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When we start looking carefully at the structure of the Magnesia, the lower utopia in Plato's Laws, it becomes clear that the structure has been thought out with great precision. The city of the Laws is one of the most amazing human artifacts. It is a complete theoretical system from well over 2000 years ago, that ranks with the axiomatic geometry of Euclid for completeness, consistency, and intellectual power and depth. We have very few human artifacts from that long ago with the same structural complexity and systematic precision. Plato, it appears, wanted to do for human affairs what Euclid had done for mathematics -- put it in order and rationalize it into a complete system. When we add to this the teaching of the Republic and the rest of Plato's dialogues, we see just how monumental Plato's contribution to Western, and even global human civilization really is. However, the city of the Laws normally does not get its due. It is considered merely an antiquated political theory superceded by other more modern theories -- and thus, of historical and not really even philosophical interest. This is the bane of specialization which prevents us from appreciating the depth and complexity of this primal Western social theory. We need to appreciate that Plato is doing more than merely advancing one sociopolitical theory among many. In fact, he is founding all sociopolitical theories. He is exploring the intersubjective unity of the city of men. He is turning the cities of the slaves of the gods into cities of men and founding a universe that excludes the gods. He is looking deeply into the inner structure of transcendence and seeing it as an intersubjective autopoietic unity that appears before conceptual fusion of Being occurs. He is showing men how to arrange their affairs to exemplify the Good in everything they do. Thus, the Laws is only superficially a political theory, or an exercise in utopianism. It is, when considered more deeply, an exposition of the transcendental core of the Western uni-verse prior to the arising of sociology, political science, legal theory and the other special human sciences.

It is not really possible to speak of the lower utopias outside the context of the higher utopia. These form a single overarching system. Unfortunately, the Republic is usually taken to be independent of the Laws, so it is regularly mis-interpreted. Our principle is that understanding of the lower utopia comes first, and is the context for the understanding of the higher utopia. The higher utopia is a limit toward which the lower utopia is tending. But the lower utopia is really the goal. This is because the higher utopia, that embodies the identity of other as Same, is completely unreachable; whereas the lower utopia, which embodies a harmonic intersubjective unity, is achievable occasionally. So we could say that the higher utopia is set up as a straw man in order to make clear what the lower utopia is not. In Cities Of The Gods, Doyne Dawson speaks of the lower utopia description within the Republic, stretching from 374 to 473, after the descriptions of the Primitive city and the City of War. However, it is clear that not all of the description from 374 to 473 describes the lower utopia, because at the end, the sharing of and equality of women is described as belonging to the higher utopia only. In fact, Socrates speaks of three waves of ridicule that he must attempt to push through. The first wave concerns the concept of sharing all property by the guards; the second concerns women and children held in common; and the third concerns the philosopher king. It is actually only the first wave which can be identified with the lower utopia, and that identification itself needs some qualification. Thus, only from 374 to 449 may be considered as relating to the lower utopia, which is analogous to the way the lower utopia is presented in the Laws. It is of interest that Plato describes these "waves" of the argument in terms that relate to the sea. Because in the Laws Plato goes to great lengths to reject the sea for the founding of Magnesia. It is clear that the real analogy is with the pushing which was a part of the battle. Socrates needs to push through the waves of ridicule in order to establish the credibility of his ideas. We know that the source of ridicule is Aristophanes, and the other comics that make fun of Socrates as in the "Clouds." But as we have shown, these are ideas that the comics present themselves. Here, philosophy and the comic are in sync. It is unclear which is the source of these ideas or whether there is another source upon which they are both drawing.

The question which is not normally dealt with is why philosophy should adopt the ridiculous as its core theory. Whether the comics are ridiculing a position which already was enunciated by the philosophers, or whether the comics came up with it first and it was later adopted by the philosophers, the real question is why the philosophers should trade in such merchandise at all. The answer to this question is quite simple. The philosophers are attempting to break the normal paradigm and create a revolution in thought. Ridicule is a way of preserving one's worldview in the face of contrary evidence. But ridicule has a two-edged blade. It enunciates the ridiculous in the very act of ridiculing it. So the ridiculous, or that which is contrary to one's worldview, gets air time in the act of defending against it. So the comics may be seen as playing either an advant guard role or a conservative role. They direct their audience's attention at the ridiculous, acting as heralds of the new, while giving the opinion of the conservatives which reject the new. The philosophers also want to direct the attention of their students to a different way of looking at things. The fact that both the philosophers and the comics are aligned on this issue of what is new is very significant. It means that what the comics have singled out to ridicule is really the direction from which the change was coming. The philosophers vote makes clear that what is being ridiculed is indeed significant.

But in the case of Plato, there is the question of irony. We cannot be sure that Aristophanes didn't come up with the ideas first, and that Plato didn't adopt them precisely because they were ridiculous. In this interpretation, we cite the fact that in one of his letters Plato says he never wrote about what really concerned him. What he did write was perhaps a complete farce. The depth of irony in Plato is incredible. In fact, it is incredible that history has conspired to make that irony even deeper than any one man could manage on his own. We actually never know when Plato is telling us something he believes, or a noble lie which will have some desired effect in the reader. And considering we know so much about this little slice of history, it is ironic that the evidence is just unclear enough that we do not really know whether Aristophanes' ridicule of the ideas of the high utopia or Plato's attempt to take them serious came first. Another option is to believe that they were both attempting, in their own way, to make a point of crucial importance to their respective audiences. They were alerting their audiences to the direction from which Otherness was fast approaching. They were, in effect, pointing in the same direction by taking up ideas that were at once their ownmost, and at the same time totally foreign. The sharing of property was something attested to by the Spartans and Pythagoreans. The sharing of all property, including women, to the extent of making women equal, was something that their arch-Other, the nomadic Scythians and Amazons, appeared to do. The real point here is that an idea, sharing of property, is being taken to its logical conclusion, and that results in changing the Same into the Other. The taking of an idea to its logical conclusion is a theoretical movement of thought. It involves idealization in which the idea is freed of its instances in order to act with a reality of its own, becoming an ideology. This freeing of ideas is characteristic of the metaphysical era. Ideas were always bound in the mythopoietic era to the myths that embodied them and the poetry that expressed them. In the metaphysical, the separation of the Meta (the idea) from the physical (the instances) allowed the ideas as memes to become freed. Thus, this particular meme, the idea of communistic high utopia, became free of the otherness of the barbarian and could be posited as a possibility for the Greeks themselves. It was a limiting possibility that went against everything in Greek social organization and culture. But because it was the Other, as complementary opposite to the norm, it has a powerful force on the Greek mind as it considered what was different, and the critical meta-difference between the Same and the Different.

