Heraclitus, hermit

The divergence of Eastern and Western philosophy came to be expressed in the relationship of individual and state. This relationship is a more reliable measure than the words and dictums of representative thinkers.

Thus in ancient China the saying attributed to Confucius identifies the ethical foundation of Chinese philosophy. Because educated males were expected to use their knowledge and writing skills on behalf of the state, the dictum advised: “Serve when the emperor is good, recluse when the emperor is corrupt (or evil, etc.).” This moral principle gave psychological latitude to dissenters, nonconformists, and the morally sensitive. Because China was a large country geographically, wilderness was available to whomever might dissent, willing to live in remote and distant lands.

During the age of the philosophers in ancient Greek Athens, no parallel political option of reclusion was available to the dissenter or nonconformist. Additionally, enthusiasm for democracy and social participation called for service in one form or another, and the relation of individual was to the citizenry of the immediate geographical or civic unit. Civic engagement, if not conviviality, was considered a hallmark achievement of the city-state. The city of Athens reserved a punitive sentence not only imposing verdicts against tried criminals (such as Socrates) but reserved the decreeing of ostracism against alleged or libeled individuals for whom no specific or described crime was brought. Such was the measure called banishment or ostracism.

Anybody, any citizen, any peer, could allege offenses against another citizen and vote on banishment, with the length of exile up to ten years. Such a measure was considered an option of pure democracy. The place of banishment or ostracism was eremos, translated as “desert” or “wilderness.”

Not many ancient Athenians actually suffered ostracism. However, the idea and practice inj itself suggests an extreme measure reserved to the majority. Thus, while the few historical figures punished with ostracism were military figures, the punishment had no defined limit of potential crimes or victims.

The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus was apparently intensely disliked by his fellows, at least according to his biographer Diogenes Laertius. Heraclitus opposed the traditional Greek philosophical premise popular from Parmenides to Plato to Aristotle, the notion of absolutes, forms, or monads. These intangible Absolutes were the real basis of phenomenon, the real and abiding objects in the universe. Against this metaphysics, Heraclitus is famous for advocating a philosophy of flux, or change. Thus his contrary statement that no one steps into the same river twice. The river is not the same. Nor are we. The river that flows before us will never be seen again, is not the river you will see tomorrow.

But the other source of resentment against Heraclitus may be his simplicity of living. He lived alone in a hut, with meager belongings, in contrast to the probable scene in the Athenian marketplace and living districts, the conversations about money, politics, property, status. One day, a delegation of citizens called upon Heraclitus. Discovering the simplicity of his home, the visitors were offended and showed it in their expressions. Heraclitus noticed. He said quietly, “But here, too, the daimons dwell.” Meaning that not in luxurious temples and at household shrines but in humble places like his rude hut, the gods or spirits come and dwell, finding its dweller compatible.

Heraclitus was not ostracized. He could not be accused of military or political crimes or of corrupting the youth, as Socrates was re the latter. Urban and social life must have been overwhelming enough that Heraclitus finally ostracized himself. It is said that Heraclitus spent his last years on an island, the equivalent of eremos, where he pursued vegetarianism and solitude. His biographer called him the “dark” philosopher.

Winter thoughts

Green kale is an attractive and nutritious vegetable, growing to a couple feet tall, useful in every kitchen garden. Towards the end of fall, the gardener should monitor overnight temperatures, although kale reputely is cold hardy and can tolerate occasional frost. This recent autumn, however, an overnight rainfall froze to heavy snow in the morning, and the cold of hours was too much, freezing the kale in layers of snow. Too late to salvage the kale, hard in the frozen soil, the gardener left the kale as a memento mori.

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A Japanese death poem reads thus: “I only regret that I did not plant more flowers.” This line can be taken literally, but a perkier interpretation is that one should cultivate more friends along the way. The hermit will prefer flowers, though.

