A Philosophy of Autobiography

Body & Text

Aakash Singh Rathore

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429763540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book offers intimate readings of a diverse range of global autobiographical literature with an emphasis on the (re)presentation of the physical body. The twelve texts discussed here include philosophical autobiography (Nietzsche), autobiographies of self-experimentation (Gandhi, Mishima, Warhol), literary autobiography (Hemingway, Das) as well as other genres of autobiography, including the graphic novel (Spiegelman, Satrapi), as also documentations of tragedy and injustice and subsequent spiritual overcoming (Ambedkar, Pawar, Angelou, Wiesel).

In exploring different literary forms and orientations of the autobiographies, the work remains constantly attuned to the physical body, a focus generally absent from literary criticism and philosophy or study of leading historical personages, with the exception of patches within phenomenological philosophy and feminism. The book delves into how the authors treated here deal with the flesh through their autobiographical writing and in what way they embody the essential relationship between flesh, spirit and word. It analyses some seminal texts such as Ecce Homo, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Waiting for a Visa, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, A Moveable Feast, Night, Baluta, My Story, Sun and Steel, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, MAUS and Persepolis.

Lucid, bold and authoritative, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of philosophy, literature, gender studies, political philosophy, media and popular culture, social exclusion, and race and discrimination studies.

1
The Crucified

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo

Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is is an autobiographical book of the great but profoundly controversial German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). It is one of the last books written by him, just before his final years of insanity that lasted until his death. Ecce Homo was written in 1888 and published posthumously in 1908.

§

‘Ecce homo’: ‘behold the man’ (John 19:5). These were the infamous words, spewed out by Pontius Pilate¹ with mild contempt, as he displayed the mocked Jesus, the Nazarene, soon to be the Christ, bloodied face under a crown of thorns. The crowd before whom Jesus was thrown, hostile and thirsty for blood, cheered and jeered, calling out for his crucifixion.

Nietzsche’s curious choice of the title of his autobiography needs some dwelling over. Why did the great German philosopher entitle his autobiography Ecce Homo? Did he liken himself to Christ? It seems unlikely, given that the book Nietzsche wrote just before this one was entitled The Antichrist! And the book after Ecce Homo? He called that one Dionysian Dithyrambs, philosophically laden poetry in honour of the Greek god Dionysus – the god of wine, carnal pleasure, the fertility of nature’s bounty, patron of the tragic stage where so much blood was spilt.

Can you imagine Nietzsche, between Christ and Dionysus? Take into perspective the final words with which he ended Ecce Homo: ‘Have I been understood? – Dionysus versus the Crucified’ (Nietzsche 1967, IV, 9). Is this a declaration, a challenge, or a signature?

A peek into his later writings might throw up some understanding. After his descent into madness, Nietzsche wrote numerous, exceedingly scandalous and partly coherent letters which he alternated between signing as, at times, Dionysus, and at other times, The Crucified. For example, this one:

God is on the earth. Don’t you see how all the heavens are rejoicing? I have just seized possession of my kingdom, I’ve thrown the Pope in prison….

(The Crucified)²

But there is also evidence that being simply ‘The Crucified’ was quite inadequate to the dizzying complexity of his self-understanding. At other times, he was both Dionysus and Christ (not to mention Buddha and a few choice others as well):

It is a mere prejudice that I am a human being. Yet I have often enough dwelled among human beings and I know the things human beings experience, from the lowest to the highest. Among the Hindus I was Buddha, in Greece Dionysus – Alexander and Caesar were incarnations of me, as well as the poet Shakespeare.… However, I now come as Dionysus victorious.… The heavens rejoice to see me here… I also hung on the cross.…³

That’s wonderful. After representing himself as Buddha, Dionysus, Alexander the Great, the greatest Roman emperor Caesar, and the unparalleled poet and playwright Shakespeare, Nietzsche throws in almost as an afterthought, by the way, I was also the Crucified one!

