Reflections on Simon Critchley's Philosophical Short Cuts (Part 2)

Simon Critchley: Bald 

(Yale University Press, 2021)

Part 1 of this post can be read by clicking here.  

All page numbers given below refer to the above edition of the book. 

Titles are Critchley's own. 

 

 

The Cycle of Revenge [a]

 

Critchley, somewhat surprisingly, takes a very Christian position on the question of revenge: turn the other cheek and forgive those who have sinned against you; at least on the first 490 occasions [b] and even if you have just witnessed the death of nearly 3000 of your citizens: 

 

"What if the grief and mourning that followed 9/11 were allowed to foster a nonviolent ethics of compassion rather than a violent politics of revenge and retribution? What if the crime of the September 11 attacks had led not to an unending war on terror, but to the cultivation of a practice of peace - a difficult, fraught and ever-compromised endeavour, but perhaps worth the attempt?" [111]    

 

As I say, that strikes me as very Christian - but almost inhuman in its idealism; as D. H. Lawrence says, man isn't a spiritually perfect being full of light, he is rooted in blood and soil and has natural instincts and vital passions and it's probably better in the long run to give these expression rather than deny them. 

 

Thus, although Lawrence acknowledges the madness of those who live solely for revenge - see his poem 'Erinnyes', for example [c] - he is not going to be meekly submissive before those who would devour him; nor is he going to love his enemies, bless those that curse him, or pray for his persecutors [d]. 

 

As for Nietzsche, well, he wasn't a big fan of revenge, describing it as a manifestation of ressentiment that often masquerades as justice. The noble individual, he says, knows not only how to forgive - for that is merely Christian - but also how to forget. Just like the spirit of gravity, the spirit of revenge must be overcome. 

 

On the other hand, however, Zarathustra teaches us that a small revenge is better than no revenge at all; that an action taken spontaneously and limited in scope prevents the malignant growth of resentment that will ultimately issue as a repulsion against time and earthly existence itself [e]. 

 

The Good Book ends, one might recall, not with Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, but with John's call for the Apocalypse, the great book of revenge and world destruction that gives the death-kiss to the Gospels [f]. That tells us something important, I think. 

 

 

The Art of Memory

 

This is the first of a series of essays collected under the section heading 'Athens in Pieces' and written during the first four month of 2019, whilst Critchley was based in the Greek capital. 

 

Like him, I too have a fondness for the city - though for different reasons; Critchley thinks it "a magical city [...] where what we still recognise as philosophia really began" [124]; I think of it as the birthplace and hometown of My Little Greek. 

 

In other words, he has a more professional and I have a more personal reason for loving Athens and, whilst I'm not disputing it's ground zero for philosophy, my interest in the latter is really more Franco-German in character and located in the modern and postmodern period, rather than the Classical Age of Greece. 

 

Nevertheless, let's explore a city and a time whose ghosts "continue to haunt our present, often in unexpected and unimagined ways" [124] - ghosts whom we must find a way to make speak (or moan a bit at the very least); something which, says, Critchley, requires giving them "a little of our lifeblood" [124]. 

 

For only when we have transplanted a little of our blood into these ancient Athenian ghosts, will they communicate in a manner that will make sense to our modern ears and "tell us not just about themselves but also about us" [124] (and let's be honest, we moderns only really want to hear about ourselves):

 

"We always see antiquity in the image of ourselves and our age. But that image is not some Narcissus-like reflection; it is more an oblique refraction that allows us to see ourselves in a novel way and in a slightly alien manner." [124]

 

That's a positive spin and not one I'm sure I agree with. And I certainly have problems with the idea that the ancient past should be valued for providing "some kind of solace and escape" [125] from the present; "for a time", writes Critchley, "we can be transported elsewhere, where life was formed by different forces" [125].

 

He'll be telling us next we can even learn from the ancients, but I tend to agree with Foucault that we must exercise extreme caution here; our world and the world of ancient Greece are fundamentally distinct and we can't, for example, simply adopt their model of ethical behaviour, no matter how much we may admire aspects of it, and "you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people" [g].

 

The Stench of the Academy 

  

On my one and only trip to Athens, I crashed through a glass door - click here - and I took a look at the Acropolis. 