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The Tang-era Chinese poet Po Chü-i is representative of the old Confucian dilemma to serve the bureaucracy when it does good, and to recluse when it does not. Being outspoken,Po Chü-i frequently offended supervisors and rivals, suffering banishment to outlying regions to serve petty or important but nominal positions. However, he always took advantage of the quiet and isolation of wherever he lived, visitig hills and mountains, old temples, and found hermits. One place where he was supposed to represent the government he found the populace so aloof, unperceptive, and obtuse, that he concluded that they were not unlike the pes that inhabited the nearby mountains. When, at an advanced age, he finally retired, Po Chü-i, qn avid poet (writing for himself and a few trusted friends) retired to a hut. Here he was quiet, occasionally ill, but relishing simplicity and nature. He had long forgotten about court life, though twinges of painful memories would surface once in a while. One winter day, he wrote a poem reflecting on his present days:

“Lined coat, warm cap and easy felt slippers.
In the little tower, at the low window, sitting over the sunken brazier.
Body at rest, heart at peace; no need to rise early.
I wonder if the courtiers at the Western Capital know of these things, or not?”

Hobbes vs. Rousseau

A favorite website Existential Comics presents in a nutshell the clash of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). By assuming a violent and degraded human nature, Hobbes can pretend to lament summoning authoritarianism as a necessity, while at the same time presenting himself as a staunch ally of the noble-minded state. The very reality of a society persuades Hobbes to suppress human nature, human collectivity, human autonomy.

In contrast, Rousseau affirms that society, already controlled by authoritarian structures, has bludgeoned human nature, that original expression of conviviality, copoperation, and well-being, destroyed its original benignity, and replaced it with the structures that Hobbes thought indispensible. The structures Rousseau would cast off were exactly the structures Hobbes would elevate. Society with its control of the individual from cradle to schooling to livelihood, was to Rousseau an inimical force, a corrupting force. Rousseau applied his principles to every field of soceity, from educatipon, to religion, to economics, and science. He paid for his unorthodox (for the time) beliefs, shunned and hunted by all of their representatives. Eventually Rousseau retired and wrote his reflections as a selection of thoughts, not unlike famous French predecessors (such as Pascal). The Reveries of a Solitary Walker make useful reading for the solitary who needs the examplesf history to understand the course of timem to appreciate the lessons of a lifetime of struggle. But bitterness, not optimism, characterizes Rousseau’s last writings. The authoritarian premises of Hobbes eventually came to influence not only the contemporary empires but statescraft in the Western world ever since.
URL: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/525

Hakuin and Yuan-wu

Yuan-wu (Yuanwu Keqin, 1063–1135) was an early Chinese Zen (Chan) master credited with constructing The Blue Cliff Record, probably the most representative compilation and discussion of Zen koans. The later Japanese Rinzai Zen master Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769), whose students and disciples organized his lectures into essays, acknowledged the important influence of Yuan-wu in Hakuin’s first essay. There, Hakuin indicates that when Yuan-wu first delivered lectures he was reproached by other masters for doing so. Yuan-wu acknowledged their criticism. Chan was understood to be transmitted (as Bhodhidarma had said) not by outward teaching but in example and meditation. Here, too, Yuan-wu alludes to the Hermit of Lotus Flower Peak, as will be seen.

Thus when Hakuin’s students and disciples announced to him their interest in publishing Hakuin’s key lectures, Hakuin demurred, but eventually gave in, as long as the publication did not come to be associated with intentions to be admired. Indeed, Hakuin writes, in his first essay:

“Yuan-wu said:
After the ancients had once achieved awakening, they went off and lived in thatched huts or caves, boiling wild vegetable roots in broken-legged pots to sustain themselves. They were not interested in making names for themselves or in rising to positions of power. Being perfectly free from all ties whatever, they left turning words to their descendants because they wanted to repay their profound debt to the Buddha-patriarchs.”

Hakuin thus had intended to follow the eremitic path in at least the sense of living obscurely and quietly in the world, following Yuan-wu’s example, “on achieving awakening.” He would pursue lecturing and teaching and permit his disciples and descendents to transcribe his works as repayment to the patriarches. The decision to remain in the world through works could, however, only be the result of enlightenment, or satori, which was not the case for most Zen practitioners or teachers.

Yuan-wu himself concluded as much, realizing that he was teaching but was not himself enlightened. He models life after the hermit whom he calls the “Hermit of Lotus Flower Peak,” for like direct prajñā (wisdom) conveyed to the Buddha’s disciple Mahākāśyapa, Yuan-wu acknowledgred that a master receives the Buddha’s wisdom and insight directly, without or in spite ofinterventional reading, scripture, or teaching. This direct transmission is the teaching of Bodhidharma himself regarding what is Zen (or Chan):

“A special transmission outside the scriptures,
Not depending on words and letters;
Directly pointing to the mind,
Seeing into one’s true nature and attaining buddhahood.”

