THE BEAUTIFUL ORGANISM
Freja Værnskjold Dzougov
Suspension of Judgement
Judgement is a harsh act, meant to lock things up in themselves in a state of immovability. It is an act of definition that freezes a moment of the world in a crystallized form in which all ambiguity has disappeared, and everything is decided upon. There is no potentiality left in judgement, nothing more to be understood or explored. Judgement is, with regard to a specific moment in time and space, always the final word.
This characteristic of judgement is not just present in ethical or legal judgements, but also in theoretical ones that merely judge what a given thing or human is. In this sense, judgement is a way of making sense of the world that can allow you to move forward rather than to be caught up in an everlasting stand still, but only because a sacrifice has been made of all the nuance and depth that did not allow you to take mental possession of it. This is always a tragedy since it is a way of estranging yourself from the world and the humans who inhabit it for the sake of making the process of decision-making easier for yourself. It also carries within it the irony that all the aspects that you chose to ignore in your judgement are more than likely to come back and haunt you in your later stages of dealing with the things and humans in question. This is the point where judgement shows itself as a catalyst for states of war in so far as a person or group of people is unable to bear the judgement of another and thus starts violently fighting to throw it off – whether this be a judgement about who they are, where they belong, how they should live or something else. This can of course lead to a revision of the judgement so that your world changes into a new shape that however is just as unambiguous as the first and very likely to end up causing the same problems. In modernity there has grown forth a belief that such revisions will generally lead to less and less problematic worldviews that somehow slowly progress towards, without necessarily ever arriving at, an unproblematic stage where people are seen the way they want to be seen and everybody feel in agreement and at home. This is kind of skepticism towards the validity of one’s own judgements however does not question whether the process of judgment in itself is a valid way to approach the world. And this, it must be admitted, would also be a difficult claim to make, since the idea of sacrificing judgements would seem to leave one nothing but a world of chaotic and ever singular impressions that wouldn’t allow for any ingathering of experience. Everything would turn arbitrary. That is, for a critique of judgement to succeed it must happen in a way that still allows you to navigate the world, and one of the most brilliant attempts to take such a step is Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement.
His main insight is, that the very idea that judgement is an inadmissible mode of being, is itself a judgement, and that this is what makes the choice to dispense with it just as sterile and immovable as every other judgement. However, Kant claims that there is a possibility for judgement to critique itself which is more sophisticated than this – namely by going from the sphere of determining judgements and into the sphere of reflexive ones. Determining judgements are namely all the judgements that we normally engage in when we try to define things through concepts (Begriffen) by grasping them possessively with our minds. Reflexive judgements on the other hand are completely different. They consist in an active suspension of determining judgements and the use of concepts which allows the very faculty or possibility for such judgements to show itself in a way that is impossible when actual determining judgements take place. (Kant, 1997, p. 24-29) It is like the example in Aristotle’s De Anima of the eye that is unable to see its own sight, except in the case of darkness where it through the lack of visible objects is allowed to contemplate itself as a possibility. (Aristotle, 1907, p. 77-79) In this process, Kant claims that you enter the realm of “ideas” which does not mean some far-off duplicate of this world but rather the principles which always regulate our determining judgements without themselves being able to be judged or grasped conceptually. (Kant, 1998, p. 708-28) Kant thereby uses reflexive judgements to critique the process of judging things determinately, but without thereby losing the ability to navigate the world. In them, a person namely draws back herself to allow for the concreteness of the other to show itself as something which has its ground beyond conceptuality, but which is also absolutely different from chaos. That is, reflexive judgements have the form of an act of mercy that allows for the other to exist unjudged without this meaning that you stop caring about or engaging with them in a meaningful way. They are thus a highly antipolitical way to live since they shun every attempt to activate one’s power in the world, but rather prefers to uphold it power in a state of suspension, as pure potentiality where movements become possible in a free, even if somewhat timid way, where things are always ambiguous, even paradoxical, from a conceptual point of view, and non the less completely clear on a different level.
It must be noted that Kant never uses the concept of reflexive judgement in this way to talk about human relationships, which he prefers to deal with either through the ethical idea of the categorical imperative or the political idea of the bourgeois state consisting of citizens capable in the art of using concepts. (Kant, 2004) Instead, after having put forth these general remarks on reflexive judgments in the introduction, he goes on to first explain how finding something beautiful is one form of reflexive judgement, namely the aesthetical one, and then how organisms can only be thought through a different kind of reflexive judgement, the teleological one. And these are the only two ways in which the antipolitical way of reflexive judgements seems possible for him. However, I want to try to develop a way in which these two modes of reflexive judgements can take on a meaningful role as two ways of envisioning an antipolitical form of peace. Thus, I am using Kant’s theory in a way foreign his own sentiments, but it is my hope that it can help to understand some ways of thinking peace that are not caught up in the secular split that Kant envisions between a state in which only conceptual, determining and political judgements are able to play a role, and a life of ethics and religion that is purely private and which is the only place that the thinking through ideas can take place. This potential in the Kantian text, I want to develop by investigating two different religious traditions and their way of thinking peace in highly antipolitical terms: First the Christian tradition that grasps peace through the idea of “concomitance through kenosis” and secondly a Jewish one that does it through the idea of “the unity of opposites”. I will claim that the Christian one can be understood as suspending judgement aesthetically, and the Jewish one teleologically. I will later describe exactly what this mean, but already here I will say that the aesthetical form of reflexive judgement is provoked forth when an ungraspable and constantly self-undermining multiplicity of ideas are at play in a given object, whereas the teleological one rather happens when an object can only be grasped by means of a single, ungraspable idea through which its movements are regulated.
