They bow to Power. “Plato, who courted the tyrant Dionysius the Elder of Syracuse, and as if that were not enough, also his son. Glory be to destiny that made things work: on both occasions, the missions of the author of The Laws ended in failure. One of them even resulted in a journey of initiation during which Plato tasted the charm of slavery. The Athenian philosopher had his imitators. Among the most famous we find Hegel, symbol of cooperation between Germany, then Prussia, and France: indeed, the worthy author of the Science of Logic in Jena hailed Napoleon as a savior, the spirit of the world incarnate, and so on. Today we might write bulky volumes counting idyllic relations between Freud and Mussolini, between Heidegger and Hitler,or between Sartre and Stalin, Castro or Mao.
Cynismes, Portrait du philosophe in chien,
by Michel Onfray.