Month: September 2016

Herodotus says that the highest ethical principle recognized by the Persians is not to lie.  This is in the nature of a local custom and forms part of every Persian child’s education.  As so often in his treatment of Persia, it seems like he’s onto something here: one would like to draw a line connecting Herodotus’ remark to the hatred of the lie (Avestan drug) so thoroughly attested in the oldest texts of Zoroastrianism.  Of course, hating “the lie” isn’t quite the same thing as hating lying; the Zoroastrian drug sometimes takes the form of a cosmological principle, sometimes that of a hypostasis of evil, rather rarely a form that fits the Merriam-Webster definition of english lie: “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.”

One also observes that drug is far from the only, and perhaps not even the most important, ethical concept toward which Zoroastrianism manifests hostility: rage, for instance (Avestan aeshma), plays the villain’s part in plenty of Avestan hymns.  But Herodotus mentions no customary aversion to rage among the Persians.  What forces have compressed Zoroastrianism’s diverse field of ethical-emotional concepts down to Herodotus’ monotonic focus on the lie?

Our approach to this question depends on whether we see Herodotus’ remark as a true descriptive statement about Persian nomos or, rather, as part of an ethnography that structures the people of the inhabited world by defining them against one another, or against the Greeks who would have made up Herodotus’ first audience.  I think there’s value in both hypotheses; I’ll follow up the first one today, and the second one tomorrow.

As I’ve suggested, there’s a gap that separates Herodotus’ remark from the texts of Zoroastrianism: Herodotus both literalizes the lie and makes it the prime ethical enemy of the Persians.  Another text that makes these same maneuvers is the inscription placed by Darius the Great on the cliff-face at Bisutun in present-day Iran.  The inscription narrates Darius’ rise to power and his suppression of a number of nationalist-nativist revolts among the peoples then subject to Persian rule.  Naturally, this narrative involves a measure of propaganda.  Take, for instance, this summary passage that appears near the end of the inscription:

(52) King Darius says: This is what I have done. By the grace of Ahuramazda have I always acted. After I became king, I fought nineteen battles in a single year and by the grace of Ahuramazda I overthrew nine kings and I made them captive.

One was named Gaumâta, the Magian; he lied, saying ‘I am Smerdis [Bardiya], the son of Cyrus [Kûruš].’ He made Persia to revolt.

Another was named ššina, the Elamite [Ûvjiya]; he lied, saying: ‘I am king the king of Elam.’ He made Elam to revolt.

[similar formulaic entries follow for the other 7 kings]

(53) King Darius says: These nine king did I capture in these wars.

(54) King Darius says: As to these provinces which revolted, lies made them revolt, so that they deceived the people. Then Ahuramazda delivered them into my hand; and I did unto them according to my will.

(55) King Darius says: You who shall be king hereafter, protect yourself vigorously from lies; punish the liars well, if thus you shall think, ‘May my country be secure!’

Part of the inscription’s propagandistic force is its assertion that each rebellious king defeated by Darius lied (old Persian adurujiya) to the people of his province in articulating the proposition, “I am king of such-and-such.”  This is contrasted, implicitly, with the truth that a claim of that nature has in Darius’ mouth; in fact, the inscription as a whole (for whose own truth it repeatedly vouches) is just such a claim.

Adurujiya and related lexemes form the Bisutun inscription’s main, and perhaps only, vocabulary of ethical condemnation.  For the most part, this vocabulary passes judgment on the propositional content of statements made by Darius’ rivals.  Whatever Herodotus’ motivation for placing the lie at the center of Persian ethical culture, he seems to be following in Darius’ footsteps.

Tomorrow: more Herodotus.  What  it means.

“Who knows if there might not have been several worlds before this one?  That hypothesis would give a very natural origin to the good and evil angels; it would be appropriate to add to each world a universal judgment; the destructions of these worlds would then not at all be annihilations, but rather derangements.”