Aesthetical Judgements and Concomitance through Kenosis
The aesthetical kind of reflexive judgements for Kant is what takes place in us when we feel that something is beautiful. He describes it as a kind of pleasure over an object despite the fact that we are not interested in owning it neither materially nor conceptually, but rather just finds joy in the way in which its concrete form stimulates a play between our imagination (Einbildung) and understanding (Verstand) in the sense that the images in the imagination (which must be concrete images of the reproductive imagination based in sense impressions, not just empty and private dreams of the Phantasie) carry within them a kind of excess with regard to our faculty of understanding and its ability to form concepts. (Kant, 1997, p. 124-34). This excess, Kant calls aesthetical ideas which thus exist as the limit points or processes of breakdown in the workings of the understanding when it tries to grabble with the concrete form of a beautiful thing. (Kant, 1997, p. 249-54) Furthermore, Kant claims that this experience, when it takes place, demands to be understood as having universal validity even though there is no conceptual reason for this since the beauty is exactly not a conceptual fact but rather a fact of how ideas in the thing constantly supersedes every concept that tries to take hold of it. The beautiful object thus seems to demand from you that you allow others to share in its beauty, and when they don’t, you cannot help but feel that it is not just a question of a difference in opinion, but that there really is something about the object that the others don’t manage to see, but which you also cannot explain or force upon them rationally. (Kant, 1997, p. 130)
This process in which aesthetical suspension of judgement happens through multiple lines of conceptual break-down (that is, multiple ideas), I think can explain how a certain structure in Christianity – that of concomitance through kenosis – is able to be understood as an anti-political theory of peace. This structure has not been equally important in all periods of Christianity, but at certain times it has been very widespread, especially before the Counterreformation in Western Europe, and more consistently as part of the Orthodox tradition in Eastern Europe. However, the main thinker that I want to read into this tradition is a modern one: namely Simone Weil. But before I analyze her texts, I want to do a short excursion through some of the earlier ways in which the idea of concomitance through kenosis has been present in Christianity and how they can be understood as an aesthetical suspension of judgement. This will help me to explain the way in which Weil concretely actualizes them in her thought about peace.
Concomitance and kenosis are two technical terms within Christianity that have different origins and don’t necessarily have to be thought together. Concomitance is a concept from Catholic Christianity that in the Early Modern Period came to refer to the fact that in the sacrament of the Eucharist, Christ is wholly present in every single particle of both bread and wine, so that the believers partook fully in Him even if they only received the bread. However, as Carolyn Walker Bynum has pointed out in her book Christian Materiality, this technical use of the term reflected a much more general structure in the thought of the time. It namely referred to the idea that with God’s incarnation, the borders between time and eternity, death and life, had become loosened in such a way that normal spatio-temporal structures of the world had broken down. Specifically, the otherwise well-established Aristotelian principle that the whole is always bigger than the part, was no longer valid in the sense that every part of either space or time, no matter how big or small, was touching upon every other part, even parts within itself, with the result that all material bodies had been cut up and wrapped in upon themselves and each other in ways that, under this-worldly eyes, would seem grotesque, but which in the eyes of eternity was a revelation of the intimacy that the Persons of the Trinity always have with each other, and that through Christ had also become possible for His creatures. (Bynum, 2011, p. 208-16) Bynum furthermore points out how some of the clearest expressions of this idea can be observed in the physical objects that Christians at the time engaged with. The clearest example is the Eucharist where the believers could partake fully in Christ by receiving one little fragment of His blood and flesh thereby becoming a limb on His body. This process also brought them intimately in contact with the body of every other believer Who shared the same flesh and blood, which was brought to Life in them through the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, this is both repeated again and again each Sunday in ever new moments of time, and yet also keeps on being numerically the same act, each Sunday being in a sense part of every other. That is, here wholes are parts and parts are wholes, both regarding space and time and persons. This structure of concomitance, however, is also present in many other places for example in the way that the bodies of saints were almost immediately cut up after their death and distributed to different Christian communities that were then understood to each have the nearness of the saint fully present to them, and furthermore to be bound together in intimacy with all the other Christian communities through this presence (Bynum 2011, p.178-92); a process somewhat resembling how a single saint in the Orthodox Church is split up in multiple icons, often looking at the believers from several different points in the Church room simultaneously thereby having lost all organic coherence in her form by being whole in every fragment and fragmented in every whole. Furthermore, concomitance shows itself in the structure of images from the late Middle Ages, for example the very common pictures of the 5 wounds of Christ, inside the side-wound, which is thus inside itself, and is furthermore also a vagina from which life flows (Image I) Another common theme is one in which Christ is the midwife Who helps Himself give birth to Himself in the moment of His death on the Cross through the wound in His side wherefrom the Eucharist is also given, and in which the Three Christs are also meant as the Trinity. (Image II) However, the structure did not die completely out in modernity, and can be seen for example in Klimt’s painting The Tree of Life, where animals, plants, and humans are integrated into each other, not by filling up holes in each other – all are whole in themselves - but rather as pieces of excessive garment which makes the beauty of concomitance more immediate to the modern eye than the more openly grotesque medieval images.
