Reason, Emotion and “Stepping Back”
Over the last month, I found myself re-inspired to read one of my favorite of Foucault’s published works: his College de France lecture of 17 February 1982. I was merely a high school junior at the time, and I only came to these lectures long after I had left grad school (in December 1994) where Foucault was my preoccupation. At the time, Discipline and Punish was the central text because of its methodological focus on techniques of power. These later lectures, however, appeal to my current self because they provide something of a re-engagement of my long-standing interest in ethics as well as a way out of some of the dead ends that can occur when one reads only the Foucault of the 1970’s.
This particular lecture I find fascinating because it lays out an alternative vision and practice for ethics and freedom without making recourse to a subject with free will — one that requires discipline and punishment for transgressions; one that self-corrects through internalizing the values of the guard in the tower. In those works of the 1970’s, I learned to denigrate notions of “freedom” and “self-knowledge” as the dangerous and tempting artifacts of bourgeois power relations. To seek freedom was just a matter of conforming to what society wanted me to be. Self-knowledge was just another way of internalizing the demands of an industrialized society sold to us as liberation. Discipline and Punish, while a revelatory moment for me, also left me with a dead end. How could I conceive of a life that was not trapped within the false promises of the Enlightenment? Is any attempt to make a better life, to improve oneself, to help others, to make a decent living just kowtowing to the demands of an industrial society with no way out?
This 1982 lecture is, in many ways, one of Foucault’s clearest statements of the way out — at least for me. The 1983 and 1984 lectures on truth-telling are less compelling today because they focused on the courage required of people in public positions — politicians, professional philosophers, activists — to speak truth to power. This is not our problem today. Our problems are much more closely related to the concept of ascesis — “stepping back” — that is the focus of the 1981-2 lectures. By the time I get to the end of this essay, I hope to have arrived at why I think ascesis is a more important set of problems than truth-telling. To be sure, telling the truth is critically important today, but all of our media outlets and talking heads claim to be telling us the truth. What they’ve done, however, is deliver their truths in ways that encourage us not to step back and evaluate what we are being asked to believe. They encourage us to accept our feelings and emotions as the gateway to truth and that, far from stepping back from them, we should lean into them (to use the popular phrasing) as the source of truth. Stephen Colbert rather perfectly captured this leaning in as “truthiness.”
These media outlets — social and broadcast — are profit-driven and rely on having a committed and growing audience to increase advertising revenue. They must become “echo chambers” in order for the business model to work. This happens by making the audience feel good about its beliefs so that they continue to tune in. Cable news — Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC — are intended to be on all day. “Breaking News” is not special; it is a constant feature of the screen and therefore a constant demand on our attention. Similarly, social media is driven by FOMO (fear of missing out) and constant engagement.
Echo chambers are, in short, a profitability model that pray upon our knee-jerk feelings about truthiness. Within this model, cultivating anger is an easy audience-building strategy that ensures eyeballs being available to advertisers. It seems that if we aren’t angry, then we aren’t engaged — as if anger is the measure of knowing the Truth of our situation. The result has been the well-known recent phenomenon of “sorting” at the heart of echo chambers. Anger is fundamental to how this sorting works. These echo chambers make us feel good in our anger because we find a community of others who think like we do and share in the Truth that we’ve discovered and have reinforced for us every hour. We are encouraged to lean into our anger and embrace the stress that necessarily comes with it. All of this is interspersed with ads for life insurance, new drugs for what ails us, and new consumer goods to reward our sense of entitlement to the good things in life — or are they consolation prizes for our continual levels of stress and momentary distractions from our anger?
For these reasons, I find the ascesis lectures, particularly the 17 February lecture, far more relevant for today than the parhessia lectures. Our problems today are not about our ability to tell truth to each other; our problems have more to do with how we respond and react to the truths we are told. When our media outlets and talking heads thrive on provoking our anger to build their audiences, they necessarily seek to validate our knee-jerk reactions. Stoicism, however, was fundamentally about being able to step back from those knee-jerk feelings and evaluate their content. This requires techniques of calming ourselves and others so that we aren’t too quick to turn these provocations into unconsidered actions. We’ve collectively lost this ability to step back and evaluate our own knee-jerk reactions, and that loss has been systematically promoted.
