Nihilism and Philosophy: Nothingness, Truth and World 9781350035188, 9781350035225, 9781350035171

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Truth and world
Truth and wisdom
Socratic truth
Truth and time
1. The True World
The two worlds
Whence worldlessness?
The Christian world
Spinoza’s world
2. Cynic Nihilism
Phusis
Foucault’s Cynics
Apolis
Negation
3. Paul’s World
A genealogy of cosmos
Paul against empire
Anti-cosmos
Badiou’s anti-cosmos
4. Paul: Nihilist or Overman?
The reactive Paul
The active Paul
Paul the Overman
The messianic vocation
5. Nietzsche’s World
Nietzsche’s anti-cosmos
The true world is a lie
‘The world is perfect’
Heidegger’s Nietzsche
6. Heidegger’s World
Being-in-the-world
Freedom and finitude
The Nothing
Nihilism
7. Parrhesia
Parrhesia in the polis
Philia
Socrates’s last words
Philaletheia
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Nihilism and Philosophy

Nihilism and Philosophy Nothingness, Truth and World Gideon Baker

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Gideon Baker, 2018 Gideon Baker has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3518-8 PB: 978-1-3501-3674-8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3517-1 eBook: 978-1-3500-3519-5 Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Lotte, Atticus and Iago

Linked in this way with the others, he will lead the life of the world in full confidence, mistrusting neither himself nor the others . . . He will practice parrhēsia, a parrhēsia which . . . is confidence in self, in others, and what can be done together. (Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, p. 355)

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Truth and world Truth and wisdom Socratic truth Truth and time 1

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ix 1 3 6 11 15

The True World The two worlds Whence worldlessness? The Christian world Spinoza’s world

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Cynic Nihilism Phusis Foucault’s Cynics Apolis Negation

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Paul’s World A genealogy of cosmos Paul against empire Anti-cosmos Badiou’s anti-cosmos Paul: Nihilist or Overman? The reactive Paul The active Paul Paul the Overman The messianic vocation Nietzsche’s World Nietzsche’s anti-cosmos

23 29 39 51

66 69 73 83 93 95 105 109 117 123 128 130 132 138 143 144

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Contents

The true world is a lie ‘The world is perfect’ Heidegger’s Nietzsche 6

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Heidegger’s World Being-in-the-world Freedom and finitude The Nothing Nihilism Parrhēsia Parrhēsia in the polis Philia Socrates’s last words Philaletheia Conclusion

References Index

148 152 157 165 166 173 177 180 191 195 199 202 205 215 221 229

Acknowledgements My warmest thanks are due to the following readers of parts or the whole of drafts of this book:  Suvi Alt, Govand Azeez, Bruce Baker, Naomi Baker, Pol Bargués-Pedreny, A. J. Bartlett, Edwin Bikundo, Roland Bleiker, Dan Halvorson, John Mandalios, Nicholas Onuf, Vassilios Paipais, Haig Patapan, Jon Roffe and Emma Wilson. An earlier version of most of Chapter 4 was originally published as ‘Paul and Political Theology: Nihilism, Empire and the Messianic Vocation’ in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 41(3): 295–315.

Introduction

That the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as ‘spirit’ – that alone is the great liberation. (Nietzsche 2005: 182) Nietzsche believed that the outcome of nihilism – the death of God – is itself the opportunity for what he terms ‘the great liberation’. Not the inexistence of God but his death. For Nietzsche, ‘God’ is shorthand for the entire metaphysical tradition and its true world, a timeless, unchanging, supersensible world in contrast to the world as it appears to our senses, which is rather a world of time and becoming. Given that the true world is manifestly not our world, the true world also gives rise to two worlds – paradigmatically to the heaven–earth distinction – and so the problem of the true world and of the two worlds is really the same problem. Indeed, as Giles Deleuze comments (1983: 147), the idea of another, supersensible, world is not for Nietzsche one error among others, but the source of all error. That this true world died upon the realization ‘that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as “spirit” – that alone is the great liberation’, writes Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols, shortly before losing his mind (2005: 182). What we have to be equal to here is the thought not that God never existed – mere atheism – but that his death is where the possibility of liberation lies.1 Although Nietzsche detests Christianity, he seems to be telling us that we should be grateful for a God who died, which is obviously not so much at odds with the Christian story as a different version of it.2 To be sure, Nietzsche 1

2

Deleuze (1983: 152) makes a similar point in his book on Nietzsche: ‘God is dead’ says both that God existed and that he is dead. This is not a speculative but a dramatic proposition, ‘the dramatic proposition par excellence’. ‘ Existence or non-existence cease to be absolute determinations which derive from the idea of God, but rather life and death become relative determinations which correspond to the forces entering into synthesis with or in the idea of God’. Deleuze (1983: 172) again: ‘The transmutation which defeats nihilism is itself only the completed and finished form of nihilism. Nihilism is defeated, by itself. For it is the role and foundation of nihilism to reveal the will to power’ since ‘nihilism, the will to nothingness, is not only a will to power, a quantity of the will to power, but the ratio cognoscendi of the will to power in general.’

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is looking for a new faith – Zarathustra criticizes his shadow for celebrating the ‘Ass Festival’ in the old pious ways – but he does acknowledge the need for new festivals, which should be celebrated ‘for your own sake’ (Nietzsche 2006: 257). To have no festivals is to risk being recaptured by the old faith. But the festivals of the new faith celebrate nothing other than the freedom enabled by the demise of the old faith, which is why Zarathustra, the first of the godless, adds that these new festivals should be celebrated also ‘in remembrance of me!’ (Nietzsche 2006: 255). As well as being an opportunity, nihilism is first and foremost a problem – the problem – in Nietzsche’s estimation. To restate Deleuze’s crucial point: for Nietzsche, nihilism is the problem, first and always, of the true world. This book pursues the implications of this insight. It asks what the problem of the true world is, which is inseparable from the question of where the true world came from. These questions are the subject of the present chapter and of Chapter 1. But the real intent of the book is to build on this understanding in order to consider how the problem of the true world has been confronted. Are there ways of thinking of the world other than as a true world and are there ways of thinking of truth other than as the truth of the world? And, since thinking and being are the same, are there other ways of being in the world than those given by the true world? Arising from these guiding questions are chapters devoted to the image of the world in the thinking of the ancient Cynics, St. Paul, Nietzsche and Heidegger respectively. These thinkers (and Cynicism as a tradition of thought) have been chosen ahead of many others with good claims to our attention for the reason that the true world has long been a vision of the world as a totality – or kosmos (κόσμος), to use its ancient name. And Diogenes the Cynic, Paul, Nietzsche and Heidegger are all exemplary figures when it comes to arguing that what it is to be in the world, as also to be in truth, is otherwise than to know one’s place in the cosmos. If Paul, Nietzsche and Heidegger are all to some extent anti-philosophers, then the final chapter on parrhēsia (παρρησία),3 the ancient courage of truth, will show that philosophy has also known (even if it has largely forgotten) another truth to that of the true world. Indeed, its concern with parrhēsia distinguishes the Socratic event itself. Given that the free-spokenness of parrhēsia is founded in confidence in self and others and what we can do together, it serves as a concept of truth as worldly – a truth in the world rather than of the world. And since 3

From πᾶν ‘all’ and ῥῆσις ‘speech’, meaning to speak everything, namely to speak freely or boldly.

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parrhēsia is also a provocation to live truth  – that is, to change  – it envisions world as possibility rather than the unchanging identity of the true world.

Truth and world Michel Foucault’s last lectures on parrhēsia seize on something significant. In these lectures, and in his discussion of ancient Cynicism in particular, Foucault identifies a form of the will to truth that aims not at capturing the world in a re-presentation, which presupposes a world that does not alter, but rather at an interventionist truth – truth as a test of oneself, and as a provocation and a challenge to others – which understands that the world can become other than it is. Foucault, like his master Nietzsche, believes that the notion that everything stands still ‘is a real winter doctrine, a good thing for sterile times, a good comforter for hibernators and stove huggers’ (Nietzsche 2006: 161). Yet in silent conversation with Nietzsche, Foucault seeks to overcome Nietzsche’s assumption that truth can only lie because, beings always a ‘winter doctrine’, its tenets freeze in place what is really a broiling world of change: ‘Sometimes I believed I was lying and behold – that’s where I first hit – the truth’ (Nietzsche 2006: 222).4 Foucault does not dispute Nietzsche’s insight (2001: 201) that this wintery form of the will to truth ‘could be a hidden will to death’, but he does question whether the will to truth must only will the timeless truth of the world, must only be a ‘winter doctrine’. Foucault’s other will to truth – parrhēsia – is rather living, in the world, and, being a thaw wind to all winter doctrines, can even change the world. As we will see, Nietzsche seeks to overcome the nihilism of the true world by way of world-affirmation. Affirmation is the superhuman element, the mark of the Overman which even the higher man remains incapable of (Deleuze 1983:  170).5 But Nietzsche has less to say about how to confront the crisis of truth that the true world engenders. For all Nietzsche’s efforts to overcome the true world, does his sense of truth get suitably transformed in the process? There are certainly glimpses of another truth in Nietzsche. For example, Zarathustra 4

5

See also Zarathustra: ‘powerlessness to lie is by no means love for the truth. Beware! Freedom from fever is by no means knowledge! I do not believe spirits that have cooled down. Whoever cannot lie does not know what truth is’ (Nietzsche 2006: 235). This is why, for Nietzsche, the transvaluation of values is not so much a change of values as a change in the standpoint from which the value of values derives, a shift from a negative to an affirmative standpoint. For affirmation is the ground of the will to power in general; new values emerge only from this ground (Deleuze 1983: 171–3).

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(Nietzsche 2006:  80) identifies the truthful one as he who has not the will to truth but rather ‘the will of the truthful’. Here truth is a way of being rather than a claim about the way of the world. For the most part, however, Nietzsche thinks that the death of the true world (the death of God) kills off truth too – makes truth something that is not true. The problem here is that the notion that the true world is a lie continues, of course, to presuppose a truth of the world. The lie cannot be a lie unless it is other than truth. Nietzsche is thereby forced to counter the lie of the true world with a deeper truth of the world. But a truer truth of the world must assume a true world. The question of nihilism, of the nothing (nihil), is always a question of truth. Only when truth is taken as the measure of the world is a crisis of truth also an experience of worldlessness. How, then, did truth become this measure? Nietzsche’s answer to this question is: philosophy. Philosophy as the will to truth is ‘the faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato’s, that God is truth, that truth is divine’ (Nietzsche 2001: 201). Indeed, this will to truth and its nihilistic implications are already present in the pre-Platonic philosopher, Parmenides. Nietzsche (1962: 81) recalls Parmenides’s prayer: Grant me, ye gods, but one certainty [. . .] if it be but a log’s breadth on which to lie, on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that comes-to-be, everything lush, colourful, blossoming, illusory, everything that charms and is alive. Take away all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor certainty.

The philosophical will to truth opens the door to nihilism since it makes truth (understood as what is timeless) the utmost thing and by the same token besmirches a world of time and becoming. This tension between truth as unchanging and world as change is also why the will to truth continually calls truth into question. As soon as something is held to be true (and here our language betrays its metaphysical element), the very holding turns it into a lie. For Nietzsche, his awareness of this dilemma in both its ‘most terrible’ and ‘most hopeful’ aspects is the decisive feature, not only of his thought but also of his life: ‘what meaning would our entire being have if not this, that in us the will to truth came to consciousness of itself as a problem?’ (Nietzsche 2014: 348). For all his insight into the will to truth as a problem, it is worth being more historically specific about the will to truth than Nietzsche was. Although he wrote a genealogy of morals, Nietzsche did not write a genealogy of truth. Nietzsche sees the will to truth as leading inexorably to nihilism – and not only Nietzsche, since plenty after him have agreed that the will to truth is so self-defeating that, in

Introduction

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Deleuze’s words (1983: 99), we need a truth ‘which presupposes a completely different will’, a truth that does not seek truth. Deleuze, like Nietzsche, has in mind a creative will rather than a will to truth, but this risks repeating Nietzsche’s mistake of thinking that the will to truth has aimed only at giving an account of what does not change. Nietzsche is right that this truth ends in nihilism, but the question is whether the will to truth has indeed been concerned only with the truth of the world? This is not to deny that the true world has been the main road that the will to truth has taken. In the metaphysical tradition, eternity is identified with truth and time with error. Even in Presocratic natural philosophy it is the case, as Nietzsche (1962: 66) says, of letting ‘the wheel of time roll where it will, it can never escape truth’. In Parmenides, if being is one then the appearance of change must be an illusion. This tendency to identify change with error is retained in post-Socratic philosophy by way of Plato. In Plato’s Republic we read that when the mind ‘is fixed on the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its opinions shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence’ (Plato 1974: VI: 508d). Plato’s account of the creation of the world in Timaeus is exemplary here. Timaeus recounts (3.29), to Socrates’s approval, that the maker and father of the universe must have worked from a pattern based on some unchanging principle since the alternative ‘is a blasphemy even to mention’. The world is the fairest of all things created, so undoubtedly the demiurge ‘had his eye on the eternal’ when giving form to it. And indeed, the demiurge’s model was an eternal living being such that, although it was not possible to bestow eternity fully on the created universe, ‘he determined to make a moving image of eternity, and so when he ordered the heavens he made in that which we call time an eternal moving image of the eternity which remains for ever at one’ (7.37). Eternity is the model for a time that always falls short of eternity’s timelessness. For Plato, given that the true world is changeless, a description of it will itself be changeless – will be ‘as irrefutable and incontrovertible as a description in words can be’ (3.29). For the same reason, however, the truth of our material world of change, a world which is only a likeness of the true world, will itself ‘be merely likely; for being has to becoming the same relation as truth to belief ’ (ibid.). The true world, being timeless, is the very model of truth, whereas the world of becoming can have no certain relation to truth at all. Modernity can no longer bring itself to believe in the true world. But this does not make the true world go away. If Descartes inaugurates modern philosophy as the philosophy of the solipsistic subject, then this is in no small part

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because radical doubt quickly brings the true world into question, leaving only the ‘I think’ in place: ‘But it will be said that these phenomena [of the senses] are false and that I am dreaming. Let it be so; still it is at least quite certain that . . . I see light, that I hear noise, that I feel heat’ (Descartes 1911: 10, emphasis added). The true world can be false; I remain true! It is the true world that brings about the crisis of truth in Descartes, a world that only gains a firmer grip when the solution to it is the cogito alone. However, if it is insufficient merely to stop believing in the true world, neither is it enough to redescribe the true world as what becomes rather than what always is; and this, fairly or not, is Heidegger’s fundamental objection to Nietzsche’s world, as we shall see shortly. The truth of the world redescribed as becoming rather than being is still a true world. The other of that which is eternal is not what is always changing (note the metaphysical ‘always’ that is still in operation here) but that which is mortal. Mortal truth belongs to a transformed sense of world, understood now as time rather than timelessness, and as possibility rather than eternity. For Heidegger (1991), Nietzsche does not question whether there can be another truth than that of the world, it is just that, being more honest than the metaphysicians, he finds this one truth unsightly: ‘The belief that truth does not exist, the nihilists’ belief, is a great stretching of the limbs for someone who, as a warrior of knowledge, is constantly at struggle with so many ugly truths. For the truth is ugly’. (Nietzsche 2003: 220). Rather than another account of the world, for Heidegger the experience of nihilism that the true world leads to can be answered only with another truth: a truth not of the world but a truth in the world, in fact a truth that is identical with world as what world gives to be known, as what it lets be. We will now turn to Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche, since in it the stakes of the problem of the true world become clearer.

Truth and wisdom You famous wise men – how could you go with me! – Thus spoke Zarathustra. (Nietzsche 2006: 81)

Does the term philosophy mislead? Philosophia is the love of wisdom; but would this be the same thing as the love of truth, as is assumed? Does the love of truth have anything to do with wisdom? For wisdom, as the truth of the world, has a

Introduction

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problem. The problem is whether, in knowing how the world is, we are party to untruth. If the world is nothing except for that which it was not before, becoming other at every moment, then the test of truth is change, not what remains the same. The same world, the true world, would be untrue. Perhaps the only way of reconciling a finite world of blind becoming with a final truth of the world – namely its being – is to posit the eternal return of the same, as Nietzsche believed. If the world is limited in its quantum of force (‘we forbid ourselves the notion of an infinite force as incompatible with the very concept “force” ’ [Nietzsche 2003: 24]), then its becoming is not infinite, and, given infinite time, everything will return – just exactly as it was before. ‘Even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ (Nietzsche 2001: 194). In his Late Notebooks, Nietzsche makes it clear that the thought of the eternal return is necessary to overcoming the residual theological thinking which, even though it no longer thinks the world as divine, continues to indulge itself in conceptions of the world as ‘possessing divine powers of creation’. The world is ‘still supposed to possess not only the intention but the means of avoiding repetition’ (Nietzsche 2003: 24). The circle of eternal recurrence is Nietzsche’s attempt to conceive of the movement of the world while keeping its Godless, and therefore goalless, state in mind. That truth is movement, that propositions about the world cannot have an unlimited and universal value, was already central to German Idealism. But here the teleology, and with it the theology, remained. For Hegel, although there are no absolutely true statements about the world taken in isolation, the movement through which these claims emerge and are in turn overcome can be grasped: ‘Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is in itself and constitutes the actuality and the movement of the life of truth’, as Hegel (1977: 27) writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit. This self-grasping of world-movement is itself the telos of that movement, a progression towards the true as the self-knowledge of the world-subject.6 The world for Hegel thereby remains that which can be known, can know itself, as providential process. In the Philosophy of History (Hegel 1980: 26–7), we read that the ‘truth, then, that there is a divine providence presiding over the events of the world, corresponds to the stated principle: for divine providence is wisdom with infinite power, realizing its own ends, i.e., the absolute, rational end-goal of the 6

‘the thought of the Whole is the effectuation of the Whole itself ’, as Badiou (2009a: 142) summarizes it nicely.

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world’. As the very progression of providence itself, everything turns, for Hegel, on grasping the True as subject – self-knowing movement – and not only as substance, as he famously argues in the Phenomenology (1977: 10). Once removed from any total and teleological schema, however, the implications of becoming are much more destabilizing. After the death of God, and along with him his providence, is the true world any longer thinkable? Working to undermine even his highest thought of the eternal return, this is also a nagging question for the late Nietzsche. Indeed, it gives him a fundamental problem that perhaps, hints Heidegger, was the very thing that drove him mad. For the eternal return, while it might overcome metaphysical providence or teleology, is still a vision of eternity; in short, it remains a timelessly true world, only differently described. The illusory world as defined by metaphysics – the world of change – becomes the true world. Since Platonism ‘amounted to the very inversion of truth’, then the opposite of Platonism must itself be the true world, Nietzsche (2014:  2) supposes. But the true world as eternal becoming rather than eternal being is still a true world. Being and becoming have merely traded places in the metaphysical two-worlds schema, a schema that remains unquestioned. Just how decisive for Nietzsche in his last year of sanity was the insight that, absent the true world of Platonism, the illusory world of change disappears along with it (i.e. can no more be the true world than can the ideal true world of Platonism) can be gleaned from Twilight of the Idols (2005: 171): ‘The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps? . . . But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one! (Noon; moment of shortest shadow; end of longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.).’ For Heidegger (1991, I: 200–10), Nietzsche realizes only very late, indeed just before his descent into madness, that the passing of the true world as the world beyond (the ‘death of God’) means the loss of any truth of the world at all – even that deepest, most terrible truth of the eternal return, the facing up to which Nietzsche had made the ultimate test of the overcoming of nihilism. The world as eternal becoming ends up being the true world just as much as any motionless metaphysical world. In Heidegger’s reading, up until this point of no return for any truth of the world whatever, Nietzsche’s attempts to escape metaphysical wisdom, the timeless truth of the world, remained ensnared in it since the timeless truth of the world was now that there is no timeless truth. The world in Nietzsche is becoming. In Beyond Good and Evil, for example, Nietzsche (2014:  16) intimates that if both idealist and natural philosophy fail in their search for the truth of the

Introduction

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world, then he, Nietzsche, will succeed:  ‘It is dawning now on perhaps five or six minds that physics too is only a world interpretation and arrangement (by us! if I may say so!) and not a world explanation.’ And, just as Heidegger claimed, even at the end, namely in his late notebooks from late 1887/early 1888 (Nietzsche 2003: 219), we find that the true world still provides the sense of truth for Nietzsche, which is why ‘truth’ must be discarded: nor [may] the concept of ‘truth’ be used to interpret the total character of existence [which] is not ‘true’, is false . . ., one simply no longer has any reason to talk oneself into there being a true world [. . .] Once we have devalued [truth], demonstrating that [it] can’t be applied to the universe, ceases to be a reason to devalue the universe.

That the true world is not true holds only because the true world is still Nietzsche’s model of truth. As Heidegger saw it (1998c:  179), Nietzsche thereby remained trapped by metaphysical truth:  by truth as truth of the world, which is truth as correspondence between the representations of a subject and the world given as an object. This truth is what must be overcome. For the truth understood as something objective fails to account for that which might be universally binding, for example most prejudices, and yet still not true. ‘Conversely, something can indeed be true which is not binding for everyone but only for a single individual’ (Heidegger 2003: 17). This does not mean that truth is subjective, but, for Heidegger, rather that it is historical. There can be no timeless truth of the world not because the world is movement but because time is constitutive of human existence, which therefore cannot be understood without it. In his debate on Kant with Cassirer at Davos (1929), Heidegger makes this point directly. Having argued that human transcendence (i.e. being open to Being) is entirely dependent on finitude, Heidegger goes on to say that ‘truth itself ’ is unified with this transcendence, and calls this ‘Being-in-truth’ (1990:  176). Being-in-truth excludes ‘universally valid eternal truths’ in the sense that, absent Dasein – the being-there of mortal existence – there can be no truth. This does not mean that truth is relative to what individuals think, but is rather to be understood ontologically:  truth could not be without Dasein.7 The ‘trans-subjectivity of truth’,

7

Thus if Kant’s emphasis is, negatively, on the limits of human knowledge of the world, then, for Heidegger (2002b:  163), the ‘limit’ of human finitude is the positive condition of worlddisclosure: ‘This finitude must be exhibited, not in order to ascertain its boundaries or limits, but in order to awaken the inner resolve and composure within which everything essential begins and abides.’

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that truth is not individually subjective, depends upon truth being ‘relative’ to Dasein (ibid.). If the idea of eternal truth is that, against ‘the flow of experience, there is a permanence’, then Heidegger’s counter-question, a question to which ‘every page’ in Being and Time (1996) was devoted, is: ‘What, then, does the eternal actually mean here? From where, then, do we know of this eternity? Is this eternity not just permanence in the sense of the ἀεὶ of time? Is this eternality not just that which is possible on the grounds of an inner transcendence of time itself?’ (Heidegger 1990: 176; see also 1988: 75). Eternity is only an idea of time, and time is mortal time. Heidegger was not the first in the tradition to question truth as correspondence of thought with an eternally given external world. Kierkegaard, a significant influence on Heidegger (see, e.g. Heidegger 1988: 13), had already pointed to the irreducibility of a truth that is true for the subject rather than indifferently given as objective. Objective truth, the truth of the world, makes individual existence vanish from view. And, in turn, objective truth is a matter of indifference from the perspective, the only one that can really matter for the individual, of existence (Kierkegaard 2009: 162–3). In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard puts it like this: ‘Conventional wisdom [Hegelianism] aims presumptuously to introduce into the world of the spirit that same law of indifference under which the outside world groans. It believes it is enough to have knowledge of large truths. No other work is necessary. But then it does not get its bread, it starves to death while everything is transformed into gold’ (1985: 57–8).8 Schelling, although in his case from a metaphysical rather than an existential starting point, had also argued against truth as correspondence. For Schelling, the truth of the world as adequate idea of an object for a subject is thinkable only if subject and object are different, since agreement presupposes separation. But as soon as we think subject and world as difference in order to think their agreement in knowledge (as correspondence), we find that we can no longer explain this agreement. The world cannot be accurately reflected in the representations of the subject unless the subject already knows what the world is. Otherwise, how would the subject recognize the world that it re-presents to itself as the world in the first place? Once this deeper identity of world and human knowledge is admitted, then the Cartesian cogito is revealed as a fundamental error: ‘thinking is no longer my thinking and being is not my being’ 8

See also this from Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (2009: 211): ‘Only the truth that edifies is truth for you. This is an essential predicate relating to truth as inwardness, whereby its decisive feature as edifying “for you”, i.e., for the subject, is that in which it differs essentially from all objective knowledge, in that the subjectivity itself becomes the mark of the truth.’

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(cited in Laughland 2007:  54). Indeed, absent this deeper identity of human knowledge and world, the partial and shifting character of knowledge could not be thought of as concerning the same world. Long before Heidegger, Schelling suggested that that within which beings appear, the world as totality, though it cannot appear as such, is the condition for their appearing at all. As later for Heidegger, for Schelling, time ‘is’ that negation which is ‘the totality appearing in opposition to the particular life of things’ (cited in Bowie 1993:  73). The absolute, World, is finitude, and thereby cannot be known in the manner of a thing. This is why Nietzsche’s attempt to overcome static metaphysical truth with a deeper truth of the world as becoming remains, in Heidegger’s view, metaphysical. It is what enables Heidegger to characterize Nietzsche as the last of the metaphysicians.

Socratic truth For all that the philosophical tradition has prioritized the metaphysical question of the truth of the world (and, by the same token, forgotten truth as being always in the world), it was never the case that the will to truth of philosophy took only the metaphysical road. Indeed, for Foucault (2011), whose work on ancient philosophy reinforced this point, philosophy emerged precisely in the attempt at establishing its difference from wisdom (the truth of the world), a distinction that is not yet clear in Presocratic natural philosophy. The Presocratic thinker Heraclitus, for example, sat in the kitchen of some common people, warming himself by the oven and announcing, to much astonishment, ‘but the gods are here also’. His point? For Foucault (2011: 246), that ‘philosophy is fulfilled in the thought of the world itself, and in the form of the common life’. Natural philosophy, like all wisdom, establishes the oneness of things, not the rupture that is the true life, a life that has no common measure with customary existence. The moment of differentiation of philosophy from wisdom is the Socratic event (Foucault 2011: 82). According to Foucault, we need to grasp the singularity of Socrates.9 If for Foucault the singularity of Socrates is essentially the difference of Socratic truth from wisdom, then Nietzsche thought the opposite. In Twilight of the Idols 9

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche (1999: 74) had already called Socrates ‘the vortex and turningpoint of so-called world history’. Nietzsche intends this judgement negatively in this early work, but his opinion of Socrates undergoes many modifications in following works (see especially his late judgement ‘The Problem of Socrates’ in Twilight of the Idols).

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Nihilism and Philosophy

(2005: 162), opening the section ‘The Problem of Socrates’, Nietzsche identifies Socrates with the tradition of wisdom that Nietzsche finds to be nihilistic: About life, the wisest men of all ages have come to the same conclusion: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths – a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: ‘To live – that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Saviour a rooster.’ Even Socrates was tired of life. [. . .] These wisest men of all ages – they should first be scrutinized closely. Were they all perhaps shaky on their legs? tottery? decadent? late? Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a raven, attracted by a little whiff of carrion?

Foucault (2011:  81–92) sees Socrates as entirely foreign to this picture of the doddery, decadent wise men, drawing out instead the distinction between Socratic truth-telling and wisdom. First, Socrates explicitly rejects the use of wisdom in the political sphere, arguing in the Apology that his daemon has forbidden him from entering into political life. Socrates will not be Solon; he will not seek to be the wise lawgiver. Second, Socrates makes a quite atypical response to the Delphic Oracle’s pronouncement that he is the wisest man in Athens. Rather than seek either to interpret this prophecy or to await or avoid the fate it unveils, Socrates rather tries to test it. If not exactly sceptical and impious, Socrates is certainly questioning.10 A  critical attitude surfaces in Socrates and with it the corrosive rise of reason, as Nietzsche often bemoaned.11 Socrates effectively sets out to disprove the oracle by going from the highest to the lowest of Athenian society seeking the wisdom that may be found there. Third, if the sage is the one who shares his wisdom seldom or not at all, somebody who in the case of Heraclitus is even proudly misanthropic, then Socrates rather defines himself as a soldier who must not leave his post in the city until the day he dies (even Nietzsche [2001:  194] cannot help but admire this man who ‘lived cheerfully and like a soldier in plain view of everyone’). This is why Socrates chooses death over exile and is also, no doubt, an inspiration for Plato’s allegory of the cave: the true philosopher must not, as does the sage, remain outside the cave, basking in the light of the Good. He must rather return to the darkness to tell of what 10

11

Questioning is actually a zone of indistinction between wisdom and parrhēsia. Inasmuch as it avoids pronouncements, questioning maintains the silence of the sage; yet the question also remains true to the parrhesiastic injunction not to be silent (Foucault 2011: 26). ‘With Socrates, Greek taste suddenly changed in favour of dialectics: what really happened here? Above all, a noble taste was defeated [. . .] Honourable things, like honourable people, do not go around with their reason in their hand. It is indecent to show all five fingers. Nothing with real value needs to be proved first. Wherever authority is still part of the social fabric, wherever people give commands rather than reasons, the dialectician is a type of clown.’ (Nietzsche 2005: 164)

Introduction

13

he has seen. If the wise man needs nothing and need do nothing, then Socrates rather has a mission. This is also why Socrates, who does not fear death, nonetheless avoids the citizens’ Assembly less he be killed for telling the truth. His mission gives him much to do, work he cannot accomplish from beyond the grave. Finally, if wisdom is founded in a truth that is timeless, leading thereby to the essential indifference of the sage, then Socrates’s mission is rather a mission of care (epimeleia). The Pythian Apollo was concerned for Socrates, and, by announcing that he was the wisest, also concerned, by way of Socrates (who would seek to get them to care for themselves, too), for all men. Socrates therefore pursues the truth from out of a founding divine care (Foucault 2011: 88, 100, 113). The distinction between the truth that Socrates pursues and the truth retold by wisdom is clearly revealed by Socrates himself in his apology. Defending himself before the popular jury on charges of impiety, Socrates points out that, contrary to the accusations made against him, he has never spoken of the being of the world, something which might indeed suggest doubting the existence of the gods: there’s [supposedly] a Socrates around who’s an expert – one who dabbles in theories about the heavenly bodies, who’s already searched out everything beneath the earth [. . .] I ask those of you who’ve ever heard me in conversation (and there are plenty of you who have) to tell the others, if any one of you has ever yet heard me making the smallest mention of such things. (Plato, Apology, 18b and 19d)

Socrates does not deal in the truth of the world; he ‘shows that what he is striving for is not at all the being of things and the order of the world, which is in fact the object, the domain of the discourse of wisdom’. Socrates rather ‘speaks of the test of the soul’ (Foucault 2011: 89). The importance of the test of the soul can of course lead to the metaphysical question of what the soul is in its truth, as for example in the Alcibiades, where the soul is identified as the immortal element, as the ontological reality of the self considered in distinction from the body. But in reconstructing the life of Socrates, it is clear that this is Plato’s inflection. For Socrates, the test of the soul is the test of life. The Socratic quest is not a matter of the being of man but rather of his existence (Foucault 2011: 125–8, 160–2). The question ‘who are you?’ is reducible entirely to the question:  ‘how do you live?’. In this way, Socrates is the point at which the already long-standing concern of the Greeks with care of self (epimeleia heautou) is delinked from its traditional aim of a beautiful

14

Nihilism and Philosophy

and memorable existence and becomes indexed rather to the question of truth, to truth as courageous truth-telling:  parrhēsia (Foucault 2011:  163). As Plato makes Socrates say at the end of the Gorgias: Renouncing the honours at which the world aims, I  desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and, when I die, to die as well as I can. And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same. And, in return for your exhortation of me, I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.

As indicated by this reappraisal of Socrates, Foucault (2011:  114) came to see ancient philosophy as a form of life characterized – if not exclusively then certainly in its point of differentiation from other modes of truth-telling – by parrhēsia, the courage of truth. This truth is not the truth of the world, but truth as a courageous intervention in the singularity of souls and situations. It is truthtelling understood not in the register of epistemology – does the truth-teller’s statement conform with the world? – but in the register of ontology – what is the way of being of the one who tells the truth (Foucault 2010: 309)? For Foucault, parrhēsia thereby does just what truth should do but which wisdom does not: it is truth indexed to change, rather than what stays the same, and it finds its principle of identity (that which does not change) not, metaphysically, in a frozen world picture but in this very courage itself, something which is always and necessarily in the world. It is the subject of truth (the true life), not the veracity of truth (the true statement), which is at stake in parrhēsia. As a logos proper to philosophy and quite unlike the logos of wisdom, parrhēsia does not claim to know the truth in advance, only to place itself in relation to truth. As the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope said, being but a pretender to wisdom is philosophy (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 66–7). The purity of the subject of metaphysical truth is constituted in a cathartic break from the sensory world as the world of error. This subject identifies with the eternity of truth as that true world which is beyond this world. The subject of parrhēsia, by contrast, is a very this-worldly and engaged subject of sacrifice, battle, resolution and endurance for the truth (Foucault 2011: 125). The metaphysical subject washes his hands of the world; the truth that changes him is given to him from elsewhere. The parrhesiast struggles to change the world; the truth that changes him is his acceptance of the test of the true life, here. The last lines of Foucault’s parrhēsia lecture notes summarize the significance, indeed the urgency, of this difference for the dying Foucault: ‘But what I would like to stress in conclusion is this: there is no establishment of the truth without an essential

Introduction

15

position of otherness; the truth is never the same; there can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life’ (2011: 340; see also 247). The Nietzschean provenance of this understanding of truth is clear, and was also influential on Foucault’s friend, Deleuze. In his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze too is keen to draw a distinction between wisdom and philosophy. As Deleuze notes (1983:  5–6), philosopher does not mean ‘wise man’ but ‘friend of wisdom’. But this friendship is not what it first appears to be. The friend, says Zarathustra, is actually a third person in between ‘I’ and ‘me’ who pushes me to overcome myself and to be overcome. The philosopher, then, makes use of wisdom for ends that are hardly wise at all. The philosopher is in no way a sage since he destroys the old concepts, creating new ones in their place that are ‘neither eternal nor historical, only untimely and not of the present’ (Deleuze 1983: 92 and 107). For this reason, the philosopher, unlike the wise man, will avoid the metaphysical mistake of asking ‘What is it?’, preferring rather: ‘Which one?’ (Deleuze 1983: 76–7). Applied to parrhēsia in Foucault’s treatment of it – a treatment that attempts a genealogy of the courage of truth rather than an account of truth ‘itself ’ – we can see that when it comes to the content of truth, parrhēsia is a question of the appearance of truth rather than its being. Its concern is not what truth is, but which one has the courage of it (Foucault 2010: 306). Parrhēsia wants to make distinctions and is concerned with singularities; it always wants to affirm its difference, as Deleuze would say.

Truth and time The true world, as a timeless world, puts truth and time at odds. Given that human being is not immortal, our temporal existence itself ceases to have any relation to truth. Time is in every case only my time or our time: Either there is still time, or it is the time, or there is no more time (Heidegger 2002b: 90–1). Because the essence of time is singularizing rather than universalizing, because there is no generic time, the true world is out of time.12

12

Compare, for example, Immanuel Kant on this point in his Critique of Pure Reason: ‘For there is only one time, in which all different times must not be placed simultaneously but only one after another’ (Kant 1998: 303). The flow of time, for Kant, is precisely what is constant, what abides in becoming. For Heidegger (2002b: 118–19), it is this very conception of the permanence of time that ultimately defeats Kant’s critical project, which, though it starts out from human finitude (Kant’s distinction between appearance and unknowable thing-in-itself, by which he limits pure reason, is basically that between finite and infinite knowledge), fails to think it all the way down. Kant’s model for time remains the causal time of nature (Heidegger 2002b: 138–9; 165–8). Elsewhere (1988: 144) Heidegger levels this same accusation at Hegel. Time and space for Hegel are principally understood

16

Nihilism and Philosophy

The true world is out of time not only in the sense of being removed from time but also in the sense of having run out of time. As accomplished being, the true world is a world that stands judged; since it can be nothing else than it is already, since it is at a standstill, a final judgement of the true world can be given. As Aquinas says in the Summa Theologiae (cited in Agamben 2015: 58) of the Last Judgement, ‘Judgement belongs to the term, wherein [things] are brought to their end’. Heidegger, in a lecture on time from 1924, writes of human Dasein: ‘How is this entity to be apprehended in its Being before it has reached its end? After all, I am still underway with my Dasein. It is still something that is not yet at an end. When it has reached the end it precisely no longer is’ (1992a: 10). The world as mortal time and possibility is a world in which a final judgement becomes impossible, a world in which the day of salvation is always at hand. If salvation is the possibility of a new beginning, of Paul’s ‘new man’, then the world as mortal time is a world that can be saved. Only after the world can the world be judged. In the world, no last judgement comes. There is salvation because there is still time. The true world is first fundamentally challenged by Paul, for whom timeless cosmos, as the world order of empire, gives way to this world, a world that, no longer eternal, instead draws to an end: ‘Do not be conformed to this world [αἰῶνι τούτῳ] but be transformed by the renewal of your mind’ (Rom. 12.2). For Nietzsche, this only means that Paul takes metaphysics to a new level by preferring the next world to this one, but Heidegger demurs. On the way to his rethinking of human being in Being and Time (1927), Heidegger argues that Paul inaugurated a new experience of time and the world in which temporality is not the eternity of a timeless cosmos in which all is already accomplished, but essentially open, because mortal, human being-in-the-world. In short, Paul is crucial to putting Heidegger onto finitude as the groundless ground of human being.13 In his early lectures on ‘The Phenomenology of Religious Life’ from 1920–21 (2004: 48), Heidegger notes of Galatians 1:5 that Paul’s sense of world (aeon) is that ‘The present time has already reached its end and a new [aeon] has begun since the death of Christ. The present world is opposed to the world of eternity’. If eternity is the metaphysical sense of time and the world, then Paul’s world is

13

as problems of the philosophy of nature: ‘Conversely, the problematic of time is not developed in terms of history. . .’. But, as mentioned, also Kierkegaard, for whom the philosopher has no answer to the question: ‘ “What am I supposed to do?” . . . See, here you are at one with the philosophers. What unites you is that life comes to a halt. For the philosopher, world history is ended, and he mediates . . . He is outside; he is not a participant’ (Kierkegaard 1987: 171–2).

Introduction

17

now:  ‘Galatians 2:2:  ‘ “Running.” Paul is hurried, because the end of time has already come’ (2004: 49). Differently from the stasis of cosmos, Paul encounters himself and his congregations not as given but as becoming other. ‘Paul experiences the Thessalonians in two determinations: 1. He experiences their havingbecome . . . He experiences, that they have a knowledge of their having-become . . . That means their having-become is also Paul’s having-become. And Paul is co-affected by their having-become’ (2004: 65). For Paul and his followers, no fixed sense whatever can be given to their being:  ‘their Being [Sein] now is their having-become [Gewordensein]. Their having-become is their Being now’ (2004:  66). God’s being-present leads to a transformation of life (peripatein, living), not to its remaining the same (2004:  67). This is why Greek-inflected theology, with its understanding of God as an object of speculation (theo-logy as the logos of God), cannot grasp Paul’s good news primordially as an active turning towards God rather than his passive contemplation. It also means that life, for Paul, ‘is not a mere flow of events; it is only insofar as he has it. His life hangs between God and his vocation’ (2004:  70). The parousia (presence, coming) of Christ is therefore not something the Christian awaits as for a future event. Christian hope is not in an objective time to come – Paul does not tell the Thessalonians when Christ will return but rather announces ‘you know exactly’ (1 Thess. 5.2). Paul refers the Thessalonians back to their own life; how they live is decisive, not the precise hour of Christ’s return. He thereby distinguishes between two ways of living rather than between two given orders of time: 1 Thess. 5.4: ‘But you . . .’ (2004: 71–2). For Heidegger, it is not possible to encounter this Christian temporality in an objective concept of time:  ‘The when is in no way objectively graspable’ (2004: 73). Metaphysical ideas such as the eternity of God thus reflect the penetration of Greek philosophy into Christianity and are not found in original Christian experience itself.14 These reflections on world and time in Paul anticipate, and no doubt stimulated, core themes of Being and Time. In this work time is to be thought neither as dead eternity nor as a simple succession of nows but as ‘the moment’ (Augenblick), or finitude. Time is not something other than mortal existence but rather Dasein, as time, ‘temporalizes its Being’ (1996: 319). This understanding of time, contrary to the time-image of a series of nows, establishes the essential

14

While Heidegger might agree with Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1999: 64) that metaphysical Christianity has stolen away our mortal time (‘of all the hours of man’s life [it] holds the last to be the most important’), he would profoundly disagree that Paul is ultimately responsible for this.

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Nihilism and Philosophy

unity of past, present and future: ‘The future is not later than having been, and having-been is not earlier than the present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in a process of having been’ (1996:  401; see also 1990:  143). The future of projection is what makes present  – the present is made from out of the sense of future possibility that every tradition, every ‘having-been’ is.15 Indeed, given that projection onto death as a possibility discloses Dasein’s constitutive finitude, the ‘primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future’ (1996: 378).16 Inauthentic temporality, by contrast (the time of Das Man, ‘the they’), prioritizes the present.17 Time as successive nows, the ‘vulgar interpretation’ of time, therefore lacks ‘datability and significance’ (1996: 387); it fails to think ‘the moment’ not as a mere now but as that which ‘lets us encounter for the first time what can be “in a time” ’, its possibility (1996: 311).18 It is the moment that brings existence to a situation by disclosing the ‘there’ of significance (1996: 319). The now, by contrast with the moment, is a dead time image because it is always already either no longer (past) or not yet (future). The now is a timeless time because it is endless in both directions without giving us any time (1996: 38).19 In his Introduction to Metaphysics (2000:  47–8), Heidegger thus calls the moment ‘history’ while ‘what is merely contemporary’, to the contrary, ‘never happens, but always just “passess”, makes its entrance and goes by’. Indeed, when we look away from the moment and experience time merely as the nows that we never have, then we lose ‘temporality itself ’ (2000: 389). Time is ours only as finitude, only when we no longer look away from our own mortality. Time is mortal time. This is why our everyday talk is not of how time comes to be but of how it passes away: ‘Dasein knows fleeting time from the “fleeting” knowledge of its death’ (2000: 390). This is why the moment, as opposed to the now, temporalizes itself from the future. It also means that the future is not the not-yet of 15

16

17

18

19

On this account of tradition as a ‘thinking forward’, which is not a planning, see also Heidegger (1996: 41): ‘ “Being” ever and always speaks as destiny, and thus permeated by tradition’ (see also 1996: 51). Heidegger repeats this point in his book on Kant (1990: 128 and 177): ‘when exactly does the most original essence of time, i.e. that it is developed primarily from the future, come to the fore?’; ‘the analysis of death [in Being and Time] has the function of bringing out the radical futurity of Dasein, not of producing a . . . metaphysical thesis concerning the essence of death’. ‘Does not all war over Being, then, move in advance within the horizon of time?’ (Heidegger 1990: 164) Again, this point is repeated in his study of Kant (1990: 120): ‘Th[e] sequence of nows . . . is in no way time in its originality. On the contrary, the transcendental power of imagination allows time as sequence of nows to spring forth, and as this letting-spring-forth it is therefore original time’. (See also 1990: 132 and 137.) Aristotle, the first for Heidegger to really think time, shapes the tradition here, conceiving of ‘the “Being” of time from the “now” ’ (1990: 165).

Introduction

19

the now but the very condition for the present itself to arise (2000: 391). In the moment, the future comes ‘first’ just as, for Paul, tomorrow’s parousia transfigures today’s subjective possibilities: ‘History as happening is determined from the future, takes over what has been, and acts and endures its way through the present. It is precisely the present that vanishes in the happening’ (2000: 48). But if the present vanishes in the moment, then the past is also transformed. The past is no longer simply what is past, or gone, but that which is recapitulated from out of the future (elsewhere Heidegger [1990: 159] calls this ‘remembering again’20). If the past operates in the present – in a sense is the present in terms of giving to it its horizon of possibility (1998c: 181; 1988: 32)21 – then the redetermination of the past from out of the future is a transfiguration of the present into the moment (Augenblick).22 Metaphysical eternity, then, is really only the failure to think time. Heidegger (2000:  89) makes this point bluntly:  ‘There is no time in which there were no human beings, not because there are human beings from all eternity and for all eternity, but because time is not eternity, and time always temporalizes itself only at one time, as human, historical Dasein.’ Heidegger’s Paul does not negate the world in some nihilistic beyond. Rather, ‘primordial Christian facticity gains no exceptionality, absolutely no special quality at all. In all its absoluteness of reorganizing the enactment, everything remains the same in respect to the worldly facticity’ (2004: 83). The Christian does not leave this 20

21

22

See also Heidegger 2002b:  ‘the historical past is not defined through its position in bygone, but through its future’ (147). This is very different from temporality in Hegel, where although the past is ‘the decisive character of time’, nonetheless it is always ‘fading away, something transitory and always bygone’. For Heidegger (1988: 82), it is decisive that Hegel ‘speaks about having been, but never about the future’. That the past constitutes the essence of time for Hegel is unsurprising since a genuine (self-conscious) being is that which has returned to itself. Being is therefore what has always already occurred, that for ‘which nothing can be earlier’ (1988: 146). Following Heidegger, Deleuze (1994: 84–5) takes up the importance of reminiscence to recovering the past, a past that we otherwise reduce ‘to the former present that it was, or to the present present in relation to which it is past’. Only in reminiscence can we save the past for ourselves. Thus does the future subordinate the present and the past to itself, ‘making use of the repetition of habit [past] and that of memory [present]’ as stages that it leaves in its wake. This is how repetition (which for Deleuze means difference) passes from a thing in itself to a thing for itself (1994: 94, emphasis added). See also Henri Bergson as cited in Deleuze (1991: 51): ‘the following moment always contains, over and above the preceding one, the memory the latter has left it’. As Deleuze (1991: 63) says of ‘the Bergsonian revolution’: ‘We do not move from the present to the past, from perception to recollection, but from the past to the present, from recollection to perception.’ Also: ‘we must recognize that the present itself is only the most contracted level of the past’ (1991: 74; see also Deleuze 1994: 85). Badiou, who rejects all talk of finitude, rather sees the possibility of the recapitulation of the past in the present as a possibility opened up by the event, not by the future (2009: 507). To live is then to be incorporated into the present as a subject of truth, an incorporation which ‘reconstitutes a different past’. In this reading, the past is ‘the amplitude of the present’ such that, for the subject, ‘History does not exist. There are only disparate presents whose radiance is measured by their power to unfold a past worthy of them’. Indeed, to the extent that the subject of an event creates the present according to a universal truth, this present is nothing less than the ‘being-there of eternity’ (2009: 509–10).

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world behind but, remaining in his worldly station (I Cor. 7.20), finds only ‘a new fundamental comportment’ to the world (2004: 84). The world of the Christian is taken up into becoming not because another world arrives but because this world is determined ‘out of the original enactment’ (2004:  85). Christian enactment remakes the world through resignification. That the slave is free in Christ and the Christian a slave to God means that, far from stepping out of the world, the Christian now receives his worldly determination (as free man or slave) as something temporal rather than eternal. The slave in Christ ‘is’ no longer a slave while the freeman in Christ ‘is’ no longer free. These worldly determinations are overcome not through their replacement by some other equally fixed determination but through their ‘having-been’, their becoming other. This becoming is not just the flow of time, which, in its own way, is equally lifeless, but is rather a ‘complex of becoming’ (2004: 80)23 which is beyond the alternatives of static-dynamic altogether: ‘The time of factical life is to be gained from the complex of enactment of factical life itself, and from there the static or dynamic character of the situation is to be determined’ (2004: 64, emphasis added). Enactment itself decides what endures and what passes. Christian life is therefore lived temporality as opposed to both deathly eternity and the indifferent flux of time:  ‘Compressed temporality is constitutive for Christian religiosity’ (2004: 85).24 Paul’s hos me, the famous ‘as if not’ of 1 Cor. 7 (which signifies how the believer should relate to his worldly vocations such as husband or as one who weeps), should thereby not be translated ‘as if ’ since this suggests an ‘away from here’ with regard to the world. The ‘as’ adds a new, positive, sense to worldly determinations rather than introducing otherworldliness (2004: 86), as is affirmed later in Being and Time’s discussion of authenticity, where the ‘proper’ is, existentially, ‘only a modified way in which the [improper] is seized upon’ (Heidegger 1996: 224). Heidegger provides us with a sense of the importance of Paul to any challenge to metaphysical timelessness, his own included. But if the condemnation of mortal time by the vision of eternity is what is decisive, then we need to understand more of how this two-worlds structure  – the very heart of the 23

24

Deleuze (1991: 32–3) reads Bergson’s philosophy as making a similar point: ‘Intuition is not duration itself. Intuition is rather the movement by which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make use of our own duration to affirm and immediately to recognize the existence of other durations . . . ’ Badiou (2009 : 384–5) concurs that the event – which for him opens up the possibility of a truth – is in immanent exception to becoming: ‘The event is neither past nor future. It presents us with the present.’

Introduction

21

metaphysical operation – came to be. For if Nietzsche (2006: 257) is right, the true world is the source of all error: ‘To be sure, unless you become as little children, you shall not enter that kingdom of heaven. (And Zarathustra gestured upward with his hands.) But we do not want to enter the kingdom of heaven at all: we have become men – and so we want the kingdom of the earth.’

1

The True World

The whole attitude of ‘man against the world’, of man as a ‘world-negating’ principle, of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who finally places existence itself upon his scales and finds it too light [. . .] We laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of ‘man and world’ (Nietzsche 2001: 204) What is the true world? Nietzsche argues that the true world appears first in Platonism as a supersensory world that is defined as true because, unlike the sensory world, it is not subject to change. In Plato’s Phaedo, for example, Socrates reassures his friends that the invisible world above to which he is about to depart is many times more beautiful than the world below. The precious stones that gleam in this world are but a pale imitation of the jewels in the next world since these are ‘not damaged by decay’ (1993: 174). Platonism, for Nietzsche (2014: 2), would be this supersensory realm as the real truth of this world; Christianity, as Platonism for the people, would be this supersensory world as the world beyond. The metaphysics thus bequeathed to European history would thereby devalue our world, a world that is now deemed false in some way. This loss of world is the condition of nihilism. It is important to recall that for Nietzsche this alienation from the world is also the condition of our finding it: nihilism provides the opportunity for its own overcoming. The world that is lost to us is a world we can finally love because only now does it appear as that with which we can be reconciled as our very own fate – amor fati.

The two worlds For now a more basic question remains: why must the world remain lost to us in the first place? If nihilism is wrapped up in the two-worlds problem then why not

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simply abolish the supersensory (true) world of metaphysics and get back to the one world that metaphysics divided into two? Indeed, the supersensory world is long gone; Nietzsche already announced its departure, ‘the death of God’, well over a century ago. And yet nihilism, the negation of world, continues by the light of many leading philosophies to characterize, perhaps even to define, modernity. Heidegger’s analysis of technology as an experience of beings as so many objects for utilization by a human subject is the most well known of these diagnoses. ‘Homelessness’ is thus the destiny of the modern world, a world in which human beings, along with all beings, have been abandoned by Being (which for Heidegger means the same as world, as we shall see) (Heidegger 1998b: 258). Nihilism would also be the modern condition for Giorgio Agamben (2011: 140), for whom our fundamental extraneousness to the world is reflected in practices as quotidian as tourism. For Alain Badiou (2012: 55–6), meanwhile, the radicalism of nihilism today is such that there is no longer any ‘world’ at all. Instead there is only either a libertarian delinking from the world or the liberal attempt to purchase it. But a world is only a system of links and the events that occur in it, being incalculable, can never be bought or sold. How, then, might we explain this ongoing loss of world given that the true world is now a pale shadow of its former self? Released from the grip of the timeless world beyond, why have we not thereby regained this world? But as we began to see in the Introduction, when considering the crisis (as Heidegger saw it) facing Nietzsche in 1888, how could we even get to this world without that supersensory world by which ‘this world’ was first defined as lack? Paradoxically, this world as final ground is the outcome of the groundless world beyond, and not its precondition. Once having lost the world beyond we cannot simply revert back to this world since, prior to the beyond, it was not there! Undermining Heidegger’s claim that Nietzsche only realizes this at the end, this is no doubt why Zarathustra (Nietzsche 2006: 6) says that the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth even as he also beseeches his brothers to remain faithful to this earth by disbelieving those who speak of extraterrestrial hopes. After Zarathustra, the confidence of Schelling in a new golden age inspired by a return to the one, true world seems forlorn, even though it is separated by only seventy years: The most supersensible thoughts now receive physical power and life and, vice versa, nature becomes ever more the visible imprint of the highest concepts. Soon the contempt with which only the ignorant still look down on everything physical will cease and once again the following saying will be true: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Then [. . .] there will no

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longer be a distinction between the world of thought and the world of actuality. There will be one world and the peace of the golden age heralds itself first in the concordant conjunction of the sciences. (Schelling 2000: p. xl)

Such is the scale of the challenge of worldlessness following the death of God that, for Nietzsche, it will take nothing less than the Overman as creator of a meaning for the earth to rise to it. The death of God does not allow us to reinherit the earth since we did not previously possess it. We have lost what we never had and cannot then rediscover it. The death of God was the advent of nihilism only in the sense that it was the moment at which we began to realize how radically world-less our condition really is. We are extraneous to all worlds, the true (ideal, eternal) and the illusory (material, transient). The death of God merely switched these worlds around such that the true world of metaphysics became the illusory world, while the illusory world of metaphysics became the true world. But the true world below, as true world, is still a metaphysical world. When the sensory world of change becomes the true world then, like the supersensory world that it swapped places with, it is defined as that which is changeless. Now it is change that is changeless. The true world, now this world of becoming, is thereby still a realm wherein nothing can really happen. *** The true world is explicit in the philosophical tradition right up to Kant. Kant’s division in Critique of Pure Reason between the world of sensory appearance (phenomena) and the world of things in themselves (noumena) remains within the two worlds problematic (even as the noumenal true world, which unlike the world of sense is beyond all possible experience, becomes inaccessible to us in Kant’s critical schema).1 Although in his critique of metaphysics the supersensory world is for Kant strictly an idea of reason rather than a substance or higher reality, nonetheless, when asking whether there is anything different from the world which contains the ground of the world order and its connection according to universal laws, then the answer is: Without a doubt. For the world is a [unified] sum of appearances, and so there has to be some transcendental ground for it, i.e., a ground thinkable merely by the pure understanding. (Kant 1998: 618–19)2

1

2

‘What the things may be in themselves I do not know, and also do not need to know, since a thing can never come before me except in appearance’ (Kant 1998: 375). This unifying ground of the world also leads Kant (1998: 619) to posit ‘a unique wise and all-powerful world author’. Indeed, not only can we posit such a supreme being but we must do so.

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Thus despite Kant’s prohibition on forsaking the ground of experience, the world conceived as a totality, which precisely makes this mistake of speculatively rising above possible experience, nonetheless survives as a ‘regulative idea’ along with the soul and God (Kant 1998: 613). In this way Kant excludes the world as totality from time, since time is a feature of human consciousness of the world rather than of the world in itself. With the idea of world, ‘we should proceed as if we did not have before us an object of sense’, a phenomenon, but rather ‘one of pure understanding’. Here the conditions of human sensibility, namely space and time, ‘can no longer be posited in the series of appearances’ that constitutes the world for us, but must instead be placed outside it (Kant 1998: 613, emphasis added). A world exposed to the negation of time could not even be a totality, since it could never be given in a complete or final form (Hägglund 2008: 30). In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel seeks to overcome Kant’s distinction between the (phenomenal) world as it appears for us and the world as it is (appears) in itself, which for Hegel is still to know the world only on the surface or as if from the outside. There are no appearances for themselves – appearance just is the showing of something other than what is shown. Appearance is also not only that which appears but, as appearing, that which will disappear. Appearance is in movement: each appearance gives way to another, being negated in the process. Understood positively, this movement of negation is dialectics, the negation of the negation. There are thus not mere appearances behind which a true world lies unreachable but, instead, appearing is the way, the truth, of the world. The sensory and supersensory worlds that still remain separate in Kant are unified in Hegel: The supersensible is the sensuous and perceived posited as it is in truth; but the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearance. The supersensible is therefore appearance qua appearance. [. . .] It is often said that the supersensible world is not appearance; but what is here understood by appearance is not appearance, but rather the sensuous world as itself the really actual. (Hegel 1977: 89)

From the elevation of the sensible to the actual it seems to follow that the truth of the world is captured in the idea of the true (or ‘inner’) world as a world in which nothing endures unchanged – plus ça change. But in anticipation of Heidegger’s dismissal of Nietzsche’s world of becoming as still a metaphysical true world, Hegel (1977: 90) notes that when flux is posited in the ‘inner world’ of things as their truth, then this world is received as that which ‘is absolutely at rest and remains self-same’. In short, difference is expressed as law-like, as

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the ‘stable image of unstable appearance’.3 This supersensory or true world as an ‘inert realm of laws’ (ibid.) is merely the ‘direct tranquil image’ of the sensory world as a world of flux. As such, this difference is only an ‘inner difference’ – ‘each of the two worlds is really the opposite of itself ’ – since the sensory world of flux identifies itself in its constant change while the supersensory world of law differentiates itself by being a law of nothing static but rather of dynamic force: it ‘exhibits law only through incessant change’ (Hegel 1977: 96 and 91). The timelessly true world, then, as only the ‘imperfect appearance of Reason’, has its necessary counterpart in the world of appearance since this latter world retains ‘for itself the principle of change and alteration’ (Hegel 1977: 88 and 97). Hegel’s ‘inverted world’ (verkeherte Welt),4 to the contrary, seeks to think the true world dynamically: ‘We have to think pure change’, change in itself (Hegel 1977:  99). Hegel seeks to take the principle of change and alteration up from the world of appearance into the truth of the world in such a way that change is not only an external description of what, described as constant change as if from the outside, stays the same (law-like), but as that which really changes: ‘The kingdom of laws lacked that principle [of change], but obtains it as an inverted world’ (Hegel 1977:  97). The inverted world is then the true (supersensory) world turned in on itself, or rather the true world and its opposite (the world of appearance/phenomena) ‘in one unity’ (Hegel 1977: 99).5 This inverted world is thus not the true world turned upside down – the ‘inverted world’ is not a mere return to the sensory world of perception.6 Rather, the inverted world is a dialectical reversal of the supersensory world which, as a world of law, remains an abstraction from the ‘absolute unrest of pure self-movement’ of the world, or life itself (Hegel 1977: 101). ‘This simple infinity, or the absolute Notion [Concept], may be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood, whose omnipotence is neither disturbed nor interrupted by any difference, but rather is itself every difference, as also their suppression; it pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest’ (Hegel 1977: 100).

3

4

5

6

Despite his loathing of Hegelianism, Deleuze makes a similar point in Difference and Repetition (1994: 2): ‘As an empty form of difference, an invariable form of variation, a law compels its subjects to illustrate it only at the cost of their own change.’ Commentators (e.g. Hyppolite 1974: 135; Gadamer 1975: 401; and Flay 1970: 662) agree that the section of the Phenomenology on the ‘inverted world’ is one of the most obscure but also one of the most important passages of the entire work. ‘The Understanding falls short of infinity as such, since it [. . .] apportions to two worlds, or to two substantial elements, that which is a difference in itself – the self-repulsion of the selfsame and the self-attraction of the unlike’ (Hegel 1977: 102). ‘It is evident that we cannot without much ado go straightaway behind appearance’ (Hegel 1977: 103).

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The inverted world, as the true ‘true world’, is not a world set over against the knower; knowledge must rather be understood as dynamically in-the-world. Indeed, the entire thrust of the Phenomenology is to demonstrate that consciousness is not consciousness of some external thing but truly self-consciousness, a consciousness of life of itself.7 The idea of the inverted world seeks to capture this idea since invertedness, as invertedness not of two worlds that swap places but as the inversion of what is one unity, ‘means to turn against one’s self to relate to oneself – that is, to be alive’ (Gadamer 1975: 414).8 For consciousness of being a self has exactly this ‘structure of being a distinction which is no distinction’ (Gadamer 1975: 421). Hegel’s true world as absolute restlessness, self-movement – as a living world – is beyond both the timeless world and the world of flux. But it is, of course, still a true world. For difference in itself is the undifferentiated. Dissimilarity has its condition of possibility, thereby its essence, in the similar, in the unity of the same (Heidegger 1988: 134). In this essential sense, worldly difference is identity, the world as an unconditioned universality – infinity or the Absolute. Although the Absolute must be conceived as spirit (Geist), the being of spirit is eternity or, to say the same thing, the ‘absolute presence’ (Gegenwart) that was also the Greek understanding of being (Heidegger 2002b: 77). Thus for Heidegger (1988: 12, 82, 98), even though Hegel thinks the world as movement, he nonetheless fails to think time (Being) as something other than beings (namely as that which is present) and thereby remains stuck with metaphysical timelessness. Hegelian being, as the pure concept, is the power of time rather than time ‘itself ’. In other words, the problem of being in Hegel ‘is properly conceived only when time is made to disappear’, or, to say the same thing, time in Hegel ‘is unfolded from out of the problem of being itself ’. This is what allows Hegelian philosophy to be conceived as absolute knowledge: ‘the genuine concept of being . . . is nothing less than leaving time behind on the road to spirit, which is eternal’ (Heidegger 1988: 147). It is also why Heidegger (1988: 100, 145–6) is able to say that the difference between his thought of being and time and Hegel’s is that the latter sees being as the essence of time while Heidegger reverses this.9 With such a reversal, 7

8

9

‘Consciousness is for its own self, it is a distinguishing of that which contains no difference, or selfconsciousness’ (§164). Thus, famously: ‘It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner [true] world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen’ (Hegel 1977: 102 and 103). Or as Hyppolite (1974: 138) makes the same point: ‘The inverted world, therefore, is not to be sought in another world. It is present in this world, which is simultaneously itself and its other and which is grasped in its phenomenal entirety as “absolute concept”, or infinity.’ Hegel’s ontology in the Phenomenology is thereby an onto-theo-logy: it is from the being of the absolute – God – that beings are determined (Heidegger 1988: 99). Heidegger sees his contribution in

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the very possibility of absolute knowledge becomes unthinkable – all comprehension of the world is relative, and indeed necessarily (constitutively) so, to our understanding of being. Being is no longer the movement of the Same and so historical in only a penultimate sense, but is rather ultimately historical (historical all the way down). An understanding of being can only be an understanding of the history of being with nothing in addition. Being, or world, is essentially finite, not the infinity of the absolute that it is for Hegel. *** The true world, as Nietzsche argued, is not true. There is no world of immutable being. Contra Nietzsche, however, neither is there only a world of blind becoming – chaosmos. As Heidegger asked (1991, III: 72): where is this chaos?10 Our experience of world is that it is ordered even though it is also a world of time and change. Being, for Heidegger, is not pure predation of time but historical being-in-the-world. Not only is there no true world in the metaphysical sense of eternity, but neither is there a true world as historical becoming (Spirit), as for example in Hegel’s ‘inverted world’ of real appearance (or appearance as real). There can in fact be no true world at all absent metaphysics. To break with metaphysics we need a truth detached from the way in which the world is. The world can only be this way for a subject somehow outside of the world, when human being is always already thrown and thrown-ness is being-in-the-world. We find ourselves radically in the world, not as those who look down on it (indeed, neither as those who, though immanent to the world, are nonetheless able to gain a total perspective on it, which amounts to the same thing).

Whence worldlessness? If nihilism is the forgetting of being-in-the-world that the true world stands for, then this means that any history of nihilism cannot start with the modern death of God, which would involve taking the consequences of nihilism for nihilism

10

Being and Time as rather an onto-chrony (1988:  100). Exchanging chronos for logos is more than a simple switching of places, since when time replaces reason as the ground of being then being becomes a question again. More recently, Badiou (2009a: 118) has affirmed that ‘Appearing in a given world is never chaotic’. If appearing were chaotic, then beings could not be thought. Deleuze’s Bergson (1991: 98–9) also argues against any purely accidental differences in the world, since such differences, however small, would thereby remain external and thus indifferent to each other: ‘There would be no reason why [they] should link up and add together in the same direction; nor any reason for sudden and simultaneous variations to be coordinated into a liveable whole.’ In Deleuze’s Bergsonism (1991: 106) there is finality rather than chaos ‘because life does not operate without directions’, but at the same time no telos ‘because these directions do not pre-exist ready-made’.

