Category Archives: Judaism

Going first

Ethics, Judaism

Being morally responsible means going first. Trying first. Opening first. Listening first. Repenting first. Giving first. Disarming first. Showing goodwill first. Seeking forgiveness first. Acting first.

We can speculate on how others will respond — whether they will or won’t reciprocate, cooperate, collaborate, exploit or humiliate us — but we cannot really know what is possible until someone actually makes that first move toward mutuality.

Being morally responsible means being that person.

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Being morally responsible means acting on faith that other people do not live inside our own minds. They can shock us with the reality of who they are and how much it differs from our ideas of them.

Tour of the asterisk

Judaism

purpleasterisk

We cannot live in an imagined future within our own mind. The future is real and it will reveal itself when it arrives. The future will defy our specific predictions and our general expectations.

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We cannot live in a remembered past within our own mind. The past was real and what it showed us when it was here can never be fully reclaimed. If we allow the past to speak it tells us scandalous and amazing things. Usually, though, we ask it leading questions and it obliges us, confirming what we suspect, flattering our conceit that now is fundamentally different: we know better now. But we have always known better now.

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We cannot know any particular entity just because we know about it in general. If we interact with the particulars of the world in new ways, paying scrupulous attention, striving to make coherent and general sense of what we perceive, these things will disclose truths to us that will force us to rethink everything we think we know. This process is unending, its content inexhaustibly volatile.

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We cannot know situations in general from what we have learned of the specific situations we have inhabited: those situation to which we are habituated. Only a minuscule slice of possible situations are habitable to beings like us, and within this range, the tiniest shift will throw us into shock. We love to hear the survivors’ stories, but these are exceptional.

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We cannot know another person by knowing about them. Each person is another instance of everything, containing anticipations, memories, understandings, and incommunicable experiences unlike our own, and person packs the power to teach us not only about realities, but to teach us into new relations with reality, which is to teach us out of old selves and into new ones. Be careful who you let teach you!

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And finally we cannot know ourselves, simply from having been ourselves so far. We are fragile, fallible, barely oriented, and packed with potential to learn, to transform and to live brand-new transfigured realities. Self-estrangement can throw a me into relief before a more enduring I. It is hard to want that.

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Mutuality

Ethics, Judaism

It is important to distinguish between feeling as though you are member of a community because you share its values and beliefs, and actually becoming a member of that community by mutually acknowledging shared values and beliefs with fellow members. This is true of communities of dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions, and it is true of communities as small as two, such as friendships and marriages. Community is essentially mutual.

Similarly, there is a difference between forgiveness that involves making peace with estrangement with an alienated friend or loved one and the deeper forgiveness of mutual reconciliation. Most feelings of alienation come from a sense that one’s reality has not been acknowledged — from a sense that mutuality is lacking. Reconciliation is restoration of mutuality. Sometimes this is not possible (yet), and we do have to make peace with that fact in unilateral forgiveness, but we should know and feel the difference between this and true mutual forgiveness.

Mutual relationships transcend individuality and that’s what makes them sacred.

This view feels Jewish to me, and when I articulate it I want to be Jewish.

Secular mystic

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

I told a rabbi that I am a “secular mystic”.

What do I mean by that? I see the transcendent realm as inexhaustibly understandable. The act of understanding incomprehensible phenomena increases our capacity to understand. The very increase that makes the understanding possible makes us aware of new incomprehensible phenomena (and with it, the limits of our understanding), re-arousing the need to understand.

I am most interested in the experience of these limits. This problem could probably be called “hermeneutical liminality” but these days I’m trying to find clearer, prettier and more pregnant language to express this kind of idea, which is precisely why I’m interested in religion. But I find that most people are so misaligned on what religion is and does that use of religious (or “spiritual”) vocabulary leads to instant misunderstanding. “Threshold” is pretty. Limbo? Border or boundary? For now, I’ll just call them “boundary experiences”.

What are boundary experiences like when we encounter them? How do we recognize them? What are their characteristics? What are our natural responses, and are other, better responses available to us? In other words, what are the ethical implications of boundary experiences? When do we keep going, and when do we stop? When and how do we involve others in boundary-crossings?

