This essay is dedicated to my friends Katharina Olschbaur and Felipe Fergusson in deepest gratitude
“The Silent Years”
An experimental essay on God and history
By Arie Akermann-Amaya
“Do you know then, -she interrogated me, do you know
then what you yearn for, what is missing in you, what you
seek like an Alpheus his Arethusa, over what are you so
sad with such sadness? It is not about the years that
passed, one could never say that, or about what happened
there or what is happening here, it is but about what there
is in you, the problem is in you. What you look for is a
time more beautiful than this. Only that new world which
is old because there you were with your beloved friends
in that world”. –Friedrich Hölderlin, “Hyperion”.
O
ften would Virginia Woolf begin one of her many letters with a statement of the kind “and yet one night alone, but never in peace” no less than would Ingeborg Bachmann finish a certain less known poem with “always night and never day”, though be this inappropriate for a conscious essay writer or a would-be at least, this is not entirely unlikely for someone who always meant to write his essays to somebody and in the present tense –in the form of an unfinished conversation, a foul play convincing enough to want to copycat the Bible, and that is somewhat like sending off a letter, in which case needless to say the opening statement could not hold out of uttering something so generally universal as to render writing unnecessary. This is not just a common everyday scenario of speaking “untruths”, but as in the obvious business of religion and faith, the content of these truths no more often sheds an immediate light than it does obscure its own subject matter so that the truth and of a lone individual might never hold as a testimony not even at heaven’s court except at the fulfillment of the promise that it shares the knowledge necessary to foster an understanding of something albeit it constitutes in itself by no means the target hypotheses, no less than what is achieved by someone telling any good story, Joyce and Homer or any one journal from a certain forgotten war.
The root of the matter lies precisely in that this understanding belongs to the kind that prevents men from gathering conclusions, as is paradoxically the nature of all understanding of truth. The statements of great poets are never accused of lacking truth for themselves or in-themselves as Hegel would have it, it is just that they in their category of people have been granted permission to read into the spirit of any age they happen to belong to and therefore produce expressions of universal feelings – production which sadly is not our domain as people of flesh and bone and for whom these generalities are likelier to pass unnoticed in their obviousness. For this very reason we are usually not given licenses for universal enterprises –a rather complex problem in the arena of philosophical thought as we are obligated to leave the business of philosophy when we have ceased to wonder, and are henceforth obligated at least in the world of prosaic intellectual production to recreate the world by means of our knowledge, of our stories or a combination of both; this being said counter to the theory that runs around there with the everyman since Hegel that the world is no longer poetic but entirely prosaic and disenchanted, what might as well mean that this problem of not having license to be the spokesman of mankind could be a lawsuit filed against every denizen of this world even beyond the rare and rather corky crowd of intellectuals, if there be any around still. This could be filed even against modern poets too.
In this state of affairs, producing a work of our own is the only redeemable accruing for immortality available nowadays that heroes have been out of business for just too long and their darling Gods have seemly closed down their temples for long-term renovations; at this a certain Israeli author mentioned in his memoirs that it would be better to be a book than a writer, because writers are easily done with but books are bound to survive by chance somewhere even the fiercest of fires. There are two arguments counter to this: Firstly, work or production, albeit not necessary for survival (what is fundamental for the survival of the species is the activity of labor or better said, the production of the means necessary for survival only) but for permanence in this world and therefore for transcending through it, for reaching beyond the limits of the world imposed by nature and somehow overcome them (that is, to create a history for oneself) is by no means the most fundamental activity of man, whilst neither survival would be at the basic ontological level. Production in any form is only a partial activity, whereas acting and thinking constitute life in its entirety. Secondly, said in all honesty immortality is perhaps the least of all the political and economical preoccupations in the upheaval of our times and I should even dare go further to say that the true nature of those preoccupations (precisely because they are literally previous to action and not yet “occupations”) remains unknown to us as we wander aloof in the dark.
In this same spirit, a lot of the illuminati and Enlightened of our times and even from times brighter and prettier have misidentified the “darkness” we walk within with other phenomena such as poverty and strife, environmental devastation and hunger, or the greatest Hollywood actress of our times – forced migrations and enforced emigration. These things are most definitely a fact of our world and not just one mere topic of conversation, so that as facts they do not constitute a mere situation “we happen to be in” in any sense whatsoever, so that as such our entire life is surrounded by them and all common talk about eradicating these “evils” as they are portrayed in the multimillion-dollar-enterprise of mass media is something as futile as the medieval discussions about the body of the eternal God, two laconically contradictory lexemes. Whatever had been once the domain and province of the painter and bard to represent has been nowadays entrusted to the news broadcaster, yet if these facts by themselves were the entirety of the “darkness” then of course no painting or poem would be gifted enough for representing anything – all speech and images would be very much alike, pegs wandering in the silence of dark canvas and empty pages and thus rendered useless. Darkness means for human production what mortality does for philosophy or genesis for politics: The palette of colors.
