Foucault on Nietzsche (with or without Hegel)

For some time now I have wanted to sit down and read Nietzsche with an eye to forming an opinion about his work for myself. To do this properly is clearly a long term project. I have recently got a start on it. It comes on the heels of reading Hegel, and it has been suggested to me that Nietzsche should be read as reacting deeply against Hegel and Hegelianism generally. Further, that his long-term reception has been as an arch anti-Hegelian, an anti-dialectical war machine. Foucault, I have been told, is crucial here.

So what I want to do here is think through what I am prepared to say about The Genealogy of Morals, thinking of Nietzsche as at least a surface anti-Hegelian (whatever that may mean), but also contextually, in as much as I am able. Then I want to look at how Foucault presents Nietzsche in “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” an essay that I had not read in some years. Foucault himself is generally regarded as antithetical to Marx, Marxism, and all the more so to Hegel. I have long been skeptical of this view. Calling Marx a ‘minor Ricardian’ in Paris in, I think, 1966, is it seems to me to protest too much. Given that I have been encouraged to think of Nietzsche, and in particular Foucault’s Nietzsche as anti-Hegelian, I was all the more surprised to see that Foucault’s essay was first published in a collective volume, Hommage à Jean Hyppolite. Hyppolite, after all, is the individual most responsible for re-introducing Hegel into France in the 1940s and 50s. Which is enough on its own to suggest that we’re dealing here with two distinct Hegels. There is the Kojevian, ‘existentialist’ Hegel, drawn from the Phenomenology, which had to be painfully excavated again in the early, and perhaps later Marx in the second half of the 20^th century. Then there is the Hegel of the Philosophy of Right, a philosopher of history, of world history, and of modernity as a collective condition. Not that the two don’t fit together in various ways, but it is not hard to see that different lessons, different readings of Marx, fit together with different approaches to Hegel.

From the beginning, I am hesitant to say what Nietzsche is ‘up to’ in the Genealogy. To dive right in: Nietzsche wants to consider the way in which morals, moral evaluation, changes, and the consequences of this instability. I want to focus on Hegelian resonances and conflicts here, but it seems to me clear that Nietzsche’s 19^th century was at least as post-Kantian as post-Hegelian. Morality is a major contender in this world for a stable point around which to orient human life. Over and against the idealist impulse (variously debased) is materialism (also, of course, variously debased). In a sense, this materialism is simply the continuation of 18^th century materialism: there is only matter in motion. It has become more sophisticated, and has been applied more aggressively to biology and thence to society (a transformation that Foucault, as a student of Canguilhem, certainly spent a long time thinking about, by the by). 19^th century racism, of the sort that at least seems to be everywhere rearing its head in Nietzsche, fits in here. The most intellectually interesting thing to happen here, however, is the renewal of attempts to draw philosophical lessons from the undeniable practical success of science. This is the tradition from which, ultimately, Foucault himself will come.

Nietzsche was by training a philologist. It has been pointed out that Renan makes a very interesting comparison to Nietzsche, and I think this is so. Philology was one of the great intellectual projects, whose massive promises (on plain display in Renan’s youthful confession, L’Avenir de la science) turned out to be nothing other than dust glued together with the blood of others. Philology as practical science has its origin in the search for textual originals. Its method is to compare languages across time and space. Language slides into society, society into the material being of the human—which is to say into race. This could only happen because science moved forward on the biological front as well. Objects had to be defined, slow changes and also continuities accounted for, physical inheritance presented itself as an obviously true hypothesis. Languages evolve together with the peoples to which they are attached. The two are tied together by a sort of essence, and this is what the philologist is ultimately after. Nietzsche reacted to this, and I think the slow-motion decomposition of Renan’s ‘faith in science’ is instructive here.