This process does not preclue or exclude study and meditation, which can, however, only confirm it later. Thus the hermit in Yuan-wu has the opportunity to receive enlightenment directly. Enlightenment later redeems use of written and oral teaching but only if that service to humanity is geniune and truth-telling, not simply an ego spreading poison, what Hakuin called “fox-slobber.”

Louise Gluck: “Celestial Music”

In the late poet Louise Gluck’s poem ”Celestial Music” are presented two friends reflecting on fundamental sensibilities about nature, death, and reality.

The friends are walking on a country road. One friend senses the indifference of nature toward suffering and violence, even in the cruelty of battling insects encountered on the roadside. The friend is the poet herself, by nature pessimistic. This friend sees that the meaning or import of things is understood or identified by the self (however that is construed) and not by something higher. Or perhaps not so much understood as simply experienced. What is about us receives its identity from what we see.

The other friend sees reality as harmony, speaks of the beauty of nature, celebrates sky and clouds and color and grandeur, hears “celestial music.”

In a previous entry we quoted a line in Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah: “You don’t really care for music, do you?” Is this music the frivolous pop music of convention, or is this the celestial music of Gluck’s poem? The former is negligible and its classical counterpart is intense but historically pretensious. What Oliver Sacks could have labelled potential earworms. But are not both contrived? Are not they and celestial music illusory imaginings of peace and harmony in the universe?

This may have been the realization that came to the young Nietzsche when at first he became enamored of the sweeping mythological grandeur of Wagner’s music. Then he confronted its reality by attending a performance at Bayreuth. The audience was entirely aristocrats and bourgeoisie with their arrogance and opulence in full display. At that moment, Nietzsche walked away from music in disgust and never returned.

In Gluck’s poem is the telling line of the optimistic friend: “when you love the world you hear celestial music.” The original friend — the poet — would object that one need not love the world, be reconciled to the universe, to its suffering and death, but merely acknowledge its reality.

Here is Gluck’s poem:

Celestial Music

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god,
she thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth, she’s unusually competent.
Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I’m always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality.
But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
according to nature. For my sake, she intervened,
brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else explains
my aversion to reality. She says I’m like the child who buries her head in the pillow
so as not to see, the child who tells herself
that light causes sadness –
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person –

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We’re walking
on the same road, except it’s winter now;
she’s telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
like brides leaping to a great height –
Then I’m afraid for her; I see her
caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth –

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It’s this moment we’re both trying to explain, the fact
that we’re at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn’t move.
She’s always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image
capable of life apart from her.
We’re very quiet. It’s peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering–
it’s this stillness that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.

Louise Gluck, Poems 1962-2012. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, p. 240.

Zen violence

Historically, violence has been a characteristic pedagogical tool of Zen monastic masters, used not only as pedagogy but rationalized as necessary to imparting enlightenment to the monk-novice. The inevitability that violent actions in monastic transactions will occur and should be highlighted is commonly assumed in Zen literature, which regularly presents them within koans. Intertwining such violent anecdotes within koans may shield the acts from criticism, but at the same time can make it impossible to use the koans intelligently when so many are based on violence.

Koans do not arise without a context, namely, the Zen Buddhist monastery, with its master and novices. The method of the koan is to present a Zen master offering to a novice (sāmaṇera) or monk a snippet of story, dialogue, or narrated incident, or even a phrase that is a conundrum to be reflected upon, intended to provoke particular thoughts, conclusions, responses, or actions.

In the typical koan, the master is presented making a statement to the novice that is received thoughtlessly or solicits an inadequate or wrong answer. Sometimes the novice more boldly responds with a further question, points out a contradiction in the master’s words, or expresses incredulity or sarcasm. The master’s response is often a slap to the face, a shove backwards, or a blow from the master’s stick.

The violent response of the master is not just an anomaly. Koans including such violence are ubiquitous in Zen anthologies and collections, such as in Gateless Gate, Zen Flesh Zen Bones, Iron Flute, and Blyth’s Zen Classics. Fewer such koans appear in the celebrated 101 Zen Stories and the Blue Cliff Records.

