Reflections on Simon Critchley's Philosophical Short Cuts (Part 1)

Simon Critchely: Bald (Yale University Press, 2021) 

Essays edited by Peter Catapano 

Cover design by R. Black

 

 

I don't know Simon Critchley: but he's one of the Simons that I can't help admiring and to whom I feel a vague connection, that is part philosophical in nature and part generational; we share many of the same ideas and points of reference and we were all born in the same decade [a]. 

 

Having said that, there are differences between me and the Simons, including Herr Professor Critchley, whose collection of essays Bald (2021) I'd like to discuss here in an amicable if still critical manner. Readers might best see this post then as less the staging of a confrontation or a reckoning [Auseinandersetzung] and more an attempt to offer an insightful commentary in the same kind of engaging, jargon-free - or bold and bald - style that Critchley adopts in this work.  

 

Note: whilst there are thirty-five essays in Bald - all originally published in the New York Times - I'll not be discussing each of them here; just the ones that really catch my interest or which I find particularly provocative [b]. The titles in bold are Critchley's own. And all page numbers refer to the 2021 edition shown above. If the post becomes overly-lengthy - as these posts often do - I'll publish it as two (or possibly even three) parts.   

 

 

Happy Like God  

What is happiness? 

 

In an attempt to answer this question Critchley calls on Rousseau, who provides him with the idea that happiness might simply be the feeling of existence; a feeling that fills the soul entirely. 

 

Perhaps in order to update the language slightly, Critchley reframes this feeling as one of "momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time" [5]. Happiness, in other words, is learning to enjoy the nowness of the present (no regrets and no longing for a better tomorrow). 

 

Achieve a state of joyful reverie and, says Rousseau, you become like God - and Critchley doesn't demur, which is slightly strange for an atheist, but indicates the direction his thinking often takes; i.e., towards secular mysticism (whether this makes him a crypto-theologian more than a critical theorist is a question we can return to later). 

 

And where and when is Critchley happiest? 

 

Sitting by the sea, or in his lover's bed; happiness can be a solitary state, but "one can also experience this feeling of existence in the experience of love" [6]. Maybe: though I'm not sure that love is ever that blissfully straightforward and Critchley is honest enough to admit that even the most oceanic feeling of happiness is outrageously short lived: "Time passes, the reverie ends and the feeling for existence fades." [6].

 

Didn't Goethe once say that no one can enjoy looking at a beautiful sunset for more than a few seconds without getting bored; and I remember also Johnny Rotten once characterising love as less than three minutes of squelching noises. 

 

In other words, we are incapable of being permanently happy (or even happy for long) [c].  

 

 

How to Make It in the Afterlife 

 

As a thanatologist, what I like about Critchley is that, sooner or later and no matter what the topic - he's going to speak about mortality. And sure enough, we quickly pass from happiness to death and the relation between them, which he discusses in relation to ancient Greek philosophy (his other specialist subject). 

 

The key is: live a good life and die a noble death and happiness will be yours. Which means that "happiness does not consist in whatever you might be feeling [...] but in what others feel about you" [13]. 

 

In other words, happiness is something posthumously ascribed - a very unmodern view, but one worth considering; particularly if the adoption of such a view encourages us to live in a more beautiful manner so as to be remembered with smiling fondness.  

 

 

The Gospel According to Me

 

That's a nice title. And it's a crucial short essay attacking the search for individual authenticity, which Critchley rightly recognises is born of a "weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality [...] and a litugy of inwardness" [15]. 

 

This ideal of authenticity - which was central to existentialism before becoming central to New Age therapeutic culture - is basically a type of selfish conformism; something which "disguises acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion" [16]. 

  

Those who think the quest for authenticity is an ethical practice, might be surprised to find Critchley dismiss it as a form of passive nihilism. Passive nihilism and the zen fascism of the 21st century American workplace. For when the office is such a fun place to be and encourages you to be yourself and express yourself, then "there is no room for worker malaise" [17] or class war and in in this way authenticity becomes "an evacuation of history" [17] [d].    

