Aphorisms on the in-Between Part I
The Tightrope Walker. Zarathustra’s relationship to the in-between is difficult to pin down. He is the champion of impermanence. He is the builder of a bridge. Both seem the very essence of the in-between. But the tightrope walker is not an unequivocally favorable image. “What are you doing there between towers? You belong in the tower,” yells the fool just before he leaps over the tightrope walker who then falls at the feet of Zarathustra leading to his eventual death. The tightrope walker falls because he is so fragile that a jester leaping over him destroys his equilibrium. Yet Zarathustra admires his bravery: “You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own hands” (I.6). These are the ones who Zarathustra has come to save — those willing to get onto the tightrope. What is the salvation? Is it salvation from the herd? No, it can’t be. It is salvation that shows how to live on the tightrope. This salvation will be a demonstration that cannot be reduced and resolved into any philosophical or religious system.
The risk and danger represented in the vocation of the tightrope walker is a twofold movement of time. First, he steps out onto the tightrope to embrace the danger and take the risk of leaving the comfort of the stable tower. For Nietzsche, this is the admirable movement. But in doing so, his vocation risks becoming a second temporality: the permanent embrace of the in-between as the tightrope walker becomes a mere entertainer for the crowd of Last Men below. In other words, to make the in-between his home and not seek to make it all the way to the opposite tower is to desire the the in-between as a balancing act; it is his profession, he is an entertainer of the crowd below. He is Philipe Petite balancing between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. He lingers as the goal of his personal challenge. To get to the other tower is simply the end of the show and the end of the challenge. As such, he embraces danger, but in the lingering, he becomes fragile: “Human existence is uncanny and still without meaning: a jester can become man’s fatality” (I.7). He is Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness stuck (or oscillating?) between the Twin Towers of solipsistic Stoic virtue and nihilistic Skepticism — without seeking a fourth way that is neither the permanent residency in the Towers nor the acrobatic in-between of the tightrope.
Fourth way? Did I not mean to say third way? No, the third way is the tightrope itself. Nietzsche admires those who get onto the tightrope. It is the embrace of danger and risk, but when it becomes a desire unto itself, it is fragile — “a jester can become man’s fatality.” Yet Nietzsche wants us to stare into this third temporality because, in that meditation, we will find the demonstration of the Übermensch, not its definition. Zarathustra continues speaking from this moment of recognizing the frailty of the third temporality: “I will teach men the meaning of their existence — the Übermensch, the lightning out of the dark cloud of man.” What it means to teach this lesson will become the force of Zarathustra. When we stare into this tightrope, we will not find a doctrine or a system or a treatise, we will only find Zarathustra as demonstration of how to walk the tightrope. This demonstration won’t be clearly articulated, and it will be misunderstood not only by the herd he disavows but also by the companions he seeks. It is a demonstration of the future in the present that seeks a bridge to something else that is not defined. Zarathustra continues: “But I am still far from them, and my sense does not speak to their senses. To men I am still the mean between a fool and a corpse.”
Moving out of the Aristotelian mean — the third temporality of the tightrope — is the force of the remaining movement of Zarathustra’s Prologue. This third place of the tightrope is created by its tension, but the tension is only the emanation of the two stable towers on either side. Thus the tension can never escape the towers that define it. If we simply try to walk the tightrope without understanding that we are actually trapped between two towers, this is how “a jester becomes man’s fatality.”
Nietzsche takes the tension of the tightrope and stretches it in a different direction as Zarathustra walks away from the town of Last Men — at the bidding of the same jester who threatens to inflict the same fate as that of the tightrope walker: “But go away from this town, or tomorrow I shall leap over you, one living over one dead” (I.8). Zarathustra leaves the town, and as he does so, he is “a living and a dead man.” When he finally runs out of a clear pathway, he lays down to sleep. Here we have the first of the bookends of Zarathustra lying underneath a tree passively receiving a revelation. We will see it again in the section titled “At Noon” in the fourth part. But let us understand at this moment what is at stake in this first revelation:
An insight has come to me: let Zarathustra speak not to the people but to companions. Zarathustra shall not become the shepherd and dog of a herd.
To lure many away from the herd, for that I have come. The people and the herd shall be angry with me: Zarathustra wants to be called a robber by the shepherds. (I.9)
“This is what Zarathustra had told his heart when the sun stood high at noon” (I.10). As Nietzsche asks us to stare with him into the tightrope, we find its admirable value (danger and risk), but we also find its frailty when it is merely the entertainment of the herd of Last Men below. This purpose comes to Zarathustra as an insight, or a calling, from the outside. He does not find the power from within himself. He receives his purpose that arrives as an insight from outside of himself. This is pure revelation, not introspection. The insight arrives only after he wakes up. It is not, therefore, the result of prayer or meditation that looks inward. He is without consciousness before the revelation. Let’s say it clearly and again: it does not come from an inward turn but arrives from outside himself.