 

But I didn't visit Plato's Academy, although, from Critchley's description, it doesn't sound like I missed much: a run-down space smelling of piss calling itself a park in "a not particularly nice part of town" [128], where undesirable go to get high (and not on philosophy).   

 

Funnily enough, Critchley also does his best to put readers off the Academy even in its heyday and its founder:

 

"The Academy was a privately funded research and teaching facility, situated outside the city. Most of us have a rather whimsical idea of philosophy as a bunch of men in togas having a chat in the agora. And we think of Socrates as a gadfly philosophising in the street and somehow speaking truth to power. The idea is attractive. But it is a literary conceit of philosophy - one that is still in circulation today. It is the fiction that Plato wanted his readers to believe." [130-131]

 

Critchley continues - and I think these are my favourite paragraphs in Bald so far -

 

"Behind that fiction stands the library, the editing and copying rooms, and the entire research engine of the Academy, which was devoted to the careful production and dissemination of knowledge through texts and teaching. Much as we may flinch at the idea, philosophy has been academic and linked to the activity of schools since its inception." [131]

 

In other words, it's always been a business on the one hand and factional on the other and Plato - if that was even his name - was ultimately just a rich fantasist backed by wealthy patrons and fleecing wealthy students who led us all into an Ideal dead-end: 

 

"We are less attracted to the idea of a wealthy aristocratic philosopher sequestered in his research facility and making occasional trip to visit foreign tyrants than to the image of the poor, shoeless Socrates causing trouble in the marketplace, refusing to be paid and getting killed by the city for his trouble. But out captivation with this image, once again, is overwhelmingly Plato's invention." [131-132-   

 

It's the great philosophical swindle ...  

      

 

In Aristotle's Garden 

 

After visiting the Academy, Critchley obviously had to go next to the "beautifully maintained site" [137] of the Lyceum; Aristotle's answer to the former [h] - only bigger and better, transforming his new space into "the most powerful and well-endowed school in the world" [136]. 

 

And he was able to do this because if Plato had a few bob, Aristotle was one those individuals we now term the super-rich. Anyway, the Lyceum was the "aspirational school destination of choice" [137] for the elites to send their children and for ten years or so, Aristotle was top dog in the philosophical world (which is not to imply he was in any way a Cynic).  

 

For Critchley - and I agree with him here - it's important to point out that the Lyceum, like most ancient schools, had a lovely garden, and he ponders what it was for:

 

"Was it a space for leisure, strolling and quiet dialectical chitchat? Was it a mini-laboratory for botanical observation and experimentation?  Or was it [...] an image of paradise?" [138]

 

Critchley finds the latter possibility the most intriguing, but personally I prefer to think that his first suggestion concerning its use is the right answer. But whatever the answer, it's true that there's a close and vital relationship between gardens and philosophical thought. Indeed, I would suggest that those who lack green fingers and an appreciation for the beauty of flowers can never be a true lover of wisdom:

 

"At the end of the Nicomachian Ethics, Aristotle sees the promise of philosophy as the cultivation of the contemplative life, the bios theoretikos [...] What better place for this than a garden? Might not botany be the royal road to paradise, an activity at once empirical and deeply poetic." [138]

 

Is Critchley - someone who by is own admission was formerly insensitive to the pleasure to be found amongst plants and trees - becoming a floraphile at last ...? Will he end up like Rupert Birkin, rolling in the grass and ejaculating in the foliage in a state of delirium? [i]  

 

Perhaps not. But, then again, anything's possible ...  

 

 

We Know Socrates's Fate. What's Ours?

  

Interesting that Critchley should claim he was named after Simon the Cobbler; a good friend of Socrates and someone who "also pretended to be a philosopher of sorts" [154]. 

 

Apparently, whenever the latter called into his workshop, Simon made notes on their conversation; thus some claim that it was Simon - not Plato - who was the first author of a Socratic dialogue. 

