Mistaking the Unintelligible for the Unintelligent

Fat Tony, of course, had many precursors. Many we will not hear about, because of the primacy of philosophy and the way it got integrated into daily practices by Christianity and Islam. By “philosophy,” I mean theoretical and conceptual knowledge, all knowledge, things we can write down. For, until recently, the term largely referred to what we call today science—natural philosophy, this attempt to rationalize Nature, penetrate her logic.

A vivid modern attack on the point came from the young Friedrich Nietzsche, though dressed up in literary flights on optimism and pessimism mixed with a hallucination on what “West,” a “typical Hellene,” and “the German soul” mean. The young Nietzsche wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, while in his early twenties. He went after Socrates, whom he called the “mystagogue of science,” for “making existence appear comprehensible.” This brilliant passage exposes what I call the sucker-rationalistic fallacy:

Perhaps—thus he [Socrates] he should have asked himself—what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled?

“What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent” is perhaps the most potent sentence in all of Nietzsche’s century—and we used a version of it in the prologue, in the very definition of the fragilista who mistakes what he does not understand for nonsense.

Nietzsche is also allergic to Socrates’ version of truth, largely motivated by the agenda of the promotion of understanding, since according to Socrates, one does not knowingly do evil—an argument that seems to have pervaded the Enlightenment as such thinkers as Condorcet made truth the only and sufficient source for the good.

This argument is precisely what Nietzsche vituperated against: knowledge is the panacea; error is evil; hence science is an optimistic enterprise. The mandate of scientific optimism irritated Nietzsche: this use of reasoning and knowledge at the service of utopia. Forget the optimism/pessimism business that is addressed when people discuss Nietzsche, as the so-called Nietzschean pessimism distracts from the point: it is the very goodness of knowledge that he questioned.

It took me a long time to figure out the central problem that Nietzsche addressed in The Birth of Tragedy. He sees two forces, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. One is measured, balanced, rational, imbued with reason and self-restraint; the other is dark, visceral, wild, untamed, hard to understand, emerging from the inner layers of our selves. Ancient Greek culture represented a balance of the two, until the influence of Socrates on Euripides gave a larger share to the Apollonian and disrupted the Dionysian, causing this excessive rise of rationalism. It is equivalent to disrupting the natural chemistry of your body by the injection of hormones. The Apollonian without the Dionysian is, as the Chinese would say, yang without yin.

Nietzsche’s potency as a thinker continues to surprise me: he figured out antifragility. While many attribute (mistakenly) the notion of “creative destruction” to the economist Joseph Schumpeter (not wondering how something insightful and deep can come out of an economist),2 while, as we saw, the more erudite source it to Karl Marx, it is indeed Nietzsche who was first to coin the term with reference to Dionysus, whom he called “creatively destructive” and “destructively creative.” Nietzsche indeed figured out—in his own way—antifragility.

I read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy twice, first as a child when I was very green. The second time, after a life thinking of randomness, it hit me that Nietzsche understood something that I did not find explicitly stated in his work: that growth in knowledge—or in anything—cannot proceed without the Dionysian. It reveals matters that we can select at some point, given that we have optionality. In other words, it can be the source of stochastic tinkering, and the Apollonian can be part of the rationality in the selection process.

Let me bring the big boss, Seneca, into the picture. He, too, referred to Dionysian and Apollonian attributes. He appeared to present, in one of his writings a richer version of our human tendencies. Talking about a God (whom he also calls “destiny,” equating him with the interaction of causes), he gives him three manifestations. First, the “Liber Pater,” the Bacchic force (that is, the Dionysos to whom Nietzsche referred) that gives seminal power to the continuation of life; second, Hercules, who embodies strength; and third, Mercury, who represented (for Seneca’s contemporaries) craft, science, and reason (what for Nietzsche appeared to be the Apollonian). Richer than Nietzsche, he included strength as an additional dimension.

As I said, earlier attacks on “philosophy” in the sense of rationalistic knowledge from the Plato and Aristotle traditions came from a variety of people, not necessarily visible in the corpus, mostly in forgotten or rarely mentioned texts. Why forgotten? Because structured learning likes the impoverishment and simplification of naive rationalism, easy to teach, not the rich texture of empiricism, and, as I said, those who attacked academic thinking had little representation (something that we will see is starkly apparent in the history of medicine).

An even more accomplished, and far more open-minded, classical scholar than Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century French thinker Ernest Renan, knew, in addition to the usual Greek and Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic (Syriac), and Arabic. In his attack on Averroes, he expressed the famous idea that logic excludes—by definition—nuances, and since truth resides exclusively in the nuances, it is “a useless instrument for finding Truth in the moral and political sciences.”