 

I like it when Critchley nails his colours to the mast and pops his political hat on; exposing not just the fantasy of authenticity, but the evils of the workplace - even those that allow us to wear our favourite T-shirt "and listen to Radiohead" [17] on our i-Phones while at our desk. 

 

And I like it too when he relates his philosophical and political critique to literature; pointing out, for example, that Herman Melville, "writing on the cusp of modern capiatlism" [19] in the mid-19th century, had already twigged that "the search for authenticity was a white whale" [19]; i.e., an obsessive quest that is "futile at best and destructive at worst" [19] [e].   

 

 

Abandon (Nearly) All Hope

 

Having demolished the ideal of authenticity, Critchley now attacks the ideal of hope: is it, he asks, such a wonderful thing? 

 

Obviously, I don't think so and I've long been an vociferous opponent of this Christian virtue: see the post dated 6 Feb 2022, for example, on Shep Fairey's Obama poster: click here. Thus, I was pleased to see that Critchley is also hostile to the idea, regarding it from a Graeco-Nietzschean perspective as a form of moral cowardice that "allows us to escape from reality and prolong human suffering" [20].    

 

Hope, says Critchley - contra Obama - is not audacious; it is mendacious; something exploited by our religious teachers and political leaders alike. And what we need is not blind hope but clear-sighted courage in the face of reality (including the courage to abandon hope). 

 

Or, to put that another way, "skeptical realism, deeply informed by history" [25], that knows how to smile like Epictetus (the slave turned Stoic philosopher admired by Nietzsche).    

 

 

What Is a Philosopher? 

 

An idiot who falls down the well (like Thales); or one who takes their time ...? 

 

Probably a combination of both: 

 

"The philosopher [...] is free by virtue of his otherworldliness, by the capacity to fall into wells and appear silly" and this freedom "consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic" [71] [f].   

 

Critchley endorses this Socratic defnition further by agreeing that the philosopher is also one who is indifferent to convention; shows no respect for rank; never joins a political party or a private club. Of course, this kind of attitude and behaviour can get you in trouble - Socrates  was ultimately put on trial and condemned to death for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens [g]. 

 

Thus, Critchley (amusingly) decides: "Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS" [72]. 

 

It is thus not only a perverse love of wisdom - a form of erōtomaniā (see below) - but a risking of one's own life; i.e., a practice of joy before death. 

 

Critchley concludes (in a slightly confessional, slightly self-dramatising manner):

 

"Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully uncanny about philosophers, something either monstrous or godlike, or, indeed, both at once." [73]

 

 

Cynicism We Can Believe In

 

Ancient cynicism is "not at all cynical in the modern sense of the word" [83], writes Critchley. 

 

And that's certainly true; ancient cynicism was a rigorous philosophical way of life that involved self-debasement in order to make its case, whilst modern cynicism, on the other hand, is "an attitude of negativity and jaded scornfulness" [83]; often no more than a fashionable pose.  

 

The modern cynic isn't expected to live like a dog, eat raw squid, or masturbate in the market place and his cynicism lacks the moral and political radicalism of the hardcore cynicism that Diogenes practiced. 

 

But in a world like ours - self-interested, lazy, corrupt, and greedy - "it is Diogenes's lamp that we need to light our path" [85]. Though I think we can do without the flash-wanking or pissing in public, thank you very much.    

 

 

Let Be - An Answer to Hamlet's Question

 

For Heidegger, letting be [Gelassenheit] is a fundamental granting of freedom, born not of indifference, but an active concern for otherness and a refusal to see the world as something to be manipulated and exploited. In other words, it's a form of care. 

 

Critchley - who certainly knows his Heidegger - prefers to think the idea of letting be in relation to Shakespeare's Hamlet, however. In response to the play's famous ontological question - 'To be, or not to be?' - he says 'Let be'. 

 

But in order to let be, requires, he says, the cultivation of "a disposition of skeptical openness that does not claim to know aught of what we truly know naught" [107]. 