 

Simon was also much admired by the Cynics, for refusing the patronage of Pericles in order to safeguard his freedom of speech (parrhesia): 

 

"For the Cynics, only those people who achieved self-sufficiency (autarkeia) or independence of mind could truly exercise their freedom speech. For a cobbler-philosopher like Simon to work for a powerful political figure like Pericles would have undermined that independence and compromised his freedom." [158]

 

One wonders if Critchley ever has doubts about his own relationship with powerful institutions like the New School for Social Research and the Onassis Foundation; ever wishes he were repairing old boots instead?     

 

 

The Happiest Man I Ever Met

 

From Simon the Cobbler's workshop to Mount Athos ... and three days, two nights at the monastery of Simonopetra, founded in the 13th century. Critchley wishes to know: "What is it like to be a monk? And what does it take to become one?" [161]

 

These are not questions I would ask and it's not somewhere I would go: anywhere that doesn't welcome the presence of women is a place I choose not to visit. I'm fine with the idea that monks choose to hide themselves from the world of Man, but not that the only female creatures tolerated on their Holy Mountain are cats and that this is justified on supposedly religious and spiritual grounds.

 

How, one wonders, does Critchley look his wife and daughter in the eye after going to a place from which they are barred on the grounds of maintaining a pure environment [j] ...?  Expensive four-wheel drive cars - no problem; they apparently don't pollute the place in the way that women would stink up the joint. 

 

At the end of his stay, Critchley takes off the little wooden cross he had been given to wear, and returns back into the profane world, resuming his "stupid philosophical distance and intellectual arrogance" [169].

 

I know it's a Latin phrase associated with the Jesuits, rather than a Greek phrase associated with the Orthodox monks of Athos, but, clearly, Critchley has found out what it takes to be a monk: sacrificium intellectus (i.e., the voluntary subordination of reason to faith; or what Nietzsche describes as moral self-mutilation).  

 

What shocks me is that Critchley seems to think this is something admirable and he ends this profoundly depressing piece by describing his time at Simonopetra as "the closest to a religious experience that I have ever come" [169] - as if such a psychotic episode were a good thing!

 

        

Adventures in the Dream Factory

  

This is the third of three pieces on the science fiction writer (and garage philosopher) Philip K. Dick - not someone I've ever read (or wish to read), although, yes, I know the film adaptations of his work. 

 

Dick was a kind of Gnostic on Critchley's reading and Dick's Gnosticism enables us to ditch the traditional Christian idea of original sin:

 

"Once we embrace Gnosticism, we can declare that wickedness does not have its source within the human heart but out there, with the corrupt archons of corporate capitalism or whomever. We are not wicked. It is the world that is wicked. This insight finds its modern voice in Rousseau before influencing a Heinz variety of Romanticisms that turn on the idea of natural human goodness and childhood innocence." [219]

 

Critchley continues in a paragraph that returns us to where we began this post, with a critique of authenticity:   

 

"On the gnostical view, once we see the wicked world or what it is, we can step back and rediscover our essential goodness, the diving spark within us, our purity, our authenticity. It is this very desire for purity and authenticity that drives the whole wretched industry of New Age obscurantism and its multiple techniques of spiritual and material detox [...] Against this toxic view of the world, I think we need to emphasize what spendidly impure and inauthentic creatures we are." [219]

 

Horray! Something I can agree with and get behind! Probably a good place to finish then. But let me first wish Mr Critchley a happy 66th birthday - that's not quite the number of the Beast [ἑξακόσιοι ἑξήκοντα ἕξ], but it's two-thirds of the way there ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This essay should probably be read in conjunction with the following piece 'Theater of Violence', pp.112-120, though it's not absolutely necessary to do so and I do not, in fact, analyse this later essay here; not because I disagree with Critchley's view that we need to "understand the history of violence from which we emerge" [113], but because Greek theatre, Shakespeare, sport, and the work of American rapper Kendrick Lamar do not particularly interest me (and, to be honest, I'm increasingly sceptical that complex philosophical problems can best be addressed in terms of football and/or popular music).    

 

[b] Critchley quotes Jesus telling Peter that it is not enough to forgive someone seven times, you must, rather, forgive them seventy times seven, which Critchley interprets as meaning that the quality of forgiveness is infinite and unconditional. See Matthew 18:22 and see Bald p. 110. 

  

[c] The poem 'Erinnyes' (1915), can be found in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. III., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1526-1527. Or it can be read online by clicking here. 

