Justice against Objectivity for Nietzsche’s Modern Man; Or,
The Efficient Causes of Modernity
| Author: |
James Ressel LLB (Hons)
Solicitor and Lecturer, University of East London
|
| Issue: |
Volume 11, Number 2 (June 2004)
|
Contents
- First I offer a "health warning": This paper does not claim to offer a
global survey of Nietzschean themes or even a carefully
analytical dissection
of primary and secondary material, rather it attempts to present what may,
with some justification, be
called speculative and subjective response to one
essay. Yet we may ask, what is the meaning of objectivity for the scholarly
community, if not a sign, an outcrop or manifestation of shared consensus
unique to that particular community. Signs often
have a bad habit of becoming
immutable laws guaranteeing a particular outcome, becoming the force or
violence of ‘rational
necessity’. As Nietzsche puts it better in the essay
being discussed here, "if every event is the victory of the logical or the
'Idea', then get down quickly now and kneel down before the entire hierarchy
of 'success.'"[1]
- In other words, Nietzsche suggests that to detriment of thinking we become
enmeshed in the systematic march of logic. The way forward
is neither the
dialectic, logically a manifestation of logic, nor some sort of reconciliation
or compromise between ideas.
Rather we should accept as necessary condition
the requirement that for the existence of a concept, such as justice or , for
example, we must also recognise accept the existence of un-justice or
un-history, “the right of what is to come into being”
the commonality of
understanding. Nietzsche borrows and develops the notion of the co-dependence
of apparently contradictory
concepts from Heraclitus.[2] From this follows that our idealised heroic conception of
‘justice’ can never be objective and certainly never an “Idea”.
- Against this background, this paper attempts to respond to the excitement
of Nietzsche’s methodology of the non-heroic. The heroic
code, according to
Kahn, is founded on a duality of speech and action manifest as competition for
human excellence. The duality
implies an objective judgment and punishment
outside the pure terms of heroic competition, for how else would we know what
is right and wrong? The consequence of this is that we automatically privilege
“the ‘competitive’ excellences” over “the more
‘cooperative’ virtues”.[3]
- Nietzsche seeks to overcome the problem of duality and consequently deal
with the resistance of the objective. Hence, on his terms,
a non-scholastic
approach to reading Nietzsche may offer fresh perspective. Or as Heraclitus
put it “He who does not expect
will not find out the unexpected, for it is
trackless and unexplored”.[4]
- In this note I want to consider some themes from Nietzsche’s little known,
but if one is generous a wide ranging essay “On the
Use and Abuse of History
for Life “ (1873).[5] The essay is a critique, even though for Nietzsche criticism
amounts to a ‘weakness’ of character presumably because it means
that
inevitably he has to adopt and thus legitimate the Hegelian lexicon, of the
German historical culture, which is “really
a kind of congenital grey haired
condition…the old age of humanity” consisting, according to Nietzsche of
“looking back, tallying
of accounts, balancing the books, seeing consolation
in what used to be thought memories, in short, a historical culture” and
more
particularly of Hegel’s notion of the inevitable force or power of history.
- He takes issue with Hegel’s idea of history as the idealised ‘last
judgment’ reducing Hegelian history, in his language, both rudely
and
succinctly to Hegel’s personal existence: “for Hegel the summit and end point
of the world process coincided with his own
individual existence in Berlin”
amounting to no more that “idolatrous worship of the factual”. He sets out to
defeat the ‘factual’
with life, in other words an objective all-inclusive
explanation, the completeness of a scientific ‘system’[6] or process. As Levinas notes because “this is the inclusive
system, with nothing beyond, there is no appeal from this judgment.
It is
final….History itself is the final judge of history”.[7]
- However, notwithstanding their quarrel, some parts of the essay attracted
my attention because at certain points he briefly touches
on the relationship
between modernity, objectivity, knowledge, truth and justice in a manner
indicating potentially a fruitful
departure point.
- Although in later writings he proposes social models, largely undemocratic
and based on violent hierarchical systems of authority,
he is not known for
developing any useful conceptions of justice. This could be simply because
such models predicated on power
and vitality of life forces are necessarily
unthinking a-historical and thus unidirectional - facing the future of its own
face.
