Saturday, March 17, 2007

Everything from this world

To Sandra

As I frame a statement of philosophy such as "I want everything from this world as it is", I am clearly engaging in an overaffirmation which reveals an abyss of anxiety; anxiety understood in the Christian sense - the net of insecurity and homelessness that only reveals its opposite, theology and metaphysics. The statement itself concerns more the desire than the world and it is in itself the summary of a very catastrophic and destinationless reading of history and story, of the history of our world-time and the story of our life-time. In the sight of the apparent and imminent Death-of-God which we both have experienced in the entanglements of our everyday, in the eyes of the everyman and the human despair before their bereftness from the powers that be, in the sight of this an abyss opens that reveals an extreme loneliness and incommunicability that troubled Jaspers more than anything else. The alienation is the major symptom of the Death-of-God, namely in the sense that our creatureliness as Sons of God holds no longer binding powers in the realm of the social. Thus, mass culture is the social sphere of the mass man, once the boundaries between the public eye and privacy have been uplifted and there's no other social sphere but the sphere of culture.

I don't want to develop this statement with a mystical undertone, which is what I've so far rejected in all philosophies that produce accounts of worldliness and the human person, be it in the form of theologies or of post-Enlightenment philosophies. The Zeitgeist of our age has never been so decissively distant from the conceptual foundations of our current "life together", namely the Revolutions of the 18th century. We stand at a juncture whereon the idea of Athens and Jerusalem has all the power necessary to become in fact even a momentum of historical significance, the Age of the Self. Henceforth my account of will-to-worldliness (contra the Nietzschean will-to-power as a throughway to the ethical life) is not very keen on Gnosis, on whose the political theologians of the 20th century described the irreparable collapse of Western humanity experienced not only in the advent of Nihilism and burgeois philosophies but in the political catastrophe of Germany and of the whole civilized world. I will explain why, and en tour de force contradict myself but only in this way I might be able to convey my thinking onto you, in a way that I could never do by speaking or in the plurality of people.

My philosophical project starts with Jacob Taubes and his book on the Political Theology of Paul; the grandiose beginning of the enterprise in the light of the philological sources and their interpretive hermeneutics is absolutely fabulous and in fact it is the beginning of a small school of hermeneutics of which I consider myself part of and thereof Eveline and Agnes some of their only exponents. Taubes is a Hegelian philosopher and an intellectual acquaintance of the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar. His program on the political theology starts off with Carl Schmitt and Benjamin and develops a ground-breaking development of negative Messianism which then turns to Nietzsche and finally to Freud for inspiration; the final product is a form of sooth-saying that flees from the finitude of the present not even into philosophy but into a complex world of psychoanalytical images, dreams, utopias and folk-tales. Then Taubes claims "I don't want any spiritual involvement with this world as it is". Taubes was afraid of the spiritual life because the dark times of his life rendered this an impossible project, his philosophical historiography was one of catastrophe and desire.

Taubes desires many a thing from the world and the gates of the garden are closed before him, and his philosophical refugee is a poorly illuminated room where there's no hope to be encountered in the factuality of the world, in its raw materials; yet Taubes doesn't give up hope and his hope encounters an uncanny moment in a world that can never be redeemed, that can never yield to its possibilities and that in fact has been damnated and forsaken; the cultural sphere of that world is that typical of the Fall of Man, Taubes' "humanitas" is the humanity of Cain, not the humanity of Kant. He experiences the distancing God of Kafka in the lovelessness of Occidental mankind, in the cultural pessimism of Europe and in the Augustinian love that is so strong as to go forth from the world and find its counterpart with death only. Taubes sickened of awaiting the world to come and his faith was that of the hope beyond hope; this world could never be redeemed as it is and therefore the memory of love lost all its possible value before the longing hope for love. The unity of human existence dialectically turned upside down, the Hegelian turn wherein the knowledge of the future is the only import left to philosophy and the cohesion of all pasts heading toward the future, the Occidental future, namely Modernity and the project of the modern state. This fine detail is actually Arendt's impressive critique of Hegel's "Will-to-History".

