Monthly Archives: May 2015

Writing and Technology

Writing is not merely grapheme. Writing is a technology (techne, τέχνη). This technology is not exterior to being human. It expresses an essence of human. As Maurice Blanchot describes, writing is the universal scene of death. It is absolutely powerlessness. It is timeless. It reminds me of what Levinas refers to as the il ya, the ‘there is’. Writing is sheer ‘isness’ without exterior. It is empty and void. Only when it is taken up into a ‘regional’ sense, a living human, can it rise from its eternal death and empower and animate itself as meaning and truth. As ‘regional’ it must iterate. It must seek once again the drama of replay. Its greatest and most riveting scene is one of origin. The notion of origin is one of authorizing. Authorization asserts rule. It arouses power and vitality. This is the essence of technology.

According to Heidegger, technology ontologically understands being as standing reserve. It pre-cognitively and already allows being to show itself as awaiting use. Techne, the Greek root of technology, was according to Socrates an art. For Socrates it was the art of creating new kinds being from the midst of beings. Perhaps in a more Aristotelian frame, it brought potentials of being into actuality. The art consisted in a special kind of knowledge of matter (hyle) coupled with a telos, a fulfillment or culmination.

While this dynamic is already at work in some sense in modern technology, it has engendered a historical sense, not based on the artisan, that matter reduces to use-value. Over thousands of years of iterations and more and more massive productions, iterations, history acquires an ontologically reinforced showing of being as stuff for convenience and consumption, as disposable raw materials. In many iterations of knowing/thinking the environment as use-value, the dynamis of being gets lost in stuff, empty and devoid of everything but use-value reduced to a living death. Just as the scene of writing is universal death, technology has stripped and reduced the openness of being to an empty and monstrous repetition of the death of being. Only in use does being rouse itself but not as mystery, wonder, disturbance or dread for example but as zombie, devoid of everything except capital, an economy of abstract gazes in comfort, titillation, feeding on the meat of numbness. As in Levinas’ il ya, this setting invokes a perpetual swarming buzz of sheer isness. In this way, the ontology of technology is like the scene of universal writing, archi-writing as Derrida thinks it.

It is important to understand that writing is not an activity we participate in for example. Technology is not air-conditioning for example. The relationship to writing and technology is more like the long lost Greek middle voice. It is not being acted on or acting on something. It is a reciprocity, a interaction which is not passive or active. Writing and technology thought this way is who we are not something we relate to as objects or things. It conditions objects and things before we realize it or are explicitly aware of it as something, as this or that. Writing and technology tell us something about ourselves, about how we see, orient and understand. Writing and technology inform us before we ask the question. Writing as origin, as arche, pieces together sheer isness into value, meaning and truth, as me here now. Technology as the perpetuation of stuff to be used animates thing and substance to utility. This gathering together as the ‘there of being’ (dasein) takes hold of universal meaninglessness, mere a-temporal differences, and regionalizes, animates, particularizes as life, existence, me. As re-enactment we think, we believe, we love, we hate, we set the stage for desire and passion. Perhaps, momentarily, we burst forth from reductive, historical ontologies, iterations of origin and use and have the possibility for breathing fresh air, exteriority, not-me, not consumed in universality but novel, new, not yet codified – otherwise than being.

Origin and Chaos – The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

In Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s recent and interpretive decision, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA V. HELLER1, the majority ruled that gun ownership is an individual right and not just a collective right. The Second Amendment simply states:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

As recently as the 1990s total estimates of people in the civilian militias in this country range from 20,000 to 60,0002. These groups are chiefly comprised of far right wing groups. If the right to bear arms were limited to fringe groups like these, we are faced with an overwhelming dilemma:

Does the U.S. Constitution maintain an absolute right to abrogate itself?

Put another way,

Does the U.S. Constitution provide the right for groups, hostile to the United States and its Constitution, to destroy the country?

