Facets of Modernity: Reflections on Fractured Subjectivity 9781786615053, 9781786615060, 1786615053

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Facets of Modernity

Facets of Modernity Reflections on Fractured Subjectivity

Dmitri Nikulin

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Selection and Editorial Matter Copyright © 2021 by Dmitri Nikulin This volume contains revised versions of material outlined in the ‘Permissions’ section, reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nikulin, D. V. (Dmitriĭ Vladimirovich), author. Title: Facets of modernity : reflections on fractured subjectivity / Dmitri Nikulin. Description: Lanham, Marylard : Rowman & Littlefield, [2021] | “This volume contains revised versions of material outlined in the “Permissions” section, reproduced with permission.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021003920 (print) | LCCN 2021003921 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786615053 (cloth) | ISBN 9781786615060 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: History—Philosophy. Classification: LCC D16.8 ,N478 2021 (print) | LCC D16.8 (ebook) | DDC 909—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2021003920 LC ebook record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2021003921 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Permissions vii Preface: Close-ups and Close-downs

ix

Acknowledgments xv 1 On Gods and Demons

1

2 The Other in the Mirror

31

3 Conversation and Critique

49

4 The Burdens and Blessings of Boredom

73

5 The Eternal Return of the Other

89

6 Establishing the Laws of History

113

7 Names and Voices in History

129

8 The Comedy of Philosophy

149

9 The Gifts and Dangers of Free Speech

177

10 The Promise of the Beautiful

197

11 Rethinking the Ontological and Scientific Revolutions

209

12 Productive Imagination

229

Bibliography 255 Index 271

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The individual chapters have been originally published as: 1. “The Gods and Demons of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche,” in: Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy. Ed. by Jeff Love and Jeffrey Metzger. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016, 173–200. 2. “The Man at the Mirror: Dialogue with Oneself,” Isis 5 (2011), 61–79. 3. “Richard Rorty, Cynic: Philosophy in the Conversation of Humankind,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 29, 2 (2008), 85–111. 4. “The Burdens and Blessings of Boredom: Heidegger and Kracauer,” Kronos 6 (2017), 120–132. 5. “The Eternal Return of the Other: Benjamin on the Social and Political Effects of Boredom in Modernity,” Social Imaginaries 4.2 (2018), 135–157. 6. “Establishing the Laws of History: Or, Why Tolstoy Is Not Homer,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 37, No. 2 (2016), 307–324. 7. “The Names in History: Rancière’s New Historical Poetics,” in: Jacque Rancière and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality. Ed. by Jean-Philippe Deranty and Alison Ross. London-New York: Continuum, 2012, 67–85, 224–228. 8. “The Comedy of Philosophy,” in: Engaging Agnes Heller. A Critical Companion, ed. by Katie Terezakis. Lanham: Lexington, 2009, 167–192. 9. “Diogenes the Comic, or How to Tell the Truth in the Face of a Tyrant,” in: Philosophy and Political Power in Antiquity, ed. by Cinzia Arruzza and Dmitri Nikulin. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2016, 114–133. 10. “The Promise of the Beautiful,” Revue internationale de philosophie, vol. 69 (3), no 273, 2015, 289–301.

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11. “Hans Jonas, the Thinker of Ontological and Scientific Revolutions,” in: Hans Jonas: The Thinker of Antiquity and Modernity. Giornale Critico di Storia delle Idee, 14 (2015), 83–99. 12. “Productive Imagination: What Is Productive Imagination?” in: Productive Imagination: Its History, Meaning and Significance, ed. by Saulius Geniusas and Dmitri Nikulin. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018, 1–28. I wish to thank the publishers of these chapters for granting permission to reproduce the texts in this book.

Preface: Close-ups and Close-downs

This book is a collection of tesserae from a complex mosaic that depicts modernity in its various aspects, the way it appears in history, philosophy, literature, social and political practices, and art. However, the entire multifaceted image remains forever unfinished—not only because we constantly keep changing it by our activity but also because our very reflection about modernity is its own product, which thus both transforms our thought about modernity and is in turn blurred by it. One might say that excessive reflexivity is also a sign of modernity: thinking about a thing can never be without thinking about our thought itself at or during its moment. Such thinking is expected to result in a transparent understanding both of the thing and of ourselves as thinkers. Yet, in order to be able to reflect on ourselves, we need to step back and move beyond ourselves, which is never entirely possible, because our thinking and our understanding of our thinking always mutually condition and affect each other. Hence, every piece of smalt we add to the (cobalt blue) mosaic of modernity both contributes to the overall picture and changes and complicates it. Because reflection is meant to establish a clear image of oneself in and against the counterpoised other, this other is taken as our unmediated opposite. Everything that stands between us and our reflection in the cultural, historical, and philosophical mirror of the other becomes an obstacle and thus has to be removed so that we can achieve clarity of vision and an understanding of ourselves as moderns, eventually negating even the other, which becomes obsolete after the reflection. This means that the logic of modernity is not that of the excluded third but rather that of the excluded second. The other of modernity is established through the querelle des anciens et des modernes, “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns,” in which “antiquity” is an artfully and artificially produced picture of the ancients. It ix

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is an antiquity seen through the lens of the Romantics, which amplifies and overemphasizes classical Greek philosophy, art, and drama, with a special accent on tragedy and “Pre-Socratic” thought. This constructed cultural and historical other of modernity is built at the expense of later Greek and Roman antiquity (seen as “decadent”), the medieval era (seen as “dark”), and other cultural traditions (seen as utterly foreign, and not yet colonized and enlightened by western thought in a progression through its historical embodiments). All of these other times and contexts, in their fascinating complexity and astonishing refinement, could well become the other or, better, an other of us moderns. In an attempt to rectify these omissions to some extent, it is not only the thinkers of the classical Greek age who appear in the book—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Diogenes—but also later writers—Menander, Plautus, and Terence—who have been artificially excluded from discussion by the “moderns,” and who nevertheless engage in a fruitful strophic and antistrophic conversation with each other and with ourselves. Modernity is a set of mutually entangled, interacting processes and phenomena that establish the theoretical cognition and practical action of the modern self-reliant and self-sufficient autonomous subject, which becomes the focal point of moral legislation and the theoretical assignment of meanings to the world. The modern subject is the only hero(ine), actor, playwright, director, and spectator of the drama of modernity, acting on the stage of a devastated and scorched landscape devoid of any living presence except for its own. The essays collected in this book are analyses and close readings of a number of texts across the philosophical tradition, and intend to demonstrate that the complexity and variety of our modern experience is grounded in the construction of the modern subject as universal, rational, autonomous, and necessary. From this perspective, the experience of being human in modernity is fascinatingly complicated, leading to unique gains (in the production and understanding of the world as scientifically cognizable) and losses (e.g. in our capacity for a commonly shared action and dialogical interaction with the other, who now becomes only a projection of a lonely subject). The modern subject asserts itself as universal in cognition and autonomous in action, that is, as self-legislating and establishing the universal moral law. Being universal and self-sufficient, the modern subject substitutes nature for a mathematically constructed world, which can be studied scientifically to the extent that its laws are prescribed by the very subject’s thought and perception. This radical rethinking of nature and of our cognitive attitude toward it results in the modern scientific revolution and is accompanied by a rethinking of being. This rethinking is epitomized by the Cartesian ontology of an unbridgeable gap between internalized thinking and externalized

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natural existence, which makes any mediation between the two impossible and obsolete. The protagonist in this book is thus the modern subject as it appears in its philosophical, literary, dramatic, political, and social guises, its accomplishments and transgressions, all of which are portrayed from various angles and with reference to different thinkers. In a sense, it is the modern subject that reluctantly casts an eye upon itself and quarrels with itself in this book, to the extent that each of us is its concrete embodiment and unwilling representation. Being lonely and alienated, the modern subject recognizes no other of another person, of the world, and even of itself. It is therefore monological, lonely and alone, and cannot escape its solitary existence. This self-imposed inability to get rid of itself is translated into finitude, historicity, and a striving toward death, which is tragic to the extent that tragedy portrays being toward death. No wonder that modernity loses the understanding and capacity for comedy, which, in contradistinction to tragedy, allows for resolving the current problem by the collaborative action of everyone involved in it. Contrary to tragedy, comedy requires a different kind of subject, one that is collectively distributed among all those involved in the action, in which the leading role is taken on by the comic thinker who represents the oppressed and the dispossessed. Unlike the carefully planned-out action of the solitary subject, the plot of the comic communal action on the public stage is played out with others and is corrigible and improvable at each step of the way. The comic thinker lacks a monolithic identity and often appears ambiguous, inconclusive, and disjointed in action. And yet, the free comic thinker is the one who is capable of promoting freedom in thought and speech on the public scene in a commonly shared dialogical interaction that undermines the oppressive monolithic unity and self-centered autonomy of the modern subject. The human experience, as inscribed into the possibilities of the modern subject, reflects on the past, lives in the present, and is directed into the future. Because it is not evident whether these possibilities can be ever fully thematized and extinguished, the discovery and exploration of the novel and the new becomes a salient feature of such an experience, which is never a given but is always a task to be accomplished through historical reflection and the introspection that might and should eventually lead to a full selftransparency and self-clarification. Lonely and alone, exclusive of the other and of the world, the modern subject always faces the repetition of the same from which it cannot break away. Thus, it is inevitably bored even in its search for novelty, which becomes entertainment. The cultural embodiment of the bored modern subject, then, is the flaneur, who observes the urban fabric without passion, consumes without enjoyment, and acquires without production.

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If self-cognition comes through the effort of a dialogic interaction with others and with oneself, then, in the absence of a real other, the monological modern subject is incapable of self-knowledge. Mirroring itself in its own artificial image, the modern subject misses itself: its own reflection becomes unavoidably alien and mendacious. There always remains something unfinalizable in being and something opaque in the thinking of the modern subject; so its desired rational autonomy of will and reason turns into the autonomy of desire, regulated by imagination. Rather than playing the role of a mediator between thinking and sensation, the productive imagination becomes autonomous, defining the modern subject as the one that imagines itself in its being and thinking. Because the thinkable and the sensible are not mediated anymore, instead of discovering the beauty in each of them, one is left with only a promise of the beautiful, which lurks in the always transforming imagination. Life, which in antiquity is considered beautiful in itself, becomes a desideratum, a not defined and not definable other of thought. In antiquity, one can speak about two approaches to art: one suggesting that art imitates nature, and the other taking art to be based on proportion and harmony, which are primarily expressed in and studied by mathematics. In modernity, however, nature becomes a lifeless, mathematical construction, so there is nothing left to imitate. So, if in antiquity, art is the imitation of nature, in modernity, art is an imitation of art—imaginative, unrestrained, and always seeking novelty. While nature in antiquity is the subject of history and has its own history, the modern subject considers itself as the sole subject of and for history, to which it submits itself to the extent that it constructs history. With Vico, history becomes our own construction and thus the voice of a singular subject that provides the laws to history, even if it is not always aware of them. The modern subject thus asserts itself as inescapably and intrinsically historical. The natural history and the multiple narrated and transmitted communal histories, then, give way to one universal, teleological history, which involves all peoples and cultures as actors on the grand stage of a single action moving toward the realization of one goal (e.g., that of freedom). And while ancient historians employ the narrative patterns of conquest and travel, the modern thinkers of history use narratives of liberation and discovery, both of which are the impositions of sovereign thought and free will onto the imagined course of historical events. As universal and autonomous, the modern subject strives to become fully rational and reflectively self-transparent. And yet, as a constant work (of self-clarification) in progress, it always remains fragmentary and fragmented, impervious and non-translucent to itself, each time seeing and being seen from a different perspective. The following chapters can thus be also read in any order, since the book does not attempt to give a comprehensive depiction

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of modernity but only a few cross-sections and episodes from the unraveling story of modern philosophy, commented on by a chorus of contemporary interpreters in their mutual (strophic and antistrophic) critical interventions. The resulting picture cannot be exhaustive: it presents only some facets of an implied whole that can hardly be fully grasped or finished. These short stories about modernity range over a panoply of themes: modern universal history that eventually turns against itself (in Tolstoy and Rancière); the coincidence and non-mediation of opposites as represented in new philosophical and literary mythology (in Nietzsche and Dostoevsky); the ways of political resistance to oppression through free speech in the practice of philosophical comedy (in Diogenes, Foucault, and Heller); the role of productive self-transformation and its limits (in Rorty); boredom as constituting the modern subject in its historical (in Heidegger), social (in Kracauer), and political being (in Benjamin); the ontological revolution as underlying the new vision of the world (in Hans Jonas); and the promise of the beautiful in aesthetics (in Heller). These thinkers are themselves in conversation with Descartes, Baumgarten, Kant, and Hegel, as well as with Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Terence, Plotinus, and Proclus. As with every genuine dialogue, this dialogue remains unfinalizable and can be carried on without repetition in an ongoing attempt to understand us—moderns.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Suzi Adams, Carol Bernstein, Richard Bernstein, Krishna Boddapati, Simon Critchley, William Desmond, Caryl Emerson, Alfredo Ferrarin, Rainer Forst, Nancy Fraser, Jeremy Gauger, Saulius Geniusas, Ágnes Heller, Christoph Horn, Erick Rafael Jimenez, Joseph Lemelin, Elena Nikulina, Lev Nikulin, Jón Olafsson, Alison Ross, Alejandro Vigo, and Samuel Yelton for most valuable remarks and comments on the text.

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Chapter 1

On Gods and Demons

It is the fall of the year 1869, and Dostoevsky and Nietzsche are thinking and writing about apparently very different things. They do not know of each other’s existence, but eighteen years later, Nietzsche will accidentally pick up a French translation of two of Dostoevsky’s novels and will immediately recognize a touch of the genius in their psychological depictions.1 Nietzsche is a brilliant classical philologist becoming increasingly disappointed with the petty precision of textual criticism. This year, he begins writing The Birth of Tragedy, a literary reflection on the role of ancient literature in the constitution of modernity. Nietzsche decides that tragedy comes out of communal, choral musical performance. But now, tragedy is dead, which seems to signify history as a bleak, rationally chartered implementation of thinking rather than a joyful and bawdy celebration of life. Dostoevsky is a military engineer trained in mathematics and finds its precision stifling; he keeps drawing Gothic windows in the margins of his manuscripts as a way of rendering the dry, mathematical beauty appealing to the senses. In his search for liberation from unbearable social and political conditions, he turns to the study of human desperation in the hope of its transformation and overcoming by the ahistorical and otherworldly. This year, Dostoevsky publishes The Idiot, which portrays a “positively morally beautiful person” who strangely enough turns out to be a complete stranger to the world. This foreigner to any

 “Dostoevsky, the only psychologist . . . from whom I had something to learn . . .” Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, in vol. 6 of Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988), 147. See also: Wolfgang Gesemann, “Nietzsches Verhältnis zu Dostoevskij auf dem europäischen Hintergrund der 80er Jahre,” Die Welt der Slaven 6, no. 2 (1961), 129–56; and C. A. Miller, “Nietzsche’s ‘Discovery’ of Dostoevsky,” Nietzsche-Studien 2, no. 1 (1973), 202–57. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.

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country, who is more of an ideal human type than a real person, will reappear in a dramatic collision with other characters in Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Yet, remarkably, although Dostoevsky and Nietzsche come out of very different contexts and sets of problems that define their thinking, their character types share many of the same features. NIETZSCHE’S GODS καί μ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἰάμβων οὔτε τερπολέων μέλει “and neither iambs nor amusements please me”2

German philosophy of the twentieth century, from Cassirer and Heidegger to Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Jonas, owes many of its achievements to the classical philology of the nineteenth, which combines the precision of textual readings with broader historical reconstructions and hermeneutic insights. Nietzsche is exemplary as a representative of this philologicophilosophical approach: in 1867, he published a substantive study of the Theognidean fragments;3 two years later, an essay that reconsidered Homer’s place in classical philology;4 and the same year he decided to rewrite the whole history of Greek literature in a way that would also vindicate German philosophy and even mythology, the spirit of which his friend and later fiend embodies in his innovative operas. However, the idea of understanding the moderns in an encounter with the ancients as allowing for an external, comprehensive look at oneself is not original but goes back at least to Charles Perrault’s querelle des anciens et des modernes and flourishes in the Romantics, who also meant to come to self-understanding as inscribed in the history of the movement of thought and writing, with all its continuity and ruptures, from antiquity onwards.5 Later, in 1886, in his self-critical and penitential palinodia, Nietzsche recognized the weakness and bias of his original reconstruction in The Birth of Tragedy, which he called a “weird and poorly accessible book.”6 In the original  Archilochus, frag. 215 West.  Friedrich Nietzsche, “Zur Geschichte der Theognideischen Spruchsammlung,” in Philologische Schriften (1867–1873), pt. 2, vol. 1 of Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Fritz Bornmann and Mario Carpitelli (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1982) 3–58. On the importance of philology for Nietzsche and his reinvention of antiquity, see James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 228–35 passim. 4  Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer und die klassische Philologie,” in Philologische Schriften, 247–69. 5  Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, 4 vols (Paris: Coignard, 1692–1697). 6  Friedrich Nietzsche, “Versuch einer Selbstkritik,” in Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, in Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden, vol. 1, ed. Giorgio Colli 2 3

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work, he famously attacks the image of antiquity as the monolithically beautiful “other” of modernity. Nietzsche’s complication of the view of antiquity, however, is itself rather simplistic: in his reconstruction, the essentially beautiful and serene obtains its double in the apparently ugly and unruly.

THE APOLLONIAN AND THE DIONYSIAN Nietzsche’s rethinking of the meaning of antiquity and the history of its literature is propelled by the play of opposites that appear unbridgeable, mutually exclusive and complementary, and thus contradictory. For Nietzsche, it is Apollo and Dionysus who become mythological personifications of the opposite principles of thought and life. In his interpretation, Apollo, the divinity of light, is the foreteller and nunciate of the future, seen as a beautiful illusion in dreams (GT §1, 26; §10, 72). As such, he is the embodiment of passivity, which is represented in and as the image and concept (das Bild und der Begriff) of what is, contemplated in and by reason (GT §9, 67; §6, 51). Apollo, therefore, stands for cognition and self-cognition based on moderation and measure (Maass, GT §4, 40; §9, 70), which is the principle of individuation (GT §1, 28; §16, 103). Indeed, everyone has to apply and interpret the prophesized in dreams to oneself, and thus turn into a unique recipient and guardian of such knowledge. The uniqueness and self-deification become, then, the source of satisfaction and “cheerfulness” (Heiterkeit; GT, Attempt at Self-Criticism §1, 11; GT §17, 115). Dionysus, on the contrary, is the best-kept secret of ancient Weltanschauung for Nietzsche. The “other god” is the principle of life, insuperably powerful and joyful, displaying himself in intoxication, ecstasy, and sexual licentiousness (GT §1, 28; §2, 30; §7, 56). As such, Dionysus is represented as sublime terror translated into the dissolute joy of the annihilation of the individual and the destruction of the principle of individuation (GT §2, 33; §16, 103). Instead of moderation and measure, exorbitance becomes the truth (GT §4, 41). Contrary to the Apollonian maxim, “nothing in excess,” the Dionysian precept is “everything in abundance.” Reason and nature, then, are considered as opposites without reconciliation: in modern understanding imposed onto antiquity, reason becomes disembodied in nature and nature and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988) §1, 11; henceforth referenced as GT, followed by section and page number. For the references to the English translation, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). See also Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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becomes irrational, and thus can be known only to the extent that it is considered devoid of any thought. For Nietzsche, reason is embodied in the Apollonian plastic arts and is opposite to Dionysian music; the seen is opposed to the heard. Apollonian theoretical optimism of the cognition of being is in stark contrast to the Dionysian practical pessimism of striving toward non-being. Rather than remaining an isolated individual who fasts eternally with water, one joyfully dissolves oneself into nothing in a violent, communal celebration with wine (GT §3, 35). For Kant, phenomena are knowable and things in themselves are accessible not to reason but only in practical action. Nietzsche interprets this distinction as the opposition between the knowability of the Apollonian appearances and the noncognizability of the Dionysian things in themselves. For Nietzsche, it is Kant who, without even having noticed it, thus restores, if not the balance, then at least the opposition of the two gods. Nietzsche makes a weak attempt to “deduce” the Dionysian rather than just recognize it as a “fact.” For if it is a “fact,” then it could be thought of either as historical or as normative, similar to the “state of nature,” which was considered the historical condition of humans in Hobbes but only a normative way of describing their current state in Rousseau. Nietzsche suggests that since the Apollonian is the principle of individuation, of producing an individual, it takes us out of Dionysian universality and makes us delight in an individual (GT §21, 137)—primarily, in oneself. The resulting Apollonian illusion liberates us from Dionysian excess. In a sense, Nietzsche himself wants to become the priest of Dionysus and, by trampling on the illusion of orderly thinking and rational argument, to bring us back to a life that suspends thought and apparently no longer needs reason. The Apollonian and the Dionysian thus mutually affect each other (GT §4, 41), insofar as the two are both complementary and mutually exclusive. The initial move beyond the primary, unified universality comes from the necessity to see the world, to perceive it in its distinct concreteness and deceptive beauty, as an infinite series of individualized phenomena, which all turn out to be an Apollonian illusion. Therefore, the Dionysian originally engenders the Apollonian. However, once one is no longer satisfied with the illusory, one needs to transcend both the world and oneself in the world, which means that the seen and the individual must be destroyed (GT §24, 150). The Apollonian, then, must also produce the Dionysian (which, apparently, is the task Nietzsche sets out for himself in his book). Therefore, the Dionysian is both the precondition and the aspired-to end result of the reconstructed historical development, primarily seen in art. But the Dionysian as the task to be achieved is not a Hegelian sublation of an original thesis in which, through a series of logical transformations, the thesis turns into the now enriched synthesis. Rather, the end is a complete oblivion of the existent

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in an ecstatic, dreamless inebriation of the unreflective reproduction of the same. Here, the picture of antiquity represented as the Apollonian “other” gets complicated by the original yet forgotten Dionysian, which appears as the unrecognized “same” of modernity. So, Nietzsche uses the dual force of the Apollonian and the Dionysian not for the sake of understanding or rethinking ancient literature and art but for the purpose of a reflective reconstruction and justification of modernity, the apex of which he finds in Wagner’s music. NIETZSCHE AND THE ROMANTICS Nietzsche’s reconstruction draws largely on the broad tradition of German Romanticism, which also finds its way into Hegel’s lectures on history and aesthetics. However, Nietzsche’s attitude toward the Romantics is ambiguous. On the one hand, he criticizes the Romantic straw man of antiquity as univocally beautiful and Apollonian. Yet, on the other hand, Nietzsche is incapable of an ἐποχή—a truly skeptical, aesthetic suspension of judgment in his own understanding of antiquity—and thus reads ancient literature through the modern Romantic prism. Thus, he interprets Goethe’s Faust as an ultimate development of the figure of the Apollonian optimistic theoretician (GT §18, 124). In his understanding of music, Nietzsche also remains very much under the spell of the Romantics, which is evident in his own early musical compositions of 1862 that show the strong influence of Schumann.7 Among the Romantics’ genuine insights into, and prejudices against, antiquity is the already mentioned attitude of taking it as the “other” of modernity, where antiquity appears in a reconstructed (either progressive or regressive) development toward modernity. In Hegel, antiquity, which itself goes from Greek to Roman, is predated by the broadly conceived “Oriental” stage in history and art (e.g., in sculpture and epic)8 that, for Nietzsche, appears only later in the figure of Zoroaster/ Zarathustra.9 In fact, Nietzsche’s preference for the Dionysian over the Apollonian is an intentional reversal of the “Oriental” Mazdaic opposition.

 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Aus der Jugendzeit,” “Unendlich,” “Heldenklage,” et al., with John Bell Young in The Piano Music of Friedrich Nietzsche, Newport Classic, 1992, compact disc. 8  G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, vol. 13, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986); Werke, vol. 14, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II; Werke, vol. 15, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III. See especially Werke 14: 446–53; 15: 462–4, 527–31. See also: G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 1199–1201. 9  Nietzsche calls Zarathustra the “Dionysian monster” (GT, Attempt at Self-Criticism §7, 22). 7

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It is also noteworthy that Nietzsche demonstrates the same set of prejudged opinions toward ancient literature that are spelled out in August Schlegel’s famous 1808 lectures on dramatic art and literature, which were known to Nietzsche.10 Here, Schlegel establishes three historical oppositions: firstly, that of tragedy to comedy as two complementary dramatic genres in which the latter is considered inferior to the former.11 Comedy, then, is a decline and degradation of tragedy, or at least a depiction of subjectivity that abandons the substantial and shows itself in and as comic characters who comprise the democratic people. These are the characters who Hegel, in his Lectures on Aesthetics, considers egoistic, vain, arrogant, irreligious, poorly educated, garrulous, quarrelsome, and boastful (as also does Aristophanes in his comedies). Second, Schlegel affirms the superiority of Old Comedy over New Comedy, arguing that the Nea of Menander and Terence is just “the old tamed down.”12 The loss of the boisterous and licentious paradise of tragedy due to the destructive forces of Apollonian optimistic inquisitiveness is Nietzsche’s idée fixe, which makes him recognize the alleged superiority of tragedy not only over comedy but also over any other literary genre. This is the reason why he does not spare sarcasm in his philippics against New Comedy, which for him only stresses the banality of everydayness against the sublimity of heroism as well as the vulgarity of the crafty slave as the main comic character standing against the aristocratic chivalry and heroism of tragedy (GT §11, 76–79). The New Comedy of Menander and Philemon, then, appears a particularly odious and degenerative genre since it marks the suicide of tragedy, already committed under Nietzsche’s nemesis Euripides, the first “sober” poet of “the aesthetic Socratism,” who embodies the “non-Dionysian spirit” (GT §11, 76ff, §17, 113). The Nea, for Nietzsche, is but a hopelessly optimistic and dialectical bourgeois drama, “bürgerliche Schauspiel” (GT §14, 94), employing petty, familial characters. Nietzsche’s inability to understand and appreciate the originality and true modernity of New Comedy comes from his suspicion of dialectic, which, for him, is the ultimate form of the Apollonian “syllogistic” rationalization of the unrationalizable, raw Dionysian musical flux of life (GT §14, 95–96). In fact, Nietzsche misses a most obvious point—namely, that comedy is a celebration of life, whereas tragedy is a celebration of death. To this very day, under the influence of the  August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking, vol. 5, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, Erster Theil (Leipzig: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1846); vol. 6, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, Zweiter Theil. The English translation Augustus William Schlegel, Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, ed. A. J. W. Morrison (New York: AMS Press, 1973). Nietzsche explicitly refers to Schlegel in GT 7, 54. 11  Schlegel, Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 145–6. 12  Schlegel, Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 176. 10

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Romantics and Nietzsche, we are unable to fully appreciate the originality and subtlety of New Comedy, which is probably the only ancient literary genre that survives nowadays due to its historical translation through the reading of Roman comedy and also because of the sheer modernity of the Nea. Yet, New Comedy presents a most subtle depiction and analysis of human conflict and of the possibility of its resolution that comes with a carefully calculated—truly Socratic and dialectical—movement from the initial problem, through complications, to the resolution, which is a joyful, yet not banal, good ending. Moreover, the main comic character, who appears in a socially subordinate and subjected position, is indeed the real thinker and political actor who allows for the movement of comedy toward its end. This comic thinker is paradigmatically represented by the figure of Socrates.13 The third historical opposition established by Schlegel is between Greek and Roman drama in general, and comedy in particular.14 Nietzsche, however, does not condescend to mention Roman poetry and drama, not even the great and utterly modern tragedy of Seneca or the comedy of Plautus and Terence, which were directly inherited, read, and performed in their original language over centuries, and imaginatively transformed into the modern drama of Shakespeare and Molière, the dramas that, for Hegel, crown the development of aesthetics. For Nietzsche, Roman literature is too much the “same,” hopelessly and undeniably Apollonian. The duality of the two opposite principles in Nietzsche thus appears to be a quasi-mythological appropriation of the Romantic and idealistic dichotomy into opposites, the moving force of that same Socratic dialectic that he so studiously criticizes and vehemently denies throughout his life (cf. the section “Socrates Problem” in the Twilight of the Idols). In particular, Nietzsche’s personified “divine” duality seems to arise out of the spirit of Friedrich Schiller, to whom Nietzsche keeps referring, always with approval, as someone who finds poetry in, and established on, a musical mood, thus probably imagining Schiller as his alter ego, or at least a precursor (GT §5, 43; §7, 54–55; §8, 58; §20, 129; §22, 144). One of the first theoreticians of modern literature and art, Schiller indeed tends to think in terms of opposites, which allows him to both detect and classify aesthetic phenomena. Thus, Nietzsche explicitly refers to and uses Schiller’s distinction between elegy and idyll as the genres rooted in sadness (Trauer) and joy (Freude) (GT §19, 124). The well-known division of poetry into naïve and sentimental is also mentioned by Nietzsche (GT §3,

 Dmitri Nikulin, Comedy, Seriously: A Philosophical Study (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 113–31. 14  Schlegel, Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 188–9. 13

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37).15 Less known is Schiller’s distinction between fear and joy, Furcht and Freude: fear or awe is the principle of immobility and respect for the existing limits, whereas joy is the principle of creation and transgression.16 One can easily interpret fear as standing for cognition that remains within the rationally accepted and that discovers the new only within the confined, whereas joy stands for life that always moves on and produces the new. Fear and joy, then, exactly replicate Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian principles. The duality of opposites, which in Hegel and Schiller serves as a heuristic and classificatory tool,17 and in modern ethics stands for the moralistic opposition between good and bad, thus becomes “divinely” personified in Nietzsche and turns into the device for a mythological rethinking of modernity through the opposition to its “other” of (re)constructed antiquity. NIETZSCHE’S HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE Nietzsche’s Romantic story about the loss of life (of Dionysian tragedy) and the hopeful regaining of it (in new music, drama, and myth) necessitates the neo-mythological personification of abstract and unmediated opposites as ancient gods.18 Yet the rigid schematism deprives them of their complex and often contradictory mythological traits and thus turns them into rational figures necessary for a rather arbitrary reconstruction of the history of ancient literature. With Nietzsche, deliberate “strong readings” in the history of thought become a fashion and almost a norm. Examples of such (often intentional) misreadings in Nietzsche are plentiful. He follows the traditionally accepted division of Greek literature into epic, lyric, and drama, and takes the decline of tragedy, already apparent in Euripides, as receiving its full expression in prose (GT §14, 93–4). For Nietzsche, this process comes to fruition in rational “syllogistic” and dialectical thought (GT §14, 94–5), whose main protagonist, Socrates, destroys myth (GT §23, 146) by critical and argumentative thinking that aspires and dares to correct being. Socrates thus undergoes a strange transformation

 Friedrich Schiller, “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” in Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966). 16  “Furcht zielt auf Stillstand. . . . Freude auf Fortschreitung. . . . Furcht existiert in den Grenzen dessen, was da ist. Freude schafft, was nicht da ist. (Fear aims at stillness. . . . Joy at progression. . . . Fear exists in the limits of that which is. Joy creates that which is not [Friedrich Schiller, Zwei philosophische Entwürfe, in Sämtliche Werke in 5 Bänden. ed. Wolfgang Riedel, vol. 5 (München: Deutscher Tauschenbuch Verlag, 2004), 1019])” 17  Dmitri Nikulin, Dialectic and Dialogue (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 58–68. 18  See Vyacheslav Ivanov, “Nietzsche and Dionysus,” in Selected Essays, trans. Robert Bird, ed. Michael Wachtel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 177–88. 15

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from a passionate, Dionysian, flute-playing satyr, which he is in Plato (Symp. 215a–216c), into a cold and detached Apollonian thinker. Epic Since Nietzsche attempts to derive the Dionysian from the Apollonian, epic for him is an Apollonian enterprise and as such precedes Dionysian tragedy.19 Homer, therefore, is an Apollonian poet, a “dreamer” similar to the plastic artist in being immersed in the contemplation of images (GT §5, 42). However, since the Apollonian arises by individuation from the universality of the Dionysian, both of the tendencies, for Nietzsche, stand in a quasi-historical, logical progression. But, on the other hand, they also appear as two opposite forces or principles underlying the development of literature and culture. The very account and understanding of such development, then, itself turns into a carefully calculated, Apollonian, theoretical enterprise, which Nietzsche strives to convert into a violent and ecstatic Dionysian one. Lyric The problem with giving an account of Greek lyric is that it encompasses a wide variety of different poetic genres. Among them, one usually distinguishes elegy, iambus, and melic, which can be further subdivided by the generations of lyric poets. Yet, Nietzsche chooses just one poet—Archilochus—to bear the weight of this very diverse tradition and makes him the incarnation of the Dionysian spirit, one who “frightens us by his cries of hatred and disdain, by drunken blazes of desire” (GT §5, 43). However, in so doing, Nietzsche misses a crucial difference between epic and lyric—namely, that epic poetry is to a great extent improvised and oral (and thus “Dionysian,” contrary to Nietzsche’s claim), whereas lyric poetry is carefully calculated and written (thus “Apollonian”). Since Archilochus proclaims in his poems both love and scorn for the unfortunate daughters of Lycambes, by one of whom he was spurned, the poet embodies the “primordial contradiction” (Urwiderspruch) (GT §5, 44; my emphasis). Archilochus, who both loves and hates at the same time (GT §5, 45), thus displays the mens diducta, or split soul, later exemplified in Anacreon and Catullus (in the famous “odi et amo,” [Catull. 85]). The lyric poet therefore personifies the Romantic and idealistic contradictory opposition, which Nietzsche ascribes to the restless Dionysian nature. Yet the duality within the uneasy lyric poet might signify the presence of  Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 42–43.

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both Dionysian and Apollonian principles in him, so that the “primordial” contradiction is in fact the result of the struggle of unmediated opposites. What Nietzsche does not want to mention is that Archilochus is the originator of iambus, which is not only a specific poetic meter but also a way of mocking and criticizing one’s opponents in acrimonious verses (even pushing them to suicide, as in the case of Lycambes’ daughters). In Aristotle’s account, lampoons or blameful songs give rise to iambus, which, in turn, produces comedy, much as epic originates tragedy (Poet. 1448b27–1449a6, 1449b4–5). In this way, comedy comes out of the spirit of the down-to-earth iambic mockery. At the very heart of iambic poetry are agonistic verbal battles, personal attacks, and scoffs, all of which include explicit allusions to the favored topics of eating, drinking, and sexuality as the celebration of life in all of its physically available forms.20 These features are later incorporated into Old Comedy and become especially prominent, although refined, in New Comedy. Nietzsche, however, does not want to recognize them as comic but rather as Dionysian and tragic, which makes him reject outright and entirely disregard the great Nea. Neither the iambs nor the pleasures of comedy delight the suffering Nietzsche, who fancies himself a Bacchic follower of Dionysus, but is in fact a despondent, overly reflective Alexandrian philologist, choked by the noose of abstract opposites. Another problem with Nietzsche’s Archilochus interpretation is the account of music, the inebriating “spirit” of which apparently gives rise to tragedy. For, on the one hand, Nietzsche recognizes that lyric introduces the popular song into poetry, which for him reflects the fact that in lyric, language imitates and follows music so that poetry is produced by and organized around the rhythmic structure of the melody (GT §6, 48–49). In a sense, this claim reflects the broader Romantic interest in the genre of song, Lied, which is intended to reflect and draw upon the “spirit of the people” and became highly refined in Schubert. But, on the other hand, Nietzsche takes no notice of the important distinction between monodic and choral lyric, between the monodic lyric of Alcaeus and Sappho and the choral lyric of Stesichorus and Ibycus. The monodic lyric simply does not fit within the Procrustean bed of Nietzsche’s interpretation, according to which, first, the Dionysian primarily shows itself in the chorus singing and, second, the lyric poet is identical with the impetuous Dionysian musician (GT §5, 43; §6, 49).

 See “Archilochus,” in Iambi et elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati: Archilochus, Hipponax, Theognidea, ed. Martin L. West, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 18–20, frag. 41–44, 46. See also Martin L. West, Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974), 22–39; and Joachim Latacz, ed., Archaische Periode, vol. 1 of Die griechische Literatur in Text und Darstellung, ed. Herwig Görgemanns (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991), 240–7.

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Thus, Nietzsche chooses to become the proponent of the orgiastic flute at the expense of ignoring the harmonious lyre (see Polit. 1341a17–1341b1). However, the opposition between the Apollonian, serene lyre (perceived as “native”) and the Dionysian, ecstatic flute (perceived as “foreign”) is traditional and central to ancient Greek culture and music.21 This distinction is established already in the early lyric, which the author of the De musica attributes to Terpander in the case of the lyre (κιθαρῳδικὸς νόμος), and to Clonus in the case of the flute (αὐλῳδικὸς νόμος) ([Plutarch], De musica 1133A). Yet, at the same time, contrarily to his literary inventions, Nietzsche himself composed for piano, which is an awkward, contemporary string version of the Apollonian lyre. He simply ignores the great polyphonic, non-instrumental music of the Franco-Flemish School, particularly of Ockeghem—and the “mathematical” Bach is magically transformed into a Dionysian composer (GT §19, 127). But the best-kept secret is Theognis, who is probably the key to the understanding of Nietzsche’s entire work. Although Nietzsche knew Theognis very well and wrote a competent work on the Theognidea, he never mentions the poet in The Birth of Tragedy.22 For Theognis does not fit within Nietzsche’s rigid opposition and refutes the idea of a lyric poet being a faithful attendant of Dionysus. Quite to the contrary, Theognis considered himself a follower of Apollo (Thgn. 1–4), even if his poems were sung accompanied by a flute (Thgn. 241–243). And yet, several central themes in Nietzsche appear to come straight out of Theognis. Thus, the poet’s antidemocratic polemics (Thgn. 846–847), the contempt for the kakoi, the vulgar “many” (Thgn. 233–234, 319–322), the scornful rejection of the democratic belief in Enlightenment (Thgn. 437–438), the defense of the values and morality accessible only to the “noble” (Thgn. 27–36, 233–234)—all these topics become Nietzsche’s leitmotiv from the Genealogy of Morals on. Moreover, Theognis is also famous for his moralistic gnomes.23 The γνώμη, literally, “thought” or “judgment,” translated into Latin as sententia, is an energetic, hortative statement. It is an old literary device, already found in Homer’s poems (at least by his later readers, who are never tired of extracting quotations from Homer) and is mastered by Theognis. Sententiae play a central role in Nietzsche’s later  The two instruments are even assigned to different Muses as their attributes: flute to Euterpe, and lyre to Polyhymnia or sometimes to Erato. The use of lyre in poetry goes back at least to the Mycenaen time, as seen in one of the Pylos frescoes (Geoffrey S. Kirk, Homer and the Oral Tradition [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976], 19). 22  Nietzsche wrote his graduation thesis (Valediktionsarbeit) at the Landesschule Pforta, Schulpforta on Theognis of Megara, and presented it on September 7, 1864 (see Friedrich Nietzsche, “De Theognide Megarensi,” in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1.3, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006], 420–462). His first published article was also on Theognis (Friedrich Nietzsche, “Zur Geschichte der Theognideischen Spruchsammlung”). 23  West, Iambi et elegi Graeci, 174ff. 21

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works, including The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and Twilight of the Idols. However, being intimately familiar with Theognis’s gnomic utterances,24 Nietzsche is very reluctant to recognize the influence of the elegiac poet, who is too much of the “same” for him and defies his interpretative scheme. Drama Finally, Nietzsche’s reconstruction of drama appears equally willful, and not only in his prejudiced rejection of Euripides and New Comedy. If tragedy indeed comes out of the cult of Dionysus, namely, from the dithyramb (GT §4, 42; see also Poet. 1448a14–16), then Nietzsche’s account of it lacks any detail and finesse. Thus, for instance, he fails to mention Arion as being the first to turn dithyramb into an ordered genre that later became tragedy.25 Besides, probably deliberately, Nietzsche omits mentioning that dithyramb, originally a choral hymn praising Dionysus, was sung by a large chorus. Later, in Bacchylides, it was structured as an antiphon—or dialogue between the chorus and a single singer. This means that dialogue is already present and embedded in tragic dithyramb. Drama, therefore, is the narrative explained in and by action (properly, “drama”) complemented by dialogue—in contrast to epic, where action is narrated by the author (see Poet. 1448a20–24). But for Nietzsche, in tragedy the chorus is rigidly opposed to dialogue because the former is deemed Dionysian, whereas the latter is Apollonian (GT §9, 64). A CRITIQUE OF NIETZSCHE: APOLLO AND DIONYSUS Yet, the biggest problem with Nietzsche’s rendering of the Apollonian and the Dionysian is his intentional suppression of the dual nature of each god.26 That each one comprises opposite sides within himself is obvious in the extant myths. Thus, on the one hand, Apollo is the keeper of harmony and the leader of Muses (Μουσαγέτης) (see Homer, Il. 1.603–604); he is identified with the Sun, the source of life and the metaphor for cognition. Through his oracle, Apollo prophesies the will of Zeus in order to help people (see Hom. Hymn 3.131–132, 179 ff.). He is also the protector of herds (Apollodorus, III.10.4) and a skilled physician capable of curing disease (Aristophanes, Aves 584).

 See Nietzsche, Philologische Schriften, 8–9.  M. L. Gasparov, “Ancient Greek Choral Lyric,” in Pindar and Bacchylides, Carmina et fragmenta, ed. M. L. Gasparov (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 345–6. 26  It is only much later that Walter Otto will argue for the double character of Dionysus. Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 24 25

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But, on the other hand, the very same Sun can burn and can be pernicious, which is suggested by one of the etymologies of Apollo’s epithet Phoebus, or “radiant” (from φόβος, “fear”). When turning to the world with his other side, Apollo appears as “night-like” (Il. 1.47) and turns into a destroyer (from ἀπόλλυμι, “to destroy”)27 who can also cause disease and instill terror (Hom. Hymn 3.447). In such a capacity, he sends a plague to Troy and curses a raven, turning it from white to black (Il. 1.9–10; Apollodorus, II.5.9; III.10.2). Even before Apollo is born, it is feared that he will be too “reckless” or “wicked” (ἀτάσθαλος) (Hom. Hymn 3.67). Since one of his attributes is a bow, which he gives to Hercules (Apollodorus II.4.11), Apollo shoots arrows (Il. I.43–52; “far-shooting,” Hom. Hymn 3.215), with which he kills his adversaries and also produces lightning (Apollodorus I.9.26). The rays of the Sun, of course, can not only give life but also slay the living and thus can become deadly arrows. Therefore, Apollo is also a killer: he is a “mousekiller” (Smintheus); he kills Python in Delphi (Apollodorus I.4.1), the sons of Niobe (Apollodorus III.5.6), cyclopes (Apollodorus III.10.4), and even his own lovers—Coronis (Apollodorus III.10.3) and accidentally, by discus, Hyacinth (Apollodorus I.3.3). The duality of the Sun-god is captured in the duality of bow and lyre, which is the other common attribute of Apollo: when born, he asks for a lyre and a bow (Hom. Hymn. 3.131; see also Il. 1.603–604; Hom. Hymn. 3.201; and Apollodorus III.10.2). Both are string “instruments,” but the one celebrates the harmony of the existent, while the other destroys it. A famous story tells of Apollo’s musical competition with the satyr Marsyas: Apollo’s victory signifies the apparent triumph of the harmony-asserting lyre over the barbaric flute that disfigures the face of the player (which is why the flute was rejected by Athena [see Polit. 1341b2–8]). And yet, it ends in the most atrocious act of Apollo flaying Marsyas (Apollodorus I.4.2; Diodorus 3.58.3; Pausanias 1.24.1; Aelian, VH 13.21; Ovid, Fast 6.695–71).28 It is quite remarkable that Nietzsche chooses to ignore the myth, which might be important for his own purpose, since it clearly suggests an opposition between two modes of music represented by the two instruments, one of which is Apollonian and the other Dionysian. But Apollo the slayer does not fit his own myth. In turn, Dionysus is ecstatic and can even cause insanity. As such, he is associated with inebriation and always appears in the presence of wine and vine (Apollodorus I.8.1; III.5.1). Yet he also shows his other side, gentle

 Konrad Ziegler and Walther Sontheimer, ed., Der Kleine Pauly. Lexikon der Antike, vol. 1 (München: Deitscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979), col. 441–448. 28  The story becomes a favorite subject of depiction both in ancient and Renaissance art. See, for example, the painting Apollo and Marsyas by Michelangelo Anselmi (Apollo and Marsyas, ca. 1540, oil on panel, 55.9 x 117 cm, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.) 27

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and playful. Thus, a fragment of the Homeric hymn to Dionysus refers to the story about Dionysus’s fetching Hephaestus to Olympus not by force but by making Hephaestus happy while drunk (Hom. Hymn 1C). And as a child, Dionysus is often depicted as cheerfully playing with a satyr.29 The Dionysian double nature, his being both cruel and mild, is noticed by Nietzsche, but he takes it to be the source of the inevitable tragic suffering of tragic heroes, who all are but various manifestations of Dionysus (GT §72, 73). Therefore, contrary to Nietzsche, duality is intrinsic in both Apollo and Dionysus, so that the two are inextricably connected and each contains the other in himself. No wonder that Apollo sometimes even bears the same epithets as Dionysus (“ivy”), and Dionysus is taken for Apollo (see Hom. Hymn 7.19) and in Hellenistic times loses much of his ecstatic appearance, often depicted very much like Apollo as a beautiful and joyful young man. The new mythology created by Nietzsche misses the ancient myth, because his modern myth-making that is meant to substitute rational dialectical thinking still embodies and uses the same unmediated abstract opposites that this very thinking is originally based on. DOSTOEVSKY’S DEMONS Ум—подлец, а глупость пряма и честна. “Reason is a scoundrel, but foolishness is direct and honest.”30

The works of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche share a number of themes and topics, such as skepticism, pessimism, and nihilism that lead to the desperation of the “underground man” (Lev Shestov), the force of evil (Simona Forti), the psychology of the homo christianus (C.A. Miller), the problem of God’s existence (Janko Lavrin), the tension between “god-man” and “man-god”

 See the reverse of the bronze coin of Pergamum from the time of Marcus Aurelius. See Edoardo Levante, ed., Mysie, vol. 5 of Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum (Paris: Bibliothéque Nationale de France, 2001), 2123–25. 30  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Preparatory notes for The Brothers Karamazov, vol. 15 of Complete Works in 30 Volumes [Полное собрание сочинений в тридцати томах] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976), 232. In what follows, all references are to Fyodor Dostoevsky, Complete Works in 30 Volumes [Полное собрание сочинений в тридцати томах], 30 vols (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1976); henceforth PSS, followed by volume and page number. The notes and commentaries to the Brothers Karamazov are by G. M. Friedlander, V. E. Vetlovskaya et al. in PSS 15.393–619. All translations from these texts are mine. 29

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(Nel Grillaert), and the moral rebel and the superman (Edith Clowes and Nel Grillaert).31 The division between the Apollonian and the Dionysian is markedly present in Dostoevsky’s main characters, despite his lack of awareness of such presence. However, what Nietzsche does out of the necessity of his reconstruction of the history of literature and art (when a modern writer is obliged to see himself through the eyes of the assumed cultural other), Dostoevsky does out of the necessity of his reconstruction of human psychology in moments of collisions and catastrophes (when a modern protagonist perceives herself through the words and actions of others). It is worth noting that one of the first significant modernist novels, Andrey Belyi’s Peterburg, is based on the consciously accepted and intentionally redressed opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.32 The two main characters of the novel, the father Apollon Apollonovich Abveukhov and the son Nikolai Apollonovich become respectively Apollo (which is evident from the name) and Dionysus. The story is of a failed patricide, where the son becomes involved with an incognito terrorist who distinctly bears Nietzsche’s features (the eyes and moustache, which are also attributed to a saint and a madman [P 27, 624, 628]). The section in which the nervous and excited Nikolai Apollonovich is described winding up the mechanism of a bomb meant to kill his father and thus turns into a “suffering Dionysus” (“Дионис терзаемый”) is called “Dionysus” (P 181–3). Apollon Apollonovich, on the contrary, is an embodiment of the purely rational, “geometrical,” and calculating Apollonian spirit, who also appropriately keeps an alabaster statue of Niobe, whose children were killed by Apollo and Artemis, in his house (P 40). He sees and traces his surroundings as geometrical cubes, spheres, straight lines, and angles, all mutually balanced and symmetrical, which he eventually externalizes by a “cerebral game” (мозговая игра, P 17–21; 26–27). However, both of Belyi’s characters are  Lev Shestov, “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy,” in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, trans. Bernard Martin and Spencer Roberts (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969), 141–322; 201–202, 219; Simona Forti, I nuovi demoni. Ripensare oggi male e potere (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2012), 3–67, 272–5 passim; Miller, “Nietzsche’s ‘Discovery’ of Dostoevsky,” 255–6; Janko Lavrin. “A Note on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky,” Russian Review 28, no. 2 (1969), 160–170; Nel Grillaert, What the God-Seekers Found in Nietzsche: The Reception of Nietzsche’s Übermensch by the Philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 37–48; 71–77; 107–137; Edith W. Clowes, The Revolution of Moral Consciousness: Nietzsche in Russian Literature, 1890–1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1988), 95. 32  Andrei Belyi, Petersburg [Петербург], in Complete Works in Two Volumes [Сочинения в двух томах], vol. 2, ed. S. Piskunova and V. Piskunov (Moscow: Хudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990). 7–292; henceforth P, followed by page number. Nietzsche drew Belyi’s attention because of Belyi’s interest in the problem of suffering and sacrifice, the symbol of which he saw in Dionysus. Belyi even wrote an essay “Friedrich Nietzsche,” which was published in 1911 in the Arabeski. See Clowes, The Revolution of Moral Consciousness, 156–7. Apollo also appears in the title and on the cover of the symbolist journal Apollo. 31

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in fact very Nietzschean in that, being rather schematic, they lack the depth and mutual inclusion of their mythical counterparts. Lurking in the background of Dostoevsky’s writings are traces of antiquity, the image of which is to a great part informed by Joseph Bové’s architectural classicism, which surrounded Dostoevsky from his childhood. One cannot miss the triumphant yet intimidating presence of Klodt’s Apollo quadriga on the façade of the Bolshoi Theater, originally designed by Bové. But “ancient” reminiscences in Dostoevsky often come from the Romantics. Thus, at a crucial moment of his conversation with Alyosha, Dmitriy Karamzov quotes a translation of Schiller’s Das Eleusische Fest at length, which invokes Ceres and Proserpina (PSS 14.68). He also refers to Ulysses from Tyutchev’s rendering of Schiller’s poem (PSS 14.362; see also 14.176). At another climatic moment of the novel, one of his interlocutors mentions Pyrrho and recites Batyushkov’s epigram referring to Sappho (PSS 14.382). The non-literary presence of antiquity is felt in the novel, often in unexpected ways: thus, a gymnasium teacher bears the name of Dardanellov; the vexing question among the gymnasium boys, all of whom know Greek and Latin, is about the founder of Troy; they write a caustic “classical” epigram on the marriage of their classics teacher; a doctor gives Ilyusha’s father impossible advice to send the dying son to Syracuse; and in the preliminary materials, Dostoevsky even mentions Plato as one of the sources (PSS 14.464; 14.496–498; 14.505; 15.204). DOSTOEVSKY’S GODS The distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Dostoevsky comes out of the “logic” of characters’ interactions and struggles.33 Yet, this distinction in Dostoevsky is more complex and perhaps more refined than in Nietzsche, because the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Dostoevsky are not mutually exclusive opposites remodeled as literary devices; rather, each presupposes and bears the other within itself.

 That the Apollonian/Dionysian distinction is applicable to the description of crimes of Dostoevsky’s characters has been noticed by Khatchadourian, who has argued that the Dionysian impulses of the “heart” define the “crimes of sensuality and eroticism,” such as those of Fyodor and Dmitriy Karamazov, which are less serious that the “Apollonian” crimes of Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov, which are defined by Platonic-Aristotelian measure-oriented reason (Haig Khatchadourian, “Rational/Irrational in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Aristotle,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 11, no. 2 [1980], 107–15). However, I want to argue that the distinction is much more pervasive in Dostoevsky. In what follows, I will be mostly referring to the last and most elaborate of Dostoevsky’s novels, The Brothers Kramazov, with occasional references to and parallels in his earlier works.

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The figures of Apollo and Dionysus are paradigmatically represented in The Brothers Kramazov’s characters of Alyosha and Dmitriy. In Dostoevsky, we have a series of both “strange” literary coincidences that point in the direction of such an identification and the structural features of the characters that reflect certain “archetypes” of human characters. The coincidences begin with the names: both sets of names begin with an “A” and a “D” (and all are of Greek origin). Besides, Dionysus and Apollo are half-brothers: the two have the same father (Zeus) but different mothers (Leto and Semele). Such are also Dmitriy and Alyosha: the same father (Fedor Pavlovich) but different mothers (Adelaida Ivanovna and Sofia Ivanovna). Both are also not properly educated, since neither completed the course at the gymnasium (PSS 14.11; 14.20). But gods do not need education; they already know (moral) truths by heart and from the heart. The “archetypal” similarities with the Greek gods, however, are even more conspicuous. Aleksey-Apollo is an embodiment of beauty, primarily moral but also physical (“статный, краснощекий, со светлым взором, пышущий здоровьем” [PSS 14.24]). Light and bright, serene and fair (“ровен и ясен,” PSS 14.19), he strives toward the “light of love” and himself radiates human goodness. The dearest remembrance of his childhood, that of his mother, comes with the image of slanting rays of light (PSS 14.18). The Apollonian character embodies, for Dostoevsky, the ideal humanness of the one who loves others “for nothing,” for no reason at all (“ни за что”) (PSS 14.320) and is in turn loved by everyone (PSS 14.19). He is the personification of honesty “by nature,” which shows itself both in the readiness to forgive others, as well as in the fearlessness based on the hope and trust in the ultimate goodness of people and in the world beyond their apparent baseness and corruption (PSS 14.19; 14.25). Alyosha’s “clarity,” seen in its moral and physical purity, has a clear and intended similarity in Dostoevsky’s “positively beautiful man,” Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. Such “clarity” is translated into chastity (целомудренность, literally, “the wholeness of wisdom”), which makes both erotically very attractive for women, and yet at the same time prevents them from being attracted to women. Rather, Alyosha is afraid of women, knows them “very little” and is “unfit to be a husband” (PSS 14.94; 15.21). Myshkin acknowledges his physical impotence, which for Lukács, according to Ágnes Heller, meant the incapability of loving at all. Yet, the incapacity or unwillingness of physical love might mean not only the latent homoeroticism of the Dostoevskian Apollo but perhaps—and even more so—the incapacity to act at all. And if Apollo is indeed a personification of rational deliberative thought (Alyosha always thinks and deliberates within himself, “много про себя рассуждает,” [PSS 14.18]), then this thought is not reflective—it is not the thought of itself about oneself but about others. Alyosha can and does

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reach out for others and is thus capable of love. This thought is the right moral judgment: “You are an angel on earth. You will listen, you will judge, and you will forgive,” says Dmitriy about Alyosha (“Ты ангел на земле. Ты выслушаешь, ты рассудишь, и ты простишь”) (PSS 14.97). “Apollonian” thought, then, is profoundly ambiguous in that, despite its intrinsic goodness, it does not and cannot act. It is the right judgment that does not translate into action. It is the thought that intends to, yet in the end does not, help others. It is the thought that understands and even foresees the disastrous consequences of the actions of others and yet cannot prevent them and save others from destroying themselves and their loved ones. On the contrary, Dmitriy-Dionysus exemplifies all the qualities associated with Bacchic frenzy: the propensity toward debauchery and violence, cruelty and rage (PSS 14.100; 15.94). It is difficult to fathom what he is thinking: pensive and gloomy, he is of “abrupt and irregular mind” (“ума отрывисто го и неправильного,” PSS 14.63; 14.417). Rather, he is moved by outbursts of “passions,” which become especially apparent in his drunken escapades that often display uncontrollable impulses (PSS 14.75; 14.110). Grief and yearning, anxiety and jealousy define his “Dionysian” mood, which often abruptly turns from deep melancholy to uncontainable hilarity and exuberant and frantic laughter (PSS 14.142; 14.344). Anger is the major driving force in him, which leads to the violation and temporary suspension of moral norms, as becomes manifest in his drinking, gambling, spending, and appropriating money, in breaking social conventions and customs associated with family life and marriage, in fighting duels, beating up other people, and eventually threatening to kill his father and the lackey Smerdyakov (PSS 14.11; 14.69; 14.128; 14.176; 14.458). Rogozhin, the Dionysian character from The Idiot who acts in much in the same way and is also a “half-brother” to Myshkin (once they exchange the crosses they wear, God becomes their “father”), ends by actually killing his lover (PSS 8.504). Unseemly in appearance, Dmitriy considers himself among the chthonic, the “underground men” (“мы, подземные человеки,” PSS 15.31). Similarly to Dionysus, who is perceived in antiquity as an originally “Oriental” deity, Dmitriy is associated in the book with Siberia (to which he will go in exile after being accused of murder) or America (to which he might flee), perceived by the readers as foreign and “Oriental” countries (PSS 15.10; 15.34; 15.5). Most remarkably, Dmitriy’s self-description is Dionysian: when drinking, he quotes from a poem of Apollon Maikov and explicitly compares himself to Silenus, which comes off as a pun (“не Силен, а силён”) (PSS 14.98). Drunkenness, sublimated to being “drunk in spirit” (“пьян духом”) (PSS 14.368), is Dmitriy’s abnormal “normal” state, which for Nietzsche is the essential Dionysian modus operandi. Only in this state is the hero detached from the ordinary, when for a few brief moments he becomes capable

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of looking into the abysmal joy beyond everydayness, which otherwise remains inaccessible to him. “I will be cheerful, I will laugh” (“буду весел, смеяться буду”), says Dmitriy, seeing no way out when he is being accused of murder (PSS 14.418). The obscure Dionysian delirium and furor, ecstasy and “edge” or “tear” (исступление, надрыв) motivate Dmitriy to act often against his own will and regret the impossibility of exercising any control over his actions.34 But any rational calculation is suspect; in pecuniary matters, it amounts to sheer baseness (PSS 14.443). And yet, his impulsive, irrational spontaneity at times arouses deep sympathy for him (e.g., during the trial), because others see his “hot heart” (PSS 14.10ff.; 15.90) as a manifestation of sincere, if impure, intentions that aim at an unreachable and thus other-worldly utopian happiness and its celebration, as opposed to the cold rationalization of the “petit-bourgeois,” down-to-earth, goal-oriented reason. Being drunk and being good, then, entail each other (PSS 14.188). “I love life,” recognizes Dmitriy (PSS 14.366), by which he means life at the extreme, the one that Nietzsche and his later followers (e.g., Hermann Hesse in Steppenwolf) yearned for. Dmitriy, therefore, embodies the “heroic” and “angry” part of the soul, which dominates the actions of the Dionysian character and is associated in Plato with the heart, in contradistinction to the “rational” part (of Ivan’s Zweckrationalität or “instrumental rationality”) and the “vegetative” part (of the father Fedor Pavlovich’s lust). Yet, the lack of self-control unavoidably leads to eventual self-destruction, which, however, provokes pity and compassion from others. Perhaps this is something that Dostoevsky and Nietzsche share—the idea of the impossibility of productive creativeness of the reflective mind (of the Apollonian) and the inevitability and constructiveness of the destruction brought about by life (of the Dionysian). Yet, both Alyosha-Apollo and Dmitriy-Dionysus have and cultivate “the other within” absent in Nietzsche’s schematic depiction of the two gods. This  The Dionysian “darkness” variously shows itself in the Karamazov family (in Dmitriy through rage; in the father through greed and lust; in Ivan through the recognition of the “power” of the Karamazovs’s “baseness” [PSS 14.240]). Dostoevsky’s careful choice of the form of the family name points to it: “kara” means “dark” in Turkic languages, so that the family name would then mean “darkly painted.” This derivation remains unconcealed to the ear of others: one of the minor characters calls Alyosha “Chernomazov” (“chernyi” is “black,” PSS 14.184), which she does intentionally in order to revenge an offense against her husband by offending Alyosha’s other, his brother Dmitriy. By this fictional etymology, Dostoevsky probably also tried to stress the incongruence between the family’s deeds and its old nobility, suggested by the form of its name, which would be from the gentry of Tatar extraction going back to the Kyrgyz Horde (“вы, господа Карамазовы, каких-то великих и древних дворян из себя корчите” (see PSS 14.77). Such is also the pedigree of the family of the Apollo and Dionysus heroes in Belyi’s Peterburg, of the father and son Ableukhov, whose name is playfully derived from that of a fictional mirza Ab-Lay with a comic ending, Ukhov, pointing to the size of the father’s ears. In a sense, the name of Ablai-Ukhov can be read as a parodist reference to Kara-mazov, both being a cross of a Turkic and a Russian root.

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“other” shows not only through their mutual φιλαδελφία, or brotherly love for each other (PSS 14.96), but also through the palimpsests of the Dionysian in Alyosha and the Apollonian in Dmitriy, which at times become evident and readable again. Thus, Alyosha is surrounded by a quasi-Dionysian retinue (ватага) of boys, who often pick on passers-by with tricky dialectical questions (PSS 14.471–7). At the very end of the novel, after the funeral of Ilyusha, one of the boys, Alyosha, enthusiastically addresses his beloved “boys” almost in the form of a paean. And yet, his invocation of the restitution of life and the salvation of the dead through memory is more reminiscent of a Dionysian dream (PSS 15.195–6). Moreover, serene and conscientious Alyosha, ready to accept and forgive everyone, cannot halt a spontaneous outburst against the landlord in Ivan’s story who hunts down a boy that accidentally harmed a dog. “Shoot him!” says Alyosha in a calm and thus even more frightening and resolute rage (PSS 14.221). A strongly “Dionysian” radicalism is evident in Alyosha: deeply pious, he rebels against hypocritical rules of behavior and drinks vodka and eats sausage after the death and unseemly physical decay of his beloved spiritual leader, starets Zosima (PSS 14.309). In fact, according to A. S. Suvorin’s testimony, in the planned continuation of the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky intended to make Alyosha, who at a certain point wanted to become a monk, into a revolutionary and a regicide (PSS 14.17; 15.485–6). This intention became almost oracular, in that Alexander II was killed by an idealistic young man in March 1881, one month after Dostoevsky’s death, and that in the same year the novel was published for the first time. It comes as no surprise, then, that Alyosha shows his Dionysian side when calling on Ivan not to be afraid of life and to love life beyond and above any logic (PSS 14.210). Dmitriy, on the other hand, is essentially a simple-hearted and innocent man (PSS 14.332), who strives toward an ultimate “harmony” and calm beyond and above the passions and calamities of the world. Apollo is always lurking in the background—for example, when, “devouring space,” Dmitriy flies in his (Apollonian) chariot toward his fate and love (PSS 14.370). Besides, as Friedlander suggests, the prototype for the character of Dmitriy was Apollon (!) Grigoriev, a famous poet and literary critic who died of delirium tremens (PSS 15.404). And even Dmitriy’s vision of himself as he should and will be (the one “of tomorrow”) is that of the “golden-haired Phoebus,” to whom he wants others to raise a glass (“выпей ты мне этот стакан, за Феба златокудрого, завтрашнего”) (PSS 14.366; 14.370)! DOSTOEVSKY’S DEMONS One can trace a further important distinction that is altogether missing in Nietzsche. Not only “gods” but also “demons” play a crucial role in the

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intricately woven tissue of characters’ interaction in Dostoevsky. These are the other two brothers, Ivan and the illegitimate half-brother Smerdyakov, whose connection to the three brothers Karamazov is widely known yet never explicitly recognized by them. If indeed Dostoevsky’s novels are “polyphonic”35 in that all characters are independent voices simultaneously sounding in the texture of the novels, this means that there is no single character who would be at the center of the plot. In this respect, Dostoevsky’s novels are also “polycentric.” Ivan is one of such centers, although he also stands out among other characters of the novel. The middle brother (four years apart from each other brother) is not a “middle” or mediator between the brothers and does not reconcile them as opposites the way the Aristotelian “subject” or ὑποκείμενον would mediate and reconcile opposites. Ivan is different. He is the “stranger” among the brothers. Unlike Dmitriy and Alyosha, Ivan does not exemplify either a selfcontained thought or a spontaneity of life. He represents—or even, in a sense, is—an educated and cultivated self-reflective thinking. Unlike the other two brothers, he graduates both from a gymnasium and a university: Ivan is a “learned” and “proud” “man of letters” (“ученый, гордый”) (PSS 14.15–16), a writer and a journalist—a profession Nietzsche detested (GT §20, 130). Yet, unlike his two brothers who are “integral” persons, Ivan is a split mind (which is what “schizophrenia” literally means) who has neither an immediate (moral) knowledge nor is engaged in an unreflective action. This mind mirrors itself in the pamphlet Ivan writes about the church court, which, strangely enough, is praised by both opposing parties. This mind also produces a paper advocating that the state turn into a church, which Ivan clearly does not support himself (PSS 14.16; 14.57–58). Ivan is a “theoretical” mind that never comes to a definite conclusion that fully satisfies it, which is why it is in constant anguish (тоска) (PSS 14.241). For this reason, Ivan’s brothers call him a “tomb,” a “riddle,” a tacit “sphinx” (“Иван—могила, “Иван— загадка,” “Брат Иван сфинкс и молчит, все молчит”) (PSS 14.209; 15.32). Ivan embodies thinking that is reflective and yet cannot reconcile with and within itself and thus is dialectical, profoundly paradoxical, and eccentric (PSS 14.65). Ivan is literally torn by opposite thoughts, strivings, and intentions and finds no way of bringing them together, which at the end of the novel leads to his complete mental demise, one that amounts to death or at least a coma. Yet, on the other hand, the attempt to notice or reflectively trace and give an account of madness escapes the divided mind, which Ivan understands, asking Alyosha if it is possible to observe how one becomes insane (PSS 15.38). Apparently, such an observation is unreachable for the  Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson, vol. 8 of Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 36ff.

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reflective consciousness that takes its very reflectiveness as the sign of proper functioning and sanity. And although Ivan has the face of a dying man (PSS 15.115), only others can see it. Because Ivan’s mental and probably also physical death follow from the impossibility of coming to terms with himself, such a death is an intended but not intentional suicide, unlike the suicide of Ivan’s “double,” Smerdyakov, which is intentional but not originally intended. Irredeemably torn within his own mind without a hope for bringing it together, Ivan is incapable of reaching out for others, which is why he is incapable of love that is a suspension of the self for the sake of other. Neither Ivan nor Smerdyakov loves anyone (PSS 14.114). Ivan cannot love and yet, because he is deeply paradoxical and attempts to think the impossible, despite all odds, he loves Alyosha (PSS 14.124). As we know from Zosima’s homily, the incapacity to love is hell. Hence, Ivan lives in hell and only his mental and physical destruction allows him to escape from hell—or, who knows, perhaps allows him to sink even deeper into hell. Ivan’s inability to love is not only the result of his unhappy torn mind but also follows “theoretically” from his main “thesis” that if there is no immortality, then everything is allowed (PSS 14.65; 14.240). For if immortality means reaching out for and being with others in some state of uninterrupted communication, then, if there is no immortality, there is no love. This means further that there is no objective “law” of love “in nature” for Ivan, for love is only a fake and a human invention (PSS 14.64). Ivan is convinced that humans are “wild and evil beasts” who invented God for their own sake and as a cover-up for their meanness (PSS 14.214). Ivan’s God is a product of his split subjectivity that cannot overcome the illusion of conceiving itself as free and autonomous. By producing God, it kills God; its God has always been dead. In this sense, Ivan not only pens the Grand Inquisitor (PSS 14.224ff.), but he himself personifies the Grand Inquisitor. Because God is thus a projection of the human mind, Ivan can and does accept God; but because this is a projection of a restless and irreconciled mind, he cannot understand God, since he cannot understand his own mind, misguided in its persistent reflexivity. In this respect, the idea of God is similar to that of non-Euclidean geometry, which is also a product of the human mind that accepts yet cannot understand the non-evident (PSS 14.214). However, once the divided mind puts itself in a position to create the idea of God and to reflect on it as its own product, it cannot abstain from creating the idea of its other, of the devil. This other becomes the intimate self of and within Ivan’s split mind, which it inevitably generates yet does not want to accept. This is evident in Ivan’s conversation with the devil (чёрт), the stranger whom Ivan intimately addresses as “thou” (ты) (PSS 15.71–72), which is appropriate between relatives and close friends but never in talking

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with an unknown visitor. Ivan knows that he faces a “diabolic chaos” (PSS 14.209) and realizes that the devil who “philosophizes” with him is his own other and thus himself. Ivan knows that the devil does not exist (PSS 14.124) and is only a “fantasy,” and thus he speaks to himself (“это я, я сам говорю, а не ты!”) (PSS 15.72). No wonder that the devil, who is as learned as Ivan, ironically quotes Descartes’s famous “je pense donc je suis,”36 and demands his own annihilation (“я . . . прямо и просто требую себе уничтожения”) (PSS 15.77). And yet, Ivan’s Cartesian mind is incapable of reaching out for the other and therefore cannot get rid of the other of and within himself. He is forever possessed by this diabolic—not reachable—other and is thus a “demon” beyond the redemption of both love and a simple conversation or dialogue with the other. Reflective yet not fully self-transparent and not self-accessible, such thinking is “demonic.” It is the thinking that creates God by elevating itself to being god-like (Ivan cannot become either one of his brothers) yet at the same time unsuccessfully annihilating or denying itself. Such thinking is the devil, which, however, it does not want to be. It wants to become God, which it is not. Such “demonic” thinking can only destroy itself and fall into insanity and oblivion. One could say that the three brothers are various aspects of one integrated personality that can be never “sublated” or incorporated (literally—put in one body) into one person. Yet in fact there are four brothers, and if Alyosha and Dmitriy represent the “divine” opposites, Ivan and his “brotherly other” Smerdyakov represent the “demonic” opposites. In each case, the opposites are not reconciled or bridged and thus represent two “abysses,” the “divine” and the “demonic,” which, as Dostoevsky writes in the preliminary notes to the novel, constitute the basis of the Karamazovs’s character (“Эти 2 бездны есть основа характера Карамазовых”) (PSS 15.363). Ivan realizes his close connection with Smerdyakov, with whom he holds three intimate conferences (PSS 15.41ff.), which in their subtlety rise to the level of three conversations between Raskolnikov and Porfiriy Petrovich in Crime and Punishment. As the other “demonic” figure, together with Ivan, Smerdyakov stands against the “gods,” and is thus an atheist (PSS 15.97). Smerdyakov’s very name invokes all kinds of connotations with stench (смердящий, which is the nickname of his mother), lackey (смерд, which he is), and death (смерть, which he brings). He lives in constant humiliation of not being recognized as an equal, which he tries to rectify by deranged and hideous means. In fact, he would have preferred not to be born at all (PSS 14.204). As a boy, he was hanging cats and organizing their funeral  René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, in Œuvres de Descartes, vol. 6, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1902), 33.

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ceremonies, in which he played the priest (PSS 14.114). As an adult, he taught a boy to feed a dog a piece of bread with a needle hidden inside (PSS 14.480). Incapable of love, in which he is very similar to Ivan, Smerdyakov is despised by everyone and, in turn, despises everyone (PSS 14.114). His perverse mind shows itself in the incapacity to reconcile with himself and others, which is further underlined by Smerdyakov’s epilepsy (PSS 14.116), which in the novel becomes the sign of the demonic, in contradistinction to the “divine” epilepsy of Myshkin in The Idiot. At the same time, Smerdyakov is an able actor—a hypocrite—who can even imitate an epileptic fit and use it for his own carefully calculated purposes (PSS 15.47). He even tries to imitate Ivan’s learnedness, appearing as a pathetic buffoon who learns French “vocables” written in Cyrillic and reads a book while putting on glasses and assuming airs (PSS 15.48; 15.50). Among Smerdyakov’s reading are Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (a literary adaptation of folk stories about demons) and the Life of St. Isaac the Syrian (in the genre of hagiography: the Great Menaion Reader, for example, was a favorite folk reading) (PSS 14.115; 15.58). Exactly as Ivan, Smerdyakov shows the same cunning yet self-destroying reflection (also exemplified in another “demon,” Petr Verkhovensky, in the Demons). Still, Ivan does not want to recognize Smerdyakov as his brother and a real other (which is the devil). Ivan is increasingly irritated by the thoughts about Smerdyakov, up to the point of hating him; he wants to beat Smerdyakov up, although does not know why, and even to kill him (PSS 14.242–3; 14.251; 15.57). The recognition of Smerdyakov as the alter ego is impossible for Ivan not only because of social differences but also because he does not want to recognize Smerdyakov as the mirror reflecting his own inability to love, to be with the other, which eventually results in Ivan’s desperate solitude (after the death of the father, PSS 15.41) and demise. However, one’s own reflection in the other remains inaccessible for the reflection of the split “demonic” mind, and Smerdyakov remains an enigma even for perspicacious Ivan. Smerdyakov not only speaks in riddles, “prophesies,” and ironic allusions (PSS 15.14; 15.46)—he also draws hints from others who are reluctant to recognize openly their own inclinations and thus comfortably remain in the safety of unuttered and unrecognized intentions. Smerdyakov understands something about Ivan that Ivan himself does not want to understand (“с умным человеком и поговорить любопытно” (PSS 15.43). Most importantly, Smerdyakov hints that he understands that Ivan would not object to killing their father, which is the thought Ivan himself never wants or dares to recognize (PSS 15.53). Smerdyakov does all the carefully planned “dirty work” of killing of their father, yet in the end, he makes Ivan

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recognize that it is Ivan who is the real murderer (PSS 15.54–55; 15.63). Ivan is thus the causa finalis of the murder (an even more remote causa finalis might be Alyosha, who could make Ivan act out of bad consciousness and a feeling of guilt), whereas Smerdyakov “humbly” assumes the role of the causa instrumentalis. Clearly, Smerdyakov kills his father not out of a mercantile interest, because in the end, he gives Fedor Pavlovich’s money to Ivan, frankly relates the story of the murder in all the details (PSS 15.60), and then commits suicide by hanging himself, which is commonly perceived as a disgraceful and humiliating death. There is, however, a way of interpreting the murder, which is never depicted in the novel, as committed by Dmitriy, so that the story of the persecution in the court would be correct. This would turn Smerdyakov into a “saint,” who calumniates himself in order to save Dmitriy by sacrificing himself for the wrongdoing of his brothers who refuse to recognize him. Smerdyakov’s reading the Life of St. Isaac the Syrian, then, would not be in vain. Yet such an act would still testify to Smerdyakov’s deeply split “demonic” mind. But why does (if this is indeed so) Ivan have to kill the father? An evident motive is his moral revulsion against the disgrace that the father’s debauchery brings on every member of the family and people around him. However, the murder of the father becomes inevitable for the “demonic” sons as the expression of their inability to reach out for their other—paradigmatically represented by the father—and to reconcile with him. Yet there is more: Fedor Pavlovich is commonly portrayed as a buffoon (PSS 14.9; 14.21; 14.38) and is thus a comic character. In New Comedy, the three “generations” of actors are the children, the parents, and the servants. The initial conflict between the sons and the fathers is eventually resolved by a complex set of actions, where the shrewd and smart servant plays the leading role. Rather than being dead as at the end of a tragedy, everyone is well off at the end of a comedy. The murder of the father, then, is the symbolic murder of comedy. Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky reject comedy as banal and “diabolic” or “demonic” and prefer tragedy to it.37 This is why the devil in Dostoevsky casually quotes Terence’s Self-Tormentor (Haut. 77) in a “diabolically perverse” way: “Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto” (PSS 15.74). For Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, a person is better off dead than happy. In Nietzsche, however, there are no demons, because Nietzsche himself is Ivan, which he never wants to acknowledge.

