Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics: Philosophy as Partnership 3031447808, 9783031447808

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Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics Philosophy as Partnership Joseph I. Breidenstein Jr.

Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics

Joseph I. Breidenstein Jr.

Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics Philosophy as Partnership

Joseph I. Breidenstein Jr. Barnet, VT, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-44779-2    ISBN 978-3-031-44780-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44780-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

for my cat

Preface

1. At a time when the increasing cost of college tuition is causing many people to become skeptical of—and even resentful toward—higher education, the future of philosophy can seem as uncertain as our understanding of its origin is tenuous, and this situation is exacerbated by the exclusionary mentality that one can still find in academic culture. As the first sustained scholarly discussion of women in presocratic philosophy, this book provides a perspective on the origin and nature of philosophy which contributes to the ongoing efforts of many who are counteracting patriarchy within academia and showing why philosophy is essential for protecting and improving western democracy. Since I wrote this book to both satisfy scholars of presocratic philosophy and appeal to a wider audience, I will here take the time to briefly explain both my method of approaching the presocratics and my thesis so that, by the end of this preface, readers will have a clear idea of what I’m saying, how I’m saying it, and why it matters. 2. Over the course of my research, I’ve found scholarship on the presocratics to be limited by western classicism’s lack of engagement with other areas of research as well as by its etic approach to antiquity. In Nietzsche’s day, classical studies was a very closed community, and it seems as though the western European nature of classicism has continued to keep classical studies relatively isolated from other areas of research in the sense that, whereas people who study non-western cultures have had to consider post-colonial and post-modern criticisms that problematize the supposedly objective nature of such research, many classicists still consider themselves to be disinterested investigators of antiquity; neutral observers who are purely concerned with knowledge for its own sake. As important as vii

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striving for objective neutrality and maintaining a critical distance to one’s subject matter certainly are, assuming that one is already objective arbitrarily limits inquiry insofar as it discourages one from reflecting on one’s perspective, and likewise, keeping one’s research at arm’s length, as it were, can be not just societally counterproductive insofar as it inclines one to ignore the cultural significance of academic research but even dangerous insofar as it prevents ethical considerations from being able to provide a counter force to science when necessary. (That none of the members of the Health Service that carried out the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male expressed the slightest remorse is just one of many clear examples of how dangerous an un-checked pursuit of knowledge for its own sake can be.) Furthermore, whereas it behooves researchers of non-western cultures to employ emic methods of scholarship which consider how phenomena appear from within the perspectives of the cultures themselves, it seems as though the arm’s length at which many—but certainly not all—classicists hold their research also manifests as a predominantly etic approach to antiquity which views the latter as an object of inquiry instead of as a subject with whom one converses in a reciprocal dialogue; listening for the unexpected, and keeping in mind that the answers one receives are responses to the questions one asks. Our understanding of the historical emergence of philosophy reflects our understanding of both what we consider philosophy to be and how philosophical thought emerges within an individual, and in order to provide a conception of philosophy that will enable us to both gain an emic perspective on the origin of western philosophy and illustrate how philosophy can help better align western science and academic culture with the needs of democracy in the twenty-first century, this book approaches presocratic philosophy via Nietzsche, feminism, and embodied cognition. 3. While any work of philosophical scholarship possesses some philosophical and scholarly elements, the common conflation of philosophy with science—such as we see in the description of the presocratics as philosopher-­scientists—inclines scholars to neglect the philosophical significance of texts by assessing texts exclusively according to scientific criteria. Nietzsche is integral to both the philosophical and scholarly aspects of this book, and just as his emphasis that, in contrast to the paradigm-­ confined and critical nature of science, philosophy consists of self-reflective and creative events of artistic inspiration, helps us distinguish philosophical thought, his view that the ultimate value of a philosophical work lies in its ability to transmit philosophy to others provides us with a philosophical

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criterion by which one can assess texts. If philosophy consists, in part, of a love of learning and an ability to question presuppositions which other people take for granted, then the philosophical value of a text consists, not just in the answers and arguments it provides, but also in its ability to incite readers to ask new questions and to inspire in them an appreciation of the joys of self-reflective and creative thinking. Since this book both presents a scholarly claim and is written in such a way as to make understanding this claim as accessible, enjoyable, and thought-provoking as possible, both scholarly and philosophical criteria should be considered when assessing its value. (I specifically wrote it to be thought-provoking for specialists in the various fields with which I combine my research on presocratic philosophy—Nietzsche studies, feminist philosophy of religion, embodied cognition, social-political theory, etc.—and I encourage scholars to use this book as a resource for their own research; taking its contents in directions that I cannot.) I take up Nietzsche’s view that, like tragedy, philosophy is born from the spirit of music so as to show that the presocratics were at least as much philosopher-artists as they were philosopher-­ scientists, but far from negating the philosophical value of science that is evident in both Nietzsche’s and this book’s use of scientific research, this reading of the presocratics is meant to encourage a more balanced and culturally efficacious approach to academic research by counteracting a distinctly unphilosophical and patriarchal scientism. The applicability of Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy to the presocratics is indicated by how he himself derived it in large part from his reading of them, and it’s for this reason that, besides using his conception of philosophy so as to interpret the presocratics, I will begin my discussion of each presocratic with an account of Nietzsche’s reading of him so as to both show how the latter contributed to Nietzsche’s understanding of philosophy and to assess the accuracy of Nietzsche’s reading in light of the latest scholarship. 4. Like its philosophical nature, this book’s scholarly claim concerning the presocratics derives from several aspects of Nietzsche’s reading of them such as his views that the they were primarily religious reformers and that the Greek mysteries provided the content of early Greek metaphysics, but before stating my thesis, I’ll describe how my argument for it reflects Nietzsche’s views that objectivity is perspectival and that truth is a matter of degree. The view that objectivity consists of being in state of disinterested impartiality has been criticized by those who have noticed that, besides being an implausible attempt to deny that one is an embodied being with a particular cultural perspective, such an appeal to an alleged

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form of consciousness functions more ideologically than epistemologically—that it functions primarily so as to confer authority on the scholars who claim to possesses it—but Nietzsche avoids these problems by holding that objectivity consists, not in the denial of one’s perspective, but in approaching a phenomenon from as many perspectives as possible. Such a perspectival approach is particularly useful when studying the presocratics insofar as this is an endeavor that is often and accurately described as being akin to taking a Rorschach test. Instead of attempting to discover the truth of the ancient past by approaching it in a ‘neutral-objective’ way, it’s more productive to both employ a variety of different perspectives so as to acquire as comprehensive a view as possible and to self-consciously acknowledge the perspectives that one is bringing to the past. (This approach does not prevent one from arriving at what, for all practical purposes, are objective facts because two things can be true at the same time—one can approach the past from particular perspectives and said perspectives can shed light on previously neglected facts about the past. And to those who would say that I’ve chosen my methods in order to arrive at my conclusion, I would say that they are arbitrarily limiting what counts as relevant information so as to preserve more traditional accounts of the origin of philosophy.) In addition to his perspectivism, Nietzsche’s view that truth is a matter of degree reflects how, since different areas of research are characterized by different degrees of certainty, it is inappropriate to hold arguments in a less certain area of research to the standards of a more certain area of research. Concerning ancient history, many of our theories are highly speculative, and my basic argument is that, when we take into consideration all the perspectives and information that I discuss in this book, my reading of the presocratics not only is more comprehensive and plausible than more traditional interpretations which tend to approach them primarily in terms of scientific rationalism, but also provides a more inclusive and creative image of—and precedent for—philosophy which can help us improve both academic culture and western culture generally. The first half of my two-part thesis claims that the presocratics were trying reinstate, within the largely patriarchal and death-glorifying culture of archaic Greece, a paleo/neolithic goddess-centered religiosity that emphasized life and rebirth, but before getting to the second part of my thesis, I should note how the scholarly and philosophical nature of this text manifests as two different but co-present hermeneutics. 5. Whereas this text’s scholarly side manifests as a standard scientific hermeneutic that makes specific claims about Nietzsche and the

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presocratics, its philosophical side manifests as a Heideggerian hermeneutic which understands texts by unfolding the possibilities indicated by them. For example, instead of claiming that Nietzsche held philosophy to be feminine, I combine his idea that philosophy was born from the spirit of music and his description of the latter as being feminine to unfold from his texts the idea of philosophy as being feminine which, again, is not so much a claim to be defended but a possibility to be explored. In §68, we’ll see how, in order to inspire philosophical thought in his readers, Nietzsche employed specific techniques like using strategic silences and endorsing diametrically opposed positions without definitively settling what he himself thinks, and these techniques—along with the highly contextual nature of his statements—virtually preclude one from definitively nailing down what he really thought about a number of topics. That’s why I must also note that the Nietzsche who appears in this text is, in part, my Nietzsche. In keeping with his own way of approaching loaded topics like cold baths (quick in, quick out), I discuss several aspects of his work about which entire books could be and have been written, and such discussions should be read as my interpretation of him rather than as definitively claims about what he really thought. That, no matter how much one strives for thoroughness, simplification is inescapable for any philosophical or scholarly text becomes clear when we consider, for example, someone writing a book on Japanese material culture: one could argue that, without a definitive explanation of what matter is, such a book would be incomplete, but one could also argue that a lengthy discussion of physics would add little— and would even take away from—the main subject of the book. Similarly, this book is centered around an idea that, while its veracity can be endlessly debated, seems to me to be—as Wittgenstein would say—true enough: the oneness of all life. My Nietzsche is a mystical one who sees moments of philosophical inspiration as subtle experiences of the underlying unity of all life, and this portrayal derives from three sources: first, while Nietzsche’s metaphysics are difficult to pin down, there are several reasons—such as his Buddhist-like deconstruction of independent existence and the important role that unity plays in the affirmation of the eternal return and amor fati—why it is plausible that he did believe in an underlying unity; second, such a reading is more capable than secular readings are of doing justice to the significance which his experience of the eternal return had for him personally; third, as the unofficial first installment of a series of books in which I employ both western philosophy-­ science and eastern philosophy-spirituality, this book’s discussion of the

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ontology of mystical experience draws from a wealth of research—especially, quantum mechanics—a thorough discussion of which would take away from its main subject. 6. The methodological importance of feminism derives from how different feminist thinkers have revealed the problems that this book addresses, and have provided both the means by which it addresses them and the reasons why such problems should be addressed. In contrast to how common it is for people in contemporary secular culture to criticize the patriarchal and oppressive aspects of religions, many neither acknowledge nor address how these problematic norms also characterize modern science, but as we’ll discuss in more detail in the first chapter, some feminists have carried Nietzsche’s critique of science forward by revealing how science’s appearance of rational neutrality hides implicit biases that are not merely patriarchal and misogynists but also authoritarian. The particular instance of this problematic aspect of scientific and/or academic culture that this book addresses is the phenomenon of female students leaving philosophy departments due to a combination of being met with diminishing or toxic behavior on the part of their male instructors and peers and of having internalized an image of philosophy as a man’s business. A 2015 study suggests that it is this latter cause which may be the primary reason why so many female students are leaving philosophy departments, and I address this problem by both exploring in what sense philosophy is a specifically feminine form of subjectivity and finding precedent for this idea at the origin of western philosophy. Objections to what some may think of as the injection of gender and sexuality into the rational neutrality of philosophical thought merely beg the question concerning either the desirability or even the plausibility of such neutrality, and if conceiving of philosophy in terms of an implicitly male rationality is one of—if not the—the main reasons why female students doubt their own ability to be philosophers, then exploring in what sense philosophy can be thought of as feminine is the only way to address this problem. 7. I do this by identifying the philosophical state of being that arises from and, in turn, facilitates the emergence of events of inspiration, with a conception of feminine subjectivity that I cull from both that which commenters have found in Nietzsche’s work and women’s reports of their own experience. Basically, in contrast to the ideals of independence and invulnerability that have defined masculinity at least in the west since antiquity—Odysseus preserving his identity as he traverses the Aegean—feminine subjectivity consists, in part, of a dynamic relationality—Penelope’s

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existence being defined by, and hence changing with, her relation to Odysseus—and I identify these aspects of feminine subjectivity with the open-mindedness of philosophy. As novel as this may appear, I show that the idea of philosophy as being feminine is already found in the work of both Nietzsche and Parmenides, but it is also important to keep in mind that this book discusses masculinity and femininity not in terms of biology or sexuality but in terms of representation—how femininity is imagined and portrayed—because this is how I avoid several other problems with, or objections to, describing philosophy as feminine. Some may object that doing so essentializes women, but others also recognize that anti-­ essentialism is also problematic, and it is precisely in order to chart a middle path between essentialism and nihilism—between either assuming that there is some definable essence to femininity which all women equally share or denying that femininity can have any general meaning whatsoever which, in turn, would prevent women from being able to speak as women— that I take up Lewis Call’s suggestion that woman should be thought of as neither a subject nor an object, but as an image (representation), as well as Rosalyn Diprose’s view that women are constituted by the distance between particular appearance and universal essence. That is, this book’s representational conception of femininity occupies the interval between traditional dualisms like subject-object, universal-particular, male-female, and representation-subrepresentational, and we can better understand how one traverses this middle-path when we consider how some feminist philosophers of religion like Carol P.  Christ have noted that, while it is more accurate to conceive of the divine as transcending male-female duality, that more abstract conceptualizations of the divine tend to be less accessible for many people—and hence less culturally efficacious—means that female personifications of the divine are indispensable for counteracting the patriarchy which orthodox religions have so deeply ingrained in our species. Just as one can recognize both the individuality of a wave and that, in an equally valid sense, said wave does not exist independently of the ocean, one can describe philosophy as being feminine so as to disabuse female students of the assumption that philosophy is a man’s business while also acknowledging both that there no singular female essence that all women instantiate and that philosophy is available to everyone. (Speaking of femininity in terms of representation is also key for extending this discussion beyond the traditional sexual dualism because, instead of associating femininity with any specific form of biology or sexuality, it subverts the assumption that there are only two genders by showing how each person

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can be thought of as a unique and continually changing assemblage of various masculine and feminine tendencies.) I also avoid essentialism by emphasizing that I’m working within a western construction of gender so as to address a specific problem is western academia; using both the conception of femininity that commentators have found in Nietzsche’s texts and women’s descriptions their own experiences so as to turn the traditional male-rational female-emotional dichotomy on itself—both subverting and inverting it much like how Nietzsche not only deconstructed mind-body dualism but also elevated body over mind—but this does not preclude this work from encouraging non-western women to study philosophy. 8. With respect to the question of why this matters, I draw from the work of Riane Eisler to show that addressing academic patriarchy is also necessary for protecting and improving western democracy. For Eisler, underlying the variety of human social-political systems lies people’s tendency to develop either domination-oriented or partnership-oriented lifestyles, and her equating the former with patriarchy has been supported by recent observations of how fascism is in many ways an extreme manifestation of patriarchal relationality. That is, promoting positive and inclusive attitudes toward women is not just as women’s issue but rather a means by which we can nurture the cultural foundations upon which democratic systems of government rest, and I combine this with Nietzsche’s concern that humanity would not be able to survive the nihilism which attends the death of god to emphasize the limitations of exclusively secular approaches to such promotion. As I note in the conclusion, the ascendency of the spiritual-but-not-religious movement is one of the most significant cultural phenomena of our time, and it would be irresponsible not to meet the need felt by many people for healthier forms of religion in a way which also supports democracy. The second part of my thesis is that philosophers in general and women philosophers in particular can employ my reading of the presocratics so as to promote the spiritual-cultural foundations of democracy, but in keeping with the thought-provoking aims of this book, this is less of an assertation than it is an encouragement. By showing how philosophy began as an attempt to reform a patriarchal religion into a kind of religiosity that many today would find appealing—a goddess-centered religion where philosophical inquiry is understood to be a means by which one becomes divine over the course of successive lifetimes—, this book is just another attempt to remind our largely materialistic and patriarchal

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culture of the spiritual and societal significance of both philosophy (as well as of the humanities in general) and the affirmation of women. 9. Finally, the methodological significance of embodied cognition consists in how it both further supports and explains Nietzsche’s identification of philosophy with events of artistic inspiration and reveals some cultural preconditions for the historical emergence of philosophy that have been neglected. In the introductory chapter, we’ll discuss the scientific evidence which supports Nietzsche’s view that philosophical thoughts arise from the body’s unconscious creativity, but here, we should clarify that, just as conceiving of philosophy as feminine and creative does not prevent it from also being masculine and critical, the unconscious source of philosophical inspiration does not prevent consciousness from playing an important role. Beyond individual events of inspiration or self-reflection, philosophy is an ongoing dialogue between unconscious inspiration and conscious assessment. It is because thoughts come when they wish and not when one wishes that many creative people need to be ‘in the right place’—emotionally, psychologically, physically, etc.—in order to work, and that understanding the embodied nature of this common phenomenon can help us develop a more emic understanding of the origin of philosophy is indicated by several things such as how archaic Greece was a world in which it was thought that divinities routinely put ideas into people’s chests; how Heraclitus and Parmenides conceived of philosophical divinization specifically as an embodied or physical process; and how Empedocles located thought in the blood around the heart. 10. By extending cognition to the body, embodied cognition also extends it into society. While important work has been done on assessing how the historical emergence of philosophy was promoted by factors like contact with other cultures via trade, the development of coinage, and the proto-philosophical aspects of Greek culture and religion, approaching the origin of philosophy from an emic perspective which considers how inspiration emerges on the individual level enables us to further understand that philosophy requires the presence of a specific social environment; one that’s conducive to creative and self-reflective thought. And that is why I further define philosophy as a collective way of life—the woman-affirming partnership lifestyle that Eisler sees in old Europe and which constitutes the cultural foundation or spirit of democracy. (As Nietzsche recognized, the creativity of the Renaissance illustrates how difficult times can also inspire great works of art and philosophy, but just as the general turmoil or violence of a period does not mean that partnership

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relationality was not pervasive in everyday peoples’ lives, the problems with academic culture that this book addresses show that even an environment which appears peaceful and cooperative from the outside can be beset with the kind of toxic behavior that inhibits philosophical thought.) The argument put forward in the next chapter is briefly as follows. First, different social norms or structures either promote or impede philosophical thought—basically, more domineering forms of society inhibit philosophical thought while more partnership-oriented forms of society facilitate philosophical thought—and that, whereas domineering societies tend to be patriarchal and misogynistic, partnership societies tend to be more woman-affirming. Second, Eisler and other feminist philosophers of religion also note that different representations of the divine both reflect and further reinforce different social norms, and while goddess worship certainly does not necessarily translate into better living conditions for real women, it does correlate more with the partnership model of society than does the portrayal of the divine as a violent man. Finally, women who are less stressed and live in better conditions tend to provide better maternal care to their children, and given what we now know about the importance of touch and maternal care for brain development, it makes sense that, as Eisler observes, many of the presocratics came from areas with millennia-­ long traditions of goddess worship. In other words, when we combine what we’ve learned from embodied cognition with such things as the generally positive and even reverent attitude toward women and goddesses in the presocratic fragments; the historical or cultural connection that is provided by the Eleusinian mysteries between archaic Greece and old Europe’s partnership society and/or goddess religiosity; that folk memories of peaceful neolithic societies were alive and well at the time of the presocratics; the conceptual similarities (a feminine and cyclical worldview) between old European myths and many of the presocratics’ writings; the religiously reformative nature of presocratic philosophy as well as how appealing female representations of the divine are for many people; and last but not least, that archaic Greeks are known to have been becoming increasing dissatisfied with the domineering and death-glorifying aspects of Greek religion, it certainly makes sense that the first philosophers were trying to revive a form of religion which characterizes the parentship lifestyle which is itself a necessary precondition for philosophical thought. But as important as this new perspective on the origin of western philosophy is from a scholarly perspective, understanding the vital role that women and goddess religiosity played in the origin of western philosophy and culture has

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important lessons to teach us about how we can, and why we should, improve academic-scientific culture so as to further nurture the spiritual foundations of western democracy. Barnet, VT, USA

Joseph I. Breidenstein Jr

Acknowledgments

Since Leo is not exactly a font of emotional and financial support, I’d like to thank my godfather James Demarco for providing me with the encouragement and resources that I needed in order to both get my PhD and turn my dissertation into this book. But I also wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the Villanova University Philosophy Department: specifically, my senior thesis advisor Georg Theiner, whose tireless work-ethic showed me what it takes to succeed in academia and whose generosity showed me what it means to be a good teacher; my first philosophy teacher the late Helen Lang, who sparked my interest in ancient Greek philosophy; Julie R. Klein, who pushed me to live up to my potential as both a thinker and a writer; and John M. Carvalho, who encouraged my eclectic tendencies by always taking the time to chat about everything from Dostoevsky and Deleuze to Miles Davis. But I also would not have made it through graduate school if my best friend Stephanie Huwie hadn’t suggested that I take a yoga class at the Yoga Garden in Narberth. From my first classes with Mark Nelson and the other teachers, yoga has been as central to my life as philosophy, and once I moved from Philly to Indy so as to work on my master’s, it was my yoga-buddy Bryan Richardson who gave me the friendship and guidance that I’ve always sought in both academia and the yoga community. At Indian University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, I was also lucky enough to study with André De Tienne, whose encyclopedic knowledge of Peirce gave me an even better understanding of what it means to be a scholar and who, along with the help of Timothy D. Lyons and Chad Ryan Carmichael, is the reason why I was able to advance from working on my master’s to getting my doctorate at Queen’s University in xix

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Kingston Ontario. I’d like to thank my dissertation supervisor Paul Fairfield, who was always open-minded to what I wanted to do as well as ready with practical advice to help me channel my creative energy effectively; Daryn Lehoux, who always made sure that I knew what I was talking about and that I could sufficiently back up whatever ideas I had; Jan-Mathieu Carbon, who provided copious feedback that I have used to change my dissertation into this book; Jacqueline Davies, whose page-by-­ page comments and criticisms on an entire earlier draft of my dissertation no doubt made my dissertation defense go much more smoothly than it otherwise would have; Christine Sypnowich, whose heartfelt guidance helped me become a better teacher; Mark C. R. Smith, who helped me publish my first article on Descartes; and my external-external reviewer Babette Babich, because this book would not have been possible without her research on Nietzsche and the Greeks. I would also like to thank my Kingston yoga teachers Frederique Seroude (who’s much smarter than me), Sticky Henderson (who’s much cooler than me), and Andrea (a.k.a. Piper) Pritchard (who’s much kinder than me) for—along with Teresa Greaves Denofreo and her family—providing me the friendship and guidance that is at the heart of this book’s conception of philosophy as a collective way of life. Finally, I thank my editor Amy Invernizzi and the rest of the staff at Palgrave Macmillan for making this book possible.

About the Book

Following André Laks’ and Glenn W. Most’s Early Greek Philosophy Vols. I–VII, I use bold font for the words that we are reasonably sure were used by the presocratics, and the reason for this is to differentiate such words from others that are merely reported to be have been uttered by the presocratics; these words appearing in standard quotations. (In Democritus’ case, this includes using italicizes for statements that may have been made by Democrates instead.)

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 §1: Preliminary Precautions. –   1 §2: German Classicism. –   2 §3: Holistic Philology. –   4 §4: Philological Untimeliness and Philosophical Inspiration. –    6 §5: Body Philosophy. –   8 §6: Philosophical Therapy. –   10 §7: The Presocratics. –   11 §8: Frau Friedrich. –   14 §9: Ontology as Activism. –   29 §10: Thesis. –  36 §11: (Un)grounding and (Non)identity. –   37 §12: A New Science of Life. –   37 §13: Stress Relief. –   38 References  39 2 Greece 47 §14: Beginnings. –  47 §15: Chimps and Bonobos. –   48 §16: Homo sapiens. –   49 §17: Old Europe. –   51 §18: Carcosa and the Yella Kings. –   52 §19: The Near East. –   55 §20: Crete. –  58 xxiii

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§21: Dionysus. –  60 §22: Eleusinian Mysterium. –   61 §23: Demeter. –  62 §24: The Secret. –   64 §25: An Axial Age. –   66 §26: Athens. –  77 §27: Art. –  81 §28: Sculpture. –  82 §29: Language. –  83 §30: Music. –  84 §31: Dance. –  87 §32: Tragedy. –  88 §33: Satyr Play. –   96 References  97 3 Thales and Anaximander103 §34: The Will to Power and Eternal Return. –  103 §35: Nietzsche’s Thales. –  104 §36: Additional Origins of Philosophy. –  107 §37: And the Gods Made Love. –  109 §38: Miletus. –  112 §39: Thales. –  113 §40: The Shaping of Water. –  117 §41: Thales and Orphism. –  118 §42: ΣOΦIA. –  119 §43: Water as Will to Power. –  121 §44: Nietzsche’s Anaximander. –  123 §45: Anaximander. –  126 §46: The Apeiron. –  129 §47: Orgasmogony. –  133 §48: Cosmology as Activism. –  135 References 136 4 Pythagoras and Heraclitus141 §49: Silent Harmony and Enigmatic Dissonance. –  141 §50: Nietzsche’s Pythagoras. –  142 §51: Nietzsche’s Pythagoreans. –  143 §52: Notes Unplayed. –  144

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§53: The Man with the Goddess Tattoo. –  146 §54: Samos. –  148 §55: The Oracle. –  148 §56: The Pythagorases. –  149 §57: Croton. –  150 §58: The Life. –  152 §59: Before Being. –  157 §60: Perhaps Her Name Is Themistocleia? –  159 §61: Hearth and Home. –  160 §62: A Fifth Element. –  161 §63: Nietzsche’s Heraclitus. –  163 §64: Ephesus. –  168 §65: Artemis. –  169 §66: The Secret Fire. –  171 §67: Lightning. –  172 §68: Writing. –  175 §69: Cosmographic Atomism. –  179 §70: Elemental Soul(s). –  180 §71: Breathe/Speak to Me. –  182 References 184 5 Parmenides and Empedocles191 §72: Incubation and Emotion. –  191 §73: Nietzsche’s Parmenides. –  193 §74: Parmenides. –  198 §75: Elea. –  200 §76 . – 201 §77: Mr. Mojo Risin’. –  204 §78: ‘Persephone’. –  209 §79: Maternal Ontology. –  210 §80: Maternal Cosmology. –  212 §81: Nietzsche’s Empedocles. –  217 §82: Manic Depression. –  222 §83: Agrigentum. –  224 §84: Mighty Aphrodite. –  226 §85: Curses, Invocations. –  228 §86: The Empedoclean Kosmos. –  230 §87: Down from Olympus. –  231

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§88: Love and Death. –  232 §89: Roots. –  234 §90: Demons and Angels. –  235 §91: Wandering Limbs. –  237 §92: Chance Combinations. –  238 §93: Superorganism. –  239 §94: A Legend of the Fall. –  242 §95: Catharsis. –  246 References 248 6 Anaxagoras and Democritus255 §96: Intellectualism and Materialism. –  255 §97: Nietzsche’s Anaxagoras. –  256 §98: Portrait of a Philosopher. –  258 §99: The Science Guy. –  259 §100: From Clazomenae to Athens. –  260 §101: The Heartless. –  261 §102: The Anaxagorean Kosmos. –  264 §103: Everything in Everything (EE). –  265 §104: Universal Extraction (UE). –  266 §105: No Least Magnitude (NLM). –  266 §106: No Greatest Magnitude (NGM). –  267 §107: Non-isolation (NI). –  267 §108: Preponderance/Predominance (P). –  267 §109: Indefinite Types (IT). –  268 §110: No Becoming (NB). –  268 §111: General Homoeomereity (GH). –  268 §112: Power Ontology. –  268 §113: Chaosmos. –  270 §114: Cosmic Mind. –  271 §115: Worlds Within Worlds. –  272 §116: Seeds and Souls. –  274 §117: Anthropological Ambivalence. –  275 §118: Nietzsche’s ‘Democritus’. –  276 §119: Full Spiral. –  284 §120: Enemies with Benefits. –  286 §121: Death and Taxes. –  287 §122: Atoms. –  290

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§123: Void. –  291 §124: Chance. –  293 §125: Necessity. –  295 §126: Democracy. –  296 References 302 7 Conclusion307 §127: Time Atomism. –  307 References 320 Index323

Abbreviations

AC AOM BAW BGE BT CW D D. L. DWV EH EN GM GMD GS HH IST KGA KGB KGW KSA LM OFEI OPT PPP PTAG RWB SE

The Antichrist Assorted Opinions and Maxims Frühe Schriften (Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, 1–5) Beyond Good and Evil The Birth of Tragedy The Case of Wagner: From the Files of a Psychologist Daybreak Diogenes Laertius’ Live of Eminent Philosophers The Dionysiac World View Ecce Homo Writings from the Early Notebooks On the Genealogy of Morality The Greek Music Drama The Gay Science Human, All Too Human ‘Introduction to Sophoclean Tragedy’ Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Critical Complete Edition) Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke Kritische Studienausgabe: Sämtliche Werke Early Greek Philosophy by Laks and Most On the Future of Our Educational Institutions ‘On the Pathos of Truth’ The Pre-Platonic Philosophers Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’ ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ xxix

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ABBREVIATIONS

TAT TI TL UAHL WP WPh WS Z

‘Time-Atom Theory’ Twilight of the Idols ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’ ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ The Will to Power ‘We Philologists’ The Wanderer and His Shadow Thus Spoke Zarathustra

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

§1: Preliminary Precautions. – Nietzsche’s view that the intellect is merely an instrument of an artistically creative and unconsciously interpreting body helps explain why there is a particular difficulty with reading his work that is as unacknowledged as it is pervasive.1 Not every person is capable of experiencing the same range and intensity of affects, and even if some people are, they still may not be capable of experiencing intensely opposed feelings about the same thing. It is in this way that Nietzsche can be intellectually and emotionally difficult to read: for example, he both maintained that his dominant inclination had always been to philosophy and severely criticized philosophers: ‘Why philosophers are slanderers. – The treacherous and blind hostility of philosophers towards the senses  – how much of mob and middle class there is in this hatred.’2 A similar ambivalence also characterizes Nietzsche’s writing on women and religion, and in this introductory chapter, I will clarify his views on philosophy, women, and religion so as to illustrate both the flaws with and contemporary importance of his interpretation of the presocratic philosophers. First, I will consider how Nietzsche’s classical education influenced his views of philosophy and religion (§§2–7). Then, I will discuss how the work of several contemporary 1 2

 Brown 2006, 113–14. Blondel 1991, 206.  KGB II, 1, 174–77. WP §461.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Breidenstein Jr., Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44780-8_1

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feminists can help us overcome a significant flaw in Nietzsche’s reading of early Greek thought (§8). Finally, I will illustrate the contemporary cultural significance of a Nietzschean-feminist-embodied reading of the presocratics (§§9–13).

§2: German Classicism. – Although Germany had a religious interest in studying the ancient Greeks, one of its major innovations was the scientific method of Realien philology that married Aristotelian and Alexandrian doxographic techniques with contemporary ideas of historiography, but a generation after Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), German classicism became increasingly divided between Gottfried Hermann’s positivistic/critical Wort-Philologie and August Boeckh’s hermeneutical/humanistic Sach-Philologie: Nietzsche was on the front lines of this division during his education at Bonn and Leipzig.3 At first, he sought stability in the logical coldness of philology, but unfortunately, German classicism paid for its scientific progress by both sequestering classical studies from life outside the academy and balkanizing classical studies itself; a divisiveness which ironically symbolized the very cultural disintegration that evoked the romantic philhellenes’ yearning for Greece in the first place.4 Seduced by the success of the natural sciences, classicists became increasingly occupied with fact collection for its own sake, and by the time Nietzsche began his professorial career, dullness and dryness throve in an academic climate that now despised what it saw as the sentimentality of the classicism of the age of Goethe: ‘just consider how a scholarly man whiles his life away: what does the study of Greek particles have to do with the meaning of life?’5 As this quote indicates, Nietzsche became dissatisfied with philology because it gave no scope for his philosophic and prophetic mission, but he was also concerned with the pedagogical impotence of educational institutions that manufactured scholars instead of nurturing human beings: ‘if we adopt a scientific attitude towards antiquity … we always lose what is wonderfully educative about, yes, the real fragrance of, the atmosphere of antiquity.’6 Nietzsche’s anti-materialistic animus was primarily directed at the spirit or  Silk and Stern 1981, 2, 12. Jensen 2008, 14–15.  Silk and Stern 1981, 15. 5  Lloyd-Jones 1976, 5. EN §3[63]. 6  Lloyd-Jones 1976, 12. KGW 2.1, 251–52. Bishop 2004, 443. 3 4

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intentions of positivistic philologists because he saw them as neglecting their own pedagogical and cultural significance, and these criticisms derived largely from the religious significance of his own classical education.7 Pforta prioritized the spiritual development of its students, and Nietzsche’s religious approach to philology was especially on display in his inaugural address at Basel where he demanded that philology be thanked for being an envoy between the divine and the human.8 It was specifically with the magisterial tradition of philology that flourished in the 1830s and 40s that Nietzsche identified. Taking Boeckhianism in an even more romantic direction, this tradition was characterized by the daily practice of trying to re-live antiquity, and it held that the veneration of a master as a scholar could not be separated from veneration of a master as a human being.9 Nietzsche’s own deeply personal relationship with learning began with his beloved father teaching him to read at the age of four, and he admits that, besides its logical coldness, he was drawn to science by the personal excellence of his teachers at Pforta.10 This magisterial sensibility is also a crucial aspect of his reading of the presocratics. Just as children in nomadic hunter-gatherer societies are taught ethical values by observing and imitating their elders instead of through abstract reasoning, the early Greeks considered the truth content of a proposition to be inseparable from the living singularity of its author—ale ̄theia depended on ethos, and seeing the loss of the magisterial view of truth as a cause of modern suffering, Nietzsche’s own philosophical practice was a desperate attempt to recover the archaic understanding that the distinctive feature of real philosophers is an isomorphism between their words and their lives.11 But Nietzsche was still concerned that the antiquarian mentality of Boeckhianism was leading philologists to become lost in the past for its own sake instead of using classicism as a means to improve present and future life, and this is why he decided to go beyond (and synthesize) both scientific/critical and religious/antiquarian philology with his own ­artistic/monumental philology that we find on full display in BT. It was by using the science of philology as an artistic medium that Nietzsche sought to have his texts embody the same kind of magisterial authority as an  Jensen 2008, 222.  Young 2010, 22. Lachterman 2016, 40. 9  Whitman 1986, 453, 469, 458. 10  Brobjer 2008, 8. BAW 5, 253 f. 11  Eisler and Fry 2019, 167. Han 2000, 117–19, 128, 131. 7 8

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archaic master of truth, but in order to understand what he hoped his students and readers would derive from his work, we must further explore his own philological method.

§3: Holistic Philology. – ‘I  – perhaps as the first of all philologists  – am achieving wholeness.’12 Several commentators have noted the striking similarities between Nietzsche’s philosophy and the new-age movement, but few have appreciated how his holistic sensibility was also at the heart of his philological studies: for him, what makes antiquity ‘classical’ was precisely that sense of wholeness or meaningfulness that studying it produces.13 Nietzsche shared with Weimar classicism the view that wholeness consists of a harmonious sense of self-affirmation that arises from being able to love even one’s imperfections as irreplaceable aspects of one’s unique particularity, and keeping Nietzsche’s emphasis on wholeness in mind overcomes a pervasive misunderstanding of his work insofar as, as much as Nietzsche urges his readers to become hard so that they may use conflicts and misfortunes as opportunities for self-creation, he was well aware that people also need a healthy sense of self-esteem or self-affirmation so that they don’t give in to nihilistic reactivity; it was so as to acquire this sense of wholeness that he approached antiquity, not as an object of inquiry, but as a thou: ‘the classics speak to us when they feel like doing so; not when we do.’14 In order to become more receptive to what the Greeks have to say, Nietzsche launched the most radical critique of classical scholarship ever made from within the profession by making the philologist the object of philological inquiry.15 He sought to expose the bad faith of all attempts at describing antiquity that conceal their dependence on modern perspectives, and the contemporary relevance of this endeavor becomes clear when we consider the phenomenological presuppositions of twenty-first-­century classicists like Robert Parker who—despite noting the unimaginatively secular assumptions of modern scholarship—comments on the Greeks’ view that ‘Zeus/ god is raining’ as follows: ‘it surely will not have felt like that, even for the

 Letter to Deussen, February 1870 in Porter 2000, 35.  Porter 2000, 210. 14  BT §5. HH §P1. WPh §12 [#88] in Arrowsmith 1963a, 7. 15  Arrowsmith 1963b, 5. Porter 2000, 58. 12 13

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pious: rain for them was rain.’16 That Nietzsche’s focus was precisely on the difference between ancient and modern sensibilities is evident in such statements as ‘we no longer fully understand how the ancients experienced what was most familiar and frequent … because the ancients believed in dreams, waking life had a different light,’ and he specifically argued that ‘the classicist who possesses ratio alone is to that degree lost … what one must have is Greek imagination and something of the Greek religious sense.’17 In pursuing his method of archeological phenomenology, Nietzsche would experiment with performative re-­enactments such as dancing and fluteplaying, and he conveys the experiential efficacy of this holistic or immersive approach to philology when he writes that ‘it is only to the extent that I am a pupil of earlier times, especially the Hellenic, that though a child of the present time I was able to acquire such untimely experiences.’18 Nietzsche’s choice to immediately follow this discussion of untimely experience by asking us to consider the eternal present of animal consciousness further reflects his broader biological understanding of philology as, not just an academic discipline, but as a natural human trait derived from the will to power.19 That is, the genuine philologist is a centaur not just in the sense of being an artistic synthesis of science and religion, but also in the sense of being in touch with one’s animality because, again, intellectual analysis depends on the interpretive creativity of the animal body. Nietzsche modelled his own educational method on the Greeks themselves so as to transmit rather than explain the Greek mysteries, and the emotional and intellectual complexity of this method is evident in the following way.20 On the one hand, Nietzsche insists above all that a philologist must love antiquity and he replaced the traditional arm’s length at which antiquity was held with a vision of utter continuity; making the past come alive so as to produce an untimely intensification of the present through which one could catch a glimpse of eternity.21 On the other hand, Nietzsche confesses that ‘my purpose is: to create complete hostility between our modern “culture” and classical civilization. Whoever wants to serve the former must

 Morley 2004, 33. Parker 2011, 116, 3.  Bishop 2004, 3. GS §152. Cf. GS §135, HH §218. WPh §26 [#124] in Arrowsmith 1963b, 20. 18  Babich 2015, 236. UAHL Forward. 19  Del Caro 2004, 119. 20  EN §19[196]. Silk and Stern 1981, 398. 21  Lloyd-Jones 1976, 10. Marchland 1996, 165. Hamilton 2004, 55–56. 16 17

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hate the latter.’22 ‘A culture that runs after Greek culture can create nothing,’ and just as he encourages us to maintain an agonistic enmity toward the Greeks so that we may culturally surpass them, he recognized that the alien way in which the Greek world appears to modernity provides a discontinuity or difference which facilitates cultural progress: ‘to show how things became different from what they are, one points to the example of the Greeks.’23 In other words, just as we should expand our affective capacities by learning how to both love and hate the Greeks, we should also refine our intellectual conceptualizations by understanding how connecting with our past enables us to break through to the future. It was by thus reorienting philology from the collection of facts to the nurturing of humanity that Nietzsche sought to return to an ethical instead of scientific view of philology, but he also held that ‘all philological activities should be enclosed and surrounded by a philosophical view of things.’24 With this in mind, we can now consider how his holistic or experiential view of philology influenced his view of philosophy.

§4: Philological Untimeliness and Philosophical Inspiration. – The boundary between philological interpretation and philosophical inspiration was always a porous one for Nietzsche. Just as he was drawn to the former via the excellent personalities of his teachers at Pforta, his first philosophical influences came from people and sources outside philosophy: there was a strong Christian influence early on, but from the time he began to study philology, the ancient world—specifically, the religious and ethical attitude of the archaic Greeks—became the predominant influence that continued until his collapse.25 Also, just as he held philology to be a natural human trait, he thought that people had always been philosophers insofar as all humans (even to an imperceptible degree) have a natural drive to question. He equated philosophy with all those unconscious, instinctive, or intuitive hunches that people make throughout their daily lives, but while the seeds of this view may have begun in his own untimely philological  WPh §35[#20] in Arrowsmith 1963a, 11.  KSA 8, 7[1]. Siemens 2008, 105. Held 2004, 411. WPh §43[#182] in Arrowsmith 1963a, 13. 24  OFEI, 130. 25  Brobjer 2008, 43. Lloyd-Jones 1976, 15. 22 23

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experiences, the details of this experience become more clearly defined in his writing on philosophy. As we’ll see in his reading of Thales, he expresses the holistic and religious nature of the event of philosophical inspiration early on when he writes that all philosophy is driven by a mystical intuition of universal oneness, and toward the end of his career, he indicates that his experience of the eternal return was an extreme form of philosophical inspiration when he describes the latter in terms which recall the former—lightning flashes through which answers simply fall into one’s lap and one is able to survey the world as if from a mountain.26 Furthermore, the event of philosophical inspiration cultivates a dream-like state of being in which the previously mundane world is perceived with a new sense of wonder as one begins to suspect that reality is not as it first appears to be; that worldly multiplicity is merely a semblance subtended by a hidden unity: ‘philosophical natures even have a presentiment that hidden beneath the reality in which we live and have our being there also lies a second.’27 And, for Nietzsche, the philosophical state of being or lifestyle is also an ethical one: ‘the ultimate distinction between philosophical heads and the others would be that the former desire to be just, the other to be a judge.’28 In GM, Nietzsche wrote that the ‘dangerous slogan’ Beyond Good and Evil ‘does not mean “Beyond Good and Bad”’ because his genealogical unveiling of the historically contingent origins and reactive world-negating perspectives that lie behind moral ideas which others hold to be transcendently true should not be taken to imply that he rejects what people usually think of as ethical values and actions, but we find a more precise context for his ethical view of philosophy in his earlier essay TL where he maintains that, although one naturally uses one’s intellect to deceive others so that one may maintain oneself against them, in order to live with each other, people developed the drive for truth: ‘this peace settlement entails something that looks like the first step towards attaining that mysterious drive for truth.’29 Although the scientific drive for truth which forms a key aspect of philosophy developed as a drive for civic harmony, Nietzsche—again, as in his reading of Thales—saw philosophy’s unique ethical role as consisting, in part, of its turning critical/scientific thought on itself so as to employ it as an artistic medium with which to bring meaningfulness to people’s lives;  CW §1.  BT §1. 28  AOM §33. Cf. D §482. 29  GM I §17. TL 254–55. 26 27

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the concepts by which humans create truth and peace themselves being artistic creations: “the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, at least the grandmother of every concept.’30 ‘Only forgetting that he is himself a subject, and an artistically creative subject at that, enables man to live with a degree of peace,’ and perhaps in order to remind people of their artistic potential, Nietzsche identified philosophy with events of artistic inspiration.31 As fantastic as his mystical interpretation of philosophy may appear, anyone who, after spending an entire day writing, later spontaneously realizes what they were trying to say can appreciate why Nietzsche viewed philosophy primarily as an artistic pathos instead of as a scientific practice: ‘the gray sky of abstraction illuminated in a flash as if by lightning … the world surveyed as if from a mountain. – I have just defined the pathos of philosophy. – And all of a sudden, answers fall into my lap.’32 Furthermore, the simultaneously ethical and artistic nature of philosophy reflects how Nietzsche tends to equate ethics and aesthetics in statements like ‘the moral sense operates as taste, not as reason,’ and this equation between what we can think of as artistic and ethical-­emotional intelligence becomes clear when we consider how having a robust imagination enables one to more easily empathize with others; how the same aesthetic refinement which enables one to produce and appreciate good works of art also enables one to appreciate the inherent beauty of ethical actions.33 But although one can formulate creativity only as little as one can legislate morality, practice is still necessary, and we can appreciate why a more holistic approach to inquiry and education—one that utilizes both mind and body to not just impart information but also cultivate a healthy sense of self-affirmation—is better suited for nurturing people’s philosophical capacities then an exclusively cerebral approach when consider the somatic source of inspiration.

§5: Body Philosophy. – Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values can be summed up in Luce Irigaray’s notion of the flesh made word insofar as it reverses the traditional hierarchy of mind over body while overcoming mind-body dualism as such,  Babich 2009, 164. Babich 2005, 74. TL 258.  TL 259. 32  CW §1. Cf. EH, Zarathustra, §3. BGE §17. 33  EN §42[15]. Cf. EN §23[152]. 30 31

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and considering how the body contributes to philosophical inspiration will shed further light on the more nurturing side of Nietzsche’s work. The body is the intermediary between the chaotic multiplicity of the world and the abstract simplification of the intellect, and Kristen Brown has utilized contemporary science to illustrate the innate intelligence of the body whose drives transcribe worldly forces into values, affects, sensations, and concepts: ‘complex communication (learning and memory) … has been shown in recent studies of spinal-cord trauma to occur below the cerebrum. Attempting to survive the new circumstances after an injury, spinal neurons vigorously interrogate, respond to and learn from their new conditions.’34 By extending semiotic signification to the cellular level, Brown confirms Nietzsche’s view of the body’s intelligence, and she also emphasizes the body’s artistic creativity when she notes that—unlike the intellect which simplifies bodily drives so as to unify them in useful concepts—the body simplifies worldly forces so as to pluralize them.35 (That is, in contrast to the intellect’s reactive or practically oriented simplification of bodily drives, bodily drives are compelled to simplify the chaotic forces of the world by an artistic desire to express themselves.) In addition to the operations of the conscious intellect with which we are more familiar, thought also occurs in the unconscious depths of the body which cannot be grasped by intellectual abstraction even though bodily desire is the creative force that propels all kinds of somatic and intellectual forms of expression: ‘speech, like anatomy and technology, shows itself as signification of and intention towards expressing bodily desire to demarcate and signify self and other.’36 Elizabeth Grosz further emphasizes the fundamental significance of the body for philosophy when she notes that, despite its self-representation as a rational system, ‘philosophy is a product of the body’s impulses.’37 It is an irrational practice driven by a corporeal need for self-expression, and it’s in this way that research in embodied cognition extends our comprehension of the extant presocratic fragments by enabling us to read them, not merely as proto-scientific attempts to rationally explain the world, but as conceptual works of art that arose from the unconscious creativity of the presocratics’ bodies. However, just as the first philosophers were also consciously trying to understand their  Blondel 1991, 207. Brown 2006, 100, 21.  Ibid., 196, 117. 36  Ibid., 136, 116. 37  Grosz 1993, 59. 34 35

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world, the desire for self-expression that propels philosophical inspiration must not be understood in an ‘art for art’s sake’ sense, but rather as a desire to nurture and even heal oneself via expression such as we find in contemporary methods of art-therapy. In keeping with the ethical nature of artistic-philosophical inspiration and how the spinal neurons have been shown to learn so as to heal the body, the Nietzsche of PTAG saw the historical origin of philosophy as consisting of an unconscious effort to heal Greek culture, but this may also reflect the therapeutic agenda of his own work.38

§6: Philosophical Therapy. – Although it is widely known that Nietzsche’s father died when he was only four years old, Brown has investigated the phenomenon of trauma in a way that reveals how this event likely continued to reverberate for the rest of Nietzsche’s life and work—such as his restless wanderings, and Zarathustra’s desire to either die or climb back into the womb.39 Now, we can’t definitively diagnose Nietzsche as being traumatized by his father’s death—contemporary conceptions of trauma not existing during Nietzsche’s lifetime—but research on traumatogenic speech enables us to further appreciate the significant role that his body played in producing his written works. Unlike some non-sensical forms of speech like gibberish or glossolalia which arise from bodily drives’ desire to express themselves, the speech that we usually employ in everyday life emerges from/as a preconscious bodily desire to create sense in the world, and as such, it is a mode of bodily adaption through which our animal corporeality expresses itself.40 Brown directly relates this to Nietzsche’s practice of writing as follows: ‘it is now possible to see the body as the site that introduces text into the world … [and] Nietzsche’s writing can be seen showing the body to be not only the generative source of his text, but the text’s primary object.’41 Arguably, a human being’s most intense kind of preconscious desire is generated by a traumatic experience, and in the aftermath of such an experience, traumatogenic speech adapts to the demands of the trauma by renegotiating the conditions of one’s self-­understanding and  PTAG, 35.  Z I §21. 40  Brown 2006, 139, 122, 41  Ibid., 118. 38 39

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self-signification; there are two aspects of this process in particular that shed light on Nietzsche’s work: ‘the trauma as trauma, bursts out of any human habitudes and perceptual structures or reflection and linguistic representations’; ‘the fundamental premise of the psychotherapeutic work is belief in the restorative power of truth-telling.’42 In other words, although the traumatic event will always remain subrepresentational, and hence inaccessible, the unconscious body heals itself through spontaneous acts of authentic self-inquiry and self-expression, and we can see dynamics similar to those of traumatogenic speech in several aspects of Nietzsche’s life and work such as the way he transformed himself through his writing; his preoccupation with the subrepresentational Dionysian ground of all things; and his uncompromising pursuit of truth at all costs. (It is in this way that his instinct for wholeness and his instinct for philosophy are one and the same.) Nietzsche himself describes his philosophy as the translation into reason of his drive for health, and that he wished others to derive similar benefits from his writing is further suggested, not only by how the subtitles to TI and EH mark them out as self-help guides, but also by how he prescribes his readers to chew his aphorisms over like good medicine—the aphoristic form itself even has one of its sources in Hippocrates.43 All of Nietzsche’s tough talk and agonistic goading should not overshadow the fundamentally nurturing/therapeutic impetus and goal of his work, but there was one particular group of thinkers to whom he primarily turned for his own convalescence.

§7: The Presocratics. – ‘I need the ointment boxes and medicine bottles of all the ancient philosophers.’44 Nietzsche’s fascination with pre-classical Greece goes all the way back to his work on Theognis at Pforta, and his special interest in the presocratics grew out of his interest in pre-classical literature and tragedy.45 At Basel, he turned to these thinkers in an attempt to resolve the tension he was feeling between his philological career and his philosophical aspirations, but although, as the so-called inventor of the presocratics, Nietzsche’s discovery of them is considered to be his most important  Ibid., 129, 140–41. Herman 1997, 181.  D §553. Large 2000, 20. Babich 2006, 31, 29. 44  EN §28[41]. 45  Ruehl 2003, 76. Brobjer 2008, 57. 42 43

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contribution to our knowledge of the ancient world, his encounter with the philosophers of the tragic age was itself tragic in the sense that his writing on them is almost as fragmentary as what we have of their own surviving fragments.46 This is primarily because he was prevented from writing the ‘Philosopher’s Book’ that he intended to be a sequel to BT, and to which his essay TL was intended as an introduction.47 In this work of monumental historiography, Nietzsche planned to present an intellectual mythology of the archaic Greek philosophers as models for the artistic and legislative philosophers of the future, and his interpretation of these thinkers as primarily religious reformers has proved strikingly prescient insofar as much recent scholarship has demonstrated the centrality of theological speculation and reformation for these thinkers. In fact, despite his reluctance to admit that religion was one of his primary concerns, it is with respect to the Greeks’ religious attitudes to life that the forcefulness of Nietzsche’s philology has had the greatest impact on classical studies in general, and Karl Reinhardt conveys the impact that Nietzsche’s religious sensibility had on classical scholarship when he maintains that Nietzsche breathed new life into a discipline that, by around 1900, had become toilsome and mechanized.48 Nietzsche replaced the common scientific diction with a new kind of mythical-vitalistic manner of speech, but unfortunately for him, no one could either understand or appreciate it during his lifetime because it all happened too fast. It is only now that we can begin to make up for one of the major flaws in Nietzsche’s reading of the presocratics, namely, that he was never fully engaged with their traditional role as persistent critics of the polytheistic belief system.49 For Nietzsche, the presocratics were specifically failed religious reformers; forerunners to a reformation that never took place because they were unable to form a sufficiently strong alliance with the artists and legislators of their day.50 Unlike the historical vortex that was Socrates, the p ­ resocratics were cultural failures and this is why, by lionizing them as great figures worthy of emulation, Nietzsche was in fact trying to socratize the presocratics while using his Socratic sense of irony to lampoon them as caricatures of academic impotence; just as he satirizes epic heroes in his so-called middle  Laks 2018, 27–28.  Young 2010, 163. 48  Silk and Stern 1981, 190. Latacz 2015, 21. 49  Henrichs 2004, 134. 50  Porter 2000, 236. Caygill 1993, 116. 46 47

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period.51 Beyond its incompleteness and counterintuitive nature, another reason why Nietzsche’s encounter with the presocratics has been neglected is that it is now thought to be rather pedestrian by contemporary standards, but while Nietzsche was certainly limited by the state of scholarship at the time, this assessment ignores that his value as a scholar of antiquity derives largely from the questions he adds to the standard account; specifically, his view of philosophy as inspiration adds to standard accounts of how philosophy arose in Greece the question ‘how does philosophy arise in human beings at all?’52 What people think about the world influences how they experience the world, and the lifeworld of archaic Greece appears to have been particularly conducive to people experiencing events of inspiration insofar as it was world in which it was thought that the gods routinely put ideas into people’s chests; where several early Greek philosophers considered extra-sensory perception to be an empirical source of knowledge; where dialectic was meant to make room for mystical intuition; and where the early philosophers tended to behave as if they had been chosen.53 In the religious context of archaic Greece’s view of the poet as a master of truth, ale ̄theia came to the poet through a gift of second sight that manifested as a particularly efficacious kind of speech, and it was always linked with the poet’s social function; hence the link between ale ̄theia and ethos as well as the accuracy of Nietzsche’s view of the therapeutic origin of philosophy.54 It is in this way that, just as scholars like E. R. Dodds have used the resources of other disciplines like psychoanalysis so as to extend our perspective on the Greeks beyond the boundaries of conventional classicism, we can use both Nietzsche’s view of philosophy as inspiration and the latest scientific evidence concerning embodied cognition so as to understand the presocratic fragments as reflections of archaic embodiment. In doing so, we can further cultivate our own capacity for experiencing the philosophical event and/or state of being: we can still ‘learn from the Greeks what we experience ourselves.’55 Now that we have discussed how Nietzsche’s life and classical education shaped his artistic-­ religious-­therapeutic approach to philosophy in general and presocratic

 Ure 2005, 187, 193.  Heit 2015, 221. 53  Dodds 1951, 12. McEvilley 2002, 344, 420. Detienne 1999, 18. 54  Detienne 1999, 43, 48, 67. 55  Wohlfart 2016, 22. 51 52

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philosophy in particular, we can address another flaw in Nietzsche’s reading of the presocratics—his ignoring female perspectives.

§8: Frau Friedrich. – 1. Passages like the following bring the emotional difficulty of reading Nietzsche to the fore: ‘We artists.  – When we love a woman, we easily come to hate nature because of all the repulsive natural functions to which every woman is subject; we prefer not to think about it at all.’56 At first, it may appear that Nietzsche’s aversion to woman’s embodiment has caused him to abandon both the will to truth and the affirmation of nature that he is elsewhere so consistent in maintaining, but taking the time to consider both his equally consistent desire to arouse reflection in his readers and how this aphorism appears within the context of his critique of the dubiousness of human knowledge enables us to appreciate the psychological-­cultural insights that are being performatively enacted with this apparently misogynist statement: Nietzsche’s point is that, when motivated by desire to see the world a certain way, an individual will deny the obvious … [he] takes the falseness of men’s fantasies about women to be paradigms of deceptions that are taken as true. Nietzsche insists that women’s reality is quite different from traditional male fabrications, and he jars his readers into sensing the discrepancy between their habitual thinking and actual women’s points of view.57

Kathleen Marie Higgins’ observation that, by urging his readers both to recognize the contingency of gender roles and to consider the desirability of changing them, Nietzsche was a pioneer in gender theory is just one example of the growing recognition of how valuable Nietzsche’s work can be for various aspects of contemporary feminist thought, and just as the unintentional nature of his contributions to feminism reflects the corporeal source of this aspect of his work, the appearance of the figure of woman when he writes of his own philosophical convalescence intimates the importance of his view of women for his therapeutic agenda.58 The things that Nietzsche affirms as Dionysian have been both historically linked with women and abhorred by patriarchal religion and philosophy,  GS §59.  Booth 1991, 319. Higgins 1995, 235, 241. 58  Ibid., 228. GS §P3. 56 57

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and this is the case even if he himself either failed to recognize or neglected to acknowledge, that the things he attacked have historically been intertwined with the persistence of patriarchal ideals.59 Commentators have also argued that feminism exposes the emptiness of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of god insofar as god survives because of patriarchy, and patriarchy survives in particular discursive practices (§§9.2–9.3); this is why some have argued that Nietzsche’s value for feminism primarily consists in the way in which his criticisms of western philosophy create the possibility for new modes of discourse and subjectivity.60 Some have also recognized the promise of presocratic speech for invigorating life and how Nietzsche’s return to the archaic Greek cosmologists opens space for a new form of philosophical discourse by healing the split between poetry and philosophy, but it has not been noticed how Nietzsche’s view of philosophy as an event and/or state of being coincides with the new form of postmodern or feminine subjectivity that commentators derive from his work.61 2. The key to understanding Nietzsche’ apparent misogyny is that, when he criticizes feminism and gender equality, he is really objecting to turning women into men; specifically, into resentful scientific men: ‘feminism is nothing but the operation of a woman who aspires to be like a man. And in order to resemble the masculine dogmatic philosopher this woman lays claim—just as much claim as he—to truth, science and objectivity.’62 Nietzsche’s critique of feminism is an extension of his critique of the enlightenment subjectivity of bourgeois liberalism—the same transcendent and rational autonomy that some feminists such as Genevieve Lloyd have revealed to be implicitly and androcratically masculine as well as paradoxically anti-egalitarian insofar as it necessitates the creation of a devalued ‘other’—but besides exposing the reactive origins of this masculine type of subjectivity, Nietzsche also elucidates a problem with theorizing an alternative feminine form of subjectivity when he exposes how the essentialization of woman can be a means of making women servile: ‘the truth of woman, the eternal feminine, promises to affirm an unchanging self … man’s desire is to possess this image of woman which he has

 Booth 1991, 321.  Ibid., 321–22. Call 1995, 114. Ansell-Pearson 1993, 29. 61  Brown 2006, 152. Oppel 1993, 91. 62  Call 1995, 122. Derrida 1978, 65. 59 60

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constituted in relation to himself.’63 Nietzsche’s ideal woman is the Dionysian woman who affirms herself; a dangerous opponent who resists man’s version of her, and in doing so, elevates herself and men by encouraging a sexual antagonism through which both are allowed to display the kind of respect that one reserves only for one’s enemies: ‘what inspires respect for woman, and often enough even fear, is her nature, which is more “natural” than man’s, the genuine, cunning suppleness of a beast of prey.’64 In contrast to the static isolation of the masculine enlightenment subject, feminine postmodern subjectivity is dynamic and relational as is suggested by how many women feel that the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead—with its emphasis on internal relations—rings true to women’s experiences.65 If Dionysian woman’s continual deconstruction of men’s representation of her and affirmation of her own perspective is akin to the philosophical capacity to reflect on previously unquestioned assumptions and to create original ideas, then this conception of feminine subjectivity is philosophical, but just as this does not mean that all women share an identical form of subjectivity, Lewis Call indicates how this ‘feminine’ subjectivity problematizes or transcends the traditional sexual-biological dualism between men and women when he argues that, here, woman must be thought of in terms of representation. Unlike Derrida who unwittingly contributes to the enlightenment’s marginalization of women by interpreting Nietzsche’s woman as distance/non-identity itself, Nietzsche’s problematizing men’s ideals of women while encouraging women to speak for themselves enabled him to grant women—at least to the extent that his adherence to the gender norms of his time allowed him to—the capacity for self-representation thereby avoiding another problem with theorizing feminine subjectivity; that of arriving at an anti-essentialism that denies women political and social agency.66 In other words, like the story of the ancient Greek man who argued that he can’t be punished for the crime he committed because, if everything is in constant flux, then he is an entirely different person than the one who committed the crime, overly ­deconstructing femininity so that the very concept of ‘woman’ comes to signify only that which escapes representation is another example of how an unchecked drive for knowledge can be dangerous. It would be difficult  Call 1995, 113, 115. Deutscher 1993, 177. Diprose 1993, 15–16.  Call 1995, 126. Deutscher 1993, 181. BGE §239. 65  Howell 2011, 22. 66  Call 1995, 113–18. 63 64

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to enable women to speak as women without investing the concept of ‘the feminine’ with some representational content, but it should also be kept in mind that the conception of feminine subjectivity discussed here has been culled from, and hence limited by, western perspectives. 3. Representation contains the only possibility of liberation insofar as it is a necessary condition for political action, and in order to avoid the twin dangers of either confining all women within a specific representation or excluding them from representation all together, we can take up both Call’s suggestion that ‘woman’ can be thought of as neither a subject nor an object, but as an image, and Rosalyn Diprose’s view that women are constituted by the distance between particular appearance and universal essence ‘at least in so far as women are artistic.’67 (This last qualification reminds us that exploring in what sense philosophy can be thought of as being feminine does not mean that women are necessarily philosophers; although, Cathryn Vasseleu’s statement ‘woman represents for Nietzsche the value of appearance and the manner in which it achieves its spellbinding effect’ does suggest that Nietzsche held women to be more capable than men of invoking artistic-philosophical creativity in others.)68 If the dynamism of femininity is akin to the events of inspiration, then women’s (dynamically) occupying the interval between representational dualisms such as subject-object and particular-universal is akin to the philosophical state of being in which one suspects that the world’s apparent multiplicity (many) is subtended by a hidden unity (one). As experiences of inner alterity qua unfamiliar ideas arising from within oneself, events of philosophical inspiration disrupt the representational sense of subjective interiority, and in doing so, cultivate a state of being which is intervallic in the sense that one’s sense of self (subject) is no longer sharply differentiated from one’s environment (object)—a vague subjectivity which inclines one to question the apparent solidity of individuation as such and enables one to more directly feel for, and hence be concerned for, others and one’s world in general. In the west, such a relational way of being has typically been ascribed to women in contrast to the male ideal of invulnerability, but while this characterization has been abused to portray women as ­irrationally incapable of philosophy which, in turn, has led to a patriarchal academic culture that continues to this day, we can appreciate why a dynamic intervallic (relational) form of subjectivity is more philosophical than a  Ibid., 117–18. Diprose 1993, 23 emphasis added.  Vasseleu 1993, 80.

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static-reified one when we keep in mind that there are many different kinds of intelligence. In contrast to the deductive linearity of enlightenment rationalism which, as the paradigm-confined nature of science illustrates, can coincide with and may even benefit from a close-minded rigid form of subjectivity, the creative self-reflective nature of philosophy necessitates the open-mindedness of a dynamic and intervallic subjectivity. The human brain’s default mode network (DMN)—which has been described as a neurological equivalent of the ego—provides us with a neural correlate for philosophical subjectivity insofar as, in contrast to how its hyperactivity leads to rigid patterns of thought and action, its relaxation and flexibility facilitates inspiration and empathy by enabling thoughts and emotions to emerge from the unconscious body into consciousness. And in order to explore this further as well as to understand why cultivating both society’s capacity for philosophical thought and a cultural affirmation of women are essential for promoting more inclusive democratic forms of social organization, we’ll now turn to a woman who resists Nietzsche’s male-centered representation of the presocratics. 4. Like his interest in pre-classical Greece, Nietzsche’s emphasis on the importance of cultural health instead of political legalism goes back to his work on Theognis, and Eisler contributes to this line of thinking with her cultural transformation theory. She proposes that underlying the apparent diversity of human cultures are two basic models of society: the dominator model which is based on in-group vs. out-group thinking and the ranking of one half of humanity over the other, and the partnership model in which social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking rather than ranking.69 But this difference is not between hierarchy and equality, but rather between two kinds of hierarchy: domination hierarchies that are based on force or the threat of force as we typically see in male-dominant societies, and actualization hierarchies that function so as to maximize the potential of the societal organism by prioritizing traits that, in the west, have been more associated with femininity than with masculinity—care and compassion over aggression and domination.70 (Many women understandably prefer to strive for gender equality, but Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee’s observation that ‘in this age of political correctness, the imperialistic sentiment of the superiority of Western ethical theories in regard to the issue of gender parity continues to be assumed’ shows that diversity necessitates  Eisler 1995, xvii.  Ibid., 215 note 5.

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that we at least consider other possibilities, and Miranda Shaw indicates how valuing femininity over masculinity may be able to more effectively promote gender inclusivity when she states that the gynocentric philosophy of tantric Buddhism ‘armed women against individual male attempts to gain psychological ascendence or religious authority over them and against collective male attempts to dispossess them’; armed them, perhaps, in a way that equality could not.)71 Like Nietzsche, Eisler also recognizes that the roots of our contemporary global crises lie in prehistory, but she also exposes a serious flaw in Nietzsche’s perspective on history, namely, the prioritization of male-dominant societies that we find in his glorification of both the Indo-Europeans and ancient Hebrews. Nietzsche’s underappreciation of the significance of women in antiquity is also evident in BT’s complete silence concerning Sappho as a lyric precursor to ancient tragedy, and it is in this way that, while he was ahead of his time in turning toward pre-classical Greece—hence his ‘inventing’ the presocratics—, he was a man of his times in subscribing to the male-centered view of antiquity that only began to unravel in the second half of the twentieth century. Unlike Nietzsche, cultural transformation theory proposes that the original direction of cultural evolution was toward partnership but that, after a period of disruption, there occurred a fundamental social shift toward domination.72 We will discuss Eisler’s account of the goddess-oriented partnership culture of old Europe in Chap. 2, but considering that she bases much of her account on the controversial work of Marija Gimbutas, a few qualifications are in order. In her latest book co-authored with Douglas Fry, Eisler recognizes that, although Gimbutas’ theory that old Europe’s shift from partnership to domination was the result of incursions from Indo-European pastoralists around 5000  BCE has received some support from DNA studies of prehistoric European populations, a more generally held theory is that this shift occurred due to societal complexification, but the fact that the egalitarian social structure of early nomadic foragers was only displaced by the first domination systems of complex foragers as recently as 12,500  years ago continues to supports Eisler’s general view that the partnership model was the original form of human society.73 I will later discuss Eisler’s account of old Europe in more detail primarily so as to show how, according to Nietzsche’s own standards of  Rosenlee 2006, 2. Shaw 1994, 71.  Eisler 1995, xvii. 73  Eisler and Fry 2019, 154–55, 60. 71 72

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history, his beloved blonde beasts were most likely trying to enact a slave-­ revolution that he himself would disapprove of, but at this point, it would be best to further consider how Eisler’s work supports Nietzsche’s prioritization of cultural health over political legalism. 5. Eisler indicates the unsustainability of assuming a strict private-­public dichotomy by illustrating the societal significance of highly personal things such as religion, sexuality, and child rearing. She and Fry note that progressive social movements have ignored the parent-child and gender relations that most profoundly affect brain development, and hence, how people think, feel, and act in the world.74 Although the difference between the dominator and partnership models of society is a matter of degree with every society exhibiting some aspects of each model, partnership and domination-oriented cultural environments support very different neurochemical profiles, and in order to get a clearer picture of each—seeing how gender and sexual norms either inhibit or facilitate philosophical thought—, we’ll consider them separately.75 6. Dominator societies are founded on the institutionalization of trauma and cruelty through a myriad of tactics such as disseminating distrust by vilifying sexuality; discouraging female bonding outside of male control; the conflation of caring and coercion; fear conditioning through personal coercion or public displays of violence that are meant to systematically discourage any behaviors, attitudes, and perceptions that do not conform to dominator norms; and aggressively maintaining the social hierarchy (particularly of men over women) through the everyday use of ridicule and trivialization.76 (Eisler’s emphasis on how important affirming women is for maintaining inclusive and democratic social norms is supported by recent observations concerning the affinity that exists between patriarchy and oppressive political ideologies: ‘fascism, then, is an exacerbation, a more militant extension, of the patriarchal relationships between men and women that have persisted for centuries.’)77 The basic idea is that, since stress makes people stupid and stupid people are easier to ­control, dominators maintain their power by creating and maintaining hostile environments; by systematically suppressing both affirmative perspectives and healthy relationality/sexuality. However, even for those at  Eisler and Fry 2019, 35, 101.  Eisler 1996, 6. Eisler and Fry 2019, 120. 76  Eisler 1996, 21, 93, 5, 41. Eisler 1995, 83, 116. 77  Wilson 2018. 74 75

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the top of the social pyramid, the dominators’ rigid enforcement of societal ranking produces chronic stress—much as recent studies have shown that large wealth gaps make everyone, including the rich and powerful, more anxious and insecure—and Eisler and Fry have illustrated the affective, perceptual, and cognitive damage that arises from living in such environments, and in turn, inhibits philosophical thought.78 Affectively, by reducing peoples’ levels of oxytocin, vasopressin, and serotonin, the persistent stress of living in a dominator environment inhibits their ability to either bond or empathize with each other while inculcating a habitual form of disassociation; perceptually, the intolerance for ambiguity and complexity leads to stereotyped patterns of selective perception in which people simply ignore what they don’t want to see, and are thus incapable of accurately perceiving their environment; cognitively, becoming habituated to living in psychological attack mode constricts people capacity for independent thought.79 The societal enforcement of obedience is also selfamplifying in the sense that people who tend to be more conformist also tend to score higher on the Californian fascist scale which measures authoritarian tendencies, and the neurological influence of different political ideologies is succinctly illustrated by how people who identify as liberal tend to demonstrate significantly more activity in the anterior cingulate cortex than conservatives—a brain region that is critical for the habitchanging which is necessary for being able to both correctly perceive one’s environment and keep an open mind.80 7. If the dominator model is fascist, then the partnership model is democratic, and just as Eisler and Fry further illustrate the importance of women for democracy when they note that cultures in which women have higher status tend to be more democratic, they indicate the evolutionary significance of the democratic lifestyle when they note that the human mind evolved during the long-standing era of partnership organization before approximately 10,000  BCE.81 As a sacred peak experience and reminder of the oneness of all life, sexuality in partnership-oriented ­societies was able to provide a visceral emotional basis for social organizations structured around the give and take of pleasure (the

 Eisler and Fry 2019, 109.  Ibid., 81–82, 187, 184–85, 105. 80  Ibid., 183, 185. 81  Ibid., 34, 160. 78 79

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institutionalization of pleasure-bonding).82 Eisler and Fry further illustrate the vital role that healthy forms of sexuality play in the human quest for higher consciousness and cultural evolution by emphasizing the cognitive/neurological significance of touch: ‘how we are touched can powerfully affect how we feel, think and act … [because] the skin can be seen as an extension of the brain itself.’83 And it is by cultivating, or at least not impeding, independent feeling, thinking, and perceiving that the partnership-­democratic lifestyle facilitates philosophical thought. While the original selective pressures for love likely consisted of the need to protect and care for offspring, love became a motivation in its own right over the course of evolution, and one way in which Eisler and Fry demonstrate that ‘love is a dynamic that helps explain the emergence of humanity in both meanings of the word’ is by documenting the vital role of maternal care in brain development: ‘neuroscientists have found a strong relationship between nurturing and the size of children’s hippocampus, a brain region important in learning, memory, and response to stress. Brain scans show that children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus and were less stressed.’84 Nietzsche’s view of morality as a matter of taste and not reason is central to his emphasis on the importance of culture over policy, and Eisler and Fry elucidate the neurological basis of moral taste by describing how one’s impulses toward empathy, helpfulness, and mutuality are linked, not to extrinsic rewards, but to rewards that are embedded in one’s brain: ‘even more striking is that neural reward areas light up more when we care for others than when we only look out for ourselves.’85 Studies show that one’s capacity for empathy is related to the functional connectivity of the medial prefrontal cortex/anterior cingulate cortex within the DMN—with loss of empathy correlating with decreased connectivity and impaired self-referentiality— and the correlation between the flexibility and connectivity of the DMN is reflected in how, just as children possess more DMN flexibility than adults, its connectivity also deteriorates with age.86 Whereas the DMN’s flexibility facilitates inspiration by enabling emotions and memories to surface from older brain regions, it’s connectivity facilitates empathy, and if the DMN’s  Eisler 1996, 7, 47–49.  Eisler and Fry 2019, 197–98. 84  Ibid., 48–49, 107. 85  Ibid., 31. 86  Kim 2017. Vidal-Piñeiro 2014. 82 83

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flexibility correlates with its connectivity, then Nietzsche was right to equate artistic and moral taste. Furthermore, if such flexibility and connectivity are as impeded by patriarchal-­domineering societies as they are facilitated by the woman-­affirming relationality/sexuality of partnershipsocieties, then the artistic and emotional intelligence which characterizes the philosophical state of being may be characterized by a feminine form of subjectivity and embodiment. In other words, John Dewey is certainly on the right track to argue that ‘democracy is more than a form of government’; that its essence consists not in abstract rights but in the exchange of different ideas and the common deliberation that underlies collective decision making, but Eisler and Fry further show that democracy’s intellectual foundation rests on forms of relationality, sexuality, and embodiment/neurophysiology that characterize a particular kind of culture.87 It is because the neurological underpinnings of the philosophical discursive practices which form the cultural foundation of democratic government are damaged by patriarchy but nurtured by social environments which value women that cultivating a cultural affirmation of women is vital for protecting and promoting inclusive democratic forms of social organization. But as much as recognizing the political significance of gender attitudes enables the west to move forward beyond the implicit masculinity-patriarchy of enlightenment rationalism, understanding how women-affirming social norms facilitate philosophical thought enables us to develop a clearer picture of the origin of western culture. 8. ‘Leading pre-Socratic philosopher-scientists like Xenophanes of Calophon, Pythagoras of Samos, and Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes of Miletus lived in islands in the eastern Mediterranean and cities on the southern Anatolian coast, sites of millennia of Goddess-­ worshipping cultures.’88 In this footnote, Eisler opens a door to a new direction of research on the presocratic philosophers which has been strikingly absent until now. Although it is now a commonplace that the presocratics were critiquing and reforming Hesiod’s theogony, I have not yet come across any scholarship that considers that, since Hesiod used myth so as to naturalize and divinize patriarchy, the presocratics were creating the possibility for a less patriarchal cultural narrative by criticizing and reforming Hesiod. And while this may seem like an unintended consequence, both the positive portrayal of women and the implicit and explicit  Dewey 1916, 87. Gordon 2018, 58.  Eisler 1995, 232 note 16.

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goddess imagery in the extant fragments that we will be discussing throughout this book, indicate that the possibility that the presocratics were trying to counteract patriarchy deserves more consideration than it has hitherto be given. (One example of the silence surrounding gender in the presocratics’ relation to Hesiod in particular is how James Luchte describes the Hebrew Bible’s Genesis myth as a patriarchal revision of the Pelasgian myth of the creator goddess Eurynome while not recognizing that the same could be said of Hesiod’s Theogony.)89 It is well known both that Aristotle is our primary source for what remains of the writings of the presocratics and that his scientific materialism led to him to downplay the theological center of presocratic philosophy while distorting their views so as to fit his own philosophy, but I have not come across any scholars who have explored the possibility that Aristotle’s misogyny could have distorted his reading of, and hence our access to, presocratic philosophy even though his misogyny has already been shown to compromise his own scientific objectivity: ‘in other areas of research Aristotle shows himself to be a scrupulous empirical scientist, but where relations between the sexes are concerned his assumption that women are naturally subordinate seems to be based on nothing more substantial than his belief that the existing household is a natural entity.’90 (Considering Aristotle’s eagerness to find precedent for his own views in his predecessors, the absence of misogynistic statements in the majority of the extant presocratic fragments is significant insofar as, if the presocratics made any misogynistic statements, Aristotle would have been the first to record them.) That the theme of women in presocratic philosophy has been overlooked ever since scholarship on the latter began is further suggested by the obvious fact that classicism has always been dominated by men whose interests and interpretations were surely influenced by their more or less conscious presuppositions and prejudices about women. It seems as though the same emotional difficulty that has precluded some commentators from appreciating Nietzsche’s contribution to gender theory has also precluded scholars from entertaining the possibility that, in a society as patriarchal and domineering as archaic and/or ancient Greece, the first philosophers could have been trying to create a more partnership-oriented or woman-­ affirming religiosity, but the reason for them doing this becomes more understandable when we consider why female representations of the divine  Luchte 2011, 49.  Blundell 1995, 187.

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appeal to so many people. Whereas male-dominated social structures have historically been reflected in and maintained by male-­dominated religious pantheons and doctrines, conceptualizing the supreme power in the universe as a goddess can instill in women a more positive self-image that, in turn, encourages them to take a more active role in leading their communities, but Eisler emphasizes that, for both women and men, conceiving of the universe or the divine as a goddess is more psychologically reassuring: for her, the tenacity with which westerners have clung to the compassionate figure of the Virgin Mary attests to the human hunger for such reassuring worldviews.91 Of course, just as male figures like Jesus can promote partnership values, female personifications of divinity can be used to support androcratic social structure, and although we will consider the role of women in various areas Greek culture(s) in more detail in Chap. 2, for now, we can clarify the influence that goddess worship had on the historical emergence of Greek philosophy by taking a quick look at women in archaic Greece. 9. The archaic age was a critical period for women because it was during this time that the framework of the polis (city-state) was being developed the laws and customs of which would come to determine the position of women—as well as the relationship dynamics between men and women— for several centuries.92 Although there was an intensification of patriarchy toward the end of the archaic age, it was still an age in which Greek women received rich burials and were not kept in physical seclusion; in which aristocratic women possibly experienced a greater degree of freedom than in the classical age; and it was also an age for which we have more evidence of female homosexuality than the classical age even though most of our evidence for the archaic age comes from classical Athens.93 It is a frequently noted paradox that, even though female deities encouraged the acknowledgment of women’s importance, societies that worshipped goddesses could also be ones in which real women had a very low status, but religion as such provided opportunities for women insofar as the role of priestess—for both gods and goddesses—was the only public office open to women: there are also indications that women were regarded as having a closer intrinsic connection with the divine than men.94 Regarding both  Eisler 1995, 24, 67, 76.  Blundell 1995, 65, 68. 93  Ibid., 75, 73, 85, 104, 10. 94  Blundell 1995, 163, 17. Blundell and Williamson 1998, 1. 91 92

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the individual and historical emergence of philosophy, what is most crucial is that both poor and affluent women were involved in educating their children: in fact, women may have been the kernels of the oikos’ (home’s) self-knowledge and memory insofar as they constructed private histories of their kin-groups partly by singing songs to their children so as to educate them about their ancestors.95 Ischomachus maintained that women naturally have more affection for newborn children than men, but both the studies which show that stressed mothers are more likely to either abuse or neglect their children and Sue Blundell’s suggestion that Athenian boys would have be used as an outlet for the repressed aspirations and sexual desires of their more restricted mothers suggests that archaic Greek mothers’ capacity to provide such affection would have been impeded by an overly domineering environment.96 Given what we now know about both the influence of maternal care on brain development and the educative role of Greek mothers, any attempt to explain the historical emergence of philosophy must consider the role played by archaic Greek women as the condition for the possibility of the emergence of creative and intelligent Greek men, and given what we now know about the nurturing effect that goddess worship tends to have on people in general and women in particular, it makes sense that Greek mothers would have benefited from living in such relatively supportive environments. That is, Eisler’s observation that leading presocratics hailed from sites characterized by millennian-long traditions of goddess worship reflects how the generally positive effect which goddess worship tends to have on real women’s lives enabled—and perhaps even encouraged—the women of these sites to provide the kind of maternal care which cultivates the neurological foundations of philosophical subjectivity. And it is in this way that we can understand that philosophy has always been a collective way of life; that the creative and self-reflective lives of individual philosophers are emblematic of the partnership-democratic lifestyle. 10. Arete of Cyrene was a Cyrenaic philosopher (fl. fifth–fourth century BCE) who taught her son Aristippus the Younger philosophy earning him the name ‘Mother-taught,’ but we may also be able to see the influence that mothers had on the intellectual development of the first Greek philosopher-­poets in how the latter personified the source of their poetic  Blundell 1995, 141. Stears 1998, 97.  Xenophon Oeconomicus 7.24. Blundell 1995, 141. Eisler and Fry 2019, 107. Blundell 1995, 43. 95 96

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inspiration: ‘the poet’s speech, as developed in the poetic tradition, is inseparable from two complementary concepts: the Muses and memory. Together, these religious powers constitute the general configuration that confers on the Ale ̄theia of poetry its true, deep meaning.’97 That the therapeutic and inspirational voice arising from the presocratics’ bodies was conceived of by them as a feminine voice helps explain why—despite their living in a largely patriarchal society—I have not been able to find one misogynistic statement by any of the presocratic philosophers until Democritus, and even these statements likely belong to Democrates instead. In this respect, there is a distinct contrast between the presocratics and some of their contemporaries like Simonides (§25.6), and again, given Aristotle’s eagerness to find precedent for his views among the first philosophers, one would think that, if there was any misogyny there, he would have discussed it. Also, just as the cognitive benefits of maternal care are reflected in how Hesiod’s muse Meletē designates attention, concentration, and mental exercise, the centrality of feminine inspiration to the emergence of Greek philosophy is further suggested by how the fundamental concept of presocratic thought bears the name of another Hesiodic muse—‘Arche ̄ is the beginning, what is original; the poet’s speech strives to discover the origin of things, primordial reality.’98 As poets, the presocratics experienced their thoughts as flowing into their chests from a divine and feminine memory, and although Blundell conveys how invisible the first philosophers’ affirmation of women is when she states that gender issues had excited little interest in Greek philosophers before the fourth century BCE, her view that a number of these philosophers subscribed to a notion of gender difference as a fundamental element in the cosmic order indicates how femininity was built into the very structure of their overall worldview.99 This, in turn, sheds a new light on the explanatory significance of Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal return for understanding presocratic thought. 11. Just as focusing on the literal truth of the eternal return ignores how Nietzsche’s innovation on this ancient idea was to link it to the world-­ affirming perspective of amor fati, being too preoccupied with the literal truth of rebirth reflects a patriarchal distortion of the philosophy of religion: ‘philosophical debates on the topic of immortality have also been  Chrystal 2017, 120. Detienne 1999, 39.  Detienne 1999, 41 translation modified. 99  Blundell 1995, 181. 97 98

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deeply shaped by androcratic interests—centering on self-preservation and individual, rather than collective, survival.’100 Preoccupation with personal identity may also explain why contemporary readings in philosophy of religion far too frequently ignore the significance of Nietzsche’s work, and this is unfortunate because he was more appreciative than most people are of the psychological consequences that beliefs about what happens after we die have for our worldly life; this is from where the significance of the eternal return for understanding presocratic philosophy comes.101 Unlike beliefs in either personal immortality or certain death which reify subjective identity by either projecting it onto eternity or enabling one to delimit it within the bounds of a single life time, belief in rebirth disrupts the appearance of subjective identity by making one conceive of oneself both as having been other than one is now and, in a sense, still being identical with this unknown other.102 That is, belief in rebirth is characterized by the same intervallic vagueness as philosophical-feminine subjectivity, and this helps explain the intimate connection between rebirth, partnership societies, and presocratic philosophy. One the one hand, Eisler illustrates the connection between rebirth and partnership when she notes that that the axial shift from partnership to dominator society was also a religious shift ‘as sex, birth, and rebirth were gradually replaced by suffering, punishment and death as the central motifs of both myth and life.’103 On the other hand, Thomas McEvilley illustrates the connection between rebirth and presocratic philosophy when he notes that—despite Homeric Greece’s patriarchal glorification of death—virtually of all of the presocratics believed in rebirth and held this belief to be fundamental to the whole sense of the meaning of life, but McEvilley also notes that their belief in rebirth was symptomatic of an even more archaic worldview: ‘both Greek and Indian philosophers, when they spoke of the cyclicity of the cosmos and its eternal recurrence, were passing on a piece of an archaic worldwide construction already thousands of years old’; ‘what shape is ancient thought? Round. At least in the Mesopotamian lineage, which includes Greece and India …. The wheel of cycling time sets going a smaller wheel within itself: the wheel of the transmigration of souls.’104 Although this  Frankenberry 2018, §3.1.  Anderson 1998, 46. 102  Klossowski 1997, 54. 103  Eisler 1996, 125. 104  McEvilley 2002, 149 note 92, 88, 91. 100 101

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book will conclude by reflecting on the plausibility of reincarnation, for the most part, we’ll discuss belief in rebirth as being a metaphor for the life-affirming worldview that characterizes partnership societies, and the primordial nature of this worldview derives from how the world of the first humans was shaped by natural cycles of seasonal change and by animism— the belief that every natural phenomenon has awareness and feelings, and can directly communicate with humans.105 If the transition from partnership to domination consisted in both the subjugation of women and the shift from a worldview focused on rebirth to one focused on death, then, along with their goddess imagery and positive portrayal of women, the presocratics’ emphasis on rebirth further indicates that they were trying to reform archaic Greek religion so as make it more partnership-oriented. The prominence of rebirth in presocratic philosophy compensates for the relatively paucity of explicit references to women and goddesses in the extant fragments, and this is why, in the following chapters, I will explore the themes of both women and rebirth in presocratic philosophy so as to support my thesis. But before we get to that, we should consider the contemporary context of this investigation so that we may more fully appreciate it cultural significance.