D. T. Suzuki (1870-1965), the Japanese scholar of Zen Buddhism, sees the use of violence by Zen masters as necessary and salutary, as in the story of the master Joshu and the disciple Hakuin, wherein the master is constantly slapping, pushing, name-calling, and humiliating Hakuin, until the mental breakthrough emerges and the violence is justified. In his book An Introduction to Zen Buddhism Suzuki concludes: “Each slap dealt by Joshu stripped Hakuin of his illusions and insincerities.” In Suzuki’s book Zen and Japanese Culture, the author writes: “When Rinzai was asked [by a novice in the monastery during the master’s talk] what the essence of Buddhist teaching was, he came right down from his seat and, taking hold of the questioner by the front of his robe, slapped bis face, and let him go. The questioner stood there, stupefied. The bystanders remarked, ‘Why don’t you bow?’ This woke him from his reverie; and when he was about to make a bow to the master, he had his satori.”

Suzuki elaborates a justification for violence in his book The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk:

“In the beginning of Zen history, there was no specified method of studying Zen. Those who wished to understand it came to the master, but the latter had no stereotyped instruction to give, for this was impossible in the nature of things. He simply expressed in his own way either by gestures or in words his disapproval of whatever view his disciples might present to him, until he was fully satisfied with them. His dealing with his disciples was quite unique in the annals of spiritual exercises. He struck them with a stick, slapped them in the face, kicked them down to the ground; he gave an incoherent ejaculation, he laughed at them, made sometimes scornful, sometimes satirical, sometimes even abusive remarks, which will surely stagger those who are not used to the ways of a Zen master. This was not due to the irascible character of particular masters; it rather came out of the peculiar nature of the Zen experience, which, with all the means verbal and gesticulatory at his command, the master endeavors to communicate to his truth-seeking disciples.”

No less than psychologist Carl Jung contributed the Foreword to the 1934 Western translation of Suzuki’s Introduction book. But nowhere does Jung refer to the violence of Zen Masters. Jung notes the efficacy of koans, and the difficulty of attaining satori, but he is conspicouslly silent on violece, as if wrestling with this historical dimension and how it affects the Zen experience as a whole. The entire violence experience suggests the needfor an abandonment (if not reform) of monasticism, an investigation on whether this violence is an aspect of history, culture, collectivity, patriarchy, or authority,not a matter of pedagogy.

An early speculation on Zen violence is that of Thomas Merton (1915-1968), the Catholic monk and hermit who had developed a strong interest in Asian thought during his most mature writing. In his book Mystics and Zen Masters, Merton notes that:

“Undoubtedly, one of the most essential elements of the Zen training is encountered in interviews with the Roshi. These are deliberately humiliating and frustrating, for the spiritual master is determined to waste no time tolerating the illusions and spiritual self-gratifications that may be cherished by his disciples. If necessary, he will still resort (as did famous Zen masters in the past) to slapping, kicking, and other forms of physical violence. It may also be mentioned that in the Zendo there is always one monk on guard with a stick, with which he does not hesitate to strike the shoulders of anyone who is not manifestly awake.
Far from fearing to create tension, the Zen masters deliberately make severe demands upon their disciples, and it is understood that one cannot really attain to enlightenment unless one is pressed to the limit. One might almost say that one of the purposes of the Zen training is to push the monk by force into a kind of dark night, and to bring him as quickly and efficaciously as possible into a quandary where, forced to face and to reject his most cherished illusions, driven almost to despair, he abandons all false hopes and makes a breakthrough into a complete humility, detachment, and spiritual poverty.

“Unfortunately, however, experience in the monastic life everywhere teaches that this severe training may, in fact, simply make the monk tough, callous, stubborn, perhaps even incurably proud, rather than purifying his heart. This would of course be especially true in a case where the spiritual master, instead of being a genuinely spiritual and holy man, is only a self-opinionated bully with a taste for pushing people around. All methods have their risks!”