- With prescience relevant to contemporary events, and adopting Goethe’s
principle that instruction without vitality is worthless,
he sets out to
examine the value of history in culture.[8] He observes that we can be afflicted with history “suffering
from consumptive historical fever”. Although, chronologically, he
was writing
in Germany at the end of 19th century that is at the peak of German empire and
before its termination following
WW1, his feeling that we require history for
“life and action, not for comfortable turning away from life and action or
merely
for glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act” chimes
with for example the idea of pre-emptive strike or regime
change, where
history as life of the ‘target’ nation is buried, often literally, by
‘comfortable’ history used as a gloss for
cowardly bad acts. Thus life, action
emancipation, morality and justice can be said to be expressed in Nietzsche’s
sense of
history. The ‘goodness’ is set by our life and action and not
necessarily, perhaps only a masochistically pleasurable appreciation
of moral
sin from self-flagellation. Goodness comes from having found the right balance
between the history and unhistory.
- With ‘just’ historical irony, for a man who had spent much of his life
ill, Nietzsche adopts Goethe’s admiration for vitality,
the Dionysian worship
of the good man as physically embodied. The exuberance or even the disregard
and deliberately unknowing
lack of a logic ‘normally’ used to limit and
control vitality, energy, and movement comes to the fore. Transition, as
passage
from one stage to another necessarily involves a movement though time
and thus requires the ‘service of history’, but on one level,
at least
vitality requires to be unthinking and instinctual, natural action to
overwhelm resignation attended by bodily ‘weakness’
induced by the oppressive
weight of the Ideal.
- However, for Nietzsche weak personality is not a biological weakness but a
weakness caused by fear of Life. The source of the fear
lays in our submission
to the power of the objective/subjective dichotomy[9] the subjugation of the inner to memories so that we become
merely “wandering encyclopaedias”. Simple, unthinking accumulation
of memories
from chronological past allows us to measure and prove in a scientific manner
but fails to afford knowledge of
reality or existence. Understanding cannot
only be constituted by a chronological accumulation of empirically ‘uncovered’
pure
and objective knowledge. This is because knowledge cannot be a Terra
Nova, a certain kind of fixed external quantity waiting to
be ‘discovered’ by
an application of thought, if this were the case knowledge would cease to be a
moving creative force and
become nothing more than a static encyclopaedia. For
Nietzsche particularly, understanding involves an experience of history as
the
vital driving force of life and action.
- It is also the case that ‘vitality’ and ‘vigour’ share the same Latin
root. Vigere means ‘to be lively’ which gives rise to velocity
or watch.[10] In Old English vigere becomes wacan used to designate ‘to
wake up’ or ‘arise’. In Germanic this word becomes ‘to be awake’ and
even the
vegetable because of its connection with nature and life,[11] suggesting that vigour can designate the birth of life
itself. Thus, history is not only a simple chronology but also an opening
of
life.
- So for Nietzsche, history requires un-history, as colour requires
non-colour. In our jealousy or even fear of death we see only
the ruminating
unhistorical beast as the happy existant. The beast “gets up in the present
without any odd fraction left over;
it does not know how to play a part, hides
nothing and appears in each moment exactly and entirely what it is.” Therefore
for
Nietzsche the beast is honest, having no sense of the past or the future
it is unable to make judgments, or fear retribution.
It exists in an
unfiltered light of day open and unprotected and yet free from memory. It is
honest because it cannot be subject
or the cause of any judgment[12] or retribution, including juridical retribution. It follows
that the beast operates in a pure present yet eternal moment of coincidence
of
its being and objectivity.
- But for us, historical thinking beasts, because we cannot be honest,
forgetting is impossible in life, happiness, even in its suspension
of time in
the moment of its experience, can only be unhistorical. Unless we join the
situationists and allow intoxication
to afford us a moment of honest
forgetfulness, although ironically even such a ‘beastly’ moment is conditional
on history.
Before we try to locate Nietzsche’s conception of justice and its
source in history, we need to outline some of the key ideas
of his essay.
- Forgetting is a necessary condition of action and existence, “just as both
light and darkness belong in life of all organic things”,
forgetting forms the
boundary of the horizon. Or in another sense, forgetting is the crucial limit
setting out the boundaries
of experience of knowledge and of itself. This is
in contrast, simply put, to the idealised notions of knowledge pre-existing
in
the world waiting the discovery or unveiling. The notion of knowledge as
naturally occurring sacred ‘text’ (fact) waiting
innocently for interpretation
by scientists and experts.
- According to Nietzsche, the loss of the power to forget leads to inaction,
a loss of movement of life required to format the body.
