The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy

In The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy, Smith argues that Western Metaphysics
has indeed come to what Heidegger describes as “an end.” That is hardly to say
philosophy as such is over or soon to disappear; rather, its purpose as a medium of
cultural change and as a generator of history has run its course. He thus calls for a New
Philosophy, conceptualized by the artist-philosopher who “makes” or “poeticizes”
New Philosophy, spanning literary and theoretical discourses and operating across art
in all its forms and across culture in all its locations. To this end, Smith proposes the
establishment of schools and social networks that advance the training and development
of artist-philosophers, as well as global digital networks that are themselves designed
toward this “ever-becoming community.”

George Smith is Founder, President and Professor of Philosophy and Visual Culture
at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, USA.

Cover Image Caption: Alfredo Jaar

The Cloud, 2015
Installation with MDF, metal, wire, and polyester fibre
240” × 160” × 120” / 6 × 4 × 3 m
Installation view: Deichtorhallen, Hamburg
Photography: Henning Rogge
Courtesy Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg and
the artist, New York
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Perception and Agency in Shared Spaces of Contemporary Art

Edited by Cristina Albu and Dawna Schuld
Contemporary British Ceramics and the Influence of Sculpture
Iconoclasm, Monument, and Multiples
Laura Gray
Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture
Making and Being Made
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The Evolution of the Image
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Contemporary Artists Working Outside the City
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The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy
George Smith
The Artist-Philosopher and
New Philosophy

George Smith
First published 2018
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For Amy Curtis
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

PART 1
The Artist-Philosopher 11

1 Nietzsche & Hegel 13

2 Goethe & Rabelais 47
3 Sherman & Cézanne 69

PART 2
New Philosophy 89

4 Heidegger’s Calling 91
5 The Age of Addiction 117
6 The Saying of Parmenides 135

Afterword 161
Appendix: Heidegger’s Nazism & Anti-Semitism 167

Bibliography 175
Index 181
Acknowledgments

Most of the questions taken up in this book first came to the fore in IDSVA seminars
in Berlin, Paris, Istanbul, Athens, and at Spannocchia Castle in Tuscany. And so first
among those to be acknowledged and thanked for the book that resulted are none
other than my students. Not only did they good-naturedly endure my lectures, allow-
ing me to wander down many an endless path, but they constantly peppered me with
critically insightful questions and tough, hard-to-meet objections that enlivened the
seminars and informed my thinking throughout the book’s writing.
Though longtime friend, colleague, and mentor David Driskell had no direct input
on the book, his life’s work as an artist-philosopher lent unending inspiration to the
project as a whole. John Rajchman is to be thanked for his ever-delightful friendship
and steadfast support, and for his cautionary remarks regarding the relatively paro-
chial dimensions of Western thought and the absolute necessity of situating the future
of New Philosophy within the borderless intertextualities of today’s world.
My dear friend Sylvère Lotringer epitomizes the artist-philosopher, and indeed it is
from his example that I first began to picture the image of the philosopher as artist-
philosopher. Moreover, he was tremendously helpful with the chapter on addiction,
the most difficult of all the chapters to write. I am particularly grateful for his mention
of Virilio’s take on technology as well as Baudrillard’s, both of which can be seen as
variations on our Heideggerian theme as regards the pending extinction of man. While
Lotringer provided insight and encouragement as regards the culture of addiction
from a philosophical standpoint, the gifted neuroscientist and extraordinary thinker
Ted Coons offered me invaluable advice on the neuroscience of addiction and invari-
ably followed through with wise, patient instruction. My one friend and colleague
who has written on neuroaesthetics, Paul Armstrong, was incredibly generous and
helpful with his commentary on this chapter, too. He referred me to his very fine book
on How Literature Plays with the Brain: A Neuroscience of Reading and Art, and
above all, he guided me around many if not all of the mistaken ideas and wobbly
assumptions that at first confused my thinking on art and addiction. Ewa Ziarek read
for me an early draft of the section on Cindy Sherman’s psychoanalytic aesthetic. Like
nearly everything she’s ever said to me, her remarks and insights on this occasion were
nothing short of striking. I am ever indebted to her kindness and brilliance—a rare
combination of gifts. Rarer still is the eagerness with which she so generously shares
them.
My old and immensely kind and generous friend Howard Caygill’s careful readings
of early drafts, particularly the chapters on “Heidegger’s Calling” and “The Saying
of Parmenides,” taught me much about Heidegger’s thinking and much, too, about
x Acknowledgments
the historical significance of Caygill’s thinking as that of an artist-philosopher. Though
Caygill’s splendid book On Resistance comes up for discussion nowhere in particular
in the following pages, its intertextual presence is everywhere to be felt and hereby
gratefully acknowledged as a cornerstone of my argument. Likewise, the extraordi-
nary work Santiago Zabala and Gianni Vattimo have done together in opening out the
possibilities of hermeneutics, particularly in their co-authored Hermeneutic Commu-
nism: From Heidegger to Marx, has helped shape my book’s fundamentally hermeneu-
tic thematic. Though I was only able to read Zabala’s recently published book on Why
Only Art can Save Us just as my own book was going into print, here again Zabala
echoes and often precedes many of my own themes. His deeply insightful and in my
view brilliant commentary on hermeneutics more than confirms my own convictions
as to the future of hermeneutics as a key element in New Philosophy.
IDSVA Director Simonetta Moro is to be thanked for her constant nourishment and
cultivation of the IDSVA community, in which this book took root, and she deserves
special thanks for her unflagging support of the project. Her reading of an early draft
of the introduction was particularly reassuring. Our faculty colleague Chris Yates is
also to be thanked, not least for his work on Heidegger’s poiesis, which enlightened
my own thinking on poiesis as a key aspect of New Philosophy.
And let me not fail to say a word of appreciation for my friend and colleague Power
Boothe, painter and philosopher, artist and scholar, artist-philosopher of the finest
kind. It was Power Boothe who first opened for me a space within which I could imag-
ine what a school for artist-philosophers might look like. Long and endlessly rich
studio conversations about the meaning and function of painting, shoptalk about the
world of art and ideas and their long, intertwined histories: these are among the many
gifts that Power Boothe has brought to bear on the project at hand.
The community of those to be thanked hardly ends with the artist-philosophers
I have named above. Molly Davis, who serves so ably on IDSVA’s administrative staff,
archived permissions and illustrations and coordinated communications. Our librarian,
Laura Graveline, deserves special recognition for the effort she put in to every phase
of the project, from research assistance, to permissions acquisition, to image placement
and citations. Sarah Decker served nobly and cheerfully as endnote and bibliography
editor. Nicola Fucigna, ever sharp-eyed and undaunted by the challenge of trimming
long, winding sentences and not infrequent indulgences in the penchant for repetition,
edited the text as a whole. Many thanks as well to my editors and reviewers at Routledge;
the former provided splendid practical support and the latter gave indispensable criticisms
and advice. More generally, the members of IDSVA’s board of trustees enthusiastically
supported this project from the first and did so with thoughtful, intelligent interest.
They are to be recognized with heartfelt gratitude.
Amy Curtis, to whom this book is dedicated, cannot be thanked enough.
Introduction

We know next to nothing about the artist-philosopher. And yet to recount the artist-
philosopher’s story would require many volumes in the telling. What lies before us,
then, stands as a mere sketch, the briefly notated outline of what amounts to a more
than two-thousand-year tradition. Though we can only configure this rich and dense
tradition by way of a few fleeting examples, these instances will nonetheless bring into
focus a mode of thought, a way of thinking. We are calling this way of thinking New
Philosophy. As the term suggests, New Philosophy proffers an “other” way of looking
at and being in the world.
Before we can elucidate this other way of thinking, we are first obliged to say some-
thing about the established way of thinking that this other way of thinking is in fact
other from. What kind of thinking, in other words, constitutes today’s dominant mode
of thought? What is our habit of mind? What a priori standpoint frames our habitual
way of seeing and being in the world? We needn’t look beyond the bridge of our nose
for an answer. Western Metaphysics is rooted in our very eyes. Everything we see and
touch and feel and think is a reflection of metaphysics. Under the guise of Western
Metaphysics, which Heidegger further designates as the essence of technology, this
anything but natural way of seeing and being in the world has become over the millennia
a globalized cultural construct; it has become, in fact, the habit of human conscious-
ness tout court. We will justify this no doubt dubious-sounding claim in due course.
For now, the question is, what event explains this commonly held habit of mind? What
is its ground? How might we pinpoint a beginning of Western Metaphysics and the
supposedly selfsame advent of the essence of technology?
Plato’s Republic poses one of several likely answers. Book X in particular has long
enjoyed its justly deserved and fabled notoriety, not least for the scene in which the
artist is exiled from the City. Here, as we know, Socrates warns of a scoundrel and a
low-life, the corrupt corrupter of the good and the true—namely, the artist. What all
too often goes unnoticed, though, is the way Plato juxtaposes the inferior artist to the
shining and noble safe-keeper of truth, the philosopher. More than that, Plato in this
maneuver has reconstituted epistemology. What was once a loose and dynamic assem-
blage of myth and logic now operates as a purely scientific/mathematical construct.
And, moreover, he has commissioned the master of that construct, the philosopher, as
sole governor of truth, keeper of the highest good. Above all in this newly conjured
role stands none other than Socrates. If, as Burkhardt says, fame governed Athenian
life, it is fair to say that Socrates was its most glorified governor. Alcibiades crowns
him the “universal despot,” “the conqueror of all mankind.”1
2 Introduction
Hero of good and bastion of justice, Socrates steps onto the world stage as a bigger-
than-life champion of truth and enemy of evil. As for the shifty and ever guileful artist,
he is now and forever hence condemned as the enemy of truth and the origin of evil:

SOC: Then that part of the soul which has an opinion contrary to measure is not the
same with that which has an opinion in accordance with measure?
GLAUCON: True.
SOC: And the better part of the soul is likely to be that which trusts to measure and
calculation?
GLAUCON: Certainly.
SOC: And that which is opposed to them is one of the inferior principles of the soul?
GLAUCON: No doubt.
SOC: This was the conclusion at which I was seeking to arrive when I said that paint-
ing and drawing, and imitation in general, when doing their own proper work, are
far removed from truth, and the companions and friends and associates of a prin-
ciple within us which is equally removed from reason, and that they have no true
or healthy aim.
GLAUCON: Exactly.
SOC: The imitative art is an inferior who marries an inferior, and has inferior offspring.2

With the bong . . . bong . . . bong . . . bong of a ceremonial gong, the words “True,”
“Certainly,” “No doubt,” and “Exactly” punctuate and valorize Socrates’s step-by-
step, air-tight indictment of the artist. As importantly, they mark off and certify calcu-
lation and measure as the Socratic method. In turn, the Socratic method, as foretold in
this dialogue, will forever guarantee the clarity and certainty of Socratic logos. Nor is
the visual artist the sole recipient of the philosopher’s scorn. The poet “impairs the
reason,” and in the soul of man “implants an evil constitution.” From here on, the
philosopher is the specialist of truth, the poets and artist the purveyors of falsehood.
This split, or schism, in which philosophy becomes metaphysics and art becomes
mimesis, can be likened to the original split between man and woman. In the latter
event, as Socrates recounts in The Symposium, Zeus divided human being into two
genders. Thenceforward man and woman were categorically defined in opposite but
intrinsically relative and hierarchical terms, the man dominating the woman. In Book
X, such now becomes the case with the philosopher and the artist: they used to be one
and now they are two. Indeed, according to Plato, one of the great dangers of uncen-
sored poetry, such as Homer’s, is that it heats the passions and makes men behave like
women; it can even make men cry. So, it is hardly on a whim that Plato sees to it that
the philosopher of metaphysics no longer poeticizes, no longer thinks by way of
“poetic logic.” In fact, in this very elegant move, in which Plato implies an analogy
between the split between man and woman and the split between philosopher and
poet, Plato has assumed the role of Zeus and put the philosopher atop the phallic
pedestal of ideal masculinity and degraded the poet as an effeminate and impotent
travesty of manly logic. With the advent of metaphysics, the philosopher dominates
and controls poetic logic just as the Greek man dominates and controls Greek women.
Though it would be untrue to say that patriarchy begins with metaphysics, it is true
that patriarchy and metaphysics become more tightly linked in this very moment.
It was poetic logic, poeticized thinking, that gave Parmenides the wherewithal to
ask the question, “What is Being?” Now, instead of poeticized thinking, calculation
 Introduction 3
and measure assign to the philosopher of metaphysics one task: his specialization and
sole purpose is to determine truth, to segregate truth from untruth. And because Being
cannot be measured, Being no longer presents itself as a question of truth. The philos-
opher of metaphysics separates the logos of measurable beings from the mythos of
immeasurable Being. And so it follows that Being is no longer essential to the philoso-
pher’s questions, no longer of interest and value to the State. By the same token, the
artist no longer resembles the likes of Anaximander or a Heraclitus, no longer makes
things and creates ideas by way of “poiesis,” as did Parmenides. The poet, the artist, is
no longer a thinker but strictly a fabricator—the maker of copies, of forgeries—
the dissembler of measurable truth. The poet’s specialty, therefore, his sole purpose,
according to Plato, is to mix logos with mythos. As such, poetry confuses right with
wrong, truth with falsehood. Therefore, it stands to reason, the State should glorify the
philosopher and banish artists and poets, liars all. And yet, Plato is cautioned that
ridding the Republic of all artists and every poet might prove rash. Ever reasonable
and wise—and politically savvy—Plato therefore reprieves those poets and artists who
will create myths like his own. These latter are the myth-makers who valorize logos,
upon which metaphysics and by extension the State is predicated. From now on the
poet/artist will serve metaphysics or be cast out.
This astonishing moment in the history of art and philosophy marks the place where
Socratic philosophy, the philosophy of Plato, the philosophy called metaphysics, begins.
Granted, Book X is not the beginning of metaphysics, but it certainly marks a beginning
of metaphysics. We should also mark Book X as a germinal moment for the essence of
technology. In this moment, philosophy and epistemology, certainty and mathematics, are
forged together into a singular and unassailable correspondence to truth. Herein lies the
essence of technology, where thinking and logos become one and the same mode of
thought. Under the rubric of Western Metaphysics, this newly amalgamated modality will
eventually dominate human consciousness. Over time and across the millennia, slowly but
surely calculation and measure will become our habit of mind, our way of seeing and
being in the world. But we should also mark this incipient moment as an “overcoming”:
the overcoming of what was prior to metaphysics, the aboriginal mode of Greek thought.
This latter was the poetic logic that interfused mythos/logos. It was the first philosophy,
the new philosophy that typified the thinking/making of the pre-Socratic epoch.
Even today, when we say, “philosophy of art,” when we sign up for a course or read
a book on that particular subject, we assume that philosophy will analyze the elements
of art according to the principles of metaphysics. In this case, philosophy will demon-
strate its mastery of art. When, on the other hand, we hear or utter the inverse phrase,
“the art of philosophy,” never do we assume that art is going to analyze the elements
of metaphysics and demonstrate by way of calculation and measure art’s mastery of
philosophy. Rather, we hear in the words, “art of philosophy,” the truism that there is
an art to metaphysics, that metaphysics is artful in its method. This goes without say-
ing. But underneath this saying there is a prior saying, a second saying. For there was
a time when thinking, Being, and poeticizing were all one and the same. That was the
time of Anaximander and Parmenides. The contemporary relations between art and
philosophy are a very long way from what they were in pre-Socratic times. And yet
those relations are not far at all from where they were in Athens in the time of Plato.
The key difference between Plato’s moment and our own is that over time, little by
little, the continued logistical aggression toward poetic logic has accumulated in force
and momentum—to the point where metaphysics has finally conquered.
4 Introduction
This aesthetico-epistemological development is scientific. Whitehead shows that
when science takes measure of an object the object will appear according to the instru-
ments of its measurement. When the scientist observes the mouse, the mouse observes
the scientist. Under the close observation of the transcendental analytic of formalist
critique, modernist art becomes a pure scientific aesthetic. Predicated on logic, on the
calculation and measure that inform the judgment of taste, art dissolves, in other
words, into pure form. The modernist aesthetic thereby demonstrates the viability of
its claim to beauty, which, as Plato teaches, is another word for truth. Thus, for example,
Clement Greenberg reduces painting to paint on a flat surface and thereby proclaims
painting’s bona fides as calculable and measurable. He applies this reduction to all
legitimate art forms. Art forms to which this reduction cannot be applied are not legit-
imate forms of art; they are kitch. Modernism thereby becomes, for example, the art
of Hilton Kramer’s critical journal, The New Criterion, founded in the early nineteen-
eighties. Synonyms for the word criterion include: standard, measure, test, calculation,
gauge. Greenberg and The New Criterion follow in the footsteps of Scrutiny, the jour-
nal of scientific literary analysis that F. R. Leavis founded in the early nineteen-thirties.
Synonyms for the word scrutiny include: examination, investigation, probe, inquiry.
In this latter case, we might note the presumption that a work of art is to be suspected
of faulty measure, investigated for untruth, until proven otherwise. In more recent
times, Michael Fried’s complaint against minimalism’s theatricality comes down to the
style’s lack of calculable, measurable form.
What Fried knows, he learned directly from Plato, and more immediately from Kant
and Greenberg: outside the walls that surround and delimit fine art, art becomes a
dark tempter, a danger. Once set free, once set loose beyond the bounds of clearly
delineated aesthetic parameters, once put to use in philosophy or rhetoric, it becomes
a coiled serpent lurking in the path to truth. At any moment poetic expression can
ensnare philosophy, turn it to malevolent intent, and thereby corrupt the naïve purity
and innocence of metaphysics. Hence, in order to safeguard the integrity of metaphysics,
whenever the philosopher speaks in poetic language, we must beware, lest we be
“artfully hoodwinked.” Likewise, when the poet speaks as a philosopher, what he says
must be taken as poetry, not philosophy. And so, for example, when Lucretius, in his
philosophical poem, The Nature of Things, says that his poetry rims with honey the
cup of philosophical truth, he speaks strictly as a poet and not as a philosopher, for
otherwise, according to Kant’s metaphysics, his honey would infect philosophy with
poesy. Even in our own day, when the venerated classics scholar Frank Copley intro-
duces his translation of The Nature of Things, his very first words will serve as a
warning to the reader: “Lucretius was a poet, not a philosopher, and it is as the work
of a poet that his poem De Rerum Natura (‘The Nature of Things’) must be read.”3 If
we have been dutifully enjoined by Copley’s deployment of the word “must,” we will
take it as a command. The overriding injunction intoned in that command is none
other than Kant’s, against which Lucretius has no say whatever, even though he explicitly
identifies himself as a philosopher in the very lines of the poem Copley is translating.
Raising a strident cry against such thinking, the youthful Hölderlin writes: “Until
we make ideas aesthetic, that is mythological, they are of no interest to the people, and
vice versa: until mythology is rational, it will be an embarrassment to philosophy”4
Hölderlin was not the only young thinker to be stirred by the promise of such a future.
Written in 1796 under the title, “Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism,”
Hölderlin composed the poetically inflected sentiments quoted above in collaboration
 Introduction 5
with his two closest friends and fellow seminarians, the young Hegel and the very
young Schelling. We will come back to this extraordinary document in due course. For
now, suffice it to quote the last lines of their manifesto: “Only then will equal develop-
ment of all our powers await us, for the particular person as well as for all individuals.
No power will again be suppressed, then general freedom and equality will reign among
spirits! —A higher spirit, sent from heaven, must found this new religion among us,
it will be the last, greatest task of humanity”5 With these words, we see the rising tide
of New Philosophy.
The trans-millennial conflict between these counterpoints—repression and resis-
tance, philosopher and artist-philosopher, Western Metaphysics and New Philosophy—
brings to the fore our main theme. We can now say a word about our general outline.
The book is divided into two parts. Part I is titled The Artist-Philosopher and Part II
is titled New Philosophy. Each part comprises three chapters. Part I describes the artist-
philosopher. By way of exemplification, we focus on six artist-philosophers: two phi-
losophers, two novelists, and two visual artists. Chapter One begins with Nietzsche, if
only because it is Nietzsche who explicitly proclaims himself an artist-philosopher. But
of course Nietzsche is hardly the first or the only artist-philosopher. After Nietzsche,
therefore, we will want to say a word about Hegel. Though rarely if ever considered
an artist-philosopher, there is much to be said about Hegel on this score, especially as
regards the Phenomenology of Spirit and as regards the very early essay on philosophy
and art that he composed with his young compatriots, Hölderlin and Schelling. In
Chapter Two we will take a look at Goethe, who gives rise to what Hölderlin will call
“New Philosophy” and to what Nietzsche will name as the artist-philosopher. As a key
part of that development, Goethe establishes the fundamental principle of Freudian
psychoanalytic theory. Pace Kant’s metaphysics and aesthetics, Goethe revivifies
Dionysian modes of thought, writes philosophy as poiesis (in novel form), and on
these latter grounds repudiates Kant’s adamantine claim that art is not and never can
be philosophy. Along these lines, we will want to take a close look at Goethe’s great
predecessor, Rabelais. Through the novel form, Rabelais will conceptualize a new theory
of time, as does Goethe. And while their respective theories are different, the one physi-
ological and the other psychoanalytic, each calls into question Aristotle’s serial-mechanical
concept of time and anticipates the likes of Bergson, Einstein, and Heisenberg.
Chapter Three will continue with the philosophical question of time as psychoanalyti-
cally re-formulated in two visual artists, Cindy Sherman and Paul Cézanne. In Sherman’s
case we will see how the performativity of her temporal aesthetic re-constitutes the viewer
as a traumatized post-Kantian, post-humanist subject and as such moves psychoanalytic
philosophy beyond Freud, Derrida, and Lacan—and for that matter, Goethe. Cézanne’s
psycho-philosophical representation of temporality, as we shall see, brings Merleau-Ponty
to an ontology of painting that puts him on the same plain with Heidegger and Cindy
Sherman.
As artist-philosophers, these two visual artists re-animate the Oedipal myth, return-
ing us to a long-buried and archaic beginning. Freud and Lacan describe this kind of
mnemonic experience as the traumatic return to a primal scene that continually recon-
stitutes the human being as an ever-changing, ever fluid future Becoming. As such, the
Oedipal return comes close to and often merges with the logos/mythos trajectory that
Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and Goethe follow on their own endlessly looped
paths toward other thinking. As will have become apparent by now, the narrative
structure of this book generally follows the same back and forth trajectory.
6 Introduction
In the three chapters comprising Part II, we situate the artist-philosopher within
the larger concerns of New Philosophy. These concerns have mainly to do with New
Philosophy’s relation to Western Metaphysics. Thus, while in Part I we will have been
dealing with Heidegger more or less indirectly, now in Part II the growing conflict
between Western Metaphysics on the one side, and Heidegger as chief avatar of New
Philosophy on the other, takes center stage. In the first chapter, entitled “Heidegger’s
Calling,” we examine the Protestant notion of “a calling” as it applies to Western
Metaphysics and more particularly as it applies to bourgeois aesthetics and modernist
art. With help mostly from Weber, we consider the calling as it insinuates itself into the
discourse of modern art. This newly theorized aesthetic calling, as we shall see, is con-
stituted in servitude to Western Metaphysics and its driving force, the essence of tech-
nology. We will also want to take into account how, in covenant with the Protestant
calling, modern theorists such as Panofsky, and especially Cassirer, bring the Kantian
modernist aesthetic to bear against Dionysian mythos through the mechanisms of
logic. Clive Bell and especially Roger Fry will also figure in these discussions. Our
considerations of the modernist aesthetic calling will bring us to Heidegger’s realization
that man’s relation to the essence of technology has taken human being to the brink of
extinction. Against this still unbelievable and nonetheless pending colossus, Heidegger,
as we shall see, poses the possibility of another calling, i.e., that of poiesis, or other
thinking.
It would be all too easy to hope that Heidegger’s other thinking points toward some
kind of deus ex machina. Nothing of the kind will save us. As Heidegger spells out in
no uncertain terms, humans are blind to the fact that they have become slaves to the
essence of technology and therefore indifferent to its consequence, the symptoms of
which are habitually attributed to rationalized causes. Human beings are therefore
powerless in the face of their destiny. And while it is true that nearly a century has
passed since Heidegger first sounded this alarm, and equally true that philosophy is
tired of hearing the same old tune about Heidegger’s Ge-stell, whether we refuse to
listen or not, the fact remains that the essence of technology goes on producing the
addictive “intoxicant” that keeps human being trapped in its thrall. Not everyone
dismisses these claims. Baudrillard remarks that the closer technology gets to perfec-
tion, the closer it brings us to extinction, and Virilio says something very similar when
he makes the distinction between pure science and its applications. These points we
will indirectly elaborate within the context of Heisenberg’s commentary on science and
tradition. For Heidegger, though, the essence of technology is something very different
from technology per se, and in fact for him the essence of technology and Western
metaphysics have long since become interchangeable terms. This is what he means
when he refers to modernity as the Age of Technology. Chapter Two of Part II is
accordingly entitled “The Age of Addiction.” Through the lens of Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina, we will trace global addiction to technology and its derivatives, including
opioids, back to man’s primal and now chronic addiction to the essence of technology.
In “The Saying of Parmenides,” the third and final chapter of Part II, we argue, pace
Reiner Schürmann, that Heidegger did indeed “step back” from Western Metaphysics,
and that he did so with the full intention of regathering the way of thinking that comes
prior to the advent of Western Metaphysics. Schürmann and many other contempo-
rary Continental philosophers argue that we must keep Heidegger on the side of meta-
physics. Not only do they insist that metaphysics is where he intended to stay put, but
they also believe that it is mainly Heidegger’s philosophy that can guide metaphysics
 Introduction 7
into the next phase of its history as the predominant mode of Western thought. To the
contrary, in our view Heidegger could not have been clearer: philosophers would go
their own way, but for him, the way forward was the way back, toward the “other
thinking” that began in what Heidegger calls the “other beginning,” the beginning of
pre-Socratic thought. One might be tempted to believe that as long as Continental
philosophers like Schürmann bind Heidegger to metaphysics, we cannot fully step
back from the essence of technology, the form of Western thinking that threatens the
very existence of mankind. That kind of thinking leaves the responsibility for a way
out of the greatest threat man has ever faced in the hands of metaphysics, the very
cause of what is most dangerous. And besides, Heidegger had no illusions about where
twentieth-century Continental philosophers and especially analytic philosophers were
heading: headlong into the future of metaphysics. For his part, there would be no fur-
ther struggle with or against metaphysics. The time had come to let metaphysics “be.”
Whether they argue for a fair and equitable distribution of the sensible or for the
agonistic variety of emancipation, current political philosophies will have no effect what-
ever on the concrete unfolding of Heidegger’s prediction; nor will current religions or
belief systems, or for that matter, newly invented art forms. Were these materialist-utopian
life-systems, belief systems, and modes of aesthetic experience to be magically realized,
children would no longer starve, all would receive health care, and art of some kind or
other would adorn the world’s public and private spaces. Beyond that, the fatal pathol-
ogies that contagiously infect modern consciousness would prevail. That is hardly to
say that contemporary political theorists offer anything less than a radically compel-
ling emancipatory discourse. But as Heidegger insists (and this is why he never wrote
on ethics and why everything he ever wrote was about the present impossibility of an
ethics), an authentic ethics can only be grounded in thinking, and thinking is something
we have as yet to learn how to do—or rather, we have forgotten how it’s done. Eman-
cipatory philosophies such as those of Mouffe and Rancière keep us going, help us
endure, hold forth the promise of a future. But they cannot change the fact that we are
addicted to a drug that has robbed us of Being and will keep on robbing us until it has
robbed us of the lifeworld. In this latter respect science will not reverse the ever accel-
erating, ravenous, and humanly unstoppable despoliation of the earth. That is because,
as Heidegger says, science does not think. Even if tomorrow scientists the world over
proclaimed the means for a complete and immediate eradication of global warming,
that event would not change the habit of mind that binds mankind to the essence of
technology. Even as scientists come closer and closer to solving global warming, more
and more scientists and philosophers are coming around to Heidegger’s read on the
ubiquitous and increasingly undeniable signs of our destiny: no matter what we do, the
unrelenting contamination of the earth and its life forms is now beyond detoxification.
Even so, Heidegger holds out the possibility that maybe a god can save us. This
now infamous remark is usually taken as cryptic and irrelevant or hopelessly romantic.
It is neither. For one thing, it wryly rebuffs Plato’s scorn of poetic thinking and points
the same finger at Kant, Carnap, and Cassirer—Plato’s modern stalwarts in the war
against myth. But secondly, in alluding to the Greek gods, Heidegger implies that
a step away from pure logos, an improbable if not impossible “step back” from
Western Metaphysics and the essence of technology, could open space for poetic
thinking to take hold. Moreover, the return of poiesis, a re-interfusion of mythos
and logos, could raise yet another possibility, this one as unlikely as the first: namely,
that such a “new” mode of thought might invent what the essence of technology
8 Introduction
prevents: ethico-technological philosophies, religions (i.e., belief systems), and art forms
that sustain us—all of us, earth, water, air, and non-human beings included—spiritually,
politically, economically. Heidegger even went so far as to suggest there was a chance
the artist-philosopher could open a space for such a possibility. What he didn’t say was
how. Our overarching thesis aims toward a plausible answer to that question.
We can sum up our thesis in two parts. In the first place, poiesis stems, at least in the
extent to which it originates in Greek thought, from the work of early artist-philosophers
such as Parmenides and Heraclitus, for whom logic and poetic thinking were interde-
pendent and indeed interchangeable and hybridized modes of thought. Though such
thinking was suppressed with the rise of metaphysics, poiesis continued to find expres-
sion in various artist-philosophers who worked outside of and usually in resistance to
the pure scientific thinking that defines metaphysics. In Hölderlin, for instance, we see
poiesis reformulated as poetic logic and poetic intuition. In time, especially in the late
thinking of Heidegger, these terms become enlarged and now inhere the discourse of
hermeneutics, which is itself a mode of critical thought that combines logic with poetic
logic, mythos with logos. In this new light we see that hermeneutics is not at all
restricted to the kind of critical thinking that is typically applied, for instance, to the
reading of a text or to the critical analysis of an art object. Rather than a critical meth-
odology that is applied to the art object, we see in fact that hermeneutics operates as
well within the framework of certain art objects and styles. This leads to the conclu-
sion that the artist-philosopher is a practitioner of hermeneutics and leads to the further
conclusion that hermeneutics in this sense constitutes New Philosophy. Hermeneutics
is now understood not as a critical method in Gadamer’s sense but as poiesis in a far
wider, more general sense—a mode of cultural consciousness, a way of human being
in the world.
This wider sense of hermeneutics is precisely what Hölderlin is getting at, and it
brings us to the second part of our thesis, which says that New Philosophy is a mode of
consciousness, variations of which are to be found across history, in all cultures and in many
art forms. It is a way of thinking that begins, as we have suggested, with Parmenides.
And while that is true, this way of thinking begins also within the poetic logic of Laozi,
Confucius, Buddha, Ptah-Hotep, the pre-Columbians, and within the poetic logic of
many other artist-philosophers past and present whose way of being in the world is
grounded in the poiesis of what we are calling, in light of these artist-philosophers,
New Philosophy. As Hölderlin’s thematization of poetic intuition indicates for us,
hermeneutics—poiesis as we are now describing it in terms of New Philosophy—is, in
other words, grounded in the hybridization of mythos and logos but is not welded in
place to the archaic thinking of the original artist-philosophers who first saw the world
in these terms. New Philosophy has mutated in time and will go on doing so. Its con-
tinued evolution is the job of the artist-philosopher. If there is to be a future, in any
case, it is this perennially marginalized and nonetheless trans-historical and worldwide
tradition of resistance, we contend, that will supersede the “one-track thinking” that
has addicted human consciousness and presently endangers our being in the world.
The chapter on Parmenides brings the section on New Philosophy to a close. A brief
Afterword touches on the practical necessities upon which any future depends. In
addition to the Afterword, I have added an Appendix. With this I take up Heidegger’s
anti-Semitism and Nazism and explain why, even in the face of the undeniable, dispir-
iting, and indeed contemptible facts regarding Heidegger’s words and deeds, we cannot
do without him.
 Introduction 9
Notes
1 Plato, The Works of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1950), 34.
2 Plato, “Republic,” in The Works of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Tudor Publishing
Company, 1950), 392.
3 Lucretius, The Nature of Things, trans. Frank Copley (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1977), vii.
4 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism,” in Classic and
Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 186–7.
5 J. M. Bernstein, ed., Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 187.
Part 1

The Artist-Philosopher
1 Nietzsche & Hegel

Section I: Nietzsche
It is easy to say that Nietzsche is an artist-philosopher; he says so himself. It is not so
easy to explain what that means and why that is. Neither of these questions Nietzsche
ever addresses directly. And except for Heidegger, nobody else ever asks what Nietzsche
is getting at by making such an odd self-assertion. And yet it is only by answering these
questions that we can fully understand what happens to Nietzsche when he goes through
a near-total transvaluation of his own values. Only then can we begin to understand
how the darling of German philology becomes the scandal of Western metaphysics.
Indeed, absent these answers, major readers of Nietzsche, Walter Kaufman chief among
them, have convinced much of the world that despite everything we read in Nietzsche,
he lived and thought and wrote as a devout follower of Socrates and as a card-carrying
champion of metaphysics. Little wonder, then, that Kaufman never says a word about
the fact that Nietzsche is an artist-philosopher. After all, it is as an artist-philosopher
that Nietzsche turns against Socrates, turns, more specifically, against Plato, and more
generally and monumentally, against the whole of Western metaphysics.
Nietzsche’s turn against Plato and Socrates—against his own tribe, as it were—
begins, I want to suggest, with the mysterious disappearance of Dionysius. This event
marks the onslaught of the war between metaphysics and myth—which is to say that
the disappearance of Dionysius from the Greek cultural consciousness is not at all a
vague cultural forgetting but rather an actual and deliberately staged maneuver that
marks a turning point in the history of Greek philosophy. As such, it explains why
Nietzsche decides to write The Birth of Tragedy and why that experience turns him into
an artist-philosopher whose project is to revivify and reincorporate Dionysius into
contemporary philosophical thought and German cultural consciousness—thereby
to turn the tide in the war against myth.
Waged by an undeclared Apollonian/Socratic/Platonic alliance, we can see how this
war plays out in The Symposium as a purging of the Dionysian element from Socratic
philosophy. Though the war against pre-Socratic thinking is not a secret war, it is
unspoken, and it is waged discreetly and discursively. Be that as it may, if we are
patient and painstaking in our analysis of the text (a text all too familiar to the history
of philosophy and therefore very hard to see), Plato’s discursive moves against Diony-
sius will come to the fore for us. This in turn will show The Symposium as depicting
pre-Socratic philosophy as the murky, myth-infested thinking of the past and pro-
claiming the advent of metaphysics as the pure science of the future. Though not so
obvious to us, these discursive maneuvers were no doubt apparent to the Greek world
14 The Artist-Philosopher
and all the more so to Plato’s inner circle. Our own grasp of Plato’s narrative in this light
will make Nietzsche’s thinking as an artist-philosopher that much easier to fathom.
Already, in acknowledging Nietzsche as an artist-philosopher, we have recognized him
for a hybridized thinker; a thinker, that is, whose thinking is opposed to metaphysics,
still the pure science of the future.
As regards The Symposium, we can elaborate these points as follows. To begin with,
from Diotima, the wise old teacher of the young and still impressionable Socrates, we
learn about the love of wisdom. Insofar as the Dionysian spirit will later be character-
ized as that which is lewd, lascivious, and even incestuous, we take it as no accident
that Diotima begins her lesson by telling us that love “may be described generally as
the love of the everlasting possession of the good.”1 In which case, “the object which
[lovers] have in mind is birth in beauty, whether of body or soul.”2 But as Diotima says
to her young charge, procreation is not always a beautiful thing. Yes, “procreation is the
union of man and woman, and is a divine thing; for conception and generation are an
immortal principle of the mortal creature, and in the inharmonious they can never be.
But the deformed is always inharmonious with the divine, and the beautiful harmonious,”
which is to say that beauty is never deformed but always of pure form.

Beauty then is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at the birth, and
therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and dif-
fusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit: at the sight of ugliness she frowns
and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up, and not
without a pang refrains from conception.3

In these aesthetic pronouncements we can plainly discern Kant’s judgment of taste:

one feels pleasure at the sight of pure form, which is beautiful, and one feels un-pleasure
or pain at the sight of deformity or a lack of form, which fails to achieve beauty and
causes the senses to flinch and close down.
And when it comes to procreation, for human beings, “generation is a sort of eter-
nity and immortality.” That is because all living beings, including birds and bees and
beasts, “are in agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire
of union,” and this can only be explained as “mortal nature [. . .] seeking as far as is
possible to be everlasting and immortal; and this is only to be obtained by generation,
because generation always leaves behind a new existence in place of the old.” Hence,
we should “[m]arvel not then at the love which all men have of their offspring; for that
universal love and interest is for the sake of immortality.”4 While sexual procreation
seeks a kind of immortality, likewise, so does the creation of beauty. “All creation or
passage of non-being into being is poetry or making, and the processes of all art are
creative; and the masters of the arts are poets or makers.”5 One might think the laurels
go, therefore, to the artist, especially since:

souls which are pregnant—for certainly there are men who are more creative in
their souls than in their bodies—conceive that which is proper for the soul to con-
ceive or contain. And what are these conceptions? —wisdom and virtue in general.
And such creators are poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor.6

We should not, however, take this as the highest accolade one can bestow upon the
maker, for “the greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned
 Nietzsche & Hegel 15
7
with the ordering of states and families,” and that is the wisdom of the philosopher,
who in this case is none other than Plato, author of The Republic. On this key distinction
between the artist and the philosopher, Kant stakes the same claim that the philoso-
pher stands above the artist, for the knowledge of philosophy is teachable, whereas the
creation of art is not. And besides, the artist who conceives “wisdom and virtue in
general” is not, as we learn in Book X, just any artist, but the one who makes art or
poetry in accordance with Socratic principles, the one, that is, who does not malign the
gods or cast aspersions against the makers of the laws, but who tells stories that will
teach the young to be wise and virtuous by showing them what is wise and virtuous.
Along these same pedagogical lines, Diotima outlines for the young Socrates what
ought to be a youth’s progression from the appreciation of the outward beauty of form
to the inward beauty of the individual who recognizes form as a reflection of mind:

For he who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit
beautiful forms; and first, if he is guided by his instructor aright, to love one such
form only—out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will himself
perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another; and then if
beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize
that the beauty of every form is one and the same! And when he perceives this he
will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing,
and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage he will consider
that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward
form.8

Here in Diotima’s glorification of mind, of human reason, we see Kant’s notion of pure
reason in and of itself but also as the height of beauty. And here we arrive at Kant’s
pure form as it applies to the aesthetic: Diotima seeks “beauty absolute, separate, simple,
and everlasting [. . .] without diminution and without increase, or any change.”9 Which
brings us to the fruition of pure form:

[W]hat if man had eyes to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and
clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the
colours and vanities of human life—thither looking and holding converse with the
true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, behold-
ing beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images
of beauty, but realities of beauty (for he has hold not of an image but of reality),
and bring forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be
immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?10

The answer is no, of course, and Kant could not agree more. Eternal truth is to be
found, according to Kant, in the formal aesthetic idea as absolute beauty, given out-
ward representation in the artist’s rendering of the beautiful as form. The beautiful
image, the art work’s content, which represents a beautiful thing, is subject to the
unpredictable flux and pollutions of everyday life, whereas the form of the art work is,
on the other hand, beautiful, eternal. As such, aesthetic form is real in Plato’s sense of the
Ideal and in Kant’s notion of pure reason. Such, in other words, is the love of wisdom.
It must be pure, not mixed. It must come from love, and love of wisdom is always
pure, as Diotima teaches. This pure love of wisdom is the thinking of Socrates,
16 The Artist-Philosopher
a thinking that is never mixed with poetry, never diluted by emotion, never inspirited
with Dionysian wine. It is the Apollonian thinking of pure logic, and as such, it is the
anti-thesis of pre-Socratic philosophy, which is by definition poetic, and it is the anti-
dote to the creative and destructive Dionysian spirit. The function of beauty is to val-
orize harmony, stability, and order. Beauty is invented, therefore, in the service of
the State, to support and strengthen the security and stability of the State, to whom
the artist is subservient.
But let us return to the narrative thread. No sooner does the noble Socrates con-
clude his rendition of Diotima’s myth and his own encomium on love as a thing of pure
beauty, when who shows up the symposium but the fair and glamorous Alcibiades.
Barging in on the evening’s refined and sober gathering of high-minded Athenians,
announcing himself with yelps and whoops and followed by his noisy train of atten-
dants and his flute-girl (the maenad), this party-crasher cannot be mistaken for anyone
other than Dionysius: “He was in a great state of intoxication, and kept roaring and
shouting.” Plato’s contrast between the howling drunken sensualist and the sober and
clearheaded Socrates could not be more pointed. It is especially marked if we remem-
ber that Socrates arrives as the last of the guests, having been struck by an idea the
contemplation of which stopped him in his tracks.
But lest we somehow fail to recognize this unruly interloper for the god that he is,
Plato adorns Alcibiades in traditional Dionysian garb: “‘Hail, friends’, he said, appear-
ing at the door crowned with a massive garland of ivy and violets, his head flowing
with ribbons.”11 Thusly costumed, our Dionysian Alcibiades gives to the noble gather-
ing an impromptu but nonetheless stirring account of Socrates. We hear of his wisdom,
his kindness and patience, his magnificence as a teacher and abiding and gentle guid-
ance as a mentor. And we learn that no matter what wiles and cunning Alcibiades
brings to his relentless seduction of Socrates, nothing will tempt his master into fore-
going the eternal pleasure of the universal good in exchange for the momentary plea-
sure of the earthly profane, for Socrates has not forgotten the lessons of his old teacher,
Diotima. After many failed stratagems over many days, Alcibiades tells his fellow
guests, he is brought to desperate straits. Finally, one day he persuades Socrates to dine
with him at his home. By way of posing endless questions, each of which Socrates
answers in earnest and at length, Alcibiades draws the dinner conversation far into the
evening. As the two grow weary with the passing hours, at last Alicibiades coaxes
Socrates into spending the night with him rather than journey home in the dark and
cold. Thinking he had finally gained his glory, the fair young boy offers Socrates all the
favors sensual pleasure could want, all to no avail, until finally the young man awakens
to the light of day, only to discover that “nothing more happened, but in the morning
when I awoke (let all the gods and goddesses be my witness), I arose from the couch
of a father or an elder brother.”12 As every Athenian would know, Alcibiades in his
guise as Dionysius is right to call Socrates/Apollo an elder brother, for Apollo, son of
Zeus and Leto, is in fact the elder half-brother of Dionysius, son of Zeus and Semele.
Thus we add incest to Alcibiades’s account of love and desire, an account in diametrical
contrast to Diotima’s.
Alcibiades’ song of Socrates continues with his own capitulation:

What do you suppose must have been my feelings, after this rejection, at the
thought of my own dishonour? And yet I could not help wondering at his natu-
ral temperance and self-restraint and manliness. I never imagined that I could
 Nietzsche & Hegel 17
have met with a man such as he is in wisdom and endurance. And therefore
I could not be angry with him or renounce his company, any more than I could
hope to win him. For I well knew that if Ajax could not be wounded by steel,
much less he by money; and my only chance of captivating him by personal
attractions had failed. So I was at my wit’s end; no one was ever more hopelessly
enslaved by another.13

Just as Alcibiades plays the now enslaved Dionysius, so, as already suggested, Socrates
plays his godly opposite, the beautiful and magisterial, ever serene and ever wise half-
brother, Apollo. Plato’s lesson here is typically two-fold: on the one hand, the famously
ugly Socrates appears now in the guise of a pure and beautiful mind. As such, he
embodies Apollo, the Greek essence of beauty and truth—thus affirming Diotima’s
truth that beauty is an idea, not an appearance and not a sensual, let alone erotic,
experience. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we witness the moment when
Apollo the god of war overpowers the high-spirited and inwardly impure Dionysius,
god of wine. Wisdom, truth, and beauty of mind take control over the superficially and
artificially beautiful Alcibiades, and at last the erotic impulse and reckless creativity of
the Dionsysian body is subjugated. With no further trouble from his unruly and indeed
incestuous-minded half-brother, the good Socrates, embodiment of Apollo, god of
light and progenitor of metaphysics, departs from Alcibiades in the early morning
light, pure-minded champion and governor of beauty and truth.
Soon after this episode, the chastened Dionysius will fade into the hidden under-
ground of buried myths. But before taking his leave, the vanquished wine-god must do
the bidding of his conqueror, god of mathematics (i.e., Apollonian/Socratic philoso-
phy), and complete one final task. He must immortalize the image of Apollo/Socrates
as the ideal Greek, who stands as the embodiment of the good—beauty and truth—for
all Greeks and all history to emulate. Hence, Alcibiades/Dionysius, the sundered god
of wine and pleasure, soon to vanish from the Greek world, sings a swan song to his
victorious half-brother’s valor: “All this happened before he and I went on the expedi-
tion to Potidaea; there we messed together, and I had the opportunity of observing his
extraordinary power of sustaining fatigue. His endurance was simply marvelous when,
being cut off from our supplies, we were compelled to go without food—on such occa-
sions, which often happen in time of war, he was superior not only to me but to every-
body; there was no one to be compared to him.”14 And while the Apolline Socrates
could out-soldier the best of soldiers, who, might we ask, could possibly outdrink the
Dionysian of revelers and then so easily withstand the harshest of conditions? Alcibiades
relates,

Yet at festivities he was the only person who had any real powers of enjoyment;
though not willing to drink, he could if compelled beat us all at that, —wonderful
to relate! No human being had ever seen Socrates drunk; and his powers, if I am
not mistaken, will be tested before long. His fortitude in enduring cold was also
surprising. There was a severe frost, for the winter in that region is really tremen-
dous, and everybody else remained indoors, or if they went out had on an amazing
quantity of clothes, and were well shod, and had their feet swathed in felt and
fleeces; in the midst of this, Socrates with his bare feet on the ice and in his ordi-
nary dress marched better than the other soldiers who had shoes, and they looked
daggers at him because he seemed to despise them.15
18 The Artist-Philosopher
Still not satisfied that he has sufficiently established for all time the new myth of the
world, the myth of Socrates, the myth of metaphysics, the myth that allegorizes the
conquest of the pre-Socratic philosopher-poets of the Dionysian past, Plato bestows,
in Alcibiades’s stirring and highly poetic panegyric, one last encomium upon the god-
like philosopher:

I will tell, if you please—and indeed I am bound to tell—of his courage in battle;
for who but he saved my life? Now this was the engagement in which I received
the prize of valour: for I was wounded and he would not leave me, but he rescued
me and my arms; he ought to have received the prize of valour which the generals
wanted to confer on me partly on account of my rank, and I told them so (this,
again, Socrates will not impeach or deny), but he was more eager than the generals
that I and not he should have the prize.16

To say it again, Socrates, or better, the myth of Socrates, embodies in spirit and mind
the god of war and mathematics, that being Apollo, whose manly qualities epitomize
what Aristotle would call “Greatness of Soul,” by which he means, more than any-
thing else, magnanimity. Indeed, no better definition of this term can be found than in
Dionysius’s hymn to Socrates. Thus for instance, Alcibiades says of Socrates, “Know
you that beauty and wealth and honour, at which the many wonder, are of no account
with him, and are utterly despised by him; he regards not at all the persons who are
gifted with them; mankind are nothing to him; all his life is spent mocking and flout-
ing them.”17 But again, these traits are godly, Apollonian, as well as essential to the
great soul. Yes, Socrates is ugly on the outside. “But when I opened him,” Alcibiades
goes on to say, “and looked within at his serious purpose, I saw in him divine and
golden images of such fascinating beauty that I was ready to do in a moment what-
ever Socrates commanded.”18 These images are golden because Apollo is the god
of shimmering light, of course, but also because he is the god of unalloyed beauty,
beauty of the kind Diotima has associated with love. And so we see in Socrates a mag-
nanimity in his victory over Alcibiades, even loving humor. In Apollo’s victory over
Dionysius, the allegory Plato is creating, Dionysius is spared, given the subservient but
noble title: poet.
In a final flourish, Alcibiades proclaims, “Many are the marvels which I might narrate
in praise of Socrates; most of his ways might perhaps be paralleled in another man, but
his absolute unlikeness to any human being that is or ever has been is perfectly aston-
ishing.”19 These powerful and inspiring words describe beauty as divine, just as beauty
was described when Diotima bestowed beauty as a gift upon the ugly young Socrates.
And so it was that Apollonian/Socratic divinity gave birth to metaphysics, the beauti-
ful Idea.20 From this point, the Apollonian image of Socrates takes hold of the Greek
mind, the memory of Dionysius fades into a vague past, the pre-Socratics recede into
the so-called pre-history of philosophy, and over time Socratic logic becomes the hege-
monic mode of thought in the West.
For Nietzsche, then, the transvaluation of all values begins, as I say, with the disap-
pearance of Dionysius and the ascendency of all-powerful Apollo as the essence of
virtue, pure logic, and truth. That is to say, Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values
begins with the job of turning The Symposium topsy-turvy—disassembling its abso-
lute, monolithic structure—pulling apart, as it were, the golden statue of Apollo. As
Nietzsche puts it, “In order to understand this, we must dismantle that artful edifice of
 Nietzsche & Hegel 19
Apolline culture stone by stone, as it were, until we catch sight of the foundations on
which it rests.”21 Which is only to suggest, again, that Nietzsche wants to deconstruct
the barriers that separate art and philosophy. He wants to reinvent the artist and the
philosopher; he wants to rejoin poetry and logic, sex and beauty, to reunite the
half-brothers Apollo and Dionysius, and de-specialize, de-hyper-individualize, and
decertify self-certain human existence—and thereby reintroduce the human spirit to
communal life.
This hybridization of philosophy and art recuperates the hybridization of Apollo and
Dionysius and wants to reconstitute the thinking of the original artist-philosophers whose
thinking constituted that very kind of inter-mixing, namely the poet-philosophers—
Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, for instance—precisely insofar as their poetic
thinking and that of their fellow poet-thinkers stands in stark contrast to the sober,
unyielding philosophy of metaphysics. This philosophy, metaphysics, is the intimate of
pure beauty, and it is free of poetic intuition and unseemly caress, i.e., hybridization.
No doubt we are inciting objections from several quarters. For one thing, we will
be reminded that Heraclitus, arguably the most eminent of the pre-Socratics, held
Dionysius in disdain, and we will be informed that Parmenides in Plato’s opinion was
the pinnacle of early philosophy and the ground upon which metaphysics laid its
cornerstone. And we will be told that far from being an enemy of the gods, the
enemy of myth, Socrates endlessly chided his fellow Athenians for their lack of piety.
We will come to these questions in another chapter. Suffice it to say here that Nietzsche
wants to uncover and restore, by way of the formal expression of his philosophico-
archaeological aesthetic, the lawless, transgressive, orgiastic, Dionysian aspect of
pre-Socratic poiesis.
But to turn The Symposium upside-down, to upend metaphysics, is not to annihi-
late its essence. Dionysian rapture, unbridled and lawless sexual rapture, is the counter-
form by which Nietzsche will constitute a new, hybridized core of metaphysics.
This new value Nietzsche brings to expression through poiesis, the poetic stylization
of the philosophical thought. This latter statement immediately requires a point of
clarification, which cannot be overstressed: poiesis is a non-Socratic kind of thinking
and a non-Socratic kind of making; however, it is not a purely poetic mode of thought;
it is the hybridization of mythos and logos, logic and poetry. It comprises, as Hölder-
lin says, “poetic logic.” Nietzsche will violate Apollonian logic by way of subjecting it
to Dionysian rapture, but he will not destroy the one or elevate the other.
Nietzsche wants to reverse the Plato-Kantian idealization of art and the love of
pure beauty as glorifications of abstract reasoning. He wants art to be experienced in
raw physiological terms, which affect the mind and the body, or, better yet, the mind
through the body. What Kant calls the pleasure of aesthetic experience through the
judgment of form, all but repeating Diotima’s description of ideal beauty, Nietzsche
calls sexual rapture—of the very kind Diotima compares to the crude impulses of
birds and bees. And of course, Nietzsche’s sense of artistic rapture is epitomized in
Dionysius, god of wine and fertility, the very god Plato wants to be bury in the past.
For Nietzsche, to the contrary, the experience of art, as well as the creation of art and
the self-creation of the life of the artist-philosopher, begins not with Apollonian
philosophy (i.e., science) but with Dionysian physiology.
Far from building a wall between the aesthetic and the sexual, Nietzsche sees them
as intrinsically linked: “The demand for art and beauty is an indirect demand for the
ecstasies of sexuality.”22 The two kinds of pleasure share the same physiological
20 The Artist-Philosopher
structure, the same sensual/perceptual mode of intuition and jouissance. According to
Nietzsche, if there is to be “any aesthetic doing or seeing, one physiological condition
is indispensable: rapture.”23 Rapture is not a disembodied, cognitive pleasure. No:

art reminds (us) of states of animal vigour: it is on the one hand an excess and
overflow of blooming corporeality into the world of images and desires: on the
other, an excitation of the animal functions through the images and desires of
intensified life.24

Nietzsche, it hardly needs to be said, is projecting carnal desire against Diotima’s

divine beauty, the pure beauty that sanctifies the apotheosis of Socrates in his rebuff of
Alcibiades’s advances.
Besides Socrates and Plato, Nietzsche’s chief adversaries here are none other than
Kant and Schopenhauer. If for Kant aesthetic pleasure is the purely mathematical plea-
sure derived from the judgment of form, for Schopenhauer it is the same but with the
added boost of giving the viewer a momentary escape from the miseries of daily existence.
While Kant and Schopenhauer want to move aesthetic experience further and further
into the pure abstraction of unchanging universal truth, Nietzsche wants to feel the
particular immediacy of the physical, natural, and indeed animal joy that comes with
aesthetic experience. While we will withhold discussion of the question of Plato’s
musical aesthetics for now, suffice it say here that Nietzsche’s initial enthrallment with
Wagner stems from the emotional and mythological magnitude of Wagner’s aesthetic
imagination, which infuses his composition with musical and indeed Dionysian and
libidinal force of the very kind Plato will strictly sanction in The Republic. In short,
Nietzsche’s project is to repudiate Platonic aesthetics and ethics and to reconnect sex
and beauty; likewise, his larger project is to re-fuse art and philosophy. His initial
mistake was to see Wagner’s music as a vehicle for such change.
Nietzsche’s re-fusion of art and philosophy is geared toward an even larger project.
Nietzsche asks: what will we make of man? What will we create of man tomorrow?
What will become of future homo sapiens as a consequence of what they will become?
Such questions presuppose a deep and abiding dissatisfaction with man as he is. And
indeed there remains a good deal of quibbling over whether Nietzsche ever really did
part ways with Schopenhauer, the dyed-in-the-wool pessimist who believed life was
not worth living, except that art provided an occasional escape from its misery through
the disinterested contemplation of pure beauty. But certainly Nietzsche’s intended
transvaluation of all values says everything we need to know about his attitude toward
life as something worth fixing. This attitude can be summed up as a skeptical but
nonetheless hopeful belief in man’s creative capacity to self-overcome.
As Geuss rightly points out,

The Birth of Tragedy was one of the last and most distinguished contributions to
the Central European debate about the ills of modern society. This was a debate
in which many of the participants, oddly enough, were broadly in agreement on a
complex diagnosis of the problem, although, of course, they disagreed on the
treatment. The diagnosis was that life in the modern world lacks a kind of unity,
coherence, and meaningfulness that life in previous societies possessed. Modern
individuals have developed their talents and powers in an overspecialized, one-
sided way; their lives and personalities are fragmented, not integrated, and they
 Nietzsche & Hegel 21
lack the ability to identify with their society in a natural way and play the role
assigned to them in the world wholeheartedly. They cannot see the lives they lead
as meaningful and good.25

Among these thinkers there was never any question as to the emptiness of modern life
and never any doubt as to the cause, which Geuss labels as overspecialization and
Heidegger describes within the larger framework of the essence of technology. As
Geuss continues, “Schiller, Hölderlin, Hegel, Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche (and many
other lesser-known figures) all accept versions of this general diagnosis.”26 For us per-
haps the more important point is that all of these thinkers, including Marx, address the
problem of mechanized, meaningless life as artist-philosophers. None of them, in any
case, viewed the breakdown of modern social life as natural or permanent. For
Nietzsche’s part, he is the one artist-philosopher among them who understands that
the problem faced is indeed a modern one, as long as we understand that modern cul-
ture begins with Plato or the staged triumph of Apollo/Socrates, the war god, “the god
of purity,” the god worshiped for his “sharp clarity, his superior spirit, his will that
enjoins insight, moderation, and order.”27 For here, in the division between Apollo and
Dionysius, between art and philosophy, we see the advent of specialization. For
Nietzsche, it bears repeating—and this view he shares with Heidegger—the modern
era “starts in mid-fifth-century Athens with Socrates. It is essentially theoretical or
scientific in that it assumes that knowledge (not custom or the most aesthetically pleas-
ing words of the best poets) should be our guide in life.”28 And for Nietzsche “there is
a distinct, important, historically continuous line of development from the Socratic
quest to the nineteenth-century ideal of the pursuit of objective, scientific knowledge for
its own sake.”29 Again, this point is central to Heidegger’s proposition that the crisis of
modern life is not the consequence of technology per se, but is rather the outcome of a
gradual encrustation, an accrual, the ever-expanding dominance of the essence of tech-
nology over Western consciousness.
As Nietzsche insists, in any case, the primary task of The Birth of Tragedy is “to
look at science through the prism of the artist, but also to look at art through the
prism of life.”30 That is to say, it is a book that attempts to think philosophically by
way of poetic logic. Therefore, the book is not written merely for the philosopher of
metaphysics; it is “a book for artists with some subsidiary capacity for analysis and
retrospection (in other words for an exceptional type of artist, a type you would have
to go looking for, but one you would not actually care to find), full of psychological
innovations and the concealments of an artiste, with an artist’s metaphysics in the
background.”31 In other words, The Birth of Tragedy is a book for the artist-philosopher,
of whom Nietzsche now counts himself as one among very few.
On becoming the artist-philosopher, which is to say, upon changing his personal
mode of thought and becoming something other than a rising-star philologist and a
torch-bearing neo-Kantian practitioner of metaphysics, Nietzsche describes himself as
follows:

At any rate—and this was admitted with as much curiosity as aversion—a strange
voice was speaking here, the disciple of an as yet ‘unknown god’ who concealed
himself underneath the cowl of a scholar, beneath the ponderousness and dialecti-
cal disinclination of the Germans, even beneath the bad manners of a Wagnerite;
here was a spirit with strange needs, nameless as yet, a memory brimming over
22 The Artist-Philosopher
with questions, experiences, hidden things to which the name Dionysos had been
appended as yet another question mark; here one heard—as people remarked
distrustfully—something like the voice of a mystical and almost maenadic soul
which stammers in a strange tongue, with great difficulty and capriciously, almost
as if undecided whether to communicate or conceal itself. It ought to have sung,
this ‘new soul’, and not talked! What a pity it is that I did not dare to say what
I had to say at that time as a poet; perhaps I could have done it!32

