Article from Margin Notes 2
When the narrator, speaking omnisciently with insight into the proceedings of the gods, lists the accomplishments of Sheep and Grain, he—for this was undoubtedly a man—talks of how they gave sustenance to the land, filled the granaries and barns, brought wealth to the poor, and carried splendor and beauty with them wherever they went. Sheep and Grain themselves, having gotten drunk on sweet wine and sweet beer, take things in a different direction.
Grain boasts of how she bestows her “power” onto warriors, making them forget fear and go into battle “as if to the playing field.” This could refer to some kind of religious rite, or it could mean that Sumerian warriors were in the habit of getting soused before combat. She also mentions her ability to mediate feuds and give freedom to prisoners.
Sheep responds in kind, describing how Šakkan, king of the mountain and god of wild animals, “twists a giant rope against the great peaks of the rebel land” and manufactures the sling, the quiver, and the longbows. Clearly she is no slouch in martial prowess either.
It goes on like this. Grain charges that shepherds, those fearful plains-dwellers, covet the farmers’ fields and must be chased away with a cudgel in hand. “I am Grain, I am born for the warrior…” Incensed, Sheep takes things too far and vividly describes how “a banished enemy, a slave from the mountains, or a laborer with a poor wife” comes to the threshing floor, bound in rope, and violently pounds Grain into flour. Her face is mutilated by the wretch’s club and she is tossed around by the winds.
Grain is hurt and retaliates in the same fashion, mocking how Sheep’s innards are butchered and packed for the marketplace. At this point Enki, one of the leaders in the gods’ cosmic council, intervenes and declares that “Sheep and Grain should be sisters […] But of the two, Grain shall be greater.” Everyone “should submit to the yoke of Grain.”
Thus a dispute between the two axial organic technologies of the day—meaning the third millennium BC—became a contest in violence. The two life-bringers of Sumeria boast of their ability to wreak death. First they mustered their arguments about who was best for war, and hence the state. When this proved insufficient, they turned nasty and conjured grotesque metaphorical images of mauling and humiliating women. Pastoralism and agriculture meet as rival modes of production, daughters of the neolithic, but their debate in Sumeria elides any precise references to the relations of production. The systems appear as divine forces rather than arrangements between human beings and domesticated organisms. While the poem’s narrator portrays them as universally beneficent, the stock and measure of wealth itself, they portray themselves as power, indeed as antagonistic power. Both stories contain bits of mangled truth.
Much of recent scholarship, even if unintentionally, depicts the transition to class society as an unrelenting, millennia-spanning horrorshow. Fire and axe felled the great cedar forests, and plows broke the plains, subjecting them to the yoke of Grain. As it became ecologically impossible for the unfree workers, whether they were slaves, serfs, or something in between, to flee into the wild countryside, so too did the cities become the hosts of world-historical zoonotic diseases, nemeses of humanity that would put a cap on endogenous urban growth for millennia. The marshes were drained and irrigated, but the canals turned the land into a salted waste. The peoples of the “rebel peaks” and “high plains” were taken in captivity to the cities, the workhouses, the fields. Amidst such apocalyptic upheavals, it’s no wonder that the tension between the epoch’s two defining modes of life became the stuff of myth.
What does it mean for enlightenment to return to myth? And, coevally, what does it mean to live in a violent world? These are the dual questions posed by the form and function of the prophetic poem nin me šara, more commonly known as The Exaltation to Inanna, written in exile by the Akkadian high-priestess Enheduanna in the midst of a civil war.
The Sumerian city-state of Ur, under the rebel king Lugal-Ane, along with a number of other city-states, had risen up against the authority of the Akkadian Empire, ruled then by Narām-Sîn, blood relative of Enheduanna, both of whom were direct descendents of Sargon, the first king of the empire. Lugal-Ane beseeched Enheduanna, as priestess of the city, to inaugurate him as the rightful king of Ur, but she refused, and under threat of execution fled the city. The ritual for which the nin me šara was written took place in this moment of acute turmoil, where the power and authority of the goddess Inanna, patron deity of the Sargonic kings and cultic spouse of Narām-Sîn, had been cast into the utmost doubt, and through which Enheduanna sought to empower Inanna and call upon her to open up “the gateway of tears” and to rain down her righteous and bloody justice upon the city-state of Ur.
Enheduanna tells the story of how Inanna gathers her strength, acquiring the “countless numinous instruments of power” (of which, however, there are said to only be seven necessary instruments) from the other deities of the pantheon, through various demonstrations of her own cunning, power and aggression, such that she usurps her father, An, as the most powerful of the gods and the highest authority on Earth. It is, then, from this apex that Inanna is prophesized, by Enheduanna, to pass judgment upon her enemies and for this judgment to be executed on the city of Ur and every rebellious city, in an unceasing storm of destruction: on Inanna’s authority the patron goddess of Ur, NANNA, lays waste to the city, “overwhelming all places of joy in the city”, depriving the city of food and all means of either defense or offense, burning the city gates, conquering its troops, killing its people, filling the the canals of the city with blood such that those who are left have only the blood of their fallen to drink, and ensuring that no love, sex, or new life of any kind, may come to the wombs of the city. The rebellious cities are subdued, Ur submits, and becomes part of Inanna’s territory. Inanna will have proven her dominion over all the lands. She will have proven herself the most powerful among the gods. And so it is that the gods, in turn, will have been made to submit to her authority in heaven. Inanna will have become sovereign in Heaven and on Earth.
Enheduanna’s ritual in exaltation of Inanna’s power and authority functions as a narrative battle ground for political conflict and by all accounts did act as a turning point in the war that favoured Akkad. Hylistic analysis of the poem—breaking the text down into hylemes, the smallest action-bearing unit—reveals a sophisticated structure wherein common, abstract myths are interwoven with a concrete prophetic retelling of the same stories. The core abstract myth: An lets Inanna execute his judgment on her enemies and Sumer is made to function as the vessel, or empty form for the narration of political conflict and construction of a mythic right to rule. Meanwhile, the concrete myth: Inanna Lets Nanna execute her judgement on Ur and every rebellious city state becomes the arrogation of authority for the Sargonic king and the Akkadian Empire to quell the uprising in Ur by the most violent means necessary, and impels them to emerge from the civil war victorious. The myth in the abstract sanctions violence as a mode of law-making; the myth in the concrete sanctions a specific act of divine violence that will have been to inaugurate Akkad, Narām-Sîn, and Enheduanna as sovereign, monarch, and high-priestess, respectively, over the city of Ur and all of Sumer.
