The fact that a profoundly radical climate change occurred in the Greek intellectual domain, and among the Athenians in particular, as the fifth century BCE ended and the fourth began, is a well known, if seldom appreciated, part of old European cultural history. It is usually associated with the negative effects of the Peloponnesian War – a thirty-year ancient conflict that lead to Athens’ ruin and the loss of its hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean. After the Sparta invasion in 404, the infamous dictatorship of the Thirty Tyrants was established and provoked a democratic counter-movement whose far-reaching consequences included the indictment brought against Socrates in 399, when he was charged with atheism and corrupting youth.
The Normalization of the Logos
There is a commonplace, as legitimate as it is clichéd, according to which Socrates’ death opened a new chapter in the history of ideas. The discipline of philosophy established by Plato, influenced by Ionic and Pythagorean models adopted the Passion of the sage as its foundational myth. It thus introduced an unprecedented, almost religious seriousness into the quarrels of the learned and of intellectuals. Above all the story of Socrates’ death dramatically widened the gap between the few who were engaged in obtaining real knowledge for themselves or were at least striving for it and the ignorant many. At the same time, Plato delegitimized the poetic expression of the divine, which had thrived in the context of Dionysian festivals and reclaimed the endeavor to speak truly of God and the divine for the school he founded on the fringes of the city, whose name is supposed to have been taken from an otherwise unknown local hero by the name of Akademis.
This ‘academization ’of the logos as not merely supposed to harm the reputations of the poets – whom Plato began to ironically refer to as theologoi, implying that they spoke of God without really knowing anything about him. It was also meant to thoroughly delegitimize the eristic discourse that was quite prevalent among Greek men at the time, and indeed to completely delegitimize all forms of the instrumental or strategic use of reason, insofar as the latter involved a claim to pubic legitimacy. Plato’s polemic against the Sophistic movement is supposedly a stable factor in the old European culture of rationality. But there was actually a break here with the older custom of agonal urban speech, and historians can justifiably claim that Platonism, with its odd pathos for the afterlife, its spirit de serieux and its latent Egyptianism, remained a foreign body within Greek culture and only found its proper milieu after the rise of Christianity.
The phenomena of Plato may well have represented an idealistic exception in its time. However, we are here concerned with the development of a new discursive rule, which stipulates that the conventional techniques for being right in the eristic opinions when conversing with others in search of truth and wisdom (with those who will henceforth be called philosophoi),have been rendered inoperative. If the Platonic invention of philosophy ended up having far-reaching consequences, this was less because it established a dominant school and more because it introduced a logical practice through which a new type of authority gains ground. The oft-cited Socratic school of dialogue, the dialectic, was not essentially eristic, not an art of disputation (lasting more than 2,000 years, until Schopenhauer again evoked this submerged disciplined in his short text The Art of Being Right),but rather understood itself as a process for disarming the participants in a discussion and leading them out of fruitless strife. The goal of this process was to estrange the holders of opinions from the ideas they also associated with it, so that they henceforth received their beliefs directly from ‘truth itself.’ Thus the Platonic caesura should not merely be interpreted as an alien idealism that has pervasively spread throughout a pragmatically minded environment. Rather, it must be attributed to a much wider development, which would be characterized as the establishment of a new logical norm. This is closely associated with two cultural innovations that led to Greece’s special placed in the history of rational cultures.
On the one hand, we have the emergence of Greek writing, which was connected to the formation of memory capacity for coded knowledge and eo ipso connected to an increase of claims to lasting knowledge. On the other hand, we have the discovery of rigorous sciences, particularly in the form of mathematics. It may well be that the Academy, which was nominally devoted to paideia, the education of youth, was initially perceived as a foreign body within the framework of the old Athenian institutions – at this time, in the agora, the theater, and the stadium, the city possessed three institutions where citizens could practice stepping out into the light of the public sphere (Hannah Arendt very fittingly called such spaces, the agora in particular, ‘spaces of appearance’ [Erscheinungsraume] for ambitions typical of the polis). Its initial strangeness soon yielded to solid habitualization –this can be seen from the remarkable fact that the Academy pursued its mission uninterrupted for nearly a millennium, and was only shut down in CE 529 due to an imperial order from Byzantium.[1]
The real foreign bodies within the polis-space, however, were the novel epistemic disciplines, especially geometry, arithmetic, and philosophical semantics, the emergence of which shook the communities standards of speech and thought. In order to understand this, we must bear in mind that Plato provocatively claimed that he was putting a definitive end to the disoriented and disorientating chatter of the polis, in order to model political argumentation in the agora on the sciences and mathematics – although we do not know how serious he was about this. He was able to make his famous demand for the rule of philosopher-kings only because he had argued for the transition from a rhetorical democracy to an epistemological aristocracy. To see why this idea is excessive, we can refer to Aristotle’s objection against Platonic epistemocracy. According to Aristotle, political affairs are subject to the law of the probable, not the law of the true, which entails that rational governance can only be orientated by plausibility, and not by scientific knowledge. The democratic debate of lay persons is sufficient here, while the conversation of the learned remains for an extra-political realm.