The rational Logic of Kant had replaced Metaphysics and Hegel as a Kantian philosopher exercises a historical critique of Kant's reason; this is unsurprising until you actually realize the extent of the problem, the Ancients had no concept of time and a problem of history, therefore "Being" solved the dilemma, in Hegel the critique of "Being" is solved with history; both cases are metaphysical devices from the sources of consciousness, empirical philosophies so to speak. In our age "Time" has become the new metaphysics (metaphysics of politics, of ethics, of art, of social philosophy), the grounding structure of human existence and Taubes knew this well, accordingly he opted for the sublimation that made him homely in Golgotha together with Hegel and in the Death of the Greek gods forsook this world. He didn't know the world, but he forsook what he knew as the world, -time. He forsook his own time and in this personal rejection of the world Taubes died in 1987, his eschatology was that of the world as a vale of tears, never recognized as a Jewish thinker because of being a Christian philosopher, never recognized as a Christian philosopher because of being a Jewish thinker.

I want to reverse this philosophical solution, I want to claim that I want spiritual involvement only with this world as it is. This is where your insights proof so important - it is not with this world as it is, which every philosopher as a critic of "Being" must have rescinded in a way. The models of political actions, the social dichotomies, the structures of ethics and religious life, the mass culture, the production and labor functionalities, the endless mourning of Postmodernity. There's no possible contemporary philosophy without the rejection of this, the rejection of this age-old failures and philosophy's innermost desire for "tikkun olam"; what the political life in the inexorable demands of the everyday could never offer, philosophy wants to offer the world a "chance" which philosophers didn't have. We know this sort of philosophy as "radicalism", the will to change the world with Marx and the will to change ourselves with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Therefore my statement is not an ethical solution or a life solution, it is a philosophical-only solution. Until you explain to me how it can be a desire for this world as it is on the condition that it is the best of all possible worlds speaking in the tricky language of contingencies; I couldn't bring myself to agree any more.

We should never seek the next world, for it lays either in a distant future or in a remote past and with the apparent Death-of-God the fear of hell and punishment has completely vanished from the political life of Western nations; the next world was never of so little importance as today and accordingly the affairs of men secondary to none; everything of this world happens in this world, unfolds, is historical in a way. We might as well try to bring this world into the next world but the legitimacy of this age-old desire culminates in Auschwitz and the Gulag. My project is more of bringing the next world into this world, and in the present time not of history but of individual men and women, of contingent men and women that transform the possibilities of their "un-choosenness" of the everyday (to use the language of Kierkegaard) into their only destinations, a Will-to-Choose. Hereby is where I find Levinas most engaging when he says that we can't bring the other world into this world, we can't bring the Messiah; yet we altogether can't furnish any proof for those untimely and unhistorical concepts (like all concepts are in practical philosophy unless we'd take Hegel seriously or review with almost phenomenological aggresivity our insitution of reason -Jaspers, Bergson, Cassirer). No less interesting is Heller when she says that the chair of the Messiah must never be occupied but it cannot be taken away either, one can't give up the hope even when every Messiah that will come with a name and proclaim himself to be such is a false Messiah; the Jewish tradition says there's a Messiah in every generation but that he remains in anonimity. And this emptiness is perhaps the only possibility of fullness available to the Moderns, this disappointment with Modernity is rooted in various things, firstly the high expectations before the first entirely human and this-worldly project and secondly it is as well this disappointment something that belongs to the structures of Modernity, it is part of its functioning and its survival. The pessimism is the self-critique that doesn't exist anywhere in theology. The melancholy, the dissidence and the rejection are in fact the only language available to us moderns for what Augustine called "the love of the world"; in which we're certainly damnated but insofar as the flames of hell no longer await the political man there's a certain rightfulness about being damnated, it isn't the fear of death what makes modern life so challenging, but rather the fear of life, Modernity lives on a dialectic of the ephemeral and that's why the philosopher insists on leaving his pegs to the world, to the common enterprise of a life lived in the plurality of people. Levinas finishes off by saying that we should do "works" in anycase even if the Messiah can't be brought by prayer or charity, this "works" to me means nothing but ethics.