 

He elucidates:  

 

"If we can cure ourselves of our longing for some sort of godlike conspectus of what it means to be human, or our longing for the construction of ourselves as some new prosphetic god through technology, bound by the self-satisfied myth of unlimited human progress, we might let be." [107] 

 

I think we can all agree this would be a good thing. But it's not going to happen, of course; man is the creature who just can't help interfering and organising and wanting to be master of the universe; Homo sapien is also Homo importunus.   

  

 

Notes

 

[a] The other Simons include Reynolds and Armitage - see the post dated 17 Jan 2026: click here - and also the monstrous figure of Síomón Solomon; see the post dated 19 Jan 2026: click here. 

 

[b] Readers will note that I don't, for example, refer to any of the five essays in the section entitled 'I Believe'. Essentially, that's because I don't know anything about (or have much interest in) Mormonism, Russian literature (Dostoevsky), or Danish philosophy (Kierkegaard). 

      Nor do I share the (quasi-religious) faith of a football fan and find Critchley's paean to Liverpool FC a bit cringe if I'm honest. Does he really believe that football teaches us something important about our humanity and that being a Red inculcates a set of purely noble values: "solidarity, compassion, internationalism, decency, honour, self-respect and respect for others" [63] -? (Opposing fans sometimes accuse Liverpool supporters of moralising sentimentality and hypocrisy, but we can leave this for another post, another day.) 

      The essay on money - 'Coin of Praise' - I did read and found myself nodding in agreement with the idea that our financial system essentially rests on faith; i.e., money is the most ideal of all material things and our one true God. But saying that didn't seem to justify an entire section in this post.      

 

[c] See the follow up piece entitled 'Beyond the Sea' (pp. 7-11), in which Critchley addresses some of the comments and criticisms he received from readers of 'Happy Like God'. Crucially, he recognises that happiness in the moment is often topped by happiness of the memory of our happiness in the moment; that the best kind of happiness isn't ecstatic, but melancholic.  

 

[d] Michel Foucault famously dismissed what he called the Californian cult of the self in comparison to the ethico-aesthetic stylisation of self as practiced by the ancient Greeks and modern dandies. See 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1991), p. 359. 

      And see also what Foucault writes on the 'arts of existence' and 'techniques of self' in The History of Sexuality 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1992). 

 

[e] Critchley also refers to his hero Shakespeare, reminding readers that no one is more inauthentic than Hamlet and that the depiction of his radical inauthenticity "shatters our moral complacency" [19] as witnesses to the drama that unfolds.    

 

[f] I would suggest that just as there are two types of philosophical freedom, so too are there are two types of philosopher; I belong to the first type, who flit from topic to topic; my friend Síomón Solomon belongs to the latter type and enjoys the freedom to return and ruminate upon the same problems over and over. This naturally enough produces a different type of thinking and writing style.

 

[g] Critchley notes: "Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety" and philosophy has "repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy against the gods" [72]. Because their attitude is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as one of not giving a fuck, philosophers are often regarded as "politically suspicious, even dangerous" [72].

 

 

Part 2 of this post can be accessed by clicking here.  

 

In Memory of Tara Fares (Notes on Fanaticism)

Tara Fares on Instagram / Photo by Omar Moner

Tara Fares, the Iraqi beauty queen and outspoken social media star, has been shot dead in Baghdad by unknown assailants, after receiving a series of vile threats on her life. She was 22. A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior promises an investigation - but we all know why she was murdered and by whom.  

Her death comes just days after the murder of Suad al-Ali, an Iraqi human rights activist who was shot and killed in the southern city of Basra. Again, whilst the gunman has so far been unidentified, one doesn't have to be Columbo to crack this case.  

When men enthusiastically put their most cherished ideals and beliefs into action, the result is all too often bloody; history is nothing but this violent trajectory. As Cioran says: "Once a man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable."    

Cries of religious ecstasy and shouts of devotion are echoed in the moans of victims. And blood always flows when epileptics and ideologues - primed with explosive conviction - insist their way is the way; "firm resolve draws the dagger; fiery eyes presage slaughter".

