Lacan's Ethics and Nietzsche's Critique of Platonism

Tim Themi

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438450414
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Bringing together Jacques Lacan and Friedrich Nietzsche, Tim Themi focuses on their conceptions of ethics and on their accounts of the history of ethical thinking in the Western tradition. Nietzsche blames Plato for setting in motion a degenerative process that turned ethics away from nature, the body, and its senses, and thus eventually against our capacities for reason, science, and a creative, flourishing life. Dismissing Plato's Supreme Good as a "mirage, " Lacan is very much in sympathy with Nietzsche's reading. Following this premise, Themi shows how Lacan's ethics might build on Nietzsche's work, thus contributing to our understanding of Nietzsche, and also how Nietzsche's critique can strengthen our understanding of Lacan.

Chapter 1

The Deflationary Ontology of Lacan and Nietzsche

Nietzsche wanted to surpass the Good of Platonism because he believed it to have turned against nature, the body and its senses, and thus eventually against our capacities for a creative, flourishing life. This chapter considers how Lacan’s own analysis of the Good in his 1959–1960 Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, extends on Nietzsche’s project.

Section 1.1 discusses the real and imaginary distinctions that Nietzsche argues were confused historically by Plato’s Good. Then it considers Lacan’s tripartite schema of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real to augment Nietzsche’s purpose of deflating the Good—a purpose Lacan is found to share when motioning to discuss “the evolution of history, in order to demystify the Platonic and the Aristotelian view of the good, indeed of the Supreme Good” (SVII: 216). Section 1.2 turns to Lacan’s returning of Aristotle’s Good to the polymorphous perversities at the base of desire, to the Freudian Thing, the unruly real. I observe this Thing to manifest as our most amoral truths, painful truths we try to exclude, which leads Lacan to infer a pleasure principle in the projection of the Good as the center of the cosmos—as if this were an ultimate reality or essence of nature that guaranteed happiness, design, protection.

I suggest for Lacan as well as Nietzsche that the metaphysics of the Good will mean some error, fiction, or fantasy in the imaginary has been mistaken as “true” or “real,” when it is really only a symptom of the repression of a particular aspect of the truth, or modicum of the real, if not the source of the repression itself. This will bring us to the discontent that Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan each take the inflationary Good of moralism to cause: for what this Good disavows inevitably returns, by virtue of the disavowed being real.

1.1 Lacan’s Tripartite Schema with Nietzsche’s Critique of Plato’s Good

I will not, in fact, be able to avoid a certain inquiry into historical progress. It is at this point I must refer to those guiding terms, those terms of reference which I use, namely, the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. (Lacan, SVII:11)

Lacan’s guiding terms of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real make up what he refers to in a 1953 text as “the three registers of human reality.” Marc De Kesel notes this text to hold the “first version” of Lacan’s triadic “ ‘move,’ ” which Marcelle Marini suggests would then “form the framework of his entire theory.”¹ Before discussing this tripartite schema, I examine Nietzsche’s criticism of Plato’s Good and the proto-Christian Platonism he takes it to spawn, so as to situate the criticism Lacan also makes of this Good for being merely imaginary. In light of this shared criticism, the task is to see how all three parts of Lacan’s schema are useful to Nietzsche’s project of revaluating this Good’s values.

Nietzsche’s project is based on the claim that Plato’s Good reverses what is real and imaginary in the field of ethics. In his Twilight of the Idols of 1888, his climactic final year of writing, Nietzsche suggests that moral judgment henceforth shares with religious judgment “a level of ignorance at which even the concept of the real, the distinction between the real and the imaginary, is lacking.” He indicates this reversal is finally coming undone in the modern era when adding that “at such a level ‘truth’ denotes nothing but things which we today call ‘imaginings’ ” (TI VII:1).