Of course, these particular groups discussed in footnote 2 would certainly maintain that they are protecting their interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. However, is the Constitution meant as a document for multiple and widely varying interpretations or is there a process described by the Constitution for deterring what are lawful and unlawful interpretations? Of course there is, the Legislative and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. Do individuals have the right to have their own interpretation? Yes, they do but their interpretation is not protected against the interpretation of the courts and the legislative branch. The government maintains the exclusive right to determine what is constitutional and what is not constitutional. Therefore, like it or not the individual right to interpret the Constitution is trumped by the document itself and founding structural articles of the United States.

This is logically a necessity as many individual, widely varying interpretations could never be enacted into a cogent, defensible structure. If everyone with an opinion determined the formal and authorized meaning of the Constitution, the structure of the country would be ‘no structure’, an-archy, without origin. Origin is what validates and authorizes meaning. Accidental meanings, singular and without integral cohesion, are essentially thought in the context of origin as willy-nilly, whimsical and therefore, superfluous.

This is widely divergent from popular opinion about the individuality of the will and its protections in the structure of our government. Certainly individual rights are protected in a relative sense by the Constitution but not in an absolute sense. No one has the absolute authority to destroy the United States. It is sovereign not the citizens. The absolute right of an individual or group to destroy the country is not protected by the U.S. Constitution. Nor is any right given to an individual or a group to usurp the system of checks and balances set up by the Founding Fathers to impose their interpretation of the Constitution over and against the will of the people given by their elected representatives and judges.

Therefore, if a citizens militia group hates our current government and is hell bent on violently and singularly imposing its constitutional interpretation on the United States, it is limited by the document itself. Even Judge Scalia writes near the end of the majority decision that,

“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. See, e.g., Sheldon, in 5 Blume 346; Rawle 123; Pomeroy 152–153; Abbott 333. For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues. See, e.g., State v. Chandler, 5 La. Ann., at 489–490; Nunn v. State, 1 Ga., at 251; see generally 2 Kent *340, n. 2; The American Students’ Blackstone 84, n. 11 (G. Chase ed. 1884). Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” See footnote 1

The majority opinion goes on to state that all laws would have to pass rational-basis scrutiny and that the constitution itself prohibits irrational laws in footnote 27. Scalia goes on to add that “rational-basis is not just the standard of scrutiny, but the very substance of the constitutional guarantee”. Certainly this would cover that case where a fringe, radical terrorist group would decide it knew the ‘true’ meaning of the Constitution and would overthrow the current U.S. Government as the blood patriots and martyrs. The Constitution and “rational-basis” is the “substance” of the Constitution. The Constitution protects the rights of all Americans not just the ‘survival of the fittest’ Americans as in the pure market place of Austrian Economic’s capitalism. There is no hope that capitalism would find a ‘natural’ protection for the rights of the less fortunate but in the U.S. Constitution, there is an unmitigated guarantee. The market place is not given the right to determine a structure for the government just as the citizens militia is not protected by the Second Amendment to do whatever they want in the name of the ‘true’ (i.e. interpretation of the Constitution).

The Constitution and the elected government are given absolute power to make all final determinations, all “rational-basis” for the standard of scrutiny. In so doing, the irrational and accidental are by the same basis co-determined. The appeal to origin, is itself an appeal to rationality and its necessary irrational determinations. Any subsequent authorizations can only be made via the original authorization of the U.S. Constitution. If these subsequent authorizations are found to ‘deviate and perverse’ by the courts and elected representatives they cannot legitimately maintain their authority. The absolute authority of the government cannot be abnegated by the very existence of the government itself, its constitution. In this way the human instinct to survive is similarly taken up in the same exercise as inability of the Constitution of legitimate its own destruction. However, distinct from the individual will to survive the constitutional ‘will to survive’ has additional caveats.