Given all this, I want to say that Nietzsche is manifestly arguing, in The Genealogy of Morals, that moral evaluations can be traced, through that great archive language itself, to social conflict. His argument is schematic and so simplified that its precise status and objective should be considered carefully. He is not, I think, exactly making an historical argument. But he does say that, historically, at one time the word ‘good,’ for instance, applied not to acts, but to people ($4-6). The conquering race, as individuals but also as a group, simply was the good, and those conquered the bad. The ‘revolt of the slaves’ was responsible for ‘transvaluing’ this situation, shifting first the ‘good’ not to the individuals who suffered domination themselves, but to their state, and therefore their actions ($10). Good became to turn the other cheek, as an abstract quality. What matters is what to do with this historico-philosophical observation. Nietzsche is always saying that he “has much to be silent about.” Indeed, ‘wovon Nietzsche nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.’

It has been suggested that Nietzsche’s ‘slave morality’ in its historical victory over nobility is somehow a refiguring of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Although I suppose this is possible, it doesn’t seem likely to me. First, this is for all the same reasons that it is unlikely any particular person in the late 19^th century would have been drawn to this particular ‘moment’ of the Hegelian dialectic when there are so many from which to choose. It simply didn’t occur to most people as the most important part of Hegel (although perhaps it seemed important to some: Royce? Et alia?) Further, Hegel’s pair is Herr and Knecht, while Nietzsche’s is Vornehmen and Sklave. The bundles of associations are quite different, and the shift from singular to plural should not be overlooked. Now, perhaps all this should just be taken as evidence that Nietzsche meant to radically re-stage Hegel’s drama. I am not so sure. Anyway, this would assimilate Nietzsche still more closely to the ‘existentialist’ Hegel(ian tradition) and so retain him as a terrible critic of the Marxist/world-historical tradition.

The fundamental objection to Nietzsche, it seems to me, is that he is basically a racist and elitist aesthete. Certainly he is an elitist. At many places, in particularly in the way he talks so scornfully about democratic leveling, he echoes what I take to be a capacious 19^th century tradition of aristocratic liberalism associated most famously with Tocqueville, but also, it is my ill-informed understanding, with Jacob Burkhardt, a not-unimportant figure for Nietzsche. Although perhaps it would be better to assert that this sort of liberalism was a very broad and generalized orientation at this dawning moment of mass democracy—in the air, as it were, rather than passed from hand to hand.

Race is a major sticking point in any attempt to ‘revive’ Nietzsche or even to read him productively. Just as one must ask with Hegel how much of his system would unravel and collapse if one insisted that the nation-state—keystone of the archway to the world spirit—be removed from it, or if we prefer to keep it intact but properly interpreted, so we must ask with Nietzsche how much of his work implies or depends upon a notion of the self tied intimately to a collective biological destiny always articulate at the level of the individual, but essentially of a historical nature but. That is, is race essential to Nietzsche’s notion of the individual, and if so, can we accept, or find an acceptable version of, his notion of race?

It should be said clearly that ‘no’ seems like a plausible, although not a necessary, answer. Nietzsche, I understand, like many in the 19^th century, was Lamarkian rather than Darwinian. The terms of the debate are confused by an ambiguous vitalism that penetrates 19^th century thought at every level. No doubt much has been said about Nietzsche and vitalism, but from my own perspective it is obvious that he is negotiating between a Spencerian ‘struggle for life’ notion of vitalism and a subtly different and more idealist vitalism of the sort represented by Jean-Marie Guyau—that which is life is good, and therefore that which increases life is good. This is the principle of Esquisse d’une morale sans sanction ni obligation, published in1884, which I mention because Nietzsche read it and knew it. Henri Bergson fits, in a sense, into this line, which goes back to Ravaisson. The story is complicated because it involves a series of borrowings (perhaps mutual) between quite different French and German philosophical lines of thought. My sense is that it should be possible to tell a single story as a sort of oblique dialog that would include Cousin and Ravaisson, the German Idealists after Kant, and would run up through the Heideggerian exchange of the pre and post 1945 years—but this is the kind of nationalizing historiography that, even when practiced in its most deconstructive mode (Ethan Kleinberg) is, I think, always telling the same story again and again—in that way, maybe, we can say that history in a deconstructive mode is very like history in a Hegelian mode, the movement and the answer is always the same, but it seems always to take a long time to figure it out.

