Don’t Fall for It

The philosophical and political preoccupation with the concepts of ‘Being’ and ‘the sacred’ invariably lead to reaction: A Question for Nathan Gardels and Noema Magazine.

(This essay was prompted by Nathan Gardels’ recent (13/14 January 2023) Noema newsletter piece, Remembering Pope Benedict’s Challenge, and is informed by an earlier piece, The New Axial Age, that I had not read previously.)

“Perhaps what we are witnessing is a version of Teilhard de Chardin’s vision. The long-lost unity of origins would finally meet up again in the unity of destiny. It is the perpetual and differentiated quest for equilibrium in this new ecology of existence — an evolved level of homeostasis by which all beings not only survive but thrive — that is the new ground of the sacred.”

Nathan Gardels, ‘The New Axial Age,’ Noema Magazine, 17 June 2020

The traditionalism and ‘anti-modernity’ that informed Georg Lukács, Martin Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Continental Philosophy… which then informed the Situationists, academic Marxism, the ultra-left, the Iranian Revolution, ‘anti-politics’ and anti-leftism, right up to the Deleuze and Agamben inspired ‘Left’ Vitalists or ‘destituent partisans’ of today… is going to take a long time to dig ourselves out from.

Late last year, mainly through its association with Benjamin Bratton, I became interested in the publishing and ‘think-tank’ phenomenon of the Berggruen Institute, centred around the journal, Noema. The perspectives in the journal appear to offer a realistic, innovative, left, sensible, intelligent, and non-traditionalist approach to ‘the problems of our age.’ To this end I bought a subscription and received issue 3.

There was one piece that jarred for me though, a piece suffused with the Heidegger-esque jargon of ‘Being’: the interview with Byung-Chul Han. First a slight detour. During the height of the events around the pandemic Han was due to give a joint presentation in Italy with Giorgio Agamben, one of his closest intellectual inspirations. Agamben couldn’t make the presentation because he was unwilling to obtain a ‘Green Pass’ proving vaccination against Covid. To his credit, Han railed against Agamben at the event, “Agamben in his old age refuses to be vaccinated, because he sees in the vaccination a state scheme to extend political domination or because, like many anti-vaxxers, he fears the vaccination will render him helpless.” Han continued by asserting that Agamben was “simply stupid” in his approach to the pandemic, and saying, in reference to Agamben’s notion of the ‘state of exception,’ that, “I have a feeling that Agamben doesn’t know what democracy is.” For some, certainly myself, this may have been a (pleasantly) surprising reaction, because, prior to Han’s outburst, I would have guessed that Han would have supported Agamben’s decisions due to their shared intellectual commitments.

Agamben and Han are both ‘students’ of (unrepentant Nazis) Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. (Agamben, as we know, was literally a student of Heidegger at his Le Thor seminars). They are also both connected in deep intellectual ways to Christianity and the Catholic church. The general trajectory of Han’s work has been within the same ‘anti-modernity’ stance that Agamben shares. Han’s work is an elaboration of Heidegger’s notion of “das Man’ or “the They” expressed in terms of The Burn-Out Society (his most famous book). For Agamben, by the way, in collaboration with Tiqqun, ‘the They’ became ‘Bloom theory’:

“Bloom, since he’s not an individuality, doesn’t let himself be characterized by anything he says, does, or manifests” (Tiqqun 1999).

[For an interesting exploration of ‘Tiqqunery’ see Avant-Garde and Mission.]

Han, consciously or otherwise, mixes Guy Debord’s concept of the society of the spectacle (which, in great part, owes its existence to Georg Lukács, whose book on alienation also influenced Heidegger’s Being and Time), with Heidegger’s acclaimed restoration of the question of ‘Being’ to philosophy, even if, for Heidegger, our ‘beingness’ is moulded by its ‘thrownness’ into whatever epoch (time) one finds oneself ‘thrown’ into.

For Heidegger our Being is diminished by modernity, and he blames the Jewish people for the march of modernity. Indeed, as Donatella Di Cesare explains in the book, Heidegger and the Jews (2014), Heidegger even blames the Jews for their own destruction in the extermination camps, which were, he insists, simply a development of the modernity and technology that they themselves had put in place and accelerated.