Kenosis, on the other hand, is a term of Greek origin which literally means “emptying”. In a Christian context, its use goes all the way back to Paul’s letter to the Phillipians where he says that “Christ emptied (ἐκένωσεν) himself” when He became human in the form of a servant (Phillipians 2:7). What exactly this is supposed to mean, however, has been a matter of hefty theological debate, but one thing that almost all authors agree on, is that humans must reflect this emptying of Christ in their own way of life. This they do by emptying themselves of everything which is not the image of God, but rather idols that we try to identify ourselves with to be able to clearly see, possess and worship our own vain identity as though our only goal was to nourished and perfect ourselves in a desperate fight to overcome death, humiliation and sickness, often at the expense of others. Instead, we must realize that the only difference between the image of God in us and God in Himself, is that the image is created whereas God is the Creator, and that the image thus inherits from God all His characteristics, among other things being unlimited, indefinable and beyond any concept. (Lossky, 1997, Chapter 6) However, it is also not a completely undifferentiated nothing – Christ remained the singular Person of the Son in His kenosis, and each of us remain absolutely and wholly ourselves in ours. Kenosis is thus a sacramental process in which we sacrifice our false self in a way which answers and reflects Christ’s sacrifice of His Transcendence when He became human.
To claim that there exists a structure of concomitance through kenosis, is thus to see how the emptying of oneself is the condition upon which the breakdown of the structures of space-timely wholes and parts takes place, and which reveals the world in the beauty that it has in the Eyes of God rather than in the vain beauty which is just a prestate of rotten flesh. This beauty furthermore reflects the Kantian one in so far as the human being, in kenosis, suspends every judgement upon herelves in a sacrifice of her identity which allows her to turn into a kind of pure and absolutely singular life whose relationship to everything else can no longer be grasped by concepts of similarity and difference, but is rather mediated through an ever changing multiplicity of ideas that reflects how concepts are constantly superseded when you start living through Christ in relationships of concomitance where each thing is part of every other, and yet also whole in itself. Furthermore, this experience is universal in the sense that it refers to a way of living in the world, through Christ, that wishes to be shared among all humans, but which can never be forced upon anyone since its character is inexplicable in the language of violence whose exercise would only move the people that one tried to force into it infinitely further away from it. I now want to show how this structure of concomitance through kenosis plays itself out in the thought of Simone Weil.
Simone Weil
Simone Weil has a very refined way of talking about what it means for things touch each other. Especially, how touch can happen without violence. She is namely all too aware that in many cases touch becomes acts that degrade the thing touched – by reducing it to something used or possessed:
To soil is to modify, it is to touch. The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil. To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love. (Weil, 2002 p. 65)
There is something almost unbearable about this adoration – the forced separation from that with which we wish nothing more than to be united. But for Weil, it is absolutely necessary, for she realizes that the moment we start putting our hands on the beloved, she slowly disintegrates, loses her very being. This is the irony of possessiveness: you wish to own something in its truth, but the moment you get it, it becomes relativized and reduced, suddenly seeming like nothing other than a mirror of your own, unbearable desire. Thus, she states:
Among human beings, only the existence of those we love is fully recognized. - Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love (…) It is an act of cowardice to seek from (or to wish to give) the people we love any other consolation than that which works of art give us. These help us through the mere fact that they exist. To love and to be loved only serves mutually to render this existence more concrete, more constantly present to the mind. But it should be present as the source of our thoughts, not as their object. If there are grounds for wishing to be understood, it is not for ourselves but for the other, in order that we may exist for him. (Weil, 2002, p. 64-65)
That is, love, in the true sense as love at a distance, amounts to an intensification in the being of the loving persons who by the adoration of each other become more and more segmented as real entities that are perfected and whole in themselves, from every single perspective, at every single moment in time. None of the lovers thus takes over the other with their minds, objectifying them through their own concepts and desires, but rather allow their thoughts to grow forth from the existence of the other, like our thoughts do from a work of art. For art is beautiful, like in the Kantian theory, because it gives us an impression that we cannot grasp, and yet are forced to think and enjoy in a way completely beyond desire, interest and conceptuality. Thus, true love shows us that others are not here to fill up a hole in us, just as little as we can fill up a hole in them. Friendship, she states, “is one of those things which are added unto us.” (Weil, 2002, p. 67) That is, not something which is necessary to fulfill us as who we are, but a kind of excess – a miracle, she even calls it, “which is like the miracle of the beautiful” (Weil, 2002, p. 67). It is something that in a sense should not be able to happen, since it exceeds the boundaries of even the perfected world, and which we are thus not entitled to dream of, but can only receive as a gift beyond any merit. These relations of love thus show themselves as relations of concomitance, in which every moment and perspective of a person, every smile and every gesture, somehow reveals them fully and wholly, in their perfection, without any need for organic integration with other parts of themselves or other people or things in general. This fact even makes Weil state that in a sense the love we have for the dead must work as a paradigm for our love for the living, not unlike the sentiment expressed in the veneration given to relics and icons:
