Israel Betrothed to God

In philosophy, there should be zero reference to current events.

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Someone said that the ancient Greeks saw logistics as fit for slaves. This means, for example, that the logic of the dignity of work can be deployed by the aristocrats to humble the serfs, in order that the latter do not rebel against the former out of resentment of their privileges. And yet Kant has a point when he says, effectively, that necessity is the mother of invention, that we are aroused to develop our natural powers by the resistance offered by circumstances. Mastery of nature would be impossible otherwise, just as life is conditioned by death, and the bad attitude of some privileged towards the workers who serve them is indirect evidence that they have never had to work for a living, so that they are outside the realm of common decency, and not to be envied in this regard. “I envied the perverse,” says the Psalmist.

Suffering life is easier when one’s ancestors were enslaved, because one has a point of reference with respect to which to say, “Ah, well, I should not delude myself, as the others do, that they were born free.” One virtue of psychoanalysis is that it universalizes the insight that we are unfree to the extent that we cannot survive infancy without the help of another, and if we will concede to those who would like to insist that we attain freedom from want by our ability to serve ourselves through work, nevertheless, we must insist that our fundamental condition is unfree, because we are as helpless against death as we are against the onslaught of nature in our nascency. Death is the absolute, and so gives an inkling of the God of Israel: “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” says Proverbs.

Then again, perhaps this is not the whole truth. Since Christianity conditions Western freedom as shot through with necessity, differing modern Europeans from the ancient Greeks, for whom slave and free were absolute categories, attainment of the ancient Greeks’ freedom entails denial of Christianity, and so hatred for the Jews who are its condition of possibility, as the grain of sand in the pearl. Freedom, so conceived, means lawlessness, rather than self-governance, and so it is useless to pose counterhistories of a successful Nazism, because it is doomed from the outset as founded on chaos, anathema to the conditions required for life. But hatred is the greatest anesthetic known to man, so that suffering of life is easiest of all when one feels nothing of it, destroying with giddy self-abandon instead of wrestling with the need for self-restraint that civilization imposes. Freud is misread if he is read as licensing freedom from repression as a desirable condition for man; he prescribes it in individual cases in the service of a life well-lived, and we can take exception to psychoanalysis in this regard as licensing in others what we would not for ourselves. When Adorno criticizes Freud’s realism in the name of fantasia, it’s a legitimate complaint, but is nothing more than that, aired philosophically for all the world to see rather than restricted to the analysis in which one ordinarily does so. We might criticize him in turn as expressing that same desire for lawlessness as characterizes those who so hate constraint as being willing to take it out upon their neighbors.

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To say that we live on after death belies the urgency of our struggle against it.

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If we value marital fidelity, so that we must bracket desire, whether out of idealism or out of a circumspect commitment to even and enduring over charged and ecstatic pleasure, then why should we not value fidelity to an ideal, or a commitment to even and enduring pleasure as the absence of emotional turmoil, over desire as such? “A bachelor is an unmarried man,” say the British philosophers, thinking to capture an analytic truth, but also thereby testifying unconsciously to their environs.