The theories that rose with the modern world and that constitute it can explain away the “lies” and “deceptions” that led to this “darkness” and this is as a matter of fact a concept far more comprehensive than speaking of “a bad year of famine in Egypt”. Many from among the experts and professional diagnosed the dark times in their heyday with surgical precision; Marx for example was truly concerned with the role that the capital and exploitation of the labor force played in all historical momentum, not satisfied at that he proceeded further to discover the “rules” that govern the structure in order to “make aright” the “wrongdoing” and “one beautiful day” to truly humanize the world before the astonished eyes of mankind; and of course ran once this beautiful day which lasted for so long in the disguise of an extended night when the mad thirst of freedom ran free nightly and ransacked the home of the everyman and prevented him from seeing the sun, quite the opposite of what Hesiod predicted for the children born in the end of times. This metaphor wishes by no means to hide what extermination camps were and are: The funny and happiest final stations of freedom, the glad tidings from heavens that were to bring the darkness on earth to an end and not even from above falling down like the angels of John’s eschatology but elevating the whole world in a worldview so religious as to mock religion, and therefore end the horrible cycles of labor, production, exploitation and so on. The lies and deceptions have little if anything at all to do with the darkness, or at least no more than they have to do with the fact of human existence on earth. Darkness is more akin to what Sophocles felt in the play of his old age quoting a poet from the archaic times, “not to be born is the greatest gift, but once it has happened – that you were born, the best is to return whence you came from as swiftly as possible”, tantamount to the Hebrew prophets that calmly awaited for their deaths in their beds without much of a haste or even others a little less patient like the authors of the Proverbs and the Psalms.
To be clear a lot of commentary is needed, first that Marx or Hegel did not discover the dark nor were the poets of the universal, neither did they murder anybody or are faulty for the great catastrophes of our age (and saying this might be more dangerous than it is stupid, the silly talk about the “tradition that gave us Auschwitz as a grand finale”), no ideology can be found universally guilty for anything since it is only individual people who are to be found individually guilty for any action at all or for non-action, both of which our modern legal systems have sometimes framed in the category of crimes –individual commission and individual omission. To be even clearer, upon reflection it surfaces that there is not any statement here or elsewhere that I am aware of where it is explicitly stated foolproof that freedom is not good or that darkness is not bad; but it is sustained by all post-metaphysical thought that the great narratives of history are no longer binding (perhaps poetry might be the last narrative to be called in any way a philosophy of history and at that with reservation) because it is the personal story remembered by a community what finally constitutes the original and reliable tissue of history even in the light of national consciousness of histories. Stories are told too, so runs one that a certain Bolshevik revolutionary came to the home of an intellectual and gun-pointed at him with the demand to join Moscow’s regime and this intellectual in turn demanded askance a reasoning from his captor, to which the villain responded that he had been obligated to make the intellectual free because he was unable to achieve it on his own merit. The problem with the great narrators of history is that they have never entrusted anything to everyday people but to grand heroes and when grand heroes are no longer that, they never tend to become everyday people but grand villains instead.
The beautiful gospel here for us is that sadly freedom, just like philosophy and life (three words analogous and only seldom sympathetic to one another) cannot be taught or learnt ever by anybody. There are schools of thought, lifestyles and models of freedom –see the American constitution and the many French republics, but this is something for which there is no possible learning, and two statements support my idea: First that putting a banister between thinking and living is an impractical pleonasm and not just a terrorist tool of the Cartesians, second (the most important) is that once you have chosen yourself as a philosopher (and perhaps this applies only to philosophy – what I do) you are as good a philosopher as you could ever be; you can learn more, be a runaway through the material, give conferences and teach lectures, but you never improve upon the decision – the decision to be a philosopher makes you as good a philosopher as you could ever become. The same decision that makes you free or alive, that is in a dynamic social arrangements like ours, for nothing could run more counter to the opinion of Greek citizens and feudal lords. Of course this all relies upon the tissue of contingency against teleology, but that is a subject to be touched upon later on.