In this sense, and on condition that it is not turned towards a pseudo-immortality conceived on the model of the future, the love we devote to the dead is perfectly pure. For it is the desire for a life which is finished, which can no longer give anything new. We desire that the dead man should have existed, and he has existed. (Weil, 2002 p. 66)
This, of course, is said through the lens of eternity. It is not that we should wish death upon the people we love, but that we should stop fixating on what they are not yet, what they could be in the future, because this only leads to empty dreams of the imagination which directs our love away from the person who is actually with us, and thus makes us miss the miracle of love, by instead losing ourselves in the mundane, and in every sense unmiraculous fact that we, as fallen human beings, have desires.
The miraculous nature of the concomitance of love, Weil ties tightly together with the idea of a void. She namely states that miracles are not the kind of thing that can just happen within a human. We are in a sense too full of something else, caught up with an energy infinitely far from that of love, namely that of force or gravity. Here, humans are nothing but mechanical creatures, not always directly evil, but also never really good, since they are bound to tightly by a set of laws of action and reaction that nothing moral can take place. The laws of gravity namely demand that a person uses all the force within his disposal, pushing it onto the world in acts that are always secretly violent, even if they appear as something else. (Weil, 2002 p. 10) Thus, within the realm of force, charity and good deeds exist, but they never exist the way in which they are supposed to, because the charitable person can’t help but to enjoy his own potency, his own ability to make himself felt outside of him, in the lives of other humans. Thus, the existence of others again become relativized, and the moment that there is no longer anyone whom he can help, his energy all too easily becomes restless and reaches out in the world in other, more obviously reprehensible ways. The most radical example of course is war, and in her little book on the Illiad she clearly states how wars are scenes in which such restless energies are let lose in mad and unrestricted ways to the result that absolutely no one can feel themselves safe:
The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. (Weil, 1991, p. 3)
The idea of “heroes” of wars are thus just a product of our own imagination with which we like to pretend that some people were able to endure war without humiliation of their true being. This, however, is false. The only hero of war is a force, which is always the force of gravity in its mechanical workings of cause and effect, in which things are played out with the determinism of a Greek tragedy in which destiny is a blind, heathen goddess who ensures that every last man will die in blood, tears and dirt. (Weil, 1991, p. 13) The brilliance that Weil gives to this book thus consists in the fact that it never hides this fact – in the Illiad the heroes run crying to their mothers in face of humiliation, they must confront the fact that their own self-pity has caused the death of their beloved, and are again and again they are reduced to bleeding, disintegration bodies lying maimed in the dust. The Illiad is a poetic work, she points out, but never with regard to death, here it always remains prosaic in complete and cynical honesty. (Weil, 1991, p. 31-32) Thus, it is a work that aims to work out in us a transformation of our relationship to force:
Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice. (Weil 1991, p. 34)
That is, to arrive at the concomitance of love you must confront the force of gravity, rather than just ignore or hide it behind imaginary pictures of meaningful death and heroism. Only by doing this and contemplating the fatal ending of the ever-same story of force, it becomes possible to throw off its logic definitively. That is, only in the realization that under the dominion of force, you are nothing but a slowly degenerating bag of flesh proceeding towards its destiny as a smelling corpse, you are able to let go of the force that you are personally able to exercise. However, emptying yourself of force in this way creates a void in you that in and of itself is unable to achieve anything. Rather, it just breaks down everything you believed yourself to be and leaves you as a kind of half-dead nothingness. It is not easy to endure. In a sense, it consists in doing all the things to yourself that you know are wrong to do to others: to take advantage of the weakness of others and force them into a state of humiliated, passive submission where they become so broken that they consider themselves nothing but a dead pile of flesh would be unforgivable. Just as it would be to take away all possession from another, or to uproot and exile them from their homes. However, all of this, you are asked to do to yourself, not necessarily in a physical act of renunciation, but in a mental one, where you realize that it is a completely arbitrary fact that someone has not already done this to you, that it can happen any moment, and that all of these things are thus not to be held unto as though you could make them eternal and essential parts of your being. However, in this seemingly self-destructive process, by embracing yourself as a creature who is a weak, humiliated, passive, and empty nothingness, you allow a void to grow forth within you in which God can take up residence and transform weakness into fragility, humiliation into humility, passivity into receptivity, and the sterile nothingness of death into the creative Nothingness of a God beyond being. Thus, what is naturally grotesque turns into something beautiful in the eyes of eternity. (Weil, 2002, p. 34) This allows for a new kind of strength to work in you, through which the miracle of love can also take place in so far as you turn into point through which God touches Himself through His creation:
If my eyes are blindfolded and if my hands are chained to a stick, this stick separates me from things but I can explore them by means of it. It is only the stick which I feel, it is only the wall which I perceive. It is the same with creatures and the faculty of love. Supernatural love touches only creatures and goes only to God. It is only creatures which it loves (what else have we to love?), but it loves them as intermediaries. For this reason it loves all creatures equally, itself included. To love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger. (Weil, 2002 p. 62)