However we care to evaluate the Platonic caesura in the world of Greek discussion, it unquestionably represented a great event in the history of Western culture of rationality, whose consequences can be traced up to the present day. We could call its modus operandi an epistemic domestication of the logos. The word ‘logos’ itself, in its traditional sense, which remains distinct even today, indicates that speech that wishes to be rational in the foundational age of philosophical thought is supposed to undergo a double purification. Its first purgation refers to the doxic origin of true thought – the true logos, initially, at least, takes root in the mire of opinion, as even the philosopher concedes, but must then be uprooted from this mire in order to claim independence from any lower genesis (the reasons for the validity of true utterances are only to be found ‘above’). The second purgation involves isolating true statements from the passions and particular interests of speakers, since with their inevitable agitation the former disturb the ideal of rest, which from this time on is considered the constitutive feature of alethes logos. The true statement’s state of rest is the guarantee of impartiality, without which science as a comprehensive practice of neutrality and disinterestedness is inconceivable. It brings about the intellect’s free passivity in receiving the final results of logical and empirical investigations.
It is only by means of these two purifications that the improbability known as scientific objectivity can be elevated into a norm and a habitus of the professional and committed pursuit of theory- faced with these stringent demands, we understand why philosophy as away of life could at first only be made appealing by recommending it to followers as a path to salvation. It formed the core discipline of academic passivism, without which old European efforts to institutionalize the logos – whether in academies, cathedral schools, universities, archives, or argumentative media – would have been unthinkable.
To put this emphatically for the moment, we would have to say that the idea of objectively universal truth is inseparable from the supreme tranquility of contemplation that is supposed to occur as soon as evidence and findings have been taken care of. The philosophical path leads from interest to disinterest, from pathos to apathy, from a position to ascendance above positions. With their efforts to come to rest, which alone make philosophically scientific cognition possible, the most resolute adepts of this new discipline initiate nothing less than the being-at-rest of the god of philosophers. He represents a newcomer in the Greek heavens, distinguished toto ceolo from the popular gods of Homeric and Hesiodic times by his radicalized cognitive design.
[1] So if he
didn’t have an axe to grind against paganism why did Justinian close the
Academy in 529?
Competition. He had
just founded a new University in Constantinople
which was directly under imperial control, and this was a convenient way
to get rid of a rival. He did the same
thing to the main competitor of his new law school. When an earthquake hit the renowned
university of Beirut in 551 he took the opportunity to close it down
(officially it was ‘moved’ but it never recovered) while transferring its most
distinguished faculty to the capital. Ruthless? Yes. Anti-intellectual religious fanaticism? Not
quite.
The End of History
The concept of time ‘after history’ is initially associated with the theological idea that God will one day reclaim the world he created and eo ipso cast into time – and indeed at a moment that is humanly inconceivable, namely when he is finished with the world. If one translates these ideas into the language of secular logic, we find the assumption that history as a whole is pursuing an end, or an estuary, to put it more cautiously, in which the historical process is finished with itself. It could reach such a point if the energies which impelled it forward until now were used up or if the conflicts that had hitherto rendered it dynamic were completely resolved. Such an end would be humanly conceivable and ascertainable, in distinction to the transcendent conclusion brought about by God. As is well known, these kinds of ideas had previously been part of the Hegelian tradition, which had suggested the establishment of the constitutional state in the Napoleonic era, the cessation of class conflict following the Russian Revolution, and the satisfaction of the human striving for recognition ( or rather its hedonistic miniaturization) as possible criteria for admission into post-history.