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A Book for All and None. We can now begin to understand Nietzsche’s subtitle. The companions he seeks are those who have stepped onto the tightrope but have gotten stuck as “a mean between a fool and a corpse.” The only roles available in the city are shepherds and the herd. These are the two poles of the towers between which the tightrope is strung. If we remain stuck in those roles as our only options, we are the Aristotelian mean that is easily undone by the leaping of a fool.
So Nietzsche leaves us with the image of the tightrope as the necessary condition of the Übermensch, but its great danger as well. Neither tower provides the goal as the exit from decadence. What would it mean for the tightrope walker to get to the other side? It would be a stable location from which to turn and face the herd as a shepherd with a new message. It would be a systematic treatise that stands on stable ground. It turns its acrobatic demonstration into a platform for a new doctrine to be preached to the Last Men. At best, it will fall on deaf ears; at worst, the message will be adopted but only as a profound misunderstanding. This is, in fact, what happens in I.3 when Zarathustra addresses the crowd waiting for the promised tightrope walker. He preaches with lots of words, including the first image of the tightrope: “Man is a rope, tied between beast and Übermensch — a rope over an abyss” (I.4). The only result of this speech is the opposite of what he intends: “And here ended Zarathustra’s first speech, which is also called ‘the Prologue’; for at this point he was interrupted by the clamor of the crowd. ‘Give us this last man, O Zarathustra,’ they shouted. ‘Turn us into these last men! Then we shall make you the gift of the Übermensch!’” (I.5).
This teaching cannot be, therefore, a speech, a treatise, or a new systematic doctrine. It cannot be delivered from a stable platform by a new shepherd. It cannot issue from the desire to be a shepherd. We must read carefully the reaction of the crowd: “we shall make you the gift of the Übermensch!” If the Übermensch is the gift of the crowd, then the Übermensch can only be a shepherd as the creation of the crowd. The Übermensch will forever be stuck as the crowd’s entertainer.
The crowd cannot bring about its own salvation by selecting its redeemer.
Zarathustra will be a different kind of moral model — one who demonstrates the Übermensch as his mode of teaching. The teaching must become a demonstration that creates the followers worthy of it. Zarathustra will gather companions who equally are capable of embracing the mimetic model of Zarathustra. “Companions, the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators, the creator seeks — those who write new values on new tablets” (I.9).
The difference between the bridge and the tightrope is this: the tightrope walker wants the in-between to be his permanent possession — to stay on the tightrope entertaining the herd below. Zarathustra’s bridge is not a permanent state nor does it lead to a permanent state. He hates States (the monster of the all-consuming Hobbesian Leviathan): “Where the state ends — look there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridge of the Übermensch?” (“On the New Idol”). Try as we might, we will never reach the end of the rainbow, yet if we simply treat the tightrope as home, we are in danger of letting jesters “become man’s fatality.”
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Zarathustra’s temporality. We must see that Zarathustra brings about a change in the nature of time. He seeks a future with companions that cannot be described in the present: “Companions, the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers” (I.9). When he spoke to the people in I.3 and begins his speech with “I teach you the Übermensch,” he was treating the Übermensch as a concept and seeking to gather his own herd by using the concept as his (and their) galvanizing truth. Zarathustra’s realization by the end of his Prologue is that the very structure of tightrope walking + herds + shepherds is a trap. He must build a bridge out of this entrapment that is so frail that a jester can break it.
The bridge is a way out of the complacent temporality of the Last Man who experiences time passively as only ever chronos. The bridge and the tightrope represent a kairos for Zarathustra. This kairos leads to another way of living. Upon laying the tightrope walker to rest, Zarathustra announces his kairos:
But I part from you; the time is up. Between dawn and dawn a new truth has come to me. No shepherd shall I be, nor gravedigger. Never again shall I speak to the people: for the last time have I spoken to the dead.
I shall join the creators, the harvesters, the celebrants: I shall show them the rainbow and all the steps to the overman. (1.9, Kaufmann trans., my emphasis)
Zarathustra here announces his own kairos — “the time is up” and “Never again shall I speak to the people.” His kairos will be a demonstration, not an oracle or a prophecy that Last Men cannot and will not hear. He will create his own time, which is an overcoming of the time of the Last Man. Not all will follow him over the bridge. “To my goal I will go — on my own way; over those who hesitate and lag behind I shall leap” (I.9). He will not carry the tightrope walker over the bridge. This is too much of a burden and will prevent the passage. Zarathustra will be an example, a demonstration, of the passage.
On the other side of the bridge is the transvaluation of values. To get there, we can’t get stuck — we can’t “hesitate or lag behind” like the tightrope walker as entertainer — but the Übermensch, insofar as s/he shows the way, will occupy the middle ground at some point: “To men I am the mean between a fool and a corpse.” Not until Zarathustra jettisons the corpse of the tightrope walker in the hollow of a tree do we begin to see his movement out of the in-between.
