“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.”

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

Years ago, Alter started with annotating the Book of Psalms, well before beginning this larger project of translating the entire Hebrew Bible. In this introduction, he first gives the historical context behind the psalms. “The psalm was conceived in the ancient period as a fairly flexible poetic form. Sung and played in the Temple service, it could be a liturgical text in the strict sense. It could also accompany individual ritual acts of thanksgiving, confession, and supplication, or perhaps express these various themes outside a ritual context…. The psalm could serve as a poetic vehicle for philosophic reflection or didactic instruction or the commemoration of national history or for the celebration of the monarch and the seat of the monarchy.” Alter continues by explaining the specific poetic nature of the psalms. “Biblical poetry is based on a parallelism of meaning between the two halves of the line (or, in the minority of lines that are triadic, among the three parts of the line). There is no requirement of rhyme (very occasionally one encounters an ad hoc rhyme) and no regular meter…. Between the two halves of the line there may be some equivalence of meaning (“semantic”), and equivalent number of stressed syllables (“accentual”), and a parallelism of syntax…. Much of the force of ancient Hebrew poetry derives from its rhythmic compactness…. A typical line of biblical poetry has three beats in each verset.” Finally, Alter defends his translation choices, “What I have aimed at in this translation—inevitably, with imperfect success—is to represent Psalms in a kind of English verse that is readable as poetry yet sounds something like the Hebrew—emulating its rhythms wherever feasible, reproducing many of the effects of its expressive poetic syntax, seeking equivalents for the combination of homespun directness and archaizing in the original, hewing to the lexical concreteness of the Hebrew, and making more palpable the force of parallelism that is at the heart of biblical poetry. The translation is also on the whole quite literal.”

In Psalm 8:10, Alter alerts the reader to a familiar biblical structure, the envelope form, but then also how this case is unique, “Lord, our Master,/how majestic Your name in all the earth. Although biblical literature, in poetry or prose, exhibits considerable fondness for envelope structures, in which the end somehow echoes the beginning, this verbatim repetition of the first line as the last, common in other poetic traditions, is unusual.”

Alter’s annotations often point out poetic technique. In Psalm 14:2, he notes, “The LORD from the heavens looked down/ on the sons of humankind/ to see. These three versets are remarkable for involving enjambments from verset to verset (a rare maneuver) and avoiding semantic parallelism, which appears only at the end (“discerning,/ … seeking out”). Thus, the eye is drawn downward in a miniature narrative sequence, following the divine gaze, from the heavens to the human sphere.”

Psalm 22:2 is famous in Christian theology. Alter notes, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? These famous words are the ones pronounced by Jesus in his last agony—though in Aramaic, not in the original Hebrew. That moment in Mathew is a kind of pesher, or fulfillment interpretation, of this psalm.”

Alter also is quick to note when his translation differs from more standard versions and gives an explanation for his choices that reveal them far from arbitrary. In Psalm 23:4, he states, “in the vale of death’s shadow. The intent of the translation here is not to avoid the virtually proverbial “in the shadow of the valley of dearth” but rather to cut through the proliferation of syllables in the King James Version, however eloquent, and better approximate the compactness of the Hebrew—begey tsalmawet.”

In Psalm 27:10, Alter points out a poignant verse, “Though my father and mother forsook me,/ the LORD would gather me in. The extravagance of this declaration of trust in God, perhaps the most extreme in the whole Bible, is breathtaking and perhaps even disturbing.”

Often, Alter alerts the reader to unique stylistic moments in the psalms. However, the transition from paganism to monotheism is also a recurring motif throughout the Bible. In Psalm 82:1, he notes, “God takes His stand in the divine assembly. Like the psalms of supplication, this poem is concerned with the infuriating preponderance of injustice in the world. It differs from them, however, not only because God is the principal speaker (from verse 2 through verse 7) but also because the psalm is frankly mythological in character. Alternatively, one could describe it as a poem about the transition from mythology to a monotheistic frame of reference because in the end the gods are rudely demoted from their divine status.”