For Heidegger, ‘the They’ is the modern human condition, a banal, or ‘inauthentic’ condition (see also J-P. Sartre’s elaboration of ‘Dasein’) in which we lose ourselves:

One’s Dasein is dissolved completely into the Being of ‘the Others,’ so much so, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. (Heidegger 1927)

Hannah Arendt used this conceptualization of modern people in her analysis of Adolf Eichmann at his trial in 1961. She fell for his defense that he was simply following orders in an unthinking way and was not ‘evil’ as such (recently, taped interviews with Eichmann have surfaced that demonstrate clearly that he knew full well what he was doing and that he pursued the extermination of Jewish people with creative enthusiasm). Although she agreed that his crimes warranted the death penalty, she framed her analysis of his role in the Holocaust as expressive of the human condition as articulated by Heidegger, therefore she was able to title her book on the subject, A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).

It should not be forgotten that in 1943 Heidegger was concerned that what he viewed as a worthy attack on modernity being undertaken by the Nazis was now, in light of its impending failure, of secondary importance, as Andreas Grossmann writes:

Heidegger states in the final passages of his Heraclitus lecture [1943] that “the greatest and genuine test of the Germans” is still forthcoming. This is the question as to “whether they, the Germans, are in concord with the truth of Being, whether they are strong enough beyond the readiness for death to save the seminal in its inconspicuous adornment from the small-mindedness of the modern world.” The real danger that Germany is in, he claims, is not “the danger of its downfall, but the danger that we, being confused, surrender to the will of modernity and drift towards it.”

(Andreas Grossmann, ‘The Myth of Poetry: On Heidegger’s Hölderlin,’ 2004, available on Jstor)

It should also not be ignored that Heidegger’s ‘notorious’ Black Notebooks were not intended to remain secret; Heidegger kept them so they could be published after his death. In 2016/17, two years after their publication, Giorgio Agamben responded to a question about the recurring issue of Heidegger’s Nazism with this curious defense:

These controversies rest on a misunderstanding of the definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ and its use. The way it is used today, this word designates something that has to do with the persecution and the extermination of the Jews. One does not have to use this word in order to describe someone that, even if his opinions about Jews are erroneous, has opinions that have nothing to do with these phenomena. (Giorgio Agamben 2016/7)

This defense of Heidegger follows the reasoning behind Heidegger’s own self-defense. He refuted the Nazi biological definitions of ‘race.’ Heidegger did not view Jewish people as an inferior race, he criticized them for their history of rootlessness, nomadism, and lack of belonging, and the way this had badly affected the world — in this sense the Jewish person was the first “the They,” a figure that was now, for him, dominating Western culture. He ‘consented’ to the extermination of the Jewish people not because they were racially inferior and biologically ‘contaminating,’ but, firstly, because they had brought it upon themselves and, secondly, through this event, the world might put a halt to, or a brake on modernity. As Agamben implies, Heidegger’s antisemitism is ‘metaphysical,’ or ‘philosophical,’ or ‘historical,’ but the problem in Agamben’s defense lies in the fact that even this ‘metaphysical/philosophical/historical’ critique of Jewish people helped pave the way to the death camps, and Heidegger was, of course, aware of this.

Having come to accept the failure of the Nazis to bring the worthy elements of their project to fruition, Heidegger became more contemplative, and then, after the war, quite dispirited. On top of the defeat of the Nazis, he lost his teaching rights at Freiburg University, then another of his affairs became known to his long-suffering wife: he went to a sanatorium to recover. (Fortunately for Heidegger he was literally saved for posterity at this point by the admiration of philosopher Jean Beaufret.) In 1946, perhaps in a kind of melancholy despair, in which he takes the tasks of the future away from the ‘men of action’ and gives them to ‘the poets,’ Heidegger writes:

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. (Heidegger 1946)

Interestingly, the refrain highlighting the crucial significance of the ‘poets’ (and ‘theologians’), or artists, in restoring ‘the authentic’ to our lives is repeated and elaborated by a cross-section of the ultra- and anti-political left (or anti-leftist left), for example, Tiqqun (having been influenced by Agamben), Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Alain Badiou, Ill Will Editions, Infrapolitics, as well as the more orthodox Heideggerians, such as Byung-Chul Han, and Agamben himself.

When Heidegger speaks of “the holy” he means, obviously, the opposite of ‘the profane.’ But the term profane means more than just secular: it means without meaning; empty; irreverent; or contemptuous. Essentially his perspective is traditionalist, and he wants ‘a sense of the sacred’ to return. This is captured in the movies of the Heideggerian, Terrence Malick (before I understood the meaning of his movies I found them quite beautiful and seductive, but now they sicken me). Malick’s work suggests a way of Being (living one’s life) that is concerned with ritual and gesture, the immanence of death, and the timeless (Christian) soul.

In the interview with Nathan Gardels in issue 3 of Noema Byung-Chul Han says:

“In a world that is completely without rituals and wholly profane, all that is left are consumption and the satisfaction of needs.”