Freedom and darkness become here coeval in that they constitute the two most frustrated promises of the modern age; darkness because the modern world would release us from it in the city without God (the City of God had been only a capitol of suffering in the middle of the desert like the early Fathers would have it lovable) and freedom because it was freedom who would carry out the assignment in the modern age for man, the freedom that would absolutely conquer the natural world and alas did not. Darkness could not absolutely vanish because it would make humanity vanish withal and freedom could not absolutely take over because otherwise the open space between neighbor and neighbor would be impossible to bridge, thus we would be so very unchristian and unworldly, -barbarians. Modernity left too many unfulfilled promises because it is part and parcel of its functioning; disappointing belongs to its dynamic as the cast that protects a man-made-only world – what could allegedly separate this world in whatever form from God’s if not disappointment. We were unable to conquer the whole world (i.e. nature) because once we ventured into the universe, the space to colonize happened to be millions of times larger that had been ever imagined by the medieval scientists in their playful count of starts, conquering the world through the eye of Columbus was feasible, but from Copernicus’ was not – needless to remember the fact that the full conquest of the living space of nature could mean nothing but the shattering of the human condition and the end of the condition of labor – the most fundamental assumption for the survival of the species.
By reaching out to the universe barehanded we understood finally the Biblical simile appearing early in the Book of Genesis where it is spoken about the giants whose heads reached as far as the top of the skies –a strange species watched over with curiosity by the mortals descending from Adam and Eve and rarely mentioned only once in the canon; we were those giants until we reached the universe, and the great ideals of humanity cultivated by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were cruelly shattered as we diminished our own stature to the point of becoming invisible –the paraphrase of Kafka, “he was commanded to find the Archimedean point only under the condition that he shall use it against himself”. Not everything here is the damnation of purgatory or the twilight of poets, for once bereft of our original stature in the creation the wonder before the giants was to become the rare curiosity that did away with Aristotelian and medieval science (the last possible secure dwelling for men, -eternal immanence) and threw a hand into the outer space, the major enterprise of mankind as a whole but perhaps the very worst and greatest as if a great tragedian wrote it together with Adorno. The consolation of Lessing is left still when he wrote that had God consulted him over choosing the right hand with all the truth or the left hand with not only the lack of truth but an unquenchable thirst to obtain in, he chose but over the left hand because the truth belonged to God alone. So far so pretty, but shall not suffice for those thrown into the precipice.
The precipice and the darkness are analogous in that they open the same gate or in words of Gillian Rose “keep your mind in hell and despair not” but the precipice, the deep abyss of our times contains facts that albeit inseparable from humanity such as the extermination camps and other no-return points of history are not as wholly defined as the darkness. Contemporary philosophy has become all too engaged with the idle talk prompted by the field of Holocaust studies about the “dark times” and “the end of philosophy” missing a point completely; as if those terrible facts of history would constitute in their terms a philosophical history or a philosophy of history for the man of the world without traditions for a stronghold (and therefore a grand narrative for times without grand anything but some lone poets). We are definitely thrown into that abyss that without us being much aware built the walls that inextricably separate one age from another, but this is not the darkness that I mean to handle because history seen as a pathway of mankind is only a little peg in the dark alley.
New paths have opened in the footsteps of philosophical thinking that are neither original nor new but do reveal something often elusive to the naked eye and it is the notion of history as the totality of the limits set off by the interplay between the world of thought and the arena of actuality. There are no dark times as we learnt them because firstly time is an absolute horizon to exist therein and not a mere chronological measurement, and second the dark has been there since the creation, since the night was up there even before the day, it is the tiles on top of which the carpet of happy lives settles. So runs the saying in popular culture that a man never returns home from the war because his innocence and the basic grounds on which his values were oriented in the world became shattered in the battlefield; the important lesson here is that there are many wars to be waged and that there is a war with oneself too, sadly noticeable since the greatest philosophical discovery of the modern age, -the Self (and the true opposite of Christ, a rather vacuous friend this self thing). Regardless the wars, there is no homecoming and there is no homecoming even to oneself precisely because living in the world is very different from occupying a place on earth.
The world is meant here as the totality of the relationships between thinking beings, the bonds between neighbors that receive actuality only in their temporality. The natural world or earth has little involvement with the above because the earth as the Greeks found it is eternal and eternity is not a temporal tense because eternity is really a very long time and since time is built not of the continuity of the future but in fragments of the present, time is necessarily a series of intervals in which existence is possible, -existing totally, that is, indefinitely over continuous time is as paradoxical as living forever, who could bear it?. The fragility of human bonds is precisely the foundational stone of our humanity and making the bonds eternal or bulletproof is tantamount to shattering them. There is no home in the world for man because the world is not a home but a relationship and the earth is not a human place, something that religion did know thousands of years (despite the obvious chasm between morality and religion, between divinity and the forces of nature) before modern philosophy discovered the independence of the nature from the man-made world. This is why the homecoming is never happy for humanity, a homecoming like the Enlightenment and freedom for example. We have been always in the dark, and that is the only assurance of our happiness, -a rather fragile one. The only home for man is the fragile bonds of human relationships, the there-ness of being with others and this obviously inextricably intertwinted with the most worldless of feelings, -love, or perhaps should we say “earthless”? Could a something that shatters the space between people take away not only the human condition of being earth-bound but also the social world? This is a question that remains as open today as it does in the old theology but it is a question by no means political.