In many ways Zarathustra can be read as a long meditation on the problem of the in-between that can be held onto only as an equilibrium that balances indifference and ressentiment. This equilibrium becomes a psychology called “the Last Man.” It does not reflect or represent a pre-existing psychology. At the heart of it we will find a long historical problem of what happens when we accept the call to step onto the tightrope. The first move accepts the risks and dangers of leaving behind that which is secure and comfortable. But Nietzsche’s power was in showing that this first move must keep moving and the dangers change as the first movement proceeds in time.
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The neutral observer. Peter Sloterdijk has made this episode of the rope-walker a central figure in his thought. In You Must Change Your Life!, he compares Nietzsche’s tightrope with Kafka’s tripwire. The latter evolves from the tension of the former: “The rope is no longer meant to test the ability to keep your balance on the slimmest foundation; its function is more to prove that if you are too sure of yourself, you will fall if you simply walk forwards” (63). The danger is that keeping one’s balance becomes the artistry of the acrobat that Modernity can only treat as entertainment: “In the final moment of his life, the tightrope artiste feels that the new prophet has understood him as no one has before — as the being that, even if he was scarcely more than an animal that was taught to dance, he made danger his profession” (62-3). As such, he is announced as Zarathustra’s first companion.
At the heart of this chapter of You Must Change Your Life is the historical movement from ascetic to acrobat as paradigms of spiritual practice. The former is the spiritual paradigm of a vertically oriented soul. It reaches toward God because it believes He is up there. As we shall see, the boy in “On the Tree on the Mountainside” will be the epitome of the vertical stretch that drives itself further and further into ressentiment to create the vertical tension in the self that can only yield self-loathing: “My contempt and my loathing grow at the same time.” Zarathustra recognizes the nobility of this vertical tension, and he wants to redirect it so that it becomes a bridge. I appreciate Sloterdijk’s vision of Nietzsche as a profound thinker of the problems of treating spiritual practice as vertically oriented. Sloterdijk does not simply seek a solution in the preference for the horizontal, which is equally fraught with challenges, as the episode of the tightrope walker shows us.
The Übermensch must keep moving and must keep treating the tightrope as a bridge even if what is on the other side — the transvaluation of values — is not perfectly clear. How to do so when the aspirational reach of the vertical is no longer available (i.e., God is dead) becomes Nietzsche’s challenge to the spread of Last Men he saw all around him.
For Sloterdijk, Nietzsche’s tightrope walker captured how quickly a noble morality that embraces risk and danger can become the passive nihilism of the Last Man:
…for it was [Nietzsche] who succeeded in revealing an a priori asymmetry with a strong pull between being able and being more able, wanting and wanting more, and between being and being more — as well as uncovering the aversive or biogenitive tendencies that not infrequently aim, under the pretext of humility, for the wanting of not-wanting and of always-wanting-to-be-less. (65)
How quickly the nobility of walking the tightrope becomes the trap of the Last Man’s comfort is Nietzsche’s great prophetic warning to the twentieth century. We must be careful not to immediately psychologize this entrapment, as if it emerges from a Human Nature that is its source. This entrapment is not a function of the acrobat himself. Nietzsche is not articulating an internally motivated psychological drive. These drives for Nietzsche are always products of the temporality within which one lives. They are made possible by the prolonged temporal action of cultural forces that dictate over the long haul of a life what selves are available to mimetic desire at any historical epoch. The psychological type of the artiste acrobat is a function of the temporality of entertainment that Modernity makes available to those who demonstrate an alternative existence. Risk and danger are commodified for the entertainment of the crowd, which becomes the neutralized observer who risks nothing in watching another’s dangers play out. This is as much a trap for the crowd as it is for the tightrope walker who is today’s action hero on the big screen.
This theme of the neutral observer, who can only use philosophy and religion as methods of erudition, is the real object of the critique contained within Zarathustra. Heidegger, as I have already meditated on, captured this in his reading of Augenblick and the fool’s reaction to eternal return. The fool sits on the sidelines unable to step into the Moment of Augenblick, thus limiting the transformational power of eternal return by treating it merely as a philosophical concept without consequence for living. The fool is unable to make the leap from passive contemplation of a concept to the active self-transformation that occurs when one allows that thought to transform you or crush you (GS 341).
The neutral observer has a long history in the Western world. A key moment in its history occurs as a lesson in geometry.
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Socratic aporia and the tightrope. Many believe that the important part of the slaveboy episode in the Meno is demonstrating recollection. This is wrong. Nothing in this episode indicates that this is Plato’s central lesson. The real lesson is demonstrating the moral value of aporia — the Socratic state of perplexity in between ignorance and false certainties. As shall become clear in what follows, I am ambivalent about this achievement just as Nietzsche was ambivalent about the tightrope. Socratic aporia opened new possibilities for self-transformation, which finally has started to be recovered as the original focus of philosophy and religion as spiritual practices. I have Pierre Hadot, Michel Foucault, and Peter Sloterdijk to thank for much of this recovery for me.
