German Christian-Jewish Association
Forum on Politics & Society
Dr. Rev. Petra Heldt
The Spell of Plato
To Eveline Goodman-Thau
"fuer alle nicht im Exil und nicht zuhause"
The Spell of Plato is one of those famous kernels of social theory brought to us by Karl Popper in his book "The Open Society and Its Enemies"; the spell of Plato is a call for a democratic world summoning Socratic discussions and their interlocutors, which has been the occidental tradition of politics for nearly twenty-five centuries. The fact that I've been kindly invited by the Theological Research Fraternity in Israel, gives me some hope that the spell of Plato still holds true for many of us but by no means all. Somehow else the American novelist Mary McCarthy wrote in the 1960's that this philosophizing had a very tyrannical and non-democratic nature for whenever you teach or even speak philosophy you are already preaching a common world; not the common world of senses and bodily experience but a common world in which the philosopher conducts experiments: his mind. It becomes problematic though, when philosophy turns into a cult with initiates and followers as it was the case with Neo-Platonism.
Hannah Arendt would have said this is the tyrannical aspect of reason that had been ever-present in political philosophy and any sort of instruction that calls us "to do the right thing". The trial of Socrates might have been indeed one of the most important political events for the 20th century; blind adherence to the laws of the state to safeguard democracy and the Polis from the abyss of mythologies and pre-rational storytelling, it was Jaspers who remarked only after the screen of mist of pre-rational thought had dissipated we could do philosophy with Plato and since Plato. Political philosophies are indeed moral philosophies and limited spherical ethics attempting to tackle the age-old problem of human duality between thought and action; some of these philosophies might speak about the state, the citizen, denizen or even about the human personality.
Nonetheless as far as we have lived in a world that Rosenzweig would call "post-Hegel natum" our philosophies might never again aim at completeness or at reason as the only source of our morality of whichever kind it might be. We can only attempt our best at providing descriptions for some of the worldly artifacts of importance second to none and only then achieve at a system that embraces it all; this has become barely possible in a world that houses as many artifacts as it does ideas and dwellers. Perhaps a thorough understanding of the world had been available to the Jewish sages and also to some of the Church fathers only on account that the world was ever-so-great and indestructible; a certain Lutheran hymn of epiphany speaks about that "world that Christian or unchristian is so totally indestructible". Not so in 2006.
The world of today has become increasingly small yet impossible to capsule, an entropy of knowledge, information and individual reasoning from which one could find anything resembling truth or real presences from old sentences, it is all a matter of the most meaningful representations and projections; not of the most truthful images. This is the legacy of Modernity. Even when this could only narrowly apply to Western men and women of the contingent kind, those who by applying to themselves Apollo's dictum "know thyself" are rather implying a "choose yourself". In choosing yourself you create a paradox because choosing becomes the only way to become what you really are, how can you choose yourself then? These are the men I would like to address tonight, irrespective of Judaism despite Christianity or Christianity qua Judaism.
As a Jew it is notwithstanding puzzling to be summoned to speak in Jerusalem from all places about the rise of political Neo-Nazism in the Federal Republic of Germany; country I do not live in, am not a national of and to which I am only related by accidents of fate, intellect and emotions. I am not a historian of political ideas or a political scientist therefore I shall not dare to address poignant questions on the political life of the young German republic yet old, but will limit myself to speak about the topic I know best and in which I regard myself to contribute in a very personal way: The Structures of Modernity. In this spirit I will adopt a universal perspective with a faith of the sociological kind with little to do with the world of Jewish and Christian world-views yet I will humanly resign myself to dwell on the tension between my universal ideas and my particularity as a "mens generis" as you can see, a Jew as you well know and as an outsider to both the English and the German language as you can no doubt hear. This poignant distinction I owe to a philosopher I will return to many times in the course of this presentation.
Let me start speaking about the Modern world: We all know what this is but few of us have asked the question of what it implicates; the modern world is one and the only of all possible worlds based entirely on freedom yet this freedom cannot become a foundation for anything since it shares a sense of emptiness parallel to no other. This idea is anything but new and has been pondered by the public since Hegel, whether you were acquainted with this great philosopher or not. It was him who also remarked that the modern world is the only world that cannot be destroyed because it is thoroughly empty. At that point he called himself the last philosopher and called for the end of history. Hegel solved this problem of the end of history by making this world-history itself the history of intellect, morals, philosophy, etc. and creating what we know today as "the world spirit". His philosophy cannot be overcome, it can only be discussed...