Toward the end of Psychiatric Power, a series of lectures delivered at the College de France in 1973 and 1974, Foucault says something like this:

“Now I think there has been a completely different standpoint of truth in our civilization. This completely different standpoint of truth, no doubt more archaic than the one I am talking about, was gradually pushed aside or covered over by the demonstrative technology of truth. This other standpoint of truth, which is, I think absolutely crucial in the history of our civilization by virtue of it being covered over and colonized by the other, is that of a truth which, precisely, will not be everywhere and at all times waiting for us whose task is to watch out for it and grasp it wherever it happens to be. It will be the standpoint of a dispersed, discontinuous, interrupted truth which will only speak or appear from time to time, where it wishes to, in certain places; a truth which does not appear everywhere, at all times, or for everyone; a truth which is not waiting for us, because it is a truth which has its favorable moments, its propitious places, its privileged agents and bearers. It is a truth which has its geography. The oracle who speaks the truth at Delphi does not express it anywhere else, and does not say the same thing as the oracle in another place; the god who cures at Epidaurus, and who tells those who come to consult him what their illness is and what remedy they must apply, only cures and expresses the truth of the illness at Epidaurus and nowhere else. A truth, then, which has its geography, and which has its calendar as well, or, at least, its own chronology.”

Or, exactly this.

“Truth” as we think of it–whether descriptive, deductive, demonstrative, or what have you–is something that holds, in the same way, everywhere.  Gravity is the same everywhere on Earth, a failure of the Pancreas will lead to diabetes as surely in Mexico as in Taiwan, and the capital of Mexico is Mexico City as surely on Mars as on the Moon.  Fine, says Foucault, that’s one way of thinking about truth, but certainly not the only one.  We could just as easily imagine truth to be local.  Foucault’s immediate point in saying so is to put a theoretical framework behind his claim that the mad are (or were, in the 19th century) insane in the clinic, by contrast with e.g. diabetics who are diabetic everywhere.  This follows from methodological divergences between psychiatrists, who demonstrate the truth of madness by provoking a crisis according to an irregular technique, and other doctors, who can demonstrate, etc.

The classics are evidently playing a background role here (although in a sense Foucault is elaborating on conclusions he drew in the previous year’s lectures) and so Foucault is perhaps under no obligation to “get things right.”  With reference to ancient medicine, I think, he’s got things partly wrong; take for instance the explanation of epilepsy offered in the Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease.  Epilepsy is the immediate result of a wet south wind, so one’s liability to an attack depends on one’s location and even on the topography of the land around one’s house.  What seems like an eminently “local” ailment, though, turns out to have purchase only on victims who suffer from an insufficient (in-utero) purgation of cerebral phlegm; so epilepsy does have a “general” truth, independent of any particular place or climate.

On the other hand, the author of Sacred Disease also refers contemptuously to several types of itinerant folk-healers whose methodology does seem to have more to do with Foucault’s oracles than with the universalist truth-claims of (some strands of) Hippocratic medicine.  These–as far as the text lets us reconstruct–make a cure of epilepsy by intuiting or in some other inspired way discovering a “sin” on the part of the sufferer that needs to be purged.  And Foucault himself goes on to make reference to the so-called “critical days,” localized sectors of time in which the truth about a patient’s disease or prognosis would reveal itself to the learned eye.  So, within one field, a double regime of truth, local and universal both at once.  And, as any unbiased reader of a text like On the Sacred Disease will see, universal claims have no particularly good claim to rightness or rationality over local ones.

To say something similar about classical politics would be difficult, not least because politics as a field doesn’t really come together in Ancient Greek thought until the last decades of the classical period.  That is to say, there aren’t really “political facts” until figures like Plato and Aristotle introduce them under the heading of universal claims, either about the nature of the “best state” or, in a more diagnostic mode that reminds us, rightly, of the authorial voice of Sacred Disease, about how things “generally go” with various forms of actually existing state.

Buried beneath this discourse, which is familiar to us because its dead hand still directs our own political conversations, is another, earlier way of talking about rule, and one in which Foucault’s two modes of truth production assume a very different configuration.  This one also undergirds our thinking about politics, but in a much more pervasive way, so that trying to recover it from a modern point of view is a little bit like staring at the sun.

Tomorrow: Herodotus, Bisutun, and the drugs.