Taking Stock
Everything in this Essay will flow from this insight from Socrates: our cultures inhabit us well before we are able to take stock of their effects on us. The moral challenge is to evaluate those effects even as we are the products of them. Plato would carry this forward as a problem of true and false beliefs. Aristotle would famously formulate the problem in terms of habit and character formation. St. Augustine will take it to a whole new level of introspection in Confessions as a new genre of self-evaluation. One could defensibly argue that his Confessions is a prolonged demonstration of how to use neoplatonic Christianity to create time and space enough to understand how one’s habits have been shaped by the culture in which one lives. In doing so, the implicit interiority of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle is more fully baked in Augustine’s Confessions. But somewhere along the line, we lost the emotional and aesthetic power of these earlier thinkers as modernity pulled on the thread of rationality. In doing so, modernity doubled down on ressentiment, the ascetic ideal and slave morality.
My recent meditations have sought to pull on other threads in these thinkers. Untangling these threads show me a different way that was not taken. This way undoes ressentiment because it recognizes its dynamics, reroutes and defuses them. Paradoxically, I find these threads in the very texts that are supposed to be the archetypes of the ascetic ideal — Plato, Augustine, Evagrius, Anthansius’ Life of Anthony, Luke, John. My contention has been that we cannot undo the ascetic ideal and its need for ressentiment by hunting down these texts as the impresarios of slave morality. To do so is simply to replay the game using the rules of the ascetic ideal. We find new things to hate and blame for the ills of modernity. The ascetic ideal would end up preserving itself by offering itself up as a new object to condemn. This is not a direction that I want to go. Looking within these texts for the other threads seems a more fruitful undertaking. I think that it is now time to take stock of where I have arrived as a result of these recent meditations.
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Today, I will start with Descartes. In the Fourth Meditation, he captures in a single sentence the expression of modern nihilism:
As I seek the cause of these errors, I notice that passing before me is not only a real and positive idea of God (that is, of a supremely perfect being), but also, as it were, a certain negative idea of nothingness (that is, of what is at the greatest possible distance from perfection), and that I have been so constituted as a kind of middle ground between God and nothingness, or between the supreme being and non-being. (Fourth Meditation, 54, emphasis added).
On one level, this is straightforward neoplatonism. There is nothing new purely in the fact of seeing existence as stretched between perfection (the One) and the rest of creation that is less than perfect. Neoplatonic humanity has always occupied a middle ground somewhat removed from perfection but less removed than animals or inanimate things like rocks. What makes human beings special in the neoplatonic worldview is that we have souls that stretch us in both directions. The measure of a good or bad human is his or her orientation one way or the other — toward or away from perfection. St. Augustine, also a neoplatonist, captures this beautifully especially in Book VII of his Confessions:
So that when I now asked what is iniquity, I realized that it was not a substance but a swerving of the will which is turned toward lower things and away from You, O God, who are the supreme substance: so that it casts away what is most inward to it and swells greedily for outward things. (7.16.22, emphasis added)
For Augustine, the guarantee of our soul’s connection to the cosmos is that the knowledge of God is implanted in our memory (10.24.35). The proper orientation of our souls to the world starts as an inward turn to find the memory of God there. This is well understood in Augustinian scholarship, but the content of this memory is extremely difficult to grasp definitively. The ethical work of self-orientation is a rather constant process of turning our attention this way and that.
