Richard Eldridge Plato, Zizek, and Herzog on Courage PDF

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Saggio in inglese sulla visione del coraggio in Platone, Herzog e Zizek...

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Il Mulino - Rivisteweb

Richard Eldridge

ˇ zek, and Herzog on Courage Plato, Ziˇ (doi: 10.14648/97253)

estetica. studi e ricerche (ISSN 2039-6635) Fascicolo 1, gennaio-giugno 2020

Ente di afferenza: Universit` a di Bologna (unibo)

c by Societ` a editrice il Mulino, Bologna. Tutti i diritti sono riservati. Copyright  Per altre informazioni si veda https://www.rivisteweb.it Licenza d’uso L’articolo `e messo a disposizione dell’utente in licenza per uso esclusivamente privato e personale, senza scopo di lucro e senza fini direttamente o indirettamente commerciali. Salvo quanto espressamente previsto dalla licenza d’uso Rivisteweb, `e fatto divieto di riprodurre, trasmettere, distribuire o altrimenti utilizzare l’articolo, per qualsiasi scopo o fine. Tutti i diritti sono riservati.

Richard Eldridge

Plato, Žižek, and Herzog on Courage

Abstract which courage in the end reduces implausibly to knowledge of the good, and withŽižek’s account, according to which knowledge plays little if any role in informing or sustaining either meaningful activity or hope. Herzog marks out a productive way between these two extreme positions. InSigns of Life(1968) and Encounters at the End of the World (2007), Herzog focuses on human beings who are captivated by disruptive images that pull them away from relatively empty commercial life, and he produces such images himself. These human beings and these images help us to see how we might pursue more meaningful life courageously, in a way that is founded on neither doctrinal knowledge nor arbitrary will. Keywords: Courage, Knowledge, Hope, Meaning, Ethics.

1. Courage, Philo phy, Contemporary Life, and Herzog It is a persistent co ophy that virtue, or the accomplished ability to lead one’s life well, uced to knowledge. Plato notoriously indulges in this conceit in prop nowledge of the Good as the only thing that will enable us «to give birth n t to images of virtue […] but to true virtue»1. «Anyone», he adds, «who is to act sensibly in private or public must see it»2. This holds out the hope – the vain, narcissistic, and impossible hope, as Nietzsche saw3 – that we might become fully knowledgeable resolute engineers of the courses of our lives and impervious to fortune.

1 Plato, Symposium, 212A, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1989, p. 60. 2 Plato, Republic, 517b-c, trans. G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1992, p. 189. 3 See especially F. Nietzsche, The Problem of Socrates, in Id., Twilight of the Idols (1889), trans. D. Large, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998, pp. 11-15.

estetica. studi e ricerche – vol. X – 1/2020 – 3-24

©Società editrice il Mulino. ISSN 2039-6635

This Platonic conceit might seem to be a thing of the past. Surely we have given up on all that. But

Economic theory, for example, tells us to be instrumentally rational, to maintain transitivity of preferences, and to be clear-sighted about costs and benefits in light of our fixed preference scale. Or we are offered rules about how to develop «the seven habits of highly effective people» or «high performance secrets from the best of the best». If one adopts the recommended policies, bad things can of course still happen as a result of misfortune. But one will have done the best one can in the circumstances, one need not have regrets or second thoughts, and self-assurance can be maintained. One need not question one’s own values or preferences. Meanwhile life in industrial consumer society goes on, and many people seem ill at ease: whipsawed between the pursuit of material acquisitions and social status, where there is never enough, and melancholy and anomie at things not really making sense. We develop technologies and exploit natural resources shamelessly, live amidst radical economic inequalities, and never really feel at home with ourselves, our relations, and our courses of life.

Two of his «Twenty-Four Pieces of Advice», printed on the back l Cronin’s collection of interviews with Herzog and aimed at bot contemporary life more broadly, are «Kick Back No Matter Wh ds» and «Send Out All Your Dogs»4. But what ought we to kick back a t, and how? And how do both Herzog’s characters (fictional and factual) and his own directorial work and persona model forms of courageous resistance to contemporary industrial consumer society and the production of more intense life? How is it possible to question and reflect on one’s preferences radically, against the blandishments of a consumer culture, but without reverting to the will of God, the authority of pure practical reason, or mere considerations of strength of desire? In order to get clearer about Herzog and self-reflection, it will be helpful to begin by contrasting his stance with the accounts of courage that have been put forward respectively by Plato and Slavoj Žižek: two thinkers who, whatever 4 W. Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed. Conversations with Paul Cronin, Faber and Faber, London 2014, back cover.

