Persuasion and Rhetoric by Carlo Michelstaedter (1887-1910)

[Torstone]

Hi,

I`ve come across a book I think would be worth mentioning due to some similarities to the concept of man always lying to himself, the particular story about the author and that it left me a little disturbed thinking of how dangerous it is to approach the metaphysical “void” without proper context.

The book is a dissertation named “Persuasion and Rhetoric” and is written by Carlo Michelstaedter.
He majored in Greek and Latin, and had selected for his thesis a philosophical study of persuasion and rhetoric in ancient philosophy (Wikipedia).

On October 16, 1910, the dissertation was submitted by mail to the university of Florence. The following day Michelstaedter killed himself by firing, he was 23 years old.
In the introduction to the book, written by the translators we get the general lay out of his life and the core elements of his thesis:

Obscurity is the truth, against which, according to Michelstaedter, we attempt to create protective and deceptive screens of light or at least ornament.

...The staying power of a text by an immature author who was never personally in a position to defend his brainchild can be explained only in terms of the continued resonance his work has had for several generations downwind of the crisis of values so deeply etched in it. It is that continuing power, some of which springs from the heightened consciousness and preternatural sensitivity for cultural crisis that those living at the margins of cultures frequently exhibit, that is the main subject of this introduction.

What Michelstaedter means by “persuation” is the state of consciousness and being in which an entity, any entity, is entirely at one with itself and the world, entirely present and true to itself and others

What, by contrast, Michelstaedter means by “rhetoric” is the endless series of deceptions by which we try to convince ourselves and each other that we are persuaded: satisfied, fulfilled, “happy”.

For Michelstadter absolute control could be reached only by means of the Schopenhaurean strategy of suppressing or eliminating desire for life

Michelstaedter assumes that there is a philosophia perennis, a truth that wise people have discovered again and again but that is necessarily lost again and again because most people, adrift in what Montaigne and Pascal call “distraction” and what Heidegger, in Being and Time, was to call “the they”(das Mann), cannot bear the truth and will do anything to avoid it. They invent kallopsimata orfnes, “ornaments of darkness”, the rhetorical commonplaces that allow them to live without understanding. And in this, Michealstaedter emphasizes repeatedly, they are aided by the “god” of philopsychia, “pleasure”, “attach-ment to life”, or as he translates the term in a footnote, vilta, “cowardice”.

The central idea of his work in my eyes has a Nietzschean approach to the whole thing, that if you lift the veil of reality, what is left is obscurity and the bottomless void of nothingness. And the means by which we escape this reality is trough self-deception and a constant longing for the relationship between the past and the future so that one at all times can escape from that which actual is, namely the present and the reality around us.
To describe what persuasion and rhetoric is and his idea of what life is, he uses the example of a weight hanging from a hook at the beginning of his 1. Chapter:

I know I want and do not have what I want. A weight hangs suspended from a hook; being suspended, it suffers because it cannot fall: it cannot get off the hook, for insofar as it is weight it suspends, and as long as it suspends it depends. We want to satisfy it: we free it from its dependence, letting it go so that it might satisfy its hunger for what lies below, and it falls independently for as long as it is content to fall. But at none of the points attained is it content to stop; it still wants to fall, for the next point below continually overtakes in lowness that which the weight has just attained. Nor will any future point be such as to render it content, being necessary to the weight`s life insofar, as it awaits below; but every time a point is made present, it will be emptied of all attraction, no longer being below; thus does it want at every point the points below it, and those attract it more and more. It is always drawn by an equal hunger for what is lower, and the will to fall remains infinite with it always.

If at some point its will were finished and it could possess in one point the infinite descent of the infinite future, at that point it would no longer be what it is – a weight.

Its life is this want of life. If it no longer wanted but were finished, perfect, if it possessed its own self, it would have ended its existence. At that point, as its own impediment to possessing life, the weight would not depend on what is external as much as on its own self, in that it is not given the means to be satisfied. The weight can never be persuaded.