I want to spend a little more time with Augustine before coming back to Descartes. This will help to understand the thread that Descartes pulled on in contrast to the one I would like to hold onto. The short answer to their difference is this: Augustine had a far more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of human knowledge than Descartes, who reduced all forms of knowing down to procedural method. This has profound implications for how each of them oriented themselves to the world that we live with today. Augustine’s problem of orientation distinguishes between “seeing” and various other metaphors of “going” or “holding onto” or “strengthening.” Seeing the good or God for Augustine means intellectually understanding a concept or a truth. The experience of this grasp can be emotional even though it is driven by an analytical process. For instance, who can doubt the emotional force of Augustine’s intellectual overcoming of his entrapment within Manicheism through his reading of “some books of the Platonists”? These philosophical books, however, can only take him so far. “Of your eternal life I was now certain, though I saw it ‘in a dark manner and as through a glass.’ All my former doubt about an incorruptible substance from which every substance has its being was taken from me. My desire now was not to be more sure of You but more steadfast in You” (8.1.1, emphasis added). This certainly is more than an intellectual’s analysis of Plotinus’ view of the world. Augustine’s challenge to himself and to us is to move beyond the analytical grasp to achieve something higher and stronger in one’s soul. “It is one thing to see the land of peace from a wooded mountaintop, yet not find the way to it and struggle hopelessly far from the way…” (7.21.27, emphasis added).
For Augustine, if this rational knowledge stops at mere analytical understanding — even if that understanding is emotionally powerful — it is very far away from lasting transformation. “For I had begun to wish to appear wise, and this indeed was the fullness of my punishment; and I did not weep for my state, but was badly puffed up with my knowledge” (7.20.26). The problem is not that Augustine has his new intellectual knowledge of the neoplatonic metaphysics. He has greatly benefited from that, and all of Book VII is dedicated to this benefit. The problem is that he stopped there. He found an end point where his pride and vanity took root — he locked in on his certainty as an end point. This is the moral danger of the neoplatonic soul — it is overconfident in itself and easily weaponizes its certainty as it condemns others. “Where was that charity which builds us up upon the foundation of humility, which is Christ Jesus?” (7.20.26). It leads to an arrogance that keeps one’s focus on external things rather than turning back inside to keep one’s perspective on external things in order. Externally directed ressentiment is never very far away if certainty is your goal and you think you’ve found it.
Humility and charity, however, are not the goals of the inward turn. We do not achieve them as a permanent state. They are merely the ethical dispositions we marshal when we recognize our overconfidence in our intellect. In short, they keep us from being “badly puffed up with knowledge.” Of course, this is not new. This is easily found throughout the works of Evagrius, for one, who was living in the Egyptian desert as a monk about a generation ahead of Augustine. In fact, Evagrius codified two different stages: vainglory as the precursor to full blown pride. Nonetheless, this undoing is not a negation of what one knows. Augustine does not do this. His negation of Manichean dualism is really a replacement of it with the more subtle metaphysics of Plotinus. This is critical to understand because if humility is simply a negation of our confidence in what we know, we’ll be in a constant state of starting and restarting seemingly from scratch each time, which is what happens in Plato’s early Socratic dialogs: certainties give way under contradictions and we start all over again. As we discover our ignorance, we can easily end up in a an endless cycle of self-negation and a nihilistic undermining of our own self-confidence. (Of course, Plato deals with this nihilistic problem at length in the Meno.)
Augustine, to the contrary, is pursuing a neoplatonist’s progression from one state of knowing to another. In this way, he is much closer to the Socrates of The Republic than the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogs. One must move beyond the way of knowing specific to the intellect — what is justice? what is courage? what is temperance? what is the nature of good and evil? — so as to achieve something higher but far more difficult — seeing the Good. The latter is not known in the same way as the former (see 506d-e). It is Plato’s distinction between episteme (how one definitively knows what temperance and justice are) and gnosis (the non-propositional and metaphorical knowledge of the Good and the Beautiful).
For Augustine, something more is at issue, which he famously refers to as “grace” — a way of knowing that comes from outside oneself as a gift. But the only way to receive this grace is through an effort of preparation. This preparation is not formulaic; it is highly personal, which is why the Confessions is not a prescription for others to follow but simply one man’s story of his journey through the neoplatonist’s progression.