No philosophy can be ever falsified like the sciences, it is true logically and is only meant to be part of a world-building discussion as Lessing would put it drawing from Augustine's famous phrase "In the same sense that these things are all true, it is for the same reason that they are all false". Yet the second part of the Hegelian spell remained untold until Auschwitz: This modern world is the only that cannot be destroyed since it's empty, it's true; yet everything inside it can indeed be easily destroyed, including the human world. The modern world is an idea, no more than that, an illusion. But as George Steiner remarked is the most authentic and revolutionary intellectual idea in the whole of Western history; the divorce between the world and the words. This could be also referred to as the metaphysical "rebellion" of Albert Camus, who being the first existentialist in the professional sense of the word spoke already in his time of destruction, abyss, suicide, totalitarianism, terrorism. He was forerun by Schelling who as early as 1850 said "Once you begin with conceptual content divorced from existence, you discover with consternation after an interval of intoxication that you have no vessel to contain this content", this was his attack on Hegel.
Modernity is an illusion but it is this illusion itself what creates it: The denial of having any chains to our past or in the words of Rousseau: "Man is born free and he remains in chains", idea which was familiar to any of the great thinkers from Parmenides to Kafka. It was this modernity the only possible social arrangement that permitted the emancipation of the Jews and that makes it possible for me to face this Christian audience with all the dignity my position entitles, it also made possible the enactment of a democratic government in Germany and that Germans and Jews can discuss these matters of political importance today. At the same time it made possible Auschwitz and this is true in the historical sense - no philosophizing required here. The deliverance from chains threw us outright into a very seldom form of nothingness; the early Biblical humanist a-la-Eramus spoke about how only one can provide himself with meaning. This meaning can still today be found in love, in theology, in philosophy or in simple unreflected faith; yet it can be also found in death, murder and extermination.
Since I am as well an outright defender of this modern social arrangement the melodramatic pessimism is not in place, I am only stating the obvious. Not defending modernity means doing away with Hitler and others of his kind, but also doing away with democracy, freedom of speech, individuality and tension. I do not want to do away with the later so I have to tackle with the former. Not philosophically like the scholastic tradition tackled with evil, but politically. I cannot personally tackle with it politically as a citizen of the world - concept that can only make one burst in hysterical laughter, I have to tackle with it according to the facts of my life, of my everyday life for which my philosophical background might be as useless as it was for Benjamine Fondane, pupil of the great Lev Shestov who despite his tutelage under one of the most important philosophers could only find his way to Birkenau. At about the same time the literati Roman Rolland wrote to his friend Stefan Zweig "art can provide us consolation as individuals, but it is powerless before reality".
It is now an everyday phenomenon to speak about "world-peace", universal love, freedom, deliverance and at the same time ignore altogether the Nazi past of the Germans. The Jewish thinker Gillian Rose returns to the spell of Plato: "To Plato, doing wrong could only occur if one lacked knowledge of what was right - one could not intend wrong; to Aristotle, it was possible to intend and act rightly but unwittingly to incur wrong - a dilemma, but not one of malicious foresight. To modernity this dilemma of contingency acquires a systemtic twist: for, it is possible to mean well, to be caring and kind, loving one's neighbour as oneself, yet to be complicit in the corruption and violence of social institutions. Furthermore, this predicament may not correspond to, and maybe not be represented by, any available politics or knowledge."
I will never be able to agree with the functionalist view that what matters about the Shoah is not who made it possible but how; as an intellectual I am obviously parting from theoretical assumptions and dealing on the how, but as a person I can only think about the who. It is impossible to reconcile with this and who if not Milan Kundera to phrase it so accurately: "This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore cynically permitted". For the sake of my moral sanity I cannot reconcile with this tragic past; at the same time one can always have the sociological faith of Agnes Heller and return to Plato again, "It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong". This is not so politically and the means have been created to assure one's world-survival. I have chosen myself as a person and as long as this is this choice cannot be for anything other than being a good person. This is the legacy of Kierkegaard in our times best represented by Weber and Heller.
It is the democratic society the one that provided Hitler and others with the tools they could make use of to eliminate human tensions and promise a paradise on earth which necessitates by proxy the elimination of some undesirable elements, among them always the Jews. I do not want to destroy this possibilities because in doing so I would destroy democracy altogether and engage in some sort of neo-liberal Stalinism not alien to certain political circles today. That trend is obviously patterned into the tradition and relying on Greek sources itself; the problem is that the Greek model of democracy might work very well for the upper classes and elite, but not so for most of us who would see ourselves back in Athens under the yoke of being slaves, women and foreigners. A democratic model of the modern West can rely on Greek sources only hermeneutically, not historically; in doing so it is faithful to modernity. Totalitarianism did not come willy-nilly from nowhere, it took place right at the center of modern democratic imagination and that is why it remains an entirely modern phenomenon without parallels in the pre-modern arrangements; only inspiration.
