Philemon and Baucis (or: Why I Write)

Ovid, Metamorphosis, Book VII,

A cold night in a small town:

Two peasants are wandering from house to house in search of shelter. Everywhere they go the ragged looking couple is rejected. We are not sure what goes through the heads of the various homeowners, but we are fairly certain that it has something to do with the appearance of the strangers. But what is it exactly about these two that incites doors to be closed on their faces? Do they look dangerous? Do they give off an unbearable odour or bear an unfortunate resemblance to the old "Wanted posters" for Carthaginian generals?

What canon of respectability has been contravened by the appearance of our pair? What ill-favoured aspects could have led the villagers to so blatantly disregard the laws of hospitality, given that – this being the ancient and not the modern world – these laws are among the most sacrosanct. Remember that in the absence of phones, cars, trains, homeless shelters, credit cards et cetera, there is nothing that stands between any traveler – rich or poor -- and a night in the open air, BUT hospitality. And anyone may at any time find themselves -- a winter night's traveler and thus someone who is dependent – like Blanche du Bois – on the kindness of strangers.

As it turns out, but as the reader may have already guessed, our two indigents are more than they seem. They are, in fact, Zeus and Hermes (or Jupiter and Mercury, The King of the Gods and his herald. The two gods have exchanged their properly divine splendour for beggars’ rags – which is one of the ways that we can interpret the presence of Hermes – Zeus has come, but he is, of course, ‘attended’ by the trickster god, by the god of disguises, the messenger, the god who (to quote Heidegger) leads travelers to find the right path on a starless night, but who also leads them astray (even and especially when they try to take the path most taken.) The character of Hermes is known to anyone who has ever tried to interpret anything: a poem, a novel, a philosophical treatise, and above all another human being: that which leads us to understanding and that which leads us to misunderstanding are often the same things.

To return to our story: after being turned out of virtually every house in the town, the divine pair comes to the home of an old couple, Philemon and Baucis. Unlike, their fellow burghers (it’s hard to tell such a homely story without updating it to the Middle Ages: I always end up placing medieval lanterns into my image of the couple's domicile), Philemon and Baucis are not, somehow, put off by whatever it is that is so unprepossessing about the looks of the wanderers. The aged mortals take the ageless immortals to their hearth, and we are left to wonder about what kind of night must have passed between them: what the god of magic had in his tea, and what the King of the Gods talked about when he sat down by the fire.

For their kindness – a kindness that was intended to be recieved by the lowest and most humble of mortals rather than to the eternally radiant and majestic gods – Philemon and Baucis will receive a number of rewards. Their first reward is to be spared the destruction that awaits the rest of the village and its inhabitants (punishment from Zeus for abrogating the laws of hospitality, but also for having unwittingly angered the gods.) Second, the old couple are made custodians of the temple that the vengeful gods will build on the ruins of the village that refused them the grace of hospitality.

Third, in response to the “anything you wish for” request that populates the fairy stories of all nations and all epochs: the couple ask (poignantly) that they may die at exactly the same moment such that neither of them will be forced to live through the death of the other. It is hard to imagine a more moving testimony to love than this request, which is why I have no doubt that it caused, lean and lupine Old Republicans (like Shakespeare’s Cassius), otherwise smarting at the benevolent tyranny of Augusut to take out their handkerchief-equivalents and blubber like puellae.

Like several of the stories recounted in the Metamorphosis, this is not, I believe a story that would have been familiar to figures of Periclean Athens who knew their Homer and their Hesiod, their Pindar and their Aeschylus. This may be because we’ve lost the original source material, but it is more likely to be the case that the story is simply an invention of Ovid’s.

At any rate, AFTER Ovid, the story is destined to be recounted through a million minor variations throughout the middle ages often because of the obvious proximity of the story to certain New Testament "classics", in particular to the story of the the Prodigal son). And via the sadly departed classical education, the story is retold again in subtle and not so subtle variations into the modern era (I am thinking for instance – with thanks to my friend J.F. -- of aspects of Dickens’ Great Expectations.)

