“The Hebrew Bible: Proverbs” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction, “The Book of Proverbs is not merely an anthology but an anthology of anthologies. It is made up of six discrete units, each marked editorially as such at the beginning, with notable differences of emphasis and style among the units…. By and large, the underlying conception of wisdom is thoroughly pragmatic, and, in keeping with the characteristic direction of Wisdom literature, it does not reflect particular Israelite interests…. The book is poetry from end to end…. The one-line proverbs are either didactic admonitions or, somewhat less frequently, observations about social and ethical behavior…. Within the tight formal constraints of the one-line aphorism, dynamic and revelatory relationships emerge between the two halves of the line, generating what I have elsewhere called a poetry of wit…. The book as a whole, after all, works on the assumption that knowledge and experience are eminently transmissible and teachable and that everyone draws on the same fund of set moral principles…. The more pervasive challenge to the translator of Proverbs is that the expressive vigor of these sayings depends to such a large degree on their wonderful compactness, an effect reinforced by sound-play (alliteration, assonance, an occasional ad hoc internal rhyme). Most of this sound-play inevitably disappears in the English…. I have sought to narrow the gap between the two languages by avoiding (with just a few exceptions) polysyllabic words, by trying wherever possible to keep the number of accents—typically, three per verset—close to that in the Hebrew, and by reproducing something of the compression of formulation of the Hebrew without resort to explanatory or paraphrastic maneuvers in translation.”

In Proverbs 4:3, Alter discusses the role of tradition and the recurring theme of teaching wisdom to the young, “For I was a son to my father. In the tradition-oriented framework of Proverbs, wisdom is a quality that age imparts to youth…. That idea is reinforced here by the introduction of a third generation, the grandfather of the young man who is the object of instruction. Just as the Mentor was taught by his father, whose words he goes on to quote, he will teach the young man.” Alter describes, in Proverbs 10:25, another recurring motif in the book, “When the storm passes. This is a bedrock assumption of Proverbs—vehemently contested by Job—that adversity sweeps away the wicked while the righteous endure.”

Wordplay is another common theme of the Book of Proverbs. In Proverbs 11:22, Alter explains, “A golden ring in the snout of a pig. This is another proverb cast in riddle form. This first verset gives us a bizarre and rather shocking image. The second verset spells out the referent of the image, the beautiful woman devoid of sense, and thus becomes a kind of punch line.” In Proverbs 16:1, Alter returns to the main theme of wisdom, “from the Lord is the tongue’s pronouncing. Throughout Proverbs, apt and articulate speech is conceived as a key to relationships among people and as the indispensable instrument of wisdom. Thus, a person orders his own thought because the autonomy of consciousness is not questioned, but it is a gift from God when thought is translated into fitting speech.”

Finally, Alter points out, in Proverbs 18:24, one of the recurring formulas of Biblical writing, the envelope structure, but with a twist, “There is a companionable man to keep company with/ and there’s a friend closer than a brother…. The textual unit from verse 1 to verse 24 is neatly marked by an antithetical envelope structure: in the first verse, we see someone who is isolated or separated from others, focusing on his own desire, and who consequently gets into trouble; this last verse affirms the sustaining power of friendship.”

“The World as Will and Representation: Volume 2” by Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by Christopher Janaway, Judith Norman, and Alistair Welchman).

This second volume of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus is mainly footnotes, expositions, and addendum to his main treatise. It does contain a multitude of hidden gems. Schopenhauer states, “Our whole consciousness, with its inner and outer perception, always has time as its form. Concepts on the other hand, as representations that have arisen through abstraction and are thoroughly general and distinct from all particular things, have (in this quality) a being that is certainly objective to a certain extent, and yet does not belong to any temporal sequence…. They must to a certain extent be reduced again to the nature of particular things, individualized and thus linked to a sensible representation: i.e. to a word. The word is therefore the sensuous sign of the concept and as such the necessary means of fixing it, i.e. of making it present to consciousness (bound up as this is with the form of time), and hence creating a connection between reason (whose objects are merely general universals that know neither time nor place) and consciousness (which is sensible, bound up with time, and to this extent merely animal)…. Only this makes possible other operations such as judging, inferring, comparing, restricting, etc…. Word and language are thus the indispensable means of clear thinking.”

Next, Schopenhauer takes a step back in scope to describe the object of philosophy. “The truly philosophical state consists in the first instance in being able to entertain a sense of wonder about habitual and everyday things, since this causes one to problematize the universal aspects of appearance…. The lower a person’s intellectual stature, the fewer riddles existence itself holds for him: everything for him seems self-evident, both as it is and that it is…. The philosophical sense of wonder that arises from this in certain individuals is conditioned by a higher development of intelligence, and yet not only by this; doubtless it is knowledge of death, together with reflection on suffering and the needs of life, that give a strong impetus to philosophical deliberation and metaphysical interpretations of the world. If our lives were endless and painless, it might never occur to anyone to ask why the world exists and precisely the nature it does.”

