Expression given to some thought one was pondering, may suggest to the more contemplative that one’s heart did abandon it. To send it out, as an establishment of a fact, ejects the thought from the shelter wherein it might continue revolving, with some facets not yet heard from emboldened to speak for themselves, pipe up, and share in someone’s inner speech that is (it is a cogent definition) thinking itself under a further name. Precipitous would this debut then look when the thought has been translated into exteriority, its launching observed from another outside. No longer, so one may gather, was this thought loved enough to keep, while an excuse euphonises its abandonment, the item is branded ripe enough to utter or be borne into the greater permanence of the written. Then, were these cosmetic excuses identified as such, once left behind the sheltering protection of the idea could appear twofold. Not only did the mind shield the idea on every side. In turn it had been fortified by the close contact, so close indeed that its strength grew while the absorption lasted, and by dint of this their mutual rapport. Rapport it was; not the relation or relations of container and contained. One’s glance backwards would note how the sheltered item, so ensconced, itself also formed a shelter. Afterwards, for a stretch of time, mnemonically this dual support might glow a while.
Nor need rumination stop there. The particular delights of one’s inner theatres one also can weigh. Considerable are the ways in which the interlocutors speak their thoughts who stroll amongst them! — the varieties of speech while any soul’s silent dialogue with itself is ongoing, spoken inwardly, attracting notice and/or repelling it amidst zones that feel like stages, squares, streets, or settings of other types, perhaps more secluded. Not solely the concepts of reflection are amphibolous, but the interior spaces in which they appear and are spoken as well, albeit not in the very same way. From the franker styles of talk to the evasiveness by which the deft skills of the diplomatists signalise them, with the seductions of flattery and indirect self-praise, all can find a place inwardly; while what each says may even be essayed like a text, thus eo ipso prepared, already pre-fitted to write down. Sometimes, however, the mind’s inner auditor, a personage akin to the fabled omniscient narrator who holds together some kinds of novels, too busy elsewhere or otherwise, is unavailable to record those statements. At other moments, his powers of memory may not suffice to ready him to transcribe it all accurately. Bits may get left out, one way or another. Quite possible he is not situated close enough to the conversationalists to hear them adequately; or if he nears them step by step, he neglects to move unremarked, and they, on their own privacy’s behalf, withdraw accordingly. None of their inner words is uttered for transcribing, at least not yet. And perhaps by dint of just this reticence they later will deliver a written statement which, if the time ever did come for putting them into such a form, would join the choice ranks of those that show writing has the possibility of expressing some realities which cannot be approached through speaking (il est possible d’exprimer par écrit des réalités inaccessibles à la parole) — that is, speaking in the usual sense of the word, outer speech. In a scenario like this, its inner counterpart, the soul’s inward conversation with itself (the main activity of thinking as per one Platonic insight), may be spoken otherwise than in the mind’s lingua franca, in a different tongue that might be susceptible to translation into it, though a conveyance directly into writing would suit these words better — whenever the conversants happen to stay aloof in order that the mind in the role of bystander hear them neither clearly nor distinctly. If they prefer that which is written over the spoken, would this be a reason why such unobtrusive thinking as theirs, though while they are so engaged some base notes of an awareness (call it Wittgensteinesque) might strike the mind that some potent activity is transpiring off in the obscure recesses of itself, keeps a distance just out of earshot? These lengthier thought-scripts, earmarking themselves from the start for a more full expression in written form, are reclusive that they may gestate and ripen optimally, developing as far as they can the writing which they, in an ideal outcome, would originate. In such a rare case the results should match the intention; but the chance of this happening, is really quite slender. During the transposition (or translation) from an unheard inner speech into a writing emitted to be read amidst the outer world, the words will vacillate, the undertaking go awry. More likely as an occurrence, some reminiscence of what an inward utterance had been at inception, when already it was virtually a radiant piece of written work, will hover over the outward expression afterwards, whenever its author comes to recognise, sadly on his own behalf, that what anyone eventually did write conveys merely a sickly trace of what he has dreamed of writing (que ce qu’on a écrit ne sera qu’une faible trace de ce qu’on a rêvé d’écrire). The inferential feeling that those inchoate yet eloquent texts somewhere within his mind did not fully agree to be transferred outwards, even though at the outset he presumes they had wanted that very thing, will haunt him subsequently. Failure to transcribe anything more than a shadow of that which they had been while alone by themselves, his mind cannot not dwell on. What ever did it lack? Something that already was virtually writing, this inner speech which moved beyond the range of the mind’s ear, had merited tacit words of persuasion, suited to obtain its agreement to permit an introduction as a reality into the world; but this effort failed to persuade, either sufficiently, in by far the greatest number of instances, or even at all, in some others that are also not few. Hence, the suasion come to naught, around the resultant writing which conveys at most but a fraction of what it in its inner-mental debut seems to have been, there circles a shade of disappointment. Then one doubts whether these superlative inward writs which no one ever will know, were not held back inadvertently. Indeed one might believe they had had some say in the matter (personifying them as though that were their due). By their absence from the scene, do they not intimate there is nothing they should like to say to you (ils n’ont rien à vous dire)? — and since the latter have earned no respect from them, nor will they even deign to say that. What the more particular reasons for their non-appearance were, therefore, if in such a case someone offers any, one could of course merely guess. For they may have let slip something other than a certain deficit of politeness (certains manquements à la politesse), here indeed is notable some instructive point worth remembering (un enseignement qu’il convient de retenir). Surmising about these matters, however, should be ventured cautiously, lest anyone strip someone else’s mind down to only his abilities of verbal communication (réduire l’esprit d’un homme à ses facultés de communication orale), a small presumption which could turn back upon the presumptuous and leave him or his mind’s inner interlocutors utterly stupefied (tout simplement stupide).1
—And yet some point may come when the idea could want to bolt forth in a sprint. But then —
As an idea darts towards expression, its pace may slow, hesitations kicking in, whenever the state of the exterior is observably poor. And this ill condition, inferred not least from the fraught tone audible there, one may find even less easy to ignore when the nascent idea pertains also to it, being an idea about how the exterior itself affects the ideas that pass into it (making an entrance either verbally or in the garb of writing), by dint of the alterations through which an inner thought-thing does become an appearance in the world: thus an idea about the transmutation, wrought during the passage into any such exterior area defined at least implicitly as a space of appearances, undergone by that which then appears in the latter. The basic change which an idea of this sort will address, it itself would have to accept, were it likewise to be expressed, that is, made for the very first time to appear, now elsewhere than in the inner zone where it first grew, invisibly and perhaps inaudibly too. Hence if this idea does consent to run headlong out, would some trepidation of its own not need to be bypassed? But perhaps an impulse to harm itself, or else to witness itself being harmed, somehow is mixed into the idea’s motivation. While, on the other hand, who really could say with assurance (though by amphiboly) what the conditions within its mind are like? Conceivably this idea had good reasons for quitting the inner zones of which little can be known. Or, a further possibility, there it did find itself put before a simple choice between two bad alternatives. If the exterior is regarded as dark, would the attribute not cast something like a shadow back in the other direction, lining with further obscurity an interior that had itself already dimmed?
