Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Choices

I've been thinking about the choice of philosophy, not of being chosen as a philosopher by the public faces but rather of choosing yourself as a philosopher; this was inspired by reading the interviews with Agnes Heller, that great thinker. Once you choose yourself as a philosopher it seems you've radically made one of the most terrible and fateful choices in your life, because this is one you are not allowed to regret. The modern version of the story might date back to Kant when he said he always returned to philosophy like one returns to a concubine after a quarrel. In a more general sense this spirit might be as old as the Greek world, as old as the first philosophers who burdened by the oligarchy and the different "official" religions sought to defy their pre-rational explanations of the world, in fact enacting the first and most important intellectual revolution of Western history.

No matter how longingly we turn towards Jerusalem, in choosing ourselves for philosophy we remain faithful to the spirit of the Classics; this desire to seek world explanations out of nothingness because of the simple craving to do so is an entirely Greek enterprise. Julius Guttman explained us how the Jewish people did not start to philosophize out of a desire to do so, they simply joined forced with the intellectual traditions of the time and their echoes can be hard to this very day, but philosophizing wasn't a natural alternative for the Jew like it was for the Greek. Absurd enough is that this paradox is not far from the paradox of freedom, one that not only has no solution but does not seek to find one.

Modernity endows us with a different motivation for philosophy - perhaps you can call it Angst, existential despair. Once all the traditions have been destructed and deconstructed to make space for freedom this has become the only foundation on which everything rests, but in itself freedom is not a foundation for anything, is not a goal. The paradoxicality of freedom has been in our minds since Kant, who first discovered the lethal powers of this force. The philosopher of modernity does not seek rational explanations for the world, since the truths inherent to it lie already shattered before our eyes; he seeks a language in which he can communicate and overcome his alienation, the philosopher seeks a language that will permit him to love directly, "language as the house of being" (Heidegger). The modern philosopher yearns for Socrates and Jesus, he yearns for communicability and from within his alienation any form of communicability is translation in itself. The idea was perhaps not new to Rosenzweig and Benjamin but they actualized the tension before us. For the Jewish philosopher there's obviously no natural home in the philosophical language, because it is not home for the Greek philosopher himself.

In Modernity as both philosophy and Judaism attempt to mend the world Athens and Jerusalem both share a sense of estrangement, they share an impossibility. To the same degree that Modernity allows the possibility of Judaism and philosophy to communicate, it also enhances the danger of the alienation from one another. Agnes always says that the modern imagination posseses a double-bind, in which lie its greatest potential and its danger. The fact that traditions no longer exist and that thinking is subject to the pull of the abyss that freedom leaves when turned into a foundation leaves Judaism and philosophy in an equally difficult position.

Were it not for Plato I think perhaps I should found distaste in philosophy since the very beginning. I did start choosing myself for philosophy as the product of an education, but rather of facing Heidegger both as a Jew and a reader of the Classical antiquity. It was Heidegger who convinced me of philosophy and with his hand I opened the gate of Athens, through which I entered as a visitor from Jerusalem - unknowingly. In my glorious return to the Jerusalem of the prophets I entered it as a Greek nihilist, as an stupefier of the human, trading the ethical for the sake of the beautiful as the supreme good. During my adolescence I read extensively Holderlin more than anybody else and wrote childish poems in which I embraced myself as the son of Endymion. In an unknowing way I was myself a critic of the historical imagination disattaching myself from it, in order to create a world of things, a technological one. In interpreting Holderlin I returned to Heidegger, criticizing the Romantics and naturally aiding Modernity along my threads.

In growing up I chose myself for philosophy, and only this year I came to comprehend my doubly-binded tragedy; I chose myself for "in-betweens", which could be translated into a logic of entirely human terms, but biblically speaking I made a choice for both solitude and loneliness both of which this era enabled in the modern mind. It is a choice of love, the work of love.

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