Short Take: The Idea of the Philosopher-King, And The Poison of Divided Virtue

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Maybe the most important Concept in all of western thought is that of the Philosopher-King.

And the significance, of course, is that he's BOTH.

There isn't a priestly hidden class of eunuchs and foreign ethnics doing his policy and thinking for him, there isn't a caste system where he's the highest Kshatriya, but he needs to respect the Brahmins in their domains...

No there is a military, political, academic, and spiritual unity in the will and intellect of the one man, and to a large extent the corpus of the best men of the western tradition have aspired and judged themselves by this standard.

Socrates was an experience and admired soldier during the Peloponnesian War, and this served as the basis of much of his mentorship of his students, notably the celebrated Philosopher/Commander Xenophon, as well as more infamous students like Alcibiades and Critias.

And in his ideal of the Philosopher king we find the unity of purpose and vision that within 3 generations of students would produce Alexander, and by extension aristocratic conqueror-king that defines western civilization.

You can see this Martial, political, rhetorical and spiritual unity in Caesar (a great Alexander admirer) who was both Consul, Dictator, General, and Pontifex Maximus (head preist), and law reformer....

And you can see it in the great subsequent kings like Henry VIII (Unified head of church and state in Britain), in Napoleon, In Hitler... and countless others.

It is the central organizing principle of the entire Idea of a ship's captain in the early modern age, invested with Godlike power and Godlike responsibility, against almost cosmic uncertainty

And you can see it in almost all the great industrialists...

Indeed the entire idea of the modern Founder is largely taking the idea to its logical conclusion, the unity of deal maker, presenter, inventor, first worker, employer, earliest investor, and final decision maker in one man of unified vision, uncompromised by neither disparate visions nor power struggles...

This is often presented as a wish fulfilment, but it is largely the opposite, in modern times the dream of the upper-class is to attain power without responsibility or rather the status and spoils of power without responsibility...

by contrast The Philosopher-King universally stands precarious, neither Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, or Hitler died peaceably in a state of victory, rather each was riding the tiger the majority of their adult lives... and each suffered massive consequences after criticizable but heroic effort.

This is why so much of Socrates (passed over by so many academic analysts, and would be priests and philosopher-advisors/courtier-sycophants) is concerned not with a formulaic political program or ways to maintain power, but with the nature of virtue...

Against the incredible fog of war and millions of unexpectable asymmetric temptations and traps that beset a small military platoon, let alone a nation, the philosopher king must become a paragon and saint of his intellectual, personal, military, and spiritual virtue...

He must decide in the midst of no information things lesser men cannot choose with perfect information, he must understand the capabilities of himself and others and successfully demand even more than either imagine possible.... he must react to disaster with not only courage but resolve, forethought, and vision... holding and dragging out the fight and struggle of himself and others against hopeless inevitability long enough that mere dumb luck or the mistakes of his foes grant him an opening...

He must move himself, and institutions of his friends and then hundreds and then thousands, with the deliberateness, creativity and daring of a vastly more agile and uncompromising creature...

Where committees might hesitate and choose a middle option, he must go further to the left or right of even the most extreme options presented to him, instead of waiting he must move faster on the opening play than any expected to move the entire game...

He must do all that a division of power and decision making, and the hesitation of a committee, and the contest of credit of a bureaucracy could not...

And in so doing he might achieve the impossible.

.

This is the western aristocratic spirit. The idea that one man might achieve preeminence in scholarship, oratory, invention, and the field of battle. That he might be at the cutting edge of science and of the bayonet... That his individual virtue might cause spiritual, political, military, and technological reforms and changes of his people.

That he might be a "Hero" in the Homeric sense of physical deeds, the spiritual sense, the political sense, the ideological, and the "Morale" sense, if not the moral sense.

Be very VERY wary of people who'd try to steer you away from this and accept some philosophical of scholarly intermediary for understanding your own action and causes, or who'd encourage you to scholarly obscurity and non-physical pursuits whilst "brutes" and "less educated men" carry out the task of actually enacting things in the world. don't accept a Bureaucracy's "process"

An aristocrat must be warrior and scholar, athlete and writer, proprietor and adventurer, scientist and poet, cavalryman and sailor...

He must aspire to preeminence in all things as they may be needed because he struggles not for position in a hierarchy but to create order out of a chaos... To be the true leader of those beneath him, and to produce outcomes, not excuses or plausible demonstrations of effort...

and he knows that merely being the best there ever was might not be enough.

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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak