1917, War, democracy and conscience: on Franz Rosenzweig's Vox Dei

 

1.

Franz Rosenzweig was stationed in Macedonia, in a German unit that was in liaison with the Austro-Hungarian army, in 1917.  In January of that year, his parents sent him Kafka’s The Judgment, which he read and tried to analyse. Over the course of that year, Rosenzweig was very productive: he wrote extensively on the philosophy of politics, and sketches of the thinking that went into Star of Redemption. In one of his letters to his parents (the most oracular letters to one’s parents one can imagine: only an adoring, highly cultivated Central European mother and father could have endured them), Rosenzweig wrote: Truth is a sea into which only he may dive whose heart has a specific gravity greater than “truth”, that is, a heart full of irreducible reality.”

Which I think is a pretty straightforward methodological statement. I can’t imagine what the parents thought. Those parents! Kafka’s, Benjamin’s, Rosenzweig’s!

The essay Vox Dei?, which came out of this period, was first published in the “Little Writings” in 1937. A fuller version was published in the Collected Works in 1984. It has been translated into French. But I cannot find a translation into English. Pity.

Rosenzweig, at this time, was pulled between Zionism, of which he had a vague idea, and the fierce anti-zionism of Hermann Cohen, the most famous Jewish philosopher of the time – who visited Rosenzweig’s parents in 1917. Cohen told Rosenzweig, in listing the deficiencies of Zionism, that the Zionists wanted to be happy. This was a putdown indeed.

Rosenzweig visited with the Sephardic Jews of Greece, and wrote about them to his parents with a mixture of sympathy and condescension. His experience, however, was important to his thinking about community and the meaning of “the people” in political discourse.

Rosenzweig’s friend, Martin Buber, would later develop his political philosophy, vis a vis Zionism, by an extended meditation on the Jews as a nomadic people, and the Jews as a nation, with the latter characterized by the fact that the Jews demanded a King. The relevant passage here is 1 Samuel 8:

4 “So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. 5 They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”

6 But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. 7 And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”

Rosenzweig, in 1917, does not cite this passage in his essay; but he surely knew of it. Thus the irony encoded in the term Vox dei, entitling the essay, and the ending sentence, which quotes the entire phrase: vox Populi, vox Dei.

The subtitle of the essay is: Democracy’s question of conscience. Or in the French translation: the case of conscience in democracy.

The essay is structured around three slogans. The term in German is Schlagwort, and Rosenzweig plays with the meaning of Schlag – a blow. Slogans are blows, necessarily making a point without trailing or incorporating the long course of reflection that stands behind them.

The slogan that he is, perhaps, closest to is at the beginning: Everything for the people, everything by the people. This is, he takes it, the slogan of democracy, of democrats. The problem with it is: what does it mean by the people? The second slogan takes that problem into a reactionary point of view: Everything for the people, nothing by the people. However, Rosenzweig points out, this is not an escape from the problem of the people. Finally, after balancing reaction against democracy (a democracy with an anarchist slogan, as that is where the everything for the people, everything by the people has its root), Rosenzweig considers the middle way: “Everything for the people, everything under the concurrence [Mitwirkung] of the people.” Out of the slogan of the middle way emerges the legislative moment, legitimated not by the monarchical or authoritarian instinct for the people, and not out of the people themselves somehow autonomously self-governing.

Thus, a rather liberal shaping of the problem of the people. Rosenzweig’s next move, however, is rather surprising. It is the introduction of the temporal dimension that defines the people. The people of yesterday, or the day before yesterday? The people of tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow? Or the people defined by the today?

Here Rosenzweig makes an complicated case that requires quoting a long paragraph:

