A Defense of The First Amendment
Apologia Primus Emendationis

by Sterling Davis


​
​​
​
​1


    What separates man from animal or animalcule is his ability to will himself into being. The willful self-creation of character. All art, religion, and literature is emphatically preoccupied with the process of becoming. For everything that is created originates from a seed, and a seed presupposes a telos (τέλος). Tragedy, in all of its manifestations, is merely the interdiction of telos. As death is the final telos for all life, death is entirely untragical. — Leo Strauss observed correctly when he said the ultimate human fear is fear of a violent death. Death is painful and maladaptive, so this opprobrium is sound. But since death is unavoidable and even untragic, what precisely is tragedy?

2

     No human group before or since has been more attentive of symbols than the Ancient Greeks. Their whole world was reticulated into a narrative of symbols, with a brilliance and simplicity of purpose that is gapeworthy. Need to protect the meadows for the grazing of ewes? The meadows are sacred and inhabited by nymphs. In one stroke: narrative, conservation, and adaptation. Culture can be defined as moral stories that aid adaptation within a certain landscape. In a world where agriculture was the primary means of production, the meadows were sacred.

3

     Let's return back to tragedy. The Greeks invented tragedy, and Aristotle has passed down to us a text, The Poetics, that allows us to discern precisely what this means. According to Aristotle, and evidenced in all succeeding tragic works, tragedy is when a noble character—a hero, in other words—is interdicted in their process of becoming. I will proffer you two contemporary examples to prove my point. In the film Blue Jasmine, the heroine's narrative is tragic because fate interdicts her ability to become her telos—the wealthy courtesan. In Star Wars, Anakin Skywalker's tale is tragical because he is denied his telos, which is to balance the Force, whatever that means. So, tragedy, as it is decidedly understood today, is a hero being denied their telos.

4

     But what, then, is a noble character? First, it is incumbent upon us to disentangle the notion of nobility with wealth. Jefferson's term natural aristocracy is apt here: many wealthy persons are scarcely noble, while some poor persons brim with nobility. Nobility is entirely concerned with character traits that are elevated, rarefied, and means nothing more.

5

     Now we can smile upon a philosophical definition of character: elevated or rarefied traits. People who exhibit rarefied or elevated traits are interesting. People who exhibit rarefied or elevated traits, and face adversity, are heroic. So then, what is an individual?

6

     The individual is the most vaunted social position one can achieve, and the most harried. The individual is both heroic and interesting. Being heroic implies some level of social, moral, or legal rulebreaking, and, seeing as the function of society is to retard rulebreaking and punish its offenders, to live as an individual always means to live dangerously.

7

     Now I want to emphasize, in a way that is remembered, that being an individual is a willful act, a choice, and is always an artistic gesture. Art is merely elevated acts. And art always has a political resonance and a philosophical orientation toward the state of things. The social function of art is threefold: to interest or entertain; to advocate a particular political action; or to criticize or critique. Every true artist is an individual; middling artists are technocrats, and poor artists are more or less unsuccessfully fumbling with archetypes.

8

    Great artists serve as actors of social change to correct societal defects. In exchange for heightened risk—not to mention social sanctions—if they are successful, they are rewarded with plaudits of prestige and wealth. There is, at its base, a lurid contractarian aspect of art, the taproot being manifest symbolically as the universal artistic opprobrium against selling out. But perhaps the most important function artists fulfil is making life interesting: the annihilation of dailiness. The philosophical import of this claim must not be underestimated. The meaning of life, verily the most hackneyed philosophical question, has an answer that is apodictic in its simplicity. The meaning of life is not to be bored. You see, the human thing, at its subterranean core, under the mask that it only peels off once daily—at solar midnight—is an indefatigable escapist. And escape into the sublime is emphatically the product of artists. What would life be without the refreshing salve of art? Boredom and the fearful knowledge that all that remains is nihilistic materialism: stultifying, vulgar, and devoid of spiritual dignity. Were it not for art, life would be a moonscape in which predation, sublimated to an arithmetical torsion, is made all the more perverse by a state-sponsored religion of roboticism and squirearchical docility. Human life would pass to the plane of the emmet, where only the most sordid masks—that of the cog or the cicada—could be donned, safely.

9

     I want to depart the rather gloomy and piquant topic of the etiology of the dystopia—the destruction of individuality—to connect the dots on some of the things I have been saying. I know you've read what I said, but do you know what I mean? First, it's important to comprehend that the artist's role in society is entirely apotropaic. Second, the fate of the individual and the artist are inextricably intertwined and analogous. So much so, I will use these terms interchangeably. And third, that the social role of the artist is at risk in our society—America and the Western World—and that this risk is not only esthetical but existential.