The chronology of the myth is rearranged in the text—beginning with a statement of Inanna’s authority over the land and ending with Inanna having proved herself the greatest of the gods by an elliptical return to the phrase “Queen, who would dare take away your territories from you?” Inanna, then, becomes the protagonist of both the abstract myth, wherein she executes AN’s judgment to conquer Sumer, and in the concrete myth, wherein she devastates Ur – to emphasise this final outcome, the judgement of Inanna. Inanna becoming sovereign in Heaven and on Earth is made homologous with the actual sacking of Ur. By this the poem functions as both a revision of and a return to the myth of Inanna’s absolute sovereignty, yielding the practical meaning that the Akkadian Empire must be, or rather will have been, victorious by whatever means necessary.
The climax of the poem and, so too, the ritual involves a heavy repetition of the phrase “ḫe-zu-am”—It will truly be known, so it is. And by this mantra Inanna’s judgement, power, victory, and wrath are all in turn asserted to be, equally and at once, the true and the actual. It will truly be known, so it is—that Ur will fall and the Empire will rule.
Mesopotamian polysemy contrasts with the Greek search for etyma and Abrahamic inquiries into gematria and hurufiyyah because it largely shuns appeals to roots and numerological hypotheses. For example, the sign designated as MUL—made up of three AN signs, which in turn mean “the heavens”—ordinarily means “star,” but it can conceivably mean, following various relations of homophony, synonymy, and homography, “planet,” “writing,” “shoes,” and “man.” The last possibility is illustrative: In Emesal, an obscure form of Sumerian used by goddesses in certain literary texts, the word for man is pronounced mulu, which is almost a homophone of the standard Sumerian mul.
Would anyone ever actually write MUL and mean “man?” Probably not, but knowledge of such complex semiotic connections was nonetheless important. Lexicography gave the scholar, who was always also a scribe, crucial insight into the esoteric structures of reality, which were often linguistic in nature. The liver studied by a baru was a “tablet of the gods,” gods who wrote omens in the stars for the tupšar Enuma Anu Enlil—tupšar being a Sumerian loanword literally meaning “tablet writer,” and Enuma Anu Enlil the title of a mammoth list of over 6,000 astronomical omens—to decipher. Incantation tablets used semiotically charged spellings to enhance their potency, and less esoteric lists gave scribes who worked in accounting the knowledge required to make fine-grained distinctions: During the reign of the Third Dynasty of Ur, sheep and goats were categorized based on their age, sex, quality of wool (five grades), and what they had for fodder.
In the past scholars were wont to ascribe to the Mesopotamians a desire to create a Listenwissenchaft, a science of and in the form of lists that reflected their belief in cosmic order and social control. Cuneiform had, after all, originated as a form of bookkeeping, and almost as soon as it became a full-fledged system for representing language there began to appear troves of tablets listing different signs in innumerable arrangements based on all conceivable criteria. The idea of Mesopotamian Listenwissenschaft has fallen out of favor, but cuneiform lists of all types demonstrate an interest in knowledge for its own sake, not least because numerous entries were impossible or absurd: a solar eclipse that proceeds from north to south, a jar of donkey, grammatical formulations like “he is going away from us with us,” or a lion with the face of an ass born of a ewe. Late Babylonian astronomers kept a continuous list of astronomical observations for 600 years, the data from which laid the basis for their famous mathematical astronomy. Before any of that, however, the scholars had more practical concerns.
In the proto-historic and early historic periods of Sumeria, scribes had a crucial role in constructing two of the eternal pillars of class society: the distinctions between hand and head and town and country. The cities, and in particular their temples and palaces, became the agents of exchange, organizers of infrastructure, and owners of vast tracts of land as well as, with time, human beings. The scribes were the city’s administrative bureaucracy, and hence central to all of these roles: They were the ones who wrote contracts, tabulated the outlays for construction projects, and recorded land ownership.
After centuries of this arrangement, things became dire. The junior members of the ruling class had preyed too fiercely on the commoners, extracting exorbitant fees and forcing them into debt penury. The status of the free citizens that the Lugal—the Great Man, the one today called king—relied on was jeopardized, prompting these Great Men to periodically issue jubilee edicts that canceled debts, freed slaves, and scolded the bureaucrats for their rapacity. An ideology of justice emerged, with Hammurabi of Babylon—or rather his scribes—as its most famous mouthpiece.
In the more chaotic scene of the Babylonian and later Assyrian periods, neither the gods nor economic performance could guarantee the legitimacy of the ruling class and the prestige of the scribes. How could the people sleep soundly after their enemies sacked the city and carried off the holy statue of Marduk, which was both the actual body of Babylon’s divine protector and the center of the world?
It was in this era that divination took on increasing importance and penetrated every sphere of life: commoners and kings alike consulted the baru haruspices and ašipu exorcists. Babylonian divination used the semiological principles of writing and interpreting cuneiform to manipulate the logic and categories common to the population. The application of these semiological principles, mixed with some empirical and historical elements, to events celestial and terrestrial generated the omen lists; from the omen lists diviners could find an entry that was appropriate for their mark’s quandary; and with logic and a fitting omen in hand the diviner could reduce the whole edifice to the binary of favorable and unfavorable, typically telling the client that everything would be OK after all.
Divination thus served as a guarantor in an increasingly chaotic world. When the scribes were a bureaucratic quasi-class joined at the hip with the state, writing was an immediate performance of power. Discursive ideology did not concern them. As the secretions of the original state-class nexus took on their own relative autonomy through the grand dance of differentiation and integration, so the scribes ceased to be a uniform bloc of privileged administrators attached to the great institutions. They became subject to the same precarity their predecessors had usuriously inflicted upon the tillers of the soil. The majority of first-millennium BC scribes known to history worked in the private sphere and freely sold their services as a commodity; some were even able to turn their knowledge to pecuniary ends and become wealthy merchants. Science, philosophy, and magic, scarcely distinct from one another, were all alternative forms of authority that scribes could claim. These were repetitions of the power they once enjoyed, which was now only available in a diminished form. Knowledge had become decoupled from the state.
For Confucius, Heaven was forever mute. However much he idolized the rites of Zhou, the numinous, spirit-packed world of the Shang would have been alien to him. The sage himself once disclaimed his power of speech and voiced his preference for quiet.
The most powerful forces, whether human or divine, were silent. Godlike meant something that just worked, as it were, with no outward hint of transcendence. Divine efficacy is as effortless as the North Star standing in the sky, and this is what made it so painful to be a teacher of students and advisor of lords—how could any man measure up to the example of Heaven? Rhetorical trickery and logical games could never achieve the immanent sublimity of the true way.
Thus the teacher must endlessly grapple with the fact that the same divine and human history that furnishes him with examples of just and sagelike conduct is to blame for his present predicament. Conversely, the success of learning would put an end to it. Learning and teaching are practices characteristic of an unhappy age, and only through indirection can they become more than trickery and brutishness.
Indirection that shuns trickery can therefore be forceful at times. When asked about serving the gods and the spirits of those passed on, Confucius replied with his own question: “You are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits?” How indeed.
