Nietzsche and Plato on Ancestral Authority

266 Pages·2017·1.84 MB·English

by  Janice Freamo

Google, Grandfathers, and God(s):
Nietzsche and Plato on Ancestral Authority

by

Janice Freamo

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

Political Science

Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario

© 2017, Janice Freamo
Abstract
The ever-changing technological landscape is shifting generational patterns of authority.
Authority is grounded in knowledge. Knowledge—technical, moral, or otherwise—
commonly proceeds from an older generation to a younger one. This is changing.
Younger generations in the Western world are posing their questions to Google rather
than Grandpa or God. Such challenges to the hierarchy of generational knowledge are
not entirely novel though, and the history of Western political thought suggests that
they are telling indicators of impending political change.

The study engages two examples, one in Nietzsche (“Second Treatise” of On the
Genealogy of Morality) and one in Plato (“Book One” of The Republic), wherein lapsed
generational authority is discussed alongside the topic of justice. In the texts, both
authors proceed from a definition of justice associated with ancestral authority and
described in the language of debt and credit. Justice is what is owed to one’s ancestors.
Ancestral knowledge provides the first codification of duties or obligations. It is the first
sense of law. It describes a clear division between the ruler (to whom one’s obligations
are due) and the ruled.

To date, the vast literature on these authors has not yet considered how the precise
concept of ancestral authority informs the political meaning of their works. This is
particularly the case for Nietzsche. The contest that he invokes with Plato, his
philosophical ancestor, requires meditation on the significance of this idea. This
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comparative analysis meets this objective in two ways. First, it analyzes the selections to
understand what happens politically and philosophically when the primary direction of
intergenerational education changes. Second, it proposes that Nietzsche’s politics of
cultural formation should be understood as a non-nostalgic recovery of ancestral
authority. This concept is central in Nietzsche’s understanding of the shift from kinship-
based models of justice to what he calls in §12 of the Second Treatise, “misarchism” or
the “democratic idiosyncrasy” of being against the idea of rule itself. His account of
justice describes the theological conditions that informed the shift from tribalism to
universalism in the West, and, by this account, he forces an assessment of the limits of
overwriting the grandfathers’ generational knowledge.
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Acknowledgements
A project of this nature is not an individual feat. I owe a great deal of gratitude to those
who inspired it in the first place, those who sustained it over the course of its
development, and those who saw it through to its present state of completion. Its muses
were two. My paternal grandmother, Mary Mandryk, and my husband’s grandfather,
“Poppa” John Stelter (now deceased), loom large in the thoughts behind these pages. As
I witnessed the societal reception of this generational cohort, and closer to home, the
familial dynamics brought on by their advancing age and greater need of care, I began to
think about intergenerational relationships, and whether or how they were changing. As
a line in one of my daughter’s books goes, “some questions are tricky and some hold on
tight.” This was such a question for me. I am fortunate enough to be married to a man
who knows and appreciates the grip of such questions and the value of the intellectual
endeavour and with whom I could repeatedly discuss and revisit the fundamentals of
the project. It is impossible to do justice to my husband John’s contribution in a sentence
or even two. So, let it suffice to say that I could not be more grateful that he was the one
to share the highs and lows of this journey with me.

I am also fortunate to have built a broader community of such friends, and mentors,
included among them my supervisor Tom Darby and committee members Marc
Hanvelt, Robert Sibley, and Geoffrey Kellow. I imagine that it is often difficult for a
supervisor to strike the correct balance between liberty and guidance with students, but
this was something that Tom was able to achieve in our relationship, and I am grateful
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for it. Beyond my committee, the project was developed with, or portions of it read by,
the following people: Nicole Van De Wolfshaar, Denis Madore, Larissa Atkinson, Colin
Cordner (for assistance with Greek), Gillian Bose (for assistance with German), Megan
Pickup (for assistance with life!), Caleb Chaplin (for our writing exchanges), and my
mother, Mary Rudyk-Papadogonas, who braved reading my commentary on Nietzsche.
Additionally, over the course of the project’s development, I had the opportunity to
study at the University of Chicago with the Fulbright Canada program. During that time
the project benefitted immensely from the guidance of Martha Nussbaum, Nathan
Tarcov, Heinrich Meier, Demetra Kasimis, and Brian Leiter. Last, the project was
supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
as well as the Ontario Graduate Scholarships (OGS) program.

These acknowledgements themselves confirm one of the central arguments in the pages
that follow. Humans, including political philosophers who seem to claim god-like
capacities, are not self-sufficient beings. We do, and we must, exist with others. This is
not something to be disparaged. It is part of the beauty of what it means to be human. It
is part of the chaotic beauty of love and friendship that informs who we are as political
animals, that I hope to be able to help my daughter, Marian, to see as she grows up in
this messy, but wonderful, and all-too-human world. That is a promise to her that I will
be honoured to keep.

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Table of Contents

Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... iv
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................ vi
Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1
1 Philosophy, Poetry, and Politics........................................................................................ 48
1.1 Dialogical writing ...................................................................................................... 53
1.2 Plato's Phaedrus .......................................................................................................... 58
1.3 Nietzsche's Zarathustra .............................................................................................. 66
1.4 Analytics and Hermeneutics .................................................................................... 81
1.5 Authority .................................................................................................................... 88
2 Debt and Bad-Conscience: The Problem of the Ancestral in Genealogy II............. 100
2.1 Approach and Assumptions .................................................................................. 104
2.2 Related Matters ........................................................................................................ 106
2.3 The Question of Nature .......................................................................................... 108
2.4 Promising .................................................................................................................. 115
2.5 Punishment and Bad Conscience .......................................................................... 124
2.6 Debt, Credit, and Guilt............................................................................................ 131
2.7 Ancestors and God(s) .............................................................................................. 142
3 Promises, Piety, and Paternity: The Problem of Cephalus in Republic I ............... 162
3.1 Approach and Assumptions .................................................................................. 167
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3.2 Related Matters ........................................................................................................ 173
3.3 The Mythic and Ancestral ...................................................................................... 179
3.4 The Old and New .................................................................................................... 185
3.5 Exit the Father .......................................................................................................... 198
4 The Problem of Plato's Socrates .................................................................................... 204
4.1 Exit Eros .................................................................................................................... 208
4.2 Enter Efficiency ........................................................................................................ 214
4.3 Heroes, Young and Old .......................................................................................... 218
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 228
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 249