The problem faced here today is that we have come to understand the dark as a lethargic silence like that present over graveyards where no graves are to be seen and this is the principle of Nihilism and the real tragedy that means the end of understanding when the comedy of life and the tragedy of philosophy are turned into absolute values and even virtues. Understanding the darkness as silence is not living but mourning and understanding all knowledge of the past as fatal mistakes, - and nothing could be more mistaken precisely because knowledge also unfolds historically, it has an archaeology. This happens when Aristotle made us forget our Plato, in that this “thinking business” is circular and that no conclusions are drawn from it because it does not constitute any particular knowledge as in the sciences but only generally and that is why wonder and curiosity is necessary; from this follows that the end of philosophy is not an end for thinking but a momentum in which the homecoming to ourselves has become unlikely. Not coming home to ourselves means the end of wonder, the adulthood of mankind that means perhaps not something all that good anyways. Never coming home is the ultimate loneliness and has little in common with the intimate solitude of the philosopher because the former could hardly be thought of as a choice.
Political philosophy contended at some point of the 20th century with an old Platonic argument albeit in up-to-date form that it is no one but God the sole witness of my good deeds so that basically ethics is attached to a certain form of solitude but not from myself; because I am the person with whom I live and the two-in-one, who I am and what I appear like must coincide in me, otherwise it means that I am not able to live myself and there is an obvious divorce between my essence and my presence, -the situation of our times and a rather grave position to be in. But coinciding within me means also that I am not bound in any of the pieces of me by the rules that governed history in the universal so that I am not being thrown into the future as the Christian metaphysicians aimed to, because this future was empty of content since the greatest reward was the eternity and we moderns have never seen or experienced eternity so far. I am able to coincide only in the present tense with me and myself complying with the premise that I know I have been randomly thrown into this world and I cannot possibly change but I do have the possibility to choose this contingency and turn it into my destination, that is as radical as freedom can grow because we ourselves are most possibly the only thing in the world that we can change. And lastly freedom once again is not entirely foreign to the darkness, because freedom as the sole foundation of our society and cultural struggle is never a secure foundation or even a foundation at all because this freedom as referred to the absence of limitations in general (and this includes historical limitations, that is, the boundaries of personality and identity as the pre-modern world knew them) is not as many mistakenly thought a constitution of civil and political liberties, whose struggle is older than modernity and than Christianity, -the struggle of culture. A double-bind in the imagination, to the left Auschwitz and to the right modern art, this is the problem with the absence of limitations in general, an unsolvable paradox.
The darkness is not the chains of Prometheus but the possibility that we can promise inner freedom to ourselves in so far as we do not instrumentalize life for the pursuits of happiness and freedom but self-contain it as something to be lived for its very own and unique qualities,-the metaphysical enterprise to make subject and object coincide is entirely futile when opposed to the triad of life, freedom and philosophy. This promise is the only faith available to the man who did not return home from his own war (and there are many other who did not return to and thinking of politics is this commonality, a theory of modernity that assures the stability of family, society and institutions as Hegel glimpsed it in his Philosophy of Right) and understanding this promise can grant us no salvation other than the reconciliation with the facts of history that have become abysmal to the human condition and have prevented the coincidence between ourselves. We have inherited the years as a deep sadness only because we have not remembered that at any point in the universe life is only a fleeting moment and little else, the broken second of temporality, of the Sabbatical sun. That is why it has come a time for people and specially for those who struggle to coincide with themselves, to turn the silent hours of our histories into the possibility to tell a story in a time when no longer immortals dwell who can write. This is our only promise, that even at the risk of not fulfilling it is the only one we can make. There is no home in this world for us because the only home is God and if there be any home it is ourselves in the plural space, and hitherto we have turned disappointment into the dressing room where the distance of Simone Weil between God and God lives and other Gnostic monsters too, being this now a fact we are not obligated to erect a mourner’s tent. There is a home, but it is not heaven or earth, only a little station in between. All these thoughts cannot be anything but true because they are particular and because philosophy cannot be counterfeited like money or science. Lessing quotes St. Augustine in the opening of a certain work from his soliloquies with “In the same sense that these things are all true, is the same sense in which they are all false”.