In this passage, Nietzsche tells the story of his own awakening, the transvaluation of
his own innermost values. As if to pose this awakening against that of the young logician-
philosopher, Socrates, Nietzsche’s is a calling to the life of the artist-philosopher, the
life of the thinker-poet.
In becoming a thinker-poet, Nietzsche proclaims an intervention that over time he
expects will change the course of human thought and deliver human beings from the
spiritual squalor of servitude to an outmoded mode of thought. To be sure, this deliv-
erance is not from mankind’s sex-driven Will, as Schopenhauer would have it. Rather,
Nietzsche describes the Will as the following:

lust for logic and for making the world logical, which is to say both more ‘cheerful’
and more ‘scientific’—could it then perhaps be the case, despite all ‘modern ideas’
and the prejudices of democratic taste, that rage victory of optimism, the predom-
inance of reasonableness, practical and theoretical utilitarianism, like its contem-
porary, democracy, that all this is symptomatic of a decline in strength, of
approaching old age, of physiological exhaustion? And that pessimism is precisely
not a symptom of these things? Was Epicurus an optimist—precisely because he
was suffering? —As you see, this book burdened itself with a whole bundle of
difficult questions. So let us add the hardest question of all. What, when seen
through the prism of life, is the meaning of morality?33

And indeed, sexual desire, the sexual will as Nietzsche understands it, is the positive
Dionysian will to destroy, to change, to overcome—in contrast to the Apollonian will
to conserve, to keep as is, to stay the course of the status quo.
A couple of years before he wrote The Birth, Nietzsche sketched out his first essay
on what he called “The Dionysiac World View.” He was twenty-five years old at the
time. Already he had glimpsed his future as the “disciple of an as yet ‘unknown god.’”
Of Apollo he says that his image “must include that measured limitation, that freedom
from wilder impulses, that wise calm of the image-making god. His eye must be ‘sun-
like and calm’; even when it is angry and shows displeasure, the consecrated aura of
lovely semblance surrounds it.”34 “Dionysiac art,” by contrast, “is based on play with
intoxication, with the state of ecstasy.” Nietzsche writes,

There are two principle forces which bring naïve, natural man to the self-oblivion
of intense intoxication: the drive of spring and narcotic drink. Their effects are
symbolized in the figure of Dionysos. In both states the principium individuationis
is disrupted, subjectivity disappears entirely before the erupting force of the gen-
eral element in human life, indeed of the general element in nature. Not only do
the festivals of Dionysos forge a bond between human beings, they also reconcile
human beings and nature. Freely the earth brings its gifts, the fiercest beasts
 Nietzsche & Hegel 23
approach one another in peace; the flower-decked chariot of Dionysos is drawn by
panthers and tigers. All the caste-like divisions which necessity and arbitrary
power have established between men disappear; the slave is a free-man, the aris-
tocrat and the man of lowly birth unite in the same Bacchic choruses. In ever
swelling bands the gospel of ‘universal harmony’ rolls on from place to place; as
they sing and dance, human beings express their membership of a higher, more
ideal community; they have forgotten how to walk and speak. Yet it is more than
this: they feel themselves to have been transformed by magic, and they really have
become something different. Just as the animals now talk and the earth gives milk
and honey, something supernatural now sounds out from within man. He feels
himself to be a god; that which had previously lived only in his imagination he
now feels in his own person. What does he now care for images and statues. Man
is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art; man himself now moves with
the same ecstasy and sublimity with which, in dream, he once saw gods walk. The
artistic force of nature, not that of the individual artist, reveals itself here; a nobler
clay, a more precious marble is kneaded and chiseled here. This human being
whom the artist Dionysos has formed stands in the same relation to nature as a
statue does to the Apolline artist.35

These sentiments will mature and evolve. Eventually they will serve as the groundwork for
The Birth of Tragedy. To fully grasp the radical departure this groundwork marks from all
previous philosophy would require lengthy disquisition. For now, we can call especial
attention to the last sentence, where Nietzsche contrasts the authenticity of the human
being as formed by the Dionysian artist to the aesthetic artificiality of the Apollonian
statue. Nietzsche’s indirect rebuke of Winckelmann is fairly obvious here. Not only had
Winckelmann’s legendary writings on Apollonian art and culture formed the basis of
modern German aesthetics, they were instrumental in the formation of German cultural
consciousness. It is precisely this consciousness that Nietzsche will describe as the essence
of herd-mentality, only to be escaped through the wilds of Dionysian art.
Nietzsche’s rude affront to the memory of Winckelmann, who many German histo-
rians and scholars still revered and not a few still worshiped, was also meant to insult
the long-held traditions of German philosophy and philology. If Nietzsche’s affront
caused no resounding offense, that is only because so few paid the least attention to it.
Of those who did, fewer still understood its full implications. But beyond his sacrile-
gious repudiation of Winckelmann and the culture of Winckelmannism, not to men-
tion his less direct but equally significant swipe at German Idealism and at Kant in
particular, Nietzsche’s deeper implication is in fact far more radical and far less obvious.
In a passing, matter-of-fact comment that effectively camouflages the monumental weight
of his claim, he asserts that the artist forms the human being.
This idea serves as the basis for The Birth of Tragedy. A year after he published The
Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche returns to the related question of human morality. In this
1873 essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense,” we see emerging the question
that comes to final and full-blown determination in 1887 as On the Genealogy of
Morality. The question as it first arises in 1873 could not be more simply posed:
“What then is truth?” He concludes with the following:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of

human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification,
24 The Artist-Philosopher
translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use a long time,
strike people as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of
which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors, which have become
worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost
their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins . . . . Now, it is true
that human beings forget that this is how things are; thus they lie unconsciously in
the way we have described, and in accordance with centuries-old habits—and pre-
cisely because of this unconsciousness, precisely because of this forgetting, they
arrive at the feeling of truth.36

But here Nietzsche is not merely calling attention to the absence of truth, rather, he is
saying that truth lies elsewhere than in Socratic metaphysics—elsewhere than in science,
ratio, or reason. Thus, “[a]s creatures of reason,” which is to say, as creatures of habit,
“human beings now make their actions subject to the rule of abstractions,” to the Soc-
ratic mode of thought. But these abstractions, however factual they may be, are merely
mathematical in their claim to truth. Blind to the wonderment that defined Heraclitus’s
world, “they no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous
perceptions.” They have lost all contact with the Dionysian spirit, long-since suppressed
with the defeat of Alcibiades at the hands of Socrates. Henceforth, “Everything that
distinguishes human beings from animals depends on this ability to sublimate sensuous
metaphors into a schema, in other words, to dissolve an image into a concept.”37
Similarly, looking back into history from his own place in time, Nietzsche sees that
“the Romans and the Etruscans” already had “divided up the sky with rigid mathe-
matical lines and confined a god in a space they had thus delimited as in a templum.”
Within a few centuries, certainly by 1873, “all peoples have just such a mathematically
divided firmament of concepts above them, and they understand the demand of truth
to mean that the god of every concept is to be sought only in his sphere.”38 By remem-
bering human beings as they existed prior to The Symposium, Nietzsche asks, can we
imagine freedom from the age-old habit of seeing the world through mathematical
mindedness? He continues,

Whereas a man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds thereby
in warding off misfortune, is unable to compel the abstractions themselves to yield
him happiness, and strives merely to be as free as possible of pain, the man of
intuition, standing in the midst of culture, reaps directly from his intuitions not
just protection from harm but also a constant stream of brightness, a lightening of
spirit, redemption, and release.39

Such is Nietzsche’s project from here on, to pry open the closed mind of man, to
expose it to “a lightening of spirit,” and thereby redeem its authentic presence to
the world and release it from the once inescapable habit of mind called Socratism.
This process is the project of the artist-philosopher, who wants to escape metaphys-
ics for other thinking. This latter kind of thinking gives rise to the search for new
values. It seeks a new philosophy, a new way of seeing and living in the world, free
not of concepts, but of Socratic pre-conceptualism, free, that is to say, of concepts
stripped of poetic intuition, concepts schematized and ineluctably reduced to the
measurable. Ultimately, Nietzsche wants to do away with what in the modern world
has become an across-the-board abstraction of all concepts. For him universal
 Nietzsche & Hegel 25
abstraction defines modern thinking; it is the mode of thought that underlies the
valuation of all modern values.
Donning the mask of Dionysius, Nietzsche the philologist-philosopher becomes
Nietzsche the artist-philosopher. As such, Nietzsche’s persona goes beyond the upheaval
of abstraction. His mask conceals and dramatizes the philosopher who becomes not
just an artist, but also a performative work of art. That is to say that when Nietzsche
wears the mask, when he poeticizes philosophy, he assumes the role of performance
artist-philosopher, whose ever-becoming philosophical-poetic performativity enacts
the creative-destructive self-overcoming of the bourgeois subject. The ever-becoming
polymorphic trajectory of Nietzsche’s performative thinking is, as we know, toward
the ubermench, toward the formation of a new human being. In today’s world, this
post-humanist non-individual can be seen, for instance, in the performativity of drag
or in the performativity of sexual self-reassignment, or more specifically, in the contin-
ual carnal re-makings of Orlan. But here again we must bear in mind that for Nietzsche
the artist-philosopher constitutes an ever-mutant becoming, the possibilities of which
far exceed the limits circumscribed by sexually determined self-resubjectification, how-
ever vast and promising in scope those limits may be.
More than any other of his works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra can be singled out as the
poetic expression of Nietzsche’s philosophical thought. But here we must be mindful
of the fact that this critical truism has done much to confuse what the artist-philosopher
does and what New Philosophy is. In the first place, with the possible exception of The
Birth of Tragedy, all of Nietzsche’s work stands as the work of the artist-philosopher.
Indeed, after The Birth of Tragedy all of Nietzsche’s works, be they aphoristic or not,
are inherently poetic. Each of these works of literary philosophy and philosophical
literature speaks through the mask of the persona. In other words, the fact that Thus
Spoke Zarathustra represents philosophical ideas through a work of poetic fiction
does not excuse us from approaching Nietzsche’s other works as instances of creative
literary form. Heidegger says as much when he notes “that the common assumption
that Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra was to present his philosophy in poetic form,
and that, since Zarathustra did not achieve this goal, Nietzsche wanted to transcribe
his philosophy into prose for the purpose of greater intelligibility, is an error. The planned
major work, The Will to Power, is in truth as much a poetic work as Zarathustra is a
work of thought.”40 But again, the fact is that after “The Birth” all of Nietzsche’s work
is “poetic,” and all of it constitutes “a work of thought.”
The work of the artist-philosopher always creates from poetic logic, the poiesis of
philosophico-aesthetic thought-making. This goes for the philosopher who is an
artist-philosopher and by the same token it goes for the poet or the artist who is an artist-
philosopher. In either case, the work of the artist-philosopher will always create con-
cepts from within poetic logic, as poiesis. To suggest that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra fails
to present “philosophy in poetic form” is to thoroughly miss Nietzsche’s Dionysian
point, which is that for him the boundaries of Western metaphysics no longer delineate
ground worth holding. Only by dissolving those boundaries, by perforating and infil-
trating modern philosophical thought with poetic thought, and at last rupturing the
pure sphere of Socratic philosophy with the concussion instruments of Dionysian rap-
ture, will we break the “centuries-old habits” that confine man’s thought to the logic
of metaphysics. It remains to be said that Nietzsche was never able to break the habit
of mind called metaphysics; rather, he laid the groundwork for doing so. He was in
this respect, according to Heidegger, the last metaphysician.
26 The Artist-Philosopher
Especially given its fragmented, incomplete form, The Will to Power is as much an
example of hybridized form as is Zarathustra. Together these two works lay out the the-
oretical plan that Nietzsche intended as a life practice. Like the philosophico-aesthetic
idea of Zarathustra, The Will to Power gives expression to poetic logic, the essential style
of Nietzsche’s thinking and writing. This poetically hybridized form of thinking and
making stands in part as a repudiation of pure form and the pure logic of Socratic
thought and Platonic metaphysics—the singular, pure, universal, mathematical truth of
the Idea.
One of the main obstacles standing in the way of understanding Nietzschian poiesis
in these terms is Nietzsche’s poetry. Not one of Nietzsche’s poems comes close to par
with that of the great writers of poetry, such as Homer or Sappho, Shakespeare, or
Hölderlin. That is not, however, because Nietzsche is a bad poet but because his poetic
métier is prose poetry, not verse. Critics characterize Nietzsche’s verse as something of
a busman’s holiday. The tendency is to interpret his verse as a clear indication that
Nietzsche the philosopher has no claim to the status of a major poet whose work
should be subjected to close reading and serious literary-critical analysis. Even the fact
that some critics recognize him as one of Europe’s major philosophical prose stylists
gets in the way of the essential fact of recognizing Nietzsche as artist-philosopher. To
label Nietzsche as a prose stylist says nothing about the fact that Nietzsche the artist-
philosopher more or less invents a new form that is neither pure art nor pure philosophy.
And because it is neither one or the other, but hybridized as both, most philosophers
tend to overlook Nietzsche’s aesthetic form and most art critics do not bother with
Nietzsche at all. The fact remains, however, that Nietzsche’s philosophico-poetic form
constitutes a new art form, whereby philosophy and poetic thinking disappear into
each other.
As Heidegger insists, Nietzsche’s formal opposition to Plato and Kant comes from
inside metaphysics, precisely because, according to Heidegger, Nietzsche fails to appre-
ciate the ontological difference and consequently fails to reformulate the question of
Being. In this sense, Nietzsche’s repudiation of metaphysics can be likened to Luther’s
Ninety-Five Theses. The “Theses” stands as a repudiation of Roman Catholicism, not
of Christian religion. Likewise, Nietzsche’s last word as an artist-philosopher stands as
a highly antagonistic rebuke of Socratism, but not as a break from Western metaphys-
ics, even if that is Nietzsche’s intention. In a rueful tone that no doubt betrays his
frustration with Nietzsche’s failure to overcome metaphysics, Heidegger writes that
“[t]he fable that Nietzsche rediscovered ‘pre-Platonic philosophy’ will one day come
to light as a fable; for Nietzsche has indeed bequeathed the most superficial interpre-
tation of these thinkers, i.e., of what they thought, due to his very great obliviousness
regarding what is reserved for essential thinking as that which is thought.”41 The clue-
lessness to which Heidegger refers, of course, is Nietzsche’s indifference to the question
of Being, especially as it pertains to pre-Socratic poiesis. That being said, no writer on
Nietzsche takes Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics more seriously than does Heidegger.
We can take, for example, Heidegger’s hermeneutic analysis of Zarathustra. Very
early on in his reading of this text, Heidegger alerts us to the word “convalescent.”
When we first come upon this word in Zarathustra, we take it in from a predeter-
mined and more or less fixed point of view: we derive the word’s meaning from our
preexisting knowledge of Nietzsche’s ill health and thereby arrive at the word’s appar-
ent connotation, its manifest content. As a philologist, though, and as an historian of
Greek tragedy for whom suspense, surprise, and recognition are the essence of
 Nietzsche & Hegel 27
dramatic art, Nietzsche harbors an older usage of the verb, “to convalesce.” This for-
gotten usage, Heidegger tells us, conveys the sense of homecoming. With Heidegger’s
reading, this usage is set free from underneath the surface of the text, where it has lain
submerged, and rises up to view. Read this way, the end of Part Three of Zarathustra,
titled “The Convalescent,” resonates in a polyphonic tonal register, one that echoes
between Nietzsche, the itinerate convalescent, and Zarathustra, the “man who col-
lects himself to return home, that is to turn in, into his own destiny.” Whether Nietzsche
or Zarathustra, or both in one, “[t]his convalescent is on the road to himself, so that he
can say of himself who he is.”42 Such is Zarathustra’s homecoming, Nietzsche’s home-
coming, man’s homecoming: it is a journey inward. Thus through his poeticization of
“convalescence,” Nietzsche enacts the essence of dramatic art. The suspense lies in the
question, what does this convalescence mean? The surprise comes in the fact that it
means a homecoming. And the recognition is revealed in the discovery that the home-
coming is not just that of mankind in general and of Nietzsche in particular, but also
our own.
Zarathustra comes to say of himself: “I, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advo-
cate of suffering, the advocate of the circle.”43 We have already learned from Heidegger
that the “advocate is ultimately the man who interprets and explains that of and for
which he speaks.” Further into Heidegger’s reading, we learn that “Zarathustra speaks
on behalf of life, suffering, the circle, and this is what he advocates.” Indeed, Heidegger
insists, “These three things, ‘life’, ‘suffering’, ‘circle’, belong together, are the same.”44
For Nietzsche, according to Heidegger, life “means will to power as the fundamental
characteristic of all beings, not only man.” As for suffering, Heidegger gives us a direct
quote from Nietzsche: “All that suffers wills to live.”45 Heidegger reads Zarathustra’s
circle as “[t]he sign of the ring which flows back into itself, and so always achieves the
recurring selfsame,”46 the eternal return.
Subsequently, we learn from Heidegger that “the advocate Zarathustra is a ‘teacher.’”
He seems,” Heidegger tells us, “to teach two things: the eternal recurrence of the same
and the superman.”47 The eternal recurrence opens out onto the verb to convalesce, to
return home. Superman, Heidegger says, does not mean “a type of man who tosses
humanity aside and makes sheer caprice the law, titanic rage the rule. Rather, taking
the word quite literally, the superman is the individual who surpasses man as he is up
to now, for the sole purpose of bringing man till now into his still unattained nature
and there secure him”48 — there to let him dwell, finally at home with himself. But still,
Heidegger wants to know of Nietzsche, “Why does prevailing man no longer suffice?”
Heidegger provides the answer:

Because Nietzsche recognizes the historical moment in which man prepares to

assume dominion over the whole earth. Nietzsche is the first thinker who, in view
of a world-history emerging for the first time, asks the decisive question and thinks
through its metaphysical implications. The question is: is man as man in his nature
till now, prepared to assume dominion over the whole earth? If not, what must
happen to man as he is, so that he may be able to “subject” the earth and thereby
fulfill the word of the Old Testament? Must man as he is then be brought beyond
himself if he is to fulfill this task? If so, the “super-man” rightly understood cannot
be the product of an unbridled and degenerate imagination rushing headlong into
the void. Nor, however, can the superman species be discovered historically
through an analysis of the modern age. Hence we may never seek the superman’s
28 The Artist-Philosopher
essential structure in those personages who, as chief functionaries of a shallow
and misconstrued will to power, are pushed to the top of that will’s various orga-
nizational forms. One thing, however, we ought soon to notice: This thinking
which aims at the figure of a teacher who will teach the super-man, concerns
us, concerns Europe, concerns the whole earth not just today but tomorrow
even more.49

If we pause to weigh Heidegger’s meaning at the moment in which he is writing

(toward the end of World War II, when one could be shot for saying less), we cannot
fail to wonder at Nietzsche’s prescience, writing as he was, half a century earlier. And
while it was perhaps Thucydides who first wrote history as a harbinger of the future,
Heidegger is probably right to suggest that Nietzsche is the first philosopher to discern
the catastrophic stakes that lie ahead in the future of modern man.
Moreover, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his other writings, not least The Will to
Power, Nietzsche is first to draw out a strategic plan for the aversion of the cata-
strophic collapse looming on the horizon. That plan, as Heidegger understands it,
cannot be instigated through an “unbridled,” Dionysian “imagination rushing
headlong into the void”; it can only begin with the hybridization of artistic and
philosophical thought. Indeed, as Heidegger implies, it is only through thinking as
an artist-philosopher, only through the thought of the artist-philosopher, that
Nietzsche arrives at the astounding prescience that Heidegger perceives and inter-
prets through his hermeneutical approach to Nietzsche’s poeticized thought. Heide-
gger explains, “Hence we may never seek the superman’s essential structure in those
personages who, as chief functionaries of a shallow and misconstrued will to power,
are pushed to the top of that will’s various organizational forms.” It is precisely
through his turn away from the modern world’s “chief functionaries,” especially of
the kind who so completely failed “to understand and appreciate the historical intent
of The Birth of Tragedy”—failed, in other words, to see that in his struggle as an
artist-philosopher—that Nietzsche strived to lead the way back, toward the type of
human “prepared to assume dominion over the whole earth.” This way back, this
way of walking, as Heidegger says elsewhere, is a “convalescence.” It is man’s return
home, to the soul of man.
But whenever was man prepared to “assume dominion over the whole earth?” The
answer to this question is perhaps too simple for contemporary man to understand.
Only when he has fully convalesced, only when he is home again, will he realize that
he was at home with himself once before—which is to say, prior to his enslavement to
the essence of technology. But this convalescence, what Heidegger is interpreting as
man’s return home to himself, requires preparedness, which may be impossible to
come by.
Impossible, or very nearly so, because, according to Heidegger, preparedness involves
the relinquishment of revenge—revenge against time. Heidegger writes, “Deliverance
from revenge is the bridge from contempt for time, to the will that represents beings
in the eternal recurrence of the same, in which the will becomes the advocate of the
circle.”50 On this reading, “[o]nly when being is represented to man as the eternal
recurrence of the same, only then can man cross the bridge and crossing over, delivered
from the spirit of revenge, be the superman.”51 But here lies the problem: “Because of
the peculiar ascendency of modern science, we modern men are ensnared in the singu-
lar error which holds that knowledge can be obtained from science, and that thought
 Nietzsche & Hegel 29
is subject to the jurisdiction of science. But that which is unique in what a thinker is
able to express can neither be demonstrated nor refuted logically or empirically. Nor
is it a matter of faith. It can only be made visible in questioning-thinking. What is then
seen always appears as that which is always worthy of questioning.”52 Such is the
“questioning-thinking” of the artist-philosopher as epitomized in Zarathustra, and such
is the form of New Philosophy as Nietzsche proposes it.
Thus, Heidegger explains, the superman is a teacher. To put it another way, the artist-
philosopher is the teacher of New Philosophy. “Zarathustra is not a teacher who
teaches two different things. Zarathustra teaches the superman because Zarathustra is
the teacher of the eternal recurrence. But conversely, as well, Zarathustra teaches the
eternal recurrence because he is the teacher of the superman. Both doctrines belong
together in a circle. By its circling, the doctrine accords with what is, the circle which
constitutes the Being of beings, that is, the permanent within Becoming.”53 In what
Heidegger calls Nietzsche’s Dionysian thought, “‘[e]ternal recurrence of the same’ is
the name of the Being of beings. ‘Superman’ is the name of the human being who cor-
responds to this Being.”54 As dramatized in Nietzsche’s poeticized philosophical prose
and in Nietzsche’s life as a self-becoming performative act—that of the modern artist-
philosopher, all who followed Zarathustra would become the “poets of ourselves.”55
Superman is but another name for the human being at home with herself. Herein lies the
future purpose of the artist-philosopher and New Philosophy: to secure man in his nature.
In Will to Power, Nietzsche notes, “The artist-philosopher. Higher concept of art.”56
This “higher concept” speaks toward New Philosophy:

We new philosophers, however, not only do we begin by presenting the actual

gradations in rank and variations in value among us but we also desire the very
opposite of an assimilation, an equalizing: we teach estrangement in every sense,
we tear open gaps as never were, we want man to become more wicked than he
ever was.57

That is to say, more Dionysian than he ever was. In and through New Philosophy, in
other words, this so-called and badly named superman—and no better-named super-
woman—is, Heidegger tells us, “destined to bring the essence of modern technology to
light.”58 To say “artist-philosopher” instead of “superman/superwoman” is merely to
say that the poet who re-forms human being is none other than the artist-philosopher.
It is to say that this human being can break the habit of mind that blinds humankind
to its current subjugation and pending expiration. It is to say, finally, that we all come
into the world as artist-philosophers and that we are all convalescing homeward,
toward the “poets of ourselves.”

Section II: Hyppolite’s Hegel

If Zarathustra represents for Nietzsche a world in which the artist-philosopher would
again exist as something other than an outcast, Nietzsche saw his own life as a flicker-
ing instance of that possibility. More than once he speaks from the standpoint of “we
artists.” Nor does Heidegger hesitate to ascribe the name artist-philosopher to
Nietzsche, and indeed, as we have suggested, even if at the end Heidegger abandons
Nietzsche to metaphysics, Heidegger will bring with him in his own “step back” into
“meditative thought” an unshakable belief in the historical necessity of what may be
30 The Artist-Philosopher
Nietzsche’s chief contribution to the history of philosophy: that being the very notion
of the artist-philosopher as the one promise remaining in the face of man’s otherwise
cancelled future. But that is hardly to say that Nietzsche is the only artist-philosopher
the world has ever known. Though he is likely the first modern poet-thinker to call
himself as such, Nietzsche comes on the scene of New Philosophy as yet another
chapter in a long if unmarked tradition. In this respect perhaps it is worth noting that
Nietzsche is born in the same year that Hegel dies. And while few would call Hegel an
artist-philosopher, that is partly because very few indeed have considered the possibil-
ity that Nietzsche’s Dionysian/Apollonian poetics could have anything to do with the
author of The Science of Logic, Nietzsche’s foremost predecessor, Hegel.
As if to preempt Nietzsche before Nietzsche ever spoke, Hegel notoriously pro-
claimed that art had long since outrun its course as an effective element in the consti-
tution of Geist, the spirit that defines history as the quest for the Absolute. Whatever
art might have done in the long-ago past to forward that quest, as far as Hegel is con-
cerned, it had been out of service since the end of ancient times. In the Introductory
Lectures on Aesthetics, he remarks that “it certainly is the case that art no longer
affords that satisfaction of spiritual wants which earlier epochs and peoples have
sought therein, and have found therein only; a satisfaction which, at all events on the
religious side, was most intimately and profoundly connected with art.”59 The “epochs
and peoples” he is referring to are, of course, the archaic and Classical Greeks. In
Hegel’s view, the ensuing periods give way to the development of an increasingly
informed and sophisticated religion and philosophy. This development applies espe-
cially to philosophy, which can, Hegel insists, go well beyond the merely sensuous
representation of the spirit as afforded by art. In the Aesthetic Lectures, Hegel writes,
“We may well hope that art will always rise higher and come to perfection, but the
form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit.”60 Elsewhere he argues that
only philosophy, “absolute science,” can actuate the higher possibilities that art can
only symbolize.61
As much as anything else, notorious statements such as these have come to define
Hegel’s relationship to Nietzsche, the artist-philosopher who devotes his life to the view
that man’s “spiritual wants” are no longer met precisely insofar as we have abandoned
art as a fundamental source of their satisfaction. In fact, while the mature Hegel insists
that Absolute Spirit unfolds not in art but in philosophy and somewhat less so in modern
religion, Nietzsche will counter that modern-day philosophy and washed-out religion
have beclouded man’s spiritual world. This world, according to Nietzsche, is a world that
can only be re-animated by the very Dionysian spirit philosophy wants to bury.
Deleuze puts it rather neatly for us when he says, “There is no possible compromise
between Hegel and Nietzsche.”62 And even Lukács, who so brilliantly illuminates the
development of Hegel’s thought in The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between
Dialectics and Economics, says nothing about young Hegel as an artist-philosopher.63
Pretty much the same can be said of Kojève, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Blanchot, Georges
Bataille, Luce Irigaray, and any number of other major writers on Hegel whom we
might expect would take an interest in young Hegel’s Hölderlinian inclinations toward
poiesis, not least, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Agamben. Suffice it to say that Hegel has
given us plenty of cause to forget where he is coming from, reason to forget, that is,
that Hegel’s earliest thoughts are decidedly those of the artist-philosopher. Once this
latter aspect of Hegel comes to light, however, Hegel and Nietzsche can be seen as
fellow partisans in the same cause, one that Hegel, however briefly, takes up long
 Nietzsche & Hegel 31
before Nietzsche. In fact, one could go so far as to say that Hegel was among those
who inspired the young Nietzsche to join the ranks of New Philosophy. This would
suggest that for Nietzsche one of the main draws toward New Philosophy would have
been Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In turn, the Phenomenology derives largely
from an earlier call to New Philosophy, the very brief and little-known text entitled
“The Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism.”64 Though Nietzsche never
set eyes on this obscure manifesto, it is fair to say, nonetheless, that Nietzsche gives his
life’s work to its fundamental principles.

Oldest Programme
Written in 1796, “The Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism” is put to
paper in Hegel’s hand but generally appears under Hölderlin’s name. The attribution
goes to Hölderlin because, as Bernstein points out, the essay’s theme and thesis come
close to those that Hölderlin flushed out in his essay, “On Religion.” As Bernstein
shows, however, “The Oldest Programme” reflects the polyphonic authorial voice and
the collective thoughts and aspirations of three young scholars who were studying
theology together at Tübingen—these being Hölderlin, Hegel, and the very young
Schelling—and so, as Bernstein insists, the authorship should rightly be attributed to
all three.65 Foreshadowing Nietzsche’s project, the theme of their co-authored philo-
sophical prose-poem centers on the possibility of forming a new kind of human being.
By the late 1700s, the bourgeois individualism that Nietzsche would condemn as the
baleful consequence of modernization had already become a question of great social
concern, especially for this small circle of fledgling thinker-artists. For these three
(whose very act of multiple authorship radically problematizes bourgeois subjectivity
as per Kant’s notion of genius and originality), the paramount question had to do with
an ethics of the future that would replace the categorical imperative. They asked, how
can we rescue traditional agrarian communal consciousness from the pall of modern
individualism and re-animate such a consciousness in the face of ever-increasing indus-
trialization, social fragmentation, and spiritual alienation?
Intermittently rhapsodic and strident, “The Oldest Programme” is not composed in the
conventional style of a singular poetic voice; rather, it comprises multi-voiced thinking of
a kind that creates the promise of a communal spirit conceived not by the sovereign indi-
vidual, not by genius, but by poetic being. Thus the manifesto gives lyrical expression to
a philosophico-poetic consciousness that is not Hölderlin’s, not Hegel’s, and not Schelling’s
alone. Communal spirit as demonstrated in this given instance comprises, in other words,
three voices blended together as one, triple-voiced “I,” a poetic persona that is asking the
philosophical question, ‘How must a world be constituted for moral being?’ This is a
radical question radically posed. It challenges the firmly established categorical impera-
tive and does so from an emphatically philosophico-aesthetic standpoint, the very nature
of which violates the limits of reason that Kant has proscribed for metaphysics.
Thus, “The Oldest Programme” begins with the phrase “an ethics” (authors’ italics)
and follows with the statement:

Since in the future all of metaphysics will be part of moral theory (Kant, in his two
practical postulates, has only given an example of this), this ethics will be nothing
less than a complete system of all ideas or, what comes to the same, of all practical
postulates.66
32 The Artist-Philosopher
Therefore, “The first idea is, of course, the representation of myself as an absolutely
free being.” But this free being is no solitary subject. “With this free, self-conscious
being a whole world comes into existence—out of nothing—the only true and conceiv-
able creation from nothing.”67 Self-consciousness is constituted not of sovereign,
self-inured individuality but as world. It is a world born of self-conscious creativity,
but this self-consciousness is of a world from which it is inseparable.
In very broad terms, we can say that the main purpose of Enlightenment metaphys-
ics, in Kant’s view, is to understand the world as it appears to reason so that the sover-
eign individual can live in it accordingly—as a moral being. This is to say, harking
back to Socrates, that human beings will not knowingly do wrong. And to know what
is right, to act in one’s own self-interest, one merely needs to know right as rationally
determined. For Kant’s social construct, following Plato’s Republic, this means, to
begin with, the constitution of the State as predicated on logic, on reason—on
calculation and measure. Now, from Tübingen, we hear trumpet calls for the abolition
of the State:

From nature I proceed to human works. Before the idea of humanity, I will show,
there is no idea of the state, since the state is something mechanical, just as there
is no idea of a machine. Only what is an object for freedom, is called an idea. We
must thus also progress beyond the state! For every state must treat human beings
as mechanical wheels; and it ought not to do that; therefore it should cease. You
see for yourselves that all ideas, of perpetual peace etc., are only ideas subordi-
nated to a higher idea. At the same time, I want to set down the principles for a
history of humanity and want to lay bare the completely wretched human pro-
duction of the state, constitution, government, legislation. Lastly the ideas of a
moral world, divinity, immortality—the overturning of all superstition, persecu-
tion of the priesthood who have recently begun to feign obedience to reason,
comes about through reason itself. —Absolute freedom of all spirits, who carry
the intelligible world in themselves and may seek neither god nor immortality
outside of themselves.68

For all their radicalism, these ideas harbor a great deal of establishment philosophy.
Nonetheless, they also convey unmistakable harbingers of Nietzsche. This is true as
regards their repudiation of the modern state as the manufacturer of individualistic
mechanized consciousness—of, in other words, technology as alienation—and it is all
the truer as they push their thinking toward a radical new philosophy, that of the artist-
philosopher. To that end, they proclaim,

the philosopher must possess as much aesthetic power as the poet. Those people
without an aesthetic sense are our philosophers of literalness. The philosophy of
spirit is an aesthetic philosophy. One can be spiritually brilliant in nothing, one
cannot think about history—without an aesthetic sense. Here it should become
apparent what those humans actually lack, who do not understand ideas—and are
simple enough to admit that they are in the dark as soon as things go beyond
tables and rosters.69

The one who stands in the dark, in other words, is none other than Socrates, master of
measure and calculation, the ideal embodiment of pure reason and founder of Western
 Nietzsche & Hegel 33
metaphysics, who admits to knowing nothing beyond what can be dialectically certi-
fied as true to logic. And lest we miss these aspersions as cast in the direction of Kant,
too, let us remember that Kant’s transcendentalism is a metaphysics that deals with
aesthetics and is itself the very opposite of art: it is the philosophy of reason, of Kant
notwithstanding, “poetry gains a higher honour, it finally becomes what it was at its
inception—the teacher of humanity; for there is no longer any philosophy, any history;
the art of poetry alone will outlive all other sciences and arts.”70 Need it be said that it
was Homer who at the “inception” of poetry became the “teacher of humanity.” By
Plato’s designation, now Socrates, the modern philosopher of pure mind, would
replace the ancient poet as preeminent teacher and shaper of ethics and Greek con-
sciousness. As for reason and mathematical logic, upon which Kant predicates his
transcendental metaphysics, “The Oldest Programme” tropes these scientific concepts
as mere “tables and rosters.”71 The function of tables and rosters is that of taxonomy,
the Kantian method derived from none other than Socratic logic.
Moving yet further away from Kant’s taxonomical conceptualism and ever closer to
a new-blooded philosophy that embraces and celebrates the communal powers of
poetic myth, the threesome writes, “At the same time we hear so often that the great
masses must have a sensuous religion,” a religion, in other words, that is physiological,
which is to say Dionysian and indeed proto-Nietzschean. For that: “Monotheism of
reason and of the heart, polytheism of the imagination and of the arts, that’s what we
need!” To say it another way, “we must have a new mythology, but this mythology
must be in the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason.”72 Here we see the
Hegelian dialectic in its incipient form; and here, in this early intonation of Hölderlin’s
later themes, we discern Hölderlin’s plan to recover man’s long-lost spirit from the
depths of ancient myth. What’s more, Schelling’s notion of the human unconscious can
be traced back to this moment, precisely insofar as the synthesis of mythology and
reason implies Freudian psychic life.
It remains for us to show more particularly how each of these three writers demon-
strates the ways in which logic and reason must be resituated within a space open to
Dionysian consciousness, how, in other words, the “calculation and measure” of
Apollo, god of mathematics, is brought back into dialogical engagement with Dionysius,
god of creative imagination and rapture. The more pressing point for the moment lies
in their manifesto’s core statement: “Until we make ideas aesthetic, that is, mytholog-
ical, they are of no interest to the people, and vice versa: until mythology is rational, it
will be an embarrassment to philosophy.”73

Thus those who are enlightened and those who are not must finally make com-
mon cause, mythology must become philosophical, to make people rational, and
philosophy must become mythological, to make philosophy sensuous. Then eter-
nal unity will reign among us. Never again the arrogant glance, never again the
blind, shuddering of the people before its wise men and priests. Only then will
equal development of all our powers await us, for the particular person as well as
for all individuals. No power will again be suppressed, then general freedom and
equality will reign among spirits. A higher spirit, sent from heaven, must found a
new religion among us, it will be the last, greatest task of humanity.74

Plato delineates a clear line, indeed he builds a wall, between art and philosophy,
between the artist and the philosopher. By this, as we have already noted, he institutes
34 The Artist-Philosopher
the segregation of mythos and logos, and ancient myth, especially Dionysian myth, is
henceforth proclaimed anathema. Beginning with Plato’s Republic and carrying right
through Kant’s Three Critiques, such is the relation between metaphysics and Dionysian
myth. In “The Oldest Programme,” especially in these last lines, we are given a decla-
ration of radical resistance to an idea that has continued as an unquestioned matter of
course for over two millennia.
In no small way, then, “The Oldest Programme” is pitched against the entire history
of metaphysics and its sanctions against myth. These sanctions were not stale leftovers
from a bygone age; if anything they had been recently revivified and intensified by
Kant’s proscriptions against the use of poetic language in the composition of modern
philosophical discourse. Thus the manifesto calls for a new way of thinking. One that
abolishes the boundary between pure philosophy and poetic myth, this new way of
thinking would be that of the artist-philosopher, whose poeticization of thought would
stand as a repudiation of Plato’s extrication of myth from metaphysics and Kant’s
concomitant institutionalization of pure reason as the ground of transcendental meta-
physics. It is precisely by way of this new thinking, this New Philosophy, that “The
Tübingen Three” mean to change the German mind.

Hegel’s Novel
As Hyppolite describes it, the Phenomenology of Spirit “is the itinerary of the soul
which rises to spirit through the intermediary of consciousness.”75 Here we can read
the word “soul” as connoting the one and the word “spirit” as connoting not the other,
but the all. As such an itinerary indicates, the Phenomenology responds to any number
of Hegel’s contemporaries, perhaps most notably to Kant and to Fichte, and also to
Schelling. And while the arguments they each put toward advancing the history of
metaphysics were instrumental in formulating Hegel’s own philosophical point of view,
as Hyppolite goes on to say, “the influence of the Bildungsroman of the time seems to
us to have been just as important.”76 The Bildungsroman is of such keen interest to
Hegel partly if not largely because of the way Goethe situates its form within a Dionysian
discourse that brings the all as individuated souls toward the one communal conscious-
ness, an interest that Hölderlin undoubtedly encouraged Hegel to pursue. But Goethe’s
is hardly the only Bildungsroman coming into play as Hegel’s thinking matures and
develops toward an idea that would eventually materialize as the Phenomenology of
Spirit.

Hegel had read Rousseau’s Emile at Tübingen and had found in it a preliminary
history of natural consciousness rising to liberty through particularly educative
experiences which were specific to it. The preface to the Phenomenology empha-
sizes the pedagogical nature of Hegel’s book, as well as the relation between the
evolution of the individual and that of the species, a relation also considered in
Rousseau’s book. Royce, in his study of German idealism, emphasizes Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister, which the Romantic circles of Jena considered one of the essen-
tial events of the time, and Novals’ answer to it, Heinrich von Ofterndingen. In
each book, the hero completely gives himself up to his conviction. Wilhelm Meister
believes in his theatrical vocation; Heinrich von Ofterdingen allows himself to be
trapped in the prosaic milieu in which he still lives. Through a series of experi-
ences, each comes to abandon his first conviction: what had been a truth becomes
 Nietzsche & Hegel 35
an illusion. But whereas Wilhelm Meister leaves, so to say, the poetic world for the
prosaic world, Heinrich von Ofterdingen progressively discovers the poetic world
alone is the absolute truth. Hegel’s Phenomenology, for its part, is the novel of
philosophic formation; it follows the development of consciousness, which,
renouncing its first beliefs, reaches through the experiences to the properly philo-
sophic point of view, that of absolute knowledge.77

Here Hyppolite has given an intertextual reading in which all four of these literary
texts—Rousseau’s, Goethe’s, Novalis’s, and Hegel’s—engage in a dialogical exchange
of concepts concerning the soul and human consciousness in quest of truth via the
Bildungsroman.78
A good way to approach the Phenomenology as a work of literature, as a Bildungs-
roman, is to start with the final scene and last words, which draw us backwards into
the text as a whole, recollecting our experience of the narrative’s first poetic evoca-
tions. The gathering scenes that then unfold on a trans-historic and indeed epic scale
do in fact reveal the truth of those opening words and phrases, to the effect that the
truth is not an either/or proposition, not a right or wrong, but an unfolding and a
revealing of accumulating spirit in its desire for totality, the Absolute. As to the viability
of describing those opening words in terms of poetic language, we need only bear in
mind that we are reading a Bildungsroman, which means that the voice we encounter
in the Preface is indeed a narrative voice, the authorial voice as opposed to the author/
philosopher’s voice. In fact, it is the same kind of voice we encounter in Nietzsche’s
prose: it is the voice of the persona, the narrator.
Anyhow, with the narrative’s last phrases and final few words, we realize that we are
experiencing revelation in the moment, a moment as revealed to us subliminally over
time and then suddenly recollected. We might describe this sensual, physiological
experience as a feeling of retroactive wonderment, not unlike the feeling one gets at
arriving at Joyce’s last word, “Yes,” or at watching Lily Briscoe complete her portrait
of Mrs Ramsay—directing her painter’s gaze through the picture window that frames
a now empty living room where Mrs Ramsay had once been sitting with young James,
on a long-ago summer’s morning at St Ives, when Mr Ramsay said “No,” there would
be no voyage to the lighthouse. On stepping across the threshold of the Phenomenol-
ogy of Spirit and moving among its densely crowded thoughts and concepts, hardly do
we expect to make our way through a weighty philosophical treatise only to lift our
head from the last page and realize we have journeyed through an extraordinary liter-
ary adventure, one that has filled us with wonderment, even joy. There comes, at any
rate, a sense of surprise, surprise at recognizing in an instant that we have experienced
the duration of beauty, as if the retroactive transfiguration of historical and mechani-
cal time into elliptical, undulating, oceanic time was itself the essence of trans-figurative
beauty, the expression of the human spirit at its most miraculous, which is to say, at its
greatest distance from pure logic—from the scientific either/or measure and verification
of the kind Woolf alludes to when Mr Ramsay pronounces his “no” as a scientifically
determined irrevocable fact of a barometer.
There is more to be said about Hegel’s literary characterization of spirit as a trans-
historical heroic consciousness. But first we can lay out the narrative structure of Hegel’s
epic-sized Bildungsroman in the simple fashion Hyppolite proposes: beginning, middle,
and end. The hero as spirit evolves along the following trajectory: “consciousness” at the
beginning, “self-consciousness” in the middle, and “reason” at the end. With regard to
36 The Artist-Philosopher
reason, we should be clear that when Hegel uses the term “reason” in the Phenomenology,
he does not yet convey its meaning in the crystallized sense as it is applied in The Science
of Logic. For the most part, especially in the earlier sections, “reason” still has the more
plastic sense that it carried in “The Oldest Programme,” wherein reason is poetically
conceptualized and posed as decidedly different from if sometimes similar to that of
Kantian metaphysics. In the Phenomenology, in other words, reason inheres in the
element of Bildung, which is to say that reason is not yet solely predicated on a priori
logic but is, like poetic truth, arrived at through conscious experience. As Hegel puts
it in the Preface, “Reason is purposive activity.”79
And so it comes as no surprise that those who would fail to recognize the Phenom-
enology for what it is, a Bildungsroman—those unable to sense the narrative grandeur
and beauty of Hegel’s trans-historical saga—are missing the central insight of “The
Oldest Programme”: “the highest act of reason, by encompassing all ideas, is an aesthetic
act, and that truth and goodness are only siblings of beauty.” They are those readers,
in other words, who could never agree or never imagine that “[t]he philosopher must
possess as much aesthetic power as the poet.” These “people without an aesthetic sense
are our philosophers of literalness.” They will never understand that Hegel’s “philoso-
phy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy.” The young Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling
phrase this point again in another way: “One can be spiritually brilliant in nothing,
one cannot think about history—without an aesthetic sense.” Pure logicians are empty
of poetic sensibility; like the pure-minded Socrates, like Woolf’s Mr Ramsay, they are
bereft of the poet’s measure.
As Hyppolite says earlier, “The road which consciousness follows is the detailed
history of its education. The road of doubt is the actual route that consciousness fol-
lows.”80 For now at least, Hegelian doubt will contradict the certainty of Socratic
calculation and measure, the scientific certainty of Mr Ramsay’s barometer. Hyppolite
continues, “In the course of its development, consciousness discovers the falsehood
not only of what is held to be true from a theoretical point of view, but also as regards
its own view of life and of being, its intuition of the world. Experience bears not only
on knowledge, in the narrow meaning of the word, but also on conceptions of exis-
tence. The journey of consciousness, therefore, entails not only doubt but actual
despair.”81 Such is the structure of the Bildungsroman as Hegel has dramatized it on a
trans-historical scale.

Bildung
At university Hegel had come to embrace wholeheartedly the virtues and promise of
the French Revolution. As Pinkard points out, he had, “like many other young men
of his generation, come to think of the revolutionary moral and spiritual renewal of
Germany in terms of establishing a new elite of educated leaders (men of Bildung) to
rule the country. In Hegel’s mind, the new revolutionary order would bring about a
state of affairs in which men of learning, taste, and cultivation would be running
things instead of the undereducated, pompous, corrupt aristocracy.”82 And so it
comes as no surprise that while writing the Phenomenology Hegel remarks, accord-
ing to Pinkard, that “the ‘novel of the Revolution’ was to be completed by German
philosophy, not French politics.”83 Clearly Hegel has in mind the revolutionary novel
of German philosophy that he himself is writing, the Phenomenology of Spirit.
 Nietzsche & Hegel 37
To Hegel’s thinking, such a revolution would fulfill the aspirations of “The Oldest
Programme.” With this fulfillment, the self-sovereign individual, heretofore constrained
within the universal law of the modern State, would instead become a communally
re-constituted spiritual consciousness.84
In this latter respect, the young Hegel is undoubtedly affected by Hölderlin’s interest
in the poetic expression of human consciousness as a trans-historical construct. This is
especially true as regards Hölderlin’s recuperation of the seafaring Dionysius, who had
sailed up onto the shores of archaic Greece from lands far away in the East and who
had eventually disappeared from history under the dictates of Plato. But in these still
early years, for Hegel it is not so much poetry per se that will bring about a new mode
of Dionysian thought as it is the modern novel, especially the modern novel as Goethe
had developed it in terms of the Bildungsroman. And just as for Hölderlin the poetic
voice represents the “stimulant” that will bring the viewer closer to the Dionysian
experience of self-dissolution and will draw her further on toward communal conscious-
ness, so for Hegel the Bildungsroman will draw the reader toward Bildung, the spon-
taneous experiential nature of which he sees as the real Dionysian corrective to
“modern society” and as the one true pedagogy for the educational development of
European communal self-consciousness.
As Pinkard explains, Hegel’s philosophy of education is “essentially more a matter
of support for rather than suppression of the awakening feeling of the self, it must be
a Bildung to independence,” and as such, it must replace the old educational model,
which was directed toward “giving to the young the feeling of submissiveness and
unfreedom [. . .] of demanding empty obedience for obedience’s sake.”85 Hegel realizes,
nonetheless, that since contemporary culture is so deeply bonded to the strictures of
Socratic thought, Bildung alone would not emancipate the German mind. “Bildung
required something beyond what it had traditionally included,” Pinkard observes,
“namely the kind of systematic philosophy Hegel was now advocating.”86 Here Pinkard
is alluding to the Phenomenology as it is to be contained within the larger system of
philosophy that Hegel envisions for the Science of Logic.
Holding this last remark in abeyance for the moment, we can say that the Phenom-
enology of Spirit is nothing short of a direct contradiction of Plato’s hyper-conservative
philosophy of education as set down in the Republic. The Republic grounds all edu-
cation in ratio and minimizes poetic language to that which underscores the truth of
scientific logic as the one universal truth that encompasses all existence. In contrast,
Hegel’s novel of experience is given as the platform for re-educating modern con-
sciousness in an entirely different and indeed contradictory mode of pedagogical
discourse than the one that European educators had more or less continually refash-
ioned after the example of Plato’s Republic. As we know, Hegel’s example and inspi-
ration is Rousseau’s Emile, or on Education, the Bildungsroman that did in fact
change French education for good. No less so, Hegel’s other model is Plato’s Repub-
lic, which had also changed a national consciousness. But in the former case Hegel is
taking inspiration from Rousseau’s example in terms of its emancipatory content,
while in the latter he is taking Plato’s example in terms of its form, which, like Emile,
is a powerfully composed work of literature that not only changes minds but in fact
the whole of Western cultural consciousness—this being the mind that has over time
become the constricted and confined consciousness that Rousseau and Hegel want to
emancipate.
38 The Artist-Philosopher
Reversal
Before his momentous encounter with Hölderlin, Hegel’s thinking is that of a dyed-in-
the-wool neo-Kantian. As Henrich puts it, at this point for Hegel the categorical
imperative “is the ultimate understanding of freedom.” On this understanding, Hegel
“therefore thought himself excused from any requirement to develop a metaphysical
program.” For him, “life in the community is by itself the best way to become and to
express a moral personality.”87 But, as Henrich insists, “all this changed when Hegel
encountered Hölderlin’s philosophical discoveries.”88 Henrich continues, “To be sure
Hegel’s early development as a creative Kantian prepared him well for this change.
Nevertheless, those who hold that this change would have occurred anyway, and that
a step toward a new metaphysical program was inevitable without the incentive from
Hölderlin’s philosophical discoveries, are wrongheaded in their assessment.”89 According
to Henrich, what so struck Hegel about Hölderlin’s “philosophical discoveries” was
the “establishment of an ultimate presupposition for all discourse: the absolute as
Being and its internal separation into the world of finitude and a system of relations.”90
For Hegel, this meant that we “can no longer understand this absolute, which sepa-
rates itself internally, as the internal constitution of consciousness, nor can we understand
it as the result of an adequate explication of the self’s self-reference.” With this realiza-
tion we see the incipient idea that gives rise to the monumental event that appeared
under the title Phenomenology of Spirit. According to Henrich, “After his encounter
with Hölderlin’s system, Hegel’s first reaction was to develop a theory of the various
stages of moral life. The last of these arrives at a metaphysical image of the world that
is nearly identical with Hölderlin’s.”91 If we follow Henrich a little further on this
point, we can see all the more clearly the beginnings of what would eventually emerge
as the Phenomenology of Spirit. Henrich explains,

In this theory Hegel pursues the following strategy: he invokes Kant’s idea of
autonomy (complete self-determination) as his criterion, and then notes that there
are various ways in which the individual agent can acquire and observe this prin-
ciple. Among them, some, although dependent on the principle of autonomy, are
not sufficient realizations of it. Now the critical analysis of the philosopher can
show the discrepancy that remains between the demands of autonomy and the
state of consciousness or behavior that the agent has already achieved. Moreover,
the proof of this discrepancy is simultaneously the justification of the demand for
a higher form of moral life. The higher form eliminates the defects of the previous
one and so completes it. So we may call the subsequent form a fulfillment of the
previous form, because it functions as a completion.92

Here we have in embryonic form the fundamental structure of the Phenomenology.

For us the equally important point is that Henrich, like Heidegger, is taking Hölderlin
seriously as a philosopher.
Which is to suggest that Hölderlin’s own development as an artist-philosopher
draws his close friend Hegel in the same direction—especially as regards Hegel’s con-
ception of the Phenomenology as a work of art or, to put it more precisely, as the work
of an artist-philosopher. In short, Hölderlin wants to make philosophy and poetry as
poeticized philosophy, much as what was promised in “The Oldest Programme.”93
Pinkard, for one, is far from seeing Hölderlin’s style as that of an artist-philosopher;
 Nietzsche & Hegel 39
but he does go so far as to say, “It was certainly Hölderlin’s most ambitious legacy to
his old friend that he convinced him to cast his philosophy in the form that demanded
of his readers that they take him on his terms. The sudden and profound shift in the
style of writing and the growth of a recognizable ‘Hegelian style’ of prose around the
end of his Frankfort stay and during his sojourn in Jena were indications of the depth
of influence that Hölderlin exercised on him—an influence that extended up until
“Hegel’s death.”94 The commonly overlooked but nonetheless critical point here has to
do with the fact that, largely due to Hölderlin, Hegel is now demanding of his readers
an interactive participation in a new art form—one that as such leaves Kant’s notion
of autonomous aesthetic form and disinterested aesthetic judgment beside the point.
More importantly still, this interactive participation requires hermeneutic interpretation
of the text (as poiesis). Moreover, the new style stands as a repudiation of Kant’s insis-
tence that philosophy not be art, that it not be poetry, but that it be pure metaphysics.
This Kantian law still stands today, and it goes a long way in explaining the continued
tenacity of those who will not recognize Hölderlin’s thinking as that of a philosopher.
That thinking in no small part gives rise to the Phenomenology as a revolution in form.
Far from upholding the autonomy of the aesthetic object and the disinterestedness
of the judging subject, for Hölderlin and Hegel, this new philosophy has everything to
do with the way human beings live their lives in the everyday world.95 This point
underscores for us the divide between Kant’s pure aesthetic and Hegel’s application of
aesthetic-philosophical principles to the project of changing human consciousness and
the everyday lives and actions of human beings. As Pinkard suggests, “the stage was
set for the spiritual crisis over whether the modern authority of reason was itself sus-
tainable or was itself simply too empty and arid to produce anything worthy of full
allegiance.”96 For Hölderlin as for early Hegel, the problem with modern reason, as
established as the essence of human freedom and upon which Kant bases the categorical
imperative, is precisely its logical abstraction, its abjuration of experiential consideration.
In other words, modern reason disregards the kind of thinking and knowledge that
derives from the poeticized thinking that had allowed Hölderlin to arrive at the phil-
osophical discoveries that opened Hegel’s eyes to the need to change human perception
and consciousness in the very terms outlined in “The Oldest Programme.” As Pinkard
points out, in Hegel’s view, “[P]ure reason alone cannot motivate,” precisely because it
“cannot claim our hearts.”97 In Hegel’s own words, “man needs motives other than
pure respect for moral law, motives more closely bound up with his sensuality [. . .],
hence what this objection [to Kant] really comes down to is that it is altogether unlikely
that humankind, or even a single individual, will ever in this world be able to dispense
entirely with non-moral promptings.”98 While these sentiments more or less reiterate
the impassioned call from “The Oldest Programme” for a new philosophy, we also see
the recognition of human sensuality as poetic form, what Nietzsche will call the
Rauche of artistic experience, as essential to authentic human relations.
Again anticipating Nietzsche, Hegel locates the problem of modern consciousness
and modern culture in the logic of “calculation and measure.” As Hegel says in the Pref-
ace, “The evident character of this defective cognition of which mathematics is proud,
and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on the poverty of its pur-
pose, and the defectiveness of its stuff, and is therefore of a kind that philosophy must
spurn.”99 The modern society educated in these terms is a society incapable of genuine
thought; it thinks and lives within a shallow cultural consciousness, a consciousness that
knows the world through ratiocination but without any depth of understanding.
40 The Artist-Philosopher
In the end, though, Hegel’s narrative persona turns out to be one of the great unre-
liable narrators of nineteenth-century literature. The Absolute does not materialize
spontaneously. Duplicitous claims to the contrary, all the hullabaloo about bacchanalian
adventure—this in a Preface written after the text was completed—and all the promise
of an ever unfolding truth, boil down to a bogus prophecy. The “human I” of the Phe-
nomenology marks but another transient moment before Hegel’s heroic consciousness
becomes one with reason—this latter standing as the first predicate and fundamental
principle of transcendental philosophy.
True enough, the original impulse for the Phenomenology as a revolutionary work
of philosophy to be written in the form of a novel is by itself and still remains in resis-
tance to Kantian metaphysics—at the very least in terms of Kant’s proscriptions
against poeticized philosophical prose. More, the book upends the claim to aesthetic
disinterestedness and does the same with the autonomous aesthetic object. Neverthe-
less, as Hegel’s narrative unfolds towards its culmination, we see the gathering prepon-
derance of pure science, pure philosophy. Hegel writes, “The unfulfilled negativity of
the self, with its senseless pursuit of death, is, however, such as to swing over into
absolute positivity insofar as the individual becomes, not something to be destroyed
by the universal will, but to be taken up into it as pure will and pure knowledge, the
Kantian formal a priori.”100 So much for the Dionysian communal spirit. Nor does the
Dionysian spirit of revolution, the spirit of Dionysian adventure and the valorization
of knowledge as experience that inspired the novel carry forward to its end: “Absolute
freedom has as its positive outcome a purely formal moral will, universal as much as
individual. The Kantian Categorical Imperative is the other side of revolutionary
destruction.”101 This latter phrase Hegel evokes in ironic reference to the French
Revolution he was supposedly going to complete by way of the revolutionary novel
form he has invented for that very purpose. The return to the categorical imperative
also marks the abandonment of Dionysian spirit and a return to the Christian God,
upon which, as Kant insists in the Critique of Practical Reason, the categorical imper-
ative depends.
Though Hegel’s early view of the categorical imperative as “the ultimate under-
standing of freedom” had gone out the window once he “encountered Hölderlin’s
philosophical discoveries,”102 by the novel’s end his perspective has altogether flip-
flopped. Ultimately, Hegel is not or is no longer the artist-philosopher “who follows
the development of the experiences of consciousness.” Whatever the book’s Dionysian
and dialogical intentions as proclaimed in the Preface, whatever Hegel’s repudiation of
calculation and measure, a monological voice gradually asserts itself and takes control
of the narrative’s direction and intent. Somewhere along the plot-line, this authorial
voice “presupposes” and predetermines the work’s constitution and historical destina-
tion. In short, Hegel’s Phenomenology ultimately fails to keep covenant with the prin-
ciples Hegel as an aspiring young artist-philosopher had co-authored under the title
“The Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism.” Whether commentators
think of the Phenomenology as literature or not, the outcome of the Phenomenology
is routinely ascribed to the onset of Hegel’s mature, conservative philosophy, the devel-
opment of which coincides with the writing of the Phenomenology. This is a fair judgment,
though lacking recognition of the Phenomenology as a hybridized philosophical-
literary form.
The fact remains that Hegel poetically symbolizes in the Phenomenology a fiction-
alized hero that moves through the narrative’s various historical epochs in the form of
 Nietzsche & Hegel 41
consciousness. The Hegelian heroic figure is characterized as an ever mutating, ever
creative self-creating trans-historical spirit, one that creates and “constitutes” the world
by way of negation as its being becomes toward the absolute—toward the “absolutely
free being” that is ever becoming one with the Absolute. As Heidegger puts it, in the
Phenomenology:

when consciousness undergoes its experience of itself as knowledge of the object

and thus also undergoes its experience in terms of the object, then consciousness
must experience that it becomes something other for itself. Consciousness verifies
to itself what it really is, in the immediate knowledge of the object, which is not
further known. In this verification consciousness loses its initial truth, what it at
first thought of itself.103

Consciousness knows itself as one thing, and then, through experience, through
Bildung, knows itself as something else, which Bildung verifies as “other” than what it
was in the first place.
Likewise, Hegel begins his own philosophical life as a neo-Kantian, becomes in his
early years a radical critic of Kant’s transcendental metaphysics, and then, through
experience, Bildung—in this case, the day-to-day experience of writing the Phenome-
nology, the historico-philosophical critique of human consciousness—Hegel realizes
the falsity of his theoretical belief in Hölderlin’s Dionysian poiesis and experientially
“verifies” his own truth, whereupon he leaves Hölderlin behind and returns to the fold
of Kantian metaphysics. Structurally speaking, this is precisely what happens in
Goethe’s Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister. Against his father’s wishes, the young Wilhelm
follows the path of his own will, which is to live to the full his love of the theatre. And
yet when Wilhelm’s story ends many years later in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman
Years, Wilhelm Meister leaves the theatre behind for good, enters into business, and
thereby fulfills his father’s expectations.
Even as Hegel’s Bildungsroman dramatizes the history of Hegel’s intellectual life,
from neophyte Kantian, to radical thinker, to conservative neo-Kantian metaphysi-
cian, the story traces the history of human consciousness as it unfolds in the mind of
Hegel over the course of the same narrative. As such Hegel’s Phenomenology should
be seen as a modern allegorical novel that ends in double-closure: the experiential
journey of human consciousness is brought to the finality of the Absolute, while the
experiential development of the author’s consciousness is brought to its finalized
understanding of philosophical truth. Here perhaps it is worth repeating Hyppolite’s
comment that “Hegel’s Phenomenology [ . . . ] is the novel of philosophic formation;
it follows the development of consciousness, which, renouncing its first beliefs, reaches
through the experiences to the properly philosophic point of view, that of absolute
knowledge.”104 Now we see that the same applies to Hegel as well as it does to human
consciousness—applies, that is, to the experiential truth of the living individual as well
as it does to the trans-historical experiential life of human consciousness. In short,
Hegel demonstrates the truth of his philosophy through dramatizing his own experi-
ential coming to that truth.105
What Hyppolite does not mention, and which has been the purpose of our own
discussion, is the fact that, for however briefly, and for whatever fleeting moment of
contingent truth, Hegel joins a long line of artist-philosophers who cut against the
grain of metaphysics. However briefly, there appears in his novel the expression of a
42 The Artist-Philosopher
New Philosophy and thereby, for an instant, Hegel makes good on the promise called
“The Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism.” That he fails to hold true
to that promise comes as no great shame. Very few thinkers, not even Nietzsche, have
been able to do so. But Hegel nonetheless gives impetus to the forward motion of the
hidden tradition he momentarily takes up and embraces. In fact, as we have already
suggested, such impetus carries the tradition directly forward to Nietzsche, who then
gives rise to the further possibilities of New Philosophy, so richly reasserted in Dosto-
yevsky and then in Heidegger’s late work. As though to acknowledge this historical
trajectory, Heidegger notes that “Schelling and Hegel will first become essential German
thinkers in the future, if the unconditionality of their basic metaphysical position is
taken up as a question carried over into futural thoughtful meditation.”106 By this last
phrase, Heidegger has in mind the thinking that comes not after metaphysics but
alongside of metaphysics, with the gathering momentum of New Philosophy. This is
the thinking of the artist-philosopher that Heidegger frequently characterizes as
“thinking” or “thoughtful meditation”—in contrast to the productive ratiocination
that comes of metaphysics in its primary relation to beings and their potential utility.
But one needn’t wait for Dostoyevsky or Heidegger (or for that matter, Woolf,
Bataille, Lacan, Derrida, Cixous, or Irigaray) to see the intertextual fruits of Hegel’s
dalliance with New Philosophy. For certainly Hölderlin benefitted immeasurably from
his early years with Hegel and benefitted all the more, one would venture, from the
disappointment he must have felt when all the Dionysian promise of the Phenomenology’s
hero winds up at the novel’s end in the arms of Kantian metaphysics. Whether his
disappointment emboldened Hölderlin to brave on toward the realization of “The Old-
est Programme” with even greater determination is a matter of conjecture. This much
is certain: Hölderlin never wavered from the revolutionary ideas that he, Hegel, and
Schelling hatched during their school days at Tübingen. As Heidegger says many times
over, with Hölderlin, the overcoming of metaphysics begins in earnest. In Ponderings
XII he writes, “Hölderlin is the poet of that unique decision—and thus he is someone
unique—incomparable; as a poet he founds in advance the essence of this decision,
without thinking of it as a decision pertaining to the history of being—yet his poeticiz-
ing is already an overcoming of all metaphysics. That can be known only thoughtfully
and is also worthy of knowledge only for thinking.”107 For Heidegger, in other words,
Hölderlin’s is a meditative thinking that rises up alongside of metaphysics. If only for
a moment, this thinking was Hegel’s, too.