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Side Note: Confessions is personal in a very different way than Montaigne’s Essays, to which Confessions is not infrequently compared. As I focused on in an earlier meditation, Confessions provides more of an interpretive structure of conversion that can be applied to anyone’s Christian journey. This makes the temporal structure of the Confessions incompatible with the Essays: Augustine looks back in judgment on an earlier self to narrate his progression in retrospect. Montaigne’s Essays relentlessly refuse any retrospective self-judgment because he refuses to establish any end point from which he can look back on himself objectively. Later moments in his life are no more enlightened that his earlier moments. This is why he can write in Of Repentance, “I do not teach; I tell.”
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What keeps us from experiencing grace? What keeps us from recognizing it and letting it in when it happens? Augustine’s answer is twofold: 1) our long-term habits that are a product of the culture in which we live, and 2) a willingness to bullshit ourselves that our beliefs are actually knowledge. Bullshitting ourselves is key to Augustine’s spiritual assessment of ourselves, and he more than hints of it as a source of ressentiment:
“Why does truth call forth hatred?” Why is Your servant treated as an enemy by those to whom he preaches the truth, if happiness is loved, which is simply joy in truth? Simply because truth is loved in such a way that those who love some other thing want it to be the truth, and, precisely because they do not wish to be deceived, are unwilling to be convinced that they are deceived. Thus they hate the truth for the sake of that other thing which they love because they take it for truth. They love truth when it enlightens them, they hate truth when it accuses them. (10.23.34)
Nietzsche captured exactly this relationship between truth, hatred, and self-bullshitting in ressentiment. It is a kind of energy that projects hatred outward toward the world. As a momentary act of frustration, this is not a problem. When this energy is sustained, slave morality and the ascetic ideal are born. It works like this: hatred becomes ressentiment when this momentary hatred becomes a self-validating certainty about ourselves and the world over time. We believe with certainty that the world owes us something, and when it doesn’t pay it back, we condemn it. It is a vicious cycle: the longer the wished-for day of redemption is delayed, the more we lean into our ressentiment-fueled condemnation of the world. Those feelings become embedded in our identities and they become harder and harder to give up without giving up on ourselves. One could say that our selves are formed as stable identities through the sustained validation of ressentiment.
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With this understanding of Augustine’s neoplatonic inward turn established, I can return to Descartes, with whom I began this essay. His Meditations is clearly within the neoplatonic legacy, which makes him deeply interested in this problem of how to gain the time and space to understand how culture inhabits us. But he takes it in a new direction that is far less personal while also being both nihilistic and arrogantly optimistic about what he can achieve if he can disengage himself from the effects culture:
“I will stay on this course until I know something for certain, or, if nothing else, until at least I know for certain that nothing is certain. Archemedes sought but one firm and immovable point in order to move the entire earth from one place to another. Just so, great things are also to be hoped for if I succeed in finding just one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshaken. (Meditation Two, 24)
Descartes’ search for this Archemedean point was not a search for himself. It was a search for an “original foundation” within himself upon which he could build a systematic and universal knowledge. With the inward turn, his legacy is Augustinian (he would have known this as a good Jesuit educated at La Fleche), but the result is entirely different than Augustine. Where his predecessor turns inward to find a spiritual progression that is his own, Descartes annihilates himself completely. All that he finds is a bare existence that has no inherent values. While he thinks that he finds himself as a stable “I” — I think therefore I am — there is no guarantee that the the I that thinks isn’t an illusion of the thought process itself. Of course Nietzsche pointed this out 250 years later: the “I think” (cogito) statement, even before the “I am” predicate, is full of “daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove; for example, that it is I who think, that there must be necessarily something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking — that I know what thinking is” (BGE 1.16).