Hesitation could actually have the last word wherever the exterior an idea would move to enter, is the arena par excellence, the public realm. The latter at present often seem (speaking of them in the plural) in such arrears behind the great radiance with which it once shone, in such default before a strong resurgence where it might live again, that one tends to ask how it possibly could persist now, when in effect they themselves start to call for their own euthanasia (certainly some broach the matter with less frankness and more discretion of speech than do others). Recollection of what the public realm was, at its acme, as a tangible reality those who know something of history may circle about in their reading, may fortify one’s awareness of the level on which today’s lugubrious iterations usually are sited, prompting one to recognise just what a falling-off and letdown most of their low spectacles represent. (To venture onto those darkling plains, is to descend; whereas ideas and even words, if they go beyond the peripateticism of the horizontal, should prefer ascent. Nighttime clashes of armed ignorance, if one is to observe them at all, may it be from a vantage above, far above.) Taking the public realm itself as a topic in one’s thinking, whether this silent dialogue of the soul with itself is already or is not yet audible to the inner ear of the mind, could raise unease within the latter, even before it considers how it might issue its thoughts outwardly, by speech in the common sense of the term, or else in written form. That inner sentiment of disquiet, in such a case, prior to the consideration of the last externalising step, might disconcert the mind which felt it — indeed, heard it, as it would register quasi-sonically, much like the inward speech, at the same time and in the same space as those words were being spoken within the soul, by itself to itself (also perhaps beyond itself). Inwardly this sound of unease might well up with both volume and rhythm, to the point of drowning out the inner discourse concurrent with it — as though in the screening of a film the orchestral music on the sound-track would get turned up periodically and blot out throughout the darkened room the recording of whatever the actors happened to be saying. Or, amphibolously let me offer another description of the same inner-mental occurrence, one to which I can attest a bit less reservedly because something like it has struck me more than once, recently, during the run-up to writing this essay; think of the conveyance into music of the inward sensation of being pulled in opposing directions, or of being beckoned towards each of them, oppositely, by the tremulous sixth Étude for the piano by Philip Glass. For love of these sounds, let me state the point as clearly as I can: throughout his piece’s juxtaposition of the soft and the loud, the rhythmic and the interruptive, one follows a musical writing which transcribes a mind’s own trepidation as its ideas are pushed towards utterance and then pulled back, in prolonged indecision as regards the world outside. Jaunty nervousness which one may hear again and again, gestures formally towards the publicness these ideas are reluctant to assume, the publicising that makes them blush . . . But with such arrangements what does the composition want to indicate? That these ideas would prefer to abide in the seclusion afforded them by the mind and its operations. And yet their inner speech remains capable of saying this. The locale they dwell in is not yet overwhelmed (whence is only a minor issue) by dissonance or cacophony. Thankfully their residence has not begun to find itself too often amidst distractions which buzz the mind’s ears so thoroughly, interfering with the attentive listening these inner conversations otherwise would require, or without which they might fully vanish (— esse est percipi —), that a sudden active silencing of them altogether shall befall (it seems quite inevitable as a prospect).
Amphibolous terms may lead without much detour to startling results, depending on how closely and carefully they are applied, with what caution one transports them onto other “terrain.” Yet words like these might also undercut, give the lie to, dispose of themselves at the very moment of their expression, while the risk of self-falsification will be higher still if the statements are to appear in print, where all that is tentative or provisional about them might soon melt away into air. Underscoring which a figure of speech bestows on some feature of the life led by the mind while by itself, quite readily becomes over-emphasis; by construing them too definitively the recipient does any such words wrong, an injury also to the matters they are supposed to announce and to explicate. Much the same could happen when these terms intimate their unease about the fields into which they are set to be conveyed: then the right kind of emphasis eludes them, their verisimilitude will lessen, the audience having been misprised in advance.
The light shed by amphibolies makes minds murky, someone could jest, turning on its head a famous philosopher’s biting epitaph, now nearly one hundred years old, for the public realm. — Ideas about the latter, once expressed and gone forth into whatever remains of it, might effect a little clarification there; or so one may hope, considering the loud obscurity wherein it now is shrouded. Wearily and warily these words might still achieve something, though it would not behoove them to take either weariness or wariness of speech as any sort of criterion for its veracity. Instead they might regard both qualities as veracity’s concomitants, while skirting the darkness of the topic, lest their utterances splinter, rather like the feral anti-protagonists’ of Samuel Beckett, whose shorter texts over the years since their publication have become somewhat less removed, somewhat less untrue to lives as they commonly are lived, for instance Krapp’s Last Tape. Wilt of the public as intimated on a small scale by theirs, decrepitude which appears everywhere while the many “nowheres” here and now are also unappealingly full of it, I at least should prefer not to meet; a distance from it ought to be kept.
Thinking of the public realm and its vicissitudes, one might call back to mind what it once had been, when feral words and acts were fewer. (Thoughts to be ventured as minor signs of gratitude, in no way meant to ratify the abatement, but rather, insofar as they can, to interrupt if not to halt it; while also relieving such distress as they may feel by turning minds elsewhere, for a time. Indeed, on board today’s ships, one may wish to remember other crews, routes, storms, wrecks. As well as messages in bottles and faces traced in the sands at the edge of the sea.)
Speaking with reference to polities, in better days each of their public realms was, to apply what has become something of a term of art, a space of appearances where the main political actors both individual and collective would enter, move about, soliloquise, speechify, and converse, undertake a variety of actions, singly and together, and exit again, and all this not once only, in an extended or even overbearing sojourn, but possibly several times in succession. All of these participants, prior to entering, did prepare themselves for their appearance, working themselves up into the proper character or role, donning their persona — each with a specificity that was uniquely theirs. Whether it be termed persona, role, or character, this device is a communicative instrument, serving them by transmitting some image or semblance of their singular quintessence. Such an instrument, to describe its operations quite abstractly, at times will convey an impression of the uninterchangeable who, at others transmit some sense of what this person is, at yet others signalise that which he can do, revealing the capacities harboured by him alone nearly as irreplaceably. Therefore it is an instrument to be utilised in at least three different ways, when these main actors enter the space of appearances, while they occupy themselves there, and when they take their leave from it. — Nor, at the centre of the action, was that all. There were also main actors apart from human individuals: collective persons having some recognisable, tangible existence, not any merely fictive entities. These did enter the space of appearances in a similar way, likewise composing themselves such that here too each donned something like a persona: by this they hoped to show by turns who and what they were and that which they could do. And much like the individuals, these other main participants would remain at the centre for a while, then make an exit, later perhaps returning for a further appearance.