Schopenhauer’s great insight was distinguishing between the nature of appearances and the things in themselves. “The thing in itself can, as such, enter consciousness with complete immediacy only by becoming itself conscious of itself…. And since intuition can provide only appearances, not things in themselves, it follows that we have absolutely no cognition of things in themselves…. I accept this for everything except the cognition everyone has of his own willing…. It is more real than any other cognition. It is also not a priori…. In fact, our willing is the only opportunity we have to understand the interior of a process that also presents itself externally, and hence it is also the only thing that we are acquainted with directly and not, like everything else, given merely in representation…. We must learn to understand nature through ourselves, and not the other way around.”

The law of causation also plays an integral role in Schopenhauer’s philosophical system. “No truth is more certain than this, that everything that happens, be it small or great, happens with complete necessity…. Every being in the world is on the one hand appearance, and necessarily determined by the law of appearance, but on the other hand is in itself will, and in fact absolutely free will, since any necessity arises only through the forms that belong entirely to appearance, namely through the principle of sufficient reason in its different configurations…. Therefore people really only have the choice either to see the world as a mere machine that necessarily runs down, or to recognize as its essence in itself a free will that does not express itself directly in the effects of things but, in the first instance in their existence and essence. This freedom is therefore a transcendental freedom, and coexists with empirical necessity just as the transcendental ideality of appearances coexists with their empirical reality…. Every being, without exception, acts with strict necessity, but exists and is what it is by virtue of its freedom.”

Throughout this volume, the difference between the world of appearances and the things in themselves is drummed in again and again. “When directly intuiting the world and life, we usually consider things only in their relations, and consequently in accordance with their relative rather than absolute essence and existence. We look, for instance, at houses, ships, machines and such with the thought of their purpose and their suitability for that purpose. We look at human beings with the thought of their relation to us, it they have one; next we look at them with the thought of their relation to each other…. This is the consideration of things in their relations, indeed, by means of these relations, according to the principle of sufficient reason…. But if, by way of exception, we experience a momentary increase in the intensity of our intuitive intelligence, then all at once we see things with completely different eyes: we no longer grasp them according to their relations but rather grasp what they are in and of themselves…. Then each particular thing is the representative of its species: accordingly, we now grasp the universal in each essence. What we recognize in this way are the Ideas of things.”

Morality for Schopenhauer was a relation of the will and not, therefore, merely in the world of appearances. “Morality is what everything depends on, according to the testimony of our innermost consciousness: and morality lies only in the individual, as the direction of his will. In truth only the life course of each individual has unity, coherence, and true significance: life should be viewed as teaching us a lesson and the meaning of the lesson is a moral one. Only inner processes, to the extent that they concern the will, have true reality and are actual events; because only the will is the thing in itself.”

Finally, Schopenhauer riffs more on the true nature of the will. “In self-consciousness, the subject of cognition, as the only source of cognition, confronts the will as a spectator and, although it arose from the will, it cognizes the will as something different from it and foreign; thus, it cognizes the will only empirically, in time, and piecemeal in its successive acts and affects, and so experiences the will’s decisions only a posteriori and often very indirectly. This is why our own being is a riddle to us (i.e. to our intellect) and the individual views itself as newly created and transient although its being in itself is timeless and hence eternal.” He continues poetically, “Awoken to life from the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself as an individual in a world without end or limit, among countless individuals who are all striving, suffering, going astray; and it hurries back to the old unconsciousness, as if through a bad dream. — But until then its desires are unlimited, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one. No possible worldly satisfaction could be enough to quiet its longing…. Everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is ordained to be in vain or recognized as an illusion…. What is promised is not delivered, unless it is to show how undesirable the desired thing was…. And so happiness always lies in the future, or in the past, and the present is like a small dark cloud.”

“Metaphysics and Nihilism” by Martin Heidegger (translated by Arun Iyer)

This is the gist of Heidegger’s two complimentary essays, taken from his lecture notes, in a nutshell, “In the instant that metaphysics is overcome through beyng, things get serious with philosophy because a decisive moment in the history of beyng arrives…. That which is to be overcome must now be placed into its essence, which has been veiled so far; it must be elevated to its essentiality…. The decisive aspect of the overcoming lies in a rift that is opened between the beingness of beings and the truth of beyng…. It is from this point on that the differentiation between beyng and beings is first grounded in an abyss as that which belongs to the history of beyng.”