Why do these mad musings even matter? What is the significance of these declarations of being both Christ and Dionysus, alternatively and at the same time? The reason is that in all of Nietzsche’s earlier philosophy, we come across the quite distinctive and dramatic figure-symbols of Christ and Dionysus as positioned at two totally opposing poles, representing radically rival worldviews. The Christian world-view culminates in the ascetic ideals that despise the body, deny its nature and its will, and offer us in the end a ‘will to nothingness’. On the other (and opposite) side, the Dionysian worldview affirms human being and its nature, its willing, creating, and destroying the limitations set by the vast masses of men and reinforced through the pathetic, nay-saying history of philosophy. Furthermore, and more strangely to the way his life closes, Nietzsche, as his thought evolved, increasingly insisted on eschewing Christianity, denouncing the high and holy (the spirit), and in its place, decidedly following Dionysus, celebrating the deep and sacred (the body).

Dionysus and Christ are both gods who physically suffer, whose bodies are destroyed and they die, and who are then reborn. However, Dionysus’ death and rebirth are strikingly differently represented from that of Jesus, as much as – Nietzsche claims – health is different from disease. Dionysus’ death and rebirth sanctify life by recognizing suffering as an essential and affirmative part of it, and by affirming life as irrefutably good even in spite of its suffering. But with Jesus, thanks to Paul’s⁴ interpretative and missionary work, suffering was a sacrifice that promised a complete life only after death, with the nay-saying of this life being a precondition for achieving the blessedness of the next one. Asceticism and denial of life, this is the disease introduced into human consciousness through the symbolics of the passion of Christ, tied up with the salvation of the soul.

On the contrary, Nietzsche argues, Dionysus makes ‘the sexual symbol… the venerable symbol’ (Nietzsche 1888) and he makes sacred ‘the act of procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth’ (Nietzsche 1888). Dionysus valorizes the body and returns a sense of triumph to the life of the flesh as each factor involved in these acts of the body results in the most splendid and highest of feelings. As he puts it:

I know of no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism of the Dionysian festivals. Here the most profound instinct of life, that directed toward the future of life, is experienced religiously.

(Nietzsche 1888)⁵

And philosophers, that incorrigibly pathetic lot, have always foolishly privileged Christ over Dionysus.⁶

Nietzsche, or so claims Nietzsche, was a great philosopher precisely because he exposed the fraud of the history of philosophy. This fraud took many forms – it has been the many endeavours to escape from honesty in the guise of pursuing truth, the ascetic, high, and holy truth. The tradition of philosophy that we have all championed has largely been a history of self-deception, from its very Socratic inauguration (Socrates started it all, by preferring the god Apollo – the god of the sun, light, and prophecy – over the god Dionysus). It is this systematic and long-standing process of self-deception that philosophers teach their students, and their students teach theirs, and so on.

Nietzsche, however, sets about exposing this fraud. He dethrones Christ and hammers away all our other idols – piety, morality, humility – and thus struggles to restore Dionysus to his rightful place. Obviously, he had to have been wise, clever, and to write brilliant books to have achieved this. And so, here, we have the chapter titles of Ecce Homo, from the table of contents:

Why I Am So Wise

Why I Am So Clever

Why I Write Such Good Books

Why I Am a Destiny

We might easily understand the ‘wise’, and the ‘clever’, and ‘good books’ part, but why is he a ‘destiny’? As Nietzsche was not only a prolific writer, but also an extremely stylized one (variously employing techniques such as aphoristic writing, metaphor, parable, and so on), to claim to be able to decisively sketch an answer to this, or even certain fundamental aspects of his philosophy as a whole, would be dubious to say the least. Nevertheless, we can do our best to attempt to understand his salient teachings, especially those that relate to his being a destiny, which I think has to do mostly with moral philosophy. Some points of his thought are easier to summarize than others. For example, his dismissal of both Kantian deontological moral thought as well as of utilitarianism or consequentialism are fairly straightforward. Let us look briefly at how and why he overcomes these dominant positions, clearing a ground for his own radical thoughts on morality. By achieving this, we can get an even better vantage point on his autobiography, and what he finally understands himself to be teaching us through it.