The “middle ground between God and nothingness” will always be precarious as he strives to find an Archemedean point from which to free himself from the bonds of habit and move the earth. The certainty of nothingness will always be more easily proven than the certainty of God. Eventually modernity must go toward nothingness as its certainty — Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Sartre are all predicted in this single line from the Meditations. Before them, however, Descartes sought culture’s outside by turning inside as did Augustine, but again, the results were different. Where Augustine found himself in all of the minutiae of his memories, Descartes annihilated the self in favor of procedural rationality. The cold rationality of Descartes “sitting here next to the fire, wearing my winter dressing gown” is absent in Augustine’s Confessions. As I argued above, Augustine’s achievements of the intellect are not unemotional and cold. They are powerfully personal, but they are limited. There is no way in Augustine’s worldview that the intellect could ever be compared to Archemedes.
At the risk of being repetitive, I want to make this clear: there is nothing that makes Descartes’ search about Descartes himself. His inward turn is to find something beyond himself that actually ends up annihilating himself in favor of a coldly rational method that seeks certainty at all costs. The Archemedean point he seeks is simultaneously outside the world and within himself. This is the final birth after a prolonged labor of the subject-object dichotomy in the North Atlantic world. This is also Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal at its fruition, and it is purchased at the cost of human emotion and experience as having any claim on knowledge. Far from subduing the body and its passions, Descartes simply writes them off by assigning them to the inert mechanics of the world beyond the mind. In this assignment, they are given a role, but their role is to be completely subservient to the intellect, which is his conclusion of the Fourth Meditation. This is where his Archemedean metaphor breaks down. We must imagine Descartes’ Archemedes exactly as he describes him, not as a body but as a point outside the world doing with it what it wills. We must imagine this point as procedural rationality, not the body, which, as we see later in the Meditations (and especially in his letters to Princess Elisabeth), must become the master of the will. For Descartes, the will is merely part of the mechanics of the world, which must be subjected to the depersonalized intellect. This is the ascetic ideal as Nietzsche formulated it. The way I see it, the ascetic ideal doesn’t fully arrive until Descartes’ Meditations. Before that, it has no necessity to arrive.
Descartes finishes the Fourth Meditation by making a particularly neo-Stoic promise to himself: “remembering to abstain from making judgments whenever the truth of a given matter is not apparent.”
Since herein lies the greatest and chief perfection of man, I think today’s meditation, in which I investigated the cause of error and falsity, was quite profitable. Nor can this cause be anything other than the one I have described; for as often as I restrain my will to make judgements, so that it extends only to those matters that the intellect clearly and distinctly discloses to it, it plainly cannot happen that I err. (Meditation Four, 62)
The function of the intellect is to force the will to conformity with what the intellect perceives as truth. But the only way that truth is revealed is through the rigorous application of Cartesian method. All ways of knowing are reduced to instrumental rationality as the only one capable of properly aligning judgment and will. Insofar as the will is a purely mechanical manifestation of the body as part of the world, and thus separate from the mind, the will is subject to instrumental control by the intellect.
To put a point on it for this essay: there is absolutely nothing personal in this instrumental subjection. If Descartes is embracing Socrates’ challenge to find a way to evaluate the culture that inhabits us, he does so by completely depersonalizing the endeavor. His method is not part of the culture he inhabits, but is the “original foundation” he takes with him into his solitary confrontation with self annihilation. This inward turn seeks a stable and universal point from which to judge and control all things. There is no Augustinian confrontation with his upbringing. There is no confessional move that tries to see the origins of his opinions. Rather, there is the absolute reliance on his ability to doubt, which is the gateway to clarity in the search for the Archemedean point of certainty.
A close reading of the opening sentences of the the First Meditation will make this clear. In these sentences, Descartes hints at an Augustinian undertaking: “Several years have now passed since I first realized how numerous were the false opinions that in my youth I had taken to be true, and thus how doubtful were all those that I had subsequently built upon them.” Here he acknowledges the weight of habit. These false opinions have been built up over time. While the task of undoing these false opinions “seemed enormous,” the time has come to “raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations… At last I will apply myself earnestly and unreservedly to this general demolition of my opinions.”