 This is not to say that Dostoevsky’s novels lack in humor, parody, and satire (see R. L. Busch, Humor in the Major Novels of F.M. Dostoevsky [Columbus: Slavica, 1987]).

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THE MAENADS One cannot fail to notice that Nietzsche’s main philosophical categories are disguised as male gods. Only in passing does he mention the maenads, the female followers of Dionysus (GT §5, 44). In Dostoevsky, on the contrary, female characters not only play a crucial role in the novels, but the central female characters are disguised as maenads. Already mentioned in Homer (Il. 22.460–461), maenads become ubiquitous suitors of Dionysus in later times and as such find their way into drama (in Euripides’ Bacchae). Recognized by the phallic attributes of thyrsus and snake, maenads are primarily characterized by Bacchic fury, drunken frenzy, and erotic rage (Diodorus 4.3.3).38 Possessed by the Dionysian “life-asserting” rampage, they even become involved in an ecstatic killing. As Apollodorus tells us, Orpheus invents the Bacchic mysteries but eventually dies, being torn to pieces by the maenads (I.3.2); and Agave kills her son Pentheus, tearing him apart when mistaking him for a beast (III.5.2). Dostoevsky’s most important female characters are maenads in that, far from being meek and mild, and tame and dutiful housewives, they are primarily defined by the “heroic” or “Dionysian” passions of the “heart”— anger and rage. Such are Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya in The Idiot and Grushenka and Katerina Ivanovna in The Brothers Karamazov. As maenads, they passionately love and enthusiastically follow their Dionysus (Rogozhin and Dmitriy). After the condemnatory verdict is passed on Dmitriy, the women who attended the trial seemed to be in a kind of delirium and ready to revolt (PSS 15.178). The love rage of the maenads even unduly extends to the beautiful Apollo (Myshkin and Alyosha) whom they want to seduce, although they eventually abandon the intention once they realize its inappropriateness. Like the “gods,” the “maenads” in Dostoevsky are characterized by a “coincidence of the opposites,” by contrasting intentions, passions, and qualities, by embracing and containing “the other within” so conspicuously absent in Nietzsche. As with the “gods” and “demons,” the “maenads” come in pairs, in which each one is both opposed to and complements her other. In each pair, a well-educated and well-mannered maenad (Aglaya or Katerina Ivanovna) stands opposite to a seemingly uncouth and vulgar maenad who is also perceived as “fallen” and compromised as a kept mistress (Nastasya Filippovna or Grushenka, “a provincial hetaerae,” PSS 14.454). Yet, beyond the superficial social conventions, they are very similar in that they are both

 The characteristics of maenads include “frenzy, running, intrafamilial killing and destruction of the household, and lamentation for family members” (Richard Seaford, “Tragedy and Dionysus,” in A Companion to Tragedy, ed. Rebecca Bushnell [Oxford: Blackwell, 2005], 25–38; 34–37).

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spectacularly beautiful, and thus attractive—and unmistakably furious, and thus repulsive. In her beauty, Grushenka appears perfectly Apollonian and is thus compared to the Venus de Milo (PSS 14.136–7). In his notebooks, Dostoevsky describes Grushenka as a “goddess,” later adding: “GODDESS!” (БОГИНЯ!) (PSS 15.287). Both Grushenka and Katerina Ivanovna attract by the way they walk, even if differently (PSS 14.136). Yet maenadic beauty is not serene but rather “mysterious” in its sensuousness and seduction. It is “an awful and frightening thing” (“Красота—это страшная и ужасная вещь!”) (PSS 14.100), as Dmitriy experiences it when he “goes mad” and abandons his fiancée Katerina Ivanovna for Grushenka, becoming both sanctified and tortured by his love. Such beauty is not only a blessing but also a curse, both for oneself and others; it is the beauty of rage and fury. No wonder, then, that Katerina Ivanovna appears as “blistering” and a woman of “great wrath” (стремительная Катя; великого гнева женщина) (PSS 14.446; 15.121); and Grushenka is seen by others as “possessed,” “proud and insolent,” a “tiger,” “terrible woman,” and “mutinous wench” (страшная женщина, бунтовая баба) (PSS 14.141; 14.323; 15.270). Yet Grushenka’s and Katerina Ivanovna’s self-descriptions are surprisingly similar: each one considers and describes herself in contradictory terms, both as beautiful and worthy—and as nasty and willful, furious and run amok (PSS 14.139; 14.324; 15.181). Young Lise Khokhlakova, who is an “aspiring” maenad in the novel, is an embodiment of the maenadic paradox: she claims to want not to do good but bad, not to be happy but tormented, and to love Alyosha for his letting her not love him (PSS 15.21–22)! The maenad is thus constituted and torn by opposite forces, which affect both herself and everyone around her. For each other, the maenads show opposite affects, too: mutual distrust, jealousy, and even hatred—but also human sympathy, compassion, and readiness to forgive. In fact, Grushenka clearly realizes her maenadic affinity with Katerina Ivanovna and expresses it to her in a double act of recognizing and rejecting the sister maenad (“Злы мы, мать, с тобой! Обе злы!”; “We are wicked, you and I! We are both wicked!”) (PSS 15.188). On the one hand, Katerina Ivanovna acknowledges that she would have “beaten up” Grushenka, yet on the other hand, she also asks Grushenka for forgiveness (PSS 14.141; 15.188). A quick change of mood is characteristic of maenads—from the Dionysian to the Apollonian and back, from being at an edge to being self-possessed (PSS 14.173). The maenads do not keep their passions to themselves and express the feelings for each other and their Dionysus openly in public and in each other’s face. Their meetings, therefore, invariably turn into a scandal, a “rich” spectacle bordering on farce (“зрелище было богатое”) (PSS 15.122; see also 14.132–41; 15.187–9). The profoundly ambivalent attitude not only toward each other and others and

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but also toward oneself distinguishes the “divine” maenads, who harbor and cherish the Dionysian and the Apollonian much more intensively than the Dostoevskian “gods.” This same ambiguity is seen in the maenads’ capacity not only for spontaneous rage but also for carefully calculated revenge, which is a motive well known in literature since the time of Aristophanes (see Aristophanes, Lys.).39 They both tear apart those whom they love—and save them by an act of unselfish sacrifice; they both ruin and destroy—and save and expiate their Dionysus (Dmitriy). They ruin his life as femmes fatales by making him act in an uncontrollable delirium, yet they help him in all possible ways, by providing him with money at a crucial moment (Katerina Ivanovna) and by being willing to follow him into the “underground” world of the Siberian exile. For this reason, the maenads are not “demonic,” insofar as they are not overly reflective and are capable of action that is not only destructive but also truly generous and redeeming (PSS 15.266). Most importantly, without the maenads, the interaction of the characters cannot go on and the plot cannot unfold. The power that holds all characters together is love: not the brotherly love of the “gods” or sisterly love-hate of the maenads but the erotic and ecstatic, not redeemed and unfulfilled, love, which binds together the characters of the novel. Love relations between heroes differ from dialogical relations in that erotic love is never reciprocal and remains unanswered. Alyosha seems to love Lise; he wants to marry her and wheel her around in a wheelchair (PSS 14.167). Lise, in turn, fantasizes about marrying Alyosha and yet desperately falls in love with Ivan (PSS 15.19–20). Ivan, however, ardently loves Katerina Ivanovna (PSS 15.48). But Katerina Ivanovna is deeply in love with Dmitriy. Dmitriy cannot stop loving Grushenka. And Grushenka strives to love Alyosha and thus attempts to seduce him (she sits on his lap and wants to “swallow” him) (PSS 14.315; 14.318). The chain that erotic unrequited love builds and by which it inexorably links the “gods,” “demons,” and maenads together appears, then, like this: Alyosha ⟶ Lise ⟶ Ivan ⟶ Katerina Ivanovna ⟶ Dmitriy ⟶ Grushenka ⟶ Alyosha. But the erotic full circle is broken by Alyosha, who falls in love with one of the boys, Kolya Krasotkin (whose name comes from “красотка,” “beauty”): both blush and make a mutual declaration of love, and Kolya ardently exclaims: “I loved you, loved terribly, loved and dreamed of you!” (“Любил, ужасно любил, любил и мечтал об вас!”) (PSS 14.504). In this way, Alyosha redeems himself from the Apollonian inability to love. The line of maenadic, erotic love, however, is finally interrupted by a maenad herself—by Grushenka, who turns to Dmitriy in self-sacrifice (“пойду

 F. Schiller, “Merkwürdiges Beispiel einer weiblichen Rache,” in Sämtliche Werke, 5:183–219.

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с тобой на век,”) (PSS 14.469). Yet at this moment the action stops, and all the gods, demons, and maenads return from the ongoing tragedy of the novel to the myth of final redemption. Thus, despite Nietzsche’s quibbles about the death of tragedy, Dostoevsky keeps tragedy alive as a narrative in which people face their fate, are afflicted by disasters, commit crimes, and die, in which they freely accept the guilt for what they could not do otherwise, and are saved in the end by a maenas ex machina’s miraculous moral transformation. In the grand tragedy of Dostoevsky’s works, where the characters are interconnected through suffering, aspiration, and love, the Apollonian and the Dionysian thus turn out to be two indissoluble aspects of the characters rather than two abstract, dialectical opposites that are the driving forces of a historical downfall.

Chapter 2

The Other in the Mirror

Фальшь и ложь, неизбежно проглядывающие во взамоотношении с самим собою. Внешний образ мысли, чувства, внешний образ души. Не я смотрю изнутри своими глазами на мир, а я смотрю на себя глазами мира, чужими глазами; я одержим другим. Здесь нет наивной цельности внешнего и в нутреннего. Подсмотреть свой заочный образ. Наивность слияния себя и другого в зеркальном образе. Избыток другого. У меня нет точки зрения на себя извне, у меня нет подхода к своему собственному внутреннему образу. Из моих глаз глядят чужие глаза. Falsity and lie, which inevitably show up in the relation with oneself. The outer image of thought, of feeling, the outer image of soul. It is not I who is looking from inside with my own eyes at the world, but I am looking at myself with the eyes of the world, with the other’s eyes; I am possessed by the other. Here there is no naïve wholeness of the outer and the inner. To spot one’s own image at one remove. The naïveté of any fusion of oneself with the other in the mirror image. The surplus of the other. I do not have a perspective on myself from outside, I do not have an approach to my own inner image. Gazing out from my eyes are another’s eyes.1

A man stands by a mirror and is looking into it. Somebody’s eyes are looking at him. Is it himself, or somebody else? Something seems missing from the picture; the other transforms the self beyond recognizability. It is 1943. It is winter. It is cold outside. It is quite cold inside too, there being not enough

  Mikhail Bakhtin, “Man at the Mirror” [Человек у зеркала], in Collected Works [Собрание сочинений], vol. 5 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996), 71; henceforth MM, followed by page number. All translations from texts in Russian are mine, unless otherwise noted.

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firewood. The man feels hungry, though he is not at the brink of starvation: potatoes save him. It is also strangely quiet outside, though the war is in full swing. This last year there were two major battles, Stalingrad and Kursk. Yet the war is still very much undecided, and the allies have not yet opened the “second front.” Hopefully, they will do so next year. In the meantime, people keep fighting out there, doing their job, still dying in hope and desperation by the millions. But now it is winter, and cold. So the war lingers for a while, perhaps until spring. Leningrad, the city where the man has spent many years, is still besieged; soon it will be 900 days of the blockade. Rumor is that people are dying of starvation by the thousands. The most awful siege in human history, it seems. La Rochelle? No, this one is definitely worse. The big black radio “plate” on the wall, which cannot be disconnected, whose voice cannot be fully extinguished, does not tell about the stacks of bodies that lie frozen out in the streets of the city. Well, it is better not to ask, not to discuss it with anybody. The radio on the wall tactfully suggests that it is not to be spoken of either, implying as much with its very tone, self-confident and solemn. It is better even not to ask one’s own image in the mirror: who knows, it may betray you. Don’t trust, don’t fear, don’t plead. The man does not want to go back to the dull, now frozen steppes of northern Kazakhstan where you can only see the same woodless flatness all around, so that you always seem to stay in the middle of a great circle, no matter whether you move or stand still. This stillness kills all hope and is worse than any confinement. It crippled Dostoevsky when he was in exile in this vast place. It is no great consolation for the man to realize that the two shared the same distressed place, though not the same time; or maybe even the time as well? Nothing seems to have changed much. No change in time can be perceived in this house of the dead. So, it is better not to speak, not to ask; the other staring out at you is a liar, perhaps a traitor. There is something wrong with the image in the mirror. This other is alien, a stranger. He does not seem to reflect or share your memory— or does he? He looks out at you with hostility. Perhaps this is the man’s own fault and failure; maybe the mirrored other does not want to look the way the man makes him look. Not only the “when” but the “where” also remains unreflected in the mirror. Yet, it is Savelovo, a town on Volga, and across the river is the old town of Kimry. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this forlorn place except that it is more than 100 kilometers north of the capital, Moscow. This is a magic number: all socially suspicious “elements” are to be kept beyond a circle of 100 kilometers in radius with its center in the Kremlin. Everybody is carefully watched and wisely taken care of from the center of this circle, even now. When the man is not teaching at school, he sometimes goes to Moscow. But even this is not altogether safe for a former outlaw. There is no way he can legally remain or live or get any job there. In the end,

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the capital is meant to be a city only for impeccable people, a group to which the man does not belong. So he can only stay for a little while, in the hopes of getting access to the books that his friends secure for him. Each day of his visit, he stays with a different friend, bringing all of his belongings with him—omnia mea mecum porto. Each night, a friend makes an improvised bed by placing chairs together when there is no extra sofa—and mostly, there isn’t, for the friend lives in one room of an apartment consisting of a number of other rooms that are also shared by many families. So they all stay together in one room for this night. The next morning, there will again be a queue to the bathroom and gloomy looks from other inhabitants of the big apartment. The man does not want to be a nuisance. Besides, he does not feel altogether safe staying in the same place for another night, so he moves on to another friend, until all of them are visited. Then he takes a local train at Savelovsky station and goes back to his town. There was a time when he was becoming an acclaimed philosopher; now, he is a schoolteacher. Solitary thinking in front of the mirror does not bring philosophy back; he needs others who would continue talking and disagreeing with him. The only escape from the present appears to be in fiction, so reading and teaching literature keeps him afloat. Remarkably, they still teach German at schools as a foreign language, even now, in the middle of the war. The man himself teaches German. In his past life, he read Kant, Schelling, Natorp, Hermann Cohen, Cassirer, and Gustav Shpet. Now, these books are not around. He thus has to revisit his own written excerpts from the books he once read; he has to go over them, memorize them, make them his own, and copy them verbatim. Anyway, there is almost no hope of publishing anything anymore. In the past, he wrote a number of brilliant books, some under the pseudonyms of his friends. But that was in the past. The past is not real, and the present is elusive when it attempts to mirror the past, as if in a reverse perspective. It is a wonder he is still alive, but this could end at any time. The past is not innocent, the future is opaque. The other in the mirror remains silent about it. Three years ago he finished a work on laughter in which tragic laughter came to coincide with comic and obscene laughter. This perverse laughter can only be properly heard during times when everything is turned upside down, when such laughter seems to be the only remedy against desperation. Turning everything upside down, when the decorations, the language, and the usual appearances change radically, is liberating for a short while, but it is such only when the topsy-turvy world lasts several days. When it lasts forever, it becomes self-destructive, and the laughter turns into a lament. Yet the man wants to grasp the desperate comedy of life, at least in writing. At the moment, the man does not write much. Writing does not make sense anymore. Why write? For whom should he write? Only occasionally does he

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write—it is hard to abandon the habit—a few lines concerning what he still cannot stop thinking about. The man came to this small, godforsaken provincial town five years ago because he wanted to move closer to the capital in the futile hope of being once again part of intellectual life. But that was in 1937, the year of great purges, so the life of the mind quickly and prudently came to a halt. Now, in the middle of uncertainty, there is hardly any hope for the resumption of such a life, at least the one that would include him. The year after he came to this obscure place, the man’s leg was amputated because of a disease that was causing him pain for a long time. But the other in the mirror seems not to see it. There is something troubling and wrong about the relation with this other. So there is no hope now, not even fear, of which the man is simply tired. He has only a deaf non-existence, which in its desperation is almost liberating. But not quite. In his past life, the man was only guilty of attempting to think, perhaps awkwardly. At that time he was not yet afraid of openly discussing Freud, Marx, and Saussure. Yet the level of desperation over that now longgone past, as well as over his current life, is such that not even being a Stoic would help. He tried. Only bitter laughter—and thinking about laughter— about that which cannot be changed seems to be able to liberate him for a while from this weary life. At the moment, it is strangely quiet and calm; only the dogs bark at night. At the war front, there is “nichts neues.” The man is fortunate to be alive. Yet, these days, his being alive may be dangerous for those close to him, who have to share all the hardships of the many years of his protracted exile. His closest other—always there—is his wife Elena Alexandrovna, who accompanies him wherever he goes, or, rather, is made to go. Already long ago he lost any contact with his older brother, a professor in England, an unorthodox Leftist, a friend of Wittgenstein, who is far too suspicious a figure for the authorities. Two of the man’s closest friends, brilliant philosophers and philologists, Matvei Kagan and Lev Pumpyanskiy, died several years ago. Right now, none of his significant others are reflected in the mirror, just himself and this other—not the real other of a dear friend, with whom he might continue talking and disagreeing, but the other of his own self in the mirror. What does this image in the mirror know about the man’s significant others, and what does this mirrored other not want to know about the quiet and terrifying work of war going on out there, beyond the front line, right in the middle of this deceptively calm winter of 1943? Does the other in the mirror know of all this? Does he know anything else? Does he know that the man has just finished reading a book on Jonathan Swift? It’s hard to tell. Time, place, and biography—a seemingly random collection of events in one’s life—perhaps inscribed into one’s invisible and elusive self—are left out of the picture. The mirror image does not catch them. The image is mute and voiceless and

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cannot respond to one’s mourning about undeserved suffering. The other out there is just looking; he does not speak. 1. The short text “Man at the Mirror,” quoted at the opening of this essay, belongs to the few surviving written pieces by Bakhtin from his Savelovo period of the mid-1940s. It consists of eleven lines: nine short sentences, some of which do not have predicates and look more like theses. The text was written quickly with a pencil in a gray-bluish notebook and is perhaps a set of notes for a future article. Thematically and terminologically, it follows (in the same notebook) another text from the same time period, “Rhetoric, to the extent of its mendacity,”2 which thus might be of help in unfolding the mirror notes. The major theme of the “Man at the Mirror” is the relationship of the self and the other, or with the self and the other.3 Bakhtin begins with this theme early on in his life and work and, in a sense, never abandons it; or rather, the theme of the other never leaves Bakhtin, reappearing in his considerations of dialogue and the dialogical other. Now, as the man is standing by the mirror, it is the self, and the other of the self in the self, qua other self, that appear to interact and ask for an explanation. The case seems to be clear: oneself—one’s self—is looking at its mirrored image and is trying to understand itself, to the extent that this image is defined by that other, mirrored self. Looking into a mirror, the self already appears to be in a relation to its mirrored other. Yet the immediacy of such relation might be deceptive: the other out there might not be so immediate. The man’s suspicion is that the Cartesian cogito ergo sum4 is not an expression of the immediacy of either thinking attending to being, or of being as a precondition for the thinking of “am.” Not even the Augustinian fallor, ergo sum (De civ. Dei, 1.26) seems to represent the other in its immediacy and relationship to one’s self, because the “I am mistaken” is a product of deliberation, conclusion, and an implied suspicion, rather than being an immediate distrust. The lack of immediacy in relation to the self is immediately recognizable precisely because it is paradoxical. Immediacy thus cannot be but a mistake, although not in the Augustinian sense but rather as a performative  Bakhtin. “Rhetoric, to the extent of its mendacity . . .” [Риторика, в меру своей лживости . . .], in Collected Works [Собрание сочинений], vol. 5 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996), 63–70. Another closely related set of notes, which will be referred to throughout Bakhtin’s text, is from a period between 1943 and 1949. (See “Towards the questions of self-consciousness and self-evaluation . . . [К вопросам самосознания и самооценки . . . ],” in Collected Works [Собрание сочинений], vol. 5 [Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996], 72–79; henceforth TSS, followed by page number). 3  See Dmitri Nikulin, On Dialogue (Lanham, MD: Lexington 2006), 108ff. 4  René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, in Œuvres de Descartes, vol. 6, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1902), 32; Principia Philosophiae, in Œuvres de Descartes, vol. 8, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1905), I.10, 8. 2

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contradiction: the sense of immediacy with my self as other is mediated by that other’s looking at me through the mirror image. Therefore, the relationship to one’s self as the other begins not with the truth of the cogito but with a lie and mendacity. The deception begins with the mirrored self posing as a real other of another person. The other in the mirror seems to depend on one’s self and one’s self also seems to depend on the other, insofar as we—I—reflect each other. And yet, the real other of another person, even if mirrored, appears to be quite different from this mirrored other because the other’s other is not immediately mirrored by, and is independent of, my self. Thus, there is “falsity and lie, which inevitably show up in the relation with oneself” (MM 71). 2. The falsity that comes from the deceptive immediacy of one’s other, mirrored self, which is mediated by the self that is mediated by the other— mirrored—self, calls for rhetoric to overcome the illusory ambiguity. Only rhetoric seems capable of breaking the suspicious circle of infinite mutual reflection of oneself in the mirror of one’s own gaze. But the rhetorical solution is dialectical; it is the one that can disprove, through an exchange with the other, any thesis, and thus justify its opposite, which in turn can also be disproved. Hence rhetoric is mendacious and as such instils both fear and hope (R 63).5 Fear and hope are two mutually connected modes, rather than psychological perceptions, of the self. Fear appears to be the mode of perception of an illusion, including an illusory mirrored image of one’s self. The fear of illusion is the fear of nothing. The nothingness causes fear and provokes the hope of overcoming the frightening nihil. These two non-psychological “feelings” are appealed to not by rhetoric alone but in a different way—by religion (in an attempt to overcome death), by social motivation (in an urge to become a socially significant and recognized “something”), by creativity (in an endeavor to produce something lasting and memorable), and by love (in an effort to last in the beloved, and possibly in a new and different physical other self). But fear and hope draw a circle that already brings closure to any attempt at understanding oneself even before any such attempt takes place, thereby finalizing even the simple unreflected and unreflective gaze out there in the mirror, and without, as yet, any recognition of the image. For Bakhtin, the circle of fear and hope can only be broken by art and cognition (R 63). Only

 Popova notes that the theme of fear and hope in Bakhtin probably comes back to Cassirer (I. L. Popova, “Rhetoric, to the extent of its mendacity . . .,” Mikhail Bakhtin, Collected Works [Собрание сочинений], vol. 5 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996), 462–3n1. See Ernst Cassirer, “Furcht und Hoffnung,” in Das mythische Denken, vol. 2 of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1925), 100ff.

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art and cognition (which, as self-knowledge, is not only—and even not so much—a reflection, but rather, a refraction and a deflection), by involving the real other who is rigid and stubborn, and who disagrees but at least does not lie, may come as a liberation from the constant Unbehagen of an unaccountable fear and the futile hope of overcoming it. The lie of one’s mirrored other comes in as a certain mystery of the other’s look, which is one’s own. Yet mystery itself is often violence, insofar as mystery promises a release from fear and the fulfillment of hope behind an image, without, however, delivering that promise. Violence is thus always “proportionate” to lying (R 65). If, furthermore, lying is to be overcome in cognition, which in this case means “to know oneself” and to know “what is the case” with oneself in self-cognition as assisted by the other, then the lie and falsity of the rhetorical substitute consists in finalizing and objectifying the image of that which has yet to be known. Indeed, that which is to be known, in this case of and about oneself, is not yet known, and thus, at this present moment of an unreflective and naïve staring into the mirror, it is quite undetermined. The self might be able to say something about itself, and thus connect with itself as another self, but perhaps one must also undergo a painful yet potentially liberating process of self-cognition, of dialogical negotiating with oneself as another. At this moment, the self is simply not yet—and perhaps never will be—finalized into a clearly defined and finite image. The finalization of one’s self—which then becomes the subject of cognition—is a violence to oneself, a deadening of oneself as another that presents the other as finalized and not free—that is, as the one who fully coincides with herself in her appearance, and who is thus incapable of being seen or approached differently. Such a finalized other is an objectified self; it is oneself turned into a welldefined object, like a target that one always misses, and which is turned into an object of use and consumption (R 66). One’s inexhaustibility in relation to oneself as the other does not yet mean that such an other is utterly vague. Rather, the other of oneself is always new and unexpected; it is the one with whom one can communicate, talk, and inquire about oneself. Only thus can one speak to oneself—not in one’s absence but in one’s full yet never completely thematizable presence. 3. One’s self, as one that is fully finalized and seemingly defined before any act of definition, can take place in the self as the other who is defined in the mirror and who is present in the image, the “outer image of thought, of feeling, outer image of soul” (MM 71). If one cannot see herself directly and perceive immediately (the physical parallel would be the capacity to see only the parts of one’s body), then one has to see oneself as a mirrored other, namely, as the other who is equally also a self looking at itself. But one’s self, looking at itself as at another, is thus already not oneself; rather, it is oneself as one’s other who does not see

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herself naturally and immediately. The mirrored other, who represents the self in the way that it is not and never appears to itself, is thus an awkward other. The proper self, the eye, cannot look at itself without the other self, the other eye. The eye sees itself in and through the mirrored eye. Yet the mirrored eye, the eye’s own other, only sees what the eye allows it to see, and does so only because of the eye of the self. One’s other as the mirrored self is thus mediated by the self, which is itself mediated by, and is reacting to, the other of the self. But who sees whom? It seems that both the man at and the man in the mirror see each other. And who defines whom? The self realizes itself through the mirrored other, yet that other is always the one that the self makes to be, that is, to be mirrored, because this other is the other of the self when the self startlingly watches itself in its own image. 4. Hence, the eye looks at itself through its reflected other and is possessed by this other, the mirrored image of the eye, which is now its other eye. “Not I am looking from inside with my own eyes at the world, but I am looking at myself with the eyes of the world, with the other’s eyes; I am possessed by the other” (MM 71). The eye and the other of the eye meet at a certain point, a sui generis focus of mutual reflection and careful, suspicious observation, whereby each other follows the other, pretending to be the first, and yet each constantly cedes this primacy to its other to the point of being unable to act any more. The eye and its mirrored other are thus both joined and disrupted in the focal image of the mirror. But what is this mirror? The mirror appears to be that shifting surface upon which the gaze and the image are momentarily focused, only to be moved next moment either closer to the eye, or closer to the mirrored eye, thus losing its focus in an attempt to gain it. The mirror, then, seems to exist only with and at the moment of mirroring, and not before.6 5. Therefore, the man looking into the mirror, on the one hand, depends on his image (on “the other’s eyes”), which copies and follows the movements of the original. On the other hand, the original—the man looking at himself—is hypnotically fascinated with the other who obeys every one of his slightest intentions and gestures, so that the man is impelled by the precise and inescapably necessary imitations of the mirror image into performing such movements, the only purpose of which is to be copied in the mirror. The original thus becomes dependent on its mirrored other and almost falls into a

 See Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia, II.2, 102.

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cataleptic state, striving to reproduce itself for the sake of its image, for the sake of being precisely reflected and followed. The fascination with, and even possession by, the absolute precision of copying one’s body—never fully accessible—in and by its mirror image, where the purpose of the original suddenly appears to become present and acts or moves in order to be copied and mirrored—leads to a rather awkward relation to one’s image in the mirror. Possessed by the other, one cannot get rid of it. 6. Yet, the looking eye is not identical with the mirrored eye looking back at it. Even if the other, mirrored eye is the “same” as this eye, it is also always already different, precisely because it is mirrored. Thus, despite a naïve— perhaps desired—perception of the fusion of one’s self with its represented other, the self is still different from its other. The other by which the self is mirrored is an anonymous other self, which is therefore not the self proper. Indeed, the self does not feel the mirrored other’s pain, does not perceive the other’s perception—the self feels only its own. The self exercises its own look, which is perceived by itself in an astonishingly different manner than is the other’s stern and stiff look in and out of the mirror, even if such selfperception is not an immediate, Cartesian self-awareness but is rather the result of an interaction with one’s other. Even while intensely looking at each other, even in a desire to merge, the two remain stubbornly distinct, mutually strange, and alien. Because of this, “here there is no naïve wholeness of the outer and the inner” (MM 71). 7. In what sense is the mirror image other to the eye looking at it? First of all, the mirror image of the self is other to the self simply in the sense that an image is different from its prototype, to which the image may or may not (if the mirror is distorting) be isomorphic. The image is also other to the imaged numerically, for they are already two (or more, even up to infinity in a complex system of mirrors). Moreover, the image is other to the original in that it is symmetrically mirrored, whereby left and right do resemble each other, but never coincide, as with a pair of Kantian gloves. The most important difference between the man and his image, however, is that the other—the image—does not exist as an independent person. Rather, the image is possessed by the man standing at the mirror. The image also possesses him of whom it is the image, thereby making the man dependent on the image and making him struggle with the image, liberate himself from the image, and fit into a new, imagined one. There is no person in the image, only an imitation of one. The mirrored other can thus repeat and copy the man, and the self in him, only syntactically, not semantically; the image only reproduces the order of reflections and movements (whereby one might assign the primacy of movement to either of them, that is, to the original or the image), and not of the meanings, of that which is expressed or shown.

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Yet the mirrored other is also different from the real other of another person. Even if it is difficult to establish argumentatively the objective reality of the other person in their irreducible difference to one’s subjective other, still such difference is already there in the very attitudes toward these two others. Indeed, one’s other, mirrored self is to be taken as insufficient for itself—but the other person is always considered good for me.7 Since the mirrored other of the self is not good for itself, it is never (yet) the other proper. The other’s self as it is reflected in the mirror is painful and shameful, for it is an everinsufficient self. Hence, the commandment that the self issues to itself is to “love oneself as one’s other (neighbor)” (MM 71). 8. Still, the self does not appear directly accessible to itself because, first, it is not a particular, well-defined thing. And second, since the other self is not yet clearly established with regard to the self as the mirrored other, the reflexivity of self-awareness is not at all immediate, as Descartes takes it to be in the act of the cogito, but is a task yet to be accomplished, and it is to be established in one’s relation to the self as other and to the other as self. The self knows the other as other, that is, as the other self, or as the not-self; the other knows the self as self; and the self knows that the other knows the self; and the other knows that the self knows that the other knows the self. Reflexivity appears, then, as a complex process of mutual recognition, negotiation, and “othering,” whereby the perspective of the self is never definitively established with absolute certainty. This is why “I do not have a perspective on myself from outside, I do not have an approach to my own inner image” (MM 71). 9. So the self and the not-self meet “halfway through” in an image. The image is the image of the self, which, properly, is neither the self nor the other of the self. The image of the self as the other, mirrored self, then, always misrepresents the self, of which, strictly speaking, no ultimate and definitive image is possible. Any image is a definite image, and as such it closes, it screens and shields that of which it is the image; both the self and its other are seen in the mirrored image. The image prevents the self from being other, makes the other coincide with itself, and brings it to a “desperation of the finalized and of the ready” (R 67). The image hides and veils (and exaggerates) the self to itself in the presence of its other. Thus, the image is a lie—inescapable and necessary. And yet, the self can only approach itself, and can only be approached, through an image, though not as an image. To be—the old theme in  On the motive of hatred of and toward oneself in one’s mirror image in Dostoevsky’s “underground man,” see S. G. Bocharov, “Man at the Mirror [Человек у зеркала],” in Mikhail Bakhtin, Collected Works [Собрание сочинений], vol. 5 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996), 465.

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philosophy—is to be without an image. And yet, no being can escape images and imaging, especially once it attempts to revert to itself, that is, to be or become reflexive. 10. Hence, when the self is speaking to itself, the image is silent and tacit, but it is only through the image that the self can address itself in its mirrored “othering” and in producing a (self)-observing image. In this respect, the image is similar to written speech as it is criticized by Alcidamas and later by Plato: such speech is similar to a painted bronze statue that imitates a living person but that can neither speak nor answer nor defend itself.8 11. The self and the not-self, then, do not clearly see each other; they always miss each other in and through the mirrored image of the self that constantly moves, always tending to lose its focus and certainty. Rather, the self and not-self call each other in and through the image. Each one has a voice, but their voices are different: the mirrored self has a finalized voice that presents itself in the way that it appears—as rounded up and finalized. The voice of the self, on the contrary, indefinite and thus “unfinalizable,” as Bakhtin terms it,9 because it can always be new and other, due to which, furthermore, the other self is also constantly renewed and othered. The two voices sincerely attempt to reach out to each other, but because the one is not finalizable and the other is finalized (and thus appears as a fully defined subject S with definite predicates Ps), they never coincide—rather, they struggle and maintain a tension with each other (R 64). The other’s voice is a silenced cry, one that is always only partially heard because of its finalization; hence its inability to respond properly to the call of one’s own voice. The two voices appear to address each other in and through the image. Yet the mirrored other does not reply, the other is looking at itself through the image that hides each one’s other in a desperate attempt to reveal that other. The image that is in between the two—namely between the self and the not-self—is “small” (R 68); it is as though it were always in the process of being refocused, renegotiated, changed, accepted, and rejected. The voices of the self and of the mirrored, other self, are not symmetrical and neither coincide nor really meet in the image of the self (R 67). Rather, they negotiate and talk to each other—in different, asymmetrical voices. Once the man dares to come to the mirror, to reflect himself for himself and to look into his own eyes, he lets himself out. Mirroring himself, he invites the mirrored other to appear. Together, by looking at each other, they produce

 See Alcidamas, Peri Sophistōn 27–33; and Plato, Phaedr., 275d–e.  Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson, vol. 8 of Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 59; and Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford Press, 1990), 36ff.

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their—one’s—“own” image. The man produces the image for the other and in the other. It is hard to say the same about the self’s other, because this other is finalized, and as such it does not have a free voice and Willkür (arbitrariness or willfulness). Thus, the self and the other of the self are other to each other; they are never ultimately brought together into a wholeness and completeness of fusion or identity. The two are different and mutually irreducible, even if both affect each other. The “naïveté of fusion of oneself with the other in the mirror image” (MM 71) is such that an aspired return to oneself remains a futile hope. 12. Because of this, the other self, which is supposed to help one’s self reflect upon and somehow come to an understanding of that self, fully moves into the “world” (TSS 73). The world then looks at me in my own eyes, but it is neither a given nor a complete whole. In fact, the world as the other—in this case, my other—remains hidden “behind” the image. This point of view, namely the view of oneself as self, is thus the meeting point of what is often an obscure speech, a babbling of the self and the other’s mirrored self in the image of the self. In this sense, the eye of the other, which is one’s own reflected eye, is a muddled look that is unable to return one’s glance properly. The image, which is often unfocused, is not yet—and never fully is—defined; it is a meeting point, or rather, it is an open neighborhood, precisely because it is not focused, consisting of two points of view, of two “regards.” The two looks that always miss each other, the one being unfinalizable while the other is (all too) well defined, thus establish the sense of the “inner” and the “outer,” in contradistinction to the Cartesian “inner” of the res cogitans and the “outer” of the res extensa. For the Cartesian, ubi cogito, ibi sum, where I think, there I am (I am fully there where I think myself as well-defined), whereby I am fully accessible to myself and I am clearly thought by myself. Unlike the Cartesian ego, however, the Bakhtinian self in the mirror of self-reflection is never univocally located as being focused in the mirrored image: rather, ubi cogito, ibi non sum. 13. Therefore, in any image of oneself there are points of view from both the inside and the outside, namely those of the self and the not-self of the world. Yet, as was said above, the two are not equivalent and they are not symmetrical: the outside voice is complete, the look of the other’s eyes always coincides with itself, and it is what it is at this moment, although it can, and probably will, be different in future, just as it was in the past. The inside voice or look, however, because it is always indefinite without the response or echo of the other’s voice (that is, without a look in return), is deaf without the other’s voice and blind without the mirrored other outside of the self-image; thus it is never complete and never fully thematized. One’s own inner point of view, one’s own voice, therefore, always has a capacity toward

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being other without abandoning itself as its self or one’s voice. Even if it is not yet apprehended by itself, the self is not yet finalized; it is never turned into a clearly and univocally known and cognizable object.10 The capacity of being differently defined while still remaining the same looking eye, the same speaking voice, explodes the image, unfocuses and refocuses the image. And yet, only in the image does the self meet its other, each time hopelessly renewing its attempt at thematizing and “knowing itself.” Because of the inescapable partiality of the representation of oneself to oneself in the mirror image, one never fully coincides with oneself in one’s self. In other words, the self cannot be defined, cannot define itself, in finite terms. In particular, this means that in thinking about oneself, any attempt to restore oneself by a rational, reflective procedure of reconstruction is partial in the sense of being discursive, in which one is never fully or momentarily accessible to oneself as a cogito that is immediately aware of itself. The reflexivity of the self, then, is speculative. Even etymologically, mirror, speculum, comes from speculari, among whose meanings are “to look around,” “to watch,” “to spy.” Speculation, which accompanies discursive thinking, implies, due to its reflexivity, that one is watching for oneself, while at the same time realizing that one is doing something improper and can never fit oneself into an adequately representative image. 14. The self can thus be characterized as unfinalizable; and the other, mirrored self—as rounded up and finalized. If the image is the point or the “neighborhood” where the self meets itself through its own other, thereby always missing itself, then what can be said about the image? The man in the mirror sees his image, which he recognizes as his own because the image seems to obey his intentions of moving and, broadly speaking, his intention to change. Yet, the image is also stubborn and reflects what the man does not intend—and perhaps does not even want—to be reflected. Moreover, as was stated earlier, the image not only discloses one’s self to itself, but it equally also hides it from itself. The live presence of oneself in the act of mirroring both of and with oneself as the other, who is vaguely perceived by the self as actual and alive, is deadened and stiffened because of the incongruence of the self with one’s other self in the mirror image. Being objective and destitute of any inner, the image acts “at one remove” or “in one’s absence,” even when one is present to it.11  Mikhail Bakhtin, “Dostoevsky, 1961,” in Collected Works [Собрание сочинений], vol. 5 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996), 367. 11  In Bakhtin’s terms, the image is “at one remove” (заочный, zaochnyi) (R 66–67, 69.). Caryl Emerson, who made a number of valuable comments to this paper, notes that “ ‘being at one remove’ [заочность, zaochnost’, ‘at a distance’, literally, behind one’s eyes and thus unseen—DN] is the opposite of being on-hand, available, ready, present as a consciousness and a body that one can touch, interact with, see and respond to without intermediaries [наличность, nalichnost, ‘being 10

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The image that is in front of one’s eye is in and of one’s eye; it veils the eye from oneself and thus places the reflected eye “behind and outside one’s eyes and one’s gaze” as something that one cannot see in one’s own presence. In a sense, then, the image is nothing, for it only connects the self to the mirrored other, thereby inevitably hiding and disconnecting the one from the other. Being “at a remove,” one’s image is therefore altogether and fully out there and lacks any inside. But the self wants itself to be somehow known to itself on the inside, both as reflected and at ease with itself. Yet what it has, what it sees, is the mirror image “at a remove.” It is not that the image lies—for it tells and shows what it tells. Rather, the image forces one to fit into it by shrinking or extending. The image makes one dependent on the mirrored other (TSS 73), which it does by defining the “inner” from the “outside” by connecting the self with the other of the self, which or who is finalized and is thus not really adequate to the self in any sense. By making that which is not finalizable, namely the self, finalized by the other reflected and mirrored self, the image thereby always exercises violence (R 69). In an attempt to trace himself and, in fact, to liberate himself from his own preset representation in and by the other, the man wants “to spot his own image at one remove” (MM 71). 15. If the inside meets the outside, then both meet and are reflected in the mirror image in which they never coincide: the self is never what it is reflected in and as the image. When the self and the other self meet, they miss each other in an unfocused neighborhood of the mirror surface. And since one can never fully fit into one’s own image, which is mutually produced by the self and by its finalized other, therefore one can never be fully in the world. The self, then, perceives itself at a tangent to the world (TSS 72–73) because it is only as if it touches the world, is into, but never fully in the world. One is, thus, always as though at the edge of the world. An attempt to move into the world brings one to one’s mirror image. It is from an edge of, or at a tangent to, the world, where one moves toward oneself as reflected in the world. In doing so, one’s self looks at one’s other touching the other in and through the image. 16. Being at the edge, one cannot see one’s own back, which is not immediately perceivable. One needs to reflect, and to be reflected, in order to realize how one looks, not only from the front of the eye, but also from the on-hand’, literally, being in front of one’s face, which also translates Hegel’s Dasein as ‘beingthere’]). The relevance to the ‘Man at the Mirror…’ is that the categories are subtly, brilliantly interlaced: we look in the mirror hoping to mimic ‘how we look to others,’ but since it is only a single-consciousness-loop, me looking at myself and not me looking at my reflection in the pupils of your eyes, it is both a false being on-hand and a false being at one remove. Since genuine being on-hand requires you to make me cohere, with borders and edges” (Caryl Emerson, personal letter to author, March 25, 2004).

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“back of the head” (R 67–68). The image of the “back of the head” can only be seen as objective, and hence as already finalized—only thus can it fit a scientific picture of the world, which is never complete, but which is definite at any moment. One’s mirrored or reflected image is always on the surface; it is a thin film with nothing behind it, with no back and no depth. As such, the mirrored image both separates and unites the self and its other, which, in turn, has neither self-reliance nor independence.12 The image both reveals the self and hides the self, because the self is always shown as finalized, as a this, and as a fixed thing. Hence, there is no back to be seen in the mirror, which is why the other of the self is present as a look of and into one’s eye. Not having a back, a “seamy side,” the image does not have an inside. It is all flat on the outside, which coincides with its surface. Even if adding another mirror and thus arranging a complex system of reflections might demonstrate one’s “back of the head,” it will still be the same leveled and finalized image with no back. Once mirrored, the back of the head, in turn, acquires its own inaccessible back of the head. When two mirrors are arranged to reflect the “back of the head” and to mirror each other, the image proliferates to infinity by being indefinitely multiplied and still remains a sheer surface with no depth, with its dark side still remaining forever invisible. 17. Being seen and seeing itself through the other in the mirror image, the self perceives itself as associated with a body, which is implied in and by the finalized image. The peculiarity of the human condition consists in being embodied, that is, in being always present to a particular body and mirrored in it (the reason for the association with this particular body as mine remains forever hidden). This body can move in the mirror, but, properly speaking, it does not appear to be the man’s body, because, first, his image is fully on the surface (of the mirror) and, second, the image is always partial and fragmented. The body, one’s outside, like the world, has no “back of the head”; it is never given to the self in its entirety, as a whole, in any possible act of experience. Yet, from the inside, one does not perceive oneself as a whole either, but rather only through a fragmented partial reconstruction. The self is thus as if clad in the body that is projected onto the outside mirror image. The contact with the outside body as presented in the mirror is visual, and it is established once the self projects itself as if onto a stage and sees itself acting on that stage, that is, it sees itself as the other who puts itself in the position

 “Independence” here renders Selbstständigkeit, or независимость.

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of the other, like an actor following the instructions of a director, who, in turn, is therefore no different from the actor in this context. 18. The man who sees his body in the mirror wants to see it the way it is, and yet always sees only parts and fragments, and also never sees its back. The attempt to see one’s body as an objective image equally fails, because the image is not free from the self, just as it is not free from the other self. The image is an always moving and renegotiable focus for the meeting of the two, which are thus one without being one. Looking at one’s image is almost a voyeuristic peeping at one’s own appearance. Watching oneself almost furtively in the mirror thus results in seeing an embarrassing image that one does not want to see, because that which is seen never coincides with the vaguely imagined inner image. Spotting “one’s own image at one remove” (MM 71), removing oneself from a narcissistic self-identification, is often a painful experience. The utter strangeness and painfulness of looking at oneself in the mirror makes such an act intimate, and it prohibits the public showing of one’s image, which is often traumatic and humiliating. A student reflected in mirrors during a ballet class can only see their inevitable non-coincidence with a prescribed image. They thus have to reconstruct their appearance—their own is of a partial, flat image—into a normative other, a required ought of the appearance, which is furthermore supposed to become themselves as an even stranger other to their initially reflected other. This makes such a double, or second and imposed other, even more inaccessible, hidden, and alienated from the mirrored other of their body, which is otherwise already fractional and incomplete. The objectified, standardized, and publicly accepted body, as it is hailed and sanctified through common fashion, is thus imposed on one’s own appearance, and onto the mirrored body, which is finalized in its every fragment. The reflected body of one’s image is inescapably individual, and hence it can never properly fit the Procrustean bed of the publicly approved image. 19. When the man decides to stand desperately in front of the mirror and dares to look into it, he puts himself on the stage of the world, as it were, at the same time still attending to himself and being unable to abandon or get lost in his image. A “simple formula” defines one’s attitude towards oneself: “I am looking at myself by and through the eyes of the other, I am evaluating myself from the point of view of the other” (TSS 72). Since, however, the other self looks at oneself through the image that has neither back nor depth, this other does not possess the fullness of one’s life. But at least the other in one’s mirror image is out there, in the world as a finalized and defined part of the world. Yet, as was said earlier, one’s self is at a tangent to the world, it moves into the world but is never fully in the world.

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Because of this, one cannot altogether leave the world (TSS 72). Therefore, one cannot get rid of one’s image, either. Thus, the image of the self, where the never fully definable and finalizable self meets its finalized, definite and defined other, is “out there”—is outside. The “outsideness” (See R 68–69; TSS 72)13 of the image means its utter completion and petrification into a photographic image that will forever stay the same, and while it may, perhaps, be differently interpreted, still it is never able to reveal the unique and personal touch of the photographed person. The outsideness of an image signifies its full finalization. The outsideness of the self’s image means that it is fully out there and never becomes part of one’s self, even if it affects one’s own perception of oneself and one’s identity. In other words, even if one internalizes one’s own mirror image, still that image is never a part of the self, which is neither fully definable nor ultimately accessible to itself. On the contrary, the outsideness of the real other (of another person), and the outsideness that is defined by the other’s spatial expression and location, can help one gain fresh and new perspective on oneself.14 The outsideness of the image thus means that the image hides and prevents the imaged—the self—from being newly and differently present to itself through the other (R 67).15 20. In the last instance, the view of the other’s self, concerning oneself, comes to one’s image from the self, when one dares to become mirrored, and thus to send out one’s other. Since, as was said above, the image is a sui generis neighborhood where such a view is being constantly refocused, the image always testifies to its non-coincidence with one’s finalized other, who, in turn, is like a target that is always missed by the unfinalizable self. In this sense, the image may be considered as alien and strange, as coming from elsewhere, from outside, or from a “nowhere” behind the mirror. If the self is always unfinalized, then any prereflexive inner perspective on, or awareness of, oneself, whatever it might be, is too vague and thus cannot be established with any (Cartesian) certainty, which is postreflexive and  The term (by Caryl Emerson) stands for Bakhtin’s “вненаходимость” (in Tzvetan Todorov’s translation, “exotopy.” Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984], 99; Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997], 207ff). 14  See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Aesthetics of Verbal Creativity [Эстетика словесного творчества] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), 334. 15  Later, in 1961, preparing a reworked edition of the book on Dostoevsky’s poetics, Bakhtin uses the term “outsideness” also to characterize the position of the author vis-à-vis the portrayed characters. Since the author is in an “outside” position, they might choose to decide for the characters and thus force them into saying what the author intends to say (Bakhtin, “Dostoevsky, 1961,” 367). However, such a position of the author’s outsideness is to be abandoned in order to let the characters themselves speak for themselves, to let each follow her intrinsic voice, and to let the collisions within the plot unwrap accordingly, which are often contrary and against the author’s preestablished, “outside” plan. 13

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determined by the completed other of the self. In the reflective and reflected look at oneself, the inner look becomes the outer in the mirror. Because of its outside location, such an outside view of the mirror self seems to have a certain “surplus” over an inner view of oneself concerning oneself (R 64); that is, to have the privileged position of an observer who can gaze at themselves from different perspectives and points of view. Because of the other’s outsideness, the “surplus of the other” (MM 71) seems inevitable. “From without,” the other self seems to be capable of having another perspective on itself, of seeing what one cannot immediately see (R 68). But the surplus is not that of a real other,16 for the mirrored other cannot assume just any position to observe one’s self. The mirror self is positioned by the self in front of itself, for the eye looks straight at itself in an attempt to see and reflect on itself. This eye is one’s own eye, and yet, as mirrored, it is at the same time the other’s eye: “other eyes are gazing from my eyes” (MM 71). And because the other is finalized, the surplus of the mirrored other’s point of view is always and already finalizing, insofar as it fits one’s self into a mirror image. The mirror image is still and silent in its outsideness, having a finalizing grip on the self, and which, flat and strained, veils as much as it reveals the other of the self.

 The surplus of the mirrored other’s point of view is not even that of the author in a novel, unless one’s self is considered to be its own product and production, where the self is both the author and the character, and where the two constantly rewrite and redefine each other. This, however, cannot be the case if the other self (the character) is finalized and completed and the self (the author) is not finalized, for, in the novel, the two are supposed to be equal in their capacity to determine the course of the plot (see Bakhtin, “Dostoevsky” 1961, 367).

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Conversation and Critique

Philosophers are curious people: not only are they curious about the things and the world in which they are situated but also—perhaps primarily—about themselves. Often, philosophical self-questioning becomes an obsession. Perhaps, it is a sign of reflectivity ingrained into the project of modern philosophy, wherein one cannot do philosophy without at the same time giving an account of what one does while doing it. This is what Rorty does in his magnum opus, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, in which critical reflection on contemporary problem-solvingoriented philosophy turns philosophy into an enterprise that calls for a radical, self-subversive rethinking of itself. Here, he argues against the image of the mind as a “glassy,” self-transparent substance capable of knowing truth, thereby also making his own mind non-transparent and not in the search for truth. Rorty’s main struggle is against the notion of truth as objective (universal and non-historical, which corresponds to the states of things out there that do not depend on us), linguistic (one that searches for a universal vocabulary that would be equally applicable to the description of all possible descriptions or realms of cognition), representational and epistemological (one that provides a proper description of the world), and foundational (one that is justified by a right philosophical discourse, which itself explains a possibility of any particular cognitive activity, including science and social sciences).1  “Philosophy’s central concern is to be a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide culture up into areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretense of doing so)” (Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979], 3); henceforth PMN, followed by page number. He writes that “there is no such thing as epistemology and no surrogate can be found for it” (PMN 317). Rorty himself takes the main antagonist of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature to be representationalism after the emergence of the new science, or “the doctrine that our knowledge of the world passes through a representing medium which may or may not distort

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Later, Rorty claims that “truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about”2 and that truth “is too sublime . . . to be either recognized or aimed at.”3 One might say the struggle against Truth, a sui generis anti-epistemological epistemology, becomes, or is, the truth for Rorty. As a result, philosophy for Rorty cannot be conceived of as an autonomous discipline that discovers and adequately describes, thinks, and understands things-that-are-out-there (PMN 131). Rather, it is an enterprise that produces such things that, for Rorty, constitute the world of social phenomena, which he understands negatively as a non-physical world, a world that he tends simply to dismiss as a historical construction of new science that, from its very inception, is guilty of representationalism and foundationalism. A philosopher, then, becomes engaged in constant self-creation,4 a recreation of oneself that accompanies, in the words of Habermas’s tribute to Rorty, “a restless self-transformation of society and culture.”5 The ensuing position is radical historicism (PMN 10). Rather than being engaged in a futile and unproductive search for an epistemology that would embrace a synoptic, clear vision of things and provide us with a universal vocabulary applicable to the description of all things true, we have to opt for a “cultural anthropology (in a large sense which includes intellectual history)” (PMN 381). Historicism, then, is “the idea that our philosophical vocabularies and problematics are attempts to deal with contingent historical circumstances rather than ‘perennial’ or ‘basic’ ones.”6 Any belief, then, “is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance” (CI 189). However, such an understanding of the historical is itself historical. Historicism in philosophy and culture is a result of a historical development in philosophy and culture. For this reason, Rorty attempts both a historical reconstruction of the history of philosophy within the context of Western what the world is really like.” (“Response to Williams,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom [Oxford: Blackwell, 2000], 216). Thus, Rorty’s criticism of Charles Taylor, in Taylor’s own account, is that Taylor is still “concerned with propounding an alternative story about what it is to be a knowing agent rather than just dropping the whole poisoned epistemological subject” (Charles Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy,” in Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and D. R. Hiley [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 160). 2  Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xiii. 3  Richard Rorty, “Universality and Truth,” in Rorty and His Critics, 2. 4  “There is no way to bring self-creation together with justice at the level of theory” (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], xiv; henceforth CI, followed by page number). 5  Jürgen Habermas, “ ‘. . . And to define America, her athletic democracy’: The Philosopher and the Language Shaper; In Memory of Richard Rorty,” New Literary History 39, no. 1 (2008), 6. 6  Richard Rorty, “Biography and Philosophy,” in Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 152.

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culture—in which the villains are Plato, Descartes, and Kant—and further envisages a philosophical culture which would bring us out of the impasse of epistemology- and truth-oriented modern philosophical inquiry. Such a radically novel culture, then, would be anti-normative (against all attempts to provide a final vocabulary that would allow for an insight into the essences of things) and yet at the same time, paradoxically, normative too, in the sense that it must be accepted. Moreover, this new projected culture has to be historicist and nominalist, one that would settle not for a theory, but for the proliferation of multiple narratives which connect the present with the past, on the one hand, and with utopian futures, on the other. More important, it would regard the realization of utopias, and the envisaging of still further utopias, as an endless process—an endless, proliferating realization of Freedom, rather than a convergence toward an already existing Truth. (CI xvi)

Being utopian or utopia-oriented, such a culture would not only be always critical and self-critical but would also embrace and recognize the radical contingency of our situatedness in a social and physical world and understanding its multiple features, of our very selfhood and language (CI 3ff.). It must be noted that Rorty is not the first to pay attention to contingency as a possible constituent of modernity: before him, it was Baudelaire who was the first to introduce the very term “modernity” and to speak, in his “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), about the privilege of the “transitory, fugitive and contingent” over the “eternal and immutable.”7 The recognition of one’s radical contingency should turn any philosopher into a critical ironist (see CI 61, 72ff.).8 Such irony, however, is not a philosophical, Socratic irony that might lead us to a recognition of our ignorance and entice us to keep thinking about a problem but rather, as Habermas puts it, is an expression of “the melancholy of a disappointed metaphysician.”9 The only meaningful way for a Rortyean philosopher to be a philosopher is to be an ironist who recognizes the radical contingency of human existence in the world and with fellow human beings. Such an ironist inevitably has to be a disappointed metaphysician, because, for Rorty, there is no way she  See Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 48. 8  Rorty writes, “I shall define an ironist as someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her current vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others” (CI 73). 9  Jürgen Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” in Rorty and His Critics, 32. 7

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can meaningfully posit a philosophical problem, let alone solve it, since the essences of things are inaccessible to us for the simple reason that they do not exist. A philosopher, then, can only be a public intellectual critical of the tradition, continually denouncing, as Descartes and Hobbes did, the “philosophy of the schools” (PMN 131), and whose only paradigm can be literature.10 Therefore, philosophy has to be substituted with literary criticism, because only literary criticism (1) is properly perceptive of the contingency of our situation; (2) can provide an ironic, critical distance from the study of texts, each of which is equally contingent yet capable of meaning; and (3) can proliferate new vocabularies, each of which creates its own inhabitable world (CI 79–81). Philosophy, then, turns into a kind of story-telling, wherein each story is contingent, plausible, and in principle equal to any other one. Philosophy as narrative, then, becomes “plain talk” in public without forcing the teller to be committed to a position stronger than one’s own, to a particular and peculiar individual point of view. This program may be formulated simply as on s’engage et puis on va voir, or “let’s engage in talking something about something that seems interesting without any strong epistemological commitments, and then let’s see if we are able to say anything exciting.” Historicity and contingency thus entail that all philosophy is left with, and is meant for, is a narrative—or a set of possibly incommensurable narratives—about anything that somebody might find of interest.11 Anything becomes possible and yet nothing is sure. Thus, Rorty’s own philippics against Truth do not constitute a speculative argument—for he wants to move away precisely from even a possibility of it—but a narrative, a reconstructive story, or a staged drama wherein the author’s dramatis personae (who do not have to share much in common with the historical figures) are Plato, Galileo, Descartes, Kant, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, and others. Such a dramatic story, then, is always contingent in its beginning yet—paradoxically—appears inescapably teleological or necessary in its end (PMN 391).12 However, such an end is achieved as a subjective, teleological reconstruction of the history of philosophy, which in principle might always be told otherwise.

 “All of these wonderful books are only rungs on a ladder that, with a bit of luck, one day we may be able to do without. If we stopped reading canonical philosophy books, we would be less aware of the forces that make us think and talk as we do. We would be less aware to grasp our contingency, less capable of being ‘ironists’ ” (Richard Rorty, “Persuasion is a Good Thing,” in Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, 79). 11  “The conversational interest of philosophy as a subject . . . has varied and will continue to vary in unpredictable ways depending upon contingencies” (PMN 392). 12  On this point, Rorty references Harold Bloom and Foucault (PMN 391n).

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By telling a genealogical story about philosophy as a history of philosophy, Rorty turns himself into a stage director who graciously allows the spectators to join in and become interlocutors within a community of peers, who share the same narrative that underlies the story on stage. Yet, stories are not only told—they are told to someone. Hence, a post-epistemological philosophy has to be practiced as a conversation. Concluding his attack on modern philosophy qua epistemology, Rorty outlines his own solution to the problem of what philosophy should be and how it should be practiced: “I end this book with an allusion to Oakeshott’s famous title [‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’], because it catches the tone in which, I think, philosophy should be discussed” (PMN 389).13 Yet, a closer look at Oakeshott’s piece shows that its influence on Rorty (who also mentions Oakeshott several times on another occasion in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity14) is deeper than just the “famous title.” In his paper, Oakeshott argues that human activity and intercourse cannot be limited to inquiry alone.15 Humankind has invented different “modes of speaking,” which are different ways of shaping human activity. Oakeshott takes the world to be the world of experience “within which self and not-self divulge themselves to reflection” (VP 204). The self, for him, is the activity that consists in “imagining,” whereas the not-self is composed of “images,” which are never isolated but always belong to the world. As a mode of speaking, every kind of activity establishes and represents a “voice” in the conversation of mankind. For Oakeshott, there are only two voices dominating in such “conversation”: the voice of inquiry (science) and the voice of practice, or practical activity (politics). However, this framing reduces all human activity to just these two kinds, and inevitably leads to boredom and monotony. Oakeshott wants to add a third voice to it—that of poetry (VP 202–203). The “voices,” for him, are particular types of activity of “making images of a certain kind”: each “voice” “is a reflection of human activity” (VP 199), which means that it is not a personal human voice but an impersonal mode of action, and, as the activity “in practice is desiring and obtaining, and activity in science is inquiring and understanding, so poetry is contemplating and delighting” (VP 242; see also 214–6). At the same time, similarly to Rorty, Oakeshott does not recognize a “vita contemplativa;  This last section of the book is titled “Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind” (PMN 389–94).  “John Dewey, Michael Oakeshott, and John Rawls have all helped undermine the idea of a transhistorical ‘absolutely valid’ set of concepts which would serve as ‘philosophical foundations’ of liberalism” (CI 57). Rorty also discusses Oakeshott’s Of Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) (see CI 58–60). 15  Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen & Co., 1962), 197–9; henceforth VP, followed by page number. 13 14

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there are only moments of contemplative activity abstracted and rescued from the flow of curiosity and contrivance” (VP 246). As a universal and universalizable human activity, poetry thus has no cognitive or utilitarian practical purpose other than pure “delighting” and “entertaining mere images” (VP 221), which yields enjoyment, “not a victory, but a momentary release, a brief enchantment” (VP 247). Nevertheless, at the end of Oakeshott’s overtly poetic analysis, it remains unclear why there are just three, and not more, such voices within the societal “conversation.” For Oakeshott, all modes of activity are essentially equal, and no one can have a privileged position in the “conversation.” There is no hierarchy and no fixed number of voices, so that each one is equally important, even if each voice tends to be “prone to superbia”—that is—to usurp the whole of conversation for itself (VP 200–201). Philosophy, however, has no specific voice in such a conversation—it has no special role except for being “the impulse to study the quality and style of each voice” (VP 200). Philosophy thus loses any privileged (cognitive, constitutive, or normative) position in human activity, becomes dethroned from being an overarching activity or a leading voice, and is at best just a way to reflect on other activities that constitute the very life and being of the “conversation of mankind.” Rorty eagerly joins Oakeshott in this enterprise. The “conversation of mankind,” then, becomes “the meeting-place of various modes of imagining; and in this conversation there is, therefore, no voice without an idiom of its own: the voices are not divergences from some ideal, non-idiomatic manner of speaking, they diverge only from one another” (VP 206). Put otherwise, every “voice” comes with its own “vocabulary.” Yet, ceteris paribus, despite the equality of all the voices in such conversation, poetry still has a special position in it, because poetry is uninterested in its own product, which is not obtained for the purpose of either understanding the inquired or obtaining the desired. In a sense, poetry, then, is more representative of conversation in its entirety, because, similar to conversation, poetry (1) recognizes no external authority, (2) tolerates a diversity of voices, (3) is there not for the sake of inquiry or knowledge of a subject or any profit (except for the “pure delight” of “contemplation”), and (4) comes with the spirit of playfulness (VP 198–202).16  “In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or debate; there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing. Of course, a conversation may have passages of argument and a speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itself does not compose an argument. . . . Nobody asks where they [thoughts] have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part. . . . Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit. . . . It is with conversation as with

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Thus, if for Oakeshott it is proper for a human to be a member of “the society of conversationists” (VP 241), and hence involved in the ongoing conversation, it is still conversation that implies personally practiced yet historically established, conditioned, and recognized number of impersonal modes of activity. In such “conversation,” poetry (despite its etymology) remains a non-productive and non-personal voice of humankind in its conversation with itself. Thus, the way out of the epistemological impasse for Rorty is conversation, which is the solution he suggests at the end of Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature. The “conversational philosophy,” then, should not ask how to “get things right” but rather how to get itself engaged in a renewed “historical and metaphilosophical” conversation about new problems, by using and inventing a new language.17 Rather than talking about conversation, Rorty practices it. Because of his ongoing struggle against the very possibility of a final and finalized theory of any subject, Rorty does not and cannot provide a theory of conversation and a thorough analysis of how we are and can be in conversation: somehow, we are always in conversation, as we are in language. From Rorty’s perspective, it is important not that we know what conversation is (for this would amount to knowing its essence) but that we know how to use it. Yet, even thus, one can discern several distinctive features of conversation in Rorty. In his later works, he does not abandon the “conversational turn” altogether, yet, he does not go back to a conversation about conversation very often, making only occasional references to it. Remarkably, however, toward the end of his life, Rorty returned to the notion of conversation once again, suggesting that the analytic/continental philosophy distinction should be substituted with analytic/conversational (or neo-Kantian/neo-Hegelian). “Conversation,” in Rorty, appears to stand for “dialogue.” As I have argued elsewhere, dialogue should be considered personal (the locus of meeting the other person as well as the other of oneself), non-productive (it does not produce anything but allows for being, which is being in dialogue with the other), oral and spontaneous (hence not literary, which is an ordered, artificial imitation of live dialogue, which is often haphazard and seemingly undirected), and as such opposed to monologue.18 The following analysis of conversation in Rorty will compare it, on the one hand, with my own understanding of dialogue and, on the other hand, with Oakeshott’s treatment of

gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices” (VP 198). 17  Richard Rorty, “Analytic and Conversational Philosophy,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 4, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 120–30. 18  See Dmitri Nikulin, On Dialogue (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), passim.

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conversation. The two main points I am interested in here are whether Rorty’s conversation is productive and whether it is personal. CONVERSATION AS PRODUCTIVE If conversation has to replace the grand project of philosophy, then nothing is external to conversation: there are no other constraints on conversation as a practice except for those that come from conversation itself—“no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers.”19 Hence, conversation is always a conversation with other fellow-inquirers, who are thus still inquirers into and about something. This means that (1) those involved in a philosophical conversation are still critical inquirers whose aim is to criticize and reject any well-established or “grounded” theory or grand narrative; and that (2) they intend to come to a meaningful conclusion. A philosopher, for Rorty, should not think of herself “as knowing something about knowing which nobody else knows so well” (PMN 392). Conversation aims at discussing a point or subject-matter, and attempts— with no guarantee—to come to an understanding of it, even if not in terms of a universal and universalizable ultimate vocabulary. Hence, a philosopher is always involved in an ongoing conversation, in a debate whose aim and agenda are still cognitive, although it does not intend to produce a sound conclusion. Even if conversation substitutes a systematic search for truth, it is clearly not a method. In particular, conversation is not dialectical dialogue in and through which we might hope to get to a (or the) truth of the debated thing; rather, one hopes, in conversation, to be able to discuss a thing and have at least some provisional insight into it, an insight that may be corrected at a later point when either we, the thing itself, or the conversational context change. The open-ended philosophy that Rorty famously calls “edifying,” then, can engender a new direction or a program (as Rorty himself is trying to do)—yet only accidentally, as a “byproduct” of the conversational activity (PMN 378–9). Hence, if for Oakeshott, dialogue is non-productive, for Rorty, conversation becomes productive, capable of producing—asserting or contesting—a belief, a point of view, even if such a production is accidental and occurs in a situation of radical contingency of its own conditions, topics, and speakers. An unresolved difficulty that remains here is that conversation

 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 165; see also 167.

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turns into a conversational reflection of the meta-condition of philosophy and philosophizing, which itself is conversation. A possible way out, which Rorty does not take but hints at by the very way he is practicing conversation, is to deny any possibility, or rather to postulate the impossibility, of a meta-position as it is universalist and hence inherently “epistemological.” Conversation turns into a somehow supported belief, although not a justified true belief: “If we see knowing not as having an essence, to be described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current standards, to believe, then we are well on the way to seeing conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood” (PMN 389).20 Reflecting on what philosophy is, is doing philosophy (and vice versa) without securing an external point of view. Any conversation in philosophy and about philosophy is then always only a conversation, one that can never give us access to a non-conversational system of ultimately grounded, expressed, and expressible truths. But if this is the case, then Rorty’s conversation is not really a dialogue, because conversation is not a place of and for being but for a possible production of it. In other words, Rorty’s conversation is still about τέχνη and not φύσις, if one is to use a Heideggerian-Aristotelian way of expressing it. If conversation is (accidentally) productive, what does it produce? For Rorty, it produces (1) a meaning of the discussed item; and, at the same time, (2) the self of the one who discusses. That is to say, conversation is strongly productive of both the discussed subject and of the subject-“discussor.” In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, hermeneutics is presented as an alternative to epistemology, which is in search of essences (PMN 357). Hermeneutics, however, is not properly a method. Yet, Rorty’s hermeneutics has to be closely associated with conversation. And since conversation is the only way to support our beliefs (although not as universal ones), hermeneutical conversation has to be productive of meaning. The peculiarity of Rorty’s hermeneutical project, for which he has been often criticized, lies in its main goal—the interpretation of pressing moral problems and not so much of works of art (which, for him, unlike for Gadamer, are not ancient works and texts but rather contemporary literary texts). Eventually, such hermeneutics has to become a conversation that can produce a moral consensus. Furthermore, philosophy as conversation produces a story, and thus presupposes a literary narrative, which assumes the place of a rational, dialectical justification. Hence, philosophical conversation (or conversational

 Rorty is here attempting to “draw some corollaries” from Sellars’s “logical space of reasons” (see Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality [New York: Humanities Press, 1963], 169, cited in PMN 389).

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philosophy) is predominantly a written and artificial literary genre21 that is writing- and text-oriented in its scope, genre, and range of possible tasks, even if it was practiced by Rorty in the form both of oral talks and written texts. In fact, Rorty’s discussion of conversation is itself non-conversational as it is not a real dialogue with real interlocutors. Rather, it is an imaginary monologue that incorporates possible objections and sed contras envisaged by the sole speaker; it is a theatrical piece that invents and posits imaginary interlocutors, who are literary characters named “Plato,” “Descartes,” “Kant,” and so on. In the garb of conversation, such a story is still not really fragmented, and even if it wants to be contingent and non-systematic, it is still a consistent and coherent tale and, despite its best efforts, a grand narrative: it presents a whole point of view is a holistic story, as Taylor suggests.22 This story is Rorty’s story, and this conversation is Rorty’s conversation. Hence, it is not a dialogue with real interlocutors but a monologue. Moreover, it is a repeated monologue, the one that Rorty keeps telling us over and over again. It is a monologue repeatedly uttered to and within a community of other fellow speakers, who may be important as interlocutors but are much more significant as the listeners of a productive, reconstructive historical narrative. Yet, Rorty insists on the conversational character of his thinking, because both thinking and conversation are to be considered free, which means that both have to embrace and exemplify utter contingency. For Rorty, there is a fundamental choice which confronts the reflective mind: that between accepting the contingent character of starting-points, and attempting to evade this contingency. To accept the contingency of starting-points is to accept our inheritance from, and our conversation with, our fellow-humans as our only source of guidance. To attempt to evade this contingency is to hope to become a properlyprogrammed machine.23

If truth is not found but made, then the very language in which we might hope to express a belief is itself radically contingent, and thus our use of it is always in a conversation with other fellow-speakers.24 Therefore, there can be no universal vocabulary of philosophy, the one we might use in any conversation.  Rorty, talks, for example, of “the literary genre we call philosophy” (Consequences of Pragmatism, xiv). 22  Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy,” 161. 23  Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 166. 24  “Languages are made rather than found” (CI 7); and “truth is made rather than found” (CI 53), this contradicts Rorty’s earlier claim that the distinction between epistemology and hermeneutics is not the same as the one between “what is ‘out there’ and what we ‘make up’ ” (PMN 342). 21

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There is, of course, an apparent performative contradiction involved in such a statement: if every vocabulary used in conversation is contingent, then Rorty’s vocabulary is contingent too. Yet, he takes his conversation not to be contingent, at least for him. The only way out for Rorty seems to be to recognize a conversationalist as a radical ironist, because only an ironist is capable of creating her own innovative vocabulary. However, if everyone creates and stays within her own vocabulary, communication becomes impossible. For Rorty, an edifying philosopher is a truly innovative vocabularist. But then the edifying philosopher has to impose his new vocabulary on others, who have to share and receive it, which makes conversation partners unequal. Conversation, then, becomes not a strict notion but rather a metaphor for a set of different and loosely connected practices. Such conversation seems to fit well with Rorty’s intention to abandon a monolithic, unified philosophy and move toward one with an ever-refreshing capacity for looking at the world and moral problems in new and contingent situations, which might require an equally new and idiosyncratic use of language (CI 26–28). Yet, different, often incommensurable, vocabularies create different types of conversation with different communicative styles. Rorty himself recognizes a distinction between at least two types of conversation, private and public, when he says that we have to “drop the demand for a theory that unifies the public and private, and to treat the demands of self-creation [private] and of human solidarity [public] as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable” (CI xv). If this is the case, then there should be two different conversations going on, one private (“self-realization”), and the other public (“solidarity”), with two incommensurable “vocabularies.” But then private and public conversations have to be incommensurable, which means that no private talk can become, or influence, conversation in the public realm. Rorty seems to suggest that one has to be committed and ready to embrace and participate in a radical plurality of vocabularies and a multiplicity of conversational modes. Rorty’s conversation, then, is emphatically nominalistic: it is always only a conversation and as such comes with a singular vocabulary. Nevertheless, multiple conversations can become mutually commensurable, even if Rorty denies the possibility of an overarching universal vocabulary suitable for one general conversation that would give us not only a common ground for communicating with each other but also a way of knowing and reflecting on things that are discovered in the world. The way to save conversation would be to claim that its purpose is still nonepistemological, even if accidentally one claims to know something; but this, for Rorty, will always be a construction resulting from a contingent conversation. Conversation attempts to make it possible to talk to the other rather than putting her on the spot: conversation has to replace confrontation (PMN

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163).25 Thus, Rorty praises Jacques Bouveresse for being “so clearly aimed at facilitating mutual understanding, as opposed to achieving a dialectical victory.”26 But if conversation aims at mutual understanding and not at gaining a victory in a dispute about an abstract matter, then no vocabulary can remain ultimately contingent, singular, or “idiosyncratic,” because inevitably it will be shared and used by fellow interlocutors, who will thus always opt to be more than just listeners. Therefore, conversation is productive for Rorty; hence it is not about dialogical co-being but still about looking for and creating (non-universal) beliefs. Yet conversation creates not only nominalistic meanings in the process of hermeneutic interpretation, which is the creation of a literary narrative. In conversation, every person has to become a construction within the context of a particular project of historical reconstruction that replaces a metaphysical description. But telling a story to others in a conversation amounts to giving simultaneously an account to oneself of oneself, which amounts to creating a self. And self-creation amounts to self-transformation or edification, Bildung, of oneself as a conversational, hermeneutic “redescription”: “we become different people. . . . We ‘remake’ ourselves as we read more, talk more, and write more” (PMN 359).27 However, because a created self can only be contingent for Rorty, a “self-redescription” can mean only one’s own free production, the author’s literary fiction, a creation of oneself by oneself ex nihilo.28 Since Rorty prefers a productive paradigm to that of discovery, ποίησις to φύσις, it comes as no surprise that the re-descriptive creation of oneself, of the self, is assigned to the work of poetry. Rorty regrets being a professional philosopher and wants rather to be an inspired poet who designs a new language, new vocabulary, new genres, and new conversation, in the spirit of a Romantic genius or Nietzsche’s Übermensch. This for Rorty is “the essentially human activity—it suggests the poet, rather than the knower, as the man who realizes human nature.”29 The old quarrel between poetry and philosophy represents “the tension between an effort to achieve self-creation by the recognition of contingency and an effort to achieve universality by the transcendence of contingency” (CI 25).30 In this quarrel, Rorty unequivocally

 He writes, “Once conversation replaces confrontation, the notion of the mind as Mirror of Nature can be discarded” (PMN 170). 26  Rorty, Rorty and His Critics, 153. 27  For Proust and Nietzsche, Rorty writes, “there is nothing more powerful or important than selfredescription” (CI 99). 28  Rorty also talks about the “contingency of selfhood” (see PMN 23ff.) 29  Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 137. 30  One might note in passing that Rorty constantly moves, thinks, and (re)creates himself in terms of oppositions: truth/contingency, philosophy/poetry, and so on, which apparently does not bother 25

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sides with poetry because for him it is self-creation.31 Since there is no predetermined essence of human being for him, such poetry can only be ironical, contingent, and private, a poetry that creates and uses its own vocabulary, not understandable to the uninitiated. It is here that the influence of Oakeshott’s notion of poetry as the third voice in the “conversation of mankind” is most manifest in Rorty’s thinking and writing. But if this is a conversation, then it is a monological one. CONVERSATION AS IMPERSONAL In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty sees the edifying philosopher (himself in particular) as the one—in fact, the only one—who can prevent conversation from degenerating into an inquiry aimed at the realization of a systematic research program or the search for a universal vocabulary: “edifying philosophy aims at continuing a conversation rather than at discovering truth” (PMN 372–3). He writes, “To see keeping conversation going as a sufficient aim of philosophy . . . is to see human beings as generators of new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to describe accurately” (PMN 378). New descriptions of old things makes them renewed, insofar as they are produced and constructed in and by such an act of description. It is worth noting that this approach coincides with the program of the analysis of new poetic language by the Russian formalists in the 1920s (Lev Yakubinsky, Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, etc.). Here, however, one still makes a distinction between the poet who produces a new vision and the scholar who analyzes it. Rorty, however, wants to be both the poet of a new philosophical language, the one who creates and uses it, and the one who analyzes it—both the doer and the teller, the hero and the poet, Agamemnon and Homer. Such a conversation, however, is impersonal; it is not meant to disclose something within a person, within the other or oneself—but is about supporting either a belief, an innovative description, or self-edification, which for Rorty is a self-creation. But even such a self, created in conversation, is not personal, because this self is a free, literary, and poetic (“poietic”) construction. Rorty never thinks of conversation as possibly elucidating something personal within a person: there is nothing to be disclosed in us to us in conversation with others, because everyone is to be seen as a free creation within a re-description of and by a new vocabulary. him, because, for him such, oppositions themselves have to be the result of an epistemological dialectical position that he hopes to overcome. 31  Everybody has to have “a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities” (CI 84).