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‘itself ’. We must instead follow the trace of the emergence in Greek Antiquity of the true world. Kosmos, as timeless and static good order of the world, was a Greek invention, one by which the Greeks left behind the eternal return of other ancient cosmologies, in which the order of the world was precisely the rise and fall of good order that the sovereign might ameliorate but could never control. This shift has been given an idealist reading: as the emergence in Greek thought of the subject for whom world then became object (Brague 2003). And it has been given a materialist reading: as driven by the class struggle connected to the rise of the polis in the sixth century BCE in which the ideology of different shares for different classes legitimated itself by reference to the – now frozen – order of the heavens (Foucault 2013). But in either case the order of the world, perhaps for the first time, became knowable. There was now an objective world given to a subject that grasps it, and who is thereby somehow set apart from it. For Heidegger, this worldless metaphysical subject is the subject of ancient and modern nihilism; the world as object for a subject is the very ground of western man’s technological domination of nature, and even of evil itself: ‘Self-will can elevate itself above everything and only will to determine the unity of the principles in terms of itself. This ability is the faculty of evil’ (2006: 142). Nihilism is thus not a uniquely modern problem for Heidegger, as also for Nietzsche before him. Ancient cosmos, as eternal order of the world, is still inside the two-worlds problem, even though in Antiquity it is viewed as the only world. In other words, we do not need the world beyond of Christianity to have the two worlds. Cosmos is already the two-worlds problem since it is the supersensuous world as the truth of this world. This world, in the cosmic vision, is the timeless (heavenly) order of the world within which the (earthly) time of mortal life takes place, only this time as lack. So the supersensuous and sensuous worlds are already in place in cosmos and it is only a short step from here to their complete separation in Ancient Gnosis and their only partial reconciliation in the heaven/earth distinction of Christianity (in which the Son governs the world on behalf of a Father who is effectively absent from it). By the same token, overcoming the two-worlds distinction will certainly not happen simply by retreating from Christianity back to the seemingly unified, but actually always already fractured, world of cosmic totality. Though they are undoubtedly nostalgic for the age of the Greeks, neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger thinks nihilism can be answered by any kind of return. If the true world is a world of sovereign self-sameness, a world which, being identical with itself, cannot change (what Derrida always called ‘the worst’), then

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the historical impetus for this, Foucault argued (2013), was the rise of a new form of sovereignty in the ancient polis based on a corrective rather than a constitutive principle of justice. Thus did the lawgiver replace the hero. Foucault identifies this new justice with the requirement of the polis for a legitimation of shares. While constitutive justice must always begin again, corrective justice must refer to something already constituted. That reference point was the (true) world understood as a cosmic order. And it was from this fixing of the order of the world that the metaphysical subject who knows that order, as if from the outside, was derived. Foucault’s analysis, being a genealogy rather than a history of Being as in Heidegger, understands the true world as contingency rather than destiny. For Foucault, the polis is the site for the emergence of the nomos (law) of metaphysics, for the idea of the ‘permanence of distributions among things and men’ and of a knowing subject ‘no longer connected to the repetition of an event, but to the discovery and maintenance of an order’, which is the true world (2013: 163). Nomos is the law of the city by which the unequal shares brought into the polis are naturalized by their alignment with the very structure of the world, which itself is newly subject to nomos rather than chaos. In his Lectures on the Will to Know (2013), Foucault shows how the function of juridical judgement in Greek Antiquity came to lose its decisionistic character in which the judge constituted law by deciding for one party, replacing this allocative function with a corrective one. Corrective judgement was linked to the rise of the polis and to the need to establish order in the city. The judge must now see ‘to it that the place of each is in harmonious balance with that of others’ (2013: 95). And because this judging was corrective rather than constitutive, it needed to refer to a higher order. But a problem arises. What is this truth in the form of knowledge that [this justice] needs? Following Hesiod, but also his successors, it is the truth of days and dates; of favourable times; of the movements and conjunctions of the stars; of climates, winds, and seasons: that is to say, it is the whole body of cosmological knowledge. It is also the truth of the genesis of the gods and the world, of their order of succession and precedence, of their organization as system of the world. Theogony. Knowledge of the calendar and of the origin; knowledge of cycles and of the beginning. (2013: 111)

This knowledge was not originally Greek. Truth understood as knowledge of the cosmos formed in the empires of the Hittites, Assyrians and Babylonians. ‘And their formation there is linked directly with the form of political power’

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(ibid.). Why was this? These ancient empires tied their statecraft closely to an official-religious calendar in order, first, to manage widely dispersed territories, second, to establish systems of equivalence for the raising of taxes and the like and, third, because the magical-religious basis of royal power was regularly renewed by ceremonies that would recite the genealogy of the king (‘a sort of new beginning on the basis of the beginning’, ibid.). Though such a connection arose with the political needs of empire (as the cosmological ‘secrets of effective power’), justice in the Greek polis also comes to be identified with cosmos:  ‘The lawmaker will be [.  . .] one who speaks of the order of the world [. . .] Conversely, someone who knows the order of the world [the sage] will be able to say what is most just for men and cities’ (ibid.). Foucault argues that this initial connection in Greek Antiquity between political justice (nomos) and the discourse of knowledge as understanding of the order of the world (cosmos) established a dynasty to which the West belongs even today (2013: 96). In particular, this nomos–cosmos axis, as Nietzsche intuited, signalled ‘the first great defeat of the aristocratic and warrior justice dispensed on the basis of decisive moments’ rather than according to the order of the world (ibid.). Also lost in this epoch-making moment of Greek Antiquity is any idea of truth as the always singular truth of a subject (a truth that will preoccupy Foucault in his last lectures on the courage of truth). Truth, and the justice which refers to it, had consisted in the heroic action by which a subject ties his destiny to the truth. Through a close reading of the Homeric texts, Foucault shows that this had been the principal mode of justice in Greek prehistory. Here, justice was served when a warrior stated the truth on oath; and this oath was its own guarantee since it bound the one who uttered it to the justice of the gods which, though it might be delayed, was sure to be meted out eventually, to his descendants if need be. But with the rise of the polis, this singular subject of truth was eclipsed by the deployment of an imperial truth as knowledge of the order of the world. Although this new political truth did not render such cosmic knowledge in the arcane manner of the empires to its east, it reproduced the essential link found in them between truth and the order of things. Justice in the city would now take the form of nomos, which itself would only truly be law if acting in conformity with the cosmos (Foucault 2013: 120). Foucault carries out his own etymology of nomos, arguing along similar lines to Carl Schmitt (2003) and others that it stems from the root NEM, which is to distribute or divide up (2013: 156). However, Foucault adds a novel twist, suggesting that nomos as institution breaks off from the earlier principle of eunomia,

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which Foucault translates as ‘just distribution’. ‘It is from this demand for eunomia that nomos will arise as the juridico-political structure of the city’ (ibid.). Whereas in Nomos of the Earth Schmitt was content to link nomos to any apportioning of land that establishes order, Foucault uncovers the primordial importance of the justice of these shares. Turning to Solon’s account of his law-giving role in Athens, Foucault (2013: 157) draws attention to the fact that, for Solon, dusnomia is not only the dispossession of property owners but also the sending of the property-less poor into slavery because of their debts. Dusnomia is more than appropriation, being also the expulsion from just shares. A just distribution will give to each his due, apportioning political power on the basis of the distribution of wealth. Nomos as appropriation is not, as Schmitt imagined (2003), the primordial basis of law; rather, the polis derives law from the cosmic order of rank or station. Contra Schmitt, it is order (cosmos) that founds spatial orientation (nomos), not orientation that founds order. Just as the distribution of wealth, and the power that flows from it, is seen as natural, so too the law that preserves this distribution is in accordance with nature. For sure, nomos naturalizes appropriation to the extent that it fixes inequalities of wealth by writing them into the political order, but this order is not arbitrary since it reflects the just deserts of hierarchical cosmos. It is not that this ‘cosmic’ justification of ordering was the real driver of that order, of course. In fact, Foucault argues that giving the right of attendance of the Assembly to all citizens was legislated by Solon (himself of the line of the last king of Athens) first and foremost in order that the demand for the redistribution of land could be neutralized: ‘where land was demanded, power was given’, ‘substituting political for economic sharing’ in the process (2013: 159). The idea of justice as conformity with the order of the world was what allowed the revolutionary demand for a fair share to be deflected by the limited sharing of power (four political classes fixed by a property qualification, and with high office drawn only from the top tier, remained despite the equal right of membership of the Assembly). With Solon’s reforms the polis began to constrain the formal-legal inequalities characteristic of the empires to its east, but it was unable to tackle the substantive idea of station on which they were based: What makes one rich or poor remains outside euonomia (justice); it is luck, chance or fate, it is the will of the Gods. On the other hand, what determines that one exercises more power when one is rich than when one is poor is the principle that we finally encounter:  nomos [. . .] Nomos is the name given to a

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Nomos, for Foucault, is the ‘fiction of a real break’ between economic and political power. Indeed, inasmuch as it hardly touches wealth and station while yet appearing to meet the requirements of justice for a fair share, nomos actually serves to renew the link between wealth and power. Nomos is the rule of the rich armed with the law. Yet inasmuch as nomos appeals to the principle of a just distribution that leaves everything in its place, it cannot but sing of cosmos, of the very ‘principle of distribution, its value and wisdom, the origins on which it is founded, and the order whose reign it establishes not only over men, but over the stars, seas, animals, and plants’ (Foucault 2013: 163). In this sense, Foucault sees nomos as nothing other than the material basis of the true world, of the idea of the ‘permanence of distributions among things and men’ and of a knowing subject ‘no longer connected to the repetition of an event, but to the discovery and maintenance of an order’ (ibid.). Metaphysics is founded in Greek Antiquity not on the forgetting of Being but on the forgetting of the class struggle behind the veil of the stations of the true world. Nomos as the just principle of distribution in the city, a distribution that echoes the tiered places of cosmos (but in truth projects these ranks from the city to the heavens), is also a principle of purity. Right distribution is a separation of what should not be mixed, it is a proper and necessary distribution of inside and outside (Foucault 2013: 187). The new impurity structured by nomos is no longer that of the Homeric hero who has provoked the anger of the gods; it is now the culpable transgression of the laws of the city which, since they manifest the order of nature, are known to everyone (2013: 188). The impure status of the anomos (lawless one) is that his blindness to nomos makes him a threat to the city. But that he cannot or will not conform his actions to the order of things means that the transgressor of nomos must have already been impure. Impure in his very being as well as in his effects on the polis, the anomos must be exiled from the city. But the impure individual who denies the order of things is not the only anomos. Popular power does not know the nomos either and is thus not only ignorant but also impure. It is this impurity that is reflected in its murderous acts towards those sages, exemplified by Socrates, who do know the order of the world and therefore the true law, which is inscribed in nature and has nothing to do with popular decision. The rule of the demos is thus criminal; it is

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precisely a crime against nature because it rejects the expression of nature’s order in the nomos of the city (Foucault 2013: 190). For Foucault (2013: 193), the institution of nomos, arsing in the context of the class struggle in Greece in the sixth century, is pure ideology. Its function: to divert the popular demand for an egalitarian redistribution of land by establishing the ‘fictitious place’ of a neutral, objective and natural truth, a truth independent from political struggle or the economic interests that this struggle relays. The remarkable thing is that this fictitious place of nomos went on to be the privileged site for the production of knowledge of the world, of the polis, and of men from that day to this: over two and a half millennia of the lie: [Freud] thought that Oedipus was speaking to him about the universal form of desire, whereas, in lowered voice, the Oedipus fable was recounting to him the historical constraint weighing on our system of truth, on that system to which Freud himself belonged. [. . .] Freud thought that Oedipus spoke to him about desire, whereas Oedipus, himself, was talking about the truth [. . .] [W]hat Oedipus recounts is simply the history of our truth and not the destiny of our instincts. (Foucault 2013: 196–7)

Oedipus became the impure anomos because he was ‘blind to the most fundamental nomos – father and mother’ (Foucault 2013: 191). In falling into impurity thus, Oedipus had to be put out of the city. Foucault’s genealogy of the true world establishes a political point of emergence for the idea of cosmos, which prior to the polis had been for the Greeks too, as seen in Homer, the non-totalizable ‘heavens and the earth’. There is no kosmos in Homer (Brague 2003). The true world as tied to a cosmos that is itself epiphenomenal on the emergence of a new form of sovereign power is a reversal of Heidegger’s order of priority. Heidegger (2002c: 165), by contrast, identifies the ordo, or hierarchical order of beings, as a fundamental structure first ‘established through Plato’. If Plato’s ideas are the primordial expression of the hierarchy of beings, then Aristotle gives the rational necessity of this order perhaps its clearest statement in his Metaphysics (2001a: Book 12, ch. 7). The movement of the world is itself moved by the stars of the ‘first heaven’, which, revolving in fixed orbit, are eternal (the only motion that can be everlasting is motion in a circle) but not for all that uncaused – since what moves must itself be moved. That which keeps the heavens, and thereafter the sublunary world of nature, in motion must itself be eternally at rest and unchanging (indeed only that which is at rest can be unchanging:  ‘For motion in space is the first of the kinds of change’; ‘all the other changes are posterior to change of place’). This ‘impassive

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and unalterable’ being is Aristotle’s God, the ‘unmoved mover’ which, as final cause of the cosmos, moves the world by being its aim (telos), its object of love or desire (os eromenon).11 This Greek hierarchy of beings – kosmos – emerges, for Heidegger (2003: 22– 4), because of the Greek will to know, namely thanks to philosophy. Here, only what always is can really be known. That which becomes, meanwhile, is outside of knowledge since it will change during the intervals in which I catch sight of it such that my former view is now false. True beings, by contrast, can be known because they are always the same regardless of my regard of them. I do not have to keep coming back to them. This means that, for the Greeks, true being is defined as changeless because only this being can be known. Being is ranked on the basis of the knowing subject, on the basis of what this subject can have at its disposal.12 Once true being is defined as permanent presence a logic is set to work which ranks being first and becoming second. For what always is must come earlier than what is perishable.13 And indeed for Aristotle in Book 4 (ch. 12) of Physics, the world, in the sense of the heavens, is what is eternal. It was not created and it will not pass away: ‘It suffers nothing from time.’ All beings in this way can be led back to an everlasting being, hence the coincidence of ontology with theology in Greek thought: for theology considers ‘what constitutes, in the most proper and highest sense, the presence of the world’, namely the unmoved mover and the heavens, which are the pre-eminent place for all beings that are placed below them (Heidegger 2003: 154 and 74). Indeed, in the theological vision of the world, place is what constitutes the being of beings itself as presence. Beings are not first existent and thereafter placed, but place belongs to beings as such, to their ‘very capacity to be present, a possibility which is constitutive of their Being’ (2003: 75). Place is the being-there of a being.

11

12

13

If the unmoved mover moved the world as its efficient cause – that is, by starting the movement of the world off – then he would be changed by his action. God is the eternal purpose of the Universe, not its big bang. This knowing subject placed over against its objects is the basic structure of representational thinking, which forgets that Being and human being belong together, indeed are inextricably intertwined (Heidegger 1969: 32). An irony of the metaphysical framing of the Being of beings as permanent presence is that it is a frame that ‘no longer concerns us as something that is present’ (Heidegger 1969: 36, emphasis added). It is only mortal – namely impermanent – human being that allows Being to appear: ‘being is present and abides only as it concerns man through the claim it makes on him. For it is man, open towards Being, who alone lets Being arrive as presence. Such becoming present needs the openness of a clearing, and by this remains appropriated to human being’ (1969: 31); Heidegger also wants to put this the other way round, namely to say that human being is appropriated to Being. It is not at all the case that ‘Being is posited first and only by man’ (ibid.).

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For Heidegger, the hierarchy of beings which inaugurates the true world, and with it theology, is simply an expression of the metaphysical forgetting of Being, of mortal time or finitude: ‘For Aristotle and the Greeks, as well as for the tradition, beings in the proper sense are what exists always, what is constantly already there . . . On the other hand . . . [h]uman Dasein is not [aei], always; the Being of man arises and passes away; it has its determinate time, its [aion]’ (2003: 94). The heavenly bodies as the highest  – because eternal  – beings emerge as world is forgotten. This forgetting of Being reaches its apogee in the great chain of being of medieval Aristotelianism, where, as Thomas Aquinas argues in De Substantiis Separatis, the heavenly beings are highest because they exist in pure act (i.e. form), without any potentiality (i.e. matter) to take other forms; in short because they are immutable: ‘The more imperfect is in potency in relation to the more perfect and so on upward to the first Form, which is act only, namely, God’ (Aquinas 1959: 38). For Heidegger, the highest being can only be highest because the ‘equiprimordiality’ of being, that every being, even the lowliest, is just as much as any other, has dropped out of sight.14 Indeed, it is Being ‘itself ’ that withdraws, as the concealment necessary to the unconcealment of beings. Beings are only given as beings because that ‘in’ which beings appear  – world  – is no-thing (though not for all that nothing). Given that speaking is always speaking about something, gaining access to that which is not a being, to the non-being that nonetheless pre-eminently is in some way, is always closed off from logos (2003: 292). Whether it is the Presocratics explaining being on the basis of a being such as water, air or fire (notwithstanding Parmenides’s claim that ‘beings are’, which Heidegger concedes is at least on the way to thinking about Being), or Aristotle’s ousia (being) as derived from parousia (presence), Greek being is that which is there. To be is to be present (2003: 275, 302, 323). More than this, ousia for the Greeks is constant presence, it is what, as fixed and stable, is always readily available – what remains. How else to explain that ousia names both being and house/home? Possessions are exemplary beings because of this quality of Greek being as always at our disposal (2002b: 36–8). Thus it is the

14

Deleuze says something similar in Difference and Repetition (1994:  36–7):  ‘Being is the same for all [. . .] modalities, but these modalities are not the same. It is ‘equal’ for all, but they themselves are not equal. It is said of all in a single sense, but they themselves do not have the same sense.’ ‘The words “everything is equal” may therefore resound joyfully, on condition that they are said of that which is not equal in this equal, univocal Being [. . .] [W]hether they are large or small, inferior or superior, none of them participates more or less in being, nor receives it by analogy. Univocity of being thus also signifies equality of being.’

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destiny of Being, which is precisely not present, not there ready at hand, to be forgotten.15 But as Heidegger argues at length in What is Metaphysics? (1978), metaphysics is not just the thought of beings as such, but also as a whole. Theology arrives along with metaphysics just as much as ontology also for this reason – metaphysics is onto-theo-logic, as Heidegger will later say (1969). Indeed, the ‘deity enters into philosophy’, by which Heidegger clearly means that thought of the highest being is invited by metaphysics. This is confirmed when Heidegger suggests that the question of why the deity enters into philosophy can be answered ‘only when that to which the deity is to come has become sufficiently clear: that is, philosophy itself ’ (1969: 55). Accounting for beings within the whole – the thinking of cosmos – leads the Being of beings to be represented as causa sui. ‘This is the metaphysical concept of God. Metaphysics must think in the direction of the deity because the matter of thinking is Being’ (1969: 60, emphasis added). The thinking of Being is not just a concern with the ground as what is lowest (‘universal and primal’) in beings but also with ground as the ‘highest and ultimate’ of what is in Being. Indeed, the one supports the other: the primal accounts for the ultimate (1969: 61), but it is just as true that the primal ground appears ‘as something that is, thus itself as a being that requires the corresponding accounting for through a being, that is, causation, and indeed causation by the highest cause’ (1969: 70). God lies in wait for all those who pursue the metaphysical concern with grounding. This God, the causa sui, Heidegger calls the god of philosophy, a god before which it is possible neither to fall to one’s knees in awe nor to dance. The god-less thinking that abandons this philosophers’ God ‘is thus perhaps closer to the divine God’ than onto-theo-logians would care to admit (1969: 72). It has been over for the olds gods for a long time now – and truly, they had a good cheerful gods’ end! They did not ‘twilight’ themselves to death – that is surely a lie! Instead they just one day up and laughed themselves to death! This happened when the most godless words were uttered by a god himself – the words: ‘There is one god. Thou shalt have no other god before me!’ (Zarathustra III ‘On Apostates’)16

15

16

Although even being understood as presence is conceivable only on the basis of temporality: presence is a characteristic of time. True being is that which endures in every now. This is why in enquiring into being we are compelled to ask about time and, thereby, about ourselves (given that time is not to be found among beings but only in human being). The question of being ‘leads to the question of man’ (Heidegger 2002b: 80; 83–4). See also ‘On Old and New Tablets’ where Zarathustra (Nietzsche 2006: 162) says ‘Precisely that is godliness, that there are gods but no God!’

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The Christian world Before turning from the world as given in Antiquity to the Christian experience of the world it is necessary first to consider the world as seen in Neoplatonism. Given the influence of Neoplatonism on the Church Fathers, this Neoplatonic world is profoundly knotted up with both the world of Plato before it and the Christian world after it. It is not for nothing that Nietzsche held Christianity to be Platonism for the plebs. Although the true world and the material world both emanate from the same One, the two-worlds division is ever-present in Plotinus (204–270 CE). And yet there is much in the Enneads to suggest that the timeless true world is not other than the world that passes away. This is particularly apparent in Plotinus’s denunciation of the Gnostics in the ninth tractate of the second Ennead. In defending the demiurge, the creative agent of the world (which Plotinus sees as a creative principle against the anthropomorphism of Plato’s Timaeus), from Gnostic attack, Plotinus finds the world innocent  – there is no deficit of worldly existence. In this, as we shall see, he shares the same delight in the way things are as Spinoza and Nietzsche after him: it is not that this world is good because it conforms to some higher principle of goodness; rather, ‘it is because things are the way they are that they are good’ (Plotinus, in Hadot 1993: 39). The true world of forms does not have to be explained by way of something else – ‘it is enough for one to posit it as holding the first place’ (Plotinus in Hadot 1993: 40). The forms do not carry out some higher plan; as living beings (not the inert and lifeless ideas of Platonism) they are the causes of themselves and therefore self-justifying. They did not have to be the way they are; rather, it is because they are what they are that they must be that way (Hadot 1993: 39). The forms are not merely ideas in the mind of God, rather these ideas are what the mind of God is made of. ‘Thinker and thought are one’, as Plotinus (1991: 3) puts it. Holding the creative principle to be itself divine, Plotinus (1991: 5) asks how the demiurge could have created the world if, as the Gnostics held, his creation is proof of his forgetting of the Divine. There are indeed many confronting things in the world, but to find the origin of the world unhappy because of these would be to confuse the sensible world with the intelligible (true) world of which the former is merely the reflection. That it is a reflection, however, does not condemn the world of appearance since ‘what reflection of that [true] world could be conceived more beautiful than this of ours? [. . .] Or what other earth than this could have been modelled after that earth? [.  . .] And for a sun figuring

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the Divine sphere, if it to be more splendid than the sun visible to us, what a sun it must be’ (Plotinus 1991:  6; see also 23–4). Moreover, that this world is not an original but a copy of the true world of forms is not a condemnation of this world but its very nature. This world cannot be at once symbol and reality, but, as reality, it is as perfect a representation as can be. More than this: such a real representation is necessary for the higher symbol to be a symbol. The true world cannot be true without that which is its copy (1991: 11). Nor can it be perfect unless its image is also: ‘if this world has no beauty, neither has its Source’ (1991: 24). It follows that ‘Nothing is to be blamed for being inferior to the First’ (1991: 18, emphasis added). All of this makes it strange to Plotinus that the Gnostics should seek to leave this world and depart to the true world, given that the true world is the archetype of the world that is so abhorrent to them (Plotinus 1991:  7). The world that is despised must always be the starting point of otherworldliness (1991: 21); even the sweet, seductive poisons of the true world are taken from the earth, as Nietzsche (2006: 37) put it. Besides, how could the God that cares for the soul of the Gnostic be so indifferent to the cosmos in which it exists? Who dares to make the Divine ‘stop short of earthly concerns or set any limit to it whatsoever?’ ‘If He is absent from the Universe, He is absent from yourselves, and you can have nothing to tell about Him’ (Plotinus 1991: 14, 22, 23). For if the world really contains shards of Divine light (the souls of the Gnostics), then either this light is part of the eternal order of things, in which case it must be included more generally in the created world, or, if it is against the order of things, then this breach exists in the Divine also and the cause of evil is no longer the world but the Divine itself:  ‘a Providence watching entires is more likely than one over fragments only’ (Plotinus 1991: 18, 23). In Hadot’s study of Plotinus (1993), the gulf between Plotinus’s otherworldliness and the nihilistic beyond-ness of Gnosticism comes through with exceptional clarity. As Hadot (1993: 25) notes, the true world, for Plotinus, does not wait for the end of the world; nor does it remain inaccessible from before the world began. Not being separated in time, neither is the true world separated by space. The true world is no eighth heaven, no supra-cosmic realm. Indeed, ‘The more we seek it the less we find’ for, ‘although it was right there, you will not have seen it, because you were looking elsewhere’ (Plotinus in Hadot 1993: 46). The true world is nothing other than this world at its deepest level, a world that can be reached immediately by returning within oneself (a self that, at this level, is the identity of the self thinking the divine and the divine Thought of the

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self) (Hadot 1993: 28). As later in Spinoza, for Plotinus ‘We are always in God’ (Hadot 1993: 27). *** If Heidegger, after Nietzsche, tends towards viewing the nihilism of the true world as stretching back more or less continuously to Plato, Agamben, by contrast, has argued that the true world was given a fundamentally new inflection in Christianity. Agamben’s genealogies tie modern nihilism specifically to Christian ontology and the impetus this gave to government. For the world is only governable from the outside and in accordance with a plan of salvation that finds the world wanting. Thus as the Homo Sacer series of books has progressed, Agamben has shifted attention from his genealogy of sovereign power since the Greek polis to focus on what he sees as a largely separate genealogy of modern governmentality, one which he believes Foucault (2014) did not trace back far enough when highlighting the rise of the Christian pastorate, the government of souls (On the Government of the Living). Differently from Foucault’s emphasis on Ecclesiastical practices, Agamben’s genealogy of government takes him to the ontological stakes of the emergence of Christianity itself. Before considering Agamben’s genealogy of government, it is important first to understand his method and its difference of emphasis from Nietzschean and Foucauldian genealogy. For Nietzsche, paradigmatically in his Genealogy of Morality, noble ideas turn out to have ignoble origins and, in this sense, Nietzsche’s genealogy, and following him Foucault’s too, focuses on the accidental and contingent – eschewing notions of origin and teleology. Nietzsche saw genealogy as the only way to rid thinking about the past from the vestiges of God – we must get over the idea of any providential ordering, of any sense of destiny or purpose. Even Darwinism forgets this with its assumption of the survival of the fittest when European civilization, for Nietzsche (2003: 85), is rather built on the defeat of the strong and the triumph of the weak. Is this concern with accident and contingency in history also Agamben’s approach to genealogy? There is no doubt that Agamben sees himself as a genealogist. After all, the subtitle of a major recent work The Kingdom and the Glory, for example, is: ‘for a theological genealogy of economy and government’. But in eschewing universals Foucauldian genealogy (see Foucault 1977) raises new problems for Agamben. Although the ‘origin’ does not come ‘before’ the present it remains determinative of it, and this is why Agamben prefers the term

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‘archaeology’ (itself Foucauldian, of course) to describe his histories and his etymologies. In an interview Agamben makes the reasons for this clear: Q: What is this archaeological method? Agamben: It is a search for the archè, which in Greek means ‘beginning’ and ‘commandment’. In our tradition, the beginning is both that which gives birth to something and that which commands its history. But this origin cannot be dated or chronologically situated: it is a force that continues to act in the present, just as infancy, according to psychoanalysis, determines the mental activity of the adult, or like how the big bang, which, according to astrophysicists, gave birth to the Universe, continues expanding even today. The example typifying this method would be the transformation of the animal into the human (anthropogenesis), that is, an event that we imagine necessarily must have taken place, but has not finished once and for all: man is always becoming human, and thus also remains inhuman, animal. [. . .] The present is the most difficult thing for us to live. Because an origin, I repeat, is not confined to the past: it is a whirlwind, in Benjamin’s very fine image, a chasm in the present. And we are drawn into this abyss. That is why the present is, par excellence, the thing that is left unlived.17

The past, in this approach, is not past at all, but continues to operate in the present and, thereby, to determine the future. Analogously to psychoanalysis, we are talking about a past that, precisely because it has not been lived (which is why it is not really past), continues to be present in some way (Agamben 2009: 225). Archaeology, like genealogy, is really a history of the present. Yet this is a history of the present with the intent to open, not the future as in deconstruction, but, similarly to psychoanalysis, the past.18 Unlike psychoanalysis, however, the intent is not to re-present the symptom’s origin but to demote or decentre it – finally to bypass it. Strictly opposed to the eternal return, the archaeological method does not consent to the past, refusing to turn the ‘so it was’ into a ‘so I wanted it’. What it wants, to the contrary, is to be rid of the past so as to gain access to what has never been. Archaeology seeks to enable access to the present for the first time (Agamben 2009: 225, 227). In this it is a method appropriate to Agamben’s notion of messianic time, which, in recapitulating what is past, enables the past to regain a certain possibility; the present, meanwhile, thereby 17

18

‘Thought is the courage of hopelessness:  an interview with philosopher Giorgio Agamben’, Jordan Skinner, 17 June 2014 (available at:  www.versobooks.com/blogs/1612-thought-is-thecourage-of-hopelessness-an-interview-with-philosopher-giorgio-agamben). Heidegger (2003: 286) has something similar to say on this point: ‘Philosophical questioning . . . is not concerned with freeing us from the past but, on the contrary, with making the past free for us, free to liberate us from the tradition. ’

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acquires completeness rather than the undecidability it has in deconstruction (Agamben 2005: 24).19 Agamben’s archaeology of government, then, is not content only to reveal government’s pudenda origo. This ‘origin’ is still a force that must be reckoned with and, in so reckoning, deactivated – which means not so much overcome as opened up for a new use. Thus in The Kingdom and the Glory (2011), Agamben’s overarching question is as much critical as historical: ‘Why has power in the West assumed the form of an “economy”, that is, of a government of men and things?’ Just as, for Heidegger, the essence of technology is nothing technological so, for Agamben, the essence of government is nothing governmental. Agamben finds its point of emergence to be the entry of economy (oikonomia  – the government of the household) into theology with the rise of Christianity. Though the meaning of oikonomia remains basically unchanged with this shift, the change in its field of application is decisive. Agamben, ever the philologist, finds evidence of this in the transition from the Pauline construction ‘economy of the mystery’ (Ephesians 3.9, where salvation is what is mysterious) to the ‘mystery of the economy’ in Hippolytus and Tertullian in the third century. The classical administration of the household now becomes the obscure principle of government both of God himself (who is internally organized both as three hypostases, ‘persons’, and as one being) but also of his actions, namely his government of the world. And if classical oikonomia managed beings that were given, for example Aristotle’s natural slaves, then Christian divine oikonomia governs the household of the world according to a plan (oikonomia) of salvation, which implies that the beings being governed shall now become other. That God now governs the world through Christ according to a plan of salvation implies a number of aporias in the Christian experience of the world, aporias which remain operative to this day. First, God remains other than the world that he governs. This division between the divine and the world and, concurrently, between being and existence, is already well under way in Neoplatonism, as for example in the God of Philo, who exists in being even while his being is not in existence (in the manner of lowly beings) (2016: 137).20 But a God entirely other 19

20

That messianic time, for Agamben, is wholly other than the time of deconstruction is made absolutely clear in a short text on Pilate and Jesus (2015: 14). Jesus, as the Messiah, comes to save the world and not to judge it, so he has nothing to decide. Pilate, on the other hand, seeks to arrive at a judgement on Jesus but finds he cannot. Moving on and off the bēma, the seat of judgement, in the end he simply washes his hands of the whole affair. Pilate, deciding differently each time, properly decides nothing. That the chasm between Being (as originating from the One beyond being) and beings (hypostases) is Neoplatonic in origin means that the later Heidegger’s notion of the abandonment of beings by Being finds its point of emergence here (Agamben 2016: 145).

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than and uninvolved in the world is specifically the contribution of Gnosticism and, for Agamben (2011: 53), this nihilistic ‘Gnostic germ’ continues to infect Christianity despite its attempt to overcome the Gnostic deus alienus. For in order to resolve the Gnostic rupture between God and world while resisting Stoic pantheism, Christian theology (which was shaped decisively by its attempt to exclude Gnosis) ended up introducing a division in God himself – a division which made God both transcendent to the world (Father) and actively involved in it (Son) at the same time. Though the Father governs the world through Christ he does not appear in it as such. And this empty throne of the sovereign is, for Agamben (2011), the secret of governmental power to this day in popular regimes. For the popular sovereign, like God the Father, never appears as such in the world, referring only to its government. In its turn, government seeks its ground in the sovereign, referring itself back to it at every turn. This ‘governmental machine’, as Agamben calls it, works only because at its heart there is nothing. The movement from groundless government to the empty throne and back again operates precisely because it finds no ground at either pole, ceaselessly rebounding from one to the other. But in its effects, the governmental machine increasingly refers the political history of the West to government. This is why the problems of sovereignty become steadily more opaque in modernity while at the same time there is an exponential growth in the arts of government. Foucault seized on this difference in modernity with his famous quip that political theorists must learn to chop the king’s head off in their thinking. However, Agamben implies that while Foucault could describe this shift he could not explain it, as Agamben believes he has been able to. Second, if God created the world ex nihilo and now plans to save it then his actions are not reducible to his being – there is freedom in God and thereby in his government of the world.21 (The difference here from Aristotle’s unmoved mover, a transcendent first principle that is not directly involved in the world, is obvious.) This is the anarchism of government, its being anarche, without first principle or ground in the being of God. After all, Christ, as the one given the government of the world by the Father, is himself anarche, being begotten and 21

The idea of the creation of the world is already enough to raise the problem of God’s freedom, as Schelling (2006: 5) argued: Everyone recognizes that God would not have been able to create beings outside of itself from a blind necessity in God’s nature, but rather with the highest voluntarism. To speak even more exactly, if it were left to the mere capacity of God’s necessity, then there would be no creatures because necessity refers only to God’s existence as God’s own existence. Therefore, in creation, God overcomes the necessity of its nature through freedom and it is freedom that comes above necessity not necessity that comes above freedom.

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not created, as the Nicene Creed emphasizes. Christ is from before the creation of the world – having no ground in it. That the world is other than God and requires salvation also implies a freedom of the world, even if this freedom is cast negatively. And indeed, government presupposes free beings in order to be what it is. There cannot be government without freedom, recalling the etymology of the word in kubernáō – namely to pilot a ship on what are precisely the open seas. The Stoic cosmos, by contrast, was necessary; there is nothing here to govern. Government presupposes, and thereby can be even said to constitute, free beings. But if Christian theology marks the epoch within which free beings first come to be, the initial reason for this appearing remains contingent. Free beings only call for government from the perspective of a God other to the world who plans to save it. Absent this God, free beings remain but the providential government of the world loses its justification (and this is what Nietzsche meant with his suggestion that the death of God is dead is itself the liberation: the death of God creates freedom rather than restoring something that God took from us). Free beings do not call forth government unless there is a divine plan to be accomplished. This means that providence is the secret driver of government. However, the idea of a divine plan of salvation that will be accomplished makes Christian theology pose the question of government but also of its overcoming – hence the rebound in Occidental societies between ever evolving arts of government and the perennial desire for their ruination. The inexorable rise of government in the Occident is therefore to be understood on the ontological level as the shift from the substantial ontology of the ancients – for whom being is ‘to be’ – to the imperative ontology of the Christian world, an ontology expressed with the intensification of the idea of providence. Now the world, being no longer necessary in the manner of ancient cosmos, ‘is’ not but ‘has to be’, an ontological shift that calls for, indeed calls forth, both government (Agamben 2013b: 119) and the free beings government presupposes. From out of this ontology of ‘must be’, an ontology that finds the world wanting, Agamben traces the evolution of ethics to Kant, an ethics which remains linked to command and, at bottom, to that which the command presupposes, namely the will.22 In this sense it is perhaps not surprising that, working in the wake of Kant, Schelling (2006: 231) finds that ‘In the final and highest instance, there is 22

Heidegger (2002b: 191) also emphasizes that ‘the pure law-giving of the will’ in Kant ‘has the character of a command or imperative, i.e. of a “you ought” ’. He (2002b: 186–201) discusses the connection between will and the moral law in Kant at length in this text, dismissing Kant’s idea that we discover the categorical imperative within us (2002b: 194–5).

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no other being than will. Will is original being, and to it alone all predicates of being apply: groundlessness, eternality, independence of time, self-affirmation’. In this tradition of thinking, Nietzsche’s ontology of will to power does seem like the culmination of metaphysics, more specifically of the transcendental freedom of the Christian God, rather than its overcoming, as Heidegger argued. The reverse side of God’s otherness from the world, as we have seen, is his radical freedom with regard to his government of it. While the deus alienus of the Gnostics was also foreign to the world, he did not govern it in any way. In Gnosticism, the demiurge is both the god of this world and the one that rules it. But in bringing the two gods of Gnosticism together in the one God, Christianity created a God that governs the world freely. This, for Agamben, is why decisionism, from the sovereign deciding on the exception in Schmitt to its deconstructionist version in Derrida, remains problematic. Decisionsim is a pathology of the ‘Gnostic germ’ that was transmitted to Christian ontology. For the pure decision is unthinkable without our estrangement from the world: the unfounded decision only makes sense in a situation of radical undecidability. With Agamben’s form-of-life, by contrast (and, as with Heidegger’s being-inthe-world, the hyphens are crucial here, neither term being separable from the other), this possibility of an unfounded decision is itself void. If my life is inseparable from its form then I decide from out of it, not from some nowhere.23 And this life that cannot be separated from its form also cannot be cast as anything like an indeterminate or bare life.24 Which is to say that it cannot be a matter for government, remaining essentially ungovernable. Form-of-life, like Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, is never a norm imposed on life from the outside.25 Absent the indeterminate existence of bare life, a life separated from its form by sovereign power, there is nothing to govern. *** The critical edge of Agamben’s genealogy of government – what it seeks a way out from – is freedom understood as arbitrariness, which is the freedom that government presupposes. The Christian God creates and governs the world 23

24

25

Agamben’s form-of-life is the attempt to think beyond any subject which might pre-exist living and to articulate, instead, only that form that is generated in living and only that life that takes its form (Agamben 2016: 224). In this approach the vitalisms (Nietzsche; Deleuze) that give priority to ‘life’ are being rejected just as much as any metaphysical-humanist prioritization of form. It is rather the inseparability of a life from its form and a form from its being lived that is decisive. Bare life in Agamben is not natural life but a life that has been cut off from its form (paradigmatically the bare life that has been captured, in the form of its exclusion, in the polis). Unlike Heidegger’s Dasein, however, form-of-life is a living, a living that ‘gives itself and makes itself a form’ (Agamben 2013a: 105, emphasis added). This giving and making, this fabrication or living of form-of-life seeks to escape the paganism of place, as Levinas memorably called it, that arguably thwarts Heidegger’s being-in-the-world as rather a dwelling.

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for no reason at all (at least nothing related to his being but only according to his will) and Agamben, after Spinoza and Heidegger, seeks an understanding of freedom as rather that which arises from how things are (‘freedom is something binding, indeed obligation in general’ writes Heidegger [1995: 127] in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics). Spinoza, to whom we will turn in a moment, is the forefather of this revaluation of Christian ontology and of an apparent return to an ancient ontology of necessity (explanations of the way of the world that seek refuge in the will of God are, for Spinoza [2007: 29], Asylum Ignorantiae – a sanctuary of ignorance). For Spinoza, a thoroughgoing determinist, an action is ‘free’ not because it could be otherwise but rather because it arises necessarily from the essence of a being: ‘That thing is called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone’ (Ethics, Definition 7). Thus a man can be free when, unconstrained by any external cause, he nonetheless acts as he must, namely in accordance with his essential drive to preserve in his being (conatus), which for Spinoza is the very being of beings (1996: 75). Nietzsche (1962:  63), echoing Spinoza, is also contemptuous of notions of human freedom as choice: ‘Man is necessity down to his last fibre, and totally “unfree”, that is if one means by freedom the foolish demand to be able to change one’s essentia arbitrarily, like a garment’. Heidegger, in his lectures on Schelling for example (2006: 102), similarly dismisses any notion of freedom as arbitrary choice, which would have nothing to orient it, nothing to be free for: If freedom means man’s complete indeterminacy, neither for good nor for evil, then freedom is conceived merely negatively, as mere indecisiveness, behind which and before which stands nothing. This in-decisiveness thus remains nugatory, a freedom which is anything else but a ground of determination; it is complete indeterminacy which can never get beyond itself. This concept of freedom is again a negative one.26

For Heidegger this does not imply a return to ancient necessity since what human being is, though it is thereby not arbitrary, is essentially open (for good and evil in this discussion, in which Heidegger uses Schelling’s terms). We must be this openness that we are. Our existence does not precede our essence, as Heidegger famously corrected Sartre in the former’s ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1998a; see also Heidegger 1990: 157), but rather is our essence.27 Our existence, by which Heidegger means

26 27

See also Heidegger (1998c: 170): ‘Authentic liberation is the steadiness of being oriented.’ ‘By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing’ is in fact the very first definition of Spinoza’s Ethics (1996: 1) and is one of the definitions of God.

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our Dasein, our being-there, is undetermined but for that very reason is not thereby indeterminate; we are, determinately, our indetermination, our thrown-ness or our ‘destinal sending’ – our historicity (Heidegger 1998a: 249). Given that ‘finitude completely determines the human being from the ground up’, as Heidegger argues in his book on Kant, ‘it is precisely a question of becoming certain of this finitude in order to hold oneself in it’ (Heidegger 1990: 150 and 148, emphasis added). Being determined by finitude – by time – we are determined by no-thing and need to seize this openness that we determinately are. Agamben expresses this idea of essential human potentiality somewhat differently. For potentiality, as Aristotle noticed (Metaphysics, Book 9), is always also impotential of the same  – the possibility not to be.28 While other living beings must be their particular potential, must be this or that, only human animals are ‘capable of their own impotentiality’, of not being this or that (Agamben 1999a:  182).29 Agamben has latterly (2011) come to express this same idea through the image of ‘man’ not as the political animal, the man of action, he was for Aristotle but as the Sabbath animal who desists from all works.30 Our human being is such that we have nothing to do, no telos. Our work is inoperativity, the absence of work. Yet  although inoperativity is how human being is given ontologically, this does not mean that there is something like a subject lurking in inoperativity which, like the theologians’ God, can will in all freedom to act or not to act. The other of metaphysical operativity is not metaphysical inoperativity but rather inoperative praxis, or habit. As a practice that is not consumed in the act and so remains internal to potential, habit is beyond the abstract Aristotelian opposition between potential and act (Agamben 2016: 93–4). And the subject of habit is constituted only by way of habitual use; it in no way precedes that use – as Nietzsche (2014: 236) said, there is no doer behind the deed. The subject and its world is a matter only of living bodies that put their body parts, as also the world around them, to use (Agamben 2016: 60–2). Both subject and world are found solely in use, in what is habitual.31 28

29

30

31

The possibility not to be – impotentiality – can be realized in its very non-actualization. The impotential is thus different from the possible which, as Deleuze notes in Bergsonism (1991: 96), has no such reality (though it might be actualized). The possible in Bergson is a false notion in the sense that it is only the real projected backwards. Paradoxically, then, possibility, is of the order of that which ‘is already completely given’ (1991: 98). This expresses Heidegger’s notion that man is rich in world while the animal is poor in world in apophatic terms. Heidegger (2006: 136–7) had already called the primacy of action into question in his lectures on Schelling’s Essence of Human Freedom. Agamben gets onto habit by way of Deleuze. The absolute immanence of habit – in which no subject, no transcendence, is doing the using but rather the use is effecting the subject, makes it rich pickings

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Bringing these reflections back to the theme of world, we find that Agamben himself has expressed them in this way. In The Coming Community (2003: 90– 2), an earlier work from before the Homo Sacer series, what Agamben calls the Irreparable ‘is that things are just as they are, in this or that mode, consigned without remedy to their way of being’. This means that ‘How you are, how the world is – this is the Irreparable’. In a move that is very close to Nietzsche, revelation, for Agamben, is revelation not of the world’s sacredness but of its ‘irreparably profane character’. It is only at the point that we see the world in this light that it is saved. Indeed, to the extent that wanting something just as it is, with all of its predicates, is love, it is only thus that we can love the world. I love the world, as I love anything or anybody at all, because it is thus and no other way. That it is thus is contingent but still absolutely necessary for it to be what it is; it is necessarily its contingency. The revelation that the world is profane is also the realization that the world – is God (ibid.). Agamben writes that ‘At the point you perceive the irreparability of the world, at that point it is transcendent’ (2003: 105). This proposition is expressed by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus (2013: 91) as follows: ‘that God is not revealed in the world could also be expressed by the following statement: What is properly divine is that the world does not reveal God’.32 For Nietzsche too in The Gay Science (2001: 204), the realization that the way of world is anything but divine does not lead to its being worth less – and this is why Cynicism is ‘the highest elevation you will find anywhere on earth’ (Nietzsche 2005: 103). Agamben, after both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, is saying something similar: that the world is thus is still in the world, but ‘that this thus is without remedy, that we can contemplate it as such – this is the only passage outside the world’ (Agamben 2003: 102). Agamben acknowledges Spinoza as a forerunner of this thought – the world is not that in which a God somehow separate from it is revealed; the world is God. Agamben’s modal ontology (see 2016: 164, 172 and 223) builds on Spinoza’s modes of Deus sive Natura (God or Nature). What is divine is not being in itself but its sive; its always and only being expressed in the modes. Being does not have but is its modes, its way of being. Nothing pre-exists the way in which being is.

32

for Deleuze, the thinker par excellence of immanence. Deleuze’s subject is only ‘a habitus, a habit, nothing but a habit in a field of immanence, the habit of saying I’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 48). Deleuze, in turn, gets onto habit by way of Hume. That the world needs no justification and that God is not revealed in the world is something like the mirror image of Hegel’s world, which demands a theodicy, a justification of the evil to be found in it: ‘That the History of the World, with all the changing scenes which its annals present, is this process of development and the realization of Spirit – this is the true Theodicaea, the justification of God in History’ (Hegel 1980: 477).

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As modal, being constitutes itself only in being modified, is ‘nothing other than its modifications’ (Agamben 2016: 170). In this way Agamben’s modal ontology is a development of Spinoza’s monism, which rather describes substance (being) as something separate from its modes (Spinoza 1996: 10, 19). Agamben is actually following Deleuze here, who concludes Difference and Repetition by arguing that (1994: 304): ‘All that Spinozism needed to do for the univocal to become an object of pure affirmation was to make substance turn around the modes  – in other words, to realize univocity in the form of repetition [of difference] in the eternal return’. Ontology has incessantly questioned only what or, starting with Descartes,33 that being is when what is properly divine is how being is (neither its essence nor its existence but its mode or habit).34 From the standpoint of this ontology, the source of all true joy and sadness is that the world is as it is, that it is how we find it to be (which is not the same as to say that it cannot change). Joy or sadness that arises from the world being other than it seems or than we want it to be is, to the contrary, false. After Spinoza, what matters is not joy or sadness themselves, but that these affects are true, namely that they arise because all trace of doubt is gone and because we know with complete certainty that the world is thus (Agamben 2003). As Spinoza makes this point in his Ethics (1996: 169): But it can be objected, while we understand God to be the cause of all things, we thereby consider God to be the cause of sadness. To this I reply that insofar as we understand the cause of sadness, it ceases to be a passion, that is, to that extent it ceases to be sadness. And so, insofar as we understand God to be the cause of sadness, we rejoice.

The ‘so be it’ said to the world, echoing Nietzsche’s amor fati, is when we no longer hope for anything other than a world without God; when all doubt is gone – ‘What! Did the world not become perfect just now?’ (Nietzsche 2006: 224). This is why 33

34

Descartes’s doubt concerning the tradition’s definition of what man is leads him to the realization: ‘Am I not that being who now doubts nearly everything . . . Is there nothing in all this which is as true as it is certain that I exist’ (1911: 10; emphasis added). Agamben acknowledges that Heidegger also provides a modal ontology inasmuch as Dasein’s essence is only its existence (i.e. that Dasein is always and only its mode of being – as thrown, Dasein, in seizing its existence, seizes only this very thrown-ness and its possibilities). Yet, for Agamben, this ontology is never expressed explicitly as an ontology by Heidegger, something that a confrontation with Spinoza, which Heidegger always avoids, might have brought to light (Agamben 2016: 175). Be that as it may, Heidegger is not in any doubt that the question of being and time is a question neither of being nor of time in isolation but rather of the ‘and’ of their relation: ‘The “and” signifies a primordial co-belongingness of being and time from the ground of their essence’ (2002b: 82). Heidegger is saying that being is always only how being is given in time (namely, as history). This does not seem far from Agamben’s modal ontology.

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the world of the saved is identical to the world of the damned in terms of its being; what changes for the saved is not the things themselves but their limits (Agamben 2003: 92). This is also why, although there is no world beyond, nonetheless, how it is with the world is outside of the world, as Wittgenstein argued (2003: 105). Agamben returns to this theme in a recent essay (2015) on the encounter between Pontius Pilate and Jesus. In Agamben’s restaging of this encounter, Jesus is defined as the one who, in refusing to judge the world, comes instead to save it (Jn 3.17), while Pilate is the one who, being only a man and invested with a purely earthly power, must come to a judgement on Jesus but finds he cannot. Jesus represents a messianic power that, by contrast to Pilate’s, is not worldly and yet is immediately at hand (Lk. 17.21): the ‘so be it’ to the world which, though it refuses another world, as world-blessing is neither of the world.

Spinoza’s world Spinoza’s world is completely necessary. The world is not the way that it is according to some external measure of what must be, but rather it is immediately – immanently – necessary. For this reason, like the world of Epicurus (‘never suppose the atoms had a plan’, as Lucretius [1968: 172] writes of the Epicurean world), Spinoza’s world knows nothing of providence.35 Indeed, accusations of atheism levelled at Spinoza in his day related precisely to this denial of providence, which, in ridding the world of a telos, rids the world of lack: ‘By reality and perfection I understand the same thing’ (Spinoza 1996: 32). ‘I do not know why [matter] would be unworthy of the divine nature’, writes Spinoza (1996: 13), in a decisive break with Platonism. When Nietzsche (2006: 131) invokes those who ‘smile down cloudlessly from bright eyes and from a distance of miles, while beneath us pressure and purpose and guilt steam like rain’, he is looking out from a peak scaled by Spinoza before him. So necessary is Spinoza’s world that it is freed of the free beings that make the world governable and human beings responsible. Only because ‘men think themselves free’, have notions of ‘praise and blame, sin and merit’ arisen, states the Ethics (Spinoza 1996:  29); only because men imagine that they disturb, rather than follow, the order of nature that human nature is subject to laughter

35

In Lucretius’s (1968: 183) account of the Epicurean world, chance rather than necessity takes the place of providence – the world is made up of atoms that randomly ‘swerve’ in the void. This means

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and disdain (1996: 68–9). As the Theological-Political Treatise (Spinoza 2007: 45) clarifies, we follow the laws of nature from necessity rather than volition: [G]iven that nobody does anything except by the predetermined order of nature, that is, by the eternal decree and direction of God, it follows that no one chooses any way of life for himself nor brings anything about, except via the particular summons of God, who chose this man in preference to others for this task or that way of life.

Spinoza famously draws a radical indistinction between God and Nature (Deus sive Natura), which is above all why we must briefly consider what appears like perhaps the first attempt from within the metaphysical tradition to overcome the two-worlds distinction that arises from the true world.36 Spinoza finds the world’s plan to be purely immanent to the world, something that even the Stoic cosmos does not do. Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus, for example (Cleanthes was a student of Zeno, the father of Stoicism), identifies god as the world soul who nonetheless is not identical with the universe, which he directs: ‘The whole universe, spinning around the earth/goes wherever you lead it and is willingly guided by you’. For Spinoza, by contrast, as Deleuze (1988: 128) puts it: ‘a plane of immanence has no supplementary dimension; the process of composition must be apprehended for itself, through that which it gives, in that which it gives. It is a plan of composition, not a plan of organisation and development’. Spinoza rejects any notion of a transcendent God, of God as a sovereign or legislator somehow separate from his creation (Spinoza 2007: 64–5). God is not other than the world but is the world, which is thereby necessary or predetermined in every degree: ‘In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way’ (Spinoza 1996: 20). If we call a thing contingent, then, it

36

that ‘time does change/ The nature of the whole wide world; one state/ Develops from another; not one thing/ Is like itself forever; all things move,/ All things are nature’s wanderers, whom she gives/ no rest; ebb follows flow, disdain succeeds/ On admiration. Time indeed does change/ The nature of the whole wide world; one state/ Of generation follows on another,/ So earth no more has power to produce/ What once she bore, but can give birth to things/ Impossible before’. Yes, Spinoza is a metaphysician and was criticized, by Nietzsche for one, of providing a timeless image of the world by emphasising its necessity at every point. Spinoza’s substance is also infinite, unlike Nietzsche’s world. However, none of this should blind us to the many similarities between Nietzsche’s post-metaphysical thought and Spinoza’s. Nietzsche (2014: 16) dismisses Spinoza’s conatus, arguing that its identification of the desire for self-preservation as the fundamental character of being is dependent on a metaphysical ‘self ’ that survives becoming and which, by thereby re-positing the thing in itself, is incompatible with Nietzsche’s (2006: 129) own post-metaphysical ontology of will to power as self-overcoming: ‘Desire – to me that means: to have lost myself ’. Yet Nietzsche would have known from his own sources on Spinoza (whom he seems never to have read directly) that Spinoza’s conatus is no stagnant preservation in being but rather a striving or insistence of being. How this differs in the fundamentals from Nietzsche’s own will to power is a moot point (Urs Sommer 2012).

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is only because we do not understand it sufficiently (1996: 23). God is immediately and necessarily given in the world in the manner of a mathematical truth (and we should not forget that this is Spinoza’s criterion of truth, as the Appendix to Book I of the Ethics makes clear), which is similarly unconcerned with ends. There is no freedom because there is no will in Spinoza’s God – a most radical undoing of the split between the being and activity of God that Agamben identifies as the ontological shift that characterized the demise of Antiquity and rise of the Christian era. Even Plotinus’s emanation from the One, where it is also the case that the hypostases (existences) are necessary rather than a willed creation, yet moves out from God. Spinoza’s modes of God/Nature, by contrast, remain entirely in God (Agamben 2016: 162): ‘That eternal and infinite being we call God or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists’ (Spinoza 1996: 114). Being the immanent rather than the transitive cause of all things, ‘neither intellect nor will pertain to God’s nature’ (1996: 16, 14). Rather, ‘all things have been predetermined by God, not from freedom of the will or absolute good pleasure, but from God’s absolute nature’ (1996: 25).37 This is not Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds, a world which a transcendent God has willed having considered all possible alternatives. Spinoza’s radical monism rules out any idea of a division between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. There is nothing beyond the world (1996: 13) and therefore no providential government of it, either. Spinoza is insistent (1996: 25–6) that all the prejudices he seeks to expose in the Ethics ‘depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all things act, as men do, on account of an end’. He corrects this illusion decisively: ‘Nature has no end set before it, and [. . .] all final causes are nothing but human fictions.’ As he [God or Nature] exists for the sake of no end, he also acts for the sake of no end. Rather, as he has no principle or end of existing, so also he has none of acting. What is called a final cause is nothing but a human appetite insofar as it is considered as a principle, or primary cause, of some thing. (Spinoza 1996: 114)

We see here that Spinoza dispenses not only with a creator God separate from his creation but also with the Philosopher’s God, the Prime Mover. If Aristotle’s world requires this ultimate final cause, Spinoza’s world requires nothing. What Spinoza’s world lacks is only a telos, a telos that constitutes the two worlds by finding this world as not yet brought to completion or as caused by something

37

Taubes (2004: 79) believed that Spinoza’s emphasis on predetermination drew on the theology of predestination in Paul’s letters to the Romans.

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beyond itself. This means not only that the world needs no justification but also that it is perfect. Providential teleology, by contrast, ‘turns Nature completely upside down’, making what is most perfect imperfect: [For] that effect is most perfect which is produced immediately by God, and the more something requires several intermediate cause to produce it, the more imperfect it is. But if the things which have been produced immediately by God had been made so that God would achieve his end, then the last things, for the sake of which the first would have been made, would be the most excellent of all. Again, this doctrine takes away God’s perfection. For if God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants something which he lacks. (Spinoza 1996: 28)

Given that the eternal necessity and the greatest perfection of Nature are one and the same – ‘Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced’ (Spinoza 1996:  22; see also 154) – neither can there be any moral law hanging over the world by which the world is judged. Spinoza’s world, long before Nietzsche’s, is beyond good and evil: ‘I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes and bodies’ (1996: 69). Appetite is ‘the very essence of man’ such that what we call the good is what we strive for, rather than our striving aiming at something good in itself (1996: 76).38 Thus the free man, living according to reason alone, knows that everything is necessary and so cannot even conceive of evil; for ‘if the human mind had only adequate ideas, it would form no notion of evil’ (1996: 150). And, since good and evil are correlates, the free man, like God, neither conceives of the good (1996:  151–2). If God acted for the sake of the good then something would be placed ‘outside God, which does not depend on God, to which God attends, as a model, in what he does, and at which he aims, as a certain goal’ (1996: 25). It is in this sense, argues Spinoza (1996: 152), that the Biblical story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil should be understood. God prohibited the fruit of this tree because he knew that Adam, created a free man in the determination of his essence, would lose this freedom upon obtaining knowledge of good and evil, whereby things appear as if they are contingent. From the false knowledge of contingency comes the fear of death in place of the desire to live, and, according to the Ethics (1996: 151): ‘A free man thinks of nothing less than 38

Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (2007: 40) calls on Paul in support of this thesis, claiming that Paul ‘teaches nothing more plainly than that men have no power over the temptations of the flesh except by the calling and grace of God alone’.

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of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death.’ The life that the free man meditates on could not be otherwise than it is; it is free through the necessity of its nature alone. This is why Spinoza (1996: 70) describes our actions not in terms of us leading but rather as something following from our nature. The free man is free not in the sense of having choices (only the infant believes it freely wants milk), but in his contemplation of the divine necessity of all things. In this sense the free man is not born but becomes free; he frees himself when his being (unlike that of the belligerent, the coward or the drunk) is determined not by illusions of free will but by adequate ideas. This self-determination that is in no way a choice is freedom itself once we understand that freedom is destiny, a coming into possession of our essential (i.e. necessary and determined) power of acting (Deleuze 1988: 70; see also 1994: 83).39 As Deleuze (1988: 69, 97) says, nothing less than the ‘whole effort’ of the Ethics is directed at severing the link between freedom and will, and in God no less than in us. The notion of a purely immanent necessity also drives out the idea of a good order of the world, an order which, in implying the possibility of disorder, suggests that the world can take on different states – can be other than it is. The idea of a good order of the world could then only be a human, all too human, projection onto Nature that has no need of it (Spinoza 1996: 29–30): [Men] firmly believe, in their ignorance of things and of their own nature, that there is an order in things. For when things are so disposed that, when they are presented to us through the senses, we can easily imagine them [.  . .] we say that they are well-ordered; but if the opposite is true, we say that they are badly ordered, or confused [. . .] as if order were anything in Nature more than a relation to our imagination. [. . .] Men have been so mad as to believe that God is pleased by harmony. Indeed there are philosophers who have persuaded themselves that the motions of the heavens produce a harmony.

Spinoza here singles out the Pythagorean ‘harmony of the spheres’ for ridicule, but his attack is really much broader: aimed at all imaginations of the world as a cosmos, whereby the necessity of the world is only its good order as established in the superlunary realm. This apotheosis of the celestial bodies, of the heavens over the earth, robs the terrestrial sphere of its necessity and thereby allows it to appear as flawed. But once we see that Nature’s apparent imperfection is only our feeble estimation of the world according to how it pleases or offends us (Spinoza

39

‘The entire Ethics presents itself as a theory of power, in opposition to morality as a theory of obligations’ (Deleuze 1988: 104).

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1996: 31; 120), the earth is redeemed: ‘nothing happens in Nature which can be attributed to any defect in it, for nature is always the same’ (1996: 69). The unity in perfection of heaven and earth, God and man, is expressed in the proposition (1996: 176) that ‘The mind’s intellectual love of God [amor intellectualis dei] is the very love of God by which God loves himself ’. Thus our salvation or freedom consists ‘in a constant and eternal love of God, or in God’s love for men. And this love, or blessedness, is called glory in the Sacred Scriptures – not without reason’ (1996: 176–7). This glory, which, as in Plotinus, is the indistinction of our love for God and God’s love for us, is a glory quite other than that of the ‘governmental machine’, which is dependent upon the separation between sovereign principle and world. In this machine glory functions to veil the empty throne, thus enabling the reproduction of the Gnostic separation of God and world. That which is recovered in the identification of God and Nature is human potentiality. It seems strange that a philosopher that emphasizes necessity in all things, including in us, should restore our freedom. But in returning us to what is necessary, Spinoza believes that he enables us to overcome the sadness that is being cut off from what we can do. Sadness is a passage from greater to lesser perfection, not the privation of perfection itself, as if human perfection was somehow separate from human activity. Sadness is the loss of the power of acting rather than anything external, any telos, lost. Sadness is thereby ‘an act by which man’s power of acting is diminished or restrained’ (Spinoza 1996: 104). By the same token, the opposite of sadness, which Spinoza calls joy, ‘is not perfection itself, but passing from less to more of it’. Perfection is not something apart from our existence, ‘but on the contrary asserts it’ (1996: 8). The more reality the more perfection, and vice versa (1996: 33). But given that ‘no one has yet determined what the body can do’ (1996: 71–2) what this reality is capable of remains an open question. Spinoza anticipates Nietzsche’s disdain for a fixed realism. Spinoza would not disagree with Zarathustra’s injunction (Nietzsche 2006: 235) to ‘Will nothing beyond your capacity’, because, like Zarathustra, he knows that this capacity is not a known quantity but rather a matter of forces, a matter of the capacity for being affected in ways which either increase or decrease the power of acting (Spinoza 1996: 70). For all that it is still unknown what exactly it can accomplish, what does the passage to a greater perfection consist in? Blessedness. Since all things are in God, all is conceived through God, and it follows from this (1996: 61) that ‘The human mind has an adequate knowledge of God’s eternal and infinite essence’, which is known to all, even if mostly unclearly. Blessedness, then, is a gain in

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understanding by which all doubt is banished as it is understood that ‘we act only from God’s command, that we share in the divine nature’, and this ‘the more and more we understand God’. Understanding thereby brings us ‘complete peace of mind’ by teaching us ‘wherein our greatest happiness, or blessedness consists:  namely, in the knowledge of God alone’ (1996:  67). In the perfection of the mind through understanding we thereby pass from hope, which is only an incomplete joy, to the confidence that is hope with all doubt removed, namely completeness of joy (1996: 81, 106). In addition to our own blessedness, true understanding also contributes to blessing our life with others ‘insofar as it teaches us to hate no one, to disesteem no one, to mock no one, to be angry at no one, to envy no one’ (1996: 68). For those who understand ‘that all things follow from the necessity of divine nature’ will ‘surely find nothing worthy of hate, mockery, or disdain’ (1996: 142). Once we have understood that our neighbour is caused rather than free we have less reason to hate him when he harms us (1996: 95). If we keep in mind ‘that men, like other things, act from the necessity of nature, then the wrong, or the hate usually arising from it, will occupy a very small part of the imagination, and will easily be overcome’ (1996: 167). The man of ressentiment, by contrast, will be happy with nothing less than sinners, with people who are responsible and therefore guilty (Deleuze 1983: 119). Similarly where we ourselves are concerned, if repentance is a sadness occasioned by the idea of something we believe ourselves to have done from a free decision (Spinoza 1996: 108), then upon the realization that there are no free decisions, neither must we repent. ‘Repentance is not a virtue, or does not arise from reason; instead, he who repents what he has done is twice wretched’ (1996: 144). A man whose deeds are not attributable to him is no longer guilty. The Moral Law has no hold on him.40 Spinoza’s belief in the divine necessity of the world allows him to posit that reason demands that: we love and esteem ourselves (1996: 125, 143), want nothing that we do not desire also for others (1996: 126, 134), and, insofar as we live according to reason, agree in very nature with other men and thereby always

40

Compare this with Kant where, as Heidegger notes (2002b: 155; see also 179–80), ‘we decide for freedom as the condition of the possibility of responsibility and thus of morality’. Kant requires freedom for the sake of his Moral Law. In the Critique of Practical Reason (Kant 2002: 124–5), we read: ‘Let a human being use what art he wants in order to paint to himself a remembered unlawful behavior as an unintentional oversight [. . .] and to declare himself innocent of it; he nonetheless finds that the lawyer who speaks in his favor can in no way silence the prosecutor in him, if only he is conscious that at the time when he committed the wrong he was in his senses, i.e., had the use of his freedom.’

