Misogyny and Ressentiment from Orpheus to Dylan and Meat Loaf (continued…)

1. Rock Ressentiment

Ressentiment and Misogyny: Between Old Resentments and New Configurations

A complicated ressentiment permeates rock music along with misogyny,[1] via what the analytic philosopher, Kate Manne 2017 analyzes as The Logic of Misogyny[2] and others theorize as ‘masculine hegemony’ or the ‘male gaze,’[3] the idea of ‘revolt,’[4] and the ‘energy’ of anger.[5] In addition to patent or overt misogyny,[6] at scholarly issue for decades[7] is a teasing out, more generally, of gender privilege,[8]  i.e., but not only: who sings and who does not, as of musical-theoretical presumption and express disabuse.[9] Yet, apart from what has been named ‘postmodern’ musicology, arguably inspired by feminist readings, such readings remain, if abundant, under-received.[10] When it comes to Bob Dylan, perhaps especially when it comes to Bob Dylan, claims of misogyny can lead to pushback among fans, the so-called ‘Dylan bros’, as among scholars.

Here I argue that Bob Dylan’s 1964, “It Ain’t Me Babe” exemplifies ressentiment along with Dylan’s 1965, “Like a Rolling Stone”, once named the ‘iconic rock song’ by Rolling Stone. The pop music critic, Ellen Willis, then teaching at Berkeley, characterizes “It Ain’t Me Babe” as a ‘non-love song,’[11] which I read together with Jim Steinman’s and Meat Loaf’s “Two of Three Ain’t Bad” and “Paradise By the Dashboard Light” from their 1977 album, Bat Out of Hell.

In what follows, I reference Orpheus and Dionysus, particularly foregrounding Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1872 Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music — Nietzsche and Beethoven being the third part of my book on Leonard Cohen and k.d. lang (and Adorno): The Hallelujah Effect — along with the various Basel University lecture courses Nietzsche gave in the 1870s including his lectures on the Greek divine service.[12] Yet in connection with rock music, any reference to Dionysus seems cliché. Thus Michael Jones’s 1994, Dionysus Rising, focuses on Mick Jagger’s “Sympathy with the Devil”, to counter then ‘counter-cultural’ consequences. Thus, in spite of Jones’s subtitle: The Birth of Rock Music out of the Spirit of Music, Jones’s book is not about either Dionysus or Nietzsche.[13] The devil is at issue for Jones, as we shall see that the devil is key for Dylan.

Concerning Athenian tragedy, Nietzsche argued that the Dionysian be traced to Plato’s cautions contra certain musical modes.[14] After Nietzsche, Jane Harrison (1908) thematized a more complicated context. Today, given material discoveries like the Derveni Krater/Papyrus in 1962 and given the complexities of the Orphic tradition,[15] Dionysus cannot be excluded. Hence Sarah Burgess Watson quotes Nietzsche’s claim that

aesthetic Socratism is the murderous principle; but in so far as the fight was directed against the Dionysiac nature of the older art, we may identify Socrates as the opponent of Dionysos, the new Orpheus who rises up against Dionysos and who, although fated to be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian court of justice, nevertheless forces the great and mighty god himself to flee[16]

Nietzsche remarks, this is perhaps the most esoteric and complicated of his references, on the opposition between Orpheus and Dionysus.[17] Thus The Birth of Tragedy begins with reference to the conjunction of the male and the female, sexuality and conflict, quite as Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion ends, Empedocles-style, whereby everything separated is rejoined, lovers already reconciled in the midst of strife.[18]

Nietzsche has the brother gods, Apollo and Dionysus marry one another in ‘a mysterious wedding bond,’ with a child born from this divine union, the musical artform of tragedy, a religious rite, ‘at once Cassandra and Antigone [das zugleich Antigone und Kassandra ist]’.[19] Pindar’s 4th Pythian Ode gives us Orpheus playing the phorminx, as “father of melodious songs”, just as Dionysus is depicted with a phorminx (Fig. 1) such that from ‘the beginning, the figure of Orpheus arises under the joint signs of Apollo and Dionysus.’[20]

Figure 1 Dionysus singing with a phorminx and two satyrs. Red-figure kylix. Attic, Athens. Brygos Painter, 80—470 BCE. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cabinet des Médailles. Public Domain.

Seeing ‘Satan fall like lightning’ (Luke 10:18): Hell and rock ‘n’ roll

As Orpheus, Dionysus figures in connection with Meat Loaf, including the underworld in Jim Steinman’s and Meat Loaf’s 1977 album, Bat Out of Hell – sirens screaming, fires howling – referring to a vision of hell told on the seducer’s word, threatening (like many pop love songs)  that by morning light, the singer will be gone. ‘Gone’ is the word Meat Loaf repeatedly sings, three times over, like Dionysus there again, gone again, engaging/evading Pentheus in the Bacchae. And in 1975, Meat Loaf’s saxophone playing, Rocky Horror Picture Show delivery boy, Eddie, wears a leopard print collar (de rigeur for the bacchant) on his leather motorcycle vest (Fig. 2).

Figure 2 Meat Loaf as Eddie, playing the saxophone in Jim Sharman, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Public Domain.

To be ‘gone’ – to be carried away, enraptured, longing or bereft – is key to desire.

Reading Anne Carson’s “Gone” in this light,[21] one may be struck by the force of male eroticism. Carson’s focus in her Eros, the Bittersweet, is Sappho’s word, yet Carson begins with Anacreon, Archilochus, and Catullus.

For sheer offense, Anacreon is hard to match and Nietzsche helps us read Archilochus (more excessive than most misogyny, ancient or modern).[22] Read in this lineage, Jim Steinman’s is a metaphoric hell on earth: evil in the air, thunder in the sky and the damage done to the innocent – I swear I saw a young boy, eerily underscored in Steinman’s lyric of a glimpse of horror and Meat Loaf singing on the screen, playing a saxophone, and emerging from the hell-freeze of a meat locker, bless my soul. Channeling the film’s lyrics 50 years later, the poet of the lyric word, riffing metonymy, the poet and classics professor, Anne Carson muses,

…Rock ’n’ roll don’t help me.

Alas, O my soul!

Rock ’n’ roll don’t help anyone anymore.[23]

In radio retrospect, one commentator reflects on Dylan’s self-accounting in his 2022 The Philosophy of Modern Music: writing ‘Dylan is the radio’, featured ‘in many of his own songs, (not to mention his satellite radio show).’[24] ‘On the radio’, reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, ‘without introduction’, Aidan Day’s ‘Satan Whispers’ cites Dylan citing Milton:

Him the almighty power

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms.[25][26]

Figure 3 Alexandre Cabanel, L’ange déchu. 1847. Public Domain.

Day cites Dylan’s ‘We’re talking about the Devil’, as

Dylan advised his listeners, ‘you might know him better as Beelzebub, Satan, Lucifer, Mephistophilis, Old Scratch, the Monarch of Hell, Leviathan, the Prince of Darkness, the Anti-Christ or, as they call him in Spain, El Diablo’.[27]

One should add Dylan’s seemingly gnostic description of Satan qua ‘prince of the power of the air’[28] if Day’s “Satan Whispers” is overdetermined with respect to gender, given the complexities woven into Milton’s language on Satan and Eve.[29] For Day, Dylan hears, quite as Milton also follows, the language of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians.

The precision is an academic one: Dylan adopts Alistair Fowler’s editorial gloss in his 1968 edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost,

‘Satan has presented himself to the sleeping Eve in the guise of a good angel and, when telling her dream to Adam, Eve relates Satan’s words:

                        be henceforth among the gods

Thy self a goddess, not to earth confined,

But sometimes in the air, as we, sometimes

Ascend to heaven …

(Y. 77-80)’[30]

The 1965, “Like a Rolling Stone” ‘transfers’ the artist’s ‘contract with the devil’ by writing to an unnamed subject (i.e., not Dylan) on her own, ‘like a rolling stone’, asking, with no little misogyny (for Willis this is ‘the most scurrilous and – with its powerful beat – the most dramatic in a long line of non-love songs’, recalling ‘Dylan’s characteristic bohemian contempt for women’),[31] as Day quotes ‘how does it feel?’, explaining that the ‘rhyme pattern in the second stanza invokes the sleeve-note pun on I/eye’.[32]

Willis begins her 1967 essay on Dylan, by uncovering Dylan’s ‘masks hidden by other masks’ (and see on Dylan’s labile appearance, casting “six different people” in the biopic on Dylan, including Cate Blanchette),[33] we recall that the devil is a trickster – C.S. Lewis calls Satan a ‘liar’[34] – where such a multifarious aspect belongs to Dionysus (to recall Euripides), as Willis highlights the

original disparity between [Dylan’s] public pose as rootless wanderer with southwestern drawl and the private facts of home and middle class Jewish family and high school diploma in Hibbing, Minnesota, was a commonplace subterfuge, the kind that ‘pays reporters’ salaries.[35]

Day’s citation from Dylan parallels the ‘mystery tramp’ – again: the devil:

You said you’d never compromise

With the mystery tramp, but now you realize

He’s not selling any alibis

As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes  (Day 2010, 261)

There are parallels with Ernest McClain’s musicological analysis of the devil, specifically the tritone, called diabolus in musica which he also analyses in esoterica terms (read: Gematria) in The Pythagorean Plato.[36]

Arguably, it might have advanced Jones’s analysis in his Dionysus Rising (cited above) had Jones read McClain (as he manifestly had not) given that McClain later explains the Pythagorean spiral as the ‘The “Great Serpent” Spiral of Musical Fifths And Fourths’,[37] articulating the numeric equivalent of ‘Satan’s comma’ here referenced, iconically, with Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 Purple Haze, etc.

And Dionysus? This is more complex as Nietzsche notes. More popularly, René Girard reflects on Heraclitus, connecting Dionysus with Satan:

‘Dionysos is the same thing as Hades’. Dionysos, in other words, is the same thing as Satan, the same thing as death, the same thing as the lynch mob. Dionysos is the destructiveness at the heart of violent contagion.[38]

Orpheus, Dionysus, and Ressentiment

ὡυτὸς ‘Αίδης καὶ Διόνυσος [One and the same are Hades and Dionysus]
— Heraclitus, Diels Kranz 155, Fr. 15.

I read the myth of Orpheus in terms of Nietzschean ressentiment,[39] or, better, via Max Scheler’s (1972 [1912]) reading of Nietzschean ressentiment given that it is Scheler and not Nietzsche[40] who informs current scholarship.[41] Complicated in Greek antiquity, Orpheus is synonymous with music and the mystery tradition.[42] But as is commonly observed, Dionysus is cliché: a metonymic signifier popularly associated with Jim Morrison,[43] reborn, like Dylan, in filmic imaginaries in Morrison’s case as embodied by Val Kilmer (1959-2025) (Fig. 4) in Oliver Stone’s 1991, The Doors.[44]

Figure 4 Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison, Oliver Stone, The Doors, 1991. Public Domain.

Scholarship on the figures of Orpheus and Dionysus can be contentious, reflecting rises and falls in the styles of Ancient Philology as Nietzsche already argued in his 1869 inaugural lecture on the historical person/personality of Homer.

