They are not exposed to or involved in any of the daily concerns of the political or legal system. These human beings, alone, says Socrates, are free. Every other human being, says Socrates, is a slave. More literally they are slaves to time. And expressed in more Greek fashion, they are slaves to the water clock. All of their actions and their thinking, all of their problem solving, is on a timer.
To be free one must be able to do what one wants. But in order to be able to do what one wants in the fullest sense, one must know what one is doing. Only those who are not concerned with the matters of the day, the week, the year are free to think about a problem for as long as the problem deserves. Only a thinker who is at leisure thinks about a problem with no limitations other than those that define sound thinking itself.
Only such a thinker can delay their conclusion until the thinking itself merits a conclusion. All others are under the pressure of some deadline, the pressing down of the flowing water of time.
This pressure distorts their thinking in one way or another. It makes them proclaim a finish to the thinking when more thinking is needed. It makes them proclaim a matter finished when more argument or more evidence is needed. Human beings become slaves to the clock mostly because other human beings put them on the clock.
What Nietzsche seems to have in mind is that our intercourse with other human beings pressures us to adopt illegitimate modes of thinking.
We must agree or, more accurately, pretend to agree about many matters regardless of whether we have the resources and have utilized those resources to come to a well-founded conclusion.
Human beings do not feel secure in the proximity of other human beings who do not agree with them. Such agreements are demanded by social life, and they are demanded on a time table determined by the feelings of the human beings, not by the epistemological requirements of the matter under consideration.
Who is comfortable with a neighbor who does not respect property rights, or does not endorse the prohibition against cannibalism, or who openly admits that they do not know what justice is? In general, who is comfortable living near to human beings who do not hold a massive host of opinions shared in rough outline by the whole group?
It is bad thinking to declare a matter resolved before it is resolved. It is a mental defect to think one knows what one does not know. Yet it seems that social life pushes our thinking into this premature and self-deceiving form. Not only that, the matters that society demands we resolve are matters that move our passions deeply.
Thus we see exhibitions of great anger and agitation in our efforts to govern ourselves. Governing demands results. Results are not answers.
The clearest thing is that strength of the passions is out of proportion with the fullness and soundness of the thinking that backs our claims. We very often do not know, but when another human being disagrees with us, we act as if we do know and as if they ought to know. We would never demand that a human being give a solution to an equation before they had actually worked it out, but in many matters of much greater concern to us we demand something like that from our fellow human beings.
We put them on the clock. We impress upon them habits of bad thinking. And we invest the situation with great passion and grave consequences. Her suitors have put Penelope on the clock. They are aggressive and avaricious.
Instead, she puts off her decision and leads them on with promises that she will choose a new husband as soon as certain things happen. Her astute delaying tactics reveal her sly and artful side. The notion of not remarrying until she completes a burial shroud that she will never complete cleverly buys her time. Similarly, some commentators claim that her decision to marry whomever wins the archery contest of Book 21 results from her awareness that only her husband can win it.
Some even claim that she recognizes her husband before she admits it to him in Book Ace your assignments with our guide to The Odyssey! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Why does Telemachus go to Pylos and Sparta? How does Odysseus escape Polyphemus? Why does Odysseus kill the suitors? By day, the queen, a renowned weaver, worked on a great loom in the royal halls. At night, she secretly unraveled what she had done, amazingly deceiving the young suitors.
Her ploy failed only when one of her servants eventually betrayed her and told the suitors what was happening. The contest of the bow and axes is another example of Penelope's guile; it also illustrates her wry sense of destiny. After Odysseus returns to Ithaca, the queen announces first to the visiting beggar, whom she suspects to be Odysseus, that she will hold a contest in which the suitors will be asked to string the great bow of Odysseus and shoot an arrow through a dozen axes, an old trick of her husband's, and that she will be the wife of the man who can perform the feat.
The choice of this particular contest is no coincidence; Penelope knows exactly what she is doing. If the old beggar really is Odysseus in disguise, he alone has any realistic chance of winning the contest. Previous Odysseus.
Next Telemachus.
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