In a way, it is quite easy to imagine these variations (especially the Medieval ones) without reading them, or without, even these stories having to remain extant. It is, after all, no great leap for the imagination to see the two gods being substituted for angels or for saints, for witches, and goblins, Kings, Queens, gnomes, fairies, sorcerers, Popes, and other sundry intermediary beings.

But the point is the same: something not quite of this world visits us clad not in the radiance that belongs to it by nature, but in an infinitely ruder disguise. We (the people and audience of the story) fail to recognize the luminous being that we would otherwise profess to love, or to seek on account of this disguise. This is because we have learned to confuse our love of truth, or of the divine, with our attraction to the glory of such things. In doing so, we have confused our desire for the source of the light with a desire for the radiance which envelops it. This attraction to the halo as opposed to that which possesses it (as an afterthought -- I'm thinking of a passage in Agamben here) then puts us into the (tragic) position of being unable to recognize something which we otherwise claim (in pious hypocrisy) to be precisely devoted to anticipating.

The importance of the story is manifold. On the one hand, it could be looked at simply as a beautiful formulation of the theoretically simple, but practically Herculean task of not being deceived by appearances. (The practical difficulty comes from, amongst other things, that we have nothing to work with apart from appearances. Hence, the Scholastic doctrine (later made into a slogan phenomenology) that philosophy was about saving the appearances.

Doubtless, the story is about the importance of hospitality in the ancient world.

But it is more than this.

The main point, and the one most relevant to the times, is the way that the story remind us of the importance of distinguishing a love of truth (or beauty, or the good) from a worship of power that is always the simulacrum of this love. As a religious allegory, it could be looked at in terms of Kierkegaard’s statement that "the knight of faith is indistinguishable from the bourgeois in his Sunday best.”

I would gloss this statements (and its more ecumenical, i.e. less extravagantly Protestant equivalents) about how the inner light (however you would conceive of it) is invisible to the eye and so forth, but I will not take up this theme here, first because it would have me going down a rateher well-worn path, but second, because to make that path seem rather less familiar may require me getting lost in a theological wood, which I am, for various reasons, perhaps not qualified to extricate myself without a Virgil for a gudie.

For myself, I like to see the story, in terms of philosophy. In particular, I like to see it as reminidng us of one of the tasks of philosophy. It also has a more personal resonance: I’ve always seen my own motivations for doing philosophy in encapsulated in this story.

But let’s leave the personal stuff for the moment:

Philosophy, to cite the original (Platonic) quarrel with the sophistry which it resembles, can – as it was in Plato’s day (think Alcibiades, Critias adn others) and it certainly is on our own – be worshipped for all the wrong reasons. All of these wrong reasons have to do with venerating philosophy for its effects, its accidents instead of its essence, in other words, for its power. To enumerate those effects: philosophy tends to be pursued for one of two reasons:

The first reason philosophy is pursued is in the hope of obtaining for oneself the appearance of sagacity: there is (in all ages) a certain glory that attaches to a reputation for wisdom. And despite the protestations of philosophers in the Socratic mode that they are not wise, (but that they are lovers of wisdom dedicated to the ardent pursuit of a particularly coy beloved), many, at all times will do what they can to try to make this glory attach to their person. Second (obviously related to the first) there is a certain kind of spirited young person (the kind of person who can be coutned as the average Socratic interlocutor) who enjoys seeing sacred cows impugned, the proud brought low, and the pompous being forced to recognize their own flatulence. This is another perhaps timeless delight. Obviously, the person brought to philosophy by “A” (the first reason) and the person brought to philosophy by “B” (the second), may often be the same person.

To put this another way, we could say that people often come to philosophy out of a desire to possess the power of the dialectic, to have some of its suplle splendour attached (if only vicariously) to oneself. Nietzsche speaks of this when he says that the Greeks loved Socrates (despite everything) because he invented a new form of competition (agon) and announced himself the first fencing master of this new game of skill. Thus, we can see the philosopher, just as we see an athlete, as a paragon of grace and beauty, who, like an athlete is capable of receiving the adulation that all people covet. Thus, we can find ourselves thinking: I want THAT, I want the rapture of the crowd that is produced by the great orator or the great performer, I want the deference or at least the respect that so often comes with wisdom. Petrach, interestingly, and to a much greater extent Machiavelli both thought that these kind of desires could be shaped or guided until tehy went from being simply seeking a personal, or idiosnycratic good into something that would be good for the city.