§9: Ontology as Activism. – 1. Although a secular view of Nietzsche has characterized Nietzsche studies since the end of the second world war, the recent considerations of him as religious thinker are bringing scholarship back to how he was originally interpreted, and it is by combining his reading of the presocratics with recent advances in feminist philosophies of religion that this book seeks to address both the exclusionary patriarchy that continues to linger within philosophy departments and the consumerist materialism that continues to prevent the west from making significant and sustainable cultural-­ political progress. It’s debatable whether Nietzsche would have endorsed a religious qua theistic solution to modernity’s problems—although his affirmation of Dionysus suggests that this is possible—, but the vociferousness of his criticisms of Christianity should not lead us to overlook his appreciation of the important role which religion, as a source of the sense of meaningfulness which makes us human, plays in peoples’ lives. While the death of god is positive in the sense that, as the end of the definitional  Harari 2014, 53, 60.

105

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meanings of ascetic ideals, it opens doors for creative experimentation, Nietzsche was also concerned that humanity would not be able to survive the death of god insofar as it was also the end of existential meaning—that feeling of meaningfulness and purpose which religion provides. Nietzsche’s account of the Socratic destruction of myth in BT shows that, from the start of his professional career, he was aware of how the emptiness that attends the loss of meaningfulness causes people to anxiously fill the void with distractions, and his concern with cultural materialism in particular goes all the way back to the same source as his interest in both pre-classical Greece and cultural health: Theognis. This concern spans his entire career up until his latest notebook entries, but despite how prescient it was with respect to the consumerism of contemporary western culture, it has not received the attention it deserves perhaps because the way in which he enthusiastically both utilizes the resources of scientific materialism and praises the body has prevented commentators from exploring in what sense he was anti-materialistic. But ever since he read Friedrich Lange’s History of Materialism, Nietzsche was aware of both how theoretical materialism encourages cultural materialism and how dangerous this is for society: this is why it is important to seriously consider his warning that modern science, not religion, is currently the strongest and most insidious manifestation of the ascetic ideal.106 For Nietzsche, science physiologically rests on a slavish impoverishment of life, and if we keep in mind both that slavish impulses are fundamentally negative and that emphasizing negativity is central the dominators’ institution of cruelty, we can appreciate Nietzsche as an important forerunner to contemporary feminist critics of science who reveal how current knowledge practices disadvantage women in several ways such as denigrating ‘feminine’ cognitive styles and producing theories of women that portray them as inferior. 2. ‘Western science came out of a hierarchical, conformist, misogynist, all-male medieval clerical culture,’ and one of the ways in which the patriarchal god lives on in the discursive practices of modern science is that some of its evolutionary theories are as much projections of cultural assumptions meant to reinforce the prevailing dominator model of society as were many creator gods of antiquity.107 Scientists like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker do this by boiling down all evolutionary imperatives to selfishness thereby naturalizing the worst aspects of humanity such as 106 107

 GM III §25.  Eisler and Fry 2019, 3.

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deceit, violence, and rape: ‘although in other respects evolutionary psychologists reject religious explanations, the notion of an innately flawed, ruthlessly selfish human nature is very similar to the religious dogma of original sin that for centuries justified strict top-down controls and punishments’; ‘what these authors are actually expressing is an ideology that serves to justify the direct and structural violence of hierarchies of domination and the rigid ranking of some people over others. Theirs is an authoritarian worldview.’108 The misogyny of science’s discursive practices becomes clear in how the sociobiological and evolutionary psychological vocabularies specifically use the language of neo-liberal or trickle-down capitalist economists to rank traditionally masculine traits over stereotypically feminine traits; as well as in how ‘the discourse of the sciences of man constructs the object as female and the female as object. That, I suggest, is its rhetoric of violence, even when the discourse presents itself as humanistic.’109 But the violence of modern science’s discursive practices extends from women and marginalized groups to humanity as such when it reinforces domination, not just by naturalizing dominator values, but also by trivializing all forms of religion. Rupert Sheldrake confirms Nietzsche’s view of the sickliness of modern science when he notes both that ‘militant atheism should come with a health warning’ because numerous studies have indicated the various health benefits of being religious in some way, and that ‘the proportion of atheists is higher among the scientifically educated’ because scientists simply consider atheism to be the norm despite the fact that modern atheism is a Christian phenomenon: ‘for believers in the materialist theory of nature, living unhappily can seem like an act of heroism, an unflinching fidelity to objective truth. But philosophical materialism is not the truth; it is a world-view, a belief system.’110 Nietzsche indicates the physiological and even generational violence that this dominator discourse has inflicted upon humanity when he writes that ‘what things are called is unspeakably more important than what they are. The reputation, [the] name … has, through the belief in it and its growth from generation to generation, slowly grown onto and into the thing and has become its very body.’111 (That is, by speaking of people as being inherently selfish and domineering, science had contributed to people  Ibid., 20–26.  Ibid., 55. de Lauretis 1987, 45. 110  Sheldrake 2017, 165, 3, 159, 42–43. 111  GS §58. 108 109

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becoming more selfish and domineering.) The visceral influence of discursive practices and belief systems is especially evident in how the west’s predominantly negative valuation of menses has inscribed itself both psychologically and physiologically in women’s bodies by creating (pre)menstruation as a socially constructed disease—an assumption which has only been challenged in recent decades with the recognition of Great Ovulation Elation Syndrome (GEOS) in which ovulation is experienced as a time of euphoria and heightened creativity—and if we can use the discursive construction of PMS as prism through which to estimate the effect that the dominator discourse has had on humanity as such, we can certainly agree with Pamela Sue Anderson that science’s rationalization of patriarchal theism is ‘a scandal of largely unacknowledged proportions’; especially when we consider that ‘the efforts of intellectuals to make reality conform to a dominator worldview go way back into prehistory.’112 Babette Babich continues to be an important voice in, not just elucidating Nietzsche’s philosophy of science and warning that science is now the best means for advancing the slavish capacities of humanity, but also in conveying the danger that scientism poses for philosophy insofar as science is now being set in place of philosophy due to the latter’s physics envy. Considering the effect that dogmatic scientism has had on contemporary philosophy will, in turn, help us address the pressing question of ‘why do female students leave philosophy?’113 3. ‘The anglophone philosophy profession has a well-known problem with gender equality,’ and while some of this problem no doubt stems from how western philosophers’ pretense of gender neutrality often conceals their male-sex bias, there is another reason why female students (and sensitive people in general) are leaving academic philosophy; one which directly reflects the influence of modern science’s authoritarian worldview: ‘“micro-inequalities” that are individually minor but add up over a long period of time to produce a significant effect.’114 The adversarial method has become so deeply inscribed in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition that it is rarely challenged or even acknowledged, and because of this, ‘intellectual aggression has taken a central role in analytic philosophy’:

 Brown 2006, 11, 51. Anderson 1998, 49. Eisler 1995, 76.  Dougherty et al. 2015, 467. 114  Ibid., 467, 470. Anderson 1998, 7. Brennan 2013. 112 113

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Analytic philosophy, instead of working cooperatively and creatively to open up new insights and risking the possibility of mistakes, is too often content with “blowing holes” in “opponents” arguments, or else in “mounting a defense” of ever dwindling and more boring positions.115 It is assumed that the only, or at any rate the best, way of evaluating work in philosophy is to subject it to the strongest or most extreme opposition. And it is assumed that the best way of presenting work in philosophy is to address it to an imagined opponent.116

Andrew Gregory indicates how the boringness of much contemporary philosophy is intentionally cultivated when he writes of receiving the following feedback from an Oxbridge professor: ‘yes, young man, that was a very interesting paper, very interesting indeed. Interesting and therefore wrong. The truth is always dull.’117 It’s one thing to not let the attractiveness of an idea function as proof of its veracity, but it’s something else entirely to present as rational objectivity the assumption that the unattractiveness of an idea proves its veracity, and it is through discursive practices like these that the scientific-materialistic worldview foments the very nihilism that leads people to discount truth and evidence altogether. But some feminists themselves are also liable to contribute to the hostile climate of philosophy departments insofar as what began as a campaign to get woman appointed and promote women’s studies can devolve into ‘an increasing bureaucratization which operates with definite techniques of surveillance and normalization—with pervasive and constant procedures or appraisal in which each individual must monitor themselves to ensure that they conform to the standardized expectations of what it is to be an academic.’118 4. Although ‘philosophy of religion was not regarded as “real” philosophy during the ascendancy of the analytic movement,’ analysts have nevertheless worked to rationalize patriarchal forms of theism: ‘this can be seen most clearly in contemporary analytic philosophers’ defenses of the unramified beliefs at the heart of Christian realist forms of theism.’119 ‘It was not until the late 1960s that the subject of gender began to break into research and education’ and in ‘the entrenched bias and resistance to  Jantzen 2004, 15.  Moulton 1983, 153. 117  Gregory 2016, viii. 118  Tapper 1993, 137. 119  Frankenberry 2018, §1. Anderson 1998, 49. 115 116

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feminism within mainstream analytic philosophy of religion.’120 But despite this cultural inertia, feminist philosophy of religion finally began to emerge as a distinct field by the end of the twentieth century with fresh research appearing more frequently in the twenty-first century. 5. Feminist philosophers of religion have acknowledged that, while most misogyny has been committed in the name of religion, religion as such still remains a necessity for humanity in general and for many women in particular. On the one hand, ‘history shows that the moral degradation of woman is due more to theological superstitions than to all other influences together.’121 On the other hand, just as Irigaray reminds us that ‘no human subjectivity, no human society has ever been established without the help of the divine,’ Nancy Frankenberry maintains that ‘feminists must face up to the fact that religion is a potent dimension of the lives and desires of contemporary women around the world; therefore, philosophizing it away as superstition … simply calls into question, not the phenomenon of religion, but the grasp of feminist philosophy itself on its subject matter.’122 While secular feminists may understandably reject feminine approaches to religion on the grounds that ideas like the divine feminine have been used to oppress women—in early twentieth-century America, some argued that it is because women are closer to the divine than men that they should not be sullied by the public realm; for example, by being allowed to vote—, abuses of religion shouldn’t dissuade anyone from utilizing religion as an effective means of social-cultural progress, and Anderson’s prioritization of the construction of belief over its justification shows why religion is an invaluable resource to this end. Since purely formal reason is too thin to deal adequately with the beliefs of embodied persons, and mainstream empiricist methods of defending or attacking theistic beliefs simply confirm the status quo of patriarchy, Anderson prioritizes the construction of religious beliefs over their justification so as to address the usually unasked and unresolved question concerning the significance of desire in the creation of difference religious beliefs.123 That is, debates over the veracity of religious beliefs tend to overlook how, since they were constructed so as answer life’s big questions and speak to the deep desires and yearnings of the human heart, religious  Eisler and Fry 2019, 11. Frankenberry 2018, §1.  Stanton 1885, 389. 122  Irigaray 1993, 62. Frankenberry 2018, §6. 123  Anderson 1998, xiii, 16. 120 121

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ideas are believed in on a more than rational basis. This is why they can be as obstinate an obstacle to change as they are valuable sources of progress, and Irigaray’s view that belief formation is implicated in the formation of different kinds of subjectivity further shows why belief in feminine images of divinity can be particularly empowering for women: ‘as long as woman lacks a divine made in her image, she cannot establish her subjectivity.’124 Feminist philosophers of religion also cultivate religion’s progressive potential by both maintaining that the criterion for assessing religious beliefs should be ethical and political adequacy instead of certain epistemic criteria that disregard ethical considerations and by grounding theistic devotion in a passionate desire for healthier forms of relationality and sexuality: ‘mediated by a “god of her sex,” woman’s becoming (divine) is thus possible, and in turn makes possible for the first time an ethics that defines a genuine relationship between two subjects … a new form of ethical relationship that can exist between women and men.’125 6. In other words, thealogians provide a this-worldly form of religion in which divinity manifests through the magisterial force of partnership relationality, and one way in which they activate this way of life is by replacing the dead mechanism of modern science with a more nurturing worldview. ‘An absence of maternal ontology is a cause of anxiety,’ and it is by creating a worldview in which being/existence is fundamentally alive, divine, and nurturing that feminist philosophers of religion can begin to make cultural and political headway against the dominator paradigm that has characterized western civilization for thousands of years, but unfortunately, their efforts to do so have been impeded by a misunderstanding of the origins of western philosophy: ‘the history of philosophy begins by imagining female powers as what had to be excluded by thinkers seeking to be rational. In Lloyd’s terms, the mysterious powers of goddesses were left behind by reason in western philosophy.’126 By considering the themes of women and rebirth in presocratic philosophy, I will show that the history of philosophy began, not by excluding female powers, but as an attempt to revive, within the domineering, patriarchal, and death-­ glorifying culture of archaic Greece, a partnership religiosity that valued women and saw life as a process of eternal rebirth that was directed by a goddess. And besides showing how a form of religion which can both  Irigaray 1993, 63.  Anderson 1998, 19. Frankenberry 2018, §4.2.2. 126  Ferrell 2006, 2. Anderson 1998, 8. 124 125

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counteract consumerism and cultivate the cultural foundations of democracy ignited the origin of western philosophy—and thus lies at the foundation of our educational institutions—, the contemporary significance of this account of presocratic philosophy derives from how it can help academia overcome what Dougherty et al. found to be the primary reason why so many female students are leaving philosophy—namely, that they enter universities with a gender schema that makes them both less likely to believe that they can do well in philosophy and less able to imagine themselves becoming philosophers.127 (This conclusion is clearly a generalization which was not meant to deny that each person who chooses to leave a philosophy department does so for a combination of reasons that is unique to her.) If gender neutrality is a mask for implicit masculinity, then the only way to disabuse female students of the idea that philosophy is a man’s business is to both explore in what sense philosophy is feminine and show how its femininity manifests historically as philosophy itself originating as an attempt to revive and/or create a more woman-affirming worldview. But before we get ahead of ourselves, it would be best to clarify a few things.

§10: Thesis. – The neglect of women’s perspectives by presocratic scholarship since its inception, as well as the incomplete comprehension of the beginning of western philosophy which has resulted from this neglect, have prevented many from appreciating both how Nietzsche’s view of philosophy as such and of the presocratics themselves—despite the male-centered bias of his reading of them—helps us see that they were trying to revive a goddesscentered form of religion within patriarchal Greece and how contemporary philosophers (women philosophers in particular) can, in turn, employ this new perspective on the origin of philosophy so as to contribute to Nietzsche’s vision of the philosopher as a cultural physician; how we can both encourage female students to study philosophy and support the cultural foundations of democracy by reconceiving philosophy itself as a form of religion that is the inverted image of the patriarchal dogmatism that most people associate with institutional religion—a religion that values women and sees inquiry itself as a sacred process of divinization.

 Dougherty et al. 2015, 469.

127

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§11: (Un)grounding and (Non)identity. – Although there is a grain of truth to the trope that the Greeks constitute the archē or dawn of the west, the uncritical repetition of this idea has erected barriers between the ‘west’ and ‘others’ as well as rendered nearly unintelligible the genuine significance of early Greek thought, and in order to overcome these problems, the next chapter will provide an (un) ground for the west by describing the various cultures which contributed to Greek philosophy emerging within Asia minor and subsequent chapters will discuss Greece’s intellectual and cultural exchanges with India in particular.128 The point is to construct a historical narrative that encourages the same sense of intervallic (non)identity which characterizes philosophical subjectivity. All forms of learning reconstruct our brains, but studying presocratic philosophy in particular is an enterprise that calls into question our identity insofar as ‘our investigation of early “Greek” thinking must simultaneously be a radical exploration of ourselves as we live and affirm—perhaps resist—our own questionable “identity,”’ and by inciting one to question oneself, it is precisely this thawing of identity that enables one to begin to personally emically understand the historical origin of western philosophy: ‘in order to understand the emergence of philosophy, of tragic thought, we must retrieve the original, radical impetus of questioning.’129 Higgins’ observation that Nietzsche ‘saw questions where his contemporaries did not’ further conveys the perceptual nature of this simultaneously archaic and postmodern form of subjectivity; that the way of life which characterizes the affirmative worldview of philosophy and democracy is itself literally a way of seeing or perceiving the world.130

§12: A New Science of Life. – As much as Nietzsche’s polemical style may resemble the adversarial mentality of Anglo-American philosophy, the impetus behind his work is diametrically opposed to the latter insofar as his criticisms are fundamentally constructive. They are always made to make room for future growth, and this is also the case for his critique of modern science which was  Luchte 2011, 28.  Eisler and Fry 2019, 86. Luchte 2011, 23, 17. 130  Higgins 1995, 246. 128 129

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meant to encourage the kind of philosophical self-­reflection that began to emerge within the scientific community itself when quantum physicists revealed the subjective construction of ‘physical’ phenomena. The counterintuitive notions such as wave-particle duality with which physics had to contend in the 1920s and 30s led physicists like Einstein and Bohr to speculate that progress in theoretical physics could only be made by tackling philosophical questions, but this style of doing physics— according to which the physicist should be, above all, a bearer of culture—was tragically cut short when European fascism thrust physicists into projects of immediate, worldly significance: ‘over the next quarter century, Cold War imperatives shaped not just who received grants to pursue this or that problem; they left an indelible mark on the world of ideas, on what counted as “real” physics …. As far as the postwar generation of physicists was concerned, their business was to calculate, not daydream about philosophical chestnuts.’131 Although the cultural rebirth of the 1960s did much to overcome the sterilization of science—leading to innovations that would later become the basis for quantum encryption—, the rebirth of science has still yet to overcome the dominator paradigm which continues to fuel both political fascism and scientific materialism. Nietzsche’s criticism of modern science is constructive insofar as—along with other voices within the scientific community like Rupert Sheldrake and Robert Lanza—he exposes how scientists’ militant atheism continues to lead them to both misinterpret their finding and to ignore how the advances in physics are returning us to an animistic worldview in which life and consciousness are fundamental to the structure of the universe.132

§13: Stress Relief. – As inspirational as Nietzsche’s artistic-religious-therapeutic vision of philosophy may be, there’s one aspect of his view of art that serves as both a guard against fanaticism and a reminder of the feminine perspective that is implicit in his critique of science: ‘the casualness of real art.’133 Woman is the source of gaiety in Nietzsche’s notion of a gay science because he saw women as possessing the same epistemological decency and profound  Kaiser 2011, xiii-xiv.  Lanza 2010. 133  Bishop and Stephenson 2005, 111. 131 132

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superficiality as the Greeks, and his notion of truth as woman is the positive and inverted image of his notion of the death of god: ‘god the father, the fraternal order, the paternal order—all these strategies of undoing otherness are undone under the assumption of truth as woman’ or woman as ‘a vibrant, living thing, a delightfully contradictory (non)truth.’134 Nietzsche associated women with the lightness and playfulness of affirmative values—as opposed to the nihilistic values that weigh one down—, and we can see this artistic casualness in how some feminist commentators on Nietzsche have called on their colleagues to ease up on political correctness. Unlike the adversarial scientism of much contemporary philosophy which fetishizes absolute certainty, the approach to philosophy that this book takes up from the presocratics and Nietzsche prioritizes the communal process of philosophizing over its individual products because it understands that, just as a thriving arts scene is a clear indication of cultural health, cultivating people’s capacity for—and especially their interest in—philosophy is essential for maintaining the affective, perceptual, cognitive, and cultural foundations of any democratic society. We can further elucidate the evolutionary origins of these foundations by considering the animal origins of artistic-ethical taste.

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Timothy F. Sellner, and Robert M. Helm, 1–15. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Luchte, James. 2011. Early Greek Thought: Before the Dawn. New  York: Bloomsbury. Marchland, Suzanne. 1996. Down from Olympus: Archeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McEvilley, Thomas. 2002. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Allworth Press. Morley, Neville. 2004. ‘Unhistorical Greeks’: Myth, History, and the Uses of Antiquity. In Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, ed. Paul Bishop, 27–39. Rochester: Camden House. Moulton, Janice. 1983. A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method. In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, 149–164. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1909. On the Future of Our Educational Institutions – Homer and Classical Philology. Trans. J.  M. Kennedy. Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis. ———. 1967a. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. ———. 1967b. Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 1967c. Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werk. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 1988a. Kritische Studienausgabe: Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 15. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 1988b. We Philologists. In Kritische Studienausgabe: Sämtliche Werke., 8:1–96, 121–27, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 1996a. Assorted Opinions and Maxims. In Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free pirits, 215–299. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996b. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Daybreak. Eds. Maudemaria Clark and Brian Leiter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Trans. Marianne Cowan. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. ———. 2001. The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. The Birth of Tragedy: And Other Writings. Eds. Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2005. The Case of Wagner: From the Files of a Psychologist. In The Anti-­ Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, 231–262. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009a. On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense. In Writings from the Early Notebooks, ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, 253–264. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009b. Writings from the Early Notebooks. Eds. Raymond Guess and Alexander Nehamas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Eds. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2017. On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings. Ed. Keith Ansell-­ Pearson. Trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1994. Frühe Schriften (Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, 1–5). Oppel, Frances. 1993. ‘Speaking of Immortal Waters’: Irigaray with Nietzsche. In Nietzsche, Feminism, and Political Theory, ed. Paul Patton, 88–109. London: Routledge. Parker, Robert. 2011. On Greek Religion. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Porter, James I. 2000. Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rosenlee, Li-Hsiang Lisa. 2006. Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation. Albany: SUNY Press. Ruehl, Martin A. 2003. Politeia 1871: Nietzsche Contra Wagner on the Greek State. In Out of Arcadia: Classics and Politics in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Wilamowitz, ed. Ingo Gildenhard, 61–86. London: Institute of Classical Studies. Shaw, Miranda. 1994. Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sheldrake, Rupert. 2017. Science and Spiritual Practice: Transformative Experiences and Their Effects on Our Bodies, Brains, and Health. Berkeley: Counterpoint. Siemens, Herman. 2008. Agonal Configurations in the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen. Identity, Mimesis and the Übertragung of Cultures in Nietzsche’s Early Thought. Nietzsche-Studien 30 (1): 80–106. Silk, M.S., and J.P.  Stern. 1981. Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. 1885. Has Christianity Benefitted Women? North American Review 140 (342): 389–410. Stears, Karen. 1998. Death Becomes Her: Gender and Athenian Death Ritual. In The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, ed. Sue Blundell and Margaret Williamson, 89–117. London and New York: Routledge. Tapper, Marion. 1993. Ressentiment and Power. In Nietzsche, Feminism, and Political Theory, ed. Paul Patton, 130–143. London: Routledge.

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Ure, Michael V. 2005. Stoic Comedians: Nietzsche and Freud on the Art of Arranging One’s Humours. Nietzsche-Studien 34 (1): 186–216. Vasseleu, Cathryn. 1993. Not Drowning, Sailing: Women and the Artist’s Craft in Nietzsche. In Nietzsche, Feminism, and Political Theory, ed. Paul Patton, 71–87. London: Routledge. Vidal-Piñeiro, Didac. 2014. Decreased Default Mode Network Connectivity Correlates with Age-Associated Structural and Cognitive Changes. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 6: 256. Whitman, James. 1986. Nietzsche in the Magisterial Tradition of German Classical Philology. Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (3): 453–468. Wilson, Jason. 2018. What Do Incels, Fascists and Terrorists Have in Common? Violent Misogyny. The Guardian. Wohlfart, Günter. 2016. Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy. New Nietzsche Studies 10 (1/2): 13–26. Young, Julian. 2010. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2

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§14: Beginnings. – Nietzsche adopted the notion of an artistic drive from a line of thought that began in 1760 when Hermann Samuel Reimarus first used the term Kunsttrieb so as to explain certain spontaneously creative behavior in animals, and Nietzsche’s development of this concept into the body’s drive(s) to produce metaphors is supported by Merleau-Ponty’s observation that animal corporeality is itself constituted by a form of communication; selfsignification rooted in a desire for self-expression.1 Animal artistry is evident in the quasi-ritualistic behavior that we find throughout the animal kingdom—some of which is used to control mutual recognition and cooperation—and Darwin also supports the idea of animals possessing an artistic taste when he observes a love for singing and music in a wide range of animals, but it seems as though it’s the appearance of mammals that brings the ethical side of animal artistry to fore: ‘the evolution of mammalian nurturing represents a phylogenetic shift in the direction of care and empathy’ which is illustrated in how ‘caring can even extend to other species, like when dogs or dolphins save human lives occasionally at the cost of their own.’2 There is also evidence for reasoning and problem-­solving among certain animals such as elephants and chimpanzees, but we will  Brown 2006, 100, 122, 127.  Burkert 1985, 54. Burkert 2001, 14. Sheldrake 2017, 109. Eisler and Fry 2019, 47.

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only be considering the social dynamics of the latter so as to provide as comprehensive a context as we can for the following chapters’ discussion of presocratic philosophy.3 After a brief discussion of the evolution of humans (§§15–16), we’ll consider Eisler’s view of how old Europe was converted from a partnership to a dominator social model and then trace how partnership still continued through the Near East to Minoan Crete (§§17–21), which, in turn, serves as a link between old Europe and the Eleusinian mysteries. §§22–24 focus on what we can know of these highly secretive mysteries so as to illustrate both their significance for and their conceptual-cosmological similarity to presocratic philosophy thereby providing the link between presocratic philosophy and old European partnership to which we will return in Chap. 5. Once this is all in place, we will continue to explore several developments that occurred during Greece’s archaic age that also contributed to the historical emergence of philosophy (§25), and finally, we’ll turn to classical Athens so as to further elucidate the lifeworld(s) of archaic and ancient Greece (§§26–33). It’s in this way that this chapter will provide the cultural-historical context for the origin, heyday, and twilight of the presocratics.

§15: Chimps and Bonobos. – Researchers have observed the existence of prolonged violence between groups of chimpanzees with one case even exhibiting genocidal activity in which one troop systematically slaughtered most members of a neighboring band, but as much as this helps explain human aggression, chimps are not our closest chromosomal relatives.4 The body proportions of early hominid fossils are more similar to pygmy chimpanzees (bonobos) than to any other ape, and the social dynamics of this species indicate that partnership was as important for how we humans came to be as it is for where we will go.5 Bonobo social organization is not free of aggression, but compared to common chimps, it has less institutionalized violence and more social fluidity as well as more sharing behavior, and this relatively peaceful society is maintained by female dominance and the institutionalization of ritual sexuality. Female coalitions play an important role in preventing males from dominating young females, and it is  Eisler and Fry 2019, 45.  Harari 2014, 29. 5  Eisler 1996, 46. 3 4

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the potential that bonobo females have to dominate males which forms the basis for their relatively egalitarian sexual relations because the females tend not to use their power to either subordinate males or control male sexuality.6 That both chimp and bonobo females show a definite preference for less aggressive males suggests that early human sexual relations were based more on mutual trust than on fear and force, and bonobos specifically use nonreproductive sex as a peacemaking ritual so as to avoid the kind of violence characteristic of chimps: ‘when two different bonobo groups met at the same feeding site, the tension of the encounter was broken first by sex between a female and a male from each group.’7 Eisler suggests that this ritualization of sex as a means of reducing and resolving potential conflicts foreshadows the association of sex and religious ritual in prehistorical societies, and the less stressful nature of bonobo society helps explain why bonobos are, in significant respects, smarter than chimps: besides having a superior capacity to learn, their brains contained better-developed pathways to control aggressive impulses and this endows them with increased empathetic sensitivity.8 This correlation between partnership sexuality, brain development, and emotional intelligence coincides with Nietzsche’s view that, just as ‘the sense of the tragic gains and wanes with sensuality,’ the intuitive knowledge (Dionysian wisdom) of philosophy springs from sexuality.9 By turning toward our own species, we can begin to see how, beside facilitating brain development, partnership relationality contributed to the origin of philosophy by virtue of the way in which it enabled humans to use their animalistic artistry to transcend evolutionary and societal limitations.

§16: Homo sapiens. – Nietzsche’s statement that ‘at the natural preliminary stage a people is a unity only to the extent that it has a common primitive art’ conveys the important role that art and/or myth played in enabling Homo sapiens to become the dominant species on the planet.10 Natural selection was against sapiens insofar as the great cost that having a big brain places on  Ibid., 47.  Ibid., 39, 44. 8  Ibid., 48. Eisler and Fry 2019, 58. 9  BGE §155. O’Flaherty 1976, 136, 142. 10  EN §19[256]. 6 7

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one’s body caused them to have to spend more time searching for food and atrophied their muscles, and this difficulty was compounded by their not having any marked advantages over similar species—in the first known conflict between sapiens and neanderthals, the latter appear to have won—, but they overcame these obstacles thanks to the capacity for largescale cooperation that they derived from their myths.11 The mutual trust that common myths and gods provided for sapiens both led to the emergence of the first trade networks and enabled human evolution to transcend previous dynamics by allowing sapiens to rapidly revise their behavior in accordance with changing needs.12 That partnership relationality in general and women in particular played an important role in the generation of myth is suggested by how it may be that language (and hence myth) arose from the caring bonds between mothers and/or caregivers and children instead of from the need for male hunters to communicate, and this maternal and nurturing origin of language coincides with the feminine and life-affirming nature of the first myths: ‘our early mythical imagery reflected a worldview in which death was neither an isolated event nor a final destination in heaven or hell. Rather, it was part of the same cycle: a cycle of sex, birth, death, and rebirth, in which the Goddess reclaimed what was hers to give, and in which sex played a mysterious central part.’13 (Women’s significance for human evolution is also indicated by how, just as the need to carry infants suggests that it is highly likely that early women were responsible for making the transition to bipedalism, it is also likely that they invented the domestication of plants and animals.)14 Although there is very little evidence to support the existence of a single unified mother earth goddess religion in the prehistoric era, the partnership mentality of prehistoric humans manifests in the egalitarianism of nomadic foragers whose ethic of care and sharing is evident in their collective parenting and ubiquitous meat-sharing: some even speculate that meditation—which has been shown to relax the DMN— started among hunter-gatherers sitting around fires and gazing into the flames.15 But the speed with which sapiens ascended to the top of the food chain also had negative consequences. Not only did it not give the  Harari 2014, 9–10, 22, 30.  Ibid., 39, 36. 13  Eisler 1996, 68, 127. 14  Eisler and Fry 2019, 59. 15  Blundell 1995, 18. Eisler and Fry 2019, 165. Sheldrake 2017, 14, 19. 11 12

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ecosystem time to adjust by creating checks and balances, but it prevented sapiens themselves from adjusting to their new prominence insofar as, in contrast to other top predators who develop an instinctual selfconfidence from millions of years of domination, sapien psychology still reflects how, until very recently, we were in the middle of the food chain: many catastrophes continue to result from how sapiens’ psychology resembles that of a banana republic dictator who is full of fears and anxieties over his position.16 The danger that this psychological insecurity poses is exacerbated by sapiens’ relative inability to either fathom the long-term consequences of their actions or to remember what early life was like, but Eisler helps us address both these problems by showing how our egalitarian instincts continued from the paleolithic (2.5 million–10,000 BCE) into the neolithic (10,000–3000 BCE).17 Tracing this continuation will, in turn, enable us to connect the feminine cyclicity of the first myths to presocratic philosophy.

§17: Old Europe. – ‘Archeological finds point to the importance of women in the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. The majority of stone carvings of this era are of female figurines. And a recent analysis of the handprints sometimes found on the walls of famous cave sanctuaries shows that the majority were female hands.’18 Whereas the gender of said handprints remains debated insofar as other studies suggest that adolescent males were primarily responsible, the female figurines suggest that early humans found reassurance through a variety of rituals and myths that were associated with the belief in rebirth, and the more highly stylized goddess figurines articulated this belief in symbolic signs such as meander patterns which appear to have led to the formation of a rudimentary form of linear script: Gimbutas has argued that the snake, and its abstract derivative the spiral, were the dominant motifs in the art of old Europe, and that there are unquestionable similarities between old European characters and those of linear A and CyproMinoan.19 Caves themselves were symbols of the womb, and the concern for rebirth also helps explain several features of these sanctuaries such as representations of vaginas and other serpentine forms that r­ epresent grass  Harari 2014, 12–13.  Ibid., 97–98. 18  Eisler and Fry 2019, 60. 19  Eisler 1995, 1–2, 86, 73. 16 17

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snakes emerging from hibernation.20 (The cognitive fecundity of such a feminine religiosity is illustrated by the abundant evidence that the spiritual visions of wise seers were once associated with women.)21 Eisler indicates the feminine-cyclical cosmology of paleolithic-partnership religiosity when she writes that ‘just as all life is born from her, it also returns to her at death to be once again reborn,’ but Eisler also notes that masculinity played an important role in this worldview as is evident in the androgyny of many of the figurines as well as in the symbol of the son-­consort’s sacred marriage to the goddess.22 As I understand it, the basic message of Eisler’s account of old Europe is that its art reflects a culture that invested women, nature, and sexuality with great spiritual significance, and this continued to be the case as these good Europeans moved into the neolithic era in which equality between the sexes—as well as between all people—was the norm.23 Instead of idealizing armed might or violence, miniature shrines from neolithic Europe depict what in contemporary society has come to be thought of as women’s work (spinning, weaving, baking, etc.) and this appreciation for women’s artistry reflects the correlation between feminine religiosity and technological innovation—almost universally, goddess worship characterized the places where the first great breakthroughs in material and social technology were made.24 Finally, in the neolithic, the head of the holy family was a woman, and just as the female bonobos were not inclined to use their powers to control or suppress the males, the partnership sensibility of neolithic female rulers is evident in the absence of the kinds of lavish chieftain burials that characterize maledominated civilizations like Egypt.25

§18: Carcosa and the Yella Kings. – 1. The cultural transformation of old Europe seems to have begun around the fifth millennia BCE when the Indo-European or Aryan-speaking people from the steppe region north of the black sea—whom both Nietzsche and Hitler idealized—swept across prehistoric Europe in three successive waves from 4300–2800 BCE, and this resulted in a mythic inversion from  Eisler 1996, 16, 55.  Eisler 1995, 70. 22  Ibid., 20, 26. 23  Ibid., 12. 24  Ibid., 17, 9. Eisler 1996, 75. 25  Eisler 1995, 24. 20 21

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feminine cyclicity to masculine necrophilia: ‘where in older art and myths the central theme is the cyclic regeneration of life, focusing on sex, love, and regeneration, the central emphasis of later art and myth is on punishment, sacrifice, and death,’ and in turn, goddess figures gradually became the mere wives or consorts of male deities who now personified power in terms of destruction rather than creation—symbolized as weapons or thunderbolts.26 The irony of Nietzsche’s idealization of these war-loving peoples becomes clear when we consider that, just as dominators’ in-­ group vs. out-group mentality served as a neolithic origin for the nauseating party politics that he avoided, it was the dominators who introduced a polarization between absolute good and absolute evil which was absent in earlier iconography.27 2. Practically all of the material and social technologies fundamental to civilization—such as law, government, religion, dance, drama, and art— were developed before the imposition of dominator society, and the dominators’ divisive mentality seems to have actually fomented cultural regression by both creating a breach between technological and cultural evolution and directing the former primarily toward the production of weaponry.28 The impact of this mentality began to manifest physically as fortified acropoleis or hill forts started to replace the older unwalled settlements as well as in the appearance of ostentatious chieftain graves in which strongmen elites would have their wives, concubines, and slaves sacrificed when they died, but these monuments also point to another central tactic of domination—‘the appropriation by men of important religious symbols that their subject peoples once associated with women.’29 Nietzsche’s accusation that new testament scholars were engaged in intellectual holy war pertains just as much to the very cultures that he saw as the pinnacles of ancient grandeur such as the Aryans who appropriated the role of creatrix goddesses by having their male deities be the creators of all life (some doing so with their weapons); the Greeks who equated the serpent with Zeus Meilichios; and the ancient Hebrews whose efforts of re-mything— such as eliminating the use of women scribes and obscuring their

 Ibid., 44, 53. Eisler 1996, 134.  Ibid., 135. 28  Eisler 1995, 66, 56. 29  Ibid., 50–53. 26 27

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domineering mentality by paying lip service to ideals of peace—continued until 400 BCE.30 3. Now, although the dominator-model certainty reflects the aggressive aspects of humanity’s evolutionary past, Nietzsche’s emphasis on people’s inherent need for personal satisfaction helps us truly detect what may be the primary origin of domination culture insofar as the latter’s institutionalization of trauma is itself the result of traumatic experiences.31 James DeMeo speculates that the cause of the original trauma occurred in two geographical regions that became sources for domination: what is now the Arabian desert, and the large territory that stretches from the eastern banks of the Caspian Sea into southeast Asia (very close to the homeland of the Indo-Europeans).32 DeMeo ascribes the original emergence of domination to drastic changes in climate in these areas which led to famine, social chaos, and mass migration, and in doing so, eventually caused a fundamental shift in the prevailing social and sexual organization of these societies: he supports this conclusion by observing a global ‘correlation in preindustrial tribal societies between a harsh environment, the rigid social and sexual subordination of women, the equation of masculinity with toughness and warlikeness, and the repression and/or distortion of sexual pleasure.’33 The psychological armoring—the deadening of positive emotions which results from severe trauma and can lead to the addiction to pain—by means of which these societies likely coped with their circumstances eventually perverted their entire way of life, and the different ways in which women and men typically respond to stress suggests that this was a primarily male-driven inversion: whereas women frequently deal with stress by joining together to care for one another and each others’ children, it has been found in some cultures that men react to stress by banding together, excluding women from male-oriented power ceremonies, and by turning aggression against women.34 4. Nietzsche is very clear that the urge to dominate and harm others ultimately derived from inner self-dissatisfaction, and insofar as this admittedly speculative psychological dynamic can explain the cultural transformation of an originally partnership-oriented European culture, then  D §84. Eisler 1996, 90. Eisler 1995, 87, 93, 44, 85.  GS §290. 32  Eisler 1996, 92. 33  Ibid., 92, 93. 34  Ibid., 94. Eisler and Fry 2019, 80–81. Sandy 1981, 158. 30 31

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Nietzsche’s blond beasts were really the first slave revolt.35 But, to be fair, the marauding Aryan bands were not totally heartless. Although their own art glorified violence and domination, their aesthetic/ethical taste was refined and softened as they gradually adopted some of the values and ways of life of the cultures they conquered, and the Indo-European languages may have even been an important step toward the emergence of western philosophy insofar as their emphasis on the noun and on the being verb were conducive to analyzing experience into discrete ontological states.36 The evolutionary recency of the dominator model explains why, despite all the efforts of re-mything, the partnership worldview could never be completely eradicated, and in fact, it remained a prominent cultural force in a region that is much closer to the Ionian emergence of philosophy.

§19: The Near East. – 1. Çatalhöyük (7100–5700 BCE) is the largest neolithic or early agricultural site discovered so far as well as an example of enduring peace insofar as there are no convincing signs of destruction through warfare for 1000  years of its existence. Analyses of isotopes in bones and of either burial or housing spaces have given no evidence of gender inequality, and this egalitarian ethos coincides with its partnership religiosity: in its shrines, ‘where rites expressing our ancestors’ hope for (and faith in) rebirth probably took place, we find the Goddess in association with vultures—still in historic times linked with return of life to the Goddess’ womb after death.’37 (However, contra Eisler, the prevalence of goddesses at this site has been challenged by scholars such as Ian Hodder who note that ‘goddess’ figures have been found in refuse heaps.)38 Besides their androgyny, another way in which prehistoric goddess figures symbolized the unity of nature was through their animality, and the shrines of Çatalhöyük continued this theme by closely associating their goddess with both the vulture and the bull; there being giant stone heads of bulls with enormous curled horns painted on the walls of Çatalhöyük shrines in which there is also a

 GS §290.  Eisler 1995, 90. McEvilley 2002, 2. 37  Eisler 1996, 62, 64. Eisler and Fry 2019, 29–30. 38  Hodder 2010. 35 36

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notable absence of altars for blood sacrifices.39 Walter Burkert further illustrates the similarity between the goddesses of Çatalhöyük and prehistoric goddess imagery when he notes that a female statuette of the former has been found accompanied by a boyish consort, and he also indicates the influence that this tradition exerted on the Greek world when he notes that sanctuaries such as the horn altar of Artemis on Delos follow a custom—which stretches back at least to Çatalhöyük—of raising up and preserving bull horns.40 Neolithic imagery of a goddess in two simultaneous forms—such as the twin Goddesses excavated in Çatalhöyük—survived in the classical Greek images of Demeter and Kore as the two aspects of the same goddess: ‘Mother and Maid as symbols of the cyclic regeneration of nature.’41 In fact, the very personification of Nietzschean truth (Baubo) is a figure whose iconic and exhibitionist posture was already used in Çatalhöyük before she appeared on Near Eastern seals in the second millennia as a mistress of animals, and the partnership mentality behind such feminine imagery is evident in how the grave sites of Çatalhöyük indicate no presence of the glaring social inequities that we see in Indo-European chieftain graves.42 But this peaceful lifestyle ended when Çatalhöyük was taken over by the Indo-European Hittites. 2. Furthermore, Inanna—the queen of heaven and earth and/or goddess of love and procreation—was the most beloved and revered deity in Sumer (4500–1900  BCE) which is the oldest western civilization from which we have extensive deciphered written records; her traditions retaining elements that undoubtably go back to neolithic and perhaps even paleolithic civilizations.43 ‘Like the art of the Paleolithic and Neolithic, the Inanna cycle deals not only with sex but also with death and rebirth,’ and whereas the nurturing aspect of this worldview is conveyed by the Sumerian word amargi, which means both ‘freedom’ and ‘return to the mother,’ the Sumerians’ affirmation of sexuality is evident in the both their institution of temple prostitution and their encouragement of either individual or collective masturbation as a means of enhancing potency.44 Eisler notes the similarity between this aspect of Sumerian culture with the tantric use of erotic pleasure as a means of raising one’s spiritual consciousness, and  Eisler 1995, 18. Eisler 1996, 132.  Burkert 1985, 12, 65. 41  Eisler 1995, 23. 42  Marinatos 2000, 58. Eisler 1995, 25, 56. 43  Eisler 1996, 67. 44  Ibid., 70, 8. Eisler 1995, 65. Chrystal 2017, 180. 39 40

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McEvilley suggests that something similar to the tantric emphasis on the feminine could be said of the Pelasgian substrate on which the Indo-­ European Greeks erected a male-dominated superstructure.45 Unfortunately, as the pressures from the more domineering peoples to the east and west intensified, Sumer’s many states—each with its own priest-­ king—gave way to the urgent need for military leadership, and Sumer shifted toward a dominator social order in which the rule of strong-men kings became mythically legitimized.46 But this could not negate the lasting influence of partnership: ‘it is [Ariadne] who, like Inanna in the Sumerian hymns, holds the secret to the labyrinth, to an initiation-like journey … it is also she who has the knowledge of how to return.’47 3. Finally, partnership and domination are blended in old Syrian cylinders from the second millennia BCE on which a naked goddess stands passively between two figures: The main role of the nude figure has been established as that of a sexual female who is sometimes an intermediary between major gods and humans. In all cases that we have seen, she is associated with men, not women. Further, she has attributes which link her with nature which means that she cannot be completely detached from the concept of fertility/nature goddess.48

As the emphasis shifted from fertility to sexuality, female sexuality was seen less as a source of inspiration and more as a means by which to consolidate male identity, but there was also a second iconographical type of sexual female divinity whose domineering role is conveyed by her showing her genitals like Baubo. Unlike the later jovial version of Baubo, the goddess who lifts her skirt both shows her divinity and indicates her dominance over the animal world, and she personifies the dominator tactic of conflating compassion with coercion insofar as her sexuality is primarily meant to arouse the war god: ‘these glyptic scenes show that the naked goddess is not only a carrier of erotic connotations: she is also dangerous, as the scenes of predatorial killing indicate. Sexual females in Near East iconography can be aggressive and terrible.’49 This domineering view of sexuality was part of a cosmic worldview insofar as, in the Near East, the  McEvilley 2002, 591.  Eisler 1996, 68. 47  Ibid., 128. 48  Marinatos 2000, 3–4. 49  Ibid., 5, 7, 9. 45 46

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s­ ubjugation of animals was considered to be a sign of an ordered universe and ‘the central position of the naked goddess shows how she is an axis of a hierarchical and structured cosmos.’50 Greek depictions of the mistress of animals closely resemble the Syrian goddesses because the Greeks derived their female nudes, in part, from the Near East during the oriental period, but the sea provided a natural barrier that enabled another part of the Aegean to retain a more nurturing conception of female divinity.51

§20: Crete. – The story of Cretan civilization began around 6000  BCE when a small colony of immigrants (probably from Anatolia) arrived on the island’s shores bringing their goddess with them.52 Minoan religion was pre-eminently feminine: ‘a hymn to Nature as a Goddess seems to be heard from everywhere, a hymn of joy and life,’ and this goddess was the product of a very different mentality than the Syrian goddess insofar as she had an affectionate relationship with animals who were seen as guardians instead of as wild things that need to be subjugated.53 Her transformative power was associated with both snakes and butterflies as symbols of rebirth—the latter forming the model for the Cretan double axe—and recalling the twin Goddesses of Çatalhöyük, two of her personas illustrate her connection with preceding goddess traditions.54 As Ariadne (the true divine queen of Crete), she both spins the spiral-meander patterns of previous goddesses into the linear form of the labyrinth and reveals her other identity by forming the true center of the labyrinth: ‘Knossos coins bear witness to a star in the labyrinth, to the lunar nature of Ariadne, and to an identity which justifies us in regarding “Persephone” as a possible name for the “mistress of the labyrinth”’; ‘the mistress at the center of the true labyrinth, the underworld; she bore a mysterious son and conferred the hope of a return to the light … [hence] the Cretan origin of the mysteries of Eleusis.’55 The earliest representation of Persephone that we have dates from the beginning of the middle Minoan period (shortly after 2000 BCE), and that she continues the tradition of associating women with spiritual  Ibid., 11, 26.  Ibid., 120, 1. 52  Eisler 1995, 30. 53  Burkert 1985, 45. Platon 1955, 27. Marinatos 2000, 124, 119, 121. 54  Eisler 1995, 18. 55  Kerényi 1976, 102, 90–91, 105–06, 118. 50 51

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vision is indicated by a cup from the first palace at Phaistos which depicts her as a snake goddess being gazed at by a man experiencing an epiphany.56 Cretan art illustrates how they lived in the kind of eternal present that Nietzsche tried to communicate through his own reflections on the a-­temporality of animal consciousness: Here and here alone … the human bid for timelessness was disregarded in the most complete acceptance of the grace of life the world has ever known. For life means movement and the beauty of movement … [and it] was revealed in human-bodies acting their serious games, inspired by a transcendent presence, acting in freedom and restraint, unpurposeful as cyclic time itself.57

The absence of any distinction between the secular and the sacred, as well as the presence of a religiosity founded on faith in the goodness of nature, ensured that Cretan art and leisure activities were both pleasurable and meaningful, and the partnership orientation of this lifestyle is also evident in the healthiness of Cretan sexuality: ‘the bare-breasted style of dress for women and the skimpy clothes emphasizing the genitals for men demonstrate a frank appreciation of sexual differences … this “pleasure bond” would have strengthened a sense of mutuality between women and men.’58 Eisler illustrates the democratic sensibility of this institutionalization of pleasure-bonding when she notes how Cretans tended to share their wealth equitably thereby maintaining a relatively high standard of living even for peasants, but even though the Cretans were able to preserve the supremacy of their goddess—as well as the lifestyle she symbolized—into the fifteenth century BCE (when Achaean dominion transformed them into a Minoan-Mycenaean culture), Syria began to exert a general influence on Crete in the seventh century BCE during which time we find substantial evidence for a goddess depicted as a patroness of men with whom the warrior elite ate in Cretan hearth temples.59 Dominator re-­mything also took place by replacing Ariadne with the Minotaur as the center of the labyrinth; by vilifying the sacred marriage between the goddess and the bull god by having Pasiphae’s sexual union with the white bull result in the monstrous Minotaur; and generally by how the  Kerényi 1967, xix. Kerényi 1976, 16.  UAHL §1. Groenewegen-Frankfort 1951, 186. 58  Eisler 1995, 35–36, 39. 59  Ibid., 31–32. Marinatos 2000, 74, 77. 56 57

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Indo-­European Achaeans made Cretan art more rigid and placed ever greater emphasis on death instead of rebirth/life.60 But there was also another result of the re-mything process that, instead of re-enforcing domination, provides another example of how a male god can be portrayed so as to encourage partnership.

§21: Dionysus. – On Crete, Semele’s son was looked upon as the son of Zeus and Persephone, but he eventually took the place of an older vision of indestructible life—as personified in the image of a goddess—when he became the god of the cosmic lifeforce or zoë.61 (Understanding zoë will clear up some confusions that tend to arise from Nietzsche’s view of Dionysus as originating in what he saw as the barbaric east.) ‘Any account of the Dionysian religion must put the main accent not on intoxication but on the quiet, powerful, vegetative element which ultimately engulfed even the ancient theaters,’ and zoë is symbolized by several images such as the vine, spiral, snake, and especially ivy which—like evergreens in the ancient north—symbolized the indestructability and eventual return of life by surviving in even the harshest of the winter months: ‘zoë is the thread upon which every individual bios is strung like a bead, and which, in contrast to bios, can be conceived of only as endless.’62 The myth(s) of Dionysus invert the original hierarchy of mother goddess and son-consort by conceiving zoë as a masculine force that flows through feminine forms, but Carl Kerényi’s description of this process conveys how it was characterized by the same reciprocity which we also find in Deleuze’s account of how the primary affirmation/becoming of Dionysus only exists through the secondary affirmation/becoming of Ariadne: ‘just as Dionysos is the archetypal reality of zoë, so Ariadne is the archetypal reality of the bestowal of soul, of what makes a living creature an individual. The soul is an essential element of zoë, which needs it to transcend the seminal stage. Zoë requires soul.’63 Furthermore, like primeval mother goddesses, Dionysus is both androgynous and nurturing insofar as ‘the Dionysiac world is, above all, a world of women. Women awaken Dionysos and bring him up … much  Eisler 1996, 130. Eisler 1995, 54.  Kerényi 1976, 83, 49. 62  Ibid., xxv, xxxv. 63  Ibid., 124. Deleuze 1983, 185–86. 60 61

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more important than the sexual act are the act of birth and the feeding of the child,’ but besides childrearing, the eroticism peculiar to Dionysian women is even more connected with their great visionary capacities.64 ‘The Greek language clung to a not-characterized “life” that underlies every bios and stands in a very different relationship to death than does a “life” that includes death among its characteristics’ and zoë is the linguistic expression of the definite yet indescribable experience of life as such: ‘the zoë that is present in all living creatures became a spiritual reality as man opened himself to it, perceiving it in a kind of second sight … he experienced its immediate nearness in the animal.’65 As a means of experiencing the inexhaustible lifeforce that flows through all individuals, Dionysian eroticism endowed the Cretans with the animalistic second sight which later became the privilege of the archaic masters of truth, and the unique temporality (eternal presence) of this experiences coincides with Nietzsche’s equation of philosophical inspiration with the eternal return: ‘the moment in which the aesthetic epiphany of the artist-god DionysusZagreus is achieved is the moment of eternal return.’66 Nietzsche’s description of indescribable Dionysian intoxication as being ‘like dreaming and at the same time being aware that the dream is a dream’ further identifies Dionysian second sight with the oneiric philosophical suspicion that the apparent world is not ultimately real.67 And the phenomenological affinity between second sight and the philosophical state of being coincides with how the historical emergence of philosophy in archaic Greece was facilitated by Greece’s longest lasting and most significant religious institution enabling many Greeks to have this experience annually.

§22: Eleusinian Mysterium. – The origin of the mystery form is arguably the greatest mystery of all, but we know enough now about the Eleusinian mysteries—which existed for approximately 2000  years until the destruction of the sanctuary in 400 CE at the hands of the Goths—to be able to understand them as a continuation of the goddess-centered religiosity of old Europe even though the evolution of Eleusinian mythology was subject to the  Otto 1965, 141. Kerényi 1976, 133.  Ibid., xxxv, 80. 66  Wohlfart 2016, 20. 67  DWV, 121. 64 65

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dominator tactic of defeminization.68 The cult which was to characterize Eleusis appeared on Crete in the first late Helladic or early Mycenaean period (1580–1500 BCE) during which time there was mutual religious influence between Crete and continental Greece.69 It seems that public drinking of the kukeon and initiation into the mysteries took place at Knossos, and the Greeks’ use of the kernos dish for the preparation and drinking of the kukeon suggests a continuity between later Greek cult and the goddess worshipping Cycladic culture of the bronze age, but this continuity was interrupted by the Greek dark ages: use of the Eleusis site only resumed in the eight century and only became recognized as a cult site early in the sixth.70 As a shrine common to the whole earth, the mysteries at Eleusis had to be celebrated when the time came because they encompassed the whole world and held the entire human race together; the annual pilgrimage to Eleusis being considered the most important event in the world to the Greeks because there they saw in a momentous vision that death was really just another beginning of life: ‘these mysteries are about … the eternal return.’71 Eleusis conferred on Greek existence a characteristic sense of security by responding to universal religious needs for communal solidarity and comfort in the face of death, and Kerényi emphasizes the fundamentally feminine nature of Eleusis: ‘in the Mysteries both men and women seem to envisage the feminine source of life, but not in an intellectual way.’72 We can both continue to connect the feminine cyclicity of the first European myths with presocratic philosophy and further appreciate the centrality of feminine intuition (women-inspired visions, Dionysian second sight) in Greece’s intellectual history by considering the Eleusinian mother goddess.

§23: Demeter. – Just as old European cave sanctuaries were adorned with vaginas as symbols of rebirth, the vagina was exalted in the Eleusinian mysteries as both a symbol of fertility and a guarantee of the eternal return of all things, and while both Demeter and Dionysus convey the neolithic basis for the  Parker 2011, 254. Burkert 1985, 285. Eisler 1996, 137–38.  Kerényi 1967, 20–21. 70  Kerényi 1976, 53, 79. Kerényi 1967, 181. Burkert 1985, 14–15. Parker 2011, 255. 71  Wasson et al. 2008, 27, 5, 7. Kerényi 1967, 10–12. 72  Ibid., 16, xxxiii. 68 69

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mysteries through their specific relations to the ancient Anatolian mother goddess, Demeter conveys the civilizing nature of feminine sexuality and subjectivity in a way that Dionysus typically does not.73 Of the six Olympian goddesses, only Demeter could be said to be a true mother goddess who presents a positive image of motherhood. She is as associated with human control of the earth as she is with the earth itself, and her essential gift to humanity was not corn but the Eleusinian ceremonies in which initiates were expected to identify with Demeter as searching for a part of herself in her daughter by imitating both her fasting and her drinking of the lysergic kukeon which enabled them to see the world from the goddess’ perspective: ‘men’s imitating of the questing Goddess led to the same telos, the same goal and fulfillment, as the women’s imitation deae—to the same epopteia, the visio beatifica. For men and women alike this was the true visit, a visitation, for which the Greek word is theoria’; ‘knowledge was communicated to them by the beatific vision of the Kore at Eleusis— vision of the innermost “divine maiden” of men and women.’74 Just as Plutarch’s equation of philosophical illumination with the experience of the mystai reflects how the original sense of the word theoria was close to the beholding of divine images, Nietzsche’s view that ‘the deep-­thinking Greek had an unmistakably firm foundation for metaphysical thought in his Mysteries’ reflects how the vision of a cosmically ubiquitous divine maiden foreshadows presocratic ontology, and Richard Seaford supports Nietzsche’s view by suggesting that the mystic notion of a concealed fundamental truth may have been adapted to a new cosmological idea of a concealed reality underlying appearances: ‘exposition of myth in mystic ritual may have involved physical cosmology.’75 In other words, as a continuation of the feminine cyclicity of old European myths, Eleusis’ implicit ontology and cosmology connect the feminine cyclicity of presocratic philosophy that we’ll explore in subsequent chapters to the partnership tradition that we’ve been tracing throughout this chapter, and Kerényi’s description of the vision of Demeter/Kore as a ‘double vision’ or ‘double sight’ further adumbrates the phenomenology of women-­ Dionysian inspired vision/second-sight.76 Considering the central event of the  Kofman 1998, 45. Burkert 1985, 278.  Blundell 1995, 25, 43, 40. Kerényi 1967, 13, 145–46, 174. 75  Ibid., 91, 146. BT §9. Seaford 2004, 227–28, 234. 76  Kerényi 1967, 148. 73 74

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Eleusinian mysteries will enable us to further relate this form of perception to the conception of philosophical-feminine subjectivity that we discussed in the previous chapter.

§24: The Secret. – Neither the concept of immortality nor books are mentioned in connection with the Eleusinian mysteries because they retained, from the bronze and early iron ages, the method of wordless teachings or imagistic communication, and this is why they were more concerned with evoking the experience of rebirth instead of expounding any specific doctrine.77 The process of mystic initiation was itself one of death and rebirth in which the initiate experienced a loss of identity, regression to infancy, and/or gender inversion, but the second sight which attends such a dynamic and relational form of subjectivity was also personified in the multiple identities of Dionysus—he was Persephone’s abductor on the Nysian plain, Persephone/Semele’s new born son, the Eleusinian hierophant, and so on: ‘in the Mystery Night Dionysos was present as Iakchos at his own subterranean birth—the Eleusinian double perspective actually made this acceptable.’78 If the dynamic—one changing one’s own identity as one witnesses Dionysus doing likewise—and relational—one, therefore, not existing merely as oneself but as relations between these ever-changing semblances—nature of this situation corresponds to the dynamic relationality of both how women are traditionally represented in the west and of the artistic-ethical nature of philosophy, then Aristotle’s was correct to compare Eleusinian initiation with philosophical instruction; the latter now understood—as Parmenides will later conceive of it (§80)—as the cultivation of a feminine form of subjectivity and even embodiment.79 And that Nietzsche was correct to identify philosophical inspiration with the eternal return becomes clear when we consider the event which, like ancient tragedy, invoked the double vision which enables one to perceive how individual semblances (representational identities) can be subtended by a hidden unity (Dionysus, the innermost divine maiden), by unifying ritual and myth. The holy open secret of the Eleusinian mysteries was the unification of opposites (life and death) as personified in the goddess of  Burkert 1985, 289. Parker 2011, 18. McEvilley 2002, 110.  Seaford 1998, 106, 101, 110. Kerényi 1967, 35, 55, 156. 79  Kerényi 1967, 113. 77 78

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death giving birth to new life, and at the moment of epiphany, a light would flash from the sanctuary across the bay accompanied by both shouts of ‘Iakchos!’ and an enormous gong reverberating with the sound of subterranean thunder.80 ‘At the center of the Eleusinian sanctuary stood an unhewn rock that was always left open to view,’ and for hundreds of years, Greeks annually experienced the same revelation that visited Nietzsche at the pyramidal rock on the banks of lake Silvaplana.81 The intellectual stimulation that Nietzsche derived from this experience suggests that, besides its implicit onto-cosmology, the Eleusinian vision played a major role in promoting Greece’s generally philosophical atmosphere in which even ordinary Greeks were interested in big questions such as divine justice, fate, and human responsibility, and it is in this way that we can further see how central Greece’s partnership heritage was for the emergence of Greek philosophy.82 But the implied relationship between the wholeness of what was seen in the mystic vision and the wholeness of the initiate herself reveals that these rites where as much a source of personal fulfillment as they were of cognitive stimulation, and the metaphysical comfort that the Greeks derived from Eleusis further consolidates the latter’s continuity with the religiosity of old Europe: ‘a birth in death was possible! And it was possible also for human beings if they had faith in the Goddesses; that is the message which Demeter herself proclaimed at Eleusis.’83 Whereas the emotional intelligence of the mysteries is personified in the female double of Dionysus (Baubo) who, via Nietzsche, continues to promise new modes of thought that go beyond metaphysical oppositions such as male and female or life and death, Nietzsche indicates the artistic creativity which the initiates acquired when he states that it was only when such ecstatic conditions had cocooned themselves in the mysteries that Apollo and Dionysus were able to enter into an alliance so as to create tragedy.84 But before we consider tragedy as a return to the public (Cretan) performance of the mysteries, we’ll consider several developments in archaic Greece.

 Ibid.,, 10, 84.  Burkert 1985, 85. 82  Parker 2011, xii. 83  Seaford 2004, 227. Kerényi 1967, 94. 84  Kofman 1998, 44. Ansell-Pearson 1993, 39. EN §7[123]. 80 81

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§25: An Axial Age. – 1. Nietzsche derived his understandings of both philosophical meditation and nature from the Greeks, and considering how he did this will enable us to further clarify his views on race as well as gender. Although statements such as that Polish Jews ‘simply do not smell good’ show how easy it is to caricature Nietzsche as a racist, his rejection of his contemporaries’ interest in locating—via comparative linguistics and studies in religion—a pure Indo-German origin in prehistory shows the complexity of his view of race: for him, the most splendid side of ancient Greece was that, from the beginning, it was constantly stimulated on all sides by a world of foreign cultures, and just as his view that the Greeks took the gods and myths of the Mongols, Thracians, and Semites into their blood was meant to shock the philhellenic admirers of Greek purity, his reference to the Greeks’ tree and snake cult was meant to set the Hellenes on the same level as people who were then considered savages 2000.85 ‘There are probably no pure races but only races that have become pure,’ and the Greeks became pure by acknowledging and appropriating other cultures while also agonistically seeking to overcome them by taking what they’ve appropriated even further; hence Nietzsche’s view of meditation as a mood of sensory responsiveness toward, and even stormy confrontation with, overwhelming forces.86 Nietzsche believed that it was the Greek’s robust belief in themselves that enabled them to overcome their neighbors and predecessors, but he was also aware of how the Greeks’ dependence on other cultures compromised their sense of identity, and this is why meditation is also a moment of non-identity or self-alienation in which one challenges and overcomes oneself as well as others.87 He conveys the phenomenological similarity between such moments of philosophical non-identity and mystic initiation when he attributes to the Greeks the same untimely animal presence which characterized both Cretan civilization and the vision of the eternal return, but when we keep in mind that Greek agonism influenced his view of the essential cruelty of life, we can see how his view of the Greeks’ naturalness also illustrates his own domineering tendencies: ‘“Hellenic” and “humane” are contradictory terms’; ‘a man … must always think about woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of woman as a possession … as the Greeks did formerly, who were Asia’s best heirs and  Cancik 1997, 59, 56. Canick and Cancik-Lindemaier 2015, 272. Riedel 2000, 143.  D §272. Siemens 2008, 81. 87  EN §6[7]. 85 86

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students.’88 But the cosmological prioritization of partnership over domination that we see in what has been called his organizationism nevertheless shines through in his view of the Greeks as a feminine race: ‘there are two types of genius: one which above all begets and wants to beget, and another which prefers being fertilized and giving birth. Just so, there are among peoples of genius those to whom the woman’s problem of pregnancy and the secret task of forming, maturing, and perfecting has been allotted—the Greeks.’89 (That the positive tone here expressed concerning the Greeks’ femininity contrasts with Nietzsche’s hostility to classical Athens which, as we’ll see in the next section, he saw as a masculine culture suggests that, despite his male-centered reading of the presocratics, he attributed at least some of their greatness to their femininity.) Diana Behler sums up the seminal role that women played in Nietzsche’s account of the emergence of ancient Greece as follows: ‘for Nietzsche, woman always makes up for, compensates for the short-comings of the state …. In the embryonic stages of the state, woman dominated as mother and determined the level and manifestation of culture, just as woman has to rescue the disintegrated state.’90 Nietzsche describes the state of women as being one of contemplation and modification of male ferocity through peaceful recuperation, and in doing so, he also intimates the femininity of philosophical meditation which, despite its stormy agonism, nurtures through its contemplative calmness.91 But there is one more aspect of Nietzsche’s thought which is as important for understanding the temporality of meditation as it is for understanding Nietzsche’s account of ancient Greece: ‘Degeneracy is lurking behind every great appearance; the beginning of the end is to be found in every moment.’92 Time flows in reverse in Nietzsche’s account of ancient Greece insofar as the Alexandrian decline that he personified in the figures of Socrates and Euripides was already there from the start of the archaic age, and it also flows in reverse in philosophical meditation insofar as the sense of eternity/timelessness that attends meditative absorption arises via the experiential recollection of the animal presence which continued to characterize Crete and which the Greeks accessed via the Eleusinian mysteries.93 Greece’s archaic age was a time of immense  WPh §57[#121] in Arrowsmith 1963a, 15. BGE §238.  WP §636. Hales and Welshon 2000, 64, 70. BGE §248. 90  Behler 1989, 373. 91  Ibid., 370–71. 92  Porter 2000a, 393 note 77. 93  Porter 2000a, 229. 88

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change, and after comparing Nietzsche’s view of Greek religion to that of contemporary scholarship so as to get a general sense of the lifeworld of archaic Greece, this section will consider several developments that were taking place during this time so as to both clarify the causes of the simultaneous emergence and decline of presocratic philosophy and to set the stage for the concluding discussion Athenian tragedy. 2. ‘The enormous mass of philosophical thinking among the Greeks’ is perhaps most explicit in how fertile their religion/culture was for the emergence of philosophy.94 The lack of any priestly caste, canonical doctrines/texts, or even any word for religion, meant that no two Greek political communities worshiped the same gods in exactly the same way, and citizen assemblies were able to make decisions about religious matters— except for certain foundational beliefs—in a democratic fashion without having to defer to the authority of a church: ‘the ancient Greeks have no normative theology: everybody has the right to invent one and he may believe what he likes.’95 Of course, this did not preclude larger city states like Athens from punishing people for impiety toward foundational beliefs, but we can understand Nietzsche’s view that this was ‘the greatest advantage of polytheism’ as reflecting his preference for the less dogmatic forms of early polis religion.96 Just as his applying the term ‘polytheism’ to Greek religion was itself an instance of polytheistic freethinking insofar as, at the time, this term was predominantly applied to non-western (‘primitive’ or ‘heathen’) religions so as to distinguish them from Christianity, his use of the term ‘believing’ must be understood in an artistically casual sense insofar as he subscribed to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s view that the Greeks didn’t really believe in their gods: ‘the Greeks are the artists of life; they have their gods in order to be able to live, not in order to alienate themselves from life.’97 Besides encouraging freethinking and conceiving of altered states of consciousness as divine, Nietzsche’s views that the Greeks were without a sense of sin and that their religion served to both keep bad conscience at bay and deify their animality, further illustrates how Greek religion provided the self-affirmation necessary for philosophical thinking, but even beyond encouraging philosophical thinking, there is another way in which Greek religion laid the conceptual framework for the emergence  EN §19[110].  Parker 2011, 70, 37, 45. EN §19[110]. 96  GS §143. 97  Henrichs 2004, 124. Porter 2000a, 366, note 72. EN §3[62]. 94 95

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of philosophy: ‘the great wisdom of Hellenism, which understood the gods as also being subject to ἀνάγκη’; ‘to regain the ancient view of the world! The Moira really above everything’; ‘the whole conception of a ‘natural occurrence’ … first dawns with the older Greeks … in the conception of a moira.’98 Moira is not a person, god, or power, but a fact, and by using feminine names to describe necessity, fate, and destiny, public Greek religion mirrored the Eleusinian mysteries’ vision of the innermost divine maiden: this proto-ontology may also be implicit in the terminological alteration between reference to ‘the gods’ and to ‘the divine’ which supports Nietzsche’s view that ‘all individual gods were merely so many transitory manifestations of the One, of the divine power that permeates Nature.’99 The similarity between Greek religion and philosophical-­ feminine subjectivity is further illustrated by the fluid identity of the gods who were typically prayed to as chords not as individuals, but even though the social importance of women was most explicit in Greek religious practices, the domineering elements of Greek religion show how it could also inhibit philosophical thinking: ‘Evil through high spirits.  – “If only we don’t feel too happy!” – that was the anxiety the Greeks of the best period felt secretly in their hearts.’100 3. In contrast to Nietzsche’s view that it was only when the rabble came to power that fear choked out the boundless gratitude which radiated from Greek religion, E.  R. Dodds illustrates how Olympianism was, in many ways, a religion of fear.101 The gods’ jealousy became oppressive in the archaic age insofar as it was thought that they resented any success or happiness which might for a moment lift people above mortal status thereby enabling them to encroach on the gods’ prerogative: confirming Nietzsche’s suspicion, Dodds writes that ‘men knew that it was dangerous to be happy.’102 Contra Nietzsche’s assertion that the nobility of Greek religion resided in how gods and men were thought to belong to one species, Greek names separated people from gods more than Minoan names, and Dodds illustrates how the Greek’s strict distinction between mortals and gods—one which only Heracles and Dionysus crossed—is a manifestation of the typical dominator in-group vs. out-group way of thinking  Burkert 1985, 161. EN §§27[76], 3[62], 28[40]. GM II §23. HH §111.  Burkert 1985, 129. Seaford 2004, 51. KGW II/2, 414–15 in Porter 2015, 40. 100  Parker 2011, 66. Blundell 1995, 160. D §156. 101  WPh §33[#49] in Arrowsmith 1963a, 11. Dodds 1951, 35. 102  Ibid., 29, 31. 98 99

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when he notes that Zeus (who punished the capital sin of self-assertion) belonged to Greece’s Indo-European inheritance.103 The patriarchal element of Greek religion is also evident in the portrayal of goddesses whose births are rarely depicted because the vulnerability of a female child was thought to be incompatible with divinity.104 As we have seen in the dominators’ mythic inversion and will continue to see in Anaxagoras and Democritus, the diminishing of goddesses goes hand in hand with a rejection of rebirth, and that’s why public Greek religion offered little to satisfy the human longing for a life beyond death.105 Early Greeks generally accepted death because they were traditionally more concerned with group rather than individual survival, but interest in personal survival emerged during the archaic age thus leading to developments such as the idea of Elysion and the building of grave monuments bearing inscriptions of their dead owners.106 ‘Reincarnation can been seen as a more radical answer to this general development,’ but before we consider femininity and rebirth in the presocratic philosophy, we’ll discuss several other developments that were occurring before and during the archaic age.107 4. ‘The Greeks were certainly not possessed of a square and solid healthiness; – their secret was to honor even sickness as a god if only it had power’; ‘how much did this people have to suffer in order that it might become so beautiful!’108 For Nietzsche, the Greek’s ability to affirm even suffering and evil both constituted the real paganism of their world and endowed them with the wonderful sense for the factual that enabled them to become philosophers, but his suggestion that the Greeks derived this perspective from the joy which Homer and earlier poets took in every kind of actuality ignores the importance of pottery and women for the emergence of philosophy: philosophical reflection on the riddle of life and death ‘can be traced back earlier to vase paintings in the Dark Ages instead of the written records of Hesiod and Homer.’109 Beginning with the end of the Mycenaean palatial civilization around 1100 BCE, and lasting until the start of the archaic age around 750 BCE, the dark age was a period of horrible insecurity in which Greece experienced a sharp drop in p ­ opulation  HH §111. Kerényi 1976, 70–71. Dodds 1951, 47–48.  Blundell and Williamson 1998, 4. Beaumont 1998, 67. 105  Rempel 2010, 39. 106  Bremmer 2001, 5. 107  Ibid., 25. 108  HH §214. BT §25. 109  AOM §220. Wang 2018, 49. 103 104

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and the vanishing of written records, but plastic arts such as pottery provided another cultural medium which prevented remote antiquity from fading away completely, and Shunning Wang supports Nietzsche’s emphasis on suffering as the source of Greek beauty as follows: ‘it appears that pottery symbolizes a peaceful and idyllic life. However, the truth is, behind the beautiful silhouette of pottery in the Dark Ages, archeologists found a turbulent world.’110 Although the evidence of women vase painters is small, if men were often massacred after defeat in battle in ancient times, and hence the male population experienced an exceedingly sharper decline than the female population, then the percentage of female potters was probably much higher in the dark ages than in the archaic and classical periods. Wang supports this hypothesis by arguing that the greater prominence of male bodies over female bodies on vases in the protogeometic (1025–900 BCE) and geometric (900–700 BCE) periods—relative to the archaic and classical periods—indicates the existence of female artists’ perspectives: ‘Greece was being reborn and pottery provided the little wombs.’111 The radical social changes of the dark age provided the Greeks with unique life and death experiences as well as the impetus to reflect on them, and Wang summarizes the significance of women potters as follows: Through these vases, exploration of the significance of life and death, and the affirmation of tragedy, as the Greeks’ cultural genetic heritage, has been rooted deeply in the ancient Greeks, and manifested broadly later. Therefore, we have encountered them again and again, in the Pre-Socratic fragments, in the tragedy of Dionysus’ death and rebirth, even after 2500  years in Nietzsche’s writings.112

But both the correlation between harsh climates and domineering social systems and Nietzsche’s own insistence on how important satisfaction is remind us that, as philosophically stimulating as the trials of the dark ages were, this was still an extremely traumatic time. Wang even goes so far as to suggest that the damaging experiences of this period led to the west’s negative assessment of the value of life which can be seen in both Socrates’ last words and the notion of original sin.113 Like the simultaneously

 Ibid., 59, 54, 58.  Ibid., 59–60. 112  Ibid., 64. 113  Ibid., 62. 110 111

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open-minded and domineering aspects of Greek religion, this is another way in which the beginning of philosophy was simultaneously its decline. 5. For Nietzsche, the polis—a Phoenician invention that the Hellenes imitated—was the perfect form of culture because the constant competition and war between the Greek city-states served as an artistic and philosophical stimulus, but he also recognized its oppressive tendencies: ‘the intellectual culture of Greece was an aberration of the enormous political drive for ἀριστεúειν. – The πóλιϛ was extremely hostile to the new education. Nevertheless, culture existed.’114 As aristocratic commonwealths, poleis were intolerant ‘in the education of youth, in their arrangements for women, in their marriage customs’ and even considered intolerance a virtue insofar as any form of variation was perceived as a possible threat in their constant fighting with their neighbors.115 Greek religious practices and representations achieved their characteristic form within the context of the polis as the political structure which constituted Greek life from approximately 800–300 BCE: it determined which religious conceptions were to be permitted within its walls, and its oppressive nature is evident both in how asceticism developed as a protest against it and the way in which it organized relationships between men and women.116 A pyxis in the British museum illustrates the significance with which the Greeks viewed relationships by seeming to identify marriage as an element of political and even cosmic stability, and this is why women’s behavior was considered to be central to the well-being of the whole community; just as female unreliability was considered to be a threat to the entire community.117 The close relationship between oikos and polis granted women certain informal patterns of political power—an example being how women’s performances at funerals could have legal consequences concerning who could lay claim to the deceased’s estate—but it was precisely the importance of women that led to them being subjected to the kind of intolerance that Nietzsche describes: as the polis evolved and marriage became the norm, female homosexuality was suppressed and thiasoi—Sapphic communities in which girls could receive basic education—were eliminated.118 Although there is ample evidence for the education of elite  KSA 8, 5[65]. Siemens 2008, 96. WPh §34 in Arrowsmith 1963b, 22. EN §5[179].  BGE §262. 116  Blundell and Williamson 1998, 3. Burkert 1985, 8, 98. Parker 2011, 58–59. Blundell 1995, 68. 117  Blundell 1998, 43. Blundell and Williamson 1998, 7. Cole 1998, 26. 118  Blundell 1995, 144. Stears 1998, 96. Chrystal 2017, 87. 114 115

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Athenian and Sparta women in earlier periods, it was only from the fourth century on that female children began to obtain a formal education (especially in Macedonia), and it is in this way that, like the stimulating trauma of the dark ages, the competitive yet confining lifestyle of poleis both facilitated and impeded the emergence of philosophy.119 This paradoxical dynamic also manifests in how the emergence of the polis itself gave rise to both philosophy and philosophy’s opposite. 6. The polis developed around the communality of animal sacrifice through the establishment of centralized means of resolving crises of reciprocity. The need for warriors to fairly distribute booty from either a sacrifice or an athletic contest necessitated the creation of a new kind of space as well as a new kind of speech; namely, public or common space and secular dialogue: ‘in such military assemblies, the value of speech for the first time depended on the judgment of the social group as a whole. It was here that preparations for the future status of legal or philosophical speech were made.’120 Unlike the magicoreligious speech of the archaic poets and kings, the secular and egalitarian nature of warrior dialogue belong to human instead of mythic time, and as Greek society developed, the initially isolated warrior class incorporated the entire community into this new spatial-temporal-societal framework: ‘the interconnected hoplite reform and the birth of the Greek city were indissociable from a crucial intellectual mutation in the development of Greek thought: namely, the construction of a system of rational thought that dramatically broke with the old, religious, all-encompassing type of thought.’121 The Greeks constructed this new space and speech by distinguishing the domains of speech and reality, but the decline implicit in this origin of philosophy becomes clear when we keep in mind that the secularization of speech was also the loss of magisterial truth. Magicoreligious speech was the privilege of an ethical social function—poets were defined as men who love justice—but the secularization and reification of speech made speech political in the worse sense of the word: ‘logos became an autonomous reality and obeyed its own laws. Thought about language began to be elaborated along two major lines: as an instrument of social relations and as a means of knowing reality. Rhetoric and sophistry explored the former path, forging techniques of persuasion … the latter path was the subject of one  Beaumont 1998, 69. Chrystal 2017, 113.  Seaford 2004, 90. Detienne 1999, 99. 121  Ibid., 100, 103–04. 119 120

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c­urrent of philosophical reflection: Was speech reality, all of reality?’122 Whereas philosophers compensate for the inherent limitations of language by having their deeds match their words (ale ̄theia as ethos), sophists identify language with reality so as to use the former as an instrument of coercion and domination, and the materialistic impetus behind sophistry becomes clear in the career of the first person to treaty poetry as a profession.123 With Simonides of Ceos (born 557–56 BCE), the muse became a greedy mercenary. He set about earning a living by devaluing poetic ale ̄theia and criticizing the aristocratic ideals of agathos or the esthlos ane ̄r: ‘Simonides has often been seen as prefiguring the Sophists. In his poems, he cultivates antithesis and delights in playing on the ambiguity of words. To his contemporaries he was a man who sold his poetry and boasted of “deceiving” people,’ and Nietzsche notes that neighboring nations were no doubt reduced to despair by the delight in lying that Simonides disseminated among the Greeks.124 In stark contrast to the correlation between partnership religiosity and philosophy, the misogyny of materialistic sophism is exemplified in Simonides’ statement that woman is the worst plague Zeus has ever made, and although Nietzsche praises what he saw as the manly courage of sophistic Greeks such as Thucydides, he also recognized that the prevalence of Greek mendacity shines a new light on courage of honest Greek intellectuals: ‘and now try to assess the greatness of those exceptional Greeks who created science! He who tells of them, tells the most heroic story in the history of the human spirit!’125 7. ‘The culture of the Greeks is a culture of the wealthy … as a result their brains at length became at once so full and delicate, the blood flowed so rapidly through them like a joyful and sparkling wine, that the good and best things they could do emerged from them no longer gloomy.’126 The Greeks were the first people to use something like modern money, but while contemporary research supports Nietzsche’s view of the influence money had on Greece’s intellectual development, it also reveals the culturally damaging effects of materialism of which the Greeks themselves were already aware.127 Like the polis, money emerged within the context of the communality of animal sacrifice the inherent tendency toward  Ibid., 75–76, 106.  Eisler 1995, 118. 124  Detienne 1999, 107, 114, 116. HH §154. 125  Chrystal 2017, 11. AOM §221. 126  WS §184. 127  Seaford 2004, 3. 122 123

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­ onetization of which is illustrated by how the standardization and mass m production of iron spits enabled the latter to perform many of the functions later taken over by money.128 The first coins were made from electrum by the Lydians probably toward the end of the seventh century, but it was the Greeks who first made pervasive everyday use of coins, and the radically novelty of Greek coins consisted in several factors such as their being issued by the state which meant that they were counted and not weighed; their conventional value was generally higher than their value as metal; they were only used for their monetary value; and they have been found in vast numbers.129 As with the emergence of secular dialogue, the importance of the sign-value over the use-value of the metal coins instituted a conceptual transformation that carried the philosophical tendencies in Greek religion, history, and politics even further: ‘what is required is the combination of substance (valuable metal) with form (the mark) … implicit in this semi-abstraction is ideal substance which … belongs to a new kind of reality, concrete and visible (being metal) and yet (because distinct from the actual metal) abstract and invisible.’130 Besides the Greeks’ association of money (particularly gold) with divinity and immortality, Aristophanes shows how money came to replace the cosmic role of earlier mother goddesses when he states that wealth is ‘all alone the source of all things,’ and this conceptual transformation coincided with a phenomenological one: ‘the general adoption of coinage requires a general power of universalizing abstraction, the ability to perceive the coin as embodying the abstraction of number … early in the Greek experience of money we find the idea that money is everything. The idea that to be transformed into something (or everything) is to be that thing (or everything) is common in presocratic philosophy.’131 That is, money inculcated a general sense of homogeneity in the early Greek mind, but as much as this may have conceptually and perceptually prepared the Greeks for the double vision of philosophy, the Greeks personified the negative affective consequences of monetary homogenization in the myth of Midas: ‘money reduces the need for reciprocal personal relations and for direct involvement in the provision of goods, and so tends to delimit the individual

 Ibid., 90, 104.  Ibid., 130, 126. 130  Ibid., 6, 120. 131  Ibid., 3, 31, 164–65. Aristophanes. Wealth 182. Seaford 2004, 258–59. 128 129

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unitary mind from all else save a focus on money itself.’132 Money distorted Greek relationality by both instilling an unlimited erotic desire for wealth—the pleasure of which was said to be greater than that of parents and children in each other—and replaced the ancient generosity of giftgiving with emotionless and egotistical commercial transactions.133 Although the invention of coinage depended on the communal solidarity exemplified in sacrificial feasts, when it became a general means of payment and exchange, it turned such solidarity on itself by marginalizing reciprocal partnership and encouraging the kind of domineering individual autonomy that was personified in tragedy as the figure of the tyrant.134 8. Finally, the emergence of philosophy also coincided with the change from oral-aural to visual-graphic modes of communication and composition, and although the evidence for the oral nature of Greek literature was not yet marshalled during the young Nietzsche’s time, he interpreted Greece’s entire history in light of the conflict between orality and writing.135 The earliest surviving texts in the Greek alphabet were written shortly before, and concurrently with, the monetisation of the polis, and like money, the invention of writing had a profound effect on cognition and perception: the common Mesopotamian practice of writing lists acclimated people to conceiving of particular things and the world as a whole in terms of lists, and Seaford suggests that the paratactic aggregative perspective characteristic of Homeric and Hesiodic poetry should be understood in this context.136 Brown illustrates the philosophical significance of phonetic speech in particular when she notes its implicit substance metaphysics, and her discussion of the nature of pre-phonetic forms of language like pictograms and ideograms indicates how phonetic speech contributed to the disembodied nature of the emerging Greek individualism.137 Virtually all of the early human writing systems rely upon worldly phenomena such as local animal life, vegetation, and seasonal changes which ‘remind the reading body of its inherence in a more-than-human field of meaning,’ but ‘with the advent and spread of phonetic writing, human experience in the West increasingly identifies itself with the possibilities that phonetic reading suggests … a realm of relative security and  Ibid., 150, 296, 172.  Ibid., 198. 134  Ibid., 260, 292. 135  Tejera 1987, 21. 136  Seaford 2004, 10, 240. 137  Brown 2006, 149, 155, 169. 132 133

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permanence, and freedom from the complex powers of nature’138 Just as Nietzsche maintained that the feeling of independent subjectivity is the source for one’s perception of the world in terms of individual beings, David Abram argues that Plato’s theory of forms depended on the invention of phonetic writing, and it is in this way that, while phonetic writing fostered the security and detachment necessary for philosophical contemplation, it also vitiated the Greeks’ capacity for inspiration by replacing the holistic interconnectivity of the magicoreligious world with a world of independently existing subjects and objects.139 With the reification of individuality, worldly multiplicity was less often suspected to be a mere semblance subtended by a hidden unity, and people were less likely to understand the unity of opposites (one and many, life and death) which was beheld at Eleusis.