In short forgetting is
horizon of the movement material history and transcendence. Without forgetting
we have a transcendent
“coming into being”, a pure disembodied consciousness
as a “stream of becoming”. It also follows that a loss of action results
in
the loss of the material body. We loose the bodily purpose of life, the
vitality of being and action. Or in other words,
loss of power to forget
leaves us nothing but a pure and history-free cyclical motion, akin to
rumination, a person without
access to the choices, just or unjust acts,
movements, but being (not existing) in a sort of negative misplaced eternity.
- Such a person “sees everything in moving points flowing out of each other”
and becomes lost in the “stream of becoming” not even
daring to lift a finger.
Thus we see that for Nietzsche, unlike Descartes, the coincidence of the
thinking and corporeal being
is essential for life. Thus he concludes that it
is impossible to lead a life without forgetting: “There is a degree of
insomnia,
of rumination, of the historical sense, through which living comes
to harm and is finally destroyed, whether it is a person or
a people or a
culture.”
- We can see the importance of forgetting exemplified at the point of a
revolutionary victory, or indeed any final violent point,
at the moment of
complete and deliberate forgetfulness of the past and before the ‘new’ history
is constructed, here the power
to forget is intensified and at its highest
accompanied by corresponding increase in bodily activity and movement (i.e.
the
revolution) At that unique but single point of victory the past is
forgotten. Or, in other words, history falls from our consciousness
liberating
our sense of unlimited and un-limiting freedom (even if only during the
transient period) thus liberating the and
we can forget us because in time)
having been destroyed, yet at the same moment fear of the ‘new’ forces life
out of the just-past[13] revolution (re-)introducing ‘new’ history. Or as Nietzsche
says, “that for the health of a single individual, a people, and a
culture the
unhistorical and the historical are equally essential” meaning that only
though the unhistorical condition will
the violence of the change, the force
of the revolution bring forth life and history, or put another way forgetting
is a necessary
transformative force, a necessary condition of change.
- Forgetting is also a necessary and liberating condition of life, without
the power to forget we would not be capable of doing anything.
For Nietzsche
it is also the crucial feature of what he calls the critical methodology of
history, the liberating force of
history. Yet, inevitably forgetting is, on
another level, a source of injustice. It amounts to the power to break the
past
in re-affirmation of the dominance of life and drags the past before the
“court of justice”. However, according to Nietzsche,
such a court is able to
deliver only one verdict condemning history. This is because “Here it is not
righteousness which sits
in judgment seat or, even less, mercy which announces
judgment, but life alone, that dark, driving, insatiable self-desiring force”.
The judgment of this court is “unmerciful and always unjust.” The authority
for such judgment is the sovereignty of forgetting
and “life and being unjust
are become one and the same”. Thus the power to forget operates to transform
history into life,
freeing life from history. Yet the appeal to unjust justice
ironically appears to follow the logic of the judgment of history,
but
reversing it in favour of life. Similarly, the violence of history is reversed
in favour of life to affirm life rather
than to repress life, but yet to force
the coincidence of being and the body, or more broadly the harmony of the
subject and
the object.
- Hence the power of forgetting becomes the source of freedom for life,
liberation from the ‘objective’ inevitability of the judgment
of history, and
the critical means for the destruction of the unjust constructs of history,
such as “a right, a caste, a dynasty”.
- The notion of forgetting as a delineation of the boundary history for life
could equally usefully be employed in examining the
sources of the ‘body’ of
law. The unique unhistorical point of temporary victory of the body is at the
same moment a formative
event of source of law and of unjust (in)justice.
- Nietzsche’s important insight is to show the significance of the power of
forgetting as the underpinning condition of freedom capable
of transforming
mere beastly existence in the pure honest moment into life itself. Life
becomes undeniably chronologically
placed, but free of, what he would see to
be the oppression of the inevitability of history.
- Similarly, the idea of justice is based not only on its ‘due’ process, but
also on a system of allocation of the labels of untruth
and truth. Justice
does not necessarily require a finding of an absolute truth to become a just
outcome; although a coincidence
of the truthfulness and result is welcome, it
is not necessary. It follows that a conception of justice free but located in
life will require an understanding of the theory of lies. Nietzsche’s fear of
death expressed as dual denial of history and its
un-history such that the
worship of the happy moment replaces life is analogous to fear of lies and
denial of untruths as a
necessary pre-condition of truth. Such a notion is
close to the idea of parrhesia as developed by Foucault in his Fearless
Speech.