So let us start where Plato himself starts in the Republic -- his primitive and festering cities.

This first statement is crucial. In the end it will be found that Justice was placed within the city because it was assumed from the first by this statement. Here, each individual is seen as incomplete and partial. Due to the incompleteness, the individual needs the rest of society in order to complete him to make up a totality and fulfill all his needs.

What we will notice as we go along, is that the community founded in the Republic is purely theoretical. Unlike the community in The Laws which is predicated on the real city, this purely theoretical city has only the individual and the city as conceptual structures. So in The Laws we see families coming together to form the real city. Here, we start from abstract partial individuals and attempt to build a unity directly. We have enough people when all our needs are fulfilled. Going further, showing the theoretical nature of the enquiry of the Republic even clearer, we will know how many people are needed because each person has only one job. Thus, we have a totality when we have one person to satisfy each of our needs. Each person is acting to satisfy the needs of all, completing all the others. This is what Plato calls the primitive city. It is a theoretical construct which does not take into account reproduction, which is the basis of the family.

The concept of one person, one job is taken to the extreme in the primitive city. There is a spectrum which is clearly delineated between the independent person who does everything for himself becoming self sufficient, and the person who only does one thing and needs others in order to fulfill all his other needs. In order to make the city necessary, Plato must choose the extreme end of this spectrum where each person can only do one thing. In reality, people usually fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, doing many jobs for themselves, many imperfectly, and getting some of their needs met by others. Thus, Plato is really projecting on humans a greater degree of dependency than actually exists in most cases. His city is a totality made up of artificially induced partialities. It is Adeimantus who makes the choices that produce this extreme theoretical city. So in the end, we cannot really say whether this is the preference of Socrates or whether he is allowing the divine aspect of Adeimantus and Gluacon to manifest. They are spoken of as a divine pair, like the divine twins of Indo-European tradition, who were able to speak so forcefully for injustice when they actually believed in justice. We are reminded that they acquitted themselves honorably in the battle of Megara to the extent that they were praised by a poet as a divine pair.

The words are apt; you indeed have something divine about you, if you can put the case for injustice so strongly and yet still believe that justice is better than injustice. And I am sure that you genuinely believe it; I can tell from your general character -- though the speeches you have made would have left me in doubt about you. But the surer I feel, the more doubtful I am what to do. I don't see how I'm to help you; I don't think I've got the ability -- witness my failure to convince you just now, when I thought I had demonstrated the superiority of justice in my discussion with Thrasymacus. Yet I don't see how I can refuse; for I am afraid it would be wicked, while I've life and voice in me, to hear justice slandered as I have done and then refuse to come to the rescue. So I must do my best to rescue her." [368a-b]

So Socrates is attempting to help this divine pair. He helps them by acting as midwife and allowing their selves to manifest. One of them chooses the extreme city where every individual does only one job. This choice makes the city as an abstract totality necessary. They have led the discussion away from the mean of the real city, where most people do multiple things for themselves and get other needs fulfilled by specialists, from the beginning. It should be noted that both extremes of individual self-sufficiency and individual dependency on specialists cut down on natural variety. Individual self-sufficiency causes the variety of specialists to not appear. Extreme partiality of the individual keeps the generalists who understand more than one speciality from appearing. Plato is an example of such a generalist. He would have to ban himself from this extreme primitive city. The real city is a place where the most variety is produced. There are specialists, self-sufficient individuals, and generalists who understand and practice multiple specialities.

So Adeimantus reveals his sickness by choosing an extreme form of primitive city. Glucan intensifies that sickness by wanting more than what the inhabitants "need." So we move from the primitive city to the feverish and festering city where unneeded items are produced, as well as what is needed. Glaucon calls the primitive city "a city of Pigs." The primitive city is likened to a healthy man, and the city of luxury is likened to a man with a fever. But we must note that the primitive city is also sick because it has imposed extreme partialness on its citizens who can only do one thing that satisfies the needs of all, rather than doing anything to satisfy his own needs without the intervention of others. The feverishness of the city of luxury leads directly to war. And that leads to the paradox that a special class of citizen is needed whose only job is to fight in war, because of the one man, one job assumption.

The principle that his brother chose is haunting Gluacon. Hidden in Adeimantu's choice was an absurdity. This is the essence of all Socratic dialogues, to bring out the absurdities in the premises of his interlocutors. By the process of bringing out the absurd results of poor premises, Socrates serves as midwife for ideas and shows the phantom ideas for what they are. He performs a kind of therapeutics which heals his interlocutor if they get the picture of the errors in their professed views. The rest of the dialogue unfolds as we explore the nature and education of these guardians who are considered to be like watch dogs over the city. The fact, that they are considered watch dogs is significant because they are like Cerebus, the guardian of hell. In fact, the ideal city is a kakatopia, a hell on earth in which ideology controls human beings. It is the working out of the divinity of the twins, which is, in fact, their sickness. The divinity of the twins is that they really want to live in a city that is only fit for the gods, and not for humans. Socrates, step by step, works out the implications of their first assumptions. The whole problem boils down to how to educate the Guardians so that they will defend the city, but not turn on its citizens like wolves.

A point that should not be missed is that the primitive city is based on need, and the swollen city is based on inflamed desire. Both of these exhibit two types of clinging and craving. Needs produce extreme behavior when the needed thing is cut off. Also, desires out of control produce similarly extreme behavior. Both exhibit the nature of clinging and craving which is the essence of Being which wants to make the possessions which fulfil needs and desires persist. So we must not forget that Plato's city is an ontological construct. It is not merely a social or political one. Both needs and desires miss the mark. The ideal with which they should be contrast is called "doing without." Doing without does not deny needs as asceticism does. Instead, doing without exhibits what the Buddhists call non-attachment. It is not attached to either needs or their fulfillments, to desires or the desired. It is free of the strange attractor of the autopoietic ring of Aphrodite which goes continuously from longing, to desire, to eros, to persuasion, to action, and back to longing. It is not taken in by the smiles of Aphrodite. Instead, it exists on what is available without attachment to the provider. Thus, the ideal is neither self-sufficiency or radical partiality. Both deny non-attachment. The self-sufficient is continuously providing for its own needs at the expense of others doing injustice to them. The partial is serving the others so it will be served. Instead, the non-attached is alert to the error of doing injustice to others. It provides for itself from what is available, not attempting to hold on to anything. It is the opposite of dynamic clinging. Dynamic clinging lets go in order to hold on longer. The non-attached does not seize in the first place. What is given freely is taken, the source of the satisfaction of the need is never seized. In static clinging, the source of the satisfaction of the need is seized and is not let go of unless it is wrested away. This is the essential view of the city folk that remain on one spot, hoping to cling to it for their whole lives. The dynamic clinging is performed by the nomads who follow their cattle, letting them roam and going with them. They let go of what they have in order to hold on to it longer, because they understand that those who do static clinging usually lose what they are holding onto very soon, as others try to take it from them. Like the Scythians told Darius (liberally paraphrased) when asked why they would not stand and fight, "We are nomads, we only hold onto one thing -- the graves of our ancestors --unless you find that we will merely keep drifting before you. We are not running away. We just happen to be drifting in the opposite direction as your army." To go to the opposite extreme from the city folk is to adopt dynamic clinging. This is exactly what they teach their young people in initiation ceremonies outside the city. The great heros, like Achillies,, go to a teacher like Cheron the Centaur, to learn the secret of the nomads. The Greeks were not so far away from their own nomadic roots that they did not preserve an understanding of the significance of dynamic clinging as a basis for the safety of their cities.