Notes

Chapter 1, Section I: Nietzsche

1 Plato, The Works of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1950), 330.
2 Ibid., 331.
3 Ibid., 336.
4 Ibid., 332.
5 Ibid., 330.
6 Ibid., 333.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 334.
9 Ibid., 335.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 336.
 Nietzsche & Hegel 43
12 Ibid., 342.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 342–43.
16 Ibid., 342.
17 Ibid., 340.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 It has been said that Socrates represents Dionysius’s crude and drunken tutor, Silenus. But
this is to miss Plato’s intention, which is to show the way Socrates hides his Apollonian
wisdom behind the “talk of pack-asses and smiths and cobblers and curriers.” Whomever
“opens the bust and sees what is within will find that they are only words which have a
meaning in them, and also the most divine, abounding in fair images of virtue, and of widest
comprehension, or rather extending to the whole duty of the good and honourable man.”
Silenus was anything but good or honorable. Plato, The Works of Plato, trans. B. Jowett
(New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1950), 344.
21 Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, eds. Raymond Geuss and
Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 22.
22 Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale,
ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vantage Books, 1968), §805, 424.
23 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer,” in
The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman,
trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), IX, 8.
24 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §802, 422.
25 Ibid., xii.
26 Ibid., xii–xiii.
27 Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, trans. Robert F. Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1965), 65.
28 Raymond Geuss, introduction to The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, by Friedrich
Nietzsche, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald
Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs, 15th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), xvi.
29 Ibid., xvii.
30 Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, Cambridge Texts in the
History of Philosophy, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs, 15th ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 6.
33 Ibid., 8.
34 Ibid., 120.
35 Ibid., 120–21.
36 Ibid., 146.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 147.
39 Ibid., 153.
40 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art
(New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 12.
41 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings XII-XV: Black Notebooks 1939-1942, trans. Richard
Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 178.
42 Martin Heidegger, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?,” in The New Nietzsche: Contempo-
rary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 65.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 469.
46 Heidegger, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?,” 65.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 67.
49 Ibid.
44 The Artist-Philosopher
50 Ibid., 74.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 75.
54 Ibid., 77.
55 Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josephine Nauckhoff
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 299.
56 Ibid., §795, 419.
57 Ibid., §988, 516.
58 Heidegger, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?,” 79.

Chapter 1, Section II: Hyppolite’s Hegel

59 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard
Bosanquet, ed. Michael Inwood (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 12.
60 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetic: Lectures on Fine Arts, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 103.
61 Ibid., 224n.
62 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983), 195. We should note here that Deleuze makes this statement in
regard to Nietzsche’s take against Hegel’s dialectic and not in light of Hegel’s reputation as
a neo-Kantian.
63 Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press,
1975).
64 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism,” in Classic and
Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 185–87.
65 J. M. Bernstein, ed. Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), n.1, 185.
66 Ibid., 185.
67 Ibid.
68 Hölderlin, “The Oldest Program for a System of German Idealism,” 186.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid., 187.
75 Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samual
Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanstan: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 11.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid., 11–12.
78 Upon completing the Phenomenology, Hegel comes to the conclusion that the work is, as
Hyppolite puts it, “not a novel but a work of science.” Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Struc-
ture, 12. This would seem to contradict everything we’ve said so far regarding the Phenom-
enology’s literary status. But when Hegel calls the Phenomenology a work of science, he is
describing it as a system of thought. And while that can be seen as situating the text within
the mainstream of German Idealism, here he is actually saying that he has delivered on what
was promised in “The Oldest Programme,” to the effect that “this ethics will be nothing less
than a complete system of all ideas or, what comes to the same, of all practical postulates.”
J. M. Bernstein, ed., Classic and Romantic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
185. Hegel plainly indicates this as the intention for the Phenomenology, which he published
in the original 1807 edition under the title, System of Science: Part One, The Phenomenology
of Spirit. True, this seems a far cry from the claim he makes in the Preface, to the effect that
the Phenomenology is a Dionysian “bacchanal,” a voyage of adventure the outcome of
which awaits the end of the tale. But these two opposing descriptions of the Phenomenology
are not contradictory. As Kojève remarks, if it were not for the Phenomenology’s scientific
 Nietzsche & Hegel 45
aspect, whereby Hegel connects the various links in the chain of images that comprise his
dramatization of human consciousness, Hegel’s phenomenological descriptions of the
content of consciousness “would be purely literary.” Alexandre Kojève, in Introduction to
the Reading of Hegel, ed. Alan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithica: Cornell University
Press, 1969), 262.
79 Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 12.
80 Ibid., 12.
81 Ibid., 13.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid., 229, 12n.
84 Ibid., 16.
85 Ibid., 304–05.
86 Ibid., 161.
87 Dieter Henrich, in Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, ed. Davis
S. Pacini (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 304.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid., 305.
93 As Pinkard observes, “Hölderlin’s conviction that it was the poet’s responsibility to fashion
a new language appropriate to the new age—and to create a responsibility among his readers
to participate in fashioning this ‘new sensibility’—had a profound effect on Hegel; it was
to lead him to make a decisive shift near the end of his stay in Frankfort to abandon in his
philosophical writings the more easygoing prose style of his earlier years and adopt instead
his own analogue of Hölderlin’s notion of his readers that they actively participate in fash-
ioning this new way of assuming responsibilities to the world and to each other.” Terry
Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 304.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid. Pinkard writes, “with the development of European life’s failure to rationally under-
write the authoritativeness about what mattered to it, Kant emerged the great hero of
modernity; Kant heroically rescued modern reason’s claims to authority by showing that
reason could indeed establish a ‘substantial’ form of Geist in the shape of the ‘kingdom of
ends’ mutually legislating for itself, taking no authority for itself except that which it could
generate out of its own ‘spontaneous’ activities. However, while that turned out to be fully
necessary as a modern self-conception, it also turned out, Hegel argued, to be empty as an
actual guide to action.” Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography, 304.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid., 41.
98 Ibid., 41, 27n.
99 Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 25.
100 Ibid., 568.
101 Ibid.
102 Ibid.
103 Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 22.
104 Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, 11–12.
105 Not until Dostoyevsky’s 1881 break-through Brothers Karamazov do we see the advent of
a truly dialogical novel of the kind Hegel discursively claims for his 1807 Phenomenology
of Spirit but never realizes. As Bakhtin shows, in Dostoyevsky’s open-ended novel the
author stands for one voice among the many characters who come together in the novel,
and each decides for himself or herself what to do, where to go, and what to say. The novel
as such tells the story of these many choices as related from the narrator’s openhanded
point of view, and those choices determine the plot’s unfolding. Here we see a spontaneous
interaction that comes of communal discussion and argument, differences of opinion, famil-
ial love and romantic intrigue and resentment.
46 The Artist-Philosopher
And rather than the fixed, self-determined a priori subject characterized in the bourgeois
novel, each character in Dostoyevsky’s dialogical novel is intersubjectified as she formu-
lates her words in anticipation of what her interlocutor expects to hear in response to her
utterance. While classical philosophy defines man as the one who possesses language, or
the one who speaks, Dostoyevsky defines subjectivity as the one who is intersubjectified as
she formulates the utterance in anticipation of the other’s response. Thus the dialogical
character is indeed ever-becoming, ever-intersubjectified, and totally free of fixed,
self-sovereign bourgeois consciousness. Here we see in no uncertain terms Dostoyevsky’s
striking intertextual response to Book IV’s master-slave thematic. While Hegel creates a closed
dialectic, Dostoyevsky creates a wide-open, unending and wildly revolutionary dialogic.
Likewise, the structural outcome of the dialogical novel is not predetermined by the
single-voiced, single-minded author who stands behind the narrative voice, as is the case in
Fielding’s algebraically plotted Tom Jones or Austin’s intricately orchestrated and
choreographed Pride and Prejudice. Rather than “presupposed,” the dialogical novel’s
outcome is open-ended, and as such it is altogether contrary to the aesthetic closure that
defines the rational essence of the bourgeois novel’s form, a form that Hegel’s Absolute
reiterates. With Henry James’s middle and late phases, beginning with The Portrait of a
Lady, which appeared in 1881 (the same year as The Brothers Karamazov), and culminating
in The Ambassadors of 1903, we see the novel structured toward an open-endedness that
resists the logically summed-up closure that determines modernist organic form. This
development leads, through the likes of Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, eventually to
Robbe-Grillet’s Nouveau Roman. In this latter style, we see the complete decentering and
fragmentation of the bourgeois subject and the correlative deconstruction of modernism’s
purposefulness without purpose, a purposefulness which boils down to the finality of form,
the closure that is supposedly above purpose, above, that is, ideology. Robbe-Grillet’s
deconstructive form, in other words, stands as a critique of Kantian formalism and its
correlative, the bourgeois subject. French poststructuralism notwithstanding, bourgeois
subjectivity is now the thoroughly globalized and dominant mode of human conscious-
ness, an eventuality that has come to pass with a good deal of help from Hegel.
106 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings XII-XV: The Black Notebooks, 1939–1941, trans. Richard
Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 8.
107 Ibid., 47.
2 Goethe & Rabelais

Section I: Goethe’s Freud

Among Goethe’s novels, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship is the one most
taken up with the relations between philosophy and art. Never easy and perennially
vexed, these relations had recently been stirred up by the appearance of Kant’s Critique
of Judgment, and now Goethe would reply in novel form. True, not many contempo-
rary readers would have read, let alone understood, the transcendental philosopher’s
notoriously dense Third Critique, and fewer still would have picked up on Goethe’s
challenge to Kant’s aesthetic pronouncements. Prominent among those who most
certainly had read and had understood the Third Critique, we can count Goethe’s
erstwhile friend and admirer, Schopenhauer. A devoted champion of Kantian aesthetics,
Schopenhauer considered Wilhelm Meister one of the greatest novels ever written, and
so he must have overlooked or chosen to ignore Goethe’s serious objections to many
if not most of the aesthetic assertions Kant lays down in his Critique of Judgment.
At any rate, he said nothing about any such objections.
Of those who did recognize Goethe’s Bildungsroman as a challenge to Kant’s
Critique of Judgment, the young Hegel and Hölderlin, and the very young Schelling,
were surely among those most deeply affected by Goethe’s contrary assertions. In fact,
it is Bildung that ties these young poet-thinkers together in a tightknit circle around
the new philosophical and aesthetic ideas that Goethe formulates in Wilhelm Meister.
As we have seen, these ideas are given pride of place as central themes in the “Oldest
Programme” and in Hegel’s Phenomenology as well. Wilhelm Meister also left a deep
mark on Schelling’s later philosophical development, not least as regards The Philos-
ophy of Art, and much the same can be said of Hölderlin’s poetry and prose, especially
as regards his notion of poetic intuition as an experiential mode of philosophical
thought—a concept he shared with Schelling. In addition to Schopenhauer, Hegel,
Hölderlin, and Schelling, we can add Fichte, Schiller, and Friedrich Schlegel to the list
of important contemporary German philosophers who considered Wilhelm Meister a
major contribution to German philosophy.
If Wilhelm Meister was rarely thought of as such outside of those mentioned above,
it is less frequently thought of as such today. That is partly because Goethe is hardly ever
thought of as an artist-philosopher. But we should also bear in mind that Goethe’s
Sorrows of Young Werther had hit Europe like a volcanic eruption in 1779, and Faust,
which still holds the crown as Germany’s proudest literary achievement, would appear
with similar force in 1829. Though these two literary spectacles typically draw serious
critical, not to say philosophical, attention away from Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Appren-
ticeship, by no means is Wilhelm Meister to be taken for a minor interlude between two
48 The Artist-Philosopher
major artistic events. For the moment suffice it to say that any discussion of the artist-
philosopher that fails to take into account Goethe’s place in the history of philosophy does
so at its own peril. And while that place can be attributed to Goethe’s work in its entirety,
nothing he thought or wrote more assuredly earned him that place than Wilhelm Meister.
Goethe has been generally recognized as a great artist who also happened to be an
exceptional dabbler in science. This latter characterization was set in stone mostly by
the well-known early nineteenth-century scientists who poo-pooed Goethe’s color
theory, which contradicted the color theory of a so-called bona fide scientist—none
other than Newton. And though Goethe’s color theory has since proved correct,
Goethe’s philosophizing is still typically dismissed by the philosopher, whether in the
guise of scientist or not. In what follows we will be advancing a radical departure from
that received opinion. Nor for that matter can we agree with those few who recognize
Goethe as an artist and a philosopher, as if Goethe had explored two related but sep-
arate paths of inquiry, the one scientific and the other creative. Rather, Goethe lived and
worked and thought as an artist-philosopher. In the long run, adequate consideration of
Goethe’s life as an artist-philosopher will require a separate, extensive study, the result
of which is bound to show that his work effectually altered and in many cases erased
the borderlines between art and philosophy. On this score we can make but a few prelim-
inary observations. These we will necessarily limit to comments on Wilhelm Meister’s
Years of Apprenticeship—which we can simply refer to as Wilhelm Meister.
We can note to begin with that Hölderlin’s deep and authentic wish to revitalize
Dionysian themes was an aspiration he learned mainly from Goethe. The question of just
when and by whom Dionysius regains the light of day after his long sojourn in the cultural
underworld is hardly a trivial academic matter of provenance or attribution; rather, it is a
key to elucidating the various modes of philosophical resistance that were developing in
reaction to the by then deeply entrenched traditions of Western metaphysics, traditions
that Nietzsche would see as chains of enslavement and that Spengler, for example, was
also trying to shake the world free of when he published The Decline of the West. Long
before Nietzsche and Spengler, Goethe and the small circle of young artist-philosophers
that gathered around his thinking and writing—Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling—were already
at work trying to free Western consciousness from the powerful grip of mainstream
metaphysics. Nowhere is this intention more evident than in Goethe’s modernized dra-
matization of the incest taboo, a fundamentally Dionysian theme diametrically opposed
to the Apollonian logic that grounds Western metaphysics and aesthetics.
In Welhelm Meister, this theme is most obviously dramatized in the Oedipal relation-
ship that develops between Wilhelm and Mignon, the novel’s main characters. At first
the bird-like and charming little orphan, Mignon, comes to identify Wilhelm as her
father and indeed calls him by that name. She dresses as a boy and turns out after all
to be the kidnapped daughter of Milanese aristocrats. She is, in other words, a young
princess in disguise. In her increasingly strange and eventually mad ways, Mignon takes
on the character traits of Hamlet’s beloved fiancée, singing lewd and lascivious snatches
of verse, all of a kind unmistakably reminiscent of Ophelia’s bawdy phantasms. By and
by, the lovely Mignon, in her role as a pubescent boy-girl Ophelia, has taken to embracing
Wilhelm and kissing him on the mouth with more than child-like passion and less than
androgynous innocence. For his part, Wilhelm finds himself in a provocative and increas-
ingly incestuous relationship with a young girl he has informally adopted as his daughter.
At this point, his critical analysis of the character Hamlet, whose oedipal role he plays
in his own production of the tragedy, can be seen as anything but disinterested.
 Goethe & Rabelais 49
At the close of Wilhelm’s premier production of Hamlet, a cast party has gathered,
and the players join in drinking toasts to the evening’s success. But even as baccha-
nalian merriment arises in celebration of the night’s triumph, a general sense of
mystery pervades the mood. That is because during the production, Hamlet’s father
had appeared from off stage, even though this strange Ghost was not called for in
the script. Here Goethe introduces a momentous departure from Shakespeare’s
tragedy. He brings into play what may well be the first artistic dramatization of what
Freud calls Nachträglichkeit and what Lacan calls deferred action: the sudden
recollection of a repressed Oedipal event from the past that is triggered by a similar
event that occurs from out of the blue in the present. In this case, when the mystery
of the ghostly father comes up among the revelers, it triggers in Wilhelm the memory
of Wilhelm’s first childhood experience with puppet theater, and he suddenly under-
stands the origin of his life-long fascination with stagecraft. This memory is what
Freud will call a screen memory, and behind it hovers yet another, somehow related
memory. For like Hamlet, Wilhelm has failed to follow a patriarchal command—in
his case he has not taken the path of business and finance that his father had laid out
for him—and now during the cast party it occurs to him that while playing the role
of Hamlet onstage he had remembered this long buried past event as he witnessed
the uncanny appearance of the patriarchal ghost, who enjoins his son to avenge his
murder.
As Wilhelm ruminates on the connection between the ghost, the haunted memory of
his own dead father’s unfulfilled expectation, and his early-childhood memory of puppet
theater, Mignon begins to act out some puppet theater of her own:

Sitting in a big chair and peeping out over the table, but only like Pulcinella dolls
out of the box, the children began to perform in this way a play. Mignon imitated
the humming sound very prettily, and finally they knocked their heads together to
such an extent, banging them also on the edge of the table, in a way that only
wooden puppets can tolerate.1

Suddenly she becomes

merry to the point of anger, and the company had to call her to a halt in the end,
however much they laughed and joked at first. But talking did not help much, for
she now jumped up and raced round the table with the tambourine in her hand.
Her hair was flying and as she threw back her head and so to speak tossed her
limbs into the air, she seemed like a maenad whose wild and almost impossible
positions still surprise us frequently on old monuments.2

In her momentary madness Mignon is acting like Ophelia, of course, but she is also
described as behaving like a “maenad,” a cult follower of Dionysius. Meanwhile, the
stage manager hands Wilhelm the veil behind which King Hamlet’s Ghost had disap-
peared, and in the instant Wilhelm feels a sharp pain, only to discover that Mignon has
bitten his arm, a reminder that Dionysius’s maenads were famous for tearing into the
flesh of those who fell into their grips in the moment of Dionysian frenzy.
Staggering back to his room, dizzy and exhausted from the evening’s Dionysian
“bacchanal,” and no doubt more than a little drunk from too much wine, Wilhelm
throws off his clothes and collapses onto his bed.
50 The Artist-Philosopher
Sleep was about to overpower him straight away; but a noise that seemed to orig-
inate in his room behind the stove made him pay attention. The image of the King
in armour was just then poised before his heated imagination; he sat up in order
to address the ghostly figure, when he was aware of being embraced by soft arms,
as his mouth was closed with lively kisses, and felt a breast pressing against his
own which he had not the courage to repulse.3

And so the question arises as to whether the wine-drunk Wilhelm has been seduced in
the dark by his quasi-daughter, the crazy maenad, Mignon. To get to the bottom of the
Oedipal mystery, we must follow Goethe’s lead:

Next morning Wilhelm started up with an uncomfortable feeling and found his bed
empty. His head was heavy as he had not fully slept off the effects of drinking, and
the memory of the unknown nocturnal visitor disturbed him. His first suspicion fell
on Philine, and yet it did not seem as if the lovely body that he had held in his arms
had been hers. Amid lively caresses our friend had gone to sleep by the side of this
strange silent visitor, and now no further trace of her was to be found. He leapt up,
and while he was getting dressed he found that his door, which he usually bolted,
was only ajar, and he could not remember if he had locked it the previous night.4

In the next moment, Wilhelm comes upon a strange note hidden in the folds of the
Ghost’s veil, a note that comes as if from his own father’s hand. Goethe writes,

At that very moment Mignon came in bringing breakfast. Wilhelm was surprised
at the child’s appearance, indeed it may be said he was startled. She seemed to
become bigger during the night; she stepped in front of him with a lofty, noble
propriety and looked into his eyes with great seriousness, so that he could not bear
her gaze. She did not touch him as at other times when she usually pressed his
hand and kissed him on the cheek, mouth, arm or shoulder, but went silently away
again after tidying his things.5

With these last gestures Goethe beclouds the question as to whether Wilhelm has
committed symbolic incest with his pseudo-daughter. A few days later, when Wilhelm
set off on travels, the girl “took Wilhelm’s hand as he was parting, and standing on
tiptoe she gave him a true hearted and vigorous kiss on the lips, though without any
caressing endearment, saying: ‘Master, don’t forget us and come back soon.’”6 Though
these last words would seem to suggest affection other than incestuous, in fact they
suggest the opposite, for up until this moment Mignon has customarily addressed
Wilhelm as “Father”; after the Dionysian orgy, fraught with wine and song and what-
ever took place in his bedroom, he is now Mignon’s “Master,” too. The insinuation in
this context suggests the idea of a teacher, or guide, as in master of the sensuous arts.
Goethe brings the scene to a close with Mignon reciting verses all but revealing the
identity of the strange night’s phantom of delight:

Ask me not to speak, but leave me silent,

For my secret is a duty for me;
I’d like to show you all my inner being,
But such is not the Fate’s decree.
 Goethe & Rabelais 51
When the time is right the sun’s course drives away
The somber night, and daylight starts to glow,
The hard rock gladly opens up its heart,
And gives to earth the springs concealed below.
Each one seeks peace and calm in his friend’s arms,
For here the heart’s laments can be expressed;
And yet my lips, which are locked fast by an oath,
Can only be unsealed at a god’s behest.7

We note here the reference not to God but to “a” god, namely, Dionysius, with whose
cult Mignon is identified as a maenad. And while Mignon’s sexually veiled verses
suggest none other than Ophelia, the figure of Hamlet is played by Wilhelm, the
surrogate father and dreamland lover of the would-be bride.
So far, we have been able to suggest a Dionysian presence in Goethe’s narrative, a
presence to which Hölderlin, for one, was most certainly alive. And, in tracing Wilhelm’s
hermeneutic analysis of the play’s content as it pertains to his personal interests, we have
been able to suggest the length to which Goethe is developing a critical alternative to
Kantian formalism. Beyond that we have only managed to show that Goethe has given
us a variation on the Oedipal theme as it was first established in Sophocles and then
modernized in Shakespeare’s Renaissance makeover. But this hardly goes to show that
Goethe has invented psychoanalytic theory, let alone that he has done so in a way that puts
down the very bedrock of Freudian analysis.
If we stay on track, however, the scenes we are holding up for analysis do indeed lead
back to the advent of a new science based on the hermeneutic interpretation of word and
image as symbolic representations of the workings of the human unconscious. At this
juncture we will have reached a critical breaking point between Goethe’s new kind of
philosophy and Kant’s metaphysics. This is to suggest that the basic hermeneutic func-
tion that Goethe brings forward by way of the Bildungsroman is to interpret the repressed
in ways that closely approximate manifest and latent content as well as displacement
and condensation. These terms, which Freud introduces in his 1901 The Interpretation
of Dreams, were subsequently acknowledged as major new developments in critical
hermeneutics. This new methodology directly opposed the fundamental principles of
Kant’s formalism.
On the question of Goethe’s interpretation of Hamlet, Freud says the following:

In the Oedipus the child’s wishful fantasy that underlies is brought into the open
and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and—just
as in the case of a neurosis—we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting con-
sequences. Strangely enough, the overwhelming effect produced by the more modern
tragedy has turned out to be compatible with that fact that people have remained
completely in the dark as to the hero’s character. The play is built up on Hamlet’s
hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its text
offers no reasons or motives for these hesitations and an immense variety of
attempts at interpreting them have failed to produce a result. According to the
view which was originated by Goethe and is still the prevailing one today, Hamlet
represents the type of man whose power of direct action is paralyzed by an excessive
development of his intellect. (He is “sicklied o’re with the pale cast of thought.”)
52 The Artist-Philosopher
According to another view, the dramatist has tried to portray a pathologically
irresolute character which might be classed as a neurasthenic. The plot of the
drama shows, however, that Hamlet is far from being repressed as a person inca-
pable of taking any action.8

In the one scene in Wilhelm Meister Freud is referring to in particular, which amounts
to a play within a play, or if you will, a play within a novel, Goethe again puts forward
a startling variation of Shakespeare’s script. Whereas Shakespeare’s mousetrap ends
with the distraught Claudius calling for light, Goethe’s ends with a fire that destroys
the theater. In this latter scene, Wilhelm jumps to the ready and rescues Mignon and
his son, Felix, as well as the old harpist—hardly the behavior of a character supposed
to mirror Hamlet’s morbid passivity. Whether this latter detail obviates Freud’s rather
fuzzy and ultimately incorrect distinction between his and Goethe’s interpretation of
Hamlet’s character is of no concern; the key fact is that Wilhelm’s fast action reverses
his less than disinterested interpretation of Hamlet’s character as identical to his own.
This minor thematic development will emerge as a fundamental principle of Freud’s
theory of resubjectification.
As Goethe’s text unfolds, other Freudian themes emerge. Following “Confessions of
a Beautiful Soul,” the interlude that comprises Book Six and which pre-establishes the
theme of guilt, Mignon reappears on the narrative scene after a long hiatus, during
which she has been convalescing for symptoms related to neurasthenia, and so does
Wilhelm. The doctor who has been attending to Mignon’s illness in Wilhelm’s absence
soon takes Wilhelm aside to apprise him of the young girl’s condition. Again, we will
want to follow the text verbatim:

The doctor was now alone with Wilhelm and continued, “I have strange things to
tell you, which you are scarcely expecting. Natalie is leaving us on our own so
that we can speak more freely of things which, although I have only been able to
learn about them from her, nonetheless could not be so freely discussed in her
presence. The strange temperament of the child whom we are now talking about
consists almost entirely of a deep yearning; I might almost say, the longing to see
her native country and the longing for you, my friend, are the only earthly things
about her; both stretch into infinity, both objects are unattainable to this unique
disposition.”9

In this first moment of the doctor’s diagnosis, we see the prelude to a classic Freudian
psychoanalysis that points in this case to hysteria resulting from the guilt of Oedipal
desire. Incest, however, is not the kind of delicate matter our good doctor wants to
discuss in the presence of a woman; and even with Wilhelm, he invokes eighteenth-
century professional decorum. This discretion no doubt serves Goethe’s sensitivity to
the mores of his time, but if we pay close attention to the dialogue we can easily
discern the psychosexual implications of the narrative discourse: “Even what I am
telling you now she did not confide to Natalie in so many words,” the doctor says. We
are nonetheless assured that psychoanalytic interpretation informs the doctor’s
“read” of Mignon’s condition: “[O]ur dear friend has pieced together from separate
statements, songs and childlike indiscretions which reveal precisely that which they
wish to conceal.”10
 Goethe & Rabelais 53
The doctor’s Freudian analysis brings to light repressed desire as revealed in speech
meant to hide any and all association with the object of desire. In this new light,
Wilhelm understands Mignon from an altogether new perspective:

Now Wilhelm was able to account for many a song and many a saying of this dear
child. He asked his friend in the most pressing terms not to withhold from him
anything that he knew about the strange songs and confessions of this unique
creature.
“Oh,” said the Doctor. “Prepare yourself for an extraordinary confession, for a
story in which you are involved without your remembering it, a story which,
as I fear, is a matter of life and death for this good soul.”
“Do tell me,” Wilhelm replied, “I am extremely impatient.”
“Do you remember the secret, nocturnal woman visitor after the performance of
Hamlet?” the Doctor said.
“Yes, I well remember the occasion!” Wilhelm exclaimed in some confusion, “but
I did not think that I should be reminded of it just now.”
“Do you know who she was?”
“No, you shock me! For Heaven’s sake, surely not Mignon? Who was it? Tell me!”
“I don’t know myself.”
“Not Mignon then?”
“No, certainly not! But Mignon was on the point of going to you when with
horror she was compelled to observe from a corner that a rival was forestalling
her.”
“A rival!” Wilhelm cried out. “Tell me more! You are altogether bewildering me.”11

What follows could be mistaken for a paragraph lifted directly from one of Freud’s
case studies:

“Be content that you learn of these consequences from me so quickly,” the Doctor
said. “Natalie and myself, who after all are only able to be involved in a fairly
remote way, were tormented long enough until we had as much insight as this into
the confused condition of this dear creature whom we wanted to help. Frivolous
chatter of Philine and the other girls, together with a certain little song, had
aroused her attention and made attractive to her the thought of spending the night
with her loved one, without her being able to envisage this as anything but a trust-
ing, happy repose. The affection for you, my friend, had already become lively and
powerful in her good heart, and the dear child had already rested in your arms in
face of many a paroxysm and suffering; now she desired this happiness in its com-
pleteness. Sometimes she resolved to ask for it in a friendly way, sometimes a
secret terror would hold her back once more. Finally the cheerful evening party
and the mood induced by the frequent partaking of wine gave her the courage to
try the bold venture of slipping in with you that night. She had gone ahead so that
she could hide herself in the unlocked room, only just as she had come up the
54 The Artist-Philosopher
stairs she heard a noise; she concealed herself and saw a female figure in white slip
into your room. You yourself came soon afterwards, and she heard the big bolt
being put in.12

We needn’t apply advanced psychoanalytic hermeneutics to understand what hearing

the “big bolt being put in” means for Mignon. She is aural witness to her surrogate
father engaging in coitus with her “rival.” As such, she plays the role of voyeur identical
to the one assumed in the primal scene. In standard Freudian terms, the experience
Mignon has gone through in Wilhelm’s bedroom constitutes psychic trauma precisely
insofar as it triggers a mnemonic return to the primal scene, an event that has long been
repressed in the unconscious, a psychic “space” which, according to Freud, is consti-
tuted for the designated purpose of hiding such a memory from conscious awareness.
In the next passage, we see that it was Goethe and not Freud who first thematized
the acute psychic effect of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), generally considered the
corner stone of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Goethe’s doctor, argu-
ably the world’s first Freudian psychoanalyst, further explains his analysis to Wilhelm
as follows:

Mignon suffered unbearable torment, all the vigorous emotions of passionate jeal-
ousy were combined with the unrecognized demands of an obscure desire and
played havoc with her youthful temperament. Her heart, which up to that point
had been beating animatedly with yearning and expectation, all at once began to
falter and felt like a lead weight in her bosom, she couldn’t get her breath, she
didn’t know how to protect herself. She heard the old man’s harp, hurried up to
him in the attic and spent the night at his feet amid terrible convulsions.”
The doctor paused a moment, and as Wilhelm kept silent, he went on: “Natalie
has assured me that in her whole life nothing had terrified and affected her as
much as the child’s condition while giving this account; indeed our noble-minded
friend reproached herself for having elicited these confessions and hints and for
having recalled so cruelly the intense sufferings of the dear girl.
“‘The good creature had scarcely got to this point in her narrative, or rather in her
answers to my mounting questions,’ so Natalie told me, ‘when all at once she col-
lapsed before me and with her hand on her bosom complained of the return of the
pain of that terrible night. She writhed like a snake on the ground, and I had to
summon up all my composure in order to think of and apply the remedies I knew
for a mind and body in these circumstances.’”13

Here Goethe gives us what would become fundamental concepts in Freudian psycho-
analytic theory: the hysteria and neurosis that result as a consequence of repression,
the traumatic psychic return to the primal scene through mnemonic experience, and
the talking cure that reveals the repressed secrets that infect the mind of the neurotic.
We have pieced this reading together by following the analytic lead of Wilhelm’s criti-
cal hermeneutics and the doctor’s psychoanalysis. It is worth repeating that both
deploy the hermeneutic critical methodologies that Freud will refine and develop in
The Interpretation of Dreams.
Much as the doctor tries to engage Mignon in some kind of talking cure, his attempts
come to no avail. Further on in the narrative, when we find Natalie and Wilhelm
 Goethe & Rabelais 55
looking at an art collection, Mignon and the young boy Felix suddenly burst in upon
them, to announce the arrival of Theresa, Wilhelm’s betrothed.

Mignon was first to burst open the door; she was out of breath and could not
bring out a word. Felix, still some distance away, cried: “Mother Theresa is here!”
The children had organized a race, it seemed, in order to bring the news. Mignon
lay in Natalie’s arms, her heart was beating violently.
“You naughty child,” Natalie said, “haven’t you been told to avoid strenuous
exercise? Look how your heart is beating,”
“Let it break!” Mignon said with a deep sigh. “It’s been beating too long anyway.”
They had scarcely recovered from this confusion and from this kind of consterna-
tion when Theresa entered. She flew to Natalie and embraced her and the good
child. Then she turned to Wilhelm, looked at him with her clear eyes and said:
“Now, my friend, how are things? I hope you haven’t let yourself be led astray?”
He took a step in her direction, she leapt towards him and put her arms around
his neck. “Oh my Theresa!” he exclaimed.
“My friend! My beloved! My husband! Yes, yours forever!” she called amid most
spirited kisses.
Felix pulled at her skirt, crying: “Mother Theresa, I’m here as well!” Natalie stood
looking on; Mignon suddenly felt her heart with her left hand, and stretching out
her right arm with a violent movement, she collapsed with a violent shriek at
Natalie’s feet, dead.14

The triggered mnemonic return to the primal scene has instigated one too many traumas
for Mignon’s fragile psychosomatic condition. We needn’t recount here the similarity
between her death and Ophelia’s. Nor do we need, at this point, to trace in further
detail Goethe’s dramatization of Freudian Nachträglichkeit. Nearly all of the elements
that Freud so dramatically recounts in the Wolf Man case have already been acted out
here, in Goethe’s dramatization of the human unconscious in the traumatic throes of
Oedipal crisis.
Bearing in mind that Freud poured over the very same pages of Wilhelm Meister
that we have been examining and had no doubt read the novel more than once, it is
safe to say that the foundation of psychoanalytic theory was laid here, in Wilhelm
Meister. Goethe’s dramatization and hermeneutic analysis of the incestuous uncon-
scious represents a profound departure from Kant’s philosophy of mind, both in terms
of subject matter and critical methodology. Undoubtedly Kant would never object to
hermeneutic interpretations of the mind as long as they were dramatized as art and
not represented as science, in which case he would find nothing wrong with Wilhelm
Meister as a work of science fiction. What he would take strong exception to, however,
is the claim that artistic form can produce philosophical and indeed scientific concepts,
which is precisely what we see in Goethe’s philosophico-aesthetic conceptualization of
Nachträglichkeit.
With the death of Mignon, the Dionysian maenad and Oedipal child, we see the
interfusion of art and science, Sophocles and Freud. One might go so far as to say that the
Dionysian is the Oedipal, is the unconscious. That is why, I take it, Freud kept an
56 The Artist-Philosopher
ancient Greek vase depicting Dionysius. It was one of his most prized possessions, and
therein his ashes are still kept. And yet, to say that the Dionysian is the Oedipal con-
stitutes a thesis that could not stand farther from scientific truth as established in
transcendental metaphysics. For Freud, nonetheless, Goethe brings to light the relationship
between the conscious and the unconscious, mythos and logos, and shows how that
dynamic relationship results in the mutation of both. While Mignon demonstrates the
morphology of consciousness as occurring through the dynamics of Oedipal repression,
Wilhelm dramatizes this change as it occurs over the Oedipal history of an individual’s
life experience and spiritual education. Freud will combine Oedipal repression with
Bildungsroman and arrive at the hermeneutic historicization of psychic life.
Known as psychoanalysis, the hermeneutic connection between Oedipal desire and
repression marks a paradigm shift in the historicization of human consciousness, and
for this reason alone Freud was justified in habitually referring to the author of Wilhelm
Meister as “my beloved Goethe.”15 While commentators generally attribute Freud’s
discovery of repression to Schopenhauer, the fact remains that The World of Will and
Representation appeared in 1818, long after Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Like
Freud, Schopenhauer had read and reread Wilhelm Meister many times over. As much
as Schopenhauer understood the sex drive as the underlying will of the world, he had
no appreciation of the Oedipal, whereas for Goethe it accounts for the inner workings
of the human unconscious, and for Freud it accounts for everything.
Through his reading of Goethe, Freud builds on the insights of Schopenhauer and
readily acknowledges that there are many ways in which “psychoanalysis coincides
with the philosophy of Schopenhauer—not only did he assert the dominance of the
emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality but he was even aware of the
mechanism of repression.”16 What Freud brings to this mechanism, however, is a care-
ful analysis and rich understanding of the events that take place during the primal
scene, and again, it is largely from his analysis of the Wolf Man case in light of Goethe’s
analysis of Mignon that Freud arrives at these paradigmatic insights. In short, in his
reading of Wilhelm Meister, Schopenhauer picked up on Goethe’s thematization of
repression but completely overlooked Goethe’s dramatization of deferred action.
Freud did not.
That is hardly to say that Freudian psychoanalysis has ever since remained the
mainstay treatment for psychic trauma and the various neuroses that result. In 1995,
Alan Stone, then chair of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, announced in his
keynote address to the academy that “psychoanalysis, both as a theory and a practice,
is an art form that belongs to the humanities and not to the sciences.”17 Pharmaceuti-
cal technology was the new cure for mental illness, and the old days of psychoanalysis
were officially over. As Stone reminded his colleagues, most of whom had long since
gotten their patients up off the couch and sent them to the drugstore,

Freud in fact had enormous literary talent and when it seemed clear that he would
never win the Nobel Prize for medicine, Thomas Mann, along with other literary
greats, actually encouraged the nomination of Freud for the Nobel Prize in literature.18

Later in his address, Stone says of Freud’s discoveries, “This is Freud advancing the
human project of self-understanding more than any other person in this century—but
with the unique subjective vision of the artist and not through the objective methods
of science.”19 It was for this lack of scientific objectivity, Stone seems to be suggesting,
 Goethe & Rabelais 57
that most of Freud’s ideas as regards psychoanalytic theory had now been relegated to
the “hermeneutic turn”—by which he means literary criticism. The one Freudian the-
ory that remains unshakably in place, however, is none other than the one that informs
the diagnosis and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder,20 namely, Nachträglichkeit,
the first analytical representation of which is dramatized in Mignon, Goethe’s Dionysian
maenad.21
Toward the end of his life, Jung makes the offhand remark that Freud was no
philosopher; for one thing, he hadn’t read Kant and Hegel. As Alan Stone tells it,
Freud was no scientist, either. To an extent they are both right—Freud as a young
aspiring scientist had read Goethe’s essay on nature. From then on, he would give up
pure science. Like his mentor, Goethe, he became an artist-philosopher. No surprise,
then, that winning the Goethe Prize in 1930 was one of the proudest moments of
his life.

Section II: Bakhtin’s Rabelais

Goethe—and after him, the young Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling, and later on Nietzsche
and Freud, and then, as we shall see, Heidegger—was following a path long since laid
down by Rabelais. For it is Rabelais whose chrono-topological style re-naturalizes and
indeed re-eroticizes time and space. In so doing, Rabelais wants to pull cultural conscious-
ness loose from its inveterate ties to Platonic abstraction, which the sixteenth-century
church and aristocracy still maintained and reproduced as the discourse of universal truth.
By the same token, Rabelais wants to bring cultural consciousness back into the daily life
of the thinking, feeling body, back into the experience of real, living human beings. In a
very physical and palpable sense, Rabelais is returning cultural consciousness, and not just
philosophical and aesthetic discourse, to the spatio-temporal mode of being as it was lived
in the age of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and the other artist-philosophers whose
pre-Socratic way of thinking and being in the world had been more or less covered over
by the advent of Socratic thinking and otherwise appropriated to the cause of newly
established metaphysics.
What Bakhtin further suggests, however, is that cultural dominance of pure Apollonian
thought had disconnected the natural relations of earthly things and re-aligned them in a
vertical, hierarchical relationship of relative values. This new system of values was predi-
cated on proximity to verifiable truth as the first premise of utility. Now the natural spatio-
temporal world is re-conceptualized as a scientific construct. The world that was once
steeped in a largely undifferentiated blend of poetic wonderment and natural science
becomes a world in which time and space are the formal predicates upon which calcu-
lation and measure determine the utility and value of things and ideas. Once the new
scientific concept of time/space takes hold of cultural consciousness, its power and
force far exceed its originary Apollonian moment and indeed shape and reshape West-
ern consciousness as an ever-expanding, ever more powerful mode of thought.
Rabelais’s aesthetico-philosophical project, then, is meant to dislodge the long since
firmly entrenched Apollonian concept of time and space. He wants to renovate the
spatio-temporal modes of consciousness that characterized Greek life prior to the
ascendancy of Apollonian consciousness. As Bakhtin explains,

What is at issue here is that special connection between a man and all his actions,
between every event of his life and the spatial-temporal world. This special
58 The Artist-Philosopher
relationship we will designate as the adequacy, the direct proportionality of
degrees of quality (“value”) to spatial and temporal quantities (dimension).22

These qualities center on the organic spontaneity of social life, “life in open spaces set
against open-ended or at least undetermined, natural time spans.” Bakhtin continues,

This means that everything of value, everything that is valorized positively, must
achieve its full potential in spatial and temporal terms; it must spread out as far
and as wide as possible, and it is necessary that everything of significant value be
provided with the power to expand spatially and temporally; likewise, everything
evaluated negatively is small, pitiable, feeble, and must be destroyed—and is helpless
to resist this destruction. There is no mutual hostility, no contradiction between
spatial and temporal measurements, and value of any kind—food, drink, holy
truth, “The Good,” beauty, they are directly proportional to one another.23

Which is to say that this kind of valuation is not set up as a hierarchical order of
things. To the contrary, Rabelais creates a world of dynamic and relative equivalencies,
especially between time and space, but also between earth and sky, ideas and feelings,
body and mind. Bakhtin elucidates,

But this passion for spatial and temporal equivalence in Rabelais is far from
naïve—as it was in the ancient epic and in folklore. Rabelais’s equivalence is spe-
cifically contrasted with medieval verticality, and this polemical opposition
receives a special emphasis. Rabelais’s task is to purge the spatial and temporal
world of those remnants of a transcendent world view still present in it, to clean
away symbolic and hierarchical interpretations still clinging to the vertical world,
to purge it of the contagion of “antiphysis” that had infected it. In Rabelais the
polemical task is fused with a more affirmative one: the re-creation of a spatially
and temporally adequate world able to provide a new chronotope for a new,
whole and harmonious man, and for new forms of human communication.24

Here again we see in no uncertain terms an early sounding of what will stand as a
central theme for the likes of Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling, whose co-authored
“Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism” takes up the Rabelaisian
critique and reignites the mission to re-unite wonderment and science. Long before
Goethe alerted these young thinkers to the necessity and possibility of a new philos-
ophy, Rabelais re-opens the pre-Socratic life-world, wherein “antiphysis” had not
yet taken hold of what Bakhtin calls the “forms of human communication.” As
Bakhtin explains,

This fusion of the polemical and the affirmative tasks—the tasks of purging and
restoring the authentic world and the authentic man—is what determines the dis-
tinctive features of Rabelais’s artistic method, the idiosyncrasies of his fantastic
realism. The essence of this method consists, first of all, in the destruction of ordinary
ties, of all the habitual matrices [sosedstva] of things and ideas, and the creation
of unexpected matrices, unexpected connections, including the most surprising
logical links (“allogisms”) and linguistic connections (Rabelais’s specific etymology,
morphology, and syntax).25
 Goethe & Rabelais 59
Anticipating “The Oldest Programme,” Hegel’s Aufhebung, and of course, Nietzsche’s
transvaluation of all values, these destructive reconfigurations come together as the
main theme of Rabelais’s poeticized philosophical discourse.
Prior to Rabelais’s poetic intervention, the Platonic hierarchical divisions between
thinking and feeling, metaphysics and poesy, had become increasingly ingrained in
cultural consciousness. Eventually taken for granted as universal truth, they became the
“habitual matrices” Bakhtin so astutely thematizes. Thus Rabelais’s project means to
break the originally insidious and now automatized habit of seeing the spatio-temporal
world from the utilitarian perspective of Socratic logic. To that end, Gargantua and
Pantagruel shocks the human spirit out of its habituated mode of thought and at the
same time dramatizes spatio-temporal life from the standpoint of a poetic intuition that
reconnects things and ideas, the mind and body, philosophy and art. Bakhtin asserts,
“It is necessary to liberate all these objects and permit them to enter into free unions
that are organic to them, no matter how monstrous these unions might seem from the
point of view of ordinary traditional associations.”26 What was monstrous to Plato’s
metaphysics—what was so impure and toxic to his way of thinking, in other words—
was none other than the polyphonic and hybridized relationship between things and
ideas, logic and poetic intuition.
In order to reclaim these relations, Rabelais presents,

new matrices between objects and ideas that will answer to their real nature, to
once again line up and join together those things that had been falsely disunified
and distanced from one another—as well as to disunite those things that had been
falsely brought into proximity.27

i.e., the exclusive, self-enclosed correspondence between logic and truth.

On the basis of this new matrix of objects, a new picture of the world necessarily
opens up—a world permeated with an internal and authentic necessity. Thus, in
Rabelais, the destruction of the old picture of the world and the positive construc-
tion of a new picture are indissolubly interwoven with each other.28

What remains to be said is that the “new picture” is older than the “old picture,” insofar
as the “new” one is copied from the likes of Heraclitus, while the “old” one replicates the
mind of Socrates, the picture of pure logic.
Rabelais dramatizes this appropriated way of seeing and being in the world by
means of grouping together the “specific characteristics” of daily human life and rep-
resenting them in a “series” of episodic dramatizations. According to Bakhtin, these
include, “(1) the human body, in its anatomical and physiological aspects; (2) human
clothing series; (3) food series; (4) drink and drunkenness series; (5) sexual series
(copulation); (6) death series; (7) defecation series.”29 The real, corporal human body
replaces the ideal, symbolic one. In short, Rabelais creates a life-world in direct con-
tradiction of the world according to metaphysics.30 With these dramatic scenarios
Rabelais sets out to destroy and replace the Socratic picture of the world, the world-
view taken for granted not only in its “official” language and its matter of fact ways
of taking in the world as a matter of calculation and measure.
By no means is Rabelais proposing the conquest of Apollonian modes of thought
and the triumph of Dionysian sensibility and sensuality. Rather, again anticipating
60 The Artist-Philosopher
Nietzsche and before him Goethe and the authors of “The Oldest Programme,” Rabelais
is attempting a reintegration and a re-assimilation of the two polarized strains of percep-
tual experience. His purpose is not to obviate reason, but “to return both a language and
a meaning to the body, return it to the idealized quality it had in ancient [anti-Socratic]
times, and simultaneously return a reality, a materiality, to language and to meaning.”31
It is no surprise, then, that allusions to Dionysius run through the entirety of Rabelais’s
text. Indeed, to associate Rabelais’s exuberant dramatization of bawdy jokes, drunken
carousing, lewd and licentious sensuality with Dionysius and his flaunting of Apollonian
symmetry and order, is merely to call attention to an obvious and nonetheless important
aspect of Rabelais’s narrative structure, which is essentially allegorical.
Thus Gargantua springs from his mother’s ear, just as Dionysius is born through the
thigh of Zeus. As Bakhtin points out, “[t]he very names of Rabelais’s major protago-
nists derive etymologically from the drink series: Grandgousier (Gargantua’s father) is
‘Great Gulp’. Gargantua is born into the world with a terrible cry on his lips: ‘Drink!
Drink! Drink!’” Following the pattern, “Rabelais likewise etymologically interprets the
name ‘Pantagruel’ as ‘he who is always thirsty.’”32 For that matter, “Even the birth of
the major protagonists takes place under the sign of eating and drunkenness. Gargantua
is born on a day of great feasting and drinking arranged by his father—thus it is that
his mother overeats tripe. The newborn infant is immediately ‘wined.’”33 As if to leave
no doubt as to Gargantua’s Dionysian lineage, “his genealogy is found among the
symbols of drunkenness: it is uncovered in a crypt, amid nine wine flasks under a gob-
let on which is inscribed ‘Hic bibitur.’”34 And “the fundamental motif of thirst under
whose aegis Pantagruel is born—the ‘King of the Thirsty’”35 only serves to underscore
the constant allusions to Rabelais’s overarching theme of the Dionysian bacchanal as
a physiological discourse to be reinserted into the aristocratic and religious climate of
“antiphysis” that dominated the more or less Apollonian cultural consciousness of the
epoch.
These overarching Dionysian themes convey a larger significance than debauchery
for its own sake. “Rabelais by no means advocates crude gluttony and drunkenness. But
he does affirm the lofty importance of eating and drinking in human life, and strives to
justify them ideologically, to make them respectable, to erect a culture for them. The
Socratic, essentially ascetic world view had deprived them of affirmative value, had
taken them as nothing more than a sad necessity of the sinful flesh; such a world view
knew only one formula for making such processes respectable, and that was the fast—a
negative form, hostile to their nature, dictated not by love but by enmity.”36 Likewise,
the Dionysian celebration of the sensual body, especially in its antithetical relation to
the cerebral and logical pursuits of Apollonian antiphysis, centers largely on sexual
pleasure, not lust. As Bakhtin notes, Rabelais’s representation of sex,

appears in a wide variety of forms: from sheer obscenity to subtly coded ambigu-
ity, from the bawdy joke and anecdote to medical and naturalistic discourses on
sexual potency, male semen, sexual reproductive processes, marriage and the sig-
nificance of the origin of the genders.37

Ultimately, through these depictions Rabelais wants to establish a new spatio-temporal

worldview by reintegrating the sensual, Dionysian body with the rational, Apollonian
mind in what Bakhtin describes as the “Rabelaisian ideal of a whole and harmoniously
developed physical and spiritual human being.”38 Thus, for example, “The sexual series
 Goethe & Rabelais 61
functions [. . .] to destroy the established hierarchy of values via the creation of new matri-
ces of words, objects, and phenomena.”39 This “hierarchy of values” is first established
when Plato bifurcates Dionysian agricultural time and Apollonian mathematical
time—Aristotle’s “now” time.
Sensual pleasure, sexual love, once a shameless actualization of organic, regenera-
tive fertility, is now subordinated to love of knowledge and sent away in secrecy,
degraded as an abject bodily function that corrupts the purity of mind and soul. At this
historically significant moment, “[a]ll that has already been severed and disunified in
life itself is now reflected in ideology.”40 Thus, for example, the suppression of sensual
pleasure goes hand in hand with the suppression of Dionysian consciousness. In Bakh-
tin’s view, “sexuality (the sexual act, sexual organs, and defecation as something con-
nected with the sexual organs) in its realistic and straightforward aspect is almost
completely driven out of the official genres and out of official discourse of the ruling
social groups. In its sublimated form, love, the sexual element of the complex enters the
higher genres.”41 This development, as we have seen, is substantially advanced in The
Symposium, most obviously in Diotoma’s fable on love, in which sexual reproduction
is recognized as a necessary but debased kind of love and wherein ideal love, the love
of knowledge and wisdom, supercedes physical love as the medium of noble existence.
Moreover,

the imminent unity of time disintegrated, when individual life-sequences were sep-
arated out, lives in which the gross realities of communal life had become merely
petty private matters; when collective labor and the struggle with nature had
ceased to be the only arena of man’s encounter with nature and the world—then
nature itself ceased to be a living participant in the events of life. Then nature
became, by and large, a “setting for action”, its backdrop; it was turned into a
landscape, it was fragmented into metaphors and comparisons serving to subli-
mate individual and private affairs and adventures not connected in any real or
intrinsic way with nature itself.42

Here again we come back to Plato’s Symposium, which stands a far cry from the
Homeric epic and its richly detailed descriptions of farming, pastoral life, and the
Odyssian struggle against nature. The Homeric pre-Socratic social life and natural
world is the world Rabelais recovers and allegorically re-opens in Gargantua and
Pantagruel. Precisely insofar as it is grounded in the “imminent unity of folkloric
time,” Rabelais’s novel, according to Bakhtin,

achieves a penetration of historical time that is in its own way unique and pro-
found, but nevertheless localized and limited. Individual life sequences are present
in the epic as mere bas-reliefs on the all-embracing, powerful foundation of collec-
tive life. Individuums are representatives of the social whole, events of their lives
coincide with the life of the events of the life of the social whole, and the signifi-
cance of such events (on the individual as well as on the social plane) is identical.
Internal form fuses with external: man is all on the surface. There are no petty
private matters [the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon, for instance is
petty but hardly private], no common everyday life: all the details of life—food,
drink, objects of everyday domestic use—are comparable to the major events of
life; it is all equally important and significant.43
62 The Artist-Philosopher
Indeed, Rabelais is reconstituting the collective consciousness and natural time/space
in which Achilles and Agamemnon lived. Gargantua and Pantagruel in fact allegorizes
the underground war between the Homeric and Socratic worlds and ends with a dif-
ferent outcome than the one effectuated in Plato’s supposed victory over myth, the
victory of logic in its war against poetry.
In this regard Rabelais is one of the earliest thinkers to understand that time—natural
time, the time of collective consciousness and of life lived solely from inside social
relations—had slipped away and was slowly replaced by the isolated, aloof, alienated
temporal existence of the solitary tactician, the Apollonian modern subject. While
Apollonian consciousness had become the dominant mode of post-Socratic Greek
thought and Greek consciousness, now it dominated the social and natural world in all
its aspects. Life in Rabelais’s world was fast becoming a spatio-temporal abstraction.
Natural life—the life intrinsic to the organic life-world, in which individual human
beings lived as part of a larger social whole and the social whole lived as part of a
larger natural and spiritual world—had given way to the supremacy of Socratic logic.
It hardly needs repeating that these developments were driven by the gathering
momentum of technology, or more to the point, by the tightening grasp of the essence
of technology that was relentlessly rendering life ever more reducible to calculation
and measure.
For Rabelais, we want to bear in mind, the individuum stands out as the most dis-
turbing symptom of the rise of Socratism as the hegemonic mode of Western thought,
precisely insofar as it marks the fragmentation and dissolution of social life. As Bakhtin
points out,

for Gargantua (Rabelais), it is not at all important to immortalize one’s own “I,”
one’s self as a biological specimen, one’s own selfhood, whatever values may
attach to it: what matters to him is the “immortalizing” (or more precisely, the
further growth) of his best desires and strivings.44

For Rabelais the point of life is not the individual, but the community and social life
as a whole. “Rabelais connects the growth of generations with the growth of culture,
and with the growth of the historical development of mankind as well.”45 These are
the natural, anti-Socratic spatio-temporal dynamics that Rabelais wants to re-establish
as the formal underpinnings of a new mode of consciousness.
Following Rabelais, it is precisely this organic spatio-temporal life-world that Goethe
and Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel, not to mention Nietzsche, set out to re-actualize
as modern life. As Bakhtin suggests, the relentless rise of the individual that Rabelais
tries to repulse becomes

particularly acute in the eighteenth century in Germany. The problem of a personal

individual perfection and “becoming” of a man, of the perfection (and growth) of
the human race, of earthly immortality, of the education [vospitanie] of the human
race, of rejuvenating culture through the youth of a new generation—all these
problems will arise in conjunction with each other.46

It is none other than Goethe who will be first among eighteenth-century thinkers to
respond to this conjunction—especially as it is driven by the ever more self-inured
individual—most notably, as we have seen, in Wilhelm Meister. But again, the alienating
 Goethe & Rabelais 63
relationship between technological thinking and individuation begins much, much
earlier, with the capitulation of pre-Socratic consciousness and the advent of Socratic
thought, and Rabelais sounds the alarm long before these later thinkers start to take
notice of industrialization’s manifest consequences.
Bakhtin writes,

In the process of destroying the traditional matrices of objects, phenomena, ideas

and words, Rabelais puts together new and more authentic matrices and links that
correspond to “nature” and that link up all aspects of the world by means of the
most marvelous grotesque and fantastic images and combinations of images.47

Reconnecting the inter-relations that had been disconnected in Plato’s division of

myth and science, “Rabelais brings about a restoration of the most ancient object-
associations.”48 These ancient associations bear all the markings of Dionysius:

The direct association of eating, drinking, death, copulation, laughter (the clown)
in one image, in one motif or plot is the exterior index of this current of literary
thematics. The elements themselves that make up the whole image, motif or plot—
as well as the artistic and ideological functions of the entire matrix taken as a
whole at various stages of development—both change drastically. Beneath this
matrix, which serves as the exterior index, there is hidden a specific form for expe-
riencing time and a specific relationship between time and the spatial world, that
is, there is hidden a specific chronotope.49

This is to say, again, that the poeticized time and space that defined the pre-Socratic
world had been covered over, buried underneath the new philosophical discourse
called metaphysics, whereby time and space become logical abstractions.
Rabelais’s philosophical project amounts, then, to nothing short of an attempt to do
away with the Socratic chronotope, predicated as it is on what Bakhtin calls antiphysis
and what we have been variously calling Apollonian consciousness, Socratic thinking,
the essence of technology, and more generally, Western metaphysics. In this respect,

A new chronotope was needed that would permit one to link real life (history) to the
real earth. It was necessary to oppose the eschatology through a creative and gener-
ative time, a time measured by creative acts, by growth and not by destruction.50

Here it bears repeating that Rabelais’s new chronotope is hardly original; rather, it
marks a new beginning, a re-surfacing and re-appearance of the long repressed pre-
Socratic consciousness, a chronotopological world of fertility, growth, spontaneous
creativity—a world wherein can be seen the real, living god who meanders across real
mountain valleys and meadows, his cult of maenads following in his train as they
arrive at the village clearing to commence the ritual celebration of a Dionysian holiday.
In a very real sense, Dionysian time/space, therefore, “is collective, that is, it is dif-
ferentiated and measured only by events of collective life; everything that exists in this
time exists solely for the collective.”51 This archaic moment precedes the ancient age of
Socrates and Plato, even if its mythology overlaps with their life spans and in its sedi-
mentary form was still powerful enough for Plato to see as one of the few remaining
obstacles standing in the way of a purely logical state consciousness. What Bakhtin
64 The Artist-Philosopher
labels “the time of the collective” constitutes the horizon of being that existed before
the essence of technology reconstituted consciousness as alienated subjectivity, for
which time becomes the instrument and standard measure of material as opposed to
natural production. In contrast, in this collective time, “the passage of time marks not
only quantitative but also qualitative growth—a movement toward flowering and
ripening.”52 This latter temporal process unfolds in the custody of Dionysus, god of
fertility and reproduction. Thus, “[g]enerative time is a pregnant time, a fruit-bearing
time, a birthing time and a time that conceives again.”53 It is the spatio-temporal form
that precedes the logical abstraction of time and space. To re-animate the spatio-
temporal form that precedes the logical abstraction of time and space, Rabelais means
to break open crystalized, mathematized consciousness and reinfuse human thought
with a newly re-hybridized way of perceiving the world and being in time. To be sure,
agricultural, collective time will not be reborn through the return of the agricultural
collective as it existed in the heyday of Dionysius; neither Rabelais nor Bakhtin harbor
any such illusions. But if thinking could be wrested from metaphysics and re-hybridized
with art, a new way of perceiving time and space and being in the world could be
constituted in the creative imagination of a re-poeticized human consciousness.
We can trace Rabelais’s effect on the subsequent development of the novel as it
moves toward such an enterprise. Bakhtin writes:

In the novels of the Rousseauan type, the major protagonists are the author’s
contemporaries, people who had already succeeded in isolating individual life-
sequences, people with an interior perspective. They heal themselves through con-
tact with nature and the life of simple people, learning from their wisdom to deal
with life and death; or they go outside the boundaries of culture altogether, in an
attempt to utterly immerse themselves in the wholeness of the primitive collective
(as Rene does in Chateaubriand, and Olenin in Tolstoy).54

In a word, to the extent that the novel can be seen as resisting its own formal tendencies
toward the valorization of private life, that resistance stems from Rabelais. As Bakhtin
goes on to say,

This line of development, which began with Rousseau, proved to be highly pro-
gressive. It succeeded in avoiding the limitations of provincial forms. In it there is
no doomed attempt to preserve the dying remnants of little patriarchal (provin-
cial) worlds (which had been, moreover, idealized)—on the contrary, the Rous-
seauan line of development, by sublimating in philosophical terms the ancient
sense of the whole, makes of it an ideal for criticizing the current state of society.
In the majority of cases this critique is two-pronged: it is directed against feudal
hierarchy, against inequality and absolutism, against the false arbitrariness of soci-
ety (conventionality); but it is directed as well against the anarchy of greed and
against the isolated, egoistic bourgeois individuum.55

Thus “the novels of the Rousseauan type” are smuggled into the essentially “egoistic
bourgeois” novel form through the artist-philosopher’s philosophico-poetic discourses—
through, that is, poiesis.
Bakhtin closes his discussion of the chronotope with a word about “the boundaries
of chronotopic analysis.”56 He says,
 Goethe & Rabelais 65
Science, art and literature also involve semantic elements that are not subject to
temporal and spatial determinations. Of such a sort, for instance, are all mathemati-
cal concepts: we make use of them for measuring spatial and temporal phenomena
but they themselves have no intrinsic spatial and temporal determinations; they
are the object of our abstract cognition. They are an abstract and conceptual con-
figuration indispensable for the formalization of strict scientific study of many
concrete phenomena. But meanings exist not only in abstract cognition, they exist
in artistic thought as well. These artistic meanings are likewise not subject to tem-
poral and spatial determinations. We somehow manage however to endow all
phenomena with meaning, that is, we incorporate them not only into the sphere
of spatial and temporal existence [what Kant calls form] but also into a semantic
sphere. This process of assigning meaning also involves some assigning of value.
But the question concerning the form that existence assumes in this sphere, and
the nature and form of the evaluations that give sense to existence, are purely
philosophical (although not, of course, metaphysical) and we will not engage
them here.57

In these assertions Bakhtin clarifies the typically blurred and far too frequently obfus-
cated distinction between metaphysics in particular and philosophy in general. From
this vantage point we see all the more lucidly that Rabelais not only produces in his art
a kind of philosophy, but that in fact he is making, by way of poiesis, a New Philosophy.
This way of thinking, of being in the world, as we have seen, is taken up by Goethe,
migrates into Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin, the latter of whom gives New Philoso-
phy its name, which then passes on to Nietzsche, then to the likes of Degas, Manet,
and Cézanne; and from these painters it passes on to Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and
the later Heidegger; and through him to Derrida, Lacan, Wittig, Cixous, Irigaray, the
later Kristeva, and our current hyper-Nietzschean, Žižek; and to Vito Acconci, Nam
June Paik, and Alfredo Jaar, as well as Carolee Schneemann, Mary Kelly, Cindy
Sherman, and the feminist postmodernists; and then, more recently, to Fred Wilson,
William Pope.L, Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, Mark Bradford, and Hank Willis
Thomas. While the former-named are generally concerned with deconstructing the
bourgeois patriarchal subject and thus ground much of their thinking and making in
the problem of Oedipal perception, these latter-named are preeminently concerned
with the recuperation of collective cultural consciousness and are in one way or
another in dialogue with David Driskell and Deborah Willis, and, if to a lesser extent,
Cornel West—whose own performativity, like Žižek’s, can be easily likened to that of
Nietzsche.