Nietzsche, it seems to me, is really pursuing a very different project than Bergson. Bergson is absolutely interested in the natural sciences, in the physiology of the human, but it seems to me that his whole way of proceeding through the physical, as much as it deposits there, is quite abstracted. One could talk a great deal about the way Bergson dealt with the issue, of which he was acutely aware, that he understands language to be conceptual, and the durée to non-conceptual and therefore non-linguistic (although it would be wrong, I think, to say that it is what escapes language), but that Bergson could only discuss durée in language. Nietzsche, on the other hand, I think is attempting in his discussion of ‘morals’ to work the ideal directly out of physical, tactile, reality. This is why race matters to him, but also why he brings up the ancients’ practice of reading out loud, the ideal determination of the sentence by the breath and so the body. The latter seems clear enough, and not too problematic. But race? The point, I think, is that there are bundles of characteristics, wills, that cannot be dissociated from their material foundation. This is race. It is exactly an incarnated concept, a Hegelian idea. To the degree that the European ‘nations’ are young and undefined, they are not yet races (I’m thinking of $251 in Beyond Good and Evil). There is no hint, so far as I can see, of the Hegelian teleology of freedom in Nietzsche. True, Nietzsche, like Hegel, like Spinoza, and many others, finds a way to identify freedom and necessity. This is not, however, transformed into an historical principle as it arguably is in Hegel. The reason is, it seems to me, that Nietzsche’s attitude to history is, for all his biologism, enormously voluntaristic.

This is where Foucault comes in. The vulgar version of Nietzsche, or racial thinking, is a sort of biologized Marxism. Indeed, the argument has explicitly been made that the intellectual roots of Nazism are to be found in a revisionist Marxism that, essentially, transformed classes into races (I’m getting this argument from James Gregor, but not endorsing it). Marxist historiography has often handled superstructural elements like morals through reference, with varying degrees of sophistication, to structural facts, including structural conflict. The Hegelian heritage in Marxism is supposed to mean that this conflict, the many generations of superstructural chaff, all fit into a total picture. The unfolding logic of productive forces in conflict with social relations comes to an impasse, there is not just a revolution, but the Revolution. Nietzsche may retain teleology, but it is not a pre-given teleology as in the vulgar version of Marx. Life, in its breadth and depth, is the teleological goal, but can itself be understood only genealogically, which is to say retroactively (how far from Hegel are we here, really?)

And this is the Nietzsche that Foucault gives us. He is above all an anti-Platonist. The ‘origin’ in which he is interested is in no way a philological essence, but rather a contingent and tainted thing recognized. Genealogy is a way of doing history against history, which is taken to be obsessed with origins in the Platonist sense of essence. Foucault says that the genealogists does not look for the Ursprung,

Parce que d’abord on s’efforce d’y recueillir l’essence de la chose, sa possibilité la plus pure, son identité soigneusement repliée sur elle-même, sa forme immobile et antérieure à tout ce qui est externe, accidentel et successif. Rechercher une telle origine, c’est essayer de retrouver ‘ce qui était déjà’, le ‘cela même’ d’une image exactement adéquate à soi…Si le généalogiste prend soin d’écouter l’histoire plutôt que d’ajouter foi à la métaphysique, qu’apprend-il ? Que derrière les choses il y a ‘tout autre chose’ …le secret qu’elles sont sans essence, ou que leur essence fut construit pièce à pièce à partir de figures qui lui étaient étrangères (148).