Concurrent with all these performances, but situated for the most part at variable distances from the main centre, were the greater numbers of those in supporting roles. Like the foregoing, each of these also would prepare for their entrances, adopting a similar though perhaps a bit simpler persona, utilising it then as required while moving about the venue, and when departing it. Not that those in these ranks always had less to say than did the main actors; but much of the time it was as adjuncts that they spoke, or alternately as assessors of the words and the deeds of those stationed nearer the centre of this space of appearances. — With these communicative participants, pointed silences may well have taken a larger role and spoken up more often than was the case with the main actors. — How manifold then were the interrelations between these two sets of participants, and amongst both! Nor could the distinction between them have been quite fixed; individuals and even collective persons might on occasion fluctuate from one to the other or back again.
For yet more complexity, located further away from the centre was a larger number of observers. Their entries into and exits from this space of appearances usually went unnoticed; nor would they profile themselves as performers in any conspicuous sense. Hence such self-composure as became incumbent on them once there while speaking with one another, generally tended towards the minimum, and studied personæ, as communicative devices, were not requisite. Although they too did appear, mostly it was as assessors of the appearances of the others situated more towards the centre of the venue. Assessing these appearances of theirs in turn, amidst that locale, they would probably have regarded as a distraction, occupying them no more than incidentally, if at all.
Further beyond them: the gradation with which the space of appearances faded away, a zone without obvious bounds, posing a challenge difficult to delimit or even to notice. And yet from some distance outside, this public realm itself appeared, by dint of all that was going on within it.
Almost as though by themselves, analogies with the edifices of theatres will spring to mind. This space of appearances was structured much like an open-air theatre in the round. Towards the middle of the stage the main participants would come, entering from the wings, or, lacking them since the number of vantage-points for the audience was to be maximised, emerging through trap-doors from the infrastructure of staging-rooms below; with lesser fanfare the supporting actors would find their way to the more peripheral areas around the former set; while around the stage the larger groupings of people were stationary or milling about; and yet further off, on the theatre’s fringes or just beyond them, the many several witnesses of the thing as some kind of entirety.
Concentric arrangements of areas like this, may help to propose such a theatre in the round as an analogon of the public realm.
Of course this analogy should not be pursued in too much detail. It also becomes imprecise around the edges. But its sheer schematism may help to put into relief some features of the public realm, taken as a space of appearances, as it once existed, albeit largely as an ideal.
Thought of in the terms of the analogy, at first a public realm manifests an architectural character. Primarily it comprises a set of edifices paired with a disposition of spaces. Insofar as this set of elements is constructed, it exists by enduring in its own being. Permanency is its aim and raison d’être.
Very soon, however, the analogy turns the thing around and displays quite a different facet. Insofar as the public realm is akin to a theatre, by definition it must change its offerings periodically. Not permanency but a decidedly shorter life-span begins to typify the existence of this realm, and quickly becomes its correlate. Then, with but another small movement of thought, the idea of an organism comes in (amphibolously?). Thinking of it as shorter-lived, attributes something very much like a vital force to the space of appearances. In consequence, supplanting the greatest lastingness as an ideal, an ambiguous longevity starts to reign. More rapidly than does even that mercurial establishment the theatre, this space (so the thought runs) sustains itself by dint of an internal strife which however will also hasten its ending from within — a result akin to the terminus of organisms in general. Not far off, relatively speaking, hovers the moment when this one’s inner force will vanish, in a last depletion perhaps overtaking it by surprise.
Those who think about the public realm in accord with this analogy, whether or not they notice themselves doing so, and even if the analogy does itself remain implicit (or, in its own term, off-stage), could fathom something otherwise obscure. Because in principle one deemed it a construction, the space of appearances would henceforth be set to persist enduringly in its own being, and once thus personified — another term drawn from the analogy which has no lack of them on offer! — it then tendered a promise that it was meant to last. However, because the space of appearances was also encountered just as principally in the form of a theatre, one did note it went on (a further personification) without any long pause to hint that the guarantee never really was serious. — Thus built in from the start, underlying that space there has been a basic duplicity. The troubled inception does call for thought; a thinking run through by a worrisome query: how to broach these matters so that no one would fall under irresponsibility’s sway.
What sort of lastingness the public realm may vouchsafe to itself, one can show by the most illustrious political realm, Athens’ in its heyday. For this, beyond the city’s perdurant name itself, no more than a few aspects need be invoked (hopefully without too terrible a simplification).
To the space of appearances that was Athens’ political realm, only those generally were admitted who mustered the inward strength to leave possible weakness at the entry. Disqualifying was an excessive attachment to their own private affairs and to life itself, for risks were not unknown amidst the artifice that was Athenian politics, and so it fared better when those whom the reality or eventuality of the dangers would affect unduly were kept out. Hence the perils also worked as a filter right at the entrance, prompting some to desist and keep themselves away. Otherwise the bold speaking (παρρησία) then and there, alongside the citizens’ pointed allusions to deeds more daring than words can say (κρείσσον᾽ ἢ λέξαι λόγῳ τολμήμαθ᾽),2 might have dispersed amidst a raft of weak participants, when with the influx too great a love for life would in the aggregate have obstructed freedom. Free people, preserving the city’s political artifice on a plane above banausic self-interest or the slavishness sunk still lower, distinguished themselves by the degrees of their courage, which under these conditions therefore became the political virtue par excellence3 — all the more so, as in the political realm not action only but speech as well could require it. Courage when it appeared distinctively in the political realm, or was recounted properly, might also heighten itself amongst the observers or audience. (Somewhat as one now hears it said from time to time, Courage is a contagious virtue!) Courage that was shown in such a manner, back in Athens, may at times even have persuaded some of them to take themselves beyond their own natural inclinations, outside the narrowness ratified by their common vice of φθόνος (malice, ill-will, envy), an insidious shrinkage all too often met with, when, for instance, someone less well-versed in the world, if he does hear of things beyond his own nature, presumes the account of them to be exaggerated, due to the envy in him (ἄπειρος ἔστιν ἃ καὶ πλεονάζεσθαι, διὰ φθόνον, εἴ τι ὑπὲρ τὴν αὑτοῦ φύσιν ἀκούοι).4 Hence, generally speaking, the limitation which they suffered under by nature (φύσει), whenever it too slipped into the political realm, others’ courage as encountered there might assist them to surmount. So, by the interventions of courage, tendencies within the political realm to slide again or for the first time under the sway of fears, might have been largely forestalled. And thus the stage was primed for valiant acts and words to receive their due through remembrance. Set into the grand edifice of memory, then they would persist in their own being. Once enshrined in those well-lit rooms, largely beyond the reach of human φθόνος, harboured amidst the radiance which was as though destined for them, they too, one might think, had been meant to perdure, each by its great uniqueness, forever in a close parallel with the singular works of architecture.
