Ironic

It is ironic, unreal and bewildering to read certain passages from the diaries of the German philosopher Heidegger, also known as the Black Notebooks, especially in these days when land and military action are at stake in the Middle East. The passages are presented as follows by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in his book The Banality of Heidegger:

► Uprootedness and therefore Bodenlosigkeit (lack of soil of one’s own) is a distinguishing feature of Judaism. The lack of ground consists in – or leads to – “being bound to nothing, making everything serviceable for itself (Judaism).” (Quote from Heidegger in this sentence: from‘Überlegungen VII-XI’, Schwartze Hefte 1938/39, p. 97).

► Because of this lack of a country of its own, Judaism writes itself out of human history because “groundlessness excludes itself”. (Quote from Heidegger in this sentence: from ‘Überlegungen VII-XI’ , Schwartze Hefte 1938/39, p. 97). Did Heidegger think, Nancy wonders, that Judaism could be helped in this self-destruction, for example by the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws?

► The contempt for the (then) lack of their own land is reinforced in Heidegger as, because of that lack, Jews do not know what it is to fight: “World Jewry(…)does not need to participate in military action, whereas we have to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people” (Quote from Heidegger in this sentence: from ‘Überlegungen XII-XV’, Schwartze Hefte 1939-1941, p. 262).

Heidegger would probably not have minded saying exactly the opposite in today’s situation. A bit like in the last century the anti-Semitic communists detested the Jews because of ‘their’ capitalism, and the anti-Semitic capitalists because they were all communists. 

Also see Heidegger and the Jews

If you would like to see or give comments: click on Ironic and scroll down.

Kol Nidrei and other illusions

Sometimes it happens that people are open to someone else’s distress, at the moment it becomes clear to them that they injured that other. Such is the central thesis which the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas elaborates in his books.

Among the many injuries which people inflict upon one another, Levinas’s attention is primarily directed towards, what he calls, the ‘violence of thinking’. This violence appears where one person thinks for another and this other doesn’t like it. It is a kind of intrusion, Levinas calls it ‘imperialism’. The thinker can dwell in the euphoric illusion that he helps the other. But the injury which the other incurs because of the thinker’s obtrusiveness can vary from humiliation to the feeling to be pressed into a corner. When the thinker notices this he can be startled by his own illusions and adjust his behaviour.

When I talk with people about this Levinasian thesis, they often recognize the phenomenon and they can point to concrete experiences of it in their own lives. But at the same time they often ask: why are there also people who do nót let themselves be directed by the distress they cause with another; who just keep going their own sovereign way and do as they please with their obtrusive plans? What causes that one person may be sensitive for the injury being done to the Face (as Levinas calls it) and another person is not?

Every time again I find this an intriguing question and I don’t have an answer to it. Some Levinas-students think you can train this sensitivity. For instance by listening seriously to others and practising this competence. I think this is not a wrong suggestion, because by doing so you develop a kind of alertness regarding illusions in which you may be trotting on and transgressing borders. 

Actually, the value of Day of Atonement for me lies precisely in its contribution to that training: to bring to mind, via a specially marked day and an overwhelming liturgy, where and when I lapsed into error. To be able to do so we need a special language and Yom Kippur’s liturgy offers that language. From this perspective Day of Atonement may be regarded as a training in sensitivity, because a whole day long you are immersed in that language.

Yet, I keep being sceptical about the suggestion that we can get rid of our illusions by such training. For illusions are simply inherent to our thinking. So, as long as we don’t give up thinking (and I would not recommend that) illusions will keep popping up and with them the injuries which they cause. I certainly believe that reflection on the effects of our thinking and acting produces progress, also in our thinking. But at the same time I am convinced that we will keep being surprised by our illusions and unwantingly will continue to injure people because of them.

The nice thing is that scepsis as to the possibility of countering illusions also got its place in the liturgy of Yom Kippur. Namely in the Kol Nidrei, where we direct our attention to promises (to conceive of as euphoric intentions or illusions) which in the future we certainly will break.

Far from offering a license for randomly making and breaking promises – as this text has been interpreted by malevolents - the Kol Nidrei herewith testifies of realism and of a deep insight into the treacherous nature of human thinking. From this perspective the pronouncing of the Kol Nidrei is to be seen as a training in sensitivity.

Yom Kippur may be the heaviest training in sensitivity of the Jewish yearcycle. But immediately afterwards it gets a continuation, in a lighter style, with Sukkot. The tent (Sukkah) which is open to all sides, as Abraham’s tent was, according to Levinas is a model of sensitivity and as such, for him, of human conscience.

Spiritual violence

It recently was twenty years ago that seven monks were kidnapped from their monastery in Tibhirine by Algerian Islamists. Two months later, on May 30, 1996, only their heads were found.

They had let it happen. The monks knew of the advancing Islamist violence in the region. They did consider to leave, but decided to remain in their monastery in solidarity with the local population and to refuse protection by the military.

And time and again at every commemoration, most recently by Stefan Waanders in Trouw, there are those gushy comments which extol the monks’ behavior as a sign of ultimate sacrifice readiness. This time Waanders adds to his article Brother Christian’s ‘testament’, in which he sums up the essence of his life. “This is a testament of the great spiritual texts of the last century”, says Waanders.

In the text, Brother Christian de Chergé, the prior of the monastery, speaks of his willingness to die out of solidarity with the Algerian Muslims who for more then a century were humiliated by the French. The respect that he thus shows to victims of French colonialism is certainly sympathetic, although I do not see how an Islamist massacre can benefit the image of Islam.

What stings me, and what makes questionable the whole gesture of the monks for me, is the following passage in Christian’s testament.

“Of course my death will seem to confirm all those who derided me as naive or idealistic: ‘Tell me, what do you think about it now!’ But people need to know that what torments and makes me curious most, will finally get a liberating answer. Because I will, if it pleases God, I will be allowed to let my sight be united with that of the Father to look with him to his Muslim children. I will see them as he sees them, bathed in the light of the glory of Christ, fruit of His Passion and coated with the gift of the Spirit, who always with hidden joy will create community and, playing with all the differences, will restore the similarities.”

