As long as we are children, we will not put up with a lot. A poor man who has been made to get used to pressure takes things differently. Only late in life comes a feeling of how badly people behave and a glimpse of how things could be different. At first this glimpse is fugitive, evasive, the individual falls back on himself as quickly as possible, without needs. Thus Bias said that he carried all his possessions with him; he did not need much and did not ask much of others. Life without luggage appeared to be the best from both an economic and a social point of view, this sort of thing was never wholly forgotten. Friction becomes slight, envy and cheating come to an end, there is no cause for either among those who are idle. Epigrams from the time of the Seven Sages were all of the same opinion in this respect, in a figurative sense they all wish that man should be contented. He can be happy with a little and only with a little; too much property, says Solon, should be shared. It is not riches that are desirable for us, but virtue, and that alone makes communal living easy. Nobody is to be considered happy before his death, this maxim also means that there is no relying on riches, that they are advisable neither for an
individual nor as the condition of lots of people. As general and condescending as all this is, it still seeks a quiet medium. This medium was to feature that happiness which grants the same thing to everybody and thus persists.
Diogenes and the exemplary beggars
If life that was too fat was made lean, then where was the place to stop? Certainly not at anything to which man had previously been accustomed, nor at sweet contentment. Diogenes lived out everybody's wish of going to the dogs;* for man and the group he forms are the false, devious animal that has become artificial.
Antisthenes, as head of the Cynics, taught from the start that the real community was like that among dogs who know how to beg and are not shy of doing so; a free herd, satisfying its simple needs. All people should live together as this loose herd, and no nation should be separated by borders from another. Gold is abolished, marriage and households too, and extreme absence of needs (something which dogs do not possess of course) frees people from one another and from their surroundings. Since the man dreamed as a dog is no longer involved in unnecessary pleasure, his other involvements come to an end. He becomes independent of the circumstances which stand around life, he and his kind are at home in every situation, as long as it is an undisturbed one, one which has as little to do with the state as possible. Freedom therefore begins here by no means boldly and lavishly, it begins fugitively and offensively. Thus among other things Diogenes publicly masturbated from his barrel, and also regretted that he could not drive away his hunger just as simply. Krates and Hipparchia, a girl from a wealthy family who adopted the life of a beggar with the Cynic, publicly consummated their sexual relations in a pillared hall. Apart from dogs the simple manners of their forefathers served as a model, satisfied with life and unafraid of it. The olden days with rye bread, milk and turnips were the only healthy, natural ones, and people who declare their faith in them get along with one another as easily as all those who have eaten their fill. Also almost all work becomes superfluous amongst those without needs, only a little splashing on the water is needed to keep the naked swimmer afloat. And a city of barrels for the free man to live in makes it easy enough to keep envy at bay. Above all, the man who is frugal in this way sleeps soundly at night, and
* In this section, Bloch plays on the original meaning of the word Cynic: doglike.
walks upright during the day; for he does not settle in the vicinity of conditions over which he has no power.
Aristippus and the exemplary scroungers
But parallel to this ran the lure of the merry life which goes short of nothing. The original golden age was then conceived not as that of frugal equality but as that of lavish equality. Instead of a rugged bohemia, one of pleasure and scrounging here fills a proper existence. It taught that pleasure is the human share, enjoyment for its own sake, independently of stilling our needs, that is what distinguishes man from the animals. The power of enjoyment, it was affirmed here, elevates man above dogs, above animals, above the satisfied ascetic (Marx would by no means have denied this). Human wishes unlike animal ones ultimately aim at orgy, and they are
completely natural in this respect. Thus Aristippus, the head of the Hedonists, taught that not absence of needs but the unlimited, shrewd capacity for enjoyment was the natural human condition; and that it should be cultivated. A Hedonist breed thus arose, in contrast to the Cynic one, and its state is dreamed as one of mutual or patronizing egoists. The best of all communities is that which is least of a hindrance to the highest possible pleasure of its citizens. The Hedonist group demands no individual sacrifice, recognizes neither family nor fatherland, least of all prohibitions which hamper an individual's desire for happiness or even simply determine it from the start. This links Cynics and Hedonists, the freethinkers of absence of needs and of pleasure; they are both anarchic. Their own lives are to be the state that is organized, social life is to be unobtrusive like strolling in the marketplace. Aristippus delighted in his social independence which allowed him to wear the beggar's cloak and fine clothes with equal propriety. He delighted, as Xenophon relates, in the political independence of his roving life, in his ubi bene, ibi patria, and he set it up as an example. Dependence was allowed at most within friendship, a later Hedonist by the name of Annikeris even taught that a city of friends should be established, not because of its usefulness but because of the selfgenerating goodwill and the pleasure that results from it. The democratization of this essentially aristocratic image of enjoyment was furthered by the fact that even the poorer citizen benefited from slavery; on this basis a commune of enjoyment could be generally conceived. But above all, the Hedonistic image corresponded much more exactly than the Cynic one to the
conceptions of the Golden Age, to those that still remained vivid. In his malicious comedy ‘The Birds’, Aristophanes indicated the scale and the power which the popularity of this image of pleasure had assumed. The image of pleasure became a rebellious one in the play in so far as it was never accommodated, never remained undisturbed. After all, the heroes of the comedy, Euelpides (Hopegood) and Peisthetairos (Trusty Friend), who were little satisfied with the earthly Fortunate Islands, decided to remain in the clouds with the birds and to propose that they found a new state in the air. Yet the different, considerably more earthly and actually existing utopia of that time is also already cited in the comedy. It is really against this that Aristophanes directs his armoury of wit:
A man will never die of want any more, Because everything is the property of everybody, Bread, cake, garments, salted meat,
Wine, peas, lentils and garlands.
