Belief as an Antidote to Nihilism II: Plato, Derrida & the ‘Pharmakon’

In a previous post, I referred to belief as an ‘antidote’ to nihilism, which implies that nihilism is a poison. In that same post, I mentioned that Nietzsche believed himself uniquely suited to the task of understanding nihilism because he had personally experienced it and come out the other end: ‘he was, in his own words, the ‘first perfect European nihilist’. But he was also ‘one who has already outlived the nihilism he contained within himself — who has left it behind, considers it beneath him, no longer a part of him’.

This outlook is relevant to a discussion of antidotes and poisons because it speaks to the dual sense of the root word pharmakon — which, as Derrida explains in Plato’s Pharmacy, means both remedy and poison. In this text, which is a response to Plato’s Phaedrus, Derrida demonstrates the instability of binary thinking, which relies on dichotomies such as love and non-love, philosophy and sophistry, speech and writing, father and son, etc.

In the Phaedrus, writing is referred to as a potion (a pharmakon in the original Greek). Socrates, in order to demonstrate the limitations of writing, recites the ancient Egyptian myth of Theuth and Thamous. Theuth, ‘the inventor of number, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and especially of writing’, presents his inventions to Thamous, the King of…