To live peacefully and happily requires learning how to curb enthusiasm and counter all certitudes, absolutes and convictions with irony and a smiling insouciance. For if the former ideals are allowed to contaminate the soul, the result is fanaticism: that fundamental human defect which instills in us the desire for truth and terror.

To quote Cioran once more:

"Only the skeptics (or idlers or aesthetes) escape, because they propose nothing, because they [...] undermine fanaticism's purpose, analyse its frenzy. I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. [...] What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man ..."

He concludes:

"The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster."

And that's why I prefer Instagram over Islam, fashion over faith ...

See: E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). Lines quoted are from the section entitled 'Genealogy of Fanaticism' in chapter 1, 'Directions for Decomposition'.

Morgenröthe: Nietzsche's Red Dawn

Alicia Dunn: Red Dawn No. 5 (2017)

aliciadunnart.com

I. If Passion Ends in Knowledge then Nietzsche is the Best-Read Man in Town

According to Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's 1881 work Morgenröthe - usually translated into English as Daybreak or Dawn - is the most neglected of all his texts.*

If that's true, then it's a real shame. For it's a brilliant and beautiful book which illustrates how philosophy is, first and foremost, a form of erotics. For what is the pursuit of knowledge if not a passion, suggests Nietzsche; an intense desire to shatter established patterns of thinking and abandon the fears and consoling fictions that have for the greater part of history reduced man to the status of a herd animal.

Nietzsche anticipates "a new dawn in human existence" in which individuals are free to "cultivate their lives in a manner that is conducive to themselves and beneficent to others" [44]. He proposes ways of becoming who one is that involve thinking differently and, just as importantly, thinking critically with regard to the self. It's philosophy as a playful and experimental practice; what he'll term in his next work die fröhliche Wissenschaft.


II. Say Yes to a Single Joy and You Say Yes to All Woe

Nietzsche completed Daybreak in the Italian city of Genoa. He had by this time retired from his professorship at Basel University due to ill health and was living on a very modest annual pension in an unheated garret. His diet was as restricted as his income and consisted mostly of porridge and risotto, followed by more porridge.

Not only did he have to endure extreme cold and isolation, but Nietzsche spent a lot of his time suffering with blinding headaches that lasted for days at a time and caused him to vomit. His only relief was provided by that solitary vice much favoured by Diogenes, but condemned by Kant as an unnatural form of self-abuse. "And yet", writes Ansell-Pearson, "it was under these harsh conditions that he wrote over the course of a year one of his 'sunniest' books" [65].

And this is why one loves Nietzsche: for the fact that he says Yes to life in all circumstances and under any conditions; affirms, in other words, life as an economy of the whole and gives even the most terrible aspects of existence his blessing. It takes an almost inhuman degree of courage to affirm even a single moment or joy, when it's in the knowledge that by so doing we affirm all eternity and every pain, every sadness, every evil.

In sum: Nietzsche constructs a harsh philosophical ethic not only beyond good and evil, but, as Ansell-Pearson argues, beyond solitude and compassion as well; one that rests upon endurance and cruelty. Free-thinking, as he conceives of it, "will, initially at least, plunge people into despair and grief" [111]. But it results at last in happiness and in greatness.

Obviously, this isn't a philosophy that everyone might choose to live by, or be capable of living by: 

"I think it is clear, both from hints he gives in Dawn and says in other texts, that Nietzsche thinks the tasks of free-spirited thinking are ones reserved, and perhaps best reserved, for a few individuals who will constitute what we might choose to call a moral (or 'immoral') avant-garde." [112]


*Note: Ansell-Pearson reminds us that the original German title literally means 'morning redness' and specifies "the precise but fleeting moment at which the sky is aflame with colour and before the red yields to the customary blue or grey. It suggests a time of possibility, invention, inspiration and renewal, in which the freshness of the day augurs a new way of life." [67] 

See: 

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this book. 

Nietzsche, Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith, (Stanford University Press, 2011). 

