by Giorgio Agamben
“In Genoa at the time of evening twilight I heard coming from a tower a long peal of bells: it seemed it would never stop, resounding as though it could never have enough of itself over the noise of the streets out into the evening sky and the sea breeze, so chilling and at the same time so childlike, so melancholy. Then I recalled the words of Plato and suddenly they spoke to my heart: all that is human is not, on the whole, worthy of being taken very seriously; nonetheless (trotzdem)… ”
This aphorism from Nietzsche’s Human Too Human titled seriousness in play (Ernst Im Spiele, 628) quotes almost literally the platonic passage from The Laws, which, according to scholars, contains the definitive expression of the philosopher's political thought: “The affairs of men are certainly not worthy of great seriousness (megales men spoudes), nonetheless it is necessary to deal with them seriously (spoudazein); and this is not a happy fate (ouk eutyches).” (803b) A few lines later, the speaking character, simply named the Athenian, adds: “I say that we must take seriously what is serious (to men spoudaion spoudazein) and not what is not so; and that God by his nature is worthy of all the seriousness of a blessed being, while instead man, as we said before, is a puppet designed for the amusement of God, and this is really the best thing for him; that every man and every woman, conforming to this condition, should spend their lives playing the most beautiful games (paizonta… kallistas paidias), contrary to what is believed today.” (803c)
The word 'nonetheless' explicit in Nietzsche, in a manner characteristic of Plato's late style in the text of the Laws, is expressed by a series of reinforcing and adversative particles that are difficult to translate: ge men, which Nietzsche, with his sensitivity as a philologist, renders as trotzdem — however, nonetheless. By truncating the quotation on this word, Nietzsche seems to suggest that it somehow defines the most proper gesture of Platonic politics, that the political thought of the philosopher is, so to speak, inseparable from a 'nonetheless'.
In an essay published in 1992 (Virtuosos of Contempt), Alex McIntyre investigated the relationship between Nietzsche's ideas on politics and the themes of late Platonic thought. According to McIntyre, Nietzsche picks up from Plato the motif of the ‘nonetheless’, for the obligation to take seriously non-serious human affairs — politics in particular — and transforms it into a theory of ‘contempt’ as an emotional disposition that defines the relationship of the philosopher with other human beings and with the city. As an aphorism from The Gay Science specifies, this contempt can be neither hatred nor misanthropy because for these “we should renounce contempt. And how much subtle joy, how much patience, even how much affability we owe precisely to our contempt.” Contempt is, in fact, the sign of a divine election and of a real art: “thanks to it we are the ‘elect of God', contempt is our taste and our privilege, our art, perhaps our virtue… we are virtuosos of contempt (in der Verachtung Künstler)” (GS, 379). Nonetheless — and here the Platonic motif reappears — this contempt is, in Zarathustra's words, a “loving contempt (liebendes Verachten) … which loves most where it most despises” (Z, 257). In fact, although despicable, man can be loved for a reason higher than the human, as religions have taught: “To love man for the love of God —this was, up to now, the noblest and most remote sentiment that has been reached among men”. Love for men, in fact, “without some secret purpose that sanctifies it” is “nonsense and bestiality” because it can receive its measure “only from a higher inclination” (BGE 60). The higher inclination, in the perspective of Nietzschean “great politics”, can only be the selection and cultivation of a more than human man, who is able to set new and nobler values.