§26: Athens. – 1. Although Nietzsche held that the archaic Greek philosophers of Ionia and Italy were the real philosophers so as to counteract his contemporaries’ Athenocentrism, he also thought that one can learn philosophy (as he himself did) from Athenian tragedy, but in order to understand the philosophical nature of tragedy, we must contextualize it in terms of the cultural life of ancient Athens. Despite the aforementioned transitions, there was substantial continuity between archaic and classical Greece, and this is why exploring Athens will also help us get a better sense of the lifeworld of the archaic presocratic philosophers.140 2. Nietzsche’s failure to sufficiently distinguish between classical and hellenistic Greece may explain why, for him, Athens meant the ruin of Greece, but he explains this decline in terms of the loss of the polis system.141 The Persian wars replaced the healthy competition between the warring city-states with the more centralized political structures of the Athenian and Spartan empires thereby, for Nietzsche, both paving the way for the Christian homogeneity of modern Europe and instilling in the Greeks a cultural arrogance similar to that which resulted from the Prussian unification of Germany after the Franco-Prussian war: ‘the Persian wars  Abram 1996, 97.  WP §488. Abram 1996, 109–15. 140  Silk and Stern 1981, 284. 141  Tejera 1987, 24. Caygill 1993, 117. 138 139

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are their national misfortune: their success was too great … with the rule of Athens (in the intellectual sphere) a great many forces were crushed.’142 The Peloponnesian war further exacerbated the cultural decline that resulted from the new intellectualizing attitude toward tradition. We can see this attitude in the coining of the term ‘atheos’ in the fifth century, but just as Nietzsche’s emphasis on myth as the source of cultural vitality shows how Socratic intellectualization can lead to societal decline, the cultural significance of partnership that we have been tracing throughout this chapter suggests that another cause of Greece’s decline was the more domineering attitude that classical Athens had toward women: Greek culture of the classical era is a masculine culture. As regards women, Pericles says it all in the funeral oration with the words: they are at their best when men talk about them as little as possible …. The women had no other task than to bring forth handsome, powerful bodies in which the character of the father lived on as uninterruptedly as possible and therewith to counteract the nervous over-excitation that was gaining the upper hand in so highly developed a culture. It was this that kept Greek culture young for so relatively long a time; for in the Greek mothers the Greek genius again and again returned to nature.143

But just as Nietzsche’s male-centered view of Greece did not prevent him from acknowledging the fundamental importance of Greek mothers, the Greeks of classical Athens were not completely oppressive toward women, and in this section, we will briefly consider the nuances of the status and role of women in Athenian Society. 3. As a paradigm for the emergence of civilization from barbarism, classical Greece has virtually defined the habitus of western civilization with Pericles’ funeral oration often being taken as celebrating this emergence. Since it occurred early in the war (431  BCE), almost no one had died when Pericles spoke thus, and Thucydides portrays Pericles as being more concerned with Athenian propaganda than with discussing violence, but Grace M. Jantzen attributes the necrophilia and misogyny of the western habitus to this speech insofar as Pericles directly links death and gender; death being praised as proof of the manly refusal to submit while women’s duty was to be submissive.144 Nietzsche brings out the possibly necrophilic  Ruehl 2003, 76. Jähnig 2000, 82. Behler 1998, 421. EN §6[27].  Silk and Stern 1981, 42. Burkert 1985, 275. HH §259. 144  Jantzen 2004, 47–48. 142 143

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tendencies of Pericles’ oration when he writes of the latter as praising the Athenian’s delight in all destruction, and his description of Solon’s lawgiving as ‘a more sublimated form of tyranny’ coincides with how the latter not only did not support women’s rights, but by clamping down on their behavior at funerals, they actually denied women one of the few ways in which they were able to express themselves.145 This domineering mentality is also evident in the Athenian devaluation of children as being physically, morally and intellectually weak—girls in particular were less well fed than boys and generally lived unhealthily sedentary lives—but while the lack of legal representation and relative seclusion of Athenian women is well known, it is also important to keep in mind that, again, all such forms of oppression derive from self-dissatisfaction.146 The male insecurity that drove these restrictions is clearly displayed in such things as the Greeks’ fear of both female literacy and the Thesmorphoria; their thinking that it was absolutely intolerable that Xerxes have a female advisor and warrior (Artemisia); and their viewing Aspasia’s influence on Pericles as an illegitimate intrusion into the male-dominated political sphere.147 Most Athenian males likely placed a low value on women’s domestic work, and the pervasive downgrading of motherhood was perhaps responsible for the relative dearth of images of mothers and children in Greek art—images which are quite numerous in specific contexts such as funerary reliefs—but even among themselves males suffered from this mentality as well insofar as there was a prohibition against sex between males of equal maturity and power: ‘Athenian society tried to make sure that all sexual relations involving males, be they homosexual or heterosexual, conformed to the dominator model.’148 It is in this way that Nietzsche’s view that the pederasty of Greek male education meant that ‘young people have probably never since been treated with so much attention and kindness’ is mistaken, but Kerényi’s assertion that Athens bore the enduring fruits of Minoan religion reminds us that domination and partnership are not mutually exclusive.149 (For example: whereas Xerxes ignored Artemisia’s warning about Salamis being a trap, the Greek Cleomenes did heed the advice of his daughter Gorgo and didn’t let Aristagoras, the tyrant of Miletus, bribe  GM I §11. HH §261. Chrystal 2017, 90, 149–50.  Beaumont 1998, 65. Blundell 1995, 132, 133. 147  Chrystal 2017, 63–64. Blundell 1995, 148. 148  Ibid., 140, 142. Eisler 1996, 107–08. 149  HH §259. Kerényi 1976, 193. 145 146

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him into joining the fated Ionian revolt. Also, the Athenian’s may have seen Aspasia intruding as a Milesian into Athenian politics.) 4. The Parthenon, with its albeit motherless yet intensely feminine Athena, is visible evidence of a strong streak of femininity in Greek religion, but it was the considerable political authority of the Pythias at Delphi—a shrine which stood on a site originally identified with goddess worship—which suggest ‘that even as late as the classical age of Greece the partnership society tradition of seeking divine revelation and prophetic wisdom through women had not yet been forgotten.’150 Dionysus’ cult at Delphi was the nurturing soil from which the illuminations of Apollo’s religion grew: it was Dionysus who first sat on the tripod and performed the role of the oracle-giving Themis, but Delphi’s history extends even further back insofar as, even at the height of the bronze age, the people of Delphi were still living under neolithic conditions which eventually changed when Apollo, arriving as a conqueror, took possession of the oracle whom had formerly belonged to a great earth goddess (Ga).151 Besides these few exceptionally influential priestesses, the lives of everyday Athenian women were not as oppressed as has previously been assumed. While paranoid and insecure husbands and fathers likely secluded their wives and daughters to some extent, sexist prejudices have led generations of scholars to generalize seclusion in the name of academic tidiness and convenience, but there is no reason to believe women were isolated from companions of their own sex, and this enabled the existence of an autonomous sphere of female relationships that both existed in parallel with the masculine social network and annually took over the heart of the city of Athens in the form of the Thesmorphoria.152 Herodotus tells us that it was the Danaids who brought the rites of Demeter Thesmorphoros to Greece, and unlike the rites of Dionysus, these rites occupied a central place in Athenian state religion: just as everyone at Eleusis imitated Demeter and experienced a vision of rebirth, the women at the Thesmorphoria re-­ enacted Demeter’s grief at the loss of Persephone and symbolized the latter’s resurrection by placing organic materials into the ground where, through the process of composting decay, they would foster new growth.153  Chrystal 2017, 133. Blundell 1995, 161. Eisler 1995, 70.  Kerényi 1976, 238, 211, 207. 152  Chrystal 2017, 88. Blundell 1995, 137. 153  Burkert 2001, 74. Blundell 1995, 163–64. 150 151

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The high degree of official encouragement for these rites reflects the same appreciation for women that Euripides conveys in his statement that ‘to an aged father there is nothing more sweet than a daughter’ and which shines through in the unique prominence of women in the art of fifth-century Athens.154 When we keep in mind the correlation between partnership and artistic refinement, Nietzsche’s statement that, in Athens, ‘even the rabble had a fine and delicate sense of judgment’ suggests that it is in Athens’ aesthetic refinement that we can discern the influence of women.155

§27: Art. – Just as there was no Greek word for religion, and sexuality as such was an alien concept, there was no term for art as such besides the term τέχνη which can also mean skill, cunning, or the regular method of making a thing.156 This may be because life in Greek antiquity was in many ways a life surrounded by art, and for Nietzsche, Greek art was born from more than just suffering: ‘the Greeks, to whom their art was an outflowing and overflowing of their own healthiness and wellbeing and who loved to view their perfection repeated outside themselves:  – self-enjoyment was what led them to art, whereas what leads our contemporaries to it is  – self-­ disgust.’157 Unlike the modern tendency to reduce art to mere entertainment, art and truth formed a unit for the Greeks who understood the political necessity of having an aesthetically and emotionally sophisticated population: ‘the Greek artist addresses his work not to the individual but to the state; and the education of the state, in its turn, was nothing but the education of all to enjoy the work of art. All great creations, in sculpture and architecture as well as in the other fine arts, have their sights on great popular emotions nurtured by the state.’158 Insofar as philosophy is primarily artistic and the intellect is an instrument of the body, this artistic and emotional education is also a philosophical and intellectual one. And this may be why Nietzsche describes the task of philosophers and artists in similarly temporal terms:  Ibid., 132. Euripides Suppliant Women (1101–03). Chrystal 2017, 33.  GMD, 12. 156  Blundell 1995, 103. Babich 2013, 260. Liddell and Scott 2007, 702. 157  AOM §169. 158  Babich 2013, 177. EN §7[121]. 154 155

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The philosopher is a self-revelation of the workshop of nature – both the philosopher and the artist speak of the trade secrets of nature.    Above the tumult of contemporary history lives the sphere of the philosopher and the artist, remote from necessity.    The philosopher as the brake on the wheel of time.    It is in times of great danger that philosophers appear – when the wheel rolls faster and faster.159

By creating texts or works that cause people to slow down and take a step back from everyday hastiness, philosophers and artists cultivate people’s capacities for aesthetic appreciation and intellectual reflection, and by supporting the cultivation of the emotional, aesthetic, ethical, and intellectual capacities of its population, Athens promoted the cultural foundation of democracy.160

§28: Sculpture. – The artistically surreal atmosphere of Greece derived in large part, not just from the sheer number of statues in places like Rhodes, Athens, and Olympia, but from how—as numerous sources like Greek history, tragedy, and painting attest—the ancients used statues both as signs of invisible forces and as means of communicating with the dead.161 In a society that lacked a literate populace, statues also had the ethical and political function of encouraging civic formation by serving as ideals which encouraged the Greeks to live up to their potential. ‘The Greek found himself against and in tension with such statues, his own bodily being highlighted against an imaginary exemplar, just as he might find himself agonistically reflected by and in an opponent,’ and this inspiration would have encouraged Greeks to embody the magisterial bearing that Nietzsche ascribes to the presocratics: ‘the Greek philosophers did not seek “happiness” otherwise than to find themselves beautiful, thus to make of themselves the statue, the look of which did one good.’162 The statues’ immobility would have facilitated philosophic slowness insofar as ‘the statue is exemplary in its standing in itself, its self-possession, its stillness. The statue stamps the image of being on becoming’, but beyond such atemporal exemplars, the Greeks  EN §19[17].  Miller 1999, 20. 161  Babich 2007, 423. Pappas 2014, 49, 47. 162  Babich 2007, 440–42. KSA 11, 25 [101]. Babich 2007, 466. 159 160

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also encouraged civic solidarity through the very way in which they spoke to each other.163

§29: Language. – ‘A people that has [five] cases and conjugates its verbs with a hundred forms has a full, communal and overflowing spirit.’164 Oral cultures tend to be more fluid and open since they are being constantly and consciously recreated, but the inherently musical aspect of ancient Greek nevertheless endowed it with a great capacity to cultivate communal cohesion.165 The Greek word was itself a musical component with an intrinsic musical will insofar as it was expressed in a complete time in which individual syllables could be neither extended nor abbreviated: ‘the speaking subject was engaged not only as a speaker but always also as an active listener. Because of this doubly aspected engagement of attentive articulation, ancient Greek presupposed a community and possessed a community-building power nearly impossible to imagine today.’166 Just as the masks of Greek theatre possessed fixed expressions, the syllables of the Greek language possessed fixed time intervals that enabled Greeks to both compel the active and ethical engagement of their listeners and to transmit cultural values through mousiké: —the oral training in poetry which served as ‘the enabling element of intellectual or spiritual education, figuring as the determining force of both individual and societal character (ethos).’167 Writing enabled the birth of prose out of music thereby liberating language from its musical expression in the full measure of time, and for Nietzsche, the Socratic predominance of the rational-logical over the mythic-tragic expressed the same shift—‘the more the sensibility for a natural causality took the place of magical causes, the more rhythm recedes.’168 That is, whereas the musical immersiveness of spoken Greek reflects the holistic connectivity of the magicoreligious worldview, the disembodied linearity of writing is more akin to the mechanical determinism of modern science, and the more that the latter perspective replaces the former, the more that one’s musical-artistic-ethical taste diminishes. This  Babich 2007, 465.  EN §37[6] translation corrected. 165  Babich 2013, 171. 166  Ibid., 178–79. 167  Ibid., 177. 168  Babich 2005, 57. 163 164

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transition can also be described as the loss of the spirit of music, but in order to further clarify the phenomenology of this spirit, we must turn to Greek music itself.

§30: Music. – 1. Nietzsche’s synaesthesia—to which scholars like Rainer Hanshe have brought our attention—gave him a unique insight into the holistic way in which the Greeks experienced music.169 For him, the music of ancient drama ‘was never enjoyed as something absolute, but always in connection with divine service, architecture, sculpture and poetry’ and the Greeks even demanded that the state be founded upon music.170 Just as in earlier societies one did not sing carelessly because every note was thought to summon a spirit, the Greeks personified the evocative power of music in the story of Hermes realizing the immortal gods and dark earth by drawing harmonious sounds from his lyre: this power is why Nietzsche spoke of tragedy as literally being born from the spirit of music, and he seems to relate this to the emergence of philosophical second sight when he writes that music forces us to see more with ‘our spiritualized eye.’171 Nietzsche’s observation that ‘those whose hearing is sharp hear the overtones of a tone as a jarring chord’ further illustrates the subtle precision of his own experience of music the significance of which is evident in how he consistently compares the primordial structures of perception to those of tone, rhythm, and melody.172 2. He maintained that our inner affective and volitional experience is always representational, and he divides these representations into two constantly conjoined kinds the first of which are the sensations of pleasure and pain—exteriorizations of the chaotic (un)ground of sensation as such.173 The scale of pleasure and pain is represented via tones which, as symbols that stem from the Dionysian realm of disindividuation and are immediately understood by the ear, provoke a state of extreme excitement in which affects become progressively freed from their associative connections and regular accompanying object representations until the point of  Hanshe 2015.  EN §3[1]. RWB §5. 171  McEvilley 2002, 79. Detienne 1999, 71. BT §21. 172  EN §19[69] October–December 1876. Porter 2000a, 102. 173  Allison 2016, 143–44. 169 170

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free-flowing frenzy (O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!).174 Whereas the will— the primary continuum of pleasure-pain representations—is the object of music that musicians seek to communicate to their listeners, the subrepresentational Dionysian state of dispossession is the origin of music which also generates a visionary world (tragedy), and one way in which Nietzsche develops Schlegel’s view that music possesses a certain tendency to philosophical meditation is by describing how this loss of one’s identity permits a sense of greater belonging to nature and even an identification with the divine.175 Since ‘our experiences determine our individuality, so that after every sense impression our individuality is determined down to the last cell,’ one is literally reborn through such dispossession, and the process of reconcrescence occurs via rhythm which Nietzsche defines variously as the form of time/becoming; an attempt at individuation; or the form of the world of appearances.176 As a representational structure that supervenes on objects as a division of time or a system of ratios, rhythm is at once sensuous and abstract. Although it is made perceptible, it is less a sensation than the shape of sensation as such, and ‘since the entire body contains an infinite number of rhythms in it, every rhythm will make a direct attack upon the body’ thereby attuning the latter to a new law or way of being.177 Music ‘sets off contemplation in the will’ not just by tonally releasing emotions so as to facilitate more comprehensive forms of identification, but also by rhythmically restraining passions so as to enable reflection, and whereas the ecstatic nature of tone is Dionysian and the individuating nature of rhythm is Apollonian, the lengthy quote from Schopenhauer that Nietzsche includes in BT illustrates how melody—the synthesis of tone and rhythm—is Socratic-Platonic: We could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will …. For, to a certain extent, melodies are, like concepts, an abstraction from reality … these two universalities, however, are in a certain respect opposed to each other, since the concepts contain only the forms, first of all abstracted from perception … music, on the other hand, gives the innermost kernel preceding all form, of the heart of things.178

 Ibid., 147, 150.  Dahlhaus 1980, 31. Allison 2016, 151. 176  EN §19[241]. Porter 2000a, 142–43. 177  Ibid., 150, 140. Miller 1999, 4. 178  Miller 1999, 3. BT §16. 174 175

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Although Nietzsche criticizes the application of numbers to the world insofar as this assumes the existence of individual things, he nevertheless maintained that the mathematical ratios which one hears in music are fundamental to the structure of existence.179 And the particular nature of Greek music enabled the ancients to experience this structure as the unity of tone and rhythm just as the mysteries enabled them to experience the unity of death and life. 3. Nietzsche developed Schiller’s idea that a musical mood precedes creative activity by conceiving of the spirit of music as a pervasive and non-­ localizable mood, and his unusually consistent description of tragedy being born from the spirit of music coincides with his description of the femininity of this mood: ‘The woman in music. – Why do warm and rainy winds also bring on a musical mood and the inventive pleasure of melody? Are they not the same winds that fill the churches and give women thought of love?’180 Nietzsche also used the idea of a spirit of music so as to convey the pregnant Greeks’ utterly different linguistic-acoustic sensibility which derived from the fluidity of Greek rhythm. Unlike modern music, which imposes upon tones a rhythmic structure composed of equivalent time-­ units, Greek rhythm is irrational in the sense that it does not obey an exact equivalence of measure: just as different vowels resonate with different parts of the body and different tones can create different Chladni patterns, the tones of Greek music determined their own rhythm, the ever-­ modulating nature of which was pervaded by rhythmic instead of tonal dissonances.181 Although it’s possible that chords were struck occasionally and there were heterophonic deviations between voice and instrument, Greek music was generally monophonic—hence Nietzsche’s view that the Greeks felt melody, not as a harmonic power, but as the spatial distances in the passage from note to note—but the phenomenological wholeness of Greek sensibility also derived from their music’s inherent corporeality: ‘genuine Greek music is inherently vocal music: the natural link between the language of words and the language of sounds has not yet been torn apart.’182 That is, not only did the Greeks’ auditory refinement enable them to sense the unity between tone (quality) and rhythm (quantity), or between melody’s spatial structure (being) and its temporality (­ becoming),  BGE §4. PPP, 133. Porter 2000a, 103.  GS §63. 181  Babich 2013, 171. Porter 2000a, 152. Sheldrake 2017, 115. 182  Zuckerman 1974, 20–21. Porter 2000a, 163. GMD, 34. 179 180

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but the vocality of their music also allowed them to experience the interplay between the particular (voice) and the universal (sound) as the dissolution and reconcrescence of representational consciousness: ‘such rhythms are at the limit of sensation: to experience them is to experience sensation’s boundaries as well, and it is this that contributes to their effect.’183 But as much as the ecstatic nature of Greek music and the inherent musicality of the Greek language may help us understand how tragic performances continued the Eleusinian tradition of invoking experiences of rebirth, we must further consider the visual nature of Greek music that is implicit in its inherent corporeality.

§31: Dance. – Since our whole physical being relates to the primal manifestation of the will and the spirit of music can also be perceived through dance, Nietzsche maintained that, in dance, one perceives music become visible.184 In fact, besides the instinctive impulses of sexuality, ‘the keenest insight into willing that we could gain through our representing senses might be gained by watching a chorus of intertwining dancing limbs, of grasping hands and nimble feet, overlapping in unclearly individuated groups.’185 Nietzsche speculated that rhythm was gradually emancipated from its bodily origin in dance because we only perceive bodies which have been made rhythmic, not rhythm itself, and the ecstatic effect of dance depends on the second kind of experiential representation.186 Whereas degrees of pleasure and pain are represented by tone, all other representations are indicated by gesture or gestural language—‘language by means of commonly understood symbols, forms of reflexive movement’—and it is specifically the unconscious or reflexive gestures which, when combined with music, turn representation upon itself by invoking the subrepresentational unity of life: ‘an experience of complete loss of species-man in the becoming one with the being of the Ur-Eine arises through the intensification of the gestural languages (dynamic and rhythm) and with the entry of the symbolic of the will itself in tone (harmony).’187 When musical  Porter 2000a, 152.  EN §12[1]. Babich 2005, 59. GMD, 36. 185  Nussbaum 1991, 83. 186  Porter 2000a, 142, 141. 187  EN §12[1]. Crawford 1997, 75, 78. 183 184

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intoxication causes spontaneous or instinctive impulses to erupt within a performance, such reflexive gestures enable one to become animalistically immersed in the present moment by revealing the Dionysian energies that seethe beneath Apollonian order. But as commonly understood symbols, gestures are also important because they are mediated by the symbolism of a socially encoded language, and this is why Nietzsche details in BT how ecstasy could be ritually manipulated and directed in Dionysian cults.188 It is this introduction of socially constructed symbolism that enabled the Greeks to represent the rebirth and unity of all life, not only though tone and gesture, but also through narrative.

§32: Tragedy. – 1. In keeping with his emphasis on the animalistic source of artistic creativity, Nietzsche saw the Greeks as expressing themselves as belonging to a species in their springtime dithyrambs, and this coincides with how the very term tragōidia (song for the prize of—or at the sacrifice of—a goat) seems to impose the animal on the development of high human civilization.189 Nietzsche saw tragedy as a worldview instead of as a literary genre, and he traced its beginnings back to the unfathomable expressions of folk impulses in the orgiastic celebrations of Dionysus: like the old European goddess cults, the dithyrambic folk dances celebrated life and fertility but also the coming of spring and the birth of the god, and like his artistic view of philosophy, Nietzsche posits an inspirational starting point for Greek tragedy—the enchanted Dionysian improviser who causes a chorus to see a vision.190 Nietzsche personifies the Dionysian improviser (subjective artist) in the figure of Archilochus (680–645 BCE) who, from the depth of his mystical experience of oneness, produces a copy of the Ur-Eine as music, and this imageless and conceptless reflection then generates a universal symbol of the world: ‘the image which now shows him his unity with the heart of the world is a dream scene which gives sensuous expression to the primal contradiction and pain, along with its primal lust for and pleasure in semblance. Thus the ‘I’ of the lyric poet sounds out from the

 Allison 2016, 144, 151.  Ibid., 138. Burkert 2001, 4, 2. 190  Silk and Stern 1981, 435. EN §1[1]. Babich 2013, 218. Kerényi 1976, 305. EN §9[104]. 188 189

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deepest abyss of being; his “subjectivity” … is imaginary.’191 Being speaks through the heart of the world-genius as the creation of universals (mythic world images), but what mattered for Archilochus was not so much the communication of personal experience as the creation of the musical mood in his audience through the creation of tragedy, and Nietzsche describes this as occurring through an ecstatic endemic in which the chorus raises the improviser to an ideal height thereby participating in the latter’s initiatory experience of mystic rebirth: ‘[drama] begins when a human being steps outside himself and believes himself to be transformed & enchanted … we do not return back into ourselves, but turn into another being, so that we ourselves behave like enchanted beings.’192 Nietzsche’s emphasis on the ontological source of the spirit of music indicates how, even though it was the spread of the cult of Dionysus between the seventh and sixth centuries that led to the definitive establishment of tragedy, this feminine-­ philosophical form of subjectivity also produced the narrative at the heart of earlier Dionysianism: ‘the evidence is clear and leaves no room for doubt as to the core of the Dionysian religion, the essence that endured for thousands of years and formed the very basis of its existence. In the form of an animal the god suffered the extreme reduction, a cruel death, but he, indestructible zoë, escaped—to Thetis, to the Muses.’193 In other words, just as we can equate both the spirit of music with feminine-­ philosophical subjectivity (state of being) and the former’s giving birth to tragedy’s world images with philosophical-artistic inspiration (events), we can see Dionysianism as a continuation of the feminine cyclicity of the first myths. Tragedy continued Dionysianism insofar as the sacrifice of a goat instead of Dionysus was the core of Attic tragedy, and that sacrificial murder always stood in the background, if not the center, of tragedy is evident in how it routinely surrounded scenes of violence and destruction with metaphors of animal sacrifice, but Aeschylean tragedy in particular brought the philosophical nature of this partnership heritage even more to the fore insofar as it was directly influenced by the philosopher who—again, as we’ll see in Chap. 5—conceived of philosophy as a divinizing-feminizing process.194

 Humphrey 2014, 383. BT §5.  Humphrey 2014, 390. Allison 1983, 309–10. EN §9[104]. GMD, 16. 193  Renzi 2000, 123. Kerényi 1976, 179. 194  Ibid., 155. Burkert 2001, 17. Burkert 1985, 58. 191 192

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2. The story that Aeschylus almost lost his life because people thought that his tragedies divulged some of the secrets of the Eleusinian mysteries supports Nietzsche’s contention that universal oneness, as personified in the rebirth of Dionysus, constituted tragedy’s mystery doctrine, but the fact that Aeschylus was also influenced by Parmenides suggests that tragedy was even more philosophical than the mysteries.195 Aristotle investigated what happened in the mind of both the audiences of tragedy and the initiates of the Eleusinian mysteries and he notes that, unlike the mystic initiate, the spectator of tragedy had no need to build up a state of concentration via ritual preparations.  – The spectator was to be purified, not before, but through the process of forgetting himself while entering into other people’s sufferings as portrayed in the tragic vision.196 This vision was created by the poet, chorus, and actors with relatively little effort on the part of the spectators, and like Aristotle’s identification of philosophy with the mysteries instead of with tragedy, Kerényi maintains that the epopteia of the mysteries was closer to the original meaning of theoria than the theama of the theatre because only in the former does one ‘participate in a vision, which is something very different from looking at a statue.’197 But we can understand why Nietzsche would more directly relate philosophy to tragedy than to the mysteries when we consider both the production and nature of the tragic performance. 3. Much like the theatre-like terracing that surrounded a number of altars, the encircling terraces of the original Greek theatre created a sense of egalitarianism in which matters of social distinction receded in the face of an essentially communal identification even though, at least by the hellenistic period, there were reserved special seating and luxury boxes.198 Since we don’t have many earlier built theatres, we don’t know how far back such additions go, but although the relatively democratic atmosphere of early Greek theatre likely facilitated people’s capacity to sympathize with each other, the innermost of the concentric circles of the terraces invited them to sympathize particularly with the chorus so that, despite the physical separation of the stage, they could vicariously participate in the drama by identifying with the chorus.199 For Nietzsche, the tragic  Sattler 2013, 159. BT §10. Kouremenos 1993.  Kerényi 1967, 113. 197  Ibid., 146. 198  Burkert 1985, 87. 199  Mulhall 2013, 253, 248. 195 196

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c­ horus is an artistic imitation of the natural phenomenon of the agitated mass of Dionysus’ servants being seized by moods and insights so powerful that they are transformed before their very eyes while a single vision spreads from the improvisor to others thereby merging the entire mass of people into one individual; the chorus being an organism, ‘an enormous single being endowed with oversized lungs,’ that not only sees the figures on the stage as real living beings but creates the actions on stage by repeatedly discharging itself in successive worlds of Apollonian images.200 As such, the chorus is a macro symbol of the fecundity of the animal body, and by identifying with the chorus, the spectators are reminded of, and begin to experience, the artistic creativity of their own bodies, but if such corporeal creativity necessitates that one identify with the ontological (un) ground of being (life), then it is also the microcosmic manifestation of the cosmological creation and destruction of worlds through which life continually regenerates itself and revels in the pleasure of its endless overflowing.201 That is, just as Nietzsche derived his understanding of philosophical meditation, in part, from the agonistic warring of the Greek city states, he derived the fundamental entity of his onto-cosmology, in part, from the event of Greek tragedy. By turning against itself, life produces atomic wills (time-atoms) which, like the tragic chorus, project their world perspectives; this time, constituting the appearance of everyday reality as they do so. (We’ll return to this in Chap. 7) 4. Nietzsche conveys the body’s philosophical intelligence by conceiving of the chorus, not just as an organism, but also as a concept, and he notes how the architecture of the Greek theatre contributed to its philosophical atmosphere when he states that the narrowness of the ancient stage turned the figures upon it ‘into living bas-reliefs or animated marble statues of a temple pediment.’202 Tragedy was Platonic insofar as the tragic heroes were as remote from ordinary individuals as Platonic forms were from their earthly copies, and for Nietzsche, it was the spectators’ ability to simultaneously perceive the action on stage as real while still being aware of its mythic ideality—as if they were in a lucid dream or endowed with second sight—which encouraged the capacity for self-reflection that is necessary for philosophical contemplation.203 The accuracy of Nietzsche’s  BT §§7, 8. EN §7[127]. GMD, 26.  Nussbaum 1991, 104. 202  IST, 26; Porter 2000b, 198 note 13, 101. GMD, 30. 203  Silk and Stern 1981, 425. Miller 1999, 9. 200 201

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description of tragedy as an oneiric experience is illustrated by another aspect of tragedy that symbolized the unity of Dionysus with his votaries.  – On Greek vases, huge (and hence unwearable) masks were frequently depicted as autonomous faces floating between human beings, and it is in this way that the mask represents appearance or presence as such without anything being concealed beneath it.204 It represents both the dreamlike Dionysian intoxication that Nietzsche identified as the essence of tragedy and the overcoming of the truth-appearance dualism which he describes as noon, high point of humanity, or INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA, and he ascribed an animalistic-unhistorical temporality to this experience: ‘the orgiastic experience leads a people in just one direction … ecstatic states with their elevation above space, time, and the individual’; ‘for brief moments we are truly the primordial being itself.’205 In the tragic ecstasy of Dionysus (the bull god), one returns to the eternal present of the grazing cattle who don’t know what is meant by either yesterday or tomorrow. One simply enjoys life without feeling the need to search for any definitional meaning from without, and Nietzsche’s description of this state at the climax of BT as ‘dissonance assuming human form’ reflects how this sense of existential meaningfulness arises as one’s consciousness descends into the myriad tones, rhythms, melodies, and voices that constitute the scintillating somatic subrepresentational substrate of sentience.206 (In §77.4, we’ll read Parmenides’ poem as describing this meditative experience as well.) Nietzsche’s emphasis on the therapeutic nature of tragedy is supported by the lasting effect that having regular access to Dionysian ecstasy had on Greece’s cultural and sexual health: ‘men and women experienced Dionysos in themselves, in the most intimate life of their own sex, and they had no experience of the cessation of this experience. What death might be they experienced at the high point of enhanced life, and what is almost death they experienced in the sexual exhaustion that is so close to the exhaustion of zoë.’207 5. As ‘an annual act prepared solemnly by and for the state and uniting the whole people,’ tragedy utilized the dwindling of the political instincts to the point of indifference which characterizes Dionysian fervor so as to cultivate the cultural, affective, perceptual, and cognitive foundations of  Burkert 1985, 162. Jähnig 2000, 107.  BT §§14, 21, 17. TI IV. Miller 1999, 9. 206  Sweet 1999, 355. Nussbaum 1991, 100. BT §25. 207  Kerényi 1976, 349–50. 204 205

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democracy.208 Culturally, this consisted of providing people with the individual and collective sense of wholeness that Nietzsche pursued via philology and philosophy. ‘The Greeks watched the ancient tragedies in order to collect themselves’ and it unified them by helping them avoid the domineering toxicity of party/identity politics: ‘far from promoting a quest for identity through a politics of domination, tragedy represents a mode of political discourse that seeks to affirm and renew collective identities through an appreciation of plurality, contingency, and paradox.’209 By reminding the Athenians of the fictious nature of identity, tragedy’s oneiric atmosphere kept at bay the cultural stagnation that attends dogmatic identification, and the productivity of this societal inculcation of artistic casualness was amplified by the kind of emotional education which tragedy also provided: ‘the co-existence of opposite feelings experienced by a spectator during a performance of tragedy is shared by the tragic artist himself. Despite the pleasure he finds in appearances, he negates it for the higher satisfaction of their destruction. And it is in terms of just such a co-­ existence of opposites that tragic myth arises.’210 Affectively, tragedy both invoked intensely opposed emotions and affirmed them with respect to the same events appearing on stage thereby cultivating the Athenians’ emotional range and sophistication, and Nietzsche conveys the perceptual aspect of tragic education when he intimates the influence which tragedy’s mystery doctrine had on his own portrayal of the vision of rebirth in GS §341: he writes that tragedy ‘says to us: “Take a look! Take a close look! This is your life! This is the hour-hand on the clock of your existence!”’211 Like all engaging works of art, tragedy encouraged people to cultivate an animalistic attention to the immediate particularities of life, and the cognitive benefits of such perceptual refinement consist in how it enables people to better understand not just the particularities of external life but the particularities of their own subjectivity experiences: ‘the ancient Greeks took refuge from the familiar distractions of public life, from life in the market-place, the street, and the courts of justice, in the calm and meditation-­promoting festivities of theatrical action.’212 The quiet power of zoë engulfed the ancient theatre when tragedy brought people together  EN §7[121]. BT §21.  EN §3[1]. Gambino 1996, 415. 210  Silk and Stern 1981, 106. 211  BT §24. 212  GMD, 14. 208 209

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to linger in the post-orgasmic afterglow of the performance so that they could reflect upon such things as their conventions, relationships, and the kinds of big questions that constitute the unresolvable heart of philosophy, and Nietzsche’s statement that this public meditative space was experienced as an escape from the market-place reflects another aspect of tragedy’s cultural cultivation which is as relevant today as it was then.213 6. As both a continuation of the mysteries and the first genre to be created in the new world of the widespread use of coinage, tragedy arose from and synthesized the mystery cults and the monetized polis, and although its very existence required considerable monetary expenditures, it made sure to warn people about the dangers of cultural materialism.214 The tyrant at the center of tragedy represents the money man whose unprecedented individualism leads him to jeopardize the stability of the polis by diverting the resources of its long-term economic cycles for his own short-term ends.215 Pentheus is the paradigmatic example of the anti-­ Dionysian man of money insofar as he reduces the Dionysian to money by both explaining insubordination as being motivated by monetary gain and by saying that he would give a vast amount of gold in order to see the maenads on the mountain, and the way in which the scene of Pentheus’ death seems to portray him as being male and female, adult and baby, and living and dead illustrates how, in the end, ‘the man of money is destroyed by the Dionysiac power to unite the opposites.’216 But as much as the fact that both tragedy and presocratic philosophy arose as syntheses of the mysteries and monetization may support Nietzsche’s equation of tragedy with philosophy, the way in which tragedy’s depiction of figures like Polymnestor being destroyed by their passion for gold echoes Socrates’ own anti-materialism—his insistence that wisdom should not be exchanged for money—intimates the limitations of Nietzsche’s view that it was the materialistic side of Euripides’ Socratism that caused the death of tragedy.217 7. Nietzsche attributes the death of tragedy to a form of materialism or naturalism insofar as, whereas genuine mythic tragedy characteristically ended on a note of metaphysical comfort (rebirth or the unity and inexhaustibility of life), the new drama that was pioneered by Euripides and  Gambino 1996, 433.  Seaford 2004, 147, 308–09. 215  Ibid., 15. 216  Ibid., 307, 309. 217  Ibid., 169, 162. 213 214

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perfected as new comedy sought an earthly resolution to tragic dissonance (reward of marriage or some token of divine favor) because it rejected the implications of tragic myth: ‘once Dionysus makes way for ordinary individuals, tragedy dies,’ but the limitations of Nietzsche’s diagnosis become clear when we keep in mind that his reading of the tragedians suffered from the same domineering bias as his reading of the presocratics.218 Whereas he writes of the latter that ‘they were tyrants, that is to say that which every Greek wanted to be,’ he writes that ‘the Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest,’ and while, in contrast to the presocratics’ partnership lifestyle that we’ll be exploring in the following chapters, this dominator perspective is more in line with tragedy’s often misogynistic agonism, it overlooks the dissonance between the femininity of the spirit of music and Nietzsche’s account of the decline of tragedy.219 Despite the prominence of women in the content of the plays, drama was an essentially male project that took place in a primarily male context.220 Composed by a male dramatist and performed in front of a mostly male audience, a female character’s voice was at best an inspired male view of a female voice, and in fact, the agonistic mentality of the tragedians exacerbated tragedy’s misogynistic overtones by tempting them to pander to the prejudices of the men in the audience.221 Now, since to preclude all men from speaking either for or about women would be to reify the representational distinction between men and women, the problem is not so much that men composed tragedies as much as it is that the more domineering or patriarchal environment of classical Athens likely discouraged them from appreciating women’s perspectives and, hence, the feminine spirit of music. (Alf Hiltebeitel clarifies this issue by noting that, today, men can theorize feminism as long it’s not only men who do so.)222 But things began to change in Athens with the advent of the same new comedy that Nietzsche equates with the death of tragedy: ‘it is reasonable to argue that the prominent role of girls and women in these plays did reflect a growing acknowledgement of the active, positive, and decisive role of women in the family, not simply about working the wool and household ­management.  Silk and Stern 1981, 99, 425.  HH §§261, 170. 220  Blundell 1995, 172. 221  Ibid., 180. Chrystal 2017, 33, 11. 222  Hiltebeitel 2000, 121. 218 219

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Women now had an increasing say in who they married and how they behaved.’223 Instead of, as Nietzsche hypothesized, perishing from its inability to incorporate Socratic self-consciousness, tragedy may have declined due to its inability to incorporate women’s perspectives—and hence the feminine spirit of music—at least to the extent that the emerging new comedy did. That is, the naturalism that Nietzsche blames for removing the mythic vitality of genuine tragedy, may have been a re-­ emergence within tragedy’s primarily male realm of the same appreciation for women’s artistry that we saw in the art of neolithic Europe. The same appreciation for the invaluable yet often overlooked particularities in life the importance of which Nietzsche himself never tired of emphasizing.

§33: Satyr Play. – As he conducted his work with the uncompromising determination of a child who takes her playtime very seriously, Nietzsche appreciated the religious significance of comedy; as did the Greeks. Besides the iambic jesting at Eleusis, satyr plays brought some much-needed comic relief after the emotional catharsis of tragic performances, but this form of stress relief was also essential for acquiring second sight through mystic initiation: ‘the burst of laughter at the end marks the break with the period of tension and the return to normal daily life after the journey to the Beyond …. On emergence from his incubatory consultation, the initiate was endowed with a memory, the same gift of second sight as that of the poets and diviners.’224 The perceptual lucidity and dynamic relational subjectivity that either one acquires through mystic initiation or spontaneously arises when one is inspired to ask new questions and think new ideas is also the sense of humor that enables one to not take either the affairs of the world or oneself too seriously. It is in this way that a sense of humor is as essential to the artistic casualness of philosophy as it is opposed to the adversarial pretentiousness of sophistry, and when we take the time to imagine what life was like so long ago, we can see how the partnership worldview that we have traced in this chapter would be conducive to such casualness. It’s a worldview in which existence (being) was considered to be fundamentally alive, divine, and nurturing and where, despite the arjunic anguish one experiences when confronted with death, death is viewed as an as  Chrystal 2017, 54.  Burkert 1985, 65. Detienne 1999, 64.

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opportunity for reunification with the goddess and progression in one’s own journey. By considering femininity and rebirth in presocratic philosophy, we will see how the first philosophers responded to, and tried to reform, the domineering and patriarchal aspects of Greek religion by not only reinstating the partnership worldview, but also adding to it the idea that it is through philosophical inquiry that one can reunite with the divine and/or become divine oneself.

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———. 2017. On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings. Ed. Keith Ansell-­ Pearson. Trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1991. The Transfigurations of Intoxication: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionysus. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 1 (2): 75–111. O’Flaherty, James C. 1976. Socrates in Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. In Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition, ed. James C. O’Flahtery, Timothy F. Sellner, and Robert M. Helm, 134–143. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Otto, Walter Friedrich. 1965. Dionysos: Myth and Cult. Trans. R.  B. Palmer. Bloomington Indiana and London: Indiana University Press. Pappas, Nickolas. 2014. Nietzsche’s Apollo. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 45 (1): 43–53. Parker, Robert. 2011. On Greek Religion. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Platon, Nikolaos. 1955. A Guide to the Archeological Museum of Heraclion. Heraklion: Crete. Porter, James I. 2000a. Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000b. The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on the Birth of Tragedy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2015. Nietzsche’s Radical Philology. In Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity, ed. Anthony K. Jensen and Helmut Heit, 27–50. Great Britain: Bloomsbury. Rempel, Morgan. 2010. Nietzsche, Mithras, and “Complete Heathendom”. Comparative and Continental Philosophy 2 (1): 27–43. Renzi, Luca. 2000. Winckelmann and Nietzsche: Apollonian and Dionysian. New Nietzsche Studies 4 (1 & 2): 123–140. Riedel, Manfred. ‘The Origin of Europe: Nietzsche and the Greeks.’ New Nietzsche Studies 4:1&2 (Summer/Fall 2000) 141–55. Ruehl, Martin A. 2003. Politeia 1871: Nietzsche Contra Wagner on the Greek State. In Out of Arcadia: Classics and Politics in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Wilamowitz, ed. Ingo Gildenhard, 61–86. London: Institute of Classical Studies. Sandy, Peggy Reeves. 1981. Female Power and Male Dominance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sattler, Barbara. 2013. The Eleusinian Mysteries in Pre-Platonic Thought: Metaphor, Practice and Imagery for Plato’s Symposium. In Philosophy and Salvation in Greek Religion, ed. Vishwa Adluri, 151–190. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Seaford, Richard. 1998. In the Mirror of Dionysos. In The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, ed. Sue Blundell and Margaret Williamson, 101–117. London and New York: Routledge.

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———. 2004. Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sheldrake, Rupert. 2017. Science and Spiritual Practice: Transformative Experiences and Their Effects on Our Bodies, Brains, and Health. Berkeley: Counterpoint. Siemens, Herman. 2008. Agonal Configurations in the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen. Identity, Mimesis and the Übertragung of Cultures in Nietzsche’s Early Thought. Nietzsche-Studien 30 (1): 80–106. Silk, M.S., and J.P.  Stern. 1981. Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stears, Karen. 1998. Death Becomes Her: Gender and Athenian Death Ritual. In The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, ed. Sue Blundell and Margaret Williamson, 89–117. London and New York: Routledge. Sweet, Dennis. 1999. The Birth of The Birth of Tragedy. Journal of the History of Ideas 60: 345–359. Tejera, Victorino. 1987. Nietzsche and Greek Thought. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Wang, Shunning. 2018. The Riddle of Life and Death: An Interpretation of the Relationship between Presocratic Fragments and Vase Paintings of the Dark Ages. Sofia Philosophical Review XI (1): 49–66. Wasson, R.  Gordon, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A.P.  Ruck. 2008. The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of The Mysteries. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Wohlfart, Günter. 2016. Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy. New Nietzsche Studies 10 (1/2): 13–26. Zuckerman, Elliott. 1974. Nietzsche and Music: The Birth of Tragedy and Nietzsche Contra Wagner. Symposium 28 (1): 17–32.

CHAPTER 3

Thales and Anaximander

§34: The Will to Power and Eternal Return. – Now that we have delineated the partnership tradition as it extended from old Europe to classical Athens, we can begin to argue for this book’s scholarly-scientific claim that the presocratics were reviving this tradition within the largely patriarchal culture of archaic Greece. In keeping with our philosophical-cultural aim of using this new perspective on the origin of philosophy so as to elucidate both what philosophy itself is and why it matters, we have also been describing philosophy as a state of being that arises from certain events and, in turn, facilitates the emergence of such events; philosophical subjectivity being akin to the feminine spirit of music and moments of inspiration being akin to the projection of world images. In the last chapter, we extended our exploration of the phenomenology of philosophy into ontology by discussing Nietzsche’s view that Archilochus’ inspirations derived from the latter’s union with being (Ur-Eine) qua a mystical experience of oneness, and in this chapter, we will further develop this onto-­phenomenology by discussing both the will to power and the eternal return as simultaneously ontological and phenomenological concepts; the former as the cosmic substance—or rather, cosmic process—and philosophical subjectivity, the latter as the actualization of this substance and the event of inspiration. Although Nietzsche compiled these concepts from several sources, this chapter will focus on the significance of his © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Breidenstein Jr., Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44780-8_3

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reading of Thales and Anaximander in particular so as to not only clarify the philosophical influences of Thales and Anaximander on Nietzsche but also illustrate how the very personalities of Thales and Anaximander reflect the affirmative will to power and the nihilistic will to nothingness respectively. Finally, this chapter also establishes the general pattern for the next three chapters. After exploring Nietzsche’s reading of Thales (§35), we will consider historical and biographical information—which, in Thales’ case, will include a brief discussion of Pherecydes—so as to combine Nietzsche’s personality-centered approach to the presocratics with the latest scholarship (§§36–39). In this way, we will continue to situate each Greek philosopher within the cultural context that we developed in Chap. 1, and once this is established, we will explore the themes of femininity and rebirth in Thales’ philosophy (§§40–43). This same pattern will hold for Anaximander as well, and each of the next three chapters will exhibit the same dual structure.

§35: Nietzsche’s Thales. – 1. One of the funniest things about Nietzsche’s reading of Thales (640–548 BCE) isn’t just how conventional it is but how, despite projecting himself onto Thales, his portrayal of the latter seems to negate his own status as a philosopher. Just as Aristotle referred to Thales as an arche ̄ of philosophy and stated that the latter’s wisdom was divine but useless, Nietzsche both states that ‘the archetype of the philosopher emerges with the image of Thales’ and concurs that what the latter knew was divine but useless because, unlike science, it had nothing to do with human goods.1 He then proceeds to portray Thales as the antithesis of his own early artistic-­religious view of philosophy: ‘philosophy in Greece began with a great mathematician. That was where his sense of the abstract, the unmythical, came from’; ‘Thales posits a principle from which he makes deductions; he is foremost a systematizer.’2 Nietzsche’s mathematical incompetence was as debilitating as his incapacity for systematic (even musical) composition, and his portrayal of the arche ̄ of philosophy as a systematizer provides a striking contrast to his later suspicion that systems tend to merely extend themselves while preventing people from 1 2

 Aristotle Metaphysics 983b20, Nicomachean Ethics 1141b6. PTAG, 45. PPP, 8.  EN §19[96]. PPP, 7.

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questioning the fundamental premises on which they are based, but it is his identification of Thales with the Socratic negation of myth that seems to only confirm the accusations made by some in the analytic tradition that Nietzsche’s artistic style of writing precludes him from being a philosopher.3 Nevertheless, this reading is as over-simplistic as the view that Nietzsche was merely conventional. In contrast to Aristotle’s criticism that the presocratics failed because they denied becoming, Nietzsche argues that Ionian philosophy began with becoming, and for him, it is precisely philosophy’s anomalous position between religion, science, and art, that enables scientific systematizers like Thales to use science in creative ways.4 Thales is the archetype of philosophy insofar as, like Nietzsche, he went beyond science by using scientific thought as an artistic medium: ‘Thales is a creative master who began to see into the depths of nature without the help of fantastic fable. If, in so doing he used and then passed over the methods of science and of proof, he but demonstrates a typical characteristic of the philosophic mind.’5 Like Aristotle, Nietzsche suggests that Thales’ water hypothesis was inspired by the scientific observation of how animal bodies are formed out of moist semen and eggs, but Nietzsche also held there to be an unscientific source of Thales’ hypothesis; namely, the irrational origins of philosophy itself: ‘its feet are propelled by an alien, illogical power—the power of creative imagination.’6 2. Nietzsche lampoons Thales’ irrationality as follows: ‘the whole world is humid, therefore humidity is the whole world. Metonymy! A false conclusion’; ‘Greek philosophy seems to begin with an absurd notion, with the proposition that water is the primal origin and womb of all things,’ but Nietzsche also maintains that this notion must be taken seriously, not just because it tells of the primal origin of all things in a language devoid of fable, but also because it embryonically contains the thought that all things are one.7 For Nietzsche, it is this last reason that makes Thales the first Greek philosopher, and his idiosyncratic description of the source of Thales’ water hypothesis further reflects his view of Greek metaphysics as originating in the mysteries: ‘what drove him to it was a metaphysical conviction which had its origin in a mystic intuition. We meet it in every  Tejera 1987, 95–96.  Physics 191a25–30. PPP, 6. 5  PTAG, 42. Translation modified. 6  PPP, 27. PTAG, 40. 7  EN §19[215]. PTAG, 38–39. 3 4

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­ hilosophy, together with the ever-renewed attempts at a more suitable p expression, this proposition that “all things are one.”’8 Although he portrays the comedic side effects of mystic initiation-inspiration when he writes that ‘Thales had seen the unity of all that is, but when he went to communicate it, he found himself talking about water,’ Nietzsche still considered early Greek philosophy to be essentially tragic: ‘the philosophical systems of the early Greeks. The same world as that which created tragedy manifests itself.’9 Like Archilochus, Thales produced a universal world image out of the depths of his mystical experience of being, and the philosophical subjectivity that emerges as one undergoes such eventful experiences is a renewed fascination at things that most people consider commonplace: ‘the free spirit surveys things, and now for the first time mundane existence appears to it worthy of contemplation as a problem. That is the true characteristic of the philosophical drive: wonderment at that which lies before everyone.’10 Just as Archilochus composed so as to awaken the spirit of music within his audience, Nietzsche maintains that the real significance of Thales’ or any philosophical system lies, even after it has been refuted, in its ability to transmit philosophy to others, but as much as this may be characterized as an experience of universal significance, what distinguishes philosophy from science is the former’s selectivity: ‘science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste,” at whatever is knowable, in a blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing.’11 By evaluating and comparing the importance of different questions, philosophy actually suppresses the drive for knowledge so as to harmonize the latter with the needs of society, and just as Nietzsche intimates the ethical imperative which attends the philosophical intuition of oneness when he writes that ‘the philosopher must empathize with universal suffering most strongly,’ he notes how Thales applied this holistic sensibility to the political realm: ‘Thales must have been an extremely influential man politically: according to Herodotus, he advised the Ionians, in the face of their downfall to the Persians, to unify into a federation of states.’12 As the experience of meaningfulness beyond oneself, philosophy  PTAG, 39.  PTAG, 45. EN §19[51]. 10  PPP, 6. 11  PTAG, 41, 43. 12  EN §19[23]. PPP, 24. 8 9

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is inseparable from an appreciation of, and concern for, the world and one’s community, and philosophers instinctively work toward the healing of their communities either by encouraging solidarity legislatively or by creating world images that provide a unifying center of meaningfulness. But although Nietzsche’s religious sensibility enabled him to appreciate the human need for wholeness and meaningfulness, his suspicion of Thales’ views both on the immortality of the soul and on the entheogenic nature of all things reminds us that Nietzsche failed to sufficiently attend to the religious side of presocratic philosophy.13 By comparing his view of the origin of philosophy to that of contemporary scholars, we can also discern an eastern religious influence on presocratic philosophy that Nietzsche may not have even had the resources to pursue.

§36: Additional Origins of Philosophy. – 1. In keeping with his observation that, to some degree or another, people have always been philosophers, Nietzsche thought both that it was arbitrary to call Thales the first philosopher and that the quest for philosophy’s beginning was idle, but considering his take on the matter will enable us to further clarify the political significance of philosophy in our own times.14 Nietzsche’s suggestion that there was an orphic origin for Greek wisdom— as well as the deep dialectic that he developed between orphism and presocratic philosophy—is supported by the reports that claim that Musaeus (Orpheus’ disciple) was the first to posit a material substrate of all things, but Nietzsche also thought that Homer and Hesiod indicated a vast preliminary stage to philosophy in which proverbs were sporadically and situationally employed but not yet brought into a system by someone like Thales; Homer illustrating the presence of a long-standing ethical consciousness, and Hesiod demonstrating a vast wealth of proverbial wisdom.15 It is in this way that ‘all of Greece philosophized in countless proverbs,’ but the contemporary relevance of Nietzsche’s account only becomes clear when we turn from the philosophical substrate that Greek culture provided to the religious function which the first philosophers fulfilled.16

 PPP, 28.  PPP, 7. PTAG, 30. 15  PPP, 175–76. Laks 2018, 74. 16  PPP, 178. 13 14

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2. Nietzsche saw both the tragedians and the presocratics as responding to the questions of meaning and purpose that arose during the increasing secularization of the tragic age, and the way in which they did this shaped his own conception of the will to power.17 No amount of technological innovation can compensate for the sense of meaninglessness that arises when people lack a unifying cultural vision. ‘Only a creative vision, Nietzsche argues, can remedy such a condition; hence the tragedians and the pre-Platonic philosophers of the tragic age warded off this nausea with new bounds of artistic and intellectual expression,’ and they did this by creating variations of old ideas so as to both educate and nourish their countrymen: ‘formal variations of cultural beliefs function to bring the social instinct up to date with the latest insights gained from the knowledge drive, while measuring this drive and moderating its insights with the emotional needs of individuals.’18 Again, philosophy differs from the scientific drive for knowledge insofar as it uses the latter so as to create world images that reinforce communal solidarity by providing people with a common source of meaningfulness. And the Greek’s practice of doing this via formal variation re-emerges as Nietzsche’s philological conception of the will to power as an essentially creative and interpretive force, but before discussing Thales’ water as a formal variation of the old myths of feminine cyclicity, we must consider the influence of a less nurturing and more Indo-European view of rebirth on archaic Greek thought.19 3. ‘Both Greek and Indian philosophers were evidently sensitive to the fact that the iconography of goddess religions, in a tradition flowing from the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Ages, foreshadows in various ways the monistic view of the universe.’20 Like the presocratics, the Indian monistic schools favored goddess imagery, and in the sixth century, the Persian empire opened up contact between Greece and India so that the Greeks from the heartland of presocratic philosophy at the eastern edge of the Iranian plateau provided a channel by which Indian ideas could make their way into Greece before the Ionians’ revolt against Persia in 500 BCE caused this contact to become more sporadic.21 Although the virtual ubiquity of the belief in rebirth precludes us from precisely defining its origin,  Wilkerson 2006, 12, 23.  Ibid., 65, 101. 19  Ibid., 41. 20  McEvilley 2002, 56. 21  Ibid., 6, 9–10. 17 18

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McEvilley suggests that, in India, it probably arose from the synthesizing impulse in the Aryan community and the latter’s encounter with the indigenous population, and the influence of Aryan necrophilia, may account for this version of rebirth’s characteristic world-negating perspective.22 It was defined by a specific formula, namely, the process of reincarnation (samsara/metempsychosis), the moral and cognitive laws governing this process (karma/katharsis), and the ultimate goal of escaping the world (moksa/lusis). And the fact that, in contrast to India where this formula seems to have crystalized in the seventh century after a series of developmental stages, it appeared in Greece in the seventh to sixth century BCE with no signs of development suggests that it passed from India to Greece: ‘the tripartite doctrine of reincarnation is the most widespread eschatological-­ ethical attitude of the Greek philosophical lineages. Dominant in the pre-Socratic period, it survived in a variety of forms through the Roman Empire and was consistently posited by such major lineages as the Platonic and the Stoic. Still it is widely ignored in discussion of Greek philosophy’ even though it’s negative evaluation of worldly life helps explain why the presocratics’ religious reformation did not succeed.23 That this is the case is suggested by how arguably the most influential presocratic promoted a world-affirming view of rebirth thereby indicating its cultural efficacy, but before we get to him in the next chapter, we’ll continue to establish the historical context for Thales’ life and work by discussing a contemporary of his whose proto-philosophy also contributed to the partnership religiosity of presocratic philosophy.

§37: And the Gods Made Love. – 1. Due to the scholarly dismissal of early philosophical interest in divinity, Pherecydes of Syros (580–520 BCE) has not fared well in the history of philosophy, but once the sixth-century Greek intellectuals’ shared interest in theology is recognized, we can include him in the archaic philosophers’ efforts to either reform or break with the Homeric-Hesiodic poetic tradition.24 In contrast to the canonical dismissal of Pherecydes, Nietzsche’s interpretation of presocratic philosophy as a religious reform movement enabled him to understand that Pherecydes’ work ‘exercised a definite,  Ibid., 116.  Ibid., 98, 117. 24  Granger 2007, 135–36. 22 23

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profound influence on those who study nature.’25 Living at a time when the authority of tradition was waning, Pherecydes, the Milesians, and the orphics were united by a broad discontent with tradition as well as by a concern for the correct depiction of divinity, and Pherecydes pursued this goal by developing a new form of writing: although the possibility that he was younger than Anaximander may call into question the reports that he was the first to write in prose, Pherecydes still abandoned poetic meter and challenged Hesiod by writing in his own name instead of invoking the muses.26 Furthermore, besides his writings, Pherecydes himself embodied the archaic transition from theogony to cosmology insofar as he was both a legendary and intellectual figure: he is reported to have been both one of the seven sages to whom marvels such as past-life recollection were attributed and the first among the Greeks to put forth a doctrine of elements.27 That such a pivotal figure in the origination of philosophy was also reported to have been the first to introduce the idea of metempsychosis to Greece further reflects the centrality of rebirth for presocratic philosophy, but the possibly Indian origin of his view of rebirth suggests that it had more in common with life-negation than life-affirmation.28 McEvilley argues that Pherecydes’ deification of time (Kala/Chronos) indicates that he was influenced by either the early Upanishads or their sources, and McEvilley also suggests that Pherecydes may have called Indian teachings orphic so as to naturalize them.29 But Pherecydes’ writings exhibit both partnership world-affirming and dominator world-­ negating aspects. 2. Zas and Chronos were always, and Chthonie was. But the name of Chthonie became Earth when Zas gave her the earth as a present.30 By beginning his book with three eternal deities, Pherecydes provided a rational amendment to traditional genealogical portrayals of the gods as being born yet never dying, but he also continued the largely biological nature of traditional theocosmogonic explanations insofar as, just as Thales’ hypothesis was inspired by the observation of the moisture of semen and eggs, Pherecydes makes his gods embodiments of cosmic  PPP, 13.  Granger 2007, 136, 139. LM R4, R5/DK A2. LM R6. LM R10/DK A2a, A1. 27  McEvilley 2002, 103, 306. LM D4. 28  LM R15/DK A2. 29  McEvilley 2002, 260, 171. 30  LM D5/DK B1. 25 26

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sexual potency.31 One possible source for the enigmatic name Zas (Zeus) is that it was derived from Zη̑ν so as to reflect the life-giving power of the deity, and Pherecydes further emphasizes the sexual nature of the lifeforce when he states that Zas transformed himself into Eros (power of attraction) in order to create the cosmos.32 Before Pherecydes, no god was depicted in Greek literature as a creator god, and the intensive prefix ζαalso indicates the superior position of Zas over the feminine passivity of Chthonie, but as much as this continued the patriarchal tendencies of Hesiod’s theogony, Pherecydes makes a partnership reform when he has Zas make use of distinctively feminine crafts such as weaving and embroidering: ‘Zas’ feminine craftsmanship, as well as his prominent association with love and marriage, argue for his possession of a peace-loving character, which would be a further marked departure of Pherecydes’ theology from the religious tradition of the Greeks, who require the most important of their earliest male deities to be warriors.’33 Forming a distinct pair with Zas, Chronos was also consider to be superior to Chthonie, and he carries both Pherecydes’ theological rationalism and eroticism even further by being both a deification of the abstract category of time as well as a better representation of sexual fecundity insofar as Pherecydes presents him as an eternal autosexually generating deity whose seed provides the material from which the next generation of gods emerge.34 3. Despite her inferior position, Chthonie is still one of Pherecydes’ eternal gods-elements or first principles, and he derived her name from χθóνιος (in, under, or beneath the earth) so as to indicate her true nature as the underlying foundation of our visible world.35 In her capacity as the mistress of marriage, she also possesses an erotic function that reflects the partnership impulse behind Pherecydes’ religious reform: ‘there is even a homely dimension to Pherecydes’ depiction of the gods, in the careful attention he gives to the marriage of Zas and Chthoniē and in the stress he puts upon its aetiological significance for mankind’s marriage practices.’36 That is, Pherecydes reformed the scandalous and violent depiction of the gods’ exploits as portrayed in traditional Greek religion by emphasizing the importance of what we would now call romantic or spiritual love over  Granger 2007, 136, 156.  Ibid., 145. 33  Ibid., 141, 153. 34  Ibid., 142, 144. 35  Ibid., 145. 36  Ibid., 150. 31 32

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sexual conquest, and we can see the healthy positivity of the partnership mentality in several anecdotes about Pherecydes himself such as the story that he and Thales were constantly singing or that, adorned with prowess and reverence, he had a pleasant life for his soul even after he died.37 Just as his abhorrence of bloodshed recalls the ethical aspect of philosophical subjectivity, his being inspired by a dream to tell the Lacedaemonians not to hold either gold or silver in honor further recalls the anti-materialism that we saw in Greek tragedy and will continue to see in the presocratics; one of several external or behavioral aspects of philosophical subjectivity that we’ll note over the course of the following chapters.38 Like Pherecydes, it seems as though Thales also posited a female divinity as the underlying foundation of the visible world, and it’s by turning to his historical context that we can better understand his participation in the partnership tradition.

§38: Miletus. – During Thales’ time, his hometown was ruled by the reputedly ruthless tyrant Thrasyboulos, and in fact, there is nothing to suggest that any of the cities that produced philosophers before 500 BCE were democratic— several other presocratics lived under tyranny—but Miletus was exceptional in several respects.39 Economically, the Ionians in general were the first Greeks to use coinage, but as probably the first thoroughly monetized society in history, Miletus in particular played a special role in the monetization of Greece in two ways: besides its being a commercial hub, this most prosperous of the Ionian states also produced some of the earliest electrum (late seventh century) and silver (middle of sixth century) coins, and by making these coins to the same weight standards as those of southern Ionia and Lydia, the Milesians transcended traditional polis boundaries thereby enabling Thales to recommend further unification as a response to the threat from Persia.40 Religiously, Miletus had ties to the partnership tradition insofar as, while the main temple was that of Apollo at Didyma, its impressive use of meander patterns—an albeit almost ubiquitous decorative motif—and the repeated use of the term labyrinthos in connection with this temple suggest the presence of a Dionysianism which is also  LM P11. LM R1/DK 36B4.  Granger 2007, 153. LM P10/DK A1. 39  Seaford 2004, 183. 40  Ibid., 184, 15, 199. 37 38

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evident in the ancient tradition of associating the founding of Miletus with both a Cretan of the same name and the town of Milatos on the northwestern coast of Crete.41 As in most other Greek cities, Dionysus and mother were worshipped openly, but the priestess of Dionysus Bacchios in Miletus also likely subcontracted the right of initiating people to women operating in individual demes.42 Miletus’ connection with the belief in rebirth becomes even more clear when we keep in mind that it was also the mother city of the colony of Olbia where bone tablets (many of them being Apollonian) from 500 BCE were found bearing—besides the words orphic, Dionysus, and Alētheia—the words life-death-life.43 Culturally, Miletus was the most cosmopolitan of the Greek city states, and while we’ve already come across a strong Milesian woman in the figure of Aspasia on whom Plato modelled Diotima, Miletus’ appreciation of female sexuality is also suggested by its role as one of many centers for the manufacturing and exporting of dildos the oldest examples of which date back to the upper paleolithic period; its appreciation of female intelligence is further indicated by the fact that, along with Aetolia, the hetaerae of the Ionian poleis were also considered the most brilliant.44 Now that we understand that Thales lived in a culture that valued things like political cooperation, life-affirming religiosity, and female sexuality and intelligence, we can see how this partnership mentality is conveyed in the image of the philosopher himself that has come down to us.

§39: Thales. – 1. Like Pherecydes, Thales was also somewhat of a legendary figure insofar as a mythic genealogy was attributed to him according to which his parents Examuas and Cleobuline were held to be the most noble descendants of Cadmus and Agenor, and just as the story of Pherecydes and Thales constantly singing supports Nietzsche’s idea of philosophy as being born from the spirit of music, the following lines which have been preserved from one of Thales’ songs illustrate how he sought to place a break on the wheel of time by admonishing people to move beyond the din of the marketplace:  Kerényi 1976, 90. O’Grady 2016, 160–62. Parker 2011, 249–50.  Burkert 1985, 291. 43  Detienne 1999, 26. 44  O’Grady 2016, 62. Chrystal 2017, 123, 180. Eisler 1995, 115. 41 42

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Many words do not manifest a sensible opinion. Search for one thing: what is wise. Choose one thing: what is good. For you will undo the endlessly talking tongues. Of chattering men.45

The religious significance of inquiry for Thales is suggested in the stories that he drew mathematical figures on the sand floor at the shrine of the Didymean Apollo and that he sacrificed a bull so as to celebrate learning how to inscribe a right angle within a circle, but besides the sacredness of inquiry, the last two lines of this song introduce another philosophical behavior that we will be tracing throughout presocratic philosophy, namely, healthy elitism—one’s contempt for materialists who are incapable of appreciating the joy of philosophical inquiry, let alone its cultural importance.46 Nietzsche was certainly right to emphasize that elitism is one of the most difficult things for moderns to appreciate about the Greek ethos, but the theme of anti-materialism that Thales carries over from Pherecydes—Diogenes Laertius reports that, although rivals, these two corresponded—reminds us of how useful elitism is for keeping cultural materialism at bay.47 2. After using his knowledge of astronomy to predicate a large olive crop, Thales rented out all of the available olive presses so that he could rent them out at a higher price when the time came thereby demonstrating to his countrymen that philosophers could become rich if they wished to, but besides illustrating the practical value of philosophy, Thales also taught them not to value money too highly when he gave away the wealth he made.48 Thales’ heart is also on display in the report that, when asked why he did not have children, he replied ‘because of my love for children’ as if to convey the anguish that arises when, despite all of one’s worldly accomplishments, one doubts whether one could live up to the responsibility of being a parent.49 And it is in this way that, by combining Nietzsche’s personal approach to the presocratics with the resources of contemporary scholarship, we can understand Thales as the arche ̄ of the artistic, ethical, and emotional intelligence that characterizes philosophical  O’Grady 2016, 7. LM P2/DK A1. Riedel 1991, 62. LM P16/DK A1.  O’Grady 2016, 11. LM R27/DK A1. 47  LM R11, R31a, b. 48  LM P15/DK A10. Blumenberg 2015, 16. 49  LM P17/DK A1. 45 46

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subjectivity. Just as this supports Nietzsche’s view that the Greeks knew how to begin philosophy ‘as a pursuit springing from the ardent joyousness of courageous and victorious maturity,’ taking a look at Thales’ career will confirm several other aspects of Nietzsche interpretation.50 3. First is Nietzsche’s view of Thales as an influential yet ultimately failed politician. Our earliest sources suggest that Thales was interested above all in politics and that he devoted himself to the observation of nature only after engaging in politics, but he was not granted the status of being one of the seven sages because of his political advice: his advice that his countrymen gather together around Ionia as a common (xunon) hearth failed because he was unable to envision the possibility of a cultural unity that was not ultimately based on the polis.51 Second is Nietzsche’s assertion that Thales derived his sense for the abstract from his mathematical studies. Although his Didymean sketches show how Thales proved his theorems empirically, he is nonetheless associated with the birth of deductive mathematics, and the cultural forces behind this birth further supports Nietzsche’s view of the importance of Greece’s agonism for its intellectual achievements: This spirit of pure competition arose in Greek agonistics, then spread to areas of intellectual creativity, first to literature, subsequently to philosophy and science, multiplying tenfold the force of those striving for truth. Once set on the path of free research, unconstrained by narrow practicalness and corporative ethos, the mathematicians very quickly realized that to apply strict, logical proof makes it possible in this pursuit to achieve irrefutable and hence universally recognized results.52

One example of Thales’ intellectual creativity was his introduction of the mathematical concept of ratio, but despite Nietzsche’s emphasis on the masculinity of Greek agonism, Eisler and Fry note its partnership preconditions: in contrast to the cut-throat competitiveness of domineering societies, ‘competition in partnership systems tends to be less overt and may be directed more to excellence: the achievements of others are a spur to great accomplishments.’53 The final aspect of Nietzsche’s view of Thales is the latter’s wonderment at the mundane sundries of life. Thales’ p ­ rediction  PTAG, 28.  LM R11/DK A1. O’Grady 2016, 146. Detienne 1999, 101. Caygill 1993, 120. 52  Zhmud 2012, 252, 254–55. 53  O’Grady 2016, 207. Eisler and Fry 2019, 103. 50 51

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of a solar eclipse already intimates the presence of an alternative form of perception insofar as it was a way of seeing what remained hidden to others, but his interest in the mundane is more evident in his mathematical studies.54 Greek geometry was revolutionary in its aspiration to prove obvious mathematical facts and Thales contributed to this by proving obvious geometric facts that others had not thought it necessary to prove; he was also distinguished from the other seven sages insofar as his wisdom went beyond practical or political necessity.55 Nevertheless, the accuracy of Nietzsche’s reading of Thales does not negate his neglect of Thales’ relation to women. 4 The correlation between the birth of philosophy and strong Greek mothers is perhaps best personified in Thales’ mom Cleobuline who, besides being the daughter of one of the seven sages, was a poet in her own right who was praised by Thales as being a woman with a statesman’s mind although he himself didn’t always follow her advice: when she first tried to compel him to marry, he would say ‘it’s not yet the right time’ and then, when she kept insisting as the years went by, he would say ‘it is no longer the right time.’56 But there was another female figure who is responsible for Thales not just being considered a philosopher but the philosopher: It is said … that Thales, while doing astronomy and looking upward, fell into a well, and that a witty and charming Thracian handmaiden made fun of him, saying that he was eager to know what was in the sky but did not see what was in front of him and at his feet.57

Throughout its long history, this anecdote both became the most enduring prefiguration of all the tensions and misunderstandings between theory and lifeworld and consolidated Thales’ reputation as the paradigmatic absentminded philosopher.58 And the different interpretations that it acquired over the centuries shed further light on the connection between philosophy, laughter, femininity, and rebirth. Just as the laughter after initiation arises as the tension is broken and one returns to the everyday world, here, laughter represents the inevitable clash between theoretical  Blumenberg 2015, 19.  Zhmud 2012, 245, 273. LM R3. 56  Chrystal 2017, 115. LM P17/DK A1. 57  LM P12/DK A9. 58  Blumenberg 2015, 3. 54 55

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generality and real particularity, and it’s being a woman’s laughter conveys just how easily male theorists can be disrupted by femininity; an example of this being Nietzsche comically running to a piano so as to free himself from the paralysis that overcame him when he unexpectedly found himself surrounded by half a dozen prostitutes.59 Furthermore, that the maid should be silently thinking about the gods when she sees Thales plummet to the earth coincides with how Plato created the figure of a Thracian maid so as to evoke a feminine, nocturnal, and subterranean world of alien gods, and later, she is even identified with Iambe (Baubo) who cheered up Demeter after the abduction of Persephone.60 In this interpretation, the maid reminds Thales that the gods are here on earth as well as in the stars, but that Thales himself already appreciated this life-affirming religiosity is suggested when we speculate about what stars he may have been looking at when he fell.61 He may have been looking at the Hyades who were the nurses (nymphs) of Dionysus whose weeping at the death of their brother Hyas was thought to be the cause of rainfall which brings the world back to life by fertilizing the earth: ‘indeed, as the sky is itself Oceanus, it is clear that Thales, looking at the sky, at the primordial Water of Chaos, home of the nymphs, the Hyades, fell into a lesser body of water … water, which also reminds us to the cyclical necessity of rebirth, to the comedy of the eternal recurrence of the same. The handmaidens laugh—are joyous— since they know that although Thales has in this instant fallen into the well, that he will re-emerge.’62 Beyond the general Dionysian-Cretan atmosphere of Miletus, Thales’ relation to the Hyades suggests that he was personally interested in Dionysian notions of rebirth, and although the archetypal significance of water intimates that his formal variation on this worldview arose in part from the unconscious creativity of his body, his water hypothesis may also have been influenced by Indian thought.

§40: The Shaping of Water. – The presocratic cosmos is generally much closer to the older goddessoriented worldview than it is to the later Olympian pantheon, and Eisler singles out Thales’ work as being strikingly reminiscent of the early idea  Ibid., 6. Young 2010, 56.  Blumenberg 2015, 12, 42. 61  Ibid., 17, 21. 62  LM R 22/DK B2. Luchte 2011, 41, 43. 59 60

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that both the goddess and earth originally emerged from the primeval waters.63 This view is supported by how Thales’ water is not lifeless H2O, but arguably, a formal variation of the goddesses of the first myths. It is the all-nourishing divine lifeforce from which everything comes and into which everything returns, but as much as the ubiquitous association of the female principle with primeval waters may enable us to read Thales’ water as his body’s archetypal projection of a feminine ontology, his choosing water as the cosmic foundation may also reflect Indian influences.64 Although Thales’ work preceded the period of unimpeded contact between India and Greece (about 545-490 BCE), there are several similarities between his worldview and Indian thought which suggest the possibility of diffusion.65 Like Thales, the Rg Veda echoes bronze age myth by calling water the ultimate principle of things, and McEvilly notes the shared immanentism in Thales’ idea that ‘all things are full of gods’ and Yājñavalkya’s description of the atman as the inner controller: the Upanishads also said that everything is water, and a report of Thales’ view of life and death seems to foreshadow the later Mahayana idea that samsara is nirvana: ‘he said that death is not at all different from life. Someone said, “Then why don’t you die?” He answered, “Because there is no difference.”’66 It may be going too far to interpret these similarities as evidence for a direct influence of Indian thought on Thales, but McEvilley’s suggestion that orphism goes back to India indicates the possibility of an indirect means of transmission.67 One that suggests that, despite his affirmative disposition, Thales endorsed a life-negating view of rebirth.

§41: Thales and Orphism. – Greek philosophy and orphism originated as trends within a sixth-century religious movement concerned with mysticism and catharsis, and the unconventional nature of orphic poetry made it a suitable medium for innovative thinkers to both develop new cosmological ideas and address the very questions which also concerned the presocratics such as the problem of the one and the many.68 The orphics understood the movement  Eisler 1995, 110–11.  LM R32/DK A12. LM D4. Eisler 1995, 21. 65  McEvilley 2002, 18. 66  Ibid., 306, 313, 30. LM D10/DK A22. LM P17c/DK A1. 67  McEvilley 2002, 171. 68  Finkelberg 1986, 334–35. Edmonds III 2013, 163. 63 64

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from the one to the many as the dismemberment of Dionysus by the Titans, and presocratic notions of becoming were strongly influenced by the orphic myth of Dionysus’ spiraling eternal recurrence; water also being pre-eminent in orphic thought, and it seems that Thales made this element into the first principle in an array of elements that exist in an eternally recurring cycle of transformations.69 But as much as this may reflect the world-affirming perspective of feminine cyclicity, the orphic concern for escaping the cycle of rebirth via the purificatory rites of Dionysus and Kore adds a nihilistic valence to the Milesians’ worldview: ‘the Milesians held the doctrine of transmigration, saw liberation from bodily existence and reabsorption into the divine as the soul’s end, and believed this end to be attainable through communion with the divine and subsequently living a pure and righteous life to actualize the divine and suppress the bodily principle.’70 The Milesians improved on orphism by favoring personal insight as a means of purification instead of ritual, and Thales’ emphasis on the importance of having a healthy body speaks against his having such a negative view of embodiment, but the possibility that Milesian theocosmogony is the story of the fall of the deity (cosmic soul) instead of being a manifestation of the latter’s erotic creativity may explain why, according to Howard Caygill, Thales’ water hypothesis was an inadequate basis for a new cultural unity.71 That is, at a time when people desired more fulfilling forms of religion, Thales still endorsed a life-­negating, and hence unfulfilling, perspective. Nevertheless, as attempts to reform the HomericHesiodic worldview, both the orphics and Milesians provided a more nurturing perspective the partnership thrust of which emerges when we consider an orphic myth which itself recounts the patriarchal appropriation of myth.

