Moshe Ron

But What is a Father?

From: Jacques Derida: “La Pharmacie de Platon,” La Dissemination, Paris: Seuil, 1972

What we are provisionally and for the sake of convenience continuing to call a metaphor thus in any event belongs to a whole system. If logos has a father, if it is a

logos only when attended by its father, this is because it is always a being (on) and even a certain species of being (the Sophist, 260a), more precisely a living being. Logos is a zoon. An animal that is born, grows, belongs to the phusis.

Linguistics, logic, dialectics, and zoology are all in the same camp. In describing logos as a zoon, Plato is following certain rhetors and sophists before him who, as a contrast to the cadaverous rigidity of writing, had held up the living spoken word, which infallibly conforms to the necessities of the situation at hand, to the expectations and demands of the interlocutors present, and which sniffs out the spots where it ought to produce itself, feigning to bend and adapt at the moment it is actually achieving maximum persuasiveness and control.[12]

Logos, a living, animate creature, is thus also an organism that has been engendered. An organism: a differentiated body proper, with a center and extremities, joints, a head, and feet. In order to be “proper,” a written discourse ought to submit to the laws of life just as a living discourse does. Logographical necessity (anangke logographike) ought to be analogous tobiological, or rather zoological, necessity. Otherwise, obviously, it would have neither head nor tail. Both structure and constitution are in question in the risk run by logos of losing through writing both its tail and its head:

Socrates:

And what about the rest? Don’t you think the different parts of the speech (ta tou logou) are tossed in hit or miss? Or is there really a cogent reason for starting his second point in the second place? And is that the case with the rest of the speech? As for myself, in my ignorance, I thought that the writer boldly set down whatever happened to come into his head. Can you explain his arrangement of the topics in the order he has adopted as the result of some principle of composition, some logographic necessity?

Phaedrus:

It’s very kind of you to think me capable of such an accurate insight into his methods.

Socrates:

But to this you will surely agree: every discourse (logon),  like a living creature (osper zoon), should be so put together(sunestanai) that it has its own body and lacks neither head nor foot, middle nor extremities, all composed in such a way that they suit both each other and the whole (264-c.)

The organism thus engendered must be well born, of noble blood: “gennaia!,” we recall, is what Socrates called the logoi, those “noble creatures.” This implies that the organism, having been engendered, must have a beginning and an end. Here, Socrates’ standards become precise and insistent: a speech must have a beginning and an end, it must begin with the beginning and end with the end: “It certainly seems as though Lysias, at least, was far from satisfying our demands: it’s from the end, not the beginning,  that he tries to swim (on his back!) upstream through the current of his discourse. He starts out with what the lover ought to say at the very end to his beloved!” (264 a.) The implications and consequences of such a norm are immense, but they are obvious enough for us not to have to belabor them. It follows that the spoken discourse behaves like someone attended in origin and present in person.

Logos: “Sermo tanquam personaipse loquens,” as one Platonic Lexicon puts it.[13] Like any person, the logos-zoon has a father.

 But what is a father?

Should we consider this known, and with this term–the known–classify the other term within what one would hasten to classify as a metaphor? One would then say that the origin or cause of logos is being compared to what we know to be the cause of a living son, his father. One would understand or imagine the birth and development of logos from the standpoint of a domain foreign to it, the transmission of life or the generative relation. But the father is not the generator or procreator in any “real” sense prior to or outside all relation to language. In what way, indeed, is the father/son relation distinguishable from a mere cause/effect or generator/engendered relation, if not by the instance of logos? Only a power of speech can have a father. The father is always father to a speaking/living being. In other words, it is precisely logos that enables us to perceive and investigate something like paternity. If there were a simple metaphor in the expression “father of logos,” the first word, which seemed the more familiar, would nevertheless receive more meaning from the second than it would transmit to it. The first familiarity is always involved in a relation of cohabitation with logos.

Living-beings, father and son, are announced to us and related to each other within the household of logos.

From which one does not escape, in spite of appearances, when one is transported, by “metaphor,” to a foreign territory where one meets fathers, sons, living creatures, all sorts of beings that come in handy for explaining to anyone that doesn’t know, by comparison, what logos, that strange thing, is all about. Even though this hearth is the heart of all metaphoricity, “father of logos” is not a simple metaphor. To have simple metaphoricity, one would have to make the statement that some living creature incapable of language, if anyone still wished to believe in such a thing, has a father. One must thus proceed to undertake a general reversal of all metaphorical directions, no longer asking whether logos can have a father but understanding that what the father claims to be the father of cannot go without the essential possibility of logos.

A logos indebted to a father, what does that mean? At least how can it be read within the stratum of the Platonic text that interests us here?

The figure of the father, of course, is also that of the good (agathon). Logos represents what it is indebted to: the father who is also chief, capital, and good(s). Or rather the chief, the capital, the good(s).

Pater in Greek means all that at once. Neither translators nor commentators of Plato seem to have accounted for the play of these schemas. It is extremely difficult, we must recognize, to respect this play in a translation, and the fact can at least be explained in that no one has ever raised the question. Thus, at the point in the Republic where Socrates backs away from speaking of the good in itself (VI, 506e), he immediately suggests replacing it with its ekgonos, its son, its offspring:. . . let us dismiss for the time being the nature of the good in itself, for to attain to my present surmise of that seems a pitch above the impulse that wings my flight today. But what seems to be the offspring (ekgonos) of the good and most nearly made in its likeness I am willing to speak if you too wish it, and otherwise to let the matter drop. Well, speak on, he said, for you will duly pay me the tale of the parent another time. I could wish, I said, that I were able to make and you to receive the payment, and not merely as now the interest (tokous).

But at any rate receive this interest and the offspring of the good (tokon te kai ekgonon autou touagathou).

[12] The association logos-zoon appears in the discourse of Isocrates against the Sophists and in that of Alcidamas on theSophists. Cf. also W. Suss, who compares these two discourses line by line with the

Phaedrus, in Ethos: Studien zur alterengriechischen Rhetorik (Leipzig, 1910), pp. 34 ff) and A. Dies,”Philosophie et rhetorique,” in Autour de Platon (Paris:Garbriel Beauchesne, 1927) I, 103.

[13] Fr. Ast, Lexique platonicien. Cf. also B. Parain, Essai sur le logos platonicien (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), p. 211; and P.Louis, Les Metaphores de Platon (Paris: Les Belles Lettres,1945), pp. 43 44.