Notes

Chapter 2, Section I: Goethe’s Freud

1 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, trans. H. M. Waidson (London: Alma Classics.
2013), 250.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 251.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 273.
66 The Artist-Philosopher
7 Ibid.
8 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic
Books, 2010), 282.
9 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, 399.
10 Ibid., 399–400.
11 Ibid., 400.
12 Ibid., 400–01.
13 Ibid., 401.
14 Ibid., 416.
15 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 571.
16 Sigmund Freud, in An Autobiographical Study, Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey, ed.
Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952), 59.
17 Alan A. Stone, M.D., “Where Will Psychoanalysis Survive?” Harvard Magazine (keynote
address, American Academy of Psychoanalysis, December 9, 1995), 2, https://harvardmagazine.
com/1997/jf97/original.html.
18 Ibid., 3.
19 Ibid., 4.
20 Ibid., 8.
21 We have already seen the threads of Goethe’s nuanced and nonetheless powerful Dionysian
theme weaving through Hölderlin and Hegel, and then all the more emphatically in
Nietzsche. It remains for us to note that the Dionysian is no less a theme in Freud. For
Nietzsche the problem of modern civilization and its discontents resulted from the fact that
man had extinguished the Dionysian aspect of human consciousness and eliminated it from
human affairs. For Freud the problem was to more firmly hold the Dionysian instincts in
check, especially the incestuous, and this control could only be maintained through the
supremacy of Apollonian modes of thought.

Chapter 2, Section II: Bakhtin’s Rabelais

22 M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time in the Chronotope of the Dialogic Imagination,” in The
Dialogic Imagination, ed., Michael Holquist, trans. Carol Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 167.
23 Ibid., 167–68.
24 Ibid., 168.
25 Ibid., 169.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid. In this respect, Bakhtin continues, “Rabelais presents the human body, all its parts and
members, all its organs and functions, in their anatomical, physiological and Naturalphilosophe
aspects alone . . . . This idiosyncratic artistic presentation of the human body is a key stylistic
element in the Rabelaisian novel. It is important to demonstrate the whole remarkable com-
plexity and depth of the human body and its life, to uncover a new meaning, a new place for
human corporality in the real spatial-temporal world. In the process of accommodating this
concrete human corporality, the entire remaining world also takes on new meaning and con-
crete reality, a new materiality; it enters into a contact with human beings that is no longer
symbolic but material.” M. M. Bakhtin, ” Forms of Time in the Chronotope of the Dialogic
Imagination,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed., Michael Holquist, trans. Carol Emerson and
Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 170.
30 Ibid. “The new picture of the world is polemically opposed to the medieval world, in whose
ideology the human body is perceived solely under the sign of decay and strife, where in real-
life practice, there reigned a crude and dirty physical licentiousness. The reigning ideology
served neither to enlighten nor make sense out of the life of the body, rather it rejected such
life; therefore, denied both words and sense, the life of the body could only be licentious,
crude, dirty and self-destructive. Between the word and the body there was an immeasurable
abyss.” Bakhtin, “Forms of Time in the Chronotope of the Dialogic Imagination,” 171.
31 Ibid.
 Goethe & Rabelais 67
32 Ibid., 178.
33 Ibid., 178–79.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 179.
36 Ibid., 185.
37 Ibid., 190.
38 Ibid., 186.
39 Ibid., 192.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 217.
43 Ibid., 218.
44 Ibid., 203–04.
45 Ibid., 204.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 205–06.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 207.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 231.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 257.
57 Ibid., 257–58.
3 Sherman & Cézanne

Section I: Sherman’s Wolf Man

As much as any other feminist postmodern artist, Cindy Sherman brings into contem-
porary focus the themes we have touched on in Goethe and in the Rabelaisian novel.
This is most obviously the case as regards Sherman’s representation of abjection, the
Rabelaisian theme par excellence. Indeed, abjection might be said to define the essence
of Sherman’s style—not least in the vomit that congeals and dries in the wrinkles of a
beach towel laden with the signs of modern culture—artifacts mirror-reflected in the
lenses of a pair of Hollywood-style sunglasses lying among the folds. More typically,
though, Sherman depicts abjection in her sex-themed dolls, monstrosities she com-
poses out of prostheses.
The machine-clean plasticity of Sherman’s uncanny and hyper-sexualized prosthetic
body desterilizes the purity of Kantian form even as it ironically dissolves into Sherman’s
content, which always gives image to the abjections of the human mind and body, the
shared boundaries of which are never clean, never certain, never secure. But this abjection
is not to be taken in the terms of lurid sex and its fluid jouissance; it is abjection as it lives
in the macabre world of the Oedipal unconscious and rises to the manufactured skin-
surface of the prosthetic body. In this respect Sherman’s Oedipal and uncanny prosthetic
materiality shows a savvy understanding of Kristeva’s abjection as a dialogical blending
of Bakhtin and the Lacanian unconscious. As regards this latter point, her works state in
no uncertain terms that the unconscious is indeed structured like a language; but as
Sherman shows, this language is itself abject; it is expressed as hybridized discourse
through the mix of word and image—visually and hyper-symbolically. With shocking
impact, her dramatization of the Lacanian unconscious barges through the conventional
concept of language as defined in the strict terms of the linguistic utterance, leaving word
and image, narrative and picture, time and space psychically jumbled and interfused.
In all of this, it goes without saying, Sherman challenges the categorical non-relation
between sex and pure form that predicates the essence of aesthetic disinterestedness.
Already in this latter respect we have noted the intertextual links between Kant’s Third
Critique and Plato’s metaphysics, and it is fair to say that in intervening against this
trans-historical alliance, Sherman’s deconstructive philosophico-aesthetic cuts across
the entire history of Western metaphysics. If only because Sherman is so rarely thought
of in these terms—as an artist-philosopher—we should develop this point further and
more carefully.
For starters, let us remind ourselves that Socrates allows for only two kinds of harmony,
the Dorian and the Phrygian, and thus, he says, “we will have no need for multi-stringed
70 The Artist-Philosopher
or poly-harmonic instruments to accompany our odes and songs.”1 Such modes of artistic
expression are not singular, not of pure of form, but are indeed abject because they are
multi-stringed and therefore poly-harmonic, and they are dangerous because they incite
the mixing up of passion and logic. And yet, if art is the expression of beauty, and beauty
gives rise to pleasure, one might deduce a relation between beauty and sexual pleasure.
After all, as Socrates admits, there is no “pleasure that is greater or keener than sexual
pleasure.”2 True enough, Socrates asks, but “isn’t the right sort of passion a naturally
moderate and musically educated passion for order and beauty?”3 In which case it fol-
lows that “sexual pleasure must not be involved, must it, and the lover and the boy who
passionately love and are loved in the right way must have no share in it.”4 The erotic
must have no share, that is to say, in the “passion and order of beauty,” nor in the judgment
of taste. Otherwise, such an individual who indulges in sensual confusion of the kind
“will be reproached as untrained in music, and as lacking in appreciation for beautiful
things.”5
By the same token, Apollo, as we know, stands opposite Dionysius, his infamous
half-brother, the hyper-sensual god of wine and fertility. The one is pure and singular,
the other masked (duplicitous) and corrupt (abject). As if she is looking directly at the
Socratic-Apollonian ideal, Sherman dons the Dionysian mask and plays a duplicitous
role in her self-representation as other, usually with sexual connotations pointing
toward the Oedipal and the abject. All of which is to suggest that Sherman’s visual
dramatization of abjection in sexual terms is always intertextually and polyphonically
engaged in the discourse of philosophy, a discourse that she understands precisely in
the terms that Goethe does—from the standpoint of the artist-philosopher. And again,
like Goethe, as well as Rabelais, her argument is with Western metaphysics, espe-
cially as advanced in the Socratic doctrines of beauty and further advanced in Kantian
aesthetics.
What has yet to be discerned in Sherman’s work, however, is its psycho-temporal
core. This too can be traced back to Rabelais and to Bakhtin’s notion of the chrono-
tope, and then more immediately to Goethe, and through him to Freud, Derrida, and
Lacan. This is particularly true of the way Sherman deconstructs the self-certain, sov-
ereign subject, especially as regards portraiture. Insofar as the portrait is one of the
most direct artistic modes of representing the self-certain subject, the self-portrait
stands as the essential aesthetic representation of Cartesian subjectivity. This psycho-
aesthetic concept Sherman is intent on up-ending, mostly by representing herself in self-
portraiture as a masked persona. On this score, Sherman says that in fact she doesn’t
do self-portraits, that she tries to get as far away from herself as she can when she uses
herself in photographic images such as the film stills. At the same time, however, she
recognizes that quite possibly “it’s by doing so that I create a self-portrait, doing these
totally crazy things with these characters.”6 In seeing her own identity disappearing
into the reflected image of a persona, Sherman brings us to the Wolf Man’s inverted
subjectivity via his “self-portrait” as reflected in the mirror image of his parents’ primal
gaze. In doing so, she is dramatizing mnemonic trauma.
Indeed, Sherman’s dramatization of trauma as a mnemonic event that originates in
the primal scene brings us to what we have already referred to as the very core of her
aesthetic. Elizabeth Bronfen notes that Sherman “stages her memories of media images
and personal fantasy images, and at the same time seeks to trigger memories and fan-
tasies in her viewers by performing her very specific understanding of this culturally
given image repertoire.”7 Which raises Bronfen’s question,
 Sherman & Cézanne 71
Can we as spectators discern an intact subject behind the performance and in
addition, can we recognize in these non-self-portraits a woman who is radically
other than ourselves? Or are we, as Sherman at least suggests, primarily expecting
to find our own self-image mirrored in the representation of the Other?8

In turn Sherman insists that she’s “trying to make other people recognize something of
themselves rather than me.”9 Again, this mnemonic function depends on the hybridized
relation between word and image. As Bronfen argues, “[I]n order to become meaningful,
each image requires an interpretive story, regardless whether in the process the series of
stills is supplemented by a narrative, or whether it is reshaped into our own fantasy
scene.”10 Moreover, Sherman’s hybridized image-text results in a Lacanian mirror reflec-
tion. Hence, as Craig Owens puts it, “Sherman’s photographs themselves function as
mirror-masks that reflect back at the viewer his own desire (and the spectator posited by
this work is invariably male)—specifically, the masculine desire to fix the woman in a
stable and stabilizing identity.”11 In Sherman’s reversal or inversion of phallic desire, we
see a shattering of the male viewer’s self-certain, self-contained, Cartesian subjectivity.
Bronfen locates the psychoanalytic source of Sherman’s representation of memory
in Freud’s understanding of hysteria, which, according to Bronfen, “involves the suf-
fering from memory traces of a psychic trauma, whose origin is either unknown to the
person affected, or which he or she has repressed.”12 This suffering explains why Sher-
man “stages the body in relation to a past trauma, to retained memory traces, whose
vanishing point is death.”13 Here of course, Bronfen situates her analysis of Sherman’s
traumatic repressed within the discourse of Freud’s work with Charcot at Salpêtrière.
“If the classic hysteric who suffers from non-abreacted reminiscences, finds herself
subject to belated memory traces whose origins are unknown to her,” Bronfen argues,
“Sherman provokes both in herself and in her viewers the analogous effect of being
confronted with free floating and overdetermined memory traces.”14 And yet, while
Bronfen locates that dynamic within Freud’s concept of hysteria, it is also true that
Sherman is dramatizing Nachträglichkeit.
In his theory of the unconscious, as we have seen, Freud locates the constitution and
reconstitution of an ever-changing, ever-becoming “split” subjectivity. Because this dis-
covery shatters the long-established Cartesian subject as a totalized, self-certain, self-
contained, sovereign individual, it marks a major event in the history of philosophy
and psychoanalytic theory. Goethe has shown us early variations on the Wolf Man’s
primal theme in the inversion of Wilhelm’s Hamlet identity and, more acutely, in
Mignon’s discovery that she is not only the would-be seductress of her father-figure
but in fact the witness to her rival’s coitus with him. And it is equally true that prior to
Freud’s analysis of the Wolf Man artists and writers such as Manet and Henry James
had also dramatized deferred action. But as Owens suggests, with Sherman something
even more extraordinary happens in the history of psychoanalytic aesthetic represen-
tation: her non-self-portraits not only dramatize deferred action, but also incite the
traumatic experience of deferred action in the viewer-subject. In other words, when
the male viewer comes upon Sherman’s image, the shock of the horrific representation
of castration reverses his subject position, from phallic power to fear of castration, and
incites in his unconscious the same deferred action and traumatic return to the primal
scene and an ensuing resubjectification as that experienced by the Wolf Man.
Here we should note that there are two fundamental viewer positions in Sherman’s
image: that of the male viewer who undergoes deferred action as caused by traumatic
72 The Artist-Philosopher
visual experience and that of the female viewer who “witnesses” the drama as it
unfolds in the male viewer’s unconscious. Once again, but in a different way, we see a
reversal of subject positions. While in the traditional nude, the eroticized female body
is there to be looked at by the male viewer, now in Sherman’s work the traumatized
male psyche is there to be looked at by the female viewer, although the terms male and
female as Sherman applies them are identity positions and not necessarily heterosexual
ones. In any case, the female viewer position functions here as Lacan’s fantasized gaze.
We can illustrate these latter comments by way of an untitled piece from 1992, in
which a human-sized doll is laid out on a pile of fetishistic brunette wigs. Prosthetic female
breasts and a pregnant belly are propped up on legs chopped off at the upper thighs,
exposing a splayed vagina, from which protrudes the fetish in what looks like a pair of
sausage links—the phallus cut in two and re-tied together. Meanwhile, the androgynous
face of a wrinkled geriatric glares back at the viewer, and in that gaze the subject-viewer
sees reflected his newly constituted subject position (see Figure 3.1). Constructed of pros-
thetics, Sherman’s doll is, in other words, an acutely overdetermined spectacle of cas-
tration. Ordinarily, the fetish defends against castration trauma and thereby prevents
a return to the primal scene. But literally “disembodied and dismembered,” Sherman’s
castrated phallus refuses fetishization. The fetish-function is thereby short-circuited;
the un-neutralized image of castration reawakens the primal memories buried in the
unconscious, and the traumatized subject-viewer is returned to the primal scene. This
dramatizes the traumatic psycho-mnemonic event that Freud calls Nachträglichkeit,
or deferred action. In the return to the primal scene, the subject understands the traumatic
experience in a new light, verifies the meconnassiance of his/her previous return to
the primal scene, and resubjectifies himself/herself accordingly. This resubjectification
reoccurs with each new instance of Nachträglichkeit, which is to say that subjectivity
is not the Kantian a priori but is instead a process of ever-becoming resubjectification.
To take another example, Sherman reconstructs Manet’s Olympia by way of prosthetic
breasts, legs, and an oversized protruding vagina. Yet again pushing abjection into the
feminist sublime, she has replaced the fetishized black shoelace Olympia wears around
her neck (and on which depends a single white pearl) with a leather Sado-Masochistic
black mask—Sherman’s eyes peering out from behind the fetishized mask, repeating the
piercing look that Olympia fixes on the john at the threshold of her boudoir door. The
image as Sherman reproduces it as a postmodernist copy has an even more horrific effect
on the male viewer than does Manet’s original. And like the original, there is no way for
the viewer to deal with the shocking and hyper-overdetermined image of castration, and
with the fetishistic register destabilized and short-circuited, the viewer’s return to the
primal scene ensues (see Figure 3.2).
Similarly, according to Jeanne Siegel, Sherman’s “toy penises [. . .] reference [. . .] the
pervasive macho-dom in ‘high art’” (i.e., modernist/formalist art, especially Abstract
Expressionism). Sherman wants

people to look at my work and use what they’re seeing to help themselves to either
see or recognize something they realize is really stupid, like, ‘See, I’m sort of like
that and I shouldn’t be,’ or ‘Why am I attracted to that? It’s really ugly.’15

In these deliberately un-theoretical terms, Sherman is in fact describing resubjectification

that takes place in consequence of the viewer’s shock, again with the (male) viewer
engaged in his own Oedipal story as it unfolds through the process of Nachträglichkeit.
 Sherman & Cézanne 73
In situations such as these, Bronfen asserts, Sherman “force[s] us to invent narratives
for her images,” which she is able to do because “[l]ike her, we are possessed by memory
traces that have no clear origin.”16
Thus, Sherman’s female body is virtually (de)constructed as parody, as a way of
“mocking traditional centerfolds.” The idea, according to Bronfen, is “to make the
viewers embarrassed or disappointed in themselves for having certain expectations
upon realizing that they had invaded a poignant or critically personal moment.”17
Frequently there is a lag before the portrayed sexual body is suddenly perceived as
plastic fake, and here again occurs the bait and switch shock to the viewer: “So,” Sherman
says, “it’s kind of a slap in the face to those who would get off on nudity to think that
[they] would have to stoop to that.”18 The shock disorients the gaze and destabilizes the
defense mechanisms, i.e., fetish and voyeurism, making the subject all the more suscep-
tible to the Nachträglichkeit triggered by the breakdown of the fetishistic mechanism.
Sherman repeats this primal drama many times over, perhaps most parodically
within the theatrical space of the uterus. In her hilariously horrific dramatization of
vagina dentata, rows of dirty teeth threaten disembodied eyeballs as they peer at uterus
membrane in the ultimate endoscopic penetration of the Emersonian gaze. But again,
our larger point cannot be over-stressed: while Freud, Derrida, and Lacan theorize
deferred action in psycho-philosophical terms as the constitution of post-Kantian sub-
jectivity, and while artists such as Goethe, Manet, and James dramatize deferred action
as an aesthetically mediated representation of psychic experience, Sherman’s shocking
and unmediated dramatization of deferred action is staged and experientially acti-
vated in the traumatized viewer’s unconscious, who is thereby resubjectified in real
life. In other words, the viewer-interactive performativity of Sherman’s primal aes-
thetic stands as philosophy in action. Not only does she decisively repudiate the plea-
sure principle upon which Kant predicates the disinterested judgment of taste and by
extension his claim to pure reason as the essence of fixed subjectivity; in instigating
deferred action in the viewer’s psycho-visual field, she actualizes the psychoanalytic
event as an experience that Lacan, Derrida, and Freud merely theorize in their poeti-
cized philosophical prose. In this aesthetic experience, Sherman reverses the viewer’s
subject-position (powerful voyeur to arrested exhibitionist) and brings him to recognize
his own meconnaissance, his own colossal mistake.

Section II: Cézanne’s Merleau-Ponty

In one of several versions of a poem about Cézanne, Heidegger writes, “Is a path
revealed here, which leads to/ a belonging-together of poetry and thought?”19 This
belonging-together of poetry and thought means for Heidegger the kind of poetic
thinking that constitutes poiesis, the thinking of the artist-philosopher—the poeticized
thinking, as Hölderlin will say, of New Philosophy. Elsewhere, Heidegger suggests that
to understand thinking of this kind, we must grasp it in terms of shock. He explains,

Shock: it can best be clarified in contrast to the basic disposition of the first begin-
ning, namely wonderment . . . . To be shocked is to be taken aback, i.e., from the
familiarity of customary behavior and into the openness of the pressing forth of
what is self-concealing. In this openness, what was hitherto familiar shows itself
as what alienates and also fetters. What is most familiar, however, and therefore
most unknown, is the abandonment by being.20
74 The Artist-Philosopher
In short, to be shocked in this way is to be suddenly and violently awakened to the
bondage of calculation, to see or momentarily glimpse the “habitual matrices” that
bind us to seeing by measurement toward utility and that simultaneously blind us to
the absence of Being.
Alerted to the absence of Being by a shock of this kind, we are recalled to the fact
that Being resides in “the seeker of beyng,” “the thinker who creates,” the one who, in
other words, seeks wonderment in the belonging-together of poetry and thought.
Heidegger asks, “Yet who is able to let this basic disposition of shocked and diffident
restraint resonate in the essential human being?”21 To which he proposes another pos-
sibility: “namely, to become the one who grounds and preserves the truth of beyng, to
be the ‘there’ as the ground required by the very essence of being, or, in other words,
to care.”22 And yet, instead of thinking this way, according to Heidegger, we conduct
ratiocination. This is the thinking of calculation and measure, a kind of thinking that
is far from care, “because,” as Heidegger insists, “care is uniquely ‘for the sake of
beyng’—not of the beyng of the human being but for the being of beings as a whole.”23
It is for this larger sake, he says, that Hölderlin “calls” us to think otherwise.
Indeed, this mnemonic calling, a calling to which Hölderlin is awakened in the
myth of Mnemosyne, comes as a shock much like the one Heidegger registers when
looking at Cézanne’s pictures. Which is to say that in thinking alike, Hölderlin and
Cézanne, each in his own way, awaken Heidegger to what has been forgotten: the
absence of Being. Such a shock is to be experienced in Sophocles, too, “the seeker of
beyng” in whom Heidegger locates the advent of man’s historical consciousness, and
in whose tragedy Freud locates the psychic history of the Oedipal unconscious. Like
the mnemonic shock to which Goethe awakens us in the story of Wilhelm and
Mignon, and like Cézanne’s picture, the shock of Oedipus the King is the shock of
Nachträglichkeit.
To be shocked in this way, however, is quite other than what Heidegger has onto-
logically in mind when he speaks of Hölderlin and Cézanne, or, for that matter, of
Sophocles. For Freud’s Nachträglichkeit reveals, ontically, that the unconscious holds
the primal scene in storage—on file, as it were—in the form of a copy, “a picture,” as
Freud calls it. In effect, there is a moment in the primal scene wherein the temporal
flow of dramatic action is converted into a concretized spatial image. What the Wolf
Man sees unfolds before him in real time in the form of cinemagraphic sequence, as if
he were witness to the making of a pornographic film. And yet, like one of Sherman’s
film stills, this cinemagraphic visual narrative is repressed in his unconscious, as
“a picture.” This concretization of the primal scene, a psycho-chronotope in which
cinemagraphic or moving sequential narrative time is suddenly captured and petrified
in spatial form, does not seem to interest Freud in the least. At any rate, he never both-
ers to explain why the primal scene is repressed in the Wolf Man’s unconscious as a
picture or why it comes back in deferred action as a picture—why, in other words, it
was repressed in the unconscious as a spatial image in the first place. And yet, if the
primal scene is repressed in the unconscious as a picture, as a moving image that has
been frozen in time, doesn’t that indicate that when the child experiences the primal
scene—or more particuarly, when he or she is caught looking—the shock petrifies the
instant as a suddenly spatialized visual event? After all, that is how the image is stored
in the child’s unconscious. And, it follows, shouldn’t we assume that perceptual infor-
mation of this kind is important to the monumental task of analysis that Freud so
boldly—and in this case so self-consciously—undertakes?24
 Sherman & Cézanne 75
It would be well worth the trouble of answering this latter question simply for the sake
of psychoanalytic history. But for us there is an added inducement, insofar as the spatio/
temporal gap Freud leaves open in the Wolf Man case raises the possibility of reaching
the farther end, the onto-poetic end, of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. If this is a point
at which, by his own ever-halting doubt, Merleau-Ponty never quite arrives, that would
be partly explained, I want to suggest, by the missing pieces to the psycho-pictorial puz-
zle we will try to assemble in the following discussion of the Wolf Man case. In this case,
Freud famously settles the score with Adler and Jung by theorizing the primal scene and
deferred action, the former as subject formation and the latter as the mnemonic trauma
through which the subject is returned to the primal scene again and again. The result of
these traumas is a shattered bourgeois subject: first because resubjectification leaves us
with a reversed subject, and second because deferred action occurs repeatedly and causes
repeated, unending resubjectification, leaving us with an ever-deferred subjectium.
In other words, re-subjectification pulls the rug out from under the Kantian subject by
turning it inside out and then scattering it to the winds of reversability.
We can elaborate the idea of reversability by way of Lefort, who points out that “revers-
ibility inhabits the seer itself.” For one thing, “the gaze can detach from the subject and
turn back upon itself.”25 Goethe illustrates this fundamentally Lacanian concept when
Wilhelm Meister looks back at himself through the eyes of Hamlet, his persona. Similarly,
the Wolf Man’s dream reconfigures an earlier diagetic constellation of the primal scene in
its originary, astonishing moment. Prior to that moment, wherein he awakens in a dream
to find the wolves staring at him, the Wolf Man had, at the age one and a half, awakened
from an afternoon nap in his parents’ bedroom. Opening his eyes, he discovers his parents
copulating. According to Freud, the sudden, unexplained opening of the window in the
wolf dream stands in as a screen memory that symbolizes the Wolf Man’s eyes opening in
the moment he awakens to the primal scene. As such, the wolf dream reconfigures the
primal event in such a way that the Wolf Man looks back on the primal scene from the
detachment of his place in the dream and sees himself from an omnicient point of view,
which in this case “inhabits the seer itself.” Insofar as the Wolf Man as a boy of three is
dreaming about himself as a child of one and a half watching his parents copulate, we see
how, as Lefort puts it, “the gaze can detach from the subject and turn back upon itself.”
But Freud’s analysis of the Wolf Man’s dream does not quite add up: the Wolf Man
is clear that from the moment he opens his eyes in the primal scene he finds himself in
a voyeuristic position, while as Freud analyzes it, as the dream begins, the wolves are
staring back through the Wolf Man’s bedroom window, their eyes “riveted” on the
little boy. Here Freud misses a key link in the chain of dream events, insofar as he
jumps to the Wolf Man’s exhibitionistic situation too early in his analysis of the dream-
narrative, and thereby misses the Wolf Man’s shocking reversal. The Wolf Man’s inititial
position in the primal scene is that of the voyeur, after all, and this distinction between
voyeurism and exhibitionism is, to say the least, key to understanding the Wolf Man’s
subjectification as a matter of reversibility. We will come back to this point momentarily.
First, though, let us note that in the primal scene it is from the voyeuristic register that
the Wolf Man enters the erotic zone of visual pleasure, and from this vantage point, as
Freud puts it, “he witnessed a coitus a tergo, three times repeated; he was able to see
his mother’s genitals as well as his father’s organ; and he understood the process as
well as its significance.”26 In visceral response to the sexual stimulus, the boy passes a
stool. What transpires next concerns sound, rather than sight: surprised by the sudden
pain of the passing stool, the infant Wolf Man lets out a startled cry.
76 The Artist-Philosopher
This sudden utterance tells us that the opening of the window, for which a moment
ago we took Freud to task, does not symbolize the Wolf Man’s opening eyes as he awak-
ens to the primal scene.27 Rather, the opening window symbolizes his mother’s and
father’s eyes at the moment the Wolf Man cries out. His cry has suddenly ruptured their
ecstasy, and the shock to their senses certainly does not go unremarked: as a matter of
automatic reflex their eyes flash wide open and they turn their startled look toward the
source of the violence, the intruder/voyeur. Yes, Freud has established the fact that “[t]he
child finally interrupted his parents’ intercourse by passing a stool” and letting out a
cry.28 All well and good; but it bears repeating that the couple does not merely pause in
the midst of their lovemaking and let it go at that; they turn and look at the cause of the
interruption. In this instant, the couple is frozen still, the father upright on his knees, the
mother on all fours, both fixing their eyes on the child. The child-voyeur, also aston-
ished, has been suddenly caught, arrested in their gaze. Looking back at them, into their
wide-open eyes, he sees the mirror reflection of himself. This is precisely the configura-
tion symbolically dramatized in the Wolf Man’s dream, when he sees himself reflected in
the eyes of the white wolves (symbolizing the white-skinned naked parents) gazing back
at him through the open window. What we have in the primal scene, then (which the
dream reconfigures by way of displacement and condensation), is something of a highly
charged tableau vivant, wherein all three figures are spatially frozen in the moment
of shock. To put it differently, the primal scene has become petrified—“astonied,” as
Milton says of Adam when Eve appears apple in hand—and it is this hyper-spatialized
image that has been documented in the form of a snapshot and then “archived” in the
Wolf Man’s unconscious. Which is to say that a “photo-graph” has been repressed in the
unconcious that has been constituted for this special purpose.
This all too disregarded photographic moment marks the very point at which the
cimemagraphic temporality of the primal scene is concretized into a spatial image, a
film-still. It is the moment when time is transformed into space and the two are hybrid-
ized in reversability. We cannot be certain Lacan had precisely this moment in mind
when he coined the italicized and hyphenated term “photo-graph” that we have just
ascribed to the primal scene. Be that as it may, the ascription fits. From his parents’
point of view, reflected in their eyes, in a moment of shock, the Wolf Man sees mir-
rored back at him an exhibitionist under arrest, apprehended, photographed, and
charged with crimes against the Law of the Father. In a word, his subjectivity has been
reversed. He knew himself as an all-powerful voyeur and now he sees in his mirror
reflection the opposite: a terrified exhibitionist. In this photo-graph, which the Wolf
Man has taken of himself from a mirror image, we see a form of self-portraiture that
captures the very essence of Sherman’s masked self-portraits. It is identical to what
Hugh Silverman means by self-portraiture in the essay he writes on Merleau-Ponty
and Cézanne, which he titles “Cézanne’s Mirror Stage.”29 It is here, in other words, in
the Wolf Man’s photo-graphic proof of his own mistaken identity, the forensic evi-
dence of his own meconnaissance, reflected on the glossy surface of his parents’ eyes,
that we see the subject resubjectified and re-constituted in reversibility.
Lefort hardly stretches the point, then, when he explains reversibility in terms of
the Wolf Man case. And no doubt Merleau-Ponty also has the Wolf Man in mind when
he says,

the psychoanalyst’s hermeneutic musing, which multiplies the communications

between us and ourselves, which takes sexuality as the symbol of existence and
 Sherman & Cézanne 77
existence as the symbol of sexuality, and which looks in the past for meaning of
the future and in the future for meaning of the past, is better suited than rigorous
induction to the circular movement of our lives, where the future rests on the past,
the past on the future, where everything symbolizes everything else.30

For one thing, his remark about the relation between past and future refers precisely
to that which is determined through deferred action, the fundamental concept that
Freud derives from the Wolf Man case. For Merleau-Ponty, moreover, the temporal
looping back and forth between past and future as constituted in deferred action
circumscribes the space within which reversibility occurs, in the way in which the
Wolf Man “looks in the past for meaning of the future and in the future for meaning
of the past.”
Heidegger, as we know, was no friend to Freudian theory. And so it might come as
some surprise that the temporality of deferred action intersects more than once with
Heidegger’s ontological time. In Being and Time, Heidegger writes, for example,

In its factical Being, any Dasein is as it already was, and is “what” it already was. It
is its past, whether explicitly or not. And this is so not only in that its past is, as it
were, pushing itself along “behind” it, and that Dasein possesses what is past as a
property which is still present-at-hand and which sometimes has after-effects upon
it: Dasein “is” its past in the way of its Being, which, to put it roughly, “historicizes”
out of its future on each occasion.31

Dasein’s understanding of itself is retroactive and futural, just as the primal scene is
for the Wolf Man, who comes to a new understanding of his past and his futural pres-
ent each time he returns to the primal scene by way of deferred action. Heidegger
continues,

Whatever the way of being it may have at the time, and thus with whatever under-
standing of Being it may possess, Dasein has grown up both into and in a tradi-
tional way of interpreting itself: in terms of this it understands itself proximally
and, within a certain range, constantly. By this understanding, the possibilities of
its Being are disclosed and regulated. Its own past—and this always means the
past of its “generation”—is not something which follows along after Dasein, but
something which already goes ahead of it.32

Such temporal possibilities are also much the same as those Goethe dramatizes in his
fiction and much the same indeed as those that Sherman incites in her viewers through
the photo-graphic dramatization of Oeidpal abjection.
As we see Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger circling around Goethe and Freud, all the
while anticipating Sherman, they are also drawing nearer together as regards the onto-
logical question of time. And so perhaps it is worth mentioning that the two never
quite met in person. As it happened, Merleau-Ponty died in May 1961, just eight days
prior to his scheduled visit to Freiburg, where he and Heidegger had arranged to meet.
Not long before the meeting, Heidegger had told Arendt he didn’t know much about
Merleau-Ponty, except that he was drawing closer to Heidegger. But if anything it was
a mutual attraction toward the same idea, an idea that Goethe and Freud had already
conceptualized. In fact, in the lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology, which Heidegger
78 The Artist-Philosopher
delivered in the winter semester Freiburg in 1930, long before his scheduled meeting
with Merleau-Ponty but well after Freud had published the Wolf Man case, Heidegger’s
ontology of time had begun to veer from its original status in Being and Time and was,
I want to suggest, heading into closer proximity to Freud’s theory of deferred action
and the temporal dynamics that define that psychic reversal. With regard to Hegel’s
idea of consciousness in relation to experience, or Bildung (which Hegel derived
largely from Goethe), Heidegger writes, for example, “When consciousness undegoes
its experience of itself as knowledge of the object and thus undergoes its experience in
terms of the object, then consciousness must experience that it becomes other for
itself.”33 In this case, consciousness gains a new insight, a new truth. “Consciousness
verifies to itself what it really is, in the immediate knowledge of the object, which is
not further known. In this verification consciousness loses its initial truth, what it first
thought of itself.”34 Now time, conscious experience, becomes retroactive, according to
the relation between past and present, initial truth and later verification. In this case,
Heidegger is thematizing Hegelian consciousness, not his own ontological concept of
time. Nevertheless, there is to be discerned here a whiff of his own thinking, for now
truth as predicated on the correspondence between the object and the perception
thereof is problematized by the multiplication of the object and the retroactive verifi-
cation of the copy’s appearance against the original object. Here is not the place to
analyze the “scientific” absolute that Hegel finally arrives at through the loss of “initial
truth,” except to say by way of contrast that for Heidegger the loss of initial truth is
open-ended, rendering truth an ever-becoming poiesis that bears much in common
with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility. Later still, Heidegger will come even
closer to Merleau-Ponty’s Freudian concept when he says that “original temporal
simultaneity consists in this, that having-been and being futural, and equally originally
being-present, assert themselves within one another as the plenitude of essence, coining
themselves with one another.”35 What Heidegger is saying here could easily be applied
to deferred action and the temporality that defines its ever-changing, newly minted
resubjectifications—all of these inverted copies of what came before, each frozen in
time, spatialized as a photo-graph, and stored in the unconscious.
We can elucidate the developing proximity between Heidegger on the one side and
Merleau-Ponty’s Freudian psychoanalytics on the other by further examining the Wolf
Man’s experience. Freud has initially determined that the Wolf Man comes to a new
understanding of the primal scene when it reappears to him in the form of the wolf
dream. Then, when the Wolf Man psycho-mnemonically returns to the primal scene a
couple years later, he comes to yet another understanding of the primal scene and his
own reversibility. In this latter instance, while walking down a hallway in his parents’
Russian estate, he comes across Grusha, an old housemaid, scrubbing the floor. He sees
her from behind, and again he occupies the voyeur’s position. Watching Grusha scrub-
bing back and forth, on all fours, he sees her repeating the motion his mother made
during a tergo copulation in the repressed primal scene. Again aroused, this time the
little boy urinates on the floor, and when Grusha hears the piddle on the new-scrubbed
floor behind her, she turns and freezes her gaze on the Wolf Man. Seeing what he has
done, she threatens him with castration if ever she catches him doing anything like
that again. Once again the Wolf Man sees his subject-position violently reversed, from
powerful voyeur to arrested exhibitionist. As he experiences himself reflected in the
mirror gaze of the other, in this case, Grusha, his subjectivity (to borrow Heidegger’s
apt phrasing) “loses its initial truth, what it first thought of itself,” and he becomes
 Sherman & Cézanne 79
other for himself. Simultaneously, he is traumatized by the mnemonic return to the
primal scene, a return that has been allegorically triggered by Grusha’s back and forth
scrubbing and the shocking replay of the castration complex. With the distance of
time, however, the Wolf Man understands the primal scene altogether differently than
he did when he first experienced it at the age of one and a half, and re-experienced it
then again in the wolf dream at the age of three. Now, in the episode in the hallway at
the age of four, again, he discovers his own meconnaissance. He loses his “initial truth”
and is thereby resubjectified in reverse. And here we should note that as the Wolf Man
re-witnesses the primal scene as he originally experienced it, he is standing in that
originary moment (the primal scene) and looking forward at himself as he stands in
the present (in the hallway with Grusha) looking back at the primal scene. Henceforward,
whenever the Wolf Man comes across a visual experience that even remotely replicates
the episode with Grusha or the primal scene, he is re-traumatized and is immediately
resubjectified by the mnemonic return to the primal scene. This futural looking from
the past to the present and then from the present to the primal scene in the past con-
stitutes the experience, the unconscious Bildung, by which the Wolf Man’s multiple
subjectivities are constantly re-subjectified, constantly “coining themselves with one
another” in reverse.
These proximities between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty become all the more evident
when we consider the Wolf Man case in light of Merleau-Ponty’s essay on “Cézanne’s
Doubt.”36 As we know, in “Cézanne’s Doubt” Merleau-Ponty is commenting on Freud’s
analysis of Leonardo. But to what end? Certainly to draw a connection between
Leonardo’s psychoanalytic history and Cézanne’s, as well as to underscore the viabil-
ity of psychoanalytic theory as a philosophical discourse, especially when it comes to
the phenomenology of perception. But equally important is the question as to how the
artist is going to “depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through sponta-
neous organization.”37 To create order, the artist, as Cézanne puts it, has to “freeze
these distortions in repainting them on canvas.” It follows, according to Merleau-Ponty,
that the artist has to “stop the spontaneous movement in which they [these distortions]
pile up in perception and in which they tend toward the geometric perspective.”38 He
has to gather their dynamic relations into one fixed image, wherein the cinemagraphic
temporal flow is suddenly concretized as a spatial image. In the painter’s practice,
Merleau-Ponty continues, “[P]erspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own
right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging
order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.”39 This is for
one, sole purpose: “to recapture the structure of the [object] as an emerging organism. To
do this, all, the partial views one catches sight of must be welded together; all that the
eye’s versatility disperses must be reunited . . . . It is a process of expressing.”40 It is, in
other words, a process of representing becoming, of representing the coming into being.
What Cézanne sees, what Cézanne captures and puts to canvas, is always caught in
the throes of transmutation, a jumbled series of snapshot-like primary perceptions,
which Cézanne gathers together in the orderly uncertainty of a painting that attempts
to represent the coming into being. Unlike Hegel’s ultimate experience of consciousness
as absolute self-knowledge, however, Cézanne’s coming into being, into self-knowledge
as a knowledge of an other self newly discovered in reversibility, is repeated, coined
anew, each time he completes a painting. By the same token, each time the Wolf Man
undergoes deferred action, he is newly subjectified—newly stamped. Photographing
the mirror image of himself as he now appears from a new time/space perspective, he
80 The Artist-Philosopher
completes a new self-portrait. For Merleau-Ponty, in other words, Cézanne’s constant
attempts to make a painting “depict matter as it takes on form” and to “freeze these
distortions in repainting them on canvas” reiterates the essential structural elements of
the Wolf Man’s primal scene and his life-long re-experiences of Nachträglichkeit.
We can further elucidate these intersections between Cézanne’s frozen distortions
and the Wolf Man’s photo-graph by first reminding ourselves that Merleau-Ponty
would speak of flesh as the “prototype of being.” This ontological image links the flesh
with genesis, according to Lefort,41 and, more to the point, to “self-genesis” or, to use
Lefort’s word, “self-begetting.”42 And to follow Lefort a little further, “It does not suf-
fice to say that the human body is a body that unites us directly with things through
its own genesis. We should rather recognize that Being means coming into being.”
Moreover, “We should also admit that the doubling concerns time as much as space.”43
To these observations, Lefort adds the following from Merleau-Ponty: “It is time to
emphasize that this is reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact.”44 But
herein lies the problem, as Lefort poses it: “On another side, as we take into account
the original relation to the other, we should ask ourselves if it is possible to separate
the perceptive life from speech.”45 On this chronotopological possibility, the possible
hybridization of time and space, word and image, Lefort laments that Merleau-Ponty
put the question off in order to deal first with more pressing concerns regarding the
sentient and the sensible. Once again we see Merlau-Ponty’s tendency to hesitate, to
put off, to leave his phenomenology open at the farther end as a “coming into being.”
Nonetheless, the question concerning the sentient and the sensible prompts Lefort
to remark that Lacan’s theorization of the mirror stage represents the moment the
child locates her body in the unity of the flesh. In the unity of the flesh (language Lefort
takes from Merleau-Ponty’s ontological lexicon), Lefort recognizes that the mirror
phase is about the imminence of coming into being, the process of becoming as consti-
tuted in the primal scene. According to Lefort, though, because the enunciation of the
proper name is prior to the primal scene, the name preempts the primal scene as that
which establishes human being as such. This is an unfortunate mistake. It leaves one
tone-deaf to the Wolf Man’s cry, which in turn leaves the constitution of the logos all but
inaudible to the histories of psychoanalysis and philosophy. More immediately, it leaves
Lefort little to say but that the origin of identity is located solely in the other who
names. And for Lefort, it follows, “If we question the relation to one’s own name [. . .],
we can no longer stay within the limits of the milieu of the flesh.”46
But why not? It is Lefort, after all, who asks “if it is possible to separate the percep-
tive life from speech.” If this question is supposed to posit the reversibility of word and
flesh, for Lefort, regrettably, the answer lies elsewhere, in Freud’s deafness to the Wolf
Man’s primal speech, and in Lefort’s strange unwillingness to examine his own acute
observation that Merleau-Ponty’s “doubling concerns time as much as space,” word as
well as flesh. And much the same has to be said of Lacan. Like Freud and Lefort, he
too turns a deaf ear to the reversibility of time and space as determined in the very
bowels of the Wolf Man’s flesh. We might go so far as to say that Lacan and Lefort fall
into the very same trap Freud is caught in, the trap of the visible—a spatial trap, by the
way, that Lacan self-assuredly points out along his way, thanking none other than
Merleau-Ponty for the warning.47 This is the trap that deafens us to the cry of revers-
ibility as it functions so importantly in the Wolf Man’s case. To be plain, reversibility
functions in the Wolf Man’s cry as utterance and flesh, literature and painting, time
and space, word and image, perceptive life and speech.
 Sherman & Cézanne 81
In fact, these are the very dichotomies Merleau-Ponty tried to assimilate in an aes-
thetics of art, to say nothing of his struggle toward an ontology of painting. He was
moving from dichotomy to dialogy, from resubjectification to intersubjectification,
and, beyond that, from the ontic to the ontological. And though he never did complete
his projected philosophy of time and space, it is safe to say that the separation and
hence the irreversibility of time and space that Freud and Lacan as well as Lefort leg-
islate has no jurisdiction for Merleau-Ponty, nor for Cézanne, and certainly not for the
Wolf Man. According to Merleau-Ponty, and this is the key point lost to Lefort’s pre-
occupation with naming, Cézanne is a self-begetter par excellence. However doubtful
his appellation, Cézanne defines himself as “the painter who doubts what he sees
because what I see I see differently with each slight turn of the head.” Herein lies the
phenomenological perception that connects Cézanne to the Wolf Man.
Self-genesis is constituted in the reversibility of time and space through the activated
interrelation between the body, ocular experience, and speech. Thus the little Wolf
Man’s bowel gives rise to the temporal word uttered in visceral response to the spec-
tacle of his parents in coitus. When the Wolf Man’s cry rises up in spontaneous response
to the sudden, startling pain of a bowel movement and commands the status of an
utterance, in that moment the child’s word asserts the authority of law. When his par-
ents hear the Wolf Man’s cry, his human voice embodies the force of a “Hey you!”
Hence do they freeze and turn their “astonied” gaze upon him. And indeed, as this
moment indicates, it is no accident that Althusser’s notion of interpellation comes
from Lacan’s mirror work. Here we see the hybridization of law and crime, for in this
moment of reversibility, the Wolf Man is both law-giver in his utterance and the one
under arrest in his apprehension. He is in fact, the ultimate embodiment of Oedipus
the King, who is himself the embodiment of Apollo and Dionysius.
We have indicated that the Wolf Man’s cry assumes the power of interpellation, but
we have yet to show how it constitutes logos; nor have we sufficiently elaborated the
Wolf Man’s scream as a function of self-begetting and reversibility. Let us spell out in
some detail, then, the function of the scream as a veritable constitution of the logos—
to the extent that this function is indicated in Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on Cézanne’s
perceptual uncertainty. Speaking of Cézanne (and no doubt alluding to Heidegger’s
notion of “thrownness into being” in relation to the Wolf Man’s utterance), Merleau-
Ponty says, “the artist launches his work just as a man once launched the first word,
not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout.”48 And earlier, in the
attempt to reduce his notion of the primacy of perception to its simplest common
denominator, he says, “[B]y these words, ‘the primacy of perception’ we mean the
experience of perception in our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are
constituted for us, that perception is a nascent logos.”49 As to the first quotation, it
would be hard to believe that Merleau-Ponty has any other than the Wolf Man in
mind when he thinks about the relation between Cézanne and language—that indeed
the shout he has in mind is any other than the Wolf Man’s.
But how, the question remains, does the Wolf Man’s cry constitute logos? The
Greeks define human being as logos. One becomes human with the utterance of speech.
And, in light of Freud’s analysis of the Wolf Man case and Lacan’s further analysis, we
are able to see from Merleau-Ponty what they could not see for themselves: language,
the constitution of the logos, begins anew with each primal scene, with each pri-
mary perception. Furthermore, every primal scene and primal perception, in which a
child will “freeze these distortions” as a photo-graph to be stored in the unconscious,
82 The Artist-Philosopher
constitutes the advent of seeing what is said and saying what is seen, each in hybrid-
ized reversibility. This means that language is not a priori; nor is the infant born into
a language always already preceding and awaiting her arrival. In the primal scene,
language is created on the spot. Just as each and every Cézanne painting founds a new
world, this creation is a poetic event. The first word is a poetic utterance, a founding
of the world.50 (See Figures 3.3 and 3.4.)
As such, this “nascent logos” is therefore a matter of self-creation, self-genesis
“self-begetting.” Visual pleasure, voyeuristic erotic pleasure, stimulates a bowel move-
ment. This in turn causes pain. The effect is the infant’s cry, a poetic utterance which
marks the advent of language. This momentous instant announces the promise of
future events, the first of which is the constitution of the law. The child self-constitutes
the law; she proclaims the law unto herself. In the moment the infant vanishes into the
child, as she enters the speaking world of the symbolic—a symbolic order she has
created for herself—she “hails” her parents, who, by responding to her summons,
recognize her legal status as a human being. Even as they subject her to arrest, they
are law-bound to show justice. Thus we see the body, the flesh, in its spontaneous
incitement of the shout, as the “prototype of being,” what Merleau-Ponty describes as
“the flesh of language, the flesh of history.”51 This flesh, giving rise to the guttural
utterance, becomes word as “self-genesis” and self-determined law.52 The entrance
into the symbolic by way of the primal scene, the primacy of perception, constitutes
logos.
To say that logos is constantly reconstituted in Nachträglichkeit is to recognize that
the Wolf Man’s parents, in the instant they receive the shock of his cry, are mnemoni-
cally returned to their own respective primal scenes. As each of them looks into the
Wolf Man’s eyes, they both see reflected back at them the image of themselves as chil-
dren when they experienced the same moment for the first time, when, in other words,
each of them experienced the shock of the primal scene for themselves. The mirror
image each sees reflected in the Wolf Man’s eyes produces an allegorical snapshot,
releases from the unconscious a photo-graph of their primal scene. The image triggers
their mnemonic return to the original event in the past, and from the standpoint of the
past they now see the present as the future, and from the standpoint of that future they
look back on the past and understand the significance of the primal scene in the present.
Each of them, to reiterate Merleau-Ponty, “looks in the past for meaning of the future
and in the future for meaning of the past.” And simultaneously, in the traumatic return
to that past, each of them respectively reconstitutes logos in their own reversal and
resubjectification.
To say this—to say that in her nascent speech, her legal birth and self-begetting, by
coming into being as an inhabitant of the symbolic, the child reconstitutes logos and
thereby creates and invokes the law—is merely a parallel affirmation of Merleau-Ponty’s
claim, made repeatedly, that Cézanne is a genius. As a genius, Cézanne does not follow
the laws of aesthetics; he creates the law of aesthetics, for himself alone. Like the Wolf
Man, who “launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more
than a shout,” then to see it constituted as logos and law, Cézanne reconstitutes the
law of aesthetics each time he launches a new work of art into becoming. We have seen
how the primal scene is frozen into a tableau vivant at the very moment the Wolf Man
cries out his right to come into being and the petrified moment is then captured as a
photo-graph and repressed in the newly constituted unconscious. Likewise, as we have
seen, Cézanne attempts “to recapture the structure of the [object] as an emerging
 Sherman & Cézanne 83
organism. To do this, all, the partial views one catches sight of must be welded together;
all that the eye’s versatility disperses must be reunited . . . . It is a process of expressing.”53
With each attempt to fuse himself and the world as an expression of nascent being,
Cézanne dismisses the sum of aesthetic law and makes up a new one for himself on
the spot. Here, in many respects, Merleau-Ponty concurs with Kant, who defines the
genius as the artist who does not follow the rules of art, but constitutes for herself her
own laws of aesthetics.
But we would be mistaken to think that Merleau-Ponty is chasing after Kant hat in
hand. Quite otherwise. Kant introduces the formalist creed to the likes of Roger Fry
and others who tried to reduce Cézanne’s art to the pre-existing laws of pure form.
According to Merleau-Ponty, the primacy of perception,

teaches us, outside all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself; that
it summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a question of
reducing human knowledge to reason, but of assisting at the birth of this
knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover the consciousness
of rationality.

Elsewhere, he says, it “is certainly right to condemn formalism, but it is ordinarily

forgotten that its error is not that it esteems form too much, but that it esteems it so
little that it detaches it from meaning.”54 Merleau-Ponty’s hermeneutic engagement
with Cézanne cannot be fully understood, it bears noting, until it is counted as an
indirect retort to the likes of Roger Fry and Clive Bell,55 not to mention a host of others
who staked the claims of modernism on the designation of Cézanne’s painting as the
epitome of pure spatial form.
For Merleau-Ponty time and space are equal functionaries in Cézanne. More impor-
tantly, and here is the genius of Merleau-Ponty, while Kant understands time and space
as fixed universal coordinates that together comprise intelligible perception and square
the frame of aesthetic representation as a matter of form, for Merleau-Ponty, time and
space are reversible, interchangeable, hybridizable, which is to say, psycho-chronotopic.
The truth revealed in Nachträglichkeit is not fixed and universal, never the predicate
of pure reason; it is ever-changing and relative. Whereas Kant’s formalism is predeter-
mined by physics, Merleau-Ponty’s field of inquiry lies in the unconscious, wherein the
laws of physics do not apply.
No doubt thinking of the white wolves staring back at the Wolf Man from where
they sit in the bare branches of the tree outside his window, Paul Klee writes: “In a
forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some
days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me.”56 Klee’s words, we
are told, “haunted Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on painting.” That is because Klee gives
us the “purist expression of reversibility,”57 and not least because he echoes the voice
of Cézanne, who says, “landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.”58 In
these words, which come before and anticipate Klee’s, Cézanne gives poetic expres-
sion to the wolf dream in all its reversability. Perhaps in saying as much, Cézanne
explains Merleau-Ponty’s wish to think the Wolf Man case through to the farther
end, the onto-poetic end, of his phenomenology. Here in any case we discover the
never-ending poetic advent of logos and the self-constituted ever-becoming subject.
Here as well, Cézanne’s “coming into being” reveals the “belonging-together of
poetry and thought.”
Figure 3.1 Cindy Sherman. Untitled #250. 1979: Courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.

Figure 3.2 Cindy Sherman. Untitled #264. 1992: Courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Figure 3.3 Paul Cézanne. Large pine tree and red earth. 1890–1895: Courtesy of Art
Resource, New York.

Figure 3.4 Paul Cézanne, Farmhouse in Normandy, summer (Hattenville). 1882: Courtesy
of Art Resource, New York.
86 The Artist-Philosopher
Notes

Chapter 3, Section I: Sherman’s Wolf Man

1 Plato, Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 81.
2 Ibid., 86.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Cindy Sherman, Zdenek Felix, Martin Schwander, and Elisabeth Bronfen, Photographic
Work: 1975-1995 (Munich: Schirmer Art Books), 14.
7 Ibid., 14.
8 Ibid., 15.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-
Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 2002), 12.
12 Sherman, Felix, Schwander, and Bronfen, Photographic Work: 1975–1995, 19.
13 Ibid., 20.
14 Ibid., 21.
15 Jeanne Siegel, ed., Art Talk: The Early 80’s (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1988), 282.
16 Sherman, Felix, Schwander, and Bronfen, Photographic Work: 1975–1995, 26.
17 Siegel, Art Talk, 275.
18 Ibid., 278.