“The Silent Years”
An experimental essay on God and history
By Arie Akermann-Amaya
“Do you know then, -she interrogated me, do you know
then what you yearn for, what is missing in you, what you
seek like an Alpheus his Arethusa, over what are you so
sad with such sadness? It is not about the years that
passed, one could never say that, or about what happened
there or what is happening here, it is but about what there
is in you, the problem is in you. What you look for is a
time more beautiful than this. Only that new world which
is old because there you were with your beloved friends
in that world”. –Friedrich Hölderlin, “Hyperion”.
O
ften would Virginia Woolf begin one of her many letters with a statement of the kind “and yet one night alone, but never in peace” no less than would Ingeborg Bachmann finish a certain less known poem with “always night and never day”, though be this inappropriate for a conscious essay writer or a would-be at least, this is not entirely unlikely for someone who always meant to write his essays to somebody and in the present tense –in the form of an unfinished conversation, a foul play convincing enough to want to copycat the Bible, and that is somewhat like sending off a letter, in which case needless to say the opening statement could not hold out of uttering something so generally universal as to render writing unnecessary. This is not just a common everyday scenario of speaking “untruths”, but as in the obvious business of religion and faith, the content of these truths no more often sheds an immediate light than it does obscure its own subject matter so that the truth and of a lone individual might never hold as a testimony not even at heaven’s court except at the fulfillment of the promise that it shares the knowledge necessary to foster an understanding of something albeit it constitutes in itself by no means the target hypotheses, no less than what is achieved by someone telling any good story, Joyce and Homer or any one journal from a certain forgotten war.
The root of the matter lies precisely in that this understanding belongs to the kind that prevents men from gathering conclusions, as is paradoxically the nature of all understanding of truth. The statements of great poets are never accused of lacking truth for themselves or in-themselves as Hegel would have it, it is just that they in their category of people have been granted permission to read into the spirit of any age they happen to belong to and therefore produce expressions of universal feelings – production which sadly is not our domain as people of flesh and bone and for whom these generalities are likelier to pass unnoticed in their obviousness. For this very reason we are usually not given licenses for universal enterprises –a rather complex problem in the arena of philosophical thought as we are obligated to leave the business of philosophy when we have ceased to wonder, and are henceforth obligated at least in the world of prosaic intellectual production to recreate the world by means of our knowledge, of our stories or a combination of both; this being said counter to the theory that runs around there with the everyman since Hegel that the world is no longer poetic but entirely prosaic and disenchanted, what might as well mean that this problem of not having license to be the spokesman of mankind could be a lawsuit filed against every denizen of this world even beyond the rare and rather corky crowd of intellectuals, if there be any around still. This could be filed even against modern poets too.
In this state of affairs, producing a work of our own is the only redeemable accruing for immortality available nowadays that heroes have been out of business for just too long and their darling Gods have seemly closed down their temples for long-term renovations; at this a certain Israeli author mentioned in his memoirs that it would be better to be a book than a writer, because writers are easily done with but books are bound to survive by chance somewhere even the fiercest of fires. There are two arguments counter to this: Firstly, work or production, albeit not necessary for survival (what is fundamental for the survival of the species is the activity of labor or better said, the production of the means necessary for survival only) but for permanence in this world and therefore for transcending through it, for reaching beyond the limits of the world imposed by nature and somehow overcome them (that is, to create a history for oneself) is by no means the most fundamental activity of man, whilst neither survival would be at the basic ontological level. Production in any form is only a partial activity, whereas acting and thinking constitute life in its entirety. Secondly, said in all honesty immortality is perhaps the least of all the political and economical preoccupations in the upheaval of our times and I should even dare go further to say that the true nature of those preoccupations (precisely because they are literally previous to action and not yet “occupations”) remains unknown to us as we wander aloof in the dark.
In this same spirit, a lot of the illuminati and Enlightened of our times and even from times brighter and prettier have misidentified the “darkness” we walk within with other phenomena such as poverty and strife, environmental devastation and hunger, or the greatest Hollywood actress of our times – forced migrations and enforced emigration. These things are most definitely a fact of our world and not just one mere topic of conversation, so that as facts they do not constitute a mere situation “we happen to be in” in any sense whatsoever, so that as such our entire life is surrounded by them and all common talk about eradicating these “evils” as they are portrayed in the multimillion-dollar-enterprise of mass media is something as futile as the medieval discussions about the body of the eternal God, two laconically contradictory lexemes. Whatever had been once the domain and province of the painter and bard to represent has been nowadays entrusted to the news broadcaster, yet if these facts by themselves were the entirety of the “darkness” then of course no painting or poem would be gifted enough for representing anything – all speech and images would be very much alike, pegs wandering in the silence of dark canvas and empty pages and thus rendered useless. Darkness means for human production what mortality does for philosophy or genesis for politics: The palette of colors.
