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 Egypt, who in turn ‘expressed himself at length to Theuth about each of the branches of expertise’. When it came to writing, Theuth described it as ‘a potion [pharmakon] for memory and intelligence’. However, the King of Egypt disagreed, replying that ‘the loyalty you feel to writing, as its originator, has led you to tell me the opposite of its true effect’. Instead of increasing the intelligence, and improving the memory of the Egyptian people, Thamous argued that by relying on ‘marks made by others’ writing ‘will atrophy people’s memories’ and provide only ‘the appearance of intelligence’.

The problem, as Socrates goes on to say, is that writing, like paintings, ‘maintain an aloof silence’. They are, in essence, incapable of discussion. Instead, ‘they just go on and on for ever giving the same single piece of information’. It is at this point in the dialogue that Socrates proposes an alternative, one that he has been hinting at throughout the dialogue, one…