- According to Nietzsche, in an existentialist way, a closed horizon is
necessary for life defining the limits of its forgetting.
The scope of the
horizon depends on what Nietzsche calls the plastic force that is, what could
be called, the wholeness of
the being of the body in its relation to others
and as shaped by its contact (existence) with experience, time and others. He
defines the plastic force as “that force of growing in a different way out of
oneself, of shaping and incorporating the past
and the foreign, of healing
wounds, compensating for what has been lost, rebuilding shattered forms out of
one’s self” or in
short the vital experience of living and resistance to the
end of life.
- In one sense this could be read in purely biological terms as indicating
the idea of a super-man, but in fact his use of the “single
tender injustice”
suggests a wider and deeper meaning of the idea of plastic force relating to
the body and what can superficially
be called the life force, which includes
philosophy, the mind and politics. Indeed Nietzsche talks of the inner nature,
the
Hegelian subjective strong enough to define an unlimited frontier
incorporating all history, which is able to ‘take’ even with
violence, from
the past without risk of interference from the ‘injurious overseer’ of the
historical sense. This amounts to
a transformative affirmation of life,
expressed in Nietzsche’s visceral language as blood.
- In short, what we see is a subjective, restless, vibrant yet empirical
model of history, placing action at the centre of the movement
of time, within
a horizon of experience the scope of which is determined by plastic force. As
Nietzsche points out the problem
now faced here is that this model fails to
address issues of what makes experience a mistake or a judgment unjust. He
points
out that this leads to a relativist argument and it is possible to have
a happy but unjust and unknowing man of action, and a
just and scholarly
person; the former thrives and the latter dies. Because the happiness (and
discrimination) lies with the
unhistorical beast, the unhistorical is the way
out of the relativist dilemma. In other words, the moments of unhistorical
form life, or as he puts it “the unhistorical is like an enveloping atmosphere
in which life generates itself alone, only to disappear
again with the
destruction of this atmosphere.” This does not mean to say that the past is
ignored, it is an essential element
of human life, but in making of history
out of the past the unhistorical offers a sort of shield from the ‘injurious
overseer’
to help overcome the fear of life, or the fear of the unknown
future.
- We can see this for example in the explanations offered for the existence
of a new nation, located in a justifyingly remote (but
not necessarily just)
unrecorded but generally glorious past. Interestingly, totalitarian
dictatorships also tend use fabricated,
although not necessarily untrue,
history to historicise an anti-historical moment and thus making the citizen
unhistorical
in the bovine sense,[14] but with the aim of homogenising experiences and senses into
an overriding ideal.
- This heady elixir of violence, passion and of “deeds in such an excess as
to be outside even of love”, speaks of un-logicised thought,
the infinite,
actions so complete in their uniqueness so as not to require the
objectification. Or put another way, the object
is dissolved into a new
subjective object. The ‘historical’ person glancing into the past is thereby
propelled into the future
fuelled by the gaseous hopes of justice and
happiness. For such a historical person, according to Nietzsche, “the meaning
of
existence will come increasingly to light in the course of its process”.
The process of knowing, resolving historical phenomena
transforms the
phenomena into objects of knowledge. Nietzsche argues that the recognition of
the transformation of history
into an object spells the death of historical
phenomena. The perception of death of history once recognised confirms “the
delusion,
the injustice, the blind suffering and generally the entire temporal
dark horizon of that phenomenon.” This uncovers the immanent
power of history,
which in this self-knowledge denies life. On the other hand, the immanence of
unhistorical life defeats the
given inevitability of history
- However, history is governed by a higher power, the force of the
unhistorical which brings forth a “new stream of life”. If history
is allowed
to govern life and the present through its demand that it “is to be a
science”, seeking glory in the logic of the
universal and the absolute, its
logos deforms and destroys life.
- Thus Nietzsche concludes that “In so far as history stands in the service
of life, it stands in the service of the unhistorical
power and will
therefore, in this subordinate position, never be able to (and should never be
able to) become pure science,
something like mathematics.”
- The question for Nietzsche is to find a balance between life and history,
the extent to which life requires history. If we have
too much history “living
crumbles away and degenerates”, but history requires life and without it
“degenerates through decay”.
In short it is the “excess of history that harms
the living person.”