In this perspective, the Platonic theme of the philosopher-king is revisited by Nietzsche in the sense that “the true philosophers are those who command and legislate” (BGE, 211), because “their knowing is creating, their creating is legislating, their will to truth is — will to power”. According to McIntyre, in Nietzsche's political thought, the Platonic “nonetheless” takes the form of a hierarchical society, the aim of which is to make possible the advent of the superior type. As read in the Antichrist (57), “The ordering of castes, the hierarchy, only expresses the supreme law of life itself; the separation of three types is necessary for the preservation of society, so that higher and supreme types are made possible”. McIntyre thus establishes a convergence between Nietzsche and Plato: “The philosopher seeks to establish not simply a noble type of man (an exception), but a relationship of authority between noble and base types. In short, as the spiritual power underlying a culture, both Nietzsche and Plato demand of the philosopher that he institute: 1) a hierarchical, spiritual-political order of rank between noble and common souls and thus, through his “selective and cultivating influence” (BGE 61), create a truly good and noble type of spirit to justify or give meaning to society; and 2) a new law-book of values enshrined as the supreme authority; 3) a culture or people which the philosopher founds and which represents the collective unity of the hierarchical order…” (McIntyre, 194).
The relationship between seriousness and play is problematic for Nietzsche, perhaps it is his problem par excellence, something like a strictly personal question. A year before writing Human, All Too Human, in a letter to Rohde dated 8th December 1875, he drastically questions the meaning and the very possibility of seriousness. “Every seriousness, every passion, and everything that touches the heart of man is quixotic (Don Quixoterie); this is good to know for some, otherwise, usually, it is better to ignore it.”
It is at least presumable that Nietzsche included himself among those for whom it is good to know it and not among the people who would do well to ignore it. “How much truth can he bear”, we read in the prologue of the work composed a few months before the madness, “how much truth can a man dare? This has increasingly become my unit of measurement.” All the more surprising is that, in this same book, Ecce Homo, which Peter Gast already feared might be comical and which modern interpreters consider intentionally burlesque, Nietzsche compares himself to a character of the German popular farces (Hanswurst), a kind Harlequin or buffoon: “I don't want to be a saint, I would rather be a buffoon (Ich will kein heiliger sein, lieber noch ein Hanswurst )… maybe I'm a buffoon (vielleicht bin ich ein Hanswurst )”. He immediately adds, “And nonetheless (trotzdem), or, rather not nonetheless — since there is nobody more mendacious than a saint — the truth speaks out of me.” The relationship to truth — the most serious thing — is inseparable from assuming a comic mask, only a fool can tell the truth.
Overbeck's testimony, according to which Nietzsche “never believed in himself” and constantly conducted his life in a theatrical way (theatralisch), here acquires all its meaning: “playing or rather acting with himself (according to the two meanings of the German verb spielen), he has, so to speak, extracted one backdrop after another (eine Kulisse nach der anderer) from his scenographic warehouse until the whole show was performed” (CA Bernoulli, F. Overbeck und F. Nietzsche, Eine Freundschaft, Jena 1908, p.270).
It is possible that madness was also part of this farce. It is Overbeck himself who suggests it: “There have been moments when I could not prevent myself from thinking that Nietzsche's (mental illness) was all a fiction, an unbearable thought for me.” If the term fiction (acting is anything but pretending) is certainly inadequate, it is however legitimate to record at least an analogy between the claim of the farce in Ecce homo and the letters of January 1889, always considered as the first indubitable documents of his dementia. Not only is it here that he defines the nonsense he communicates to Burkhardt as “bad jokes”— schlechte Witze — (“I am condemned to entertain the next eternity with bad jokes”), but in the letter to Cosima Wagner of January 3, he identifies himself again with a buffoon (“They tell me that a certain divine buffoon has recently finished writing Dionysus' Dithyrambs…”). A precise comparison between the sentence that opens the letter to Burkhardt of January 6 and the quoted passage from Ecce Homo shows a singular correspondence: “in the end I would be much more willingly a professor in Basel than God (zuletz wäre ich sehr viel lieber Basler Professor als Gott)”; “I don't want to be a saint, (I would be) more willingly a buffoon (ich will kein heiliger sein, lieber noch ein Hanswurst). In both cases a personal condition (‘professor in Basel’ or ‘buffoon’) is opposed as preferable to another (‘God’ or ‘saint’); but the evident farcical tone of the passage from Ecce Homo cannot but color the corresponding incipit of the letter, which almost seems to quote it. Bad jokes are more suited to a buffoon than to God. The boundary between seriousness and play has here become undecidable: every seriousness is necessarily quixotic, every madness necessarily a perfectly serious joke.