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Besides, when Rorty argues in support of his own (nominalistic and partial) point of view against another (equally partial) point of view that he ascribes to other edifying philosophers (whose position is then very much simplified), he tacitly presupposes that his own view may, and should, become the view of the reader—that is, anyone’s and everyone’s view. Conversation, thus, is not really intersubjective but still aims at establishing—and imposing—a belief, although not a universal and universalizable one. This is conversation about (a belief), and not so much with (the other). Moreover, the edifying philosopher’s conversational activity in practicing and extending her new vocabulary, in new ways of re-description, or in the re-invention of oneself and reality (which is mostly social reality for Rorty, and also includes human being as the other in conversation), establishes a group identity. This is the identity of peers or fellow speakers who share a particular vocabulary and agree on its implicit (linguistic, pragmatic, philosophical, moral, etc.) presuppositions. In a response to McDowell, Rorty claims: “I think that if we do our best with our peers, we need not worry about answering to any other norms, nor to the world.”32 Such conversation has no other criteria for its acceptability than a consensus of the peers, and thus always stays—and intends to stay—within the particular. Accepted and shared, this kind of discourse is a conversation within a shared and established group identity, which for Rorty is provisional and may be always changed by an edifying re-description, and thus is not directed to the other person qua person. Later, in Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty claims: Our identification with our community—our society, our political tradition, our intellectual heritage—is heightened when we see this community as ours rather than nature’s, shaped rather than found, one among many which men have made. In the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right.33

Conversation, then, is established by edifying thinkers, who are poets creating a new language, but then is practiced and transformed within a community shaped by an innovative vocabulary. Such conversation presupposes a group identity and a constructed identity of an individual, and yet still moves within a monologism of its vocabulary, trying to address, formulate, and often invent problems that are not immediately (if at all) understandable to and within other conversational communities. But how does one then speak across communities or address  Richard Rorty, “Response to McDowell,” in Rorty and His Critics, 127.  Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 166.

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other communities with their own vocabularies that may not be secular, (post-)enlightened, and anti-foundationalist? One is obliged to be committed to a particular community and its vocabulary and to see other people as members of a conversational community, as individuals shaped in and by its ongoing conversation, but not as unique persons. Moreover, Rorty’s conversational community is exclusive of everyone who does not happen to belong to it. But exclusion is the worst dialogical crime that one can possibly conceive of, because it deprives person of her very being, which is being in dialogue. The entire account of conversation gets even more tangled due to Rorty’s claim, in which he straightforwardly follows Oakeshott’s lead, that philosophy as an activity is only a voice along with other voices, and not as a subject or Fach (PMN 391). In such a case, conversation is nothing more than a culturally and historically established type of communicative practice. Conversation, then, keeps oscillating between an individual “poetic” re-description, group communicative identity, and a voice among other disciplines. One might say, then, that conversation is an ambiguous and confused notion in Rorty, one by which he means different things at different times and in different contexts, without ultimately providing a coherent story about philosophy as the “conversation of mankind.” Perhaps such ambiguity fits within Rorty’s own intention to criticize any constructive attempt at building the ultimate grand system of philosophy as false and pretentious. Rorty’s “conversation,” on the contrary, is to be destructive of false statements and constructive of the self (including one’s own self), and to move away from a universal truth, including the truth about conversation; rather, we just speak and keep talking about different problems, producing new meanings and a new self. Bouveresse notes, “As a number of critics have suggested, the weakness of Rorty’s conception lies in his failure to indicate how things should work in a post-philosophical world where one will no longer refer to such things as reason, truth, and objectivity.”34 Bouveresse is also joined by Richard Bernstein, who argues that in his program of political application or extension of his philosophy, “Rorty is much more effective in ridiculing the cultural Left than he is in coming up with feasible political alternatives.”35 If this is the case, Rorty’s conversation is not and cannot be dialogue; at least, from my perspective. But what is it, then?  Jacques Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty: Pragmatism and its Consequences,” in Rorty and His Critics, 140. 35  Richard J. Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” in Richard Rorty, 127. Bernstein cautions, however, that “it is terribly misleading to suggest that these are the only two viable ways of thinking about the role of political and social theory: either misguided foundational theory or self-indulgent postmodern theorizing” (ibid, 136). 34

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Rorty seems to have never overcome his passion for truth, even if it was presented as a non-truth, a negative truth about truth’s never-existence. Yet, it might be “edifying” to look at truth the way it is practiced in the “conversation of mankind” (i.e., as spoken). Here, I follow Foucault’s insight that rather than speaking about truth, we might pay attention to speaking truth, “truthtelling” or freedom of speech, παρρησία, to which he dedicates a whole set of lectures delivered in 1983.36 Unlike modern (Cartesian) truth, which is mental and requires doubt or a skeptical stance in order to be established, παρρησία is verbal and implies no doubt (at least, it does not begin with doubt), because the speaker is convinced that she is being truthful in telling truth. Hence, the truth-teller is not a (Cartesian) skeptic but an audacious and courageous speaker who dares to tell truth in a dangerous situation, when one faces the possibility of hurting and angering one’s interlocutor. However, telling truth is perceived as a moral and political duty and presupposes and requires a critical attitude toward the existing (mostly moral, social, and political) world.37 Freedom of speech understood as both frankness and a duty of telling truth becomes, then, the major political freedom that has to be constantly reasserted, maintained, and struggled for within public discourse by courageous citizens. Analyzing various historical forms of παρρησία in antiquity, Foucault draws our attention to its different forms, which he puts into a succession: the Epicurean παρρησία occurs within community life; the Cynic παρρησία within public life; and, finally, the Stoic παρρησία within individual life.38 Such a progression, however, appears to be schematic and obsolete, insofar as it provides a sui generis logic for the development of the historical forms of free speech. I want to take a closer look at one of these historical forms, the Cynic παρρησία. In one of his responses to his critics, Rorty says: “I entirely agree with Habermas when he says that philosophical ‘paradigms do not form an arbitrary sequence but a dialectical relationship.’ ”39 He thus seems to recognize the non-arbitrariness of philosophical paradigms and, implicitly, his own role in the constitution of one of them. This is a rather astonishing claim for Rorty, given his constant polemics against finding out “how things are,” and his strong suspicion against, and avoidance of, any objective laws of nature or history. My thesis is that Rorty, despite the considerable confusion in his description and account of conversation, was a modern Cynic (and not a modern  Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001).  Ibid., 11–20. 38  Ibid., 107–66. 39  Richard Rorty, “Response to Habermas,” in Rorty and His Critics, 63. 36 37

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Skeptic, as he is often portrayed) in the very way he was practicing his “conversation with mankind.”40 This is Rorty’s role in the modern comedy of philosophy. If I am right, this implies that there are, if not logical stages within the movement of philosophy that reproduce or resemble each other in different epochs, then at least certain philosophical types that appear on stage when summoned at an appropriate moment. If philosophizing as a constantly renewed attempt at telling has to replace philosophy as a theoretical enterprise that grounds universal truths, then one can find several features equally distinctive of a Cynic philosopher and Rorty. (By a “Cynic” I mean here both Antisthenes [445–365 BCE, a student of Socrates] and Diogenes [of Sinope, 412–323 BCE, a student of Antisthenes]).41 (1) A Cynic is deeply suspicious of theory, and hence has no positive philosophical doctrine. Moreover, she does not intend to establish a systematic theoretical teaching, because she deems it to be pompous and ultimately useless. A theoretical doctrine has to be about truth that is to be established as a result of a dialectical procedure and conversational exercise. But such a procedure, first, can be considered always refutable by means of other dialectical exercises. Therefore, nothing can be refuted or asserted, which means that contradiction is impossible. As Antisthenes famously claims to Plato, μὴ εἶναι ἀντιλέγειν, although it might be that this claim itself is performatively self-contradictory (DL 3.35). And second, a system of abstract claims provides no incentive for practical action, either in moral self-betterment or in political improvement. Because of such a negative, essentially critical, attitude toward theory, theoretical philosophy cannot claim to have a privileged position among other disciplines or practices and has to be abandoned altogether. In the Mirror of Nature, Rorty denounces the very idea of philosophy as an autonomous discipline and asks us to drop metaphysics, because it “converts philosophy into a boring academic specialty” (PMN 384). Later, he claims that “the Left should put a moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit.”42  By a “Cynic,” I mean an adherent to the school of Cynicism and not a cynical person, someone who exemplifies a bitter, overly ironic, derogatory attitude toward others that often intends to humiliate them in a vain and futile attempt to establish oneself over others by ridiculing them, and mostly expresses a person’s extreme uncertainty about themselves. 41  Antisthenes, Fragmenta, ed. Fernanda Declara Caizzi (Milan: Istituto editoriale cisalpino, 1966); DL 6.1, §80; Dio bks. VI, VIII, IX, and X. See also Foucault, Fearless Speech, 115–33; Plato, Phd. 59b; Luis E. Navia, Classical Cynicism: A Critical Study (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996); and Luis E. Navia, Diogenes of Sinope: The Man in the Tub (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998). 42  Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 91. Richard Bernstein, however, notes that “the trouble 40

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(2) As a result of their anti-theoretical (“anti-foundationalist”) position, the Cynics disliked Plato: Antisthenes wrote anti-Platonic dialogues, and both Antisthenes and Diogenes kept mocking at Plato who, in turn, would ironically retort back (DL 3.35, 6.3, 6.7, 6.24–26, 6.53; see also Plato, Soph. 251b). Rorty is well known for making Plato a “metaphysician” and a straw man responsible for the contemporary universalist tendency in philosophy (primarily, in analytic epistemology), which for Rorty is both misleading and utopian, insofar as it aspires to “context-transcendent universal norms.”43 (3) Hence, much more important than philosophical theorizing is the example of one’s personal life and behavior, which has to exemplify right action in moral and political life. Being a Cynic is a distinctive style and way of life that becomes one’s own creation, and is a practical enactment of truth as the right attitude toward oneself and others, rather than a conceived abstract truth. One has to practice truth, assert it in one’s actions, rather than provide a systematic account, definition, or theory, or λόγος, of truth. Foucault gets it exactly right when he says that the Cynics “taught by way of examples . . . . The Cynic attitude is, in its basic form, just an extremely radical version of the very Greek conception of the relationship between one’s way of life and knowledge of truth.”44 This is the reason why Rorty eventually prefers pragmatism to theoretical epistemology: the pragmatic philosophical attitude is practical, insofar as one has to constantly critically deliberate and choose how to live and act. Truth-telling, then, is truth-making. (4) The Cynics were deeply suspicious of the existing philosophical schools, including both the Academy and the Sophistic schools, because, in their views, such schools intended to usurp the access to truth as truth-telling and make it accessible only to a chosen few who know how to think properly. In this respect, the followers of Socrates betrayed his legacy by becoming exclusive, elitist philosophical clubs, whose members indulge in endless discussion of philosophical puzzles and conundrums that have no real practical consequences. Instead, a Cynic should be ready to constantly be and speak in public: by doing so publicly, he avoids the exclusion of anyone from the possibility of living a good life and thereby asserts a profound equality of and among people. Most philosophers in antiquity occasionally speak in public: they “would occasionally deliver speeches where they presented their doctrines. Usually, however, they would lecture in front of a rather small audience. The Cynics,

with Rorty’s ‘inspirational’ liberalism is that, at best, it tends to become merely inspirational and sentimental, without much bite. . . . Inspirational liberalism without detailed, concrete plans for action tends to become empty” (Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” 137). 43  Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” 129–30. 44  Foucault, Fearless Speech, 117.

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in contrast, disliked this kind of elitist exclusion and preferred to address a large crowd.”45 The Cynics thus assert that who one is does not depend on one’s birth but on one’s becoming through the result of the life one lives. The motive of human equality as a result of one’s effort of becoming free in conversation with others and oneself, and not being free by being born into a wealthy class or family, becomes a leading motive in the later Stoics, but originates among post-Socratic Cynics. Thus, Antisthenes “showed his contempt for the airs which the Athenians gave themselves on the strength of being sprung from the soil by the remark that this did not make them any better born than snails and wingless locusts.”46 (5) By speaking in public and acting through personal example, a Cynic philosopher is not asserting an abstract true proposition but is engaged in truth-telling, or παρρησία.47 That is exactly Rorty’s position: we always have to try our best to speak the truth to others to the best of our abilities.48 Speaking in public takes the form of “preaching.”49 The Cynic diatribe is a “conversation to oneself” (ἑαυτῷ ὁημιλεῖν) (DL 6.6.), which takes the form of self-investigation in front of and in presence of other people. In Rorty, speaking in public becomes, in Bernstein’s words, “a type of lay sermon.”50 (6) Being suspicious of theory, which is considered either useless or implicitly oppressive, the Cynic is engaged—has to be engaged—in a radically subversive liberating practice. However, this is potentially dangerous to one’s reputation and even life. Therefore, the Cynic speaking truth, παρρησία, always involves risk. Hence, one has to have courage, one has to dare to speak one’s mind and act in public. Cynic “public preaching” is always critical of oppressive moral, social, and political practices. Even if there is little positive doctrine or formulation of the ideals of personal and public good, there is still a powerful affirmation of freedom (ἐλευθερία).51 Paradoxically, this affirmation is negative because it comes as a (practical and  Foucault, Fearless Speech, 119. For instance, Plato addressed the Athenian citizens with his famously failed speech, “On the Good” (Peri tagathou) (see Aristotle, Fragmenta selecta, ed. W. D. Ross [Oxford: Clarendon, 1955], 111–20; Alexander of Aphrodisias, In Aristotelis Metaphysica commentaria, ed. Michael Hayduck [Berlin: George Reimer, 1891], 55.20 ff.; Simplicius, In Aristotelis Physicorum commentaria, ed. Hermann Diels [Berlin: George Reimer, 1882], 453.22–455.11). 46  Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, trans. and ed. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 6.1. 47  See also Guiseppe Scarpat, Parrhesia: Storia del termine e delle sue traduzioni in latino (Brescia: Paideia, 1964), 62–69 (La parrhesia cinica). Foucault identifies three main features of the Cynic παρρησία: “critical preaching,” “scandalous behavior,” and “provocative dialogue” (Fearless Speech, 119–33). I use these distinctions but also try to identify further parrhesiastic traits. 48  We all remember Rorty speaking publicly at a teach-in at the New School in April 2002, in support of the Graduate Faculty. 49  Foucault, Fearless Speech, 119. 50  Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” 137. 51  Scarpat, Parrhesia, 62. 45

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conversational) negation. Freedom is freedom of life without fear or shame. It is the life that does not come in an argument but is shown and embodied in a Cynic philosopher who becomes the paradigmatic example of the “citizen of the world” (κοσμοπολίτης) (DL 6.63). Rorty’s intention to consider philosophy as practically liberating is very similar to Antisthenes’s and Diogenes’s. (7) The Cynic as a public speaker has to be an ironist, an “ironist preacher,” because the ironist position allows, first, not taking philosophy too solemnly and seriously. In Rorty’s account, irony is “recognition of the contingency of one’s ‘final vocabulary.’ ”52 Rorty both speaks about irony (even if sometimes without irony)—and also practices it. He is serious about being ironic, which itself is ironic. And, second, irony enables one to more easily overcome the fear of speaking in public: the fear of both appearing rhetorically awkward and politically provocative. If the ironist speaker does not take too seriously what she says—or pretends not to take it too seriously—then she is playing a public game (Foucault calls it a “parrhesiastic game”), which is the game of luring the listeners into becoming interlocutors who dare to question the existing moral and political institutions. Qua game, it is never boring but is engaging and interesting, and thus helps to suspend a fear of going against the traditional and usual, which may be oppressive. Cynic irony, then, differs from Socratic irony, whose purpose is to exhibit one’s ignorance and encourage one to think for oneself. Cynic (“parrhesiastic”) irony does not intend to promote an “unabashed ‘bad’ nihilistic relativism,”53 but rather to problematize one’s own moral and political habits in front of others and thereby invite others to do the same. Of course, taken to an extreme, Cynic irony may become bitterly sarcastic and thus self-destructive. Taylor, in particular, complains about “Rorty’s habit of using ironically inflated language to describe the position of his realist opponents.”54 (8) Cynic public talk is critical by being provocative: it challenges conventional codes and invites others to reconsider one’s ἦθος, one’s behavior and way of life. Thus, Diogenes is accused of having “re-stamped the currency” (παραχαράξαντος τὸ νόμισμα) (DL 6.20, 6.56), that is, called for a total reevaluation of all the values. By provoking others, a Cynic, first, affirms her personal and political freedom to act and speak in the way she considers proper, and, second, draws others into conversation and dialogue. As Foucault rightly sees it, such provocative Cynic dialogue (predominantly oral but also written) differs from the Socratic dialectical dialogue. Although both  Rorty, “Persuasion is a Good Thing,” 72; see also CI 73ff.  Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” 129. 54  Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy,” 177. 52 53

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begin with questions and answers, the Socratic dialogue targets ignorance and shows the interlocutors that they are ignorant of their very ignorance, whereas the Cynic dialogue (in Diogenes) targets vanity, pride, and desire for domination, not only of politicians (Alexander) but also of philosophers (Plato) who attempt to conquer and hold the whole world in one’s power of either political violence or philosophical thinking.55 However, there is more similarity between the Socratic and Cynic dialogues than Foucault wants to recognize, not only because the Cynic dialogue genetically comes out, and is considered a version of, the Σωκρατικὸς λόγος, but also because in both kinds of dialogue, talking to the other, which is always a verbal fight or duel, implies a possibility of one’s own betterment in a battle for achieving dangerous freedom-from (passions and desires) and freedom-for (the good). (9) Such provocative behavior is shocking and implies a scandal, because Cynic dialogue targets, and goes against, the conventions of the day. Sometimes, one has to provoke others to think differently through irritating actions and speeches in order to draw their attention to morally and socially questionable and corrupt practices, with a hope of changing them. Scandalous behavior suspends the accepted and acceptable norms of conduct and often performatively denies them. Diogenes’s acts in public were notably indecent and often obscene (DL 6.32, 6.37, 6.61). Scandal always has the structure of a theatrical act performed in public, in the streets and agora of the city, and in the presence of fellow-citizens. Scandal needs to be seen and heard by others and thus cannot be a private act. Accompanied by offensive claims and insulting gestures, public scandalous behavior is a comic action, and not a tragic one, and as such is patronized by Thalia, not Melpomene, because, as in a well-conceived comedy, a good and free life is achievable as a result of a long, often painful and tedious, practice. Scandalous and provocative Cynic “preaching” needs the stage of a “moving theater,” which is any place where a Cynic happens to be, act, and speak. This is the theater in which everyone wants to be a spectator and no one wants to be an actor: one likes to see people and ideas ridiculed, but no one wants to be in the position of the ridiculed or having one’s dear thought made fun of. And yet, such theatrical action almost immediately becomes dialogical, the action in which actors and spectators are no longer univocally distinct and distinguished. All those originally present as bystanders become suddenly involved in communication with each other in order to ask for, and get some reply to, the meaning of the event and to verify their understanding of it.

 Foucault, Fearless Speech, 126–30; see also Dio 4.11ff. Diogenes provokes Alexander by attacking his pride, thus showing him the vanity of his ambition to conquer the world while being unable to conquer his own passions (DL 6.26).

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The norms of behavior constitutive of a political body are often implicit, and, until their boundaries are transgressed in a scandal, they may not be clearly established or demarcated and thus negotiated and understood. Because scandal suspends and questions the existing norms and happens in public, it is indispensable in and for politics, in which scandals are looked for and thus have to be renewed all the time. Rorty’s writing and especially his “public preaching” are often deliberately and intentionally scandalous. His Mirror of Nature provoked quite a scandal with the claim that contemporary epistemology is not worth much and simply has to be dismissed and abandoned as a program, rather than transformed. Ever since, he intended to provoke his readers and listeners and thus draw them into a commonly shared public action. As Habermas notes, all too often Rorty overwhelms his readers with mind-blowing rearrangements of conceptual constellations, he shocks them with thrilling binary oppositions. He often transforms complex chains of thoughts into seemingly barbaric simplifications, but at second glance such dense formulas prove to contain innovative interpretations. Rorty plays with his readers’ conventional expectations.56

Scandal appears indispensable as means for suspending old oppressive practices, and thus clearing a space for new liberating ones. Yet scandal does not immediately yield a positive understanding of what these new implicit norms might be. But this, as said, is a distinctive feature of the Cynic diatribe: the imperative is not to deliberate dialectically but to act theatrically in public, demonstrate not by argument but by personal example, which then can be practically imitated and reproduced. (10) Cynic diatribe is thus a genre of public and critical, scandalous and provocative “preaching.” It can be oral and spontaneous, and as such it lives on in numerous anecdotes that were collected and preserved in later tradition, anecdotes (literally “unpublished, unedited stories”) that provide examples of personal life and behavior. But Cynic diatribe can also be written and as such is literature-oriented: both Antisthenes and Diogenes wrote (Socratic) dialogues (DL 6.15 §§18, 80), which present a “minimal compromise” between writing and speaking, insofar as written dialogues imitate free oral speech. Cynic written works mostly discuss moral issues but also contain much “literary criticism” (e.g., discussion of Homer and the myths by Antisthenes)(DL 6.17–18). Classical antiquity does not make a clear-cut distinction between philosophy and literature, which is especially true for Cynicism, which gives philosophy another chance to avoid being strictly theoretical.

 Habermas, “‘. . . And to define America, her athletic democracy’,” 10.

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The Cynics and Rorty share in common this interest in the genre of literature-oriented and conversation-reproducing written dialogue that properly complements oral, provocative speech. Only literature is properly creative or “poetic” and thus can make a difference in one’s life: “Literature is more important for moral progress, because it contributes to the widening of the moral imagination. . . . Philosophy is more useful for summarizing previous moral insights in the form of the moral principles, but it doesn’t do much creative work.”57 (11) If arousing other people’s imagination and thus drawing them into the theatrical act of the story told is a major device in Cynic diatribe, then metaphor plays an important role in it. Says Rorty: “It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions” (PMN 12). Metaphor, then, becomes a major carrier of a philosophical, moral message, not by means of an argument but by means of persuasion. Hence, Cynical public philosophizing that seemingly rejects philosophizing has to pay attention to and constantly practice rhetoric and use various rhetorical devices, including irony. Conversations with Socrates were as important for Antisthenes’s development as his studies with Gorgias (DL 6.1). Hence, Antisthenes’s dialogues inevitably have a rhetorical spin unlike those of Socrates, which are deliberately (seemingly) unsophisticated in their make-up. Rorty’s inclination toward rhetoric is well known and sometimes provokes an irritated reaction, as that of Taylor, who complains about Rorty’s tendency to trivialize problems and ask rhetorical questions, the answers to which are clearly implied not just in the question itself but in its very rhetorical form.58 (12) Finally, provocative philosophy practiced as literature and theater invites the creation of an innovative language of conversation and the use of new idioms or, in Rorty’s terms, a new “vocabulary” (and he clearly thinks that he himself is engaged in such an invention). The Cynic philosopher is thus an ironist “poet” who not only uses known rhetorical devices but also creates her own novel language of expression, gesture, and action. And this language is provocative, because the new is always provocative and often irritating. Even a “plain, public, easy-to-handle language” in which one has to address urgent moral and political needs,59 has to be constantly reinvented  Rorty, “Persuasion is a Good Thing,” 67. See also Rorty’s interview, “Philosophy without Foundations [Философия без оснований],” in Mikhail Ryklin, Deconstruction and Destruction: Conversations with Philosophers [Деконструкция и деструкция: беседы с философами] (Moscow: Logos, 2002), 139–63. 58  Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy,” 172–3. 59  Richard Rorty, “Reply to Simon Critchley,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe. (New York: Routledge, 1996), 45. Habermas writes, “As to the writer, we have to acknowledge the fact that among those rare philosophers who can write flawless scholarly prose, Richard Rorty came closest to the spirit of poetry. His strategy of an eye-opening renovation of 57

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and renegotiated in order to become a powerful rhetorical device. Such an innovative language, however, is inevitably violent, because those involved in a staged public action are forced to follow and use the new, and not their own, vocabulary. But most important is that this new Cynic language becomes the way— maybe the only way—to the good life with oneself (one’s recreated self) and others. Rorty writes in the final lines of his responses to his numerous critics: “I can still maintain that there is no such thing as the search for truth, as distinct from the search for happiness. . . . ‘Happiness,’ in the relevant sense, means ‘getting more of the things we keep developing new descriptive vocabularies in order to get.’ ”60 The Cynic is thus a necessary but transitory and transitional figure who provides a diagnosis of her time, and yet herself is one of her own time’s symptom. After the Cynics, however, come the Stoics, who not only refute contemporary doubtful moral and political practices but already give a positively formulated moral theory. If it is indeed the case that philosophy always moves, albeit differently at different epochs, within the triangle of physics (thinking about nature)—logic (thinking about thinking)—ethics (thinking about action), then it is understandable that the peak of the recent interest in philosophy of science (“physics”) and philosophy of language and mind (“logic”) can only move toward moral philosophy (“ethics”). And we have to be grateful to Richard Rorty, a contemporary Cynic philosopher, who helped clear the way toward the elaboration of a new modern ethics.

philosophical jargon lay the foundations for the affinity between what he achieved with his texts and the world-disclosing power of literature” (“‘. . . And to define America, her athletic democracy,’” 8). 60  Rorty, “Response to Ramberg,” in Rorty and His Critics, 376.

Chapter 4

The Burdens and Blessings of Boredom

Modernity is a complex set of interacting and interwoven social, cultural, political, and historical processes and phenomena that establish, define, and describe both theoretical cognition and practical action. Among the concepts that define it, perhaps the central and most significant is that of the modern subject, which establishes itself as universal, rational, and necessary, expelling everyday experience from philosophy. As a result, the post-metaphysical scene is that of devastation, a scorched landscape and an empty stage devoid of any decorations that might represent and retain any of the minutiae that make life engaging and worth living. One could say that the modern subject is the only hero, protagonist, playwright, director, and spectator of the drama of modernity. Exclusive of the other (of another human being) and of the world, the modern subject is inevitably monological, lonely, and alone, and thus can neither escape its own solitary presence nor get rid of itself. As such, it is inevitably bored. Boredom, then, becomes the conditio moderna. KRACAUER’S PARADOXES OF BOREDOM Perhaps one of the most significant modern accounts of boredom is a short piece by Siegfried Kracauer, which was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1924.1 Kracauer’s writing is stylistically elegant, philosophically condensed, and literarily engaging. In just four pages, he mentions and succinctly

 Siegfried Kracauer, “Langeweile,” in 1924–1927, pt. 2 of Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach, vol. 5 of Werke (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011), 161–4; henceforth L, followed by page number. The chapter was originally published in Frankfurter Zeitung on November 11, 1924. All translations in this essay are mine, unless otherwise noted.

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engages with the themes (anonymity, alienation, inauthenticity) that preoccupied thinkers of the age and that would be developed at much more length and with scholarly ponderosity three years later by the author of Sein und Zeit. Kracauer begins his discussion with a rather paradoxical claim that those who today have time for boredom but are not bored (nicht langeweilen) are as boring as those who do not become bored at all. This happens because their self (Selbst) is lost, remains unaccounted for, and has been long forgotten, since people live in the ever-busy, hasty world, without an aim or purpose, not lingering anywhere for long (nirgendwo lang zu verweilen) (L 161). Similar to Kant, Kracauer takes boredom to be inevitable, although in a very different sense. The experience of the inevitability of boredom inescapably leads us to encounter a number of paradoxes. Kracauer himself seems not to notice them, and yet they transpire and are implied in his discussion. For him, boredom is both a burden and a blessing. People—by whom Kracauer means modern city dwellers, wage-earning, bureaucratic laborers who routinely do tedious work, and petit bourgeois who follow strict Kantian Arbeitsethik, the working ethics of duty, which they proudly uphold—reward themselves with justly deserved contentment and satisfaction for fulfilled obligations, after which they customarily return to their city apartments to enjoy leisure. However, for Kracauer there is no nature, but only urban civilization; therefore, unlike in Kant, boredom is not a voice of nature in us but is intimately connected with culture and its emphasis on production with its eventual rewards of entertainment and leisure. The distraction, fascination, fantasy, and enchantment of city life are endless. They drive oneself from oneself, hanging and hazing about in the evening streets, from one night into another, illuminated by lights and advertisements. The fantastic world of cinema, the illusion of the presence to other places through radio (and later television and the internet), which substitute for communication in cafés, is expressions of a city life that has become a perpetual self-contained stream of amusing activity (L 161–3). Kracauer is condescending toward the people of the (big) city, and yet, since he himself is one of them, he is not disdainful of the city inhabitants, unlike Heidegger, who cannot find a better way of describing the “contemporary city man” than “the ape of the civilization.”2 Because city life is the life of culture, superfluous yet vivid and engaging, the sympathetic figure of a city-dweller is that of a flaneur, of a gadder—the observer of city life in its endless fascinating minutiae, a frequenter of films and cafés who knows and loves the city, in the theater of which every minor

 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 5; henceforth FC, followed by page number.

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event may become insightful and connected with the lived history of the city.3 Another figure representing the ever-curious and never-busy city inhabitant is the ragpicker, Lumpensammler, which is what Walter Benjamin calls Kracauer in his review of Kracauer’s book. Interested in the splinters and rags of what the city has to offer, a chiffonnier, or ragpicker, is a connoisseur and antiquarian, a collector and appreciator of the ongoing poetic and political activity of the city. The first such figure in the history of the city is probably Socrates, followed by Diogenes the Cynic. In Benjamin, this becomes the flaneur, ever distracted and never bored. Yet the leisure offered by the city is both a burden and a blessing. Here we encounter the first paradox: (1) contemporary life provides people with much leisure, yet, in fact, they have no “real” leisure at all because they are as bored at their leisure as they are at their work, which means that most people lack leisure. For rather than being time off—time for freedom—leisure becomes an institution that pays for the boring work one does otherwise. In such leisure, one is allowed not to do anything, does not want to do anything, and indeed one is made not to do anything.4 But this is boring too. Here, Kracauer introduces an important distinction between two kinds of boredom: the “right,” “exemplary,” “radical,” “legitimate” type—and a “vulgar” (vulgäre), ordinary, and mediocre boredom. The latter is the insatiable satiety of the improperly lived leisure that suspends leisure and cancels its blessing. The vulgar boredom is neither hot nor cold, but rather tepid: it neither kills (like Kant’s English gentleman)5 nor calls for a new life. It only causes dissatisfaction, which can be driven away by morally allowable distraction, which ultimately testifies to moral uprightness. What Kant takes to be the purpose of boredom—the pursuit of duty, the establishing of moral character—for Kracauer is only the means to dispel the bother of inauthentic boredom. People are too busy to be bored, which is why they are bored, but not in the right way. Boredom, then, is the condition of modern human existence in its two different forms, which in fact are two sides of the same coin with which the modern self both pays and charges itself. This entails the second paradox (2): the flight away from boredom through distraction by the abundance of modern entertainment does not save us from boredom. Fleeing boredom only makes us more bored in a “vulgar” way. On the other hand, embracing boredom in its inevitability makes us realize that  The figure of the flaneur is best exemplified in Convolute M of Benjamin (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ed. Rolf Tiedemann [New York: Belknap Press, 2002], 416–55; Das Passagen-Werk, vol. 5 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982], 524–69). 4  “Indessen: man will nichts tun, und man wird getan” (L 161). 5  Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 63. 3

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boredom itself is not boring at all, once we come to recognize its right, radical form. Accepting boredom gives us back our leisure, which is the leisure not of fleeing boredom but the leisure for being bored, or rather for not being afraid of being bored. What we cannot avoid, we should accept, and boredom becomes our blessing. The third paradox (3) is that boredom is a state of powerlessness and supineness, in which one cannot and does not produce anything, and yet boredom is most creative. Kracauer’s prescription for well-being is to turn away from vulgar boredom to the genuine one by a radical suspension of all commonly accepted distraction. On a sunny afternoon, when everyone is outside, one goes back to one’s room, closes the curtains, lays on the sofa, and does the “spiritual exercise” of fully committing oneself to radical boredom by embracing inactivity, by not doing anything, drifting away in thoughts and reveries.6 In this way, Kracauer performs a radical ἐποχή, yet not of thought or judgment—but of action. Radical boredom is the suspension of all action. In order to be properly bored, one needs leisure, which one should be able to know how to use. In a sense, one should dare to be lazy, not to produce, make, or do anything. Paraphrasing Erasmus, one could call Kracauer’s way Pigritiae laus, “Apology of laziness.”7 Outlined ironically and in a sketch, Kracauer’s way to “legitimate” boredom goes through a number of stages (L 163–4). First, one entertains certain ideas and even thinks of some projects, which, similar to Chichikov’s grand projects in Gogol’s Dead Souls, do not and cannot lead anywhere, and are thus totally useless. Recognizing their ephemeral character, one comes next to the rejection of any thought and activity, marveling at the presence of the “not serious” little, ludicrous beings around you, such as a glass grasshopper or a cactus. Their just being-there testifies to the purposelessness of the activity of the constant production of new things, distractions, and meanings, which makes one utterly and inescapably bored. Such a being finds nothing (Nichts) in its existence worth noting or of importance to the greater whole of the existent. Such a being is that which is without being (was ist, ohne zu sein) (L 164), a being that is present in its absence to the world of reality and purpose. But existence without (serious, purposeful) being is irritating, causes an inner unrest without any aim, and one can only be content with “not doing anything further than being by oneself and not knowing what one actually

 In Ludwig Tieck’s William Lovell, the experience of the hellish suffering of boredom (“Langeweile ist gewiß die Qual der Hölle”) is associated with passing the time in one’s room on a sofa (William Lovell [Berlin: Carl August Nicolai, 1795], 215). 7  See Desiderius Erasmus, Moriae encomion or Stultitiae Laus (Basel: G.Haas/J.J. Thurneisen, 1780); The Praise of Folly, trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 6

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should do.”8 And third, if one can wait long enough, one comes to legitimate boredom, which opens the flux of passing images through to a shimmering landscape that looks strangely like a paradise.9 And here one encounters that which one was always looking for but was always missing, the end of the journey, which is itself a journey. For lack of a better word, Kracauer calls it a “great passion” (große Passion) (L 164). But it can probably be called anything because everything is just a game of boredom in the imagination playing against itself. Hence, along the “way of boredom” one first needs to know how to be distracted; then one does not know at all what to do, rather than just being with oneself by being bored; and finally, one does not even know how to be, what to know, and how to ask the right question, committing oneself to the oblivion of anything having a purpose, useful knowledge, and dutiful judgment. Yet, one cannot force oneself to be rightly bored: radical boredom cannot be produced or be had on purpose. Rather, one needs patience in order to be bored. Boredom thus comes to those who are capable of being bored in waiting for it. And so boredom, which does not produce anything, generates nothing, nichts. The one who can get embraced and taken away by boredom, then, is a kind of bored creator who produces nothing—the nothing of the daydream, of not knowing and oblivion. Yet the nothing of boredom is almost nothing, which makes the bored creator an as-if creator who flows with the fleeing appearances of the world of rattletraps, fantasies, and forgetting that she makes up out of prope nihil. This leads us, finally, to the fourth paradox: boredom alienates ourselves from ourselves (our self), yet it is the only way to go back or have access to our proper (“authentic”) existence (Dasein) (L 163), which is being bored without giving an account (λόγον διδόναι) of that which is and should be, of the Sein and Soll of the world and our action in it, with and against each other. Here, Kracauer diagnoses what many thinkers of the age were discussing at length: that we can get back to ourselves as living, non-productive beings by facing the negativity of finitude, mortality, or the anxiety of Angst. Kracauer is more benevolent: it is boredom that opens the way to our self and existence, rather than death. Unlike in Kant, boredom is not opposed to pleasure, but

 “Nichts weiter zu tun, als bei sich zu sein und nichts zu wissen, was man eigentlich tun solle” (L 164). 9  See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Russell Goulbourne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 49–58. Rousseau notes that dreaming at one’s leisure, “to the attraction of an abstract and monotonous reverie, I am able to add charming images that enliven it. The objects of these images often eluded my senses in my ecstasies, and now, the deeper my reverie is, the more vividly it presents them to me. I am often more in their midst and more pleasantly so than I was when I was really there” (ibid., 58). 8

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if it is the right one, it brings its pleasurable blessings (L 164). Boredom is useless, yet it is most helpful. We live to the full only when we are really bored. Paradoxically, we are liberated from (vulgar) boredom by (radical) boredom. Happiness, life, and freedom such are the blessings of the right, radical boredom for Kracauer. Radical boredom is thus the way to its own truth, which is freedom. It is the freedom for our proper existence and the freedom from the fake life of purposeful production. Kracauer thus establishes the diagnosis of modernity: to be is to be bored. Modernity is born out of the spirit of boredom. But he also finds (or thinks he finds) a remedy by a kind of philosophical homoeopathy: treat the same by the same, similia similibus, evil by evil, poison by poison, φάρμακον by φάρμακον, boredom by boredom. In fact, philosophical thinking itself gets suspended by literary writing, the boredom of long treatises by a short newspaper article, attentive thinking by the farniente of doing nothing, which becomes the realization of freedom. Kracauer’s discussion is noteworthy in that it is both a reflection on boredom and an exemplification of the working of boredom by being bored. As he hints at the end of his piece, this very double reflection on the boredom of thinking about boredom and acting out of it might itself be boring, and it might even be written out of boredom. If the modern subject is forever stuck in an ongoing reflection about itself, there might indeed be no way out of such a reflection. Besides being boring, the boring reflection of boredom on boredom, a kind of self-praise, is also highly narcissistic, which, however, is alleviated by self-irony—the way the praise of stupidity suspends and cancels stupidity.10 Yet, Kracauer envisages radical liberation and freedom from boredom by boredom. The freedom achieved in boredom by being bored might even make radical boredom extinguish and transcend itself, so that, as Kracauer says (L 164), everything that is, would be . . . simply “. . .” The end of thinking as the end of writing as the end of being-useful, not allowing for existence with oneself, at one’s self . . . Just the ellipsis, which marks the inevitable elision in existence without being, without knowing, and without acting, in total forgetfulness of these three. Only suspension points, which suspend any point of productive being, purposeful knowledge, and dutiful action . . . Kracauer thus has to finish his discussion of boredom with an ironic selfsuspension of what he said about boredom in order to elude a boringly serious and productive conclusion about boredom (L 164). The “great passion” is just passing on the horizon, and the true boredom that does not mitigate itself keeps being productive—but only of trifles and bagatelles, like this boring

 See Erasmus, The Praise of Folly.

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piece Kracauer has just quickly written for a newspaper that we have picked up and read in haste . . . THE POETICS OF BOREDOM IN HEIDEGGER Boredom is a very modern phenomenon, whose roots lie deep in the constitution of modern life, and that cannot be cast off; rather, it needs to be carefully analyzed as a profound symptom of the crisis of our time and a sign of our condition.11 This is also Kracauer’s and Simmel’s diagnosis.12 Heidegger dedicates careful, studious, and tedious philosophical investigation to boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. His starting point is Stimmung, “mood” or “attunement,” one of the key terms in Being and Time, which also often appears in Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin and Nietzsche.13 Here, Heidegger argues that this fundamental mood “must permeate [durchstimmen] our Dasein in the ground of its essence” (FC 132; GM 199). It is always already there as waiting, latent or sleeping, and hence can only be awakened (FC 68; GM 103). What is this fundamental mood that we are meant to awaken by philosophical questioning, which comes to a stop in waiting for the truth of things and of Dasein to become unconcealed? Waiting means putting oneself in a state of receptivity for a more manifest and transparent understanding of the fundamental mood or attunement of Dasein (FC 132; GM 199). For Heidegger, this mood is unique to us and unambiguous in our Dasein when awakened: it is boredom. But how do we wake the fundamental mood? Apparently, by stopping and waiting, listening to the word of the poet and to the language itself. Why? Because the language and dialect of his surroundings, Heidegger’s native Alemannic, have already provided the answer: “to be homesick” (Heimweh haben) means “to have a long time” (lange Zeit haben) (FC 80; GM 120). And the poet—Novalis—who speaks the language of philosophy tells us that philosophy is a homesickness (Heimweh) (FC 5; GM 67).14 Therefore, philosophy awakes the mood in which the “long time” becomes transparent. But “long time” literally means boredom as a “long while,” or Langeweile. Thus,  Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, vols. 29–30 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983); henceforth GM, followed by page number. In many cases, I am retranslating the original text, without further notice. 12  Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 409–24. 13  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962); Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), 134–9, 339–46, et passim. 14  “Die Philosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh, ein Trieb überall zu Hause zu sein” (Novalis, Das Philosophische Werke I, vol. 2 of Schriften, ed. J. Minor [Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1923], frag. 21, 179). 11

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binding together two singular sayings (a poetic fragment and a local, linguistic utterance) into a kind of syllogism suggests a universal claim: that the ground mode of our Dasein is boredom. Listening and attending in waiting is thus ultimately the attention to language, which suggests turning to boredom. THREE MODES AND TWO MOMENTS OF BOREDOM How do we approach boredom? At the superficial level of ordinary perception—and Heidegger will start with ordinary examples and proceed by moving deeper and deeper—boredom is the modern response to the improper, skewed life of the contemporary, bourgeois city-dweller, who is thus caught in inescapable boredom, which comes out of the utter inadequacy of her existence. The immediate natural attitude is to drive boredom away, to escape it, which seems easy, given the enormous amount of entertainment that contemporary life provides. However, in boredom, time becomes long, and yet we are constantly trying to make it short and eventually fall asleep. By making time short through increasing entertainment, which becomes more and more overwhelming in the contemporary world, going beyond any visible scope of amusement-seeking activity, we shorten the time of our life instead of making it longer. We give up on our life. Instead of becoming fulfilled with a few meaningful acts that reach out for the other, the time of our life becomes filled with nonsensical distractive activity that is ultimately pointed at ourselves. The right attitude for Heidegger, then, is exactly the one Kracauer has described before: not to resist boredom but to “let it resonate” (FC 82; GM 122). Only this way we can find something important about boredom, and hence about our fundamental mode, indeed about our very Dasein. Heidegger accepts three different forms of boredom, each one present in two moments. The distinction between these three forms of boredom again is suggested by the genius of language, which distinguishes between the property of a thing (which may also stand for its concept), the state induced in oneself by a thing, and the thing or concept itself. The three forms, then, are (1) that which is boring; (2) becoming bored by something; and (3) boredom itself or profound boredom. (1) We are at a tasteless train station several hours before the train leaves (FC 93; GM 140). This is the situation in which we try to get rid of boredom, because we are tired of waiting, which oppresses us. Yet boredom is neither waiting nor impatience, because waiting and impatience can be not at all boring (FC 94; GM 141). What we cannot miss noticing is that boredom is somehow connected with time in the activity of passing time (Zeitvertreib) (or

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the passivity of acting time out). Passing the time, then, is the “driving away of boredom that drives time on” (zeitantreibendes Wegtreiben der Langeweile) (FC 95; GM 145). Passing the time, therefore, is a confrontation with time that whiles, drags on, lingers, and vacillates. By passing the time, we find ourselves being oppressed by being held or delayed by lingering time (Hingehaltenheit, Heidegger’s neologism [FC 99–100; GM 149–52]). This is the first important moment in the encounter with boredom: being delayed by time as it lingers. We are not late: we were there on time, but we still had to wait. The situation of being held or delayed by time dragging is that of being in a prison. Although here we are free to leave, we don’t. This being bored by something that results in the oppressive hold of lingering time is also the situation of our life, when we have to pass the time while often not willing or wanting it, without reaching the desired end when we finally can move on and not be oppressed by the delay. In becoming bored, we are bored by something but are not looking for anything in particular, which means that we do not really know what we are looking for—something that will save us from being oppressed in the delay, which can be the delay of our entire life, and so can even lead to death. We thus get engaged in a rather meaningless activity: we try to flee from boredom as being held by lingering time, whose specifically modern form is an attempt to escape the vacuity and devastation of being held empty by immersion into the endless activity—without stop or purpose—of being entertained, in order to become immersed in the fullness of things and life (see FC 101; GM 153). This leads us to the recognition of the second constitutive moment of boredom, that of being left empty (Leergelassenheit), another neologism, in which Heidegger cannot miss the Gelassenheit, composure, as the constituent of this second moment of boredom (FC 101; GM 152). We are thrashed, emptied by things at hand that do not disturb us, but in doing so, we abandon ourselves to ourselves and thus offer nothing (FC 103; GM 155). Things (the train station) refuse us in themselves by still being there yet not meeting us, by not allowing us to meet them in a precise moment. This is, then, a provisional definition (even if Heidegger tries to avoid definitions as finalizing the unfinalizable) of the first form of boredom that ties together the two constitutive moments of boredom. (1) Becoming bored is the essential being delayed in allowing oneself to become empty (Hingehaltensein im Leergelassenwerden) (FC 105; GM 158), that is, by the things that did not let us meet them at the right time and thus left us emptied. (2) In the first form of boredom, something is boring. In the second form, I am bored with something. Here, we find the same two structural moments of boredom that we saw in the first form, those of delay and emptiness. Although being delayed determines and carries the allowance to become empty with it—two structural moments that are independent but that we will find

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transformed in the other forms of boredom—insofar as the two are connected by a link, Fuge, which also can imply musical fugue, where the two moments might be considered independent voices in the polyphonic sound of boredom in its three movements (FC 106–107; GM 160–1). The important difference between the two forms of boredom is that the first is linked with something determinate: a particular thing at a particular moment. We can always say that we are bored with something at the moment when we are bored. Contrarily, in the second form of boredom, I am not bored with anything specific or bored at a given moment. Here, “the border cannot be drawn” (FC 109; GM 165). The example of this kind of boredom is an evening that one spends quite comfortably at dinner and in conversation, only later realizing that it was utterly boring (FC 109–11; GM 164–7). Thus, in the first form of boredom (1), one is immediately reflective of being bored by something “outside,” by a thing that refused its meeting at the proper time. In the second form of boredom (2), reflection comes only belatedly, after the whole event took place, and thus comes from us (FC 118; GM 178). While in (1) we do not want to lose time, in (2) we have time, we give and leave it to ourselves (FC 115, 129; GM 174, 195). Now, what about the other structural moment of boredom, that of being delayed or put on hold? During an entire evening, being busy with chatting and thus creating emptiness that appeared in the fullness of time as one time, the very “during” (Während) does not even occur to us (FC 121; GM 182). While and during when we do not notice the passage of time because we do not attend to it, time (meanwhile) does not release us but spreads stillness and calm (Stille) into us (FC 122; GM 183). Unlike in (1), in (2), time does not hold us but leaves us to ourselves, makes it possible to be near here (Dabeisein), as part of the existent. But we are held still nevertheless. Hence, we stop time, make it stand still, although we do not make it disappear: we allot it, leave time to ourselves, but even then time does not leave us (FC 121; GM 182). Therefore, time stands, “whiles and endures” (weilt und währt) (FC 122; GM 184), and because this is not how we usually perceive time in its timing, it cannot be recognized and thus is indeterminate and unfamiliar. In the second form of boredom, time brings us to a standstill, to the point. To a full stop. Or, rather, it suspends us in stillness and brings us to suspension points and elision marks (FC 108–109; GM 163–4). The “. . .”— which has also been used by Kracauer—stand(s) in singular plural indicating motion without moving. It stand(s) for being bored with something that then contracts to a point of “standing now,” which nevertheless, being the point of utter indeterminacy, still has the traces of these three dots, as three “un-” for the indeterminate-and-unknown, or for indefinite-indeterminate-unknown. By spending the evening in careless entertainment and chatting rather than conversing, we blow time away by making it stand (FC 124; GM 187). The

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three points of suspension turn it into a “now.” This “standing now” is what holds us still by making us pass away time as an almost atemporal activity, in which the flow of time becomes imperceptible and thus makes time unfamiliar. The “. . .” stands for the past and the future as cut off, disconnected from the present, in which we are present to what is happening by being disconnected with what has just happened and what will be. The past and the future here are not lost but are dissolved, interrupted, although they are still tied to the mere present as disconnecting the have-been and the will-be (FC 124–5; GM 187–8). In the elision points, the middle point of the “standing now” is not connected to the other two that stand (still) for the past and future—but rather marks them as elided by suspending but not eliminating them in its current standing presence. Therefore, in the first form of boredom (1), time lasts and endures, while things and the existent as a whole refuse us in meeting them at the proper time. In the second form of boredom (2), time stands still, does not move. And by not moving, it holds us still, brings a delay. The second structural moment of boredom, that of delay and delay and hold, comes in (2), the second form of boredom—“standing now” as time that does not move. However, the two structural moments, those of emptiness and delay, are not isolated, because by being immersed in entertainment, by spending time in chatting it away, we make present whatever is going on. And by making it present, we bring time to a stand, to standing. By passing the time without noticing it, or without paying attention to it, we make it stand. The time that has come to a stand forms an emptiness, which stands (stellt) us, and thus holds and delays us. This “making-present bringing to a stand(still)” (das gegenwärtigende ZumStehen-bringen) is the structural unity of the two structural moments of (2), the second form of boredom, of becoming bored by something (FC 126–7; GM 190–1). (3) Finally, we have to dig even deeper to achieve the very height of the situation of boredom. For, as Heidegger says, “where there is height, there is depth” (FC 129; GM 194). We need to learn how to move in the “depth of Dasein” (FC 131; GM 198). The three forms of boredom thus differ in their depth (FC 156; GM 233). The third form of boredom (3) is the most profound: it is boredom itself. Whereas for the other two forms, there are paradigmatic examples (the train station and the party), there is no such example for the third one. This means that profound boredom, boredom itself, is ubiquitous and all-pervasive: it is always there with us, whether we do not notice it or try to drive boredom away in a particular situation. Again, the genius of language comes to the rescue in its initial hint of how to approach this ultimate form of boredom: “it is boring for one” (Es ist einem langeweilig) (FC 134–5; GM 202–3). Here, two elements of what language reveals to us are important: it and one.

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It is boring for one: einem, someone—everyone, anyone, not anybody in particular, and hence for everyone. It is given to one. One cannot escape boredom, because it is the most profound and proper mood indicative of what we are deep down, in the essence of our Dasein. Boredom is thus our human condition, which we should not try to escape but embrace and learn from. Here, Heidegger and Kracauer are in full agreement. It is boring for one: Es, the author and the namer of profound boredom. It makes its famous appearance in “there is,” literally as “it gives” (es gibt) in Zeit und Sein.15 That which is, is it and is grammatically neutral, as being itself. In the “es gibt,” it gives itself to us as our Dasein, itself as its self wants to tell us something through the constant pain and disturbance of boredom. It bores us—but we do not know what it is (FC 115; GM 174). It appears troubling, because it is utterly impersonal, as in the phrase, “it rains.” Therefore, it is indefinite, unknown (Unbestimmte, Unbekannte) (FC 134; GM 203), which already made its appearance before, in the second form of boredom (FC 116–7; GM 175–6). It can be perhaps approached by the via negativa: it is not this and not that (FC 142; GM 214). Yet it is not nothing, because it talks to us all the time, even if we do not want to listen, killing time and entertaining ourselves to death.16 It is rather no one (Niemand) (FC 135; GM 203), the Odyssey’s Οὖτις (Od. 9.367–408), who speaks to us from the depth, reveals itself in simple things and ordinary situations around us: during the walk through the city streets on a Sunday afternoon (FC 135; GM 204) (this is also Kracauer’s example!), the horizon of a plain, or the snow when it snows. It speaks not to me but to the very self of the itself of Dasein. Thus, if in the first movement of boredom (1) we do not need to listen to boredom, and in the second (2) we do not want to listen to it, in the third movement (3), we are compelled to listen to boredom as the oracle that we cannot escape, because it calls us de profundis, speaking the proper (das Eigentliche) of Dasein from its profound freedom (FC 136; GM 205). The Two Structural Moments of the Third Form of Boredom (3): Emptiness and Delay With the two structural moments of the third, deepest form of boredom, Heidegger proceeds in reverse. The first (formerly the second) moment, being left empty, comes now in a different form. Again, continuing with the poeticophilosophical description, Heidegger does not provide much of an argument  Martin Heidegger, “Zeit und Sein (1962),” in Zur Sache des Denkens, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, vol. 14 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), 9–14. 16  This is achieved by creating new media that define new forms of truth-telling and entertainment (see Neil Postmann, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business [New York: Penguin, 1985], especially 27). One can even say that truth-telling becomes entertainment. 15

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concerning why this should be the case, drawing on the resources of the language and building up a coherent picture of the various forms of boredom. The emptiness now is neither a lack of fullness or fulfillment, that is, not a privation or a whole, nor as a self-building emptiness in which one’s proper self can be left standing. Rather, emptiness now comes with not wanting anything in any contingent situation (FC 137, 140; GM 206–207, 210). Emptiness is now not wanting anything. This is not depression or anxiety, though, because its origin lies not in us or our not knowing or not understanding the source of this not wanting. We do not want anything, because in profound boredom, we are suspended and raised above any particular situation. For this reason, everything becomes of equally great and equally little worth (FC 137; GM 207). Everything is equally far removed and equally near. Nothing can be clearly seen, because everything that is too far and too close cannot be seen distinctly. Nothing matters, because everything is of equal worth, or indifferent (gleichgültig) (ibid.). We stand—are put—into the middle of the circle, the periphery of which is the existent as a whole, where all things are equally unimportant and thus are the same in their worth. Everything is at an equal distance from the horizon, and nothing can come in the proper vicinity. The equal distance or worth, the indifference of every thing in every situation means that in profound boredom, it is the existent as a whole (das Seiende im Ganzen) (FC 138, 139; GM 208, 210) that becomes indifferent. But if the existent, or all things, are indifferent, this means that everything is impossible. Nothing can be done. Not doing (Tun), not letting do and done (Lassen) is possible. It is profoundly boring for one, which means for this particular Dasein. The equal worth or the indifference of the existent as a whole now reveals itself to Dasein as such. The existent as a whole becomes indifferent not to me as “I-ness” (Ichlichkeit) but to the self of Dasein itself, whose name becomes unimportant, and is from now on an Οὖτις, yet one which brings the self to itself as that which is there/here (da ist) in Dasein, in me (FC 141, 143; GM 212, 215). This is Heidegger’s substitution for reflection, when profound boredom brings itself to its self not through a systematic argument but through listening—being compelled to listen to the unknown that is already there. To what end? To be it. Delay But why are we delayed when we encounter profound boredom? Again, Heidegger deduces the most profound characteristics of our being from language: the apparently universal features—which come from the German language in particular, where he mostly uses semantics (and not so much syntax, which might be more defining of the structure of thinking). If the existent as a whole refuses itself to the generous offer of Dasein, this refusal

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(Versagen) is itself saying or telling (Sagen), which both comes with and as an announcement (Ansagen) (FC 140–2; GM 211–4). The announcement, then, intensifies to the appeal, or calling (Anrufen) (FC 143; GM 216). The refusal needs to be told, and with this telling comes the announcement, or rather an announcing hint (ansagendes Hinweiseisen). At what? At the suspension points and elision marks (FC 142; GM 214) . . . We encounter suspension and elision once again. The κένωσις of Dasein is left without response and recognition from the things, from the existent as a whole. There is the call of being in Dasein but no response from the existent in its entirety, from things that remain mute. There is no dialogue that being could have established in and through Dasein in and for us. We only need to wait in a profound boredom that is not caused by anything in particular. . . . What does the announcement announce, besides its semantic commonality with refusal via telling? It tells us about all the possibilities in and of Dasein, which the existent as a whole has missed by refusing it. These are the possibilities of doing and letting do (Tun und Lassen) (FC 141; GM 212). But they are being left uncultivated, unused, unexplored, because they are being refused. And yet—. . .—the refusal of and to Dasein by the existent as a whole, in the midst of which we are, announces and points toward that which allows (das Ermöglichende) (GM 216) for all essential possibilities of Dasein that are now being refused, in me. That which makes Dasein possible, however, is without content, because that where we are placed has refused Dasein and is thus being held empty. That which constitutes the possibility of acting and letting be, because it is contentless for us now, is it, das or es. It is present in . . . . It is possible that it is being itself. But it is not named, cannot be defined but rather only asked about. It is announced, hinted at. We drive away the way it is announced, which is boredom. But if we wake boredom, embrace and turn toward it, we cannot miss the hint, announcement, or appeal. Yet we do not know what calls us from the depth. This cannot but disturb us. And this disturbance compels us. To what? To the edge, the peak (Spitze), which is another way of saying that we concentrate on that which makes Dasein possible in acting and being-there, where we realize these possibilities in ourselves. And this is what being held, Hingehaltenheit, means in the form of boredom (3): being compelled to the original realization (Ermöglichung) of Dasein as such (FC 144; GM 216). PEAK AND BREADTH Because now, when we have a glimpse into the depth of Dasein, everything is very close to us yet unfamiliar, the unseen can only be described

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metaphorically, not in terms of familiar philosophical concepts. Despite stressing the temporal character of our existence, the wanderer through the woods and mountains chooses spatial metaphors to describe the unfathomable depth of time, which stands still and in front of which we suspend the flux of time on the moment of sharp vision. This should mean, in particular, that boredom, even if being ultimately profoundly temporal in its constitution and essence, is still understood from reference to places that arrange temporal events: travel and railway stations, the house full of guests, the entertainment of the city or the leisurely walk along its streets. Loci temporis have now been substituted for the places of memory that had embodied the properly temporal events in their succession yet suspend the flow of time in memory.17 In particular, profound boredom is described metaphorically by breadth (Weite) and peak (Spitze), which, in their unity of the two structural moments, characterize the most profound form of boredom (see FC 140ff.; GM 211ff.). The refusal of the existent as a whole compels Dasein to the extremity, the peak (Spitze), which is the moment of vision of the fundamental possibility of Dasein’s proper existence. But we also know that this compulsion eventually comes from the refusal of time itself in its horizon, which means that Dasein is compelled by the banning of time itself in its proper essence, compelling Dasein to the fundamental possibility of its proper existence (FC 149; GM 224). Going even deeper through the layers of boredom compels us to the height of looking into the unfathomable depth, out of which every form of boredom comes. Moved by profound boredom, which thus becomes a productive force, the bann, the spell-ban of the temporal horizon, makes the moment of vision that belongs to temporality disappear (FC 153; GM 230). In boredom, which as Langeweile is a “long while,” time becomes long. The lengthening of time is the expanding of the temporal horizon into the entire temporality of Dasein. Yet, Dasein as properly existing has its own time, which is a short while (FC 152–3; GM 229). It is in the moment of vision that our Dasein becomes “short whiled.” The proper existence of Dasein with all its possibilities can be thus regained in a moment, in this very moment of sharp vision, to which Dasein is compelled by boredom, by this bann. The moment, Augenblick, is thus the peak, pike, and prick of time itself, the moment of its extremity and sharpness, which comes all of a sudden, in the blink of an eye, rupturing the spellban and disrupting the exclusion from things.18

 See Dmitri Nikulin, “Memory in Recollection of Itself,” in Memory: A History, ed. Dmitri Nikulin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 8–34. 18  On the concept of Augenblick, see Koral Ward, Augenblick: The Concept of the ‘Decisive Moment’ in 19th- and 20th-Century Western Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 97–124; and Otto Pöggeler, “Destruction and Moment,” trans. Daniel Magurshak, in Reading Heidegger from the Start: 17

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The moment of vision is the look of Dasein in three perspectival directions (FC 151; GM 226), that is, at the time horizon, where the present, future, and past are present in their fusion and entirety. Yet at the moment of vision, the continuum of the horizon is contracted into a point-like instant, a “now” that is standing and stood. The profound boredom makes us oscillate, swing between the breadth of the continuity of the temporal horizon and the point of the discreteness of the moment of vision, between the breadth of emptiness and the peak of the sharpness of the moment of vision (FC 166; GM 247). What is important to note here is that there is no mediation between the breadth and the peak, between the horizon and the moment of its interruption. One could say that the breadth locked into the undistinguished horizon is the Dionysian, and the summit of vision is the Apollonian moment provided to Dasein by time itself. The two are not mediated and cannot be mediated. The breadth of the temporal horizon, the entire circumference of things that has receded into the unreachable, is interrupted and pierced by the moment of the simplicity of vision (la simplicité du regard, to use Pierre Hadot’s phrase),19 which reinstalls Dasein at the center where it properly is—everywhere. . . . In the end, through boredom it is time itself that casts a spell and bans Dasein from the existent and refuses it a meeting at the proper time. And yet, at the same time, it is the same time that summons Dasein by compelling it to the possibility of its proper existence during the moment of acute vision, in all its possibilities as grounded in the depth of time and being (FC 153; GM 230). This is the mystical picture of the breadth and peak, of the continuous and the discrete that we have to relive, once we have awakened the monstrous sleeping beauty of boredom.

Essays in His Earliest Thought, ed. Theodore J. Kisiel and John Van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 137–56. 19  See Pierre Hadot, Plotin ou La simplicité du regard (Paris: Plon, 1963).

Chapter 5

The Eternal Return of the Other

Modernity is the time of boredom. As Michelet reports, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the only original new literary genre was the “literature of boredom,” la littérature de l’ennui.1 A century later, in the 1920s, in a time of revolutionary changes in society, politics, philosophy, literature, art, technology, and science, boredom spreads like an epidemic. Philosophy from the age of modernism is full of discussion of this everyday, yet perplexingly evasive, phenomenon. In what follows, I attempt to trace and reconstruct the interpretation of boredom in Walter Benjamin, one of the most perceptive thinkers of modernity, who came up with its precise diagnosis. Benjamin turns to boredom in his posthumously published The Arcades Project, which was started in 1927, falling right between two other significant discussions of boredom, by Kracauer (in a feuilleton) and Heidegger (in a lecture course).2 It thus belongs to the same brief and intensely lived epoch when the acute sense of life was perceived in and as boredom. The Convolute D, which encompasses the fragments and extracts from literary works on boredom and eternal return,

 Michelet writes, “Une seule originalité a été réservée aux temps de Bonaparte, un genre nouve la littérature de l’ennui. Cela étonna Napoléon. Il lisait parfois les livres nouveaux, et ne trouvait rien. Il consultait Fiévée, qu’il avait dans ses entresols. Il ordonna une fois à un de ses ministres de faire une Histoire de France. Il n’obtient rien. Le vide, le néant, ce nouveau roi du monde, le néant lui répondit” (Jules Michelet, Histoire du XIXe siècle, vol. 3, Jusqu’à Waterloo [Paris: Librarie Germer Baillière, 1872], 87; also quoted in Roland Barthes, Michelet (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 57. 2  Seigfried Kracauer, “Langeweile,” in 1924–1927, pt. 2 of Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach, vol. 5 of Werke (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1995); Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, vol. 29–30 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983). I have discussed both these texts in detail earlier (see chapter 4). 1

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contains some twenty pages on Langeweile.3 Since this text is a mélange of fortuitous thoughts that Benjamin came across in his and others’ strolls through Paris and written accounts of walks in the city, nothing is central, and thus every fragment is equally important. Even before the Annales School, which makes nonhuman entities the protagonists of history (e.g., the Mediterranean Sea in Braudel),4 Benjamin makes Paris the main hero of his writing. Paris is the capital of the nineteenth century. Therefore, it should be properly dressed. Paris chooses to garb its busy trade streets, which attract most visitors, both those on business and idle passersby, with glass. For, the city needs to set off its consumption districts not just as places of ordinary trade and exchange of goods but as those that dictate the style of consumption, which then define the whole way of life that would rule the rest of the world by style and fashion.5 Gray from the soot in all its picturesque gradations, tattooed into the body of the city by the coal burnt at every house and brought down the Canal St. Martin, Paris brightens itself up with fashionable colors under the covers of its passages (AP D1a,7). Yet the immediate, perhaps unintended, purpose is the protection of these emphasized public spaces from rain. THE BOREDOM OF THE WEATHER Benjamin does not provide any systematic insights into boredom, its types or causes. His thinking is, on principle, fragmented; yet, one can distinguish three distinct yet interconnected forms of boredom in Benjamin: weather, waiting, and repetition. In the old “cosmo-political” opposition of the world to the city, the κόσμος is the other of the πόλις, both defying and complementing the life of its citizens. The cosmic, mathematical law counters the economic and moral bourgeois law. Yet, for Benjamin, the modern opposition between the two is not that of a forceful collision or drama but rather of a narcotizing effect, which is that of boredom: “Nothing bores common man more than the cosmos” (AP   Walter Benjamin, “Convolutes,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ed. Rolf Tiedmann (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), Convolute D (Boredom, Eternal Return); henceforth AP, followed by Convolute uppercase letter, Arabic numerals and lowercase letter, wherever appropriate, and a final Arabic numeral. All translations in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise noted. 4  Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper Collins, 1975). 5  See, for example, Roberto Rossellini’s film La prise de pouvoir par Loius XIV, which brilliantly shows that Louis’s main instrument of imposing power onto his subjects was not sheer violence but the force of fashion, which he established and dictated singlehandedly (La prise de pouvoir par Loius XIV, [1966, Paris], 100 minutes). 3

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D1,3). But how does the cosmos appear to the hollow and stale contemporary city dweller? Not as the ancient cosmos, which literally was a beautiful—and living—being that showed itself in its splendor and fury to political beings, who protected themselves from it with thick city walls. Stripped of any apparent or hidden purpose, demystified and disenchanted, the modern cosmos appears in tedious natural monotony—of and as weather—to the bourgeois, who protect themselves not behind walls but under the glassed roofs of the arcades, and more recently, of enormous malls, exhibition centers, and stadiums. Therefore, the primary manifestation of cosmic power for the city inhabitant is rain. “Rain makes everything more lurking, makes days not only gray but uniform” (AP D1a,9). Boredom that may become productive of new experience becomes increasingly rare in modern, bustling, ever-busy cities and thus literally has no place in them: “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places—the activities that are intimately associated with boredom—are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well.”6 However, in protecting themselves from rain, the streets lose their power for natural cleaning and get covered in dust: “As dust, rain takes revenge on the arcades” (AP D1a,1). Dust enters every single pore of the lush colors, penetrates every surface: “Plush as dust collector” (AP D1a3). The cheerful is downgraded to being monotonous and dull, and the work of cleaning the invisible, all-pervasive particles that only rarely show themselves dancing in a ray of (artificial) light is the epitome of the monotony of the city life, matched only by that of work on a conveyor belt. The modern cosmos finds a way to retaliate against the bright, new world of consumerism. The new world is a mechanical one, rotating and repeating its movements with the startling necessity of natural law. And the social world as a mirror of nature also becomes, for example, a reflection of abstract mathematical principles. This reflection is, however, in the words of Proust, incurably imperfect (AP D2a1), not because it is irregular but precisely because it is too regular and always the same, repeating according to the same established rules and patterns and tastes. The modern social world is boring because it follows, and imitates, the new mechanistic world. Speaking about Louis-Auguste Blanqui’s last work, written in prison, L’Éternité par les astres—a book of the rebel who tried to escape the monotonous injustices of the bourgeois world by turning to science—Benjamin, in a letter to Horkheimer on January 6, 1938, writes:  Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” trans. Harry Zohn, in 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 3 of Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), 149.

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The cosmic vision of the world which Blanqui lays out, taking his data from the mechanistic natural science of bourgeois society, is an infernal vision. At the same time, it is a complement to the society to which Blanqui, in his old age, was forced to concede victory. . . . It is an unconditional surrender, but simultaneously the most terrible indictment of a society that projects this image of the cosmos—understood as an image of itself—across the heavens. (AP D5a6)

Still, the whole city cannot cover itself in glassed ceilings, which remains a utopian vision and aspiration for the future. Devoid of the glassed-roof protection, the city dwellers need to use umbrellas, which become one of the most ubiquitous carried-along items in modern city life. Occasionally, umbrellas can also protect from the sun, as one can often see in late nineteenth-century French painting (in Renoir and others.). According to a 1845 piece on the climate of Paris, serene nature showing itself in clear skies and fine weather is alien to French literature—the author of the piece finds that Corneille mentions the stars only once, the sun in Racine is similarly a hapax legomenon, and that the stars and flowers are introduced into literature by Chateaubriand, who discovered them in America.7 Thus, the folding fan was never a protection against the force of nature in Paris. Rather, it was used to reveal seductive beauty by intentionally hiding it. For the power of erotic attraction is always in the lack of transparency. But now in modernity, even in lascivious pictures and appearances, fan is substituted by umbrella, which now “fans” erotic fantasies by providing an intentionally small, discreet refuge beyond which the city dweller wants to throw an indiscreet look (AP D1a,6). Inevitably, one needs to leave the cozy streets of the covered arcades and the snug salons, where the whirl of commotion and conversation results in the nothing of profound boredom, and go out into the streets. There, again, one is met with the inevitable grey and the rain. The capital of the nineteenthcentury world is a rainy and foggy place. Yet when the rain stops, it does not recede altogether but gets sublimated—into the fog. For Baudelaire, the fog is spleen (AP D1,4), which linguistically feels like an untranslatable borrowing that epitomizes the eternal fog from another great city across the English Channel/La Manche. Yet the fog, which tends to turn into haze, and in modern industrial society into smog, is the embodiment of boredom. The colors, which the city tries to scale up, turn inevitably into ubiquitous gray, and life gets back on its monotonous track.

 Joseph Méry, “Le climat de Paris,” in Le diable à Paris, vol. 1, ed. Pierre-Jules Hetzel (Paris: Hetzel, 1845), 245, quoted in AP D1a,5 (where the author of this piece is wrongly cited as Victor Méry).