 

[d] Whilst admitting that the Christian vision is one form of consummation for man, Lawrence makes his opposition to Luke 6:27-28 clear pretty much throughout his work. See, for example, 'The Lemon Gardens'; in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 119.

 

[e] See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Of the Adder's Bite' (in Part 1) and 'Of Redemption' (in Part 2).

 

[f] See D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1980).      

 

[g] Michel Foucault, 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1991), p. 343. Developing this point, Foucault goes on to say: "I think there is no exemplary value in a period which is not our period ..." [347]. To think otherwise, of course, sets one on a slippery path towards universal humanism. 

 

[h] Aristotle established the Lyceum after being snubbed by Plato, who chose Speusippus as his successor, rather than him. Critchley wonders whether Aristotle was angry and disappointed not to have become the main man at the Academy and I would imagine that he was; for, in fairness, although he was "reportedly a difficult character" and "not much loved by the Athenians" [134], he was undoubtedly the best qualified for the role.    

 

[i] I'm referring to the (in)famous scene in chapter VIII of D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love (1920), to which I have referred numerous times here on Torpedo the Ark: see, for example, the post 'Floraphilia Redux' (17 Oct 2016) - click here.    

 

[j] Critchley explains, but doesn't challenge, the Athonite legend which has it that the Virgin Mary travelled to Athos and liked it so much that her son Jesus declared it her private garden, from which all other female creatures were banned. The 335 sq km peninsula that Mount Athos sits at the heart of is the largest area in the world that women cannot enter (they are not even allowed within 500m of the coast).

      What strikes me as a little hypocritical, to say the least, is that in an essay written earlier, Critchley says that the BBC Television series The Ascent of Man (1973) has an admittedly sexist title and wishes to point out that there are "a few great women too!" [190] who have played a key role in human history (not that any of them would be allowed to visit Athos).  

      In this same essay, Critchley also opposes monstrous certainty which, he says, leads "not just to fascism but to all the various faces of fundamentalism" [193] - though that apparently does not include the dogma of Greek Orthodoxy.   

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.  

 

Haddaway, Man! An Open Letter to Peter Wolfendale

Hi, my name is Pete, 

and I’m a systematic philosopher [1]  

 

 

I. 

 

Hello Pete, my name is Stephen Alexander, and I mistrust all systematisers and would normally seek to avoid them [2]. In your case, however, I'll make an exception ... 

 

For like you, I'm an independent scholar - which you amusingly suggest is merely a fancy way of saying unemployed with a Ph.D - who is less than impressed with the "ossified social cliques" [3] that control academia and although I live in Essex, my roots, like yours, are in the North East of England; my father was from Gateshead and my mother from Whitley Bay. 

 

We also both came out of the philosophy department at Warwick: I note that you completed your doctoral thesis on Heidegger in 2012; I finished mine, on Nietzsche, in 2000. 

 

So we have some things in common. 

 

 

II. 

 

However, I also note that you consider yourself "a heretical Platonist, an unorthodox Kantian, and a minimalist Hegelian" [4], and whilst I'm pleased to see you qualify your Platonism, Kantianism, and Hegelianism in this manner, I'm still troubled that these are the three thinkers you name as your primary sources of inspiration. 

 

And whilst we both have a wide range of interests, I'd say my curiosity is motivated more by hate than by love and, actually, I think you're mistaken to say it's all good at the end of the day. 

 

As for your "trinity of dialectical virtues" [5] - sincerity, explicitness, and consistency - well, I had to smile as these are possibly the three things I most try to avoid on Torpedo the Ark, where I never mean what I say or say what I mean and couldn't care less about whether my text is haunted by the spectre of logical contradiction [6]: I am Monsieur Teste in reverse! 

 

III. 

 

Two confessions: 

 

Firstly, I haven't read your 2014 book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, even though I probably should have. For whilst I was never in with the OOO crowd, I did read a good deal of Graham Harman's work and found a lot of it resonated with my own (rather more material and less metaphysical) interest in objects. 

 

It was only when Harman started promoting his version of OOP as a new theory of everything and boasting of how he had become a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" - and had even "captured the notice of celebrities" - that I grew tired of him and his flat ontology [7]. 