Yet returning to Taubes and his "I want no spiritual involvement with this world as it is" despite myself I can only disagree with him philosophically, not from the perspective of my life-time story and the struggle against this principle is wherein my secular faith is at stake. This tension doesn't exist in the arts, the possibility of wanting everything from this world as it is, Katharina and me have discussed this at length. Philosophically there's always this utopian odour in such statement and I reject that, it is Pauline eschatology in reverse. I can only think of a solution for this tension enabling the possibility of thinking both the "climax" and the "anti-climax" (without pretenses to discipline the orgiastic moment of philosophy, like Hegel and Patocka do) with a concept of time and world that are both existential, individual instead of hierarchical and systematic as in the old theology; hereby I stumble upon the challenge of framing the ethics for such worldview. I can only argue at this point that the ethics can never be framed, stated, solved; everytime we stumble upon a troubling concept such as world, time, person, art, religion then it must be ethics the sole concern here and thus philosophy could altogether return to its origins, and perhaps even "home".

If at all possible I look for a Gnosis that involves a tremendous amount of faith and revelation but that contains no redemption. Faith without promises or compromises, the only form of faith that to me is relevant once I've experienced the Death-of-God and the loneliness of man in its puremost actuality: the image of our everyday life, yet I want to insist that I have no intention to "deify" the everyday into some sacred category like theology did with Being, Hegel with history and our philosophy with time. This faith I search is not Pauline, but rather the faith of Jesus (following Bultmann's account of his faith) and this can hardly exist without radicalism. I found this radicalism i the language of Hegel, in Kant and in the critique of all Occidental philosophy. The faith does exist in Agnes Heller but it fails to understand time properly in leaving it completely out of the questions about the moral personality. Ethics and redemption have no relationship in Agnes Heller, the radical opposite is true for me. My faith is the faith on the human person, it's a hope you might not like and you might not have, but you're not permitted to give it up altogether. Only in that sense the Messianism makes sense to me, becomes attractive even; not in the view of the "redeemed life" but in the constant passage of time that postpones the future redemption a day more everyday, being the Zeitgeist of our age closer and closer to it, this is the only prediction our philosophy might be able to make, and its only activity is moving things from one place into the other as I explained to you in another letter. Gegenwaritg zu sein, to use the expression of Jaspers.

Lastly the reality behind all this is that I share in my own personal life Taubes' most absolute rejection of this world as it is, and only in trying to reverse this situation and this feeling I can make myself at home in a world wherein I remain but a philosopher. Only in this process I can understand the human condition much more than I do in conversations, in letter to people I love or in the experience of art; I share with Benjamin and Taubes the "catastrophes of history" and somehow am beguiled by the lovelessness and the hopelessness available in the form of that Benjaminean infinite amount of hope but not for us, I feel this so strongly and only in speaking contra myself in these matters I can make sense of my life. Today as I spoke to my father on the phone we had one of those typical chit-chats about my life and then suddenly he asked me "Why can't you have a normal boyfriend? Normal friends? Lead a normal life for God's sake?" and unsurprisingly enough I had very little to back my arguments with, the answers to those questions I can produce only in philosophy, because it is the only language available I found to make my protest heard, my protest of the everyday which I so forcefully reject. My melancholy is my experience of that philosophical truth, of the thrownness and the bewilderment before the raw materials of existence, it is the only happiness available to me from within the womb of my struggles, of my failures and my tragic sense is the counterpart of the Protestant happiness that my childhood lived through. I truly feel this is a loveless and Godless world, but I refuse to believe it, I entirely refuse to believe it and in those dark moments when the chips are down and I experience the failures of wisdom, love and life only philosophy and the figure of the Occident come to my relief. My faith is one of un-faith, and its language very southern Germanic and urgent, its symbols are all Jewish and its representation is a form of truth that blurs the limits of philosophy and life and that wouldn't be possible without the companionship of those other loners thinking out there, only in their companionship I can embrace and live that humanitas for which philosophy is my only language, and my only protest.

Ari