Thus, by the act of kenosis, the distance of love shows itself as really being a kind of intimacy in which you do touch the other without hurting, possessing or changing her, but only in so far as you do it through a God, Who is infinitely transcendent with regard to the forces of natural life, and Who thus upholds the natural distance between things which are allowed to be whole and perfect in themselves, while however opening up a space for an inner kind of intimacy that does not violate the wholeness of the other by intruding on it from without. In this way the relations of the world mirrors those of the Trinity, in so far as they consist in a communion through the nature of God, while also upholding the absolute difference between every person of the world. This leads to a field of an infinity of relationships of every thing with every other thing; relationships which can again form relationships to themselves, growing forth as an ever-multiplying, unbounded glory.
Thus, concomitance through kenosis in Simone Weil, clearly consists in a suspension of judgement over the world, in so far as it is approached as inappropriable, beyond not just the determining touch of your hands, but also the determining concepts of your mind. Instead, the world appears as an infinite play of something beyond conceptuality – ideas, in the Kantian sense of the word – which is really the Trinitarian Life of God, in which distance and intimacy come together in an ever-multiplying adoration of each other. In this state, the world turns beautiful, and it does it in such a way that its true existence is revealed to a universal eye – the Eye of the Creator – that all creatures as meant to partake in and which thus belongs to no one, and demands of everyone who sees it, that they try and share it with others in their way of life. But again, just like in Kant, this universality is not one that can be argued for in such a way that others are almost forcibly convinced and converted through the deterministic logic of the understanding. For you cannot, ever, demand of others that they become a bag of flesh in their own eyes. This would be an evil act of mere human, manipulative force that has only all too often been invoked in the history of the institution of the church. Only God can work out this transformation of the other, all you can do, is silently pray for it in your heart, and approach the other as best as you can, by fighting to see her as God sees her, hoping that this will be felt by the other, helping her to make the act of kenosis less lonely and less harsh. And whenever it succeeds, whenever true love is being shared between humans, this must never be received as a work of your doing, but as miracle, a gift of the Grace of God. This, for Simone Weil, is the state of peace that we can attain to through God, and which will never be possible within the world of force where all that can be reached is a kind of fragile equilibrium in which no one dares to act in fear of the counteract that would result against them, peace being nothing but a sterile and passive period of waiting for the balance to tip, and states of war and exploitation to take over.
Buber and the Unity of Opposites
I will now go on to the other way to suspend judgement that Kant works with - the teleological one - and explain how it can be used to understand the structure of “unity of opposites” which is present in the way that a certain strand of Judaism, exemplified in a text of Martin Buber, thinks peace. Teleological judgements are, like aesthetical ones, reflexive; they are a suspension of determining judgment provoked forth by a concrete object that cannot be grasped by concepts of the understanding. However, the difference between them is that the reason for this conceptual breakdown is not an excess of aesthetical ideas in the object, but rather a kind of self-referentiality in its causal workings by which it appears to be alive rather than just a mechanical entity. These objects of teleological judgements are thus not beautiful things, but organisms characterized by the fact that every part and action of them cannot be explained through a merely mechanical relationship to what came before. Instead, they can only be thought in a meaningful way by being related to a single idea that captures the unity of all the parts of the organism and which allows each of them to be both means and ends of every other as though they miraculously could feel how they were felt in all the others. (Kant, 1997, p. 319-22) This idea thus works as a regulative principle that is beyond every conceptuality in the sense that it only leads to paradoxes within a conceptual discourse, but which makes all conceptual judgements about the organism possible. Thus, whereas nothing really can be said conceptually about an object’s beauty, conceptual things can be said about the life of an organism, but they are always said through something unconceptual. In a sense, the beautiful object is an incarnation of ideas, whereas the organism is rather regulated by an idea beyond itself. To understand in what way this relates to Judaism’s idea of the unity of opposites, it should first be noted that one of the main images that is used to describe it is exactly that of an organism or a living body. In Buber’s essay The Spirit of Israel and the World of Today he makes this image regarding the unity that humanity is supposed to find with itself:
Our purpose is the great upbuilding of peace. And when the nations are all bound together in one association, to borrow a phrase from our sages, they atone for each other. In other words: the world of humanity is meant to become a single body; but it is as yet nothing more than a heap of limbs each of which is of the opinion that it constitutes an entire body. (Buber 1997, p. 186)
