The Autobiographical Novel
Other powerful lineages populate the history of philosophy. There are other binaries to describe the issues and people at work in the tradition. Of course, there is Idealism and Materialism; the ascetic Ideal and the hedonist Ideal; and transcendence and immanence. But equally, there is denigration of the “I” and writing about the self. On the one hand, the philosophers I have listed did not seem to value autobiographical confession or little details derived from personal experiences. On the other hand, their lives fed their thought and they acknowledged drawing lessons from life. Some are messengers who efface themselves, trying to convince themselves that they act as mediums inspired by some extrinsic force, something beyond themselves, descended from the sky. Others are egoists, recounting their lives, involving themselves in the narrative and teaching that all ideas proceed from one’s self, more precisely, from one’s body.
The split between self and body is a fiction. All philosophers without exception start from their own concrete existence. Dualism reveals a different logic: Some hide in it, creating the illusion that dualism was revealed to them as an epiphany of reason, something that welled forth in spite of themselves. On the other hand, there are those who clearly protest. Classical and traditional historiography is for skillful liars and the falsely modest. It loves the proud humility of a Pascal who claims that the Self is detestable, but who uses the word “I” 753 times in the pages of his Pensées.
Montaigne is one of my heroes. Part of the success of his Essays comes from the personal examples he uses: waking to the sound of the pines; the servants speaking Latin; his father’s skill as a horseman; his own awkwardness in all manual, physical, or sportive exercises; his taste for oysters and claret wine; his passion for women; the enormous lesion of his tiny organ; the taste of feminine kisses perfuming his mustache; his cat; his precocious sexual failures; his fall from a horse; his misadventures with troublemakers in the forest and in his own home; and so many other moments much more useful than mere anecdote. For philosophy, the point of the stories is not their narrative power; they are important for their philosophical role: these existential details provide us with a theory that allows us to get back to our own existential condition.
Through these stories, which are the means of his thinking and not the ends, Montaigne clarifies the role of education in the constructions of identity, the inherited part of all personal evolution, and the body’s major role in his philosophy. He reflects on identity, Being, our ontological uncertainty when confronted with the Other; man’s animal aspect; the importance of determination, Stoic confidence, and strength; and the possibility of an Epicurean life. These life lessons illuminate the author’s self-construction, of course, but also that of the reader, who is drawn in amiably.
One part of French philosophy speaks in the first person. Adrien Baillet, Descartes’s first biographer, tells us that the famous Discourse on Method was almost given the name The Story of My Life. But beginning with the self does not mean you have to stay there forever, nor does it compel you to indulge. Between the self-rejection of the self and maniacal egoism, there is a way to give the “I” dignity: a chance to apprehend the world and uncover some of its secrets. Philosophical introspection—the wager of Descartes’s cogito—is a point of departure. All ontology is preceded by a physiology.
The Existential Hapax
The body plays a major role in the life of a philosopher. Everything that can be said on the subject can be found in the preface to The Gay Science. Nietzsche knew from where he spoke—he knew nothing but migraines, ophthalmy, nausea, vomiting, and a collection of other maladies. He proclaimed that all philosophy is reducible to the embrace of the body, to the autobiography of a Being that suffers. Thought emerges out of a subjective flesh that says “I” and “the world that contains me.” Thought does not come down from above like the Holy Spirit that causes the elect to speak in tongues. Rather, it rises through the body, welling up from the flesh and entrails. What philosophizes within a body is nothing other than strength and weakness, ability and disability.
There is yet no discipline that would permit such a decoding of philosophical texts. We don’t need a new semiology, textology, or linguistic science, but the kind of existential psychology left stranded after Sartre. It was stranded theoretically in Being and Nothingness, and stranded practically in the three volumes of The Family Idiot. This is because a philosophy is not apprehended in the Platonic mode of contemplating great concepts in the single nebulous plain of pure spirits. It is carried out on the material earth where the things that matter are bodily, historical, existential, and psychoanalytic, to name a few things.
Strangely, the history of philosophy teems with details that could make this project possible. But in order to do it, we must rethink the rejection of biography and affirm the possibility of entering the interior of a work, knowing its margins, its surroundings, and everything extrinsic to it. The details are not enough in themselves. We cannot reduce everything to anecdotes, nor can mere accessories destroy what is essential. But understanding the nature of a work requires understanding the mechanisms that produced it.
Sartre’s original project promoted what I called, in The Art of Enjoyment, the existential hapax—the kairos of every philosophical enterprise.1 In Greek music, it was the chaos of anacrusis before the beginning of refined modulation.2 It is a singular moment during the life of the philosopher, in a particular place and at a distinct time—the je ne sais quoi of Benito Feijóo3—that resolves the contradictions and tensions accumulated in the body. The body registers that shock and it manifests in our physiology: sweating, crying, bleeding, trembling, fainting, comas, exhaustion, and the evacuation of vital fluids. Along the lines of the bodily trances of this peasant mystic, philosophers have produced a considerable number of variations. This hapax is the start of a work’s genealogy.