10

     The precondition to any artistic expression or political act is freedom of speech. Without the freedom of expression, nothing can change. The world stagnates; planets and mandalas hang limply; acropolis raided, virgins carried off on horseback. The fine thread—a gossamer, really—that holds our civil life together is (however anticlimactically) the forty-five honeyed words of the First Amendment. And you'll recall §9, above. (Bear with me) To dissever individuality from artistic expression would be—well, completely tautologous! Again, individuality is artistic expression. The inseparability of these two moulds is the unio mystica our wise man from the Eleatics up through Jung have been adumbrating! — It is an old program!

11

     But enough with this misty talk of alchemical marriages! Any discussion of freedom of expression must begin with the contents of Plato's Apology. The matter at issue is clear here: who or what types or categories of people should have the right to influence public opinion. The issue here is breath, as Anaximenes told us so. The entire conception of the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech is to let public opinion be heard—while the aim of censorship always is to make public opinion harder to hear. This is how the First Amendment is to be rightly understood.

12

     Before I can continue, a few words must be said of Socrates—a most peculiar of individuals. As protagonist of The Apology, he is completely jesuitical. This characterological feature must not be viewed too superficially. In my estimation, there are, and always have been, and always will be, two contrastive threads in all art and social life, especially politics: that of the Homeric and the Socratic. What separates the two is their attitude toward transcendence—a notion first formed by the Eleatics—that there is more to human life than meets the eye. The Homerics tend toward an ethos where the individual and his struggle—his hero's journey, to borrow an apothegm from Campbell—has a centrality. Transcendence presupposes that there is something in life to transcend: a core conflict between interests, which it is the province of the hero to overcome. What is The Odyssey or The Iliad about other than heroic individuals overcoming problems? It is the most forthright and human of narratives. Conflict in life is completely unavoidable—that is a tropism. But what of Socrates? Socrates's entire philosophical project must be understood to be a complete rejection of the notion of transcendence. Only things that accorded with his new regime of scientism could have the freedom of expression. The Apology is not a text advocating free expression; it is a text advocating the constriction of expression to some misty technocratic elite—those who have lived an "examined life," whatever that means. How ironic!

​13

     I have a few more sharp things to say about that old so-and-so, Socrates! All philosophical thought, philosophical actions, presuppose transcendence. What is not philosophical is the mundane: what I am saying is that Socrates, being something of an alley cat, effected history's greatest bait and switch. He replaced transcendence with the dialectic, which he swiped from Heraclitus, to be reunited in Hegel. That is why all future politics would be based on shapeshifting—it is the Socratic inheritance to the history of ideas! What do you think all the form business really meant?


     As Gadamer tells us, we must envisage now how his contemporaries in Periclean Athens would have construed this work—what did Socrates and his message mean to them? Well then! The people of the Greek Golden Age were not, as it were, born the other day. They saw Socrates for what he was: the trickster archetype! While openly professing an affinity for freedom of expression, his real object—the subterranean message—was to restrict speech: from the masses, the dēmos, where it is properly situated, to the handsel of an arbitrary band of initiates. To what mysteries, I cannot speak of. But there is a whiff of nihilism, and something exceedingly sinister in their pretense to expand expression by limiting those who have the legitimacy of speech.


It smells of biopower!

14

      In point of fact, Socrates's disdain for the freedom of expression of his contemporaries was the worst-kept secret in town. Everywhere in his work, this point is made. But let us fix ourselves, for a moment, on The Crito, where Socrates, perhaps etiolated by the rigors of confinement, lets his hair down, so to speak, and gives us quite a disquisition of his views on freedom of expression:


     SOCRATES: My good Crito, why should we care so much for what the majority think? The most reasonable people, to whom one should pay more attention, will believe that things were done as they were done.


--The Crito, trans. G.M.A. Grube (44d)  


     So there we have it! Socrates cares nothing for what the majority thinks—his own words. The bedrock principle of democratic governance is respect and control by majorities. Thus, the Socratic orientation toward government is entirely undemocratic. This is the reason why he drank his hemlock: not because of his advocacy of freedom of speech, but because of actions to destroy freedom of speech. How ironic!

15

     In closing, in democratic regimes, from time out of mind, the primary mechanism for actualizing the democracy is free expression of its citizenry. That is the fundamental equation of democratic governance: free expression by its citizenry to influence public opinion—this is how the people rule. Any ploy to enhance democracy by limiting the expression of others must be seen as Socratic in origin and viewed warily. And to those, often Socratics, who evince a fear of the national security state, they must know this: it is only through tyrannical censorship of human expression that that nightmare can ever be realized. By pacing our quays with flashlights, and punishing speech that is unpopular, ugly, but legitimate, they are indeed birthing Frankenstein's monster—how ironic!

​
Sterling Davis is an American poet and the Publisher of Poetries in English.

​