That is, for as long as humanity is split into parts – individuals and nations – who each think that they are whole in themselves, peace will not be possible. Instead, each of these “limbs” will fight to steal away energy from the others, trying desperately to stay alive instead of growing into an organic unity with the others in which the body would start functioning smoothly and there would be enough for everyone. However, to grow into such a unity is not easy. As Buber points out, the natural state for most humans is to live under so called “angels” that represent a kind of national idea of a people which is meant to be nothing but a particular channel through which to reach God, Who is the true unity of every nation with every other in a way which “cannot be defined in terms of a concept”. (Buber, 1997, p. 186) However, humans like to grasp things and they therefore often prefer to define their angels with a concept, turning them into idols which in their definiteness cannot hold within them anything except themselves, and thus demands the destruction of every other such conceptual angel. This is war. However, the true God, Who is not a definite idol, but an ideal unity, working in us as “the living truth which is not in our possession, but by which we can be possessed” (Buber, 1997, p. 185) does not exits by delineating Himself in opposition to other “gods”, but is rather, in His indefinite, ungraspability able to hold within in Him even the things that on a conceptual level are most vehemently at war. Thus, Buber states that the unity of God is between classes and sects (Buber, 1997, p. 186) – entities which have been defined on the one hand by their constant struggle against each other, and on the other by their exclusive rejection of each other – and not between things that are just mildly different in a compatible way. Thus, the organism envisioned, has limbs that fight with each other over resources and uses and exploits each other for them, as well as parts that seem unable to even touch or engage. And it is clear that this from a conceptual point of view makes the organism a paradox – it simply cannot exist mechanically. Rather, it can only be thought and believed in from the point of view of a single unity which cannot be grasped, and which thus does not consist in affirming a commonality between the otherwise disparate limbs. Rather, it lies hidden in the connections between every part of the organism, at every level – between cells, internally in organs, as well as between them – each of which are somehow able to feel themselves mediated into intimate and peaceful relations to every other without giving up anything of what makes them unique. Thus, if you are able to see this unity, which Buber claims that the Jews are in so far as the experience of Sinai still lives in them (Buber, 1997, p. 186), everything turns new and alive, full of possible unions that are infinitely more true than what an idolized angel can offer. However, this does not mean that the realization of it is easy. Even explaining it to others, and to yourself, seems almost impossible because it is not a conceptual truth that can be nailed down in a theoretical, juridical or ethical judgement, but rather a suspension of every such determining judgment to allow for a unity greater than that to appear.
The question could easily be raised that since Weil’s idea about concomitance through kenosis entails the wholeness of every part of the world, whether it falls under Buber’s image of the “heap of limbs” - which some of the fragmented Christ-pictures could easily suggest. However, concomitance is not achieved by the fact that every part of the world defines an idolic image of itself to be worshipped, but rather that it gives up its own being, in an act of love, not however to regain it through its relation to all other things mediated by the unity of God as in Buber, but rather to allow for everyone else to appear whole in themselves. Thus, in a sense, it is the asymmetry between how you deal with yourself and how you deal with others in Weil’s thought which saves it from the logic of the heap of limbs. Furthermore, the perfection that you perceive in others is only the perfection that they inherit from the fact that they are creatures of God, not whatever idol they play themselves out as in the world of force. However, whereas you own forceful acts must actively degrade the way in which you see yourself, the acts of others cannot do that. In a sense, you must always uphold them in your mind as images of God, no matter how they choose to handle this, seeing in them something that you can only hope and pray that they also one day get to see in themselves. Thus, Simone Weil and Buber both describe how ideas, understood as a breakdown in conceptuality, start working out a kind of peaceful coexistence of things in so far as you anti-politically suspend your determining judgements of them. Furthermore, they both identify this/these ideas with God, Whom you must thus come to know if not the suspension of judgement is to be a sterile and uninvolved chaos in which nothing can be thought. The difference however is that for Buber, in this process the characteristics of things are upheld in their opposition, but under a new light of a single idea which shows how they will really perfect each other. For Weil, on the other hand, all that is oppositional in a sense disintegrates, just as all sameness, because each conceptual line that delineates the world, is collapsed according to its own, absolutely unique idea which thus does not constitute it in unity with everything else, but rather raises it into an infinite and excessive play in the realm of ideas. Thus, God is not so much a single idea, but rather the fact that ideas exist on a single plane which is absolutely different from the conceptual one. So while Buber upholds the idea that “these and these are the words of the living God” (Eruvin 13b:10-11) – in the sense that God will always be with him who quotes the opinion of the other before his own, upholding them both as opposites in unified existence, Weil would rather say “these and these are the Word of the Living God” that is, these and these, every single thing, is partaking wholly and perfectly in Christ, the Word of God the Father, Whose Life is the Holy Spirit. This difference also plays well into the fact that Kant states that the aesthetical judgement is noticing that a given thing exist with a purposiveness without purpose (Kant 1997, p 136) – that is, with a constant potentiality of making sense, which however is never actualized. In this sense, it is like the eternity presented in the Nicene Creed, which is also without telos meaning not just an end in time, but any formal end of perfection in being as well. On the other hand, teleological judgements are exactly about purposes – not a conceptually given purpose that an organism can be grasped as exemplifying, but a transcendent purpose which we hold onto as existing, even if we cannot express it, and which we feel guided by whenever we understand and engage with the organism.