The Constitution is a written document. An individual is alive, existing not as a writing but as an excess to writing. All writing, the body of writing, is only meaningful to a human that knows language. It is in whole meaningless to animals or atoms. Therefore, writing is inherently human. Any excess to writing does not imply a fundamental difference to writing but a qualitative difference. Therefore, we think to exist, as only humans can think they exist as such, suggests something more than a certain kind of human grapheme but exactly what this more is seems to deviate from constitution, the structure inherent in writing. Writing is not non-sense, it defines sense, it defines what is possible for ‘rationality’. To deviate from constitution, “rational-basis”, is chaos. Since Christendom, chaos has largely been thought from the basis of rationality as irrational, without meaning, empty. And yet, these negative connotations seem to be dismissive of any excess to ‘constitutionality’, the writing of God and the thought of immortality. These negative connotations of chaos bring up the nonsensical as the extremist right wing militia groups which cannot deviate from an authorizing origin and are condemned to live in the hinterland of their ‘truth’, their unthought and assumed right to exist as such. They are forever held prisoner by their ‘constitutional blood of patriots and martyrdom’ and at the same time, by the same Constitution, denied their insistence on absolute authorship. They are hopelessly lost in a singularity without an excess. They cannot endure an excess of chaos. They must in futility hold on to chaos in the passion of a singular death grip on gun, God and glory authorized by an absolute denial to their Constitutional authority. In this negation without excess, their existential angst, they take up chaos without ever becoming aware of it as such. They can only rail and rally in their desperation.

What escapes these desperados cannot be given or thought in common contemporary philosophical avenues. There is a sense of excess beyond writing, beyond constitution, that ‘constitution’ essentially cannot come to grips with. When excess to origin cannot be allowed to escape the insistence on constitution, on rational-basis, without becoming yet again a pseudo-rationalism it is condemned as Sisyphus to eternally roll a boulder up a hill only to have it fall again. This is why Hegel’s System can never be completed as Kierkegaard recognized. Not because it is inadequate but because it cannot constitutionally recognize what the early Greek philosophers realized from Hesiod,

“Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning [archê, ἀρχῆς], tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽].

First of all Chaos came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽]; but then afterwards…” Hesiod

_________________

1 See DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA V. HELLER

2 Right-wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort

By Chip Berlet, Matthew Nemiroff Lyons, Pg. 289, See Link


 

Calling All Citizens Militia

Alert! Alert! The legendary and widely heralded citizens militia has received orders to converge on Wacko, Texas. We all know their constitutional call:

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

We have heard about these super heroes for years. The NRA has told us that good guys carrying guns is the only way to stop a bad guy carrying a gun. Well, now is the time, Texas is the perfect place, for these citizen soldiers to bear arms and come to the aid of Wacko, Texas. The evil biker gangs of the world are all racing towards Wacko. There are four guns, tanks and bazookas for every man, women and child in Texas. Elementary schools are mandated to certify Kindergartners to be registered gun dealers by the state of Texas.

Now, the citizens militia can prove its case. Now they can show the world that they are not a bunch of drunk, red-necks shooting every tree in the woods imagining them to be the notorious bad guy trying to rob their house or kill their children only to find the strong hand of the militia beating them to a pulp with lead. Come on militia, show us you metal now! Head to Wacko and kill the bad guys. Trees don’t shoot back but we know trees are only part of your paramilitary training. Now you can shoot at an enemy that shoots back. Now is the time to show us your metal, make your day, and finally show the world that the Founding Fathers were not protecting drunken red-necks on parade at the expense of anyone that might accidentally get shot by them but the Founding Fathers were creating the citizens militia to hate the government they had just created. Gee, those guys were almost as smart as the good ‘ol boys in the militia.

 

The Strange Case of Rand Paul

Rand Paul, as his father, make an odd footnote in the history of the Republican Party. The Republican Party is fond of acquiring token representations of its ‘new face’ exemplified in their analysis of why they lost the last election to President Obama. They understand the need for good public relations. After all, they have been weaving the ‘we are the working class heroes’ tale for many years. They are really good at it. The Paul’s offer the Republican Party the opportunity to capture some of the conservative, libertarian leaning folks. So, let’s take a look at Rand Paul.