Ostensibly, Merton strives to reconcile himself to the vicarious use of violence displayed in the texts of Suzuki, whom Merton followed closely and met personally. Further, Merton wanted to compare and contrast monasticism West and East, specifically their institutional styles, and how eventually they would be compared to eremitism. But clearly he was disappointed in the Zen monastic scenario, as he was in the Western one, and even a cursory reading reveals his skepticism. After all, Merton was the author of THE Wisdom of the Desert, his own collection of “koans,” and he maintained a strong interest in hermits.

How to disentangle institutional Zen from this violence? Is it a cultural phenomenon, as observers of hikikomori have tried to discern, wherein the retreat from society is the psychological response (and actual physical result) of childhood bullying and oppresive social and economic structures that cause trauma? Is historical Zen monasticism characterized by patriarchal authoritarianism? Is it not but exactly what eremitism rebelled against, as in the universal case of the hermits of Western antiquity? The Western monastic system, both Orthodox and Catholic, was founded on authority and pedagogical methods not unlike Zen monasteries, and perhaps represent the same phenomenon. We must look for authentic Zen, as in the West, to the wise sages and to the hermits.

Nietzsche: thought and health

The relationship between creative or intellectual thought and health is seldom examined, perhaps because such a focus may suggest that a work of art, literature, or philosophy is merely a byproduct of bad experience. Beethoven cannot be reduced to deafness, nor can the works of writers such as Milton, Joyce, or Borges reduced to blindness. The most compelling personality in this issue is, perhaps, Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophy actually embraces the fullness of personal illness even to the point of presenting his philosophy of life as a means for overcoming suffering, and not the abstract suffering of existence (from Buddha to existentialism) but quite literally, for Nietzsche suffered grievoously from debilitating disease. At the same time, Nietzsche presents a profound philosophy of solitude.

Given his iconoclastic thinking about culture and belief, Nietzsche generated hostility years after his death. His most vehement twentieth-century opponents (and some proponents) accepted the outrageous interpretations of Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth Forster, who popularized a proto-Nazi version of her deceased brother. More conventional opponents of Nietzsche’s thoughts attributed them to “insanity” brought about by syphilis, a convenient ad hominum argument now proven false.

That Nietzsche suffered illnesses is clear. Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann points to biographer Stefan Zweig for a precise description, quoting Zweig’s summary as “unsurpassed.” Zweig notes:

“No devilish torture is lacking in this dreadful pandemonium of sickness: headaches, deafening, hammering headaches, which knock out the reeling Nietzsche for days and prostrate him on sofa and bed, stomach cramps with bloody vomiting, migraines, fevers, lack of appetite, weariness, hemorrhoids, constipation, chills, night sweat — a gruesome circle. In addition, there are his ‘three-quarters blind eyes,’ which, at the least exertion, begin immediately to swell and fill with tears and grant the intellectual worker only ‘an hour and a half of vision a day.’ But Nietzsche despises this hygiene of his body and works at his desk for ten hours, and for this excess his overheated brain takes revenge with raging headaches and a nervous overcharge; at night, when the body has long become weary, it does not permit itself to be turned off suddenly, but continues to burrow in visions and ideas until it is forcibly knocked out by opiates. But ever greater quantities are needed (in two months Nietzsche uses up fifty grams of chloral hydrate to purchase this handful of sleep); then the stomach refuses to pay so high a price and rebels. And now-vicious circles: spasmodic vomiting, new headaches which require new medicines, an inexorable, insatiable, passionate conflict of the infuriated organs, which throw the thorny ball of suffering to each other as in a mad game. Never a point of rest in this up and down, never an even stretch of contentment or a short month full of comfort and self-forgetfulness.” (Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 116; see also Stefan Zweig, Nietzsche, chapter 3: “Apologia for Illness,” p. 5-26. London: Pushkin Press, 2012.

With modern medicine, many scientific researchers discuss Nietzsche’s neurological history, beginning with the indisputable genetic connection: Nietzsche’s father died at age 35 from apoplexy. Today it can be specifically surmised that Nietzsche suffered CADASIL, also known as Cerebral Autosomal Dominant Arteriopathy with Subcortical Infarcts and Leukoencephalopathy (see “The neurological illness of Friedrich Nietzsche,” by D. H. Emelsoet, K. H, Emelsoet, and D. Devreese, in Acta neurologica.belg., 2008, 18, 9-16 (https://www.actaneurologica.be/pdfs/2008-1/02-Hemelsoet et al.pdf). We may then speculate whether and how the disease affected his ideas and thoughts. The correlation is clear, for Nietzsche always sought to transform personal pain and suffering into a transcendent or transvaluative experience, the very themes of his works. Nietzsche’s life as a loner and solitary was as much a physical inevitability as a psychological one. Nietzsche providides a path for addressing the challenges of life’s harshest necessities with grace, intellect, and circumspection.