And then: where have boundary experiences been misunderstood? And what does that look like?

My hostility toward magic is bound up with this last question: what do misunderstandings of boundary experiences look like? What artifacts of such misunderstandings remain in our culture? My attitude toward magic has nothing to do with how it conflicts with science’s current view of the world (about which I am grossly under-informed, anyway) and everything to do with the functioning of religion. Magic forecloses religious questions, and removes intellectual tensions required for religious insight.

Again, Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim comes to mind: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Or so it all appears to me right now, as I stand at the the threshold of Judaism. And one thing I’ve learned about thresholds is that something unexpected is always waiting in ambush — some unnoticed detail that changes everything.

Meta-xenophobia

Ethics, Judaism

A xenophobe is averse to alien being. The degree of aversion is proportional to the alienness of the alien.

Two xenophobes from different tribes will go to war over their differing loyalties, beliefs and customs. But at least they share xenophobia (and those tacit fundamental faiths that produce xenophobia).

What happens when a xenophobe encounters a someone who not only tolerates alienness, but seeks and affirms it? — a soul for whom alienness marks a path to transcendence? A soul founded on a faith that everts xenophobia into xenophilia?

For a xenophobe, this exponential alienness — alien even in its fundamental disposition toward the alien — provokes exponential hostility, for which war is insufficiently violent.

Rehumbled

Judaism, Philosophy

It is always frustrating to find established settlements on the other side of what you thought was a frontier, but with the humiliation comes shelter, a shower, a bed, a hot meal and good company.

As I tuck myself in, I recall St. Nietzsche’s kind words: “A sign that a man suffers from envy but is striving for higher things: drawn by the idea that in face of the man of excellence there is only one way of escape: love.”

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Unless you are a glutton for humiliation, stay away from philosophy, religion and all other insight disciplines. Here you cannot know what you do not know until you have learned how to know it.

Religious technology

Judaism

(Interestingly, I wrote this same post last year around the same time.)

Arthur C. Clarke is famous for saying “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing he probably used the word “technology” in the popular sense to mean engineering technologies.

Consider, though, the etymological meaning of technology: Techne (skill, art, craft) + logy (subject of study) — skillful application of practical knowledge. By this definition, engineering is only one source of technologies.

I invite you to entertain this question: What if religion is a kind of technology useful for helping finite individual people form relationships with realities beyond the limits of any individual’s existence?

I have, in fact, tried thinking about religion in this way, and I am convinced that it is true.

My belief is that religion seems like magic-mongering to the degree that the meaning of religion stands beyond the limits of our conception. To the degree that we understand what it is, what it does, how it does it, and why it matters the aspects of religion that strike us as magical are interpreted as mysteries.

A Jew trapped in a Gentile’s biography

Biography, Fructivism, Judaism

Two details from a passage in Martin Buber’s Between Man and Man have stayed with me over the years.

My friendship with one now dead arose in an incident that may be described, if you will, as a broken-off conversation. The date is Easter 1914. Some men from different European peoples had met in an undefined presentiment of the catastrophe, in order to make preparations for an attempt to establish a supra-national authority. The conversations were marked by that unreserve, whose substance and fruitfulness I have scarcely ever experienced so strongly. It had such an effect on all who took part that the fictitious fell away and every word was an actuality. Then as we discussed the composition of the larger circle from which public initiative should proceed (it was decided that it should meet in August of the same year) one of us, a man of passionate concentration and judicial power of love, raised the consideration that too many Jews had been nominated, so that several countries would be represented in unseemly proportion by their Jews. Though similar reflections were not foreign to my own mind, since I hold that Jewry can gain an effective and more than merely stimulating share in the building of a steadfast world of peace only in its own community and not in scattered members, they seemed to me, expressed in this way, to be tainted in their justice. Obstinate Jew that I am, I protested against the protest. I no longer know how from that I came to speak of Jesus and to say that we Jews knew him from within, in the impulses and stirrings of his Jewish being, in a way that remains inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him. “In a way that remains inaccessible to you” — so I directly addressed the former clergyman. He stood up, I too stood, we looked into the heart of one another’s eyes. “It is gone,” he said, and before everyone we gave one another the kiss of brotherhood.