For this very reason together with its messianic elements, Totalitarianism remains a political model in our days and by no means an outdated one. I am not expressing that the German National Party is a totalitarian party but historically it holds a bind within and alongside modern forms of totalitarian government. In a democratic country all forms of political expression must be tolerated, this is almost a statement of faith. I am not advocating the churches and religious leaders not to oppose vehemently the rise of Fascism in our days, I am rather asking that this should be done by means other than violence and totalitarianism.
This shall bring one to have second thoughts about the war in Iraq and Fukuyama's recent recanting of his neo-conservative views, this shall not be discussed here but only stated that the form of totalitarianism found down there (which in practice means down here) is no different from the one that found its place among the Germans more than half a century ago. No doubt Hitler had sought shelter beneath the Greek political tradition no less than we do, present-day Israelis and Germans. But let us not fall into the trap of German Idealism by turning our modes of thinking into imaginary flights from reality into a "homeland" for centuries arid and deserted. Remember the Biblical tradition of interpretation that explains how the Flood was brought about by violence of one man against the other, more than any other form of moral corruption. Violence is the highest form of moral corruption and in the world where as Foucault remarked the good-bad-evil has been replaced by normal-abnormal-pathological under the auspices of a triumphant science-based world-view, this is always possible and never labeled as "bad" or "evil", simply slightly abnormal and quite indifferent to any other possible solution. As soon as we have enacted a division of labour that is functional rather than social we have also established functional categories of judgement; because I support the functional division of labour I do not want to eliminate this problem, I want to deal with it.
This could be understood as a very light and sophisticated form of moral and political appeasement but it is not. The German National Party must be permitted but it cannot be left alone to solve the problems of German society just as Modernity cannot be left alone to run its course, because otherwise its discontent that produces it anew it will never cease and we will find ourselves experiencing this form of painful modernity until the very end of times; which if it will arrive at all will find no one on the face of the earth. This is my only thesis: Modernity in so far as it cannot be destroyed if it is left alone will never cease from existing in such a somber and discreet way as it does today. An independent modernity is able to create firstly a theory of morals and emotions for modernity which would be by no means human (since it would be technology-based) and by doing so would eliminate the tension between word and world; it could be said then Modernity IS overcome; but only by throwing us into the abyss from whence it sprang, not too different from the speechless world of Auschwitz. Secondly whatever will follow Modernity will never be the pre-modern arrangement, never. That possibility is shun forever.
The only sociological faith that Modernity can embrace is responsibility of the moral kind; with a departure point in the human person and building up through differentiated social clusters and winding up finally in a responsible world that could be self-sustainable. It is the Germans who must solve their political and social problems, not a German ideology among many. The moral philosophy of the modern world cannot be a moral philosophy of philosophy but a moral philosophy out of human sources for the use of human culture, this idea is as old as Herman Cohen and Ernst Cassirer. Culture in fact (not the culture of the production stage but the discussions on plays, movies, novels, etc) is the only bond we have left with each other in the extreme alienation that our world dwells at. It can be our only salvage, not in producing salvation or redemption (for who would like a world like this redeemed after all?) but in producing safeguards not from God or Lucifer or even technology, but from ourselves!
The parties cannot be ignored or even worse supressed. They must be dealt with. Their existence should be only the symbol of a critical democracy; at the same time that the same democracy than enabled the means for its existence must also enable the means for its control, meaning that democracy is based on the struggle between freedom and equality in the Kantian sense; this struggle can be overcome to some extent as the American political discourse has shown, yet it is clear to me this model is not applicable to Germany, the struggle can simply be maintained under observation so that its course will not break free into a pseudo-existentialist arbitrariness as in the Heideggerian model. Too much freedom for the German National Party risks our equality before the law with them and too much equality risks our freedom alongside them. At this point we shall speak as well briefly about the Law; our moral maxims cannot be understood as individual understandings, they must become axiomatic and unanimously accepted by all, they cannot be even thought about, they are taken for the granted. The laws that ensure world-sustainability and responsibility should become our confession of faith because ever since Plato they cannot be rationally proven. You could even call, if you wish, my approach, "theology of world-responsibility".
This is the only way in which we can protect ourselves. This solution is only temporary for we can't politicize in moral terms a person or a nation's heart, they are free to think and believe anything they want but their freedoms cannot be let free to act as they wish. It is part of the structure of modernity to understand that our social arrangement altogether with its laws and maxims and creeds is merely temporary. Modernity does not grant sureness of the self, certainly not of the nation. We are living under the spell of certain world-pictures we have ourselves created, they are not harmful in the sense that they're not absolutely true, they can only become meaningful.