In Psalm 86:8, the shadow of paganism’s influence in the Bible is again described, “There is none like You among the gods, O Master. This line quotes the Song of the Sea, Exodus 15:11. The move from this quotation to verse 9 and 10 traces the trajectory from henotheism to proper monotheism. In the old poem in Exodus, other gods are imagined as existing but are feeble in power compared to YHWH, God of Israel; here the poet goes on to affirm that “You alone are God” verse 10.”

Alter notes that psalms were often song chorally. In Psalm 98:7, he states, “Let the sea and its fullness thunder. There is a concordance between the human orchestra—in all likelihood, an actual orchestra accompanying the singing of this psalm—with its lutes and rams’ horns, and the orchestra of nature, both groups providing a grand fanfare for God the king. The thundering of the sea in a percussion section, joined by the clapping hands of the rivers, then the chorus of the mountains…. The Israelites chanting the poem’s words of exaltation, to the accompaniment of musical instruments, are invited to imagine their musical rite as part of a cosmic performance.”

Finally, Psalm 114:1 is an example of the layers of meaning often alluded to in biblical literature. Alter reveals, “When Israel came out of Egypt…. This psalm is used to illustrate the fourfold levels of interpreting a sacred text (literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical or mystic)…. The original intention of the psalmist, however, seems clearly literal—which is to say, historical—a celebration of God’s spectacular intervention in history on behalf of the people of Israel.”

“Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau” by Jacques Maritain

Maritain’s book is a set of pen portraits of Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau from his perspective as a reactionary Catholic philosopher. “Three men, each for very different reasons, dominate the modern world, and govern all the problems which torment it: a reformer of religion, a reformer of philosophy, and a reformer of morality.”

Maritain begins with Luther, “It would be astonishing if the extraordinary loss of balance induced in the Christian mind by heresy had not had the most important repercussions in all spheres, particularly in that of the speculative and practical reason. By the very fact that the Lutheran revolution bore on religion, on that which governs all human activity, it was bound to change most profoundly the attitude of the human soul.” Obviously, Maritain is far from an impartial commentator on Luther’s character flaws, “One might sat that that immense disaster for humanity, the Protestant Reformation, was only the effect of an interior trial which turned out badly in a religious who lacked humility…. In origin and principle the drama of the Reformation was a spiritual drama, a battle of the soul…. What first impresses us in Luther’s character is egocentrism…. Luther’s self becomes practically the centre of gravity of everything, especially in the spiritual order…. The Reformation unbridled the human self in the spiritual and religious order…. After Luther decided to refuse obedience to the Pope and break with the communion of the Church, his self is henceforth supreme…. And so in Luther the swollen consciousness of the self is essentially a consciousness of will, of realisation of freedom…. The Reformer, and with him the whole modern world, rises against two mysteries: the mystery of the divine operations, and the mystery of immanent activity and the capacity of spirits.”

Descartes is viewed as the philosopher who ushered in the age of modernity, with its primacy on the individual. “What Descartes really attacks, in his impatience of the servitude of discursive work is the potentiality of our intellect, that is to say, its specifically human weakness, what makes it a reason. So by curious chance the first move of rationalism is to disown reason…. Behold it reconstructed after an intuitive type…. Descartes applies to the certitudes of reason and science the classical solutions of the traditional teaching about the formal motive of faith…. If we could not lean on the guarantee of the truthfulness of the Creator, author of things and author of our mind, we could not know on trustworthy authority that there is a material world, or that there exists outside our thought things in conformity with our ideas…. Rational cognition is for Descartes a sort of natural revelation…. The transition to existence, the grasp of existence by the help of the intelligence alone and starting from pure ideas, forms just the crucial problem of the Cartesian philosophy…. We must arrive at being, we must rejoin it, or deduce it, or beget it, from an ideal principle set or discovered in the depths of thought…. In the modern world, reason turns its back on eternal things and is ordered to the creature. It rates the mathematics of phenomena above theology, science above wisdom.”