Floraphilia Redux (With Reference to the Case of Rupert Birkin)

Floraphilia 

YouTube (2009)

 

Flowering plants don't just grow in soil: they are also rooted in our hearts and blossom in our poetry; from Wordsworth's daffodils to Sylvia Plath's poppies. We love flowers and our love is like a red, red rose; just as the columbine is the emblem of our foolishness, the marsh-lily the symbol of our corruption and the narcissus conveys our conceit.

In language, as in art, we have formed an unnatural alliance with flowers and some, like Oscar Wilde, fervently hope that in the next life they might even become-flower - which is to say, beautiful but soulless. Here, I would like to examine this literary-erotic entanglement with flora and the manner in which we, like insects, become implicated in their sex games just as they are utilized in ours ...

What are flowers?

Flowers are the obscenely colourful sex organs of the flowering plant and they are what distinguishes angiosperms from other earlier forms of seed producing plant. Without flowers, an angiosperm would be just another gymnosperm: all leaf and naked of seed. Arguably, the same is true of people: they either blossom into full being like a bright red poppy, or they remain closed up within a mass of foliage and growing fat like a cabbage.

What is pollination?

Pollination is the process by which one plant receives the pollen from another: it is the botanical term for fucking. Some angiosperms are pollinated abiotically by the wind, some by water. And some rely upon small animals, such as bats or hummingbirds. But the majority, around 80%, exploit the labour of roughly 200,000 different types of insect. It is, if you like, a perfectly natural form of artificial insemination.

But insect pollination might better be viewed as a form of paid sex work, rather than erotic enslavement. Because when plants are fucked by insects the latter get something sweet in return for their services: nectar. However, this is not to say that the insects are entering into the relationship with full consent (whatever that might mean in the world of bugs and bees and cigarette trees) and most seem blissfully unaware that they are playing such a crucial role in plant reproduction.

Further, there are instances of male insects being sexually duped by a plant with sex organs that have evolved to look like the female of their species. The insect is attracted not by the pretty colours or the alluring scent of the flower, nor even the promise of a sugary drink, but by the prospect of being able to mate. The French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari discuss this in A Thousand Plateaus, with particular reference to the case of an orchid and a wasp. However, they argue that it should be understood in terms of becoming and not in the more conventional terms of mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.

The question remains, however, what this aparallel evolution or game of becoming, has to do with us: how are we implicated in the sex life of flowers? The answer is hay fever. For what is the allergic reaction to pollen suffered by many millions of men, women and children other than a sexually transmitted condition? Every spring we are sexually pestered by flowering plants that promiscuously allow their sperm-producing cells to be carried by any passing breeze into the eyes, ears, nose and throat of any passing creature.

As with herpes, there is presently no cure for hay fever. However, an article in The New Scientist several years ago suggested that 'organic masturbation' with fruit and vegetables might alleviate the problem. It turned out to be an April Fool's Day joke. But, many a word spoken in jest ... The revenge of the flowers starts with a runny nose, but who's to say in what humiliating circumstances it might end?

Of course, not all plant-human penetration is non-consensual. Whilst no one wants a nose full of pollen, many men and women are happy to insert carrots, cucumbers, and courgettes into those places usually reserved for cocks, tongues, fingers, and toys. But just because a woman might choose to insert a banana into her vagina, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she is on the road to building a body without organs, or that she's had done with the judgement of God.

In D. H. Lawrence's novel, Women in Love, the central male protagonist, Rupert Birkin, is a confirmed floraphile, as this scene illustrates:

"He was happy in the wet hill-side, that was overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. He wanted to touch them all, to saturate himself with the touch of them all. He took off his clothes, and sat down naked among the primroses [...] then lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts. It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact.
      But they were too soft. He went through the long grass to a clump of young fir-trees [...] The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him vividly, but not too much, because all his movements were too discriminate and soft. To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one's belly and cover one's back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one’s breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges - this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. Nothing else would do, nothing else would satisfy, except this coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling into one’s blood. How fortunate he was, that there was this lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, waiting for him, as he waited for it; how fulfilled he was, how happy!"