Another point of consequence is that by adopting the concept of specialization, where one man does one job, Socrates says that the citizens will be more excellent in the pursuit of their crafts. Thus, Plato's ideal city seeks to maximize excellence which is an attribute of the Good. But here we see again the concept of the perfect example. Each craftsman should produce, as nearly as possible, perfect examples. This striving for perfection in everything leads to destruction of all the imperfect examples, excluded by the law that one person does one thing only. Thus, all the imperfect examples that occur as natural variety as a background against which the perfect example is seen, is eliminated. The perfect city has only perfect examples in its goods. In this way, we can see that the ideal city is aligned with the sacrificial victim which is always a perfect example¹. When the sacrificial victim is destroyed, it unleashes the abundance of all the pent-up forms that were denied existence. It is like the injustice of Uranus or Kronos. It is injustice to deny the production of natural variety, which means a myriad of imperfect examples. Uranus was unjust not allowing them to manifest, as Plato is doing here by denying lesser artisans their ability to practice their trades imperfectly. But the opposite of this is Kronos' injustice, which eats the fruits when they manifest. This is, of course, the opposite extreme of self sufficiency. Kronos ate his children and made himself self sufficient as he lived only on what he himself produced. But this meant that all those who would satisfy his needs were not allowed to manifest, i.e. his children. In both cases, the injustice was broken, and the natural variety was unleased by the destruction of the nihilistic opposition of the two types of injustice. So we see here in the kakatopia that these two extremes are fused into a single theoretical structure that exemplifies both simultaneously. The self-sufficient Guards, watchdogs/wolves, are camping inside the city where everyone is, by law, only partially sufficient. The wolves would be living off the land outside the city, but they make their camp inside and live off the surplus of the feverish, swollen city.

How many needs does a person have? This is another point that Plato does not delve into very deeply. Needs are the adequation between the variety of the organism and the variety of its environment. The organism has certain needs which must be fulfilled from the environment, such as for food, clothing, shoes, and shelter. As Plato points out, these basic needs are mediated by those who make the implements which those that fulfill these needs use in that craft. Normally we would expect the craftsman to make his own tools. But in the extreme ideal city which merges radical self-sufficiency with radical insufficiency, those that provide intermediate needs must have separate professions, also creating a network of interconnecting crafts. Every intermediary need spawns a new craft, creating a paradoxical situation in which there is an infinite number of crafts -- this is essentially an indication of Godel's paradox appearing much earlier than its rediscovery in this century. The system can never be sufficient to describe itself. Here is a regressive generation of crafts where craftsmen generate a need for tools that is infinite. These situations are analogous. We can liken the needs to the arts of civilization. The Sumarians had a list of these "me" which included pottery, prostitution, etc. It turns out that in Sumarian the word for Being is also "me," so that it has been speculated that these two words are the Same. Here the arts of civilization are the list of needs for the primitive city. It is the list of crafts needed to adequate the needs of the human being to his environment. These arts of civilization all indicate a means of bringing the human being into harmony with the environment, which is essentially working the variety of the environment so it can be absorbed by the variety of the human being. These become the arts of civilization and crafts as human beings discover how to do this in ways that are more and more sophisticated. The crafts all hold a secret concerning the relation between the human being to the environment. Thus, the arts of civilization, or "me," are part of the fourfold. The gods are seen as the source of these arts. Inanna stole them from Enki for mankind. For the Greeks it was Prometheus that did the same thing. Each god governed a particular craft. The craft connects the human being to the realm of heaven and earth -- his environment. So the crafts are the proliferation of the relation of the fourfold. In Plato's higher utopian city, only the excellent crafts would be allowed to manifest. In this light, there are only the specialists and the geniuses like Leonardo de Vinci, who are self-sufficient, going beyond speciality and bringing new ideas into being. Here we see hints of the appearance of the Epoch and Novum in the formulation of the structure of the Kakatopia. The self-sufficient are those who rise above speciality as geniuses, bringing new arts to civilization and increasing the play of mirroring within the fourfold. The specialists are those that continue the mirroring that already occurs, pursuing normal science until a scientific revolution occurs due to the work of the genius. In the excellent city, the mirroring of the fourfold is brought into the sharpest focus. It is the city where the inner structure of Being is exemplified most perfectly. But it is also the place where the Enframing appears as well. The ideal higher utopia cannot embody appropriation, and thus its ideologies generate the nihilism of enframing. By pursuing excellence in all the crafts, it approaches the essence of technology which is the nihilistic enframing. That situation which clarifies the inner structure of Being, also produces nihilism. What is needed is a way to create the situation of appropriation without entering into enframing. This is the job of the lower utopia. The lower utopia affirms the household, and intermediate structure between the individual and the city. It affirms reproductive immortality, not just the immortality of the laws. Thus, it is Apollian and Dionysian too, as we have seen the lower utopia is by looking at their choruses. It affirms both kinds of immortality Plato mentions in the prelude to his Laws, and thereby covers both sides of the paradoxicality of the autopoietic system. In the higher utopian city, the ultimate genius is the philosopher king. Between the nihilistic opposites of the city of specialists and the philosopher king lies the second wave concerning women and children. Affirming the household, which is the special realm of women and children, allows us to approach the possibility of appropriation without enframing.