Rand and his father were both huge fans of Ayn Rand and of the Objectivist philosophy. As a philosophy Objectivism is not well respected among serious philosophers. Their philosophical exegesis of great philosophers tend to be shallow and more opportunistic than penetrating. Ayn Rand wrote fiction books which highlight elitist views with its necessary accompanying condition of the lowly, uneducated masses. Her books favor a social Darwinism where the strong, the bright and the wealthy are the masters and creators of human destiny and the huge rest of the masses are simply cattle for herding and feeding off of. The elitists are the survivors of the fittest. The masses are simply failed genetics which are condemned by their own tragic inadequacies.

The Paul’s were also fans of the Austrian School of Economics which I have written at length about on this site. The Austrian School is the economic equivalent of the Objectivist philosophy. They are pure and fundamental ‘free marketers’. They believe the problem with the market has always been the government. They think that left totally to its own the free market will solve all the problems we thought we needed governments for. Whenever the government intervenes in the market, the market fails to work to its fullest and results in all the booms and busts of market history. They think government intervention resulted in the Great Depression not free market, unregulated banking and stock market failures as most economists believe. The think monopolies are the result of government intervention and corporatism where corporations buy off the government for the dreaded market regulation. Market regulation is a free market enemy because it deforms the natural workings of the market and gives companies a protectionist strategy that the market left to its own would not provide.

The Austrian School is a reductionist philosophy which accounts for market dynamics as a kind of zero sum game albeit not about wealth creation but about market dynamics. The purist school of Austrian Economics start from the assumption that the market, free of government intervention, will always be the best and most efficient delivery of goods and services in the long run. Any government intervention will ‘gum up the works’ and proportionally destroy the markets effectively. In this sense, the zero sum dichotomy at work is the absolute poles of free, unregulated market and encumbered, regulated government intervention. There is absolutely no middle ground for the purists. There is no daylight between government regulation and market degradation. The more the government intervenes in the market the more the market fails. This is a zero sum game. Regulation can never be thought as aiding the market. So, for example, if planes crash because of poor maintenance, the FAA is not the answer. The market is the answer. Folks will not fly with airline companies whose planes crash. The market will reward the company whose planes do not crash and punish the company whose planes crash. Eventually, the market will fix its own problems left to its own workings (just hope you are not flying in the meantime). Intervention by a government agency like the FAA will degrade the ability of the market to police itself.

The zero sum game played by the Austrians is really a thin veneer for survival of the fittest. Those that survive and thrive in the unregulated market get to establish their dominance. Those that fail in the market fall into the trash heap of wannabes. Of course, the Austrians would never say this. Their line concerning the ‘less fortunate’ is that the market will decide their fate. They think whatever happens with human failures of the market will eventually be corrected by the market. Although the Austrians would rather leave the ultimate outcome of their ideal unaddressed, it could be a place at the table for everyone in the long run but more likely human tragedies and failures are swept under the old proverbial rug as Austrians cannot address the conditions for human tragedy except by the faith of the market. They could never acknowledge that the market, free of government intervention, could result in an elitist economy that is simply the latest face of tragic human history.

The Paul’s are students and advocates for these ideologies. The Republican Party fits very well with these concepts. The Party has convinced folks that their problem is not the market but the government. All the while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The faithful just turn this reality back on the government. They blame the government for these inequities. Regular folks are feed a steady diet of this dogma to the point where they cannot think that maybe the free, unregulated market could be part of the problem. This fictitious production does play into the power broker hands of the Republican Party. However, the Republican Party will never allow a Ron or Rand Paul be more than a token gesture.

