When I described philosophy as a kind of love, it is because I am trying to argue that philosophy is an intellectual activity which, unlike many others, has a central place for feelings and questions of desire. Historically, however, philosophy has expressed some hostility to desire. When Plato condemns poets and bans them from his utopia, one of his reasons is that poets depict gods and heroes as subjected to their desire; the only words and deeds that ought to be promoted are those of ‘famous men, who are exhibiting endurance in the face of everything’.1 For Kant, desire is too often self-contradictory and too irrational to guide us morally; it is part of the ‘pathological’ dimension of human existence. In its more lenient moments, philosophy has afforded a place to desire only if it is reined in: literally ‘reined in’, in the case of Plato’s metaphorical ‘charioteer’ who keeps the winged horse of desire from flying off the rational course.2
Nonetheless, as Judith Butler has pointed out, philosophy’s repudiation of desire has always been accompanied by a hypocritical employment of it.3 In the Symposium, Plato describes Diotima’s ladder of love, the journey in which desire pushes us forward towards the philosophical contemplation of pure beauty.4 For Spinoza, desire (cupiditas) is the very essence of the human condition, and philosophy ends, so he argues, with an intellectual love of God.5 Perhaps, then, Plato was too hasty in trying to restrict the poets’ embrace of desire: perhaps desire is the unacknowledged legislator of philosophy.
Now, where philosophy has had a complicated relationship with desire, psychoanalysis was founded on taking desire seriously. It might have something to offer philosophy, therefore, at least insofar as desire is concerned. I want to argue that philosophy, as I conceive of it, originates in a kind of desire embodied in—perhaps an unusual place—hysteria, as psychoanalysis has understood it. The short story is: I understand philosophy as involving the pursuit of unsatisfiable desires, and hysteria has been understood as the condition wherein we create unsatisfiable desires for ourselves. The long story is what follows.
Psychoanalysis recognises that everyday life retains its stability on the basis of certain structures, assumptions, and (sometimes) lies. For Jacques Lacan, one name for this basis of ordinary behaviour is ‘the symbolic’. When we offer someone money that we owe to them, and they protest at first—‘oh no, you mustn’t!’—we both know that this protest is a game. We each play our humble, generous role in order to symbolically demonstrate our respect for one another—even if, ultimately, I will be giving you the money, and you will be accepting it. Another Lacanian name for this symbolic structure is ‘the name of the father’, le nom du père.6 The idea of the symbolic, the authoritative name of the father, led Lacan to the idea—expressed in a French pun—that ‘the non-duped err’, les non-dupes errent.7 The idea here is that, even when symbolic orders appear absurd and unnecessary, we must remain ‘duped’ by them if we are to ‘get along’ with other people, to play by their rules. Ordinary life, in other words, is life in accordance with a fiction.
A typical historical narrative is that, in the ancient world, people directly identified with the norms of their society. A figure who breached this identification, like Antigone, would be killed. In the modern world, by contrast, we are more like jaded Antigones: we recognise that the symbolic is a fiction, we recognise that we are duped, and yet we choose to continue being duped anyway. Think of the literary and cinematic genre, the ‘comedy of manners’: these writers and directors are able to reveal the absurdity of social norms, of ‘the rules of the game’, and yet they continue to live more or less according to these norms anyway. This is not hypocrisy; this is a recognition that the non-duped err.
What does it look like to ‘err’? Imagine someone who rejected the fictions that orient us in life, and who demanded a factual account of everything. Trusting nobody, they would partake in conversations with suspicion; they would only believe that food from the supermarket was not poisonous if they could prove it themselves; everything that most people accept intuitively (that is, symbolically), this person would doubt. This is what G.K. Chesterton meant when he wrote that ‘the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason’: refusing to be duped, ‘the madman’ demands a reason for everything… and this is his madness.8
Here is where we come to hysteria. Hysteria started as a misogynistic diagnosis: according to Plato, when women didn’t have children, their womb would travel around the body and cause distress.9 In the late nineteenth century, hysteria was eventually regarded as psychological, not anatomical, and in Freud’s work it was no longer associated only with women.10 For Lacan, both psychosis (Chesterton’s madman) and hysteria involve a complicated relation to the symbolic. If I am psychotic, I am totally non-duped, and am thus left in a total void of symbolic reliability, a lack of trust in other people. If I am hysteric, however, I experience this void as something specific: it is not a general void, a total nothingness, but is a lack of something specific. In hysteria, I feel that something crucial I need is missing from my life, totally unknown to me. Hysteria thus poses questions with burning desperation: what do you want of me? Who am I?
Is this not exactly the condition of philosophy? Philosophy, I have argued, begins with an experience, a transformative moment, wherein the world starts to appear as inconsistent and unstable. When, as the result of some imperceptible shock, I am no longer able to live in an everyday manner—when I am no longer ‘duped’, even if just for a moment—when the ground shatters beneath me, and I have nothing solid to stand on, that is when philosophy can begin.11 Before this shock, I can ask philosophical questions, but I do not feel them weigh upon me. If I were to be psychotic, I would feel no urge to question at all; I would be free-floating in a senseless abyss. In philosophy, as in hysteria, I understand the significance of the symbolic, but feel no relation to it. I want it to make sense for me, and I am overwhelmed by questions.