 

Secondly, I'm not sure your new book is going to feature on my list of Christmas reading either. 

 

That's mainly because as someone who is still very much committed to Nietzsche's reverse anthropocentrism - i.e., his attempt to translate man back into nature and demonstrate how virtue itself is animal in origin - I suspect I'm just the sort of thinker whom you are seeking revenge against in the name of Reason unbound from all such petty naturalism. 

 

What I am going to do, however, is follow your advice and start by reading your newer blog writings (those classified as Phase 3) and then read one (or more) of your interviews, in the hope that I can better understand what you mean by rationalist inhumanism and Promethean socialism; neither of which I very much like the sound of [8]. 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] This line of greeting from Wolfendale - and the photo - are taken from his blog, Deontologistics: click here. 

      For those readers who might not know, a systematic philosopher - such as Wolfendale - is one who seeks to develop a logically coherent and comprehensive body of knowledge based upon fundamental principles in order to explain the world we live in. To create such a perfect system - or metanarrative - has been the (insanely ambitious and inherently oppressive) dream of thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. 

      As for the term deontologistics, this is a neologism coined by Wolfendale to describe his own research project into the nature and limits of reason and his aim to establish a system of philosophy of the kind described above. 

      In moral philosophy, deontology is the idea that an action should be based solely on whether it is right or wrong according to a set of fixed principles, with no consideration given to the consequences of that action. In other words, it's a form of fundamentalism; insisting that one's duty or obligation is always to uphold the letter of the law and stick to the rules no matter what. 

 

[2] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche writing in Twilight of the Idols ('Maxims and Arrows', 36), who then goes on to add: "The will to a system is a lack of integrity." See the Hollingdale translation (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 35. 

 

[3] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here. 

 

[4] See the short biographical note on Wolfendale on the Urbanomic website: click here. He is one of their authors and his debut book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, was published by Urbanmomic in 2014. His new book, The Revenge of Reason, is forthcoming at the end of this year; a work in which he ponders the fate of Reason in the 21st century and lays out his vision for neo-rationalism as a distinctive philosophical path towards an inhuman destiny. 

      Ray Brassier obviously thinks highly of him, as he wrote a postscript to the former and supplied a preface to the latter. Details of both works are available on the Urbanomic website. 

 

[5] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here. 

 

[6] When it comes to sincerity, explicitness, and consistency, I side with Nietzsche, Wilde, and Roland Barthes (even at the risk of falling into what Wolfendale terms unrestrained irony). Barthes famously rejects the ideology of clarity (or explicitness) in Critique et vérité (1966), just as he mocks the idea of logical consistency in Le plaisir du texte (1973), from where I borrow the idea of M. Teste in reverse. 

      For my thoughts on (in)sincerity, see the post dated (9 July 2018): click here. 

 

[7] I'm quoting Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Penguin Books, 2018), p. 8. For my thoughts on this book, see the post published on 24 March 2018: click here. 

 

[8] From what I understand at this point - without having done much reading in the area - rational inhumanism seems to intersect with (or emerge from) Ray Brassier's idea of transcendental nihilism and is an attempt to liberate reason from human biology, psychology, and cultural history. 

      As for Promethean socialism, I believe this refers to the deliberate re-engineering of ourselves and our world on a more rational and egalitarian basis. In other words, it's a kind of left-leaning accelerationism that affirms techno-scientific progress and the overcoming of natural limits. 

      One can't help feeling we've heard all this before and that, ultimately, if you strip Wolfendale's work of its complex and sophisticated philosophical theorising, one's left with just another fevered dream of a future utopia.

 

 

On Board the Ship of Fools

 Fig. 1 Woodcut illustration by Albrecht Dürer for Sebastian Brandt's  

Das Narrenschiff (1494)  

 Fig. 2 Photo by Fabrizio Villa of Greta Thunberg with some of her crewmates 

 preparing to depart Italy for Gaza on a boat - the Madleen - organised by 

the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (June 2025)

 

 

Seeing "professional tantrum-thrower" [1] Greta Thunberg and her dysfunctional crew of activists aboard a sixty-foot sailboat heading across the rather lovely waters of the Mediterranean to Gaza in an attempt to break the Israeli blockade of this Palestinian enclave [2], I was reminded of Plato's ship of fools [3] ...  