The Pauls attract social libertarians even though they personally advocate for anti-abortion groups and favors laws to vastly restrict abortion. The Pauls are also against same sex marriage. Rand Paul is not in favor of government anti-discrimination laws. He thinks the market should decide. Business should not be hindered by anti-discrimination laws. He has also supported laws to protect ‘religious freedoms’. The Pauls tend to be non-interventionists when it comes to foreign affairs and aid but they still have strong affiliations to Israel. While the Pauls have some positions that seem to contradict civil libertarian ideologies, they have many positions which certainly give lip service to a libertarian ideology. However, what one must not forget is that they are not running independently. Their campaigns are bought and paid for by the Republican Party. Therefore, they have indebtedness to the Party that I suspect is probably partly responsible for some of their deviations from a strict libertarian ideology.

The Republican Party has too much interest in social conservatives to ever let the Pauls get too close to winning a presidential bid. The Party is all too happy to display adherence to diversity but when push comes to shove Rand Paul will never get the nomination just as his dad before him. Rand Paul will follow the Party line and would never run as an independent. His willingness to shift his positions to placate the Republican Party is troublesome. If he ever were president I think he would cave to party pressure and be more likely than he pretends now to engage in military campaigns and foreign aid. Admittedly, these are simply my concerns not anything factual. What I find more troublesome is his alliances with Ayn Rand and Austrian Economics.

I do think that Rand Paul would dismantle the government to the point of dangerous economic consequences. Ron Paul has written extensively about how he believes the Federal Reserve is corrupt and unconstitutional (See End The Fed). Of course, he would expect the free market to fill the gap and do a better job. Anyone that thinks this should check out this site before locking in a vote for Rand Paul. Check out the facts detailed on this site before blatantly deciding that the government is mostly dispensable. Most people are totally unaware of what the government does for them every day. Anyone who is willing to think about this rationally will inevitably have concerns about whether and how the free market could effectively address vital concerns that the government currently addresses. Rand Paul would, at the least, be a huge gamble that this unfettered, free market ideology would and could fill the gap right away.

Towards the end of the Great Depression the Fed was given much more power to stabilize the economy. Take a look at these graphs which show the effects of the Feds market intervention beginning in the 40s. While I did not graph the detrimental effects of GDP, unemployment and inflation before 1917 (that data is harder to find but is well known), it was even more erratic with many more severe depressions. These early years of our country would have been the ugly reality of what an Austrian Economy would look like with the gold standard and almost no regulation. However, instead of the most efficient utilization of goods and services we actually saw widespread poverty, early death and mass subsistence as a quality of life. Anyone that would vote for Rand Paul would have to think if they are really willing to take the chance of a Mad Max type existence. If the unfettered free market would have worked so greatly it would have worked in the first hundred years or so of our country. This Austrian style ideology became a free for all that resulted in a bought and paid for government in the Gilded Age at the expense of the majority of the country. Of course, the Austrians would blame the government for this but anyone with common sense will recognize that when big money is given carte blanche to do as it pleases, it will create a corrupt government if one does not exist. The Republican Party is smart enough to know that a Rand Paul type figure could never get elected president. They know that their benefactors do better when they keep a low profile as their prize victory, Citizens United, clearly demonstrates.

Senator Cory Gardner Prefers War With Iran…

The following is the gist of what Senator Cory Gardner had to say responding to the email I sent him about the nuclear talks with Iran:

“This framework, based on details released thus far, appears to leave vast portions of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure intact despite their continued sponsoring of terror, and would expire in as few as ten years, allowing Iran to build nuclear weapons unrestricted. The American people, through their representatives in Congress, should be provided the opportunity to reject any deal that does not completely eliminate the threat of a nuclear Iran. I am also concerned that the current deal ignores other state-sanctioned terror activity Iran is pursuing.” Senator Cory Gardner

To “completely eliminate the threat of a nuclear Iran” is a fine and lofty goal but diplomacy is all about what is possible not what is ideal. What I pointed out to him in my initial email was that war is always an option regardless of any previous treaties. I cannot understand why, if there is a possibility for a treaty to monitor and restrict Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, why wouldn’t we try? Military experts have made it clear that even if we bomb Iran we will at most delay their nuclear development by a couple years. Isn’t ten years better than two years which is in effect the Cory Gardner default plan? Iran is within a year of developing a bomb if we pursue Senator Gardner’s ambitions. He and everyone that voted for him will be personally responsible for the inevitable outcome.