This 1982 lecture helps me make sense of this problem of anger and how we orient ourselves to political and cultural truths. To be sure, Foucault is interested in our relationship to truth as central to his life’s work. He is clear about this at the end of the 1982 lectures, which led to the final two College de France lecture series, which focused on parhessia — truth telling. But for me, there is a different angle on these lectures — the ascesis angle — that points in a different direction to understanding how I want to “problematize” today’s issues of truth, reason, emotion and subjectivity.
With all that said, I want to spend some time summarizing this lecture and my changing reactions to it. The lecture focuses on the Roman Stoics, Seneca in particular. In Seneca, Foucault found a practical and philosophical approach to experience and identity that was squeezed out by the Platonic mode of the self (based on “recollection”) and the Christian mode of the self (based on revealed Truth and self-renunciation). Both of these modes helped each other out in the early centuries of Christianity. (This is a well known history covered by both Pierre Hadot and Peter Brown, both cited by Foucault as significant influences on these lectures.) Platonism and Christianity famously colluded because they share a similar concept of Truth — one that is otherworldly, stable, transcendent and relegates the messy lived-reality of life-on-earth to mere shadows and reflections of the One (Plotinus) or God (Augustine and the early Christian “fathers).
In this collusion, they hid the “Hellenistic” model represented by Roman Stoicism in general and Seneca in particular:
These two great models — the Platonic and the Christian, or if you like, the model of recollection and the model of exegesis — have obviously had an immense historical prestige which has hidden the other model, the nature of which I would like to separate out for you. (256)
In this hidden alternative Foucault found a practical and philosophical approach to the self that does not “entail or call for a fundamental and continuous task of knowledge of what we will call the human subject, the human soul, human interiority, the interiority of consciousness, etcetera” (258). But we still have a self that works on itself, that takes itself as a project, that has some agency and “self-control” that is not reducible to the mere effects of modern power relations. By the time we get to the end of this lecture, this self will be able to attain “freedom” (282).
As a thoroughgoing advocate of the Discipline and Punish version of Foucault, this was foreign territory for me. This is the kind of language I would have criticized assuming that any form of working on oneself is an effect of modern power. There could be no outside of power relations where freedom would reside. Thus there could be no crossing over to a pure outside of freedom. Now 30 years down the road I read with greater nuance and far less pre-determined judgment. I’m not trying to synthesize everything I read and hear into a coherent world view that I’ve already decided is True. Instead, I read to think differently than I do now. I can see how he got to ascesis and how it was crucial to do so to break through the dead ends of the analytics of power. These lectures have led to my own reading of Seneca (and Plato and Augustine), which I’ve been covering in these meditations and essays. I agree with Foucault that there is a different model in Seneca — one that is far more promising for answering the ongoing modern question of how one might live (to borrow Todd May’s phrase) while being well aware of the truths created and exposed in Discipline and Punish and the other power-analytics and genealogical works of the 1970’s.
For me now, this lecture gets to the heart of “how one might live” in a world where our ability to step back from our knee-jerk reactions is systematically disabled so that emotionally invested audiences can be built for advertisers. The important passage on Stoic ascesis comes at the end of his reading of Seneca’s two “prefaces” in Natural Questions where he shows how it offers a different (though related) model of knowledge than that of Plato’s Forms. Foucault focuses on how this knowledge of the world (what the Stoics called “physics” as a branch of philosophy) is not otherworldly. It is “the world in which we live” (282). The human capacity for reason that we use to gain knowledge of earthquakes, fires, floods and all the other cause-and-effect driven events of the natural world is made of the same substance that drives these events (281). Everything is happening on the same plane; everything is material and driven by fundamental forces — earth, wind, fire, water — and animated by pneuma. There is no Platonic or Christian transcendence of mind and spirit out of this world to another more perfect one. There is no fundamental discontinuity between the reasoning power of the mind/soul (animus) and the underlying laws of nature that power everything. Your animus is part of everything.