This verse — one like it has already appeared in connection with derided wishful images (Vol. I, p. 436) — undoubtedly refers to recollections of the Golden Age which were beginning to grow dangerous and serious at that time. The verse satirizes the plebeian ‘natural state’ with its reference to lentils, and with the profusion of other goods it satirizes the Hedonist ideal, or rather: the democratic sellout of this ideal. The violent belching which fills such travesties is Epicurus among the people as it were; freedom is meant to appear as gluttony. It appeared among the Hedonists themselves as wine for all, in so far as they are human beings and not slaves. The freedom of pleasure was democratic, despite boundless egoism; for happiness was conceived in generous terms once again, in terms of live and let live, with polite good manners.
Plato's dream of the Doric state
It is one thing to mock such wishes, another to render them harmless. Plato undertook to do the latter, in such a way that he both took up the utopian drive and reversed its trend towards freedom. Plato wrote the first detailed work on the best state, the ‘Republic’, and this work is as well thoughtout as it is reactionary. Here there are no vague dreams any more, no vague notions dreamed through to the end, but neither is some
original golden age longed for and extolled. Lost freedom (of a rustic or lavish kind) is replaced by unattained order: the dreaming is consolidated by its content and becomes imperious. And it is even based on an empirical model here, a model which is found very close at hand (with a realism which is surprising in this great idealist), namely in Sparta. The love for Sparta and its aristocrats began to answer the interests of the Athenian upper classes after the Peloponnesian War, their interest in dismantling democracy. The ruling class always tends towards the dismantling of democracy as soon as conditions arise like those described by Plato: ‘The present state is falling into two states, that of the poor and that of the rich, who pursue one another with implacable hatred.’ At such times there is a tendency towards total state authority, towards a police state, one based on order. Thus Plato's utopia (the paradox of a utopia of the ruling class) became an idealization of Sparta; the growing tension between classes recommended Sparta as the strictest Greek state, as the remedy based on authority. Farmers, guardianauxiliaries, guardianrulers, these three castes of Plato's ideal state have their prototypes on the Peloponnese; they are the Helots, the Spartiates and the Council of Elders (Gerusia). Thus Plato takes up the popular dreams of an ideal state and reverses them; thus he builds a splendid socialutopian ship and gives it a headwind; thus he transposes the land for which the ship is destined and replaces the Golden Age with that of black soup. Only in passing does Plato also recall the Golden Age as that of plenty, indeed he adds that only through the ‘worsening of the world’ had authorities and laws become necessary. And the famous verdict on the natural state as being one of pigs refers not to its obscene but to its undemanding character. Socrates gives an account of these undemanding creatures in the second Book of the ‘Republic’, and how their healthy state is to be described: ‘We will give them peas and beans, and they are to roast myrtleberries and acorns at the fire and wash them down with a sip of wine.’ And Glaucon then calls this ‘a state of pigs, for these are just the things we would throw down for them to eat as well’ — whereby the Cynic state is therefore also rejected from the angle of its undemanding nature, not merely from that of its lack of discipline and its bohemia. But immediately afterwards, in the same Book of the ‘Republic’, Socrates also tackles the Hedonist state, the state of gluttons. He treats its effeminate happiness ironically: ‘We must introduce painting and gold and ivory and everything like that … This also includes all heroic hunters, the imitative artists, the poets and their servants, the rhapsodists, actors, dancers, showmen, artists in all sorts of fields, among
others those who make jewellery for women.’ And a higher happiness was only granted to the Golden Age in so far as people in those days exploited the advantages of their situation in order to gain higher knowledge. So there is no room for any Saturnalia in Plato's temple state, no carnival of nature, none of art and superfluous beauty: a thoroughly ruled world arises, the rational structure of a permanent realm. Its people have a Doric toughness, its order remains precisely that of Spartan aristocratism. Even the holding in common of women and other things (among the upper castes), even this so apparently dangerous similarity of Plato's ideal state to the anarchy of Cynics and Hedonists stems from the Spartan camp. In Sparta too an elderly man could supply his wife with another man, and an unmarried man could borrow the wife of his friend; in Sparta too the possession of gold and silver was forbidden the warrior caste, the provisions and tools of others could be shared. The Gerusia though, Lycurgus' Council of Elders, only provided the framework for the upper caste in Plato's state, the philosophical caste; for even the eldest members of the Gerusia were not Plato's academicians, quite the opposite. So when Plato called for the Philosopher Ruler, when he taught that the state would not become a good one until the regents became philosophers or the philosophers became regents, the antiintellectual model of Sparta is certainly abandoned in this one point, as far as the content of the framework provided by members of the Gerusia is concerned. But it is noteworthy that even the caste of philosophers in Plato's utopia does not last: the deeply disappointed work of his old age, the ‘Laws’, wholly does without an aristocracy of education. Instead, in this work the ideal society is posited entirely as a police state, now incidentally retaining private property and marriage. The ‘Laws’ are instructive as a restrained, and as it were burntfingered social utopia; they content themselves with the design of a second or even thirdbest state. Of course in this diminished ideal, precisely because it is diminished, the growth of reaction is particularly strong, extending as far as a criminal law against political and particularly cultural innovators; so that it almost seems as if even Plato — who had become highly conservative as a result of his pessimism — no longer regarded such an ideal of order as — an ideal. However, definition of the state and criticism of the state in the ‘Republic’, and even more so in the ‘Laws’, are exclusively orientated around the idea of tiered architecture, tiered human architecture.