The crucial moment comes when Socrates shows the slaveboy that his newly found confidence in geometry is misplaced. In this moment, we see the inseparability of aporia as spiritual practice from the emergence of Meno as the neutral observer who merely witnesses the transformation of another without necessarily having to undergo that transformation himself. In this reading of this episode, we can see how geometry, recollection, and tragedy are all at work to create both the value of aporia and its neutralization as something simply to be observed in another.
Let’s recount the main moment of aporia in the episode. The slave thinks that by doubling the length of the sides of a square, he has doubled the area: a 2x2 square has an area of 4 square feet. If we double the length of the sides to 4x4, we must quadruple the area to 16 square feet. The slaveboy gets hung upon this latter move. He thinks by doubling the sides we double the area but 4x4 does not equal 8.
Socrates backs him down from this misplaced confidence, but the moment he does so, he turns to Meno to deliver the true meaning of the demonstration:
SOCRATES: Are you considering again, Meno, to what point he has already proceeded in this recollecting? To begin with he didn’t know what the line of the eight-square-foot figure is — just as he still doesn’t know — but he then supposed that he didn’t know it and confidently answered as though he did and didn’t believe that he was perplexed. But now he does believe that he is perplexed, and just as he doesn’t know in fact, so he doesn’t even suppose that he knows [my emphasis].
MENO: What you say is true.
SOCRATES: So is he now in a better condition concerning the matter he didn’t know? [my emphasis]
MENO: This too is so in my opinion. (Meno, Robert Bartlett trans., 84a-b)
Being in between pure ignorance and pure confidence is the state of aporia that is validated here as the morally better condition attained by the slaveboy. Recollection only solves the pure ignorance problem for Plato’s Socrates: it gives us enough confidence to pursue knowledge. But recollection must give way to perplexity (aporia) on the other side of the equation. In other words, when over-confidence is the issue, then we need to induce aporia, rather than recollection, to solve the problem.
To be sure, this is a profound accomplishment in human history: the ability to use language to open an experiential gap between ignorance and false certainty. This temporality is the Socratic legacy we live with today, and we can draw a line from it to Zarathustra’s tightrope walker. This need not have been a straight line. Socratic aporia as experience is indeterminate and undetermined. (In fact, we shall have to come to terms with treating time as a line — a tightrope or a road or even Zarathustra’s bridge — that is a stage for a mode of subjectivity that travels along it.) There is and was no necessity to draw a straight line through aporia, nor to make it into a circular recovery of retrospective truths (i.e., Platonic recollection of the forms that reside eternally in our souls). Recollection, for Plato’s Socrates, merely was a device to get the process started, but not necessarily finished.
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Geometry and tragedy. The birth of aporia as a mode of experience is not born out of nowhere. We must look for aporia’s birth in two seemingly different lines of thought: geometry and tragedy both of which were pervasive in the Athenian culture of the fifth century BCE. In the geometrical demonstration of Meno we find a moment in the history of aporia’s emergence. It is, as we’ve already begun to see, dependent on an adaptation of geometry as the paradigm of abstract, eternal, knowable truth. It is also a consequence of the aporia of Greek Tragedy and its withdrawal of the gods from human life. Jean-Pierre Vernant repeatedly pointed out that this withdrawal opened a view of human action as a problem without tragedy necessarily providing the language in which this problem could be resolved. Philosophy would take up the implicit, but not necessary, challenge to be the resolution. In Meno, we find a crucial moment where this problem seeks one mode of resolution through the language of geometry.
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Aporia and experience. If the episode of the geometry lesson is a demonstration of recollection, no one in the scene experiences recollection as recollection. The slaveboy only experiences a strictly linear passage from ignorance to certainty to self-correction. Socrates tells us this is recollection, but he doesn’t insist on it, nor does anyone in the episode describe an experience of definitive recollection. The upshot is that recollection may never actually happen as a fully present recovery of geometrical knowledge in our souls. All that recollection does in this dialog is provide the confidence that we are not eternally trapped in ignorance. Recollection, in other words, is less of a Truth than it is a lever to get the demonstration moving with some level of confidence that we won’t end up in pure ignorance or nihilistic skepticism.
This confidence comes from a belief that “true opinions” already reside in our souls, and that it is possible to “stir them up” (85c). Aporia, therefore, is not ignorance but a mode of confidence that is neither pure orientation nor disorientation. Aporia is the confidence that this indeterminacy — what is repeatedly called narkan (numbness) in the dialog — can be experienced without being a total destruction of the self. Aporia is, therefore, a positive naming of a third mode of being between ignorance and certainty. This is, emphatically, what Plato’s Socrates defends as the demonstration concludes:
SOCRATES: So if the truth about the beings [i.e., forms, ideas] is always present for us in the soul, would the soul be immortal such that, with respect to what you now happen not to know — and this is what you don’t remember — you should be confident [my emphasis] in attempting to inquire into it and recollecting it? … by supposing [my emphasis] one ought to inquire into things he doesn’t know, we would be better and more manly and less lazy than if we should suppose [my emphasis] either that it’s impossible to discover those things that we don’t know or that we ought not to inquire into them — about this I certainly would do battle, if I could, in both speech and deed.
