Just one step from waste matter, the lowest of the low, an embodiment of falsehood and vanity, the wig has never belonged in the sphere of thought. As with clothing and other trivialities—daily life, for instance—anything branded as banal is of no concern to the philosopher, or not at least to the philosopher who develops his ideas in the vast empire of the footnote on a passage from Plato, the coordinates of which are fixed by immutability and permanence. An absurdity in comparison with the problem of Being, contingent and insignificant in the face of need, doubly contemptible for its seductive dimension and perceptible impurity, hair has no place in the hierarchy of illustrious topics, and much less the wig, which, as a simulacrum, fluttering in the wind far removed from the duty of imitation, would almost seem to flaunt its unreality.
But there was a time when those philosophers intolerant of all things hirsute, those minds resistant to the smaller things in life that are contaminated by non-being, sheltered under exuberant, well-groomed wigs; two long centuries during which the elevated discourse of philosophy, staunch expurgator of the trivial, found the ritual of donning another’s hair essential. Why did none of those male philosophers give a second thought to the perturbing organic mass that crowned their heads each morning? Had the infamy of existence and the degradation of the ordinary reached such extremes as to leave no room for questions about that hairy architecture, about that mammalian headwear that gazed back at them from the mirror on a daily basis?
If a meeting of philosophers had been organized in classical antiquity, the most celebrated of them—beginning with Socrates and Diogenes—would have proudly exhibited a smooth forehead, brilliant in every sense of the word. Despite the fact that Plato was only able to display a latent receding hairline, and that Aristotle, Epicurus, Heraclitus and Parmenides all had quite flourishing tresses, in the archetypal image the Greek thinker is bald as a coot with a thick compensatory beard, but devoid of the impetuosity of youth. That is the picture that Synesius, “the most valiant of bald men,” records and transmits in his In Praise of Baldness, in part to do justice to his own devastated scalp, but also to stress that hair—that animal accident, that unpredictable, superfluous attribute—has nothing in common with the heights of abstraction. If his humorous text is to be believed, the majority of classical philosophers lived in that state of asymmetry, that tension between “barren pate” and “populated understanding.”
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