Genealogy is thus against both philology and Hegelian or other idealist ways of writing history. What emerges is a frankly materialist conception of history. For Nietszche, channels Foucault,

« La vérité et son règne originaire ont eu leur histoire dans l’histoire…L’histoire, avec ses intensités, ses défaillances, ses fureurs secrètes, ses grandes agitations fiévreuses comme ses syncopes, c’est le corps même du devenir.» (150-151). Rather than Ursprung, the genealogist is interested in Herkunf and Entstehung. The former Foucault renders as ‘provenance’ and the latter as ‘emergence.’ Of the first, he says, “La généalogie, comme analyse de la provenance, est doc à l’articulation du corps et de l’histoire. Elle doit montrer le corps tout imprimé d’histoire, et l’histoire ruinant le corps. » (154). This, I think, is how Foucault would want to say Nietzsche deals with race—race is history marking the body. Of the second,

L’émergence, c’est donc l’entrée en scène des forces; c’est leur irruption, le bond par lequel sautent de la coulisse sur le théâtre, chacune avec sa vigueur, la juvénilité qui est la sienne. Ce que Nietzsche appelle l’Entstehungsherd du concept de bon, ce n’est exactement ni l’énergie des forts, ni la réaction des faibles ; mais bien cette scène où ils se distribuent les uns en face des autres. (156)

This begins to sound to my ears a great deal like Badiou. Take for instance this, “Nul n’est doc responsable d’une émergence, nul ne peut s’en faire gloire ; elle se produit toujours dans l’interstice.” (156) Of course Badiou has an explicitly worked-out metaphysics to go with his notion of the event, while Foucault certainly does not—but still I would be surprised if it wasn’t, on investigation, very clear that Badiou is working on Foucault’s notion of history and historical change. Or perhaps Althusser and Spinozan Marxism are really the important things here? (The answer seems increasingly often to be ‘Althusser’ when the question is about the French 1960s and 70s).

Although I would resist the notion that we should read Foucault’s Nietzsche as simply endorsed by Foucault, there is clearly overlap. For instance, “L’humanité ne progresse pas lentement de combat en combat jusqu’à une réciprocité universelle, où les règles se substitueront, pour toujours, à la guerre; elle installe chacune de ces violences dans un système de règles, et va ainsi de domination en domination” (157). That is, as they say, a strong reading. Yet stronger and more clearly self-referential is the discussion of ‘interpretation,’

Si interpréter, c’était mettre lentement en lumière une signification enfouie dans l’origine seule la métaphysique pourrait interpréter le devenir de l’humanité. Mais si interpréter, c’est s’emparer, par violence ou subreption, d’un système de règles qui n’a pas en soi de signification essentielle, et lui imposer une direction, le ployer à une volonté nouvelle, le faire entrer dans un autre jeu et le soumettre à des règles secondes, alors le devenir de l‘humanité est une série d’interprétations. Et la généalogie doit en être l’histoire : histoire des morales, des idéaux, des concepts métaphysiques, histoire du concept de liberté ou de la vie ascétique, comme émergences d’interprétations différentes. Il s’agit de les faire apparaître comme des événements au théâtre des procédures. (158)

The broader point of Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche is that the past does not give us meaning in the form of history, but rather just the other way around, we put meaning into the past ourselves. We believe in general that " notre présent prend appui sur des intentions profondes, des nécessités stables; nous demandons aux historiens de nous en convaincre. Mais le vrai sens historique reconnaît que nous vivons, sans repères ni coordonnée originaires, dans des myriades d’événements perdus” (162). Foucault walks the reader through a genealogy of history itself and concludes that Nietzsche’s ‘true historical sense’ is a point by point rejection of Plato’s concept of history. In a nicely surrealist phrase, Foucault says, « La généalogie, c’est l’histoire comme carnaval concerté. » (168). All of this comes down to an analysis of the Will to Truth, closely related to the Will to Power. Historical analysis shows that, “il n’y a pas de connaissance qui ne repose sur l’injustice (qu’il n’y a donc pas, dans la connaissance même, un droit à la vérité ou un fondement du vrai) et que l’instinct de connaissance est mauvais…” (170). Truth, this is to say, does not set you free, it simply enslaves you yet the tighter. This is the anti-enlightenment turn everyone is always talking about in Foucault. There is no truth, because truth is slavery, there are only strong interpretations, which is to say autonomous self-creation. That is Foucault’s Nietzsche.