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Courage

their spectacular differences from each other are, join the ethical, the social, and the metaphysical in their thinking, and who set themselves in different ways radically against the status quo. But before turning to them, it is worth remarking to begin with that courage has generally gotten a bad press in modern systematic moral theory. Perhaps owing to the decline of ritualized tribal warfare using low technology weapons, to the rise of Christianity, and in general to life in large settled communities,

There is something vaguely embarrassing about thinking of oneself as courageous in one’s commitments in one’s life as a bookkeeper, computer programmer, or philosophy professor. The very word suggests bellicosity and an unattractive hypermasculinity. Perhaps «spiritedness», in Greekthumós rather than andreía (courage), is a better term for what I have in mind, and what I have in mind has some relation, too, to strength of ego. Courage as spiritedness is an important virtue, I suggest, precisely when we don’t know the good with any sufficient legislative detail for building our lives skillfully and with control, when we must nonetheless pursue coherent meaning-making over time (including measures of self-recognition and reciprocal recognition), and where this pursuit must include ongoing attachment to and integration of what one does, rather than simply waiting for things to happen.

2. Plato on C How, then, does Plato about courage, and in particular about its relation to knowledge? The most extended treatment of courage in Plato’s corpus is in the Laches. Laches proposes two definitions of courage, each of which is rejected by Socrates for good reasons. The first definition – the «man of courage [andreía, which carries a suggestion of manliness] […] is [the one] who does not run away, but remains at his post and fights against the enemy»5 in battle – is plausible enough at first blush, but Socrates points out both that there are circumstances in battle where it is courageous to fight on the move as cavalry riders do, rather than remaining fixed in place, and that there are other contexts than battle in which courage is called for, including facing up to disease, pover-

5 Plato, Laches, 190e, trans. B. Jowett, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1961, p. 134.

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ty, pain, fear, and political opposition6. Laches then sensibly enough generalizes his definition, proposing «that courage is a sort of endurance [kartería] of the soul, if I am to speak of the universal nature»7 of courage in all contexts. To this Socrates points out that there may be foolish endurance8, such as, presumably, recklessly defending a position. What is needed, apparently, beyond endurance, is good judgment about when, where, and how to be steadfast or firm. In response Laches then proposes that courage is «wise endurance»9. Here Socrates counters, and Laches agrees, that one who fully knows a craft and practices it well, such as a battlefield general who establishes and maintains an overwhelmingly superior position, or an expert cavalryman, archer, or diver who knows what he is doing, is less courageous than someone with less knowledge and skill who therefore runs more risks10. But that can’t be right, since courage would then be a «base and hurtful» quality11. When Laches then concedes that andreía «has somehow slipped away from me, and I cannot get hold of her and tell her nature»12, Nicias steps in to take over the argument. Building on a suggestion that he claims to have heard from Socrates, according to which goodness and wisdom, badness and folly are closely related, Nicias proposes that «courage is the knowledge of that which inspires fear or confidence in war, or in anything»13, or, as Socrates paraphrases the suggestion, «knowledge [epistéme] of the grounds of hope and fear»14 or of «the terrible and the hopeful»15. In a crucial turn of the argument, Socrates then invokes the signature Socratic-Platonic idea that knowledge, in contrast with opinion, is «infallible» and «set over what [fully] is», not over what either merely appears to be the case or is only te arily the case16, or, as he puts it in the Laches, «the same knowledge [ep to do with the same things in the future or at any time»17.

Ibidem, 191a-d, p. 134. Ibidem, 192b, p. 135. 8 Ibidem, 192d, p. 135. 9 Ibidem. 10 Ibidem, 193a-c, p. 136. 11 Ibidem, 193d, p. 137. 12 Ibidem, 194b, p. 137. 13 Ibidem, 195a, p. 138. 14 Ibidem, 196d, p. 140. 15 Ibidem, 198b, p. 141. 16 Plato, Republic, 477d, 478a, p. 153. 17 Id., Laches, 199b, p. 142. 6 7

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Socrate parla

If a man knew all good and evil, and how they are and have been and will be produced, would he not be perfect and wanting in no virtue, whether justice or temperance or holiness? He alone would be competent to distinguish between what is to be feared and what is not, whether it be supernatural or natural, and would take the proper precautions to secure that all shall be well, for he would know how to deal aright both with gods and with men19.