Maritain saves his most searing scorn for the philosophical system of Rousseau, “Such is the “sincerity” of Jean-Jacques and his friends. It consists in never meddling with what you find yourself at each moment of your life, for fear of perverting your being. So now all moral labour is tainted…. “You must be yourself”…. On his lips it meant: you must be your feeling, as God is His being…. Every form imposed on the inner world of the human soul, whether it come from nature or grace, is a sacrilegious wrong to nature…. He attributes to himself the privilege of being the still unblemished Man of Nature, without trace or stain of the original corruption due to civilization…. Mimicry of sanctity, changing of the heroic life into a religious enjoyment of self, ambition to reach God and the divine life by sensation and the affective imagination: is not Jean-Jacques the finest specimen of the naturalist mysticism of feeling?” Maritain particularly disdains the fact that Rousseau never turned away from his religion, but simply perverted it. “Rousseau plunged the heart into endless uneasiness, because he hallows the denial of grace. With the philosophers he rejected the gift of Him Who first loved us, but yet he makes an outlet for religious feeling. He turns our hunger for God towards the sacred mysteries of sensation, towards the infinite of matter…. As the search for mystical enjoyment in things which are not God is an endless search, it can stop nowhere…. If we want a label, we may say that Jean-Jacques, like Luther, is a very perfect and unalloyed specimen of anti-intellectualist religious thought.”

“Poetry, Language, Thought” by Martin Heidegger (translated by Albert Hofstadter)

This is a collection of Heidegger’s lectures circling around the themes of art, aesthetics, and language. He begins with the origins of art, “The thingly element in the art work is like the substructure into and upon which the other, authentic element is built…. These three modes of defining thingness conceive of the thing as a bearer of traits, as the unity of a manifold of sensations, as formed matter…. It is precisely in great art—and only such art is under consideration here—that the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work…. To be a work means to set up a world…. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being…. By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits. In a world’s worlding is gathered that spaciousness out of which the protective grace of the gods is granted or withheld…. A work, by being a work, makes space for the spaciousness…. The work as work sets up a world…. Thus art is: the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then is the becoming and happening of truth…. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry. The nature of art, on which both the art work and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into-work of truth. It is due to art’s poetic nature that, in the midst of what is, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual…. If all art is in essence poetry, then the arts of architecture, painting, sculpture, and music must be traced back to poesy…. But poesy is only one mode of the lighting projection of truth, i.e., of poetic composition in this wider sense. Nevertheless, the linguistic work, the poem in the narrower sense, has a privileged position in the domain of the arts…. Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time…. Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance.”

Heidegger, in another lecture, deals with poets more directly. “Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods’ tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning…. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy…. What threatens man in his very nature is the willed view that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition, man’s being, tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects…. What threatens man in his very nature is the view that technological production puts the world in order, while in fact this ordering is precisely what levels every ordo, every rank, down to the uniformity of production, and thus from the outset destroys the realm from which any rank and recognition could possibly arise…. Who are we? We are those who will, who set up the world as object by way of intentional self-assertion…. Only in the invisible innermost of the heart is man inclined toward what there is for him to love: the forefathers, the dead, the children, those who are to come…. But the interior of uncustomary consciousness remains the inner space in which everything is for us beyond the arithmetic of calculation, and, free of such boundaries, can overflow into the unbounded whole of the Open…. The interiority of the world’s inner space unbars the Open for us. Only what we thus retain in our heart (par coeur), only that do we truly know by heart. Within this interior we are free, outside of the relation to the objects set around us that only seem to give protection…. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight?”

The lectures end by returning explicitly to the theme of language. Heidegger concludes, “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man…. For, strictly, it is language that speaks. Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal…. Language beckons us, at first and then again at the end, toward a thing’s nature.”