As this analogy should indicate to us: the problem posed by the desire to appear wise (as opposed to the actual love of wisdom which may – frequently lead us to appear foolish by the standards of the things that we question) recalls the problem of the ring of Gyges from the first book of Plato’s Republic. In that portion of the dialogue, Socrates is famously asked (by Glaucon) to come up with an argument for why justice is good in itself and under all circumstances, such that a wise man might say with a straight face, without dissembling and against the consensus of many ages that a truly just man who was treated as if he were precisely the opposite (i.e. who was cursed and condemned as the worst sort of criminal), could still say that he was ‘happier’ than an unjust man who – APPEARING just through the power of his mendacity got all the fringe benefits of justice (award ceremonies, adulation, praise – all those things that the Greeks called kudos – glory), despite their actual wickedness.

Obviously, in some ways, the entire Platonic corpus deals with this problem, but I like to cite Xenophon’s Memorabilia, I.2 (24 -50) on this. This passage (which I have alluded to elsewhere on the blog) gives us a sense of both what this extra-philosophical motive for philosophy looks like(Alcibiades desire to feel superior to the great Pericles by using the Socratic elenchus to confound and thus 'triumph' over him) and of the difficulty posed by yet another eternal Platonic problem: problem of sophistry as the simulacrum of philosophy. A simulacrum, I have said elsewhere means principally an imitation of accidental features, but not essential ones such that a simulacrum is to the thing it simulates what an idol is to a god.

But there are two difficulties here. The firstis: how does one distinguish what Alcibiades and Critias (who according to Xenophon betray the teaching of their master) do from what Socrates does, given that what the latter two do is precisely an imitation (a simulacrum) of Socrates? How can Socrates really be considered innocent (as Xenophon argues that he should be) of the excesses of his students, when they seem to be following his method?

In addition, how is it that one can LEARN (or for that matter teach) philosophy (actual love of wisdom as opposed to love of the glory that attaches itself to wisdom) given that what tends to lead anyone to philosophy in the first instance cannot be philosophy but only its simulacrum. To use the Platonic metaphor: we need to be attracted to luminous objects like the ‘glory’ of wisdom, before we can see wisdom herself, precisely because we can only truly see once our eyes have adjusted to the light. But this means, that we must ALLOW the fact that our mere attraction to shiny objects necessarily precedes our ability to know what these objects are in themselves. St. Augustine was obssessed with this question in all the phases of his life: how can we know what we seek when without knowledge of that which we seek?

Philosophy always starts with a simulacrum of itself; or put otherwise, it is only through simulacra (through imitating the wrong thing) that we learn to even SEE the object to which our imitation does not conform. Thus, a musician must start by doing BAD versions of beloved compositions (songs et cetera), must be a 'pale shadow' of Bach or of Keith Richards, before they can be a successor to either.

These questions are, obviously, far beyond the scope a blog post, so I will not take them up here in their entirety. But, this excessively large problem – central to Xenophon, central to Plato -- still brings us to what I think of as the real point of the Philemon and Baucis story, namely to the idea that one of the reason for philosophy’s existence (apart from the erotic madness that defines it – it’s mad, dangerous, and yet impossibly beautiful impulse to transcendence) is that people have a tendency to lose whatever sense they might have once had for the things that they profess to love in certain patterns or certain forms (certain simulacra) of the thing sought.

Thus, whether we are talking about wisdom or beauty, goodness or freedom -- whatever “values” – to use the contemporary vulgate – to which we find ourselves paying lip-service to – there is a tendency to lose the ability to see (which is the same as losing the ability to seek) the true bearers of such apparently vaunted qualities because we become too comfortable with our associations, i.e. our prejudices as to what such things are likely to look like. Thus, instead of seeking wisdom, we seek the person acclaimed for wisdom. Instead of truth, we take what a lot of people (or authoritative looking figures) tell us will PASS for the truth. (We are happy to see people nod when we say the thing that they expect, or the thing they like to hear). Instead of the good, we take that which resembles, or that which shares certain prominent features with other things that we associate with being good. Instead of wisdom, we settle for something that will pass for wisdom, as long as no one actually tries to work out what it is saying.