The discussion of the situation between Jews and Christians had been transformed into a bond between the Christian and the Jew. In this transformation dialogue was fulfilled. Opinions were gone, in a bodily way the factual took place.

The first striking detail is the indication of a palpable shift of relationship that both parties feel with immediacy. “It is gone.” I believe this kind of shift is not just an experience, but an experience of something real: the essential reality of all sacred being. Without this immediate mutual knowing, there is no marriage, no friendship, no conversation, no reconciliation, no sacrament.

The second striking detail is bothersome to me. It is the claim that “Jews know Jesus from within, in the impulse and stirrings of his Jewish being,” in a way that is “inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him.” At first glance, this appears to be an essentialist (congenialist?) “it takes one to know one” argument.  I have a strong aversion to this kind of thinking.

But rereading it, the point can be interpreted in a non-essentialist way. The point is less about being non-Jewish, than with having a submissive relationship to Jesus, which would be an un-Jewish attitude — a distancing, dehumanizing and objectifying I-it mode. To relate to Jesus in a more mutual and intimate fellow-person I-Thou mode invites Buber’s impulses and stirrings of Jewish being to stir and impel.

Precisely this impulse toward I-Thou is what I feel in my own being when I read my Jewish heroes, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Richard J. Bernstein, Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Husserl, Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Haidt and even the great aspie Ludwig Wittgenstein. And Jesus of Nazareth, too, of course.

It is this feeling that makes me say that “I am a Jew trapped in a Gentile’s biography.”

This and the fact that I look so Jewish that nearly everyone who meets me assumes I am Jewish, especially other Jews.

And another clue: when my mother and uncle told me that they found evidence that we have Jewish ancestry, and that it appeared to go straight up the matrilineal line I lost my mind with happiness.

This is obviously far too important a matter to leave to my Great Great Great Grandmother Anna Maria Scheidegger’s mother (Elisabeth Sigerist?) and her mother’s mother back in Switzerland or Alsace.

Pluritarian Pluriversalism

Anthropology, Biography, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism

To someone born into an autistic universe controlled by a single set of strictly logical natural laws, the experience of empathy and the subsequent revelation of an empathic pluriverse redefines the meaning of miracle, and of transcendence, and of religion.

Before, miracles were exceptions to the laws of nature. After, miracles are the irruption of something in the midst of nothingness: other minds, each with a world of its own — each with the power to change the meaning of one’s own world.

Before, transcendence was defined in terms of an infinite reality standing beyond the finite objective world.  After, transcendence was defined in terms of an infinite reality standing beyond myriad finite objective worlds, each rooted in the elastic mind of a subject.

Before, religion was the attempt for an individual to commune with a transcendent reality with miraculous powers. After, religion was still the attempt for an individual to commune with a transcendent reality with miraculous powers, but the change in conceptions of transcendence and miracle means that it is the individual and the individual’s world that is transcended, and this means the route to transcendence is not around the world and one’s neighbors, but through them and their worlds. The activity of loving, respecting and learning from one’s neighbors is intrinsic to loving, respecting and learning from the infinite God who cannot be confined to any one world, however vast.

Myriad worship practices are needed to worship myriad aspects of an inexhaustible and inexhaustibly meaningful God. By this understanding, empathy is worship.

Apeirony

Judaism, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Taoism

Gorging Ouroboros

Anaximander’s maxim:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

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The Greek word for “whence things have their origin” is the apeiron — primordial chaos. The world without form, void, with blindness upon its face — that over which the spirit moves… the element in which when we are perplexed we drown: this is apeiron.

I am vitally interested in the experience of grappling with apeiron. The apeiron in all its dreadfulness is what we encounter when we actually transcend ourselves. (And it is ourselves we transcend when we transcend — not the natural world, like magic-mongers claim!) Bliss might follow transcendence, but it is strictly what follows — and it happens after transcendence has happened, not during it. If you “follow your bliss” you flee transcendence back into your most finite (most conceptually infinity-containing) self: that who you are, not that who you are not but who simultaneously exceeds and involves you.

Nowhere is “no pain, no gain” it truer than in religious activity.

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If I have a positive metaphysical conviction it is in the existence of apeiron.