Lawrence continues:

"Really, what a mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people, thinking he wanted a woman. He did not want a woman - not in the least. The leaves and the primroses and the trees, they were really lovely and cool and desirable, they really came into the blood and were added on to him. He was enrichened now immeasurably, and so glad.
      ... Why should he pretend to have anything to do with human beings at all? Here was his world, he wanted nobody and nothing but the lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, and himself, his own living self.
      It was necessary to go back into the world. That was true. But that did not matter ... He knew now where he belonged. He knew where to plant himself, his seed: – along with the trees, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves. This was his place, his marriage place. The world was extraneous."

It might be suggested that in this extraordinary scene Birkin is in the process of forming a rhizome between himself and the vegetal world, similar to that formed between the wasp and the orchid. It's a deterritorialization of sex from its traditional object and aim; a setting free of desire to roam and eventually reterritorialize on all kinds of new things, in all sorts of strange new ways. The great and intoxicating truth that Birkin demonstrates is that we can form loving relations not just with anyone - but anything and everything.

Admittedly, it's not love in the conventional and orthodox sense of the word, which is to say love that has been sanctioned by God and which involves the right persons doing the right things at the right time in the right place with the right organs - a model that is so restrictive and so reductive that it makes one want to immediately run outside and commit acts of erotic atrocity like Diogenes in the market place.

However, let it suffice for me to point out to those law-abiding individuals who think that love should circulate exclusively within a system of moral legislation, that were it not for Eve daring to consort with serpents and eat of whatever fruit she pleased, then none of us might have attained to carnal knowledge, or experienced the full range of earthly delights. Ultimately, love is tied to transgression and to crime - not to obedience or conformity with social convention.

In fact, one might argue that the highest forms of love are precisely those branded as paraphilias in which strange connections are sought out and one dreams of establishing an inhuman relationship with alien forces, or heterogeneous terms and territories. Quite clearly, Birkin is caught up in a process of becoming-plant via a series of perverse participations none of which involve imitation or identification. It's a question of extracting from his own sex the particles that best enter into proximity with those emitted by the plants and which produce within him a micro-florality.

If usually when we love we do so in order to seek out ourselves, that's almost certainly not the case here. For Birkin is not depositing his sperm amongst the foliage in the same way as he might come inside a woman and one suspects that he isn’t even that concerned with his own functional pleasure or the banality of orgasm. What really excites Birkin, even more than the delicious touch of the plants on his bare skin, is that he might enter into a new way of being and release the flows and forces and strange feelings presently overcoded by his humanity. Or, put more simply, that he might blossom and unfold into his own poppiness.

The problem with having a human being as a lover, is that their body often doesn’t serve to set anything free; rather, it gives impersonal desire personal expression and in this way it acts as a zone of containment, or a point of blockage - a dead end if you like, no matter how you choose to penetrate it. In other words, the anus is a cul-de-sac and, as Bataille reminds us, the vagina is a freshly dug grave.

There is, I admit, something utopian in this belief that we might discover via molecular-desire a new world in which we each contain an infinite number of impersonal selves and the anthropomorphic representation of sex is shattered once and for all: a future in which love will no longer mean boy-meets-girl, but boy becomes-girl, boy becomes-animal, boy becomes-plant, etc. But, even after the orgy, it surely remains true to say that perversions make happy.

This, however, is not to argue that the only way to form an intimate relation between yourself and the world of plants is to roll around naked like Birkin in the wet hill-sides, saturated with a mixture of pollen and semen. Nor does it mean having to masturbate with the contents of your vegetable drawer. For art also serves as a method of becoming and when Van Gogh paints sunflowers "he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as a man, and the sunflower, as sunflower". The canvas acts as a zone of proximity wherein something is exchanged between the two terms: the artist becomes-object, just as the object becomes pure line and colour.

This is the power of painting: it gives us the third thing, which, in this case, is a kind of human-flower hybrid that blossoms in the fourth dimension as a form of perfected relationship and becoming "where no Kodak can snap it". And, for Lawrence, our life hinges upon this relationship formed between ourselves and the world around us. Via an infinite number of different contacts we enter into the kingdom of bliss.

