Abstract
In this chapter, my implexic account of drives and the context that informs them, which I have labeled parallel genealogy, is tested against two forms of Christian subjectivity. The first I call the internalized Augustinian model. The second I refer to is Tertullian’s externalist framework. First, I demonstrate how my theory of affects, which has both somatic and cognitive elements, explains a new phenomenon in history: the conversion experience exemplified in Augustine’s Confessions. I then demonstrate how we can better understand Augustine’s unique internalized Christian form of subjectivity by contrasting it with that of Tertullian’s externalized type. Toward the end of GM I, Nietzsche quotes extensively from Tertullian’s De Spectaculus ostensibly to justify the claim that the actual engine of Christian sentiments is the very hostile drives Nietzsche discusses in GM II 16. I don’t doubt that Nietzsche’s quoting of the penultimate passage of the Spectacles is meant to justify this claim. However, I contend there is another reason why Nietzsche invokes Tertullian in the final section of GM I. The logic of Christianity, whether this includes the incarnation, the notion of heaven, or causa sui freewill, are conceptual developments meant to decipher and utilize ancient affective neural pathways. Such concepts are not sui generis but emerge, genealogically speaking, due to prior existing material conditions and social practices. The movement from the internal to the external is in keeping with the fundamental process of genealogy, which is discovering the lines of descent that made a new phenomenon possible. Finally, I show how the evolution of one naïve kind of Christian subjectivization to a more sophisticated version took place.
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Notes
- 1.
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981–1982. Edited by Frederic Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 2005.
- 2.
Foucault, “The Return of Morality,” 242–254, 253.
- 3.
The question of how one may think of ethics as aesthetics is posed by Foucault in one of his last interviews. He says: “What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals and life…. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?” Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress,” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, (New York: Pantheon Books), 1984, 340–372, 350. Although not fully worked out by Foucault, due to his untimely death in 1984, an important aspect of this aesthetics of existence is the “will to experiment” with our limit-attitudes with the purpose of “going beyond them.” Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader, 50.
- 4.
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Translated by Sean Hand. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 102.
- 5.
Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Book VIII, Chapter 12, 28–29.
- 6.
Richard Lazarus, “From Appraisal: The Minimal Cognitive Prerequisites of Emotion.” In What Is an Emotion, 2nd edition, edited by Robert C. Solomon, (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2003, 125–131.
- 7.
I develop what I call “affective genealogy in an earlier article. Brian Lightbody “The Relations of Affect and the Spiritual: Towards a Foucauldian Genealogy of Spirituality”, Philosophy Today Vol. 65 Issue 1 Winter 2021, 161–183.
- 8.
Philip Burton, Language in the Confessions of Augustine, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 162.
- 9.
Burton, 151.
- 10.
Burton, 163–164.
- 11.
Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Book XII Chapter 16, 23.
- 12.
See Brian Lightbody, Dispersing the Clouds of Temptation (Eugene OR: Pickwick Press, 2015), 7.
- 13.
Tertullian, De Spectaculus, XII.
- 14.
Tertullian, De Spectaculus, With an English translation by T.R. Glover, (Harvard University Press), 1931, XXX.
- 15.
De Spectaculus XXIX.
- 16.
Tertullian, De Spectaculus, XXX.
- 17.
Daniel Conway, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, 48.
- 18.
Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 204.
- 19.
Lawrence Hatab, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals An Introduction, 66. Also see David Owen’s analysis in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, 88.
- 20.
Tertullian De Spectaculus, XVII, 275.
- 21.
Victor Power “Clerical animosity Towards the Theatre” Educational Theatre journal Mar., 1971, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Mar., 1971), pp. 36–50, 42.
- 22.
Tertullian, De Spectaculus, VII, 251.
- 23.
Tertullian Spectaculus, XIX. 279.
- 24.
Tertullian, Spectaculus, XIX.
- 25.
See Emily Cain “Tertullian’s Precarious Pan-opticon: A Performance of Visual Piety”, The Journal of Early Christian Studies Vol. 27 Issue 4 2019, 611–633. “This brings an interesting parallel to Tertullian’s rhetoric of a visible and visual performance of spirituality. Tertullian had analogized God as the sun to demonstrate that God remained pure in the face of the impurity of earth. The sun, however, also serves as the visible watchtower of the panopticon that gazes upon the ring of the earth. The divine watchtower is unverifiable: humans may never know if or when they are seen, but they may assume that they are always seen by the divine gaze. Both men and women must perform visibly before the divine gaze by avoiding harmful sights. This panopticon is not the disciplinarian panopticon of the prison, but mimics more closely the power dynamics of the hospital or the school. This rhetoric helps Tertullian to describe the shared Christian performance of difference. Christians are different than others by performing their visible purity before the watchtower of the divine gaze.” 629.
- 26.
Tertullian, Spectacles, XVII, 275.
- 27.
Tertullian, Spectacles, XXI, 283.
- 28.
Riccardi, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology, 65.
- 29.
Notice what Riccardi writes on p. 67 “This suggests that affective states mediate between one’s drives and the environment. The drives prime our very experience of the external world: they make us look for objects that can satisfy their goal.”
- 30.
Collins Dictionary https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/implex.
- 31.
Tacitus, Annals, Loeb Classical Library, 5 volumes, Latin texts and facing English translation: Harvard University Press, 1925 thru 1937. Translation by C. H. Moore (Histories) and J. Jackson (Annals), XV.
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Tertullian, De Spectaculus, With an English translation by T.R. Glover, Harvard University Press, 1931.
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Lightbody, B. (2023). A Test Case: Comparing Augustinian to Tertullian Christian Subjectivity. In: A Genealogical Analysis of Nietzschean Drive Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27148-9_6
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