The Nietzsche who teaches us ancient Greek prosody, underlining the ‘spirit’ as he says in his first book on lyric and tragic poetry, that is, the articulated sound of music, is essential in reading ancient Greek.[45]

Writing on Dionysus, Nietzsche highlights ‘genealogy’ as the philological method for Nietzsche’s teacher, Friedrich Ritschl as adopted from Karl Lachmann [1793-1851] read via ‘style’,[46] citing Heraclitus: “Dionysus ist Hades”.[47] Thus genealogically, Nietzsche tracks:

Ζόννυξος (= Διόν σος im Lesbisch-aeolischen Dialekt.

Ursprünglich wohl Διόν σος).

Dies führt auf einen Stamm νεκ also νεκύς, νεκρός usw — neco. …

Kuretenkult des Zeus ursprünglich.

Ζόννυξος ist der todte Zeus: oder der „tödtende Zeus“ — Zeusjäger = Ζαγρεύς und ὠμηρτής.

[Ζόννυξος (= Διόν σος in the Lesbian-Aeolian dialect / Originally likely Διόν σος / This leads to a stem νεκ thus νεκύς, νεκρός etc. — neco. / Originally the Curetes cult of Zeus. / Ζόννυξος is the dead Zeus: or the “killing Zeus” — Zeus-hunter = Ζαγρεύς and ὠμηρτής.][48]

The notes are unpublished but Nietzsche publishes his etymological reflections on ‘words and roots’ in The Genealogy of Morals,[49] following Ritschl ‘across the disciplines’ as philology also worked to establish ‘“method”’.[50] Here, archaeological hermeneutics makes all the difference[51] and discoveries like the Orphic gold tablets (which Nietzsche would have known), along with the more recent discovery of the Derveni Krater and Papyrus, have galvanized interest in Orphism.[52]

The Orphic connection concerns Dionysus and Ariadne after she perishes on Naxos: Dionysus marrying and restoring her to life (see Fig. 5), thereby, as Britt-Mari Näsström observes, illustrating

the experience of physical death by the individual who had been initiated into the mysteries. For this reason, Dionysus’s wedding on Naxos is represented on many sarcophagi, which represent him as the lord of nature and nature’s reviving power.[53]

Qua barred from the rites of Orpheus, women would be excluded from the benefits of the Orphic initiate in the underworld. Thus the Maenad’s anger may be read as ressentiment following their exclusion from Orphic mysteries.[54]

Figure 5 Roman sarcophagus showing Dionysus, right of center, foot forward, approaching Ariadne, reclining in death, far right. Ca. 230-240 AD. Louvre. Paris. Public Domain.

At the close of the Republic, Plato tells his readers that the Orpheus who failed to retrieve Eurydice, his wife, from the underworld also refuses rebirth as human but instead as a swan, precluding contact with woman (Rep., 620a) . For Ovid, following Plato, this is due to the Maenad’s savage treatment who fell upon and dismembered him (Met. 11: 1-43).[55] Along with others, Ovid inspires Milton, here to cite Lycidas,[56] as we recall[57]

What could the Muse herself,

that Orpheus bore

Milton repeats, this is music, this is lyric form,

The Muse herself, for her enchanting son,

Whom universal nature did lament,

When, by the rout that made the hideous roar,

His gory visage down the stream was sent,

Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?

Popularly, James Sale tells us by way of (a silenced) allusion to Joseph Campbell (among others also uncited), that the myth of Orpheus ‘crystalizes’ all myths as Eliade[58] emphasized that the Orphic tradition maps the landscape of perdition, significant for Dante as for Milton, as for the lyrics of teen rock songs and the popular comic book backgrounds of Richard Corben [1940-2020] famous for, as Steinman once noted, the ‘prodigiously sexually endowed’ (to cite Wikipedia) male underground comic figure Den [1968, 1973]) and the album cover for Bat Out of Hell.

Otto Kern, as Mircea Eliade critically recalls,

goes so far as to say that Orphism was the first creator of Hell. In fact, Orpheus’ katabasis in search of Eurydice justified all kinds of descriptions of the infernal world. Again we come upon the shamanic element, a dominating feature of the myth of Orpheus; it is well known that, throughout central and northern Asia, it is the shamans who, telling in infinite detail of their ecstatic descents to the underworld, have elaborated and popularized a vast and spectacular infernal geography.[59]

Although more concerned with the classical music tradition, Vladimir Jankélévitch agrees with Nietzsche aligning Orpheus and Apollo, recalling Jules Michelet’s Bible de l’humanité (1864), expounding on

the battle of the lyre and the flute together with Aristotle’s Politics: set against the Dionysian flute – the instrument chosen by the satyr Marsyas, the orgiastic flute of disgraceful intoxication – are Orpheus’s phorminx and Apollo’s kithara, arrayed in opposition. And just as the flute that tames rats and charms snakes is the suspect instrument, the languid, impudent instrument of the Thyrsian bearers, Orpheus antibarbarian constitutes the civilization of the lyre incarnate.[60]

Here, I note that Steinman’s/Meat Loaf’s 1977 Bat Out of Hell, like the single ‘From the Underworld’, from the British rock band, The Herd’s 1967, Paradise Lost, echoes, were we to ignore the drama of the Bat out of Hell music video, the Orpheus myth.

Which Dionysus? Which Orpheus?

Figure 6 George de Forest Brush, Orpheus. 1890. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Public Domain.

What is a ‘god’?

We philosophers, we classical philologists, we theologians, should ask. Or perhaps, for the sake of pluralism, we need to leave it to the anthropologists/ethnologists.

There is monotheism (or what Nietzsche calls ‘monotono-theism’)[61] as the Judeo-Christian tradition excludes all other gods. In our day, even for those who do not themselves or personally believe in God, it is (as Jean-Paul Sartre observes) the one God they do not ‘believe in’. Dionysus does not fit the Judeo-Christian tradition, although there are long-standing (and recent)[62] claims to the contrary. To this extent, Hölderlin’s syncretism requires the Syrian Jesus and Herakles along with Dionysus.

My focus on ressentiment joins two singers not routinely conjoined, Bob Dylan and Meat Loaf, via Orpheus — classically, the lyric figure par excellence, charming beasts and even rocks (Fig. 6, and note, as it matters, the rabbits, a typical love gift between an older male and a youth).

Figure 7 Franz von Stuck, Orpheus und die Tiere, 1891. Villa von Stuck, Munich. Public Domain.

Recent scholars foreground conflicting accounts given today’s assumptions concerning the exclusivity of erotic attraction. In the modern mode of ‘coming out’, it is argued that Orpheus favored men all along.[63]

Compare too, the profile of Franz von Stuck’s 1891 Orpheus und die Tiere (Fig. 7), if Brush’s rabbits (see, again, Fig. 6 above ) may also remind one of the fox hats of the Thracian Bassarai, fitting Orpheus’s exclusion (across birth and rebirth) of contact with women together with (there is a fairly extensive literature) Orpheus’s express condemnation of heterosexual love.[64] 

It’s more than that.

As Jankélévitch reflects, here, again, with reference to Michelet, although we may also think, of Meat Loaf, given the thematic of Steinman’s Bat Out of Hell and Rocky Horror’s flash-frozen Eddie, qua quasi- or rock Orpheus,

the work of Orpheus completes the labors of Hercules, and that they are, both of them, heroes of culture and the supernatural: because just as the athlete colonizes and reclaims the desert by means of strength, the magician humanizes the inhuman by means of art’s harmonious and melodius grace: the former exterminates evil, as much as the latter, architect-kitharist, converts the evil into the human.[65]

Misogyny cannot be overlooked.

And yet it is.

This is the reflective conundrum for de Beavoir reflecting on the research turns she uncovered in writing her two volume, Le Deuxième Sexe [The Second Sex] in 1949.

Orpheus, like Dionysus, is associated with mystery and death cults, differing from locale to locale, cult to cult, culture to culture, certainly between Greece and Rome (and Christianity).[66] Thus Plato at the end of the Republic emphasises that Orpheus opts for a swan as vehicle for rebirth,[67] associating Orpheus with music in the Myth of Er and so the muses gathered, as Milton’s Lycidas also tells us, fragments of Orpheus’ body (Fig. 8), as Apollo gathered the morsels of the dismembered Zagreus (proto-Dionysus), inspiring poetry and opera.

Figure 8. Gustav Moreau, Orphée, 1865. Public Domain.

The musicologist and composer, Wilfrid Mellers, who writes on continuities between British and American folk[68] and who analyses Dylan,[69] also traces Orpheus throughout the history of Western music in his The Masks of Orpheus.[70]

The focus is Orpheus’ katabasis, key to mystery access and opposition to Hades: descending into and returning from (like Sisyphus, Ovid, Met. 10, 40) the underworld (the return highlighted by contemporary scholars and already, mockingly, by the second century CE Lucian in connection with ‘the disciples of Zoraster’).[71]

Fig. 9. Slide for Meat Loaf, Bat out of Hell

The ‘bat’ in Steinman’s/Meat Loaf’s 1977, “Bat Out of Hell” (Fig. 9) echoes Orpheus’ descent (and return), via Little Steven (Steven van Zandt), Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 “Born to Run”, with its ‘suicide’ machines, though one cannot fail to hear Steppenwolf’s 1966: “Born to be Wild”. To this extent, tracing Orpheus, “Bat Out of Hell” is a motorcycle album, evidenced by the album cover, the music video, and the line ‘Get your motor runnin’ which Steinman sets, like a chrome outline around a car radio dial, into the soft misogynist lyrics for “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”.

Vladimir Jankélévich draws on the classical music tradition which illuminates Steinman’s musing on the past, ‘As if it happened only yesterday’, which Jankélévitch argues as advanced via duet, dialogue and punctuation and seemingly non-music sounds, here including the Phil Rizzuto excerpt, highlighting time, ‘praying for the end of time’, repeated three times, ‘to hurry up and arrive’. In the classical music cannon, Jankélévitch compares other sounds, explaining Musorgsky’s ‘truth at point-blank range’,[72]  such as

the cannon shots in Shostakovich’s Symphony XI or the horns of the cars in Gerschwin. As one hears the roar of motors in Mosolov’s The Foundry. The atonal racket of the machines resounds as it is in these precursors of true ‘musique concrète’.[73]

Referring to Ravel, Jankélévitch’s reflections also illuminate the phantom operatic dimensionality of the music video for “Bat out of Hell”, with its make-up, candelabras, gothic interiors, its detectives (in the video: its police cars) and its promise of redemptive transfiguration: there is a ‘celestial “enchantment” that breaks the evil curse put on the prince … and changes the Beast into a Prince.’[74]

The dark dimensionality of Orpheus’ realm requires transfiguration: as if Jankélévitch were describing (he is not) “Bat Out of Hell”, if one needs further reflection on the stakes of redemption (whose?):

Love the enchanter exorcises the sorcery of Love the magician. Candelas – transfixed by black magic and intoxicated by all those magical brews – receives the consolamentum of truth and leaves the magic circle that held him in thrall.[75]

Mixing ‘black magic’ with ‘philosophical and alchemical transmutations’, Jankélévitch is writing, just as Steinman is writing about (homosexual/heterosexual) love.

