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.

p72

...“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 XVIII. Nietzsche - part 7

The daemon of Socrates

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XVII. Nietzsche - part 6

From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche...

Sec 13 - The daimonion of Socrates

The daemon is a divine “something” between men and gods that inspires a man. From Wiki:

In the Hellenistic ruler cult that began with Alexander the Great, it was not the ruler but his guiding daemon that was venerated. In the Archaic or early Classical period, the daemon had been democratized and internalized for each person, whom it served to guide, motivate and inspire, as one possessed of such good spirits. Similarly, the 1st-century Roman imperial cult began by venerating the genius or numen of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.

The Delphic oracle proclaimed Socrates to be the wisest man, followed by Euripides and Sophocles. But Aristophanes portrays him as the supreme Sophist and the government of Athens found him guilty of not believing in the gods of the city and of corrupting youth. Nietzsche is much harder on him.

[According to Nietzsche, Socrates attacks all who live...] "Only by instinct"... Socrates conceives it to be his duty to correct existence: all alone, with an expression of irreverence and superiority, as the precursor of an altogether different culture, art, and morality... 

...What demonic power is this that dares spill this magic potion [Hellenic Greek culture] into dust?...

...Socrates might be called the typical non-mystic, in whom, through a hypertrophy, the logical nature is developed as excessively as instinctive wisdom is in the mystic... [And yet he is directed by his daemon.] 

...it was as impossible to refute him here [in his belief in his divine calling] as to approve of his instinct-disintegrating influence... [And his execution did no good in the long run as,] ...The dying Socrates became the new ideal, never seen before, of noble Greek youth....

I suspect Nietzsche is also thinking of Alcibiades here, Socrates’s companion and the military genius who was chased from Athens and left her without a great leader just when she most needed one. 

Settembrini, in The Magic Mountain, is very like Socrates in his passion for reason and for ending suffering through knowledge.

Sec 14 - The Platonic dialogue

...To this [Socrates's] eye was denied the pleasure of gazing into the Dionysian abysses. What, then, did it have to see in the ‘sublime and greatly lauded’ tragic art, as Plato called it? Something rather unreasonable, full of causes apparently without effects, and effects apparently without causes; the whole, moreover, so motley and manifold that it could not but be repugnant to a sober mind, and a dangerous tinder for sensitive and susceptible souls...

...Plato’s main objection to the older art [poetic tragedy] -- that it is the imitation of a phantom and hence belongs to a sphere even lower than the empirical world -- could certainly not be directed against the new art [his dialogues]; and so we find Plato endeavoring to transcend reality and to present the idea which underlies this pseudo-reality. Thus Plato, the thinker, arrived by a detour where he had always been at home as a poet -- at the point from which Sophocles and the older art protested solemnly against that objection. If tragedy had absorbed into itself all the earlier types of art, the same might also be said in an eccentric sense of the Platonic dialogue which, a mixture of all extant styles and forms, hovers midway between narrative, lyric, and drama, between prose and poetry, and so has also broken the strict old law of the unity of linguistic form....

The Platonic dialogue was, as it were, the barge on which the shipwrecked ancient poetry saved herself with all her children: crowded into a narrow space and timidly submitting to the single pilot, Socrates, they now sailed into a new world... Indeed, Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel -- which may be described as an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable, in which poetry holds the same rank in relation to dialectical philosophy as this same philosophy held for many centuries in relation to theology: namely, the rank of ancilla [handmaid]. This was the new position into which Plato, under the pressure of the demonic Socrates, forced poetry.

Here philosophic thought overgrows art and compels it to cling close to the trunk of dialectic... Consider the consequences of the Socratic maxims: ‘Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy.’ In these three basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy. For now the virtuous hero must be a dialectician; now there must be a necessary, visible connection between virtue and knowledge, faith and morality; now the transcendental justice of Aeschylus is degraded to the superficial and insolent principle of ‘poetic justice’ with its customary deus ex machina.

At this point the translator, Walter Kaufmann, points out that:

...the superabundance of dialectical fireworks in... [the tragedies of Euripides] ...usually illustrates the futility of reason, its inability to prevent tragedy. Optimistic dialectic drives music out of tragedy with the scourge of its syllogisms; that is, it destroys the essence of tragedy, which can be interpreted only as a manifestation and projection into images of Dionysian states, as the visible symbolizing of music, as the dreamworld of a Dionysian intoxication.

[Nietzsche then reflects on Socrates sudden determination to practice music in his final days before execution.] ...Perhaps -- thus he must have asked himself -- what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science?

Next: Interlude XIX. Nietzsche - part 8.