It is apparent that Israel will not hesitate to do whatever they think they need to do whenever they think the time is right. If they make a decision to attack unilaterally they know that we will have their back. Personally, I am tired of committing our soldiers and financial resources to conflicts that do not threaten our national security except in some politician’s war hawk brain. Our Founding Fathers including Washington and Jefferson were very adamant that we should only declare war in case of a vital threat to our national security. Since the War Powers Act that FDR signed after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the executive ability to effectively declare war without a Constitutional act of Congress has become easier and easier with every subsequent administration.

Perhaps American exceptionalism has contributed to our eagerness to involve ourselves in foreign military campaigns. As the world’s number one energy producer I find it hard to believe that the U.S. is merely motivated by commerce. In any case, anyone that is a strict Constitutionalist will have to recognize this fundamental deviance from the Constitution and the Founding Fathers intention. To oppose this possibility to avoid war with Iran is certainly tantamount to inviting war. Republicans have historically favored war on various non-Constitutional grounds. Did you know that Eisenhower, a Republican, started our involvement in Vietnam? Check it out. The opposition of the Republican dominated Congress to any attempt to avoid war should be punished by the voters. However, I tend to doubt if it will since Americans seem to turn a blind eye to these kind of international involvements. I hope war weariness will show itself in the actions of the American electorate. We have enough problems here in this country without spending more American resources on efforts that just create more problems for us and hatred of the U.S..

Please listen to the Republican presidential candidates. They really think that tough talk and actions will be better in the long run for the U.S.. Are we willing to once again tragically take that chance? Every historical despot has thought the same thing. History is replete with examples which proves it does not work. Rome overextended its military campaigns on this line of reasoning only to lose the empire. The German Nazis also spread themselves too thin on the Western and Eastern fronts. The U.S. will not make our country more secure by becoming more aggressive with every regional and international skirmish. We will only create more enemies, kill our young folks and rake up multi-trillion dollar debts as we did with Iran and Afghanistan. If we keep electing war hawks we will not get peace but more war. American voters should make it very hard for our politicians to get us into war. This should have been the lesson of Vietnam. I am not sure we are capable of learning these lessons. If we do not, we will not be remembered well by history. The U.S. should always err on the side of peace if we want to do something historically different.

War is always an option and Senator Gardner is not doing any of us a favor by disregarding any treaty in advance to restrict Iran’s nuclear ambitions. We may not be able to “completely eliminate the threat of a nuclear Iran” for all time but any delay to war, even if ten years, should not be dismissed lightly and ideologically. Senators Gardner’s inability to think and act rationally due to political affiliations proves that he is none other than the typical partisan, Republican war hawk that G.W. Bush and the neocons were. They were wrong then and they are STILL wrong! Please write him and let him know but don’t get your hopes up.

Schrödinger had it wrong…

As we all know, the cat is in the box with a flask of cyanide. A single radioactive isotope is also in the box with a radioactive sensor. If the sensor detects the isotope the cyanide is released and the cat will die. The state of the cat is simultaneously dead and alive until someone looks into the box. The act of observing the cat as either dead or alive collapses the quantum superposition wave function and reality is constrained into one possibility to the other.

Actually, this is wrong…

When the box opens, the cat observes whether there is an observer or not. Until the cat observes the observer the observer exists and does not exist. The act of the cat observing determines whether the observer exists or not. If the cat sees an observer the observer exists. If the cat does not see the observer the observer does not exist. The cat actually collapses the wave function and only lets the idiot observing think he or she collapsed the idiotic wave function.

Texas Fishing for Islamic Radicals

Right wingers in Texas are at it again and this time with the help of a far right wing hate group called the American Freedom Defense Initiative. Their latest “art exhibit and carton drawing contest” was designed to award the funniest cartoon drawing of Mohamed. Their key note speaker Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician who makes his living hating Islam.

