Taking protrepsis seriously

If a text doesn’t fit into my way of life, my first reaction isn’t to change my way of life, it’s to discard the text. This is particularly easy for texts from other times and other places. Ancient thought is embedded in its time and circumstances, I tell myself, and therefore irrelevant in my, very different, time and circumstances.

In a moment I will consider whether this argument is plausible. But first I would like to ask, what motivates me to make the argument in the first place? A technique used by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud is what Paul Ricoeur calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” where, in addition to questioning the plausibility of an argument, we question the motives of the person making the argument. Ricoeur contrasts this hermeneutic approach with what he calls a “hermeneutics of faith,” where we assume that the person making the argument makes it with the sole motive of discovering and bearing witness to the truth. When I make an argument, particularly one whose consequence is avoidance of intellectual and moral effort, one of my responsibilities to myself as an intellectually disciplined mind is to question my own motives.

Kierkegaard points out that distancing ourselves from historical figures by calling attention to the time elapsed between us and them is often merely a way for us to excuse ourselves for failing to live up to the greatness they represent and demand from us. “It goes against the grain for me,” says Kierkegaard, “to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.” When I read ancient philosophy, I am often confronted with minds wholeheartedly devoted to truth, virtue and wisdom. In contrast my life seems to be devoted to wealth, comfort and convenience. Is this merely because I live in a different era? Or is it because I fail to live up to the greatness the ancients demand of me?

We moderns have tools like telescopes and microscopes that arguably allow us to understand the cosmos far better than the ancients could. But ancient philosophy doesn’t just consist of cosmological theories. It also contains exhortations. A philosopher doesn’t just instruct us about facts. He also calls us to a way of life. When we’re dealing with protreptic and parenetic elements of ancient philosophy, there’s no reason to suppose modern inventions make them obsolete. Ancient texts confirm what we might have suspected, that in the ancient world, just as in today’s world, the vast majority of free men were interested only in the pursuit of wealth and pleasure. Only a tiny minority took an interest in truth, virtue and wisdom. If I’m honest with myself, I will have to admit that the reason I dismiss the ancients’ exhortations to become part of this small minority have nothing to do with time or progress, and everything to do with cowardice and indolence.

Some innovations of ancient philosophy have exerted so much influence on the historical course of thought that they no longer seem innovative to us. It’s useful to study these innovations in order to help us understand the genealogy of our ideas. Other innovative thoughts, however, have never had the influence their argumentative force merits. These thoughts remain innovative no matter how many millennia have elapsed between us and them. As Nietzsche points out, we moderns have a tendency to dismiss the ideas of “disturbing innovators” by telling ourselves they are part of an “epigone age” and therefore no longer relevant. Smug modern philistines, Nietzsche explains, in order to dismiss the threat ancient wisdom posed to their torpid tranquility, “sought to transform all sciences that threatened to disturb their wretched ease into branches of history.”

Classics have attained their classic status because they have demonstrated their ability to break out from the confines of their time and place and influence later generations. By studying classics as if they were merely products of their time and place, we remove from them precisely the thing that makes them classics. “Coming to life as classics,” Herbert Marcuse explains, “they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.”

The pernicious consequences of sequestering ourselves from the past are aptly described by Russell Berman in his 2007 book, Fiction Sets You Free. The unquestioned supposition that the modes of thought and criticism dominant in the present are the best modes of thought and criticism not only deprives us of the past, Berman explains, but also of the future:

Presentism implies not only a shift toward contemporary material (older material is denounced polemically as tied to dead authors), but an implicit structuring of time as always only a present, without a recollection of its past, without an aspiration to a future.

In order to continue “business as usual” in the present, we need an intellectual dumping ground where we can dispose of ideas incompatible with business as usual. The past serves this function admirably. Ideas from the past that are useful for business as usual are carried forward into the future. Ideas that challenge present practices are dismissed as of “merely historical interest.”