Ordinary Oblivion and the Self Unmoored: Reading Plato’s Phaedrus and Writing the Soul

Ordinary Oblivion and the Self Unmoored

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16 15 14   5 4 3 2 1

First edition

grass of forgetting

picked for a rice soup

the end of the year

—BASHO, The Complete Haiku

(translated by Jane Reichhold)

Contents

Preface

Introduction. Replete and Porous: Reading the Phaedrus and Writing the Soul

1.     The Teeming Body: Making Images of the Soul through Words

2.     The Fluid Body: Madness and Displaced Discourse

3.     The Torn Body: Forgotten Logos and Unmoored Ideals

Conclusion. Ghost Ribs of Discourse beyond the Phaedrus: Radical and Domesticated Forgetting in Euripides, Zhuangzi, and Aristotle

Epilogue: Poetics as First Philosophy

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Preface

We are porous creatures. Our lives are saturated with repletion and incompleteness. Brimming and leakage abound. There is a surfeit of the self, even as much of what flows into a life slips to the margins or becomes obscured from view, often lost without a trace. Sometimes the fugitive surfeit of the self drifts back into our lives, as a rekindled intimacy with who we have been and who we are. Sometimes it remains fugitive, a ghostly vestige imparting knowledge at a distance. My primary interest has been how this lost surfeit of the self creates fissures in self-knowledge that are not empty or vacant, though they are spaces where something has gone missing. What would it mean to build an understanding of the human person from such spaces? Do these spaces suggest a way of understanding the sacred? What is their ethical significance? This book focuses on the first of these questions. Subsequent writing will engage the remaining two queries, informed by the endeavor presented here.

The whole of this book is evoked by the title. Reflecting on it, prior to reading the remainder of the text, would engender a more dialogical encounter with what I propose. A few remarks to bear in mind, if you embark on this suggested interruptive reflection:

Ordinary oblivion is how I have named the spaces in a person described above, those fissures best characterized neither wholly in terms of presence nor wholly in terms of absence. Literally and figuratively, remembrance and forgetting have allowed me to think through the character and meaning of these spaces in a life. Between simply being able to remember something and simply having forgotten something is a whole range of possibility. This is the range in which what is most crucial to self-knowledge transpires. It is the abode we come from, even as it is placeless. Oblivion indicates how the replete, brimming-over content of a life can become extinguished from the surface even as it may live on, in us, in other ways. Ordinary describes the mundane ubiquity of this process and my focus on nontraumatic modes of forgetfulness.

The Self Unmoored bears two directions of reference. First, in the experiential sense, it gestures toward the often unsettling effects of ordinary oblivions—namely, that they can unmoor the self one takes oneself to be. Second, in the direction of theory, the phrase refers to my claim that our understanding of an individual life would be better were it to relinquish the apparatus of selfhood that has dominated contemporary discourse. Prevalent approaches to selfhood often presume or facilitate the notion that human beings can be regarded in terms of an abiding essence, entity, or structuring capacity. Once discovered and understood, this abiding form could then provide a secure source of identity. I depart from this conception of security and the variations of selfhood with which it can be associated. These variations include (but are not limited to) conceiving selfhood in terms of rational choice and agency, the cultivation of excellence within a model of progress, the maximization of pleasure and the achievement of gratification, and the creation of authentic, indelible expression.

"Reading Plato’s Phaedrus and Writing the Soul" refers, most immediately, to my concentration on that text as the source through which I make an anthropology in terms of the soul. My reading of the Phaedrus as a source text recasts our view of Plato by attending to the overlooked complexity of the relationship between remembering and forgetting in the dialogue as well as its somatically rendered expressions of the soul. Plato has often been read as depending on a metaphysical basis for truth, with the soul being a corollary, divinely oriented concept and reality. He has also been characterized as a dualist, with the soul and body regarded as a conjunction of the (unfortunately necessary) material order and the (divinely aspiring) ideal dimensions of the person. I take these characterizations to be wrong. Plato’s understanding of the soul is best construed not in metaphysical or dualist terms, but rather through his entanglement of the soul with written form. As such, the subtitle of this volume points beyond my particular, theoretical interests to the larger stakes of his dialogic texts: Soul is written—that is, it is made—through the processes of engagement spurred by particular written forms.

With these preliminary remarks in mind, reflect on the title in your own terms. Then, read on, to encounter mine.

INTRODUCTION

Replete and Porous

Reading the Phaedrus and Writing the Soul

Should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul?