§42: ΣΟΦΙΑ. – In the first generation of the orphic pantheon from which the Eleusinian mysteries were born, Metis, mother of Athena, was the source of all things.72 Like Dionysus, she wore several masks in the mysteries (‘mother substance,’ ‘cosmic egg’), and like some paleolithic goddesses, she was  Ibid., 42. Luchte 2011, 115–16. LM R44/DK B3.  Finkelberg 1986, 325, 332. 71  LM P17c/DK 1. Finkelberg 1986, 327. Caygill 1993, 120. 72  Hawke 2018, 41. 69 70

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portrayed as androgynous: ‘Metis is the great primordial goddess, aquatic and polymorphous, and to show that she can never be subordinated to any oversimplified Olympic ordering principle, they no longer represent her as female but, in a male dominated society, give her masculine status.’73 Metis is the ocean of uterine blood before creation; the boundless mother substance which represents life, consciousness, and light, but besides her ontological role (egg=being), she also has an epistemological role as the separating and discriminating cause of intelligible things: ‘Metis was infinitely wise. She in fact, knew more than all the Gods’ and she was specifically the source of a more tender form of wisdom qua the emotional intelligence that attends the perceptual gift of foresight.74 Zeus wanted to appropriate Metis’ wisdom so that he could rule the world so, when she was about to give birth to Athena, he asked her if she could change herself into a drop of water and then devoured her when she did, but she was eventually able to escape to the Aegean sea when Hephaestus split Zeus’ head open by the river Triton.75 (In Hesiod’s telling of the myth, Metis remains swallowed and is, to some degree, reborn as Athena.) ‘Without representation of the mother-daughter relationship—divine or corporeal—woman exists in a state of de facto exclusion,’ and in this way, traditional Greek religion excluded women by having Hades and Zeus take Persephone and Athena from their mothers: ‘under Zeus’ reign a nontender mood flourished, with repression of the feminine divine one of his imperatives,’ and he accomplished this by giving birth to Athena himself thereby appropriating the goddess’ generative power.76 Besides being a metaphor for both the dominator appropriation of myth and the intellect’s attempt to conceal its dependence on the body’s unconscious creativity, Zeus’ giving birth via his head to a fully formed Athena can also be seen as a desperate and sophistic effort to make conscious-representational thought (language) the basis of reality.77 Orphism and Milesian philosophy were responses to both Hesiod’s Theogony and to the religiously unsatisfactory nature of Homeric pessimism, and it seems as though Thales in particular was driven by a sense of theological dissatisfaction to posit water as the arche ̄.78 If orphism and Milesian thought constituted two  Ibid., 43–44, 55. White 1990.  Hawke 2018, 68, 57, 45–46, 59, 63–64. Campbell 1991, 49. 75  Hawke 2018, 43. 76  Perpich 2013, 167. Hawke 2018, 59. 77  Harrison 1922, 648. 78  Granger 2007, 138. Drozdek 2007, 2, 6. 73 74

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streams of the same religious movement and orphics were known to veil the mother of the gods in symbols, allegories, and myths that only those with philosophically illumined hearts and minds could see through, then even the fact that Thales’ term for water (τò ὕδωρ) is neuter instead of feminine does not necessarily prevents us from identifying Metis with Thales’ water.79 I see no harm in doing so especially considering what this means for how we conceive of philosophical wisdom: Metis represents ‘the magical factor of right timing … an intelligence or alertness of an extremely particular and skillful kind … above all, it implies a type of intense and yet flexible awareness which is always firmly rooted in the present moment.’80 In other words, Metis is both ontological and phenomenological in the sense that she personifies the cosmological foundation (being) and the specific talents that arise through the magical or mystical experience of being (animal presence/second sight), and we find a similar unity of ontology and phenomenology in Nietzsche as well.

§43: Water as Will to Power. – When we keep in mind that Thales’ water goddess is both creative and rational, his view that, while water is the beginning of all things, god is the intelligence capable of making all things out of water can be interpreted as reflecting the two aspects of Metis’ nature, but Thales also links intelligence with a specific kind of action—‘the fastest thing is mind; for it races through everything.’81 The particular nature of this action becomes clear in his argument that magnets have souls because they have the power to move iron: ‘the wondrous property of the lodestone … calls attention to the ability of certain agents to act at or over a distance.’82 Although Nietzsche’s neglect of the entheogenic nature of Thales world would have caused him to overlook this aspect of Thales’ thought, he described action at a distance to be the operative mode of the will to power, and he also associates this cosmological force with an oneiric experience that recalls the feminine love of the spirit of music:

 Hawke 2018, 47.  Kingsley 2002, 362. Emphasis added. 81  Drozdek 2007, 7. LM R38/DK A23. LM P17c/DK A1. LM D11/DK A22, A1. 82  Pinto 2016, 247. Kwasniewski 1997, 92. 79 80

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Women and their action at a distance …. How magically it touches me! … Is my happiness itself sitting in this quite place – my happier self, my second, immortalized self? Not yet to be dead, but also no longer alive? As a spiritlike, silent, watching, gliding, hovering intermediate being? …. When a man stands in the midst of his own noise … he is also likely to see gliding past him silent, magical creatures whose happiness and seclusion he yearns for  – women. He almost believes that his better self lives there amongst the women: in these quiet regions even the loudest surf turns into deathly silence and life itself into a dream about life …. The magic and the most powerful effect of women is, to speak the language of the philosophers, action at a distance.83

In contemporary physics, non-local or superluminal causality—what Einstein referred to as ‘spooky action at a distance’— is held by some to indicate the existence of the extra-spatiotemporal unity of all things (being), and Nietzsche’s association of such action with magical experience coincides with the striking parallels that are increasingly being recognized between quantum mechanics and eastern mysticism; not least of which, is the extra-spatiotemporal reality corresponding to the cosmic consciousness that is accessed via mystical experience. And as arcane as such experiences may appear to us today, this may not have always been the case. When Martin Buber writes that the causality of the lifeworld of early humanity ‘is not a continuum; it is a force that flashes, strikes, and is effective ever again like lightning’ he supports Kerényi’s suggestion that archaic people possessed more visionary capacities and ‘psychic gifts’ than we do today—indicating that this worldview reflects archaic people’s experiences of discrete visionary inspirations—, but another observation of Buber’s indicates how cosmic consciousness may continue to manifest in everyday life, albeit in more subtle ways: ‘the powerful revelations invoked by the religions are essentially the same as the quiet one that occurs everywhere and at all times.’84 That is, it may be that the cosmic consciousness which manifests in full-blown mystical experiences also manifests more subtly in the philosophically dreamlike subjectivity that Nietzsche describes above, and it’s as conceptualizations of cosmic consciousness that we can understand Nietzsche’s will to power and/or Thales’ water as simultaneously ontological and epistemological concepts. But setting aside these considerations for another time, we’ll here note two final aspects of Thales’  LN §34[247]. GS §60.  Buber 1970, 72, 165–66. Kerényi 1976, 108.

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thought. First, that he helped his Ionian countrymen move beyond the mythic discontinuity of early humans’ lifeworld toward a rational religion by maintaining that the divine shines through the order of the cosmos instead of through its disruption, and second, when read in light of how the earliest Mediterranean civilizations associated the sea with justice, Thales’ view that the gods are aware of all injustice likely indicates that he considered his divine water to be an ethical force as well.85 In this way, despite the implicit world-negation of the Milesians’ view of rebirth, the pervasive positivity of Thales’ life and work shines through and enables us to see him as a personification of the affirmative perspective of the will to power; just as the feminine cyclicity of his worldview enables us to see him as a continuation of the old European partnership tradition. But the possibility of an extra-spatiotemporal reality leads us to the questions of how the will to power either actualizes as the everyday world of space and time or is experienced in events of philosophical inspiration, and in order to address these questions, we’ll turn to one of Thales’ contemporaries who inspired Nietzsche’s onto-phenomenological conception of the eternal return.

§44: Nietzsche’s Anaximander. – 1. Since it can only manifest against resistance, the will to power transmutes into the will to nothingness so that it can then turn upon and cut into itself. This division enables it to actualize as eternally recurring atomic wills (time-atoms) that, as we’ll see in §130, effect their contemporaries via spatial and their successors via temporal action at a distance. In contrast to the affirmative creativity of the artistic will to power, Nietzsche identified the nihilistic analysis of the will to nothingness with the scientific drive for knowledge, and Anaximander (610–540 BCE) embodied this ontological inversion insofar as he was, in many ways, the opposite of Thales. That is, just as Thales both personified the affirmative perspective of the will to power and inspired Nietzsche’s own version of the arche ̄, Anaximander both personified the will to nothingness and inspired Nietzsche’s view of how the will to power manifests as the eternal return. 2. Nietzsche’s neo-orphic reading of Anaximander coincided with nineteenth-century scholars’ dominantly mystical form of interpretation, and this is why his interpretation of Anaximander’s philosophy as arising  Graham 2013, 215. Kwasniewski 1997, 80. Detienne 1999, 56–57. LM P17/DK A1.

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from mystical experience is less idiosyncratic than his mystical reading of Thales.86 For Nietzsche, Anaximander wrote ‘in graven stylized letters, sentence after sentence the witness to fresh illumination each the expression of time spent in sublime meditation,’ and his emphasis on Anaximander’s graven character derives from the nineteenth century’s tendency to ignore the ἀλλήλοις (‘to each other’) in Anaximander’s fragment; this word being restored later by Hermann Diels.87 Without this term, the things in Anaximander’s cosmos appear to pay retribution, not to each other for their previous encroachments, but to the apeiron for the sin of just being born: hence Nietzsche’s interpretation ‘all coming-to-be as though it were an illegitimate emancipation from eternal being, a wrong for which destruction is the only penance,’ and it is with this assessment of Anaximander’s cosmos that Nietzsche aligns him with the nihilism that Nietzsche saw in both eastern thought and the scientific drive for knowledge.88 But he also emphasizes the anti-scientific side of Anaximander’s style. Whereas Thales moved away from philosophy’s mythic precursors toward scientific abstraction, Anaximander moved away from science back to mythology by viewing birth and death in nature in terms of the legal processes of guilt and punishment.89 For Nietzsche, this is what makes Anaximander a predecessor for the Platonic moralization of the cosmos, and he conceived of Anaximander as embodying nihilism by describing him as a true pessimist who dressed all in black.90 3. But as much as this assessment of Anaximander derived from the incompleteness of the text with which Nietzsche was working, he also returned to Anaximander twice in his mature work to offer alternative explanations for this nihilistic assessment of worldly life. The second essay of GM can be read as an interpretation of Anaximander’s fragment, and here Nietzsche offers a socioeconomic explanation: due to the brutal techniques of mnemonics that early humans imposed on each other so as to develop the memory necessary for social cohesion, guilt as well as debt and punishment were inscribed both on peoples’ bodies and minds so much so that they became integral to consciousness itself and this, in turn, led to explicit religious and philosophical teachings like Anaximander’s.91  Mansfeld 2011, 10–11.  PTAG, 45. Gregory 2016, 68. 88  PTAG, 46. 89  EN §23[8]. EN §6[21]. 90  WP §412. PTAG, 45. Wang 2018, 51. 91  Shapiro 1994, 369, 371. GM II §§3–4. 86 87

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Nietzsche also returns to Anaximander in Z’s ‘On Redemption’ where he describes the latter’s pessimistic moralism as being symptomatic of the spirit of revenge that attends the linear view of time: ‘Everything passes away, therefore everything deserves to pass away!    And this itself is justice, this law of time that it must devour its own children’ – thus preached madness.    ‘All things are ordained ethically according to justice and punishment. Alas, where is redemption from the flux of things and from the punishment called existence?’ Thus preached madness.92

In contrast to Thales’ affirmative philosophy with which Nietzsche identified, Anaximander’s madness-driven mysticism may be identified with the philosophical slanderers of the senses that Nietzsche opposed: ‘Anaximander had fled into the womb of the metaphysical “indefinite” to escape the definite qualities’ of the world.93 However, Zarathustra also sought to flee into the womb of the earth, and we can begin to see the positive side of Anaximander when we consider how Nietzsche derived from him the redemptive cyclical theory of time as eternal return. 4. ‘Nietzsche’s most general project is the introduction of the concepts of sense and value into philosophy,’ but he himself attributed the introduction of value to Anaximander: ‘he grasped with bold fingers the tangle of the profoundest problem in ethics. He was the first Greek to do so. How can anything pass away which has a right to be? … he puts a question to all creatures: “What is your existence worth?”’94 Nietzsche saw Anaximander’s moral meditations as a major philosophical breakthrough, and he also attributed a special significance to Anaximander as the main presocratic philosopher—to whom Thales was merely a forerunner— because Anaximander’s discovery of metaphysical being would directly or indirectly influence every subsequent thinker in Nietzsche’s account.95 While he stands on Thales’ shoulders with respect to his less important physical doctrines, Anaximander advanced beyond Thales by positing a principle that is prior to both water and time, and Nietzsche attributes to him a more robust use of reasoning than metonymy: ‘the fundamental idea of Anaximander was indeed that all things that come to be pass away  Z II §20.  PTAG, 58. 94  Deleuze 1983, 1. PTAG, 48. 95  PPP, 185. 92 93

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and thus cannot be a principle; all beings with definite properties are things that come to be, thus true Being must not have all these definite properties.’96 With the introduction of the idea of eternal being, Anaximander rises the crucial issue of time—‘time exists for these individual worlds alone; the Unlimited itself is timeless. A view of the world worthy of serious consideration!’—and Nietzsche’s exclamation here reflects how he himself derived his theory of the eternal return of difference (time-atomism) from Anaximander’s cosmology.97 Greg Whitlock summarizes this theory as follows: ‘for each “individual world” (Individual-­ Welt), or monad, time begins only when it breaks off from the Indefinite and ends only with its own destruction. With a succession of worlds, time begins anew again and again.’98 As the eternal source for an infinite succession of worlds, the apeiron was an important inspiration for Nietzsche’s view of how the will to power manifests as the eternal creation, not of event in time, but of events of time-will-sensation-force; the emergence of each time-atom being the return of the ontological difference of the will to power. (It is the discreteness of these events that prevents them from collapsing into each other and this, in turn, is what enables time to flow.) Just as Nietzsche’s emphasis on the cyclicity of Anaximander’s cosmos brings the latter into closer proximity with the partnership worldview, his suggestion that Anaximander’s strict asceticism was a reaction to the danger of Greek culture succumbing to ‘the flabby creature comforts of life’ places him in the same anti-materialistic tradition of Greek tragedy, Pherecydes and Thales.99 Since Anaximander lived and worked in relatively the same cultural context as Thales, we can now turn directly to the man himself.

§45: Anaximander. – 1. In direct contrast to Thales, who either wrote nothing or wrote very little, we know more about Anaximander’s work than about his life, but what we do know shows that, despites its being based on an incomplete version of Anaximander’s fragment, Nietzsche’s view of the latter’s morbidity was spot on. Wang both maintains that the collective trauma of the  Ibid., 191, 36.  PPP, 33. 98  PPP, 187. 99  PTAG, 48, 59. EN §6[12]. 96 97

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Greek dark ages explains why Anaximander held the Socratic-Christian view of life as original sin and summarizes the latter’s necrophilic departure from Thales as follows: ‘Thales’ focus is merely upon where cosmos and life come from, while Anaximander mainly questions why cosmos and life decay. What stimulates Thales to explore is childlike curiosity, but what triggers Anaximander to contemplate is adult solemnity.’100 A more immediate source of Anaximander’s pessimism is indicated by how the way in which he writes of the wrong perpetrated by the cosmic forces upon one another suggests an exchange of crimes like that which Herodotus presented as the antecedents of the Persian wars.101 It is in this way that, like Hesiod’s Theogony, Anaximander’s cosmogony is a violent affair, but beyond these historical, political, and mythological factors, the influence that folk meteorology exerted on Anaximander was another source for both his concept of cosmic debt and his emphasizing death over birth.102 Terms like ‘borrowed day’ and statements like ‘be it dry or be it wet, the weather’ll always pay its debt’ clearly present weather patterns in terms of financial or moral obligation, and in general, ‘there is a definite tendency in weather lore to take bad weather over good weather as the ultimate cause of weather patterns.’103 When combined with stories about his theatrical pomp and pretentious clothes, Anaximander’s morbidity makes him appear as the prototype of the nihilists in The Big Lebowski, but the likelihood that he held a version of the orphic idea of the soul returning to the god-realm after its release from nature indicates that we can interpret Anaximander as a simultaneously comic and tragic figure insofar as he endorsed a version of the eternal return—the original narrative of Dionysian tragedy.104 2. Eisler’s observation that Anaximander’s concept of the balancing of opposites was foreshadowed in the cosmological imagery of the earlier goddess-worshipping era reminds us that nihilism isn’t necessarily incompatible with partnership, and besides the culture of Miletus, we can discern another potential source for Anaximander’s partnership-orientation in the story that he successfully warned the Lacedaemonians (Spartans) of an impending earthquake.105 Now, since our (primarily external) sources  Wang 2018, 62, 51.  Kahn 1960, 179. 102  Mansfeld 2011, 12. 103  Shelley 2000, 11–12, 9. 104  LM P10/DK A8. McEvilley 2002, 111. Luchte 2011, 119. 105  Eisler 1995, 111. LM P9/DK A5a. 100 101

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for Sparta are often problematic, contradictory, and exhibit an Athenian anti-Spartan bias, our understanding of Spartan society is extremely tenuous, but there are several aspects of the Spartan mirage that indicate how, even though in many ways it appears as a traditionally Greek society, Sparta, like Miletus, may have been an environment that was more conducive for appreciating female perspectives than classical Athens. Spartan men’s preoccupation with war enabled spartan women to live relatively liberated lives: like all Greek women, Spartan women were owners of landed property—even if they could not administer it on their own behalf—and even the dominance of spartan women over their menfolk is attested by a number of sources; there was probably no strict supervision of women’s sexual activities and mothers who had children from more than one husband would have been the dominant stable figure in the family; although statuettes of female nudes are found across Greece, Blundell maintains both that Sparta was also unusual in its production of such statuettes and that this suggests that the Spartans were more accustomed to witnessing displays of female nudity than other Greeks; andfinally, their appreciation of female beauty and intelligence is also evident in how girls received a similar education to that of boys.106 Pherecydes and Thales were both honored in Sparta for their constant singing and philosophizing, but whereas their partnership reforms were theological and cosmological, Anaximander’s was also anthropological.107 In contrast to Hesiod’s portrayal of women being created as a consequence of the separation between men and gods, Anaximander presented men and women as being born at the same time: ‘man no longer has the temporal and logical priority over woman that he possessed in the mythical accounts of the Greeks.’108 3. Just as Anaximander expressed his appreciation of Thales’ positivity by writing that the latter’s memory should be cherished by their children and pupils, his attunement to the nurturing spirit of music is further conveyed in the following anecdote: ‘they say that while he was singing, children made fun of him; and when he found out, he said, “So I must sing better for the sake of the children.”’109 The very nature of his multiverse cosmology indicates that he overcame the egocentric tendency to build the universe around the observer, and this artistic-ethical sensibility is also  Blundell 1995, 151–55.  LM P11, P12. 108  Couprie et al. 2003, 12, 16, 17. Gregory 2016, 49. 109  O’Grady 2016, 2. D. L. 2.4. LM P11/DK A1. 106 107

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evident in both the source of his discoveries and his way of communicating them.110 That none of his main discoveries arose from observations ‘reveals the true character of Anaximander’s achievement as an act of the imagination. Anaximander imagined, for the first time in history, a universe with depth,’ and he used stylistic features like repetition and chiasmus to invest his writing with a solemn hymnal quality which could have transmitted the philosophical gift of imagination to his readers.111 In this way, the poetic nature of Anaximander’s fragment supports Nietzsche’s view that the first philosophers, like Archilochus, composed their works so as to transmit philosophy to others. And that Anaximander also sought to transmit philosophy via the very nature of his cosmology is suggested by how he identified being with the source of philosophical creativity itself; that is, if being is the source of creativity (becoming), then understanding being with facilitate creativity.

§46: The Apeiron. – 1. For several reasons, the definition of Anaximander’s indefinite has itself remained indefinite. Since his pre-aristotelian notion of the arche ̄ was not suited well by later separations between terminology, Anaximander’s intentions were from the start distorted by being interpreted in terms of Aristotle’s conceptual framework—Aristotle’s difficulty with Anaximander may explain the latter’s conspicuous absence from the first book of the Metaphysic where Aristotle ascribes various archai to his predecessors— and things are made even more complex by how the term ἄπειρος has several simultaneous meanings.112 Anaximander had a multivalent notion of arche ̄ and its various non-equivalent interpretations are at play when he considers the role of the apeiron in different contexts, but despite these difficulties, we know enough about Anaximander’s apeiron in order to see its similarities to the partnership reforms of Pherecydes and Thales as well as how it elucidates the way in which events of philosophical inspiration arise from the body.113 2. Although the possibility of eastern influences remains an open question, McEvilley supports his view that Anaximander, like Thales, was  Burch 1949, 151.  Couprie et al. 2003, 238. Granger 2007, 158. 112  Gregory 2016, 85. Sieroka 2017, 257. Kočandrle and Couprie 2017, 12–13. 113  Sieroka 2017, 247, 257. 110 111

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involved in bringing the cultural legacy of the Near East into Greece by noting both that the apeiron has often been compared to the Rg Veda’s Aditi (‘the unlimited’) and that many passages in the Upanishads describe Brahman in terms virtually identical to those used to describe the apeiron, but there were also more direct Greek sources for the apeiron—in Anaximander’s time, money was considered to be an unlimited source of limit and measure.114 Anaximander goes beyond Pherecydes’ eternal gods-­ elements by further distilling the essence of divinity (eternity) into an abstract concept which fulfilled the same cosmic function as Thales’ water—the eternally creative and divine lifeforce that governs, and is one with, the endless succession of cosmic generation and destruction—and that the apeiron is also a formal variation on the myths of feminine cyclicity is suggested by its role as the nurturing source and destination of rebirth.115 Returning to the apeiron amounts to a sort of divinization, and Charles Kahn notes both that Anaximander’s fragment does not announce that the return to the apeiron is an absolute end or death and that the apeiron functions as a source of sustenance for the world.116 Pindar’s declaration that the best future incarnations will be for those from whom Persephone accepts compensation for ancient grief suggests an orphic source for Anaximander’s notion of cosmic debt which would also coincide with his negative view of worldly life, and as with Thales’ term for water, the neutrality of the term τò ἄπειρον does not necessarily prevent us from interpreting the latter as a symbolic or allegorical representation of an orphic goddess.117 There is perhaps a feminine aspect in Simplicius’ speaking of ϕúσις ἄπειρον, and Grosz emphasizes the apeiron’s femininity in the following way: ‘it is the continuing source, a kind of feminine or maternal principle (!) that gives birth to whatever can be.’118 3. Insofar as water or the sea was said to be apeiros, Anaximander can be seen as building on Thales’ hypothesis, but he also makes two important advances beyond Thales.119 First, Thales didn’t think that there was an unlimited quantity of water, and whereas his theological step was to extract immortality as the essence of divinity, Anaximander’s philosophical step was to extract infinity as the essence of immortality: besides being  McEvilley 2002, 31–33. Seaford 2004, 197.  Kočandrle and Couprie 2017, 12, 55–56. Drozdek 2007, 12. 116  Kahn 1960, 183, 233. 117  Bremmer 2001, 21. 118  Grosz 2017, 284 note 4. 119  Sieroka 2017, 246. 114 115

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eternal, the apeiron is a spatially infinite mass of imperceptible subtle matter that encompasses an infinite number of worlds.120 Secondly, Anaximander explicates the implicit morality and rationality of Thales’ water when he writes that the apeiron not only surrounds all things but also steers all things—qua steering, the apeiron is both a rational and moral infinity, and this accounts for Anaximander’s emphasis on the regularity of the generation and destruction of worlds.121 Although we may be able to identify the apeiron with moira insofar as both are feminine principles that guide or determine the fate of all things in the world, its identification with Metis also becomes plausible when we consider how the apeiron in effect functions as the mother of the gods. That the Hippocratics spoke of the body as desiring penalty or retribution in one quality after overdosing on another quality implies that Anaximander considered the apeiron to be a cosmic organism with inner health and self-regulatory mechanisms, and Cicero intimates the maternal productivity of this cosmic body when he identifies the innumerable worlds that the apeiron produces with the gods who are born and eventually die.122 Dirk L. Couprie’s discussion of the various archetypal images in Anaximander’s cosmology suggests that the apeiron may also symbolize the artistic creativity of the animal body as such; that the concept of the apeiron not only originated from the unconscious creativity of Anaximander’s body—like Thales’ archetypal water—but also symbolizes the process of somatic self-­signifying creativity as such.123 In fact, another influence on Anaximander indicates the body’s specifically philosophical form of creativity. 4. In Homer and Hesiod, the terms ἄπειρος, ἀπείρων, and ἀπείριτος were widely used to describe objects like the sea or earth as being experienced as being indefinite, and in order to understand Anaximander’s apeiron, we must consider how these notions practically figured in everyday contexts.124 As the opposite of ἔμπειρος (empirically accessible experience), ἄπειρος describes something being experienced as either inexhaustible by human standards or going beyond one’s experience—just as the irrational rhythms of Greek music reside at the ecstatic limit of sensation, the apeiron expresses the limits of mortals’ experiential capacities  Dancy 1989, 151. Drozdek 2007, 8, 11.  LM D9/DK A15, B3. Drozdek 2008, 12. Drozdek 2001, 112–13. Finkelberg 1994, 495. 122  McEvilley 2002, 31. LM D18/DK A17. 123  Couprie 2016. 124  Sieroka 2017, 251, 243. 120 121

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beyond which only the gods can go—and this coincides with Merleau-­ Ponty’s view of the body as the invisible limit and precondition of experience: ‘one’s body is not just any structure, but the structure conditioning all perception and experienced structures …. If certain traumatic wounds sustain their intractable fate due to the extraordinary horror that bore them, the lived body sustains its originary invisibility due to the necessary and ordinary structures that condition all perceived structures.’125 It is in this way that Nietzsche’s pursuit of the Dionysian subrepresentational could be understood as both a therapeutic attempt to confront the traumatic loss of his father and as an exploration of the myriad somatic drives that form the invisible substrate of sentient experience, but indefiniteness characterizes the goal of somatic creativity as much as its source: ‘animal behavior if oriented to self-signification, is nevertheless an indeterminate directedness—that is, its intended object remains constitutively indeterminate.’126 In other words, whereas the apeiron, as a subtle and imperceptible form of matter, reflects the oneiric lucidity of philosophical subjectivity (an intermediary being occupying the interval between mind and matter, subject and object), Anaximander’s view of cosmogenesis, as the flow from the formless apeiron to a formed world and then back to the apeiron, reflects the event of philosophical inspiration as a flow from the invisible depths of the body, through representational consciousness, to a yet-to-be-determined product. The philosophical suspicion that the word of individuation is a mere veil for an underlying unity arises as this unity (being) flows through and disrupts one’s own individuality. Norman Sieroka elucidates the philosophical nature of such events as follows: ‘the experience of things as being inexhaustible or untraversable gives rise to a concept’; ‘it is the experience and acknowledgement of the limits and horizons of daily life that give rise to the introduction of abstract objects and theoretical entities that do not form a direct part of daily life.’127 5. Just as, in order to make sense of the world, early humans created myths which, in turn, enabled communal solidarity to expand beyond previous limitations, the body, in order to orient itself in the world, creates concepts which, in turn, enable one’s mind to expand beyond one’s own experiences. And just as Metis personifies both the all-nourishing lifeforce and a more tender wisdom; and the will to power represents both the  Ibid., 256, 248, 258. Kočandrle and Couprie 2017, 15–16. Brown 2006, 142–43.  Ibid., 124. 127  Sieroka 2019, 17, 20. 125 126

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Dionysian reality that exists within (not behind) sensation and a dreamlike subjectivity that blurs the distinction between representational dualisms like subject-object, life-death; and the eternal return refers to both the way in which the will to power actualizes itself as individual wills and an extreme manifestation of philosophical inspiration, Anaximander’s apeiron is simultaneously ontological and phenomenological—the foundation of his cosmology and a description of the experience of indefiniteness that incites the body to create concepts and/or cosmologies in the first place. (The similarity between Anaximander’s quiet philosophical revelation and Nietzsche’s mystical vision of the eternal return becomes even more uncanny when we keep in mind that apeiron also means circle.)128 That Anaximander’s cosmology is specifically an expression of the sexual creativity of the body is evident in his description of the cosmogenetic event.

§47: Orgasmogony. – 1. Echoing Hesiod’s genealogical theocosmology, Pherecydes’ portrayal of the gods as being born from the seed of Chronos, and Thales’ deriving his water hypothesis from the moisture of semen and eggs, Anaximander continues the tradition of biological cosmology by describing the cosmos as emerging via the ejaculation (ἀποκρίνεσθαι) of a seed (γóνιμον) which, in turn, produced fire and air—the latter being Anaximander’s conception of soul.129 After this cosmogonic event, fire grew around air like bark around a tree, and the term which Anaximander uses for this bark (ϕολιóν) intimates a possibly feminine aspect of his cosmogony.130 This term is used to denote smooth shells, husks, or skins like that of snake eggs, and although it can certainly be argued that ϕολιóν does not refer to an embryo in the womb, Radim Kočandrle and Couprie suggest that Anaximander may have been comparing the bark of the world to ‘an amniotic or embryo sac formed around eggs or more generally around the embryos of animals or plants.’131 Both the presocratics’ propensity for conceptual innovation—as we shall see, Parmenides, who was likely influenced by Anaximander, explicitly used traditional terms in new ways—and the maternal aspects of the apeiron, indicate that reading Anaximander as  McEvilley 2002, 32.  LM D8/DK A10. Kahn 1960, 156. Mansfeld 2011, 18. 130  LM D37/DK A29. Burch 1949, 157. 131  Kočandrle and Couprie 2017, 70. 128 129

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comparing the formation of a world to the development of an embryo in the womb is not entirely out of bounds. If, according to the Hippocratics, the moist seed was solidified by the heat of the womb into which it was separated, then we may read Anaximander’s cosmic fire as a feminine principle, and that his embryo-cosmogony was his body’s attempt at a partnership religious reform is implied by three factors: first, his using the embryo as a more scientific substitute for the cosmic egg suggests that the former may be another symbolic permutation of Metis; secondly, Dionysus was also considered to be the protector of zoë qua embryo as ‘the most direct manifestation of life, something which only women can experience’; third, the image of bark surrounding a tree evokes something more like protection or shelter rather than rivalry or antagonism, and this indicates that at least Anaximander’s cosmos originated in cooperation instead of violence.132 By drying up the originally moist air, the fiery membrane transformed it into the sea and the earth, and at some point, fire broke away from air and became the heavenly bodies qua the several concentric wheels of fire surrounded by opaque air except for several openings which let the fire shine through as the light of the sun, moon, and stars.133 2. It is within this fully formed cosmos that forces pay the penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the order of time, and Kočandrle and Couprie convey the violence of this process by comparing it to a line in Shakespeare’s Othello (‘cannibals who eat each other’) so that any cooperation (harmony) within Anaximander’s cosmos is really just a mask for hidden conflict (dissonance): ‘the conflicting character of cosmic forces is something that can remain hidden for a long time, even for ages, behind the mask of creative and helpful cooperation.’134 Besides these local skirmishes, the sun’s continual drying out of the earth and sea constitutes a global injustice for which all will pay. It is the process of the cosmos being re-absorbed back into the apeiron insofar as, when all the moisture has been consumed by the fire of the sun, the fire itself dies out and the earth, no longer held together by moisture, will crumble and vanish.135 Air and fire recombine into a destructive counterpart of the productive γóνιμον and return to the apeiron only to be reborn, and while Anaximander’s name is also conspicuously absent from Aristotle’s list of  Baldry 1932, 27. Kerényi 1976, 109. Kočandrle and Couprie 2017, 76.  Drozdek 2001, 109. LM D36/DK A27. 134  LM D6/DK A9, B1. Kočandrle and Couprie 2017, 93–95. 135  Mansfeld 2011, 17, 24. Panayides 2010, 292. 132 133

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those who held the view of multiple successive worlds, the infinite creativity of the apeiron is good reason to think that Anaximander posited an infinite number of successive and coexisting worlds; another reason being the principle of sufficient reason: ‘if the apeiron originative substance generated a world in one place, it would generate worlds elsewhere too— without limit. But it did generate our world here, so it did generate others elsewhere.’136 And the partnership impetus for Anaximander’s cosmos helps explain its democratic structure.

§48: Cosmology as Activism. – 1. Anaximander’s participation in the partnership tradition is further supported by his projection of an ideal democratic politics onto the cosmos: ‘the apeiron surrounds and steers. So political/cosmic power is not vested in one individual, but in the mass which surrounds the centre. So politically decisions flow from the masses surrounding the centre of the agora, in cosmic terms the steering comes from that which surrounds.’137 In contrast to both the domineering nature of traditional theogony and the materialism of the sophists, the democratic-partnership ethos of Anaximander’s cosmology is further conveyed by how it continues the anti-materialism of Pherecydes and Thales. In his fragment, justice seems to be concerned, not with political arrangements, but with possessions or disputes about ownership, and this supports Nietzsche’s suggestion that Anaximander’s asceticism was a response to the dangers of cultural materialism. Gerard Naddaf illustrates how Anaximander’s anti-materialism was also built into the structure of his cosmos by comparing him with Phocylides (born 560 BCE)—a Milesian gnomic poet who was expressly against extreme forms of wealth. Naddaf maintains that, along with Thales, Anaximander expressed a similar emphasis on balance or moderation in the isonomia of his cosmological model in which the cylindrical earth rests in the middle of the celestial circumference.138 2. Despite its violence, Anaximander envisaged his cosmos as being fundamentally good qua well-ordered, and his specifically mathematical way of conceiving of the design and structure of the cosmos was inspired by the sacred architecture of his day. Just as Cretan palaces like those at  Ibid., 294. Drozdek 2008, 14–15. McKirahan 2001, 61.  Gregory 2016, 138, 212. 138  Gregory 2016, 77. Couprie et al. 2003, 62 note 76, 31. 136 137

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Knossos seem to reproduce the cosmos, Anaximander adapted and applied architectural techniques to his cosmic thought, and the formative power which number had for the Greeks explains why the use of architectural mathematics contributed to both the organic and poetic nature of Anaximander’s cosmos.139 Temples were conceived of as growing like living organisms according to the formative power of number—the ratio 3:2 being linked with a female principle of generation—and this is why they could be experienced as visible poetry: ‘like epic poetry, whose literal meaning is delivered not by syllables but by larger units—the verses expressed in cola—architectural meanings are expressed, analogously, in larger units such as the proportions of column diameter to height … the monumental temples, like the poet’s verse moves us, each in their own special dance.’140 It seems as though Anaximander sought to transmit the sense of wonder or meaningfulness that characterizes philosophical subjectivity through both the poetic nature of his prose and the harmonious structure of his cosmology, and the inspirational effect of Anaximander’s mathematical artistry may account for the story that Pythagoras ordered that Anaximander speak first in the assembly of philosophers.141 (Hippolytus’ statement that the openings in the air surrounding the heavenly wheels served as ‘orifices as in an aulos’ also suggests that these openings made sounds as they revolved, and thus that Anaximander foreshadowed Pythagoras’ notion of the harmony of the spheres.)142 By continuing our exploration of femininity and rebirth in Pythagoras and Heraclitus, we will further describe how, through either one’s lifestyle, cosmology, or writing, one can transmit philosophy to one’s friends and readers.

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Blundell, Sue. 1995. Women in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bremmer, Jan N. 2001. The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Brown, Kristen. 2006. Nietzsche and Embodiment: Discerning Bodies and Non-­ Dualism. Albany: SUNY Press. Buber, Martin. 1970. I and Thou. New York: Simon & Schuster. Burch, George Bosworth. 1949. Anaximander, the First Metaphysician. The Review of Metaphysics 3 (2): 137–160. Burkert, Walter. 1985. Greek Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Campbell, Joseph. 1991. Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God. New York: Penguin. Caygill, Howard. 1993. Philosophy and Cultural Reform in the Early Nietzsche. In The Fate of the New Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Howard Caygill, 109–122. Aldershot: Ashgate. Chrystal, Paul. 2017. Women in Ancient Greece. United Kingdom: Fonthill. Couprie, Dirk L. 2016. Archetypal Images in Anaximander’s Phenomenological Cosmology. Athens. http://enlightenedionia.siu.edu/?page_id=94#couprie Couprie, Dirk L., Robert Hahn, and Gerard Naddaf. 2003. Anaximander in Context: New Studies in the Origins of Greek Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press. Dancy, R.M. 1989. Thales, Anaximander, and Infinity. Apeiron 22 (3): 149–190. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press. Detienne, Marcel. 1999. The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books. Drozdek, Adam. 2001. Anaximander: Theological Provenance of the Apeiron. Giornale de Metafisica: Revista Bimestrale Di Filosofia 23 (1): 103–118. ———. 2007. Greek Philosophers as Theologians: The Divine Arche. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2008. In the Beginning Was the Apeiron: Infinity in Greek Philosophy. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart. Edmonds III. 2013. Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisler, Riane. 1995. The Chalice & the Blade: Our History, Our Future. New York: HarperCollins Publishing. Eisler, Riane, and Douglas P.  Fry. 2019. Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finkelberg, Aryeh. 1986. On the Unity of Orphic and Milesian Thought. The Harvard Theological Review 79 (4): 321–335. ———. 1994. Plural Worlds in Anaximander. American Journal of Philology 115 (4): 485–506.

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CHAPTER 4

Pythagoras and Heraclitus

§49: Silent Harmony and Enigmatic Dissonance. – The question of ‘how does one transmit philosophy?’ is similar to one of the most important and difficult questions any philosopher or educator can ask—‘how can one teach people to think for themselves?’ If philosophical subjectivity and/or inspiration is akin to both artistic creativity and ethical-emotional intelligence, then the above questions can also be understood as a variation of another age-old question—‘how can one teach virtue?’ ‘Style is the selective transmitting medium of Nietzsche’s philosophic intention’, and in this chapter, we will discuss his readings of Pythagoras and Heraclitus so as to unearth two roots of, not only the style and content of his work, but his unity of style and content.1 Again, the discussion of each Greek philosopher in this chapter will follow the same basic pattern as the last chapter: first, Nietzsche’s interpretation; then, historical and/or biographical context of the philosopher in question; and finally, the themes of femininity and rebirth in what we have of the philosopher’s work. Besides seeing how each philosopher inspired different aspects of Nietzsche’s writing style, we will discuss Pythagoras/the Pythagoreans’ method of transmitting philosophy via lifestyle and cosmology as well as Heraclitus’ method of transmitting philosophy via lifestyle, cosmology, and writing. 1

 Babich 1994, 26.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Breidenstein Jr., Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44780-8_4

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§50: Nietzsche’s Pythagoras. – Heraclitus’ polemics against Pythagoras (570-490 BCE) led Nietzsche to treat the latter dismissively in the sense that, for Nietzsche, Pythagoras was a minor and inauthentic figure who made no contribution to presocratic thought—‘he was not a philosopher at all.’2 Although it was not until the second half of the 1880s that Nietzsche linked Pythagoreanism with the Christian depreciation of the senses, his early sketches equate Pythagoras with the eastern nihilism that he saw in both Christianity and orphism: ‘it is absolutely certain that he shared the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul and certain religious observances with the Orphics …. He teaches to conceive earthly existence as punishment for a prior transgression.’3 But Nietzsche also acknowledged Pythagoras’ more life-affirming side. He argued that it was the belief in rebirth that led Pythagoras back to other humans for their redemption; that it was Pythagoras’ modesty which led him to coin the term ‘philosopher’ instead of claiming to already possess wisdom; and that Pythagoras’ asceticism was, like Anaximander’s, a response to the dangers of materialism.4 Nietzsche’s affinity for Pythagoras is evident in how he mentions him as a representative of the majesty of sixth-century Greece, and he even acknowledges Pythagoras as the primary religious reformer of archaic Greece: ‘I believe that without the Persian wars the idea of centralization would have been obtained through a reformation of the mind—Pythagoras? What mattered then was the unity of celebrations and worship: and this is where the reform would have begun.’5 If any presocratic would have been able to institute a successful religious reform, it would have been Pythagoras, and Nietzsche even saw Pythagoras’ failure as really being a sign of Greece’s cultural sophistication instead of as an example of the latter’s political ineffectiveness: ‘one may always infer a high level of culture when powerful and domineering natures only manage to have a slight and sectarian influence.’6 Pythagoras is an important figure in Nietzsche’s reading of the presocratics because, whereas previous historians had taken Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans to be roughly contemporary, Nietzsche made a sharp distinction between  Wilkerson 2006, 47 note 22, 136, 140. PPP, 44.  Biebuyck et al. 2004, 157. PTAG, 81. PPP, 204, 47. 4  PTAG, 66–67. GS §351. EN §6[12]. 5  BT §11. EN §6[30]. 6  GS §149. 2 3

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the cult leader and the scientific community which later bore Pythagoras’ name.7 Nietzsche’s new chronology presents this community as the culmination of the emerging natural scientific insights of the period, and his engagement with the neo-­Pythagoreans also brought his theory of timeatomism further in line with the implicit rationality of Metis-water by enabling him to overcome what he saw as the problematic metaphysicalphysical dualism of Anaximander.8

§51: Nietzsche’s Pythagoreans. – Nietzsche saw the Pythagoreans as responding to Eleatic monism by positing a pre-ontological dualism with which they could account for worldly multiplicity: ‘the Eleatics say: “There is no Not-­Being, thus all things are a oneness.” The Pythagoreans say in contrast: oneness itself is the result of something being and not being, hence Not-­Being certainly exists, and then, in addition, multiplicity.’9 Since oneness is itself something that has come to be from two principles, it can produce worldly multiplicity, and although Nietzsche identifies Pythagorean not-­being with Anaximander’s apeiron, he also held that the Pythagoreans burned a bridge with Anaximander by calling the unlimited ‘the even.’10 For Nietzsche, this mathematical orientation also led the Pythagoreans to develop the foundation of modern science by reducing all qualities to quantities: ‘now the field of chemistry and that of the natural sciences rigorously strive to find the mathematical formula for absolutely impenetrable forces. In this sense, our science is Pythagorean!’11 Nietzsche conveys the fundamentally musical nature of the Pythagorean worldview when he writes ‘everything is number, everything is harmony, because every definite number is a harmony of the even and the odd,’ and the importance of this worldview for Nietzsche’s own onto-cosmology becomes clear when we keep in mind that he saw the scientific ­speculations of presocratic philosophy as culminating in the Pythagoreans’ mathematical atomism: ‘he viewed the will as a calculating, intelligent, everchanging quantitative force whose most immediate expression is music  PPP, 203.  PPP, xlv. 9  PPP, 132. 10  PPP, 131–33. 11  PPP, 140. 7 8

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and the world as a mass of points in motion, creating lines, surfaces, bodies, and hyperspace …. It was the fifth-century Pythagorean atmosphere that made this possible.’12 Whereas Anaximander’s cosmology inspired Nietzsche’s view of the eternal return of difference qua the indefinitely recurring production of time-atoms which effect later atoms via temporal action at a distance, Pythagorean science inspired his view of how the will to power operates within a given world via the spatial action at a distance between centers of force-will, and he also argued that the will’s mathematical rationality resolved Anaximander’s ontological dualism between being and becoming: ‘the basic idea is the matter considered to be entirely without quality becomes this and that various quality by way of numerical relations alone. So Anaximander’s problem is answered. Becoming appeared as a calculating?’13 Events are no longer just events of time but also events of the order of time by which being steers the interplay of cosmic forces, and it is in this way that Nietzsche synthesized being and becoming, not just through the notion of return, but also by maintaining that becoming possesses an inherent eternal structure—the indefinite continuum of numerical-musical ratios-proportions (being) that determines both the primordial structure of perception and the qualitative manifestations of the inexhaustible lifeforce (becoming). Hence the correlation between the state of the spirit of music and the event of the mystical intuition of being, but in order to see how Nietzsche sought to transmit this to his readers, we must consider his stylistic use of both music and silence.

§52: Notes Unplayed. – ‘The Greeks, as a voluble and disputatious people, could therefore endure music only as a seasoning … the Pythagoreans, those exceptions among the Greeks in many respects, were reportedly also great musicians: they who invented the five-year silence.’14 All of Nietzsche’s published texts were composed musically according to what Babich has called Nietzsche’s concinnity—a composer’s style the architectural smoothness of which requires the reader to participate in Nietzsche’s musical project like singers in a chorus—and concinnity is an integral part of the double valancing of  PPP, 136, 252.  PPP, 141. 14  WS §167. 12 13

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Nietzsche’s style according to which he is able to appeal broadly to many people while selectively conveying esoteric ideas to those who possess the right musical-philosophical sensibility: ‘Nietzsche’s style sounds out the “right” readers with, as he puts it, an “ear” for the “music,” the tempo, the rhythm of Nietzsche’s text.’15 Silence is an essential part of Nietzsche’s concinnity insofar as his texts oscillate in a dialectic of saying and unsaying that transmits the dynamism of philosophical subjectivity by conveying the experience of continual somatic rebirth: this dialectic ‘acts as a structural metaphor for the so-­called self, unconscious body, and the external world about which we can say almost nothing for certain’; ‘it directs us to a motion that posits and de-posits, creates, and destroys, a motion that may eventually subject saying and unsaying itself as a metaphysical limit to its own movement.’16 That is, Nietzsche’s style of deconstructing his own assertions both conveys the philosophical capacity to reflect on one’s previously unquestioned assumptions and mirrors the content of his own worldview—that the world is made, not of facts, but of the mutually competing and cooperating interpretations projected by centers of forces. Both saying and unsaying are simultaneously present in his presentation of the eternal return in GS §341 insofar as this aphorism is characterized by what Babich refers to as aposematic aposiopesis—a kind of incomplete suggestion or hypothetical subjunctive mood that is deliberately left incomplete so as to tempt the reader to think for herself thereby invoking the philosophical event and/or the eternal return: again, the style (aposematic aposiopesis) is unified with the content (eternal return).17 But Nietzsche’s loudest silence regarding the eternal return concerns its orphic-Pythagorean inspiration: ‘Nietzsche associated the figure of Dionysus directly with the religious-­philosophical cluster of ideas formed by the Orphic anthropology of metempsychosis, its most prominent advocate Pythagoras, and the Pythagorean cosmology of the “circle of necessity.” Yet he says nothing about this background.’18 Nietzsche wanted to distance his affirmative interpretation of rebirth from what he saw as orphic-Pythagorean ­nihilism, but this silence is also an acknowledgment of his debt to Pythagoras—‘A school for speakers. – If one stays silent for a year one unlearns chattering and learns to speak. The Pythagoreans were  Babich 1994, 17–18, 4, 29.  Brown 2006, 106, 119. 17  Del Caro 2004, 110. 18  Biebuyck et al. 2004, 152. 15 16

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the finest statesmen of their age.’19 After this aphorism, Nietzsche stopped writing publicly about Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, and this is an example of both how he used silence to honor Pythagoras and of how Nietzsche’s texts can speak directly to those who approach them with a sufficiently philosophical ear. But it remains to be seen if his assessment of Pythagoras’ character was as accurate as his interpretation of Thales, and Anaximander.

§53: The Man with the Goddess Tattoo. – The first mention we have of Pythagoras is from a contemporary of his who reports a story strikingly similar to that of Nietzsche’s mental collapse: ‘one day, passing a puppy being thrashed, they say he pitied the whelp and cried out, “Stop, don’t strike! For it’s the soul of a dear man—I recognized him by his yelp.”’20 Here, Xenophanes is satirizing Pythagoras’ doctrine of transmigration which was nevertheless compatible with Xenophanes’ own theology, but the dominator impetus behind such trivializations of rebirth is more explicit in Dicaearchus’ derisive report that Pythagoras was the prostitute Alco in one of his previous incarnations.21 The reports that portray Pythagoras as a self-promoter who was referred to as ‘that man’—as if he considered people to be unworthy of calling him by his name—and who, like a Persian king, maintained a custom of speaking to his disciples from behind a curtain portray Pythagoras as a prima donna who was just asking to be satirized, but Xenophanes’ and Dicaearchus’ stories also highlight how central rebirth was to Pythagoras’ own identity.22 Like Pherecydes—who is reported to have been Pythagoras’ teacher and who the latter allegedly buried at Delos— Pythagoras personifies the centrality of rebirth for presocratic philosophy insofar as he was thought to have both introduced transmigration into Greece and to have coined the term ‘philosophy,’ but he was even more of a legendary figure than Pherecydes.23 Besides the story that he was a son of Hermes who received the ability of past-life recollection as a gift from the god, he was  D §347.  D. L. VIII.36. 21  Zhmud 2012, 30. Huffman 2014, 282. 22  Dodds 1951, 145. Zhmud 2012, 187. Kingsley 2010, 154. 23  LM P12, P13. Zhmud 2012, 79–80. LM P44c, D7, D9a. 19 20

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also thought to be the incarnation of Hyperborean Apollo—Peter Kingsley argues both that Pythagoras showed the hyperborean shaman Abaris his golden thigh as proof of his being Hyperborean Apollo and that this gold member links Pythagoras to the central Asian shamanic traditions of ritual death, dismemberment, and rebirth.24 Although Nietzsche’s Apollonianism is as clandestine as his Pythagoreanism, he intimates the presence of both in his own attempt at religious reform when, in the preface to AC, he states ‘let us look ourselves in the face. We are Hyperboreans,’ but while he uses the story of Pythagoras’ golden thigh as an example of what happens when monumental history dominates over the other historical modes, he does not mention that myths repeatedly tell of the favorite of the great mother being wounded in the thigh (Adonis).25 The golden thigh was specifically linked with Demeter cults where men who dedicated themselves to magna mater received her seal by having their bodies engraved with burning needles: ‘there we have tattooing and golden limb connected, in the cult of Meter …. The oldest instance is the golden thigh of Pythagoras. It marked him as an initiate, as a mystic or hierophant of Meter.’26 Others like Shé Hawke count Pythagoras as an adept in the sacred lineage of Metis and this coincides with the fact that he ‘has been called the “feminist philosopher” because much of his oeuvre was influenced by various women.’27 Even more than Cleobuline’s influence on Thales, with Pythagoras, we have a clear indication of the foundational role that women had in the origin of western philosophy, and in contrast to Nietzsche’s dismissal of Pythagoras, Gadamer intimates the pervasive partnership of early Greek philosophy when he notes that all of the presocratics were portrayed as followers of Pythagoras.28 It is in this way that we can see Pythagoras as also personifying the centrality of partnership for presocratic philosophy even though his hometown was overseen by an often domineering goddess.

 LM P37, P34. Kingsley 2010, 10, 121, 155.  AC P§1. UAHL §2. Burkert 1972, 160. 26  Burkert 2013, 110. 27  Hawke 2018, 46. Chrystal 2017, 117. 28  Gadamer 2016, 29. 24 25

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§54: Samos. – Pythagoras’ birthplace succeeded Miletus as the most powerful commercial center of the eastern Aegean, and although Pythagoras allegedly fled Samos because of the tyranny of Polycrates, the latter’s reign over the island from about 540–522  BCE was very favorable—there were large scale construction projects, a flourishing economy, and like many tyrants, Polycrates patronized talented people.29 Hera was the patron deity of all of Samos and her cult importance encompassed both the feminine-domestic sphere and the protection of the entire city. She’s not the archetypal wife insofar as she is rebellious and even threatening at times, and just as her independence from Zeus is illustrated in her giving birth to her own parthenogenetic child (Typhon), her superiority to Zeus is indicated by the latter being referred to as ‘Zeus Heraios’—an epithet that strongly implies that Zeus was perceived as Hera’s consort.’30 While, at Olympia, she led an all-female festival, at Samos, she was closely linked with political and military functions, and a bronze horse piece that made its way from northern Syria to her Samian sanctuary links her with the same hierarchy of nature and conflation of danger and sexuality that constituted the warrior ideology of the mistress of the animals.31 As the goddess of marriage, Hera is linked with the growing control that poleis were exerting on women’s lives, and Burkert’s interpretation of the Pythagoreans as a protest movement against the polis helps explain why Pythagoras is linked more closely with Demeter than Hera.32

§55: The Oracle. – Instead of taking up an Aryan-Indian view of rebirth from Pherecydes, the roots of Pythagoras’ doctrine of transmigration go back to the Demeter cult of which he presented himself as a hierophant. This cult was influenced by traditions originating in Asia Minor, and while it is well known that his house in Metapontum was called ‘the temple of Demeter,’ the story that beans (a gift from the underworld) angered Demeter by continuing to grow despite her curse on the earth also suggests that the famous Pythagorean bean taboo may be another indication of his  Seaford 2004, 267. LM P5. Zhmud 2012, 81.  Clark 1998, 14, 15, 17. 31  Ibid., 19, 14. Marinatos 2000, 23. 32  Burkert 1985, 303. 29 30

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allegiance to the mother goddess, but the identity of the actual woman who is perhaps most responsible for Pythagoras’ philosophical success is intimated by Diogenes Laertius’ albeit questionable etymology of Pythios which links Pythagoras with the Delphic oracle: ‘Themistoclea (fl. Sixth century BCE) was a priestess at Delphi and Pythagoras’ teacher. Diogenes Laertius … asserts that Themistoclea taught Pythagoras most of what he knew; Porphyry (233–305 CE) says the same’; ‘Aristoxenus also says that Pythagoras derived most of his ethical doctrines from Themistocleia of Delphi.’33 That is, behind arguably the most influential presocratic philosopher stood a woman who, as a Delphic priestess, stood in a long line of visionary women whose Dionysian lineage extends back into the bronze age and possibly the neolithic. It may be argued that it was the voice of Apollo that spoke through the priestess that really mattered, but our sources do stress the priestess, and besides her, we certainly should not discount the influence of Pythagoras’ mother.

§56: The Pythagorases. – As a family man, Pythagoras was unique among the presocratics.34 The story that his father Mnesarchus was a simple gem-­cutter was invented by Hermippus and developed in the scholarly literature which linked it with the rise of incuse coins in southern Italy after the arrival of Pythagoras who was supposedly familiar with the engraver’s trade, but that his father was really a wealthy merchant coincides more with Apollonius’ report that his mother Pythaïs was a descendent of Ancaeus, the founder of Samos.35 Hermippus’ story that, while in the underground chamber of his house in Croton, Pythagoras had his mother send him messages so that he could amaze the Crotonians when he later emerged may simply reflect the revelations that Pythagoras received from Demeter during his mediational katabases (incubation), but the point is that with Pythagoras, as with Thales, we have evidence of a prominent mother who likely contributed to Pythagoras’ success.36 Pythagoras’ wife Theano was of Cretan origin as well as a philosopher in her own right insofar as she expounded 33  Burkert 2013, 113. LM P46a. Kerényi 1967, 193 note 1. Luchte 2009, 91. Chrystal 2017, 117. LM P16. Rowett 2014, 113. 34  Zhmud 2012, 103. 35  Ibid., 78–79. LM P8. 36  Burkert 2013, 112–13.

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on number theory and wrote a maxim discussing the immortality and transmigration of souls; in On Piety, she spoke of the differences between men and women, encouraged women to be temperate and faithful to their husbands, and emphasized the societal importance of women: ‘it fell to woman to uphold law, justice, and domestic harmony; failure to do so led to chaos and disorder in society.’37 Pythagoras’ daughter Damo seems to have been a natural born leader insofar as she was the head of the girls in Croton and, when she grew up, head of the women. Her philosophical anti-materialism is illustrated in how, after inheriting her father’s works, she refused to sell them and lived a life of poverty as a consequence, but Pythagoras and Theano had other prominent daughters as well: Myia married Milon of Croton and was known for her exemplary religious behavior and emphasis on female temperance—Lucian said that he would be happy to say many things about her if her life story wasn’t already so well-known; Aresa may have been the same woman as Aesara of Lucania, a Pythagorean philosopher who taught that we could understand the basis for natural laws and morality by studying human nature and the soul; and Arignote or Arignota who wrote on the mysteries of Demeter and rites of Dionysus.38 Finally, Pythagoras’ son and successor Telaugues was thought by some to be the teacher of Empedocles, but Pythagoras’ influence extended far beyond his family.39

§57: Croton. – 1. Pythagoras may have left Samos around 530 BCE for different reasons than fleeing Polycrates. After nursing Pherecydes through the latter’s final illness, he may have gone to Apollo’s oracle at Delphi whose cosmopolitan interest in the cities of Italy and Greece directed Pythagoras to visit Croton, but in contrast to the reports of his instant success, it seems more probable that he achieved gradual recognition through his pedagogical skills: He had such an effect upon the city of the Crotonians that after he had won over the souls of the council of elders by delivering long and fine speeches, he in turn bestowed upon the young men, at the request of the magistrates,  LM P11. Chrystal 2017, 118.  LM T22. Chrystal 2017, 118–20. 39  LM P10. 37 38

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advice adapted to their age, and after this upon the children … and then upon the women, and he organized an assembly of women.40

Nietzsche’s early view that the presocratic philosophers instinctively worked toward a healing of their communities is supported by how, during Pythagoras’ lifetime, the physicians of Croton enjoyed the greatest renown: although Pythagoras seems to have been primarily interested in the physics and mathematics of music, Iamblichus discusses his use of music as both a means of treating mental illness and as an educational device.41 Just as this further supports our account of philosophy as being born from the nurturing spirit of music, Pythagoras’ intellectual inclusion of women supports our position on partnership as first philosophy— ‘Pythagoreansim welcomed women philosophers; some of the first female philosophers that we have extant texts from followed Pythagoras’—but it seems to be his emphasis on the importance of female sexuality in particular that won him the admirations of the Crotonians: ‘when he descended to Hades he saw … that those who did not want to have sexual intercourse with their own wives were punished; and this is precisely why the Crotonians honored him.’42 Although the fact that Greek husbands were expected to have sex with their wives so as to produce legitimate children suggests that this story may be an example of Pythagoras’ ethical or sexual conservativism, the prominent and positive position of women in the biographical material make it difficult to deny this story’s partnership significance; conservativism and partnership not being mutually exclusive. 2. Perhaps even more than any philosopher we have looked at so far, Pythagoras also personifies the anti-materialistic sentiment that characterizes philosophical subjectivity, and the story of his conversation with Leon (tyrant of Phlius) ties anti-materialism directly to rebirth and the origin of philosophy. After Leon asked him what wisdom he possessed, Pythagoras replied that he knew no wisdom and instead was a wisdom-lover (philosophos), and when asked how such a person differed from other people, he replied that life seemed to him like an athletic festival—most are there for either fame or profit ‘but there was one kind of man, the noblest of all, who sought neither applause nor profit but came in order to watch … so too among us, who have migrated into this life from a different life …  Rowett 2014, 113. Zhmud 2012, 93–95. LM P25.  Zhmud 2012, 347, 287–89. 42  Chrystal 2017, 117. LM P40. 40 41

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some are slaves to fame, others to money; but there are some rare spirits who, holding all else as nothing, eagerly contemplate the universe. These he calls “wisdom-lovers.”43 Pythagoras’ anti-materialism is implicit in the report that he brought the pursuit of number away from traders and explicit in the report that he convinced the tyrant Simichus of Centuripe to renounce his power and give away part of his wealth, and it was also a central part of his reformation of Crotonian society.44 After losing a war against their neighbor Locri, the Crotonians drowned their humiliation in a life of excessive luxury, but Pythagoras called on them to renounce luxury for σoϕία and he induced such a zeal for sobriety that the Crotonians thought it incredible that some of them should live in luxury at all—‘due to Pythagoras the women of Croton no longer dared to wear expensive clothes but dedicated them in the most prominent sanctuary of the town, the temple of Hera Lacinia.’45 (This last part of the story may be another indication of religious conservativism or even an admonition for women to be modest, but again, the other reports of Pythagoras’ anti-materialism indicate how it may be read as anti-materialistic as well.) Nevertheless, Pythagoras was certainly not a democrat, and although the actualization hierarchy of Eisler’s cultural transformation theory indicates how a healthy form of elitism is necessary for preserving the cultural foundations of democracy, further considering how Pythagoreans actually lived will show how our prima donna may have pushed his disciples’ elitist tendencies a little too far.46

§58: The Life. – 1. Before we can discuss the Pythagorean lifestyle as a means of transmitting or attuning people to philosophy, we have to defend Pythagoras’ status as a philosopher against Nietzsche’s dismissal. Empedocles’ praise of Pythagoras’ intelligence is one example of how the dominant image of the latter in the presocratic period is of a σoϕóϛ instead of a wonderworker, and although it has been argued that later Pythagoreans attributed their discoveries to him, there is little to no evidence to support this.47 No  Dillon 2014, 259. Cicero Tusc. 5.3.8ff.  Huffman 2014, 291. LM T24. 45  Hermann 2004, 41–42, 47. Zhmud 2012, 175. Bremmer 2001, 12. 46  Lloyd 2014, 28. 47  Zhmud 2012, 40, 51. 43 44

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­ iscoveries were attributed to Pythagoras that could not have been his, d and Leonid Zhmud argues not only that mathematical harmonics goes back to Pythagoras—Anaximander’s application of numbers to nature serving as an indirect predecessor—but also that the theory of the even and odd number which Nietzsche places at the heart of Pythagorean ontology belongs to the most ancient stratum of Pythagorean mathematics and goes back to the time of Pythagoras.48 But, besides partnership, rebirth, and anti-materialism, Pythagoras also personifies the tenuousness of our grasp of antiquity, and while we cannot definitely attribute any teaching directly to him—Diogenes Laertius states that, until the time of Philolaus, it wasn’t possible to know anything about Pythagorean doctrine—what we do have conveys a figure that is as significant to the history of early Greek philosophy as he is to Nietzsche’s reading of it.49 Just as Samos’ close proximity to both Miletus and Ephesus supports Zhmud’s view of Pythagoras as a bearer of Ionic culture and enlightenment, the reports that he studied with Pherecydes, Thales, and Anaximander portray him as a continuation of the Ionian philosophical movement, but his deriving his view of rebirth from Demeter’s cult instead of from orphism gave him one crucial advantage over his Ionian predecessors which helps explain why he was the most influential of all the early Greek philosophers: ‘in none of the early testimonia on Pythagoras or the Pythagoreans do we find any evidence that transmigration of souls was seen as a punishment for any previous sins. The likening of the body to a prison (σω̑μα-ϕρoνρά), ascribed by some scholars to the Pythagoreans, is in fact the property of the Orphics’; ‘Pythagoras’ succession of lives is not presented as a linear ascent …. He seems to have experienced a variety of lives for their own sake: to have experienced creation’s plenitude and otherness.’50 Contra Nietzsche’s conflation of Pythagoreanism and orphism, Pythagoras was a precursor to Nietzsche’s own life-affirming view of rebirth (the eternal return), and since the religious unrest of archaic Greece was driven by a desire for more satisfying religious perspectives, this would have given Pythagoras an advantage over the life-negating aspects of his predecessors. It also deeply influenced his conception of philosophy. 2. ‘Philosophy, for the Pythagoreans, has no other meaning and context than the narrative of transmigration’; a narrative based on the same  Ibid., 257, 268, 291–92, 262.  LM D1d. 50  Zhmud 2012, 42, 230. LM P12–15. Allen 2014, 444. 48 49

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vision of cosmic unity that we find in Nietzsche’s early reflections on philosophy, and which illustrates our connection with nature and/or divinity: ‘the doctrine that all life was homogenes not only united men in the ties of kinship with animals, but most important of all, it taught them that their best nature was identical with something higher.’51 For Pythagoras, philosophy is the journey of remembering one’s inner divinity, and it arises when the heart’s silent aspiration to return to divine being shines through the din of forgetfulness that characterizes the marketplace of everyday life: ‘truth, as the wisdom of the path, is the same as be-ing, as traveling upon the path, of remembering the truth of Being.’52 But, again, this is not so much about fleeing the world for the sake of the divine as it is about experiencing the divine within the mundane: ‘as the silence between two musical notes … forgetfulness sets free the soul to a different wandering,’ and this life-affirming perspective is why Luchte distances Pythagorean philosophy from the escapist connotations of the term ‘mysticism’ by describing it as ‘magical in the sense that it exhibits an existential harmonization of theoria and praxis amidst a sacred pagan ethos or form of life. This harmony is most prominent in its interpretation of the body as a microcosm of the All.’53 Since it is based on the same universal kinship as rebirth, ‘magic is a remembrance of the All,’ and just as Luchte links Pythagorean magic to Nietzsche’s account of magical experience by noting that sympathetic magic has always been connected with action at a distance, his description of the Apollonian aspect of Pythagorean magic also recalls Nietzsche’s account of the silent stillness that overcame him via women’s action at a distance: ‘Apollo: that the secret to all movement lies hidden in the mystery of what never moves …. Apollo’s ecstatic servants were famous for their utterly impersonal expression of otherworldly calm.’54 Just as Pythagoras incubated in the basement of his house so as to receive insight from Demeter, he had his students remain quietly in rooms underneath the earth so that, by acclimating their bodies to stillness, they could begin to place a brake on the wheel of time and experience the magic of the present moment, but a more continual practice of stillness is indicated by how

 Luchte 2009, 53, 8.  Ibid., 6. Guthrie 1962, 202. 53  Luchte 2009, 7, 10. 54  Ibid., 35, 39, 42–43. GS §60. Kingsley 2010, 26–27. 51 52

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silence qua sacred secrecy was also a key aspect of Demeter’s cult and mysteries.55 3. Although they distanced themselves from traditional Greek religion, the Pythagoreans preserved its heterogeneous individuality. We have no evidence for anything resembling a Pythagorean orthodoxy or shared doctrines, and since it is impossible to find any one common characteristic that applies to all Pythagoreans, it is best to speak of a family resemblance among them where certain Pythagoreans had characteristics in common with some Pythagoreans but not with others.56 The stories told about anonymous Pythagoreans are often quite different from those told about specific individuals, and we are on much safer ground with the latter even if it contradicts some of our most basic assumptions: we have no evidence for prominent known Pythagoreans believing in metempsychosis; strict vegetarianism isn’t attested on an individual level, but carnivorism is; and adherence to taboos is not attested at all on the individual level and only poorly at the collective level.57 Although Pythagoras founded a political society rather than a school, the Pythagorean revolution was more philosophical than political insofar as its ideas, values, and allegiances spread by contagion instead of by military force; they were distinguished primarily by their general attitude to reality which valued the divine over the material as well as by their specific concern for becoming divine themselves, and their practice of cultivating receptivity to the divine within the world also promoted their scientific capacities: ‘it is easy to imagine a tolerant and even encouraging attitude to scholarly endeavors, a model for which was provided by Pythagoras himself.’58 Just as Nietzsche constructed his aphorisms so as to change the way his readers perceived the world, symbola— short maxims which recall the sayings of the seven sages and continued Hesiod’s rules—were an integral part of the Pythagorean goal to experience the divine within the word by becoming divine oneself; they helped Pythagoreans ‘to recognize the presence of the divine and the daimonic in this world and to interpret the cosmos and its phenomena against the background of the journey that the soul must undertake to return to its original divinity.’59 The very succinctness of the symbola conveys the importance  McEvilley 2002, 181. Blundell 1995, 41.  Zhmud 2012, 22. Zhmud 2014, 90. 57  Zhmud 2013, 36–37, 48. 58  Zhmud 2014, 88. Rowett 2014, 120, 136. Miller 2011, 57. Miller 2011, 57. Gemelli Marciano 2014, 135. Zhmud 2012, 147. 59  Zhmud 2012, 204. Gemelli Marciano 2014, 133. 55 56

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of silence for divinization: ‘the closer the mind approaches the One, the fewer the words it needs; and at the moment when it is finally enraptured, it contemplates in wordless silence.’60 4. The idea of a five-year silence was a fiction created to both get people’s attention and to portray the old Greek teachers as superior, but a more practical account of Pythagorean silence is conveyed by their view that not everything could be said to everyone.61 Pythagorean silence was a practice of deep attentive listening to both the inner self and the divine within the world, but this was only one way in which the Pythagoreans, like Nietzsche, sought to spiritualize their senses: ‘within the context of the Pythagorean bios and ethos, the body must be seen as a gift, as that which must be affirmed in the context of an exploration of the All.’62 Since the desire for a return to the divine is accompanied by a care of one’s mental and physical health, the Pythagoreans used such things as exercise, music, and dance so as to attune their entire being to the divine, and these methods were based on the musical mechanism of rebirth—‘the soul transmits a vibrational pattern to the new body in consonance with its specific attunement in the prior embodiment, entering another being which longs for a soul, as this latter longs for a body.’63 ‘It is through friendship that we return to god,’ and the Pythagoreans set people on the philosophical path via a program of well-rounded education that Nietzsche certainly would have endorsed.64 5. Whereas Alcmaeon’s teaching that bodily health consisted of a balance between opposing powers reflects an anti-hierarchical side of Pythagoreanism, the Pythagorean idea that friendship is based on harmonious equality reflects the same harmony between equality and hierarchy that we also saw in Eisler’s concept of actualization hierarchy: ‘the harmony of friendship also entails respect of the hierarchy of authority and awareness of one’s position within it’ because people must know their place if society as a whole is to function properly.65 Furthermore, despite Aristotle’s neglect of women in the Pythagorean lifestyle, the Pythagoreans’ appreciation of women is evident in such things as their albeit conservative reaction against divorce: ‘don’t expel your wife, for she is a suppliant’;  Allen 2014, 450–51.  Zhmud 2012, 163. LM T15. 62  Gemelli Marciano 2014, 144–45. Luchte 2009, 176. 63  Ibid., 25, 126, 124, 78. 64  O’Meara 2014, 409. 65  Zhmud 2014, 98. Gemelli Marciano 2014, 145–46. 60 61

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‘one must absolutely not commit injustice [scil. to one’s wife], because she is like a suppliant who has been led away from her hearth.’66 Nevertheless, the secondary position that women take in these statements as a suppliant suggests that the Pythagoreans, like Nietzsche, were men of their times, and the domineering aspect of Pythagoreanism emerges when we keep in mind that they strove to attain divine favor through obedience instead of through ecstasy.67 6. ‘The relationship between Pythagoreans and Crotoniates deteriorated in the course of time due to an increasing exclusivity of the brotherhood,’ and the pretentiousness of the Pythagorean attitude is evident both in their refusal of friendship with strangers—whom they took great care to avoid—and especially in their practice of erecting tombstones to symbolize the social death of those who were banished from the brotherhood.68 Pythagoras’ refusal to include the admittedly vicious Cylon seems to have led the latter to start persecuting the Pythagoreans, but the Pythagorean community was also torn apart from within by individual power struggles.69 Still, one prominent Pythagorean contributed to the partnership reformation of Greek religion by creating a sophisticated conception of how the process of rebirth is steered by a female divinity, and it is by taking a look at his work that we can see how the Pythagoreans could have transmitted philosophy via cosmology as well as via lifestyle.

§59: Before Being. – Philolaus’ (470–385  BCE) views on principles and the role of number were probably the acme of Pythagorean thinking in these areas, but he did not represent mainstream Pythagorean doctrine. Nietzsche’s suggestion that the Pythagoreans were responding to the Eleatics is supported by how Philolaus gives to number a role very similar to Parmenides’ being and truth as the conditions for the possibility of thought, but although having number is a necessary condition for something being known, it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for something to be, and this is why Nietzsche’s identification of Pythagorean not-being with Anaximander’s apeiron is also important for understanding Philolaus’  Luchte 2009, 97. LM D20[84], D24.  Zhmud 2012, 204. 68  Schorn 2014, 305. LM T3. LM T20. 69  Huffman 2014, 292. Hermann 2004, 41. 66 67

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ontology.70 Early Pythagorean cosmology goes back to Anaximander, but Philolaus changed the meaning of the apeiron by having it be the name for an indefinite number of separate continua: ‘it is these continua without any internal boundaries, i.e. τὰ ἄπειρα, the unlimited, that are ultimate realities.’71 Pythagoras’ main ontological break from his Milesian predecessors was his preference for dualism over monism, and Philolaus contributed to this break by arguing that form (quantity) must be given the same fundamental status as matter (quality).72 A world consisting only of unlimiteds would be unintelligible, and since Philolaus couldn’t conceive of how limit could emerge from unlimit, he argued that an indefinite amount of both unlimiteds (even) and limiters (odd) constituted equally fundamental and eternal principles, but Pythagorean cosmology has more in common with Anaximander’s than just its mathematical orientation: ‘gender had a central role in Pythagorean doctrine. Numbers were at the root of all things in the universe, and since numbers include both odd and even, all things must have a contradiction. Male and female were two of those contradictions that were implicit in all things.’73 At least some early Pythagoreans probably made use of the same embryological metaphors for cosmogenesis as Anaximander and they specifically identified limit with sperma, but the possible influence of Zoroasterism on Pythagoras may explain the negative connotations of the feminine unlimited.74 Aristoxenus reports that Pythagoras went to Babylon where he learned from Zaratas that light and darkness were the male and female principles from which the world was created, and it seems that the negative image of femininity conveyed in Zoroaster’s view that the gaze of menstruating women was a source of pollution may, along with the predominance of number and the need to master the indefinite, explain the negative connotations of unlimitedness or infinity in Pythagorean thought.75 But the Pythagoreans also continued Anaximander’s positive view of the apeiron insofar as, instead of being a necessary ontological evil to be tamed, unlimitedness is a welcome property of being that enables limit and structure to occur; just as silence enables musical notes to be heard, and forgetfulness enables one to  McKirahan 2013, 119, 71. Rowett 2013, 22.  Zhmud 2012, 80. Huffman 2013, 129. 72  Ibid., 143. 73  Ibid., 132. Chrystal 2017, 118. 74  Baldry 1932, 31. 75  Miller 2011, 64, 66. Drozdek 2007, 69. 70 71

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immerse oneself in one’s present incarnation.76 And besides the femininity of necessary albeit slightly diminished non-being qua the unlimiteds and even, we can see a more positive and even divine instance of feminine ontology when we speculate as to whom the oracle may be who harmonizes the unlimiteds with the limiters.

§60: Perhaps Her Name Is Themistocleia? – Since the unlimiteds and limiters constitute different categories of being, Philolaus posited harmony as a third equally coeval principle that synthesizes them into nature—or the even and odd into the one—and his use of the singular term ‘harmony,’ in contrast to his plural terms for the other two principles, ‘may indicate that harmonia plays the role of the world-soul that is an organizing principle of the universe. The individual harmoniai to be found in the hearts of animals and humans would be just individualized offshoots of the cosmic harmonia.’77 Harmony is both divinity and the seat of rationality, and its function as the source of nature reveals its intimate connection with the tetractys—‘the source that holds the roots of everflowing nature.’78 Whereas harmony is the source of the one (even-odd) which, in turn, is the source and principle of all number, the tetractys is a universal pattern that symbolizes the world order qua the totality of all numbers; it is the all, the continuity of harmonic ratios that determines the primordial structures of perception and steers the becoming of life: ‘it contains within itself the full definition of the continuity between the divine and the world, conceived in this allegorical scenario, as the radical continuum of the invisible to the visible.’79 In contrast to Anaximander’s distilling infinity as the essence of divinity, the Pythagorean identification of divinity with harmony qua the union of opposites puts divinity beyond the finiteinfinite dualism thereby further conveying the invisible presence of the infinite divine within the visible finite world, and the intimate connection of harmony with the tetractys indicates the femininity of this third principle and/or Pythagorean divinity: ‘what is the oracle of Delphi?—The tetraktys,  Drozdek 2008, 28.  Huffman 2013, 135. Drozdek 2007, 65. 78  Ibid., 66. Drozdek 2008, 23. LM D10. 79  Luchte 2009, 110, 128, 112. Dillon 2014, 255. 76 77

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which is the harmony in which the Sirens [scil. sing].’80 That is, although, as an intermediary between the feminine unlimiteds and the masculine limiters, harmony may be considered to be either androgynous or genderneutral, this divine principle was associated more with femininity qua the position of a woman who may have been Pythagoras’ main teacher and with the feminine voice of the Sirens. But it is by moving from ontology to cosmology that the persona of Pythagorean divinity undergoes an apotheosis from priestess to goddess.

§61: Hearth and Home. – Pythagorean cosmogenesis begins when harmony combines the unlimiteds (even) with the limiters (odd) so as to create the one which, as the principle unit of all number, goes on to create the world out of number; the generation of the cosmos being identical with the generation of the number series where numbers are both ontological and epistemological entities in the sense that, as the universal models according to which all things are composed, numbers enable things in the world both to be and to be known.81 Like Anaximander, the Pythagoreans saw the first act of cosmogenesis as a harmonious one, but they departed from Anaximander in maintaining that there is only one world—both in the numerical sense and in the sense that, contra Plato, numbers have yet to be separated from the world.82 In the cosmological counterpart to the ontological creation of the one, the first thing fitted together was the one in the middle of the sphere which Philolaus called hearth, and although the Pythagoreans followed Anaximander by having this central fire function as a cosmic embryo, they reversed the relation between fire and air.83 Instead of fiery bark surrounding air, the hearth immediately breathed in the void as the nearest available unlimited, and in doing so, it enabled this unlimited to function as a limiter in the sense that it separated the things in the world and introduced time.84 Divinity is active in the cosmogonic process beginning in the hearth, and since Philolaus drew upon the association between chthonic and celestial deities so as to place fire at both the center and the  LM D20[82].  Drozdek 2008, 22. McKirahan 2013, 99. Drozdek 2007, 61. 82  Ibid., 62. Drozdek 2008, 27–28. Rowett 2013, 19. 83  LM D15/DK B7. Baldry 1932, 30–31. 84  LM D28–30, D34. Drozdek 2008, 28. 80 81

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boundary of the cosmos, it seems that the divine is also active in the cosmic periphery: its femininity is also indicated by the Greek term for hearth (ἑστία) which, as the place for fire, is also separate from the fire itself.85 As the first child of Cronos and Rhea, Hestia, like her sisters Demeter and Hera, was part of the ruling Olympian elite, but although the hearth can function as a source of many stories and Hestia herself was a deity of great symbolic significance who was worshipped throughout the Greek world, she generated few myths because she stayed at home on Olympus to keep the fire lit while the other deities were out and about. She symbolizes both the sanctity of the Greek household as well as the centrality of women for domestic stability, but as much as her perpetual virginity was linked with the continual regeneration of the family unit—the virgin daughter who will always be able to marry and bear children—, it was also linked with patriarchal control qua the indefinite prolongation of the paternal line through the daughter.86 The Pythagorean association of hearth and embryo reflects how, in Athens, Hestia was sometimes replaced with Dionysus, and considering Pythagoras’ familial orientation—as well as the fact that the collective hearth of the polis was considered the center of its respective universe—, it makes sense that Pythagoreans would place Hestia at the center and boundary of the cosmos thereby producing a nurturing worldview in which the comforts of home are universalized.87 This worldview enables the transmission of philosophical subjectivity insofar as, by speaking to people’s need for comfort and stability, it provided them with the sense of security needed to question the world around them, but the actual transmission of philosophy may have occurred via the Pythagoreans’ cosmic portrayal of rebirth.

§62: A Fifth Element. – Anticipating Nietzsche’s view that we are continually being reborn with each new sensation, Pythagoreans thought that ‘a man was not one form but a succession of forms; and wisdom came with Proteus, with our ability to become other selves.’88 Souls are harmonies or harmonizing principles that make bodies what they are, and the ­independence of harmony  Drozdek 2007, 67. Miller 2011, 59.  Blundell 1995, 17, 20, 31–32. Vernant 1983, 120–21. 87  Blundell and Williamson 1998, 2. 88  Allen 2014, 444. 85 86

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as a coequal principle with the unlimiteds and limiters ensures that souls survive independently of their corporeal actualization.89 Whereas the world soul consists of an indefinite continuum of souls qua harmonies, each person consists of an ever-flowing multiplicity of souls, and the Pythagorean view of philosophy as a means of attaining better incarnations in this life and the next coincides with their identifying the immortal part of the soul with ϕρένεϛ (intelligence).90 Recalling one’s previous incarnations formed the starting point for Pythagoras’ whole system of education, but Pythagoreans also helped initiates remember their inner divinity by enjoining them to become divine through thinking divine thoughts, and the ethical nature of this process is indicated by their conception of the divine as the source of both what is good and knowledge of the good.91 Hippasus’ view that the soul is made of fire further suggests that individual souls are parts of Hestia qua world soul, but the Pythagorean conception of the soul as a detached portion of ether more explicitly emphasizes the musical nature of transmigration: ‘this concept is closely related to the Indian concept of the fifth element, ākāśa’—a subtle form of matter like Anaximander’s apeiron which functions as a universal memory field that has sound as its inherent sense nature.92 That the roots of Pythagorean rebirth go back to Demeter’s cult does not preclude the influence of Indian thought—McEvilley suggests that, via Democedes’ stay in Persia, the Pythagorean physicians in Croton were aware of Indian physiology—and the unity of sound and memory that we find in ākāśa helps explain both the intrinsic connection between the music of the spheres and the fate of the soul and the religious significance of Pythagorean silence qua the spiritualization of one’s senses.93 It is through such aesthetic cultivation that one increases the etherial element in one’s body which, in turn, enables one to begin to see the invisible and infinite divinity within the world as well as hear her silent harmony. Through such magical experiences, one not only becomes aware of the same internal voices that are revealed via tragic catharsis, but also begins to remember that they are eternal parts of the divine world soul. In other words, Pythagoreans inspired the love of wisdom in their friends by, not  LM D27. Drozdek 2007, 65. Luchte 2009, 113.  Laks 2014, 374. 91  Allen 2014, 442. Miller 2011, 77. Drozdek 2007, 54. 92  LM D5. Palmer 2014, 212. McEvilley 2002, 308. 93  Ibid., 16. Hermann 2004, 104. 89 90

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just believing in, but also explaining rebirth and conceiving of philosophy as a means of divinization that occurs via transmigration. But in order to see how philosophical can be transmitted via lifestyle, cosmology, and writing, we must turn to one of Pythagoras’ most acerbic critics.