There may be no greater vindication of speculative thought than the final movements of Zeno of Elea. His infamous paradox demonstrates the situation of action and desire in space and time. To get to where we want to be, we first must move part of the way there. And to reach partway, we had to first move towards it in part as well. Getting to where we want to go may be broken down into infinitely small steps of getting only part of the way there. The result of this analysis is that we cannot, in theory, ever get to where we want to be. We cannot close the gap. We are left, emphatically, where we always already are. Arrival becomes impossible. And yet, it is a brutal fact of history that to have arrived at where we are now, we must have moved from where we used to be. Arrival must, therefore, at some point in time, have been possible. Logically, we cannot get anywhere. Yet, empirically, we have gotten to where we are. To pass the impasse, must one limb give way?
Consider the following:
The horse, by the procession of its hoofs – front left, hind right, front right, hind left – moves from A to B, maintaining, at any moment, at least one hoof suspended in the air. This quadpartite example is the dialectical demonstration par excellence of the antinomy of historical movement. The bike, by contrast, displays a different modality. Beginning at the base of a slope, the flow of pedals, the constant flux of feet – both of which being indefinitely suspended – proceed by infinitesimal increments and generate a real force within the wheels which, in relation to the ground, exert a false, or derivative, force upon it and by this the bike arrives atop the hill. In neither case, on Zeno’s analysis, should movement have occurred. But in both cases, movement does. Whether one emphasises the concrete progression of each historical hoof or the constant flow of force across a concrete surface one remains incapable of explaining how history happens and, therefore, how we might possibly move from here to where we want to be.
Now, Zeno, outside the academy, was certainly a mover and shaker. Becoming embroiled in a plot to overthrow a tyrant ruler. For this he was apprehended and impelled to divulge the names of his co-conspirators. Being, too, a good comrade, Zeno refused. Enduring torture and, eventually, forfeiting his life. However, in his final moments before death, cast at the feet of the tyrant, Zeno appeared to relent and begged that the tyrant come close, saying that he would, at last, disclose the identities of his fellow revolutionaries. But then, as the tyrant leaned in – and here the sources differ – Zeno bit off the organ by which his history would be inscribed. On one account he bites down upon the tyrant’s ear, holding fast until he is stabbed to death; on another he bites off the tyrant’s nose; and on another still, he bites off his own tongue, but only after crying out “You are the curse of this city!” and turning to the bystanders, “I marvel at your cowardice, that, for fear of any of those things which I am now enduring, you should be the tyrant’s slaves.” By this the crowd was moved and promptly stoned the tyrant to death.
The immediate significance of such movement is clear. The contradiction between the ruler and the ruled, the eternal curse of the city, is resolved and the people set free. But, on the grander tableau of history, Zeno’s death, and his last gasp attempt to prove the truth of Parmenidian ontology, left barely a mark. The city-state of Elis, after the synoecism Zeno would have witnessed in his youth, oscillated between modes of governance. At times approximating Athenian democracy and at others shifting into an oligarchic gear, the latter often set in motion by military defeat. History continued to move, its direction set neither by the inertia of Being that Zeno adduced nor by the activity his sacrifice elicited.
What then maybe said of history? That it does not move by increments, but by the catastrophic, violent defiance of the rational authority: the horse’s hind hoof lands ahead of where its front hoof began and by this it begins again; not anew, not partly moved, but literally on different grounds: the bike outputs, upon the concrete, the full force of all those thousands of feet, all that labour congealed within it, to effect an upward climb. Only from this higher vantage may we look back and assess how far we have come, and begin to recoup the cost.
The problem, though, with these representations, is that in them movement is presupposed. They do not address what is to be done when we are in the saddle. What would make the difference can only be viewed, so it appears, from the top of the hill that we may never reach. At the same time, every martyr may be the one for whom the masses move. The rational and the empirical must be equally denied and construed. What belies the two is that the movement of history can, at any point in time, change directions—and we are the moment of inflection—real actuality manifests itself through what it produces. Such is the weapon of nature and the nature of the weapon by which we get to where we are going. All prevarications of so-called paradox are but the reins and chains of prehistory.
The work of Antisthenes survives only in quotations, testimonia, and brief summaries. One fragment, transmitted by a certain Athenaeus, stands out. It simply says “to be fed like a suckling pig.” This is a rich image, then as now. The good life for the Cynic can be defined, via negativa, as not being “fed like a suckling pig.” Positively, the strong association between Antisthenes and dogs leads us to the position that the good life must also be canine in character. Thus it seems to us that the entire Cynic outlook is contained within the opposition of the dog and the pig. The dog and the pig are both creatures of human settlement. (It seems that wild dogs were not prominent in Greece, for Aristotle specifies that only in India are dogs sorted into wild and tame.) Both beasts are dirty, violent, chthonian, and rough, but while the dog can retain its sense of nobility in abjection, the pig is a cultured being through and through: It cares little for what it consumes as it is fattened for slaughter. Thus, we can see two differing styles of abjection in the lives of these animals: the porcine and the canine.
Juvenile pigs were an impure beast used often for minor purification ceremonies; perhaps their tendency to consume waste suggested apotropaic potency. Piglets were also the least expensive votive animal in Greece, and this is another reason they were used in such diverse rites: burnt in the holocaust to Zeus; butchered and buried for the sake of Demeter in the autumn thesmophoria, only to be dug up a few days later and cast into the fields as magical fertilizer; and used in some manner for initiation into the famous Eleunisian mysteries. Citizens would ritually cleanse public spaces in Athens by slitting the throats of piglets and sprinkling their blood around (the victims’ bodies were burnt afterwards to dissipate the impurity they carried). Mature pigs were also sacrificed, as one can already see in Homer, but they, too, represent a special case. Unlike with other livestock, the procedure seems to have focused on the meat of the pig, as opposed to the fat and bones traditionally offered in the thysia. The pig symbolized lack of taste and distinction just as much as it did an excess in appetite not just for food, but also for sex and even violence (thus Aristotle: “A pig will give battle even to a wolf”).
The dog, too, was an impure animal banned from entering most sacred spaces—notably the Acropolis of Athens—but paradoxically they were permitted to stand guard outside them. Despite their impurity, or at least in part because of it, they were also sacrificed. Like the piglet, they were an inferior sort of offering. Their bones and teeth could become protective amulets. A puppy could be used as a magical cure: rubbed on the body of a sufferer to absorb their affliction and then killed. In Athens dogs were mainly used in apotropaic rituals dedicated to Hecate, the chthonian witch queen of death whose presence was heralded by howling dogs. Even though they were not strictly taboo, dogs were rarely eaten. Odysseus’s dog Argos shows loyalty, but Homer’s goddesses are called bitches on numerous occasions. There is a certain roughness even in the supernatural roles played by dogs.