But if the ultimate reality is apeiron, and apeiron is not an essential wholeness but an infinite profusion of particular views of the whole — a flood of incommensurate meanings — we are morally free to find our own commensurations. Not “everything is permitted” but myriad things are…  But as a liberal, I’m most interested in what we humans permit: and I want to permit what permits. According to Richard Rorty, this makes me an ironist.

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So, metaphysically, I am Taoist. However, I do not think metaphysical beliefs are a suitable foundation for religion. Equating religions and belief systems (ideologies), faiths and factual convictions causes us to make category mistakes that block religious life. My preference for radical pragmatism resembles the religious attitude of a Buddhist. (I agree with Buddhism on what religions do/are.) But ultimately my passionate Judeo-Christian moral commitment to human dignity makes me not only resemble a liberal Christian — it makes me identify as a Judeochristian.

By the way, starting today, I’m removing the hyphen from Judeo-Christian, because Judeochristianity is not a hybrid of two separate things, but a refusal to separate them in the first place.

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This morning I registered apeirony.com and apeironism.com.

Re-thinking / re-feeling politics

Judaism, Philosophy

Something to consider from Bruno Latour: “Politicians are the scapegoats, the sacrificial lambs. We deride, despise, and hate them. We compete to denounce their venality and incompetence, their blinkered vision, their schemes and compromises, their failures, their pragmatism or lack of realism, their demagogy. Only in politics are trials of strength thought to define the shape of things. It is only politicians who are thought to be dishonest, who are held to grope in the dark. … It takes something like courage to admit that we will never do better than a politician.”

None of us are above politics. However, if too many of us withdraw from politics with an attitude of moral (or intellectual!) superiority will increasingly make politics something we will want to withdraw from. But to reengage we will have to re-think (and consequently re-feel) “politics”, and stop using the term in the disparaging popular sense which connotes deceit, manipulation and abuse of power.

I’ve found Hannah Arendt’s characterization of politics to be helpful: “Action … corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non [the essential condition], but the conditio per quam [the required condition] — of all political life.”

In other words, politics is the conscious navigation of a pluralist reality, where our own views are one of myriad possible views, where others are in the same state as ourselves: finite and fallible. But if we will gather in the spirit of humility and respect and desire to understand, and adhere to a political faith that the (considerable) suffering of the process is not only obligatory but worth undergoing — we might find ourselves re-thinking what seemed to be no-brainers, and, consequently, re-feeling what seemed to be eternal convictions.

This deeply weird* re-thinking/re-feeling experience is called “metanoia”. But metanoia only comes when we take two political rules very seriously 1) that though reality is intellectually inexhaustible, we continue to try to know it and respect it as much as we are able, and 2) we respect our fellow-humans as someone who, just like us, has something to teach us. Further, we must take these these two rules as, for all practical purposes, the same exact rule, our highest political commandment.

This is what genuine politics requires. It is an exceptionally difficult path — so difficult we are 100% doomed to perpetual failure. But we can always recover from our failures and even learn from them, and it can even bring about yet more metanoia, which turns the failures into healing and growth and all that good stuff we all want to want. And despite our wishes, this process never ends. The minute we think it has ended we degrade into ideologues who think we are right (and we usually are somewhat right, at least in the gnat-like minutiae) but in a far more important sense we are wronger than wrong.

I’d follow all this us with a disqualifying, “anyway, that’s just my opinion”, except that would be disingenuous. I really think this is both right and true, and this is what I will wholeheartedly believe until I’m bowled over by the next metanoia.

(* When I say that I don’t believe in magic, but do believe in miracles, this is the sort of thing I am talking about. My hostility to magic is rooted in the fact that facile magical “explanations” dismantle miracle-inducing perplexities.)

Faithlessnesses and faiths

Judaism, Philosophy

I’ve speculated that the extremes of exoterism (fundamentalism) and esoterism (mysticism) have little do do with the faiths they are thought to exemplify.

They are faiths of their own — the former a faith in a divinity who dwells beyond (who demands particular observances), the latter a faith in a divinity who dwells within (who bestows universal insights).

