The Harvard Review of Philosophy VIII 2000 24-38

On the Philosophical Life

An Interview with Alexander Nehemas

Nehemar. The interesting thing about Socrates, of course, is that he never wrote anything, but Plato did it for him. He was extraordinarily lucky, if you like. In a very serious sense, Socrates and Plato are difficult to distinguish from one another, especially in the early dialogues, and in that sense we could almost say that Socrates did write. He wrote that which Plato wrote for him. And, as I said earlier in my book on Nietzsche, one of the reasons Nietzsche is so suspicious of Socrates - not suspicious, but jealous, I would say—is that Socrates didn’t have to do any of the work of writing. Nietzsche attempts to become Plato to his own Socrates, Socrates to his own Plato—to play both roles. Socrates’s transient life is not important at all. We know very little about that. We know that people found him extraordinarily interesting and that he was executed. That would not be enough to make him a great figure. It is Plato’s depiction of Socrates that starts off the tradition of philosophy as an art of living, not really Socrates’s life itself. The actual events of Socrates’s life, most of which we don’t know, gave Plato the impetus to create that tradition. But I don’t think it was just Plato’s doing, as I may have suggested; a lot of other people were writing about Socrates at the time, and they were doing very similar things: they were all writing dialogues and they attributed to him the most varied views. So, clearly, there was something amazing about Socrates to begin with. He was, I think, incomprehensible to everyone around him, as incomprehensible then as he is now. And the tradition takes off once he is, so to speak, canonized—not just through his life.

HRP: In the introduction you write, "But his early works, in which Socrates is an unexplained mystery and simply leads a philosophical life, stand at the beginning of a different philosophical tradition"—that is, different from the tradition growing out of Plato’s middle period in which philosophy becomes a purely theoretical activity. It would seem that philosophy as the art of living must constantly return to Socrates and reconsider and reencounter his irony. Do you think the art of living can be identified with or defined as the tradition of trying to make sense of Socratic irony?

Nehemas: I don’t know that every philosopher who belongs to that tradition makes an explicit return to Socrates, but it’s interesting that almost everyone who does belong to it exhibits what we might call Socratic features—particularly ambiguity. It’s difficult to know when to take them seriously and when not. That applies not only to Montaigne or Nietzsche, but also to Wittgenstein, if you read Wittgenstein as a philosopher in that tradition. It’s very difficult to know what exactly he’s saying—when he’s speaking in his own voice, when he is not. With Pascal, also, you have the sense of someone baring his soul, but you are never quite sure. How seriously are you going to take him? Many of those people are ironical. Montaigne is a highly ironical author, so is Nietzsche, and so is Foucault. The features we find in Socrates keep reappearing in the figures who belong to this tradition even when they don’t write as Socratic scholars or interpreters.

HRP: I’m interested in what figures you would like to identify in the philosophy of the art of living who don’t explicitly discuss Socrates.

Nehemas: I don’t think Thoreau does, but I think Thoreau belongs to that tradition. (He does, of course, like Socrates, make a big issue of civil disobedience!) Emerson, who I also think belongs to it, talks a lot about Plato, though perhaps he is thinking of Socrates. Wittgenstein does not discuss him. Still, the Philosophical Investigations, perhaps even the Tractatus, can be thought of as a series of dialogues even more complex than Plato’s, because we don’t always know who’s speaking. We don’t even know how many interlocutors there are in the Investigations.

One feature of this tradition of philosophy is the direct examination of Socrates. Another is the presence of Socratic features. A third is an emphasis on literary style, or what we call literary style, because all philosophy is written in some style. By that I mean a personal style, an explicit interest in how you write. I think I see such an interest in Stanley Cavell; that’s exactly what distinguishes him from many contemporary philosophers and why it’s so difficult to create a school out of CavelPs thought—in the end, it’s too personal, too "autobiographical" (to use his own term), for that purpose. Of course, many people created Socratic schools, but we have no idea how true to Socrates any one of them was; and no one has ever known exactly who Socrates was or what he believed.

HRP: I’d like to back away from philosophy as the art of living and concentrate on Plato and Socrates. In your work you consistently argue that some issue in their philosophy is directly relevant to contemporary debates. Sometimes you do so by overturning the standard interpretation. I’m thinking here specifically of your two essays in Virtues of Authenticity about Plato and the poets on the one hand and contemporary criticisms of popular culture on the other, as well as your re-working of the question about whether arete can be taught. To what extent do you think it is possible for someone of another time and culture to model his or her life on Socrates’s project of self-creation? To what extent is the Socratic project singular and specific to fifth-century Athens?

Nehemar. I don’t think Socrates’s project is so specific to fifth-century Athens. It’s something we find people doing all the time. What you can become, if you are involved in that project, is going to depend crucially on the situation and historical conditions in which you find yourself. But the idea of harnessing your energy, harnessing your personality, and making something worthwhile out of it is as basic and general as any human activity could possibly be. Of course, I don’t think you could do it by going around and talking to people in the street any longer—if Socrates ever did that. So you would have to go about it in a very different way.