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find agreement with them. For ‘it is not by accident that man’s greatest good is common to all; rather it arises from the very nature of reason’ (1996: 132–3). Indeed, such is Spinoza’s confidence in self, others and what we can do together that he is able to displace the ancient claim that ‘man is a wolf to man’ with ‘man is a God to man’ (ibid.). While this reversal is occasioned only in the light of reason that few men in practice follow, it nonetheless remains the case that faith in man is built on the ultimate foundation of Nature itself: So let the satirists laugh as much as they like at human affairs, let the theologians curse them, let melancholics praise as much as they can a life that is uncultivated and wild, let them disdain men and admire the lower animals. Men still find from experience that by helping one another they can provide themselves much more easily with the things they require, and that only by joining forces can they avoid the dangers which threaten on all sides. (1996: 133)

The free man, living according to reason, ‘strives to join other men to him in friendship’ and, indeed, free men, being very useful to one another, are ‘joined to one another by the closest bond of friendship and strive to benefit one another with equal eagerness for love’ (1996: 153). Spinoza thinks the world as divine not in the sense that it is a providential order, but immediately so, just as it is  – hence his amor intellectualis dei, the mind’s love of God/Nature. Of course, inasmuch as he is telling the timeless truth of the world, Spinoza remains wholly within the metaphysical tradition41 – as Nietzsche often reminds us, seeking above all not to be confused with his predecessor in world-affirmation (Urs Sommer). But something interesting happens when this truth of the world is held to be purely immanent to the world that it claims correspondence to. For the true world disappears from view just at the point in which it coincides entirely with the world as we find it, without remainder. That Spinoza thought this world as necessary being contra Nietzsche’s world of blind becoming is only a matter of emphasis when we recall that, in Nietzsche’s eternal return, the becoming of the will to power is also forever the same in the eternal return. Neither is this difference of emphasis between a necessary world and a contingent world significant from the standpoint of Nietzsche’s own concern with the overcoming of nihilism – after all, Spinoza’s world passes the most important test there is for Nietzsche: the test of the affirmation of our world. And just as much as Nietzsche, Spinoza accomplishes the negation of providence,

41

‘Being finite is really, in part, a negation, and being infinite is an absolute affirmation of the existence of some nature’ (Spinoza 1996: 4).

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which always presupposes an outside – namely the true world. For Nietzsche, as for Spinoza, the absence of providence is also, positively, that the world needs no justification. In this sense the amor intellectualis dei and amor fati are not as far apart as Nietzsche protested they are.42 *** As our overview of the metaphysics of the true world has indicated, the shift in emphasis from truth as truth of the world to truth as immanent in the world is usually seen as a modern accomplishment, in particular one due to Heidegger. Yet Spinoza can be read as anticipating this same theme through his refusal of a providential ordering of the world, which takes him, like Nietzsche and Heidegger, beyond cosmic necessity and its idea of the truth of the world as somehow above the world. Spinoza’s world is necessary not only at the cosmic level, in the order of the heavens, but all the way down. And only absent any primary cause of things, as Nietzsche (2005: 182) argued much later, can it be that nobody is held responsible any longer. This is the great liberation. Having considered the true world as a problem, we now turn in the rest of the book to attempts to think, and indeed to live, beyond the true world. Spinoza thinks the true world in its identity with this world, and this enables him also to conceive the true life as immanent rather than transcendent to the world. It is nonetheless the case that Spinoza has to go by way of metaphysical speculation on the truth of the world in order to get to this point: Spinoza seeks, after all, ‘true knowledge of things’ or ‘to explain Nature’ (Ethics Book I, Appendix). As we shall see in the next chapter, the Cynics of Antiquity rather believed that the true life of philosophy had no need whatever of the true world, even defining themselves through their exclusion of speculative philosophy, which they deemed unnecessary for living the life of truth.

42

Hence his overwrought dismissals (Nietzsche 2003: 226–7) of Spinoza’s love for the world as drained of blood by Spinoza’s insipid rationalism in contrast to Nietzsche’s return to pathos – to the affirmation of a world of suffering (Urs Sommer, 2012: 170).

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Cynic Nihilism

I am thinking of the first night of Diogenes [. . .] as long as philosophers do not muster the courage to seek an entirely different lifestyle and demonstrate it by their own example, they will come to nothing. (Nietzsche, unpublished fragment from notebook of 1874)1 Zarathustra admits to his animals that, having once seen the great and the good among men unclothed, his realization of the all-too-human smallness of even the best made him sick. This nausea at man, however, is revealed later as a snake that, having crawled into Zarathustra’s throat and bitten fast, is choking him. Nobody can help Zarathustra by pulling it out. Only by biting the head off the serpent can Zarathustra finally cure himself of his nihilism – which at bottom is nothing other than his disgust at the animality, the utter this-worldliness, of man (Nietzsche 2006: 71, 127, 75; see also Nietzsche 2005: 83–4). If Zarathustra initially finds the sight of the best when stripped of their clothes a cause for despair, the Cynics of Antiquity found in the unadorned body rather the affirmation of existence. That the naked body reveals conventional estimations of who is the best as nothing – stripped of his robes in the manner of the Cynic Diogenes, even Alexander the Great is shown as a man like any other – is not a crisis for the Cynics, but rather a reason for celebration. For the reduced existence of the one who goes naked and unadorned is closer to the truth of existence. Nietzsche (2006: 80) claims that truthful is the one who has ‘broken his revering heart’, who will never be persuaded to be like the ‘comfortable ones’, and who is ‘fearless and fearsome, great and lonely’. As we shall see, Nietzsche could have been describing Diogenes when he wrote these lines. Ancient Cynicism presents us with a form of nihilism that calls into question a too easy identification of nihilism with the loss of world. For the nihilism of 1

Cited in Jensen (2004: 183).

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the Cynics underpinned not passivity and other-worldliness but the most militant care for the world. The Cynics conceived truth as entirely other than the truth of the world, finding it rather in the true life. The true life in Cynicism is a nihilism not of the world – the Cynic, engaged in a combative care for all men, could not be less interested in the elsewhere – but of the law (nomos). Indeed, only by stripping away the laws (nomoi) can the true life as universal friendship be found. The Cynic struggles to reveal the truth of existence itself, which is the truth of being as being-in-common, that the divisions of customary morality hide. This simple truth of being means that very little in the way of life is needed for the truth and very little truth is necessary for life (Foucault 2011: 190). Yet if truth is simple, indeed the simplest thing, because it must be lived it is not easy to attain. The true life is not everyday existence that merely follows a moral code imposed from the outside; it is rather a life that forms itself by truth and a truth which is found only by following a way of life. But this life is the hardest and, although all are called to it, only a few will pass the test: ‘The necessity of commitment for the philosopher – if, as is the case, philosophy is actual and remains only as work – is simultaneously the necessity of exposure’ (Heidegger 1988: 39). Cynicism is the most misunderstood and neglected of the ancient philosophical schools, partly because it was not a school, passing on little in the way of doctrine and relying instead on tales of exemplary lives (Julian 1992: 19). But in Antiquity the Cynic was a well-known and formidable figure.2 Even Alexander the Great, on his conquest of Corinth, sought out Diogenes of Sinope. Having found him sunbathing, Alexander is recorded by Plutarch (2012) and Diogenes Laertius (1991) as saying that if he had not been Alexander then he would have liked to have been Diogenes – the same Diogenes who lived naked in a barrel. By Plutarch’s account, Diogenes did not return the favour, telling Alexander that, if he were Alexander, he too would wish to be Diogenes. Semi-mythical figure that Diogenes may be, the tales of this philosophical hero as passed down in the Cynic tradition give us a clear sense of Cynicism in Antiquity as a body of truth. One theme in particular stands out as singular in Cynicism: the relationship of the Cynic to political power. Diogenes was not only indifferent to imperial power – hence his snub of Alexander – but was also proudly apolis, without a state, a term used by Epictetus (2010) in his description of the Cynic life. Contrary to the received wisdom of Antiquity, pity the one 2

‘And as for the Cynics, as they are called, it is true that the city contains no small number of the sect’ mentions Dio Chrysostom (1932: 181) about Alexandria in the first century. In the second century Lucian (1968: 99–100) bemoans this ‘vile race’ that ‘bawl and bark and bray against all comers’. The Emperor Julian is still denouncing them in the fourth century.

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who is condemned, as Diogenes put it, to the domesticated life of the citizen (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 51). It therefore was not an accident that this naked, destitute, ignominious exile was the first to call himself a kosmopolitês, a ‘citizen’ of the world (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 65; Julian 1992: 238). In fact, only a Cynic could have adopted this stance, for cosmopolitanism could not have come into being without the negation of the state, of the empires and polities that divide humanity. As the state was first devalued, the ‘brotherhood of man’, as the Stoics – much influenced by the Cynics – later called it, became capable of being valued. The Cynic’s cosmopolitanism, then, while it identifies him, as we shall see, with world understood as the universality of being, distances him from cosmos as a universe of assigned places. The Cynic negates the stations that characterize cosmos, which is why he finds himself the brother of all. To have neither citizenship nor a slave is to subtract oneself from the nomos of the world as it is expressed in the rankings of cosmos.3 Neither free man nor slave, the Cynic is thereby acosmic, also. The phusis he lives according to is not, as it is usually understood, ‘natural law’ (this Stoic notion is developed fully long after Diogenes) but rather his essential freedom from any law, even those laws of nature that apply to his very body. This is clear from Epictetus’s account of the ideal Cynic: the body is a slave to disease, and therefore not free, but is there nothing in man’s possession that is free? ‘And who is able to compel you to assent to that which appears false? No man. And who can compel you not to assent to that which appears true? No man. By this then you see that there is something in you naturally free [. . .] Wretched men, work out this, take care of this, seek for good here’ (Epictetus 2010: 252). The Cynics’ freedom, is, as Heidegger would have it (not that Heidegger ever had anything to say about the Cynics), a freedom for ground as that which, in Dasein, is precisely groundless rather than law-like. The Cynics are clearly the point of emergence of this decisive shift away from nomos since Socrates, who the first Cynic (Antisthenes) had been a student of and whom all Cynics revered, never himself calls nomos into question. To the contrary: as we know from the Crito, Socrates argues that the laws of the city are effectively his parents and should never be disobeyed, even unto death. It is true that Socrates questions whether the demos can have any relation to truth, arguing in his apology that he had never sought to practice his truth-telling in the Assembly since this would

3

When upon his exile Diogenes was abandoned by his slave, he announced: ‘If Manes can live without Diogenes, why not Diogenes without Manes?’ (Seneca 2007: 125).

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certainly have led to his death. So the questioning of the democratic form of the polity (which, besides, was customary for the Athenian aristocracy) is already present in Socrates, but the polis is as yet excluded from this questioning – and with it the nomoi as such. The laws of democratic regimes may not be the best, but the just polity will have good laws. The Cynic radicalization of Socratic questioning is nowhere more apparent than in their very different relationship to the polis, which the Cynics rejected. In pursuing the true life, the Cynic finds himself in a position of radical exteriority to custom, which, after all, is not founded in truth but precisely in convention.4 The true life turns out to be radically nihilistic, finding that nothing much of everyday life has any relation to truth. The Cynic therefore spurns the customary laws which stipulate that one should take a wife, have children, eat and have sex only in private, and so on. Diogenes, infamously, scorns all of this as having no foundation in ‘nature’ (phusis), even to the extent of masturbating in the marketplace. To crown it all, the Cynic will be contemptuous of the citizenship that, in Aristotle’s view (Politics, Book 1, ch. 2), is the very essence of what is proper to man and what distinguishes him from a wild animal. From where did this radicalization spring? There are a number of possibilities. Foucault (2011) argues that the Cynics simply took the Socratic will to truth more seriously by applying it to their entire existence rather than merely to their logos. As Foucault was well aware, there was much in Socrates that pointed already to philosophy as a way of life and to truth as the living of a true life, albeit minus the scandalous element central to Cynicism. The Cynic insistence on the indifference of the true life to convention was already a Socratic theme, as Plato’s Gorgias makes clear. At the end of the Gorgias, Socrates recounts a myth of the judgements given to souls on their death, judgements which Zeus insists be passed on naked bodies such that the wealth and rank of the deceased should not blind the judges to the true state of their souls. For Socrates, however, the truth as manifest in the unadorned body has to wait for the hereafter, whereas Cynic nudity is lived. In Foucault’s telling (2011:  172), the connection between truth and existence in Cynicism is threefold. First, the Cynic mode of existence is a precondition of truth-telling. It is not possible to tell the truth while still invested in customary ways of life or while remaining beholden to power. Second, in its

4

‘Each particular [social] obligation is conventional and can border on the absurd; the only thing that is grounded is the obligation to have obligations, “the whole of obligation”; and it is not grounded in reason’ (Deleuze 1991: 108).

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negating function, the Cynic form of life makes space for truth-telling. Having stripped away conventions, even his clothes, the Cynic distinguishes what is true in existence (e.g. equality of embodiment) from what is not (the forms of dress that establishes ranks between bodies). Third, Cynic existence manifests truth through the style it gives to life – the actions, even the naked body, of the Cynic makes truth visible, is literally an embodiment of the truth. Finally, truth and existence come together in ‘the work of the truth of self on self ’ (2011:  310). The Cynic must constantly take the true measure of himself, of what he can do. Epictetus (2010: 253) compares the Cynic to an athlete who must examine himself in the mirror, seeing how strong he has become and what remains to be done. The true life involves telling oneself the truth in order to change.5 The true life that the Cynic practices in these ways is however only the notion of the true life common to all ancient philosophy taken to its limits: a kind of ‘carnivalesque continuity of the theme’ that ends up reversing this theme, as Foucault shows (2011: 228). Thus the true life as a sovereign life – an entirely classical theme  – becomes the life so sovereign that, dispensing with everything external to the soul beyond the body’s most basic needs, it is transformed into a life of begging, even slavery. In this way, Cynicism is the sword that divides: shocking the philosophical conscience by revealing that it takes an entirely other life to remain true to the principles of the true life. The true life is an other life; life changes when the true life is actually lived (Foucault 2011: 244– 5; 314).6 As Diogenes responded when confronted with having falsified the currency in his native Sinope: ‘That was the time when I was such as you are now; but such as I am now, you will never be’ (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 59). Although an ascetic, in no way does the Cynic see life as an evil. Diogenes Laertius (1991: 21 and 57) has both Antisthenes and Diogenes state this explicitly: Antisthenes when, seeking relief from terrible pain, refuses the offer of a dagger with the rejoinder that he wants to be relieved only of pain, and Diogenes says that not life but living ill is what is evil. Rather than being tired of life and resentful at the strong, the Cynics’ nihilism with regard to custom was itself a test of strength and force of life. Indeed, in his agonistic fervour to be the best at living according to phusis, the Cynic appears to remain very Greek, except 5 6

See Dio Chrysostom (1932: 101). Another possible source of Cynic radicalization with regard to the nomoi is latent already in Presocratic philosophy – for example in Parmenides, the way of being involves rejecting the way of semblance, and custom is the first casualty of this way. Heraclitus, meanwhile (in Burnet 1908: 153), refers to universal being in Fragment 114: ‘Those who speak with understanding must hold fast to what is common to all as a city holds fast to its law, and even more strongly. For all human laws are fed by the divine one. It prevails as much as it will, and suffices for all things with something to spare.’

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that, as we shall see, this competitive streak is connected more to his profound philanthropy, to his friendship of all humanity, than to the agonistic drive for individual glory. In the Emperor Julian’s account (1992: 61) of the Cynics, for instance, Diogenes’s legendary public displays of his natural functions is not described as self-interested but as motivated by care:  ‘When Diogenes made unseemly noises or obeyed the call of nature or did anything else of that sort in the marketplace, as they say he did, he did so because he was trying to trample on the conceit of [man]’. Zarathustra, in this sense, is like an echo of Diogenes: ‘I walk among these people and keep my eyes open; they do not forgive me that I am not envious of their virtue’ (Nietzsche 2006: 133).

Phusis The decisive injunction for the Cynic of Antiquity, hence the famous quote that the Cynic tradition places on the lips of Diogenes, was to live according to phusis rather than nomos. The Sophists too (as we know from Plato’s dialogues the Gorgias and the Protagoras) argued that nomos is only convention rather than anything given by phusis, but they, unlike the Cynics, used this argument for purely rhetorical gains. They certainly did not live according to it as the Cynics sought to. Reflecting on what phusis signified in Greek Antiquity is therefore of critical importance to understanding the Cynic life. As Heidegger argued in his Introduction to Metaphysics (2000: 14–19; see also 1992b: 139), phusis should not be translated as nature in our Latinized sense of the term (natura means birth). Greek phusis is rather to grow or become; what emerges from itself in the manner of the blossoming of the flower – namely ‘Being itself, by virtue of which beings first become and remain observable’. According to Heidegger (2000: 15), then, the Greeks did not first experience phusis in natural processes but rather encountered these processes in phusis: ‘only on the basis of this disclosure [of beings] could they then take a look at nature in the narrower sense’ as something only ‘physical’ (2000: 16). Phusis is a name for Being.7 The fundamental connection between truth and being for the Greeks was one of Heidegger’s recurrent themes (e.g. 2000: 107–10; 1992b: 26; 2002b: 63–5). Truth is aletheia: in Heidegger’s translation Erschlossenheit, unconcealment, or 7

Foucault, however, persists with the usual ‘nature’ (see, for example, 2011: 263). But that being is a better translation than nature is clear as much in the Stoic School as in the Cynics, where the notion of living according to phusis in Chrysippus, for example, means our individual nature as well as the nature of the universe (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 195).

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Unverborgenheit, unhiddenness. The word aletheia is derived from the river Lethe, the river of oblivion in Hades. A-letheia is therefore given in the negative form as a description of being as what is not in oblivion, as what comes to unconcealment. This, for Heidegger, is also the sense of phusis. Being and truth say the same thing. Our representational concept of truth – truth as correspondence (adaequatio) of our representations with some external object – is, according to Heidegger, entirely foreign to the Greeks.8 Greek being is that which comes to stand in unconcealment of its own accord, not because a subject has comprehended it: ‘[Phusis] signifies precisely a being which has the [arche] of its Being in itself rather than, as is the case with [poiesis] . . . by means of human knowledge and production’ (2003: 146). It is Being, not human being, that ‘asserts its truth in what its projection allows to be seen’, or, to put it another way, truth is a trait of beings themselves, not of the correctness of the human gaze (1990: 159; 1998c: 177). For Heidegger this means that the question of truth does not belong, as is customary, to logic and epistemology but properly (and originally for the Greeks) to ontology. Being-true is not a matter of propositions about or knowledge of beings, not a matter of grasping of beings in thought, but rather a property of beings themselves (2002b: 55). Being-true, for the Greeks, is the most proper mode of being (2002b:  61–2). In propositional truth-claims about beings we only ‘preserve and secure’ this primordial truth of the unconcealment of beings (2002b: 64). What is seized in knowledge is nothing other than beings ‘beingthere-in-themselves’, their presence as this ‘offers itself without distortion’. What knowledge appropriates is only this prior ‘truth of beings’, namely their unconcealedness (aletheia) (2003: 191, emphasis added). As Aristotle says in Book 9 of the Metaphysics (1051b): ‘It is not because we think truly that you are pale that you are pale, but because you are pale that we who say this have the truth’. And already in Book 2 (993b): ‘as each thing is in respect of being, so it is in respect of truth’. This means that it is right to call philosophy ‘a knowledge of truth’ (993b). Philosophy does not yet, as later it will, misunderstand its vocation as a theory of truth understood as knowledge. Rather, philosophy can have knowledge of truth, as beings in their unveiledness (Heidegger 2002b: 76). If truth is ‘letting be seen’, what shows itself, then untruth is distortion, a showing that twists what is shown (Heidegger 2003: 350; 2002b: 64). The Cynics sought to define themselves by truth-telling. And what truth did they tell?

8

As Heidegger notes elsewhere (1990: 8), even Kant’s Copernican revolution in knowledge, by which the object now agrees with the subject rather than vice versa, continues to assume this correspondence model of truth.

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Nothing esoteric, nothing otherworldly: only that men as they live customarily live in error. Distortion is what they must then have seen in nomos, in convention. Custom is not in truth but in semblance. The state, as the embodiment of nomos, appears to be, which is to say that what comes to appearance appears by way of distortion rather than in self-showing being (phusis). In the Sophist, Plato suggested that there is a showing that conceals, the pseudes logos of sophistry. What false speech shows is not nothing – the image really is, as an image – but it does not appear as it really is and in this sense is not only incorrect but leads astray (Heidegger 2003: 282, 297, 418; 2002b: 64, 69). When Alexander appears before Diogenes, convention would have it that he is a great King, perhaps the greatest. Diogenes, by contrast, in telling Alexander to step out of his light, sees only a man, which is indeed all that phusis, as opposed to nomos, gives of Alexander. While the great King is in some way (nomos too reveals, only its revelation is a distortion), Diogenes chooses to acknowledge only what is unconcealed by being ‘itself ’ of the potentate standing over him. For if truth for the Greeks is aletheia, then true speech ‘discloses the thing addressed for what it is’ (Heidegger 2003: 353; see also 418). The logos is always about something, and therefore can only either disclose or distort (Heidegger 2003: 417). For Heidegger (2002b:  65, 69), truth as unconcealment  – being as beingtrue – leads the Greeks to being as constant presence. Thus for Aristotle, accidental beings (beings that alter – such as the paleness of Socrates – rather than those that undergo substantial change – such as the acorn that becomes an oak), can have no proper relation to truth since what they are unveiled as may change at any moment, leading to the ever-present possibility of untruth. While Aristotle is the first to really think time he does not manage to align it with truth:  ‘As regards things which cannot be otherwise the same opinion is not sometimes true and sometimes false, but the same opinions are always true or always false’ (Metaphysics, Book 9: 1051b). Indeed, working from being as constant presence, that being is most true that, incapable of any relation to anything else, can never change; a being that thereby can never be mistaken for something other than it is (Heidegger 2002b: 70–1). This non-relational being that is never presented as something but which manifests only itself is the highest and purest being, absolutely unmediated – the Philosopher’s God. Truth as aletheia is therefore still inside Heidegger’s forgetting of Being: while the Greeks, unlike the moderns, saw that truth is always a question of being, they did not yet question being sufficiently. Asking the leading question of ontology (‘what is the being of beings?’), they did not yet ask the fundamental question,

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the question of Being ‘itself ’. ‘Our more radical conception of the problem’, writes Heidegger (2002b: 73), ‘means that, if beings are to be discoverable and determinable at all, being must be constantly deconcealed’. For Heidegger, unlike for his Greeks, what is constant is not presence but deconcealment, not beings but Being. Indeed, permanent presence can only be encountered in and through mortal, finite time. The idea of permanence is first given to us in our everyday relation to beings, especially the being that we ourselves are. For it is our own experience of self-constancy that is the source of our understanding of permanent presence (2002b: 122).9 Yet despite this difference from the Greeks, Heidegger’s truth as the truth of Being remains Greek, and for good reason:  notwithstanding the forgetting of Being, it remains the case that philosophy (Heidegger’s too) is only able to distinguish itself from sophistry by shaping its bios, its form of life, according to Being rather than appearance. Heidegger does not have the Cynic in mind in the following passage, but it applies perhaps best of all to him: The philosopher, as the representative of this radical research, has absolutely and purely decided in favour of substance over semblance . . . The sophist [by contrast] has made a decision in favour of form, in favour of [an] aesthetic ideal of human existence, i.e., actually in favour of an unconcern with substantive content, whereas the philosopher has a [proairesis, decision] . . . in favour of the [bios] of . . . uncoverdness in itself (2003: 149).

Foucault’s Cynics And how is it possible that a man who has nothing, who is naked, houseless, without a hearth, squalid, without a slave, without a city, can pass a life that flows easily? See, God has sent you a man to show you that it is possible? (Epictetus 2010: 146)

Foucault’s genealogy of ancient parrhēsia (the courage of truth), the topic of his last lectures at the Collège de France shortly before his death in 1984, seizes on

9

Compare with Descartes (1911: 16), for whom it is the other way round: ‘Hence there remains only the idea of God, concerning which we must consider whether it is something which cannot have proceeded from me myself. By the name of God I  understand a substance that is infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, all-knowing, [and] allpowerful [. . .] Now all these characteristics are such that the more diligently I attend to them, the less do they appear capable of proceeding from me alone; hence [. . .] we must conclude that God necessarily exists.’

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Cynicism and finds something singular there where his history of truth is concerned. Foucault locates in ancient Cynicism another way of philosophy to the path of ‘Platonism’. This is philosophy as a way of life. Ancient philosophy as bios rather than logos had of course not been forgotten, as for example in the work of Pierre Hadot (see 2002)  that Foucault himself was influenced by.10 But for Foucault (2010: 286) the real alternative to Platonism in Antiquity is not philosophy as a way of life as such: neither Epicureanism (the natural philosophy that Nietzsche, for example in The Anti-Christ §58, takes to be the chief opponent of Platonism in Antiquity), nor Stoicism, but Cynicism is what really escapes metaphysical capture. The contrast with Platonism in the Cynic tradition is explicit and extreme. Take the Platonic figure of the philosopher king, for example:  while Plato sought to make the tyrant of Syracuse worthy of kingship by teaching him philosophy, Diogenes is always portrayed by the Cynics as treating claims to kingship with utter derision. And if Plato sought to confront the Prince with the truth in order to change him then Diogenes told the Prince the truth in order to ridicule him. Who could be further removed from the model of the philosopher king than the anti-king Diogenes? This is anti-Platonism at its purest (Foucault 2010: 287). What especially interests Foucault in Cynicism, then, is that here we arrive at the maximum remove from the philosophical logos without in any way rejecting this logos (which would remain tied to it as its negation, which is the problem faced by anti-philosophy). With Diogenes, philosophical truth-telling, while retained, is nonetheless reduced entirely to the truth as made manifest in the here and now: as literally embodied truth. Diogenes does not confront the Prince with his logos but with his nakedness, homelessness and rudeness. This is not a philosophical telling of the truth to power but a ‘philosophical being true’ in the face of power (Foucault 2010: 287, emphasis added). From this perspective, philosophy’s problem is not the truth of politics but of remaining a subject of truth in the face of politics. Philosophy’s truth in relation to politics is a matter of ergon (act) not logos (discourse), and in relation to ethos rather than the polis (Foucault 2010: 319–20). This is truth-telling that lives the truth rather than persuading of the truth, which is the way of rhetoric and therefore of sophistry (Foucault 2010: 320, 343).

10

Although Foucault’s interest in philosophy as a way of life in Antiquity was undoubtedly influenced by Hadot, Foucault’s concern, as a genealogist, is with the link of this ancient philosophical ethos and the present. Hadot’s concerns, by contrast, are more conventionally historical.

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Heidegger had already noticed from his reading of Plato’s Sophist (2003: 168) that Socrates sees the ‘real philosopher’, in contradistinction to the Sophist, as the one who actually lives the life of philosophy, which is to live in truth (aletheia) (2003: 262). The true philosopher, as Plato says, looks ‘down from above on the bios of those who are beneath’ him. Heidegger notes that the word zoē – life in the sense of everything that moves and grows – is not used here by Plato, but rather bios: ‘life in the sense of existence, the leading of a life, which is characterized by a determinate telos, a telos functioning for the bios itself as an object of praxis. The theme of the philosopher is thus the bios of man . . .’ (2003: 168). Less this looking down on the bios by the true philosopher be mistaken for purely passive contemplation, what is implied here, argues Heidegger (2003: 168), is that in order to be able to properly see bios, the philosopher himself must have achieved a bios that enables a view of existence in general. The philosopher can only see the bios, the ‘being-there’, of human existence for what it is once his own life is fully formed by the bios of philosophy.11 He can only see the truth when he lives the truth. In Cynicism, philosophy understood as bios takes a unique path. By radicalizing the Socratic injunction to care for the self, which for Socrates is to take care of the capacity for truth that is the soul, the Cynic displaces the will to truth from discourse to existence, from the logos to life. The Cynic is the first subject to seek actually to live the truth. After all, as Diogenes remarked, even Socrates went home in the evening to his bed and slippers (Foucault 2011: 258). Socrates’s life simply had too much in common with conventional existence to be the true life. Customary lives cannot access the true life – this is the nihilism of Cynicism and the entirely positive relation of this nihilism to truth. Foucault demonstrates (2011:  219–28) that the Platonic principles of truth (alētheia), namely truth as that which is clear, pure, straight and unchanging, when applied to the life of the Cynic rather than to propositions about the world, took on a very different sense from metaphysical truth. The true life (alēthēs bios) in Platonism is an unconcealed life, an unalloyed life, a life of rectitude that accords with the nomos, and, finally, a self-identical life defined by its independence and self-mastery. Yet with the Cynics, this metaphysical existence is

11

Indeed, as Heidegger points out in a discussion of the Phaedrus (2003: 221), even the rhetoric taught and deployed by the Sophist is redeemable for Plato if it is founded on the true life of philosophy. Once given the foundation of true speech (parrhēsia) and, no longer limited to the political speeches given in court or in the Assembly, once it becomes a speech which relates to every moment, then even rhetoric becomes, in Plato’s words, ‘a know-how in guiding the existence of others by means of speaking with them’.

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overcome not through being rejected or inverted but through its intensification, through ‘making the theme of the true life grimace’ (2011: 227). Using the Cynics’ own metaphor of changing the value of the currency (parakharattein to nomisma), Foucault notes that the Cynics do not find a true life elsewhere, but play with the true life that they find in Platonism in a way that profoundly transvalues it from within (2011: 228).12 Perhaps this is why Diogenes Laertius (1991: 55) has Plato saying that Diogenes the Cynic is a Socrates gone mad. Taking the theme of the unconcealed life that has nothing to hide or be ashamed of, first; the Cynics radicalized this theme with the shameless life, the life without modesty that is a dog’s life (κυνικός – kynikos – meant dog-like) in that it was carried out entirely in public, hiding nothing (Foucault 2011: 243). Second, the pure life without admixture or dependency became with the Cynic the utterly indifferent life of active poverty, a living that needed nothing, not even a cup to drink from (2011:  244). The paradox here is that the pure and self-sufficient life, which in Platonism was a life of beauty, was thereby transformed into its opposite:  a life of ugly destitution, even begging (2011:  259). This adoxia (dishonour) was a profound reversal of Greek ethics (2011: 261). Third, the straight life lived in line with the nomoi, the laws of the city, became the life that obeyed only nature, copulating in public if needs be. As such, the straight, true life ended up being not the life of the citizen but animal existence, the very thing that the philosophical-humanist tradition always defined itself against (2011: 264). The animalistic existence of the Cynic was not some return to nature’s laws, then, but rather a direct, if extreme, result of philosophical truth-telling put into practice. Cynic animality was no original nature to be recovered but rather a way of relating to oneself in the form of an ongoing test: ‘Animality is not a given; it is a duty’ (2011: 265).13 Finally, the tranquillity of the sovereignly self-same life became the aggressive polemicizing of a life that remained identical with itself only through its confrontation with everyday life. Foucault sees the metaphysical conception of truth being transformed in Cynic existence not so much through the mutation of metaphysical principles as through the shift in their sphere of application away from the logos. By giving a form to existence rather than a truth of the world, metaphysical truth becomes 12

13

Foucault notes (2011: 227) that in this expression ‘change the value of the currency’ (parakharattein to nomisma), the verb parakharattein signifies change or alteration rather than devaluation. And here Foucault sees that Cynicism was never a valorization of the laws of nature as such, something which his conventional translation of phusis as ‘nature’ prevents him from getting to more directly. Contra Foucault (2011:  282), even the Cynics’ censure of Prometheus for giving fire to humanity bemoans not the loss of some primordial naturalness but rather the ‘softness and love of luxury’ that resulted (Dio Chrysostom 1932: 264–5).

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a principle of differentiation in which the true life is shown to be radically other than everyday existence: ‘With this idea that the true life is an other life (vie autre), I think we arrive at a particularly important point in the history of Cynicism, in the history of philosophy, certainly in the history of Western ethics’ (2011: 244). The other life (the life of truth) is not lived in another (true) world but rather radically changes this life (2011: 245). While Platonism poses the question of the other world, Socrates, at least as he was taken up in Cynicism, poses the question of the other life. And indeed, for Foucault, this division is internal to Plato’s dialogues themselves. For while the Alcibiades, the urtext of the Neoplatonists, takes Socratic care of self towards the question of what this self is, finding its answer in the immortal soul, the Laches rather asks what this care looks like. As Socrates says at the end of the dialogue: ‘I maintain, my friends, that every one of us should seek out the best teacher whom he can find, first for ourselves, who are greatly in need of one, and then for the youth, regardless of expense or anything. But I cannot advise that we remain as we are.’ So the being of the self is one question of the dialogues, but the existence of care is another. The former takes the first steps towards the other world, the latter towards giving (another) form to life (2011: 246). This latter path, however, has been largely eclipsed. Philosophy has forgotten that it was not only a form of true discourse but also a way of life, truth as a mode of existence. Foucault even considers (2011: 235), after Heidegger, whether this was its destiny. But very differently from Heidegger, Foucault offers some concrete reasons for this forgetting, which are not only internal to metaphysics itself (and in this sense Foucault [2010: 350] rejects the whole idea of philosophy having a radical origin in forgetting). First, Christianity to some extent colonized the Cynics’ challenge of the true life from the end of Antiquity onwards and, second, the institutionalization of truth-telling practices in scientific institutions has further erased the theme of the true life in modernity (2011: 235).

Apolis We without homeland – yes! But let’s exploit the advantages of our situation and, far from being ruined by it, draw full benefit of the open air and the magnificent abundance of light. (Nietzsche 2003: 97)

The nihilism of the Cynics was productive of nothing less than a new, and indeed unprecedented, historical figure: the brotherhood of man. For what the Cynic negated above all was the polis. The Cynics wandered from city to city in a way

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that was unthinkable for a Greek citizen wedded to his polis by birth and living in mortal dread of exile.14 By contrast, ‘When someone reproached him with his exile, [Diogenes’s] reply was, “No, it was through that, you miserable fellow, that I came to be a philosopher” ’. Similarly, when reminded ‘that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, “And I  them”, said he, “to home-staying” ’ (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 51).15 If for Aristotle the state is what is proper to man, for Cynicism the true life must keep its distance from the state. Thus Nietzsche (2006: 104) is displaying his Cynic credentials when Zarathustra condemns the state as a ‘hypocrite hound’ that, speaking with ‘smoke and bellowing’, likes to make believe ‘that it speaks from the belly of things.16 For it wants absolutely to be the most important animal on earth, this state; and people believe it, too’. This difference between the Platonic and Cynic view on the proper relation of the philosopher to power are staged in the Cynic tradition in a supposed encounter between Plato and Diogenes. Diogenes Laertius (1991: 51) records that: Observing Plato one day at a costly banquet taking olives, ‘How is it’, he said, ‘that you the philosopher who sailed to Sicily for the sake of these dishes, now when they are before you do not enjoy them?’ ‘No, by the gods, Diogenes’, replied Plato, ‘there also for the most part I lived upon olives and such like’. ‘Why then’, said Diogenes, ‘did you need to go to Syracuse? Was it that Attica at that time did not grow olives?’

As detailed in his seventh letter, Plato had journeyed to Sicily in the failed attempt to convert the Tyrant of Syracuse (Dionysus the Younger) to philosophy, and thereby to fulfil the task of making rulers into philosophers if philosophers cannot themselves be rulers. But for Diogenes this was clearly a useless task,

14

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16

‘What do you gain by travelling about in all directions and wearing out the very mules you ride?’ ‘Like [the impious Galileans] you have abandoned your country, you wander about all over the world’ (Julian 1992: 123) Dio Chrysostom, for a time a Cynic in the first century, also embraced his banishment from Rome under Domitian: ‘the thought came to me that exile is not altogether injurious or unprofitable, nor staying at home a good and praiseworthy thing’ (1932: 92 and 96). Zarathustra is often portrayed like a Cynic:  ‘I a crawler? Never in my life have I  crawled before the mighty [and] a meagre bed warms me more than a rich one, for I am jealous of my poverty, and in winter it is most faithful to me’ (Nietzsche 2006: 138). Zarathustra is also proud of being an exile from all fatherlands (2006: 163). There are differences, however. Zarathustra’s love is not for humanity but for his friends of the future: ‘This is what my great love of the farthest demands: do not spare your neighbour! Human being is something that must be overcome’; ‘What fatherland! There our helm wants to steer, where our children’s land is!’ (2006: 172). In the final part of Zarathustra (2006:  231) there is also this:  ‘When I  came to mankind for the first time, I  committed the hermit’s folly, the great folly:  I situated myself in the marketplace.’ Finally, courage, for Zarathustra (2006: 233), is also something other than parrhēsia: ‘Do you have courage, oh my brothers? Are you brave of heart? Not courage before witnesses, but the courage of hermits and eagles, which not even a god looks at any more.’

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hence his retort about the olives – Plato may just as well have stayed home and saved himself the effort. Yet this cynicism with regard to the Platonic project of the reform of political power is a peculiar form of indifference. Diogenes is indifferent to power, yes, but his indifference has a political edge – his insouciance towards Alexander could easily have cost him his life. While the Cynic must remain in a position of radical exteriority to power, he still has something to say to power. Although this saying is nothing pedagogical, as in the Platonic schema, but rather polemical, it remains the case that the Cynic needs power in order to find the courage of truth.17 Unlike Plato, who operates as advisor to Dionysius and therefore adapts to the post-political reality of kingship by seeking to form the Prince’s soul, the Cynics continue to stage the relation between parrhēsia and power in the public arena, the agora. Diogenes, radicalizing the Socratic gesture, confronts Alexander on the street (Foucault 2010: 291). The Cynics are therefore like an echo of the politics of the city in a post-political age, indeed right up to and through the Roman Empire (Foucault 2010:  292). This difference between Plato and Diogenes is staged by Diogenes Laertius in another version of the, no doubt apocryphal, encounter between the two philosophers. Diogenes is seen by Plato washing his salad. Plato says to Diogenes: if you had heeded Dionysius’s request you would not need to wash your own salad. Diogenes replies: if you had learned to wash your own salad you would not have become the slave of Dionysius. As Foucault (2010: 292) sees it, this story gets to the heart of the Platonic–Cynic divide in the Socratic philosophical inheritance: should philosophy privately address the Prince’s soul or should it publically criticize the Prince’s actions? Should philosophy be a true discourse or a true life? Given that his vocation was living a true life, the great test of the Cynic was his capacity for parrhēsia, the courage of truth. And truth never requires more courage than when it is spoken to power. Was the Cynic sufficiently committed to the truth to tell it even to the face of the king (hence the plethora of, no doubt, partly apocryphal stories of Diogenes standing up to Alexander)? To the fixed, indeed metaphysical, ‘I am’ of constituted state power, as exemplified in Alexander’s ‘I am the king’, the Cynic will echo Diogenes’s defiance, which amounts to saying: ‘you are only a man like me’. Cynic contempt for constituted political power will not seek to reconstitute that power differently or elsewhere, but rather to expose it as

17

Hegel expresses this point negatively in the Philosophy of Right (1991: §195), arguing that Diogenes was determined by the opinions he railed against. Nietzsche (2014: 295) too argued that the Cynic derives his happiness from his contrariness.

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groundless. Diogenes wonders who the true king is given that Diogenes is truly independent while Alexander relies on advisers, soldiers and slaves in order to exercise his power (Dio Chrysostom 1932: 172). Similarly, as we saw earlier, to tell the great man to get out of one’s sun is a demonstration that he, Alexander, is just a body (one that in this case is blocking the light) and that the ‘kingship’ attached to that body is but an illusion (albeit one with real effects). The cosmopolitan aspect of Cynicism, then, is not directly aimed at. The Cynic is apolis before he is a kosmopolitês. Although the Cynic tradition will refer to a divine calling by making Diogenes, like Socrates, the recipient of an oracular injunction, in truth the Cynic discovers his mission to care for all men as an accidental effect of actually living the true life of philosophy. Foucault (2011: 301), inverting this order of priority, finds that the negations of the Cynic are, in the end, nothing other than the negative condition for his positive mission of universal care. But we should reverse this: having reduced his existence, in the name of the truth of that existence, to the status of apolis, the Cynic finds that he is brother to all and that that which separates him from other men has no ground in being.18 There is, in fact, nothing that divides the sons of Zeus. When one’s bios, one’s form of life, is only its (literally, in Diogenes’s case) naked existence, then the differences of citizenship, based as they are in customs that veil existence, evaporate into the ether. Although it is a naked existence, the life of the Cynic is not a natural life. It is made rather than born. Human artifice is not the problem, so much as artifice that has no relation to truth. This is shown in the relationship of the Cynic to the city. The Cynic, although he is an exile from his own city, does not flee the city as such. In moving from city to city he shows that he is not interested in recovering some pre-political state of innocence. To abandon the city would be to remain captured by the polis in the form of an exclusion from it. Only by remaining in the polis as one who flaunts his lack of citizenship can the Cynic demonstrate that his life has not been captured by the polis. The Cynic remains in the city in order to boast that he has made his exclusion from it his own, setting up home in the marketplace to harangue passers-by for the sake of the philosophical life. The Cynic must tell the truth, and he must stay in the city to do so.19 18

19

Aristotle’s famous description (in his Politics, Book 1, ch. 2) of the apolis as someone who, in his self-sufficiency, is like a god or a beast rather than a man has led much commentary on Cynicism to see the Cynic as seeking a god-like existence. But what allows us to think that the Cynics would have accepted Aristotle’s capture of human existence in the polis in the first place? Foucault’s reading enables us to see the Cynics’ rejection of the polis not as the attempted transcendence of human being but rather as its absolute affirmation free from any qualifying predicates such as ‘political animal’. As Nietzsche (2014: 30) puts it, the Cynic is forced to speak ‘in front of witnesses’.

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Nor is the Cynic’s life anything like a passive or default existence – the Cynic is a master of poverty. He works on his poverty, and never ceases working on it. It is a rigorous practice, training, askēsis. ‘A child has beaten me in economy’ says a clearly competitive Diogenes, on the realization that, when drinking from the fountain he, like the boy in question, does not even need a cup. The parred-down existence of the Cynic is the form that he gives to his life, not his life in some more primordial state. Indeed, in refusing any distinction between his naked body and his mode of existence, the Cynic overcomes the division of natural life (zoē) and form of life (bios) that is produced by the polis, with its separation of the daily life of the household from the political life of the city. But that his nudity is inextricably tied to the bios – the form – that he gives to his life, means that the Cynic’s life is not, as contemporary thought might imagine it, a life that has rediscovered the body. In his active poverty, his stripping away of hearth and homeland, the Cynic does not discover the body but the soul.20 The body is still a slave, as Epictetus notes (2010: 252), only the soul can be free. This soul is not the metaphysical soul that survives death, but rather the soul as the capacity for truth. The Cynic, parrhesiast par excellence, does not fear death, but not because of the eternity of the soul, rather because the passing of the body is nothing compared to the disfigurement of the soul that has lost its relation to truth. In this the Cynics were disciples of Socrates, whose final discourse on the eternity of the soul in the Phaedo is only a consoling afterword, as it were, to the Apology in which Socrates leaves no doubt that he has never feared death because his mission to tell the truth (in order to care for his soul) is much more important to him. The parrhesiast (the one with the courage of truth) does not despise death because this life has no value, but because his mortal existence is ensouled rather than merely embodied. And nothing damages the soul’s capacity for truth like the fear of death. Indeed, Dio Chrysostom’s sixth discourse (1932) on tyranny makes this fear the chief difference between Alexander and Diogenes. It is therefore the affirmation of the true life that is at stake in the risky exercise of speaking truth to power, not some death-drive.21 20

21

Epictetus (2010: 250) tells us that it is the Cynic’s duty to say, like Socrates: ‘you seek for prosperity and happiness where they are not, and if another shows you where they are, you do not believe him. Why do you seek it without? In the body? It is not there’. In this sense, the Cynic life, despite its being defined by the negation of the polis, is also not dialectical in the Hegelian sense (where the negation of the negation is the mediation effected by the universal). The universalism of the Cynic cannot be expressed in the following Hegelian terms: in being negatively not of the polis, the Cynic is at the same time positively indifferent to all identities. It is rather the affirmation of the negation that is at stake in the Cynic life. In negating the polis the Cynic constitutes a new form of life that he positively identifies with. The singularity of Cynic existence is what emerges from the negation of the polis, not some empty universality. Cynic universality, then, is not its abstractness but that it is addressed to all. As Deleuze (1983: 179–80; see also 198) says in

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In this way, the Cynic’s life is something like a counterpoint made of human existence to the existence of the state as that most metaphysical of entities. ‘What state would listen to Zarathustra’s advice: “Let yourself therefore be overthrown” ’, asks Deleuze (1983: 138). The difference between the metaphysical experience of the timelessly true world and the Cynic experience of the true life is that change is the Cynic’s test of truth, not permanence. Yet neither is this change some generalized, still metaphysical, becoming. It is the transformation of life, that, working from within the metaphysical model of the sovereign life, transforms it beyond recognition. Where the sovereign is that self-same entity that endures unchanging, surviving the predations of time (‘The King is dead, long live the King!’), the Cynic displaces sovereign self-sameness with the sovereignty of mortal existence. He posits nothing other than his exposed life, which can be killed at any moment. To tell Alexander to get out of one’s light is to take a stand on that which is most vulnerable and fleeting – a life entirely subject to sovereign power. But that life which claims for itself what is most fragile and contingent in its living turns out to be the one that fears least, to be the truly sovereign life. Unlike the reach of kings, this form of life is also genuinely universal – bare life, the life that has been exposed to sovereign power, has a far broader scope than any empire ever could. The Cynic can be the friend of all men because all men are captured by sovereign power, both those foreigners who are excluded from it (and therefore included in the form of an exclusion) and those who are included as citizens. The Cynic has no country not because he points to a more universal inclusion than the polis, one that might encompass all men in the form of a kosmopolis, but because, as apolis, he practices the destitution of political inclusion itself.22 In taking the philosophical will to truth to the utmost by actually living it, the Cynic finds not some more universal identity above his bare life, rather the universality of bare life itself. But this bare life, as exposure to the sovereign, is something that he appropriates rather than something that is proper to him. That the Cynic subtracts his existence from the polis means not only that he does not sublate it into something higher but also that he does not ground it in some nature. The Cynic constitutes the universal precisely there where there is no longer any identity:

22

another context, it ‘is only as power of affirming (love) that the negative attains its highest degree’. If the Cynics lived this positivity of the negative, then Deleuze believes that Nietzsche thought it, opposing it to the Hegelian positivity of the negative. Crates is recorded in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives (1991:  97) as saying:  ‘When Alexander inquired whether he would like his native city to be rebuilt, [Crates’] answer was, “Why should it be? Perhaps another Alexander will destroy it again.” Ignominy and Poverty he declared to be his country, which Fortune could never take captive. He was, he said, a fellow-citizen of Diogenes.’

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And this man, of whom one demands detachment from every particular tie of family, homeland, and civic and political responsibility, is freed from these ties only so that he can accomplish the great task of ethical universality, which is not the political universality of the group (city, or State, or even the whole of humankind), but the universality of all men. An individual bond with individuals, but with all individuals, is what characterizes [.  . .] the Cynic’s bond with all the other men who make up humankind. (Foucault p. 302)

A good example of this Cynic refusal of any particular identity in the name of universality – indeed, in the name precisely of the brotherhood of men – is the Cynics’ injunction on marriage. There is a long passage in the section of Epictetus’s Discourses (2010) that he devotes to Cynicism (ch. 22 of Book 3) on this. Epictetus, presenting the Cynic position on marriage (which is here opposite to the Stoic one), informs us that the Cynic must not marry. Husbands must take care of their households while the Cynic must be free to go abroad among all men without the hindrance of private duties: ‘are those men greater benefactors to society who introduce into the world to occupy their own places two or three grunting children, or those who superintend as far as they can all mankind . . .?’ For Foucault, the Cynic’s refusal of marriage is then really nothing other than the reverse side of the positive mission the Cynic has received to care for all men (2011: 301). And this goes not only for the Cynic’s lack of family but also for his lack of a homeland: ‘The only true commonwealth, [Diogenes] said, was that which is as wide as the universe’ (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 75). Although the positive mission of care is only the other side of the coin of Cynic nihilism, this nihilism, as the stripping of all that has no relation to truth, is fundamental. Renunciation is what enables the Cynic to take care of others. But this is not a self-renunciation. The Cynic will fundamentally take care of himself through all his renunciations.23 ‘Go ahead and love your neighbours as you love yourselves’, Zarathustra says (Nietzsche 2006: 137), ‘but first be the kind of people who love themselves’. This care for himself will enable the Cynic to be useful to others:  ‘For pirates, well aware as they are how worthless is the life they lead, take cover in desert places as much from shame as from the fear of death: whereas the Cynics go up and down in our midst subverting the institutions of society’ (Julian 1992: 87). Unlike the sage, who retreats to his cave, all wrapped up in his wisdom, the Cynic is so concerned with his mission of care that he will not only be found in the 23

‘While I was uttering these and similar upbraidings of all others, but first and foremost of myself, at times, when at a loss, I would have recourse to an ancient appeal made by a certain Socrates’ (Dio Chrysostom 1932: 101).

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marketplace, but will actually set up home there. Even the Cynic’s death is a public and edifying spectacle. Peregrinus Proteus, a second century Cynic, immolated himself at the Olympic games and Lucian the Cynic-baiter had this to say about it: ‘if a fiery end is so attractively Heraclean, what was to prevent his quietly selecting some well-wooded mountain top and doing his cremation all by himself [. . .] But no: he must roast in full concourse, at Olympia, as it might be on a stage’. Yet even Lucian must admit that Peregrinus ‘says, of course, that it is all for the benefit of the human race – to teach them to scorn death and to show fortitude in trying circumstances’ (Lucian 1968: 374–5). The popular character of Cynic philosophy, the fact that it required no special education and was practiced by fullers, joiners and cobblers (Lucian 1968: 99), in addition to its reduction of customary hierarchies, reflected the Cynics’ confidence that what is good for one is good for all. Yet this confidence does not lead to a purely didactic relation to others. Rather, the Cynic actively binds himself to all men by way of his sufferings: he must love those who beat him as if he were ‘the father and brother of all’ (Epictetus 2010: 253). If he does not renounce himself, the Cynic does sacrifice himself in the sense that he devotes himself to others by inviting their scorn. And this self-sacrificial life is also where the Cynic finds his joy and purpose in existence, hence the Cynics’ devotion to Heracles, the only hero who struggles and suffers (Epictetus 2010: 278–9, 281). Long before Zarathustra, the Cynic is ‘the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering’ (Nietzsche 2006: 174). Foucault (2011:  275) contrasts the care of others characteristic of the sage who merely gives himself as an example to others, and the interventionism of the Cynic, who must go from door to door. And contrary to the care that, following Socrates, is applied to each individual as an individual, the Cynic’s care is much more a social struggle, a constant public polemic, because it is not only a battle against individual vices but against all those customs, conventions and laws that afflict humanity at large (2011: 280). The Cynic thus seeks to change not only the ethos of the individual but also the collective way of life, he ‘aspires to change the world’ much more than to give his followers a happy life in the manner of Epicureanism (2011: 285). Indeed, to the extent that he is a universalist, believing that all men are on the wrong path and addressing this judgement to all, the transformation of individual existence that the Cynic seeks cannot but change the world (2011: 315).24 The other life of the Cynic opens on to the other world: not the world beyond but ‘an other life for an other world’ (2011: 287).

24

See Dio Chrysostom (1932: 100): ‘And the opinion I had was that pretty well all men are fools, and that no one does any of the things he should do’

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The Cynic is apolis, he must have no country, because human laws themselves, and not only the laws of particular cities, are his target. His struggle is thereby for all humanity (Foucault 2011: 281).25 The Cynic, says Epictetus, is the scout (kataskopos) for humankind, and the fact of being without family, property, or country makes this duty to all people much easier to carry out – for scouts, in travelling on ahead to warn of danger, must travel light.26 Although he will be in the vanguard in finding out what is favourable and harmful for humanity, nonetheless the Cynic must return to tell the truth of what he has seen to all (Foucault 2011: 167). In telling of the philosophical vocation through the theme of a return to the unenlightened place, Plato’s analogy of the cave is taken to its uttermost in Cynicism. And, just as in Plato’s analogy, the Cynic does not expect anyone to thank him for this mission of care. Unlike the man of ressentiment, who wants to be loved but does not know how to love (Deleuze 1983: 118)27, the Cynic will express his love for his fellow man by making himself as unlovable as possible: ‘Thus speaks all great love; it overcomes even forgiveness and pitying’ (Nietzsche 2006: 69). After Socrates, Diogenes’s mission of care is not one he chooses but one which is given to him originally by the Pythic god. According to Seneca, upon his exile from Sinope Diogenes consulted the Delphic oracle and received his vocation to change the value of the currency.28 Unlike Socrates, however, there seems to have been little need in Diogenes’s mind to test the oracle. Nomisma (money) is taken in its similarity to nomos and a lifelong vocation to devalue the nomoi and to restore the true value of life’s currency  – phusis  – begins. Where Socrates’s mission remains related to the esoterism of wisdom – if I am indeed the wisest man then what does this say about wisdom?  – Diogenes’s vocation, as he who points to the simple truth of being-with, is exoteric through and through. 25

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Demonax, a second century Cynic, is recorded by Lucian as defending himself for refusing initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries in precisely these terms: if the Mysteries are bad, Demonax will have to tell all to warn people off; if they are good he will have to share the good news with everybody. He will thus divulge the Mysteries hupo philanthropias (for the love of humanity) (Foucault 2011: 169). It is this scouting mission, indeed, that is inseparable from his scandalous publicity. The Cynic hides nothing, living his life in full view, because veiling one’s existence is to be fearful of the opinions of others, ‘and when then a man fears these things, is it possible for him to be bold [enough] with his whole soul to superintend men?’ (Epictetus 2010: 249). So even in his care for all people, the Cynic will only care for that which is of concern to people in general. He shall not tell them to honour the city’s particular gods, for example, only question them as to why they bother with mere externals such as reputation and possessions. Even in his care the Cynic is resolutely universalistic, focusing negatively on the inessentials of human existence. ‘All great love does not want love – it wants more’ (Nietzsche 2006: 238). Dio Chrysostom (1932: 98) also claimed to have been advised by the oracle to take up the Cynic life with the injunction to wander ‘to the uttermost parts of the earth’.

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The belief in divine appointment seems to have been widely shared in Cynicism, as indicated by Epictetus’s account. Epictetus’s Stoicism was the choice of a philosophical way of life, but Epictetus, against his tendency to read Stoic themes back into the Cynic life, emphasizes that the true Cynic cannot be selfappointed (Foucault 2011: 292–6). However, although the Cynic is called to care, as with Socrates, this vocation is found only in the test by which the Cynic recognizes himself; it bears no external signs. Paul’s rebuke (1 Cor. 1.22) of both Athens, where the Greeks seek wisdom, and Jerusalem, where the Jews look for signs, is in this sense anticipated in the Cynic life. Just as Paul proposes preaching Christ crucified in place of both philosophy and the study of the law, so too the Cynic emphasizes the true life as something that must actually be lived.29 As Badiou (2009a: 508), the thinker par excellence of the militant life, puts it in a different context: ‘It is not enough to identify a trace’ of an event and of the truth procedure the possibility of which it opens up. Rather, ‘One must incorporate oneself into what the trace authorizes in terms of consequences. This point is crucial’. The universalism of the Cynics stood in stark contrast to the other ancient philosophical schools, which all saw philosophy as something for the few rather than the many.30 As militant, universalist and the one who opposes the laws of men, is the Cynic a model for Paul?31 For, like Paul’s, Cynic militancy is ‘militancy in the open’, ‘a militancy addressed to absolutely everyone’ and a ‘militancy in the world and against the world’ (Foucault 2011: 284–5).32

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The Cynic Demetrius, as recorded by his friend Seneca (2011: 85), had the following saying on this point: ‘[one gains] more by having a few wise precepts ready and in common use than by learning many without having them at hand’. Demetrius, according to Seneca (2011:  86), discounted what we would call scientific knowledge of the world, ‘which we should not profit by knowing’. Rather, the one who would make progress in philosophy needs only a few simple rules which he should cling to ‘and make part of himself ’ (ibid.). We also know from Lucian (1968: 190) that the Cynics ‘avoided the study of natural philosophy’ and, to the extent that they ‘devoted themselves to speculation, [did so] solely for practical ends’. Diogenes Laertius (1991: 107) too refers to the Cynics’ exclusion of logic and physics from philosophy, which they took to be exclusively concerned with ethics. As the Cynic Deomonax put it: ‘You go to great pains over the subject of the cosmic order, but you are completely unconcerned about your own internal disorder’ (in Foucault 2011: 239). The popular nature of Cynicism is particularly repugnant to Lucian (1968: 99), who writes that they are ‘composed for the most part of serfs and menials, creatures whose occupations have never suffered them to become acquainted with philosophy; whose earliest years have been spent in drudgery in the fields, in learning those base acts for which they are most fitted – the fuller’s trade, the joiners’, the cobbler’s – or in carding wool’ The similarity has often been noted. See, for example, A. J. Malherbe (1970) and F. Gerald Downing (1998). Earlier, in The Government of Self and Others (2010: 277), Foucault had already emphasized that parrhēsia involves addressing oneself to all. Discussing Plato’s discourse to the tyrant of Syracuse (as recounted in Letter VII), Foucault notes Plato’s description of his advice to Dionysius the Younger as addressed not only to him but to everyone.

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Negation What appears only shines forth in its appearance to the extent that it subtracts itself from the local laws of appearing. (Badiou 2009a: 513)

The function of the universal in the Cynics is negation. In this the Cynics are certainly kindred spirits of Paul; for in Paul’s estimation (Gal. 3.28), too, there is neither slave nor free; male nor female; Jew nor Greek. Paul is not proposing some more universal identity above these particularities (‘Christian’ is not an identity available to him) but rather negating them – subjecting them to indifference without replacing them with something else (which is where his negation differs from the Hegelian negation of the negation). Between the Cynics and Paul there is a shared indifference to difference that does not posit a new difference: the Cynic is apolis; the believer is neither Jew nor Greek. From the start, then, nihilism has had an apocalyptic (unveiling) function which ties it closely to the messianic tradition – what it reveals is the groundlessness of all powers and principalities.33 If this was the Cynics’ mission, it was certainly also Paul’s, the difference being that the Cynic will himself be the true king rather than the one who pronounces the Messiah’s kingship.34 Nonetheless, like the Christian Messiah, the Cynic will both reveal and at the same time hide his true kingship. When Diogenes realized he had won over a crowd with his discourse he immediately ‘ceased speaking and, squatting on the ground, performed an indecent act’. The crowd’s pleasure immediately turned to scorn and he was once again dismissed as crazy. Dio Chrysostom (1932: 399), who tells this story, likens Diogenes to a water-snake that, having been spotted, quietly slips beneath the surface of the water: ‘and again the sophists raised their din, like frogs in a pond when they do not see the water-snake’. The significance of negation to the true life is already visible in the life of Socrates. Socrates’s daemon never gives him positive guidance, but intervenes 33

34

‘vis-à-vis kings of the world, crowned kings sitting on their thrones, [the Cynic] is the anti-king who shows how hollow, illusory, and precarious the monarchy of kings is’ (Foucault 2011: 275). Foucault sees this unveiling function of Cynic anti-kingship as ‘at the very centre of the Cynic experience and the Cynic life as true life and other life’ (ibid.). The constant retelling of the encounter between Diogenes and Alexander in the Cynic tradition is clearly aimed at this point. Diogenes, not Alexander, is the true king: ‘[Diogenes] went on to tell the king that he did not even possess the badge of royalty. And Alexander said in amazement, “Did you not just declare that the king needs no badges?” “No indeed,” he replied; “I grant that he has no need of outward badges such as tiaras and purple raiment – such things are of no use – but the badge which nature gives is absolutely indispensable.” ’ (Chrysostom 1932: 197)

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only to indicate what he should not do, for example not to participate in political life. But it is in Plato’s Sophist that the positive power of negation is first thought. Plato here decides that difference cannot be thought as the mere privation of identity.35 From this momentous decision flows the key finding of the dialogue – that non-being is. Against Parmenides, for whom non-being is unthinkable, difference must be thought positively; there must be a proper idea of difference, which Plato names ‘otherness’ (ἕτερον). To say that movement is not rest is more than to say, negatively, that it is non-identical with rest, but, affirmatively, that it is other than rest.36 For Badiou in Logics of Worlds (2009a), the thinking of non-being requires seeing that every being is marked by contingency, by the fact that it need not have appeared in the world in question (we will see in a discussion to come later that, for Badiou, there is no World, only an infinity of worlds). Take any being in any world at all: once everything has been said that can be said about it, there will still remain its ultimate ‘indifference to its worldly site’ (2009a: 322). This means that for every being there remains something that is not conveyed in its worldly appearance; every being-there contains something that is not there. Badiou terms this a ‘reserve’ of being which is ‘subtracted from appearance’ and which constitutes ‘a real point of inexistence’ in existence, specifically an inexistent that every existent – every being-there – posseses (2009a: 322–3). Consider, for example, the case of Diogenes while recalling that Badiou (2009a:  324) sees the inexistent as precisely what ‘testifies, in the sphere of appearance, for the contingency of being-there’. By subtracting himself from the polis, Diogenes demonstrates that his being-there in the world of the citizen is, in at least one point, entirely contingent rather than the natural necessity Aristotle took it for. But while Diogenes can gesture towards this point of inexistence in every citizen, he can do so only negatively – by revealing as much as possible in

35

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This is also Deleuze’s position in his discussion of Plato’s Sophist in Difference and Repetition (1994: 63–4): ‘non-being is not the being of the negative; rather it is the being of the problematic, the being of problem and question. Difference is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is Difference’. This conception of non-being as the being of difference is then opposed (1994: 268) to the Hegelian dialectic, which ‘substitutes the labour of the negative for the play of difference’. Instead of being, positively, the being of problems and questions, non-being in the Hegelian schema is the being of the negative. For Badiou (2009a: 105 and 124), the negation of being-there, which is to appear in a world, is rather thinkable on the basis of the being qua being, which, while it is there in a world, may not appear in it if its existence ‘is nil according to the transcendental of that world’. Thus not-being-there has no being, but is rather a measure of (in)appearing. This is also Badiou’s thought of death, which is not an event in being (and in this sense is not) but rather a matter of ceasing to appear relative to the world (2009a: 269–70). Crucially, from this perspective, death is not to be confused with nothingness (2009a: 328). To have been is still in being; it is not nothing.

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the world of the city of the bare existence that survives his subtraction of himself from the world of the city. In this sense the life of the Cynic marks the site of an inexistent, given that the inexistent is always ‘suspended between (ontological) being and [. . .] (logical) non-being’ (2009a: 324). Diogenes is in the city, yet in the world of the citizen he is not. But there is more: for Diogenes is not merely caught between his being and his appearing (there, in the city). Diogenes in fact succeeds in shattering the logic of appearing of citizenship, the transcendental of the polis. The name Diogenes signals an event in the world of the polis – an event precisely because it changes the transcendental arrangement of that world. For after Diogenes, a new figure emerges – the cosmopolitan – that, according to the logic of the city, cannot exist. And there can be ‘no stronger transcendental consequence than the one which makes what did not exist in a world appear within it’ (Badiou 2009a: 376). This leads on to the crucial question of how such change is possible in a world. For Badiou (2009a: 357), real change can no more be explained by phenomenology than ontology. If the source of change is not to be found in being qua being (which, as pure multiplicity – the void – is absolutely immobile), then neither is it to be located in what the logic of a world allows to appear. To be sure the transcendental of a world modifies objects in the sense that, in including them within the time of that world, their appearance is always a becoming. But this becoming is prescribed by the transcendental – it is rule-governed, authorized – and so is in no sense real change (2009a: 359). An exception to both being and appearing is required if a world is to be transformed. This exception, in Badiou’s thinking, is the coming to existence of the inexistent. It occurs when being, which functions normally as the invisible ontological support for objects in a world, ‘rises “in person” to the surface of objectivity’ (2009a: 360). This ‘mixture of pure being and appearing’, which is really the revelation of the void that haunts all beings, is possible when a being ‘lays claim to appearing in such a way that it refers to itself, to its own transcendental indexing’ (2009a: 360). Rather than being merely objectified by the logic of the world in question, this being reflexively ‘self-objectivates’ by presenting itself as one of its elements, thereby being caught up in the logic of which it is the ontological support or, to put the same point differently, becoming ‘the ontological support of its own appearance’ (2009a: 362–3). Basically, it makes itself appear (2009a: 452). We have here the ‘subversion of appearing by being’ that we needed in order to account for real change. But, contravening the laws of being as it does (for Badiou, the laws of being are mathematical, captured in a Cantorian set-theory which forbids a being from constituting a reflexive set), such a rising of being,

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though its consequences can literally change a world, appears only immediately to disappear. Developing his central concept of the event, Badiou calls this a ‘site’. Was the encounter between Diogenes and Alexander, semi-mythical as it may be, just such a site – a true ‘insurrection of existence’ (2009a: 373) that each Cynic sought thereafter to be faithful to? In this connection it is worth recalling one of Badiou’s transcendental maxims: If what was worth nothing comes, in the guise of an eventual consequence, to be worth everything, then an established given of appearing is destroyed. What seemed to support the cohesion of the world is abruptly turned to nothing. Thus, if transcendental indexing is indeed the (logical) base of the world, it is with good reason that we can say, along with the Internationale: ‘The earth shall rise on new foundations’. (2009a: 379–80)

For while the site itself must be local, destroying a customary evaluation in one of its points only, it nonetheless forces a new arrangement of existence in the world – of what exists and what does not. Event-sites thus ‘de-compose’ worlds, are ‘in exception’ to them or constitute a ‘dysfunction’ of them (2009a: 385 and 386). So it is that ‘the world may be accorded the chance – mixing existence and destruction – of an other world’ (2009a: 380). Returning to the question of negation in Plato’s Sophist: Heidegger believes Plato’s discussion of apophasis in this dialogue to be the place where negation is first seen ‘positively’, which for Heidegger means: not as other than truth, but as revealing in its own way. There is ‘a denial that discloses’ because being is always ‘being-in-relation-to’ and not because, as in Hegelian logic, negativity is only a transitional stage in the dialectic (Heidegger 2003: 387–8). Being in the Sophist includes being with one another, the possibility to be affected by one another (2003: 331–2), which is how, in Heidegger’s reading, Plato begins to grapple with the problem of non-being in this crucial dialogue. If being includes that which is not then this is because change and possibility are within being, and this dunamis is the expression of how beings are always in a relation to the other such that ‘every being, insofar as it is, is itself and something other’ (2003: 329).37 Indeed, the relation is still more original than the other since, in each and ‘every case, the other is possible only as other-than’. In the other the relation-to is always already

37

Or, expressed in Hegelian terms, every being is ‘one only for another; and because it is for another, the one is itself an other’ (Heidegger 1988: 93). The being-in-itself is therefore absolute negation, ‘in which the thing differentiates itself from all others and in this differentiation is for another . . . [indeed] has its essence in the other. The relation to the other belongs essentially to being-for-itself ’ (1988: 94).