So much is promised at this moment about a personal introspection that will be at one and the same time a demolition that entrusts that the result will not be nothingness. The “original foundations” will be found, and when they are found, an Archemedean point will be created. But he veers away from this being a personal introspection at the moment it should begin:
Yet to bring this [general demolition of my opinions] about I will not need to show that all my opinions are false, which is something I could never accomplish. But reason now persuades me that I should withhold my assent no less carefully from opinions that are not completely certain and indubitable than from those that are patently false. For this reason, it will suffice for the rejection of all these opinions, if I find in each of them some reason for doubt.
In other words, a complete survey of himself and the origins of his false opinions will not be necessary. Rather simply withholding his assent from anything he believes to be true is good enough. But this withholding is not going to go all the way, as Nietzsche pointed out in BGE. If Descartes is going to “raze everything to the ground,” he is at least going to trust and assume that there is a ground — the “original foundations” that are promised from the beginning as the Archemedean point.
These passages I’ve been citing, I believe, bear witness to the birth of modern nihilism: the insistence on certainty as the only valid way of knowing; the instance on method as the way to be certain; the demotion of other ways of knowing as inferior to procedural method; the denigration and fear of error; the complete subjection of the passions of the will to a mathematical mechanics manipulable by intellect and method. All of this leads to a “will to certainty” (a phrase that certainly is not my own but that I’d like to mint) that is a powerful force in modern nihilism. It is my contention that one of the most powerful and misguided ways that we deal with modern nihilism is through the activation of ressentiment. At the heart of ressentiment is certainty. I am certain that this world is fallen. I am certain that I know it. I am certain that my knowing it is an indication that I am above it and better than others. The ascetic ideal fuels (and is fueled by) ressentiment when it ensures that I can “raze everything to the ground” to find that Archemdean point from which I can objectively judge and condemn what I see. When this Archemedean point is threatened — when it is rendered powerless or exposed as false — it goes into fight or flight mode. It either lashes out (if it feels empowered to do so) or it turns into slave morality as consolation (if it perceives a lack of empowerment). I cite January 6, 2021 as my evidence, as well as Descartes’ condescension to Hobbes.
It is equally my contention that the moral challenge of our time is not to restore the primacy of reason or truth or knowledge as the basis of our politics and our culture. This will just be to rehash and replay the whole thing over again. Rather, the challenge is to restore what Nietzsche told us at the beginning of BGE: “Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?” This is not the embrace of a moral or epistemological nihilistic relativism. We need scientific knowledge to flourish and to work if we are to have any faith that humanity can live better lives or that we can stop the planet from heating up at a faster pace than evolution can handle. Nietzsche’s challenge for our modern world is this: we need to restore different ways of knowing as equal partners alongside science if we are to survive and thrive as a species.
This does not require a neoplatonic hierarchy of ways of knowing, nor does it require neoplatonic mysticism, but it does require us to understand that Plato got something right when he differentiated opinion (doxa) from episteme (knowing the nature of something and what makes it a good version of that something), and techne (know how) from episteme, and episteme from gnosis (experiential knowledge of the Good and the Beautiful). It also requires us to recognize that Plato equally believed that these form of knowledge need to flow back into one another. To be a good doctor, one must know how to treat symptoms but also what is true human health, which means having some curiosity about what a good life is. In so far as “the good” is a non-propositional experience of harmony and beauty, this must flow back into his medical techne. How else are we to understand Plato’s instance that the philosopher must go back into the cave to “share the labors and honors” of his fellow citizens?
Our post-Cartesian world has reduced everything to techne and demoted all the other ways of knowing. This demotion takes the form of either condescending labels that turn other forms of knowledge into new objects of scientific inquiry, such as rituals and myths as the province of anthropology, or it places them in the service of science, such as when English departments become the places where students go to learn the technical skill of writing good sentences. We see this most clearly in the decline of our universities as places to learn anything other than employable skills, which is the essence of techne. The essence of techne is also to manipulate the world to our own ends, and in the process we turn ourselves into instruments of techne. Amazon, Instagram, TikTok, and the rest all know exactly how we as a population are going to react to their digitally driven experiments. We are part of the calculation because we have been reduced to calculating machines.