HRP: Might that have something to do with the fact that after Socrates, philosophy as the art of living has to be done through writing? Nehemas: Philosophy is now a  written discipline. It wasn’t one for Socrates, but for him it wasn’t even a discipline in the sense we use "discipline" today. The questions we ask can be too complicated to address for a culture that is no longer an oral culture unless it addresses them in writing. When I say that the art of living is an art practiced in writing, I don’t mean that it is enough to just write about it. In some sense what you write must have an effect on your life and personality. That’s why I think that ad hominem arguments, interestingly enough, are important and relevant to this kind of philosophy: you can criticize philosophers in that tradition if their lives do not reflect their thought—whereas, generally speaking, ad hominem arguments are irrelevant and fallacious when applied to theoretical philosophy. But to the extent that ad hominem arguments are relevant to it, there is more to philosophy as an art of living than just the writing. On the other hand, suppose that somebody who was living philosophically never wrote a word (and wasn’t lucky enough to have a Plato do it instead!). That is possible, at least in principle. But could one then leave behind the kind of model that can make one part of that tradition? To me it seems pretty clear that this is impossible. No matter how influential

you are on the people around you, unless either you or someone else writes about it, people will forget your effects, the changes your life produced. Like ripples made by a pebble in a pond, they will eventually die out. Writing remains; it keeps getting interpreted and reinterpreted, again and again, and so the ripples never die. Well, perhaps you might say, "I don’t want to have an effect on other people. All I want to do is make sense of my own life and make a good person of myself." That’s an admirable purpose. The trouble is that I wouldn’t ever know anything about it, or about you, because I won’t have any evidence. You disappear after you’ve done your job. And that’s fine. But you can’t have it both ways.

HRP: I’d like to return to a statement you make in The Art of Living: "The monument one leaves behind is in the end the permanent work, not the transient life." Earlier, you write: "Perhaps these people succeeded in applying their models to themselves, perhaps they did not; whether they did it is a matter of biography, and most likely it will remain a matter of contention as well. The image of life contained in their writings is a philosophical matter and, though it too will remain a matter of contention, the contention will be over whether that image is a coherent or admirable one." Remarkably, however, three of the figures you write about in The Art of Living—Socrates, Nietzsche, and Foucault—share one obvious distinguishing characteristic: the facts of their lives are common knowledge. Bearing in mind the extent to which these philosophers’ lives have become common knowledge, I’d like to refer to another passage on this question, from Foucault’s essay "What is an Author?": "This relationship between writing and death is also manifested in the efface-ment of the writing subject’s individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality." How, despite what you and Foucault seem to say, have the lives of these philosophers become omnipresent in interpretations of their work?

Nehemas: We know very litde about Socrates—I want to insist on that. We do, I must admit, have all those biographies of Nietzsche, but what we know about him "as a person" is so general and broad and, ultimately, useless for understanding the work that leaves you speechless. When people try to do the psychobiography of Nietzsche they say ridiculous things like, "He said that God is dead because his father died when he was a child and he couldn’t get over it." That is an absurd simplification, reducing the significance of a view people hold to a single event in their life, thinking of the event (or events—it doesn’t matter how many) as the cause of the view, of the view as the expression of the event.

The important question you raise here is this: what do we dispute about when we discuss philosophy? What I’m trying to say—and I’m not saying it very clearly either in tiie book or here—is that when you read people like Nietzsche or Socrates, Montaigne, or Foucault you should not ask, "Were they right in the way they lived?" or "Did they themselves live the way tJiey said life is to be lived?" but rather, "How does that affect me? What am I to do once I have read them?" The philosophical question is not about diem, but about you and your own life. And what you do is whatever it is you’re trying to do. You try to answer questions; you try to be good to your friends; you try to be generous to people—whatever it is that

attracts you, whatever is part of your life. And, ideally, you try to impose some order and coherence on it all. So the question, again, is not whether Nietzsche produced an admirable model of life, although you may perhaps also want to answer that question. But somehow, ultimately, what you want to do is to make something of yourself—although not under that description: success is not itself a goal. My own goal is to get whatever interests me right, and to get it right in such a way that all its parts fit together. I don’t want to have one view today and another one tomorrow, do one thing now and another later, and have them bear no relation to one another. It’s important that our actions, our lives, manifest a consistent personality.

HBP: I would like to return to Foucault for a moment and recall the passage I read from "What is an Author?" He seems an interesting exception to your view in The Art of Living that the author constructs for himself a consistent and unified literary self through certain literary styles. Foucault’s writings seem characteristically impersonal, academic, and scholarly. And yet few interpretations of Foucault’s writings fail to mention the details of his life, specifically his political activism, his sexuality, and his death from AIDS—facts you mention as well. What do you make of this conflict between Foucault’s impersonal style and the predominance of biographical details in interpretations of his work?