But in this case, courage, thus reduced to knowledge of the good, would then be the whole of virtue, rather than only a part of it or one of several virtues, as had been previously agreed. At this point, readings of Plato’s teaching diverge somewhat. Terry Penner concludes that . Or as A.E. Taylor puts it, «if we try to explain what any one great typical moral virtue is [according to Plato], we find ourselves driven on to define it as “the knowledge of what is good”»21. In contrast, Terence Irwin holds that for Plato knowledge is only necessary for courage (and the other virtues), not sufficient; «for real courage, nature and good training are [also] required, and the training may or may not produce knowledge, as long as it produces confidence and the desire to use it rightly»22. Against Irwin, however, w may well wonder whether having a good nature and undergoing proper aining can be sufficient for courage. Surely the desire to use courage rightly e well aimed, if the person acting on it is to be genuinely courageous n any case concedes that f he other virtues). Plato’s depictions of Socrates as simultaneously p nt among knowers (including knowing that he does not know) and pre minently courageous suggest a very close connection, perhaps identity, for Plato between courage and knowledge. In the Republic, Socrates undertakes to show that it is better to be just than unjust, even if (in the formulation of Adeimantus) a just person is «whipped, stretched on a rack, chained, blinded with fire […] and impaled»23. The philosopher, should one 20

Ibidem, 199b-c, p. 142. Ibidem, 199d-3, p. 143; emphasis added. 20 T. Penner, The Unity of Virtue, in Id., Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates, ed. by H. Benson, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1992, p. 175. 21 A.E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work, Methuen, London 1926, p. 64. 22 T. Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory: The Early and Middle Dialogues, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1977, p. 307, n. 7. 23 Plato, Republic, 361e, p. 37. 18

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peradventure exist on earth, who grasps the form of the Good via understanding (noésis), has more truth in his soul than anyone else and as a result is «really divine» (VI, 497c) and «as divine and as ordered as a human being can» be24 (VI, 500c).

, therein inadvertently picking up on the report of Aristodemus early in the dialogue that «every now and then [Socrates] just goes off like that and stands motionless, wherever he happens to be; […] it’s one of his habits»27 (175B). 26

. Overall the image of Socrates is of one who has exercised understanding (noésis) as well as any mortal human being can and thereby become unified with himself and impervious to outside influences, under his standing dispositions and commitments that are informed by knowledge. That is, he is in virtue of his knowing thereby fully and genuinely virtuous, including fully and genuinely courageous29. And now we may well wonder whether all this can quite be right. Is knowledge of the form of the Good genuinely available to us? 28

No matter what Plato’s views on the atter, doesn’t Irwin have a point in holding that knowledge may not be sufficient for courage and that a strong spirited nature, training, confidence, and desire are necessary, where knowledge is neither necessar sufficient for them? As Nietzsche charged against Plato, worshipping p nally existing abstractions might well be a way of avoiding life a nitude and temporality30. Isn’t courage often Ibidem, 497c, p. 171; 50 , p. 174. Plato, Symposium, 220a, p. 72; 221a-c, pp. 73-74. 26 Ibidem, 220c-d, pp. 72-73. 27 Ibidem, 175b, p. 5. 28 Plato, Apology, 41c-d, in Id., Five Dialogues, trans. J. Cooper, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 20022, p. 44. 29 Here my reading of Socrates is much influenced by Martha Nussbaum’s The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of the Symposium, in M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1986, pp. 165-199. Whatever one makes of the difficult topic of putative Platonic intellectualism vs. Aristotelian anthropocentrism and concern with praxis – there are in fact deep strains of both intellectualism and concern with praxis in both Plato and Aristotle – Nussbaum’s reading of Plato’s presentation of the character of Socrates is right on target. 30 See especially F. Nietzsche, «Reason» in Philosophy, in Id., The Twilight of the Idols, cit., pp. 16-19. 24 25