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found (2003: 377). If Being is that which is most original, then Being is beingin-relation. (Unlike Aristotle, Plato is not considering the being of movement as such. The other in beings is not their possibility of being-other – potentiality – but rather their relation to the other, their being-with.) Even timeless beings, insofar as they are known in a soul itself defined by motion (the capacity to affect and be affected), are thereby included in becoming, finding themselves in a dynamic relation with that which they are not (2003: 333). What is moved and this movement itself both belong to beings,38 and this means that the meaning of Being itself must be reworked to include not only that which is but also that which is not (2003: 334). If everything remained unmoved, as Parmenides held, then mind (nous) and life (zoē), and with them all knowledge (noein) itself, would be impossible. And by Plato’s own account, being is the idea (that which a being presents of itself, its outward appearance), such that a being that cannot be known is no being at all (2003: 337). On the other hand, however, if Heraclitus is right that being is only movement, if everything is in motion, then, equally, nothing could be known (there could be no self-sameness, no identity, to know) and Being could not be.39 Given the impossibility of either rest or motion, being or becoming, as names for Being, we are compelled to think both together (2003: 338). And, after all, both stasis and kinesis are (2003: 340). What both beings and the non-being of movement share in, then, is Being. Being is the koinonia, the communion, the with in being-with. Against the Neoplatonists, who took from this very same argument of the Sophist (that non being is) the implication that true being is beyond beings, Heidegger finds in Plato’s dialogue an account of Being as rather that which is closest to beings. And the pervasive presence of the other in all beings (not beyond them) means that Being is not only not self-identical presence but that everything is both a being and a non-being at the same time. As Heidegger translates Plato on this point: ‘insofar as it is the others, to that extent it precisely is not’ (2003: 385). In sum, the being of non-beings – the elusive quarry of the dialogue – can be understood only by way of the koinonia, the being-together of beings (2003: 386).40 Just

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Similarly for Deleuze’s Bergson (1991:  48):  ‘It is only to the extent that movement is grasped as belonging to things as much as consciousness that it ceases to be confused with psychological duration, whose point of application it will displace, thereby necessitating that things participate directly in duration itself.’ ‘Everywhere, wherever and however we are related to beings of every kind we find identity making its claim on us. If this claim were not made, beings could never appear in their Being’ (Heidegger 1969: 26). ‘Identity appears as a unity. But that unity is by no means the stale emptiness of that which, in itself without relation, persists in monotony’. Mediation is what prevails in the unity of identity (Heidegger 1969: 25).

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because, as Parmenides saw, all beings are (the universal character of presence) does not mean that we can understand Being in this ontical way as the totality of present beings, as pure presence (2003: 395). The Being of the ‘not’, of non-being, is not an absence that points us either to pure nothingness or to an otherworldly source of Being but rather ‘the presence of the Being-in-relation-to’ (2003: 387). Being is co-presence, and only the ‘not’ and negation can disclose this. The ‘not’, negation, is nothing negative but is rather a positive letting be seen, which means that it is fundamental to aletheia, to truth as unconcealment (2003: 388).41 Negating citizenship in the name of universal friendship, the Cynics indicated that equality is ontological before it is legal. We are used to hearing that inequality is natural and equality only political, but, in truth, communion of being is more primordial than differences between beings. Heidegger (2003: 292) called this the ‘equiprimordiality’ of Being and Deleuze (1994: 37) the ‘univocity’ – which also signifies equality – of being. For Badiou, this ontological truth provides the basis of his universalism: being is the generic set, the set without qualities or the set whose predicate is to have no predicates; a set which, as precisely open, is thereby for all. The truth of being is that everything is equally, even that which is most lowly and fleeting.42 Awareness of this truth defeats the ordo (the hierarchy) of beings that metaphysics establishes. Metaphysical being, inasmuch as it is defined as presence, as that which is present-at-hand, makes beings that always are more in being than those that only become (and therefore are not) – hence the highest being as the eternity of Aristotle’s God, which is precisely the unmoved mover.43 If such hierarchization of being inevitably legitimates sovereign power, the Cynics’ negations rather enable an ontology that subverts sovereignty. This

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Heidegger returns to the theme of the difference between the ‘not’ and no-saying in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1998a: 272–3). The ‘no’ that recognizes itself as affirming the primordial truth of the ‘not’ in letting being be is entirely other than the ‘wilful assertion of the positing power of subjectivity’. For ‘Nihilation unfolds essentially in being itself, and not at all in the existence of the human being’. Deleuze (1994: 40) attributes this insight to Spinoza, also: ‘Any hierarchy or pre-eminence is denied in so far as substance [Spinoza’s term for being] is equally designated by all the attributes in accordance with their essence, and equally expressed by all the modes in accordance with their degree of power.’ Plato had already argued in his allegory of the cave (Republic, Book 7, 515 d3/4) that those who turn away from the flickering shadows contemplate that which ‘is more in being’. The ideas (forms) seen outside the cave in the true light of day go beyond what is transitorily present towards what, in showing itself, is immediately and enduringly present. Just as Aristotle after him, Plato names the highest and first cause of these ideas (namely the sun in the cave allegory) not only ‘the good’ but also τό θεῖον (the divine) (Heidegger 1998c: 180). For a modern statement of this same logic take Descartes (1911: 15), for whom that idea: ‘by which I understand a supreme God, eternal, infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and Creator of all things which are outside of Himself, has certainly more objective reality in itself than those ideas by which finite substances are represented’.

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means that the will to truth in Cynicism can never lead to a crisis of truth – to nihilism. The will to truth is a crisis for truth only in the sense that it reveals that the highest being as eternal being (God) or as sovereign being (State) is not true. But the truth of being as equality of being is immune to this revelation, which it already knows and which is indeed its truth. It is for this very reason that Badiou, for whom truth and being also say the same thing,44 calls for the recognition that ‘there is only one world’. One world is here not an ontological claim (for Badiou, the One is not) but a political claim – it is a world in which I  take all other people as belonging to the same world as me. That this world is constituted by ‘an unlimited set of differences’ is not at issue here since what is significant is that these different human beings are equally different (Badiou 2010: 63). The unity of the world, then, ‘is one of living and acting beings existing in the same world with others’; ‘we can agree and disagree about things. But on the absolute precondition that they exist exactly as I do – in other words in the same world’ (2010: 61). In Logics of Worlds, Badiou has formalized this insight in terms of a phenomenology (a being-there) of how beings appear in any given world (the world of the polis, for example, or that of the boardroom, or indeed any ‘world’ whatever). That which determines where beings appear on a spectrum from maximal intensity to invisibility in any world is the logic of that world, which Badiou names the transcendental of the situation. Being other than the objects whose appearance it regulates (regulation is the word, since the transcendental of a world, in establishing a relation, properly creates nothing), the logic of a world does not itself appear, remaining entirely anonymous (2009a: 326–7). To appear in a world is to be seized by its logic. For example, in the polis, given its transcendental of citizenship, the native freeborn man appears brightly, while the slave, though equally an existent in the polis, fails to appear at all. But the hierarchical logic of a world does not change the fact that the beings in that world are rendered visible or invisible only on the basis of this logic (which itself ‘is’ not) and not according to their existence. The Cynics, too, pointed to the inexistence of the logic of their world – the king is not, only Alexander exists, and no more or less than anyone else. But like the subjects of Badiou’s truth procedures, this negation proceeds, positively, by way of the affirmation of a new body of truth. Diogenes is not content to sneer at citizenship but positively revels in his slavery to poverty, indeed

44

Being, as void, is not predicated, and the Event, as the upsurge of Being in a situation, is that from which all truth procedures, which are therefore indifferently ‘for all’, stem.

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even in slavery itself. And for the ancients, slavery was the very antithesis of the status of the citizen as a free man. As Foucault reminds us (2011: 260), in the slave market Diogenes lies on his belly like a fish, the better to play the role of merchandize for sale. Even when free, Diogenes scandalizes citizens with his ugly poverty, which manifests a very slave-like lack of autonomy. He is a beggar, after all, and this was even more shocking than slavery in Graeco-Roman culture, given that begging is an absolute dependency on others beyond all ownership and contract (Foucault 2011: 260). Cynic nihilism was a scandalous formof-life, but its scandal, though unthinkable without the rejection of the highest values of Antiquity, nonetheless amounted to a conviction that slavish poverty and the lack of citizenship was an affirmative negation. As an exposed life, the life of the Cynic was a manifestly mortal existence; it was thereby a true life. Nietzsche too imagined Diogenes of Sinope as a figure of truth. The madman who enters the market place in The Gay Science (2001: 119–20) with lit lamp on a bright morning seeking God, the same one who pronounces the death of God, is clearly a modern Diogenes (who tradition similarly has searching with a lantern in broad daylight). Diogenes seeks a man (indeed, Diogenes is forever failing to find men, especially when surrounded by many of them); Nietzsche’s madman seeks God. Neither find him; and that is Nietzsche’s point. The quest for the truth of man might well require the Cynic’s lantern – cynicism. Man, for Nietzsche, is an animal that only cynicism with regard to all humanist pretensions of his being god-like can expose.45 ‘God’, for Nietzsche, is then shorthand for an entire humanist tradition that has preferred the lie of other-worldliness (expressed in the refusal to see man as the animal he is) to the beautiful but terrible truth of this world. In this light, Nietzsche’s claim that Cynicism is the highest thing that can be attained on earth acquires a clearer sense. This reading gains support in an unpublished late note: ‘Life’s worthlessness was recognized in Cynicism, and yet it was not yet turned against life’ (cited in Niehues-Pröbsting 1996: 358). *** The philosophical life, the will to truth as bios, discovers that nothing much of life is true, but it makes a virtue of this corrosive nihilism. Or, as Foucault (2011: 190) puts it, ‘Cynicism constantly reminds us that very little truth is indispensable for whoever wishes to live truly and that very little life is needed when 45

Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Hughes 1997: 7–8) provides a good example of this pretension: ‘Nothing was closer to the gods/ Than these humble beings [fish, beasts. birds]/ [.  . .] Till man came./ Either the Maker/ Conceiving a holier revision/ Of what he had already created/ Sculpted man from his own ectoplasm,/ Or earth/ Being such a new precipitate/ Or the etheric

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one truly holds to the truth’. Among other things, Foucault is carrying on a conversation with Nietzsche, saying that he was only halfway right that philosophy, as the will to truth, will lead us to perish from the truth. By his own reckoning, Nietzsche had seen just how little truth the Cynic needed – Nietzsche’s Cynic recognizes life’s worthlessness – but this is only something, negatively, that the Cynic does not turn against life. Foucault, however, establishes that, positively, Cynicism’s parring down of existence gave the Cynic precisely the courage of his truth. The nihilism engendered by the will to truth finds, in the Cynic, an opportunity rather than an obstacle. The Cynic is the Overman of Antiquity.46 The will to truth, then, is not the identity that Nietzsche suggests it is. If we take Deleuze’s restatement (1983:  96) of Nietzsche’s will to truth, we see that, where the Cynic is concerned, it is a poor fit: ‘we always come up against the virtuism of the one who wills the truth: one of his favourite occupations is the distribution of wrongs, he renders responsible, he denies innocence, he accuses and judges life, he denounces appearances’. Contrary to this description of the man who wills the truth, the Cynic with the will of the truthful is not a man of law. Yes he accuses, yes he denounces appearances, but he does not distribute wrongs. He might judge but he is not interested in punishment. And if anything is responsible it is the laws, not those who break them. People, for the Cynic, are not guilty, even if they are lacking in virtue. This is why the Cynic is able to befriend everyone. The Cynic is the first to befriend all people because he does not subordinate being-with to being-there. Such a prioritization of place is of course the decisive move in Heidegger’s philosophy, which in this sense risks following Nietzsche’s in deciding for the national gods (this is what Levinas termed Heidegger’s paganism of place). But as we have seen from our discussion of their negation of the polis, the Cynics do not divide being by place. Being-there can be negated, and although this negation remains dependent on what it negates, its creative deed is that it constitutes a being-with that knows no such bounds, and no national gods.

heaven/ Cradled in its dust unearthly crystals. [. . .] In this way the heap of all disorder/ Earth/ Was altered./ It was adorned with the godlike novelty/ Of man.’ 46

Foucault hints at this connection (2011: 308): ‘Cynic sovereignty establishes the possibility of the blessed life in a relation of self to self in the form of acceptance of destiny . . . The Cynic says yes to his own destiny.’ We are being reminded here of Nietzsche’s amor fati.

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For two hundred years one had watched Rome subdue one people after another, the circle had been drawn, any other future seemed foreclosed, all things were arranged as if forever. (Nietzsche 2011: 51–2) The attempt to think truth and world as other than given in the true world is why we are interested in the image of world as it appears in the writings of Paul, Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular. In their different ways, each of these connected figures of Western thought denied the existence of a true world, of an unchanging truth of the world, and instead struggled to conceive of a truth in the world. Indeed, inasmuch as they hold the true world to be nihilism, both Nietzsche and Heidegger are descendants of the Pauline break with cosmos. Badiou (2003) captures this aspect of Paul’s thought well, arguing that Paul’s ‘profound ontological thesis’ is that the subject of a truth cannot be thought as part of the cosmic Whole but as ‘in excess of itself, as that which is out of place’ (2003: 78). To be out of place or to exceed limits is to be at once acosmic and illegal, given the fundamental connection between the world viewed as a cosmos and life lived under the law. While cosmos is a picture of a world in which places are eternally the same, Paul’s new creature, coming out from under the law, can no longer be assigned to the Totality.1 Of course, Badiou is not the first to see Paul as a break with fixed metaphysical identity. Centuries earlier, Luther’s lectures on Rom. 8.19 (‘For the creation is eagerly awaiting the revelation of God’s children’) noted that: The apostle philosophizes and thinks about the things of the world in another way than the philosophers and metaphysicians do [. . .] For the philosophers are so deeply engaged in studying the present state of things that they explore

1

Agamben’s Paul (2016: 56) is no different at this point: Paul’s ‘ “new creature” is only the capacity to render the old inoperative and use it in a new way’.

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Paul, as the thinker for whom being awaits redemption, opens a way to a new conception of truth as no longer in conformity to the true world, but rather as indexed to becoming other. This, despite his hatred of Paul, will also be Nietzsche’s understanding of truth, and, in his own way, Heidegger’s too (truth is the event of the giving of being, not what is given). It is also, more recently, Badiou’s truth – truth as a creative process and not an illumination of some everlasting order. Paul’s thought of world, as we shall see, is complex; but in no way is he a prophet of otherworldliness as in Nietzsche’s denunciations of him (to which we will return in the next chapter). The old scoundrel that Lucretius (1968: 114) denounces for desiring ‘Always, what isn’t there’, while ‘what is, you scorn’, is not Paul. A striking indication of this is Paul’s treatment of the great commandment that Jesus repeats twice in the gospels (Mt. 22.35-40 and Mk 12.28-34), and that must have been central to the teaching of the early communities of believers: One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’ Jesus replied:  “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself ’. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’ ” (Mt. 22.35-40)

But for Paul, this dual commandment must be reduced to one commandment alone. In Romans 13.9 we read:  ‘whatever other commands there may be, [they] are summed up in this one command:  “Love your neighbour as yourself ” ’. Jacob Taubes, who apparently felt his identification of the significance of this Pauline reduction to be his most enduring contribution to scholarship on Paul (2004: 130–1), believed this to be ‘an absolutely revolutionary act’.2 The dual commandment ‘belongs to the primordial core of Jesus’s Christian tradition. And that Paul couldn’t have missed. This is why this is a polemical formulation. This [one commandant] and only this is valid’ (2004: 53). What this Pauline reduction of love of God to love of neighbour suggests is that Paul is not

2

Although it has to be said that the same point had already been noted by Spinoza (2007: 173) in his Theological-Political Treatise.

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a thinker of an other-worldly kingdom; we must rather grapple with the worldliness of his thought. The kingdom of God, for Paul, is both now and not yet.3 Before we turn to Paul’s world, however, we need, first, to gain a better understanding of the world that he is negating. As one who rejects cosmos, Paul is the first to challenge the true world.

A genealogy of cosmos In the Roman Empire of Paul’s time (c. 5 – c. 67 CE), cosmos as a timeless totality appeared to have found its political reality. Likewise, in cosmos the Roman Empire sought its idea of everlasting order. In this connection Foucault (2014: 1–5) recounted the example of Septimius Severus. The palace commissioned by this Emperor contained a representation of the heavens on the ceiling of the ceremonial room where he received his audiences and dispensed his justice. As Foucault suggests (2014: 2), the Emperor’s motives for officiating under a canopy of stars are not difficult to discern, being ‘that of inscribing his particular and conjectural judgements within the system of the world’. Septimius Severus must show that these judgements belong ‘to the same order of things as that fixed once and for all on high’. He must make it known that his position of power is in accordance with the very necessity of the world. ‘His reign, his seizure of power, which could not be founded by the law, was justified once and for all by the stars.’ This symbiosis of metaphysical cosmos and imperial power in the Empire (what Taubes, 2004:  23, called the ‘apotheosis of nomos’) is one reason why Paul’s attack on law is so significant. Throughout his letters, as we shall see in the next two chapters, Paul is responding to this nihilism of the Roman Empire, to an imperial violence that manifests in the cult of the pacifying warrior-king and the ‘religious’ preponderance of rank that this cult supports. This imperial structuring is given ontological expression in the idea of cosmos, which elevates the hierarchical ordering characteristic of empire into the first principle of the universe. The political determines the ontological, and vice versa, in a vicious spiral of imperial domination and cosmological determinism. This construct is then apotheosized, as in Cicero’s paean to cosmos in On the Commonwealth 3

The dual commandment, along with the two worlds to which it belongs, is reinstated in the Church Fathers, for example in Augustine’s City of God (1963: 345) in which the dualism of the earthly and heavenly cities is the organizing theme: ‘God, the Instructor, teaches two main laws: love of God and love of one’s neighbour.’

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(1999:  96):  ‘For nothing on earth is more agreeable to God, the Supreme Governor of the Universe [Kosmos], than the assemblies and societies of men united together by laws, which are called States. It is from heaven their rulers and preservers came, and thither they return.’ In this first part of the chapter our aim is to understand this diffuse sense of cosmos in Antiquity and, from there, to see better the break with cosmos that Paul accomplishes. *** From the viewpoint of Nietzsche’s attacks on ‘Platonism’, it is in Plato that the contemplation of the order of beings decisively displaces the chaos of becoming. In the Timaeus (7.30) we read that the demiurge, ‘finding the visible universe in a state not of rest but of inharmonious and disorderly motion, reduced it to order from disorder, as he judged that order was in every way better’. And as Plato makes Socrates say to Adeimantus in the Republic (6.500c2-c6), the eyes of the true philosopher, ‘are turned to contemplate fixed and immutable realities, a realm where there is no injustice done or suffered, but all is reason and order, and which is the model which he imitates and to which he assimilates himself as far as he can’. Whether or not Nietzsche is right that Plato’s world is a static cosmos (and we have already seen plenty of evidence to the contrary), the philosophy of Roman Antiquity would certainly see cosmos as an enduring order. Middle Stoicism, for example, dropped its earlier notion of the world’s final conflagration (by which the world is reintegrated with the primordial fire from which it came) for the idea of the world’s eternity (Brague 2003: 132). Rémi Brague has shown that the term, or series of terms, that in English we would translate as ‘world’ only appear quite late in Antiquity. Prior to the Greek concept of cosmos, the whole was referred to, if at all, by listing its component parts, often by using the very ancient formula of ‘the heaven and the earth’ (Brague 2003: 12). After Heidegger, Brague suggests that what the totality lacks that might make of it a ‘world’ is a subject for whom the all is fully comprehensible, as if from an independent viewpoint. It is this subject that Greek thought first posited, and it is in his eyes that world is constituted as cosmos. According to Heidegger (1977: 129–30), the destiny of this metaphysical subject that represents the world to itself reaches its fulfilment in the modern age, ‘the age of the world picture’: Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in

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a decisive sense to set in place before himself. Hence world picture [Weltbild], when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth.

In the world represented by and for a subject, that subject is necessarily outside of the world. Human being is separated out from the all, losing the immanence, the being-in-the-world, that had made ‘the world’ previously unthinkable. And it is for this very reason that, according to Heidegger, Nietzsche’s answer to the question of nihilism thereby makes the very mistake it is supposed to correct. For Nietzsche’s Overman, as source of new values, is as worldless as the metaphysical subject he is intended to displace. If values can be posited, then they can equally be un-posited; they cannot really matter, cannot be values at all. Something has to matter in a way that ‘values’ cannot, and this fundamental comportment, which is not a value posited by a subject, Heidegger (2004: 87) finds exemplified in Paul’s ‘primordial Christianity’. Paul does not project his own values, he is seized by a calling: ‘To have a foothold is always accomplished in view of a particular significance, attitude, view of the world, insofar as God is, in giving a foothold and in winning a foothold, correlative to a significance.’ Unlike Paul’s world, cosmos is not a world in which we could ever gain a foothold. Its signification as everlasting order means that our existence adds nothing to the world, just as our inexistence takes nothing from it. The Stoic idea of the wise man as the one who adapts himself to the universe, finding his rightful place in it rather than seeking to influence it in any way, arises from the contemplation of this implacable order. Differently from this Graeco-Roman cosmology, most ancient civilizations seem not to have understood themselves to be passively imitating the order of the world. If the polis was thought to reflect the cosmos, then previously the order of determination was thought to move in the opposite direction: the cosmic order was understood on the model of the state (Brague 2003:  14). One implication of this reversal is that where once the order of the state remained an ongoing process – the heavens and earth must be periodically restored to good order by the administration of justice in the state – now the eternally good order of the cosmos must be reflected in a statically organized polity. Research by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann (2001), for example, has demonstrated that, contrary to this cosmos-thinking, ancient Egyptians did not

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see human action as inserting ‘itself into the static order of things’, but rather believed that it is ‘the just practice of man that contributes to maintaining the world in movement’ (Brague 2003: 15–16). The Egyptian ‘earth and heaven’ is, in short, a process in which human society is dynamically embedded; it is not the predominantly spatial, and therefore atemporal and static, order of cosmos. Of course, Egyptian and Mesopotamian cosmologies still functioned as political theologies since, as Brague notes, without the state the cosmos itself could not endure on this model. And, in fact, it was precisely the agency-denying cosmology of the Empire that would later provide Paul with his opportunity: by negating cosmos, Rome itself could not stand. Paul was right about this, as Nietzsche conceded when he posed the question in The Anti-Christ of who is worshipped today in Rome: Caesar or Christ? The Greeks did not always have a cosmos, either. Homer still refers to ‘the heaven and the earth’ (Brague 2003: 17). But as early as Hesiod, cosmos is what appears as chaos recedes. In Hesiod, the movement from chaos to cosmos is one of differentiation. Beings come loose from other beings, ‘as though all the eventual constituents of the cosmos had already been there from the beginning but concealed within one another or tangled together. As in a kit, the parts were present but not yet arranged usefully’ (Hansen 2004: 140). The Greeks named this proper arrangement of beings kosmos. This choice was not arbitrary, since, beginning with its appearance in the Iliad, cosmos denotes order, and specifically ‘in good order’ given that it is always found there in the fixed expression kata kosmon. This expression is used to convey the beauty arising from order as in the boss on a horse’s bit or Hera’s jewels (and survives in roughly this sense in the term ‘cosmetics’). This Greek sense of cosmos was obviously clear to the Romans, who, in translating it with mundus, sought to capture ‘its perfect and faultless elegance’, in the words of Pliny the Elder. The Church Father Tertullian similarly reflected on how the Greeks named the world after a term for ‘ornament’ (Brague 2003: 19). To apply this term, with its connotations of the beauty of order, to world implied a decision on the Greeks’ part. Perhaps this decision is already visible in one of the earliest uses of cosmos as a name for world in Fragment 30 of Heraclitus, which Brague (2003:  20) translates as follows:  ‘This world [Kosmon], the same for all, it is neither a god nor a man who has made it, but always it was, it is, it will be:  an ever-living fire, kindling in measures, and being extinguished in measures.’ This is no longer an image of the world as that which responds, for good or ill, to human influence, as in Egyptian cosmology.

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Although it remains, for now, a dynamic cosmos, its good order is given for eternity. An ancient source attests that ‘Pythagoras was the first to call “kosmos” the encompassing of all things, because of the order [taxis] that reigns in it’ (in Brague 2003: 19). Whether this was indeed Pythagoras’s doing, or whether a Platonic conception of cosmos was being projected back onto him, we cannot know. What we do know is that it is in Plato that cosmos as the goodness and beauty of order finds its established usage in the ancient world (Brague, ibid.). Plato concludes a late dialogue, the Timaeus, thus: ‘this world [hode ho kosmos]’ ‘is a visible living creature, it contains all creatures that are visible and is itself an image of the intelligible; and it has thus become a visible god, supreme in greatness and excellence, beauty and perfection, a single, uniquely created heaven’.4 It is also in the Timaeus that the creator god, the demiurge, is made guarantor of the knowledge that the human subject might obtain of the totality of beings now ordered and arranged as intelligible cosmos. We read (47b6c2) that the cause and purpose of the demiurge’s ‘invention and gift to us of sight was that we should see the revolutions of intelligence in the heavens and use their untroubled course to guide the troubled revolutions in our own understanding’. That the highest ideal for human life consists in the imitation of cosmos, which, especially in Stoicism, was to become a commonplace of the piety of Antiquity, is first made explicit here. The Timaeus tells the story of how the world soul ensures the good order of the heavenly bodies and of how humans, although created by the secondary gods to whom the demiurge delegated the task, nonetheless contain a soul made from the same mixture as the soul of the world, only less pure in the sense of less ordered. In order to purify itself of disorder, then, the soul must come to copy the regularity of the movements of the world soul in its own motion, something that can only happen if the soul first attains knowledge of the order of the cosmos (Brague 2003: 33): The motions that are akin to the divine in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. We should each therefore attend to these motions and by learning 4

Yet Plato elsewhere (Philebus, 28c6-8) appears to admit that this vision of the world as cosmos, this decision to value the world as ordered, could be seen as the veneration of the intellect that finds it so, that is, of the wise man, the philosopher, himself. If this is correct, then Plato is not blind to the point made by Nietzsche when he suggests that philosophers vainly imagined God after their own image, thereby creating a ‘God-monster of wisdom’ (Brague 2003: 24)!

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about the harmonious circuits of the universe repair the damage done at birth to the circuits in our head, and so restore understanding and what is understood to their original likeness to each other. When that is done we shall have achieved the goal set for us by the gods, the life that is the best for this present time and for all time to come. (Timaeus: 90c7-d7)

The Timaeus’ notion of the order of the cosmos as something that men should emulate as if themselves a mikros kosmos also exerted a lasting influence. Only one generation before Paul it was still true for Ovid that in the Golden Age of man:  ‘Mankind listened deeply/ To the harmony of the whole creation,/ And aligned/ Every action to the greatest order/ And not to the moment’s blind/ Apparent opportunity’ (Hughes 1997: 10–11). And as late as the Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus (412–485 CE), ‘when the man below will be assimilated to the Universe, he will also imitate its model in the mode that is appropriate to him, for he will have become “ordered” [kosmios] by the fact of resemblance with the Order of the world [kosmos], and happy since he will be rendered like the Blessed God’. To be wise in Antiquity is to be worldly in the sense of imitating the order of the cosmos. As a Neoplatonist text of the fourth century asserted, ‘We who imitate the world [ton kosmon mimoumenoi], how could we be better put in order?’ (Brague 2003: 133–4). Brague (2003: 134) notes that although calls to imitate cosmos from the Stoics, Neoplatonists and others propose the entire order of cosmos as worthy of emulation, concretely what they had in mind was the hierarchical aspect of cosmic ordering. ‘It is less a matter of imitating the totality as such than the ordering and layering that turn it, right through, into a kosmos’. In other words, cosmos is the total order that it is precisely because it is a hierarchical arrangement. Rank is what differentiates the intelligible beings of cosmos from the blind becomings of chaos. Although the tiered stations of cosmos would later become the template for the Empire in the frozen imperial social relations of late Antiquity (relations characterized by hierarchical patronage rather than horizontal citizenship as in the classical polis), it was actually the idealized polis that first provided the image that was then applied to the world as a cosmos. In the Republic (4.431e8-432a9), Plato offers a description of the offices of his model polity that would come to serve as a description of the places of cosmos: unlike courage and wisdom, which make our state brave and wise by being present in a particular part of it, self-discipline stretches across the whole scale. It produces a harmony between its strongest and weakest and middle

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elements, whether you measure by the standard of intelligence, or of strength, or of numbers or money or the like. And so we are quite justified in regarding self-discipline as this unanimity in which there is a natural concordance between higher and lower about which of them is to rule in state and individual.

Plato summarizes this discussion of justice in the polity (4.434a4-c11) with a clear statement that the ideal polis works by everyone knowing their place in the whole and staying in it. Although we must take seriously Foucault’s startling assertion (2010: 253) that Plato intends his Republic as a myth rather than a blueprint (since Plato clearly conceives philosophy as a way of life rather than a set of doctrines), it remains the case that Platonism would find in this notion the very ordering principle of cosmos: ‘when each of our three classes (businessmen, Auxiliaries, and Guardians) does his own job and minds his own business, that [. . .] is justice and makes our state just’. The principle of knowing one’s place and staying in it applies just as much to the individual as to the state (4.441d5-7). The just man must see justice done between the higher and lower elements that constitute the inner self. Otherwise there will be civil war between these elements as ‘they interfere with each other and trespass on each other’s functions, or when one of them rebels against the whole to get control when it has no business to do so, because its natural role is to be a slave to the rightful controlling element’ (4.444b2-6). Mirroring the state, justice is produced in the individual only ‘by establishing in the mind a similar natural relation of control and subordination among its constituents’ (4.444d7-9). The importance of rank to the order of cosmos is an insistent theme in Antiquity such that, by Paul’s day, it is the highest beings, the celestial bodies, which are really the model for human life, rather than nature in general. While the valorization of the celestial bodies was already ancient (e.g. in Heraclitus fire is the loftiest phenomena in nature, which means that the celestial bodies, and not man, is what is highest5), the call to imitate the superlunary rather the sublunary, first evident in the Timaeus, took on particular significance from the 5

According to Diogenes Laertius (1991: 417), Heraclitus’ view was that ‘The moon, which is nearer to the earth, traverses a region which is not pure. The sun, however, moves in a clear and untroubled region, and keeps a proportionate distance from us’. This accords closely with the Pythagorean view that, ‘The air about the earth is stagnant and unwholesome, and all within it is mortal; but the uppermost air is ever-moved and pure and healthy, and all within it is immortal and consequently divine’ (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 343). Like Heraclitus, Anaxagoras answered the question as to why human existence has value: ‘Because it allows me to view the heavens and the whole order of the cosmos’ (in Nietzsche 1962: 113).

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first to the third century. The unperturbed movements of the heavenly beings became the very idea of ethics in late Antiquity (Brague 2003: 134). It is, for example, a staple of Stoicism: Seneca praises that part of the universe which, being closest to the stars, ‘does not bunch together in clouds, is not pushed into a storm, does not whirl around in a cyclone; it is exempt from all upsets; the thunder claps lower down’ (in Brague 2003: 134–5). It is also an abiding theme in Plotinus (1991: 6), where the souls of the stars ‘are far purer and lovelier’ than our own souls, being ‘not blind to the order, the shapely pattern, the discipline prevailing in the heavens’. If for Seneca it followed that the soul of the wise man should model itself on the superlunary world where the weather is always fine, then for Plotinus (1991: 23) too we should ‘reproduce within ourselves the Soul of the vast All and of the heavenly bodies’. Indeed, the souls of those ‘not able to comply with the larger order, are destroyed’ (1991: 10). Plotinus scoffs at the Gnostics who talk of the dangers of the celestial spheres, ‘which in reality provide all joys for mortal men’ (Plotinus in Hadot 1993: 61). The philosopher models himself on what is highest, which is also that which is most orderly. It is the celestial powers that are ‘bound forever to the ordering of the Heavens’ (Plotinus 1991: 27). These stars, ‘moving in their ordered path, fellow-travellers with the universe, how can they be less than gods?’ For ‘if men rank highly among other living beings, much more do these, whose office in the All is [. . .] to serve beauty and order’ (ibid.: 11, 19; see also 23). The hierarchical order of cosmos is not only a model for the wise man but also for the polis. As we have seen, ancient ethics conceives the cosmos on the model of the polis only then to project this image of the universe back onto the state, lending a seeming naturalness to hierarchical political order in the process. That the polis is where the concept of cosmos originates is echoed in Marcus Aurelius’s invocations of the cosmos as a world city (Meditations, x.15, viii.23) and also in Philo’s assertion that: ‘For anyone who contemplates the order in nature and the constitution enjoyed by the world city whose excellence no words can describe, needs no speaker to teach him to practice a law-abiding and peaceful life and to aim at assimilating himself to its beauties’ (in Brague 2003: 135). Ovid describes how God sorted out chaos by giving ‘to each its place’, thereby gaining ‘control of the mass’ (Hughes 1997: 3–4). Plutarch, too, in his commentary on the Timaeus, described cosmos subduing chaos in terms redolent of how virtue in the polis is understood as suppressing the surrounding anarchy in Plato’s Republic: ‘the Universe which was by nature anarchic found the principle of its metamorphosis into an organized world (kosmos) in a resemblance, a participation in the ideal virtue that belongs to the divinity’ (Brague 2003: 136).

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Greek cosmos found its way into Christianity via the Fathers. In the City of God, Augustine (1963: 343) puts it succinctly: ‘The peace of the universe is the serenity of order. Order is the adjustment of like and unlike each to its own place.’6 *** No consideration of cosmos can avoid the relation of cosmos-thinking to natural law. It is usually assumed that the concept of natural law, utilizing as it does the ideas of universal law and right reason, is primarily of Stoic origin (Troeltsch 1960). When Cicero repeatedly defines law as commanding what ought to be done and prohibiting what ought not to be, he uses a formula for law that was earlier used by Zeno to define ‘right reason’. The concept is included in Arius’s compendium of Stoic doctrines (Horsley 1978:  39). Natural law is no doubt prefigured in Aristotle’s discussion of a universal law or justice, which he contrasts with the particular laws of peoples (e.g. in the Nicomachean Ethics, 5:7). According to Plutarch, this was a distinction also found in Zeno’s Republic and used by him as a critique of humanity’s fragmentation by local laws. But it was the later Stoics that linked the law according to nature with a universal reason constitutive of the cosmos (Horsley 1978: 39). Nonetheless, the phrase ‘law of nature’ is rare in Greek texts until Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 BCE–c. 50 CE), from which point it appears frequently. ‘Common nature’ or ‘common reason’ are the usual Stoic formulations before this (Horsley 1978:  35). Since much the same idea is articulated by Cicero in Latin two generations earlier, it seems that the concept of natural law is central to the wider thought of Paul’s time. Horsley (ibid.) argues that in this moment, earlier Stoic notions are taken up more explicitly than before. This is the shared milieu that explains the remarkable similarities between Cicero and Philo’s conceptions of natural law, where both emphasize that the cosmos is a vast city-state with one, unchanging, constitution – a constitution which is the right reason, or the law, of nature. This law is then contrasted with the mere positive laws of the cities of men (1978: 36). There are numerous statements of this conception of natural law in both authors and also more widely: we can take it that it was standard and widespread at the time. This is also suggested by its use from 6

For all this, Augustine’s thinking of truth and world is not reducible to Platonism. As he writes in his Confessions (1961: Book 7.20): ‘By reading those books of the Platonists I had been prompted to look for truth as something incorporeal, and I “caught site of your invisible nature, as it is known through your creatures” [Rom. 1.20] [. . .] [Thus] I should be able to see and understand the difference [. . .] between those who see the goal that they must reach, but cannot see the road by which they are to reach it, and those who see the road to that blessed country which is meant to be no mere vision but our home.’

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this point on in a range of different schools, from the late Stoics (e.g. Marcus Aurelius) and the Neoplatonists (e.g. Maximus of Tyre) to the Christians (e.g. Origen) (1978: 38–9). To take just one example from Philo: ‘For this world is the Great City, and it has a single constitution and law, which is the reason of nature’; ‘since every well-ordered state has a constitution, the world-citizen enjoyed the same constitution as did the whole world [. . .] This state and constitution must have had citizens before man. Who should these be but the rational and divine beings’ (in ibid.). We see in this passage from Philo, which matches Cicero’s view exactly, that if cosmos is the world imagined as a well-ordered state, then the law of nature is its constitution. Cosmos and natural law go together as order and ordering principle. Nomos rises from the polis to the cosmos and from cosmos it is then reflected back onto the Empire, now conceived as a natural order. In this case, Paul’s devaluation of cosmos could only be an attack on natural law also, and this indeed is what his antinomianism amounts to in Taubes’ estimation (2004). The law of nature also needs to be located in the context of a revived Platonism. Neoplatonism gave to the law of nature a transcendent, rather than an immanent sense. The Stoics had pantheistically apotheosized law (as logos, or reason) as the first principle of cosmos, identifying God with nomos in the process (Horsley 1978: 41). Cicero and Philo, however, clearly introduce a division between natural law and God, using terms such as ordinance, which was deployed by Platonic philosophy to indicate the transcendence of the divine mind over the cosmos that it orders. Philo’s God is a divine legislator of the law of nature (1978: 53, 42). While the transcendence of God is to be expected in the Hellenized but still Jewish philosopher Philo, it is as much in Cicero that God is the lawgiver. In Ovid, too, we read that Before sea or land, before even sky Which contains all, Nature wore only one mask – Since called Chaos. [. . .] God, or some such artist as resourceful, Began to sort it out. Land here, sky there, And sea there. Up there, the heavenly stratosphere. Down here, the cloudy, the windy. He gave to each its place,

(Hughes 1997: 3–4)

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Such imagery is familiar to readers of Plato’s late works such as the Timaeus (41E), where Plato talks of God having spoken the laws for the nature of the universe to souls. While Paul too knew a transmundane God, this was the God of the Israelites, not Plato’s demiurge. Paul would have well understood that the law of nature was a Greek notion. While natural law is not foreign to Paul, neither is it difficult to see that it might have aroused his suspicion. The ‘apotheosis of nomos’ characteristic of Roman Antiquity, a consensus that Taubes thinks Paul ‘clambers out of ’, is expressed above all by natural law and its legislating of places and orders (Taubes 2004: 23).

Paul against empire Having understood something of the imperial cosmology of Paul’s time, we will now show that his writings are shot through with imperial terms and concepts that are given a fundamentally new, this time non-metaphysical, sense. Paul struggles to overcome the very idea of empire. Paul’s context, after all, is the Empire, and yet Roman rule has not featured much at all in discussions of Paul, whether theological or philosophical. Of the philosophers, only Taubes emphasized Paul’s ‘declaration of war on Caesar’ in his letter to the Romans, yet in a discussion that was more philological than historical. However, in New Testament studies over recent years, precisely the significance of the Empire for Paul has come to light, especially his highly political ambition to replace faith in Caesar with faith in Christ. Indeed, Paul’s term for his movement as a whole, as for its individual communities, is the political term ekklesía, the assembly of citizens in the polis. Richard Horsley has been central to this rethinking, and, as he argues (1997), the Caesar cult of Paul’s Antiquity was no mere religious sideshow, but central to the political, social and economic life of the Roman world, especially in the Greek East of the Empire where most of Paul’s communities were based. The Caesar cult went beyond a legitimizing function to constitute the primary mechanism for the operation of the Empire itself in Paul’s day. The patron–client relations that structured imperial power relations were often indistinguishable from the devotion to the cult whereby provincial elites (themselves imperial clients) patronized their social inferiors in the form of city festivals, games, public buildings (temples, shrines) and the like. Without understanding the importance of the Caesar cult in Paul’s day, how else to explain the lack of any Roman military presence, or even an imperial bureaucracy, in Greece and Asia Minor? When we

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bear in mind that Corinth, for example, had been brutally suppressed by Rome only a century and a half before Paul, this cohesiveness of the Empire requires some explanation (Horsley 1997: 11). Augustus’s revitalization of traditional Roman civil religion as an Empire cult focused on the deified person of Caesar goes a long way to providing an answer to this conundrum. Religion and politics had never been separable in Rome, and Cicero, for example, lists mostly religious statutes in his account (De Legibus) of the laws that should govern the state. For Cicero, the founding and preservation of states is the human art that comes closest to the divine power of the gods (Horsley 1997: 14). Within this framework of understanding, Octavian’s decisive victory over Mark Anthony at Actium (31 BCE) was, at least for the Roman elite, a god-like restoration of civil peace and order after decades of devastating civil war. The Greek cult to Augustus (Octavian) expressed this widespread sentiment as follows: The providence which divinely ordered our lives [.  . .] produc[ed] Augustus and fill[ed] him with virtue for the benefaction of mankind, sending us and those after us a saviour who put an end to war and established all things [. . .] The birthday of [this] god marked for the world the beginning of good tidings through his coming. (cited in Price 1997: 53)

A similar proposal to start the new year on Augustus’s birthday read: ‘It would be right for us to consider him equal to the Beginning of all things [. . .] for when everything was falling and tending toward dissolution, he restored it once more and gave to the whole world a new aspect’ (in Horsley 1997: 14). The Caesar is here heralded as a divine warrior-king. As Horsley notes (ibid.), understanding the unprecedented (at least in Rome) emergence of the divinized power of the emperor under Augustine has to do with his success as an orderer, one who, after the manner of the Hellenistic emperor cults, brought cosmos out of chaos. As one contemporary wrote of the Emperor’s birthday: ‘Justly would one take this day to be the beginning of the Whole Universe’ (cited in Horsley 1997: 21). Octavian the man had become Augustus the god: Augustus alone has a name that ranks with great Jove. Sacred things are called august by the senators, And so are temples duly dedicated by priestly hands. From the same root comes the word augury, And Jupiter augments things by his power. May he augment our leader’s empire and his years, And may the oak-leaf crown protect his doors.

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By the god’s auspices, may the father’s omens Attend the heir of so great a name, when he rules the world. (Ovid, Fasti 1.587–616)

The divinization of Augustus went furthest in the Empire’s Greek territories, where it ‘pervaded the urban ethos’ in cities such as Corinth and Ephesus (Horsley 1997: 20). The imperial cult in these cities built on traditional Greek religion and was driven not by the imperial family but by the competitive local urban elite, who often practised their patronage in the guise of imperial priests. Sacrifices to Augustus and donations to the community during imperial festivals brought the donor ongoing prestige since his descendants thereby won the right to be included in the procession at the festival. In these festivals, the Emperor was depicted in mythical guises modelled on the Greek myths and, as such, became a god among the traditional gods. Indeed, he was often identified with Zeus himself given that his order-producing acts ranked him alongside the king of the Olympian gods, who had similarly produced cosmos from chaos (Price 1984: 233). His statue or image was added to temples devoted to leading Greek deities and new shrines and temples were constructed in city centres to the Emperor. Sacrifice to a god became the primary way of relating to a Cesar that now ‘permeated public space’ (Horsley 1997: 21). Although the emperor cult built on earlier Hellenistic royal cults, it diverged from them in a significant way. While the Hellenistic cults, as city cults, arose from a specific royal intervention in the polis, Augustan cults severed this tie to place, as can be seen by the fact that establishing Augustus’s birthday as the start of the new year applied not to an individual city but to the whole province of Asia. Augustus was not the patron of a polis but benefactor of the whole world (Price 1997: 54). The cities of this Augustan world competed among themselves to be the most pious in their observance of the Imperial cult (Price 1977: 56). Having first surrendered their autonomy to the Hellenistic kings, the Greek cities now had to make sense of Roman rule, and it seems that they did so largely through this cult, which represented the Emperor in familiar terms and which allowed urban elites to continue to dominate their populations as the cult’s priests (Price 1977: 71). The Caesar cult was a major means of the once self-governing Greeks accommodating themselves to, and profiting from, the Empire. Cult and Empire were not ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ as in the modern mind, but rather one and the same thing. Paul opposes this whole milieu intensely, and this means that his discourse, though voiced positively in the terms of an alternative ‘good news’ of another

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saviour, is both highly political and anti-imperial. As classics scholars such as Hopkins (1978) and Deissmann (1910) had already noted, Paul does not shy away from appropriating terms that were central to the political theology of the Caesar cult and that had no ‘religious’ meaning in the modern, privatized, sense of the word. These terms included, but were not limited to, euangelion (gospel), which is ‘proclamation’ as both the act and its content, and pistis (faith), as in the loyalty of Caesar, to be repaid with that of his subjects. This is the use of pistis in the gospel of the Caesar religion, the Acts of Augustus (Georgi 1997: 149). Paul’s dikaiosynē (justice), meanwhile, is Caesar’s justice in the cult and Paul’s eirene is likewise the peace of the Pax Romana (Horsley 1997: 140). Paul’s political theology goes much further than a counter-hegemonical use of imperial terms, however. His letters are often explicitly anti-Roman. In his earliest surviving letter, 1 Thessalonians (5.2–3), Paul looks to the coming day of the Lord, when the faithful in Christ will avoid the destruction that awaits those who put their faith in ‘peace and security’. This is clearly a swipe at the repeated claims, not only by Augustan ideologues but even by subject peoples such as the Jewish Philo (Legatio ad Gaium), that such was the gift of Caesar to the world; a condemnation of all those who offered gifts at the altar of the peace of Augustus on the Hill of Mars, god of war (Elliot 1997:  169). In the first letter to the Corinthians (2.6–8 and 24), the Emperor’s claim to have put an end to war is also contradicted with the stark warning that the rulers of the age are doomed to perish when Christ destroys every rule (archē), authority (exousia) and power (dynamis) (Horsley 1997: 142). In Philippians (3.20–21), meanwhile, Paul, who is entirely aware that the saviour of the world is supposed to be Caesar (Philippi was a Roman colony dominated by army veterans), talks rather of those who follow Christ as having their true citizenship in heaven, from where the real ‘saviour’ will soon return (Horsley 1997:  6). Given that Paul nowhere else uses the term saviour (sōtēr), his meaning here seems clear enough. But it is Paul’s elevation of the cross that is perhaps the most blatant aspect of his critique of the Empire, since the cross was the very symbol of the violence that Rome reserved for those that disturbed its peace. Josephus (Antiquities 17, Book 10)  mentions that two thousand Judeans were crucified following the uprisings that accompanied the death of Herod in 4 BCE, so Paul would clearly have shared in the horror that the cross symbolized for Rome’s subject peoples. The cross also represented the hierarchies of Empire: it was almost never used on the higher class honestiores, only on the humiliores (Hengel:  1977: 125). The cross was imperial shame. And yet it is in the cross that Paul glories (Gal. 6.14).

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Anti-cosmos There is a whole book devoted to Paul’s cosmological language (Adams 2000). In this study, Adams establishes that Paul uses the term kosmos thirty-seven times in his undisputed letters and that the term is well distributed throughout these, though with a heavy concentration in 1 Corinthians where it appears twenty-one times. Paul is no stranger to cosmos, but what does it mean for him? The first volume of Rudolf Bultmann’s influential Theology of the New Testament reads Paul’s cosmology through the lens of the early Heidegger’s existentialism, which had been formative for Bultmann, his pupil.7 For this reason, Bultmann’s Paul is perhaps too interiorized, but illuminating nonetheless. Bultmann (2007:  254) takes kosmos in Antiquity to denote ‘a totality bound together by rationally comprehensible relationships of law into a unified structure containing heaven and earth and all living beings, including gods and men’. Bultmann argues that no such conception of the all is present in the Old Testament; if ‘heaven and earth’ are mentioned, it is always in such a manner that God is treated separately from it as the Creator. It is this delimited, created order that Bultmann suggests Hellenistic Judaism adopted kosmos to describe. Bultmann notes that although Paul does not know the providence of the Stoa’s natural theology (in which God’s governance of the world is expressed through the law-like order of natural phenomenon), he does adapt the Stoic concept of ‘nature’ in the phrases ‘according to’ or ‘contrary to’ nature. Here, Paul reflects the Stoic’s vision of man ‘as a being fitted into the totality of the cosmos’ (Bultmann 2007: 9). For example, in Rom. 11.36 (‘for in him and through him and to him are all things’) Paul is deploying a formula familiar to Stoic pantheism. However, it is just as clear from this passage that Paul’s world is not the Greek cosmos, since, as the closing words of Romans 11 show, this Stoic formula is now related to the salvation of the nations, in other words to history as it is divinely preordained rather than to providence in its immanent ordering (Bultmann 2007: 229). In shifting the signified of ‘cosmos’ from an eternally providential and fully legible order in space to the mystery of salvation unfolding in a time that draws to an end, Paul turns cosmos from a ‘space-concept’ into

7

Although as early as 1930, Heidegger was clarifying (1988: 13): ‘It was never my idea to preach an “existential philosophy”. Rather, I have been concerned with renewing the question of ontology [. . .] the question of being.’

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a ‘time concept’ (Bultmann 2007:  256). Bultmann draws from this and other such evidence the following conclusion: For Paul, the word cosmos has in the great majority of cases a meaning different from that of the Greek conception of the world. As the created world, here and now existing, Paul calls it ‘creation’, with reference to its Creator (Rom. 1.25). When the world is so regarded, man is excepted from it, even though as ‘mortal man’ (Rom. 1.23) he belongs to it. But as a being endowed by God with special dignity and responsibility (cf. 1 Cor. 11.3,7, ‘he is the image and glory of God’), man stands between God and creation and must decide between the two. (ibid.)

This arena of struggle, which is the arena of human history constituted in relation to the divine plan, is cosmos:  ‘the world which is at man’s disposal, giving him the possibility to live from it and to be anxious about it’ (Bultmann 2007: 235). Bultmann’s student Günther Bornkamm, a noted New Testament scholar in his own right, agreed with his teacher that Paul’s use of cosmos means both ‘humanity in general’ and also that ‘in which man lives his life, the embodiment of his concerns’ (Bornkamm 1971: 129). Cosmos is an order of existence rather than of nature, and what is natural is only a ‘stage’ and a ‘life condition’ for the care characteristic of human existence. If cosmos was not for Paul ‘the world of men’, of their ‘conditions of life’ and ‘earthly possibilities’, then how else to explain that sin entered into cosmos, or the foolishness of cosmos, in Paul (Bultmann 2007: 254–5)? This rendering of cosmos as a human rather than natural world is straight from Heidegger (1998b: 112), for whom, in On The Essence of Ground, the ‘irruption’ in Christianity of a new experience of existence led to a fundamental redefinition of cosmos: Kόσμος οὗτος [this world] in Saint Paul (cf. 1 Corinthians and Galatians) means not only and not primarily the state of the ‘cosmic’, but the state and situation of the human being, the kind of stance he takes toward the cosmos, his esteem for things. Kόσμος means being human in the manner of a way of thinking that has turned away from God [. . .] Kόσμος οὗτος refers to human Dasein in a particular ‘historical’ existence, distinguished from another one that has already dawned.

The most important thing of all about Paul’s use of kosmos for Bultmann (2007:  255–6), again following Heidegger, is that it ‘contains a definite theological judgement’: Kosmos constitutes the implicit or explicit antithesis to the sphere of God or ‘The Lord’, whether ‘kosmos’ denotes the totality of human possibilities and

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conditions of life (1 Cor. 3.22, 7.31), or whether it implies persons in their attitudes and judgements (1 Cor. 1.20, 27) or in their sinfulness and enmity towards God (Rom. 3.6; 19; 11.15; 2 Cor. 5.19). But this is especially true where Paul says ‘this world’.

Bultmann’s argument that, contra the Greek view, Paul sees cosmos negatively is widely shared. Bornkamm (1971: 129), for example, also holds that Paul’s cosmos is ‘man’s overlord [. . .] blinding him, it is the realm of Satan, the god of this aeon’. While the darkness of ‘this world’ in Paul is not dualistically counterpoised (as it is in the Gnostics) with an entirely other world of light, it remains the case that the powers of ‘this world’ in Paul are demonic. However, for Bultmann (2007:  256), these dark powers in Paul are constituted by nothing other than a decision by man against God; they have no ontological, only an existential, meaning:  ‘ultimately, it is from men that they derive their power, and for the Christian they are already “dethroned” (1 Cor. 2.6)’. Most commentators would now reject the decisionistic emphasis that Bultmann, influenced by the early Heidegger, places on Paul. Bultmann believes that cosmos in Paul is a sort of mythological precursor to existentialism in that, just as man, though ‘thrown’ into the world, must decide between it and God in Paul, so also modern man, although not master of his own destiny, must still choose his lord (Adams 2000: 15). This theme is passed on to Bornkamm, who argues (1971: 130–1) that man, for Paul, ‘never belongs to himself, but always has a master set over him:  sin, death, or the Lord. [Man] is always asked:  To whom do you belong’? Bultmann’s and Bornkamm’s reading of cosmos in Paul as the anti-godly power into which individuals have fallen and which suppresses their existential need to decide – a sort of Heideggerian ‘they’ – is clearly a deliberate ahistoricism, as can be seen in the claim that the modern equivalent of Paul’s cosmos is ‘the atmosphere to whose compelling influence every man contributes but to which he is always subject’ (in Adams 2000: 14). Yet despite these now unfashionable tropes, few would dispute Bultmann’s view that cosmos was not for Paul what it was for the Graeco-Roman culture around him. Indeed, if one of the things that Bultmann is trying to capture in Paul is his difference from the Greek ethos of individual attunement to the cosmos, then his anachronism of individual decision in the face of cosmos in Paul at least highlights this much. The real weakness in Bultmann’s analysis, then, would rather be his methodological individualism, which really does do violence to Paul, who knows only ‘we’. As Adams notes (2000: 15), if cosmos signifies opposition to God in the Pauline letters, then the antithesis of this opposition is not the authenticity of individual

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belief, but rather the faith of a community of believers (Adams points to 1 Cor. 1–3 in this regard, especially to 1.26–8; 6.1–2; and 7.29–31). Even when Paul writes that the cosmos was crucified to me (Gal. 6.14), the context (vv. 12–13, 15–16) reveals Paul’s words as directed towards messianic community. As Taubes (2004:  148), who set his historical-political Paul against Bultmann’s ontological-existential one, said:  ‘Bultmann and all this modern exegesis whose thinking is completely besides the point, which thinks in terms of the individual’.8 Although it is undoubtedly influenced by Bultmann’s reading, Bornkamm’s study of Paul (1971) reflects on Paul’s sense of the time of faith in ways that go beyond the faith of the individual believer. For Bornkamm, there is a tension in Paul’s letters between his emphasis on the imminent return of Christ (Phil. 4.4), the passing away of the world (1 Cor. 7.29), and his seemingly contradictory insistence that the present time is fulfilled (Gal. 4.5), that the ‘new creation’ is present reality in Christ (2 Cor. 5.17) and that, for believers, ‘the end of the ages’ has already come (1 Cor. 10.11) (Bornkamm 1971: 196). For Bornkamm, this tension should not mask the radicalism of Paul’s difference from Jewish apocalypse. Despite sharing the apocalyptic view that the world will end, indeed that Christ’s return is close enough that many of his own generation will see it (1 Thess. 4.15), Paul’s temporality is not apocalyptic. What apocalyptic awaits in the future is, for those who are in Christ, already come: ‘the old has passed away, behold the new has come’ (2 Cor. 5.17). Bornkamm quotes Luther approvingly: ‘It was not the time that occasioned the sending of the Son, but the reverse: the sending of the Son brought the time of fulfilment’ (1971: 198–9). Bornkamm believes this to have been Paul’s message, too. ‘Man’ has been released by Christ in time, he does not have to wait until the end of time. But this dawning of the day of salvation does not mean that man is released from the provisional nature of his existence, from humiliation and suffering. Paul rejects such Gnostic ‘enthusiasm’ in the name of a ‘still continuing temporality’ that, far from being a relic of this world that believers hurry to escape, is rather the very condition of salvation. ‘Time and history are the field in which faith exercises and verifies itself ’ (1971: 200). ‘Thus while all Paul’s utterances go beyond the individual’s human experience in time and refer to the divine “beyond”, they serve the purpose of pinning believers down within the confines of the “here”, “this side”, the “not yet” of their temporality and historicity’ (1971: 223).

8

Bornkamm (1971: 147) thinks that salvation in Paul is for the individual since this is what sets Paul apart from the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, where it is rather a matter of the salvation of the world.

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However, although Bornkamm sees Paul’s Christian life as having nothing to do with flight from the world, he takes issue with the idea that it is compatible with Heideggerian fallenness into it (1971: 205). Faith releases the Christian to an independence from the world even while he must ‘stand up to its testing’. Paul is clear that the believer no longer belongs to this world, or at least to its ‘powers and entanglements’ (Gal. 1.4), and that the cross of Christ is that by which the world is crucified to the apostle himself (Gal. 6.14). The influence of Heidegger in these interpretations of Paul is shared in Brague’s discussion of Paul’s cosmos. Brague (2003:  55) too, after Bultmann and Bornkamm, sees kosmos in Paul’s letters as ‘above all’ that which ‘designates human life’. As in 1 Corinthians (7.31), ‘to live, for man, is to “deal with the world” ’. This world, as cosmos, ‘is constituted by the concerns of fallen man (“the flesh”)’, which turn against him and enslave him. Bornkamm (1971: 133) sees ‘flesh’ in Paul as man in the attitude of opposition to God, or as ‘the powers to which he has fallen victim in his heady urge to assert himself ’. To comport oneself in accordance with the order of the world as given in cosmos is, negatively, to conform to the ‘wisdom of the world’ as Paul puts it (1 Cor. 1.20, 1.27– 28; 2.6–8; 3.18–19). Since the form (skhema) of this world is passing away, the cosmic attunement of the wise man of Antiquity is transvalued as foolishness. In a similarly Heideggerian way to Bultmann, Brague (2003: 55) sees skhema in Paul’s use not as an abstract representation of the world but rather as a practical idea of the world that enables one to ‘have a hold on life’. For Brague, Paul’s good news of salvation history is a direct rejection of the cosmos-piety of Antiquity. The wise man, modelling himself on the ordered movements of the heavenly bodies, reads the signs of the cosmos in a spatial way. But the real knowledge of God demands a temporal reading of cosmos; one must understand the signs of the times. The death and resurrection of Christ in history establish contact between man and God that no longer passes through the elements of the world (Eph. 2.18). For these elements are under the control of ‘worldly’ powers that renounce their dependence on God – Paul’s ‘powers of the air’ (Eph. 2.2) are no longer the perfect celestial bodies of the Greek cosmos but agencies that, being ignorant of God’s plan of salvation (Eph. 1.21, 3.10, 6.12), have been dethroned by Christ (1 Cor. 15.34). To be under the influence of the celestial beings, then, is to be slave to that which is most cosmic in cosmos: ‘When we were children we were slaves to the elemental spirits (stoikheia) of the universe (kosmou)’ (Gal. 4.3); ‘Now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits (stoikheia), whose slaves you want to be once more?’ (Gal. 4.9);

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‘If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits (stoikheia) of the universe (kosmou), why do you live as if you still belong to the world (kosmo)?’ (Col. 2.20–21) (Brague 2003: 55) Stanislas Breton’s ‘Pauline Cosmos’ also appears to be influenced by Heidegger’s thought, this time by his account of the importance of calling (kleisis) in Paul. For Breton, Paul’s experience of world, being a function of the missionary vocation of his life, is ‘prior to all speculation’. Unlike the wise man, Paul’s vocation is determined not by knowledge of the world, but his world is rather an outworking of vocation. Heidegger (2004: 55–6) makes this point as follows:  ‘in [proclamation] the immediate life-relation of the world of self of Paul to the surrounding world [. . .] is able to be comprehended’. For Breton, this means concretely that because Paul’s calling is his mission to the nations, thus also his world (unlike Greek cosmos with its allotted places and orders) is a world without borders. If Paul’s vocation makes it impossible for him to stop anywhere, to put down roots by finding his place in the whole, then his world is also ‘the passage from an environment to what overflows to the infinite, to that openness in which all regional landscapes are inscribed and fade away’ (Breton 2011: 97). World in Paul is not the all but only a function of opening; a ‘worldfunction’ (Breton 2011: 98). As function of a vocation, neither is Paul’s world a metaphysical substance. It is calling rather than being, and this calling radically devalues the things that are: Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I  regard them as rubbish, in order that I  may gain Christ. [.  . .] Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 3.7–8 and 12–14, emphases added)

Paul devalues cosmos by levelling all its places and orders as equally nothing before the ‘call’; it is vocation, and not station, that is at stake. And yet it is also the case that the universality of the call in Paul, its summons to wander indifferently throughout the earth, would likely not have been possible without the Greek cosmos. As Breton reminds us (2001: 102), Paul is Paul of Tarsus, a Greek city of some renown, and it is questionable whether Paul could have enlarged

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his messianic view of history to include the entire world without the Greek contribution. Thanks to cosmos, salvation history in Paul would no longer be the destiny of a chosen nation, but a veritable cosmology in which all beings are submitted to the lordship of Christ. Yet despite his dependence on cosmos, for Breton Paul decisively puts it in its place. The primacy of Christ both in and to the cosmos is not deployed as the solution to a philosophical problem; it is not a matter of bringing the one and the many together into a well-balanced and beautifully proportioned whole. Paul rather seeks to break the spell of the Whole itself: A Hellenized Jew but a Jew nonetheless, Paul did not forget that ‘everything was created, the heavens and the earth’, according to Genesis. This is why, rising up in thought above the immensity of creation [. . .] Paul takes the liberty of putting the totality into question [. . .] The primacy of Christ, as an echo of the creative origin, is at once that which gives substance to the world and that which grants courage to the thought that thinks it. (Breton 2011: 108)

By shifting between Paul’s cosmism and anti-cosmism, Breton illuminates that Paul’s relation to cosmos is subtle. Paul puts cosmos in its place, but he does not make it anathema, as the Gnostics would later attempt to do with the knowledge (gnosis) that the creator of this world is not the true God, who is above and beyond the heavens. Basing his discussion on the hymn-like passage in Colossians (1.15–20) where Christ is described as the ‘firstborn of all creation’, Breton notes (2011: 108) that in this hymn Christ takes up the function typically assigned to the ‘world soul’ in Greek discourse.9 Christ is described as the ‘firstborn of all creation’ by whom and for whom all things were created and subsist. Cosmogonically, Christ is the generative principle, which therefore invests cosmos with value, even if from without. Cosmologically, Christ plays a function analogous to the ‘great organism’ or ‘living being’ of Greek philosophy which, by its spirit (pneuma), animates the world from within. The totality has reality only in Christ, and yet it is not thereby nothing, since his spirit moves throughout it. Paul’s Christ is then both for and against cosmos. As that from which cosmos comes, he denies the totality of cosmos, but as that which upholds cosmos, he constantly affirms it. The Christ has a dual nature as mediator of cosmos. He is the one who both transgresses and yet also shares in ‘the cosmic and human vicissitudes of universal becoming’ (Breton 2011: 110). For Breton, this is seen 9

Although not attributed to Paul by most scholars, Breton believes this epistle to be directly inspired by Paul.

