Interlude L. Foucault - part 27

Trophonius + Fun + The DUKW

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XLIX. Foucault - part 26

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Chapter 5 - In the Labyrinth cont...

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In his preface to The Archeology of Knowledge [his next book], evoking “this blank space from which I speak,” Foucault himself alludes to what is at stake in his own “great Nietzschean quest.” Singing the praises of a certain anonymity, Nietzsche, too, had once referred with admiration to the thinker who “tunnels and mines and undermines,” going forward “slowly, cautiously,” as though (as Nietzsche put it) “he perhaps desires this prolonged obscurity, desires to be incomprehensible, concealed, enigmatic, because he knows what he will thereby also acquire: his own morning, his own redemption, his own daybreak.”

“He will return,” pronounces Nietzsche, “that is certain: do not ask him what he is looking for down there, he will tell you himself of his own accord, this seeming Trophonius and subterranean, as soon as he has ‘become a man.’”... [also here for how difficult it is to belong to the cult of Trophonius]

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same,” Foucault replies in 1969, sounding very much like Nietzsche’s Trophonius. “Do you imagine that I would take so much pain and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would be so stubborn, so reckless, if I were not preparing -- with a rather feverish hand -- a labyrinth into which I can venture, shifting my purpose, opening for it underground passages, pushing it far from itself, finding for it overhangs that epitomize and deform its journey, where I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes I will never have to see again.”

One is reminded of the great unspoken aim of Foucault’s lifework -- the daimonic effort to become what one is.

One is reminded as well of the oracle and fate of Trophonius, according to Greek myth: “Live merrily and indulge yourself in every pleasure for six days; on the seventh, your heart’s desire shall be granted” -- and on the seventh day he died...

And so Foucault now appears before us as well: a baffling figure of self-creation, self-destruction, and self-discovery, “withdrawn into the manifestation of his work.” A creature of heterogeneous dimensions, he evokes Daedalus and the Minotaur, Ariadne and Dionysus -- Kant and Sade -- somehow combined into one. Balanced between reason and unreason, his words conjure up an “invisible presence” -- the traces of an underground man, still tunneling, doubtless still suffering, destination still unknown.

The end of the 5th chapter... six more to go! But not for us. At least not now.

Late update... I quit just a little too soon. There will be just one more (short) chapter.

Having fun.

Because “Henry Ryecroft” was just writing notes to himself, he never comments on the overall endeavor he’s engaged in -- since there is no endeavor “officially.” I, on the other hand, while also really just writing for myself, do view this as an endeavor of some sort. (I don’t recollect any mention of solipsism in the accounts of Descartes, Hume, and Kant, and yet solipsism is precisely the boogeyman that drives much of this philosophy. How do we know, given the unreliability of our senses, that anything beyond ourselves really exists? Descartes endeavored to convince us that things are as they appear (because God would not deceive us), but never with complete success. Kant tries to reestablish reality on a firm footing after Hume but ends up giving us the unknowable “thing in itself.” Aside from faith, how do you assert the existence of “things” you can’t actually sense? Husserl is at least honest in ignoring the “thing in itself,” but then how do we know that there is anything but us? (And by “us” I mean “Me.”) Fortunately, this isn’t a problem for pantheism -- or at least it’s less of a problem.

I can never know for certain that I have readers beyond myself. (And I’m OK with that.) And I’m also delighted in some of the unexpected (and certainly unplanned) recent developments of my blog. I had thought that limiting myself to non-fiction would also limit the surprising (almost transcendent) directions that prose can take the writer. With fiction, characters can say or do things you, as author, don’t expect, or plots can run off in unexpected directions. There is a magical point in the process where you cease to be the driver and become the passenger. I’m sad to admit that I’m still not sure if Nietzsche would attribute this to Apollo or to Dionysus. Perhaps it’s Apollo tapping into the Dionysian.

But lately the connections, and digressions, I’ve been making have also had this exciting -- magical -- character for me. The Kantian multiple digression, that drew on the structure borrowed from Roussel (mentioned in Interlude XXXIX) was nice but the Goddesses digression was inspired (though not by me). I had no idea how well it would connect, I just knew I had had more than enough of this sausage fest. The jury is still out on Faust.