This text strikes me as a mark of spiritual imperialism, one of the most unsympathetic kind, and, I fear, exemplary of Christianity. When reading such a passage I ask myself in despair: Is there no one who will see how here, from under a blanket of fluffy piety, in one blow every deviating, differently defined identity is assimilated to what for this monk rises over everyone and everything? Gone all otherness, away with plurality. Doesn’t anybody – this monk, or the author of the article, or the public – feel that there is coarse mental violence, pure imperialism at stake?

I know, irenic souls like Erasmus and others had exactly the same view. To me that only confirms what I tend to consider as the blind spot in our civilization, namely that mental pressure is not perceived as violence, and therewith as condemable as physical violence. Mental pressure is not innocent, if only because frustrated mental pressure can still lead to physical violence. As Luther’s dealings with the Jews can illustrate: when his preaching could not convince the Jews, he towards the end of his life turned to hate speech against the Jews.

This has got much to do with Thinking for someone else. Also see Reversal of values.

The whole world – or just a small part?

The relationship of Western culture to the bordercrossing and sometimes terrorist ambitions of Islam is more complex than is often thought. There is a strong inner relationship between the universalist orientations of the West and of Islam. That’s my conclusion after reading an enlightening article by the Arabist Maurice Blessing.

This conclusion is reached by the observation that 1. both the West and Islam start from a universalist, transnational ideal; 2. this ideal is not satisfied with less than global universalism; and 3. to achieve that goal the use of force is justified.

The presence of a universalist ideal appeared in the West since the time that Christianity got solid foothold there. From that moment it was its declared objective to from the West further Christianize the world. Think of the Catholic  and Protestant missionaries who certainly at the time of the 18th and 19th century imperialism, took it for their task (‘the white man’s burden’) to spread the Christian message to the farthest corners of the earth. When Christianity began to make way for the values of the French Revolution, such as democracy and human rights, the universalist fervor was no less.

In the case of Islam, according to Blessing, there is a religious commitment to ‘higher spheres’ that by its nature can accept no limits that prevent its spread. Because of that universalist orientation Islam can not but consider all national, particularistic borders as void and meaningless. Not only of non-Islamic countries, but also of Islamic countries, as evidenced by the change of the name ISIS (‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’, so tied to a limited territory) in IS (‘Islamic State’). Loyalty should not be shown to human citizenship but to Allah. And Islam does not go for less than the whole world.

The conviction of having a universally applicable message was sufficient legitimacy for Christians to proceed to conversion under pressure. For example, of Jews in Spain, or of Indians in South America. And later, for the secular revolutionaries of the RAF and the Red Brigades to perpetrate their attacks. To the revolutionary Muslims it is sufficient justification for committing acts of terrorism around the world and for the destruction of national heritage.

Thus revolutionary fervor, stemming from the sincere belief to have a beneficial or even spiritual message for everyone, might point to greater affinity between Islam and the West then we usually tend to assume. A – not unimportant – contemporary difference is that the West has tempered the use of violence by attributing the monopoly of violence precisely to the national state. Such a concession to the national state radical Islam will not easily do, says Blessing. Indeed, Islamic terror is the very protest against this domestication of Islam and its binding to national borders.

But even with that difference the congeniality in universalist orientation between the West and Islam remains striking. Expanding your ideal all over the earth, as a necessary part of the ideal’s concept, appears to be an inseparable characteristic of both Christianity/Enlightenment and Islam. Could it have to do with a certain Greek conception of truth? That something called ‘truth’ only deserves the name if it has proven to be ‘universally valid’? Well, then you must first conquer the world.

Whatever you may say of the Jewish tradition – that it inspires people to discrimination against Israeli Arabs and encourages colonization of the West Bank –for roughly two thousand years it is a fact that Jewish attention is directed particularisticly, namely towards the welfare of the Jewish group. You might find that  narrow-minded, but maybe nicely modest as well.

In any case, the urge to missionate or conquer the world, including the immense brutality that goes with it, is foreign to the Jewish tradition. Except of course if you believe in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

Also see Borders and Countries without borders

‘Intrinsically disordered’

The Ministry of Education is going to start information sessions in asylum centers about gay rights. It are especially asylum-seekers from the Middle East who will be informed that homosexuality is not wrong.

Is that going to work? In the rejection of homosexuality, by both immigrants and natives, often several elements play a role. For example, the security of a world in which there is a natural order, which at the same time is divine because nature is considered to be designed by God. And if nature is designed primarily for procreation, God has willed heterosexuality, not homosexuality.

For me it is a serious question whether you can ‘out-educate’ such a view. The Roman Catholic church, however Western it is, has not yet succeeded in that, anyway. During last year’s extraordinary synod on the family there was officially no change in the view of homosexuality as ‘intrinsically disordered’. It is thought that homosexual relationships “are contrary to divine and natural law”.

In the Anglican church a form of education has indeed been on the agenda, mainly from the white part to the colored and black part. During the last decades gay priests have been ordinated Anglican bishop. But in some parts of the church this caused so much resistance that now one must say such education would appear to have failed. Especially on the African continent and with conservative Americans feelings on the subject ran high, and a church schism was feared. Thanks to a gay-unfriendly compromise that danger could recently (temporarily?) be averted.

If acceptance of homosexuality can be so problematic, even in a church community with common traditions and customs, how difficult it must be for people from the Middle East who share a lot less in terms of ideas and traditions with us?

Also see (Un)purity

Humiliation is never good

Last week I thought: this goes all wrong. I do not mean that we - the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France – accept too many refugees, because I do not know. Maybe we can handle it.

Nor do not mean that other countries - Hungary, Czech Republic, Israel - wrongly hold off the boat, because they may have their reasons.

I refer specifically to the reproaches made by the rich and developed West within the EU to the poorer and less developed East. Thus it is said that Hungary is “antisocial” and “inhumane”, and that the Eastern European countries in their opposition to mandatory quotas don’t represent “21st century Europe”.

Aren’t here the most deadly ingredients that can play in the interaction between people and states fully active again? The moral and cultural superiority of the West and the ‘primitiveness’ of the unruly countries are recurring themes. And therewith humiliation is the order of the day.