Peace-making
These two modes of reaching peace through suspension of judgement thus amount to two quiet different modes of appreciation of and engagement with the world that however share the fact that they are highly antipolitical, and furthermore grounded in the knowledge of God. This makes them especially apt to work within societies, such as those in the Middle East, which are far from having a unanimous appreciation of secularity among its citizens. However, their antipolitical nature where God is not a concept, but rather exists in the realm om “ideas”, also means that they are very far from being anything like a proposal of theocracy, and thus they are able to hold within them at least certain forms of secularists who, like Kant, do revolt against any human engagement with God, but only the political one in which He is introduced as an explanatory concept in the earthly realm of force. However, even though both modes peace share these characteristics, they are not the same. Thus, the peace of the unity of opposites is the peace of the stuttering prophet who could not utter the name of the God, Who brought unity to his people, nor tell about His nature in a clear and definite way which was easy to understand and follow. Instead, he had to constantly stay engaged with people in an unconceptual way, insistently trying to reflect each one’s words and deeds in that of the other’s, including his own, with the awareness that such reflection is only possible through the opposition of the involved elements. If all were the same, after all, no reflection would be needed, everyone would have access to the essential through himself, and people could just stand beside each other, as superficially different copies of the same species. In reflection, on the other hand, you are always in front of the other, seeing yourself in her eyes, but always reflected around her axis, as your mirror image, somehow becoming slightly uneasy about yourself, a bit too revealed and naked. However, this reflecting revelation in necessary, for it reveals to you that a part of you consist in the way that you are played out in the eyes of the other, especially the one who is your enemy. In her eyes, you get to engage with a kind of evil shadow of yourself that you would prefer not to notice, but which you realize only becomes more powerful the more you try and push it away. Here, the appreciation of the other is thus never isolated to just looking at her, but always involves the way in which she is a point of reflection – and not even just of you, but also for the rest of the world. Finding peace with a human being who in this way is appreciated in the way that she reflects the rest of the world is thus in a sense always also trying to find peace with the rest of world through her, by reflecting in you its reflection in her. In this way, humans always entail each other, and peace with one is never truly obtained without the peace with all the others in a unified whole, and yet you can also work on the whole through every single part of it. The art, however, to work effectively on peace here, is to find the points within the organismic workings of the whole in which most parts meet – that is, to find the humans who have already deisolated themselves and become actively intermingled with others, both positively and negatively, for they are the ones through whom peace will spread most readily.
In a sense, concomitance through kenosis, has a hard time making such prioritizations. Here, since everybody is considered whole in every part of themselves, there is really very little ability to choose where a peace process should start. Furthermore, there is also a big amount of suspicion towards the effects that power has on a human soul’s ability to reach kenosis (the story of the rich man, the camel and the keyhole) which shuns the idea of approaching central people in society as starting points for peace. This fact becomes obvious in a kind of anti-organizational sentiment present in many parts of Christianity, often exemplified through the way that Christ preferred the company of the poor, the sick, the sex workers, and tax collectors to that of scholars and politicians. In this spirit, many Christians have preferred to deal with rulers by parading before them the wisdom of Holy Fool instead of actually talking engagingly to them – for example in the story of Ivan the Cruel and Basil the Holy Fool (Gorsky, 2019), or St. Francis’ meeting with the Egyptian Sultan (Cragg, 1991, p. 106-8). In the same spirit, Simone Weil herself spend a good deal of time with factory workers rather than with other students. This tendency might at a whole seem idealistic, and even a bit antisocial. However, it does have its reasons, especially in the fact that the language of the people in power, even when they are absolutely sincere in their hearts, has a hard time grasping what goes on in the lives of the unempowered masses. As an example of this, Simone Weil uses a poor, starving man who is prosecuted for having stolen a carrot from a farm, and who in court cannot make himself heard. He stands trembling, stammering, pressed down by the legal terminology and impressive rhetoric of the prosecutors who talk about rights of ownership, the rule of law, the possibility of welfare programs and the like – and all the while, his heart is screaming, but it is locked up inside his breast, its voice unable to find its way to his mouth, and all that Weil wishes for is that somehow these barriers would break down, the heart spring forth out of the breast, screaming what only it can scream: “Why do you hurt me?”(Weil, 2005, p. 88) In this sense, the body and mind, she claims, in their organization into a meaningful whole through their place in the greater organization of society, is holding down the heart which is barred from speaking in and off itself, but always has to be mediated through brain, hands, language, institutions and the like. This becomes a problem, if the brain is weak, the hands bound, language abstract and the institutions corrupt. Then, it is caught up in the realm of force which chain down the singular experience of the small, unimportant human voices which are always drowned in that of more central personalities by being told that they are nothing but a fragmented part of something bigger than themselves.