- Or put another way, the sovereignty of history’s dictatorship, or
historicism of life extinguishes life if it is “conceived as
pure knowledge”,
but history is brought into life and given to the living person in a trinity
of relationships (corresponding
to Nietzsche’s methodology of history) “as an
active and striving person” that is monumental history, and as “a person who
preserves and admires” the antiquarian history, and finally it belongs to a
person as a “suffering person in need of emancipation,
expressed as critical
history.
- In short, history is not an objective science but should be used for “the
purpose of living” sometime as monumental history, sometimes
as antiquarian
and sometimes, to achieve freedom as emancipatory critical history. Nietzsche
summarise our relationship with
history as “summonsed by hunger, regulated by
the degree of the need, and held to the limits by the plastic power within,
the
understanding of the past is desired at all times to serve the future and
the present, not to weaken the present, not to uproot
a forceful living
future.” And one should add, critically free of objective historical proof.
- I have tried above to outline some of Nietzsche’s basis ideas on history
and action, including the point that it is possible locate
both justice and
injustice within the field of the horizon and subject to the scope of plastic
power. So, can we now ask, where
does Nietzsche locate justice?
- Perhaps surprisingly, having been brought up to revere the domination of
logo-scientific thinking, we find that Nietzsche’s justice
originates in blind
violent passion, the passion which cuts out senses, feelings and judgments,
yet objective in its construction
(and destruction) and liberated, free of
inevitable or inexorable progress of history or law.
- Justice therefore comes from “It is the most unjust condition of the
world, narrow, thankless with respect to the past, blind to
what has passed,
deaf to warnings, a small living vortex in a dead sea of night and forgetting:
nevertheless this condition
– unhistorical, thoroughly anti-historical – is
the birthing womb not only of an unjust deed but much more of every just deed”
Thus, the anti-historical un-justice, becomes the essential creative force, a
revolutionary force, without which “no people
achieve its freedom” a force of
life faced towards “the right of what is to come into being” i.e. life.
Justice contains injustice,
because it is not absolute and totalising.
Nietzsche shows that objectivity and justice have nothing to do with each
other.
Indeed, justice requires injustice, otherwise we would not have any
sense of justice, the revolutionary movements, the moment
of progression come
about in moments of forgetting (the past or legal precedent), within the scope
of our immanent plastic
force.
- We also see reflect in this idea Derrida’s conception of justice as
created by political violence and power, the objective force
of authority. In
case of Nietzsche the source of justice is violence of life, the need to live,
the call of boiling blood,
coupled not with denial or reformulation of the
past, but on the contrary, with a deep understanding of history being and time
powered, or liberated, by forgetting, and in the case of justice liberated by
lies.
- According to Nietzsche, for peoples to achieve freedom or (un)just deeds,
(note here in passing the submission of the moral value
judgment to life and
action), the active person must act without conscience and without knowledge.
The forgetting frees the
person of action to do one thing to become unbound
from the past. Such a person “is unjust towards what lies behind him and knows
only one right, the right of what is to come into being”. The creative force
unleashed in the overwhelming right of coming
into being subsumes the person,
justifying the done-action it becomes the ‘excess love’ and liberates the
force of life from
the logo-scientific thinking, the unhistorical is
transformed into the judge.
- But at the same time by virtue of its strength and power, objectivity lays
a claim to justice. But not only justice it also claims
historical justice – a
power to pass judgment over past times. However, if we turn flip this idea
round objectivity may not
in fact be just, but its presence gives the
appearance, chimera, or a mere depiction (Schiller) of justice.
- Nietzsche described this claim to justice as follows: -
The hand of the just man authorised to sit in judgment no longer
trembles when it holds the scales. Unsparingly he puts on weight
after
weight against himself. His eye does not dim if he sees the pan in the
scales rise and fall, and his voice rings
out neither hard nor broken when
he delivers the verdict.
- The judge becomes the “cold demon of knowledge” spreading “out around him
the ice cold atmosphere of a terrifying superhuman majesty.”
We feel terror,
fear violence from this demon of justice, the direction is given by the
command “You must”; logic has removed
your humanity and life. The will is to
truth, total and unconditional, as “the Last Judgment”. Although, perhaps a
somewhat
bleak paraphrase of Hegelian view of history.
- The combination of the “unconditional will to be just” with the
‘thoughtlessly glorified’ truthful man leads in the real world
to much
suffering and injustice coming “directly from the drive for justice without
the power of judgment” can it seems only
be mitigated and returned to life
within the scope of plastic force. Plastic force is the horizon of the
movement of lies and
of forgetting, affirming justice in a form outside the
logic of the commandments and the Last judgment. Thus avoiding the relativist
criticisms and yet fully appropriating for life the unjust in justice.