All of this is possible only in a world in which historical meaning is generated subjectively, in the moment. The material reality of the world must be scratched clean of the accretions of valuation that are history in order to make a different meaning. Meaning is not intersubjective. Nor is it present but unavailable as a sort of transcendentally necessary object. Essence has fled history, and given way entirely to existence. Sound familiar? It seems to me that Foucault is here basically getting from Nietzsche the propositions of Sartrean existentialism while avoiding Sartre, and the requisite encounter with Hegel’s Phenomenology. It was surely not as a matter of convenience that Foucault published the Nietzsche essay in a volume for the translator of the Phenomenology.

It would be wrong, I think, to assume that Foucault’s Nietzsche is the same as Foucault. Here there is a complication, a significant complication. Foucault’s fundamental rhetorical mode is that of world history. It is deeply marked by Marx and conceptual tools forged in the Marxist tradition. Althusser is obviously unavoidable here. How does this kind of ghostly Marxism (borrowing, perhaps unwisely, the idea) fit with the thrown, existentialist-Heideggerian Hegelianism I am arguing we see Foucault find (and that he must, in some sense, in some context, endorse) in Nietzsche? Without pushing the point too much, this is exactly Sartre’s problem in Search for a Method and then The Critique of Dialectical Reason.

Perhaps the conclusion here is that we might take Foucault’s essay on Nietzsche as evidence, or a starting point for arguing, that Foucault in particular and his generation in general were deeply engaged in playing out and refiguring the wars of their older brothers. It has been said that when Foucault and Barthes ceremoniously removed the head of the Author, they really were decapitating Sartre. The argument has again drifted into a kind of schematism that I don’t think can be sustained.

Freudo-Marxism mark 3 (or higher)

Le capitalisme, au XXè siècle, a fait de la libido sa principale énergie : l'énergie qui, canalisée sur les objets de la consommation, permet d'absorber les excédents de la production industrielle, en suscitant, par des moyens de captation de la libido, des désirs entièrement façonnés selon les besoins de la rentabilité des investissements. Or, aujourd'hui, cette captation de la libido a fini par la détruire, et ce fait majeur constitue une immense menace pour la civilisation industrielle : elle conduit inévitablement, à terme, à une crise économique mondiale sans précédent.

The work of Bernard Stiegler was recommended to me the other day. I was told that I could start with the writing available on the website of the Ars Industrialis, the organization he co-founded in 2003. Their manifesto is remarkable. The above is a chunk from its 3rd proposition that gives an idea of how they are updating Marx.

Codgers and Hair

Very occasionally, I regret not knowing more about contemporary fiction. I know nothing, for instance, about Padgett Powell except the pages that I have just read in the June issue of Harper’s.

Here, with only an approximate typography, are the first few lines, which appear under the subtitle ‘manifesto,’

I will miss looking at the little creek, pointing out as I must that there is not a famous cathedral within five thousand miles of us, or ten.

What is it about the little creek?

Its forlornness, its slightly iridescent stagnation, its unsupport of anything alive that one can see, its dubious mission, its helplessness, its pity, its bravery, the miracle of it withal in even remaining wet—

Which sometimes it does not—

—Exactly.

You see in the creek us.

Yes I think I do.

It is our mirror.

It is.

Well let us not be so vain.

All right. We shall cease going to the creek.

Our hair is also not good but I do not see that we can stop it. In our hair is us bet we must have it. We are not good and we must admit it.

I think we do a fair job of that. As good a job as might be asked of anyone.

Tell that to the codgers.

It would stop them for a moment in that calm stream of strong silent knowingness they so gallantly ride.

Those codgers get you worked up.