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in that, while Christ is firstborn of all creation, he cannot escape death, but must instead become, as the author of Colossians (1.18) puts it, the ‘firstborn from among the dead’. Given that this second birth reconciles ‘all things’ in heaven and earth to God (Col. 1.20), the Pauline stance on cosmos seems clear enough to Breton (2011: 111): ‘the cosmos of nature has neither meaning nor existence except in and by its integration into human history’, a history which itself lacks meaning outside of the economy of salvation. Although cosmos lacks value considered on its own, it is nonetheless capable of redemption. In the letter to the Romans, Paul also indicates that his hope for cosmos is that it might be subject to transfiguration rather than to a final conflagration. Paul writes (8.19–25) of the creation being ‘subjected to futility’ and of ‘groaning with the pains of childbirth’ whereby the entire cosmos waits in expectation for redemption. Breton (2011: 115) calls this a cosmology of hope whereby nature is placed ‘under the sign of a desire that pushes it beyond itself, a desire that would be the unconscious form of a hope’: The ontological depths of the real are defined not by an ensemble of properties, but by the sigh of a slave shaking off his chains, powerless to rid himself of them, yet animated in his impatience by the expectation of his future liberation. From the highest point to the lowest on the ontological ladder, a single groaning, transmitted from one level to another, proclaims that the essence of the world is simply freedom. (Breton 2011: 117)

Paul does not so much reject Greek cosmos as subject all of its stations equally to futility. From this standpoint of a shared slavery, the hope for liberation is common to all beings. And, as Breton notes (2011: 117), the remarkable thing about this is that Paul is thereby using the language of the apocalypses, which also spoke of a new heaven and a new earth, while radically changing their context from eschatology  – the end of the world  – to ontology  – the very being of the world:  ‘It seems that the Pauline originality consists in the transfer of the apocalyptic eschaton onto the genesis and the very structure of things. Thus inverted into a “proton” of hope, the eschaton is inserted into the very fiber of the universe.’ Paul finds a way of taking nihilism and transforming it into hope; the obscure desire for the destruction of this world is transformed into faith for its renewal (2 Cor. 5.17: ‘all things have become new’). And in the process, the very ‘being of things is merged with the dynamism of their becoming’, something that Nietzsche’s eternal return also seeks to think. For that impulse which subjects the cosmos to futility such that it might be transformed inhabits all beings,

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preventing them ‘from being shut up within the borders of a defined nature’ by secreting an ‘impatience that moves them and destines them to a continual transit’, a ‘permanent metamorphosis’ (Breton 2011: 120). As also in Nietzsche, this Pauline becoming is not a tranquil Heraclitean river that never stays the same while neither really changing. It is characterized instead as a groaning akin to the agonies of a woman’s labour, where frustration at the painful transition is mixed with joyous expectation of new life. But there is a difference from Nietzsche’s becoming. Paul’s cosmic metamorphosis is not the play of forces within a closed system, and in this sense at least it is no longer cosmos at all. The forces being arranged are constituted only through their integration within a history that is human through and through. Breton (2011: 121) therefore suggests that Pauline becoming is the active principle by which cosmos comes to coincide, for better or worse, with human history, which itself is nothing other than the divine plan of salvation. Natural and human history are intertwined not as equally immanent processes but in their relation to a higher mystery which is being revealed. That cosmos requires human history in order to find its meaning should therefore not be interpreted as a humanism since human history itself is but the outworking of divine grace. Paul, in Breton’s view (2011: 124), therefore celebrates a ‘beyond’ to human willing. Breton here echoes Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche (as well as Heidegger’s critique of his own work prior to ‘the turn’), as he does also when claiming that, for Paul, it is human mastery of nature that subjects creation to slavery (to sin and death) in the first place. Human history, as the unfolding of God’s plan of salvation, is then also a liberation of nature from human domination. With the redemption of humankind, creation will also find its freedom.

Badiou’s anti-cosmos The contemporary thinker most closely aligned with Paul’s anti-cosmic impulse is Badiou. Badiou’s entire oeuvre is oriented by the attempt to think through the implications in ontology of the absence of the One and, more recently, in phenomenology of the inexistence of World – namely of the category of world understood as the Whole, or cosmos. In Logics of Worlds (2009a), Badiou argues that there are only worlds and no World to subsume them all. Each and every being is manifest only locally, in a world, according to the transcendental – or ‘logic’ – of that world, and in this sense Heidegger’s ‘beings-as-a-whole’ is wrong, as also his famous being-in-the-world, which Badiou rather calls ‘being-in-a

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world’ (2009a:  118, emphasis added). As in Heidegger, the appearing of the being of beings for Badiou is being-there (2009a:  102), which is the same as being-thus (2009a: 326). Without this ‘there’ there is no appearing of being, but this is also why there can be no being of the Whole, which could have no ‘there’ of its own without thereby being less than the Whole. From the other side, having established that there is no World we have also established that there is more than one world, since if there was only one it would be that World. Badiou’s proof (2009a: 109–11) of the inexistence of the Whole is formal and can be summarized as follows: if the Whole is the set of all there is, thus the set of all sets, it must also include itself in its set, in which case it is a reflexive set that presents itself. However, given that it is the set of all sets, the Whole must also include all the sets that do not include themselves (the set of pears in the fruit bowl is not itself a pear, for example). But what is the status of the set of all these sets (that do not include themselves)? Is it a reflexive set, like the Whole, or not? If yes, then it is certainly able to present itself except for the fact that, being a set of all the sets that do not present themselves, we immediately have a fatal inconsistency. So perhaps it is a non-reflexive set? But inasmuch as it is subsumed in the Whole that is reflexive, it does present itself. Inconsistency arises again. Yet if the set of all sets that do not present themselves is inconsistent, then so immediately is the Whole, since this ultimate set must contain the lesser one. ‘Therefore, the Whole has no being.’ Is this formal exclusion of the Whole really necessary?, Badiou asks (2009a: 111). Yes, because it is ‘being as such’ that cannot form a whole, ‘and not the world, nature or the physical universe’. As also for Heidegger, Badiou’s being is something other than the totality of beings, although for the French philosopher this is not because being is always a question but, to the contrary, because, as established in Cantorian set theory, ‘every consideration of beings-as-a-whole is inconsistent’ (ibid.).10 That there is no Whole means that there can be ‘no uniform procedure of identification and differentiation of what is’ (2009a: 112). Badiou here formalizes Paul’s insight that, in Christ (i.e. as appearing in a different world), the slave

10

Despite Badiou’s characterization (2000) of Deleuze as a thinker of the One, Deleuze (1991: 104) in fact excludes the Whole as something given. We must ‘be delighted that the Whole is not given’. Not everything is calculable according to a state or determinable by way of a programme. The ‘Whole of duration’ is only virtual and never actual and differentiated actuality in no way resembles the virtual that it actualizes. In Deleuze’s Bergsonism, then, the classical conception of cosmic totality acquires a new meaning: ‘it is not the whole that closes like an organism, it is the organism that opens onto a whole’ (ibid.: 105). But this whole that is opened onto is ‘a Whole in which there is nothing to see or contemplate’ (ibid.: 112).

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is free and the freeman a slave. The thinking of any being whatever is always local, never universal. This is why, although truths are ontologically universal (trans-worldly), the appearance of a truth requires a body of that truth  – the subject of its event – which, as a being, must always be in a world. Truths are universal but appear singularly. To illustrate using one of Badiou’s own conditions: love is a universal but its appearing as this One of love is always dependent on the being-there of two in a singular world. That there is no World but only worlds enables Badiou to articulate a profoundly anti-cosmic anthropology:  ‘man is the animal that appears in a very great number of worlds’ (2009a: 113; see also 513). If other beings also inhabit different worlds, then it is man that ‘appears most multiply’. Contrary to man in the context of cosmos, who is positioned once and for all in the Totality, Badiou’s ‘human animal is the being of a thousand logics’ (ibid.). Is Badiou now saying that multiple-appearing is what is decisive? After all, to be able to appear in innumerable worlds is to have the possibility of appearing differently. As Badiou himself puts it (2009a: 514), playing on the word grace: ‘The infinite of worlds is what saves us from every finite dis-grace.’ That there is no World would then itself be the liberation, as it was for Nietzsche. This would clearly be in some tension with the emphasis in Being and Event (2007a) on the universality of truths. Badiou (2009a: 113) seeks to bring these positions together with the argument that the human is traversed by a capacity to include itself in the move back from appearance in multiple worlds (as a being) towards universality (being). Human beings can thereby contribute the universality of truths to all the worlds that they find themselves appearing in. In the process, and here the Cynic comes to mind, the human animal can point to the void of being, a void which can only appear in a world but without which no world could be. Maybe it is this ‘worldly ubiquity’ of the void that humanity desires above all else as the ‘elusive One of its infinite appearances’ (2009a: 114). What Badiou calls the ‘egalitarian consequences’ (2009a: 143) of this absence of the Whole are drawn out by way of a comparison with the ultimate thinker of the Whole – Hegel. For Hegel the axiom of the Whole leads thought always in the direction of conceptual determination  – from the outside towards the inside, from exposition to reflection, from form to content – until, finally, ‘fulfilled being’ is achieved in the figure of thought ‘comprehending itself ’ (ibid.). For Badiou, by contrast, it is ‘impossible to rank worlds hierarchically’ in this way since a world only is a world ‘to the extent that what composes its composition lies within its composition’ (ibid. and 307). It is therefore ‘of the essence of the world not to be the totality of existence, and to endure the existence of an

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infinity of other worlds outside of itself ’ (2009a: 146–7). There is, in short, an ‘egalitarian indifference of an infinity of worlds constructed on distinct transcendentals’, with no meta-transcendental above them all (2009a: 328–9). While being and thought are the same for Badiou as much as for Hegel, this identity is purely a ‘local occurrence’ in Badiou and could never be the ‘totalized result’ it is for Hegel (2009a: 143). This is also why ‘the True’ for Badiou, though as universal as it is for Hegel, takes the form of absolutely singular truth-events rather than the Totality thinking itself. Badiou shows how any thinking of the Whole ends up finding a place for everything and putting everything in its place in the manner of cosmos. For while a being can fail to appear in one of many worlds, it is unthinkable for it not to appear in the Totality. To not appear in the Whole is not to be at all, whereas to in-appear in a world does not prevent appearing in another. The judgement of the Whole on a being that in-appears is that it is not, but its judgement on a being that appears weakly is still damning: to barely appear in the Whole is barely to be. When it comes to the Whole ‘there is always a fixed determination which affirms the thing as such in accordance with the Whole’ (2009a: 147). The thought of the Whole cannot but lead to a hierarchy of beings. Indeed, Hegel is incapable of admitting the absolute difference of beings (i.e. their real equality outside of any common measure) for very good dialectical reasons. It is only because of the relative inequality that exists between any two things that we can ‘derive the immanent equality for which this inequality exists’ (2009a: 148–9). Each thing finds its identity only by differentiating itself from the other, thereby being, from the perspective of the Whole, finally the same as this other. Although Badiou himself rejects the idea that there can be an absolute difference between beings, this is so because, for him, beings can only appear within a determinate world that submits them both to a common measure. But to the extent that beings appear in many worlds – and human beings in innumerable worlds – this is in no way a final measure: ‘Existence stems solely from the contingent logic of a world which nothing sublates’ (2009a: 152). To the contrary, having ditched World, Badiou is able to posit the radical equality, which is at once the real difference, of beings qua beings. Only in their appearing (namely in a world) are beings put in relation, a relation that allows some to shine more brightly than others. Beyond Hegel, Badiou finds the trace of the cosmos-thinking of the One also in the vitalist philosophies running from Nietzsche and Bergson to Deleuze (2009a: 267–70). The axiom of these philosophies of life, for Badiou, is the term (‘life’) that transcends the singular states that deploy it – each being can

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be thought, finally, only by referring it back to the One of which it is an evanescent mode. But to be referred back to the One is, of course, to be nihilated. The infinite creativity of the One means, as far as each existent is concerned, death. Being’s dependence on this chaotic, formless One is revealed in the return to it of every being. Existence is precarious and reveals its constitutive limit – its finitude – never more than in its cancellation. ‘Death alone is the proof of life’ (2009a: 268). Badiou thus finds in these philosophies of life (not to mention the Heideggerian thought of finitude) rather the spectre of the dead God. ‘One may call Him Life, or – like Spinoza – Substance or [as in phenomenology] Consciousness. We’re always dealing with Him, this underlying infinite whose terrestrial writing is death’ (2009a: 268). To conceive of existence without finitude is the task of thought; that there is no World, rather an infinity of worlds, is itself the great liberation. *** The similarities of Paul’s way of being in the world to Cynicism – the wandering, the poverty, the militancy, the universalism, the affirmation of suffering – should not hide an essential difference. Cynicism levels the pretensions of rank by unveiling that being that is common to all. Paul rather reveals a new being that is given by a time that is being redeemed. The Cynics call for change at the level of individual existence and, given their universalism, thereby effectively (as Foucault emphasizes) for another world. Yet for all this, world for the Cynic is not a complex of becoming, instead that phusis which is the same. Paul rather thinks world as becoming-other, which enables him to mount a new critique of the timelessness of imperial cosmos. Paul really has no true world. His ontology points to nothing substantial but only the time that remains. As we shall see in the next chapter, this makes it very difficult to give credence to Nietzsche’s claim that Paul was the greatest of the nihilists.

4

Paul: Nihilist or Overman?

This was his Damascene moment: [ . . .] that the idea of ‘hell’ could master even Rome. (Nietzsche 2005: 62) This chapter engages with the Paul debate in modern philosophy, specifically with the question of how Paul stands with regard to nihilism. Interpretations of Paul in modern philosophy, starting with Nietzsche, could hardly be more divergent, but they are all illuminating. Understanding what is at stake in these different readings is best accomplished through the categories of nihilism as understood by Nietzsche. As we have seen, modern nihilism, for Nietzsche, is the nothingness that results from the devaluation of the highest values, values that are themselves the result of that ancient nihilism which posits values higher than life – the true world. This other world is present in all ascetic ideals which embody the will to nothingness and which give to reactive forces their force, even when that force finally expresses itself as no will at all (Deleuze 1983: 171). For the nothingness of the will characteristic of the last man is but the outworking of the ancient will to nothingness. In Deleuze’s summation (1983: 151), the journey of nihilism for Nietzsche runs from God (the first, active nihilism), to God’s murderer (reactive nihilism), to the last man (passive nihilism): Previously life was depreciated from the height of the higher values [. . .] Here, on the contrary, only life remains, but it is still a depreciated life which now continues in a world without values, stripped of meaning and purpose, sliding ever further towards its nothingness. (Deleuze 1983: 147)

How one relates to this history of nihilism is, for Nietzsche, the decisive question. What is not in doubt is that the death of God is not an answer to nihilism but only its outworking, for the reactive life ‘secretes its own atheism’ (Deleuze 1983: 154). God dies of his own pity – the reactive man turns the weapon that he gets from God against God (Deleuze 1983: 150). This is why God’s murderer, as

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the prototype of the man of ressentiment who is only capable of rejecting God’s pity, is the Ugliest Man in Zarathustra. Who then is Nietzsche’s Overman that can have done with all this ressentiment? Unlike the reactive man, who can only say no to God and thus remains world denying, the Overman affirms the world without God. The Overman’s affirmation is actually a second affirmation (this is the affirmation of the affirmation rather than the negation of the negation!), since all that he affirms is the primary affirmation that is becoming. Zarathustra, as he who announces the Overman, is the high noon of the coincidence of being and becoming because he is the first to affirm that becoming is, the first ‘To impress upon becoming the character of being’ (Nietzsche 2003: 138). Deleuze (1983: 187) puts it like this: ‘The Dionysian [primary] affirmation demands another affirmation which takes it as its object. Dionysian becoming is being, eternity, but only insofar as the corresponding affirmation is itself affirmed.’ This world, as a world of Dionysian becoming, is like ‘a wedding mirror which awaits the soul capable of admiring herself there’. Becoming only has being insofar as its affirmation is itself affirmed. Zarathustra’s affirmation alone is what gives ‘unity to multiplicity, necessity to chance’ (Deleuze 1983:  188). It thus becomes clear why Deleuze claims that Nietzsche’s eternal return selects only that which is different to return.1 There can be no return of the negative, of that which is not creation, because being is only affirmation, the affirmation of becoming. As Deleuze (1983: 190) summarizes this thought beautifully: ‘the negative expires at the gates of being’. In a passage in his Late Notebooks from the autumn of 1887, Nietzsche (2003: 146–7) places active and passive nihilism in a different order from that which appears in his history of nihilism (where it is a matter of the active nihilism of the great slave revolt of Christianity giving way to the passive nihilism of the last man in modernity). In this note, active nihilism is treated as an intermediary stage between passive nihilism and the overcoming of nihilism. Treating nihilism this time conceptually rather than genealogically, Nietzsche admits that nihilism as the condition under which ‘the highest values are devalued’ is, in itself, ‘ambiguous’. To be sure, nihilism can be a sign of weakness and weariness at life, of the ‘decline and retreat of the spirit’s power’. Such passive nihilism, finding that traditional values have become inoperative, seeks solace in benumbing balms 1

For Deleuze (1994: 6, 41 and 299), Nietzsche’s eternal return is not some external order imposed upon the world’s chaos, it is only the internal identity of world and chaos – Chaosmos. This is why Nietzsche’s eternal return cannot be understood as a cycle, as if it is an idea content only to oppose linear time.

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such as religion and morality. But there is an active nihilism, too. This nihilism is rather ‘a sign of the increased power of the spirit’, of strength, in that it does not passively find itself lacking the old values, but rather actively outgrows them. Active nihilism is not yet strong enough to proactively posit new goals or beliefs, in which case it would no longer be nihilism at all. It thus remains a ‘pathological intermediate state’ in which the inference that there is no meaning at all always threatens and in which: ‘It achieves its maximum of relative force as a violent force of destruction:  as active nihilism. The opposite would be the weary nihilism that no longer attacks: its most celebrated form Buddhism, as passivist [sic] nihilism.’ Nonetheless, as the second sentence of this entry hints, active nihilism, despite its incompleteness and its dangers, remains an intermediate, and therefore necessary, stage in the overcoming of nihilism. As Nietzsche (2003:  141) had admitted a short time before in a note from the summer of 1887, hatred of a world in which we suffer takes the form of the imagination of a different and valuable world, and here ‘ressentiment towards the real is creative’. Indeed, in a note from that spring, Nietzsche (2003: 140) even considered giving ontological primacy to active nihilism: Every drive that wants to be satisfied expresses its dissatisfaction with the present state of things – what? Might the whole be composed entirely of dissatisfied parts, all of which have their heads full of what’s desirable? Might the ‘course of things’ be precisely the ‘Away from here! Away from reality!’, be eternal discontent itself? Might desirability itself be the driving force? Might it be – deus?

*** Nietzsche’s three modes of relation to nihilism – reactive nihilism, active nihilism and the post-nihilistic, affirmative, Overman  – frame nicely three of the most significant philosophical readings of Paul that we have:  Nietzsche’s own (where Paul is viewed as a reactive nihilist); Jacob Taubes’s (where Paul is seen more in terms of Nietzsche’s primary nihilism: as an active, even revolutionary, nihilist driven by an eschatological nihilism); and Alain Badiou’s (where Paul is something of an Overman in his positing of new values, specifically the value of universalism). Yet while they position Paul very differently in relation to nihilism, all three of these readings thereby continue to tie Paul to the problem of nihilism. That is, even if Taubes and Badiou release Paul from Nietzsche’s charge of reactive nihilism, they continue to insist that Paul should be understood in relation to the transvaluation of values itself, whether this is the destruction of old values (Taubes) or the creation of new ones (Badiou). Even in the latter case  – the

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creation of new values as in Badiou’s reading – there must still first be a devaluation of the old values. What values does Paul negate, then? There is general agreement with Nietzsche from both Taubes and Badiou that Paul is the great devaluer of the highest values of Antiquity. First, Paul devalues hierarchy as an essential difference between freemen and slaves. Paul either inverts this hierarchy – as in Nietzsche’s charge that the Christianity that Paul invents is history’s great slave revolt – or transcends it – as in Badiou’s account of Paul’s universalism, where those who are one in Christ are no longer defined as slaves or freemen (Gal. 3.28). The spurious universalism of ancient cosmopolitanism is for Badiou exposed (as also its modern variants) by Paul’s egalitarian version. Cosmopolitanism is a hierarchical universalism which remains imperial, as in the figure of Marcus Aurelius, at once Roman Emperor and Stoic citizen of the world. Taubes, too, sees Paul as first and foremost an anti-imperial figure whose nihilistic eschatological theology is also deeply political. Second, Paul devalues communalism as an essential difference between Jews and Greeks. Nietzsche argues (2011: 51) that communalism is overcome by Paul as the ‘first Christian’ of the first non-national religion, just as he bemoans the loss of these national gods (Nietzsche 2005: 14). Badiou, who rather celebrates this accomplishment, agrees that the form of Paul’s universalism, being that of a universalizable singularity (the resurrection), belongs to everyone and therefore to no-one in particular. Taubes and Badiou also concur that communalism is overturned in Paul by his repeated emphasis on the pas, the ‘all’, in contradistinction to those Jewish Christians who sought in some way to preserve Israel’s special election, if only through the continuation of Jewish customs and rites such as circumcision (Taubes 2004: 24–5; Badiou 2003: 19–23). Third, Paul devalues law as the ordering principle of the cosmos. Paul’s critique of law in Taubes’s view attacks not just specific forms of law, for example pharisaical Jewish law, but, as we saw, the generalized ‘apotheosis of nomos’ characteristic of Paul’s Antiquity (Taubes 2004: 23). Badiou (2003: 87) concurs that Paul’s deactivation of law is very profound, proposing nothing other than a trans- or non-literal law of love where it is a matter of subjective fi delity to truths rather than being bound to objective norms (the laws of nature or of the universe). This is an assault on the Greek cosmos itself in that it substitutes the law as that which is due (hence the law’s particular and partial character) for its opposite: that grace which comes freely, without being due (in other words: universally or for all) (Badiou 2003: 77). Wholly other than law, the event of the resurrection is incalculable; nothing leads up to it – it

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happened, pure and simple. While the wise man, knowing the order of the world, has nothing to decide, the subject of the event will rather have to roll the dice. Paul wagers on the resurrection and nothing is the same thereafter. Indeed, a breaking of the history of the world in two (something Nietzsche himself attempted but, in falling short of, was broken by) results from this irruption of the resurrection in a previously static cosmos (Badiou 2003: 208; Taubes 2004: 80). Thus, fourth, in devaluing law, Paul also devalues cosmos; and this indeed could serve as a heading for the first three devaluations named above. As we have seen, cosmos is the conviction (recalling the etymology that would take cosmos back to the verb kosmein: to order or arrange) that the order of things is an everlasting totality.2 Against this, Taubes’s Paul is a Gnostic-apocalyptic who expects the imminent end of ‘the present form of this world’ (1 Cor. 7.29– 31). Badiou’s Paul, meanwhile, establishes the event of the resurrection as a world-historical rupture with the allotting of places and orders characteristic of cosmos. It is the egalitarian ‘for all’ of the resurrection, rather than ‘the One’ of cosmos, where the latter is a matter of adapting oneself to the totality by knowing one’s place in it (and that the ‘One is not’ is also the central claim of Badiou’s secular ontology – the multiple without One) (Badiou 2003: 108). The devaluation of cosmos is therefore intimately linked to the overcoming of hierarchy, communalism and law, which also work, can only work, by finding distinctions (recalling that nomos derives from nemo, which is to divide or to assign). In sum, although they evaluate Paul’s rupture with the highest values of Antiquity differently, both Taubes and Badiou, following Nietzsche, agree that Paul is a break with everything that the ancients held to be most true – that Paul’s teaching of the cross of foolishness (1 Cor. 1.20) ‘equals a slap in the face of the noble ethos of Antiquity’ (Taubes 2010:  77).3 In this sense all concur on one theme: inasmuch as he seeks a new world-order, Paul is a thoroughgoing nihilist. Having established this much, we can now see the significance of the messianic Paul offered by Agamben. Only Agamben’s Paul escapes the charge of nihilism – neither devaluing the world as he finds it nor pronouncing a new one (the latter which, to repeat, first requires this same devaluation), but rather opening up his world for use. This messianic Paul would also deal in critique of the old

2 3

See, for example, Mircea Eliade (1971). Taubes repeats this point in The Political Theology of Paul (2004: 10): the cross is a ‘total and monstrous inversion of the values of Roman and Jewish thought’.

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and hope for the new, but this would not take the form of a linear operation in time but rather a mode of relation to the present. Such a messianic time sees its opportunity in the time of the now (ho nyn kairos), rather than receiving openness from the future to come. To be sure, even this messianic vocation in Agamben’s Paul requires that the world be passing away (hence the importance of the negation of the figures of this world, as in Paul’s use of the formulation hos me, ‘as not’). However, Agamben denies that this negation implies the nihilistic idea of another, better world in Paul, arguing that nothing in Paul’s messianic vocation tends towards the elsewhere. If we accept Nietzsche’s history of nihilism, then there is no way out of its predicament, no way of seizing its opportunity, other than via the Overman, who is the other side of the rope over the abyss of nothingness that is man in his dangerous crossing over from his animal origins (Nietzsche 2006: 7). Only this joyfully creative creature, this bringer of new values, can be an answer to the nothing; and he will be a long time coming. But if Agamben is right that the Pauline messianic vocation enables a creative new relation to the present time and to the subjectivities that we already find there, must we wait? Indeed, must we understand our predicament in terms of the need for Dionysian destruction–creation at all?

The reactive Paul Nietzsche gets on to Paul in the first book of his mature work, Dawn (1881), where he identifies him as the founder of Christianity, as the ‘first Christian’ (since, without Paul, Jesus would have remained the property of an obscure Jewish sect). Nietzsche seeks to portray Paul as tormented and self-lacerating, but also as cunning and ambitious. The source of this deformed character? That Paul, enforcer of the strict observance of Jewish law, found that he himself could not fulfil it, and thus came to hate it, seeking now for ways to destroy, rather than observe, the law. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus is, for Nietzsche, the moment when Paul sees a way to revenge himself on law by identifying the risen Christ as law’s destroyer. From this moment, and Nietzsche cannot hide his jealousy, European history will revolve around Paul as the one who announces the death of law in life with Christ. The latter part of this equation, in Nietzsche’s eyes (2011: 51), is what reveals Paul’s true intentions: ‘with the idea of becoming-one [with Christ] every shame, every subordination, every barrier is removed from it [Paul’s soul], and the untameable

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will to lust for domination reveals itself as an anticipatory revelry in divine splendors’. Nietzsche does not return to Paul until his last writings, where Paul is taken up again in his notebook of autumn 1887. Here Nietzsche (2003: 204) argues that ‘Paul’s genius’ was to have recognized that the Jewish diaspora’s naysaying to Roman power and magnificence was itself a form of power that could be exploited. Not long after this, Paul becomes the chief target of Nietzsche’s polemic in The Anti-Christ (written in the second half of 1888). As in his recent notebook entry, Nietzsche resumes where he left off in Dawn, arguing that Paul, as an archetype of ‘the priestly kind’, has an interest in ‘making humanity sick’ through the inversion of concepts such as good and evil, which now denigrate what is noble and strong and elevate that which is decadent and weak (Nietzsche 2005: 21). What is this interest? To ‘attain power’. Such power is attained – man is made sick – primarily through the deemphasizing of Christ’s teachings, which Nietzsche sees as preaching a guilt-free union between man and God in the here and now, and instead shifting the emphasis to Christ’s death, which is now interpreted as a guilt sacrifice the reward for which is eternal life in the hereafter (ibid.). Nietzsche’s claim is clear: Paul has devalued this world in the name of the world to come in the interests of establishing (his) priestly power. The driver of this will to power is, in Paul’s case, ressentiment; ‘Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge’ (Nietzsche 2005: 44): You can see just what came to an end with the death on the Cross: a new, a completely original attempt at a Buddhistic peace movement, at an actual happiness on earth, not just a promissory one [. . .] On the heels of [these] glad tidings came the very worst ones of all: Paul’s. Paul epitomizes a type that is the antithesis of the ‘bringer of glad tidings’, the genius in hatred, in the vision of hatred, in the merciless logic of hatred. And how much this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the redeemer: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, example, teachings, death, meaning and rights of the whole evangel  – nothing was left after this hatred-inspired counterfeiter realized what he and he alone could use. Not reality, not the historical truth! [. . .] What he needed was power . . .. (Nietzsche 2005: 38–9)4

4

For all that Nietzsche criticizes Paul for fabricating the need for life to be redeemed, it is striking that Zarathustra (2006: 158) is also described as a redeemer, this time of chance. Since for Nietzsche life is chance, we are left with two redemptions of life – the Pauline and the Zarathustrian. Of course, the former (in Nietzsche’s reading anyway) is a redemption of this life in the life beyond, whereas the latter redeems life in the here and now. But the need for a redeemer is a constant. Nietzsche is explicit about this: Zarathustra wants to go to mankind and, among them, ‘to go under, dying I want to give them my richest gift’ (ibid.).

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Although the will to power undoubtedly burns brightly in Nietzsche’s Paul, it is important to see that the form that this will takes is one of ressentiment, and in this sense Paul’s nihilism is of a reactive, if not strictly passive, kind. This ressentiment is diagnosed by Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ (2005: 62) as a symptom both of personal weakness – Paul is made angry and revengeful at his impotence before the law – and also ‘national’ or political weakness – Paul is a member of a Jewish nation defined by its historical experience of exile and, in Paul’s day, by its subordination to the mighty Roman Empire:  ‘This was his Damascene moment:  he understood that he needed the belief in immortality to devalue “the world”, that the idea of “hell” could still gain control over Rome, – that the “beyond” could be used to kill life . . .. Nihilist and Christian:  this rhymes [in German], it does more than just rhyme . . .’

The active Paul Taubes was a philosopher of religion who’s Political Theology of Paul (taken from a series of lectures given in 1987, just before his death) was a significant spur to the recent Paul revival in philosophy. Taubes admitted (2004: 79) that Nietzsche was his greatest teacher on Paul. Yet for Taubes, Paul is not the reactive nihilist that Nietzsche describes, but an active, even revolutionary, opponent of imperial power:  ‘my thesis is that . . . the Epistle to the Romans is a political theology, a political declaration of war on the Caesar’ (2004: 16). The distinctly political ambition of this Paul is not a matter of seeking personal, priestly power by devaluing the values of the Roman world, as in Nietzsche, but rather to found and legitimate a new people of God (2004: 28). Taubes’s Paul is an active, ‘eschatological’ nihilist. Taubes follows Nietzsche in identifying Paul’s nihilism towards the Roman Empire, but he evaluates this nihilism differently (2004: 72). Paul’s political theology of a world that is passing away is a redemptive counter to Rome’s imperial pretentions of never passing away – to a political theology of empire. This equation of redemptive politics with nihilism is also Walter Benjamin’s, from the last line of his ‘Theological-Political Fragment’, but Taubes sees an ‘astonishing parallel’ between Benjamin’s text and chapters  8 and 13 of Paul’s letter to the Romans (ibid.). Benjamin (1986: 313) writes: ‘For nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away. To strive after such passing, even for those stages of man that are nature, is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism.’

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Taubes finds evidence for his thesis that Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is nothing less than a political declaration of war on Rome from the letter’s opening salutation. Taubes seizes on Paul’s announcement of his ‘calling’, which asserts that he, Paul, is ‘called to proclaim the gospel of God’ since this gospel concerns God’s son, who ‘was descended from David according to the flesh’ (Rom. 1.1–3). Taubes asks: why this emphasis on Jesus as the son of David?, which is not repeated anywhere else in Paul’s letters. It is as the son of David that Jesus is elected to rule, which is a natural quality, but ‘Son of God’ is rather ascribed, as in Psalm 2, the Psalm of coronation. Taubes concludes (2004: 14) that this is an act of enthronement. ‘So we are dealing with a conscious emphasis of those attributes that are imperatorial, kingly, imperial. They are stressed before the congregation in Rome, where the imperator is himself present, and where the center of the cult of the emperor, the emperor religion, is located.’ Taubes returns three times to this theme over the course of his lectures, stressing that Paul’s Epistle to the Romans needs to be understood as a ‘political declaration of war’ and as carrying a ‘political charge’ which is ‘explosive to the highest degree’ (2004: 16, 24; see also 73). When a letter is introduced in these terms, here and nowhere else, and is to be read aloud to the congregation too, a challenge is being laid down. This is a piece of anti-Caesarism that is being made eminently public, and the Romans have censors who are not idiots. Taubes then moves from philological reflections to a much broader thesis that the central function of law in Romans (recalling that, in this letter, Paul seeks to describe law as somehow deactivated or rendered inoperative in Christ) is itself a piece of political theology, since the concept of law is being used by Paul as ‘a compromise formula for the Imperium Romanum’ (2004: 23). In a memorable phrase that we have encountered already, Taubes describes Paul’s period of Antiquity as suffused with an aura of ‘an apotheosis of nomos’ (ibid.). This Hellenistic nomosaura could take a Greek, Roman, or Jewish form, but, while each understood law in his own way, all participated equally in generalized nomos theology (ibid.). Taubes believes that Paul himself reflects this aura, such that ‘law’ for Paul is not simply the Torah, nor the law of the universe, nor natural law, but ‘all of these in one’ (2004: 24). But while Paul’s sense of ‘law’ echoes his context, his treatment of law is anything but contemporary. For Taubes, Paul ‘clambers out’ of the nomos consensus of his day and in this sense is a fanatic, a zealot whose protest against ‘law’ proposes an incredible transvaluation of values: It isn’t nomos but rather the one who was nailed to a cross by nomos who is the imperator! This is incredible, and compared to this all the little revolutionaries

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are nothing. This transvaluation turns Jewish-Roman-Hellenistic upper-class theology on its head, the whole mishmash of Hellenism. Sure, Paul is also universal, but by virtue of the ‘eye of the needle’ of the crucified one, which means: transvaluation of all the values of this world. This is nothing like nomos as summum bonum. (ibid.)

Taubes’s Paul, like Nietzsche’s, is a nihilist. But where Nietzsche’s Paul is reactively bent on exploiting existing resentment at Rome for his own, destructive, purposes, Taubes’s Paul actively creates opposition to the Roman Empire almost out of nothing. And he does so for that most constructive of political motives – to found a new people. That this people, occupying a demonic world structure that is passing away (1 Cor. 7.29), should in no way seek a revolutionary confrontation with its equally transitory Imperial superstructure does not make Paul’s intentions, or his methods, any less radical (2004: 54). To the contrary, they indicate just how nihilistic Paul really is with regard to this world (Gold 2006: 155). Neither Taubes’s Paul, nor Taubes himself, see anything in history other than crisis. Historical time is distress, and therefore Benjamin is right in seeing politics, ‘whose method must be called nihilism’, as capable only of destroying the old order (Taubes 2010: 110; Gold 2006: 145–6; Benjamin 1986: 313). For a Paul capable of traversing such destruction, giving values necessary not only for a new people but a truth for the whole world, we must turn to Badiou.

Paul the Overman He who demanded Dionysian affirmation, him who, like Paul, believed himself to be breaking the history of the world in two, and to be everywhere substituting life’s ‘yes’ for nihilism’s ‘no’, would have found better inspiration by citing this passage: ‘For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you [. . .] was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes’ (2 Cor. 1.19). (Badiou 2003: 71)

For Badiou, nothing in Nietzsche’s attack on Paul fits its target. Paul does not detest Rome, being on the contrary proud of his Roman citizenship (ibid.). Neither does he condemn this life, since ‘the world’ that is crucified with Paul’s Jesus is nothing other than the Greek cosmos as a totality that puts everyone in his place (ibid.). He does not even mention hell (2003: 71 and 96). Nietzsche’s hate-filled nihilist who preaches eternal life hereafter as a curse on life is more accurately described as completely uninterested in immortality, emphasizing

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rather the trinity of affirmation, life and the new man (‘the Overman?’) over negation, death and the old man (2003: 71). Where Nietzsche criticizes Paul for the falsification of the gospel accounts of Jesus, saying that Paul wants only Christ’s death and ‘something in addition’, Badiou points out that this ‘something’, the resurrection, is in fact Paul’s entire focus (2003: 61). It is Nietzsche who is falsifying Paul, argues Badiou, since in shifting attention from the life of Christ to his death and resurrection, Paul is not nihilistically moving the centre of gravity from this life to the nothingness of the beyond, as Nietzsche claims, but rather is teaching ‘a principle of overexistence on the basis of which life, affirmative life, was restored and refounded for all’ (ibid., emphasis added). Badiou’s Paul thus shifts the centre of gravity in a direction opposite to that of Nietzsche’s, from death to life – from life in the flesh, which perishes and dies, to life in the spirit, which takes revenge on death by enabling us to live affirmatively here and now; and from life under the law, which kills, to a life of grace, which knows nothing of death (2003: 45, 62, 73). Against Nietzsche’s judgement that Paul would seek to ‘kill life’, Badiou (2003: 71) has a simple rejoinder from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (15.5): ‘O death, where is thy victory?’ Badiou’s Paul is a figure of absolute affirmation: after the Event, anything is possible. Indeed, such is Badiou’s estimation of the Pauline ‘Yes’ that he makes of it the embodiment of an affirmative logic – what Badiou (2013) calls ‘affirmative dialectics’. The Hegelian dialectic, as the negation of the negation, remains, in Badiou’s terms, too negative.5 While Hegelian logic can account for change, it is unable to think the radical, creative rupture that is the Event. For this New to be thinkable, what is required is affirmation as the first term of dialectical logic rather than negation. Subjects of the Event, following Paul, affirm the affirmation – in Paul’s case the resurrection – rather than negating the negation. This is why Paul, in Badiou’s view, has little interest in saying ‘No’ to Rome. Paul’s ‘Christ is risen!’ provides a rupture with the old order without in any way negating it. As Badiou points out, Paul’s affirmation of the resurrection does not change the Roman Empire, it simply opens a new, indeed infinite, possibility within it, a possibility by which the places and orders of imperial cosmos become a matter of indifference. Paul does not negate Rome, he simply transcends its stations (freemen, slaves) in the yes in Christ.6 The negation of the negation here gives

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Although, as Deleuze (1983: 158) says: ‘One dialectician cannot accuse another of standing on his head – it is the fundamental character of the dialectic itself ’! But as we saw earlier, the Cynic, by contrast, does say no to the polis. Yet because he does not leave the polis, this negation, in opening new possibilities within the polis, has similar effects to Paul’s

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way to the creation of genuine novelties – truths – by which we can start again, and infinitely so.7 Paul’s hope is a subjective principle of fidelity to the event of the resurrection, not a vengeful hope for future retribution. Paul says that hope does not disappoint (Rom. 5.5) because we gives ourselves hope rather than waiting, passively, for it to come. The temporality of hope ‘has nothing to do with the future’ but ‘is a figure of the present subject’: ‘Hope is not hope in an objective victory. On the contrary, it is subjective victory that produces hope’ (Badiou 2003: 97, 95). Pauline hope is overcoming oneself in fidelity to a truth, not overcoming one’s enemies. There is no ressentiment in Badiou’s Paul. Given all of this, Badiou (2003: 61) thinks that Nietzsche should in fact have seen Paul as his ally, rather than his opponent, in the overcoming of ‘contemporary nihilist decadence’. For if Nietzsche were to have been successful in such an overcoming, he would have had to echo (which he in fact did), rather than to oppose, the three themes ‘of which Paul is the inventor’, namely: ‘that of the selflegitimating subjective declaration (the character of Zarathustra), the breaking of History in two (“grand politics”), and the new man as the end of guilty slavery and affirmation of life (the Overman). If Nietzsche is so violent toward Paul, it is because he is his rival far more than his opponent’ (2003: 61). For Badiou (2003: 62), we can only understand Nietzsche’s hatred of Paul if we see how much Nietzsche loathes universalism. Indeed, Paul is where the bug gets into aristocratic history for Nietzsche, such that nobility is transferred into weakness, with all the democratic ‘levelling’ that results (Taubes 2004: 78). For Badiou, too, Paul is undoubtedly the one who devalues ancient hierarchy, though Paul’s responsibility for this is even more direct in Badiou’s account than it is in Nietzsche’s – Paul is, quite literally, the ‘inventor’ of universalism in the sense that, until Paul, the thought of the universal remains only implicit. What Paul manages to think explicitly is the idea of the indifference to difference of every truth, of a truth’s being true for all – and this is the very being of universalism. If Paul is indeed the founder of universalism, then this act of foundation gives us a better, or at least a more psychologically pertinent, explanation for Nietzsche’s hatred of Paul than Badiou’s second argument (which focuses on

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affirmation. Just as Paul’s ‘yes’ to the resurrection does not overcome Rome but opens Rome, so also the Cynic’s ‘no’ to the polis provides an opportunity within the polis rather than leading to its destruction. The Cynics thereby practice Pauline inoperativity (the making inoperative of worldly vocations without ever leaving them) in the form of a ‘no’ rather than a ‘yes’. For all that Badiou (2000) draws a strong contrast between his thought of the event and Deleuze’s, Deleuze (1994:  136) also holds that ‘The new, with its power of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new’.

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Paul’s universalism). In accordance with Badiou’s first argument, it could more plausibly be claimed that Nietzsche is simply jealous of Paul’s status as the Overman of Antiquity who succeeds not only in devaluing the values of the ancient world (which, as nihilism, is all that Nietzsche will allow him) but also in posting new values (which, in his jealousy of such overcoming, Nietzsche is not able to admit). In one sense, Badiou’s Paul is simply Nietzsche’s, with the difference that Badiou pronounces Paul’s breaking of history into two, namely his devaluation of the highest values of Antiquity, to be a positive, rather than a catastrophic, event. Badiou celebrates what he sees as Paul’s novel exclusion of communalism, of the ‘national gods’, the passing of which Nietzsche rather laments. Badiou sees this break as possible because, at the level of thought, Paul understands that the event (which for Paul, though not for Badiou, is the resurrection) is that which, being indifferently for all, breaks with the conjoined themes of law and cosmos, with the assigning of places and the order of things respectively. Badiou’s Paul, in short, enacts a rupture with ancient particularisms in the name of a singular universal. This Paul is the first to see that the universal has the structure of an absolutely unique event which finds no differences in the ‘all’ it addresses, and that genuine universalism therefore cannot be the universalization of any particularity, which is ultimately what the ‘One’ of cosmopolitanism (of the Pax Romana in Paul’s case and global capital in ours) consists of. Throughout Badiou’s account, we get a strong sense of Paul as a creative (rather than cunning) genius. Thus we read that, contra identitarian communalism, ‘Paul is, strictly speaking, the inventor’ of ‘a subject devoid of all identity’ (2003:  5, emphasis added); that, to those who ‘know the rules of the ancient world’, Paul’s statement to the Galatians (3.28) that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, is ‘genuinely stupefying’ (2003: 9); and that, in deploying the underlying structure of Paul’s thought, which is its universalism, we should give ‘credit to him who, deciding that none was free from what a truth demands and disjoining the true from the Law, provoked – entirely alone – a cultural revolution upon which we still depend’ (2003: 15). As Badiou himself hints on a couple of occasions, should we not see Paul as an Overman? However, if we adopt this perspective then, although we release Paul from Nietzsche’s charges of passive or reactive nihilism, we continue to tie Paul to the problem of nihilism itself. And this is something that Badiou’s reading lends itself to, given that, for Badiou, it is true, first, that nihilism is the figure both of Paul’s age and of our own, and, second, that Paul, who overcomes the nihilism of his own age, is our contemporary (hence the title of chapter 1: ‘Paul: Our

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contemporary’) (2003:  7).8 Though the nihilism of the Roman Empire is different from our ‘capitalist-parliamentarian’ nihilism, it shares the same form of depoliticization; and though Paul’s passage through nihilism (the resurrection) cannot be our passage, its form (the truth of the event, addressed universally) remains the only way to confront nihilism in our own time (2003:  7).9 In his book on ethics, Badiou (2001b: 38–9) puts it like this: ‘Every age [. . .] has its own figure of nihilism. The name changes, but always under these names [. . .] we find [. . .] an obscure desire for catastrophe. It is only by [. . .] affirming truths against the desire for nothingness, that we tear ourselves away from nihilism.’ Nevertheless, if Paul is Badiou’s model in the creative overcoming of nihilism, it is important to be precise that this is not in the Dionysian sense of Nietzsche’s destruction-creation. Nietzsche’s answer to nihilism, as Deleuze (1983: 174–5) reconstructs it, involves the will to nothingness breaking its alliance with reactive forces. As Zarathustra announces (Nietzsche 2006: 8), in place of the passivity of the last man the Overman will affirm the ‘joy of annihilation’ by destroying himself actively: I love the one whose soul squanders itself, who wants no thanks and gives none back: for he always gives and does not want to preserve himself. I love the one who is ashamed when the dice fall to his fortune and who then asks: am I a cheater? – For he wants to perish. I love the one who casts golden words before his deeds and always does even more than he promises: for he wants his going under. I love the one who justifies people of the future and redeems those of the past: for he wants to perish of those in the present. I love the one who chastises his god, because he loves his god: for he must perish of the wrath of his god.10

In The Century, Badiou (2007b: 64–5) concedes that such ‘terroristic nihilism’ of the destructive–creative kind has a creative, rather than a consenting, relation to the nothing, and is thereby preferable to the passive nihilism that abounds today, where the best that can be hoped for is the avoidance of evil. As Badiou points out, this contemporary ‘humanitarian’ nihilism, in ideologically refusing any contact with the nothing, collapses even deeper into it. In other words, having suppressed the ‘terrorism’ of active nihilism, we do not escape nihilism 8 9 10

See also Badiou 2012: 55–6. Thus, elsewhere (2012: 60), Badiou outlines one of his maxims for anti-nihilism as ‘Exalt exceptions’. ‘In the man who wants to perish, to be overcome, negation has broken everything which still held it back, it has defeated itself, it has become power of affirming, a power which is already superhuman’ (Deleuze 1983: 175).

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itself, since we have only substituted its reactive for its active form (ibid.). But in more recent works, starting with Being and Event (2007a), Badiou has offered a self-criticism of his earlier emphasis (e.g. in Theory of the Subject [2009b]) on destruction, which he now identifies as too close to a ‘blind imperative’ to purify (2007b: 54–7). In place of the terroristic charms of destruction–creation, Badiou now proffers subtraction–creation, where subtraction thinks the nothing or negativity as a gap rather than as primordial identity. This shift in emphasis, Badiou suggests, avoids the pitfall of the search for authenticity (exemplified in the case of Heidegger), which loses itself in the destructive quest for the origin (Being). Although many things do indeed deserve to be destroyed, this passion for destruction can never be fulfilled since purification is fated to remain incomplete (2007b: 56).11 Subtraction, by contrast, is committed to the construction of a ‘minimal difference’ from the nothing, which is what a truth procedure does by providing its own axiomatic (ibid.). While destruction–creation can never actually begin creating (since the destructive project of purification will always recede over the horizon), subtraction–creation knows it must invent content and is therefore the only true passion for the new. The ‘new man’ is produced rather than restored in his Heideggerian authenticity (2007b: 65).12 The difference between destruction and subtraction notwithstanding, Badiou continues to tie Paul to the question of nihilism – as Nietzsche understood it – by making him the first prophet of the possibility of ‘new worlds’ (truth procedures that, in pronouncing the event, break with the order of things). It is rather in Agamben that we find the most sustained attempt to write a non-nihilistic Paul, although it will be interesting to see that Badiou’s passion for the ‘minimal difference’, which is his own attempt to exit the cycle of destruction–creation, is close to the ‘messianic vocation’ that Agamben finds invaluable in Paul.13 11

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More recently, in Logics of Worlds (2009a: 396), Badiou has reaffirmed that destruction is an inevitable component of change. The event must destroy what linked a being to the transcendental of the world in which it appears in order for real transformation to occur: ‘The opening of a space of creation requires destruction.’ Thus the ‘new man’ is free from all predicates such as family, property and nation: ‘Marx had already understood that the universal singularity of the proletariat derives from its bearing no predicate, possessing nothing, and in particular not having, in the strong sense of the term, any “fatherland” ’ (2007b: 66). There is not space to explore it fully here, but Badiou’s ‘minimal difference’ (or creative relation to the nothing) nonetheless continues to differ from Agamben’s messianic vocation, which, as we shall see, turns on the (non-dialectical) power of negation of extant worldly vocations. For Badiou, on the contrary, a ‘creative excess can[not] be produced be negating ordinary life. No, there must already be an excess in place . . . There is no alchemy that could change the sign of ordinary states’ in the absence of the passage called rebellion. ‘Rebellion’ here, then, ‘means that within the extremity experienced in negative excess abides the certainty that we can change its sign’ (Badiou 2007b: 142–3). In contrast, Agamben’s version of changing signs, which he calls recapitulation, does not find this messianic ‘excess’ as something separate from everyday life.

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The messianic vocation ‘Making use’ here names the deponent power of the Christian’s form of life, which renders destitute ‘the figure of this world’. (Agamben 2016: 274)

It is no omission that leads Agamben (2005) to make only passing reference to Nietzsche in his book on Paul. Agamben’s Paul, precisely because he is a thinker of the messianic vocation, cannot be grasped through the categories of Nietzsche’s nihilism – he is neither the giver of new vocations nor the one who tears down the old vocations, but rather the one who announces the possibility of using existing vocations.14 The messianic vocation, which is the deactivation of law, is thus neither a militant revolutionism with regard to this world nor a nihilistic iconoclasm, but a profaning of worldly identities which enables them to be used without in any way transcending them in some beyond. This world remains in place, but is no longer experienced as it was before. The ‘before’ is therefore not temporal in the sense of the experience of chronological time, but rather an existential experience of closure, to be replaced in the ‘after’ of messianic time by the negation (the Pauline hos me, ‘as not’) which enables these same worldly vocations to be experienced as open by those who live messianically. For Agamben, the small but all-important difference between negation as the ‘as not’ and the ‘as if ’ is the difference between messianic redemption as already realized eschatology and as merely a point of view on another possible world. Redemption is not a remedy for fallen creatures but really what makes creaturely creation possible. Redemption comes ‘before’ any creation (Agamben 2009: 229). The ‘as if ’, which reduces this ‘always already’ of an available redemption to a mere point of view is, in Agamben’s view (2005: 38), characteristic of Adorno’s negative dialectics, which Agamben sees as ‘an absolutely non-messianic form of thought’. The messianic vocation, as far as Agamben (2005: 41–2) is concerned, does not give us a viewpoint on another, redeemed, world. The ‘as not’ is not an ideal in the way that the ‘as if ’ is, and is indeed the latter’s abolition, in the sense of its realization. Crucially, the ‘as if ’ (presumably inasmuch as it assumes the

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Agamben no doubt follows Heidegger in eschewing discussion of values when speaking of nihilism. Conceiving of our fundamental concerns as values is nihilism, for Heidegger, who comes to see Nietzsche’s emphasis on will (the positing of values) as not the solution to, but indeed the culmination of, European nihilism. Values, considered as objects independent from us that we chose/posit can equally well be rejected/un-posited. No one dies for mere external values, but only for shared commitments by which he/she is always already gripped (Dreyfus 1993).

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uselessness of existing vocations) is also an outcome of every nihilism, a point which draws Agamben (2005: 37) into one of his few references in his Paul text to Nietzsche, this time in explicit agreement with him. The messianic subject, on the other hand, no longer knows the as if [. . .]. He knows that in messianic time the saved world coincides with the world that is irretrievably lost, and that, to use Bonhoeffer’s words, he must now really live in a world without God. This means that he must not disguise this world’s being-without-God in any way. The saving God is the God who abandons him, and the fact of representations (the fact of the as if) cannot pretend to save the appearance of salvation. The messianic subject does not contemplate the world as if it were saved. In Benjamin’s words, he contemplates salvation only to the extent that he loses himself in what cannot be saved; this is how difficult it is to dwell in the calling. (2005: 42)15

The tensions with Nietzsche’s thought of the death of God here are striking. In Agamben’s version, the realization that this world is all there is tempts us nihilistically to opt for the ‘as if ’ where we should rather attempt messianically to maintain ourselves in the ‘as not’. The ‘as not’ is itself clearly a form of negation of the world, but it is not a nihilistic one in the sense that it neither seeks, nor even contemplates, some beyond. On this radicalized reading, even if one refrains from positing another world, but rather, as with Nietzsche’s artist, creates new forms, one is still caught up in nihilism (2005: 37). Messianic life, in stark contrast to Nietzsche’s artistic life, is assimilation to the world even to the extent of involving those it has called in becoming ‘like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things’ (1 Cor. 4.13) (2005: 41).16 Nietzsche too, of course, sought the utmost affirmation of everything that has been with his ‘abyssal’ thought of eternal recurrence, his amor fati. Yet Agamben’s messianic vocation (with strong echoes of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return as the return of difference, of that which differs from itself) does not want the return of the same – how could anyone love Auschwitz as destiny (Agamben 1999b:  100)? Rather,

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Benjamin also expresses this idea as follows: ‘Justice is the striving to make the world into the highest good’ (cited in Jacobson 2010: 166). This section of Agamben’s discussion is no doubt indebted to Heidegger’s reading of Paul, which Agamben engages briefly. Agamben seeks to open up some space between himself and Heidegger by recalling that Heidegger’s version of assimilation to the world involves, in its authentic mode, the ‘appropriation’ of the improper. Agamben apparently sees this terminology as too caught up with traditional notions of subjectivity, and therefore prefers the term ‘use’ to ‘appropriation’, since the messianic subject (being nothing other than the ‘as not’ of existing subjectivities) is itself nullified, and so cannot seize either profane identities or even itself. What the messianic subject can seize is not itself as some self-same identity, but a certain time (Heidegger 2004; Agamben 2005: 33–4).

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redemption, though it is firmly of this world, is this world rendered graspable and therefore used ever anew. The hos me is what offers up this world for use. For Agamben, this ‘as not’ is therefore the fundamental messianic term in Paul (2005: 23).17 This hos me is not a matter of ‘eschatological indifference’ (the world is ending; what does it matter!), nor does it have any specific content. We remain as we were when we were called (1 Cor. 7.20). The nullification wrought by the hos me therefore attaches itself to that which is, it ‘does not tend towards an elsewhere’ (2005: 24). But since it neither induces a fatalistic indifference towards that which it nullifies, what exactly does it do? It deposes the social and biological conditions in which it finds itself thrown in the very same gesture that it maintains itself and dwells in them. In deactivating its worldly vocations it lives in them; the messianic vocation coincides completely with living a life, with use (2016: 277). Living a life is using its time. Worldly vocations can be used because they are always passing away. Agamben highlights Paul’s conclusion to his passage on the hos me, which declares that ‘the present form of this world is passing away’ (1 Cor. 7.31). In accordance with this passage, which Agamben (ibid.) translates somewhat differently as ‘passing away is the figure, the way of being, of this world’, the hos me itself is what makes the figure of this world pass by preparing its end. ‘This is not another figure or another world: it is the passing of the figure of this world’ (2005: 24–5). The hos me is negation, not dialectics, where the latter, in sublating that which is negated in a universal and teleological process, tends towards the elsewhere, the other world.18 Politically, this means revealing the fundamental contingency, the arbitrariness, of each and every social condition or identity (2005: 30–1).19 Given that it is law that apportions these identities, this revelation is at once an unveiling of underlying lawlessness and of the powers that hide this lawlessness.20 Unveiling is what the messianic vocation

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See also The Kingdom and the Glory (2011: 248–9). Badiou agrees (2003: 65) that, contra the Hegelian appropriation of Christianity, the Pauline message is non-dialectical, though for Badiou it is not dependent on negation either. The event (which is the resurrection in Paul) ‘is affirmation without preliminary negation; it is what comes upon us in caesura of the law. It is pure and simple encounter’. As Blanton (2011: xvii) notes, Breton’s thought is similar here, where the cross in Breton’s Paul ‘signifies the pale void that renders inoperative the fullness of any ensemble or cultural form’. See Breton, The Word and the Cross (2002: Chapter 4, ‘The Cross and the Powers’). These powers, in Paul’s time the Roman Empire, is how Agamben (2005: 108–11) identifies Paul’s cryptic concept of the katechon in 2 Thess. 2.3–9. Agamben thus reads Paul’s katechon negatively as obfuscating the truth of lawlessness in messianic time in contrast to Carl Schmitt’s reactionary reading, which would rather celebrate the capacity of profane power to ‘hold back’ lawlessness (Schmitt 2003:  59–62). This difference between a revelatory and an obfuscatory relation to lawlessness is found also in Agamben’s treatment of biopolitics (Agamben 1998: 51). Biopolitical nihilism captures (i.e. uses while also hiding) the ‘nothing’ of bare life rather than messianically living in it. For a full discussion of the katechon in the context of contemporary nihilism, see Prozorov 2012.

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does: ‘bringing to light the inoperativity of the law and the substantial illegitimacy of each and every power in messianic time’ (2005: 111). In the precise sense of anarchy as an-arche, that which is without origin, the messianic vocation is anarchistic – showing the absence of foundation beneath all profane power without in any way offering the foundation for a new, redeemed power (ibid.).21 Agamben finds further support for his thesis that the messianic vocation negates this world without positing a world to come (or, more precisely, that in negation the world to come is already here) in the Pauline notion of messianic time. Agamben argues (2005: 62) that messianic time is neither this eon (world) nor the coming eon; neither chronological time nor the apocalyptic time of the eschaton (the end of time). Messianic time is rather an ‘operational time’, ‘the time that time takes to come to an end’ (2005: 65, 67). It is seized kairos (occasion or opportune moment), which is itself nothing other than seized chronos (sequential time), and this is its relation to the ‘as not’, which, as revocation, as deactivation, is nonetheless active, a vocation (2005:  69, 68). This operational time is not to be added as a supplement to chronological time (as, for example, in Marxism, which, following Hegel, views redemption as the final result of a historical process), which is why Paul’s parousia (presence) should not be understood as ‘second coming’ but rather as the relation of the Messiah to each instant of chronological time (2005:  76, 101, 70–1).22 This relation is one of recapitulation, as in Eph. 1.10, where Paul writes that ‘all things are recapitulated in him, things in heaven and things on earth’ (2005:  75). In this sense, suggests Agamben (2005: 77), messianism is wrongly described as future orientated, since it rather involves memory, a thoroughly un-nostalgic remembering which allows what was accomplished in the past to be unaccomplished and, conversely, what is unfulfilled in the present to be fulfilled. Paul’s messianic vocation is thus an immanent rather than an imminent transcendence, or, in Agamben’s own words, ‘a zone of indiscernability between immanence and transcendence, between this world and the future world’ (2005: 25).23 While this world is negated, it is brought thereby to fulfilment. There is no place for nihilism here in any of its Nietzschean moments: this world is neither a source of ressentiment, 21

22 23

This point is reiterated in The Kingdom and the Glory (2011:  166), where Agamben claims that Pauline messianism must be understood ‘as a corrective to the demonic hypertrophy of angelic and human powers’. See also Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1968). This abstract understanding of messianism acquires a more concrete reading in Agamben’s study of monasticism, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Here Agamben (2013a: 48– 51) explicitly links monastic ‘flight from the world’ to the possibility of new forms of life/community: ‘ “Exile from the world” is first of all a political gesture that [. . .] is equivalent to the constitution of a new community.’

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nor a target for destruction, nor an opportunity for overcoming.24 In place of all this otherworldliness there is use of the world. For if, as Benjamin claimed, the world is the highest good, then it cannot be appropriated but, rather, always already appropriates us. And the only possible experience of the inappropriable is use (Agamben 2016).

24

Again, this characterization of messianism in its contradistinction to nihilism comes across clearly in The Highest Poverty. Agamben (2013a) identifies Franciscan monasticism (which he sees as eclipsing contemporary monastic orders and religious movements of the Middle Ages in its radicalism) with an anomic emphasis on poverty rather than office. Because early Franciscan community is thus defined by form-of-life rather than law, it knows nothing of the anticlericalism that defined contemporary movements. Francis could ‘give to the Church what is the Church’s without polemic, namely the administration of the officium that belongs to it’ (Agamben 2013a: 120). Although religious movements contemporary to Franciscanism also emphasized poverty, they did not succeed in disassociating themselves from institutions and law as the Franciscans did, something which is revealed in their always putting themselves forward as the true Church in opposition to Rome (2013a: 212).

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I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! [. . .] Once the sacrilege against God was the greatest sacrilege, but God died, and then all these desecrators died. Now to desecrate the earth is the most terrible thing, and to esteem the bowls of the unfathomable higher than the meaning of the earth! (Nietzsche 2006: 6) The struggle to be free of the true world is an abiding theme in the mature Nietzsche. We find it expressed from Dawn (1881) onwards. From this point Nietzsche sees that his earlier distinction between the world as Apollonian individuation and as Dionysian oneness retains the two-worlds structure. This is the lingering mark of Schopenhauer on his thinking, of the difference between the world as representation and as will, a distinction which itself echoes Kant’s distinction between appearances and things in themselves. I will argue in this chapter that, despite Heidegger’s suggestions to the contrary, Nietzsche is aware that the world as will to power risks being as much a true world as any heavenly beyond. As a world of becoming, nothing can be said of the world’s being. All that matters is that the true world is no longer true, and Nietzsche (2003: 199) is insistent at the end that this is as much as he has demonstrated, but that it ‘alone is the great liberation’ (Nietzsche 2005:  182). This undermines Heidegger’s attempt (to which we will return at the end of the chapter) to portray Nietzsche as the one who, in merely reversing the order of the two worlds, remained stuck with the true world. Nietzsche’s notion that the death of the true world is itself the liberation shows that he does not think that a world of becoming is any more the true world than its metaphysical opposite. When the true world dies we are left without any truth of the world at all, and this is freedom – the possibility of new worlds.

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This is why Nietzsche could not be further from a world-weary sage. Affirming that there is no true world does not mean accepting the world of the ‘realists’: This, oh this is bitterness for my bowels, that I can stand you neither naked nor clothed, you people of the present! All uncanniness of the future, and whatever caused flown birds to shudder, is truly homelier and more familiar than your ‘reality’. (Nietzsche 2006: 94)1

For Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, there is in fact nothing more false nor malicious in the world than the claim that we should just let the world be, not lifting a finger against it. To say, for instance, that those who kill and abuse the people should be left to their own devices (since, that way, the people will learn to renounce the world) is world-slander of the highest order (Nietzsche 2006: 164). Nietzsche’s anti-realism, rather than any otherworldliness, is also the reason he can give Zarathustra the words: ‘this mountain is teeming, my kingdom is no longer of this world, I need new mountains’ (Nietzsche 2006: 220). Rather than affirm the real world, then, Nietzsche’s affirmation would have us create the world: ‘And what you called world, that should first be created by you:  your reason, your image, your will, your love itself it should become!’ (Nietzsche 2006: 164). The real world is only the true world in new clothes.

Nietzsche’s anti-cosmos Nietzsche, like Paul, is no friend of cosmos. The realization that the world does not form a unity is what is decisive (2005: 182). In the Late Notebooks (2003: 23), Nietzsche argues that if the world process could reach a final state, if a cosmos could arise, then this could not have failed to have occurred already. Indeed, Nietzsche claims (2003: 211) to be seeking a conception of the world which can do justice to just this fact. For if the world were at all capable of being, if everything had its place in an ordered whole even for a second, then all becoming 1

As Deleuze notes (1983: 182), this is what, in Zarathustra, unites the beasts of burden – the Camel and the Ass. These creatures are defined by their acceptance of a reality that is only the desert. To affirm the real is to affirm only a consequence. This is why, and unlike the Ass who can only say yes, we must be able to say no, no to a reality that is only the consequence of nihilism. ‘The world is neither true nor real but living. And the living world is will to power.’ This means that, contrary to the beasts of burden who take on the heavy load of what is, to affirm is to unburden oneself of the real world so that the living world might live (Deleuze 1983: 184). Inasmuch as Nietzsche’s Ass can only say yes to the real, to all that is negative and negating, he is a creature of ‘terrifying conservatism’ and stands, in Nietzsche’s mind, for Hegelianism and its phantom of affirmation (Deleuze 1994: 53).

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would cease along with all thinking of it. The very fact of thought as movement proves, for Nietzsche, that the world is ‘incapable of being’. Nietzsche (2003: 199) makes of this insight ‘that the world does not aim for permanence’ the sole contribution of his thought. Thinking world such that, at its highest point, there is no equilibrium is what thought must prove itself capable of. And this is exactly what Nietzsche (2003: 38) attempts to think in perhaps his most extended definition of world: And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I  show you it in my mirror? This world: a monster of force, without beginning, without end; [. . .] as force everywhere, as a play of forces and force-waves simultaneously one and ‘many’, accumulating here while diminishing there; an ocean of forces storming and flooding within themselves, eternally changing, eternally rushing back [. . .] a becoming that knows no satiety, no surfeit, no fatigue – this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creating, of eternal self-destroying.