We can start with the deontological position. Deontology refers to duty-based (as opposed to consequence-based) moral theory, and its primary representative for Nietzsche would be his German predecessor, the philosopher Immanuel Kant. With respect to deontology, Nietzsche sweeps aside all of its basic presuppositions, such as rational self-awareness. For Nietzsche, consciousness is a surface and plays less of a role in our actions than the primitive instincts or than the unconscious in the psychological sense. Any Kant-styled ‘categorical imperative’ is doomed. Kant exhorts us to ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’. But we do not really ever know why we act; the true grounds and motivations of our actions are as opaque to us as they are to others – indeed, sometimes they are less opaque to others than they are to us. Furthermore – even when we do know why we chose to take a certain course of action – we spend a great deal of time deceiving ourselves about our actions. As Nietzsche says, ‘the most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception’ (Nietzsche 1967, 185). Our motives are largely inaccessible to us. Any moral philosophy conditional upon self-aware action or upon intention is hardly more than a fiction.

Consequentialism (e.g. moral theories like utilitarianism) fares no better, according to Nietzsche, since it presupposes some sort of adequate knowledge of the future. In fact, we can never really know the full consequences of any act. We may believe we know certain immediate consequences, but since the chain of causality never ends, that which may appear to us as a bad consequence, and thereby worthy of blame, may ultimately produce wonderful and happy broader results, thereby far worthier of praise. As Nietzsche states, ‘any action at all is and remains impenetrable; our opinions about “good” and “noble” and “great” can never be proved true by our actions because every action is unknowable’ (Nietzsche 1910, Aphorism 335).

But particular, targeted critiques of specific moral philosophies are nothing new, and writings from advocates of deontological ethics are full of criticisms of utilitarianism, and vice versa. Thus in any academic moral philosophy course, a battery of criticism against each moral position would be encountered by the student. Much more profound are Nietzsche’s wholesale attacks upon morality, as we know it. Chief among these is the denial of the substantive opposition of good and evil, upon which so much of our conception of morality rests: ‘Between good and evil actions there is no difference in kind, but at the most one of degree. Good actions are sublimated evil ones; evil actions are coarsened, brutalized good ones’ (Nietzsche 1998, 107).

Indeed, evil, far from being something that morality should eschew, is in fact a necessity. It is ineliminable:

there is a personal necessity for misfortune; that terror, want, impoverishment, midnight watches, adventures, hazards and mistakes are as necessary to me and to you as their opposites […] for happiness and misfortune are brother and sister, and twins, who grows tall together, or, as with you, remain small together!

(Nietzsche 1910, Aphorism 338)

Another wholesale attack on the idea of morality itself is present in Nietzsche’s apparent denial of free will. Obviously, if moral agents are not acting freely, they cannot be held morally culpable for their actions. Although there is a great deal of debate whether Nietzsche is truly committed to determinism, nevertheless it is fairly clear that he regards man as essentially primitive and animalistic, of a piece with the natural world where morality plays no role. This position is referred to as Naturalism. Nietzsche appeared to hold to naturalism both methodologically, meaning that the methods of philosophy should be no different from the methods of the empirical sciences, as well as substantively. In terms of the latter, an appeal to non-natural causes cannot offer an explanation of natural, including human, phenomena. Thus, our beliefs, our moral values, as well as our moral actions must be explained in relation to causal determinants in our nature.

As devastating as it is, Nietzsche’s multi-pronged critique of morality is not merely nihilistic and destructive. In fact, it is meant ultimately to be creative. The primary point of Nietzsche’s undermining of morality is in order to clear away the old and useless brush in the effort to offer fresh ground for a new ethical flourishing. He is presaging this new flourishing, and the new man who embodies it is the Ubermensch, or Overman, about whom more below.

A great deal of this new orientation comes out in the Preface to Nietzsche’s earlier book Beyond Good and Evil. In that book, just as recapped later in Ecc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Introduction: the flesh made word
• 1 The Crucified: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo
• 2 The Mahatma: M.K. Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth
• 3 The Untouchable: B.R. Ambedkar’s Waiting for a Visa
• 4 The Nigger: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• 5 The Boxer: Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast
• 6 The Survivor: Elie Wiesel’s Night
• 7 The Dalit: Daya Pawar’s Baluta
• 8 The Poet: Kamala Das’ My Story
• 9 The Samurai: Yukio Mishima’s Sun and Steel
• 10 The Fake: Andy Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
• 11 The Mouse: Art Spiegelman’s MAUS
• 12 The Daughter: Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis
• Epilogue
• Index