With that said, the claim that there was also a non-Hegelian route to the posthistiore – thesis should now be plausible. According to out interpretation, Heidegger, with his powerful intuitions about the diagnosis of time, followed this alternative path to establish the end of history, before he was compelled by his non-heroic imperative to take a detour in order to devote himself to the creation or letting happen of supposedly decisive world-historical actions, works, or events.
The real father of the non-Hegelian theory of the end of history (it would be better to call it a vision or a daydream), which Heidegger occasionally espoused, is acknowledged to be Fyodor Dostoyevsky – particularly in his short novel Notes from the Underground, published in 1864. This work has to be recognized as the founding charter of anti-globalization sentiment, if such an anachronistic back-dating of the term is allowed. The narrator of the virtuous monologue in the first part of the book (a bitter and comic prelude to philosophical anthropology offered in the first person) is a figure whom we would call today a modernization-loser. He represents a neurotic version of Nietzsche’s last man, a character whose motivation has been undermined, who can only satisfy his desire for self-respect by deviously taking pleasure in his own humiliation. He is someone who contrives his own misfortune and flirts with it. He settles into a ‘cold, loathsome despair,’ into a ‘half-belief’, into a ‘assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness,’ which serves as an Archimedean point that he can use to unhinge the world of progressive mind.
The narrator in his squalid hole (which is described as a deliberately chosen dingy subterranean dwelling on the fringes of St. Petersburg) presents himself as a vehement critic of the Western way of life, and opponent of globalization, in the parlance of or times. He also professes himself to be a man of the present day and argues that the ‘man of the nineteenth century’ is morally obligated to be a ‘characterless creature’- almost the only claim in the subsequent cascade of words that he realty seems to believe in. It gives him the greatest satisfaction to act like an anthropologist who marshals evidence that the predominantly pro-Western ideologists of the market, of relaxation, and of universalized humanitarianism have made their calculations without reference to actual human beings or, to put it more precisely, without reference to the ungrateful and rebellious freedom of human beings, which amounts to little more than continually taking it into one’s head to oppose every given order, even one promising universal happiness. In this context, the well-known neo-Cynical thesis is formulated according to which the human being is an ungrateful bipedal animal Nietzsche could rightly remark that Dostoyevsky’s ‘terrible and cruel work’ presents us with the sharpest mockery of the Delphic inscription ‘Know Thyself’.
The author of this confession clearly and intuitively understands himself to be a creature of boredom – a witness to an existence without beliefs, responsibilities, and obligations. His stream of words reflects whatever enters its author’s mind, without reaching a standpoint of truth worthy of being repeated. The rambling talk of the voice from the underground thus demonstrates just how impossible it has become to participate in a meaningful history.
I swear to you, gentlemen, that do not believe word, not one little word, of all I have scribbled! That is, I do believe, perhaps, but a the same time, who knows why, I sense and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler. ‘Then why did you write it all?’ you say to me. And what if I put you away for some forty years with nothing to do, and then come to you in the underground after forty years to see how you’ve turned out? One cannot leave a man alone and unoccupied for forty years, can one?
It is crucial to note that this man without commitments continuously refers to those opposed to his own modus vivendi with the clairvoyance of the evil eyes; he finds such opposition in the secular anthropology of Western progressive parties. Such progressives, whether liberal or socialist, believe that human beings have needs that can in principle be satisfied. They derived various policies for satisfying need from this view, but strategic differences of their policies could not conceal the fact that they were basically after the same thing.
The Crystal Palace of London, erected in 1851, the greatest structure in architectural history at that time, was a public symbol of this belief. It was triumphantly erected in a mere ten months to accommodate the first world’s fair in Hyde Park. It was set up again on an even larger scale in 1854 on Sydenham Hill, near London, as a popular indoor park. The Crystal Palace’s articulation of the nineteenth century’s civilizing tendencies had a significance that an be compared with the World Trade Center in New York City, whose collapse in September 2001 was symbolically on a par with it. The megastructure of Sydenham, in which the ultimate aims of the progressive way of life were completely revealed for all to see. The underground man is quite obviously a contemporary of the Crystal Palace, since he understands why the superb construct was erected: the temple of satisfaction is a house of worship for the anti-metaphysical project of modernity, which aims to dissuade satisfied human beings who have been accounted for, made equal, and discretely animalized, from the further use of their freedom. Historic tensions [Spannungen] are supposed to achieve a post-historical equilibrium in this grand overarching receptacle [alles uberspannenden Behalter].