Alas, it’s not easy to come into touch in this way. To form a new relation with the world is invariably painful, if only because it involves the breaking of old connections and loyalties and this, as Lawrence reminds us, is never pleasant. But, nevertheless, we live in bright red splendour like the poppy via acts of infidelity and not by staying true to old attachments like a fat green cabbage forever stuck in the same old cabbage patch.

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-07.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 171.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Art and Morality', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, p. 168.

Note: A much longer version of this work was first presented at Treadwell's, London, on 19 June, 2012.

Aparigraha and Adoxia (Notes on Yoga and Cynicism)

My confidante and muse, Zena, has newly qualified as a yoga teacher after an intensive period of study in the foothills of the Himalayas. She enjoys yoga as a physical and mental practice, but is also excited by it as a philosophy or system of spiritual beliefs, about which I’m naturally curious.

Thus I listened with interest when she told me about the Hindu virtue of aparigraha - an ethical concept that encourages non-attachment to material things, thereby countering the will-to-possess that can so often result in the vulgarity and the violence of greed.

Of course, what we in the West might term temperance is a crucial component of various religious traditions, not just Hinduism. For many people, the true life is not merely a simple life, but one in which poverty is believed to be a good thing and wealth something of a disadvantage for those who hope to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But - as far as I understand it - that's not quite the idea being advanced by the teachers of aparigraha.

Rather, as with the Stoics, the crucial issue is not so much having or not having money, but adopting an indifferent attitude towards riches, so that one does not become fixated by all the trappings of wealth, greedy for all the goods and services that money can buy, or overly worried by the prospect of one day losing one's power and status within society.

In other words, it remains perfectly possible to lead a virtuous and humble life and still have millions stashed in a secret bank account. All that matters is that these millions don’t really matter to you; that you remain morally aloof, so to speak, from your own wealth and unafraid of any reversal of fortune. By liberating the spirit and letting go in the mind, one needn't be deprived per se or physically destitute (which is certainly convenient for those religious leaders and gurus who like to wear Gucci loafers with their robes).

Now compare and contrast this with the real and radical poverty that the ancient Cynics actively sought out. Diogenes and his followers didn't just offer an effectively virtual moral teaching based upon a simple detachment of the soul; rather, they stripped existence of even the basic material components upon which it is usually thought to depend (including clothes and shelter). Thus, as Foucault notes:

"The dramaturgy of Cynic poverty is far from that indifference which is unconcerned about wealth ... it is an elaboration of oneself in the form of visible poverty. It is not an acceptance of poverty; it is a real conduct of poverty ... unlimited ... in the sense that it does not halt at a stage which is thought to be satisfying because one thinks one is ... free from everything superfluous. It continues and is always looking for possible further destitution."

- Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 258. 

In fact, the Cynics push their scandalous practice of poverty to the point that they end up leading lives full of dirt, dependency, and disgrace; they become the one thing worse than being a slave in Greek eyes - and that's being a beggar. For the Cynics, the key is not aparigraha - it's adoxia - the seeking out of a bad reputation and the systematic practice of dishonour.  

Now - just to be clear - I'm not saying that I approve of or advocate Cynicism; not encouraging those who have taken up yoga in order to find a certain degree of inner peace and wisdom to suddenly abandon their practices and start leading a naked, bestial life of shameless destitution - I'd hate it if Zena suddenly started barking like a dog and committing indecent acts in public.

Nevertheless, I am saying something and I suppose what I'm saying is that I find the core principles of yoga (the so called yamas, of which aparigraha is a key element) platitudinous; they lack any philosophical bite, or critical edge. Further, I worry that they can lead not only to good karma for the individual (whatever that is), but to a socially conservative politics that reinforces convention and the order of things.

In sum: I don't want to masturbate in the market place, but neither do I want to meditate cross-legged on a mountain top, surrendering myself to the higher power of the universe ...            

Dog Bites: On the Question of Man and Animal (and the Becoming-Animal of Man)

Photo by Eija-Liisa Ahtila from the eight part series 

of images entitled Dog Bites (1992-97)

Like Lou Carrington, I’ve always believed there must be something else to marvel at in humanity besides a clever mind and a nice, clean face and that we might term this something else animality.