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The modern perception of rain as the epitome of “natural” boredom is opposed to that present in the famous print by Hiroshige, which depicts seven people on a bridge and one boatman caught by an evening shower, who keep on walking and rowing under the protection of hats, umbrellas, and a straw mat. There is no hint of boredom but rather the expression of an exalting sorrow brought about by the perception of the world’s transience. The picture of the fleeting scene is taken at dusk, which will last for a short—not long— while, and then will disappear forever—the people will pass, the shower will stop, and the day will fade away—and will never repeat but stay in its momentary transient and utterly non-boring fascination.8 THE BOREDOM OF WAITING The inner side of boredom, however, is waiting (AP D9a,4). Again, Benjamin does not provide an argument—only a thesis, which is then supported and justified with reference to other theses and quotations. He continues, in parentheses: “Boredom waits for death [Die Langeweile wartet auf den Tod]” (AP D9a,4). And a further quote, from Victor Hugo: “Waiting is life [Attendre c’est la vie]” (AP D10a,3). Therefore, one should conclude from this simple and seemingly unpretentious syllogism that boredom is life that waits for death. Yet death is never a given thing for us. It is never a part of our experience, since experience can only be lived through by a living being. Death is not a purpose or τέλος of our existence but rather, as Heidegger suggests in Being and Time, life is being toward death because death is the limit of all aspirations in life. But there is something very peculiar in this modern attitude to death: death is not frightful but boring. As frightful, death is still meaningful. But as boring, it is just an indefinitely postponed event that not only does not have a meaning by itself but is not able to give a meaning to life, either. Therefore, boredom is waiting for that which one cannot know but still keeps waiting for.9 This is a very peculiar kind of search. If life is waiting for that which it cannot possibly grasp, it is very much akin to the Socratic paradox of knowledge: If we are looking for something that we do not yet know,

 See Andō Hiroshige, Sudden Evening Shower over Ohashi Bridge at Atake, 1857, woodblock print, 37 x 25 cm. This polychrome print (no. 58), from One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo, depicts a shower over the wooden Ohashi Bridge that spans Sumida river, and was published in 1857, precisely at the time of the boredom epidemic’s spread in Europe. 9  “Boredom is an awaiting without an object” (Andrew Benjamin, “Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity,” in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin [London: Continuum, 2005], 168). See also Eli Friedlander, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 98–99. 8

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how do we know what we are looking for? And if we come across that which we have been looking for, we should have known it all along, and therefore should not have been looking for it (Plato, Meno 80d–e). This is a paradoxical and enigmatic situation. For Benjamin, “We have boredom when we do not know what we are waiting for” (AP D2,7; see also D4,6). Hence, boredom is a unique negative expression of looking for knowledge as waiting for that which we do not know, and which is thus marked as death. This modern attitude to knowledge is radically different from the ancient one: for Socrates, it has an insuperably erotic, attractive character, so that one cannot oppose the unavoidable—and very engaging—gravitational pull of knowledge. However, in modernity—and this is what its most acute critics perceive and express—knowledge becomes a burden, a tedious responsibility, a bore. Modern knowledge is never a revelation of the what is, but a long-winded, superficial, and boring construction of what should be. This is well grasped by Benjamin: “That we know or believe we know, is almost always nothing other than the expression of our superficiality or distraction” (AP D2,7). The what is is apparently there, veiled but waiting to be revealed in an act of knowledge. It is the ultimate triumph of the life of the mind. The what should be is never yet there but always needs to be achieved, though never in a final and finalized way. As such, it is boredom, the unattainable, repulsive, and yet unavoidable waiting for death. Modern knowledge, built piece by piece and accumulated through a constantly renewed effort of its scholarly artisans, is the product of a factory of knowledge (as in Bacon10 and Descartes11). It should eventually take the shape of a system of knowledge, which will be complete, comprehensive, and exhaustive. But the system signifies the end of effort and the death of knowledge in the making. A system is to be expected and is therefore boring, in contradistinction to a seemingly isolated insight—which is always sudden and unexpected. One should fill in every single entry that the system demands. Philosophical systems are fascinating in their grandiosity but are boring (as in Proclus or Hegel). A system is meant to achieve a final and ultimate transparency of all things and processes, both in nature and history. Understanding is thus deadly, whereas misunderstanding, or not yet understanding, is productive and alive. It is a wonder that cannot be classified or fit within a system. But modern systematic knowledge is a welcoming of the wonder of the not yet formulated and deductively justified but anticipated  See Francis Bacon, “The New Atlantis,” in The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 11  See René Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii, in Œuvres de Descartes, vol. 10, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1908); Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 10

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knowledge. And if productive misunderstanding abandons us moderns to the tedious job of systematic knowledge production, it can only be substituted with an artificial and intentional “strong misreading” of a problem or a text. Building a system is thus difficult, and the difficult is boring, because it is not a challenge of solving a particular problem but a big and long task, which needs waiting. In the end, the system turns out to be the death of the mind. Knowledge is transparency. Solving a problem may be a challenging task, but the process of the solution may be engaging because the unknown but aspired for is erotic, insofar as it attracts by its not-yet-full transparency. But when we come to know, the life of the mind comes to an end, which in the ancient search for knowledge is the purpose of the mind, but in modernity is flatly an unexciting ending. In this sense, the search for knowledge is life, but knowledge itself is death. New knowledge is engaging in its novelty. And novelty is never boring, because it is an interruption to and a seeming end to waiting.12 But novelty for novelty’s sake is boring, because it itself is never new but always repetitive. The search for novelty as a means for getting excited, and in this way for overcoming the modern boredom of waiting, is thus a distinguishing trait of modern life. As Benjamin observes, modern bourgeois society strives to become more and more bureaucratically organized by increasing the extent and grasp of administrative norms. The necessity of following the mesh of these selfproliferating norms makes people wait more. Caught in the bureaucratic web, people find an escape and liberation in games of chance (AP D10a,2). Gambling, then, becomes the expression of modernity: as the preferred distraction, gaming seemingly liberates, but does not really save, people from the superfluous, stifling regulations that they anonymously impose on themselves without their proper consent or even willingness. Gambling becomes the main principle of functioning for modern financial capitalism, which is entirely based on the concept of chance and luck as the Calvinist expression of the predestination for salvation. The salvation, in this case, is from boredom. And acquiring the support of reason for gambling requires an entirely new mathematical apparatus, which introduces the study of probability as the exact science of modernity. Entranced by boredom, modern society perceives it as a collectively shared phenomenon. Similarly to Durkheim’s collective perception and Halbwachs’s collective memory,13 one could introduce the concept of collective boredom,

 On the role and importance of interruption for the human being, see Dmitri Nikulin, Dialectic and Dialogue (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 95–118. 13  See Émile Durkheim, “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 6, no. 3 (May 1898): 273–302; and Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also Dmitri 12

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in which everyone inevitably participates. Collective boredom is a mood that is not rooted in the constitution of human beings and is not their ontological predicament. Boredom is not a collectively shared phenomenon in antiquity since there is not even a concept of it. The “epidemic” of boredom (AP D3a,4) is a very modern disease, precisely in the sense of putting people collectively out of their ease in society. For Benjamin, boredom is a clear expression of collective dreaming, the “indication of the participation in the sleep of the collective” (AP D3,7). In a dream, many things happen simultaneously yet haphazardly and without a clearly established plot. One could say that dream functions according to the principle post hoc sed non propter hoc. In this sense, dreams are plotless. As Ágnes Heller has suggested (in a personal conversation), dreams are organized according to the modern logic of contingency. The demand of constant growth as the purpose of the modern capitalist economy is set off by the jumps and deviations of gambling within the market, which grip everyone’s attention—but, as in a dream, without any resolution or meaning. Boredom as waiting, then, is the situation when much is going on and yet nothing really happens. Such a waiting is not even a constant return to and of the same but an unavoidable (neurotic) repetition of a different other and another in the absence of the same. There is no plot, just a limitless variety of distractions, which are infinitely entertaining but ultimately contingent and boring. THE BOREDOM OF REPETITION The first form of boredom in Benjamin (at least in my reconstruction) comes from and with the mechanistic structure of the world as the repetition of the same. Repetition brings melancholy as exhaustion, tiredness, and fatigue. In fact, in the Middle Ages, melancholy was considered a malaise, a weariness caused by repetitive action or the complete lack of it.14 The embodiment of repetition is rain, from which the modern city wants to protect itself with glassed roofs. A mechanism is always repeating the same and the same, according to a firmly established set of natural laws and in accordance with the task—or a multiplicity of tasks—that it is meant to perform and that becomes its efficient and its as-if final cause. A quotation from Blanqui’s L’Éternité par les astres: “The universe repeats itself without an end and Nikulin, “Memory in Recollection of Itself,” in Memory: A History, ed. Dmitri Nikulin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 10–16. 14  Raymond Kilbanksy, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964).

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paws in place. In infinity, eternity imperturbably impersonates the same representations” (AP D7a). In early modern science, the clock is the image of the world, which either needs constant or periodic rewinding by its maker or is set to run once and for all, according to its mechanistic design. Yet, for Benjamin, in the mechanistically repeating world, in nature, which is translated into social second nature, it is rain that exemplifies repetition without an end. It has no end but an accidental ending and purpose. Rain is nothing but monotony and repetition, where same does not meet other. The rain that was sent by nature or by gods to nourish the living is nothing but a nuisance for the modern city. Thus, one can only detect “the decreasing magical power of rain” (AP D1,7). The second form of boredom is waiting. We wait for the rain to stop in order to be able to go about our business. But rain has no purpose in its monotonous persistence of the same. Rain is the recurrent, eternal other. Waiting is the unending, eternal same. While rain is the other without the same, waiting is the same without the other. Both the other and the same come together, without a synthesis or interaction, in repetition, the third form of boredom. This is repetition without repetition, a pure monotony. It is one repeating tone, one and the same theme without variations. It is the monotony of serialism without a chance for polyphony or even a simple melody. The “eternity” of the same and other, however, is not the eternity that would be an eternal presence of the other in the same, a nunc stans or αἰών. In modernity, the eternal is just an embellishment, reduced to a parergon, a fashionable, telling, yet ultimately insignificant detail, a “ruffle of a dress [eine Rüsche am Kleid]” (AP B3,7). Modern eternity is eternal repetition, boring and monotonous. Monotony, as a quote from Jean Vaudal suggests, “feeds on the new” (AP D5,6). It is waiting for the new that turns out to be eternally the same, and is thus forever old, or rather, is without past and future but not in the present. The monotony of repetition is ahistorical. Repetition is thus neither a process nor an act but is their coincidence without identity. Repetition is the eternal avoidance of death without a possibility of asserting life. As Benjamin puts it, “In order to grasp the significance of nouveauté, one should go back to novelty in everyday life. Why does everyone share the newest with others? Probably, in order to triumph over death. This only where there is nothing really new” (D5a,5). One can say that the boredom of the cosmos as reflected in rain is the repetition of the other as discrete, of units as the monads of number. It is . . . The boredom of waiting is the continuation of the same as the continuous, of the extension of line or magnitude, which cannot be reduced to the discrete (see Aristotle, Phys. 206a8–207a10). It is —. And repetition, then, is a non-synthetic binding and bringing together of the same and the other into a

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cycle or circle, where the same and other remain mere opposites without any mediation. It is O. The mechanistic repeating universe of Laplace, where every thing’s position can be calculated and predicted with absolute certainty at any moment in past and future, is a world devoid of any extra meaning or a being that might bring a meaning to the world, except for the cognition of its mechanicalmathematical laws. In such a world, the idea of any being transcending the existing repeating established order of things is obsolete. The world that endlessly repeats itself does not have an end as a meaning or purpose. This is the Nietzschean world where existence (das Dasein) is “without meaning and purpose, but inevitably recurring without any finale into nothingness: the eternal return [die ewige Wiederkehr].”15 This is the world that feeds on itself, the world without will, without a goal (unless one finds consolation in the “the luck of the circle”) (AP D8,4; D8,5). Yet, Nietzsche attempts to avoid positing the idea of eternal recurrence as a new myth, and is thus obliged to provide an argument in favor of the unavoidability of the eternal recurrence, thereby paradoxically making, or assigning, sense of his own construction of the nonsensical and boringly self-repeating world of the eternal same. For him, the mechanistic world is determined by a finite quantity of force and its bearers; therefore, in infinite time, all of the possible combinations should be repeated, and the world will inevitably come to the same state where it once was.16 The world, however, does not consist of a finite number of constituents that can be numbered. Thus, the decimal transcription of π is infinite, and yet no finite combination of numbers in it ever repeats. Thus, Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return of the same into the same is ungrounded, as is the world that it regulates. In the very last fragment dedicated to boredom and eternal return, Benjamin greets eternal recurrence as undermining the very idea of progress, which for him is the belief in “an infinite perfectibility understood as an infinite task in morality” (D10a,5). For him, the two are complementary. They are the indissoluble antinomies in the face of which the dialectical conception of historical time must be developed. In this conception, the idea of eternal return appears precisely as that “shallow rationalism” that the belief in progress is accused of being, while faith in progress seems no less to belong to the mythic mode of thought than does the idea of eternal return (AP D10a,5).

 Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht, in vol. 18 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Franziska Oehler et al. (Munich: Musarion, 1926), 46; The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 33–36, quoted in AP D8,1. 16  Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 548–50, quoted in AP D8a1. See also AP D6a,1. 15

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Progress as an infinite moral task and the infinite return to the same are opposites, and yet both are false, and thus do not present a real antinomy. Each one is a myth. Myth is supposed to liberate from boredom. But the myth of eternal reiteration is profoundly boring, and such also is the myth of infinite perfectibility, which necessarily means perfectibility without perfection and thus without any meaning except the repetition of the very process of perfectibility. Either one is thus the myth of the modern monological subject, which keeps reaffirming and reiterating itself without a chance of getting rid of itself in the boring, recurring repetition of the same. THE IDEOLOGICAL BOREDOM OF THE RULING CLASS Most of Benjamin’s thinking about boredom bears on literary and cultural criticism and history. Apparently, Adorno encouraged him to write more on political issues, and Benjamin’s voluminous Convolutes, with multiple extracts from Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Marx, reflect Benjamin’s socialist sympathies. In the process of the worker’s self-alienation, according to Marx, The worker produces capital; capital produces him—hence, he produces himself, and . . . his human qualities exist only insofar as they exist for capital alien to him. . . . Production . . . produce[s] man as a . . . dehumanized human being.17

Capital, then, regulates the production and produces—reproduces—itself by the labor of the workers, who are dehumanized to the extent that they are—always in plural—the inorganic organ, the tool of such production. The producer—the capital—that stands behind the production as its ruling principle therefore produces without working, by the sheer will of the modern economic embodiment of the divine, omnipotent being. The modern subject, then, as fully autonomous, self-legislating, willing intellect, considers the other—others—as a part of the external world, which is mechanistic. Therefore, the workers are mechanical, lifeless extensions of the body of the res extensa of the universal res cogitans. The workers are considered lifeless limbs, tools, and instruments, which are hence inevitably alienated, not only from the product they produce but also from their very humanity, because humanity now belongs to the universal subject. This modern subject  Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus: die Frühschriften, ed. Seigfried Lanshut and J. P. Myer (Leipzig: A. Kröner, 1932), 361–2; The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 120–1, quoted in AP X1a,1.

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is capital, the soul of the world of modern exploitation behind the production, which is socially constituted by the economic ruling class of the owners, who use the labor of dehumanized workers. Yet, something strange happens to such a subject: instead of either physically enjoying the fruits of the others’ labor that it considers its own production or morally suffering from the realization of the injustice of distribution, the modern subject is bored. Benjamin astutely notes that factory work is “the economic foundation of the ideological boredom of the higher classes” (D2a,4). The ruling class, which is the economic embodiment of the modern subject as pure same, cannot even enjoy what it produces, because the autonomous subject is the ultimate loner that dooms itself to the inescapable and eternal repetition of the same. It is others who really produce the goods by their work, but being reduced to nonhuman organs or instruments, they are unable to use and enjoy the product of their labor. The dull pain of the boredom of the repetition of the same is epitomized in ongoing and everincreasing consumption, which has no end except for distracting the subject—the ruling, consuming class—from itself, which it is unable to do, being incapable of moving beyond subject’s self-imposed solitary confinement of self-isolation. Modern bourgeois ideological boredom is thus associated with production and consumption, in stark contrast to the premodern boredom of ceremonies (still present in stately academic ceremonies), which was opposed to the full engagement of and involvement in battles and tournaments (which Benjamin notices in the depiction of the dolce far niente of battle scenes [AP D2a,8]). For the modern bourgeois ruling class, life is the life of production without production and consumption without enjoyment. Such a life is marked off by inevitable ideological boredom, which is the agony of the constant, unavoidable repetition of the same by the same. The pain resulting from the self-isolation of the modern subject and the mechanistic repetition of the same is well spotted by Engels in the myth of Sisyphus, as quoted by Marx in Capital: The bleak routine of endless torture of and by the work (Arbeitsqual) in which the same mechanical process is repeated again and again is like the work or labor of Sisyphus; the burden of work, like the rock, always keeps falling back on the worn-down worker.18

In the Greek myth, however, Sisyphus is punished for his dreadful wrongdoing; he is condemned to the eternal repetition of the same  Friedrich Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (Leipzig: O Wigand, 1848), quoted in AP D2a,4.

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meaningless labor, by the gods, who are many, just, and enjoy their eternal life shared with others (see Apollodorus I.9.3). In the modern rendition and appropriation of the myth by the universal subject, Sisyphus becomes the working class that is punished without having committed any crime, and has to suffer for the sole reason of being excluded from the same of the subject, being considered as a mere instrumental extension of its body. Marx wants to return the alienated workers back to humanity by making them the subject of history in his historical-materialist project, the makers and producers of a just history based on equal distribution of the produced. And yet, he does it still within the paradigm of modern universal subjectivity, which is why the substitution of one class for another in the same subject does not make it less isolated and does not open it to the sisterhood of the others. Sisyphus is punished without guilt, and thus without a real punishment. Sisyphus must suffer, but so does the one who makes him suffer unjustly. The ruling class assumes the position of gods who punish the humans—the workers, the poor, the ruled. But in doing so, the owners, the rich, the rulers, in fact assimilate themselves to the modern self-sufficient autonomous subject, who usurps legislation and justice. In the modern reversal of the myth, Sisyphus suffers the physical pain of destitution. But the real torture and ultimate punishment is the self-inflicted pain of boredom from which the modern consumerist ruling class, the embodiment of the modern subject, can never escape. WHO IS BORED? If it is indeed the modern subject who is inextricably bored, how is boredom translated into ordinary life? For, in the end, the subject is a philosophical and historical construction and does not walk the streets of modern city. Produced by and within the project of modernity, with its multiple facets of humanism, the social state, liberal democracy, anticlericalism, modern science, and art, the modern subject, in turn, produces cultural and historical commonalities or types which incarnate in us humans who walk the earth, reproducing themselves as cultural types and sometimes disappearing in order to later reemerge under a different guise. Benjamin does not suggest the inevitability of boredom and the ultimate need for its embracing. For him, one should flee and liberate oneself from boredom, which is annoyance and discontent.19 The escape and salvation comes in random thoughts, reading casually from meticulously selected books, unintended conversations with friends about seemingly haphazard  For Benjamin, boredom is Verstimmung—a nuisance, a misattunement—and is thus in stark contrast to Heidegger’s Stimmung—mood, or attunement (AP D3a,4).

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topics, which, however, all come down to the same set of themes. His liberation from boredom in a sense is philosophical too, but it is emphatically non-systematic—rather, it is Romantic in style, playing with literary genres, expressing itself in aphorisms, fragments, and journalistic essays. In Benjamin, the modern, universal, bored subject is personified in three types of the bored: (1) the gambler, (2) the flaneur, and (3) the one who waits. One must not pass the time—one must invite it to oneself. To pass the time (to kill time, drive it away): the gambler. Time spills from all of his pores.—To store time, as a battery stores energy: the flaneur. Finally, the third: he invites the time and releases it in altered form—in that of expectation: he who waits. (AP D3,4)

Benjamin follows what the language suggests: boredom—the “long while” (Langeweile)—has to do with time and its overcoming, not by cancelling, driving away, or overcoming the time, but rather by inviting it and making a friend with whom one can keep conversing in and throughout time.20 In the “beginning” of facing boredom, one is the gambler who drives the time away in his inability to manage time and come to terms with it. No matter whether one wins or loses, one gambles away one’s life as free time and is thus always a loser. In the “end” of the experience with boredom, the one who waits is the real winner, for he copes with time through expectation (Erwartung), which does not come with an ultimate achievement of an end where everything fits, all coming to a final resolution within a systematic, all-embracing understanding of a whole. One keeps expecting the unexpected—a sight, a sigh, an insight, always partial, dug out in an unexpected place—a showcase, an exhibition, an occasional conversation, a tree on one’s route—which one always share with another in order to fully appreciate it, then abandoning it and resuming waiting as expecting the always partial but always fascinating new thought. And in the “middle” is the flaneur, the troubled seeker for elusive mundane wisdom. As we have seen, boredom in Benjamin shows itself as rain, waiting, and repetition. One could say that each of the three kinds of the bored is subject to these three types of boredom as the repetition of the discrete units of the same, of the duration of one single same, and of the duration wrapped

 Not quite as poetic as Heidegger in his play with words, their roots, prefixes, and suffixes, Benjamin still discerns the three types of the one who is bored by distinguishing their relation to time: the gambler (der Spieler) is to pass and drive time away (vertreiben) by driving time out (austreiben); the flaneur (der Flaneur) is to store and (re)charge (laden) time in the store of his memory; and the one who waits (der Wartende) is to both invite and load (einladen) time (AP D3,4).

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into a circle and thus reproducing itself as the same, as the path of a planet around its star. The Flaneur The “middleman” of the three (cultural and historical) types of the bored is an intriguing and fascinating figure that energetically accumulates and distributes the experience of boredom.21 The flaneur is a wanderer, a viator who walks around and hangs about without a perceptible aim. In a sense, the flaneur is a planet, etymologically a “wandering star” (πλάνητες ἀστέρες), circling in retrograde loops around its star. The flaneur is a monotonous vagrant who is roaming around without having left his home, to which he always returns. The star that keeps him gravitating always toward the same in its seemingly infinite facets is the city. There is a certain monotony to the stars (AP D6a,1), not only because of their dim, repetitive, yet irregular expansion among the lights of the city but also because they are the visible representation of the melancholy of eternity (AP D7; D7a), where everything always returns to the same and nothing changes in the perennial repetition and waiting, only rarely interrupted by the rain of the falling stars. This is why the flaneur traverses his grounds along familiar routes while making occasional loops, not only during the day but also at night in fits of noctambulism (AP M6a,2). Thus, the flaneur is primarily and mostly a walker who spends hours wandering around a big city (in the nineteenth century, paradigmatically Paris, and now, for us, New York). The city, and especially the big city, is an artificially produced place, arranged according to some plan, either visible or invisible, regulated by human needs for shelter and the exchange of goods. As such, the big city is full of remembrances and reminiscences, which the flaneur is capable of extracting from its places by walking and observing them. For this reason, he is not only a connoisseur but also a kind of historian of the city, which is always his city. Unlike the tourist, who gravitates toward recognizably significant places about which one can read, the flaneur knows seemingly random places by paying his respect to minute details inaccessible to others, frequenting subreptive corners and just-above-ground places. Every street, then, is “precipitous” (AP M1,2), leading him right down into the underground, hidden past. One could say that the tourist is a historiographer who studiously works on the adequatio of the learned written guide with what she observes in travels all over the world, thus elevating her experience into systematic  Benjamin dedicates the entirety of Convolute M to the flaneur (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 416–55).

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historical knowledge. The flaneur, on the contrary, is an antiquarian who stays in one big city but prefers to get his knowledge of its places in pieces and keeps it as a collection of precious yet disconnected fragments, urban myths, and the minutiae of colorful splinters of the small, all of which might add up to the whole of the mosaic if there is one who would bother to collect them all and put them into a coherent picture. But that would be a task for the tourist as the historiographer, whose aim is generalization rather than attention to particulars. As an antiquarian, the flaneur prefers to attend to his favorite places by personal evidence, hearsay, and anecdotes, rather than a comprehensive narrative.22 Memory, City, Landscape Walking down memory lane, the flaneur appropriates the non-private and thus owns it: “His soles remember” (AP M1,1). Meandering through the city, the flaneur walks his grounds “without definite attachment to anything,”23 driven only by curiosity and the pleasure of recognizing familiar places, which are now his own—in his memory and reminiscence. Each place is populated by people and events from the past and present, and each becomes a place for his inner theater, where the drama of city life unfolds in its multiple independent, yet often intersecting, novellas. The walked city is not a geographical map superimposed onto bricks and stones and occasional trees but is the animated landscape in which every place is unique, has a strong individuality, and is loaded with an antiquarian historical account. Landscape as the Romantic “ideal landscape,” in which imaginary groves are inevitably complemented by grottoes and a “malerische Ruine,” is the place for imaginary wanderings, where one can realize one’s longing for the ideal that is always only partially, or perhaps never at all, translated into the real.24 But the flaneur translates the live Romantic landscape into the living organism of the city. As Benjamin notes, “The old Romantic sentiment for landscape dissolves and a new Romantic conception of landscape emerges—of landscape [Landschaft] that seems, rather, to be a cityscape [Stadtschaft], if it is true that the city is the properly sacred ground of flanerie” (AP M2a,1). In this sense, the flaneur is a new Romantic who lives in his own intimate world, created and guided

 See Arnoldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” in Studies in Historiography (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); and Dmitri Nikulin, The Concept of History (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 67–71. 23  Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1922), 245, quoted in APM2a,1. 24  See Jacob Philipp Hackert, Ideale Landschaft mit Motiven aus der Gegend von Tivoli, 1775, oil, 122.8 x 168.2 cm, Goethe-Haus, Frankfurt. 22

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by imagination (AP M17a,1), and populated and kept alive by frequent walks through memorable places. The flaneur is thus the creator of his own world, and as such translates the macrocosm of the city into the microcosm of his room. The room is now the contracted city, and the city is the expanded room. “So the flaneur goes for a walk in his room” (AP M2a,2), as does Kierkegaard in his early work. “The city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room” (AP Ma,4). This boring, “epic” voyage autour de ma chambre,25 however, demonstrates the “dialectical” character of the flaneur’s wanderings: creating the space for freedom in the city, he produces his own prison in his room, where he locks himself in for life. But the room as the isomorphic reflection of the city is more than just a physical, rectangular space: it is the imaginary setting for walking in memory places. The loci memoriae, the invention of which is ascribed by Cicero and Quintilian to Simonides, and which are today reinterpreted by Pierre Nora, are imaginary places where one puts and stores images of the events and things to be remembered, located, and then retrieved when needed.26 The flaneur lives in and off memory places, thus reproducing the collective city memory: “Just as every tried-and-true experience also includes its opposite, so . . . the perfected art of the flaneur includes a knowledge of ‘dwelling.’ ” And since “images can inhabit a place, then we have an idea of what concerns the flaneur and what he looks for. Namely, images, wherever they lodge. The flaneur is the priest of the genius loci.”27 In this way, the now becoming anonymous and withered collective memory lives off images inscribed into the places visited by the flaneur. The flaneur is thus the bearer and interpreter of memory as inscribed into now live and living places. Memory is transformed by him from antiquarian into personal and autobiographical, which, when shared (for the flaneur is the one who writes), can also become part of collective memory.28 Liberated and imprisoned in his imagination and memory that superimpose the remembered onto the places in the city and the room, the flaneur is permanently drunk and intoxicated by memory in his perambulations, where he now cannot distinguish the imaginary from the actual. In  Xavier de Maistre, Voyage around My Room: Selected Works of Xavier de Maistre, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New York: New Directions, 1994). See also Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 908, no. 8. 26  Cicero, De or. 2.86.351–3; Quintilian, Inst.11.2–11.5. See also Aristotle, Phys. 425a14; Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, 3 vols, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–1998). 27  Walter Benjamin, “The Return of the Flâneur,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, vol. 2, pt. 1 of Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings (New York: Belknap Press, 1999), 262–7, esp. 264. See also Alison Ross, Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Image (New York: Routledge, 2015), 79. 28  See Nikulin, “Memory in Recollection of Itself,” 9–16. 25

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the self-induced state of “anamnestic intoxication in which the flaneur goes about the city” (AP M1,5), he experiences the permanent “intoxicating interpenetration of street and residence” (AP M3a5; see also M1a,1, M2,3, M17a,5). Benjamin distinguishes between Erinnerung, “memory” broadly speaking, and Eingedenken, which, as he writes in response to Horkheimer, is a reconstructive form of remembrance capable of modifying the past and thus constitutive of history itself (AP N8,1). In this respect, Eingedenken is similar to recollection that allows a reconstruction of the past in a stepby-step reasoning.29 The Romantic translation, transformation, and identification of the unmediated dialectical poles of the ideal and the real is thus accomplished by the anamnestically inebriated flaneur, locked within the city-room of his memories. Flaneur as Observer and Consumer The flaneur is an acute observer and keen consumer, a critic of modernity by tasting, swallowing, and digesting it and then producing his verdict in writing.30 In this sense, the flaneur is distinct from the “philosophical walker,” (which is the Greek “peripatetic” [AP M1,6]), who intends to provide a systematic (although not necessarily efficient), critical reflection on the current state of social and political affairs with an extrapolation into the future. But the flaneur belongs to the modern ruling class of gods who exploit the destitute and dehumanized producers, those who constitute the contemporary desperate, collective Sisyphus, rather than a self-governed, dreadful Leviathan. Therefore, the flaneur is a consumer, who consumes and enjoys their work and relishes and appreciates its display in the department store, which is his ultimate ambit and terrain. As Benjamin perspicaciously notes, the flaneur’s “empathy [Einfühlung] with the commodity is fundamentally empathy with exchange value itself. The flaneur is the virtuoso of this empathy. He takes the concept of marketability itself for a walk” (AP M17a2). Therefore, the flaneur is the observer of the market (AP M5,6). This is why one of the preferred activities of the flaneur is staring into shop windows (AP M18a,3), which, like the arcades, are also covered with glass, providing a seductive transparency without possession. The one who is bored can see, without yet having the seen in the marketplace. Observation through and under the glass comes first, regulating consumption without

 “History is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance [Eingedenken]. What science has ‘determined, remembrance can modify’ ” (AP N8,1). See also Alexander Gelley, Benjamin’s Passages: Dreaming, Awakening (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 177–8. 30  Compare the discussion of taste as the most adequate metaphoric representation of modern reason in Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). 29

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consummation, for full transparency is the opposite of eroticism. Here, the object of desire is not, and often never is, fully seen, because it is partly veiled and obscure, but precisely as such invites the onlooker to be made fully transparent, as the end result and prize of the work of practical and theoretical cognition. The flaneur is thus the opposite of the ancient (Athenian) philosopher, who is driven by the erotic desire to know and discover the true things behind their appearances. The modern (Parisian) philosopher is the flaneur, who desires without desire and claims the impossibility of getting to the truth of things, since there is nothing behind the shop windows’ appearances but the appearances themselves, multiplied in the reflections through the glass. The flaneur is the spectator of the boulevards, cafés, shops, and photographers’ studios behind the glass: visible but not touchable, they are like the stars or that absolute past of epic events that one cannot change but only tell about. Yet, this absolute past is now made into the absolute present of the market behind the glass-cases. As the observer of modern city life, the flaneur is a leisurely figure: he reaps without sowing, consumes without having produced. But unlike the dandy, who has means of his own, in order to justify his social existence, the flaneur has to market and sell himself by displaying himself on this side of the show windows in public. Yet what can he offer, the one who belongs to the leisurely non-producing class? The flaneur is the one who writes. The writing about his strolls fills his diary, but for the public he can only make himself appear useful and interesting by writing that fits only in the marketplace of the modern newspaper. As such, the flaneur can become the public intellectual and thus constitute what modernity calls the realm of “culture.” As Benjamin himself writes: The social base of flaneur is journalism. As flaneur, the literary intellectual [der Literat] ventures into the marketplace to sell himself. . . . “We know,” says Marx, “that the value of each commodity is determined by the quantity of labor materialized in its use value, by the working-time socially necessary for its production.” . . . [The flaneur is] in the privileged position of making the work time necessary for the production of his use value available to a general and public review by passing that time on the boulevard and thus, as it were, exhibiting it. (AP M16,4).

Journalism is the modern marketplace, where people discuss the latest news and establish and defend political programs. In this way, the flaneur’s passing the time in public becomes the justification of his use value. Leisure in modernity thus becomes indistinguishable from work, and the gods as bourgeois intellectuals impose the Sisyphean labor of self-commodification on themselves, in order to justify their observant and consumerist existence.

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The flaneur is thus a narcissist: he enjoys showing himself to others and to himself in the streets, publicly reflected in the glass of show-windows, and privately in the mirrors of his own room. And yet, he is fascinated with the masses, in which he sees his own reflection, multiplied and enhanced. People en masse inhabit the city as their own dwelling place: Streets are the apartment of the collective. The collective [das Kollectiv] is an eternally unquiet, eternally agitated being that—in the space between the building fronts—experiences, learns, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. (AP M3a4)

Setting himself apart from the masses, perceiving himself as solitary, the flaneur is part of them without even noticing this since he is so busy with his own image and reflections. This inevitable inclusion in the masses further enhances his constant inebriation and delirium with the city.31 Being the staunch spectator of modernity, the flaneur is fascinated and drunk with the motion of great masses in the city, which proves to be a sweeping revolutionary force, as Sergei Eisenstein makes visible in his film, Battleship Potemkin. Benjamin notes that in the great construction projects of the nineteenth century—“railroad stations, exhibition halls, department stores”—all have been of great collective importance and were built for the masses. “The flaneur feels drawn to these ‘despised, everyday’ structures . . . . In these constructions, the appearance of great masses on the stage of history was already foreseen” (AP M21a2. Cf. K1a,5). The flaneur is the first to detect the looming contours of the history that will soon befall the city, yet is unwilling to recognize its dangers and consequences, still busy with his own glass mirror reflections. In this way, there is a certain dialectic to the flaneur’s existence, since he is both visible and invisible: he walks the streets of the city and writes about it as an individual, and yet he is variously present in manifold reflections in glass windows (today, on CCTV cameras)—he is ultimately lost in, and dissolved into, the masses. The flaneur is, thus, “on the one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all, altogether a suspect and, on the other side, fully elusive, the concealed one” (AP M2,8), in fact, “the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness” (AP M1,6). As the social werewolf, the flaneur is seen and not seen; is both conspicuous and anonymous; mixes with the  “[The masses] stretch before the flaneur as a veil: they are the newest drug for the solitary.—Second, they efface all traces of the individual: they are the newest asylum for the reprobate and the proscript.—Finally, within the labyrinth of the city, the masses are the newest and most inscrutable labyrinth. Through them, previously unknown chthonic traits are imprinted on the image of the city” (AP M16,3). See also Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 150–7.

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crowd and yet keeps apart from it; is the perceptive observer of modern social and political life and yet is its most complicit bourgeois supporter and participant; is permanently drunk with the excitement of the city life and yet is utterly bored with it; is replete in his writings with the premonition of coming disasters and yet is incapable of averting any of them. AN ANTITHESIS OF BOREDOM? “Now, it would be important to know,” asks Benjamin, “What is the dialectical antithesis to boredom” (AP D2,7)? Indeed. The knowledge of a thing might come from various and heterogeneous sources: from logical investigation, empirical research (driven by an explicit or implicit theoretical scheme), historical sources and comparisons (always made from a particular historical vantage point, which is often deliberately ignored and taken to be ahistorical), from its causes—or from the understanding of what it is not by opposition. So, it might be helpful to throw a brief glance at the opposite of boredom and see if it is really not (that) boring. Antithesis is an opposite that can be taken either as contradiction, which has no intermediate, or as contrariety, which allows for mediation. If we are looking for a contradictory opposite to boredom, then it has to be exclusive of boredom; and if for a contrariety, then such an opposite might point to a state in which boredom and its opposite are overcome yet are still somehow present. And “dialectical” might either mean the Platonic questioning that leads to the proper understanding of the subject, or the Hegelian “sublation” of the opposites that is meant to disclose a new category produced out of the “struggle” of the unmediated opposites.32 Either way, it is instructive to look for a possible antithesis of boredom. If it is not found, then perhaps the very search might be the antithesis and overcoming of boredom. Moreover, the antithesis to boredom might not be singular and unique but rather each time an antithesis to a particular form of boredom. (1) In the case of the boredom of rain, its antithesis is unmistakably obvious and self-evident: it is sun and sunshine (AP D1a,9). Instead of monotonous shades of ubiquitous gray, one is exposed to bright colors that are meant to enliven the flaneur’s ambience. Yet, such colors provide a distraction and entertainment but not an overcoming of boredom. The alluring promise of happiness, as embodied in the blissful landscape of the beach, is a figment of the consumerist imagination, which dreams of a world that has hardly a

 Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Dutt, in Collected Works, vol. 25, ed. Valentina Smirnova (New York: International, 1987), 313–588.

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connection with the repetitive, inescapable reality of rain, where the opposite of pouring—drizzling—is even more boring. (2) The antithesis to waiting can show itself in multiple ways. Against killing time, it appears as play, which has no particular purpose and is thus opposite to gambling (see AP D3,4), whose aim is profit—the goal of the modern market economy—which makes it utterly boring. Play (chess, basketball) does not have any purpose other than itself and is thus a self-sustaining activity that can be repeated without repetition and hence without being boring.33 Another antithesis to boredom as waiting is battle. Battle, which stops or transforms time from the dull, long waiting to the momentaneous anticipation of immortality in the moment of death, is disruptive of the lengthy time of the Langeweile. The momentous battle scene is captivating in its messiness and unpredictability, and as such is opposed to lengthy ceremonial scenes (D2a,8), to the boredom of the ritual, of the purely formal and the solemn. And a final antithesis to boredom as waiting is the search for knowledge, which is the life of the mind as opposed to the deadening and finalized knowledge taken as a fait accompli. Knowledge can be reinterpreted, rethought, and even rejected, if the scientific community switches to a new paradigm, but as a given and accepted system of thoughts, statements, and facts it is boring. Knowledge is the repletion of the same, whereas the search for knowledge is waiting for a discovery of radical novelty—of the other that will be meaningful only within the same of the existing knowledge— that no one ever has achieved up to this unique moment. Yet, all these three antitheses to boredom as waiting—play, battle, and the search for knowledge—can themselves be boring, tiresome, and exhausting, and thus do not represent a clear opposite of waiting, insofar as each one does involve waiting and anticipation and cannot be understood apart from them. (3) Finally, what would be an antithesis to boredom as repetition? It might be reading, impossible without the repetition of the discursive operation of going over parts of syntactic structures, gathering letters into syllables into words into paragraphs into chapters and eventually into a whole, restoring and squeezing a meaning out and into a text. No doubt, reading can be a pleasurable experience. Yet “le plaisir du texte” is more often a torture, accompanied by the narcissistic pleasure of self-immortalization through the incessant repetition of writing and rewriting, reading and rereading.34

 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 (Tübingen: JCB Mohr, 1990), 107–16; Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weisenheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004), 102–110. 34  For Barthes, “Boredom is not far away from enjoyment: it is enjoyment seen from the shores of pleasure [L’ennui n’est pas loin de la jouissance: il est la jouissance vue des rives du plaisir]” (Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte [Paris: Seuil, 1973], 43). 33

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Another possible candidate for the antithesis of boredom as repetition is travel or taking a journey, which presupposes the change of places that do not repeat themselves and are different from the familiar, from those places seen before. From visiting such places, one would expect to learn something, which connects travel with the search for (historical) knowledge. An old remedy for spleen, the downside of travel is fatigue, repetition of the same, and distraction from the familiar that itself is familiar. The hoped for far niente of travel often does not bring the refreshment of the novelty of the other, but returns to the well-known same, where distraction and entertainment substitute for the search of well-being. It is thus difficult to find a clear-cut antithesis to boredom in any of its appearances, one that would be either exclusive and complementary to boredom or allow for a non-boring mediation. Each time, boredom is lurking in what might appear to be its opposite. The problem, really, is ontological, for boredom itself is neither a subject (there is only one subject, that of the self-reflective and self-aware cogito) nor a predicate. For nothing is opposite to the subject (Aristotle, Cat. 3b24–27), and boredom is not a predicate of the (modern) subject. The problem with finding an—or the—opposite to boredom is that boredom inevitably accompanies the modern subject, which is very much its own construction, and thus cannot get rid of itself; the subject thereby cannot escape boredom as its own and that which is unavoidably proper to it, and hence cannot establish itself as non-boring to itself in its own activity. One thus needs to look for a being that would allow for subjectivity and yet be non-boring. But this means an entirely different kind of subject, one that would need and come to replace the modern, monological, solitary, and bored subject.

Chapter 6

Establishing the Laws of History

1. Everyone who was raised in the formative field of Russian culture has been traumatized by the writings of a great, obnoxious man that were carved into you before you can remember yourself. The stories about Filipok who was too young to go to school, the boy who stole the plums, the smart jackdaw who figured out how to recover food out of a jar filled with water—they all have become anonymous pieces of the moral thesaurus for children. Yet soon you begin to learn to distinguish a strict, but apparently benevolent glance from behind the thick brows that teaches you to tell right from wrong by following simple examples rather than by reasoning according to an abstract imperative. You become accustomed to—and you are taught to admire—this figure in a linen peasant shirt who turned into the prophet of the inner truth of conscience against the outer pretence of rite. Somehow you come to know that Tolstoy is a stern yet benign teacher of good through his tales, complemented by stories of his personal life, both of which, you are advised, should be memorized, studied, imitated, reproduced, and adjusted to real-life situations. Your life is thus constantly judged against an invented moralistic narrative and its fictional characters, one of whom turns out to be the inventor himself. But before long you also begin to learn to draw lessons from history that conveniently offer themselves for an appropriate explanation through examples of great wars and victories. And before anyone can notice that you can draw, you take a pencil and produce a large battle canvas, which the awestruck parents have no choice but to place on the wall. You do not know yet that history tends to show itself in a way that suggests a quick and safe moral interpretation that distinguishes right from wrong. You will come to see that history often craftily masks a great victory as a defeat, of which the prominent example is Russia’s 1812 war with Napoleon. This you will learn later 113

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from the great work of the same writer. You will learn about Napoleon and Mikhail Kutuzov, as well as about “the cudgel of the people’s war,”1 invariably accompanied by the same strict, attentive look behind the cardboard figures in your history box, which paints them in appropriate moral colors and enables you to move around the scene. To a great extent, then, the whole paideia of Russian culture hinges on Tolstoy’s texts, judgments, and opinions. The word is out: Tolstoy is the modern Homer, and hence all the lesser events of our lives need to be sieved and seen through the body of his work, of which the greatest member is War and Peace, a modern epic.2 Tolstoy’s œuvre has thus become an indispensable fictionalized source of correct meanings and right attitudes. To liberate oneself from this fiction, one can try to suspend it in and by fiction—as Pelevin does in his T3—or read carefully through the canonical texts. 2. But why epic? In its slow and solemn motion, epic depicts acts and actors of the past, which it protects from the “futility that comes from oblivion.”4 Epic becomes the condition for the transmittance of cultural memory, which it does in the Iliad, in the historical books of the Bible, in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, in the Scandinavian sagas, in The Song of Roland, in Táin Bó Cúalnge, in Beowulf, in Kalevala, in Manas, and many other poems. Epic speaks about past events not as historical but as removed into an “absolute past” (as the Romantics consider it),5 at which we can only look, which we can and should remember, from which we can learn—but which we can never change. Yet Tolstoy’s time of literature is not that of epic but of national literature, of an identity that is established not vis-à-vis the great deeds preserved and appropriated through cultural and linguistic memory—but in contradistinction to other cultures and languages, which constitutes the unique identity of the “national.” Tolstoy’s time is that of the Romantics, who spell out the idea that literature should be divided into “national” literatures, each of which has to be written in a constructed language of “high” literary culture. However, in order to be recognized as modern, every literature should rely on its epic,  L.N. Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin, 1978), vol. 1, bk. 4, pt. 3, chap. 1, p. 1222. 2  See R. F. Christian, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”: A Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 116–120. Tolstoy himself considered his book as an epic and confessed to Gorky that “without false modesty, War and Peace is like the Iliad” (ibid, 117). See also Frederick T. Griffiths and Stanley J. Rabinowitz, Novel Epics: Gogol, Dostoevsky, and National Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 2–39. 3  Viktor Pelevin, T (Moscow: Eksmo, 2009). 4  Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), 41–90, 41. 5  M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 3–40; esp. 13–15. 1

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of which Homer’s poems are the paradigm. And if no epic of Homer’s scale is available, one must create it on the basis of familiar myths, legends, and stories. And thus, Virgil, on Augustus’ order, writes a “national” Roman epic. Perhaps unwittingly, Tolstoy undertakes the chore of producing an epic, which seems to have been written almost out of the sense of duty to a literature that did not yet have its canonical text. But is Tolstoy’s novel modern epic? Its imitation? A fictionalized history? A memoir passed on from the previous generation to the next one? Tolstoy himself was not quite sure about it.6 Probably, War and Peace is none of these. According to Boris Eikhenbaum, its genre is a combination of two literary forms popular in the beginning of the nineteenth century, that of a “landlord’s life,” and of a historical account of a military campaign.7 Or the novel may be an attempt to establish a modern history of memory sifted through already available, and inevitably prejudiced, interpretative schemes. There have been a number of illuminating studies of Tolstoy’s understanding of history, its sources, and its fallacies.8 Here, I want to look at the features that distinguish Tolstoy from Homer and eventually make it impossible for Tolstoy to be a modern epic writer. Tolstoy’s book appears to share a number of features in common with epic. The sheer length of War and Peace is its most conspicuous feature.9 Being voluminous, it often becomes boring, especially in its accounts and analysis of big military movements. Both Homer and Tolstoy use paratactic means in their narrative. As in the Iliad and Odyssey, in War and Peace there is a sense of temporal progression of events, but it is only loosely chronological and moves in big leaps and backward motions and is freely intermingled with anecdotal episodes of societal and family life. As Hayden White has argued,

 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace: Draft Editions and Variants, vol. 13 of Complete Works [Полное собрание сочинений] [Война и мир. Черновые редакции и варианты] (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1949), 55. 7  Boris Eikhenbaum, “The Genre of War and Peace in the Context of Russian Literary History,” in Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace: The Maude Translation, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. George Gibian (New York: Norton, 1996), 1126. See also: Dan Ungurianu, Plotting History: The Russian Historical Novel in the Imperial Age (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 97–124. 8  Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of a Long Conversion, 1845–1887 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 71–81. For Tolstoy’s philosophical sources (Rousseau, Kant, Herder, Hegel, Schlegel, and Schopenhauer), see ibid, 109–30. For a discussion of “historical fallacies,” see Gary Saul Morson, “War and Peace,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65–79, 71–73. 9  In what follows, all references are to Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace [Война и мир] (Kishinev: Cartea Moldoveneasca, 1975); henceforth BM, followed by volume, part, chapter, and page number. See also Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace [Война и мир], vol. 4–7 of Collected Works in 22 Volumes [Собрание сочинений в 22 томах] (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978–1981). All translations in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise noted. 6

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the episodes of the novel constitute a series, but not a sequence, because, for Tolstoy, there is no plot in history, which is why “in spite of all the movement, sound and fury of the war story, nothing really happens.”10 Both the Iliad and War and Peace are narrated in medias res, without an obviously necessary beginning (the Iliad starts with the description of Achilles’ insult; War and Peace with gossip in Anna Scherer’s drawingroom) or an ending that would justify, and be justified by, the development of the plot.11 Both “poems” are linguistically estranged from the modern listener or reader: Homer’s language is archaic and saturated with an admixture of even more archaic Aeolic words, and Tolstoy’s language is a bizarre blend of Russian and French with occasional German, spiced by the now archaic and incomprehensible vocabulary related to all things canine and equestrian. For Tolstoy, this is the “natural” language of his characters, unlike, for example, the notable but intentionally recreated language of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake with its fascinating, strange, and often archaic sounds and a blurred field of meanings that are always open to interpretation. War, of course, is the central event and is the cause of great travels and movements of big masses of people, first West to East and then from East to West. In both cases, the war is victorious. In the case of Tolstoy, however, the war is won at the price of a visible loss and defeat, which then miraculously turns into a victory due to reasons that we can guess but cannot really know and explain. In both texts, the commanders idle, so the outcome of the war often depends on personal heroism (of Achilles, Captain Tushin), as well as on a previously unforeseeable constellation of events that are not in the warriors’ power to change, since they are guided by some other force. In Homer, however, this force reveals itself through the poem (the help and hindrance from gods), whereas in Tolstoy, it remains inaccessible to the actors, spectators, and readers. In both Homer and Tolstoy, the characters are rather static, and while they go through battles in war and changes in life (inner life, in Tolstoy), there is no real character transformation in Tolstoy.12 In both “poems,” homoerotic motives play a role (Achilles and Patroclus’ friendship; Nikolay Rostov’s enamourment with the tsar [BM 1, 3, 18, 358]; Petya Rostov’s admiration

 Hayden White, “Against Historical Realism: A Reading of ‘War and Peace,’” New Left Review 46 (2007), 97; see also 91. 11  See Aristotle, Poet, 1459a30–34. 12  “Rather than development, most of the characters undergo a kind of refiguration, with new traits being added and old traits rearranged” (White, “Against Historical Realism,” 91). 10

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for Dolokhov, [BM 4, 3, 9, 559]; Natasha Rostova and Marya Bolkonskaya’s intimate relation after Petya’s death [BM 4, 4, 3, 595]). Tolstoy’s differences from the epic poet, however, are much more evident. Most importantly, Homer is an oral poet who relies on the orally transmitted and rhythmically organized poetic works and stock of episodes and formulas that he can reuse and improvise with.13 Tolstoy, on the contrary, is primarily a prose writer who relies on records of the war and their written arrangement into a well-organized, structured, and written (and several times rewritten) novel. Both the Iliad and War and Peace are organized around war. Yet, for Homer, war is the place for obtaining κλέος, glory, and, through it, immortality (Il. 2.325 et passim.; see also Hesiod, Theog. 530). Such a war is an enterprise of and for free people in their quest and conquest of fame, which itself is free from a moral or moralistic message. The epic poet tells because the hero acts, and the hero acts because there is a poet to tell about his heroic deeds. In epic, immortality is gained not through personal salvation but in the memory of those who keep reciting and listening to the poem. In War and Peace, on the contrary, the officers belong to the nobility, but the foot soldiers, those who suffer most and gain nothing out of war, are serfs. For Tolstoy, war is abominable and contrary to human reason and nature (BM 3, 1, 1, 7; see Andrey Bolkonsky’s bitter invectives against war [BM 3, 2, 20, 217]) and inevitably brings suffering and death. Unlike in epic where death can be lamented but is not the most frightening event, because it only leads to life in the memory of people, death in Tolstoy is the central event of war and it often comes with, and causes, fear and grief, and leaves a deep, open wound that does not heal (BM 4, 4, 1, 588). Portraying death, Tolstoy is at his best as a writer (as also in his “Sebastopol Sketches,” “Death of Ivan Ilyich,” “Kholstomer,” “Master and Man,” and “Anna Karenina”). Death, including the deaths of Platon Korotayev, Andrey Bolkonsky and Petya Rostov (BM 4, 3, 14, 573; 4, 1, 16, 475; 4, 4, 1, 566), is portrayed through the ears, eyes, and suffering of the living. As such, death is the death of the other and it makes its profoundest impact on the witness’ own self. Life, which is the condition of well-being and happiness (a “simple thought” to which Pierre comes through suffering [BM 4, 2, 17, 642]), is meaningful vis-à-vis and because of death, which remains a mystery that may have a justification (through suffering [BM 4, 3, 15, 574]) and a solution, but never a final one. Death may have a meaning that hints at an immortality, which could be guessed and hinted at, but not expressed.

 Milman Parry, “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making,” in The Making of the Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 266–364.

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3. The most noticeable difference between Tolstoy and Homer, however, lies in their attitudes to history, to what constitutes history and to how history is told. Epic refers to the lore of μῦθος, behind which, through an appropriate interpretative and scholarly effort, we might try to distinguish the λόγος of “what really happened,” even if we might never be sure that we got it right. In this respect, epic seems to be quite different from what we usually think of as history. Yet if we look at the way Homer tells and transmits his stories, we can find important structural elements that can be taken as constitutive of history-telling in general. For history is not only told and written in accordance with what happened—it also depends on how it is written or told. In particular, among the most stable and established “building blocks” of Homer’s narrative are the so-called poetic catalogues that consist of (long) lists of names of people, things, places, and events organized by and around the story told. Such catalogues in Hesiod, Homer, and other epic poems (often in the Homeric hymns, e.g., the Hymn to Delian Apollo, lines 421–429) are plentiful.14 A short catalogue of famous catalogues in Homer includes the Τειχοσκοπία, or Priam’s and Elena’s view of the Achaean troops from the walls (Il. 3.162–244), the Ἐπιπώλησις, or Agamemnon’s inspection of the troops (Il. 4.250–418); the catalogue of Nymphs, or the list of Nereids who lamented Patroclus (Il. 18.39–48); the catalogue of Myrmidonian leaders as they form up for battle (Il. 16.173–198); of the heroes who follow Diomedes (Il. 8.261–267); of the nine volunteers who would fight Hector (Il. 7.161–169); of the Phaeacian nobles who go off to an athletic competition (Od. 8.110– 120); of the seven towns offered by Agamemnon to Achilles (Il. 9.150–152, 9.292–294); of Trojan heroes (Il. 11.56–61, 12.88–104); of prizes (Il. 23.259– 270); of contestants in the games that are held in the memory of Patroclus (Il. 23.288–304), of the so-called ανδροκτασίαι or battle lists of those who slay and are slain in battle—altogether there are about 200 names (Il. 5.37–83, 5.677–698, 6.5–65); and others. But the most famous are Homer’s catalogue of ships, νηῶν κατάλογος (Il. 2.494–877), probably the oldest part of the Iliad, and the celebrated catalogue of women in Hesiod (the so-called Ἠοῖαι). A poetic catalogue is always detailed and well organized, whereas the accompanying narrative is a story that appropriates and makes sense of names, things, and events. The story in any history is always simple and easy to tell, memorize, and transmit, both orally and in writing. The basic story or plot can be called fabula, which in Homer’s and Tolstoy’s case is the story of a great war (but it can also be that of travel, liberation, conquest). The fabula can always be further tuned and finely ground, but it still remains simple and  Mark W. Edwards, “The Structure of Homeric Catalogues,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 110 (1980), 81–105. See also Hesiod, Theog. 886–1022 and Apollodorus, Bibl. III.7.2.

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is of the kind: A did B in place C and the outcome was D. The “catalogue,” or list of things that happened, is complex and meticulously detailed, and is ordered and clarified by the fabula. A poetic catalogue, with its distinction between a simple story told and a complex detailed list, then, is sufficient to tell any history. Epic and history are thus not identical, but they serve the same purpose and use similar narrative techniques, the paradigm of which is the poetic catalogue, which is the “core” of epic, although epic also uses other narrative means. In this sense, epic and history (always a history of something) coincide in their structure.15 In such a history, there is no meaning beyond the narrative. The weight and importance of narrative lies in its attempt to capture and preserve, by means of poetic catalogue, minute details, names of people, places, and events. This is the most important task of history, because everyone knows the “what happened” of the fabula, but not everyone remembers the names, which, once forgotten and not passed on, forever perish from a history into the “futility [of] oblivion” and can never be restored to their historical being as beingtold and thus being-in-memory. For this reason, epic tellers are so careful in transmitting every detail in a poetic catalogue, whose very organization assures that no one is left out of the history. Yet Tolstoy, whose novel contains some masterfully conceived, though few and occasional, “catalogues” (e.g., BM 4, 2, 14, 517), intends to delegate the meaning of the history to a transcendent meaning of history as such. Paradoxically, however, since this meaning transcends any event, it cannot be told. But, because we are historical beings and are always in history, we want to grasp this meaning even if we cannot do it. And Tolstoy keeps returning to the unthinkable and untellable of history in his history of the war, which makes the effort inevitable yet desperate—and very long. Such history is always reflected in many mutually related stories, and the task of a writer is to demonstrate their connectedness. None of these stories, however, have the structure of a poetic catalogue, for Tolstoy has no intention of telling what happened apart from what he thinks did happen. But then the reason for Tolstoy’s telling the long story of the Napoleonic invasion is that there is a reason why that which happened (Napoleon’s retreat and defeat) coincides with what had to happen. Tolstoy keeps coming back to what had to happen again and again, each time from a different perspective, without, however, ever telling us what its reason is, for he deems it impossible to be known and therefore impossible to be narrated. As Eikhenbaum has argued, Tolstoy’s original anti-historicism changed to historical nihilism as he kept working on War and Peace.16 I would  Dmitri Nikulin, “Memory and History,” Idealistic Studies 38 (2008), 75–90.  Eikhenbaum, “The Genre of War and Peace,” 1126.

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think, however, that there is something unmistakably apophatic, rather than nihilistic or skeptical, in Tolstoy’s attitude to history, which is to say that he does not deny history as such but rather denies its intelligibility. Yet history is not only an accurate reconstruction and communication of things past but also, and much more, it is history that hints at a future, which means that history has a purpose. The future can be hoped for and even anticipated retrospectively in a novel (the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, for example, in the epilogue to War and Peace). But as such, the future is opaque and is never given to us, even if history, while being non-intelligible, is still fully present at any time and in any act of war and peace, and thus always shimmers through the novelistic story. 4. Tolstoy’s famous “strong claim” is that one single person cannot either know the outcome of a historical event or influence it in any way. This, for Tolstoy, is particularly well seen in the movement of great masses of people meant either to march through an unknown country or to fight a battle, which is the activity not of one single person but of all people (BM Epilogue 2, 7, 745). The sheer complexity of such an event and the great number of contingencies involved make the course and outcome of the event utterly unpredictable. In their entirety, people behave like a swarm (BM 3, 1, 1, 11)—abandoned Moscow looks like an abandoned beehive (BM 3, 3, 20, 336). For this reason, one person cannot guide or direct anything or anyone, and every event, including a battle, never goes as it was planned (BM 3, 2, 35, 254; 4, 2, 7, 493). Hence, Napoleon’s guidance and control over his troops cannot be but imaginary (BM 3, 2, 28, 224), and his vain nullity becomes apparent to others facing their finitude (the dying Andrey Bolkonsky) (BM 1, 3, 19, 363). Kutuzov, then, is only right to sleep and idle on the eve of the Battle of Austerlitz (BM 1, 3, 12, 326), and Bagration to only pretend to be in charge during the Battle of Schöngrabern (BM 1, 2, 18, 227). The conclusion Tolstoy draws out of such understanding of the role of personality, which is relevant both for the making and the study of history, is that a single person is only a means and instrument of history. In a sense, Tolstoy himself becomes, and wants to become, the means of history’s reflective thinking about itself through a fictionalized narrative. Therefore, only people as a whole can be the bearer of truth, and one single person does not, and cannot, understand his or her role in history. Perhaps only the “poor in spirit,” those who do not interfere with events and renounce their private interests, can anticipate and apprehend the direction of events, like Kutuzov when leaving Moscow to the enemy’s plunder. Not only the historical actors but every single person has a place and a role in the drama of history, which the wise accept and the foolish reject, deceived by the illusion of their greatness and the possibility of changing the course of events. Tolstoy takes this simple truth to be a moral truth that is reflected in, and translated into,

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the truth of history, which is then enacted rather than rationally expressed and understood.17 This critical anti-Enlightenment attitude, implicit in the Enlightenment itself, stands in a stark contrast to the reliance on the power and light of reason alone, which suggests that it is rather one person who can come to the realization of truth, and not a group of people.18 Tolstoy’s apophatic attitude is apparent in his reflection on the essence of history throughout War and Peace, especially in the second part of its epilogue. It is worth noting that in his later works Tolstoy almost never speaks about history as the history of the past, being more interested in the future that is yet to come, the future that is hoped for, yet may never come to pass. This future is both one’s own future, which one should make meaningful by an appropriate life, and the future of humankind. And yet, Tolstoy’s via negativa approach is peculiar, if not performatively contradictory, because he both knows the unknowability of history and its purpose, and also his not knowing of this purpose. In a strange way, Tolstoy assimilates himself to Socrates in his knowledge of not-knowing, which he delegates to Pierre’s words (BM 2, 2, 1, 430).19 Tolstoy’s apophatism, in fact, is a much broader attitude, because he is convinced that one can never express everything one thinks (BM 2, 3, 6, 533). Therefore, the most important things in life come not as a result of a rational distinguishing and ordered arranging of thoughts, but they are given in their entirety as accessible only to “feeling” (чувство). Thus, Platon Karataev, who embodies the ideal of authentic living, cannot understand the meaning of a single word but only the meaning of the whole of what is said (BM 4, 1, 12–13, 454–61). At a certain point, Tolstoy mentions a schematic subdivision of arrogant self-confidence according to “national types.” The Russian type for Tolstoy is exemplified by the self-assurance of someone who does not know and does not want to know anything, because he does not believe that he can know something (BM 3, 1, 10, 52). Without noticing it, Tolstoy himself exemplifies this very type of assured and self-confident ignorance in his knowledgeable not-knowing of history. In his utter seriousness, Tolstoy

 Rancière thinks that Tolstoy’s “strange alliance” between the indolent, contemplative leaders (which diminishes the role of great personalities in history) and ordinary people (which increases the role of the “masses”) naturally leads to the “scientific history of masses” of the Annales School of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre (Jacques Rancière, “Sur le champ de bataille: Tolstoï, la littérature, l’histoire,” in Politique de la littérature [Paris: Galilée, 2007], 85–92). 18  René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, in Œuvres de Descartes, vol. 6, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1902), 16. 19  See also Pierre’s becoming cataleptic while thinking (BM 4, 2, 12, 511), which is similar to the famous description of Socrates frozen in thought (Plato, Symp. 220c–d). On his way to the rejection of all unnecessary things and superfluous habits, Pierre becomes akin to another ancient reincarnation of Socrates, Diogenes (BM 4, 2, 12, 510). 17

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misses the irony: his description of this type of self-confidence as his own self-characterization. 5. With Hegel, Tolstoy assumes that history is a whole that has unity. Yet, contra Hegel, Tolstoy denies progress to history20 and speaks about history apophatically, since neither its purposes nor causes nor laws are known to us. The causes of history remain unknown (BM Epilogue 2, 7, 743), because they transcend history. The purposes of history are equally unknown, although everyone bears them in oneself (BM Epilogue 1, 5, 665). Finally, the laws of history are unknown (BM Epilogue 1, 1, 653), although we can try to guess and describe some of them. As Hayden White puts it, “History is not something that one understands, it is something one endures—if one is lucky.”21 Qua laws, the laws of history are the laws of necessity, which no one can avoid and whose efficacy for Tolstoy becomes more apparent with the historical perspective, when the events appear at a distance (BM Epilogue 2, 9, 755). No one can escape them, be it Napoleon or a simple soldier (BM 4, 2, 8, 495), which, again, suggests an utter futility of any striving to a historical grandeur and shows, if not the falsity, the nullity of the figure of a historical genius (BM 4, 4, 5, 603). For Homer, even gods, who often participate in narrated events, are subject to the force of necessity, which cannot be known, because it is blind. For Tolstoy, there should be a cause both in and beyond the events that governs and directs them toward a purpose. This purpose can become known only at the end of an event, but its cause still remains ultimately unknown, because it transcends all things human. This cause works through each and every one, but most conspicuously through people in their mass actions, as seen in wars—and not through individually chosen “heroes,” who do not decide anything (BM 3, 2, 28, 228; Epilogue 2, 1, 718 et passim). In this respect, everyone is equal and no one is a hero before the laws of history. Of course, the laws of history with their alleged necessity might be just Tolstoy’s construction and fictional invention, which would always allow for a different “alternative history” that would eventually substitute for the real history, in order to prevent the real history’s unwanted “distortion.”22 Following Kant’s third antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason,23 Tolstoy makes an attempt to save human freedom by referring it to consciousness (сознание), which expresses the essence of freedom as the content of action,  Donna Orwin, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 100–107. 21  White, “Against Historical Realism,” 110. 22  Pelevin, T, 96. 23  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Benno Erdmann, vols. 3–4 of Werke, ed. Wilhelm Dilthey, vols. 1–9 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Prussian Academy of the Sciences (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1911), B 472ff. 20

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whereas reason (разум) gives the form and expresses the pure necessity of action as dependence on the world. Such necessity eventually gives us the notion of laws (BM Epilogue 2, 10, 760; Epilogue 2, 12, 765). However, Tolstoy’s “antinomy” does not really help solve the problem of causation in history, because he still presupposes a purpose that transcends the world and our actions and yet exercises real causation in the world and in our actions through an effective yet forever unknown (final) causality that each time can be seen in (or interpreted into) the outcome of historical events, although always post factum. With Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith, Tolstoy takes history as moving and directing us to what is best, or right, through our individual interests and egoistic inclinations (BM 4, 1, 4, 422), which makes individuals involuntary instruments of history. Several times Tolstoy mentions providence, which, through the individual strivings of each person, accomplishes great results of which no one has any clue in the beginning (BM 3, 2, 1, 105; see also 4, 4, 5, 601). Tolstoy thus reluctantly hints at the divine origin and direction of history, but never follows up on these hints, precisely because of his apophatic attitude to all things divine. In this respect, he again differs from Homer, who often allows the interference of gods in things human but always knows the reasons for such intervention and makes sure that the readers know them too (Il. 2.155ff.). In order to be consequential in his treatment of history as unknown and unknowable in its causes and purpose, Tolstoy should keep silent about them, because his knowledge of history is merely apophatic: he knows that no one, including himself, can know such laws. And yet, in his long narrative, Tolstoy cannot but give away his innermost intimate thought: there is and cannot not be one “cause of all causes” (BM 4, 2, 1, 477). Whether Tolstoy dodges when he says that we cannot know this “cause of all causes” as the cause of history and then mentions it, or whether he has already known from the beginning this causa causarum to move history, remains ultimately unclear, perhaps even to Tolstoy himself. One could argue, as Descartes does, that we can know that there is a cause of history, the “cause of causes,” but we cannot know what it is. But Tolstoy does not argue this way; rather, he asserts this cause as revealed through “feeling,” in the border states of suffering, death, and love—the “human” love for a dear one as opposed to the “divine” love for one’s enemy (BM 3, 3, 32, 395). Tolstoy seems to understand that because of his apophaticism, he puts himself in a difficult position in understanding history. On the one hand, he cannot know the essence of history and therefore should not even try to know it. But on the other hand, he should attempt to do it, because the whole novel is a prolonged reflection on history, its causes, purposes, and laws. For this reason, Tolstoy has to delegate the establishing of the cause of all

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causes not to a rational argument, which in the Epilogue is mostly negative, but to a different mental (almost mantic) operation—that of a dream. In particular, he entrusts this task to Pierre, who thinks, or thinks that he thinks, or imagines in his dream, that war, which is the historical event par excellence, is the submission of human freedom to the laws of God (BM 3, 3, 9, 300). But Tolstoy can always claim that this is only a dream in which a voice suggests a solution to the vexing problem, and hence the told and revealed cannot be binding and thus cannot commit us to any conclusion about the cause of history, which still remains utterly opaque. And Tolstoy wakes Pierre up. 6. Yet, there are two histories in Tolstoy: one military and one familial; one of war and the other of peace. The war history is the history in that it unfolds on a great scale and has laws, purposes, and causes that Tolstoy attempts to grasp in his apophatic approach. The “peace,” that is, family, moves only in circles, from birth to marriage to death, and thus from one generation to another. Each person participates in both histories at the same time. The two histories are relatively independent of each other and are thinly connected through “border” situations, as well as long journeys and trips caused by war, wounds, captivity, and—especially—death. In Nikolenka’s dream, which ends the narrative part of the novel, the impossible becomes possible, the unknown future is mantically hinted at, and the two histories are fused through his search, identification with, and imaginary resurrection of the dead, who now live on as the figures of memory—the father, the heroes of Plutarch, and C. Mucius Scaevola (BM Epilogue 1, 16, 716; Livy II.13). In Homer, on the contrary, both histories are not distinguished, and should not be distinguished, because they follow the same narrative pattern and always presuppose each other. And yet, War and Peace is not a history and Tolstoy is not a historian. Rather, Tolstoy is a biased historian, which means that he selects only those events that fit his conception of history, and he interprets them according to his scheme of understanding history that has been chosen in advance. In other words, Tolstoy is an emphatically historiographic historian, and not, as Homer, an antiquarian who preserves everything that he can in a transmittable narrative to save what is being told from death, the nihil of historical oblivion. Tolstoy’s history is thus a construction, Homer’s, a description. Tolstoy often critically mentions other historians’ accounts, which means that he sees them in the light of his main negative idea of denying one single person an exceptional role in history. Thus, he does not mention that the lateness of the Russian army was a major factor in the defeat of the Austrian army at Ulm. He never mentions that General Mack was captured and then pardoned by Napoleon but instead makes the pathetic Mack appear in front of

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Kutuzov with a dramatic “Vous voyez le malhereux Mack” (BM 1, 2, 3, 157). Tolstoy never misses an opportunity to mock “illustrious men.” Not being a history and not even strictly historical, War and Peace is a reflection on what history is, both through a fictionalized narrative of war and peace and through a number of repeated reflections on history, the pieces of which Tolstoy tries to brings together to a unity in the second part of the Epilogue. Yet the essence of history cannot be known to us—we can only know that it cannot be known. This explains Tolstoy’s constant recurrence to the same (history) that is never the same, because the object of this thought is nothing, insofar as it is not graspable in thought. Because we are historical beings, we have to think about history. But because the cause(s) and purpose(s) of history are not accessible to us, we cannot think history. For this reason, Tolstoy’s reflection on history, as he himself finds out, cannot be completed. This is another reason for War and Peace being eerily long and not following the Ecclesiastes’ warning against writing too many, too long (Eccl. 12:12). History can be an entertaining account of things past referring to the lives and events of illustrious people. Such an account is often fragmented or can be loosely grouped around a topic, as are the haphazardly assembled yet enjoyable writings of Aulus Gellius’s Noctes Atticae, Aelian’s Varia historia, and Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae. History can be also a memorable retention of names, things, and events of the past that could serve a paradigmatic example for the reader to follow and reproduce in her own life. Such is Homer’s Iliad and so also a great number of later histories. But the nineteenth century wants to turn history into a Wissenschaft, or a strict, rational science based on a philosophical foundation. The laws of history, then, should become the subject-matter of a special discipline, and the discovery and establishing of these laws is similar to Newton’s description of the law of gravity without knowing its cause. For this reason, despite his apophaticism, Tolstoy explores a possibility of history as scientific in three models of mathematics, mechanics, and chess. Mathematics provides the model of infinitesimal calculus, which makes it possible to find an integral as the sum total of an infinite number of elements.24 In history, such an approach might assist in establishing a resulting cause of a “million of millions” of smaller causes (BM 3, 1, 1, 11). For even if the entirety of causes of events is inaccessible to us, the need for its discovery is constitutive of the human mind (BM 4, 2, 1, 477). But, again, since we cannot know these causes, we should at least aim at discovering historical laws determined by them. Therefore, we could hope to establish such laws if  See Jeff Love, The Overcoming of History in War and Peace (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 69–90 (for a criticism of the calculus model by Isaiah Berlin and Gary Saul Morson, see ibid, 79–83).

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we could achieve the art of (mathematical) integration or of finding the sums of masses of infinitely small entities in history (BM 3, 3, 1, 273). Tolstoy recognizes that we cannot be sure whether such “historical calculus” is at all achievable, but if it is, then we should altogether change our view of the constituents of history. In particular, if the sum total of history depends on historical “infinitesimals,” we should “deheroicize” history, and rather than studying “great personalities,” we must consider a sui generis historical integral of the “infinitely small uniform elements that govern the masses” (BM 3, 3, 1, 276). Mechanics suggests a possibility of finding a resulting force as a sum total of a (great) number of forces (BM, Epilogue 2, 2, 724). Such resulting force determines the motion’s direction (and thus, the outcome of the event), which does not coincide with the direction of any of its constituents or “differential forces” (BM 4, 2, 1, 480; 4, 2, 7, 493; see also Epilogue 2, 7, 746), the elementary case of which is the parallelogram of forces. And because—for no apparent reason—mathematics in modernity becomes applicable to the description of mechanical movement, Tolstoy finds the model of mechanics or mathematical physics adequate for the discovery of the laws of history that describe motion of great masses of people, that is, again, the laws of war but not the laws of “peace.” Tolstoy illustrates the mechanics approach to history by providing (tentative) equations of the kind F=m•x, where the unknown x is the “spirit of the army,” or 4x=15y, which captures the proportion of the forces of two armies (BM 4, 3, 2, 537). All these quasi-mathematical equations and considerations mean to stress Tolstoy’s main idea that the only way to understand historical laws is by paying attention to the infinity of (often infinitely small and thus imperceptible) historical, quasi-natural forces that appear ungraspable due to their infinity and yet could be brought into a unity of a “historical integral” by using contemporary “strict” scientific methods. And, finally, chess (which was a favorite pastime of Tolstoy) is a metaphor for war (BM 3, 2, 7, 138; 3, 2, 25, 213). However, unlike in chess, one can never precisely and fully calculate a military position because of its infinite complexity, which arises due to the unpredictability of the volitions (произв олов) involved at every move. Therefore, Napoleon’s “je ne vois pas encore clair sur mon échiquier” (“I still cannot see clearly on my chessboard”) (BM 3, 2, 34, 249) only shows the pettiness of his effort and the failure to understand history and his own role in it, a role that is pathetic and ridiculous rather than heroic and sublime. However, none of these three models works on Tolstoy’s own terms, because each of them involves an infinite number of factors that themselves are sheer contingencies of concrete situations, accidental volitions, and inevitable miscalculations that, unlike in mathematics, mechanics, or chess,

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can never be fully accounted for. The “positive” program of history in any of the three models unavoidably fails because our knowledge of history is negative for Tolstoy: we can only know our not-knowing of history that results both from the incalculability of the actions and interactions involved in any event, and the incomprehensibility of its purposes and ultimate cause. Therefore, the “laws of history” remain a desired but fictional construction. 7. But there is yet another important distinction between the narrative strategies in Tolstoy and Homer. If the formalist account of plot is right and there are only a limited number of plots that get reused and redressed (several hundred mentioned in Vladimir Propp’s careful elaborated typology, and just a few in Borges),25 then one might try to distinguish certain forms of narrative organization and poetic thinking in “epic poems.” Following but also rethinking Ágnes Heller’s notion of “master narrative” as a set of stories reproduced within a particular culture,26 I want to mention four such “master narratives” in literature that appear to be sufficient for recounting and shaping the stories about peoples’ lives, misfortunes, adventures, and triumphs over long periods of time. These are: liberation, conquest, discovery, and travel. In fact, one might consider them as paired (but not opposite): liberation—conquest, and discovery—travel. These narrative patterns may describe the events of the life of a person (of another but also of oneself), of a number of people (including their liberation from captivity or their dependence, be it physical, mental, or moral), of a city, land, or the whole of nature (human or cosmic). Every narrative as a “master narrative” may include several “subnarratives” that can further subdivide and finely tune the plot and that can be of the same four kinds in many different variations. However, Homer and Tolstoy tend to use different master narratives for the description of their wars and peaces, even if all four can be distinguished in their “poems.” For Homer, these are predominantly conquest and travel: conquest as a restoration of justice, war, capturing booty, obtaining the shining glory—and travel as a journey of bringing forces for war, traveling through unknown lands, returning home and, again, reaching glory. Tolstoy, on the contrary, uses much more the narratives of liberation and discovery:  Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, 2nd ed., trans. Laurence Scott, ed. Louis A. Wagner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968); Jorge Luis Borges, “The Telling of the Tale,” in This Craft of Verse, ed. Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 51. Borges, who mentions several kinds of plot mostly with reference to epic poems, does not seem to recognize his affinity with formalism. 26  Ágnes Heller, “European Master Narratives About Freedom,” in Handbook of Contemporary European Social Theory, ed. Gerard Delanty (London: Routledge, 2006), 257–65; esp. 258. For Heller, the master narratives of European culture are the Bible and Greco-Roman historiography and philosophy. But the stories told and organized by these narratives can be of very different kinds, such as the history of the Scientific Revolution with Columbus as its hero and patron figure. 25

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the liberation of one’s land from occupation, of one’s self from the burden of ignorance and prejudice (e.g., in Natasha or Pierre)—and the discovery of history, of one’s place in life, and, again, the discovery of one’s self and the meaning of life through struggle and suffering (in Andrey Bolkonsky’s and Pierre’s “revelations”). Of course, liberation and discovery are also present in Homer, but never as the liberation and discovery of one’s “self.” For, epic needs no introspection because there is no self in epic apart from the stories, memories, and events told and preserved in the poems. And in Tolstoy, there is conquest and travel that, however, are usually not shown through a simple story supplemented by a comprehensive “catalogue” and an account of minute details that use stable metaphors. Tolstoy’s narratives of conquest and travel are mostly introduced through the gaze of a reflective observation of a character’s “inner” life that for some reason (never explained in the text) is accessible to the author, who thus assumes the character’s narrative self. For this reason, in his long, novelistic meditation, by writing the other’s self, Tolstoy is reading himself as anyone’s self and reflects on his own life as everyone’s life. Therefore, when speaking about events of war and peace, the epic poet and the novel writer resort to different narrative strategies. Tolstoy’s example thus shows that even if Romantic modernity is attracted to epic, it cannot (re)produce epic. But even if modern epic is impossible, it does not mean that it is dead and that Homer does not speak to us anymore. Rather, epic remains in the same realm as the events it describes—in the remote “absolute past.” Just as the starry skies, the remote past continues to delight us as a source for admiration and knowledge of otherwise inaccessible things, and as a dim but significant and enduring source of light, which will still be there for us once every other source has been extinguished.