§63: Nietzsche’s Heraclitus. – 1. Nietzsche’s student Ludwig von Scheffler conveys his teacher’s deeply personal admiration for Heraclitus (535–475 BCE) when he recalls how Nietzsche concluded his lecture on the sage from Ephesus—with a gentle trembling in his voice, Nietzsche took a deep breath and then resounded in the harmonious tones of the Greek text Heraclitus’ maxim I searched for myself.94 Like Pythagoras, Heraclitus is an ideal Apollonian, but besides seeing this maxim as evidence that Heraclitus too heard the immortal wisdom of the Delphic oracle, Nietzsche also discerned in it a hatred of excessive knowledge which coincided with another central theme of his own work—the distinction between philosophical laborers and philosophers who live their work: ‘Heraclitus stood out as a prime example of one whose life incarnated his own principles.’95 (It’s in this way that, like the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus transmitted philosophy via his lifestyle.) Nietzsche grouped Heraclitus with Anaximander as providing a check on the scientific drive for knowledge, and he also saw him as carrying further Thales’ mystical intuition insofar as Heraclitus intuited, not just the unity of all things, but also the inherent goodness of all things: ‘do guilt, injustice, contradiction and suffering exist in this world? They do, proclaims Heraclitus, but only for the limited human mind which sees things apart but not connected, not for the con-tuitive god. For him all contradictions run into harmony, invisible to the common human eye, yet understandable to one who, like Heraclitus, is related to the contemplative god.’96 In this way, Heraclitus inverted Anaximander’s invisible discord into an invisible harmony. 2. Nietzsche projected a Schopenhauerian aesthetic intuition onto Heraclitus according to which truth emerges when one transcends the veil of māyā and identifies with the object of cognition in an act of non-­ conceptual intuition, and he saw Heraclitus as breaking through to a  PPP, xli. LM D36/DK 101.  EN §23[8]. PTAG, 68. EN §19[61]. BGE §211. Rudolph 1965, 64. 96  PTAG, 62. 94 95

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Dionysian affirmation of life by identifying directly with the divine logos; wisdom (fire) consists in actually becoming the intelligence by which all things are steered through all others, and it was Heraclitus’ intuitive grasp of divine being that led him to despise merely historical inquiry for the sake of introspective wisdom—‘nature is just as infinite inwardly as it is outwardly.’97 But as much as Heraclitus personifies the religious significance of philosophical (self)inquiry, Nietzsche also saw him as an opponent of religion. In contrast to Pythagoras as the archetypal religious reformer, Nietzsche saw Heraclitus as a solitary truth seeker who vented his scorn for religion specifically on Dionysianism: ‘in Dionysian excitement he saw only an invitation to ill-bred drives by way of hot-blooded festival of desire.’98 Nevertheless, Heraclitus’ hostility to both science and religion may be as illusory as his introspective method: ‘we psychologists of the future—we have little patience with introspection: we almost take it for a sign of degeneration when an instrument tries “to know itself.”’99 The concept of the isolated subject upon which the notion of introspection rests is a reactive representation that the body produces in order to make its way in the world, and just as philosophical thinking is not merely a matter of cognitive calculation but instead consists, in part, of discerning the unknown in the known and to asking after it, knowing oneself consists of breaking through the illusion of representational identity so as to understand oneself as part of the world. Calling into question one’s own self-image can, no doubt, be a challenging endeavor, but Nietzsche saw Heraclitus as a philosophical artist who could use the primacy of aesthetics so as to inspire people to ask such difficult personal questions: ‘it is not the pure drive for knowledge that decides, but the aesthetic drive: the poorly supported philosophy of Heraclitus has greater artistic value than all the propositions of Aristotle.’100 3. Nietzsche also projected modern science back onto Heraclitus by interpreting the logos as the laws of nature, and although he argued that Heraclitus, as a physicist, subordinated himself to Anaximander, he also saw Heraclitus as making several important advances beyond the gloomy nihilist.101 Approaching Heraclitus along Stoic lines led Nietzsche, like  Jensen 2010, 347. PPP, 206, 70, 55–56, 62.  PPP, 56–58, 211. 99  WP §426. 100  Babich 1994, 32. EN §19[76]. 101  PTAG, 59. 97 98

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most other nineteenth-century scholars, to attribute to him a now primarily disputed notion of world conflagration, but while he held that Heraclitus shared this belief with Anaximander, he has the former transform it from a moral into an artistic process.102 The world rushes to dissolve itself into fire out of desire for rest but then regains its desire for expression: ‘an instant of satiety—and again it is seized by its need, as the artist is seized by his need to create.’103 Nietzsche’s Heraclitus also changes the dynamics of cosmic rebirth by incorporating rebirth within the world as an oscillation between visibility and invisibility. Heraclitus resolved Anaximander’s metaphysical dualism by rejecting being in favor of becoming, but Nietzsche’s view that Heraclitus will always be right in thinking that being is an empty fiction must be understood in the context of his reading of Greece in general.104 Nietzsche’s apprehension of how the Greeks considered the whole of life to be a contest would have enabled him to appreciate how they also conceived of being as activity, and this is why he has Heraclitus deny being qua intellectual abstraction but not qua the invisible totality that immanently steers all phenomena: ‘that which becomes is one thing in eternal transformation, and the law of this eternal transformation, the Logos in all things, is precisely this One [being], fire … [multiplicity] is for Heraclitus the cloth, the form of appearance, of the One.’105 Just as Nietzsche attributed eternal recurrence to Heraclitus as a general theory of temporal relativity, he also attributed time atomism to him as a special theory of temporal relativity, and he argued that Heraclitus’ fiery particles of intelligent but nonpersistent force served as an inspiration for the Pythagoreans’ mathematical atomism; for Nietzsche, contemporary science is also Heraclitean insofar as it denies the existence of absolute persistence.106 Nietzsche’s Heraclitus held that the whole nature of reality lies in the acts of individual force-atoms that only exist through their relations to all other atoms with whom they ceaselessly struggle according to eternal laws, and either the emergence or the disappearance of any definite quality is merely the momentary victory of one force over another: ‘the entrance of life and death … is only predominance becoming visible that one force

 Hershbell and Nimis 1979, 35.  PTAG, 60–62. 104  TI III §2. 105  Tejera 1987, 45. PPP, 62–63. 106  PPP, 214, 139 note 13, 60. 102 103

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has won over its opposite and momentarily begins to lose again to it …. It is one and the same thing to be living and dead.’107 4. Nietzsche saw Heraclitus’ positive view of the cosmos as being his primary advance beyond Anaximander. Heraclitus’ replacement of Anaximander’s fire-air dualism with a single continuum of degrees of warmth was a source for Nietzsche’s value monism according to which the world is made of varying degrees of power, and since power in inherently good, the world is inherently good with evil being merely how a lower degree of power appears to a higher degree. And the fundamental optimism of Heraclitus’ cosmos also derives from how, contra Anaximander’s cosmic injustice, he saw justice precisely in the continual struggle between opposing forces. ‘It is just in the strife that eternal justice is revealed. It is a wonderful idea, welling up from the purest strings of Hellenism,’ but Nietzsche was also critical of the eternal nature of Heraclitus’ justice: ‘order in the world, the most laborious and slowest result of terrible evolutions, understood as the essence of the world—Heraclitus!’108 In contrast to Heraclitus’ portrayal of the eternal justice between opposing forces as being metaphysically guaranteed, Nietzsche reconceived it as being a contingent and hard-won phenomenon, and the opposition between Nietzsche’s and Heraclitus’ vision of the cosmos is further illustrated by how, whereas the effect of the latter’s logos is regularity in change, the former characterizes nature as inherently wasteful and chaotic; the contingency of harmony in Nietzsche’s cosmos driving him to be more explicitly normative than Heraclitus: ‘the notion of a unitary logos, guaranteeing agonistic unity, can lead to a Heraclitean disdain for practical life (in favor of a detached, theoretical and asocial appreciation of the logos).’109 Like Heraclitus, Nietzsche developed a physical basis for his ethics and he admired how Heraclitus places ethics on the limited human level insofar as those who view the world as an aesthetic phenomenon and contemplate becoming like god do not need an ethical system of necessary imperatives, but he also acknowledged the limits of Heraclitus’ world-affirmation: ‘he does not feel suffering, but he does feel stupidity.’110 5. Nietzsche identified deeply with Heraclitus’ elitism and he portrays it as the polar opposite of the ethical impetus that Pythagoras derived from  PTAG, 53, 55. PPP, 65.  PTAG, 60, 51, 55. EN §19[124]. 109  Pearson 2018, 45, 61, 65. Hershbell and Nimis 1979, 29. 110  Hershbell and Nimis 1979, 25. Lesser 1987, 32. Rudolph 1965, 64. EN §19[61]. 107 108

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transmigration. ‘The feeling of solitude, however, that pierced the Ephesian hermit of the temple of Artemis, we can intuit only when we are freezing on wild desolate mountains of our own. No all-powerful feeling of compassionate emotions, no desire to help, to heal, to save stream forth from Heraclitus’ who ‘was a merciless opponent of democratic parties,’ but the healthiness and even societal necessity of elitism becomes clear when we consider Nietzsche’s view that the origin of consciousness is disclosed by how ‘conscious thinking takes place in words’: since consciousness/language ‘developed only in relation to its usefulness to the community or herd … our thoughts themselves are continually as it were outvoted and translated back into the herd perspective.’111 That is, elitism and even misanthropy are preconditions for artistic creativity— and, hence, for society—because, just as psychological healing requires that one overcome the ego’s displacement mechanisms so as to allow repressed memories or ideas to emerge into consciousness, a certain degree of hostility to—or, at least, detachment from—one’s community is required so that ideas which may have been pre-censored by unconscious conformity can emerge in moments of inspiration; moments the ethical side of which nevertheless reminds one to use one’s originality for the sake of one’s community. The asocial consequences that may be derived from Heraclitus’ eternal justice show that how we conceive of the world effects how we act within it, and Nietzsche’s emphasis that perception is inherently interpretive and evaluative further explains how cosmology can transmit philosophical subjectivity, but it is his view of the linguistic foundation of consciousness which indicates that philosophy can also be transmitted via writing. That Nietzsche thought philosophy could be transmitted via a specifically Heraclitean form of writing is indicated by his praise of Heraclitus’ style: ‘he speaks oracles, the nature of which one must interpret for oneself and for him’; ‘very instructive when Heraclitus compares his language with Apollo and the sibyl’; ‘war is also the father of good prose!’112 By turning to Heraclitus and his historical context, we can see how he and Nietzsche used writing to transmit philosophy.

 PTAG, 67. PPP, 53. GS §354.  EN §§19[61], 19[100]. GS §92.

111 112

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§64: Ephesus. – 1. Cyrus the great conquered Heraclitus’ hometown in 547  BCE, and except for the short-lived Ionian revolt of 499, the insurgents of which were harshly punished in 493, it was not until the ending of the Graeco-­ Persian wars in 450 that Ionian cities were free from Persian rule; Miletus only being freed by Alexander in the summer of 334  BCE.113 Ephesus’ being under Persian rule for most of Heraclitus’ lifetime would have provided an efficient channel by which Indian ideas could make their way to what some consider to be the apex of Ionian philosophy, and this explains why ‘the general ambiance of Heraclitus’s fragments could not be more receptive to comparisons with India.’114 His statement invisible harmony, stronger than a visible one recalls the Upanishadic idea of the two forms of Brahman (formed and formless), and it seems that Heraclitus was also familiar with Indian physiology’s doctrine of the spinal energy channel Sushumna nadi surrounded by the Ida and Pingala nadis, but it was the Indian conception of reincarnation as a natural process that is intimately linked with meditation and which occurs via elemental transformation that probably had the most impact on Heraclitus.115 2. The Athenian influenced reforms that were put in place during the Ionian revolt made it likely that Heraclitus also came into contact with democratic ideas at this time, but what is certain is that Heraclitus preferred to attend to his personal matters instead of engaging in politics.116 When the Ephesians asked him to give them laws, he refused and withdrew into the temple of Artemis where he spent his time playing dice with children, and according to Nietzsche, contemplating the universe: ‘if he was seen watching the play of noisy children, he was in any case thinking about something that no mortal ever thought about on such an occasion—the play of the great world-child Zeus and the eternal joke of the destruction and the creation of a world.’117 Heraclitus’ appreciation for children is also evident in his statement that all the adult Ephesians ought to hang themselves and to leave the city to beardless boys, and although most of what we know about his life consists of stories that inferred his character from his writings—this goes for Empedocles as  Robitzsch 2018, 417–18 note 44.  McEvilley 2002, 39. 115  LM D50/DK B54 translation modified. McEvilley 2002, 39, 210, 44, 40. 116  Robitzsch 2018, 418 note 44. LM P9/DK A1. 117  LM P6/DK A1. OPT, 250–251. 113 114

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well—, this evidence suggests that his aversion to politics was another manifestation of philosophical anti-materialism: those who search for gold dig up much earth and find little; he refused the title of king in favor of his brother; he showed people that to be indifferent to luxuries preserves civic concord; and he is also reported to have persuaded the tyrant Melancomas to renounce his rule.118 3. The original site of Heraclitus’ hometown was sacred to the Amazons, and ever since it was named after its Amazonian founder, women were accorded special honors in Ephesus.119 We can discern a trace of this woman-affirming perspective in a story that conveys Heraclitus’ characteristically obscure affirmation of the feminine realm: strangers who wanted to speak with Heraclitus were approaching him but they stopped when they saw that he was warming himself by an oven; he told them not to hesitate but to enter, saying to them, ‘for there are gods here too.’120 Besides delivering the same message of immanent divinity as the Thracian maid who mocked Thales, keeping in mind that, for the Greeks, space was gendered—the domestic-feminine sphere being distinct from the public-­ masculine sphere—enables us to interpret Heraclitus’ statement that the gods are also inside a building as meaning that the feminine is also divine. The plausibility of this reading is further supported by how, like Pythagoras’ home becoming a temple for Demeter after his death, Heraclitus dedicated his book as an offering to the temple of Ephesian Artemis.121 Now, it can be argued that making such dedications at major cults sites was a natural thing to do; that had he lived in another city, he would have dedicated his book to another goddess or god. But the fact remains that he dedicated his book to a goddess.

§65: Artemis. – That the Artemision at Ephesus was the site of a large hoard of Lydian and Greek coins indicates the influence which money had on Heraclitus’ antimaterialistic philosophy, and the irony is further increased by how money could have inspired his central idea by negating his central distinction: ‘the 118  LM D14/DK B121. LM D39/DK B22. LM P3/DK A1. LM P7/DK A3b. LM P8/DK A3. 119  Muraresku 2020, 241. Kearns 1998, 81. 120  LM P15/DK A9. 121  McEvilley 2002, 36.

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desire for money is powerful enough to efface the distinction between good breeding and bad. This distinction becomes irrelevant in the choice of spouse … so the wealth itself seems to unite the opposites,’ and Heraclitus even uses monetary exchange as a model for the cosmos when he writes that all things are in exchange for fire, and fire for all things, just like goods for gold and gold for goods.122 The unity of opposites was also personified in the figure of Artemis herself. As the chief heiress of the Syrian mistress of animals, Artemis was a patron goddess of men, especially young future warriors, and although her cult was extended to included young women due to the demands placed on it by the polis system, she was still portrayed as being especially destructive toward young women—even killing Ariadne at the behest of Dionysus—but her statue at Ephesus was very different from the image of the lithe young athlete honored in the western part of the Greek world: the numerous globes that were attached to her chest—and are now believed to be neither breasts, fruits, or testicles of sacrificed bulls, but beehives or pollen sacks—was the most graphic depiction of her creative and nurturing side.123 There are striking similarities between the depictions of both Artemis and Heraclitus such as the former’s being closely associated with childhood and the wild and the latter’s appreciating children before he withdrew into the mountains to eat herbs and plants, but Heraclitus’ Artemisian temperament is perhaps most evident in the reports of his melancholic sensitivity—‘instead of becoming angry, Heraclitus, among the sages, was overcome by tears.’124 ‘The protection offered by Artemis to her female worshippers had a special meaning. There was a correspondence between the vulnerability of a city’s women and the vulnerability of a city’s borders,’ and as they performed their rites at borderlands that lay outside the protection of the city, Artemis’ female votaries indicated how the capacity to express one’s vulnerability is as necessary for the preservation of civic harmony as is the indifference to luxuries.125 In addition to the healthy elitism and nurturing anti-materialism that we been considering so far, Heraclitus personifies how vulnerability also tends to characterize the relationality of philosophical subjectivity, and one of the saddest ironies of Nietzsche’s macho reading of the presocratics is how it ­ prevented him from  Seaford 2004, 126, 170. LM D87/DK B90.  Marinatos 2000, 95, 134. Blundell 1995, 29–30. Kerényi 1976, 98, 101. 124  Clark 1998, 13. LM P16/DK A1. LM P12. 125  Cole 1998, 25. 122 123

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understanding the depth of his spiritual kinship with Heraclitus as another extremely sensitive man living in a largely domineering society. It is in this way that he understood Heraclitus even more than he himself was aware of, and we ourselves can further understand Heraclitus’ partnership sensibility by considering his ties to Pythagoras’ goddess.

§66: The Secret Fire. – Although Heraclitus personifies the deep structure of the world in the figure of Zeus, his personification of astronomical regularity in the female figures of the Erinyes, Justice’s helpers adds a feminine element to his worldview which is also evident in his statement all things come about by strife and constraint—his term for strife (ἔριϛ) being feminine.126 (Just as the neuter gender of Thales’ water and Anaximander’s apeiron doesn’t necessarily preclude their being intended as symbols of mother goddesses, the feminine gender of eris doesn’t necessarily entail that Heraclitus conceived of it as a feminine principle, but it does fulfill a similar function to water and the apeiron as the source of all things.) This coincides with how, beyond being a hereditary prince-priest at the Artemision, his status as a member of the royal family of Ephesus enabled him to also be a priest of Eleusinian Demeter—the temple of Artemis in front of the greater propylaea at Eleusis suggests a continuity between these two positions.127 Ephesus did not have any public mysteries comparable to those at Eleusis, but Heraclitus was still known as a kukeon-drinker and he even saw the drink as a metaphor for how worldly multiplicity is united through perpetual change—a kukeôn too separates out if it is not stirred.128 Besides the influence of his Pythagorean teacher Hippasus, the mysteries’ association of fire with the continuation of life out of death is another possible influence for Heraclitus’ choice of an ever-living fire as the cosmic substance; fire being the Dionysian weapon which conveyed the god’s identity with the torchbearer Iakchos.129 The similarity between Heraclitus’ own literary style and both the legomena (things said) of the Eleusinian mysteries and the orphic bone plates from Olbia indicates that eschatology

 Long 2013, 221. LM D89c/DK B94. LM D63/DK 80.  Robb 1986, 334. Most 2013, 156. Burkert 1985, 222. 128  Bremmer 2001, 20. LM R67. LM D59/DK B125 translation modified. 129  Seaford 2004, 237–38, 184. Kerényi 1976, 78. 126 127

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was also at the center of his own teachings.130 The riddling quality of his writing is one way in which he presented his logos as a mystery cult would present its secret teachings where eventual revelation of the profoundly inaccessible only comes after initial puzzlement and struggle, but there is another way in which his text emulates mystic initiation; one that is often obscured by his melancholic temperament: after you have listened not to me but to the logos, it is wise to recognize that all things are one.131 The irony of first separating himself from the logos and then telling his readers that the logos speaks the truth of the unity of all things is just one way in which Heraclitus used comedy to initiate his readers to his esoteric teachings, and he also displayed his sense of irony by shouting about Pythagoras’ much learning and evil artifice while he and his followers observed Pythagorean silence—when asked why he kept silent, he said, ‘so that you can chatter,’ and Plato reports that his followers refused all discussion.132 As one of the most vociferous critics of his rivals and opponents in the history of thought, Heraclitus was the Lewis Black of philosophy, but perhaps the greatest irony of this solitary truth-seeker is the communal nature of his philosophical method.

§67: Lightning. – 1. As one of the first thinkers that we know of who engaged in second-­ order thought, Heraclitus offers us the earliest recorded description of what came to be called philosophical self-reflection, and the general thrust of his entire philosophical project was to add to his Milesian predecessors’ focus on the physical world questions concerning the human being who is striving to understand the world.133 Heraclitus was interested in meditating so as to perceive the invisible harmony that unifies opposing principles in both the cosmos and one’s psyche, and he conceived of philosophical meditation as a physical process in which a soul’s knowledge and perception of the logos waxes and wanes as the soul increases or decreases in similarity to the logos; i.e. in fieriness—a dry soul: wisest and best.134

 Finkelberg 2013, 161.  LM D46/DK B50 translation modified. 132  LM Pyth D1b. LM D26/DK B129. LM P13/DK A1. Plato Theaetetus 179d-180c. 133  Long 2013, 221. Hülsz 2013, 283. Betegh 2007, 4. 134  Kahn 1979, 23. Wilcox 1991, 631. LM D103/DK B118. 130 131

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2. Heraclitus’ key discover was that harmony embraces both joining together and separating apart, and he identified harmony with time, fire, and the process of self-inquiry through which one begins to know the logos by realizing one’s inner divinity: ‘in the activity of self-inquiry, then, as in the burning of fire, the contradictions of any frozen moment become a harmonia, a unity in opposition, through the passage of time’; ‘in self-­ inquiry in short, the self recognizes itself as this divine activity, the very activity of the whole temporal cosmos, becoming god.’135 Heraclitus was so deeply saddened by the stupidity of most people because he thought that everyone had an inherent capacity for philosophical divinization, and his preference for the term phronein coincides with the embodied and ethical conception of cognition that we find in his statement wisdom: to speak the truth and to act in conformity with the nature [scil. of each thing].136 In its oldest usage, phronein designates a primal unity of mind in which perception and cognition are associated with an emotion and a tendency to act, and Heraclitus also uses the term syllapsies to convey the simultaneously analytic and synthetic nature of cognition—that, in order to understand anything in the temporal cosmos, we must both analyze it into distinct moments and synthesize these moments into a temporal continuity.137 The simultaneity of synthesis and analysis in cognition reflects the equiprimordiality of unity and difference in the cosmos, but it is the inherently concrete nature of both thought and world that accounts for the hierarchical elevation of unity-synthesis over difference-analysis: ‘though unity is constituted through difference, nevertheless, within the concrete whole, unity transcends and thereby comprehends the difference of the many in a way that the many does not in turn comprehend the unity.’138 The term logos comprises both subjective and objective dimensions insofar as it was most originally associated with acts of speech and intelligence and only gradually was used to refer to the results of these acts, and Heraclitus’ logos is a fundamentally concrete and tension-filled structural whole like the cosmos itself; it is inseparable from its perceptible appearance in activity.139

 Schindler 2003, 433. Miller 2011, 29, 33.  LM D114/DK B112. 137  Schindler 2003, 423. Miller 2011, 30. 138  Schindler 2003, 435. 139  Ibid., 418, 416, 422, 419. 135 136

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3. The logos’ inherent tension propels both cosmic becoming and the essentially epiphanic nature of perception and rationality in which separate objects or ideas are spontaneously perceived or understood to be parts of a larger whole, and D. C. Schindler both notes that there is no more traditional imagery for such moments of philosophical inspiration than the image of light and illustrates the musical nature of these revelations by recalling Bob Dylan’s account of being struck by the words of a thirteenth-­ century Italian poet—‘every one of them words rang true and glowed like a burning coal.’140 The thunderbolt steers all things because our minds and lives are directed by revelations which are themselves cognitive manifestations of the cosmic process, and whereas Heraclitus’ statement that war is the father of all things reflects the productivity of harmonic tension, opposition or dissonance, Schindler’s view that love would perhaps be a better analogy for Heraclitus’ unification of unity and difference reflects the communal nature of Heraclitean cognition.141 To say that thinking is in common for all ‘means that, properly speaking, I cannot think by myself alone,’ and the communal ethos of Heraclitus’ statement although the logos is in common, most people live as though they had their own thought, is suggested when we keep in mind that his word for common (xunon) is the same term that the Greek warriors used to designate the shared space of secular discourse; in contrast to private conversations, words spoken from this spot concerned matters of common interest.142 Just as the embodied nature of cognition extends mind into society, for Heraclitus, philosophy is both embodied qua concretely tied to perception, emotion, and action and collective qua depending on one’s connection to the logos and, hence, to the other people through whom it speaks. 4. Far from conflicting with Heraclitus’ own reclusiveness and the asocial consequences that can be drawn from an eternal logos, the communal (partnership) side of his thought is just one half of a productive and unifying tension between the apparent opposites of individualism and collectivism; of how, just as creative originality contributes to communal well-being, one’s relations with others can be a major source of inspiration. In keeping with his own relation to the mysteries, Heraclitus’ unity of opposites enables us to see the double vision (second sight) invoked at Eleusis as a  Ibid., 441–42.  LM D82/DK B64 translation modified. Schindler 2003, 443. 142  LM D29/DK B113. Schindler 2003, 425. LM D2/DK B2 translation modified. Detienne 1999, 97. 140 141

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specifically philosophical kind of intelligence that, again, can grasp an underlying unity between representational dualisms. His interest in perceiving such invisible harmony reminds us that the capacity to have such insights also manifests as the above-mentioned oneiric subjectivity (beyond subject-object, life-death, self-world, etc.), and with this in mind, we can now consider how Heraclitus and Nietzsche kindled such experiences in their readers.

§68: Writing. – 1. The textual musicality that Nietzsche derived from Heraclitus adds to the unique difficulties of reading his work. He used his concinnity to deliberately leave his books vulnerable to misunderstandings by over-­ simplistic readers, and Nietzsche’s appeal to Heraclitus in TI as an example of a radically different perceptual existence clarifies the perceptual nature of this additional difficulty. Just as not every person is capable of the same emotional range or sophistication, not every person is capable of perceiving the world in the same way, and both Nietzsche’s emphasis on the importance of Greece’s transition from orality to writing and his view of the linguistic nature of consciousness indicate the archaic nature of the form of perception needed to read him or Heraclitus accurately.143 2. Heraclitus wrote during the emergence of phonetic speech and his use of the middle voice enabled his writings to transmit a pre-phonetic sensibility which recalls the dynamic relationality of philosophical subjectivity. The fluid identity or universal interconnectivity of pre-phonetic speech is conveyed by a verb tense in early Sanskrit that existed in a truncated reflexive form the intransitive nature of which recalls Deleuze’s use of infinitives to describe the nature of virtual events (‘grass grasses’ or ‘blackberry blackberries’), and Brown summarizes the relational or holistic form of the perception that attends this mode of speech as follows: ‘the subject appears to be the same as the movement it enacts, and in an ambiguous way, suggests an inclusion of the environmental forces in its immediate sphere. These neighboring forces reveal themselves as participants in the interplay of forces enacting and constituting the movement itself. In this way, a sense of overflow emerges as not only the subject-object formation disappears, but also the boundaries delimiting the subject recede.’144  Babich 2013, 187–88. Brown 2006, 152.  Ibid., 149, 160–61.

143 144

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That is, pre-phonetic speech facilitated the same philosophical sense that individual appearances are mere semblances of an underlying unity which also enables one to look beyond over-simplistic (oppositional) interpretations of texts. Greek translated this protean atemporality into the cyclical structure of the transitive middle voice where, since the subject is implicated in the result of its action, it is neither an active subject nor a passive object—an example of this is Heraclitus’ statement I searched for myself where ‘“myself” plays the role of object and the sense of movement originates from and returns to the subject.’145 As literacy gradually faded out the middle voice, human speech and perception shifted from immersion in, and dependence on, the environment to an apparent independence from the more than human world, and this corresponded with the development of the unified concept of psyche ̄ of which Heraclitus was a pioneer, but Heraclitus also retains pre-phonetic perception in another way in which he anticipates Nietzsche; namely, his perspectivism qua the multiple meanings and viewpoints that constitute the paradoxical nature of his texts.146 (Nietzsche’s replacing a metaphysics of identity with one of self-­ reflexive overcoming also provided his readers with the conceptual tools to retrieve their archaic perceptual capacities.) 3. Both Diodotus’ description of Heraclitus’ book as a rudder for setting life straight and Plato’s report that the behavior of Heraclitus’ followers was entirely in accordance with their writings testify to the efficacy of Heraclitus’ book in shaping people’s lives, and this resulted in part from how it consisted, not of extended argumentation, but of short aphorisms that compelled his readers to draw their own conclusions and make their own connections between different parts of the text.147 Deleuze’s suggestion that it was the aphoristic format that enabled Nietzsche’ writing to establish immediate relations with extra-textual forces applies equally to Heraclitus, but Deleuze also notes that aphoristic writing has less to do with length than with covering a multiplicity of topics without attempting to force them into a single unity, and this also has important implications for how we conceive of the art of philosophical reading—the point is not so much to define the true meaning of a text but to discover new possibilities within a text even if these go against the intentions of the author.148  Ibid., 163.  Ibid., 166. 147  LM R3c. LM R17. 148  Patton 1993, x. 145 146

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Furthermore, besides using a lack of cohesion so as to encourage creative thinking, there is another method for transmitting philosophy that Nietzsche adopted from Heraclitus: ‘Nietzsche’s concinnity is a playing of and between his own texts, evoking an echoing reception or choral response by playing among the reader’s own background skein woven of anticipations.’149 Heraclitus went beyond the Delphic oracle by constructing utterances that remain eternally ambiguous so as to challenge his readers to think for themselves, and he also both twisted traditional religious language and challenged common sense assumptions to shock his readers into questioning themselves and their beliefs: it was by combining an enigmatic style with the strategic use of such cognitive dissonances that Nietzsche and Heraclitus goaded readers to question their preconceptions much like how mystic initiations take participants beyond their normal identities, but just as Nietzsche understood that obscurantism can be a cloak for vapidity, Heraclitus balanced his enigmatic Apollonianism by taking a cue from Apollo’s nurturing twin sister: ‘sometimes he lets fall a brilliant and clear utterance in his treatise, so that even the dullest man can easily understand it and acquire elevation of soul; the brevity and the gravity of his style are incomparable.’150 4. Heraclitus’ style is itself epiphanic in the sense that it both expresses meanings that arise in flashes of inspiration and that such events are precisely what his fragments are trying to describe, and his thought is epiphanic for the same reason that it is concrete. Since the interweaving of unity and difference eludes discursive rationality, it can only be given all at once in atemporal flashes of insight, and this also accounts for the circular or backward-turning nature of epiphanic rationality that Schindler illustrates with the concept of reciprocal causality qua an effect being the cause of its cause and a cause being an effect of its effect.151 While this concept eludes the linearity of discursive thought, it is concretely instantiated in intrinsically relational objects such as a bow in which the unifying pull of the string that causes the two arms to bend toward each other is simultaneously being effected by the opposing pull of the arms themselves. Schindler illustrates how Heraclitus’ text incites such holistic and concrete epiphanies in his reading of the aphorism one must know that war is in common, that justice is strife, and that all things come about by strife and  Babich 1994, 19.  Miller 2011, 21. Granger 2013, 196, 192. Long 2013, 221–22. LM R5c/DK A1. 151  Schindler 2003, 439, 434. 149 150

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constraint: ‘by bringing opposed concepts together into a unity, the very grammar becomes an instance of the war/community-justice/strife phenomenon that the fragment articulates.’152 Heraclitus used grammar to dispel the illusions of grammar such as representational identity as well as to awaken his readers’ capacity for the higher-order levels of reflection that characterize philosophy, and the poetic artistry of his aphorism it is always different waters that flow toward those who step into the same rivers also invokes the experience of continual change that it describes.153 By putting the first four words in the dative plural (πoταμoɩ̑ σι τoɩ̑ σιν αὐτoɩ̑ σιν ἐμβαίνoυσιν), Heraclitus creates the sound of a bubbling river that speeds up in an alliterative series of aspirated vowels (ἓιερα καὶ ἓτερα ὕδατα έπιρρε̑ι), and Kahn’s view that Heraclitus seems to be saying that the stability of the structure and identity of human beings remains fixed precisely because it is constantly changing suggests that Heraclitus was precisely trying to convey the dynamic subjectivity that the mysteries invoked.154 The importance of double vision in this respect is conveyed by how this fragment is also a perfect example of Heraclitus’ unity of form and content because it itself is unstable insofar as the word for ‘the same’ could be associated with either the rivers or those who step into the rivers or both at once. That is, just as the double vision of the Eleusinian mysteries enabled the initiates to perceive Dionysus as also Iakchos, Baubo, etc., Heraclitus’ writing encouraged his readers to consider multiple meanings together at once without feeling the need to choose a definitive one. (Nietzsche’s perspectivism doing likewise.) Finally, Heraclitus transmitted the eschatological idea of the eternal return via the backward-turning structure of the chiasm (A:B:B:A)—immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living the death of these, dying the life of those.155 This meta or super-chiasm transfers the pattern of the first cosmic cycle (I:M:M:I) to the human cycle (L:D:D:L) so as to conflate divinity and humanity, and it is through the intertwining of life and death that Heraclitus portrays life itself as an eternal process of rebirth; what awaits humans after they have died is everything that they do not expect or suppose because, as Thales maintained, things will simply remain the same ‘since we are and

 LM D63/DK B80. Schindler 2003, 432.  Miller 2011, 27. LM D65b/DK B12. 154  Graham 2013a, 314, 317. 155  Miller 2011, 13. LM D70/DK B62. 152 153

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always have been familiar with the experience of continually dying and continually being reborn.’156 5. Whereas Nietzsche seems to have been mistaken about Heraclitus’ anti-Dionysianism, he was right about the latter’s view of continual rebirth, and the content of Nietzsche’s own texts is also inseparable from his chiastic form of presentation qua the self-reflection and self-subversion that both expresses the perspectival openness that he saw as a new possibility for thought beyond metaphysical dualisms and enables his texts to be perennially fresh and new.157 And just as Nietzsche also sought to transmit this perspective via the cosmological idea of the eternal return, Heraclitus’ appears to have sought to awaken his readers by portraying the epiphanic event of holistic self-reflection as a manifestation of the larger cosmic cycle of the soul’s return to its own divinity.

§69: Cosmographic Atomism. – Nietzsche’s statement that ‘Heraclitus only describes the world as it is’ reflect how, just as Heraclitus distinguished himself from other presocratics by explaining stability from change instead of vice versa, he distanced himself from his fellow Ionians by rejecting cosmogony for an everlasting world, but while Heraclitus’ omission of a cosmic beginning should have steered Nietzsche away from ascribing a cosmic conflagration to Heraclitus, Nietzsche’s projection of time-­atomism onto the hermit sage could have made this reading more plausible.158 Nietzsche’s atomistic reading of Heraclitus has been supported by how the doxographic tradition portrays Heraclitus as maintaining that, in addition to logos-god as the efficient cause, the ultimate material cause of the cosmos consists in imperceptible atoms that eternally move at high speed and are alternatively described as either fire or air: Stobaeus’ report that Heraclitus held these Ψήγματα to be prior to the one indicates how an atomistic reading of Heraclitus could make the possibility of cosmic birth and death more plausible, but Heraclitus held that there is really only one finite world that oscillates between two states—an eternal state in which the atoms are neither transformed nor distributed and a perishable state in which the atoms are transformed into other simple bodies  Miller 2011, 35. LM D120/DK B27. Kahn 1979, 226–27.  Babich 1994, 27, 30, 44. 158  PTAG, 64. Graham 2013a, 319. Graham 2013b, 206. 156 157

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via condensation until, via rarefaction, these bodies dissolve again into the atoms.159 Different versions of atomism were held by practically all ancient philosophers, and Posidonius’ report that Moschus of Sidon invented atomism before the Trojan war even makes Nietzsche’s atomistic reading of Anaximander more plausible than it may appear at first, but unlike the materialistically reductive atomism that Leucippus and Democritus introduced, previous thinkers adopted a pious atomism that acknowledged the fundamental status of divine life and activity.160 Heraclitus adhered to the poetic convention of treating the elements of the world as gods, but like Pythagoras, he replaced the traditional distinction between the human and the divine with a continuity by transferring divinity qua infinity to the soul—he who travels on every road would not find out the limits of the soul in the course of walking: so deep is its logos.161 Just as the infinity of the logos places it in the Milesian tradition of archai, the extension of infinity in some sense to soul coincides with the reports that Heraclitus said that the archē is soul and that everything is full of souls and divinities.162 This suggests that Heraclitus, like Nietzsche, conceived of his atoms as ensouled, but in order to see how Heraclitus sought to explain how souls are reborn, we must consider the material aspect of his psychology.

§70: Elemental Soul(s). – Although the theory of elemental transformation may go back to Thales, Heraclitus is often thought of as the first presocratic to argue that opposites or elements change into each other, and he was also the first to make significant changes in the usage and meaning of the term psyche ̄. He improved upon the Homeric use of psyche ̄ by using it to account for the subjective unity of individual people, but his conception of psyche ̄ also disrupts subjective unity insofar as it both encompasses a continuum of physical states and mental capacities and can function as either a count noun or a mass term: for souls it is death to become water, for water it is death to become earth; but out of earth, water comes to be, and out of

 Primavesi 2015, 105, 107, 120, 111. Stobaeus Ecl. I.14,1. LM R46b, D85.  Primavesi 2015, 110, 109, 95–96, 114. 161  LM D98/DK B45 translation modified. 162  Wilcox 1991, 630. LM R43/DK A15. LM R46a/DK A1. 159

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water, soul.163 Besides illustrating Heraclitus’ affinity with the Indian idea of rebirth as occurring via elemental transformation, there are several important things to note about this passage: first, Heraclitus’ description of water as dying entails that psyche ̄ is not the only bearer of life, and this coincides with his ascribing mental functions to natural phenomena such as thunderbolts and the cosmic mass of fire; second, just as humans live the death of the divine and vice versa, the life of each element is the death of another but each death is never permanent because each element will eventually be reborn; third, although he does mention it, Heraclitus could not have omitted air or atmosphere from his account of elemental transformation, and this ties into the final important thing about this passage which is that it begins by using souls as a count noun and ends with soul as a mass term.164 It only describes half of the cycle of elemental transformation with the missing half being the re-emergence of individual souls from the world soul, and this process is indicated by how the earliest accounts identify Heraclitus’ psyche ̄, not with either air or fire, but with evaporation—‘the soul of the world is an evaporation of the moisture it contains, and the one that is in animals … is of the same kind.’165 The world soul that surrounds us and extends to the sky undergoes an individualizing descent/death when it is breathed in by our bodies and the life-negating tone of Heraclitus view of worldly life is further reinforced by the possibility that he coined the famous description of the body (σω̑μα) as the soul’s tomb (ση῀μα).166 Beyond his obscurity, this negative evaluation of worldly life may explain why Heraclitus was less influential than Pythagoras, but this should not obscure the Pythagorean tone of his cosmos the backward-turning harmony of which consists in how all opposites are invisibly united as phases in one cyclical continuum of elemental change (it was this continuum that Philolaus later pluralized).167 Although Heraclitus’ disregard of mathematics makes his cosmos appear un-­ Pythagorean, he shared the Pythagoreans’ crucial connection between harmony and rationality, and although he conceived of harmony as the constant change across the continuum instead of as numerical ratios, there is still a proportionate ratio between the elements that is preserved 163  Mansfeld 2011, 23. Robb 1986, 315. Betegh 2007, 23. Curd 2013, 241. Betegh 2007, 3. LM D100/DK 36. 164  Betegh 2007, 8, 13–14, 16. Neels 2018, 443. 165  Betegh 2007, 10, 18, 27. LM R48a/DK A15. 166  Finkelberg 2013, 155–56. 167  Huffman 2013, 130.

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throughout the transformative cycle.168 Like the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus reformed the traditional distinction between humans and the divine by explaining rebirth as a cosmic process of divination, and his affinity with Pythagoreanism is also evident in his view of philosophy as divinization.

§71: Breathe/Speak to Me. – Heraclitus’ epistemic optimism consists in his view that souls have a potentially boundless capacity to understand nature, but whereas the incorporeal or extra-sensory aspect of knowledge consists of how the soul’s inner logos can enable humans to know what is beyond them in space and time— something that had hitherto been the exclusive province of the gods—, knowledge’s corporeal aspect consists in how it depends on the quality and quantity of one’s physical contact with the surrounding rational substance (world-soul) through breathing—‘it is by inhaling this divine reason when we breathe that we become intelligent.’169 Heraclitus distinguished between bright and dark kinds of evaporation that come from the earth and sea respectively, and it is by breathing in the bright evaporation that a soul cultivates the inner fire which enables it to know the logos; but just breathing is not sufficient for becoming intelligent.170 Cultivating inner fire via philosophical meditation plays a crucial role in one’s rebirths because the presence or absence of understanding determines the very nature of living and dying, and an Indian inspiration for this view is suggested by more than just the thoroughgoing parallelisms between pneuma and prana: ‘both the Orphics and Heraclitus seem in fact to have held a doctrine of the process of reincarnation that was spelled out in the early Upanishads …. A system of two “paths”: the Path of the Gods (devayāna) and the Path of the Fathers (pitryāna) or the path of the sun and the path of the moon.’171 Both Heraclitus’ calling soul a spark of the star’s substance and his view that stars are also nourished by evaporation from the earth suggest that his bright and dark evaporations can be equated with the paths of the gods/sun and fathers/moon respectively.172 He echoes the idea of yoga endowing one with extraordinary powers by  Sassi 2015, 9. Neels 2018, 446–47.  Long 2013, 216. Curd 2013, 241. LM R59/DK A16. 170  LM R46b. Betegh 2007, 26. 171  Hussey 1991, 523. McEvilley 2002, 545, 41, 43–44. 172  LM R48c, R56. 168 169

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holding that the fieriness of one’s soul determines one’s understanding and perception of the world—his aphorism death is whatever we see when awakened; whatever we see when sleeping is slumber ‘asserts a thorough-going parallelism between the state of the soul and the nature of experience.’173 In other words, it is through the mental and physical cultivation of ethereal matter (inner fire) that one begins to perceive the fundamental unity and goodness of all things, and while special perceptual capacities were ascribed to the Pythagoreans who were thought to be the only people who could hear and see daimōnes, Heraclitus’ emphasis on listening to the logos further specifies the kind of perceptual spiritualization he had in mind: ‘Logos appears as a voice coming from the real itself, the voice of meaningful and intelligent language, which coincides with the structural objective single form in things themselves and is mirrored in Heraclitus’ own carefully articulated statements.’174 In Z, Nietzsche dramatizes his own experience of harkening to a silent voice which quietly announces the eternal return qua fleeting moments of inspiration that awaken the childlike sense of wonder that Heraclitus would have recognized as the heart of philosophical (self)inquiry: Yesterday, at the stillest hour, the ground faded from me, the dream began ….    Then without voice it spoke to me: ‘You know it, Zarathustra?’ –    And I cried out in terror on hearing this whispering, and the blood drained from my face, but I kept silent ….    Then it spoke to me again like a whispering: ‘The stillest words are those that bring the storm. Thoughts that come on the feet of doves steer the world’ ….    Then it spoke to me again without voice: ‘You must become a child again without shame’ ….    Then laughter broke out around me. Alas, how this laughter tore my entrails and split open my heart!175

In sum, Heraclitus—like the Pythagoreans—transmitted philosophy to others via his lifestyle and cosmology, but he also did so—like Nietzsche— by writing in ways that were meant to transform how his readers conceived and perceived themselves and the world. But the question of ‘how does  LM D72/DK B21. Hussey 1991, 526.  Burkert 1985, 180. Hülsz 2013, 292. 175  Z II §22. 173 174

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one transmit philosophy?’ presupposes that one already can philosophize, and although both Heraclitus’ emphasis on self-inquiry and his view that intelligence can be acquired through breathing practices provided his readers with some techniques for becoming philosophers, we can further explore how one can use not just silence and meditation but also darkness and passion so as to hear the voice of being by turning toward the philosopher whom most people interpret as Heraclitus’ opposite.

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Clark, Isabella. 1998. The Games of Hera. In The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, ed. Sue Blundell and Margaret Williamson, 12–23. London and New York: Routledge. Cole, Susan Guettel. 1998. Domesticating Artemis. In The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, ed. Sue Blundell and Margaret Williamson, 24–38. London and New York: Routledge. Curd, Patricia. 2013. The Divine and the Thinkable: Towards an Account of the Intelligible Cosmos. Rhizomata 1 (2): 217–247. Del Caro, Adrian, ed. 2004. Nietzsche’s Rhetoric on the Grounds of Philology and Hermeneutics. Philosophy and Rhetoric 37 (2): 101–122. Detienne, Marcel. 1999. The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books. Dillon, John. 2014. Pythagoreanism in the Academic Tradition: The Early Academy to Numenius. In A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A. Huffman, 250–273. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dodds, E.R. 1951. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Drozdek, Adam. 2007. Greek Philosophers as Theologians: The Divine Arche. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2008. In the Beginning Was the Apeiron: Infinity in Greek Philosophy. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart. Finkelberg, Aryeh. 2013. Heraclitus, the Rival of Pythagoras. In Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras, ed. Dirk Obbink and David Sider, 147–161. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2016. The Beginning of Philosophy. Trans. Rod Coltman. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Gemelli Marciano, M. Laura. 2014. The Pythagorean Way of Life and Pythagorean Ethics. In A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A.  Huffman, 131–148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graham, Daniel W. 2013a. Once More unto the Stream. In Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras, ed. Dirk Obbink and David Sider, 303–320. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. ———. 2013b. The Theology of Nature in the Ionian Tradition. Rhizomata 1 (2): 194–216. Granger, Herbert. 2013. Early Natural Theology: The Purification of the Divine Nature. In Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras, ed. Dirk Obbink and David Sider, 164–200. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Guthrie, W.K.C. 1962. A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol I: The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawke, Shé. 2018. The Exile of Greek Metis: Recovering a Maternal Divine Ontology. Poligraft 23: 41–75.

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Hermann, Arnold. 2004. To Think Like a God: Pythagoras and Parmenides. The Origins of Philosophy. Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing. Hershbell, Jackson P., and Stephen A.  Nimis. 1979. Nietzsche and Heraclitus. Nietzsche-Studien 8 ((1) (17)): 17–38. Huffman, Carl A. 2013. Philolaus’ Critique of Heraclitus. In Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras, ed. Dirk Obbink and David Sider, 121–144. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. ———. 2014. The Peripatetics on the Pythagoreans. In A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A. Huffman, 274–295. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hülsz, Enrique. 2013. Heraclitus on Logos: Language, Rationality and the Real. In Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras, ed. Dirk Obbink and David Sider, 281–301. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Hussey, Edward. 1991. Heraclitus on Living and Dying. The Monist 74 (4): 517–530. Jensen, Anthony K. 2010. Nietzsche’s Interpretation of Heraclitus in Its Historical Context. Epoché 14 (2): 335–362. Kahn, Charles H. 1979. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kearns, Emily. 1998. The Nature of Heroins. In The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, ed. Sue Blundell and Margaret Williamson, 74–86. London and New York: Routledge. Kerényi, Carl. 1967. Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1976. Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kingsley, Peter. 2010. A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World. Point Reyes Station: The Golden Sufi Center. Laertius, Diogenes. 2020. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Trans. Pamela Mensch Ed. James Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laks, André. 2014. Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Pythagoras. In A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A.  Huffman, 360–380. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laks, André, and Glenn W.  Most. 2016. Early Greek Philosophy. Vol. I– VII. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Lesser, Harry. 1987. Nietzsche and the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 18 (1): 30–37. Lloyd, Geoffrey. 2014. Pythagoras. In A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A. Huffman, 24–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, Anthony A. 2013. Heraclitus on Measure and the Explicit Emergence of Rationality. In Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras, ed. Dirk Obbink and David Sider, 201–223. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.

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Luchte, James. 2009. Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration: Wandering Souls. London and New York: Continuum. Mansfeld, Jaap. 2011. Anaximander’s Fragment: Another Attempt. Phronesis 56: 1–32. Marinatos, Nanno. 2000. Goddess and the Warrior: The Naked Goddess and Mistress of the Animals in Early Greek Religion. London: Routledge. McEvilley, Thomas. 2002. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Allworth Press. McKirahan, Richard. 2013. Aristotle on the Pythagoreans: His Sources and His Accounts of Pythagorean Principles. In Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras, ed. Dirk Obbink and David Sider, 53–120. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Miller, Patrick Lee. 2011. Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy. London and New York: Continuum. Most, Glenn W. 2013. Heraclitus on Religion. Rhizomata 1 (2): 153–167. Muraresku, Brian C. 2020. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Neels, Richard. 2018. Elements and Opposites in Heraclitus. Apeiron 51 (4): 427–452. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. ———. 1989. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New  York: Random House. ———. 1996. The Wanderer and His Shadow. In Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, 301–395. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Daybreak. Eds. Maudemaria Clark and Brian Leiter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Trans. Marianne Cowan. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. ———. 2001. The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. The Birth of Tragedy: And Other Writings. Eds. by Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005a. The Anti-Christ: A Curse on Christianity. In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, 1–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005b. Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer. In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, 153–229. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. The Pre-Platonic Philosophers. Ed. Greg Whitlock. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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———. 2009a. On the Pathos of Truth. In Writings from the Early Notebooks, ed. Raymond Guess and Alexander Nehamas, 248–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009b. Writings from the Early Notebooks. Eds. Raymond Guess and Alexander Nehamas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Eds. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Meara, Dominic J. 2014. Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life in Context. In A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A.  Huffman, 399–415. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palmer, John. 2014. The Pythagoreans and Plato. In A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A. Huffman, 204–226. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patton, Paul. 1993. Nietzsche, Feminism, and Political Theory. London: Routledge. Pearson, James. 2018. Unity in Strife: Nietzsche, Heraclitus and Schopenhauer. In Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche’s Philosophy, ed. Herman W.  Siemens and James Pearson, 44–69. London: Bloomsbury. Plato. 1997. Complete Works. Ed. John M.  Cooper. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Primavesi, Oliver. 2015. Olearius on Atomism and Theism in Heraclitus: A Presocratic in Late 17th Century Germany. Rhizomata 3 (1): 94–123. Robb, Kevin. 1986. Psyche and Logos in the Fragments of Heraclitus: The Origins of the Concept of Soul. The Monist 69 (3): 315–351. Robitzsch, Jan Maximilian. 2018. Heraclitus’ Political Thought. Apeiron 51 (4): 405–426. Rowett, Catherine. 2013. Philosophy’s Numerical Turn: Why the Pythagoreans’ Interest in Numbers Is Truly Awesome. In Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras, ed. Dirk Obbink and David Sider, 3–31. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. ———. 2014. The Pythagorean Society and Politics. In A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A. Huffman, 112–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rudolph, Arthur W. 1965. Nietzsche’s Heraclitus. Philosophy Today 9 (1): 61–67. Sassi, Maria Michela. 2015. How Musical Was Heraclitus’ Harmony? A Reassessment of 22 B8, 10, 51 DK. Rhizomata 3 (1): 3–25. Schindler, D.C. 2003. The Community of the One and the Many: Heraclitus on Reason. Inquiry 46: 413–448. Schorn, Stefan. 2014. Pythagoras in the Historical Tradition: From Herodotus to Diodorus Siculus. In A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A.  Huffman, 296–314. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seaford, Richard. 2004. Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tejera, Victorino. 1987. Nietzsche and Greek Thought. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

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Vernant, J.P. 1983. Myth and Thought Among the Greeks. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wilcox, Joel. 1991. Barbarian Psyche in Heraclitus. The Monist 74 (4): 624–637. Wilkerson, Dale. 2006. Nietzsche and the Greeks. London and New  York: Continuum. Zhmud, Leonid. 2012. Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. Pythagorean Communities: From Individuals to a Collective Portrait. In Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras, ed. Dirk Obbink and David Sider, 33–52. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. ———. 2014. Sixth-, Fifth- and Fourth-Century Pythagoreans. In A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A.  Huffman, 88–111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Parmenides and Empedocles

§72: Incubation and Emotion. – By now, our general narrative of how the presocratic philosophers were reforming archaic Greek religion in a direction the recalls the partnership culture and worldview of old Europe should be clear. We began with Pherecydes’ aversion to violence as well as with how his (albeit patriarchal) theology both portrayed Zas as creating the world via feminine crafts and emphasized the mutual romance between Zas and Chthonie. Thales shared Pherecydes’ joyful musicality and is reported to have praised his mother’s intelligence. And not only did his water fulfill the same rebirthsteering function as the goddesses in old European myths, but Milesian philosophy’s being part of the same movement as orphism enables us to read Thales’ water as a symbolic representation of the aqueous goddess Metis. Anaximander’s apeiron has both been described as a feminine or maternal principle and may also be a symbolic representation of an orphic goddess, and his implicitly democratic cosmos began with the nurturing image of fiery bark protecting air: he also challenged Hesiod’s portrayal of woman’s insalubrious origins by maintaining that women and men were created together. Pythagoras—a physically marked adept in the lineages of Metis and/or Demeter who is also reported to have learned most of what he knew from a Delphic priestess—has been described as being a feminist by some scholars due to his intellectual inclusion of women, and he © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Breidenstein Jr., Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44780-8_5

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brought the partnership worldview of rebirth to the fore of presocratic philosophy. Both Pythagoras’ strong partnership credentials and his being arguably the most influential presocratic—the rest being portrayed as his followers—further illustrates the partnership orientation of presocratic philosophy as a whole, and Philolaus’ Hestia is another instance of an albeit implicit goddess figure taking center stage in contrast to the patriarchal nature of traditional Greek myth. Heraclitus’ musical style and his affirmation of children recall Anaximander’s desire to improve his singing for the sake of the children, but besides Heraclitus’ reference to the Erinyes and Justice, the feminine gender of his term for cosmogonic strife, and his obscure intimation that the divine also resides in the feminine-private sphere, Heraclitus’ affirmation of female figures appears in the biographical reports about his devotion to Artemis and his affiliation with Eleusinian Demeter; he also carries the partnership emphasis on rebirth further by explaining rebirth as elemental transformation. We’ve also seen other personality traits such as anti-materialism and healthy elitism which, along with the aforementioned affirmation of women and children and artistic/ musical creativity, further illustrate how the feminine, artistic, and ethical sides of philosophical subjectivity tend to manifest behaviorally. Furthermore, by now, both the significance and limitations of Nietzsche’s reading of the preoscratics should also be clear. While Thales and Anaximander were important sources for his notions of the will to power and eternal return, Thales in particular was an inspiration for his view of philosophy as arising as a mystical experience or metaphysical intuition of cosmic oneness. Pythagoras and Heraclitus influenced how Nietzsche constructed his writings so as to transmit philosophy to his readers via the strategic use of silences and cognitive dissonances, but unlike the veracity of his view of the affirmative and nihilistic personalities of Thales and Anaximander respectively, he was unable to appreciate either Pythagoras’ philosophical significance or the vulnerable sensitivity which he himself shared with Heraclitus. In this chapter, we will see how the partnership trend of presocratic philosophy culminates in Parmenides and Empedocles, who also provide further conceptual and historical connections to old Europe, and we will compare these philosophers’ methods of incubation and emotional amplification to Nietzsche’s own methods of cultivating philosophical subjectivity. However, just as all of the philosophers we have discussed so far were by no means perfect, our discussion of Parmenides and Empedocles will also illustrate how the seeds of decline were present even at the highpoint of the partnership reforms of presocratic philosophy.

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§73: Nietzsche’s Parmenides. – 1. Serious documentation of presocratic philosophy begins with Parmenides (515–450  BCE) insofar as, unlike the sporadic textual evidence for Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus, the first few pages of Parmenides’ poem have been preserved as a continual text; this enables us to sufficiently judge the complexity of speculative thought at the threshold of the fifth century.1 Nietzsche’s reading of Parmenides is likewise an important point of orientation for understanding his reading of the presocratics in general because he discusses what he saw to be Parmenides’ relation to several other thinkers of that period. He singles out three other philosophers in particular: ‘Parmenides shows a threefold influence: Anaximander, Xenophanes, and a Pythagorean Ameinias, in this order.’2 2. Nietzsche cites Theophrastus in maintaining that, before the sixty-­ four year old Parmenides taught the twenty-year-old Anaximenes, the twenty-year-old Parmenides was taught by Anaximander, but Nietzsche’s view of Parmenides’ relation to Anaximander was also influenced by his own division of the former’s thought into two periods—first, a furthering of Anaximander’s system and, second, Parmenides’ own theory of pure being.3 For Nietzsche, although it was only an exposition of Anaximander’s dualism between being and becoming, the early Parmenides’ system had a more powerful and lasting effect than his later theory of being, and like Anaximander, the impetus behind Parmenides’ system was not merely physical; it was also moral.4 In contrast to his own emphasis on the need for universal affirmation, Nietzsche saw Parmenides’ discussion of light and night as dividing the world into positive and negative qualities respectively, but he also saw Parmenides’ goddess as uniting these opposites: ‘Parmenides appeals … to the mystic tendency of opposites to attract and unite, and he symbolizes the opposition in the name of Aphrodite … it is the power of Aphrodite that weds the opposites, the existent with the nonexistent. Desire unites the contradictory and mutually repellent elements: the result is coming-to-be.’5 In other words, Nietzsche mistakenly read the doxa section of Parmenides’ poem as representing the latter’s  Kahn 1960a, 3.  PPP, 80. 3  PPP, 40, 81. 4  PPP, 88, 34. 5  PTAG, 71, 73–74. 1 2

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early Anaximandrean phase, but he accurately notes the presence of rebirth in Parmenides’ cosmos as follows: ‘Simplicius says of Parmenides’ world-­ governing deity … “that it at times sends souls from the manifest into the formless and at other times contrariwise.” Here we find the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul.’6 Nietzsche also accurately notes the other non-dualistic aspects of Parmenides’ cosmos such as how the latter merged knowledge with sensation and didn’t include spirit and matter in his table of categories, but according to Nietzsche, the young Parmenides’ encounter with Xenophanes led to a change in Parmenides’ thought that, in turn, divided presocratic thinking in two.7 3. In contrast to contemporary scholars who see the later pluralists as responding to Parmenides, Nietzsche thought that Parmenides had already been instructed by Anaxagoras when, at the age of thirty, he interacted with Xenophanes (570–475 BCE) in Elea, and in keeping with his anti-academic reading of the presocratics, Nietzsche maintained that we cannot speak of Xenophanes as founding any Eleatic school of philosophy.8 Whereas Nietzsche closely associates Xenophanes’ monistic god with Thales’ holistic vision, he equates Xenophanes’ distinction between god and the world with Anaximander’s dualism between being and becoming, and he supports his individualistic reading of the Eleatic philosophers by arguing for a fundamental difference between Xenophanes’ and Parmenides’ temperaments: ‘whereas Parmenides came to the unity of the existent purely by adherence to his supposed logic … Xenophanes was a religious mystic who with his mystic unity belongs very typically to the sixth century.’9 For Nietzsche, Parmenides is the embodiment of logical abstraction, and that he saw Parmenides as being motivated to merge Xenophanes’ god with Anaximander’s indefinite purely by a desire to find certainty in logic also explains why Nietzsche associates him with Kant and distinguishes him from Indian thought qua Hinduism or Buddhism.10 Beyond Nietzsche’s appreciation of the role of rebirth in Parmenides’ cosmos, his view that Pythagoras’ image of the philosophical life exerted, via Ameinias, a powerful influence on Parmenides should have given him  PPP, 81.  PPP, 84. PTAG, 69. 8  PPP, 77. 9  PPP, 80. PTAG, 75. 10  PPP, 80, 85. RWB §4. EN §23[12]. PTAG, 81. 6 7

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second thoughts about reducing Parmenides’ to being a mere logician, but the same fondness for Heraclitus that led to his dismissal of Pythagoras also led him to trivialize Parmenides.11 4. Nietzsche saw the mature Parmenides as the direct counter-image to Heraclitus who, in contrast to the latter’s fiery passion and artistic intuition, forged his philosophy from icy logic and bloodless abstraction, but the reason why Parmenides can serve as Heraclitus’ exact opposite is that they have a common origin.12 ‘Heraclitus and Parmenides alone are monists’ because they both sought to resolve Anaximander’s dualism by rejecting being and becoming respectively, and for Nietzsche, Parmenides’ logical rejection of becoming was propelled by the same nihilistic hatred of art and sensuality that would later come to characterize the ascetic ideal: ‘[Heraclitus’] is an aesthetic view of the world. Here with Parmenides, everything aesthetic ends.’13 Nietzsche’s statement that Parmenides ‘must hate in his deepest soul the antinomy-play of Heraclitus’ is an example of his tendency to psychologize historical figures; a tendency that goes back to the very beginning of his philological studies when he suspected that the texts of Theognis were purposely assembled by an unknown Christian polemicist so as to make Theognis and Greek culture look deplorable, but although it was Nietzsche’s psychological acuity and imagination that enabled him to make such lasting contributions in the study of Greek religion, his reading of Parmenides was distorted by more than just his affinity for Heraclitus: ‘Nietzsche, like many others, has failed to see through the Parmenides of the later tradition to the metaphysics, poetry and irony of the original.’14 That is, Nietzsche’s Parmenides is Parmenides as presented by the very (male) academic tradition that Nietzsche himself was challenging, and the irony of Nietzsche’s critique of Parmenides is that, by presenting him as being purely logical, Nietzsche contributed to the same conspiracy to rewrite the history of thought which, in the twentieth century, was carried out by Anglo-American analysts who both dismissed the pervasive femininity of Parmenides’ poem as being of no philosophical interest and tried to portray Parmenides as being concerned with the same  PPP, 44.  PTAG, 69. 13  PPP, 87, 44, 83. 14  PTAG, 77. Jensen 2008, 338. Tejera 1987, 48. 11 12

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meaningless little puzzles on which they try to make their careers.15 Nietzsche anticipates contemporary philosophers like Babich and Luchte who are currently raising alarms about the positively dangerous nature of analytic ‘philosophy’ when he writes that Parmenides’ later dualistic separation of mind from body led philosophy down ‘the most dangerous of false paths.’16 Finally, that his Parmenides is that of the sophistical tradition indicates how his criticisms of Parmenides will be helpful in developing the image of the sophist that we considered in §25.6.17 5. ‘Nothing has ever had a more naïve power of persuasion than the error of being, as formulated by the Eleatics, for example: after all, every word we say, every sentence we use, speaks in its favor! …. “Reason” in language: oh, what a deceptive old woman this is! I am afraid that we have not got rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.’18 While we have been discussing the partnership-oriented worldviews of Pherecydes, Thales, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus as instances of the artistic creativity of the animal body rebelling against the domination-oriented worldview of archaic Greece, it must be kept in mind that these were affirmative manifestations of the body’s capacity to generate representations. The potentially negative nature of this capacity lies in how the practical utility of representations can seduce one into forgetting their genesis and, in turn, into assuming that representative systems such as language constitute reality as such. Nietzsche personifies the phenomenological consequences of such shallow superficiality in the figure of Socrates whose pathological form of perception precluded him from seeing through the fictitious nature of individual forms to their underlying unity, and Nietzsche uses the Eleatics to illustrate the fundamental assumption on which this intellectual and phenomenological sickness rests: ‘the starting point of all their proof is the wholly unprovable, improbable assumption that with our capacity to form concepts we possess the decisive and highest criterion as to being and nonbeing … instead of being corrected and tested against reality (considering that they are in fact derived from it) the concepts, on the contrary, are supposed to measure and direct reality.’19 Whereas the opposite of the philosophical state is having the conviction that reality is  Jantzen 2004, 147. Mourelatos 2008, 354.  PPP, 86. 17  Tejera 1987, 55. 18  TI III §5. 19  PTAG, 87. 15 16

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exactly the way one thinks it is, the opposite of the philosophical event is the urge to make others conform to one’s unquestioned assumptions. Blind to the corporeal production of representations (becoming), sophists/analysts can think and perceive only in terms of the intellectual products of representation (being). Nietzsche voices his opposition to the sophistic assumption that concepts or language constitute reality as follows: ‘Parmenides said, “one cannot think of what is not”;—we are at the other extreme, and say “what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.’20 As the harmonious unification of opposites such as sameness and difference, becoming will always elude intellectual analysis the logical laws of which are merely products of corporeal representation, and if reality is becoming, then reality too will always elude analysis. Nietzsche reveals the absurdity of the sophistical mode of thought by demonstrating the inherently temporal nature of thought itself, and he does so by turning what he saw as Parmenides’ logic against itself: ‘thinking and being must be the same: otherwise thinking would not come to know being. In thinking, then, there is no movement: a rigid intuition of being. In so far as thinking moves and is filled with other things it is no longer being but illusion. – But the dialectics of thinking – is this not movement?’21 The very act of drawing logical conclusions instantiates the process of becoming from which representational logic emerges and to which it can only return via the lightning flashes of non-conceptual intuition, and this is why Nietzsche argued that Parmenides ‘demolished intellect itself’ by wrenching intellectual abstraction away from its foundation in the body.22 6. Nietzsche’s view that Parmenides split presocratic philosophy in two foreshadows his description of Socrates as a historical vortex, but unlike his appreciation Socrates’ inchoate musicality, it seems that he saw Parmenides as his real archenemy. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s gratitude for having such an enemy shines through in several places like when he refers to the Eleatics as exceptional thinkers who invented the sage as the man of universal intuition; his inclusion of Parmenides in the list of presocratics that constituted his hope for the German character; his recognition of the boldness of Parmenides’ identification of thinking and being; his statement that Parmenides’ argument that the fundamental deception is the existence of nonbeing was ‘a very remarkable advance!’  WP §539.  EN §23[13]. 22  PTAG, 79. 20 21

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and perhaps most significantly, his use of Eleatic reasoning to argue for his own theory of time-atomism.23 Such is the fairness and hermeneutic charitableness that arises when one care’s more about learning new things than about winning arguments, and Erwin Rohde’s suggestion that BT should be read as a didactic poem (like Parmenides’) was perhaps the first suggestion that there was an invisible unity between Nietzsche and his perceived opposite: ‘a person is necessary, a person is a piece of fate, a person belongs to the whole, a person is in the context of the whole, there is nothing that can judge, measure, compare, or condemn our being, because that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, and condemning the whole …. But there is nothing outside the whole!’24 Nietzsche invokes Parmenides’ trademark insight into the unity of all existence in order to justify the life-­affirming perspective of amor fati and the eternal return, and the way in which Nietzsche’s encounter with Parmenides was as sadly tragic as his encounter with Heraclitus becomes clear when we keep in mind that Parmenides was referred to as father Parmenides.25 The loss of his own father led Nietzsche to collect father figures among both the living and the dead, and just as his macho reading prevented him from understanding the depth of his connection to Heraclitus, his succumbing to the canonical portrayal of Parmenides prevented him from appreciating that Parmenides was adept in a method for using corporeal sensuality so as to cultivate philosophical intuition that Nietzsche himself also practiced. Luckily, some contemporary philosophers have managed to set the record straight.

§74: Parmenides. – As the truth of the Ionians whose monism is the culmination of Milesian philosophy, Parmenides is a significant figure in the history of presocratic philosophy; Kingsley goes so far as to portray him as the founder of western culture.26 But modern historians’ characterization of Parmenides as a pivotal figure has fundamentally distorted our understanding of this period, and John Palmer refutes Nietzsche’s reading of Parmenides as  GS §110. WP §419. PTAG, 87. PPP, 86. Rayman 2018, 175.  Silk and Stern 1981, 232. TI VI §8. 25  Tejera 1987, 120. Plato Sophist 241d. 26  Laks 2018, 83. Seaford 2004, 218. Kingsley 2013, 19–20. 23 24

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splitting presocratic philosophy in two by demonstrating that, instead of sparking a paradigm shift, Parmenides belongs within the preceding tradition.27 Nevertheless, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos indicates how Nietzsche’s megalomania could have given him unique insight into Parmenides’ perspective when he argues that Parmenides was aware of the historic role of his philosophy.28 It’s one thing to love what one does, but the sense of responsibility that arises when one believes in the world-­historical significance of one’s work is something else, and the personal similarity between Parmenides and Nietzsche is further conveyed by how the former’s philosophical method coincides with a central inspiration for latter’s concept of the will to power. Parmenides freely appropriated traditional religious models such as the verses of Homer and Archilochus for his own creative purposes and this is why, in contrast to Nietzsche’s accusation that Parmenides’ bloodless abstraction was the most un-Greek moment in the two centuries of the tragic age, Parmenides actually embodied the practice of formal variation by which Nietzsche defined Greek culture.29 Parmenides’ originality is evident in how he was considered to be the first thinker who not only investigated nature, but also spoke about what transcends nature; Aristotle compares Parmenides’ investigation of ‘what is one’ to a geometer who engages in a different kind of science that is common to all science, and he further identifies Parmenides’ first philosophy with theology.30 Eudemus’ view that Egypt served as one of the origins of theology corresponds with McEvilley’s suggestion that the immanenttranscendent god Amon-Re could have been an Egyptian ancestor to both Parmenides’ being and India’s Brahman, and McEvilley notes further similarities between Parmenides and Indian thought such as the correspondence between doxa and māyā which are both linked with goddess religions.31 But in order to further elucidate the affinity between Parmenides and Nietzsche, we must turn to the former’s more immediate cultural context.

 Palmer 2009, 318, 335–36.  Mourelatos 2008, 216. 29  Tor 2015, 29. Bredlow 2011, 225. PTAG, 69. 30  LM R7/DK A14. LM R46. Palmer 2009, 347. 31  Eudemus fr. 150. McEvilley 2002, 25, 52–55. 27 28

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§75: Elea. – ‘For us the philosopher must be a legislator.’32 Unlike Heraclitus, Parmenides heeded the call of civic responsibility by establishing good laws for his countrymen: ‘Parmenides put his country in order by means of optimal laws, so that the citizens make the magistrates swear an oath every year that they will respect Parmenides’ laws.’33 That his countrymen spoke of a Parmenidean way of life indicates that Parmenides was also engaged in the kind of cultural reformation that Nietzsche preferred to politics, and his Heraclitean method for doing so is illustrated in the report that he angrily attacked the arrogance of those who claimed to possess knowledge because nothing can be known.34 Parmenides was deeply concerned about the dangerous consequences that result from people habitually living according to conventional beliefs that they refuse to question, and Kingsley brings out the anti-materialistic impetus behind Parmenides’ healthy elitism when he interprets the latter’s statement that mortals are two-headed as meaning that most people ‘are only bums and prostitutes and cheap tricksters who end up tricking ourselves more than anyone else.’35 But there is another archaic practice that reveals the religious impetus of Parmenides’ politics: ‘for an entire tradition, various forms of political power and certain judicial practices were in essence based on prophetic knowledge. Both mythically and historically, the divinatory procedure of incubation, “the most ancient form of divination,” seems to have been especially highly valued.’36 At Elea, the masters of the incubation lairs were associated with Apollo Oulios, and evidence that Parmenides participated in this tradition is provided by a Stela of a headless statue found at Elea dated 50 CE that bears the inscription ‘Parmenides, son of Pyres, Of the family of the Ouliads, natural philosopher.’37 André Laks’ and Glenn W. Most’s qualification that this may be no more than a legend projected back on to Parmenides could be an expression of appropriate scholarly caution, but it could also be an example of Kingsley’s observation that scholars refuse to understand evidence that forces us to start thinking

 WP §979.  LM P20/DK A1, P21/DK A12, P22/DK A12. 34  LM R70. LM R1/DK 21 A25. 35  Barrett 2004, 279–80. LM D7/DK B6. Kingsley 2013, 100. 36  Detienne 1999, 63. 37  Kingsley 1999, 83, 174. LM P23. 32 33

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about ourselves and our past in very different ways.38 Although Kingsley sometimes overdoes it with his criticisms of academia, it must be kept in mind that his passion derives from the same noble source as Nietzsche’s— to save the classics from the classicists. Victor David Hanson’s and John Robert Heath’s description of the current state of classical studies as ‘a mock epic struggle of nocturnal creatures croaking and scratching at each other for their tiny lily pad on an evaporating pond’ helps explain why the classics are dying fast, but Kingsley’s account of Parmenides’ incubatory method provides an example of the kind of daring scholarship that has the potential to remind (post)modernity of the perennial importance of classical studies.39 Kingsley sums up the legislative efficacy of incubation when he writes that ‘to give good laws to a city is to heal it …. It’s through encountering Justice in another world, another state of consciousness, that you’re able to bring justice into this,’ and by comparing Parmenides’ and Nietzsche’s use of incubation, we can further illustrate the cultural and religious importance of experimental scholarship.40

§76

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1. The visionary kind of healing that occurs when one spends time in silent darkness has been indicated by the contemporary use of sensory deprivation tanks, and this practice goes back to two partnership-oriented regions. On the one hand, Kingsley’s observations that Apollo Oulios had centers of worship around the coastal regions of Anatolia—Miletus, Rhodes, Kos, as well as in Phocaea where the Eleatic people came from—and that Pythagoras took Anatolian technique for incubation with him when he left Samos for Italy place an origin of incubation in the same relatively partnership-­oriented region as the birth of philosophy.41 On the other hand, Dodds’ assertion that the Minoans probably knew of the incubatory techniques that had been practiced in Egypt since the fifteenth century BCE places incubation at the partnership stronghold of the Aegean, and this correlation of incubation and partnership is personified in the female figures that were accessed via this technique.42 Epimenides of Crete—to  LM V page 3. Kingsley 1999, 37.  Hanson and Heath 2001, xxiii. 40  Kingsley 1999, 215. 41  Ibid., 58, 102. 42  Dodds 1951, 110. 38 39

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whom the whole setting of Parmenides’ proem refers back—claimed that, after having slept for years in the Zeus-cave of the Dikte mountains, the goddesses Alētheia and Dikē appeared to him in a dream.43 Besides noting the archetypal significance of the cave as a symbol for one’s return to the primordial mother, Burkert conveys the feminine nature of this practice by noting that the one basic theme in all forms of incubation was ‘the path to knowledge and power, the path to the mountain, to the cave, to the goddess.’44 Marcel Detienne further clarifies the link between knowledge/ truth and power/justice when he notes that, in archaic religious thought, Alētheia and Dikē were not distinguished, and he supports Kingsley’s view of the legislative importance of incubation when he writes that ‘for an entire mystical tradition, the exercise of justice was indissociable from certain forms of divination, particularly incubatory consultation.’45 2. It was the poor but noble Pythagorean Ameinias who led Parmenides to incubatory tranquility, and McEvilley asserts that the peace for which Parmenides’ thanked Ameinias by building the latter a heroic shrine was the state of being a jı ̄van-mukta—one who becomes liberated from the wheel of rebirth before death.46 This corresponds with Kingsley’s identification of Parmenides’ tranquility with samâdhi—the highest state of yogic enlightenment that consists in a full meditative absorption in the self.47 When read in light of the inscription on St. Paul’s monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece which reads ‘if you die before you die, you won’t die when you die,’ Kingsley’s view that Parmenides’ incubatory method was a practice of dying before you die suggests that, like Heraclitus’ self-inquiry, incubation was practiced as a means of attaining better incarnations in this as well as the next life; Kingsley’s account of the onto-phenomenology of this experience also echoes the atemporality of Nietzsche’s salutary experience of the eternal return: ‘what was most important was the fact that the healing comes from another level of being …. For the Greeks the god of this other state of awareness was Apollo. In his consciousness space and time mean nothing. He can see or be anywhere; past and future as present as the present is for us.’48 Nietzsche conveys the benefits that he derived from his own practice of sitting quietly in the dark so as to conserve his spiritual  Detienne 1999, 130. Burkert 2013, 103.  Ibid., 106. 45  Detienne 1999, 55, 62. 46  LM P8/DK A1. McEvilley 2002, 111. 47  Kingsley 1999, 115. Bryant 2009, 572. 48  Muraresku 2020, 11. Kingsley 1999, 65, 101, 112. 43 44

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powers in his aphorism ‘Medicine of the soul.  – Lying still and thinking little is the cheapest medicine for all sicknesses of the soul and, if persisted with, grows more pleasant by the hour’ but we must turn to Zarathustra in order to identify this practice with incubation.49 3. Through numerous ancient sources from Homer to Strabo and Macrobius, Nietzsche would have been intimately familiar with how the devotees of Asclepius practiced incubation for medical purposes, and that he sought to revive incubation as a philosophical and meditative practice that uses the entire body to cultivate imaginative intuition is demonstrated by both his descriptions of Zarathustra as receiving visions while sleeping and his implying that Zarathustra slept for an entire day—precisely the length of time spent in incubation.50 The stillest hours such as those of the passage with which we concluded the last chapter ‘are direct incubatory encounters with the psyche’s hidden depths, the nethermost self in which the “tiefe Himmel” or “world symphony” is reflected,’ and Nietzsche conveys the affinity between Parmenidean incubation and Heraclitean self-­ inquiry when he describes the difficultly of both: We live in fear of memory and of turning inward. But what is it that assails us so frequently, what is the gnat that will not let us sleep? There are spirits all around us, every moment of our life wants to say something to us, but we refuse to listen to these spirit-voices. We are afraid that when we are alone and quiet something will be whispered into our ear, and so we hate quietness and deafen ourselves with sociability.51

Beyond the linguistic basis of consciousness, the communal construction of one’s identity can make withdrawing from one’s community and everyday life feel like death, but it’s only by dying to one’s persona that one can discover oneself. The more one undergoes these deaths-event the more one begins to enjoy this state of authenticity, and just as the ancients experienced receiving the young woman Alētheia via incubation as the gift of second sight, Rainer J. Hanshe characterizes Nietzsche’s incubatory practice as the latter’s means of cultivating synesthesic consciousness.52 By repeatedly dying to our conceptions of ourselves, we return to an animalistic mode of perception that is characterized as much by a synesthesic  Young 2010, 317. AOM §361.  Hanshe 2013, 142–44. 51  Ibid., 148. SE §5. 52  Detienne 1999, 65. Hanshe 2013, 148. 49 50

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unity of the senses as it is by a sense of eternal presence, and it is in this way that Nietzsche’s repeated description of the voice of the stillest hour as speaking to him without a voice indicates that what was really occurring was that he was perceiving the unity of his different senses. Hanshe further clarifies the onto-phenomenology of incubation by tying it to Nietzsche’s experience of the eternal return qua the past and future fading in comparison to the intensity of the present: ‘Zarathustra experiences the eternal return while in a state of incubation. And the following three chapters that close the third book all occur in absolute silence and stillness, as Zarathustra is incubating and conversing with, respectively, his soul, Life, and Eternity.’53 4. By repeatedly dying into and being reborn from absorption in the magic of the present moment, one acquires the abilities to perceive and think of things that others who are bounded by societal convention simply cannot. The synesthesic state that enables one to hear the inaudible and see the invisible is also that which enables good readers to appreciate just how pregnant textual silences can be, but although Nietzsche equates Parmenides’ being with the eternal presence that he later identifies with the eternal return, he was ultimately unable to see through the traditional portrayal of Parmenides to a figure who, perhaps more than any other, could have helped him cultivate the tranquility that left him after his father died.54 Now that we have seen how one can cultivate the philosophical state and event by, at the very least, taking time to enjoy some peace and quiet, we can turn to the proem of Parmenides’ poem as a portrayal of his experience of how incubation leads to the emergence of philosophical subjectivity.

§77: Mr. Mojo Risin’. – 1. The depth of Nietzsche’s misunderstanding of Parmenides is encapsulated in his statement that the latter would have hated Heraclitus’ writing style. Socrates once said that one would need a Delian diver to get to the bottom of Heraclitus’ book, and Simplicius’ mistaken report that Plato applied this description to Parmenides reflects how Parmenides can be even more obscure than Heraclitus.55 This is often overlooked because  Ibid., 145–46.  PTAG, 78. 55  LM Heraclitus R5a/DK A4. LM R51/DK A19. Barrett 2004, 269. 53 54

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obscurity seems to be at odds with what many assume to be Parmenides’ purpose, but besides the many ambiguities of his text precluding a single definitive reading, Parmenides’ text shares several characteristics with Heraclitus’ book such as his use of irony, word-play, and jokes; the way he reveals and conceals like the Delphic oracle; the unity of form and content like when metrical anomalies appear in lines that express violent motion or straying; the musicality of his text; and especially, the way in which he used the language of initiation and incantatory techniques like repetition so as to enable his poem to actually divinize the reader.56 Parmenides even goes beyond Heraclitus’ self-reflexivity insofar as the theme of the journey in the proem models and comments on the very difficulties of reading Parmenides’ text, and he even appears to take up Heraclitus’ pneumatic conception of thought by composing his poem to be, not just read, but recited because such an oral performance would promote breath control and meditation.57 Nietzsche should have intoned Parmenides’ words in the original Greek as well because one goal of Parmenides’ poem was to induce the very feeling of completeness or wholeness that Nietzsche sought so persistently.58 2. The reformatory impetus behind Parmenides’ poem is evident in how he extracts a new conception of reason from the traditional portrayals of the muses as granting divine revelations to mortals, and he even composed his proem so as to invoke the experience of being reasonable qua the oneiric eternity that characterizes philosophical subjectivity.59 Parmenides identifies with, and expects his readers to identify with, the Kouros (young man) whom he presents as just having returned from divinity so as to relate his journey to us, and just as Parmenides’ refusal to define where the Kouros’ journey takes place evokes the disorientation of a dream, the general anonymity or abstract nature of the proem gives one the impression that its subject matter lies beyond any particular place or time.60 Parmenides also cultivates the dynamism of his reader’s subjectivity insofar as he transforms Odysseus’ journey into an infinitely recurring journey that both constitutes one’s identity and overflows Parmenides’ own description of it: ‘the multiplication of journeys serves not only to 56  Ibid., 270. Mourelatos 2008, xxvi, 202–03, 2, 215. Granger 2010, 18. Burkert 2013, 90. Kingsley 1999, 118, 123. Tor 2015, 32. 57  Barrett 2004, 272. Marciano 2008, 27, note 17. Granger 2010, 17. 58  Marciano 2008, 41–42. 59  Granger 2008, 16–18. 60  Mourelatos 2008, 16. Granger 2008, 14.

