Commentaries
In the past, there was a divine law, and what happened to a people or nation could be explained in terms of whether that law was obeyed (they flourished) or not (they suffered through divine punishment). We have our own secular law of nations, which has left and right versions. On the right, it says that if the borders of a country are violated, and its people diluted etc., then the nation will decline. All problems of the nation can be explained as violations of this law of nations. The restoration of this law – bringing the country back – will bring about the restoration of the nation. On the left, the law of nations says that if the nation is sold to capitalists, companies, commerce etc., it will decline. On the right version, mass deportation will rid the country of its enemies, and restore the law; on the left version, nationalisation will rid the country of its enemies, and restore the law. The law of nations myth is in essence the same, left or right.
The synthesis of the two – bringing together the most popular aspects of both, and completing, in a sense, the law of nations concept – is national socialism, something we haven’t here let ourselves think of. But we are drifting there, even if we don’t know we are; even with the best of intentions. For it is the natural development, or logical synthesis, of our own left and right, who are unknowingly uniting over their joint obsession with Jews, the middle term in their sick political syllogism.
Thinking that what happens to you is due to your own actions is a more useful way of thinking than blaming someone or something, such as your past, or someone else, or nature. It seems cruel to think that every bad thing that happens is a punishment – some things should surely not be explained at all, and certainly not as something you are responsible for.
But if we were forced to choose full responsibility or none, full would be better, for you would have to think that what happens to you is a result of your own actions, which would lead you to look inwards, to take responsibility, and change. And for the most part, things which we relate to and go awry, go awry because our relation to them was faulty, which is because our relation to ourselves was faulty.
If we instead blame the past, or others, or an unchangeable part of ourselves, or nature, we condemn ourselves to repeated action. Because of this, Maimonides saw this approach, according to which you are not responsible and not guilty, as a “cruel conception of things”.
Everyone keeps the story of the other to themselves. (We fear it would hurt them if we told them: we have it, but do not say it.) But it would be fruitful to tell them the whole story of their life, as we see it. Not the factual details, but what is really going on, as if it were a fairy story. We cannot easily see this whole for ourselves, but can recognise it if it were told to us, which of course would hurt us.
Each year in the sun, you think there is a way to escape your thinking and enter a completely different level of thinking altogether, like a holiday of thought and feeling. In this is the idea that you don’t have to go through the problems of your life, but can skip over them, or go parallel to them, side-stepping them altogether, all with the help of the sun. And then, by autumn, we rubbish this idea as merely the delirious effects of the sun.
But it is not clear what is and is not possible, and so it is unclear what are the delusions caused by the sun, and what can really be done with its help. Perhaps those who always live in the sun see what we think of as sunlit dreams as reality, and perhaps they see what we think of as reality, in our own dark country, as the delusions caused by lack of sun.
If you are prepared to call someone sweet, you are well on the way to calling them anything whatsoever, such as angel or devil. Reduced to sweet, you have shown they are there for you to make them into whatever you wish them to be; they have slipped away from you altogether, all because of your sweet.
It is a frightening thought that you reveal yourself and cannot help revealing yourself in everything you say and do. For instance, if you criticise someone for not being courageous about x, you reveal yourself as someone who values being courageous about x, as someone, perhaps, who needs to prove to themselves that they can do x, or at least as someone who wants to show themselves to be courageous or value courage. You haven’t, in a sense, said anything about the world outside of you.
Likewise, if you want to slip away and hide yourself, you reveal yourself as someone who wants to hide away – the exact opposite of what you wanted to do, the very point of slipping away being not to reveal anything to anyone.
In tolerant, liberal, open society, if you are attached to taboo or shame, you are shamed. This form of shaming is not only allowed, it appears to be necessary as a punitive measure against anyone reactionary enough not to think that everything is permitted. I, on the other hand, do not want to relinquish shame, and I have a taboo on the revocation of taboo. Shame can only be tolerated by progressives through pity: you are not quite there yet, in the promised land of openness and transparency. If accepting shame as a legitimate way of being would violate the progressiveness of progressivism, this suggests that such progress is founded on intolerance.
When you hear someone’s voice and the way they speak to you, you hear their parents, and the way they were treated and spoken to by their parents. Your voice is an outgrowth, not your own; in a single voice, there are many voices, yet we pretend that the speaker is a singular person, just as if we would pretend they had no parents or ancestors and they arose ex nihilo, fully responsible for being the way they are. And perhaps we want to think that of others and of their voices, because we want to think this way about ourselves and our own, for this is our individualism, our ‘I’.
‘Responsible’ is ambiguous. It has a causal meaning: the burst pipe is responsible for the leak. And an ethical one: you are responsible for the crime. In this way, you can say that someone is not responsible for their life in the first sense, but even despite that, they are responsible for it (no one else is) in the second sense. The two senses are not only ambiguous, but together seem to be contradictory as applied to humans.
We see the real costs of the status quo, so want to change it for x. But we do not see the costs of x, for x is so far just an idea, and so it has no real costs. It may well be that the status quo is better than x, but who will defend the status quo with its real costs, when you can advocate for x, which is an idea, and so cost-free. All this will change when x is realised, but then it will be too late to defend the status quo.
The way you walk together is an expression of yourself and the relationship with the one you walk with. E.g one walks on a difficult area, so the other has an easy walk. Or: each walks their own way, only rarely walking in step. Or: one systematically walks ahead of the other, and one systematically walks behind the other. Or: each try to walk the easiest route for themselves, and come into conflict with one another over smooth and dry ground.