Lastingness as the ideal of the structures comprising this political realm where the virtue of courage furnished a foremost criterion for entrance and lent form to much that happened there, puts this space of appearances into a simplicity of relief. Countervailing this brilliance, however, the political realm’s quasi-theatrical features, no less characteristic of the thing, throw some obscurity over it.
Courage as the criterion in selecting and self-selecting the entrants into the space of appearances that was the public realm in Athens, impressed a particular character upon the gathering. It was a fellowship. All those who appeared in its space, the main participants, the supporting actors, the onlookers, had their parts to play. Such an assembly of men in the city’s concerted artifice, political in content and purpose, had by dint of the exclusive filter around itself transcended the mere togetherness imposed on all — on every collective existence into which human beings as physical creatures were fitted, slaves, barbarians, and Greeks alike, as the Athenians themselves might have said, or into how ever high or low an economic or social category they were slotted, as today’s invidious jargons prefer to remark. Mere togetherness of human beings, realised on these other planes of common life, pushed them together compactly, such that their relations did not comprise the distances requisite for appearances in the better sense of the term. Palpable in the midst of such mere togetherness were several tempos, since for those bound together the basic concern was how they would manage the urgencies of life5 — the pressing demands of physical existence which could hardly be deferred for very long. And, though the participants in the public realm in Athens did transcend the brute togetherness of human life on other planes, in favour of setting the distances amongst themselves whereby a space of appearances would come into its own, nonetheless their political fellowship could not lift itself entirely beyond the urgent demands of physical existence. Thus the appearances in that space cannot be characterised without speaking of their tempos; the several distances between them also carry indications of relative speed and of various styles of movement. Courage itself, regarded under this aspect, appears to diverge similarly in the velocities whereby courageous people will take stock of a situation and then spring into action. And, once come to think of it, this characteristic does seem obvious. Must I really introduce the banality that some tigers do leap faster than others?
(Men. — Here some words may be in order about courage as the essential criterion for those who would participate in the political realm, since a better notion of the trait has become hard to attain, as a consequence of the low wrongs of today’s intellectual fashions, which abet and espouse the general acceleration into totalitarianism. Worse than baseless it is, therefore, to identify the virtue of courage as an exclusively masculine attribute and then to call it “toxic” — what does shriek through this stigma, if not mere nature’s rancour, φθόνος? The adversarial trick represents none-too-brightly one of the badges of anti-honour on which οἱ φθονεροί of all genders pride “themselves” while they imagine they are serving to theorise or rethink the political, that is, to deconstruct, demean, demolish it: a programme which as actuated through them manifests neither gratitude nor grace. — Nor does one witness much lovely dancing amongst the adherents in those odd academic/activist coalitions. Their performativity notwithstanding, they lack the requisite centres of gravity, the one thing that would matter to those bodies, so prurient and puerile, so unstably engendered and troubled, so precariously intersectional, in their pretences of existence. Could they any longer even know or say what dances are? Where ever has that golden watchword gone, It’s not my revolution if I can’t dance to it! These more commendable dancers, like many other items branded as antagonists (Antigonists?), are cancelled or worse by today’s killjoys. — On the contrary, remarkably, a select few of the most “courageous men” whom one may greet whenever there is room enough and freedom for one’s own reading of political history, were women! Too much a detour would it entail to bring in their names, dates, facts, hopes, etc. Instead let me merely note they appeared on several of history’s “sides” (or shores), not only on those to which a student of history might do honour as being the “right” ones. But regardless of their side, to the particular courage of these figures some recognition is owed, in accord with a better Catonic ideal for historical pursuits.
Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni.
Bravery as shown by these heroines of the past, eminent actors in the polities of their times, may prove able to draw anyone upwards, ever an awakening force no matter how long ago all that was. The small-mindedness of the merely natural and its venomous envy, should not forestall him from raising himself over the lowlands of partiality. At least in considered judgements if not throughout all the researches on which he is persuaded to set out, φθόνος may be slain by ἄσκησις and πειθώ. Their triumph told or not told, matters less, than that the tale of it remain exemplary in itself.)
Tempo was an essential feature of the space of appearances in Athens: to recognise this may also help one to understand why the twofold analogy remains so apt. Not the invocation only of the architectural, that yield of stationary music as it has been typified, but also of the theatrical, with its complex and variable rhythms of entrances, perambulations, and exits, would elude an inquirer if somehow he ignored the realities of tempo. The theatrical side of the analogy tends to suggest that the space of appearances fared poorly when those tempos abated. Without the participants variously in movement, the space would dwindle away; and yet the life with which they all invested it, was intrinsically transient, whereas the public realm taken as an exemplification of that which is built, did aim at perdurance as its ideal. Mortality advances upon the space from out of its likeness to the theatre; its own death will supervene far sooner than in the case of edifices which may at some distant time perhaps fall or not fall into ruin. The quasi-theatrical life filling the space of appearances in Athens, would also after not all that long induce weariness and then just a bit later a more thorough decrepitude, and thereafter — the further trajectory downwards may easily be filled in. Yes, analogies pertaining to organic existence, contradict the analoga of architecture, that wondrous endeavour which approaches the everlasting as nearly as is possible for any artifice of men. A most serious contradiction! Insofar as the very definition and description of the political realm did rely also on these analogies (and how could reliance on them possibly have been avoided?), some element was lodged in it which later would work as a dissolvent from within.
Analysing, untying by force of comprehension, various strands of the political realm par excellence, those woven through it by the architectural and the theatrical analogies on which its notion relies, will always be done quite imperfectly. Why indeed would one want to disentangle the thing all the way to the end? Weaving anew what one had just untied, will be a better mode of failing to think about the endeavour that was the polity. Failure like this is the thinking.* — Too fanciful a thought of what thinking itself could be? — Well, fancy is fertile only when it is futile.6 Dwelling on its own impasses might actually bring it further. Had only some greater number schooled themselves in this kind of fancy (an intellectual power of imagination), launching themselves above the narrow horizons of physical nature, perhaps our present arrangements might have been just slightly better than they are. — Though the last thing I should want to do, would be to assign this thoughtful thinking as a duty or a piety (die Frömmigkeit des Denkens),7 nonetheless now to me it seems far from importune to ask or to hope that one not forget how short the true classical period in Greece was, and that we are in effect still nourished by it today (wie kurz das wirklich klassische Zeitalter in Griechenland war und dass wir sozusagen noch heute davon zehren). Athens’ political realm, likened to a theatre, had brevity built in; to the edifices of architecture, exemplary longevity it still displays: after the city’s acme a quick decline, and the inclusion in vocabularies for the polity of concepts drawn from the processes of organic and physical life, succeeded by a very long afterlife. Altogether this history does indeed give us food for thought, if not also for action, millennia later. For how much longer this bounty may continue to exist, one shudders to anticipate; this is or will be the watershed of the present. Honesty does prompt one to reckon with such items as the defamations of the Occidental heritage in many quarters, the deliquescence of scruples when the meagre remnants of earlier limits foreign and domestic melt into air under the touch of an evermore hungry power-politics in many countries, etc., etc. — cognisant of all these signs of decline, one really should hear the dark humour of a situation where, more than in earlier periods, replete with nonsense though they were, there are so many absurdities in our time that it is hard to assign first place (es gibt so viele Torheiten der Epoche, dass es schwer ist, einer der Vorrang zu geben).8 What further ambit can the political or public realm extend to the contest of these follies, all now swarming as though directed in a semi-planned, semi-chaotic miasma, before it as a space of appearances itself will sicken and die altogether?