Chapter 7

Names and Voices in History

In The Names of History, Jacques Rancière undertakes a bold attempt to establish a new way of writing the history of those who so far have been missing and excluded from it. The task of the philosophy of history is to provide an outline of a new “poetics” of historical narrative that would allow the previously silent and silenced to acquire a distinct voice, and thus to obtain the ability to be heard and to become the subjects of history rather than to remain impersonal objects of official historical records. To that end, Rancière provides a careful reconstruction of the modern historical writing that for him is established on an improbable yet actual “triple contract” of the scientific, narrative, and political. In such a “contract,” the scientific is meant to necessitate “the discovery of the latent order beneath the manifest order”; the narrative should supply “the readable forms of a story with a beginning and an end, with characters and events”; and the political should be suitable for the age of democracy.1 Rancière’s claim, then, is that only through a critical reflection on this triple order might we be able to reclaim history and politics for those who did not and still do not have a voice in history.

 Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 9, 41, henceforth NH, followed by page number; Les mots de l’histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 23–24, 88, henceforth MH, followed by page number. The book remains Rancière’s major contribution to philosophy of history. Ever since, reaching across social and political theory to literature, Rancière has provided an account of a redistribution of social justice, which, however, neither supersedes nor denies but further elaborates thoughts central to The Names of History. For this reason, in what follows, I will be referring and discussing mostly this work.

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THE SCIENTIFIC: AGAINST THE ANNALES In providing the outlines of this new history, Rancière begins by criticizing the Annales school, starting with Lucien Febvre. Yet the Annales school becomes both the point of departure and the point of return, insofar as Rancière borrows a good deal of his examples and some central ideas from Fernand Braudel (e.g., when speaking about the role of a single person who has the preemptive right of keeping a name for history), as well as from Le Roy Ladurie (who argues for new history as a democratic “heresy”). According to Rancière, the Annales school reacted against the previous tradition of “chronicling,” in which every event or person was considered nominalistically, as being strung onto a thread of linear temporal progression, reduced to just a record in a document. As an alternative, the Annales school strove to provide a “scientifically” rigorous history based on measurement— on geography, statistics, and demography.2 Instead of providing a haphazard chronicle, one should work out a historiography working with big periods and whole “mentalities,” which are sometimes read into or out of concrete examples of a “microhistory” (as in Le Roy Ladurie’s history of the village of Montaillou in Ariège),3 and inscribed into a closely inspected place that engenders history by transmitting to it the character of its “terroir.” (Later, this approach was transformed and reinterpreted in Nora’s extensive project on the “places of memory.”)4 The Annales revolution in history thus presupposes the science of registration and measurement, of numerical evaluation and statistical analysis of “objective” data. Against this kind of historiography, one could argue that in order to know something about past events, one should look at them from a particular perspective that is already implicitly loaded with theoretical presuppositions and interpretations, which, however, remain outside of the historical analysis. In other words, the Annales school’s approach might in fact shape and construct, rather than discover and interpret, historical material. But for Rancière, the main problem with the Annales school is that it leads to a complete dissociation of the scientific and the narrative component in history. By promoting a strictly scientific approach, such a history, first, ignores good storytelling, which results in history being dissociated from the story. And second, favoring “the great spaces of life formed over long periods” (NH 7),  See, e.g., Lucien Febvre, “Parole, matière première de l’histoire,” Mélanges d’histoire sociale, 4 (1943): 89–91; Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée,” Annales E.S.C. 13, no. 4 (1958): 725–53 (repr. in Écrits sur l’histoire [Paris: Flammarion, 1969], 41–83). 3  Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village Occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). This text includes a detailed history of local habits, institutions, and families. 4  Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992–1998). 2

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the Annales school’s kind of history suppresses and abolishes the uniqueness of events and of proper names, which results in their anonymity and obliteration. From now on, personal names are irretrievably lost for history qua personal and become only raw material for scientific interpretation. Thus, for Rancière, in coupling science and history, the Annalistes establish an insurmountable separation between science and narrative (récit) (see, e.g., NH 6–7, 66–67, 76, 88). But when history becomes scientifically constructed historiography, it degenerates into a sociology that abolishes history altogether (NH 41). MICHELET, THE AMBIVALENT FATHER FIGURE Jules Michelet, often considered the founder of modern French historiography, is also one of the main figures in Rancière’s discussion of history (NH 42–60; MH 89–124). Since, in the words of Febvre, Michelet is “the founding father” of the Annales school, Rancière cannot avoid both an appropriation and a rejection of Michelet’s way of studying history (NH 42ff.). While being critical of Michelet’s political views (which, however, were progressive for his age), Rancière is fascinated with Michelet’s style of writing history. Michelet’s poetic history and especially its remarkable appropriation and presentation in Roland Barthes’s book on Michelet become the non-foundational stylistic foundation for Rancière’s new “poetics” of history.5 In Rancière’s account, Michelet overcomes the previous “royal-empiricist” analysis that concentrates on grandiose, king-like figures by inventing a “republican-romantic” historiography (NH 42–43), which attempts to spell out and to account for “the appearance of a new political entity that is at the same time the new object of love, the native land” (NH 43). Michelet, then, substitutes the figure of a king as the embodiment of a people with the abstraction of people and country as a nation that is now the historical subject, rubbing shoulders and engaging in struggles with other subjects who are also nations. This collectivity of the people for Michelet is embodied in one event that will always have but one inexplicable, true, and eternal name: the Revolution.6 Since, however, this event cannot ever be fully explained, the event of the Revolution becomes a non-event. This can be considered a properly Romantic component in Michelet’s writing about history, similar to Friedrich Schlegel’s insistence on recognizing something in a person that  Roland Barthes, Michelet (Paris: Seuil, 1995).  France “n’aura jamais qu’un seul nom, inexplicable, et qui est son vrai nom éternel: la Révolution” (Jules Michelet, preface to Le peuple, vol. 1 [Brussels: Meline, Cans et Compagnie, 1846], xxxv, quoted in Barthes, Michelet, 63).

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can never be fully thematized or spelled out.7 Hence, Michelet invents a new narrative that, in the words of Rancière, “is not one and that thereby suits the event that doesn’t have the character of an event” (NH 43). For this reason, Michelet’s narrative is inevitably antimimetic (NH 51), because the subject of history can never be imitated or fully reproduced. A historical event, therefore, can only be hinted at, and the historian can give us a glimpse into it not by an exhausting, rigorous, scientific analysis of all the appropriate circumstances—but rather only by a poetic description of the event’s seemingly accidental appearance. Two examples of Michelet’s “historical poetics”: one in the original, the other in translation. A history of the sea: “L’eau de mer, même la plus pure, prise au large, loin de tout mélange, est légèrement blanchâtre et un peu visqueuse. Retenue entre les doigts, elle file et passe lentement.”8 And a history of the revolution: “What is the old regime, the king and the priest in the old monarchy? Tyranny, in the name of grace. What is the revolution? The reaction of equity, the tardy advent of eternal justice.”9 The science of history has thus become altogether abandoned and dissociated from the poetic narrative in Michelet, so that we are presented with a choice: either an accurate but dry scientific historical analysis—or an oracular, engaging story-telling. Michelet clearly opts for the latter, whereas Rancière hopes to turn the disjunction into a conjunction, still adhering to Michelet’s poetics in Barthes’s version (NH 98–99). For Michelet, then, the truth of an event is better “read in cries than in spoken words, better in the disposition of things than in the ordering of discourse. It is better read where no one is trying to speak, where no one is trying to deceive” (NH 57). And such is the gasp of a “silent witness,” whom the historian “brings into a significance without lies” (NH 58). This means that the historian should become, in Barthes’s formulation, a civil servant who is in charge of the good of the dead by explaining the meaning of their actions and lives to both us and the dead who never understand why they lived.10

 Another example of Michelet’s Romanticism as subject-, literature-, and progression-oriented: “We progress from one ideal to a more complex ideal . . . also in individual existence: I pass from my individual self to my literary self, which intensifies the world as beauty, then to my moral self, which absorbs the world as benevolence, so that it may purify itself through resignation” (Jules Michelet, Mother Death: The Journal of Jules Michelet, 1815–1850, trans. and ed. Edward K. Kaplan [Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1984], 58).  8  Jules Michelet, La Mer (Paris: Hachette, 1861), 111, quoted in Barthes, Michelet, 37.  9  Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution, trans. Charles Cocks, ed. Gordon Wright (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), 80. See also Michelet’s description of the PèreLachaise cemetery: “Those leafless trees, the white stones that rise up on all sides, everything seemed bare to me, sad and harsh, despite the softening hues of a half-shadow” (Michelet, Mother Death, 61). 10  Barthes, Michelet, 66.  7

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The central idea in Michelet that is scrutinized by Rancière is that the historian is obliged to lend her voice to others who have so far remained voiceless and thus outside history. But at this point, Rancière becomes critical of Michelet because for the latter, the meaning of history is immanent to history and to the narrative through which it is told, so that the historian as the hierophant of history generously returns this meaning to us in and through narration (NH 48; see also 99). Moreover, Michelet tells us this meaning, whereas Rancière attempts to rescue history from a precise, finalized, and unambiguous speech that signifies history’s becoming a stiff scientific enterprise, a division of political science, which only means the abolition of history (NH 41). Rancière, on the contrary, intends to reclaim the literary “excess” of what history can possibly say and in this way to allow for a new narrative capable of giving a voice to the voiceless. METAPHORS OF THE POLITICAL: THE KING, THE SEA, DEATH The “royal-empiricist” history offers highlights of the biographies of “great people,” represented archetypically by the figure of the king. A “romantic” way to overcome and suspend this approach is to turn the king into a metaphor. Once the king becomes a metaphor, his life story cannot be fully told and deployed, precisely because it is now only a metaphor. But the metaphor can be elicited and explored in its multiple meanings, which can be further clarified and complicated by other metaphors, such as death and the sea. The significant insignificance of the figure of the king as a metaphor, in which all individual and concrete historical features begin to fade and are ultimately obliterated, is put forward by Braudel. Yet, in his great, voluminous book about Philip II of Spain, Braudel mentions the king’s death only in passing.11 The death that took place in September 1598 was not the end that completed the whole period in history called “the age of Philip II” or simply “Philip II.” In this sense, the end “never took place” (NH 10; MH 25). If there was no end, then there was no death, at least, no death worth paying attention to. But without the end, a historical event can never receive and preserve its

 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 1234–37; La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949). The king’s death “was not a great event in Mediterranean history” because, for Braudel, a historian should reflect on “the distance separating biographical history from the history of structures, and even more from the history of geographical areas” (The Mediterranean, 1237).

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meaning. The event is thus displaced, is out of place. Hence, we have to find other ways to speak about it and to communicate it. Rather than obtaining its meaning at the end—the meaning that can be expressed in words, or speech (of history), passed on and communicated to posterity—the death of the king for Rancière is simply “becoming silent” (devenir-muet) (NH 11; MH 27). It is not meaningless; it is simply mute and thus cannot be told. Why? Because it is a double event, both a political and a “paper death” (perhaps, in this way corresponding to the “two bodies” of the king, the body natural and the body politic).12 Philip was a bureaucrat king who ruled out of El Escorial, the center of the web of both the known and hidden connections that he established in order to manage his empire. Almost never leaving his seat, every day he had to go through a pile of paperwork, make decisions on cases, write resolutions, reward the loyal, and punish the apostate. As the head of a bureaucratic system that he single-handedly creates and maintains, the king becomes the epitome of a ruler-bureaucrat who accumulates power in, and emits it from, a single center that is both real and symbolic. The king, then, becomes ubiquitous and omnipresent through the bureaucratic network and yet is entirely withdrawn from the world, which makes history impossible, other than the history of the organization and distribution of such a power under the generalized and impersonal name of the king. For this reason, the dead king is nothing more than the silent king who leaves behind him a “mass of paper” (NH 24). The king is buried alive under this mound of paperwork and, as “paper” king, is already dead long before he dies. The mass of paper becomes his tomb, in which he is buried long before his death. Everyone else is either reduced to a record somewhere in the geological layers of paper or speaks directly yet in striking opposition to the immense paperwork. This inevitably puts such a speaker outside of truth, the access to which can only be granted through the access to the documents read and approved by the king. The living and the dead cannot speak for themselves and thus are outside of, and remain inaccessible in, history. Still, there is something so vast that it cannot be missed even by an inattentive and heedless eye yet is still overlooked by the meticulous letterking. It is the sea. In its startling sublimity, with its Michelet-like “whitish” (blanchâtre) water, the sea attracts, dazes, and makes stumble everyone who looks at it. But not the king, who is far from the sea, living in his paper tomb. The king does not know what the sea is, what it signifies, even if his empire is the empire of the sea. Michelet’s “Copernican revolution in history,” then,

 See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. 13.

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is “a displacement from the history of kings to that of the sea” (NH 12; see also 16), when the sea can—and does—become a subject of history. Rancière’s own attempt to appropriate the metaphor of the sea, however, appears doubtful: for him, the sea is split into the easily readable yet rather simplistic opposition of the sea of the Mediterranean to the sea of the Atlantic. As a historical subject, the sea, then, should be understood from, and in relation to, epic—its epic. For the Mediterranean, it is the Odyssey; for the Atlantic, Moby Dick, a “counter-epic” (NH 86). The apparent difference between the two, for Rancière, is that the former unites—by the ancient but still very much alive communication of trade and culture exchange; the latter divides—by its vastness and especially by its being “a space without historiality” (NH 87). The simplistic opposition between the Old World and the New World is unluckily reminiscent of the alleged superiority of the supposed refinement of the metropolis over the vulgarity of the colony. Besides, many other historical “seas”—the Sea of Japan, the Black Sea, the Pacific, the Caribbean, the Tasman Sea—each come with its own “epic” and therefore its own history. THE EXCESS OF WORDS AND THE MASS OF PAPERWORK The sea for Rancière is a metaphor that is more than a metaphor, because it is the very basis for a new history that should be turned into a story, which can only be told as metaphorical. Yet the metaphor of the sea still does not allow for the appearance in history of those who are displaced from it by greatman-oriented history-telling. Hence, it is the very form of telling history that defines what history is, how history is reconstructed from the past, and how history becomes normative for the future. Therefore, the “words,” or speech, of history (which is the original title of Rancière’s book in French) do matter. History is not innocent for Rancière but implies a particular kind of politics. And if the current politics of the time does not correspond to the normative evaluation of what the time should be, it is history that needs to be changed, the very form of telling history that might give politics the language and tongue to account for the (democratic) age. It is thus the “words” or “names” that need to be liberated in their excessive meanings to fit the historical, political, and social reality. Unwittingly, the originally Confucian notion of 正名, zhengming, the “rectification of names” (Lun Yu 13:3), thus becomes a metaphor for the revolution in history.13  See Confucius, Analects, with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 139.

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The “poor use” of words (NH 19), however, is itself established by the way a particular kind of history is told—by the “royal-empiricist” accounts of paper deeds of the “paper kings” that intend to regulate the historical speech as forever finalized and unambiguous. The “mass of paper” that buries the king also buries everyone else, because people are reduced to impersonal records and faceless inscriptions, incapable of speaking for themselves or of being spoken of in history. Therefore, the more people use the current “words” of history, the more they are themselves obliterated from it. This situation is described by Rancière as the “excess of words” (l’excès de parole) (NH 22–23; MH 50–52). Referring to Durkheim’s claim, which Rancière regards as “one of the founding axioms of modern social science” (and which, in a sense, goes back to Hippocrates’s natural philosophy), that “the excess of life makes life sick and provokes death,” Rancière diagnoses modern society with the inability to release an “excess of speech” in a non-choking and not finalizing way.14 Rather, one should pay attention to the literariness of historical speech that is always “excessive” in that it allows for its reinterpretation and reappropriation by the previously historically mute. Michelet, for him, is the inventor of the “art of treating the excess of words, ‘the death by paperwork’ of the king,” which means the rejection of the “royal-empiricist” model of history in favor of the new “republican-romantic” one (NH 42). However, Michelet’s way of telling and accounting for history is dated and thus unsatisfactory for modernity, because, metaphorically speaking, after the death of the king (i.e., after the revolution) those who previously were deprived of the right and chance to produce their own “paperwork” begin frantically doing so, which is still meaningless and thus leads to the total loss of any meaning in history. Schematically put, history for Rancière is the history of understanding and living up to the expectations of the Event, which for him is the French Revolution that kills the king (already buried under the mass of paperwork), liberates the bourgeoisie, and eventually allows the dispossessed to come to the fore of history, leaving behind the previous masters of history. The three stages of modern history are thus the royal, the bourgeois (of which Michelet becomes the historian), and the democratic. Democratic history, however, is not yet properly told and thus needs a new language and new poetics that Rancière hopes to lay out in his book. This new history “must regulate this excessive life of speakers that has killed royal legitimacy and threatens that of knowledge” (NH 23).

 For Durkheim’s views on excess, see, for example, Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, ed. George Simpson (New York: Routledge, 1952), 208, 250.

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Thus, the problem with history for the democratic age is that it is indispensable but does not (yet) exist, because “the excess of speech” that creates modern history (NH 88; MH 177) currently cannot be regulated. History’s very beginning is troubled, because modern history abolishes royal legitimacy but still uses its narrative and the suffocating massive paperwork: “The history of the masses that belongs to the age of the masses finds its seat only in speaking of the times of kings” (NH 90). Inherited from the ancien régime, the bourgeois abundance of words makes speech frozen and incapable of either grasping or rectifying the exclusion of people from history. This is the main “defect” (défaut) (NH 91; MH 183) of modern history for Rancière. GIVING VOICE TO THE POOR For Braudel, when paperwork becomes available to everyone in the sixteenth century, the “Renaissance of the poor” occurs as opposed to the “true Renaissance” (NH 17). The former, “faux” Renaissance is propelled by people’s desire to talk about themselves in writing, in the hopes of leaving a trace in and for history through a written document. But the suffocating “mass of paperwork” buries not only the king but also everyone around him under “the paperwork of the poor” (NH 22) or la paperasse des pauvres (scribbles of the poor) (MH 49). Those who are eager to write about themselves— the “poor”—speak “poorly” and beside the point, outside the truth about themselves, not only because they are not in command of the proper style but mostly because the truth of themselves, already excluded from the “paperwork” history, cannot be told by the current means of writing. When the symbolic death of the king under the mass of paper is followed by his equally symbolic death after the Revolution, history still remains unable to tell about those who previously have been transparent for and unnoticed in history. Hence, as Rancière concludes, “the heritage of the king’s ‘force of history’ has to be removed from the people of paper that encumbers his desk” (NH 76). Braudel’s answer to the exclusion of people from the elitist royal empirical history was to “reverse the order” of history by bringing people back as the “masses,” to write history on a grand scale, as the “history of mentalities” inscribed into a “geology of time” over a “long duration” (NH 81–82). However, such an answer still appears unsatisfactory, because the “poor” are still effaced both in and by the royal-empiricist and the Annales school ways of telling and doing history: in the former, only a chosen few have access to the constitution of history through writing and documents; in the latter, the masses efface the individuality of those whom they embrace and are supposed to represent.

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Rancière opts for a different kind of history, which would steer between the Scylla of abstract individualism and the Charybdis of impersonal dissolution. He hopes that the “poor,” who are the dispossessed of history and forsaken in history, can come back in a new history and become its proper subject. To that end, in a book entirely dedicated to the “poor,” Rancière argues that our “democratic and social age is . . . neither the age of the masses nor that of the individual.”15 A problem with the “poor” is that they should include not only the living but also the dead, those “poor” of the past who need to be restored back to history yet cannot tell and talk about themselves. But the absent are not in the past, because each of their stories is “no longer there—that is in the past; and that never was—because it never was such as it was told” (NH 63). The only way out, then, is to give or “deliver” the “poor” a voice (NH 46; MH 97). The paradox of bringing the “poor” back to history is that Michelet tells us what they would have said, whereas Rancière hopes to allow them to say what they should have said—but in whose voice? At this point, as in his whole historical project, Rancière appears to be influenced more by Barthes’s reading of Michelet than by Michelet himself. For Barthes, historical truth can be recovered only if we take documents as a voice, rather than as witnesses.16 The historical truth, then, is not (only) a factual correspondence of the told to what happened, but much more the recognition, behind a document, of the voice to those who so far were outside of being told. Rancière replicates this position in considering historian as a contemporary of a speech,17 which means that a historian should lend her voice to those who have been missed in and by history. As an example of those who speak “in excess,” Rancière mentions Tacitus’s description of Percennius, who, after the death of Augustus, demands an improvement of the soldiers’ situation (NH 25–30). Tacitus then gives a convincing reconstruction of the non-convincing speech of Percennius, who is simply considered as lacking the social position to advocate any change (Ann. 1.16–18). For this reason, Percennius’s speech is not only subversive—it is self-subversive. As Thucydides lends his voice to Pericles, so Tacitus allows Percennius to speak through him. Yet the very language and “poetics” of Tacitus’s history does not allow Percennius to speak for the “poor” of a Pannonian legion. Percennius, therefore, “speaks without speaking” (NH 28) and thus outside historical truth: he simply has no right for reason and language, unlike Junius Blaesus, the commander of the  Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker, ed. Andrew Parker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 93; Le philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris: Fayard, 1983). 16  “Les racines de la vérité historique, ce sont les documents comme voix, non comme témoins” (Barthes, Michelet, 65). 17  Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 74. 15

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legions, which means that Percennius’s reasons in support of the exploited cannot even be considered true or false. The historian, then, should give the “poor” a proper voice. But which voice? To restore the wretched of the Earth to history is to allow people to reclaim not only their dignity but also their very lives within the life of memory. No doubt, this is a worthy enterprise. However, the “poor” are speechless because they do not know how to speak, and when either a “royal” or “romantic” historian lends them her voice, she makes them speak in well-established, “literate” ways that substitute for, and thus really misses, the unique voices of the “poor.”18 But because the “poor” are speechless, giving them a voice in fact amounts to assigning them a voice. And this voice is always the historian’s voice. To give the “poor” a voice, then, is not only to reinvent them in Collingwood’s sense, where to understand a past event is to restore and re-enact the “mind” of its actors, to reproduce the whole set of mental states and intentions that constitute a historical action.19 To give the “poor” a voice in Rancière’s sense is to invent them, to ascribe to them a voice. Nothing guarantees that the voiceless “poor” will speak in their own voice, because so far they have not had it and have had no way to gain a voice for history. Hence, Rancière has to invent a voice for them that would suit their needs as he understands these needs. Yet the voiceless might have a different voice. Moreover, they might have many voices. And even more than that: these voices might change with time. Rancière’s historical poetics presupposes that the speech of the “poor” is always meaningful yet they are not aware of its meaning before it is released in history (NH 46). Therefore, the historian must give them a voice. However, by lending them a voice he does not deliver the voiceless a voice of their own but assigns them the voice of the learned historian-writer with all the prejudices (as “pre-judgements”) and implied meanings that come with this voice, which, however, the historian herself might not really know. In Michelet, the sea becomes the subject of a historical account but speaks for the historian in the historian’s own voice; in Virginia Woolf, the mark on the wall becomes the subject of a literary novel yet speaks for her in her voice that is not fully

 According to Rancière, this is what Isaac Babel does in telling the story of the Red Cavalry (NH 52–53) (see Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, trans. Peter Constantine, ed. Nathalie Babel [New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003). Yet, Babel uses a modernistic technique of writing in order to suspend and supersede both the “illiterate” and “literate” ways of those who speak around and during the revolutionary event. Lev Lunts uses similar devices to redescribe the Exodus in his “In the Wilderness” (see Lev Lunts, “In the Wilderness,” in In the Wilderness: The Prose of Lev Lunts, vol. 2 of The Collected Works of Lev Lunts, trans and ed. Gary Kern [Las Cruces, NM: Xenos Books, 2014]). 19  See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. Jan Van Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 205ff. 18

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understood until the end of the story.20 But then one needs to lend a voice to the historian, and then a voice to this voice, and so on. The voiceless are thus deprived of a unique voice and are each made to speak in the historian’s own voice. Rather than being a “medium” for the voiceless, the historian becomes the narrator who at the same time is also the playwright, the director, and the protagonist on the newly found historical stage. The new historical narrative, then, gives voice primarily to itself, and not to its “poor” who become an embodiment of the historian’s own aspirations, thus turning “poor” into an abstract historical construction of a solitary historical subjectivity. Rather, if one wants to help the “poor” out of what Arendt called the “futility of oblivion,” one should give each a possibility to speak to and with others in a personal voice, rather than lending them one’s own voice. Besides, the “poor” are initially an economic category meant to refer to the poor and exploited: our age, for Rancière, is the “democratic and workers’ age” (NH 100). But if the struggle of the working people is far from being over and as such should be supported and recognized, one needs to rethink and extend (but not cancel) the democracy of our age beyond the labororiented paradigm. By referring to the oppressed as the “poor,” Rancière forever fixes and preserves them as poor and non-equal to others. The category of the “poor,” therefore, does not extend to those whose systematic exclusion from history cannot, and should not, be thought in purely economic terms (e.g., women). Progressive as it is, “poor” is still exclusive of others. Rancière speaks about the exclusion of any exclusion (of what is “exclusive of all exclusion,” of the “denial of exclusion,” in reference to the English working class [NH 92; MH 185]), but in fact his own approach is selective and exclusive of everyone who does not pass the test of being capable of the aspired new history. Moreover, democracy should also imply a possibility of equal access to history-telling and a place in the memory of history for all living beings, both human and nonhuman, and even for nonliving things. The “poor” refer to a community bound by an economic or social bond (love, fraternity, and work); not a universal community of humankind and nature. A “natural history” should be possible in democracy, but Rancière leaves no place for it (unlike, e.g., Hans Jonas in The Imperative of Responsibility).21 If the category of the “poor” has any place in history, the category itself has to be radically rethought, in order to be able to include the “poor” of nature, those exploited and endangered precisely because of our transforming economic activity.  See Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall,” in Monday or Tuesday (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1921), 99–116. 21  Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. Hans Jonas and David Herr (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984). 20

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Rancière intends to provide a possibility for a universal history—but only for those who fall under its central category of the “poor.” Yet, paradoxically, the context of his discussion is almost exclusively Eurocentric, with very sparse references to non-Western historiography and history. The category of the “poor,” then, is exclusive of everyone who does not fit into it and thus has no place in a new history. The equality becomes possible only within a community of those who are nominated equals.22 For radical democracy would rather require radically non-exclusive ways of telling the history of the living and the dead, as well as of the living and the not living (the “natural”). History, for Rancière, lives off the written words of the past. As such, history is itself a written enterprise whose task is to capture past events and to restore to dignity those who lived through them. Yet the “poor” remain a constructed collective entity that speaks for a group constituted according to the recognized and newly invented procedures of telling history. It is then up to a historian to decide who can and should be included in this collective entity—and who cannot and should not. Moreover, a unique voice of a person might not be heard and become lost in this collective voice, for if the dead are to speak through a historian, one needs to restore and preserve their names. But in most cases, the dead remain nameless, exactly because they have been excluded from history with its preferential treatment of either only a certain kind of people or of the whole masses of people. For Rancière, history faces “the personal absence of what the names name” (à l’absence en personne de ce que nomment les noms) (NH 63; MH 129). I would think, however, that the problem is not only the absence of those whom the names name—but of the names themselves, which all too often are irretrievably lost from history. In this way, the narrative that would give the “poor” a voice remains largely a normative but, in many cases, impossible task. A NEW HISTORICAL POETICS In Rancière’s project of a new history with its “triple contract” between literature, science, and politics, the scientific aspect means the precision of a historical account rather than a set of quantitative methods that allow for study and interpretation of empirical data. But to make a story historically precise, one should use radically new ways of telling it. Hence, in order to provide “a poetic regulation of the excess” in history (NH 91), one needs a literary revolution. For Rancière, only a change in the very form of literary  See Jacques Rancière, On the Shore of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1995), 63–92; Aux bords du politique (Paris: Osiris, 1992). The non-exclusive, universal community of equals is suspected to be a “great all-devouring Whole” (On the Shore of Politics, 65).

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historical narrative will allow the “poor” and dispossessed to gain their voice and to become fully present in history. For this reason, one needs a new “poetics of knowledge” (NH 8), which, as Hayden White aptly defines it, “is a study of a certain technique of writing by which a discourse originally belonging to ‘literature’ escapes from this ‘literature’ and, by the use of literary techniques, constitutes itself as a ‘science.’ ”23 For Rancière, the human being is a literary animal (NH 52), no less than she is a historical being. Therefore, the task of a historian is to make the human being known through new forms of narrative, which are the new forms of writing, because history, as has been said, is a written narrative. In this way, the human being is also a written animal, who writes, or signs, herself back into history through a historian, now as a precise scientific and poetic enterprise. Only by becoming literature of a certain kind can history again become history, that is, revert back to its name, which presupposes a mode of an engaged story-telling that allows everyone to have a voice. The previously speechless regain a voice. Moreover, they become visible, which means that those who spoke as “illiterate” become literate as visibly written. In recent publications, Rancière appears still committed to the idea of the revolution in history as taking place first of all in literature.24 But the revolution in history-telling suggests a new construction of the events, rather than their redescription or recollection anew. A historian, then, must produce literature (NH 101), yet the problem is to understand what kind of literature one should produce. Style One might say that while Michelet wants to invent a poetics for the revolution, Rancière hopes for a revolution in the poetics of history. History as literature, then, should not be a mere fiction but should tell the truth of history by giving a chance to speak to those who so far have been voiceless and deprived of a possibility of speaking in history by either being muffled or made to speak in improper ways (through “excessive” speech that does not really tell anything). But at this crucial junction, Rancière stops short of giving a developed account of the literary devices suitable for his new history. In fact, the truth of history, for him, lies largely in the very texture of narrative, in its stylistic quality, rather than in formal techniques and rhetorical devices: History can become a science by remaining history only through the poetic detour that gives speech a regime of truth. The truth it gives itself is that of  Hayden White, foreword to Rancière, The Names of History, xii.  Jacques Rancière, Politique de la littérature (Paris: Galilée, 2007), 88.

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a pagan incarnation, of a true body of words substituted for erratic speech. It doesn’t give it to itself in the form of an explicit philosophical thesis, but in the very texture of narrative [la texture même du récit]: in the modes of interpretation, but also in the style of the sentences [la découpe des phrases], the tense and person of the verb, the plays of the literal and figurative. (NH 89; MH 180)25

The historian thus becomes a writer and playwright who suspends—prohibits—the traditional forms of history-writing as inadequate, and turns to the modern novel and to drama in search of new and suitable ways of speaking on behalf of the voiceless and “poor.” The novels of Woolf, Flaubert, and Joyce should supply the new language and forms of narrative, rather than empirical history or the history of mentalities. In the end, Rancière’s project for a new history boils down to accepting Michelet’s romantic poetics of writing minus his liberal bourgeois politics. Or rather, it is Barthes’s account of Michelet that establishes the new ways of writing history—in Barthes’s case, a history of the historian. Such a new history becomes a fragmented and systematically unsystematic intertextual pastiche of texts, documents, memoirs, references, reflections, poetic excerpts, aphorisms, incantations, and oracles. In a sense, because the truth of history lies in the ways of telling of it, in the style of narration, the new historical poetics can and should be primarily exemplified and demonstrated in its very use, rather than strictly described and defined. Most probably, Rancière intends to exemplify this new historical poetics in his very writing about history, which, however, itself is not a history but a philosophical reflection on history. A Critique Rather than being defined through a number of methods and tropes, the new historical poetics should use a whole arsenal of literary, especially modernistic, devices. But, preeminently, the truth of history about those previously absent from it should be told by metaphor. It is in and behind a metaphor that the “science” of new history seeks precision. For Rancière, Michelet was the first to realize that the truth of history is better told in “cries” than in a wellordered discourse. In the new history, literature should disrupt statistical analysis: one should not hesitate to insert a “little narrative” (le petit récit) of “the teacher’s notebook” or “the memory of some childhood” into telling  Thus, the main question for Rancière is to define historicity (une historicité) with reference to “the possibility that subjects in general would make a history—and of the forms of writing that account for them by inscribing them in the genre of a narrative and the figure of truth” (NH 98; MH 198).

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a history (NH 101; MH 203–204). In this way, it should become possible to overcome the gap between the “poetic” word of myth and the systematic account of scientific historical discourse. The seemingly insuperable Platonic distinction between μῦθος and λόγος will disappear (NH 90). History, then, will become a mytho-scientific “discourse-narrative” (récit-discours) (NH 56; MH 117); the poetry of history will become scientific, and as the science of history, poetic. However, Rancière’s history project appears shaky, because, first, the subject of history is a construction rather than a (re)description. In a sense, the new history is overly reflective in being more preoccupied with itself—its new poetics, forms of narrative, and style—than with those about whom it is meant to speak. Second, the ideal of “science” in history is reduced to the precision of metaphor, yet the precision of metaphor is a matter of interpretation left up to the narrator and the reader, and as such can be arbitrary. Third, Rancière’s narrative for a new history tries to avoid any structural classifications of literary and narrative genres. Still, it appears to be morphologically very close to the genre of “tale” (fairy tale), which, as Robert Scholles puts it, “takes place in a world which is deliberately set against our own world as other, different, better. The tale is a progress toward justice through potentially tragic obstacles.”26 But the tale, although being in an oral narrative form, has a highly structured plot,27 which Rancière neither mentions nor employs, reducing tale-telling to the use of metaphor. But then, fourth, the normative task, giving the dispossessed a voice and a place in history, is entrusted to a poetics that organizes its narrative around a metaphor. Yet, in fact, most of Rancière’s metaphors—“the sea,” “the excess of words,” and others—have a metonymic function, that is, they suggest a connection by contiguity rather than by similarity. However, if Roman Jakobson is right, this turns the new history into a novelistic, fictional literature.28 Epic and Parataxis Therefore, in order to be able to write a new history, the historian should make a literary revolution by inventing a new poetics that employs novel forms of narrative. Rancière grants Michelet the discovery of the immanence

 Robert Scholles, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 47.  See Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, 2nd ed., trans. Laurence Scott, ed. Louis A. Wagner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 6, 23ff. 28  Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1980), 90–96. 26 27

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of meaning to forms of literary narrative (NH 56, 99), which means that the ways we tell history are not “innocent,” for each one is a form of literary speech and thus entails a meaning that goes beyond both a straightforward imitation and a scientific interpretation of the past. But then, again, a particular narrative form provides a construction, rather than a description, of a meaning in history. We only need to choose the right genre of telling history. Yet in this way the dispossessed of history are assigned the voice of the benevolent narrator, rather than gaining their unique voices. The story of their history is then told for them, not by them. But because the new history now has to speak through a historian, who lends his voice to the new subject of history, history-telling becomes oracular rather than “scientific.” Yet, the oracle is long dead in and for history, and should remain such, if history is to be a reasoned enterprise of understanding the voices of people and things of the past for the sake of the understanding of the present. Rancière makes an interesting observation, which, however, he does not elaborate but rather mentions in passing: the “literary revolution” in history should overcome the traditional structure of the novel and turn to epic, in order to allow the “parataxis of democratic coordinations succeed the syntax of monarchical subordinations” (NH 99–100). It is not by chance, then, that the metaphor of the sea as representing the new historical poetics is tied to an epic. The new history for Rancière should follow the narrative that makes it possible to break the existing hypotactic, and thus hierarchical, order of speech, where some people are considered to have a privileged access to being told about. Within the epic parataxis, the king is just one of the characters, but he is already dead, a stock character buried alive under the mass of speechless paperwork, which constitutes his tomb. It is well-known that the modern novel (in Andrei Belyi, Joyce, Proust) is very interested in epic, and intentionally uses and reproduces paratactic narrative structure. An important feature of epic, which distinguishes it from other literary genres and, in particular, from tragedy, is that epic introduces and holds together many narrative parts at once. Epic is therefore paratactic, that is, it allows for the simultaneous coexistence, or co-presence, of a number of different parts of equal value within its plot, which employs a series of mutually independent narratives. The paratactic whole does not take precedence over its parts, so that while each constituent is meaningful within the context of the unified whole, each part is nevertheless autonomous, remains equally meaningful and important, and not subordinate to or hypotactically subsumed under the whole. Because epic consists of many loosely related stories about independent characters, its narrative is therefore voluminous and lengthy, can begin and

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end with any event, which demonstrates epic’s intrinsic unity.29 Such is also the story of real events, that often do not seem to have a meaning outside of the way they are told about. But epic, originally paratactic, is later “completed” by “prequels” and “sequels,” which turns it into an enterprise of strict historical and temporal subordination.30 And this is the work of a traditional historiographer, who arranges the described events into a sequence that makes sense within the traditional novel or dramatic narrative structure of entanglement, development, and resolution. Moreover, epic time is gathered into the a-temporal “absolute” past, that of memory and remembrance, removed from the linear and sequential historical time. The temporal setting of epic is the past par excellence, the non-existing tense of the absolute “past present,” always already complete but redefined through a renewed interpretation. For this reason, if the modern epic of the dispossessed can be told at all, it would place them in the ahistorical presence of the goal the narrator establishes and attempts to articulate, such as atemporal justice. Rancière presupposes the possibility of a modern historical epos that would acquit and justify those whom previous historical narratives have been systematically missing. Yet, history is epic-oriented from its very inception as written history. Hecataeus of Miletus, who became the model for later historians—Hellanicus, Herodotus (“the father of history”), Eratosthenes, Strabo, and Diodorus—already composed in the “epic” mode.31 In its very structure, Hecataeus’s Περιήγησις is very similar to Homer’s catalogue of ships (Il. 2.494–877). Hecataeus’s history provides detailed lists and accounts of names—of people, peoples, countries, cities, mountains, rivers, islands— that became known in history as inscribed into a concrete place through the accompanying narrative of travel, the founding and naming of a city, war, genealogy, and so on. Such a history is structurally similar to epic in that it too consists of a great number of episodes that involve many people, and is thus very detailed, but its basic plot is rather simple and can be expressed in just a few words, although this plot is always capable of being further refined and finely tuned. One might say that this epic structure in fact is the ahistorical invariant in any history. Epic thus has been the pattern for writing

 See Aristotle, Poet. 1451a19, 1455b15–16, 1456a12, 1459b26–28.  The convenient beginnings and endings to Homer are added by later poets (e.g., in the Cypria). See A. Bernabé, ed., Poetae et epici Graeci: Testimonia et fragmenta, Pars I (Leipzig: Teubner, 1987), 36–64; and M. L. West, ed., Greek Epic Fragments: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries B.C., trans. M. L. West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 31  Felix Jacoby, “Hekataios,” in Griechische Historiker (Stuttgart: Alfred Druckenmüller Verlag, 1956), 185–237. See also Aelian, Varia hist. XIII.20; Cicero, De leg. I.1.5. Of Hecataeus’ two major works, Periēgēsis and Genealogiai, around 400 fragments are preserved. See G. Nenci, ed., Hecatei Milesii Fragmenta (Firenze: La nuova Italia editrice, 1954). 29 30

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history from history’s very inception and can also be taken as the model for new history. NAMES OF HISTORY AND NAMES IN HISTORY Rancière criticizes Michelet for establishing the difference between word (mot) and name (nom) as a “generalized synonymy,” that is, taking the name of a historical character to stand for a whole range of related phenomena and events, to “all the places and all the generations that find voice in his speech” (NH 47). He himself wants to get rid of such synonymy, as well as of proper names of chronicles and of common names of science in favor of the names that stand for concrete people (NH 96; MH 193). However, as I have argued, this cannot be achieved, because the voices assigned to these names are reduced to the same unique authorial and authoritative, even if often implicit, voice of the narrator. The others’ voices are then dissolved into various tonalities and registers of literary devices and writing techniques within the searched historical poetics. In this way, personal names get substituted for literary words. Although this new historical poetics should be epic-oriented, Rancière mentions rather disparagingly “the mnemonic fancy of the Homeric catalogue” (NH 86). And yet, proper and personal names—unique but not mutually isolated—are handled in and by epic with great care. In an epic “catalogue of names,” each name is both independent of any other but at the same time appears in—without being subordinated to—a story that can be thought of as a historical narrative. Within the same history and the same set of names, one can tell different and independent stories, which means that history is not teleological and dominated by one master narrative but allows for many histories. Each history that uses epic narrative is constituted by a detailed and elaborate account of names—the “who” of history, as well as a relatively simple narrative account of the story—the “what” of history, which can always be “zoomed in” on with more details. These names are personal, unique names that can be the names of people, events, and things, including living things, which allow for a new “natural history” of the world that is absent in most modern accounts of history, including Rancière’s. Such a history, which has the structure of the “catalogue of names” that are further specified by a narrative, is, again, very similar to epic which also uses a narrative plot (even if often skillfully hidden in some modernistic novels) and an ordered set of characters.32 Yet, Rancière’s poetic narrative,  For a comparison of literary and historical discourses, see T. Todorov, “Les catégories du récit litteraire,” in L’analyse structurale du récit (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 134–38.

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however progressive it is intended in its design to be, is still selective and thus privileges one “borrowed” voice—eventually, the voice of the narrator—at the expense of others who are therefore excluded from this constructed history. This makes this new history uniform, even if it might use fragmented narrative techniques. But if we want to conceive of everyone as a subject of history—of a history—we need to limit the exclusive power of narrative by limiting the very narrative itself, by reducing it to a “minimal” narrative that is closer to spoken word of mouth. The properly “historical,” then, resides in the detailed account of names of those who should become the subjects of history. Therefore, one should preserve and account for proper names as kept in history, rather than for the names of history. If history is not monolithically universal and does not evolve toward a telos or an extra-historical purpose (which in Rancière is established by the voice of the narrator-historian), it must admit of a coexisting plurality of histories. This means that everyone always participates and lives in several histories at the same time. As I have argued, Rancière’s new historical poetics supplies a new narrative that should justify those previously excluded from history by giving the dispossessed their place in history, or rather, making history the place for them. However, in such a history, justice comes from and with a narrative that takes primacy over the names, because narrative constructs and constitutes the names of history by the “words” of history. And yet, each history depends on, and is constituted by, its names, which are then its proper names. These names should have priority over the narrative, if they are to be the names in history, that is, not produced but shown and told by a history. Moreover, the names in history can be those of any people, things, and events. The names in history, then, constitute the properly historical and should be carefully preserved, organized (modes of which are, for example, epic poetic catalogue and genealogy), supplied, and clarified by a narrative. However, contrary to Rancière, this narrative, in principle, can use any narrative techniques and not just one poetic narrative that is thought of as both epically paratactic and modernistically aphoristic. History should care for those about whom it speaks and tells, and thus become properly democratic, not exclusive of anyone or anything. Every history, then, has the structure of the historical that provides the form for a history supported by the interpretative narrative that gives a history its content.

Chapter 8

The Comedy of Philosophy

Throughout its history, philosophy has tended to ignore comedy. A reason for this may be that comedy is considered secondary to, and derivative from, tragedy. In his Poetics, Aristotle lists comedy (κωμῳδία), together with tragedy, epic, and dithyramb, as a way of imitation (μίμησις) (Poet. 1447a17). Yet, unlike tragedy, which is an imitation of the best people, comedy imitates the worst (Poet. 1448a16–18). And, even worse, comedy presents the funny and ridiculous (τὸ γελοῖον), which generically belongs to the ugly (τὸ αἰσχρόν) (Poet. 1449a32–34). As such, the funny by itself is a mistake (ἁμάρτημα), which, however, is still pardonable, because it does not cause pain (ἀνώδυνον) or inflict any harm (οὐ φθαρτικόν) (Poet. 1449a34–37). Plato already takes comedy seriously––perhaps too seriously: because comedy is imitative and appeals to passions rather than reason, it spoils public morals (Rep. 606b). As such, comedy is dangerous to a serious and appropriate political constitution and hence has no place in it. One might notice, however, that an utter seriousness that comes with a loss of the sense of the comic is itself not comic but rather tragic, or maybe even pathetic. Nevertheless, contra Aristotle, Plato (Phlb. 48a), and especially Proclus (In Rep. 49.13) hold that comedy can purify the passions and may have a purifying effect equal to that of tragedy. Because comedy is an imitation of the worst, lowest, and basest in humans, it surely cannot be but vulgar, both in its origin (which is popular: vulgus, “people”) and in its elements (e.g., in that it comes from phallic songs [τὰ φαλλικά]) (Poet. 1449a11). No wonder, then, that for a long time comedy existed and developed in obscurity, hidden from a watchful philosophical eye, so that already by Aristotle’s time, he could not establish the names of those who made significant innovations to comedy––those who introduced masks, prologues, increased the number of actors, and so on. 149

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(Poet. 1449a38ff.). In other words, for philosophy, comedy does not have an origin or a beginning. Hence, comedy is secondary to tragedy, not only in its aesthetic and philosophical importance but also genetically: as a significant dramatic genre, it develops only after tragedy. This is not only Aristotle’s understanding, but also Hegel’s, Marx’s, and Lukács’s. Ágnes Heller contests this view, noting that in Roman literature, the situation is exactly the reverse, since tragedy (in Seneca) comes after comedy (in Plautus and Terence). In Heller’s interpretation, Greek culture is perceived within modernity as the originary and primary culture, from which Roman culture receives and develops all its paradigms, and thus is nothing but secondary and derivative. Similarly, the moderns, especially from the time of the Romantics on, over-appreciate Greek literature at the expense of Roman writing. In established modern understandings, Roman philosophy, literature, and drama come late and mostly imitate their Greek counterparts. Even nowadays, it would still be a shocking statement to say that Plotinus is no less a profound and original philosopher than Plato, and Terence no less important than Aristophanes. And yet, in support of Heller’s claim, one might say that Roman literature borrows the form—the genre—but in its content is already quite different from Greek literature. In fact, Roman literature is much more modern—indeed, it is modern. Roman culture, and literature in particular, is profoundly humanistic: it displays almost no interest in myth and divine interference but presents a subtly portrayed individual as a real person. It is multicultural: it is not afraid of other cultures and makes what it borrows from others its own. Also, politically and legally, Roman culture is much more comprehensible and still serves (even if often negatively) as a model in many modern debates. There are a number of noteworthy books dedicated to the consideration of comedy as a literary genre and its poetics—by Elder Olson, Morton Gurewitch, L. J. Potts, Nancy Klein Maguire, John Morreall, Jan Walsh Hokenson—to name only a few.1 In philosophy, however, the treatment of comedy is very different. A number of contemporary thinkers speak about laughter, jokes, wit, and humor,2 and make thoughtful remarks about comedy. Bergson’s Le Rire,3 which is still often discussed, does not address comedy as such but is a serious work on laughter as an expression of the  See Elder James Olson, The Theory of Comedy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968); Morton Gurewitch, Comedy: The Irrational Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Leonard James Potts, Comedy (London: Hutchinson, 1966); Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); and Jan Walsh Hokenson, The Idea of Comedy: History, Theory, Critique (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2006). 2  See, for example, Simon Critchley, On Humor (London: Routledge, 2002). 3  Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1900). 1

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spontaneity of life. Yet it is most astonishing that there are practically no philosophical works dedicated entirely to comedy. Perhaps Ágnes Heller has written the first comprehensive philosophical study of comedy, Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature and Life, published in 2005.4 Since, in my opinion, comedy is a philosophical genre through and through, in what follows I will be mostly discussing comedy in those of its structural features that it shares in common with philosophy. I will try to justify my opinion and thus elevate it to the status of “true opinion” (but not strict knowledge), mostly in relation to Ágnes Heller’s book. In doing so, I will try to be true not so much to the letter but rather to the spirit of her work. My discussion is confined to comic drama only; moreover, to Roman comic drama, and mostly to Terence, because his comedies appear to be more appealing to us moderns than any other ancient dramas (a point that is also explicitly recognized by Heller [IC 66]). Put succinctly, philosophy and comedy are not identical, and yet philosophy is always comic, and comedy is always philosophical. Comic Modes: Comedy as Heterogeneous The phenomenon of the comic, as Heller takes it, is multifaceted and present in many different ways to thought and culture and in many different genres. For this reason, the comic is heterogeneous (IC 6), that is, it pervades all practical—moral and political—activity. In the afterword to his book on comedy, Richard Keller Simon lists thirty different accounts of the comic.5 But Heller goes even further, arguing in a Socratic fashion that no definition of comedy would stand: since the comic is present in so many different ways, it cannot be defined (IC 15, 204). This, of course, is a rather astounding claim. What it means, however, is not that comedy should be spoken about in a purely via negativa fashion—but rather that we cannot exhaust all the embodiments and possibilities of the comic. I will attempt not to define an essence of comedy but to point at those of its features that it has in common with philosophy, that is, not to the moments of difference but to those of similarity, to the points in which both comedy and philosophy do common work. My major claim here is that comedy is a philosophical genre that presupposes a complex and rationally verified development of the plot that always brings action to a conclusion in which the good is justified in a non-moralistic and non-theological way, that is, as human and humane.  Ágnes Heller, Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature and Life (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2005); henceforth IC, followed by page number. 5  Richard Keller Simon, afterword to The Labyrinth of the Comic: Theory and Practice from Fielding to Freud (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1985), 239–44. 4

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Indeed, in comedy, we find discussion of and often a solution to moral problems. Yet comedy is not moralistic, because moralism is boring, and comedy is not. Moralistic reasoning achieves the opposite of what it preaches, and comedy teaches how to behave by showing misbehavior. In a sense, in comedy, ethics is the first (and only) philosophy, but morality is present in comedy often by being apparently denied and ridiculed. Comedy as Reflective We might begin by asking about a beginning or “origin” of comedy. Yet a real origin or beginning may never be achievable in and for thought, because inquisitive and reflective thought might have this “origin” at its very constitution. Comedy may be taken as a parody of tragedy, both of typically tragic characters and action, and parody may be considered a vulgar and “low” a genre. The comic parody, however, is not low, because, as Heller notes, laughter at the vulgar is not vulgar itself (IC 36), and hence, a parody of the vulgar should not itself be vulgar. But for something to be a parody means that this something is conscious of what it ridicules and that it ridicules. Consequently, in order to be a parody (of tragedy), comedy has to be reflective: comedy is always “mediated by reflection, by understanding, by work of the intellect” (IC 11). First, this means that comedy (the comediographer and actors, as well as spectators or readers), has to be aware of the properties and (formal) characteristics of tragedy. Second, comedy has to imitate and reproduce them in a different way, according to its own tasks and properties. Third, it has to explicitly know these properties. And fourth, it has to be aware that it does actually parody tragedy. Both Plautus and Terence are clearly aware of this sort of reflectivity in comedy, which they present in the form of “literary criticism” in the Prologue, which is absent in Old Comedy. In this respect, comedy as reflective is already a philosophical enterprise. The Comedy of Life By contrast (although not in opposition: tragedy and comedy are not opposites), one may also say that if tragedy celebrates death and mortality, comedy celebrates life and vitality. Tragedy is “living towards death,” whereas comedy, as Nietzsche and Bakhtin take it, is “living towards life” (IC 3, 38). The comic, then, is coextensive with life and represents life in its constant self-renewal, in contrast to (and often in parody of) tragedy, which represents death as life’s ultimate termination and self-exhaustion. Yet the comic rendering of life refers both to body and spirit. The “bodily” renewal of life in comedy is present in ridiculing “low” bodily functions

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but also in “high” spiritual passions that embrace love for the other, present in and through physical attraction, sexual intercourse, illicit relationships, conception, births, and marriages, as well as friendly attraction, dialogical intercourse, disinterested help, and self-sacrifice for the other. Life’s self-renewal is thus double and ambiguous in comedy, so that from its very inception comedy appeals to “low” bodily functions (e.g., in scatological humor, from Aristophanes to Rabelais), as well as to “high,” spiritual ones (e.g., subtle intellectual jokes). Both kinds of life-renewal, however, are entwined in a most intimate way, so that it is not always easy to strictly separate the two. In fact, such a separation is hardly necessary. Perhaps this implicit yet understood agreement of spectators or readers to voluntarily suspend a seemingly rigid separation between the low and high in comedy, as well as between the “what” and “is” (the “that”) of characters and action, is an agreement to submit themselves to the scenic illusion, which is a secret of the magic of drama. Love If comedy renews life and overcomes death, it has to be about love, because only love reproduces life in all of its appearances, vulgar and sublime. The erotic component in comedy is realized as a striving toward the loved, as an impulse that can be fully released only at the very end of the comedy. If comedy, as Aristotle thinks, is an imitation of life, then comedy reproduces life. Yet comedy is also an art (a dramatic art), which means that it is also productive. Comedy artfully creates artificial situations that do not occur in life but show life “distilled” and separated from the boredom of repetition and of the everyday inconclusiveness of action. Referring to and living in everydayness, comedy rejects everydayness in order to come to an end. And this end always has to be a “happy ending” (see Poet. 1453a35–39). Formally speaking, this is probably the most distinctive feature of comedy: everything, all action, has to fit within a conclusion that gathers the characters and resolves the plot into a happy ending. Unlike tragedy, which has to have a “bad” ending, comedy must have resources to find a way out to a “good” ending, away from any present impasse and dead end. One can thus say that comedy is about life. Yet it would also be fair to say that life is a comedy, because, despite the ongoing suffering of all characters in life’s grand drama, one might say that through us life always comes to a certain happy ending in its constant self-renewal. Thus, if life is renewed in and through love, comedy must end well (which is why Dante’s poem is improbably called The Divine Comedy), thus assuring us, who are both actors and readers (interpreters) of life’s comedy, that in the end everything is better in the world than it seems. One may say that many

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modern versions of history are comic, insofar as they share with comedy a vision that all things come to a resolution in history’s “end.” In Bernard Mandeville, Kant, and Hegel, history wants to see progress toward the good, which, as in comedy, is eventually realized (or has to be realized) despite individual, egoistic interests and the fact that at any given moment things seem to be going wrong. In a sense, the good ending in comedy suggests, first, that every difficult situation in life, every entanglement, can always be rationally resolved, even if good luck often comes to the rescue (although good luck is itself part of the plot); and second, seemingly irreversible things in life may be reversed. Death appears to be irreversible, until it is overturned by its renewal in life and memory, and hence by a happy ending, which makes death only a comic “as-if” event. Comedy as Liberating Comedy is subversive, destroying stereotypes both of a whole society (hence, comedy liberates politically and socially through ridiculing established oppressive practices and prejudices)—and of an individual psyche (hence, comedy heals one’s soul). The social aspect of comic freedom is present in that the spectators and readers are capable of identifying themselves with characters’ affects and circumstances, and thus say “we,” insofar as we all participate in the same comic liberative motion. This personal, social, and political liberation is always in the background of the comic plot. Thus, the liberation of a slave is a prized goal and frequent motive of the happy ending in New Comedy (e.g., the liberation of Syrus in Terence’s Adelphoe (960ff.); and in Menander’s Epitrepontes (538ff.), slaves dream of liberation). Personal psychological liberation is also an important constituent of comedy. Comedy helps to overcome death, but not as such, because death is not a part of one’s personal experience, and hence death is rare in comedy; main characters, at least, do not die. If comedy is capable of overcoming death, it can help overcome the fear of death and related affects, without eliciting them. In comedy, I do not have to die to understand that for me death does not exist. This means, again, that comedy has a cathartic effect (although Heller herself denies it, thus siding with Aristotle [IC 41]). Thus, comedy liberates the body not only by fulfilling bodily desires but by recognizing them as legitimate. Comedy also liberates the soul by helping to overcome and release the affects or “passions” of the soul. This liberating force of comedy is inscribed into its dramatic character, that is, in its suspension of the “is” and stress on the “what” of our relations to others and ourselves. This means that comedy is always an as-if action. And yet, to further stress the conventional character of the affects

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shown and released, comedy often breaks the “fourth wall.” Examples of breaking the scenic illusion are numerous in both Old and New Comedy: Aristophanes’s Clouds (345ff., 1095, 1202, 1299); Plautus’s Pseudolus (720, 1081–1082, 1240, 1333), Amphitryon (151), and Poenulus (126); and Terence’s Hecyra (866). In its liberatory force, comedy is thereby also therapeutic. For the most part, its therapeutic effect is carried out by and through laughter. Still, comic therapy is never direct but has to be mediated by reflection and understanding. This means that the cathartic effect of comedy is not direct and immediate but is carried out—performed—with others and in the presence of others. Because of this, comic therapy is collective, rational, and judgmental. Such is also, as Heller suggests, comic laughter: I cannot speak when I laugh but I can always explain afterward why I laughed. On the contrary, elementary crying is therapeutic too, and yet it is not reflective (IC 11, 14, 24–26, 65). Distance and Danger Heller argues that writing comedy presupposes freedom, because without freedom, there is no distance from the characters and events portrayed; and without distance the average and conventional cannot be ridiculed (IC 41). I would think, however, that it is also the other way around—comedy has to keep a distance from what it shows, for otherwise it would not be able to provide a space for both its characters and spectators. The characters need space to establish and keep their identity and to move within the developing plot. Spectators need space for the freedom of interpretation, which comes with reflection. And reflection presupposes and needs a distance between the interpretandum and interpreter, who may come to coincide in an act of comic self-cognition while still maintaining the difference between comic characters and comic spectators or readers. In other words, without distance, freedom in comedy cannot be preserved. Moreover, the freedom of comedy implies danger (IC 41). Comedy is dangerous in its freedom, both politically and existentially. Politically (and socially), comedy ridicules oppressive practices and thus draws public attention to them in the hope of changing such practices. Existentially, there is always the danger of not achieving one’s freedom of self-understanding, and thus, of (comic) misinterpretation. But the presence of danger is also therapeutic because danger makes us vigilant and alert to our circumstances, and forces us not to succumb to the deadening and boring routine of life, which is always a target in comedy. Being in a state of constant self-renewal, comedy is always engaging; it is “fun” to attend, watch, interpret, discuss, and retell, thus comedy is never boring.

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Contingency and Universality of Comic Action and Characters One may say that comedy has a plot whose unraveling is guided by contingent events, such as the recognition of a person as one’s daughter or son, as a free citizen, and so on, as based on a material evidence or testimony of a witness (of a nurse, ring, layette, token, etc.) (Epitr. 387–388; Hec. 574; Haut. 614). Yet it is a contingency that testifies to comedy’s universality; a contingency through which a universal is always shimmering. As Micio in Terence’s Adelphoe remarks, human life is a game of dice, which, however, is based both on chance and skill (Ad. 739–41). Aristotle’s famous saying runs that poetry (which includes comedy) is more philosophical than history, because the former speaks about the universal, whereas the latter—about the particular (Poet. 1451b5–7). Hence, there is no history or myth in comedy (IC 38), and therefore comedy excludes historical drama. Menander’s Dyskolos begins with a monologue by Pan, which, however, has no mythological references at all but only introduces the comedy. Both the action and the characters show the universal in and through the particular. In doing so, comedy may be said to be more universal than any other dramatic genre, even more so than tragedy, where characters are historical or mythological individuals associated with particular names and inscribed into individual biographies. In comedy, on the contrary, we mostly encounter “speaking names” (Onesimos, “Useful,” in Menander’s Epitrepontes; Eunomia, “Good Order,” in Plautus’s Aulularia; Glykeria, “Sweet,” in Terence’s Andria, etc.). It is important to note that the speaking names are all Greek, which suggests that Roman comedy wants to stress its continuity with the Greek tradition, but also testifies to the fact that the public was sufficiently educated to understand the meaning of these names. But speaking names do not make comic characters into abstract types. A peculiarity of comedy, then, consists in its characters being concrete yet universal, so that everyone, every spectator and reader, can either identify herself with a particular character or draw a parallel between her own situation and the situation in a comedy. Thus, one can say that comic characters are universal and contingent, but not abstract. Elsewhere, Heller argues that contingency characterizes the very human condition.6 Such “universal contingency” is another point of the coincidence of comedy with philosophy. On the one hand, characters display typical or universal features. On the other hand, they all are uniquely recognizable through characters’ voices. This is especially true in Terence, whose characters are far removed from grotesque vulgarity, always trying to carefully preserve the decorum, the proper and decent  Ágnes Heller, A Philosophy of History in Fragments (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 1–35.

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ways of speaking and behaving, and are not mere masks but are subtly modeled in a true-to-life way. We find this universal contingency in comic characters who display both everydayness and frailty (IC 40). Particularly, this can be seen in the main comic characters who are lovers and who are very mundane (in New Comedy, they are not state figures but primarily family members) and yet very humane, often ready to help others or inadvertently helped by them in a disinterested and self-sacrificial way. Such are, for example, Sostrates in Menander’s Dyskolos; in Terence, the courtesans Bacchis in the Hauton timorumenos and Thais in the Eunuchus, the slave Parmeno in the Hecyra, and Micio in the Adelphoe. This is particularly true of Micio, who makes Demea recognize that re ipsa repperi facilitate nil esse homini melius neque clementia, “I’ve discovered that in reality nothing is better for a man than to be generous and easygoing” (Ad. 860–1).7 Comedy and the Modern Subject As I have suggested, of all ancient literary and dramatic genres, comedy appears to be the most modern. Comedy is modern because it portrays and presents a well-developed and self-conscious subject, who is also studied by philosophy, although by different means. In our visual epoch, when the text has receded and become more a subscription to an image—or even an inscription in a text bubble—comedy, and drama in general, has come back, because it can always be more than reading a script: it can also be a visually appealing performance on stage, put in motion and made alive by its characters. The modern subject is capable of combining, displaying, and becoming aware of the opposite passions or affects, while perceiving them at the same time. In particular, comedy, which is erotic through and through, embraces the opposites of love and pain. But it is through the immediate interaction of opposites that the modern subject of Fichte and Hegel is constituted. In Terence’s Hecyra, Pamphilus complains about the anguish inflicted by love (nemini plura acerba credo esse ex amore homini umquam oblata quam mi, “I don’t believe anyone has ever had more anguish inflicted on him by love than I have”) (Hec. 281–2).8 Those who make others suffer are granted a capacity to learn how to love others (e.g., Demea in the Adelphoe). Love inflicts pain, and suffering is released and resolved in satisfaction, while  Terence, The Brothers, in Terence, vol. 2, trans. and ed. John Barsby (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 351. 8  Terence, The Mother-in-Law, in Terence, vol. 2, trans. and ed. John Barsby (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 175. 7

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both love and hatred are simultaneously present to the subject, as Catullus puts it in his famous odi et amo (Catull. 85). However, the comic subject is capable of overcoming the duality and split of the opposite affects and achieves self-reconciliation. Such comic self-reconciliation, however, happens, as in Hegel, only at the very end of the comedy of loving, being, and thinking. The modern subject is also an individual, who realizes her separation and apparent autonomy from others to the point of self-isolation and loneliness. However, the comic character always tries to reach out for the other, a pursuit in which he or she usually succeeds, unlike the tragic character. Being lonely, comic (dramatic) characters are individuals. This is why the chorus, which is essential for Old Comedy, begins to disappear in Menander, and why there is practically no chorus in Plautus and Terence. No wonder that there is no parabasis in Terence either; parabasis became obsolete because it requires the common, coordinated action of many people acting as one collective subject, whose autonomy is not that of an individual. Being mono-conscious and autonomously self-sufficient, the modern subject is also monological. Monologues indeed play an important role in Plautus and Terence, even if in principle every monologue may be considered an implicit dialogue either with oneself, other characters, spectators, or readers. In comedy, all monologues and dialogues are oral, and represent “pure speech,” (pura oratio) (Haut. 46). The orality and spontaneity of the said are reflected in, and accompanied by, a frequent change of meter in Plautus, and even more so in Terence. And yet, the mono-conscious subject is also a literate subject, one who writes and reads: it is not by chance that already in antiquity comedies are not only staged but are also read (although aloud). Contamination The term contaminatio first comes as a reproach of the critics: it means “spoiling” or “muddling” the allegedly pure and sublime originals of ancient drama by combining them and introducing new elements. Contamination soon becomes a major principle of composition in New Comedy. Because comic plot has to be devoid of historical or mythological events, it has to be fictitious and fully invented, as Heller, with Diderot, takes it (IC 39). As Michael von Albrecht shows in his History of Roman Literature,9 Roman comediographers freely borrow from their Greek originals, and even from each other. It is well known that Apollodorus of Carystus was the source for

 Michael von Albrecht, History of Roman Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1997).

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Terence’s Hecyra and Phormio; Diphilus’s dramas were adopted by both Plautus and Terence; and Menander was the most frequent source of plots for Plautus, Terence (Andr.; Eun.; Haut.; Ad.), and other Roman comediographers. Terence readily admits to borrowing and combining from ancient plays and says he does not regret it and will do so again (Haut. 16–19; cf. Andr. 9–16). Addressing his critics, Terence stresses that the purpose and goal of comic drama is not a good translation of the originals (bene vertere) but good writing (bene scribere). On the contrary, his purist critic and objector, who has been translating well but writing poorly, made bad Latin plays from good Greek ones (qui bene vortendo et easdem scribendo male/ex Graecis bonis Latinas fecit non bonas [Eun. 7–8]). Terence himself prefers a liberal attitude toward Greek originals, without a literalism that would require undistorted translation. Because of this, Terence defends the neglegentia (carelessness) of Naevius, Plautus, and Ennius in their dealing with the originals, preferring a “negligent” freedom to a dreary pedantry (obscura diligentia) (Andr. 18–21). Only in this way can one save the spirit of the “immortal comedy” without deadening it by meticulously sticking to the letter. Only a free attitude toward the original can renew a comic glance at contemporary things and events. A good comediographer thus places herself within an already developed and sophisticated tradition, and yet does not restrain her own spontaneous creativity. In doing so, the dramatist follows a “golden mean” (such is also virtue in Platonic and Peripatetic ethics), a middle way between meticulous copying of the original and utter arbitrariness. In other words, a good (comic) writer is the one who is neither a philologist nor a mathematician but is still a bit of both. The comedia palliata is thus not a mere redressing and imitation of Greek comedy, much as later Roman (Neoplatonic) philosophy is not an imitation of classical Greek philosophy. Roman comedy is already a modern literary genre and remains so in and for modernity. New comedy is really a new form of comedy, a structural principle of which is the free borrowing from an original in an original way. This form of new comedy realizes itself as standing in a particular relation to tradition, which it always supplements with the originality of its commentary and invention. This originality is unmistaken yet not stressed and, in a sense, is inevitable, which distinguishes it from eclecticism. One has to emphasize the importance of both components here: not only originality (which Terence humbly tries to hide) but also the otherness of the tradition. To be sure, it is acceptable to borrow from Menander—but it is not acceptable to plagiarize from contemporary dramatists, in part because borrowing from the borrowed is copying a copy, which both dulls the original and is boring to spectators and readers. Because of this, Terence has to defend himself against the reproach of “stealing” from other Roman

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comediographers, particularly from Naevius and Plautus (Eun. 23–34; Ad. 6–14). Again, the parallel with philosophy is rather evident here: a philosophical work freely borrows, combines, and contaminates arguments, notions, and ideas from the extant tradition, which it does not even always acknowledge (e.g., in Plato’s argument against writing at the end of the Phaedrus [Phdr. 274b], which is “borrowed” from Alcidamas): apparently, the readers already know the source and are capable of recognizing it. At the same time, a philosophical work does not plagiarize the original, that is, it does not simply repeat a thought without reference, but always brings into discussion a genuinely other and new way of seeing the old problem. In this sense, in a genuine philosophical discussion plagiarism is simply impossible, but contamination is necessary. Comedy as Rational Enterprise One can say thus that of all the dramatic genres, comedy is the most philosophical. This further means that comedy is a rational enterprise. Not only laughter but also comedy in its whole make-up and in its major characters is judgmental, and therefore rational and not emotional (see IC 8), because comedy is a dramatic locus for the realization of freedom, and the freedom to act presupposes the freedom to think and judge. Comedy appeals to sensuality but requires an interpretation of action and everyday life from the standpoint of reason. Yet “rationality also requires distancing ourselves from ourselves” (IC 66). Such a gap creates the possibility for reflection, in which thought thinks, understands, and interprets itself by fleeing not only sensual images but also itself. In his “On the Aesthetic Value of Greek Comedy,” Friedrich Schlegel claims that the ideal of Greek comedy is “sublime freedom.”10 I would think, however, that this is not the case, because freedom in comedy is not sublime but immanent to comic action, and thus to considering it, in a situation shared by all its participants. Such freedom is comic freedom, for it is always ridiculous and awkward––often indecent but always humane. This freedom is not sublime but mundane and is inscribed into everydayness. As reflective, comedy thinks about, and thus reflects on, the limits of human possibilities for reaching happiness through love in (and not after) life. This means that comedy presupposes not only thinking (practically and morally) about the best outcomes but also thinking about our own thinking and situation in the comedy of life. Hence, comedy always implies judgment, and (free) judgment is properly possible only within rationality  Friedrich Schlegel, “Vom ästhetischen Werte der griechischen Komödie,” in Dichtungen und Aufsätze, ed. W. Rasch (Munich: Hanser, 1984), 256–67.

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or reflective reason. Therefore, comedy always implies thinking that is utterly comic, judgmental, reflective, and, as such, therapeutic. It is rational comedy that saves us from death and absurdity in life, for the absurdity is disguised as boredom, and thinking is never boring. Besides, reflective thinking is not solitary but is a thinking with and toward the other, including the other of oneself. It is reflective comic thinking that makes love and being, as being with the other, possible, and in fact, inevitable. Paraphrasing Hegel’s claim that the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual, we might say, together with Heller, that the comic is the rational and the rational is the comic. Plot and Characters The rationality of comedy is realized both in the development of its plot and through the dialogical interaction of individual characters with each other. Comedy is universal and reflective in that, in and through everyday situations, it presents our own human condition to us, to us as spectators who are at the same time actors in the comedy of life. Such a situation is always concrete and unique and yet is always common, or is the one in which spectators can easily place ourselves and thus become actors. Our comic self-cognition is then realized as watching others act in a comedy and imagining ourselves as others and others as ourselves. In drama, as Aristotle famously argues, action takes precedence over characters (Poet. 1450a15–23). This is definitely true for classical tragedy, where characters carry out the plot of an unfolding fate. Nevertheless, in later comedy, particularly in New Comedy, and especially in Terence, characters are at least of equal importance. On the one hand, their presence on stage is justified by the unfolding of the plot. Yet, on the other hand, they are also there as individuals, as unique people with recognizable voices who show themselves to us in their dialogical, dramatic interaction, in which we spectators or readers can join as interlocutors. This unique individual is a person who is present in drama not through an outer description of her face or appearance, comportment, or manner of dressing—all these external descriptive features are absent from the text of comedy and have to be interpreted by the actors (quite often, it is this extratextual interpretation that is funny). The dramatic characters are uniquely characterized by their speech, on the one hand, and by the action, on the other. The comic main characters are subtly modeled and uniquely recognized by the timbre of their voices and individual stylistic peculiarities of their speech. Terence in particular is a great master of the vivid “vocal” dramatic portrait, which we find in the old man Chremes in the Hauton timorumenos, Micio and Demea in the Adelphoe, in the courtesan Thais in the Eunuchus, the

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parasite Phormio in the Phormio, and the slave Parmeno and the young man Pamphilus in the Hecyra, among others. Action: Agon and Invention Action in comedy is carried out within a complex plot unwrapped through intense dramatic interaction. Such interaction is communicative and often adversarial or agonistic. Dramatic action develops through every character’s attempt to realize their own purpose, which, however egoistic this may seem, nevertheless contributes to the eventual well-being of others. Comedy thus knows and uses “unsocial sociability” long before Kant. Comic dramatic agon is realized in various ways: as verbal duel (of individual characters as independent subjects); as battle of the sexes (see IC 63); as battle of generations (father and son); and as battle of social groups or classes (master and slave). Besides, comic agonistic action usually unfolds in a dramatic dialogue that is a swift exchange of brief rejoinders. Such dialogical interaction exemplifies βραχυλογία, or short energetic speech, which is contrary to the lengthy monologues that represent μακρολογία¸ or long speech (Plato, Gorg. 449b–c).11 Both short speeches and long ones are abundant in Plautus and Terence. The former tends to convey the sense of change and development of the intrigue (e.g., Eun. 345ff.), whereas the latter serve as an explanation of the current state of affairs (e.g., Haut. 121ff.). In the end, comic agon always must bring a full and mutually satisfactory resolution of the conflict—action has to arrive at a situation that is acceptable to everyone. In other words, comedy has to achieve a final agreement through an agonistic disagreement. Agonistic disagreement thus becomes a “motor” of comic action, in which capacity, it appears to coincide with the role played by dialectic as a vehicle of thought’s movement and progression in Hegel.12 But comic disagreement is often dressed up as an agreement based on misunderstanding: comic characters often agree while misunderstanding each other (and themselves), and thus disagree in an apparent agreement or agree in a seeming disagreement, which leads to a final agreement beyond the characters’ and spectators’ expectations, achieved only in the end. Comic plot, as was argued, is fully fictitious: it is an invention of the comediographer. However, an apparent unrestricted sovereignty of plot construction is always balanced in comedy by the realism of characters that are true to life but often carry and reproduce a mistaken or misinterpreted identity (IC 49–50). Misunderstanding, thus, is an important constituent of both  See Dmitri Nikulin, On Dialogue (Lanham, MD; Lexington Books, 2006), 206–9.  G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §31.