To avoid my statements here turning into a series of platitudes, I should note here, that in our own age, the danger does not consist only in the ever present danger of deferring to the madding crowd (a tendency which, like so many things about democracy has a good and a bad side), but in the danger of fetishising a series of traits that we have come to associate with a highly idiosyncratic sense of ‘goodness’, ‘beauty’ or ‘truth’.

The danger of this second aspect has several sources: I suppose that if I had to summarise I would suggest that these are the nature of a liberal polity combined with the nature of a (hyper-consumerist) society. The fact that we live in a liberal polity means that we have the right to think what we want, i.e. we cannot (or at least should not) ever find ourselves – as in 1984 -- dragged before the Thought Police or tortured until we have learned to love Big Brother.

The good that this entails is obvious (if you need it explained to you, then we are more trouble than I tnd to think we are): where thought is not free, nothing is free: which is why Americans are justifiably proud of the First Amendment to their Constitution.

But the downside to ‘freedom of opinion’ is that it can simply mean 'anarchy of opinion', i.e. the veneration of the doctrine (which is worthy of POLITICAL respect) can lead to a situation, where one sees no reason to change one’s opinion about anything (because we conceive of opinion, as I've said elsewhere, as a sacred possession, a little treasure that is perfect for at once coming from us and remaining a part of us in its seeming separateness. We thus treat our opinions the way parents who spoil their children treat their children: Little Jimmy can do no wrong, because he's OUR little Jimmy.

And this tendency towards stasis (which means, interestingly, ‘civil war’ in Greek as well, as what we normally think of it as meaning, i.e. as ‘a situation where nothing moves/grows) is exacerbated by the present phase of consumer capitalism, where much of the market relies (c.f. “Time Out of Mind”) on people striving (in an actively febrile fashion) to differentiate themselves from others by their particular (idiosyncratic) mode consumption. The combination of these two social factors tends to exacerbate human being’s natural propensity towards what I call, according to its etymology, idiocy. By “idiocy”, I follow the classics (via Hannah Arendt) in mentioning that ‘idiocy’ comes from a word that means ‘household god’ (idion)

An idiot, originally, is thererfore someone who knows only the gods of their household, but not the gods of the city, let alone the gods whose breath suffuses all being. To put this in more conventional terms: an idiot is a person who manages to be a big fish within the very small pond: who would prefer to rule a world whose limits may be found in the narrow confines of their own imagination than to live in one in which they are dwarfed by all manner of things in heaven and earth. The idiot has engaged in a deliberate process of narrowing (in order to protect the ego, which is otherwise threatened by the world). An 'idiot' is, therefore, in the words of a Beatle’s song, someone who starts by making their world a little smaller and who ends up with a universe that they can rule over ("as a King of infinite space)on the condition that their world retains the proportions of a nutshell.

I also note, that contrary, to certain prevalent sophistries that idiocy is a concomitant of sophistry and not its opposite. So, yes, one can be an idiot by never straying (especially mentally) out of one place (this defines idiocy after all), but this does not mean that you can avoid idiocy simply by 'going out a lot', 'travelling', or 'knowing lots of people'. This is to neglect the paradoxical genius of idiocy, which is to manage to be an idiot, not only, when we are confined to our own home's and little social circles, but wherever we go. We can be idiots by taking our catechism of self-flattering opinions all over the world, by bustling about constantly and talking to all kind’s of people. We can be idiots who are constantly in motion, constantly chattering, constantly kissing the cheeks of strangers whose phatic babble helps makes us take our small world for the universe.

One can even be an idiot with Socratic pretensions; in an age where everyone prides themselves on acknowledging no authorities apart from themselves, do we really expect to hear people say: “Me? I blindly follow my opinions, I put myself in situations that flatter my stupid prejudices. I have never had cause to question myself on any point.” ? Of course not. Everyone is (in their own minds) a tortured artist struggling against the confines of their tortuously bourgeois situation; the last living person in a city of zombies; the last sane person in a world gone mad. But such opinions of ourselves are not guard-rails against idiocy, they are, on the contrary, almost certain signs of its grip having taken hold of our minds. Philosophy begins in wonder; the antithesis of philosophy therefore lies in complacency.