This is so bad because with a bit more historical look at our own cultural and social developments it may become well understandable that the East European countries do what they do. Don’t we ourselves wrestle with the integration of newcomers, while working on that already for fifty years. A couple of years ago Chancellor Merkel still considered integration to have “failed”. I did not agree with her, I think it goes well in many areas, but let’s not forget  that we needed fifty years for it. That experience Eastern European countries do not have. And Israel certainly not, because for such a development peace is a prerequisite for, including with Syria.

Furthermore, the seventy-year post-war peace and prosperity helped the indigenous Western European population to for the first time in world history think in completely different ways about faith, tradition, sexuality and identity. Remember the many shocks accompanied the process, at least in Holland, from the rebellion of the first prosperity-generation of in the sixties, through massive secularization, the revolt of Fortuyn and Wilders to the current debate about Blackface.

A suchlike cultural and social development apparently can only start to develop after a period of 20 to 25 years of peace and stability, the point where Eastern Europe is only now. Moreover, Hungary and Romania have had bad experiences with the difficult embeddable Roma. How ethical – or simply: wise – is it to demand of others something after twenty-five years that took us seventy years te reach?

Europe will have to deal with its member states in the way in which a state deals with its subjects. No state will oblige citizens to just take refugees into their homes. Those who can and want to do so may be encouraged. But those who are not ready to do so for whatever reasons – trouble in organizing their own life, trauma, poverty – can not be forced. And certainly not with an appeal to 21st century moral standards which originate in Western peace and prosperity and are suddenly thought to be universal.

The latter pretension can only have a humiliating effect. And does the pedantic West still not know what that means?

Also see Reluctance against the West, Half-grown and Plato disproved?

Derailed ideology

What is worse? A Palestinian baby died in a fire bomb attack by Jewish settlers; or four stabbed participants in the Jerusalem gayparade, one of whom is already deceased and the others probably marked for their lives?

This is no kind of question, of course. For those directly involved this kind of suffering equation is not an issue.

And for us as spectators? Once more we find how dangerous ideologies can be. In both cases, it comes to political and religious ideas that run off with people. They turn them into criminals who in their ideological foolishness know no boundaries any longer.

That finding may encourage us to watch more critically the process of our thinking and to ask ourselves where we get unacceptably ideological. After all, precisely well-intentioned ideas – and at this moment I still want to consider most religious or political ideas as such – can get monstrously ideological.

Apart from that I think throwing the fire bomb is the most evil of the two crimes. Because this settlers action takes place within the framework of ideological infatuation which is not limited any longer to individuals. The desire – whether or not religiously motivated – to appropriate as much Palestinian land as possible is the ideological madness of an entire Israeli cabinet. With government-sanctioned lawlessness and outlawry of the Palestinians as a result. That is really very serious.

I hope this time the bombthrowers wil be identified and brought to court.

Also see Polyphony

Bankers sincerely don’t understand

I must explain that title. I mean that bankers are not necessarily malevolent as they once more bring mathematically smart but risky financial products on the market or use perverse reward systems.

I say that because people (bankers, in this case) will not be willing to talk about their actions when they are accused of malice. But also because alarmingly often this is the case: bankers believe in what they do. They don’t necessarily have bad intentions.

Merel van Vroonhoven, head of the Dutch Regulator Financial Markets, expresses this as follows: “Bankers feel that they have done what has been agreed, so that’s it. They are, unlike the surrounding society in which they operate, insufficiently aware that there is really need for something else. Therefore, the surprise in the sector about the commotion from society is sincere.”

And Joris Luyendijk, in his book Swimming with Sharks, says: “Outsiders see that the amoral financial system leads to immoral outcome, but bankers have learned in their economic studies, especially if that was at an Anglo-Saxon top university, that the result of their work is morally right because it contributes to economic growth. That is their dogma.” That’s what they believe in and much more they sincerely do not see.
In addition, says Luyendijk, that universe is not so exceptional. Rather, the amoral mindset where everybody is so angry about now, has found broad access in society, even in sectors such as education and healthcare. So the problem is the system, in the broadest sense, and instead of furiously blaming individual bankers for succumbing to perverse incentives we should invest our energy into tackling and eliminating them.

The wide spread of Anglo-Saxon management values – such as rational cleverness, priority for thinking over doing and for policy over implementation – allows the comparison of bankers with other professions that sometimes operate in a similar dysfunctional way. Certainly for the illustration of the influence of good intentions such a comparison is instructive, because in those other professions money does not play as big a role. So the accusation of avarice and greed (often directed against bankers) is not needed for an understanding of the type of dysfunctional behavior we talk about. Good intentions and ambitious cunning explain enough.

You can see that for example in the US policy officials who had to carry Obamacare through parliament. Obama’s team consisted of super smart people. But they appeared to have little interest in the concrete implementation and elaboration of the plan. They had terminated the insurance of millions of Americans without telling them they quickly would get a new - and better - insurance.

Obama’s project then was in danger of running ashore. With understated anger the president subjected his team to a questionsession which the participants experienced as “an autopsy and as much worse than shouting”. By doing so, Obama as yet made his policymakers aware of the panic and commotion they had caused to people and which they, with all their cunning, had not seen coming. As bankers do not understand the turmoil that may cause their products in society.

The comparison shows that these policy-makers and bankers have the following in common: a great belief in complicated products, thought-out by high potentials and rolled out downward; a certain blindness to the effects of those products in the daily lives of people; the belief that their products serve a higher purpose.

Anyway, well intentioned or not, if the results of their actions are undesirable, then bankers must be addressed on the risks of their actions, as Obama did with his policy officials.

In order to protect society from this kind of smug smart guys. And also because maybe it is not so nice at all for bankers and policy officials themselves, having to live in the above described value system. Luyendijk: “That’s why I say we should hug them. Because they lead tragic lives.”

Also see Crisis of Ethics or of Thinking?

Measurability

The time that students rode through town in carriages is over, fortunately. True, in those days there always were a few of them that used the very same pool of money and time for thorough study of their subjects, in breadth and depth. Then quality could just spontaneously emerge: Bildung we can only dream of.

Because of the affluence on which that Bildung mostly rested, the latter had a decidedly elitist and exclusive character. I’m not sorry to see it gone, and I welcome the fact that large groups of other people now share in academic education.

So I also understand that a lot of public money goes to the universities. And that one wants to have some control over it. And that directors and managers should monitor that. And that inevitably some form of counting and measuring is always involved.

