Within much Socialist thought, the philosophers of ancient Greece are regarded with suspicion. Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek thinkers are seen as prefiguring Hegel’s attempt to turn the world upside down and as centering philosophy on a realm of metaphysical realities detached from the real world. The Greeks failed to teach people how to improve the conditions of social existence and to achieve intellectual emancipation. The authoritarianism, obscurantism, and political theology of medieval and early modern times as well as nineteenth-century romantic nationalism have grown from ancient Greek seeds, it seems, and it is not without a cause that cultural conservatives from Joseph de Maistre to Harvey Mansfield claim ancient Greek philosophy as one of their main inspirations. The ivory-tower intellectualism of Greek metaphysicians appears as the very opposite of dialectical materialism.

But this narrative is not as self-evident as it seems. Accepting the assumption that ancient Greek philosophy vindicates authoritarianism and cultural conservatism implies that one validates the narrative of modern conservative thinkers. It means that one accepts the core element of the reactionary narrative that conservatives have been constructing since the nineteenth century, and legitimizes the historical assumptions that have motivated European supremacism and nationalism – assumptions that present ancient Greece as the origin of Western civilization and as a bulwark against cultural otherness.

But is there an alternative approach?

The study of ancient philosophy should not primarily be understood as the study of ancient texts and ideas. When scholars write on these texts and ideas and attempt to bring their original meaning to light, their writing is not primarily determined by that meaning. Instead, it is determined by the established historical body of work from which scholars draw their questions and philological tools. Or to put it differently: ancient philosophy does not consist in the study of ancient philosophical thought, but in the study of the use that can be made of common, contemporary concepts and categories to unravel the meaning potentially implied by ancient philosophical writings. A philosopher analyzing Plato’s Parmenides is not part of the Parmenides‘s historical context: his or her context is that of the present time, determined by the interests and intentions of the present time. It is through the lens of that time that he or she reads Plato – and the study of the socio-historical conditions of that lens must, from a socialist perspective, be part of the field of ancient philosophy.

Of course, one could object that some philosophers such as Pierre Hadot attempt to use ancient philosophy as a direct source of inspiration and moral commitment. They aren’t so much interested in approaching ancient philosophy as an historical problem than in using ancient philosophy as a source offering answers to existential questions. However, even in their quest for existential answers, their point of reference still lies in the present time. They turn to ancient philosophy because of the problems that modern culture arouses, and not because they want to be part of ancient culture. There is no possible exception to the principle that a philosopher is the product of his or her time. One cannot go back in time and reflect on the past from the standpoint of the past.

The philosophies born from Marxian inspiration, dialectical materialism, critical theory, cultural studies, offer a tool for understanding this constellation better and for generating a methodology applicable to ancient philosophy in particular. Seen through critical theory and socialism, ancient philosophy may be studied not as the intellectual history of a past civilization but as the history of the social relations from which interest in, and perspectives on ancient philosophy have emerged. The critical element in this approach is that the assumption that we can directly know what ancient philosophers thought is treated critically. What we know about ancient philosophy is what previous historical periods, along with their historical bloc, have sought to uncover in ancient sources – and that knowledge is what we can expand and clarify.

At the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century, German Romanticism and German idealism, from Schleichermacher and Hölderlin to Hegel and Schelling, sought to present Greek philosophy as the origin of European dialectical and metaphysical thought. At the end of the nineteenth century, Russell, Moore, and the subsequent analytic tradition dismissed ancient philosophy because of its alleged role in imagining a world of metaphysical entities and prompting a naive, realist perspective on those entities. Today, in a post-analytic time, the very question of metaphysics has become an object of intellectual fatigue and annoyance. Looking at scholarship on ancient philosophy, recruitment at universities, and public interest, the shift from Platonism and Aristotelianism to the Stoa, Skepticism, and Epicureanism, from metaphysical questions about the first principles to questoins about meteorology and zoology, indicates that the eclipse of metaphysics mirrors the general spread, throughout Western societies, of what Georg Lukacs calls Vulgärmaterialismus. For each historical period and social configuration, a new field of “ancient philosophy” arises – each social configuration treats ancient philosophy as determined by specific tendencies and dynamics. But these tendencies and dynamics are the products, not of ancient philosophy, but of the social dynamics in which the scholar participates.