This is canonical Stoicism, and it is worth dwelling on how important this continuity is to that school of thought. While it is clearly articulated throughout Natural Questions, one of the clearest statements is found in the earlier On Anger. In 2.19, Seneca discusses how some people are predisposed to anger as a characteristic. He ties this characteristic to the dominance of fire and heat:
[C]reatures’ innate characters incline more in a given direction in direct proportion to the greater force that the preponderance of a given element provides…. the element that predominates in him will determine his characteristic behaviors. An ardent mind’s nature makes people disposed to anger, because fire is active and intransigent; a mixture in which cold predominates makes them timid, because cold is sluggish and pinched. (2.19.2)
The animus (mind/soul) is part of the flow of forces in nature. It is not something different in kind from nature; it is part of the same four elements (earth, fire, water, air) and animated by the same pneuma. When we combine this line of thinking with the canonical Stoic belief that everything that matters is composed of physical substance, we have a very different picture of the world than that offered by Plato and Christianity where the immaterial is hierarchically privileged over the material: no eternal immaterial Forms; no eternal immaterial God; no spiritual Holy Trinity. To be sure, Stoicism has the concept of the “incorporeal” as a mode of existence, but these incorporeals don’t produce effects. In fact, they are the effects of the corporeal forces of natures. There is also a recurrent god in Seneca, but it is the animating material force that unifies and runs through everything. It is not an immaterial Being that one prays to nor can its Truth be written down as anything like a Nicene Creed, though it does carry with it some aspects that Christianity will pick up later — omnipotence, providence, goodness, etcetera. Nature is God for Seneca. It is a flow of forces and is therefore better understood as temporal rather than a purely spatial Being laying out a chessboard universe. It is better understood as “substance” as Deleuze borrowed it from Spinoza — pure materiality but a materiality that can only be grasped in its modes of “expression”. Yes, Nature is made up of four elements, but these elements have no content in and of themselves and no effectivity until they are activated, combined and expressed as events — earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, wars driven by angry emperors. So, yes, Nature is material “substance,” but it is not substance as a “thing”; it is substance as the flow of time and exists only as these modes of expression.
This has important implications for how the human being is conceived and what the status of self-knowledge is. In a temporally conceived, fully material, flattened universe, human interiority doesn’t exist as an original condition of identity. There is no external spiritualized Truth that the self needs to rediscover and reconnect within itself. For Platonism, this takes the form of recollection; for Christianity it takes the form of revelation. Both require some form of self-renunciation because the material world is a deformity and denigration of the real etherial world of the spirit. In order for recollection and renunciation to work, some vestige of this Truth needs to be hidden within the human being. Salvation, whether Platonic or Christian, comes through reconnecting with this Truth hidden within.
The Platonic/Christian self is split across this material and spiritual divide. The real self (its Truth) exists in the immaterial realm and must be reconnected. The material self (traditionally the body) must be at best bracketed, at worst utterly renounced. The work of self-knowledge is to make the reconciliation. Thus the “care of the self” is subordinated to, and an outcome of, knowing oneself. For Plato, this comes in the form of philosophical contemplation in the cave where we reconnect our memories and thoughts with the Forms. For Christianity, this comes in the form of reading the Bible (or having it interpreted for you) as the bearer of revealed Truth (254-5). Both of these models relied on human interiority as the repositories of Truth. Whether or not this was necessary, I won’t go into. Nonetheless, the Platonic and Christian models totalized “knowledge of the self” such that “caring for oneself” or an “art of oneself” meant to look inside oneself to discover a hidden Truth. In short, there is no “care of the self” that is not encompassed by “knowledge of oneself.” For Christianity, this has involved over millennia many “techniques whose essential function is to dispel internal illusions, to recognize the temptations that arise within the soul and the heart, and also to thwart the seductions to which we may be victim” (255-6).
Foucault found in Stoicism a rejection of this subordination of what you might become (care of the self) to knowledge of yourself. Because Stoicism didn’t believe in a material/immaterial split, it didn’t posit a bifurcated subject that must be reunited with itself. Thus Stoicsm (and Cynicism and Epicureanism) provided an alternative model of the self that is open-ended and fashioned over the work of a lifetime: “far from moving in the direction of self-exegesis or self-renunciation, [the Hellenistic model] tends rather, to make the self the objective to be attained” (257). This is what Foucault famously called “an art of oneself” and what others have called the Hellenistic “art of living.”