* A knotty point. — This un-unravelled nexus may provoke one to overhear, as speech already underway, a silent dialogue on the question whether cloth also is an apt image of the city. (A query not only for politics but for urbanity inter alia as well.) What these interlocutors within the soul do say, one’s mind as yet cannot hear; but that right now it is going on, this one should find thought-provoking: though to admit one took the hint, the mind must be broad, its step sure.
Overdramatic assessment? Yes, most likely. But the excess of drama stems not least from having analysed this space as though there were merely one such. More adequate will it be to speak of spaces of appearances. The plural introduces further complexity, and with it a more subtle kind of drama that may help to counteract the other.
An outline of the spatial arrangements within a space of appearances, was not drawn in error, earlier; but the real challenge is to picture how several such spaces are related to each other. Putting the matter in schematic terms, they overlap or are interspersed with one another — these are the admixtures within the context of a single polity. Moreover, polities, amongst the Greek cities millennia ago, as now on quite a larger scale with the “international system” (adopting this term for want of a better), also exist amongst themselves in a vast number of layerings. Hence the spaces of appearances proliferate almost inconceivably, each with its own provisions for entrances, actions, and exits, its own ways of freeing itself somewhat from the “urgencies of life” without leaving them quite unheeded, its own variable arrangements of tempos. One stumbles to find the mot juste for them in the aggregate. Perhaps their collectivity would best be termed a throng.
Wherever one may stand vis-à-vis these spaces, inside and/or outside any and/or all of them, or else (a position still conceivable though barely) in some refuge “nowhere” apart from their entirety, there is a conundrum. How to draw a rough and ready mental blueprint of the entirety of it, a helpful map by which anyone may orientate himself at least in thought if not also in action, poses a considerable challenge, and that in nearly the optimal instances. All the harder will the effort prove, since each of these spaces does in some mode also appear — when regarded from some vantage-points exterior to it. From those vantages it too will be marked as coming to appearance, abiding there a while much as do others of its sort, then departing again. And these comings, stayings, and goings* would seem to occur even were it configured quasi-architecturally, which under today’s conditions it in all likelihood would not be. While in the event that the various spaces of appearances are structured like theatres, the difficulties facing anyone’s mental cartography multiply; becoming yet more insuperable, the further these spaces adopt the conceptuality of organic life whose terms do proceed to overgrow the other, better analogies. Whereas, in a case that is worse still and increasingly common, the very possibility of appearances within a space dwindles away with the compaction of relations amongst previously free human beings into the “mere togetherness” where physical nature sets the agenda.
* Or: to-ings, there-ings, and fro-ings?
All these spaces of appearances together, for their part, themselves are not, or not yet, compacted into a more dense state that is something like “mere togetherness imposed on all.” With their manifold layerings, interspersednesses, juxtapositions they do however form a confusing amalgam. How quickly the ensemble could devolve into a flammable and explosive mélange, is one of today’s live questions.
Infrequent but all the more conspicuous and worthwhile to reflect on, at the present time, would be the moments when any one space of appearances discloses what it is. If this essence is not precisely unique to it alone, nonetheless its distinctiveness attracts notice which, when given, may help to transform it into a memory. Should it perpetuate itself as one, then, conserved along with it, a recollection could endure of the multitudes amongst which it appeared, from which it shone forth, out of which it was plucked. Against such a background — I surmise it is the present’s — what the space of appearances has been in its generality, and what that particular space of appearances was remembered as being, are items which do clarify each other reciprocally. And on the contrary, were the attempt made simply to derive either of these essences from the other, it would reveal an ungainly misstep on the part of contemplation (θεωρία).
Καὶ μήν, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, ὥσπερ ἀπὸ σκοπιᾶς μοι φαίνεται, ἐπειδὴ ἐνταῦθα ἀναβεβήκαμεν τοῦ λόγου, ἓν μὲν εἶναι εἶδος τῆς ἀρετῆς, ἄπειρα δὲ τῆς κακίας […].
— Socrates, in Plato, Republic, bk. iv, 445c
καὶ διὰ ταῦτ’ οὖν τῆς μὲν κακίας ἡ ὑπερβολὴ καὶ ἡ ἔλλειψις, τῆς δ’ ἀρετῆς ἡ μεσότης·
ἐσθλοὶ μὲν γὰρ ἁπλῶς, παντοδαπῶς δὲ κακοί.
— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. ii, vi, 1106b
Unless perhaps one hides away in a “nowhere,” remembering that the spaces of appearance are multiple and many, seems the better course. For, amidst their profusions, could the metaphysical avowal of uniformity or the simple plausibly still illuminate the phenomena of the public realm? What possible insights would abscond if virtue (ἀρετή) is defined as an instantiation of oneness?
Pause to consider this metaphysical notion of virtue as being a singular excellence. Defined in this way, virtue is raised in stature above everything multiple, and when it goes amidst the latter it stands out. Such uncommon distinctness may not meet with recognition from the others who have in themselves less of ἀρετή and more of the manifold. Evidently this lack can take numerous forms. Φθόνος has ready many little tricks by which the eyes and the ears will remain wide shut. And these low struggles may altogether exceed the power of the “political virtue par excellence” to win. Well-counselled then will the courageous be who skirt them in advance. Acknowledging all this at the right time, would however require a further sort of — courage.
The virtue (ἀρετή) that is courage, properly considered in accord with the principle of the political realm itself, i.e., also deemed an “appearance” to be regarded “perspectivally” in the round, discloses itself as other and indeed more than an instantiation of a uniform oneness. Its varieties are shown. (Perhaps it even contains multitudes. Where the word may be spoken univocally, the thing spoken of univocally, becomes a question.) Metaphysics’ espousal of virtue’s simplicity, for its part, then becomes thought-provoking. Was that metaphysical notion less a flash of insight than a laborious result? Had the philosophers raided the political realm, snatched one variety of courage from amidst its fellows, transfigured its existence and its essence as they rendered it into the idea of ἀρετή, and then found themselves struck with wonder at this virtue’s almost ineffable excellence of simplicity? If that summary is plausible, then one could traverse the route backwards, arriving back in the realm where the participants were more aware of courage’s various sides, by dint of the experience they had of them in their own persons. Alighting amidst the fellowship of those courageous people, one might ask them how important to them was the virtue’s selective character. And moreover, how central a position had it taken in their political realm whose space of appearances, so one would like to believe, courage served as a filter to uphold.
