The Same Thing, Only Different
The man who today would be my father-in-law (well, in all but law, that is) had he lived, a Swabian pig-farmer not untouched by a spark of the creative fire that blazed in his Landsmänner, Schiller, Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin, was fond of saying, and presumably more so of thinking, Die Gedanken sind frei, which, helpfully, had had a catchy tune attached to it at some point in his grim, post-war youth: In thought (at least) we are free.
While this bit of passive-resistant folk wisdom seems plausible enough, perhaps even healthy at first glance, especially from the perspective of one who has suffocated inside a true totalitarian nightmare, its political meaning, whatever the circumstances of its origin, is actually the internalization of unfreedom, an unchosen exile from the world at large, the price of which is constant self-surveillance, the regime of an inner Gestapo. We are perfectly free to think as long as we keep our thoughts to ourselves . . . and make sure they cannot escape. But of what character are thoughts produced under such conditions likely to be? Can they ever be unaffected by what is happening without? Hardly, I should think; and is such a freedom really one that we’d be inclined to celebrate? In any case, it is not exactly as if we can summon thoughts as we please; if we could, wouldn’t we be summoning better ones? It seems to me that we are subject to thought, or are its recipient, more than we are its creator.
Ever since Zeno broached the dialectical pomegranate, the paradox of freedom, perhaps not formulated explicitly as such, though that is its secret subject, has tormented philosophy, appearing in various guises, whether as thought and “reality,” reality and appearance, being and time, matter and energy, particle and wave, slavery and freedom, innocence and guilt, determination and will — funny how those sound like synonyms, and more interesting still that all such “dichotomies” have at some time, at some spectacular moment in the history of thought, been theorized as equivalences or, at weakest, as simultaneous truths, as opposed to irreconcilables — or the epistemological matter of truth and opinion with which we are more or less directly concerned at present; and whether they are construed as paradoxes, aporias, antitheses, or antinomies, they are all aspects of this same problematic, if not always in their overt content, then in their structure at least, where they embody the tension of thought and action that compels us to feel the tug-of-war between freedom and constraint as we engage them — the liberty to think contradictory things and the bondage of being unable to resolve them — evidence of both the limitations and the majesty of thought, of the enormous fertility and the cruel sterility of the negative which is its engine. But, as Derrida observed, every conceptual opposition has a stronger and a weaker component, the latter of which secretly governs the otherwise inexplicable self-justificatory tergiversations of the dominant as the invisible binary of a visible star sends its partner spinning into absurd epicycles . . . at least until we learn to read them.
For much of history (sic), the chief temptation or, alternatively, the avowed task, of thought was to deny time, appearance, the transitory, as the enemy of truth, to survey its realm sub specie aeternitatis — the perennial philosophy, if you will. Even Nietzsche, author of the most radical, exhilarating, and chilling, of epistemologies — there are no facts, only interpretations — aspired, or rather succumbed, to the ambition of “seal[ing] becoming with the character of being [for] that is the supreme will to power.” And to be sure, thought is accompanied by the sense that it is not of the world, that it may mysteriously arise from within matter, but is not of it, a sanctuary from space and time, while even the atomic component of language, its nouns — derived from nomen, or name — seems to imply a timelessness on account of whose self-evidence we may forgive its millennia-long oblivion: if no one asks me, I know; but as soon as they do, I do not, as Augustine said of time. Plato’s forms are beyond language; in that language cannot accommodate them, they embody the persistent longing after a pre- or extra-linguistic Eden, a literal infancy, that calls critically to mind Rousseau’s idyllic lament that man is born free, but everywhere we find him in chains.¹ Our language, our selves, our family and social life, and, even more invisibly, our grand conceptual structures and the meaning imperative itself, are, no doubt, our chains, but they are the (imperfect) tools of our (always imperfect) liberation as well.
In Heideggerian terms, even though being, and a fortiori, Dasein, is time, or at least time is of its essence, it rejects (or forgets) that truth and seeks, even if benightedly, to transcend time — to transcend itself — which is the way in which it creates its history, its specific, and, I would contend, necessarily delusional, perhaps spurious, mode of being in the world. Heidegger’s schemata notwithstanding, we are not a telos. It is not only difficult, it is impossible to know oneself, to comprehend one’s motives, to speak the truth, even to say what one means. Medical science now tells us explicitly what we always suspected, that even memory is unreliable, and intrinsically so, changing every time we draw upon it and ultimately calcifying in self-serving or wistful falsehood. For reasons that are inherent, neither thought, nor memory, nor knowledge will ever bridge the gap between philosophy and wisdom, and the more one knows oneself, the more one knows that it is not even oneself that one has been endeavoring to know.
Whatever we think is necessarily wrong. This is the fundamental principle of deconstruction, though it was hiding in plain sight already in Plato. And it has been the motivating principle of philosophy from its inception. Unlike complex formal systems such as mathematics, which, as Gödel demonstrated, generate truths that are impossible to prove, complex natural discourse, philosophy — and here everything simple derives from the complex, not vice versa — generates contradictory and thought-imploding propositions that are not only impossible to disprove, but are essential, and which therefore plague it in perpetuum.
Esse est percipi, the real does not exist, there is no hors-texte, es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen, the disaster has always already happened, and so on: from such philosophical shackles, it must sometimes be the animal in us that simply shrugs and walks away, who calmly cross the finish line as the slower animal recedes into the distance, or who exercises the free will that we magnificently, and ludicrously, give ourselves leave to doubt. It is not we, after all, who are the fly in Wittgenstein’s bottle, but only our thoughts, and to stop their maddened buzzing, it is necessary only to disengage them from the twisted labyrinth of philosophy.
When my would-have-been father-in-law plunged to his solitary, soundless, terrifying death in a great vat of pig excrement — a horrifically eloquent one if it was premeditated, a grotesquely ironic one if not — not even his children could be sure whether this was finally the freedom he craved, or a trick of necessity…or both.
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1 And I think that the trespass of Adam and Eve is clearly related to the power of onomasty that Yaweh conferred upon them, separating them from God and animal, for both of whom the name is superfluous, as they know the thing itself directly, purely, unmediated, whereas to name is to kill, to invite death into our every thought and act. Animals and God have no time or choice.
John Wronoski is a former antiquarian bookseller, art dealer, and curator. He is the author of the book-length exhibition catalogue, Boris Lurie: A Life in the Camps, and has essays in numerous art-related publications, most recently, Heide Hatry’s Icons in Ash (Station Hill Press).