The moral challenge, as I see it, is to relearn and reactivate different ways of knowing so that we can take different stances to the world. There is no one way to take this orientation. Everyone’s journey is their own, but these journeys should not be in search of end points or final certainties that further fuel our ressentiment. Nor is the answer “balance” as some sort of stasis point that is apathetic. Rather, I stand with Nietzsche in seeing everything through a metaphysics of energy — the “will to power.” But this will to power does not have an origin or an end point. It is not driven by something other than itself. Thus it cannot be analyzed backwards to find an origin as its explanation. There is no Oedipus Complex or Class Struggle or Natural Selection as the only explanations that matter: “In short, here as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles — one of which is the instinct of self-preservation” (BGE 1.13). This does not mean that we don’t find self-preservation or class struggle or Oedipus complexes or natural selection at work. Rather, we must treat them as results and not causes: “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is a will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results (BGE 1.13).
Such a view of this moral challenge has a great deal of use for a notion of free will, but not a radically free will. Rather, we must understand that the habits that inform us are part of the flow of energy. The will to power does not have an origin that can be explained. But it does have effects and it can be manipulated. Our free will is the freedom to respond to the flows of energies — the competing, colliding and collaborating wills to power that make up our daily existence. Our wills give us the power to orient ourselves in this swirling of energy because we have agency within this swirl. We don’t need Descartes’ “original foundations,” but we do need instrumental reason, just like we need Evagrius’ apatheia as a profound openness to how this energy is moving and affecting us. The challenge is to understand what way of knowing is appropriate for the flows we inhabit at any one moment, while also realizing that any one “opportune moment” — to borrow a phrase from Aristotle (kairos in his ancient Greek) — may not be contained within the clock time we experience.
Such a view of the moral challenge also has a great deal of need to restore a practical notion of the soul. Nietzsche saw this too: “But the way is open for new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as ‘mortal soul,’ and ‘soul as subjective multiplicity,’ and ‘soul as social structure of the drives and affects,’ want henceforth to have citizens’ rights in science” (BGE1.12). Our souls must no longer be considered atomized possessions that we own and are trying to save for an eternal afterlife. This soul fuels ressentiment. Rather, we need a relational soul that can operate on vertical and horizontal dimensions simultaneously. This relational soul should not be understood in isolation from what it gives to and gets from others, including non-human others. Such a soul should learn radical empathy that doesn’t reduce the Other to a version of oneself. With Simone Weil, such a soul is capable of asking, “What is your malheur?” and dropping all prejudices that would codify the answer ahead of time. This is not a Cartesian (perhaps Habermasian?) bracketing of prejudices to find the purity of procedural reason that the Other must share with me. This is a bracketing akin to what Lyotard called “bearing witness to the differend.” All of this requires a soul as the seat of our agency — a will to power — but not an atomized and autonomous soul. It is fueled by the belief that we are tied into this world — all of it — and that we have the capacity to respond and control our responses.
Finally, such a view of the moral challenge needs amor fati as a commitment that combines the ability to see beauty in what has happened in order to create beauty out of whatever has happened. Our new relational soul-hypothesis will have the power to see, and in that power it can create. I am talking about the ability to affirm this power of orientation as the moral ground on which we stand. Again, with Nietzsche, this ground is not discovered. It is activated with all of our ways of knowing and not just with instrumental rationality. We should not wonder why his initial formulation of amor fati was formulated as a new years resolution and a reversal of Descartes:
For the new year — I still live; I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought that ran across my heart this year — what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not want to even accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all on the whole: someday I wish to be a Yes-sayer. (276, emphasis added)
To see beauty is no mere passive aesthetic experience. It is the capacity to create beauty by willing oneself to see beauty even if it is ugly at the moment of its appearance. But this is extremely difficult to achieve in practice, and I will save this difficulty for another day.