Craft and techne, as the refining of a craft, holds an important place in Plato's philosophy. But now perhaps we understand why it is so important. Crafts come from the gods and serve to relate man to his environment between heaven and earth. They are the concrete manifestation of the mirroring of the fourfold. That mirroring shatters into a thousand pieces and lives on as the arts of civilization. Those arts control the relation between the variety in man to the variety of the environment. The city is actually the increasing of the variety in the community of men in order to increase the adequacy between these two realms of variety. The crafts are attenuators and amplifiers of that variety. So the crafts are man's way to adhere to the law of requisite variety enunciated by Ashby and elucidated by Stanford Beer in The Heart Of Enterprise. Each craft, like pottery, for example, is an art given by a god to man as a means of serving his needs. Man needs to mix things from the environment in order to prepare food; he needs to store things from the environment; he needs to eat these prepared dishes. Pottery gives him a means to do this which is well suited, both to man and to nature. Clay is plentiful and can be easily molded to the shapes that fit man's fated body and purposes. Pottery stands within the fourfold as a thing. Each pot recalls the initial gift from the godlike ones. Each pot is made of earth, and yet when finished, stands exposed to heaven and with that, in the clearing of Being, for all to see. And the pot made by man fits man -- his hands, his mouth, his dwelling place, his world. But beyond this, the pot holds an inner secret concerning the relation of man to the fourfold. The pot is made of clay which is shaped upon the wheel and then dried. A glaze is sometimes applied to it when dried, without which it could not hold water unless fired at a very high temperature. The pot must be fired in a kiln in order to drive out all the water and fuse the molecules of clay. If it is not glazed, it must be fired at a high enough temperature to fuse the molecules completely. However, if the pot is to hold dry things, neither glaze nor high temperature is necessary. The pot is decorated before firing, either through its shape, or the glaze on its surface, or by marking its surface directly, or all of these things. Through the decoration it stands to be seen within the clearing between earth and heaven. When the pot is taken out of the kiln, many times small flaws, or bubbles, have caused it to break in firing. Thus, the potter does not know what will turn out or how the final product will look until it appears from the kiln. All these aspects of the pot indicate something about the inner nature of the world. It is as if pottery were a summary of the mirroring of the fourfold.

Man is seen to be, by many myths, like the clay of the pot. He is made of clay and water. Man is malleable, and Plato wants to make use of this fact by educating the children. He wants to balance them in his educational program, like the potter spinning the pot on the wheel. A pot on the wheel must be carefully sculpted in order to maintain its balance. The slightest imbalance and it becomes completely ruined. Once the form is produced, then the pot is dried. Its water is taken out slowly. If this occurs too fast, the pot will break. So we see in Plato's educational system the children are produced through an optimal eugenic program, and the naturally good form is dried out by the slow process of education which makes them remember what is Good, the source from which they came, and which they must embody. Education is the forming and drying process. But drying makes the pots brittle, and so they must be constantly tested, and the rejected inferior pots thrown away. In this process, the children acquire the arts of civilization which is like the decoration. The finally ready pots are the fired. What is the firing? War and drunkenness -- intentional artificial confusion which cause the pots to become hardened inwardly and outwardly to both pleasure and pain. In this process, many pots may break or spoil, but those that come through the process will be properly hardened. Some will hold their form, but not water, some will hold water through their hardened glaze, and some will hold water because they have been fused inside. This is to say that some will be hard but porous. These are the ones that can withstand physical suffering, but do not deserve to be guardians because they cannot hold water. Plato calls these the iron and bronze men. They have gross strength but not the subtle. The Auxiliaries are those that can make the subtle discrimination that allows their characters to retain their hold upon the goal of protecting the city in all circumstances, but their knowledge remains superficial. The rulers are those who have the ability to discriminate because they have completely fused their inner structure so that the knowledge that allows them to maintain their sight on goal of preserving the city comes from deep insight into the nature of things. Like Being, the ideal rulers have become completely fused.

This is a different analogy than Plato advances for the training of the guardians; but it works, because it has something to say about the nature of man within the fourfold. Each craft has its secret because it tells us something about man, as in the analogy where man is considered to be made of clay. It also tells us about the jinn. Man is initially wet and pliable. In order to become hard, he must be fired. Jinn have the nature of air and fire. These are the elements that make man unpliable. So when the godlike ones give the gift of pottery it has a double nature. It makes it easier for man but it makes him less pliable. It sets up a specific relation to his environment where the pliability of the clay-making vessels makes man less pliable. He needs the vessels to eat, store, prepare. The adaptation of man to his environment through the vessels hardens man. As such, the relations of men to jinn always have this nature. When the jinn bring out something in man by giving him a craft that process also hardens man. It sets his infinitely malleable nature into what we now call human nature. Pottery also tells us something about the earth. In it we see the earth taken out of its hidden place and displayed. Earth is revealed -- but it is also decorated and shaped, and this shows us something about heaven. Because of heaven man may bend the earth to his will and mold it to his purpose. It is heaven that allows man to distance himself from the clay in order to impose form on it. In the pot there is exemplified the mirroring of the fourfold that teaches us about heaven, earth, jinn, and man. When we apply this inner essence of the pottery process back on man, then we get something like Plato's educational process with all its trials. The transcendental relation man is taking toward the clay of pots, Plato is taking to man. Man is forming man. This is self-organization, especially when it is undertaken by the city as a whole. To Plato, producing men is merely an extension of the techne by which man forms nature, using the arts of civilization. Each art of civilization may be taken as such a meta-process, and reveals thereby a secret of the fourfold as it relates to man. Here in the ideal city, where only the perfect examples are allowed to exist, where other variety is stifled, the perfection of each craft is that it is taken as a meta-craft applied to man himself. Thus, the craftsman in pursuing his craft, is shaping himself and all those who use the results of his craft. The perfect examples that appear in this highly refined society make the world shine forth from out of the freed relation of things to the fourfold.

