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Review by Adriano Palma
University of KwaZulu-Natal
Philosophical Papers 39:1
The one and only work by Carlo Michelstaedter was published for the first time in 1913, after he shot himself in 1910 at the age of twenty three. It is a singular classic. Nothing else like it exists in Italian philosophy. The peculiarity of philosophy in Italy is, with minor exceptions, an endless target practice with the object of refining some aspects of German classical idealism, or else the re-hashing of themes from the philosophy of the ‘schools’ in quasi Thomistic ways.1
The only help one would find in reading Persuasion and Rhetoric is literary. Similar themes are found in Leopardi, Petrarca, and in the classical tragedies. The book was conceived as an undergraduate thesis and it was supposedly discussing the notion of rhetoric in Plato and Aristotle. Nobody should think the text is a scholarly enterprise. The main thesis is violent: all of philosophy descends from a primal scene in which Aristotle kills the Platonic instinct. Only an underground network of persuaded people, oppressed by the rhetoricians, indicated the truth of the matter, and nobody listened: ‘Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles said it to the Greeks, but Aristotle treated them as incompetent naturalists; Socrates said it, but they constructed four systems on it. The Ecclesiastes2 said it, but they treated and explained it away as a sacred book, which therefore could not say anything that was contrary to the optimism of the Bible.’ (3) Wondering about what ‘it’ is, one would have to come to the conclusion that it is nihilism. Once cured from the disease of rhetoric: ‘The voice of pleasure is interrupted—the one which says that you are— and the consciousness now hears only the dampened murmur of pain become clear, which says you are not, while all the time, despite it all, it is still asking for life.’ (32) This perception of nothingness is however immensely painful, and it is felt by anything and everything: ‘The hydrochloric acid was, before their embrace, predetermined in the consciousness of the chloride and of the hydrogen.’ (16) And chloride too is subject to the universal pain. If that were all, Michelstaedter would be less interesting than he is. He has a question and an answer in mind:
… do you know what you are doing? And what you do, which is all within you in the moment in which you do it, can no one take it away from you? Are you persuaded of what you are doing? You require this or that to happen or not to happen, in order for you to do what you are doing; so that the correlations always coincide. The purpose, however vast and distant, is never in what you do; it is always your continued existence. You say that you are persuaded of what you do, come what may? Let me tell you something: tomorrow you will surely be dead. It doesn’t matter? Do you think of fame? Of your family? But your memory dies with you and so does your family. Do you think about your ideals? Do you want to draw up a will? Do you want a gravestone? But tomorrow they will be dead, they too will be dead; all men die with you—your death is a comet that does not falter.’ (36-37)3
The text by Michelstaedter has no argument in any standard sense. It had to be written as poetic thinking. It consists mainly of extended quotations from classic tragedies, Italian poets, and scattered biblical references. ‘Philosophy’ itself appears as a composite character of Plato and Hegel. ‘Science’ is no particular theory of anything: it is an apparatus to enslave ‘life’ as understood by Michelstaedter. The closest one gets to some form of argument is the parable of the macrocosm, a sort of rigid balloon achieving levity and vision (pp. 78 & ff) The fiction makes Plato a space traveller who sees from high above reality. Reality is a reality of (platonic) Forms. The Vision is transmogrified into a theory, and such a theory was sold as merchandise: ‘And the public was happy to see that the merchandise came from heaven and they were happy that they were able to use it exactly as if it were merchandise that came from this earth.’ (84) The man who made this possible was Aristotle. Michelstaedter is quick to point out (85) that while there is no historical basis for any of this, it is nonetheless true that the confused masses insisted on ‘moving in the realm of the positive, repeating the voice of things given by familiar methods and nearby necessities, elaborate on it in the name of absolute knowledge, and busy themselves theorising over thing’. (85)4
After the way of persuasion, all we get is an endless droning on the fact that everyone is deeply wrong, deceived and self-deceived. That is what rhetoric does: it helps people coping with the dread of the nothingness that only persuasion displays in its real form. What is, indeed, original here and pre-dating the equally endless Heideggerian droning, is the view that what we do, when we do anything is violence. The ‘security’ (the imposition of an ontology that, deceitfully, establishes that something is) is violence: ‘The security (the “thing”, as the jurists say) signifies:
1. Violence against nature: labour
2. Violence towards men: property.’ (112)
By and large, Michelstaedter delineates the tragedy of Dasein, its being captive of a realm of chattering people who talk to escape the recognition of what they are unable to face, while at the same time being victim of unbearable anxiety.
One may very well surmise this to be the work of a disturbed young man5 and nothing else. I beg to differ. Here we have an exceptionally pure form of what would become phenomenology and existentialism if purified of its most laughable aspects. The primacy of the phenomenal is such that ontology is determined by subjective sensations: ‘Nothing exists per se, but in relation to a consciousness … Life is an infinite correlativity of consciousnesses’. (14) At the same time no difference is to be made between the normative and the ontological.6 What rules the mind of the author is the rage at the appalling condition of slavery people are in: being enslaved by rhetoric, they do not know what they are doing. It would take persuasion to know, and that is hidden. It is only this rage that drives Michelstaedter’s halfbaked attempts at repeating some version of Christian social doctrines (about the value of persons, who are not ‘things’.) They mostly resort to the standardized conservative convention that there is something of great value lost in liberating people from manual labour. It is equally rage, combined with juvenile, supremely beautiful arrogance, driving his conviction that nobody else ever thought about any of this (except, of course the sapiential poetic aphorisms peppering Sophocles and Petrarca). However, despite all of its failings, the text is interesting, to this reader at least. It is much better than later existential literature, and it does not pretend to clothe its shape in spurious distinctions. What is here felt is the pain of life. For all the irrelevance of opinions, the present reader is in complete agreement, being ‘life’ whether or not one has a philosophical thesis about it, a biological short process with tragic endings.