“The World as Will and Representation: Volume 1” by Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by Christopher Janaway, Judith Norman, and Alistair Welchman)

Schopenhauer’s magnum opus is about the nature of reality and the individual’s place in it. He begins with the understanding, “The subjective correlate of matter (or causality, since the two are the same) is the understanding…. To have cognition of causality is the understanding’s only function, its single capability…. All causality, and therefore all matter, and with it the whole of actuality, exists only for the understanding, through the understanding, and in the understanding…. What the eye, the ear, the hand senses is not an intuition: it is merely data. Only when the understanding proceeds from the effect back to the cause is the world present in intuition, spread out in space, its form capable of change, its matter persisting through time…. Just as the world as representation exists only through the understanding, it exists only for the understanding as well.”

Schopenhauer moves on to the conception of the world. “The world is exactly as it presents itself and it presents itself completely and without reserve as representation, held together by the law of causality. This is its empirical reality. But on the other hand, causality exists only in the understanding and for the understanding. Thus the understanding is always the condition for the actual (i.e. active) world as such and in its entirety: without the understanding this world is nothing.”

Next, Schopenhauer circles back to individual consciousness. “We start out neither from the object nor the subject, but rather from representation as the primary fact of consciousness, whose most essential and primary form is the subject/object dichotomy…. The total and complete relativity of the world as representation, both in its most universal form (subject and object) and the form subordinate to this (the principle of sufficient reason), indicates, as we have already said, that the innermost being of the world is to be sought in a wholly different side of the world, in something utterly distinct from representation…. This new, more highly potentialized consciousness, this abstract reflection of everything intuitive in the non-intuitive concepts of reason is the only thing that gives people the circumspection that so completely distinguishes their consciousness from that of animals…. People are determined by abstract concepts independent of the present moment…. It is only through abstraction that the simultaneous presence of such motives in consciousness can lead to the knowledge that one motive excludes the other and hence permits a comparison of the relative force each exerts on the will. Accordingly, the prevailing motive, in so far as it is decisive, is the considered decision of the will and announces itself as a sure sign of the state of the will.”

Reason is the next concept Schopenhauer tackles. “Reason only ever reproduces in cognition what had already been received by a different means, it does not actually extend our cognition, but only gives it a different form: it allows what is already cognized concretely and intuitively to be cognized abstractly and universally.” Next, Schopenhauer explains philosophy. “Philosophy has the peculiarity that it does not presuppose anything as already known… even the principle of sufficient reason itself…. The very thing that the sciences presuppose and posit as the basis and limit of their explanations is exactly what constitutes the real problem of philosophy…. The principle of non-contradiction only establishes the mutual consistency of concepts, but does not specify the concepts themselves. The principle of sufficient reason explains the connections between appearances, but not the appearances themselves. So philosophy cannot use these principles to search for either an efficient cause or a final cause of the world as a whole…. But such cognition is intuitive, concrete cognition: philosophy’s task is to reproduce this in the abstract, to elevate the succession of transient intuitions and in general everything that the wide-ranging concept of feeling includes (and designates merely negatively as knowledge that is neither abstract nor clear) into permanent knowledge. Accordingly, philosophy must be an abstract statement of the essence of the entire world, of the whole as well as of all its parts…. Philosophy will be a complete recapitulation, a reflection, as it were, of the world, in abstract concepts…. We human beings always lead a second, abstract life alongside our concrete life…. Our abstract life, as it appears before us in rational contemplation, is the calm reflection of the first life and the world it is lived in.”