Yet by no means should those old metaphysical positions be set aside entirely. What they aver of the opposite of ἀρετή, vice (κακία), does sound plausible today, albeit in quite another way than their statements perhaps did intend. In the case of vice, those philosophers may also have educed their notion of it from the political realm, though leaving its derivation unremarked. If courage was indeed the criterion for fellowship there, then from its space of appearances vices would tend to be filtered out somewhat in advance, such that when they did appear there, their sheer variegation and divergence made them conspicuous. What vices were, therefore, metaphysics had some cause to define by its notions of multiplicity and distance from the median. In the case of the vices evident in the political realm, their translation into ideas did not involve much of a transfiguration, indeed hardly any at all. There were fewer steps in the procedure, since the ambiguities of these phenomena were the very things the philosophers sought to convey intellectually. These were items that could only be spoken in various ways, never univocally, not least since one could hardly say what any particular instance of vice was, and numbers of words accrue as a stopgap where precision was difficult or unknown.* Now, metaphysical corollaries such as these do sound plausible when one relates them to the political realm — so long as one does not omit to consider how they may have been drawn from it. For with the vices as with the virtues translated out of the Athenian space of appearances and situated on quite another plane for the benefit of metaphysics in its inception, if this transposition is described plausibly then a possible route in the opposite direction may also open up, which in a better case one might actually traverse, for the sake of the political realms today.
* À propos these many vagaries which as it were essence itself would not touch, to these philosophers the cela, dire cela, sans savoir quoi sentiment might have appealed, moving them for once towards virtual agreement with a modern dramatist whom I’ve mentioned before. — Of course, during the best period of antiquity in Athens, realms other than the political that were also set apart from the “mere togetherness” of the lower domains of life, did also exhibit a share of vices, but these sorts and the treatment befitting them, in words or in other ways, are not germane here.
Not only is there a greater number of political realms in an array very much more complex than during earlier periods, but the instances where courage serves as a general filter and helps thus to sustain the level of quality within a space of appearances or a set of them, themselves become conspicuous by their rarity, if indeed any now still exist. Hence, whenever they appear within these spaces, the more specifically political vices, such as, to take the most patent of them, cowardice, may garner attention, but this occurs not by dint of their infrequency. How seldom actually does it happen that they advance to the forefront while intact behind them in implicit contrast is a backdrop relatively uniform, an arrangement that would indicate the primacy of the virtue of courage and others closely adjacent to it. Neither in its more exalted flights, as the courage to risk one’s life, counterbalancing the usual love of life with a love for the city or the polity, nor in the more prudent ranges where it offers a reservoir of bold strength to be drawn upon in emergencies, does such a virtue seem to filter the set of prospective entrants to the political, indeed to any public realms. Selectivity might hover over the entrances, but that the public and political virtues remain factors there, one would honestly hesitate to claim. So numerous are the vices which come to waft in, that one well can wonder what in fact is being done by the filters.* If ever such a selective criterion did inspire a space of appearance with its unique grand simplicity, already and even for a while now the filtering devices seem to discharge something quite different into them: manifold complexities which foster in response amongst their denizens so much perplexity, and this in a multitude of ways. — Furthermore, taking the metaphysical postulates at their word, vices prove next to impossible to define as regards their essences, so far down into multiplicity have they fallen; and thus in these deficient regions they all are equal, even though some are more equal than others, insofar as they succeed in the rush into political or public realms, long since become spaces where what really matters is to garner a profile by putting on a show, again and again and again. For there, in a further convolution, very quickly, the habits of attention-seeking that elsewhere is merely obnoxious, can by sheer rashness themselves amount to most conspicuous vices.
* Does the word, applied here, do much else than make a sad joke?
Whether it is selectivity which is exerted around the edges — the entrances and the exits — of the political realms, considered as spaces of appearances, becomes an actual question. A different principle may now be involved, if there is not set in its place none at all. Or else, worse still, negative selection — a deliberate shepherding of the worse in — so bad a thing anywhere, and here in particular. A set of operations by which a polity in effect extends the route it had opted to follow towards its own death, prolonging the demise for reasons which would leave thought, the silent dialogue that the mind can sustain when by itself, at first too stunned to ponder.
Spaces of appearances devolve such that multitudes of vices, and especially the political sort, do obtain berths there — this is a phenomenon striking in its own right, with or without recourse to the amphibolies or the shorthand offered by the old metaphysical propositions. Immense in their vicious aggregation, what any is will elude an exact statement. Moreover, a few spaces of appearances have themselves begun to appear at definite spots amidst the all-too-complex amalgam, and more and more an opportunity comes to say what they are, or were: an unsettling turn of events, because seeing them as such one suspects they are as it were taking a last bow prior to disappearing forever, wherever be the shores for which they shall depart . . .
—Yes, yes, I’d like to bid a timely farewell to all of them too, if it comes to that, but where are you going with all this? It seems rather abstract and obscure.
—Well, what strikes me, whether it is thought which places itself in medias res amidst these spaces of appearances, or action, is the way in which either starts to accentuate that one word as if in itself it were always already set in italics.
—Come on. What word is it?
—The one you just uttered! “What.” One does tend to give it emphasis when some items that appear are so multitudinous in themselves that even their lack of essence becomes an inscrutable puzzle, while the essences of others one intuits a single time just before they vanish, in fraught minutes which may have their reasons, though prying too much into them would probably be unseemly. So perhaps, whenever next the conversation focuses on politics (and where now do political themes ever really not lurk?), one could try an experiment in fleeing from the word “what” — just for fun, to see how far the utterances then will manage to go. Probably they won’t get far at all, grammar being, oh, what it is. But these fluctuations in the language which, er, appear to be tied to the vicissitudes of the public and political realms, put me in mind of something else. Namely —
When the appearances grow so numerous within the complex amalgam of their spaces, and a better notion of a median between a surfeit and a sparsity of them is forgotten, areas quickly can become overfull, though it is probable that these will be spread throughout in uneven distributions. Where they are compressed too nearly together, there may result not a further instance of “mere togetherness” but rather something like a crowd, thick with a crowd’s density. Moreover, if these appearances are replete with symbolism, such a crowd may well be likened to the proverbial forest of symbols, and then the idea of jungles or deserts or still less hospitable zones does readily spring to mind. Movements in this direction no one should minimise; though variegated, they may amount to a general tendency: plotting its trajectory by a more kinetic variant of the mental cartography I brought in earlier, one fears the arrival of moments which together will describe not an arc but a decline, and even a steep slope down.