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action and individual characters, although this misunderstanding is carefully calculated by the author and whichever characters become the masterminds of the plot. Eventually, a mistake must be revealed through the characters’ interaction within the action, which often implies a narrative about the loss and discovery of a particular thing (a ring, some clothes, a necklace, etc.), whose recognition will result in establishing and proving someone’s identity (e.g., in Epitr. 300ff.). A comedy that “solves” the initial “mystery” of an act of misunderstanding, misbehavior, or mistaken identity is similar to a detective novel (IC 14). This, again, testifies to comedy’s rational character, because the detective novel is an artful and artificial literary construction, in which the reader is invited to resolve the initial riddle of “what really happened” through a careful interpretation of each character’s personality and an understanding of the action. Both a comedy and a detective novel begin with a mischievous or hurtful act (e.g., the debauchery of a son or a rape, although comedy tends to avoid murder), a “mistake,” an “error,” or an irrational decision in the treatment of others. Heller argues that comedy is always a comedy of errors: error causes an illusion, and illusion needs to be exposed and rectified. Therefore, error is necessary for a comic plot (IC 44, 49–51, 65). One can also add that, like philosophy, comedy should help both characters and spectators/readers to rid themselves of an error that initially makes things go wrong, and thus to overcome the illusion, that is, to understand what is right in its simplicity and thus to “cure” themselves of what is wrong in its variegated complexity. Both comedy and the detective novel resolve and dissolve the initial mystery, albeit differently: in a detective story, the criminal is exposed and usually punished, whereas comedy is capable of turning the act of wrongdoing around and inscribing it into a peaceful resolution (marriage, reconciliation, liberation). But comedy achieves such reconciliation in a peculiar way. It is through intrigue, deception, tricks, and making mistakes, by negating the (morally) negative, that comedy comes to the “truth” of a (happy) ending in full conciliation of the conflict in the invented story. Comedy and Dialectical Argument Resolution of a conflict at the end of a comedy that appears irresolvable in the beginning requires great dramatic skill in the construction of the plot. Similar to a good argument, a good plot may be borrowed or freely contaminated from several other comedies. Now the rationality of comedy may also be seen in that its complex and intense plot resembles in its structure a long and sophisticated logical or dialectical argument. In its very complexity, comic plot may also be compared to the game of chess (IC 49), in that a winning chess combination is similar to a dialectical argument that proves

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its point. Of course, both can fail, but both carefully try to avoid such an outcome. Comic plot is more a product of a carefully calculating and demonstrative reason than of an unrestricted productive imagination, because by the end the action should arrive at a mutually acceptable state of affairs. The structural similarity or analogy between comic plot and dialectical argument is rather striking. One might even say that comedy is a dramatization of dialectical reasoning. Indeed, both comic plot and logical argument are understandable at any step of their development, but both are rather hard to keep and remember in their entirety due to their complexity and abundance of subtle yet important details. To this end, some of Plautus’s and all of Terence’s comedies are later supplied with a brief synopsis, which is traditionally placed at the very beginning and whose purpose is to recollect and remind the audience of the comedy’s “argument.” Both comic plot and logical argument start with accepted premises (comedy with an exposition or prologue; argument by presenting its terms, which are either postulates or are deduced from other arguments); both go through development (comedy through the unfolding of its plot; argument through deduction); and both end in a solution (comedy in resolution of the conflict and rectification of errors; argument in a conclusion). Both comic plot and dialectical argument are “complete”: both have to “logically” go through all the stages of their movement toward a resolution, carefully avoiding missing or confounding any step in their deduction. Both are free inventions of the mind, yet both have to be well-conceived and thought through; both follow (often implicit) rules of logical or dramatic inference, by which they justify every act, so that nothing remains redundant or obsolete in their composition. At the same time, both are relatively independent of their author, thinker, or narrator, for both follow and show their immanent rules. The conclusions of both have to stand, and have to be independent of any particular interests, purposes, and strivings. The ways of bringing about the conclusion may differ widely for both: one can arrive at the same end in many different ways, through various methods or plots. Thus, there can be many different (good) comedies and (right) arguments, even if both are relatively rare. But both have to have a happy ending: in comedy, by obtaining the desired that exhausts the desire, the consummation of a marriage, sexual release, and earning an amount of money that secures one’s social position; in argument, by reaching the desired logical conclusion. In comedy, we find not only a structural analogy between plot and argument but also a straightforward comic imitation or parody of dialectical argument and argumentation. Examples of such “logical” parody in comedy are numerous, beginning with Aristophanes, who famously mocks his contemporary Sophists in the Clouds. In the Clouds, he parodies a dialectical

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dispute between the personifications of Truth and Falsity as a dialectical agon (Nub. 899ff.), while the monologue of Truth is a ridicule of didactic moralistic speech (Nub. 961ff.). In Menander, we also find a debate between Daos and Syros that is portrayed as a dialectical legal argument, in which each speaker presents arguments in support of his position (Epitr. 305ff.). In Terence, a comic dispute between husband and wife, Chremes and Sostrata (Haut. 1003ff.), acts as a parody that nevertheless follows the rules of dialectical engagement. Similarly, in his Phormio, the father, Demipho, asks for legal counsel from three advisors, one of whom replies, “it is allowed,” the other, “it is not allowed,” and the third one, “I do not know”—a parody of Sophistic argumentation as inconclusive or skeptical, even though it claims to be capable of proving any point, or its opposite, if only it would please the speaker (Phorm. 441–59). Argumentum Now, I want to refer to two passages in Terence, which might further support my thesis that comic plot is overall structured as a dialectical argument and that the motion of plot reproduces the development of argument. (a) In the Hecyra, the young man Pamphilus does not want to tell his father the whole story of his love for Philumena, who by now has happily become his wife. Says Pamphilus: “There’s no need to [tell him], not even a whisper. I don’t want what happens in comedies to happen here, where everybody finds out everything. In this case those who need to know (resciscere) know already (sciunt); those who don’t must not find out or ever know” (Hec. 866–8).13 Apart from its face value, this rejoinder can be considered a comic selfreference to the comedy within comedy, which now understands itself as ultimately resolving the initial (love) conflict through the whole of the action, in which an original error and offense (rape) is disclosed, exposed, and rectified in the end. Here, at this particular place, which comes at the very end of comedy, one of its main heroes claims that comedy is a device that allows people—both characters and spectators/readers—to know. This knowledge is the knowledge of others in and through comedy, but it is also the knowledge of oneself, that is, it is reflective, or self-knowledge obtained through knowledge of others in action with others. Put otherwise, those who need to know are those who want to know, to find out or get to know (resciscere) how things will turn out to be: these people already know (sciunt) how things are. Such people are already implicitly familiar with the

 Terence, The Mother-in-Law, 239.

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“what” of things from the very beginning, through acts of human goodness, even if such acts are initially muddled by a mistake of wrongdoing. In this sense, the development of comic plot in its entirety provides an almost Platonic or Socratic ἀνάμνησις, or recollection, of how things are and should be: everyone should be well off, and things should be understandable and simple in the end—of the comedy of life and of everyone’s purpose. This is the justice and goodness of comedy and argument that unknot apparently irrevocably entangled love and life affairs. But the ultimate goodness of comedy and argument consists in their capacity for a complete apocatastasis that makes even the grouchy and ignorant happy, who thus achieve their end in life without even knowing or having ever known it by the sheer grace of comedy. (b) At the end of the Prologue in the Brothers, Terence notes: “Do not expect [in this Prologue] an outline of the plot (argumentum fabulae). The old men who come on first [sc. the two main characters of the comedy] will in part explain it (aperient) and in part reveal it in the course of the action (in agendo)” (Ad. 22–24).14 The argumentum fabulae here is taken to mean the “outline of the plot.” In Latin, argumentum has many different meanings, which include story, subject-matter, content; theatrical piece; picture, image; argument, proof; sign; truth, truthfulness; and conclusion. The term itself comes from the verb arguo, “to show, make clear,” but also “to accuse, blame.” And fabula may mean “rumors; conversation; story, plot; dramatic piece.” Thus, argumentum fabulae is probably best translated the way it is rendered above, but, in fact, it may also suggest what I would call a “true conclusion of conversation or of the (whole) story of a drama.” Moreover, the mesh of meanings of argumentum and fabula intersect at the theatrical piece or drama, where the two are almost synonymous, even if the former shows or presents (as the form) the latter (as the content). The “dramatic argument,” then, does not retell the plot of a comedy in advance, as a later interpreter and epigone of Terence, Sulpicius Apollinaris, does in his Synopsis. The “argument” makes its “fable” explicit as a comedy progresses: partly in the speech of its characters (in their explanations and dialogues), and partly through action and plot. The argument thus shows or demonstrates comedy in two mutually complementary ways: by dialogical word that makes the plot evident and opens it up (aperire), and by interactive action that both moves and follows the plot (agere).

 Terence, The Brothers, 257; trans. mod.

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Doubles in Comedy To be sure, the understanding of dialectic varies widely in the history of philosophy, and here I refer primarily to dialectic in its original form in Plato’s early Socratic dialogues. Socrates’s dialectical argument is an argument that uses implicit logical rules of deduction in an attempt to come to a conclusion about what and how something is, or, more often, it negates an erroneous claim about what a thing is. Dialectical argument can consider any subject matter (love, happiness, friendship, justice, etc.) and always involves discursive reasoning—it exists within a movement of thought, which proceeds step by step, from shared premises to a deductively justified conclusion. The movement of dialectical argument can always be presented (as it is by Plato and the Sophists) as a sequence of questions and answers: each step in reasoning may be framed as a question that requires an answer, which allows one to proceed to the next step, and, finally, to the conclusion. This process can be easily dramatized, and Plato does exactly this in his dialogues, where questions and answers are assigned to various interlocutors. Obviously, to stage a dispute, one needs at least two interlocutors: the one who asks, and the one who replies. Such an exchange, then, is dialectical, dramatic, and dialogical. Only in later, subject-oriented drama does it become a soliloquy, which, however, is still inherently monological, because it presupposes either oneself as an addressee (in which case one treats oneself as the other) or a κωφὸν πρόσωπον of another character or spectator/reader. Dialectical argument is propelled by the “struggle” of opposites, which cannot coincide but are to be reconciled in the end in the conclusion. Similarly, comic plot is always agonistic and is advanced through disagreement between the characters, and yet it finally achieves an agreement. According to Plato (Leg. 861d–e), one cannot produce (ποιεῖν) both the serious and the ridiculous at the same time, so that one can know and learn the serious from its opposite—from the ridiculous shown in a comedy or farce. Plato himself, however, speaks about the ridiculous in a rather serious way, which may appear a pragmatic contradiction. Comedy is moved by the conflicting interests of opposed, and hence often paired, characters (e.g., the brothers Micio and Demea in Terence’s Adelphoe), who embody dialectical opposites and supply them with a soundtrack. In the case of tragedy, the dramatic conflict is resolved negatively by the death of the characters, which brings no conciliation, perhaps only a “purification of (or from) the passions” (see Aristotle, Poet. 1449b27–30). On the contrary, in the case of comedy, the conflict has a positive (happy) resolution, which, as I have argued, is a rational construction that is structured as and after a dialectical argument, which moves through the interaction of

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opposites. It is thus comedy that is capable of a reconciliation of opposites, which it does long before Hegel, even if dramatically and not speculatively. Therefore, comic plot needs double characters that disagree and struggle in verbal duels and battles of the sexes, generations, and classes. Duos play a considerable role in later comedy. In Terence, there are usually four or five main characters or speakers, but in many key scenes, we find only two interlocutors speaking. In a sense, the double may be considered as a “minimum” of dialectical and dialogical multiplicity, which in Old Comedy is presented by the collective body and personality of the chorus. Perhaps for this reason, doubles are rare in Aristophanes and usually appear as secondary characters, for example, as two women in the Thesmophoriazusae (383ff.), where their paired appearance is justified by their interaction with the chorus and their polyphonic complementing of each other in parodistic philippics against Euripides. Within the dramatic duality of plot (action) and characters (people), the structure of doubling appears both through paired characters and double events. This is already evident in Menander: in the Samia, there are no double characters, but the Dyskolos ends with two marriages; and in the Epitrepontes, there are three slaves, yet two of them appear as a duo of constantly disputing, rhetorically sophisticated, and mutually interrupting characters (Epitr. 218 ff.). Double characters are common in Plautus (e.g., the two old men, Nicobulus and Philoxenus, the two young men, Mnesilochus and Pistoclerus, and two courtesans bearing the same name, Bacchis, in the Bacchides), and they are pervasive in all of Terence’s plays: two old men, two old women (their wives), two young men (their sons), two (silent) young girls, and two slaves. Doubling a character is a source of intrigue, especially when one appears as her or his physical other, as a (false or imaginary) twin. Thus, in Plautus’s Miles gloriosus, one of the characters, the girl Philocomasium, presents herself as her own twin sister and thus becomes a double lover in order to deliberately create confusion that will, in turn, resolve the dramatic conflict (see IC 51, 150–3). The intrigue with pseudo-adultery and the resulting birth of twins is propelled in the Amphitryon by Jupiter, who assumes the appearance of Amphitryon, in which form he appears before Amphitryon’s wife Alcmene, accompanied by Mercury who is disguised as Amphitryon’s slave Sosia. Sometimes we encounter a doubling of the double, as in the quaternary scene in Terence’s Andria (Andr. 412ff.), where the dialogue by Simo and Pamphilus is eavesdropped upon by two other characters, which creates a whirlwind of action and a complex dynamic interaction between the two duos, action into which spectators too become inescapably involved. Introducing and employing doubles in comedy allows the author to question the idea of a stable and monolithic identity of both dramatic characters and

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real persons. By becoming—or pretending to be––one’s own physical other, one allows for a non-identical identity, which becomes shaken and fluid, misunderstood and misinterpreted. The confused—personal, sexual, or social—identity becomes the source of error and incongruence that allows the intrigue to develop. Besides, the non-identity of a character or person with oneself is a source of comic effect (IC 43, 56): we, the spectators or readers, see it and know it, but the comic characters do not until the very end. In the end, we too begin doubting that our personal identity is unshaken, because one can always be and become otherwise than one is, by assuming a different role in the comedy of life. In Terence’s Phormio, Geta says about two disputing characters: quam uterqu(e) est similis sui!, “How each one is similar to himself” (Phorm. 501)! That is to say, each disputer resembles himself and reproduces himself as a character, and yet does not fully coincide with himself, forced to recognize it by the development of comic action. Thus, in comedy everyone (every one) always seriously attempts to be and remain identical with her- or himself, with an image that people have of her or him. And yet, ironically, everybody (every body) at the same time becomes non-identical with themselves, which makes every comic character a “twoself.” The Dialectician If comic plot resembles dialectical argument, then both have to share not only the same structure but also the same characters. Dialectical argument is a rational construction realized through a motion of discursive thought from premises to a conclusion, the process of which is dramatized in Plato’s early dialogues. The argument is propelled by questions and answers and hence has to be carried on and out by at least two interlocutors: the one who asks and the one who replies. The interlocutors, however, are not symmetrical: the dialectician is the questioner who takes the risk of defining the direction of the argument’s development, for nothing guarantees in advance that the searched conclusion will or could be reached. The answerer, on the other hand, is initially responsible for the debated thesis or claim. As I have argued, dialectical debate moves between opposites implied in a question that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” Such an argument is advanced by the speakers step by step, through questions and answers, to either a conclusion (in positive dialectic) or disproval of the initial thesis (in elenchic or negative dialectic). In either case, the dialectician does not have to be committed to any claim whatsoever. Rather, his task is to test the initial thesis of the opponent and to find out if this thesis stands, that is, if it is correct. In the former case, the dialectician has to produce skillfully an argument

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that would allow the interlocutors to move from a mutually shared and agreed starting point to the sought conclusion. From the very inception of this technique of reasoning in the Sophistic Enlightenment, Socrates is the embodiment of the figure of the dialectician. A dialectician is one who knows which question to ask at this particular junction of the dispute; she is capable of formulating the question that is carefully constructed in such a way as to yield an answer that would advance reasoning toward the desired end. But a dialectician does not know why she knows which question is the right one, or what the correct logical move at this point should be. Because of this, Greek dialectical questioning has to be recognized not as a strict discipline or science but as an art (τέχνη) that is structurally similar to the art of comic dramatic dialogue. The characters of dialectical or comic dialogues do not know why they are asking the questions that will turn out to be appropriate from the perspective of the end. Only the author of the play (Plato, Menander, or Terence) might know this, but they do not tell us, so we have to guess, restoring the “logic” of the development of a dialectical or dramatic plot. Being an art, ancient dialectic differs from modern dialectic, which, although inspired by its ancient model, wants to understand itself as a science and universal method of correct reasoning. The dialectician—Socrates—is, then, a logical artisan and skillful mastermind behind the construction or destruction of a complex dialectical argument and (comic) dialogical plot. The Slave as a Central Character of Comedy and the Justice of Comedy A clever slave (servus or ancilla, servant or maid) is a central figure in comedy, omnipresent in New Comedy, in Menander (e.g., Parmeno in the Samia), Plautus (Chrysalus in the Bacchides), and Terence (Davos in the Andria, Pythias in the Eunuch). She is also the most important character, the one who rescues everyone in an apparently unsolvable situation, leading all others out of an impasse or a dead end. Thus, cunning Palaestrio in Plautus’s Miles gloriosus and ingenious Syrus in Terence’s Hauton timorumenos are the conductors of an undisciplined orchestra of comic characters, as well as the directors of the intrigue, who stage and plan a whole new drama within the current drama, a comedy within a comedy, in order to trick the unwise and steer the action toward the right end. Traditional society requires loyalty and discretion (fides et taciturnitas [Andr. 34]]) in a slave. In comedy, however, along with other characters, a slave receives a justification. Not only is she recognized as equal to others, she becomes an embodiment of practical reason and wisdom through which she can solve apparently unsolvable problems, and which she does by reasoning

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and shrewd action. In comedy, a slave is no longer discrete and silent but has a right and an obligation to speak, thereby becoming the mastermind behind the development of the comic plot. As Plato argues in the Laws, comedy depicts base and ridiculous things, and therefore should be left to slaves and foreigners (Leg. 816e). A slave is a foreigner (as the very name suggests, e.g., Syrus), and a foreigner is a comic figure because he speaks, acts, and looks differently, in stark distinction to the homogeneous morals of a community of the like-minded and like-looking. However, a foreigner or slave is never a bore, exactly because she can see— and tell—things differently. In this sense, the philosopher is a comic figure and a foreigner to her own country, as both Hans Blumenberg and Ágnes Heller note, because she despises the common sense that she lacks (IC 65), and is (or should be) ready and capable of thinking beyond the accepted social and political divides and cultural clichés. And, in fact, the classless intelligentsia always consists of a set of comic characters. Already in the New Comedy, and especially in the Roman cosmopolitan and multicultural world, there is an understanding of the contingency of class distinctions. As Moschio in Menander’s Samia says, people do not differ by birth, and it would be only just if honest people were free and the morally base were recognized as slaves (Sam. 140–3). In comedy, it is the slave who is wise, and the master is either greedy and stupid (the old man) or selfindulgent and inexperienced (the young man). It is the slave who helps her master out of a difficult situation and cheers him up by entertaining him with (often rude and obscene) jokes (Pseud. 23–24; see IC 62). In the opposition of bright slave/dull master, the former “enlightens” the latter and makes him come to the realization of his end in the obligatory happy ending. Only a wise person can accept and bear their fate, and at the same time try to improve their situation to the extent that they can understand and change it. In this sense, the slave is a Stoic. As Geta puts it in Phormio: quod fors feret feremus aequo animo, “whatever fortune brings I will bear it with equanimity” (Phorm. 138).15 Most importantly, Stoics are the first philosophers to stress that all humans are profoundly equal. Because of this, Stoic ethics is particularly modern. The modernity of comedy can be seen in its ethical position, which can be characterized as Stoic. In comedy, each character is free to do whatever he or she thinks is best. Yet, each action is always inscribed in a concrete situation that develops within and with comedy, the situation that one has to both accept and try to change for the best—and sometimes, even one’s mores or moral behavior must be transformed (see Terence, Ad. 984). Human moral knowledge and wisdom consists, then, in knowledge of what  Terence, Phormio, in Terence, vol. 2, trans. and ed. John Barsby (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 25.

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is up to me and what is not. It is on the basis of such knowledge that a wise and moral comic character—usually a slave—has to decide how to bring the situation to a desirable conclusion and satisfactory closure. Hence, only a slave in comedy can transgress social differences and show that they are always only a matter of convention and have nothing to do with the human condition. As was said, this is both rational and comic, insofar as it always allows for a good ending as achieved through action and deliberation. No wonder, then, that Socrates, the first Stoic before Stoicism, becomes the paradigm for the Stoic wise person, and in later Stoicism, it is Epictetus, himself a former slave, who is the model for an emperor, Marcus Aurelius. The slave is thus the master of comedy, which encapsulates the comedy of life, because she is the master dialectician, a mastermind and architect of its plot. And the master is the slave of comedy because he has to follow the dialectical unwrapping of action or argument, which often drags him along. Ancient comedy and dialectic thus always restore dialectical and social justice—again, long before Hegel. Socrates and the Figure of the Slave The slave plays the same role in comedy as Socrates does in dramatized dialogues. The former directs the plot, the latter steers the dialectical argument. Both the slave and Socrates appear, and deliberately make themselves appear, as somewhat simplistic “divine fools.” Both come under an ironic guise behind which we quickly discover a powerful and sophisticated mind. Hence, both are dialecticians: the slave is a practical thinker, the one who leads us through the labyrinth of plot, as Socrates guides us through the maze of argument, even if often to a negative outcome. Both selflessly promote the happiness of others (see IC 61): the slave by directing them toward a resolution of the conflict; and Socrates by steering others to the freedom of and in thought. Both free themselves by helping others: the slave is often rewarded for her deeds with the highest gift, that of freedom, and Socrates remains free in the knowledge of his apparent not-knowing; for in being unlimited by any fixed knowledge, he keeps striving toward finding out how and what things really are. Even socially, Socrates constantly reaches across the classes of his society. As we know from Plato and Xenophon, he prefers to talk to ordinary people without paying attention to their social position or age. Both fellow citizens and slaves become his cherished interlocutors, as the famous example with a slave boy demonstrates, where the dialectical discussion appears rather comic insofar as Socrates guides his interlocutor from a total impasse toward a “happy ending” of resolving a rather complex geometrical problem (Plato, Meno 82b). One may even say that Socrates’s dialectic is realized in and as a

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comedy of errors—for instance, in Plato’s Euthydemus, when two Sophists, brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, produce seemingly valid yet in fact deeply confusing arguments, all based on some error, usually that of equivocation. During his lifetime, in his relentless critique and subtle mockery of the Sophists, Socrates often ridicules a “serious” (often flawed) argument by reproducing it, usually reducing it to a farce. Even on his deathbed, Socrates remains a comic figure who refuses to take his situation as tragic; his death is clearly a comic event for him, since, as we learn from the Phaedo (70c), he argues for the best as the ultimate end of his life’s comedy. No wonder, then, that Socrates becomes a comic character already in Old Comedy. In Aristophanes’s Clouds, he is present on stage in person, as a parody of a thinker and as a Sophist. One may say that in later comedy, Socrates turns into a smart slave, or at least a witty servant who bears clear resemblance to Socrates. Thus, in Plautus’s Pseudolus, the master Simo explicitly compares the crafty slave Pseudolus, famous for his disputational skills, to Socrates (Pseud. 464–5). The subsequent discussion between the master and slave parodies a dialectical dispute, in the beginning of which Pseudolus even compares himself to the Delphic oracle that only tells the truth (Pseud. 480). This “self-description,” however, is itself ironic, because the oracle neither reasons nor speculates in order to get to the truth: the oracle already knows it. Simo thinks that he outsmarts Pseudolus in the debate, but in fact the master is tricked and fooled skillfully by the slave without even having noticed it. Later, in a monologue directed explicitly to himself and implicitly to the spectators, Pseudolus appears as a non-dialectical, tragicomic raisonneur, speaking about the illusion of striving toward a desired end in life, and about suffering and death. But at a certain point, he abruptly interrupts himself, saying, “Enough of philosophy” (Pseud. 687), because rather than being engaged in idle talk, one has to return to action. A noteworthy difference between Socrates and the comic figure of the slave consists in the fact that Socratic dialectic is usually (but not always) theoretically negative, that is, it usually destroys an erroneous statement or argument, whereas comic dialectic is always practically positive, because a good comedy must come to a happy resolution of the dramatic conflict. Truth-Telling and Acting Most importantly, the smart slave as a dialectician is the one who tells the truth. She is both capable of doing it (she either dares or is forced to do it) and has a comic responsibility for telling the truth. Pretense and contrivance, slyness and craftiness (calliditas) (Terence, Haut. 887; see also 469) are used for the sake of obtaining the truth, but not so much for pronouncing

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a theoretical truth as for making or implementing the practical truth of the happy ending, of bringing about a compromise that will satisfy everyone. The mastermind of comedy thus often tells the truth by acting through a kind of “practical syllogism,” by making things right, restoring the situation to what it should be, returning others’ actions to their proper order. To be able to achieve this, the clever slave often has to resort to lying or withdrawing truth. Pseudolus’s very “speaking name” testifies to bringing about truth by telling a lie: ψεῦδος means “falsehood, lie,” and δόλος, “cunning, treachery.” Furthermore, Syrus persuades his young master to tell the truth (qui nolo mentiare, “I don’t want you to tell a lie”) (Haut. 701),16 only to be able to carry out his own shrewd plan, with the hope that the “true” truth will not be believed by others, and hence will not be accepted. In a similar vein, Parmeno’s ironic response to the question as to whether he can keep a secret is: “The truths I hear I keep secret; I contain them very well. But if anything’s false or fanciful or fictional (falsum aut vanum aut fictum), it’s out at once: I’m full of cracks, I leak all over. So, if you want your secrets kept, tell the truth (proin tu, taceri si vis, vera dicito)” (Eun. 103–106).17 Parmeno, therefore, will keep the truth secret, but act in such a way as to make it prevail in the end. To be sure, “irony” originally means “pretense” in Greek. Hence, strictly speaking, an ironic actor is a hypocrite. More often than not, especially in the early Platonic dialogues, Socrates ironically withdraws a theoretical truth from a dialectical argument, thereby creating a theoretical mess and confusion. But Socrates still acts toward the truth of a discussed subject in dialogical action and communication with other actors. He shows such truth pragmatically, through its opposite, in what it is not and how it cannot and should not be obtained. The comic truth thus appears by not being told and often by being concealed until the very end. Such a withdrawal of truth is not at all a “noble lie”; it is rather a device that allows for the suspension of present havoc and for the motion—the action—through the “negative dialectic” of the plot, toward a happy resolution of the conflict. As in a syllogism that allows a true conclusion to come from false premises (or from merely probable premises, as in a dialectical syllogism), withdrawing the truth or even telling an outright lie allows truth to prevail in the end of comedy.

 Terence, The Self-Tormenter, in Terence, vol. 1, trans. and ed. John Barsby (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 257. 17  Terence, The Eunuch, in Terence, vol. 1, trans. and ed. John Barsby (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 325. 16

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Learning toward Well-being Dialogical dialectical and comic plot not only share similar methods and strive toward a common end, but they also address and attempt to resolve similar problems. In the Adelphoe, Demea says: “Learn how to be a father from those who really know” (pater esse disce ab illis, qui vere sciunt) (Ad. 125).18 In the context of Terence’s comedy, this statement sounds rather ironic because Demea, the “conservative” father, is exactly the one who does not know how to be a good father. The really caring father is exemplified by his “liberal” brother Micio, who is also the adoptive father of Demea’s natural son and who answers Demea’s criticism with: “You’re his father by birth, I by counsel” (natura tu illi pater es, consiliis ego) (Ad. 126).19 The action of comic plot not only rectifies a situation that appears to be hopelessly screwed up—it also teaches characters an important lesson about how to be worthy of their not-always-deserved happiness and how to learn to achieve it. In a sense, both comic action and dialectical reasoning constantly move in terms of the above quotation: “to be” (esse); “to learn/study” (discere); “to know” (scire). In comedy, knowledge comes with learning how to connect with one’s (well-)being by means of reasoning and practical action, which is both comic and dialectical. The triple distinction between being/learning/knowledge is always present in comedy, where learning mediates between being and comedy. It takes a smart slave, a comic master dialectician, to make everyone realize such knowledge, although, again, not theoretically but practically, in and through action. One may also say that learning as a way from (implicit) knowing to (well-)being is precisely the “pedagogical” agenda of Socrates in his constant debate and conversation with young people. (Thus, as Seth Benardete has noticed, the arrangement of heroes in Aristophanes’s Clouds matches that of Plato’s Theages. Both works represent the same trio of main characters whose interaction in the Theages is reproduced and parodied in the Clouds: father/son/educator: Strepsiades/ Phidippides/Socrates in the Clouds; and Demodocus/Theages/Socrates in the Theages.) The program of esse/discere/scire thus is realized both in and as a comic drama and dialogical dialectic. Finally, the distinction between being (esse) and knowing (scire) matches precisely the opposition between nature (which acts according to the way it is, and can never be otherwise) and counsel (which includes a moment of justification and deliberation, which in principle can always be otherwise). One can say, therefore, that what we can learn from the immortal comedy is exactly how to learn to act in a justified and deliberate way toward our own  Terence, The Brothers, 265.  Ibid.

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well-being, which cannot be otherwise, but which should never exclude the well-being of others. Such is the comedy of philosophy, which stages and portrays the human condition in a plot that has the structure of a dialectical argument. The comedy of philosophy unfurls itself through those of us who attempt to understand our own condition in the world in communication with our fellows, but almost always fail to do it, and who thus can be placed appropriately as characters in a Socratic dialogue. However, the irony of philosophy is that often it cannot remain comic: when it cannot find a satisfactory solution to a problem, philosophical comedy tends to turn tragic or at least melodramatic. In such a case, philosophy likes to stress an alleged absurdity of life, which apparently has no meaningful—comic—end or resolution. In the end, the inability to grasp and reflect on the comedy of life might be the real tragedy of philosophy. And yet, as we keep on living, we cannot stop thinking, again and again, about the same things differently, with the same interlocutors, although each time anew. We are thus always inescapably involved in a universal comedy. Because of this, there is always the hope that philosophy too will remain possible, as a comedy that allows us to think, and to try to bring about goodness as a common human purpose and end.

Chapter 9

The Gifts and Dangers of Free Speech

There are very few ancient thinkers that are still commonly known and referred to outside of philosophy. Among the most colorful, no doubt, are Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic. This recalls Jan Assmann’s apt distinction between the figures of history and the figures of memory. Figures of history are those who are preserved through the verifiably reliable sources of texts and monuments. Figures of memory are those whose acts and existence are not corroborated by dependable texts or evidence from other sources.1 Following this distinction, one could say that Socrates is primarily the figure of history (in Xenophon’s Memorabilia [Mem. 4.8.11; 1.1.16.] and Aristotle [NE 1116b4], and, in fictional disguise, in Plato’s dialogues) and only then of memory. Diogenes, on the other hand, is more or less obliterated from history (the only contemporary mention of Diogenes is by Aristotle [Rhet. 1411a24]) but flourishes in collective memory generations and centuries later.2 There is something particularly appealing and attractive in Diogenes. His contour still  Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2; see also 1–54. 2  The fragments of Diogenes are collected in: Gabiele Giannantoni, ed., Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae, vol. 2 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1990), 227–509; henceforth G, followed by the fragment number. See also, Robin Hard, trans. and ed., Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes, with other Popular Moralists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Georg Luck, ed., Die Weisheit der Hunde: Texte der antiken Kyniker in deutscher Übersetzung mit Erläuterungen (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1997); I. M. Nakhov, ed., Anthology of Cynicism [Антология кинизма] (Moscow: Nauka, 1984). Most of the sources for Diogenes the Cynic were compiled much later. Diogenes Laertius, who has preserved the most extensive collection of testimonies on his namesake, lived some 500 years later (see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, trans. and ed. R.D. Hicks [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000]). Cf. The Cynic Epistles, which were written by different Cynic authors sometime between the second century BCE and the second century CE (see G, 423–64; Abraham J. Malherbe, The Cynic Epistles: A Study Edition [Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977], 6–19; Eike Müseler ed., Die Kynikerbriefe, 2 vols. [Paderborn: Schöningh, 1994]). William Desmond, however, argues for a robust consistency of the Cynic tradition, from Diogenes 1

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emerges through the sedimentary layers of the later tradition, which not only transmitted his original words and deeds but also reinterpreted, distorted, and mixed them up with other doctrinal, anecdotal, and apocryphal components borrowed from different traditions, most notably, Stoic.3 Besides, even if lacking in wealth and being somewhat idiosyncratic, Socrates is still a well-respected bourgeois, enjoying the protection of the law and the privacy of his own house. Diogenes, on the contrary, is an illegal immigrant from Paphlagonia, homeless, and with a criminal record of counterfeiting money back in Sinope (παραχαράξαντος τὸ νόμισμα) (DL 6.20).4 Because Diogenes is exiled (DL 6.20; Dio 6.1, 7.1), he does not belong either to his home political body or to the new one. He literally is the one who does not fit or does not belong to a traditional πολιτεία. This is why when asked where he came from, Diogenes replied: “I am a cosmopolitan” (κοσμοπολίτης) (DL 6.63). With this claim, he does not place himself outside of the political, nor does he deny its meaningfulness. Rather, he originates a radically new politics. Diogenes’s new politics is not the traditional politics of exclusion within the polis that separates one political community from another and pitches the polis against nature. It is the politics of the voluntary “uprooting” of oneself from a particular polis and place,5 of detachment from the inherited and the familiar, which should result in the radical inclusion of everyone into the world, κόσμος. From the view of this uprooting, the world becomes the place for every living being, for humans and animals alike, and embraces both the polis and physis. Diogenes is thus an outsider who accepts his position and builds his life and teaching around it. His teacher, Antisthenes, a pupil of Socrates and the originator of Cynicism, is an Athenian and thus still has a place of his own and a roof over his head (DL 6.1).6 Diogenes, however, is homeless, a situation that induces him not only to find his home in a tub but also to constantly

to Sallustius (William Desmond, Cynics [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008], 6–8). All translations in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise noted. 3  This admixture is significant in Dio Chrysostom. Dio has not only Cynic but also Stoic inspiration and influences; hence, his Diogenes is painted in a mixed media (see Gabriele Giannantoni, ed., Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae, vol. 4 [Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991], 553–9). 4  Diocles suggested that it was Diogenes’s father who counterfeited money (DL 6.20). This was judged by the number of test cuts on the drachms (five out of twenty-seven of those minted during Diogenes’s lifetime, and practically all the drachms of the fifth century BCE issue), which were meant to verify the authenticity of a coin; defacing currency was a widespread activity in Sinope (see Richard Ashton and Stanley Ireland, eds., Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum, vol. 5, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Part IX: Bosporus-Aeolis [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 227–93). 5  Léonce Paquet, ed., Les Cyniques grecs: Fragments et témoignages (Ottawa: Les presses de l'Université d'Ottawa, 1988), 10. 6  But even then, Antisthenes remains somewhat an outsider in Athens, being discriminated against on the basis that his mother was a Thracian.

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wander within the city and migrate between Athens and Corinth, living in the open and spending nights at temples (DL 6.23; Ep. 16; Dio,. 6.2–3), and thus always remaining in public space. In antiquity, the public/private distinction has a different meaning from that of modernity: their mutual border is established by the house wall, which serves as an analogue to the city wall that separates the polis from the “non-political” of nature. The private, then, is the inside, that which lies within the house (οἶκος)—and the outside is public. The political, in turn, is that which lies within the city—and the outside is natural. Since Diogenes does not have a house, he does not have a private life. Every place, then, is his home. On account of this, the rigid opposition of public and private, which underlies the political, does not hold anymore. His house is the whole world,7 which is why he is a cosmopolitan (DL 6.63). Public and private thus become indistinguishable for him in the realm of the political. It is the imperial expansion of Alexander, and later of Rome, that leaves no room for φύσις, which is then suspended and substituted by the wall-less and unbounded, and thus undefined and lawless, polis. FOR AND AGAINST NATURE Diogenes’s revolt against the corruption of public life begins with a radical turn against the existing polis, exclusive of others in the access to and the distribution of goods, which thus need to be taken out of willful human jurisdiction and put back to where they originate: in nature. As the tradition has it, the “epiphany” occurred when Diogenes saw a mouse (DL 6.22). Seeing the mouse made him realize that moral and political corruption comes from the overzealous cultivation of our unnecessary needs within the polis, which leads to illness, unhappiness, and misery. As a result, humans are worse off not only than gods but also animals (Dio 6.22). In this sense, Socrates, who, as a Silenus, is half-god and half-animal (Plato, Symp. 221d–e), exemplifies the proper combination of the “naturally” good that should become the ethical guide for humans. Diogenes’s appeal of going “back to nature” does not mean, however, the study of a universal λόγος that would underlie both cosmic and human nature (which will be the Stoic preoccupation) but rather the practical discovery of nature aimed at its practical use in life. For this reason, Diogenes develops an “antitheoretical” position (see DL 6.27–28, 39), in which he follows Socrates, who in his youth became interested in the study of nature yet later turned solely to ethics (Plato, Phd. 96a–99d). The Cynic attitude to nature is not to study it theoretically, but

 [Lucian], Cynicus §15.

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to follow it practically (see [Diogenes], Ep. 42). One could say that while Plato eventually turns away from Socrates toward mathematics and while Aristotle simply rejects him, Diogenes reinstates Socrates as a philosopher who makes his claims and proves them not so much by words (through which he usually dialectically rejects others’ theses) but by actions (see Xenophon, Mem. 4.4). And Diogenes does so in a much more radical way, which makes him known as “Socrates gone mad” (Σωκράτης μαινόμενος) (DL 6.54). In terms of the Academic triad of the disciplines (Xenocrates, frag. 1 Heinze) of ethics, physics, and logic, Diogenes’s logic of the suspension of everything superfluous leads to an ethics that recognizes the sufficiency of our physical makeup for a good life. In the list of Diogenes’s works, we do not find any single title that would suggest any interest in science or logic; Diogenes and later Bion speak explicitly against mathematics as useless (DL 6.28, 39, 73, 103; DL 4.53; Stobaeus 2.1.20).8 Diogenes’s stance against science and theoretical reason is thus a practical critique of reason, rather than a critique of practical reason, which is still a theoretical enterprise. But it is also a critique of art as the production of unnecessary and unnatural devices that create artificial needs and artfully corrupt morals. In a sense, since animals do not use artificial devices, they are better off than humans (Dio 10.16). Those who live against nature, παρὰ φύσιν—and this is the predicament of civilization and its political expressions—will be inevitably punished by nature, as was Icarus (Dio 4.120). Therefore, the way to well-being is to use that which nature has already equipped us with: a hand, rather than a cup (DL 6.37). The only art Diogenes recognizes is the art of ethics (τέχνη ἠθική, the title of one of his lost works) (DL 6.80), which allows us to live well in accordance with virtue that can be taught, learned, and then cannot be forfeited (DL 6.105).9 For Diogenes, the city as the seat of the political power is based on law, which is a mere convention, κατὰ νόμον, and as such is contrary to that which exists by nature, κατὰ φύσιν (DL 6.71–72).10 Since the city stands against, suspends, and rejects nature through unnecessary artificial devices and habits detrimental to our life, the way to live well is to return to nature by turning  Jan Frederik Kindstrand, ed., Bion of Borysthenes: A Collection of the Fragments with Introduction and Commentary (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1976), frag. F5–F10.  9  Life according to virtue is considered a common principle of both the Cynics and the Stoics (DL 6.104). 10  The opposition between convention and nature (ἀντιτιθέναι . . . νόμῳ δὲ φύσιν [DL 6.38]) is apparently inherited by Diogenes from the Sophists, and yet receives a very different interpretation. Unlike the Sophists, Diogenes stresses the sufficiency of the means provided to us by nature, which are sufficient not to live at the expense of other people (see Anthony A. Long, “The Socratic Tradition: Diogenes, Crates, and Hellenistic Ethics,” in The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, ed. R. Bracht Branman and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé [Berkley: University of California Press, 1996], 28–46, 34–35).  8

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against convention and thus suspending the suspension of nature. The only true polity is then the world, or κόσμος.11 But to be the world’s citizen, a cosmopolitan, is a difficult task, first of all, because it implies a profound paradox. Cosmopolis is an oxymoron, since city-πόλις is complimentary to the world-κόσμος, and the two are differently structured and governed: the former is a human creation based on the νόμος of custom, whereas the latter exists of and by itself and is governed by the universal λόγος. Therefore, to claim that one is a cosmopolitan is to recognize one’s simultaneous existence both in the world of the political and in the world of the natural, two domains that are not simply collapsed but are no longer separated. Citizens of the world cohabit both the world of the political and the world of the natural. Most importantly, Diogenes’s attitude to nature is marked by a peculiar contradiction, which he does not notice, or perhaps prefers not to. Despite his constant praise of everything natural in us, Diogenes does not really suggest returning to nature, living in the wild, in woods and caves, nor even does he advocate going back to country pastoral life. Living off his incessant critique of superfluities and luxuries of the polis while at the same time remaining in the polis, Diogenes never leaves the city. He keeps scavenging at the polis’ margins looking for food, abiding at the political outskirts and cleansing the polis through his critique. Being free to wander, he never leaves the city: when leaving one city (Athens), he never ends in the mountains or on a sea/ beach but always in another city (Corinth). His repeated migration from one city to another appears a failed attempt to ultimately liberate himself from the political in favor of the natural and to fuse the natural and the political. For, he neither uses the products of nature nor produces his own subsistence within the polis. Therefore, returning back to nature is returning to the good life originally meant and provided for us by nature while staying within the polis. To achieve the good life, the Cynic has to wage a struggle (πόνος) against the false fears of shame and public disapproval, the power of authority, death, and gods, as well as against the false glory of flattery, against wealth, proper appearance, and attire. He does so through the strenuous exercise of the mind and body, by practicing indifference (ἀδιαφορία), and limiting one’s needs only to the basic, “natural” ones.12 And yet, not being dependent on the unnecessary, the Cynic nevertheless is not autonomous, because he is the citizen of the anticipated cosmopolis. In reality, however, the Cynic lives off the city’s moral and physical decay. In this respect, Diogenes’s politics is “economic” (since the whole city turns into his house-οἶκος, where all things private become public) and his nature is domesticated. It is an artfully and  μόνην τε ὀρθὴν πολιτείαν εἶναι τὴν ἐν κόσμῳ (DL 6.72).  See Paquet, Les Cyniques grecs, 8–9.

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unnaturally cultivated nature. This is why Diogenes is a dog, and not a wolf.13 Since he has neither a house nor a master, he is a stray dog. Yet, among the dogs, he is a celestial one (DL 6.77): Sirius, the brightest star in the night of human delusion. AGAINST CONVENTION: NEGATIVE FREEDOM AS LIBERATION Diogenes thus wants to live and act according to nature, which is the life and action against the established, against law as arbitrary and repressive convention and custom of the city. Convention is not in the order of things but is something of the city—bourgeois, fancy, and improperly refined (ἀστεῖον) (DL 6.71). For this reason, law is unnecessary and superfluous. If the city relies on convention only and not on a natural or even naturalistic foundation for its operation, it is inevitably morally and politically corrupt. Therefore, Diogenes cannot but constantly suspend and interrupt the conventional by calling it into question in and by thought and action. He cannot but continually challenge and intentionally irritate—provoke—others. Rather than relying on systematic argumentation and school discussion, as was the case in Plato, the Diogenes of the tradition proceeds by personal example.14 His first move is purely negative or therapeutic: Before making a suggestion for personal (moral) and universal (political) betterment, as a physician, he has to make a diagnosis and convince others (the “patients”) to recognize the misery of their situation (Dio 9.2, 10.1). Because decency for Diogenes is conventional and hypocritical, he cannot but épater la bourgeoisie, provoke the non-cosmopolitan city-dwellers by “shamelessness” (ἀναίδεια), by expressing scorn and treating them haughtily (κατασοβαρεύσασθαι τῶν ἄλλων) (DL 6.24), by indecent gestures (ἐποίει τι τῶν ἀδόξων) (Dio 8.36), by whistling like a bird, by looking for a man with a lantern in the daylight, and by questioning social taboos such as the privacy

 Aristotle simply calls Diogenes “the Dog,” (ὁ Κύων) (Rhet. 1411a24; see also DL 6.26; Dio 4.3, 8.11, 8.17; [Diogenes], Ep. 40; and G, 143–51). For Plato, dogs are perfect guardians of the state (Rep. 375e), gentle with those whom they know and ferocious with strangers. Diogenes, seemingly ferocious with everyone, does not protect the existing state but attacks it all the time, guarding his own ideal polity, about which he wrote his own State (DL 6.80), which text, however, we do not have (see [Diogenes], Ep. 41). Only the dog (Cynic) can succeed in acting in accordance with virtue (Ep. 44). See also Gabriele Giannantoni, ed., “Nota 47: Diogene: l’epiteto ‘cane,’ ” in Socratis et Socraticorum reliquiae, 4:491–7 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991). 14  See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 115–133. Foucault writes, “The Cynics taught by way of examples . . . the Cynic attitude is, in its basic form, just an extremely radical version of the very Greek conception of the relationship between one’s way of life and knowledge of truth” (ibid., 117). 13

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of sex and the prohibition of cannibalism (DL 6.27, 32, 46, 69, 73). Against the ubiquitous city-dwelling political hypocrisy, a radical protest takes the form of provocation. Provocation, however, is—or at least, has to be— always an “as if” action whose intention is to question and problematize the existing moral, social, and political order. One can make a provocation only against the conventional and not against the natural. Only the conventional can be questioned and changed. Those who understand the “as-ifness” of provocative gestures, words, and actions learn from them. Those who don’t are scandalized. Scandal is the public reaction to the violation of moral, legal, social, and political norms and customs. The reaction is only exacerbated once such breaching is perceived as intentional and deliberately provocative. Because scandal suspends and questions the existing norms, it is indispensable in and for politics. In the case of politics, norms are often implicit, and until their boundaries are transgressed in a scandal, they may not be clearly established or explicitly demarcated and understood by people. Apparently, the oracle urged Diogenes to counterfeit political currency (τὸ πολιτικὸν νόμισμα). Even Diogenes himself did not understand the meaning of political currency at first and so took the advice literally (DL 6.20). The oracle, however, meant the “reevaluation of all values,” which does not imply reverting to certain originary, but lost, upright political and moral laws (the laws of the polis). The reevaluation of all values meant the recognition of the fact that the polis should return and live according to φύσις, even if this turn can never be complete or completed. In the effort to recoin political currency, we always remain political beings in search of nature. Diogenes clearly intends to cause scandal by his actions and to outrage the public. His scandalous acts include asking to be buried face down or going to a theater when everyone is leaving, explaining that this is what he was doing all of his life—going against the grain (DL 6.32, 64). Important in scandal is that it is—and has to be—public. But for a Cynic, as said, private is public and public is private, which is why all the private actions are put on public display. This is the meaning of Cynic provocative action that aims to be practical teaching: it is action and discourse that is addressed to the public and is played out in public, during big assemblies and communal celebrations (in the streets, squares, theaters, and stadiums) (see Dio 8.6), involves many people, and suspends what up to this point has been accepted as unquestioned and unquestionable norms of thinking and behavior. Public space, then, turns into the space of spectacle, and thus becomes theater. For this reason, scandal has the structure of a theatrical act, activity or action that inevitably involves spectators who get engaged in the discussion of the act and sometimes become the actors. Cynic scandal is a kind of theater in which everyone wants to be a spectator, but no one

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wants to be an actor: one likes to see how people, thoughts, and institutions are ridiculed by Diogenes, yet no one wants to be ridiculed. In the theater of political life, however, spectators want to become actors, which is the intention of democracy. And yet, in a political scandal, the spectators are mostly not actors. The spectators are left to publicly discuss the meaning of the enacted event. A scandal, then, can trigger a series of important political actions that might lead to a change in moral, legal, and political norms and institutions. For this reason, political life to a great extent lives off scandals and needs them as the means of the rejuvenation of public life. Thus, poverty is a scandal for society, especially for an affluent society that allows its member to suffer by failing to redistribute the goods and make them public. Diogenes, however, accepts, embraces, and stresses his own poverty (G 220–246; [Diogenes], Ep. 32, 33),15 using it as a powerful critical device meant to expose the hypocrisy and moral failure of the powerful and the rich, and thus turns his poverty into a public theatrical scandal. Therefore, (1) scandal occurs always in public since a provocative act performed in private is either offensive (to other people) or is not even noticeable (to oneself). Besides, (2) scandal performatively suspends, rejects, and makes explicit the accepted norms of behavior that are often implicit and usually taken for granted. Moreover, (3) scandal involves other people who must understand what is going on—both the meaning (semantics) of the act and the performance (syntax) of the action. Finally, (4) others—the “spectators”—need to get engaged and communicate with each other, in order to question, understand, and possibly change the implicit and explicit norms. POSITIVE FREEDOM AS THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH But what does Diogenes aim to achieve with his escapades? His ultimate purpose is personal freedom as self-sufficiency or self-reliance. When asked, who is really rich, Diogenes replied, “the self-sufficient” (ὁ αὐτάρκης) (Gnomologium Vaticanum 743n.180 = G 241). Self-reliance, however, differs from contemporary autonomy, which is self-legislation. The Cynic does not provide the law for herself or the city. Rather, she strives to achieve the good life—the life free from the fear of the conventional, free from the dictate of fashion and shame.

 Poverty for Diogenes is a way to philosophy, and what philosophy puts in words and arguments (τοῖς λόγοις), poverty does in deeds (ἐν ἔργοις) (Stobaeus 4.32, 4.11 = G 223). See William Desmond, The Greek Poverty: Origins of Ancient Cynicism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 31–103. Cf. [Plato], Eryxias 401d–e.

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Here it might be appropriate to recall Hannah Arendt’s distinction between liberation and freedom. Liberation is freedom-from, the necessary negative moment of questioning and overthrowing repressive habits and institutions, whereas freedom is the positive moment of establishing (or reestablishing) a proper political order that, according to Arendt, can only be achieved in public.16 One could say, then, that Diogenes’s freedom as self-sufficiency is equally achieved in two steps: first, as freedom from fear—of poverty, illness, and death, from the conventions of the straight jacket of oppressive moral, social, political, and religious habits, through the rejection of everything superfluous, unnecessary, and enthralling—of luxury, property, power, and fame. And only then, at the second step, can one achieve the freedom of self-containment and voluntary poverty (against wealth), of simplicity and health (against excess), of moderation and virtue (against pleasure) (DL 6.31; [Diogenes], Ep. 9, 16, 25, 27; Dio 10.16).17 Whereas negative liberation is primarily expressed in shamelessness (ἀναίδεια), the positive freedom becomes manifest in the freedom of speech (παρρησία). Negative liberation from oppression, violence that aims to end violence, thus should lead to positive freedom of the good life and self-sufficiency (αὐτάρκεια). But does Diogenes’s personal freedom translate into public freedom? In other words, by achieving personal freedom and teaching others to do so through outrageous public acts and personal example, does Diogenes contribute to a change of public morals and political institutions? Or is he indeed acting on pretense and out of vanity and resentment, as Plato has suggested (DL 6.26)? The tradition does not provide a straightforward answer, yet we can make an educated guess: Diogenes’s personal ἄσκησις is always performed in public (being always exposed to public is itself a rigorous exercise), and is thus an integral part of public life. It also serves as an example to the public and thus contributes to the public good. Becoming public, personal betterment therefore contributes to the achievement of freedom through liberation.

 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1965), esp. 29–31, 142. In its radical version, “without destruction, there is no construction (不破不立).” As Richard Bernstein explains, “Liberty is always liberation from something, whether it is liberation from poverty, or from oppressive rulers, tyrants, and dictators. Liberty is a necessary condition for freedom, but not a sufficient condition. Freedom is positive political achievement of individuals acting together” (Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 [Cambridge: Polity, 2005], 74). 17  “Diogenes said that true pleasure lies in having one’s soul in a calm and cheerful state” (Gnomologium Vaticanum 181 = G 300; Hard, ed., Diogenes the Cynic, 30). 16

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Παρρησία Personal freedom is literally translated into public freedom by free speech. For although one has control over speech in what one says, speech is a public phenomenon because it is always addressed and needs an addressee, or the other. Free speech is speech that questions and suspends commonly accepted norms, conventions, and institutions. As such, (1) free speech is always public and unashamedly trespasses the limits between the private and the public, doing so often in a brusque and provocative manner, in challenging and often publicly offensive words, acts, and gestures. Free speech is both the sign and the moment of establishing a mutuality between oneself and others, between an individual and society, who not only can be liberated but also can be freely bound to each other in an act of free speech. Freedom of speech,18 then, is a most important—if not the major—political freedom, which has to be constantly reasserted and struggled for in public discourse. It is not by chance that Diogenes claimed that παρρησία is the best in us (τὸ κάλλιστον) (DL 6.69) or “most sweet” (ἥδιστον) (Dio 4.15). In free speech, one becomes free and asserts one’s freedom and self-reliance in front of and together with others. Since παρρησία is free, and thus incorporates both the moments of liberation and freedom, it is (2) always a critique of existing (politically corrupt) morals, habits, and conventions. Such a critique (2.1) is rational but not theoretical, even if it aims at truth and intends to publicly disclose it.19 Such a critique is also (2.2) performative, that is, it needs not only to be formulated in a thesis but also acted out (Dio 8.3). The truth of παρρησία is not abstractly theoretical. It is practical truth—moral and political—that resides in people and is exercised by and between people. It is not the λόγος as a theory of truth—it is the λόγος as the mutual practice of truth. Free speech, therefore, liberates and frees not only the others it addresses—but also oneself. Free speech presupposes and demands telling the truth to the best of one’s abilities, with one’s whole “might.” Paradoxically, then, although free speech does not lie, it does not necessarily always speak the truth but rather shows or hints at it. Because the freedom-for (the good life and self-reliance) begins with the freedom-from (oppression of the convention and authority), free speech (3) is dangerous. It is risky to speak truth against unshakable social and political convention or in the face of a tyrant, not only because of a possible backlash

 In Cicero, libertas loquendi (with reference to the Stoics) means calling a thing plainly by its name (Fam. 9.22). 19  In this respect, as Ágnes Heller has argued, truth-telling is akin to prophesizing (Ágnes Heller, The Concept of the Beauitful, ed. Marcia Morgan (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012), 124. 18

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but also, because despite one’s best intentions, one can be mistaken and should recognize such a possibility. Speaking truth thus requires courage. If courage is indeed the originary virtue (both as the “archaic” virtue of the heroic age and the model for other virtues), then free speech is primarily virtuous, because it is courageous.20 Yet the fear of saying—and knowing—the truth is mutual: both of the one who speaks and of the one who listens, for one might never be the same after saying and hearing an uncomfortable truth. This is the reason why free speech makes a tyrant afraid (Dio 6.57). The courage to speak and the implied courage to listen and hear, then, becomes liberating, insofar as it leads to a cathartic emancipation from tyrannical repression in the soul, society, and the state. Since παρρησία makes one free through liberation, it is (4) the freedom from constraints imposed by an authority. The free speaker is not indebted to the authority of either the law (because it is a convention), or of the ruler (because his imposition of power is accidental and willful), or of pleasure (because it is contrary to the order of things). Diogenes refuses to pay and simply cancels all the debts, his own and everyone else’s, in a radical and audacious gesture of their abatement and rejection, since “by nature” one owes only to oneself the effort of moral betterment. He is in no one’s debt, not even of a king, ruler, or tyrant: paradoxically, Diogenes both owns nothing (he has no property)—and he owns everything (the whole world, of which he is both the ruler and the citizen). COMEDY AND THEATER As I have argued, scandal is a theatrical act in which everyone gets involved. Since free speech is a scandal, always predictable and always unforeseen, it therefore presupposes a theatrical performance. This is why Diogenes (and before him, Socrates) speaks—performs—in public, invariably attracting interlocutors by provocative speeches, gestures, and arguments (Dio 8.10). The protagonist, παρρησιαστής himself, makes the spectators become actors in a play that not only concerns them but promises to make them better people in real life and not just in the fictional space of the play. Such theatrical performance is conceptually written, insofar as it involves an ordered philosophical or dialectical argument, which has a clear structure of premises, development, and conclusion. Moreover, such a play is always rhetorically seasoned, which is why Diogenes becomes a major hero with later rhetoricians, who can use a variety of τόποι in order to present what  For Aristotle, magnanimous is the one who speaks freely (παρρησιαστής), because to care for opinion more than for truth and hide one’s thought is cowardly (NE IV.3, 1124b26–31).

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he, as a theatrical character, did not but could have said.21 But medially this performance is oral and takes the form of public “preaching.” Most of Diogenes’s sayings are of the form of an answer to either an explicit or implicit question, and thus presuppose a dialogue. Put on the stage of the city’s squares and arenas, this dialogue becomes a theatrical enactment of philosophy ([Diogenes], Ep. 31). As Foucault has noted, however, there is an important difference between the Socratic and the Cynic dialogue: while Socrates targets ignorance (“to show someone that he is ignorant of his own ignorance”), Diogenes targets pride.22 Since the Cynic theatrical public and dialogic performance is an improvisation and thus has no script, it is free to experiment with genres and use the thesaurus of sententiae. As free, public speech employs not only the condemnation of the wrong but even more often resorts to ridicule, hyperbolic metaphor, and farce, παρρησία implies and is accompanied by jest and joke, game and sport (Dio 9.7). As such, free speech is closest in its genre to comedy, which comes out of mime or iambus, which also uses improvisation, sententiae, and provocative language, and aims at exposing one’s own and others’ wrongdoings. Because comedy allows people to speak their minds freely, which often takes the form of free speech and accompanying mockery, Aristotle sought the origin of comedy in the iambus, which, together with the elegy, was one of two major forms of archaic poetry. On Aristotle’s account, lampoons or “blameful songs” originated iambus, which in turn gave rise to comedy (Poet. 1148b27, 1448b31–1449a6, 1449b4–5). At the very heart of iambic poetry, we find agonistic public verbal battles, scoffs, indecent sarcasm, pungent gestures, and acrimonious acts, all of which are abundant in Diogenes and which included allusions to Diogenes’s favored examples of eating, drinking, and, quite explicitly, sexuality. Like comedy, the iambus too is a celebration of life in all its physically explicit forms.23 At the same time, the iambus is attractive to comic dramatists, Diogenes included, thanks to its conversational character and colloquial simplicity. For this reason, iambus can be used in dialogues and is suitable for the depiction of dramatic interaction.24 Therefore, Diogenes’s iambic public performance in its genre is comedy, and not tragedy. Indeed, unlike tragedy, which is a celebration of death (in  It is worth noting that Antisthenes learned rhetoric with Gorgias (DL 6.2).  Foucault, Fearless Speech, 127. 23  See Archilochus, frags. 41–44, 46. West, in M. L. West, ed., Iambi et elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 18–20. See also M. L. West, Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974), 22–39. 24  Plato is said to have imitated Sophron’s mimes in his dialogues (Anon Proleg. 1.3 Westerink; see also Aristotle, Poet. 1447b10–11). Another closely related dramatic genre is mime (of Sophron; later, the mimiambs of Herodas), which displays short comic scenes from everyday life in the form of monologue or dialogue. 21 22

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Socrates’s famous dictum, philosophy is preparation for dying [Plato, Phd. 67d–e]), comedy is a celebration and assertion of life in all its forms, including shockingly indecent ones. Unlike tragedy, which is based on seriousness and sorrow, comedy is based on laughter and jokes. And we find plenty of banter and raillery in Diogenes, who never cries but does smile (Dio 4.46). MASTER-SLAVE Diogenes is thus a comic hero on the public stage of the polis, comically impersonating a mythical hero. Primarily, it is an intentional parodistic allusion to Heracles, who is the hero of the Cynic moral ἄσκησις, which requires commitment and labors comparable to those of Heracles (Dio 6.28–35; [Diogenes], Ep. 36). In order to be taken seriously, the hero has to become a fool. In the search for simplicity and self-reliance, which suspends the serious norms of behavior and oftentimes even of thinking, the Cynic chooses to appear under the guise of a simpleton, fool, trickster, alazon, or buffoon. The fool is the one who fools around, who acts strangely and out of place, and seems to be mistaken, but in fact labors to tell the daring truth. In this respect, both Socrates and Diogenes are comic figures, but if Socrates is explicitly present in Old Comedy in Aristophanes’s Clouds, Diogenes appears implicitly in New Comedy (Nea), becoming the prototype for the comic figure of the smart slave who appears a fool and yet outsmarts everyone else. The clever slave, servant, or maid is one of the most important characters in comedy, omnipresent in the Nea, whose originator, Menander, was almost twenty years old when Diogenes died. Growing up in Athens, Menander certainly could not miss such a colorful figure as Diogenes, who is therefore an evident candidate for the stock figure of the crafty slave.25 And in one of his comedies, The Groom, Menander does explicitly mention a pupil of Diogenes, Monimus of Syracuse, who was once a slave (DL 6.82–83). No wonder, then, that the bizarre dress of the Cynic Menedemus parodied that of an actor (DL 6.102). In comedy, it is the fool who is wise, which he demonstrates by enacting his “foolish wisdom.” The fool’s wisdom shocks others. But from foolish wisdom, others can also learn about the good life and the ways to achieve it. This is the wisdom that allows one to recognize and know one’s ignorance and enables others to learn and do the same (Dio 10.32). The slave is thus  See Véronique Sternberg, La poétique de la comédie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999), 182–5; T. G. A. Nelson, Comedy: An Introduction to Comedy in Literature, Drama, and Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 89–102; and Diego Lanza, Lo stolto: Di Socrate, Eulenspiegel, Pinocchio e altri trasgressori del senso commune (Turin: Einaudi, 1977).

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the mastermind behind the development of the argument and comic plot, the “director” of the intrigue who plans and stages a whole new dramatic frame in order to trick the seemingly wise and steer the action toward the good life. The comic slave stands out by being “the other” of everyone else. He looks differently, speaks differently, dresses differently, and acts differently. As Plato argued in the Laws (Legg. 816e), comedy depicts base and ridiculous things, and therefore should be left to slaves and foreigners. And Diogenes is precisely this kind of character, since not only is he a foreigner but also reportedly was once enslaved (DL 6.29–30).26 Aesop, famously the originator of “fables” and another picturesque prototype of the smart slave figure, was a foreigner (from either Thrace or Phrygia) and a slave (see Aristotle, Rhet. 1393b5–6; Herodotus, Hist. II, 134–5).27 However, a foreigner or slave is never a bore, exactly because he can see—and tell—things differently. In this sense, a philosopher is a comic figure and a foreigner to his own country,28 because he despises the common sense that he lacks and is (or should be) ready and capable of thinking beyond the accepted social and political divides and cultural prejudices. In comedy, only a slave is capable of transgressing social differences and driving action toward justice and equality, which is what Diogenes does in life and through his diatribes. Personal, social, and political liberation is always present in a comic plot as a prized goal in the good ending of New Comedy. All those who were oppressed in the beginning—a slave, a mistreated and silenced woman, a person in a position of dependence—dreamt of liberation as the highest goal in life.29 Being excluded from the social ranks of the polis, the stranger is in a lower position, yet he is the one who allows for liberation and freedom, through his personal example and public free speech. Comedy can be taken as dramatic action that unfolds through a plot, which intends to resolve a complication through a mutually shared performance, where one of the characters serves as a mastermind or philosopher on stage, who moves the action toward a resolution of the conflict and the fulfillment of the aspirations of all the participants. Comedy and philosophy, then, are capable of restoring social and political justice. We might say that the justice of comedy consists in the recovery of human equality and dignity, of wellbeing and freedom that are achieved in and as the end of (often difficult) action and free (and often dangerous) public deliberation with others.  Menippus too was a foreigner and a slave (DL 6.89).  See also Phaedrus, Fables, in Babrius and Phaedrus: Fables, trans. Ben Edwin Perry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), bk. 3, line 52, p. 256. 28  Hans Blumenberg, Das Lachen der Thrakerin. Eine Urgeschichte der Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), esp. 33–41. 29  Such is the case with the courtesan Habrotonon in Menander’s Epitrepontes (538ff.), and the slaves Doris in Menander’s Perikeiromene (982–983) and Syrus in Terence’s Brothers (960). 26 27

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THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE RULER Steering and directing the action, the slave becomes the master of comedy— the maître dialectician, the mastermind, the thinker who is the architect of its plot. And the master turns out to be the slave of comedy, insofar as he has to follow the twists and turns, the traps and clearings, along the way of the action and the “argument” of the plot, which often drags him along. In comedy, the master is the slave of the slave and the slave is the master of the master.30 The master’s power, which tends to be tyrannical, is then illusory and a convention at best. The master/slave relationship establishes the pattern for the relationship between the ruler and the thinker, which becomes a trope for the relationship between power as the locus of the political and thought as the edifier of culture. The pattern is pervasive throughout history: Dionysios and Plato, Alexander III of Macedon and Aristotle, Augustus and Virgil, Nero and Seneca, Gallienus and Plotinus, Catherine the Great and Voltaire, Napoleon and Goethe. Each time, the ruler is attracted to the thinker in the hope of cultural and cultivated justification of power. And the thinker is attracted to the ruler, lured, flattered, and fascinated by their power, attracted by its danger, driven by the vain hope of educating the ruler and making power’s crooked ways straight. The philosopher realizes the futility of such hope and yet continues the hopeless effort that is doomed to fail. The important exception is Alexander and Diogenes, in which case the king reportedly comes to the philosopher.31 The meeting most probably never took place, yet the tradition of the encounter is persistent throughout the whole of antiquity and into modernity, popularized by Rousseau, Diderot, Christoph Wieland, and others.32 The two figures stand for the ideal types of the philosopher and the ruler, and their exchange is meant to show the independence and superiority of the former over the latter in virtue, well-being, and way of life. The philosopher ends up being subservient to the ruler, but only Diogenes dares to stand up to him. Only Diogenes manages to voluntarily become the

 When asked what he could do if sold as a slave, Diogenes replied: “rule over people” (ἀνδρῶν ἄρχειν) (DL 6.29). In a conversation with Alexander III, Diogenes also suggests that the king is often a slave, as in a children’s game (Dio 4.48). 31  Giannantoni, “Diogene e Alessandro Magno,” in Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae, 4:443–451. The tradition also speaks about Diogenes’s meetings with Dionysios, Philip, Perdiccas, and Antipater (G 31–54), as well as about Alexander’s meeting with Diogenes’s student Crates (DL 6.88, 6.93). See also Hard, ed., Diogenes the Cynic, 52–57; and Desmond, Cynics, 184–208. 32  See: Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting, “The Modern Reception of Cynicism: Diogenes in the Enlightenment,” in The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, 329–65; David Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 110–142; Louisa Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 45–73. 30

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comic slave and thus be the master to the master and the ruler in the comedy of (political) life. In this respect, again, Diogenes becomes a comic reversion of Heracles, who is the subject to the weak, cowardly, and tyrannical king Eurystheus (the comic reversion for Alexander), whom Heracles serves, but whom he also ridicules and scares by his deeds and labors. SUN, EARTH, AND MOON The encounter between the thinker and the ruler is epitomized in the famous anecdote known throughout antiquity (to Cicero, Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch, and Simplicius) of Diogenes asking Alexander to move out of the Sun (ἀποσκότησόν μου) (DL 6.38).33 The implication of the story is, first, that Diogenes is not afraid of Alexander and thus can speak freely to his face (cf. DL 6.68). Second, the story implies that Diogenes does not need anything from the man who is the embodiment of almost unlimited, and thus potentially tyrannical, power. On the stage of the imaginary philosophical theater, the two figures always appear side by side. Why? At a first glance, (1) the two stand in direct opposition to each other: one is the wealthiest and the most powerful, while the other is the poorest and dispossessed. By this light, Alexander appears unquestionably superior to Diogenes as the king (is) to the dog.34 But (2) a closer look shows that the two are effectively identical, because neither one seems to need anything: Alexander already has everything and Diogenes does not need anything, because he has nothing and does not want anything. In this sense, the way from Athens to Macedonia is the same as from Macedonia to Athens ([Diogenes], Ep. 23). And yet, (3) the third, closest look reveals that in fact the two are opposite: Alexander has everything by conquering, subduing the world and acquiring the unnecessary and conventional by unnatural means (by the sword), while Diogenes has everything necessary by abdicating the conventional and having the world by natural means (by the word and action).35 Once Alexander realizes the futility of this power, which cannot even prevent him from obscuring the light of the sun, he has but to recognize that he would have liked to become Diogenes (DL 6.32; [Diogenes], Ep. 33.4). Only the philosopher is free, insofar as he is the master of pleasure,  See also Cicero, Tusc. Disp. 5.32, 5.92 = G 33; Dio 4.15; Plutarch, On Exile 15, 605d–c = G 32; [Diogenes], Ep. 33. 34  “Alexander filled a dish with bones one day and sent it to Diogenes the Cynic; on receiving it, Diogenes said, ‘A meal befitting a dog, but not a gift befitting a king’ ” (Gnomologium Vaticanum 96 = G 35; Hard, ed., Diogenes the Cynic, 55; see also DL 6.60). 35  On Diogenes’s argument on the uselessness of weapons, see Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 50–52. 33

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property, and fame (ἡδονή, χρήματα, and δόξα), whereas the ruler is a slave of them (see [Diogenes], Ep. 4 [to Antipater], 5 [to Perdiccas]). One might even say that the relationship between the ruler (Alexander) and the philosopher (Diogenes) is profoundly erotic in the Platonic sense. If Eros is mythologically defined as the offspring of Poros (Plenty) and Penia (Poverty) (Plato, Symp. 203b–e; Plotinus, Enn. III. 5 [50].7), then in having and using things Alexander represents Poros, and Diogenes, Penia. However, in having and using virtue toward the good life it is exactly the other way around. The poor philosopher is, therefore, better off than the powerful ruler. One could even say that the king is a failed philosopher, to the extent that he unsuccessfully rules over many but cannot even manage to live in peace with himself. The philosopher, on the other hand, is an accomplished ruler who rules over herself and her passions. If, as Diogenes claims, the governing of oneself, which takes extended practice and strenuous exercise, can be universally spread, everyone can become equal as the citizen of such cosmopolitan world. The all-inclusive power of Diogenes is thus opposite to the power of Alexander, which is exclusive of everyone else, and hence is tyrannical in its essence. Still, the two characters are intimately connected and need each other: the ruler in the (futile) hope to improve his life and be well-off, and the philosopher—in showing the superiority of the Cynic way of life by its practical demonstration. No wonder that the tradition claims that Diogenes and Alexander died on the same day (DL 6.79 = G 92). Yet the opposites do not coincide; unlike Plato, Diogenes does not strive to assimilate the ruler and make him into a philosopher. The philosopher is the ruler of thought but not of reality, whereas the ruler is the ruler of reality but not of thought. And unlike for Plato, reality and thought for Diogenes should neither coincide nor act according to the same principles. Hence, the failure of the thinker to change the ruler in his thinking is deplorable but is nonetheless inevitable.36 The utopian—and dangerous—hope is to fuse the two. Thus, the relation between Alexander and Diogenes reproduces that between the comic master and slave, where (1) the former appears to be the ruler of the latter. However, (2) through the action on stage, they display their equality as actors equally necessary for the movement of the plot.37 And yet (3) the slave is in fact superior to the master, because he is the mastermind, the protagonist, and the thinker who allows for the good ending or good life available not only for him but also for everyone else. Not only does  “Diogenes said that Alexander was not content to be a man, but was too foolish to be capable of being a god” (Codex Vaticanus Graecus 96, fol.88v, no.13 = G 35b; Hard, ed., Diogenes the Cynic, 55). 37  Diogenes, even in jest, “recognizes” Agamemnon in himself ([Diogenes], Ep. 19). 36

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Alexander not have power over Diogenes—he does not even rule himself. An original interpretation of the episode with Alexander standing in the way of Diogenes’s light grasps the real nature of their relationship: a Cynic letter ascribed to Diogenes compares Alexander to the moon eclipsing the sun ([Diogenes], Ep. 33.1). The implication of the metaphor is clear: Diogenes himself is the earth, which is greater than the moon and makes its satellite revolve around itself. This means that it is Alexander who depends on Diogenes, as the moon depends on the earth, and not vice versa. Therefore, the philosopher is beyond the reach of the ruler ([Diogenes], Ep. 23). This also means that the philosopher as the citizen of the world is not really autonomous and self-legislating, in the way that the earth is not autonomous but depends on the sun and revolves around it. Any human legislation for Diogenes is conventional, whereas the philosopher as cosmopolitan follows the law in nature. This law is not established by the philosopher but allows her to gravitate toward the Sun of personal and political well-being. TYRANT Therefore, Diogenes is beyond the power of the ruler and even of the tyrant because he has moved from the convention of the law and the polis—if not to nature, then at least to the very margins of the political, where he becomes unreachable to power as the embodiment of law. Diogenes speaks freely in the face of a ruler not because he is not afraid: he is not afraid, because he dares to speak freely. Free speech is palpable testimony to his freedom. And because he is free, he is not afraid of tyrants. In comedic terms, it is the slave who has the right, dignity, and power to speak the truth in the face of a tyrannical master, because the dispossessed is free from the oppression of the unnecessary—of social prestige, power, and wealth.38 The master thinks he can rule over everyone, but in fact he rules neither himself, because he is not free, nor the slave, who is free. It is the slave and not the master who is well off. The utter degeneration of the master and the ruler is the tyrant. The tyrant is the one who disregards, usurps, and suspends the prescription of morals and the law of the polis. In so doing, the tyrant places himself outside of the political. A tyrant cannot achieve the good life, because he is bound by willful and accidental conventions, which he himself partly establishes. The tyrant

 Speaking truth can turn a free person into a slave, which happens to Plato when he speaks truth to Dionysios and calls him a tyrant (DL 3.19), but it cannot deprive one of freedom as self-reliance (see also [Diogenes], Ep. 29.3).

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always lives in constant fear (see [Diogenes], Ep. 40), being afraid of breaking these conventions, which secure his power. Yet, both Alexander and Diogenes, in a sense, are extra-political too, insofar as both “supersede” the polis. In this respect, again, there is an affinity and attraction between the two—but also a crucial difference. The difference consists in that both consider themselves free and having “suspended” or conquered the polis, but in fact only one of them is free and knows that he is free. The philosopher, therefore, cannot be a tyrant, but the ruler can become a tyrant if he cannot control his aspirations and acts in ignorance of that which nature provides us for the good life. Not every ruler is a tyrant (see G 359). However, for Diogenes, the tyrant is anyone who does not rule oneself, who disregards nature and acts against it, who is ruled by pleasure, wealth, and fame. Power and wealth can be legal, yet they are tyrannical if they do not limit or suspend—cancel and deny— themselves. No wonder that, for Diogenes, nobody becomes a tyrant because of poverty, but because of wealth. The tyrant is at war with others but primarily with himself. Every form of power is thus tyrannical if it does not come from strict moral self-discipline. The Cynic ἄσκησις is, therefore, a tyrannicide, killing or overthrowing the tyrant (of pleasure and pride) in oneself. It is fair to say, then, that in his philosophical project, Diogenes comes up with a powerful (practical) critique of the existing political and moral institutions, where the liberation of oneself becomes the precondition of freedom of all.