Dogs are a laboring companion, raggedy but strong. A scholium on Aristotle’s Rhetoric tells that both dogs and Cynics are “good guards,” much in contrast to the incontinent violence of swine and servility of the unlearned hoi polloi. Further, it says that both are capable of discrimination, being loyal to friends and barking at foes. Consumed by indiscriminate lust and rage, the pig does not and cannot know friendship. Incapable of prudence in the world of everyday action, how could the pig’s life have anything in common with that of the sage?
An awesome magical potency is contained within the dog. Its voice omens disaster, and its body has the power to ward it off. The Cynic similarly dispenses the truth without regard for convention and turns their body and soul into an unbreakable fortress. Foreign, poor, woman, slave: the Cynics will learn to be hardy. The pig, meanwhile, is the least valued sacrifice. Everywhere slaughtered, even dismembered and thrown into the soil. The symbols of the dog’s physical strength, its bones and teeth, are magical, but to the gods is left the fatty meat of the pig. What little remains from Antisthenes on the topic of religion is not positive. He mocked priests and dismissed the worship of many gods as an erroneous custom that obfuscated the singular god of nature: “The god resembles nothing, and therefore no one can know him from an image.” One can hardly imagine him finding inspiration in the votive fungibility of Sus domesticus, a property which reflects its undignified abjection.
The Cynic critique of Athenian society is, like that of Socrates, a hierarchical one, and the dog reflects the perilous nature of such a critique: it must be loyal without being servile in the same way that the Socratic ironist must follow the law (even when unjust) without inwardly submitting to it. One must acquire either a mind or a noose. The ideal for Antisthenes is radically Socratic in a way that contrasts strongly with, for example, Aristotle’s megalopsychos. He has dispelled arrogance, yet is still “hard to bear” and his “kingly” behavior earns him a bad reputation. The most widely reproduced apothegm of Antisthenes is some variation on him saying that he would rather go mad than experience pleasure. The Cynic’s abasement justifies their condescension, just as the dog is imbued with magic by its own tenuous social status. This cynical gesture of condescension from below, rather than the high-handedness of Plato and Aristotle, is the true prototype of all philosophical critique.
Dionysius of Heraclea was, for much of his life, a stoic. A student of Zeno. A man of surety. Of strong constitution. He put his name to a number of works, all of which now lost, save for their titles: On Apathy, On Training, On Pleasure, On Riches and Favours and Revenge (and a few more, though we need not list them all). But what can be said about a title alone? Perhaps very little. Each of these titles could easily be found sitting in the ‘smart thinking’ section of a chain store, adorning some more-or-less helpful self-help text written by some more-or-less sincere pop-psychologist. Dionysius’ concerns are of a timeless appeal and stoicism itself is never seemingly out of fashion, but, knowing nothing of their content, we will learn nothing from the texts themselves. We may, however, learn something from the title that Dionysius earned for himself.
Some time, later in life, Dionysus became afflicted with chronic pain, localized at the back of one of his eyes. This prompted the once healthy and steadfast man into a radical change of perspective. He disavowed his earlier commitments to stoicism and turned, instead, to the hedonism of the Cyreniacs, acquiring, by virtue of this, the title of Renegade. Now, it would be easy to paint this as a typical picture of how stoic attempts to discipline the mind will ultimately flounder in the face of any sufficiently intensive or extensive physical pain. The body keeps the score and at some point the mind cannot keep count, or something like that. But that would be lazy and reductive. It would fail to comprehend the meaning of Dionysius’ change of heart, and impose upon it only the content of his hedonistic turn, telling his history from its victory.
The stoics were not ignorant of pain. Many were, on account of their social standing, relatively insulated from toil, though this was far from a universal truth. Indeed, Epictetus, a favourite of both the French Enlightenment and the contemporary self-improvement guru, was a slave. The stoic ethic was not a simple assertion of Mind over Matter. But what we can glean from the Renegade is that this was, perhaps, his understanding. Dionysius’ biography does not speak to the triumph of this or that ethical outlook but rather to the failure of his self-relation as both mind and body.
Dionysius’ initial stoicism was a satisfying reduction. It felt good for him to think that he had mastery over the appetites of his soul, as man of surety, of strong constitution. But this felt less good than the pain of failure felt bad. The body is not so easily satisfied and the mind not so easily dominated. Learning the weakness of his mind he concedes to it and substitutes for the stoic life a new simplification. His turn to hedonism, though prompted by chronic pain, was not in satisfaction of his body: it soothed his mind. His mind had failed, ultimately, to dominate itself and this new ethics absolved him of that difficulty. Whereas the old reduction had appeared to satisfy his body, this new reduction appeared to satisfy his mind. But both were, at base, satisfactions of a voracious mentality; a body in denial of itself.
The truth of this is made by the manner of his death. Dionysius, at the age of eighty, having spent many years first as stoic, then later a hedonist, in an act of asceticism seemingly at odds with them both, starved himself to death. Had he, then, at last, won the battle? Suppressing his bodily instincts through so total a mastery of his mind that they could no longer fight back against him? No. Dionysius’ death represents the total victory of the body, for it had convinced the mind this victory was its own. In his attempt to infinitely suspend the tension of having a body he had shown himself utterly incapable of facing the struggle of being one, exposing both his stoicism and his hedonism as so much repression thereof.
Dionysius was neither, really, a stoic nor hedonist; he simply shovelled these teachings down into his belly/stomach to quiet whatever discomfort he was, at the time, unable or unwilling to confront. It was perhaps this disposition that Zeno identified when, upon Dionysius asking why he never corrected him in class, Zeno replied, “It is because I do not trust you.” He treated all teaching as mere food for thought. To satisfy the appetite of his inner resentment. Rather than comprehending either ethic as an engagement with the tension between body and mind he understood them each as domination and disavowed the fight he was afraid he could not win.
Our truth is the intersection of many independent lies. Thus, every body of knowledge is built on a structure of cultured ignorance; the lie within truth is one of omission. This is self-evident in the history of pestilence. The Antonine Plague, the first pandemic to rupture ancient civil society, has been transmitted to us via various textual sources, but primarily from Galen’s De indolentia (περὶ ἀλυπίας—“on avoiding distress”). The exact etiology or what caused the pandemic remains a matter of controversy; initially, historians unanimously agreed that it was smallpox, but recent genomic and phylodynamic work has cast doubt on that conclusion. De indolentia is a curious text, Galen wrote it as an exercise of equanimity to demonstrate his mastery over the vicissitudes of misfortune. The text catalogues his personal losses during the plague years—a library destroyed by fire, manuscripts lost in transit—and rehearses the mental disciplines required to maintain ataraxia amid catastrophe. What the text does not catalog, except as occasion for demonstrating indifference, are the material conditions genomic analysis now reveals: livestock decimation disrupting grain supply, urban mortality concentrating in insulae tenements where the non-citizen poor lived at lethal densities, mass graves (and sometimes there were no graves!) where the bodies of slaves were deposited without record or ritual. The plague appears in Galen’s writing as physis—nature, fortune, the unavoidable—never as politeia, never as a product of social organization.