For Nietzsche (2003: 42), the idea that the world is ordered and, conversely, that the appearance of chaos implies a world that is false or ‘incompletely known’ is nothing other than the ‘fundamental prejudice’. A  theme found throughout Nietzsche’s writings is that the world must not be seen as a harmonious order. Suffering pervades existence, which is why all that separates Nietzsche from Schopenhauerian pessimism is that Nietzsche’s is a pessimism of strength rather than weakness. In Dawn (2011: 9), this imperative not to find harmony in the world is carried through even to its opposite, as Nietzsche warns that cosmic disharmony is likewise an inadequate image of becoming for attributing, if negatively, too much coherence to the world: ‘Against the imaginary disharmony of the spheres. – We must oust from the world anew the many types of false grandeur, because they go against the justice that all things are entitled to demand of us! And to that end, it is necessary not to want to view the world as more disharmonious than it is!’ This thought of a finite world that cannot be endlessly creative with its chaos will culminate, later, in the thought of the eternal return. It is the thought that separates Nietzsche’s world from being simply another world of flux. It is also the thought that undermines Heidegger’s charge that Nietzsche missed the obvious order that characterizes any world. For the eternal return, as Deleuze (1983, 1994) shows, is a selection of that which differs, and thus the world is in the final analysis ordered as absolute creativity (though this order is purely immanent to what is ordered – there is no doer behind the creative deed that is world). Nietzsche is not far from Paul in seeing the cosmos of Roman Antiquity as a projection onto the world of a closed imperial order that wanted the universe

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to be as timeless and unchanging as it hoped its own rule to be. In this dream of an eternal empire, Rome expressed its own driving ressentiment, since, for Nietzsche (2006:  111), ‘this alone is revenge itself:  the will’s unwillingness toward time and time’s “it was” ’. In Dawn (2011: 52), Nietzsche writes that, at the dawn of the common era, for two centuries the world had seen Rome conquer people after people such that the circle seemed closed, the future fixed, as if all things were ordered to last forever. Rome knew how to turn everything, even the very order of the world, ‘into its prehistory and its present’. Nietzsche returns to this argument in his late notebooks (2003: 130), repeating the point that the supposed order of the world is but a projection of hierarchical social order: How far interpretations of the world are symptoms of a ruling drive [. . .] Contemplating the world morally. The social feelings of the order of rank are displaced into the universe: immovability, law, fitting in and equating are, because they are most highly valued, also sought in the highest places, above the universe, or behind the universe…

From the standpoint of Nietzsche’s thought of world, cosmos must be seen as one of Apollo’s deceptions: ‘the eternity of the beautiful form; the aristocratic law that says “Thus shall it be forever!” ’. In place of such alluring chimeras, Nietzsche (2003:  79) will propose a starker yet truer beauty:  ‘Dionysos:  sensuality and cruelty. Transience could be interpreted as enjoyment of the engendering and destroying force, as continual creation.’ A significant distortion of cosmos is its imputation of purpose to the world. Freedom can only be imagined ‘as purposeless, roughly like a child’s game’ (Nietzsche 1962:  116). For the Nietzsche of Dawn (2011:  96), we must overcome our fear of the ‘great cosmic stupidity’ and recognize that even throws of the dice that issue in that which ‘exactly resembles purposiveness’ is what we would expect of a game of chance played for all eternity. One of Zarathustra’s gifts, indeed, is to restore chance as ‘the most ancient nobility of the world’, a chance which, in being given back to all things, ‘delivered them from their bondage to Purpose’. Now in place of the spirit of gravity2 (the dark and heavy clouds of Providence) is found the pure blue sky of accident, innocence, chance and mischief. This sky is the deep blue of ‘the well of eternity’ in which all things are ‘baptized beyond good and evil’ (Nietzsche 2006:  132). The world is beyond good and evil because, as that play of forces on the basis of which 2

Zarathustra (Nietzsche 2006: 252) describes this spirit as his old arch-enemy.

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all valuations are made, the value of the world simply cannot be estimated (Nietzsche 2005: 162). If the order of cosmos is, for the ancients, also the mark of its beauty (recalling that kosmein first denoted ornamentation), then Nietzsche (2011: 272) again demurs. It is ‘knowledge even of the ugliest reality’ that is beautiful, since nothing is beautiful in itself. Man forgets that he is the cause of the beauty of the world, that the ‘human, all too human beauty’ which he has projected onto the heavens is indeed only a humanization, and that, in fact, ‘nothing, absolutely nothing, guarantees that a human being is the standard of beauty’ (Nietzsche 2005: 201). Cosmos, like all worlds, would then be a creation, but this time the creation of a fictitious world in which there are beings and places. Nietzsche (2003: 245) is clear: the only necessity in the world is that of becoming. ‘Let us here remove the two popular concepts “necessity” and “law”: the first puts a false compulsion, the second a false freedom into the world.’ Nietzsche’s necessity is the play of chance, a necessity that plays ‘blissfully with the string of freedom’ (Nietzsche 2006: 158). This identity of being and the game of chance is already a theme in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks from 1873, where Nietzsche (1962: 58) quotes Heraclitus approvingly: ‘ “The world is the game Zeus plays,” or expressed more concretely, “of the fire with itself. This is the only sense in which the one is at the same time the many.” Heraclitus, having caught sight of the law in becoming, understood this law to be identical with the play of necessity. And what he saw ‘must be seen from now on in all eternity’ (Nietzsche 1962: 68). One of the most significant aphorisms to establish the difference between cosmos and Nietzsche’s world is found in The Gay Science (2001:  109). Here Nietzsche warns us against ‘assuming in general and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighbouring stars’. The order of the world is disorder, ‘for all eternity chaos’, and this is where its necessity is found rather than in any ‘order, organization, form, beauty, wisdom’. At this point Nietzsche lists the adjectives that the ancients used to describe the world. These descriptions of world are but ‘aesthetic anthropomorphisms’ and they could never capture the eternally repeated tune, ‘which must never be called a melody’, of the cosmic musical box. Nietzsche repeats his warning from Dawn that, if we are to do justice to blind becoming, then, strictly speaking, we cannot even attribute to the world the opposite of order – the world is neither reason nor unreason, since both of these judgements would arise from us as anthropocentric visions of the world. None of our judgements apply to the world and so we should be cautious of deifying ‘again after the old manner this monster of an unknown world’. Rather than the great ‘Unknown One’, Nietzsche’s world (2001: 238) is far

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too capable of ‘ungodly possibilities’, of ‘devilry, stupidity [and] foolishness’. For it is a world interpreted after ‘our own human, all too human’ folly. Nietzsche’s rejection of cosmos also implies, in turn, the nullification of natural law. Indeed, Nietzsche had already warned in Dawn (2011: 279) that the idea of a moral world-order is delusional. In The Gay Science (2001: 110) this is put explicitly: ‘Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses.’ In the absence of a law-like order to the world, there can be no infringements either. This sentiment is repeated forcibly in Genealogy of Morality (2014: 25), where this world is described as having a ‘necessary’ and ‘calculable’ course, ‘not because laws govern it, but because laws are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences in every moment’. The difference of Nietzsche’s thought of world from any idea of cosmos means that, as Deleuze argued (1983: 29), Nietzsche’s eternal return should not be confused with the eternal return of Antiquity. What Nietzsche’s ancients could not see, with the possible exception of Heraclitus, was that the play of chance is the only necessity of the eternal return, its only law the law of becoming. The eternal return of the ancients rather accuses becoming by maintaining its injustice and seeing in the eternal return the restitution of this injustice.

The true world is a lie World of phantoms in which we live! Inverted, topsy-turvy, empty world, dreamed full and upright nonetheless. (Nietzsche 2011: 88)

Nietzsche insists time and again that the true world of Platonism is false and mendacious – ‘Away with this “inverted world”!’ (Nietzsche 2014: 313). In Dawn (2011: 28), the driving force behind the fiction of the true world is a blend of escapism and the will to power, specifically pride. Beyond the consolation that it offers for those who suffer, there is also a feeling of exultation to be had from suffering if it is conceived as enabling an approach to the true world. In Genealogy of Morality (2014: 225–6), the ascetic priest is described as denying life in order to construct a bridge to the other world and as growing more triumphant the more his capacity for life decreases, since in this ascetic ideal lies his ultimate victory. Yet to revel in pallid images of the beyond and to sport with beings that are ‘invisible, inaudible [and] intangible’ is also to display contempt for our sensorily tangible, seductive and evil earth below (Nietzsche

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2011: 35–6). The true world is a ‘curse on reality’, a devaluation of the only world there is (Nietzsche 2005: 71). It falsifies and cheapens this world such that no goal can be had for our earthly existence. Perversely, this sense of purposelessness below provides a feeling of being at home in the true world above, a world where no reality survives (Nietzsche 2005: 150). But such is to be expected from those who, because they suffer from life, rage: ‘Then let the whole world perish!’ These Nietzsche (2011: 189) calls ‘The world destroyers’. It is not suffering in life that is problematic for Nietzsche  – indeed, existence is suffering  – but suffering from life. In an unpublished reflection from his notebooks (cited in Bracht Branham 2004:  174–5), Nietzsche makes this all-important difference clear by way of Diogenes Laertius’s account (1991: 21) of the death of Antisthenes, the teacher of Diogenes of Sinope. On his deathbed Antisthenes cried out ‘who will release me from these pains’ and Diogenes, pointing to a dagger, replied: ‘this’. Antisthenes responded: ‘I said from my pains, not from life.’ Nietzsche writes of this ‘very profound statement’:  ‘one cannot get the better of the love of life by means of a dagger. Yet that is real suffering. It is obvious that the Cynic clings to life more than the other philosophers: the “shortest way to happiness” is nothing but the love of life itself and in complete needlessness with reference to all other goods’. In The Gay Science (2001: 69–70), Nietzsche admits that the true world cannot be torn down merely through an account of its origins in human needs and drives. Once again, this admission gives the lie to Heidegger’s notion that Nietzsche stops at replacing the true world with a truer – starker – truth of the world. The ‘misty shroud of delusion’ by which the true world came to count as real will be dispersed not by more reality but only by creators of new worlds. ‘There is another world to discover  – and more than one! Embark, you philosophers!’, says Zarathustra (2001: 163). Zarathustra is the great teacher of this truth. If suffering, incapacity and weariness created all afterworlds then bearing one’s earthly head freely is that which ‘creates a meaning for the earth!’ (Nietzsche 2006:  20–2) After all, even the ‘sweet and shadowy poisons’ of the heavenly realm were taken from the earth. There is no true world, tells Zarathustra; rather, those who invent new values are the axis around which the world turns (Nietzsche 2006: 37). This is then Nietzsche’s difference, in his own understanding at least, from Spinoza, who rather stops with acquiescence ‘in the world as it is’ (Nietzsche 2003: 86). World-worship, for Nietzsche (2006: 65, 88), is rather the veneration of that which is made. Zarathustra casts his golden rod in a human sea and declares:  ‘Open up, you human abyss!’ (Nietzsche 2006: 192).

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Twilight of the Idols sees a resurgence of the theme of there being no true world. Heraclitus will always be right in seeing being as an illusion. The ‘apparent world’, as seen from the perspective of the ‘true world’, is the only world there is (2005: 170). Nietzsche does not mean that the world of appearance is, but that how it appears (and it can do so only from the standpoint of the true world) is all we have of it. Nietzsche sets out a number of further theses on the two-worlds problem in Twilight (2005:  171). First, the transient nature of the ‘apparent’ world is precisely what makes it real, not false. Again, this should not be taken as meaning that the world of appearance is the true world, but rather as another way of making the point that there is no true world. Saying that a world of appearance is real is the same as saying that there is no worldly reality. Second, the intransience of the true world, its being, is the very quality of not being, of nothing. The concept of being is ‘the last wisps of smoke’ of evaporating reality (Nietzsche 2005: 168).3 Yet Nietzsche also accepts the Parmenidean claim that the road of not-being leads nowhere. The true world has only been able to fabricate its being out of negation of the world of becoming, out of the absence of any true world. That the artist, and not only the ascetic priest, demotes reality is no objection to this thesis, for the former is creative with the real, selecting, reinforcing and correcting ‘reality’ as necessary in order to say ‘Yes’ to the absence of the true world. The priest, by contrast, is a pessimist who says ‘No’ to this same truth. In The Antichrist (2005: 9), Nietzsche finds that this priestly type lingers on and, with him, the concept of the ‘true world’. Noting that most German scholars, himself included of course, were themselves the sons of pastors, Nietzsche bemoans the influence of Kant for reintroducing, by the back door, the idea of morality as the essence of the world. If the true world is no longer demonstrable in Kant, then his priestly genius is that it also thereby becomes irrefutable. In Kant, our world, the world of appearance, becomes once again a shadow world of phenomena which are understandable only in relation to the ‘absolutely false world, that of being, [which] has been turned into reality’. Kant’s success, for Nietzsche, is a theological success, and therefore truly a failure. And before Kant, Spinoza too had rid himself of the moral order of the world only ‘so as to have “God” remain, a world that holds its ground in the face of reason…’ (Nietzsche 2003: 86). Nietzsche (2003: 145) returns to this theme of Spinoza seeking to save the God of reason by contrasting Spinoza’s valorization of ‘what

3

Already in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche (1962:  80) had described Plato’s thought of being as ‘the rigor mortis of the coldest emptiest concept of all’.

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remains eternally the same’ with Nietzsche’s own preference for ‘the value of the shortest and most fleeting, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the snake vita [life]’. Unlike Kant’s, Nietzsche’s world as appearance is not a means to safeguard the true world, but rather an invitation to face, but also to use, the fact that ‘the world’s value lies in our interpretation’ – ‘this theme runs through my writings’. ‘The world which matters to us is false’ in the sense that it is a ‘fictional elaboration’ of our limited observations and thus is in flux (Nietzsche 2003: 80). But this world of becoming that we only ever grasp in a way that also becomes is not thereby invalidated, ‘for there is no “truth” ’, by which Nietzsche clearly means being (ibid.). Indeed, Nietzsche’s own interpretation of world, which consists in imprinting ‘upon becoming the character of being’ is itself the will to power (in Nietzsche’s estimation, ‘the highest’ such will) rather than any claim to a true world (2003:  138). Even the antithesis of true and illusory world is itself nothing but the result of an earlier valuation: ‘we have projected the conditions of our preservation as predicates of being in general’ just as we ‘have taken the fact that in order to prosper we have to be stable in our belief, and made of it that the “true” world is not one which changes and becomes, but one which is’ (2003: 148). Since all our categories of reason are sensual in origin, we simply lack the capacity to separate a true world from a world of appearance. And if our world of appearance contains nothing material, then there is nothing immaterial, either (ibid.). The opposite of our world of appearances ‘is not “the true world” but the formless, unformulatable world of the chaos of sensations – thus, a different kind of phenomenal world, one not “knowable” by us’ (2003: 161). Beyond the world as it appears for us there is no (true) world in itself but only more appearance. Nietzsche wants to restore illusoriness from that which is unreal to reality itself. In a world without being, a world essentially of relationships, identical cases are themselves the illusion, if one necessary to life (2003: 250). Nietzsche is telling the truth  – he identifies as a Cynic after all  – about a world of becoming in which the principle of identity, and its foundation in the appearance that things are the same, is no longer tenable. This means that there can be no truth as knowledge of the world. ‘A world of becoming could not, in the strict sense, be “grasped”, be “known” ’ (2003: 26). Yet Nietzsche knows that this concern for the truth of becoming, even if it appears to take the seeker out beyond truth as metaphysically conceived, is still the will to truth itself. In The Gay Science (2001: 201), this much is admitted – the will to truth, as a will to know, is, in a world of appearance and becoming, hostile to life and might well

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be a concealed will to death. It is certainly only a disguised will to power: ‘my will to power follows also on the heels of your will to truth!’ (2006: 90). Even godless anti-metaphysicians such as Nietzsche himself, inasmuch as they seek the truth of the world, look to a world of being, a world other than our transitory world of ‘life, nature, and history’. Nietzsche (2001: 201), too, takes his fire ‘from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which is also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine’. But with Nietzsche this flame of truth will be put to more nihilistic uses still. Rather than devaluing the world, as the metaphysicians have done, Nietzsche, knowing that behind the will to truth there is only will to power, will deny it. There is no true world, and this, if it can be faced, is the liberation. If the will to power is what persists in the will to truth (what is in truth), then the will to truth can be understood not as a means to power (as if there was something outside the will to power) but as the test by which the will to power overcomes itself – what becomes in the will to power. That ‘the lightning bolt of truth struck precisely what was highest so far’, namely the true world, does not mean that truth is disposed of; rather ‘Everything that has been called “truth” so far is recognized as the most harmful, treacherous, subterranean form of lie’ (2005: 150). We cannot have truth as knowledge of the world, but we can have truth as exposure of the lie. Of course, by the same token, this ‘lie’ cannot be measured against ‘the world’; it is rather a refusal of any false comfort. In a manner that echoes the parrhēsia of Antiquity, Nietzsche’s noble type is open with himself (2014: 230). He refuses the ‘hiding places, secret passages and back doors’ of the man of ressentiment, who is defined precisely by his inability to acknowledge that the true world is only his world, an otherworld made by one who cannot endure this world of appearance (ibid.). Nietzsche’s truth is of the order of the test – it is a principle of change rather than stasis. If Foucault’s genealogy of the will to knowledge (2013) is correct, this truth would take Nietzsche back to the world of the heroes told of by Homer. It would also place him in the line of Diogenes, a genealogy that Nietzsche had already written himself into.

‘The world is perfect’4 The true world, for Nietzsche, emerges as a consequence of morality, since it is good and evil that, having no place in this world, requires a foundation beyond 4

Nietzsche 2005: 58.

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it. Morals make God necessary (Nietzsche 2005: 22), a God who then lends his weight to the innumerable judgements of this world, judgements that have made it appear ugly. This is why saying yes to a world that has become ugly is so crucial to Nietzsche’s attempt at overcoming nihilism. ‘Reality’ is not intrinsically ugly, the world is intrinsically nothing at all, but metaphysicians have made it so with their otherworldliness. Overcoming the nihilism of otherworldliness therefore requires affirmation of this world in all its acquired ugliness: a richness of joy that thirsts even ‘for pain, for hell, for hate, for disgrace, for the cripple, for world – this world, oh you know it well!’ (Nietzsche 2006: 263). We must love this world as we find it not because this world is essentially lovable – Zarathustra does not like those who consider everything good and this world the best (2006: 155; see also 2001: 204) – but because it is our fate. Just as the world is not intrinsically ugly, neither is it intrinsically beautiful. Nietzsche (2003: 24) has no time for pantheistic world worship, which he finds in Spinoza, seeing it as an attempt to fill the space left by the infinitely creative God. This world can become beautiful, really for the first time, through our saying yes to it in a way that it could never have been without initially becoming ugly, without that first no: ‘what would be “beautiful” if the contradiction had not become conscious of itself, if the ugly had not first said to itself: “I am not ugly?” ’ As Nietzsche (2014: 2) puts it in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘we, whose task is wakefulness itself’, are the heirs to all the strength that the struggle against [Platonism] has cultivated to maturity’. This is the deeper sense in which nihilism is necessary for Nietzsche. Only once having found the true world to be a lie do we find whether we are strong enough to ‘admit to ourselves illusoriness, the necessity of lies, without perishing. To this extent nihilism, as the denial of a true world, of a being, might be a divine way of thinking’ (2003: 149). The challenge to love this world unreservedly – a task that, as the test of the eternal return, decides everything – is only given to us because first there was the nihilism of the true world. The dependence of this world that can be loved on the nihilism of the true world does not dawn as late for Nietzsche as Heidegger argued when restricting it to the last year of his active life: 1888. To be sure, it does not seem to have come fully to light in Dawn (2011: 113), where the contrast is drawn between the true world, this time in one of its Christian guises as a world of universal love (which Nietzsche finds a horrifying world of selflessness), and the utter baseness of ‘the charming animal world in which we live’, where it is mercifully possible to be undisturbed and unloved. Elsewhere in Dawn (2011: 123–4), Thucydides is compared favourably to Plato for his delight ‘in all that is typical in humans and

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in events’ which makes him the last to cultivate an ‘impartial knowledge of the world’ before the otherworldliness of Plato sets in.5 Here, the true world is simply a wrong turn to be retraced in order to bring thinking back down to earth. Indeed, when Schopenhauer is acknowledged (2011: 135) for catching sight of the real world in all its devilry (if not of the beauty of this devilry!), the emphasis is precisely on how this reality has again become visible. The true world is not yet a condition for the ‘real world’, but only that which has, until now, obscured its reality. But starting in The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche (2001:  110) begins to acknowledge this irreducible relation between ‘true’ and ‘real’ worlds, arguing that it is ‘only against a world of purposes’ that the word ‘accident’ has a meaning. The sense of the world as chaos is only found in contrast to an ordered cosmos. In the fifth book of The Gay Science (2001: 203–4), which was added to the second edition of 1887, this idea appears again. Nietzsche starts by giving the impression that those who would bless this world are able to do so because they have pushed beyond the mystifications of the true world, in the process becoming ‘hard-boiled, cold, and tough in the realization that the way of the world is not at all divine’. It is the scepticism of the true philosopher rather than the nihilism of the true world that has won through to the insight that though ‘the world is not worth what we thought’, it is no less valuable for that. Rather than being a residue of nihilism, this world appears as the final measure, the ultimate value, to which all values, even the new values of the Dionysian destroyer–creators, are subordinate. Nothing can excel the value of the real world, and to imagine so is but an ‘aberration of human vanity’. However, in this very same aphorism, Nietzsche goes on to unpick the idea that man as the judge of the world – namely world negation – is only negative. In a dramatic about-turn, Nietzsche first builds up the pose of ‘man against the world’ as a piece of ‘monstrous stupidity’ that ‘has finally dawned on us and we are sick of it; we laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of “man and world”, separated by the sublime presumptuousness of the little word “and”!’ But then there is a pause for thought:

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Despite this direct attack on Plato, Platonism is Nietzsche’s usual target. His position on Plato, as those who follow him (Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze), is more ambivalent: ‘to speak about spirit and the good as Plato did; indeed, one is allowed to ask, as a physician: “What explains such a disease on the most beautiful plant of Antiquity, on Plato?” ’ (Nietzsche 2014: 2; see also aphorism 14 where Plato’s resistance to a world-explanation built on ‘the rabble’ of the senses is seen as admirably aristocratic: ‘in this overpowering of the world and interpreting of the world in the manner of Plato’, there was a ‘kind of enjoyment’ different from ‘the one offered us by the physicists of today’.)

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But by laughing, haven’t we simply carried contempt for man one step further? And thus also pessimism, the contempt for that existence which is knowable to us? Have we not exposed ourselves to the suspicion of an opposition  – an opposition between the world in which until now we were at home with our venerations – and which may have made it possible for us to endure life – and another world that we ourselves are: a relentless, fundamental, deepest suspicion concerning ourselves that is steadily gaining more and worse control over us Europeans and that could easily confront coming generations with the terrible Either/Or: ‘Either abolish your venerations or – yourselves!’ The later would be nihilism; but would not the former also be – nihilism? That is our question mark.

Nietzsche’s question mark reveals a growing sense that reverence for this world cannot simply be a matter of unveiling the unreality of the true world. The pivot in Nietzsche’s thought here seems to be Zarathustra (2006), with its overarching emphasis on world as the creation of new values. We have already remarked on ‘On the Spirit of Gravity’, where nausea at man ‘creates wings and water-diving powers’ and where ‘the earth is to be loved’ for its ‘many good inventions’ (see also ‘On the Sublime Ones’) rather than for anything in it that might be true. But it is ‘The Seven Seals’ that offers the most tantalizing glimpse of Nietzsche’s growing awareness that he has the nihilism of the true world to thank for this world that he loves: ‘if I ever sat jubilating where old gods lie buried, blessing the world, loving the world, next to the monuments of old world maligners – because I love even churches and God’s graves, once the sky’s pure eye gazes through their broken roofs’ (Nietzsche 2006: 185). The close juxtaposition of world-blessing and world-slandering here should not be identified only with reaction, with the intention to bury the curse beneath the blessing. Zarathustra loves even churches, and not just because they now have holes in their roofs but because it is through these holes that the sky first gazes with its pure eye. This world can be loved because it has been slandered, can be won because it was first lost – ‘only where there are graves are there resurrections’, sings Zarathustra (2006: 88). In Genealogy of Morality (2014: 284), this insight is mixed with the earlier condemnation of the slander of the world as born of a bad conscience with all that is natural (‘senses, instincts, nature, animal’) in this world. But the insight is retained nonetheless: elsewhere in the text (2014: 276) the bad conscience that besmirches the world is described as a sickness, ‘but a sickness as pregnancy is a sickness’. To understand this ‘sickness’ pregnant with possibility it will be necessary to go back again to an earlier point of view (presumably to a time before metaphysical world-slander began to take hold), but only ‘first of all’. By

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implication, love of this world will not be achieved by returning to a true world before the world was cursed. In Nietzsche’s late work, Ecce Homo (2005: 71), there is something of a return to the earlier idea that the true world is only an invented world that mendaciously denigrates ‘reality’, but this reality can nonetheless only be conceived ‘as it is’ by those strong enough for it (who are thus revealed as the types of men that Zarathustra wants) (2005: 72–3). In the Late Notebooks Nietzsche (2003: 179– 80) admits that in this sense his thought is a theodicy, a justification of evil in the world, if this time without reference to God. Nietzsche’s honesty that he is doing theodicy reminds us that he is never in any doubt that loving the world as we find it is difficult. Why so difficult? How is the world’s ugliness even possible? Thanks to metaphysics, and its association of beauty with that which endures unchanging, a world of becoming cannot but be seen as ugly. But metaphysics itself is rooted in something deeper: psychologically, it offers ‘a means of preservation’ in a precarious world of becoming. For becoming, as not only an eternally creating but also ‘an eternally-having-to-destroy, is inseparable from pain’ (Nietzsche 2003:  79). Nietzsche seems to be exchanging his earlier perplexity at how this world became ugly for a deeper appreciation that the world must appear ugly to those who suffer from its ceaseless becoming. In the Late Notebooks (2003: 116–21), Nietzsche offers a reason for love of this world. Honest contemplation of the world as we find it is not only a test of the strongest wills (can the world be loved even though it has no point?) but also provides a way back from a disenchanted world to a world with purpose. What is this new purpose? It is nothing other than the purposelessness of existence, which, given that it is affirmed at every moment of existence, is itself the truth of such existence. Purposelessness is the ‘purpose’. But it is clearly a purpose that required first the sense of purposelessness that only the death of God could bring: Nihilism appears now not because displeasure in existence is greater than it used to be, but because we have become more generally mistrustful of a ‘meaning’ in evil, indeed in existence itself. One interpretation has perished; but because it was regarded as the interpretation, there now seems to be no measure at all in existence, everything seems to be in vain. (Nietzsche 2003: 17)

Nietzsche (2003: 118) calls us to have the courage of this thought ‘in its most terrible form’. This is the thought of an existence ‘without meaning or goal, but inevitably recurring, without any finale into nothingness: “eternal recurrence”. That is the most extreme form of nihilism:  nothingness (‘meaninglessness’)

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eternally!’ But at just the point where we seem to have stripped all meaning from existence, we find that the affirmation of meaningless is that meaning: ‘if we remove the idea of purpose from the process do we nevertheless affirm the process? – This would be the case if something were achieved at every moment of it – and always the same thing’. Nietzsche uses this argument (which he here acknowledges Spinoza got to first, a generosity he was never capable of in his published works) to suggest that a pantheistic affirmative stance towards all things might be possible. After all, only the moral true world has been overcome in European nihilism. There may still be room for a true world beyond good and evil: ‘Would a pantheism in this sense be possible?’ If we felt that we were this purposeless world-process then we could ‘welcome triumphantly every moment of general existence. The point would be precisely to experience this fundamental trait in oneself as good, as valuable, with pleasure’ (Nietzsche 2003: 118). Nietzsche’s theodicy is the other side of the ‘pessimism of strength’, which is the test of the eternal return: can existence be affirmed, in its very purposelessness, to repeat for all eternity? Nietzsche wants us to progress to the stage where the pessimism that prompted the test, and the strength that were needed to pass it, are surpassed ‘in an absolute saying Yes to the world, but for the very reasons that used to prompt one’s No to it: and thus a Yes to the conception of this world as the actually attained, highest possible ideal’ (2003: 180). This is pure Spinozism. But notice that this world is here a conception that is attained by way of Nietzsche’s negative theodicy. The world is justified by its lack of justification; because there is nothing to justify it, neither is there anything before which it stands accused. Nietzsche’s theodicy does not, as Leibniz’s does, justify this world despite some of the things that happen in it. Rather, that we must not judge the world means, in a world of force relationships in which everything is connected to everything else, that we must not condemn any action whatsoever: ‘to want to reject anything at all means rejecting everything. A reprehensible action means a reprehended world’ (2003: 244). Zarathustra (2006: 263) puts this same point in a positive register: ‘love it eternally and for all time’.

Heidegger’s Nietzsche We encountered Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche (1991) earlier, but now is the time to take a closer look. After all, Heidegger’s Nietzsche is a thinker who,

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though he seeks to overcome the true world, ends up giving the true world its last and most decisive formulation. For Heidegger, Nietzsche realizes only right at the end that the overturning of Platonism cannot be merely its inversion. As long as the supersensuous (true) world and the sensuous (apparent) world, the above and below, merely changes places, then the very structure of Platonism remains firmly in place (1991, I: 201). Prior to this belated realization, Nietzsche’s true world is becoming and the apparent world is in being. The true and apparent worlds have therefore swapped places and ranks, yet the deeper distinction of a true and an apparent world is not itself called into question. Indeed, the exchange of places of the two worlds is only possible with this distinction acting as its foundation (1991, III: 124). In Heidegger’s estimation, the overcoming of the nihilism of the true world requires not the elevation of the apparent world to take the place of the true world, but the setting aside of the true world itself. And when the true world is put aside does the apparent world remain? ‘No. For the apparent world can be what it is only as a counterpart of the true. If the true world collapses, so must the world of appearances. Only then is Platonism overcome’ (ibid.). For Heidegger (1991, I: 202), this ‘twisting free’ of Platonism, with its essential difference from the earlier inversion of Platonism, happens only in Nietzsche’s final creative year (1888). It is Nietzsche’s last and decisive step, but also for that reason unclear in its full import and wider implications. Indeed, Heidegger (1991, I: 203) implies that Nietzsche’s realization that he had for so long been reproducing Platonism when he thought he was overcoming it is what precipitated his descent into madness:  ‘Whoever believes that philosophical thought can dispense with its history by means of a simple proclamation will, without his knowing it, be dispensed with by history: he will be struck a blow from which he can never recover, one that will blind him utterly.’ Heidegger’s supporting evidence that 1888 is the decisive year comes from a number of texts. First, there is a note on nihilism from the notebook covering November 1887 – March 1888 (2003: 218). In this note, Nietzsche observes that growing ‘disbelief in any metaphysical world’, far from being the other side of nihilism, is actually its last stage. For disbelief in the true world of metaphysics is still a crisis of the true world. If the true world is and always was an invented world, then the world was never devalued in the first place and Nietzsche protests too much. However, the crucial passage, for Heidegger, is in Twilight of the Idols (1888): ‘The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps? . . . But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one!

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(Noon; moment of shortest shadow; end of longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) (Nietzsche 2005: 171)

In the section that culminates with this insight, Nietzsche traces ‘the history of an error’, which is the error of the true world. At first, that is in Plato, the true world is not yet elsewhere, but exists only for the wise man who is also the man of virtue. The rejection of the sensuous world is carried out not in the name of another world but in the name of the truth of this world, which is its ideal. The supersensuous is the idea, the true being, of this world (Heidegger 1991, I: 204). The second stage of the error of the true world is the taking up of Plato’s supersensuous world in Christianity, by which the true world is displaced to an elsewhere accessible only to the sinner who repents. In this stage the unbroken world of the Greeks, still in one piece in Plato, is fractured forever. No longer is human being grounded in what is obtainable (if only for philosophers), here. And so ‘In Plato’s stead, Platonism now rules’ (Heidegger 1991, I:  204). The supersensuous becomes the beyond. In the fifth stage of Nietzsche’s history of the error of the true world lies nothing other, argues Heidegger, than Nietzsche’s own work prior to Twilight. Nietzsche writes (2005: 171) of this stage: ‘The “true world” – an idea that is of no further use, not even as an obligation, – now an obsolete, superfluous idea, consequently a refuted idea: let’s get rid of it!’ Nietzsche’s emphasis is instructive here. That the true world becomes obsolete does not, in itself, make it go away. Platonism remains operative and the thinker who would push beyond it must go further. Thus must Nietzsche overcome his own thinking. If the apparent world is apparent only in the light of the true world, then the apparent world is also Platonism. Overcoming Platonism cannot stop at affirming the sensuous but requires a Yes! to the non-sensuous world of the spirit also (Heidegger 1991, I: 209). In place of the deprecation of the sensuous and the elevation of the supersensuous, there must instead be ‘a spiritualisation of the senses’ as Nietzsche puts it in his late notebooks (ibid.). The world must be rendered holy rather than true. For Nietzsche (Heidegger 1991, III: 58), the distinction between the true and apparent worlds is what first makes the meta (beyond) of metaphysics possible. The true world enables the going beyond of what is given, which is now seen as illusory, to something else. If in Plato’s ideas (eidos) what is most in being is that which is not subject to the perishability of matter (house-ness persists even as houses continue to crumble and fall), then being becomes that which does not change, what is in permanent presence (Heidegger 1991, III: 59–60).

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Since nothing in this world is in such a way, this world itself becomes a world of appearance. In Nietzsche’s estimation, the reason that this world is devalued is that, given their own desire for permanence, human beings condemn a world of impermanence while valuing a (concocted) world beyond time. Metaphysical nihilism, the two worlds of Platonism and its afterlife in Christianity, is nothing but a perennial temptation of mortal man in an attempted flight from his mortality. In other words, Nietzsche finds something inevitable about metaphysical nihilism since it is but an outworking of the fundamental condition of life itself, namely valuation. We value starting from where we are and so, as mortals destined to die, we naturally value immortality. In doing away with the true world of timeless eternity and retaining only a world of transient becoming, however, Heidegger’s Nietzsche finds himself with a problem. Because he retains the metaphysical notion of truth as adequation with how beings ‘are’, then if beings are nothing other than becoming, nothing about them is ‘true’ (in the sense of permanent) other than their being something else  – their becoming. ‘Truth’ itself is the first casualty of Nietzsche’s attempted abolition of the two worlds since he leaves truth in the metaphysical world that has been rejected. The only truth of the world, where truth is understood as identification of that which is unchanging, is that there is no truth; hence Nietzsche’s infamous claim that truth is but an illusion (Heidegger 1991, III: 64). Or, to put the point another way, the true world, in the sense of an eternally self-identical world, is not true (Heidegger 1991, III: 128). The true world is the world of appearance, but, given that appearing is only appearing in relation to fixed being (something which does not exist according to Nietzsche), ‘No shadow of a right remains to speak here of appearance’ (Nietzsche, in Heidegger 1991, III:  129). ‘With the abolition of the “true world” the “apparent world” also is abolished’ and the two worlds of Platonism becomes world and nothing (ibid.: 129–30). Because truth in Nietzsche is opposed to becoming (where Heidegger, by contrast, identifies truth as aletheia – as that which comes into unconcealment), truth has no place in the world. Instead, there is only valuation – including, of course, Nietzsche’s assertion that this is a world of becoming (Heidegger 1991, III:  65). If truth is only a holding-to-be true then it is a fixing of that which essentially flows; it is thereby not true. Truth lies, though we need this lie in order to live, in order to gain a hold on a world that, in truth, offers no holds (we would perish from this truth). ‘Life’, as what becomes, is outside of truth because it is outside of all fixity – it cannot be held on to because it ‘is’ nothing other than becoming. But if truth is a letting-be, a letting come into unconcealment

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(a-letheia), then this problem is avoided. Heidegger’s truth survives Nietzsche’s critique of truth because in some ways it concedes this critique and simply renames truth as what becomes. But such an argument, though tempting, would miss the essentials of Heidegger’s position, whereby becoming (in Heidegger’s sense of what comes into unconcealment) is not understood in Nietzsche’s way as chaos. Nietzsche’s truth finds itself in trouble because all truth-claims consist in our imposing regularities (valuations are regularities) on chaos. But, as Heidegger notes (1991, III: 72), where is this chaos, exactly? When we look at our ‘world’, even if it is the narrow one of, say, the educational context implied by sitting in a classroom, then we find not chaos but order. Nietzsche’s ‘world’, like that of the entire tradition before him, involves a forgetting of Being: did Nietzsche not see the world immediately around him? Did he pay no heed to his ‘own everyday experience of this world?’ In addition, Nietzsche’s truth as a kind of error does not do away with truth since error could not err unless it was in a relation with the true (Heidegger 1991, III: 126). Nietzsche is saying that metaphysical (holding-to-be-true) truth is not true; but there is still the truth of becoming. In shifting the definition of truth from being to becoming, Nietzsche retains the metaphysical sense of truth as correspondence with the world. Becoming is a more true representation of what the world is. For Heidegger (1991, II: 89–90), Nietzsche cannot think world, except in a fairly traditional way, because he is unable to think Being as the void. Nietzsche’s sense of the world as chaos aims at a description of world as perpetual becoming in opposition to visions of the world which give it an overarching unity or form. Yet according to Heidegger (ibid.: 91; see also III: 77–83), in seeing chaos negatively as that which lacks order (but this is a mistake that Nietzsche is wise to as early as Dawn), Nietzsche fails to free himself from the metaphysical tradition and remains closed to the originary sense of chaos as khaos. Khaino means to yawn, and Heidegger insists that khaos should therefore be understood as that which stands open wide, gaping: ‘We conceive of khaos in most intimate connection with an original interpretation of the essence of aleatheia as the selfopening’ (ibid.). Chaos is yet another Heideggerian term for the open clearing of Being. Unlike Nietzsche’s chaos, which though it posits a lack of order, must posit the necessity of this lack (‘The total character of the world [. . .] is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity, but of a lack of order’ as Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science [2001: 109]), Heidegger’s ‘chaos’ is pure potentiality.

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Heidegger argues (1991, II: 92) that Nietzsche’s choice of chaos as a description of the world is an attempt to avoid anthropomorphizing being as a whole. The world is neither created by a good God nor by a purposeful demiurge. Any description of the world as cosmos, with its intimations of ornamentation, order and beauty, is a humanization. But so too are the opposite notions that the world is irrational or shaped by a drive for self-preservation (hence Nietzsche’s rejection of Spinoza’s conatus as still a teleological conception of world). Self-preservation posits some purpose or goal to beings as a whole that is lacking, while purposeless ‘irrationality’ only makes sense if there is purpose in the world to start with. Beings follow no ‘laws’ of any kind, whether moral or scientific, since law itself is a moral-juridical category that pertains to human existence rather than to the world. In fact, the world not only lacks purpose but also lacks any organic unity whatsoever. The world is not an organism since organisms require something outside themselves to endure. The world is both all and, by the same token, not One (Heidegger 1991, II: 93; see also III: 80). Rather than conatus, then, the being of beings is pure will to power: while self-preservation would put a stop to change, ‘Everything that lives is exactly what shows most clearly that it does everything possible not to preserve itself but to become more . . .’ (Nietzsche 2003: 257). Nietzsche’s chaos, then, is neither a naturalism nor a materialism but an ontology of will to power. But the will to power, in excluding all talk of purpose, acts in some ways like a negative theology in which nothing can be said of the world as a whole. Nietzsche’s world is thereby ineffable, holy even (Heidegger 1991, II: 94–5): The most fundamental point to be made about Nietzsche’s notion of chaos is the following: only a thinking that is utterly lacking in stamina will deduce a will to godlessness from the will to a de-deification of beings. On the contrary, truly metaphysical thinking, at the outermost point of de-deification, will uncover that path where alone gods will be encountered – if they are to be encountered ever again in the history of mankind.

Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche narrates a thinker whose thought overcomes itself. Having determined world as purposeless becoming, even these determinations are seen, in the final analysis, as humanizations which themselves ‘scuttle the concept of chaos’ that they were supposed to serve. ‘In that case we dare not propose any determinations at all; all we can say is nothing’ (Heidegger 1991, II: 95). *** The real world is an outcome of the ideal world, having no standing independently from it. We do not first have the real world and then the metaphysical one

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that idealizes it. Rather, the real world is only the world we find ourselves in defined as lack – our world as it falls short of the ideal. Intimations of worldly reality, of what is real in the world, are thereby exposed as metaphysical. The real and the ideal are inextricably entwined; indeed co-constitute each other. We do not escape the ideal by taking refuge in the real but rather entrench the ideal even further through our forgetting of how it continues to determine our reality. As Heidegger argues also with regard to Sartre’s reversal of the metaphysical prioritization of essence over existence: the inversion of a metaphysical statement remains metaphysical. And so it is with Heidegger’s Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s true world, as a now chaotic inversion of a providential order, preserves the fundamental feature of this first metaphysical world – it is the same for all eternity. That the timeless truth of the world is now becoming rather than being remains a statement of the very being of the world, which now can only ever become. Heidegger is not wrong to claim that Nietzsche struggles to free himself from the abyss of the true world. But where Heidegger finds only a very late realization of the depth of this abyss and hints that it drove Nietzsche mad, we have demonstrated that in fact all of Nietzsche’s mature works are marked by an awareness of the abyss of the true world. If Nietzsche is the last of the metaphysicians, then this is because, for all his temptation to plunge deeper into the abyss by seeking a truer truth of the world, he is able to pull back from it. Nietzsche points to a way out from the true world.

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It is necessary not to want to see the world as being more disharmonious than it is! (Nietzsche 2011: 9) The radicalism of Heidegger’s thought of world is that being-in-the-world is before the being of the world as a totality. Heidegger does not deny that the world as the totality of beings is, but what there is is not all. World is what is left when the totality has been accounted for, except that world is not a residual category but rather absolutely primary. World comes before the totality and, in this sense, gives the totality itself. As we have seen, Nietzsche too dethrones cosmos, but inasmuch as he starts with the totality rather than with time or history, then the significance of being-in-the-world remains largely latent in his thought. As far as Heidegger is concerned, this is because Nietzsche shares Parmenides’s prejudice that the road of non-being leads nowhere. What has no being, for Nietzsche (2005: 168), is being itself, which is only the last wisps of vapour of an evaporating reality – beings, not being, is what is real. In Heidegger’s thought, by contrast, world always signifies not beings, not even all beings (the totality), but the openness, or ‘clearing’ (Lichtung), of Being, which is not a being, not something present, at all (hence the capitalization of Being, to avoid the confusion with beings which are present at hand). This is Heidegger’s summary of the meaning of world for him in his later ‘Letter on Humanism’ from 1949, where he snorts at the idea that human being could ever be considered to stand ‘on the hither side of the world as a “subject” ’ looking on (Heidegger 1998a: 266). As early as the winter semester of 1924–25, Heidegger (2003: 405) had indicated that he already understood world in this sense. Human existence is always set within a universal context of phenomena, but this context itself is ‘ultimately grounded in Being-in, in the antecedent uncoveredness of the world’ (2003: 411). Our experience of the totality of beings, although it

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seems as if this is all there is, is not what is primary; rather, ‘Being-in-a-world is a basic phenomenon and is not resolvable further’ (2003: 256). The transcendence offered by Being-in-the-world is presupposed in any and every experience of beings in the world. The disclosure of world, the disclosure that is world, comes before everything else. The mortal existence that is Being-in-the-world Heidegger calls Dasein. Dasein is the Da, the there, of being (Sein). As Heidegger insists in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, Dasein is not human being but the co-implication of world and human being. Indeed, at least for the later Heidegger, it is the priority of the former – human being depends upon the clearing of being that is world (Heidegger 1998a: 248–9). Although human being ‘sustains’ Dasein, Dasein is the ‘throw’ of Being that gives to human beings their ‘destinal sending’, namely their historicity (1998a: 256). Thus the difference between metaphysical being and Dasein is that being-there is only its there – the particular ‘clearing of being’ that is the history of a people – rather than some substance or subject that subsists beneath that ‘there’. Against all metaphysical subjectivism, Heidegger is clear that ‘only so long as the clearing of being propriates does Being convey itself to human beings’. Referring back to Being and Time, Heidegger (1998a: 256) quotes his earlier work: ‘Being is the transcendens pure and simple.’ This means that human being is ‘more’ human to the extent that it is considered less from the standpoint of subjectivity: ‘The human being is not the lord of beings’ (1998a: 260).

Being-in-the-world It is famously in Being and Time (1927) that Heidegger develops his thesis that being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) is the fundamental constitution of Dasein. World itself is not a thing, no ‘inner-worldly being’, and yet it is so determinate for the beings that we find in the world that they could not even show themselves otherwise. Beings manifest themselves ‘because “there is” world. But how “is there” world?’ (1996: 67–8). Heidegger’s answer to this question starts with a demonstration that being-in-the-world is a compound, the parts of which cannot stand alone. Dasein is not somehow given and then put in a relation to world (1996: 54); it is always already in-the-world. This means that even nature, as that which is supposedly most objective about the world, can only be discovered in a definite mode of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world such as, for example, the Romantic mode and its attendant concept of nature (1996: 61). Things, even natural things, appear only in our caring about them in a particular way, paradigmatically in

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finding them useful as tools: ‘World is that in terms of which things are at hand for us’ (1996: 77). Thus it is not only in the context of tools such as paper and desk that the pen can appear as what it is, but also the ‘forest is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock’. Even nature, then, is ‘discovered in the use of useful things’, although how it is discovered will vary (‘the botanist’s plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow’) (1996: 66). World in Being and Time is then the totality of reference (what Heidegger calls Bedeutsamkeit, ‘significance’) within which beings can appear, a totality that only comes to light when something in that world becomes unusable, revealing the totality in the process (1996: 81, 70, 71). When the hammer loses its head, the purpose of the hammer becomes apparent, a purpose which is tied up with the totality of what is produced by the hammer and what that production is in turn used for (and so on up to the totality of world within which the hammer appears). This ‘total relevance’ of the hammer, as with any being which is able to appear in a world, always refers back to Dasein (to being-in-the-world), to a ‘dwelling’ (Wohnen) rather than to anything objectively given (1996: 78). Beings, including the being it itself is, are encountered by Dasein in a context of relevance, and this context is the phenomenon of world (1996: 80–1). The normal run of things is for world to recede into the background, unnoticed, assumed. Indeed, the world not making itself known is the deeper reason why what is at hand, for example the hammer, largely does not emerge from its inconspicuousness (1996: 81). For the hammer to be what it is, it is not enough that there be a subject (e.g. the carpenter) and the hammer as an object for that subject. What makes this subject–object relationship possible in advance, and thereby takes up both ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in a deeper unity, is an understanding of Being. For both the hammer and the carpenter to be what they are there must first be dwelling. Just as much as it produces beings, world also allocates places. Place is defined not by the ‘random objective presence of things’ but always through the belonging there of useful things. Useful things are placed, set up, ordered in relation to their use (1996: 95). Thus ‘above’ is on the ceiling while ‘below’ is on the floor. Place refers back to purpose, to the ‘what for’ of Dasein, not to space. This is why finding something that is not in its place can open the region of that place as something explicit rather than only implicit (1996: 96). When Peter sat down with gentile believers to eat he was no longer in his place, and the question of the right relation to Jewish law in messianic time became a problem. But the beings of a world are mostly in their place. To use one of Heidegger’s own examples (1995: 340) from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (the

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lecture course of 1929–30), I only apprehend the blackboard as what it is if first, and quite apart from my individual perceptions, I am familiar with the place of the blackboard’s appearing – in this case in the university lecture theatre with everything that this means. Unlike a piece of wood from a broken branch, the blackboard has a purpose, which is not attached to the blackboard as something external but which thoroughly determines what and how it is. Being is inseparable from, is nothing other than, the understanding (de-concealment) of being (2002b: 86–7). World, not consciousness as in phenomenology, is what is first necessary in order for the blackboard to appear. World, as meaningful, is therefore always also historical. The question of Being is always a question of the history of being.1 The blackboard cannot appear as such unless there be a history, in this case the history of a certain kind of education and everything that this education is in turn inextricably linked to – the history of the modern state, for example. The power of the Weltgeist (world spirit) ‘goes its ways to the end, while we remain its small satellites’ (1988: 74). Time is what unifies the existence of the blackboard and its essence. To be capable of identifying the ensemble of materials that make up the blackboard as a blackboard is to be able to connect a present existence with an essence that is already known. Time in the form of recollection is what gives the being of the blackboard, is what makes existence and essence coincide in the object. That the being of the blackboard, as all being, is historical in this way means that my experience of the blackboard, though not objective in the usual sense of the term, is certainly not subjective either. For even if I am sitting to one side of the lecture theatre and it appears badly positioned to me, the point is that the blackboard cannot even appear as badly positioned absent this history of Being: ‘already manifest in the board’s bad position correctly considered [is] the lecture theatre as a whole. It is out of the manifestness of the lecture theatre that we experience the bad position of the board in the first place’ (1995: 345). My ‘subjective’ experience of the board is in reality ‘utterly objective’ since my judgement does not concern an isolated object but rather speaks out of the whole that it already finds itself in (1995: 346–7).

1

Heidegger’s history of Being does not, however, assume that there is one such history. Bergson, by contrast, makes being ‘historical’ in an absolute sense: ‘Not only does the past coexist with the present that has been [i.e. that passes in its very arising], but, as it preserves itself in itself (while the present passes), it is the whole, integral past; it is all our past, which coexists with each present’ (Deleuze 1991: 59). As Deleuze (1991: 81, 82) notes, ‘Bergson’s whole thesis consists in demonstrating that [the different fluxes of time] can only be liveable or lived in the perspective of a single time’. There ‘exists one Time and one Time only’.

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This whole is the ‘as’, the world of meaning whereby we take beings as the beings they are (as pencils, blackboards etc.). Indeed, this ‘as’ is the ground of ‘is’ (propositional statements). The ‘as’ and Being are inextricably connected such that it is only the ‘as’ structure that even ‘makes it possible to get a glimpse of something like being’ (1995: 338).2 The unity of the ‘as’ – we can never take a being as the being that it is in isolation from how all other beings are given by this same ‘as’ – is ‘that which lies together, lies together before us, that which I can refer to as together’ (1995: 325). And that which lies together in the form of the ‘as’, in the form of a relation to beings as a whole, is world: ‘The question of how things stand regarding being cannot be posed without asking about the essence of the “as”, and vice-versa’ (1995: 334). We can see in all of this how Heidegger keeps his earlier reflections on Paul in mind. The primacy of the logos – of the propositions ‘is’ and ‘is not’ – established by Greek philosophy was tied up with the invisibility of the ‘as’ of world. But if metaphysics from Aristotle fatefully steered the question of Being towards the ‘is’ (1995: 323), then in Paul the more original ‘as’ comes to light. Paul’s comportment towards beings in the form, not of the ‘is’ and ‘is not’, but rather in the form of the ‘as not’ (hos me), enables them to appear differently. In Christ, slaves become free men and free men slaves. Where is this ability for comportment towards beings grounded? As an ability for precisely comportment [Verhalten], for taking a stance, it can be grounded only in nothing – or, put otherwise, in freedom, in ‘being free for beings as such’ (1995: 339). Heidegger makes this point repeatedly at this stage in his lecture. Logos is dethroned because, as assertion, it is possible ‘only where there is freedom’. Likewise, the revealing and concealing of logos, the very possibility of true and false itself, ‘is to be found only where there is freedom’ (the possibility of something having the binding character of truth likewise).3 In all his propositional discourse, man ‘must have leeway [Spielraum] in advance’ for the comparative to-and-fro of truth or falsity. Propositional truth is by no means the fundamental form of truth. The prior of predication is world, and world can

2

3

In his Introduction to Metaphysics (2000) Heidegger makes this same point as follows: ‘For saying beings as such involves understanding beings as beings – that is, their Being – in advance’ (2000: 86). Blindness to our openness to the being of beings is both the condition for and the outcome of ‘traditional’ metaphysics, which, in its fixation on beings and its forgetting of beings, ‘remains “physics” ’ (2000: 149). This means that the idea, central to the metaphysical tradition, of man ‘having’ logos needs to be approached differently. Having logos is no longer being able to distinguish between true and false but having the very possibility of taking to be either true or false. Logos is now seen as an ability rather than a fixed capacity, the possibility of taking, rather than simply having, a comportment towards, or a relation to, beings as such. To possess logos, for Heidegger, is not to have some thing or property, but rather to have ‘a relating towards beings as such at one’s disposal’ (1995: 337).

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always be, must always be able to be, other. For while world is determining of beings it is founded in its being open, in freedom; hence the ‘necessity of a destructuring [Destruktion]’ which gets behind the ‘is’ in each and every one of its specific determinations (1995: 341). Heidegger’s world is not a cosmos. Although, like cosmos, world is pure immanence  – we only ever ‘speak out of the whole and into it’ (1995:  353)  – world is nonetheless (un)founded in freedom rather than in cosmic necessity, and in this sense ‘has nothing to do with any pantheism’ (1995:  354). Unlike cosmos, which, in its attention only to beings, arrays different regions of being alongside, above or behind each other as if in a vacuum, Heidegger’s world finds these regions of being to be what they are ‘only within and out of a prevailing of world’ (1995: 354). This means that although the being of, say, a man and a horse may be entirely undifferentiated (as the metaphysicians argue, being is that which is most abstract or universal), our comportment towards these beings is entirely different in each case (1995: 354). In this capacity for comportment, we thereby live in – are – the difference between Being and beings, a difference invisible to metaphysics since it is not found among beings and also because we are always already in it (1995: 356; see also 1998a: 246). World is any one mode of this ontological difference between Being and beings, that which expresses this difference in a particular yet all-encompassing way. Ontological difference is thereby not only an ‘essential moment’ of world, but, indeed, is the moment from which the problem of world becomes comprehensible (1995: 358).4 It is not that first there is the being of beings (ontology) and then there is world as an expression of this. Rather, world (ontological difference) lets being be: ‘The ontological difference is the difference sustaining and guiding such a thing as the ontological in general, and not a particular distinction that can or must be made within the ontological’ (1995: 359).5 For this 4

5

By contrast, the natural attitude is to treat being as undifferentiated, to erase the difference between the ontical (beings) and the ontological (Being) such that both are ‘understood, with equal indefiniteness, as “being” ’ (2002b: 162). Agamben has argued (2016:  170) that the ontological difference between being and Beings is internal to language (‘in reality there is only . . . sayability: the word and the thing are only its two fragments’). The presuppositional structure of language is that as soon as something is named the thing named has to be presupposed as extra-linguistic (and therefore in some sense as unnameable). Being is only a shadow cast by being-in-language. Although Heidegger came to acknowledge (1998a: 239) that language is the ‘house of Being’, in his earlier work he takes awareness of the being of beings to be in some sense ‘prior’ to language. In The Essence of Human Freedom (2002b: 30; see also 87 and 158), for example, Heidegger writes that ‘we can use the “is” and “was” and so forth because the being of beings is already self-evident to us prior to all speaking. In understanding the being of beings, we always already understand being as divided’. Indeed, even in the later ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1998a:  254, 248), Heidegger continues to hold that ‘Because plants and animals are lodged in their respective environments but are never placed freely into the clearing of being which alone is “world”, they lack language’. The ‘clearing’ of Being is prior to language even if it can only

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reason, it is never a matter of first having something and thereafter the possibility of taking that something as something, but rather the reverse: ‘something first gives itself to us only when we are already moving [. . .] within the “as’ ” (1995: 365). Or as Heidegger makes the same point in his lectures on Nietzsche (1991, III:  69):  We always ‘take beings in advance, in the way we have determined what is decisive in our relation to them’. In On the Essence of Ground (1998b) from 1929, Heidegger continues his reflections on comportment as the way in which we relate to beings, including to the being that we ourselves are. What makes beings available for comportment towards them is an understanding of the Being of beings. The unveiled-ness of Being is what first makes possible the manifest-ness of beings (1998b: 103). Comportment requires that Dasein must always already have surpassed beings as a whole. This is not a theoretical grasping of things but rather Dasein just is the surpassing of beings. And in surpassing beings, Dasein reveals itself as not aiming at beings at all: ‘We name world that toward which Dasein as such transcends’, and, as such, ‘determine transcendence as being-in-the-world’ (1998b: 109). Again, we are being asked to interpret world not as everything that is, as the totality, but rather as that in which what is appears (1998b: 110). Heidegger finds a decisive moment here, albeit an ‘inexplicit’ and ‘dawning’ one (1998b:  112), in some of the commencing statements of ancient philosophy. Kosmos in the Presocratics is not only a reference to a being in itself nor to the totality of beings. It can also mean ‘a “state of affairs”, i.e. how beings, and indeed beings as a whole, are’. ‘This world’ (κόσμος αὐτούς) does not point to one domain of beings as opposed to another, but rather ‘this world of beings as distinct from another world of the same beings’ (1998b: 111). The world is not put together from its various parts, through the addition of different regions of beings up until the whole, but the partitioning of beings always rather requires the whole (1998b: 111–12): (1) World refers to a ‘how’ of being of beings, rather than to these beings themselves. (2) This ‘how’ determines beings as a whole. In its grounds it is the possibility of every ‘how’ in general as limit and measure. (3) This ‘how’ as a whole is in a certain manner prior. (4) This prior ‘how’ as a whole is itself relative to human Dasein. The world thus belongs precisely to human Dasein, even though it embraces in its whole all beings, including Dasein. be disclosed in language: ‘Language is the clearing-concealing advent of being itself ’, which means that language, as the house of being, is ‘propriated’ by being or that ‘being comes, clearing itself, to language’ (1998a: 249, 254, 274). For this reason, ‘the metaphysical-animal explanation of language’ can only cover up ‘the essence of language in the history of being’ (1998a: 254).

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If this understanding of world is implicit in Presocratic philosophy, then it becomes clearer in the ‘new understanding of existence’ that was the irruption of Christianity. The relationship between kosmos and Dasein is experienced more sharply in Christianity, to the extent that (as we saw in Chapter 3) kosmos now refers directly to a particular kind of fundamental human existence. ‘This world’ in the apostle Paul, as seen in the first letter to the Corinthians and also in his epistle to the Galatians, refers not to an external world but rather to the ‘situation of the human being, the kind of stance he takes towards the cosmos, his esteem for things’ (1998b: 112).6 Kosmos is now the pejorative name for human beings turning their backs on God, a historical time to be distinguished from the new one that has already arrived. This sense of world as the ‘how’ of human existence, specifically of a stance facing away from God, then pervades the entire Christian tradition, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and thereby to Scholasticism (1998b: 113–15). For Heidegger (1998b:  120–1), both the natural concept of world and the personal concept of world (the former as ‘the totality of natural things’ and the latter as the cosmopolitan community of all human beings) are therefore erroneous. World rather points to an understanding of Dasein ‘in its relation to beings as a whole’. In this reaching ahead and embracing of beings as a whole, Dasein surpasses beings ‘in the direction of world’. World is then ‘that from out of which Dasein gives itself the signification’ of the beings towards which it can comport itself. Dasein exists for and is the source of itself in the sense that Dasein has to be, to exist, in some way. World is that ‘for the sake of which Dasein exists’ (1998b: 121). Being-there is to have the significance of world. None of this means that human beings can posit their own worlds. Heidegger’s is not a subjective definition of world (see also 2003: 324 for a restatement of this crucial point). World is subjective to the extent that it ‘belongs to Dasein’, but since it is not a being, nothing objective, that does not make it the object for some ‘subjective’ subject. World is ‘objectively’ subjective in the sense that Dasein never explicitly grasps what has been projected as world and, indeed, always already exists in the shadow of this projection. Apart from this overshadowing by world in which Dasein is ‘temporalized’ (finds it time), beings could not manifest themselves. Dasein is ‘world-forming’, but is also itself part of what is formed by world (1998b:  123). The metaphysical tradition has missed this double movement of world because it has held being either to be what most truly ‘is’ in beings – as that which is most objective in the sense of everlasting – or 6

Here we see once again the influence of Heidegger on Bultmann and Bornkamm.

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as innate to a subject that relates to the world in an unmediated way through reason (1998b: 124–5). World, by contrast, is neither objective nor internal to a subject, neither eternal nor directly graspable.

Freedom and finitude If world always already casts its shadow over Dasein, coming therefore ‘before’ Dasein, then any particular act of will, any specific comportment towards beings (such as judging, representing or enjoyment of beings), is referred back to the transcendence which allows these various forms of surpassing of beings in the first place. Indeed, such ‘surpassing in the direction of world is freedom itself ’ (1998b: 126). In this sense, ‘Freedom is freedom for ground’ or ‘Freedom is the ground of ground’ (1998b: 127, 134). Returning to this theme a year later (1930) in The Essence of Human Freedom, Heidegger (2002b: 93) writes that freedom is ‘prior even to being and time’ and, as such, is not the property of man but man is rather a possibility of freedom. As this ground of possibility, freedom binds, indeed is ‘obligation in general’. Freedom is a strange sort of ground since it is nothing other than the absence, ‘the abyss’ (Ab-grund), of ground in Dasein (1998b:  127, 134). Although this abyss is ‘overcome’ in factical existing, it is never eliminated (1998b: 134). That freedom is the Ab-grund of all grounding – namely of all worlds – means that the projection of possibilities (the possibilities of existence) that is Dasein always exceeds what is projected as possible in any world: ‘In the projection of world an excess of possibility is given with respect to which . . . the “why” springs forth’ (1998b: 130).7

7

This identification of freedom with world is to be contrasted with Kant’s understanding of freedom as a kind of causality specific to human being (i.e. of which the human being is himself an original cause – a beginning or an unconditioned causality – in contrast to the chain of natural causality). By connecting freedom with a being in this way, freedom is wrongly conceived, Heidegger believes, as being-present. This ‘turns freedom into its complete opposite’ (Heidegger 2002b: 133). Because Kant works with a cosmic concept of world as the totality of beings, freedom must be understood on the basis of natural causality. The world is determined by natural causality but what brought the world into being? That the world started spontaneously, even if how it did so remains obscure (indeed, given the antinomies of pure reason, we cannot know that it even does have a beginning), is proof enough (viz., is a necessary regulative idea) that there can be self-origination of new series, and this is how human freedom is explained (basically, we decide for the thesis of human freedom against the antithesis of pure natural causality). In other words, human freedom for Kant is derived from natural causality rather than being treated on its own terms; it is a merely cosmological idea. Kant’s ‘problem of freedom belongs to the problem of world’ rather than, as in Heidegger, the problem of world belonging to the problem of freedom (Heidegger 2002b: 156). As Heidegger expresses this point (2002b: 205): ‘The problem of causality is a problem of freedom and not [as in Kant] vice versa.’

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But despite the irreducibility of this ‘why?’ (Why in this way? Why this? Why anything at all?), there is no way of living in the pure possibility that gives rise to such questioning. To the contrary, Dasein’s facticity means that other possibilities are always and necessarily withdrawn from it in such a way that the particular projection of world within which it finds itself is binding (1998b: 128–9). The ‘ontological truth’ of our situation is that our sense of Being supplies ‘the ultimate and primary grounding of things’. Without the illumination provided by our understanding of Being things could not even manifest themselves as the beings they are (1998b: 130). Freedom as the final ground of world is available to us only in the form of the withdrawal of that freedom within a world (existence is always some comportment towards beings, never the abstract possibility of comportment). This withdrawal is ‘a transcendental testimony to the finitude of Dasein’s freedom. And does not the finite essence of freedom in general thereby announce itself?’ (1998b: 129; see also 135) Nonetheless, although world is the withdrawal of possibility ‘itself ’, it remains the case that world gives rise to a sphere or range of possibilities. World gives the character of possibility a particular determination rather than being determining as such. If world was a determination of beings themselves then there could be no taking up of a comportment towards them. As Heidegger says in his Introduction to Metaphysics (2000: 70) from 1935, that ‘wherein the things that are becoming are set must precisely not proffer its own look and its own appearance’. It must rather be ‘that which separates itself from every particular, that which withdraws and in this way admits and “makes room” precisely for something else’. This means that, for Heidegger, ‘even Nothing “belongs” to “Being” ’ (2000: 89). Being is not only dwelling. The restlessness of those who philosophize is a homesickness, a not being at home anywhere. But this lack reveals something positive:  we always find ourselves ‘called upon by something as a whole. This “as a whole” is the world’ (1995:  5). In addition to the totality of reference constituted by dwelling, world is also that being as a whole to which human beings are driven, a sojourning which even defines human being given that we have ‘always already departed’ on our way towards it. Given our essential finitude, this whole can never be reached. We are always underway; indeed, we are this transition (1995: 6). That freedom is only the withdrawal of the ‘whole’ of possibility within the particular possibilities of a world is an indication of the essential finitude of freedom (1998b: 133). Freedom is not that which is beyond finitude, that which finitude is incapable of, but, rather, finitude is the very ground of freedom.