Texas Governor Gregg Abbott called out the Texas Rangers to “protect his state from an Obama-led military takeover” from U.S. troops doing training exercises in the Southwest including Texas.

All these right wing nuts are on a fishing expedition to catch Islamic radicals. Well, they snagged a couple nuts, nuts killing nuts.

If Americans keep voting for these right wing nuts our country will start fighting wars that make the wars of G.W. Bush look like a Texas bar room brawl.

Levinas and Hitlerism

How is universality compatible with racism? The answer-to be found in the logic of what first inspires racism involves a basic modification of the very idea of universality. Universality must give way to the idea of expansion, for the expansion of a force presents a structure that is completely different from the propagation of an idea. The idea propagated detaches itself essentially from its point of departure. In spite of the unique accent communicated to it by its creator, it becomes a common heritage. It is fundamentally anonymous. The person who accepts it becomes its master, as does the person who proposes it. The propagation of an idea thus creates a community of “masters”; it is a process of equalization. To convert or persuade is to create peers. The universality of an order in Western society always reflects this universality of truth. But force is characterized by another type of propagation. The person who exerts force does not abandon it. Force does not disappear among those who submit to it. It is attached to the personality or society exerting it, enlarging that person or society while subordinating the rest. Here the universal order is not established as a consequence of ideological expansion; it is that very expansion that constitutes the unity of a world of masters and slaves. Nietzsche’s will to power, which modern Germany is rediscovering and glorifying, is not only a new ideal; it is an ideal that simultaneously brings with it its own form of universalization: war and conquest. But here we return to well-known truths. We have tried to link them to a fundamental principle. Perhaps we have succeeded in showing that racism is not just opposed to such and such a particular point in Christian and liberal culture. It is not a particular dogma concerning democracy, parliamentary government, dictatorial regime, or religious politics that is in question. It is the very humanity of man.1 Emmanuel Levinas

As a victim of fascism and concentration camp survivor, Levinas well understood the outcome of power and racism. In the quote above Levinas sketches out what he believed to be a critical ground of racism not in the horrific acts of racism but in the seemingly banal appeal of what he terms the “idealist liberalism” in historical Christianity. Levinas thinks that in Christianity we have a liberation of spirit, an unprecedented act of freedom in the idea. Prior to this denouement where freedom begins, the human spirit was chained to the powerlessness of the body and the brutality of the natural world. Levinas writes,

It makes it impossible to apply the categories of the physical world to the spirituality of reason, and so locates the ultimate foundation of the spirit outside the brutal world and the implacable history of concrete existence. It replaces the blind world of common sense with the world rebuilt by idealist philosophy, one that is steeped in reason and subject to reason. In place of liberation through grace there is autonomy, but the Judeo-Christian leitmotif of freedom pervades this autonomy.

The temptation the liberation of the soul from the body brings is expanse. Expanse is the exercise of power. Force is the ontic effect of power. Power does not diminish in its use; it intensifies itself in the manifestation of force. I might add, the freedom and universalization of the idea perhaps indulges the natural narcissism of human being. As the old motif goes ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’. The spiritual liberation of spirit sets the conditions for infinite expansion of the ego. From this authentic epoch of being, a new man draws its first breath, the modern master and the slave emerge. The master expresses the ideal world of the soul. The slave remains bound by the shackles of the natural world, the abomination of abominations. In the clear light of reason an unbridled exercise of egoistic freedom announces itself, free, liberated, unchained from every constraint, natural and ethical determinations. In this moment, Hitlerism blinks and gazes long into an abyss and the abyss gazes back.2

_________________

1 Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism

Author(s): Emmanuel Levinas and Seán Hand

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 62-71

Published by: The University of Chicago Press

 

2 I would like to thank Robert Bernasconi for an inspiring lecture last night at the University of Colorado in Denver and the occasion for my discovery of this text of Levinas.