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link our reading of the poem to the practice of philosophical inquiry; it serves also to perform the ongoing, renewing nature of both journeys.’61 The very act of reading Parmenides’ poem was meant to evoke the experience of being reborn and to set one on the path of divinization qua the cultivation of a certain kind of intelligence. ‘The Proem helps prepare us for the nature of the thinking the goddess exercises in Truth,’ and both the specific nature of Parmenidean rationality as well as his description of his journey to it can be summed up in Heraclitus’ statement the way upward and downward: one and the same.62 3. One archetype for Parmenides’ journey is the descent to the underworld undertaken by Pythagoras through which the latter confirmed his doctrine of transmigration, and both the close connection of katabasis with rebirth and Kingsley’s view that Parmenides was willingly traveling to his own death in Hades correspond with Parmenides’ poem being a first-­ hand account of the incubatory experience of death and rebirth, but Kingsley’s description of Hades also reveals why others have read Parmenides’ journey as a heavenly ascent toward enlightenment: the underworld is ‘the supreme place of paradox where all the opposites meet. Right at the roots of western as well as eastern mythology there’s the idea that the sun comes out of the underworld and goes back to the underworld every night.’63 Kingsley also emphasizes the specifically experiential kind of knowledge that Parmenides acquires in the underworld: ‘it’s not even a matter of attitude but simply a question of perception—the perception that light belongs in darkness, clarity in obscurity, that darkness can’t be rejected for the sake of light because everything contains its opposite.’64 Parmenides is acquiring the same second sight that arises from mystic initiation and which Heraclitus conceived of as the ability to perceive the invisible unity between opposites such as upward and downward, but we must turn to a more traditional influence on Parmenides in order to see how this perception occurs via the cultivation of Heraclitus’ inner fire or Pythagorean ether. 4. Parmenides’ description of his destination as where the gate of the paths of Night and Day is anticipates Nietzsche’s description of the gateway ‘Moment’ where the paths of two contradictory eternities come  Barrett 2004, 278–79.  Granger 2008, 14. LM Heraclitus D51/DK B60. 63  Burkert 2013, 114. Kingsley 1999, 52–53, 68. 64  Ibid., 70. 61 62

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together, but whereas Nietzsche here conveys how the eternal return emerges as the experience of the eternity of the present moment, Hesiod’s influence on Parmenides indicates how this experience comes about.65 In Hesiod’s mythic geography, the great bronze threshold of the house of Night—where Night and Day approach each other—lies at the edge of the world, and according to Burkert, ‘Parmenides travels on the path of the Daimon to the edge of the world, where at the boundary between heaven and earth a towering gateway divides this world from the beyond.’66 This version of Parmenides’ destination bears a striking similarity to Anaximander’s apeiron qua the edge or limit of empirical experience, and although the report that Parmenides studied with Anaximander is chronologically impossible, it still may reflect some kind of intellectual influence: ‘the fundamental Parmenidean contrast of determinacy vs. indeterminacy may well have been inspired by the Anaximandrean contrast of an articulated, delimited, and circumscribed cosmos vs. the encompassing apeiron that lies beyond outside it …. Parmenides’ philosophy can be viewed as a critical commentary on Anaximander’s.’67 Both the apeiron’s status as a subtle form of matter and the plausibility of Indian influences on Greek thinkers of this period support Kingsley’s following observation about Parmenides’ proem: ‘in India exactly the same signs [that Parmenides describes in the proem] are described as the prelude to entering samâdhi, the state beyond sleep and waking. And they’re directly related to the process known as the awakening of kundalini—of the “serpent power” that’s the basic energy in all creation but that’s almost completely asleep in human beings.’68 Parmenides’ journey to the house of Night is an account of meditational consciousness penetrating deeper and deeper into the previously invisible depths of the unconscious body—recall our discussion of this occurring during performances of Greek tragedy—, and this occurs when the subtle matter of the lifeforce (Anaximander’s apeiron, Pythagorean ether, or Heraclitean inner fire) rises up the spine thereby enabling one to perceive the invisible unity of all things. Nietzsche’s own account of perceiving the world through his third eye conveys what happens when the lifeforce ascends to the ajna chakra between the eyebrows, and his description of this as a theatre-eye that enables one to view one’s  LM D4/DK B1. Z III §2.2.  Hesiod Theogony 743–50. Burkert 2013, 94, 101. 67  LM P6a, b/DK A1, A2. Mourelatos 2008, 362–63. 68  Kingsley 1999, 128. 65 66

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life as a tragic-comedy recalls Pythagoras’ description of viewing life as a spectator views an athletic competition.69 But Parmenides takes this even further by providing us with a more robust phenomenological description of the emergence of philosophical subjectivity. 5. ‘Phenomenology arguably begins with Parmenides,’ and that Detienne wrote his book on the archaic masters of truth as a prehistory of Parmenides’ poem indicates how we can read Parmenides’ proem as a phenomenological description of the event of visionary inspiration that we have traced in the pre-history of philosophy.70 Parmenides conveys the femininity of inspiration by having every figure in his poem besides the Kouros be female, and his being led by the immortal maidens of the Sun reveals both the divinity of inspirational femininity and the passivity with which the event of inspiration is experienced, but his being carried as far as ardor might go makes the inner source of this compulsion more explicit.71 Artistic creativity will only go as far as one’s heart’s longing for meaningfulness; the same longing that begins one’s philosophical return to divinity. Parmenides extends this longing beyond the human condition to the intelligence of the animal body by specifying that he is being carried by much-knowing mares, and although the goddess’ realm to which he moves is beyond sense-experience, he describes the transcendence of ordinary sense perception in terms of specific sounds and sights: the axel in the naves emitted the whistle of a flute as it was heated (for it was pressed hard by two whirling wheels).72 ‘For Greeks this sound of piping and whistling was also the sound of the hissing made by snakes’ and this is one of the signs of the kundalini serpent power ascending the spine of a lizard king like Parmenides who indicates the other sign in the image of the whirling wheels: ‘ancient Greek accounts of incubation repeatedly mention certain signs that mark the point of entry into another world … one of the signs is that you become aware of a rapid spinning movement.’73 Besides shedding light on how the dragon Zarathustra’s incubatory practice led to the circular vision of the eternal return, the fact that the truth to which Parmenides moved was indissociable from the gift of second sight further reveals how incubatory meditation cultivates the kind of  D §509.  Babich 2013, 117. Detienne 1999, 9. 71  Kingsley 1999, 49. LM D4/DK B1. 72  Hermann 2004, 165. 73  Kingsley 1999, 128. 69 70

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­ erception (synesthesic double vision) which attends philosophical subjecp tivity, but before we turn to Parmenides’ account of Alētheia, we must consider the identities of his unnamed goddess.74

§78: ‘Persephone’. – Demeter’s daughter was a particularly important goddess in Parmenides’ Elea, and the fact that it was a well-established custom to keep silent about the identity of underworld divinities suggests that Parmenides refusal to name his goddess was really a way of identifying her.75 This is further supported by his describing his goddess as prophron (favorable’ or ‘well-disposed’) which is a terms that also occurs on two of the most famous orphic gold leaves found in south-Italian tombs that were meant to conjure up Persephone, but reducing Parmenides’ goddess to Persephone alone underestimates the scope of his method of creative appropriation; his specifying that his destination is the palace of Night suggests the presence of another orphic goddess.76 As the Derveni papyrus’ mention of ‘Nightborn heaven, who was the first king’ makes clear, the earliest orphic theogony started with the goddess Night whose identity with Metis is further reinforced by the story that Zeus entered Night’s cave sanctuary in order to receive instructions on how to rule the world; Simplicius intimates how Parmenides’ being could be read as a continuation of the Metis lineage when he asks how Parmenides’ description of the one as a well-rounded ball differs from the orphic cosmic egg.77 McEvilley suggests that, as the mother of Eros who also wields the sword of reason, Parmenides’ goddess is a synthesis of Aphrodite and Artemis but she has also been compared to a Hesiodic cult goddess who receives her disciple in her precinct as well as to Circe—another daughter of the sun.78 Finally, the fact that Parmenides’ goddess fulfills the function of a Hesiodic muse by revealing Alētheia to him indicates how she personifies the femininity of philosophical subjectivity: ‘Parmenides is endeavoring to reshape the age-old practice of the appeal to a divine muse into that which he takes to be the real value that lies behind the mythology of the Muse … the ­goddess as a persona who is  Detienne 1999, 131.  Kingsley 2002, 375. 76  Ibid., 373. LM D4/DK B1. 77  Bremmer 2001, 20. Burkert 2013, 86, 104. LM D8.48. LM R5b/DK A20. 78  McEvilley 2002, 56. Granger 2010, 30. Granger 2008, 10. 74 75

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symbolic of non-empirically based reason, and Parmenides is engaged in the demythologization of the Muse into a priori reason.’79 In contrast both to the traditional western association of rationality (and hence philosophy) with masculinity and to the feminists who claim that western philosophy began by opposing femininity to rationality and by leaving behind the mysterious powers of goddesses, Parmenides—arguably the founder of western rationalism—personifies rationality itself as a goddess thereby providing a significant precedent for the feminine conception of philosophy that we developed in the introduction. And we can get a better sense of how philosophical rationality emerges through the mystical intuition of a feminine reality (being), by turning to the next section of Parmenides’ poem.

§79: Maternal Ontology. – 1. Instead of projecting an abstract or logical concept of being onto the world, Parmenides, via his goddess, encourages us to overcome conventional beliefs and to think for ourselves so that we can experience reality/ life itself: do not let much-experienced habit force you down onto this road, to wield an aimless eye and an echoing ear and tongue—no, by the logos decide.80 Since this experience is a sense of oneness that most people live in continually without ever realizing it, Parmenides’ goddess uses logic as an awakening force the femininity of which resembles Nietzsche’s experience of his stillest hours: ‘behind the scenes of this world we have fabricated for ourselves, there is a power just waiting patiently. It speaks with a female voice that talks, in silence, through every woman who has ever lived. And this is what logic once used to be …. Before people learned how to use reasoning as a mask to disguise their terror of logic.’81 That is, in contrast to heartless calculation, Parmenidean logic is the artistic-­ethical event of inspiration itself as well as the casual state of reasonableness that this event produces. Like artistic creativity, all true thinking is a longing for a connection with life, and just as Nietzsche affirms the perspectival nature of his own assertions so as to halt the reader and make her question the veracity of his views, the goddess bids us to meditate on her arguments because they are really instruments the contemplation of  Detienne 1999, 130. Granger 2008, 14.  LM D8/DK B7, B8 translation modified. 81  Kingsley 2013, 81, 144. 79 80

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which brings forth the stillness that, in turn, enables us to know and experience unchanging being.82 But besides its femininity, the goddess intimates the circularity of the kind of logic that she is trying to impart when she states in common, for me, is the point from which I shall begin: for I shall return there once again later.83 By having all of the goddess’ descriptions and arguments about being take place within the context of inquiry, Parmenides is not providing unconditional statements about being but, instead, is exploring the conditions for the possibility of inquiry itself; the paradoxical implications of these conditions prevent us from being able to know being conceptually.84 In this way, the circular self-­ reflexivity that we saw in Heraclitean self-inquiry now appears in Parmenides as inquiring about inquiry itself, and the goddess’ statement it is the same, to think and also to be reveals how, just as in Heraclitus, it is this specifically philosophical kind of thinking that enables one to connect with life and recognize one’s inherent divinity: ‘if being is thinking, after all, the proper object of its thought, which is being, must also be itself: thinking. Thinking, according to this reading, is thinking of thinking … [by] assimilating our minds to Truth, in sum, we recognize that our thinking is already identical to divine being … recognizing ourselves as eternal and immortal, we thereby conquer the illusions of time and death. Knowing-mortals, we travel the road to immortality. This is the road of the goddess.’85 That is, since being/the goddess is self-reflective thought, we become divine by engaging in philosophy. 2. The goddess intimates both the somatic origin and the inherently ethical impetus of philosophical thinking when she describes being as the unshakable heart of well-convincing truth.86 The traditional use of heart, dating back to Homer, had a long history of being associated with the seat of cognition, and Parmenides’ preference for designating philosophical thinking with the term νoεɩ̑ ν—in contrast to Heraclitus’ preference for ϕρoνεɩ̑ ν— sheds further light on the onto-phenomenology of the philosophical state of being.87 By noein, the Greeks meant both an experience of being which was inherently alive and divine as well as a superior kind of perception; it was a kind of sixth sense that can penetrate deeper  Kingsley 2013, 48. Babich 1994, 22. LM D7/DK B6.  LM D5/DK B5. 84  Cherubin 2005, 3. Cherubin 2001, 277, 299–301. 85  LM D6/B2. Miller 2011, 50–51. 86  LM D4.28–29/DK B1. 87  Crystal 2002, 218. 82 83

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into the nature of an object than ordinary perception because it consists of both perception and intuition.88 The femininity of this state of ontologically expanded consciousness is indicated by the female names that Parmenides associated with being/reality. Besides identifying being with Alētheia (Truth), he also states that it remains complete because Dikē (Justice), Anagkē (Necessity), and Moira (Destiny) hold it together, and Mourelatos reveals the nurturing and Nietzschean nature of Parmenides’ being by indicating the presence of Peithō (Persuasion) as well: ‘this inner-­ directed justice, innocent of the temptation of aggrandizement or the spirit of ressentiment, draws on intrinsic rather than extrinsic sanctions and rewards’; ‘the compulsion of Constraint-Fate-Justice is also one of gentle persuasion’; ‘we have in this a complete spectrum from brute force to gentle agreement.’89 Parmenides is among the first of the theorists of Eros mentioned in Plato’s Symposium because his being/reality is literally held together by the same feminine love that Nietzsche identified with both life itself and the philosophical spirit of music, and it is in this way that he created a maternal ontology that, unlike patriarchal religions’ fixation on sin, assuages people’s anxiety by enabling them to understand that, despite all the difficulties and horrors of worldly life, existence itself is fundamentally good; a goodness that they themselves can experience and even embody by philosophically cultivating their own inherent divinity.90 In order to see how Parmenides portrays philosophical divinization as the cultivation of feminine embodiment as well as to speculate about why such an affirmative worldview didn’t catch on, we’ll turn from ale ̄theia (being) to doxa (becoming), from femininity to rebirth.

§80: Maternal Cosmology. – 1. The final section which comprised about eighty percent of the original poem was itself an account of the fate of the reincarnated soul, but whereas the femininity of Parmenides’ world has been neglected due to the gender bias of presocratic scholarship, the validity of Parmenides cosmology has been neglected due to scholars’ tendency to overlook the modal clause in Parmenides’ statement the one, that ‘is,’ and that it is not possible that

 Gadamer 1999, 56–57. Mourelatos 2008, 68. Kingsley 2013, 77.  LM D8.17, 8.36, 8.42/DK B8.14, 8.30, 8.37. Mourelatos 2008, 152–53, 160. 90  Ibid., 162. 88 89

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‘is not.’91 Parmenides is a generous monist in the sense that he does not say that only being exists. Being is that which is and cannot possibly not exist, but becoming is that which exists but could possibly not exist, and this is what Parmenides’ cosmology describes.92 As the moving image of being, Parmenides’ cosmology is an account of the world that allows us to disclose being within becoming, and although the paucity of our evidence for this part of his text is only matched by the rarity of doxographic reports on his view of the soul, we have enough to not only see his cosmology as a continuation of the old European feminine cyclicity that we have been tracing over the past several chapters, but also see the possible influences of Anaximander, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus in particular.93 2. Light and night are the two principles of Parmenides’ cosmos, and the influence of Anaximander may account for Parmenides describing these principles as forming a series of rings that surround the earth which itself stays in place because of its equidistance from the rings; it is these rings that preserve the spherical perfection of being within the cosmos.94 Parmenides participates in both the Hesiodic-biological and Dionysian-­ embryological traditions of cosmology by portraying the interaction between light and night in sexual terms and by having human generation be one of the two primary categories of his cosmology, but the violent nature of Anaximander’s cosmos may account for why Parmenides also describes the male and female principles as fighting one another.95 ‘The κóσμoϛ of mortals is actually a battlefield,’ and echoing Anaximander’s positing of a destructive counterpart to the productive cosmic seed, Parmenides’ created monstrous gods of war, discord, and greed who separate light and night after the principles’ erotic mingling.96 Finally, although Censorinus’ report that Parmenides thought that embryos only end up as female after having encountered cold suggests that Parmenides viewed female birth as being a distortion of an inherently male embryo, Parmenides’ view that males are more dense than females indicates how he carried Anaximander’s reformation of Hesiod even further.97 Parmenides’ view of gender equality is intimated in his maintaining that children are  Palmer 2009, 160. Kurfess 2016, 41–42. LM D6/DK B2.  Palmer 2009. 93  Luchte 2011, 151. Tor 2015, 23. 94  LM D13/DK B9. Finkelberg 1986, 317. LM D36/A44. Drozdek 2008, 43. 95  Palmer 2009 173 note 51. Kurfess 2016, 36. LM D49/DK B18. 96  Mourelatos 2008, 231. LM D17, R59/DK A37. Finkelberg 1997, 3. 97  LM D41/DK A51. LM D42/DK A53. 91 92

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born from both the father’s and the mother’s seed, but the superior position of women is indicated by his view that, due to their abundance of blood, women are warmer than men.98 Parmenides spoke of the principles of light and night also as either hot and cold or fire and earth, with fire acting as an active cause and earth functioning as passive matter, and whereas Anaximander promoted gender equality by having men and women being brought into being at the same time, Parmenides, by both associating men with density and women with heat and maintaining that the hot is better and purer than the cold, posits the superiority of the feminine over the masculine while conceiving this superiority as being a fundamental part of the structure of the cosmos.99 That is, in opposition to the western equation of masculinity and femininity with activity and passivity respectively, Parmenides’ view is more akin to the Indian view of Shakti as active action and Siva as passive contemplation, but the structure of his cosmos also intimates a Pythagorean influence on his view of femininity. 3. Parmenides’ saying of the divinity who steers all things that she devised Eros as the very first of all the gods is what led Plutarch to identify her with Aphrodite, but the fact that Parmenides identifies her with the central ring of fire underneath the earth suggests that we may also see her as a version of Hestia qua central fire.100 She is the cause of all movement and generation in the cosmos, and the similarity with Philolaus’ cosmos is further illustrated by how Parmenides placed a wreath of divine fire at the cosmic periphery as well.101 Like the goddesses of the old European myths, she directs the process of rebirth as both its source and its goal, and just as Parmenides’ description of the soul as fiery reflects the Pythagorean view of individual souls being part of the world soul, his identification of the soul with the intellect further illustrates the importance of not just incubation but also philosophical inquiry for the process of transmigration.102 4. Just as Heraclitus had Justice’s helpers the Erinys maintain astronomical regularity, Parmenides had Necessity—whom he also called Divinity, Justice, and Providence—maintain the limits of the heavenly bodies, but an even more significant influence of Heraclitus’ is suggested  LM D44/DK 24 A13. LM D43/DK A52.  LM R12/DK A24. LM R13/DK A7. 100  LM D14b/DK B12. LM D16/DK B13. LM R58/DK B13. Finkelberg 1986, 311. 101  LM D15a, b/DK A37. 102  LM D53a. 98 99

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by Parmenides physiological view of cognition.103 In keeping with his description of being as the unshakable heart of reality, Parmenides located the directive part of the soul in the chest, and his physiological view of cognition is conveyed in the highly ambiguous passage LM D51/DK B16. I defer to Luis Andrés Bredlow’s translation: For such as the mixture of the wandering members is in relation to each thing, so is understanding present to men; for what the nature of the members thinks in men is the same. as each and every thing: for being this it is knowledge.104

The different proportions of light and night in one’s body lead to different levels or kinds of cognition, and ‘knowledge occurs when the combination of hot and cold in the members is proportional to that in the object,’ but despite Parmenides maintaining that both light and night are required for knowledge, he echoes Heraclitus’ view that dry souls are best by making intelligence depend on the physical amount of light in one’s body: ‘knowledge varies in degree, from a residual awareness inherent even to dead matter up to human intelligence (νóoϛ, διάνoια), according to the proportion of Light and Night in each part of the mixture: the more Light prevails in the body of the knowing subject, the more thinking becomes better and purer.’105 Parmenides’ speaking of sensation and thinking as being the same entails that, like Heraclitus, he saw the cultivation of inner fire/light as leading to cognitive and perceptual elevation: specifically, the more light in one’s body the more one’s mental functions like memory and reason can transcend sensation, and when we keep in mind the identity between thinking and being, Bredlow’s speculation that ‘the theory of mixture, after all, might account for knowledge of Being as well’ certainly makes sense.106 In other words, whereas the Pythagoreans and Heraclitus conceived of divinization as the somatic cultivation of a specific kind of matter, Parmenides’ identification of feminine being with both thinking and perception as well as his identification of femininity with light, shows divinization to be specifically a cultivation of a feminine form of embodiment. His account in the proem of being led by the  LM R55. LM D12/DK B10.  LM D56/DK A45. Bredlow 2011, 249. 105  Ibid., 246, 252. 106  LM D52/DK A46. Bredlow 2011, 246, 253. 103 104

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­ aidens of the sun to the goddess of being is a portrayal of how the vision m of cosmic unity arises via the cultivation of the divine and feminine lifeforce the ascension of which enables past life recollection and creates the feminine subjectivity and embodiment that constitute philosophy. (Jantzen claims that, by presenting the goddess as the one who reveals truth to him, Parmenides ‘is effectively silencing all female voices and placing himself in the position of the mouthpiece of the divine,’ but Shaw shows that Jantzen’s view is itself based on an unstated premise of androcratic textual analysis that ‘if women are present in a text, it must a priori be as objects of male subjectivity’: for Shaw, since tantric ‘texts were not created by men in isolation from women, they do not express exclusively male views. These views grew out of communal exploration and practice and proceed from the insights of both men and women.’107 And that we can say the same for Parmenides’ poem is indicated by both his Pythagoreanism which, as we have seen, was a movement distinguished by its inclusion of women intellectuals and his being a continuation of the Ionian philosophical tradition whose positive attitude toward women we have traced in the preceding chapters.) 5. However, as much as the prominent position of femininity and rebirth in Parmenides’ philosophy enables us to see him as the culmination of the presocratics’ partnership religious reforms, there is one important way in which he was unable to escape the necrophilia of the dominator mentality: the divinity who steers all things. For she begins the hateful birth and mingling of all things.108 Contra the life-affirming perspective of Pythagoras’ Anatolian view of rebirth, Parmenides’ description of birth as hateful retains the world-negating perspective of the Indian-Aryan view of rebirth, and again, if the partnership religious reforms of archaic Greece were driven by a desire for more nourishing and life-affirming forms of religion, then this helps explain why these thinkers were unable to shift the center of gravity of western culture back from domination to partnership. As we shall see, goddess imagery recedes in presocratic philosophy after Parmenides.

 Jantzen 2004, 145. Shaw 1994, 36.  LM D14b/DK B12.

107 108

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§81: Nietzsche’s Empedocles. – 1. Ever since he became absorbed in Hölderlin’s Der Tod des Empedokles during his school days at Pforta, Nietzsche found in Empedocles (494–434  BCE) a role model into whom he could project himself.109 Many elements of Nietzsche’s own aborted Empedocles drama appear a dozen years later in the plans surrounding Zarathustra, and since both Nietzsche and Hölderlin were haunted by the ideal deed of suicide, the presence of Empedocles can be keenly felt in the section ‘On Free Death.’110 Zarathustra’s flight to the volcano echoes Empedocles’ suicidal plunge into Mt. Aetna, and both Nietzsche and Hölderlin saw Empedocles as being driven to commit suicide as a means of resolving the tension that arose from the plurality of extremely intense and conflicting drives that he was able to unite within himself.111 (Recall tragedy’s portrayal of money men like Pentheus being destroyed by the Dionysian unity of opposites.) The idea that Empedocles was driven to commit suicide by a desire to escape the cacophony of inner voices/forces that were surging within him is highly speculative and theoretical, but right before his own descent into madness, Nietzsche returned to the theme of inner plurality in a way that illustrates its necessity for cultivating philosophical greatness: ‘commonplace men … perish when the multiplicity of elements and the tension of opposites, i.e., the preconditions for greatness in man increases. That man must grow better and more evil is my formula for this inevitability.’112 Whereas incubatory meditation enables one to cultivate the philosophical state in a top-down manner by letting the conscious intellect quietly descend throughout the previously unconscious depths of the body, emotional multiplication and amplification does so in a bottom-up manner by enabling unconscious drives to break through representational consciousness. And Nietzsche breaks with Hölderlin by emphasizing the importance of sexuality for affective spiritualization: ‘every tragic philosophy, every philosophy of unification and discord, becoming and passing away, must be a philosophy of Aphrodite.’113 Nietzsche’s predominantly chaste lifestyle reminds us that we should read his reflections on sexuality either as perhaps being theoretical or as applying to an expanded polymorphic  Krell 1991, 34. Most 2005, 36.  Krell 1986, 12. Krell 1991, 35. 111  Babich 2012, 68. Krell 1991, 35. 112  WP §881. 113  Krell 1991, 42. 109 110

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notion of sexuality that extends beyond sexual intercourse, but he sums up the redemptive significance of sexuality for his Empedocles in a way that recalls his view of Parmenides’ Aphrodite as a uniter of opposites: ‘in this world of discord, of sorrow, of oppositions, [Empedocles] finds only one principle that guarantees an entirely different world order: he finds Aphrodite, known to all, but never as a cosmic principle. The life of sexuality is the best, the noblest, the greatest opposition against the drive towards division.’114 2. Gaston Bachelard’s statement that ‘Nietzsche’s femininity is deeper for being more hidden’ applies equally to Nietzsche’s view of sexuality the affirmative nature of which is evident in the latter’s statement that ‘all contempt of sexual life and all besmirching of the same through the use of the concept “impurity” is the capital crime against life.’115 Nietzsche’s view that Empedocles universalized the sexual drive provided a crucial source of inspiration for the inherently erotic nature of both the will to power and the eternal return. His identification of sexual love with action at a distance indicates the erotic nature of the will to power, and the concept of an erotic matrix of all things that he derived from Empedocles emerged ten years later in the notebook that contained his first jottings toward the thought of the eternal return; hence his exclamation ‘oh how then could I not lust for eternity and for the nuptial ring of rings – the ring of recurrence! Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it were this woman whom I love: for I love you, oh eternity!’116 The eroticism that Nietzsche derived from Empedocles indicates a Platonic side to his own conception of philosophy as an erotic ascent, namely, how the philosophical saturation of the body with consciousness leads to the polymorphic proliferation of erogenous zones, but although having a multiplicity of intense affects certainly plays an important role in cultivating the dynamic relationality of philosophical subjectivity, the dangerousness of overstimulation may explain why Nietzsche emphasizes the importance of subtle sensuality. He does this in a passage that recalls how the eternal return arises via the meditational ascension of the reptilian lifeforce:

 PPP, 114.  Krell 1986, 3, 25. 116  Ibid., 42–43. Z III §16. 114 115

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– an old brown drop of golden happiness, golden wine? It flits over him, his happiness is laughing. Thus laughs – a god. Still! … Precisely the least, the softest, the lightest, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a wink, a blink of an eye – a little is the stuff of the best happiness. Still! – What happened to me: listen! Didn’t time just fly away? Am I not falling? Did I not fall – listen! – into the well of eternity?117

For Nietzsche, it will always be worth knowing what Empedocles had to say about existence because the latter personified how the Greeks had life itself before and around them in luxuriant perfection, and this is why Empedocles was also a crucial inspiration for Nietzsche’s own method of reviving an archaic sensibility.118 3. Nietzsche’s powerful dramatization of the death of god in GS §125 illustrates the sensorial dimension of the death of god.119 He sought to retrieve a pre-Christian sensibility by, in contrast to the Christian vilification of the senses and the secular deification rationality, recuperating an Empedoclean epistemology the synesthesic nature of which enables one to break through the limits of representational consciousness: ‘for Empedocles the discovery of common sense—of that consciousness which is able to hear and see and touch and feel and taste at the same time—was a matter of direct experience. And to experience it was to start waking up from the chaotic dream of human experience into another state of awareness.’120 Like Empedocles, Nietzsche sought as direct an experience of life as possible and he pursued this goal, not only through unifying his senses, but through a unification of the intellect and the body; by refuting the false idols and moral evaluation that have separated reason from sensuality, Nietzsche turns intellectual abstraction upon itself so as to reveal the intellect’s dependence on somatic creativity.121 The proper use of the senses as routes to knowledge both reunites people with their animal nature and cultivates the feeling of divinity that Nietzsche saw as the source of our true humanness, and as someone who cultivated primordial perception and proclaimed himself to be a living god, Empedocles was an ideal role model for Nietzsche’s attempt to walk the tightrope between the animal and the divine, but again, Nietzsche’s view of Empedocles as the  Z IV §10.  SE §3. 119  Hanshe 2015, 185. 120  Kingsley 2013, 514. 121  Hanshe 2015, 181. 117 118

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e­mbodiment of tragedy indicates how the dangers of madness always haunt the process of divinization.122 4. ‘The failed reformer is Empedocles’ because, although (after Pythagoras) he tried the hardest to carry the people with him and may have come closest to creating a reformed panhellenic culture, he ultimately failed; for Nietzsche, it was precisely Empedocles’ democratic nature which held him back: ‘hatred of kings—sign of a democratic mentality. I believe that the reformation would have been possible if a tyrant had been an Empedocles.’123 But Empedocles is tragic also in the sense that, just as tragedy arose via the productive tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Empedocles is a boundary figure who unites opposites such as god and man, Pythagoras and Democritus, religion and science, superhuman pride and pity for all living things, antiquity and modernity, and orgiastic tragedy and the new democracy.124 While Nietzsche thought that it was the tension of this inner plurality that drove Empedocles to take his own life, Nietzsche also saw Empedocles’ political failure as deriving from how the latter came down firmly on the side of something like Schopenhauerian pessimism in contrast to Greek-Nietzschean affirmation: ‘the most unique thing about him [Empedocles] is his extraordinary pessimism.’125 Nietzsche saw Empedocles as sharing his own method of trying to reform social practices by grounding them in a comprehensive ontology and cosmology, but Nietzsche also indicates the problem that Empedocles’ pessimism caused for the latter’s attempt at cosmological reform: ‘pessimism decisively calls for the view that earth is the showplace of strife alone. The notion of an age of paradise for humanity has no place in it, or generally in his cosmogony.’126 In other words, Nietzsche thought that, despite the cosmic role of love, Empedocles’ world is one pervaded by strife, and unlike the orphic promise of escape from transmigration, the cyclicity of Empedocles’ cosmos prevents living things from ever escaping the eternal return of pain and suffering. 5. Nietzsche saw Empedocles’ cosmology as a politically motivated reformation of Anaxagoras’ thought; one that also coincided with Nietzsche’s own emphasis on the priority of affective drives over the intellect: ‘we see  GS §337.  EN §§6[18], 23[14], 6[28]. Caygill 1999, 29. 124  PPP, 119. Thomson 2003, 208. PPP, 119. 125  SE §3. PPP, 113. 126  PPP, 118. 122 123

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here, in comparison to Anaxagoras, that [Empedocles] strives to accept a minimum of mind (νoȗϛ) in order to explain all motion from … desire and aversion, the ultimate phenomena of life were sufficient, both being results of forces of attraction and repulsion.’127 As opposing manifestations of action at a distance, love and strife operate as drives within the four elements, and whereas Nietzsche criticized Empedocles by arguing that the latter really explains nothing via love and strife because they cannot be measured, he held that Empedocles’ greatness consisted in how the latter paved the way for atomism.128 Nietzsche conceived of Empedocles’ elements as individual Parmenidean ὄντα (beings), and he thought that Empedocles assumed the concept of empty space in the theory of effluences—even though Empedocles clearly states that nothing, in the whole, is empty—, but Nietzsche singled out the idea of chance emergence as being particularly brilliant: Empedocles’ ‘main difficulty, however, is to allow the ordered world nonetheless to arise from these opposing forces without any purpose, without any mind, and here he is satisfied by the grandiose idea that among countless deformations and limits to life, some purposive and life enabling forms arise.’129 Nietzsche saw Empedocles as anticipating both Democritean cosmology and Darwinian evolution by thinking that both mechanism and purpose emerged from chance, and this also led him to identify in Empedocles’ cosmos a non-mechanistic yet non-teleological omnipresence of motion consisting of immanent, internally moving forces.130 6. Despite his emphasis on Empedocles’ pessimism, Nietzsche’s reading of Empedoclean motion provided a crucial inspiration for his own affirmative cosmology of the eternal return: ‘because love and strife exist in the moment, in this world, their good [is] found in their very activity …. All motion in Empedocles finds its purpose in its very activity, and for this reason is neither mechanistic nor teleological but rather self-­ affirming.’131 That is, Empedocles’ cosmology is characterized by the same affirmative or eternal presence that Nietzsche saw in the cattle whom he mentions right after is his account of untimely experiences he derived from his philological work, but the societal significance of Empedocles’ cosmos  Caygill 1999, 32; KGW III 14, 152. PPP, 115–16.  PPP, 118. 129  LM D49/DK B13. PPP, 116–118. 130  Shaw 2017, 15. 131  Ibid., 16. 127 128

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lies in how, by being fundamentally alive and unified, it demands the cultural practice of absolute kindness to all living things while extending ethics beyond individual beings: ‘[Nietzsche] understands that mortal beings are insignificant to Empedocles because of their connection to the eternal sources, and finds the culminating natural and ethical thought to be: the unity of life. Nietzsche identifies this as the most significant and original Empedoclean thought.’132 Whereas Heraclitus took Thales’ holistic intuition further by making it the intuition of the goodness of all things, Empedocles back-tracks on the goodness aspect while making this intuition that of the unity of all life, and it is in this way that, just as Heraclitus’ misanthropy did not preclude him from affirming the communal nature of thought, Empedocles’ pessimism did not prevent him from embodying the inherently ethical nature of the philosophical state and event. We can get a better sense of the emotional complexity of this, ‘the motliest figure of older philosophy,’ by turning to the man himself.133

§82: Manic Depression. – It is as easy to make fun of Empedocles as it is difficult to make fun of Parmenides, and Nietzsche sums up why when he notes both that Empedocles ‘regarded all philosophical fame before himself with jealousy’ and that Empedocles was reported to have imitated Anaximander, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras.134 Empedocles came from an illustrious family. His rich grandfather Empedocles was famous for sponsoring chariot-teams, and as Empedocles the younger went about in a purple robe with a golden girdle, bronze shoes, and a Delphic laurel wreath on his head, he was trailed by a retinue of servants, but such pretentious garb could not conceal a petty side of his character: after he was caught plagiarizing Pythagoras, he was forbidden from participating in any further discussions and the Pythagoreans made a new rule not to transmit any more doctrines to poets.135 The reports of Empedocles’ gloomy or melancholic demeanor as well as the story that he cried when he saw the meadow of judgement that later became Er in Plato’s Republic suggests that he also imitated Heraclitus, and Plutarch describes  Ibid., 17.  PPP, 119. 134  PPP, 108. 135  LM P8a/DK A1. LM P21/DK A1. LM P10/DK A1. LM P12/DK A1. 132 133

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Empedocles and Heraclitus as both complaining and vilifying nature for being inherently unjust; the apparent preponderance of strife in Empedocles’ worldview may be explained by his view that, unlike the purer region beyond the moon, ‘the whole region near us is full of evils.136 Apparently, when he wasn’t desperately trying to posture his way into philosophical fame, Empedocles was melodramatically bemoaning the horrors of life, but as much as this supports Nietzsche’s view of Empedocles as a pessimistic imitator, there is another aspect of the latter’s world negation that, if Nietzsche knew about it, would have caused him to think of Empedocles as committing the worst sin against life instead of as having life itself before his eyes: ‘[Empedocles] advised against heterosexual intercourse, considering it a mode of furthering Strife’s creation and hindering Love’s. To him, sexual politics represents division and discord, not love. Strife’s divisive act looks in fact like an Empedoclean development of the Hesiodic Pandora myth.’137 David Sedley’s reading of Empedocles on the point that sexual desire is strife’s work can be misleading if one interprets it as implying that heterosexual desire is the fueled by strife.138 (As we shall see in §94.2, strife enables the emergence of heterosexuality, but as an act that unifies opposites, heterosexuality is more likely the work of love even though, as either a way of reproducing difference or an expression of aggression, strife may also play a role.) But Sedley nevertheless does convey how, by vilifying heterosexuality because it results in divine souls being incarnated into a world full of evils, Empedocles opens the door to the vilification of women as sources of either heterosexual desire or earthly reproduction. While such an implicit misogyny may also be seen in Parmenides’ description of birth as being hateful, it can still be argued that Empedocles, not Parmenides, is a pivotal figure in the history of presocratic philosophy because, in contrast to how Parmenides made the relatively latent femininity and goddess imagery of presocratic philosophy explicit, Empedocles’ implicit misogyny coincides with a decline of goddess imagery that we will continue to see in Anaxagoras and Democritus: with Empedocles’ love goddess becoming outnumbered by neuter strife and the masculine sphere-god. Still, commentators tend to dwell too much on Empedocles’ egregious egoism, and it is by considering Empedocles’ historical context

 LM P21/DK A1. LM P23/DK A17. LM R56. LM R63. LM D142/DK A62.  Sedley 2005, 343. 138  Kamtekar 2009, 229 note 17. 136 137

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that we may in fact discern a positive side to his opposition to heterosexuality.139

§83: Agrigentum. – 1. Between the Persian wars, the Peloponnesian war, wars between cities, and wars against the Carthaginians in Sicily, the society of Empedocles’ time was exceedingly violent, and although the way in which his speaks of traveling from city to city suggests that his political career in his home town ended in banishment, Empedocles was a beacon of democratic peace and love in these difficult times.140 Like many of his predecessors, he personifies how philosophy was born from the spirit of music insofar as we have reports of him singing prophetically in Greek poems about how friendship holds the world together; of songs arising from his divine heart; and of his using music to calm a young man who was about to murder Anchitus.141 The anti-materialism of Empedocles’ musical spirit is conveyed by the report that ‘he was free-spirited and averse to any political power, since he refused the kingship when it was offered to him … evidently because he preferred a simple life,’ and he warns Pausanias of the dangers of materialism when he writes of the countless miseries that blunt thoughts if you covet different things, such as those that among men are.142 His democratic sensibility was clear from the start insofar as he began his political career by having a man who was planning to become a tyrant condemned and executed, and his partnership predisposition continued in how he ‘persuaded the Agrigentines to put an end to their dissensions and to practice political equality.’143 His stealing and publishing Pythagoras’ doctrine could also be seen as a democratization of knowledge the impetus for which lay in his opposition to Pythagorean elitism, but he nevertheless could have benefited from taking a cue from the Pythagoreans who likely didn’t practice strict vegetarianism so as not to alienate themselves too much from traditional religion.144 2. Although substitute sacrifices happened quite often, it may be that Empedocles’ sacrifice of an ox made of barley, figs, and honey was not  Babich 2011, 213.  Picot 2015, 395. Kahn 1960b, 5. 141  LM R2b. LM R31/DK A21. LM P17/A15. 142  LM D257/DK B110. 143  LM P19/DK A1. LM P18/DK A1. 144  Schorn 2014, 304. 139 140

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necessarily well-received by a society that expected animal sacrifices from the noble class, and Nietzsche indicates how Empedocles’ pomposity didn’t do the latter any favors when he notes that the grand manner in which Empedocles refused kingship ‘was such that in the long run he could not avoid suspicion,’ but it is also possible that the Agrigentines didn’t sufficiently appreciate the concern and support Empedocles provided to girls and women.145 ‘By reason of his ample wealth he gave a dowry to many girls of his city who did not have one,’ and when miasma from a neighboring river was causing women to miscarry, Empedocles paid to have two other rivers diverted to the city so as to sweeten the water; the reports of him performing sacrifices so as to bring a woman who had stopped breathing back from the dead and to cure another woman (Pantheia) whom doctors considered to be beyond help reminds us that the misogyny of his negative view of heterosexuality is only a potential misogyny.146 In fact, like Parmenides, Empedocles extends Anaximander’s anthropogonic critique of Hesiod insofar as he not only maintained that men’s seed only contributes half to birth, but also endowed women with a unique influence on embryonic development— ‘the shape of embryos is determined by the imagination of the woman at the moment of conception.’147 Just as Empedocles here anticipates contemporary findings on how important the emotional or psychological health of the mother is for an infant’s development, his opposition to heterosexuality anticipates Nietzsche’s own view on the toxic egoism of modern sexuality: ‘it is bad to live in the cities; there too many are in heat …. And just look at these men: their eyes say it—they know nothing better on earth than to lie with a woman. There is mud at the bottom of their souls’; ‘for most men, love is of course a sort of possessiveness.’148 Besides Empedocles’ negative view of heterosexuality as a source of incarnation, it is unclear whether or not he would have agreed with Nietzsche’s critique of possessive-egoistic forms of sexuality in general. Nevertheless, we can discern a positive side to Empedocles’ critique of heterosexuality when we keep in mind that there is a big difference between sex and love, and it is by turning to his goddess that we can further clarify Empedocles’

 Babich 2011, 207. PPP, 111.  LM P21/DK A1. LM P29/DK A1. 147  LM D164/DK B63. LM D182/DK A81. 148  Z I §13. Krell 1986, 57. 145 146

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role as the last presocratic to explicitly participate in the partnership tradition.

§84: Mighty Aphrodite. – 1. The congenitally cosmogonic goddess of love who was seen as being present in sexual acts themselves was also thought to be a source of civic harmony, and the fact that Empedocles both avoids using her to point to sexual love and even indicates that it is because mortals interpret her sexually that they remain ignorant of her cosmic presence suggests that Empedocles, like Pherecydes, was trying to remake traditional mythology so as to prioritize what we now think of as romantic or spiritual love instead of sexual conquest.149 Besides the Indian portrayal of elements as gods, Pherecydes’ element-gods provided another possible source of inspiration for Empedocles’ elements which the latter personifies in a Jungian marriage quaternion—Zeus (air) and Hera (earth), Hades (fire) and Persephone/Nestis (water).150 Empedocles is associated with several other prominent female figures like Baubo whose name he used to mean womb thereby providing Nietzsche with the conceptions of nature and truth needed for the latter’s gay science; the muse Calliope, daughter of memory and love’s instrument, who collaborates with Empedocles at the turning point in the Purifications; Pantheia, his beloved, into whom he symbolically plunged in the form of Mt. Aetna; and finally, Hecate who was said to be associated with a single bronze sandal like the Anatolian one he left behind after his suicide.151 But the prominence of Aphrodite in Empedocles’ teachings derives from his view of knowledge as being inherently erotic: ‘in Empedocles’ world, an increase in Love leads to an increase in thinking’; ‘Love indicates the basis for speculative work.’152 2. Empedocles denied comprehensive knowledge of physics to those who live incorrectly because one must be in the proper state of soul so as to learn and retain knowledge, and foreshadowing Nietzsche’s insistence on increasing one’s affective and perceptual capacities, Empedocles observed that most people are carried away or inhibited by the narrowness 149  Burkert 1985, 154. Blundell 1995, 35. Parker 2011, 89. Sedley 2005, 362 note 37. Pierris 2005, 194. 150  McEvilley 2002, 305–08. Kingsley 1995, 355. 151  LM D160/DK B153. Shaw 2017, 5. Detienne 1999, 41. de Jáuregui 2013, 55–56. Krell 1991, 42–43. Babich 2012, 68. Kingsley 1995, 294. 152  Hladký 2017, 20. Bollack 2005, 68.

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of their experiences: having seen in their existence only a small part of life they fly off, swift-fated, borne along like smoke, convinced of whatever one thing each one of them has encountered.153 (It is in this way that, besides making time for peace and quiet, one can also cultivate philosophical subjectivity by experimenting with new experiences.) Although Empedocles’ claim that no mortal man has yet noticed that the love operative in our bodies operates in the same way throughout the cosmos is an ironic allusion to Hesiod’s cosmic Eros, he was seriously concerned with how the belief that one’s limited experience completely represents reality prevents one from appreciating love’s cosmic status; that’s why—echoing Parmenides’ admonition to see these things, which, remote though they are, are firmly present to thought—he says look upon her with your mind—and do not sit there with astounded eyes—she who mortals too think is implanted in their joints and by whom they have loving thoughts and perform deeds of union.154 In contrast to the critical-analytic kind of thinking represented by the gender neutrality of strife, Empedocles associates love with the synthetic creativity of philosophical thinking. We ‘directly experience ourselves as instantiating love’s causal power when we engage in creative activity,’ and just as Empedocles continues Parmenides’ association of the goddess with the extra-sensory perception of being by telling Pausanias to observe love via noos (noein), his description of love’s ascension continues the imagery of Parmenides’ proem—he describes love as spinning around in both the center of the cosmos and in the midparts of one’s body, and the words he uses to convey this (messoisin helissomenen) imitates the hissing sound of her spinning.155 3. Like the spiral patterns in the cave sanctuaries of old Europe, the spiral was used in Sicily, the Mediterranean, and the Near East, as the supreme symbol for the great goddess—it was specifically used on Venus figures to indicate the genitals—and it is in this way that both Parmenides and Empedocles continued the partnership tradition that we have been tracing since chapter one: ‘this story that [Empedocles] is telling is the same one we have already heard from Parmenides. We live in a world created by mêtis, the supreme cunning, of a great being: a goddess called  Curd 2005, 141, 153. LM D42/DK B2.  Finkelberg 1997, 6 note 19. Palmer 2016, 36. LM Parmenides D10/DK B4. LM D73 252–54/DK B17.21–23. 155  Kamtekar 2009, 215, 224–25, 233. Kingsley 2013, 385, 382. Kingsley 2002, 389. 153 154

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Aphrodite.’156 Angelo Tonelli reveals that there is another name for this thousand-faced goddess: ‘The σoϕoί, from Empedocles to Heraclitus, to Parmenides … cultivated σoϕία as a way of practical wisdom, and the instrument of perpetual ecstasy and illumination, as happened in the oriental spiritual tradition’; ‘σoϕία is a spiritual tradition, transmitted by a master to a disciple, and it is developed in an original way, by each disciple who will become in his own turn a master. In this way, σoϕία discloses herself as an enlightened fragment of the Cosmic mind, incarnated in a chosen spirit …. To cultivate the pureness of knowledge, for the σoϕóϛ is a cosmic responsibility, because he is Cosmic Mind incarnated in man.’157 In other words, although the ‘philo’ in the term ‘philosophia’ refers to Aphrodite and the ‘sophia’ refers to Metis, these two are really one in the same. They are both formal variations of the all-steering goddesses of old European myths, but just as Aphrodite can also be a terrible goddess qua a mistress of beasts of prey, Empedocles conveys her forcefulness when he writes under her dominion all these come together to be only one, each one coming from a different place, not spontaneously but against their will.158 Alcibiades’ description of the madness and Bacchic frenzy that arise from receiving the snakebite of philosophy conveys the same sense of inner compulsion that Parmenides describes as being driven by ardor and which we all experience as the feeling of helplessness in being unable to choose with whom we fall in love, and although Empedocles pivots presocratic philosophy in the direction of negating goddess imagery, he was perhaps the votary who, of all the presocratics, was most adept at transmitting the enchanting experience on which this tradition was based.159

§85: Curses, Invocations. – That the forces of love-attraction and strife-repulsion on which Empedocles bases his cosmology are also ‘the fundamental governing principles of magical operations both in the ancient Greek world and elsewhere’ reflects how he was an actual, practicing magician: ‘he himself talks in terms which demand that we understand his poetry in a magical context, as having a  Ibid., 390. Kingsley 2013, 385.  Tonelli 2005, 309, 313. 158  Burkert 1985, 154. LM D75/DK B35 translation modified. Kingsley 2002, 397. 159  Plato Symposium 217e-218b. 156 157

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specifically magical purpose and aim.’160 Since the desire for mystical union with the divine that drove presocratic philosophy first arose out of magical and ritual practice, Empedocles considered divinization to be a fundamental prerequisite for being an effective magician, and his using his magical powers to descend to the underworld where he could invoke Hecate, the Furies, and Persephone further conveys the affinity between the magical and partnership traditions that we continue to see in the history and practice of witchcraft.161 Empedocles’ own title Katharmoi recalls the initial stage of the mysteries that preceded the paradosis—the transmission of esoteric doctrine on a one-to-one basis—and the final epopteia, and like Heraclitus and Parmenides, he used the magic of words to initiate and divinize his readers.162 The Greeks assumed that there was a profound and intimate link between poetry—especially poetry written in hexameters— and magic, and Empedocles was celebrated as an expert in harnessing the magical incantatory power of hexameter verse, but it seems that it was Empedocles’ knowledge of Indian physiology that enabled him to carry the meditational efficacy of Parmenides’ poem even further.163 Like both the Upanishads and the Pythagoreans, Empedocles thought that all beings were united by a common universal breath, and he placed his teachings under the sign of Zeus qua the cosmic breath/ether by referring to his god as the holy phrēn: in Homer, ϕρήν meant lungs or the seat of conscience which contains πνεȗμα, and the close link between Greek pneuma and Indian prana is conveyed by how ‘within each living thing, the continuity of the individual from one incarnation to the next is assured by the phrenes or prapides.’164 Empedocles’ description of Pythagoras recollecting previous lifetimes whenever he stretched forth with all his prapides was probably a reference to specific breathing practices like those practiced by yogis and shamans, and this is why Empedocles told Pausanias to press his words down underneath the latter’s dense-packed prapides: just as Nietzsche later encouraged his reader to ruminate and chew on his words.165 Whereas the seat of magical power was thought to reside in the abdomen, Empedocles continues Parmenides’ view of the seat of philosophical wisdom by  Kingsley 1995, 298, 290.  Ibid., 313–14, 249. 162  Kingsley 2002 348–49. 163  Ibid., 358. McEvilley 2002, 212. 164  Tonelli 2005, 324. Panchenko 2018, 456. Kingsley 2002, 404. Trépanier 2014, 204. 165  LM D38/DK B129 translation modified. Kingsley 2002, 400–01; Zuntz 1970. 160 161

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­ aintaining that the blood around the heart is for humans their m thought, and it was by awakening the inner divinity that lay within the hearts of his readers through, not just the meditational rhythm of his words, but also through the prescription of specific breathing practices, that Empedocles appears to be the presocratic who was most adept at transmitting philosophy.166 But like several of his predecessors, Empedocles seems to have sought to transmit this magical experience via his cosmology.

§86: The Empedoclean Kosmos. – Like every one of the philosophers we have considered so far, Empedocles’ cosmology both expressed the descent and ascent of transmigrating souls and was intended to help people go beyond merely conforming to traditional religion by providing them with a genuine cosmological understanding that would enable them to hold more informed religious views; the notorious difficulty of interpreting his cosmology derives from how it was constructed as a cosmic representation of the unity of opposites that eludes intellectual analysis.167 Its paradoxical nature is evident both in its double cosmogonic structure where the world is created from different beings at different times and in how both love and strife combine and separate the four elements in their own ways, but the specifically Nietzschean way in which Empedocles transmits the philosophical capacity to unite opposites is conveyed by how he describes both love and strife in positive and negative terms. That is, just as Nietzsche held that greatness consists of being able to intensely experience opposed passions while having them effortlessly under control, Empedocles’ cosmos affirms both love and strife while also negating them, and the unity between the emotional and incubatory methods of philosophical cultivation becomes clear when we keep in mind that the basic antithesis between love and strife is between rest and movement respectively.168 Just as the practice of incubation consists of retiring from the hustle and bustle of everyday life to the stillness of the incubatory chamber only to return to life at the proper time, Empedocles’ cosmos goes from the furious speed of strife’s dominion to the peaceful rest of love’s dominion only to return to strife again, and it has even been suggested that Empedocles’ cosmos is analogous to  Kingsley 2002, 401 note 165. LM D240/DK 105.  LM R59. Curd 2005, 147. 168  Pierris 2005, 205. 166 167

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the cycle of respiration.169 That modeling the cosmos on a breathing organism was more of an unconscious preconception than a conscious choice indicates how the cosmos created by ‘Empedocles’ can be considered as another manifestation of the philosophical creativity and intelligence of the body, and it is in this way that the Empedoclean cosmos can provide us with perhaps the most robust illustration of the philosophical productivity of animal and/or archaic embodiment.170

§87: Down from Olympus. – In contrast to Hölderlin and Nietzsche who thought that Empedocles shared their longing to lose their identity in an eastern or oceanic absorption in life itself, Empedocles’ ideal goal consists in sharing the hearth with other immortals, sitting at the same table, without any share in men’s sufferings, and in contrast to his own goal of making the world a more loving place, Empedocles’ cosmic cycle begins and ends with the dominion of strife in which each of the four elements has been completely separated from the others.171 They exist as a series of furiously revolving concentric spheres where, vanquished and exhausted, love has retreated to the center where her influenced has been reduced to each element’s own self-love, but this picture is complicated by the testimonies that attest to their being, not four, but five elements in Empedocles’ cosmos: as the mixture of fire and air, ether retains love’s unifying force in the outer most concentric sphere, and as a principle of harmony, Empedocles’ god the holy phrēn is strongest in this etheric sphere.172 Once the velocity of the universal circumvolution reaches its maximum, it begins to decrease and the wearied elements begin to think of love and peaceful union, but again, this picture is complicated by how love’s unification of the elements is as violent as strife’s breaking apart of elemental compounds.173 Empedocles does not utter only a single path but instead draws out one discourse by means of another, and his description of love as striking from the center of the spheres so as to gradually consolidate her power over the elements reflects how this amorous deceleration is also the death  Wilford 1968, 111.  Ibid., 117. 171  Laks 2005, 277. LM D40/DK B147. Kingsley 2002, 386. Primavesi 2008, 257. 172  Pierris 2005, 211. Drozdek 2007, 78–79. 173  Pierris 2005, 212–13. Curd 2005, 158 note 37. 169 170

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of the gods whose immortality resides, not in their indestructability, but in their eternal return: immediately were born as mortals those that earlier had learned to be immortals.174 That the fall of the gods is also portrayed as the result of their accepting the honor of blood sacrifices further complicates Empedocles’ story insofar as, by presupposing the existence of an already differentiated cosmos, it indicates that he is in fact describing two cycles.175 Just as Anaximander described a measured cycle of natural change within a longer-term cycle of cosmic generation and destruction, Empedocles described a demonic cycle governed by hypothetical necessity—whenever a god accepts a blood sacrifice it falls from divinity—within a cosmic cycle governed by absolute necessity—an oracle of Necessity, an ancient decree of the gods, eternal, sealed by broad oaths.176 Laks and Sedley maintain that the cosmic cycle begins, not with the fall of the gods, but with strife breaking up Empedocles’ one spherical go, but by continuing our account of Aphrodite’s conquest, we can see why this may not be the case.

§88: Love and Death. – Empedocles further echoes Anaximander’s democratic cosmos by having every entity in his cosmos feel, think, and be open to interpretation by every other entity, and in fact, it was likely this egalitarian sensibility that drove him to replace Parmenides’ all-steering goddess with the duo of love and strife.177 The oscillation between these two powers represents a rejection of any form of monarchical supremacy, and that ‘the struggle of these drives ensures that no force can ascend to dominance like Anaxagorean nous’ supports Nietzsche’s interpretation of the political motivations behind Empedocles’ cosmology.178 Love and strife dominate at difference areas of the cosmos as well as at different times, and Empedocles illustrates the creativity of both when he compares them to painters who grasp many-colored pigments in their hand, then, having mixed them in harmony, the ones more, the others, less, out of these they compose forms similar to all things.179 This unity or equality between creation  LM D46/DK B24. LM D75/DK B35. LM D75/DK B35.  Trépanier 2014, 207 note 47; Zuntz 1970, 273. 176  Sedley 2005, 356. Laks 2005, 272. LM D10/DK B115. 177  Bollack 2005, 70. 178  Shaw 2017, 18. 179  LM R79. LM D60/DK B23. 174 175

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and destruction is personified in the figure of love herself in the sense that she is both the universal lifeforce—Empedocles replaced Hesiod’s sexual account of theocosmogony with vegetal language—and can be identified with the goddess of death (Pindar’s Persephone).180 Strictly speaking, only fools who have no long-thinking concerns believe in birth and death because Empedocles both replaces birth and death with mixture and separation and denies the existence of individual beings, but he also endorsed a specifically Pythagorean mechanism of transmigration: this becomes clear only when we keep in mind that, besides the two powers and four elemental masses, there is a seventh divinity in Empedocles’ cosmos—the Pythagorean oath by which love and strife swore to maintain their equality.181 Empedocles no doubt knew that the Pythagoreans included the tetractys (the totality of all harmonies/proportions) in the oath they swore, and this is why he has Harmony (daughter of Aphrodite and Ares) both keep the interplay between love and strife in check and determine the structure of the cosmos: ‘the acceptable ratios of elements that determine the makeup of what exists in the world are the laws of harmony …. They are divine because they are eternal, because they are the laws to which love and strife are subsumed, and because they express the rationality of the world. However, they do not exist by themselves; they find their seat in the divine Mind, the divine Phrēn, and as such they are an attribute of God.’182 The different kinds of materials in the world are determined by the particular proportions of elements that they contain, and as parts of the divine mind (world soul), these harmonic proportions also constitute the formal mechanism for transmigration. Although Empedocles joins Heraclitus in maintaining a non-musical notion of harmony, his identification of the soul with ether indicates his affinity for the Pythagoreans’ musical conception of rebirth even though he pivots away from the partnership tradition by subsuming harmony within the holy phre ̄n which, despite the feminine gender of the term ϕρήν, is usually interpreted as a male god due to its close similarity to Empedocles’ sphere.183 Empedocles transforms the usual feminine form of σϕαɩ̑ ρα into the masculine form Σϕαɩ̑ ρoϛ so that it 180  Osborne 2005, 304 note 7. Kahn 1960b, 22. Long 2017, 5 note 17. Pierris 2005, 223 note 12. 181  LM D51/DK B11. Shaw 2017, 10. 182  Drozdek 2007, 54–55, 72, 74–75. 183  Sassi 2015, 9. Kingsley 2013, 401.

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reflects the gender of his god, and we can see a similar concern with the gender of his terminology in how, while he uses the feminine ἔριϛ at least once when he describes the wretched race of mortals as being born from strife, he otherwise refers to strife with the neuter term νεɩ̑ κoϛ.184 Continuing to explore the other aspects of Empedocles’ world will help us clarifies the connection between the formal-harmonic and material-etheric mechanisms of transmigration.

§89: Roots. – Aëtius’ report that ‘before the four elements there are smallest sparks, like elements before the elements’ indicates that Empedocles subscribed to the same pious atomism as Heraclitus and his other predecessors, and he even seems to echo Heraclitus by giving fire a privileged status; according to Aristotle, just as Parmenides postulated only two elements (fire and earth), Empedocles ‘too draws [the elements] together so as to reduce them to the two, for he opposes all the others to Fire.’185 Empedocles also continues Heraclitus’ view of rebirth as elemental transformation, and we can get a better understanding of this process by envisioning the beginning of his cosmogony as follows. As the rotation of the concentric spheres began to slow, the boundaries between them gradually relaxed until bubbles from each element were able to break through into the masses of its neighbors. Like egoists getting over their initial fear of intimacy, the elements (roots) learn that getting involved with others does not necessarily mean violence, and can even be enjoyable if the mixture is harmonious: elemental mixture is a ‘question of harmonious blending, and this of right proportion. Certain combinations of elements in suitable proportions yield stable mixtures, i.e. things mortal but enduring. Better proportioned elements give stabler concatenations of elements.’186 Although these elements-gods feel and think, their initial mixing was still an abiotic stage of the cosmos until love fused them into basic biological substances like blood, other forms of flesh, and bones fitted together marvellously by Harmony’s adhesives; consciousness emerges from the roots’ subrepresentational awareness via the fineness of the ingredients and the thoroughness of their  Hladký 2017, 12 note 44. LM D17/DK B124.  LM R27/DK A43; Primavesi 2015, 107. Aristotle On Generation and Corruption 2. 3. 330b20–21. 186  Pierris 2005, 198. 184 185

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mixture.187 The roots are equal in being but differ in quality, and when their growing appreciation of the joys of love enables them to enter into harmonious unions, they undergo an elemental transformation: ‘the formation of a compound simultaneously involves both its generation, obviously, but also the passing away into it of the elements from which it is composed …. In the same way, the destruction of a compound simultaneously involves both its destruction, obviously, but also the generation out of it of the elements from which it is composed.’188 Unlike the unchanging eternity of love and strife, the roots are immortal in the sense that, although they die via erotic union, they will always be reborn; they have their own lifecycles of dying into and being reborn from mortal compounds that are unable to be reborn from the elements.189 It is through the creation of such harmonically proportioned compounds that the forms/harmonies of the holy phre ̄n incarnate into the physical world, and we can see how they transcend the mortality of compounds by turning toward Empedocles’ conception of soul.

§90: Demons and Angels. – The incorporeality of the Empedoclean soul is suggested by both Plutarch’s report that it came from somewhere else to be joined to the earth-born body and by Empedocles’ view that some unnamed goddess was responsible for enveloping the soul in an unfamiliar cloak of flesh.190 Commentators have described the Empedoclean soul as the body’s noetic replica and identified it ‘with the numerical proportion, ratio, or harmonia of the elements, considered as an organizing principle capable of passing from one compound to another, and holding them together.’191 But while this formal reading of the soul corresponds with the term δαίμων etymologically translating as ‘divide(r)’ or ‘apportion(er),’ Empedocles’ identification of the soul with ether reminds us of its quasi-material nature.192 The same elemental ratio can result in different substances depending on particle size and the degree of mixture, and whereas blood is the seat of thought, ‘daimonic matter is constructed of even finer particles even more  LN D190/DK B98. LM D192/DK 96. Sedley 2016, 113. Curd 2016, 65 note 21.  Pierris 2005, 191–92. Palmer 2016, 47. 189  Ibid., 49–51. 190  LM R48. LM D19/DK B126. 191  Bollack 2005, 50. Cornford 1926, 569. 192  Trépanier 2014, 206. 187 188

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thoroughly mixed’: Empedocles further associates daimōnic matter with ether when he starts his description of the soul’s descent by stating the force of the ether chases them toward the sea.193 It is their intermediate status between form and matter that enables daimōnes to occupy a middle position between the immortality of the roots and the mortality of the compounds, and as avatars of the fifth etheric concentric sphere (holy phre ̄n/world soul), daimōnes actively direct the evolution of the cosmos: ‘the Divine Phrēn, by loving and hating, creates the universe. Daimon apparently derives its power to love and hate from this god, sharing some of his velocity and force …. Each daimon is a bearer of powers whose interaction causes the formation (as described in B59) or disintegration of different objects. Daimon functions as an agent of the Divine Phrēn which is loving and hating.’194 It is through the actions of daimōnes that the world becomes a more or less harmonious place, and the transpersonal nature of this process derives from how Empedocles’ denial that individual entities exist precludes us from identifying a specific daimōn with an individual organism: ‘our psychic nature at any given moment is obviously just as transitory as the physical mixture on which it is based. Not only does our mind in this sense not survive death; it does not survive any physical change whatsoever. The ratio of ingredients is altered by every bite of food, as well as every act of learning and forgetting.’195 It is the formal similarity between the different daimōnes that are continually flowing through an organism that accounts for the experiential continuity both within its lifetime and between the lifetimes or incarnations of different mortal compounds, but although this continuity ‘is likely to be something purely formal, like the “harmony” with which some Pythagoreans identified the soul,’ daimōnes’ etheric nature also means that they are ‘flesh-andblood organisms, not mere transmigrating souls or spirits.’196 Simon Trépanier identifies them with the enduring limb-substances from the first stage of love’s zoogony, and it is by turning to this stage that we can further elucidate the material vehicle for transmigration.197

 Curd 2005, 143. LM D10/DK B115.  Darcus 1977, 188. 195  Curd 2016, 61. Kahn 1960b, 16. 196  Sedley 2005, 364 note 49, 332. 197  Trépanier 2014, 199. 193 194

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§91: Wandering Limbs. – In language that vividly invokes the image of the dead who, in Homer, wander the banks of the infernal rivers before going down to Hades, Empedocles describes the fecundity of the earth as follows: from it blossomed many faces without necks, naked arms wandered about, bereft of shoulders, and eyes roamed about alone, deprived of brows.198 After unifying the elements so as to create the primary biological substances, love unifies said substances so as to create the primary zoological organs which may have really been whole yet simple organisms with one specialized function; especially since Empedocles grants to them the role of substances that Aristotle will later reserve for complete individuals: ‘though Empedocles uses Love or a given elemental ratio to account for the nature (and perhaps unity) of each part, he gives no account of the unity or soul of the whole organism.’199 Both limbs and daimōnes possess a functional unity, and although the limbs are ‘short-­lived individuals that succeed one another through biological reproduction,’ they may survive longer as types and even contribute to the continuity between life-times thanks to Empedocles’ pangenetic theory of reproduction—‘every parental “body part” contributes genetic material to the embryo, so that lines of inheritance are transmitted from organ to organ.’200 When a limb is passed on via reproduction, the parent limb is not exactly the same as the child limb, but for Empedocles, there is a sense in which the first limbs are still with us today: ‘despite their relative fragility, the Empedoclean limbs may yet deserve to be called δαίμoνεϛ, now also taken as ‘gods’: in virtue of their great age, and perhaps originally much greater size, these Presocratic “immortal genes” are worthy enough to be called gods.’201 That is, ‘through the sexual act those limbs that “wander on the shores of life” are sent again into circulation and reshaped in a new body. Reproduction thus represents the physiological actualising of reincarnation.’202 But although the holy phre ̄n emerges in the world via the collective actions of these divine genes or limbs-daimōnes, this process is also influenced by the stochastic formation or whole organisms.

 Marciano 2005, 390. LM D154/DK B57.  Sedley 2016, 113. Sedley 2005, 339. Trépanier 2014, 182, 185. 200  Ibid., 193, 197. 201  Ibid., 200–01, 200 note 37. 202  Marciano 2005, 391. 198 199

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§92: Chance Combinations. – If the limbs recall the wandering Homeric dead, then the second stage of love’s zoogony recalls some of the most surreal characters of Greek myth in general: many grew double of face and double of chest, races of man-prowed cattle, while others sprang up inversely, creatures of cattle-headed men, mixed here from men, there creatures of women fitted with shadowy genitals.203 Although the limbs have an inherent inclination to form empowering partnerships because this would enable each of their specific functions to be complemented by the others’ thereby increasing their chances of survival, there is no hint that love herself chose how the limbs should be combined into more complex organisms.204 Instead, Empedocles writes that these fell together wherever each set coincided, and again, it was the laws of harmony qua proper proportion, that decided which organisms survived: only this time, the harmony was not between the qualities of elements or substances, but between the functions of the limbs.205 Empedocles singles out mountain-bedded earth-couched lions as the best among wild beasts and laurels among beautiful-tressed trees, but since the evolutionary failures explicitly included features of women and men, it is certain that the evolutionary successes also included actual women and men, albeit with a much grander bearing than contemporary people: ‘the humans of nowadays, compared with the first ones, have the rank of those who are newborn.’206 The same process of chance combination and harmonic selection both gave rise to the biodiversity that still characterizes the world today and even created creatures that surpassed ordinary women and men due their well-tempered mixture, but besides their god-like size, the divinity of the first people is also expressed in their a-sexuality: ‘Love’s original “human” creations were solely the blissful gods or daimons, so that their resort to sexual reproduction occurred only after their fall … when they were condemned to the familiar relatively short human life span.’207 It’s rather unlikely that the meaning of daimōn in Empedocles differed radically from the meaning of this term in his poetic predecessors, and in Hesiod, this term designated  LM D156/DK B61.  Sedley 2016, 115. 205  LM D149/DK B59 translation modified; Sedley 2016, 115. Drozdek 2007, 75. 206  LM D36/DK B127. Sedley 2005, 341. LM D203b/DK A95. 207  Sedley 2005, 341. Trépanier 2014, 177. LM D178a/DK A75. Sedley 2005, 364 note 50. 203 204

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one of the deceased members of the golden race who act as guardians in later ages.208 Eisler indicates the significance of this parallel for Empedocles’ notion of the fall when she suggests that Hesiod’s references to a golden race that lived in peaceful ease ‘are memories of the more peaceful and equalitarian farming peoples of the Neolithic who were even by this time remembered only in legend.’209 The Homeric and Hesiodic poetry that constituted the mythological foundation on which the presocratics built their worldviews was full of remnants of neolithic partnership society such as when Hesiod writes that war was brought to Greece by a race of lesser men, and while the Theogony functioned to divinize patriarchy, it is revealing that Hesiod explicitly states that ‘not from me, but from my mother, comes the tale.’210 Even Hesiod’s vision was inspired by a female muse whose intimate connection to memory symbolizes how folk memories of older partnership lifestyles were still present in archaic Greece, and we can see a similar memory in what some scholars consider to be the real origin of Empedocles’ cosmos.

§93: Superorganism. – 1. Empedocles describes the reign of love as culminating in the unification of the elements into a mammoth single sphere, and some argue that the total dominance of love, not strife, is the privileged reference point or telos of the cosmic cycle, but we can begin to square this with Empedocles’ cosmogonic portrayal of the beginning of love’s reign by conceiving of the sphere as constituting an even larger cosmic cycle.211 Sedley argues that the cosmic cycle is not punctuated by the sphere at every round; ‘we can no longer afford to assume that the alteration of “one” and “many” is intended there as limited to the arrival and destruction of the sphairos’ since this alteration ‘operates no less within the continuous history of a single world than it does between one world and the next.’212 That is, his view that the sphere occurs, not at the end of every phase of increasing love, but only at longer intervals, enables us to conceive of the sphere as the beginning of a longer cosmic cycle in which the demonic cycle of the  Primavesi 2008, 260, 259.  Eisler 1995, 107. 210  Ibid., 108. 211  Pierris 2005, 202. Laks 2005, 267. 212  Sedley 2005, 349–50. 208 209

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soul’s fall from Olympus takes place, but when we keep in mind the presocratics’ tendency to describe the cosmos as originating from the divine, the differences between the sphere and Empedocles’ god suggest that we can interpret the sphere as something else besides the divine origin of the cosmos.213 2. As we saw, the holy phre ̄n is the seat of the cosmic rationality that manifests as the law of harmony and necessity, and although Empedocles’ description of the holy phre ̄n as steering the world by darting forth across the cosmos by swift thoughts has been taken as evidence that we cannot identify this god with the pre-cosmic sphere, Empedocles’ description of love as also bringing things together into a cosmos complicates this argument in a typically Empedoclean manner.214 The possibility that Empedocles intentionally created ambiguity here by using the term ‘cosmos’ in two different senses coincides with Laks’ and Most’s suggestion that the ethical dimension of Empedocles’ thought takes precedence over its physical dimension.215 That is, whereas Heraclitus and Parmenides used ambiguous language so as to goad their readers to think for themselves, Empedocles created an inherently ambiguous cosmology so as to invoke the same philosophical (creative/self-reflective) kind of thinking that is so crucial for making the world a more harmonious place. Empedocles continues Xenophanes’ criticism of anthropomorphizing the gods by describing the holy phre ̄n as having no feet, no swift knees, no shaggy genitals and this description is itself ambiguous insofar as it could be referring to either Apollo or the divine in general.216 The ambiguous identity of the holy phre ̄n is further increased by its quasi-identification with the sphere as Dionysus: the different entities in love’s ascension ‘represent Zagreus dismembered. While Dionysus Whole is the Σϕαɩ̑ ρoϛ, whom Regia Venus (Κúπριϛ Βασίλεια) reconstitutes in turn, eternally.’217 In other words, beside representing the process of respiration, Empedocles’ cosmology represents the conception (love’s zoogony) and articulation (strife’s zoogony) of an embryo (Dionysus), and whereas the steering of the holy phre ̄n recalls the story of how Apollo put Dionysus back together after the latter was dismembered by the titans, Empedocles’ having Dionysus be  Ibid., 353.  Drozdek 2007, 76. LM D93/DK B134 translation modified. LM 77b/DK B26. Curd 2016, 75. 215  LM V page 318. 216  LM D93/DK B134. Trépanier 2014, 189. 217  Pierris 2005, 217. 213 214

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r­econstituted by queen Cypris gives his goddess a role in this process as well.218 From the times of Homer onward, Cypris was the epithet most commonly applied to Aphrodite because it was onto the dry land of Cyprus that she strode after having been born fully grown from the ocean, and Sedley indicates how Empedocles’ description of the sphere as the reign of Cypris can be read as referring to folk memories of neolithic partnership societies when he notes that ‘there is very good reason to hold that the golden age of Kypris was an earlier era of our own world, since it apparently terminated, according to B115, in an exile of the daimons which still continues today.’219 Empedocles recalls the peaceful creativity of a society not dominated by male gods as follows: There was neither some Ares for them as a god nor Tumult, nor Zeus king nor Cronos nor Poseidon, but Cypris queen …. She it was whose favor they won with pious images, painting animals and artfully scented perfumes, sacrifices of unmixed myrrh and of fragrant incense, casting onto the ground libations of blond honey. The altar was not drenched with the unmixed blood of bulls.220

3. The primary reason why the sphere may not be read as a cosmic origin is that love’s ascension culminates, not in an amorphous or homogenous mixture, but with ‘the emergence of a huge, internally differentiated, complex, and thinking “superorganism.”’221 That Empedocles’ description of the sphere as not having human limbs was meant as a criticism of anthropomorphic images of divinity instead of as meaning that the sphere is completely homogenous is indicated by his also saying of the sphere that neither dissension nor battle is fitting in his limbs.222 Despite his describing the sphere as masculine, the absence of male gods at this time indicates how ‘the reign of Cypris illustrates a feminist model of power, and a feminist mode of regime-change. Love’s velvet revolution is engineered by the subtle infiltration of harmony among the inhabitants of the world.’223 In other words, just as love unites elements to form biological substances, substances to form limbs, and limbs to form complex  Marciano 2005, 383.  Blundell 1995, 36. Beaumont 1998, 60. Sedley 2005, 334. 220  LM D25/DK B128. 221  Hladký 2017, 1. 222  Ibid., 11. LM D91/DK B27a. 223  Hladký 2017, 12 note 44. Rowett 2016, 97. 218 219

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­ rganisms, she ultimately unites organisms into a superorganism—a como munity with the same instinctive cohesion that we currently observe in insect colonies, schools of fish, or flocks of birds. All creatures continue their lives in voluntary harmony with both one another and with the goddess, and they do so because their sense of personal identity has been expanded so as to include the totality of life itself—hence Empedocles’ emphasis on the unity of life: sometimes by Love we come together into one, all limbs that the body has received in the flower of blooming life.224 In a communal version of returning to the incubatory cave, the sphere represents how ‘the Goddess has absorbed and assimilated everything in her body’ so that all creatures live in light of the instinctive sense of partnership that characterized paleo/neolithic Europe: ‘by a self-­ compounding increase in the level of internal ϕιλóτης [love] and by constructive social activity, humans at the end of their quest can make the transition directly to divinity. Practice and preaching Empedokles’ philosophy is not an act of faith that one’s lot will improve in the next life but an emulation of the gods that will carry at least a few all the way to their company before they leave this life.’225 The process of evolution-­ divinization culminates when daimōnes bring the harmonic unity of the holy phre ̄n into this world as a partnership-oriented society, and it is in this way that, instead of conceiving of divinization as the individual cultivation of etheric matter, Empedocles envisioned it as a historical process in which, through a process of hereditary enlightenment, entire communities become divine. But as much as this communal interpretation of the sphere may speak against a cosmogonic interpretation, Empedocles’ account of the emergence of the cosmos from the sphere also provides valuable information about what causes partnership societies to dissolve.

§94: A Legend of the Fall. – 1. During love’s reign, strife retreats to the outermost periphery of the sphere, and Empedocles’ account of how all the god’s limbs were shaken, one after another as strife sequentially penetrated into the sphere recalls the paradigm-shifting nature of the successive invasions of the Indo-Europeans into the partnership culture of old Europe.226 The  Hladký 2017, 21. LM D73 303/DK B20.2.  Pierris 2005, 203. Stehle 2005, 268. 226  LM D95/DK B31. Graham 2005, 231. 224 225

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­ ossibility that the dissolution of the sphere was also caused by the elep ments committing perjury qua their violating their agreement to completely merge into a homogenous sphere reflects how internal divisions within a community open the door to its being overtaken by external forces, and this political reading of strife’s ascent helps explain why Empedocles appears to have not spent much time describing it: ‘the great challenge of Greek political theory is how to unify the state so that parties and factions are neutralized and the different classes and civic associations work together in harmony’ and since, ‘politically speaking, the connection between like and like is natural and normal; it is the connection between unlike and unlike that must be promoted.’227 As the principle of individual (instead of collective) identity, strife’s rise to power required much less explanation than love’s, but there is another psychological source of the dissolution of the sphere that intimates why the inhabitants of the sphere would want to dissolve it; namely, the peaceful stillness of the sphere inevitably causes the elements to become restless and weary of being subdued by love.228 The elements’ feeling the need to reassert each of their individual identities after being submerged in the nurturing harmony of the sphere reflects how an overly comfortable lifestyle can eventually cause a grizzly voice to growl from deep within—a will to power that desires resistances so that it can manifest its strength by overcoming them. Furthermore, just as love resided at both the earthy center and etheric periphery during strife’s reign, Empedocles also describes strife as rising from within the sphere, and this adds a cosmogonic interpretation of strife’s ascent to the aforementioned political and psychological ones: Strife had grown great in his limbs and rushed upon his honors, as the time was fulfilled.229 Empedocles associates strife with fire as the most active element against which all the others stand as a group, and it was a condensation of fire in some region of the sphere that, by initiating a rotating movement, enabled strife qua the principle of movement to reaffirm itself and divide the limbs of the sphere into the various aspects of the world that we observe today.230 Again, our information concerning strife’s ascent pales in comparison to that of love’s with only one fragment describing the first stage of strife’s zoogony, but at least this pertains to one of the biggest puzzles of  Pierris 2005, 217. Graham 2005, 237–38.  Pierris 2005, 206. 229  LM D94/DK B30. 230  Pierris 2005, 206–07. 227 228

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Empedocles’ narrative—that, unlike plants, animals, and gods, humans appear to be born twice: Come then: how fire, separating off, drew upward the nocturnal saplings of much-weeping men and women—Hear this. For my tale is not aimless nor ignorant. First, complete outlines sprang up from the earth possessing a share of both, of water as of heat. These fire sent upwards, wishing to reach what was similar to it; as yet they displayed neither the lovely framework of limbs nor the voice and the organ that is native to men.231

Although Empedocles illustrates the creativity of both love and strife by describing them as two painters, the fact that strife is a divisive or analytic force means that it does not so much create as unfold what love has already put together, and this is why it is most likely that strife’s zoogony is a continuation of love’s with the above description of the emergence of humans from the sphere being an account of people asserting their egoistic drives against the partnership ethos.232 Far from being a progression from archaic collectivism to modern individualism, the breaking of the sphere represents people’s loss of the instinctive sense of communal care and responsibility without which no society can endure and for which no amount of legislation can compensate. 2. Our meager evidence at least enables us to discern three phases of strife’s ascension. First, there is the third stage of Empedocles’ zoogony where strife extracts humans from the sphere, and these humans were whole-natured in the sense that each of them consisted of a unity of a man and a woman: they were likely the inspiration for some of the spherical beings described in Plato’s Symposium. The second stage is the fourth stage in the zoogony. It is the only stage in which we see strife acting deliberately by splitting the whole natured beings in two thereby creating the individual sexes and hence the need for sexual reproduction: ‘when the sun rises for the first time, the living beings, which have been mute up to this point, produce their first sound, the cry of pain with which they react to their division.’233 Empedocles speaks of these people as being wretched because they are not fallen daimōnes on their way to recovering divine bliss but rather a species condemned to permanent discord; they recall Hesiod’s  Sedley 2005, 332, 345. LM D157/DK B62.  Marciano 2005, 382. 233  Sedley 2005, 343. Primavesi 2016, 21. 231 232

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fifth and final race, and just as Hesiod thought that lesser people brought war to Greece, Empedocles’ wretched humans replaced queen Cypris with their male war gods who demanded blood sacrifices: ‘the prevailing force (Love or Strife) leads humans not only to behave accordingly but to project the same character onto the gods they worship, and the character they attribute to the gods in turn determines the form of worship they offer.’234 In contrast to the increase in sensitivity and intelligence that attends the ascension of love, strife’s ascension brings with it increased dullness and stupidity, and Empedocles symbolizes the disorientation that he himself experienced after relying on insane Strife in his portrayal of the final stage of his cosmology.235 Like love’s initial blending of the elements, this is an abiotic stage, and it begins when the rotational movement with which fire inaugurated strife’s ascension becomes so fast that all living things are torn limb from limb; the process of putrefaction that follows this dismemberment, in turn, enables each of the elements to reassemble into the four pure masses of furiously rotating concentric spheres that constitute strife’s dominion.236 3. In sum, Whereas Parmenides’ maternal ontology and cosmology may be thought of as the conceptual zenith of the partnership tradition that we have been tracing through the history of presocratic philosophy, Empedocles’ cosmology provides invaluable historical support for our interpretation of the presocratics. His connections to the Greek mysteries and the plausibility that his sphere is a nostalgic recollection of a more peaceful past further support our contention that the first philosophers were trying to revive an old European goddess-oriented form of religion within the predominantly patriarchal culture of archaic Greece, and the somatic elements of his cosmology—its reflecting both respiration and embryonic conception-articulation—further conveys how this reformation arose from the unconscious body’s therapeutic creativity; from those intuitive hunches or gut feelings that something just isn’t right which one experiences within domineering environments as well as from those spiritual longings that continue to drive people to seek more fulfilling forms of religion. Finally, Empedocles thought that humans were currently living in the fourth stage of his zoogony, and now that we have the cosmological

 Sedley 2005, 347. Stehle 2005, 264.  Kahn 1960b 22. Rowett 2016, 100. 236  Primavesi 2016, 23. 234 235

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context in place, we can consider what he thought he was doing as he traveled around proclaiming his own divinity.

