Interlude XXVII. Foucault - part 7 - Why am I alive?

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.

p71

...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.”

Foucault's daemon.

As with Socrates, Foucault was blessed with a personal daemon who frequently set him on the right (though not the “straight") course. As we've already seen, his homosexuality made his prolonged inclusion in the Communists party simply impossible. Both his homosexuality and his fascination with death forced him to question conventional standards of sanity. He really had no option in the matter.

Next: Interlude XXVIII. Foucault - part 8.

Interlude IX. Standing in the sun + Cynicism

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude VIII. Foucault - part 3

Standing in the sun.

Just before I got off my bus this morning on my way to breakfast, my strange-dar (I don’t think that coinage is likely to catch on) picked up a person standing in the street with his shirt open and half off. After breakfast I walked over to catch a different bus home and the guy was still standing in the same place. I then noticed that he was also barefoot. He was with a small pack of very stoned street people (this was in the Haight-Ashbury). Mostly I was impressed by his ability to stand at all.

The delay until my bus arrived gave me some time to consider this person. It was a delightful day, sunny but not really warm, with a light breeze. Between all his bare skin and his state of intoxication, I doubt that anyone around was seizing the moment to the degree that he was. If you could wire people for sensory experiences the way you can for an EKG, his chart would be off the chart compared with everyone else around, including me. Thinking about this reminded me of envying dogs frolicking in a fountain on a hot day.

I suspect Michel Foucault saw the rest of us as cut off from experience -- bundled up and well shod, as he welcomed experience barefoot and bare-chested. Manic bipolar people probably see the rest of us this way as well. Likewise junkies. I’m not sure about the autistic, it probably depends on where on the spectrum they fall and how well they can manage their day to day lives. If the goal of life in this reality is to maximize experience (and I don’t know how you could honestly argue that that isn’t a reasonable goal) then I’ve not been doing a very good job. To perform an Erickson style evaluation of my life with this standard in mind would result in a very poor outcome.

Another way to do this would be to consider what you are likely to regret on your deathbed. I can’t really imagine myself regretting not accumulating wealth and power and honors or wives or children. But I also can’t honestly imagine someone regretting standing barefoot and bare-chested and stoned in the street on a perfect autumn day; or regretting problematic orgasms; or too many opium dreams. This doesn’t really make me want to trade places with anyone, but it does make me a little less quick to judge.

Cynicism.

A day after writing the above I realized this is the perfect time for a shout-out to the Cynics -- the often neglected Hellenistic school of philosophy. People (here meaning Ryecroft and me) quote the Stoics and Epicureans but rarely if ever the Cynics. Like “epicurean,” even the meaning of the word “cynic” has been twisted over the millennia. “Cynic” is simply the Greek word for “dog” and this is the best, most intuitively named, of any philosophical school ever. A good Cynic acts more or less as a dog would -- he takes his pleasure as it comes and doesn’t worry about much else. Not that dissimilar from my Tao of Puppy idea, except with the focus on adult dogs, not puppies.

I bring them up here because my man “standing in the sun” is a good example of Cynic virtue, at least to an extent. Athenian Cynics were known to copulate and masturbate in public. The current underclass of people who prefer to live by dumpster diving could also be seen as good Cynics. Here’s Wiki’s short description: 

For the Cynics, the purpose of life was to live in virtue, in agreement with nature. As reasoning creatures, people could gain happiness by rigorous training and by living in a way which was natural for humans, rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, sex, and fame. Instead, they were to lead a simple life free from all possessions.

From a more detailed Wiki description I'm also going to quote this item for reasons that will become clear in a later Foucault section (part 6): "The goal of life is Eudaimonia and mental clarity or lucidity (ἁτυφια) - freedom from τύφος (smoke) which signified ignorance, mindlessness, folly, and conceit."

And going a little deeper in Wiki:

Eudaimonia..., sometimes anglicized as eudaemonia or eudemonia /juːdɨˈmoʊniə/, is a Greek word commonly translated as happiness or welfare; however, "human flourishing" has been proposed as a more accurate translation.[1]Etymologically, it consists of the words "eu" ("good") and "daimōn" ("spirit"). It is a central concept in Aristotelian ethics and political philosophy, along with the terms "aretē", most often translated as "virtue" or "excellence", and "phronesis", often translated as "practical or ethical wisdom".[2] In Aristotle's works, eudaimonia was (based on older Greek tradition) used as the term for the highest human good, and so it is the aim of practical philosophy, including ethics and political philosophy, to consider (and also experience) what it really is, and how it can be achieved.

Diogenes of Sinope was the St Paul of the Cynics and he is responsible for my favorite story in all of philosophy (I like my version better than the one in Wiki): Diogenes heard that Plato was going to be lecturing in the Academy on Socrates’ definition of man as “a featherless biped” -- a definition Plato was very pleased with -- so he tossed a plucked chicken over the wall of the Academy. From what little I’ve read so far of both French and German academic philosophy in the years around WW2, a modern Diogenes would have wrecked his rotator cuff tossing figurative plucked chickens into the universities of the time. Not that this really distinguishes this period...

Next: Interlude X. Foucault - part 4 - Heidegger & Althusser.