For instance, the Greeks said that all entities are composed of earth, air, fire, and water which appear from hot/cold and wet/dry by permutational combination. This qualitative understanding of the nature of things comes from the consideration of them in relation to the arts of civilization and their inner workings. For instance, the elements in making the pot are the earth made pliable by water and shaped, then dried by air and fired. It is earth, air, fire, and water that make clear the qualitative differences in the stages of the production of the pot as an entity within the fourfold. But looking at this art of civilization and others, the ancients became convinced that each thing is composed of a particular set of characteristics that can be related to these qualitative elements. These elements appear within the relation between the variety of man and the variety of man's total environment, including jinn. The individual qualitative entity appears within the fourfold as an intersection of the mirroring of the fourfold. When seen through the lens of the arts of civilization, the qualitative nature of the entity becomes apparent. But this entity, with its qualities, stands in relation to the generation of the fourfold itself. It is something good to the extent it completely adequates the human being to the environment. So the entity is the embodiment of the good and has its qualities too. If that entity is man, and we want the man to exemplify the Good, then we have moved up to the meta-level problem of how to turn the crafts of civilization back on man himself. How does the entity man become an embodiment of the Good through his own elemental qualities that appear in the process of his training. The qualitative entity stands within the positive and negative fourfold simultaneously. The entity stands in relation to the partialities, birds, and the unity of the autopoietic system simultaneously. The entity stands in relation to the fivefold of the autopoietic ring as well, its real opposite. Thus, the qualities of the entity relate to each of the phases of the autopoietic ring. That ring is the same as the five Hsing of Chinese cosmology, the primal intersubjective structure of interdependent arising transformations. The autopoietic ring operates on and transforms the entity given its current phase as it breaks out of unity. That qualitative celestial cause hits the entity through each of its four elemental qualitative surfaces. That produces the twenty sources which are the heart of the I Ching beyond mirroring and substitution, or appear in the Mayan day names. These twenty fundamental interactions between the qualities of the entity and the autopoietic ring determine the possible transformations of any entity within the fourfold. The entity relates to the closed unity of the fivefold as the essence of manifestation and to the partial objects, so-called desiring machines. The entity relates to the positive and negative fourfolds as what appears at their center. In the positive fourfold it is the object of a craft and embodies the mirroring relation of the fourfold within the world. In the negative fourfold it is the noumena -- that aspect of the object that never appears. It never appears because transcendence is prevented from ever arising. It is what exists beneath the transcendental superstructure --- what the object shares with the women, the slaves, the barbarian Scythians and Amazons -- the object as Other.

The four stages that Plato sees in the people of his city -- Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron -- are, in fact, measures of the relation between the autopoietic ring and their qualities as people. By testing, like the pot, these qualities come to shine forth within the positive fourfold. Those who are gold have the weakest reaction to the action of Aphrodite in any of her five manifestations, and that reaction gets increasingly stronger with each of the other three classes. Those effected by Aprhodite are those whose characters are weakest. Their flaws show up in the firing. But this conception is tainted with desire and need. If we take away desire and need from the structure, we get the five Hsing, essential transformations of Chinese medicine. These five transformations lie at the basis of the relations between man and nature, within both. They appear as the structuring of Discrimination (Earth), Intentionality (Wood), Spacetime (Water), Autonomy (Metal), and Timespace (Fire). The tainting of these fundamental transformations that appear everywhere in man/nature with desire leads to a distorted picture of their nature. When we substitute non-attachment, we see them more clearly. These are intersubjective structures which effect the elemental qualities of every entity, not just those born of crafts. The qualities of each entity are transformed by the intervention of these fundamental transformational possibilities. The whole structure of the positive and negative fourfold, and the relation of partial machines to the body without organs, has been distorted by the introduction of clinging. When you subtract these distortions, you get a fundamental structure of the unfolding of the world which has been clearly understood by Chinese philosophy for thousands of years. In Plato's city, those who are less effected by the distortions, but who respond to the tests well, are the ecstatic entities who exemplify the Good. The extremes of the entity and the good are not separate. The entity embodies the Good because it pours out from that source and is naturally good. That Goodness appears in the adequation between the variety in the environment and the variety in the human being. If this balance between the two is not maintained, then bad things result. The inequality of requisite variety results in all bad things. As long as balance is maintained approximately, then the Good shines through the clouds. Between mediating the good entities is the structure of intersubjectivity itself. That structure appears as the unity and diversity of the autopoietic system. Externally it is the desiring machines -- pure partiality -- and the unity itself as supplement. As Plato says, humans are in need; they must have their environment, they are full of partial objects that are desiring machines. Yet, the human is also in some sense a totality. It is in the sense that the human and environment together form a closed system -- not an open one. Men can only react to and know about what they have the capacity to comprehend of the environment. We do not see, for example, X-rays. They are there, but they pass through us without our knowing it. It is only by highly sophisticated techne that we know they are there. Our world is made up of those things we can know from our environment. Within the universe, what we can know is severely limited. The closed unity of man with his environment is the unity of the autopoietic system. This is equivalent to the universe. Finally, there are the phases of the autopoietic ring that break through that unity. When the universe splits open, we get a glimpse of the five Hsing that operate in man and nature without desire. How else could the unity of autopoiesis become differentiated. Beyond the veil of Aphrodite is a way of looking at the world which just sees transformations for what they are, not with a view of dynamically clinging to their result. These transformations operate on the elemental qualities of the good entity mediated by the autopoietic system that appears as closed unity and open partially at the same time. We must see this possibility against the backdrop of the nihilistic (enframing) completely fused ideal of the higher utopia.

Here we actually see an amazing point which has deep implications. Plato's higher utopia actually brings into the ideal Greek city something that has always been outside the real Greek cities. His ideal city brings in the so-called "secret service" mentioned in the Laws that is always traditionally outside the city into the inside. In effect, he turns the Greek city inside out. It was traditional for young warrior initiates to leave the city and become robbers that preyed on travelers and other cities. In myth, they were identified as "were-wolves." They would leave the city, undressing on one side of a river, and swimming to the other side, and spend seven years in the wilderness where they would learn the arts of war. Then, after seven years, they would return and be established as warriors within the city. Plato's ideal city moves these guardians of the city from their camps outside the city to the inside of the city. This is an important point for interpreting what is going on in the Republic, which has been missed by earlier interpreters. It is significant that Plato identifies the guardians as wolves. They are the were-wolves, or hunters, that identify with animals of prey, that prey on other cities and travelers. They are the wild men who live off the countryside, who are, in fact, the ideal of the self sufficient individual. When the ideal of the self sufficient individual is brought within the city of partial individuals who rely on each other, then he becomes the leader. He is the one who has no job except in war. So we see that Plato's ideal city unifies the two nihilistic extremes of self-sufficiency and utter dependence. The ideal city is a kakatopia in which the play of nihilistic opposites produces a chimera, the illusion of a possibility, which, in fact, does not exist except as a projection of ideation. But the fact that the Kakatopia brings inside the very destructive element of the real city is of significance. It allows us a case study of this elusive element of the Greek city which preserved the nature of the nomadic life, from which the Greek city evolved. Thus, we can expect the guardians life to be similar to the life of the initiates who live in the city to be turned into men and women by the experience of liminal situations which are the inverse of the norm within the city. There the women become equal to the men. They put on men's clothes and hunt. There is group marriage of fifty men and women together at a time. There the rules of seclusion of women do not apply. There the rules of marriage do not apply. All the norms are turned upside down. The men may steal, and kill from travelers and make raids on other cities at night in order to learn to be warriors. It is this initiation ceremony which is reenacted in order to train the divine twins. In fact, it is just the divine twins within the Indo-European tradition who undergo this initiation to become warriors. So Plato is satirizing something which is very obscure but very important to the real Greek cities. By this satire he is making its outlines seen vaguely in myth much clearer, like the opposite of ridicule spoken of earlier. Here we are speaking of the initiation ceremonies that all the Greeks knew in antiquity, which only appear obliquely through myths. Plato is making those clearer by using them as the template for his ideal city. He is using them as a template because many of the practices that go on in the initiation of warriors and women are the opposite of what is the norm in the city. By confronting the norm with its opposite, through an analogy that all understand, Plato is able to lead them beyond their present partial view of things toward a more complete or higher view.