And what is more, this structure is already supposed to be exactly predetermined in the human predisposition. Man accordingly has three
forces or parts in his soul, desire, courage, and reason. These three active voices are arranged in order of value from bottom to top, thus there is a various order of rank even here. Desire, courage, and reason are allocated to the loins, chest, and head; as each predominates they form the fiery character of southern peoples, the bold one of northern peoples, and the levelheaded character of the Greeks. They constitute the three kinds or directions of levelheadedness among the Greeks: the levelheadedness of desire is obedience, that of courage bravery, that of reason wisdom. Greek virtue derives from levelheadedness: the virtue of obedience thus further constitutes the farmers, the virtue of courage the military class, and the virtue of wisdom the class of philosophical legislators. So in this way a state willed by nature so to speak is supposed to arise, a state whose laws so little contradict nature that they complete and crown nature in the social stratum. Very much unlike the Cynics and Hedonists, Plato consequently deduces no libertine Natural Right from nature, but a directly hierarchical one: the principle of suum cuique is contained in physis itself. The third Book of the ‘Republic’ even maintains, in a literal sociological application of chemistry, that those who are suited to be regents have had gold added to their souls, the warriors silver, and the traders copper and iron. So the suum cuique certainly seems easy; Plato also adds that as a rule children will resemble their parents, so that ‘by nature’ a son from a lower class would only rarely fit into a higher one or even a soldier's child into the trading class. Statecraft in general is the fusing of basic characterologicalsocial circumstances into a harmonious whole, into the harmony of ‘justice’. We will often encounter the structure of Plato's ideal state later on; for it is that of a longedfor ‘state morality’. The fact that (along with the slaves) there was the broad exploited mass of peasants and traders in this ideal state, this pervasive immorality was cloaked by the ideology of a tiered justice; and the exploitation here, as is obvious, was ideologized by the doctrine of an innate servant soul (of base metal). The upper classes are completely supported economically by the work of the third class, and their communism is not one of work but one of non
work: of the police and the learned Gerusia. It is not as if Plato did not want to ‘tax’ the lower class with the military and monastic communism of the upper classes, for instance; as if it were too tough. He sees it instead as too noble, the philistines are not worthy of it, they must definitely continue to have cares, unlike the aristocratic commune which has no cares any more, but takes care, of its state. Even the task which Plato assigns to the upper classes of watching ‘that poverty and wealth do not creep into the state unnoticed’,
— even this variety of financial asceticism, applied to the third class, simply means letting no rich and hence dangerous plebeians appear on the scene. Despite these not exactly revolutionary contents, Plato's ‘Republic’ subsequently continued to act like a socialist, indeed communist work. It was regarded, particularly in the
Renaissance, as a kind of set of instructions for socialism, supported by the powerful authority of the great philosopher. Thomas Münzer, the theologian of the German peasants' revolution, also cites Plato's utopia, moreover in the spirit of Omnia sint communia, not in the spirit of suum cuique. This is a productive misunderstanding: the image of the Golden Age, which Plato had given a Spartan turn, was now again recalled in terms of primitive communism, and as if Plato, by distinguishing the commune as what was best for his nobility, had also been the guide to this best form of society for all. Thus the ‘Idea’ as it were of social utopia, one without classes and stations, was restored in this version of the great idealist. There and then, Plato's best state looked different of course; he had the wishful dream, in the framework
Renaissance, as a kind of set of instructions for socialism, supported by the powerful authority of the great philosopher. Thomas Münzer, the theologian of the German peasants' revolution, also cites Plato's utopia, moreover in the spirit of Omnia sint communia, not in the spirit of suum cuique. This is a productive misunderstanding: the image of the Golden Age, which Plato had given a Spartan turn, was now again recalled in terms of primitive communism, and as if Plato, by distinguishing the commune as what was best for his nobility, had also been the guide to this best form of society for all. Thus the ‘Idea’ as it were of social utopia, one without classes and stations, was restored in this version of the great idealist. There and then, Plato's best state looked different of course; he had the wishful dream, in the framework