  

For aboard the Madleen we encounter a group of entitled young people who, despite believing themselves to be politically clear-sighted and possessing an acute sense of hearing attuned to the cries of the oppressed, are actually cloth-eared and blind to reality; people whose knowledge and experience is limited, but who are certain that they are always in the right and therefore justified in shouting down anyone who disagrees with what they say.   

Now, to entrust moral leadership to those who shout the loudest and make the most extreme claims is, I would suggest, profoundly mistaken. 

 

And whilst Greta and her chums may not be wearing traditional jester's costume - having swapped multicoloured motley for the distinctly patterned black and white keffiyeh [4] - they are fools all the same - or useful idiots, as some might say - and theirs is less a humanitaran mission and more a game of larping for Palestine [5] (i.e., a game of role play, virtue signalling, and self-promotion that shamelessly exploits the very real suffering of the people of Gaza). 

 

Having said that, however, the voyage of fools carries great symbolic weight in the Western imagination and perhaps Foucault is right to suggest that the figure of the madman, or joker, or even an autistic and bipolar activist is not merely a ridiculous and marginal one, but one who "stands centre stage as the guardian of truth" [6].      

 

Perhaps, therefore, we should at times write in praise of folly ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] A description provided by Julie Burchill in 'Greta Thunberg's pathetic Gaza voyage', The Spectator (4 June, 2025): click here. For those who would like to see Miss Thunberg speaking to the press prior to setting off on her voyage, click here.  

 

[2] The Madleen departed Catania, Sicily, on 1 June, 2025. The 1,250 mile journey is expected to take seven days. As well as the Swedish doom goblin, there are eleven other über-privileged activists on board and 64-year-old Irish actor Liam Cunningham. 

 

[3] See Book VI of Plato's Republic (c. 375 BC). 

      Without actually using the phrase 'ship of fools', Socrates speaks (allegorically) of a ship with a mutinous and foolhardy crew and readers are meant to take away the idea that sound governance always requires expert knowledge and strong leadership; that statecraft is essentially the same as seafaring. 

      The ship of fools analogy has been influential throughout history, appearing in various works of art and literature, often as a criticism of societal chaos and a lack of authority in difficult times. Sebastian Brandt's satirical work, Das Narrenschiff (1494), inspired by Plato's text, further extended the concept.

 

[4] Use of the keffiyeh as a symbol of Palestinian nationalism and resistance dates back to the 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine. Outside of the Middle East and North Africa, the keffiyeh has gained increasing popularity among activists and is widely considered to be a sign of solidarity with the Palestinians in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.  

 

[5] See the post of this title published on 8 may 2024: click here. 

 

[6] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (Tavistock Publications, 1967), p. 14. 

 

 

On Plato and Starmer: Noble Liars

Noble Liars: Plato and Keir Starmer

 

 

I. 

 

Q: What unites Plato (an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period) and Keir Starmer (a British politician and lawyer currently serving as Prime Minister of the UK)? 

A: Both believe in the political necessity of falsehoods; of deliberately propagating a noble lie in order to achieve and secure social cohesion and stability. Both understand that this might be seen as morally questionable, but justify their mendacity by appealing to the greater good - and, indeed, their own inherent virtue. 

 

Plato wished to found his ideal city-state - ruled over by golden philosopher-kings - on a myth about the metallic origins of class difference [1]; whilst Starmer, on the other hand, wants to defend his ideal of a multicultural society - ruled over by a woke liberal elite - on a myth that has the red letters DEI running through it like those in a stick of rock. 

 

 

II. 

 

Of course, as someone who has previously written in praise of three great liars - Nietzsche, Twain, and Wilde [2] - and argued that lying is an art not only vital to the functioning of society, but necessary for the preservation of human life in a violently chaotic and inhuman world, it would be hypocritical for me to now condemn Plato and Starmer for their mixture of political pragmatism and cynicism, and to start defending the ideal of Truth at all times and on every occasion (as Kant does, for example). 