Schopenhauer moves on to the subjective individual and his will. “His cognition, which upholds and conditions the entire world as representation, is nonetheless completely mediated through a body whose affections, as we have shown, are the starting point for the understanding as it inuits this world. To the pure subject of cognition as such, this body is a representation like any other, an object among objects…. The subject of cognition, appearing as an individual, is given the solution to the riddle: and this solution is will…. Every true act of his will is immediately and inevitably a movement of his body as well…. The entire body is nothing but objectified will…. The will is a priori cognition of the body, and the body is a posteriori cognition of the will…. The will is the most immediate thing in our consciousness…. Only the will is thing in itself…. All objects are the appearance, the visible manifestation, the objecthood of the will…. This thing in itself (we will retain the Kantian expression as a standing formula) can never be an object, because an object is only its appearance and not what it really is…. The concept of will is unique among all possible concepts in that it does not come from appearance, it does not come from mere intuitive representation, but rather comes from within, springs from everyone’s most immediate consciousness…. We are this…. It is only by virtue of time and space that something that is one and the same in essence and concept can nonetheless appear as different, as a multiplicity of coexistent and successive things…. The will as thing in itself lies outside the province of the principle of sufficient reason in all its forms, and therefore has absolutely no ground…. It is one in the sense that it lies outside of time and space, outside the principium individuationis…. The individual, the person, is not will as a thing in itself, but rather an appearance of the will…. Although the will is in itself groundless, its appearance is very much subject to the law of necessity, i.e. the principle of sufficient reason…. Although each motion is an appearance of the will, it must nonetheless have a cause that situates it in relation to a particular time and place, which is to say: not in general, according to its inner essence, but rather as a particular appearance…. What is universal, the common essence of all appearances of a particular sort, what must be presupposed if causal explanation is to have sense or meaning, is the universal force of nature, which can never be more than an occult quality for physics, precisely because this is where aetiological explanation ends and metaphysical explanation begins…. The differences between these original forces (forces that can never be derived from one another) in no way interrupts the unity of that chain of causes and the connections between all its links. The aetiology of nature and the philosophy of nature will never detract from one another…. Aetiology accounts for the causes that necessarily give rise to the particular appearances to be explained…. Philosophy however only thinks about universals, even in nature: here, the original forces themselves are its object.”

Schopenhauer circles back to the world. “This world in which we live and have our being is, in its whole essence, the will through and through, and at the same time representation through and through…. Everyone finds that he is this will that makes up the inner essence of the world, and he also finds that he is the cognitive subject; the whole world is only the representation of the subject and to this extent it exists only in relation to his consciousness, as its necessary bearer.” Now, he goes back to the nature of the will, “In fact the absence of all goals, of all boundaries, belongs to the essence of the will in itself, which is an endless striving…. Every goal that is achieved is once again the beginning of a new course of action, and so to infinity…. Eternal becoming, endless flux belong to the revelation of the essence of the will.”

Schopenhauer riffs on meditation, the subjective perspective, and the nature of the will. “No longer led by the forms of the principle of sufficient reason to pursue merely the relations between things (which in the end always aims at their relation to our own will), if we stop considering the Where, When, Why and Wherefore of things but simply and exclusively consider the What, if we do not allow our consciousness to become engrossed by abstract thinking, concepts of reason; but if, instead of all this, we devote the entire power of our mind to intuition and immerse ourselves in this entirely, letting the whole of consciousness be filled with peaceful contemplation of the natural object that is directly present… we lose ourselves in the object completely, i.e. we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, the clear mirror of the object, so that it is as if the object existed on its own, without anyone to perceive it…. The individual has lost himself in this very intuition: rather, he is the pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of cognition.” However, Schopenhauer understands that everyday life is not often like this. “As long as our consciousness is filled by our will, as long as we are given over to the pressure of desires with their constant hopes and fears, as long as we are the subject of willing, we will never have lasting happiness or peace…. But when some occasion from the outside or a disposition from within suddenly lifts us out of the endless stream of willing, tearing cognition from its slavery to the will, our attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing but instead grasps things freed from their relation to the will, and hence considers them without interests, without subjectivity, purely objectively; we are given over to the things entirely, to the extent that they are mere representations, not to the extent that they are motives: then suddenly the peace that we always sought on the first path of willing but that always eluded us comes of its own accord, and all is well with us…. The particular intuited thing is at once and inseparably raised to the Idea of its type, and the cognizing individual is raised to the pure subject of will-less cognition; as such, neither stands in the stream of time or any other relations…. Happiness and unhappiness disappear: we are no longer the individual, this is forgotten, we are only the pure subject of cognition: we continue to exist only as the one eye of the world.”