Heidegger questions the theology (and ontology) beyond the act of overcoming, “Overcoming metaphysics—does this not mean creating “new,” different gods? But who creates them? Or indeed going beyond gods—that we no longer need them, in turn to be enslaved more than ever by such a lack of need…. Or is over-coming completely different—not an elevated-beyond of a super-metaphysics, but an acceptance and recognition of a lapse—something very slight and peculiar and simple, whose continued existence makes “demands” on the more essential capacities of the human being than the ascent into the making and despising of gods, both of which belong together, balancing each other out.”

Heidegger refines his definition of metaphysics. Metaphysics is removed from the chain of causation and, therefore, from history as experienced, “Metaphysics is not doctrine and opinion. It is also not just a basic stance of the thinking human, but the truth of beings; however here the essence of truth in ungrounded…. Ungrounding from early on unfolds a peculiar predominance of beings over being.” Heidegger contrasts nihilism, “The essence of nihilism lies in the neglect of the nothing, which comes from nihilism’s incapacity to grasp its own essence as the essentially “corrupted essence” of beyng and to experience the inception of the grounding to come,  in the abyss of the truth of beyng…. The errancy of metaphysics consists in this: it is familiar with only one way out of being lost in the emptiest-most universal, which is to flee into the “particular” and the concrete, whether this be the positivity of the sciences or the “praxis” of so-called “life” or the moral “appeal” to individual existence (“anthropology”)…. We are seeking the “ground,” not some particular ground for some particular being, but the ground for beings as such…. One may say that [Being and Beings] are infinitely distinct—distinguished by an abyss—separated from each other by an abyss, which is beyng itself…. Metaphysics projects the beingness of beings without grounding it…. Indeed the a priori character shows that being is no more and will henceforth never at all be interrogated in all of metaphysics, that is to say, will never at all be creatively questioned from itself and back into itself—The a priori denies being its own essencing back into itself.”

Heidegger circles back to the history of metaphysics, “Metaphysics begins with Socrates insofar as we mean metaphysics in the narrow sense as the establishment of the truth about beings…. With the evolved “doctrine of ideas,” Plato created the instrument for all metaphysics…. Socrates brought philosophy from heaven to earth and turned it against metaphysics in order to “care” for the human being alone. This opinion is erroneous on two counts. For one, there was still no metaphysics before Socrates; the thought of Heraclitus and Parmenides is “physics”…. Secondly, the turn toward the human being is, however, precisely the precondition for all metaphysics. Prior to this, the human being, as in any inceptual (i.e. non-metaphysical) philosophy, was inessential and not more essential than the gods, who remained out of consideration. Socrates makes it his business to strive after the good and with this metaphysics is first posited…. Absolute knowledge as the truth of beings as a whole knows itself and thus excludes any questionability. From this, we can see in historical reflection that metaphysics, as soon as it becomes the thinking of thinking, distances itself, if anything, from reflecting on the truth of being.”

Heidegger moves on to nihilism by first defining it, “Nihil (nothing) exists essentially in what it names. Nihilism means: there is nothing with respect to a being…. There is nothing with respect to beings as such as a whole…. Not every metaphysics has experienced nihilism, only the metaphysics of Nietzsche…. “God is dead.” With this expression Nietzsche gives a theological and, seemingly, only a negative formula for what he, thinking metaphysically, understands under nihilism. Nihilism, thought positively, is metaphysics understood as the truth of a being (of what is actual) in terms of the will to power from the eternal recurrence of the same…. The happening whereby the supersensible world falls away and loses its binding-formative essence is construed as the act of the human being. Nihilism, understood as the history of the devaluation of the highest values, is the work of humans…. The name God stands, metaphysically speaking, for the supersensible world. Since Plato, it is the realm of the “ideas.”… The murder of God, metaphysically speaking, consists in wiping away the entire horizon. The horizon of the supersensible is erased.”

The experienced world is nothing but history traced back to the ground. Heidegger states, “Because there is nothing permanent and everything “is” a becoming-having-become, “permanence” remains something only imagined in fancy. Indeed, this imagination is necessary, as the positing of the permanent, for assuring the continued existence of the will to power…. What is actual is only what becomes…. Nietzsche thinks what becomes in its becoming as the will to power…. Nietzsche himself figured it out because he experienced Western history in its occurrence as nihilism. Nihilism, as the process of the devaluation of the highest values, the murder of God, must lead to the revaluation of all values…. Nietzsche experiences nihilism as the history of the devaluation of the highest values…. Nietzsche’s fundamental experience says: a being is, and as such it is not nothing. As a consequence, nihilism, according to which there is nothing with respect to beings as such, is excluded from the foundations of metaphysics. Thus, it has overcome nihilism…. Yet, does he also recognize in such a recognition the being of beings and indeed being itself, namely, as being? By no means…. Being is not recognized as being…. It is as if it is nothing: being is a nihil…. There is nothing with respect to being in Nietzsche’s metaphysics. We therefore say: Nietzsche’s metaphysics is nihil proper.”