—Theodore Roethke, On Poetry and Craft

Theodore Roethke’s query and the affirmative response it invites create this book’s terrain.¹ The heart of this inquiry is a consideration of what it means to perceive the self and whether, following Roethke, through such perception the self becomes something different, a difference to be understood religiously. The idea arising from the whole of this book is that soul remains a meaningful word and idea for human life, not in a material or metaphysical sense, but to express those features of human being that emerge in the attempt to perceive the self. Specifically, in trying to perceive the self, there is much that cannot be seen that yet constitutes the particular character of a life. We outstrip our own habits of perception, and this incongruity leads to many forms of experience, knowledge, and emotion, the awareness of which is distinctive to human living. I take soul to name—indeed, to be—that dimension of human experience opened up by the juxtaposition between the perceiving self and the limitations of direct perception. To acknowledge this juxtaposition, to encounter its implications, and to pursue the alternate modes of seeing it requires make the self into something different, something for which the language of soul is compelling. This is not just a renaming of the self. It is a claim that the soul is real.

Although Roethke evokes the terrain that this book examines, Plato is the figure through whom I build my account. Plato understood the limitations of direct perception of the self, the necessity for alternate modes of viewing the self, and the transformative effects of those viewing processes. He is, in effect, one of the richest sources to engage Roethke’s query and to answer it affirmatively. He shows how to perceive the self and suggests how—through such perception—the self becomes understood, religiously, to be a soul. Given the connection I am suggesting between Plato, a philosopher, and Roethke, a poet, it is most significant that Plato’s examination of the processes of self-perception and the soul’s burgeoning hinges on the character of written discourse. For Plato, discourse can either obscure self-perception or engender the alternate modes of viewing through which the self becomes seen more rightly. Soul is the self rightly understood.

My focus is on the written forms of discourse through which, for Plato, such understanding becomes possible. Plato engaged the kind of possibility Roethke’s words express and did so primarily through a philosophic consideration of the powers and risks of written discourse, powers and risks he enacted within his own chosen forms.

The specific form to be examined here is one suggested by Socrates as a mode of argument in the Republic and realized by Plato to greatest effect in the Phaedrus: Forming an image of the soul through words.² This book examines the various ways in which Plato forms images of the soul through words in order to effect—not merely represent—the shift from the self to the soul.

Before turning to Plato, a brief consideration of another author who formed images of the soul through words in especially potent ways will help illustrate the core conceptual elements of my examination of the Phaedrus. Three poems by Emily Dickinson point to three ideas around which the rest of the book is built: the ordinary oblivion of the self, the disruption and unmooring of the self, and the need for slant modes of viewing the self. Dickinson expresses radically what I take to be present in Plato in a germinal, originary manner. The compressed and stark character of Dickinson’s poems highlights the ideas at issue and serves to focus our interpretive eye on the openings within the Phaedrus to be elaborated in the remaining chapters.

THE ORDINARY OBLIVION OF THE SELF

One need not be a Chamber - to be Haunted -

One need not be a House -

The Brain has Corridors - surpassing

Material Place -

Far safer, of a midnight meeting

External Ghost

Than it’s interior confronting -

That cooler Host -

Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,

The Stones a’chase -

Than unarmed, one’s a’self encounter -

In lonesome Place -

Ourself behind ourself, concealed -

Should startle most -

Assassin hid in our Apartment

Be Horror’s least -

The Body - borrows a Revolver -

He bolts the Door -

O’erlooking a superior spectre -

Or More -

—Emily Dickinson (407/J670)³

Dickinson expresses dramatically and figuratively a very ordinary feature of human living: Much of who we are remains hidden from view, and these obscured aspects of the self can unsettle and disrupt the apparent surface of who we take ourselves to be. The Brain has Corridors - surpassing/Material Place: The mind has spaces removed from direct view that cannot be simply mapped without remainder in the way one might map a material structure. Ourself behind ourself, concealed - /Should startle most: The aspects of the self removed from direct view should surprise us, even more than unanticipated incursions from without, given the inner locale of such surprise. The self behind the self is a source for haunting, risk, and danger, where more is at stake than a midnight meeting/[of] External Ghost. Unarmed, solitary encounters with the self are the least safe place. And it is a place where The Brain and The Body must reckon with each other in order to navigate, control, and contain the haunted space of the self.

Dickinson uses dramatic and stark forms of poetic expression, not to suggest the extraordinary or unusual nature of the psychological feature at issue, but rather to evoke the pressing significance of an ordinary, common feature of the human person. Though doing so in her distinctive, innovative forms of expression, Dickinson is giving voice to a long-standing impasse in Western European philosophical and literary traditions regarding how to comprehend the replete and porous nature of the self. Augustine’s formulation of this impasse within his brilliant examination of memory characterizes the philosophical backdrop to Dickinson’s poem.

Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God, a spreading limitless room within me. Who can reach its uttermost depth? Yet it is a faculty of my soul and belongs to my nature. In fact I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside itself and not within? How can it not contain itself? [How can there be any of itself that is not in itself?]⁴

Not only does Augustine characterize the philosophical history of the issues present within Dickinson’s poem, he also describes features of the mind that are the locus of investigation within contemporary neuroscience. Indeed, Augustine’s characterization has been pointed to as an apt description of the conundrums faced in trying to understand the character and processes of the brain and how these bear upon the mind-body complex of human beings.⁵ The neuroscientist David Eagleman turns over Augustine’s query in his own words: There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.⁶ Whether expressed as the looming chasm within the human person, as our inability to grasp all that we are, or as ourself behind ourself, concealed, these authors point to the general idea from which this book sets forth: The human person is characterized by repleteness and porosity. The replete, overabundant character of the human being is implicated and enmeshed with its forms of insufficiency, lacunae, and failure. We are more than we can see or encompass, and yet the plenitude that has become absent from view, that has slipped away, still constitutes who we are. Our porosity consists not only in this slipping away but also in the unexpected returns that also characterize a life, when what has been concealed in corridors arrives to haunt the sense of person to which one has become accustomed.

To draw on Dickinson’s imagery, the points of contact and passage between the seen and unseen realms may be likened to doors and corridors, but they are swinging doors on hinges and corridors with permeable walls. Ourself behind ourself suggests, through its very linguistic structure, a fluid linkage of terms in which the direction of relationship and boundary are nondeterminate. Indeed, Dickinson suggests that confrontation and containment of the specters of the self require force and violence (Revolver and bolts the Door) given their ghostlike nature. If we consider her work as a whole, we see her awareness of the illusion of such attempts at containment. For Dickinson, poetic force could enact encounters in the corridors of the self only if the reader also braved the radically unhinged doors such viewing requires. In this, she echoes a Platonic orientation to the self.

Of course, not all that has slipped from view returns, and in this way too we can take Augustine’s observation that he cannot grasp all that he is. Who we are often lies beyond points of contact, no matter one’s efforts. It is a form of loss or absence, born of the intangible, that yet creates a felt sense of who one is. A primary interest of this book is to suggest an account of the human person that can do justice both to the recovered or returned repleteness of the self and to its irrecoverable, specter-like aspects. I take Plato’s Phaedrus to offer such a possibility and to offer a true picture of who we are.

This truth rests in an apprehension of what I call the ordinary oblivion of the self. As the previous illustrations have indicated, much of who we are is, ineluctably, forgotten by us or has escaped our notice. The Greek language and roots of forgetting are especially telling in this regard: λήθη (lēthē) means a forgetting, forgetfulness or a place of oblivion and in the Greek language is related to the verbal form λανθάνω (lanthanō), to escape notice, to be unknown, unseen, unnoticed. Throughout the Phaedrus, Plato plays with—and builds on—the associative connections between forgetting and escaping notice.⁷ As the word oblivion connotes, and as Dickinson’s poem enacts, there is a dramatic dimension of this feature of the human person, insofar as its effects on a life are often not trivial. Yet I add the descriptor ordinary to indicate my emphasis throughout on the mundane everydayness of the ways this oblivion works within a life. The effects of oblivion may be extraordinary, but its presence and processes are primarily ordinary, saturating a life in an intimate manner such that change occurs incrementally and deciduously.

My emphasis on ordinary—rather than extraordinary—forms of oblivion, as well as the way in which I have chosen to examine this feature of personhood, is significant and needs to be addressed, however briefly. There are several extant interpretive trajectories dealing with forgetting and oblivion from which I am shifting away. In the study of religion, lēthē in ancient Greek myth, oblivio within the context of mysticism, and the altered states of shamanic and other ritual practices have been deep sources for theoretical and interpretive exploration.⁸ Forgetting or obscured memory have, of course, been key issues in the psychoanalytic tradition(s) and trauma studies.⁹ These approaches to forgetting have tended to consider oblivion in its more dramatic forms, whether within the heightened ecstatic or traumatic experience of an individual or within large-scale historical and communal phenomena. Other approaches have focused on forgetting in the constitution of the self, yet with an eye to how this affects the individual person’s relationship to a broad conception of history.¹⁰ These approaches draw together the phenomenological aspects of oblivion and extraordinary, large-scale contexts or implications. The classic instance of this approach is found in Nietzsche, whose idea of self-forgetting hinges on the relationship (and its rupture) between immediate, subjective experience and history.¹¹ As described in one of his more dramatic formulations, this rupture becomes possible when the chasm of oblivion separates quotidian reality from the Dionysiac.¹² I am interested not in oblivion that separates quotidian reality from some other Dionysiac reality, but rather in how oblivion within quotidian reality itself creates distance from, and within, the self.¹³ I thus use ordinary oblivion as a term of art to name my present focus on the surfeit of experience that becomes lost from view in the self, a loss that does not result in vacuous emptiness, but rather creates a transformative locale of knowledge and perspective.¹⁴ Close textual attention to the Phaedrus, as framed by the poetic evocations of Dickinson, is the method of viewing I take to be most appropriate to this focus.¹⁵

UNMOORING THE SELF

Me from Myself - to banish -

Had I Art -

Invincible My Fortress

Unto All Heart -

But since Myself - assault Me -

How have I peace

Except by subjugating

Consciousness?