And like Lou, I’ve always hoped that were we to conduct what Nietzsche terms a reverse experiment and resurrect the wild beast within us, then we might produce a type of man who would be “as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath”.

But now I’m not so sure about the desirability of this: for clearly there are dangers involved in the process of man’s becoming-animal and no one really wants to see werewolves prowling the streets.

Nor, for that matter, do I think it an attractive prospect to live like a dog, as Diogenes liked to live and as was central to the ancient philosophical practice of Cynicism. I don’t want to shit in the street or copulate in full view of others; don’t want to drink rainwater, growl at strangers, or eat raw meat. Like incest, these provocative acts might be perfectly natural and constitute secret pleasures, but they should only be indulged in with extreme caution.

In other words, unlike the ancient Cynics - and unlike some of the more militant of the animal rights activists and environmentalists campaigning in our own time - I don’t wish to tie the principle of the true life exclusively to the domain of Nature and thus reject all social convention and civilized restraint.

Our humanity may well be something that needs to be reformulated and eventually overcome, but it remains nevertheless a magnificent accomplishment; one that was achieved only after a huge amount of suffering over an immense period of time.

Thus, to adopt a model of behaviour based upon that of our own animality (or, rather, what we imagine the latter to be) simply so we might lick our own balls in public and thereby scandalise those who pride themselves on all that distinguishes them as human beings, seems to me profoundly mistaken.


Notes

Lou Carrington is a character in D. H. Lawrence’s short novel St. Mawr. See St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). The line quoted is on p. 61.

For an interesting interpretation of the bios kunikos and why the Cynics prided themselves on living such see Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 242-43.

Chaturbate and the Question of Cynicism

Georg Viktor: Diogenes in der Tonne (Raku ceramic figure) 

www.viktor-ge.org

For those of you who don’t know, Chaturbate is a popular pornographic website where individuals live-stream themselves engaged in sexual activity, either solo or with a partner or partners. Performers can earn money in the form of tips from viewers, but they are essentially amateurs in the pure sense of the term; i.e. they do it because they love to live an unconcealed and shameless life; a life that is constantly under the watchful eyes of others and before the virtual gaze of the camera.

Some critics argue that such behaviour is unnatural and immoral and I’ll come to this philosophically naive charge shortly. Others suggest it constitutes a way of being that is unique to the age in which we live; one that can only be understood in terms of the technology that facilitates it. But, of course, despite what the posthumanists think, there’s nothing new under the sun, and even so-called cybersex might be seen as nothing more than a digital restaging of life in its libidinally material reality.

As such, Chaturbate constitutes a novel revival of an obscene and scandalous ancient practice - Cynicism. Diogenes masturbated in the market place and his disciple Crates liked to fuck his wife in public; our twenty-first century cynics do these things online. But far from being corrupt or perverse, it’s actually a form of the good life; a type of true love taken to the logical extreme. For as even Plato knew, true love never hides itself away; it’s that which is always happy to reveal itself before witnesses.

Now, this is not to say that Plato would have approved of Chaturbate. He may have taught that truth loves to go naked, but he also subscribed to traditional rules of Greek propriety. There were limits and it was best to exercise caution and moderation. For Plato, Diogenes was beyond the pale; he was a Socrates gone mad. And Plato knew that if you push ideals to their extreme, then you effect a kind of transvaluation.

What Michel Foucault writes of the Cynic dramatization of the unconcealed life, is precisely what we might say of Chaturbate’s interactive community of cam-girls and cam-boys and their attempt to love with complete openness: chaturbating is “the strict, simple, and, in a sense, crudest possible application of the principle that one should live without having to blush at what one does”.

But, as a result of this, all the rules, habits, and conventions of behaviour which this principle initially accepted and reinforced, are now overturned. Cynicism explodes the code of propriety and offers the possibility of a radically different (more brazen, perhaps more brutal) form of life: one that is watched over by the goddess Anaideia.

See: Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), The line quoted is on p. 255 of this paperback edition.