- Similarly you can’t have pure ‘servers of truth’ searching for barren
truth, that is the objective truth. Accordingly “the highest
demands of modern
man are for a loftier and purer justice, a virtue which has never had anything
pleasant, knows no attractive
feelings, but is hard and terrifying.”
- So, if Nietzsche is right and justice has no connection with objectivity,
can we say that magnanimity or forgiveness power judgment?
It is interesting
to observe that the notion of forgiveness is central to the reconciliation
process. Here, a public declaration
of claim to truth coupled with apparently
a voluntary assumption of responsibility for a past and perhaps (it matters
not)
an unlawful act is sufficient to exempt the accused from the just
consequences of that act. In other words forgiveness and magnanimity,
although
‘good’ and noble virtues, operate to reintroduce causality to justice moving
it within the scope of the objective/subjective
dichotomy, thus historicising
justice and removing it from life, reducing justice to nothing but an
expression of its own emptiness.
Or as Nietzsche better put it: “Weakness must
tolerate, unless it wishes to feign strength and turn justice on the judgment
seat into a performing actress.”
- However, what is missing is the area of experience, the vitality of
experience from life, the truth does not lie in canonical “measuring
past
opinions and deeds by universal public opinion of the moment” like a painting
does not show complete empirical essence
of the thing, it is only a depiction.
But in the moment of forgetting crucial for life, the forgetting allows a
movement, yet
is also a temporary suspension between moments of
transformation. Truth like history lies in these moments. Absolute truth kills
absolutely and absolute justice amounts to the literal terminality of the Last
Judgement. In conclusion, Nietzsche writes[15] that history should not search for universal ideas “but that
its worth is directly one which indicates a known, perhaps a habitual
theme, a
daily melody, in an elegant way, elevates it, intensifies it to an inclusive
symbol, and thus allows one to make out
in the original theme an entire world
of profundity, power and beauty. What is appropriate, however in this process,
before
everything else, is a great artistic potential, a creative hovering
above and a loving immersion in the empirical data, a further
poetical
composing on the given types – to this process objectivity certainly belongs,
but as a positive quality.” In short
the aesthetics of justice.
[1] Frederick Nietzsche “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
“ Ian Johnston’s 1998 translation at: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/history.htm
[2] III “Although the account is shared, most men live as though
their thinking were a private possession” in Kahn Charles H. “The
Art and
Thought of Heraclitus” 1979 Cambridge University Press p 29
[3]Kahn Charles H. “The Art and Thought of Heraclitus” 1979
Cambridge University Press p 12-1
[4] Kahn Charles H. “The Art and Thought of Heraclitus” 1979
Cambridge University Press VII p 31
[5] Op cit. n.1
[6] Although according to Alexandre Kojeve Introduction to the
Reading of Hegel 1980 Cornell University Press p 132-3, the aim of
Hegel’s
philosophy, 'Science' means the whole system, was “to give an account of the
fact of History”. The project is made
possible only if we agree with Hegel
that “the real Concept (that is, Bring revealed to itself by empirically
existing Discourse)
is Time”. According to Kojeve, Hegel’s philosophy (or
Science) deals with this task at three levels: phenomenologically the
philosophy “describes the existence of a Man who sees he lives in a World in
which he knows he is free and historical individual”
metaphysically the
philosophy describes what the World in which Man can appear must be and
ontologically what must be the Being
able “to exist as such in the World”. In
other words if the real experienced object is taken to mean the coincidence of
the
Object and the Subject in Time, not referenced temporally but in the
eternity of circular motion we find relation of Being and
History.
[7] Levinas E, Totality and Infinity 1969 Duquesne University
Press p18.
[8] Although I have some reservations with regard to many of the
then topical items discussed in his paper, I think that overall the
essay is
capable of providing some useful insights.
[9] A dichotomy also identified as troublesome by Hegel but
resolved not through rejection but redefinition and synthesis.
[10] As in “to keep guard”.
[11] The American Heritage Dictionary of English language, Fourth
Edition at http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE553.html
[12] Here judgment, I think must be used in the moral sense.
[13] In the temporal sense, not juridical.
[14] We also note the reverence totalitarian systems have for
preserving the past, for didactic purposes of allegedly enlightening
the
population of the errors of the past, never to be repeated.
[15] In concluding this part of his essay p 29/30.
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