These and kindred presentiments may in a better case do something to slow down the descent they fear, and in the best conceivable one, to help halt it outright, while in a worse they might abet it; but here my interest in the spaces of appearances is mainly theoretical. Crowded as they are with more and more bad multiplicity, not only do the objects of the interrogative “what” — that is to say, essences — signalise the pressures by the changes that they too seem to undergo. Beyond that delicate attestation or formal indication, as thought-fostering as it could prove, one could detect something else transpiring with language. Since many of the appearances under compression are first and foremost speech — public statements, remarks, declarations, comments, etc. — how they are spoken acquires significance it would have neither borne nor shown earlier, when the space was less crowded. This interrogative word at its more basic is an index of pressure. “How” is pressed out! How the word is expressed!* These tones really should be listened for, though conveying them will be a challenge: at present the data are many, the terms scarce. So, as a parallel to the notion of speech-acts, let me call these items, the objects of the interrogative “how,” speech-appearances. How any such item does sound, already embodies a subtle inquiry, though one now becoming more and more audibly concrete; while this consequential shift stems from alterations in the spaces of appearances. These parameters of the how remain to be fathomed. Already, a keen-eared inquirer may surmise, dextrously wielded the interrogative word could prove a handy analytical tool; but for that his grammar and his syntax, not yet nimble enough, do require stretching, while finesse of exclamations and intonations too he should polish up. Think of all there is to be done with this one word! Through sportive linguistic play he will get to know — how.
* Exhalation and/or exhilaration are audible characters marked especially by the word “how” (likewise with the Netherlandish “hoe”). Counterparts elsewhere vie to accommodate or comment on other subtleties, however. English ears may find that a few do rush in, even as cacophonies, though the aural strangeness of it could also give them pleasure.
Speech-appearances are frequently assessed informally for their “how,” but in general this manner of approach has not been put into writing as a formal statement.* One rare instance where it was, made its way into print during the tense period before the First World War, in a book about noise (der Lärm). Perhaps then already, more or less aware of this as he may have been, the author’s ears were noting how the changes would likely come in the political realms, listening closely while various speech-appearances were pre-auditioning some years in advance for that later Europe-wide catastrophe. Once again I recur to a favourite hypothesis, on this occasion varying it to suggest that the sonic dimension, in unique contrast to all the others, does comprise vectors by which the noise of some moments of futurity can reach the present long before they themselves ever will. Quite unlike all other phenomena, the audible sort do at times show themselves to have been harbingers. (How to divert the premonition from becoming an idée fixe, is a challenge to be met carefully.) Indices they then uniquely are, and thus now I link them to the political and the public realms with their spaces of appearances.
* Granted, in one section of his opus, in the inimitable Heideggerian “diction” (»Diktion«) the manner (die Weise) and the how of something’s being-said (das Wie des Gesagtseins) are mentioned, but hardly a line later they are dismissed as incidental to the explicandum, an ongoing shared understanding of that which is said (ein vorgängiges Mitverstehen des Geredeten), that is, in plainer terms, mutual comprehension reached by words perhaps a bit impatient and instrumental. Thus it seems his treatment held no magnifying glasses in readiness for the aspects which now concern me. (Vide Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, pt. i, sec. i, ch. v, §34.) Possible it is I suppose that some active force in my mind has “repressed” a recollection of some title or titles that would otherwise fittingly be introduced here, for the sake of intellectual good conscience, if only in order to confute it or them. But none does heed, how ever indirectly, the summons to appear in awareness, and neither time nor inclination have I to chase down those mere possibilities.
Jene rein perzeptive Seelenfühlung, die die unbewusste Direktive auch für alle Menschen- und Weltkenntnis bietet, rechnet nur wenig mit dem, was einer redet; aber sie weiss sehr feinhörig das unbewusste Wie der Rede zu erlauschen, welches niemand klar in seiner Gewalt hat. Ja, ich glaube, dass der Mensch sogar sich selber nur so lange versteht, als er schweigt; sobald er aber zu reden beginnt, ist sicherlich irgend jemand unter der Hörern besser imstande, den Redenden zu verstehen, als er sich selber zu durchschauen vermöchte.
— Theodor Lessing, Der Lärm, ch. iii
Whenever the amalgam of all such spaces is filled overmuch from within, beset by inner multiplicities, then occasion comes and some speech-appearances utter their piece of the future, through a disclosure which they who listen impersonally fathom best, following it not for the what or the who but solely for the how. No understanding without these noise-surfeits!
How a speech-appearance speaks, in medias res of the political or public realms amalgamating into a thicket, becomes an item of formal, theoretical interest. How its speaking is heard, interpreted, understood, likewise. And, emitted under all the pressure, the sounds that are its constituents do also tend to speak on their own behalf, often disjointedly, jostling at cross-purposes. Altogether then there will be rather more than one “how” or even two to consider. Regarded from outside or from above with as much impartiality as a witness, a theoretician, a historian can muster, it quickly becomes a perplexing scene! For their part, the right terms with which to give account of it, seem more and more elusive once one starts to ponder them. No sooner does the external observer notice a keen-eared (feinhörig) auditor committing himself to listen in on (zu erlauschen) the speech’s unconscious “how” (das unbewusste Wie der Rede) better than can he who spoke it (der Redende), then these notions themselves sound off. Unsurely each as introduced does waver, and how!
Reading slows down in response. It may set aside the larger question whether the activity of hearing for its part does also have “hows” calling for thought, and the smaller, how each of its manners if they do might then possibly be described and considered; for there appear yet other “hows” to weigh. How does such an acute listener alongside the others less acute actually deem himself able to understand (zu verstehen) the “how” of the utterance he hears? If he assures himself that something like a purely perceptual empathic power in the soul (rein perzeptive Seelenfühlung) is in this instance operative and enabling him to comprehend how the other is speaking, would this assurance not be tendered in the form of inward utterance — as would indeed any more sustained reflection on the “how” of the other’s words? Whether his inner conversation about them is styled talking (die Rede) or speaking (das Sprechen), how could an outsider aver that it only commences once they are finished, and would not make itself heard concurrently with them? They would not find him in a mood of pure wordless receptivity in which he keeps silent (er schweigt) — or would they? But if not, how then do they once having entered his mind engage with the counterparts it sends to meet them? How to describe the encounter: with the noble terms of amity and fellowship, or in some more cautious or complicated ways? Not a matter easily decided at any point, and even less so when silence and not speech is said (a touch of the illogical here!) to establish the very condition of a proper self-understanding, such that only while silent would someone be able to look himself through (er vermöchte sich selber zu durchschauen). — In order to counterbalance the intuition that inward turbulence and unclarity are the wages of speech (as though these inner conditions somehow were punishments!), one might seek to identify whence it hailed, thus better estimating its proportions and its potency. Had it not emerged when the spaces of appearances in the aggregate were already overloaded? That murky state of the world, how ever aware or unaware (unbewusst) of what the whole man was doing the author in him could have been, the thinker did translate and transfigure into his idea of the speaking mind’s interior opacity. That idea, if such was in fact how he proceeded, historians, theoreticians, and witnesses today ought to recall as a cautionary lesson.