The force of this conclusion to the demonstration is not that recollection is indisputably true. The conclusion Socrates tells Meno to draw is that we should act as if it is true so that we can move into a third temporality between pure ignorance and absolute certainty. Both bookends — ignorance and certainty — prevent the pursuit of knowledge as virtuous improvement. If we assume that we are purely ignorant, then why try? The exact same condition occurs if we assume the absolute certainty of our knowledge. Why try? You already know what is true. Both poles are closed in on themselves and incapable of venturing forth with some confidence into an exploration of what we think we know and can know. From the perspective of the tightrope walker, we occupy one of the two towers.
Socrates’ achievement has been to use geometry, the soul, and slavery (and implicitly Athenian citizenship) to provoke and name a genuinely new realm of human experience that willingly steps onto the tightrope. This is the first movement of aporia. As a concrete practice of time, aporia is an effect of dialog that suspends the culturally given so as to treat these givens as abstractions that we can evaluate and modify before we act. Socratic aporia is geometrical through and through, as we shall see even further as we proceed in our reading. It is also an extension of Greek tragedy, which posed the problem of human agency in a cosmos that was being vacated by the gods. What is the presence of recollection in the soul if not Plato’s Socrates’ attempt to reconnect the eternal world of the gods with justifications of human action? The movement of the drama from the collective stage to the individual soul is crucial in the development of philosophy and religion.
I continue to be ambivalent about this achievement, as was Nietzsche. I shall continue trying to unpack why. My ambivalence does not have to do with the provocation of aporia, but what happens to resolve it. It is the resolution that becomes the condition of possibility for our modern sins of ressentiment, acedia, and indifference. Yet aporia cannot be an end state, which yields the fragility of the tightrope walker as entertainer. Aporia must be the eternal return of courageous thinking that seeks the transvaluation of values even if it does not know or prescribe the end state of the transvaluation.
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Geometry, abstraction, universality. More ambivalence: Michel Serres pointed out that in geometry we witness the possibility of a universal language that is non-violent. “When, in the midst of local violences, difference as dogma collapses, and relativism arrives at the emptiness of nihilism through the generalization of regional conflicts, measure and reason [i.e., geometry] that demonstrates it remain, invariant and strong. They unite without opposing, assemble us without organizing into a hierarchy, teach that men, whether solitary or in groups, are not the measure of all things” (Geometry xii).
No matter where we are, the internal angles of a triangle will always equal 180 degrees. This is no mere academic abstraction. If our engineers and architects don’t know their geometry, buildings and bridges fall down. Human suffering increases. To understand geometry is to non-violently abstract oneself into a non-place that emerges from the measurement of the earth, specifically the measuring of plots of land or trying to determine how far off the shore is a perhaps hostile ship. Out of this practical undertaking, which must have been at times violent, emerges “the strange land, the non-place where geometry was born, rootless” (xiv).
Yet, for Serres, the Greek origins of geometry limited this power in just the way that we have been tracing it in Meno: Greek philosophy elevated geometry to “metalanguage and publicity, refusing and suppressing its predecessor and causing it to be forgotten” (Geometry 136). What is the predecessor? It was the algorithmic and improvisational movement of practical calculation: how far is that ship from the shore? How do we re-calculate the boundary between plots of land after a flood? In Socrates’ pivot from the practical teachability of virtue to the ontological definition of virtue as the properly prior question, we read first hand a moment in the history of this forgetting of the primacy of the practical. Again, the fact that this happens in Meno through geometrical demonstration that overcomes “the long anamnesis of Meno’s slave” (136) is not incidental.
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The repentant temporality of Socratic virtue. I am ambivalent of Socrates’ accomplishment because his temporality of aporia is an experience of repentance that opens a passage to ressentiment. The entire dialog emerges from a pivot that insists on a particular sequence of questions: “But I am so far from knowing whether it [virtue, arete] is something teachable or isn’t something teachable that I don’t even happen to know at all what in the world virtue itself is” (71a, Robert C. Bartlett translation). Meno’s initial question, can virtue be taught, is held in abeyance while Socrates asserts that there is a prior question — what is virtue? — that must come first. Nothing less than the reconfiguration of time as a required sequence of thought is at stake: “what virtue is” must be answered before we can determine if it is teachable. If the Athenian virtues are going to be passed from generation to generation, then what those virtues are must be the foundation upon which we build pedagogical practices.
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Ressentiment of the Solitary Walker. Two thousand years later, Rousseau will demonstrate this same sequence that insists that our actions derive from our beliefs — action, in other words, is an excess of thought. Its hold is that strong: “What we ought to do depends largely on what we ought to believe, and in all matters other than the basic needs of our nature our opinions govern our actions. This principle, to which I have always adhered, has frequently led me to seek at length for the true purpose of my life so as to be able to determine its conduct…” (Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Third Walk). To be sure, this is the modern inflection of what Plato’s Socrates set in motion. If Socratic recollection provided the confidence that knowledge could be fruitfully pursued, “the true purpose of my life” as the center of gravity for conduct becomes one of Modernity’s expressions of this sequence. Rousseau’s purpose is embedded in his soul as his truth. The goal of Modern life, if we treat this as one of its paradigms, is to live in total conformity to this purpose, so long as we are able to discover it in our souls.