Chapter 3, Section II: Cézanne’s Merleau-Ponty

19 Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 163.
20 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojewicz and
Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 14.
21 Ibid., 15.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 245.
25 Claude Lefort, “Flesh and Otherness,” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, ed. Galen
A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 3–13.
26 Sergius Pankejeff, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Anna Freud, Muriel Gardiner, and Sigmund Freud.
The Wolf-Man (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 181–82.
27 Ibid., 179.
28 Ibid., 222.
29 Hugh J. Silverman, “Cézanne’s Mirror Stage,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
40, no. 4 (1982): 369–79, doi:10.2307/429968.
30 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-sense, trans. Herbert L. Dreyfus
and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 9–25.
31 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQrarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York: Harper and Row, 1962), 41.
32 Ibid.
33 Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 22.
34 Ibid.
35 Krell adds that here in the last phrase he is translating, “selbst ineinander schlagen,” the “last
word means to strike or to imprint.” Hence, he translates, “to coin.” David Farrell Krell,
Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from Being and Time to the Black Notebooks (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2015), 15.
36 Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 25.
37 Ibid., 13.
 Sherman & Cézanne 87
38 Ibid., 14.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 17.
41 Ibid., 5.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 6.
44 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lefort, and Alphonso Lingis, The Visible and the Invisible:
Followed by Working Notes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000.), 147; 194;
Lefort, “Flesh and Otherness,” 7.
45 Ibid., 11.
46 Ibid., 12.
47 Ibid., 93.
48 Ibid., 19.
49 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomeno-
logical Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), 25; 9.
50 See especially page 69, where Vattimo says that for Heidegger, the work of art “opens and
founds around itself its own world and imposes a general rearrangement of things.” Gianni
Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, ed. Santiago Zabala, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010, 69.
51 Ibid., 3.
52 Likewise, as Vattimo says of art as it pertains to Heidegger’s essay on “The Origin of the
Work of Art,” “The shock produced by the work is linked to law: in the work a world is
encountered as it is being born.” Ibid., 69.
53 Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 16.
54 Ibid., 114.
55 Ibid., 6.
56 Ibid., 117.
57 Ibid., 44.
58 Ibid., 17.
Part 2

New Philosophy
4 Heidegger’s Calling

Protagoras
Because pleasure can confuse reason, Jowett explains in the introduction to his still
admired 1871 translation of Plato’s “Protagoras,” and because this is especially true
when it comes to weighing good and evil in the balance, “Some art of mensuration is
required in order to show us pleasures and pains in their true proportion.” Indeed,
“mensuration,” mathematical reasoning, will bring us to the sure footing of Plato’s
ethics, precisely insofar as “The art of mensuration is a kind of knowledge, and knowledge
is thus proved once more to be the governing principle of human life, and ignorance
the origin of all evil.”1 Paraphrasing Plato’s hero, the inimitable and universally loved
Socrates, Jowett takes it as a matter of course, then, that “no one prefers less pleasure
to the greater, or the greater pain to the less, except from ignorance.”2 Here Jowett is
only making common sense of what Socrates has taken from Pythagoras, the
great mathematician who had long since established the unshakable certainty of
proportion—ratio—as the “governing principle of human life.” As Socrates never tires
of insisting, though, for him life’s first principle, his universal truth, is to be found not
so much in proportion as in the virtue of knowledge. Nor, for that matter, is it Socrates
who comes up with the idea of universal truth. Rather, Plato’s third favorite, Par-
menides, had long-since located universal truth in the unchanging essence of the
world.3 Whether Parmenides’s truism holds true is a matter of unending debate, of
course. But what is certain is that it is none other than Plato who finally brings all
these ideas together and gives us mathematics as the virtue of knowledge, the essence
of the Idea, and, indeed, the eternal essence of metaphysics.
In the “Protagoras,” it is by ratio, the logic of the greater and the less, the near and
the far—the pristine virtue of a priori mathematical truth—that Socrates defeats the
great Protagoras in their famous disputation on the question, can virtue be taught?
Our hero’s magnanimous victory over the renowned Sophist, Protagoras, counts as no
small triumph. The latter is the celebrated author of the maxim, “Man is the measure
of all things.” His teacher, the Pythagorean philosopher Democrates, judges him an
excellent mathematician; and, moreover, he is widely known as a founder of Sophism,
the school of philosophy that supposedly vies with Plato’s metaphysics for top rating
in the Athenian marketplace of ideas. Thus, Plato assures us, one can only attribute the
defeat of such a champion to the fact that Socrates is so virtuous, so knowledgeable,
in a word, so supremely equitable—so just—that nobody, not even a philosopher of
Protagoras’s rare gifts in the art of rhetoric, not to mention his innate mathematical
prowess, could outdo Socrates in a philosophical contest.
92 New Philosophy
For a comparison of the Athens encounter with something of equivalent cultural
impact in modern times we might well consider the 1974 World Heavyweight Boxing Title
match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. The analogy to the Protagoras/
Socrates disputation is not so far-fetched. After all, Jowett says that “Protagoras falls
before [Socrates] after two or three blows.”4 And, moreover, Ali and Foreman were
ringside philosophers in their own right, and both were gifted verbal pugilists. And
while both champions were original thinkers, Ali was a real poet, too. Whenever the
media caught him in the spotlight he could be counted on to recite a lively concoction
of beauty and violence, most famously, “Fly like a butterfly/ sting like a bee!” Ali’s
poeticizing added a bizarre element to the already frenzied world-wide media hype
that had been playing up the great match for months on end. Dubbed by promoters as
the “Rumble in the Jungle” and hosted in Kinsasha, Zaire, the bout was attended by
60,000 spectators, televised worldwide, and covered live on site by the world-famous
sports commentator, Howard Cosell. It was called the biggest sporting event of the
twentieth century. And yet today “The Rumble in the Jungle” is remembered mostly
by boxing enthusiasts and sports historians. By contrast, the Protagoras/Socrates Athens
encounter still is replayed “round the world.”
The stakes for Protagoras were his reputation as a great rhetorician and teacher and
therefore his livelihood, which depended on student fees. In the other corner, the real
contestant was not so much Socrates but his former student, Plato, and for him the stakes
were of another kind. Whatever the differences between Socrates and Plato, Socrates was,
after all, Plato’s mentor, the patriarch, the progenitor of Platonism. And so, heaven forbid
the valiant Socrates might ever be outdone by a rival to Plato’s metaphysics. Most cer-
tainly Socrates could never be outdone by a Sophist, a shameful peddler who sold for a
price whatever scraps of knowledge he happened to be hawking in the streets on a given
day. If Socrates went down in a great defeat, that would be bad enough, but if he fell
before a Sophist, the future of the newly established school of metaphysics could well be
jeopardized.
We might wonder, then, whether Plato’s characterization of Protagoras is altogether
fair and impartial, whether, in other words, the way Protagoras fares at the hands of
Plato’s champion, Socrates, the father of Platonism, implicates Plato in what modern
journalists would call slanted reporting—reporting that in this case may have been
motivated by what today we would call a clear conflict of interest. In this regard, per-
haps it would be fair to suggest that Plato’s role as the chronicler of “The Protagoras”
can be likened to Howard Cosell’s at Kinsasha. But such a comparison could hold true
only if (a) Cosell had been a contestant in the ring, (b) had simultaneously broadcast
the contest to the world live, and (c) had served as the historian who delivered his
personal recap of the event into the waiting arms of posterity.
The possibility of a conflict of interest of this kind seems not to have escaped Profes-
sor Jowett’s notice. Certainly he takes care to vouchsafe Plato’s trustworthiness in the
matter: “There is no reason to suppose that in all this Plato is depicting an imaginary
Protagoras; at any rate he is showing us the teaching of the Sophists under the milder
aspect under which he once regarded them. Nor is there any reason to doubt that
Socrates is equally an historical character, paradoxical, ironical, tiresome, but seeking
for the unity of virtue and knowledge as for a precious treasure; willing to rest this
even on a calculation of pleasure, and irresistible here, as everywhere in Plato, in his
intellectual superiority.”5 And while Jowett assures us that Plato is a reliable recorder
of the events at hand, the fact remains that Socrates is himself very much a Sophist.
 Heidegger’s Calling 93
Indeed, the authors of A Short History of Philosophy call him “the wisest and cleverest
of the Sophists.”6 More than likely he was thought of as such by his fellow Athenians,
too, who were all too familiar with Aristophanes’ satirical depiction of Socrates the
Sophist, an inconvenient point Plato never mentions. Intentional or not, the oversight
serves all the more to protect the reputation of Plato’s beloved surrogate and cham-
pion, Socrates. And intentional or not, it serves all the better to even the score with
Protagoras, who had shown the temerity to challenge the claims of Parmenides and
Pythagoras, mainstays in Plato’s metaphysics. To put upon Protagoras the onerous
mark of a Sophist who prostituted his knowledge for pay, and to pose the good and
true Socrates as innocent of the aspersion, could not but help tip the sentiment of
skepticism in the direction of Protagoras. And though Socrates was never said to
charge money for his teaching, the fact that Socrates was known to his fellow Athenians
as a practicing Sophist is a telling detail that Jowett also fails to mention.
Rather, the renowned theologian and Master of Balliol casts Plato and Socrates as
the better, more trustworthy philosophers precisely insofar as theirs is an objective,
scientific, mathematical truth derived from the art of mensuration; whereas Protagoras,
the famous master of disputation, relies on the art of rhetoric as his chief defense
against the towering Socrates, noble stalwart of right and good. And while it is true that
Protagoras scores lots of points against Socrates and could well be considered the win-
ner of the contest, as some would assert,7 nevertheless, as Professor Jowett writes for
the edification of his adoring undergraduates (and they did adore him), Socrates is
“irresistible here, as everywhere in Plato, in his intellectual superiority”—that is, in his
greater mathematical virtue.
At any rate, it is by calculation and measure—by what Jowett calls “the art of men-
suration”—that in the “Protagoras” Plato is able “to show the unity of virtue,” and to
bring to light Socrates’s “identity of virtue and knowledge” as a universal, mathematical,
scientific truth.8 And it is precisely Plato’s mathematical truth, this “unity of virtue” and
this “identity of virtue and knowledge,” that Jowett means to impart to his students, the
undergraduates at Oxford. I give us the Professor Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Greek,
because, again, it is instructive to see how Plato as the philosopher of eternal proportion
and universal law, is translated specifically if not solely for the inspiration of England’s
young elite. These were the next generation, the future of the Empire—modern-day
knights of the global realm. For these “happy few,” on the authority of no less than
Socrates and Plato, and on the added authority of Jowett, Greek philosophy’s most
renowned English acolyte, the knowledge of the ages would come down to one simple
axiom: virtue, knowledge—the difference between good and evil—is assured, can only
be assured, by way of calculation—through, that is, the art of mensuration.
And so, according to Jowett, it should come as no surprise that “The victory of
Socrates over Protagoras is in every way complete.”9 Anybody today who reads the
“Protagoras” with a half-open eye can see plainly enough that the dialogue’s a set-up,
a rigged outcome, which, like so many of The Dialogues, winds up with Socrates hold-
ing the upper hand and his confused and befuddled interlocutor wondering how in the
world he could have got so tangled up in his own argument. Whether he knowingly
aided and abetted Plato’s history-tampering or not, what Jowett is doing here is what
always has been done: Logic, mathematical thinking, which Plato set down as the
essence of virtue and as the essential “worldview,” is passed on to the ruling class from
generation to generation, from the Greeks down to the present, in the form of education,
as knowledge of the highest good.
94 New Philosophy
This brings us to our main question, which has to do with the relation between art
and philosophy. Let us repeat to begin with that the “Protagoras” establishes ratio as
the essence of Socratic virtue and the measuring stick by which good and evil are to be
forever hence divided. Here we see in no uncertain terms a reinforcement of the math-
ematical logic Plato introduces in The Republic. This logic, which over time would
become accepted and then eventually taken for granted as the essential ground of
Western metaphysics, he elucidates by way of music theory in Book III.
We can ascribe Plato’s ultra-conservative attitude toward music theory to the change
and unrest that had brought about what Plato viewed as a decline of Athenian culture.
This decline, in Plato’s view, was marked by the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants. The
new pro-democracy regime that superseded the Thirty furthered the mean-spirited,
self-serving mindset that had plagued Athens in the wake of the Peloponnesian Wars.
Protagoras, and for that matter, Heraclitus, could be singled out for their ever-shifting
epistemological contingencies and thus seen as suspects behind the rampant changes
that had set upon and destabilized the old established Athenian aristocracy, not least,
the just noted rise of democracy. Plato, as already mentioned, believed he had found in
music a powerful pedagogical antidote to these developments. Against the hyper-flux
that had brought on Athenian decline, Plato put forward the kind of music that would
induce in the listener and in the culture as a whole a sense harmony and balance. A serene,
unruffled form of musical expression could “purge the soul” of the spiritual unrest and
mental agitation the new popular musical styles were inciting. The Pythagorean
essences of proportion and harmony, as well as the ever-secure, unchanging world of
Parmenides, represented not only virtue but political/ideological stability. Music that
gave form to these principles would be taught to the young, to the exclusion of all
other styles.
Hence, we see in Book III Plato’s crackdown on newfangled poetry and music. All but
the Dorian and Phrygian scales are put to harsh proscription. And even the Phrygian
is subject to close watch and suspicion, given its known affiliation with Dionysian fes-
tivals and cult practices. Since music is known to move the soul, the Dorian and Phrygian
expressions of stability, regularity, and order could not only purge the soul of unrest,
but indeed compose the State in like harmonious and temperate manner. And because
music is so powerful, once these styles have been established, no change in music
should be allowed whatever, because when the fundamental laws of music change, so
do those of the State. And again, by inculcating the young with a knowledge and
appreciation of this form and none other, Athenian education would cultivate a social
and political mindset of the same order.
For Plato, to put it another way, the unshakable and virtuous State stands on no more
nor less than the measured logic of Pythagorean ratio, its mathematical foundation.
Underlying Plato’s conservative political aesthetics stands Pythagoras’s music theory.
But of course, music theory alone would not do for Plato’s Republic. Rather, Plato
outlines an entire educational system and a design for pedagogical practice that would
instill in the young Athenian the essential values reflected in the music they were taught
to appreciate. Such a system would produce, in the end, not only the virtuous citizen,
but the virtuous, and above all, enduring, State. Here we see the long foreshadow of
Professor Jowett and the English education of the elite.10
Besides the composers and players of reckless and dangerous melodies, there are to
be dealt with in Plato’s view the equally reckless poets and artists. If anything, they are
the more dangerous, because, as we have already learned in Book II, “Homer and
 Heidegger’s Calling 95
Hesiod, and the rest of the poets, who have ever been the great story tellers of man-
kind,” are guilty of “telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.”11 For not only does their
kind of poetry stir up the passions, like the composers and players of dangerous mel-
odies; worse, such poets lie about the gods and they lie about men. Because such lies
corrupt youth, who embody the future of the State, these reprobates must be dealt
with by an even firmer hand than the one pressed down upon the irregularities of the
civically un-minded musicians.
As Jowett words it,

we know that poetry is not truth, and that a man should be careful how he intro-
duces her to that state or constitution which he himself is; for there is a mighty
issue at stake—no less than the good or evil of the human soul. And it is not
worthwhile to forsake justice and virtue for the attractions of poetry, any more
than for the sake of honor or wealth.12

In other words, poetry poses a serious threat to the State, and therefore steps must be
taken. Whereas the artist and the philosopher had until then been thought of more or
less as one and the same, now in Book X, for the first time in Greek thought, we see
the artist divided from the philosopher. As Socrates assures Glaucon, it is the philoso-
pher alone who possesses truth, precisely insofar as he alone possesses and applies the
logical instruments of “calculation and measure.” The unruly artist, on the other hand,
pawns off vague and imperfect images, mimetic reproductions, fake copies of reality—
in a word, corruptions of truth. This threat to the State must be dealt with. Splitting
what for centuries had been taken for granted as the artist-philosopher into two sepa-
rate entities, the artist and the philosopher, Plato gives us an incipient moment in the
history of modern specialization. In this case, the artist is remanded to the side of
ignorance, the source of evil; and the philosopher, master of mathematical logic, mas-
ter of the “art of mensuration,” takes the place reserved for him at the font of truth
and knowledge.
By contrast to the artist, the philosopher is the source of all good, the essence of cer-
tainty. Mensuration—ethics by “calculation and measure”—leaves us to understand—
leaves, rather, Jowett’s Oxford undergraduates to understand—that those with the
greatest knowledge of mathematics stand closest in proximity to the good. Invariably,
they will be the most virtuous. By the same token, it follows, those most ignorant of
mathematics are most likely the evilest of barbarians, precisely in that they stand far-
thest from the good. Such is the logic of proportion, ratio. It follows, too, therefore, that
the stupidest of Oxford undergraduates is far more virtuous than the smartest of uned-
ucated farmhands. As Plato insists, the same logic applies to the artist, who, to the
extent he is unschooled in mathematics, invents lies for want of truth. Therefore, until
such time as the artist can prove the renouncement of his dangerous ways, he is declared
persona non grata.
In conferring upon the artist the title of genius, Kant would appear to be circum-
venting Plato’s injunction. But in fact the social contract Kant writes up for the artist
keeps faithful covenant with Plato’s ethico-mathematical terms—terms, in other
words, that reiterate the ideals of Dorian and Phrygian scales. For, if nothing else,
Kant’s aesthetic form maintains and reproduces Plato’s politico-aesthetic sanctions
against all but harmonious and temperate expressions of stability, regularity, and
order, expressions that could not only purge the soul of unrest, but indeed compose the
96 New Philosophy
State in like manner. Little surprise, then, to find the art of mensuration as the key to
Kant’s judgment of taste—which comes down to what Jowett calls, no doubt with
Kant in mind, the “calculation of pleasure.” Here is one of myriad examples from
Kant:

When the form of an object (as opposed to the matter of its representation, as
sensation) is, in the mere act of reflecting upon it, without regard to any concept
to be obtained from it, estimated as the ground of a pleasure [my italics] in the
representation of such an Object, then this pleasure is also judged to be combined
necessarily with the representation of it, and so not merely for the Subject appre-
hending this form, but for all in general who pass judgement. The object is then
called beautiful; and the faculty of judging by means of such a pleasure (and so
also its universal validity) is called taste.13

To estimate, as Kant is using the term here and elsewhere (as when an object is “being
estimated aesthetically,” or when we are “forming an immediate estimate in perception,”
or when we “form an estimate of color contrasts”), he is using it as a mathematical
construct, along the lines of calculation and measure. Here, for example, is the New
Oxford American Dictionary definition of the verb to estimate:

verb |'est maˉt| [ with obj. ]

e
'
roughly calculate or judge the value, number, quantity, or extent of
And here is its definition of the word as a noun:
noun |'est mit|
e
an approximate calculation or judgment of the value, number, quantity, or extent
of something:

And with more particular relevance to Kant:

a judgment of the worth or character of someone or something: his high estimate

of the poem.14

So as to draw Kant’s neo-Platonic modernist aesthetic from the Enlightenment into

the twentieth-century, Clive Bell, as we know, describes the feeling of pleasure derived
from the beautiful as “aesthetic emotion,” which, as he says, results from the experi-
ence of “significant form.”15 By significant form he means, coming very close to Kant,
“a combination of lines and colours (counting white and black as colours) that moves
me aesthetically.”16 As he goes on to say, “A good work of visual art carries a person
who is capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy.” This individual, who is capa-
ble of appreciating art’s form, appreciating it, that is, from a disinterested standpoint,
will feel aesthetic emotion. This emotion is an altogether different feeling from that felt
by those who “treat created form as though it were imitated form, a picture as though
it were a photograph. Instead of going out on the stream of art into a new world of
aesthetic experience,” which is to say, the world of Platonic form, “they turn a sharp
corner and come home to the world of human interests.”17 Significant form, by con-
trast, always “transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic
exaltation,” the ecstasy that comes from aesthetic emotion.
 Heidegger’s Calling 97
Insofar as this emotion is a pure emotion coming from the experience of pure
form, “we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are
arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life.” This experience Bell likens to that
of the

pure mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to be
similar, if not identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from
no perceived relation between them and the lives of men, but springs, in-human or
super-human, from the heart of an abstract science.18

Bell adds, “I wonder sometimes whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical
solutions are not even more closely allied. Before we feel an aesthetic emotion for a
combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of
the combination.”19 When we appreciate art in terms of calculation and measure,
in other words, we are in fact “estimating” the significance of its form. We are “calcu-
lating pleasure.” On the basis of such calculation, we will know if the object of our
attention is beautiful or not. The judgment of taste, Bell insists, comes down to
“abstract science.”
The English are hardly alone in cultivating and teaching the mathematical truths of
neo-Kantian aesthetics. Cassirer’s monumental three-volume work on The Philosophy
of Symbolic Forms provides the most telling case in point. Considered at the time
(along with Heidegger) as Germany’s greatest living philosopher, Cassirer ceaselessly
explores and catalogues the trans-historical, transcultural shift from primitive myth to
modern mathematics as the basis of truth.

Myth remains attached to the world of change and hence to allusion, while the
truth of being [. . .] is alone apprehended in the pure concept. Philosophical knowl-
edge must first free itself from the constraint of language and myth; it must, as it
were, thrust out these eyewitnesses of human inadequacy, before it can rise to the
pure either of thought.20

If in these words we are reminded of Plato, that is because for Plato, “whenever an
erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes—as when a painter
paints a portrait not having a shadow of a likeness to the original,” we are left with
nothing but illusion.21 For his own part, Cassirer insists,

To achieve its own maturity, philosophy must above all come to grips with the lin-
guistic and mythical worlds and place itself in dialectical opposition to them . . ..
And natural science arrives at the mastery of its specific task in very much the
same way as pure philosophy. In order to find itself it, too, must first effect the
great intellectual differentiation, the krisis, separating myth from language. This
act of separation marks philosophy’s hour of birth, and also the starting point of
empirical research and the mathematical determination of nature.22

This birth of philosophy is actually not the birth of philosophy. The birth of Western
philosophy takes place in the anti-Socratic moment, with Thales. What Cassirer is
referring to is the birth of metaphysics, which he wants to conflate with philosophy in
general. But no, the birth of metaphysics takes place in the moment Plato divides the
98 New Philosophy
artist from the philosopher, myth from what will be subsequently known, thanks to
Aristotle, as metaphysics—the philosophy predicated on ratio, calculation, and measure.
Which is to say that modern metaphysics is grounded in Plato’s establishment of
mathematics as the essence of virtue and virtue as the essence of knowledge. For Plato,
as we see, the chief enemy of metaphysics is myth, especially of the kind represented in
poetic/artistic poiesis. As Cassirer says, Plato’s

struggle against myth followed from his conception of dialectic . . .. If we accept

this definition of philosophy and dialectic it becomes clear why Plato had to
exclude myth from his Republic, that is to say, from his system of education. Of
all things in the world myth is the most immoderate. It exceeds and defies all limits;
it is extravagant and exorbitant in its very nature and essence.23

A proud and loyal confederate in Plato’s war against myth, like Plato, Cassirer is well
aware that banishing myth from the “human and political world” has to start with its
banishment from metaphysics and, as importantly, by replacing myth with mathematics
and science—what Plato calls “calculation and measure.”
At the same time Cassirer is writing on symbolic form, his friend and colleague at
the Warburg Institute, Erwin Panofsky, ushered in “an unprecedented elevation of art
into a ‘science.’”24 Here of course we are referring in particular to Panofsky’s study of
the mathematization of aesthetic form as it occurs in the Italian Renaissance vis-a-vis
the development of linear perspective. From the standpoint of Alberti’s theorization of
perspective in particular, as well as Uccello’s, knowledge and virtue become intrinsic to
aesthetic representation by way of calculation and measure. Lessing had already estab-
lished the laws of perspective as a science.25 Panofsky admits that the laws of perspec-
tive “look more like a mathematical than artistic matter,” but nonetheless insists that
these laws “in no wise encroach upon artistic ‘freedom’.” In fact, perspective as a style
should be thought of in terms of his friend Cassirer’s notion of symbolic form, wherein,
“spiritual meaning is attached to a concrete, material sign and intrinsically given to
this sign.”26
Of course, Plato’s mathematical notion of virtue played out as a major theme in the
arts long before Alberti came up with the notion of three-point perspective. This was
especially true as regards the relation between reason and the good on one side and
passion and evil on the other. We can take William Nelson’s contemporary commen-
tary on Spenser’s Faerie Queene as typical of the critical attention paid to this Classical
thematic convention as it runs through the arts and literature of the West:

In the early sixteenth century, somebody scribbled in the margin of a manuscript

of Latin decretals, “yf Luste or anger do Thy mynde assayle,/ Subdu ocasyon and
thou shalt prevayle.” In obedience to this precept, Guyan binds Occaison in order
to overcome furer. His reason recovers its dominance before he comes to blows
with St. George.27

But again, with Panofsky’s brilliant and groundbreaking mathematical analysis of

Renaissance perspective, virtue becomes mathematized as a matter of symbolic form.
The parable of virtue as mathematical truth is not merely told, as it is in Spenser, or
symbolically dramatized, as in the “Protagoras”; now, by way of linear perspective,
virtue is infused within aesthetic form.
 Heidegger’s Calling 99
What is so often missed in reiterating this obvious point is the simple fact that pure
mathematics comprises reason as opposed to passion. As Panofsky puts it, psycho-
physiological space is dangerous or at least unpredictable and contingent precisely
insofar as the psychophysiological is made up of a jumble of desires; whereas mathe-
matical space constitutes the objective repository of truth as determined by rational
calculation and measure. As such, aestheticized mathematical space, insofar as it
represents what Kant calls the finality form, will give pleasure and constitute what is
beautiful. Therefore, mathematical space as represented in the finality of form must be
taken as the good because it is the true.
All of these factors emanating from the Kantian aesthetic were in full swing with the
on-going rise of neo-Kantianism. Bell concludes his remarks on “The Aesthetic
Hypothesis” by observing that “The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the
same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.”28 But we would
be forgetting the scientific nature of Bell’s title if we mistook his notion of ecstasy as
anything like the Dionysian passion that finds its haven in psychophysiological space.
When he says that “Cézanne carried me off my feet before I ever noticed that his strongest
characteristic was an insistence on the supremacy of significant form,”29 he is referring
to the Apollonian rapture that comes of aesthetic emotion: “The contemplation of
pure form leads to a state of extraordinary exaltation and complete detachment from
the concerns of life,” i.e., content. Further on he says, “Instead of recognizing its acci-
dental and conditioned importance, we become aware of its essential reality, of the
God in everything, of the universal in the particular, of the all-pervading rhythm.”30 As
Cassirer put it at Davos, man “must have, however, the metabasis that leads him from
the immediacy of his existence into the region of pure form. And he possesses his infin-
ity solely in this form.” He adds, “the true spiritual realm is just the spiritual world
[man] created from himself.”31 Here, to underscore his point, Cassirer argues that the
artist has recognized “the creative powers of the divine mind but then reclaimed those
capacities for the human being.”32 The divinity to which Cassirer refers is none other than
Apollo, god of mathematics. For Cassirer, art in itself as mathematical form symbolizes
the human being as spirit; likewise, for Bell, this spiritual realm comes to us because
“in the moment of aesthetic vision,” the artist “sees objects, not as means shrouded in
associations, but as pure forms.”33 As virtue, as mathematical truth, significant form
creates “ultimate reality,” a spiritual essence that is felt by way of aesthetic (abstract/
mathematical) emotion.

Fry’s Cézanne
Roger Fry opens his essay on Cézanne: A Study of his Development as follows: “Those
artists among us whose formation took place before the war recognize Cézanne as their
tribal deity, and their totem. In their communions they absorb his essence and nourish
therewith their spiritual being—at least they would do this—did they, like primitive man,
know the efficient magic ritual.”34 It would be a mistake to take Fry’s allusions to the
spiritual rituals of primitive man as a Dionysian call to unbridled nature, for in all that
follows, the point is made over and over again that it is none other than Platonic meta-
physics and Apollonian (mathematical) spirit that explains Cézanne’s art as “ultimate
reality.”
We can elucidate this point by first of all observing that one of Cézanne’s most
important artistic legacies is none other than his “conception of colour not as a
100 New Philosophy
distinct adjunct to form, but as the direct exponent of form.”35 And with regard to
Cézanne’s line, he declares that, “It belongs to a world of spiritual values incommen-
surate but parallel with the actual world.”36 In these observations on line and color as
form, Fry brings us back to the earlier moments of his essay, where he writes that
Cézanne “gave himself up entirely to this desperate search for the reality hidden
beneath the veil of appearance, this reality which he had to draw forth and render
apparent.”37 The reality behind the veil of appearance that Fry ascribes to Cézanne’s
work is none other than the mathematical Idea. As Fry tells it, this for Cézanne
represents nothing short of a calling. “And it is precisely this which gives to all his
utterances in form their tremendous, almost prophetic, significance.”38 For Fry, this is
only to say that significant form as Cézanne represents it is indeed a holy essence, the
Idea, the truth, as achieved through the mathematical thought and expression of aes-
thetic form. “One notes how few these forms are,” he remarks of Cézanne’s use of line
and volume and color, in his rendering of an apple, a napkin, and a knife. “One divines,
in fact, that the forms are held together by some strict harmonic principle almost like
that of the canon in Greek architecture, and that it is this that gives its extraordinary
repose and equilibrium to the whole design.”39
It should be remembered that Greek architecture was considered applied mathe-
matics. In the time of Plato the Greek architect was first and foremost a mathemati-
cian. The “canon in Greek architecture” that Fry has in mind, in other words, is
predicated on calculation and measure. We can read in all this Fry’s keen awareness
of Cézanne’s notorious and still enigmatic remarks about the cylinder, the sphere, and
the cone; but besides this, there remains in Fry’s approach to Cézanne a deeper, more
fundamental mathematical/geometrical critical sensibility, one that goes back to
Kant’s aesthetic as predicated on the judgment of taste as the estimation of form and
on Plato’s idea of Form as truth. Regarding the cones, Fry writes, “I doubt that he
deliberately calculated them; they came as an almost unconscious response to a need
for the most evident formal harmony.”40 This is to say that Cézanne’s application of
calculation and measure is automatic, inherent, and that it is precisely this mathemat-
ical mode of aesthetic perception, what Jowett calls “the art of mensuration,” that
reveals the inner core of Cézanne’s art. Like the Renaissance painters that Panofsky
describes as having infused virtue within aesthetic form through the mathematical
harmonics of linear perspective, now, according to Fry, Cézanne has done the same
by way of breaking the laws of linear perspective and inventing a purer mathematical
aesthetic form.
In Fry’s view, mathematics is what makes art serious, makes it philosophical and
saves it from the popular and the frivolous. Mathematics separates art from the pas-
sions that distort reality and blind us to “ultimate reality” that art reveals; it takes art
above and beyond myth, to the Kantian transcendental reason that defines the freedom
of human kind. According to his friend and biographer Virginia Woolf, as Fry sees it,

A vast mass of emotional unreason seemed to be threatening not only England—

that was to be expected—but France also. France, he lamented, had lost that
“objectivity which has been the glory of its great thinkers.” And this emotionalism,
this irrationality could only be fought by science.41

In other words, in his view, Plato is correct about the dangers of passion, which, since
modern times, had only increased.
 Heidegger’s Calling 101
The Calling
Fry’s parents were devout Quakers whose roots went back to the very beginning of the
Quaker religion. And it was as a Quaker and a pragmatist that Fry began thinking about
art as a young man.42 He wanted to know why a flower in the garden could so fascinate
his imagination. Botany and aesthetics were the path to an answer. After scoring a first
in his “awful Tripos” at Cambridge, he saw a very good shot at a fellowship following
graduation, and thus, as Woolf tells it, “to a career that his father had always wished for
himself and had planned for his son, —the career of a distinguished man of science.”43
But in fact Fry had begun to wonder whether he wasn’t better and more honestly suited
for the life of a painter. The life of a painter, however, was the one path to which his
parents were adamantly opposed. They could not understand how art could be nearly
so important and so useful to mankind as science. In an attempt to ameliorate their
objections, Fry stayed on at Cambridge, studying science and painting.

Twice he sat for a Fellowship. But the first time his dissertation was purely scien-
tific, and he took so little trouble with it that he failed. And the second time he tried
to combine science and art—his dissertation was “On the Laws of Phenomenology
and their Application to Greek Painting.” That too was a compromise. It seemed,
Mr Farnell reported, “to have been put together in haste,” and again it failed.44

Whatever the shortcomings, “The Laws of Phenomenology and their Application to

Greek Painting” meant to lay the groundwork for the scientific analysis of aesthetic
form. The intention was not to develop a critical methodology based on science, but
rather, to develop a methodology that would reveal art as science. This would con-
vince his parents, especially his father, of the social legitimacy and religious value of
his work. In the aftermath of the exam, Fry wrote to his father (February 1, 1888),
assuring him that in the balance this was no great loss, especially given all the treasures
of knowledge and experience he had gained during his years at Cambridge. These
treasures notwithstanding,

To his father the failure was a bitter disappointment. It was not only that he had
thrown away the career that seemed to Sir Edward the most desirable of all
careers, a career too in which he had shown brilliant promise. But he had thrown
it away to become a painter.45

What Sir Edward could not see, was that more than any other artist or critic of his
time, his son would indeed “elevate” art to science—to calculation and measure. It is
fair to say that this project had become for the young Roger Fry his life’s calling.
Perhaps it is Weber who first understands the calling as a way of life, especially as
the calling applies to Protestant sects, including Quakerism. As Weber had come to
realize not long after Fry’s conflict with his father had erupted on the all-important
and spiritually freighted question of his own calling, “it is one of the fundamental
characteristics of an individualistic capitalist economy that it is rationalized on the
basis of rigorous calculation.”46 For Weber, this raised the question as to

whose intellectual child the particular form of rational thought was, from which
the idea of a calling and the devotion to labour in the calling has grown, which is,
102 New Philosophy
as we have seen, so irrational from the standpoint of purely eudaemonistic self-
interest, but which has been and still is one of the most characteristic elements of
our capitalist culture.47

Weber wastes little time in bringing this question to Luther’s notion of man’s absolute
obligation to God:

Now it is unmistakable that even in the German word Beruf, and perhaps still
more clearly in the English calling, a religious conception, that of a task set by
God, is at least suggested. The more emphasis is put upon the word in a concrete
case, the more evident is the connotation.48

But while this word, “calling,” knows no history in the classical languages, nor in the
Catholic lexicon, “one has existed for all predominantly Protestant peoples.”49 Weber
continues,

It is true that certain suggestions of positive valuation of routine activity in the

world, which is contained in the conception of the calling, had already existed in
the Middle Ages, and even in late Hellenistic antiquity. But at least one thing is
unquestionably new: the valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as
the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume. This it
was which inevitably gave every-day worldly activity a religious significance, and
which first created the conception of a calling in this sense.50

For the Protestant who adhered to these principles, “The only way of living acceptably
to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through
the fulfillment of obligation imposed upon the individual by his position in the world.
This was his calling.”51
In his fight to separate his theology from Catholicism, “Luther developed this con-
ception in the course of the first decade of his activity as a reformer.” His “increasingly
sharp emphasis against the Catholic consilia evangelica of the monks as dictates of the
devil, the calling grew in importance.” For Luther,

monastic life is not only quite devoid of value as a means of justification before
God, but he also looks upon its renunciation of the duties of this world as the
product of selfishness, withdrawing from temporal obligations. In contrast, labour
in a calling appears to him as the outward expression of brotherly love.52

As Weber observes, “this moral justification of worldly activity was one of the most
important results of the Reformation.”53 In this respect, “for Luther the concept of the
calling remained traditionalistic. His calling is something which man has to accept as
a divine ordinance, to which he must adapt himself.”54
What so disturbed Sir Edward Fry, was precisely his son’s failure to “adapt himself”
to the divine ordinance of his calling as a man of science. But in fact, as already noted,
Fry’s scientific conception of aesthetics was part of the larger Protestant discourse that
had shaped his thinking. Fry’s aspiration, in part, was to establish the scientific concep-
tion of aesthetics in terms that would justify his calling in the eyes of his father and
convince the world of art’s spiritual efficacy as a mode of scientific truth.
 Heidegger’s Calling 103
Here we want to bear in mind that the Calvinist furtherance and reproduction of
Platonic metaphysics had long since begun to manifest vis-a-vis increasing industrial-
ization. By this time, “The [monastic] drain of asceticism from everyday worldly life
had been stopped by a dam,”55 this being the Protestant concept of the calling. The
calling allowed, in other words, for a worldly asceticism of the kind already described,
“and those passionately spiritual natures which had formerly supplied the highest type
of monk were now forced to pursue the ascetic ideals within mundane occupations,”
including art and science.
Weber argues, therefore, that

since predestination was rejected, the peculiarly rational character of Baptist

morality rested above all on the idea of expectant waiting for the Spirit to descend,
which even today is characteristic of the Quaker meeting, and is well analysed by
Barclay. The purpose of this silent waiting is to overcome everything impulsive
and irrational, the passions and subjective interests of the natural man. He must
be stilled in order to create that deep repose of the soul in which alone the word
of God can be heard.56

Thus the Quaker’s spiritual search for an inward truth sheds light for us on Roger
Fry’s way of dealing with the dilemma of choosing his calling as a spiritual vocation.
As Woolf recounts, in Fry’s long struggle with his father and with himself over his
rightful calling, what becomes most apparent is his adherence to the Quaker principles
of the “inner testimony of the Spirit in reason and conscience.” Aside from a letter
to his mother in which “he tried to break down the reserve which, as the years at
Cambridge went on, had grown between them,”57 for Fry it had become nearly impos-
sible to share his innermost thoughts and struggles with either parent.58 “Not only was
he hiding from his friends as a guilty secret his doubts about political activity—he was
hiding from his family another secret; that art, not science, was to be his job.”59 So
already we see in Fry’s university years, as he struggles to break from paternal expec-
tations and to sacrifice the more or less assured life of a “distinguished man of science,”
that the idea of passionless, disinterested, logical analyses as informed by the spiritual
essence of his calling, is there.
In Fry’s mind, he does not choose the path of art over science; rather, he chooses art
as the path to scientific truth. Upon this path lay the inward truth of his own inner
conviction, the truth he had come to through solitary contemplation and rational
deliberation. Such was the deliberation expected of his religious training. We should
note with Weber that such deliberation is “the most important principle of the capital-
istic ethic, which is generally formulated ‘honesty is the best policy.’” As Weber adds,
“even in the judgment of the seventeenth century the specific form of the worldly
asceticism of the Baptists, especially the Quakers, lay in the practical adaptation of this
maxim.”60 It is on the basis of this simple maxim that Weber announces his intention
to “follow out the results of the Puritan idea of the calling in the business world.”61
Weber begins to pursue those results with the following observation:

For everyone without exception God’s Providence has prepared a calling, which
he should profess and in which he should labour. And this calling is not, as it was
for the Lutheran, a fate to which he must submit and which he must make the best
of, but God’s commandment to the individual to work for the divine glory.62
104 New Philosophy
Indeed, “A man without a calling thus lacks the systematic, methodical character
which is, as we have seen, demanded by worldly asceticism.”63 Moreover, the

Quaker ethic also holds that a man’s life in his calling is an exercise in ascetic
virtue, a proof of his state of grace through his conscientiousness, which is
expressed in the care and method with which he pursues his calling. What God
demands is not labour in itself, but rational labour in a calling.64

In this light there can be little question that Fry’s calling, his thinking and doing, was
grounded in his belief in the superiority of logic and ideas over art and imagination.
As such, his aesthetics distilled art to the measurable truth of mathematical form. All
content, especially the kind that would run against the grain of Quaker asceticism, was
at best beside the point. For it was precisely Quaker asceticism that Fry was trying to
preserve in his life-long devotion to the advancement of art and art criticism by way
of mathematizing every aspect of its claim to truth. What begins with Plato’s amalga-
mation of Pythagorean ratio and Socratic virtue now becomes a theory of aesthetics
that will educate modern man.
Perhaps it is fair to suggest in this regard that Weber has the likes of Roger Fry in
mind when he writes,

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when ascet-
icism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate
worldly morality, it did its part in building a tremendous cosmos of the modern
economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic condi-
tions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals
who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly connected with eco-
nomic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until
the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.65

Adding to this catalogue of spiritual maladies that so haunted the inward life of a
modern consciousness such as Fry’s, Weber pushes toward prognosis:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future or whether at the end of this
tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great
rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished
with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For the last stage of this cultural devel-
opment, it might be truly said: Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart;
the nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before
achieved.66

By Weber’s time, the scientific attitude, the mathematical way of seeing the world
through the eyes of calculation and measure, had long since trumped art and the
humanist tradition as the dominant mode of cultural consciousness. In its formalist
manifestation, art had more or less mutated into a scientific mode of aesthetic production.
Among those who ushered it on its way, chief among them was Roger Fry.
Which is to say that Fry’s development of a formalist aesthetic cultivates and indeed
maintains and reproduces all of the aspects of modern capitalism that derive power
and momentum from their internal or unseen relationship to the essence of technology.
 Heidegger’s Calling 105
To the extent that the “rationalization of conduct within the world, but for the sake of
the world beyond, was the consequence of the concept of the calling of ascetic Protes-
tantism,”67 such was the purpose of modernist aesthetics, the aesthetic ideal that Fry
develops in the name of form. To say it another way, the essence of technology that we
see taking hold of Greek thought in the birth of metaphysics and which asserts itself
through Plato’s music theory and in his proscription against the anti-Socratic artist-
philosophers, has now mutated into what has to be understood as religious calling.

Heidegger
A decade before Fry’s essay on Cézanne had appeared, Spengler argued that rational-
ism had instilled in the West a general belief “in the data of critical understanding (that
is, of the ‘reason’) alone.”68 By now, the world had become “a dynamic system, exact,
mathematically disposed, capable down to its fixed causes of being experimentally
probed and numerically fixed so that man can dominate it.”69 However, Spengler
argues, this sense of colossal control, this technological will-to-power that exerts and
manifests itself across the globe and out into ever farther reaches of space, merely
deludes us from the horrific fact of the matter. We have passed the point where “tech-
nical critique becomes tired of being life’s servant and makes itself tyrant.”70 Thus,
Spengler writes,

today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that
hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear
view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure demo-
cratic disguise has accomplished its task so well that the object’s sense of free-
dom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever
existed.71

Technology has conquered both man and nature, and “man has become the slave of
his creation.”72 Spengler continues,

Out of a quite small branch of manual work there has grown up [. . .] a mighty
tree that casts its shadow over all other vocations—namely, the economy of the
machine–industry. It forces the entrepreneur not less than the workman to obedi-
ence. Both become slaves, and not masters, of the machine, which now for the first
time develops its devilish and occult power.73

Here is not the place to develop the idea of the machine’s occult power in terms of
fetish. Suffice it to say that Marx made the point that the bourgeois industrialist was
as much in the bondage of capital as was the proletarian worker, even though his
chains were cast in a far less onerous weight. With specific regard to the laborer, in the
Grundisse he writes that:

once labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the

machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery:
the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone
transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving
power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and
106 New Philosophy
intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious
linkages.74

In this case, “it is the machine which possess skill and strength in place of the worker,
is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own and mechanical laws acting through it.”75
The new robotics brings this Marxian concept to a whole new dimension, not least in
terms of the computerized sex doll, which more and more replaces the sex worker in
high bourgeois culture.
For Heidegger, in any case, the technological development of the machine—which
Marx from the materialist left and Spengler from the idealist right pinpoint as funda-
mental to the problem facing modern Western consciousness—is not so much a simple
shift from Pythagorean ratio to the purely scientific mode of thought that has reduced
consciousness to machine mentality. Rather, Heidegger sees a slow, gradual mutation,
that begins with a useful habit of mind called metaphysics and winds up as a chronic
dependency on the essence of technology. As Heidegger awakens to this development,
which for him recounts the two-thousand-year history of metaphysics, he begins to
search for a new mode of thought. This he locates, to begin with, in Goethe.
We will elucidate this latter point in a moment. But first we should touch on the ire
and antipathy that Heidegger’s claims against metaphysics had provoked among his
peers and still provoke in contemporary philosophy. As Steiner points out, Heidegger
is often accused of wanting to make Being “into a hypostatized mystery,” as if only to
“obscure its everyday function as a grammatical copula.” Try this, the argument goes,
“and you will, most assuredly, be chasing after vapors.” For Steiner, “Such is the riposte
of common sense, of positivism, of the logician and the linguistic philosopher.”76 And
certainly Heidegger is well aware of these kinds of “stiffnecked” reactions concerning
his efforts to recuperate the question of Being and to do so through the poeticization
of philosophy. For Steiner, the question is, what explains this reaction? “How,” Steiner
asks, “did it come about that the most important, fundamental, all-determining of
concepts, that of being, should have been so drastically eroded? What ‘forgetting of
being’ has reduced our perception of ‘is’ to that of an inert piece of syntax or a
vapor?”77 This very predicament, in Steiner’s view, explains “Heidegger’s ‘whole over-
throw of metaphysics’, his critique of Plato, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, and
Nietzsche.” As he goes on to say, for Heidegger,

the history of Western civilization, seen from the crucial vantage point of meta-
physics after Plato, is no more and no less than the story of how Being came to be
ever more forgotten. To him, the “Age of Technology” and machine consciousness
is the culminating and perfectly illogical product of this “amnesia.”78

Again, Heidegger’s is a fundamentally different, and indeed, far less, materialist and in
no-wise idealist take on the industrialization of Western thought. He is neither con-
cerned with the class struggle that informs Marx’s historicization of modes of produc-
tion, nor is he particularly interested in Spengler’s focus on machine-industry per se.
To him, the problem lies much deeper and the stakes are much higher than anything
Marx sees as the necessity of history or that Spengler sees as the inevitable fading of
the West.
In this regard, getting back to what we were saying a moment ago, perhaps the most
important point the young Heidegger takes away from his reading of Spengler is the
 Heidegger’s Calling 107
idea that Goethe’s greatness lies in his thinking, the thinking of the artist-philosopher:
“The position of Goethe in West European metaphysics is still not understood in the
least,” Spengler states in a footnote, wherein he credits The Decline of the West “to
the philosophy of Goethe.”79 After Being and Time, Heidegger would assume the role
as the one who understood “the position of Goethe in West European metaphysics.”
By Goethe’s example, he would come to see Hölderlin in the same light, and Hölderlin
would in turn open the question of van Gogh and the origin of art as the essence
of Being. Eventually Heidegger would come to know Rilke and Cézanne as artist-
philosophers, too. The idea of the artist-philosopher, for Heidegger, begins, in other
words, not in his engagement with Nietzsche—the one whom Heidegger first desig-
nates as an artist-philosopher—but long before, in the thought of Goethe, a kind of
thinking, as Spengler says, that still awaited understanding. To reawaken the human
relation to Being, according to Heidegger, to reformulate the philosophical question of
Being, means to begin again at the first beginning: the wonderment of anti-Socratic
philosophy, the philosophy of the Apollonian/Dionysian artist-philosophers, founders
of the outlawed and repressed tradition that Goethe reanimates, not least, as we have
seen, in Wilhelm Meister.
The once intrinsic relations between Apollo and Dionysius mark off the anti-Socratic
artist-philosopher from the philosopher that materializes in Socratism, whereupon the
artist-philosopher is banished in disgrace. This new, Socratic philosopher, as we have
seen, is the strictly Apollonian philosopher, whose mathematical discourse will even-
tually give rise to Bacon’s scientific revolution and then to Kant’s Age of Reason. Here
again it bears repeating that it was not always this way. Socratism and the metaphysics
that emerges from its origin are habitually taken for granted as the timeless provenance
of virtue and truth. But for centuries prior to metaphysics, poetic thinking permeates
Greek consciousness. With the advent of Socratic thinking, everything changes. As we
have already suggested, in The Dialogues and in The Republic, the anti-Socratic artist-
philosopher’s poetic thinking is strictly proscribed. Greek consciousness had been, in
the time of Parmenides, a living dialogical relation between the Dionysian imagination
and Apollonian logic. The dialogical and polyphonic style of the anti-Socratics, most
notably the styles of Heraclitus and Parmenides, but that of Anaximander and of
Empedocles as well, was such that truth poetically revealed itself according to what
poetic intuition uncovers, comes upon, or allows to be revealed. Now with the triumph
of Socrates consciousness is dominated by scientific truth pure and simple. Art comes
under strict control of metaphysics and is summarily remanded to the service of utili-
tarian certainty.
The new, Apollonian philosopher is the type Plato so famously exemplifies. To Plato’s
great distinction, the first and greatest Apollonian philosopher is also a poet, a fabri-
cator of philosophical-literary prose that even to this day is rarely matched in beauty
and force of argument. Nevertheless, Plato’s narrative prose style stands as purely
monological literary discourse. As we have seen in the case of “The Protagoras,” The
Dialogues dramatize mensuration as the force that drives metaphysics, the force that
licenses the will to control and dominate man and nature. And to that end, Plato’s
fictions serve as beautifully designed and carefully appointed vehicles that invariably
deliver a presupposed, foregone conclusion—that being that truth is determined by the
philosopher’s application of calculation and measure. To be sure, there are differences
of opinion and hotly contested arguments in Plato’s dialogues. Nearly every word,
however, serves a single teleological purpose: the affirmation of Plato’s Idea as
108 New Philosophy
predicated on verifiable truth. One could object that there are plenty of passages in
Plato where Socrates speaks his own mind freely and in his own voice. And again, this
is true. But rarely does the word of Socrates get in the way of the ultimate destination
of Plato’s argument. Aside from whatever Plato wants to say, there is little if any free
speech in the dialogues; nearly every word, every aside, every gesture is subject to one
calculated, measured predetermined outcome: irrefutable proof of the truth and power
of metaphysics and its fundamental concept—Idea.
Moreover, whatever myths one comes across in Plato’s texts, they are invariably
of Plato’s own invention, the fable of Diatoma in The Symposium and the myth of
the afterlife in Book Ten being obvious examples. These new myths have one primary
function: to cover over the myths of old—the myths, that is, that blend mythos and
logos as one and the same discourse—and to replace them with newly scripted
myths that underwrite logos pure and simple. In a word, Plato is a great novelist,
but his novels repudiate the artist-philosopher. Art is at Plato’s service; he uses the
conventions of literature to his own philosophical ends, ends which are in fact
anti-poetic.
Once we leave Parmenides behind and arrive at Plato, once, as Steiner puts it, “being
realizes itself as an ‘idea’, as soon as essence is ‘idealized’, the arrow points upward.”
By that Steiner means that thinking and the thought of being

points, inevitably, to “ought”, to the category of the exemplary, the prototypical,

the teleological and obligatory. In the realm of “ideas”, essents are endowed with
a purpose, a forward-directed rationality, a “should”. This conjunction of futurity
and obligation is the core of Platonic and Kantian idealism.80

For Heidegger, in this idealism lies, in its current effect, not just the absenting of Being,
but in fact the pending disappearance of the human being who experiences Being in
the question of Being. Steiner explains,

The font of genuine thought is astonishment, astonishment at and before being. Its
unfolding is that careful translation of astonishment into action which is question-
ing. For Heidegger, there is a fatal continuity between the assertive, predicative,
definitional, classificatory idiom of Western metaphysics and the will to rational-
technological mastery over life, which he calls nihilism.81

Steiner continues, “There is a whole program of willful sovereignty in the Cartesian

ergo. Metaphysical techniques of argument and systematization prevent us from [as
Heidegger puts it] ‘thinking the question of being’, from putting our thoughts into the
vital register of interrogation.”82 “This conviction,” according to Steiner, “underlies
Heidegger’s ‘counter-logic’,” which Steiner describes as

the peculiar design to replace the aggressive, inquisitorial discourse of Aristotelian,

Baconian, and positivist investigation with an unresolved, even circuitous, neverthe-
less dynamic dialectic. In Aristotelian analysis, nature is made to bear witness;
Bacon tells of putting natural phenomena on the rack so as to make it yield objective
truths; in French, la question signifies judicial torture. In Heidegger’s “questioning of
being,” an activity so central that it defines, or should define, the humane status of
man, there is neither enforcement nor a programmatic thrust from inquisition
 Heidegger’s Calling 109
to reply. . . . Far from being initiator and sole master of the encounter, as Socrates,
Descartes, and the modern scientist-technologist so invariably are, the Heideggerian
asker lays himself open to that which is being questioned and becomes the vulner-
able locus, the permeable space of its disclosure.83

For Heidegger, poetic intuition—thinking in and through poetry—which is to say, the

hybridization of poetic thinking and philosophical thought, constitutes poiesis, “the
permeable space of [Being’s] disclosure.” This proposition counters the whole of Western
metaphysics.
But the question remains, to what end? According to Steiner, such a thinking serves
a purpose that “must remain the touchstone and starting point for that question of
being which will determine, quite literally, the survival of modern man.”84 That deter-
mination stands as anything but a foregone conclusion. The long advance of Western
technology, now at the height of its world dominance, is only the outward manifestation,
the practical application, of the mode of thought established in Plato’s pronouncement
of truth as predicated on measure and calculation, over and against the supposed
unreliability and falsehood of anti-Socratic poiesis.

It is precisely because exploitive technology and the worship of allegedly objective

science are the natural culmination of Western metaphysics after Plato, that the
Heideggerian summons “to overcome metaphysics” is, simultaneously and quint-
essentially, a summons “to the saving of the earth.” The two are indissoluble.85

Quoting Hölderlin’s well-known lines, “But where the danger lies, there also grows the
strength, the agency of salvation,” Steiner wants us to understand that for Heidegger,
“The fatality of technicity lies in the fact that we have broken the links between techne
and poiesis.”86 These links were sundered precisely insofar as the “Platonic-Cartesian
cogitation and the Cartesian foundation of the world’s reality in human reflection are
attempts to ‘leap through or across the world’ in order to arrive at the noncontingent
purity of eternal Ideas or of mathematical functions or certitudes.”87 According to Steiner,
“If being is to be thought in depth, if Western thought and society are to be freed from
their anthropomorphism, from their arrogant humanism, a new kind of language must
be found.”88 This new kind of language is to be found not in the future, but in anti-Socratic
past, a distant echo of which Heidegger discerns in the voices of Goethe, Hölderlin, Celan,
Rilke, and no less so in the voices to be heard in the paintings of van Gogh and Cézanne.
To the extent that for Heidegger, “[l]anguage is the primordial poetry in which a people
speaks being,”89 these artist-philosophers are the modern speakers of that language.
Heidegger’s early and later attempts to reconnect the “broken links between techne
and poiesis” by way of engaging these thinkers as fellow artist-philosophers have to be
understood in confrontation with Cassirer, Kant, and Plato—in confrontation, that is,
with the entire history of Western metaphysics. In appropriating Parmenides to the
ends of metaphysics, in forgetting the question of Being, Plato has pre-set metaphysics
to the never-ending calculation and measure of beings. As such, Plato’s metaphysics
eventually overcomes all of philosophy, and therefore, Heidegger argues, as an increas-
ingly refined science, metaphysics finally winds up as cybernetics.
Though Weiner would define cybernetics as the “scientific study of control and
communication in the animal and the machine,”90 as far as Heidegger is concerned, it
leads to the control of humans by machines. But again, to differentiate Heidegger from
110 New Philosophy
Marx and Spengler on this point is only to note that for Heidegger, the automaton’s
measure and systematic control of individual beings is but a symptom of the unseen,
underlying problem, that being the ever-increasing dominance of the essence of tech-
nology and the corresponding ever-diminishing presence of Being.
Weber locates the motivating force behind this phenomenon at the intersection
between technology and the calling.

For, in conformity with the Old Testament and in analogy to the ethical valuation
of good works, asceticism looked upon the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself as
highly reprehensible; but the attainment of it as the fruit of labour in a calling was
a sign of God’s blessing. And even more important: the religious valuation of rest-
less, continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling, as the highest means to
asceticism, and at the same time the surest and most evident proof of rebirth and
genuine faith, must have been the most powerful conceivable lever for the expan-
sion of the attitude toward life which we have called the spirit of capitalism.91

As Weber goes on to say,

When the limitation of consumption is combined with the release of acquisitive

activity, the inevitable practical result is obvious: accumulation of capital through
ascetic compulsion to save. The restraints which were imposed upon the consump-
tion of wealth naturally served to increase it by making possible the productive
investment in capital.92

Heidegger has come a similar conclusion. In the Nietzsche lectures, we read,

We today are witness to a mysterious law of history which states that one day a
people no longer measures up to the metaphysics that arose from its own history;
that day arrives precisely when such metaphysics has been transformed into the
absolute . . .. It is not enough that one possess tanks, airplanes, and communica-
tion apparatus; nor is it enough that one has at one’s disposal men who can service
such things . . .. What is needed is a mankind that is from top to bottom equal to
the unique fundamental essence of modern technology and its metaphysical truth;
that is to say, one that lets itself be entirely dominated by the essence of technol-
ogy, precisely in order to steer and deploy individual technological processes and
possibilities. In the sense of Nietzsche’s metaphysics only the Over-man is appro-
priate to an absolute “machine economy,” and vice versa he needs for it the insti-
tution of absolute dominion over the earth.93

Here again we see the unbridgeable gap between Nietzsche and Heidegger. In response to
Nietzsche’s Over-man as the way to control metaphysics, as dramatized in Zarathustra,
Heidegger sees the artist-philosopher’s calling as a stepping out from under the noose of
calculation and measure, a stepping back and away from metaphysics altogether.
Like Heidegger, Weber is careful about etymology. His discussion of the calling,
which comes in the chapter titled “Luther’s Conception of the Calling,” begins with
the already quoted observation: “Now it is unmistakable that even in the German
word Beruf, and perhaps more clearly in the English calling, a religious conception,
that of a task set by God, is at least suggested.”94 Nor can there be any mistake that
 Heidegger’s Calling 111
the notion of the calling, as Weber has it in mind, originates in the Judeo-Christian
tradition, especially as it functions in the Old and New Testaments. For Heidegger,
though, the calling’s incipient relation to technology precedes monotheism; and for
him, not until we get to the very beginnings of spiritual incarceration, can we begin to
imagine a way out of the iron cage within which Weber situates our modern condi-
tions of existence. That beginning is to be located at the advent of metaphysics.
Heidegger’s first lecture following World War I, titled “The Idea of Philosophy and
the Worldview Problem” (spring 1919), was based on his reading of Weber.95 In “What
Calls for Thinking” (1952), Heidegger will return once again to Weber’s 1905 analysis
of the calling and its origins in the Judeo-Christian tradition. He writes,

In the widest sense, “to call” means to set in motion, to get something under
way—which may be done in a gentle and therefore unobtrusive manner, and in
fact is most readily done that way. In the New Testament, Matthew 8:18, we read
Videns autem Hesus turbas multis circum se, iussset ire trans fretum. (“But seeing
a large crowd about him, Jesus ‘commanded’ them to go across the sea.”) Luther
translates, Und da Jesus viel Volks um sich sah, hiess er hinuber jenseit des Meers
fahren. (And when Jesus saw many people around him he called them to go over
across the sea.”) To call (heissen) here corresponds to the Latin iubere of the
Vulgate, which properly means to wish something might happen. Jesus “called”
them to go over: he did not give a command or issue an order. What heissen in
this passage means comes to light more clearly if we keep to the older Greek
version of the Gospel. Here we read, Idon de ho Iesous ochlon peri auton
ekeleusin apelthein eis to peran (“Seeing a large crowd around him, Jesus called
to them to go to the other side”). The Greek verb keleuin properly means to get
something on the road, to get it under way. The Greek noun keleuthos means way.
And that the old word “to call” means not so much a command as a letting-reach,
that therefore the “call” has an assonance of helpfulness and complaisance, is
shown by the fact that the same word in Sanskrit means something like “to
invite.”96

Here we see Heidegger in typical fashion poeticizing the word, in this case, “calling,”
so as to bend it toward his intended, which is to say, “uncommon,” meaning.