Plato, as he draws the picture of the enframing, nihilistic high utopian city, is basically prescribing for it. He prescribes that it draw in the source of its anti-production within itself and teach that part of itself that is worse how to be the best. In the Greek city, it was through the warrior initiations that the young men learned the crafts of anti-production, like being cattle thieves. But Plato suggests that the initiations be brought inside the city, and the city acknowledge that it is training its youth in anti-production, and make that education make them excellent in the job of governing the city and protecting it. Plato takes the hidden part of the city and turns the city over to expose its underneath. In this way, the higher ideal city is the opposite of the real city which hides its secret service because of the shame attached to such a hypocritical institution. Each city breaks all the rules externally that it abides by internally and publicly endorses. This hypocracy of the real city in its undeclared war against everything outside of itself is mirrored by the hypocracy that fosters internal strife by creating unjust institutions internally. For instance, the Spartans had serfs which worked the land, and the secret service would kill them if they were found on the roads. The agricultural slavery which made it possible for the Spartans to wage war continuously against their neighbors is just one example of injustice internally that results in injustice externally. Plato wants to get in control of this anti-productive element of the Greek city by bringing it to the center and controlling it. Through that exposition we gain some insight into the nature of this hidden component of the city -- normally known only through distorted mythic accounts. Myth was the veil that covered the initiations of the youth and legitimized them. In those initiations, the jinn were invoked to enter these humans, and like the potters clay, to dry and harden them so they might become warriors for the city.

Once the Guardians are brought within the city, then the key question is how to train them so that they will be able to discriminate when to vent their violence and anger and when to restrain themselves. The guards are like guard dogs. This analogy with animals goes throughout this passage and is especially prominent when considering the roles of children and women. Like a guard dog, they must recognize who is friend and who is stranger, being friendly to the former and majestic toward the latter. But this ability to discriminate brings up for the first time the nature of philosophy because Socrates says the dog does this merely on the basis of knowledge and ignorance. Thus, the dog must love knowledge. This is surely a joke, because it actually makes clear that recognition of friend and foe by means of prior knowledge alone is not adequate. Really the guardian needs to be able to look deeply into the friend and foe, and distinguish who is really the friend and foe not merely who "appears" to be so. By identifying the watchdog with the philosopher Socrates, means to indicate that the true guardian needs to make a non-nihilistic distinction between the true friend and true foe which cannot be made merely on the basis of the what appears on the surface. The guardian needs to be able to distinguish the good in people in order to do its real job properly.

The education of the innate discrimination of the Guardians is the next topic with which Plato deals. In it he begins by discussing how the stories told children must be controlled. To begin with, the stories that portray the gods as bad must be expunged from the curriculum. Secondly, all stories that make them consider how the gods change form and practice deceipt must also be eliminated. Beyond that, poets must be prevented from portraying the underworld as a terrible place, or scenes that invite too much laughter. In fact, all falsehood would be banned except that used like medicine by the rulers, acting like doctors to the state. Plato goes on to describe the rest of the educational system, both mental and physical and describes the tests he would put the guardians to determine if they were fit to govern. This unbridled control of information is the second major means of destroying variety in the kakatopia. The first was to make everyone a specialist and get rid of amateurs in all the crafts, preserving only the perfect examples which flow from excellence of techne. That was the control of action. Now Plato has moved on to control information within his totalitarian state in a similar way, even to the use of lying by the rulers. This is the sine quo non of totalitarian government. By controlling information, you control people's minds. Plato is very clear on this point. By controlling people's minds, you eliminate diversity and produce a single all-encompassing worldview within the city. In this way, you project the uni-verse outward upon the world. A universe in which excellence is the goal in action, and the Good is the goal in all things. Here we see that it is the destruction of variety which is the prerequisite for the production of the universal city, these days referred to as the global village. The city which projects the uni-verse as a special kind of world, is a fused intersubjective structure based on the special places like the Assembly where people come together to exercise power. Between the extremes of tyranny and democracy, which are the unity and fragmentation of power, a small group becomes a plurality united. The guards represent this alternative closer to the end of the scale of total unity, and the assembly, in The Laws is closer to the plurality end of the scale. This is one of the differences between the higher and lower utopias. Sartre calls this unified diversity a detotalized totality in his monumental study of the sources of power -- The Critique Of Dialectical Reason.

In the crucial first chapter of the second book of the Critique, Sartre speaks of the transformation in a revolutionary moment of the people from being a collective into being a "fused group."

From this moment [when Flessels was tricked by not being given promised arms] on, there is something which is neither group nor series, but what Malraux, in Days Of Hope, called the Apocalypse -- that is to say, the dissolution of the series into a fused group. And this group, though still unstructured, that is to say, entirely amorphous, is characterized by being the direct opposite of alterity. In a serial relation, in fact, unity as the formula (Raison) of the series is always elsewhere, whereas in the Apocalypse, though seriality still exists at least as a process which is about to disappear, although it always may reappear, synthetic unity is always here. Or, to put the same point in another way, throughout a city, at every moment, in each partial process, the part is entirely involved and the movement of the city is fulfilled and signified in it. "By evening," wrote Montjoye, "Paris was a new city. Regular cannon shots reminded the people to be on their guard. And added to the noise of the cannon there were bells sounding in continuous alarm. The sixty churches where the residents had gathered were overflowing with people. Everyone there was an orator."

The city was a fused group. We shall soon see how this differs from seriality. But first we must make it clear that it would congeal into a collective if it were not structured in a temporal development, the speed and duration of which obviously depend on the circumstances and the situation. A fused group is in fact still a series, negating itself in re-interiorizing exterior negations; in other words, in this moment there is no distinction between the positive itself (the group formation) and this self-negating negation (the series in dissolution). It can be shown that the initial struturation (in so far as it comes from the group itself) affected one district, as a part of a fluid whole, with its practico-inert structure.²

This study of the arising of the fused group in the French Revolution is very important, but are almost universally ignored contribution to sociology. Sartre is clear that the fused group is more fundamental than any other social structure and is the source of all other social structures, even though in time it may grow out of those other structures. In the fused group, arises what Sartre calls the third party.

