Behind the Animation: Video-Vérité from the Mall. On Malls and Statues, Homer’s Greeks, and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy

Vergegenwärtigung

Apollon

The statue of Apollo at the museum in Olympia we can indeed regard as an object of natural-scientific representation; we can calculate the physical weight of the marble; we can investigate its chemical composition. But this objectifying thinking and speaking does not catch sight of the Apollo who shows forth his beauty and so appears as the visage of the god. — Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology”

The hermeneutic phenomenological project of Vergegenwärtigung may be understood as a circumspect making present or a bringing to presence either of an object given to perception or else a recollected or imagined perception. To use Heidegger’s solicitous terminology, Vergegenwärtigung, as a letting-be-involved-in an object for attentive inspection, such letting be involved can attend to past or historical objects or else can attend to things otherwise “absent,” qua ideal, etc.

What is key is an active attunement to or re-presentation of that object as it would be if it were present to us but also and at the same time as it would be if we ourselves were “present” to it: open to or available for such a concernful engagement or becoming-involved.  Hence Heidegger speaks of Vergegenwärtigung in Being and Time as a modality of making present [gegenwärtigen], a rendering present [Gegenwartigung]. This way of attending to presentation as such does not relate itself to “mere representations.” Instead, such a “rendering present” of made things or artifacts (Zeug) is a letting be involved in or with things as things and as such and that is to say as self-standing presence for us (or for others) in the world. 

Bronze tripod, Olympia

Heidegger uses the example of “archaeological excavation” (BT 409/SZ 358) as an instance of Vergegenwärtigung.  We are invited to consider the conceptual dissonance involved in designating the “antiquities preserved in museums (household gear for example)” as “antiquities”?  By “what right,” Heidegger muses, “do we call this entity ‘historical’ when it is not yet past?” (BT 431/SZ 380)

Apollo Pediment, Museum at Olympia

What encountered as “historical” about such objects is what is not encountered, a foregone world “within which they belonged to a context of equipment” and within which they “were encountered as ready-to-hand and used by a concernful Dasein who was-in-the-world.  That world is no longer.” (BT 432/SZ 380)  The “antiquities which are still present-at-hand have a character of ‘the past’ and of history by reason of the fact that they have belonged as equipment to a world that has been — the world of a Dasein that has been there — and that they have been derived from that world.” (BT 432/SZ 381, emphasis added.) 

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.

LIKE UNTO LIFE: BRONZE STATUES, ART HISTORY, AND HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

I have to begin with Pliny because no one less than Friedrich Nietzsche’s teacher, Otto Jahn, also began with Pliny, and did so in specific connection with aesthetic judgment and the hermeneutics of antiquity.  

I begin with the same Pliny who tells us that thousands upon thousands of life-sized bronze statues were still standing in Rhodes, Athens, Olympia even after the sack and burning of Greek cities in the wake of the imperial incursions of Rome (NH 34.36). 

Beyond “Natural History,” statues as Plato uses the image throughout his dialogues, have a long association with philosophy and Epictetus and Plotinus likewise have recourse to the same model-ideal.

We are told that these statues were so lifelike that one could well mistake such statues for living, breathing, human beings. The rhetorical force of being “like a statue” would have inherently reflexive, a point that invites a retrieve of Nietzsche’s reflections on the importance of the agon in antiquity as well as an inquiry into the political implications of living in a city pre-populated, as it were, by a standing citizenry of statues. 

How are we to understand the number Pliny and others give for us? Is this no more than an absurd exaggeration (some scholars would say that the ancients were fond of exaggeration)? But there is also some material evidence suggesting that such high numbers may be justified. And there is room for concession here, perhaps there were not exactly however many Pliny suggests. 

But still, contemporary archaeological evidence, in addition to Pliny’s and other reports, makes it plain that statues were in any case more numerous than we like to imagine. Well then: why so many?  

Furthermore and perhaps more importantly, what would it have been like to live among so many statues? Maybe a life among so many bronzes was exactly classical in the quintessentially 19th century sense, surreal and languid, a life in the midst of ‘art’.  

Or maybe and in addition if also more radically (I favor this option myself), the statues served other political ends including defense. 

Or maybe and just as we surround ourselves by billboards (and on a smaller scale, by magazine images) showcasing beautiful people, the ancient Greeks surrounded themselves with bronze ideals of their idea of the true, the beautiful, and the good.  Perhaps as scholars have long argued (starting indeed with Winckelmann) the effect of so many statues might have had to do with desire, whether to soothe or calm it or else as a calculatedly erotic stimulus as Nietzsche was fond of arguing contra both Schophenhauer and Kant.

In addition to the studies of Eva Keuls and Kenneth Dover, Jan Elsner’s recent Roman Eyes takes its point of departure from this conventional conviction regarding „fantasies of (and apparently, according to our sources, even attempts at) sexual intercourse with statues so beautiful as to be better than the real thing.“  Elsner also includes a footnote referring „to the ancient literature on agalmatophilia (making love with statues).“ Elsner, Roman Eyes (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2007), p. 2. See too and most importantly, Andrew Stewart, Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) as well as Karin Moser von Filseck: Kairos und Eros. Zwei Wege zu einem Neuverständnis griechischer Bildwerke (Bonn: Habelt, 1990).  With respect to eros and the city, I thank Andrew Stewart for drawing my attention to R.R.R. Smith, „Pindar, Athletes, and the Early Greek Statue Habit,“ in Simon Hornblower and Catherine Smith, eds., Pindar’s Poetry, Patrons, and Friends (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 83-139 in addition to Tonio Hölscher, “Images and Political Identity: The Case of Athens” in: D. Boedeker & K. Raaflaub eds., Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth Century Athens (Cambridge, Mass. 1998), pp. 153-183, and, with reference to the role of Eros and the hunt, see Alain Schnapp’s Le chasseur et la cité: chasse et érotique en Gréce ancienne (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996).  See further Norman Bryson’s Lacanian studies in art history as well as more philosophically and much more broadly, Alexander Nehamas, The Promise of Happiness (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2007).