In the debate about the return on investment at the universities, I therefore disagree with the proposition that there is nothing to measure. Because immeasurability would make large-scale universities unmanageable. Then intellectual and cultural formation would again be accessible only to those of whom also the means are immeasurable.

In addition, there is another, more fundamental reason why I do not agree with the inmeasurability thesis. I think that measurability dóes exist in this field. However: not in the form of the brute performance indicators that managers and financials invent and apply nowadays. As if it were thém who provide the added value of education and research.

As to measurability in a realistic form, I rather think of the kind Ben Tiggelaar recently referred to in his NRC-column. People with serious ambitions, he wrote, also on the field of arts and sciences, often put themselves all sorts of standards – as countable and even rigid as imaginable. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright for example got up every day at four o’clock to work three hours in quiet. “Like the bureaucratic habit of many writers to count the number of words they daily produce and to impose themselves quotas. Hemingway: 500 words per day, Stephen King: 2000”.

The difference: these professionals know exactly what is needed for fruitful results. Tiggelaar’s advice to managers and financials would therefore be: go talk to the professionals and do not decide for thém what standards they must meet, but let them decide themselves. Let a professor describe his personal ideals and benchmark her own performance.

Because professors (and students) are no less keen on return than managers. But they have more sense of it.

Also see Grief

Je suis (pas) Charlie

A strange feeling of kinship with the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo lives in me.

Strange because I – unlike Charlie Hebdo – don’t like provocations so much. Instead, I tend to prefer to bridge divergent interests and disagreements through discussion and mutual understanding. Definitely different from what the murdered cartoonists used to do.

Does it perhaps have to do with the fact that except cartoonists also Jewish targets are high on the Muslim Terrorist targets lists? Then my sense of kinship would arise out of a shared threat. Solidarity by an accidentally shared situation.

But then, I think, is this shared first place on the list of targets so accidental really? Isn’t it possible to designate Jews in European cultural history as the freethinkers of the West? They already started being so in the first millennium of the Christian era, when the Jews were so rude to reject the so-called universal Christian truth. That was experienced by the surrounding society as outrageous and offensive. Perilous, but they did it, the Jews.

And they persevered, despite many persecutions, during the second millennium. Even when, from the 18th and 19th century secularization struck, Jews, accustomed to cherishing their own socio-inner life, kept drawing therefrom. They often contributed in an original way to Western music, philosophy and literature. Different from the (Victorian) mainstream, not constricting their hearts and sexual lifes, and therefore sometimes offensive again.

Today (Western) Christians are bothered much less by the Jewish free-mindedness than before, when the universal Christian truth pretensions were still intact. But now some Islamic movements have elevated many of these universal pretensions to ruthless truth and, again, transverse Jews don’t fit in. That may explain why their reputation for stubbornness, fanned by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, makes Jews into top butt for Muslim Terrorist attacks.

So, although I do not go on the streets with “Je suis Charlie” – I do feel that way.

Also see Parrhesia

Sacred Imagination

As long as I hear people use the word ‘imagination’, an exalted tone is connected with it. Imagination stands on a pedestal. But, I asked myself many times, why is that?

It may be because imagination helps people – writers and readers – to, if only temporarily,  escape the unruly reality and to experience a rush of oblivion. Publishers seem to aim at that effect when promoting new books, as happens now with a new book by Leon de Winter that is touted as “a dance on the high wire of imagination”. And writer Adri van der Heijden once told that in his youth he was so bored at home that he fled in imagination.

Nice that it exists that way, but a second explanation appeals to me more. It associates  imagination with nurturing and enhancing the inner human space. In the same vein as philosophy can broaden your horizons by presenting new ideas, literary imagination can produce that effect by the portrayal of emotions and psychological complications.

But what I think is less appealing of this valuation of imagination is that it often in one go is linked to a useful side effect of imagination: the latter would help improve interpersonal communication because people learn better to empathize in each other’s situation. Even, some philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty say, in order to really improve the world, you should employ literature.

I do not like that argument. Firstly, because between the study room, where imagination unfolds, and reality in a disturbing way light remains. Something of irritation thereabout was voiced lately by critic Rob Schouten in his cautious appreciation of novelist Arnon Grunberg. Who refuses to reassure us in his novels, and his reversal of the feel-good-Swiss-Life-sentiment does not leave Schouten unscathed. “His work has to do more with human trauma than with sacred imagination”.

Secondly, and related, I do not like the idea of world-improving manufacturability that is expressed by Nussbaum’s and Rorty’s plead for instrumental imagination. Of course, one can never be against broadening horizons in the philosophical or literary field, that is only too right. But the underlying idea is wrong, because it argues that if only you think and feel broadly enough, you can eliminate misperceptions. And that thought is counterproductive in an insidious way.

Indeed, the range of human thoughts and emotions is infinitely large. To think that all that can in advance be made to fit in your imaginative world, by definition does not reflect the reality of people and is therefore, in its pretensions, potentially violent. Because how will a self-conscious large imagination deal with a reality that yet appears to dwell outside of it? Something múst be wrong with that.

And this last conclusion I would not draw too quickly. But that means that, conversely, there is something wrong, not so much with imagination itself, but with the pretensions of imagination. We will, in spite of the pretensions of Nussbaum and Rorty, keep being surprised time and again by the reactions of others, however big our imagination is. Because the other is different, by definition.

All things considered, we need to know – or, if you prefer, to imagine – only one from the whole range of human emotions: grief. Because then you will usually be able to recognize the situations in which you have hurt someone else, notwithstanding all your imagination.

Defining the world

Define the world, we múst do so, because otherwise it will be chaos in our heads. So that’s why do we all do it. It is a matter of evolutionary survival, and it becomes manifest as our tendency to categorize and stereotype.

It is very well possible to speak dispassionately about it. That’s what, for example, Daniel Kahneman does in his book Thinking, fast and slow. “Stereotyping in our culture is a loaded term, but as I use it here, the meaning is neutral. One of the main features of our intuitive system is that it interprets categories as standards or prototypes. This is how we understand horses, refrigerators and police officers.”

But that it múst be done – because in order to survive in emergencies we have to be able to act immediately  and cannot allow any doubt – does not mean that our definitions are correct and our judgments founded.