Self-knowledge, then, is not irrelevant, but it does not occupy the dominant role in the Hellenistic model as it does in the other two. Teasing out the difference is what this lecture (and the entire 1981-2 series) is all about. In many ways, these lectures are a return to an archeology of knowledge. Foucault isn’t necessarily concerned with a genealogy — how we got from Plato to Stoicism to Christianity — nor is he concerned with an analytics of power — though he does elaborate on specific techniques of self-fashioning throughout these lectures, and the entire lecture series might be thought of as a genealogy of techniques for making oneself into a subject (“subjectivation”). As archeology, he is concerned to pose different modes of self-knowledge against each other and to excavate the Hellenistic one that was absorbed and hidden by the collusion of the other two in the second and third centuries.
He finds a mode of self-knowledge that does not start from a human interiority as its domain, nor does it seek a pure outside as the hard requirement of Salvation. Accordingly, the Hellenistic model doesn’t require this subordination of self-fashioning to self-knowledge:
Rather, it tends to accentuate and privilege care of the self, to maintain its autonomy at least with regard to knowledge of the self whose place is, as I think you will see, limited and restricted even so. (257)
Thus the Hellenistic self is “the objective to be attained,” and self-knowledge is a means to that end. It is not a self-knowledge that only discovers (though it certainly must do that); it is a self-knowledge that treats the self as an ongoing project of creation. The difference is subtle, but it is the work of archaeology to expose the subtle differences so that we can imagine and enact alternatives that are relevant to our own time and place. We don’t need to accept history as handed down to us. This is precisely the point of these lectures and what gives us the continuity with his earlier work while breaking through some of the aporias of power analytics and genealogy.
And here’s the payoff: Foucault found at the heart of this Hellenistic mode of self-knowledge a practical technique that is both simple and familiar to a modern reader — ascesis, or “stepping back.” We use this phrase in common language all the time. “Let’s take a step back” is a common refrain when a group is trying to reset itself in a conversation that may have run its course or is not progressing toward an outcome. We often find this phrase used to reset or re-orient a conversation by making the goals clear or asking questions about the purpose of what we are doing.
As Foucault read Seneca’s Natural Questions, he found “stepping back” to be the fundamental practical technique of Hellenistic care of the self:
The whole game … is never to lose sight of any of the components that characterize the world in which we exist and, in particular, which characterize our own situation, in the very spot we occupy. We must never lose sight of this. We distance ourselves from it, so to speak, by stepping back. And stepping back we see the context in which we are placed opening out, and we grasp again this world as it is, the world in which we exist. So it is not a passage to another world. It is not a movement by which we turn away from the world to look elsewhere. It is the movement by which we are [enabled to] grasp this world here as a whole, without ever losing sight of this world here, or of ourselves within it, or of what we are within it. (282, emphasis added)
Foucault is not a Stoic. He is not advocating that we convert to a Stoic view of the natural world. Rather, he is engaging his previous analyses — genealogies, archeologies, and power analytics — as the knowledge of “the world in which we exist” and that “characterize our situation.” Seen through this new lens of Hellenistic self-knowledge, the function of these earlier analyses is given new life. They are modes of knowing that create that ability to distance ourselves from the moment while never actually leaving that moment — never stepping outside of the history or the power apparatus itself. There never is, as Deleuze reminded us, an outside to cross over to throughout Foucault’s work:
How can we ‘cross the line’? And, if we must attain a life that is the power of the outside, what tells us that this outside is not a terrifying void and that this life, which seems to put up a resistance, is not just the simple distribution within the void of ‘slow, partial and progressive’ deaths? (Foucault 95).
This appreciation for Seneca’s “stepping back” to gain perspective is where Foucault had to go given the overwhelming determinism that his earlier works laid out for us. Seneca, as both a hard determinist and a proponent of freedom, seems a likely choice in retrospect. But Seneca also provided a vision for care of the self and self-knowledge that did not require a pure outside — because, in Stoic physics, there is no outside of the materiality of the here and now.