This is not a mistake or a matter of nescience; Galen is the physician of antiquity after all. In his work, e.g. On the Method of Healing, you find acute clinical observations: pneumonic symptoms, bubo formation, mortality patterns, and detailed taxonomy of diseases. But we know better today, don’t we? Ancient medicine was an individualizing profession, a determinate concept of population has yet to emerge. Galen was concerned with the patient’s specific constitution, their healthy base-line, their humors, in order to understand both what is wrong and how best to treat it, to return the sick person to their previous state of health. Genomic sequencing of Yersinia pestis from Roman-era dental pulp has allowed bioinformaticians to reconstruct what Galen of Pergamon could not say.
What genomic analysis and computational reconstruction reveal is not the correction of ancient error but the exposure of necessary erasure, the independent lie. Galen’s silence about the political economy of differential death was ideological labor essential to imperial subjectivity, not a fault of knowledge. Roman civil society required that slave mortality remain unthinkable as social murder—otherwise, the entire edifice of humanitas collapses into its actual foundation: normalized mass violence. Philosophy provided the conceptual apparatus for this unthinkability. Stoicism’s universalizing gesture—“all men die, the sage accepts this”—performs the same function as our contemporary epidemiological models when they describe plague transmission via “population density” and “R-naught values” without naming that density as a function of land-rent, or that certain populations were rendered expendable by law. To sequence ancient DNA is to read biological evidence of what written sources suppressed, but the reading itself occurs within institutions (genomic research facilities, university presses, grant-giving bodies) that reproduce contemporary versions of the same exclusions. Whose deaths are we counting now? Whose remains, in Galen’s phrase, matter for “avoiding distress?”
Where Galen required Stoic discipline to render mass death philosophically tolerable, we require statistical models, machine learning optimizations, the entire apparatus of data science. The content changes: genomic markers replace humoral imbalances, neural networks replace syllogistic reasoning. But the form persists. Catastrophe appears as an object of contemplation, of reconstruction, of knowledge production; never as an indictment of the social order that organizes who lives and who dies. Technical reason, in making the past legible, reads its own prehistory. The algorithm that translates περὶἀλυπίας does not transcend the text’s ideology; it extends it. We have developed new instruments for the same refusal. This is what development means: barbarism becoming more sophisticated in its forms, more total in its reach, more capable of naming itself while remaining unchanged. The plague killed; Galen philosophized; we sequence and model and publish. The self-scarring continues, now with better tools for describing the wound we continue to inflict.
The apocalypse is the most productive time to acquaint yourself with the signs of God. The dark night of the soul materialized twice: first as Athens, representing eternity; second as Baghdad, representing history. Said another way, wisdom died twice.
In 9th-century Iraq, after a bloody civil war, the Caliph al-Ma’mun ascended the throne. A lover of the intellect, he established Bayt al-Hikmah (the house of wisdom) and generously financed it. Aristotle, it is said, came to him in a dream, urging the union of Greek wisdom and Islamic knowledge. However, al-Ma’mun’s belief in the Bayt was more a wager than a gift: he believed that the Day of Judgment was near and wanted to meet Allah having built the architecture that unified Greek, Indian, Persian, and Arabic knowledge—the ideal soul for the Round City of Baghdad. It is within this milieu that the black Mutakallim read the signs.
At the end of the Mutakallim’s life, Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr al-Kinani al-Basri, better known as al-Jāḥiẓ, attempted to document totality. He endeavored to make an encyclopedia of animals, documenting over 350 species, from the housefly to the lion, outlining their habitats, food chains, and taxonomy. Unfinished at seven volumes, the Kitāb al-Hayawān (book of animals) was something fundamentally different from Aristotle’s Historia Animalium: an allegory for creation that, by way of its reading, assimilates other semiotic systems to its own cosmological biosemiotics. What emerges from al-Jāḥiẓ’s prose is 9th century Baghdad and Basra via text—cities and creatures, Bedouins and mosques, markets and salt marshes, rendered as a single interconnected whole. Ecology before the word existed.
Scholars gloss al-Jāḥiẓ’s method as “accretive intercategory,” nowhere better demonstrated than the Dog-Rooster debate. The Proponent of the Rooster claims that the Dog is a cursed creature: neither predator (sabuʿ) nor prey (bahīma,) wild nor domesticated, clean nor unclean. It guards a household it cannot fully enter, hunts beside a master it does not fully serve, and reveals its essence by eating its own excrement and defiling corpses. The Proponent of the Dog retorts in kind. Loves its abusers? So does the Sheep. Eats corpses? So do Lions. Worried about excrement—have you seen Camels, Chickens, Fish, Pigs, Eels? For every neither-nor, a both-and. Poetry, proverb, ḥadīth, Islamic law—all marshaled toward one animal’s honor. Then the Proponent of the Dog brings the Pigeon: not filth this time, but breeding, varieties multiplied by hand until no fancier can say what a Pigeon is. The Dog was cursed by what it touched; the Pigeon is cursed by what it has become. The Rooster’s side had asked what the Dog truly is; the Pigeon asks what anything is, once you start asking. If you cannot think the Dog, you cannot think the Pigeon—and a fortiori, you cannot think the Rooster. Every animal lives at the threshold of every category. The debate was supposed to establish which animal was superior; what it established was that superiority requires a ladder, and the ladder requires rungs that hold. The Scala Naturae cannot stand. From this education the ideal reader learns to interpret the signs, restoring a precarious social harmony.
If an animal within its environment is a sign of god, then the same holds for the human animal. Al-Jāḥiẓ knew this with urgency. A Black man—a Zanj—in a society where attributes were weapons, he turned the intercategory method directly on Blackness itself. If the Dog is neither predator nor prey but the product of its relations, then Blackness carries no force internal to itself. It is a complexion produced by sun and geography, not a substance with inherent meaning. It is a testament to the power of this method that, even today, who and what constitutes the Zanj remains a live historiographical controversy. The Kitāb Fakhr al-Sudān ʿalā al-Bīḍān (Book of the Boast of the Blacks over the Whites) was a philosophical weapon, its blade the same one sharpened on the Pigeon and the Mule. And yet, al-Jāḥiẓ’s household contained a concubine, a eunuch, a slave; each a sign he refused to read. The method had dissolved the foundation of the institution in which he lived, and he did not follow it home. The ideal readers, unlike the ideal writer, must follow the signs from home to city.