At this point, it will be convenient to clarify the sense of the ‘nonetheless’ in the two philosophers. Nietzsche, like Plato, felt he had to deal seriously with non-serious questions, such as those that concern the men of his time. However, everything depends on how we understand the curious expression “deal seriously with non-serious things”, that is, the weight and importance that should be assigned to that ‘nonetheless’. The conjunction Trotzdem derives from the term Trotz, which means reluctance, resistance, rebellion: to what extent is it necessary to resist the awareness of the futility of human things and try, in spite of everything, to deal with them judiciously?
Here the gestures of the two philosophers diverge. Nietzsche, who founded an “art of contempt” on the non-seriousness of human affairs, must present himself as a foolto be able to deal with them, to be a buffoon rather than a saint. Hence the exaggerated theatricality — at least starting at a certain point — of his writings, the repeated apostrophes to friends, brothers, to his own soul and to his own thoughts, which simulate the dialogic form of the drama without ever assuming it explicitly. The artificiality of always putting himself on stage or, as Overbeck said, of extracting “one backdrop after another from his scenographic repertoire,” cost him the friendship of those he venerated most: it is with extreme sorrow that in a letter to Gast of July 1884 he refers “to J. Burckhardt's embarrassment in having to tell me something about Zarathustra: he only managed to ask me if sooner or later I will try my hand at drama.”
For this reason, Nietzsche's laughter could not fail to take the form of sarcasm, that is, something that, according to the etymology of the term which derives from a Greek verb meaning “to tear the flesh”, borders on bitterness. Hence also the ambiguity of the “grand politics” that he had in mind, poised between a radical criticism of the state and hierarchical organization, between the refusal of any attempt to improve the world and the hope for the advent of a superior caste. The buffoon took himself so seriously that any attempt to distinguish seriousness from mockery in Nietzsche's extreme thinking is doomed to fail.
What does it mean to ‘take seriously’? The terms used by Plato — the verb spoudazo, the noun spoude and the adjective spoudaios — derive from a verb (speudo) which means ‘hurry up, apply oneself with zeal, strive’. In Greek usage, the terms are opposed to paizo, paidia, to joking and playing as children do (paides), and in the quoted passage, Plato is no exception in strongly emphasizing the friction between to men spoudaion spoudazein, “seriously deal with serious things” and paizonta… paidias, “to play games ”, as if the meanings of the words in question were inseparable from their opposites and were clarified only with respect to them. This is what Plato recalls when defining the game as the “brother of seriousness” (tes spoudes adelphei paidiai, Lett.VI, 323d): seriousness and game are closely related and the strategy of expression by the philosopher must take this into account, placing itself somehow in the middle of two feuding brothers.
Hence the particularity of Platonic writing, which Dilthey rightly defined as the most enigmatic and complex literary form of all antiquity. In a passage from Phaedrus (306 c-d) — heavily commented on, but from which the necessary consequences have not been drawn — Plato states that the wise man will not write “seriously (spoudéi)” with a pen dipped in black water and, if he will, he will do it “for fun (paidias charin)”. Plato's dialogues, like Nietzsche's books, are therefore a playful writing, which should not be taken seriously. Compared to Nietzsche, who, however, like a buffoon, must dramatize and exasperate a writing that does not present itself as theatrical, Plato, decidedly more shrewd, chooses — whether it is he who invented it, as is probable, or whether Socratic dialogues were already circulating at the his time — a literary genre very close to the theater, in which seriousness and joke, poetry and prose, drama and storytelling are held in acrobatic balance. Certainly, philosophical writing must reconcile the two antagonists, and the fact that they really are brothers does not exclude, as a Greek knows perfectly well, that precisely for this reason there may be a stasis, a civil war between them. But just as Plato writes about the civil war that the Greeks fight among themselves “as if they were destined to be reconciled” (Rep. 471 a), so — while Nietzsche must continually make declarations of war — the Platonic dialogues seem to tend towards something like a truce or a dialectical recomposition even if, as often happens, it turns out to be impossible or at least precarious.