You should be able to tell everything about someone from the smallest thing, as the smallest action is done by the whole person – not a part of them, as we are fond of thinking – and so as it contains the whole person, who can be read off of the action.
The one behind the leader, at the front of the hike, thought the leader was trying to prove themselves. The one behind number two, thought the same about number two. The one who stayed at home, thinking of them all, thought the hikers were all trying to prove themselves by hiking.
He had the edge, the upper hand, as he was, he thought, outside of all competition. But yet, thinking of the hikers, setting himself outside all competition, he was competing harder than them all, and he saw himself – sitting in front of the telly while the others were out hiking – as the real number one.
If you’re not giving to life, you are taking, and so feel miserable and guilty. Some will tell you to ‘re-program’ yourself, they will say that you can think about anything any way you like. Which is true, logically, and untrue psychologically.
Everything flows from the self relation, the I-I relation. Compare two ways of thinking of your life: as having parts which can be worked on, which are lacking or satisfied (friends, work, relationship etc.). Or you can think of it (as I do) as fundamentally a single thing, which through its relation to itself, manifests itself in healthy or sick relations to all other things.
On the first conception, you take responsibility, though it is grounded in false distinctions between parts, and is concerned with symptoms, not the fundamental cause. In the second, you see what is true, but because the problem is so vast – one’s relation to oneself – there is nothing tractable, no discrete problem to work on (such as a part), and so you might give up, and so fail to take responsibility for the whole. As is often the case, the more useful the idea, the more it is divorced from reality.
‘If you want to see and feel things you must constantly resist trying to explain them.’ Possibly, if explaining is a mental action in competition for attention with seeing and feeling. But even if this were true, there is a danger that without explaining we fall into mystery and stupidity, and risk confusing the blatantly idiotic and surreal with the profound.
I replaced her with the sun. Went to a hot country where the sun would burn so brightly I could not even think. Where she used to be, it was; thoughts of her were replaced by it. That I could replace her so easily with the sun – what did this say about me? Did it undermine her, or did it elevate the sun? One was gas, the other not; one had a spirit, the other not. They were entirely different kinds of thing, yet seemed, in my mind, interchangeable; each filled my mind up in their own way, leaving no room for the other.
It seemed that all the words had been used up, and now when something significant happened, it could no longer be historic or landmark or game-changing – but then how could its significance be announced or announce itself? Capitalisation was tried, but when imitated, it soon fell short. Was it now impossible to register what was important and what was not, because we had used up all the words, in all their combinations? I cannot believe this. I think rather that we have reached the limit of brash outer language; we haven’t even given inner language a chance yet.
“If you remain indifferent to Me, I will be indifferent to you with a vengeance.” (Leviticus 26:21) The only theology that makes sense to me is the abandoning theology, the God who has left us, who appears indifferent. It is God as cat, who goes off alone, whom we call but only comes when he likes, bidden or unbidden. It is a much more powerful theology than atheism, which lacks all pathos. But this God, of Leviticus, on second thought, is not the abandoning God; his threat of indifference is a threat of punishment (or a punishment itself), and so he takes a great interest in us, threatening abandonment with a vengeance. It is God acting like a child who pretends to ignore his mother, punishing her; not at all the God of traditional theism, or of the critique of that, the projection of our good qualities into the sky. This is an instance of the difference between what you think God is, and what he (at least in the book) actually is.
We allow that if you fall under a certain identity, you can claim it, be it, perform it. While if you claim an identity which you are not, you violate some social rule. But it would be more interesting if you reject even the identity that you are, or are allowed to be. More interesting if you see even that as false and merely a socially acceptable performance.
We all like to fall under an identity (national, religious, ethnic, political etc.). It puts ground under our feet. But precisely because it does, we should be suspicious of it, and should reject it as false. The ground makes us feel secure, but now we cannot move, we are limited and stuck. We want this sort of limitation, it gives us a structure and through it we obtain social rewards. But they are based on this identity, which is false. For I am not identical with the category with which I identify myself.
You can read ethical demands in two ways, as demands to live better, or as choices between life and death. And they are presented in both ways in the holy books. Often with the idea that you will be punished if you don’t do them, and rewarded if you do. But we can see many such rules as ways of saying: this is good for you (and society), and if you (and society) fail to implement it, you will suffer. If you strip out God, you can see these as suggestions for a good life and society, based on the empirical claim that outside of the path of a good life in society, there are not alternative lifestyles, but suffering and death.
There is a certain kind of person who wants to take from you in bad faith what you would freely give to them in good faith. It is the act of robbing you that they enjoy, not the thing taken; it’s the way it is obtained by them without you wanting to part with it that matters to them.
I find it remarkable that men could voice the voice of God in holy books. That anyone could have the chutzpah to say: I am God, these are my commands. You can think of it even as some kind of miracle, perhaps even a proof of God; if no one can, psychologically, do this, but someone has done this, then something impossible has occurred – a miracle!
But, no, in every hundred people there is always someone like this, and usually the worst one of the hundred, usually an absolute charlatan who will believe that because they think something, it is God-ordained. It is because they are so absurd that we don’t give any thought to the fact that there are such people, even today. But how did any one of them become so revered? Because (maybe) very occasionally, one will be an original, and of those, one in every thousand will be worth listening to. And these are the writers of the holy books. Perhaps they understood that the audacity of claiming to voice God itself convinces people that they voice God, for there must be something behind them (or else they are mad).