Backwards

Aristocracy can be conceived of as the rule by a politically empowered class over the rest, but it can also be conceived of as a gravitational force exercised by the virtuous upon their peers that inspires emulation. Nietzsche’s estimation of the Jews reaches up to the heavens, and I do not wish to disappoint him.

The fecundity of an author is measured by the quarrels of his heirs over how he is to be interpreted. I would never be canonical, even if people did take notice of me, because I am single-minded. Nietzsche calls the Jews the moral genius of the nations. When someone tells you what you are, you should listen. I grew up in the school of Marxist aesthetics, but while Adorno created lots of jobs for Jews, he sided, in the end, with his Germanness, as he had no choice but to, knowing the halacha (that Judaism is inherited through the maternal line). The place of a Jew in art is on the cross, and to the extent that Kant holds the beautiful a symbol of the morally good, he finds it in the image of a dead or dying Jew. What place do we have in art? I did not grow up drinking wine; I grew up drinking Coca-Cola. When Nietzsche says that Socrates was plebs, and derides the vision of the good as a matter of calculation – we do evil only because we think it is good, and would do good if we knew the matter aright – he inadvertently sides with the anti-Semites he treats contumaciously elsewhere, who associate what they call the empty spirit of calculation with the Jews.

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There is so little to praise and so much to blame in Western philosophy as touches on the Jews because we are existential disproof of cherished verities of the Gentiles, whether of the universal truth of a Christianity that pronounces Judaism a dead letter, or the universal truth of a liberal-democratic order that still cannot find a place for Israel in its low estimation of nationalism. Yerushalmi castigates Jews who harp on the theme of the particular and the universal because they refuse to countenance the origin of their interest in the subject, and will cover it over so as not to betray their sympathies. These would get them expelled from polite company. Aristocrats are supposed to drink wine, and not Coca-Cola.

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It is a kind of provincialism to think cosmopolitanism merely opposed to it, a kind of religiosity to think secularism merely opposed to it.