Every sign bears the mark of its conditions, as the animals demonstrated, as Blackness confirmed, as the water beneath the cities made undeniable. A famous Arabic proverb: where the water ends, the land ends. Abbasid Iraq was an empire of flow—water, goods, bodies—and the Tigris and Euphrates were its defining terms. Baghdad sat at the rivers’ confluence, the Round City’s geometric ideal presiding over everything the water carried toward it: grain from the north, bodies from the south, spices and ceramics from the Indian Ocean. The caliphs built riverside palaces with sweeping vistas, audience chambers raised above a series of courts. For the masters, water was a vista; the Round City’s geometry as the soul’s ideal form, indifferent to the network beneath it. At the bottom of the same river system lay Basra: the delta, the confluence, the blood of the empire’s commercial exchange. Here al-Jāḥiẓ assembled his method in the Mirbad marketplace, among madmen and Bedouin brigands and Jewish poets, not in the Bayt. Further south the water descended into salt marshes, below the city, below the market, below the vista—the Tigris and Euphrates losing definition, braided into channels and reed beds that shifted with the seasons, the boundary between water and land dissolving exactly as the proverb said it would. This was the empire’s agricultural foundation and its most illegible sign: the labor that drained the marshes, worked the salt flats, maintained the irrigation network that fed the cities that housed the palaces that produced the vistas. The soul, at this scale, was the earth, and the people most acquainted with it were the Zanj. But were they even able to read the signs?
The Zanj did. They rebelled. Rayhan ibn Salih, Rafiq, Sulayman ibn Jami—the black vanguard history tried to read away—and behind them a coalition of enslaved and manumitted, peasant and craftsman, Arab Bedouin and Bahraini, every body the ladder sorted beneath politics assembling into a force—at that moment they were all Zanj—that held the strongest administrative system in the Muslim world at bay for 15 years. They read the signs from the salt marsh and the reed channels imperial troops could not navigate, ambushing canal forces from concealed side channels, fighting from inside the water rather than above it. Ali ibn Muhammad declared that the most qualified man should reign, even if an Abyssinian slave, which is to say: the attribute has no force internal to itself, the niche produces the qualification, the salt marsh co-generated the sign-reader that Wisdom could not. South of Basra, intersected by canals and protected by an iron chain across the main waterway, the Zanj built al-Mukhtara, the Elect City—palaces of baked clay, houses of brick and palm leaf, its own currency minted as early as 871. The Round City claimed to embody the divine plan: soul and city corresponding, signs resolving into the Creator’s wisdom. Al-Mukhtara was built on natural history—the water that moves, the boundary that shifts, the category that will not hold. Its unlocatability is its philosophical statement: the divine plan requires a fixed point; natural history has only conditions, and conditions change. When the rebellion was crushed in 883, plantation slavery was never again practiced in the Arab world. The method, once loose, did not stop even in defeat. The Bayt al-Hikmah’s books entered the Tigris in 1258, the water running black with ink, wisdom returned to the element it had refused to think. It died because it would not go where the Zanj already were. Wisdom died twice—once in Athens, once in Baghdad—and both times it built a city to last forever. The Round City has vanished without a trace. Al-Mukhtara never asked to be found. The false is an index of itself and the true. The signs are still here.
It is said that John Scotus Eriugena’s students stabbed him to death with their stylii. Whatever the provenance of this story it provides us with a telling counterpoint to this early Medieval philosopher’s christianized Neoplatonism. More than that, it gives us a useful opportunity to reflect on the practice of philosophy in general—on what it hides, what it reveals, and where its truth really lies.
In his most important work, the Periphyseon, Eriugena develops a physiologia, a Science of Nature, in which the latter is understood as a totality that encompasses both those things that are and those that are not. He sets it up so that what is not is to be understood as equivalent to what cannot be grasped by the senses or by the intellect, while what is corresponds to what can be so grasped. Among the things which cannot be grasped we find: God, the primordial causes and the higher orders of beings like angels. These are the hidden and unknowable essences of all that is manifest, the causes which lie behind the spatio-temporal world of becoming, those truths which remain concealed within “the most secret folds of nature.”
In other words, for Eriugena, power, creation and ultimate explanation for everything we take to be real in our everyday lives rests in a supersensible beyond that is both so high above and so deep within the things of our world as to be permanently hidden to us. Even human nature, which is unique among created things insofar as it is cast in God’s image, can only know of itself that it is, but never what it is, and this is so precisely because its lack of self-comprehension is what secures its infinity and likeness to God. God, the creative power from which everything emanates, through which it exists, and to which it returns, Nature, the totality of what is and is not, and Man himself are all knowable only negatively, analogously, and dialectically, but never concretely or truly—neither in nor for themselves, if you’ll allow me to use such anachronistic terminology.
This physiologia is presented in the form of a dialogue between a master and his suitably deferential pupil. In contrast to this idealized pedagogical relation, the real relation between Eriugena and his actual pupils in the story of his death allows us to see the doctrines just discussed in a new light. Whether the events of the story actually took place or not, they contain a truth hidden by the philosophical idealization of the Periphyseon.
In putting their pens to use not as weapons of criticism but as instruments of criticism with weapons, Eriugena’s pupils show that while it may be true that what is beyond comprehension constitutes the hidden cause of the world of appearance, it is more likely only what is beyond the comprehension of the philosopher and his idealizing abstractions. Rather than looking to the supersensible beyond or some unknowable transcendence as the ground of what comes to be and passes away, Eriugena would have been better off if he had turned his attention to what would become the source of his own passing away, and what is the source of coming to be for all of us: the manifest and sensible world of social relations.
They also give us a hint as to how the idealized relations of philosophical form can actually ground the philosophical content they enform. Just as the engaged acceptance and respectful posture of the idealized pupil of the Periphyseon allows the enlightened master to unfold an account in which the hidden, benevolent origins of power are recognizable through their visible manifestations without a hitch, so form always does its share of the work in providing the conditions for a specific content to take shape. This is a hint that applies just as much to the modern philosophical essay or monograph, with their assumptions of transparent communicability and indifferent address, as it does to the more visibly constructed and more obviously contrived—at least to our modern eyes—form of the dialogue.
What a non-idealized philosophical form looks like, one that does not turn away from the real social relations within which it is embedded, remains to be seen; unless it is simply the collective practice of self-emancipation through the weapon of criticism and criticism by weapons—a practice carried out for the most part by people who are not typically seen as philosophers, but one into which putative philosophers must subsume themselves if they are to have any chance of finding truth.
Aggression is natural. All animals have a limb for defense, but God gave man alone a brain for thinking and hands for working. These two powers combine to enable labor and the crafts. Man’s most primal tools, the ones that put him on even ground with the dumb beasts of the Earth, are lances, swords, and shields.