In the name of commenting on this point further: the great thing about life in our age is the ability not to be tied irrevocably to associations that were made without our consent. Thus, we are not, condemned, as most people in the history of humanity were, to be born into the same village, nor to spend what Nabokov called our allotted “point of light between two eternities” with the same people, the same rituals, in the same culture. On the other hand, we have lost the benefits of precisely such a way of life – the stability and sense of continuity that such impler, less mobile forms of life, seem -- at least to our idealizing eyes – to have possessed.

What we gain in freedom, we potentially lose in the form of angst, anomie, loneliness and other such much commented upon social ills. “Idiocy” exists as a way of compensating for such things. To ward of the disorientation that can come from the potentially overwhelming excess of motion (potential or actual, literal or figurative) that can mark our lives, we are all given the opportunity in various ways to artificially narrow our worlds. It is even necessary to do so, in order, not to have one's personality turned into a mere strategist for adapting to ever-changing scenarios. But the danger of the 'narrowing' (the 'reduction of complexity' in system theory terms) that we -need in order to survive- is that we may far too easily call ourselves gods of our own private Kingdoms: declare that we need defer to no tribunal of goodness or truth apart from that of our own (capricious) hearts, no jury but those of our peers whom most flatter us. To do this is to douse philosophy's fire.

Philosophy exists, amongst other things, to wake us from our self-contentment, and to rouse us to the wonder with which we might once have greeted the world. It exists to remind us that what we are used to taking for bright and beautiful, may only appear so, because our eyes have grown accustomed to the darkness.

If all of this traditional light imagery looks dull to you, I give it a modern (and, now personal) spin:

One of my chief reasons for doing philosophy is to try and combat the effects of the slide by which people (in whom I obviously include myself) move from a (problematic but in some ways inevitable) tendency to believe things in packages (truth is, after all, a matter of the whole) to believing things on the basis of their packaging.

To explain: virtually everyone I know is(except for the moments when they give in to the better angels of their philosophical natures) guilty of believing – at least some of the time -- that there is a certain way in which all good, right-thinking types will act or think such that no-truly good (or truly smart person) could ever deviate from this position, could never live like x, endorse y, contradict us on z or act like the inexplicably annoying guy we met last Sunday.

It is because of this kind of thinking that a conservative rocks herself to sleep at night telling herself that any self-declared progressive is likely to be, a naïve, narcissistic fool who has confused their wrass hedonism with a stupid (because meaningless) pretension to solidarity for the wretched of the earth. Conversely, it is why leftists take comfort thinking that conservatives are baby-eating monsters who would blow up whole nations for a few dollars more if only they had the nous to find their intended targets on a map of the world.

I am not, in choosing the above example mainly railing against political partisanship. (Ovid’s story is –not- about this subject.) There is a case to be made, after all, that there are something gained by a certain amount (or perhaps better, a certain kind) of political partisanship. Imagine, as the Machiavelli of the Discourses would have us imagine: a ‘republic’ in which all conflict had ceased and which everyone had submitted to a genuinely harmonious/‘non-partisan’ consensus? This might be a good thing (absence of conflict, stability) and so on, but it also might mean that people had simply been so beaten into a particular (hegemonic) way of thinking/living et cetera, that they no longer felt compelled to contest (as is in the nature of politics) the most important things.

Another argument against what I’ve been saying might go like this: especially where moral matters are concerned we might think that there are things that count as a condition sine qua non for continuing the conversation, or giving any time whatsoever to our interlocutor. For example, we might think that there are certain things (e.g. condoning mass-murder, rape, or fascism) that in and of themselves should earn our complete condemnation of a person and our refusal to listen to them. And indeed this is right: all manner of things about life and the world require us to draw a line beyond which some things count as intolerable, some things pass beyond the pale even of philosophy’s strong stomach for the counter-intuitive, the paradoxical and the shocking. Nonetheless, it is an index of our insecurity and not our wisdom when we multiply these things unnecessarily.