The translation done by Snyman and Stellardi is excellent. Much is lost of the shining beauty of the original, through no fault of the translators. I could only advise people to learn to read in Italian, and alas in classical Greek and German, and some sort of ‘friulo-veneto’ lost language, to appreciate the point.7 One unimportant quibble: sticking to the notion that persona in Italian means both ‘person’ and ‘persona’ is doubtful, I surmise. Likewise it is very doubtful that someone like Michelstaedter says ‘something about the fraught position of Jewishness in Europe’ (vii), for the condition of the assimilated Jewry of the Habsburg empire wasn’t fraught at all, viz., Karl Wittgenstein and family. Likewise, while it is true that Michelstaedter indulges in the traditional ‘argument by etymology’, not much in common with Derridean themes is really here. These are minor points given the magnitude of the task.
Michelstaedter wrote a lesson in serious pessimism. If only to forestall a possible objection (we would be better off having a beer and watching the game) perhaps it is not amiss to close with a simple note by the author: ‘Don’t come and talk to me about sport, which is supposed to counterbalance all this. The reason for sport, its purpose, is not in doing, but in “having done”. The religion of the sportsman is the “record”. And “record” means, firstly, a most partial development, since someone who wants to maintain a “record” must not think about anything else, and secondly, danger without the need for sufficiency in all those sports where man entrusts himself to a machine and makes it work to excess … Thus sport belongs to the realm of all other societal things: stupid and uniform labour …’ (124) It is indeed very difficult, though it has been tried, to pacify Michelstaedter ironically with our, perhaps deceiving, habits of carrying on as usual.
1 Indeed it is difficult to find existential philosophy written before the 19th century. It is not coincidental that Michelstaedter presents little by way of arguments, going from premises to conclusions, and lots of illustrations by way of extended metaphors. There is, to my knowledge, not much in English about this scene and its philosophy. The scarce materials are purely literary, and it is a pity, all things considered. For those interested in pursuing the matter, it is advisable to read the Italian edition of Gyögy Lukács, Diario (1910-1911), and the postface titled ‘Metaphysics of youth’ by Massimo Cacciari, by far the best introduction to these forms of thought. Equally useful, and mercifully not in Italian is the ‘Interpretation de Michelstaedter’ by Massimo Cacciari (available at http://www.lybereclat.net/lyber/cacciari/dran/4interpretation.html). This is a chapter of a book, titled Dran, containing French translations of Cacciari’s work on the interpretation of Plato. Equally interesting is the ‘letter’ to Michelstaedter by Roberta de Monticelli, in Il richiamo della persuasione, Marietti 1988. There are also scattered theses in English available on web pages.
2 That is the Qoheleth, one of the texts that follow Torah.
3 The text continues dispelling the usual ‘moves’ confused people make: ‘You turn to god?—there is no god, god dies with you; the kingdom of heaven crumbles with you, tomorrow you are dead, dead; tomorrow everything comes to an end, your body, your family, your friends, your country, what you do, what you may still be able to do, the good, the bad, what is true or false, your ideas, your role, god and his kingdom, paradise, hell, everything, everything, tomorrow it is all over—in twenty-four hours’ time —death’ (p.37) Michelstaedter, not without ingenuity, forestalls common responses to the facts of death and dissolution of any particular thing as well as of everything people claim to care about. I find myself unable to quote in full the relevant passage. With apology to those who cannot read it, but it is written amazingly well, far better than the drivel that passes now for phenomenology and existentialism. It is a shame not to reproduce the force of the original text: Κύριός είμι θροεїν όδιον κράτος αίσιον άνδρών έκτελέων έτι γάρ θεόθεν καταπνείει πειθώ. (Eschilo) Тί τοϋτο ποιεϊς; questo che fai, come che cosa lo fai?—con che mente lo fai? tu ami questa cosa per la correlazione di ciò che ti lascia dopo bisognoso della stessa correlazione, la cui vicinanza non è in te prevista che fino a un limite dato, sicché, a te, schiavo della contingenza di questa correlazione, sia tolto tutto quando a questa cosa questa correlazione sia tolta; e tu debba altra cosa cercare e in balìa della contingenza di questa metterti? …. Chi teme la morte è già morto. (or ‘he who fears death is dead already’) Text of 1910, (V. Arangio-Ruiz (ed.) 1913; critical edition La persuasione e la rettorica, Milano: Adelphi, 1982 and following editions. Full text at: http://www.letteraturaitaliana.net/pdf/Volume_9/t253.pdf
4 This is where the text comes closest to making a philological point. Plato’s Parmenides is seen as a betrayal of Platonic ideas and inspired by an Aristotelian spirit ‘a prelude to the categories and the metaphysics of Aristotle’ (see note a, on p. 84 of the English edition here used.)
5 The gender here is relevant. Cf. Passim what the text contains about both sexual relations and females: see the likening of the ‘comfort of a woman’ with the corpse’s dead flesh, on p. 37.
6 For lack of better terms: take ontology to be whatever is, or is descriptively so, and the normative to be what ought to be, in some sense of ‘ought’ not well understood. Do not hope to find in Michelstaedter these kind of distinctions, much as you would not find them in, say Levinas.
7 To the credit of the translators sometimes they give up, see for example, note a, on page 57: ‘Untranslatable: redlich = “honest”, and also “that which can be said”, “sayable”.’
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