The today is violent in both cases. Its power makes itself felt against the habits and wishes of the practical life of the “people as well as against the history and determination replete souls of the leaders of the people [Volkheit]. These yesterdays and tomorrows, these days before yesterday and days after tomorrow fall as victims of sacrifice to the today in the same manner. All politics is putting into action the claims of today against these. And while the people and the leaders of the people express their will to political action, they declare themselves prepared to sacrifice these resistances to the command of today. Politic proves itself as sacrifice, as self-denial as much for the people as the leaders of the people. Both must throw the whole sum of their being – than what other is the collective of memory and hope – into the melting pot of the moment. The people would love to live its good days in its usual circle, in peaceful development: and the leaders of the people would like to make the living race a ship, that carrying the cargo of the fullness of the past steers towards undiscovered coasts of the future; but the moment calls for something else. It will have its own rights respected and carried out,; nothing, neither human life nor the cultural property of the people, is as valuable to it as death for the fatherland. Thus is compounded in the today the legitimacy [Rechtsgrund] for the whole indivisible state reality of the people in both senses, and opens itself at the same time to the possibility that both kinds after their different concepts of the people in the moment that they step out of their essence into action fall together as one. The sacrifice, that they bring to the moment, the sacrifice of yesterday and tomorrow, and of the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow, is exactly the sacrifice of that which divides them. A naked, pure today, they now both stand before the alter of the mighty goddess, the moment. In the sacrifice is thus realized the union of the people with the state, to which it has an unconditional right.”

Given this reconciliation of opposites in a pure negation that affirms their existence in the moment, both the reactionary and the democrat are led to a paradox – not the liberal “all for the people, all with the concurrence of the people”, but a more tragically paradoxical slogan that accounts for this sacrifice: everything by the people, everything against the people. “Thus are loosened the knots of the polyvalent people concept.”

Opfer – the word I am translating as sacrifice – means, as well, victim. The universal victimhood of the people, in the name and by the hand of the people, is a logic that probably looks a lot more plausible on the corpse strewn fields of battle in the Southern front of the First World War. Yet, there is something powerful about Rosenzweig’s idea as a way of getting us to those corpse strewn fields – or to our own reality of corpse strewn cities shown on a million screens, and always on the “periphery” of states, evil empires in which we as people who want a good day and have memories of good days and hopes for good days in the future have to cope.

“No people want war. And firstly for the simple reason that no people want action, but rather, being.” If being means something as simple as taking all the moments of one’s life as one’s being, then we can perhaps say that no people want, more broadly, sacrifice. But the people live in the State – or as the elders of Israel put it, having a king, like other people have.

Up to this point, we have moved from anarchy to reaction to liberalism to something like de Maistre’s state, or de Sade’s. And if sacrifice is the ultimate and ever present condition of politics, we are, I’d say, good and fucked - that is, Sade’s old fuckers rule. But this is not the whole story of the Voice of God and the Voice of the People. There is, as well, conscience, which is the subtitle of Rosenzweig’s essay, after all.

2.

“Ain’t gonna study war no more” – a verse in a folksong popular in my boyhood – pretty much encapsulates my position vis-à-vis war. When I first heard that song, I had little idea of what nuclear armaments were. I had no notion that somewhere, an ICBM had my name (or at least my part of the world, my bit of the U.S., my Atlanta metro area) inscribed in its program. Of course, it did.

Back in that boyhood, the good old days of the sixties, the Communist tactic was simple and seductive: advancing the program of peace. Peace even penetrated the iron curtain and became a byword among some of the bloodiest “statesmen” of the century, like Nixon and Kissinger. And of course peace for the Soviets was twinned with oppression. But the communists were, I still think, right. Peace is good.

Peace, however, was not such an absolute good to Franz Rosenzweig, writing Vox Dei? In 1917. To a man or woman in a World War, the world seems, indeed, to be a war.  The war seemed to represent some truth about the pre-war world – namely, that the prewar world was not wholly real. It was missing some core.

Vox Dei is supposed to give us some guide to the conscience in a democracy. That’s a good thing to have. It is topical: I am not in a world war, but a world in which institution after institution is collapsing due to force exerted by the stupidest people in the world. People who have so little sense of disguise that they parade their stupidity and ignobility as if it were charming. And institution after institution is showing a complete lack of conscience, which I take to be a sense of integrity, of the worth of their cause such that they would resist, with the utmost effort, the collapse of their collective history as it is embodied in these institutions.

Rosenszweig’s essay, unfortunately, leads us to a certain fascinating point in the understanding of the state and democracy – and then leaves us there. The end of the essay, it must be admitted, is a proto-Spenglerian mess, a tour d’horizon of England, Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary that rises to the level of a newspaper feuilleton – a bad one, one of the one’s victim to Karl Kraus’s cutting judgment. Or to Robert Musil’s, whose criticism of Spengler’s method, style, and anti-scientific method is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

But even given these codicils to reading the essay, it is worth following for its dialectical teasing out of the slogans underlying anarchism, reaction, and liberalism.