I had intended to copy out less, but it’s hard to find a place to stop. I hope this much isn’t some kind of infringement. The unmarked dialog of two lightly differentiated voices is surprisingly effective at providing a motive force to what would, I think, be unreadable in monolog form. The juxtapositions in this first chunk of text, its variously considered objects—the creek, the absent famous cathedral, wet, us, hair, codgers—the mutual positioning and interweaving of these is quite attractively done. Other elements that I would expect to fail also came off, for instance the balance of what I want to call ‘surrealisant’ imagery with not just real places and celebrities, but even with sociologically marked slang (an early example is “Everestage”). This is prose that works, but is also formally interesting. My obligatory academic comment, perhaps over-determined by the word dialog, would be to Bahktin, but with an emphasis on his interest in sociologically anchoring the various competing voices. Here is it objects that are so ‘anchored’ in a knowing but also estranged way. When I first read through, I registered the title as ‘Afraid to be Mean.’ In fact, in reference to a different part of text than I had thought, the title is ‘Afraid to be Men,’ which is less interesting. Maybe all of this works on me because I’m reading it in an airport? Anyway, it’s another reason that I’m glad to be subscribed to a print magazine.

Old Criticism

Feuerbach, Ludwig. “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy” (from Stepelevich ed, The Young Hegelians)

The essay is basically a critique of Hegel. Feuerbach say, “the method of the reformatory critique of speculative philosophy in general does not differ from the critique already applied in the philosophy of religion. We need always make the predicate into the subject and thus, as the subject, into the object and principle. Hence we need only invert speculative philosophy and then have the unmasked, pure, bare truth” (157). I wonder, idly, if anyone has ever presented a ‘queered’ Feuerbach. Seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to do.

The major critique of Hegel, after it is established that he hasn’t, formally, moved at all from theology, is that he rejects in every case things in themselves as they are (to import a phrase), or in Feuerbach’s words, the exoteric, for the esoteric. Meaning is always far away from what is. The meaning of the world is found in the posited negation of the world, which itself is in fact only ever what we as human beings bring to it. That is, “the night which it [philosophy] supposes in God in order to produce from it the light of consciousness is nothing but its own dark, instinctive feeling for the reality and indispensability of matter” (161). The result of this critique, which follows from defining theology as the study of God imagined as the unimaginable, and Hegelianism as a re-iteration of theology, is basically the injunction to take what is, what is least philosophical, as the basis for philosophy. Put philosophically, “Being is subject and thinking a predicate but a predicate such as contains the essence of its subject. Thinking comes from being but being does not come from thinking. Being comes from itself and through itself” (167). Or, in a poetical language, “Look upon nature, look upon the human being! Here right before your eyes you have the mysteries of philosophy” (168).

Now, the ‘gesture’ of this philosophy is depressingly familiar. The new philosophy will be the negation of academic philosophy. It will be of ‘our time.’ It will begin with being as it is. (Of course one must be careful not to, as I want to do, project a future phenomenology and its consequences onto this: ‘the world as it presents itself’ or the already mentioned ‘things in themselves as they are.’) Having tried to ‘go into’ Hegel first through the Phenomenology, it does seem to me that this is startlingly naïve, that as much as one would like to reject and dismantle Hegel’s system, one must deal, as he did, with the always-mediated nature of reality. We do not have ‘being.’ We just have some kinds of mediated representations of it. A strong phenomenological position would meet the objection, but isn't presented here. Art, I suppose, is marshaled as evidence that such a theory isn't necessary--the inadequacy of that evidence from my point of view is no doubt an index of the historical distance between 2010 and 1840.

A similar objection would meet Feuerbach’s assertion at the end of the text that “All speculation about right, willing, freedom, personality without the human being, i.e., outside of or even beyond the human being, is speculation without unity, without necessity, without substance, without foundation, and without reality. The human being is the existence of freedom, the existence of personality, and the existence of right” (170). It seems that he really means the physical, empirical (as it were) human individual. I’m not unsympathetic to this position, but it does seem inadequate.

This text is full of interesting aperçus that might or might not be significant, that can’t really be evaluated without reading more. I get the sense that they are generated often enough by the stated method of predicate-subject reversal. I’ll end with one, “whatever the human being names and articulates, it always articulates its own essence. Language is thus the criterion of how high or low humanity’s degree of cultivation is” (169). Which is a fine argument for not allowing Microsoft Word to tell you what is grammatical and what is not.

on adding verbs

Das objektive Sittliche, das an die Stelle des abstrakten Guten tritt, ist die durch die Subjektivität als unendliche Form konkrete Substanz.