Ressentiment, which is the emotional and psychological substance of the Reveries, arises from this temporality that revolves around a search for purpose as one’s center of gravity. On the face of it, Rousseau’s ressentiment is a result of his exile from his former friends and society at large. But this exile itself is actually a comfort to him given that, from his youth, he never felt like he belonged in the world. The source of his ressentiment is thwarted purpose. In so far as his purpose is his goal, and his life is supposed to add up to the fulfillment of an a priori embedded purpose, ressentiment is a likely outcome for anyone pursuing this totalizing temporality. The self, in this temporality of thwarted purpose, can feel nothing but pain. The only recompense is imagined vengeance and/or resignation.
Life lived this way requires a plan centered on the fulfillment of purpose as one’s personal gravitational pull. “Since the days of my youth I had fixed on the age of forty as the end of my efforts to succeed, the final term of my various ambitions” (Third Walk). When plans based on personal purpose are thwarted, ressentiment cycles through resignation, Gnosticism, and the embracing of one’s fate as a badge of honor:
[Resignation] The sad truth that time and reason have revealed to me in making me aware of my misfortune, has convinced me that there is no remedy and that resignation is my only course. Thus all the experience of my old age is of no use to me in my present state, nor will it help me in the future…
[Gnostic contempt for this world as badge of honor] Thrown into the whirlpool of life while still a child, I learned from early experience that I was not made for this world, and that in it I would never attain the state to which my heart aspired. Ceasing therefore to seek among men the happiness which I could never find there, my ardent imagination learned to leap over the boundaries of a life which was as yet hardly begun, as if it were flying over an alien land in search of a fixed and stable resting-place. (Third Walk)
This is all textbook ressentiment if there is such a thing. The therapist-philosopher of ressentiment, Cynthia Fleury, captures its dynamics in Here Lies Bitterness. “The belief in a right is necessary to experience resentment” (14). What stronger right can one assert than that my life centers on an unshakeable purpose given to my soul as my internal and essential meaning? Such a view of the self orients everything to oneself. The forces of the world conspire to either fulfill or thwart this purpose. Life has a center and an essence that we are obligated to, and it is a center of gravity that can only see others in relation to that purpose, especially if one believes the sense of purpose has been obstructed. Rousseau’s sense of purpose is nearly explicitly a center of gravity that makes himself the center of field of vision that can only see that which is orbiting it: “All around me I can recognize nothing but objects which afflict and wound my heart, and I cannot look at anything that is close to me or round about me without discovering some subject for indignant scorn or painful emotion” (First Walk).
We need to be careful in this analysis, however. Ressentiment contains within its movement a reminder that we can create values, set goals, and undertake purposeful action. For this reason, Fleury reminds us that “resentment is a challenge for every soul that seeks to affirm itself as virtuous…. Resentment is a failure of the soul, the heart, the mind, but let us recognize that a relationship to the world that has not passed through resentment is insufficiently tested. One must glimpse the specter of resentment to understand the risk of a subjectivation that would be completely delivered from it” (31).
Resentment, in other words, is the risk we take for trying to be good human beings in the world — the risk we take by stepping onto the tightrope with a sense of purpose. We must recognize the risks, which Rousseau’s Reveries lay bare. Perhaps this is the true usefulness that he sought in this work that “leaves me at the bottom of the abyss, a poor unfortunate mortal, but as unmoved as God himself” (First Walk). Either we undertake a Gnostic withdrawal from the world — experienced as indictment and condemnation — that wraps ourselves in our own smug virtue, or we resign ourselves to passively nihilistic indifference born of this contempt. “This resignation has made up for all my trials by the peace of mind it brings me, a peace of mind incompatible with the unceasing exertions of a struggle as painful as it was unavailing” (First Walk).
These are the risks that Hegel identified as the Unhappy Consciousness that stops pursuing Aufhebung and seeks rest in either Stoic indifference or a Skeptic’s intolerance for any truth that is not its dogmatic assertion that there is no knowable truth. These are the risks of embracing care and anxiety that Heidegger found in the various temporalities of Dasein. These are the risks that Zarathustra appreciated in the tightrope walker: “You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own hands.” Could it be that the Reveries are the concentrated attention on ressentiment that is often required to create Zarathustra’s passage through and beyond it?
These risks were present at the moment Socrates provoked his interlocutors into the aporia of saying what you believe to be true about the virtues you live by. Geometry and recollection simply became techniques for preventing knowledge and truth from spiraling off into an abyss of ignorance. Somehow, they became Plato’s Truths for the historians of philosophy, and we forgot that they were first and foremost practical improvisations for provoking fellow citizens to take care of their souls.