And since We’re Mutual Monarch

How this be

Except by Abdication -

Me - of Me -?

—Emily Dickinson (709/J642)

If spaces of ordinary oblivion form much of oneself, we become mistakenly fixated in self-understandings when the surface content of the self is taken to be the whole and the occluded aspects of the self remain unencountered. My second conceptual interest in Plato is thus his orientation toward the disruption and unmooring of such falsely fixated self-understandings.¹⁶ Or, rendered in Dickinson’s language, the self must abdicate its habituated forms of sovereignty over itself when such forms of rule prove to be incongruous with the mutual monarchy we are. The disruption and unmooring of stagnant self-understanding requires acknowledging and accessing the ordinary oblivion of the self, even as it also means—the crux, perhaps, of this entire book—neither wholly eradicating such oblivion nor living within the mistaken aspiration of being able to expunge it from a life. This dynamic, tenuous poise between encountering the ordinary oblivion of the self and relinquishing the fantasy that it can be fully mastered, assuaged, or recovered is central to my interpretation of Plato and the account offered in this book generally.

Dickinson’s poem emphasizes a torn or conflicted self, in which different dimensions of consciousness are engaged in a kind of power struggle (see, e.g., the language of assault and subjugating). Indeed, this picture of conflict or struggle is one often attributed to Plato’s conception of the soul, in which the soul’s various aspects are related in terms of compulsion and force. That is, within the starker picture of Dickinson and parts of Plato, the ordinary oblivions of the self can call into question—or outright assault—the sovereign surface of the self. As with Dickinson’s poem, one can’t deny that Plato’s depictions of the soul and composure of the philosophic self often suggest a kind of mastery over unruly elements, that harmony or peace arises from suppression.¹⁷ Alongside this aspect of the poem, and of Plato’s texts, I want to place and highlight other dimensions of his understanding of the soul.¹⁸

Within Dickinson’s poem, in the last stanza’s language of abdication, one of these alternate dimensions is gestured toward. It is the idea that the abdication or relinquishment of mistaken conceptions of self-mastery and sovereignty are formative, crucially so, to the soul. This is not to say that Plato, or Dickinson, is suggesting the replacement of our mutual monarchy with chaos or anarchic dissolution of the self. Rather, it is to suggest that an unmooring of the hold we take the surface self to have on all aspects of our being is needed for the soul to become fully manifest. The equally important, corollary element of this orientation in Plato’s texts is also alluded to by Dickinson, in her first stanza: Art will be necessary for this disruption and unmooring of the self. Heart and, in Plato, the dynamics of eros are not sufficient unto themselves. The art of writing—specifically, for Plato, through the entanglement of logos and mythos—is how the relinquishment and remaking of false forms of sovereignty will be effected. This returns us to the images of the soul made through words at the core of this book.

VIEWING THE SOUL AND TELLING ITS TRUTH SLANT

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind -

—Emily Dickinson (1263/J1129)

Examining how Plato tells slant the story of the soul in a way that dazzle[s] gradually is the connecting, structural thread of this book.¹⁹ Why must the truth be told slant? And why does success in such telling lie in Circuit? Why must Truth … dazzle gradually?

Building on the previous two poems and the ideas in Plato that I take them to illustrate, I believe that the truth must be told slant and in circuit owing to the character of the self and the art of writing appropriate for engendering its movement into being a soul. The replete and porous character of the self and the need to unmoor false conceptions of sovereignty in the self mean that direct, literal, and static modes of viewing will not be sufficient. Specifically, the ordinary oblivions of the self, which arise from its replete and porous nature, entail that angled vantage points and dynamic modes of viewing will be needed to see the obscured, fertile lacunae of the self. Similarly, slant and circuitous modes of viewing will be needed to unsettle and unmoor falsely fixated understandings of the self’s sovereignty or univocal mastery over itself. Dickinson’s poem weaves together the capacities of seeing (Too bright, dazzle, blind) and telling (Tell, explanation). For Plato, these capacities and tropes were also interwoven. The ways in which the truth could be seen and could be told were of a piece. One did not take precedence over the other, but rather both were enmeshed processes of philosophic practice.²⁰

This enmeshment is seen most dramatically and emblematically in the Phaedrus within Socrates’ main speech and his mythic narrative of the soul’s journeying in heaven before becoming embodied in an earthly bodily form. In his myth (a Platonic invention) the souls of both gods and mortals traverse a circuit around heaven, drawn forward and upward by the desire to behold the eternal truths abiding just beyond