Nor is any life ever satisfied to live in any present, for insofar as it is life it continues, and it continues into the future to the degree that it lacks life. If it were to possess itself completely here and now and be in want of nothing-if it awaited nothing in the future-it would not continue: it would cease to be life.

So many things attract us in the future, but in vain do we want to possess them in the present.

Similar to the concepts presented by Gurdjieff and Mouravieff, his book has many examples of how man deceives himself at every moment, and even though he is highly intertextual and a lot of his writing seems unorganized at times, much of the examples given helped me a attain a broader framework for understanding the necessity to live in the present, do what you can now and not to anticipate things:

The will feeds on the future in each empty present, and as it assures itself of the former by means of the evident signs of the latter, it provides for the future sine cura, now affirming itself confidently.

He finds this sweet taste in each thing, which he feels as his own because it is useful for his continuation, and in each, affirming himself with its potency, he draws from it the flattery “you are”.

So that, time after time, in the presentness of his affirmation, he feels superior to the present moment and to the relation belonging to it; and if he does this now, and that latter, this here, and that there, he always feels the same amid diverse times and things; he says “ I am”.

In the light that he took his own life after writing his dissertation, I will include some of his thoughts of how persuasion relates to death. It seems he is not talking about a justification for suicide but how to be able to live an authentic life in the form of living in the present, not expecting but seeing reality for what it is.

Death takes nothing from him who has his life in the present, because nothing in him asks to continue any longer: nothing in him exists merely through the fear of death – nothing is merely because it was given by birth as necessary to life. And death takes nothing but what is born. It takes nothing but what it took the day one was born, the one who, because he was born, lives in fear of death, for the sake of living, because he lives because he was born. But he who wants to have his life, must not believe that he was born, and is alive, only because he was born. Nor must he believe his life sufficient and therefore to be continued and defended for death.

No, he must permanere, “remain”, not follow those needs, imagining them as fixed so that they should continue to attract him into the future; he must remain even though he wants them to be in the present, truly his. He must tirelessly resist the current of his own illusion; if he gives in at one point and concedes to what concedes to him, his life again dissolves and he lives his own death.

For in accepting the suffiency of his own need, which fear of death has determined, he affirms his own insufficiency and seeks support for his life from others, taking on the persona of hunger in order to be hungry in the next moment, whereas this moment should have been his last.

….For he has the courage to tear away the weave of sweet and cherished things, which coddles one into the future, and he demands real possession of the moment..

Thus must he create himself to have individual value, not moving, unlike the things that come and go, but being persuaded in himself.

For the author, as long as man lives in the world and tries to identify himself with it by possessing it through demanding and giving in relation to what he sees fit, and not to what is true and necessary, life is not real. It is what he calls living in rhetoric as contrasted with persuasion, that refers to all methods by which humans conceal their true condition from themselves and each other.

They say, we are neither first nor last in this world, and since one`s got to live, it is better to adapt yourself to what you find, which you can`t change anyway.

But each thing is the first and the last and he finds nothing done before him. Nor is it to his advantage to trust that anything will be done after him. He must take on himself on himself the responsibility for his life(as it must be lived in order to attain life) which cannot rest with another. He must have in himself the certainty of his own life, which others cannot give him.

... No matter how much they walk, they are always where they were before, because one place is as good as another in the valley without exit. Man must make himself a way to succeed in life and not move about among others, to bring others with him and not to ask for prizes that may or may not be found along the ways of men.

Many are slaves to the line “one must live”, expecting everything from the future and reaching out for things. They demand the usual relations from these as if they had a sufficient persona which, having reason in itself, had the right to demand. Everyone says, “But I`ve got the right too, after all”; “if you knew what I`ve suffered, you`d understand I`m right; “One`s got to try! Put yourself in my shoes and then judge!” And indeed, indeed, everyone is right – everyone can show how the causes, the needs behind his act or demand, result as mathematically just: the stone is right in falling when the earth attracts it, the oppressed ant is right in protesting when the stone weighs on it; the mosquito is right in sucking man`s blood when hunger drives it; man is right in killing it when it stings him….the plague, custom officers, police officers: everybody has the right to live – everyone who`s had the fault of being born.