Now by constituting the worked Thing as a totalizing totality, the common danger does not at first eliminate seriality, either at the level of the isolated individual, or at that of reciprocity: it tears everyone away from his Other-Being insofar as he is a third party in relation to a certain constellation of reciprocities; in short, it frees the ternary relation as a free inter-individual reality, as an immediate human relation. Through the third party, in effect, practical unity, as the negation of a threatening organized praxis, reveals itself through the constellation of reciprocities. From a structural point of view, the third party is the human mediation through which the multiplicity of epicenters and ends (identical and separate) organizes itself directly, as determined by a synthetic objective. However, according to circumstances, this object will either fall outside the practical ends of the third party, or partially overlap with them, or contradict them, or harmonize with them, or subordinate them to itself, or subordinate itself to them. But if the practical unity of surrounding materiality constitutes the multiplicity, externally and negatively, as a totality, the objective of the third party produces itself for him as a common objective, and the plurality of epicenters reveals itself to him as unified by a common exigency (or common praxis), because it decodes serial multiplicity in terms of a community which is already inscribed in things, in the manner of a passive idea or a totalizing destiny.³

This third party, as Sartre calls it, between the individual and the collective [city], is the intersubjective/interobjective structure of free inter-individual reality. It underlies all social institutions as their founding possibility. Sartre was one of the first sociologists to recognize this important proto-social reality that makes all the "designated as real" social realties possible. Sartre sees the revolution as a experimental situation in which to see this proto-social reality manifest itself. Plato was clearly aware of this fundamental level at which society is constituted, and attempted to build upon it. In a way, we can see the Guardians as the embodiment of this third party. Their job is to mediate between all the individuals of the city and the city itself. They do not just wage war, but they organize the whole city by keeping all the individuals in line with the goals of the totalitarian city. The Guardians mediate between each individual and the whole city.

But it is a common error of many sociologists to stop at this point and treat the group as a binary relation (individual-community), whereas, in reality, it is a ternary relation. Indeed, this is something that no picture or sculpture could convey directly, in that the individual, as a third party, is connected, in the unity of a single praxis (and therefore of a single perceptual vista), with the unity of individuals as inseparable moments of a non-totalized totalization, and with each of them as a third party, that is to say, through the mediation of the group. In terms of perception, I perceive the group as my common reality, and simultaneously, as a mediation between me and every other third party. I say every third party deliberately: whatever relations of simple reciprocity (helping, training a new neighbor or comrade, etc.) there are within the common action, these relations, though transfigured by their being-in-a-group, are not constitutive. And I also say: the members of the group are third parties, which means that each of them totalizes the reciprocities of others. And the relation of one third party to another has nothing to do with alterity: since the group is the practical milieu of this relation, it must be a human relation (with crucial importance of the differentiations of the group), which we shall call mediated reciprocity. And, as we shall see, this mediation is dual, in that it is both the mediation of the group between third parties and the mediation of each third party between the group and the other third parties.⁴

Plato, it appears, wants to capture this proto-social reality within his imaginary institutions. He goes to great extremes to attempt to produce a structure that would make the third parties explicit within his social structure and keep them intact. As we pointed out, the guards are an implicit part hidden on the outside of every city. It is the place of initiation of youth, now brought into the city and given control of the city. As the organ of initiation it is the place where the fusion of individuals from the city into a group occurs. It is like boot camp in today's army in which common and shared hardship creates bonds of lasting friendship between unrelated individuals. It is certain that the "secret service" of the cities would have acted in exactly the same way on the citie's youth. Now that source of bonding, where all the normal rules of the city are broken in the liminal condition of initiation, is brought inside the city. The guardians are not seen as individuals -- they are, in fact, stripped of all their property and rights. They become slaves of the city who are not allowed to support themselves. Their sole duty is to control the city and guard it. As meta-slaves, they embody the third party or the unifying fusion of intersubjective structures into a single social intentionality. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call the "socius." The socius is the proto-social intesubjective non-objectified inter-individual fusion of the social group. It exists before individuals may be distinguished. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, at this stage, before the arising even of the difference between nature and culture, between artificial and natural machines, individuals are merely constellations of desiring machines suspended within the socius.

All the strategies of variety reduction are aimed at causing this fusion of intersubjective intentionality to occur. The object of the action of the intersubjective unity is the production of the excellent through specialization. The citizens become of a common mind by excluding all contrary information which diffuses their focus on the Good. But the fusion has two stages. The lower utopia stage preserves the DIVERSITY-in-unity of the community, while the higher utopia strives for UNITY-in-diversity which attempts to approach to embodying identity. As we study the Republic and Laws, it is best to keep in mind this level of proto-social reality and not think of these cities as being collections of individuals as we know them. In Greece, individuality was appearing on the scene. We know many great personalities who arose in those cities, such as Aristophanes and Socrates. But we also know that the Greeks were in the small city of Athens that stood against a great empire and won. In order to pull off that feat, it is certain that the kind of fusion that Sartre speaks of occurred. In the plays Wasps and Peace there are many intimations of this common feeling of the people, who, as a small city-state, defended all of Greece against the Persian invasion. It is clear that the democratic structures of Athens are the remnant of the fused group structures of those difficult times, in which everyone pulled together for the common good and shared their fate.