Chapter 10

The Promise of the Beautiful

Beauty is out of place in our contemporary world. In The Concept of the Beautiful,1 Ágnes Heller provides a finely tuned account of the transformations of the concept of the beautiful throughout its history, in order to explain how and why the beautiful has disappeared from our life. If the demise of the beautiful does not follow of necessity from its very concept (i.e., if the self-cancelling negativity or suicidal tendency is not analytically included in the concept of the beautiful), then one needs to provide an account that would explain its loss. Yet, since history for Heller is always contingent and does not display features of necessity or universality, which are only built into it post factum, then the history of a concept is always a history that is a story and thus presupposes a narrative.2 However, once such a story turns into a philosophical genealogy of historically contingent events, the narrative becomes non-contingent, because it is an explanation of events of the life of the philosophical mind told by the mind itself, which does not (want to) understand itself as contingent. 1. In telling a story of the concept of the beautiful, Heller follows the established pattern of the opposition between the ancients and the moderns,  Ágnes Heller, The Concept of the Beautiful, ed. Marcia Morgan (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012); henceforth CB, followed by page number. The book was first published in Hungarian as A szép fogalma (Budapest: Osiris Kladó, 1998), with an additional last part, in which Heller discusses everyday forms of the beautiful and related questions in an ironic, self-referential, and fictionalized form. I want to thank Marcia Morgan and Jonathan Pickle for helpful suggestions and for providing the manuscript of this unpublished part of the book. See also Ágnes Heller, A Short History of My Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011), 116–18. 2  Ágnes Heller, A Philosophy of History in Fragments (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 1–35. Walter Benjamin writes, “all beauty holds in itself the orders of the history of philosophy.” (Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” trans. Stanley Corngold, in 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 1 of Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996], 351). 1

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the querelle des anciens et des modernes. The opposition implies that to understand our condition as specifically modern, we need the historical other, which from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward becomes an artificially and hermeneutically conceived other of antiquity. Such a reconstruction requires a posture of rigid opposition to what it is seen as standing against. Modernity’s other is constructed and invented rather than discovered. It stresses rupture and discontinuity, avoiding continuity and mediation. In part, this explains a surprising omission in Heller’s discussion of the beautiful in the Middle Ages and especially in the Renaissance. The story of the beautiful based on the distinction and opposition between ancients and moderns is that of (philosophical) reason and its demise. This reason, for Heller, is the reason of the Cartesian, Kantian, and Hegelian subject, which considers itself self-transparent and self-sufficient, that is, reflective and ultimately autonomous. Such a subject is primarily epistemological and thus eliminates the “lived experience of the singular human being from metaphysics.”3 This universal Reason attempts (most notably in Hegel) to grasp and synthesize all the spheres of multifarious human experience into a single whole and thus to provide a coherent account of it. But in reality, Reason cannot entirely capture the manifold of experience. Therefore, the subject breaks up and inevitably becomes fragmented. Hence, on the one hand, the story of the adventure of the beautiful that Heller tells is equally inescapably fragmented, but on the other hand, it is also dramatic, although not teleological. In the philosophical drama of the beautiful, each character makes a rather brief appearance on stage, pronounces his utterance, and gives way to another one. Unlike in Hegel, the drama of the beautiful has no predetermined end that would be necessarily contained in the beginning. Rather, it is an action whose end is temporarily tragic (the death of the concept of beautiful) but never finally so. A comic ending (a good ending, one that revives the beautiful) is always possible, if only ever contingently so, because we—and not the abstract universal subject—are the ones who make the beautiful meaningful and possible. 2. There are two fundamental features of the experience of the beautiful for Heller: it is (i) radically heterogeneous and (ii) it always begins as negative. Heller wants to radically rethink the beautiful by making it universal yet present in almost anything, which can be beautiful: in natural objects and artifacts, in all living things and people, in human characters and actions, in feelings and emotions, in love and friendship, in proofs and conversations

 Ágnes Heller, “What Went Wrong with the Concept of the Beautiful?” (CB xlii). This essay is also published in Ágnes Heller, Aesthetics and Modernity: Essays by Agnes Heller, ed. John Rundell (Lanham, MA: Lexington, 2011), 29–45.

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(CB xlii–xlv).4 In so doing, she intends to restore, or perhaps philosophically recollect, the ancient understanding of the beautiful as καλόν, which is an all-embracing concept that stands for physical (of the living), practical (moral and political), and theoretical (thinkable) beauty (see Aristotle, NE I.8, 1099a22–3; III.7, 1115b12–3; III.12, 1119b16).5 Therefore, beauty needs to be rethought as heterogeneous, which means that in an important way, it should refer to the totality of our experience of multiple and different things. Further, that the beautiful is primarily and initially negative means that traditional definitions of beauty do not hold (CB xliii). For Heller, beauty is neither symmetry nor proportion, because saying that an act of friendship, an action, a law, a science, an argument, or a way of life is symmetrical does not make sense.6 Nor is beauty a family resemblance, because all members of a family are of the same (human) kind and species and thus are not radically heterogeneous. Nor is beauty a transcendent ideal Platonic form, in which a particular thing or act participates and so can be considered beautiful. At the same time, Heller incorporates Plato’s argument into her understanding of the beautiful: if this is beautiful and that is beautiful too, there should be something else that is beautiful as such and in itself, which should be thinkable and expressible in a (dialectically achievable) definition of beauty (Euthyd. 301a; Hipp. mai. 300a–b). Yet, unlike in Plato, the experience, the “wonder” of the beautiful, begins with the negative understanding that “this is not beautiful but something else is” (CB xxxix, xlv, 2, 31, 38, 132). In this way, Heller both appropriates and rejects Plato’s insight into the beautiful. This leads her to the main philosophical thesis that she defends and historically traces throughout the book: the beautiful is, yet we do not (immediately) know what it is. According to Heller, historically we lose all possibility to understand the beautiful in various spheres of our life, in sensation, emotion, imagination, and thought, but this does not mean that we cannot understand the beautiful. However, the right moment, the καιρός, for the understanding of beauty is itself historically contingent, and is thus possible yet cannot be predicted or intentionally realized. In fact, Heller’s understanding of the beautiful is apophatic rather than merely negative, since, first, it is not this thing but

 See Ágnes Heller, “The Beauty of Friendship,” in “Friendship,” special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 97, no. 1 (1998): 5–22. 5  According to Gadamer, καλόν refers to those things that “are worth seeing or are made to be seen” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 13; see also CB li–liii). 6  Here, Heller agrees with Plotinus, who argues (against the Stoics) that if beauty is proportion (συμμετρία), then no single thing can be considered beautiful but only a composite one, since proportion is between parts (Enn. I.6.1.25–30). All translations in this essay are mine, unless otherwise noted. 4

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something else that is beautiful, and second, in principle we can know the beautiful, even if we currently do not know it. From this perspective, the fragmentation of the beautiful arises not only from the heterogeneity of our experience as conditioned by our multiple faculties and activities but also from the beautiful itself, which “generously” and “graciously” extends to all things that we can possibly experience. 3. Among all the dramatis personae, two supporting actors who turn out to be important interlocutors for Heller are Plotinus in antiquity and Benjamin in modernity. Despite all their differences, both practice radical philosophical thinking that goes beyond philosophy, and both understand beauty as existing yet inexpressible. This is the league of thinkers that Heller joins, with and against whom she develops her understanding of the beautiful. In “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” Benjamin argues that beauty is in the semblance (Schein), which, however, is identical with the essentially beautiful (CB 134–41). The beautiful in itself, however, cannot be either expressed or unambiguously named. As such, beauty can be approached only apophatically and is thus beyond discursive logical distinctions. Beauty, then, is not identical with semblance. Therefore, being both identical and different from the way it appears or shines through beautiful bodies and things, beauty remains a mystery and a secret.7 In the last instance, beauty amounts to a revelation, which points toward a (Neoplatonic) unspeakable beyond-being. Heller is one of few thinkers who takes seriously Plotinus’s thinking about the beautiful, which itself is beautifully thought (CB 19–24). Heller agrees with Plotinus that beauty is in everything—in nature, in sight, sound, actions, virtues, characters, and thoughts (Enn. I.6.1–5). If the beautiful is in everything, it is both heterogeneous and ordinary. Yet, it is very difficult to grasp what beauty is. We already know that it is. But to know what beauty is takes considerable effort. In order to understand beauty, we need to change: we need to carve our own inner “statue,” to purify ourselves from everything that prevents an understanding and vision of beauty (Enn. I.6.9.13; I.6.6). In Heller’s succinct formulation, “The more beautiful the soul becomes, the more I can recognize beauty” (CB 23). As a Platonic thinker, Plotinus realizes that the beauty of various heterogeneous phenomena can be explained through a particular kind of causation, that of “participation” of multiple things in one thinkable form. The forms themselves constitute a multiplicity of beings that are and cannot be otherwise. For this reason, they are beautiful, and such is also the intellect that thinks them (Enn. I.6.2.12; I.6.5.19–20; I.6.6.26–32; I.6.9.43). However, unlike Plato, Plotinus does not stop at formal beauty, which makes him a

 Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 350–1.

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radical thinker. He affirms that the beautiful of and in thought is such because it strives toward the good, which is the source, principle, and cause of life, mind, and being (see Enn. I.6.7.11). As Heller puts it, “if there is no sole source of all beauties, there is no beauty” (CB 19). It is this ultimate beauty of the good that makes beautiful forms—and through them, things—beautiful (Enn. I.6.9.40–2). Therefore, the good is beauty most of all and is the primary beauty (Enn. I.6.7.28–9; I.6.9.39–40). Paradoxically, such beauty is in an unthinkable way and is thus “inconceivable” (Enn. I.6.8.2) because it is beyond being yet makes being what it is and makes it beautiful. Since beauty is beyond being, we cannot tell what it is: “the good” is a placeholder for the universal object of desire (Enn. I.6.7.1). We recognize the ultimate beauty and testify to its existence in the whole heterogeneity of life, thought, and actions without ever properly thinking beauty itself. The beautiful is beyond comprehension and thought. 4. The claim to the universality and autonomy of the modern subject entails the rejection of heterogeneity in the experience of the beautiful, which leads to the loss of the beautiful. Moreover, it also leads to the fragmentation of the beautiful, which is now claimed to reside only in one particular sphere and is thus reduced to just one singular form. In modernity, this happens to be the beauty of and in art. The modern subject, disappointed in itself and in its ability to incorporate and embrace all possible facets of beauty, turns against itself and becomes anti-metaphysical. This turn, according to Heller, begins with the Enlightenment and is completed in contemporary philosophy (CB 27ff.). In my reconstruction, the philosophical drama of the loss of beauty unfolds in modernity in five classical acts, which were already required of a drama by Horace (Ars poet. 189–190): (i) in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the experience of the beautiful is reduced to taste;8 (ii) in Kant, beauty can be meaningfully spoken of only in relation to the “inner,” to the subject’s judgement rather than to an object, and thus to the interplay between cognitive faculties (of imagination and understanding);9 (iii) in Hegel, beauty is excluded from the fundamental logical categories, so that the beauty of and in nature becomes only a dim preliminary stage for the ideal of beauty; (iv) after Hegel, beauty becomes solely the beauty of a work of art and thus drifts entirely to the domain of aesthetics; and (v) in contemporary philosophy, beauty, taken as a suspicious metaphysical concept, disappears altogether.  Heller even speaks of “a terror of taste” (Ágnes Heller, “Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of the Artwork,” in Aesthetics and Modernity, 49). 9  Unlike in Descartes, for whom the beautiful still signifies a relation between our judgment and an object: “generalement ny le beau, ny l’agreable, ne signifie rien qu’vn rapport de nostre iugement à l’objet” (Descartes to Mersenne, 18 March 1630, in Correspondance: Avril 1622–Février 1638, vol. 1 of Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adams and Paul Tannery [Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1897], 133). 8

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5. Heller is certainly right in claiming that the demise of the beautiful has to do with the self-affirmation of the modern subject, who constructs or produces itself from within itself and determines all the reasons and meanings for the world and society. The modern subject thus establishes itself as universal, purely rational, and necessary, and in this way expels the everyday and lived experience from metaphysics. With the demise of metaphysics, however, the lived experience, which was the locus for beauty in all its multiple and heterogeneous expressions, does not come back, since the post-metaphysical scene is still one of devastation, of scorched landscapes, of an empty stage devoid of decorations and any traces of beauty. The universal, lonely, and monological subject is extremely effective at leaving nothing in its wake, even if it made a considerable (ineffective) effort in recent decades at a postmetaphysical “repentance,” trying to get rid of itself either by claiming the “death of the author” or by distilling itself into a highly specialized logical debate over the minutiae of reason. The dominance of the abstract universal and purely rational subject is thus the main reason for the loss of the beautiful. If, as Heller argues, the beautiful is indeed radically heterogeneous, the modern subject cannot tolerate its very concept, because it cannot be uniformly deduced from within the pure logical system of categories, as Hegel already realized (the beautiful does not appear anywhere as a category in his Logic). The disappearance of the concept of the beautiful can also be explained by the following reasons, all related to the supremacy of the modern subject. 5.1. Beauty entirely disappears from nature. After Kant and Hegel, nobody even mentions nature when talking about beauty. Schelling already speaks only and exceptionally about the beauty in and of art.10 The reason for this is quite straightforward: beauty is lost in nature, because nature itself is not there (CB 146). We do not know what nature is anymore. Rather than being Aristotelian φύσις, which is all that is, and is the principle of motion, life, and growth, in early modernity, nature becomes mathematized and thus is turned into a mere construction of the universal subject. Such an understanding of nature is already found in Galileo, Descartes, and Newton and finds its apex in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which argues that all law-like regularities in this world are not found or discovered in, but are rather constructed into, the world by the subject, who then cognizes what it itself produces.11

 F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. and ed. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). See also Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 61–100. 11  See Dmitri Nikulin, Matter, Imagination and Geometry: Ontology, Natural Philosophy and Mathematics in Plotinus, Proclus and Descartes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 210ff. 10

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Moreover, in antiquity (in Plato and Vitruvius) and in the early Renaissance (in Masaccio), the body still sets the measure and standard for the beautiful, which means that the understanding and representation of the beautiful depends on our understanding of the body. Not surprisingly, then, Cicero relates that the gods for Epicurus are the most blessed and beautiful beings and thus should have bodies, because the human body is the most beautiful of all things (De nat. deor. I.47–49). In antiquity, body is understood as an embodiment of a mathematical proportion, which can be studied and then represented in art. But in Kant, the idea of the beautiful is seen through the prism of reflective judgment and not mathematics, because mathematics is now reserved for the construction of nature as an inanimate and purely phenomenal res extensa. This leads to the suspension of attempts to consider universal regularities in the living body as expressible in terms of mathematical proportions. The living body is thus no longer measurable; it loses any canon of order and measure and becomes amorphous. Because body sheds all mathematical form, and thus all proportion, it can be easily distorted, which ultimately leads to Kandinsky’s loss of any comprehensible bodily form and to Picasso’s disfiguration of body, which cannot be meaningfully said to be beautiful. Pure form that was formerly exemplified in the form of a living body is no longer beautiful but quite suspect: bodies of dead animals on display in an art gallery cannot be discussed in terms of beauty. 5.2. In antiquity, art is commonly understood as the imitation of nature. Hence, the better artist is the one who imitates nature better. Every imitation, however, is a deception. A famous anecdote relates the story of a competition between two famous painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasius: Parrhasius was declared a better artist, because Zeuxis painted grapes so well that it deceived birds who took them to be real, whereas Parrhasius deceived a human by painting a curtain that Zeuxis demanded to be removed in order to see the picture behind it (Pliny, Nat. hist. 35.65–66). Yet, if there is no nature, then there is nothing to imitate. Hence, beauty is eventually lost even in art. This is clearly expressed by Collingwood, who argued that beauty is the object of love, admiration, and desire and, as such, cannot be the object of aesthetic theory or art.12 In modernity, art becomes autonomous and does not even need beauty any more.13 As Victor Shklovsky suggests in “Art as Device,” the main purpose of art is “estrangement” (or “defamiliarization,” остранение), which means that art should teach us to look at familiar things anew, to see new meanings of and in the old. Yet, this new is not beautiful any longer, because the beautiful of the tradition is too familiar. The radical novelty should go  R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 36–41. It is a grilled steak that should be called beautiful, according to Collingwood (ibid., 40). 13  See Heller, “Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of the Artwork,” in Aesthetics and Modernity, 47–64. 12

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beyond anything that has been said and thought before and thus bring down any canon, destroy any system, and tear down any previous account. As radical reflection, philosophy becomes a new form of art (CB 125), which finally suspends beauty and destroys art. Hegel’s famous claim of the “end of art” means that in art, in Heller’s elegant formulation, “reflexivity is gained and creativity is lost” (CB 92–94). We can only think about what others have already created and thus live in the “meager” time when reflection about beauty does not amount to, or imply, creation of new (beautiful) works of art. We observe and judge but do not create any more.14 5.3. From its inception in Plato, philosophy attempts to grasp the beautiful and define its concept. In a sense, this very attempt becomes defining for the activity and organization of thought called “philosophy” as a way of thinking about the beautiful, along with the true and the good. Historically, however, the three philosophical sisters, originally the universal normative ideas, face very different fates: the true is downgraded to the semantically true debated in various theories of truth; the good either disappears entirely or lurks in theology as the divine good and in politics as the (rarely accepted) public good; and the beautiful abandons contemporary thought altogether (CB xlii; see Plato, Lys. 216d; Gorg. 474d). However, since the very distinction between “is” and “appears,” or being and becoming, is no longer meaningful, the concept of the beautiful as the ideal form is lost for and in contemporary thought. 5.4. Finally, Heller agrees with Hegel that the world is not destroyed by negation but rather “grows by saying no” (CB xl–xli). Philosophy is itself the enterprise of critical reflexive thinking that advances by and through negation.15 Yet contra Hegel, one can say that negation alone does not secure reaching the necessary and inevitable end of the universal subject’s development (that of the Spirit) from within itself. Rather, negation allows for differentiation and otherness, and thus for heterogeneity of human experience, which might include the experience of the beautiful. However, as said, modern philosophy excludes the concept of the beautiful from the list of necessary logical categories, which means that no negativity is needed for understanding beauty, but only refinement and taste. Reason that is overly reflective and prescriptive prevents us from understanding the beautiful and having a fulfilling experience of it. 6. The disappearance of beauty from the contemporary experience of thought implies that we can only wait for a Godot-like return of the beautiful,  “Works of art do not need observers, but observers need works of art. There is no reciprocity between the work and the observer, but every piece of art needs a creator” (CB 107). 15  G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, vol. 7, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), §31, 84. 14

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for which we are still waiting but are never sure that it will ever reappear or become thinkable. But we hope that it will. We cannot predict its comeback and cannot force it, yet we should not be absorbed into a melancholic mourning of the beautiful either. Rather, we should stay awake and keep thinking and looking for the beautiful. Currently, it is unthinkable and escapes our attempts at defining it. Yet nothing prevents its reappearance. As it stands now, the drama of the beautiful is a tragedy: the concept of the beautiful arises in antiquity, becomes fragmented in modernity, and dies in contemporaneity. Such an end, however, might not and should not be final but only provisional. It contains within itself its own overcoming, which then would turn the drama of the beautiful into a comedy with a good ending. However, the return of the beautiful is never guaranteed, nor is it necessarily presupposed and inscribed into the history of its concept. Currently, beauty is only a promise, which is the promise of happiness (CB 49, 62, 69–70).16 Such a promise might never be realized (CB 142–3). Yet for Heller, the promise of happiness can be fulfilled, because the promise of the beautiful is realized in love. 7. This is the reason why Plato is the protagonist in Heller’s philosophical drama: his dialogues are all propelled by the power of love (see Charm. 167e). Heller begins with Plato, rejects Plato, and comes back to Plato, whose thought gets transformed, yet remains recognizable. For her, it is Plato who “dominated the discourse [on beauty] for almost two thousand years, whereas the modern innovators followed each other in the relay run with increasing speed, only to lose the staff in the end.”17 Heller distinguishes two opposing yet closely related currents in Plato’s understanding of the beautiful, which she calls “warm” and “cold” (CB 1–19). Unlike in Kant, warm beauty does not just please without interest—it is the object of passionate desire and love that celebrates life uncovered and displayed by such beauty (see Plato, Symp. 199c–212c). This beauty is dialogical, because it needs the other, and it presupposes a striving realized as the ascent toward the good, which appears as sublimation and flight (Plato, Phaedr. 248b–c). Warm beauty is the promise of happiness. Cold beauty, on the contrary, is the beauty of thought and understanding, of poised methodical reasoning, and of carefully and artfully calculated order. This beauty is dialectical and thus needs an art or τέχνη that may be shared with others yet is best practiced in the tranquillity of solitude. It is

 Heller draws on Adorno’s famous suggestion, which is itself a reference to Stendhal’s claim that art is the promesse du bonheur (see Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 311; see also Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007], 1–3, 70ff.). 17  Heller, A Short History of My Philosophy, 116. 16

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sublimity without sublimation that strives toward perfection, transparency, and simplicity. As such, it comes with the fear of flight, with the dread of chaos. It is beauty that needs an ordered step-by-step progression through sciences and knowledge toward the eternal (Plato, Rep. 517b–534e), which is the absence of rhythm, of the excesses and the repetitions of love. Cold beauty is the promise of truth. 8. In line with her claim that beauty is originally experienced as negative, Heller argues that the beautiful is first perceived as and through the ugly, by the rejection of which we first turn to and recognize the beautiful (CB 104).18 In the beginning is Medusa Gorgona, who in ancient iconography often appears as joyous and smiling, as an affirmation of the beautiful through the ugly, disfigured, terrifying, and repulsive.19 Already Hesiod speaks of evil beauty, καλὸν κακόν (Theog. 585), which is deceptive yet appealing to humans. Plato, in particular, first fell in love with the ugly—Socrates in his physical appearance—but because he could not stand it, he declared the ugly to be (inwardly) beautiful (CB 2). This figure of the encounter with the negative as the other of the beautiful, of its rejection, and then of its acceptance as internalization and transformation into the beautiful establishes philosophy as the way to see through things into what they actually are but do not appear to be. The philosopher, then, is a seducer who tells the truth by hinting at an apparent lie and presents a live truth through its deadened written fixture, similarly to an artist who shows the beauty of a live thing by deceiving us, by presenting its dead semblance. The distinction between cold and warm beauty in Plato clearly reproduces the Apollonian and Dionysian split in Nietzsche (CB 119–26). As the divinity of light, Apollo is the embodiment of passivity, represented in and as the image and concept, das Bild und der Begriff, of what is, which is contemplated in and by reason (GT §9, 67; §6, 51).20 The Apollonian stands for cognition and self-cognition based on order and measure (GT §4, 40; §9, 70) and thus appears to be beautiful. Yet it is neither self-sufficient nor undisturbed, since the Apollonian is necessarily complemented by its opposite, the  This is also Adorno’s and Freud’s position (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 45–61). It is worth noting that today we expect mass-produced things to be kitsch and defaced. An exception to this could be Aldous Huxley, who has argued—in an anonymously published essay of 1935—that mass production will not proliferate ugly things but only beautiful ones, because the design will be made by the best artists and no one will want to reproduce ugly things (Aldous Huxley, “Art and Craftsmanship in Industry,” Aldous Huxley Annual 6 (2006): 35–37). See also Plotinus, Enn. I.6.2 and I.6.5.25, where the ugly is associated with the formless, with matter. 19  See Edoardo Levante, ed., Mysie, vol. 5 of Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum (Paris: Bibliothéque Nationale de France, 2001), no. 1342ff. 20  Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, in vol. 1 of Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988), henceforth GT, followed by section and page number; The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). 18

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Dionysian, the ugly and chaotic, which is the principle of life, insuperably powerful and joyful, displaying itself in intoxication, ecstasy, desire, and sexual licentiousness (GT §1, 28; §2, 30; §7, 56). Dionysus stands for the sublime terror translated into the dissolute joy of the annihilation of the individual and the destruction of the principle of individuation (GT §2, 33; §16, 103). Contrary to the Apollonian maxim “nothing in excess,” the Dionysian precept is “everything in abundance.” Total order is opposed to unfathomable chaos. Reason becomes the Apollonian, sculpted plastic opposite to the Dionysian, fluent music—the seen stands against the heard. Instead of the Apollonian moderation and measure, the Dionysian exorbitance of desire becomes the true for Nietzsche (GT §4, 41). In Heller’s interpretation, Plato’s soul is chaotic, because he is attracted to the ugly, Silenus-like Socrates and his seductive wisdom (Symp. 215b). Yet Plato suppresses his Dionysian, disordered striving by declaring only the Apollonian to be beautiful. By doing so, he transplants the beauty of the “here” (of the bodily, chaotic, seductive, sensual) to the “there” (of the ideal, ordered, harmonious, thinkable). Plato expels the ecstatic flute of Dionysus and celebrates the pacifying lyre of Apollo. Because Apollo is the foreteller and nunciate of the future seen as a beautiful illusion in dreams, it is the Apollonian illusion that seemingly liberates us from the Dionysian excess (GT §1, 26; §10, 72). Yet beauty needs chaos and “inarticulate cries” (CB 122). 9. Plato thus reverses the “relation between up and down,” and through this carnivalesque move establishes a new art form, that of philosophy as metaphysics (CB 121, 125). Philosophy becomes a substitution for the Dionysian loss and turns into an anti-Dionysian (deceptively beautiful) dream. Philosophy, then, inevitably misses beauty, because it loses it by hiding the beautiful of the “down here” “up there.” The beautiful is “too high” for us to reach and thus becomes “transcendent,” not sensibly perceived by everyone anymore but only thought by a few through very sophisticated reasoning (see Rep. 517c). Metaphysics creates a new, non-natural, poetic world, which is the world of beautiful (Apollonian) illusion, because the source of the beautiful is too “high,” and thus becomes hidden and cannot be grasped (CB 123). Present in light and perfection, beauty becomes opposite to everything that we encounter in life in perception, thought, and action, which then is declared not beautiful. Paradoxically, the sublime, which is ugly and Dionysian, is thus declared beautiful and Apollonian. This is Plato’s reversal, substitution, and identification of the beautiful and the sublime, against which Nietzsche was energetically fighting. The logic of Plato’s radical philosophical move is that of “Diotima’s logic”: “Life is but constant suffering from desire, whereas death (the unification with the supreme Good) is the eternal life” (CB 9; see Symp. 204d–209e). But the beautiful does not have to be

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either good or true: it can be deceptive and dangerous, destructive, and perplexing, attractive and repulsive at the same time. Why? Because beauty is both Apollonian and Dionysian. Nietzsche’s own reinstalling of the beautiful comes with the promise of totality, of the fullness of life as exuberance of the Dionysian at the expense of the Apollonian. Yet, such an understanding of the beautiful is still unsatisfactory, because it remains equally biased and one-sided. Nietzsche captures the missing Dionysian in Plato by showing that the Apollonian and the Dionysian affect and complement each other (GT §4, 41). However, what Nietzsche fails to notice is that the two do mutually imply and presuppose each other; they contain the other within oneself. Thus, Apollo can be not only serene but also pernicious; and Dionysus is not only ecstatic but also gentle and playful. Therefore, in the last instance, Nietzsche does not understand the complexity of the beautiful because he misses that the Dionysian has always and already been present in the Apollonian, and hence was never lost. Thus, on the one hand, Heller discovers that both Plato and Nietzsche support her thesis of the unfinalizability of the beautiful: the beautiful is, yet we do not know what it is. But on the other hand, she radically disagrees with the two about whether and how the beautiful can be known. For Plato, the beautiful is never immediate but always shimmers through beautiful phenomena and eventually can only be thought, that is, it is an idea that is accessible in the last instance only to philosophers. For Nietzsche, beauty is lost historically because Plato chose to suppress the Dionysian and move the beautiful from this world to the imaginary, transcendent cosmos of the forms. However, beauty can be regained for Nietzsche in the return to (Dionysian) music. But, for Heller, beauty is neither transcendent nor Dionysian. The experience of beauty for her is still possible and the beautiful may return (CB iii) if we acknowledge that no one—particularly not philosophers— has privileged access to the beautiful, and if we accept beauty in its utter negativity and radical heterogeneity: in friendship, love, nature, human actions, and character.

Chapter 11

Rethinking the Ontological and Scientific Revolutions

As with most twentieth-century thinkers with a background in the German philosophical tradition, Hans Jonas is concerned with the understanding of modernity as radically new, original, and different from its cultural, philosophical, and historical other, antiquity. The starting point for this philosophical enterprise is the opposition set by the imaginary querelle des anciens et des modernes, which emphasizes the break with the past as a principle of thinking.1 Among the many faces of modernity, Jonas is particularly interested in science as one of its defining moments. The very first course Jonas taught when he joined the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research in 1956 was on ontological and scientific revolutions—he taught this again later several times. The text of the 1967 lectures shows the full extent of Jonas’s engagement with the question of what constitutes modernity ontologically, in its understanding of being in its various aspects: being as thought, being of the world, being in the world, and being as questioning the meaning of the world and of being itself. The lectures are particularly instructive, since they show Jonas’s renewed interest in “the marvel of modern science” (OSR 26), in its history and contemporary practice, as well as many of the same  Hans Jonas, Ontologische und wissenschaftliche Revolution/Ontological and Scientific Revolution, vol. 2.2 of Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke von Hans Jonas (KGA), ed. Jens Peter Brune (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2012), 132; henceforth OSR, followed by page number. Over the course of fourteen lectures, Jonas keeps questioning, patiently, carefully, and precisely, the foundations of modern science in Copernicus, Kepler, Bruno, Nicolas of Cusa, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, with references to Whitehead, Santayana, Michael Polanyi, and Koyré. While lecturing, he also often proceeds by dialectical engagement with the students through questions and answers, even if occasionally the question is not passed on to us (“A question is raised which is inaudible due to the passing airplane,” as a remark imperturbably suggests [OSR 156]). All translations in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise noted.

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concerns that he explores in his work at that time and later. The reflection on modern science as grounded in a novel ontology with new possibilities and limitations constitutes the core of Jonas’s philosophical engagement with the understanding of human life as grounded in nature (in The Phenomenon of Life), and at the same time becomes the foundation for the moral normative stance toward securing the life of future generations (in The Imperative of Responsibility).2 REVOLUTION AND MODERNITY Modernity for Jonas is marked by a radical novelty, which transpires both in the new understanding of the world and in our self-understanding as being humans who determine how and what the world is in thought. The modern human capacity for thought is intentionally self-conscious, ruthlessly critical, and ceaselessly radical in the ultimate quest for the full transparency of both thinking itself and the world. This novelty amounts to revolution, which is a multifaceted phenomenon. In this context, Jonas is primarily interested in the vision and account of the new science. One might say that the “scientific revolution” of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries is anachronistically named after the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, it is probably the other way around: the political and social revolution is made possible as a realization of the new understanding of the world and especially of the human being. The opening statement of Jonas’s lectures runs: “ ‘Revolution’ suggests a sudden event. What is commonly understood when revolution is applied to change? It has a certain violence, a radical nature, a comprehensive scope. It is a word applied to major, not minor changes” (OSR 3).3 Put otherwise, revolution is an event that is (1) unexpected and unpredictable, which, however, appears certain and necessary after the event in its philosophical explanation and cultural procession, as presumably prefigured by the whole previous development. Revolution is (2) violent, insofar as it intends to establish a radical break, a rupture with the past, and to liberate itself from the deadening schemes of thought and action. As Jonas puts it: “We speak of revolution when the change in question—a collective change in human affairs—is radical in nature, comprehensive in scope, and

 Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. Hans Jonas and David Herr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 3  At the time when Jonas was delivering his lectures, Kuhn’s thesis about scientific revolution as the rapid change of paradigms became much discussed. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). 2

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concentrated in time.”4 This means that revolution also (3) occurs in a relatively short time span and (4) involves everyone, in one way or another, in the revolutionary activity. However, one should notice, first, that the time of scientific or artistic revolution is usually spread through two or three generations, from founders to their disciples. Second, revolution is collective action that brings about changes and transformations to the lives of many people, yet the active revolutionaries are themselves relatively few. Moreover, since the revolutionaries tend to critically distance themselves from existing institutions, quite often they are not professionals but rather vocational amateurs: Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz never held official university professorial positions. Furthermore, revolution is always (5) radical, which means that it always goes to the root, to the beginning, principle, ἀρχή, uprooting the old and planting the new (OSR 129, 133–4). And yet, similarly to the revolution of the sky, the new might be thought as the restoration of an original, simple, and true meaning of things that was later distorted or lost.5 Revolution allows for a new vision—a re-vision—of the world and our place and action in it—political, social, artistic, and scientific. Revolution thus presupposes the understanding of our previous activity as outdated and pre-revolutionary, and hence in need of a radical rethinking and change. In particular, the scientific revolution comes with (6) a new foundation of thought based on the new self-confidence and the distrust of authority, marked by the systematic doubt elevated by Descartes into the epistemological starting point that makes possible an entirely new knowledge (OSR 3–5).6 In short, revolution is marked by novelty and radicalism, and scientific revolution—by the new understanding of the world, which makes the world, at least for a while, an unusual place to observe and live in. For Jonas, among the main features of the scientific revolution that make this new picture recognizably different from the “premodern” one are: the new account of the cosmos in its (heliocentric) structure, the rethinking of the concept of the  Hans Jonas, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution,” in Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974), 45, cited in Jens Peter Brune, introduction, [OSR, xvii]. 5  See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1965), 42; Artemy Magun, Negative Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 6–8; Neithard Bulst, Jörg Fisch, Reinhart Koselleck and Christian Meier, “Revolution,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Bruner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), 653–788. 6  In Jonas’s words, “The Cartesian philosophy is the most radical expression of the new philosophy. In a sense it is a founding event, or feat, of modern philosophy as a whole” (OSR 165; see also 131). However, this Cartesian radicalism for Jonas is only a post factum assertion and ontologization of what the modern mind has come to believe and convinced itself: “Descartes offers his revolutionary upheaval as a kind of game, a post factum (for him) vindication of what he had convinced himself of before” (OSR 139). 4

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cause (by deposing the final causality), the introduction of the infinite into the world, the stressing of rational necessity along with empirical contingency, the disposal of the “occult qualities,” the rethinking of the notion of substance, the new understanding of motion and change by means of mathematics, and the introduction of the notion of quantifiable and mathematically expressible laws of nature (OSR 281). Similarly to most modern philosophers of science, Jonas takes the new science to be represented first and foremost by physics, particularly by celestial mechanics transposed and converted also to the study of the terrestrial motion that, for the first time in history, is grasped in its elusive change by the rigorous means of thinking primarily represented by mathematics. “What does the interpretation of nature mean?”—asks Jonas—“It means the explanation of changes, and these are in the last resort always motions and changes in conditions of motion that are observed by the laws of the new science of Newtonian physics” (OSR 188). The task of such an interpretation, then, is to account for the changes mathematically, rather than to explain their origin and end. For this reason, in what follows, I will mostly concentrate on the discussion of the new ontology and the role of mathematics in new science. THREE COMPONENTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION The new picture of the world that emerges as a result of the scientific revolution, according to Jonas, has new aesthetic, logical, and mathematical traits that explain its advantages over the old account (OSR 49). I will first discuss the aesthetic and the logical traits, although my primary interest is the mathematical aspect, to which the other two converge. New Aesthetics The aesthetic aspect of the scientific revolution transpires in two of its features: in the harmony of celestial motions in Kepler (OSR 33), and in the simplicity of the constituents of both the world and knowledge. Harmony attests to the either apparent or concealed beauty and first becomes visible in Renaissance painting, which is a sui generis “revolution” of returning to the ancient ways of depicting beautiful bodies and their interactions. Jonas, with his life-long interest and admiration for Renaissance painting (particularly for Giovanni Bellini), argues that the new painting both studies and stresses proportion and geometrically constructed perspective and depicts motion rather than static posture. One might also add that Renaissance painting presents and represents the phenomena according to their appearances and

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implicit mathematical laws and proportions, rather than in their inner static eternal essence. For this reason, the painters portray not only the surface of the body but also study its inside structure as the “instruments of motility,” as Jonas calls them—“the muscles and bones and joints”—that transpire through the dynamic depiction of the surface (OSR 16–17). Harmony, then, appears an aesthetic criterion for the evaluation of the newly discovered and depicted world. In particular, the principle of harmony becomes for Kepler not only an evaluative or descriptive principle, but an explanatory heuristic one. Such a harmony is primarily present in proportions, which are both seen and thought in painting, as well as in the motion of the planets, and are describable mathematically: “these mathematical proportions . . . were at the same time also the rational explanation of why the planets moved this way . . . the ideal mathematical form of movements is the reason for the movements to be that way” (OSR 34). Simplicity The other aesthetic constituent of new science is simplicity, which is both the simplicity of the world in its constituents and of the knowledge of this new world. Understanding nature as uniform and simple becomes fundamental for Galileo (OSR 68–71, 77), as well as for Newton, who says in Rule I of the Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy in the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy: “Nature does nothing in vain . . . for Nature is pleased with simplicity” (OSR 173).7 In describing such a nature, the thinkers of the newly seen and (re)discovered universe also make an “effort to achieve utter simplicity” (OSR 181). But what is this simplicity? It is the simplicity of both being and of the vision of this being. That the mottled multiplicity and the apparent variety of phenomena might have just a few underlying basic structures was commonly thought already in ancient physics in the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Yet, none of ancient thinkers considered it possible to study and describe the flux and transformation of natural things in the precise terms of mathematics. Plato describes the fundamental constituents of material things as geometrical triangles, yet never told us how they are translated into physical properties (e.g., weight) or how they can be applied to the study of locomotion (Tim. 53b–63e). And Aristotle provided a theory of change of natural things, which, however, was not mathematical but a qualitative study of the principles, elements, and causes of natural phenomena  Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, vol. 2, trans. Andrew Motte, rev. Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 392. See also Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, ed. A. Koyré and I. B. Cohen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972).

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(Phys. 184a10ff.; De gen et corr. 314a1ff.). For all antiquity, the study of being in ontology and mathematics is decisively different in its object and methods from the study of becoming in physics. But for modern science the being of the world is in becoming, which is why “the analysis of nature is ultimately the analysis of motions” (OSR 71). Moreover, the very terms in which motions can be conceived are quantifiable magnitudes and forces (OSR 73) that can be known and described by strict means, which are primarily mathematical. The new simple components of nature are physical atoms or particles, represented as and studied by mathematical indivisibles, which are rethought as infinitesimals by Newton and Leibniz.8 In cognition, these simple constituents are captured by simple ideas that allow for the reduction of the manifold complexity of phenomena to the simplicity of a few principles, elementary magnitudes, and basic forces (which in Newton account for two aspects of matter, inertia and gravity [OSR 186; see also 171, 175, 178, 182]) that should be then accessible to analysis in thought. As Jonas stresses, this simplicity of nature is a kind of axiom in the natural philosophy of Galileo.9 I would think, however, that it is much more a postulate, which means that rather than being self-evident, it becomes a task to be achieved and accomplished by the efforts of modern scientists and philosophers. Ideas and Method The new simplicity of the known is also reflected in the simplicity of the knower and the known, represented in ideas. Unlike the Platonic idea, which is the real, unchanging thing of which physical things are fluent and imprecise reproductions, the modern idea is a mental representation of a thing out there and as such is “something that is in me” (OSR 141). But since we can understand the world only in terms of and on the basis of ideas, then some of them, which Descartes famously labels “clear and distinct”,10 cannot be mistaken.11 Clear and distinct ideas that are perceived in such a way that one Newton investigates this already in his student Trinity Notebook, where he discusses the question “Of the First Matter” (see J. E. McGuire and M. Tamny, Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity Notebook [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 336–7).  9  Galileo Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. and ed. S. Drake (New York: The Modern Library, 2001); and Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican, trans. S. Drake (New York: The Modern Library, 2001). 10  René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, in Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, vol. 6 (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1902), 18 et passim; Discourse on the Method, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 119 et passim. 11  As Jonas puts it, “There must be trust in something. The central principle in Descartes is this: I must trust my own insight on the rigorous criterion that I let pass only what is clearly and distinctly perceived by me. . . . It is not a sweeping assertion about the nature of our mind, but it is a minimal  8 

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cannot be mistaken about them, their object, and the very act of perception, become then a “certificate of truth” (OSR 155). In the fully transparent and self-reflective act of perceiving, which at the same time is the act of knowing, the completely intelligible comes to coincide with the completely real (OSR 153), and thus with the undeniably true. In other words, in Jonas’s aphoristic formulation, “The epistemological simplicity is at the same time the ontologically elementary” (OSR 152). The ontological structure of the world, then, not only maps but also coincides with its epistemological reflection, both of which should be based on simple constituents. Therefore, clear and distinct ideas are themselves the elements of reality, and thus our knowledge of reality should be of the same kind and form as this reality is: clear, distinct, simple, and precise. To think the simple is simple, yet at the same time very difficult. For, on the one hand, one needs to think simple things: one needs ideas. But on the other hand, one needs to combine these things into formulations and propositions: one needs method. Since such a method is a further reflection of the postulated simplicity of the world and simple ideas, it should be, on the one hand, rational, unambiguous, and thus unique. And, on the other hand, it should be simple and easy to use, almost effortlessly leading to the understanding of the world and its properties (in Bacon’s Novum Organum,12 Descartes,13 and Leibniz [OSR 91, 129]). However, since the world (or at least the scientific ideal of the world) is complex in its phenomena yet simple in its principles and constituents, the complexity should be reduced (by metodo resolutivo in Galileo [OSR 70] and by analysis in Descartes [OSR 170–1]) to simple constituents, from which true propositions should be then deduced (by metodo compositivo in Galileo and synthesis in Descartes). In Jonas’s words, this is “a reduction of the complex and the obscure to the simple and therefore clear and distinct, and the recombination of these simple elements in a deductive process of reasoning which reconstructs the world from these simple natures” assertion—that at least something deserves trust.” (OSR 148). He continues: “The basic rule is: only to accept what is clearly and distinctly presented to me, and behind this rule there stands the more or less metaphysical conviction that what is clearly and distinctly perceived is not only true, but that what is presented in this clear and distinct manner . . . are ultimate elements of reality itself. The ultimacy of the reduction to the simple in terms of clearness and distinctness is at the same time the ultimacy of the reduction of nature to its own ontic elements” (OSR 152). 12  Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. L. Jardine and M. Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), bk. II. 13  “By a ‘method’ I mean reliable rules which are easy to apply, and such that if one follows them exactly, one never will take what is false to be true or fruitlessly expend one’s mental efforts, but will gradually and constantly increase one’s knowledge till one arrives at a true understanding of everything within one’s capacity” (René Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii, in Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, vol. 10 [Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1908], 372; see also Discours, 3; Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 16).

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(OSR 153). The two operations of the mind that make the method work are intuition and deduction.14 Intuition allows for understanding and grasping the “utterly simple ideas” (OSR 143), which themselves are not propositions; and deduction allows to connect and combine or—to use Plato’s metaphor (Polit. 305e–306a)—weave them together by means of the method’s rules into chains of reasoning arranges by “ordo et mesura”15 that lead, through divisions, arrangements, and enumerations, to true propositions and knowledge, including that of the world. Complex phenomena thus should be analyzable into simple notions, and then complex theories should be constructible out these simples, which are sui generis mathematical atoms. The two constituents of the method are therefore the analysis, for which the paradigm is the “algebra of the modern,”16 and synthesis, for which the pattern is the “geometry of the ancients.” Descartes himself stresses the importance of analysis, because of its simplicity, although both constituents are an integral part of the method.17 But what is important to stress is that the ideal of such a method is mathematics.18 The New Logic The new logic of scientific research starts by rejecting the Aristotelian syllogistic as a bare and merely formal way of drawing conclusions that are already contained in the premises, the veracity of which is either deceptively self-evident or based on a singular act of experience, rather than follows from a scientifically established theory supported by experiment. The new logic transpires primarily through the analytic method that allows for incorporating and studying empirical phenomena, and not just abstract logical propositions. In Bacon, it takes a decisively negative form of the “purification of reason” by the radical critique of previous forms of knowledge as “Idols” that prevent the humankind from making any progress in producing new knowledge (OSR 133–4).19 Such a catharsis should give way to providing new foundations of knowledge and science. The

 Descartes, Regulae, 372, 407–8.  Descartes, Regulae, 378, 451. 16  Descartes, Regulae, 373–7; Discours, 21. 17  Descartes, Discours, 17. 18  René Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, in Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, vol. 7 (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1904), 13. Jonas writes: “Geometers have always known that one deals with such complexity which the mind cannot directly and immediately handle, and how one deals with this is to reduce it to the simpler. . . . Any example of the reduction of a geometrical problem to such simple axioms and axiomatic entities as the straight line, angles, length, etc., is an example for the kind of method Descartes applies to the analysis of reality as a whole” (OSR 157). 19  See Francis Bacon, The New Organon, bk. 1. 14 15

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new scientific knowledge that follows the new logic is not just deduced from pure reason: it appears from the conjunction of the rational and the empirical, of intellect and senses and is thus actively produced; it is the knowledge achieved by doing (OSR 104). The Cartesian method only further codifies the same intention to establish a new science-oriented logic, which is then rendered fully scientific as a mathematical method in Leibniz and Newton. Because this new knowledge comes from a joint effort of reason and senses, where senses are directed by reason and reason is corrected by the senses, the empirical attitude toward the known undergoes a radical— revolutionary—change. The observation of nature yields to experiment, which already in Galileo and Bacon becomes an interrogation, coercion, or even torture, which puts nature under stress, in the conditions under which it is not normally seen but in which it starts confessing to what it usually does not do or say (OSR 61, 101–103, 123). Therefore, a scientist already needs to know, at least implicitly, what is meaningful to do and ask to extract knowledge from nature. In other words, we need either an explicitly or implicitly formulated program or “concept formation” (OSR 63) that would function as a theoretical framework allowing for new knowledge. This new theoretical framework, however, is not a matter of arbitrary choice, because the study of nature is ultimately defined by how nature is and by what our reason is capable of knowing about it. In other words, we need a new understanding of being that would allow for a new knowledge of nature. For Jonas, the new ontology remains implicit and not fully spelled out in most of the thinkers he discusses, and only in Descartes does it become “clear and distinct,” that is, explicitly and unambiguously formulated. In other words, a new ontology defines the new science: “I speak of an ontological revolution underlying and accompanying the scientific revolution” (OSR 128). We must be able to think ontological shifts and changes for, and prior to, being able to think the changes in our understanding of the world. If the ontological revolution is Cartesian, then it is primarily the change in the understanding of the self as a thinking self and its thoughts (especially those that are clear and distinct) that allows for the new picture of the world as the other of the thinking self. While Bacon does the work of cleaning the field for the new science, the new ontology in its positive formulation is provided by Descartes. Rejecting the scholastic Aristotelian understanding of substance as a concrete this, τόδε τι, which logically can only be in the position of the subject and never that of the predicate, Descartes rethinks the notion of substance as (1) uniquely and unambiguously characterized by its single essential attribute, (2) divided into finite and infinite, and (3) produced in its very concept by the

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finite thinking substance.20 Under the Cartesian framework, that substance now does not refer to an existing thing but is constituted in its concept by thinking, is itself a fundamental turn in modern ontology. The external world, whose independent existence is also ascertained by Descartes from within thinking,21 turns out to be the real other of thought. In this way, the whole of the existing reality is split into two different mutually independent (possibly depending in their existence on the infinite substance), complementary and exclusive substances of thought and matter, res cogitans and res extensa, where the former studies both itself (in philosophy) and its other (in science). Thus, the modern split between the subject and the world is established by the subject, who in this very act also establishes itself as autonomous. The studied and understood world, which is the realm of science, is now marked and defined by dualisms: of mind and body, thought and thinking, mind and will, the internal and the external, the science of the mind and the science of nature, and the later Kantian distinction between the transcendental ego and the phenomenal world (OSR 108–109, 151–2, 154, 162, 195). As Jonas puts it, Because clear and distinct attribution of the essential attribute to one side means at the same time denial of the other attribute to it. This mutual exclusiveness of the attributes of extension and thought is somehow the radical, logical premise for an unimpeded application of the new science to its own domain, the domain of nature as a whole. Nature is reinterpreted as being external nature, res extensa, and nothing else. Never before has such a conception of nature been conceived. The previous development moved towards it, but it was Descartes who made this into a new general doctrine of the nature of things as created by God. (OSR 164; see also 154, 161, 165, 196–7)

Even the simultaneous complementarity and exclusion of the two substances is itself a dualism! Mathematization of the World As Jonas rightly points out, one of the central features of the ontological and scientific revolutions is the mathematization of the world, to which he constantly comes back in his lectures (OSR 11, 59, 128, 167 et passim). Mathematization means not only the acceptance of the underlying structures of the cosmos as mathematical, proportional, and beautiful, as they are perceived by the Pythagoreans and Plato but also by Kepler and Galileo, but  Descartes, Meditationes, 44–45.  Descartes, Meditationes, 71–90.

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rather that the world is describable in its transformations and changes by mathematical means. The new physico-mathematical approach, then, further implies the exclusion of occult qualities and final causes (OSR 167) as not quantifiable, and thus the reduction of the qualitative (which was the physical for Aristotle) to the quantitative (OSR 77, 156–8). The mathematization of the world thus means not only that we see the mathematical objects in and behind natural phenomena or that the book of nature is written, as Galileo famously says, in the language of mathematics of which the words are lines, triangles, and circles (OSR 26).22 It much more means that we should be able to formulate the very laws of nature as mathematically describable laws of motion, as Newton does (OSR 171ff.). The presuppositions behind, or the conditions of the possibility of, this new scientific mathematical description are, first, that only locomotion is considered as motion, and not just any change, which κίνησις encompassed for Aristotle (Phys. 224a21ff.).23 And second, that any motion of any body—either cosmic or “sublunar,” up there or down here—can be described by such laws, by the same method and mathematical procedure. This had never been possible in ancient physics, which separated being from becoming or change, and therefore refused to apply mathematics to the study of ever-fluent things. As a motion through the uniform res extensa considered as threedimensional, homogeneous Euclidean space (OSR 171),24 locomotion is best represented by the elementary act of drawing an imaginary line (OSR 159).25 For modern science, including Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, the construction or drawing of such a line is best described not geometrically, as ancient mathematicians describe it, but algebraically, by establishing a purely functional relationship between two sets (of spatial locations and temporary moments). New mathematics is thus based on the concept of relation, rather than of non-relational substance, which is now reserved to characterize both the knowing mind and the known medium in which the motion takes place. This is, in Jonas’ words, “the difference between what is something entirely by itself [substance] and what is added to it . . . by relations” (OSR 175–6). Indeed, substances are qualitative; only relations can be quantified.  Galileo, Assayer, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo Galilei, 237–8.  See Hans Jonas, “Antiker und moderner Sinn einer Mathematiker der Natur,” in Organismus und Freiheit. Philosophie des Lebens und Ethik der Lebenswissenschaften, ed. Horst Gronke, vol. 1.1 of Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke von Hans Jonas. (KGA) (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2010), 128–35. 24  “By ‘extension’ we mean whatever has length, breadth and depth, leaving aside the question whether it is a real body or merely a space” (Descartes, Regulae, 442; Rules, 59). Jonas writes, “Space equals that which Euclidean geometry applies to, or which satisfies descriptions of such geometry” (OSR 75). 25  See Dmitri Nikulin, Matter, Imagination and Geometry: Ontology, Natural Philosophy and Mathematics in Plotinus, Proclus and Descartes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 210–30. 22 23

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The new physically oriented mathematics thus allows for the description of quantities as related to each other not as substantial units but in the process of their change or in motion. For this reason, “A law of nature is a certain correlation of measurable quantities” (OSR 35).26 The preference of algebra and functional analysis to geometry and substantial description, the rethinking of geometry as algebraic, thus constitutes an important premise that makes the mathematical formulation of kinematics possible.27 The Simplicity and Precision of Mathematics In Jonas’s reconstruction of the new ontology and science, Descartes establishes mathematics as the model for certainty in the cognition of the world. Despite the split between the two substances, which Jonas takes to be the decisive ontological moment of the scientific revolution, both should be clearly and distinctly known, which means that “the truth of reality lends itself, or corresponds, to rational knowledge, that rationality does apprehend the true nature of things. . . . reality is rational in its ultimate constitution” (OSR 146–7).28 Therefore, both mind and nature as the substantial constituents of reality should be known essentially in the same way. And if the mind’s knowledge is arranged according to the method that is modeled on mathematics, then nature too should be known mathematically. This is why, Jonas writes, “Descartes wants to transform all knowledge into mathematical knowledge, but . . . he wants to learn from mathematical knowledge something for his universal method: some formal procedure” (OSR 145). The exemplary advantage of mathematics consists in the simplicity and precision of the knowledge it provides. For modern science, mathematics becomes the appropriate method of studying nature, because nature is itself simple in its foundations, even if it appears complex in its phenomena. For this reason, as Jonas says, “Nature does everything in the simplest way  Thus, Galileo understands velocity as a “simple relation of time and space” (OSR 64).  See René Descartes, La Geometrie, in Œuvres de Descartes, vol. 6, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1902), 367–485; and Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, trans. W. C. Swabey and M. Collins (New York: Dover, 1953). 28  In Jonas’s account, “Only that is true knowledge which is absolutely certain knowledge. Absolutely certain knowledge I can have only of that of which I have clear and distinct perception. Clear and distinct perception I can have only of the ultimately simple ideas which I find in my consciousness. Unless it is only a derivative part of reality that plays the game, as it were, i.e., satisfies this requirement that it corresponds to the clearly and distinctly perceived ideas—if it were only a marginal, insignificant slice of reality which lives up to this requirement, then I would be left with a body of knowledge that is certain, which fulfills the requirement of certainty, but which would not fulfill another vital requirement of knowledge, namely, that it is knowledge of the world. But this cannot be, because then we would not have knowledge. Therefore, that which satisfies the requirement of certain knowledge also satisfies another requirement, namely, to be the element of all reality” (OSR 146–7). 26 27

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and behaves so that the mathematical reconstruction will fit nature” (OSR 74).29 And thus, “The simplicity of nature is equivalent to its mathematical form. The simplicity and mathematics have a certain relation to each other. Mathematics can be complex, but the mathematical solution to a problem is always the simplest” (OSR 63). It is on the basis of simple mathematical concepts, elements, principles, and rules of deduction that the new science, beginning with Galileo, is capable of constructing scientific explanations of complex natural processes. Mathematics is an—or even the—expression of the way two independent substances—mind and matter—are and the way they can be known. The mind is mathematical because it thinks simply and precisely in terms and concepts that can be easily arranged mathematically by the mind’s selfprescribed and self-extracted method. And matter is mathematical since it is equally simple and for this reason can be considered ordered, mathematical, Euclidean extension. Both mind and matter (or nature) are, as it were, already co-mathematical. Mathematics permeates both the mind and the world, yet the relation between the two is asymmetrical, since the one knows itself reflectively, and the other is known by its other. For this reason, mathematics can be considered by the mathematical mind not only as descriptive of the way things are but also as prescriptive: by looking at things scientifically, the mind must already see them as mathematical, as reflecting the same patterns and structures that the mind finds in itself. The mathematics of the mind is disguised as the method, and the mathematics of the world appears as the laws of the ordered physical world. Since the science of modernity is primarily physics that studies motion, then, as Jonas puts it, “the ideal mathematical form of movements is the reason for the movements to be that way. . . . The mathematical form is not only the result. It is itself the cause of the working, the function, of the system” (OSR 34–35). Mathematics, therefore, becomes the conceptual framework that allows Galileo and Newton to understand and mathematically formulate the laws of physical motion and the general mechanics of nature, and on the basis of this understanding, stage meaningful experiments that discover new truths about nature (see OSR 71, 81, 122, 177). The Source of the Mathematization A major question here is why does it become possible to describe and study the world mathematically, both at macro- and micro-level? If the world is essentially mathematical, as is our thought, and both are independent of each other, where does this affinity come from? The mathematization of the world  “If nature is essentially mathematical, then every true statement about nature must be in mathematical, i.e., non-qualitative, terms” (OSR 75).

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in its entirety was unthinkable in ancient science, where only the celestial— the divine—could be considered embodying the mathematical order. The question of the possibility of mathematical physics is rarely discussed in modern science, which almost takes it for granted that we live in a world that has already been measured and mathematized, and we simply see it this way. The ontological and scientific revolution results in a new world, in which revolution itself becomes an integral part and thus does not recognize its view of the new nature as “unnatural” (OSR 196). Only a close look at non-modern science allows us to recognize that our modern view of nature as intrinsically mathematical is not immediately self-evident.30 If the Cartesian ontology indeed underlies the scientific revolution, then the source of the possibility of understanding the world as mathematical should be either in the knower or in the known. In other words, the mathematical mind should either recognize the world as (co-)mathematical—or impose itself onto the world, thus making it mathematical. The constructivist position, which suggests that there is nothing mathematical in the world until we intentionally or unwittingly see it as such, is famously defended by Kant.31 Yet for Descartes, the mathematical structure of the world cannot be instituted by thought or constructed into the world, since it contradicts the mutual independence of the two finite substances. The realist position, on the contrary, takes the world as already mathematical. Such a world is considered by most thinkers of the scientific revolution, including Kepler, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton, as created or produced by the infinite maker. In this light, the early modern realist position becomes a version of constructivism, where the source of the production of the world as mathematical is not the finite human mind but rather the infinite divine one. For Kepler, as Jonas argues, “The form of things is the cause of things” (OSR 38), and this form is simple, beautiful, and mathematical, and originates in the divine mind. The divine mind is mathematical already in the Timaeus (Tim. 31b–36d), although there it establishes mathematical structures only as the foundation for the cosmos as a whole and its celestial motion, not reaching down to particular transformations. The modern divine mathematician, on the contrary, is the infinite thinking substance that supports the two finite substances by continuously and momentarily supporting or recreating

 See Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). See also Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. R. M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975). 31  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Benno Erdmann, vols. 3–4 of Werke, ed. Wilhelm Dilthey, and vols. 1–9 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Prussian Academy of the Sciences (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1911), B20ff; see also OSR 171, 194–5. 30

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them (OSR 172).32 God as a mathematician makes sure that when we think correctly, we think mathematically, and that the world is mathematical not only in its overall structure but also in all its transformations, changes, and motions. In Jonas’s words, It is because in God’s mind mathematical harmonies were established as the true plan, the constitutive of creation, that creation exhibits these features. In other words, the intelligibility which is not a plain one but a very subtle one, requiring the utter sophistication which Kepler had to master in order to discover these laws,—this subtle sophisticated mathematical structure of things is itself of a mind origin. It originates in a [divine] mind and in the human mind it comes, as it were, to recognition. The physical evidence therefore is intermediate between the intelligible, intellectual cause of things and the intellectual recipient in man. Thus man, the human mind, in discovering laws has not discovered something strange to man, but something which is, in his own originative principle or source, of a mind-like nature. (OSR 34–5; see also 191–3, where Jonas writes with reference to Newton)

Jonas recognizes the importance of the Judeo-Christian heritage for the rise of the new science, with its emphasis on the primacy of the infinite and of the will. Nonetheless, this theological heritage alone cannot explain the scientific revolution, which needs additional factors to become actual (OSR 125–7).33 However, the possibility that the intrinsic mathematization of the world is of divine origin is not an option for Jonas. In “Is God a Mathematician?” he explicitly rejects the hypothesis that God is a mathematician and the designer of a precisely calculable universe. On his account, such a god would not be able to understand and account for life, given its “inwardness” and purposiveness. Modern mathematical physics is unable to explain the phenomenon of the organism, because the new science excludes final causality, whereas for Jonas, “there is no organism without teleology.”34 In other words, where life and the organism begin, mathematics stops. For this reason, the soul for

 René Descartes, Le monde, in Œuvres de Descartes, vol. 11, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1909), 37; Descartes to Hyperaspistes, August 1651, in Correspondance: Janvier 1640–Juin 1643, vol. 3 of Œuvres de Descartes, Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1899), 429. 33  See Hans Jonas, “Jewish and Christian Elements in Philosophy: Their Share in the Emergence of the Modern Mind,” in Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man, 21–44. 34  Hans Jonas, “Is God a Mathematician?,” in The Phenomenon of Life, 91. See also Hans Jonas, “The Burden and Blessing of Mortality,” The Hastings Center Report 22, no. 1 (1992): 34–40; and “The Unanswered Question: Some Thoughts on Science, Atheism, and the Notion of God,” in La domanda senza risposta: Alcune riflessioni su scienza, ateismo e la nozione di Dio, ed. E. Spinelli (Genova: Il Nuovo Melangolo, 2001). 32

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Descartes is only the thinking ego, and not the principle of life (OSR 163). The remarkable success of modern science in the explanation of the motion of physical bodies nevertheless stops short of explaining life in the same mathematico-mechanical terms. Despite considerable interest in biology, which starts with Descartes and Leibniz, modern science failed to apply the same mathematical program to the account for life.35 But for Jonas, it is life that becomes the fundamental phenomenon that he addresses in his philosophical and ethical program.36 Jonas rejects the constructivist account in favor of the realist position, which he considers in more detail in The Phenomenon of Life,37 while at the same time rejecting the hypothesis that God is the source of the mathematization of the world. And yet, Jonas does not have an explanation for the mathematization of the world. This is indeed a major and most vexing question, to which Jonas does not provide an answer. For him, in the last instance, “It was the fortunate coincidence that the first great object on which the new science tried itself was indeed such an object that exhibited these clean, clear mathematical characteristics” (OSR 33). In other words, the wonder of the new mathematical science is unexplainable.38 The Imprecision of Physical Bodies vs. the Precision of Mathematical Objects One of the difficulties the new science faces is the problem of exactitude or precision: while mathematical objects and calculations are precise, the physical phenomena—the bodies in their dimensions, forms, and motions—are not. In his lectures, Jonas does not directly address the problem of the incongruity between the precision and simplicity of mathematics and the imprecision of physical phenomena that are nevertheless described mathematically. This discrepancy might be caused either (a) by the inability of the mathematical  Descartes’s approach to life is mechanistic and eventually fails to explain the organism as merely a machine, whereas Leibniz’ is based on the idea of the gradation and genealogy of life as an all-pervasive, yet not a mathematical phenomenon, which is probably why Leibniz is conspicuously missing in Jonas’ lectures. See Hans Jonas, “Philosophical Aspects of Darwinism,” in The Phenomenon of Life, 53–58. 36  Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility; and “Antiker und moderner Sinn einer Mathematiker der Natur.” 37  Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses,” in The Phenomenon of Life, 135–56. 38  Says Jonas: “I have never been able to answer for myself in a satisfactory way, what made it that in that moment such an improbable thing as modern science arose? . . . Certainly there is no satisfactory philosophy of why the book of nature should be written in mathematical symbols, why certain assumptions had an overwhelming convincingness—they had it for him [Galileo]—fortunately. But, for instance, to conceive of motion as he did is by no means a very plausible thing. There is the fact that nobody before had viewed motion in these terms. So, in my opinion, there is a certain unresolved residue there where all our explanations fall short” (OSR 127–8). 35

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approach to describe the physical reality at the microlevel, which, as we think now, might behave differently, in which case there would be no real identity of the laws of motion “up there” and “down here” (in the elementary particles). Yet even quantum mechanics is subject to mathematics, although, unlike classical mechanics, it deals with probabilistic distributions. In fact, the germ of this approach was developed already by Pascal but was not used in the scientific revolution for the description of motion of bodies that was considered strictly deterministic. Or (b) the mathematical explanation and description of physical things is in fact precise, but the physical phenomena themselves are imprecise and cannot be strictly measured or mathematically described. In each case, then, we would only have to work with mathematical approximation and idealization. Descartes is well aware of this problem, for he recognizes in the Geometry an insuperable gap between perfect geometrical figures and never precisely measurable and always irregular physical bodies, which these figures are meant to describe and represent.39 In this case, the physical phenomena either cannot be really explained mathematically, or they only appear imprecise. Jonas clearly sides with the latter option, assuming that historically the dichotomy between true (mathematical) essences and sensible (physical) appearances is already established in Kepler. In this case, if the truth of things is mathematical, then it should be only thinkable and thus hidden from immediate perception. Therefore, by means of mathematics, thinking discovers quantities that represent the true (hidden and only thinkable) essence of things, whereas sense-perception discovers qualities that constitute their appearance, which is “the symbols or the signs” of things (OSR 36).40 This is exactly what modern science does: it translates the qualitative, sensible physical differences into thinkable, quantitative mathematical descriptions, and then retranslates them back into the qualitative, which is then located in the mathematically measured materiality.41 The novel Cartesian world is the

 As Descartes explains, “For although we cannot include in Geometry any lines that are like cords— that is to say, sometimes straight and sometimes—because the ratios between straight and curved lines are unknown, and even, I believe, unknowable to men, so that we cannot thereby reach any exact and assured conclusions: nevertheless, because we use cords in these constructions only to determine straight lines whose length we know exactly, we must not entirely reject them” (Descartes, Geometry II, 412; Geometry, in Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meterology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001], 206–207.). 40  “To know the real meaning of a quality means to reduce it to quantitative facts” (OSR 77). 41  “Because in our external representations we can discern certain features which are clear and distinct, therefore they are more than mere thoughts of our thinking. They must be veridical. What is clearly and distinctly perceived has been reinstated as true, i.e., the extensional properties of the external world. And the non-clear and non-distinct parts are substitutes for the clearly and distinctly perceivable, i.e., for the extensional quantities, and the business of science is to retranslate what the senses have first translated from terms of extension into terms of quality back into terms of extension, and that has been the program of science from Descartes’ time to this day” (OSR 159). 39

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world of extension, and its imperfection is only a visible, phenomenal one: it is the imperfection of the translation of the extended things by the senses into the language of qualities. According to Jonas, for Galileo qualities are subjective . . . and the objective nature of nature is what is mathematically and quantitatively formulable. Now, since the reality of qualities cannot be denied, that means that what has its seat in man is of a different kind from that which has its seat in the external world. . . . We must make that distinction between the subjective nature of certain of our phenomena and the objective nature of others where the nature of things is adequately represented. (OSR 128; see also 90)

While primary qualities still belong to nature, which is extended and mathematical, secondary qualities are produced by sense-perception, which is thus in Jonas’s account ultimately responsible for the incongruity between mathematical precision and perceptible inexactitude.42 In other words, it is we who make an inevitable misjudgment or mistake in the perception of the pure geometry of the world. For the new science, therefore, the essences are mathematical, thinkable, and precise, while appearances are physical, sensible, and imprecise. CRITICISM Thus, Jonas’s two major claims are, first, that the ontological revolution is the condition of the possibility for the scientific revolution, because the ontological framework allows us to see the world differently and anew, as well to ask questions and stage experiments that did not make sense and were not possible before. And second, it is Descartes who most clearly expresses this new ontology, which presupposes a split—both the opposition and complementarity—between the thinking, the mental, “subjective,” “inner,” or the knower—and the extended, the physical, “objective,” “outer,” or the known. And in these two substances, it is their co-substantial simplicity and clarity that become fundamental for the new knowledge or science, which then can be expressed in strict mathematical terms. There is a major problem with this approach, though, which Jonas detects but does not have ultimately an answer to: How and why is the simultaneous mathematization of the world and the mind possible? It is important to note that the modern Cartesian dualistic rupture does not allow for anything  “The person observing creates the qualities. Secondary qualities are produced in the act of perception” (OSR 76).

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ontologically intermediate or mediating between the mind and the world. Yet, in ancient Platonic science (in Plato, Iamblichus, and Proclus), mathematical objects were distributed through various ontological realms and studied by various cognitive faculties. Thus, arithmetic examined numbers, which were distinguished into the ideal numbers identical with the forms— and into mathematical numbers identified with their logical representations. Geometry, on the other hand, studied figures that belonged to a different realm of being, intermediate between the ideal or purely thinkable and the physical. While numbers were in the province of reason (ideal numbers were though by the non-discursive intellect-νοῦς, and mathematical by the discursive reasoning-διάνοια), and bodies were subject to sense-perception (αἴσθησις), geometrical figures are known and produced by imagination (φαντασία). On this interpretation, geometrical objects are both distinct from the ideal and physical entities (from the former—in that they are divisible, from the latter—in that they are unchangeable) and, at the same time, have something in common with both of them (with ideal objects— precision and unchangeable properties, with physical bodies—extension as represented in the imagination). In this way, both the geometrical objects and their corresponding mental faculty of imagination were intermediate (μεταξύ) between the thinkable and the sensible, which they both mediated and separated.43 The radicalism of the modern Cartesian ontological revolution consists precisely in the expulsion of the intermediate from both ontology and cognition, which was an inadvertent yet necessary consequence of the rigid ontological split between two finite substances. Being mutually exclusive and complementary, they do not need, and do not allow for, mediation. Thereby, the intermediate is eliminated. Besides, in the Platonic understanding of the order of being, the soul, which was the principle of life, was also intermediate between the ideal and the physical. But when the new ontology identifies the mind with abstract thinking modeled on mathematics and posits the essence of nature in geometry (OSR 170), it becomes unable to account for life and the complexity and functioning of the organism. The new scientific world has no purpose (because the final cause has been expurgated) and no life (which has been identified with abstract mathematical thinking). One of the consequences of the Cartesian ontological split is the suppression of the whole realm of intermediate entities, which in antiquity were associated with extended yet perfect geometrical figures, both thinkable and imaginable. This move enables not only the dichotomy of two complementary substances but also the imposition of one (geometrical as  Dmitri Nikulin, “Imagination and Mathematics in Proclus,” Ancient Philosophy 28, no. 1 (2008), 153–72.

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thinkable) onto the other (physical as extended and now also geometrical), as well as the identification of the thinkable non-extended numbers with the extended geometrical objects through the introduction of the system of coordinates. The physical, then, is substituted with the geometrical, which is then studied and described formally—algebraically and functionally. The identification or non-distinction of discrete numbers and continuous magnitudes, carefully differentiated in ancient science, particularly by Aristotle (Phys. 207b1–27, 232a23–5), becomes the major presupposition for the possibility of the scientific cognition of the world. The physical, reduced to simple magnitudes and forces (see OSR 73), is now seen, studied, and reduced to the geometrical. In this way, the new scientific world is already unwittingly built as mathematical. Yet, Descartes is unable to explain why geometrical figures are precise, whereas physical bodies, represented by geometrical objects, are not.44 For he cannot properly locate the mathematical qua geometrical objects: they have to belong both to the res extensa (as extended) and to the res cogitans (as precise and thinkable), which, however, are mutually exclusive. Because he expels the intermediate, Descartes is unable to give a satisfactory answer about where the mathematical (geometrical) properly belongs: in the physical, bodily, and extended—or in the mental, thinkable, and not extended? Therefore, the Cartesian attempt to think things clearly fails at its very foundational moment. The incapacity to explain the ontological status of geometrical objects becomes emblematic of modern science’s inability to account for the mathematization of the new world in terms of non-theological realism, and to further explain why in the last instance, we are actually able to see and study the world as mathematical.

 René Descartes, Responsio ad quintas objectiones, in Œuvres de Descartes, vol. 7, 385. See also Nikulin, Matter, Imagination and Geometry, 117–20.