The Eastern observer is opposed to such pretension and intervenes, drawing upon Christian anthropological motifs to claim desire is insatiable:
Shower him with all Earthly blessings, drown him in happiness completely, over his head, so that only bubbles pop up on the surface of happiness, as on water; give him such economic satisfaction that he no longer has anything left to do at all except sleep, eat gingerbread, and worry about the non-cessation of world history [P.S.- i.e. to have sex] – and it is here, just here, that he, this man, out of sheer ingratitude, out of sheer lampoonery, will do something nasty. He will even risk his gingerbread.
This challenge to the politics of happiness
reveals two clearly distinct modes of post-historicity. In the first mode,
human beings participate in systems of satisfaction, but from time to time
escape the crystal palace to preserve their honor as human beings, that is, as
those who are free to break the given conditions – in the most extreme case, on
a whim, they opt for madness and self-destruction. In the second mode, human beings indeed remain
excluded from the benefits of existing in the sphere of comfort, but find their
own satisfaction in despising the contentment of the palace-dwellers. Even the
idle despiser lives in a post-historical situation, though with a twist, namely
that such post-historicity contains elements of pre- and extra-historical existence,
since it never participated in the struggle for historical satisfaction – and is
not subsequently inclined to struggle, either.The End of History
The concept of time ‘after history’ is initially associated with the theological idea that God will one day reclaim the world he created and eo ipso cast into time – and indeed at a moment that is humanly inconceivable, namely when he is finished with the world. If one translates these ideas into the language of secular logic, we find the assumption that history as a whole is pursuing an end, or an estuary, to put it more cautiously, in which the historical process is finished with itself. It could reach such a point if the energies which impelled it forward until now were used up or if the conflicts that had hitherto rendered it dynamic were completely resolved. Such an end would be humanly conceivable and ascertainable, in distinction to the transcendent conclusion brought about by God. As is well known, these kinds of ideas had previously been part of the Hegelian tradition, which had suggested the establishment of the constitutional state in the Napoleonic era, the cessation of class conflict following the Russian Revolution, and the satisfaction of the human striving for recognition ( or rather its hedonistic miniaturization) as possible criteria for admission into post-history.
With that said, the claim that there was also a non-Hegelian route to the posthistiore – thesis should now be plausible. According to out interpretation, Heidegger, with his powerful intuitions about the diagnosis of time, followed this alternative path to establish the end of history, before he was compelled by his non-heroic imperative to take a detour in order to devote himself to the creation or letting happen of supposedly decisive world-historical actions, works, or events.
The real father of the non-Hegelian theory of the end of history (it would be better to call it a vision or a daydream), which Heidegger occasionally espoused, is acknowledged to be Fyodor Dostoyevsky – particularly in his short novel Notes from the Underground, published in 1864. This work has to be recognized as the founding charter of anti-globalization sentiment, if such an anachronistic back-dating of the term is allowed. The narrator of the virtuous monologue in the first part of the book (a bitter and comic prelude to philosophical anthropology offered in the first person) is a figure whom we would call today a modernization-loser. He represents a neurotic version of Nietzsche’s last man, a character whose motivation has been undermined, who can only satisfy his desire for self-respect by deviously taking pleasure in his own humiliation. He is someone who contrives his own misfortune and flirts with it. He settles into a ‘cold, loathsome despair,’ into a ‘half-belief’, into a ‘assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness,’ which serves as an Archimedean point that he can use to unhinge the world of progressive mind.
The narrator in his squalid hole (which is described as a deliberately chosen dingy subterranean dwelling on the fringes of St. Petersburg) presents himself as a vehement critic of the Western way of life, and opponent of globalization, in the parlance of or times. He also professes himself to be a man of the present day and argues that the ‘man of the nineteenth century’ is morally obligated to be a ‘characterless creature’- almost the only claim in the subsequent cascade of words that he realty seems to believe in. It gives him the greatest satisfaction to act like an anthropologist who marshals evidence that the predominantly pro-Western ideologists of the market, of relaxation, and of universalized humanitarianism have made their calculations without reference to actual human beings or, to put it more precisely, without reference to the ungrateful and rebellious freedom of human beings, which amounts to little more than continually taking it into one’s head to oppose every given order, even one promising universal happiness. In this context, the well-known neo-Cynical thesis is formulated according to which the human being is an ungrateful bipedal animal Nietzsche could rightly remark that Dostoyevsky’s ‘terrible and cruel work’ presents us with the sharpest mockery of the Delphic inscription ‘Know Thyself’.