This stepping back is the ethical moment that Foucault wants to recover in his archaeology of Stoicism. But it is a stepping back that does not seek an external Truth to explain the situations we face. Stoic ascesis does not seek a Platonic recollection or a Christian revelation as a way to understand the Truth of ourselves and our situations:
What is involved is a view from above (une vue plongeante) looking down on the self, rather than looking up to something other than the world in which we live. It is the self’s view of itself from above which encompasses the world of which we are a part and which thus ensures the subject’s freedom within this world itself. (282, emphasis added)
This is not, to channel Bergson for a bit, a spatial stepping back that can pause time as it seeks Truth by surveying the chessboard like Laplace’s demon. There is no outside to occupy from which Truth can be inventoried. It is a stepping back that is a moving forward in time. It can only be experienced as slowing down of our knee-jerk reactions in the moment to find other ways to respond. We seek other responses that are not dictated by the genealogical forces and techniques of power that make up our lived reality.
Foucault will go on in the next few lectures to open up the final theme of his life’s work, parhessia (truth telling). This line of pursuit made sense for an intellectual activist who spent his life confronting forms of power that demand we speak the truth about ourselves (particularly our sexual truths) as a way to discipline ourselves. Accordingly, Foucault used this Stoic stepping back as a way to rethink our relationship to the truths we tell. This was important for Foucault because rejecting the Platonic/Christian notion of a transcendent Truth does not absolve us from a responsibility to telling the truth. The Hellenistic and Roman parhessia he excavates will be a truth-telling that does not seek transcendence, does not seek salvation and does not seek conformity. Rather, it will be a truth-telling that is subordinate to action and aligned with the ability to envision and bring about a world that is different than the one in which we live. “Subjectivation” (as Foucault will come to call the processes by which we create ourselves as subjects as an answer to how one might live) will be in part about telling truths to each other, but without the demands of conformity. Here we will find a contemporary affinity with American Pragmatism but also a resonance today with Netflix’s Queer Eye, but I will save this meditation for later.
My interest in this meditation and this particular lecture is a bit different than parhessia. As I wrote at the beginning, truth-telling doesn’t quite capture the problems we face today. Rather, the problems we face have more to do with how each of us responds to the truths that are on offer to us. “Alternative facts” and “truthiness” aren’t solved by re-embracing truth-telling as the antidote, as if we all just need to recommit to a new Age of Reason and its nostalgia for consensus. Screaming about The Big Lie or becoming “woke” isn’t going to change other people’s behavior in any substantive way.
The better set of problems for us to look at is how our experience of truth-claims and our knee-jerk feelings have become aligned such that “stepping back” is systematically disabled — as I formulated at the beginning of this essay. To this end, I will look more closely at the Stoic problem of emotion, particularly pre-emotions (propatheia) as one of the things that we “step back” from. For Seneca, we are typically stepping back from our propatheia — our feelings and knee-jerk reactions about what is happening to and around us as we move through the world. This is where I find the moral practicality in Foucault’s 1982 lecture and its usefulness for today. We do not need to envision a wholesale transformation of ourselves to achieve the moral and ethical vision of The Hermeneutics of the Subject. This ethics need not be heroic and practically unattainable for us mere mortals. Rather, we all carry with us these knee-jerk feelings as we move through life. Stoicism, and Seneca in particular, give us practical guidance on how to deal with them as historically conditioned indicators of beliefs and opinions.
Book 2 of On Anger presents a practical approach to ascesis that is useful today for a couple of reasons. One, we find the same “stepping back” described throughout this text that Foucault found in Natural Questions, but it is less contemplative and more active in the world. The practice of ascesis in On Anger is a “stepping forward” or “stepping up” into a world populated by morally flawed choices and unconsidered knee-jerk reactions without allowing oneself to perpetuate its problems and dysfunctions. Second, this is not a Platonic (or Christian) ascesis where the sage emerges from the cave as the impresario of revealed Truth. The wise person delivers no sermon on the mount. Rather, the practice of ascesis in On Anger is much more of a demeanor toward others that works by contagion rather than convincing. To calm oneself, in other words, is to potentially calm others and pass on the moment of ascesis. Stepping back, therefore, is something that one does to and for oneself but on behalf of others — it is at once personal and communal.