 

Nevertheless, I am concerned that when a noble lie is exposed, it can have unfortunate consequences; triggering the very things that those who posit such fear and seek to prevent (e.g., a loss of trust in authority figures and institutions, as well as a breakdown of social order). 

 

And the thing with Starmer is he's such a transparently dishonest figure that everyone knows he's lying all of the time. Starmer risks destabilising the UK and pushing the electorate into either political apathy (they no longer vote), political extremism (they start to vote for maverick figures), or violent protest (they start to throw bricks); for if nothing is true, everything is permitted [3].

 

Notes

 

[1] Plato presented the noble lie - γενναῖον ψεῦδος - in the fictional tale known as the Myth of the Metals in Book III (414d - 415e) of The Republic (c. 375 BC). 

      In it, Socrates describes the natural origin of the three social classes - all born of the same good earth - who compose the Kallipolis. First are the men of gold, who make the best rulers; second, are the men with more silver in their souls, who make the best auxiliaries and are thus destined to assist the men of gold; and thirdly, are the hoi polloi or men of bronze, who have a different set of strengths (and weaknesses) and make the best farmers and craftsmen. 

      Interestingly, although once born into a certain class one cannot leave it, parents with one type of soul can nevertheless produce offspring with a different metallic nature, so there is a degree of social mobility even in Plato's ideal state. Socrates claims that if everyone believed this myth it would have the positive effect of making them care for society and each other.        

 

[2] For the post on Nietzsche in the series on three great liars, published in June 2020, click here. For the post on Mark Twain in the same series, click here. And for the third and final post in the series, on Oscar Wilde, click here. 

      Readers are also invited to click here for a follow up post entitled 'Tell Me Sweet Little Lies' (23 June 2020). 

[3] This so-called assassin's creed is a nihilistic statement par excellence (even if it doesn't simply mean that any action is justifiable or without consequences). For many people, the phrase is taken from a video game first released in 2007; for others, it comes from the 1938 novel by Vladimir Bartol. But I'm sure readers of TTA will recall that Nietzsche also used this phrase in the Genealogy (1887); see Essay III, section 24.   

Who Is Stephen Alexander? A Guest Post by Sasha Thanassa

Stephen Alexander 

A Non-Selfie Selfie (2025) 

 

And how do you see yourself when looking in the bathroom mirror 

through someone else's eyes? 

 

 

I. 

 

Who (or what) is Stephen Alexander, the shadowy figure who blogs at Torpedo the Ark?

 

The multiple possibilities that he himself has playfully suggested in the past include: artist, anarchist, and antichrist; punk, pirate, poet, pagan ... More recently, he has declared himself to be a darkly enlightened philosopher-provocateur whose concerns are no longer with sex, style, and subversion, but more with silence, secrecy, and seduction. 

 

Using these and other terms that arise from within his own writings - as well as from the work of other figures to whom he often refers - I will attempt here to give a brief impressionistic sketch of someone who, like Foucault, neither wishes to self-identify as a unified subject nor feels obliged to remain forever the same [1].       

 

 

II.

 

Again, by his own admission, there are two names that have shaped Alexander's thinking above all others: Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence; neither of whom he entirely embraces, but both of whom provide him with the critical weapons and crucial conceptual tools for the fight against moral idealism (i.e., the belief that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are the highest of values and fundamentally connected) and modern humanism (i.e., the belief that behind everything sits the kind and reasonable figure of Man).    

 

Working in the entrails of Nietzsche and Lawrence more like a postmodern haruspex than a forensic pathologist, Alexander has managed on Torpedo the Ark to produce an idiosyncratic (and intertextual) brand of fiction-theory that suspends the genre distinction between philosophy and literature [2]. 

 

Arguably, it is this mode of language and thought that has enabled him to move across other established categories and freely discuss an almost infinite variety of ideas, experiences, and events in a creative and profoundly superficial manner that is always alert to the play (and permissiveness) of language.  

 

III. 

Another name we might mention is that of Simon Solomon; more than a mere commentator on posts or a sometimes contributor, Solomon is a very real (often hostile) presence on Torpedo the Ark and a vital interlocutor. 

