Americans know this better than most. Or if we don’t know it, we live it. The death of the father is our daily bread. We commemorate his decomposition with our national festivals, reenact his demise with our unending wars and circular political disputes, wave his severed head from the pike of our flagpoles, and march through the streets declaring our independence from his rule. What, after all, is the American freeman, as Emerson calls him, free from? The “courtly muses of Europe”? The “accepted dogmas” of bygone generations? No, such influences are felt as keenly today as they were in the time of George, even if we delude ourselves into thinking they are not. What American freedom loosens us from—the thing we have rooted out and rid ourselves of—is the awareness of our debt, the consciousness of our dependence, and the requisite gratitude that goes along with it. Having fled like rebellious children from our paternal home, we feed ourselves on swine pods and insist we are better off than when we shared our father’s fattened calf. In many ways, we are. The father, it must be said, is an unbearable tyrant—another maxim my life bears out daily. But a tyrant continues to tyrannize even after he’s gone. Influence is harder to remove than a human head. The question we face today is not how to depose a king but what to do with the shadow he still casts over an empty throne.

This, it should be clear, is the problem facing the American philosopher. There is no need to expend precious words rehearsing the tedious argument between the so-called Anglo-American and continental schools of contemporary thought. In truth, both are thoroughly American insofar as each is predicated on the decadent denial of the past, the former refusing the import of tradition, the latter attempting to annihilate it. Do not misunderstand me. When I say that, in a sense, all the philosophy being written today is American philosophy, I am not advancing some right-wing, populist notion of American exceptionalism. Nor am I echoing the equally juvenile zeitgeist lament that America is an exceptional menace, uniquely guilty of co-opting and oppressing other lands and peoples. In truth, every society is exceptional in that society itself is the exception, the most unnatural and antinatural scourge on the face of the earth (cf. Republic, 369b–373e; Genesis 4:17; and countless other of society’s great treasures that sing in unison on this point). And it is a banal truism that every city seeks to colonize every other. Even the most cursory look at human history assures us of that.

No, to say, as I do, that today’s philosophy is American philosophy is only to say that it embodies the American spirit, that is founded on the American ethos, by which I mean that it takes as its starting point the violent amputation of the past. There is no Russell, no Whitehead, no Quine without William James. There is no Foucault, no Derrida, no Lyotard without Nietzsche. But neither James nor Nietzsche can be understood without Emerson, godfather to one, fatherland to the other.¹ The lineage is clear. The analytic philosopher and the continental are twin stalks growing from a single root. They are siblings, kind of like Cain and Abel, divided by temperament but heirs to the same grievous crown. What did these two inherit from their shared progenitor? What trait, what deformity, what sin? Today’s philosopher may call his project a scientific investigation into what can be known or a search for meaning in the wake of the death of God. He may claim to examine logical forms and the structures of language or to deconstruct social hegemonies and patriarchal systems. But in either case, his work is driven and defined by the oedipal impulse, the quest for autonomy, the attempt to stand security for oneself, the desire to root out influence.

Such pursuits, I will not deny, were once noble. Noble as a lie can be noble, to be sure, but worthwhile all the same. There was a time when Emersonian self-reliance was the needed potion, the witches’ brew that awakened the spirit while deadening the mind to the folly of human endeavors. It had a vivacity to it, the ability to charm one back to life. The problem is that we’ve lived too long. Our tolerance has increased; our intoxication dwindled. We post-post-postmoderns have realized the promise of an empty promise and, like the maligned servant of the old parable, squandered our talents without producing anything of our own. What aim is there for man today? Around what values can he construct a life? It is no doubt easier to knock a statue to the ground than achieve that which merits one’s erection. But do we today believe that anything might merit one’s erection? Have we become so drunk on destruction that we no longer aspire to build anything at all? The past has been forgotten. The father is dead. Who will stand in his place?