It is no longer the question of mythology against rationality that we had in the Marxist system, for as Cassirer pointed out it was in the age of reason that a mythology from the sources of reason created the ground for modern fundamentalism and its motivation lies therein at the core of modern existential frustration, that is at the same time the most powerful driving force for creativity and plasticity in everyday life; we are not perfectly dovetailed individuals - if we were, we had become already one-dimensional therefore free of fear and undoubtedly uninterested in the toil of everyday life, no one would write poetry or read theology and any criticism would be as dumbfounded as the conversion of the Jews is for contemporary theology.
Neo-Nazis cannot be fought against with theology or with moral philosophies, because while we ponder in our clusters they act politically in everyday life; therefore it is that precisely we are called for, to act politically in everyday life as the natural consequence of our thoughts. If you choose yourself for thinking then it must mean you also choose yourself for thinking of the good. Choosing yourself for thinking of the bad means choosing a sophistication that only leads to irresponsibility and backwardness. Backwardness is a fact of the world, people are by no means generally modern or contingent, only some of us. If you choose yourself for the care of the world it must mean you cannot hold this to be acted politically by murder or oppression.
There is no other option to prevent radical evil from dehumanizing society, than to choose yourself to think good. From the viewpoint of practical reason choosing yourself for thinking of the bad is consequentially wrong for others as soon as you act in the world; therefore one must think that even though it is an option, this option should not be an option. I do not uphold this position because I find it to be the best or even rational, I uphold this position because it seems to me up to this point the only sustainable one and the ground of my sociological faith. We can have no answers on whether the NPD will succeed in bringing Hitler back or simply caring on what is important for German society, we can only ponder on whether they represent a significant threat to our society and whenever that will come about they should be fought against under the spell of democracy and the tools available legally to punish potential murderers for example, just as these selfsame tools have been used to enable their existence.
I do not know if the Green Party of the Christian Democrats can be dangerous for my existence in democratic societies, it is simply that they do not have historical antecedents of the kind we discussed above here, perhaps the NPD will just go into history as an attempt to a very morally-minded right-wing party, but it is for some reason my fear that this is not very feasible. Yet despite my gut feeling I shall not pass judgement so early in their debut as a convention-holding party. If for any reason at all the Nazi past of Germany should suffice as a reason to watch them carefully. They might offer radical alternatives to modern problems and from within the boredom inherent to modern liberal ideology we are in strait needs for radical thought, but the "good" of modernity has shown that this radicalism can be sought for also in many place else. We shall never get rid of extreme and fundamentalist ideas, it is part of the structure of modernity, but nonetheless they can be effectively controlled by democratic means. Once the democratic ways have been broken and revolution ensues then it is a totally different discussion the one to hold on how to protect one's values, yet it is my feeling that the time is not ripe for that still. But it might happen yet only following the demise anew of the democratic channels which the history of 20th century revolutionary movements has shown to be possible. Modernity allows this possibility therefore we are compelled to "choose" the other possibilities that modernity also offers.
An arrangement so new and radically challenging like modernity does not admit of prophets, it can only harbor social and political theoreticians, some poets and with luck a couple of good theologians. In this sense no one can foresee whether it will survive no matter how much speculation there is on this matter; it is difficult to assure the survival of an arrangement with so little spirituality and carrying a death-wish at the very spiritual center of it, yet it does not mean it will not survive by its own means which it now has. Agnes Heller said once that whenever you choose yourself for philosophy you are as good a philosopher as you can ever be; you can learn more, go through the material, prepare lectures, progress, yet you cannot improve because what primarily matters is the choice.
I would like to interpret this Kierkegaardism as one of the pillars of the Protestation that was midwife to Modernity in two accounts: Firstly that it was this Protestation what made me a man of Modernity, but it was difficult to imagine when I first embraced it how often this Protestation would send me back to Judaism and Christianity through the backdoor; secondly that this could be applied as well to human persons who chose thinking of the good and therefore acting the good: Once you choose yourself for the good you are as good a person as you can ever become even though you can progress, personally you cannot improve because it would diminish your humanity.
Your statement of faith could be: Because I chose myself for the good as there were no other practical options available I am good and therefore I am responsible for the world at any rate. I could go as far as betraying Descartes' "I think therefore I am" in saying that the being is already an implicit condition (not a value) as in the Biblical narrative of the Old Testament, accordingly my Existentialism would be phrased thus "I think therefore I act". In being a contingent person this choice is irreversible, only there it can gain a theological dimension of sorts. If you have chosen yourself for the good it means you fall under the spell of Plato in that "it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong", but if they wrong your world it does not mean you cannot seek to defend it but no nations or systems can do this. The personal choice is what is at stake, in 1933 and in 2006. "I have set the heaven and earth as witnesses that I have given you a choice, choose life so that you and your children might live". Just like only individual people could save individual Jews in WWII only individual people can fight individual threats, globality at times is only the catch-name for irresponsibility.
"The modern equivalent of repentance is the responsible use of power" -Harvey Cox.
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