Schopenhauer discusses art. “As we have said, the whole visible world is only the objectivation, the mirror of the will, accompanying it for its self-cognition and indeed, as we will soon see, for the possibility of its redemption; as if, at the same time, the world as representation, viewed on its own breaking it free from the will, letting it be the only thing occupying one’s consciousness, is the most joyful and the only innocent side of life; — we have to consider art as the greater intensification, the more complete development of all this, since it essentially accomplishes the same thing as the visible world itself, only more concentratedly, with deliberateness and clarity of mind, and it therefore may be called the blossom of life.”

Schopenhauer describes infinity, time, and history. “An entire eternity, i.e. an infinite time has elapsed before the present moment, and thus everything that could or should have become already necessarily has become…. Cognition made possible by the principle of sufficient reason can never allow anyone to gain access to the inner essence of things; all we do is chase appearances to infinity…. The truly philosophical way of looking at the world, i.e. the way that leads beyond appearance and provides cognition of the inner essence of the world, does not ask where or whence or why, but instead, always and everywhere, asks only for the what of the world…. In the world of representation, the will finds a mirror in which it can cognize itself with an increasing clarity and perfection that culminates in the human being…. Since the will is the thing itself, the inner content, the essential aspect of the world, while life, the visible world, appearance, is only the mirror of the will; life is as inseparable from the will as a shadow from its body…. The individual comes into being and passes away; but the individual is only appearance, it exists only for cognition that is caught up in the principle of sufficient reason, the principium individuationis…. The present is the only form of all life…. Since the whole human being is only the appearance of his will, nothing can be more mistaken than for him, starting from reflection, to will to be something other than he is: this is a direct contradiction of the will with itself…. Every individual, every human face and its life history is just one more short dream of the infinite spirit of nature, the persistent will to life.”

Finally, Schopenhauer returns to the nature of the world. “Eternal justice is really part of the essence of the world…. The world in all the multiplicity of its parts and forms is the appearance, the objecthood of the one will to life…. The world itself is the world tribunal, the Last Judgment…. The greatest, most important and most significant appearance that the world can show us is not someone who conquers the world, but rather someone who overcomes it…. If the negation of the will has arisen in someone, that person is full of inner joy and true heavenly peace, however poor, joyless and deprived his situation might look from the outside…. It is an imperturbable peace, a profound calm and inner serenity…. Every fulfilled wish we wrest from the world is really like alms that keep the beggar alive today so that he can starve again tomorrow; resignation on the other hand is like an inherited estate: it frees its possessor from all cares forever…. Negation is the only act of the freedom of the will that emerges into appearance.”

“Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

Han has recently been focusing on Asian culture and philosophy. In his monographs he uses his neo-Hegelian framework as a jumping off point to contrast Western thinkers, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, with those from the East, especially Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zhuangzi, and the Buddha. This short book is on the Eastern concept of absence and, particularly, the lack of an individual essence embedded within objects, as well as the impermeability of things. Han begins, “Desire, appetition, is what makes you a someone. A someone in the strong sense has no access to wandering. A someone dwells. Only someone who empties himself and becomes a no one is able to wander. A wanderer is without an I, without a self, without a name. He forgets himself. He does not desire anything and does not hold on to anything. He therefore does not leave a trace. Traces, the imprints left by holding on and desiring, form only in being. The wise man, however, does not touch being.”