In short, “to call” means “to command,” provided we hear this word too in its
native, telling sense. For “to command” basically means, not to give commands and
orders, but to commend, entrust, give into safekeeping, to shelter. To call is to appeal
commandingly, to direct and so let something be reached. To promise (Verheissung)
means to respond to an entreaty in such a way that what is spoken here is spoken
to and spoken for. To call means to appeal, and so to let something arrive and come
to presence. It means to speak to something by addressing it.97

And yet Heidegger insists that his definition of and use of the phrase “to call” is noth-
ing new or made-up. “But it is unhabitual not because our spoken speech has never yet
been at home in it, but rather because we are no longer at home with this telling word,
because we no longer really live in it.”98 This is especially evident when we see Heidegger
pushing against the Roman Law of command (Imperium). “Nothing so conforms to
statutes and to the order of nature—by which I mean the law and nothing else—as
112 New Philosophy
does this power of command (imperium) without which no family, no city, no nation,
nor even the human species, nature or the world would be able to subsist.”99 This law
traces its lineage back as far as the Ten Commandments. Our habit, the one Heidegger
is trying to break, that Heidegger wants to break us free of, is our life habituated in the
calling that Weber has defined and historicized. Diametrically opposed to Fry and all
the more pointedly against Cassirer, for Heidegger, art is the one means by which the
habit of metaphysics, the habit of Socratic thinking, can be broken.

True art, true knowledge, true technique are a “vocation,” a “calling forth” that
imposes upon man his native calling. Since Roman engineering and seventeenth-
century rationalism, Western technology has not been a vocation but a provocation
to imperialism. Man challenges nature, he harnesses it, he compels his will on wind
and water, on mountain and woodland.100

In this light, Heidegger will ask, “What is it that claims us so that we must think?” And
to further clarify the question, he asks, “What is it that enjoins our essential being to
think [. . . ]?”101 To which Heidegger answers, “The Question Concerning Technology.”
To put it another way, the artist-philosopher’s “native calling” is to create uncommon
meaning, new worlds, new, uncommon, un-habitual, un-habituated and authentic
ways of inhabiting ourselves in the world. This calling knows that “[t]he place of lan-
guage properly inhabited, and of its habitual words, is usurped by common terms.”
Heidegger is only too aware that “[a]nything that departs from commonness, in order
to inhabit the formerly habitual proper speaking of language, is at once considered a
violation of the standard.” Now, “as soon as we regard the common as the only legit-
imate standard, and become generally incapable of fathoming the commonness of the
common,” meaning is lost, and in its place we live in habituation.

This floundering in a commonness that we have placed under the protection of

so-called natural common sense is not accidental, nor are we free to deprecate it.
This floundering in commonness is part of the high and dangerous game and gam-
ble in which, by the essence of language, we are the stakes.102

But how could Heidegger or anybody else go so far as to suggest that we, human
beings, are the stakes in some kind of language game? For he certainly means that
man, Homo Sapiens, is not just at risk, but that mankind’s very future is on the table.
Are we blind to our own pending colossus? Maybe the danger is inconceivable to
our habit of mind, the dominant mode of thought that philosophers call metaphysics.
Such a danger would not be foreseen from the place of self-assurance; it would only
be “taken in” from beyond the singular, self-inured, self-certain cogito. For want of
such a humble way of seeing, for want of poetic thinking, Heidegger is telling us, we
are playing in a game for life. We scoff at the notion of any such stakes. And besides,
don’t we have virtue on our side?

Notes
1 Jowett says Plato was the first philosopher to take what was “scattered about in earlier
systems” and bring them together into “a harmonious whole.” To bring home the historical
significance of this beginning, he says, further, “We may say more truly that his blending of
 Heidegger’s Calling 113
the rays of hitherto isolated genius into one focus is the work of his originality and the fruit
of his philosophic principle.” B. Jowett, introduction to The Works of Plato, by Plato,
trans., B. Jowett (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1950), xlix. And indeed it is this
originality that allows us to call Plato the founder of metaphysics.
2 Plato, The Works of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Tudor Publishing Company,
1950), 127.
3 Parmenides, “For you will not cut off what-is from clinging to what-is.” in Philosophy
Before Socrates, 2nd ed., ed. Richard D. McKirahan (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Co, Inc., 2010), 11.4: 146.
4 Plato, The Works, 130.
5 B. Jowett, Analysis of The Works of Plato, by Plato, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Tudor
Publishing Company, 1950), 130.
6 Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, A Short History of Philosophy, 1st ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 43.
7 Ibid., 42.
8 Plato, The Works of Plato, 130.
9 Ibid.
10 Needless to say, Kant had thought out the relation between the imagination and the under-
standing long before the Third Critique. From the very beginning, for Kant the imagination
was always under the control of understanding. Given our own take on the relations
between metaphysics and new philosophy, it is worthwhile to follow Kant a little more
closely in this regard, if only to see how he rhetorically undermines the imagination as
erratic and dreamy and gives all authority and responsibility to the ever-reliable under-
standing. In terms reminiscent of the steps Plato takes to protect the impressionable young
as well as the State against unruly poetic discourse, he says in the “Prolegomena,” for
example, “the imagination can perhaps be excused if it daydreams every now and then,
that is, if it does not cautiously hold itself inside the limits of experience; for it will be
enlivened and strengthened through such free flight, and it will always be easier to moderate
its boldness than to remedy its languor. That the understanding, however, which is sup-
posed to think, should instead of that, daydream [Kant’s italics]—for this it can never be
forgiven; for all assistance in setting bounds, where needed, to revelry of the imagination
depends upon it alone.” Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Ed.
Gary Hatfield. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 68–9.
11 Plato, The Works of Plato, 74.
12 Ibid., 98.
13 Ibid., 31.
14 “Estimate,” in New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd ed., ed. Erin McKean (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
15 Clive Bell, “The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” in Art (London: 1914), 17–8.
16 Ibid., 20.
17 Ibid., 29.
18 Ibid., 27.
19 Ibid.
20 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol III: The Phenomenology of Knowl-
edge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 16.
21 Ibid., 73.
22 Ibid., 17.
23 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 77.
24 Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010), 21.
25 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol III: The Phenomenology of Knowl-
edge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press), 76n5.
26 Ibid., 40–41. Perhaps it is worth noting that Panofsky’s essay on “Perspective as Symbolic
Form” originally appeared in 1924, four years after T. S. Eliot had published “Hamlet and
His Problem.” Eliot’s groundbreaking essay theorizes what he calls the “objective correlative.”
In what would quickly become a fundamental principle of literary formalism, Eliot argued
that the objective correlative converts by way of metaphors subjective emotions into
114 New Philosophy
objective signs. As such, the objective correlative confirms the Copernican Hypothesis inso-
far as it translates the particular emotion into its universal equivalent as form, indeed, as
symbolic form. Symbolic form conforms to a priori subjective reason.
27 William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser, A Study (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1963), 192n13. For an extended analysis of the history of the classical concept of
virtue as it pertains to fiction, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel,
1600–1740 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002).
28 Ibid., 34.
29 Ibid., 36.
30 Ibid., 54.
31 Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide, 183.
32 Ibid., 184.
33 Ibid., 45.
34 Roger Fry, Cézanne: A Study of his Development (New York: The MacMillan Company,
1927), 1.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 38.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 48.
40 Ibid., 48–9.
41 Ibid., 232.
42 Ibid., 184.
43 Ibid., 58.
44 Ibid., 60.
45 Ibid., 60–1.
46 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capital (New York: Routledge,
1992), 76.
47 Ibid., 78.
48 Ibid., 79.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 80.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 81.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 85.
55 Ibid., 121.
56 Ibid., 148.
57 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, A Biography, 56.
58 Ibid., 58.
59 Ibid., 57.
60 Max Weber, Protestant Ethic, 151.
61 Ibid., 153.
62 Ibid., 160.
63 Ibid., 161.
64 Ibid., 161–62.
65 Ibid., 182.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., 153. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism anticipates World Wars I and II,
at the end of which Adorno & Horkheimer continue where Weber left off: “With the aban-
donment of thought, which in its reified form of mathematics, machine, and organization
avenges itself on the men who have forgotten it, enlightenment has relinquished its own
realization. By taking everything unique and individual under its tutelage, it left the uncom-
prehended whole the freedom, as domination, to strike back at human existence and
consciousness by way of things.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic
of the Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1994), 41. Citing a 1944 report from the
Rockefeller Foundation, they quote the following: “the supreme question that confronts
 Heidegger’s Calling 115
our generation—the question to which all other problems are merely corollaries—is
whether technology can be brought under control.” The report concludes, “Nobody can be
sure of the formula by which this can be achieved . . .. We must draw on all the resources
to which access can be had.” The Rockefeller Foundation. A Review for 1943 (New York:
The Rockefeller Foundation, 1944), 33ff, https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/
uploads/20150530122145/Annual-Report-1943.pdf; Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic
of the Enlightenment, 41. From this Adorno & Horkheimer draw their own conclusion:
“the Enlightenment is as destructive as its romantic enemies accuse it of being.” Thus they
insist, “Today, when Bacon’s utopian vision that we should ‘command nature by action’—
that is, in practice—has been realized on a tellurian scale, the nature of the thralldom that
he ascribed to unsubjected nature is clear. It was domination itself. And knowledge, in
which Bacon was certain the ‘sovereignty of man lieth hid,’ can now become the dissolu-
tion of domination. But,” they warn, “in the face of such a possibility, and in the service of
the present age, enlightenment becomes wholesale deception of the masses.” Horkheimer
and Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, 42. “The difficulties in the concept of reason
caused by the fact that its subjects, the possessors of that very reason, contradict one
another, are concealed by the apparent clarity of the judgments of the Western Enlighten-
ment. In the Critique of Pure Reason, however, they are expressed in the unclear relation
of the transcendental to the empirical ego, and in other unresolved contractions . . .. As the
transcendental, supraindividual self, reason comprises the idea of a free, human social life
in which men organize themselves as the universal subject and overcome the conflict
between pure and empirical reason in the conscious solidarity of the whole. This represents
the idea of true universality: utopia. At the same time, however, reason constitutes the
court judgment of calculation, which adjusts the world for the ends of self-preservation
and recognizes no function other than the preparation of the object from mere sensory
material in order to make it the material of subjugation.” Ibid., 83–4. In other words, Plato’s
notion of the mathematical as absolute truth is still very much in play, so much so that now
calculation is become the instrument of universal domination. “Intuitively, Kant foretold
what Hollywood consciously put into practice: in the very process of production, images
are pre-censored according to the norm of the understanding which will later govern their
apprehension.” Ibid., 84. In this latter statement Adorno & Horkheimer are assessing the
long-term effects of the Copernican revolution, whereby the subject no longer conforms to
the object, but the object conforms to the subject. Man makes the world, controls and
dominates the world. Or rather, so he is duped into so believing. The fact remains, accord-
ing to Adorno & Horkheimer, that “Science itself is not conscious of itself; it is only a tool.
Enlightenment, however, is the philosophy which equates the truth with scientific system-
atization.” Ibid., 85. It follows, then, that Kant’s scientific systematization, which begins
with the thematization of the sovereign, self-certain bourgeois subject, is merely the accrued
development of calculation and measure, the founding principle of Western metaphysics.
“With Kant’s consequent, full confirmation of the scientific system as the form of truth,
thought seals its own nullity, for science is technical practice, as far removed from reflective
consideration of its own goal as are other forms of labor under the pressure of the system.”
Ibid.
68 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1953), 343.
69 Ibid., 346.
70 Ibid., 409.
71 Ibid., 394.
72 Ibid., 412.
73 Ibid.
74 Karl Marx, Grundisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London, New York: Penguin Classics,
1993), 692.
75 Ibid., 693.
76 George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), 38.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., 38n4.
116 New Philosophy
80 George Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 53.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid., 51.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid., 141.
87 Ibid, 55.
88 Ibid.
89 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 171.
90 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1948), 221.
91 Max Weber, Protestant Ethic, 172.
92 Ibid.
93 Martin Heidegger, Vol. 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell
(New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 165–66.
94 Max Weber, Protestant Ethic, 79.
95 Rudiger Safranski. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 93.
96 Martin Heidegger, “What Calls for Thinking,” in Basic Writings, ed. and trans. David Farrell
Krell (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 386–87.
97 Ibid., 387–88.
98 Ibid., 388.
99 Cicero, in On the Commonwealth and on the Laws, ed. James F. G. Zetzel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158.
100 George Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 139.
101 Ibid., 387–88.
102 Ibid., 389.
5 The Age of Addiction

In his book on the rediscovery of Lucretius’s poem The Nature of Things, Stephen
Greenblatt suggests, more or less in passing, that individuals and indeed groups of
individuals can become addicted to ideas. Greenblatt writes,

In St. Jerome there was a distinctly destructive element in his piety. Or rather, from
the perspective of his piety, his intense pleasure in pagan literature was destroying
him. It was not a matter of spending more of his time with Christian texts but
of giving up the pagan texts altogether. He bound himself with a solemn oath:
“O lord, if ever again I possess worldly books or read them, I have denied thee.”
This renunciation of the authors he loved was a personal affair: he had in effect to
cure himself of a dangerous addiction in order to save his soul. But the addiction—
and hence the need for renunciation—was not his alone. What he found so alluring
was what kept others like him in the thrall of pagan authors. He therefore had to
persuade others to make the sacrifice he had made.1

Greenblatt, as I say, makes these remarks as a passing observation. He doesn’t pause

to dwell on its cultural or historical significance, nor does he give Jerome’s malady any
kind of name, except to call it a “dangerous addiction.” But of course such a term
could apply to any substance addiction. It bears repeating, then, that the addiction
Greenblatt describes is not to a substance, but to an idea, or more particularly, to ideas
to be found in a certain kind of book. Jerome and his secret sharers are addicted to a
literature of ideas, a way of thinking. And just like any substance addiction, this one is
extremely harmful, not only to St. Jerome but to those others in his group who indulge
in the hidden pleasure of pagan thought. No doubt they suffered, even if addictions of
the kind have yet to be verified by science.
If we want, then, to apply some kind of label or definition to the cultural phenomenon
Greenblatt so astutely picks up on, we needn’t bother the clinician or the medical physi-
cian. Neither will have much if anything to say on the matter. For such a definition we
can, then, rely on Sylvère Lotringer, in whose philosophical opinion addiction is “a habit
that cannot be renounced.”2 By this broad reaching and yet elegantly concise phrase,
Lotringer does not categorize addiction as pertaining to substances alone. Nor does he
restrict his definition as regards whether it afflicts an individual or a group, whether it
be suffered by the one or the many in common.
In what follows we will suggest that commonly shared addictions such as St. Jerome’s
can spread across an entire culture. More than that, we will make the claim that addic-
tion of this kind can under certain conditions become transgenerational and indeed
118 New Philosophy
trans-historical. Taking yet another step, indeed a leap, beyond the clinical/scientific
definition of addiction, we will contend that over time the euphoric pleasure derived
from the application of calculation and measure has become increasingly habituated,
to the point where metaphysics has become a habit of mind that cannot be renounced.
Just as St. Jerome and his fellow readers became addicted to “pagan authors,” so man-
kind has become addicted to metaphysics. Such is our claim.
But how, it is fair to ask, can we possibly be addicted to the thing we hold in highest
regard—metaphysics? And how could this exalted mode of thought be seen as a bad
thing, an addiction? After all, addictive drugs disorient the mind, and metaphysics,
more than any other kind of thinking known to modern man, is the generally accepted
path to ratiocination. For this very reason we think of metaphysics as a professionalized
kind of thinking. We say that philosophers are specialists who think about metaphys-
ics and who think in metaphysical terms—through, that is, the variously philosophical
methodologies that define and circumscribe the established discourse of metaphysics.
And indeed in this sense metaphysics has little if anything to do with everyday thinking
and nothing to do with addiction.
And yet, while it is true that many if not most Western philosophers are by defini-
tion expert in metaphysics and metaphysical thinking, it is also true that metaphysical
thought is by no means limited to the Western philosopher. Metaphysics predeter-
mines the way, the method, by which we commonly think, which is primarily by way
of calculation and measure. As such, metaphysics constitutes the essence of technology
and its colonization of global consciousness. Perhaps this statement lands as an even
more outlandish-sounding proposition than the suggestion that mankind can become
addicted to a mode of thought. Suffice it to say for now that its justification comes
from Heidegger, for whom the essence of technology is a particular way of describing
the thinking that underlies Western metaphysics, and as Heidegger already takes for
granted in the nineteen-thirties, when he introduces the phrase “the Age of Technology,”
the essence of technology has become a globalized mode of thought. To push Heidegger’s
point further, thinking in this way is not thinking at all. That is partly because, as we
just noted, metaphysics is a mode of thought grounded in the essence of technology,
predicated as it is on calculation and measure. And to the extent that the essence of
technology is grounded in science, which is to say the logic of mathematical ratiocina-
tion, we are not thinking; for, as Heidegger puts it, science does not think. Thus we are
in the habit of not thinking. This habit of mind, we shall argue, explains the current
period of man’s existence, that being the Age of Addiction, the age in which man
arrives at the edge of extinction.

Substance Addiction
Though our working definition of addiction is philosophical and not scientific, in what
follows we will want to draw parallel lines between man’s addiction to metaphysics
and the more commonly known and scientifically designated addictions to substances,
such as alcohol and opioids. This will elucidate the fact that non-substance addiction
behaves similarly to substance addiction and will shed further light on cultural addic-
tion, such as the kind Greenblatt describes in Jerome’s secretly shared dilemma. This,
in turn, will position us to move ahead with our proposition as regards metaphysics.
The American Medical Association did not recognize alcoholism as a medical illness
until 1956. Not until 2011 did the American Society of Addiction Medicine designate
 The Age of Addiction 119
drug addiction as a disease. Meanwhile, humans have been using and abusing addic-
tive drugs for at least 35,000 years. During the course of those millennia mankind has
produced more than enough evidence to show in no uncertain terms that the power of
addiction far surpasses the willpower of those who want to quit their use of a sub-
stance to which they are addicted, even when one’s life is at stake. Millions and millions
of humans who want to stop drinking die from alcoholism. Much the same goes for
users of heroin and its derivatives, the latter of which now surpasses heart disease as
the number one cause of death in the United States.
While the American opioid epidemic and the resulting skyrocketing death rate is a
relatively new phenomenon, the historically high death rate due to alcoholism makes
it fair to say that science and medicine have been slow to diagnose addiction as a dis-
ease. Art, on the other hand, has been busily dramatizing addiction of one kind or
another since the story of Homer’s lotus-eaters was first recited. Beowulf, Prince of the
Geats, battled Grendel by day and by night he and his fellow warriors guzzled grog
until they passed out. Shakespeare based Hamlet’s tragedy on the premise that
Denmark was a kingdom of alcoholics. In the eighteenth century, Hogarth weighed in
with variations on the Shakespearian theme, as did Coleridge, Daumier, and de Quincy in
the nineteenth century, not to mention Poe, Dickens, and Cruikshank. Of these, Dickens
was probably the most sociologically astute. He and Cruikshank served as tireless lead-
ers in the fight to stem the ever-rising tide of social alcoholism in mid-nineteenth-century
London. Where Dickens and Cruikshank left off, Degas picked up in the eighteen-
seventies in Paris, with his depictions of sickly and depressed absinthe drinkers. Picasso
followed suit. Back in America, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gave Americans
a vivid picture of child-abuse as perpetrated by an alcoholic father.
Twain was writing fiction but he was depicting real American life. In the New
World, communal boozing was out of hand from the get-go. In the Colonial period,
rum production counted as New England’s number one economic driver. By 1700, to
go to sea on an American whaling vessel was to court wrack and ruin on rum. In
1785, Benjamin Rush, Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, published the first treatise on American alcoholism. It was titled Inquiry
into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Body and Mind. By the early years
of the twentieth century, the rampant alcoholic ruination of American families
coast to coast and the consequent destabilization of social order were spinning out of
control.
With the rise of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, a Protestant-led
push to ban alcohol production, distribution, and consumption in the U.S. picked up
momentum, and in 1920 the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
put nationwide prohibition into legal effect. Droves of young writers and artists sailed
for Paris, most notoriously among them Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Those who stayed behind unleashed the Roaring Twenties. Alcoholics Anonymous
was founded in 1935. In the nineteen-seventies and -eighties, Richard Nixon’s “War
on Drugs” and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” movement had the same consequences
as prohibition: more drug abuse, more social and economic devastation, and more
deaths. In March of 2017, a Fox News headline read “FBI’s Comey: Mexican drug
cartels are fueling US Heroin epidemic.”3
Hollywood has sensationally dramatized the alleyway addict craving her next fix
and the alcoholic thrashing through cupboards looking for vanilla extract. The earlier
but less apparent physiological symptoms of addiction, however, are “habituation”
120 New Philosophy
and “tolerance.” The continually repeated use of certain euphoric stimuli results in a
behavioral habit, and as the habit of repeated use continues, “habituation” develops,
which is to say that as the brain’s synaptic receptors become more familiar with the
stimulation, they become “bored” by the repetition, and so the stimulus registers less
and less effect on the senses. This synaptic familiarity or boredom calls for greater
stimulation, which results in more use of the stimulant, in which case the metabolism
develops a growing tolerance toward the stimulant’s effect. It becomes “down regulated,”
to use the neuro-scientific terminology. As the user’s brain becomes accustomed to the
euphoric effects of the given chemical substance, as habituation continues to develop
and tolerance levels increase, sensitivity to the substance dulls even further, and larger
and larger dosages are required in order to maintain the stimulant’s euphoric effects
on the brain’s synaptic receptors. As Paul Armstrong puts it, “The brain can be habit-
ualized, as the deterministic skeptics fear, but the patterns are more or less open to
alteration, as the idealists hope.”4 At a certain nexus or threshold point, however,
habituation gives way to tolerance, need replaces desire, craving replaces pleasure, and
addiction takes over where habit leaves off.
Over time, the chemical physiology of addiction converts the relatively low toxicity
of the addictive substance into highly toxic material. As more and more of the substance
is ingested or behaviorally experienced in order to satisfy the increasing demands of
ever-increasing habituation and greater tolerance, the metabolism deteriorates under
the continual increase in the use of a toxic substance. With alcoholism, for example,
the vital organs—heart, liver, kidneys, as well as the esophagus and nervous system—
begin to break down, often resulting in additional illnesses and death.
But of course, addiction is not just a physiological illness; the direct effects of the
disease are also psychological, social, and spiritual. While tolerance and craving are
the basic symptoms of physiological addiction, obsession and denial are essential to
the psychological side of the disease. Here the substance or euphoric effect of a given
addiction becomes the addict’s reason for being. When a heroin addict wakes up, her
first thought is not, “Does my daughter need her breakfast?” but rather, “Do I have
enough heroin to make it through the day?” All thought, all behavior, all desire is
driven ultimately by the compulsion to satisfy the physiological craving for a given
substance and by the mental obsession to do so. The more pain and the more suffering
addiction causes, the more the addict is convinced that the substance of addiction is
his/her one effective source of relief from pain and suffering. Ultimately she comes to
believe that the only thing that will keep her alive is the next fix or another bottle.
Together, these two elemental factors, obsession and compulsion, give rise to denial,
which blinds the addict from seeing that she is ruled by a force over which she has no
choice, no control, no willpower to resist. Anyone who mentions or even alludes to the
addict’s addiction, whether physician, family member, friend, or employer, becomes
for the addict an instant threat, an enemy to be distrusted and feared, deceived and
manipulated. As the addict becomes increasingly chemical-dependent, she becomes
more and more a slave to the physiological compulsion to consume or ingest whatever
substance it is that she has become addicted to, and she becomes more and more
obsessed with the need to do so. As the physiological metabolism breaks down under
increasing toxicity, mental health begins to deteriorate, leaving the addict increasingly
depressed, alienated, and unable to function in the ordinary course of daily activities
in the workaday world. Fear, anger, dishonesty, and distrust define the chief character-
istics of the addict’s attitude and personality. As the addict becomes alienated from and
 The Age of Addiction 121
hostile toward friends, loved ones, and colleagues, substance acquisition, possession, and
use become the one means of survival in a scary and increasingly hostile environment.
Here we see one of the more vicious aspects of addiction. While internally the toxic
substance destroys the physiology and wreaks havoc on the psychology, the addict’s
external world comes crashing down around her.
As a spiritual condition, addiction functions in terms of guilt, demoralization, and
remorse. The addict’s sense of moral depravity and shame are perhaps the deeper sources
of her spiritual abjection, especially when it involves the abandonment of one’s children
or losing one’s children to divorce or court intervention. Infidelity, embezzlement,
handbag snatching, and stock fraud are among the addict’s common woes. But it is
easy to mistake the addict’s shame as merely a consequence of remorse for sins com-
mitted. This inner recognition arises when denial is no longer sustainable and the
addict, now in desperation, decides to quit, only to discover there is no longer a choice,
that she had long since given up free will in exchange for the continued use of a plea-
surable substance or the euphoric effects of a suprasensible stimulant.

Addiction and Technology

To illustrate this psycho-physiological phenomenon in light of technology, we can
begin by remarking that Anna Karenina is very much about the addict’s relation to
machine technology. We meet Anna Karenina for the first time in a rail-carriage on
the St. Petersburg Railway. When her train arrives at the station, a drunken guard is
crushed under the wheels of the locomotive. Due in part to Count Vronsky’s gallant
response to the accident, an illicit affair ensues between he and Anna. These are obvi-
ous foreshadowings, “evil omens,” as Anna calls them. Thus, in the comings and goings
on the train between St. Petersburg and Moscow, in the back and forth between the
old and the new, between the traditional, slow-moving, and “god-based” life of Old
Moscow and the high-speed scientific innovations that characterize St. Petersburg as a
modern city, Anna’s dangerous liaison with Vronsky develops into more of a night-
mare than a love affair. Finally, Anna’s “evil omens” come full circle. At novel’s end she
throws herself in front of the oncoming train and like the drunken guard, she is crushed
under the wheels. Not only do both she and the guard die a gruesome death by means
of the same machine technology, both are addicts—the guard an assumed alcoholic
and Anna an opioid addict.
Tolstoy’s story, then, is thematized around the relation between the evils of modern
technology and the symbolically related consequence of addiction. For Anna, like
most addicts, these consequences are at first subtle and then fatal. As she sinks deeper
into her addiction, she becomes more and more alienated from custom and tradition,
family and community. In the end this alienation robs her of individual free will, dev-
astates her great spirit, and reduces her life to ruin. But it is not the train that ruins
her life and ultimately takes it away, rather the train represents Russia’s fast develop-
ing modernization, which is in turn dramatized in Anna’s alienated spirit and her
devastating addiction to modern drugs. It is not by accident, then, that Anna lives in
St. Petersburg, the technologically designed city of the future where chemical labs pro-
duce and market new pharmaceuticals such as morphine.
Anna Karenina’s willingness to forego her position in society in exchange for an
affair with Count Vronsky, and her willingness to accept the sacrifice of her adored
son Seryozha as part of the exchange, may not be seen as symptomatic of addiction,
122 New Philosophy
although clinicians would designate it as such. In any case, to dull the pain of being
separated from Seryozha, and to stave off her constant and ever more paralyzing fear
of losing Vronsky to another woman, Anna seeks relief in morphine, having discov-
ered its powerful anesthetic effects during the birth of her illegitimate daughter. By the
time this mounting stress and worry becomes for her an all-out psychic crisis, Anna
“cannot fall asleep without morphine.”5 Soon regular use becomes a part of getting
through the day’s dispiriting aggravations, and these keep piling up on top of her
deeper despair. More often than not, “by being occupied during the day and taking
morphine at night, she could stifle the terrible thoughts of what would happen if he
stopped loving her.”6 And to quell the fear of that loss, at its greatest when Vronsky is
absent, morphine was the only answer. “What was I to do? I couldn’t sleep . . .. My
thoughts troubled me. When he’s here I never take it. Almost never.”7 But of course on
some level, Anna knows that “almost never” is but “a deception,” that she will always
need “the same morphine again.”8 With ever-increasing habituation, more frequent
and stronger doses are required in order to get the same effects. Soon the switch from
morphine to opium becomes a natural part of the progression of the disease. Anna
“poured herself the usual dose of opium and thought that she only had to drink the
whole bottle in order to die, it seemed so easy and simple to her that she again began
to enjoy.”9 Habituation and tolerance lead to full-blown addiction, and soon enough
the “usual” single dose of opium will no longer suffice. “[A]fter a second dose of
opium, towards morning [Anna] fell into a heavy, incomplete sleep, in which she never
lost awareness of herself.”10 She awakens to the vision of her pending death.
At this point Anna can longer check her ever-increasing fear and anger, emotions
that overwhelm her in the form of unfounded sexual jealousy. She has become a slave
to desperation, and her master is opium. Her blindness to this reality, her denial, brings
out yet another of Anna’s symptoms: her absolute belief that whatever she imagines to
be the motives or actions of another must be true. Underneath this belief lies the
addict’s driving need to delude herself into believing that she is in absolute control of
herself and everyone around her. This delusion serves to shore up her denial as she
is increasingly confronted by the mounting evidence that self-determination is a lost
cause and that she is in fact hopelessly out of control.
We can elaborate this last assertion in the following way. To control one’s immedi-
ate and extended environment, his or her inner and outer world, defines the will and
drive of the addict. This drive and will are based on fear. The addict is afraid she will
lose control of what is imperative to life. This latter elemental necessity is the sub-
stance or thing that supplies the addiction. At all times, for fear of her life, the addict
must control the supply, which is to say her outer world, and she must control the
need, which is to say, her inner world. The inner necessity is said to be a compulsion,
insofar as is physiological; the outer necessity is said to be an obsession, insofar as it
is psychological. In this sense, everything in the outer world becomes objectified, all
people, places, and things become either obstacles or utilities in the acquisition of what
is needed. Jobs, girlfriends, acquaintances, movies, automobiles, parents and family,
husbands and wives, children, the world, serve the goal or hinder its realization. The
former must be controlled by way of nourishment and cultivation, the latter by coercion.
In either case, deception, charm, manipulation, and when necessary, crime and vio-
lence, are the chief means to the end. That is because whether enhancement or obsta-
cle, the one or the other must not know the goal, which is the feeding of the addiction.
On the physiological side, the addict must constantly control, manage, adjust, the supply
 The Age of Addiction 123
of whatever the substance is, in order to satisfy the physical compulsion and to repress
the obsession. The more the treatment is repeated, the less sensitive the metabolism is
to the substance, and therefore, the greater the dosage necessary to satisfy the mini-
mum requirement of both the obsession and the compulsion. The more the addiction
is fed, the more it needs. And so, it follows, the substance, the addiction controls the
addict, the one who thinks they are in control. Just as the addict refuses to believe he
or she is out of control, which is one side of “denial,” so the self-willed addict refuses
to believe they are controlled by something other than themselves, namely, the addic-
tion. Indeed, the addict actually believes that he is in control of the very thing that
controls him. One of the things that convinces her of this fallacy is her continued
ability to fend off and manipulate ever mounting obstacles and to manipulate and
satisfy ever increasing demands for supply. But it also follows that the more the addict
is driven to control and manipulate her outer world, the more it withdraws from her
reach. In a very real sense, then, the addict’s life becomes a life of calculation: the cal-
culation of substance acquisition and use, the calculation and control of the environ-
ment and the individuals who enable or threaten acquisition and use.

Cultural Addiction
For Tolstoy, those subjected to synthetic urban innovation are the most immediate
victims of modern technology development; and, at least for him, modern technology
now constitutes and dominates Russian urban consciousness. Besides Anna, that
consciousness is characterized in the urbane and elegantly superficial hedonist, Count
Oblonsky—Anna’s charming and well-oiled, ever-loving and ever-harried, dissolute,
alcoholic brother. Like his sister, Oblonsky represents the new type of aristocrat, the
nouveau urbanite, the un-landed aristocracy of St. Petersburg. Oblonsky will fix his
myriad modern-day problems once and for all if only he can land a position with the
newly established United Agency for Mutual Credit Balance of the Southern Rail-
way Lines and Banking Institutions,11 headquartered in St. Petersburg. Built on
miles of swamp at the cost of thousands of lives and vying for designation as the
world’s first super-city, St. Petersburg serves as the epicenter of the Russian Empire’s
newly systematized bureaucracy. It is also the home base of Anna’s husband and
Oblonsky’s brother-in-law, Count Karenin—the ever willful, ever dry and bloodless,
ever Euclidian, ever mechanical, ever calculating and logical specialist in bureaucratic
administration.
As such, Karenin embodies the New Man, the data driven, highly efficient, highly
productive bureaucrat/logician. His ilk will extend and systematize the new and fast-
growing railroad economy, and the railroad lines will interconnect the Czar’s new
bureaucracy and organize Russia’s vast and far-flung territories into one hyper-modern
communications network. Radiating from St. Petersburg—the technological brain of
Russia—the technology driven communications-relay would then generate mathema-
tized data and quantifiable information backwards and forwards around and across
the land. At last the Czar would bring his great empire under total control. In its
bureaucratic, dehumanized constitution of hyper-modern world-ness, the United
Agency for Mutual Credit Balance of the Southern Railway Lines and Banking Insti-
tutions symbolizes yet another instance of how mathematization drains Russian life of
spiritual essence. More particularly, we see in Karenin’s purely scientific mode of
thought—a habit of mind he cannot renounce—a spiritual emptiness that drives Anna
124 New Philosophy
ever further away. Thus she seeks solace in her ever deeper love affair with Count
Vronsky, whose family origins are deeply rooted in the organic, agrarian past of the
feudal aristocracy, as his affinities with equestrian knighthood plainly tell. As Anna’s
relationship with Vronsky goes sour, opium gives her “fast relief.” But the more import-
ant though less obvious point here is that Anna and Karenin are both suffering from
technology-based, cultural addiction—he to the bureaucratic, scientific thinking that
ineluctably alienates him from his wife, she to the opioids her empty life has driven her to.
William James’s work on habit may have been the first truly scientific step toward
establishing the phenomena of cultural addiction as a bona fide object of scientific
study. In an address he gave to women at the Boston School of Gymnastics in 1892,
which he delivered under the title “The Gospel of Relaxation,” James opens his
remarks by saying that he wants to “take certain psychological doctrines and show
their practical applications to mental hygiene [. . .] to the hygiene of our American life
more particularly.”12 Ever the pragmatist, and driven always to get the most out of all
things practical, out of every scientific theory practically applied, James wants to
extend his investigation of mental hygiene to the level of cultural, even national,
behavior. “Our people,” he says, “especially in academic circles, are turning towards
psychology nowadays with great expectations; and, if psychology is to justify them, it
must be by showing fruits in the pedagogic and therapeutic lines.”13 In this case James
wants to establish a scientific relation between cultural tradition and socially induced
habit, especially the kind of socially induced habit that cannot be renounced.14
This “habit of mind” that James finds of such great importance is not only that of an
individual, but a nation. The only methods by which we could explain “this absence of
repose,” are to be found not in climate or geography, James assures us, but in “psychol-
ogy and sociology.” He continues,

The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and
agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phe-
nomena. They are bad habits, nothing more or less, bred of custom and example,
born of the imitation of bad models and the cultivation of false personal ideals.15

This habit of mind, like all serious conditions, must be remedied. And where, James
inquires, does the remedy for such a condition lie?

It lies, of course, where lay the origins of the disease. If a vicious fashion and taste
are to blame for the thing, the fashion and taste must be changed. And though it
is no small thing to inoculate seventy millions of people with new standards, yet,
if there is to be any relief, that will have to be done.16

What James is saying, in other words, is that seventy million people are addicted to a
physiological necessity, a harmful and debilitating habit of mind that has become pan-
demic and must be cured.
Frantz Fanon, like James a medical physician and a philosopher, brings to James’s
work another perspective. He notes that

Jung locates the collective unconscious in the inherited cerebral matter. But the
collective unconscious, without our having to fall back on the genes, is purely and
simply the sum of prejudices, myths, collective attitudes of a given group. It is
 The Age of Addiction 125
taken for granted, to illustrate, that the Jews who have settled in Israel will pro-
duce in less than a hundred years a collective unconscious different from the ones
that they had before 1945 in the countries which they were forced to leave.17

More to our point,

On the level of philosophic discussion, this would be the place to bring up the old
problem of instinct and habit: instinct, which is inborn (we know how we must
view this “innateness”), invariable, specific; habit, which is acquired. On this level
one would have only to demonstrate that Jung had confused instinct and habit. In
his view, in fact, the collective unconscious is bound up with the cerebral structure,
the myths and archetypes are permanent engrams of the race. I hope I have shown
that nothing of the sort is the case and that in fact the collective unconscious is
cultural which means acquired.18

For Fanon, certain ideologies, myths, and belief systems in general— “governing fictions,”
as he calls them—can become habits of cultural consciousness that are transmitted from
one generation to the next. According to Fanon, in other words, cultural addiction to
modes of thought can be transmitted phylogenetically as well as ontogenetically.

Globalized Dependency on The Essence of Technology

As early as the mid-seventies, Hannah Arendt was catching on to the fact that technology
was fast becoming an addictive agent in the social constitution of subjectivity. Thus
Arendt stridently warns that

rule of neither law nor men but of anonymous offices or computers whose entirely
depersonalized domination may turn out to be a greater threat to freedom and to
that minimum of civility, without which no communal life is conceivable, than the
most outrageous arbitrariness of past tyrannies has ever been.19

Talking about the way the Madison Avenue media machine had lured a segment of the
American public into habitual euphoric delusion and had thereby managed to turn
political truth into fiction and political fiction into a truth, she writes, “What comes
home to roost now is this long education in imagery, which seems no less habit-forming
than drugs.” She goes on to say,

Nothing in my opinion told us more about this addiction than the public reaction,
on the street, as well as in Congress, to our “victory” in Cambodia, in the opinion
of many “just what the doctor ordered” (Sultzberger) to heal the wounds of the
Vietnam defeat.20

In short, Arendt is saying that media technology has figured out how to “hook” human
beings to the euphoric pleasure of seeing their world in a certain way. What she
assumes, but does not elaborate, is the fact that media can achieve this through repe-
tition, which induces habituation.
Psychologists would explain Arendt’s idea of media addiction in terms of “Attitude
Stability,” “Social Conformity,” and “Obedience”—terms that have much to do with
126 New Philosophy
group behavioral dynamics but say nothing about cultural addiction.21 When a thinker
such as Arendt applies a scientifically defined word such as addiction in non-scientific
terms, however, that is hardly to say the word loses legitimacy. What it does mean is
that the thinker is looking at the lifeworld through a different lens than that of the
laboratory microscope or the computer that circumscribes the parameters of scientific
investigation. In this case, Arendt recognizes the fact that media technology has the
power to make itself habit-forming, not just in individuals, but as a social phenomenon.
Arendt means for us to understand media habituation and tolerance as a social phe-
nomenon that becomes an addiction to a suprasensible “substance” called marketing
media technology.
Arendt thematizes technology addiction in the very terms she takes up from Heidegger.
Unlike Arendt, however—and the same applies to so many others who have made
similar assertions, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari,
Baudrillard, Virilio, and Berardi, to name but a few thinkers who have taken up the
question of technology—for Heidegger, technology itself and our addiction to its var-
ious manifestations, whether it be the industrialization that according to Tolstoy
explains the spiritual alienation of modern Russian society or the media culture that
Arendt describes as technology addiction, is merely symptomatic of a latent and far
more serious cultural condition, an unseen habit of mind, the globalized addiction to
metaphysics.
The better to elucidate this proposition, let us begin again with the heroin addict,
who sees the world as a machine, the function or malfunction of which will determine
whether he will get his fix or not. Friends, loved ones, possessions—all things in the
addict’s world are instrumentalized, ordered according to their use in the supply and
maintenance of his addiction. Likewise, he sees his psychic life and his emotional and
spiritual life, not to mention his physical body and biological metabolism, as instru-
mental indicators of whether the dosage of heroin currently operating in his system
quells the physiological compulsion and the mental obsession that dominates his
will—of whether, in other words, he is in full control of the instrument panel. In the
drive to control and dominate every aspect of nature through total instrumentalization,
man has reached, in Heidegger’s view, a crisis point in which human consciousness and
the lifeworld have become incurably toxic. To put it in starker terms, for Heidegger,
man’s mathematical habit of mind, his single-minded, purely logical way of seeing his
inner and outer world—a standpoint that by way of tolerance wills him to actualize
his thinking in ever larger measure—has brought him face to face with his own extinction.
Heidegger writes,

It is not as a particular deadly machine that the much discussed atom bomb is
deadly. What has long threatened man with death, indeed with the death of his
essence, is the absoluteness of his sheer willing in the sense of his deliberate self-
assertion in everything. What threatens man in his essence is the willful opinion
that through the peaceful release, transformation, stockpiling, and delivery of nat-
ural energies, man could make man’s being bearable for all and happy in general.
However, the peace of this peacefulness is merely the undisturbed, lasting, frenzied
restlessness of self-assertion deliberately thrown back on itself. What threatens
man in his essence is the opinion that this assertion of production would be risked
without the danger if only other interests in addition to it, perhaps those of faith,
remain valid—as though the present relationship of our essence to the entirety of
 The Age of Addiction 127
beings (a relationship into which the technological mode of willing has shifted us)
could still be housed in some separate annex, some residence on the side that
would be able to offer more than temporary resorts to self-deception.22

Thus, man’s “willful opinion” drives his addiction to what has become a compulsive
dependency on the essence of technology. Elsewhere Heidegger remarks, “The will to
mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from
human control.”23 Ever more desperately seeking control of the world, man belies his
enslavement to the essence of technology.
These assertions are hardly foreign to scientific thought. Werner Heisenberg writes,

the [science/technology] process has fundamentally changed the conditions of life

on our earth; and whether one approves of it or not, whether one calls it progress
or danger, one must realize that it has gone far beyond any control through human
forces.24

Undoubtedly aware of his friend Heidegger’s famous remarks concerning the atomic
bomb, he goes on to say that

the invention of nuclear weapons, has shown the essence of this development in the
sharpest possible light. On the one hand, it has demonstrated most clearly that the
changes brought about by the combination of natural and technical sciences cannot
be looked upon from the optimistic viewpoint; it has at least partly justified the
views of those who had always warned against the dangers of such radical trans-
mutation of our natural conditions of life.25

The upshot of this transmutation, according to Heisenberg, is that man’s relation to

science, to metaphysics, has become inverted. Now man serves at the will of science
and not the other way around. And just because we have become aware of this trans-
mutation, it is not a simple matter of reversing it. Like all addictions, there is no going
back to where we were in our relation to metaphysics before we became its slave.
Transmutation is irreversible.
Heisenberg traces the slow and relentless transmutation of modern human con-
sciousness back to Galileo, wherein he finds scientific thinking at a turning point.
As Heisenberg tells it, Galileo based his self-defense before the Inquisition on the fact
that “the representatives of natural science could argue that experience offers an
undisputable truth.”26 Galileo’s claim that science and not myth gives to man the
certainty of truth had been long since established in the Republic. But for Plato, the
application of calculation and measure as the ground and experiential benchmark
of certainty is still for the most part intellectually experiential, which is to say,
theoretical. Man begins to see his world through the symmetrical frame of the Acrop-
olis, for example, but man’s thinking is yet a long way from becoming purely and
obsessively driven by anything like an addiction to logic or mathematical thinking.
True, the essence of technology is there in the calculation and measure by which Plato
originally defines metaphysics and separates this mode of thought from the poetic
logic that went before. But to say it again, metaphysics at this point in the history
of human consciousness is far from a habit of mind that cannot be renounced. In
Galileo’s moment, Heisenberg argues, “the human attitude toward nature changed
128 New Philosophy
from a contemplative one to a pragmatic one.”27 Now the experiential application of
calculation and measure becomes far less theoretical and far more concrete. We move,
for instance, from the theoretical development of mathematics and geometry to the
scientific application of its principles to engineering and applied mathematics. Logic
is applied more and more to mechanics. Without stopping to elaborate the point, we
can mention by way of example Brunelleschi’s dome. The stupendous feats of applied
mathematics that went into this gargantuan engineering project mark a significant
moment in the development we are describing. This development circumscribes
another phase in man’s habituation to metaphysical thought. Theoretical logic
becomes “down regulated,” and to get the same euphoric effects from its use, man
must find ever-new and different ways to increase its application and enlarge its
impact on human consciousness.
But again, as we have seen, this practical, technological attitude toward scientific
thinking is not the consequence of Galileo’s scientific discoveries; rather, his technolog-
ical drive toward the practical conquest of the earth and the heavens stood as a marker
in the long unfolding history proceeding from the advent of the essence of technology.
This event, which takes place in Socratism and continues to unfold all the way through
Brunellesci’s Renaissance up to and through Galileo and all the way to Einstein’s theory
of relativity—a theory which, as Oppenheimer lived to regret, is likewise instrumental-
ized as applied science.
Over time, Heisenberg insists, “the immediate connection with reality is lost.”28 In
this phrasing we hear the pattern of habituation. Mathematical thinking, what Plato
calls “calculation and measure,” has become, over the millennia, the one and only way
we see the world, the way we take it in and objectify it, control it precisely insofar as we
see our relationship to the world as purely productive and instrumental. Through
constant application and euphoric effect this mode of thought has become the “basis
for life.” It is a way of thinking, according to Heisenberg, that “can persist even against
immediate contradicting experience and can therefore not be shaken by added scientific
knowledge [. . .] upheld to a point where it seems completely absurd, and that it then
ends only with the death of the believer.”29 Just as with the drug addict or alcoholic
who refuses to believe irrefutable medical proof that his disease has reached the pre-
fatal stage and who nonetheless continues to use, so, Heisenberg is suggesting, very
possibly the species as a whole denies the danger of extinction and shows no sign of
change.
Heidegger identifies the habit of mind that cannot be renounced as “one-track
thinking.” Alluding to the globalization of one-track thinking, by which he means
metaphysics and the essence of technology, he informs us that the “dominion of this
manner of perception is so vast today that our eyes can barely encompass it.”30 We
are, in fact, blind to its dominion because it controls the way we see and think. “The
expression ‘one-track’ has been chosen on purpose,” he tells us. “Track has to do
with rails, and rails with technology.”31 To my knowledge Heidegger never makes
direct mention of Anna Karenina. Be that as it may, Heidegger is an erstwhile student
of Russian language, who derives much of his thinking on the relation between time
and death from Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, and it is almost inconceivable that
Heidegger’s notion of one-track thinking does not come from his reading of Anna
Karenina.
But here again, while Tolstoy understands machine technology as the problem per
se, for Heidegger, technology is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problem.
 The Age of Addiction 129
According to him, our habituated relationship to the essence of technology explains
our pathological relationship to technology per se. We can try to get rid of modern
technology as much as we like, but it will not go away. Nor should we want it to. It is
technology that gives us a life in nature. If we are going to change our pathological and
indeed addictive relationship to technology, there is but one answer: we must change
our mind. We must somehow break the pathological habit of thinking and seeing
through our single-minded mode of thought: metaphysics. Heidegger writes, “This
one-track thinking, which is becoming ever more widespread in various shapes, is one
of those unsuspected and inconspicuous forms, mentioned earlier, in which the essence
of technology assumes dominion—because that essence wills and needs absolute uni-
vocity.”32 Which is to say that humankind shares in common one habit of mind, the
same one-track thinking.
This is not to say that Heidegger is unaware of that rampant technology addiction
that increasingly dominates modern life. He asks, “What is it that reigns today, deter-
mining the reality of earth as a whole?” To which he answers,

[I]mperative of progress demands an imperative of production that is combined

with an imperative of ever-new needs. The imperative of ever-new needs is of such
a sort that everything which is imperatively new is likewise immediately obsolete
and outmoded, replaced by something “ever newer” and so forth.33

According to Heidegger, the

man of the times, the man who understands himself and acts as the producer of all
“reality,” the man who finds himself today caught in the increasingly constraining
network of socio-economic “imperatives” (which are, seen from the history of being,
the precipitates of positionality), can that man himself produce the means of work-
ing a way out of the pressure of “imperatives”?34

But of course, Heidegger is posing a rhetorical question. After all,

[h]ow could he manage this without surrendering his own determination as pro-
ducer? And is such a surrender possible in the horizon of today’s reality? What
would such a renunciation signify? It would mean renouncing progress itself,
committing to a general restriction of consumption and production.35

Here we are introduced to the idea of sustainable economy, in the face of which stands
that which cannot be renounced: obsessive-compulsive production and consumption
in the Age of Technology.
To trace this line of development into our own times, which we are calling the Age
of Addiction, we can take by way of quick example an article that appeared in Harvard
Business Review in 2017. A cover story authored by a leading American economist and
entitled “Curing the Addiction to Growth,”36 demonstrates that with the intensifica-
tion of nationalism in America and around the world we can expect a de-globalization
effect resulting in decreased trade. In which case, plant managers must prepare to
lower production while leveling off profits. To achieve this shift in attitude and then
implement the new strategic plan, these plant managers would have to renounce their
commitment to ever-expanding market share of global trade. In short, they would
130 New Philosophy
have to break their (unconscious) addiction to production growth, the habit of mind
that dominates and indeed defines capitalism.
But again, for Heidegger, such instances from the business world are but symptoms of
the very kind Tolstoy had long since thematized—Anna’s husband, Alexei Alexandrovich
Karenin, being the obvious case in point. As Heidegger further remarks,

everything today betrays the fact that we bestir ourselves to drive storms away. We
organize all available means for cloud-seeding and storm dispersal in order to
have calm in the face of the storm. But this calm is no tranquility. It is anesthesia;
more precisely, the narcotization of anxiety in the face of thinking.37

This says in effect that we habitually drug ourselves through technology in order
not to think. Such is the case with our woman “of the times.”38 But it is a mistake to
think technology is the cause of her delusional addiction to technology. The cause-
and-effect relationship between technology and technology addiction is symptom-
atic of a pandemic mode of thought that predetermines and dominates all relations
to technology.

Hegel
In notes entitled “Negativity, a Confrontation with Hegel Approached from Negativ-
ity,” written in the years 1938–1939 and 1941, Heidegger situates Hegel firmly within
the historical continuum of metaphysics, especially as regards the essence of technology.
He writes,

Absolute actuality (being in the broader sense) from the re-nunciation of the sys-
tematic (system-conforming) grounding off the difference between being and
beings. This renunciation (already the consummation of neglect) out of the forget-
fulness of this distinction. Forgetfulness out of the most habitual habituation to
the difference. The dismantling here necessary out of the renunciation; the latter
lies in the essence of absolute metaphysics and metaphysics in general: it is and it
is being carried out with the enactment of metaphysics.39

As with Galileo, science—metaphysics—becomes in Hegel more deeply embedded as

a habit of mind, now applied as the mode of thought. This way of seeing and thinking
involves a forgetting, a forgetting that stems from “the most habitual habituation.”40
In this sense, the habit of thought becomes, in other words, a narcotic stimulant that
with repeated use becomes more and more tolerated and, therefore, requires greater
use in order to experience the same levels of stimulation. Secure in the feeling of truth
and bolstered in the habit of this forgetting, man carries out the practical “enactment
of metaphysics.”
Later on, Heidegger will quote Hegel as saying “Being is the indeterminate immedi-
ate,” which, as far as Heidegger is concerned, “shows only that he equates being with
beings in general understood in the ordinary sense—in accordance with metaphysical
habituation, more specifically, however, according to the idealistic mode of thinking.”41
This is yet another way of saying that metaphysics, by the time it comes to operate in
Hegel, has become a habituated mode of thought. And so it follows, according to
Heidegger, that
 The Age of Addiction 131
Hegel’s concept of being thus has its very own pre-suppositions (namely those
of the horizon of thoughtness), but these are at the same time the presuppositions of
Western metaphysics; and this in turn means: that the basic position in which the
relation of Western man to beings maintains itself as such.42

To put it another way, man’s habitual and habituated way of thinking and of seeing
and being in the world, metaphysics, renounces and thereby forgets the difference
between being and beings, leaving man’s sole relation in the world to that of beings.
Heidegger continues, “This ‘re-nunciation’ is not expressly carried out but is made defin-
itive only in the manner of the traditional disregard: The pre-supposition of thought.”43
The “pre-supposition of thought,” which Heidegger also refers to as “prejudiced”
thinking, is a one-track mode of thought. This one-track mode of thought excludes
Being from thinking. It does so on the “habitual and habituated” presupposition that
Being cannot be calculated and measured and therefore stands outside the parameters
of scientific thinking, beyond the pale of mathematical thought. As such, metaphysics
comes down to what Heidegger identifies as follows: “Renunciation—of the distinction
between being and beings, its interrogation and grounding.”44 This renunciation of the
difference between being and beings comes from the thinking of a habit of mind that
cannot be renounced. Precisely insofar as this renunciation has become habituated, we
have lost sight of and forgotten the question of difference.
We should therefore understand the habituation of one-track thought as essential
metaphysics. In this regard Heidegger says that the presupposition that grounds meta-
physical thought comes from the notion of a premise, which he takes to mean, “what
is sent before—for calculating thinking.”45 Insofar as it is “sent before,” there is no
choosing “calculating thinking” as a mode of thought. Calculating thinking presup-
poses all thinking. It is our all too habituated habit of mind.
As we see in Book X, the premise Heidegger describes is predicated on the exclusion of
poetic thinking from philosophy, the monolithic result of which is metaphysics. This
exclusion, it bears repeating, operates in three ways. First, art is defined as measurable and
calculable form. Art that is shown by calculation and measure to serve the State—art that
represents the good of the gods and the good of the State and that satisfies the formal,
mathematical principles of harmony and serenity, order and balance—remains within the
city gates in subservience to metaphysics. Second, metaphysics in its thinking about aes-
thetics foregrounds this kind of art and at the same time excludes all poetic thinking from
metaphysics, from, that is, philosophico-scientific thought. Thirdly, art that is formally
imbalanced (unruly) or that demands recognition and interpretation of its content, and
which therefore lies beyond the mathematical assessment and control of metaphysics, is
sanctioned. The long-ensuing separation of philosophy from poetic thinking results in
Apollonian art (un-free art, art that is “sent before” in the service of calculation and mea-
sure) on the one hand and the philosophico-scientific domination and suppression of
whatever Dionysian remnants have survived in art from the pre-Socratic era on the other.
Because this domination and suppression is presupposed, because modern man is in the
habituated habit of relating to art in terms of metaphysics, whatever poetic thinking has
survived from the anti-Socratic epoch has been overlooked because it is hidden, and
because it is hidden it has been forgotten. According to Heidegger, what has been hidden
and forgotten and that still survives in certain kinds of poetic thinking is poiesis, the
mytho-logical thinking that reveals the ontological difference. This aesthetico-ontological
distinction is not a theoretical one. For Heidegger, at least, the future depends on it.
132 New Philosophy
Notes
1 Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Cambridge: W. W. Norton,
2011), 96.
2 The phrase, “Addiction is a habit than cannot be renounced” comes from a conversation
with the author. See Sylvère Lotringer, Mad Like Artaud, trans. Joanna Spinks (Minneapolis:
Univocal Publishing, 2003).
3 Matthew Dean, “FBI’s Comey: Mexican drug cartels are fueling US Heroin epidemic,” U.S.
Home, Fox News, March 2, 2017, www.foxnews.com/us/2017/03/02/fbis-comey-mexican-
drug-cartels-fueling-us-heroin-epidemic.html.
4 Paul B. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and
Art (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013), 120. My thanks also to Edgar E. Coons, Professor
of Psychology, Cognition, and Perception, Center for Neural Science, NYU, for his guidance
and advice on the science of addiction.
5 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York:
Penguin, 2000), 413.
6 Ibid., 640.
7 Ibid., 666.
8 Ibid., 667.
9 Ibid., 704.
10 Ibid., 710.
11 Ibid., 751.
12 William James, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students
on Some of Life’s Ideals (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1962), 101.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 99.
15 Ibid., 100.
16 Ibid., 103.
17 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 188.
18 Ibid.
19 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in Responsibility and Judgment (New York:
Schocken Books, 2003), 193–213.
20 Ibid., 4.
21 Henry Glietman, James Gross, and Daniel Reisberg, Psychology, 8th ed. (New York, London:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 518–23.
22 Martin Heidegger, in Off the Beaton Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 220.
23 Martin Heidegger, in Basic Writings, ed. and trans. David Farrell Krell (London: Harper
Perennial, 2008), 289.
24 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 131.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 136.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 139.
29 Ibid., 143.
30 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper Perennial,
2004), 26.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and Francois Raffoul (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2012), 74.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Marshall Fisher, Vishal Gaur, and Herb Kleinberger, “Curing the Addiction to Growth,” in
Harvard Business Review (January–February 2017): 66–74, www.hbr.org/2017/01/curing-
the-addiction-to-growth.
37 Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy, trans. David
Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 1975), 78.
 The Age of Addiction 133
38 Ibid.
39 Martin Heidegger, Hegel, trans. Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2015), 11.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 23.
42 Ibid., 23–24.
43 Ibid., 25.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., 27.
6 The Saying of Parmenides

The Myth of Metaphysics

Metaphysics gives pre-Socratic philosophy its name. In so naming the philosophy that
precedes metaphysics as a kind of thinking the legitimacy of which depends on its
relation to metaphysics, on its relation to Socratic thought, metaphysics has taught us
to take for granted the relative supremacy of metaphysics. We have even come to
assume the chronological primacy of metaphysics, as if a philosophy different from
metaphysics never really existed, or as if pre-Socratic philosophy were nothing more
than the adolescent stage of metaphysics. And yet metaphysics marks a radical depar-
ture from so-called pre-Socratic thought. As a mathematical-scientific mode of thought,
Socratic thinking purges pre-Socratic philosophy of mythos and reestablishes philoso-
phy as pure logos.
Nevertheless, mythos still exists in certain kinds of philosophy, a fact we ignore
because, as Heidegger tells us, “Historians and philologists, by virtue of a prejudice mod-
ern rationalism adopted from Platonism, imagine that mythos was destroyed by logos.”
Whenever modern metaphysics conveys this imaginary construct as an incontestable
truism, Heidegger gives a wry smile and says, “nothing religious is ever destroyed by
logic; it is destroyed only by the god’s withdrawal.”1 With this latter statement, Heidegger’s
old Davos adversary, Ernst Cassirer, would most certainly agree. But he would assent to
its validity from the very opposite position: “A myth is in a sense invulnerable. It is
impervious to rational arguments; it cannot be refuted by syllogisms. But philosophy can
do us another important service. It can make us understand the adversary. In order to
fight the enemy you must know him . . .. We should see the adversary face to face in order
to know how to combat him.”2 Mythos is the enemy of logos, according to Cassirer, and
logos must do everything it can to contain and minimize what it cannot destroy. If meta-
physics in the form of humanist rationalism is to go on as the dominant mode of Western
thought, modern philosophy must wage perpetual war on mythos.
When he debated Heidegger at Davos in 1929, Cassirer was still under the impression
that he and Heidegger shared common ground on this very point. For his part,
Heidegger had long since comprehended the philosophical essence of mythos. As far
as he was concerned, there was no room for compromise with the neo-Kantian likes
of Cassirer. This in part explains Heidegger’s rude demeanor toward the charming and
affable Cassirer during the debates. Long before Cassirer saw it himself, Heidegger
knew Cassirer as the enemy of myth. By 1946, when Cassirer published his final and
most forcible assault on myth, The Myth of the State, he had come to see Heidegger
for what he was: a full-fledged partisan of mythos and a threat to metaphysics.
136 New Philosophy
Cassirer had initially misjudged Heidegger only because he had assumed that Heidegger’s
thinking was coming from Husserl, then the leading light of German metaphysics.
Cassirer naturally expected the young Heidegger’s thinking would follow the path laid
down for him by his adoring mentor, whose “highest aim was to make philosophy an
‘exact science,’ and to found it upon unshakable facts and indubitable principles.”
Once the scales had fallen from his eyes, Cassirer could see that “[s]uch a tendency is
entirely alien to Heidegger. He does not admit that there is something like ‘eternal’
truth, a Platonic ‘realm of ideas,’ or a strict logical method of philosophical thought.”3
Just as Plato saw his enemy in the mytho-poetic philosophers of old, Cassirer could see
plainly now who the modern enemy was: Spengler fostered the very kind of myth-mon-
gering that led to the Nazi debacle, and Heidegger was equally dangerous.
For Heidegger, though, the issue is not a simple matter of myth against logic, mythos
versus logos. Rather, it is the essential interplay between logic and myth, science and
poetry, that gives rise to thinking, that creates the clearing wherein thinking can occur.
For him, “thinking back to what is to be thought—is the source and ground of poesy.”4
Nonetheless, Cassirer sees Heidegger as the enemy of logic—the enemy, more cor-
rectly, of Platonic philosophy, and, more correctly still, of Western Metaphysics. And
like the poet-philosophers of old and like Spengler, Heidegger must be suppressed, for
his thinking is invulnerable.
What Cassirer does not see, however, is that he too is a myth-maker. What’s more,
like Heidegger’s, Cassirer’s mythic narrative stems from the same mythology—that of
Parmenides. But while Heidegger’s Parmenides is the poet of aletheia and thus the
artist-philosopher of a fleeting logos unpredictably revealed along the path of mythos,
Cassirer’s “truth” is the secure, predictable and eternal logos of “Father Parmenides,”
as Plato called him. This is the Parmenides of non-contraction, the Parmenides of logos
stripped of mythos—the Parmenides that Plato has mythologized as the predicate of
logical thought. This latter Parmenides mutates into the myth of metaphysics—the
narrative Plato gives to posterity in the fabled name and thought of Socrates. In defense
of logical thought, in defense of Plato’s great legacy, Cassirer and the legions of Socratic
philosophers before him and after him, wage unending war against mythos. They do
so, however, in the sense that Baudrillard describes Disneyworld. While Disneyworld
serves as the spectacle that obfuscates the fact that the whole of America has
become nothing but an amusement park, so the war against myth obscures the fact
that metaphysics—Socratic thinking—is as much a myth as the one it so busily tries to
destroy. To read the myth of Socrates at its inception is to read The Symposium—the
great founding myth of metaphysics. And thus, it bears repeating, metaphysics does
not separate mythos from logos, as Plato would have us believe. Rather, metaphysics
originates in Plato’s newly constituted myth, his new order of things: the myth of logos
distilled of mythos, the myth of logos pure and simple, the absolute myth of Socrates.
With Plato, with the advent of metaphysics, begins the forgetting of Being, the sup-
pression of poetic thought. To uncover the Being of thinking, Heidegger insists, is to
recollect the other Parmenides, the one that metaphysics has covered over, hidden and
repressed. There must be a “thinking back to what is to be thought.” Instead of a return
to Plato’s “Father Parmenides,” the pure logician of non-contradiction, Heidegger pro-
poses a “stepping back” from Plato, a remembering of the pre-Socratic thinkers, the
artist-philosophers for whom logos and mythos are aspects of thinking as Being.
Heidegger elaborates, “Surely, as long as we take the view that logic gives us insight
into what thinking is, we shall never be able to think how much all poesy rests upon
 The Saying of Parmenides 137
5
thinking back, recollection.” This recollection is a thinking back to the poetic logic
that precedes Socrates, that comes before metaphysics.
But while metaphysics generally wants to suppress mythos and undermine poetic
thinking as the enemy of logic, Heidegger, as already suggested, has no wish to be rid
of logos, or, for that matter, the mathematical sciences, which for Heidegger now comprise
metaphysics. Heidegger’s fast-held grasp of logos is what initially confuses Cassirer.
Like Husserl, for Heidegger, “the sciences are in themselves positively essential.” Science—
i.e., logic—is not a bad thing in and of itself, but we fail to see that “today’s sciences
belong to the realm of the essence of modern technology, and nowhere else.”6 Here
Heidegger is making a crucial distinction, which he stresses by insisting we “[n]ote that
I am saying ‘in the realm of the essence of technology’, and not simply technology.”7
We know from “The Question Concerning Technology” and other writings that the
essence of technology is to be located in Socratic thought. We will explore this latter
point in due course. For now, we can observe in a preliminary way that in the absence
of poiesis (i.e., logos/mythos), mathematical/scientific analysis and deduction (i.e.,
pure logos) became what it is today: the essence of technology. When Heidegger won-
ders, “Why does the traditional doctrine of thinking bear the curious title ‘logic’?”—
he has already given an answer, which is, that we have forgotten how to think.

