Derveni Krater and the Missing Sandal

Derveni krater detail. One sandal shod warrior... pic.twitter.com/OUAtdxBBM2

— Babette Babich (@babette_babich) June 27, 2014

That was a tweet, and on Facebook I added some further explication.

But explications always need more explication and by the time that is done one is left with complication upon complication.  And that should give us food for thought.

The problem to begin with is the parallel I have been emphasizing for quite some time between Nietzsche’s Zarathustran Übermensch and Lucian’s cynically satirical ’υπɛράνθρωπος.

I argue that one cannot read the one without the other although Nietzsche scholars have been doing that, all of them, continental and analytic alike, in German, French, English, Italian, Greek, or any other language, for more than a century. Longer if we count Nietzsche’s own lifetime of course (but he himself complained about that). 

I talk about this in several places (here: in French and here: most recently of all), but the relevant detail here when it comes to the detail above is that all this discussion and all the necessary hermeneutic attention that it requires, also requires as Husserl always argued that we return to the thing itself and as such. In this case this is still a text, a burnt papyrus, a stunning find, absolutely transforming philosophy and classics, except of course that neither has been transformed at all, not one bit, not in more than half a century. 

 Mainstream scholarship knows how to use interpretation quite well when it needs to do so: that is as a delaying tactic and the folks in charge (that’d be at Harvard and Oxford and Berlin and Athens and so on) aren’t yet sure enough, or perhaps better said they’d rather not rock their own boats, so they don’t and they rear up grad students who read as they do (a mite worse) and so the uncertainty acquires certainty by attrition.

So again, by way of explication, I borrow from a forthcoming essay that draws on previous essays, some on Nietzsche and Empedocles, some on Nietzsche and Lucian, some on ancient Greek bronzes (life-size) and so on none of which array of earlier efforts does anything, which is the point of this blog, to settle the need to return to the things themselves. 
Related gold tablets are more enchanting still.

But the Derveni papyrus itself haunts all of this (not that scholars would have had a clue about that, not at all, if it weren’t for the krater which advertised the contents as nothing else could).

In the interim one needs to think a little bit about the properties of things, papyrus and its properties, and those of bronze, all to go with those of mortal beings — and we know all about mortality: we eat death every day.

As Nietzsche reminds us 

Empedocles sought to impress the oneness of all life most urgently, that carnivorism is a sort of self-cannibalism [Sichselbstverspeisen], a murder of the nearest relative. He desired a colossal purification of humanity, along with abstinence from beans and laurel leaves.

Purification is what matters, if one can understand this in terms of a classical ascesis or training or practice. 

And when it comes to Empedocles’ purification—far more than his caution against carnivorism (here via Nietzsche read as a kind of self-devouring), and more than his cosmological cycle (although both of these issues matter greatly to the Schopenhauerian Nietzsche) — it is the tableau of the volcano and of Empedocles’ voluntary death that strikes us most powerfully. 

And then we can also note the nicely dramatic detail of a single bronze sandal, tossed up and back to the land of the living by the same volcano.

The Derveni Krater detail shows this for us, and to see this we also need to recall the papyrus itself and that takes us to the mysteries, and that again is all about death.