A rarity in Han’s older works, here he directly focuses on Eastern philosophy. “Both Daoist and Buddhist thought distrust any substantive closedness that subsists, closes itself off and perseveres. With regard to absencing, understood in an active sense, the Buddhist teaching of kong is certainly related to Daoist emptiness, xu. Both bring about an absencing heart, empty the self into a non-self, into a no one, into someone ‘nameless’…. Zhuangzi therefore teaches that one should associate oneself with the whole world, even to be as large as the world, to elevate oneself to a wide world, instead of clinging on to a small narrative, a small distinction.” Zhuangzi, himself, posits, “But if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.” Han suggests, “Buddhism is ultimately a religion of absence, of fading out and blowing away, a religion of ‘dwelling nowhere’…. Absencing does not empty love and friendship and make them irrelevant. It turns them into bound-less friendliness.”

Han contrasts the Eastern and Western aesthetic, first within the concept of space. “Essences block transitions. Absencing is in-difference…. One rarely finds flowing transitions in the West…. An absencing gaze has an emptying effect, flowing transitions create places of absencing and emptiness…. It widens space. A space makes space for another space.” He continues on beauty, “In the sensibility of the Far East, neither permanence of being [Standigkeit] nor stability [Bestandigkeit] of essences is part of the beautiful. Things that persist, subsist or insist are neither beautiful nor noble. Beautiful is not what stands out or exceeds but what exercises self-restraint or retreats, not what is solid but what hovers. Beautiful are things that carry the traces of nothingness…. What is beautiful is not full presence but a ‘there’ that is coated with an absence, that is made lighter or less by emptiness. What is beautiful is not what is clear or transparent but what is not clearly delineated…. In-difference does not lack anything.” Finally, Han discusses Eastern cuisine, “Rice, without a doubt the centre of Far Eastern cooking, appears empty because it lacks colour. The centre is empty. The bland taste of rice also pervades it with emptiness and absence. Zhuangzi would say that rice is able to cling to any dish, any taste, because it does not have a taste of its own. Rice appears as empty as the white ground of Far Eastern ink drawings…. In the Far East, eating is not a matter of cutting something up with knife and fork but a matter of putting something together with chopsticks.”

Throughout this work, Han insists that absence is not a lacking. “As opposed to the idea of freedom, which is ultimately based on a world-less subject, effortlessness is the result of an in-difference between consciousness and world, between inside and outside.” Zhuangzi suggests, “To forget all things and to forget heaven, that is called being oblivious of self. But whoever is oblivious of self reaches heaven for that very reason.”

Han spends a fair amount of time contrasting the Eastern and Western concepts of the sea and of water. In the East, “the sea symbolizes the world’s immanent space of in-difference, out of which contours of things emerge and into which they flow back again…. ‘Longing’ is alien to the Far East, which does not know of a radical somewhere else for which one could set sail…. Water does not dwell.” In contrast, “Hegel’s perception of water and the sea is everywhere guided by a compulsive desire for solidity…. Western thinking has its source in a desire for a solid ground. It is precisely this compulsive desire for permanence and clarity that makes every deviation, every transformation, look like a threat…. If ‘reason’, as the ‘ultimate touchstone of truth’, sets sail for the beyond of objective intuition, it ends up in a dark space…. Chinese wisdom, by contrast, does not hide. It does not withdraw and is not shrouded in mystery. Instead, it is placed under the light of a particular kind of evidence, of the obviousness of being-so, of a bright being-present.” Han continues, “The world is a verb, or, to be more precise, an infinitive, a happening that is in many respects infinite, that is, undetermined. In positive terms, it points to an endless process of transformation.”