Nietzsche on Homer

The philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone Weil are certainly distinct, but both note — to a degree not noted or pursued by modern conventional thinkers — the characteristic violence embedded in ancient Greek culture. Both Nietzsche and Weil were scholars of Greek and understood the literature and spirit of ancient Greek cultural expression perhaps better than most contemporaries. They both see in Homer the purest expression of human nature in culture and society, extrapolating to an understanding of how ancient Greek psychology is the foundation of modern Western thought and institutions.

In Weil’s essay “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force” (1940), the culmination of warfare and savagery highlighted by descriptions in Homer’s Iliad renders Homer’s work a clear paean to force or violence. The contemporary gods encourage and abet the madness, and Homer’s cosmogony presents human nature as corrupt, vain, jealous, vengeful, and debased. Weil suggests that the Greek model adapted by the West in Greek politics, aesthetics, and intellectualism inevitably absorbed premises about human nature as well, embracing the premises of the mindless warriors and the supposed heroism of war.

Nietzsche, too, was influenced by philosophers about human nature, but he sees Greek culture in a more benign light. In his short essay “Homer’s Contest” or ”Homer’s Strife” (1872), Nietzsche argues that the Greek goddess Eris, who incites war and destruction among humans, is accompanied by a good second Eris who incites (only) jealousy and envy. Eris (the second one) only foments struggles that include a sense of competition or contests. This influence is useful to human productivity, says Nietzsche. But it is not a tenable presentation of Homer, where no such temperate sentiment drives the absolute violence and cruelty of the Trojan War, where no sense of fair competition is in sight. Nietzsche is searching for an exemplar of how Greek culture made itself superior to contemporaries, but his assumptions are untenable compared to Weil’s keen understanding.

The ancient Greeks (says Nietzsche) consciously pursued the “contest” because it challenged everyone to strive to perform to their best ability. The contest assured the generation and distribution of jealousy, rivalry, and envy, because those were virtues that maintained and extended accomplishment. The domination of envy in the Greek mindset is demonstrated not merely on the large theater of war, as in Homer’s Iliad, but at lesser levels of conflict, as Nietzsche himself notes. A representative example of poisonous envy Nietzsche points out is that in Ephesus the philosopher Hermodorus was banished simply because of envy. Nietzsche writes:

“If one wants to observe this conviction — wholly undisguised in its most native expression — that the contest is necessary to preserve the health of the state, then one should reflect on the original meaning of ostracism, for example, as it is pronounced by the Ephesians when they banish Hermodorus: ‘Among us, no one shall be the best; but if someone is, then let him be elsewhere and among others.’ Why should no one be the best? Because then the contest would come to an end and the eternal source of life for the Hellenic state would be endangered. … Originally this curious institution is not a safety valve but a means of stimulation: the individual who towers above the rest is eliminated so that the contest of forces may reawaken an idea that is hostile to the ‘exclusiveness’ of genius in the modern sense and presupposes that in the natural order of things there are always several geniuses who spur each other to action, even as they hold each other within the limits of measure. That is the core of the Hellenic notion of the contest: it abominates the rule of one and fears its dangers; it desires, as a protection against the genius, another genius.” (Walter Kaufmann translation)

Ostracism or banishment in the ancient Greek world exiles the offender to eremos, a desert place, a place of desolation. And eremos is the root word of eremite or hermit. And so Nietzsche indirectly provides a description of the historical hermit: best at whatever it is that provokes resentment among the authorities.

For Nietzsche, this essay is an early one, still under the influence of his The Birth of Tragedy, with its bipolar contrast of Apollonian and Dionysian. Later, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche will pursue the element of “contest” no longer in a literal sense but as an individual project, the transformation of self that coincidentally recognizes the superiority of the hermit life, the life of solitude, which is at the same time a projection of Nietzsche’s own life and vicissitudes.