Perhaps the latter perspective, on today’s metaphysical fatigue, is most apt to reveal the ramifications of this historical problem. Evidently, Marxian philosophy is critical of metaphysics in the traditional sense. But its critique relates to metaphysics in its positive, dogmatic dimension, namely, to metaphysical legitimations of inner-worldly social and political situations. Marxian philosophy rejects the instrumental function that metaphysics have served in history. But this does not exclude that there is another approach to metaphysics. One example of such an approach can be found in the work of critical theorist Max Horkheimer. In his essays on cultural critique as well as in his Eclipse of Reason, he notes that the metaphysical systems of the ancient world had a critical function, which he calls the “critique of the established” (Kritik des Bestehenden). For example, Plato’s metaphysics may be seen as legitimizing a certain political conception. But more importantly, Plato warns against considering the apparent world as the real one and against identifying the perceptible with the essential. Trusting perception is immanently problematic. There needs to be a critical distance between a perceived reality and a claim about the core of that reality. Identifying those two elements with each other would be a cause of dissent and ideological thinking. So, there is a “critical” reading of ancient thought: a reading that highlights the anti-ideological function of anti-empiricist metapysical

In contemporary scholarship on ancient philosophy, the critical function of metaphysics has receded. The questions of essence, existence, and transcendence have vanished and made way for the questions of immanent relations, for example physical, natural, or personal-ethical relations: sleeping, waking, eating, drinking, leading the “good life,” animal taxonomy, the planets, the demons, magic. And even when scholars raise the question of existence, they do so within the strict boundaries of the scholarly purpose they are pursuing. The existential dimension of their question cannot exceed the discursive categories through which the question is posed. Theory cannot possibly translate into praxis, and it cannot acknowledge its own historical conditions either.

These restrictions and impossibilities are expressions of the function to which capitalist thinking attempts to reduce philosophy. Today, philosophy, and ancient philosophy in particular, may only exist as a function of capitalist self-affirmation. Ancient philosophical sources may only be read as expressions of the capitalist, inner-worldly way of existing: as the way of life of an individual, self-referential, economic subject, existing within a world of planets, animals, images, hobbies, commodities, and consumption. And these categories affect not only the topics that scholars of ancient philosophy study, but also their mode of study. The production of scholarship through papers in a strictly corporate system cannot exceed that system, in a same way as the objects of that scholarship cannot exceed the formal restrictions of a paper in a corporate system.

The socialist study of ancient philosophy aims to manifest the social character of these economic conditions. It does not aim to ressuscitate metaphysical claims nor to completely reject the veracity of those claims. Rather, it aims to manifest the historical and social configuration of our standpoint and of any given attempt to reflect on historical sources. To use a Marxian metaphor, the socialist standpoint unveils the structures through which the super-structures of scholarly inquiries into ancient philosophy are determined: it unveils the capitalist dynamic that favors stoic philosophy as a tool for orientation within the world of individual, economic, embodied existence, and it explains why the very idea of principles existing beyond that existence must be rejected as meaningless. It dissects and critiques the body of academic work on ancient philosophy to reveal that what lies underneath that work is not ancient philosophy, but the economical model through which capitalism seeks to maintain its own intellectual framework: Socrates, not as a teacher of what lies beyond being, but as a teacher of how to exist in the world of ordinary experience.

This critical, historicist standpoint does not make it impossible to take ancient philosophy seriously. But it makes it necessary to recenter ancient philosophy on a different gravitational point. Instead of absolutizing ancient claims about ultimate reality, the socialist standpoint manifests ancient philosophy’s critical potential as a tool for overcoming normative constructs, and for the deconstruction of traditionalist or conservative claims to cultural supremacy. By highlighting the historicity of attempts to interpret ancient sources and by acknowledging the historicity of any intellectual endeavor, it becomes possible to clarify the forces of opposition and resistance working within historical contexts.

Those forces constitute a praxis rather than a theory, which makes it necessary to overcome the idea that philosophy is purely theoretical. But it is precisely such emphasis on praxis, or, as Christoph Schuringa establishes in reference to Marx’s philosophy, on “actualization” that may help philosophy escape its erasure from public life: “For philosophy as the mere providing of doctrines or foundational principles is philosophy falling short of its actualization.” (Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy, p. 2) A socialist reading of ancient philosophy allows us to see that the study of ancient philosophy is not centered on foundational principles – which would be useless for societies for which foundational principles do not carry any explanatory value anymore – but on the potential to understand the historical conditions of the present, and to use the historical past to push beyond the limits of the present.