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Apart from in Being and Time, it is in Heidegger’s book on Kant (1929) that the theme of finitude is made most visible. Controversially, Heidegger reads Kant’s Copernican Revolution in philosophy as founded upon an implicit awareness that finitude is not so much a limit on human knowledge as the condition for any appearing whatsoever. Transcendence ‘is finitude itself ’ (1990:  62). For Heidegger, the utility of this reading is that it enables him to put forward his own, this time explicit, account of finitude as the condition of possibility  – the transcendental – of the ‘taking as’ (care) structure which he identifies as unique to Dasein.8 To take something ‘as’ something is already to have the being of beings opened in some way, but opened in some way which concerns me (1990:  49). The transcendental of care (Sorge, which in Being and Time Heidegger identifies as the essence of human being) is finitude (1990: 163; see also 1998b: 132–4). Heidegger’s appropriation of Kant’s Copernican Revolution involves arguing that Kant was the first to reveal that finitude is found in the very structure of knowledge itself (1990: 15). That appearing is only appearing for us shows the dependence of knowledge on finitude. But this essential finitude of knowledge is just as clear in the fact that what appears has to be given to us. In Heidegger’s Kant, finitude is the transcendental of knowledge of beings (1990: 64). Heidegger illustrates this dependence of ontology on finitude by contrasting it with infinite, divine knowledge. Would divine knowledge be absolute if it depended on a being that pre-existed its representation of it? No. Infinite representation of the being is what brings the being into existence. An absolute intuition, having first created the being, simply sees through it in advance (1990: 16). There is no place for thinking in divine intuition. Thinking is already ‘the mark of finitude’, since thinking is always, unlike intuition, to know limits, namely that the being is not created by my thinking it: ‘finite intuition of the being cannot give the object from out of itself. It must allow the object to be given’ (1990: 17; see also 82 and 155–6). An object that is given, the being that shows itself, is an appearing, even appearance itself. Appearance is nothing other than the being as object of finite knowledge, or, to put it the other way round: ‘only for finite knowledge is there anything at all like an object’ (1990: 20). Only finite knowledge could be ‘delivered over to the being which already is’; objectivity is always a ‘Being-inopposition-to’ (1990: 20, 74). Infinite knowledge, which can never be opposed

8

There is an interesting contrast with the Epicurean gods, here, who Lucretius (1968: 161) describes as leading ‘lives supremely free of care’.

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by any being to which it must conform, can have no such object. To conform to an object would be dependency on the object, and therefore finitude rather than the infinite (1990: 20). Far from appearance being illusory, only the being in appearance (namely for a finite knowledge) can be a being in itself, can become an object. For absolute intuition, on the other hand, the being is only inasmuch as it is coming into being – it is the being as Being itself, and not as an object (1990: 21). It is not, then, that human knowledge can never know the thing in itself, but that the thing in itself can only be for finite human knowing (which nonetheless does not create it), can only be as appearance. The thing in itself can only be as appearance because it is not a being but no-thing. But the nothing understood as not a being is something. It is the pure horizon of time, the ‘original truth’, against which beings stand (appear as beings) – finitude (1990: 84–5). But this means that finite human being, as finite, has a ‘certain infinitude in the ontological’ (in the sense of the understanding of Being), while infinite being, as infinite, can have no ontology because no understanding (only an accomplishing) of Being: ‘ontology is an index of finitude. God does not have it’ (1990: 175).9 Heidegger (2002b: 94) makes the same point, only more vertiginously, in The Essence of Human Freedom. As that being wherein alone occurs the understanding of Being, human being ‘is awesome in a way that a god can never be, for a god must be utterly other. This awesome being, that we really know and are, can only be as the most finite of all beings.’ The ‘greatness’ of this finitude has been obscured by a false infinity in such a way that we now see finitude and greatness as antonyms rather than the synonyms they really are. For only in mortal ‘man’ can truth – the unveiling of Being – be. The gods can have nothing to do with truth. Neither can the gods have world, and for the same reason. That which opens up world, which makes beings visible as beings, is finitude, which is therefore, contra all anthropology, ‘[m]ore original than man’ (1990:  156). Finitude is constitutive of human being, or we ourselves ‘are’ our time. It is not the subject that is temporal but time that is ‘subjective’ (1990: 129). Heidegger thereby rereads Kant’s exclusion of the self from time (‘For the standing and lasting I [of pure apperception] constitutes the correlate of all of our representations’ [Kant 1998: 240]) as saying not that the self is outside of time but that it is time (1990: 131). I am not in time as something separate because I am only my time.

9

Deleuze’s Bergson (1991: 49) thinks something similar: psychological duration is the ‘opening onto an ontological duration. Ontology should, of necessity, be possible’.

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Finitude ‘forms the horizon of selfhood within which what is objective becomes experienceable as the same throughout change’ (1990: 132).10

The Nothing While finitude allows the manifestation of beings, it does not explain the refusal of beings that we experience. In Being and Time (1996: 315) anxiety (Angst) – the fear of nothing in particular, of no being – is identified as the mood (Stimmung) in which this withdrawal of beings takes place. In anxiety, beings are no longer ‘relevant’, no longer have anything to ‘say’ to us: ‘the world in which I exist has sunk into insignificance’. Angst is anxious precisely in the face of this nothingness, in awareness of its thrown-ness. In the lectures that make up The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995:  145), Heidegger also identifies boredom  – the Langeweile (long while) in which all beings recede into an equal indifference – as a fundamental mood that reveals nothingness. What entrances us in profound boredom is not beings, but rather the no-thing of the temporal horizon ‘itself ’ (1995: 147). Boredom is an experience of the fundamental openness of Being, that ‘[w]hat gives itself and how it gives itself remain open’, as Heidegger writes elsewhere (1990: 101). The ‘lengthening of the while manifests the while of Dasein in its indeterminacy that is never absolutely determinable’ (1995: 153). World is not the totality of beings but rather the open expanse of the whole that we become dimly aware of, and are oppressed by, in boredom (1995: 279). World is that emptiness in which we find ourselves always among beings but not necessarily, at least when profoundly bored, preoccupied with them (or captivated by them, as Heidegger’s animals will always be). If world means the accessibility of beings then Heidegger (1995: 199) concedes that animals have world too. However, Heidegger’s animals are always, indeed in their very essence, fully captivated by beings (thus unaware of the Being of beings, their being ‘as such’) which means that, while the animal has an environment, only ‘man’ can be properly said to have a world. While the stone is ‘worldless’ and the animal ‘poor in world’, man is ‘world-forming’ (1995: 282, 269, 177; see also 1998a: 248 for a later statement). If this thesis stands, then understanding the concept of world is the same thing as grasping the essence 10

In his famous second meditation on what remains the same in wax between its solid and liquid states, Descartes (1911: 11) had rather argued that neither the senses nor the imagination but only the understanding (my mind) can intuit that the same wax undergoes this change. Here the subject constitutes its time rather than vice versa.

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of man (1995: 211). As human beings we are held captive by our ‘living nature’ in a particular way, namely we are not what that nature makes of us, but rather what we make of our living nature arrives ‘from out of our essence’ (1995: 278). Since world cannot be found outside of man, it must lie deeper in him still, in his very essence: ‘We indicated this essence by way of a thesis: that man is worldforming’ (1995: 341). Yet contrary to the subjectivism of idealist philosophy, we must re-emphasize not only that man shapes world but also, and especially, that world forms man. The thesis that man is world-forming should not imply that world is ‘something subjective’, that it is nothing other than what man makes of it. ‘For it is not the case that man first exists and then also one day decides amongst other things to form a world. Rather world-formation is something that occurs, and only on this ground can a human being exist in the first place’ (1995: 285). If human being is world-forming, then, as we have seen, it is in the sense of the ‘as’ by which the ‘is’ comes to be expressed in some meaning or other (1995: 337). The ‘as’ in the sense of meaning or significance, however, is itself dependent on the ‘as’ in the sense of manifestness. This ‘as’ is awareness of the Being of beings, of the being as such of beings. Animal behaviour, by contrast, is never an apprehending of something as something. Inasmuch as this ‘as’ is refused to the animal, so too the phenomenon of world is withheld from it (1995: 287, 311; see also 349). Human beings alone can attend to beings in the sense both of letting be and not letting be – comportment. However, the not letting be (negation) is possible only on the basis of the former. Contra dialectics, it is the letting be of beings – the awareness of their being – that is primordial (1995: 274).11 Although this awareness comes to be in man, it is not rooted in him but in Being. Beings are only accessible because beings themselves ‘allow and enable’ their manifestness (1995: 279).12 Does this then mean that world ‘is’ only beings that are manifest, Heidegger asks? ‘No, it means the manifestness of these beings’ that are manifest in each case (1995: 280). This manifestness is something we will never come across in itself, it is not to be found in beings as beings; but neither is it above and beyond the realm of beings. World, manifestness, is not something that arises ‘before’ beings, but neither can beings be without world. If man is world-forming, then beings cannot be without man (1995: 280). The question

11

12

The possibility of the thesis and antithesis of the dialectic is comprehendible only if we know what the logos is. The logos reveals or conceals, but what is the ground of this possibility of truth or falsity? It is an apprehending of that which forms a unity, since ‘whatever is to be pointed out must already be apprehended in advance in the unity of its determinations’ (Heidegger 1995: 313–14). ‘How can man even come to a subjective conception of beings, unless beings are already manifest to him beforehand?’ (Heidegger 1995: 286; see also 287 and 341).

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concerning world-formation, which is the question of Being, can only then be a question ‘concerning ourselves’ (1995: 281). It is only that the Dasein, the being-there, in us manifests itself that allows this questioning. In being-there we are set before beings as a whole and this setting is an attunement by which ‘we are in such and such a way’ (1995: 283). World turns out not to be that which is furthest away, as is cosmos with its valorization of the superlunary, but that which is closest to us, so close in fact ‘that we have no distance from it that would allow us to catch sight of it’. World is never such that we could look on it directly (1995: 284, 292, 297–8; 2002b: 127). Yet for all this closeness, world also forms the whole. Quite apart from the ‘naive concept of world’ as beings, Heidegger’s claim is that world is neither the manifestation of beings, nor even the manifestation of the Being of beings, but rather the ‘manifestness of beings as such as a whole’. However obscurely, ‘world always has a characteristic wholeness, something somehow rounded out’ (1995: 284). Finding ourselves in-the-world we encounter beings, that beings are, in the context of completeness. Completeness of being is not something positive, however. Counterintuitively, our sense of the whole is really our awareness of the nothing. How would comportment, as opposed to passive adaptation (the stance required by wisdom), be possible unless the ‘not’ of beings opened up the possibility of an otherwise? The nothing should therefore be understood as having an ‘innermost power’. The nothing is not the empty nothingness of nihilism (where man has nothing and consequently is nothing), but is rather ‘that power which constantly thrusts us back, which alone thrusts us into being and lets us assume power over our own [being]’ (1995: 299). The nothing is not a black hole that allows nothing to be present but rather that giving power that lets beings be. The nothing in Heidegger has nothing to do with nihilism. The nothing is not something present at hand, an emptiness in man that could somehow be filled. The nothing does not appear as something separate from how beings are given in a world. Rather, it is an openness for beings as they are. The nothing as a being-open-for is ‘a free holding oneself toward whatever beings are given there in letting oneself be bound’ (1995: 342). This being bound by beings as ability and comportment should be contrasted with the capacity and behaviour that are rather the realm of ‘instinctual drives becoming disinhibited while remaining captive’ (ibid.). Heidegger has the animal in mind here. The purely negative fact that human beings are not captured by their animal instincts, then, is really the difference between the human being and the animal. In becoming bored, the human animal awakes from its natural captivation by

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beings. It is freed from its instincts only in their no longer binding it, not in any positive sense, not for something. If human being is only the inoperativity of animality, then what is grasped in Dasein (recalling that Dasein is not just human being simpliciter) is just this suspension of animal captivation. This is why boredom is the Ur-Stimmung, the ‘ground’, of all moods or attunements. We are only capable of various modes of captivation by beings because we have first, in boredom, been exiled from captivation as such (Agamben 2016: 90–1 and 186–8).13 With instincts voided, we are capable of moods. Only by way of the negation of our animal environment do we find ourselves in the world. The open of world is the non-openness of beings in boredom. The whole of world, then, is in no way the totality of cosmos but rather the Nothing.

Nihilism Heidegger’s thesis on world enables us to gain a better purchase on his critique of metaphysics and the nihilism that this opens on to. If world is what brings beings to perception then, in the lectures that constitute his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger (2000: 14–19) argues that this understanding of Being is what the Greeks named phusis. As we have seen already, Heidegger suggests that phusis should not be translated as nature. Greek phusis, as what becomes, is rather that by which beings first emerge and endure for a time. Heidegger’s Greeks therefore saw in natural processes only one aspect of phusis. Only because beings are first disclosed in phusis could the Greeks point to nature as something ‘physical’ (2000: 16). It is the loss of this sense of Being that Heidegger pins on Plato’s theory of forms or ideas: The word idea means what is seen in the visible, the view that something offers. What is offered is the current look or eidos of whatever we encounter. The look of a thing is that within which, as we say, it presents itself to us, re-presenting itself and as such stands before us; the look is that within which and as which the thing comes-to-presence – that is, in the Greek sense, is. (2000: 192)

What starts to go missing here for Heidegger is the awareness of Being (phusis) as that something comes to presence in favour of a sense of being (eidos) as what comes to presence (2000: 193). In this barely noticeable shift is concealed 13

In describing Heidegger’s world as ‘the inoperativity of the animal environment’, Agamben is aligning it with his messianic vocation, which is similarly the destitution of all biological (and social) conditions of life that in no way transcends these conditions.

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the origins of the metaphysical subject as that being which alone is necessary for beings to appear (rather than that being which is able to apprehend beings only because of what has already been given by Being). Where phusis is being that ‘comes to presence of itself’, the look of a thing (its eidos) is rather how it appears to a subject that apprehends it. The ‘standing-there in itself ’ of phusis is now the standing ‘opposed to a seeing’ of eidos (2000: 193 and 194). Prior to the Platonic fall that made eidos the measure of all things, Parmenides’s saying is already that ‘Being and apprehending’, namely what is seen and seeing, belong together. Something seen doubtless belongs to seeing, but this does not mean that its being seen can alone determine its coming to presence. Parmenides’s saying is that seeing is ‘for the sake of ’ Being, not that Being is to be conceived on the basis of seeing. ‘Apprehending should open up beings in such a way that it sets beings back into their being, so that apprehending takes beings with regard to the fact that they set themselves forth as what’ (2000: 195). The transformation of the sense of Being from self-showing phusis to what is possessed through being taken in as eidos is also the hidden origin of the distinction that comes later between existentia and essentia, existence and essence. Ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings, starts from this point on to be reduced to the difference between existence and essence. But these later terms, as well as the difference between them, is really only internal to (now concealed) Being ‘itself ’ (2000:  195). What is given in Being as self-standing phusis is both the existence and the essence, the that-ness and the what-ness, of beings. The difference between a being as something that is, and also what it is, is itself within Being – both being and being-thus are. When eidos, which is a consequence (albeit an essential one) of Being, is made into the essence of Being itself, then ‘[t]here is a fall’. ‘What remains decisive is not the fact in itself that phusis was characterized as idea, but that the idea rises up as the sole and definitive interpretation of Being’ (2000: 194). The sense of Being as eidos is also what accounts for metaphysical timelessness. If Being only concerns existents then what a thing is becomes the only question to ask of it (see also Heidegger 1998c: 173). But if Being is not only what is unconcealed in existence but also, and primordially, that unconcealedness ‘itself ’, then time comes to light. Beings do not remain in Being – just as they appeared out of nothing so they will also pass into nothing. While the whatness of a being (e.g. a human being, with the predicates, such as biped, which come attached to this kind of being) may be more or less enduring, that it is remains subject to time – to creation and decay. Human being persists across time, but human being is mortal.

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In fact this ‘human’ of humanism that endures over time turns out to be a pure abstraction. Human being determined in a certain way as a timeless entity ‘is’ not. Only mortal human beings exist. In other words, to repeat the point: making the essence of a thing its eidos or what-ness is what creates the difference between existence and essence in the first place. Human being is not something separate, or indeed separable, from existence. To say that a human being fundamentally unfolds not in and of herself but only according to a fixed essence (e.g. as a ‘rational animal’) is to miss what makes her human. The distinction between existence and essence makes no sense with regard to human being, and this is also the nub of Heidegger’s later critique of Sartre in his Letter on Humanism. It is not a matter of reversing the metaphysical prioritization of human essence over existence since the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains metaphysical. Rather, human being, uniquely, is an essence defined by existence, a form of being for which Being is precisely a question (rather than an answer). The difference between essence and existence in human being is no difference at all: The determination of the human essence that is required here is not a matter for a free-floating anthropology, which at bottom represents humanity in the same way as zoology represents animals. The question about human being is now determined in its direction and scope solely on the basis of the question about Being. Within the question of Being the human essence is to be grasped and grounded [. . .]. (2000: 219)

Another malign outcome of the elevation of the idea to the very essence of being is that all beings become but a poor likeness of the idea (form), which really ‘is’ in a way that now imperfect beings never can be. Beings lose their weight (seriousness) even as the matter that they materialize is associated with semblance, with a mere ‘participation’ in being (2000: 196–7). The loss of Being, which is the loss of world, brings beings down with it. Beings themselves now only appear as an imitation of true being; they become mere phenomena. In other words, the appearance of beings, no longer the very essence of Being, is now the appearance of something else. Beings become shadows cast by the forms. The loss of Being is also the loss of beings. For Heidegger, this inceptive nihilism also needs to be grasped in terms of the sense of truth at work in it. Indeed, the transformation of the sense of truth is nothing other than the ‘inner ground’ of the alteration of being from phusis into eidos (2000: 203). Marking this shift, Heidegger suggests, is the change in the meaning of logos from that which is grounded in, and remains in service to, phusis (i.e. logos as participating in the truth of being as unconcealment) to

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that which, as assertion, becomes the very place of truth, which is now understood as correctness (2000:  199). Originally truth, as unconcealment, was an event of beings themselves, beings that thereby ‘hold sway’. Now, however, what is proper to truth is only logos. In being reduced to assertion, truth not only changes its place but its essence also shifts. Truth is now only the ‘correctness’ of logos. Having once been included in originary unconcealment, the logos now breaks away, standing solitary and sovereign, such that the truth of beings themselves is now referred back to it alone: ‘and not only decisions about beings but even, in advance, about Being’ (2000: 199). Where truth is dependent on the showing of beings characteristic of world, with the rise of metaphysics it now becomes possible to judge world itself as if from the outside. This new truth is bought at the price of an extraneousness to world that is of the very essence of nihilism. This truth Nietzsche is right to charge with lying. But Heidegger means to say that there is another, more primordial, truth that Nietzsche missed. Truth only lies when truth stands apart from, and in judgement on, world. But when truth is itself opened by world, is the opening of world, then nihilism as the death of truth finds no hold. But is everything opened by world indifferently true? Is everything what it ‘appears’ to be? Heidegger’s thought on the being of appearing, of convention or doxa, is complex. On the one hand, the polis is the very site of Being as that which ‘grounds and preserves’ the unconcealment of beings in a particular world (2000:  204). Unlike metaphysical beings, which are already present at hand, the unconcealment of beings depends upon the work: ‘the work of the word as poetry, the work of stone in temple and statue, the work of the word in thinking, the work of the polis as the site of history that grounds and preserves all this’ (2004:  204). Yet at the same time as the state is the site of historical being, what is preserved in this site is doxa – ‘seeming’. Doxa is not external to Being in the sense that, as seeming, it appears (is within unconcealment). And yet as well as being that which proffers itself, doxa is also the views that human beings have of things, views which can become fixed in a way that obscures underlying appearing (Being). Dasein easily ‘settles in’ to such doxa, reproducing them blindly such that they come to obstruct a view of beings as the beings they themselves are. When this occurs, beings ‘are deprived of the possibility of turning themselves toward apprehension’, of appearing in their own right. ‘The dominance of views thus distorts beings and twists them’ (2000: 205). Heidegger goes on to consider the struggle for the ‘untwisting’ of doxa as a struggle against distortion (pseudos) and for unconcealment (phusis). However, by making unconcealment the opposite of twisted or distorted seeming, Being is

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thereby transformed into that which is straight and undistorted, which endangers the originary experience of truth as unconcealment: ‘For the undistorted is reached only when apprehending and comprehending turn to beings without twisting, straight on – that is, when apprehending and comprehending are directed by beings. The way to truth as correctness lies open’ (2000:  205–6). Where beings should be understood to be given by Being – such that all beings are in semblance – here beings give themselves with nothing in addition. Being, that ‘in’ which beings first appear, is occluded. Heidegger’s point is that seeming is Being also, but that ways of seeming can, over time, fossilize and obscure the deeper truth of seeming itself – that it appears at all. The outcome of Platonism, although only embryonically present in Plato’s thought itself, is the sense of Being as ousia, that is as substance or essence. Unlike Heidegger’s Being, which is appearing rather than what appears, and which is therefore not something present at hand, ousia is Being in the sense of constant presence (2000:  206). This effects a radical transformation in the meaning of Being:  from that which ‘is’ not (time), Being is now understood as what always is (eternity). That which comes to presence rather than that in which there is presence is the metaphysical sense of Being. The being, which once stood in its own light, becomes nothing more than an object for a subject. Indeed, such a being exists only to the extent that it can ‘stand up to’ the thinking of an independent logos (2000: 207). Being becomes calculable, and beings a standing reserve for human exploitation. The meaning of Being as that which is constantly present, as enduring substance or immutability, is then that by which everything else is defined  – so becoming, far from being, positively, that ‘in’ which beings come to unconcealment, is reduced to the not enduring, to mere privation. Similarly, seeming and semblance, no longer properties of Being, are demoted to that which lacks the transparent visibility of Being proper. By forgetting Being as the measure of all things, and instead making the ideal being (the idea or form) that measure, the problem is created of what determines the Being of these ideal beings? By stopping with beings (something) rather than Being (Nothing), the problem is one of infinite regress: what is the cause of that being in turn? No God can solve this conundrum. Indeed, starting with Plato’s agathon (the Good) and continuing with Gnosticism (the deus alienus) and negative theology, the only way out is to posit that the final cause of beings is itself beyond Being (2000: 211). Plato’s Republic (509b) reads: ‘The good therefore may be said to be the source not only of the intelligibility of the objects of knowledge, but also of their being and reality; yet it is not itself that reality but is beyond it, and superior to it in dignity and power.’

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Rather than Being lying ‘beneath’ beings as the Nothing that ‘grounds’, this metaphysical Being is above and beyond beings in its absolute potency. This gives to beings a lack that they never had before, a deficit of existence that is the first face of nihilism. The ‘beyond Being’ then has to make up for this lack, which is nihilism’s second face. Nihilism is then also, third, the source of the ‘ought’ as something separate from Being  – beings ought to be more like that which is beyond Being, which of course they can never be (2000: 211). The ‘ought’ is first lack and then impossibility, a process which reaches its high point in Kant, where the moral law is opposed to nature and remains entirely empty of content (2000:  212). Indeed, contra Nietzsche, who sought the positing of new values as an antidote to Platonism, values per se are now shown to be the children of Plato: ‘Plato conceived of being as idea. The idea is the prototype, and as such it also provides the measure. What is easier now than to understand Plato’s ideas in the sense of values, and to interpret the Being of beings on the basis of the valid?’ (2000: 212).14 The sense of Being as substance means that to be now means endurance, identity and presence: all the things that Being is not (2000: 216). This determination of Being as substance is not a matter only for philosophy since, as the metaphysical history of the West, it ‘is the power that today dominates all our relations to beings as a whole, to becoming, to seeming, to thinking, and to the ought’ (2000: 217). Where, then, is the nihilism at work, Heidegger finally asks? Where one clings to current beings and believes it is enough to take beings, as before, just as the beings that they are. But with this, one rejects the question of Being and treats being as nothing (nihil), which in a certain way it even ‘is’, insofar as it essentially unfolds. Merely to chase after beings in the midst of the oblivion of Being – that is nihilism. [. . .] In contrast, to go expressly up to the limit of Nothing in the question about Being, and to take Nothing into the question of Being – this is the first and only fruitful step towards the true overcoming of nihilism. (2000: 217–18)

14

Heidegger often restates his belief in the nihilism of value thinking. For example in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1998a: 265), where he writes that ‘thinking in values is the greatest blasphemy imaginable against being’ inasmuch as, when we make something a value, we reduce it to an object for human estimation. Every valuing is therefore a subjectivizing which fails to allow beings to be. Also in ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’ (1998c: 174) we read that, to the extent that interpretation in terms of values sustains Nietzsche’s metaphysics, ‘Nietzsche is the most unrestrained Platonist in the history of Western metaphysics’. However, inasmuch as Nietzsche understands that valuing is necessary for life, even something posited by ‘life itself ’, he manages to hold on to the Greek understanding of Being far more than those who absurdly seek after ‘intrinsically valid values’. In other words, valuing for Nietzsche stems from what is rather than from what ought to be, which means that at least he does not weigh the world according to values conceived as somehow above it.

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All that which was separated out from Being in the metaphysical divisions (namely becoming, seeming, thinking and the ought), which is essentially time, turns out not to be nothing after all, which must mean that it ‘is’ itself in Being. The concept of Being in the metaphysical tradition is thus insufficient ‘to name everything that “is” ’ (2000:  220, 218). Being, as time, must be ‘experienced anew’, which means dissolving the metaphysical divisions into the ‘originary division’, a disjunction which sustains history itself, namely the ontological difference between Being and beings (2000:  218–19). In metaphysics, time ‘itself ’ is brought under the rule of presence in the sense that each time is conceived starting from the now  – thus the past is no longer present while the future is not yet present.15 Rediscovering the sense of Being as time means not counting time but rather knowing the ‘right time – that is, the right moment and the right endurance’ (2000: 221, emphasis added). We find ourselves back with Paul, this time with his kairos or opportune moment. *** Our discussion of Heidegger’s sense of world will draw to a close with his reading, in his lectures on Parmenides (1992a) from 1942 to 1943, of the myth of Er. This myth, in telling of the immortality of the soul, concludes Plato’s Republic. It is one of the key moments in the Platonic oeuvre, a moment where the metaphysical devaluation of this world appears to gain a footing. Plato tells here of how the warrior Er, killed in battle, came back to life on the funeral pyre to tell of what he had seen ‘there’ (ἐϰεῑ, often taken to be ‘the other world’) after his ‘soul’ left his body. As we know well by now, Heidegger thinks that Plato’s thought is the beginning of metaphysics, but Heidegger’s Plato is also the end of a Greek thinking that was in no way metaphysical, and this thinking is not yet silent in Plato (see also Heidegger 1998c: 172)16. In this light, Heidegger notes, first, that the myth of Er takes place at the conclusion of a discourse on the politeia (Republic is, of course a Latin transcription of this very different Greek term), and that this 15

16

Deleuze’s Bergson (1991:  55 and 58–9) also warns against confusing Being with being-present. When Being is thought as being-present, then the past, no longer present, cannot be. But it is rather the present, as that which always and necessarily passes in its very emergence (since otherwise no new present could arise), that is never present; it is the present that ‘is’ ‘pure becoming, always outside itself ’. The past, on the other hand, while it has ceased to be present has not ceased to be. ‘Useless and inactive, impassive, it IS, in the full sense of the word: It is identical with being in itself.’ Paradoxically, then, at the limit ‘the ordinary definitions are reversed: of the present, we must say at every instant that it “was,” and of the past, that it “is,” that it is eternally, for all time’. Deleuze (1994:  59) takes up this insight in Difference and Repetition:  ‘the Heraclitan world still growls in Platonism. With Plato, the issue is still in doubt: mediation has not yet found its readymade movement’. However, see pages 127–8 for a harsher judgement of Plato as the one who first subordinated difference to the power of the Same and the Similar.

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is no accident. As we might expect, Heidegger reads the Greek polity as, in its essence, nothing political (in fact, the Greeks are held to be essentially ‘utterly unpolitical people’ [1992b: 96]). Instead, the polis, as polos or pole, is the place around which, for the Greeks, all beings turn, that which allows them to come into unconcealment (1992b: 89). The polis is therefore fundamentally connected to the Greek Being of beings; between the polis and Being ‘there is a primordial relation’ (1992b: 90). Indeed, if the polis is that space by which beings come to stand in unconcealment, then it is nothing other than the topos, the place, of Being ‘itself ’. When the polis is understood in this properly Greek way, Heidegger argues, then the myth of Er, and the ‘there’ that it points to that is away from ‘here’, far from being an unrelated appendage to Plato’s discourse on the politeia, is in fact its true dénouement. If the polity reveals the Being of beings then Being ‘itself ’ is that which can never directly be brought to light. This is Plato’s ‘there’ of which Er tells. Heidegger’s entire thesis on aletheia as the truth of Being is recapitulated here. In the Parmenides lectures, Heidegger struggles to articulate aletheia as an unconcealment that also conceals. At a late point in his discussion he reintroduces disclosure (Erschlossenheit, a word first used in Being and Time in the context of world disclosure) as another term for this event of Being, since what disclosure cancels is closure (1992b: 133). Being can only be disclosed in a disclosure, and this is what the polis, as the pole that also encloses, does. But Being as such cannot be disclosed, hence the myth of Er appropriately concludes a discourse on the politeia by pointing towards that ‘there’ which cannot be seen in the polity but is nonetheless its very ground. The ‘there’ names not the other world but Being. Heidegger’s Plato finishes the Republic with the myth of Er not because the polity, being found only ‘here’, is ultimately nothing compared to what is ‘there’. Rather, Er tells of the ‘there’ (Being) which, though it ‘is’ nowhere, is always already ‘here’, primordially in the polis that, for the Greeks, founds the ‘here’ itself. To the extent that the ‘soul’ (psuke, a word which Heidegger believes to be untranslatable) is said, at death, to travel to the ‘there’, then this is only because the Greeks, in Heidegger’s estimation, understood the soul as the capacity, shared only by humans who have logos, to be in relation to beings as beings, which is the same as the capacity for truth (1992b: 99). And this relation, in turn, is only found because of the primordial capacity of human being for a relation to the Being of beings (by which beings stand out as beings in the first place). The soul that, in death, journeys to the ‘there’ is nothing other than that receptivity to the unconcealment of Being that is the essence of human being itself in Heidegger. Plato’s ‘there’ is not only other than the metaphysical-Christian

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beyond in form and content, but even its Being is in a different mode (1992b: 97). The Greek ‘there’ is not what is furthest away and least worldly but that which is closest, but also most uncanny – the very worldliness of the world itself. The ‘there’ to which Er’s ‘soul’ travels, as ‘the district of the uncanny’: Is neither on ‘earth’ nor in ‘heaven’. Quite to the contrary, in this district there are such things, and only such things, which point to the subterrestrial, the supraterrestrial, and to what pertains to the earth. The subterrestrial and the supraterrestrial are the places whence the ‘demonic’ shines up upon, or down upon, the earth. They are the places of the gods. (1992b: 118)

And what are the Greek gods? Far from those that dominate Being as with the metaphysical God beyond Being, ‘they are Being itself as looking into beings’ (1992b:  111, emphasis added). The Greek gods are not outside of the world, condemning it by their otherness from it; rather, they are world itself as that in which beings come to appear. They are that same light of which Plotinus (in Hadot 1993: 49) would write: ‘Even in this world, we must say that beauty consists less in symmetry than in the light that shines upon the symmetry, and this light is what is desirable.’ Heidegger’s alternative to metaphysical cosmos, then, is a new vision of world-order (recalling that, unlike Nietzsche, Heidegger does not find chaos anywhere) in which the beings that appear within a world (through the ‘letting be’ of that world) stay only awhile and, for this very reason, are not abandoned to being ‘sheerly persisting constituents’ (Heidegger 2002a:  272). It is this persisting beyond their while that causes beings to violently seek to expel each other  – hence cosmos, with its eternal beings and everlasting places, is the very death of world. In contrast to this cosmic fixity, philosophy, as the thinking of Being, is ‘constant transformation’ not because it changes its mind about everything but because its very questioning and knowing is a transforming (2002b: 126). We have encountered world in Heidegger in two different aspects: 1. As the totality of reference, the complete context of meaning or significance, which gives the ‘how’ of beings as a whole – that gives beings as the beings they are. This is world as historical Being. 2. As the Nothing or the freeing absence of ground, which, constituted by finitude rather than ‘man’, is what gives the being of beings. This is world as transcendence of beings, as the whole not of beings but of Being. It is world as revealed in the fundamental moods of anxiety or boredom.

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These two faces of world in Heidegger are not separate, of course. Historical being-in-the-world, as time, is no-thing, just as this nothing of temporality is revealed only in historical being-in-the-world. The way in which beings are given in a world is not separable from the giving of the Being of beings in the nothing. But that there are two faces to Heidegger’s world is instructive, nonetheless. We should recall at this point that, for Heidegger (1995:  358), ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings, is not only an essential moment of world, but, indeed, is the moment from which the problem of world becomes comprehensible at all. Ontological difference, then, is equally fundamental to both of these senses of world, but in World 1 ontological difference is expressed as an immanent principle, as historical, while in World 2 it rises to a transcendental principle, namely is expressed as a difference as such; as a difference which, in being understood, brings awareness of Being. Driving this significant difference of emphasis is Heidegger’s ambivalence as to whether world is opened by Dasein (World 1) or, conversely, whether Dasein is opened by world (World 2). While this ambivalence is deliberate in the sense that Heidegger wants to underline the co-implication of Dasein and world (hence the hyphens in Being-in-the-world), it is worth exploring its implications further. Instructively, in Being and Time and the lectures that make up The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (i.e. until 1930 at the least) the strong sense of ontological difference – as awareness of Being as other than beings – is revealed only in anxiety or boredom (the former where I find myself fearful of nothing in particular, the latter where beings slip away into the nothing of a generalized indifference). Heidegger (1990: 177) is explicit about this in his Davos lectures from the same period (1929): ‘the Nothing is thought of only as an idea which has also been grounded in [the] disposition of anxiety. It is only possible for me to understand Being if I understand the Nothing or anxiety’. The ‘why?’ that stems from the awareness of Being first requires that I be anxious. To be sure, historical being-in-the-world is also revealed only when things go wrong, but here the revelation is not of the Nothing but of world as meaningful. That awareness of Being as such is dependent upon those moods when I am no longer at home in the world raises the question of whether Heidegger’s thought at this point is internal to nihilism rather than its overcoming. Can the question of Being be a question of anything other than the living of a life? Is the addition to this living of anything at all (even the Nothing) a shadow of the true world? Is the strong sense of ontological difference, the awareness of Being, an away from here? As a student of Heidegger who nonetheless seeks to overcome Heidegger, this is why Agamben is so insistent that the messianic life

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is only the destitution of historically determined vocations and not some new vocation.17 Heidegger makes this same point himself in his early reading of Paul. But why then does he come later to describe the human being as the shepherd of Being (Heidegger 1998a: 252)? Does the true world abide in Heidegger’s world (and is the abandonment of beings by Being a lament for it?)? If so, then his attempt to overcome Nietzsche must be in question. Nietzsche, after all, is content to celebrate the death of the true world, with nothing in addition. This is why Nietzsche has to acknowledge, if grudgingly, the significance of Spinoza, who had already very nearly killed off the true world by identifying it (if incompletely) with its modes, its ways of being. As Agamben (2016: 175) points out, Heidegger, by contrast, never did engage Spinoza. Perhaps this is because in Spinoza’s thought of the blessed life, unlike in Heidegger’s with its call of a Being that has been forgotten, the true life is already here.

17

More recently, Agamben (2016: 30; see also 51–6) has expressed this idea through the concept of use:  ‘every use is first of all use of self:  to enter into a relation of use with something, I  must be affected by it, constitute myself as one who makes use of it. Human being and world are, in use, in a relationship of absolute and reciprocal immanence; in the using of something, it is the very being of the one using that is first of all at stake’.

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Fear you see – [said Zarathustra] is our exception. But courage and adventure and pleasure in uncertainty, in what is undared – courage seems to me humanity’s whole prehistory. He envied and robbed the wildest, most courageous animals of all their virtues: only thus did he become – human. This courage, refined at last, made spiritual, intellectual, this human courage with eagle’s wings and snake’s cleverness: it, it seems to me, today is called – ’ ‘Zarathustra!’ cried everyone sitting together, as if with one mouth . . . (Nietzsche 2006: 246) In the last two years of his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault recapitulates his entire oeuvre under the heading ‘The Courage of Truth’. In a remarkable study of ancient παρρησία (parrhēsia), Foucault implicitly identifies himself with a long-forgotten branch of philosophy which, running from the Greek polis to the early Christian era, and exemplified in the life of the ancient Cynics, seeks the true life.1 The true life is not founded on knowledge of the cosmos and does not consist in imitating it. What one orients oneself towards in parrhēsia is not the unchanging totality but the inexhaustible singularity of souls and situations. In place of the passively adaptive stance of wisdom, truth as a form of life, as a bios, is Foucault’s great theme in these lectures. By his own account, Foucault (2010: 309) had always been interested in forms of truth-telling (veridiction), but here he encounters a form of truth-telling that seeks to make that truth-telling itself the form that it gives to life. Although this theme was partially a development of Pierre Hadot’s historical thesis on

1

See Foucault (2011:  30) for his claim that parrhēsia has disappeared from the earth (a claim he repeats in these lectures). See also Foucault’s last remark from his lecture of 8th February 1984 (2011: 68) for a clear indication of how he saw his work as belonging to this lost line of parrhesiastic philosophy.

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philosophy as a way of life in Antiquity, Foucault develops it in a much more ethical register, as we shall see. Foucault first stumbles upon parrhēsia in his lectures (1981–82) on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, a study of practices of the care of the self in Antiquity. In these lectures, where parrhēsia is first noted for its importance to the philosophical relationship between guide (hegemon) and pupil in the Epicurean School, Foucault translates parrhēsia with ‘plain-spokenness’ (francparler) (Foucault 2005: 137). Taken up fully in the last lectures (1982–84), this translation becomes the ‘courage of truth’ (le courage de la verite). Although Foucault had long been concerned with practices of veridiction, with the study of the parrhēsia of Socrates and the Cynics truth is no longer only a telling but, more fundamentally, a living – a being-true. The subject of metaphysical veridiction seeks the truth of being; the parrhesiast rather makes of truth an existence. With his earlier studies of ancient and Christian veridiction, Foucault was already interested in truth as something that is manifested as opposed to the sense of truth as scientific or objective knowledge. In On the Government of the Living (the lectures of 1979–80), for example, Foucault singles out what he nominates ‘alethurgy’ (from the Greek adjective alethourges: someone who speaks the truth) as that which makes truth appear against a backdrop of the ‘false, hidden, inexpressible, unforeseeable, or forgotten’ (2014: 6–7). At this stage, however, ‘alethurgy’ is still identified with power, even to the extent that Foucault claims that ‘there is no exercise of power without something like an alethurgy’ (2014: 7; indeed he makes this point three times in quick succession). There is as yet little sense that truth could ever confront power, and, inasmuch as Foucault is still concerned here with articulating truth-power, he remains within the Nietzschean problematic that had shaped his work to this point. Nonetheless, unlike Nietzsche, Foucault believes that truth need not lie. Thus in these same lectures of 1979–80 Foucault is interested in truth-telling as that which speaks of change, rather than as that which always says the same. For example, he highlights that it is ‘the path and work of the truth’ (2014: 24) that leads to the reversal of the characters’ fortunes in Oedipus the King, and implicitly contrasts this, later on, with oracular or religious truth-telling, which, in complicity with metaphysical truth, is a form of ‘veridiction that nothing escapes, that dominates time and pronounces eternal decrees from afar’ (2014: 48). In fact, Foucault implicitly identifies his own work with the former of these modes of truth-telling when making the aside that the only theoretical work he feels capable of is to leave a trace ‘of the movements by which I am no

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longer at the place where I was earlier’. Also describing this trace as a ‘line of displacement’, he argues that it tracks how his ‘theoretical positions continually change’ (2014: 76). Foucault’s interest in parrhēsia is pricked partly by his search for something outside of the relationship of self to self characteristic of modern (govern)mentality and its antecedents in Christian confession (the subject of the lectures On the Government of the Living). Ancient parrhēsia constituted a very different mode of relation to self in which the subject did not confess his own truth (which makes the subject’s access to truth something that cuts him off from others) but rather challenged others and himself with the truth. Contrary to modern governmentality, which, given its point of emergence in the Christian pastorate, is a government of souls founded in a lack of confidence in them, Foucault finds in parrhēsia a form of the government of self and others that begins with confidence in self, others and what we can do together.2 The parrhesiast seeks to govern others through the care of their souls so that they might learn to govern or care for themselves; the pastorate, by contrast, sees the care of souls as a task that always requires a confessor and that is never brought to completion. From within the pastorate, if one is to have faith then one must be uncertain of what one is. ‘Fear, for the first time in history – well, fear in the sense of fear about oneself, of what one is . . . and not fear of destiny, not fear of the gods’ decrees . . .’ (2014: 127). The Christian subject, confessing the uncertain truth of himself, complicates the ancient link between salvation and truth. In Platonic recollection, what is recalled is the subject’s primordial knowledge of the divine, namely the truth of the world. This subject, in recollection, is identified with the world, and world with the subject of recollection. In Gnosis, which goes far beyond Neoplatonism, what is known (recalling that gnosis means knowledge) is that the world is entirely foreign to the divine pnuema within each soul; but this remains a truth of the world. The subject of that truth, as in Platonism more broadly, is saved by this knowledge, which is at once its own truth. Christianity shatters this intimate connection between the truth of the subject and the truth of the world by making the truth that matters (at least for the Christian subject) his own truth.

2

By contrast, being separated from what it can do – Spinoza’s sadness – our active force is turned back inside and against itself. It becomes self-loathing or bad conscience. Eventually, even re-active force is stymied in this way: ‘Ressentiment said: “it’s your fault”, bad conscience says: “it’s my fault” ’ (Deleuze 1983: 128 and 132). Deleuze argues elsewhere (1994: 37) that this condition of not being separated from what we can do is also the condition of equality of being, of the smallest becoming equivalent to the largest.

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Christianity is a real break with Platonism in the sense that the truth of the subject is no longer the truth of the world. For Foucault (2014), this rupture with Platonism is largely negative: as in Socratism, the truth of the world becomes largely a matter of indifference, but unlike Socratism, the new subject of truth can in no way be confident in the truth he tells, since this truth is, obscurely, the truth of himself. At this point, Foucault has not yet found a subject of truth whose truth is neither the sage truth of the totality nor the guilty truth of the soul. Later, by which time he has discovered the Cynics, Foucault will say that by putting ‘the truth of life before the true life’, Christian asceticism effected a great reversal of ‘an ancient asceticism which always aspired to lead both the true life and the life of truth at the same time and which, in Cynicism at least, affirmed the possibility of leading this true life of truth’ (2011: 338). These, indeed, were the very last lines that Foucault ever uttered at the Collège de France. They express the difference, which Foucault clearly felt to be very significant, between Christian truth-telling as condition of access to the true life (elsewhere) and the identity of truth-telling and the true life in Cynicism, where the true life, as bios, is right here. The former, seeing truth as a means of access to another world is a passive nihilism; the latter, as that by which battle is done in this world against the world, is an active nihilism (2011: 340). But if parrhēsia is attractive for not being a timeless-metaphysical or uncertain-confessional truth, it is also, positively, a mode of subjectivation by truth that develops the Socratic idea of the care of self (epimeleia heautou). The link between care of self and the courage of truth is in fact all that Foucault claims to be interested in with his study of Cynicism (2011: 339). The Platonic form of this care by truth is ultimately less interesting to him because it tends towards the metaphysical question of what the self is in its truth (and the practices of purification associated with this turn inward). In Cynicism, meanwhile, the outward manifestation of the truth through struggle is what is significant. Foucault is no doubt fascinated by this truth in part because he finds there a practice of the care of the self that takes the form of the sacrifice of self – a very Nietzschean theme that Foucault, so indebted to Nietzsche, could not have missed. ‘In the man who wants to perish, the man who wants to be overcome, negation changes sense, it becomes a power of affirming’, as Deleuze’s Nietzsche has it (1983: 176).3 Just as Nietzsche’s answer to the self-sacrifice of the crucified 3

The Neoplatonism implicit in Deleuze’s reading should be noted. Hadot (1993: 22) has this to say in his famous study of Plotinus: ‘It is the only desire in which he would have recognised himself, and the only desire which defines him: no longer to be Plotinus; to lose himself in contemplation and in ecstasy.’

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one was the eternal death and rebirth of his god Dionysus, so Foucault finds in ancient parrhēsia a care of self that resists the metaphysical temptation to essentialize or fix self. The subject of parrhēsia ‘is’ only in his courageous disregard for his being; his being is merely having the courage of truth of his situation, with all the risks that this involves. In one sense, then, Foucault’s courage of truth is an echo of Nietzsche’s claim that what is required is ‘To impress upon becoming the character of being’ (Note 617 of The Will to Power). What lets becoming be is the courage to affirm it as true. Yet Foucault finds in parrhēsia something that is absent in Nietzsche’s Dionysianism. The affirmation of the suffering of existence in Nietzsche relates to truth at the ontological level, namely the truth of becoming, or of eternal recurrence. The Dionysian is the one who affirms this ultimate truth of the world (becoming) in his way of being. The Dionysian, conforming himself to the way of the world, is still a sage.4 In Foucault, however, the love of fate retains nothing of wisdom, with its temptation of retreat from the world of men (a temptation that Zarathustra, by contrast, has to struggle to the utmost to overcome). For the parrhesiast has the courage of the truth, not of being, but of being-with. Foucault’s subject of truth is thereby brought into an entirely positive relation with the other, a relation this subject lacks in Nietzsche. The self-sacrifice of parrhēsia is not an affirmation of a world of becoming but a care for the becoming-other of souls. It is ethical rather than ontological. The courage of truth is thus founded in confidence rather than knowledge.5 The Dionysian one joyously affirms the eternal game of chance because he knows that this is the (dis)order of things, that this is how the world is. The parrhesiast takes no such comfort in fate; his self-confidence is rooted not in the way of the world but in the capacity of the soul for truth, which is the source of real change.

Parrhēsia in the polis In his lectures on The Government of Self and Others from 1982 to 1983, Foucault carries out a genealogy of parrhēsia through an analysis of the use of the term in classical texts, in particular as it appears in Euripides’s Ion (c. 413 BCE). Foucault shows how parrhēsia first appears as a political virtue, as the virtue by which the 4

5

The cave-dwelling Zarathustra also has sage-like properties. Yet the significance of Zarathustra leaving his cave in the very last line of Nietzsche’s work should also be noted. In Book 2, chapter 5, of his Rhetoric, Aristotle too finds confidence, not courage, to be the opposite of fear.

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foremost citizens might influence the demos through triumphing in the agonistic game of politics (2010: 104–5). In this sense parrhēsia seems to have been viewed as a necessary accompaniment of isegoria, the citizen’s right of speech before the Assembly, though it was not codified as isegoria was. Parrhēsia was not a matter of law because not just anybody was capable of using his right of free speech in order to persuade by the truth. Democracy gives to all citizens equally the right to rule, but only the best will be able to govern through truth; parrhēsia introduces a difference to the sameness of democracy – contra isegoria it is a principle of differentiation (2010: 183, 200). Parrhēsia as a political practice involves the recognition that the problem of truth-telling in a democracy is a fundamental one given that the city cannot have an immobile relationship to truth (2010: 155, 195). Democracy gives decisionmaking powers to all citizens but it must also ensure that the demos takes the right decisions, and parrhēsia is necessary for this. Parrhēsia is the only way by which the demos might be brought into a relation with truth, in this case with the general interest, rather than giving way to the powers of rhetoric and the special interests that rhetoricians mask. So parrhēsia allows for the ascendency of some citizens over others in the general field of political equality (isegoria) in order that truth might emerge in a democracy which would otherwise be mastered, not by a tyrant, but by madness (2010: 161). Parrhēsia is the difference that makes democracy governable and Pericles is the embodiment of this mutually reinforcing structure of excellence and equality, which seeks to utilize ascendency for the good of the demos by indexing it to truth-telling. As recorded in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles argues in the Assembly that the Athenians reject the punitive terms given to them by the Spartans, and this discourse carries the day. Pericles tells the Assembly that he is happy to be reproached if the course he advocates turns out badly, so long as he receives due honour if Athens prevails. Pericles takes a risk; he seeks to govern Athens, to be its foremost citizen, by having the courage of a dangerous plain-spokenness (2010: 175–8). If citizenship (isegoria) is contrasted to slavery, then parrhēsia enables the best citizens to mark their difference even from free men, who, though they have the right of speaking, dare not express their thoughts in the Assembly. The parrhesiast, by contrast, is not such a slave as to silence his thoughts publicly (2010: 160). Due to its connection to a political agonism engaged in only by those who would be the foremost citizens, parrhēsia is marked from the beginning by a certain freedom. Through parrhēsia, the ambitious and bold citizen seeks to command others only in the context of a political game of persuasion where others have

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the same chance to command and may, indeed, prevail. Beyond the risk of being prevailed over rather than prevailing there is also the threat that, instead of commanding the general body of citizenry, the parrhesiast might antagonize it (2010: 105). And the exile that may result is a kind of death, perhaps worse than death if Euripides’s Electra (1361–2) is any guide:  ‘What greater sorrow than being forced/ to leave behind my native earth?’ But political parrhēsia has a built-in weakness, and, with the execution of Socrates, reveals itself to be effectively dead even before the eclipse of democratic politics by the Macedonian Empire (from which point parrhēsia is exemplified in the courage of the Prince’s advisor when telling him the truth, as Plato did to the tyrant of Syracuse – nearly paying with his life for it). Democracy requires parrhēsia (just as political parrhēsia requires democracy), but constantly threatens it and, indeed, basically cannot handle it (2010: 184). The demos needs to be confronted with the truth but wants to be flattered by demagogues. Telling the truth to the demos is a risky business, as Socrates’s Apology exemplifies. By his own account (recounts Plato in the Phaedo), Socrates only lasted as long as he did because he took parrhēsia out from the Assembly into the Agora. Plato follows his master’s lead and does not seek to practice an impossible political parrhēsia (2010: 214–15). For Plato, if truth-telling is to have any impact on the polis, then it will only be by way of philosophy. This is why kings will need to become philosophers if philosophers cannot be kings. Foucault (2010: 197) thinks that we could read all of Plato’s works as stemming from the realization, brought to a head with the death of Socrates, that democracy and truth can have no relation, hence the need for philosophy to take up the question of political truth (something that pre-Socratic wisdom had nothing to say about) in opposition to rhetoric, which rather takes up the question of how to prevail in politics. Plato infuses philosophy with the parrhēsia that had proved short-lived in the democratic polis itself. Indeed, we could even see philosophy as constituted by this offer of hospitality to a now homeless parrhēsia. Parrhēsia gives to philosophy its reality, which is not some external reality to which it must compare itself but rather an internal principle, namely its will to tell the truth (2010: 228). Philosophy may be mistaken about the truth it tells but it is the compulsion to tell the truth that gives it being. And to whom does it tell the truth? To power. This is its courage. The shift in Socrates from a political parrhēsia to a philosophical parrhēsia therefore does not take parrhēsia away from the political field as such. Though philosophy does not tell the truth about politics, of what politics is or should be, it confronts the polity with the truth. While Socratic parrhēsia becomes impossible in the polis, it remains a

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truth-telling for politics, even if this political reality is now embodied in the person of the Prince. Indeed, this parrhesiastic role in relation to the Prince marks philosophy’s ongoing difference from rhetoric, the success of which is only measured, can only be measured, by its success. Philosophy’s reality, however, is not its political effectiveness and hence it enters the political field in its difference from that field, a difference which rhetoric cannot maintain (2010: 229). Socratic philosophy is a parrhesiastic intervention in the field of politics and, in this sense, it does not tell the truth about truth but rather speaks truth to power (2010: 230, 286). Philosophy’s point of contact with the real is thus not the cosmos but politics. And because politics is its touchstone, philosophy will have real effects, it will be constitutive, rather than merely reflective, of reality (2010: 278–9). In all of this Foucault is interested also in redeeming Plato, as the child of Socratic parrhēsia, from the reduction of his philosophy to metaphysics. While acknowledging that dialogues such as the Alcibiades and Republic point in this direction, Foucault is keen to show how other dialogues and letters in the Platonic oeuvre lead somewhere else entirely. For Foucault, Plato is the philosopher not only of conversion in the face of the Absolute but also the philosopher of practices; not the philosopher with a fixed bearing towards eternal realities but the philosopher following a path. And this way is marked by an initial choice, a choice of a way of life that then must be followed assiduously from day to day throughout life. Rather than the gaze directed elsewhere, upwards, here the focus is on everyday activity as the site of application of an ascesis (2010: 241). Rather than contemplate himself, the philosopher as a practitioner must work on himself. The reality of philosophy is not eternity but, with both feet on the ground, ‘this work of self on self ’ (2010: 242; see also 255). At this point in his lectures Foucault gets back to his long-standing argument with Derrida: as Letter VII makes clear, Plato disavows writing not because of his metaphysical logocentrism, as Derrida (1976) had argued,6 but, quite the opposite, because writing down philosophy might give the one who seeks philosophy the misleading idea that it is only logos when in fact it is a way of life.

6

Derrida (1976) focuses on Plato’s exclusion of writing in the Phaedrus (274c–275b): with writing men call ‘things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks’. Derrida sees this as a key statement of the ‘logocentric’ sense of language that characterizes metaphysics, whereby the full presence of the subject of speech is manifest only in the immediacy of speech, never in a writing that is only secondary or derivative – fallen. Speech, then, is the originally speaking subject present to, or identical with, itself, whereas writing is present only in the absence of this origin-subject. In this sense, writing is representative, for Derrida, of the trace (his alternative to the metaphysical sense of being as presence).

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Contra Derrida, that ‘philosophy has no other reality than its own practices’ is the lesson to be drawn from Plato’s exclusion of writing (2010: 249; see also 254), especially as this would be taken up in Cynicism, which sought to equip people for life rather than to pass on teachings (2011: 204).7 Instead of marking the advent of logocentrism, the Platonic prohibition on writing is the advent of philosophy itself, ‘of a philosophy whose very reality would be the practice of self on self. It is something like the Western subject which is at stake in this simultaneous and conjoint refusal of writing and logos’ (2010: 254). Yet this emergence of the Western subject in its work of self on self only itself comes to pass because of the test of philosophy in politics (2010: 255). In risking his life, indeed in losing his life, through telling the truth to the Assembly, Socrates establishes for Plato, and for all Western philosophy, the singularity of the subject as the one who binds himself to himself through the courage of truth. Parrhēsia as a radical work of self on self, one which manages to overcome even the desire to live on, founds philosophy. And philosophy will continue to find its task and its reality in this government of self and others by and for the truth (ibid.).

Philia Philosophy as a form of life in Foucault’s account has its site of emergence not in the sagacity of natural philosophy but in the political experience of truth-telling, an experience which pointed to the necessity for, but also the difficulty of, bringing the democratic city into a relation with truth. Political parrhēsia is not itself philosophy but is constitutive of philosophy because it involves a truth-telling that does not speak of the timeless being of the world, as pre-Socratic wisdom did (‘the theme of sophia is in a preeminent sense what always is’, Heidegger

7

It is worth noting that Heidegger (2003: 236–7) gives a compatible reading of the Platonic exclusion of writing here. The making public in writing of what has been said will create a forgetting of what has been learned. Logos as communicated in writing promotes a lack of concern with the matters spoken of in their substantive content. With writing, knowledge is retained only on the outside, so to speak, and remembering is thereby cut off from internal resources, in short from possibility. The written word risks becoming a dead letter. Heidegger is also on the same track as Foucault in understanding this Platonic exclusion as an exclusion of logos itself, that is of speech also and not just of writing. What is said, just as much as what is written, ‘can by itself deliver nothing’ (2003: 237–8). To take up the logos, whether as speech or writing, the individual must already see what is spoken of or written about. He must ‘see’ matters for himself in his soul, and this requires that his soul is well formed. In sum: ‘There is a double [logos], the living, i.e. the one that takes its life from a relation to the matters themselves, from [dialogue], and the written one, in the broadest sense the communicated one [i.e. including speech], which is a mere [image] of the other, living [logos]’ (2003: 239).

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2003: 40), but of the good government, first of the city and, then, with Socrates, of self and others. Socrates, who is the point at which parrhēsia founds the philosophical life (Foucault 2010:  340, 342), does not pretend to know, only to put his and his interlocutor’s discourse to the test. In the Phaedrus, Socrates dismisses the idea that the true discourse could know the truth in advance, since then discourse would be nothing other than the dissimulation of what is already known, namely rhetoric. Indeed, for the true discourse to be other than rhetoric it is not even enough that the true discourse seeks the truth. Philosophical discourse refers to truth neither as something known in advance nor as something arrived at as a result, but at every moment – hence the centrality of the dialectic to philosophical discourse. The logos of philosophy does not have the truth but rather stands in a constant relation to truth – it is truth-telling as ontology, as a way of being, before any epistemology. In seeking the truth as something external to the soul, we would be reproducing the claim of sophistry that the truth can be had, merely displacing this having of the truth from the beginning to the end of our discourse. True discourse is marked not by any knowing at all but by its capacity, via the dialectic, to modify the soul (Foucault 2010: 330–1, 352). Only the soul can accede to truth; is this capacity for truth. Truth can only recognize itself in the soul which it modifies (Foucault 2010: 335). Plato’s Protagoras can also be read in this way. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates and the sophist Protagoras are each arguing what the other had argued at the beginning of the dialogue. They have switched places. Although Socrates says that this would make people laugh at the strangeness of it all, surely Plato’s point is that the philosopher, unlike the sophist, is capable of – indeed must – be transformed by the dialectic. Unlike rhetoric, the dialectic modifies not only the other’s soul but also one’s own. By contrast, if the sophist is seen to change his position then he loses; he is bad at the rhetoric that he is supposed to be able to teach and which should enable him to prevail. The true philosopher, by contrast, must on no account finish where he started, and for this he needs interlocutors rather than competitors, fellow-friends of truth. The dialectic, in contrast to rhetoric, is the movement of thought that philosophical friendship makes possible and, in turn, is established by. In the interests of this movement, which is the very being of care for self and others, Socratic parrhēsia renounced power over others, that agonistic struggle for ascendency characteristic of political parrhēsia. Socrates avoided politics as best he could, and his parrhēsia was negative and personal rather than positive and political, seeking to avoid doing injustice through its exteriority to power

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(2010: 319). If the political arena is one where the truth cannot function, then the life of truth must keep its distance from power. To fail in this would be to fail to care for oneself, for that essential capacity for truth which is the soul. To live by practising philosophy one must be a just subject at all costs. This is why rhetoric is literally useless, since if doing justice is everything then escaping the injustices of others is nothing (2010: 363; Plato 1987). Yet the examination of self and others that this will require will also be of great service to the city. As Socrates reminds his jurors in the course of his apology, he alone has prevented the city from sleeping and, in choosing his death, they also choose to spend the rest of their lives asleep (2010: 327). This keeping watch over the lives of men without attempting in any way to govern them politically is a way of philosophy that the Cynics will inherit from Socrates. Taking care of others, governing their souls, is nothing more or less than getting them to take care of, or govern, themselves. Socratic parrhēsia will replace political parrhēsia by renouncing an agonistic relationship between souls in which each seeks to prevail over the other in favour of a relationship in which one soul tests another and itself at the same time (2010:  370). This ‘test relationship’ established by plain and courageous speech replaces aristocratic competition (a competition that had to lead, by contrast, to rhetoric) with the natural affinity of friendship. The aim of the true discourse is no longer to win but, through love, to establish a homology between two souls such that both can accede to the same truth (2010: 335, 371, 374): ‘to agree, to say the same as the other, to mean the same as the other’ (Plato, Sophist 218c5). The identity of a discourse between friends’ souls is here the measure of truth, not the identity of a solipsistic discourse with an external world. In establishing philosophical friendship as the ground of ethical parrhēsia and parrhēsia as constitutive of such friendship, Foucault introduces a distinction (if not a division) between the will to truth and the will to power which goes much further than his earlier work, where truth-power had often seemed entirely undifferentiated.8 In friendship, the parrhesiast relates to the other not in the political sense of seeking supremacy but in the ethical sense of the test. By way of the test, namely telling the truth to the other, but also accepting the challenge of truth for oneself, the parrhesiastic pact establishes a measure of

8

In the Will to Know (2013), the Collège de France lectures from 1971, Foucault is by contrast entirely true to the Nietzschean schema, as can be seen from his lecture summary (2013: 197–8) in particular, where he sees truth as only a fictitious outcome of the will to power. This echoes Zarathustra (2006: 90): ‘And even you, seeker of knowledge, are only a path and footstep of my will; indeed my will to power follows also on the heels of your will to truth.’

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equality between the parties in which the will to truth remains irreducible to the will to power. Though there is still struggle, it is struggle for the truth, not by the truth, and it is a struggle that unites, rather than dividing. The parrhesiastic relationship is one in which the truth is put to work not over against the other but for him, and for oneself too. This is the dual structure of care for self, which is also care for others. The test of truth with the other is a collaborative rather than a competitive endeavour because establishing a relationship to the truth is not something that one can do alone. Just as the other requires my challenge, so also I need his. My care for myself and for the other in parrhesiastic friendship is inextricably intertwined. This is still the will to power, but it is a power of selfovercoming, a collective power, rather than a power that feeds off identity and the separateness from others that self-sameness implies. This is also why parrhēsia, alone among the forms of truth-telling in Antiquity (wisdom, prophecy and technical knowledge), refuses the nomos. The parrhesiast refrains from using his truth to reinforce the justice of a right distribution of places and orders in the city. Far from supporting the conventional social bond as inscribed in the laws of the polis (in the manner of the sage or teacher), the parrhesiast, especially the Cynic, risks going to war with others (Foucault 2011: 25). Yet this going to war with others is actually the sign of a confidence in them, in their ability to change, to stop doing the customary things and instead to join the enterprise of the true life. Parrhēsia alone continues to place its trust in self, others, and what we can do together. Parrhēsia is true philia.

Socrates’s last words In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche (2005:  162) derides Socrates for letting slip on his deathbed that he was really a nihilist after all. Socrates’s last request for the sacrifice of a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing, indicated, argued Nietzsche, that even Socrates was tired of life and thankful for his impending death. Foucault contests this account, not only of Socrates’s last words (though he disputes the meaning of these, too), but of the general picture of Socrates as the first nihilist with his head in the other world. Foucault starts out by noting that, taking the Platonic dialogues as a whole, life is clearly not an evil for Socrates. Turning to the Phaedo, Plato’s account of Socrates’s death, Foucault draws attention to the discussion towards the end of the dialogue in which Socrates recalls a Pythagorean maxim that ‘we are in the phroura [enclosure]’. Rather than giving this saying a pejorative sense (as

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prison), however, Plato makes Socrates say that he understands it to mean that the gods are concerned with and take care (epimeleisthai) of us since we are their flock. In the Greek, epimeleia, epimeleisthai always designates positive activities. Epimeleia is not a warder’s supervision of his slaves; it is not the prison guard’s supervision of his prisoners. It is the positive concern of a father for his children, of a shepherd for his flock [. . .] It is the concern of the gods for men. We are in the gods’ care, and this is why, Plato says, we should not kill ourselves. (Foucault 2011: 99–100)

Though the care of the gods will also be a feature of the world beyond death, hence the futility of fearing death, the same gods, and the same care, exist in this life as in the next. In this case, and here Foucault makes a crucial point in passing, Socrates ‘does not renounce life; he renounces, in life, his body, which is obviously something completely different’ (2011: 101, emphasis added). Socratic care for existence is care also that life not be reduced to care exclusively for the body. Indeed, as we have seen in the case of the Cynics especially, the courage of truth rather subordinated the body to truth (without in any way denying life). Socrates’s discussion of care in the Crito, of how we must not care for opinion,9 but only for truth, is linked not to the soul as an immortal element but only to the part of us that is concerned with justice, which remains otherwise undefined and unnamed (2011: 104). Just as a gymnast must care for his body, says Socrates, so we also should attend to that part of ourselves that distinguishes between good and bad and that can be corrupted through neglect. But the fact that this care is not yet care of the soul suggests that the care that should be taken is a care for oneself in this life and not for the sake of the next: ‘well before the soul is founded metaphysically [in the Phaedo], it is the relation of self to self that is questioned here’ (ibid.). Foucault demonstrates that care for self and others is in fact the overarching theme of the three dialogues dealing with Socrates’s death (The Apology, Crito and Phaedo) and that this care is what concerns Socrates even unto his cryptic last words. The curing that Socrates celebrates by calling for the sacrifice of a cock to Asclepius is symbolic of all that care for others which consists in encouraging them to some actions and dissuading them from others, in aiding them to come to true opinions and to avoid false ones. And the abiding aim of this curative care for others and the bold truth-telling that it requires? ‘To teach men

9

For all Nietzsche’s ambivalence about Socrates and his anti-sophistry, Zarathustra (2006: 141) continues to reject opinion: ‘they are all sick and addicted to public opinion’.