The theories that rose with the modern world and that constitute it can explain away the “lies” and “deceptions” that led to this “darkness” and this is as a matter of fact a concept far more comprehensive than speaking of “a bad year of famine in Egypt”. Many from among the experts and professional diagnosed the dark times in their heyday with surgical precision; Marx for example was truly concerned with the role that the capital and exploitation of the labor force played in all historical momentum, not satisfied at that he proceeded further to discover the “rules” that govern the structure in order to “make aright” the “wrongdoing” and “one beautiful day” to truly humanize the world before the astonished eyes of mankind; and of course ran once this beautiful day which lasted for so long in the disguise of an extended night when the mad thirst of freedom ran free nightly and ransacked the home of the everyman and prevented him from seeing the sun, quite the opposite of what Hesiod predicted for the children born in the end of times. This metaphor wishes by no means to hide what extermination camps were and are: The funny and happiest final stations of freedom, the glad tidings from heavens that were to bring the darkness on earth to an end and not even from above falling down like the angels of John’s eschatology but elevating the whole world in a worldview so religious as to mock religion, and therefore end the horrible cycles of labor, production, exploitation and so on. The lies and deceptions have little if anything at all to do with the darkness, or at least no more than they have to do with the fact of human existence on earth. Darkness is more akin to what Sophocles felt in the play of his old age quoting a poet from the archaic times, “not to be born is the greatest gift, but once it has happened – that you were born, the best is to return whence you came from as swiftly as possible”, tantamount to the Hebrew prophets that calmly awaited for their deaths in their beds without much of a haste or even others a little less patient like the authors of the Proverbs and the Psalms.
To be clear a lot of commentary is needed, first that Marx or Hegel did not discover the dark nor were the poets of the universal, neither did they murder anybody or are faulty for the great catastrophes of our age (and saying this might be more dangerous than it is stupid, the silly talk about the “tradition that gave us Auschwitz as a grand finale”), no ideology can be found universally guilty for anything since it is only individual people who are to be found individually guilty for any action at all or for non-action, both of which our modern legal systems have sometimes framed in the category of crimes –individual commission and individual omission. To be even clearer, upon reflection it surfaces that there is not any statement here or elsewhere that I am aware of where it is explicitly stated foolproof that freedom is not good or that darkness is not bad; but it is sustained by all post-metaphysical thought that the great narratives of history are no longer binding (perhaps poetry might be the last narrative to be called in any way a philosophy of history and at that with reservation) because it is the personal story remembered by a community what finally constitutes the original and reliable tissue of history even in the light of national consciousness of histories. Stories are told too, so runs one that a certain Bolshevik revolutionary came to the home of an intellectual and gun-pointed at him with the demand to join Moscow’s regime and this intellectual in turn demanded askance a reasoning from his captor, to which the villain responded that he had been obligated to make the intellectual free because he was unable to achieve it on his own merit. The problem with the great narrators of history is that they have never entrusted anything to everyday people but to grand heroes and when grand heroes are no longer that, they never tend to become everyday people but grand villains instead.
The beautiful gospel here for us is that sadly freedom, just like philosophy and life (three words analogous and only seldom sympathetic to one another) cannot be taught or learnt ever by anybody. There are schools of thought, lifestyles and models of freedom –see the American constitution and the many French republics, but this is something for which there is no possible learning, and two statements support my idea: First that putting a banister between thinking and living is an impractical pleonasm and not just a terrorist tool of the Cartesians, second (the most important) is that once you have chosen yourself as a philosopher (and perhaps this applies only to philosophy – what I do) you are as good a philosopher as you could ever be; you can learn more, be a runaway through the material, give conferences and teach lectures, but you never improve upon the decision – the decision to be a philosopher makes you as good a philosopher as you could ever become. The same decision that makes you free or alive, that is in a dynamic social arrangements like ours, for nothing could run more counter to the opinion of Greek citizens and feudal lords. Of course this all relies upon the tissue of contingency against teleology, but that is a subject to be touched upon later on.