Let’s start at 2.6.1 where Seneca poses an objection from his fictitious interlocutor: “Just as virtue is kindly disposed to honorable behavior, so should it greet disgraceful behavior with anger.” This objection sets up a long discussion of ascesis that is less contemplative than what we find in Natural Questions and more practical as it paints a picture of ascesis operating amid other people.
Let’s take two examples from this section. First, the example of Socrates at 2.7.1:
Now, what’s more unworthy than having another man’s wickedness determine a wise man’s passion? Will the great Socrates no longer be able to return home wearing the same expression he had when he left? And yet if the wise man should always be angry at shameful behavior and be riled and gloomy because of criminal behavior, he must be the most troubled man in the world: he’ll pass his entire life in anger and grief. (2.7.1)
Then a similar the example at 2.10.7:
And so the wise man — calm and even-tempered in the face of error, not an enemy of wrongdoers but one who sets them straight — leaves his house daily with this thought in mind: “I will encounter many people who are devoted to drink, many who are lustful, many who are ungrateful, many who are greedy, many who are driven by the demons of ambition.” All such behaviors he will regard as kindly as a doctor does his own patients. (2.10.7)
In both of these cases, we see examples of ascesis (stepping back) that is literally a stepping into and out of one’s home. Unlike Natural Questions where the ascesis is a withdrawal into contemplation (as preparation for stepping back into the world), here the wise man’s withdrawal to his home is followed by a return to the world from that home fully prepared and anticipating the challenges that he/she will encounter.
That withdrawal is a preparation for the world in a twofold sense. First, the withdrawal is a self-preparation. One must be in control of oneself before one can enter into the world and not be completely determined by it: “what’s more unworthy than having another man’s wickedness determine a wise man’s passion?” Other people’s emotions (particularly anger) are contagious. Thus, the wise person must be prepared for the world by stepping back from it so as not to be sucked into its “wickedness” and knee-jerk reactions. Second, the wise person must step back into the world to help others be better versions of themselves — to accomplish the ascesis for themselves. This is essential to Seneca’s brand of Stoicism. The ascesis of the sage is and must be counter-contagious through his demeanor. We don’t see, in these examples, the wise person talking to others. Rather, the wise person’s stepping back is primarily a demeanor and disposition — “calm and even-tempered” — and only secondarily what he says or will say. For Plato, Socrates was a talker; for Seneca he is much more than that: he is an exemplar. In this sense, parhessia and libertas are as much about how one comports oneself as well as the content of what one says. Being calm and even-tempered is the mechanism of a counter-contagion. Hence the recurring analogy of the sage as doctor.
Thus the sage is in the world and of the world but not participating in the emotions that are pervasive. The person who is in control of their emotions helps others control theirs not by judging them, but by judging himself first:
We see other’s vices right before us, but we carry our own on our backs [i.e., they are invisible to us]…. We’ll become more self-controlled if we take a look at ourselves and ask: “It’s surely not the case that I’ve done nothing like that myself, is it? Surely I’ve gone astray that same way, haven’t I? Is it in my own interest to condemn such behavior?” (2.28.8)
We do not have someone emerging from Plato’s cave and walking into the world as the barer of a revealed Truth. That is not at all what is happening here. Nor is the sage’s power only a speaking power. We have someone who operates on the same plane as others — the sage is human and subject to the same feelings and errors of judgement — but helps others accomplish their own ascesis because the sage has perfected her own ability to step back from her knee-jerk reactions to the behavior of others.
But, again, what are we stepping back from when we exert “self-control”? What is it that we are controlling when we control ourselves? Certainly there is a physical distancing as a literal “stepping back” — such as when Socrates returns home. But more pervasive and more important in all of Seneca is that we are stepping back from our own knee-jerk responses — our propatheia that are the “preludes to emotion.” These pre-emotions are crucial to understanding ascesis and moral responsibility in Seneca, and they are fundamental to understanding Stoicism’s moral psychology.
Let’s break down certain aspects of these feelings that are relevant here. First, they are fundamental to our human condition and indicators of our humanity. Not even the sage can escape them. We are not talking about pure physical reactions like when one has cold water splashed on her. Rather, we are talking about knee-jerk reactions that carry with them implied propositional content — “I have been harmed and should take revenge” is the typical example used by Seneca. As such, no moral responsibility has occurred until the judgment is endorsed at which point action will follow.