Heidegger concludes by contrasting metaphysics with nihilism. “Metaphysics itself thus blocks the path toward the experience of the essence of nihilism. Metaphysics, at any time, puts the affirmation or the denial of beings as such up for decision and sees its alpha and omega in the relevant explanation of beings on the basis of their ground, a ground that also exists as a being…. Being abandons its own nature to the thinking of metaphysics, which omits this staying-away as such and also does not admit to this omission…. The essence of nihilism is not a matter pertaining to human beings at all, but to beyng itself…. The dignity of being does not consist in being considered as a value, even if it be the highest value. Rather, the dignity of being consists in being the freedom, which frees all beings as such into itself…. The fact that beings exist as if being were not the unrelenting and the one requiring accommodation, as if it were not the urgency of the truth itself that urges, is the dominance of the lack of urgency, which is reinforced in the metaphysics that has reached consummation.”

“The Transparency Society” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

Han often complains about modernity. In this short monograph he takes on the modern pose of transparency. He asserts that the trend towards greater transparency is far from positive. “The society of transparency is not a society of trust, but a society of control…. Total transparency imposes a temporality on political communication that makes slow, long-term planning impossible…. Compulsive conformity proceeds from transparency. In this way, transparency stabilizes the dominant system.”

For Han, the transparent society is one of enforced intimate relations with strangers. “In modernity, theatrical distance is increasingly abandoned in favor of intimacy…. The world today is no theater where actions and feelings are represented and interpreted, but a market on which intimacies are exhibited, sold, and consumed. The theater is a site of representation, whereas the market is a site of exhibition…. Intimacy is the psychological formula of transparency…. The tyranny of intimacy psychologizes and personalizes everything…. The public sphere becomes an exhibition space…. As a society of revealing and denuding, the society of transparency works against all forms of the mask…. The mounting deritualization and denarrativization of society also strip it of forms of symbolic appearance and render it naked…. Human beings become sociable when they preserve distance from one another. Intimacy, in contrast, destroys distance…. The society of intimacy is a psychologized, deritualized society. It is a society of confession, laying-bare, and the pornographic lack of distance…. Narcissistic subjects who lack the ability of scenic distantiation populate the society of intimacy…. Experience [Erfahrung] means facing the Other. Experiencing [Erlebnis], in contrast, means encountering oneself everywhere.”

Magic and enchantment are lost in a world of transparency. It only produces a world burdened by facts and data. “The society of transparency is a society without poets, without seduction or metamorphosis. After all, it is the poet who produces scenic illusions, forms of appearance, and ritual and ceremonial signs: he sets artifacts and antifacts against hyperreal, naked evidence…. Today’s society of transparency lacks divine light inhabited by metaphysical tension. Transparency has no transcendence…. The society of transparency not only lacks truth; it also lacks symbolic appearance. Neither truth nor symbolic appearance are see-through. Only emptiness is entirely transparent…. The mass of information and imagery offers fullness in which emptiness is still noticeable…. Transparency also does not entail clairvoyance. The mass of information produces no truth.”

Finally, Han compares the world of transparency to Bentham’s vision of the panopticon. “The digital panopticon of the twenty-first century is aperpectival insofar as it no longer conducts surveillance from a central point, with the omnipotence of the despotic gaze. The distinction between center and periphery, which is fundamental to the Benthamian panopticon, has disappeared entirely…. The inhabitants of today’s panopticon network and communicate with each other intensively. Not lonesomeness through isolation, but hypercommunication guarantees transparency. Above all, the particularity of the digital panopticon is that its inhabitants actively collaborate in its construction and maintenance by putting themselves on display and baring themselves. They display themselves on the panoptic market…. The society of control achieves perfection when subjects bare themselves not through outer constraint but through self-generated need, that is, when the feat of having to abandon one’s private and intimate sphere yields to the need to put oneself on display without shame…. No community, in the strong sense, can form in the society of transparency. Instead chance gatherings [Ansammlungen] or crowds [Vielheiten] of isolated individuals, or egos, emerge…. Today the entire globe is developing into a panopticon. There is no outside space. The panopticon is becoming total. No wall separates inside from outside.”