A few sections later, Nietzsche designates Plato’s role in this initial moral-religious reversal when portraying him to have “deviated” from the “instincts of the Hellenes” and become “morally infected” when, like an “antecedent Christian,” he already has “the concept ‘good’ as the supreme concept” (TI X:2). It is the inflationary nature of this Good, that is, its projection into a supernatural imaginary, that leads Nietzsche to conclude he “should prefer to describe the entire phenomenon ‘Plato’ by the harsh term ‘higher swindle’ or, if you prefer, ‘idealism,’ than by any other” (TI X:2).²

Nietzsche takes the best Hellenic instincts, which Plato deviated from, to be typified in the “Sophist culture” or “realist-culture” of those such as Thucydides. In contrast to Thucydides’ “strong, stern, hard matter-of-factness,” Nietzsche suggests “Plato is a coward in the face of reality” who “flees into the ideal” (TI X:2).³ We find this contrast also in one of Nietzsche’s unpublished notes of 1888, which states that “the high culture of Thucydides,” “as necessarily as Plato’s does not,” belongs to “the Periclean age” which “has its predecessors in Heraclitus, in Democritus, in the scientific types of the old philosophy,” adding that today “every advance in epistemological and moral knowledge has reinstated the Sophists” (WP 428).

Brian Leiter explains that Nietzsche’s conviction that the best philosophers came before Plato comes from the “methodological naturalism,” “empiricism,” and “realism” he often shares with them—in viewing, for instance, “nature as continuous throughout,” of which we have emerged as merely one of its products, “so that even the understanding of human beings must proceed apace with the understanding of the rest of nature.”⁴ The empiricism entailed in this view, that is, Nietzsche’s often stated view that “evidence of truth comes only from the senses” (BGE 134), also stands in stark contrast to what Nietzsche decried as the “Platonic slander of the senses” that was a “preparation of the soil for Christianity” (WP 427).⁵

Lacan for his part illustrates with the Cathars, a puritanical Christian sect, how such a slander of the senses in the form of the belief that “evil is in matter” because it entails “generation as well as corruption,” conditions the “ascetic task” of “turning away” to an imaginary Beyond, “an Edenic world characterised by purity and light,” as if “the true world of the original good creator” (SVII:124). And although commentators suggest that after Plato there were in fact sceptics in the Academy he started—particularly under the leadership of Arcesilaus—this period of Academic scepticism, from about 274 to 74 BC, was both preceded and followed by the religiously dogmatic, doctrinal codification of Plato’s metaphysics of the forms and of the Good that was to prove so conducive to later onto-theological ventures.⁶

Mark McPherran notes that Plato was already assimilating the prevailing “Pythagorean, possibly Orphic,” religious views of his time on the soul’s catharsis and reincarnation⁷—and although Nietzsche is skeptical of Plato’s “integrity” on doctrines like the “separate immortality of ‘souls,’ ” claiming here that Plato merely “wanted to have taught as absolute truth what he himself did not regard as even conditionally true” (WP 428), still Nietzsche holds Plato responsible for the distinctive promulgation of these beliefs and our eventual moral-religious capture by them. Laurence Lampert suggests that because “interpreters of Plato as competent, as different, and as separated by time as Plutarch, Montaigne, and Nietzsche all read Plato in a similar way,” this “should inspire contemporary scholars to pay more attention to the view they share,” a view “also held by other great readers such as Francis Bacon and Descartes.”⁸

This religious sense to Plato is there in Phaedo, where the Good is seen as the “divine force” that “causes things to be now placed as it is best for them to be placed,” and where skeptics are rebuked who “give no thought to the Good which must embrace and hold together all things.”⁹ As Charles Kahn notes, whereas in Meno “the immortality and pre-existence of the soul was taken for granted,” in Phaedo it is “systematically argued for”¹⁰—and it enables Plato to conceive like a proto-Christian of a postmortem judgment by the Good, when writing about heaven for those “who have duly purified themselves by philosophy” and are thus “freed from these regions within the earth,” “released as from prisons,” to “live henceforth altogether without bodies.”¹¹ What Nietzsche saw as the anti-nature in Plato manifests in this tendency to treat earth and body as a prison and fantasize of life without them. Accordingly, Maudemarie Clark refers to Plato’s Phaedo as a “great panegyric to the ascetic ideal.”¹²

We can see in Plato’s Republic how his ascetics affect his epistemology. This is not only in the marginalization of anything bodily in the acquisition of knowledge, namely the senses—a marginalization that Deborah Modrak points to also being in Phaedo¹³—but also in the view that, as Plato put it, “the idea of Good” is “this reality, then, that gives their truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower,” as “the cause of knowledge, and of truth,” as if “objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the Good their being known” but also “their very existence and essence.”¹⁴ When Plato has his Socrates add that even then, “the Good itself is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power,” the interlocutor Glaucon will only “very ludicrously” answer, “Heaven save us, hyperbole can no further go.”¹⁵ But more in accordance with this suggestion of hyperbole, Nietzsche would remark firstly that the Good is not real but imaginary and only falsely claimed to be real, to be most real even, whereas the opposite is closer to the truth; and second that this Good is thus inimical toward what is actually real—as a rival—especially toward the bodily parts that constitute so much of earthly experience.