New Philosophy
In Parmenides, fragment VIII, we read “Just one story of a route/ is still left: ‘is.’”8 This
“is” marks the path, the allegorical narrative trail, that beckons us to come and think.
Indeed, in Heidegger’s view, if we are going to find our way, this is the path to be taken.
It is a never-ending, winding path, a woodcutter’s path, with no destination, but for
the perambulation of poiesis, of poetic thought. We learn from Parmenides,

What is to be thought of is the same as that on account of which the thought is.
For not without what-is, on which it depends, having been solemnly pronounced,
Will you find thinking.9

What precedes Plato, in other words, is the anti-Socratic philosophical thinking that is
grounded in poetic wonderment in the presence of Being, which unfolds, reveals itself,
in narrative form—through the unfolding, that is, of poetic time.
If the “what-is” is thinking itself, then Being is thinking. It is the poetic thinking of
Parmenides and those who follow him. These thinkers seek “refuge” in the world of
art, a safe-haven beyond the threat of Western Metaphysics. It is here, in the return to
Apollonian/Dionysian aesthetico-logical consciousness, that Heidegger finds a way
back to the Question of Being. Here Heidegger has arrived at the prior end of meta-
physics, the other end of the “controllable” and the “manipulable,” the prior end of
calculation and measure as the sole determinants of truth.
True, when he debates Cassirer at Davos, Heidegger has not yet completely broken
with metaphysics. By the time he comes to write the “Letter on Humanism,” however,
Heidegger has no wish to be seen as a philosopher of any kind whatever, let alone as
a practitioner of metaphysics. He now just wants to be someone who thinks.10 For him
the prime example of the thinker is the anti-Socratic artist-philosopher who dwells
poetically in the question, in the wonderment of not-knowing. Posed against the think-
ing of science, of post-Socratic metaphysics, in which the logical and inextricable
138 New Philosophy
assimilation of “thinking and action” leads inexorably to “the dominance of the use-
ful,”11 Heidegger’s question of Being is now to be formulated in the logico-poetics of
the what-is.
This thinking, the thinking of Parmenides, Hölderlin describes as “new philosophy.”
In a 1799 letter to his half-brother Karl Gok, Hölderlin writes:

[The] affected talk of heartless cosmopolitanism and inflated metaphysics can

probably not be more truly refuted by such a noble pair as Thales and Solon, who
travelled through Greece, Egypt and Asia together to acquaint themselves with the
constitutions and philosophers of the world, and were thus generalized in more
than one respect but at the same time friends and more human and even naïve in
their relations than all the people who seek to persuade us that we should keep
our eyes shut and not open our hearts to the world (which always deserves it) if
we are to maintain our naturalness.
Now, as the Germans found themselves in this state of anxious narrow-mindedness
they could come under no more salutary influence than that of new philosophy,
which takes the universality of interest to an extreme and discovers the infinite
striving in the human breast. And even if it does orient itself too one-sidedly towards
the great autonomy of human nature, still it is the only philosophy for our time.12

Hölderlin is here staking out the ground of what we are calling “new philosophy” and
situating it in resistance to metaphysics. Kant’s autonomous subject, for example, is free
on the basis of his inherent ability to make rational—which is to say, disinterested—
determinations, both ethical and scientific, but even so,

Man’s horizon expands, and if we attend to the affairs of the world daily our
interest and involvement in it arises and grows as well, and the sense of the general
and the transcendence of our narrow milieu are encouraged just as much by
witnessing the widespread variety of human society and its momentous fates as by
the philosophical imperative to generalize our interest and points of view . . .. For
all that, the interest in philosophy and politics, even if it were more general and
serious than it is, falls far short of being sufficient for the education of the nation,
and it would be a good thing if there were at least an end to the boundless miscon-
ceptions that lead to art, and especially poetry, being devalued by those who prac-
tice and enjoy it. So much has already been said about the influence of the arts on
the education of man, but it always came out as if it wasn’t meant to be taken
seriously, and that it was quite natural, because they didn’t reflect what the true
nature of art, and especially poetry, is.13

Not only does Hölderlin take issue with disinterested rationalism as it pertains to eth-
ics and politics; he also with disinterestedness as the fundamental principle in the
judgment of taste—and therefore as the foundation of modern aesthetics. Further on
he objects to Kant’s implication that art lacks scientific rigor. He says, “Whomever
advanced this attitude confined themselves to its unassuming external aspect, which is
certainly bound up with what it is but is far from making up the whole of its character;
they took it to be playful because it appears in the modest form of play, of a game, and
so rationally no other effect could be expected of it than that produced by play, that
is, diversion, almost the exact opposite of the effect it has when it occurs in its true
 The Saying of Parmenides 139
14
nature.” In short, Hölderlin rejects Kant’s insistence that art is “something that could
only prove final (be a success) as play, i.e., as an occupation that is agreeable on its
own account,”15 that it has no purpose beyond the finality of its own form. To the
contrary, Hölderlin asserts,

poetry unites people differently from the way play does; that is, if it is genuine and
has a genuine effect, it unites them with all their manifold suffering and happiness
and aspiration and hope and fear, with all their opinions and errors, all their vir-
tues and ideas, with all about them that is great and small more and more to form
a live, intricately articulated, intense whole, for that is what poetry should be, and
the effect is like the cause.16

Art, in other words, is not at all autonomous, nor, it follows, is the experience of art
disinterested—it is anything but disinterested. Furthermore, while Kant’s characteriza-
tion of art as play of the imagination seems innocent enough, it is in fact the very ground
upon which Kant bases his distinction between art and science: art as play is not only
inconsequential, but also, unlike science, cannot be taught. As Hölderlin puts it, “most
important for humankind is to see with respect to everything that it [art] is something,
that it is knowable in the medium (moyen) of its appearance, that the conditions of its
existence may be determined and taught.”17 For Hölderlin, everything rides on this issue.
Kant will insist that science is superior to art because science is teachable and there-
fore useful, and on the other hand, he makes this claim on the presupposition that art
is intuitive while science is logical. For Hölderlin, art is not only teachable, but it is
teachable because it is scientific. “For that and for higher reasons poetry needs espe-
cially certain and characteristic principles and limits . . .. Therein belongs precisely the
aforementioned calculable law.”18 Hölderlin makes explicit poetry’s claim to the logic
of calculation and measure when he says, in the notes to his Antigone, “The rule, the
calculable law of Antigone stands to that of Oedipus as does / to \ , so that
the balance inclines more from the beginning towards the end than the end towards the
beginning.”19 Here in fact, we see Hölderlin’s understanding of poetic logic as expressed
and represented precisely in terms of Pythagorean proportion. But Hölderlin does not
rest his case on Pythagoras alone. In accordance with Parmenides, the poetic language
Hölderlin locates in Sophocles inheres both logic and myth, logos and mythos. Again,
we cannot overestimate the significance of Hölderlin’s repudiation of Kant on this very
point. When Kant claims that art cannot be taught because it is not science and that
therefore science and the scientist are superior in value to art and the artist, he affirms
Plato’s separation of philosophy and art and ratifies the hierarchical epistemology that
begins with Plato and is then established for all time in Aristotle. And while Kant’s
autonomous subject makes every man free, his epistemology makes every man free but
not equal. In perfect keeping with the “Oldest Programme,” Hölderlin’s “new philoso-
phy” makes every man free and equal on the basis of a non-hierarchical epistemology.
This epistemology is founded in poiesis, precisely insofar as mythos and logos are deter-
mined as intertwined and equal.20

Intuition
In Hölderlin’s “new philosophy,” we see, in other words, a definitive departure from
metaphysics as it comes down to Hölderlin from Plato via Kant. We see this departure
140 New Philosophy
taking flight plainly enough in the “Oldest Programme” of 1796–1797. Even earlier,
though, in the 1795 essay, “Being Judgement Possibility,” Hölderlin repudiates Kant’s
Copernican revolution in the subject-object relation when he proclaims that “Being—
expresses the connection of subject and object.”21 Hölderlin continues, “Where the
subject and object are absolutely, not only partly, united, namely so united that no
division can be executed without damaging the essence of that which is to be separated,
there and nowhere else can one speak of a being as such, as is the case with intellectual
intuition.”22 Now we see that the subject/object is not determined by the subject’s rep-
resentation of the object, but that the two spheres are concentric. More importantly,
though, the being that Hölderlin names, “being as such,” is the Being of Parmenides,
not the being of Plato and Kant, for whom being is ousia, a thing. Hölderlin’s “being as
such,” in other words, is the Being that Heidegger wants to recollect in poetic thought,
as it is to be remembered in the poesy of Parmenides.
The editors of Hölderlin’s letters and essays, Adler and Louth, define intellectual intu-
ition as “a spiritual vision, the highest form of knowledge in Neoplatonic epistemology.”
As we have already noticed, however, Hölderlin’s “new philosophy” has little to do
with Neoplatonic philosophy. While Kant dismisses intellectual intuition as irrational,
Hölderlin will insist that intellectual intuition “is the highest insight, the view that
everything is one (‘dass Alles eins ist’).”23 Here we have returned, in other words, to
the fundamental intellectual intuition of Parmenides. Pace Adler and Louth, however,
Hölderlin’s insight is far from and indeed contrary to the universal and eternal truth
that Plato makes of Parmenides’s “all is one.”
In a letter to Schiller dated September 4, 1795, Hölderlin writes that he wants to
find “the union of subject and object in an absolute.” This for him is “possible aesthet-
ically, in an act of intellectual intuition.”24 For Hölderlin—and here again he announces
his departure from both Schiller and Kant, “this principle is also capable of making the
conflict disappear, the conflict between the subject and the object, between ourselves
and the world, and between reason and revelation.”25 Arguing directly with Kant on
the point, Hölderlin asserts that the division between subject and object is resolved
“theoretically through intellectual intuition, without our practical reason having to
intervene.”26 That is the translation we have from Adler and Louth. We do well to
repeat the statement in David Farrell Krell’s version, which is as follows: “I am trying
to show that the relentless demand that must be made on every system, namely, the
unification of subject and object or in whatever one wants to call it—is possible, albeit
aesthetically, in intellectual intuition.”27 Krell’s translation stresses Hölderlin’s assault
on Kant’s sacrosanct truism that the thing-in-itself can never be known. We will return
to this key issue momentarily. For now we should note that Krell’s translation also
foregrounds for us the essentially aesthetic nature of intellectual intuition—again, a
point that Kant would never consider, let alone concede. Intellectual intuition is, then,
precisely the thinking of the artist-philosopher, whether that thinking be expressed in
poeticized philosophical prose, philosophical poetry, or in the representations of the
visual artist.
In other words, for Hölderlin and Schelling—with whom Hölderlin undoubtedly
collaborated in formulating the concept—intellectual intuition re-assimilates logic and
poetic expression, Apollonian and Dionysian modes of thought, as thinking per se. In
his “Notes on Antigone,” Hölderlin remarks, “The rule”—or the “calculable law of
the Antigone”—“is one of the various successions in which the idea and feeling and
reflection develop, according to poetic logic.”28 In the notion of “poetic logic” as it
 The Saying of Parmenides 141
applies to “calculable law,” Hölderlin underscores the aesthetic intention not to replace
logos with mythos, philosophy with art, Apollo with Dionysius, but in fact to re-twine
these two divided systems of incomplete thinking into one dynamic mode of thought.29
As such, Hölderlin’s poetological thesis is precisely that of a “new philosophy,” the term
by which he means to insist that thinking is poetry, or more generally, is art.
At one point, Hölderlin writes, “Everything is interconnected, and suffers as soon as
it is active, including the purest thought a human being can have.”30 This latter refer-
ence to “purest thought” stands in pointed allusion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
“And properly speaking,” Hölderlin goes on to say, “an a priori philosophy, entirely
independent of all experience, is just as much nonsense as a positive revelation where
the revealer does the whole thing and he to whom the revelation is made is not even
allowed to move in order to receive it, because otherwise he would have contributed
something of his own.”31 Here we see the widening gap between Kant’s transcendental
idealism and Hölderlin’s “new philosophy.” Coming back to the poetic assimilation of
subject/object, Hölderlin insists, “anything made, every product, is the result of the
subjective and the objective, of the individual and the whole, and the fact that the share
the individual has in a given product can never be completely separated from the share
the whole has in it shows once again how intimately every individual part is bound up
with the whole and that together they make up one living whole which, individualized
through and through as it is, consists of parts which are entirely independent but at the
same time intimately and indissolubly interconnected.”32 Once again on the basis of intel-
lectual intuition, Hölderlin refutes Kant’s claim that we cannot know the thing-in-itself.
It is worth taking the trouble to elaborate this latter issue, often dismissed as a red
herring. Speaking of Aristotle’s student Theophrastus, who did much to establish the
conventional view of Anaximander’s philosophy as one that is grounded on what
Heidegger calls “juridical-moral meaning”—terms that would adduce an Aristotelian
pragmatism, Heidegger notes that Theophrastus acknowledges the fact that Anaximander
is “speaking here in poetical words.” However, as Heidegger insists, “these words are
‘poetical’ only if one gives them an emphatically juridical-moral meaning and in addition
holds fast to the unfounded presupposition that at issue here is the knowledge of nature.”33
That is to say, the knowledge of science, of metaphysics—as Theophrastus applies that
epistemological construct in the very terms he learns directly from Aristotle—supplies
the frame of reference from within which we inherit the words of Anaximander. But
this metaphysical representation is not at all true of Anaximander: “Actually, the
words are poetical in the genuine sense of the poetry of Being—a poeticizing of Being;
but it is precisely the abandonment of ‘anthropomorphism’ and therefore shows the
impossibility of such a way of thinking.”34 The “poeticizing of Being” as a way of thinking
is impossible for metaphysics. As Heidegger never tires of reminding us, metaphysics
has hidden or buried the question of Being under the science, the calculation and mea-
sure, of beings, and therefore cannot think it.
This explains why intellectual intuition is capable of thinking Kant’s “thing-in-itself,”
whereas for Kant such a thinking is impossible—impossible because it is a thinking that
metaphysics does not recognize. As Heidegger puts it,

For Kant, that which is becomes the object of a representing that runs its course
in the self-consciousness of the human ego. The thing-in-itself means for Kant: the
object-in-itself. To Kant, the character of the ‘in-itself’ signifies that the object is
an object in itself without reference to the human act of representing it, that is,
142 New Philosophy
without opposing the ‘ob-’ by which it is first of all put before this representing
act. ‘Thing-in-itself’, thought in a rigorously Kantian way, means an object that is
no object for us, because it is supposed to stand, stay put, without a possible
before: for the human representational act that encounters it.35

In other words, when the poeticizing of Being abandons “anthropomorphism,”

it reveals the thing-in-itself.
Let us consider one further point regarding Hölderlin and his status of the artist-
philosopher. It is fair to suggest that Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles is worthy
of consideration as a serious philosophical critique, especially in its intertextual engage-
ment with anti-Socratic thought in the terms we have enumerated. More assuredly, it is
fair to say that Heraclitus, Anaximander, and Parmenides animate Hölderlin’s intensely
dialogical encounters with the philosophers of his own day, most especially Kant,
Schiller, as we have just demonstrated. With Hegel and Schelling, as we have seen
already, Hölderlin works out the fundamental principles of “new philosophy” in “The
Oldest Programme,” and likewise, much of their philosophical thinking is directly
attributable to Hölderlin. And yet, besides Heidegger, few if any art or literary histori-
ans or philosophers have recognized Hölderlin as a philosopher, let alone as an artist-
philosopher, and fewer still have critiqued his work as that of philosophy, let alone
that of a “new philosophy.” Thus, for example, Adler and Louth express this received
opinion in the very first sentence of the introduction to their translation of Hölderlin’s
essays and letters: “Hölderlin is known best as a poet, and that is how it should be.”36
Their statement upholds—as does the general silence regarding Hölderlin’s status as a
philosopher—a fundamental premise of metaphysics: philosophy is not poetry and
therefore poets are not philosophers.

Parmenides
For Parmenides, on the contrary, thinking is Being and Being is thought. Parmenides
arrives at this truth by way of poiesis—that is, by way of intellectual intuition. Along these
lines, Reiner Schürmann begins his own discussion of Parmenides with the following
remarks:

Parmenides, it has been said from antiquity, is the father of philosophy. He was
the first to place discursive reason in the service of intuitive thought. He was also
the first to designate the one problem worthy of philosophy, the problem of being.
He carried out this act of paternity by arguing that being is one.37

Though he would not say so himself, here Schürmann might as well be describing New
Philosophy—new in the sense that it is a kind of discourse new to the world, and new
in the sense that Hölderlin has in mind when he talks about “new philosophy” as a
philosophy that places “discursive reason in the service of intuitive thought.” We
should note here, too, that Schurmann’s grammatical construct reverses Kant, who
places the poetic imagination in the service of and under the guidance and patriarchal
control of reason. In any case, if, as Schürmann suggests, “Parmenides thus inaugu-
rates discursive philosophy,” it is also true that “he follows and he teaches a way of
proceeding.”38 Parmenides describes taking this way in the following passage: “mares
which carry me as far as my spirit ever aspired were escorting me, when they brought
 The Saying of Parmenides 143
me and proceeded along the renowned route of the goddess.” There can be no doubt
that the mares are not under the command of the chariot’s occupant; rather, “On this
route I was being brought, on it wise mares were bringing me, straining the chariot,
and maidens were guiding the way.”39
This way of thinking, according to Parmenides, is a journey, a poetic unfolding
along the path of aletheia. In the fragment from Parmenides that comes down to us,
there is, however, the question of which path and of how many paths. According to
Schürmann, “The question of how many paths does not seem to pose any problem.”40
He explains,

Whatever this “one” may be which is or is not, the two propositions, “it is” and “it
is not,” present themselves in the form of an alternative. And the text leaves no doubt
about the import of this disjunction. Its “either-or” constrains all thinking—“it is”
and “it is not” indicate the only paths an inquiry may take. A contradictory relation
is a relation between two propositions, one of which affirms what the other denies.
This is why we are in the habit of saying that Parmenides was the first to employ,
with an unequaled rigor, the principle of non-contradiction.41

The fundamental principle of logic, of non-contradiction, is, as Schürmann puts it,

an “epistemic site,”

the specific realm of which is called “logic”; for the proportions which are obvious
because they are seen as invariables, that of mathematics (which is to say, for the
ancients in general, axiomatic geometry); for the generic structure of reality, that
of theology; for the ontological deficiency of evil, that of morality.

Therefore, “[l]ogic, mathematics, theology, and morality,” predicated as they are on the
principle of non-contradiction, “stood as proof of nature’s sovereignty,” i.e., “natural
law.”42
What Schürmann does not mention, however, is that the logic of non-contradiction
is revealed for Parmenides through poiesis, along an allegorical path that opens out
onto aletheia. To put it another way, the logic of non-contradiction does not come to
light through an “act of paternity,” as Schürmann would have us believe; it is uncovered
by way of poetic or intellectual intuition. In this unfolding of and coming to logic, there
is revealed for Parmenides, in other words, another, more deeply hidden truth: logical
principles are unconcealed by way of intellectual intuition. Logic may well be the char-
ioteer, but this charioteer does not drive the chariot; rather, he is a passenger, and in that
passive mode of letting be he is conveyed by unbridled mares guided by maidens.
Aletheia, as we learn from the aesthetic intuition of Parmenides, is the unfolding of
signs along the path, along the poetic journey. These signs reveal Being as the one and
reveal the one as thought and thought as Being. Thinking is Being and Being is thought
as revealed poetically, revealed, that is, through intellectual intuition. As Schürmann
explains, “In the age of Parmenides, truth had not yet been forced under the exclusive
reign of the principles of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, as will inexora-
bly happen later.”43 What remains to be said is that the reign of pure logic that comes
after Parmenides arises because Plato separates intellectual (aesthetic) intuition from
the principle of non-contradiction and claims non-contraction as the founding princi-
ple of metaphysics.
144 New Philosophy
Heidegger counters that “Language first comes to language, i.e., into its essence, in
thinking. Thinking says what the truth of Being dictates; it is the original dictare.”44
Therefore, “[t]hinking is primordial poetry, prior to all poesy, but also prior to the
poetics of art, since art shapes its work within the realm of language.”45 In these
words, we hear the unmistakable echoes of Parmenides: we see language, or poetic
thought, as the essence of intellectual intuition. And so, it follows, within intellectual
intuition we find embedded the principle of non-contradiction, the logic of Parmenides.
His poetry, poiesis, is not averse to or separate from logic, nor is it pure logic, as
though his poetry and his conceptual thinking were distinct; rather, poiesis inheres the
logic of non-contradiction.
In “Moira (Parmenides VIII, 34-41),” Heidegger asks what Parmenides means when
he says that Being is thought and thought is Being. Getting to the bottom of this ques-
tion, Heidegger insists, “is one of the chief aims of modern philosophy.” Following
Heidegger, Schürmann says the same. According to Heidegger, though, in pursuit of
this question, “philosophy has even produced a special discipline, theory of knowl-
edge, which today in many respects serves as the chief business of philosophy.”46 To
distinguish this kind of philosophy from his own—which he now prefers to designate
in the very terms that Parmenides, the poet-philosopher, has given us as that thinking
which is Being—Heidegger says that the specialized philosophy business has “changed
only its name, and is now called ‘Metaphysics’ or ‘The Ontology of Knowledge.’” This
name-change, as we know, comes from Aristotle, who raises the question of Being, but
then drops it in order to focus on the ontology of being, of ousia, of being as thing. For
Heidegger this leads to the business of specialized philosophy, by which he means
analytic philosophy. More especially, he is directing his assertion toward Rudolph
Carnap, whose work in Symbolic Logic distills the science of logic of all remaining
poetic remnants, such as those still to be evaporated from Cassirer’s Symbolic Form.
Under Carnap’s thinking, “the saying of Parmenides, by a strange and unforeseen
transformation, has reached a decisive position of dominance.”47 Heidegger continues,

Thus philosophy in the modern age everywhere deems itself so situated that from
its seemingly superior standpoint it can extract the true meaning from Parmenides’
saying concerning the relation between thinking and Being. Considering the
unchecked power of modern thinking (philosophy of existence and existentialism,
along with symbolic logic, are its most effective exponents), it is necessary to
emphasize more distinctly that definitive outlook within which the modern inter-
pretation of Parmenides’ fragment operates.48

Tracing this line of thought back to Leibniz, Heidegger shows that perception is
conceived as operating,

like an appetite which seeks out the particular being and attacks it, in order to
grasp it and wholly subsume it under a concept, relating this being’s presence back
to the percipere (repraesentare). Repraesentatio, representation, is defined as the
perceptive self-arrogation (to the self as ego) of what appears.49

If Heidegger is likening this kind of perception to dominance and control, he is not

done casting aspersions in the direction of analytic philosophy: “Among the doctrines
of modern philosophy there is one outstanding formulation which is unfailingly
 The Saying of Parmenides 145
regarded as the final solution by all those who help modern philosophy undertake to
clarify Parmenides’ saying.”50
The phrase “final solution” cannot be passed over as an offhand characterization of
modern metaphysics and its will to knowledge. By 1952, when Heidegger gave this
lecture (under the title “What Calls for Thinking?”), it was already a term of infamy
known the world over, and Heidegger’s name had long since been tangled in its web.
Heidegger’s use of such an odious term deliberately provokes a close reading of the
passage we are drawing from, in which Heidegger is struggling to retrieve Being from
underneath modern metaphysics and in particular from under the symbolic logic of
Carnap’s analytic philosophy. Heidegger continues,

we mean Berkeley’s proposition, which is based on the fundamental position of

Descartes’ metaphysics and says: esse = percipi, Being equals represented. Being
falls under the sway of representation, understood in the sense of perception. This
proposition fashions the context in which the saying of Parmenides first becomes
accessible to a scientific-philosophical explanation, which removes it from that
aura of half-poetical “presentiment” to which Pre-Socratic thinking is usually con-
signed. Esse = percipi. Being is being represented.51

Now rendered subject to calculation and measure, Being is no longer proper to New
Philosophy, no longer the insight of intellectual intuition, no longer the “presentiment”
of the artist-philosopher. It now belongs to logic plain and simple. Heidegger con-
cludes, “In light of this assertion regarding the relation of Being and thinking, the
saying of Parmenides comes to be viewed as a crude prefiguring of contemporary
doctrines of reality and the knowledge of reality.”52 In other words, Heidegger is sug-
gesting that the catastrophe of modern consciousness, including its consequence as
“logically” determined in the Final Solution, is to be laid at the feet of those who have
clarified Parmenides’ saying—bearing in mind that to clarify is to purify. In self-defense
against accusations that he was responsible for or colluded in the Holocaust, Heidegger
is saying, in effect, “It wasn’t me, it was metaphysics.” By any measure this has to be
taken as a cowardly statement.
In fairness to Heidegger we should note the idea that the modern catastrophe results
from metaphysics is not an alibi Heidegger conveniently cooks up after the fact, in 1952.
However lacking in courage the comments just quoted from “What calls from Think-
ing,” the fact remains that Heidegger had seen the catastrophic force of the essence of
technology much earlier than 1952, especially as regards the rise of fascism and the
ascendency of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. In the Contributions (1936–1938), he writes,

The leader is the source of anger who cannot escape the persecution of anger
which they only appear to enact, since they are not the acting ones. One believes
that the leaders had presumed everything of their own accord in the blind rage of
selfish egotism and arranged everything in accordance with their own will. In
truth, however, they are the necessary consequence of the fact that beings have
entered the way of erring in which the vacuum expands which requires a single
order and guarantee of beings. Herein the necessity of “leadership,” that is,
the planning calculation of the guarantee of the whole of beings, is required . . ..
The “leaders” are the decisive suppliers who oversee all the sectors of the con-
sumption of beings because they understand the whole of these sectors and thus
146 New Philosophy
master erring in its culculability. The manner of understanding is the ability to
calculate which has totally released itself in advance into the demands of the con-
stantly increasing guarantee of plans in the service of the nearest possibilities of
plans. The adjustment of all possible strivings to the whole of planning and guar-
anteeing is called “instinct.” The word here designates the “intellect” which tran-
scends the limited understanding that only calculates in terms of what lies closest.
Nothing which must go into the calculation of miscalculating of individual “sec-
tors” as a “factor” escapes the “intellectualism” of this intellect. Instinct is the
superescalation to the unconditional miscalculation of everything. It corresponds
to superhumanity. Since this miscalculation absolutely dominates the will, there
does not seem to be anything more besides the will than the safety of the mere
drive for calculation, for which calculation is above all the first calculative rule.53

Thus, the consequence of the essence of technology is established in the supremacy of

calculation and measure in the determination of beings, the ontology that begins with
Plato’s appropriation of Parmenides and not with Aristotle, as generally believed.
“Viewed in this way,” that is, from the standpoint of Plato’s separation of poiesis from
philosophy, “technology is the organization of a lack, since it is related to the empti-
ness of Being contrary to its knowledge.” Moreover, “This circularity of consumption
for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure which distinctly characterizes the
history of a world which has become an unworld.”54 Nor is Heidegger all too vague as
to the future consequence of metaphysics:

The desolation of the earth begins as a process which is willed, but not known in
its being, and also not knowable at the time when the being of truth defines itself
as certainty in which human representational thinking and producing first become
sure of themselves.55

One might say that this self-assurance marks the moment of total enframing, totalized
dependency on and indeed addiction to the certainty of calculation and measure as
absolute truth.
From Berkeley Heidegger will follow Leibniz to the later Hegel, for whom “philos-
ophy is at hand when the self-thinking of absolute knowledge is reality itself, and
simply is. The self-perfecting elevation of Being into the thinking of Spirit as absolute
reality takes place in and as speculative logic.”56 Hegel’s “Logic” gives “the one and
only suitable interpretation of Berkeley’s proposition in modern times”; it is, accord-
ing to Heidegger, “the unconditioned realization of Berkeley’s conceptual construct.”

That Berkeley’s esse = percipi concerns precisely what Parmenides first put into
words has never been doubted. But this historical kinship of the modern proposi-
tion and the ancient saying at the same time has its proper foundation in a differ-
ence between what is said and thought in our time and what was said and thought
at that time—a difference which could hardly be more decisive.57

In simple terms,

The modern statement asserts something about Being, understood as objectivity

for a thoroughgoing representation. The Greek saying assigns thinking, as an
 The Saying of Parmenides 147
apprehending which gathers, to Being, understood as presencing. Thus every inter-
pretation of the Greek saying that moves within the context of modern thinking
goes awry from the very start.

We needn’t follow Heidegger through every turn in the historical unfolding of this
development, as it unwinds through the teachings of Socrates and Plato, along through
to Plotinus. In the end Heidegger concludes, “Nonetheless, these multiform interpreta-
tions fulfill their inexorable function: they render Greek thinking accessible to modern
representation and bolster the latter in its self-willed progression to a ‘higher’ level of
philosophy,”58 i.e., symbolic logic.
For Heidegger, symbolic logic could not be further from the truth. He explains,
“Insofar as what is thought-provoking, though not yet thought, is announced in Par-
menides’ exposition, so far does the fundamental requirement clearly come to light for
proper reflection upon Parmenides’ statement that thinking belongs to Being.”59 We
will not come to this truth through the “self-willed progression” of a logic unhinged
from intellectual intuition. Rather, “[w]e have to learn to think the essence of language
from the saying, and to think saying as letting-lie-before [. . . ] and as bringing-forward-
into-view.”60 The task, then, is to let Being be. This is the meaning of Parmenides, the
lesson of his pseudo-charioteer’s unbridled journey. “To satisfy this demand remains
a difficult task because that first illumination of the essence of language as saying
disappears immediately into a veiling darkness and yields ascendancy to a character-
ization of language which relentlessly represents it in terms of [. . . ] vocalization—a
system of signs and significations, and ultimately of data and information.”61 This
system, this data and compendium of information, takes root in Plato’s reduction of
Parmenides’ poetic logic to calculation and measure. Consequently, modern meta-
physics, symbolic logic, and analytic philosophy mistake knowledge for truth. For
Heidegger, “thinking does not belong to Being because it is also something present
and therefore to be counted in the totality of presencing—which means here the whole
that is present.”62 Rather, Parmenides has presented truth as the “disclosure of the
duality of Being and beings.” As such, truth “lets thinking, from out of the duality,
belong to Being.”63

Reiner Schürmann
For Heidegger, thinking entails what he calls a “step back” from metaphysics. By
stepping back, Heidegger means a return to the New Philosophy that came prior to
metaphysics. In the essay, “Metaphysics as History of Being,” he says, “[I]n the begin-
ning of its history, Being opens itself out as emerging (physis) and unconcealment
(aletheia). From there it reaches the formulation of presence and permanence in the
sense of enduring (ousia). Metaphysics proper begins with this.”64 Prior to metaphys-
ics, truth belongs to thinking insofar as truth comes from the duality of Being and
beings. From that duality there is an emergence and an unconcealment, physis and
aletheia. With metaphysics, Being becomes presence and permanence, ousia, the being
of things, as we have noted. The duality of Being and being becomes being, whole and
simple.
Nothing could be clearer: before metaphysics there is already established another
philosophy. This earlier philosophy marks what Heidegger calls the “other” beginning
of philosophy, when “Being opens itself out.” This “other beginning,” as already
148 New Philosophy
suggested, is the thinking of New Philosophy, new in the sense of newly created, orig-
inal, never known or seen before. It is the philosophy of Thales, Heraclitus, Par-
menides, Empedocles—in short, the thinkers for whom truth is the “disclosure of the
duality of Being and beings,” and thinking is Being. Heidegger locates bits and pieces
of this earlier mode of thought in Nietzsche, especially in his style. He finds it more
authentically in the art of van Gogh and Cézanne, and in the poetry and prose of
Rilke. More than anywhere else, though, Heidegger finds the authentic expression of
thinking in Hölderlin, who gives us the term New Philosophy and whose philosophi-
cal poetry and poeticized prose demonstrate poetic logic through and through. In
Hölderlin, Heidegger sees a way out from under metaphysics, a way back to another
kind of thinking. In Hölderlin he sees, in short, a way to resituate our relationship to
the essence of technology.
Of the many thinkers and writers who pay close attention to Heidegger, perhaps
Reiner Schürmann poses the most formidable objection to our own reading of
Heidegger. As Schürmann insists, Heidegger’s ontological mission depends on the
continuation of metaphysics. Schürmann bases his contention on a close and erudite,
elegant reading of Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy.65 In this text, according
to Schürmann, Heidegger raises problems “comparable to the question raised in ‘What
is metaphysics?’” And while Schürmann readily concedes that for Heidegger to raise
the question is “‘in a sense, to have left metaphysics,’” Schürmann grants this state-
ment only insofar as it is to be taken with a strong emphasis on the phrase “in a
sense.”66 For him, “This is something quite different from declaring cheerfully that
metaphysics has ended and that one has only to decide to change terrain by abruptly
placing oneself outside.”67 True enough.
But let us pause here and raise a few preliminary points. To begin with, after Being
and Time, Heidegger’s mission is no longer strictly ontological. Nor to my knowledge
does he ever say anything that could be misconstrued as suggesting that metaphysics
has come to an end. Rather, he insists that metaphysics continues and will continue,
even though he, for one, is stepping back from it: “Reversions to the all-too-familiar
modes of thought and claims of metaphysics will still be disturbing for a long time
and will obscure the clarity of the way and the determinateness of the speaking.
Nevertheless, the historical moment of the transition must be carried out in the
knowledge that all metaphysics (founded on the leading question: what are beings?)
remained incapable of transposing the human being into the basic relations to
beings.”68 The failure begins with the absence of Being. Nor does Heidegger suppose
that the step back is to step outside of metaphysics, as if to suggest that New Philos-
ophy, or “other thinking” as he calls it, opposes metaphysics from beyond metaphys-
ics. In fact, “other thinking,” anti-Socratic thinking, is prior to metaphysics and
therefore stands as that to which metaphysics is foreign. Metaphysics stands from the
outside, the far side, of other thinking. And so it follows that for metaphysics, to the
science of calculation and measure, “philosophical thinking will always seem strange.”
That is because, Heidegger explains, “[i]n philosophy, propositions are never subject to
proof.” 69 And proof is the domain of science, of metaphysics. “Especially in the other
beginning,” thinking follows the path “in pursuit of the truth of the question of
beying.” According to Heidegger, “the style of the inceptual” is “thinking in the other
beginning.”70 By the time he writes the Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event),
Heidegger will have indeed stepped back toward the poetic thinking of the anti-Socratics.
 The Saying of Parmenides 149
In section 4, for example, to which Heidegger gives the heading “Of the event,” he
writes, “the question of being is the leap into being, the leap carried out by the human
being as the seeker of beying, i.e., as the thinker who creates. A seeker of beying, in the
most proper abundance of the power to seek, is the poet, who ‘institutes’ beying.”71
This is the thinker of poiesis, not the avatar of modern humanist metaphysics, and
certainly not the arbiter of Symbolic Logic.
As we suggested a moment ago, Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy is the text
on the basis of which Schürmann argues that Heidegger epitomizes modern metaphysics.
We should examine this proposition in light of Schürmann’s claim for metaphysics as
a historical continuum that extends from its Greek beginning to Heidegger, and by
unspoken implication, through Heidegger to Schürmann himself. For Schürmann, the
“many events” that Heidegger designates in recounting the advent of philosophy
“spell out segments of history”:

The latter is emphasized when one start (Beginn) follows another. Grasping is now
to be written in the plural, and the new departure in the past, present, or future
tenses. For instance “today, in the beginning of the decisive segment of modern
times. . ..” (BzP 493). In such a beginning, a new economy grasps us and holds us.
According to the most summary statements of this history of being, there was only
one beginning, which was the one that instituted “metaphysics” in the fifth and
fourth centuries B.C.E. in Greece. But each institution that establishes an epoch is
also a start.72

To elaborate his thesis, Schürmann adds, “The beginning, the origin, and the start
converge in the transition that is possible today. The question from then on is know-
ing if ‘the beginning’ becomes a start and a linking-up [. . .]—a linking up of the
originary grasp by means of grasping anew.”73 In this statement, though, Schürmann
lumps into one beginning what Heidegger designates as two beginnings: 1) the
beginning of thinking as instituted in the thought of the already named artist-
philosophers who in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. preceded Socratic thought,
and 2) the “event” of Socratic thought. Schürmann only recognizes the latter, the
beginning of the “metaphysics” which Plato “instituted” in “the fifth and fourth
centuries B.C.E.”74 Speaking of “the other beginning” in the Contributions, Heidegger
says, “To be sure, such negation is not satisfied with leaping-away-from in the sense
of merely leaving behind,”75 by which he means that metaphysics is not to be aban-
doned in typical fashion. For one thing, Heidegger leaps backward, into the anti-
Socratic mode of thought which precedes metaphysics, and secondly, as we have
already indicated, this is hardly to announce that metaphysics has been left behind
for dead. He writes,

The first beginning experiences and posits the truth of beings without asking
about truth as such, for the things unconcealed in the truth of beings—namely,
beings as beings—necessarily overpower everything because they swallow up even
nothingness, incorporating it as the “not” and the “over and against.” Or other-
wise they utterly annihilate it. The other beginning experiences the truth of being
and asks about the being of truth in order first to ground the essential occurrence
of being and to let beings arise as the true of that original truth.76
150 New Philosophy
In other words, underneath the first beginning there lies another, hidden, concealed
beginning, the other beginning that asks, what is Being? For Schürmann such a distinc-
tion is a mistake:

Reading the opening paragraphs of the lecture “Time and Being” (1961), one may
be left with the impression that it was only with his last word on the question of
being that Heidegger found access to the site from which he could raise it “without
regard for the grounding of being in beings.” With the Contributions, such a reading
of the texts no longer holds. I continue to believe that Heidegger is to be read
backward, from the last to his first writings. By reading him this way, one glimpses
precisely the motives and paths that led him to raise the question of being for its
own sake and out of itself, motives arising from the singular and paths prompted by
the many ways of accentuating the internal conflict arising from singularization.77

“Time and Being” undoubtedly undermines Schürmann’s position, as he himself con-

cedes; but the very late “Time and Being” is hardly the only Heidegger text that does,
which explains in part Schürmann’s concentrated focus on the Contributions. In fact,
for Heidegger, as is already plainly discernable in the Contributions and irrefutable in
the later essays and seminars, the issue is no longer the question of Being and its
ground; the issue is the flight of Being from man in the face of the ever-narrower space
for Being in a world dominated by the essence of technology, which Heidegger views
as the signal and unstoppable exertion of Western metaphysics.
As for the Contributions in particular, a quick look at one of the final entries will be
enough to set aside any assertion that the Contributions adds up to a Heideggerian
apology for the preservation of metaphysics as the dominant mode of globalized con-
sciousness. Heidegger writes,

The question of the origin of the work of art is not intent on an eternally valid
determination of the essence of the work of art, a determination that could also
serve as a guideline for the historiological survey and explanation of the history of
art. Instead, the question stands in the most intrinsic connection to the task of
overcoming aesthetics, i.e., overcoming a particular conception of beings—as
objects of representation. The overcoming of aesthetics again results necessarily
from the historical confrontation with metaphysics as such. Metaphysics contains
the basic Western position toward beings and thus also the ground of the previous
essence of Western art and its works. Overcoming metaphysics means giving free
rein to the priority of the question of the truth of being over every “ideal,” “causal,”
“transcendental,” or “dialectical” explanation of beings. The overcoming of meta-
physics is not a repudiation of philosophy hitherto, but is a leap into its first
beginning, although without wanting to reinstate that beginning.78

Again, to speak of philosophy’s first beginning is to say there is more than one begin-
ning. In fact there is more than one first beginning. The first beginning that begins with
the Platonic ideal—which moves through Newtonian Causality, Kant’s transcendental
critique, and winds up with Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason—is the first begin-
ning of Plato’s metaphysics. The other first beginning, the first beginning of Western
philosophy and as such the primal scene of metaphysics, initiates the “event” of
anti-Socratic thought. We come to this other beginning secondly because we are
 The Saying of Parmenides 151
moving backwards from the present to the past, in which case the beginning we arrive
at first is that of metaphysics. This temporal construct can be likened to entering a
Catholic church in Rome. At first, we see it as an ancient relic of early Christian wor-
ship. But then we discover the foundations of the older church, the originary temple
over which the Catholic church is built. So it is with Heidegger’s other beginning, not
the beginning of metaphysics, but the beginning of philosophy.
This is very different from Schürmann’s account. He reads Heidegger’s statement
that “[t]he thought of being qua being is the initial thought” [. . .] to mean that such a
“first beginning [. . .] designates the procedure that considers principles—notably
hegemonic ones—and that, beginning with their being intuitively grasped, passes on to
discursive demonstrations.”79 This is to suggest that whatever the poetic elements to be
discerned in Parmenides, the essence of Parmenides’ thinking is discursive, i.e., logic.
By this move Schürmann elides the first beginning to which Heidegger refers into the
hegemony that Schürmann locates in the advent of metaphysics as instituted in Socrates/
Plato, as if the philosophy of Parmenides is merely a preliminary phase of metaphysics,
i.e., pre-Socratic. Schürmann wants us to see metaphysics as a seamless block of his-
tory that begins with the Greeks and continues over the course of “many events” that
“spell out segments of history.” As Schürmann goes on to say, history as such is
“emphasized when one start (Beginn) follows another.”80 These “segments of history”
mark off “broken hegemonies,” in which “one start follows another.” But, again, for
Schürmann all of these “segments of history” comprise the overarching and uniform
history of metaphysics. For him the real task is to guarantee “the future metaphysics.”
This future has to be protected from poetic logic, which, as we have argued, begins in
Parmenides and persists through the artist-philosophers who still carry on in resistance
to Plato and the hegemony of metaphysics.
In short, the fact that metaphysics still remains the dominant mode of Western thought
is not in question for Heidegger. To that extent Schürmann is correct. But it is a mistake
to say that Heidegger is committed to metaphysics as the mode of thought that rightly
dominates Western consciousness. Indeed, when Schürmann suggests that it is the irre-
sponsible French poststructuralists who “equate” the “essence of technology [. . . ] with
that of metaphysics,” he conveniently forgets that French poststructuralism finds its
justification for doing so from none other than Heidegger: “Machination, which orders
this compulsion and holds it in dominance, arises from the being of technology, the
word here made equivalent to the concept of metaphysics completing itself.”81 Again, for
Heidegger, herein lies the finality of the form of metaphysics.
Heidegger’s last word in “Overcoming Metaphysics” is as follows: “No transforma-
tion comes without an anticipatory escort. But how does an escort draw near unless
Appropriation opens out which, calling, needing, envisions human being, that is, sees
and in this seeing brings mortals to the path of thinking, poeticizing, building.”82
Parmenides lays out the same path:

Just one story of a route

Is still left: “is.” On this [route] there are signs
Very many, that what-is is ungenerated and imperishable,
Whole, unique, steadfast, and complete.83

For Heidegger, this “path of all is backward-turning.”84 The path, in other words,
brings Being back to its poetic roots, its place of beginning prior to metaphysics. Thus,
152 New Philosophy
he cautions, “We make the dialogue of Parmenides’ way of thinking too easy if we
ignore the mythic experience in the philosopher’s words.”85 While Plato divides mythic
from rational experience, in Parmenides, “knowledge and the evidence of knowledge
cannot renounce their essential derivation from luminous disclosure, even where truth
has been transformed into the certainty of self-consciousness.”86 As such, the signs
along the path that Parmenides poeticizes “are the manifold shining of presencing
itself, out of the unfolded duality” of ratio and poiesis.87 This duality, as we have seen,
is what Hölderlin calls intellectual intuition, poetic logic. Elsewhere, in his comments
on “The Anaximander Fragment,” Heidegger says, “it is not that Parmenides inter-
preted being logically. On the contrary, having sprung from metaphysics, which at the
same time it wholly dominated, logic led to a state of affairs where the essential richness
of Being hidden in these early fundamental words remained buried. Thus Being could
be driven to the fatal extreme of serving as the emptiest, most universal concept.”88
“The Anaximander Fragment” was published roughly a decade after the Contributions.
By then Heidegger had stepped back all the more definitively toward New Philosophy.
Whatever ambivalence Heidegger still might have been harboring at that point would
vanish in the decades to come. The Heraclitus Seminar and Four Seminars are cases in
point. The former is drawn from the seminar offered by Heidegger and Eugene Fink at
the University of Freiburg in the winter of 1966–1967. The latter comprises a series of
three seminars that Heidegger held in Provence from 1966 to 1969 and a fourth seminar
that he gave in Zähringen in 1973. For our purposes, consideration of the Four Seminars
will suffice.
These late seminars, it goes without saying, come well after Heidegger’s Nazi disaster.
During the intervening years, Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis became a matter
of ever-increasing public record and international scorn. His close proximity to the Nazi
crisis undoubtedly pressed upon him during the time he composed The Contributions,
not to mention the other texts we have cited that were written later on, including “The
Anaximander Fragment” of 1946. Clear evidence of Heidegger’s continued complicity
with Nazism through 1945 notwithstanding, the Heraclitus Seminar and Four Seminars
indicate Heidegger’s growing awareness of and dismay at Nazism’s entanglement with
the essence of technology. For anyone willing to listen, these texts also reveal his increas-
ing awareness of his own colossal mistake. The wooden star mounted over the well-
pump at Todtnauberg says what he would never publicly admit: reaching for the stars,
he had fallen into Thales’ well. To call Heidegger’s early enthrallment with Hitler a
mistake is not confuse that horrendous failing with Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, a prej-
udice that had nothing to do with misunderstanding or accident. Be that as it may, the
distance of time and the coming of his later years could not but affect Heidegger’s
thinking about the relation between metaphysics and the essence of technology. The
brilliant young metaphysician who had tentatively raised these questions in Being and
Time, and had so vehemently defended myth against metaphysics at Davos, had
become an artist-philosopher during the years that followed.

Four Seminars
In the first of the Four Seminars, Heidegger states the following: “Since Heraclitus
speaks with such a wealth of meaning, which he is nevertheless able to bring together
in a single name, ‘the poet says’, he belongs in the company of poets.”89 This is to
say that received knowledge has classified Heraclitus incorrectly as a philosopher.
 The Saying of Parmenides 153
When we read him purely as a philosopher, as a practitioner of ‘pre-Socratic meta-
physics’, and not as a poet who thinks, we read him incompletely and indeed incor-
rectly. As Heidegger explains, “the fundamental relation of the Greek language to
nature consists in leaving nature open in its radiance.”90 But because he is a poet,
Heraclitus does not say this about Greek language, rather, the fundamental relation
between Greek language and nature speaks through whatever Heraclitus says. What’s
more, we should be alive to the fact that the Greek language Heidegger is referring to
is the language of the artist-philosopher, or more specifically with regard to Heraclitus,
the language of the poet-philosopher. In the spoken word of Socrates and in the writ-
ings of Plato, this relation between language and nature will undergo a radical trans-
formation. It will become the subject/object relation of the “modern era,” wherein
language renders the appearance of nature “easily calculable.”91 If in the time of Her-
aclitus the fundamental relation of Greek language was the radiance of nature, “the
completely different people of the modern era, as devotees of logic, believe the con-
trary, that a word is only first meaningful when it has just one meaning.”92 Prior to
metaphysics, reductive thinking is not at all the dominant mode of thought. Indeed,
for Heraclitus, “the most beautiful ordering of all is surely comparable to a heap of
randomly spilled garbage.”93 With Plato, however,

As distinct from the “world” of Heraclitus, by the standard of which the plenitude
of nature is offered to the inhabitants of this world, today a world dominates in
which the decisive question runs: How do I have to represent nature in the
sequence of its appearances to myself, so that I am in a position to make secure
predictions about all and everything? The answer to this question is that it is com-
pulsory to represent nature as a totality of energy particles of existing mass, the
reciprocal movements of which are to be mathematically calculable.94

Yes, such calculations of energy systems will become possible with Newtonian physics,
but the compulsion to transform man’s relation to nature from that of wonderment
to measurement begins, as already suggested, with Socrates. The radiant “world” that
Heraclitus sees is “distinct” from the rational one that Plato posits for the sole purpose
of measure and control. “Hence,” according to Heidegger, “in the age of world impov-
erishment, a botanist sees in the blossoming of a flower only a sequence of chemical
processes.”95 The blossom proves the scientist’s hypothesis, and every proven hypothesis
leaves the world a little more predictable, a little more secure.
For Kant, as we know, the purpose of metaphysics is in fact to make the world as
secure and as scientifically predictable as possible. Heidegger observes that

with Kant the fundamental experience is that of being as “Nature.” Experience—

the key word in the Critique of Pure Reason—does not have the vague sense of
what is felt. Experience for Kant is experience in the scientific sense, that is, in the
sense of science par excellence which, since the beginning of modern times until
today, is mathematical physics.96

But again we must bear in mind that the ground of metaphysics is not established in
modern physics, but rather is established in the logic of calculation and measure that
begins with the advent of metaphysics. Modern mathematics, modern physics and
science, to say nothing of transcendental idealism, are rooted in Socratism, in the logic
154 New Philosophy
of calculation and measure. As such they stand in direct contradiction to the radiant
world that Heraclitus sees through the poetic thought of anti-Socratic philosophy.
For Heidegger, the distinction between metaphysics and the poetic language of
anti-Socratic thinking is, to borrow an apt word from his own lexicon, “decisive.” In
coming to this realization for himself, he allows that Being and Time “still speaks in
expressions borrowed from metaphysics and seeks to present what it wants to say
with the help of new coinings, creating new words.” After Being and Time, though,
Heidegger finds himself deeply immersed in Hölderlin’s language and thought. From
that encounter, he tells his seminar group, he “came to understand how useless it is
to coin new words; only after Being and Time was the necessity of a return to the
essential simplicity of language clear.”97 This latter remark dispels any lingering ques-
tion as to whether Heidegger was only toying with the coinage of new words as he
was casting about in search of a distinctive but essentially scientific metaphysical
prose style. What he was looking for was another way of thinking, and poetic lan-
guage was his searchlight. Nor can there be any doubt that in Hölderlin, Heidegger
finds what he is seeking: a kind of thinking that could reveal and indeed nourish and
cultivate thinking as being, being as thinking in the terms that Parmenides imagined
and expressed.
Once Socrates assumes the dominant voice in Western philosophy, Heidegger
laments, there is “already a basic characteristic of the language of information science
that, by reductive analysis of all data, it sets up a new and entirely bare structure which
henceforth is to function as the essence of language for all technological undertakings.”98
Long before Kant, in other words, philosophy becomes the science of experience and
the experience of science. Heidegger continues, “In this way language is robbed of its
proper laws and immediately rendered conformable to machines. Obviously, the relation
to language that makes possible such a process,” i.e., the language of metaphysics, “is
determined by the conception of language as a mere instrument of information,” and
information is the “reductive analysis of all data.”99 Meaning, especially the meaning
of being or the radiant meaning of nature, is no longer useful or desirable, at least not
for metaphysics. “As far as one may surmise,” Heidegger writes, “the external conditions
today are unfavorable. Between philosophy and this interpretation of language there
is no longer the slightest common ground for dialogue.”100 This raises the question,
“What practical consequences are to be drawn from this state of affairs? In other
words, what is the thinker to do?”101
Heidegger’s choice of the word “thinker” in place of the word “metaphysician” or
the word “philosopher,” as generally applied to the practitioner of metaphysics, means
that he and the other members of his seminar group are speaking and thinking from
the standpoint of “other thinking.” Even as they talk about metaphysics, metaphysics
has become an object of thought and not the presupposed method of thinking. It is this
monumental shift away from metaphysics as the fundamental mode of philosophical
thought that raises the question, “What remains for the thinker to do?” For Heidegger,
“The current seminar already presents a kind of response,” and, he adds, “that is why
I am here.” The purpose of the seminar

is a matter for a few of us to untiringly work outside of all publicness to keep alive
a thinking that is attentive to being, knowing that this work must concern itself
with laying the foundation, for a distant future, of a possibility of tradition—since
obviously one cannot settle a two millennia heritage in ten or twenty years.102
 The Saying of Parmenides 155
There can be no mistaking Heidegger here. Whatever Schürmann sees in the Contribu-
tions that so convinces him of Heidegger’s unrelenting commitment to metaphysics,
has been by now totally obviated. The purpose of his thinking, and that of those in
Provence with whom he is sharing his thoughts, is one of resistance.
Such resistance is necessary, according to Heidegger, because metaphysics “is satis-
fied with running behind science, in misrecognition of the two sole realities of this age:
the development of business and the armament that this requires.”103 And how did this
come to be? “Why this strange project? Because nature is to become calculable, since
this calculability itself is posited as the principle of the mastery of nature.”104 This
ineluctable construct brings the lifeworld to Max Planck’s thesis: “The real is what is
measurable.” For human consciousness, Plank writes, “The meaning of being is thus
measurability, whereby it is not so much a matter of establishing ‘how much’, but
ultimately of serving to master and dominate the being as object.”105 We have witnessed
the theoretical institutionalization of this dogma in Book X.
As a newly developed methodological practice, Heidegger identifies this dogma as
“already operative in the thinking of Galileo, which is even prior to the Discours de la
Methode.”106 From here on, it now appears that “technology is not grounded in physics,
but rather the reverse, physics is grounded in technology.”107 Now physics does not lead to
applied technologies, but applied technologies drive the development of physics. The atom
bomb is the obvious case in point, but hardly the only one. Where does this lead? Accord-
ing to Heidegger, “Here, more disturbing than the conquest of space, there appears the
transformation of biology into biophysics. This means that the human can be produced
according to a definite plan just like any other technological object.”108 What’s more, “The
most extreme danger is that man, insofar as he produces himself, no longer feels any other
necessities than the demands of self-reproduction. Hence, we once again come to the ques-
tion of the language of the computer.”109 At this point, “the end of language and the end of
tradition are equally visible.”110 To ignore Heidegger’s mention of biophysics as the means
of producing human beings as technical objects is to look away from his further allusion
to Nazism as a thinking deeply imbedded in the essence of technology.
In the 1968 seminar, Heidegger has already said, “If the ontological difference which
appears here is the most dangerous matter for thinking, it is because it always represents
being, within the horizon of metaphysics, as a being.”111 As the habit of mind that dom-
inates and controls human consciousness, metaphysics is like any other habit that can-
not be renounced: it cannot be controlled or conquered. As William James was first to
show, the only way to break such a habit is to replace it with another one.112 Heidegger
will not fight metaphysics, in other words; he will not try to control it or conquer it. But
neither will he dwell any longer in its thinking, a thinking he has been stepping away
from since well before these last seminars. Already, in his essay on “The Thing,” he has
insisted that thinking “does not just speak of renunciation but already has renounced,
namely, renounced the claim to a binding doctrine and a cultural achievement or a deed
of the spirit.”113 The doctrine to which he refers, needless to say, is metaphysics.
Thus, in accordance with James’s studies in habit, to Heidegger this renunciation
will include a stepping away and a stepping back, to the originary beginning. “The
beginning must be made by a return to the history of being.” He says at Le Thor:

[T]hinking is poeticizing, and indeed more than one kind of poeticizing, more
than one poetry and song. Thinking of Being is the original way of poetizing. Lan-
guage first comes to language, i.e., into its essence, in thinking. Thinking says what
156 New Philosophy
the truth of being dictates; it is the original dictare. Thinking is primordial poetry,
prior to all poesy, but also prior to the poetics of art, since art shapes its work
within the realm of language. All poeticizing, in this broader sense, and also in the
narrower sense of the poetic, is in its ground a thinking. The poetizing essence of
thinking preserves the sway of truth of Being. Because it poeticizes as it thinks, the
translation which wishes to let the oldest fragment of thinking itself speak neces-
sarily appears violent.114

The violence to metaphysics comes as an intervening truth, the poetic truth of poiesis
over and against the truth as proclaimed in the logic of science. As Steiner puts it,

to realize that false technicity has edged the human race to the brink of ecological
devastation and political suicide, is to realize also that salvation is possible, that it
must be possible. It is precisely because exploitive technology and the worship of
allegedly objective science are the natural culmination of Western metaphysics
since Plato, that the Heideggerian summons “to overcome metaphysics” is simul-
taneously and quintessentially, a summons to the saving of the earth.115

After Being and Time, this double-ended summons, and not the ontological question,
stands as the quintessential mission of Heidegger’s project.
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake, indeed a grave mistake, to say that Heidegger’s
call “to overcome metaphysics”—a phrase to which we have been attaching a meaning
decidedly different than Schürmann’s—is in any way advocating an abandonment of
logic and mathematics, which is to say, an abandonment of Apollonian thinking of the
very kind we see in Plato, Descartes, Kant, and for that matter, Schürmann. Techne
and poiesis, logic and poetic language, were indeed linked together prior to the moment
Plato pried them apart and laid the foundations of Western metaphysics.