This chapter, I hope, represents a first attempt at construction after destruction. There is no denying that it looks to topple certain ideals, values that have calcified and become the most monstrous of idols. But a hammer is put to ill use if used only for smashing. My chief concern is the future. Where do we go from here? What comes next? Lyotard rightly defines the postmodern as a part, perhaps even a precondition, of the modern. “All that has been received, if only yesterday . .. must be suspected.”² True enough. But if the man who suspects everything suspects even his suspicions, if he sees something questionable in his questioning, recalls that all his ideas are only recollections received from another—what then? How will his future unfold? What will become of him? The answer, I think, is as untimely as it is obvious. We live in an age of progress that never wants to look back—and yet, here we stand at a crossroads. At this late hour, we are confronted with only two options: ruin or return. Wary of everything, wearied by everything, lacking faith and without hope, we can either continue to starve, feeding on the straw reserved for swine, or muster the humility to return to the old man’s doorstep and ask for a little bit more.

The copy of Self-Reliance that sits open on my desk was printed by a press that calls itself “American Renaissance Books.” The American Renaissance, like its European predecessor, appreciated the virtue of the past. (Even Emerson, who seems to advocate cutting ties with tradition, is steeped in it.) Its authors and artists saw that the way forward and the way backward are the same, that the one who comes after us is before us, that he who would envision his tomorrow must look to his yesterday, must examine where he has been before he can know where he is going. As I’ve grown older, I’ve appreciated more and more how indebted I am to my father, both the flesh-and-blood man and the idol of the father that stands before me in all things, looms over everything I do. The question is: Can we learn from our predecessors as men, not as boys? Can we lean forward with trust after we’ve cast trust aside, passed through the crucible of doubt?

The chapter that follows returns us to Plato not because it longs to go back but because it desires more than anything to forge ahead. What comes after the postmodern? What can be built when even the raw material has been destroyed? It is a question that is on the minds of us all, and yet none has an answer to it. Well, in the following pages, I venture to offer an answer to it. The picture is partial, not fully formulated or worked out, but I offer it all the same and hope that in the months and years ahead, others will take up my call to return to the wellspring of the past in order to envision anew what might be made of the future. To do so, it will be necessary to destroy, to clear the way for that which is yet to come. It is only by examining the origins of our values, the regime under which we live, that we can see our ideals for what they are—dangerous idols. And it is only when we have knocked every idol to the ground that we can erect for ourselves a new and noble ideal, sacred, wonderful, and pleasing—radiant as the sun.

Echoing his question to Critias, Socrates asks Agathon in the Symposium, “Is Love [Eros] the love of nothing or of something?” (199e). And Agathon, like Critias before him, answers without hesitation: “Of something, surely!” (200a). From here the argument flows on as a matter of course, and the question of erotic desire—the questionable nature of erotic desire, erotic desire as questionable, as a riddle—is left behind. To those who have not been initiated into the “Bacchic frenzy of philosophy” (Symposium, 218b)—those who fail to recognize that irony is the heart of philosophy—there is no reason to question any further. The obvious answer and the true answer are one. But what about us? Will we number ourselves among those who stumble upon a satisfying conclusion and question no further? Will we have our fill of argumentation and cease to search for answers? Will we become fat, glutted, complacent, ready to give up the pursuit? Or, like the erotic man who Socrates offers as an image of the true philosopher (Republic, 474d–475d), will we follow our insatiable appetite, give ourselves over to an endless longing, allow our lust for truth to carry us beyond all limitations (cf. Republic, 485b; 490a)?

The brilliance of the questions raised by Socrates is that they immediately bring us beneath the surface of the text and point beyond the surface answers provided by Socrates’ interlocutors. Merely by posing the question of desire, Socrates opens readers to the possibility of an unsettling truth. And his formulation of the question—Is desire anything more than a desire for desire itself? Is love, to recall Augustine, anything but the love of loving?⁴—gestures at an uncomfortable answer. Yet in order to see the game that is very much afoot, one must pay close attention not only to what is being said but also to how it is being said, who it is being said to, who is saying it, where and when it is being said, and often what is not being said, what is merely being hinted at, or even concealed behind what is being said.⁵ It is by learning to notice the subtleties of the text, by learning to read Plato not as a logician but rather as an incredibly subtle poet, that one begins to recognize the ideas hidden in plain view.⁶ And this is especially true when it comes to trying to untangle the enigma of desire, an enigma that, as we shall see, stands at the foundation of the polis, of civilization, and thus is the key to interpreting the construction of the city “in speech” (Republic, 369a) that accounts for the majority of the Republic.