Freedom and darkness become here coeval in that they constitute the two most frustrated promises of the modern age; darkness because the modern world would release us from it in the city without God (the City of God had been only a capitol of suffering in the middle of the desert like the early Fathers would have it lovable) and freedom because it was freedom who would carry out the assignment in the modern age for man, the freedom that would absolutely conquer the natural world and alas did not. Darkness could not absolutely vanish because it would make humanity vanish withal and freedom could not absolutely take over because otherwise the open space between neighbor and neighbor would be impossible to bridge, thus we would be so very unchristian and unworldly, -barbarians. Modernity left too many unfulfilled promises because it is part and parcel of its functioning; disappointing belongs to its dynamic as the cast that protects a man-made-only world – what could allegedly separate this world in whatever form from God’s if not disappointment. We were unable to conquer the whole world (i.e. nature) because once we ventured into the universe, the space to colonize happened to be millions of times larger that had been ever imagined by the medieval scientists in their playful count of starts, conquering the world through the eye of Columbus was feasible, but from Copernicus’ was not – needless to remember the fact that the full conquest of the living space of nature could mean nothing but the shattering of the human condition and the end of the condition of labor – the most fundamental assumption for the survival of the species.
By reaching out to the universe barehanded we understood finally the Biblical simile appearing early in the Book of Genesis where it is spoken about the giants whose heads reached as far as the top of the skies –a strange species watched over with curiosity by the mortals descending from Adam and Eve and rarely mentioned only once in the canon; we were those giants until we reached the universe, and the great ideals of humanity cultivated by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were cruelly shattered as we diminished our own stature to the point of becoming invisible –the paraphrase of Kafka, “he was commanded to find the Archimedean point only under the condition that he shall use it against himself”. Not everything here is the damnation of purgatory or the twilight of poets, for once bereft of our original stature in the creation the wonder before the giants was to become the rare curiosity that did away with Aristotelian and medieval science (the last possible secure dwelling for men, -eternal immanence) and threw a hand into the outer space, the major enterprise of mankind as a whole but perhaps the very worst and greatest as if a great tragedian wrote it together with Adorno. The consolation of Lessing is left still when he wrote that had God consulted him over choosing the right hand with all the truth or the left hand with not only the lack of truth but an unquenchable thirst to obtain in, he chose but over the left hand because the truth belonged to God alone. So far so pretty, but shall not suffice for those thrown into the precipice.
The precipice and the darkness are analogous in that they open the same gate or in words of Gillian Rose “keep your mind in hell and despair not” but the precipice, the deep abyss of our times contains facts that albeit inseparable from humanity such as the extermination camps and other no-return points of history are not as wholly defined as the darkness. Contemporary philosophy has become all too engaged with the idle talk prompted by the field of Holocaust studies about the “dark times” and “the end of philosophy” missing a point completely; as if those terrible facts of history would constitute in their terms a philosophical history or a philosophy of history for the man of the world without traditions for a stronghold (and therefore a grand narrative for times without grand anything but some lone poets). We are definitely thrown into that abyss that without us being much aware built the walls that inextricably separate one age from another, but this is not the darkness that I mean to handle because history seen as a pathway of mankind is only a little peg in the dark alley.
New paths have opened in the footsteps of philosophical thinking that are neither original nor new but do reveal something often elusive to the naked eye and it is the notion of history as the totality of the limits set off by the interplay between the world of thought and the arena of actuality. There are no dark times as we learnt them because firstly time is an absolute horizon to exist therein and not a mere chronological measurement, and second the dark has been there since the creation, since the night was up there even before the day, it is the tiles on top of which the carpet of happy lives settles. So runs the saying in popular culture that a man never returns home from the war because his innocence and the basic grounds on which his values were oriented in the world became shattered in the battlefield; the important lesson here is that there are many wars to be waged and that there is a war with oneself too, sadly noticeable since the greatest philosophical discovery of the modern age, -the Self (and the true opposite of Christ, a rather vacuous friend this self thing). Regardless the wars, there is no homecoming and there is no homecoming even to oneself precisely because living in the world is very different from occupying a place on earth.
The world is meant here as the totality of the relationships between thinking beings, the bonds between neighbors that receive actuality only in their temporality. The natural world or earth has little involvement with the above because the earth as the Greeks found it is eternal and eternity is not a temporal tense because eternity is really a very long time and since time is built not of the continuity of the future but in fragments of the present, time is necessarily a series of intervals in which existence is possible, -existing totally, that is, indefinitely over continuous time is as paradoxical as living forever, who could bear it?. The fragility of human bonds is precisely the foundational stone of our humanity and making the bonds eternal or bulletproof is tantamount to shattering them. There is no home in the world for man because the world is not a home but a relationship and the earth is not a human place, something that religion did know thousands of years (despite the obvious chasm between morality and religion, between divinity and the forces of nature) before modern philosophy discovered the independence of the nature from the man-made world. This is why the homecoming is never happy for humanity, a homecoming like the Enlightenment and freedom for example. We have been always in the dark, and that is the only assurance of our happiness, -a rather fragile one. The only home for man is the fragile bonds of human relationships, the there-ness of being with others and this obviously inextricably intertwinted with the most worldless of feelings, -love, or perhaps should we say “earthless”? Could a something that shatters the space between people take away not only the human condition of being earth-bound but also the social world? This is a question that remains as open today as it does in the old theology but it is a question by no means political.