Neither fundamentalist nor mystic can be told anything new, and in this they are strikingly similar. Both have already arrived at the truth. I suggest that this is the entire point of them: they are perennially convenient evasions of religious struggle. They are certainly faiths, but not religious ones. And “spiritual” dissociation from religion (with the insinuation that religion is essentially exoteric), only shows the extent to which transcendence is misunderstood, and confused with what ought to be called “inscendence”, an intensification of self within itself.

Perhaps it is a symptom of my essentially Judeo-Christian nature or second-nature that I believe so strongly that 1. religion is essentially struggle with the truth of transcendence — of relating oneself to the reality that exceeds and involves each particular person and demands that one participate in universality as custodians of a particular and unique everything among innumerable everythings — 2. that the primary locus of this struggle is not within the individual, nor between the individual and supernatural beings, but rather between individuals in the medium called the world, and 3. that the primary action of religion is transformative learning: metanoia — unlearning and relearning for the sake of relationship with beings beyond the mind’s bounds.

According to this view, avoidance of being schooled by one’s irritating neighbor is symptomatic of an avoidance of religion itself, and a removal of oneself from the realities religion seeks to inhabit with increasing intimacy, extent and awareness. The loss of religion is not wrongness but loss of the desire for ever greater rightness.

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.
— Milton

A holy diary

Judaism

It would be really interesting if a religion kept a chronicle of its own development from its own current perspective, never modifying past entries, but constantly reflecting upon and reinterpreting the older perspective in terms of the latest one.

(Imagine a collective version of a child writing a continuous diary, starting from infancy, each session reading the story so far, then continuing it.)

The chronicle might start of as a purely mythical self-interpretation of a mythical existence. Then it might progress to a more institutionalized state and formally self-interpret its formalization, and so on all the way to its development into an pluralistic interpersonal religion, and offer pluralistic self-interpretations of its own pluralistic existence and its harmoniously divergent views on its past and future.

The only drawback to the experiment would be if some reckless Prometheus-type were to hand the work to wild readers from a more primitive stage of development. Would they even grasp it as a chronicle? They might see it as a catalogue of true factual assertions. They might misinterpret truths they’re unprepared to grasp, like children attempting but failing to make sense of the adult world.

A They

Judaism

I cannot help but think that Heidegger’s understanding of social being would have been radically different if he had participated in a society that understood fellow human beings as gateways to divine being, instead of in a Protestant Christian milieu (which holds that others are, at best, superfluous in one’s own personal relationship with God) and had developed to a point where National Socialism could dominate it.

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If you happen to believe other human beings are intrinsically part of one’s relationship to God you’ll consider the conditions for cultivating and preserving relationships sacred. You might occasionally go too far and idolize those conditions, but as long as the relationships are preserved it is possible to reawaken the spirit for the sake of which they are upheld.

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My experience of social being is exactly like Heidegger’s.

However, I interpret the experience differently. I’d call it a “deficient mode” of inhabiting a culture. Heidegger’s existentiell relationship with his culture distorted his understanding of everyday Dasein — and consequently of Dasein.

Meditations on the rough game

Ideas, Judaism, Philosophy

“Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the rough game…”

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The difference between simple animal pain and human suffering is the element of perplexity. Pain is mere sensation. If we let pain just be bare pain as the Buddhists advise and refuse to compound that pain with interpretation and conceptualization, we can withstand extreme pain with the dignity of a house pet.

Suffering is pain interpreted as an insight into the human condition, a certain foresight that is actually fore-blindness, an intellectual analogue to the discovery of the ever-present/ever-absent scotoma in our field of vision.

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Philosophers are perverse people who, upon detecting perplexity, instead of evading it like a normal person, go straight into it, and through it, in order to come out on the other side of it with something deeper and more comprehensive.

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There is nothing more natural than to detest philosophy. Without this natural impulse there would be no culture because there would be no stability.

But when stability is not advantageous, and deep disruption desired, nobody is better for the job than a philosopher. A philosopher will rip down a system of thought and replace it with another that was inconceivable while the old system reigned.

That’s why once a satisfactory system is put in place, the philosopher who established it should be given the post-war Churchill treatment.

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The best simple insight I’ve heard in the last year is that chaos is not the vacuum of order, but the simultaneous existence of far too many orders.