These arms, however, are insufficient for man to defend himself against his fellow man: “If you are not a wolf, the wolves shall eat you,” as the saying goes. The only way out of this impasse is through the emergence of a human restrainer, wāzi’, that stands above the people and dominates them, but even this is a natural and necessary process—that is, if it can be called a process at all. By Ibn Khaldun’s own claim that it is impossible for human society to reach a true state of anarchy, it must be concluded that the pattern of restraint emerged outside of historical time. Even the maximal freedom of the desert-dwelling Bedouins and Berbers is conditioned by the natural restraints of political animality.
Still, kings and rulers do emerge. Dynasties are carried to the throne by the group feeling of their tribe, house, or faction, then lose their group feeling and rule through clients and followers, laws and punishments. The ruler’s personal restraining force is supplanted by that of the law, and the noble vegetate in luxury as their subjects languish under draconian harshness, becoming cowardly and unfit for militia service. To be punished by the law when one cannot defend oneself is humiliating and leads to the destruction of fortitude. Similarly, a child that grows up in the bosom of the city and receives education is deprived of its fortitude, being habituated to authority and incapable of self-reliance. Such craven beings make poor men.
Seeing the pitfalls of punishment and education, the Prophet applied a different restraint. Religious principles, unlike the law of the state, function without external sanction. The believers carry them within themselves, for they received the precepts of faith from the Lawgiver in a way that transcended technical instruction and scientific education. How could the Prophet have scientifically educated his companions when both he and so many of them were illiterate? With foresight, Muhammad stipulated that a ruler should not be too shrewd, for the shrewd are wont to be tyrants, and even predicted that the caliphate to succeed him would last only thirty years before descending into tyranny and injustice. Those who are too clever are all “would-be shayatin.”
In time, the leaders of the state came to exclusively concern themselves with governmental affairs, and by the end of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate scholarship had become a profession for the timid and resentful. Once worthy of being likened to prophets by God’s final messenger, the erstwhile class of scholars, ‘ulama, degenerated to the status of mere teachers for hire, mu’allimun, representing little more than a pack of “weak, indigent, and rootless” ingrates despised by those who enjoy the power of the state, perhaps because the rulers understood that these weaklings can only sap the fortitude of their subjects. Learning is further restraint, knowledge of the crafts and sciences a noxious tonic brewed in the luxury of civilization.
The scholars, for their part, are unable to grasp why they are hated. Political matters slip through the sieve of their analogical intellect just as the true contents of the sciences slip through the frivolous abridgements and handbooks they produce. Though scholars are mere “urban weaklings,” rulers still find themselves obliged to keep some scholars, particularly jurists, on hand for the maintenance of religious order. Lesser intellectuals found work teaching. Those in Ifriqiyah and the Maghrib used the Qur’an as the basis of their curriculum to the disbenefit of their students, for the Qur’an is inimitable and its study cannot provide students with the habits of knowledge.
And yet, children must be taught religion before they have “shaken off the yoke of authority,” and the power of custom dictates that the Qur’an comes first. Education is caught in a blind alley. Religion stands alone as the sole restraining force and form of knowledge that can sustain a dynasty, but it is impossible to teach religion without degrading both religion and teaching. Ibn Khaldun had served every post imaginable for a man of his rank: chancellery secretary, judge, professor, privy councilor, military commander, diplomat, prime minister—and his verdict was dim. When the father of social science takes on the role of a teacher and directly addresses his reader as a student in the sixth chapter of his Muqaddimah, it can only be interpreted as an act of desperation.
Humanity is not merely held in suspension between its natural and supernatural destinies, between the promise and the threat, by the circle of civilization; It is hanged. Prophetic ecstasy is the only thing that can put a spoke in the wheel and briefly establish an interregnum in the cycle of the lower world, where life is no more than the enjoyment of delusion.
The bivalent attitude which Christine de Pizan displays to her own gender is a result of the fortune and misfortune associated therewith. If, at the beginning of The Book of the City of Ladies, she laments her femininity, in the first book of On the Mutability of Fortune she laments the fact that Fortune saw fit to transform her into a man. Nature endowed Christine with a crown containing the precious stones of Discretion, Consideration, and Retention, but her female assignment at birth prevented her from inheriting her father’s earthly possessions.
What prompts male chauvinism? In The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine’s interlocutor Lady Reason provides a taxonomy of misogynists: those who defame women out of ignorance, those who do so out of vice and impotence, those who do so from jealousy, those who take pleasure in slander, and those who wish to demonstrate their erudition. None of these types are blameless - Reason even compares the ignorant misogynist to someone who has committed manslaughter - and yet each species of misogynist has its own particular venom. The misogynist who attacks women out of ignorance is harmful because he cannot be trusted to reason properly; he who attacks women out of vice and impotence is harmful because he has turned into a shriveled, misanthropic husk after a lifetime of pleasure-seeking, the vanity of vanities. Those who attack women out of jealousy recognize that they are intellectually mediocre and have boundless passion for attacking those whom they recognize as their rightful superiors; those who attack women from a desire for slander need no explanation for the harm they cause.
The recalcitrant dismissal of women opens up a philosophical puzzle: its origin. De Pizan, much like de Gouges centuries later, decries both the epistemic injustices that men commit against women as well as the property relations which forbid women from forming an independent bloc of economic power with which to rectify the situation. Yet unlike de Gouges, de Pizan does not attempt to connect the two causally. De Gouges insightfully sees nature as licensing egalitarian, pro-social relations between genders, yet de Pizan reverts to the chauvinist dogmas of her time on occasion. When de Pizan asks Reason why women do not hold legal offices, Reason responds by claiming that the different genders have different functions and serve different ends, a clear nod to the Aristotelian chauvinism that predominated in her time. From such a justification was the Salic Law upheld. And yet de Pizan’s personal role in helping France’s diplomatic aims during the Hundred Years’ War points to a performative contradiction; she condones a gendered division of labor in her writings yet shows their historical decadence in her actions in piazza.
The philosopher, like the prince, must avoid flatterers. If, in The Prince, Machiavelli counsels that Fortune has its due, but that a sagacious ruler can temper it by working alongside it, then in the Discourses we see the inanity of the princely form of government itself. Be he under the rule of law or unshackled, a prince is less wise and constant than the people. Unjust people can be spoken to or dispersed, while the unjust prince can only be tempered by steel; the misdeeds of the common people are done in the name of the common good, while the prince’s misdeeds are done only for his own sake. Moreover, as maintaining the good graces of Fortune requires new provisions, a free republic will ever be able to supply a fresh crop of virtuous citizens, able to stand alongside history, weathering its tumults through skillful navigation instead of obstinate opposition. Fortune, then, is not a woman to be beaten, but a companion to be respected.
