I’ve been teaching Nietzsche’s madman this week in the context of a unit on literary modernism, and there has been some fascinating discussion among the students about the solar imagery in the passage. As a contribution to that discussion, here is an extract from Michel Serres: Figures of Thought in which I compare the image of the sun in Plato’s cave allegory in Republic 7 to Serres’s reading of a passage from Jules Verne’s The Vanished Diamond (L’Étoile du sud). The extract sets out some of the context and the stakes of the madman fragment, and there is a passing reference to Nietzsche along the way…

 

Serres gives Leibniz’s multiplication of Copernican Revolutions its own cave allegory to set alongside Plato’s, not a story of escaping the cave to find the light, but of finding a cave full of its own lights. It is drawn from the nineteenth chapter Jules Verne’s The Vanished Diamond, in which the protagonist Victor Cyprien (in the original French: Cyprien Méré) and his friend Pharamond Barthes are lowered into an underground cavern:[i]

Dazzled with the light after so long a darkness … [the two heroes] thought at first they were the prey of some ecstatic illusion, so splendid and unexpected was the sight that greeted their eyes. They were in the centre of an immense grotto. The ground was covered with fine sand bespangled with gold. The vault was as high as that of a Gothic cathedral, and stretched away out of sight into the distant darkness. The walls were covered with stalactites of varied hue and wondrous richness, and from them the light of the torches was reflected, flashing back with all the colours of the rainbow, with the glow of a furnace fire and the wealth of the aurora. […]

Blocks of amethyst, walls of sardonyx, masses of rubies, needles of emeralds, colonnades of sapphires deep and slender as forest pines, bergs of aquamarine, whorls of turquoise, mirrors of opal, masses of rose gypsum, and gold- veined lapis lazuli, all that the crystal kingdom could offer that was precious and rare and bright and dazzling had served as the materials for this astonishing specimen of architecture; […]

Further along, an artificial lake, formed of a twenty-metre long diamond, set in the sand, seemed like an arena all ready for the movements of ice skaters. Aerial palaces of chalcedony, turrets and minarets of beryl and topaz, rose pile upon pile, and heaped together so many splendours that the eye refused to grasp them. The decomposition of the luminous rays by the thousands of prisms, the showers of brilliancy that flashed and flowed from every side, produced the most astonishing combination of light and colour that had ever dazzled the eyes of man.[ii]

 

Sous le coup de cet éblouissement qui résulte d’un retour subit à la lumière Pharamond Barthès et Cyprien se crurent tout d’abord en proie à une sorte d’hallucination extatique, tant le spectacle qui s’offrit à leurs yeux était à la fois splendide et inattendu. Tous deux se trouvaient au centre d’une grotte immense. Le sol en était couvert d’un sable fin tout pailleté d’or. Sa voûte, aussi haute que celle d’une cathédrale gothique, se perdait dans des profondeurs insondables au regard. Les parois de cette substruction naturelle étaient tapissées de stalactites, d’une variété de tons et d’une richesse inouïes, sur lesquelles le reflet des torches jetait des feux d’arc-en-ciel, mêlés à des embrasements de fournaise, à des radiations d’aurores boréales.

[…] Rochers d’améthyste, murailles de sardoine, banquises de rubis, aiguilles d’émeraude, colonnades de saphirs, profondes et élancées comme des forêts de sapins, icebergs d’aigues-marines, girandoles de turquoises, miroirs d’opales, affleurements de gypse rose et de lapis-lazuli aux veines d’or, – tout ce que le règne cristallin peut offrir de plus précieux, de plus rare, de plus limpide, de plus éblouissant avait servi de matériaux à cette surprenante architecture […].

Plus loin, un lac artificiel, formé d’un diamant de vingt mètres de long, enchâssé dans le sable, semblait une arène toute prête pour les ébats des patineurs. Des palais aériens de calcédoine, des kiosques et des clochetons de béryl et de topaze, s’entassaient d’étage en étage jusqu’au point où l’œil, lassé de tant de splendeurs, se refusait à les suivre. Enfin, la décomposition des rayons lumineux à travers ces milliers de prismes, les feux d’artifices d’étincelles qui éclataient de toutes parts et retombaient en gerbe, constituaient la plus étonnante symphonie de lumière et de couleur dont le regard de l’homme pût être ébloui.[iii]

 

There are many important contrasts between Plato’s and Verne’s caves, which help us to appreciate how light, shadow and the cave itself function very differently for Serres compared to their Platonic analogues. We can note at least eleven.