So there is a fair chance that you put animals, people, things in the wrong box. And that is less innocent than it seems. Especially when you do that with people, because people in the last resort want themselves to have control over their own lives. If another puts them prematurely or wrongly in a certain box (that’s to say: defines them), it can feel like a border crossing: you don’t have anything to say about me! That feels like violence.

But at the same time, as I said, our lives are made up of definitions and labels that we impose on the world and others. And their obviousness sometimes is so big that it seems far-fetched to problematize them.

Thus you would think that the distinction between men and women is one of the most basic and easy ones that we can make. So that we may assume that everybody can be classified in one of those two categories. That’s why it is quite natural for us to ask: is it a boy or a girl?

However, what we then actually do, says Lies Wesseling, is that the many differences between people are thrown on just two heaps. Then everything that does not fit under the headings of ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is seen as deviant or as irrelevant.

But nature is not that clear cut, at least not always. And more importantly, individual human experience is not so clear. Someone in a woman’s body may feel himself a man, or vice versa, or something in between. If you pin such a person, as a matter of course, to a stereotype, you can cause serious damage.

How hurtful that obvious categorization can be may appear from the experiences of people for whom those categories were not suitable and whose stories only recently are being taken seriously: the transgenders. Those stories are pure sadness. And in the Netherlands their number easily runs into 50,000.

Now there is a new Dutch law that confirms that identity is something that only you yourself can feel and name. Transgenders can now administratively change sex, even without changing anything to the body. For example, it may happen that a man gives birth to a child, and is regarded as the mother.

The new law does not abolish the categories, so there is still spoken in terms of male and female. The dream of many transgender continues, such as Vreer puts it: “I dream of a birth certificate and an identitycard without gender designation. Even an X, as recently is allowed in Australia, can be an improvement. That means ‘not specified’, and so it is with me”.

But anyway, the new law infringes on stereotypes and definitions that until recently seemed to be cast in concrete. The law may therefore be seen as a Levinassian answer to the problem that Levinas treats with great tenacity in all his works: of the injuries that with our defining thought, seeking stable categories, we inflict to others.

Could possibly the Dutch Black Peter (Zwarte Piet) be such a dubious stable category as well?

Also see Kol Nidrei and other illusions

Half-grown

In the workshop on thinkshame there will always be a time when a number of participants has had enough. At such a moment they are fed up with the premise that underlies the workshop. Namely that, while you only meant well, someone else may be seriously hurt by something you said; and that you feel perplexed about it.

“Come on, we’re all grown-ups! You just get yourself over it”.

Yet, I insist, in identifying the injury that you inflicted, you can feel a deep shame. That means: thinkshame, because with your thinking (and speaking) you crossed someone else’s border, even if you meant well.

“What nonsense! Shame really is not needed for a mistake, you know”.

Well, I say, injuries cán go deep. And shame, however irrational, for what you inflicted therefore can be very adequate. Apart from that – and this is my actual message – that shame simply appears to occur in such situations. And: we better be happy with that, because this embarrassment can lead to reflection and caution and can help prevent relations get completely stuck.

So, at that point in the workshop my plea is thus: don’t wave feelings of humiliation and injury too quickly away as symptoms of immaturity, because they have a big impact, just as the feelings of shame that you can have about them. Taking them seriously could very well make a lot of misunderstood behavior of people in organizations more understandable.

That argument is not only relevant for organizations. In the newspaper I read the column by Caroline de Gruyter about world politics, and she actually discusses the same mechanism as that of the workshop, but now with respect to the relationship between the West and the rest of the world.

Putin, she says, and Isis and militia leaders from Libya to Nigeria feel deeply humiliated by the Western interventions under ‘humanitarian’ label of the past decade in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Mali.

“So what? The West had modern, rational arguments for those actions indeed, who could nót understand that? And NATO membership for the countries of Eastern Europe was not meant offensive, please let Putin stay a little rational”. 

Watch out, says De Gruyter, by labeling the feelings of humiliation and resentment as immature, perhaps a lot of the present world political dynamics remains misunderstood, and more dangerous than necessary. Take those feelings seriously, however good our Western intentions may be.

Also see Something small

What would YOU do in the ultimate situation?

The fascination with the ultimate situation is big. That will always have been the case, but at this remembrance-and-freedom-celebrating time of the year our thoughts tend to dwell at the ultimate situations that the Second World War presented to people. And at the questions that since then have been the moral benchmarks of our culture such as: Would you have put your life at risk to save others lives? Would you at the right time have made the right choice? Would you have recognized the ultimate situation anyway?

I hear that fascination reflected in the responses to the violent death in Syria of the nice Jesuit priest Frans van der Lugt. For example when the Dutch vicar Leegte believes that Van der Lugt is rightfully placed on a pedestal. Especially his willingness to remain faithful to his convictions, up to the ultimate consequence of death, commands respect. It reminds him, Leegte says, to previous martyrs in history who by their own death “had the intention to be present to Jesus’ death”.

nd I recognize that fascination with writer Willem Jan Otten in his discussion following the film 12 Years a Slave . He believes that the film has an essential idea in common with the Christian Easter story. Namely that ‘surviving’ is inferior compared to ‘living’, and always implies guilt and shame, and that therefore ‘giving your life’, may be preferable. “Something is put upside down in a terrible way, and yet it is just right”, thus he then cites what G.K. Chesterton defined as the essence of the Easter story. Whereby the ‘terrible’ again refers to the ultimate situation, with – apparently – a special appeal.

It is true, Christianity does not seek death as a Japanese kamikaze pilot does or an Islamic suicide bomber. And the bloody Filipino and Spanish passion rituals can be seen as an aberration, and not as representative of Christianity.

But those blood-processions do not completely fall out of the blue, the fascination with the ultimate situation has a lot to do with it. This is also evident from the pedagogical questions that, in line with the scheme of the imitatio Christi, are directly linked to it in the comments on Van der Lugt’s death. “Is his example applicable in the Netherlands?” Leegte asks, “He has given an example to follow”, clergyman Peter Nissen says.

But precisely from a pedagogical point of view I think the fascination with the ultimate situation is not a good idea. First, because that orientation discourages people. Peter Nissen rightly argues that the greatness of stories of sacrifice and holiness can block the listener. “Then the feeling gets you that you do not even need to start” And how stimulating is Leegte’s statement that the ultimate martyr’s act makes us aware of “our own shortcomings, our cowardice”? To me all this seems to lead up to disengagement rather than engagement. Anyway, I feel myself collaps already from cowardice.