While he may not be stating that ‘we’ are at that point right now, the implication is that we are at least approaching it. Similarly, in one of the founding texts of the Situationist International (Formulary for a New Urbanism, 1953), Ivan Chtcheglov writes:

“Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.”

Guy Debord, in 1967, refines the message that we have lost all authenticity and become mere consumers (developed from his readings of, and association with Henri Lefebvre, and also reflected in the work of Marshall McLuhan and Herbert Marcuse):

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life has become an immense accumulation of spectacle. All that was once lived directly has passed into representation.”

It is easy to see how the traditionalist critique of ‘modernity’ dovetails so alarmingly perfectly with not only that of Continental Philosophy, but also of revolutionary Marxism, ‘the communist desire,’ and the ultra-left. And if one reads Pierre Bourdieu’s The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1988), one can see how Heidegger’s philosophy was riven with an “ultra-revolutionary conservatism” that, despite Theodor Adorno’s (weaker) criticisms of Heidegger (see, for example, The Jargon of Authenticity, 1964), was able, along with the Frankfurt school, to inform and establish the institution that has become known as Continental Philosophy.

While this essay does not explore the complex intellectual roots of this intertwining of perspectives, it can give the reader pause for thought… and worry. The history of ‘third positionism’ — or ‘red-brown confusionism’ — today expressed by journals such as Compact, The New Atlantis, UnHerd, etc., indicates that the ‘anti-modernity’ contained within the critique of society originally emanating from revolutionary, communist, or Marxist discourse can easily be drawn into, or drift into, a reactionary politics.

It should be noted that the ‘anti-modernity’ sentiments expressed by Debord, for example, are what attracts those on the far-right to his work, such as Aleksandr Dugin (described by Holocaust denier and “Author at CounterPunch.org”, Israel Shamir, as “a master of tools sharpened by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord,” 2014).

The question for after reading this examination is how to critique modern society without becoming reactionary, or having your words used approvingly by the extreme-right; without becoming traditionalist; without becoming a red-brown confusionist; or without simply acquiring a ‘grumpy-old-man’ pining for the presumed simpler life of an imaginary past. But we have a little more to get through before this essay ends.

As mentioned above, the essay that has inspired this response (my response probably being a little incoherent, due to the haste involved in the writing of it) is the Noema piece, Remembering Pope Benedict’s Challenge, by Nathan Gardels, Editor-in-Chief at Noema. But its companion piece (which I read after Remembering Pope Benedict’s Challenge), The New Axial Age (2020) is more comprehensive.

Pope Benedict (Joseph Ratzinger), who resigned in 2013, and died a few days ago, was an arch-conservative Catholic and scholar who appeared to capture the imaginations of significant figures in philosophy and on the left, such as Jürgen Habermas, as discussed by Gardels. For those who understand Agamben’s relationship with neoconservative Christianity, Giorgio Agamben, unsurprisingly, wrote a book dedicated to his resignation, The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days (2013/17).

More surprising is the fact that Mario Tronti, a founder of autonomous Marxism (operaismo) in Italy, was part of a group who insisted that the Italian left engage with Pope Benedict in 2011 to find a new, more unified, way forward in politics. His group were known as the ‘Ratzingerian Marxists.’ The four authors of the Ratzingerian Marxist Manifesto stated that they wished, along with Benedict, to combat the ‘anthropological crisis’ expressed in “the manipulation of life, originating in technological development.” When the group were questioned on what they meant by supporting the “freedom and dignity of the human person from the moment of conception,” Tronti et al replied: “It seems to us that we are able to say that an unborn life represents a value in itself from the moment of conception.” Oh dear…

In fact, on reading Gardels essays, one can see that Gardels is perhaps suggesting a similar project of unification with the Church — particularly, as with Tronti, its conservative elements — in order to forge some new kind of political direction.

In these two articles Gardels brings in an assortment of conservative thinkers to make his case, and even praises the — what I see as worrying — ‘capitulation’ of Habermas to Ratzinger’s perspectives. Gardels quotes Habermas:

“We continue to nourish ourselves from [the Judeo-Christian] source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”

Elsewhere, Gardels discusses Ivan Illich (whose ideas are disseminated today in the work of David Cayley, a covid-skeptic and friend of Front Porch Republic):

Illich went on to argue that “a life,” defined no longer as “the miraculous sharing of God’s own intimacy” but as an “immune system” to be medically managed, is “the most powerful idol the church has had to face in the course of its history.” Just as the crumbled ground of human dignity yielded to totalitarianism in the 20th century, Illich viewed the “depersonalization” of the technological order as preparing the path to a brave new biocracy in which all are reduced to patients managed from “sperm to worm” by the medical-industrial complex, being kept alive rather than living. (Gardels 2020)

… oh dear.

