If you never have been tempted by a demon or a god

 

“At Pharai in Achaia [a  rite] was practised under the official patronage of Hermes, the market god. In front of the image is a hearth made of stone, with bronze lamps clamped to it with lead. He who would inquire of the god comes at evening and burns incense on the hearth, fills the lamp[s with oil, lights them, lays a coin of the country called a copper on the altar to the right of the image, and whispers his question, whatever it may be, into the ear of the god. Then he stops his ears and leaves the market-place, and when he is gone a little way outside he takes his hands from his ears, and whatever words he hears he regards as an oracle.” - William Halliday Greek Divination (1913)

Overhearing, eavesdropping – I have long thought that these are severely neglected topics in the philosophy of language and literary criticism.  In the Pharai example, the inquirer intentionally overhears. He or she intentionally appropriates the word spoken and applies it to the question asked. But of course that an utterance can be inhabited by a wholly other spirit than that in which it is spoken gives us an eery sense of how the gods operate in the world. There is a great deal of this in the modernist novel. To give just one example that occurs to me right now, this was the sort of thing Evelyn Waugh loved. In Black Mischief,  Basil Seal, making love to Prudence Samson, the daughter of the British envoy to Azania tells her she’s a grand girl and “I’d like to eat you up.” A phrase that the reader is not especially called upon to remember – it is all just lovey-dovey, innit?  Yet, in the final chapter, when Basil attends a dance of the Azanian tribe that has overthrown the Azanian emperor and captured his entourage, including Prudence, he  is treated to a feast at which he asks the headman where the white girl has gone, and the headman responds by rubbing his belly and saying “why here – you and I and the big chiefs have just eaten her.” 

This is the overheard word that is not overheard by the person who speaks it – it is rather commandeered. All of us have surely had those moments when, in the thick of some bad situation, we think back to something we have said without thinking that seems to point to the future mysteriously.

Such is the oracular power of words that are, so to speak, overheard by fate that I often, superstitiously, will knock on wood after making some decisive judgment, like, I am sure I don’t have COVID. What I am certain of has a tendency to vanish in the future. To leave the noise and voices of the market place and go “a little way outside” is the philosopher’s path – from Socrates to Descartes to Nietzsche – and it is only imperfectly imitated by the university. The philosopher, of course, wants to be a scientist, not a superstitious supplicant. Thus, no philosopher that I am aware of has written a tractate on eavesdropping, which is a pity – and a puzzle. Philosophy moved, at some mythical point,  from worshipping at the altar of Athena to worshipping at the altar of Hermes, who overhears and delights in being overheard. A trans deity.

And still a deity. The force of the oracular word has not been slain by the formula or set theory. On the contrary, one of the great evidences of social media is that some phrase, attached to a celebrated name – “said”, most often – is circulated over and over, to the evident satisfaction of the circulators. “God doesn’t play dice, said Einstein.” So, for instance,  we copy this and use it, often with illustrations, and it becomes a kind of evidence, and Einstein becomes a kind of oracle.

But what if the word overheard is not recognized by others as an oracle? What if charisma for me (remember, Weber’s image of charisma is exemplified in Jesus, the man who said: “I say unto you”; the man whose mission was, so to speak, captioned when, as described in Matthew 3:, And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased) is not for thee?  There is a saying for that: “They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.".

When we identify with the voice within we call it thinking. But what if we don’t identify, and the voice comes? Is it eavesdropping? Overhearing? An oracle? A daemon? Or schizophrenia? Myself, I think there is always a bit of schizophrenia, of another voice, lurking within, things "said" in the brain that we do not identify with, flashes in the brainpan, words that answer questions we did not know we were asking.