Because there is no effect without cause, everything in the world is right to happen; each effect is just to its cause, each affirmation is just to its need. But no one is just: no one, insofar as someone demands an affirmation that accords with his causes and needs, he takes on their persona, and he cannot have the persona of justice.

…In whatever manner he asks to continue, the necessities of his existence speak in him, and insofar as he affirms as just what is just to him, he denies what is just to others, and he is unjust toward all others, whether he wrongs them or not.

Because you participate in the violence of all things, all of this violence is part of your debt to justice. All of your activity must go toward eradication this: to give everything and demand nothing; this is the duty – where duties and rights may be, I do not know.

The activity that does not demand, that does not do in order to have but gives in doing, is benefaction. Giving doing, benefitting – three beautiful words. Everyone gives, does, benefits: but nobody has, nothing is done, and the good, who knows it?

….Doing is not for the sake of having done; having done does no good. You do not have in the present what you have done, and yet you want to retain it. In order to have it you must do it again like anything else: and you don’t reach an end.

He who is not, cannot do; he who has not cannot give; he who knows not the good cannot benefit: this activity of finite beneficences is itself a form of violence. For while affirming itself as an individual activity, it is always a slave to what it wants to continue in the future. Irrational needs affirm themselves in such activity, demanding.

This is the easy, weak, stupid compassion of the persona who does not know what he is doing but wants to have the illusion of doing.

Not giving men support against their fear of death but taking this fear away, not giving them, illusory life and the means of always demanding it but giving them life here and now entirely so that they do not demand – this is the activity that eradicates the violence.

What do you care about living if you give up life in every present for the sake of he possible? If you are in the world and not in the world, grasping things without having them, eating things and remaining hungry, sleeping and remaining tired, loving and doing another violence, if you are and are not?

Giving is doing the impossible: giving is having.
For as long as man lives, he is here, and the world there. For as long as he lives he wants to possess it. For as long as he lives he affirms himself in some manner. He gives and demands. He enters the ring of relations – and it is always he here and there world, different from him. Facing that which was once a given relation for him, where in affirming himself he demanded to continue, now he must affirm himself not in order to continue, must love that not because it is necessary to his need but because of what it is, because in it he does not see a particular relation but all the world, and in the face of this all, he is not his hunger, torpor, need for affection, or any other of his needs – he is everything: for in that final present he must have and give everything: to be persuaded and to persuade, to have in the possession of the word the possession of oneself – to be one with the world.

After reading his work, I was at the same time confused and a little understanding to the reason for his suicide. Although the theme and methods of his writings is dark, it does lay out a possibility of man living a real, authentic life where one is true to oneself and others, and the methods to reaching it is through separating oneself from the love of life in the form of lies and illusions. And this understanding may or may not(or both) lead one to despair or wishing to increase the knowledge of once being to better understand the world in which one lives.

At the same time he had a tragic life losing a close friend to suicide, his brother died under mysterious circumstances in New York and much drama from his family lead him into suffering isolation and depression. He had no means of dealing with his psychological traumas, seemingly having a very high intellect and understanding through his studies but no network or outlet for his experiences.

Trying not to over speculate, the thought that hit me when thinking about his work is his fundamental view of life and reality; being an obscurity and not containing any objective truth or higher principle in terms of for example STO and STS. Being 23 years old and living with this realization must really be a one way ticket to despair. At the same time, one gets the impression by reading his work that choosing physical death may be the final expression of being totally persuaded and attaining true “authenticity” , since it according to him seems to be impossible while living.

His work is definitely open to a multitude of interpretations and I might be reaching for easy conclusions. Any thoughts on this is much appreciated.