Which, to recall yesterday’s little ditty of mine, were: ‘everything for the people, everything by the people’;”everything for the people, nothing by the people’; and ‘everything for the people, everything with the concurrence of the people’. The last slogan is awkward, as awkward as the liberalism it encodes. This is the style of the middle way, and somewhere in that middle way style itself will become suspect – the liberal hates nothing more than a killer prose style. It’s a mutual hatred.

But this is by the by. As my man Musil shows, a killer prose style is no substitute for an awkward but logical argument.

Remember, too, Rosenzweig’s methodology, which recalls Hegel’s remark, in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, that you can’t learn to swim on dry land. Rosenzweig imagines himself as the diver into the sea of truth, whose specific gravity – his skin, breath, dreams, etc. – is an actuality that allows him to plunge. Every dive has its deepest point, at which his actuality directs him back up to the surface. The sea itself cannot rise above its surface, cannot breathe – the truth to that extent cannot set itself free.

The deepest point in the dive into political philosophy (I am not going to call this political theology – since I think that phrase is horseshit) is reached when the slogans we are dealing with turn into actualities of state power. It is then that we reach a paradoxical slogan: “everything for the people, everything against the people.”

A man in a war sees the world as a war, and the state as a war formed entity. This is the case with Rosenzweig. He begins to ask about war from the viewpoint of the people: “no people want war.” The folksinger who aint gonna study war no more would say that this is because people basically don’t want to kill each other or be killed. But in Rosenzweig’s view, a view from within a total war, the desire of the people for peace is a desire for inertia – for the ordinary life, with its yesterdays and its tomorrows. The German word “Ruhe”, for peace, is also the word for rest – and it is on that lexical play that Rosenzweig builds his case (even as peace as Ruhe and peace as Frieden uneasily alternate in the essay) It is not that far from Marx’s remarks about rural idiocy. The traditional people are, as it were, encased in a world that is ritually organized. But the state – and the statesman – has discovered something different: a today, a moment [Augenblick] that not only overshadows the yesterday and tomorrow that gives ordinary sense to time – but also demands the sacrifice of that ordinary sense of time.

The goddess Moment  stands in, here, for the introduction of the simultaneous and the contemporary into ordinary life – the introduction of news, the twin of politics. It is to Moment that the politician sacrifices the people for the sake of the people.

In order to do this, the people must be pulled from their being (Sein) into existence (Dasein). Although Rosenzweig is writing in 1917, before Heidegger, this vocabulary was in the air – partly from Hegel, partly from expressionism and the culture of critique, etc. ‘The people do not want to acknowledge [wahrhaben] the moment, because if the moment becomes true for them, Being must be disturbed: it wants to have its ‘peace’, wants the same course of the familiar and the pleasure-borne work in its everyday, its self-satisfaction in the mirror of its holidays, its self-celebration and its vows. The people do not want war. The state does.”

Now comes a curious twist. If the state is lead by people who identify with the people, why would it want what the people don’t want? The twist is overcome here by the transition from Being to Da-sein by way of consciousness. The state, then, makes the people conscious.

Rosenzweig puts this in terms of the word – the state gives the people, or makes the people, conscious of the word. Historically, the state takes on the task of educating the population. The moment, the contemporary, the new, only emerges as a force in an educated population. Underneath that seemingly progressive goal is another one: to get the people to want War.

Just as in the unconscious, everything is desire, so to in the consciousness of the state, everything is war.  “Even peaceful acts are painted in the image of struggle, of conflict, and the equaling out of conflicted strivings, of blow and counter-blow, of the insistent and the resistant, of act and pay-back. It is with such eyes that the statesman views the stockpiling of world-historical tensions.”

So the world looked in 1917. But if the world looks like this, the statesman and the state have a big problem. How to end a war? For the end of the war sees the reversal of the leader of the state and the people. The people now demand the word, they have seized the word, they will have their say.

Thus, the dive. Having dived into the war, the state must come back to the surface. But this is a tricky business.

To my mind, Rosenzweig’s essay, here, goes off the tracks into, as I said above, a proto-Spenglerian look at the powers at war. What is lacking, here, is the conscience. Rosenzweig has viewed the question of democracy through the question of war, but his very terms have disallowed the leap to the other level, which is the question of peace – the question, that is, of conscience. For consciousness of the actual, of the moment, must come, if there is to be peace, if ethics is indeed possible, with the formation of conscience – with the Gewissensfrage which is never put.