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to take care of themselves’. Socrates ‘wants to take care of them so that they learn to take care of themselves’. ‘What is it that Socrates always says, which is nothing new, and which is his last wish that he will convey to his children, his circle, and his friends? “Take care of yourselves” [. . .] This is Socrates’ testament, his final wish’ (2011: 110–12). Foucault lingers over the care of self in Socrates because he wants to show that the Socratic tradition of philosophy was not initially linked to otherworldliness. Yes, a concern of philosophy since the Pythagoreans had been the subject’s purity as the condition of access to truth. And this purification of the subject was consistently understood in terms of the passage from an impure sensory world of error to a pure world of eternal truth in which there is nothing obscure or fleeting (2010: 125). No doubt this cathartics of the subject was influential for Plato, but as the student of Socrates Plato was concerned as much with care as catharsis: ‘There is another aspect which is that of the courage of truth’, and this way of truth is not the path of purification but of struggle and sacrifice: what ‘battle is one able to face in order to arrive at the truth?’ (2010: 125). Contrasting the Laches with the Alcibiades, Foucault shows that Plato’s dialogues do not reduce care of the self to concern for the immortal soul (psukhē) as a reality ontologically distinct from the body, as in the latter text. The Laches rather identifies the object of care as life (bios), or form of life. This is care not for the being of the soul but for Being, for the ‘practice of existence’ or the style that one gives to life (2010: 127, 144, 159–61): When we compare the Laches and the Alcibiades, we have the starting point for two great lines of development of philosophical reflection and practice: on the one hand, philosophy as that which, by prompting and encouraging men to take care of themselves, leads them to the metaphysical reality of the soul, and, on the other, philosophy as a test of life, a test of existence, and the elaboration of a particular kind of form and modality of life. (2010: 127; see also 161 for a restatement of this point)

Although these two ways of philosophy are linked up in Plato, Foucault’s point is that they begin to diverge thereafter, with the result that the ontology of the self becomes the main road of Western philosophy (and thereafter Christianity) while the way of the aesthetics of existence becomes increasingly overgrown. Bios as a beautiful work is forgotten (2010: 162). With Socrates, this traditional theme of Greek culture that life should be beautified through a brilliant and memorable existence is brought together with the concern for truth-telling (2010: 163). So while the domain of application of

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Socratic parrhēsia is the mode of life, this mode of life should exhibit the courage of truth. Hence the proof of parrhēsia is the harmony between Socrates’s life and his truthful discourse (2010: 146, 148). The Socratic moment was not only the point when the traditional theme of the unforgettable life was allied to truthtelling. It was also the occasion for the binding of truth-telling to the ancient injunction to care for oneself (epimeleia heautou). If the beautiful life and the care of self predated Socrates, then the idea that these twinned aspects of existence should be placed under the banner of truth-telling is what constitutes the singularity of Socrates. Care for self is not something that political or technical expertise can guide from the outside. Socratic parrhēsia is ethical not political: concerned with selfformation rather than external legislation. And since this form is a taking care of oneself, the parrhesiast, unlike the sage or technician, is in the same position as those that he practices his parrhēsia on. Socrates must also take care of himself, must question his way of life, and this is the real principle of equality at the heart of parrhēsia since it is a task that never ceases, not even when one is old (2010: 152, 153). If Socrates nonetheless holds a unique position with regard to those he encourages to care for themselves, this principle of differentiation is only the knowledge of his ignorance, which the others lack.

Philaletheia Quite independently of Foucault, it seems, Alain Badiou has developed an account of truth that is in many ways a systematic philosophical statement of Foucault’s more fragmentary genealogy of parrhēsia, a genealogy that Foucault never got the chance to develop beyond his lecture notes. Of course, Foucault’s suspicion of universals was such that he would never have treated parrhēsia as a concept, but, as we have seen, Foucault certainly saw parrhēsia as playing a significant role in the history of the Western subject – and especially in the history of his own subjectivity. Although he does not work by way of genealogies, it is also the case for Badiou that philosophy does not itself provide the criterion of truth but rather draws out the implications of truth procedures in the various domains of human existence where truth can take place. Badiou’s conception of truth (2007a), like the practice of parrhēsia, has nothing to do with being; there is no true world. Truth is entirely subjective, being of the order of what happens rather than what stays the same. A truth is always new. It testifies to the conviction linked to an event and it does not describe

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the objective order of the world. That Badiou consigns ontological truth to the realm of mathematics means that we can get on to the business of the truths that involve us. And these truths for Badiou, as in parrhēsia, are always in process, a process that requires our active and ongoing creation as the subjects of a truth. Truth is not an illumination. We must care for truth because the true cannot be without us, without our subjective fidelity to it. To be sure, any such truth procedure in Badiou is dependent initially on an event, which does not rely on us. But inasmuch as the event is always something that breaks with the transcendental of a world (that which regulates appearing in that world), it is manifestly not a truth of that world but rather what enables the reconfiguration of its truth – what allows something new to appear in it. So the subject of the truth of the event binds itself to a truth’s singularity and to its transformative effects just as the one who has the courage of truth. This affirmative aspect of Badiou’s idea of truth is in one sense the only real difference with Heidegger’s sense of truth, which is much more pessimistic in tone. Badiou (2001a: 247–8) does not dispute Heidegger’s insight that truth is always a matter of the negative. As much as for Heidegger, truth for Badiou is of the order of the undecidable, the indiscernible, the not-all and the unnameable. As for Heidegger, the event is the giving of being as the nothing. But for Badiou, our relation to the nothing in any truth procedure involves taking the measure of the negative rather than passively hearing its call. The event in Badiou requires the active elaboration of its consequences rather than, as in Heidegger, the mere contemplation of what is given (which is why, for Badiou, Heideggerian truth leaves no recourse other than the poem, since only the poem can speak of being as if calling on it for the first time, outside of all established knowledge). Badiou also agrees with Heidegger’s diagnosis that the sense of truth is lost when it is reduced to the proposition, namely to a judgement of those things that are already presented. For Badiou, too, if (propositional) knowledge repeats, then truth creates (or ‘gives’, as Heidegger would put it). But if truth is always new, then Heidegger is right that the real philosophical question of truth relates not to its being but to its becoming, to its appearing: ‘a truth must be submitted to thought, not as a judgement [the proposition] but as a process in the real’, as Badiou (2001a: 249) puts it. However, while Badiou’s analysis of the loss of the sense of truth overlaps with Heidegger’s, the implications of this reading are treated very differently. Heidegger’s melancholy is that he sees the consequences of the hiddenness of the sense of truth as determining an entire history of (abandonment by) Being. Badiou, meanwhile, is intent on showing that although every world, precisely in its constitution as a world, is incapable of accounting

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for a new truth, truth happens nonetheless. There is a grace in Badiou that is lacking in Heidegger’s account of the fall.10 Also at work in Badiou’s notion of truth is that least Heideggerian of notions – infinity. Badiou counters Heideggerian finitude, ‘the central ideological fetish of our times’ (Badiou’s notes for his forthcoming The Immanence of Truths), with the infinity of truths. In Badiou’s view, the finite is simply what there is. But what ‘is’, and here Badiou plays Heidegger against himself, is not all. To assume finitude is to assume along with ‘democratic materialism’ more broadly that there are only beings and languages (bodies and cultures), when in fact there are also truths. Truths are not reducible to either term. To assume finitude is therefore the operation of a reality principle that is a principle of obedience: ‘we must submit to the realistic constraints of finitude’ (ibid.). The absolutization of finitude, far from being the way out of metaphysics, is only a new form of metaphysical timelessness. In the place of finitude, argues Badiou, it will be necessary to posit that the finite is not. The finite has no being, not only in the negative sense of being only becoming, but in the positive sense that it is only ever the result of operations in the infinite. These operations can take two forms, and it is the active form (e.g. the work of art; new forms of political organization; love) that we need. Alternatively, we have only the passive result of the infinite play of the world – the very flux of time. The only way out of nihilism, for Badiou, is neither the changeless world nor the becoming world but only the trans-worldliness of truths – the eternity of truths is that something of them is out of time; a truth is therefore eternity in time. There is, in short, no contradiction between time and eternity. The eternity of truths should not be confused with the metaphysical eternity of truth. Badiou’s truths, as precisely truth procedures, are created and they change; but they can forever begin again, and this is what is infinite (or transworldly) about them – hence the Greek tragedies that can always be restaged, or the truth of communism from Spartacus to the Arab Spring. Although a truth, as a human creation, must take finite form, its inexhaustibility is what makes it infinite. A truth procedure is, in this sense, an active operation in the infinite. Subject to one of these infinite truths, by which we affirm a new possibility with infinite consequences, we too can be immortals. The infinity of truths is an important aspect of the distinctiveness of Badiou’s thought of truth. The active-creative aspect of truth, by contrast, is already

10

Given the influence of Plato on Badiou we should perhaps not be surprised at this. Plotinus, a much earlier disciple of Plato, also found that, in the final analysis, life is grace (Hadot 1993: 50).

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found in Nietzsche, as is the notion of truth as the subjective declaration of an event: ‘A good wind? Indeed, only the one who knows where he’s sailing knows also which wind is good and which is his favourable wind’ (Nietzsche 2006: 222). But while the infinity of truths would be alien to Nietzsche, Heidegger, indeed to almost all modern philosophy, it is not foreign to parrhēsia. Foucault’s Cynics have the air of immortals about them, too. For while parrhesiastic truth can be told only in relation to a particular world (the courage of truth cannot take an abstract form because truth is always that of a situation), the courage that parrhēsia expresses is trans-worldly – applicable to other, potentially all, situations or ‘worlds’. This is why Foucault’s genealogy of parrhēsia (tracking it through diffuse political, ethical and early Christian modes) is feasible in the first place – the content of parrhesiastic truth is never the same, but having the courage to tell it remains recognizable. The courage to live truth, rather than the knowing of truth, is what remains the same in this truth, and, since this precisely changes the world, the truth it tells changes too. Rather than truth being identical with itself, it is the life that lives truth that provides the principle of identity (infinity, in Badiou’s sense), even if the form that this life takes must always begin again. Parrhēsia requires confidence as well as courage. And confidence is uppermost in Badiou’s thought of truth, too. A truth requires our fidelity to it across the changing situations in which we find ourselves, point by point. But because a truth is not, because it has no being other than the vanishing event, by the lights of existing knowledge it is nothing and the event it announces is simply a passing disturbance in the order of things (as the event of 1917 from the standpoint of the bourgeois powers, for example). So remaining faithful to the truth of the event is exceedingly difficult and will not be possible without the confidence to say that what was previously nothing is now all. Badiou’s Paul is an exemplary figure of this confidence of truth, as we have seen. It is important to grasp that, for Badiou (2001a), the event that makes possible any truth procedure is radically undecidable to the extent that nothing in the world in which it takes place can give us an answer to the question: did something new happen here? Aeschylus’s contemporaries no doubt protested that his theatrical tragedies, while undoubtedly strange to them, were in no way a new beginning, as do the parents of many a young couple who declare their undying love. Since nothing initially permits anyone in a world (neither Aeschylus nor our young lovers) to declare that a truth has been born, then a wager is necessary. Truth begins with a decision, not with the passive adaptation of wisdom. A  truth must first be announced and only then can the consequences of this

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announcement be lived out, as Paul well understood. Thereafter, a truth is an ongoing exercise, ‘a course without a concept’ (2001a: 250). If in the initial moment of the decision-proclamation the birth of truth is inseparable from confidence, then on the long march of fidelity to the truth, a march undertaken without any guarantees of success, confidence is just as necessary. Since invention and creation remain incalculable, not only does a truth begin in the absence of a concept but it must continue without one, too. A truth must remain something that no predicate can unify  – remain non-totalizable or generic (which is why truth is essentially for all: as generic it is open and as open it has universal address). To return to one of Badiou’s examples: after the event of Aeschylus, tragedy remains an open field. Tragedy is not a set that can be unified but one that continues to be infinite in its possibilities – uncompletable. Badiou calls the fiction of a completed truth ‘forcing’ (forçage). To be sure, forcing, though fictitious, lends a truth its potency, as when a lover says: I will always love you. This amorous declaration anticipates a never reachable completion of the truth of a love affair, forcing a new experience of that affair in the process. But in providing potency forcing also opens the possibility of what Badiou terms evil (2001a:  253). For there is always a point at which forcing runs up against resistance in the real of the situation – an unenforceable term that limits the potency of any truth so that it can never become all. ‘Evil’ in Badiou is the desire to overrun this limit, a desire for a truth to achieve omnipotence (whence totalitarianism in politics, for example). In this way, evil in Badiou becomes a properly secular idea linked solely to the destructive possibilities of truth’s positive, creative power, rather than to the usual privation of ignorance, lies and ‘sin’ generally. Truth requires confidence but is destroyed by the hubris that confidence is always capable of. Parrhēsia in Foucault’s genealogy is similarly tied to a confidence that is in no way hubristic: ‘Parrhēsia as confidence is foreign to the principle of the fear of God. It is contrary to the necessary feeling of distance with regard to the world and the things of the world’ (Foucault, 2011:  334). When the will to truth is turned into one’s mode of existence, it becomes a principle of life’s movement (kinesis) rather than of stasis. It is for this very reason, argues Foucault (contra Derrida), that writing is excluded by Plato. The true life must be lived, and cannot be codified – fixed – in a written doctrine. Writing, in relation to philosophy at least, is what is metaphysical here. The subject of parrhēsia has the confidence that he and those around him can be transformed by their submitting together to truth-telling, which is the dialectic.

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Parrhēsia gives its subjects something to do. Unlike the truth of being, which can only be passively acceded to, parrhēsia is an active and ongoing practice, an ethos or a vocation. Quite other than Heideggerian Dasein, however, which similarly finds itself decisively consigned to a task (‘the earnestness of thrownness’ [Heidegger 2002b: 127]), there is nothing of anguish or guilt in the parrhesiastic vocation. We should recall that, in Being and Time (1996: 315), Dasein, as thrown, only arrives at an understanding of its thrown-ness, its being-in-theworld, by way of Angst. Similarly, the guilty pang of conscience in Dasein is the silent call away from inauthenticity back to mortal existence. Differently from Dasein, the subject of parrhēsia is borne along by, rather than consigned to, his task. Like Spinoza’s free man, and unlike Dasein, he thinks of nothing less than of death. Badiou’s subject of truth, like Foucault’s Cynic, does not pre-exist the truth he declares – there is no doer behind the deed (Nietzsche:  2014: 236). Badiou’s subject is a subject only by being subject to truth, subject to its event: ‘A subject is the throw of the dice which does not abolish chance, but which accomplishes it as a verification of the axiom which founds it’ (Badiou 2001a: 251). This is not the Subject of History, not an essence or a transcendental. It is not a metaphysical subject at all – indeed it is not far from the figure of Zarathustra as the one who first blesses chance. Contrary to the subject of humanism, which has always been an animal with an all-important additional capacity for reason, Badiou’s subject of truth has nothing proper to it. It is only a body that can be seized by an unnatural event. Prior to its being taken up in a truth procedure, Badiou’s ‘man’ is only Plato’s biped without feathers, with the addition that the charms of this biped are not obvious (Badiou 2001b: 12). But is not this separation between ‘mere’ animal existence and a higher truth of the subject humanism itself? No, because what is at stake here is not a final truth of the subject but that to be a subject at all requires a relation to, indeed an incorporation in, a truth procedure. This is why Paul is exemplary for Badiou, even if the truth event Paul subjects himself to (the resurrection) is for Badiou a fable. But if Badiou remains confident that the subject of truth, as subject to the event, is an ever-present possibility, Foucault, given his genealogical method, is not so sure. If not the forgetting of Being, then certainly the forgetting of parrhēsia is something that Foucault clearly regrets in the history of the West.11 11

‘Western philosophy – and such was its history and perhaps its destiny – progressively eliminated, or at least neglected and marginalized the problem of the philosophical life, which to start with, however, it posited as inseparable from philosophical practice. It has increasingly neglected and

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Metaphysics has bequeathed to modern science the truth of the world given to a solipsistic subject. Parrhēsia, meanwhile, as a truth told about souls so that, together, we might change, has been largely colonized by Christianity in the West. For all this, Foucault’s genealogy of parrhēsia displaces Nietzsche’s identification of Pauline Christianity with metaphysical otherworldliness. Things are more complicated than this, and Foucault’s lament for a lost parrhēsia, when it comes (and he devotes only one, but his very last, lecture to it), is aimed more precisely at the rise of the Christian pastorate, from around the fourth and fifth centuries, in short at the growing ecclesiastical power of the Church. What is lost in the pastoral care for souls is precisely the confidence without which parrhēsia cannot be. Where classical parrhēsia had been a care of others intended to get them to care for themselves, pastoral care is a care for others that can never let them go. Pastoral care has no confidence in the capacity for truth of the souls it cares for, indeed they are cared for precisely because they are not capable of truth, the very inversion of the classical schema. The Church thereby requires obedience, which is as foreign to parrhesiastic care for souls as can be. The very institution of the Christian pastoral is of course incompatible with parrhēsia, which rather leaves pastoral care to the gods, or in early Christianity to God, in whose enclosure we find ourselves. The human pastorate not only lacks confidence in others but also discourages confidence in self, which now becomes impious arrogance. The Christian must turn his suspicious gaze upon himself, distrusting himself as much as the others. This is another refinement of the Nietzschean thesis – this time of Nietzsche’s attribution of this loss of confidence to the decline of the aristocratic values of Antiquity, starting with Socratic questioning and coming to a head with the great slave revolt that was Christianity. Foucault shows that confidence was lost much later, or rather that confidence and the ‘Platonism’ that would eventually undermine it cohabited for much longer. But in one sense Nietzsche is decisively corrected:  truth did not kill off confidence (the aristocratic virtues Nietzsche loves), but the loss of confidence killed off truth (parrhēsia). This modification of Nietzsche’s thesis had already surfaced in Foucault’s lecture, On the Government of the Living (1979–80), where a genealogy of

marginalized the problem of life in its essential connection with the practice of truth-telling’ (2011: 235). If Foucault disagrees with Heidegger as to what has been forgotten in Western philosophy, he nonetheless agrees that the effect of this is that the only conceivable relation to truth is now that of scientific knowledge and its epistemological sense of truth as the conditions under which statements can be recognized as true (2011: 237).

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self-overcoming is taken back to the first Christian subjects. Foucault notes (2014: 213–14) that in the early Church’s exomologesis (public confession of sins) the Christian, dying to this world, really dies to death, and hence is reborn. In confessing what one is – namely a sinner – one becomes other than one was – namely one who has died to sin. In other notes for the lectures over that year, Foucault (1999) thus draws a distinction between early Christian hermeneutics of the self, where it was a matter of the sacrifice of self as the condition of access to any truth of the self, and all those subsequent attempts  – which, Foucault implies, are doomed to failure – in Western culture to found the truth of the self on something positive (e.g. in judicial institutions, medical and psychiatric practices, and indeed in political theory and philosophy generally). These attempts at a positive knowledge – rather than a sacrificial practice – of the self, argues Foucault, are part of a wider, indeed a permanent, ‘anthropologism of Western thought’ that is forever seeking some ground for the subject in the universal figure of ‘man’ rather than grasping that the subject is only the sacrifice of self. Early Christian practice, by contrast with humanism, opened the self as ‘a field of indefinite interpretation’. If this opening led to the possibility of ceaseless selfdoubt, then the ‘great richness’ of this field was nonetheless its insight that there can be ‘no truth about the self without a sacrifice of the self ’ (Foucault 1999: 179– 80). Although Foucault is including the first Christians in his Dionysian vision of the subject in a way that would horrify Nietzsche, we can see that the idea of the subject as Dionysian is a much deeper debt that he owes Nietzsche. *** How does the parrhesiast tell the truth, exactly? Foucault shifts the subject of truth from its Cartesian link to knowledge to its ancient link to ethics – the subject as care of self, not as a subject that knows. This is an understanding of truth not as true propositions about some external world but rather concerns the relation of a subject to truth. What is decisive here is an isomorphism of logos and action, in which there is harmony between the parrhesiast’s speech and his behaviour. By staking his life, sometimes literally, on the truth, the parrhesiast places himself in a relation to truth in a way that comes to define him. He cannot but tell the truth since truth is his way of life. So the question is not: does this or that enunciation conform to the way the world is? but rather:  is the enunciator defined by truth-telling? Parrhēsia, as Foucault (2011: 52–6) clarifies, is not defined by the content of the truth told so much as by the way in which it is told. This accounts for the only seemingly odd fact that, as Foucault reports (in unauthorized notes on Foucault’s six parrhēsia lectures given at Berkeley in

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1983), he did not come across even one parrhesiast in Antiquity who expressed any doubt that he was telling the truth of the situation. By being a subject bound to truth-telling as a vocation, the parrhesiast speaks out of truth rather than his truth being a matter of the correspondence of his discourse with some outside. Cynic parrhēsia ‘finds its point of emergence in the very life of the person who must thus manifest or speak the truth in the form of a manifestation of existence’ (Foucault 2011: 217; see also 234). The parrhesiast does not ‘have’ the truth but rather lives it, throwing down the gauntlet of the truth as a test for himself and others. Contrary to metaphysical truth that must be in accordance with the world it re-presents, parrhēsia is a truth that can thereby change the world it intervenes in. Parrhēsia is not a demonstration of the truth. Nor is it a strategy for persuasion, a rhetorical art, being too violent for that. As we have seen, parrhēsia is on the side of philosophy in its ancient struggle with rhetoric. Neither is parrhēsia a teaching of the truth, a pedagogy, since it is an irruption of truth rather than truth’s gradual progression. Parrhēsia is much closer to an agonistic conception of truth, one in which, through dialogue, one confronts one’s adversary with the truth. Parrhēsia is the risk of this confrontation, since the challenge of the truth may end a friendship, a public standing, or even one’s life. Parrhēsia takes a chance on the truth and binds the parrhesiast to the consequences. But these consequences are precisely undetermined  – parrhēsia opens a situation and therefore opens on to a future which, by definition, cannot be known. Parrhēsia is a truth that frees the elements it refers to rather than fixing them in place, and this is its uniqueness. Opposite to the performative speech act that constitutes only known effects (‘the meeting is now open’), parrhēsia creates a rupture in the known (‘this meeting is a farce!’) (Foucault 2010: 62). Parrhēsia is an event of truth. Parrhēsia is also different from truth as we have come to know it for being anything but disinterested. The parrhesiastic utterance not only claims to be true in what it says about a situation but, more than this, claims really to be what the parrhesiast believes, hence the risk he takes in stating it (2010: 64). There is a pact that the parrhesiast makes with himself in which, by binding himself both to his statement and to the act of stating it, he brings the ‘I’ of enunciation dramatically to the fore: ‘I am the person who has spoken the truth.’ This ‘I’ of parrhesiastic enunciation is not determined by any identity (by contrast, the Chair of the meeting alone can declare the meeting open in the case of the performative utterance), but only by the act of tying his fate to his truth-telling (2010: 65). The parrhesiast is defined not by his status but by his courage. The mark of this

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courage is that he chooses to tell his risky truth, even if he experiences this choice as a compulsion to speak the truth despite the consequences. He says what he must from out of his freedom rather than his servitude (2010: 66). Indeed, in binding himself to the truth, does not the parrhesiast exercise the highest form of freedom? For Foucault (2010:  67), ‘the whole analysis of parrhēsia should basically be developed around this question’. The parrhesiast constitutes himself as a subject of truth through the retroactive effects of an enunciation that both determines and changes his very being. He will be the one who took the risk of telling the truth, but what that risk will make of him is still to be seen. Foucault finds in this free relation to becoming the living of Nietzsche’s sense of truth (2010: 66). In parrhēsia the courage of truth powerfully subjectivates. The subject finds itself as an after-effect of its plain-spokenness. Something like the opposite of this confident, concentrated subjectivity is outlined in Being and Time in an analysis of the dispersion of the self that accompanies fear. Heidegger (1996: 314) argues that ‘the existential and temporal meaning of fear is constituted by selfforgetting: the confused backing away from one’s factical potentiality-of-being’. Fear forces us back on to our thrownness, the radical contingency of our being, but in such a way that we no longer experience that contingency as something we can use – it is closed off to us, as Heidegger says. Fearfulness is then like the man in a burning house who grabs, randomly, whatever is closest to him. Fear forgets human possibility itself and so cannot grasp any definite possibility at all, flailing about and no longer knowing the way around in the world. Fear is a loss of orientation and a loss of confidence, indeed thereby the loss of the present. By contrast, ‘he who is resolute knows no fear’ (1996: 316). Heidegger helps us to understand the subjectifying structure of parrhēsia more clearly by sketching out its opposite. Just as it is resolve that drives out fear, and not the lack of fear that creates resolve, the courage of truth is courage occasioned by truth.

Conclusion

Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? (Nietzsche 1984: 53) There is a true world, though we experience this world very differently after the death of God, from which point it appears as no longer true. But this means that the true world continues to be, only now in the form of its not being. To put it simply, though we now doubt the existence of the true world, the true world is still with us. The true world has changed our world forever by transforming it into this world, a world that we can have a perspective on – the ‘magnificent gift of exteriority’, as Deleuze (1983: 157) called it. Having this perspective, we can either bless this world or curse it. Although the latter might well be nihilism, there is no doubt that the possibility of the former is just as much an outcome of the true world. The world is enough, but this can only be said because once the world was not enough. And this affirmation, though it is fully immanent to the world, is also not reducible to the world. The world that is affirmed is changed by this affirmation. This is how we must read Nietzsche’s death of God – which is in no way a pronouncement that there never was a God, but rather an announcement of his death. And this death alone, as Nietzsche specifies with regard to the death of the true world (which is of course the same thing as the death of God), is the great liberation. The death of the true world does not restore us to some halcyon age before this world was found wanting, since then this prelapsarian world would itself be that liberation. No, the great liberation is the demise of the true world with nothing in addition. Nietzsche’s announcement that the true world is dead is not a truth about the world, but a claim about our history of truth. And once we turn our attention to this history of truth – as Foucault, inspired by Nietzsche, did – then we are reminded that the true world was but one outcome of the will to truth. With Socratic parrhēsia, the will to truth bifurcated and the long-standing concern of wisdom with the truth of the world became in addition a question of what is true

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about the customary ways of life. If both of these paths led to nothing – to nihilism – it has been a very different nihilism in each case. If the first way of nihilism negated the world, thereby handing us over to the nothing of other-worldliness, then the second way rather negated the nomoi while remaining firmly in the world – opening up the world in the process. The experience of this nothing is not nihilism but, if Heidegger is to be believed, rather an experience of the very truth of our being, of what is proper to us, namely that nothing is. We are not present at hand, not thing-like in the way that humanism assumes with its rational animal. As no-thing, human being is open and it is obliged only to be. In this sense, Socratic nihilism, quite contrary to wisdom, delivers up some truth. Nietzsche’s bon mot about truth lying does not apply to this truth. Yet for Heidegger, this freedom is unveiled only in its being veiled by the life of a people. The polis, even though it is founded on nothing, remains necessary – proper to man. This is why ancient Cynicism is so significant; for in the life of the Cynic human freedom is made available not in the form of its withdrawal in the polis but as a mode of living that subtracts itself from the polis. The Cynics constituted the true life not as an authentic relation to conventional existence but simply as the destitution of conventional existence. In living their lives in this destitute way, the Cynics passed from the form of life they found themselves in (the polis) to a form-of-life (apolis) defined only by the claim that nothing of their previous life had anything necessary about it. The true life coincided entirely with living a life that, once having realized that the nomoi are nothing, did not flee from this truth but, rather, clung stubbornly to it, indeed made itself at home in it: ‘And who is able to compel you to assent to that which appears false? No man. And who can compel you not to assent to that which appears true? No man. By this then you see that there is something in you naturally free. Wretched men, work out this, take care of this, seek for good here’ (Epictetus 2010: 252). Paul’s messianic vocation, as indicated by the ‘as not’ of 1 Cor. 7.29–31, is similarly one which makes the truth of our worldly vocations only that they have been rendered ‘inoperative’ (katergein) in Christ. Since inoperativity in no way means the abandonment of these vocations  – as Paul makes abundantly clear even to the extent of stipulating that the one called as a slave remain a slave (1 Cor. 7.21) – it can only mean that operativity (work) is no longer the way in which we inhabit these vocations. The messianic vocation, which is not a new vocation, is thus the overcoming of any telos, which is what vocation (calling) usually implies. The messianic vocation renders existing vocations operationless, and this is all it does. In no sense called away from our worldly vocations, we find in messianic time that their inoperativity means that they can be used

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otherwise – like a child that picks up some object from the adult world and, in playing with it, puts it to a new use. All this still leaves open the question of how we might constitute ourselves as the ones called by no calling. In Agamben’s account (2016: 277) of messianism, in deactivating our worldly vocations, messianic deactivation is not something separate from living in such a way that they are deactivated. Deactivation does not arrive from the outside as the highest vocation that deactivates all vocations – deactivation just is the making deactive that living a life accomplishes, without remainder. This means that the transition from form of life (given worldly vocation) to form-of-life (use of worldly vocations or messianic vocation) can, indeed must, take ever new forms. Indeed, this emphasis on the use-value characteristic of messianic deactivation is what distinguishes Agamben’s form-of-life from Heidegger’s being-inthe-world. To a large extent, form-of-life expresses the same idea as being-in-the world, but where Heidegger’s being-in-the-world is what is given in a world, and so at best can only be appropriated in authentic existence, form-of-life is a given-ness that becomes open, that can be used. Appropriation is still ownership – there is still something proper to it. Use, by contrast, claims no property, which is why it is free. The true life in Cynicism, as Foucault emphasized, is similarly an other life in the sense of the othering of mundane life rather than a life that is transmundane. Just as much as the messianic life, the true life remains as it is called. The Cynics did not posit any positive distinction between customary lives and the true life, the latter being solely the negation of the former. The Cynics defined themselves simply as those without citizenship (apolis) and remained in the polis. The provocation of the true life and the messianic life are only their making de-active their worldly life. The nihilism characteristic of the abandonment of worldly life is unknown in each case. The negation at the heart of the messianic vocation and the Cynic true life helps us to account for the (negative) universalism of both – the first that it renders inoperative all vocations and the second that it subtracts itself from each and every polis. Reading this universalism more positively is, by contrast, unilluminating, as Foucault’s account of the brotherhood of man in Cynicism shows. In Foucault’s lectures the Cynic’s universalism is his friendship of all men; but this is a tautology. Foucault emphasizes the debt of Cynicism to the Socratic event, yet there is nothing of love for all men in Socrates. The path from Socrates to Cynic cosmopolitanism is that the incipient Socratic nihilism towards the nomoi was taken a step further in Cynicism such that, with the polis now negated, for

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the first time nothing stood between men. Heideggerian authentic existence, to the contrary, as a mode of relation to (rather than negation of) the polis, can never be universal. In Heidegger’s thinking of Being, the nothing is constituted by time, or more precisely by finitude, a finitude that we only discover in being-towards-death. In Being and Time, Heidegger (1996:  378) is explicit that it is an inauthentic temporality that prioritizes the present  – only future-oriented finitude, the unflinching look at my own death, can transform this inauthentic present into the authentic ‘moment’ (Augenblick) of action. Here it is a matter of opening historical being-in-the-world (the present as given by the past of a people) in the form of my own-most being-towards-death. My appropriation of my past depends on my awareness of my death. What we see in the true life and in the messianic life, by contrast, is that using finitude is what is significant, not awareness of finitude. Use orientates us towards the present even as it transforms the present (as something that immediately passes) into the moment that can be seized. The messianic subject and the subject of the true life are turned not towards the future – this is not beingtowards-death – but towards the time that remains. In fact, in this orientation towards the time that we have, messianic living opens the past, which is therefore no longer the past of a people. Similarly, the true life is incorporated into the present in such a way that the past is constituted anew – and this time not as the past of the polis but as the past worthy of a Socratic event that is precisely infinite in its consequences. As Badiou has shown, the truth of the event is not consigned to the past nor put off into the future but gives to us the present as eternity in time. Finitude is an aborted nihilism. It is entranced by death, something which Spinoza’s free man thinks of nothing less than. In thoughts of finitude the true world remains operational, now as mortal time rather than eternity (indeed, finitude is only the opposite of eternity). Being is still a problem here – or a question, as Heidegger would have it. But, as Wittgenstein (2013:  6.521) argued in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the ‘solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem’. Arguing along similar lines, Agamben (1998: 59) is surely right that only an ontology that frees the nothing from every sense of destiny can perfect nihilism. At stake in Heideggerian abandonment of beings by Being ‘is not something (Being) that dismisses and discharges something else (the being). On the contrary:  here Being is nothing other than the being’s being abandoned and remitted to itself; here Being is nothing other than the ban of the being’.

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Agamben wants us to think Heidegger’s abandonment of beings by Being as an experience of abandonment as such.1 This experience of abandonment is really only the realization that in our abandonment nothing has abandoned us, which is the real destruction of metaphysics that Heidegger, with his mystery of Being, never fully accomplished.2 This is what it means to say that the relation of abandonment is actually not a relation at all, rejecting Heidegger’s ontological difference between Being and beings and replacing it with a non-relation (not no relation) (Agamben 2003: 60). The non-relation of Being and beings means that the nothing, contra Heidegger, no longer prescribes anything that might be called authentic existence. Imperfect nihilism would be that which seeks to make a destiny of the nothing rather than seizing it as an inexhaustible opportunity. Humanity has no work. We are the sabbatical animal, the inoperative being, not the ‘shepherd of Being’ as Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’ has it (1998a: 252). As that which deactivates work, we saw that messianic time is not clock time but the moment or, to use Benjamin’s expression (1968), the jetztzeit (now time). Messianic time, being both now and not yet, is available (otherwise it could not deactivate all works) and yet incomplete (without which it would itself be that work). It is caught between the coming of the Messiah and the Parousia – his ‘second coming’ in the Christian tradition but for Paul simply Koine Greek for ‘presence’. In the idea of the Messiah’s return as his full presence, we should hear Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as a philosophy of presence. Messianic time is not that eternity in which being is accomplished, in which there is the full and permanent presence of every thing to itself. But neither is messianic time the infinite deferral, the future always to come, of deconstruction in which it is essential that the Messiah never arrives. The Messiah is already here in the form of his absence, which is not the absence of never arriving but the absence of remaining with us as absent.3 It is in this sense that we should see the true world as messianic. The true world abides in the form of its absence. And in its presence to us as absence, it has bequeathed to us a fallen world that can never be saved. Without the coming of the true world neither could there be a world in need of redemption.

1 2

3

For a discussion of the political implications of ontological abandonment, see Prozorov 2009. There is no denying that Heidegger himself sometimes states abandonment in these terms, as for example in his conclusion to his lectures on Hegel (1988: 149, emphasis added): ‘is [Man’s] essence not abandonment itself, in which alone what can be possessed becomes a possession?’ This ‘Eucharistic’ presence in absence is a core theme of Quentin Meillassoux’s strange but compelling book (2012) on Mallarmé’s revolutionary poem, Un Coup de Dés.

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And without the departure of the true world, this fallen world would never have become irredeemable. But that which is irredeemable is also that which is never brought to fulfilment. That there is no true world means that there can be evernew worlds. This is what Nietzsche means when he says that the death of the true world is itself the liberation. Nietzsche’s insight that we should start from the death of the true world is in some ways only a restatement of Spinoza’s accomplishment. As Deleuze (1988: 111–12) notes, if Spinoza’s earlier work argued for the coincidence of God and Nature then the breakthrough that is his Ethics consisted in its identification of God and Nature. This stronger identification, Deleuze argues, became possible because Spinoza’s underlying method changed. Starting now from ‘given substantial attributes’ – namely from that which expresses God/Nature – Spinoza ‘deliberately avoids beginning with God’ and, in the process, arrives at him ‘as quickly as possible’ as that substance which is constituted by all the attributes. Though Spinoza arrives quickly at God, he cannot do so immediately and this is fully a part of his method. While Spinoza generally wants to proceed from causes to effects, he knows that he cannot establish himself in the cause ‘as if by magic’. One must start from what is given. Spinoza is able to identify God and Nature precisely by not starting with God – a negation that requires, first, that there be God. Only by dispensing with a transcendent God does Deus sive Natura become sayable.

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Index absolute intuition 175–6 absolute knowledge 28–9 active-creative aspect of truth 207–8 active nihilism 124–5 Adams, E. 109, 111–12 affirmation 3, 133, 215 Agamben, Giorgio 24, 41, 50, 137, 137 n.13, 180 n.13, 189–90, 190 n.17, 217–19 on archaeological method 42 archaeology of government 43–4 bare life in 46, 46 n.23 Coming Community, The 49 form-of-life 46, 46 n.23 genealogy of government 41–2, 46–7 on habit 48–9 n.31 on Heidegger 50 n.34 Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life 141 n.23, 142 n.24 on human potentiality 48 Kingdom and the Glory, The 41, 43, 141 n.21 messianic vocation 136–42 modal ontology 50, 50 n.34 ontological difference between being and Beings 170 n.5 on Paul 127–8, 136, 140 n.20 Alcibiades 13, 73, 204 aletheia (a-letheia) 66–7, 72, 88, 187 alethurgy 192 Alexander the Great 61–2, 68 amor fati 23 anarche 44–5 Anaxagoras 101 n.5 anomos 34–5 Anthony, Mark 106 anti-cosmos 109–17 Badiou's 117–21 Nietzsche's 144–8 Paul's 109–17 anti-nihilism 136 n.9 anti-Platonism 70

anxiety (Angst) 177, 210 apolis 62, 73–82 apophasis 86 aporias 43 apparent world 150, 158–60 appearance 26–7, 39–40, 89, 119, 151, 171, 175–6, 183 and chaos 29 n.10 appetite 54 appropriation 22, 139–40, 175, 217–18, 227 archaeology 42 Aristotle 18 n.19, 35–6, 48, 53, 64, 68, 74, 84, 169 description of apolis 76 n.18 God of 88 Metaphysics 35, 67 natural slave 43 ousia 37 Physics 36 Rhetoric 195 n.5 askēsis  77 Assmann, Jan 97–8 Augustine of Hippo 106 City of God 95 n.3, 103 Confessions 103 n.6 Augustus 106 divinization of 106–7 Aurelius, Marcus 102 authentic existence 217–19 bad conscience, and sickness 155–6, 193 n.2 Badiou, Alain 20 n.24, 24, 29 n.10, 82, 84 n.36, 85–6, 89, 125, 132–7, 205–7, 218 anti-cosmos 117–21 Being and Event 119, 137 Century, The 136 on evil 209 Logics of Worlds 84, 89, 117–18, 137 n.11 ‘minimal difference’ 137 n.13

230 on Paul 93 rejection of finitude 19 n.22 subject 210 transcendental maxims 86 universalism 88 on the Whole 117–20, 120–1 bare life 46, 46 n.23, 78, 140 beauty of order, cosmos as 98–9 becoming 1, 4–8, 11, 15, 17, 20, 25–6, 29, 36, 42, 48, 52, 58, 78, 85, 87, 94, 96, 115–17, 121, 124, 139, 143–5, 147–8, 150–1, 153–4, 156, 158, 160– 3, 174, 179, 184–6, 193, 195, 199, 206–7, 214 being 2, 5, 8, 17, 19 n.20, 24, 28–9, 36, 49– 50, 67, 69, 87, 89 n.44, 168, 174 and beings, ontological difference between 43 n.19, 170–1 as being-in-relation 87 as being-present 186 n.15 as communion 87 as constant presence 68 as co-presence 88 disclosure of 187 equiprimordiality of 88 forgetting of 37 history of 29 as immanent cause 53 loss of 182 and negative 124 of non-beings 87–8 as ousia 184 of the self 73 a self, consciousness of 28 as substance 185 as time 186 and time 28–9 and truth 62, 66, 88 univocity of 88 being-in-a-world 117–18, 166 being-in-itself 86 n.37 being-in-language 170 n.5 being-in-the-world 29, 166–73, 210, 217–18 being-in-truth 9 being of beings 38, 118, 162, 169 n.2, 170, 171, 178 as permanent presence 36 n.13 being-present 17, 173 n.7

Index being-there 71, 91, 118–19, 172. See also Dasein (being-there); parousia (presence) being-thus 118, 174 being-towards-death 218 being-true 67, 192 Benjamin, Walter 130, 132, 139 n.15, 142 Bergsonian revolution 19 n.21 biopolitical nihilism 140 n.20 bios. See form of life (bios) Blanton, W. 140 n.19 blessedness 56–7 boredom 177, 179–80 Bornkamm, Günther 109–13 Brague, Rémi 96, 98, 100 on Paul's cosmos 113 Breton, Stanislas 114, 116 brotherhood of man 63, 73, 79, 217 Buddhism 125 Bultmann, Rudolf, Theology of the New Testament 109–11 Caesar cult 105–8 calling, Paul's 114 Cantorian set theory 118 care for self 194, 202–3, 205, 212 dual structure of 202–4 Cartesian cogito 10–11 causa sui 38 change, identify with error 5 chaos 29, 29 n.10, 31, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 106–7, 124 n.1, 145, 147, 151, 154, 161–2, 188 chaosmos 29, 124 n.1 Christ 43–5, 113, 115–16, 128–9, 169 as firstborn of all creation 114–15 Christian asceticism 194 Christian faith 152 Christianity 23, 30, 159–60, 172, 193–4, 211 and Cynicism 73 and Gnosticism 44 Christian pastorate 41, 193, 211 Christian temporality 17 Christian world 20, 39–51 Chrysostom, Dio 62 n.2, 74 n.15, 77, 80 n.24, 81 n.28, 83 Cicero 103–4, 106 On the Commonwealth 95–6

Index on cosmos 95–6 citizenship (isegoria) 76, 89–90, 196 Cleanthes Hymn to Zeus  52 comportment 20, 97, 169–71, 173–4, 178–9 confidence 193, 195, 202, 208–9, 211 consciousness 28, 28 n.7 of being a self 28 corrective judgement 31 cosmology of hope 115 cosmopolitan 85 aspect of Cynicism 76 cosmopolitanism 63, 217 cosmos (kosmos) 2, 17, 30, 32, 35, 93, 98–9, 110–11, 170–1, 188. See also anti-cosmos and Dasein 172 genealogy of 95–105 and natural law 103–4 order of 100–1 places of 100–1 as total order 100 Crates 78 n.22 creative will 5 custom 68 customary lives 71, 217 Cynics/Cynicism 2, 49, 61, 194, 199, 201–2, 216–18 acosmic 63 animalistic existence 72 animality 72 anti-kingship as 83 n.33 apolis 62, 73–82 belief in divine appointment 82 collective way of life 80 conception of truth 62 cosmopolitanism 63, 76 death of 80 Diogenes of Sinope 14 form of life 65, 78 Foucault’s Cynics 69–73 and freedom 63 and identity 78–9 inexistence 84–5 love in 80 militancy 82 mission of care 79–81 naked existence 76

231 negation 83–91 negation of polis 77 n.21 nihilism 61–6, 90 nomisma 81 nomos 63–4 and nudity 77 other life of 80–1 overcoming metaphysical existence 71–2 phusis 63, 65–9 and political power 62 positivity of the negative 77–8 n.21 poverty 77 radicalization 65 n.6 and radicalization 64 refusal of marriage 79 rejection of polis 64 renunciation 79 scandalous form-of-life 90 scouting mission 81 self-sacrificial life 80 shameless life 72 soul in 77 and true life 62, 64–5, 72–3, 78, 83–4, 90, 217 truth and existence 64–5 truth of existence 62 truth-telling 67–8 universalism of 77 n.21, 82 will to truth in 89, 91

Darwinism 41 Dasein (being-there) 9, 17–18, 166–7, 171–3, 177, 179, 183, 210. See also being-there; presence death 18, 84 n.36, 121 fear of 77 of God 1–2, 24–5, 29–30, 123, 156, 215 decisionsim 46 Deleuze, Giles 1, 1nn. 1, 2, 5, 15–16, 19 nn.20–21, 20 n.23, 52, 55, 88 n.42, 123–4, 133 n.5, 168 n.1, 176 n.9, 186 n.15, 193 n.2, 215, 220 Bergsonism 48 n.28 Difference and Repetition 27 n.3, 37 n.14, 50, 84 n.35, 186 n.16 exclusion of the Whole 118 n.10 on Plato 84 n.35 Zarathustra 144 n.1

232 Demetrius 82 n.29 demiurge 39, 99 democracy 64, 134, 207 parrhēsia 196–7, 199 democratic materialism 207 Demonax 81 n.25, 82 n.29 demos 34, 63, 196–7 Derrida, Jacques 30, 198–9 Descartes, René 5–6, 50 n.33, 69 n.9, 177 n.10 destruction 137, 137 n.11 destruction-creation 137 Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) 49–50, 52 dialectics 12, 26, 133, 138, 140, 178, 200 Diogenes 2, 61–6, 68, 70–2, 74–7, 79, 81–3, 83 n.34, 84–6, 89–90, 101, 149, 152 mission of care 81 vocation 81 Diogenes Laertius 63, 65, 72, 74, 82 n.29, 101 n.5, 149 Lives 78 n.22 Dionysianism 195 discourse 13, 32, 69–71, 73, 75, 77, 82–3, 107, 115, 169, 186–7, 196, 200–1, 205, 213 disorder 55, 82, 91, 96, 99, 147 divine 39–40, 49–50 divine knowledge 175–6 divine providence 7–8 doxa 183 dusnomia 33 Egyptian cosmologies 98 eidos 180–2 Epictetus 62, 77, 77 n.20 account of ideal Cynic 63 on Cynics 65, 81 Discourse on Cynicism 69 Discourses 79 Er, myth of 186–8 ergon 70 essence, and existence 47–8 eternal recurrence 156 eternal return 7–8 eternity 5–6, 9, 16–17, 207 of God 17 and truth 5

Index ethics, evolution of 45 ethos 70 eunomia 32–3 Euripides, Ion 195 event(s) 20 n.24, 24, 89 n.44 event-sites 86 evil 30, 40, 47, 49, 54, 65, 129, 136, 146, 148, 152–3, 156–7, 202, 209 existence of care 73 and essence 47–8, 182 and truth 64–5 external world 10, 172, 201, 212 faith 2, 4, 58, 105, 108, 112–13, 116, 152, 193 finitude 9, 16–18, 19 n.21, 37, 48, 173–7, 207, 218. See also time form of life (bios) 46, 46 n.23, 46 n.24, 69–71, 76–7, 90, 191, 194, 204, 217 forms, true world of 39 Foucault, Michel 11–12, 31, 41, 44, 91 n.46, 152 on aletheia  71 on care of others 80 and Cynicism 64, 69–73, 79, 90–1 genealogy of parrhēsia (see parrhēsia) genealogy of the true world 35 Government of Self and Others, The 82 n.32, 195 On the Government of the Living 192, 211–12 on justice 32 Lectures on the Will to Know 31 on nomos 32–5 subject of truth 193, 195 true life 191 Will to Know 201 n.8 Franciscan monasticism 142 n.24 free beings 45, 51 freedom 57 n.40, 143, 146, 173–7 Cynicism 63 understood as arbitrariness 46–7 and will 55 of the world 45 free man 54–5 living according to reasons 58 self-determination 55 friendship 15, 58, 62, 66, 88, 200–2, 213, 217 future 18–19

Index glory 56 Gnosticism 40, 44, 46, 193 deus alienus  46 God 40, 43–5, 47 n.27, 153 being-present 17 as lawgiver 104 love of 56 murderer of 123–4 and nature 49–50, 52, 220 pity of 123–4 revelation of 49–50 as the world soul 52 Greek being 67 Greek gods 188 Greeks 37 cosmos 95–105 habit 19, 48–50 Hadot, Pierre 70, 70 n.10, 191–2, 194 n.3 study of Plotinus 40–1 heaven and earth 1, 98 heavenly beings 37 heavens 35–6 order of 30 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 7, 19 n.20, 26 on being 28 on being of the negative 84 n.35 inverted world 27–8 Phenomenology of Spirit, The 7–8, 26, 27 n.4, 28, 28 n.9 Philosophy of History 7 Philosophy of Right 75 n.17 on time and space 15–16n. 12 true world as living world 28 on the Whole 119 Heidegger, Martin 2, 6, 9, 16–17, 87, 165–6 age of the world picture 96–7 analysis of technology 24 authentic existence 218 on being 29 Being and Time 16–17, 20, 166, 177, 218 being-in-the-world 165 critique of Nietzsche 8–11 On the Essence of Ground 110, 171 Essence of Human Freedom, The 170 n.5, 176 on freedom 57 n.40 freedom and finitude 173–7

233

Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, The 167–8, 177 on hierarchy of beings 37 Introduction to Metaphysics 18, 66, 169 n.2, 174 on Kant 48 on Kant’s Copernican Revolution 175 ‘Letter on Humanism’ 166, 170 n.5, 182, 185 n.14 on metaphysical eternity 19–20 metaphysical timelessness 28 on Nietzsche 157–62 on nihilism 180–6 nothing 177–80 notion of freedom as arbitrary choice 47 ontological difference between Being and beings 189 ordo 35 on Paul 20–1, 97, 114 on phusis 66–7 on Platonic exclusion of writing 199 n.7 on polity 187 representational concept of truth 67 on time 15 n.12 on truth 68–9 What is Metaphysics? 38 on will and the moral law in Kant 45 n.22 world as historical Being 188–9 world as transcendence of beings 188–9 worldlessness 30 world-order 188 Hellenistic emperor cults 106 Heraclitus 11–12, 65 n.6, 101 n.5 Hesiod 98 hierarchical order of cosmos 102 hierarchical social order 146 hierarchy of beings 35–6, 88–9 history of being 19, 29, 168 of the error of the true world 159 of truth 215 homelessness 24 Homer 35 Homo Sacer 41, 49 Horsley, Richard 103, 105–6 hos me 20, 128, 138, 140, 169 ‘how ’ of being 171

234

Index

‘how’ of human existence 172 human being(s) 16, 36 n.13, 48, 97, 178, 181–2 humanitarian nihilism 136–7 humanity 8, 63, 66, 72, 74, 80–1, 110, 119, 129, 159, 182, 219 human nature 51–2 human potentiality 56 Hyppolite 28 n.8 ideal world 162–3 identity(ies) 3, 10–11, 14, 40, 59, 77–9, 83–4, 87, 91, 93, 120, 135, 137–40, 147, 151, 185, 201–2, 208, 213 imperfect nihilism 219 impotentiality 48, 48 n.28 impurity 34–5 individualism 111–12 inexistence 1, 84–5, 89, 97, 117–18 infinity 28, 28 n.8, 207 inner world 26, 166. See also true world inoperative praxis 48, 93, 124, 131, 134, 140–1, 180, 216–17, 219 interpretation of world 151, 171 intuition 20, 175–6 inverted world 27–8, 27 n.4, 28 n.8, 29, 148 Jesus Christ 43 n.19, 51, 94 jetztzeit 219 joy 50, 56 judgement 31–2, 64, 153 justice, as conformity with the order of the world 33 justification 49 n.32 Kant, Immanuel 9, 45, 151, 173 n.7 Critique of Practical Reason 57 n.40 Critique of Pure Reason 15n. 12, 25 on freedom 57 n.40 prohibition of world as totality 26 on supersensory world 25 kata kosmon  98 Kierkegaard, S. 10 Concluding Unscientific Postscript  10 Fear and Trembling 10 knowledge 31–2, 67 absolute knowledge 28–9

finite and infinite 175–6 koinonia 87–8 kosmopolis 78 kosmopolitês 63, 76 kosmos. See cosmos (kosmos) Laches 73, 204 language 170–1 n.5 last judgement 16 law(s) 147 of the city 63–4 of nature (See natural law) liberation 215. See also free beings; freedom logos 17, 68, 169, 169 n.3, 178 n.11, 182, 187, 199 n.7 love 49 Lucian 62 n.2, 81 n.25, 82 n.30 Lucretius 175 n.8 account of the Epicurean world 51–2 n.35 Luther, Martin 93–4 manifestness 178–9 material world 39 Meillassoux, Quentin Un Coup de Dés 219 n.3 Mesopotamian cosmologies 98 messianic deactivation 217 messianic life 189–90 messianic Paul 127–8, 137 messianic time 219 messianic vocation 136–42, 180 n.13, 216–17 metaphysical being 88, 186 metaphysical Christianity 17 n.14 metaphysical eternity 19–20 metaphysical nihilism 160–1 metaphysical timelessness 20 metaphysical truth 9, 11, 14, 72–3, 161, 192 metaphysics 34, 38, 156, 169, 169 n.3, 186, 211 modal ontology 50 n.34 modernity 5 modern nihilism 30, 41, 123 moment 18–19 moral law 45, 54, 57 n.40, 185 mortal time 18, 20, 37 mortal truth 6

Index movement of negation 26 of the world 7, 27, 35–6, 172 naked/nakedness 61, 76 natural causality 173, 173 n.7 natural law 63, 103–5, 131, 148 natural life (zoe) 77 nature 55, 58, 64 and God 49–50, 52 Neoplatonism 39, 43, 100, 104, 194 n.3 new faith 2 new man 16, 133–4, 137 n.12 new values 3, 97, 125–6, 128, 135, 149, 154–5, 185 new world 137, 143 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1–2, 23, 143–4 amor fati 50 Anti-Christ, The 98, 129–30, 150–1 anti-cosmos 144–8 Beyond Good and Evil 8–9, 153 Birth of Tragedy, The 11 Cynic credentials 74 Dawn 128, 145–6, 148, 153–4 definition of world 145 destruction-creation 136 Ecce Homo 156 efforts to overcome the true world 3–4 eternal return 124, 124 n.1 Gay Science, The 49, 90, 147–9, 151–2, 154 Genealogy of Morality, The 41, 148, 155 Heidegger’s reading of 157–62 Late Notebooks 7, 124, 144, 156 necessity 47, 55, 147 pantheism 157 on Paul 128–9 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks 147, 150 n.3 on Platonism 23, 154 n.5 on suffering 149 theodicy 156–7 true world, as a lie 148–52 Twilight of the Idols 1, 8, 11–12, 150, 158–9, 202 universalism 134 will to power 46 will to truth 4–5 world-affirmation 58–9

235

world of becoming 160–1 on world-worship 149 nomisma  81 nomoi 62, 64, 65 n.6, 216 nomos 31–3, 62–3, 71, 131–2 apotheosis of 95–6 as appropriation 33 Cynicism 63–4 and distortion 68 fictitious place of 35 and just distribution 34 non-being 84 n.35 non-relational being 68 non-relation of Being and beings 219 ‘not’ and no-saying, difference between 88, 88 n.41 not-being-there 84 n.36 nothing/nothingness 84 n.36, 156–7, 177– 80, 216, 218 of the will 123 now, and moment 18 nudity 64, 77 objective truth 10 objective world 30, 172 oikonomia 43 one world 24–5, 89 order of beings 35, 96 of cosmos 97–102, 147 of existence 110 of heavens 30, 59 of nature 34, 51–2, 109 of things 32, 34, 40, 95, 98, 127, 135, 137, 195, 208 of the world 13, 30–4, 55, 97, 100, 113, 127, 146–7, 150, 206 ordo  35 other life 15, 65, 73, 80, 83, 217 otherness 15, 46, 84, 188 otherworldliness 20, 40, 62, 68, 88, 90, 94– 5, 142, 144, 153–4, 204, 211 ousia 37 Overman 3, 124, 128, 132–42 Ovid 102, 104 Metamorphoses 90–1 n.45 Parmenides 4–5, 65 n.6, 84, 88, 186 parousia (presence) 17, 19, 37, 141, 219

236 parrhēsia 2–3, 14–15, 69–70, 82 n.32, 152, 191–5, 212–15 and democracy 196–7 philaletheia 205–12 philia 199–202 philosophical 197 in polis 195–9 political 197 and power 75 Socratic 200–1 passive nihilism 124–5 past 18–19, 42, 186 n.15 recovering 19 n.20 pastoral care 211 Paul the Apostle 2, 16–17, 19, 82, 93–5, 219 active Paul 130–2 anti-cosmos 109–17 becoming 116–17 calling 114 denial of totality of cosmos 115 devaluation of communalism 126 devaluation of cosmos 127 devaluation of hierarchy 126 devaluation of law 126–7 dual commandment 95, 95 n.3 against Empire 105–8 Epistle to the Romans 131 exclusion of communalism 136 faith 115 hope for cosmos 115 hope of 134 hos me 20 and identity 83 katechon 140 n.20 law of nature 105 messianic vocation 216–17 new creature of 93, 112 the Overman 132–42 parousia (presence) 17, 19, 37, 141, 219 primordial Christianity 97 reactive Paul 128–30 temporality 112 Timaeus 96 universalism 134–5 vocation of 114 perfection 54, 152–7 philaletheia 205–12 philia 199–202

Index Philo of Alexandria 102–4 God of 104 Philosopher’s God 53, 68 philosophical friendship 201 philosophical life 76, 82, 90, 200, 210 n.11 philosophical truth-telling 70, 72 philosophy 4, 11, 67 as a form of life 199 reality of 197–8 as a way of life 70, 73 phusis 65–9, 121, 180–2 as idea 180 Pilate 43 n.19, 51 place(s) 167–8 and beings 36 Plato 14, 39, 70, 71 n.11, 74–5, 81, 82 n.32, 154 n.5, 185–6, 197 analogy of cave 12, 79, 81, 88 n.42 on Diogenes 72 Gorgias 64 hierarchy of beings 35 justice in polity 100–1 otherness 84 Phaedo 23 Protagoras 200 Republic 5, 96, 100–2, 184 Sophist 68, 71, 84, 86 theory of ideas 180 Timaeus 5, 99–102, 105 on true world 5 Platonism 8, 23, 70, 73, 101, 104, 158–60, 184 true life in 71–2 Plotinus 39–40, 53, 56, 102, 207 n.10 Plutarch 62, 102–3 polis 30–4, 41, 64, 89, 100, 133 n.5, 183, 187, 216–18 and cosmos 97, 102 political justice 31–2. See also nomos political parrhēsia 199–200 poverty 89 presence 38 n.15. See also Dasein (being-there) absolute presence 28 present 18–19, 186 n.15 Presocratic philosophy 11, 65 n.6 Prime Mover, God as 53 Proclus 100 propositional truth 169

Index Proteus, Peregrinus 80 providential teleology 54, 58–9 pure life 72 pure presence 88 purposelessness of existence 156 Pythagoras/Pythagorean 55, 99, 101 n.5, 202 questioning 12n. 10 reactive nihilism 125 reactive Paul 128–30 reality 13, 25, 40, 48, 51, 56, 75, 88, 95, 102, 112, 115, 125, 129, 144, 147, 149–51, 153–4, 156, 163, 165, 168, 170, 184, 197–9, 204, 207 real world 144, 144 n.1, 154, 162–3 redemption(s) 129 n.4, 136 and nihilism 130 remembering again 19 repentance 57 ressentiment 57, 81, 124–5, 129, 146, 152 rhetoric 200 Roman civil religion 106 sadness 50, 56 salvation 16, 41, 43, 45, 56, 109, 112–13 n.8, 115–17, 139, 193 Sartre 47, 163, 182 Schelling, F. W. J. 10, 24–5, 45–6 on creation of world 44 n.21 on time 11 Schmitt, Carl 32, 140 n.20 Nomos of the Earth 32–3 self 28, 73, 212 and time 176–7 self-consciousness 28 self-identical life 71 self-overcoming 212 self-preservation 162 self-sacrifice 194–5, 212 self-sameness 202 Seneca 81, 82 n.29, 102 sensory world 26–7, 30, 158–9 Severus, Septimius 95 shameless life 72 slave/slavery 20, 89–90, 113 Socrates 23, 34, 63–4, 71, 73, 81, 197–205 Apology 77, 197 Crito 63–4, 202

237

parrhēsia 201 Phaedo 77 Phaedrus 200 Socratic truth 11–15 Socratism 194 Sophist 66, 68–9, 71, 83–4, 86–7, 200 soul 13, 77, 187, 200 and cosmos 99–100 sovereignty 44, 65, 78 space and time 26 speech 198 n.6 Spinoza, Baruch 47, 49–59, 150–1, 220 amor intellectualis dei 58–9 blessedness 56–7 Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) 52 on divine necessity of the world 57–8 Ethics 47 n.27, 50–5 freedom and God's will 53 free man 58 good and evil 54 God as the world 52–3 joy and sadness 56–7 justification and perfection 54 love 58 monism 50 Nature 58 negation of providence 58–9 on Paul 54 n.38 perfection 56 radical monism 53 reason 57–8 repentance 57 Theological-Political Treatise, The 54 n.38 true understanding 57 world as divine 58 spirit 28 Stoicism 63, 82, 96, 99, 102–3 cosmos 45 wise man 97 subjective truth 205–6 subjective world 172 subject–object relationship 167 subtraction–creation 137 suffering 145, 149 supersensory world 24–7, 30, 158–9 Taubes, Jacob 94, 105, 112, 125 Political Theology of Paul, The 127 n.3, 130–2

238

Index

telos 7, 53–4 temporality 18, 19 n.20 inauthentic 18 test of the soul 13 test of truth 201–2 Thessalonians 17 this-worldliness 14, 61 Thomas Aquinas De Substantiis Separatis  37 Summa Theologiae 16 thrown-ness 29, 48, 50, 77, 210 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 196 time 17–18, 26, 168, 176, 207, 218. See also finitude and being 28–9 and error 5 metaphysical eternity 19 as the moment 17–18 mortal time 18 and self 176–7 as successive nows 18 and truth 15–21 timelessly true world 27–8 totality 2, 11, 26, 30, 88, 93, 95–6, 99–100, 109–10, 115, 118–20, 127, 132, 165– 7, 171–4, 177, 180, 188, 191, 194 tragedy 209 transcendence 53, 104, 175 trans-subjectivity of truth 9–10 true being(s) 36, 38 n.15, 87 true discourse 200–1 true life 62, 191, 209, 216 and customary lives 71 in Cynicism 64–5, 72–3, 78, 217 in Platonism 71–2 as a sovereign life 65 true world 1–2, 4, 6, 8, 16, 23, 25, 123, 143, 158, 160, 215, 219 Christian ontology 41 death of 143 error of 159 of forms 39 history of error of 159 and inverted world 27–8, 9 as a lie 148–52 source of all error 21 Spinoza’s world 51–9

worldlessness 29–38 truth 183, 205–6 as aletheia 66–7 as correspondence 10 and existence 64–5 as knowledge of the world 152 as ‘letting be seen’ 67 lie of 4 manifestation of 65 as a mode of existence 73 as movement 7 and time 15–21 as the truth of Being 69 universality of 119 and wisdom 6–11 and world 3–6 truthful 4, 61, 91, 205 truth-telling 12, 14, 63–5, 67, 72–3, 191–4, 196–200, 202–5, 209, 211–13 making space for 65 philosophical 70 precondition of 64–5 two-worlds schema 8, 20–1, 23–30, 39, 52, 150, 160 ugly 153, 156 unadorned body, and truth 61, 64 unconcealedness. See aletheia (a-letheia) unconcealment of Being 187 unconcealment of beings 183–4 unity 1, 27–8, 30, 56, 87, 89, 124, 144, 161–2, 167, 169, 178 universalism 77, 80, 82, 88, 121, 125–6, 134–5, 217 universe 5, 9, 36, 40, 42, 52, 63, 66, 79, 95–7, 99–100, 102–3, 105–6, 113–14, 116, 118, 126, 131, 145–6 unmoved mover 36, 36 n.11, 44, 88 unveiling 83, 121, 140–1, 155, 176 use, concept of 190 n.17 values 138 n.14, 185 n.14 new values 3, 97, 125–6, 128, 135, 149, 154–5, 185 transvaluation of 3 veridiction 192 vitalisms 46 n.23

Index Weltgeist 168 Western philosophy 199, 204, 210–11 n.11. See also Christianity whole, the 168–9, 171, 174 will 45–6 to death 152 nothingness of 123 to power 46, 143, 152, 162, 201–2 to truth 3–4, 71, 89–91, 201, 209 of the truthful 4 wisdom 11–12 and philosophy 15 and truth 6–11 wise man 102, 113 Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus 49, 218 work of self on self 199 world ‘as’ of 169, 178 of becoming 5, 7, 20, 25–6, 151 (See also becoming) Christian world 20, 39–51 destroyers 149 as divine 58 external world 10, 172, 201, 212 of flux 28 freedom of 45 as historical Being 188–9 ideal world 162–3

239

interpretation of 151, 171 inverted world 27–8, 27 n.4, 28 n.8, 29, 148 movement of 7, 27, 35–6, 172 objective world 30, 172 order of 13, 30, 30–4, 55, 97, 100, 113, 127, 146–7, 150, 206 as purposeless becoming 162 of sensory appearance 25–6 sensory world 26–7, 30, 158–9 subjective world 172 supersensory world 24–7, 30, 158–9 of things in themselves 25–6 totality (see totality) as transcendence of beings 188–9 true world (see true world) and truth 3–6 world-affirmation 3, 58–9 world-forming 177–9 worldlessness 29–38 world picture 96–7 writing 198 n.6, 199 n.7, 209 Zarathustra 2–4, 24, 56, 61, 66, 74 n.16, 79, 124, 129 n.4, 146, 149, 155, 157, 201 n.8, 203 n.9 Zeno 52, 103