The musical issue is voice and metonymic resonance adds to the myth of Orpheus (Nietzsche adds Musaeus to Orpheus as the very ‘picture of the philosopher’).[76]

Orpheus, the husband of Eurydice, was disinclined (nor, among husbands, is this so very rare, especially in ancient Athens)[77] to the company of woman. What is not to be disputed, and this is part of Plato’s critique, is that Orpheus loses Eurydice not once but twice: first in death and again in his failed effort (Fig. 10) to retrieve her from death to life, whereupon he is beset on his return (Fig. 11).

Fig. 10. François Gérard (1770–1837): Orphée ramenant Eurydice. 1791.

There is a need for disambiguation: are these Bassarai, are these ‘Maenads,’ or are they only, like Hades and Dionysus as Heraclitus says, different ways to say the same?

Fig. 10. Orpheus and the Maenads. Bucolic, if unhappy, depiction.

Or, disenchanted, are these ordinary women, expressing their anger on all-too-human grounds, for reasons of disenfranchisement?

Drawing on an earlier research traditions, Watson contends that rather than Maenadic dismemberment, then-extant depictions show ordinary women attacking Orpheus ‘with traditional weapons and household tools’.[78]

Barred from the Orphic cult, women faced the transition from life to the afterlife without access to Orphic initiation,[79] there were also separate rituals — if just this is archaeologically beyond the scope of this discussion given that one would need to reference (and to date, as Nietzsche argues that dating is challenging for the historian)[80] the Eleusian mysteries, along with Demeter and other cults. And separate cults for men and women, like separate roles, are still exclusions.

Fig. 11. Live: Paradise by the Dashboard Light

The plaintive question in the exchange in the 1993 “I Would Do Anything for Love”, shows Steinman’s Meat Loaf (still) channelling Orpheus — ‘Will you get me right out of this god forsaken town?’

For Meat Loaf, that is: for a man, that’d be easy: ‘O I can do that’.

Fig. 12. More Orpheus. Hermes retrieving Eurydice…

If the reference to the ‘god-forsaken’ is a gnostic reference to life on earth, exclusion attends the complicated theological question of the place of women in paradise. Is there — and one may reference Augustine’s City of God — sex (or gender) in paradise?

Where are the women? Are angels sexed? McClain tells us, and for McClain, musicologically, kabbalistically, it is only about the numbers, the rapture features ‘144,000 male virgins “singing a new song”’.[81]

Fig 13, McClain Slide: The Pythagorean Plato and the ‘Great Serpent’ (see Note 37 below)

Leonard Cohen seems to suppose that women, by nature, are angelic.[82]

Or would they not have to be, as Augustine implies, transfigured, as men?

Again: are women included in the afterlife? There are, in different mythic traditions, different answers in religious culture.

Given the limitation of the Orphic mystery tradition to male initiates alone, the Maenads would be inspired by their singular impotence, just as Max Scheler argues, varying Nietzsche, emphasizing lack of power, injury, as origin of ressentiment.

At issue is the spiritual occlusion of women.

[1] Robert Pattison, The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press. 1987); Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2009), Jody Rosen, “Bob Dylan’s New Book is Revealing, Misogynistic and a Special Kind of Bonkers.” LA Times. October 27, 2022. John. 2022; John Encarnacao “Review of Bob Dylan – The Philosophy of Modern Song,” Global Media Journal, Australian Edition. Vol. 16, Issue 1. 1-8. 2022; Evan Sennett, “Dylan Bob, 2022, The Philosophy of Modern Song.” Cahiers de littérature orale. Bob Dylan, le pluriel des voix. No. 94. 209-213.2023, 213.

[2] Although her arguments parallel, Kate Manne, writing in the analytic tradition, does not advert to continental arguments such as those already offered by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949. For her part, de Beauvoir was accused of misogyny by later-wave feminists.  At stake is projection and entitlement, leading Manne to write a separate study: Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (New York: Crown, 2020) developing points likewise also found in Beauvoir’s preface. Cf., too, the issue of anger and logic in Andrea Nye, Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic (New York: Routledge, 1990).

[3] Simone Krüger, “Gendering Music in Popular Culture.” In: Karen Ross, et al., eds., The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication (Oxford: Wiley, 2020 and cf. Marion Leonard Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007).

[4] Simon Reynolds and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock’n’roll (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

[5] Niel Nehring, Popular Music, Gender and Postmodernism: Anger Is an Energy (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997).

[6] See Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), 121, at times violently owned: 235.

[7] Marion Meade, “Does Rock Degrade Women?” New York Times (March 14, 1971): 13-14.

[8] Barbara O’Dair, “Bob Dylan and Gender Politics” in: Kevin J. H. Dettmar, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (Cambridge Companions to American Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 80-86.

[9] As Kim Kelly reflects in her “Men Explain Music to Me” 2016 Vice. 7 November. Online: https://www.vice.com/en/article/men-explain-music-to-me/. cf. Paula Higgins, “Women in Music, Feminist Criticism, and Guerrilla Musicology: Reflections on Recent Polemics,” 19th-Century Music, Vol. XVII/2 (Fall 1993): 174-192. Kembrew McLeod, 2001. “One and a Half Stars: A Critique of Rock Criticism in North America,” Popular Music, Vol. 20/1 (2001): 47-60, etc.

[10] Cf. Susan McClary, “Reshaping a Discipline: Musicology and Feminism in the 1990s,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, Women’s Bodies and the State (Summer 1993): 399-423 with Stefano Marino, “Popular Music, Feminism and the ‘Power of the Body’ in the Performance: Some Remarks on Adorno, Shusterman and Pearl Jam,” Popular Inquiry. The Journal of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture. Vol. 2 (2020): 48-69 as well as Robin James, “Music and Feminism in the 21st Century,” Music Research Annual, Vol. 1 (2020): 1-25.

[11] Ellen Willis, Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), Willis 1967 “Dylan.” Cheetah. Online: https://musichistorian-blog.tumblr.com/post/23707148115/dylan-by-ellen-willis but Leland A. Poague, “Performance Variables: Some Versions of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Jul. 1979): 79-97 argues for Dylan’s ‘empathy’, here: 81.

[12] This has been translated, not perhaps accurately, Nietzsche, The Greek Worship of the Gods, Elisabeth L. Thomas, trans. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2026) and is invaluable, drawing on the source scholarship of the original Italian translation, to show the range of Nietzsche’s classically indebted scholarship.

[13] But, cf. John Carvalho, “Dance of Dionysus: The Body in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Music,” International Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 35/3 (2003): 101-116.

[14] See Christoph Stroux, “Plato’s Republic and the Concept of the Control of Music,” Revista de Musicología. Del XV Congreso de la Sociedad Internacional de Musicología: Culturas Musicales Del Mediterráneo y sus Ramificaciones, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1993): 1323-1330; J.F. Montford, “The Musical Scales of Plato’s Republic.” The Classical Quarterly. Vol. 17, No. 3/4 (Jul.-Oct. 1923): 125-136 and Ernest McClain, The Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics and Music, From Ṛg Veda to Plato (York Beach, Maine: Nicolas Hays, 1976) and The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself (York Beach, Maine: Nicolas Hays, 1978).

[15] As Mircea Eliade, “Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the New Eschatology” in A History of Religious Ideas. Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 180-209 and others like Isler-Kerényi 2009, Alberto Bernabé, “Orphics and Pythagoreans: The Greek Perspective” in: Gabriele Cornelli, Richard McKirahan, Constantinos Macris, eds., On Pythagoreanism (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 117-151 (all loci), and, in connection with Nietzsche, as Benjamin Biebuyck, Danny Praet, and Isabelle Vanden Poel. 2005. “The Eternal Dionysus,” Philologus. Zeitschrift für antike Literatur und ihre Rezeption/A Journal for Ancient Literature and its Reception, Vol. 149 (2005): 52-77 argue.

[16] Nietzsche as cited in Sarah Burges Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries: Plato, Pederasty, and the Zagreus Myth in Phanocles,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Vol. 57, No. 2 (December 2014): 47-71 and cf. Ivan Mortimer Linforth, The Arts of Orpheus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941 [1931]) and François Lissargues, “Orphée mis à mort,” Musica e storia, Vol. II (1994): 269-307.

[17] Nietzsche, Kristische Studienausgabe. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), Vol. 1, 626.

[18] „Wie der Zwist der Liebenden, sind die Dissonanzen der Welt. Versöhnung ist mitten im Streit und allses Getrennte findet sich wieder.“ Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion. Stuttgarter Ausgabe. Bd. 3. Friedrich Beissner, ed. (Stuttgart: L W. Kohlhammer, 1958), Vol. 3, 166.

[19] Nietzsche, KSA 1, 41.

[20] Eliade, “Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the New Eschatology,” 184.

[21] Carson, Eros, the Bittersweet (Princeton: Dalkey, 1986), 10.

[22] See Babich, “Who is Nietzsche’s Archilochus? Rhythm and the Problem of the Subject” in: Charles Bambach and Theodore George, eds., Philosophers and their Poets: Reflections on the Poetic Turn in Philosophy since Kant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), 85-114.

[23] Carson, “Whatever Happened to New York,” The New Yorker, May 12-19, 2025.

[24] Sennett, “Dylan Bob, 2022, The Philosophy of Modern Song,” 210.

[25] Aidan Day, “Satan Whispers,” The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3 (September 2010): 260-280. here: 261.

[26] In Day “Satan Whispers,” 261, Day cites the Alistair Fowler, 1968 edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Cf., in this general vein, Christopher B. Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (New York: Ecco, 2004) and Gilbert B. Rodman Elvis after Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend (London: Routledge, 1996).

[27] Day, “Satan Whispers,” 261.

[28] Day, “Satan Whispers,” 263.

[29]  See, classically as Day also cites, Empson 1960 but there is a fairly immense literature, difficult to track given the spontaneous metonymy of the allusion and its breadth but see, for just one overview account: Shannon Miller, “Serpentine Eve: Milton and the Seventeenth-Century Debate Over Women,” Milton Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (March 2008): 44-68.

[30] Day, “Satan Whispers,” 261.

[31] Willis, “Dylan.”

[32] Day, “Satan Whispers,” 261. More than three decades earlier, Ellen Willis was less restrained, writing of Dylan’s “horrendous grammar, tangled phrases, silly metaphors, embarrassing clichés, muddled thought; at times he seems to believe one good image deserves five others, and he relies too much on rhyme.” Willis, “Dylan.”

[33] David Muldoon, “The Postmodern Gender Divide in the Bob Dylan Biopic I’m Not There,” miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, Vol. 46 (2012): 53-70, here: 55.

[34] C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, The Centennial Press, 1942), i.

[35] Willis, “Dylan.” But see Dylan, Chronicles. Volume One (London: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 229ff.

[36] McClain, The Pythagorean Plato and cf. The Myth of Invariance.

[37] McClain, “A Priestly View of Biblical Arithmetic” in: Babich, ed., Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, van Gogh’s Eyes, and God (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 429-443, here: 432 and 438.