We can only understand these risks by treating aporia and ressentiment as the conditioning of time, not as psychological essences and inevitabilities outside of time. This has been the force of this project, Time as Practice, and I feel like I am just now getting to a better understanding of the complexities that I have been trying to articulate in these acts of writing.
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Restrictive truth. From the point of view of experience, which Plato’s Socrates has named and created in the elenchus, the movement of aporia is full of potential, yet it is highly restrictive as it plays out in the dialogs we have. The dialog cannot proceed through the practical and improvisational question — can virtue be taught — without being grounded first on the ontological question — what is virtue. On the face of it, this temporality is always seeking a return home — a conscious recollection of what has always been true. The truth that Socrates leads the slaveboy to is the same truth for all of us, and it is implanted in the soul. But this restrictive move is preceded by the provocation into aporia, which happens when Socrates insists on resolving all particulars into universals.
Geometry could not have been an arbitrary choice for Plato. It is his paradigm for the pairing of knowledge and truth. Geometrical knowledge is always fundamentally retrospective because the truth it reveals is free of any particular time and space. It is, has been, and always will be true. Geometrical knowledge can only be valued by its measurable and demonstrable correspondence to this retrospective truth. The Platonic innovation was making geometrical knowledge a paradigm for how all forms of knowledge correspond to their truths. Knowledge is potentially illusory and illusive. Truth is the stable and eternal goal of all knowledge.
When applied to the virtues, the relentless pursuit of this retrospective truth is virtue for Socrates. True belief occurs when we become conscious of and accept this truth. Only then can we be said to know some-thing. As such, geometry (as it shows up in Meno) cannot recognize particulars as valuable unto themselves. Geometry provokes a search for the universal — theorems, axioms — in the particular. This is why the Socratic dialectic never lets the interlocutor offer examples as an answer to “what is” questions. All examples are only particulars that must justify themselves by appeal to universals:
SOCRATES: But come now, you too try to keep your promise to me by speaking about what virtue is as a whole, and stop making many out of the one, as the wits say every time people shatter something. Rather leave virtue whole and sound and say what it is — you’ve got examples from me. (77a)
The many must resolve to the one. Examples of virtue cannot stand on their own but must be representative of some one thing that is Virtue. We can see this as only an ontological statement that insists on a restrictive view of knowledge. Geometry is the paradigm for how Plato’s Socrates wants us to inhabit our beliefs — they are universally true or they are false. This is certainly a plausible reading, and for much of the history of philosophy, this is the essence of Plato’s thought.
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Aporia and the collapse of sequential time. To repeat, I am ambivalent about this accomplishment of Plato’s Socrates. Yes, aporia opens the possibility of dialog to transform our selves for the better. In the course of the dialog, virtue is demonstrated as the possibility of self-transformation that is never done. But Socratic aporia is a penitent’s temporality.
Or is it? More ambivalence emerges when we follow the trajectory of the dialog. The sequential and linear insistence on ontology preceding practical action collapses as soon as we stop treating Meno as a treatise about recollection and pay attention to the fact that it is a dialog. The dialectical work of geometry is to induce aporia by creating a productive-yet-empty movement from ignorance to minimal confidence to overconfidence to aporia. This linear flow of time is also a circular one. It must recirculate as the very process of virtue itself. In this temporality, binary oppositions emerge — ignorance versus certainty, true versus false beliefs — but the aporia gains positive recognition as a third non-place that is simultaneously universal and empty — famously narkan, numbness, and disorientation induced by the sting of the stingray (80b-c). Yet this narkan (84c) is also a stirring up of the soul (85c). Plato’s Socrates names this aporia, temporalizes it in the elenchus, and puts it into play as a valuable aspect of experience. In doing so, philosophy makes the experience of aporia the open-ended possibility of being a better person in the world.
In the demonstration, Socrates will have shown that the attempt to answer, to realize error, and thus to try again is virtue and the teaching of virtue simultaneously. The sequential temporality of the ontological question (what is virtue?) that must precede the practical question (is virtue teachable?) actually collapses in nearly all of the Socratic dialogs. It turns out that the pursuit of “what is virtue?” ends up teaching virtue through the provocation of aporia. “But now he does believe that he is perplexed, and just as he doesn’t know in fact, so he doesn’t even suppose that he knows…. So is he now in a better condition concerning the matter he didn’t know?” (84a-b).
Let us state it clearly and in defense of Socrates as a complex thinker about temporality: the temporality of aporia is virtue. The sequence of the two questions — first, what is virtue, and second, can it be taught — collapse into a single time: the pursuit of virtue is virtue and simultaneously the teaching of virtue, which requires instruction by an-other through the eternally recurring cycle of confidence and aporia.
Yet my ambivalence remains: we have seen that this transformative power of Socratic aporia occurs as a very specific practice and economy of time as a retrospective act of conformity of one’s opinions with a truth that could have been recognized all along. This is the temporality of a penitent.
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The abstracted third. There is another economy of temporality at play in the instruction on geometry in Meno. While the dialog between the two poles of Socrates and the slaveboy stretches time as an instructional movement from ignorance to certainty to aporia, another economy of time emerges. This economy situates Meno (and us as his double) as an abstracted third non-place for whose benefit the dialog is constructed: “Just call over for me one of your many attendants there, whomever you like, so that I may demonstrate on him for you” (82b, my emphasis). Socrates and Meno occupy no specific place in this dialog. Only the selected attendant occupies space. Standing over there, he is called over in order to serve a purpose for Meno that is not reducible to the attendant’s moral instruction. The over there is a place while the called over is the non-place of a purely abstract instruction in geometry.
We must make this clear: the instruction in geometry between Socrates and the slaveboy is not done solely for the benefit of the slaveboy. Meno is the main benefactor of the dialog. In so far as he is a citizen, he is of higher value than the attendant, who will only serve as the object of a demonstration: “so that I may demonstrate on him for you.” In the process, we witness the construction of a triangle out of the movement of the dialog: recollection and geometry are merely the abstractions that allow Meno to become the neutral onlooker who witnesses another’s oscillation between true and false belief. To witness the instruction of another will be to judge the truth or falsity of what that other believes. Meno becomes the abstracted third surveying the other two angles that face each other. This third angel opens onto the other angles as their universal witness. It is the work of the dialog, as logos, to create this triangular temporality and topology.
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Meno’s doubles and publicity. Socrates conducts the instruction of the slaveboy while Meno and the reader occupy an abstracted third position watching the lesson unfold. In the movement of the demonstration, we are not the slaveboy, and we are not Socrates: we are Meno as the abstracted third who witnesses the truth in a demonstration as the outside observer. We, as Meno’s doubles, occupy no defined place in this witnessing. We only experience time in this third place of witnessing the dialog. I don’t even wish to call it a place since it does not occupy space, but is practice of time that seeks to align the abstracted third position with eternal truths outside of time and place. In other words, we experience the time it takes for the slaveboy, instructed by Socrates, to demonstrate to us (but not to the slaveboy) that recollection is real and that another’s aporia is good for that other. We witness his passage from ignorance to knowledge where knowledge is the retrospective recovery of a truth that has always been there. By invoking geometry as the means to demonstrate recollection, the dialog occupies no particular place; it could happen anywhere.
Meno thus becomes the abstracted center of the dialog that allows us, Plato’s readers, to occupy Meno’s non-place as a center from which to witness the dialog. From this centering, we witness the de-centering of another for our benefit. In this third economy of time and topology, Socrates and the slaveboy take up their positions as characters whose dialog is staged for us as ideal spectators.
When the demonstration concludes, the slaveboy will disappear because his job is done. The triangle will shift focal points. The angles and line connecting citizens (Socrates and Meno) will be re-established as the most important line — the line connecting truth, opinion, knowledge and virtue with citizenship — made more solid and stable through the momentary demonstration on a slave who now returns from the included second position to the excluded third position.
To say it again and clearly; the slaveboy is Serres’ “excluded third” that geometry as a paradigm of truth made possible through an inclusion-exclusion movement. As such, the slaveboy’s passage through aporia will haunt the rest of the dialog as he moves from a directly addressed “you” to referential “him.” “These grammatical third persons, generally issuing from pronouns or demonstrative adjectives, are thus exactly, demonstratively, this third whose preceding logical, geometric, and social avatars we already know. We pass our arms through the windows of belonging to indicate or point at these third persons outside.…Here then is the third person become the totality of the social collective that surrounds those who talk of him….
The Third and its vibrant law of exclusion and inclusion thus found the sciences, both hard sciences and the humanities, the first establishing themselves on rigorous proof alone, founded on the principle of the excluded third … and the second, founded on global becoming and local exclusion, which defines or designates, first of all, a given individual, then, suddenly, the totality of social inclusion… (Troubadour 46, 47).
Meno’s slaveboy — the given individual — moves from the excluded periphery to be included into the non-place of aporia activated by geometrical interrogation. But his temporary inclusion is only for Socrates to demonstrate a “rigorous proof” for the benefit of another citizen. The benefit to the slaveboy is incidental as indicated by the repetition of asides where Socrates halts the demonstration to instruct Meno as to what he should be noticing. The demonstration’s value is in the proof for Meno, the Athenian citizen and peer of Socrates. The rigorous proof now complete, and the citizen now convinced, the slaveboy can go back to the excluded third position, effectively disappearing from the dialog. His job now done he is absorbed back into “the totality of the social collective that surrounds those who talk of him.” His retreat has left behind more than recollection. He has left behind, in his wake, a way for citizens to speak to each other about the truth.
Thus the third person provides a foundation for the whole of the external real, for objectivity in its totality, unique and universal, outside any first- or second-person subject. Here, outside all logos, the reason of realism, an unprovable philosophy without this third person, which is now, thanks to it, more than provable, since it is present at the root of every proof (48).
We are following the trajectory of the second half of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Geometry and slavery are getting us there.
We shall save that for Part II.