In the final chapters of Book I of the Discourses, the Polybian taxonomy of the anacyclosis is swept away, as is any classical liberal concern for artificially balancing the state against itself. There is only the free state, full of the people, wishing to keep itself free through its own virtù rather than grovel at the feet of their putative superiors. Yet this is no utopia: we are in a world of real people, subject to real political forces, which can drive a republic into servitude if not taken care of. A free people must beat down the ambition of its elites, lest their ceaseless lust for dominance subjugate the entire society. Consequently, the people need not respect aristocratic titles or the norms of noble civility. Fortune has no need for efflorescent reverence - like Hamlet, she knows not seems. All that matters is that the people carry out their most praiseworthy of duties - ensuring the maintenance of liberty through licentiousness
This task need not grant eternal reward - some societies will still decay despite the best efforts of its people to prevent the corruption of the nobility from undermining it. Yet a valiant defeat is still valiant. The Gracchi failed, yet their failure still prevented the accrual of yet more economic and political power in the hands of vicious and incompetent oligarchs. Struggle necessarily closes off the possibility of apodictic victory; it is still necessary to undertake regardless, for the alternative is a consolidation of tyrannical power in the hands of a self-interested few.
Those who do not respect Fortune should not expect her good graces. She takes great offense at the accumulation of power into the hands of an oligarchy or tyrant, for such people are ungrateful owing to greed and wish to oppress others. Consequently, their endeavors are done poorly and without sufficient care for the people, as was the case of the French invasion of 1494. On the other hand, she smiles on those who trust the people as the foundation of all free rule, since their desires “are rarely harmful to liberty, because they are born from being oppressed, or from suspicion of having been oppressed.” She also demands that the common people see to their own defense in both the domestic and foreign spheres, and be given good motive to take up arms. There is no motive greater than one’s own freedom from domination, and thus class struggle is the basis of stable society.
Fortune despises indolence, and for this reason she has no need for the so-called “gentlemen” who “idly live on the incomes of their possessions abundantly, without having any care for cultivation or of other necessary undertakings for living.” These so-called gentlemen of yesteryear, like capital today, are “dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Closing oneself off from the world, idly indulging in ephemera reserved only for an aristocratic elite, is the negation of the dynamism of the free republic. Its indulgence comes at the price of the ruination of the rational society, for it undermines the restraints on the powerful that enable society to flourish. Such people are pernicious and ossify vice and corruption. The Florentine counsels the free republic to treat them like the sons of Brutus. Centuries before Robespierre, the sclerotic rule of the Italian city-states was proof that virtue without terror is impotence, and terror without virtue is destruction manifest.
Few know that René Descartes was not a dualist but a pseudo-dialectician, and a clever one at that. What is evident in the Sixth Mediation is downright clear and distinct in the 1643 letters to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, that the mind and body must be conceived as both two and one. So much for an open and shut case of dualism. The cleverness of his response to Princess Elisabeth’s question—how can the mind move the body when such movement necessitates the extension the mind lacks?—lies in the fact that it is spurious as much as it is true. Descartes tells the Princess that she already possesses a concept for understanding how (1) the mind and body are really distinct, meaning I am extensionless mind that can outlive my extended body, and (2) these really distinct substances simultaneously comprise a whole human being. It is the concept at the heart of an apparently accepted but false theory of gravity. Descartes says that while one abuses the concept in question by applying it to weight and the body to which it is imagined to be joined, since they are not really distinct, it is precisely the “primitive notion” through which the apparent contradiction of the relationship between the mind and body together can be grasped. For the purportedly distinct quality of weight is falsely believed to inhere in bodies and move them toward the center of the Earth without pushing them and thus without requiring extension. Gravity may remain obscurely conceived but the contradiction motivating Princess Elisabeth’s problem has thus been resolved. That is to say, an accepted framework has been supplied for conceiving how a mind that is really distinct from body (and therefore lacks extension) can move the extended body with which it is intimately united.
Clever Descartes does not deserve most of the calumny inflicted upon him. And yet Elisabeth is right to want what this pseudo-dialectician cannot give: dialectical mediation, for him to say that I as a thinking thing am empirical body, beast of burden, rotting flesh.
Bourgeois revolutionaries are ever stuck in their own antinomies. On the one hand, their program of universal freedom and equality points to a world beyond class divisions, yet on the other, their program also valorizes the present state of things, be they extant socioeconomic forms or political symbols. No figure better exemplified this antinomy than Olympe de Gouges. Qua proto-feminist, she rightfully decried the racial and gender inequality of her time, and even correctly identified economic relations as a source of women’s disempowerment. At the same time, de Gouges’ appraisal of Marie Antoinette reveals that the former valorized a moribund feudal nobility, a penchant which ultimately led her to the guillotine.
While de Gouges notes that economic inequality is a wellspring from which gender inequality draws its strength, she meditates this source by way of the family. The Salic Law forbade female inheritance, and so she sought to remedy this injustice by proposing marital and inheritance reform, wherein a couple would pool all assets upon marriage and divide them equally to all children upon the couple’s death. Such an arrangement would be enforced through a contract to which both parties would agree. Here the irony of landing Marie Antoinette becomes apparent; while the French Revolution was the precondition for the possibility of martial and inheritance reform, as it rid the country of the nobility which relied on the Salic Law, de Gouges herself implicitly legitimized the Salic Law by exhorting one of the few women who materially benefited from its enforcement.
Another limitation of de Gouges’ proposal is that it can only help those who already have material wealth to inherit in the first place. The nascent bourgeoisie would find de Gouges’ proposal beneficial as they could pass on their wealth to their progeny. However, the Third Estate lumped together all lay people regardless of wealth, and those sans-culottes who would later form the proletariat would have little to pass onto their children regardless of gender. This lack of inheritance reproduces the very gendered relations that de Gouges sought to remedy; while she correctly identified economic dependence as a source of feminine unfreedom, by trying to solve this problem purely at the level of private contract, she prevents the women of the sans-culottes from benefitting from her reforms unless they supplicate themselves in front of a rich man.
While de Gouges was a bourgeois revolutionary par excellence, she nonetheless remained a bourgeois revolutionary insofar as she sought to remedy inequality through the formal mechanism of the contract. The dramaturgist de Gouges has a proletarian counterpart in the thespian Claire Lacombe, who vociferously argued for the execution of the nobility but also the restriction of capital accumulation to better provide for the women of the sans-culottes.
Despite the half-heartedness of her proposals, de Gouges’ oeuvre points to a world beyond class relations, though she herself does not know it. By correctly identifying the social and material sources of inequality, she deserves commendation for rising above the purely private domain in which other bourgeois thinkers of her time languished. At the same time, by restricting her solutions to the private sphere, her thought retains a bourgeois streak that prevents her proposal from forming the basis of universal liberation. The liberation of women, like the liberation of humanity as a whole, is not to be sought in private contract, but in the rectification of the social totality.
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