Recipe for Hemlock
There is a subtle link between anti-Semitism and anti-Socratism. This thought struck me while reading the following passage from Allan Bloom's interpretive essay on Plato's Republic:
The philosopher is the ultimate rootless cosmopolitan. Socrates is executed because he challenges the instinctual identification of the good with one's own. Because he is a citizen of the cosmopolis, the universal city, Socrates is a foreigner to his own polis: a subversive foreigner.
The Nazis and their contemporary descendants do not consider the Jews a race: they consider the Jews an anti-race. The Jews are said to undermine the Gentile's identification of the good with his own through what MacDonald calls a "culture of critique," or what Socrates calls philosophy.
There are ethnically Jewish examples of rootless cosmopolitans, i.e. thinkers who disavow any link between the good and one's own: Spinoza, Marx, Chomsky. Yet there are also ethnically Jewish examples of tenuously rooted cosmopolitans, thinkers who still maintain some atavistic loyalty to their own: Freud, Einstein, left-wing Zionists.
The anti-Semite thinks that the Jew wants (or has already instituted) a cosmopolis for the Gentiles ruled over by a hidden polis of the Jews. Thus they refuse to take legitimate rootless cosmopolitans at their word, imputing to universal subversives like Trotsky non-existent Jewish loyalties. The renegade children of Zion become secret elders of Zion.
The issue is more complicated when it comes to tenuously rooted cosmopolitans. Most of them are genuinely conflicted. Their "objectice" side tells them to be like Socrates and reject the identification of the good with their own. Yet their subjective side tells them that they still somehow belong to a tribe to which they owe loyalty. The muddled end-result often looks like hypocrisy.
My own preference is for rooted cosmopolitanism. Rather than viewing Judaism as an anti-race out to destroy everyone else's particularity, I view Judaism at its best (rare for any "ism") as an example of how to embody the creative tension between the universal and the particular. As a universalist, man can never feel entirely at home in his polis; yet as a particular person with particular loyalties, man can never feel entirely at home in the cosmopolis either. And so the state of exile.
Our friends are those around us, and the insistence that they must be good is a seconday consideration, one that has an abstract ring to it. This condition is admitted in speech but has little effect in deed. And this means that men who loyally serve their friends are constantly and thoughtlessly doing injustice. This consequence cannot be avoided simply by making more effort, for Polemarchus' view is not merely a result of his laziness but a product of his attachment to family and city. He makes the primitive identification of the good with his own. . . . Once the distinction between what is good and one's own is made, the principle of loyalty to family and city is undermined. In order to be just, one must seek good men wherever they may be, even in nations fighting one's own nation. If the good must be pursued, then caring for one's own must be extinguished, or it will make one unjust and impede the quest for the good. . . . A man who wishes to be just must be cosmopolitan.
The philosopher is the ultimate rootless cosmopolitan. Socrates is executed because he challenges the instinctual identification of the good with one's own. Because he is a citizen of the cosmopolis, the universal city, Socrates is a foreigner to his own polis: a subversive foreigner.
The Nazis and their contemporary descendants do not consider the Jews a race: they consider the Jews an anti-race. The Jews are said to undermine the Gentile's identification of the good with his own through what MacDonald calls a "culture of critique," or what Socrates calls philosophy.
There are ethnically Jewish examples of rootless cosmopolitans, i.e. thinkers who disavow any link between the good and one's own: Spinoza, Marx, Chomsky. Yet there are also ethnically Jewish examples of tenuously rooted cosmopolitans, thinkers who still maintain some atavistic loyalty to their own: Freud, Einstein, left-wing Zionists.
The anti-Semite thinks that the Jew wants (or has already instituted) a cosmopolis for the Gentiles ruled over by a hidden polis of the Jews. Thus they refuse to take legitimate rootless cosmopolitans at their word, imputing to universal subversives like Trotsky non-existent Jewish loyalties. The renegade children of Zion become secret elders of Zion.
The issue is more complicated when it comes to tenuously rooted cosmopolitans. Most of them are genuinely conflicted. Their "objectice" side tells them to be like Socrates and reject the identification of the good with their own. Yet their subjective side tells them that they still somehow belong to a tribe to which they owe loyalty. The muddled end-result often looks like hypocrisy.
My own preference is for rooted cosmopolitanism. Rather than viewing Judaism as an anti-race out to destroy everyone else's particularity, I view Judaism at its best (rare for any "ism") as an example of how to embody the creative tension between the universal and the particular. As a universalist, man can never feel entirely at home in his polis; yet as a particular person with particular loyalties, man can never feel entirely at home in the cosmopolis either. And so the state of exile.
"The distinguished scientist and thinker Károly Kerényi once said that the spirit of abstraction opened doors to national socialism when Jews as personalities were substituted by the impersonal category of "Jewry" - "to kill Jews" sounds dreadfully; "to liquidate Jewry" resembles a description of some logical operation."
ReplyDelete-- Sergei Averintsev