The problem faced here today is that we have come to understand the dark as a lethargic silence like that present over graveyards where no graves are to be seen and this is the principle of Nihilism and the real tragedy that means the end of understanding when the comedy of life and the tragedy of philosophy are turned into absolute values and even virtues. Understanding the darkness as silence is not living but mourning and understanding all knowledge of the past as fatal mistakes, - and nothing could be more mistaken precisely because knowledge also unfolds historically, it has an archaeology. This happens when Aristotle made us forget our Plato, in that this “thinking business” is circular and that no conclusions are drawn from it because it does not constitute any particular knowledge as in the sciences but only generally and that is why wonder and curiosity is necessary; from this follows that the end of philosophy is not an end for thinking but a momentum in which the homecoming to ourselves has become unlikely. Not coming home to ourselves means the end of wonder, the adulthood of mankind that means perhaps not something all that good anyways. Never coming home is the ultimate loneliness and has little in common with the intimate solitude of the philosopher because the former could hardly be thought of as a choice.
Political philosophy contended at some point of the 20th century with an old Platonic argument albeit in up-to-date form that it is no one but God the sole witness of my good deeds so that basically ethics is attached to a certain form of solitude but not from myself; because I am the person with whom I live and the two-in-one, who I am and what I appear like must coincide in me, otherwise it means that I am not able to live myself and there is an obvious divorce between my essence and my presence, -the situation of our times and a rather grave position to be in. But coinciding within me means also that I am not bound in any of the pieces of me by the rules that governed history in the universal so that I am not being thrown into the future as the Christian metaphysicians aimed to, because this future was empty of content since the greatest reward was the eternity and we moderns have never seen or experienced eternity so far. I am able to coincide only in the present tense with me and myself complying with the premise that I know I have been randomly thrown into this world and I cannot possibly change but I do have the possibility to choose this contingency and turn it into my destination, that is as radical as freedom can grow because we ourselves are most possibly the only thing in the world that we can change. And lastly freedom once again is not entirely foreign to the darkness, because freedom as the sole foundation of our society and cultural struggle is never a secure foundation or even a foundation at all because this freedom as referred to the absence of limitations in general (and this includes historical limitations, that is, the boundaries of personality and identity as the pre-modern world knew them) is not as many mistakenly thought a constitution of civil and political liberties, whose struggle is older than modernity and than Christianity, -the struggle of culture. A double-bind in the imagination, to the left Auschwitz and to the right modern art, this is the problem with the absence of limitations in general, an unsolvable paradox.
The darkness is not the chains of Prometheus but the possibility that we can promise inner freedom to ourselves in so far as we do not instrumentalize life for the pursuits of happiness and freedom but self-contain it as something to be lived for its very own and unique qualities,-the metaphysical enterprise to make subject and object coincide is entirely futile when opposed to the triad of life, freedom and philosophy. This promise is the only faith available to the man who did not return home from his own war (and there are many other who did not return to and thinking of politics is this commonality, a theory of modernity that assures the stability of family, society and institutions as Hegel glimpsed it in his Philosophy of Right) and understanding this promise can grant us no salvation other than the reconciliation with the facts of history that have become abysmal to the human condition and have prevented the coincidence between ourselves. We have inherited the years as a deep sadness only because we have not remembered that at any point in the universe life is only a fleeting moment and little else, the broken second of temporality, of the Sabbatical sun. That is why it has come a time for people and specially for those who struggle to coincide with themselves, to turn the silent hours of our histories into the possibility to tell a story in a time when no longer immortals dwell who can write. This is our only promise, that even at the risk of not fulfilling it is the only one we can make. There is no home in this world for us because the only home is God and if there be any home it is ourselves in the plural space, and hitherto we have turned disappointment into the dressing room where the distance of Simone Weil between God and God lives and other Gnostic monsters too, being this now a fact we are not obligated to erect a mourner’s tent. There is a home, but it is not heaven or earth, only a little station in between. All these thoughts cannot be anything but true because they are particular and because philosophy cannot be counterfeited like money or science. Lessing quotes St. Augustine in the opening of a certain work from his soliloquies with “In the same sense that these things are all true, is the same sense in which they are all false”.
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