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Productive Imagination

The problem of imagination—of what it is and how it works—has occupied not only the imagination of the poets but also the thinking of philosophers for centuries. Yet it gets reimagined and rethought in each epoch in accordance with the current imaginative self-understanding of the thinking subject. Not only do we reproduce imagination, but imagination equally seems to produce and creatively reinvent us. In an attempt to answer the question about the meaning of the productive imagination, I begin with Aristotle’s theory of imagination, which is then creatively developed by Proclus. I then move on to a discussion of Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, and Kant, all of whom appropriate and reinterpret the transmitted Aristotelian account and, responding both to Aristotle and to each other, come up with a set of insights that constitute our modern understanding of the productive imagination. I will argue, first, that the imagination embraces and lives off negativity more than any other cognitive faculty. This enables the imagination to try and achieve autonomy as something productive, independently of sensation and thinking—an attitude that is exemplified in the modern understanding of the role of productive imagination in art. However, despite its best efforts, productive imagination cannot get rid of its dependence on, and mediation between, sensation and thinking. Such a mediating relation is revealed in the workings of memory. I thus argue, second, that since imagination is the production and preservation of images, it is fundamentally indispensable for the proper functioning of memory. Yet this mnemonic role of the imagination gets blurred and forgotten in modern philosophy because of the imagination’s attempt at negative self-assertion. Hence, one needs to genealogically recollect and systematically restore the connection of the productive imagination with memory. 229

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FACULTY Although it is Plato who is the first to use the term “φαντασία” (Rep. 382e), later translated as imaginatio, he does not come up with a consistent theory of imagination, and one needs to make a considerable effort to reconstruct it from his texts. It is Aristotle who turns φαντασία into an imagination that is indispensable for any discussion of the representation of the natural, social, cultural, and mental world (De an. 427a19ff). Most importantly, he takes imagination to be a capacity (δύναμις, which is translated by the Latin facultas or capacitas, but also stands for potentiality). A capacity, for Aristotle, is something that allows us to perform certain operations and thus bring about a change—to produce a state or a thing. A capacity is not acquired (as is habituation or disposition, ἕξις) but is there as part of our make-up and is determined by the corresponding activity and its objects. The activity (ἐνέργεια or ἐντελέχεια) thus takes priority over capacity both ontologically and logically, although capacity often temporally precedes the corresponding activity (Met. 1049b4ff.). We already have many different capacities for acting in various ways, but we realize each capacity in action and come to understand it only when we actually act. Imagination is understood by Aristotle as the mental capacity or ability by which we discern (κρίνομεν) and tell the right from the wrong (De an. 428a3–4). And that is what imagination remains to this day: it acts as a capacity, as a mental power, even though its activity and objects can be understood very differently. It is the same for Wolff: the “power of the soul” (die Kraft der Seele).1 For Baumgarten (who still uses the original term, phantasia), imagination is a faculty, facultas imaginandi, which is a cognitive faculty of the soul, facultas cognoscitiva (Vermögen zu erkennen).2 And for Kant, imagination is equally a power of the soul, or Einbildungskraft.3 Yet the knowledge of a capacity is never immediate but only comes after and from its use, when it is activated and made to act. Only then do we become reflectively aware of our having a capacity to do something, which  Christian Wolff, Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt, vol. 2.1 of Deutsche Schriften, ser. 1 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Jean École et al. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1983), §235; henceforth VG, followed by section number. All translations in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise noted. 2  Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1963); Metaphysics: A Critical Translation with Kant’s Elucidations, Selected Notes, and Related Material, trans. Courtney D. Fugate and John Hymers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), §§519–20, 558; henceforth M, followed by section number. 3  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Benno Erdmann, vols. 3–4 of Werke, ed. Wilhelm Dilthey, vols. 1–9 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Prussian Academy of the Sciences (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1911), B151; henceforth KrV, followed by page numbers of the A or B editions; Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 1

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we then call a “faculty” (VG §192). Thus, a faculty is known on the one hand from its activity, when the possibility of doing something becomes actual. On the other hand, we come to know a faculty from the study of its objects. We all have the capacity to see, but we see only when we are seeing and seeing the things that we see. Only then we can realize what seeing is: what it means to see and what it means to see a thing. Such an approach can go a long way: in physical things, one could claim that the capacity for a body to get warm comes from the corresponding faculty. It is precisely this understanding of physical activity, as resulting from a hypothetical “occult” capacity, that the modern science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries vigorously objected to. Yet the knowledge of the “inner” activity of the mind still remained to a great extent based on the Aristotelian faculties model. For every significant phenomenon, then, there should have been a faculty, the position for which Nietzsche has famously ridiculed Kant. Thus, if we detect moral phenomena, there should be a moral capacity; for volitional acts, there should be the capacity of will. And yet, Aristotle remained happily unaware of both. Thus, the activity of a faculty is determined by its objects, which are different and distinct for every faculty or capacity. Imagination, in particular, is defined by its images. Already Plato, without mentioning imagination by name, speaks about the soul as a “painter” capable of producing mental images—φαντάσματα (Phil. 40a). But it is Aristotle who defines imagination as the capacity to have an image (φάντασμα τι). However, he does not claim, as it often supposed, that imagination produces its images, but rather that the images or φαντάσματα occur or happen to us (ἡμῖν γίγνεσθαι) because of the capacity of imagination (De an. 428a1–2). But what are these imaginary images? The φαντάσματα, as the concept’s derivation from the verb φαίνω suggests—“to bring to light,” “make known,” “reveal,” “give light,” “shine,” “appear”—has to do with the appearance of the imagined in such a way that it shows or reveals itself to a mental “gaze.” It is something that is “seen,” an “appearance” and “apparition” of a thing in the absence of that thing. Despite the imagination’s apparent ability to represent the heard, the tasted, the touched, and the smelled, its paradigmatic object in Aristotle is the representation as seeing or inner vision. The imagined is therefore as if “before the eyes” (πρὸ ὀμμάτων), so that we are as if “watching pictures” (ἐν γραφῇ) (De an. 427b18, 24, 428a6–7). Imaginary images are hence taken as pictorial or picture-like and they continue to be understood as such in modernity, which takes seeing or vision as the paradigm for both thinking and imagination. For Wolff, as later for Kant, imagination is the power of the soul to bring forth the representations (Vorstellungen) of things that are currently not present, which are the images of imagination, the term for which, Einbildungen, is

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derived from Bild—“image” or “picture” (VG §235).4 The representations of the imaginary objects are thus visualizations or images of things or states that are (1) inner representations of those things or states in their absence and (2) are immediately recognizable from their imaginary visualization or “picturing.” Baumgarten expresses this attitude: I am conscious of my past state [conscius sum status mei], and hence, of a past state of the world. The representation [repraesentatio] of a past state of the world, and hence of my past state, is an image (imagination, a sight, a vision) [phantasma (imaginatio, visum, visio)]. Therefore, I form images or imagine [formo, seu imaginor] through the power of the soul for representing [vis animae repraesentatiua] the universe according to the position of my body. (M §557)5

Imagination is thus a mental “vision” that “sees” and recognizes its objects the way they appear to our inner mental gaze from a particular imaginary point of view (“according to the position of my body”), without, however, yet knowing the properties of those imaginary visualized representations or “phantasms.” INTERMEDIATENESS From the observation of various mental operations and different types of their objects we come to recognize a whole plurality of different cognitive faculties (see KrV B677), most notably, besides imagination, sense-perception or sensibility (of which, for Kant, there are five empirical kinds of perception but only two a priori forms—space and time), and reason. Of reason too there are different kinds, the discursive logical reasoning or διάνοια (which later becomes understanding or Verstand), moral reason or φρόνησις (which later becomes practical reason), and the non-discursive reason or νοῦς (which later becomes reason proper or Vernunft). The opposition between sensation and reason is established by the opposition of external/internal (in Aristotle) or multiplicity/unity (in Plato and Kant), and by the role they play in the constitution of knowledge and experience. Aristotle already famously claims that imagination is different from both sense-perception and discursive thinking  “Die Vorstellungen solcher Dinge, die nicht zugegen sind, pfleget man Einbildungen zu nennen. Und die Kraft der Seele dergleichen Vorstellungen hervorzubringen, nennet man die Einbildungskraft” (VG §235). 5  For Baumgarten, sensation is the reflexive representation of the current mental state: “I think about my present state. Therefore, I represent my present state, i.e. I sense it [Cogito statum meum praesentem. Ergo repraesento statum meum praesentem, i.e. sentio]” (M §534). 4

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(φαντασία γὰρ ἕτερον καὶ αἰσθήσεως καὶ διανοίας) (De an. 427b14–15). But how are these faculties different? Again, they differ as faculties that have different activities and different objects, so that the φαντάσματα of imagination are distinct both from the sensations and from the objects of thought. The important difference is that the imagination’s images can exist without sensation, for instance, in sleep, and that sensations are always present, while images are not (De an. 428a5–9). Yet as a faculty, imagination is not just different from sensation and discursive reason or understanding—it is intermediate between the two. For Aristotle, imagination has its origin in sensation, which provides the model for its inner visualizations. But at the same time, thinking is itself impossible without imagination because imagination provides a kind of pictorial diagram in which thinking can then discern certain properties (Mem. 449b31–450a2). Imagination is thus not only different from sensation and thinking but also connects them, both separating and uniting the two. However, at this point, Wolff and Baumgarten (M §520–1) dissent from Aristotle in considering imagination, together with sensation, an “inferior” cognitive faculty, opposed to the “superior” faculty of understanding. As Wolff later argues, while we come to concepts (Begriffe) by recognizing similarities and differences in our perceptions and imaginations (VG §273), the understanding in its cognition differs from both sense-perception and imagination, because the images or representations of the imagination can be clear but not yet distinct, as in the understanding (VG §277ff.). In his Anthropology (§15), Kant also considers sensibility to consist of two parts, sense and the power of imagination.6 However, in the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant is concerned with the way categories of understanding apply to objects of the senses, he goes with Aristotle, famously claiming that imagination is a pure synthesis that binds plurality of sensation with the unity of thinking.7 While sensation is an a priori manifold of pure intuition (many), imagination is the synthesis of this manifold (one-many), and only the concept of understanding gives this synthesis unity (one), which results in cognition and knowledge (KrV B104). Because our intuitions are sensible for Kant, imagination belongs to sensibility; but because synthesis is an exercise of spontaneity, imagination as the a priori synthesis (figurative synthesis, synthesis speciosa)  Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden, in Anthropology, History, and Education, trans. Mary Gregor et al., ed. Günther Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 227–429 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, ed. Oswald Külpe, in vol. 7 of Werke, ed. Wilhelm Dilthey, vols. 1–9 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Prussian Academy of the Sciences (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1907), 153; henceforth A, followed by section number, where applicable, and, in brackets, the Academy edition volume and page numbers. 7  See Beatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 35ff. 6

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is also the expression of understanding. This is the imagination as the transcendental, which has affinity with sensation (intuition), on the one hand, and with understanding, on the other (KrV B151–2). As Kant puts it in the Critique of Judgement: “Now there belongs to a representation by which an object is given, in order for there to be cognition of it in general, imagination for the composition of the manifold of intuition and understanding for the unity of the concept that unifies the representations.”8 Perhaps the best and most original illustration of the intermediate position of imagination can be found in Proclus’s commentary of the first book of Euclid. Following Aristotle, Proclus argues that imagination or φαντασία is an intermediate cognitive faculty between sense-perception or αἴσθησις and discursive thinking or διάνοια. As in Aristotle, every faculty for Proclus is defined by its specific object. The objects of the highest cognitive faculty, the νοῦς, are the indivisible intelligible concepts or νοητά; the objects of the διάνοια are discursive representations of the concepts—definitions or λόγοι; and the objects of sense-perception are the sense-perceptions or αἰσθητά. The objects of imagination are φαντάσματα, which make the thinkable mentally representable or visualizable for the inner gaze of the mind. If we take a circle as the example, it is present for the νοῦς as the indivisible concept, for the διάνοια as the definition (“the place of all the points equidistant from a given one”), and for the senses as a physical circle drawn on a material surface. But the circle for and in the imagination is the ideal perfectly round figure that exists and is “seen” only there, for neither the concept nor the definition are circular and round (i.e., they do not have the property they describe), and the sensible representation is not round at all but of an irregular shape that only resembles the circle. Therefore, the imaginary object is intermediate between the logical definition of the circle and its sensible representation. This is why Proclus says that “mathematical being necessarily belongs neither among the first nor among the last and least simple of the kinds of being, but occupies the middle ground between the realities that are partless, simple, incomposite, and indivisible—and entities endowed with parts, and characterized by every variety of composition and division.”9 The intermediate imaginable (mathematical) objects are thus situated “in between” the thinkable entities and the physical things, insofar as the intermediate objects are more complex than the

 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §9, 102–104; Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Windelband, in vol. 5 of Werke, ed. Wilhelm Dilthey, vols. 1–9 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Prussian Academy of the Sciences (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1908), 216–9; henceforth KdU, followed by section number. 9  Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, trans. G. R. Morrow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); In primum Euclidis Elementorum librum commentarii, ed. G. Friedlein (Leipzig: Teubner, 1873), 49.5–6, 51.9ff. 8

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former but more precise than the latter. Contrary to Kant, for whom imagination works from “bottom up,” submitting the manifold sensible data to the bondage of the understanding, in Proclus imagination acts “top down,” transmitting the concepts of the discursive reason into the sensible representations. In Proclus’s account, the imaginable, like the thinkable and unlike the physical, does not change over time, because its properties are univocally inscribed into its concept (εἶδος) and definition (λόγος). Yet like the physical and unlike the thinkable, the imaginary has parts and constituents and can be represented as a multiplicity of objects of the same kind (circles); moreover, it can be mentally visualized as quasi-extended (as the circle). For this reason, Proclus even characterizes imagination as a specific “intelligible” matter, which is a kind of “screen,” onto which the discursive reasoning “projects” an abstract definition or λόγος, where it becomes visualized and “unfolded” and can be apprehended in a kind of picture (the circle) “seen” or “drawn” in the imagination.10 NEGATIVITY Among the cognitive faculties, imagination is most associated with negativity. Although imagination is a necessary mediating link in making a judgment about the truth or falsity of a thing or a state of affairs, it is more prone than the other faculties to being mistaken. Imagination is all too often deceptive and produces weak and indistinct images that do not correspond to anything in the world of sensible things or in thought. No wonder that φάντασμα in Greek originally means “apparition.” Already in Plato φαντασία is associated with deception and lies: since an image is always weaker and less distinct than the paradigm or the original, imagination as the capacity of creating images brings distortion into the images it produces. Therefore, that which pertains to being, which is simple and true, does not deceive us by false imaginary visions (κατὰ φαντασίας) (Rep. 382e). For Aristotle, sensations and the thoughts that are properly thought are always true, because they show what they show and tell what they tell, so that the error arises only at the point of their (mis)interpretation or wrong connection. But the images of imagination are mostly false (De an. 428a11–12; see also Met. 1024b24–1025a6; Plato, Theaet. 152c).11 Similarly, for Wolff (VG §236) and Baumgarten (M §§562,

 See Dmitri Nikulin, “Imagination and Mathematics in Proclus,” Ancient Philosophy 28, no. 1 (2008), 153–72. 11  Negativity in antiquity is associated with materiality, so it is no wonder that Proclus further connects imagination with intelligible matter (Proclus, In primum Euclidis Elementorum librum commentarii, 48.15–56.22, 93.18–19). See also Plato, Tim. 51a, 52a–b; and Aristotle, Met. 1036a9–12.

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570), who are both committed to the program of knowledge as constituted by clear and distinct ideas in the light of reason, images of imagination are much less clear than sensations, and thus contribute less to cognition.12 Hence, Baumgarten opposes the unrestricted or unbridled imagination (phantasia effraenis) that forms empty images or false imaginations (vana phantasmata seu imaginationes falsae) to the well-ordered or disciplined imagination, capable of representing truly and wholly (totaliter), even if not with equal clarity, what we have sensed (M §571). Despite its best effort, imagination cannot make its images as clear as those of sensation, and thus always misjudges about the truth of things, which the imagination then has to reinvent to some degree, to “complement” and “reinforce,” so that the imagined would pass for real before the strict judgment of understanding. But what is even more important and relevant to the discussion is that, being associated with negativity, imagination is capable of doing the impossible. For imagination is always capable of imagining differently. And only imagination can make the absent present. As was said, for Aristotle, sensations are always present while images of the imagination are not (De an. 428a8–9). Moreover, sensations and images of imagination complement each other. So, when sensations are absent, imagination reproduces their images as φαντάσματα, which thus represent the absent, that which is no longer there. However, the φαντάσματα refer not only to the past but may also be projected into the anticipated future, which is not-yet and will never be there, and thus cannot be true in the ordinary sense, since the predicate will have never been included in the subject. And this is how imagination and its images are understood in modern philosophy: as representing the absent, of making the absent present. Thus, for Wolff, images or representations of imagination (Einbildungen) are “the representations of those things that are not present [die Vorstellungen solcher Dinge, die nicht zugegen sind]” (VG §235). For his part, Baumgarten says the following: “Since my imaginations are perceptions of things that were formerly present, they are perceptions of the senses that, while I imagine, are absent [Quumque imaginationes meae sint perceptiones rerum, quae olim praesentes fuerunt, sunt sensorum, dum imaginor, absentium]” (M §558). The images of imagination are distinguished from sensations exactly by the “impossible coexistence of the state of the past, which imaginations convey, with the state of the present, which sensations convey” (M §567).

 For Wolff, clarity consists, firstly, in the observation of differences in the manifold, so that the more distinctions we notice in a thing in its difference from others, the clearer it is; and secondly, in distinctness—in the ability to express and communicate, to “say” it to others in an understandable way (VG §§198, 201–2, 206–8). For Baumgarten, obscure, confused, clear, and distinct ideas differ in strength (robur) and in the degree of clarity (M §§515, 520–21, 567).

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In other words, we cannot perceive and imagine the same thing at the same time, because while sensation stays in the past when it perceives, imagination translates the past into the present that now excludes the presence of sensation. This is captured by Wittgenstein’s remark that “while I am looking at an object, I cannot imagine it.”13 Finally, for Kant, “imagination is the faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition [sensation] [Einbildungskraft ist das Vermögen, einen Gegenstand auch ohne dessen Gegenwart in der Anschauung vorstellen]” (KrV B151).14 Only imagination can make non-being (the past) being (the present), and thus it is an imaginary demiurgic power. PRODUCTIVE AND REPRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION At this point, we come to the distinction between productive and reproductive imagination. This distinction is missing (or at least, is not explicit) in Aristotle but becomes important in and for modern philosophy, which, in a sense, can be defined as a triumph of imagination, despite modernity’s own promoted image and (imaginary) self-perception as the age of reason. For Wolff, imagination is the faculty that produces, generates, creates, or brings forth (hervorzubringen) images or representations of things that first appear in sense-perception (VG §235). The images of imagination, however, are incapable of representing everything that was in the corresponding sensations with equal clarity, so there is always something opaque or “dark” left in them (VG §236).15 This means that one needs to do the reconstructive work of connecting an image of imagination with a present sensation (VG §238). However, Wolff also recognizes that we can imagine something that we have never perceived (empfunden), such as a geometrical figure. For instance, we can imagine a curved line, which we can then draw on a piece of paper and thus present it to sense-perception for the first time (VG §241). Kant, however, explicitly denies such a possibility. He is interested in the explanation of the possibility of experience, which always implies sensation (“intuition”) and understanding (“spontaneity”) (KrV B75), as well as imagination as a pure transcendental scheme that mediates between the two. For Kant, one can imagine a triangle from its pure concept, which will be a “product of imagination,” yet in order to become a recognizable part of sensible experience, the  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 109, §621. 14  See Kant’s formulation in the Anthropology: Imagination is intuition (sensibility) “without the presence [ohne die Gegenwart] of an object” (A §15 [7:153]). 15  Even the understanding is never pure for Wolff, because the distinctness of thought is always accompanied by a certain lack of ultimate transparency, or by darkness (Dunckelheit) (VG §285). 13

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geometrical figure needs to be processed by a synthesis of imagination that necessarily implies sense-perception (space as its a priori) (KrV A223–4/ B271–2). The distinction between productive and reproductive imagination is explicitly established by Baumgarten. For him, it is the matter of clarity in cognition. As he argues, “since there is something of the obscure in every sensation, and since an imagination is always less clear than the sensation of the same thing, a great deal of confusion is involved even in a distinct imagination” (M §570). Therefore, imagination always has to do the cognitive work of clarifying the perceptions. In Baumgarten’s terminology, A perception [perceptio] that becomes [fit] less obscure in the soul is produced [producitur] . . . whereas a perception that becomes more obscure in the soul is covered up [involvitur: “wrapped” or “enveloped”]. And when a perception that was once covered up is produced [i.e., when the perception that once became obscure is clarified by the imagination], it is reproduced [reproducitur] (it recurs [recurrit]). Now, things that were sensed are produced by imaginations, and hence they were once produced and then covered up [hic olim producta, post inuoluta] [i.e., the perceptions were once rendered more or less clear, and then muddled]. Therefore, imaginations are reproduced through the faculty of imagination, and nothing is in the faculty of imagination that is not first in the senses. (M §559)

In other words, productive imagination on this interpretation does the work of the “clarification” of a sense-perception that is no longer there, while reproductive imagination “clarifies” a previous sensation that has been clarified (“produced”) by the productive imagination but then has become more obscure. Since for Baumgarten everything that is in the imagination has been before in the senses, imagination only has to do with sensible content and not with reason (or understanding), although imagination comes with awareness of the past states. Imagination, therefore, is always implied in an active reconstruction, in “clearing” and “cleaning” past perceptions. COGNITION, FREEDOM, AND THE PLAY OF THE IMAGINATION Both productive and reproductive imagination are thus involved in the cognitive representation of the absent by making it present in and to our cognition. Following this line of thought, in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant famously claims: “Now insofar as the imagination is spontaneity, I also occasionally call it the productive imagination, and thereby distinguish

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it from the reproductive imagination, whose synthesis is subject solely to empirical laws, namely those of association” (KrV B152).16 This occasional remark, however, is important. Productive imagination is now portrayed as spontaneous imagination. Kant sides with Proclus in holding that pure imagination is always tied, or has an affinity, both with rational understanding and with sense-perception, and thus plays a crucial mediating role in cognition, although, unlike in Proclus, Kant thinks it does so a priori and transcendentally. But for Kant, the spontaneity of imagination does not mean its arbitrariness or unpredictability, which is lawlessness: spontaneity is the expression of the action of the understanding that follows its own strict norms and prescriptions, which are its own rational, inviolable laws (KrV B75 et passim). Spontaneity does not establish the law; spontaneity is the law—of thinking and cognition. However, Aristotle already observes that, more than any other cognitive faculty, imagination is within our power, that is, it is “up to us” (ἐφ’ ἡμῖν) (De an. 427b17–18). Hence, imagination appears to be spontaneous and free in representing the past as the (temporal) present, of making the absent the (ontological) present. Here, it might seem that the spontaneity of imagination means arbitrariness, since it is completely within our power to imagine whatever we like. Imagination appears to be the only faculty that can act completely at will, for the senses transmit solely what appears before them, and discursive thinking is bound by following the necessity of rational, logical rules in dealing with its objects in the right way. Being intermediate, a “middleman,” a mediator between (discursive) thinking-understanding and sense-perception, imagination has to assert its independence. The (cognitive and political) revolution is the triumph of the middle. Imagination imagines being able to do what it wants and intends to do, at its own risk, which can, and often does, lead to a misrepresentation and misjudgment of the imagined. But as such, imagination appears also capable of producing the unpredictable, the novel that makes the never seen the seen in our mental representation. As such, productive imagination might imagine itself capable of producing being (as being-there in its representation) from non-being (as that which is not any longer in our perception or thought). In this way, productive imagination attempts to become autonomous, taking over the role that has been appropriated by modern reason that, by legislating the universally binding rational laws, carefully guards its royal autonomy in the kingdom of (moral) ends against incursions of its subordinates.   On transcendental productive imagination in Kant, see Alfredo Ferrarin, “Kant’s Productive Imagination and its Alleged Antecedents,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 18, no. 1 (1995): 65–92; Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination (New York: Routledge, 1998), 155–70; and Patrick L. Bourgeois, Imagination and Postmodernity (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013), 31–64.

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Yet for Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant, productive imagination always acts by necessity, because without it, there is simply no cognition or experience. Kant presupposes that imagination is an indispensable faculty in the cognitive subsuming of the sensible manifold under the concepts of the understanding, which the imagination can do only insofar as it is in harmony with the understanding’s lawfulness (KdU §35 [5:286–87]). For Wolff and Baumgarten, sense-perception still gives us the real image of the world. But for Kant, this is “naïve” metaphysics, as the senses only show us theatrical appearances of things. The real things can only be met with in earnest in a moral reasoned act, which becomes a kind of jousting tournament with and against the improper inclinations that can be found either in a corrupt will or in sense-perception, which is only meant to provide a multiplicity of appearances that are ultimately synthesized by the understanding. Imagination as a middle, the mediator, then, is meant to put different faculties in touch, to facilitate their otherwise-broken and -interrupted communication in their striving for knowledge, even if what we come to know still remains within pure appearance, constructed according to the lawfulness of the understanding and its concepts. Knowledge is thus itself a produced appearance, which, however, cannot be otherwise since it is constructed according to universal concepts. Yet, the imagination is the epitome of appearance. The entire process of mediation might then be understood in reverse: the productive imagination as preceding sense-experience can be considered the producer of the appearances. But being independent of the existent to the extent that it acts in the absence of the existent, imagination implicitly suggests to the understanding what and how to think. This is why imagination is purely schematic. No wonder, then, that the world of the real becomes lost for and in cognition. One can say that in modernity, the real world gets substituted with an imaginary constructed one that is meant to follow rational laws, although in fact these laws are the product of the self-disciplined productive imagination. Yet, being a moralist for whom freedom consists in following the strict rules that modern autonomous reason establishes for itself, Kant is afraid of the unrestricted freedom to do what one wants, even within the virtual reality of the imagination. For when the imagination disobeys the rational laws, it cannot function properly, and thus destroys the conditions of the possibility of cognition. Therefore, one has to discipline the productive imagination, and let it be productive or spontaneous only within the limits of cognition. Hence, the entirely unrestricted productive imagination is suspect not only because it is cognitively impossible but also because it is morally suspicious. Such an imagination can—and inevitably will—go askew and become willful, following and exemplifying Willkür, the capacity to act against any reasons, however strong and rational they might be, and thus against moral rational will. In fact, to the extent that the productive imagination always

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acts according to concepts of the understanding, it does not act at will.17 Productive imagination as entirely independent of understanding is not only cognitively useless but also morally doubtful. Kant speaks about the free play of imagination and understanding, which produces the pleasure of experiencing a beautiful thing but which, however, should always be bound by rational norms, because again, imagination has an intrinsic affinity with understanding (KdU §§9 [5:216–19]; 16 [5:229–31]; 23 [5:244–46]; 35 [5:286–87]; 58 [5:346–51]). In its game with and against the understanding, imagination plays freely and creatively, but always by the book written by its opponent. One might note that for Joseph Addison, a contemporary of Wolff, imagination too is capable of providing pleasure, but only to the extent that it reproduces the pleasure of sight, thus reaffirming the visual character of imagination. To be sure, sense-perception, imagination, and understanding each have their own pleasure, which differ in their subtlety, and among which the pleasure of understanding is preferable, since it can potentially be useful in providing new knowledge or improving the mind. Imagination on this interpretation assumes the familiar role of the mediator between sensation and thinking, yet it does not play with either one, but rather diligently reproduces the former in the spectacular pleasure of vision.18 Strictly speaking, in moral matters, there is no place for the playful imagination: “We play with the imagination frequently and gladly,” says Kant, “but imagination (as fantasy) plays just as frequently with us, and sometimes very inconveniently” (A §31 [7:175]). Kant is wary of morally unacceptable consequences of unrestrained play that could represent and imagine reprehensible behavior in unwanted examples. The stern moral censor in Kant, which he takes to be the self-established rational law, shies away from the public display of any morally doubtful patterns of behavior. Moreover, imagination can easily produce seductive erotic images, of which Kant is apparently scared, because they bring an unlawful enjoyment. One should deter and hide this illegitimate imagining behind the veil of rational norms. Kant is afraid that imagination can produce something attractive yet embarrassing, which might shake the world of ends that is well-built on the firm foundation of moralistic prescriptions. Such an imagination can  “Concepts of objects often prompt a spontaneously produced image (through the productive power of imagination), which we attach to them involuntarily” (A §30 [7:173]; see also §28 [7:167–69]). 18  “By the pleasures of the imagination, I mean only such pleasures as arise originally from sight, and that I divide these pleasures into two kinds . . . those primary pleasures of the imagination, which entirely proceed from such objects as are before our eyes; and in the next place to speak of those secondary pleasures of the imagination which flow from the ideas of visible objects, when the objects are not actually before the eye, but are called up into our memories, or formed into agreeable visions of things that are either absent or fictitious” (Joseph Addison, “Pleasures of Imagination,” Spectator, no. 411 [June 21, 1712]). 17

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easily go beyond norms and become seductive and tainted by an illicit enjoyment—particularly, by representations of sexual love where imagination “enjoys walking in the dark.” A way out, then, is to play with subtle hints and innuendos, the response to which—in modest and polite bourgeois society— should “bring out a smile” and hide the inappropriate behind hypocritical, cultivated acting (A §5 [7:136]; see also §14 [7:151–53]). This is why Kant speaks about the necessity of the culture of imagination,19 for the uncultivated and uncontrolled imagination is dangerous! Kant thus keeps struggling with the freedom of imagination, which he perceives as unwarranted and seductive, trying to put the productive imagination under the yoke of the rational (understanding) and the moral (will). RADICAL NOVELTY? Productive imagination, which acts in the absence of its object, is not only defined by its spontaneity but also as preceding experience. Kant, again, says that imagination “is either productive, that is, a faculty of the original presentation of the object [ein Vermögen der ursprünglichen Darstellung, exhibitio originaria], which thus precedes experience; or reproductive, a faculty of the derivative presentation of the object [exhibitio derivativa], which brings back to the mind an empirical intuition that it had previously” (A §28 [7:167]). If, for Baumgarten, imagination can only act on what has previously been in the senses, for Kant, productive imagination is liberated from the sensory content by becoming a priori capable of synthesizing the sensible multiplicity or manifold and submitting it to the unity of the understanding. But is then a radical novelty possible for and in imagination? Can imagination produce something that has never been before, either in the senses or in thinking? If radical novelty means new knowledge, then Kant’s answer is well known: it is either empirical knowledge of singular things and events—or a priori synthetic knowledge, which is only possible if we accept the a priori forms of sensibility and the categories of understanding. Productive imagination, then, itself has to be a priori, precede experience, and make it possible. But that is only meaningful if we accept the very idea of the a priori.

 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy, trans. Robert B. Louden, in Anthropology, History, and Education, trans. Mary Gregor et al., ed. Günther Zoller and Robert B. Louden, 434–85 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 465; Über Pädagogik, ed. Friedrich Theodor Rink and Paul Natorp, in vol. 9 of Werke, ed. Wilhelm Dilthey, vols. 1–9 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Prussian Academy of the Sciences (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1911), 476.

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Wolff’s answer to the question of the novelty of the imagined is that images of imagination can come from previous sense-perceptions (which is Kant’s reproductive imagination), but we can also (productively) imagine a curved geometrical figure that we have never seen and then draw it on a piece of paper, thereby bringing it to sense-perception for the first time (VG §241; see also KrV B271–72). In this way, we imagine something that is dictated by reason (VG §245). Therefore, we can bring together what we have perceived or thought, and on this basis form a new image of an imaginary fantastic creature (e.g., Melusine: a woman and a fish). This is the power to produce or invent (die Kraft zu erdichten) something impossible, namely, empty imaginations (leere Einbildungen) (VG §242). But such a knowledge is already always squarely inscribed in the possibilities of our sensibility and thinking and cannot go beyond them. But can imagination act not out of the previous, now absent, experience? Can it produce an image of something that has never been perceived or thought—moreover, of something that cannot be perceived or thought? This is impossible for Kant, for whom the productive imagination is limited in its spontaneity to the extent that it cannot arbitrarily go beyond the possibilities of sensation before the actual sensation and the lawfulness of thinking before the actual thinking. In this way, productive imagination is always determined, if not by the objects, then by the a priori structure of sensibility and the laws of thinking. Productive imagination still takes all the material for its (re) presentations either from previous but now absent sensible images and then combines them, which is the operation according to the rules of understanding, or it can imagine some geometrical patterns that do not exist in nature but are still found in the understanding. Paraphrasing Leibniz, one can say that productive imagination is an “exercitium geometricae [ap. Leibniz, arithmeticae] occultum nescientis se numerare animae.”20 Imagination, then, imagines that it produces something new, but in reality, it merely contaminates and combines the parts of the already known, following implicit, perceived, and recognized, but not formulated, laws. Thus, imagination imagines properly when the architect makes a project of future buildings, based on previous perceptions of other buildings and the understanding of the rational laws of physics (VG §246), or when the artist first produces an image in the imagination that she wants to represent in the thought-out composition of a painting, in accordance with previous perception and the concept of the understanding (A §§31–2 [7:174–80]). In both cases, productive imagination acts deliberately and not arbitrarily. This is also the answer of Kant’s contemporary Charles Batteux, who argues that  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712, in Opera Mathematica, vol. 3 of Opera Omnia, ed. Ludovico Dutens (Geneva: Apud Fratres de Tournes, 1768), 437.

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“even monsters created by a frenzied imagination in the grip of madness can be composed of ideas copied from nature.”21 In doing so, he and Wolff follow Locke, for whom any complex idea is produced out of simple ideas, which are either internal and come from the mind itself (“reflection”) or are external, coming from sensation.22 Therefore, imagination has no resources of its own to produce something that, in the classical philosophical locus, is neither in the mind nor in the senses. Still, there is something troubling in the productive, creative power of imagination that makes it not fully within our power, something which neither Wolff nor Kant can quite deal with. Not only, as was said, is the imagination capable of and prone to distorting the perceived (see VG §243) and to imagining the improper (A §5 [7:135–37]). In this case, one can at least hope to put the imagination under the yoke of reason as understanding. But there is also a prohibited yet attractive imaginary possibility of the imagination’s breaking loose from its rational and apparently voluntary imprisonment by reason, and thus violating the laws of thinking, leaving its imposed paradise through its own willful willing. This radical negativity, absent in sensibility and reasoning, is present in its absence, insofar as it is negativity in the imagination par excellence. The imaginary production of that which has never been before, and moreover, of what could never have been, goes beyond knowledge and hence cannot be known in its impossibility before it is produced. Such an imaginary novelty of imagination can only be of the imaginary infinite productive divine imagination, as coinciding with the divine reasoning that produces its images or content—the reality—ex nihilo, that is, from within itself according to its own volition. But because such an act cannot be inscribed into cognition, which acts according to inviolable logical rules, it can only be conceived as artistic production. In doing so, the finite maker assumes, illegitimately yet inevitably, the role of the infinite creator. The inevitability of the imaginary recreation of the existent—which amounts to its creation and production—follows from the construction of the modern subject in philosophy as autonomous and self-legislating, prescribing both law to nature and the moral law. This is why even Kant has to concede that in representing “aesthetic ideas,”23 imagination produces that which can be subject to thinking but no  Charles Batteux, The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle, trans. James O. Young (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 5. 22  John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), II.1, 104–18. 23  For Kant, an aesthetic idea is opposed to an idea of reason: “Ideas in the most general meaning are representations related to an object in accordance with a certain (subjective or objective) principle, insofar as they can nevertheless never become a cognition of that object. . . . An aesthetic idea cannot become a cognition, because it is an intuition (of the imagination) for which a concept can never be found adequate. An idea of reason can never become a cognition, because it contains a 21

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determinate thought, to which no concept corresponds and which cannot be adequately expressed in any language (KdU §49 [5:314]). The artistic imagination acts as quasi-divine, as “very powerful in creating, as it were, another nature, out of the material which the real one gives it” (KdU §49 [5:314]). In this way, the productive imagination strives to become independent and liberated from the reproductive empirical imagination, which is based solely on the law of association. THE ARTISTIC PRODUCTION OF THE ABSENT Thus, we cannot escape, if not a possibility then a temptation, of the imagination to liberate itself from the sensible determinations of the past, from the watchful eye of thinking, and eventually even from itself as following empirical or logical laws.24 This is the imagination that wants the impossible: to be free without any restrictions, in dangerous proximity to Willkür. In attempting to do so, it creates another nature and acts in a way that cannot even be fully determined by thought and expressed in language! It becomes—or at least wants to become—what it unwillingly wills: the demiurge that produces its own virtual world, which goes far beyond what we can possibly perceive or express with a thought or word. Such a possibility of the imagination’s breaking loose is inscribed into its power of negativity, which now transpires in the artistic depiction of the absent as present. The productive imagination, capable of creating a radically new (other) nature, would only be possible for a divine-like creator, worshipped by the Romantics as the artistic genius, the mystagogue of art. Kant gives the genius much freer rein than Batteux before him, who takes genius to follow and be bound by nature: “If genius capriciously assembles ideas in a manner that violates natural laws . . . [it] is reduced to a type of insanity.” Genius for Batteux should follow not the capricious imagination but strict reason, thus becoming the inventor of the imitative means that display and discover being itself as the being of nature. The task of genius, then, is “not to imagine what cannot be but to discover what is. Invention in the arts does not consist in creating things. Rather, it is discovering how things

concept (of the supersensible) for which no suitable intuition can ever be given. . . . One could call the aesthetic idea an inexponible representation of the imagination, the idea of reason, however, an indemonstrable concept of reason” (KdU §57, Remark I [5:342]). 24  Speaking about Hume, Cassirer argues that “whereas formerly imagination had to fight for recognition and equal rights, it is now treated as the fundamental power of the soul, as the leader and ruler to whom all other faculties of the mind must submit” (Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz Koelln and James P. Pettergrove [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951], 305).

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are and what they are like. The profoundest geniuses discover only what was already there.”25 The artistic genius, therefore, is the natural philosopher whose task is the same as that of the scientist, but who differs from the scientist in his task—to please others—and his means and methods—to imitate nature poetically and artistically. But for Kant, the genius is no less than the talent for discovering that which cannot be taught or learned. . . . Genius, therefore, flashes as a momentary phenomenon, appearing at intervals and then disappearing again; it is not a light that can be kindled at will and kept burning for as long as one pleases, but an explosive flash that a happy impulse of the spirit lures from the productive power of imagination. (A 7:318)

This mysterious—and, as with any mystery, philosophically-erotically attractive—flash is the expression of the creative freedom of the productive imagination. And yet, even following the freedom of his imagination, the genius still has to combine imagination and understanding, where the imagination freely submits itself to the confining order and lawfulness of the understanding (KdU §§49–50 [5:313–20]).26 Such a “free” correspondence between the imagination and the lawful directives of the understanding produces “the unsought and unintentional subjective purposiveness” in the production of the genius, namely a work of art, and this is only possible if one presupposes “a proportion and disposition of this faculty that cannot be produced by any following of rules, whether of science or of mechanical imitation, but that only the nature of the subject can produce” (KdU §49 [5:317–18]). The genius produces freely and mysteriously by relying on his original playful productive imagination, which, however, is always inexplicably bound, limited, and disciplined by the immanent laws and lawfulness of thinking. This “originality of the power of imagination (not imitative production), when it harmonizes with concepts, is called genius” (A §30 [7:172]).27 Otherwise, by not submitting itself to a rational concept and thus presenting an irrepresentable—unimaginable but only thinkable—the productive artistic imagination runs the risk of becoming fantastic or “enthusiastic” (A §30 [7:172]), of being “possessed” by an irrational seemingly divine power that produces deceptive images.

 Batteux, The Fine Arts, 5; my emphasis.  On the freedom of imagination, see Jane Kneller, Kant and the Power of Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 38–59. 27  See Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 271–301. 25 26

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Radical novelty thus can only be deceptive and false because it does not correspond to anything that can be possibly perceived or thought. The unperceived and un-thought, then, becomes perceived and thinkable for the first time due to the productive imagination of a genius. But even for the genius, radical novelty is ultimately impossible and unattainable, because all the possibilities of the new are inscribed into the lawfulness of the understanding, which even the genius cannot upend and ignore. The “other nature” is thus always only an as-if nature, present only in the imagination, and hence not in the real thing (which for Kant is only accessible in moral action) but rather in the fleeting artificial beauty of a work of art. Telling the truth by telling a lie, mystifying the spectator by the lure of an unachievable ultimate transparency of the purpose, is the business of art. For art shows the true by showing the false, by depicting the not having been, the fictional, the as-if real—the imaginary—as universally valid. The exemplary work of the productive Romantic imagination is the depiction of an “ideal landscape,” built out of seen and imaginarily recovered pieces of cliffs, clouds, rivers, trees, bridges, temples, and human and animal figures. In an ideal landscape, of which a representative example is Jacob Philipp Hackert’s 1775 “Ideale Landschaft mit Motiven aus der Gegend von Tivoli,” on display in the Goethe-Haus in Frankfurt, sensibility delivers the material and the understanding provides the composition according to its implicit rules that become explicit once they are embodied in the landscape. An important constituent of the Romantic landscape is a picturesque ruin, the imaginary remains of an ancient civilization, which itself is in need of an imaginary (re)construction. The Romantic landscape then turns into what Benjamin has called “cityscape,” the depiction of the modern city in which the passer-by is not attached to anything. The passage from the Romantic imaginary as-if nature to the produced second nature of the city shows “very clearly how the old Romantic sentiment for landscape dissolves and a new Romantic conception of landscape emerges—of landscape that seems, rather, to be a cityscape.”28 Seen and interpreted, the constructed ideal landscape becomes a “theater of memory,” where one can observe and recollect imaginary perceptions and the meanings of the understanding made visible and transparent by the productive imagination of the genius.

 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Belknap Press, 2002), 420; Das Passagen-Werk, vol. 5 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 530 [M2a,1].

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MEMORY AND IMAGINATION As we remember, imagination is the faculty intermediate between sense-perception and thinking. In addition, imagination is the only faculty that appears to be wholly within our power and is thus uniquely bound up with negativity, which tempts the imagination to assert its productive autonomy. At the same time, this intrinsically negative character allows the imagination to produce and reproduce pictorial images that represent the absent as present, and hence make the past come alive in imaginary representations. But this is also the work of memory, which represents the absent—the past—as present. Imagination and memory, then, are inextricably tied together. The connection between imagination and memory is already clearly established in On Memory and Recollection, where Aristotle argues that memory needs imagination, insofar as both imagination and memory deal with images or φαντάσματα (Mem. 450a10–13).29 Whether these images are pictorial or whether they can also be taken as causal antecedents of the experience of memory is still a debated question.30 At the very least, the images of imagination and memory can be considered picture-like. An important distinction discussed by Aristotle is that between memory and recollection. Memory is a disposition or state (ἕξις) of having an image as a kind of imprinted trace that represents a past event, which can be then retrieved in a single act (Mem. 449b24–25). As such, memory is capable of keeping and reproducing, of storing and restoring images as the representations of what we have experienced before in sensation or thinking. Recollection, on the contrary, is an orderly discursive process, a kind of an inquiry or search for the past. As such, it resembles a logical syllogism (συλλογισμός), which moves from premises to a conclusion, so that the searched for recollection is recovered and reconstructed in a number of steps at and as the end of this process (Aristotle, Mem. 451b10–452a3, 452a17, 453a10, 15; see also An. priora 24b18–20; Top. 100a25–27; Plato, Meno 80d–86c; Phd. 72e–74a). Memory and recollection in Aristotle are

 See Dmitri Nikulin, “Memory in Ancient Philosophy,” in Memory: A History, ed. Dmitri Nikulin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 36–37, 60–66. 30  On the one hand, Aristotle speaks about the images of memory and imagination as a kind of picture (ζωγράφημα) or as traces of signet rings (Mem. 450a29–32; see also Plato, Theaet. 153c). Yet, on the other hand, he also mentions motions (κινήσεις), which are similar to a succession or order of steps in a mathematical proof (Mem. 452a1–3) or the process of recollecting a name, melody, or saying (Mem. 453a28–29). Such motions seem not to be accompanied by a pictorial image (see Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory, 2nd ed. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006], ix–xvi, 2–8; Julia Annas, “Aristotle on Memory and the Self,” in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], 297–311, esp. 305; and David Bloch, Aristotle on Memory and Recollection: Text, Translation, Interpretation, and Reception in Western Scholasticism [Leiden: Brill, 2007], 64–70). 29

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thus both opposed to and complement each other in keeping and retrieving instances of past sense-perceptions and thoughts. While memory has its image in an act, recollection achieves it in a process. Memory one can have, but to recollection one should come. However, memory for Aristotle is not a faculty as sense perception and imagination are: memory is a state or disposition that allows us to “have” an image of a previous sense-perception or thought as judgment, once time has elapsed (Mem. 449b24–25). The difference between capacity or δύναμις and disposition or ἕξις is that a capacity is something we already always have, while a disposition is acquired. One needs to further distinguish disposition as having (ἕξις) something versus using (χρῆσις) it, because using is the purpose of an activity, and having something is always for the sake of using it in action (MM 1184b15–17; see also Top. 125b15–19). Memory, then, is a disposition because it is acquired and then actualized through a memory image, making the original, but now absent, perception or thought actual and present. But Aristotle also recognizes that imagination can be considered either a capacity or a disposition (δύναμις ἢ ἕξις) (De an. 428a3); similarly, Baumgarten—who takes imagination to be a faculty (facultas) (M §558)— also calls it a disposition (habitus) (M §571). This means that as the capacity to properly produce and reproduce, process and recall its images, imagination can and should be habituated or cultivated—in modernity, as an artistic capacity that can play freely within the limits of the lawfulness of thinking and by the strict rules of the game set and enforced by the understanding. What is most important is that Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant (i) all notice a close association of imagination with memory and (ii) they reproduce, even if unintentionally, the Aristotelian distinction between memory and recollection. For Wolff, the connection between imagination and memory is unmistakable, which is why he turns to memory directly after the discussion of imagination (VG §§248–71).31 Memory for him is the capacity or power to recognize (erkennen) former thoughts (Gedancken) or perceptions—that we had them when we come across them (VG §249).32 Memory, then, allows us to know a perception or thought in a double act of recognition, namely, that we had this perception before, and that we had this perception before. Just as imagination does, memory makes the absent present in its representation. As imagination, memory too operates with the images as representations of

 The discussion of imagination in Wolff is preceded by the discussion of dreams, since in dreams, which are the same kind of images as those of imagination (Einbildungen), we equally perceive something that is absent (VG §239–40). 32  “Das Gedächtnis ist also nichts anders als das Vermögen Gedancken, die wir vorhin gehabt haben, wieder zu erkennen, daß wir sie schon hehabt haben, wenn sie uns wieder vorkommen” (VG §249). 31

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the formerly perceived or thought. And as in the imagination, such images are weaker or less distinct than the originals. Moreover, both imagination and memory allow us to represent the formerly perceived things in the same order and number (VG §260), and both imagination and memory allow for training and “enlargement” by exercise (VG §§262–7). It is worth adding that for Addison, imagination is also closely connected with memory through the pleasure of internal visualization and recognition, when imagination reproduces the previously seen object.33 However, when we forget something, we can bring it back through recollection (Besinnen) (VG §§254–59). That recollection for Wolff is a “logical” process becomes apparent when we “think through” (überdencken) the thoughts that we have in memory, thereby coming to recognize their similarities and differences, and thus arriving at general concepts and knowledge (VG §§272–74). Thus, on Wolff’s account, both (i) the close association of memory and imagination and (ii) the distinction between memory and recollection are well established. In Baumgarten, the discussion of the imagination is followed by the discussion of “perspicaciousness” (perspicacia), the faculty of establishing similarities and differences (M §§572–78), which is similar to Wolff’s “thinking through” and which is then followed by the discussion of memory (M §§579–88). As Baumgarten takes it, “I perceive a reproduced representation to be the same as one I had formerly produced; i.e. I recognize (I recall) it. Therefore, I have a faculty of recognizing reproduced perceptions, or memory, and it is either sensitive or intellectual” (M §579). Memory is thus the reproduction of the representation that I have produced before, which I then recognize as present in its absence. But because, as we remember, reproduction for Baumgarten is the clarification of a past perception in and by imagination (M §559), memory turns out to be intimately connected with imagination. Yet when I forget something, “I call something back to memory through associated ideas, i.e. I recollect. Hence, I have a faculty of recollecting, or recollection (reminiscentia)” (M §582). Recollection brings back a past perception by associating it with other ideas, which means that recollection is a process of reproducing in imagination a perception that has been forgotten (M §583). And when in the next section Baumgarten introduces still another faculty, that of “invention,” of separating and combining imaginary images or phantasmata (M §§589–94), this faculty works very much like recollection in Aristotle. Therefore, in Baumgarten’s view too, the theses of (i) the close association of memory and imagination and (ii) the distinction between memory and recollection can be unambiguously traced.

 Addison, “Pleasures of Imagination.”

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Finally, these two theses are equally unmistakably discernible in Kant. Surprisingly, memory does not play any major role in Kant’s theoretical philosophy and thus does not appear in the process of cognition and the explanation of the possibility of experience. Nevertheless, memory comes back with a vengeance in the Anthropology, where the discussion of imagination is immediately followed by that of memory (A §34 [7:182–85]). First (i), the connection between imagination and memory is well established: in the Lectures on Pedagogy, both figure as “lower powers of the understanding.”34 Memory is “the faculty of deliberately visualizing the past” (A §34 [7:182]) that deals with visualizable mental images of the past, which it can summon deliberately and at will. In this sense, the operation of memory is very similar to that of imagination. Visualization and deliberate extraction of memory images are the basis for the centuries-old cultivated “art of memory,” ascribed by Cicero and Quintilian to Simonides, which allows the retrieval of memories by associating them with particular images assigned to or “located” in particular imaginary memory places (Cicero, De or. 2.86.351–53; Quintilian, Inst. 11.2.11–15.). Capable of representing mental images, memory can even be considered “local imagination, by which is meant the skill to represent everything in the place where one has actually seen it.”35 However, unlike imagination, that can freely play with understanding although still restrained by its lawfulness, “memory is distinguished from the merely reproductive power of imagination in that it is able to reproduce the former representations voluntarily, so that the mind is not a mere plaything of the imagination. Fantasy, i.e., creative power of imagination, must not mix in with it, because then memory would be unfaithful” (A §34 [7:182]). Memory has to be true to the absent, while imagination can play with the past in the conditional mode and counterfactuals. Besides, imagination can also be involuntary.36 But such is also memory, which at times spills images of the past occasioned by an accidental event entirely without our consent (Proustean “mémoire involontaire”), although Kant somehow does not recognize this possibility. And second (ii), memory can be distinguished from recollection. As we remember, reproductive imagination in Kant is governed by the empirical law of association, according to which the images of imagination become  Kant speaks about “The particular culture of the powers of the mind. This includes the culture of the cognitive faculty, of the senses, of the imagination, of the memory, of the strength of attention and wit, in short what concerns the lower powers of the understanding” (Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy, 464–5 [9:475–6]). 35  Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy, 458 [9:467–68]. 36  For Kant, imagination can be so burdened when it “involuntarily recalls” music, which for him is the lowest art, in which one moves from sensations to indeterminate ideas. But imagination can “agreeably entertain itself” when it recalls painting, which is a higher art in which one moves from determinate ideas to sensations (KdU §53 [5:326–30]).

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connected (KrV B152). The law is only mentioned by Kant but is explained by Wolff in an example: when one first sees people and glasses at a drinking party, and then later sees glasses, imagination brings back the image of the people (VG §238). Wolff’s example is that of involuntary imagination, which produces an image as memory in an act occasioned by an accidental external event. Yet the chain of empirical associations can also be triggered by the intentional work of imagination. In doing so, the reproductive imagination works as recollection, since it intentionally connects and superimposes several images in a process that ties them together into one image resulting from their association.37 But the productive imagination, which for Kant is spontaneous and a priori and thus precedes experience, is an act that can still be considered as producing, reinventing, and reconstructing the past,38 for the experience of memory starts properly at the moment when it first produces its image, which is also the image of productive imagination. And thus the power of imagination . . . is either inventive (productive) or merely recollective (reproductive). But the productive power of imagination is nevertheless not exactly creative, for it is not capable of producing a sense representation that was never given to our faculty of sense; one can always furnish evidence of the material of its ideas. (A §28 [7:167–68])

Productive imagination is not absolutely unbound, because it is limited by the concept. But such also is memory, which is bound by past experience, to which it has to be true. As the embodiment of negativity, which the modern, apparently self-transparent (Cartesian) subject desperately tries to get rid of, imagination rules supreme, and not only in the production of the artificial and beautiful by its modern demiurge, the genius. In doing so, the power of imagination also overpowers memory and, in a sense, becomes memory—first personal memory and later in its historical development, collective memory. In the process of genealogical transformations, productive and reproductive imaginations come to assume the roles played by memory and recollection. Although productive imagination precedes experience, in its functioning, it is very similar to the act of memory that allows us to experience the past as  Kant explains this process without realizing that he is talking about recollection: “It should be noted that the imagination does not only know how to recall for us occasionally the signs of concepts, even after a long time, in a way that is entirely incomprehensible to us; it also knows how to reproduce the image and shape of an object out of an immense number of objects of different kinds, or even of one and the same kind; indeed, when the mind is set on making comparisons, it even knows how, by all accounts actually if not consciously, as it were to superimpose one image on another and by means of the congruence of several of the same kind to arrive at a mean that can serve them all as a common measure” (KdU §17 [5:234]). 38  See: Daniel L. Schacter, “Memory: An Adaptive Constructive Process,” in Memory: A History, 291–7. 37

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brought back to the reconstructed present. And reproductive imagination parallels recollection as a reasoned process of combining and connecting various images into one single image that restores the past in and to the present. Thus, it makes the impossible possible: the not being coming alive to being in the imagination.

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Index

aesthetics: and beauty, xiii, 201, 203; Hegel on, 5, 7; Kant on, 244–45; in the Scientific Revolution, 212–14. See also art; beauty Annales School, 90, 121n17, 130–31, 137. See also Braudel, Fernand Antisthenes, 65–68, 178, 188n21; as writer, 70–71. See also Cynicism; Diogenes of Sinope Apollonian. See Dionysian apophaticism: approaching beauty by, 199–200; Tolstoy’s history as, 120–25 Archilochus, 9–10 Arendt, Hannah, 2, 106n30, 211; on freedom, 185; idea of history in, 114, 140; Aristophanes, 6, 28, 150, 153, 155, 168; depiction of Socrates by, 165, 173, 175, 189 Aristotle, x, xiii, 161, 177, 180, 187n20, 191, 228; on comedy, 10, 149–50, 153–54, 156, 188; on imagination, 229–37, 239; on memory, 248–50; physics of, 213–14, 219 art, ix, xii, 36–37, 205; and beauty, 201–4; comedy as, 153; Cynic critique of productive, 180; dialectic as, 170; and imagination, 229, 245– 47; of memory, 251; metaphysics as, 207–8. See also aesthetics, beauty

Bacchylides, 12 Bacon, Francis, 94, 209n1, 211, 215; negative logic of, 216–17 Bakhtin, Mikhail: biographical sketch of, 31–35; on comedy, 152; other as self in, 37–39, 41, 167; other of self, 35–36, 40; outsideness of other in, 47–48; on rhetoric, 36–37; theme of self and other in, 35; unfinalizable nature of other in, 42–45, 47; self as unfinalizable in, 41–43. See also other Baumgarten, Alexander, xiii; on imagination, 229–30, 232–33, 235–38, 240, 242, 249; on memory, 250. See also imagination; Kant, Immanuel; memory; Wolff, Christian beauty, xii, 1, 197; Apollonian quality of, 3, 5, 17, 206–8; in Benjamin, 200; Heller’s history of, 201–5; Heller’s view of, 198–200, 205–8; in imagination, 217, 241, 252; of maenads in Dostoevsky, 17, 27–28; in mathematics, 212–13, 218, 222; in Plotinus, 200–1 being, 35, 175, 209; Apollonian quality of, 4, 8; and beauty in Plotinus, 200–1; and boredom, 76–78, 84–88; historical, 119, 125, 142; imaginations production of, 237, 239; and mathematics, 227, 234–35;

271

272

Index

other, 43; rethinking in modernity of, x, 98, 111, 214, 217–19; Rorty’s view of, 55, 57, 63. See also ontology Belyi, Andrey, 15–16, 19n34, 145 Benjamin, Walter, xiii; antithesis of boredom for, 109–10; on beauty, 200; bored subjects of, 101–2; on capital, 99–101; diagnosis of boredom in modernity, 89–90; on the flaneur, 75, 102–8; focus on Paris by, 90; on gambling, 95, 102; on landscapes, 103–4; on memory, 106; on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, 98; rain as boredom for, 91–92; repetition as boredom for, 96–99; waiting as boredom for, 93–94 boredom: antithesis to, 109–11; of Benjamin’s subjects, 101–2; collective, 95–96; flaneur and, 103, 109; Heidegger’s modes of, 80–84; Heidegger’s poetics of, 79–80; itself in Heidegger, 83–86; Kracauer on, 73–76; Kracauer’s radical, 76–79; of the modern subject, xi–xiii, 73, 89–90; as rain, 91–92; as repetition, 96–99; of the ruling class, 100–1; and self, 77–78, 86–88; as waiting, 93–94 Braudel, Fernand, 90, 130, 133, 137 Catullus, 9, 158 Cicero, 186n18, 192, 203; on memory, 105, 205 Collingwood, R. G: idea of beauty in, 203; reinvention in history by, 139 comedy: action of, 162–63; Aristotle on, 10, 149, 153; danger in, 155; and dialectics, 163–67; difference from tragedy of, 6, 149–50, 152; Diogenes as hero of, 187–90; distance in, 155; doubles in, 167–69; Heller on, 150–52, 155, 158, 161, 163, 171; heterogeneity of, 151–52; liberating quality of, 154–55; life as, 152–52; loss in modernity of, x, 125; love

in, 153–54; modern poetics of, 150; New Comedy, 6, 7, 10, 12, 25, 151, 154, 171; Old Comedy, 6, 10, 158, 173; of philosophy, 65, 176; philosophy’s dismissal of, 149–50; rationality in, 160–62; reflectivity of, 152; Roman borrowing of Greek, 159–60; slave in, 170–73, 190; Socrates as hero of, 172–73; subject of, 157; therapeutic effect of, 155; truth-telling in, 173–74, 188 conversation, 23, 166; beauty of, 198; in Cynicism, 67–68, 71; impersonal character of Rorty’s, 62–65; Oakeshott’s philosophy of, 53–55; opposed to boredom, 101–2; Rorty’s philosophy as, 53, 55–62. See also dialogue critique: by Bacon, 216; by Cynics, 180–81, 186, 195; of Nietzsche’s Apollonian-Dionysian distinction, 12–14; of Rancière’s historical revolution, 143–44 Cynicism: Antisthenes as originator of, 178; attitude towards nature of, 179–80; dialogue, 68–69, 183; free speech in, 64, 67; Heracles as hero of, 189; irony and, 68, 71; liberating practices of, 67–68; metaphor in, 71; philosophical lifestyle of, 66; provocativeness of, 68–69, 183; Rorty and, 64–172; scandal, 69–70, 183; suspicion of theory in, 65–67, 179. See also Diogenes of Sinope Descartes, René, xiii, 209n1; amateur status of, 211; on beauty, 201n9; on causes in history, 123; cogito of, 23, 35, 39–40; doubt and, 64, 211; interest in biology of, 224; and mathematics, 219–20, 222, 225, 228; method of, 214–17; nature in, 202, 218; ontology of, x, 42, 217–18, 226; Rorty on, 51–52, 58; system of knowledge of, 94, 220

Index

dialectic: beauty of, 205–6; character of users of, 169–70; in comedy, 163–65, 175–76; Cynic suspicion of, 65; Diogenes’ use of, 180, 187–88; in Dostoevsky, 20–21, 29; flaneur and, 105–6, 108–9; in Hegel, 6–7, 109, 162; in history, 98; Jonas’ use of, 209n1; Nietzsche on, 6–8, 14; in Plato, 109, 167–68; of self and other, 36; slave as user of, 172–74, 191; Socrates as user of, 172–73; in Terence, 165–66 dialogue: beauty and, 205; being as, 63; in comedy, 153, 158, 161–62, 166, 168, 170; Cynic, 68–69, 188; failure of, 23, 86; as genre of writing, 66, 71; with the other, x–xiii, 35, 205; Platonic, 174, 177, 188n24, 205; in Rorty, 55–58, 63; with self, 37; Socratic, 69–70, 167–69, 172, 176, 188; in tragedy, 12. See also conversation; monologue Diogenes of Sinope, xiii, 65; as comedic hero, 188–90; as cosmopolitan, 178–79, 181; dialogues of, 69–70; as figure of memory, 177–78; liberating practices of, 68, 182–84; opposition to Plato of, 66, 69; as outsider, 178–79, 190, 195; provocations of, 68–69, 182; public staging of, 187–88; against theory, 180; turn to nature by, 179–82; use of free speech by, 184–88, 194; use of scandal by, 183–84. See also Cynicism Dionysian: and Apollonian in beauty, 206–8; and Apollonian in Belyi, 15–16; and Apollonian in boredom, 88; and Apollonian in Dostoevsky, 15–19, 29; and Apollonian in Nietzsche’s approach to ancient literature, 9–12; and Apollonian nature of maenads, 26–28; critique of Nietzsche’s distinction of, 12–14; Nietzsche’s division of Apollonian and, 3–6, 208; union with Apollonian in Dostoevsky of, 19–20

273

Dostoevsky, Fedor, 1–2; Alyosha Karamazov in, 17–18, 20; Apollonian-Dionysian division in, 14–17; on comedy, 25; Dmitriy Karamazov in, 18–20; influence of antiquity on, 16; Ivan Karamazov in, 21–23, 25; role of love in Brothers Karamazov of, 22–23, 28–29; Smerdyakov in, 22–25; women in Brothers Karamazov of, 26–29 The Enlightenment, 121; idea of beauty in, 201; Sophistic, 170 epic, 10, 12, 107, 135, 149; as historical practice, 118–19, 128, 145–48; Nietzsche on, 8–9; War and Peace as modern attempt at, 114–18. See also Homer; Rancière, Jacques; Tolstoy, Leo Euclid: idea of space in, 219–21; Proclus’ commentary on, 234–35 Euripides, 26, 168; Nietzsche’s view of, 6, 8, 12 flaneur, xi, 74; Benjamin’s view of, 75, 102–9 Foucault, Michel, xiii, 64; on Cynicism, 64, 67–69, 182n14, 188; free speech: and comedy, 187–90; as liberating, xiii, 184–87; parrhesia as ancient practice of, 64, 186–87; and the tyrant, 194. See also freedom; liberation freedom: boredom as way to, 78; in comedy, 154–55, 160, 172, 190; Cynical idea of, 67–69; of imagination, 240–42, 245–46, 249, 251; negative, 182–84; of the philosopher, 192, 194–95; positive, 184–85; Tolstoy on human, 122–34. See also free speech; liberation friendship: as beautiful, 198–99, 208; in dialectic, 167; opposed to boredom, 102–2;

274

Index

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 2, 57, 110n33, 199n5 Galileo, 52, 209n1; idea of nature in, 202, 213–14; mathematization of world by, 218–19, 221, 226; method of, 215, 217; Gogol, Nikolai, 24, 76 Hegel, G. W. F, xiii, 94, 161, 198; aesthetics of, 5–7, 150, 204; dialectic procedure of, 102, 109; role of opposites in, 8, 157, 204; view of beauty of, 201–2; Heidegger, Martin, 2, 57, 74; on being bored, 81–83; on the boring, 80–81; on profound boredom, 83–88; view of boredom as modern of, xiii, 79–80; Heller, Ágnes, xii–xiii, 17, 186n19; on comedy, 150–52, 155, 158, 161, 163, 171; on contingency, 156; on dreams, 96; history of beauty by, 201–5; idea of beauty in, 198–200, 205–8; idea of master narratives in, 127 Hiroshige, Ando, 93 history: in Ancient Greece, 146; Annales approach to, 130–31; apophatic approach of Tolstoy to, 120–21, 125; as comic, 154; and epic, 118–19, 124, 144–46; flaneur and, 108; metaphor in, 133–35; Michelet’s method of, 131–33, 136, 143–44, 147; names in, 147–48; natural, 140; new poetics of, 142–43; Rancière new writing of, 129, 131– 38, 141–43, 145–47; subject of, 101, 135, 137–39; Tacitus’ approach to, 138–39; Tolstoy’s models of, 125– 27; Tolstoy’s writing of, 115–16, 118–20; voices in, 137–41 Homer, 11, 61, 70, 122; catalogues in, 118, 146; hymn to Dionysius by, 26; Maenads in, 26; Nietzsche on, 2, 9; Tolstoy as modern, 114–15; Tolstoy’s divergence from, 117–18, 123–25, 127. See also epic

image: Apollonian contemplation of, 3, 9, 206; incompleteness of, 44–46; and memory, 248–53; missing of self and other in, 41–44; in Oakeshott, 53–54; of other, 38–40; outsideness of, 46–48; production in imagination of, 229–33, 237, 243–44; of self, ix, xii, 31, 35–37 imagination: antiquity’s conception of, 227, 230–32, 234, 236; autonomy of, xii, 239–40, 244–45; flaneur and, 105; genius and, 245–46; intermediate position of, 227, 232–35; and memory, 229, 248–253; negativity of, 229, 235–37, 245; productive, 164, 229, 237–38, 240– 41, 243–45, 247; radical novelty in, 47, 242–45. See also memory irony: Cynic, 68, 71; in Rorty’s philosophy, 51–52, 59, 61, 68; Socratic, 51, 68, 172, 174; use by slave in comedy of, 172–174 Jonas, Hans, xiii, 2; components of scientific revolution for, 212, 226; idea of revolution of, 210–12; interest in science of, 140; natural history of, 140; on ontology of the new science, 217–21; on painting, 212–14; search for the source of mathematization of world, 223–26. See also science Kant, Immanuel, xiii, 4, 33, 122, 218, 222; on beauty, 201–3, 205; on boredom, 74–75, 77; concept of the genius in, 245, 247; on imagination as faculty, 229–34, 237; on memory, 251–53; Nietzsche’s ridicule of, 231; on productive imagination, 238–45 Kepler, Johannes, 209n1; on harmony, 212–13; mathematization of world by, 218, 222–23, 225 Kracauer, Siegfried, 89; boredom as modern in, xiii, 73–75, 79; and

Index

Heidegger, 80, 82, 84; paradoxes of boredom in, 75–79. See also boredom Leibniz, G. W., 211, 214–15, 217, 222, 224, 243 liberation: from boredom, 78, 95, 102; in comedy, 154–55, 163, 190; in Cynicism, 182–184, 186, 195; as different from freedom, 105; as narrative structure, xii, 118, 127–28; love: Apollonian quality of, 17–18; as beautiful, 198, 203, 205–6, 208; brotherly, 20; in comedy, 153–54, 157–58, 160–61, 165–66, 168; of Dostoevsky’s maenads, 26–28; in imagination, 242; inability to, 22–24; of native land, 131; in poetry, 9–10; as reaction to fear, 36; as social bond, 140; as theme in Dostoevsky, 28–29; Marx, Karl, 34, 107, 150; Benjamin’s use of, 99–101 mathematics: development in modernity of, 95; Dostoevsky’s training in, 1; and the imprecision of physical bodies, 224–26; as intermediary in imagination, 234–35; knowledge in, 220–21; as law of nature, 90, 98, 212–14, 216–17; non-use in ancient physics of, 213–14; source of, 222– 24, 226–28; use in Tolstoy’s history of, 125–26; useless to Cynics of, 180; world as, x, xii, 202–3, 218–21 mediation, xi, xiii, 111, 227; boredom’s lack of, 88, 98, 109; imagination as, 229, 240; learning as, 175 memory: boredom and, 87, 95; epic and, 114, 117, 119, 146; figures of, 177; flaneur and, 104–6; history and, 139–40; imagination and, 229, 248– 253; romantic landscapes and, 247; techniques to aid, 105, 130, 251. See also history; imagination

275

Menander, x, 6, 154, 156–59, 165, 168, 170–71, 189. See also comedy method: in comedy, 164, 175; of dialectic, 170, 175; in historiography, 141, 143; mathematics and, 220–22; Rorty and, 56–57; scientific, 215–17, 219; of Tolstoy, 126. See also mathematics; science Michelet, Jules, 89, 139, 142; Rancière’s view of, 131–33, 136, 138, 142–44, 147. See also history; Rancière, Jacques monologue: in comedy, 156, 158, 162, 165, 173; in dialectic, 167; modern subject’s condition of, xi–xii, 73, 99, 111, 202; opposition to dialogue of, 55; Rorty’s conversation as, 58, 61–62. See also dialogue nature, 175, 212; beauty of, 200–3; and history, 140; and imagination, 243– 47; mathematization in modernity of, x, xii, 90–92, 97, 218–22, 226; new ontology of, 217–18; opposition to reason of, 3–4; in opposition to the city, 90, 97, 178–79, 183, 194; physics as thinking about, 72; in practice of Diogenes, 179–82, 187; simplicity of, 213–14; tyrant’s disregard of, 195 negativity: and beauty, 197–99, 204, 206, 208; as constitutive of imagination, 229, 235–37, 248, 252; radical, 244–46 Newton, Isaac, 209n1; mathematical views of, 217, 219, 222; physical laws of, 125, 212, 219; understanding of nature of, 202, 213–14 Nietzsche, Friedrich: on comedy, 6–7, 25, 152; critique of ApollonianDionysian division of, 12–14, 208; division of Apollonian and Dionysian by, 3–5, 7–8, 206–8; on epic, 9; eternal recurrence in, 98;

276

Index

influence of Romantics on, 5–8; influence of Theognis on, 11–12; on lyric poetry, 9–11; ridicule of Kant by, 231; on tragedy, 1, 6, 12, 152 Oakeshott, Michael: on conversation, 53–56. See also Rorty, Richard; voice ontology: in antiquity, 214, 227; revolution in modern, x, xiii, 209–10, 212, 217–18, 220, 222, 226–28. See also being opposites: to boredom, 109–11; other as, ix other: antiquity as modernity’s, x, 3, 5, 8, 15, 197–98, 209; and beauty, 204– 206; in boredom, 96–98, 110–111; in comedy, 155, 157–58, 161–63, 165, 168–69, 172, 174, 176, 189–90; dialogue with, xii, 55–56, 60–63; free speech and, 186; image of, 39– 41, 44–48; modern subjects lack of, xi–xii, 73, 80, 99–101, 158; as self, 37–39, 41, 167; of self, 35–36, 40; surplus of, 48; unfinalizable nature of, 42–45, 47; voice of, 41–42; world as, 217–18 outsideness: of the image, 47–48 painting, 13n28, 92, 203, 243; harmony in, 212–13 Paris, 103; Benjamin’s view of, 90, 92, 107 parrhesia. See free speech philosophy: as art form, 204, 206; boredom of systems of, 94–95; Cartesian, 211n6; and comedy, 151–52, 156, 160, 171, 176, 190; conversation in Rorty’s, 55–59, 61–63; Cynical suspicion of, 65–66; as directed at beauty, 204, 206, 208; of Galileo, 214; German, 2, 209; of history, 125, 129, 143; as homesickness, 79; ignoring of comedy by, 149–50; practice of flaneur compared to, 106–7; as

preparation for dying, 189; Rorty’s practice of, 49–53; and the ruler, 191–94; staging of, 187–88; Stoic, 171 Plato, x, xiii, 144, 150, 166; on beauty, 199, 203–8; on comedy, 149, 171, 190; conflict with Cynics of, 65–66, 69, 185, 193; criticism by Rorty of, 51–52, 58; critique of writing by, 41, 160; depiction of Socrates by, 9, 172–75, 177, 179; and Dostoevsky, 16, 19; and the tyrant, 191, 193, 194n38; use of dialectic by, 109, 167, 169–70; use of dialogue by, 188n24. See also Cynicism; dialectic; dialogue; Socrates Plautus, x, 7, 150; character names of, 156; doubles in plays of, 168; fourth wall breaks in, 155; lack of chorus in plays of, 158; reflexivity of plays of, 152; slaves in plays of, 170, 173; style of, 162; use of Greek sources by, 159–60; use of synopsis by, 164. See also comedy, Menander, Terence Plotinus, xiii, 150, 191, 193; on beauty, 199n6, 200–201 Plutarch, 11, 124, 192 Proclus, xiii, 94, 149, 227; on imagination, 229, 234–35, 239 Rancière, Jacques, xiii; criticism of Annales School, 130–31; critique of historical project of, 139–141, 143,–44, 148; and epic, 145–47; excess of words in history for, 135– 37; influence of Barthes on, 138, 143; metaphor of the sea in, 135; on Michelet, 131–33, 136, 143–44, 147; necessity to include poor in history for, 137–39; new historiography of, 129, 131–38, 141–43, 145–47; on Tolstoy, 121n17. See also Annales School; history reason: Apollonian quality of, 3–4, 206– 7; autonomy in modernity of, xii,

Index

239–240; in comedy, 160–61, 163, 175; demise of, 198; in dialectic, 163, 167, 170, 175; Diogenes’ use of, 180; in Homer’s history, 123; and imagination, 243–45; in Kant, 232; in Proclus, 235; in science, 216–17; in Tolstoy’s history, 117, 119, 123. See also dialectic recollection, 106, 250–53; Aristotle on, 248–49; Socratic, 166. See also memory revolution: Annales, 130; Jonas’ description of, 210–12; Michelet’s description of, 131–32; ontological, xiii, 209, 217–18, 222, 226–27; Rancière’s literary, 135–36, 141–42, 144–45; Renaissance painting as, 212; scientific, x, 127n26, 209, 212, 218, 220, 222–23, 225–26. See also freedom; liberation Romanticism, 102, 106, 131, 132n7, 201; Dostoevsky and, 16; and epic, 114–15, 128; idea of genius in, 60, 245; and landscapes, 104–5, 247; Nietzsche and, 5–7, 9–10; view of history of, x, 2, 5, 150: See also The Enlightenment Rorty, Richard, xiii; conversation in philosophy of, 55–62; criticism of contemporary philosophy by, 49–51, 53, 65; influence of Oakeshott on, 53, 61, 63; irony of, 51–52, 68; and literature, 71; narrative of philosophy of, 52–53; relation to Cynicism of, 64–72; truth-telling of, 63–64, 67; use of scandal by, 70; scandal, 27; use by Cynics of, 67n47, 69–70, 182–84, 187; use by Rorty of, 70. See also comedy; Cynicism; Diogenes of Sinope; free speech Schelling, F. W. J, 33, 202 Schiller, Friedrich, 7–8, 16 Schlegel, August, 6–7 Schlegel, Friedrich, 131, 160

277

science: Annales and, 130–31; Blanqui’s turn to, 91–92; dialectic and, 170; Diogenes’ opposition to, 180; history as, 125, 132, 142–44, 147; imprecision of, 224–26; Jonas’ interest in, 209–10; logic of, 216– 18; and mathematics, 219–23; in Oakeshott, 53; physics as exemplary, 221, 224; Platonic, 227–28; probability as modern, 95; revolution, x, 127n26, 209, 212, 218, 220, 222– 23, 225–26; simplicity of, 213–14 self. See other Socrates, x, 8–9, 75, 94, 121, 167, 206; as comic figure, 7, 172–73, 175, 189; and Cynicism, 65–66, 71, 121n19, 177–180, 187–189; as dialectician, 167, 170, 174; use of irony by, 174. See also comedy; Cynicism; dialectic; dialogue; Diogenes of Sinope; Plato Stoicism, 34, 199n6, 213; relation to Cynicism, 64, 67, 72, 178–79, 180n9, 186n18; on slavery, 171–72. See also Cynicism; free speech subject: Aristotelian, 21; Benjamin’s bored, 102; boredom and, 111; capital as, 99–101; comedy, 157–58, 162; in Descartes, 217–18, 252; Hegelian, 204; historical, 129, 131–32, 135, 138–39, 144–45, 148; modern, x–xiii, 73, 78, 99–102, 111, 157–58, 198, 201–2, 218, 244 Terence, x, xiii, 175; characters in plays of, 156–58, 161–62; criticism by Romantics of, 6–7, 25; dialectic in plays of, 165–66, 170; doubles in plays of, 167–69; fourth wall breaks in, 155; Heller on, 150–51; lack of chorus in plays of, 158; names in, 156; reflexivity of, 152; slave in plays of, 154, 170; style of, 155, 162; use of Greek sources by, 159–60; use of synopsis by, 164. See also Comedy; Menander; Plautus

278

Index

Theognis, 11–12 time: Benjamin on, 102, 110; in epic, 146; eternal recurrence after infinite, 98; Heidegger on, 79–84, 87–88; Kant on, 232; Kracauer on, 74–75; Tolstoy, Leo: apophaticism of, 120–23, 125; history in, xiii, 119–20, 124–25; historical models of, 126–27; influence of, 113–14; narratives of, 127–28; philosophy of history of, 122–24; as writer of epic, 115–117, 128 tragedy, x, 7, 29, 145, 161; of beauty, 205; as contrary to comedy, xi, 6, 25, 149–50, 152–53, 156, 158, 167, 188– 89; Nietzsche on, 1–2, 8–10, 12, 14; of philosophy, 176. See also comedy tyrant, 185n16, 186–87, 194–95. See also Cynicism; free speech

voice: in historiography, xii, 129, 133, 137–145, 147–48; in Oakeshott, 53– 55; Rorty’s adoption of Oakeshott’s view of, 61, 63; of self and not-self in Bakhtin, 41–43. See also Rancière, Jacques well-being: in comedic conclusions, 162, 175–76, 190; in Cynicism, 180, 191, 194; opposed to boredom, 76, 111; Tolstoy’s view of, 117. See also boredom; comedy Wolff, Christian: on imagination, 229– 31, 233, 235–37, 240–41, 243–44; on memory, 249–50, 252. See also Baumgarten, Alexander; imagination; Kant, Immanuel; memory Xenophon, 172, 177, 180