  1. Plato’s captive has to leave the cave in order to find the light; Verne invites us to ‘penetrate into a vault so deep that the gaze becomes lost in it as in the starry sky’ (GB 204).[iv]
  2. Plato’s allegory ‘sings the glory of a single sun’, whereas for Verne ’a thousand nocturnal glimmers dazzle the thinker’ (GB 204).[v]
  3. For Plato it is one lone freed captive who finds the sun; Verne has two voyagers experience the cave, their twin lights multiplying the effect of the reflections they experience in its bosom. In the same way that they isolate knowledge to one unique source, Plato (and, as we shall see, Descartes even more acutely), individualise knowledge, isolating the unique knower. Serres’ cave parable pluralises and connects both the sources of knowledge and the collectivity of knowers.
  4. Plato’s sun is transcendent, inhuman and overpowering; the torches that light Verne’s cave are manufactured, human, and unremarkable. Verne’s cave shows, whether Serres intended it or not, an alternative reading of Nietzsche’s parable of the madman who ‘lights a lantern … and shouts I seek God’.[vi] The madman feverishly laments that we have ‘unchained the earth from its sun’, smashing his own lamp in desparation, it seems, to return to the comforting familiarity of the unique source of light. Verne’s explorers, by contrast, revel in the cave where their little torches are reflected and refracted to infinity. Nietzsche’s madman is still thinking diurnally, in terms of a knowledge without shadows. In Serres’ Vernian cave, we must imagine Nietzsche’s madman happy.
  5. Plato has one central sun driving away shadows; Verne has one central shadow and thousands of little suns (see TI 82/TK 46).
  6. Plato’s light is of uniform transparency; Verne’s is reflected ‘through these thousands of prisms’ (GB 203) of coloured stones, and resembles a firework display.
  7. Plato’s captive has the good fortune to exit the cave at noon, experiencing the shadowless sun of a cloudless day. Verne’s light, by contrast, is described in terms of ‘the chaotic and fluid twinkling of possible glimmers’ which ‘open a thousand and one ways’ (GB 204).[vii]
  8. Plato is a daytime thinker, believing in the unity of truth in the same way that the brightness of the proximate sun obscures all other more distant celestial lights. By contrast Verne’s cave, as well as our own thinking,

resembles [Plato’s] clarity infinitely less than it resembles the glimmers of the night, where every star shines, monadic, like a diamond, where every galaxy flows like a river of pearls, where every planet, like a mirror, returns in its own way the glimmers that it receives (GB 205)[viii]

  1. In Plato’s allegory there is no reversing the direction of flow: the sun emits light and the earth, including the escaped captive, receives it. For Verne, by contrast, each object in the cave receives, reflects and refracts light from all angles and ‘can become the subject of other objects’ (GB 207).
  2. The unidirectionality of Plato’s account maintains a strict distinction, and a clear hierarchy, between the real (the sun) and representation (the shadows on the cave wall). In Verne’s cave, however, ‘I no longer see any difference between the real and representation, because the latter is part of the former’ (GB 207).[ix] It is not merely the precious stones that participate in what we might call this flattened epistemology, however:

Like the two heroes, like everything in the world, like all living things, I am a diamond, in hard and sometimes pure carbon, transparent or granulated, reflecting a thousand times the thousand and one hues of the rainbow which emanate from the multiple things of the world and from people and living things that happen to meet and throng (GB 207-8)[x]

  1. In Plato’s account the unity of truth triumphs over the diversity of illusion and opinion. Verne’s cave, by contrast, is a concord of diversity and harmony. On the one hand every imaginable precious stone seems to be present in abundance, and yet the overall effect is described not as a bedazzling cacophony but as a symphony.

Serres offers us, then, a systematic rewriting of Plato’s cave allegory through an allegory of his own, borrowed from Jules Verne, in which Plato’s single, all-seeing sun becomes a play of coloured reflections from multiple hand-held torches. Serres’ reading of Plato has much in common with Deleuze’s and Derrida’s, while also manifesting some significant differences. All three thinkers disrupt the single Platonic sun, the unique and self-identical source of knowledge. Derrida does so by arguing that the illusion of self-presence and immediacy are effects of the condition of différance. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze subverts the hierarchy of the good copy over the simulacrum by generalising the latter, revealing the unity of the Platonic sun and its ‘good’ copies to have been an effect of difference all along such that there are no ‘true’[xi] copies in Plato’s sense at all. Both Derrida and Deleuze, then, deny Platonic truth by, each in their own way, subordinating Platonic identity to difference. Serres subverts the hierarchy with an opposite move, not by generalising the simulacrum but by multiplying the sun.This is not a reversal of the priority of difference and identity but a move that affirms the Platonic account of identity as far as it goes, reframing it as one local instance of a system that exceeds it, one model of a more complex structure.

 

[i] The title L’Etoile du sud has been variously translated The Vanished Diamond and The Southern Star.

[ii] Jules Verne, The Star of the South, trans. and ed. Charles F. Horne (New York: Vincent Parke, 1911) 276– 77. Translation altered.

[iii] Jules Verne, L’Étoile du Sud, ch. XIX, « La grotte merveilleuse », (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1884) 267-269. Quoted by Serres on GB 202-3 , Y 18, and in IP.

[iv] ‘pénétrer sous une voûte si profonde que le regard s’y perd comme sous celle du ciel étoilé’.

[v] ‘[la caverne platonicienne] chante la gloire d’un seul soleil […], [dans la caverne de Verne] mille lueurs nocturnes éblouissent le penseur.’

[vi] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 119-20.

[vii] ‘ici, mille lueurs nocturnes éblouissent le penseur ; ici, les clignotants chaotiques et fluides des lueurs possibles ouvrent mille et une voies’.

[viii] ‘la pensée ressemble infiniment moins à sa clarté qu’aux lumières de la nuit, où chaque étoile brille, monadique, comme un diamant, où chaque galaxie ruisselle comme une rivière de perles, où toute planète, comme un miroir, renvoie à sa façon les lueurs qu’elle reçoit’.

[ix] ‘[j]e ne vois plus de différence entre le réel et la représentation, puisque celle-ci fait partie de celui-là’.

[x] ‘Comme les deux héros, comme chaque chose du monde, comme tous les vivants, je suis un diamant, en carbone dur et parfois pur, transparent ou granuleux, reflétant mille fois les mille et une teintes de l’arc-en-ciel, émanées des multiples choses du monde et des personnes et vivants de rencontre, en foule’.

[xi] The true/false distinction disappears for Deleuze once the simulacrum has been generalised.