Eternal Return

Why is eternal return, or eternal recurrence, largely associated with the philosopher Nietzsche, although eternal return appears widely in ancient Eastern and Greek thought?

The short answer is the context of the times: in the mid-nineteenth century, the West had just begun translating the classics of the East and reading them seriously, or at least airing them. Schopenhauer heard details about Buddhism, for example, enough to confirm his pessimism and to prompt comments on eternal return, but there is no direct evidence that Nietzsche had a similar interest. Instead, Nietzsche attributes eternal return to his fictional character Zarathustra. While Zoroastrianism did address eternal return, it was not as thorough-going as in India, not that Nietzsche had read documents of Zoroastrianism either. Nietzsche had identified Zarathustra as a prophet not dependent on Judeo-Christian tradition, and that was sufficient for Nietzsche, who saw himself as a prophet, and Zarathustra as a persona. To Nietzsche, eternal return was not a doctrine so much as a good thought-experiment appropriate to his aphoristic style, which would not have fit the style of the formal philosophy of his day.

Eternal return refers to the repetition of grand cyclical epochs of universal time from beginning to end -— and then starting again, more or less as before. Eternal return is part of the genre of mythic cataclysm or catastrophe in many world religions. In ancient Hindu thought, transmigration of the human soul is subordinate to this process, with human beings having no say in the cyclical process. The idea was pan-Indian, informing Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain thought. Cyclical catastrophe characterized ancient Babylonian thought as well. In ancient Greek thought several variations were presented by Hesiod, Empedocles, Heraclitus, the Stoics, and eventually Plato. [The best summary of the history of eternal return is still Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954).

These speculations were all versions of cyclical returns. Universal cataclysm is an integral part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, wherein Christianity maintains the sequence of Anti-Christ, Armageddon, Second Coming, and ending. But in opposition to Asian religions presenting cyclical eschatologies, Christianity presents linear eschatologies, hence not returns.

As mentioned, Nietzsche’s original pessimism was drawn from Schopenhauer, who noted simply that no one in possession of his faculties could wish to go through cyclical return. Cyclical return would not alter events, persons, or circumstances, in the least. Sufferings, degradations, ills experienced in lifetimes would simply be repeated, all decisions, all minutiae, inevitably and irrevocably. To Schopenhauer, eternal return demonstrates the absence of free will, yet the drive of will lingers in human consciousness as a source of suffering. For Schopenhauer, eternal return may be a version of Buddhism in its perpetual revolutions in eons of time, manifesting eternal fatalism, eternal absence of succor. In any case, the notion captured Nietzsche’s imagination, but while accepting the return exactly in every respect, he makes exception for the will. Thus, return is not a repeat of mistakes but a test of one’s life at the moment, is not an eternal repetition of mistakes only but a chance to rectify will, perceptions, and meaning.

Nietzsche only mentions eternal return twice. In Gay Science (or Joyful Wisdom), he wonders how we might react to the notion of death initiating a cyclical return, and what we would think if a demon whispered into our ear that everything we are doing and thinking would be repeated infinitely. Would we not be aghast?

Thus Spoke Zarathrustra does not overthrow eternal return at all, for overthrowal would presumably liberate humanity from the misery and suffering of eternal return, but represent to Nietzsche a falsehood and a return to the myth of contemporary religious culture, including linear cataclysm with its illusion of joy and triumph. Rather, he accepts the inevitability and suffering of reality (eternal return) but insists that the person, the self, must change perception. This change of perception must address only oneself, for no other expectation or altered circumstance but only sheer will, insight, and perception, can give us a new ability to understand, tolerate, and transcend suffering. The present moment of existence must become the tablet on which to etch one’s aspirations, intentions, conclusions, directions, not change any external curcumstances but to see through everything, to live in its contradictions.

Eternal return is purgation of past weaknesses, failure, error, desire. The self must embrace not only the will to pursue a new self but what would be associated with Nietzsche as the will to power, meaning no more than the taking control of one’s self in life and destiny. Because this self-made destiny is the fruit of a personal struggle,the self must overcome much that is irrevocably external affecting the inner person. The will must transform the self not through attack but through transvaluation, the will overcoming obstacles, subjectivities, falsehoods, not reliant on society, culture, others, but forging one’s own path and system of thought and values. Who can achieve this state Nietzsche dubs the “overman” (übermensch), often misconstrued as the “superman.” The overman is not a powerful, grasping, obnoxious personality but thoughtful and collected one who rejects inherited assumptions of the world to discover what is real, if not what is true.