And even though this fact without doubt is also problematic from within the perspective of the organic functioning of the world through a unity of opposites, the way to get rid of it is different. For the unity of opposites in Buber is always worked out in a community that insistently tries to make its inner relations turn new, transformed through the light of God so that no one feels unheard or left out. Weil, on the other hand, wants to institute acts that somehow shatters the workings of these relations, for a single moment, in which everything stands still, the organism frozen and trembling before a single element in pain for whom it must fall down dead and offer its own body and blood as a meal. In this sense, Weil’s thought of peace takes its starting point at the level of the individual rather than the community, but not the individual in the sense of the ever-same juridical building block of the liberal state, but as a pure and whole point of experience. The art of such a peace process is thus not to identify points in a society through which peace can spread most easily to the rest, but rather to be able to create a void withing the system in which a pure and unmediated voice can be heard when it proclaims the eternal beauty of the world, and the need for a true and undefiled love, very possibly by showing how it has itself been deprived of it. Weil claims that the construction of such a void demands a kind of reconstruction of language that rids out the prominence of the dead phrases of politics, rhetoric and law, and instead allows words of truth to take root. These words, however, are not easy to find – she personally searches for them in the Platonic realm such of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, as well as phrases that in a real sensegrasps the pain of a world ruled by force, phrases that somehow reproclaim the ethos of the Illiad (Weil, 2005, p. 96.7). However, language is a very tricky thing which were supposed to be able to uphold words as pure names of the real things of the world, but which all too easily allows them to be swallowed up in the abstract mediation of discourse in which their meaning and relation to reality turns obscure, and what is good is called bad, and what is bad, is called good, and where the poor and suffering become a spectacle, serving nothing but our own self-exalting tendencies. Thus, human language must again and again be returned to and purified for the kind of void to take place in it that Weil hopes for – the kind of void in which the Word of God can take up shelter.
However, even though these two approaches to peace are different it does not mean that they are incompatible. In Kant’s thought, this is clear, in so far as it is perfectly possible to both understand something organismically and find it beautiful at the same time, exactly because both are antipolitical processes that don’t determine things unambiguously from a conceptual point of view, but rather exhibit two modes of living peacefully that have no need to exterminate each other. However, it does demand a certain kind of mental, emotional and practical flexibility to both address the central people of a society with a slow and stuttering process of integration into an organismic life of peace, and at the same time trying to make room for the absolutely isolated voice of the heart of singular and systematically unimportant individuals, both in their joys and their sorrows, in a way where they are not reduced to whatever they mean for society as a whole, but upheld concretely in their superfluous beauty. However, it is not impossible, and hopefully they would even exalt each other in a way where the beauty of concomitance through kenosis allows for a more free play of voices to take place in which no one is reduced to their relations but always seen in and for themselves, but in a way that does not shatter the more robust and comprehensive relations embodied in the unity of opposites, which ensures that the individuals don’t completely lose themselves in the shattering adoration of each other that can quickly lead to an unpredictable and untamed set of relations without consistency in which the community is shattered for the sake of fleeting and self-enclosed impressions.
Bibliography
Texts
Aristotle. 1907. De Anima. Cambridge University Press.
Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 13b:10-11
Buber, Martin. 1997 [1948]. “The Spirit of Israel and the World of Today” in Israel and The World: Essays in a Time of Crisis. Syracuse University Press.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. 2011. Christian Materiality. Zone Books.
Cragg, Kenneth. 1991. The Arab Christian. Westminister John Knox Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1998 [1781]. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Felix Meiner Verlag.
Kant, Immanuel. 2004 [1784]. Was ist Aufklärung. UTOPIE.
Kant, Immanuel. 1997 [1790]. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Suhrkamp.
Gorsky, Dr. Phillip. 2019. What is a Holy Fool? St Paul, Byzantium, Russia. Godseekers.
Lossky, Vladimir. 1997. The mystical theology of the Eastern Church. Azbuka.
Paul. Letter to the Phillipians. Bible Interlinear
Weil, Simone. 2002 [1947]. Gravity and Grace. Routledge Classics.
Weil, Simone. 1991 [1940]. The Illiad or the Poem of Force. Pendle Hill.
Weil, Simone. 2005 [1940]. "Human Personality” in Simone Weil; an Anthology, Penguin Books.
Images
Image I: Painting from an exemplar of The Book of Hours, England and the Netherlands 1410.
Image II: Image from French Gothic Bible Moralisée, 1225.
Image III: Klimt, Gustav (1909) “The Tree of Life”