Finally, Han discusses the concept of nobility in Eastern thought. “For what is noble is to hold oneself back, to disappear and to step back behind what is happening without anyone’s intention or intervention, without a will being involved and without emphasis on an act. What is noble is absencing…. One might also say: the subject is a slave who is under the delusion that he is master. What would be noble would be, also from a Buddhist perspective, to escape this delusion of subjectivity. Absencing is a Buddhist ideal, a formula for deliverance. Escaping is deliverance. Doing and clinging on is suffering. Deliverance means escaping from karma, which literally means ‘doing’ or ‘acting’…. Buddhist emptiness (kong) empties essence into absencing…. Essences are distinguishing; they create differences. Absencing, which must be understood as something active, turns difference into in-difference…. I am you because there is no identity, no compulsion towards essence, that distinguishes the I from the you.”

“The Hebrew Bible: The Twelve Minor Prophets” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction with a most important clarification, “The Twelve Minor Prophets are “minor” only in regard to the quantity of their writings that have come down to us. In fact, in Hebrew they are simply called “the Dozen,” with no mention of minor.”

In Hosea 5:15, Alter explains a bit of theological nuance, “I will go, return to My place. This is an interesting biblical intimation of the idea of deus absconditus. God, in His anger against Israel, withdraws from them to His celestial abode, where He will await the moment they recognize their guilt and seek Him out before He will return to Israel.” In Hosea 6:3, Alter describes a pun in the original Hebrew, “like the latter rain He will shower the earth. As often happens in the Bible, there is a pun hiding close to the surface. God’s instruction to humankind (the word translated as “shower” also means “instruct”) is life-giving, like the rain. But the verb for “teach” or “instruct,” yoreh, is also a homonym of the noun that means “former rain,” often paired with malqosh, “latter rain.” One should also note that in these two lines God is compared first to the sun, then to the rain—both giving life to earth.”

Alter, again, explains the wordplay in the original Hebrew in Joel 1:18, “the flocks of sheep are desolate. The verb here is another reflection of Joel’s fondness for introducing double meanings through similarities of sound. The verb ne’ashmu would ordinarily mean “to be guilty,” but it seems to be a deliberate distortion of nashamu, “to be desolate,” thus intimating a shadow of personifying guilt in the depiction of the desolate animals.” In Joel 4:1, there is more wordplay, “the Valley of Jehoshaphat. The name means “The Lord judges,” and the prophet immediately plays on shafat, “judges,” as he says “come to judgment,” nishpateti.” In Joel 4:10, there is a reference back to another prophet, “Grind your plowshares into swords / and your pruning hooks into spears. This is an obvious—and grim—reversal of the famous verse in Isaiah 2:4 that envisions a wondrous era of peace.”

In Haggai 2:3, Alter details a bit of history, “Who among you remains who saw this house in its former glory? There could be a few in Haggai’s audience who had actually seen the First Temple, but they would be very old because sixty-seven years had passed since its destruction. Is it not as nothing in your eyes? The foundation for the Temple, according to the Book of Ezra, had been laid during the reign of Cyrus, but the work did not go forward, so what met the eye was a half-finished foundation and no structure above it.”

Alter relates the uniqueness of Zechariah’s prophesying in Zechariah 5:1, “and, look, a flying scroll. By this point, it is evident that Zechariah’s mode of prophecy is essentially different from that of his predecessors. They occasionally experience enigmatic visions that are then explained, but their principal vehicle is direct address…. Zechariah, by contrast, witnesses a series of puzzling visions shown him by a divine emissary, and they seem to become progressively more bizarre.” In Zechariah 8:21, Alter notes the biblical introduction of the word Jew, “ten people from all the tongues of the nations shall grasp the border of a Jew’s garment. This vivid image conveys the sense of throngs of foreigners desperate to join the people with whom God dwells. The term yehudi, “Jew,” never appears in earlier biblical literature, although it occurs frequently in Esther, which also belongs to the Persian period. Yehudi is palpably moving toward the meaning of “Jew” because it is now hard to speak of a “Judahite” (Hebrew, ben yehudah), given that the kingdom of Judah no longer exists, having been replaced by the Persian province of Yehud.”