Today I read about the Goddesses in the morning and about Kant and his precursors in the afternoon -- the contrast couldn’t have been more extreme. (Not everything is published in the order it was written.) While I may not have understood everything the authors writing about Kali and Tantra intended to convey, I at least thought I was getting a great deal of it, and I liked what I was getting. With Kant, and even Hume (and Foucault and his cohort are far worse), I often don’t have a clue what they mean as I first read a sentence or paragraph. The purpose of jargon is to communicate selectively -- only to people within the circle of initiates -- and I am insufficiently initiated. Even so, some terms do make sense, like Kant’s thing-in-itself. I may prefer to consider the thing-in-itself from the perspective of Quantum Physics or Tantric monism, but it is still valuable to have a term for that which underlies what we perceive. Muriel Barbery did a good job of parsing this particular terminology in Hedgehog (though even she ignored the Quantum aspect). If you look at the thing-in-itself as part of the web Kali spins out of herself, or as Quantum potentiality waiting to be realized by consciousness, the term does have value.

Just now I clicked a “thing-in-itself” link in Wiki and was taken to Noumenon:

The noumenon /ˈnɒuːmɨnɒn/ is a posited object or event that is known (if at all) without the use of the senses. The term is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to "phenomenon", which refers to anything that appears to, or is an object of, the senses. In Platonic philosophy, the noumenal realm was equated with the world of ideas known to the philosophical mind, in contrast to the phenomenal realm, which was equated with the world of sensory reality, known to the uneducated mind. Much of modern philosophy has generally been skeptical of the possibility of knowledge independent of the senses, and Immanuel Kant gave this point of view its classical version, saying that the noumenal world may exist, but it is completely unknowable to humans. In Kantian philosophy the unknowable noumenon is often linked to the unknowable "thing-in-itself" (Ding an sich, which could also be rendered as "thing-as-such" or "thing per se"), although how to characterize the nature of the relationship is a question yet open to some controversy.

"A question yet open to some controversy" would be a good title for a book.

So here are two philosophical concepts that I knew but had never (to my recollection -- my college days are now 39 years in the past) identified with each other. And I think it’s wonderful (though I can certainly understand the opposing view) that virtually every philosophical concept and position of recent centuries can also be found in either Hellenistic or Hellenic philosophy. What does one make of the fact that pre-Socratic philosophers had a better batting average than Descartes? (Beside the obvious answer that Descarte was, to quote Shakespeare, Conrad, and Dogberry, “an ass”).

I can’t tell you how much fun I’m having with this nonsense. There may be a Prolog or just another blog after Winter.

In praise of the DUKW and Florence Nightingale.

As I took my favorite seat in the window of the Bank Cafe, a DUKW drove past in it’s latest incarnation in the Ride the Ducks vehicle fleet. This year is the 72th anniversary of the appearance of DUKWs in WW2. They are easy to skip in a list of technological developments related to that war, but they are my favorite innovation. There is an excellent U.S. Army video from 1942 showing how the DUKW is just a deuce and a half (2 1/2 ton) army truck with a few modifications. It is so simple yet so ingenious. You turn a standard army truck into an amphibious vehicle that can cross rivers, ferry men and material from offshore ships to shore (or propel tourists around a harbor or river) without reducing its ability to also act as a standard truck (granted, getting in and out isn’t as simple as with a standard deuce and a half, but, COME ON!)

The British, all-wood, Mosquito bomber is a flashier wartime innovation, and no one would deny the significance of radar or code breaking, but few tools made life easier for U.S. personnel in every theater of the war than the modest DUKW.

By “Florence Nightingale” I mean the shockingly recent trend in the military to pay attention to the health of soldiers. (I haven’t read her particular story recently, so I don’t know to what extent she is merely the symbol of medical developments at the time of the Crimean War.) I once read a particularly good account of the personal side of the Battle of Waterloo, and even I was surprised to discover that as late as 1815 no immediate, official, interest was taken in the casualties left on the field at the end of the day of fighting. Some units sent people back to the battlefield to search for friends, but in general the army moved on and it was left to local (Francophone, I believe) villagers to either loot or help any of the wounded that could still be helped.

During the American Civil War, and even later, the majority of an army's personnel losses came from disease rather than fighting. Since, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, the method of infection was still not understood, this is perhaps understandable, but soon after Florence Nightingale, armies began to pay attention to sanitation and realized that they could preserve their strength by taking both preventive measures and by caring for their wounded and sick. (At least most armies did, the Japanese in WW2 viewed the matter rather differently.)

So two non-”military” innovations -- putting a boat hull on a truck and providing humanitarian care for soldiers -- resulted in startling improvements in an army’s ability to fight. One should never underestimate the power of little things.  

Next: Interlude LI. Foucault - part 28.