The objective sphere of ethics, which takes the place of the abstract good, is substance made concrete by subjectivity as infinite form.

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, $144

Aristotle's Politics

The ancients are seductive. Although Aristotle is very clearly the product of significant cultural accumulation, there remains a sense, a feeling, that in order to understand this, I don’t really have to go further back. Aristotle is not to be explained, but rather explains; of course an illusion, but a sort of pleasant one. I have begun, perhaps wrongly, with The Politics. I’m using the translation by Jonathan Barnes, in the Cambridge edition edited by Stephen Everson.

The physicality of Aristotle’s analysis is striking. There are definitions and distinctions, but the project itself never gets very far away from the practical being-together of human beings. One reason I turned, finally, to Aristotle is Hannah Arendt. Yet her notion of ‘the political’ is infinitely more abstracted than his. I saw recently an article, I think in JHI, pointing out that the polis is always implicit behind Arendt’s discussion of the political. Reading On Revolution, I myself wanted to ask about place in the sense of geography. If I had more energy, I would dig back through the book, and submit this notion of the place of politics to a critique with the resources suggested in David Harvey’s Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. It becomes a problem for Arendt’s whole way of thinking that politics only really happens when humans are face to face, talking with one another. This seems totally inadequate to the modern world, a sort of deep utopianism. In a sort of reverse move, Claude Lefort’s formalism (for lack of a better word), seems equally utopian, so abstracted from the essential problem of getting human beings to do one thing rather than another, as to be, well, philosophically rather than politically useful.

Aristotle, on the other hand, is never far not only from humans facing one another, but from their bodies themselves. The Politics begins with a consideration of the practical necessities for the sustenance of human life. It ends with what seems today to be an over-long consideration on the proper place of music in education—what effect do certain rhythmic structures and music modes have on the development of body and mind? Aristotle often compares the state to a body, in order to argue that proper proportion is crucial for excellence. Yet more physical, bodily, evidence runs throughout the work. For instance in book V, which treats revolutions and is, interesting, the most empirical chapter, we get the following example, “In the conspiracy against Archelaus, Decamnichus stimulated the fury of the assassins and led the attack; he was enraged because Archelaus had delivered him to Euripides to be scourges; for the poet had been irritated at some remark made by Decamnichus on the foulness of his breath” (1311b.30). The passions of individuals are always an important consideration in politics—sex, therefore, is never far away. Also in book V, in the Machiavellian second half (on preventing revolutions), he advises, “neither he [the tyrant] nor any of his associates should ever assault the young of either sex who are his subjects, and the women of his family should observe a like self-control towards other women; the insolence of women has ruined many tyrannies” (1314b.25). I don’t remember Machiavelli talking particularly about sex; I do remember, however, that he says it is better to kill a man’s relative than strip him of his property, because he will forget the former faster than the latter. I doubt Aristotle—despite several times repeating the parable about cutting down the tallest corn-stalks—could bring himself to think such a thing.

Related to this, and one of the moments of estrangement for me in the text, were all the discussions of the common meal. It was evidently a widespread custom in the polis for all the citizens to eat meals in common, not always in one place, since their numbers were too great, but in common eating-rooms. Aristotle at several points discusses the best way of organizing this custom, its benefits, the problems that can arise. More than that, though, the example and metaphor of the public feast is nearly as important for him as is that of the body. This is to say that the physiognomy of the feast is well enough known that it can serve as evidence for other things. For instance, “Now any member of the assembly, taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the state is made up of many individuals. And as a feast to which all the guests contribute I better than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things than an individual” (1286a.28). Perhaps the importance of the meal in common should not surprise me (there is, after all, the Symposium, or Banquet). Still, it is a reminder of a very different mental world underneath what sometimes seems like quite a familiar one. Although, the familiarity and strangeness of this, “children should have something to do, and the rattle of Archytas, which people give to their children in order to amuse them and prevent them from breaking anything in the house, was a capital invention, for a young thing cannot be quiet” (1340b.26), with loud children everyone is familiar, but the idea that you might be able to cite the name of the person who invented the rattle…well, here is just another reason for the seductive (which is to say, to be resisted) feeling that Aristotle is in some profound way an origin, a beginning.