But secondly – and most importantly – because that fascination blocks a clear view on ordinary, everyday situations of reversal and modesty. Rightly Nissen says in his commentary: “What matters is that there are things that can weigh heavier than self-interest”,  and those things do not necessarily have to have ultimate consequences. When subsequently Nissen adds: “…even if they weigh more than their own lives”, then I also know understand what he means. But I want to emphasize that, if you actually want to experience the described reversals and want to practice them, then you better focus on everyday situations rather than - what happens collectively – on ultimate situations.

To get back to Chesterton: “Something is put upside down in a terrible way, and yet it is just right”, this can also be said without using the word ‘terrible’.

Indeed, that’s what Levinas designates in completely everyday situations as moments of reversal in which suddenly other things can weigh heavier than self-interest. Because that’s what happens if, in the middle of an impassioned self-complacent argument, I let myself be commanded by the regard of another who feels overrun by my complacency. That command feels like absurd and like a complete reversal of values. In a penetrating way something is put on its head, and yet it stands just right. But now without the word ‘terrible’ added.

In this non-ultimate way, the reversal of values may become somewhat more real and better to swallow.

Also see Badiou, Levinas and Differences

Immune

To remain equanimous and unperturbable, preferably under all circumstances. Thus was, traditionally, described what philosophy was about and so it still is by some.

Last week I was reminded to that view in an interview with the French philosopher and sociologist Frédéric Lenoir. He told about his admiration for the stoic Dutch Holocaust-victim Etty Hillesum because she had reached the situation that philosophers always considered to be supreme, namely the one in which nothing can hurt you deeply anymore. “Philosophers have always said, since the early Greeks: happiness does not depend on the situation you are in”. It is easy indeed to recognize in this statement Socrates’ goal of equanimity which he preached up to his poisoned cup, and which is the goal of many other philosophers to our time.

I can very well understand that man, in the midst of so many earthly turmoil and instability, looks for a kind of invulnerability. Still, I'm glad there are philosophers who questioned that desire for absolute certainty or exposed it as a pursuit of power. Nietzsche started doing so, and the twentieth-century postmodern philosophers followed in his footsteps. But these trends are far from being taken seriously on a broad scale. May that be called true philosophy, it is asked then. Because, true philosophy strives for absolute certainty, doesn’t it?

The problem is that the latter aim produces, besides certainty and safety, also a lot of nasty things, mostly of an uncanny character. I think of the deep-rooted tendency in our society  to objectification and measurement which can give our work floors and manners the sterility that many periodically suffer from. I think also of the extent to which people live alongside each other, safe but untouchable, and more chilly than they might want.
This way of communicating, which has learned not to touch core issues any longer, could very well stem from that age-old philosophical program that tries to reduce our touchability. With its help we have managed to develop to a high level the art of communicative immunity. The result is a safe and efficient society, but one that sometimes is nothing about any longer.

But how, then, is that communicative poverty to be related to Etty Hillesum, with whom I started this piece? Isn’t she an icon of openness and engagement with what was going on around her? Yes, maybe. If it is not the case – as some said of her – that she idolized her teenagegirl-like commitment; so if her engagement was sincere, then that matches obviously very well with the widely sought immunity.

You could say that the Etty Hillesum’s sacrificial heroism (as also eg Mother Theresa’s), and the communicative sterility of our behavior are two sides of the same coin. Both are strategies for achieving immunity, and the one succeeds through total surrender and the other by screening off touchability.

What falls out is the daily mix of vulnerabilities, in which injuries and excuses, dullness and success alternate. The trivial touchability gets orphaned . That is to say, to simply exchange about things that matter becomes problematic. It is true, there is no heroism involved in such exchange, but by rich and warm communication it's that which may hold off sterility.

Too few philosophers know about this. I cherish those who make it a subject of their speculations, and I continue to call them philosopher despite everything.

Also see Taylor, Levinas and Emptiness, The Trap of Universalizing Reason and Progress after all

Begging for Feed-back

I recently read that in the short term we in the West must not expect revolutionary new technological inventions. Technological innovation will mainly need to build on existing technology and therefore productivity increase on this basis will be modest in size.

If that’s the case indeed, more profits and faster productivity growth are to be expected of social innovation. By which I mean the fixing of the energy leak which in many organizations exists because people do not or too little cooperate. And also I mean the stopping of the waste of money, time and talent which results from dysfunctional beliefs about management.

That energy leak and waste are usually not caused because employees or managers have bad intentions, but because the organization through budgets and powers is sometimes arranged in such way as to set people against each other instead of bringing them together. And that in its turn is caused because we are saddled with obsolete, dysfunctional beliefs about management and organization. These limit, consciously or unconsciously, our space for movement and improvement.

Take the views on management and leadership. In most organizations it are still mainly forms of hierarchical thinking and command structures that determine which concepts are associated with management. These include concepts such as power, competency, the ability to override others. And far fewer – apart from exceptions – a serving and facilitating attitude.

Then this is what you get: managers who get a kick out of their decision-making-power and who in intimate moments don’t keep secret that they are in that position because they cannot stand that others tell them what to do. But who at the same time do not but expect that others are able to do precisely that.

And you get relatively many frightened employees, who have effectively been silenced.

That pinches of course, and those managers may as well feel the pinching. They largely, despite their formal power, fail to achieve what they aim at. And they feel that more is needed, and – above all – something else: they should engage in genuine consultation with “their” people. But at this point also impotence enters the story: they have to listen but because of the way they have organized things and because of their character structure that does not work properly. They beg for feedback, but what follows is a deathly silence. Touching, almost.

This is not managable any longer by hurling in a top-down way some more behavioral science and communication tricks into the organization. Here another way of social interaction is required. Which justifiably may be called: social innovation.

Also see Trust

(Un)purity

Vaguely I was aware of it, but I never realized it as precisely as described by Stuart Isacoff in The Octave. That the establishment of our tonal system – in which we modulate through all keys back and forward and in doing so produce the most beautiful musical constructions – is the result of a major battle, and that this battle proceeded along theological and philosophical lines. The story of that struggle can be read as a sound built version of a larger story. If you want: a liberation story that has interfaces with the emancipation of Western man from the tutelage of the Greek classics and the Christian church.