How many are the questions amidst the appearances! (None let me hope is too idle.) Perhaps of themselves they multiply much like those which pertain more immediately to the amalgam of those spaces, that zone whose horizons become so numerous and obscure which represents the broadest context for the themes I have been rehearsing, whether they trace discontented circles around the present, or for a shift of perspective hover over an epoch such as the Athenian at its acme.
Great numbers of spaces of appearances are amalgamating, yielding an immense surfeit — this attestation may seem plausible, but actually it does not go far enough. Not only polities or other kinds of public realms have their variegated spaces of appearances; they are likewise correlate to those other entities, less specific and yet in their ways as real, civilisations. While talking or speaking of these things may have the markings of a fool’s errand, one need only call to mind today’s watchword of “civilisational suicide” to realise that a civilisation may indeed appear as an entirety, when regarded from some vantage-points within or near the spaces of appearances in the aggregate. When it so appears, a foreboding will likely hang over the scene, the suspicion that this could well be the last time — aroused by a morbid association of ideas, not easily evaded. At the same time those who hope to see it thrive again, might summon up their courage and resolve to venture out publicly in its defence; at this moment of peril they may resolve themselves to appear, risking much and at times their very lives to do so, and thus distinguishing themselves individually. — Though I shall not now dwell on the virtue of it, their heroism does call for gratitude.
Occidental civilisation, of course, is the one which appears to be courting its own death, by protracted indirection and eager deferral of its passage à l’acte. If only the others would carry out the deed . . . A glance around the room in Western Europe, especially, if its hypocrites are disregarded, which is not hard to do, anno 2026, but also elsewhere in the West, cannot really ignore the waiting for euthanasia to come. Some treacherous rancour peeps out; undertones of provocation suffuse it; these implicitly are entreaties. Hence one reckons them too as speech-appearances, likewise to be assessed for their “how.” But I digress.
Courage as a virtue so conspicuous in a dire time, once again elicits thought. It is no filter at the many entrances of the political realm, but amongst its capacities now more prominent is a criterion-function — a negative advisory. From those who abuse courage, in their practice and in their theory, one is well-counselled to keep one’s distance. To twist courage represents not so minor a vice, whose mode of spreading (in contradistinction to the virtue’s special brand of contagiousness) one might liken to a physical infection, or the even worse transmissions that catch one’s mind unawares. — These points spring back to mind currently, occasioned by the approach of a significant date, the twenty-fifth commemoration of the mass-murder committed in New York on September 11, 2001. Nefarious intentions with regard to the event on the part of the present Mayor I’ll do no more here than mention. (To them and to him — that veritable man-dummy — at a later time I may perhaps devote a few choice words.) Yet I fully expect that some will grasp the chance to reprise an odious cliché put into circulation even while the fires still were burning, and insist that the perpetrators indeed evinced courage.
Errant thoughtlessness and gross lack of taste, stood behind that avowal, but they cannot excuse it, as though to them who uttered it no “better ideas” could possibly occur, then as now. On the contrary, such an exculpation worsens the offence. The complacency of it soon devolves into complicity. Nor did some halt before the tactlessness of calling in the higher art of making definitions to last, gesturing pretentiously in an Aristotelian direction. An embarrassing spectacle: what possessed them to do it? For an answer one might delve into the sundry/Sunday reveries of those intellectuals as slipped into print, and not only in the vicinity of the slaughter; but coming out again after the inquiry, one’s research would finish in vain. Still one would not know why. They themselves might not either.
Courage did once inspire an exemplary political artifice where life itself was risked in order to participate. Yet this risk to be run can only be accounted a risk when a considerable love of life remains a primary datum, the love of the singular life that is the participant’s. To speak of that life and that courage as though they were interchangeable with the phantasmic eternal sort (so lustily envisioned a paradise) whereby such killers hypnotise themselves before the fatal act, is quite obscene. What life of their own do the latter risk, after all? Deeds of homicide they commit after having slain the human being in themselves! What a sick jest: to imagine any worthy public realm following on or even emerging from out of such ferocious cruelty. — If that forfeiture of life could be transmuted by a political alchemy into the semblance of any political virtue at all, it would on inspection show itself, and this in the very best case, to be rashness, which strays from the median of the old Aristotelian constructions, and may therefore even find itself turned into a species of vice.
Not merely the political and public realms with their various spaces of appearances, but also the civilisation that is Western with its, are actively vandalised by these styles of abusing the old key virtue of courage. Once more one asks what the driving motive could actually be. Propelling today’s vandals who immerse themselves in such destructive endeavours, is there animosity akin to the ancient rancour, φθόνος? But how would this retort of mere nature ever be heard, and its purport understood, by those who seldom if ever decamp for Athens in its best age? (They do not mute, rather their carelessness is flaunted when these truants cloak themselves in Aristotlesque dicta.) This sort make themselves incapable of aiming their ears at the baseness that persists in them — an inner encounter for which courage indeed might be required.
Better to ignore yet without forgetting those stupidities of twenty-five years ago, even if, as seems likely, they soon are repeated, and yet there is the encouragement ex negativo such intellectual foolery provides. While recurring to the virtue’s function in filtering the participants in the Athenian political realm, one asks whether a civilisation, when it takes a more evident form in its various spaces of appearances, is sustained likewise? Granted, Western civilisation’s spaces have long been configured more like an archipelago than the old city square, and for endurance a long historical voyage overmatches Athens’ brief heyday, even while the memory of its acme accompanies the crew on this ship; hence it is a stretch to liken these spaces of appearances and their activities to the political artifice that was Athens: but amongst these wayfarers too, at the end of the day, one can notice moments of fellowship, a few free endeavours. There still is a quantum of self-selectivity, still a criterion — though whoever heeds them has reason not to want to be seen too much. But of which older elements is this filter made?
8 Notes
- Michel Houellebecq, “L’euthanasie de l’Occident.” ↩
- Theseus, in Euripides, The Suppliants, ll. 844-45. ↩
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, ch. ii, sec. 5. ↩
- Pericles, in Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, bk. ii, xxxv. ↩
- Arendt, op. cit. ↩
- Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, ch. 3, 3. ↩
- Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik.” ↩
- Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution.” ↩