What happens when the philosopher is forced to deal seriously with non-serious matters? As Plato suggests in the Laws with his ‘nonetheless’, this is what happens in politics. Plato found himself at least on three occasions in the unhappy situation (eutikes) that occurs in this circumstance: twice, as he relates in the seventh letter, in his youth and, at a mature age, when he unwisely accepted the invitation to go to Syracuse to the court of the tyrant Dionysus. Under the rule of the Thirty, “having feelings not at all surprising in a young man”, he had accepted the invitation of family members and acquaintances to enter public life, only to quickly realize that “these men made the former government appear golden”. A few years later, at the fall of the Thirty, he was seized again “by the desire to act on common and political things”. But this time too he had to withdraw in horror when “some powerful men dragged our friend Socrates to court … condemned and killed him” (325 a-c). At this point, considering the corruption of laws and customs, Plato was seized by a sort of dizziness (iliggia, literally the vertigo that seizes us when we look from a great height) and, realizing that all cities were badly governed, he decided (but Plato says “I was forced, enagkasthen”, 326 a) to abandon politics for philosophy, convinced that future generations would never free themselves from calamities until those who philosophize correctly and truly took public office, or until the powerful in the cities, by divine fate, had begun to philosophize.
It is only after these first two failures that the letter recalls the philosopher's three trips to Syracuse, where, for the first time, now forty, he meets Dion, “then still young”, and shows him “what he believed to be the best for men”, without realizing that in this way he was preparing him to overthrow tyranny. It is on the second trip to Syracuse that Plato must fully measure the problematic of the ‘nonetheless’, of the unfortunate necessity to take seriously non-serious matters. Dion, who had achieved an important position in the city, begs him to go a second time to Syracuse, where the younger Dionysius succeeded his father and ardently desires to be educated in philosophy, offering the unexpected opportunity to realize the coincidence between philosophers and rulers that Plato had in mind. The letter accurately describes the state of confusion (distazonti, a real inner scission) into which the invitation throws the philosopher: in the end, “ashamed in front of myself to appear as a man capable only of words and unable to commit to any work”, he agrees to leave, “covering his head” (katakalypsamenos, probably quoting the gesture of Hippolytus, who in the Euripidean tragedy Yppolitos kalyptomenos covers his eyes with his cloak so as not to see what he would not want to see).
There is no need to describe in detail the failure of this and the subsequent third attempt to realize the dream of Dion (and, in part, of Plato himself) of a philosopher-king in Syracuse. The decisive fact is that the trips to Sicily represent another failure, that of the philosopher to measure himself in the right way with his ‘nonetheless’. Plato, like Dion — and this is their mistake — took something not serious seriously, they took seriously a human affair, forgetting that brotherhood between play and seriousness that the Athenian imagined in the Laws when he recommended to take serious things seriously and not those which are not.
It is in this light that it is necessary to read Plato's late dialogues, in particular the Laws that are considered, rightly or wrongly, as the ultimate compendium of the philosopher's political thought.
Plato himself reminds us it is precisely for this dialogue that it is necessary to recall Phaedrus' warning that the wise man can write only for fun. When beginning the examination of the laws of the Greek cities, the Athenian declares unreservedly that “by investigating the things of the moment and considering them carefully, we must play a wise game with the laws as would elders (peri nomon paizontas paidian presbytiken sophrona) and proceed on the path, without distraction” (685 a).