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INTRODUCTION
Google, Grandfathers, and God(s): Nietzsche and Plato on Ancestral Authority

“But,” said the accuser, “Socrates taught his companions to abuse their fathers by
persuading them that he made them wiser than their fathers.”
— Xenophon, Memorabilia

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

In the past there were always some elders who knew more than any children in terms of
their experience of having grown up within a cultural system. Today there are none. It is
not only that parents are no longer guides, but that there are no guides, whether one
seeks them in one’s own country or abroad. There are no elders who know what those
who have been reared within the last twenty years know about the world into which
they were born.
— Margaret Mead, Culture and Commitment

Mobile phones, satellite television, and the Internet have allowed the newer generations
to associate, connect, and debate on a “peer-to-peer” basis rather than through a top-
down, authoritarian system of knowledge transmission. The young feel less strongly
bound to patriarchal customs and institutions…
— Olivier Roy, “The Transformation of the Arab World”

Researchers found that older generations are being replaced by Google, Wikipedia and
YouTube, with their grandchildren not asking them basic questions that they can look
up themselves.
— The Telegraph1

The Problem: Lapsed Generational Authority
In middle school, when my English teacher was struggling to have our class
embrace a particular point about a novel we were reading, she mentioned to the class

1 The Telegraph reported on the results of a poll taken of 1,500 grandparents that indicated younger
generations were requesting less advice or knowledge from them than previous generations. Less than one
in four had advice requested of them, and ninety-six percent indicated that they requested more advice of
their grandparents when they were young. See “How Grandparents are being replaced by Google,” n.p.
1
that she understood our reluctance. Not long ago she had lived by the maxim “don’t
trust anyone over 30.” She was now past the threshold of that age and asking us to trust
her, and the text and its author, who were surely much older than that. At the time, I
took it for granted that she should even feel the need to make that plea to a room full of
pre-teens.
The following study considers the political and philosophical consequences
when the primary direction of intergenerational education changes. In its broadest
sense, it asks: of what significance is it that children learn more from each other than
from ‘those over 30’? Intergenerational education refers to the way in which
knowledge—technical, moral, or otherwise—is commonly seen to proceed. This is
typically understood in a linear fashion. It proceeds from an older generation to a
younger one. This is changing. Specific language has been adopted to describe the
challenger to this model. In classrooms,2 governments,3 and private sector enterprises,
the “peer-to-peer”4 networked model exemplifies this change in generational priority.
Peers are equal participants in the network. This is contrast to “command-and-control”
models wherein hierarchical structures determine the decision-making processes, and

2 As an example, see Topping, “Trends in Peer Learning,” 631–45.
3 The Government of Canada has been pursuing this through their Blueprint 2020 and Workplace 2.0
initiatives. See Clerk of the Privy Council, Twentieth Annual Report to the Prime Minister, 8.
4
“Peer-to-peer” (P2P) describes a computational structure, wherein “peers” are the computer systems that
connect to a network (Internet) and act simultaneously as clients and servers (or senders and receivers of
data) eliminating the need for a centralized server that distributes data. As Baker describes, “The P2P
model can be used to reframe the concept of organizational leadership and organizational architecture. It
enables us to take a fresh new look at the authoritarian and centralized notions of current organizational
leadership approaches. While traditional hierarchies place emphasis on a certain chain of command, P2P
architecture places emphasis on the organizing and indexing of data (both archival, real-time inputs), so
that nodes in the organization act as both servers and clients (senders and receivers) of the data. In this
model, the network itself becomes the leader as it constantly computes raw data and turns it into actionable
information.” See Peer-to-Peer Leadership, n.p.
2
place greater or lesser value on its members based on their rank in the order.
Younger generations in the Western world are posing their questions to Google
rather than Grandpa or God. The ever-changing technological landscape challenges
traditional structures of authority. While it may be benign to use a food blogger's recipe
for chocolate chip cookies instead of Grandma's, this process of knowledge transmission
and its reconfiguration deserves reflection. This is particularly the case when we turn
from matters of technical knowledge to moral or ethical codes and to the political
structures associated therewith. In other words, it is one thing to understand how
authority is construed in the sharing of a certain expertise among friends, and it is
another thing to understand its moral, political and educational dimensions. This is
notable because these peer-to-peer exchanges propose to answer the question of what is
best. They advise new parents of the best home remedy for their child, or foodies of the
best taco stand in the city, or citizens of the best candidate for political office. Digital
forums amplify peer-exchanges and, in the process, diminish the voices of experts, in
part because there is a collective loss of trust in what had constituted expertise. All
opinions are validated, or at least so the idea of relativism proclaims. Post-truth
conditions are pre-conditions for political upheaval.
Such challenges to the hierarchy of generational knowledge are not entirely
novel though. The history of Western5 political thought confirms that they are telling
indicators of impending political change. The following study will take up two

5 One of the epigrams that open this introduction makes reference to the Arab world. I include this to allude
to the idea that the discussion of intergenerational dynamics is not one that is limited geographically and
should be properly considered alongside questions concerning globalization.
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