In the early 1970s Illich had an epiphany prompted by one of his students:

“On the icebox door two pictures were pasted. One was the blue planet and one was the fertilized egg. Two circles of roughly the same size, one blueish, one pink. One of the students said to me, ‘These are our doorways to the understanding of life’.”

Illich’s epiphany reminds me of Cynthia Eller’s analysis of the ‘male supremacism’ of Walter Benjamin’s idol, Jacob Bachofen, author of The Mother-Right (1861). (Benjamin treasured a photograph of Bachofen and wrote that Bachofen “had an almost maternal largesse.”) Eller writes:

Agriculture [for Bachofen] stands for the type of procreation that matriarchy initiates: no longer randomly sowing his seed in the swamp of communally owned women, man now [Bachofen writes] “opens the woman’s womb, lays his seed for the purpose of generation… [and harvests] the child from the maternal garden”… woman as earth, man as seed… The earth gives birth, and women give birth. (Cynthia Eller, Gentleman and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861–1900, 2011)

Interesting to note, by the way, that the term ‘biomedical security state’ — very like the terms “biocracy” and “medical-industrial complex” deployed by Gardels above — and which is used by those influenced by Agamben, Illich, Cayley, etc., was apparently coined on Twitter in 2020 by Josiah Lippincott, a huge admirer of Ron DeSantis and Giorgio Agamben, and writer for The American Conservative.

At the top of this article is a quote from Gardels praising the insight of the Jesuit priest and creator of the Vitalist concept of the noosphere, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a thinker also praised by Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. One of Teilhard de Chardin’s most famous admirers was the surrealist fan of Hitler and Franco, and ‘variable’ Catholic, Salvador Dali (he was expelled from Breton’s Surrealist group just prior to WWII, but only after years of far-right affiliations). Dali, whose later politics and associations followed on from the ‘anti-politics’ he developed after his early days as a leftist in the Surrealist group, was also fascinated by Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Omega Point, which predicted a future where everything in the universe will spiral into one point of unification.

In both essays Gardels quotes T.S. Eliot:

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? … The cycles of Heaven in 20 centuries / Bring us farther from God and nearer to the dust.”

Gardels’ quote is from Eliot’s choruses for the play, The Rock (1934).

Elsewhere in the choruses Eliot reminds us of the danger of people being rootless and nomadic (where have we heard that before?) while confirming his deep Christian faith. He writes:

“In the beginning GOD created the world. Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And when there were men, in their various ways, they struggled in torment towards GOD
Blindly and vainly, for man is a vain thing, and man without GOD is a seed upon the wind: driven this way and that, and finding no place of lodgment and germination.”

Eliot demonstrated his antisemitism in print several times and was a lifelong friend of Ezra “Hitler was a Saint” Pound. Pound was also antisemitic and a huge admirer of Mussolini. Giorgio Agamben, in 2016, wrote admiringly of Pound’s adventures in Europe in the 1930s:

“Pound is the poet who placed himself most rigorously and with almost ‘complete impudence’ in front of the catastrophe of Western culture.”

In 1939 Eliot published the classic Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (from which the popular musical Cats is derived); ‘old possum’ being Pound’s affectionate nickname for Eliot. But Eliot was never quite as ‘vulgar’ as Pound, as Roz Kaveney writes:

“Eliot was far too clever a conservative to ally himself directly with Italian or German fascism — they were far too modern and flashy for him.”

Perhaps the problem in Gardels’ narrative at least partly stems from a ‘transhistorical’ view of the ‘nature’ of the ‘human being,’ which is, of course, the essence of the question of ‘Being.’

Gardels also relies on the works of Yuval Noah Harari to express ‘the likeness to God’ of human beings. Harari’s formulations (and perhaps Teilhard de Chardin’s too) are long preceded by Ludwig Feuerbach, who wrote that “the capacity to produce systematic knowledge or science” enables humans to achieve a “consciousness of the species” and as the human becomes a ‘collective being’ it is able to possess unlimited consciousness and unlimited knowledge. (Feuerbach’s ideas here, see The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings, 2012, of course, fed into Karl Marx’s philosophy, in particular his notion of ‘species being.’)

In similar vein, but seemingly without having read Feuerbach, Hahari writes, in 2015:

“Today [humanity] stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.”

Clearly, Harari is cautious, as Gardels indicates, about how we might assume the Godhead, there are risks if we don’t get it right, but the certainty is that, presuming global eco-collapse is avoided, humans are destined to arrive there.