In respect to the genesis of a world, there is no ex nihilo.

The particular is articulated from infinite mess, speaking metaphysical perspective is chaos, and experientially, perplexity. To be philosophical is to willingly return to that mess and to allow it to re-articulate differently (for the sake of who knows what).

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Innovation is rough. That is why it rarely really happens.

People who want to invent without destroying have no choice than to be trivial.

 

Vision and voice

Hermeneutics, History, Judaism

People love to watch an artist draw. He draws a line and slowly it becomes a shape. He adds more lines, and introduces shading. So far, the relationships are all within the page; a composition takes form. But the drawing suggests that it is a drawing of something — but of what? Here is where the suspense is concentrated. The interrelated elements on the page taken as a whole point beyond themselves, to realities beyond the page. In figurative art, the reference is to physical objects. But this is only the basest reality. Beyond it is mood, and the mood is connected to the figures. And beyond that, there are layers of symbol, starting with shared cultural meanings, proceeding onward to more obscure and personal intimations.

I think storytelling is a mode of speech that imitates drawing. Human beings are predominantly visual, and whatever modes of thought make use of the visual modes of thought gain an advantage.

Maybe objectivity is preferred over subjectivity because objectivity is more optical. When we don’t want to follow some involved line of thought, when we don’t want to reach the conclusion by the path of personal realization, but just want the bottom-line result, what do we ask for? A synopsis.

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Martin Buber: “The Greeks established the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspondingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of particular objects.”

More and more, I am understanding Judaism to be a perpetually developing religion of time and speech subsuming space and sight, eternally at odds with the eternalizing religions of space and sight which look forward to the end of time (which entails an end to speech). Jews hear truth and say truth. In the process truth is revealed. Truth is a relationship. “Gentiles” see the truth and assert the truth. Truth is a thing.

To flatten the history of the Jews into a series of factual ethical assertions strung together on a thread of narrative is to misunderstand it (almost) completely.

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Here’s the Ricoeur passage that set me off on this line of thought:

…polysemy is the pivot of semantics. …we there come marvelously upon what I have called the exchanges between the structure and the event. In fact this process presents itself as a convergence of two factors, a factor of expansion and, at the limit, of surcharge. By virtue of the cumulative process… the word tends to be charged with use-values, but the projection of this cumulative process into the system of signs implies that the new meaning finds its place within the system. The expansion, and, if the case obtains, the surcharge is arrested by the mutual limitation of signs within the system. In this sense we can speak of a limiting action of the field, opposed to the tendency to expansion, which results from the cumulative process of the word. Thus is explained what one could call a regulated polysemy, which is the law of our language. Words have more than one sense, but they do not have an infinity of meanings.

This example shows how semantic systems differ from semiological systems. The latter can be treated without any reference to history; they are intemporal systems because they are potential. Phonology gives the best illustration of this. Only the binary oppositions between distinctive units play a role. In semantics, in contrast, the differentiation of meanings results from the equilibrium between two processes, a process of expansion and a process of limitation, which force words to shape themselves a place amid others, to hierarchize their use-values. This process of differentiation is irreducible to a simple taxonomy. Regulated polysemy is of the panchronic order, that is, both synchronic and diachronic to the degree that a history projects itself into states of systems, which henceforth are only instantaneous cross-sections in the process of sense, in the process of nomination.

We then understand what happens when the word returns to the discourse along with its semantic richness. All our words being polysemic to some degree the univocity or plurivocity of our discourse is not the accomplishment of words but of contexts. In the case of univocal discourse, that is, of discourse which tolerates only one meaning, it is the task of the context to hide the semantic richness of words, to reduce it by establishing what Greiman calls an isotopy, that is, a frame of reference, a theme, an identical topic for all the words of the sentence (for example, if I develop a geometrical “theme,” the word volume will be interpreted as a body in space; if the theme concerns the library, the word volume will be interpreted as designating a book). If the context tolerates or even preserves several isotopies at the same time, we will be dealing with an actually symbolic language, which, in saying one thing, says something else. Instead of sifting out one dimension of meaning, the context allows several to pass, indeed, consolidates several of them, which run together in the manner of the superimposed texts of a palimpsest. The polysemy of our words is then liberated. Thus the poem allows all the semantic values to be mutually reinforced. More than one interpretation is then justified by the structure of a discourse which permits multiple dimensions of meaning to be realized at the same time.