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enough a kind of resoluteness in making a wager on how things will or should go, precisely in conditions where we do not and cannot know how things will turn out? And

3. Žižek on Courage Unsurprisingly, Slavoj Žižek approaches courage in a way that is completely opposed to that of Plato. No knowledge of the good and thence of how to act courageously is either available or desirable. they are certainly not determined in either their being or their knowability by any Form of the Good or God. We simply don’t and can’t know either what we are doing or what we should do. As a result, Žižek claims: the dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice;it functions as a fetish that prevents usthinking through to the end the deadlock of our predicament.

Žižek bases thi t courage as facing up to chaos in the absence of knowledge in a c nti-Platonic metaphysics cobbled together out of a reading of Heg hrough Lacan. Lacan takes Freud to have shown, in his account of the h n subject in its efforts at ego formation, that the human subject always suffers from a «dehiscence at the heart of the organism»32; no unity of character under settled, rationally well-motivated dispositions and commitments is possible. The self is marked, in Lacan’s formulation, by «a radical ex-centricity to itself»; there is «a radical heteronomy gaping within man»33 and a «primordial Discord»34 between the reflective, self-mirroring human being and its environment. S. Žižek, Disparities, Bloomsbury, London 2016, p. 367. J. Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I, in Id., Écrits (1966), trans. A. Sheridan, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1977, pp. 1-7, at p. 4. 33 Id., The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, in Id., Écrits, cit., pp. 146-78, at pp. 171, 172. 34 Id., The Mirror Stage, cit., p. 4. 31

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. No contact with or knowledge of what Lacan calls the Real is possible. There is, as in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, a chaotic, not directly experienceable, unknowable, self-proliferating chaos at the heart of being, within which the human subject is housed, but in ways that must forever elude its grasp. When Hegel, in his sublation of the negative, supposes that we might over historical time and through reversals fully understand ourselves and work out coherent, meaningful, free, and satisfying forms of social life and personal characters within them, he then, according to Žižek, «obfuscates the destructive abyss of radical negativity» which is, in the end, what there is35. In the absence of Hegelian concrete determinations of free and meaningful life, we are, Žižek claims, «back at the abstract freedom which is like the night in which all (social) cows are black, a destructive maelstrom of the Real, a terrifying primordial abyss which swallows everything, dissolving all identities»36. To illustrate his point about the inaccessibility of the Real, Žižek describes the «dark flatness» in the background of David’s The Death of Marat as «an impenetrable Real which a human agent/ hero tries in vain to penetrate and master – no matter how decisively we act, “all around is darkness and impenetrable gloom”, as Boris Godunov sings in his great monologue in Mussorgsky’s opera. […] [The Death of Marat is] a desperate portrait of Marat crushed down by the impenetrable Real of history in his struggle for equality and freedom»37. Caught as we are as always already wounded subjects within this unknowable, chaotic Real, the hing to do – the only genuine exercise of courage – for Žižek is to seiz the zero-point of a new e violent clearing of the plate which opens up the space for sublimation; […] [to c t a] movement of untying [so as to establish] a zero-level that opens up the space for political intervention. […] This untying is the pre-political condition of politics, and, with regard to it, every political intervention proper already goes «one step too far», committing itself to a new project (or Master-Signifier)38.

In order to do this, that is, in order genuinely to exercise courage, we have to abandon [the thought that we are able to] open our eyes to the ultimate truth of a situation. […] Direct «education» is not able to change [our situation].

S. Žižek, Disparities, cit., pp. 369-70. Ibidem, p. 371. 37 Ibidem, p. 369. 38 Ibidem, pp. 372, 374. 35

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We need something «brutally unjust, […] something terrifying, not a sublime intervention of the divine goodness and justice»40. As examples of such a move – if it is not contrary to the spirit and letter of his call for a radical break, without planning, from business as usual – Žižek lists Benjaminian divine violence, the use of «means without ends», and the «impulsive movement into action which can’t be translated into speech or thought and carries with it an intolerable weight of frustration» that he sees in the 2005 Africo-Francan riots in the suburbs of Paris, the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri riots and 2015 Baltimore riots protesting police violence against African-Americans41. To all this, one might sa...