[38] René Girard, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, James G. Williams, trans. (Ossining: Orbis, 2001), 120.

[39] See Babich, “The Genealogy of Morals and Right Reading: On the Nietzschean Aphorism and the Art of the Polemic” in: Christa Davis Acampora, ed., Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 177-190; 183-185.

[40] Babich 2025, 81-82.

[41] Didier Vassin, „On Resentment and Ressentiment,” Current Anthropology. Vol. 54, No. 3 (June 2013): 249-267, Brown 2017, Tomelleri 2018, van Tuinen, 2024.

[42] Cf. Jane Harrison Jane, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), citing Apollodorus who claimed ‘that Orpheus ‘invented the mysteries of Dionysos’, 454ff and Albert Henrichs, in: Alberto Bernabé, Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal, Raquel Martín Hernández, Redefining Dionysos. Mythos Eikon Poiesis, Bd 5 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), referencing Nietzsche, 572-573, and Henrichs, “Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of Dionysus from Nietzsche to Girard,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 88 (1984): 205-240 and Gabor Betegh, “Pythagoreans, Orphism and Greek Religion” in: Carl A. Huffman, ed., A History of Pythagoreanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 149-166, Eliade, “Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the New Eschatology,” 180, and Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries.”

[43] Aleks Wansbrough, “The Tragic Artist on Screen as an Aesthetic Theodicy: A Dionysian reading of Mishima, The Doors and Black Swan” in Ann Ward, ed., Socrates and Dionysus (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 241-259.

[44] Cf. Simões Valério, João Paulo. 2025. “‘He Took a Face from the Ancient Gallery’: Jim Morrison and Dionysus from the Beginnings of the Doors to Oliver Stone’s Biopic.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition. Online: https://www.academia.edu/126111460/He_took_a_face_from_the_ancient_gallery_Jim_Morrison_and_Dionysus_from_the_beginnings_of_The_Doors_to_Oliver_Stone_s_Biopic and Bundrick 2009.

[45] See, in general, Babich 2016 and, as already noted, via Archilochus, Babich 2019.

[46] See Sebastiano. Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, trans. Glenn Most (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2005 [1963]). Cf. GherardoUgolini, “Nietzsche and Philology as a ‘Style of Thinking’,” Rivista di filosofia, Issue 2 (August 2023): 225-246.

[47] Nietzsche, KSA 7, 82.

[48] Nietzsche, KSA 7, 82.

[49] Nietzsche KSA, 5, 262.

[50] Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Understanding of his Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles E. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz (South Bend, Indiana: Regnery [1965. German original: 1936]), 30.

[51] See, in connection with women and death cults and funerary rites in antiquity, Babich, “Ageing, Aura, and Vanitas in Art: Greek Laughter and Death.”

[52] See, once again, Isler-Kerényi 2009 along with Bernabé, “The Commentary of the Derveni Papyrus:  The Last Of Presocratic Cosmogonies.” Littera Antiqua, Vol. 7. (2013): 4-31.

[53] Näsström 2003, 142; cf. Babich “Dionysian Redemption, Ariadne’s Death, Asses’s Ears—and Nietzsche’s Debts,” New Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 11, Nos. 3 and 4 (Fall/Spring 2021/2022): 99-130.

[54] Babich, “Dionysian Redemption, Ariadne’s Death, Asses’s Ears—and Nietzsche’s Debts.” See for further discussion and references to the literature on these misogynistic currents in antiquity, Babich, “Ageing, Aura, and Vanitas in Art: Greek Laughter and Death” in Valery Vinogradovs, ed., Art and Aging, Symposia: Slovak Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 12, No. 1 ( 2023): 56-86.

[55] Cf., by contrast, Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries” who echoes Linforth’s 1941, The Arts of Orpheus.

[56] Cf. Stanley Fish, “With Mortal Voice: Milton Defends against the Muse.” ELH, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Fall 1995): 509-527.

[57] Reference to the maenads and quite metonymically to the muse is the thematic focus, from the sense of the title and sustained throughout Fish, “With Mortal Voice.”

[58] Eliade, “Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the New Eschatology,” also not cited by the popular-minded, James Sale, “Orpheus and Eurydice: The Myth That Explains Myths.” 3 Jan 2019. https://www.inspiredoriginal.org/post/orpheus-and-eurydice-the-myth-that-explains-myths.

[59] Eliade, “Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the New Eschatology,” 191. Eliade also cites Franz Cumont’s posthumously published Lux perpetua (1949), identifying Orphism as the source of such visionary literature that via “Plutarch and the Apocalypse of Peter, leads to Dante,” 191. See for a recent discussion focusing on Ovid, Kevin R. West “Dante as Orpheus: ‘Georgics’ 4 and ‘Inferno’,” Bibliotheca Dantesca, Vol. 4 (2021): 189-198 and for literature in the last century, Daniel Puskás, “Orpheus in the Underground: Descents to the Underworld in 20th-Century and Contemporary Literature,” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2015): 45-54 and raves and rock music: François Gauthier, “Orpheus and the Underground: Raves and Implicit Religion – From Interpretation to Critique,” Implicit Religion, Vol. 8/3 (April 2007): 235-283.

[60] Vladimir Jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, Carolyn Abbate, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1961]), 2003, 5.

[61] Nietzsche, KSA, 6, 75.

[62] See David Hernández de la Fuente, “Parallels between Dionysos and Christ in Late Antiquity: Miraculous Healings in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca” in: Alberto Bernabé, M. Herrero de Jáuregui, A. Jiménez San Cristóbal, R. Martín Hernández, eds., Redefining Dionysos, (Mythos eikon poiesis, 5) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 464-487.

[63] Jan N. Bremmer, “Orpheus from Guru to Gay” in: Ph. Borgeaud, ed., Orphisme et Orphée (Geneva: Droz, 1991), 13-30; John F. Makowski, “Bisexual Orpheus: Pederasty and Parody in Ovid.” The Classical Journal, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Oct.-Nov. 1996): 25-38; Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries” and see the artist’s remarks: George de Forest Brush, “An Artist Among the Indians,” The Century Magazine (May 1885): 54-57, here: 55.

[64] See Jourdan 2008 and Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries.”  See too Ingleheart 2015, and earlier, splitting the difference as in antiquity this would be a difference that would make less difference perhaps than it does today – thus Socrates could protest his love to Alcibiades and there would still be Xanthippe, which makes all the difference one could argue for Socrates supposedly Stoic resistance when they slept together as Alcibiades tells the tale – John F. Makowski, “Bisexual Orpheus: Pederasty and Parody in Ovid,” The Classical Journal, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Oct.-Nov. 1996): 25-38 1996 as well as, again, Bremmer, “Orpheus from Guru to Gay.” And see in addition to François Lissarrague, “Orphée mis à mort,” Musica e storia, Vol. II (1994): 269-307. 1994, Marcel Detienne, The Writing of Orpheus: Greek Myth in Cultural Context, Janet Lloyd, trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) and Detienne, “Les chemins de la déviance: orphisme, dionysisme et pythagorisme” in: Orfismo in Magna Grecia: Atti del quattordicesimo Convegno di Studi sulla Magna Grecia (Naples: Arte Tipografica, 1975), 49-79 and, with a different focus, Yidy Páez Casadiegos, “Orpheus or the Soteriological Reform of the Dionysian Mysteries,” American Journal of Sociological Research, Vol. 2/3 (2012): 38-51.

[65] Jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, 4-5.

[66] I try to indicate some of these differences, along with references in Babich, “Dionysian Redemption, Ariadne’s Death, Asses’s Ears—and Nietzsche’s Debts,” and see too, already cited above, with reference to Greek funerary cult-tradition and myth, “Ageing, Aura, and Vanitas in Art: Greek Laughter and Death.”

[67] Cf. Luc Brisson, “Women in Plato’s Republic,” Michael Chase, trans. Etudes Platoniciennes, Vol. 9 (2012): 129-136.

[68] Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (New York: Knopf, 1965).

[69] Mellers, Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (London: Travis & Emery, 1984), “God, Modality and Meaning in Some Recent Songs of Bob Dylan.” Popular Music, Vol. 1, Folk or Popular? Distinctions, Influences, Continuities (1981): 142-157.

[70] Mellers, The Masks of Orpheus: Seven Stages in the Story of European Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).

[71] Lucian 2021, 17.

[72] Cited as “Letter to Stasov, 7 (19) August 1875.” Jankélévich, music and the ineffable, 162.

[73] Jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, 33.

[74] Jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, 129.

[75] Jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, 129.

[76] Nietzsche, KSA, 7, 386.

[77] See William J. O’Neal, “The Status of Women in Ancient Athens,” International Social Science Review, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Summer 1993): 115-121.

[78] Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries,” 461.

[79] See on the importance of initiation, once again: Bernabé, “Orphics and Pythagoreans.”

[80] See Babich, “Ageing, Aura, and Vanitas in Art: Greek Laughter and Death.”

[81] McClain, “A Priestly View of Biblical Arithmetic,” 430.

[82] Babich, “Hallelujah and Atonement.” In: Jason Holt, ed., Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2014), 123-134, here: 127.

Babette Babich Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #321

Reposting a blog published 2 March 2026 — unedited apart from a crucial illustration

Babette Babich is an American philosopher, a founder of the New Nietzsche Studies writing on continental aesthetics, philosophy of science (Nietzsche), technology (Heidegger, Anders), critical and cultural theory. She published Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology: From Phenomenology to Critical Theory in 2021 (Bloomsbury academic). 

Why has the philosophy of Günther Anders gained renewed relevance in 2026, particularly in discussions about artificial intelligence and automation?  

BB: This is an important question — after 70 years of inattention. It’s not as if what Anders wrote attracted commentary in 1956 to begin with! To the contrary, because Anders chose, unlike his fellow travelers in Frankfurt School Critical Theory, those would include names like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, to focus, very controversially, on positions critical of US intelligence agencies, like the FBI and the US habit of wiretapping its citizens. Today, these questions are as relevant as ever but we continue to disattend to government influence even as we are increasingly recognizing the omnipresence of ‘surveillance.’ Thus one writes about ‘surveillance capitalism’ but one does not mention Anders who was, arguably, already writing about this decades ago. Discussions of artificial intelligence need Anders because he was one of the first to write about its use in military decisions, specifically with respect to General MacArthur in Korea, and for reasons that are still relevant. Who, when a military strategy is decided via computer, we call it AI, is to be held ‘responsible’ for the bombing? If it happens automatically is it not a quasi-act of God? The pentagon liked to think in these ways and only Friedrich Kittler and Peter Sloterdijk have thought to raise related questions in the interim.  

How does Anders’s concept of the “Promethean gap” help explain contemporary ethical tensions between technological power and human responsibility?  