I have read elsewhere references to, discussions of, Aristotle’s treatment of the economy in The Politics. More interesting was what I can only call a sociology of political forms that emerges from its pages. For instance,

The first governments were kingships, probably for this reason because of old, when cities were small, men of eminent excellence were few. Further, they were made kings because they were benefactors, and benefits can only be bestowed by good men. But when many persons equal in merit arose, no longer enduring the pre-eminence of one, they desired to have a commonwealth, and set up a constitution. The ruling class soon deteriorated and enriched themselves out of the public treasury; riches became the path to honour, and so oligarchies naturally grew up. These passes into tyrannies and tyrannies into democracies; for love of gain in the ruling classes was always tending to diminish their number, and so to strengthen the masses who in the end set upon their masters and established democracies. Since cities have increased in size, no other form of government appears to be any longer even easy to establish. (1286b.10-20)

This is not so very far away from certain pages in, say, Durkheim’s Division du travail social, on the extent and density of society. Although I’m wary of the term ‘middle-class’ as it appears in this translation, we must surely also see a sort of political sociology behind such statements as, “a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government” (1302a.14). It is hard not to find some kind of Tocquevillian ‘proleptic shadow’ in an analysis of the present such as this, “Royalties do not now come into existence; where such forms of government arise, they are rather monarchies or tyrannies. For the rule of a king is over voluntary subjects, and his is supreme in all important matters; but in our own day men are more and more upon an equality, and no one is so immeasurably superior to others as to represent adequately the greatness and dignity of the office” (1313a.4-9). Aristotle comes to the conclusion that “the best material of democracy is an agricultural population” (1318b.10) through a consideration of the economic necessities of agriculture, and the (few) possibilities it leaves open for political activity. The examples of this sort of thing could be multiplied.

The point for me is that this sort of analysis—linking political forms to quite concrete social realities—no longer seems to make any sense. Why is that? An obvious answer would be that Aristotle’s world was the polis, most of which contained similar institutions, and most of which were small enough that their leadership could not be too separate from their day-to-day life. A person such as Aristotle might well come to know a great deal about all parts of life in such a society. Today, this is simply no longer possible. Even a reasonably small polity is massively more diverse than a Greek polis. But of course this line of reasoning, although it abolishes itself at the end, is just the same as Aristotle’s—it basis political theory on practical reality, although it begins by claiming that the practical reality is unknowable. I think the key here really is the space of politics. For Aristotle and Arendt, it was contained, limited, knowable. Today it is endlessly multiple. The question would be, is it fractal, and therefore in a sense knowable? or is it chaotic and basically available only in fragments? The Marxist answer is fractal, the ‘liberal’ one chaotic. That’s one way of thinking about things, at any rate.

Although I’ve said almost nothing about the ‘political theory’ elaborated in The Politics (what is democracy? What is a polity? What is the nature of a good constitution?), I will finish by remarking on the adjectival nature of most of Aristotle’s analyses. (I am tempted to grammatically summarize Greek philosophy: Heraclitus, verbs; Plato, nouns; Aristotle, adjectives—have I read that somewhere before?) Although Aristotle does, of course, describe ‘an oligarchy’ or ‘a tyranny,’ the bulk of his theoretical elaboration, it seems to me, goes into establishing the ends, therefore the natures, of these forms and then pointing to certain institutions as democratic, oligarchical, and so forth. I had often in the past heard of Aristotle’s ‘teleological’ method, but I had not realized that this might be what it meant. How rigorously must this be distinguished from a Weberian notion of ‘ideal types’? It bears some thinking about.

Excess

The fact is that the greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence great is the honor bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant.

Aristotle, The Politics, book II (1267, 14-16)