The story begins with ideas and with a problem. The ideas include the view – based on Pythagoras and Plato – that music is the reflection of a universe which is organized according to harmonious mathematical relationships. Music therefore must be composed of pure intervals such as the perfect fifth (3:2) and the perfect fourth (4:3).

The problem with this was that Pythagoras’s formulas left no space for some very popular harmonies: the major thirds, the minor thirds and their counterparts, the sixths. These intervals were so popular because they made music more intimate, more sensual and more expressive. But their use generated a lot of discussion, because according to opponents these intervals did not fit into the the world order as proclaimed by Pythagoras and the Church.

There were quite some solutions for this problem. They were found in the musical practice and consisted in more or less cheating as to the purity of the intervals. With stringed instruments this could be done because the musician has to pitch the tone himself and always can intonate slightly higher or lower. Singers could do so the same by constantly adapting their pitch to make the different intervals sound together as harmoniously as possible.

These were pragmatic solutions in which the problem was not calked and which did not challenge the guardians of the strict mathematical order. But these solutions were half-baked, because singers were accompanied by organs and there was music written for strings with harpsichord accompaniment. And with keyboard instruments such as organ and harpsichord one can not intonate while playing as it can be done with a voice or a string. Instruments must be tuned properly in advance, and when you want to play thirds on them then you have to consciously tune them differently than when only fifths and quarters are to be heard.

This technical feature left less room for pragmatism, the question of tuning had quite some theoretical aspects. That’s why it soon attracted the attention and the interference of more or less self-appointed guardians of the divinely established order. And these had fundamental objections against any infringement of the pure mathematical relationships.

Meanwhile blood was thicker than water and musicians tried all kinds of tunings on their  keyboards. Concessions were made as to the purity of the intervals for the sake of the possibility to unlimitedly interconnect a variety of fifths, fourths, thirds and octaves without the music getting terribly false.

The opponents were not amused. The 16th century music theorist Zarlino Gioseffo believed, like many others, that singers naturally sing pure intervals and that the new tunings threatened the world’s unity. He was offended when Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo Galilei) found that singers in practice go in one piece through different tunings because they are constantly looking for a beautiful harmony. Galilei reproached Zarlino that he fought for an illusion and that the music had to be completely freed from the tyranny of the inviolable numbers.

Rousseau also took position in the debate and he chose for his own variant of the cosmic order. Therein music figured as a primeval force that definitely had to be defended against the refined and therefore decadent experimental tunings. Even Newton, who in his physical work was brave enough to describe the world as it is rather than as it should be according to tradition, showed conservative here: “It is unworthy of philosophers to interfere with the pure proportions” he thought.

In particular, in the appeal which is made here to the sanctity of a divine natural order – against the praxis actually experienced or sought by people – a parallel can be drawn between what happened in the musical area and what in other areas is still happening. I am thinking of some representatives of the established order that label gay sexuality as unnatural and therefore as undesirable. Or of managers who barely pay attention to the actual undercurrents in their organization because their self-invented order leaves no room for them.

From this perspective one could call the musical struggle against the illusion of purity and pro  the multiplicity of lived practice an exemplary European project. And fortunately that struggle  ended well. In the late 17th  century the physicist Daniel Bernoulli was able to show that each tone produces overtones and that the series of overtones ‘above’ the basic tone of a string is much larger than originally thought. Isacoff: “These additional sounds are an endless expansion of the range with tones that are generally not harmonious. So all vibrating bodies float in a sea of dissonants. The idea that nature has a preference for pure harmonies was, it appeared, permanently expelled from the scene.”

Also see Order

Parrhesia

If parrhesia is a virtue than the Jewish people may be called virtuous indeed. Because parrhesia can be translated as ‘frankness’, or ‘outspokenness’ or as ‘saying what you think’. Well, that uses to come easy to a lot of Jews.

Yet the word does not stem from the Jewish tradition but from the Greek. The word parrhesia first appears in Euripides and continues to appear from the end of the fifth century before the common era in the writings of classical Greek antiquity.

In our time the word was revitalized by the French philosopher Michel Foucault who in 1983/84 gave lectures on parrhesia as the phenomenon whereby a speaker frees himself and speaks out boldly. In modernity, when man is increasingly thrown back upon himself, Foucault considers it important to be faithful to oneself and to one’s own thoughts.

The most recent plea for parrhesia I read comes from the British Professor Frank Furedi. He advocates parrhesia under the admonition “Man, dare to judge”. Therewith he counters the tendency to lukewarm tolerance in our society, as a feeble instrument of non-judgment, of keeping a safe distance. Hannah Arendt sees the unwillingness to judge as a sign that one is inclined to withdraw from public life. While by actually judging a dialogue with other people may arise.

It is true, Furedi says, that expressing a value judgment can be a form of psychological violence - but a complex society just can not do without judgment and comparison. Therefore courage is needed, because freedom of expression and the pursuit of knowledge will usually want to take their own unpredictable course.

In ancient Athens, the cradle of democracy, they possessed that courage: there, according to Furedi, that risky attitude got its first appreciation. “Daring and freedom for the Greeks were values that reinforced each other. Something similar is seen in Renaissance Italy, where ideas of freedom were accompanied by courage and zeal for discovery”.

What annoys me in a presentation of things like Furedi’s is the adoration of Greekness and Renaissance combined with the total absence of attention to the Jewish contribution to fearless speech in the course of history. That is an imbalance in the presentation of our cultural heritage that bothers me already from my high school. Also then the adoration of Antiquity raged large and I felt that something was missing.

Indeed, as far as frankness is concerned, the Jews had already earned their spurs when the Athenians had yet to establish their democracy. Abraham had been bargaining with God about Sodom and Gomorrah, and Jacob had fought with the angel.

And the Jews did not stop behaving that way when in Athens the democracy got defunct and Socrates and Plato pleaded for censorship of poetic and other expressions of the soul that could undermine the pure morale. The author of the book of Job lets his feelings speak freely and goes far in questioning God’s justice.