BB: Scholars who write on Anders opt for ‘Promethean gap’ and thereby resolve Anders’s questions concerning what he identified as a brand new or novel variety of shame in the 20th century, never seen before, so he argued, unrelated to varieties of shame as psychologists analyze shame with respect to the phenomenon in everyday life or, classically, theologically, with Adam and Eve and the postlapsarian expulsion from paradise. This was a ‘shame’ in the face of the machines humans had themselves fabricated: a shame deeply related to envy, the desire to be like the machine, not in the sense of having mechanical powers, given the patent limitations of machines, built into mechanical manufacture by corporate industry as the idea is to sell the identical product, again and again. But this serial replaceability, Anders argued, turns out to be what is desired. What is wanted is to be as the machine is: substitutable, replaceable, upgradable. Lose your phone, but apart from needing to update apps/passwords, one can get a new one, exactly the same as the old one. In addition to that, and that is already a great deal Anders argued, one might opt for the latest (which is not necessarily a better) version. This would yield a serial immortality as opposed to being an individual, unique being. What Anders called ‘Promethean shame’ drew on Goethe’s Prometheus, creating the human being and endowing it with both Titanic and Olympian powers, contests and jealousies as Anders read Aeschylus. Anders argued that one wanted to dismiss one’s uniqueness, qua born once and only once, with mechanical life, complete with spare parts. Think of the transplant industry, advertised as seamless (your results will vary), and human cloning, likewise.  

In what ways do recent translations and publications of The Obsolescence of the Human contribute to the resurgence of interest in his work? 

BB: To the extent that Anglophone scholars increasingly do not read texts in other languages, translation is indispensable. For Anglophone scholars, translation can be the only access to a thinker. At the same time, it is also the case that translators can control the spin of what Anders is saying — beginning at the level of the title itself. Anders is writing not only about ‘obsolescence’ as the recent translation settles the debate (nothing like a publication to do that) but also about what it is to be ‘antiquated,’ that is, specifically, the outdated, the expired, and Anders spends a great deal of time in his first chapter, this, again, is the point of ‘Promethean Shame,’ reflecting on the idea of humanity perceived as having reached a kind of expiry date — périmée — not as Anders’s summary judgment but much rather on the part of human beings desiring to be made or manufactured as machines are. Such distinctions matter because of Anders’s talent as a literary genius, he’s both accessible and elusive, even in German, with a mordant humor certain readers could find off-putting. But this also means that the translator, not unlike the data cleaning crucial for artificial intelligence, can tidy such stylistic offenses as today’s readers might react to these. By the same token, this shock or reaction was for Anders, arguably, the point. 

How can Anders’s critique of technological society illuminate current debates about media influence, nuclear risk, and climate catastrophe?  

BB: I think one can begin by paying attention to Anders’s analysis of media influence as Anders highlighted the experience of the ‘world’ — he was after all, like his first wife, Hannah Arendt, a student of Heidegger and Heidegger’s concept of world — when one no longer needed to leave one’s home to ‘be’ in-the-world or to imagine that one was experiencing the world. The world would, like the mountain coming to Mohammed, be delivered to one’s living room with the great convenience, remember ‘Lockdown,’ that one could continue whatever one was doing. Anders pictured a housewife vacuuming while listening to music, a scenario that offended his critical musical sensibilities (it would have offended Adorno as well as we can also read in Adorno’s Current of Music, a study of radio indebted to Anders). For Anders: it was bad enough to hear a snatch of song from the radio playing through one’s neighbor’s doors. Anders argued that delivered over to media in this way one would seek to stay home so as not to miss a single ‘crumb,’ as he said, of the ‘world.’ In addition, one occupied one’s mind with the program of broadcast events, arranging one’s life accordingly, conversation topics accordingly. Most importantly and, here it matters that Anders came from a family of psychologists, one paid for one’s radio, one’s television, these days one pays for one’s mobile phone in addition to one’s internet subscription, Microsoft subscription, blue check on Twitter, etc. and the dependence on media would be total. I think we still need to learn to think about what Anders had to say about nuclear catastrophe as he pointed out that we are no longer disturbed by the idea, and for Anders we were thereby sleepwalking not merely into nuclear destruction but the obliteration of time, also a Heideggerian theme, and this fits the destruction of the natural world which is labelled under the catastrophic rubric of climate ‘change’ as if it were somehow simply happening whereby one might pay a ‘carbon tax,’ more fees, or as if building ever more wind farms or covering farm land with solar panels might correct it.    

What does Anders’s thought suggest about the meaning of being human in an age increasingly shaped by machines? 

BB: Ah! This goes back to the very first question! Any reply returns to the challenge of Anders’s first book, of which almost all the chapters were separately published in English as of 1956 or so, with the exception of the first chapter, challenging as that chapter was about, once again, a novel variety of human embarrassment in comparison with the tools and mechanical devices humans have made.

And for that I have a book, Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology but I would urge that one read Anders’s novel of prisoners trapped in complete darkness tapping messages in obsolete rhythms, Die molussische Katakombe, I think it is now in French as La Catacombe de Molussie, inspiring, before it was translated, a 2012 film by Nicholas Rey, autrement, la Molussie. Composed in the 1930s, Anders could not find a publisher for his novel, his was a life of many resistances to his ideas. Thus, Beck, Anders’s Munich publisher delayed publishing his Molossian Catacombs until the year of his death in 1992. 

And why does he look so much like the messiah of Dune Timothee Chalamet and the ping pong player Marty supreme ? 

BB: Anders was ‘good looking,’ to quote the song, Summertime …  

In fact, he was so very good-looking that Hans Jonas, author of The Gnostic Religion, being as Jonas tells us also in love with Hannah, would sketch Anders for posterity.  

Zeichnung Hans Jonas

 I love this as a closing question along with anything that pays attention, our culture does not tend to do this, to male beauty (I have a chapter in my book, The Hallelujah Effect, with illustrations, including a reference to Alexander Nehamas’s book, subtitled: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art which focuses on the ladies, as do most discussions of beauty).  

Anders was also, this is not always to be assumed, in excellent physical condition as a young man. I argue that it makes all the difference that Anders could do hand-stand push-ups and it is amusing to imagine that that would have helped in seducing Hannah Arendt. Some scholars wonder about the speed of their engagement and marriage, but if one adds in the issue of beauty along with common interests, like Rilke, one is talking about one of philosophy’s outstanding, if rare, love affairs. These do not last, just as beauty, male or female, does not. But love endures, if it is love. 

To this same extent, it is worth reading Anders’s late-life homage to Arendt, Die Kirschenschlacht. Dialoge mit Hannah Arendt, if only for the sake of the cover. One can also find this in French as La bataille des cerises, Dialogue avec Hannah Arendt, and significantly, not in English, telling the story of their love, Anders is very clear about this retelling, by way of imaginary dialogues. Of course, ever since Plato, all philosophical dialogues have been imaginary. In Anders’s case, given grief, these dialogues would also have been therapeutic for him: written to tell the story of their love from his perspective and testimony to her person, in the wake of her death at the end of 1975. 

  

About the Author

Alexandre Gilbert is the director the Chappe gallery since 2005. He lives and works in Paris.

The original publication is here.

Misogyny and Ressentiment from Orpheus to Dylan and Meat Loaf

Introduction

There are books on pop music genres and classical antiquity — partly to sell books, if also in part to sell studies of classical Greek and Latin antiquity at university[1] — in addition to an urge to attend more broadly to musical reception as such.[2]

Not quite a general review of classical influence, which can range from the level of Saturday morning television cartoon programming to gaming — there is (at least) one monograph on science fiction[3] composed in the spirit of the subtitle of one coauthored study: What Have the Greeks and Romans Done for Us? [4] — or else reading poetry (not only in connection with Anne Carson, sometimes lionized by scholars, at times eschewed),[5] just as criticism of Bob Dylan as misogynist, if certainly extant, can be received with horror  (say it isn’t so) by a certain coterie, often male.

Given that I myself have a relatedly centauric — Nietzsche’s metaphor for ancient philology — study, The Hallelujah Effect,[6] it is hardly my intention to complain.

Nevertheless one cannot but note a certain cognitive/historical dissonance, as Keanu Reeves hit cultural consciousness in Stephen Herek’s 1989 Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, based on the premise of travel time travel, augmented by an English-speaking Socrates (thank you Star Trek but also thanks to Ray Bradbury’s 1950 Martin Chronicles for the conception of not only xenoanthropological studies but that of an advanced and thus universal ‘translator’).

Bradbury’s universal translator relieves many worries, given that as the (relatively) recent discovery of the Derveni Papyrus seems to suggest, compounding older gold tablets as vademecum for the dead, a Totenpass,[7] or passport to hell, as in addition to recommended procedure — avoid the first fountain — there seems a specific script one must pronounce, word for word in the underworld: should it transpire that efficacy might depend on words enunciated, clearly as Nietzsche emphasizes they would have to be — this after all being what he meant by ‘the spirit of music’ — said in Greek. And there we have a chance to get to the cinematic prelife of Bill and Ted on our way to ‘rap’[8] or hip hop relevance.[9]

Notes

[1] K.F.B. Fletcher and Osman Umurhan eds., 2019, Classical Antiquity in Heavy Metal Music (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

[2] Emily Pillinger and Miranda Stanyon, eds., 2025, Music as Classical Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

[3] Ross Clare 2023, Ancient Greece and Rome in Modern Science Fiction: Amazing Antiquity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press)..

[4] Gregory Aldrete and Alicia Aldrete 2019, The Long Shadow of Antiquity: What Have the Greeks and Romans Done for Us? (London: Bloomsbury).

[5] T. H. Geller-Goad 2018, „Pop Music and Graeco-Roman Erotic Verse: Teaching Thorny Topoi in Lyric Ancient and Modern,” Classical World: A Quarterly Journal on Antiquity, Vol. 112, No. 1: 649-662.

[6] Babich 2016, The Hallelujah Effect (London: Routledge [2013]) and 2011, “The Birth of kd lang’s Hallelujah out of the ‘Spirit of Music’: Performing Desire and ‘Recording Consciousness’ on Facebook and YouTube,” Perfect Sound Forever. online music magazine–Oct/Nov, http://www.furious.com/perfect/kdlang.html.

[7] See Alberto Bernabé 2002, “Orphisme et Présocratiques.: bilan et perspectives d’un dialogue complexe” in: André Laks and Claire Longuet, eds. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie présocratique. What is presocratic philosophy (Villeneuve d’Asqu: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion), 205-247 and 2013 “Orphics and Pythagoreans: The Greek Perspective” in: Gabriele Cornelli, Richard McKirahan, Constantinos Macris, eds., On Pythagoreanism (Berlin: de Gruyter), 117-151.

[8] See for a discussion of the classics scholar, Brandon Bourgeois, Lance Ignon 2019, “By rapping The Iliad, classics professor makes ancient literature relevant again. Brandon Bourgeois believes that, by translating the entirety of Homer’s The Iliad into rap lyrics, he can help students better appreciate the classic poem.” October 14: Today USC. Online: https://today.usc.edu/brandon-bourgeois-classics-the-iliad-rap/ and Ryan R. Goble and Elizabeth Wiersum. 2019. “Epic Explorations: Teaching the ‘Odyssey’ With The New York Times.” New York Times. March 21.

[9] J.A. Williams 2010, “The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hiphop Music,” Journal of Musicology, Vol. 27, No. 4: 435-459.

HowTheLightGetsIn London 20 Sept 2025

11 AM: [9] The Future of European Thought (or analytic vs. continental philosophy)

Host: Danielle Sands
Date of event: Saturday, September 20 th
Time: 11:00
Venue: Hat

Speakers: Christoph Schuringa, Genia Schönbaumsfeld, Babette Babich


17:30 PM: [50] The Word and the World

Host: Joanna Kavenna
Date of event: Saturday, September 20 th
Time: 17:30
Venue: International

Speakers: Hilary Lawson, Babette Babich, Tommy Curry

Link for info and tickets

Feyerabend’s “Science as Art” and Aloïs Riegl: On Progress in Science and Art

Babich, Progress in Science and Art

Borderless Philosophy 8 (2025): 1-31.

1. Introduction: Progress and Decline, Evolution and the Primitive

The idea of “decadent art” is well-known from its use against cultural elements often associated with Jewish artists during the Nazi era.1 But, as Paul Feyerabend (1924- 1994) points out, the idea of Verfall was well-established in the Renaissance recovery of classical ideals, revitalizing Hellenic art against supposed Roman decay, degradation, or “barbarization,”2 the same ideals Feyerabend also reads in connection with the discovery of perspective along with the social elevation or transformed status of the artist.

The constellation is essential for an understanding both of Feyerabend’s interest in art, including Dadaism, Avantgarde, modern and abstract art as well as his interest in Brecht.3 Where things become complicated will be in connection with what was crucial for Feyerabend’s philosophy of science in connection with the idea of progress as such, as if toward just one goal, one truth, one culture. This Feyerabend would contest—as did Friedrich Nietzsche4 —in his thinking on science. Today we are closer to beginning to understand Feyerabend’s insistence on “epistemological pluralism” if this notion often continues for many thinkers to be compatible with an evolutionary ideal of truth towards which “science,” so the conviction, inexorably tends. This ideal of progress Feyerabend challenged quite for the sake of understanding science throughout his work especially patent in Against Method. This contestation permits him to reflect on the point of Ivan Illich’s edifying gloss of Hugh of St Victor’s Didascalicon—“Never look down on anything” (Illich, 1993: p. 29)5 —as Feyerabend emphasizes in the title of the third chapter of Against Method: “There is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge” (Feyerabend, 1975/1988/1993: p. 5—see also pp. 33-34).

In Feyerabend’s posthumous, Quantum Theory and Our View of the World, in a Heinleinesque section entitled, “Humans as Aliens in a Strange World,” Feyerabend explains that the Gnostic movement, for example, occurred at a time of uncertainty when humans seemed subjected to irrational political and cosmic forces and when help seemed far away. Here are humans “as they really are,“ i.e., “their souls are imprisoned in bodies and the bodies in turn are imprisoned in a material cosmos. This double imprisonment, effected by low-level demons, prevents humans from discovering the truth: the more information they possess about the material world, the more they get involved in it, the less they know. Revelation frees them from their predicament and gives them genuine knowledge“ (Feyerabend, 1999: p. 168).

Teasing his former colleague, Joe Agassi, for his limitations as a reader in Science and Society, concerning “The Strange Case of Astrology,” Feyerabend contends that today’s scientists and, by extension, philosophers of science, have little hesitation when it comes to denouncing things about which they are utterly ignorant, knowing only that it cannot be true to which habitus Feyerabend opposes —the example is meant to be extreme — the Church and the Inquisition, analyzing the exigence of the logical argument and case structure of the Malleus Maleficarum,6 but also inasmuch as, as Nietzsche also observed, the notion of a singular and ideal truth has analogies with traditional theology (see Babich, 2014).

Feyerabend’s Wissenschaft als Kunst [Science as Art — this should not be translated as “Science as an Art”] (Feyerabend, 1984), must be read in the context of a debate on the sheer idea of progress per se. Feyerabend uses progress in art in analogy with the ideal of scientific progress as these themes feature in his posthumously published (but contributed, so Bob Cohen told me in conversation, in Feyerabend’s lifetime to Cohen’s Festschrift), under the title of “Art as a Product of Nature as a Work of Art” (Feyerabend, 1995), an essay reflecting Feyerabend’s protracted interest in what German speaking scholars call Naturphilosophie, a tradition which attracted both Feyerabend’s mentor/nemesis, Karl Popper and his friend, the physicist, Erwin Schrödinger.

It goes without saying that arguments contra non-received themes also support excluding knowledge traditions, including certain styles of philosophical approaches to philosophy as to the philosophy of science and history along with anthropology and sociology of science in addition to excluding aention to whole historical epochs, this Pierre Duhem (among others but Duhem at remarkable length)7 sought to challenge in medieval cosmology and also, as we are slowly learning to do with respect to different traditions of ancient science, Hellenistic, Chinese, Indian, etc., and, as Feyerabend argued at length, stone age culture as well.8

2. Wissenschaft als Kunst/Science as Art

Introducing his 1981 inaugural lecture in Zrich: “Wissenschaft als Kunst” Feyerabend compared the concept of scientific “progress” with “progress” in art (Feyerabend, 1984: p. 7).9 The nuanced opposition to the idea of (simple) progress is the heart of Against Method and there are several versions of Feyerabend’s thinking on progress in science.10 In art, Feyerabend argues contra the Renaissance theory of barbaric external depredations or internal decay [Verfall] that also found expression in Nazi arguments against Avant Garde and modern art as “degenerate” [Entartung].

Fig. 1: Brunelleschi’s Experiment in (Feyerabend, 1984)

In addition to clarifying Emmanuel Löwy’s (1857-1938) discussion of the complex advances of archaic style in Greek art, Feyerabend foregrounds Aloïs Riegl (1858-1905),11 the art theorist who revolutionized art historical research quite thematically as a “science”12 Kunstwissenschaft, qua science, as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), if he does not typically tend to be read in this fashion, had likewise highlighted as “aesthetic science [ästhetische Wissenschaft]” in his first book on The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, as Nietzsche himself draws on his own inaugural lecture on the “Homer problem” that would also engage Feyerabend.13 Nietzsche maintained that in his first book he put science as such on the very Kantian “path of a science,” raising the question of science as “a problem, as question-worthy.”14

Claiming to be the first to have posed this question and the reflexive significance of the indispensability of the ‘ground of art [Boden der Kunst]’ inasmuch as “the problem of science cannot be cognized on the ground of science [denn das Problem der Wissenschaft kann nicht auf den Boden der Wissenschaft erkannt werden]” (Nietzsche, 1980: vol. 1, p. 13), Nietzsche had claimed a revolutionary turn while also, thus the irrecusable connection with the question of style, making the scientific case that it was style that exemplified the ‘science’ of his own scientific field of ancient Greek philology. In other words, as Nietzsche explained in his Basel lecture, the expert designation—this is technically what is called the “Homer question”—of “Homer as composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey is no historical tradition but an aesthetic judgment” (Nietzsche, 1869/1994: vol. 5, p. 299). Feyerabend cites Nietzsche on “truth and lie” along with Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and it is important to note that in both texts Nietzsche highlights “style.”

If Nietzsche’s thinking on truth and lie is prototypically incendiary—classical “dynamite” for standard philosophical thinking on science—Henri Zerner argues that in his foundational contributions to art history, Aloïs Riegl’s innovations also undermined all the fundamental convictions of traditional art history. These convictions have by no means disappeared today. They are not, it is true, very comfortably held, but neither have they been replaced by what one might call a new paradigm (Zerner, 1976: p. 179).

What drew Feyerabend’s attention in his analogy, “Wissenschaft als Kunst [Science as Art]” was Riegl’s opposition to a patent presumption of aesthetic “progress,” whereby historically prior traditions are esteemed as less advanced, accomplished or competent than subsequent traditions. This Feyerabend recalls as the standard assumption of Vasari’s account of the evolution of Renaissance art (Feyerabend, 1999: pp. 89-90). It is this same assumption that drives the classification (the language) of assessing art of certain historical periods as “decadent” (see, broadly, Kuspit, 1994, 2000; and Kaye, 2020) with notorious consequences in the case of Nazi aesthetics, as already noted at the outset, but which led, here to use Jás Elsner’s terms, to characterizing “late antiquity as the fag-end and dust-bin of a dying aesthetic” (Elsner, 2021). It was this valuative ideal of the progress of art that Riegl refused. Hence where Vasari articulated a progressive schema in the “evolution” of art, Riegl’s account of the history of art articulated a properly scientific, comparative historical analysis beginning with the art of antiquity in Egypt, Greece, Rome, Byzantine, Islamic, Germanic, showing art in tension with or else “improving on nature” in various ways and subject to contextual as opposed to absolute acme and decline (Riegl, 2004).

Summary glosses of Riegl’s contributions to scholarly, scientific thinking on the history of art highlight his concept of Kunstwollen (‘wollen’ is difficult to translate, ergo hermeneutically “elusive,” here again to use Zerner’s words, “because it seems to vary with its context” [Zerner, 1976: p. 180). Contemporary scholars find themselves challenged to situate Riegl, as they claim his “limited citation of sources” (Gunser, 2005: p. 453), but such a claim typically frees scholars to reconstruct these, thus Rebeka Vidrih positions Riegl between von Humboldt’s “Bildung durch Wissenschaft“ and Dilthey’s conception of the Geisteswissenschaften (Vidrih, 2023 : p. 1), and so on. The distinction is complicated for Feyerabend, who never failed to point out that rigorously or “strictly speaking all sciences are Geisteswissenschaften” (Feyerabend, 1981: p. 12).

3. “Brunelleschi and the Invention of Perspective”

In The Conquest of Abundance, Feyerabend quotes Antonio di Tuccio Manetti’s speculative aesthetic analysis of the upper portion of the painting in which, according to Manetti, Brunelleschi had

placed burnished silver [in the painting] so that the actual air and the sky might be reflected in it, and so the clouds, that one sees reflected in the silver, are moved by the wind when it blows.15

This account has been called into question by the sculptor, Nigel Konstam (1932-2022), in his experimental (re-)construction, arguing that the mirror was a device, that is to say, expressly what Feyerabend called an “artifact” in his argument.

Konstam maintains there were two mirrors as the original painting, which has been lost for centuries, containing a sketched and painted substrate of silver quite as opposed to featuring, according to Manetti’s reasoning (which not based on observation) that the original painting included a mirror inlay of silver in order to provide a dynamic reflection of passing clouds in the sky.16 The historian of renaissance art, Samuel Y. Edgerton (1926-2021) observes that a subsequently added inlay, although common in other applications, used by an artist for such a purpose would have been a singular innovation: “as far as I know, no other artist before or aſter him had ever thought to do” (Edgerton, 2025).

Nigel Konstam, “Experiments in Perspective: Nigel Konstam Demonstrates his Preferred Hypothesis.”

According to Konstam’s video demonstration of his experimental reconstruction, Brunelleschi would have traced points for perspective projections for the painting directly on the silver mirror itself, thereby leaving unpainted what for Manetti appeared as sky, featuring passing clouds or whatever else is reflected (cf. Tsuji, 1990).

Konstam’s account is illuminating in several respects.

In Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science, Patrick Heelan had emphasized that conventional or “artificial perspective” (i.e., classical perspective)17 was designed to reflect “the way Renaissance artists organized space predominantly according to the rules of mathematical perspective” (Heelan, 1983: p. 101). This is the same point Feyerabend makes at the outset, citing Richard Krautheimer and featuring Edgerton’s illustration of Brunelleschi’s engineer-artisanal “experiment” with respect to linear perspective (see Fig. 2 below).18

Fig. 2: (Feyerabend, 1999: p. 95.

For Edgerton and Feyerabend (and not less for Konstam’s artisanal reconstruction), the instruments or artifacts are key. But Edgerton emphasizes that everything used in Brunelleschi’s “experiment”—the mirrors, the panel, but also the original sketches, drafts, paintings made, have been lost—as well as the experimental practice, crucial to which, as Edgerton echoes Filarete, pointing out that Filarete was likely, because Manetti, too young at the time, would/could not have been a witness, and was thus “looking in a mirror” (Egderton, 1975: p. 134).

Therefore, reference to the perspective frame illustrated in Dürer’s treatise on measurement, Underweysung der Messung19 —which, it is worth noting, include the perspective points Konstam emphasizes, along with the use of mirrors and a fixed optic (see Fig. 3 below)—supported the claim that

the camera, like mathematical perspective, was developed to serve a pictorial vision that already defined the World to be of a certain kind and to assist painters to express this. (Heelan, 1983: p. 102)

In addition to his focus on Brunelleschi’s experimental set up or Gestell, Feyerabend argues against the Vasarian ideal of verisimilar artistic evolution or progress and to this end he draws on Riegl.20

Fig. 3: Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der Messung, mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt, in Linien, Ebenen und ganꜩen corporen 1525
(Wikimedia Commons)

At issue is the concept of “progress,”21 including social progress relating to the rank or banausic standing of the artist. For Hans-Georg Gadamer, who cites both Karl Popper and Martin Heidegger, what is crucial is “the discovery of new questions” in the “emergence of a scientific problem” (Gadamer, 1998: p. 25). Gadamer argues that both Mill and Dilthey presuppose what may be regarded as “the objectivity of method” (Gadamer, 1998: p. 30). “Methodos,” for Gadamer, “always means the whole business of working with a certain domain of questions and problems” (Gadamer, 1998: p. 30). In this sense, the history of philosophy is not a history of “stable problems” (Gadamer, 1998: p. 28). For his own part, Feyerabend makes this claim with respect to the history of science. Thereby instability is ineliminable: “we are historical creatures,” an insight differently articulated in Riegl’s art-science: for Gadamer, “we are always on the inside of the history we are striving to comprehend” (Gadamer, 1998: p. 28).

Full pdf, including the following sections and complete reference list available here.

Notes

  1. See, in general, although there are other studies—some cited in note 20 below—the essays collected in (Peters, 2014). ↩︎
  2. See, for example, (Peirano, 2010). Such claims, and Nietzsche also discusses this, are related to efforts at cultural appropriation; see (Miles, 2015), as well as, also relevant for Feyerabend’s reference to Vasari (De Angelis, 2008). ↩︎
  3. Val Dusek argues that this illuminates Feyerabend’s dialogue with Lakatos, see (Dusek, 1999). Dusek’s reading would have benefitted from further context, literature, references, etc. and should certainly be supplemented with Matteo Motterlini’s enlightening publication of their letters: see (Motterlini, 1999). See also, for further references and discussion (Babich, 2024). ↩︎
  4. See for discussion, (Babich, 1994/1996/2020). ↩︎
  5. Illich’s gloss is meant as a comment on Hugh of St Victor’s Parvis imbutas tentabis grandia tutus which, Illich tells us Jerome Taylor translates more soberly as “Once grounded in things small, you may safely strive for all.“ ↩︎
  6. For the reference to Inquisition (in the context of his argument re arguments contra astrology), see (Feyerabend, 1978: p. 92), and with reference to Gnosticism, noted above, Feyerabend sets the thought experiment: “Can we infer that the final product, i.e., nature as described by our scientists, is also an artifact, that nonscientific artisans might give us a different nature and that we therefore have a choice, and are not imprisoned, as the Gnostics thought they were, in a world we have not made?” in (Feyerabend, 1999: p. 138). ↩︎
  7. See, in ten volumes (Duhem, 1913-1959). For a discussion, see, including reference to Feyerabend along with a discussion of Mach, (Babich, 1993/2003: pp. 187-194). ↩︎
  8. See the first chapter of Feyerabend’s Naturphilosophie (Feyerabend, 2009/2018). To understand Feyerabend’s approach, it is salutary to compare, and note the subtitle, of (Meyer-Abich, 1997), because Meyer-Abich underlines ecological and political issues, not unlike if more ecologically focused than Feyerabend. ↩︎
  9. Cf. (Feyerabend, 1986), and, again, (Feyerabend, 1995), a version of which also appears, among other loci, as a key chapter in his posthumous Conquest of Abundance (Feyerabend, 1999). ↩︎
  10. See for a now classic objection—and strikingly but not exceptionally limited reading of Feyerabend— in (Theocharis and Psimopoulos, 1987). For a reflection on philosophy of science per se, see (Stuart, 2021). And, for a comparison of Feyerabend and Popper, see (Tambolo, 2015). ↩︎
  11. To wit: Eine Diskussion der Rieglschen Kunsheorie verbunden mit dem Versuch, sie auf die Wissenschaften anzuwenden. See for a discussion of Riegl and Löwy, (Delarue, 2014) and, on Löwy, in English Alice A. Donohue’s discussion of Löwy’s rendering of nature in archaic Greek art in (Donahue, 2011), which she reads with the same reference to the Gombrich Feyerabend tells us he consults, reminding us that Gombrich was Löwy‘s student, highlighting, as this is also crucial for Feyerabend, Löwy’s discussion of the representation of space, although her reading of Löwy’s discussion of Homeric narrative might have benefitted from Feyerabend’s paratactic discussion. ↩︎
  12. Cf., focusing on Aby Warburg and Ernst Gombrich (Vidrih, 2023) and see (Cordileone, 2014), and, for the relevance of the icon (Ionescu, 2013). ↩︎
  13. See, including a reference to Darwin, (Babich, 2010). ↩︎
  14. Nietzsche, 1980: vol. 1, p. 13; and for discussion, see Babich, 2009. ↩︎
  15. Manetti, in The Life of Filippo Brunelleschi, ca. 1480, quoted in Holt, 1981: p. 171. In a note, Feyerabend tells us that he changes the translation, using “technical language where the text has none” (Feyerabend, 1981: p. 95). ↩︎
  16. See (Konstam, 2025). I invoke some of Konstam’s material argumentation with respect to technique in (Babich, 2007), referring to (Konstam and Hoffmann, 2004). ↩︎
  17. Embedded in this, as Erwin Panofsky argues, are two collimated conceptions of experimental perspective, “the perspectiva pingendi [painter’s perspective] or perspectiva artificialis [artificial perspective]” both of which were dependent on optics and frames and the artist’s specific staging (think of Dürer’s famous depiction of perspective, Fig. 3) and hence quite literally the child of optical theory and artistic practice-optical theory providing, as it were, the idea of the piramide visiva [the visual pyramid], artistic practice, as it had developed from the end of the thirteenth century, providing the idea of intersegazione [a plane intersection of the visual pyramid]” (Panofsky, 1960: p. 139). ↩︎
  18. (Feyerabend, 1984: p. 19). In addition, generally, to (Krautheimer, 1965), Feyerabend also refers to (Edgerton, 1975). Significantly enough, the first chapter of Edgerton’s book begins—and one can note the influence of the terminology used beyond Feyerabend—as follows: “More than five centuries ago, a diminutive Florentine artisan in his late forties conducted a modest ‘experiment’ near a doorway in a cobbled cathedral plaza.” Edgerton’s illustration (followed by a comprehensive citation from Manetti) in (Edgerton, 1975: pp. 126-127) appears in Feyerabend’s chapter on Brunelleschi, noted as “after Edgerton” (Feyerabend, 1999: p. 95). Cf. (Heelan , 1983) for other references on Alberti and perspective. ↩︎
  19. Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der Messung, mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt, in Linien, Ebenen und ganꜩen corporen (as cited in Heelan, 1983: p. 102). ↩︎
  20. Thus Feyerabend observes, contra Vasari that for Renaissance theorists, the elements of perspective, natural postures, delicate colours, character, emotions—are obstacles, not improvements for an artist who wants a portrait or a statue to convey absolute power or spiritual eminence: what is permanent and independent of circumstances (Feyerabend, 1987: p. 148). ↩︎
  21. “Eine Diskussion der Rieglschen Kunsheorie verbunden mit dem Versuch, sie auf die Wissenschaften anzuwenden” (Feyerabend, 1984: p. 7). The theme seems to be absent from Eric Oberheim’s planned edition/translation of Feyerabend’s notes for Science as Art (Eric shared an advance copy with participants when I presented an earlier version of the current essay at a Spring 2024 Weimar colloquium on Feyerabend organized by Helmut Heit. ↩︎

Ivan Illich’s ‘Cultivation of Conspiracy’: How to be a Saint

Abstract

My theme is ‘con-spiratio’ and Ivan Illich’s lecture on the ingredients or prerequisites of establishing a community or polity. In addition, I explore questions of culture in Illich’s conspiracy lecture along with the related question of grace, Illich’s ‘Umsonstigkeit.’ In addition to Illich on the parable of the good Samaritan and his meditation on ‘The Last Days of Savonarola,’ I note Antonio de Nicolas’s Powers of Imagining and his analysis of the role of the devotional writings of the Franciscan, Carthusian, Dominican, and Cistercian orders in the spiritual formation of Ignatius of Loyola (i.e., hermeneutico-phenomenologically, ‘how to be a saint’), along with Tracy Strong (writing on the imitatio Christi) and Alasdair MacIntyre (writing on oaths in After Virtue), with a tiny allusion to Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault but also Paul Feyerabend and Nietzsche throughout.

Thinking with Ivan Illich, 2025

Lucca, Italy 18-22 June 2025

 

Hermeneutics, Love, and Education: Reading Gadamer, Nietzsche, and Illich

Being an excerpt of a text currently available behind a paywall1

Go get yourself a culture, only then will you find out what philosophy can and will do.

— Nietzsche

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) wrote about prejudice and the importance of critique, that is: being oneself exposed, personally, to challenge. For Gadamer this explicitly included an opposition to mass media in the mid-1980s and not less, as he made this notion of critical thinking explicit, questioning official truth narratives.

Speaking on “the idea of the university,” at the University of Heidelberg, Gadamer reminded his audience that “inquiry and research produces poor television viewers and newspaper readers.” 2

The claim requires its own hermeneutic, here to be heard in the German context where the standard of education, at least at a popular level, is the ability to read the newspaper with a certain dedication.

If today we worry more about ‘fake news’ and find scholars advocating for the uncritical acceptance of ‘official’ sources, for Gadamer, hermeneutically speaking: 

We always ask: what is the motivation? What interests are being expressed? Why are we being informed about this?  Is the aim to keep us within the limits of an administered social order?3

In addition to this critical emphasis, Gadamer reminded his audience that the university is exactly not a preparation for everyday life. Thus and very traditionally, “persons having received a theoretical training are often disappointed when they have to face practical life.”4

‘Disappointed’ would be putting it mildly.

