necesariamente de un desarrollo temporal, cuya ambigüedad permaneció por mucho tiempo en la antigua Grecia.

Pero será en Las Leyes de Platón donde la analogía encuentre su mayor grado de sofisticación y perfección, puesto que las reglas mousike serán transpuestas al ordenamiento (taxin) de la polis. Y ahora el poeta aparece ‘ordenado’ para la finalidad de un ‘bien común’ de la polis, ya que el poeta compondrá en la medida en que parmanezca dentro de la ley (nomina), apele a lo bello (kala), y contribuya al bien (agatha) de la ciudad. La dimensión del kosmos-mousikos, nos dice Zartaloudis, ahora aparecía albergarse en el artificio de la palabra. Y solo de lejos era posible escuchar “el pensamiento acústico” de Heráclito. Pero entre sonoridad (nómos) y ley (nomós) algo irremediablemente se perdía: el ritmo incongruente a la forma – el orden melódico, ahora devenía un molde para el orden social. Así se edificaba el nomos mousikos como actividad cívica. Y era el filósofo quien portaría la divisa de la “más alta mousike”, cuyo mysterium era residual a la apariencia de la idea. Por lo tanto, la mousikē era una instancia profética de toda filosofía, como en su momento pensó Gianni Carchia.

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Notas 

1. Thanos Zartaloudis. The Birth of the Nomos (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).