However, because the object these questions aim at is no object at all—it is just the void of being non-duped, the gap between the philosopher and the symbolic surroundings they’ve been alienated from—there is no satisfying answer for them. Again, the same goes for hysterics in psychoanalysis: hysteria rejects every answer that is offered to its questioning. Indeed, hysteria typically enjoys something only insofar as it is prohibited. In a case study, Freud describes a woman who teasingly asks her husband for a caviar sandwich, over and over again, but nonetheless insists that he must never actually satisfy her demands.12 What Lacan finds in this study is that the woman’s desire is to never have her demands satisfied: ‘she wants her husband not to give her caviar so that they can continue to be madly in love’.13 Her ultimate desire is to keep desiring; that is, she works to keep her desire unsatisfied in order that she can keep desiring, to continue to love her husband, and so on. Slavoj Žižek offers another example: in experimental comparisons between humans and apes, when an ape is presented with an object out of its reach, it will eventually give up and move on to a more achievable object; the human, ‘will persist in its effort, remaining transfixed on the impossible object.’14
When we are alienated from a fiction because it is a fiction, we cannot hope to regain a relationship to it by means of finding fact. Philosophy and hysteria take place when, by means of some shock or realisation, the structure of everyday life is revealed as blurry, inadequate, and absurd. If philosophy tries to establish truth by patching up this inadequacy, rendering the world in a more orderly manner, it presupposes that this is how the truth of the matter really is: patched up and orderly. But just as Lacan challenged this presupposition in the psychoanalytic context (showing the symbolic to be fictional, based on assumptions without basis), so too have philosophers challenged this presupposition in a more philosophical context. The later Wittgenstein criticises philosophers for wanting discrete, absolute definitions of words devoid of any pragmatic context. The paradigmatic philosopher for Wittgenstein is someone who, prompted with questions of the form: “Do you mean the word X in this particular context Y?”, always says no.15 Words and concepts are fuzzy, Wittgenstein argues, and only ever make sense in the contexts of their usage, but the philosopher searching for definitions ignores this. In this way, the philosopher who always says no to contextualising questions is akin to the hysteric who refuses to let their desire be satisfied. To fall into philosophy, then, is to ask questions we have no hope of answering.
Nonetheless, I do not think that this makes philosophy useless. As Stanley Cavell has said, ‘hopeless tasks are not always thankless.’16 In psychoanalysis, the ‘cure’ for hysteria (if it can be called that) is not to satisfy or dissolve one’s desire, but to change one’s relation to desire. ‘[A]n hysteric does not know [consciously] that he cannot find satisfaction in the demand,’ Lacan explains; the therapeutic goal is to make the hysteric conscious of this fact—conscious of the nature of their desire.17 The painful symptoms of hysteria, if we are to believe Freud, are caused by the repression of one’s desire; dissatisfaction in philosophy, we might say, is similarly caused by an ignorance of what the philosopher is actually doing. Perhaps, when Wittgenstein famously distinguished between what can be ‘said’ and what must be ‘shown’, he opened a way for optimism in his seemingly pessimistic denunciation of philosophy.18 If Wittgenstein is right that the nature of philosophical questions is that their answers cannot be given—cannot be said—perhaps the right course of action is not to stop questioning altogether, but to show another way of thinking. The task of philosophy, and the cure for its hysteria, is not necessarily to say but to do. To quote Cavell again:
Cynics about philosophy, and perhaps about humanity, will find that questions without answers are empty; dogmatists will claim to have arrived at answers; philosophers after my heart will rather wish to convey the thought that while there may be no satisfying answers to such questions in certain forms, there are, so to speak, directions to answers, ways to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover.19
Republic, 391c-d.
Phaedrus 246a–254e.
Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 2-5.
Symposium 210a-212c.
Spinoza, Ethics, ‘Definitions of the Emotions’; Ethics, propositions 32 and 33.
To simplify, Lacan associates the symbolic with the name (nom in French) and law (nomos in Greek) of the father because, traditionally, it is through the instructions of a father that one learns about the symbolic obligations one has in familial and social life. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 230.
In French, ‘le nom du père’ and ‘les non-dupes errent’ are pronounced similarly (though not exactly the same).
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Bodley Head, 1909), p. 30. Chesterton’s mistake is that proper reasoning doesn’t resemble the madman’s reasoning at all: part of being rational is to know when to demand reasons, and when not to. But since I’m only using his claim as an illustration, this doesn’t matter to me.
Timaeus, 91c.
Freud actually diagnosed himself with hysteria. None of this is to say, unfortunately, that hysteria ever lost its relation to sexism.
Examples of such moments in the history of philosophy might include Socrates at Delphi, Augustine’s religious conversion, the dreams that led Descartes to his new method, Kant’s awakening from his ‘dogmatic slumber’, and so on.
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, Vol. 4: The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), p. 147
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Book V: Formations of the Unconscious (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), p. 343.
Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing (London: Verso, 2012), p. 651.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), §79.
Stanley Cavell, Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 203.
Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious, p. 344.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by Frank Ramsey and C.K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, 1922), 4.1212.
Cavell, Themes Out of School, p. 9.
this reminds me a bit of the phaedrus, when socrates, quite surprisingly, gives a speech in defense of beauty and love. he defines beauty as the kind of madness, which, as you say, disrupts us from the our sane, 'earthly', convictions, and, according to Socrates, manifests a vision and clarity in regard to the Forms. but this experience is imbued with pain and pleasure; desire and longing, and it is most present in the philosopher, who seeks most fervently to 'look upwards'. But of course, the more we look upwards, the more mad we become...