Lacan in his Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, also gives, for instance, the following indication of his own lack of sympathy toward this highest truth and value status of Plato’s Good, when saying of King Creon, as he appears in Sophocles’ Antigone, that “his error … is to want to promote the good of all—and I don’t mean the Supreme Good, for let us not forget that 441 BC is very early, and our friend Plato hadn’t yet created the mirage of that Supreme Good” (SVII:259). By calling Plato’s Good “mirage,” Lacan is ostensibly agreeing with Nietzsche that it is more correct to predicate it imaginary than “real” or “true.” Moreover (as I argue in chapter 3), Creon is being shown by Lacan to give a proto-Platonic example of the ethical error the Good can involve, how “the good cannot reign over all without an excess emerging whose fatal consequences are revealed to us in tragedy” (SVII:259). This suggests that not only is the Good not actually real for Lacan, neither is it “good” either in terms of the effects it has, effects that can be tragically fatal, again a view that is shared by Nietzsche.

The mirage structure of this Good is well surmised by the Nietzschean maxim: “the less real, the more valuable. This is Platonism” (WP 572)—where Nietzsche notes that one of the strategies for believing what is less real has more value, is to label such an entity “most real” regardless. And this for Nietzsche is what Plato did with his idea of the Good, he substituted an imaginary for the real, which, as Lacan also says in the pejorative sense of Plato, relegated what is actually real to “no more than an imitation of a more-than-real, of a surreal,” “since for him everything that exists only exists in relation to the idea, which is the real” (SVII:141).

We know Lacan is taking the pejorative sense because it follows what he calls Plato’s “aberration” and “unyielding position” in placing “art at the lowest level among human works,” because by imitating earthly objects, Plato held art to only imitate what was already an imitation of a better world Beyond, reducing art to mere “shadow of a shadow” (SVII:141).¹⁶ This lends itself to Nietzsche’s view that Plato rendered the earthly less-than-real or inferior because of its distance from a world of the Good imagined above. For Nietzsche held that it was this otherworld that enabled the earthly to be rebaptized “false” precisely on account of properties that make it real: “change, becoming, multiplicity” (WP 584); or “death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth” (TI III:1)—in short, all the things that can challenge us in life and also make us suffer.¹⁷ To talk then of “ ‘another’ world” for Nietzsche was sheer “phantasmagoria,” a “moral-optical illusion” that was “constructed out of the contradiction to the actual world” so that we may escape, even “revenge ourselves on life” (TI III:6).

Lacan gives further evidence in Seminar VII of a similarly skeptical stance by directly pronouncing “there is no Sovereign Good,” that this is what Freud has shown him, that “the good as such,” “the eternal object of the philosophical quest in the sphere of ethics” and “philosopher’s stone of all the moralists,” is “radically denied by Freud” (SVII:96). Later Lacan explains that this “radical repudiation of a certain ideal of the good is necessary” because “the good erects a strong wall across the path of our desire” (SVII:230), whereas an ethics would be better served by a greater self-awareness. And again he shows it is this same inflated Good as Nietzsche he has in mind when invoking to discuss “the progress of thought” and “evolution of history” so as to “demystify the Platonic and the Aristotelian idea of the good, indeed of the Supreme Good” (SVII:216).¹⁸

It is apropos of the historical part of this inquiry that Lacan states he must make use of his three terms of reference, “the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real” (SVII:11). But Lacan has a nuanced way of using these terms that, if we are not careful, may impede their use not only for Nietzsche’s goal of rejecting Plato, but also for Lacan’s own critique of the Good.

We have seen how the real for Nietzsche, in contradistinction to all Platonism, is the earthly world of becoming, the world of nature without and within. All the gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Deflationary Ontology of Lacan and Nietzsche
• 2. Distinguishing Weak Sublimation from the Strong
• 3. Before the Good: Strong Ethics in Sophocles’ Antigone
• 4. Birth of the Good: Weak Ethics in Socrates’ Alcibiades
• 5. God of the Good: Christocentric Oedipal Morality
• 6. Service of Goods: Nature and Desire in Modern Science
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover