I
Franz Rosenzweig, in The Star of Redemption — which is a very interesting book, partly written in the trenches of the Balkan front during World War I —, accuses philosophy — he says: from Ionia to Jena, that is to say, all the history of philosophy, from its inception with the Ionian philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) to German Idealism (championed by Hegel in Jena) — he accuses philosophy of spreading a sort of “blue smoke” that makes people forget about what people are really into: the here and now of life, which, inevitably one day comes to an end for each of us. Put differently, Rosenzweig accuses philosophy –— again, from Ionia to Jena — of distracting us from our awareness of dying, for what dies — what will die one day — is precisely this particular flower which I’m looking at, this particular hair I’m caressing.
What then is, according to Rosenzweig, philosophy’s “blue smoke” made of? Abstractions and totalities, and even the promise that something will last and, thereby, transcend death.
Let me quote a little excerpt from the book’s opening pages:
Philosophy — says Rosenzweig — has the audacity to […] remove from death its poisonous sting […]. All that is mortal lives in [the] fear of death […]. [E]ach newly born waits with fear and trembling for the day of its passage into the dark. But philosophy refutes these earthly fears. It breaks free above the grave that opens up under our feet before each step. It abandons the body to the power of the abyss, but above it the free soul floats off in the wind.
Needless to say, the word “soul” is nothing more than a metaphor here, used to indicate what may last. (My ideas, for instance.)
Anyway, Rosenzweig protests. He says: “no, we don’t want something — no matter what — to float off in the wind: we want this life we have not to end; it is this life, in its concreteness and singularity, that we don’t want to lose!”
II
Rosenzweig’s critique will not only be undertaken by the existentialists, but also by other contemporary philosophers who will complain about this alleged commitment of philosophy to abstractions, etc. from a different perspective. You can think here in all the importance that the singular and the differential (“this,” “that”) gained in late-20th century philosophy with, for example, Deleuze (while Derrida is closer to Rosenzweig through Levinas).
I would like then to reconsider — we could, of course, reconsider here many things — this accusation against Ionia. Let’s look at the moment of the philosophy’s inception, and let’s see whether there is there some kind of forgetting of the particular on behalf of the universal, whether the singular is there sacrificed on the altar of the eternal, as though death could be crossed out.
I would not like to go, though, through all the Ionian philosophers — of whom, on the other hand, we have very few and small fragments. I would like to focus on a single text, which is known as Anaximander’s saying, which is also the oldest philosophical fragment we know of, and which reads thus:
“That from which things spring up, is also that into which they relapse when they pass away according to necessity, for they pay justice and show mutual esteem to each other on account of their injustice, as per the assessment of time.”
III
It is an extremely interesting fragment. Like many other so-called Pre-Socratic or Pre-Platonic fragments, it plays with Homer’s poetry, and specifically with Homer’s Iliad, to which it is closely related. Homer is always a good place to start when looking at the dawn of philosophy — which is something, by the way, that Nietzsche knew very well but seems to have been forgotten afterwards; but about this I will speak another day.
The Iliad as Anaximander’s subtext, then? Indeed. For in the Iliad Agamemnon’s ὕβρις (Agamemnon’s excess, his desire to overstep Apollo’s “good order” by keeping for himself what is under Apollo’s symbolic protection) is contested by Achilles, who withdraws from the battlefield. Thus, Agamemnon’s excessive, unmoderated presence is confronted by someone else’s absence: Achilles’s absence. And what about Achilles himself? He will only return to the battlefield when some else absents himself from it: Patroclus, whom, dressed like Achilles (absent, present), Hector kills; Hector, whom will be killed by Achilles but whose corpse Achilles will refuse to give back to his father Priam. In short, absence and presence are, in different ways, the problem of the Iliad: its opening and most central issue.
Like in Anaximander, in whom certain things appear while others disappear, for some things need to disappear for others to appear in turn.
Now, this takes us back to Homer in another sense. Of each hero, something always dies and is cried accordingly. Yet, something too subsists death: the bits of wisdom and/or virtue that the deceased may have achieved before dying, a collection of noble evocable features susceptible of being remembered — something as thin as the air one breaths, but immortal.
So it is not true that the singular is not taken into account here. But there is an understanding, first, that certain things need to go for other things to appear — there is, that is, a non-egoistic or non self-centred understanding of death — of one’s own death — as being necessary for life — for other lives to be. (Which, by the way, shows that Levinas is wrong in assuming that philosophy is, in its beginnings, indifferent to ethics.) So there is the understanding that for other to enter the region of being I must necessarily abandon it. And there is the understanding, secondly, that what is carried away by death actually divides in two or even three: one part of it inevitably goes — this particular flower which I’m looking at and the eyes which look at it, in a word, the body; another part or dimension of it, however, survives, if just for a while, in the immediate memory of those who were acquainted with the deceased: it’s the ghost, or the soul (and it would be extremely interesting to introduce some comparative ethnography here); finally, another part subsists, despite all, for a longer while: what one might have achieved and others learn from — again, something as thin as the air one breaths, and yet immortal.
I don’t see philosophy’s “blue smoke” in any of this, but something else and very beautiful: the distinction between the particular, the universal, and what lies between both; three things, then, and their three fates: one dark, the other one translucent, and the one one possibly bright.
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