§95: Catharsis. – 1. Although the publicly addressed religious poem was composed later than the privately addressed physical one, the former’s political project was Empedocles’ primary aim, but the distinction between the poems shouldn’t be pushed too far because identical passages may have appeared in each one and Empedocles could have expanded or contracted the content of his public performances so as to suit the particular needs of his audiences.237 The very titles of the two poems (Purifications and On Nature) may in fact be two sides of the same coin insofar as the process of divine exile that forms the heart of Empedocles’ physics is itself a process of purification that occurs via hate-punishment instead of Empedocles’ attempt to purify people via love-philosophy.238 Empedocles’ description of himself as crowned with ribbons and with blooming garlands places his recital in the typically festive context of rhapsodic performances, and the very enactment of his poem was meant to be a healing event, but when we consider the details of his address, we can see that his method of communal healing is more like Nietzsche’s emphasis on the necessity of evil for greatness than an exclusive emphasis on love.239 2. Empedocles was attempting to invent a different kind of society in which religious beliefs harmonized with the study of nature as a practice of divinization, and the ethical nature of divinization consists in how people ‘become immortal on the strength of their benefits to other people (in religion, medicine, leadership and poetry) not merely their learning.’240 Empedocles’ presenting himself to his audience as a model for how people can become divine via contributing to their communities clearly indicates the importance of love for his endeavor, but a closer look at his list of the highest human incarnations complicates this picture: at the end they become seers, hymn singers, doctors, and leaders for humans on earth, and then they blossom up as gods.241 The famous seer Calchas  Kahn 1960b, 29. Bollack 2005, 46. Stehle 2005, 247.  Picot 2015, 405. 239  LM D4/DK B112. Stehle 2005, 249. 240  Bollack 2005, 47. Long 2017, 4. 241  Stehle 2005, 267, 270. LM D39/DK B146. 237 238

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pushed Agamemnon into making a bloody sacrifice; the poets who sing hymns also glorify martial feats and promise immortality in human memory to the bloodiest heroes; the word Empedocles uses for leaders (πρóμoι) primarily signifies warriors or battle chiefs; and in fact, all four types that Empedocles mentions have the ability to participate in military operations.242 For Empedocles, only doctors operate solely under the aegis of love, and this is why ‘honors are not reserved for Love. Hate has an equal portion (fr. 30)—and that needs to be said again and again to counter all the moralizing and angelic notions about Empedocles.’243 It is in this way that Empedocles shared Nietzsche’s method of multiplying and amplifying the emotions; of insisting on the need for terrible as well as angelic passions, and while he also shared with other presocratics the technique of using his lifestyle, writing, and cosmology as means by which to transmit philosophy to others, his theatrics gave him a distinct advantage in inspiring people to become philosophers on their own. 3. It was through riveting public performances that religious reformers attracted adherents in the competitive performance culture of ancient Greece, and a poet like Empedocles whose mode of teaching was oral and dramatic and who rhetorically enacted his most radical claims for his audience demands that we take his performance into account if we are going to understand his philosophy.244 But it is also crucial to know whom he is addressing when he begins his religious poem by saying friends, you who dwell in the great city beside the yellow Acragas on the lofty citadel and who care for good deeds, respectful harbors for strangers, inexperienced in wickedness, I greet you! I, who, for you am an immortal god.245 While many have assumed that he is addressing his fellow citizens, his description fits in more with the Sicilian practice of reserving the high point of a city’s topography for important cults. After Theron (tyrant of Acragas/Agrigentum) and Gelon of Syracuse defeated the Carthaginians in 480  BCE, the city of Acragas erected a series of temples on the hill marking the southern boundary of the city, and it would be in keeping with Empedocles’ intimate relationship to the gods that he would address them as dwelling in Acragas instead of confining them to Olympus.246  Picot 2015, 391, 393–94.  Ibid., 398–99, 403. 244  Stehle 2005, 247–48. 245  LM D4/DK B112. 246  Stehle 2005, 256–57. 242 243

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That is, he is addressing the gods as a fellow god and it is in this way that, besides teaching people how to become divine as other presocratics had done, he actually shows them what divinization looks like: ‘in his greeting he enacts before human eyes, as it were, his own “shooting up” to divinity and becoming the peer of the gods. His performance stages not just a rhetorical epiphany but an apotheosis.’247 It doesn’t matter how well one can teach philosophy if one cannot inspire people to want to philosophize, and by performing the act of philosophical divinization as he went from town to town, Empedocles did just that perhaps more than any other presocratic.

References Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works Volume 1 & 2. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Babich, Babette. 1994. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2011. The Philosopher and the Volcano: On the Antique Sources of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Philosophy Today 55: 206–224. ———. 2012. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Parodic Style: On Lucian’s Hyperanthropos Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Diogenes 58 (4): 58–74. ———. 2013. Nietzsche’s Performative Phenomenology: Philology and Music. In Nietzsche and Phenomenology: Power, Life, Subjectivity, ed. Élodie Boubill and Christine Daigle, 117–140. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Barrett, James. 2004. Struggling with Parmenides. Ancient Philosophy 24: 267–291. Beaumont, Lesley. 1998. Born Old or Never Young? Femininity, Childhood and the Goddesses of Ancient Greece. In The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, ed. Sue Blundell and Margaret Williamson, 57–73. London and New York: Routledge. Blundell, Sue. 1995. Women in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bollack, Jean. 2005. Empedocles: Two Theologies, Two Projects. In The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. Proceedings of the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Myconense July 6th-July 13th, 2003, ed. Apostolos L. Pierris, 45–72. Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research. Bredlow, Luis Andrés. 2011. ’Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Parmenides’ Theory of Cognition (B 16). Apeiron 44: 219–263.

 Ibid., 269.

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Bremmer, Jan N. 2001. The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Bryant, Edwin F. 2009. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. New York: North Point Press. Burkert, Walter. 1985. Greek Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2013. Parmenides’ Proem and Pythagoras’ Descent. In Philosophy and Salvation in Greek Religion, ed. Vishwa Adluri, 85–116. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Caygill, Howard. 1999. Nietzsche and Atomism. In Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory. Nietzsche and the Sciences I, ed. Babette Babich, 27–36. Great Britain: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Cherubin, Rose. 2001. Λέγειν, Noεɩ̑ ν, and Tò Eóν in Parmenides. Ancient Philosophy 21: 277–303. ———. 2005. ‘Light, Night, and the Opinions of Mortals’ Parmenides B8.51–61 and B9. Ancient Philosophy 25: 1–23. Cornford, F.M. 1926. Mystery Religions and Pre-Socratic Philosophy. In Cambridge Ancient History., 1:522–78, ed. J.B.  Bury, S.A.  Cook, and F.E. Adcock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, I. 2002. The Scope of Thought in Parmenides. Classical Quarterly 52 (1): 207–219. Curd, Patricia. 2005. On the Question of Religion and Natural Philosophy in Empedocles. In The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. Proceedings of the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Myconense July 6th-July 13th, 2003, ed. Apostolos L. Pierris, 137–162. Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research. ———. 2016. Power, Structure, and Thought in Empedocles. Rhizomata 4 (1): 55–79. Darcus, Shirley M. 1977. Daimon Parallels the Holy Phrēn in Empedocles. Phronesis 22 (3): 175–190. Detienne, Marcel. 1999. The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books. Dodds, E.R. 1951. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Drozdek, Adam. 2007. Greek Philosophers as Theologians: The Divine Arche. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2008. In the Beginning Was the Apeiron: Infinity in Greek Philosophy. Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart. Eisler, Riane. 1995. The Chalice & the Blade: Our History, Our Future. New York: HarperCollins Publishing. Finkelberg, Aryeh. 1986. The Cosmology of Parmenides. American Journal of Philology 107: 303–317. ———. 1997. Xenophanes’ Physics, Parmenides’ Doxa and Empedocles’ Theory of Cosmogonical Mixture. Hermes 125 (1): 1–16.

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Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1999. Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer. New Haven: Yale University Press. Graham, Daniel W. 2005. The Topology and Dynamics of Empedocles’ Cycle. In The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. Proceedings of the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Myconense July 6th-July 13th, 2003, ed. Apostolos L.  Pierris, 225–244. Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research. Granger, Herbert. 2008. The Proem of Parmenides’ Poem. Ancient Philosophy 28: 1–20. ———. 2010. Parmenides of Elea: Rationalist of Dogmatist? Ancient Philosophy 20: 15–38. Hanshe, Rainer J. 2013. Zarathustra’s Stillness: Dreaming and the Art of Inculbation. In Nietzsche’s Theraputic Teaching: For Individuals and Culture, ed. Horst Hutter and Eli Friedland. London and New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2015. Nietzsche’s Synaesthetic Epistemology and the Restitution of the Holistic Human. In Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life, ed. Vanessa Lemm, 177–193. New York: Fordham University Press. Hanson, David Victor, and John Heath. 2001. Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom. New  York: Encounter Books. Hermann, Arnold. 2004. To Think Like a God: Pythagoras and Parmenides. In The Origins of Philosophy. Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing. Hladký, Vojtěch. 2017. Empedocles’ Sphairos. Rhizomata 5 (1): 1–24. Jantzen, Grace M. 2004. Death and the Displacement of Beauty: Volume One Foundations of Violence. London and New York: Routledge. Jáuregui, Miguel Herrero de. 2013. Salvation for the Wanderer: Odysseus, the Gold Leaves, and Empedocles. In Philosophy and Salvation in Greek Religion, ed. Vishwa Adluri, 29–57. Berlin: De Gruyter. Jensen, Anthony K. 2008. Anti-Politicality and Agon in Nietzsche’s Philology. In Nietzsche, Power, Politics, ed. Herman W. Siemens and Vlasti Roodt, 319–345. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Kahn, Charles H. 1960a. Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1960b. Religion and Natural Philosophy in Empedocles’ Doctrine of the Soul. Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie 42: 13–35. Kamtekar, Rachana. 2009. Knowing by Likeness in Empedocles. Phronesis 54: 215–238. Kingsley, Peter. 1995. Ancient Philosophy Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1999. In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Point Reyes: The Golden Sufi Center. ———. 2002. Empedocles for the New Millennium. Ancient Philosophy 22: 333–413.

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———. 2013. Reality. Point Reyes: The Golden Sufi Center. Krell, David Ferrall. 1986. Postponements: Women, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1991. Nietzsche Hölderlin Empedocles. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 15 (2): 31–48. Kurfess, Christopher. 2016. The Truth about Parmenides’ Doxa. Ancient Philosophy 36: 13–45. Laks, André. 2005. Some Thoughts About Empedoclean Cosmic and Demonic Cycles. In The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. Proceedings of the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Myconense July 6th-July 13th, 2003, ed. Apostolos L.  Pierris, 265–282. Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research. ———. 2018. The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. Trans. Glen Most. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Laks, André, and Glenn W.  Most. 2016. Early Greek Philosophy. Vol. I– VII. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Long, Anthony A. 2017. Immortality in Empedocles. Apeiron 50 (1): 1–20. Luchte, James. 2011. Early Greek Thought: Before the Dawn. New  York: Bloomsbury. Marciano, M. Laura Gemelli. 2005. Empedocles’ Zoogony and Embryology. In The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. Proceedings of the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Myconense July 6th-July 13th, 2003, ed. Apostolos L. Pierris, 373–404. Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research. ———. 2008. Images and Experience: At the Roots of Parmenides’ Aletheia. Ancient Philosophy 28: 21–48. McEvilley, Thomas. 2002. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Allworth Press. Miller, Patrick Lee. 2011. Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy. London and New York: Continuum. Most, Glenn W. 2005. The Stillbirth of Tragedy: Nietzsche and Empedocles. In The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. Proceedings of the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Myconense July 6th-July 13th, 2003, ed. Apostolos L.  Pierris, 31–44. Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research. Mourelatos, Alexander P.D. 2008. The Route of Parmenides: Revised and Expanded Edition. Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing. Muraresku, Brian C. 2020. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967a. Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werk. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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———. 1967b. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. ———. 1996. Assorted Opinions and Maxims. In Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, 215–299. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997a. Daybreak. Eds. Maudemaria Clark and Brian Leiter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997b. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. In Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, 195–254. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997c. Schopenhauer as Educator. In Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, 125–194. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Trans. Marianne Cowan. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. ———. 2001. The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer. In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, 153–229. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. The Pre-Platonic Philosophers. Ed. Greg Whitlock. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2009. Writings from the Early Notebooks. Eds. Raymond Guess and Alexander Nehamas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Eds. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osborne, Catherine. 2005. Sin and Moral Responsibility in Empedocles’s Cosmic Cycle. In The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. Proceedings of the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Myconense July 6th-July 13th, 2003, ed. Apostolos L.  Pierris, 283–308. Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research. Palmer, John. 2009. Parmenides & Presocratic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Elemental Change in Empedocles. Rhizomata 4 (1): 30–54. Panchenko, Dmitri. 2018. Empedocles’ Emulation of Anaxagoras and Pythagoras (D.L. 8. 56). Apeiron 51 (4): 453–457. Parker, Robert. 2011. On Greek Religion. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Picot, Jean-Claude. 2015. Lions and promoi: Final Phase of Exile for Empedocles’ Daimones. Phronesis 60: 380–409. Pierris, Apostolos L. 2005. OMOION OMOIΩ and ΔINH: Nature and Function of Love and Strife in the Empedoclean System. In The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. Proceedings of the Symposium

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Philosophiae Antiquae Myconense July 6th-July 13th, 2003, ed. Apostolos L. Pierris, 189–224. Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research. Plato. 1997. Complete Works. Ed. John M.  Cooper. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Primavesi, Oliver. 2008. Empedocles: Physical and Mythical Divinity. In The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, 250–283. Eds. Patricia Curd and Daniel W. Graham. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2015. Olearius on Atomism and Theism in Heraclitus: A Presocratic in Late 17th Century Germany. Rhizomata 3 (1): 94–123. ———. 2016. Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle and the Pythagorean Tetractys. Rhizomata 4 (1): 5–29. Rayman, Joshua. 2018. Representationalism in Nietzsche’s Early Physics: Cosmology and Sensation in the Zeitatomlehre. Nietzsche-Studien 47: 167–194. Rowett, Catherine. 2016. Love, Sex and the Gods: Why Things Have Divine Names in Empedocles’ Poem, and Why They Come in Pairs. Rhizomata 4 (1): 80–110. Sassi, Maria Michela. 2015. How Musical Was Heraclitus’ Harmony? A Reassessment of 22 B8, 10, 51 DK. Rhizomata 3 (1): 3–25. Schorn, Stefan. 2014. Pythagoras in the Historical Tradition: From Herodotus to Diodorus Siculus. In A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A.  Huffman, 296–314. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seaford, Richard. 2004. Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sedley, David. 2005. Empedocles’ Life Cycles. In The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. Proceedings of the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Myconense July 6th-July 13th, 2003, ed. Apostolos L. Pierris, 331–371. Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research. ———. 2016. Empedoclean Superorganisms. Rhizomata 4 (1): 111–125. Shaw, Miranda. 1994. Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shaw, Michael M. 2017. Architecture and Eternity: Physis in Nietzsche and Empedocles. In Ontologies of Nature: Continental Perspectives and Environmental Reorientations, ed. Gerard Kuperus and Marjolein Oele, 3–26. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Silk, M.S., and J.P.  Stern. 1981. Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stehle, Eva. 2005. The Addresses of Empedokles, Katharmoi Fr. B112: Performance and Moral Implications. Ancient Philosophy 25: 247–272. Tejera, Victorino. 1987. Nietzsche and Greek Thought. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Thomson, Iain. 2003. Interpretation as Self-Creation: Nietzsche and the Pre-­ Platonics. Ancient Philosophy 23: 195–213.

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Tonelli, Angelo. 2005. “Cosmogony Is Psychology Is Ethics” Some Thoughts about Empedocles’ Fragments 17; 110; 134 DK, and P.  STRASB.  GR.  INV. 1665–1666D, VV. 1–9. In The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. Proceedings of the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Myconense July 6th-July 13th, 2003, ed. Apostolos L. Pierris, 309–330. Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research. Tor, Shaul. 2015. Parmenides’ Epistemology and the Two Parts of His Poem. Phronesis 60: 3–39. Trépanier, Simon. 2014. From Wandering Limbs to Limbless Gods: δαίμων as Substance in Empedocles. Apeiron 47 (2): 172–210. Wilford, F.A. 1968. Embryological Analogies in Empedocles’ Cosmology. Phronesis 13 (2): 108–118. Young, Julian. 2010. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zuntz, G. 1970. Persephone: Three Essays on Religion and Thought in Magna Graecia. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

CHAPTER 6

Anaxagoras and Democritus

§96: Intellectualism and Materialism. – Although, with respect to their lives, Anaxagoras and Democritus exhibit enough of the behavioral characteristics that we have seen in earlier presocratics to be representative of the partnership lifestyle, their works display a sharp break with their predecessors insofar as they diminish goddess imagery and reject rebirth. This shift coincides with several other changes such as the first appearance of explicit misogyny in the extant presocratic fragments; the moving of the philosophical center of gravity from Ionia and Italy to Athens; a more skeptical or reductive attitude toward religion; and the increasing influence of sophism on presocratic thought. Whereas Anaxagoras personifies the ascendance of intellectualism—the prioritization of a disembodied mind that contrasts to the more visceral conception of thought that we’ve found, for example, in Empedocles’ locating thought in the blood around the heart—, Democritus personifies the ascendance of materialism—the prioritization of dead matter over the idea of a lifeforce. And while intellectualism is one of the main targets of Nietzsche’s emphasis on embodiment, the important inspiration that materialism provided for Nietzsche’s critique of intellectualism reflects how, as much as we may interpret Anaxagoras and Democritus as constituting the end of presocratic philosophy qua the revival of goddess/ rebirth-centered religiosity within archaic-ancient Greece, Nietzsche’s © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Breidenstein Jr., Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44780-8_6

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reading of them can help us revive the presocratic—and, arguably, proper— conception of philosophy in our time.

§97: Nietzsche’s Anaxagoras. – Like Parmenides, Anaxagoras (500-428  BCE) is an important point of orientation for Nietzsche’s reading of the presocratics insofar as the latter’s entire chronology revolves around his placing Anaxagoras after the Eleatics and before Empedocles, the atomists, and the neo-Pythagoreans.1 And Anaxagoras also introduces several important shifts in both Nietzsche’s and our narrative of presocratic philosophy. In contrast to how all the aforementioned thinkers can be seen as religious reformers, Nietzsche saw that Anaxagoras wanted secularism, and this break from cultural tradition was accompanied by two other shifts: first, an axiological shift from affirming the embodied nature of cognition and toward intellectualism— Anaxagoras ‘forgot the brain … and instead decreed the “spirit as such”; and second, a geographical shift from either Ionia or Italy, to Athens— Anaxagoras ‘is the genuine, premier philosopher of Athens’ from whom ‘Socrates receives essential characteristics.’2 Nietzsche conveys how intellectualism consists, not just of valuing a detached or abstracted conception of mind, but of also denigrating the very unconscious somatic creativity that propels both philosophical and artistic inspiration when he summarizes the effect that Anaxagoras seems to have had on Greek tragedy: As a poet, Euripides is thus the echo of his conscious perceptions … with regard to his critical-productive work, he must often have felt as though his task was to give critical dramatic life to the beginning of Anaxagoras’ work, which opens with the words: “In the beginning everything was together; then reason came and created order.” And if Anaxagoras with his nous appeared among the philosophers like the first “sober” man in the company of drunks, Euripides may well have applied the same image to his relationship to the other tragic poets …. This is why he, the first sober man, was bound to condemn the “drunken” poets. What Sophocles said about Aeschylus, namely that he did the right thing, although he did it unconsciously, was certainly not meant in Euripides’ sense, who would only have

1 2

 PPP, 231–32.  EN §23[8]. PTAG, 101. PPP, 96.

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allowed that what Aeschylus created was wrong because he created unconsciously.3

Nietzsche emphasizes how the dominance of a detached mind is also evident in Anaxagoras’ cosmogony when he interpreted the latter’s cosmic mind (nous) as creating the cosmos via a completely free choice, and this cosmic beginning also inaugurated a new divided view of the world: ‘a dualism: matter is not simultaneously what lives, as with Heraclitus’s fire’ because, in Anaxagoras, we find ‘for the first time in philosophy the crude opposition of soul to matter.’4 Although Nietzsche attributed such dualism to Parmenides, these statements remind us that he ultimately saw the Eleatic as a monist like Heraclitus, but Nietzsche also recognized how Anaxagoras’ dualism is called into question by the latter’s describing nous as ‘an extremely delicate sensitive material with the specific property of “thinking.”5 (If nous is in some sense material, than Anaxagoras’ conceiving of nous as an exemption to the total mixture of the initial pre-cosmic chaos ‘is logically highly suspect … there is something mythological about it, and it looks arbitrary.’)6 But this may also indicate that Anaxagoras did not make as drastic a break with his forebears as it first appears. Just as Nietzsche’s statement that ‘every commentator explains intellect incorrectly: it is life, not conscious knowing’ presents Anaxagoras’ nous as a symbolic representation of the same cosmic lifeforce that we’ve seen in earlier philosophers, he attributes to Anaxagoras a by-now-familiar artistic and even religious sensibility: ‘the Spirit of Anaxagoras is a creative artist’ insofar as the absolutely free choice by which nous created the cosmos can only be imagined as the purposeless play of Heraclitus’ divine child, and although desiring secularism, Anaxagoras ‘treated of physical things as reverently and with the same mysterious awe with which we stand before an antique temple.’7 By turning to the man himself, we’ll get a better sense of the ways in which he either broke with or continued the partnership tradition.

 Wilkerson 2006, 137. BT §12.  PTAG, 116. PPP, 101, 72. 5  PTAG, 107, 99. 6  PTAG, 105. 7  PPP, 99, 105. PTAG, 116, 109, 112–13. 3

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§98: Portrait of a Philosopher. – The biographical material that we have about Anaxagoras paints a picture similar to those of all the philosophers that we have considered so far: ‘he was distinguished for high birth and wealth, but also for nobility of spirit, for he ceded his patrimony to his relatives.’8 The usually anti-materialistic Socrates attributed this decision to Anaxagoras’ stupidity, and Aristotle maintained that decisions like this are precisely why most people consider philosophers to be wise but not prudent, yet the practicality of Anaxagoras’ indifference to affluence is evident in his observation that wealth and power don’t make one happy.9 When his relatives accused him of neglecting his patrimony, he ask them to just take care of it themselves and ‘in the end he withdrew and devoted himself to the observation of natural phenomena, not paying any attention to political matter.’10 That his avoidance of both wealth and power was propelled by a healthy sense of elitism is suggested by his criticism of his countrymen: the Greeks do not conceive correctly either what it is to come to be or what it is to be destroyed. For no thing comes to be or is destroyed; but rather, out of things that are, there is mixing and separation.11 Unlike his predecessors, Anaxagoras didn’t extend the non-­existence of destruction to the belief in rebirth, and this corresponds with how there are no reports of his connection to any goddess religion or even to his involvement with women in general except for the report that he used the bread of Demeter to illustrate the homogeneity of the food we ingest and Nietzsche’s suggestion that he also had Aspasia as a student.12 But his nurturing sensibility is nevertheless evident in another anecdote: ‘he asked that children be allowed to play every year in the month in which he had died; and this custom is preserved to the present day. When he died, the citizens of Lampsacus buried him with great honor.’13 Anaxagoras’ temperamental proximity to both the gloomy yet nurturing Heraclitus and the melodramatic Empedocles is further conveyed by reports that he was never seen laughing nor smiling at all and that he committed suicide by starving himself in Lampsacus after being  LM P31/DK A1.  LM P28/DK A13. LM P37/DK A30. 10  LM P40/DK A1. 11  LM D15/DK B17. 12  LM D3/DK A46. PPP, 95. 13  LM P46/DK A1. 8 9

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imprisoned in Athens for introducing a new doctrine about god, but what makes him a philosopher more than anything else is that he shared with all of his predecessors a deep love of learning: when someone asked him how he could care for his fatherland if he neglected his patrimony, ‘he replied “don’t be blasphemous: for I do care for my fatherland, and indeed very much”—and pointed to the sky …. Asked one day for what purpose he had been born, he answered, “To observe the sun, the moon, and the sky.”14 Anaxagoras loved learning so much that he was given the nickname ‘Mind’ in what may have been the ancient equivalent of ‘nerd alert!’ but his passion was not confined to philosophy alone.15 Commentators illustrate Anaxagoras’ philosophical sensibility by noting his bold speculative temperament and his habit of thinking in brilliant flashes, but Anaxagoras was also empirically minded person.16

§99: The Science Guy. – In keeping with his dedication to observing celestial phenomena, Anaxagoras’ name became associated with the famous meteorite of Aegospotami (467/66 BCE), and it was precisely his theoretical boldness that enabled him to achieve his fame as a cosmologist; a fame that preceded his arrive in Athens.17 No other presocratic philosopher had posited heavy bodies in the sky because, for the Greeks, this would have been a highly counter-intuitive idea, but Anaxagoras did and it was by providing a cosmological model that could at least allow a heavy body to fall to earth that he ‘predicted’ the meteorite as well as made a historical advance in ancient cosmology: ‘Anaxagoras for the first time produced a cosmological theory that could be tested against empirical observations …. Virtually all Presocratic theories after him would use his hypotheses of massy heavenly bodies held aloft by a powerful vortex motion.’18 Anaxagoras also carried Parmenides’ hypothesis that the moon received its light form the sun even further insofar as, whereas this view merely allowed for the possibility that solar eclipses are caused by the blocking of solar light, Anaxagoras sought to test this hypothesis by collecting geographical data  LM P32/DK A21. LM P45/DK A3. LM P40/DK A1.  LM P42/DK A1. 16  Inwood 1986, 28. Stokes 1965, 16. 17  Graham 2013, 1. LM P6/DK A11. 18  Graham 2013, 3, 14–15. 14 15

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about which regions that were overshadowed by the solar eclipse of 478 BCE so as to show that the eclipse was a visible shadow of the moon; hence the view of some ancient and modern scholars that Anaxagoras was the one who discovered the cause of eclipses.19 That this dedication to precision manifested in Anaxagoras’ writing style is suggested by such comments as that all presocratics were poets until Anaxagoras put his book up for sale in Athens for one Drachma; that, unlike the enigmatic Heraclitus, Anaxagoras was plain spoken; that his style can be paratactic at times as if it were just listing individual items; and, especially, that Anaxagoras’ key contribution to the Greek philosophical vocabulary lay in cleaning up philosophical language by studiously excluding misleading language.20 But as much as this coincides with his being a notorious critic of superstitions, that he did—as Nietzsche thought—transfer a religious devotion to science is suggested by how, besides being dogmatic in his constructions and ambiguous in his expressions, Anaxagoras’ prose is characterized by a poetic technique of solemn predication qua the heaping up of ponderous predicates such as unlimited, finest, purest, self-­ controlled in his description of nous.21 It must be kept in mind that it was a poet’s nous that endowed him with the second sight necessary to see Alētheia, and just as Proclus maintained that the nous within us is Dionysian, Anaxagoras conveys his religious feelings about the cosmic nous by using the orphic term katharos (pure) to describe it.22 Nevertheless, by considering Anaxagoras’ career, we can see how little these vestiges of religious piety influenced his approach to philosophy.

§100: From Clazomenae to Athens. – The report that Anaxagoras, son of Hegesiboulus or Euboulus, studied with Anaximenes coincides with the report that he left Miletus for Athens, but besides establishing Anaxagoras’ status as an Ionian philosopher, the early biographical information indicate his pivotal significance as the man who brought the practice of philosophy from Ionia to Athens thereby shifting the center of gravity toward a more domineering

 Graham and Hintz 2007, 335–36.  Luchte 2011, 133. Curd 2010, 1. Lesher 1994, 126. Sedley 2007, 15. 21  Sisko 2010a, 443. Graham 1994, 78. Taylor 1997, 193. Granger 2013, 177. 22  Detienne 1999, 49. Seaford 1998, 112. McEvilley 2002, 315. 19 20

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culture.23 The reports about three members of his elite inner circle indicate the limits of his religious piety. First, according to Antyllus, it was because Thucydides filled himself up with Anaxagorean theories that the he was considered to be atheistic.24 Second, the reports that describe Euripides as the old Anaxagoras’ nursling who greatly honored the philosopher convey the significant influence that the philosopher had on Greek tragedy.25 Galen indicates the necrophilia of Anaxagoras’ influence when he notes that that Euripides had one of his characters say that ‘ after death every man is earth and shadow: nothing goes to nothing,’ but these lines may also reflect how ‘on the whole the Athenian public did not firmly believe in rewards or punishments after death. In fact, they do not seem to have expected very much at all.’26 Finally, Pericles was a student of Anaxagoras’ and Plutarch reports how that latter inspired the former to embrace natural science and cast away his own superstitions about heaven.27 It is in this way that, with Anaxagoras, Greek philosophy became more concerned with eliminating religion instead of reforming it, and the strategic crudeness of such an adversarial approach is indicated by the popular backlash that this shift provoked; by how the Athenians put Anaxagoras on trial for maintaining that the sun was a mere mass of red-­hot metal.28 It seems as though this nihilistic polemicism is the result of the influence which sophists exerted on the philosopher-scientist.

§101: The Heartless. – 1. That ‘Anaxagoras is Parmenides’ philosophical adversary, not his devotee’ certainly helps explain his opposition to goddesses and rebirth, and this hostility to the conceptual zenith of presocratic philosophy’s partnership tradition may reflect the significant influence that Zeno exerted on Anaxagoras; it is even chronologically possible that Anaxagoras knew Zeno personally.29 Parmenides’ impact on Zeno was likely either tangential and indirect or essentially non-existent, and that Zeno should be understood more as a  LM P1/DK A1. LM P12/DK A7. LM P13/DK A7.  LM P15. 25  LM P14a, b, d/DK A21, A20c, A33. 26  Bremmer 2001, 7. 27  LM P18/DK A15. LM P21/DK A16. Sisko 2010a, 451 note 2. 28  LM P23/DK A1. 29  Sisko 2010b, 437. Palmer 2009, 243, 250. 23 24

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sophist instead of as a philosopher is indicated by how he wrote his book in a spirit of contentiousness; a love of victory instead of a love of learning.30 Zeno renounced philosophical world explanations-­descriptions and instead composed his book as a collection of paradoxes—his aporias can be seen specifically as anti-Pythagorean polemics—the polemical or contrarian impetus of which being similar to sophists’ love of paradoxes and contradictions such as Gorgias’ presenting himself as a champion of the non-being that Parmenides had allegedly banished from discourse.31 ‘Conscious affront to religion, derision of the pious and their cult, only found a theoretical background in the age of the sophists’ who, apparently, targeted their hostility on two of the major figures of presocratic partnership.32 2. Anaxagoras’ cosmology certainly makes him stand out from his sophistic contemporaries as a truly original thinker who sought to transmit and transform the Ionian philosophical tradition, and he does not appear to privilege the human perspective like Protagoras did, but he does display several sophistic traits such as his flair for paradoxes: ‘Anaxagoras opposed to snow being white that snow is frozen water, that water is black, and hence that snow is black.’33 His predilection for paradoxes manifests in his cosmology as his view that, in the original chaotic mixture all things were together, unlimited both in quantity and in smallness; in other words, that all things were simultaneously unlimitedly large in amount and unlimitedly small in magnitude.34 And another unphilosophical aspect of his cosmology is evident in his statement appearances: vision of things that are invisible.35 That is, in contrast to the philosophical sense that the world may be different than the way one perceives it to be, Anaxagoras held the phenomenal qualities that we perceive in everyday life to be the foundational entities of the cosmos, and his appropriation of nous further reflects his subordinating the unconscious creativity-intelligence of the body to an idealize and disembodied intellect: ‘Anaxagoras was the first philosopher who elevated spirit above matter’; ‘rationality of Mind is thus elevated not only above nature and its order, but also above life itself.’36 Finally, that his qualitative cosmos is the direct opposite of materialistic  Ibid., 205, 193.  LM Parm, page 6. Zhmud 2012, 328. McEvilley 2002, 426. 32  Burkert 1985, 315. 33  Taylor 1997, 192. Marmodoro 2017, 29. LM D7a/DK A97. 34  LM D9/DK B1. 35  LM D6/DK B21a. 36  Drozdek 2007, 85, 92. 30 31

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atomism indicates another sophistic-adversarial target of his work. ‘He seemed in some way to feel hostile towards Democritus, since he had failed to enter into contact with him,’ and although Democritus praised Anaxagoras’ view of appearances, Democritus also accused Anaxagoras of stealing ancient views of the sun and the moon and even tore to pieces what the latter ‘said about the cosmic ordering and mind, displaying hostility towards him because he had not accepted him to is company.’37 (The invisible harmony between Pythagoras and Heraclitus shows that it would be as inaccurate to equate the hostility between Anaxagoras and Democritus with competitive rivalry between Heraclitus and Pythagoras as it would be to equate the logical paradoxes of Zeno’s book with the artistic ambiguities of Heraclitus’ book.) 3. We can see the complicity of rationalism (intellectualism) and irrationalism (anti-intellectualism) in the affinity between Anaxagoras’ theology and patriarchal forms of religion. He introduced the idea of a spiritual god who was separated from ordinary matter, and in contrast to the immanent and corporeal divinity of Metis, ‘Anaxagoras’s Mind stands over the infinity of matter like Yahweh over the primeval ocean.’38 ‘Josephus names Anaxagoras among those whose vision of God was very close to that of the Bible,’ and although Xenophanes’ purely cognitive god may have provided a model Anaxagoras’ nous, Aristotle’s report that Hermotimus of Clazomenae anticipated Anaxagoras’ view of a cosmic nous more explicitly indicates the misogynistic overtones of the separation and elevation of mind (masculinity) above matter (femininity): It was told of Hermotimos of Klazomenai that his soul was absent for many years and in different places foretold future events. Eventually, it would return into the body ‘as into a sheath’. In the end his wife betrayed him and his enemies burned his ‘stiff body’ in order to prevent the return of his soul. The inhabitants of Klazomenai felt they had to atone for this crime and they founded a sanctuary for the heroized Hermotimos from which women, naturally, are excluded ‘till the present day.’39

Although Aristotle’s report may only mean that Anaxagoras appealed to the experiences of the old local shaman for evidence of the separability of nous, it is still significant that Anaxagoras’ god may have been inspired  LM P10/DK A1. LM R2/DK B21a. LM R1/DK A5.  Drozdek 2007, 8. McEvilley 2002, 313. 39  Drozdek 2001, 117 note 26. LM R9/DK A58. Bremmer 2001, 38–39. 37 38

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by a figure whose life-story portrays women negatively, and sophism may have exerted a similar misogynistic influence on this late presocratic: if Simonides is to be considered a precursor, sophism may have been misogynistic, and we do find a hostility to feminine religiosity in particular in the poet-sophist Diagoras of Melos’ mocking the Eleusinian Mysteries.40 Both the report that Anaxagoras use the bread of Demeter to illustrate his ideas and the possibility that he had Aspasia as a student speak against his taking up misogyny from either Hermotimus or sophism, but the report that Empedocles imitated Anaxagoras may suggest that the latter’s sophistic and possibly misogynistic sympathies could have provided another motivation for the former’s demotion of Parmenides’ goddess. At any rate, we have in Anaxagoras a coincidence of several cultural transformations in presocratic philosophy such as the disappearance of both explicit goddess imagery and belief in rebirth; the rise of intellectualism, and if not materialism, then dualism; and a more influential role for sophistic polemicism and possibly misogyny which corresponds with the first appearance of a connection between a presocratic philosopher and a negative portrayal of women. But like the reports of his partnership behavior, Anaxagoras’ (albeit sophistically influenced) cosmology distances him from sophism.

§102: The Anaxagorean Kosmos. – At its core, Anaxagoras’ physics is a mathematical construct, and Zeno’s paradoxes were a crucial inspiration for Anaxagoras’ mathematical approach to reality.41 Zeno’s first paradox (the dichotomy) ‘states that an interval AB can be divided into a half, the second half can be divided into a half, the second half of the second half can be divided into a half, etc., so that we obtain an infinite sequence of divisions. It seems that Anaxagoras generalized the method of division used in the dichotomy, which allowed him to accept the [everything in everything principle].’42 Furthermore, ‘Zeno’s infinities gave definitional expression to continuum infinity, namely the infinity of real numbers, which is what Anaxagoras’s definition of the constitution of the opposites requires.’43 Although Anaxagoras’ no-least principle seems to be a denial of Zeno’s conclusion that complete  Dodds 1951, 143. Guthrie 1971, 236–37.  Sisko 2010a, 450. 42  Drozdek 2008, 69. 43  Marmodoro 2017, 92. 40 41

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divisibility ends in nothingness, the productivity of Zeno’s influence on Anaxagoras is evident in how ‘unlike the purely qualitative models of earlier philosophers, Anaxagoras gives us a picture of the universe in which it is in principle possible to provide a quantitative description and indeed to identify simple quantitative laws, such as the law of the conservation of matter.’44 Earlier theories of matter were more chemical-qualitative than physical-quantitative (even a Pythagorean like Philolaus who was concerned with number in the cosmos did not attempt numerical descriptions of it), but the unique nature of the Anaxagorean cosmos also makes it exceedingly difficult to interpret; a problem that is compounded by the incompleteness of the remaining textual evidence.45 Most of the twenty fragments that remain of his book come from its beginning where Anaxagoras concentrated on fundamental principles, and so we’ll begin by considering each of the principles upon which his theory of cosmos is founded.46 (Scholars differ on the precise nature, name, and number of Anaxagoras’ principles, and since this a highly contentious and complicated topic, I will merely give a general overview so as to set the stage for a discussion of Anaxagoras’ view of the cosmos.)

§103: Everything in Everything (EE). – Also known as the principle of universal mixture (UM), this principle simply means that there is a share of every kind of matter in every piece of matter; that any token of any type of matter has within it portions of every other type of matter.47 The ‘everything’ in this principles likely refers to the opposites of traditional Ionian cosmology that Anaxagoras reconceived as either forms of energy or powers, and besides Zeno’s influence, this principle also reflects Ionian cyclicity insofar as everything ultimately comes from everything by virtue of cyclical and interlocking processes: from the clouds water separates out, and from water earth; and from earth stones.48 This principle enables Anaxagoras to explain the appearance of qualitative change while avoiding the assertion that something can come from nothing, but it also exists in tension both with the Anaxagoras’  Ibid., 90. Graham 1994, 113.  Palmer 2009, 187. Graham 1994, 113 note 63. 46  LM VI page 2. 47  Marmodoro 2017, 103. Sisko 2009, 89. 48  Marmodoro 2017, 52–53, 32–33. Graham 1994, 85. LM D31/DK B16. 44 45

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positing that there are also individual seeds unlimited in quantity not at all resembling one another and with his assertion that the other things possess a portion of every thing, but mind is unlimited and master of itself, it has not been mixed with any thing.49 That is, the universality of mixture that is implied by EE seems limited by the independent existences of seeds and mind. Still, the importance of this principle is evident in how it is unique to Anaxagoras as well as in how, by placing it at the very beginning of his treatise, Anaxagoras effectively announces it as his main theme.50

§104: Universal Extraction (UE). – Similar to EE/UM, this principles states that any opposite or combination of opposites can be extracted from any other opposite or combination of opposites, and this is key to Anaxagoras’ explanation of nutrition; how the body can extract substances like bone or blood from food stuffs like bread that appear not to contain these substances.51

§105: No Least Magnitude (NLM). – Also known as the principle of infinite divisibility (ID), this principle states that there is no lowest limit to the magnitude of the opposites; that matter is infinitely divisible: for there is not, of what is small, something that would be the smallest, but rather always something that is smaller.52 This is arguably the foundational principle insofar as, not just EE/UM and UE, but every other postulate of his theory except one ultimately relies on it.53 It clearly reflects the infinite division of Zeno’s first paradox and it explains why, no matter how small a given piece of matter may be, it can contain every other kind of matter.

 Palmer 2009, 235. Drozdek 2008, 63. LM D12/DK B4. LM D26/DK B11.  Sisko 2010a, 445. Graham 1994, 79. 51  Marmodoro 2017, 50. Sisko 2010a, 446. LM D21/DK B10. 52  Marmodoro 2017, 103. Sisko 2010a, 444. LM D24/DK B3. 53  Palmer 2009, 232. 49 50

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§106: No Greatest Magnitude (NGM). – This is the one exception to, and counterpart of, NLM/ID and it states that there is no upper limit to the magnitude of the opposites.54

§107: Non-isolation (NI). – Also known as the no separation principle (NS), this states that no instance of an opposite can occur distinctly by itself because it can only exist together with instances of other opposites.55 Like EE/UM and EU, Anaxagoras derives this principle directly from NLM/ID.

§108: Preponderance/Predominance (P). – Considering Anaxagoras’ emphasis on universal mixture and non-isolation, this principle is crucial for how he accounts for the appearance of different kinds of matter, and it states that an object can be defined by an opposite or quality only if that opposite is preponderant in that object in relation to all the other opposites that are also present in that object.56 The key to preponderance is increase in density which requires more instances of an opposite in the same region of space, and in order to characterize an object, this opposite only needs to exceed the amount of any other opposite in the object; not the total amount of other opposites.57 There is no fixed threshold for when an opposite becomes preponderant because Anaxagoras relativizes preponderance to perceptibility.58 That is, an opposite can be preponderant without reaching the threshold of perceptibility, but Anaxagoras is simply not interested in such imperceptible preponderance because his ontology was developed from within the perspective of sentient organisms.59

 Marmodoro 2017, 103.  Graham 1994, 96. Marmodoro 2017, 76. 56  Ibid., 60. 57  Ibid., 66. Sisko 2009, 90. 58  Marmodoro 2017, 64 note 24, 61 note 21. 59  Ibid., 63–64. 54 55

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§109: Indefinite Types (IT). – There are indefinitely many types of the basic substances, opposites, or qualities; hence Anaxagoras’ reference to all things being unlimited in quantity.60

§110: No Becoming (NB). – The basic substances, opposites, qualities can neither come to be nor pass away, and this is why Anaxagoras criticizes the Greeks for misconceiving mixture and separation as coming-to-be or being destroyed.61 This principle is also how he anticipates the conservation of matter by maintaining that the totality of things is always equal.62 Although some have seen the influence of Parmenides here, the idea that nothing can come from nothing was a commonplace in presocratic thought.

§111: General Homoeomereity (GH). – Each of the different spatially differentiated regions of any token or instance of any opposite is the same in kind as the whole so that each of its parts is synonymous with the whole.63 This is the very principle that Aristotle mentions in connection with Anaxagoras in the first place, and it is the only standard of material structure that Anaxagoras can except while remaining true to his other principles.64 Now that we have discussed the fundamental principles of Anaxagoras’ physics, we can further explore his cosmology by considering his theory of ‘matter.’

§112: Power Ontology. – The description of Anaxagoras’ opposites as basic substances is a bit misleading insofar as his ontology does not include matter as we generally think of it.65 The notion of a material substratum that bears properties  Sisko 2010a, 444.  Ibid., 444. 62  LM D16/DK B5. 63  Sisko 2009, 90. 64  Ibid., 102. 65  Marmodoro 2017, 19. 60 61

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arguably began with Plato’s Timaeus and was developed later with Aristotle’s Physics, and this is why Anaxagoras’ opposites are best conceived as being physical but not material: they have been compared to magnetic fields and the Anaxagorean cosmos has been described as an infinite sea of interpenetrating fluid material.66 Since Anaxagoras’ ontology does not include universals, there was no need for a material substratum to facilitate the instantiation of universals in the world, and it is this absence of matter-form dualism which enables us to understand the opposites, not as abstract types, by as tropes—physical and concrete continua similar to those we encounters with Philolaus.67 But unlike how Philolaus portrays the unlimiteds as being relatively passive when compared to both the limiters and the unifying role harmony, Anaxagoras portrays the opposites as inherently powerful when he writes that from earth stones solidify by the effect of the cold.68 That is, the opposite cold is powerful in the sense that it causes earth to solidify into stone. Foreshadowing Nietzsche’s view that there is no underlying subject that exists independently of its actions, Anaxagoras’ opposites do not merely have power but rather they are their powerfulness.69 Since Anaxagoras also did not have the metaphysical distinction between potentiality and actuality, his opposites are eternally active powers that fulfill their constitutional causal role by making things instantiate the quality of the preponderant opposite that is in them.70 Preponderance is the intensification of an opposite at a particular location, and Anaxagoras describes how material earth was created by opposites when he writes what is dense and what is moist and what is cold and what is dark came together to where earth is now, but Anaxagoras’ statement that there was much earth present within the original pre-cosmic mixture indicates how it can be argued that the idea that qualities are ontologically more basic than material stuffs lacks support from the fragments.71 However, an ontology in which only opposites are fundamental is a more economical reading and the distinction between opposites and physical stuffs helps Anaxagoras avoid the charge of circularity—for example, his saying that this is earth because it is composed chiefly of earth—but the very issue of the relation between opposites and stuffs is  Ibid., 18. Sisko 2003, 100.  Marmodoro 2017, 20, 43. 68  LM D31/DK B16. 69  Marmodoro 2017, 38. 70  Ibid., 35–36. 71  Ibid., 68, 20. LM D30/DK B15. LM D12/DK B4. Taylor 1997, 195. 66 67

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complicated by the lack of any categorial distinction between the two.72 (The opposites are neither abstract nor material in the Aristotelian sense, but physical; as are Anaxagoras’ stuffs.) His description of the original mixture treats opposites as being on par with stuffs regardless of this ambiguity in his system, we can get a better understanding of his cosmos by considering the nature of the pre-cosmic mixture.73

§113: Chaosmos. – Since Anaxagoras thought that the universe has always existed, he conceived of the primordial mixture in his cosmology as being ungenerated.74 The featurelessness or indistinct nature of this mixture is a causal outcome of the compresence of all the opposites in it; each opposite extending over the whole of the spatial region occupied by the mixture, and since no opposite predominates, no qualities are discernable.75 However, the qualitative indeterminateness of the original mixture does not mean that it was completely featureless. Aristotle thought that it was absurd for Anaxagoras to deny that there was any motion in the beginning of the cosmos, and Eudemus’ criticized Anaxagoras for saying that motion did not exist previous to the beginning of the cosmogonic process.76 Contemporary scholars go even further in arguing that the original mixture possessed some form of motion: ‘the bifurcation of the history of the cosmos is, for Anaxagoras, merely a heuristic device. There is, for Anaxagoras, not a single moment in the history of the heavens in which there is absolutely no motion’; ‘it is possible that some random motion of the elements of the mixture already existed.’77 It is in this way that we can interpret the original mixture as at least having the feature of motion, but Anaxagoras’ inclusion of seeds in the original mixture further suggests that it also possessed the feature of order as well: ‘because the mixture also contains seeds of all things and seeds are characterized by some kind of order (the tendency to generate larger entities), the prime mixture is not tantamount to the existence of total chaos.’78 Although Anaxagoras’ view that the cosmos arose via a  Marmodoro 2017, 87, 40. Graham 2004, 7.  Drozdek 2008, 63. 74  Sisko 2010a, 449. 75  Marmodoro 2017, 70, 101. 76  LM R20/DK A50. LM R21/DK A59. 77  Sisko 2003, 100 note 23. Drozdek 2007, 89. 78  Drozdek 2008, 64. 72 73

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spiraling motion recalls a prominent goddess symbol, he departs from the partnership worldview when he attributes the beginning of the cosmos, not to an immanent goddess, but to a divinity the transcendent status of which reflects patriarchal forms religiosity.

§114: Cosmic Mind. – In contrast to the preceding philosophers who posited an immanent world soul, Anaxagoras conceives of divinity as a transcendent mind that functions as the opposite of the opposites insofar as its universal mastery is predicated on its complete separation: the things that would be mixed with it would prevent it from having control over any thing in the same way as it does being alone by itself.79 It is Anaxagoras’ view that knowledge comes from unlike to unlike that leads him to concludes that it is nous’ absolute difference from the world that explains why it retains the full decision/understanding concerning every thing and possesses the greatest power (while translating γνώμην as ‘understanding’ is important for conveying nous’ omniscience, translating it as decision makes the link between nous’ omniscience and its universal influence more explicit).80 But the complete separation of nous from the opposites is as tenuous as the absolute distinction of the opposites from stuffs. Whereas the subtle physicality that Anaxagoras ascribes to nous when he describes it as the thinnest of all things and the purest calls into question its absolute transcendence of the physical opposites, the remaining fragments of his book provide scant information about how the cosmic mind directs and organizes the cosmos.81 There is a big gap between the control exercised by nous and the means available to it insofar as, while Anaxagoras describes it as knowing and ordering all things, the only mechanism for this ordering is the spiraling vortex that nous initiates and which seems to take over as a mechanical explanatory principle.82 Hence Socrates’ complaint in the Phaedo that Anaxagoras says nothing about how natural change is directed toward the best, but Sedley shows how nous can help steer the world toward the good when he replaces the biblical conception of nous as transcendently intervening in the world with a more nurturing analogy: ‘Nous is a farmer. Its  Marmodoro 2017, 136. LM D27/DK B12.  Lesher 1994, 139–40. Sisko 2010b, 442 note 29. 81  LM D27/DK B12. Taylor 1997, 202. 82  Graham 1994, 111. 79 80

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creation of worlds is its way of setting up environments which will enable seeds to germinate, with plant and animal life the outcome.’83 Instead of dominating all changing in a cosmos, nous sets up the world order at the cosmic level so as to allow local powers like the opposites and seeds that existed in the original mixture to do their thing, and when combined with biographical information about the wholesome side Anaxagoras’ personality, this more partnership-­friendly conception of nous may be read as coinciding with its spiraling motion being a vestigial image of a goddess.84 In fact, that both Anaxagoras and the atomists took over Empedocles’ vortex suggest that the image of the spiral in both Anaxagoras and Democritus is a continuation of goddess imagery.85 But in order to see how Anaxagoras formally varied not only the theme of femininity but also that of cyclicity, we must turn to his bold conception of the multiverse.

§115: Worlds Within Worlds. – The rotation began at first from the small, then it rotates more broadly, and it will continue to become even broader. And the things that mix as well as those that are detached and separate out—all these mind decided.86 Commentators have pointed to Parmenides’ rhetorical question what need could have impelled it to grow later rather than sooner, if it had had nothing for its beginning? so as to argue that a problem in Anaxagoras’ cosmogony is why nous decides to create the cosmos at the specific time at which it did so.87 But Anaxagoras intimates how he, like Empedocles and the atomists, side steps the problem of an initial cosmogonic event when he writes that human beings were formed as well as all the other animated beings that possess life; and that these human beings possess inhabited cities and cultivated fields, just as among us, and that they have a sun and a moon.88 Whereas the reference to cities like ours may refer to other areas of our planet, Anaxagoras’ describing these humans as having a sun and a moon instead of the sun and the moon implies that he is talking about another cosmos altogether, and we can envision the bold uniqueness of Anaxagoras’ multiverse as  Sedley 2007, 23.  Marmodoro 2017, 130. 85  Pierris 2005, 219 note 9. 86  LM D27/DK B12. 87  LM Parm D8.13/DK B8.10. 88  LM D13/DK B4. 83 84

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follows: ‘rotational motion extends into infinity in the mixture as do the circles on water after throwing a stone.’89 That is, there never was a first cosmogonic event because the pattern of emerging whirls and worlds extends infinitely into the past and will continue infinitely into the future creating ever-larger cosmoi; NLM and NGM both enable this process to continue indefinitely and convey how a world within ours that we may consider to be microscopic can also be considered to be gargantuan from the perspective of an even smaller world.90 It is the recurrent similarities between the worlds that enables us to read Anaxagoras’ concentrically nested worlds as a formal variation of the eternal return, but as much as this solves the problem of the first event, another problem with Anaxagoras’ cosmogony is indicated by his statement that the rotational movement is being performed now by the heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon, the air, and the aether, which are separating out. And the rotation itself caused the detachment.91 The problem is that Anaxagoras does not appear to have a clear idea of how much of this rotary movement is purely mechanical (performed by the heavenly bodies) and how much of it can be attributed to nous, but as much as Anaxagoras’ attributing rotary motion to the heavenly bodies may suggest that nous merely gives the initial push for each world, there is a specific qualification of EE/UM that shows how nous continues to influence what happens in each world: in every thing there is a portion of every thing except of mind, but there are things in which mind too is present.92 ‘Cosmic nous can have direct rapport with the portions of nous in things with souls—for instance, cosmic nous can ensure that animate beings can survive and flourish’—and it is through its presence in living things that cosmic nous can have some influence even on the local level.93 Like Empedocles’ daimōnes who are responsible for making the world a more or less harmonious place, ensouled beings are the vehicles through which the cosmic mind steers the world, and whereas Anaxagoras implicitly continues the themes of femininity and cyclicity via his spiraling multiverse cosmology, we can also see how his cosmos also implicitly entails rebirth by further considering his view of ensouled

 Drozdek 2007, 90.  Sisko 2003, 110. 91  LM D27/DK B12. 92  Curd 2010, 11. LM D26/DK B11. 93  Marmodoro 2017, 154. Drozdek 2007, 91. 89 90

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beings; the entities that constitute the implicate order of his original mixture.

§116: Seeds and Souls. – Whereas individual organism do not, strictly speaking, exist for Empedocles, Anaxagoras ‘makes the individual organism eternal, via his theory of seeds.’94 Nous is a cosmic power, the opposites are local powers, but ‘the seeds are powers for life’ whose inherently structured nature makes them irreducible to the opposites.95 They may be thought of as software programs that constitute the biological starting point for ensouled animals insofar as they provide the structures that, when opposites are added to them, enable organisms to grow.96 That Anaxagoras connects nous with ensouled entities and ensouled entities with seeds suggests ‘that the seeds are the mechanism by which Nous governs the growth and structure of animals and other living seeds,’ and the fact that he conceived of seeds as being eternal suggests that seeds survive the death of individual organism; hence Anaxagoras’ cosmos at least allowing for some form of rebirth, but the inapplicability of the term metempsychosis is indicated by how he associates souls (psychai) with the individuals that are generated from seeds and not with the seeds themselves.97 Anaxagoras does not explain in the extant fragments what soul is and this confusion is increased by how he seems to both connect it to nous and the seeds while also distinguishing these three entities, but at the very least, his view of the seeds as eternal individuals allows for some form of transmigration even if this is not the transmigration of souls proper.98 When combined with EE/UM, Aëtius’ report that Anaxagoras said the soul is made of air entails that Anaxagoras was a panpsychist who believed that a particle of soul-air exists in every particle of physical stuff even if to be fully animate requires that soul reach a certain threshold of preponderance.99 In addition to these metaphysical ambiguities, there also seems to be an evaluative ambiguity in Anaxagoras’ view of gender and human life in general.  Lewis 2000, 16–17.  Marmodoro 2017, 153, 130, 16. 96  Ibid., 150 note 29, 148. Curd 2010, 7. 97  Curd 2010, 7. Marmodoro 2017, 151. 98  Ibid., 152. 99  Drozdek 2007, 92. LM D69/DK A93. 94 95

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§117: Anthropological Ambivalence. – Anaxagoras continues the embryological egalitarianism that we have seen in other presocratics by holding that offspring are created from both the father’s and the mother’s seed, and his view that children have the facial features of the parent who contributed more seed also allows mothers to potentially play a more influential role than fathers in the development of children.100 But this egalitarianism is also vitiated by his view that the very opposition between male and female exists from the outset in the semen that ‘comes from the male, while the female provides the place.’101 It is in this way that, just as Anaxagoras diminishes the prominence of goddess imagery and rebirth in presocratic philosophy, he also steers its views on gender more toward the misogynistic perspective of Aristotle who saw woman as being merely passive receptacles. The correlation between the devaluation of women and the elevation of sophistic-materialistic selfinterest is illustrated by the possibly self-serving impetus behind nous’ cosmic farming: ‘the teleology proves to have an anthropomorphic bias. Since he further regards humans as, among all living creatures, the best vehicles for nous itself to occupy, it is at least a possibility that he thinks of the world as created by nous out of motives of pure self-interest.’102 Furthermore, Anaxagoras’ intellectualist devaluation of the body is further indicated by his view that our embodiment hinders our access to divine knowledge: ‘we do not have the complete, direct intellectual grasp that Nous itself does, because in us nous is present in a way that prevents it from fully actualizing its capacity to know: in ensouled beings it is contaminated by ingredients and opposites in a manner that can sometimes thwart its power.’103 If the difference between individual minds and the cosmic mind is the latter’s alleged complete separation form the physical world, then our intellectual inferiority derives from our embodiment. Nevertheless, the report that Anaxagoras shared Empedocles’ view that plants possess reason and understanding suggests that he did appreciate the intelligence of the animal body to some extent, and finally, the report that he (or Hermotimus) said that ‘our mind is god’ and that ‘a mortal life has a share in a god’ suggests that Anaxagoras would have agreed with his  LM D85/A 107. LM D87/DK A109.  LM D86/DK A107. 102  Sedley 2007, 143. 103  Curd 2010, 11. 100 101

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predecessors’ view of philosophical inquiry as a means of divinization.104 This reminds us how Anaxagoras certainly deserves to be considered an presocratic philosopher instead a sophist, and we can further see how this philosophical sensibility remained in even the most materialistic of the (pre?)socratics.

§118: Nietzsche’s ‘Democritus’. – 1. ‘Even the older realized types have mostly come down to us ill-defined; all the philosophers from Thales to Democritus seem to me extraordinarily hard to discern; but whoever succeeded in recreating these figures would move among forms of the mightiest and purest types.’105 For several reasons, Nietzsche’s work on Democritus (460–370 BCE) thrusts the problem of identity to the fore: the latter takes on a number of shifting personae in Nietzsche’s notebooks thereby giving atomism itself an anomalous place in his genealogy of philosophy; frustrated by the suspicion that Democritus’ writings were beyond recovery, Nietzsche terminated his Democritus project, and the incompleteness of this work explains why it does not offer a final coherent view of the philosopher; and finally, the question of identity was central to Nietzsche’s interest in Democritus.106 In 1788, George Zoega proposed that ‘Homer’ was really a symbolic fiction that did not correspond to any real person in antiquity, and fascinated by Friedrich August Wolf’s pursual of ‘the Homeric question,’ Nietzsche extended this question to Democritus.107 He inquired into what the preconditions are for arriving at an identity known as Democritus and to what extent the many hands of later transcribers have contributed to the image of Democritus that survives today. But while the incompleteness of his Democritea precludes us from definitely answering these questions, what is certain is the significance of Democritus for Nietzsche’s philosophy. 2. Like his interest in pre-classical Greece, Nietzsche’s interest in Democritus was exceptional for his day, and his obsession with atomism remained until the end of his productive life. His proclamation that Democritus ‘is the only philosopher who is still alive today’ reflects both the prevalence of materialism in contemporary western academia and the  LM Empd D250c. LM P34/DK A48.  HH §261. 106  Caygill 1999, 30. Swift 2005, 33, 9. 107  Ibid., 14. 104 105

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influence that Democritus exerted on central aspects of Nietzsche’s own thought.108 Democritean atoms were themselves prototypes of Nietzsche’s genealogical method insofar as his critique of their theoretical construction foreshadowed his later method of investigating the historically contingent forces and events which lay behind ideas that later generations assume to be universally necessary, and Nietzsche’s interest in how Democritus identifies suffering as the psychological origin of false stories about the afterlife is evident in how this diagnosis anticipates his own analysis of slave morality.109 Nietzsche intimates the therapeutic impulse behind his interest in Democritus at the same time when he abandons this line of research—‘I can no longer pursue investigation about the lost writings of Democritus so as to feed my appetite with nourishment, since they are irretrievably lost’—and he conveys the nature of such nutrition as follows: ‘it certainly is a great contribution, to conceive of a totally new intuition, but there is a greater spark to be hit upon from all the pages of Democritus. The wisdom of quiet thought, which remains undisclosed to the university student, has in the history of the sciences received little claim for its worthiness.’110 That is, despite their indiscernibility, Thales and Democritus represented for Nietzsche the philosophical event (inspiration) and state of being (subjectivity) respectively. Whereas Thales’ mystical intuition is the disruptive event of subrepresentational forces breaking through consciousness, Democritus’ quiet wisdom is the peaceful state of being that arises when one’s subjectivity is dynamic enough to actually enjoy such inspirational events, and in the above quote, Nietzsche conveys his preference for this peaceful state over the disruptive event. Although Nietzsche pursued this sense of wholeness via philology, it seems as though Democritus led the young Nietzsche away from the quiet life of a scholar and toward the iconoclastic call of philosophy: Philosophy and philology were not traditionally part of the same pedagogical matrix in the German curriculum, and so the two pursuits tended to remain separate ingredients of Nietzsche’s initial formation—that is, until the moment of their sudden convergence, in the form of his encounter with the atomist Democritus.111

 BAW, 4:84 in Porter 2000a, 25.  Porter 2000a, 104. Swift 2005, 32. 110  BAW 3: 345–47, 328 in Swift 2005, 30, 21. 111  Porter 2000a, 33. 108 109

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3. Nietzsche’s encounter with Democritus led him to approach philology philosophically insofar as it incited him to make the philologist the object of philological analysis.112 One source of this approach was what Nietzsche saw as the high degree of self-consciousness in Democritus’ atomism. Although the latter maintained that atoms are insensible, the purely quantitative terms that he uses to describe them suggest a minimum quantum of sensibility, and instead of seeing this foundational paradox as being a liability for ancient atomism, Nietzsche saw this as Democritus’ way of making a philosophical point about the limitations of knowledge; about how we inevitably project our own experiences, sensations, and/or presuppositions onto the world: ‘atomism is more than an account of nature. It gives an account of ourselves’; ‘on the atomic hypothesis, meaning and representation, like sensation itself, are artifacts not just of our physiological nature …. They are also artifacts of our culture.’113 That is, it was Nietzsche’s reading of Democritus as putting forth a theory about theory-making itself—about how our representations of ourselves and of the world arise as projections of subrepresentational forces—that led Nietzsche to reflect on what assumptions philologists were projecting onto antiquity. But besides its self-reflexivity, the Democritean system also transmits or cultivates philosophical subjectivity by, like a mystic initiation, disrupting representational identity: ‘void ensures that atoms are forever literally contingent things: fleetingly tangent with one another, they are never blended into organic wholes. Nor, ultimately, are we.’114 Just to think about atomism is to consider how the sense of subjective interiority is merely a semblance that masks an underlying multiplicity—a multiplicity of particulars in contrast to the Pythagorean multiplicity of universals (musical harmonies)—and Porter’s statement that this idea ‘points the way to the ultimate value of atomism in Nietzsche’s thinking, both at the time and later on’ further illustrates the crucial role that Democritus played in encouraging Nietzsche’s philosophical sensibility.115 4. Philological scholarship itself also led Nietzsche toward philosophical self-reflection insofar as his classical research showed him how the identities of ancient figures couldn’t be disassociated from either the personalities of later commentators or the latter’s cultural-historical contexts, and  Ibid., 58.  Ibid., 88–89, 90. 114  Ibid., 89–90. 115  Ibid., 90. 112 113

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like his research on Theognis, Nietzsche’s research on Democritus was part of a larger project of investigating both what it is that drives people to study the past and the limits of such research. But whereas he saw the poet’s personality as being distorted by Christian polemicists’ interest in vilifying pagan antiquity, he saw the atomist as being persecuted by the philosophical foundation of Christianity: ‘historically theologians have policed philosophy … [and] both Lange and Nietzsche suggest that the dominant history of Western Platonism has been written according to an implicit value structure that sanctions and favors the very tendencies towards supernaturalism and teleology which Democritus rejects.’116 Besides including Democritus as among the forerunners to the Greek reformation that tragically never occurred, Democritus is central to Nietzsche’s own desire to incite a cultural rebirth by reclaiming the majesty of archaic Greece because it was by retrieving Democritus from millennia of neglect that Nietzsche sought to provide an alternative history of western philosophy; one that replaced what he saw as the world-negation of Platonism-Christianity with the more worldly or empirical approach of scientific materialism: ‘of all the more ancient systems, the Democritean is of the greatest consequence …. Now for the first time the collective, anthropomorphic, mythic view of the world has been overcome. Now for the first time do we have a rigorous, scientifically useful hypothesis.’117 That Nietzsche went so far as to think of Democritus as a martyr for science helps explains why he identified the atomist with the mystagogue of science whom he also saw as putting an end to the majesty of Greece’s tragic age: ‘with Empedocles and Democritus, the Greeks were well on the way to correctly assessing human existence, its irrationality, its suffering; but they never reached this, thanks to Socrates. An unbiased view of men is missing in all the Socratics, who have terrible abstractions, “the good, the just,” in their heads.’118 5. Several attributes that Nietzsche ascribed to Democritus were later transferred to Socrates as the latter took over the role of the archetype of rationalism that Nietzsche previously assigned to the former, and the difference between Democritus’ productive negation of myth and Socrates’ decadent negation of myth may be explained by how Nietzsche emphasizes the ‘artistic’ side of Democritus; implying that he assumed a closer  Swift 2005, 21.  PPP, 125–26. 118  BAW 3: 345–57 in Swift 2005, 30. EN §6[25]. 116 117

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connection between rationalism and art before he wrote BT.119 That is, Nietzsche conceived of Democritus as the first Greek to achieve the scientific character—to value science above all else thereby rejecting the earlier philosophers’ using knowledge in the service of life— but his description of Democritus as a pentathlete in ethics, physics, mathematics, music and the arts shows how, although Democritus was not primarily driven by creative imagination, he nevertheless possessed an artistic sensibility.120 In contrast to Democritus’ well-roundedness, Nietzsche conveys the narrowmindedness of scientism when he states that ‘the lovely madness of artistic enthusiasm never glowed’ in Socrates ‘one great Cyclopian eye,’ and this is why, for him, Socratic musicality remain merely a future hope.121 Nietzsche’s statements that ‘there was scarcely a more meaningful writer’ than Democritus whose texts constitute ‘model writings in a philosophical presentation’ reflect how, like Nietzsche and Heraclitus, Democritus offered aphorisms in a striking style, but Nietzsche also praises the poetic nature of the content of Democritus’ writing: ‘there is a magnificent poetry to the atomistic conception, a perpetual raining of diverse, minute bodies, which fall in manifold ways and in falling interlock, so that a cosmic whirl comes into being.’122 In contrast to the free will that Nietzsche saw in Anaxagoras’ nous creating the cosmic spiral, Democritus’ having the ordering whirl arise spontaneously from the chaotic movement of atoms recalls the spontaneity of poetic inspiration the experience of which Nietzsche conveys when he writes that ‘a thought when “it” wishes, and not when “I” wish.’123 And in contrast to intellectualist disparagement of the fruits of unconscious creativity that Nietzsche saw in Euripides’ aesthetic Socratism/Anaxagorism, Democritus is poetic in his affirmation of his system despite both its inspirational source and his own self-reflective acknowledgement of the limits of knowledge: ‘the poetry lies not in his system, but rather in the belief that he attached to his system.’124 In this way, although Nietzsche presents Democritus as distancing himself from his predecessors by valuing science above all else, he saw Democritus as— like other presocratics, and unlike Socrates as the personification of the drive for knowledge—providing an check on the scientific drive for  Silk and Stern 1981, 228, 233, 343.  Ibid., 228. PPP, 123. 121  BT §14. 122  BAW 3: 345–47, 332 in Swift 2005, 30, 23. Porter 2000a, 84. 123  BGE §17. 124  BAW 3, 349 in Porter 2000a, 84. 119 120

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k­ nowledge. (This is an example of the inconsistency or incompleteness of Nietzsche’s view on Democritus.) Nietzsche especially admired Democritus’ anti-materialistic independence—how, as a sage that lived outside of any academy, the atomist never felt compelled to try to gain financial support by either selling his philosophy or organizing a community of supporters—but although this anti-materialistic sentiment which Socrates also shared with his philosophical predecessors reflects the identity between him and Democritus in the young Nietzsche’s reading of them, Nietzsche came to emphasize the differences between these contemporaries.125 6. Nietzsche sums up what he saw as the major opposition between Socrates (the well-documented personality who never wrote anything) and Democritus (the shadowy figure who was also a prolific writer) as follows: ‘fundamentally, morality is hostile to science …. This is why scientific procedures rapidly declined in Greece once Socrates had introduced into science the disease of moralizing; the height attained in the disposition of a Democritus, Hippocrates, and Thucydides was not attained a second time.’126 The Socratic abstractions of ‘the good, the just’ are terrible because they are unhealthily moralistic; because, by implying that life is essentially moral and thereby making morality an arbiter of truth, they preclude people from assessing life with the kind of realism that is necessary for both science and survival. That Nietzsche considered such realism to be characteristic of the manly honesty of pre-classical Greece enables us to see the positive side of Nietzsche’s male-centered view of archaic Greece, and that we can attribute this scientific toughness to not just the sophists but also to the philosophers of the tragic age is suggested by the tragic figure whom Nietzsche saw as the major inspiration for Democritus’ brutally honesty. ‘Empedocles and his dark mythology must be thought of as the great forerunner of Democritus’ because, although these two thinkers came up with opposed responses to Anaxagoras’ dualism of motion— Empedocles transferring nous’ non-mechanical motion to love and strife whereas Democritus transferred the mechanical motion of the vortex to the atoms—Empedocles’ grim view of the world inspired what Porter refers to as the test and horror of atomism; to how just to contemplate the mechanical godlessness of atomism is to test one’s capacity to face up to the horrific meaningless that Nietzsche also personified in the death of 125 126

 Swift 2005, 20.  WP §443.

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god.127 Nietzsche aligns atomism with the dark wisdom of Silenus when he opens BT with a reference to Lucretius’ reductive view that it was in dreams that the gods first appeared to men, and much like how the impact of Silenus’ advice may be seen in Empedocles’ plunge into Mt. Aetna, a similar perspective is illustrated by Democritus’ own suicide; it is in way that Democritus seems to have shared Socrates’ view that there are certain conditions under which life is not worth living.128 7. Democritus steered a middle path between sophism and Socratism. In contrast to sophistic a-morality, Nietzsche regarded Democritus’ ethical theory as the ‘core’ of the atomist’s philosophy, but unlike Socratic moralism, ‘the key to Democritean physics lies in his ethics’ precisely because this ethics is a direct and even ‘necessary consequence’ of his physics; not the other way around.129 Nietzsche admired the affirmation of conflict that he saw in the space Democritus grants for collision between atoms, and he distances the atomist from what he saw as Socrates’ decadent desire for happiness by interpreting the freedom from disturbance that, for Democritus, results from scientific inquiry, not as being a state of happiness, but rather as an abandonment of the desire for happiness itself: ‘what atomism aims to bring about in the first and last instance is a redemption from solace.’130 Finally, Democritus’ view that, instead of being a merely intellectual endeavor, education is a physical process is an important source for Nietzsche’s emphasis on philosophy as manifestation of one’s embodiment, and he specifically saw in Democritus how education arises as a transformation in one’s perception: ‘the ethical thrust that Nietzsche sees in Democritus’ system is literally a matter of perspective. Just to see the world from the perspective of atomism is to bring about a change in oneself.’131 But the vast difference between Democritus and Nietzsche emerges when we keep in mind that Nietzsche was a strategic materialist who employed the resources of scientific materialism so as to retrieve an archaic pre-Christian form of embodiment and subjectivity while acknowledging that materialistic atomism ‘is one of the best refuted theories there are’; matter being ‘as much of an error as the god of the Eleatics.’132  BAW 3, 348–49 in Swift 2005, 25. PPP, 250. Porter 2000b, 171 note 10.  BT §1. Swift 2005, 41 note 59. 129  BAW 3: 350, 364, 4: 42, 64 in Porter 2000a, 83, 96. 130  Ibid., 83. 131  Ibid., 83. 132  Ibid., 26. BGE §12. GS §109. 127 128

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8. Democritus was a crucial inspiration for Nietzsche’s attempt to construct a more theoretically acceptable form of atomism, and his endeavor to also make atomism more culturally enriching coincides with a shift in his reading of Democritus. He eventually replaced his view of Democritus as a nihilist whose scientific explanations were meant to deprive the world of any meaning with a view of him as a philosopher who used science so as to open new possibilities for ethical and aesthetic action, and this transition began when he started to consider Democritean atomism as first of all a philosophy of time instead of a logic of being.133 Although, in his lectures, he states that Democritus held fast to Parmenidean being, Nietzsche later entertained the idea that Democritus’ atoms were not necessarily particularized instances of Parmenides’ one being, and this shift occurred when he stopped considering atomism in terms of the reduction of all qualities into mathematical quantities, and focused instead on the character of the force exerted by atoms.134 He reasoned that if force is exerted in the collisions between atoms, then said force must exist over a period of time. If force is exerted temporally, then it is never fully present—‘there are forces remaining: in every infinitesimal moment other forces: in the infinitely small temporal period always a new force: that means, forces are never actual.’135 That is, he argues by means of an infinite regress that the force of an atom cannot be considered in terms of being because forces must exist in time and time is never fully actual. He then turns from focusing on the ontological status of force to considering the time in which a force is expended and he infers that, ‘when movement is considered spatially (in representative terms) it requires the condition of timelessness— that everything must be simultaneously present’—but since the very existence of time makes such metaphysical presence impossible, he concedes that the spatial-representative view of motion contains a contradiction: ‘motion labours under the contradiction that it is constructed according to spatial laws and through the acceptance of time that makes these laws impossible; that is, one that both is and is not.’136 He responds to this contradiction by replacing spatially conceived atom with temporal atoms, but due to the obscurity and complexity of his time-atom theory, I will discuss it separately in the next chapter. There, we’ll see how  Caygill 1999, 32.  PPP, 124. 135  Caygill 1999, 31. 136  KGW III, 4; 178 in Caygill 1999, 34. 133 134

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Nietzsche’s time-atomism can help us revive philosophy in our own time, but in the rest of this chapter, we’ll see how Democritus elucidates the democratic nature of the partnership tradition.

§119: Full Spiral. – In three ways, the adumbration of Democritus that emerges from our extant sources brings us back to the archetypal image of the philosopher that we saw in Thales: both his reputation as the laughing philosopher and the story that Hippocrates considered Democritus’ honesty to be a source of latter’s happiness and great tranquility recall Thales’ child-like positivity; Sextus Empiricus’ description of Democritus as speaking ‘about the totality of things’ recalls the holistic sensibility that Nietzsche attributed to Thales’ mystical intuition; and Cicero’s portrayal of Democritus as elaborating on the first principles that Leucippus provided supports Nietzsche categorizing both Thales and Democritus as systematizers.137 But the description of Democritus as despising everything also recalls the gloomier figures that we have been considering, and in fact, the biographical reports about Democritus present a figure that combines the philosophical behavioral traits that we have seen in his predecessors.138 First of all, there is the positive relationship that Democritus is portrayed as having with women. That he was thinking of killing himself during the Thesmorphoria connects him with Demeter and his respect for both the goddess and the women in his life is conveyed by how, in order to enable his female relatives (his sister in particular) to perform the proper honors for the goddess, he postponed his suicide.139 Luchte brings out Democritus’ feminine-philosophical religiosity when he writes both that ‘Democritus, in his travels, would thus be merely fulfilling the counsel of the [i.e. Parmenides’] Goddess to discover the myriad ways of mortal knowing’ and that ‘Democritus lays out his topography of “Atom and the Void” as a meditation upon the call of the Goddess for us to know Being and Becoming.’140 The story that Democritus greeted a girl on one day by saying ‘Hello, maiden’ and then, on the next day, by saying ‘Hello, woman’ when the girl had been deflowered during the night conveys the attention  LM P48b. LM P44b/DK B165. LM D11/DK 67 A8.  LM P48. 139  LM P51/DK A1. LM P52/DK A29. 140  Luchte 2011, 166, xiii. 137 138

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that he paid to actual women as well.141 Like Empedocles, Democritus gave women a formative role in reproduction insofar as, beyond maintaining that females too emit seed, he also says that it is the mother that determines whether a baby will be born male or female.142 But there is one other anecdote that recalls the connection between women and comedy that we saw with Thales and the Thracian Maid: When he was eating a cucumber its flavor seemed to him to taste like honey, so he asked his serving woman where she had bought it …. The woman was surprised and asked what he wanted, and he said, ‘I have to discover the cause of the sweetness, and I shall discover it by observing the place.’ ‘Then you can sit down,’ the woman said with a smile, ‘for without noticing it I put the cucumber into a container that had been filled with honey.’ But he replied in irritation, ‘You have tried to fool me, and I shall stick nonetheless to what I said and I shall look for the cause,’ on the idea that the sweetness was inherent and innate to the cucumber.143

Here, as with Thales, we have a female figure whose role as a maid/servant should make her subservient to a prominent Greek male—Democritus was considered worthy of divine honors, and when he died, he was buried at public expense—assuming a superior position insofar as she laughs at how absurd the theoretical bent of mind can lead a man to be, but this anecdote also conveys the second way in which Democritus personifies philosophical subjectivity—his passionate love of learning.144 Democritus’ dedication to learning is illustrated in the story that he took his own eyesight because he thought that he would be more able to contemplate natural causes if he freed his mind from the temptation of seeing, and his Empedoclean-Nietzschean drive to cultivate his experiential capacities is also evident in how ‘he trained himself and tested his sense impressions in many ways, sometimes withdrawing into solitude and spending time among the tombs.145 Thirdly, Seneca’s report that ‘Democritus rejected riches, thinking that they are a burden for the health of the mind’ reminds us that the philosophical love of learning brings with it the

 LM P50/DK A1.  LM D166/DK A142. LM D173/DK A143. 143  LM P41/DK A17a. 144  LM P55/DK A1. 145  LM P34/A23. LM P32/DK A1. 141 142

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anti-materialistic indifference toward wealth and power.146 This final personal quality is attested in several reports such that Democritus only accepted as much of his family’s estate as he needed in order to travel—he apparently spent all of his money on traveling after which he lived in extreme poverty; that he laughed at a man who ‘melts down silver and gold and never puts a stop to this greediness’; and his statement that ‘he would rather discover a single causal explanation than become king of the Persians.’147 Democritus made it is his glory that he avoided glory, but as much as this illustrates his philosophical temperament, one specific consequence of his modesty calls into question his status as an archaic Greek philosopher: I came to Athens and no one recognized me.148 As a close contemporary of Socrates—he was only one year older—, Democritus can barely be considered as a presocratic philosopher.149 He is as much an end to archaic Greek philosophy as he is a return to its beginning, and we will now consider his relation to Socrates’ most famous student.