Talk of overman and transvaluation suggests bravado and arrogance, but Nietzsche was not such a person. He was reclsuive, solitary, with very few friends, living alone, eating abstemiously, always thinking, reading, writing, and walking alone in the mountains of Switzerland and northern Italy. He suffered intensely from the debilitating hereditary ilness CADASIL, which refers to constricted blood vessels to the brain, resulting in increasing strokes, migraine, vision pain, extreme light sensitivity, nausea, vomiting, deteriorating cognitive function and memory, and culminating in dementia, paralysis, and early death.

Nietzsche’s philosophical resources, too, predated psychology and sociology. Such tools were for the future, of course. The absence of many factors in his thinking is telling today — psychological, sociological, cultural, the unavailability or absence of intellectual and historical knowledge, plus the value of a keener awareness of the everyday factors in the material contexts of the daily lives of the masses and their effects.

But given the nineteenth-century context in the West, eternal return was bound to be unpopular even as a device, for there was not much in it that could be celebrated. Eternal return adds nothing particular to metaphysics or to our daily way of life, and may as well be non-return. But Nietzsche is using it to point to a modern theme: living in the moment and crafting a path for doing so. He correctly argues that our struggle to overcome self and context, to rise above it, is all that we can do, but also it is what we must do, and that in doing so is the only way that we can establish meaning. And what a thing if we can do it!

Thoreau on walking

In his felicitous essay titled “Walking,” published posthumously in 1862, Henry David Thoreau approximates a historical practice that he recognizes by analogy. Thoreau presents walking not as the taking of exercise but of deliberate “sauntering.” He repeats the formula of Samuel Johnson that the notion of sauntering is taken from the medieval sense of leisurely walking (i.e., “sauntering” to the “sant terre,” the Holy Land). The idea of walking should be a significant spiritual expression. Or is made so, by Thoreau.

Such is the idealized version of the term, which even in medieval times came to represent first the idea of pilgrimage or crusade, but then, among the common people, the freer notion of what idlers and vagabonds pursued in their poverty, simply walking idly, anywhere, for everywhere is holy land, after all. And here the parallel assessment of the hermit is approximated. Thoreau is aware of this nuance, and embraces it fully.

While Thoreau is the more familiar popularizer of walking for its own sake, other modern thinkers have expressed the same sensibility, as Rebecca Solnit describes in her 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking and Frédéric Gros in his A Philosophy of Walking (2008, translated 2015). Notes Solnit: “The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as welll as in songs, streets and almost everyone’s adventures.”

Or, potentially everyone’s adventures, from which is crafted the advocacy of walking, the philosophy of walking. Philosopher Gros concentrates on Thoreau, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. Solnit highlights Rousseau, Kierkegaard, the Chinese hermit Cold Mountain and the British Romantic poet Wordsworth, who composed the famous “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Wordsworth’s is the image of the wanderer, clearly alone, in a natural setting, who delights that the “crowd” is thankfully not of people but of flowers!

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Thoreau makes a further reference to Wordsworth: “When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered,’Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.’”

Thoreau also refers to the medieval ballad “Gest of Robin Hode,” the stanza wherein Robin Hood sighs upon seeing the green forest and hearing birdsong. Here is the potential for both vagabonding and freedom. But, back to walking.

Thoreau tells us, “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”

Thoreau dismisses the question of where one should walk, it being obvious to his reader that he intends wilderness, not town or city; in the latter one encounters a stultifying image of self and not the liberating one embodied in nature. He entertains the notion of walking in specific directions, perhaps to emphasize the priority of intellectual and cultural self, telling us that one should walk westward towards California, not southward towards the Confederacy, and not eastward where New England already lies. Westward, too, in his mental geography, is the Amazon, the Orinoco, ultimately Africa and Asia, India and China, the lands of the future, as he understood them.

But for the moment, Thoreau tells us, he is noticing the brilliant golden sunset, the oaks, the meandering brook, a marsh hawk.

“So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in Autumn.”

URL (original June 1862 Atlantic article): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/