Along with “logic” and “physics,” “ethics” appeared for the first time in the school
of Plato. These disciplines arose at a time when thinking was becoming “philoso-
phy,” philosophy episteme [. . .] (science), and science itself a matter for schools and
academic pursuits. In the course of a philosophy so understood, science waxed and
thinking waned. Thinkers prior to this period knew neither “logic” nor “ethics” nor
“physics.” Yet their thinking was neither illogical nor immoral. But they did think
physis in a depth and breadth that no subsequent “physics” was ever able to attain.
The tragedies of Sophocles—provided such a comparison is at all permissible—
preserve the ethos [. . .] in their sagas more primordially than Aristotle’s lectures on
“ethics.” A saying of Heraclitus which consists of only three words says something
so simply that from it the essence of the ethos [. . .] immediately comes to light.116

For the anti-Socratics, logic, physics, and ethics do not sit separately from poetic
thinking as a whole. The same holds true of Heidegger.
Heidegger is not the last of the artist-philosophers. Those familiar with Giorgio
Agamben’s work, for example, will know it as rigorously informed by the history of
metaphysics, grounded in the law of non-contradiction, and deeply imbued with the
logic of calculation and measure. All the same, the poetic space Agamben leaves open
within the discourse of his poeticized thinking makes possible the unconcealment of
Being. Likewise, in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger talks about an “open
region.” He says that
 The Saying of Parmenides 157
there must always be some being in this open region in which the openness takes its
stand and attains its constancy. In thus taking possession of the open region, open-
ness holds it open and sustains it. Setting and taking possession are here everywhere
drawn from the Greek sense of thesis, which means a setting up in the unconcealed.117

For Heidegger, “Truth happens only by establishing itself in the strife and the free
space opened up by truth itself.”118 This space is opened in van Gogh’s shoes, in an
Alfredo Jaar installation, a performance by Carolee Schneemann, or in the poeticized
philosophical prose of a Cixous or a Žižek.
Years after Heidegger delivered his seminars in Provence, Agamben would write a
book entitled The Open, in which he says of Heidegger:

Already in 1934–35, in the course on Hölderlin in which he attempts to reawaken

the “fundamental emotional tonality of Dasein’s historicity,” he writes that “the pos-
sibility of a great disruption [. . .] of historical existence of a people has disappeared.
Temples, images, and customs are no longer capable of taking on the historical voca-
tion of a people in order to compel it in a new task.”119

By now, Agamben notes, “post-history was beginning to knock on the doors of a con-
cluded metaphysics.”120 As Heidegger had already remarked, “Machination, which
orders this compulsion and holds its dominance, arises from the being of technology,
the word here made equivalent to the concept of metaphysics completing itself.”121 The
self-completion of metaphysics achieves the finality of its own form and brings us to
our current conditions of existence: “The unconditional uniformity of all kinds of
humanity of the earth under the rule of the will to will makes clear the meaningless-
ness of human action which has been posited absolutely.”122 This will to will meaning-
less action is but another way of describing our thoughtless addiction to the essence of
technology,123 the as yet unbroken habit of mind that brings us to “the very twilight of
the most monstrous transformation our planet has yet undergone, the twilight of that
epoch in which earth itself hangs suspended.”124
Aside from Reiner Schürmann and a few others, today’s philosophers couldn’t care
less whether New Philosophy should or ever could supersede metaphysics as the gen-
eral mode of Western thought. For one thing, they are too busy holding on to what little
real estate they have left after hard science’s lock-stock-and-barrel buy-out of a spiritu-
ally bankrupt academia. As for analytic philosophy, the question of New Philosophy is
not even audible amidst the 24/7 whir of supercomputers. But whether it is academic
philosophy fencing off its last few remaining acres in the marketplace of ideas or ana-
lytic philosophy expanding its global enterprise via computer technology, these systems
of knowledge serve a still dominant mode of thought called Western metaphysics. If
there is to be a future, it lies elsewhere, in the poetic logic of New Philosophy.

Notes
1 Martin Heidegger, “What Calls for Thinking,” in Basic Writings, ed. and trans. David
Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 376.
2 Ernst Cassirer, Myth of the State, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 296.
3 Ibid., 292–93.
4 Ibid., 376.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 379.
158 New Philosophy
7 Ibid.
8 Richard D. McKirahan, Philosophy Before Socrates, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing,
2010), 147.
9 Richard D. McKirahan, Philosophy Before Socrates, 148.
10 Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 364.
11 Ibid., 365.
12 Friedrich Hölderlin to Karl Gok, 1 January 1799, in Essays and Letters, ed. and trans.
Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (New York: Penguin, 2009), 120.
13 Ibid., 122.
14 Ibid., 122–23.
15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1952), 164.
16 Ibid., 122–23.
17 Sophocles and Friedrich Hölderlin, Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus and Antgone, trans.
David Constantine (Highgreen: BloodAxe Books, 2001), 63.
18 Ibid.
19 Friedrich Hölderlin to Johanna Christiana Gok, 11 December 1798, in Essays and Letters,
ed. and trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (New York: Penguin, 2009), 113.
20 Ibid. Here we should note Schiller’s hand in these matters. As much as Hölderlin admires
Schiller, Schiller’s aesthetic education, as Hölderlin alludes to it in the reference to the
education of man, is predicated on Kantian aesthetics, a disinterested, transcendental aes-
thetics that has nothing to do with life on the ground or the day-to-day reality of political
and social existence in what at the time was a rapidly changing world. It is an aesthetics
that counts art as play. As such, like Kant, Schiller would never grant art the status of phi-
losophy, nor would he attribute art to philosophy. For him, the two are entirely separate
modes of expression, severed precisely as Plato left them at the end of Book X. The one
difference between Plato and Schiller is the one that Kant has established and with which
Schiller wholeheartedly concurs: While for Plato art is admissible only insofar as it can be
controlled in absolute subservience to the State, for Kant the same holds true, with the
provisional clarification that art is beautiful insofar as it conforms to the disinterested judge-
ment of taste and as such serves the State in the representation of universal (mathematico-
scientific) truth.
21 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Being Judgement Possibility,” in Essays and Letters, Ibid., ed. and
trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (New York: Penguin, 2009), 231.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 376.
24 Friedrich Hölderlin to Friedrich Schiller, 4 September 1795, in Essays and Letters, ed. and
trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (New York: Penguin, 2009), 62.
25 Friedrich Hölderlin to Imannuel Niethammer, 24 February 1796, in Essays and Letters, ed.
and trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (New York: Penguin, 2009), 68.
26 Ibid.
27 Friedrich Hölderlin, Introduction to The Death of Empedocles: A Mourning Play, trans.
David Farrell Krell (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 5.
28 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Notes on Antigone,” in Essays and Letters, ed. and trans. Jeremy
Adler and Charlie Louth (New York: Penguin, 2009), 325.
29 Friedrich Hölderlin, Introduction to Essays and Letters, ed. and trans. Jeremy Adler and
Charlie Louth (New York: Penguin, 2009), xxxv–xxxvi.
30 Friedrich Hölderlin to Isaak von Sinclair, 24 December 1798, in Essays and Letters, ed. and
trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (New York: Penguin, 2009), 117.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 117–18.
33 Martin Heidegger, The Beginning of Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2015), 10.
34 Ibid.
35 Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter,
1971. Reprint (New York: Harper and Row, 2001), 175.
 The Saying of Parmenides 159
36 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter,
1971. Reprint (New York: Harper and Row, 2001), xv.
37 Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2003), 51.
38 Ibid., 52.
39 Richard D. McKirahan, Philosophy Before Socrates, 145.
40 Ibid., 55.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 192.
43 Ibid.
44 Martin Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David
Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 19.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 81.
47 Ibid., 82.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 105.
54 Ibid., 107.
55 Ibid., 110.
56 Ibid., 83.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 84.
59 Ibid., 91.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 95.
63 Ibid.
64 Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), 4.
65 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz
and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
66 Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 539.
67 Ibid., 540.
68 Ibid., 12.
69 Ibid., 13.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., 11.
72 Ibid., 566–67.
73 Ibid., 567.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., 140.
76 Ibid., 141.
77 Ibid., 581–82.
78 Ibid., 396.
79 Ibid., 566.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid., 110.
82 Ibid.
83 Richard D. McKirahan, Philosophy Before Socrates, 147.
84 Ibid.
85 Martin Heidegger, “Moira (Parmenides VIII, 34-4)1,” in Early Greek Thinking, trans.
David Farrell Krell and Frank Cappuzi (Cambridge: Harper and Row, 1984), 93.
86 Ibid., 97.
160 New Philosophy
87 Ibid., 98.
88 Ibid., 39.
89 Ibid., 8.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid., 9.
96 Ibid., 26.
97 Ibid., 51.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid., 52.
104 Ibid., 53.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid., 54.
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid., 55.
109 Ibid., 56.
110 Ibid.
111 Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2012), 22.
112 William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications,
1950), 107.
113 Ibid.
114 Martin Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” 19.
115 George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 140–41.
116 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings, ed. and trans. David Farrell
Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 256.
117 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, 186.
118 Ibid.
119 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Keven Attell (Stanford: Sanford
University Press, 2004), 75.
120 Ibid.
121 Martin Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan
Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 110.
122 Ibid.
123 Ibid.
124 Ibid.
Afterword

Heidegger, as we know, grounded his thinking in Greek philosophy and in Greek art. This
is typically the case with his reading of Hölderlin’s poem “The Ister,” which he approaches
from the standpoint of the Antigone of Sophocles. But perhaps we have been remiss in
therefore assuming there is nothing to be gained from considering Hölderlin’s vision of
the future through the past as coming from an intertextual dialogue with other than or in
addition to the Greek one Heidegger insists upon. According to Heidegger, Hölderlin
takes his cue from Antigone’s defense of ancient custom and myth in the face of estab-
lished law, and as such, “The Ister” gives us the image of a State already founded. Here
Heidegger is following Hegel’s reading. And yet Hölderlin’s poem also foretells, in my
view, Agamben’s “coming community.” And while it is plausible that Heidegger in his
“Ister” lectures could not, on peril of death, speak to the matter of founding a new State,
much that he implies can be opened to interpretation and much that he leaves unspoken
can be inferred in Agamben’s “whatever.”
What, to begin with, is the source of “The Ister?” Heidegger opens the same ques-
tion with a remark concerning Hölderlin’s line, “Here, however, we wish to build,”1 to
which Heidegger responds with a series of exchanges between his questions and com-
mentary on the one hand and Hölderlin’s poesy on the other:

This line stands proud and emphatic within the first strophe. Where is this “Here”?
From where is the “where” determined? Which locale is named?
We, however, sing from the Indus
Arrived from afar and
From Alpheus
“Indus” and “Alpheus” are names of rivers and streams. One belongs to the land of
the “Indians,” the other from the land of the Greeks. Those calling come from rivers.
And to where have they come? The locale, the “Here” as the decisive vicinity, is not
yet named directly. Yet the “Here” is once again determined by a river:
Here, however, we wish to build.
For rivers make arable
The land.
Those who have arrived from afar, from rivers, are to build by a river. The begin-
ning of the second strophe first tells us the river at which those who have arrived
are to dwell:
This one, however, is named the Ister.2
162 Afterword
As Heidegger insists, Hölderlin’s editor, von Hellingrath, was right in giving the poem
the title “Ister.” Heidegger explains,

“Ister” was the Roman name for the lower Donau, for the river that the Greeks
knew only in its lower course was named [in Greek]. The Roman designation for
the upper Donau is “Danubius.” Yet Hölderlin, as we shall see, names precisely the
upper course of the Donau with the Greco-Roman name for the lower course of
the river, just as if the lower Donau had returned to the upper, and thus turned
back to its source.3

And so we find ourselves in the waters of the ancient Danube.

But, as Heidegger observes, “[t]hose calling come from rivers,” but which ones is not
explicitly indicated, and indeed the Indus and the Alpheus are not the same rivers as
the ones referred to in the lines: “For rivers make arable/ The land.”4 Yes, the “Here”
referred to in the line, “Here, however, we wish to build,” locates the river basin where
the wanderers from afar have arrived. But the source, the origin of Hölderlin’s Ister,
must be the rivers (plural) that together, in affective proximity, “make arable/
The land.” Toward these rivers, toward its source, the Ister flows backwards, circles
time and space in reverse:

He appears, however, almost

To go backwards and
I presume he must come
From the East.5

According to Heidegger, “The poets are ‘of spirit,’”6 and the rivers are “the poets who
found the poetic, upon whose ground human beings dwell.”7 They are the founders of
civilization, the founders of the State. Indeed, to locate rivers that make the land ara-
ble, Hölderlin must not only take us back to the Far East, but also back to the Near
East, to Mesopotamia, where the two rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, together in
affective proximity, formed the “fertile crescent,” the great, silt-rich valley that gave
rise to the Cradle of Civilization. This is where Hercules came to, from Egypt, from
“The Isthmus,” “To the water’s sources . . .”—not one source, but two. Thus does
Hölderlin allude to these two sources, these two great rivers that “Make arable/
The land,” and on the banks of which humans first built and dwelled in community,
the State as founded by the poet.
But let us go from the Euphrates and the Tigris back again to the early Greek
moment. Heraclitus remarks, “If it were not for Dionysius that they hold processions
and sing hymns to the shameful parts [phalli], it would be a most shameless act; but
Hades and Dionysius are the same, in whose honor they go mad and celebrate the
Bacchic rites.”8 As Hillman puts it, “To a sober mind”—and if ever there was one its
epitome is that of Heraclitus—

To the sober mind the drunkenness of cultic worshipers must have been particu-
larly unappealing in a cosmopolitan city like Ephesus, with gods of wine on every
side, drunken Greeks initiated into the Thracian ecstasies of Dionysius running
amok with drunken Phrygians worshiping Sabazius, Lydians possessed by Bassareus,
 Afterword 163
and Cretans in the frenzy of Zagrues, all claiming in their cups to have transcended
understanding.9

Haxton translates Heraclitus’s put-down more pointedly:

Dionysius is their name for death.

As if they did not claim
The statue of the drunk
They worshiped was a god,
Or call their incoherent song
About his cock their hymn,
Everyone would know
What filth their shamelessness
Has made of them
And of the name of god.10

And yet it might be said that there is something quite Dionysian in Heraclitus. As
Hillman points out, “his poetic aphorisms show a deconstructive mind at work,”11 and
as Derridian poiesis demonstrates, deconstruction is hardly conceived in the pure logic
of Apollonian thought.
Which is to suggest that the poetry of Heraclitus is rich in poetic logic, in the Apollonian/
Dionysian mix of mythos and logos. Hillman continues,

Heraclitean fire, it must be insisted, is neither a metaphysical essence like the ele-
ments of his peers, nor a spiritual energy, nor a material substance, the fire that
burns your hand. His fire is metaphorical, a psychological intensity that penetrates
through all literalisms, a quicksilver fire that flows through the hand, burning
away whatever tries to grasp reality and hold it firm. This fire, as the active prin-
ciple of deconstruction, brilliantly deconstructs itself.12

As Haxton puts it, “My translation uses free verse to suggest the poetic ring of the
original prose, which deserves to be called poetry as much as the metrical writings of
thinkers like Empedocles and Parmenides.”13 And it is in this “poetic ring,” as much as
Heraclitus’s deconstructive bent, that links him with the Dionysian. For more than
anything else, it is the poetic wonderment of the pre-Socratics that separates their
mode of thought from the Socratic thinking or pure logic that Plato establishes as the
essence of Western Metaphysics. While it is true that the anti-Socratics kept away from
a purely unscientific way of seeing the world, still in Anaximander, Empedocles, and
Heraclitus, there remains in their way of seeing the world a mix of Apollonian logic
and the kind of intuitive knowing that derives from Dionysian poetic imagination. In
a word, they were artist-philosophers.
What these earliest artist-philosophers knew is what the young Hegel, Hölderlin,
and Schelling would come to know again: science without art will not teach anybody
how to think, and art without science is impossible. Here we are paraphrasing Einstein,
of course. But what no one could know in Heraclitus’s fifth-century BC or in Hölderlin’s
nineteenth-century AD is what Heidegger could see and understand as the artist-
philosopher standing in the midst of modern peril: only by stepping back from pure
Socratism and returning to the Apollonian/Dionysian mode of thinking that precedes
164 Afterword
him can we avert the life-world’s ruination. While it could be argued that even as an
artist-philosopher, Einstein could only see this colossal necessity intuitively and not
scientifically, Heisenberg sees it clear as day and does so through the same poetic logic
as Heidegger’s.
We come back to Dionysius through Hölderlin’s poem, “The Ister,” precisely insofar
as Dionysius, the seafarer from afar, comes to Greece from the East, just as the back-
ward-flowing Ister comes to the East and around again from the East. As the Ister flows
backwards in time and across space, it meanders through the zone wherein Dionysian
thought first finds a climate ripe for its gift of fertility and spirits. Heidegger’s prefer-
ence for Hölderlin’s debt to Sophocles notwithstanding, traces of the Dionysian can be
discerned as Hillman tells us in the “drunken Phrygians worshiping Sabazius, Lydians
possessed by Bassareus, and Cretans in the frenzy of Zagrues.” It is a poetic thinking
that through Ptah-Hotep takes root along the fertile Nile; it is to be felt in the shamans
of lower Africa and in the living wonderment of the East that ignites the minds of Bud-
dha and Confucius, and in even earlier periods of the Western Zhou, the earliest of
which precedes Socrates by half a thousand years. Following Hölderlin’s Ister, Dionysian
poiesis flows backwards down the ancient world’s winding river banks across the lands
that will give rise to the great pre-Columbian civilizations, up through the Canadian
Rockies and across the Bering Strait into Siberia and across the great plains of pre-
historic Russia. It is the poiesis of New Philosophy, the artist-philosopher’s founding—
the poet’s founding—of the cultures and civilizations that existed prior to the cata-
strophic reach of metaphysics.
All well and good, you say, but the question remains, if, in light of the colossal
necessity we hear from the likes of Heisenberg and Heidegger, New Philosophy is
again to take root in human consciousness, how can that possibly happen beyond the
limits of the here-and-there poetic interventions we see from artist-philosophers of the
kind we have been talking about in the foregoing pages? This point is readily con-
ceded. Alfredo Jaar will not make New Philosophy take root. Neither will Kara Walker
nor Sylvère Lotringer, nor, for that matter, Kandinsky or Rodchenko, Malevich or the
Kabakovs. Nor will Ju Bing, his trash-made phoenix rising over the canals of the Venice
Biennale; nor Wenda Gu, his monumental tapestries, poetic calligraphies woven of
human hair collected from people of all nations and races from around the world,
draped from vaulted ceilings to marble floors in the Great Hall of the United Nations;
nor, for that matter, will El Enatsiu’s glorious bottle cap tapestry, unfurling its shimmer-
ing gold luster down the palazzo’s façade on the Grand Canal. Neither did Heidegger
or any of the other artist-philosophers we have considered. As Heidegger saw in van
Gogh and Cézanne, the modern artist-philosopher opens a space within which the
possibility of poetic consciousness appears in its absence. Poetic consciousness still
lives within the utterance of the poet’s voice, the painter’s eye. But for it to take root
and come alive as a shared mode of cultural consciousness, of a kind that existed in
the time of Parmenides or Laozi, is something else altogether. Theirs was not the
expression of a solitary poetico-philosophical voice; it was the expression of a State, a
cultural spirit and consciousness, which had been founded by the logico-poetic utter-
ance of the poet-thinker.
Such in fact was the case with metaphysics, except that the founding of the Athenian
State as it came to know itself was given voice by Socrates, the anti-poet of calculation
and measure. It was nonetheless a poet, Plato, who established metaphysics as a school
of thought, and through Plato’s teachings this school of thought became the mode of
 Afterword 165
thought of Greek cultural consciousness as epitomized in the Athenian State. Anyone
who wants to hear Plato’s poetic voice as a representation of the State can start with
the polyphonic Funeral Oration of Pericles. As we have already explained, Plato was
indeed a poet, arguably the most powerful and influential the world has ever known,
but he was by no means an artist-philosopher. Around his poetic voice, a school of
thought was gathered, and his thinking spread from Athens far and wide. Early on, it
gave rise to the essence of technology, the fundamental ground of metaphysics and
now the all-dominating mode of human consciousness.
The way out from under metaphysics is both simple and difficult, if not impossible.
For it is merely to do what Plato did: to found a school of thought, the thinking of
which will spread far and wide and eventually establish poiesis, poetic logic, as the
new mode of cultural consciousness, the mode of thought called New Philosophy. But
of course, in today’s world such a school of thought, if it is to be effective, cannot
flourish in a single school, as was the case in Plato’s Academy, for not even a great
university whose sole mission is to foster New Philosophy could possibly get the job
done by itself. What is required is a world-wide school, a new kind of global learning,
in which grade school kids and graduate students alike learn to think and be in the world
as poetic logicians, as artist-philosophers. Their teachers must be artist-philosophers.
And the teachers of these teachers must be scientists and mathematicians like Einstein
and Heisenberg, philosophers like Ptah-Hotep and Confucious, Bergson and Kristeva,
artists like Jaar and Walker, and poetically gifted technology and computer scientists
capable of designing and implementing a global change we are imagining. These
artist-philosophers are not the prophets of Zarathustra, a phallocentric know-it-all
if ever there was one. Rather, they are but humble servants of the many. They will
teach the artist-philosophers, who will build their own institutions, their own schools
of thought. Insofar as they are founded by artist-philosophers, these schools will be
logico-poetic in their curriculum and in their pedagogy. They will teach the artist-
philosophers who will teach in the grade schools and high schools, the trade schools
and schools of technology, creative arts, and the social sciences, plus the schools of
political science, business, economics, fashion, design, anthropology, ecology, medicine,
and engineering.
Such in one way or another is the case with metaphysics, as we see in Plato’s Academy
and in Jowett’s legendary teaching, not to mention the fact that modern metaphysics
permeates all fields of modern study, not least, art and aesthetics. And while metaphys-
ics is a school of methodology, namely, calculation and measure, so New Philosophy
is also a school of methodology, that being the hermeneutics of poiesis. That is hardly
to say that such a school of thought is bereft of calculation and measure. Rather, it is
the opening wherein the likes of Democrates speaks again, now through Einstein’s
poetic logic as echoed in the wonderment of Lucretius and revivified in Greenblatt’s
magnificent story of The Swerve. Such a school with such a faculty as we have described
is not impossible to build; to my knowledge, at least one exists today. If one is possible,
so are two, and so then are three, and then the few and over time, the many.

We come back again to “The Ister,” where the poet says,

Here, however, we wish to build.
For rivers make arable
The land.
166 Afterword
If we follow Hölderlin’s backward soundings far enough, we come to The Book of
Change, where the poet says,

Embracing humility, all humility penetrating everywhere, as if

Bundling cuts grain into sheaves, the noble-minded cross a great river,
And so bring forth good fortune.14

Notes
1 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 10.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 5.
6 Ibid., 128.
7 Ibid., 146.
8 Richard D. McKirahan, Philosophy Before Socrates, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing,
2010), 121–122.
9 Brooks Haxton, introduction to Fragments, by Heraclitus, trans. Brooks Haxton (New York:
Penguin, 2001), xxv.
10 Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton (New York: Penguin, 2001), 89.
11 James Hillman, foreword to Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton (New York: Penguin, 2001),
xi.
12 Ibid., xiii.
13 Brooks Haxton, “A Note on Translation,” in Fragments, by Heraclitus, trans. Brooks Haxton
(New York: Penguin, 2001), xxviii.
14 I Ching: The Book of Change, trans. David Hinton (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux,
2015), 31.
Appendix
Heidegger’s Nazism & Anti-Semitism

Much has been written on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and his involvement with the
Nazi Party. Much more will be written, no doubt. Especially since the scandal of the
Black Notebooks, many claim that Heidegger’s philosophy is inherently anti-Semitic,
and still more insist that his philosophy is nothing more than a call to Nazism. With
these opinions I do not agree, though Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is repugnant and his
Nazism is vile and dangerous.
For what it’s worth, I offer my take on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and Nazism not
to convince anyone that mine is the correct view or preferable to that of anybody
else—or for that matter, to justify or make excuses for my investment in Heidegger’s
thinking as it concerns our overriding theme. Those who object to Heidegger’s central
part in my book will most likely not be swayed by the following remarks; the same
goes for those who would confirm the historical necessity of his voice in the exposition
of our theme. In either case, I am nonetheless obligated to make my thoughts known
and my purpose plain. Let me start by putting Adorno and Horkheimer in dialogue
with Weber.
In the Adorno/Horkheimer chapter on “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” we read the
following:

Modern society, in which primitive religious feelings and new forms of religion as
well as the heritage of revolution are sold on the open market, in which Fascist
leaders bargain over the land and life of nations behind locked doors while the
habituated public sit by their radio sets and work out the cost; a society in which
the word which it unmasks is thereby legitimized as a component part of a politi-
cal racket: this society, in which politics is not only a business but business the
whole of politics, is gripped by a holy anger over the retarded commercial atti-
tudes of the Jews and classifies them as materialists, and hucksters who must give
way to the new race of men who have elevated business into an absolute.1

As Weber explains it, when it comes to comparing the Jewish ethos of capitalism with
the Protestant ethos,

It is necessary, however, not to think of Palestinian Judaism at the time of the

writing of the Scriptures, but of Judaism as it became under the influence of many
centuries of formalistic, legalistic, and Talmudic education. Even then one must be
very careful in drawing parallels [between Puritanism and English Hebraism]. The
general tendency of the older Judaism toward naïve acceptance of life as such was
168 Appendix
far removed from the special characters of Puritanism. It was, however, just as
far—and this ought not to be overlooked—from the economic ethics of mediaeval
and modern Judaism, in the traits which determined the positions of both in the
development of the Capitalistic ethos. The Jews stood on the side of the politically
and speculatively oriented adventurous capitalism; their ethos was, in a word, that
of pariah-capitalism.2

This was largely because, as Adorno and Horkheimer rejoin,

The Jews were not the sole owners of the circulation sector. But they had been
active in it for so long that they mirrored in their own ways the hatred they had
always borne. Unlike their Aryan colleagues, they were still largely denied access
to the origins of surplus value. It was a long time before, with difficulty, they were
allowed to own the means of production. Admittedly, in the history of Europe and
even under the German emperors, baptized Jews were allowed high positions in
industry and in the administration. But they had to justify themselves with twice
the usual devotion, diligence, and stubborn self-denial. They were only allowed to
retain their positions if by their behavior they tacitly accepted and confirmed the
verdict pronounced on other Jews; that was the purpose of Baptism. No matter
how many great achievements the Jews were responsible for, they could not be
absorbed into European nations; they were not allowed to put down roots and so
they were dismissed as rootless. At best the Jews were protected and dependent on
emperors, princes or the absolute state.3

The situation wasn’t much different in the United States; indeed, anti-Semitism among
Jewish American capitalists was not uncommon. As Weber points out, contrary to the
pariah-capitalism that characterized modern Judaism, “Puritanism carried the ethos of
the rational organization of capital and labour.”4 Therefore, Jews who were allowed
to participate in Protestant capitalism had to hew to calculation and measure. Weber
writes,

The manufacturer took risks and acted like a banker and commercial wizard. He
calculated, arranged, bought and sold. On the market he competed for profit corre-
sponding to his own capital. He seized all he could, not only on the market but at the
very source: as a representative of his class he made sure his workers did not sell him
short with their labor. The workers had to supply the maximum amount of goods.
Like Shylock, the bosses demand their pound of flesh. They owned the machines
and materials, and therefore compelled others to produce for them. They called
themselves producers, but secretly everyone knew the truth. The productive work of
the capitalist, whether he justifies his profit by means of gross returns under liberal-
ism, or by his director’s salary as today, is an ideology cloaking the real nature of the
labor contract and the grasping character of the economic system.5

The comparison to Shylock does not work here. Shylock is not a manufacturer but a
venture capitalist. In this respect one could say that the investment management
that informed Protestant capitalism was calculated on the basis of Socratic ethics, the
carefully calibrated weight and measure of possible outcomes; while Jewish risk
management was more about recuperating losses than averting them through
 Heidegger’s Nazism & Anti-Semitism 169
mathematical calculation, as Shakespeare so famously dramatizes in The Merchant of
Venice. With the rise of manufacturing and technology production, Jews who were
allowed “in” on the capitalist’s game had to play it all the way, including displays of
Christian faith and demonstrations of anti-Semitic prejudice. “And so,” according to
Adorno and Horkheimer,

People shout: Stop thief! —but point at Jews. They are the scapegoats not only
of individual maneuvers and machinations but in a broader sense, inasmuch as the
economic injustice of the whole class is attributed to them. The manufacturer
keeps an eye on his debtors, the workers in the factory and makes sure that they
have performed well before he pays them their money. They realize the true posi-
tion when they stop and think what they can buy with the money. The smallest
magnate can dispose of a quantity of services and goods which were available to
no ruler in the past; but the workers receive the bare minimum.6

In early twentieth-century America, it is worth noting, some Ivy League schools, at the
time WASP citadels largely responsible for producing the next generation of political
leaders and professionals, took it upon themselves to keep the number of Jews admitted
to a minimum. Because German names didn’t necessarily indicate Jewish ancestry, and
because many assimilated Jews changed their names, admissions departments resorted
to requiring applicants to visit campus for a personal interview. In order to determine
whether an applicant was Jewish or not, he was looked up and down. Tall applicants
were measured as safe bets, but short men with German names were routinely declined
admission. If Oppenheimer had not been tall, admission to Harvard would most likely
have been denied, and the story of the atom bomb likely very different.
In any case,

The Jews remained objects, at the mercy of others, even when they insisted on
their rights. Commerce was not their vocation but their fate. The Jews constituted
the trauma of the knights of industry who had to pretend to be creative, while the
claptrap of anti-Semitism announced a fact for which they secretly despised them-
selves; their anti-Semitism is self-hatred, the bad conscience of the parasite.7

Beginning with the advent of metaphysics, the essence of technology had taken hold of
the Socratic Greeks, then of the Romans, who prior to the Greek conquest had imported
metaphysics, perhaps the most alluring and most deceptive of all Trojan Horses. From the
Romans, the early Christians infused the essence of technology into their lives and spirit,
as did the European Jews. With the rise of modern technology, Christians and Jews wres-
tled with the now intractable consequences of their shared bondage, each hating the other
for the increasing diminution of a freedom that never was.
It was in this atmosphere that Heidegger came of age. Cassirer for years struggled
to find a university post due to the fact that he was Jewish. As Arendt relates, even in
her day, a full generation after Cassirer’s, schools were rife with anti-Semitism, coming
not only from the Christian kids in the schoolyard, but also from the teachers at the
head of the class. If it was a kid calling her names, Arendt was left to handle it on her
own. When a teacher said something, she was to get up from her desk and walk out of
the school. On these occasions, and they were not infrequent, her mother would write
a letter of complaint to the superintendent. As early-childhood studies show, the young
170 Appendix
brain is highly plastic and whatever lessons are imprinted upon it with constant repeat-
ing tend to stay fixed, often for a lifetime. We can only guess how many German
Christians, and for that matter, German Jews, grew up to be anti-Semites for the simple
reason that they believed as true what their teachers taught them and retained the
knowledge. We do know for a fact that when Arendt enrolled at university, it was on
condition she would brook no anti-Semitic treatment. This says a lot about Arendt.
But tough-minded and thick-skinned as she was, to assume that she came out of her
early school days emotionally unscarred is hardly realistic. Whatever wounds Arendt
suffered as a consequence, Heidegger’s abandonment of her and his subsequent mem-
bership in the Nazi Party could only have aggravated and deepened them. And though
the charges against her as an anti-Semite stemming from her coverage of the Eichmann
trial were unfounded and, to say the least, unfortunate, that does not exonerate her of
her own racist tendencies. These tendencies show themselves undeniably in the Little
Rock essay, in which she passes plainly prejudicial judgment upon African-Americans
with all the self-righteous authority of an “Olympian” oracle.8
Much the same can be said of her fellow theorist of freedom and responsibility,
Franz Fanon. Even a cursory glance at Black Skin, White Masks reveals a deeply
ingrained sexism, a tendency that indeed approaches misogyny in the few passages
where women are allowed to appear in his text, usually in the flesh, as the intimate
aspects of inter-racial sexual relations are explicitly and subjectively examined under
the guise of Fanon’s psychoanalytic perspective. The purpose in raising this question is
not to point the finger and say, “her too,” and “him too,” but rather to suggest that the
crimes of prejudice are perpetrated by the guilty, as Arendt irrefutably argues; preju-
dice itself, however, is culturally transmitted, and to say that those imprinted with the
transmission are evil, as the duly outraged mothers of Little Rock might well have said
of Arendt, and as women might well ascribe to Fanon, and, for that matter, as offended
people of all genders and all races might say of them both. But here is the larger point:
the hidden origins of prejudice are always perpetuated through institutional authority,
whether by family, church, or state, and most often all three. And just as racism itself
is based on supremacy, the charge against prejudice is often delivered from the very
high horse of self-righteous superiority.
Of the many outcries against “Heidegger the Nazi” and “Heidegger the Jew-hater,”
Guattari’s comments on the matter strike me as typical, though more thoughtful than
most. He says, “I have no affinity for Heidegger. His human and political experience
is that of a cowardly and reactionary petty bourgeois, the little man who, out of love
for tranquility, allowed Hitler to do what he wanted.”9 One assumes that Guattari is
here following suit with Richard Wolin’s essay on “The French Heidegger Wars,” in
which Wolin states that since the appearance of Farias’s (notoriously specious) Heidegger
et le Nazisme, “In France and elsewhere, intellectuals in all walks of life will never be
able to relate to Heidegger’s philosophy ‘naively’, that is without taking into consider-
ation the philosopher’s odious political allegiances.”10 All fine and good; such consid-
eration is due, even if Wolin’s sideways validation of Farias’s text is not typical of
Wolin’s scholarship. To say, though, that such a “cowardly” “little man” could have
“allowed Hitler,” perhaps the most colossal despot in the history of Western civiliza-
tion, “to do what he wanted,” would suggest a deliberate lack of consideration on
Guattari’s part. For to insinuate that it was in Heidegger’s power to stop Hitler if only
he had the backbone, and to imply, it follows, that therefore, in a very real sense, the
fault of the Holocaust was not only Hitler’s, but in some respects even more
 Heidegger’s Nazism & Anti-Semitism 171
egregiously, Heidegger’s, is not only empty of serious philosophical consideration, it is
ludicrous.
I count myself a longstanding partisan of Felix Guattari’s work. Nevertheless, his
commentary in this instance should be recognized for what it is: a cheap shot. Not
only because it makes any philosophical engagement with the question of Heidegger’s
Nazism (an engagement, by the way, that has been productively exemplified by many
others, most admirably, perhaps, by David Farrell Krell), out of the question; it also
distances Guattari’s philosophy from Heidegger’s, when in fact, Heidegger’s intertex-
tual entwinement with French poststructualism, including Deleuze and Guattari’s, will
never be successfully hidden or rhetorically repressed—nor, in my view, should it be.
As I say, though, Guattari’s comments in this vein are more thoughtful than most.
That is partly because he does admit of Heidegger “glimmers of philosophical genius,”
though even these “darkly colour the late-modern historical horizon.”11 Still, “The
gesture of conceptual creation accomplished by Heidegger is thus precious and of
the greatest importance, if we wish to understand how philosophy has evolved over the
last decades, the decades in which Heidegger has been read and interpreted.”12 Perhaps
here Guattari is offering a veiled acknowledgement of his own longstanding debt to
Heidegger, not least of which is the notion of decentering that he alludes to regarding
Heidegger’s wood-paths. Of course, if Guattari wants to deny any intertextual connec-
tion with Heidegger, he offers a far-fetched but nonetheless arguable point. And yet to
say Heidegger’s conceptual creation is a “repulsive gesture because it removes any
breath of freedom and any generosity from human action”13 is something a reader
would most likely believe only on the grounds of Heidegger’s reputation as a vicious
Nazi and a so-called Jew-hater—the specious grounds, that is, that Farias has overlaid
with outright slander. According to Sartre, for Heidegger, “the sole foundation for
being is freedom.”14 Which brings me to suggest that the very notion of the wood-path
stands as a metaphor for thought seeking freedom, which is exactly why it maps out a
path leading toward Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome. Lastly, the allusion to the gas
chambers in the phrasing “repulsive gesture because it removes any breath of free-
dom,” shows Guattari’s gift for poetic nuance. But the meanness of such an aspersion
falls precipitously below the grandeur of Guattari’s noble spirit, certainly one of the
highest and most generous in the land.
Heidegger is an anti-Semite. There can be no question of this disappointing and
repugnant fact. And in this sense, Guattari is quite right to call Heidegger a “reactionary
petty bourgeois,” and a “little man.” For all his brilliance and intellectual daring, Heidegger
was incorrigibly small-minded. And he was often rude, self-serving, and irascible. He
was a liar to boot. Again, these ugly traits cannot not be denied nor dismissed.
If ever we wanted to get to the bottom of Heidegger’s banality, for starters, we might
consider his prejudices in light of the terms we have applied to Fanon and Arendt, and
in the terms we have traced through Weber and Adorno and Horkheimer. It is based
on these very terms that we will not dismiss Socrates, who was dead-set against democ-
racy. Indeed, it was with the fall of the Athens Thirty and the return of democratic rule
that Socrates was brought before the courts on a trumped-up charge. And it was his
reactionary politics, his support of his student, Critias, the worst of the Tyrants (Critias,
it is worth remembering, was at the House of Callias as a friend of Socrates in his
debate with Protagoras)—that, and his arrogant, i.e., aristocratic, speech before the
court, his insulting and haughty reminder that he was the superior to the par venues
sitting in judgment of his trial—that brought the jurors to their infamous verdict.
172 Appendix
On these same terms, we cannot dismiss the equally high-minded and aristocratic
Plato, also an enemy of democracy and also the willing, though perhaps unwitting,
teacher of a tyrant, Dionysius II, despot of Syracuse. Nor can we dismiss Aristotle,
Plato’s student, whose thoroughly elitist ethics and politics stand firmly on the foun-
dation of slavery as a taken-for-granted necessity to the good life. Nor, for that matter,
can we dismiss the artist-philosopher, Dostoyevsky, anti-Semite through and through.
It is, at least in part, on the basis of a similar sense of cultural context and what
might be called the registers of moral culpability that Levinas, who as a young philos-
ophy student sat in on Heidegger’s Freiburg lectures and traveled to Davos to see him
debate with Cassirer, could not bring himself, finally, to dismiss Heidegger. For him,
even in his private life as a Jewish mystic, it was not possible to “bypass Heidegger as
a thinker.”15 Heidegger’s former student, Gadamer, likens Heidegger’s Third Reich
“illusion” to Plato’s venture in Syracuse. According to Gadamer, the idea that Heidegger’s
anti-Semitism is a newly revealed scandal is nonsense. He and everybody else in Heide-
gger’s circle knew all along—years before any mention of the Black Notebooks. He
concludes his remarks with the following observation: “Whoever thinks we can here
and now dispense with Heidegger has not begun to fathom how difficult it was and
remains for anyone not to dispense with him, as opposed to making a fool of oneself
with supercilious gestures.”16 Much the same can be said of Arendt, Heidegger’s former
student and his former lover. Long after she had come to know the truth of Heidegger’s
anti-Semitism she continued to serve as his dedicated editor and American publishing
agent. Much the same was true for Habermas, for whom modernism was an unfin-
ished project and an unbreakable promise to the humanist tradition,17 the very tradi-
tion Heidegger deplored as the safe-keep of bourgeois subjectivity. And yet, Habermas
could never quite let go of his deep admiration for Heidegger, his conviction that in
Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, there was something that would not yield to con-
tradiction. And so does the same go for Heidegger’s refined and courtly adversary at
Davos, Cassirer, the stalwart keeper of neo-Kantian metaphysics. Just as Kant would
bring man out of his childhood state of superstition in order that all human beings
could live a free and responsible life, so Cassirer saw myth as an element in the childish
phase of philosophy, which would eventually grow into the clear-sited and mature
scientism of modern metaphysics. For Heidegger, Cassirer’s metaphysics represented
not just a failure to comprehend the essence of philosophy; to him, metaphysics as per
the essence of technology was in fact the instrument of worldwide dehumanization.
Here we are mindful of the fact that Cassirer, himself a Jew, was well aware of Heidegger’s
anti-Semitism when they debated at Davos in 1929, and still for the rest of his life he
relentlessly struggled to grasp Heidegger’s quarrel with metaphysics.
None of these thinkers—Levinas least of all—mean to justify Heidegger’s Nazi
involvement or his anti-Semitism. They merely want to explain why Heidegger can-
not be dismissed. With particular regard to the artist-philosopher and New Philosophy,
such is my purpose as well.

Notes
1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” in Dialectic of the
Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1994), 173.
2 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capital (New York: Routledge, 1992),
166.
3 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, 174–5.
 Heidegger’s Nazism & Anti-Semitism 173
4 Weber, Protestant Ethic, 166.
5 Ibid.
6 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, 174.
7 Ibid., 176.
8 See Kathrin T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2014).
9 Franco Berardi and Félix Guattari, Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, trans.
Guiseppina Mecchia and Charles J. Stivale (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 41.
10 Richard Wolin, “The French Heidegger Wars,” in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard
Wolin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 273.
11 Berardi and Guattari, Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, 41.
12 Ibid., 42.
13 Ibid., 41.
14 Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Gramercy
Books, 1956), 51–2.
15 Peter E Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010), 348.
16 Ibid., 430.
17 Ibid., 357.
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Index

Abstract Expressionism 72 Bacon, F. 107, 108

Acconci, V. 65 Bakhtin, M. M. 57–65, 69, 70
addiction 6, 7, 117–31; compulsion 120, Bataille, G. 30, 42
122, 123; cultural 123–5, 126; denial 120, Baudrillard, J. 6, 126, 136
122, 123; globalized dependency on beauty 4, 14, 15–16, 17, 18, 19–20, 35, 36,
essence of technology 125–30; 70; invented in the service of the State 16
habituation 119–20, 122, 125, 126, 128, beginning of Western Metaphysics 1–3, 97–8
129, 130–1; Hegel 130–1; obsession 120, Being 2–3, 7, 26, 29, 38, 74, 106, 107, 108,
122, 123; substance 118–21; and 109, 110, 130–1, 136, 137–8, 140, 141–2,
technology 121–3; tolerance 120, 143, 144, 145, 146–8, 155–6
122, 126 Being and Time (Heidegger) 77, 78, 152, 154
Adler, A. 75 Bell, C. 6, 83, 96–7, 99
Adler, J. 140, 142 Benjamin, W. 126
Adorno, T. W. 126, 167, 168, 169 Beowulf 119
aesthetic pleasure 19–20 Berardi, F. 126
Agamben, G. 30, 156–7, 161 Bergson, H.-L. 5
Alberti, L. B. 98 Berkeley, G. 146
Alcibiades 1, 16–18, 20, 24 Bernstein, J. M. 31
alcoholism 118–19 biophysics 155
aletheia 143 The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche) 13, 20, 21,
Ali, Muhammad 92 23, 25, 28
Althusser, L. 81 Blanchot, M. 30
American Medical Association 118 botanist 153
American Society of Addiction Medicine boxing 92
118–19 Bradford, M. 65
analytic philosophy 7, 144–5, 147, 157 Bronfen, E. 73, 75–6
Anaximander 3, 19, 107, 141, 142, 163; Brunelleschi, F. 128
“The Anaximander Fragment” Buddha 8, 164
(Heidegger) 152 Burckhardt, J. 1
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 6, 121–2, 123–4,
128, 130 calling 6, 101–5, 110–12
anti-Semitism and Nazism of Heidegger 152, Calvinism 103
155, 167–72 capitalism 101–2, 104, 105–6, 110, 130
antiphysis 58, 60, 63 Carnap, R. 7, 144, 145
Apollo 16, 17, 18–19, 21, 22, 33, 70, 81, 99, Cassirer, E. 6, 7, 97–8, 99, 109, 112, 135–6,
107, 141 137, 144, 169, 172
architecture, Greek 100 categorical imperative 31, 38, 39, 40
Arendt, H. 77, 125–6, 169, 170, 172 Celan, P. 109
Aristophanes 93 Cézanne, P. 5, 65, 73–83, 85, 99–100, 107,
Aristotle 5, 18, 61, 98, 106, 139, 141, 144, 109, 148, 164
146, 156, 172 Chateaubriand, F.-R. de 64
Armstrong, P. 120 Cixous, H. 42, 65, 157
authorship, multiple 31 Coleridge, S. 119
182 Index
collective Dionysian time/space 63–4 Faerie Queene (Spenser) 98
color theory 48 Fanon, F. 124–5, 170
compulsion see addiction Farias, V. 170, 171
Confucius 8, 164 feminism 65, 69, 72
convalescence 26–7, 28 Fichte, J. G. 34, 47
Copley, F. 4 Final Solution 145
Cosell, Howard 92 Fink, E. 152
The New Criterion 4 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 119
Critias 171 Foreman, George 92
Critique of Judgment (Kant) 47 Freud, S. 5, 49, 51–2, 54, 55–6, 70, 71, 72,
Critique of Practical Reason (Kant) 40 73, 74–81
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 141, 153 Fried, M. 4
Cruikshank, G. 119 Fry, R. 6, 83, 99–100, 101–5, 112
cultural addiction 123–5, 126
cybernetics 109–10 Gadamer, H.-G. 8, 30, 172
Galileo 127–8, 155
Daumier, H. 119 Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais) 59, 60,
De Quincey, T. 119 61–2
de-globalization 129 German Idealism 23, 34
decentering 171 Geuss, R. 20–1
deconstruction 163 global trade 129–30
deferred action/Nachträglichkeit 49, 54, globalized dependency on essence of
55, 56, 57, 71–3, 74, 75, 77–8, 79, 80, technology 125–30
82, 83 Goethe, J. W. 5, 34–5, 37, 41, 47–57, 60, 65,
Degas, E. 65, 119 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 106–7, 109
Deleuze, G. 30, 126, 171 Greenberg, C. 4
Democrates 91 Greenblatt, S. 117, 118, 165
denial see addiction Gu, Wenda 164
Derrida, J. 42, 65, 70, 73 Guattari, F. 126, 170–1
Descartes, R. 109, 156
The Dialogues (Plato) 93, 107–8; Habermas, J. 172
“Protagoras” 91–4, 98, 107 habituation see addiction
Dickens, C. 119 Hamlet 48, 49, 51–2, 71, 75, 119
Dionysius 13–14, 16–19, 21–3, 24, 25, 33, Haxton, B. 163
37, 48, 49, 51, 60, 63, 64, 70, 81, 107, Hegel, G. W. F. 5, 21, 30–1, 47, 48, 57, 59,
141, 162–3, 164 62, 65, 77–8, 79, 106, 130–1, 146, 161,
Diotima 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 61, 108 163; Bildung 36–7; Novel 34–6; Oldest
Disneyworld 136 Programme 31–4, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42,
Dostoyevsky, F. 42, 172 47, 58, 59, 142; Reversal 38–42
drag, performativity of 25 Heidegger, M. 1, 5, 6–8, 42, 65, 105–12, 118,
dramatic art 26–7 126–7, 128–31, 135–8, 141–2, 144–57,
Driskell, D. 65 161, 163–4; Cézanne 73–4, 81, 107, 109;
Hegel 30, 38, 42, 77–8, 106, 130–1, 146,
education 93, 94, 95, 165; Hegel 37; 161; Hölderlin 41, 42, 73, 74, 140, 148,
Plato 37, 94 154, 157, 161–2, 164; Merleau-Ponty
Einstein, A. 5, 128 77–9; Nazism and anti-Semitism of 152,
El Anatsui 164 155, 167–72; Nietzsche 13, 21, 25, 26–30,
Emile (Rousseau) 34–5, 37 107, 110, 148; one-track thinking 128–9,
Empedocles 57, 107, 148, 163 131; Rabelais 57; temporality of deferred
essence of technology 1, 3, 6–8, 21, 28, 62, action 77–8; “thinking” or “thoughtful
63–4, 104–5, 106, 110, 118, 137, meditation” 42
145–6, 148, 150, 151, 152, 155, 157, 165, Heisenberg, W. 5, 6, 127–8, 164
169, 172; globalized dependency on Hemingway, E. 119
125–30 Henrich, D. 38
ethics 7, 20, 31, 33, 138, 156 Heraclitus 8, 19, 24, 57, 59, 94, 107, 142,
Etruscans 24 148, 152–4, 156, 162–3
evolution of New Philosophy 8 herd-mentality 23
 Index 183
hermeneutics 8, 26, 28, 39, 51, 54, 55, 56, Lotringer, S. 117, 164
83, 165 Louth, C. 140, 142
Hesiod 95 love 14–16, 18, 61
Hillman, J. 162–3, 164 Lucretius 4
Hogarth, W. 119 Lukács, G. 30
Hölderlin, F. 4–5, 8, 19, 21, 31, 33, 34, 36, Luther, M. 26, 102, 111
37, 38–9, 40, 41, 42, 47, 48, 51, 57, 58, 62,
65, 73, 74, 107, 109, 138–42, 148, 152, Malevich, K. 164
154, 157, 161–2, 164, 165–6 Manet, E. 65, 71, 72, 73
Homer 2, 33, 94–5, 119 Mann, T. 56
Horkheimer, M. 126, 167, 168, 169 Marshall, K. J. 65
Husserl, E. 136, 137 Marx, K. 21, 105–6, 110
hybridization 14, 19, 26, 28, 40, 59, 64, 69, mathematics 91–100, 128, 137, 143,
71, 76, 80, 82, 83; law and crime 81; of 153–4, 156
mythos and logos 8, 19; thinking in and media 125–6
through poetry 109 Merleau-Ponty, M. 5, 30, 75, 76–83
Hyppolite, J. 34–5, 36, 41 minimalism 4
modernism 4, 6, 72, 83, 172
I Ching 166 Mouffe, C. 7
incest 16, 17, 48, 50, 52, 55 music 20, 69–70, 94
individualism, bourgeois 31 myth of metaphysics 135–7
interpellation 81
intuition 139–42 Nachträglichkeit/deferred action 49, 54,
Irigaray, L. 30, 42, 65 55, 56, 57, 71–3, 74, 75, 77–8, 79, 80,
“The Ister” (Hölderlin) 161–2, 164, 165 82, 83
nationalism 129
Jaar, A. 65, 157, 164 Nazism and anti-Semitism of Heidegger 152,
James, H. 65, 71, 73 155, 167–72
James, W. 124, 155 Nelson, W. 98
Jowett, B. 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 100, 165 The New Criterion 4
Joyce, J. 35 Newton, I. 48
Ju Bing 164 Nietzsche, F. 5, 13–31, 32, 35, 39, 42, 48, 57,
Jung, C. 57, 75, 125 59, 60, 62, 65, 106, 107, 110, 148
Nixon, Richard 119
Kabakov, I. and E. 164 Novalis 34–5
Kandinsky, W. 164 nuclear weapons 127, 155
Kant, I. 4, 5, 7, 14, 15, 19, 20, 23, 26, 31–4, nude/nudity 72, 73
38, 39, 40, 41, 47, 51, 55, 57, 65, 69, 73,
83, 95–6, 99, 100, 106, 107, 109, 138–40, obsession see addiction
141–2, 150, 153, 154, 156, 172 “Oldest Programme for a System of German
Kaufman, W. 13 Idealism” 4–5, 31–4, 36–7, 38, 39, 40, 42,
Kelly, M. 65 47, 58–9, 60, 139–40, 142
kitch 4 one-track thinking 8, 128–9, 131
Klee, P. 83 opioids 6, 118, 119, 122, 124
Kojève, A. 30 Orlan 25
Kramer, H. 4 overspecialization 20–1
Krell, D. F. 140, 171 Owens, C. 71
Kristeva, J. 65, 69
Paik, N. J. 65
Lacan, J. 5, 42, 49, 65, 70, 72, 73, 76, Panofsky, E. 6, 98, 99, 100
80, 81 Parmenides 2, 3, 8, 19, 57, 91, 93, 94, 107,
Laozi 8 108, 109, 136, 137–8, 139, 140, 142–7,
Leavis, F. R. 4 148, 151–2, 154, 163, 164
Lefort, C. 75, 76, 80, 81 patriarchy 2
Leibniz, G. W. 106, 144, 146 performativity 25, 29, 65, 73
Lessing, G. E. 98 perspective, linear 98, 100
Levinas, E. 172 pharmaceutical technology 56
184 Index
Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 31, 34–6, Schopenhauer, A. 20, 22, 47, 56
37, 38–42, 47 Schürmann, R. 6–7, 142–3, 144, 147–51,
photo-graph 76, 78, 80, 81, 82 155, 156, 157
physics 83, 153–4, 155 The Science of Logic (Hegel) 36, 37
Picasso, P. 119 Scrutiny 4
Pinkard, T. 36, 37, 38–9 self-portrait/non-self-portrait 70–1, 76, 80
Planck, M. 155 sensual pleasure 16–17, 61
Plato 1–3, 4, 7, 13–20, 21, 26, 32, 33–4, 37, sex doll, computerized 106
59, 61, 62, 63, 69, 91–5, 97–8, 100, 104, sex-themed dolls (Sherman) 69, 72–3, 84
105, 106, 107–8, 109, 127, 128, 136, 137, sexism 170
139, 140, 143, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, sexual pleasure 60, 70
152, 153, 156, 163, 164–5, 172 sexual rapture 19–20
Plotinus 147 sexual self-reassignment 25
Poe, E. A. 119 sexual will 22
Pope.L, William 65 sexuality 56, 60–1, 76–7
post-traumatic stress disorder 57 Shakespeare, William 49, 51, 119, 169
postmodernism 65, 69, 72 Sherman, C. 5, 65, 69–73, 74, 76, 77, 84
poststructuralism 151, 171 Siegel, J. 72
pre-Columbian civilizations 8, 164 Silverman, H. 76
prejudice and institutional authority 170 Socrates 1–2, 13, 15–18, 19, 20, 21, 22,
proportion 91, 94, 95, 139 24, 32–3, 36, 59, 63, 69–70, 91–3, 95,
prose poetry 26, 31, 40 107–8, 109, 136, 147, 151, 153, 154,
“Protagoras” (Plato) 91–4, 98, 107 164, 171
Protestant notion of “a calling” 101–5 Sophocles 51, 55, 74, 139, 156, 161, 164
psychoanalysis 51–7, 74–81; deferred action/ specialization 21, 95
Nachträglichkeit 49, 54, 55, 56, 57, 71–3, Spengler, O. 48, 105, 106–7, 110, 136
74, 75, 77–8, 79, 80, 82, 83 Spenser, E. 98
Ptah-Hotep 8, 164 sport 92
Pythagoras 91, 93, 94, 139 Steiner, G. 106, 108–9, 156
Stone, A. 56
Quakerism 101, 103, 104 substance addiction 118–21
questioning-thinking 29 superman 27–9
sustainable economy 129
Rabelais, F. 5, 57–65, 70; community and The Symposium (Plato) 2, 13–20, 61, 108,
social life 62 136
racism 170
Rancière, J. 7 technology 105–6, 109, 111, 112, 156;
Reagan, Nancy 119 -based cultural addiction 123–5; addiction
religion 26, 30; Protestant notion of “a and 121–30; as alienation 32; essence of
calling” 101–5 see separate entry
Renaissance perspective 98 Thales 97, 138, 148
Republic (Plato) 20, 32, 34, 37, 94, 107, 127; Theophrastus 141
Book II 94–5; Book III 94; Book X 1–2, Thomas, H. W. 65
15, 95, 108, 131, 155 Thucydides 28
Rilke, R. M. 107, 109, 148 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 25,
robotics 106 26–9, 110
Rodchenko, A. 164 Tolstoy, L. 64, 126, 128; Anna Karenina 6,
Romans 24 121–2, 123–4, 128, 130
Rousseau, J.-J. 34–5, 37, 64 trade, global 129–30
Rush, B. 119 truth 23–4, 26, 78, 91, 95, 100, 103, 107–8,
109, 147, 156, 157; and goodness 36;
Sartre, J.-P. 30, 150, 171 segregate from untruth 3
Schelling, F. W. J. 5, 31, 33, 34, 36, 42, 47, Twain, Mark 119
48, 57, 58, 62, 65, 140, 142, 163
Schiller, F. 21, 47, 140, 142 Uccello, P. 98
Schlegel, F. 47 United States 118–19, 129, 168, 169;
Schneemann, C. 65, 157 Disneyworld 136
 Index 185
van Gogh, V. 107, 109, 148, 157, 164 The Will to Power (Nietzsche) 25, 26,
Virilio, P. 6, 126 28, 29
Wilson, F. 65
Wagner, R. 20, 21 Winckelmann, J. J. 23
Walker, K. 65, 164 Wittig, G. 65
Weber, M. 6, 101, 101–2, 103–4, 110–11, Wolin, R. 170
112, 167–8 wood-paths 171
West, C. 65 Woolf, V. 35, 36, 42, 65, 100, 101, 103
Whitehead, A. N. 4
Wiener, N. 109 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 25,
Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship 26–9, 110
(Goethe) 34–5, 41, 47–57, 62, 71, 75, 107 Zeus 2, 16, 60
Willis, D. 65 Žižek, S. 65, 157