In practice, this mens than I am integrated into the common action when the common praxis of the third party posits itself as regulatory. I run with all the others; I shout: "Stop!;" everybody stops. Someone else shouts, "Let's go!" or, "To the left!" "To the right!" "To the Bastile!" And everyone moves off, following the regulatory third party, surrounding him and sweeping past him; then the group reabsorbs him as soon as another third party, by giving some order or by some action visible to all, constitutes himself as regulatory for a moment. But the order is not obeyed. Who would obey? And whom? It is simply common praxis becoming, in some third party, regulatory of itself in me and in all the other third parties, in the movement of a totalization which totalizes me and everyone else. I can recognize this totalizing regulation as such only insofar as my action is the same in the totalizing third party. On the basis of the common future adumbrated by the common movement (flight, charge, etc.), that is to say, on the basis of my future as the common meaning of my regulatory and totalizing praxis, the order gives me my common, future possibility. It rebels this possibility as a means within my project. In this way, I can, as being-in-the-group, myself become a means of the common praxis, that is to say, an instrument of my own praxis. ("Get back, you lot! Let the others move ahead!" -- initial differentiations, almost immediately reabsorbed, according to the circumstances and the outcome.) I execute the "command;" I am the "order," insofar as, though the third party, it accomplishes the integration which I cannot accomplish myself. This integration is real (and as we shall see, it will become more real as the group becomes more differentiated). And it is really the constituent whole which achieves practical unification through the order. In the extreme case, no regulatory third party even appears; orders circulate. Of course, they originated in some individual third party, or sometimes in several third parties at once. But distance, the impossibility of grasping the group when one is inside it, and many other reasons all mean that it is only the word which reaches my ears and I hear it insofar as it comes from afar (insofaras my neighbor repeats it without changing it). The words circulate from mouth to mouth, it might be said, like a coin from hand to hand. And, in fact, discourse is a sound-object, a materiality. Furthermore, as they "circulate," the words take on an inorganic hardness, and become a worked Thing. But this is far from meaning that we are coming back to collectives. This thing is the vehicle of sovereignty: in short, it does not circulate. Even if it "comes from afar," it is produced here as new, insofar as wherever it is, every place in the group is the same here. This object which is apprehended, understood, and reproduced in the immediate transcendence of praxis, is merely totalization itself in everyone, insofar as it can be achieved only by a sigh. I decode the sign by my action, by conforming to the maxim produced; and the absence of the first signifier (of the third party who was the first to shout the words) makes no difference to the structure of my praxis: the authorless words, repeated by a hundred mouths (including my own) do not appear to me as the product of the group (in the sense in which this might be a hyper-organism or a closed totality) but, in the act which comprehends it by actualizing its meaning, I apprehend it as the pure totalizing and regulatory presence of the third party (as the same as me) insofar as it accomplishes my integration where I am and through my freedom.⁵

Need we say that this regulation function of the third party, arising out of the intersubjective mediation of mediations, is precisely staged in the realm of autopoiesis. Here, the unordered group is patterning itself, organizing itself. Individuals make up the structural components of this group, but the third party is its organization. Given the first moment of mediation in which mediation itself appears as a praxis, the second moment provides the self-organization with no specific source arising from the whole embodied in each part. Does this description of the regulating force of third parties sound like the situation that arises in Hoplite warfare on the battlefield, within the Mele? The call to PUSH comes from everywhere at once. Out of the chaos of the Mele comes a reassertion of structural order where neighbors, fathers, sons, all working together, attempt to push through the practico-inert bodies of the Other. Within war, this camaraderie appears in its most striking and valiant form. The Greek hoplites were farmers and neighbors usually fighting a single battle each summer. They were not like the Spartans, usually professional military men. The Spartans' professionalism led to their eventual dominance over Athens. This must surely have colored Plato's view so that he felt confident to take the one man, one job maxim to its logical conclusion to produce a standing army like that of Sparta. But still, even in such a standing army, the camaraderie was enforced by common meals and clubs as well as limitations on property and common mandatory training. Plato relates the Spartan example to a rational principle, then takes that principle to its logical but highly impractical conclusion, producing along the way the lower and higher utopias. But the reality of Hoplite warfare underlies the whole structure, and within that reality we must see the emergence, in extreme circumstance, of the proto-social fused group responding to the rallying cry within the Mele, as the foundation of Plato's city. The ideal cities attempt to institutionalize that fused group as a means of creating social stability and as a way to approach the Good. In battle in the exhibit of courage and valor on the killing field were the places where glory shows forth most brilliantly. In that situation, the third party also appears as the group mind, the will to power coupled with Being-in-the-group within the arena of anti-production. Plato hopes to achieve this by stressing excellence in everything, including warfare, by the one man, one job maxim. And he also hopes to control information so as to brainwash his citizens into all having a common worldview towards the Good. By cutting down variety in this specific way, Plato hopes to freeze the fused group in existence -- clinging to that proto-social reality that only appears in rare instances. He wishes to do this because it is the autopoietic source of human social organization arising directly out of group praxis in extreme situations. Elias Canetti speaks of it in his masterpiece Crowds And Power. Canetti discusses the dynamics in terms of crowds and crowd crystals. He has a more static view than that of Sartre. From Sartre's viewpoint the fused group is logically prior to the crowd or the crowd crystals. The fused group arises in extreme situations out of the crowd, and will be seen later as a crystal -- static nucleus of group formation. But in the actual situation, it is the fused group that arises out of the crowd to be seen later as the seed crystal that caused the whole crowd to take on a different emergent structure. Cannetti correctly traces this dialectic, caused by the alienation of modern times, back to the pack.

Characteristic of the pack is the fact that it cannot grow. It is surrounded by emptiness, and there are literally no additional people who could join it. It consists of a group of men in a state of excitement whose fiercest wish is to be more. In whatever they undertake together, whether hunting or fighting, they would fare better if there were more of them. For a group consisting of so few, every single man who joined it would be a distinct, substantial and indispensable addition. The strength he brought with him might be a tenth or twentieth part of their total strength. the position he occupied would be clear to all; he would really count in the economy of the group, in a way that scarcely any of us count today.

In the pack which, from time to time, forms out of the group, and which most strongly expresses its feeling of unity, the individual can never lose himself as completely as modern man can in any crowd today. In the changing constellation of the pack, in its dances and expeditions, he will again and again find himself at its edge. He may be in the centre, and then, immediately afterwards, at the edge again; at the edge, then back in the centre. When the pack forms a ring round a fire, each man will have neighbors to right and left, but no one behind him, his back naked and exposed to the wilderness. Density within the pack is always something of an illusion. Men may press closely together and enact a multitude in traditional rhythmic movements, but they are not a multitude; they are a few, and have to make up in intensity what they lack in actual numbers.

Plato's Guardians are definitely a pack -- the initiation pack brought into the city from the wilderness. That pack forms an autopoietic ring around the fire. It desires growth and density and counteracts their lack through increased direction and the equality of its members. Each member is what Sartre calls a third party, mediating all other relations within the pack and imposing self organization on the whole group. By bringing this pack within the city and founding the city on it, Plato hopes to tap this autopoietic proto-social foundation of all social activity -- the socius. The pack is neither individual nor community. It is not made up of individuals, and is not a social unity sui generis. It is prior to both individual and community. Like the pack of wolves, it is an instinctive constellation grown out of necessity and extremity. It operates at a level before the distinction between human and animal society. In the pack, the human becomes the totem animal, and the animal becomes human. In the pack, the self-organizing principle arises in response to the moment and dissolves in the next moment, through dominance rituals. Plato wishes to tap this raw material and make it the stuff his city is made of as it is the rough-hewn human kindness which is closer to the Good than civilized man.