§120: Enemies with Benefits. – Nietzsche’s suspicion that there was a platonic conspiracy to suppress Democritus derives from Diogenes Laertius’ report that not only did Plato want to burn all the writings of Democritus, but he also refused to mention the atomist in any of his own writing: Diogenes notes that, although Plato mentions almost all of the ancients, he never mentions Democritus even where it would have been necessary so as to refute him.150 But although Nietzsche interpreted Plato’s (in)actions as arising from the latter’s concern about the societal consequences of Democritus’ atheism and materialism, Diogenes’ statement that Plato refused to mention Democritus ‘because he knew that would oppose him to the greatest of philosophers’ suggests that Plato’s opposition can be interpreted less as a conspiracy and more of an instance of the productive agonism that Nietzsche championed. That Democritus studied theology reminds us that it is unclear whether he was an atheist, and it seems that his criticism of Greek religion derived from the same concern for cultural health as  LM P36.  LM P37b/DK A1. LM P55/DK A1. LM P48c. LM P40/DK B118. 148  LM P39/B116. LM P22a/DK A1, B116. 149  LM P10/DK A1. 150  LM R11/DK A1. 146 147

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Plato’s criticism of atomism: he sought to counter theological notions such as destiny and fortune ‘because they were understood to be the greatest threats to human autonomy and responsibility at the time he was doing philosophy.’151 Furthermore, Plato even employs a Democritean premise in order to prove the immortality of the soul, and that Democritus may have been receptive to some form of survival after death is suggested by how Pythagoreanism seems to have been as important for him as it was for Plato: ‘even during Democritus’ own lifetime, there was a tradition linking Democritus with Pythagoreanism and even giving him Pythagorean teachers. In all probability the tradition has a basis in historical fact.’152 Democritus is reported to have spent time with Philolaus and to have expressed admiration for Pythagoras, and the fact that Democritus is often portrayed as a Pythagorean philosopher who journeyed to the east further suggests that Democritus may have been receptive to the idea of rebirth in particular.153 Democritus is said to have associated with many yogis (gymnosophists) in India, and there are two similarities between atomism and Buddhism that indicate how the former could be compatible with rebirth: ‘Democritus’ ideas on the relationship between impermanence, desire and the pursuit of happiness are strikingly similar to those of the Buddha’; ‘Democritus shared with the Buddha a complete disregard for the afterlife.’154 That is, just as Buddhism’s endorsement of both impermanence and rebirth shows how the dissolution of the subject which Nietzsche saw as the horrific test of contemplating atomism is compatible with the possibility of being reborn, the Buddha’s refusal to speak about the afterlife so as to get people to focus on the here and now shows how Democritus’ silence concerning the afterlife need not be interpreted as his rejection of rebirth. Still, Democritus’ necrophilia and sophism suggest that Plato may have been right to be weary of the influence that atomism’s

§121: Death and Taxes. – 1. Just as the mythic inversion characteristic of the transition from partnership to domination consisted of an exclusion of rebirth and glorification of death, Democritus seems to have been as fascinated by death as he was  LM P16a/DK A1. Johnson 2009, 11.  Plato Republic X 610A5. Kahn 1985, 6 note 15. Kingsley 1995, 327. 153  LM P21/DK A1. LM P24/DK A1. Flinterman 2014, 345. 154  LM P16b, P17, P18/DK A1, A2, A40. Hagens 2009, 35, 45. 151 152

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indifferent to the afterlife. Besides spending time among tombs—which, incidentally, were one of the few public places where women were able to meet outside of the home—, this personification of Greek atheism wrote a book On Those in Hades or On Hades in which he collected reports about people who were thought to have died but then came to life again.155 Observations such as that hair and nails appear to continue to grow after a person is suspected to have died led Democritus to maintain that there aren’t sufficiently certain signs on which doctors can rely that life has definitely ended and this is why, if it is true that he thought that the soul is destroyed together with the body, then his believing this reflects a personal preference rather than a reasoned conclusion.156 2. In Anaxagoras, we saw how the uncritical acceptance of death coincided with the increased influence of sophism on Greek philosophy, and we see this same coincidence with Democritus: ‘the origins of the atomist hypothesis were altogether more likely to have been influenced by the challenging arguments of Zeno and Melissus than by any specific engagement with Parmenides.’157 (Leucippus is reported to have been both a student/companion of Zeno and a disciple of Melissus, and sophism’s influence on Democritus calls into question Luchte’s view of him as heeding the instructions of Parmenides’ goddess.)158 In contrast to Parmenides’ generous monism, Melissus brazenly defended an absolute form of monism—his combative temper being reflected in his role as a Samian naval commander—and we can see a similarly combative temperament in several reports about Democritus such as his being hostile to Anaxagoras because the latter didn’t accept him into his company or that he followed Leucippus by developing his ideas both in continuity and polemical contrast with Eleatics.159 ‘Democritus may have entered in a polemic with Melissus’ claim that Being has no place into which [to] withdraw,’ but it is in the atomists’ arguing for the void—for the being of non-being—that we can most clearly see the sophistic embrace of contrarian contradiction: we have no evidence for how the atomists met the charge of outright contradiction by asserting the existence of non-being.160  Stears 1998, 98. LM D2/DK A33. LM D143/DK B1.  LM D142/DK A160. LM D141/DK A160. LM D139/DK A109. 157  Palmer 2009, 319. 158  LM P2, P3/DK 67 A1, 67 A10. LM P4/DK 67 A5. 159  LM P23/DK A1. Piergiacomi 2017, 443 note 30. 160  Ibid., 443 note 31. Taylor 1997, 204. 155 156

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3. It is also in the writings of ‘Democritus’ that we find in Greek philosophy the first explicit kind of sophistic misogyny that we saw in Simonides: ‘a woman is much keener for evil thoughts than a man’; ‘adornment for a woman is to speak little’; ‘to be ruled by a woman: the worst outrage (hubris) for a man’; ‘some men are masters over cities but slaves to women.’161 Kahn notes that this last passage portrays the effeminate power of sensuality as an opponent, but his qualification that the real enemy is not pleasure itself but desires whose gratification will ruin one’s health reminds us that we cannot definitely say that Democritus was misogynistic.162 The italicized font here reflects how these passages were likely written by Democrates instead of by Democritus. But Kahn also notes both that even the Democrates collection contains authentic material and that the bulk of the Stobaeus fragments—who is the source for all of those just listed—seem genuine.163 4. Finally, like Anaxagoras putting his book up for sale, the report that Democritus earned bronze statues and 500 talents for reading his Great World System reminds us of the materialistic impetus of sophism that we saw in Simonides and which was rejected by Socrates.164 But things are not so simple with our joyous philosopher. People who squandered their patrimony were, by law, forbidden from being buried in their fatherland, and Democritus only gave this reading so that no one could prosecute him for such an offense. This reflects how, although Democritus is reported to have given Protagoras the impulse to become a sophist, he also attacked sophistry by maintaining that education is not merely a step to a political career; it’s about developing the ethical personality.165 For Gregory Vlastos, the contrast between Democritus’ view that the good and the true are the same for all men and Protagoras’ statement ‘I call some things better than others, but non truer’ ‘epitomizes the difference between the last of the physiologoi and the first of the “sophists.”’166 It is by turning to the former’s physics that we can see how, despite his sophistic preference for death, his—like Anaxagoras’—system actually entails rebirth. 161  LM D328/DK B273. LM D329/DK 329. LM D391/DK B111. LM D325/ DK B214. 162  Kahn 1985, 16. 163  Ibid., 4, 3. 164  LM P55/DK A1. 165  LM P27/DK A9. Voros 1975, 467–68. 166  Vlastos 1945, 591.

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§122: Atoms. – There are several ways in which Democritus’ cosmos may be described as being Pythagorean and/or Platonic. Philolaus’ limiters-­unlimiteds pair has been identified with atoms and void, and while it is precarious to ascribe the idea of atoms to Philolaus, Aristotle’s observation that, just as the atomists say that we breathe in soul-atoms that move around like motes in the air, the Pythagoreans say that these motes—or what moves them—are soul suggests that at least some Pythagoreans may have subscribed to a version of the pious atomism that we have been tracing since Anaximander.167 Theophrastus portrays Pythagoreans and Democritus as explaining qualities by means of quantities when he writes that they both ‘thought that the shapes and magnitudes are the causes of heat and cold,’ but Theophrastus’ term for shapes (σχήματα) reflects Aristotle’s preference for static terminology in contrast to Democritus’ strongly dynamic and dispositional flavor.168 Whereas Aristotle’s ‘schema’ conveys the actual properties of an individual atom, Democritus’ term rhysmos—‘shape that involves relations with other atoms and patterns of atomic movement’— conveys ‘the objective law of a pattern [that is characteristic] of an object in itself … form as an outflow of motion from the object itself.’169 ‘It is only Democritus and Plato who (in principle, at least) reject the qualitative explanation of Nature, and insists that … the rational knowledge of the world must go deeper: to atoms and void for Democritus (B9, B125), to the geometrical structure of the elements for Plato in the Timaeus,’ but in contrast to Plato’s logical atomism, Democritus’ physical atomism can be read as more clearly illustrating the unity of being and becoming; how an atom’s static quantitative structure (being) exists within the rhythmic dynamism of qualitative forces (becoming).170 It has been argued that the motion of atoms is not intrinsic to them since it only results from collision, but this raises the serious problem of the origin of atomic motion which, instead of explaining, Democritus tries to avoid by deferring to the eternity of the cosmos—atoms move because they have always moved.171 If this is the case, then Democritus’ cosmos entails three fundamental principles (void, atoms, and the energy required to move them), but Aristotle  Burkert 1972, 259; Drozdek 2007, 59. LM R14a; Mansfeld 2015, 67.  LM D57/DK A120. Mourelatos 2005, 42. 169  Ibid., 41 note 11. Von Fritz 1966, 26. 170  Kahn 1960, 129. LM D41/DK A48b. 171  Mourelatos 2005, 40. Drozdek 2008, 78–79. 167 168

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shows how Democritus may have resolved this problem when he compares the latter’s atoms to the Platonic conception of soul as self-moving number.172 Democritus attributed soul-mind to spherical fire atoms because they are the most mobile, but it is specifically their self-motion that makes Democritus’ cosmos even more Platonic in the sense of entailing some form of immortality: ‘if soul atoms are self-­moving, it is unclear why the soul should be mortal. If life is motion, then by definition the soul should be immortal.’173 The report that, unlike Epicurus, Democritus said ‘that all things have a share in a certain kind of soul’ conveys how, like Plato and most of his predecessors, Democritus’ cosmos can also be seen as a continual process of psychic transmigration although, strictly speaking, ‘Democritus’ self-propelling atoms themselves are not to be referred to as alive …. Since they do not breathe, i.e. they do not have a soul cluster.’174 It is in this way that Democritus could still think that, while soul atoms are immortal, souls proper (soul-clusters) are mortal, but in order to assess how definitive this mortality is, we’ll start to bridge the gap between these two manifestations of soul.

§123: Void. – Democritus’ calling the indivisible atoms forms (ἰδέας) reminds us that Nietzsche saw atomistic materialism as being merely an inverted Platonism—both material atoms and Platonic forms being mythic abstractions—and the invisible harmony between ancient materialism and idealism becomes even more clear when we keep in mind the ‘curious fact that the Atomists, who are commonly regarded as the great materialists of antiquity, were actually the first to say distinctly that a thing might be real without having a body.’175 Although the idea that void/non-being exists is a transgression against Parmenides’ goddess’ taboo against affirming the existence of that which necessarily cannot be, the void appears to be feminine when we keep in mind several things such as that the Greeks considered space to be feminine—as in the Timaeus; that John Burnet’s suggestion that Leucippus’ cosmos, like that of the Pythagoreans, drew from Anaximander is supported by how Democritus assigned the term  LM R20.  LM D130/DK A101. Drozdek 2007, 100. 174  LM D140/DK A117. Freter 2018, 70–71. 175  LM D34/DK A57. Burnet 1920, 357. Freter 2018, 72 note 24. 172 173

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apeiron to the void; and the void’s association with Philolaus’ feminine unlimiteds.176 The coincidence between presocratic philosophy and the Hippocratic corpus further suggests that, like Anaximander’s apeiron and the Pythagorean unlimiteds, the atomic void may be a cosmic representation of the maternal body—Democritus may have been inspired by Empedocles to describe the shells of his worlds as being surrounded by an amniotic membrane (ὓμην)— and whereas the view that the non-being of the void is a necessary precondition for the motion of the atoms may appear to assign a passive role to this feminine cosmic principle, Leucippus’ following statement about atoms and void calls into question both the latter’s passivity and it’s non-existence: ‘both are causes in a similar way for the things that come about.’177 ‘The void is hardly a nonbeing in the literal sense; the void is a being whose nature is fundamentally different from the being, or rather, the beings, i.e., atoms’ and we can get a better sense of the void’s (a)causality by considering Philoponus’ concern that, if atoms did actually come into contact with one another, nothing would separate them and they would coalesce into a single body.178 To be sure, there is plenty of doxographical evidence that atoms do indeed collide with one another and no evidence that Leucippus and Democritus shared Philoponus’ concern, but just as the atomists’ inability to explain the origin of motion enables life, qua the self-propelling soul atoms, to play an important explanatory role in the atomic cosmos, Philoponus’ criticism elucidates the void’s causal efficacy: ‘what appears to be impact is in fact action at an extremely short distance; rather than actually banging into one another, atoms have to be conceived as repelling one another by some sort of force transmitted through the void.’179 That is, whereas the void’s unlimitedness brings us back to Anaximander, it’s being the medium through which action at a distance occurs brings us back to Thales albeit this time in terms of a repulsive action at a distance that may have more in common with Empedocles’ Strife than with Thales’ conception of soul. Like the question of whether Democritus ascribed weight to atoms, the question of whether atoms collide or not depends on our interpretation of the term βάρος, which has several meanings such as weight, burden, 176  Luchte 2011, 164. Baldry 1932, 29. Burnet 1920, 339, 61. Baldry 1932, 30. LM D29/DK A37. 177  Wilford 1968, 109–10. LM D32/DK 67 A8, 68 A38. 178  Drozdek 2008, 82. Gregory 2013, 450. 179  Ibid., 453. Taylor 1997, 205.

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­ ressure, grief, misery, a quantity, and excess.180 In order to avoid the p anachronistic interpretation of this term as meaning mass, Alan Chalmers translates it as ‘unwieldiness,’ and he also suggests that Democritus saw such unwieldiness as one of the determinants of the effect of a ‘collision’: he claims that this is borne out to some extent by David Konstan’s interpretation that Epicurean ‘atoms do not collide at all, but merely change course once their mutual approach leaves no unit of space remaining between them.’181 Just as the simultaneously quantitative/physical and qualitative/psychological meanings of βάρος coincides with Nietzsche’s view that Democritus ironically and self-consciously projected sense experience onto the extra-sensible realm of atoms, interpreting ancient atoms as centers of force repelling each other coincides with Nietzsche’s transitioning from reading atomism as a theory of matter to a theory of force and time. But in order to explain how atoms come together so as to form worlds and/or souls, we must consider attraction at a distance.

§124: Chance. – Like Plato, the atomists posited a disordered motion before the creation of the world, and like Empedocles, Democritus posited a movement of like to like which helps explain atomistic cosmogenesis; ‘that similar things move towards similar ones, but also that all things move towards the void.’182 As an example of both like to like attraction and the universally attractive power of the void, Democritus maintained that magnets and iron are composed by similar types of atoms but that magnets move more quickly to iron because they’re being more rarefied and possessing more void makes them more mobile, and it’s in this way that the void’s (non/?)being can be considered as a cause of attraction; the greater amount of void in the magnet causing it to move toward iron. It’s difficult to say what role either the self-movement of soul atoms or the void’s causal efficacy played in Democritus’ conception of cosmogenesis, but what we do know is that his image of this process recalls the archetypal symbol for the goddess that was also present in Anaxagoras. That the atomists took over Empedocles’ cosmic vortex (ΔΙΝΗ) is supported by Simplicius’ observation that, like Empedocles, Democritus also says that a vortex of all kinds  Chalmers 1997, 279. Liddell and Scott 2007, 127.  Chalmers 1997, 283–84. 182  LM Empd R75/DK B57. LM D126/DK A165. 180 181

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of forms became detached from the whole, and Simplicius’ qualification that, since Democritus doesn’t say either how or by what cause the vortex comes about, the atomist seems to generate it by either a spontaneous process or chance further reveals the implicit existentialism and femininity of the atomic cosmos: ‘for Democritus, as with Nietzsche with his Amor Fati, … it is Chance that is the divine power of the precise morphology and configuration of beings in the world … [and] we should remember, in light of our guiding indication of the context of emergence [of early Greek thought], that Chance is a goddess and in the context of archaic mythopoetic thought, has creative significance of intelligence.’183 Whereas Thales concealed Metis under the image of water, Democritus may have concealed the goddess Τύχη under the principle of ou mallon (not rather)—a general principle of indifference that conveys the random distribution of atoms throughout the void: ‘an ou mallon distribution of atoms leads to an ou mallon distribution of times and places for vortex formation,’ and this is why there is a sense in which vortex formation may be considered as arising from chance qua an absence of teleology.184 It is in this way that both void and chance may be seen as feminine aspects of Democritean atomism, but just as the possibility that the misogyny present in the Democrates’ fragments could be attributed to Democritus calls this reading into question, there are reasons to doubt both Democritus’ use and affirmation of chance. Simplicius foisted chance upon both Anaxagoras and Democritus—his attributing the formation of atomic vortices to chance being an inference from Democritus’ silence about how this occurs—and the clearest evidence we have for Democritus’ view of chance is far from Nietzsche’s Amor Fati: humans have fabricated an image of chance as a screen for their own imprudence.185 Democritus was as concerned that people would blame chance for their own bad decisions as he was that they would blame the will of the gods to avoid accepting their own responsibility, and this is why Simplicius is more accurate when he refers to cosmic spontaneity instead of to chance: ‘Democritus attributed cosmological processes to spontaneity, and that is not equivalent to chance …. They differ, [Aristotle] says, in that the spontaneous is much broader than chance. Chance applies only to rational activity involving choice. The spontaneous, on the other hand, extends to brutes, plants,  Pierris 2005, 219 note 9. LM R31/DK A67. Luchte 2011, 164.  Gregory 2013, 465. 185  Johnson 2009, 32. Taylor 1997, 208. LM D274/DK B119. 183 184

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and inanimate objects.’186 Spontaneity is a necessary cause of both atomic motion and human actions that is nevertheless compatible with human freedom, and Democritus’ affirmation of spontaneity may explain why he associates vortices with A᾽νάγκη rather than Τύχη.187

§125: Necessity. – After the spontaneous creation of a vortex, a new level of determinism sets in insofar as, from now on, nothing happens at random, but everything for a reason and as the effect of necessity which Democritus identifies with the collisions of atoms.188 In contrast to the attraction at a distance which may have taken place outside of vortices, a new form of like-to-like differentiation takes place when, by virtue of a vortex’s circular motion, atoms separate apart and move to similar atoms as though they were being winnowed: ‘this is how the earth was formed, since the bodies that are borne inward towards the center remain together there.’189 This is how multiple worlds are formed which are also liable to transform into other worlds, and according to Cicero, ‘some of them [are] not only so similar to one another, but so perfectly and absolutely equal in all regards, that there is no difference whatsoever between them … and the same for people.’190 Given an infinite amount of time, the infinite number and shapes of atoms, and the infinite extent of the void, some worlds will be so perfectly similar in atomic structure that they are identical, and Democritus’ statement that man is a small world entails that this also applies for people qua soul aggregates.191 If the same person or world can arise in different times and places, then Democritus’ atomism entails rebirth, and unlike Anaxagoras’ proto-biblical nous, Democritus’ A᾽νάγκη also seems to be more akin to the universal and immanent feminine that was glimpsed in the mysteries and which also manifested publicly as Moira. We can begin to see her in Aristotle’s report that Democritus thought that atoms ‘hold on to one another and remain together for a length of time until some stronger necessity arising from their surroundings shakes and disperses  Johnson 2009, 30, 36.  Ibid., 5. Freter 2018, 68. 188  LM D73/DK 67 B2. 189  LM D80b/DK 67 A1. 190  LM D83a and b/DK A82, B138. LM D85/DK A81. 191  LM D225/DK B34. 186 187

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them.’192 This report’s reference to a ‘stronger necessity’ conveys how ‘there is thus a weaker necessity which keeps the aggregates together …. The all-present necessity can thus manifest as the force that maintains the unity of bodies, but also as a force that disrupts this unity,’ and Drozdek’s observation that the way in which the atomists described Necessity was meant to equate her with the cosmically directive role previously played by Anaximander’s apeiron, Heraclitus’ logos, Parmenides’ goddess, Empedocles’ holy phrēn, and Anaxagoras’ nous indicates how atomism’s context of emergence suggests that the femininity of the Greek term for necessity may be far from accidental: ‘Necessity is an atomistic, nondivine divinity capable of bringing ordered and harmonious results out of disharmonious clouds of chaotically moving atoms.’193 Again, Democritean atomism consists of three fundamental principles—atoms, void, and necessity (a force that may also be immanent within soul atoms)—the last of which illustrates in what sense presocratic philosophy ended as it began— with a symbolic or naturalized formal variation of the goddesses of old European myths who harmoniously direct the processes of life, death, and rebirth.194 The communal and/or therapeutic ethos of this worldview manifests in how Democritus sought to use the principle of necessary determinism so as to show people, not only that they are responsible for their actions, but how they can determine their actions and characters so as to (re)create themselves, and he also enables us to see how the partnership spirit manifests as specific kind of political philosophy that continues to endure until the present day.195

§126: Democracy. – 1. We don’t know who first used the word de ̄mokratia, but Democritus has just as much a claim to be considered the first writer to do so as other possible sources like Herodotus or Antiphon; his affirmation of this political philosophy being evident in the statement Poverty in a democracy is just as preferable to what the powerful call happiness as liberty is to slavery.196 This statement is the only appearance that the term makes in Democritus’  LM D29/DK A37.  Drozdek 2007, 103–04. 194  Ibid., 102. 195  Johnson 2009, 52. 196  Mejer 2004, 1. LM D361/DK B251. 192 193

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extant writings, and that it may have been written by Democrates coincides with how Democritus’ view of democracy is far from straightforward. He neither explicitly says why he prefers democracy to other forms of government nor explains why democracy is good, and although he associated democracy with freedom, he did not advocate a society in which the majority is always right and where individuals have unlimited freedom.197 That Democritus was the first in a long line of thinkers to argue for the superior efficiency that is achieved by a division of resources—even relating the division of labor to people’s happiness insofar as everyone should work according to their abilities—brings his view of democracy closer to Eisler’s actualization hierarchy than to liberal equality, and his elitist realism is further evident in such statements as by nature, ruling belongs to the stronger; it is better for thoughtless people to be governed than to govern; and anyone who kills any brigand or pirate should not be penalized, whether he does so by his own hand, by ordering it, or by his vote.198 (Brigandage and piracy were real and common problems in Democritus’ world.) Democritus’ lifetime saw the appearance of the first utopian plans for ideal communities—international or panhellenic concord having some currency during the end of his lifetime—but instead of working toward an ideal, Democritus drew from his own personal experience so as to come up with realistic ways to promote the common good.199 He demanded an initiative on the part of the rich to contribute to society, but the report that he said that, since laws are an evil notion, ‘the wise man should not obey laws but live freely’ suggests that, like Nietzsche, Democritus prioritized cultural health over political legislation: ‘Democritus seems to have realized that democracy is not just a form of government but also an expression of a mental attitude: the minds of citizens are a more effective guarantee for the preservation of the society than the laws of the state. This is also the basic notion in Plato’s Republic.’200 And it is in this way that Democritus enables us to further appreciate the importance of partnership-­philosophical subjectivity for democracy. 2. Like both Socrates and the sophists, Democritus moved mankind to the center of the intellectual debate but he, again, also charted a middle  Ibid., 3,4, 2.  Michaelides et  al. 2011, 7. LM D365/DK B267. LM D367/DK B75. LM D384/ DK B260. 199  Procopé 1989, 327, 325 note 119. 200  Ibid., 329, 310. LM D376/DK A166. Mejer 2004, 9. 197 198

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way between Socratic Platonism and sophistic scepticism.201 That Democritus was less interested than Plato was in grounding his ethico-­ political views in a metaphysical system is indicated by how, like Empedocles, he only explicitly made use of the contrast between reality and convention in the context of his physical theory.202 His political writings make no references to the ultimate reality of atoms and void, but in direct opposition to the sophistic division between physis and nomos, Democritus maintains in his ethical and political theory that moral conventions are grounding in the reality of human nature.203 He is the earliest thinker reported as explicitly positing a supreme goal or good which he grounded in a concept of human nature that, while not tied to any specific theory, could be accommodated by atomism as well as by competing theories.204 Democritus’ view that happiness (contentment, well-being, harmony, equilibrium) is the ultimate goal is similar to the widespread view of poets and medical writers of that time that joy is the natural feeling of health, and like Plato, Democritus locates happiness within the soul; specifically, in both the soul’s freedom from disturbance and its enjoyment of pleasure unalloyed by pain.205 ‘Homeric man’s highest good is not the enjoyment of a quiet conscience, but the enjoyment of tı ̄me ̄, public esteem’ but Democritus reverses this mentality by admonishing us to learn to feel shame much more before yourself than before others.206 His contribution to Greek ethics was to appeal to the internal sanctions of one’s conscience so as to both derive morality from self-interest and to help people avoid the pain of having a bad conscience, but he also had other practical advice for helping people avoid other forms of discontent: be satisfied with what is present, maintaining only a small memory of the things that cause envy and admiration.207 Just as Democritus foreshadows Nietzsche’s emphasis on the importance of forgetting, he foreshadows the latter’s view that the urge to dominate ultimately derives from dissatisfaction—those who derive pleasure from the adversities of their neighbors … are deprived of their own joy—but the hedonic goal of Democritus’ emphasis on moderation also coincides with Plato’s view that moral education means being  Michaelides et al. 2011, 14.  Mejer 2004, 8. Taylor 2007, 3. 203  Ibid., 7, 1–2. 204  Taylor 1997, 217. Taylor 2007, 8. 205  LM D229/DK A1. Kahn 1985, 27. LM D231/DK A167. Taylor 1967, 7. 206  Dodds 1951, 17. LM D336/DK B244. 207  Taylor 1997, 218. LM D226/DK B191. 201 202

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trained to take pleasure in the right things: Democritus’ insistence on the insatiable nature of basic appetites also prefigures Socrates’ allegory of filling a leaky jar with water from a sieve.208 Temperance increases satisfactions and makes pleasure even greater, but Democritus is less interested in the amplification of pleasure than he is in the refinement of pleasure.209 The ‘distinction between crude and enlightened sensation, between questionable and sound pleasure … is at the heart of Democritean epistemology and ethics,’ and whereas Democritus’ statement that great satisfactions come about from observing fine actions indicates how this sensory refinement functions as a means by which to cultivate an artistic-ethical sensibility, C. C. W. Taylors’ statement ‘that the study of the universe was the best sort of activity because the pleasure which one derives from that study is the best sort of pleasure’ reminds us how central this sense is to the philosophical love of learning.210 3. For Democritus, the mental attitude (subjectivity) that nurtures the cultural foundations of democracy by enabling people to experience sound pleasures, is also an enlightened form of perception that facilitates philosophical inquiry. It was his consideration of animals, sages, and gods that led Democritus to think that humans possess more than five sens, and in keeping with the common parallels drawn in fifth-century texts between vision and the eye of the mind (gnome), he conceived of thinking as a sixth sense; dramatizing its importance for inquiry in a fictious dialogue between the senses and the mind where he shows how all theories are ultimately grounded in sensation: ‘whenever he made his accusation against appearances, saying, “by convention color, by convention sweet, by convention bitter, but in reality atoms and void,” [he] made the sensations reply in this way: “Poor mind, you receive from us all your certainties, and then you overthrow us? That overthrow is your downfall.”’211 That is, just as Democritus’ only acknowledging the intrinsic properties of atoms is called into question by how he seems to identify some of their relational properties with causally efficacious features of the world, his reduction of qualities to quantities is called into question by his acknowledging that such a reduction can never fully succeed; that, although the mind can construct theories that go beyond—and, in doing so, correct the  LM D279/DK B293. Procopé 1989, 322. Kahn 1985, 18.  LM D244/DK B211. 210  Vlastos 1946, 57. LM D243/DK B194. Taylor 1967, 7. 211  LM D144/DK A116. Kahn 1985, 21 note 46, 19. LM D23a/DK B125. 208 209

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limitations of—everyday sensation, such theories will always be under the control of the senses insofar as they both ultimately rely on empirical confirmation and are required to explain all sensory phenomena.212 Pythagoreans, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles conceived of philosophy as, in part, the cultivation of a divine form of perception, subjectivity, and/or embodiment, and Democritus naturalizes this tradition insofar as his grounding of theory in sensation simply reflects how having a more refined perception of the world enables one to have a more sophisticated conception of it as well. This is why the philosophical capacity for higher-order (self-reflective, creative) kinds of thinking, which is integral to the subjective and cultural foundations of democracy, can also be thought of as a superior form of perceptions—the ability to see the beauty of fine actions and experience the pleasure of inquiry; to see questions and possibilities where others do not. 4. As did some of his predecessors, Democritus saw that refining one’s subjectivity entails transforming one’s embodiment. He conveys the obscure, ever-changing, and somatic foundation of sensation when he writes that we grasp in actuality not anything that is certain, but something that changes according to the disposition both of the body and of what penetrates and repels, and unlike Plato’s portrayal of the body as a source of corruption, Democritus holds the soul responsible for any ethical or intellectual defects; doing so in another fictitious encounter where, if the body was given the opportunity to file a lawsuit against the soul for damages done and the person in question was made judge, the latter would gladly condemn the soul for having harmed the body by its negligence and excessive desires.213 Whereas individual soul-atoms likely play a causal role in cosmogenesis as sources of motion, soul aggregates definitely play a causal role in peoples’ lives insofar as they direct the other inanimate atoms by which one is also composed, and it is specifically through education that a soul re-creates and nurtures both itself and its body: nature and instruction are very similar. For instruction modifies the configuration of a man, and, modifying his configuration, produces a nature.214 Perhaps inspiring Nietzsche’s statement that ‘learning changes us; it does what all nourishment does which also does not merely “preserve” – as physiologists know,’ Democritus saw education as  Ganson 1999, 212, 209. Taylor 1967, 24.  LM D15/DK B9. Vlastos 1945, 580. LM D233a/DK B159. 214  LM D403/DK B33. 212 213

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a means by which one can re-create oneself, and he conceived of the goal of education as the cultivation of a state of physical or physiological equilibrium where one is able to simply enjoy the harmonious rhythm of one’s atoms without the large movements that cause discontent and arise from lacks or excesses in one’s being.215 In other words, just as Democritus’ physics entails rebirth, his psychosomatic view of education can be seen as process of continual rebirth qua self-transformation, and if—as current research on embodied cognition suggests—such a view of education will better enable us to nurture philosophical subjectivity, then, although his atheistic materialism marked the end of presocratic philosophy qua partnership religious reformation, Democritus can help us revive philosophy in our own times. 5. That Democritus would have been happy to do so is indicated by how he seems to have constructed both his aphorisms and his cosmology so as to have a transformative effect. The way in which he describes his gnomic statements as shaping his auditors evokes his own atomic theory and he also hoped that, if people realized that their true nature is atoms and void, then this would provide them with the serenity that he himself derived from his studies: ‘the anthropology of atomism seeks to calm, i.e. to reduce, the motion of the atoms. Our cheerfulness comes into existence when we reduce the eternal movement of our parts to a minimum.’216 Vlastos conveys the perceptual shift that Democritus sought to effect in people when he notes that the latter’s ‘sight of things unseen’ is not crude sensation ‘but sensation enlightened by the “subtler” (ἐπὶ λεπτòτερον) investigations of atomic theory,’ and Cynthia Farrar observes that ‘Democritus’ language attempts to transcend the barrier between the phenomenal and the atomic.’217 That Farrar makes this observation in her The Origin of Democratic Theory reminds us both how central philosophical writing—texts the form and content of which can transmit philosophy to others—has been to the origin western civilization, and the women/ goddess-­affirming possibilities that we’ve unfolded even from the twilight of presocratic philosophy remind us of the significant role feminine religiosity has played in the origin of democracy and can play in its future.

 BGE §231. LM D226/DK B191.  Johnson 2009, 14. Freter 2018, 75 note 36. 217  Vlastos 1945, 590–91. Farrar 1988, 229. Freter 2018, 75, note 37. 215 216

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References Baldry, H.C. 1932. Embryological Analogies in Pre-Socratic Cosmogony. The Classical Quarterly 26 (1): 27–34. Bremmer, Jan N. 2001. The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Burkert, Walter. 1972. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1985. Greek Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burnet, John. 1920. Early Greek Philosophy. London: A. & C. Black Ltd. Caygill, Howard. 1999. Nietzsche and Atomism. In Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory. Nietzsche and the Sciences I, ed. Babette Babich, 27–36. Great Britain: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chalmers, Alan. 1997. Did Democritus Ascribe Weight to Atoms? Australian Journal of Philosophy 75 (3): 279–287. Curd, Patricia. 2010. Thought and Body in Heraclitus and Anaxagoras. Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 25 (1): 1–41. Detienne, Marcel. 1999. The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books. Dodds, E.R. 1951. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Drozdek, Adam. 2001. Anaximander: Theological Provenance of the Apeiron. Giornale de Metafisica: Revista Bimestrale Di Filosofia 23 (1): 103–118. ———. 2007. Greek Philosophers as Theologians: The Divine Arche. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2008. In the Beginning Was the Apeiron: Infinity in Greek Philosophy. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart. Farrar, Cynthia. 1988. The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flinterman, Jaap-Jan. 2014. Pythagoreans in Rome and Asia Minor around the Turn of the Common Era. In A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A. Huffman, 341–359. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freter, Björn. 2018. Democritus on Being and Ought: Some Remarks on the Existential Side of Early Greek Atomism. Akropolis 2: 67–84. von Fritz, Kurt. 1966. Philosophie Und Sprachlicher Ausdruck Bei Demokrat. Darmstadt: Plato Und Aristoteles. Ganson, Todd Stuart. 1999. Democritus against Reducing Sensible Qualities. Ancient Philosophy 19: 201–215. Graham, Daniel W. 1994. The Postulates of Anaxagoras. Apeiron 27 (2): 77–121. ———. 2004. Was Anaxagoras a Reductionist? Ancient Philosophy 24: 1–18. ———. 2013. Anaxagoras and the Comet. Ancient Philosophy 33: 1–18.

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Graham, Daniel W., and Eric Hintz. 2007. Anaxagoras and the Solar Eclipse of 478BC. Apeiron 40 (4): 319–344. Granger, Herbert. 2013. “Early Natural Theology: The Purification of the Divine Nature.” In Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras, 164–200, eds. Dirk Obbink and David Sider. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Gregory, Andrew. 2013. Leucippus and Democritus on Like to Like and Ou Mallon. Apeiron 46 (4): 446–468. Guthrie, W.K.C. 1971. The Sophists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hagens, Graham. 2009. Syncretism and Ancient Chronology: Can Democritus Date the Buddha? Mouseion III (9): 29–55. Inwood, Brad. 1986. Anaxagoras and Infinite Divisibility. Illinois Classical Studies 11: 17–33. Johnson, Monte Ransome. 2009. Spontaneity, Democritean Causality and Freedom. Elenchos XXX: 1–52. Kahn, Charles H. 1960. Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1985. Democritus and the Origins of Moral Psychology. American Journal of Philology 106: 1–31. Kingsley, Peter. 1995. Ancient Philosophy Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Laks, André, and Glenn W.  Most. 2016. Early Greek Philosophy. Vol. I– VII. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Lesher, J.H. 1994. Mind’s Knowledge and Powers of Control in Anaxagoras DK B12. Phronesis XL (2): 125–142. Lewis, Eric. 2000. Anaxagoras and the Seeds of a Physical Theory. Apeiron 33 (1): 1–23. Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. 2007. Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Simon Wallenberg. Luchte, James. 2011. Early Greek Thought: Before the Dawn. New  York: Bloomsbury. Mansfeld, Jaap. 2015. Heraclitus on Soul and Super-Soul with an Afterthought on the Afterlife. Rhizomata 3 (1): 62–93. Marmodoro, Anna. 2017. Everything in Everything: Anaxagoras’ Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McEvilley, Thomas. 2002. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Allworth Press. Mejer, Jørgen. 2004. Democritus and Democracy. Apeiron 37 (1): 1–9. Michaelides, Panayotis, Ourania Kardasi, and John Milios. 2011. Democritus’ Economic Ideas in the Context of Classical Political Economy. The European Journal of the Hisotry of Economic Thought 18 (1): 1–18. Mourelatos, Alexander P.D. 2005. Intrinsic and Relational Properties of Atoms in the Democritean Ontology. In Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought:

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Themes From the Work of Richard Sorabji, ed. Ricardo Salles, 39–63. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967a. Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werk. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 1967b. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. ———. 1989. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New  York: Random House. ———. 1994. Frühe Schriften. Stuttgart: Beck Verlag. ———. 1996. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Trans. Marianne Cowan. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. ———. 2004. The Birth of Tragedy: And Other Writings. Eds. Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. The Pre-Platonic Philosophers. Ed. Greg Whitlock. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2009. Writings from the Early Notebooks. Eds. Raymond Guess and Alexander Nehamas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palmer, John. 2009. Parmenides & Presocratic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Piergiacomi, Enrico. 2017. Naming the Principles in Democritus: An Epistemological Problem. Apeiron 50 (4): 435–448. Pierris, Apostolos L. 2005. ΟΜΟΙΟΝ ΟΜΟΙΩ and ΔΙΝΗ: Nature and Function of Love and Strife in the Empedoclean System. In The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. Proceedings of the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Myconense July 6th-July 13th, 2003, ed. Apostolos L. Pierris, 189–224. Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research. Plato. 1997. Complete Works. Ed. John M.  Cooper. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Porter, James I. 2000a. Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000b. The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on the Birth of Tragedy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Procopé, J.F. 1989. Democritus on Politics and the Care of the Soul. Classical Quarterly 39 (ii): 307–331. Seaford, Richard. 1998. In the Mirror of Dionysos. In The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, ed. Sue Blundell and Margaret Williamson, 101–117. London and New York: Routledge. Sedley, David. 2007. Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Silk, M.S., and J.P.  Stern. 1981. Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sisko, John E. 2003. Anaxagoras’ Parmenidean Cosmology: Worlds within Worlds within the One. Apeiron 36 (2): 87–114. ———. 2009. On the Question of Homoeomereity in Anaxagorean Physics. Apeiron 42 (2): 89–103. ———. 2010a. Anaxagoras on Matter, Motion, and Multiple World. Philosophy Compass 5/6: 443–454. ———. 2010b. Anaxagoras Betwixt Parmenides and Plato. Philosophy Compass 5/6: 432–442. Stears, Karen. 1998. Death Becomes Her: Gender and Athenian Death Ritual. In The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, ed. Sue Blundell and Margaret Williamson, 89–117. London and New York: Routledge. Stokes, Michael C. 1965. On Anaxagoras. Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie 47 (1–19): 217–250. Swift, Paul A. 2005. Becoming Nietzsche: Early Reflections on Democritus, Schopenhauer, and Kant. New York: Lexington Books. Taylor, C.C.W. 1967. Pleasure, Knowledge and Sensation in Democritus. Phronesis 12: 6–27. ———. 1997. Anaxagoras and the Atomists. In From the Beginning to Plato: Routledge History of Philosophy., 1:192–224, ed. C.C.W.  Taylor. London: Routledge. ———. 2007. Nomos and Phusis in Democritus and Plato. Social Philosophy and Policy 24 (2): 1–20. Vlastos, Gregory. 1945. Ethics and Physics in Democritus (Part One). The Philosophical Review 54 (6): 578–592. ———. 1946. Ethics and Physics in Democritus (Part Two). The Philosophical Review 55 (1): 53–64. Voros, F.K. 1975. Democritus’ Educational Thought. Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education 15 (2): 457–470. Wilford, F.A. 1968. Embryological Analogies in Empedocles’ Cosmology. Phronesis 13 (2): 108–118. Wilkerson, Dale. 2006. Nietzsche and the Greeks. London and New  York: Continuum. Zhmud, Leonid. 2012. Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

§127: Time Atomism. – 1. Twenty percent of all Americans now identify as spiritual-but-not-­ religious (SBNR), and the SBNR phenomenon has been called the most important religious development of our time because this trend will only surge in the years to come; people wanting ‘to be the student and beneficiary of all traditions, and the slave to none.’1 As the twenty-first-century ascendance of feminist philosophies of religion indicates, many are becoming increasingly interested in more women-affirming forms of spirituality, and while the search for healthier forms of religion has led many to turn toward the east—especially to India which has the oldest tradition of goddess worship anywhere on earth—, Tracy Pintchman explains why a western goddess-centered religiosity will be more culturally effective in the west: ‘much of the social and political power of any religious symbol depends on a cultural context that imbues it with meaningful interpretations tied into a network of shared beliefs, values, and stories.’2 Philosophers in general and women philosophers in particular can contribute to Nietzsche’s view that philosophers should function as cultural physicians—can contribute to making philosophy departments more inclusive toward female students, and in doing so, support the cultural 1 2

 Lipka 2015. Shweder 1991, 68. Muraresku 2020, 9.  Pintchman 2000, 197–98.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Breidenstein Jr., Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44780-8_7

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foundations of western democracy—by using this book’s account of the presocratics’ partnership religiosity to speak to the growing number of people who will be interested in a goddess-centered spirituality according to which philosophy is a process of divinization that takes place across successive lifetimes. And they can do this because this religiosity’s deep connections to western beliefs, values, and stories, will grant it more social and political efficacy than other alternative forms of spirituality. But, even so, the rising spiritual tides of our time will not be able to compete with orthodox patriarchal religions if they cannot offer some hope of an afterlife, and in order to explore both the viability and the desirability of reincarnation, we’ll conclude this book by returning to a previously mentioned element of Nietzsche’s reading of Democritus. 2. Like antiquity, the significance of Nietzsche’s Zeitatomenlehre fragment of early 1873 is perhaps only exceeded by its obscurity, and it was not seriously considered until about 1990.3 Although Nietzsche atomized Schopenhauer’s will as early as 1870–1871, the next major occurrence of his new atomism does not appear until his notes on the will to power from the mid-1880s onward, but besides illustrating how it may be more accurate to speak of wills to power instead of the will to power, this fragment provides key ideas for understanding the eternal return as well.4 It is a highly experimental and provisional fragment that is open to many interpretations, and its cryptic nature recalls all of the interpretive difficulties that one encounters when trying to decipher the extant presocratic texts. Since Nietzsche’s account is replete with contradictions such as his reliance on the material law of non-contradiction, which he elsewhere rejects, some commentators argue that the fragment cannot be read literally or metaphysically; that Nietzsche is, in fact, making fun of such attempts to explain that world.5 Joshua Rayman notes that Nietzsche rejects many ways in which physicists try to explain the world because he saw them as depending on a series of unfounded metaphysical principles, and this is why ‘he rejects the very possibility of scientific explanation and the accordant causal thinking characteristic of Newtonian physics in favor of relative notions of description, interpretation, and perspective.’6 And Porter specifies that Nietzsche is here exploring at least three closely related things: an  Crawford 2005, 22.  Porter 2000b, 204–05 note 13. Crawford 2005, 45 note 2. 5  Rayman 2018, 181, 184. 6  Ibid., 168. 3 4

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anthropology or anthropomorphizing of time; the limits and fallacies of philosophical speculation; and the problems of representation and subjectivity.7 3. However, Rayman also acknowledges that ‘physics is at the heart of Nietzsche’s worldview,’ and Babich shows how we can reconcile Nietzsche’s passion for and criticism of physics when she describes his approach to science as ‘critically reflexive philosophical.’8 That is, by approaching science in a philosophical way, Nietzsche can be doing two things at once. He can be exploring and exposing the limits of science/representation while seeing not only what theory makes the most sense given these limits, but also what theory is most culturally therapeutic. Porter’s description of Nietzsche’s sketch of temporal atomism as ‘physical atomism done up as an abstract painting’ conveys how we may interpret this fragment as a conceptual work of art not unlike those of the presocratics; as an attempt to use both scientific inquiry and philosophical speculation as an artistic medium so as create a worldview that can enhance life by bringing meaning to people’s lives.9 Furthermore, ‘reading Nietzsche’s time-atom fragment as an anticipation of quantum theory provides some powerful clues to its meaning’ insofar as several of the paradoxical aspects of quantum mechanics—how classical descriptions of space and time both lead to contradictions and yet cannot be wholly abandoned, or how scientific observation actually constructs quantum phenomena— show how Nietzsche’s text can be elucidated by contemporary physics.10 Finally, we possess another invaluable hermeneutic resource for interpreting this text in our foregoing discussion of Nietzsche’s reading of the presocratics. Being writen in the middle of Nietzsche’s encounter with the presocratics, the fragment’s ‘genesis is most intimately tied to Nietzsche’s lecture series on the pre-Platonic philosophers from 1872 and the unfinished essay called Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.’11 Claudia Crawford finds some of the Zeitatomenlehre’s thought at work in the latter essay, and maintains that the relatively few lines of the fragment are a crystallization of a great deal of research including the presocratics—as well as Socrates, the Stoics, contemporary philosophy, and science/physics: ‘by  Porter 2000a, 58–59.  Rayman 2018, 167. Babich 2014, 158. 9  Porter 2000a, 70. 10  Whitlock 2000, 38. 11  Whitlock 2000, 36. 7 8

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studying the pre-Socratics, Nietzsche was working out a problem for himself, the problem of the mutually exclusive ideas of becoming and being.’12 Rayman also notes that we can assemble most of the elements of the Zeitatomenlehre from several of the presocratics, and in this final section, I will employ contemporary physics and presocratic philosophy so as to explain both the fragment itself and its cultural significance.13 4. Nietzsche traced the original problem of time atomism back to Zeno, and he conveys this Eleatic origin in the figure whom he holds responsible for the metaphysical limitations of modern science: ‘in atomic physics, one assumes atomic forces to be unchangeable in time, thus οντα in the Parmenidean sense. But these cannot be effective.’14 Classical-Newtonian science tends to operate under the sophistic assumption that the preconditions of representational knowledge are also the preconditions of existence, and Nietzsche turns this worldview of independently existing static beings upon itself through two Zeno-like reduction ad absurdum arguments. First, if movement in time occurs when a spatial point A effects another spatial point B, then this entails That A remains unchanged at this and that point of time. But then A is not an effective force, for this cannot remain the same; for that would mean, it had not been effective. If we take that which has an effect in time, then that which is effective in the smallest moment in time is a different thing. This means: time proves the absolute non-persistence of a force.15

Although Nietzsche is writing here of the causality between space-points that underlies movement in time, we can get a clearer picture of his argument by applying it to the causality between atoms; namely, in order for atom A to effect atom B, atom A cannot remain self-identical because such absolute metaphysical isolation would preclude it from being able to effect atom B, and furthermore, if this effect takes place within time and time is infinitely divisible, then atom A undergoes continual change (absolute non-persistence) whenever it acts as an effective force. It is in this way that Nietzsche deconstructs the classical worldview of independently existing static atoms that move about in an absolute framework of space and time, but he also deconstructs this framework itself with his second argument.  Crawford 2005, 46 note 22.  Rayman 2018, 192. 14  Whitlock 2000, 36. TAT, 3. 15  TAT, 1. 12 13

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As noted in §118, Nietzsche saw movement or motion as laboring under the contradiction that, while it is representationally constructed according spatial laws, this construction also depends on time the continuous becoming of which calls into question the universal, simultaneous and/or metaphysical presence of spatial laws. Nietzsche responds to this contradiction as follows: Here we can help by assuming that either space or time = 0. If I assume space to be infinitely small, all distances between the atoms become infinitely small, i.e., all punctual atoms compenetrate at one point. But as time is infinitely divisible, the whole world is possible as purely a temporal phenomenon, because I can occupy every time-point with the one space-point, thus being able to place it an infinite number of times.16

Just as quantum mechanics indicates the unreality of the Newtonian representation of space via the phenomenon of non-local or superluminal causality (action at a distance), Nietzsche responds to the contradictory status of movement by supposing physical space to be illusory and collapsing all cosmological distance into a single space-point—'the whole world at a stroke. But then there is no movement.’17 As much as this negation of distance and hence movement may look like Nietzsche taking what, for him, would be a very Parmenidean position, these arguments may be read as a piece of performance art whereby Nietzsche is showing how we project our own selves and feelings onto the world: ‘the sense in which all reality consists in a single spacepoint, then, is that we human beings create all of the concepts that we understand as reality.’18 The space-point is really the projection onto the cosmos of the same feeling of subjective unity that Nietzsche saw as the source for the empty fiction of being upon which all representational or logical thought is founded, and the inevitability of our projecting our sense of independent selfhood onto the world is indicated by how the space-point also functions as a condition for the possibility of subjective experience: it is the vanishing point one sees clearly on display in single point perspective paintings and which organizes our outer experience of the world.19 However, as much as this emphasizes the speculative and self-reflexive nature of this fragment, the productive nature of the  TAT, 2.  Rayman 2018, 170. TAT, 1. 18  Rayman 2018, 188. 19  Ibid., 186. 16 17

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perspectival space-point—‘it is from the single unextended spacepoint of our perspective that the infinite reality, as we call it, is generated’—reflects the cosmogenic productivity of the space-point in Nietzsche’s text.20 Universal oneness was also the metaphysical content of Thales’ mystical intuition, and Crawford’s view that Anaximander’s apeiron ‘is the coexistence of the multiplicity of all the atomistic points that constitutes true being, or “primal substance” for Nietzsche’ further indicates how we can interpret the space-point simultaneously as both an ironic caricature of the psychology and phenomenology of theory construction and as a version of the presocratic arche ̄ (being).21 It was to account for, not just the appearance of movement, but also the source of movement that Nietzsche continued to reduce space to time, and it is this reduction that enables us to interpret the space-point, not just as the static fictitious being that we project onto our perceptions and conceptions of the world, but simultaneously as the inexhaustible lifeforce that Nietzsche personified as the will to power and Thales and Anaximander symbolized as water and the apeiron respectively. 5. Like the space-point, the time-point, as the shortest possible discrete conscious experience of the world, is also a condition for the possibility of subjectivity, but cosmologically speaking, time-points also serve an important function as actualizations of the one space-point: ‘Nietzsche posits the totality as a series of infinitely divisible temporal moments of the spacepoint. Movement is constituted between timepoints, not spacepoints …. Each moment in time is created and destroyed ex nihilo, and thus, is numerically distinct from the previous one, even if it is spatially and qualitatively identical.’22 Nietzsche’s reasoning for reducing space to time is as follows: if time is infinitely divisible, then we can account for the whole world as a temporal phenomenon because the infinite divisibility of any time-point would enable the one space-point to appear an infinite number of times and in an infinite amount of ways thereby accounting for multiplicity. Although both the fundamental ontological status of becoming and Nietzsche’s descriptive approach to science reflect the influence of Heraclitus, we can get a better sense of both the space-point and time-­ points by identifying the former with Anaximander’s apeiron and the latter with the multiple worlds that arise from and return to the apeiron. Each  Ibid., 189.  Crawford 2005, 22. 22  Rayman 2018, 188, 179. 20 21

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world or time-point is a finite manifestation of the indefinite space-point, and it is within these worlds that all force-points are intrinsically yet a-causally interconnected; Crawford conveys how key time-points are to the eternal return as follows: ‘what we have is the eternal recurrence of the one same spacepoint (the whole world and all of its possibilities of position) in each infinitely small timepoint: the eternal recurrence of the same (whole).’23 ‘This whole world, and all its possible worlds, dies in each moment and returns,’ and the way in which the one space-point is continually reborn as individual time-points is indicated by how ‘Nietzsche’s time points are not mathematical, spatial points. They are centers of force and exist only insofar as they exert force.’24 Nietzsche draws the idea that a thing only exists through its effects from Heraclitus, and he combines this idea with the observation that, if two time-points were to make contact, then they would merge together thereby preventing time from flowing. These two arguments, in turn, result in his theory of temporal action at a distance: ‘we would then have a punctual force which would have a relation to every later temporal moment of its existence.’25 That is, if a time/force-point only exists through its effects, and it effects later time/ force-points, then it exists (is reborn) in those later time/force-points. And Nietzsche’s statement that a time-point effects every later moment of its existence conveys how, although the one space-point eternally returns in all time-points, a particular time-point also returns in succeeding time-­ points thereby creating a punctuated timeline, but again, this is as much an account of experience as it is a cosmology: ‘every successive phenomenon in consciousness is completely atomistic.’26 Nietzsche uses this intimate connection between inner experience and external description to argue that his time-atoms, like the atoms of several of the presocratics, are ensouled—‘there is nothing internal to which something external would not correspond. Thus every atom has its corresponding soul’—and that his atoms are not in time but of time coincides with his view of the experience of rebirth as being instantaneous: ‘you think you have a long rest until rebirth – but do not fool yourselves! Between the last moment of consciousness and the first appearance of new life lies “no time” – it passes

 Crawford 2005, 29, 28.  Ibid., 27. Whitlock 1997, 356. 25  TAT, 3. 26  KSA 13, 14[152]. Babich 2013, 127. 23 24

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by like a stroke of lightning.’27 It is in this way that, just as many presocratics both maintained an ensouled form of atomism and saw rebirth as an intrinsic part of cosmogenesis, it seems as though Nietzsche did as well. And we can get a better sense of how timelines develop by identifying the space-point or will to power with the ideal limit of absolute force: Fast, slow, etc. in the whole type of this effect [of temporal action at a distance]. I.e., the forces, as functions of time, express themselves in the relations of near or distant time-points, namely, fast or slow. The force lies in the degree of acceleration The highest acceleration would lie in the effect of one time moment on the next, i.e., it would then be =infinitely great.28

When an infinitesimal time-point first emerges from the infinite energy of the lifeforce (being), its cycles of death and rebirth are indefinitely fast, but the more it distances itself from such absolute force by effecting its own later incarnations, the longer both these cycles and its own duration become. This temporal dilation, in turn, progressive enables it to function as a world in which other force-points can create their own timelines. 6. Although all time-points are also force-points (and vice versa), Nietzsche’s use of a sketch of overlapping semi-circles so as to illustrate the relations between difference time/force-points enables use create a perspectival distinction between these two terms: a point may be considered a time-point insofar as it encompasses smaller points, and a point may be considered a force-point insofar as it occurs within an environment composed of more encompassing points. (To the extent that broader time-points can function as cosmoi for smaller force-points, we may conceive of the former as world-souls and the latter as individual soul-atoms.) It may help to visualize a single all-encompassing time-point arising as a world within which individual force points interact like Newtonian atoms, but the identity between time-points and force-points means that we are really talking about hierarchical series of worlds within worlds. We may further attempt to elucidate Nietzsche’s sketch by substituting for his overlapping semi-circles a series of concentric circles where the more rapid pulsations of inner circles are encompassed within the more extensive durations of outer circles, but for Nietzsche, timelines are not generated by the repetition of points but rather by a continuous progression of  EN §7[175]. KSA 9, 11[318].  TAT, 3.

27 28

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intervals overlapping one another.29 That is, time moves forward, not through the bare repetition of a time-point, but through the increasing complexification and coordination of forces that attend a time-point’s durational expansion, and we may visualize these centers of will/force/ time spatially as ‘constantly experiencing all other points as the world, sending out waves of force and interpreting the world according to the information captured in their reverberating waves.’30 Just as the current physics of loop quantum gravity suggests that the time and space that we perceive to be continuous actually comes in discrete pieces, force-points create both time and space, and that space in particular is constituted, not by extension, but by the lines of force that each point exerts on all others reminds us that space and time emerge via a holomovement instead of via the individual actions of independently existing beings.31 7. Nietzsche bridges the gap between this subrepresentational flux of forces and the apparent world of independently existing beings by translating all laws of motion into time proportions; both stating that ‘the order of the world would consist in the regularity of the time figures,’ and indicating how the becoming of each force contains an implicate order: ‘in every smallest moment the force would have to be different: but the sequence would be in any proportions, and the existing world would consist of the coming into visibility of these force proportions, i.e., translation into the spatial.’32 Time-points encompass force-points, but ‘it is in the distances between timepoints that forcepoints, and thus motion, have their effect,’ and forces become visible as they move through a succession of time-points; as they begin to shape their environments.33 We can adumbrate the Pythagorean/musical nature of this process by keeping in mind that, since Nietzsche’s interest in Democritean atomism was closely linked to his interest in Greek rhythm, the ‘time-atom theory’ is also concerned with rhythmic theory.34 If forces have their effects (and hence existence) in the temporal distances between time-points, then ‘force is a function of tempo, if not tempo itself,’ and this is why ‘force can be understood as the relative difference in the proportions between temporal durations, as it were, the rhythmical (and mathematical) movement between one ­duration  Whitlock 1997, 357–58.  Whitlock 2000, 44. 31  Crawford 2005, 32. Whitlock 2000, 46. 32  TAT, 2–3. 33  Crawford 2005, 33. Whitlock 1997, 355. 34  Porter 2000a, 61, 63. 29 30

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and another and between groups of durations.’35 The character or quality of forces is inseparable from their rhythmic quantity, and just as the Pythagoreans saw the different harmonies or ratios that constitute the world soul as manifesting in nature as well as in themselves, Nietzsche’s cosmos is an intrinsically musical one in which the visible appearance of the world is a spatial transition of the rhythm of time/force proportions: this view is supported by Hans Kayer who—following Johannes Kepler’s Harmonice Mundi—projected and sketched all the tones within an octave, and observed that ‘the interval of the octave, the basis for music making and indeed all sensation, thus contains within itself the form of the leaf.’36 Another way to visualize how subrepresentational force-rhythms construct the appearance of the everyday world is to think of subatomic rhythms as manifesting through atomic structures, atomic rhythms manifesting through molecular structures, and molecular rhythms manifesting through organic structures—the visible world, again, being the spatialization of forms of time. But Whitlock’s statement that ‘each center of force is itself a monadic time piece measuring the cosmos by its own rhythms’ further conveys how each force-point is also a center of perception and interpretation; how the world’s coming into visibility and conceivability is also its becoming capable of higher kinds of vision and conceptualization.37 8. After the space, time, and force-points, we have the perception-­ points or subjects that representationally construct the apparent world of space-time-causality-matter.38 Whereas the identity of time/force-points is disrupted by their continual becoming, and that of Democritean bodies is disrupted by the spatial discontinuity of material atoms, that of macroscopic objects and subjects in Nietzsche’s time-atom theory is also disrupted by the discontinuity of time.39 Objects or bodies are dissolved into distinct time-points and interrupted timelines, and subjects are sums of innumerable small atoms of will: we are representations that are ‘born at every moment,’ but perception-points hide this inner discontinuity by constructing representations of objective and subjective unity and/or continuous duration.40 They do this through an imaginative synthesis of time: ‘a reproducing being is necessary, which holds earlier moments of time  Ibid., 68–69.  Tompkins and Bird 1989, 161–62. 37  Whitlock 1997, 51–52. 38  Crawford 2005, 27. 39  Porter 2000a, 70. 40  EN §§7 [201], 7[175]. 35 36

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beside the present. In this our bodies are imagined. Then there is not coexistence except in representation.’41 Duration, identity, or being are really complexes of ever-changing events that, from the lower perspective of more rapid rhythms, appear static, but more encompassing rhythms can also create the appearance of stability by holding a series of atomistic perceptions together thereby constructing the everyday world of multiplicity, and this takes place via a phenomenological manifestation of the eternal recurrence of the one space-point: ‘the number and type of the succession of that one repeatedly placed point would then constitute the body.’42 Perception of or ‘belief in a continuum requires imagining the same point of space “in the smallest moment of time”’ and ‘plurality or multiplicity is generated through a fractal structure in which the representing being repeats or multiplies a single point throughout each moment in time. In this way, the experiential totality is built up by stringing together experiential quanta through sensation and memory.’43 That is, whereas the space-point creates an interconnected multiplicity of continually changing worlds by eternally recurring in an indefinite variety of ways, perception-­ points create a representation of a single world of static objects and subjects by projecting a fictional identity—the same one that manifests as the conception of the space-point itself—onto separate moments of sensation: this is how Nietzsche reduces linear time to representation much like how he reduced space to cyclical time. But, instead of dismissing the representational world as a total fiction, Nietzsche’s statement that this construction of Newtonian space simply ‘would not guarantee the existence of space’ reflects how we cannot dismiss the metaphysical status of his time-­ atom theory: ‘we remain, therefore, on the representational level without the ability to resolve one way or other the question of the reality of our representations or the role of our representational organization.’44 Instead of negating the validity of all scientific or metaphysical theorization, Nietzsche was concerned to show how ‘dogmatic notions of a non-­ representational reality lead to contradictions with our relativistic reflections’; how un(self)-reflective theories that ignore either the limitations of logical-representational thought or the existential-societal necessity of

 TAT, 2.  KSA 12, 9[91]. WP §298. TAT, 2. 43  Whitlock 1997, 354. Rayman 2018, 190. 44  TAT, 2. Rayman 2018, 192. 41 42

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representing the world in some way are untenable either rationally or culturally.45 9. While imagination constructs coexisting representations by translating discrete sensation-events into the language of continuous becoming, the essence of sensation itself consists in gradually ‘measuring such time figures [i.e. laws of movement, time proportions] ever more finely.’46 That is, Nietzsche’s atomic wills are inherently intelligent or calculating wills insofar as their very act of sensing other forces consists of determining the quantitative proportions that correspond to the quality of each force, and Nietzsche concludes this fragment by suggesting that this sensuous intelligence is itself the processual substance of his onto-cosmology: ‘time atomism ultimately coincides with a theory of sensation. The dynamic time-point is identical with the sensation-point. For there is no simultaneity of sensation.’47 (Recall how the will to power and eternal return are both ontological and phenomenological concepts.) As a discontinuous event, sensation indicates that time itself is essentially discontinuous because, for Nietzsche, time and sensation are not only coterminous but also equivalent, but his discussion of sensation here has also been interpreted as further indicating that his time-atom theory must be understood as being phenomenalist not ontological.48 The speculative or experimental tone of the fragment applies to Nietzsche’s view of sensation itself insofar as, although he conceives of the space-point and time-points a conditions for the possibility of outer and inner experience, his reduction of both space and linear time to representation reflects how he does not posit an a priori universal form of experience.49 Throughout his career, Nietzsche continued to illustrate how, to various degrees, we invent our own experience and this is why, instead of confining experience within any single universal form, Nietzsche restricted his ontological claims to experiential descriptions so as to open the possibility for alternative forms of subjective experience.50 But the distinction between descriptive and ontological aspects of Nietzsche’s cosmos begins to dissolve when we keep in mind that, since there is no reality-appearance dichotomy, it is precisely through cultivating one’s experiential capacities that one can, like Archilochus or Thales, attain  Ibid., 193.  TAT, 2. 47  TAT, 3. 48  Porter 2000a, 69. Rayman 2018, 171. 49  Ibid., 185. 50  Ibid., 189–90. 45 46

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an intuitive and experiential knowledge of being qua sensation: ‘being is sensation and representation’; ‘we are pure perception (i.e. projected images of a purely ecstatic being that is most at peace in this perception), and on the other hand the one being itself.’51 In other words, the space-­ point is the inexhaustibly ecstatic lifeforce (being) that both—as time/force/sensation-points—produces worlds by projecting its interpretations onto all other points (becoming) and—as perception-points—stabilizes it’s experiences of said worlds by constructing static representations such as the objects, subjects, or universal spatial/temporal frameworks (being as empty fiction). 10. Tragic-philosophical intuitions that a deeper hidden unity subtends yet speaks though representational individuation arise when representational consciousness reconnects with the Dionysian flow of sensation, and just as Nietzsche’s description of artists and philosophers as placing breaks on the wheel of time conveys how this can occur when one is allowed to escape the rapid pace of the marketplace and find moments of meditative quiescence, the following statement speculates about the ontological source of such phenomenological stillness: ‘the greater the slowness, the greater the intervals of time, the greater the distans.’52 That is, the same durational expansion that enables broader time-atoms to encompass narrower force-atoms is also experienced as the cultivation of the meditative slowness that Nietzsche associates with philosophy the femininity of which resides, not just in the femininity of the spirit of music from which it is born, but also in its slowness insofar as, for Nietzsche, slowness is also feminine: ‘woman reacts more slowly than man.’53 We see a similar coincidence between femininity and philosophical slowness in Parmenides’ use of incubation to cultivate the feminine inner light, but as a meditation inspired by both the presocratics and modern science, the vision of cosmological rebirth in Nietzsche’s Zeitatomenlehre fragment indicates the viability of reincarnation in a way that presocratic thought perhaps could not. And Crawford indicates the desirability of believing in reincarnation can provide: ‘like the child, who lives the moment, the overman is a new beginning and a downgoing in each discontinuous moment … the overman, by assuming this stance and accepting the idea that all life is an 51  KSA 7, 26[11]. Rayman 2018, 191. EN §7[201] translation modified. Cf. Porter 2000b, 204 note 13. 52  TAT, 3. 53  KSA 13. 14[67].

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eternal overcoming, downgoing, and rebirth in each moment, wills his own down-going, onward-going in each moment and in the repeating cycles of life.’54 By enabling one to not merely accept the finitude of one’s present incarnation but also to will one’s own down-going as a necessary means for one’s onward-going, understanding that life itself is a process of reincarnation can be a powerful catalyst for the kinds of personal and cultural transformations the need for which is being increasingly felt in contemporary society. And that is why, in my next book, I will explore a Nietzschean theory of rebirth which not only makes the case for reincarnation but also explains how it works; how we experience it within our present lifetimes; why our knowledge of all this has been and continues to be suppressed by religious, academic, and political institutions; and finally, how using psychedelics to facilitate past-life recollection will help us address the global crises of the twenty-first century.

References Babich, Babette. 2013. Nietzsche’s Performative Phenomenology: Philology and Music. In Nietzsche and Phenomenology: Power, Life, Subjectivity, ed. Élodie Boubill and Christine Daigle, 117–140. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2014. Schrödinger and Nietzsche and Life: Eternal Recurrence and the Conscious Now. https://research.library.fordham.edu/phil_babich/59/ Crawford, Claudia. 2005. Nietzsche’s Overhuman: Creating on the Crest of the Timepoint. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 30: 22–48. Lipka, Michael. 2015. Millennials Increasingly Are Driving Growth of “Nones.” Pew Research Center, May 12. Muraresku, Brian C. 2020. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. ———. 1988. Kritische Studienausgabe: Sämtliche Werke. 15 vols. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 2000. Time-Atom Theory. Journal of Nietzsche Studies., Trans. Carol Diethe and Keith Ansell Pearson 20: 1–4. ———. 2005. Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are. In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, 69–151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Crawford 2005, 42.

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———. 2009. Writings from the Early Notebooks. Eds. Raymond Guess and Alexander Nehamas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pintchman, Tracy. 2000. Is the Hindu Goddess Tradition a Good Resource for Western Feminism? In Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen M.  Erndl, 187–202. New  York: New York University Press. Porter, James I. 2000a. Untimely Meditations: Nietzsche’s Zeitatomistik in Context. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 20: 58–81. ———. 2000b. The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on the Birth of Tragedy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rayman, Joshua. 2018. Representationalism in Nietzsche’s Early Physics: Cosmology and Sensation in the Zeitatomlehre. Nietzsche-Studien 47: 167–194. Shweder, Richard A. 1991. Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tompkins, Peter, and Christopher Bird. 1989. The Secret Life of Plants: A Fascinating Account of the Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Relations Between Plants and Man. New York: Harper. Whitlock, Greg. 1997. Examining Nietzsche’s ‘Time Atom Theory’ Fragment from 1873. Nietzsche-Studien 26 (1): 350–360. ———. 2000. Investigations in Time Atomism and Eternal Recurrence. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 20: 34–57.

Index

A Adversarial method, 32 Affect, 9, 20, 22, 84, 218 Alco, 146 Aletheia, ̄ 3, 13, 27, 74, 113, 202, 203, 209, 212, 260 Amazons, 169 Ameinias, 193, 194, 202 Anagkē, 212 Analytic philosophy, 32–34 Anaxagoras, 70, 194, 220–223, 255–301 Anaximander, 23, 103–136, 142–144, 146, 153, 157–160, 162–166, 171, 180, 191–195, 207, 213, 214, 222, 225, 232, 290–292, 296, 312 Anaximenes, 23, 193, 260 Anti-materialism, 94, 112, 114, 135, 151–153, 169, 170, 192, 224

Apeiron, 124, 126, 129–135, 143, 157, 158, 162, 171, 191, 207, 292, 296, 312 Aphrodite, 193, 209, 214, 217, 218, 226–228, 232, 233, 241 Apollo, 65, 80, 112, 149, 150, 154, 167, 177, 202, 240 Aresa, 150 Arete of Cyrene, 26 Ariadne, 57–60, 170 Arignote, 150 Aristotle, 24, 27, 64, 90, 104, 105, 129, 134, 156, 164, 199, 234, 237, 258, 263, 268–270, 275, 290, 294 Artemis, 56, 167–171, 192, 209 Aspasia, 79, 80, 113, 258, 264 Athena, 80, 119, 120 Atoms, 144, 165, 179, 180, 277, 278, 280–283, 290–296, 298–301, 310, 311, 313, 314, 316

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Breidenstein Jr., Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44780-8

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INDEX

B Baubo, 56, 57, 65, 117, 178, 226 Becoming, xvi, 21, 32, 35, 36, 60, 82, 85–87, 105, 119, 129, 144, 155, 159, 164–166, 169, 170, 173, 174, 182, 184, 193–195, 197, 212, 213, 217, 223, 248, 284, 290, 307, 310–312, 315, 316, 318, 319 Being, x, 5, 55, 103, 143, 191, 258, 310 C Calliope, 226 Çatalhöyük, 55, 56, 58 Chance (Tuche ̄), 293–295 Children, xvi, 3, 5, 20, 22, 26, 50, 54, 61, 70, 73, 76, 79, 96, 114, 125, 128, 148, 151, 161, 168, 170, 183, 192, 213, 218, 237, 257, 258, 275, 319 Chthonie, 110, 111, 191 Circe, 209 Cleobuline, 113, 116, 147 D Damo, 150 Demeter, 56, 62, 63, 65, 80, 117, 147–150, 153–155, 161, 162, 169, 191, 209, 258, 264, 284 Democracy, vii, viii, xiv, xv, xvii, 21, 23, 36, 37, 82, 93, 152, 220, 296–301, 308 Democritus, 27, 70, 180, 220, 223, 255–301, 308 Destiny, 69, 212, 287 Dikē, 202, 212 Dionysus, 29, 60, 63–65, 69, 71, 80, 88–92, 95, 113, 117, 119, 134, 145, 150, 161, 170, 178, 240

Diotima, 113 Domination, 18, 19, 29, 31, 51, 53–55, 57, 60, 67, 74, 79, 93, 216, 287 E Eisler, Riane, xiv–xvi, 18–23, 25, 26, 28, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 115, 117, 127, 152, 156, 239, 297 Eleusis, 58, 62, 63, 65, 77, 80, 96, 171, 174 Elitism, 114, 152, 166, 167, 170, 192, 200, 224, 258 Embodiment, 13, 14, 23, 64, 110, 119, 156, 194, 212, 215, 216, 220, 231, 255, 275, 282, 300 Emotion, 18, 22, 54, 81, 85, 93, 167, 173, 174, 191, 247 Empedocles, xv, 150, 152, 168, 191–248, 255, 256, 258, 264, 272–275, 279, 281, 282, 285, 292, 293, 296, 298, 300 Erinys, 171, 192, 214 Eternal return, xi, 7, 27, 28, 61, 62, 64, 66, 103, 123, 125–127, 133, 144, 145, 153, 178, 179, 183, 192, 198, 202, 204, 207, 208, 218, 220, 221, 232, 273, 308, 313, 318 Ether, 162, 206, 207, 229, 231, 233, 235, 236 Ethics, 8, 35, 50, 125, 166, 222, 280, 282, 298, 299 Eurynome, 24 F Fascism, xiv, 20, 38 Femininity, xiii, xiv, 16–19, 27, 36, 67, 70, 80, 86, 95, 97, 104, 116, 117,

 INDEX 

325

130, 136, 141, 158–161, 195, 208–212, 214–216, 218, 223, 263, 272, 273, 294, 296, 319 Feminism, viii, xii, 14, 15, 34, 95 Force, viii, 9, 18, 35, 49, 55, 60, 66, 78, 82–84, 108, 115, 121–123, 127, 134, 143–145, 155, 165, 166, 175, 176, 200, 210, 212, 217, 221, 228, 231, 232, 236, 243–245, 277, 278, 283, 290, 292, 293, 296, 310, 313–316, 318, 319 Furies, 229

Heraclitus, xv, 136, 141–184, 192, 193, 195, 196, 198, 200, 202, 204–206, 211, 213–215, 222, 223, 228, 229, 233, 234, 240, 257, 258, 260, 263, 280, 296, 300, 312, 313 Hesiod, 23, 24, 27, 70, 107, 110, 111, 120, 127, 128, 131, 133, 155, 191, 207, 213, 225, 227, 233, 238, 239, 244, 245 Hestia, 161, 162, 192, 214 Homer, 70, 107, 131, 199, 203, 211, 229, 237, 241, 276

G Goddess(es), xvi, 24–26, 29, 35, 50–53, 55–60, 62–65, 70, 75, 80, 88, 97, 108, 118–121, 130, 146–149, 160, 169–171, 191–193, 199, 202, 206, 208–211, 214, 216, 223, 225–228, 232, 233, 235, 241, 242, 255, 258, 261, 264, 271, 272, 275, 284, 288, 291, 293, 294, 296, 307 Greece, x, xv, xvi, 2, 11, 13, 18, 19, 24, 25, 28, 30, 35–37, 47–97, 103, 104, 107–110, 112, 115, 118, 128, 130, 142, 146, 150, 153, 165, 175, 196, 202, 216, 239, 245, 247, 255, 276, 279, 281

I Inanna, 56, 57 Incubation, 149, 191, 192, 200–204, 208, 214, 230, 319 India, 28, 37, 108, 109, 118, 168, 199, 207, 287, 307 Indo-Europeans, 19, 52, 54–56, 70, 108, 242

H Harmony, 7, 87, 134, 136, 141, 143, 150, 154, 156, 159–163, 166, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175, 181, 226, 231–233, 235, 236, 238, 240–243, 263, 269, 278, 291, 298, 316 Hecate, 226, 229 Hera, 148, 161, 226

K Kouros, 205, 208 Kukeon, 62, 63, 171 Kundalini, 207, 208 L Language, 31, 50, 55, 61, 73, 74, 76, 83, 86–88, 105, 120, 122, 167, 177, 183, 196, 197, 205, 233, 237, 240, 260, 301, 318 Logos, 73, 164–166, 172–174, 180, 182, 183, 210, 296 Love, ix, 4–6, 14, 22, 47, 53, 56, 73, 86, 109–112, 114, 121, 162, 174, 199, 212, 218, 220, 221, 223–228, 230–247, 259, 262, 281, 285, 299

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INDEX

M Masculinity, xii, xiii, 18, 19, 36, 52, 54, 115, 210, 214, 263 Materialism, 24, 29–31, 38, 74, 94, 114, 135, 142, 224, 255, 264, 276, 279, 282, 286, 291, 301 Mathematics, 115, 136, 151, 153, 181, 280 Matter, vii–xi, xiv, 20, 22, 34, 68, 90, 103, 107, 131, 132, 144, 158, 162, 164, 168, 174, 183, 194, 205–207, 214, 215, 219, 235, 236, 242, 248, 255, 257, 258, 262, 263, 265–268, 282, 293 Meditation, 50, 66, 67, 85, 91, 124, 125, 168, 172, 182, 184, 205, 217, 284, 319 Metis, 119–121, 131, 132, 134, 147, 191, 209, 227, 228, 263, 294 Miletus, 23, 79, 112, 113, 117, 127, 128, 148, 153, 168, 201, 260 Moira, 69, 131, 295 Money, 74–76, 94, 114, 130, 152, 169, 170, 217, 286 Morality, 8, 22, 131, 150, 277, 281, 298 Muses, 27, 74, 89, 110, 205, 209, 210, 226, 239 N Nestis, 226 Nietzsche, Friedrich, vii, 1, 47, 103–107, 123–126, 141, 163–167, 192–198, 217–222, 255, 276–284, 307 Nihilism, xiii, xiv, 33, 124, 127, 142, 145 Noein, 211, 227 Nous, 232, 256, 257, 260, 262, 263, 271–275, 280, 281, 295, 296

O Old Europe, xv, xvi, 19, 48, 51, 52, 61, 65, 103, 191, 192, 227, 242 Olympia, 82, 148 Ontology, xii, 29–36, 63, 103, 118, 121, 153, 158–160, 212, 220, 245, 267–269 Orphism, 107, 118–120, 142, 153, 191 P Pantheia, 225, 226 Parmenides, xiii, xv, 64, 90, 92, 133, 157, 191–248, 257, 259, 261, 262, 264, 268, 272, 283, 284, 288, 291, 296, 300, 319 Partnership, xv, xvi, 18–21, 25, 28, 29, 35, 48–50, 52, 55–57, 59, 60, 63, 65, 67, 74, 76, 78–81, 89, 95–97, 103, 109–113, 115, 119, 123, 126–129, 134, 135, 147, 151, 153, 157, 171, 174, 191, 192, 201, 216, 224, 226, 227, 229, 233, 238, 239, 241, 242, 244, 245, 255, 257, 261, 262, 264, 271, 284, 287, 296, 301, 308 Pasiphae, 59 Patriarchy, vii, xiii, xiv, 15, 20, 23–25, 29, 34, 239 Peithō, 212 Pelasgians, 24, 57 Penelope, xii Perception, 13, 20, 21, 64, 76, 77, 84, 85, 116, 132, 144, 159, 167, 172–176, 183, 196, 203, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 215, 219, 227, 256, 282, 299, 300, 312, 316, 317, 319 Pericles, 78, 79, 261

 INDEX 

Persephone, 58, 60, 64, 80, 117, 120, 130, 209, 226, 229, 233 Pherecydes, 104, 109–114, 126, 128–130, 133, 135, 146, 148, 150, 153, 191, 196, 226 Philolaus, 153, 157–160, 181, 192, 214, 265, 269, 287, 290, 292 Philology, 2–6, 12, 93, 277, 278 Philosophy, vii, 1, 48, 103, 107–109, 141, 191, 255, 307 Phocaea, 201 Phoenicians, 72 Phren, ̄ 229, 231, 233, 235–237, 240, 242, 296 Phronein, 173 Plato, 77, 113, 117, 160, 172, 176, 204, 212, 222, 244, 269, 286, 287, 290, 291, 293, 297, 298, 300 Presocratics, vii–xi, xiv, xvi, xxi, 1–3, 9, 11–15, 18, 19, 23, 24, 26–29, 35–37, 39, 48, 51, 62, 63, 67, 68, 70, 75, 77, 82, 94, 95, 97, 103–105, 107–110, 112, 114, 117–119, 125, 133, 142, 143, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 170, 179, 180, 191–194, 197–199, 212, 216, 223, 226, 228–230, 237, 239, 240, 245, 247, 248, 255, 256, 259–262, 264, 268, 275, 276, 280, 286, 292, 296, 301, 308–310, 312–314, 319 Psyche ̄, 172, 176, 180, 181, 203 Pythagoras, 23, 136, 141–184, 191–196, 201, 206, 208, 213, 216, 220, 222, 224, 229, 263, 287 Pythaïs, 149 Q Queen Cypris, 241, 245

327

R Rebirth, x, 27–29, 35, 38, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 70, 71, 80, 87–90, 93, 94, 97, 104, 108–110, 113, 116–119, 123, 130, 136, 141, 142, 145–148, 151, 153, 154, 156, 157, 161–163, 165, 178, 179, 181, 182, 192, 194, 202, 206, 212, 214, 216, 233, 234, 255, 258, 261, 264, 273–275, 279, 287, 289, 295, 296, 301, 313, 314, 319, 320 Reincarnation, 29, 70, 109, 168, 182, 237, 308, 319, 320 Religion, ix, xii–xvi, 1, 5, 12, 14, 20, 25, 27–31, 33–36, 50, 53, 58, 60, 66, 68–70, 72, 75, 79–81, 89, 97, 105, 108, 111, 119, 120, 122, 123, 155, 157, 164, 191, 195, 199, 212, 216, 220, 224, 230, 245, 246, 255, 258, 261–263, 286, 307, 308 Representation, xiii, xvi, 11, 16–18, 24, 51, 58, 72, 79, 84, 85, 87, 111, 120, 130, 164, 191, 196, 197, 230, 257, 278, 292, 309, 311, 316–319 Rhea, 161 S Sappho, 19 Science, viii, ix, xii, 2, 3, 5, 9, 15, 18, 30–32, 35, 37, 38, 74, 83, 104–106, 115, 124, 143, 144, 164, 165, 199, 220, 226, 259–261, 277, 279–281, 283, 309, 310, 319 Second sight, 13, 61, 62, 64, 84, 91, 96, 121, 174, 203, 206, 208, 260 Semele, 60, 64

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INDEX

Sex, 24, 28, 35, 49, 50, 52, 53, 56, 79, 80, 92, 151, 225, 244 Sirens, 160 Socrates, 12, 67, 71, 94, 196, 197, 204, 256, 258, 271, 279–282, 286, 289, 297, 299, 309 Soul, 28, 60, 107, 112, 119, 121, 127, 133, 142, 146, 150, 153–156, 161, 162, 172, 179–183, 194, 195, 203, 204, 212–215, 223, 225, 226, 230, 233, 235–237, 240, 257, 263, 271, 273, 274, 287, 288, 290–293, 295, 296, 298, 300, 313, 316 Spirit of music, ix, xi, 84, 86, 87, 89, 95, 96, 103, 106, 113, 121, 128, 144, 151, 212, 224, 319 Subjectivity, xii, xiii, 15–18, 23, 26, 28, 34, 35, 37, 64, 69, 77, 89, 93, 96, 103, 106, 112, 115, 122, 132, 133, 136, 141, 145, 151, 161, 167, 170, 175, 178, 192, 204, 205, 208, 209, 216, 218, 227, 277, 278, 282, 285, 297, 299–301, 309, 312 T Thales, 7, 23, 103–136, 146, 147, 149, 153, 163, 169, 171, 178, 180, 191–194, 196, 222, 276, 277, 284, 285, 292, 294, 312, 318

Theano, 149, 150 Themis, 80 Themistoclea, 149 Time, vii, 2, 50, 106, 144, 201, 256, 307–320 Time-atoms, 91, 123, 126, 144, 283, 309, 313, 316–319 V Venus, 227 Void, 30, 160, 278, 288, 290–296, 298, 299, 301 W Will to power, 5, 103, 104, 108, 121–123, 126, 132, 133, 144, 192, 199, 218, 243, 308, 312, 314, 318 Women, vii, 1, 50, 113, 147, 191, 258, 307 Writing, xi, xvi, 1, 7, 8, 10–12, 24, 71, 76, 77, 83, 105, 110, 128, 129, 136, 141, 146, 163, 167, 168, 172, 175–179, 183, 192, 204, 247, 260, 276, 277, 280, 286, 289, 297, 298, 301, 310 Z Zarathustra, 10, 125, 203, 204, 208, 217