The theoretical ideal here was Wilhelm Humboldt’s sense of the university and culture,5 and in this Gadamer articulates the free ideal of the so-called ‘liberal’ arts, just as many Anglophone readers might cite John Henry Cardinal Newman and Alasdair MacIntyre on the ‘very idea of the university.’6 For his part, Gadamer writes in the German tradition which is to say that he writes about Bildung, i.e., culture and cultivation, a word effectively untranslatable especially if translated as education, more technically: Erziehung,7 and a bit less, but in the same context, qua professional or trade formation, Ausbildung.8

Here I argue that Gadamer’s thinking on education, classical as it was, might be productively compared with Ivan Illich (1926-2002). Both thinkers were concerned with language and history, as one might expect in the case of Gadamer, a classicist and Illich, a historian, if Gadamer’s reflections on education might seem to have little in common with the contrarian author of Deschooling Society.9 Gadamer was a university professor, who taught at universities all his life where, by contrast, as Illich emphasized, Illich was ‘associated’ with universities, apart from a short-lived (and conflicted) position as vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, connected with Fordham and the University of Bremen and Hagen, and with teaching at Penn State, Illich was not a ‘professor’ per se and where Illich remained a Catholic and, despite rumours to the contrary, an ordained priest all his life, quite where Gadamer was a perfect ‘Protestant,’ Illich was a ‘perfect’ iconoclast.

Ivan Illich and Hermeneutics

I read Illich in concert with hermeneutics yet it can be argued that hermeneutics is fairly limited to Gadamer and Ricoeur (and others less discussed). Here the point would be that it might seem that there are sufficient divergences between Gadamer and Ricoeur. In addition, hermeneutics is multifarious, as any survey article will attest, including a number of alternate and sometimes disparate hermeneutic traditions.10 Nevertheless, just as Gadamer cites Husserl with respect to phenomenology when it comes to authority/tradition:

Phenomenology: that is I and Heidegger, and no one else.11

And, if absent Husserl’s self-reference, the present author would argue that Gadamer and Heidegger exemplify hermeneutics, there is a hermeneutic breadth that takes a step back to include Nietzsche if only for the sake of his 19th century context in classical philology on the reception and reading of ancient texts.12 It is in this framework that the case for hermeneutics can be made for Ivan Illich,13 especially with respect to his discussion of Hugh of St. Victor and not less Illich’s innovative, bodily articulation of textual-locative readerly hermeneutics.


The argument for reading Illich in connection with hermeneutics and education has been made explicitly,14 thus early responses to Illich’s Medical Nemesis highlighted parallels with hermeneutics in Gadamer and Ricoeur.15 But, and again, hermeneutic analyses of Illich remain rare when it comes to education. The point is hardly that Illich is ‘unknown.’ Almost everyone knows or else supposes that they know what Illich writes on ‘deschooling society.’ Yet engagement seems to end at the title and the substance of his argument is excluded in advance as scholars bristle at the idea of ‘deschooling’ or ‘disestablishing school’ at any level.


David Gabbard has explored this issue with a hermeneutic shift to Foucault’s language of ‘discourse.’ Thus, for Gabbard, although classically philological perspectives on the tradition of ‘commentary’ might disagree with the expression as articulated, “[i]nsofar as it speaks the never-before-said of an already-said, a commentary poses as a definitive restatement of some primary discourse.”16 Here we might recall Gadamer for hermeneutic nuance when he writes about the challenge of “learning to speak” — reminding us of the relative “genius of the three year old” as Gadamer puts it, as he might have echoed Piaget — any time we undertake any effort whatever at ‘translation’

we are familiar with the strange, uncomfortable, and torturous feeling we have as long as we do not have the right word. When we have found it the right expression (it need not always be one word), when we are certain that we have it, then it “stands,” something has come to a “stand.” Once again we have have a halt in the midst of the rush of a the foreign language, whose endless variation makes us lose our orientation. What I am describing is the mode of the whole human experience of the world.17

The context for Gadamer’s 1966 reflection recalls his earlier, Truth and Method as well as his lifelong engagement with Heidegger’s reflections on hermeneutic phenomenology. Indeed in his 1942 lecture course on Hölderlin’s Ister, it is worth underlining the fairly blunt force of Heidegger’s question as Heidegger interrupted his own reflection on the ‘strange’ as such, and the same terminological array in repeated in Gadamer concerning “The meaning of δεινόν” — a term Heidegger had already unpacked reading Sophocles in his 1935 Freiburg Introduction to Metaphysics — asking “who decides a translation?”18

‘Lexical’ definition as Heidegger speaks of this, referring to a dictionary, corresponds to what may be regarded as, qua definition, what the education theorist, David Gabbard summarizes as a decided and thus “definitive restatement of some primary discourse.” For Heidegger, the problem is — and this is the core of aletheological hermeneutics — that such “correctness,” however lexically definitive it may be, “does not guarantee us any insight into the truth of what the word means and can mean.”19 Heidegger concludes by explaining, and accords with Gadamer’s more relaxed formula of being ‘caught up short’ by a text in his reflections in Truth and Method, that to make

something understandable means awakening our understanding to the fact that the blind obstinacy of habitual opinion must be shattered and abandoned if the truth of a work is to unveil itself.20

That Heidegger’s formula — “Tell me what you think of translation, and I will tell you who you are” — would influence Gadamer is patent. In this way, Gadamer concludes a reflection on the human being and on language reflecting on what I elsewhere describe as the ‘penumbra’ of the word: a shadowed echo of everything around and in what is said in and by language. Thus Gadamer reflects on the task of the translator faced with “something said either verbally or in writing.”21 Gadamer’s observation concerns what is and what cannot be brought to word in the translation. The translation, note the essential negativity of Gadamer’s expression,


lacks that third dimension from which the original (i.e., what is said in the original) is built up in its range of meaning. This is an unavoidable obstruction to all translations.22

Hermeneutics is philologically indispensable as “no translation is as understandable as the original.” Translation does not, because it cannot, “facilitate understanding.” What is needed for that is what is promised by the German language sense of ‘carrying over,’ that is: über-setzen, über-tragen, and here Gadamer includes Heidegger’s unsaid in what is spoken:


The task of the translator, therefore, must never be to copy what is said, but to place himself in the direction of what is said (i.e., its meaning) in order to carry over that is to be said into the direction of his own saying. … What he has to reproduce is not what is said in exact terms but rather what the other person wanted to say and said in that he left much unsaid.23

The rest of the text can be found in the collection edited by Kamila Drapało, Barbara Weber,
Klaudia Węc, and Andrzej Wiercinski: Subject, Identity, and Care: Educational (Dis)closures (Amsterdam: Brill, 2025) see first footnote below.

  1. https://brill.com/edcollchap/book/9783846769089/BP000014.xml?fbclid=IwY2xjawIaAs5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHawT-Z_3bDeBRHI6Oj7xZl1IRIKKsGbopqqs4vHE_mAO4fUGSzMlmh4ZEQ_aem__XfQCWFXLQuPUbCeHXvQFw ↩︎
  2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Idea of the University” in On Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 58. ↩︎
  3. Gadamer, “The Idea of the University,” 58. ↩︎
  4. Gadamer, “The Idea of the University,” 56. ↩︎
  5. See for a discussion in an Anglophone context relevant to hermeneutics and education, Pádraig Hogan’s dedicated article, “Integrity and Subordination in Educational Practice,” Counterpoints, Vol. 462, My Teaching, My Philosophy: Kenneth Wain and the Lifelong Engagement with Education (2014): 169-185, here: 181-182.  For a discussion of the ‘idea of the university, as this is a broad theme, with a context that various from linguistic culture to linguistic culture, see for an Anglophone overview, Jeffrey J. Williams, “History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,” JAC, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2005): 55-74. And see, Babich, “From Nietzsche’s ‘Educational Institutions’ to Jaspers and MacIntyre and Newman on ‘The Idea of the University,’” Existenz, Vol. 15, No 2, Fall 2020 [2022]): 17-31. ↩︎
  6. Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Very Idea of a University: Aristotle, Newman, and Us,” British Journal of Educational Studies, 57/4 (December 2009), 347-362 See my Jaspers Society lecture with interventions by Tracy Strong and others online, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHmUgac4y-4. ↩︎
  7. See Walter H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: “Bildung” from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge, 1975) and David Sorkin, “Wilhelm Von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung), 1791-1810,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 44, No. 1, (Jan.-Mar. 1983): 55-73. ↩︎
  8. See for discussion, if at the inevitable risk of simplification, as the author herself emphasizes, although the technical training offered for practical and industry/business applications, Ausbildung, is not included at the level of the title Dorothee Kohl-Dietrich, “A (too) Brief Explanation of the Terms ‘Bildung’ and ‘Erziehung’ for the Hurried English-Speaking Reader,” Online: https://www.pedocs.de/volltexte/2022/25223/pdf/Ludwig_Kohl-Dietrich_2022_A_too_brief.pdf ↩︎
  9. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London: Marion Boyars, 1970). See for a fairly incidental, reflective connection, David W. Jardine, “In Praise of Radiant Beings, Counterpoints, Vol. 452, Ecological Pedagogy, Buddhist Pedagogy, Hermeneutic Pedagogy: Experiments and a Curriculum For Miracles (2014): 153-169. ↩︎
  10. See, for a sense of this breadth (not all collections are diverse), the contributions to Niall Keane and Chris Lawn, eds., A Companion to Hermeneutics (Oxford: Wiley, 2015) as well as the contributions to the ‘International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology, especially the volume on education, Andrzej Wiercinski, ed., Hermeneutics of Education: Exploring and Experiencing the Unpredictability of Education (Litt Verlag, 2020). ↩︎
  11. Gadamer, “The Phenomenological Movement” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, David E. Linge, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 143. ↩︎
  12. See the introductory chapter to my Nietzsches Antike (Berlin: Academia/Nomos, 2020). ↩︎
  13. See Dimitri Ginev, “From Weak Thought to Hermeneutic Communism,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 75ste Jaarg., Nr. 3 (derdekwartaal 2013): 553-568. ↩︎
  14. Paul Fairfield, “Hermeneutics and Education” in Keane/Lawn, eds., A Companion to Hermeneutics, 513-519. ↩︎
  15. Clyde V. Pax, “Illich’s Autonomous Man,” CrossCurrents, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Winter 1976): 435-438. ↩︎
  16. David Gabbard, Silencing Ivan Illich Revisited: A Foucauldian Analysis of Intellectual Exclusion (Gorham, Maine: Myers Education Press, 2019), 10. ↩︎
  17. Gadamer, “The Universality of the Problem” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, 15. ↩︎
  18. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn „The Ister“, William McNeill and Julia Davis, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 61 ↩︎
  19. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn „The Ister“, 62. ↩︎
  20. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn „The Ister“, 63. ↩︎
  21. Gadamer, “Man and Language” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, 59-68, here: 67. ↩︎
  22. Gadamer, “Man and Language,” 68. ↩︎
  23. Gadamer, “Man and Language,” 68. ↩︎