The author of this confession clearly and intuitively understands himself to be a creature of boredom – a witness to an existence without beliefs, responsibilities, and obligations. His stream of words reflects whatever enters its author’s mind, without reaching a standpoint of truth worthy of being repeated. The rambling talk of the voice from the underground thus demonstrates just how impossible it has become to participate in a meaningful history.
I swear to you, gentlemen, that do not believe word, not one little word, of all I have scribbled! That is, I do believe, perhaps, but a the same time, who knows why, I sense and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler. ‘Then why did you write it all?’ you say to me. And what if I put you away for some forty years with nothing to do, and then come to you in the underground after forty years to see how you’ve turned out? One cannot leave a man alone and unoccupied for forty years, can one?
It is crucial to note that this man without commitments continuously refers to those opposed to his own modus vivendi with the clairvoyance of the evil eyes; he finds such opposition in the secular anthropology of Western progressive parties. Such progressives, whether liberal or socialist, believe that human beings have needs that can in principle be satisfied. They derived various policies for satisfying need from this view, but strategic differences of their policies could not conceal the fact that they were basically after the same thing.
The Crystal Palace of London, erected in 1851, the greatest structure in architectural history at that time, was a public symbol of this belief. It was triumphantly erected in a mere ten months to accommodate the first world’s fair in Hyde Park. It was set up again on an even larger scale in 1854 on Sydenham Hill, near London, as a popular indoor park. The Crystal Palace’s articulation of the nineteenth century’s civilizing tendencies had a significance that an be compared with the World Trade Center in New York City, whose collapse in September 2001 was symbolically on a par with it. The megastructure of Sydenham, in which the ultimate aims of the progressive way of life were completely revealed for all to see. The underground man is quite obviously a contemporary of the Crystal Palace, since he understands why the superb construct was erected: the temple of satisfaction is a house of worship for the anti-metaphysical project of modernity, which aims to dissuade satisfied human beings who have been accounted for, made equal, and discretely animalized, from the further use of their freedom. Historic tensions [Spannungen] are supposed to achieve a post-historical equilibrium in this grand overarching receptacle [alles uberspannenden Behalter].
The Eastern observer is opposed to such pretension and intervenes, drawing upon Christian anthropological motifs to claim desire is insatiable:
Shower him with all Earthly blessings, drown him in happiness completely, over his head, so that only bubbles pop up on the surface of happiness, as on water; give him such economic satisfaction that he no longer has anything left to do at all except sleep, eat gingerbread, and worry about the non-cessation of world history [P.S.- i.e. to have sex] – and it is here, just here, that he, this man, out of sheer ingratitude, out of sheer lampoonery, will do something nasty. He will even risk his gingerbread.
The first mode results in a comfortable posthistoire of freedom reduced to absurd whims (half-amusement park culture and half bloodbath), while the second mode results in the uncomfortable posthistoire of ressentiment, which remains condemned to self-satisfaction and otherwise to lethargy, due to its supposedly (or perhaps genuinely) greater depths. While suffering and doubt are eliminated in the system of comfort, or are at least continually reduced (‘. . .what good is a crystal palace in which one can have doubts?’), only partisans of ressentiment have the option of intentional suffering.
And yet I’m certain that man will never renounce real suffering ,that is, destruction and chaos. Suffering – why, this is the sole cause of consciousness.
The observing despiser of the crystal palace does not have an alternative project, as to be expected. Yet he remains parasitical on the faded historicity of others, and history is not really at an end and the satisfaction provided by the crystal palace would not amount to much, because the human resolution to suffer and impose suffering has not been extinguished even under post-historical conditions as the underground man tries to demonstrate. With his will to suffer, he fends off the unreasonable demand that he should admire the accomplishments of the party that has triumphed in history. In his masochistic authenticity, the first opponent of globalization deflects the progressive’ claim to superiority – though he seems to be susceptible to envy. He objects to the world of happiness with the thesis that another world is possible, a world in which there is still enough suffering to give the cold shoulder to history and its tranquillization by universal satisfaction.
[One could could properly speak of the dialectic of posthistoire whose modes may not be entirely distinct from a psychoanalytic point of view.-[ J. S.]
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