Second, they are deeply personal because they are the bearers of history and memory. While we all experience them — by virtue of being human — we don’t experience them the same way. We experience them based on our own history. Left unchecked, they can build up over time into unbreakable habits as illustrated by the negative examples of Apollodorus, Phalaris and Hannibal in 2.5.
Third, like all things in the Stoic worldview, they are material responses to physical stimuli and are best understood in terms of the intensity of their effects on the animus. We can see this clearly at 2.36.2 where Seneca imagines what would be visible if we could look inside the body of an angry person:
If the mind [animus] could be made visible and shine forth in some material form, its black, blotchy, seething, twisted, swollen appearance would stun the viewers. Even now, when it makes its way through bones and flesh and so many other obstacles, its deformity is enormous: what if it could be shown uncovered? (2.36.3)
“Black, blotchy, twisted, swollen appearance” is not metaphorical; it is not incorporeal. It is explicitly real and material substance expressing itself in its transformations, appearances and behaviors. We are thus dealing with transformations and intensities of material substance, not idealized faculties with coherent identities. Anger is not a “thing”; it is a state of being that is an unchecked intensification of a knee-jerk feeling of truthiness. But is is not an ethereal intensity; it is physical and material. To channel Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, it is substance expressing itself in the flow of time. The same pneuma that causes anger, causes an earthquake.
Fourth, propatheia are contagious if left unchecked by individual and collective ascesis. Because we are all connected by the same forces the intensity of my anger can be easily absorbed by you. Pneuma can move from me to you and on to others. Anger is therefore inherently and mostly social, and it flows from one person to another rapidly: “whereas all other vices seize upon individuals, this is the one passion that a whole populace sometimes contracts”:
Men and women, old and young, the foremost and the mob come to share a single thought, and the whole multitude, whipped up by a word or two, outstrips the agitator himself; straightway they scatter to seize torches and declare war on their neighbors or wage it against themselves (3.2.2-3)
On an anniversary such as this (January 6), images like this take on a special resonance — especially an image of collective anger that “outstrips the agitator himself.” We’ve been habituated to trust our feelings and emotions, and to find in them our beliefs. But we seem to have lost our ability to step back from them. Rather, our chosen media goad us on in the name of advertising dollars that require a committed audience. That commitment is both rational and emotional in the Stoic sense where these intensities blend into one another. Thus the danger of propatheia in the Stoic worldview is that we mistake our knee-jerk reactions as indicators of Truth. They have the initial impression of “Truthiness.” We seek “echo chambers” that systematically disable our ability to step back. These echo chambers train us not to step back but, instead, to trust our feelings as indicators of Truth.
Did I return to Foucault’s February 1982 lecture and Seneca’s On Anger because the anniversary was approaching? I’m not sure. But I do find the picture of Stoicism presented in these texts to be helpful in making sense of this anniversary. I don’t see in the insurrection a failure of reason as the ability to understand and abide by logical arguments. This lens is not helpful. Rather, I see a failure of being able to step back and for us to help each other step back. Our echo chambers confirm our knee-jerk beliefs over and over again as True. We have been systematically disabled from stepping back from those knee-jerk beliefs so that time can be made for thought and discussion and to think different. This time and space for thinking does not need to be conceived of as revealing Truth, but it does need to be conceived of as a time of both reason and emotion — remembering that they are not separate entities but transformations of each other.
Stoic reason is not, in the end, judged as being Right or Wrong. For the Stoic, reason is effective or it isn’t. Its effectiveness is measured in its ability to enact self-control and stepping-back (ascesis) so that one’s knee-jerk reactions can be evaluated and redirected in the flow of time. But neither of these (self-control and stepping back) involve accessing a doctrinal Truth that tells us how to behave. Seneca’s Socrates is not a talker, he is an exemplar who communicates with all of his being — his demeanor and disposition as well as his statements. Self-control and stepping back slow down the experience of time so that thought can occur and a behavior other than the historically determined one can be made possible and we can imagine other ways of how we might live.