Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XXVI. Foucault - part 6
From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 3 - The Heart Laid Bare - cont.
In 1875 and after, Nietzsche’s search for “one unique path” implicitly invokes the archaic -- and, to the modern mind, bizarre -- idea that every human being is haunted by a singular daimon. For the ancient Greeks, the word “daimon” defined the otherwise unknowable power that drove an individual more or less blindly forward... For the ordinary Greek... the idea of the daimon described whatever the individual experienced as unpredictable, out of control, and not of his own doing; it was, in short, a word for the power of a singular fate.
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...Socrates... regarded his daimon as an indwelling and audible divinity, a being other than himself who sometimes spoke to him, leading him to stop, say no, turn about, change his mind, and modify his behavior. Socrates’ professed intimacy with his daimon fueled popular suspicion that he was inventing a new (and literally self-serving) god -- one of the charges that cost the philosopher his life.
Whether knowable or not -- and whether a contingent by-product of human character, or a lot drawn at birth and held in trust by a divine, or quasi-divine, spirit -- the nature of one’s daimon defined the course of one’s life. Blessed was the soul with a good daimon: swimming with the tide, it became eudaimon [see Interlude IX.], or happy. But there was another, more disquieting possibility, dramatized in Greek tragedy: sometimes a person, even a heroic and great person, had to bear the brunt of a bad daimon. It was this possibility that the theologians of early Christianity evoked by using the word daimon to mean a diabolical fiend, or “demon” -- an emissary of the devil, haunting one’s heart, lurking in one’s dreams, presiding over carnal desires, posing a constant temptation to do wrong, resistible only at the price of mortification and self-renunciation.
Nietzsche (like Goethe before him) rejected this Christian stigmatization of the demonic aspect of the human being. If becoming “what one is” unleashes a compulsion to malignancy, so be it; “Man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him.” If acting in harmony with a particularly cursed demon brings disaster, so be it: “The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is -- to live dangerously!” For better or worse, the human being who would find (and not renounce) itself had no choice. “There is no drearier and more repulsive creature,” comments Nietzsche, “than the man who has evaded his genius.” Call it genius or consider it one’s unique daimon -- here is Nietzsche’s own key for unlocking “the riddle which man must solve,” the riddle “he can only solve in being, in being what he is and not something else.”
Remember that quote from Seneca from Stoics part 2? “The happy life is a life that is in harmony with its own nature.” I’m sure this is true but I’m not sure I want everyone to be “happy” in this sense. Because you have to “say yes” to Hitler and Stalin and Jeffrey Dahmer to be really consistent. I want to put in a good word for the Golden Rule even in a world “Beyond Good and Evil”. I suppose this makes me a cowardly “terrorist” like Sartre, and I will accept the criticism. (Masochism is a bit of a problem for the Golden Rule as it assumes people are more or less alike and predictable as to what they would have done unto them. I used to think this was a pretty trivial problem but perhaps I was just naïve -- and not “naïve” in Schiller’s “one with nature” sense of the word.
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...“The Demon is not the Other,” he [Foucault] once declared in terms that characteristically combine the gist of Nietzsche’s thinking with the hermetic abstractness of Heidegger’s style of writing. Far from being an atavism from a remote era of dark superstition, the Demon,” Foucault suggests, is “something strange and unsettling that leaves one baffled and motionless: the Same, the perfect Likeness -- the very image of our being, if only we would recognize it. In this context, Foucault goes on to point out the crucial role played by “the Demon” in one of Nietzsche’s most famous aphorisms: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal over you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it, and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more...’”
Nietzsche’s Demon is, like the Greek daimon, a figure of fate. He poses a difficult challenge: to become what one is, one must welcome not only chaos and transcendence and the power to start anew, but also embrace every unchangeable aspect of the past, every uncontrollable aspect of the present, every unintended result in the future. “‘The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust.’” To be able truly to love this fate -- even if it seems at first glance a “dreadful accident” -- would then amount, in Foucault’s terms, to recognize that the demon represents the perfect Likeness of “I myself” and saying, with joy: “‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’”
“What returns,” writes Nietzsche, “what finally comes home to me, is my own self.”
Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence is, in my opinion, another thought experiment. I don’t think he believes this is true, but that, given our only living once, it might as well be true. I think there is a tendency for people -- even outside cultures that believe in reincarnation -- to think that this life is a mess but that next time they will get their shit together, or else just do what they really want. To think that you would have to live this, your actual life, over and over forces you to really look at it and decide if this is really what you would choose to return to. If you are a person like Foucault or Bataille or Sade and were attempting to live a good, clean, pedestrian, bourgeois life, this thought would probably be a call to arms.
I look at it the other way, that regardless of how mundane or unsatisfying you may find your life, it also contains endless moments that you should struggle to savor. Your puppy guru should teach you to look and smell and taste everything about you, to enjoy the pleasures of sleeping in the sun. There’s no percentage in investing in a different future life that you imagine but don’t ever live.
...the person concerned about measuring up to his or her own fate “must descend,” as Nietzsche puts it, “into the depths of existence with a string of curious questions on his lips: Why am I alive? What lesson am I to learn from life? How did I become what I am and why do I suffer from being what I am?” The person who seriously pursues such questions “tortures himself,” writes Nietzsche, and “observes that nobody else tortures himself in the same way.”
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