The philosophical foundation of this ‘wise game’ had been revealed a few pages earlier, shortly after the beginning of the dialogue, when the Athenian proposes as a model of human laws no more and no less than a puppet theater. “Though we do not know this, let us imagine that each of us living beings is a marvelous puppet formed by the gods, whether for amusement (paignion) or with some seriousness (spoudei tini); what we do know, however, is that our affections pull us as if there were strings or cords in us that pull against each other into opposing actions”. The law of the city is compared to one of these strings, a golden string, that every man should follow without ever abandoning it. As with a really great joke, good legislation can only result, according to the Athenian, from the fact that men realize the meaning of the puppet theater in which they find themselves and the city, “instructed by a God or a citizen who knows this discourse, understands its meaning and makes a law of it” (644 d-645 a). The passage quoted on “taking seriously what is serious and not what is not” and on the “most beautiful games” that men have to play, acquires its meaning only if it is brought back to the puppet model that is drawn here.
Only if we do not forget that the work is to some extent a joke, do we understand why it could have appeared to scholars as a sketch not devoid of contradictions, where “the casualness of the Platonic style, in which the clause of a sentence often proceeds through suspensions and resumes in the midst of insertions and all kinds of grammatical inconsistencies, is pushed beyond belief”(Pugliese Carratelli, p.1168). The “gaps in thought”, the “questions that arise and of which no more is said later”, the “phrases to which it is not possible to give a suitable meaning… real puzzles, about which no two commentators, interpreters, and translators agree”, are not the sign of a lack of revision by the author, but rather the hallmark of the most proper character of the work, which is the extreme game to which Plato wanted to entrust his thought.
Once again it is the author himself who remembers it. In the third letter, Plato claims to have dealt seriously (spoudasanta), above all, with the proems of the laws. Whether the letter is authentic or not, it accords perfectly with what Plato writes in the Laws. Playing on both the musical and juridical meanings of the term nomos, he suggests that just as admirably elaborate preludes are given for the cited laws, so it is necessary that there be proems even in the laws of the city, because the law alone is more suitable for slaves than for free men. Immediately afterwards, one of the interlocutors compares the entire dialogue to a proem and not to a discourse on the laws: “So let's start all over again — as those who play (paizontes) say, the second performance is better than the first — to make a preface and not a speech. We begin by acknowledging that we are making a proem” (723 e).
The Laws are not the exposition of Plato's political philosophy. There is no political philosophy of Plato because, according to the thesis — which is also evidently playful — which states that the misfortunes of the city of men will cease only when philosophers become kings, a polity is not humanly possible for now: what is possible is only a very long, playful proem. And if this proem necessarily contains some element of a joke, this does not mean that it is useless: perhaps, in politics as in all human activities, only proems can be of any use, especially if they are not to be taken too seriously.
This does not mean, as it is recklessly claimed today, that there were questions that the philosopher was seriously concerned with only among intimates in his lectures at the Academy. In the seventh letter Plato excludes it, evoking the uselessness not only of writing, but also of a “disquisition in words” (epicheiresin…legomenen). Seriousness is what shows itself as unspoken in the non-serious writing of the dialogues. In this sense it is possible that ‘nonetheless’ is an essential technical term of philosophy. Martin Puder, in his beautiful book on Kant, drew attention to the fact that one of Kant's favorite terms, placed each time in a strategic position, is the conjunction ‘nonetheless’ (gleichwohl — sometimes even in the even stronger form dem ungeachtet (regardless). This indicates that a reflection is made without regard to what precedes it, that thought is affirmed, so to speak, hypothetically, without connection to or in open contradiction with the context in which it seems to belong. While Idealism, writes Puder, has extrapolated its dialectic from ‘nonetheless’, Kant holds firm to the stalemate and the contradiction of his gleichwohl. Though metaphysics had become a not-serious-thing in his time (it was - or seemed - impossible in this sense), nonetheless Kant sets out to investigate the form in which it becomes possible to speak of metaphysics anew. It is not surprising that this attempt leads to an ens rationis that is totally meaningless —that the noumenon is, in some respect, a sublime joke.
Philosophy would then be an attempt to think something in the form of ‘nonetheless’, to concern itself as seriously as possible — that is, ultimately playfully — with non-serious issues. Just like politics, according to Nietzsche and Plato.
November-December 2020