But we should temper Harari’s grand predictions with his own narrative for what humans apparently are. In the same 2015 book (Sapiens) he wrote:

“On a hike in East Africa 2 million years ago, you might well have encountered a familiar cast of human characters: anxious mothers cuddling their babies and clutches of carefree children playing in the mud; temperamental youths chafing against the dictates of society and weary elders who just wanted to be left in peace; chest-thumping machos trying to impress the local beauty and wise old matriarchs who had already seen it all.”

Here is a famous modern historian projecting back through two million years of time the image of a modern family… as if ‘history’ itself actually means nothing. He urges us to presume that humans behaved and organized themselves in the same way as they do now — but with increasingly less knowledge, and less technology — through every different condition of human existence right back to 2 million years ago. Harari is presenting us with a Fred Flintstone narrative of history, close, of course, to the evolutionary psychologist viewpoint. His narrative disregards a huge swathe of ethnology (that began with Michel de Montaigne) and reveals a simple naïveté that was long-ago countered by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. As Deleuze, in 1987, wrote:

“Foucault’s key historical principle is that any historical formation says all it can say and sees all it can see.”

Gardels quotes Harari:

“History began when humans invented gods and will end when humans become gods.”

This may seem an unproblematic statement, but the first half of it is full of poison. Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, wrote a similar thing, but he was clearer:

“History is prosaic, and myths contain no history. […] The prehistorical is that which precedes state life, it also lies beyond self-cognizant life: though surmises and suppositions may be entertained respecting that period, these do not amount to facts.”

Hegel was making the point that before writing, before the emergence of the state and civilization, we cannot know anything beyond the ‘myths’ that have found their way into modern culture. He decided to neglect the ‘uncontacted’ tribespeoples that still existed in his day, and who persist by a fragile thread into our own. Maybe Harari is also putting the vast extent of human pre-civilization existence outside of history too, but maybe he also thinks that those before civilization had the same kinds of Gods that we do now? Who knows?

We have also to understand that prior to civilization (or outside of it, amongst the ‘uncontacted’ tribes) there exists no religion and no God like we know. Colin Renfrew, in The Emergence of Civilization (1972), gives us a useful way to define when a state or civilization has appeared, it has “three social institutions: the [religious] ceremonial center, writing, and the city.”

Marcel Gauchet, in The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (1985/99), makes a useful argument for how ‘the Other’ of ‘primitive’ spirituality (which has no temples, and whose shamans are by no means priests, and I would disagree with Gauchet’s reference to it as ‘religious’ — see Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky, 2010/13) is reintroduced in civilization as religion:

“With the State’s appearance, the religious Other actually returns to the human sphere. While it of course retains its exteriority relative to the State, the religious penetrates and is embodied in the State. In short, the religious severance separates humans from their origins beforehand in order to forestall the sudden appearance of a division between them. Once a mechanism for domination appears, the severance occurs inside human society and separates humans from each other. The dominant ones are on the side of the gods while the dominated are not. There are many versions of this phenomenon, from the god as living despot where the Other that humans depend on openly adopts a human form, through to the temple where the god is actually present without being properly incarnated in human form, but with servants and human mediators.”

Gauchet continues: the “invisible sacred center fueling collective existence” is created, managed, and disseminated by those “who speak and organize in the name of the gods.”

It is also useful to consider the notion I have written about elsewhere that insists that religion follows politics, not vice versa.

So, anytime we call for the return of ‘the sacred’ to our lives we are really asking only for a return to an earlier form of civilized religion. Paganism, for example, was not the spirituality of peoples before they ended up in a chiefdom, paganism only exists in hierarchical and exploitative societies.

Such calls are not strategies for uncovering our ‘Being’ through ‘the sacred.’ All such calls are a lie built upon a traditionalist yearning for an imagined old-time religion. And, as has happened in Iran and Afghanistan, if we allow such reactionary notions to flourish, they will end up killing us.

So which way is Noema headed? Is it to follow the kind of trajectory of journals such as Compact, or The Lamp? Is it, under the guidance of its Editor-in Chief, to embrace a neo-Christian perspective that listens attentively to the words of reactionaries of the last century? Or is it to put a stop to this nonsense and pivot back, before it’s too late perhaps, to the — much sounder — socialist, social justice, and left-wing agenda that most of its other essays exemplify?

Mickey Moosenhauer

17 January 2023

Further Reading:

Nihil Evadere: How We Are Created Is How We Create — An Empirical Journey to the End of Marxist, Anarchist, and Ultra-leftist Millenarianism, Mickey Moosenhauer, 2022.

The Freedom of Things: An Ethnology of Control, Peter Harrison, 2017.