Nebemas: Again, I don’t think the biographical details are predominant. The biographies of Foucault contain the least interesting interpretations of his thought. As to his style, I think it undergoes the most radical changes during the course of his writing. If you start from the very early work you’ll find the influence of Heidegger. You’ll then detect in the middle works a shift toward Nietzschean ideas, although they are expressed in the most impersonal style—so impersonal that it has its own personality. The very late works, the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality for example, or the last lectures, which I discuss in the book, are written in a completely different style, completely personal. So I think the essay "What is an Author?" vastly overstates the unimportance of the author that was in line with the impersonal style he was using at that time. I have actually written an article about that essay, and I argue that a writer inevitably constructs a persona, the voice of which is always heard through the text: that’s what an author is: sometimes that voice can be very impersonal, but that very impersonality, as I said, can be a personal feature. There is, of course, another kind of impersonality—the impersonality you exhibit when you write in a style that is universally accepted in a certain discipline. That is an impersonality that does not distinguish you from other people—at least not from anyone else who writes in that disciplinary style. But when Foucault wrote impersonally he was creating the impression that he had seen a truth no one else had seen and was simply reporting on it—all the while asserting the most extravagant, sometimes almost outlandish, ideas. And that’s a very personal style, after all, it’s impossible to mistake it for anyone else’s. So, I don’t think he’s an exception at all, and I believe that toward the end of his life, when he was writing The History of Sexuality and the lectures on Socrates and the Cynics, he was speaking in a self-revelatory tone. It’s almost as if he was trying to say, "This is what I’ve been doing all along—this is what my life was all about." That’s what I find fascinating about the lectures on Socrates: Foucault, at various points, cites a translation of the Apology, and then, without a break, he begins to paraphrase it and goes on to speak in his own person. When he says, for example, "I have been trying to treat you like a brother or a father," you don’t know if it’s Socrates or Foucault who is speaking: it’s as if he is putting himself in Socrates’s place. And that link, the revelation that all his work had this personal aspect, now allows me to go back and look at the early writing and see it as one part of a single protracted project, despite all the changes of direction, all the stylistic changes, all (to use his own term) the "ruptures."

HRP: Do you find that highly personal, revelatory style in, say, the second volume of The History of Sexuality, which for me is one of the keystones of what I have called Foucault’s impersonal style? Even though he isn’t writing within the recognized style or method of a discipline, he stills maintains this academic tone.

Nehemds: No, I don’t find that self-revelatory style there. But I do find a great simplification of language in comparison to the first volume. All of a sudden the prose becomes much easier to read. In the introduction to the second volume, he says explicitly: "I’ve changed." He has had to "rework everything from top to bottom," and as to those who believe that such a change is a failure, he writes, "all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet." The language of the third volume is even simpler. It’s important to realize that you don’t need to be talking about yourself in order to reveal yourself. That is a major issue. Montaigne talks about himself. Nietzsche talks about himself in Ecce Homo and in his prefaces, but he doesn’t do so very much in many of his other works. Of course, he always uses "I" and "we," but that’s not the point. One reviewer of The Art of Living complained that the book says close to nothing about my personal life. That was silly. For, in this project to say who you are is to express your philosophical concerns, not how many children you have or what clothes you like to wear.

HRP: It’s interesting that you’ve been saying that you can reveal yourself in your writing without talking about yourself, which seems to me one of the essential features of the way Nietzsche reads other philosophers.

Nehemar. Nietzsche has been horribly misunderstood in that respect. People think that when he writes in Beyond Good and Evil that every philosophy is an "unconscious memoir" of its author, he means we should treat philosophical texts as symptoms of an underlying psychological condition. But what he means is that most philosophies contain a picture of the life their authors espouse, admire, or want to avoid, and that seeing that picture is essential to understanding and evaluating a philosophy. When he says that every philosophy is an unconscious memoir, he isn’t thinking of the philosopher’s actual life, of a biography. He isn’t saying that Kant

believed this, that, or the other thing because he lived in Prussia, because he was a pietist, or because he liked to chew his meat, suck the juice out of it, and spit it out (someone has actually appealed to that to explain Kant’s writing style!). He is saying that to understand Kant you must try to imagine what kind of life you would live if you accepted his views and lived according to them.

HRP: You frequently insist that the philosophical theses of Plato’s dialogues should be interpreted in light of the literary techniques he uses to convey them, for instance, the Socratic elenchus, the other characters in the dialogue, and so on. However, you rarely discuss one of the most transparently literary aspects of the dialogues, namely the myths that Socrates tells in several dialogues, especially the Republic. Do you think that the literary symbolism of the Platonic myths has valid philosophical content?

Nehemar. One of the reasons I don’t discuss the myths is that I don’t really understand their function. In general, I think, people don’t talk about what they don’t understand. I have never been absolutely clear about the role myths play in Plato’s work. Actually, one of the first papers I wrote in college was on Plato’s myths, and I don’t know anything more about them now than I did then! In fact, it may be anachronistic to say that they are the most self-consciously literary aspects of the dialogues. We think of myth-telling as a literary device, and although the myths are clearly a device of some sort for Plato to be distinguished from philosophical argument, it doesn’t follow that they are a literary device, since the distinction between literature and philosophy (which is not the same as the distinction between poetry and philosophy) is not at all clearly marked in the dialogues.

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