However, philosophy does always require of us at least a certain distance from moral certainty (and especially moral indignation) at least, in the first instance, in order to make us pause and listen to see whether the speaker has a point before we choose (rightly) to dedicate our life to fighting the monstrosity that they advocate.

Ergo, philosophy does NOT call (especially in practical terms, especially in the way we live) for a suspension of all moral judgment (on the contrary), it only calls for interlocutors in a debate to act as if they might be convinced by the other side, and for us to be suspicious of our own certainty, especially when we are roused to indignation.

In any case, apart from the hoary (but obviously important) issue of the limits of moral questioning, I still think that one of the things that most keeps people from philosophy is a tendency to think that the “right sort” (people, ideas, things) will share certain common and visible characteristics, that is easily picked up by one’s prejudices (again in the etymological sense) of one’s pre-judgments. Now, prejudices are not -- as Hans Georg Gadamer -- famously argues a bad thing (think of the moral case above), however, they are if they remain unreflected, i.e. implicit rather than explicit. And one of the functions of philosophy is to, in a Hegelian-heremenutic vein, make explicit those ideas that we have, but that are obscured to us by the sediment of tradition, or by our instinctive mechancial mouthing of the formulae which once named these things.

One (slightly unusual) way in which I have seen this truth exhibited is by witnessing how difficult it is for a sufficiently charismatic speaker to shock anyone (especially in academia) no matter how much they may set out to do so. Thus: I have at times been forced to observe unrepentant Maoists and even “out and proud” fascists still getting rapturous applause from audiences of soft liberals or “Burkean” conservatives WHO THEY SPECIFICALLY SET OUT TO OUTRAGE as long as the source of outrageous remarks, i.e. speaker in some ways conforms to the audience’s sense of who ‘their kind of person’ is. Of course, this “openeness” of audiences could be seen as evidence that the Academy is exactly the bastion of free inquiry that it is supposed to be. But, alas, this is not so. Instead, the phenomenon that I am discussing (the difficulty of shocking or offending anyone even when you’re going out of your way to do this) is based on the much scarier fact that if you say something outrageous to an audience that has for other reasons decided to like you that audience is much more likely to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that you have said something OTHER than the kind of things that you have in fact said.

Conversely, if you speak to an hostile audience, no amount of pleading (“but I’m saying exactly what you’re saying, we agree with each other, don’t you see?”) will convince them that you’re not – whatever kind of malevolent monster – you’ve been assumed to be. I’ve also seen people use this odd feature of (particularly academic life) to hide the fact that they are speaking entirely in non-sequiturs/ in a private jargon.

Again, if people feel that the diction of the speaker and their general attitude makes them appear as if they were the kind of person who would say something sensible, they will simply assume that something sensible has, in fact, been said. It’s like the Marx Brother’s joke that Zizek is always quoting: “Which do you
believe: your eyes or my words?”

By way of conclusion I will say: the examined life is (obviously) about vigilance. But it is also about realizing how our vigilance may be precisely what causes us to miss the things -for which- we keep our vigil. We are (all of us) the villagers in Ovid's stories who turn away the gods (or whatever it is we claim is worthy of our love and devotion) in scorn, just as we elevate that which we should -- by our own pronouncements -- scorn into our gods. To avoid this situation, we really need to allow a lot of strangers around our fire. We require that combination of pride and humility that is required to test things dialectically: to hold thoughts, and ideas up to the light even (and especially) our own.

But to live in the constant company of uncanny guests is one of the hardest things that anyone can do. It also (like most things) requires something like love in all of the forms familiar to us from the Greek: eros: the mad, striving love that looks intemperately beyond every object, which will not rest until we die (and without which we will not have the energy to PERSIST with philosophy). Then there is agape -- the tender, soft, charitable love, the love of parents for children, the love that gives of itself, but seeks little, that is all the things it is in that passage from St. Paul (1 Corinthians 13) read so frequently at weddings. Lastly, there is philia, friendship, without which we will not have the patience to do philosophy, or the strength to survive our moments of despair and loss that taking any kind of seemingly interminable journey will ential. Philia the love that is suitable amongst equals, without which their can be no philosophical DISCUSSION, which, if perhaps not philosophy itself, is philosophy's great, even gratuitous compensation, its halo.


-Best wishes everyone,

Mal