It's sometimes hard to tell whether Solomon is Alexander's shadow or vice versa; who's the Jekyll, who's the Hyde (or are they equally monstrous)? In queer ontological alliance - if there is such a thing -  Alexander and Solomon seem fated to remain the best of frenemies [3], each presumably drawing some benefit from their relationship, despite the mutual antagonism [4]. 

IV.

But isn't Alexander just another in a long line of reversed Platonists? 

Perhaps - but what's wrong with that? We need more not less such people. A reversed Plato may still be, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, a reversed Plato [5], but that's better than an unreversed Plato.

 

And besides, as Derrida indicated, the first task of deconstruction has to be reversal (i.e., the locating and overturning of oppositions within a text). That may not be enough in itself - a reversal is not the same as a revaluation - but it's a start on the road toward a new way of thinking.

 

And so, like Lawrence, Alexander encourages his reader to think in terms of immanence rather than transcendence and to climb down Pisgah [6]; to affirm appearances and the natural world of scarlet poppies rather than fantasise about a world above (and/or beyond) this one in which there are eternal white flowers and other Ideal Forms.   

And like Deleuze - another thinker whom Alexander often refers to - he perverts Plato by siding with the Sophists, the Cynics, the Stoics "and the fluttering chimeras of Epicurus" [7].  

 

 

V.

So, have I answered the question with which I opened this post? 

 

Probably not. 

 

Perhaps all I've done is refer to a number of proper names to whom Alexander himself often refers. But then, these proper names serve a crucial textual purpose and contain within them a series of associations (and connotations) that allow us to see how Torpedo the Ark unfolds within a much wider philosophical and literary history and an intertextual space. 

 

When Alexander refers to himself as a Lawrentian, for example, he's not identifying with Lawrence as an extratextual being, but evoking a certain style of thinking and writing.  

 

Using proper names is also, of course, a way of dispersing and disguising the self; like Nietzsche, Alexander wants to be able to declare himself all the names in history [8] - onymic ambiguity rather than unified authorial presence is his aim.  

 

Notes

 

[1] In his introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault famously writes: "I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order." 

      See The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 17.

 -

[2] This has been a long time goal for Alexander; see the introduction to his PhD thesis Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000): click here. 

      Admittedly, he problematically writes here about dissolving lines of distinction, whereas in his later writings, influenced by Derrida, he speaks more about troubling (or curdling) these lines and concedes that the deconstructive objective is not the dissolving or permanent suspension of all oppositions, because, ultimately, they are structurally necessary to produce meaning.  

      

[3] The term frenemy - a portmanteau of 'friend' and 'enemy' - could have been invented for Alexander and Solomon, although Jessica Mitford claimed that it had been coined by one of her sisters when they were children for a particularly dull acquaintance; see her article 'The Best of Frenemies' in the Daily Mail (August 1977). It can also be found in her book, Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (NYRB Classics, 2010), or read online by simply clicking here.       

      

[4] Interestingly, Freud recognised that a close friend and a worthy enemy are equally indispensble to psychological wellbeing and have not infrequently been one and the same person. See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Pelican / Penguin Books, 1964) p. 37.

 

[5] See Hannah Arendt, 'Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture', in Social Research, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 417-446, (The John Hopkins University Press, Autumn 1971), where she writes: 

      "The quest for meaning, which relentlessly dissolves and examines anew all accepted doctrines and rules, can at every moment turn against itself, as it were, produce a reversal of the old values, and declare these as 'new values'. This, to an extent, is what Nietzsche did when he reversed Platonism, forgetting that a reversed Plato is still Plato ..." (435)

      A revised version of this can also be found in Thinking, the first volume of her two-volume posthumously published work The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary Mccarthy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-78). 

 

[6] See the essay by D. H. Lawrence 'Climbing Down Pisgah', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 223-229.

 

[7] Michel Foucault, 'Theatrum Philosophicum', in the Essential Works 2: Aesthetics, ed. James D. Faubion (Penguin Books, 2000), p. 346.

[8] In a letter to Jakob Burckhardt dated 6 January, 1889 (although postmarked January 5th), Nietzsche claims that by becoming every name in history, he (paradoxically) fights the reduction to anonymity and generality. 

      See his Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 346.