Some examples? They abound…When philosophers are even slightly forthcoming, to which their correspondence bears witness and a biography will attest, one often finds such an epiphany in their existence…It doesn’t happen after their great work is written and the essential part of their production is behind them. It happens in their beginning, before all their work, genealogically. Their potential destiny flashes and it troubles them; it bores into them, penetrates, shoots, kills, and intoxicates them.
Without trying to offer an encyclopedia of examples, here are a few powerful moments: Augustine is the most famous—erstwhile lush and cad, future Father of the Church, the Doctor of Catholic law. He finds himself in the middle of a garden, in Milan, when grace visits him. Tears, cascades of tears, heart-rending cries, a voice from without—he documents this in his Confessions. What follows, obviously, is his conversion to Catholicism. Then there is Montaigne and his fall from a horse in 1568 after which he disposes of his Epicurean theory of death; Descartes and his three dreams in November 1619, which trigger the genesis of rationalism(!); Pascal and his famous night in Memorial between 10:30 pm to midnight November 1654 (tears there too); La Mettrie and his fever, which inspires his corporal monism on the battlefield of Fribourg in 1742; Rousseau in 1749 on the road to Vincennes, where he was going to visit Diderot in prison, when he falls to the ground in convulsions and begins to write his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men; Nietzsche in August 1881 on the banks of Lake Silvaplana where he has a vision of the Eternal Return and the Superman; Jules Lequier in the garden of his youth when he witnesses a hawk snatch up a small bird, giving him intuitions about the relationship between freedom and necessity, which is the focus of all his work, such as The Search for a First Truth.
Decoding an Egodicy
Paul Valéry had a similar experience, which I called, in Desire to Be a Volcano, a Genoa Syndrome. What does that mean? A philosopher’s body is unique: it is hypersensitive, like an open wound, simultaneously fragile and firm, capable and delicate, a precise machine capable of sublime acts, but also subject to the tiniest disturbances. The artist’s body is valuable and is destined to knowledge through the depths—according to the felicitous expression of Henri Michaux.
Matter stores up considerable amounts of energy, only to cause Being to bend, bow, and break in two. Forces, tensions, and ontological knots are incessantly at work inside this machine that is both desirous and nuclear, in all senses of the term. In infancy, but even before that, in our prehistoric unconsciousness, information accumulates as conflicting electrical charges. Only the existential hapax relieves this tension. That moment is a happy and favorable harbinger without which the person’s being would probably be destroyed.
Freudian psychologists and their many offshoots focus too much on an autonomous psychic mechanism, which has little relation to historical materiality. Time, family, place, context, upbringing, personal encounters, and physiology are as important as the psychological unconscious. I believe in a sort of vitalist unconscious, one that is energetic but also material and historical. Philosophy cannot be understood through the formal and structuralist method—the Platonic one—as if the text floats in the ether between two metaphysical waters, without roots, without relation to the real and concrete world. A reading must then be refined enough to bring to light the way this mechanism of egodicy works.
I borrow this neologism from Jacques Derrida, who coined it in The Gift of Death. He meant, in the manner of Leibniz’s theodicy, that all philosophical discourse must proceed from a justification of self. The philosopher attends to his Being, constitutes it, gives it structure, solidifies it, and then proposes his own autotherapy as if it were a general soteriological path. To philosophize is to make one’s own existence viable and livable—right where one is, where nothing is given and everything is yet to be constructed. With his suffering body, sickly and frail, Epicurus came up with a way of thinking that let him live well, live better. At the same time, he proposed, to everyone, a new possibility for existence.
The idealist philosophical tradition refuses to make Reason the flower of such a corporal ground. It challenges what it sees as the fatalistic and mechanistic materiality of being—a complex materiality of course, but mechanistic nonetheless. It bristles at the idea of physical metaphysics. It won’t incorporate those trivial activities concerned with the materiality of the world. It remains Platonic, sacrificing to the specter of Thought that needs no brain, of reflection without a body, of meditation without neurons, of philosophy without flesh. It wants something directly from heaven to explain the only unique part of man that escapes our understanding: the soul.
In the 1960s, structuralism lit the last fires of this methodological asthenia against the existential psychoanalysis of Sartre. It was against the materialism of the body and developed a phenomenology of the flesh mixed with theology and scholasticism. This combination thickens the mist between the real and the consciousness that we can have of it. Structuralism railed against the extraordinary evidence of science, against things like neurobiology. It introduced a new spiritualism. In our time, there has never been a more urgent need for an existential philosophy of the body.