In short, language is in celebration. It is indeed in a structure that this abundance is ordered and deployed; but the structure of the sentence does not, strictly speaking, create anything. It collaborates with the polysemy of our words to produce this effect of meaning that we call symbolic discourse, and the polysemy itself of our words results from the concurrence of the metaphorical process with the limiting action of the semantic field.

 

Having a place

Ethics, Judaism

Reading Gilbert Ryle’s explanation of the expression “in my head”, I reflexively asked a Nietzschean question: Why would we be satisfied with understanding thoughts to be located in our heads, as if they occupied a space? Certainly, a thought process could lead us to that idea, and (collective) intellectual habit could preserve it, but could there be something satisfying or comforting about the idea that has made us more hospitable toward it? I recalled a passage from Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition:

The profound connection between private and public, manifest on its most elementary level in the question of private property, is likely to be misunderstood today because of the modern equation of property and wealth on one side and propertylessness and poverty on the other. This misunderstanding is all the more annoying as both, property as well as wealth, are historically of greater relevance to the public realm than any other private matter or concern and have played, at least formally, more or less the same role as the chief condition for admission to the public realm and full-fledged citizenship. It is therefore easy to forget that wealth and property, far from being the same, are of an entirely different nature. The present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any single individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole, clearly shows how little these two things are connected.

Prior to the modern age, which began with the expropriation of the poor and then proceeded to emancipate the new propertyless classes, all civilizations have rested upon the sacredness of private property. Wealth, on the contrary, whether privately owned or publicly distributed, had never been sacred before. Originally, property meant no more or less than to have one’s location in a particular part of the world and therefore to belong to the body politic, that is, to be the head of one of the families which together constituted the public realm. This piece of privately owned world was so completely identical with the family who owned it that he expulsion of a citizen could mean not merely the confiscation of his estate but the actual destruction of the building itself. The wealth of a foreigner or a slave was under no circumstances a substitute for this property, and poverty did not deprive the head of a family of this location in the world and the citizenship resulting from it. In early times, if he happened to lose his location, he almost automatically lost his citizenship and the protection of the law as well. The sacredness of this privacy was like the sacredness of the hidden, namely, of birth and death, the beginning and end of the mortals who, like all living creatures, grow out of and return to the darkness of an underworld. The nonprivative trait of the household realm originally lay in its being the realm of birth and death which must be hidden from the public realm because it harbors the things hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge. It is hidden because man does not know where he comes from when he is born and where he goes when he dies.

Not the interior of this realm, which remains hidden and of no public significance, but its exterior appearance is important for the city as well, and it appears in the realm of the city through the boundaries between one household and the other. The law originally was identified with this boundary line, which in ancient times was still actually a space, a kind of no man’s land between the private and the public, sheltering and protecting both realms while, at the same time, separating them from each other. The law of the polls, to be sure, transcended this ancient understanding from which, however, it retained its original spatial significance. The law of the city-state was neither the content of political action (the idea that political activity is primarily legislating, though Roman in origin, is essentially modern and found its greatest expression in Kant’s political philosophy) nor was it a catalogue of prohibitions, resting, as all modern laws still do, upon the Thou Shalt Nots of the Decalogue. It was quite literally a wall, without which there might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town, but not a city, a political community. This wall-like law was sacred, but only the inclosure was political. Without it a public realm could no more exist than a piece of property without a fence to hedge it in; the one harbored and inclosed political life as the other sheltered and protected the biological life process of the family.

It is therefore not really accurate to say that private property, prior to the modern age, was thought to be a self-evident condition for admission to the public realm; it is much more than that. Privacy was like the other, the dark and hidden side of the public realm, and while to be political meant to attain the highest possibility of human existence, to have no private place of one’s own (like a slave) meant to be no longer human.

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We will have a place of our own, one way or another. If we cannot have it in physical space, we will create that place socially. And failing that, we will establish it in our own mind and live inside our own private place.

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Giving a person a place in your own life is an act of humanity.