In the Mishnah and the Talmud the rabbis continued rewarding intellectual courage by taking halachic decisions by majority vote and by nevertheless including the rejected ideas and their authors in the texts and preserving them for centuries. Very different from their surroundings where the dissidents of Catholic councils were excluded from the annals of the church.

It may be true that at the time of the Renaissance, the balance shifted. Then in the surrounding world came the frank and critical humanists, while the rabbinic tradition was in danger of becoming bogged down in a formalistic straitjacket.

But the degree of parrhesia, not to say the brutality, which Eli Wiesel describes in his story about the rabbis in a concentration camp who sue God for the misery he lets pass, has old testimonials. From before Greek democracy.

Also see Greek and Jew and Authority

Thought Police

Moral decisions can be extremely difficult.

Some people point their finger at members of the Jewish Councils of the Second World War or to others who by a wicked enemy were forced into the impossible choice between saving what could be saved or total resistance.

I really would not have known. The most important thing in these matters is, I believe, that we do not too quickly condemn and judge.

There are also questions which are made to look very difficult but which, morally spoken, are cristal clear . For me, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is such an issue. There is nothing difficult about it, that area belongs to the Palestinians and Israël has no business there. In my eyes therefore there is nothing wrong with a boycott of settlement products - easily distinguished from a boycott of Israel or Israeli products in general.

I am sufficiently historian to understand that these areas are attractive for Jews to settle there. After all in Biblical times Judea and Samaria were key parts of the Jewish territory. There are also safety considerations that hint towards occupation, because Israel’s military position is more firm with the West Bank included. And finally ordinary power and land hunger play their parts.

But these considerations don’t make the issue morally more difficult. Given Israël’s foundation in the UN decision of 1947, in the West Bank Israël momentarily literally exceeds its limits, it does not belong there. Moreover, this transgression of borders causes a lot of damage for Israël at the political-diplomatic level. Its safety position suffers more thereby than can be compensated by physical-military positions.

This situation is bad enough, but I think worst of all may be that since the adoption of the anti-boycott law by the Israeli parliament two weeks ago an open discussion on these issues is prohibited. Anyone who objects to the occupation and for that reason calls for a boycott of settlement products is now in violation of the law.

Here no longer only the Jewish country is at stake, but the entire Jewish tradition. This touches the heart of that tradition. Because if there is anything that characterized Judaism for centuries, it were the culture of debate and the many angles of (moral) positions. One may be in favour or against a boycott, but a free discussion on the subject should be guaranteed. Therefore I can completely identify with the condemnation of the law by the Israeli Council of Liberal Rabbis: “This is an unprecedented dangerous step onto a slippery slope that continuously erodes the Jewish character and democratic nature of Israel”.

Thought police does not suit Israël.

Polyphony

Not seldom the Jewish tradition is praised by people (including myself) for the multitude of opinions that can exist therein. The Talmud takes seriously different interpretations of transmitted texts and encourages discussion about them. Dogmatic coercion is not an issue, and that can be viewed as a pleasant and mature way of dealing with tradition and texts.

But there’s another current within the Jewish tradition which is equally old and respected. This current stresses harmony and a kind of mystical unity of the Jewish people. So, with the two currents taken together, how much polyphony is actually possible within the Jewish tradition as a whole? Let us have a closer look at that question.

Then at a first glance it appears that there is little question of polyphony. Because for example the book of Exodus describes how Moses went up the mountain and was there all alone with God when he received the Torah. The Midrash elaborates on that when it underlines the unequivocality of the revelation by the statement that where there is only the slightest division, the presence of God does not want to dwell. Philo of Alexandria connects to that when he says that all who rebel will be consumed by their inner desires, and Jehuda Halevi emphasizes the existence of a Jewish folk-soul that unites all Jews.

But it also says in Exodus that all the people have been listening to what happened at Sinai. Or rather, have been watching the voices. Furthermore, God proclaimed to Moses on Mount Sinai not only the Torah which afterwards was written down by Moses, but he also gave oral explanations, including any explanations that there ever would be, however contemporary they might be. Because, says the Talmud, even whatever any clever and serious student in the future will ask his teacher, has been revealed to Moses at Sinai. This means that the Torah cannot be but an explosive mixture, which includes many different things, or even contradictory things.

I emphatically confess myself to the current that cherishes the multiplicity of forms and voices. Because I associate the recognition of the multiplicity with a form of maturity. In that sense, I think the Jewish tradition is mature. There is that desire for an idyllic, smooth unity, but the tolerance for dissent is also well developed. This is evident from the multitude of discussing voices in the Talmud.

In our days this appears in yet another way. Namely in the way the Jewish image of the state of Israel is becoming more mature.

For a long time there was only one and therefore dominant image of Israel and its creation among Israeli historians. That was the picture of the small, brave Israel that stood alone against all-powerful Arab enemies. Like David against Goliath. In which picture the state was seen as the messianic, triumphant outcome of two thousand years diaspora and persecution. And in which the failure of peace plans was entirely due to the Arabs.

This was a way for historians to contribute to the unity and morale of the new state. It was their contribution to the myth-creation, a sort of feel-good history that the people needed to achieve the necessary efforts.

But, as happens with idyllic images and myths, they sooner or later get shattered. In the eighties there was a new group of Israeli historians (who are therefore called the New Historians) who opposed that idyllic image of Israel. They call that image one-sided and propagandistic. They are committed to view matters not only from the Israeli perspective. In their view, there is not just one single player (Israël) with the others as puppets. The Palestinians and Arabs are full players.

The self-criticism that is practiced by these historians caused a great deal of fuss: they were accused of befouling their own nest and even left-wing politicians were talking about a suicidal strategy. My point is that these historians have been able to break through the oppressiveness and coercion that is always connected with a closed dominant historical image. Now there is something to choose. There are now several documented and legitimate ways to look at the same thing, there are multiple voices, even if the discussions take place mainly in academic circles.

I myself am inclined to consider the emergence of these countervoices as evidence of the strength of Israeli society. I think it testifies of maturity if a society is able to produce and take seriously this kind of internal critical voices. Comparable to the way Torah always inspired people to take responsibility and to break the atmosphere of mystical unity that can surround the Torah as well. The New Historians are an expression of critical Jewish consciousness and therefore an asset to be proud of.

See also History as an exact science