Introduction for Nocturnal Seeing

INTRODUCTION

Together Apart

Melancholia and the Solitude of Philosophic Meditation

I am light; oh that I were night! But this is my loneliness, that I am girded by light.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The mystery of pain remains veiled.

—Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?”

In this monograph, I will investigate the theme of philosophical gnosis in the writings of Susan Taubes (1928–1969), Gillian Rose (1947–1995), and Edith Wyschogrod (1930–2009). To the best of my knowledge, this is the first scholarly analysis that triangulates these individuals. Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me state unequivocally at the outset that the methodology I employ in the following pages should not be construed as a comparative analysis of these three extraordinary Jewish philosophers. It is rather a juxtaposition of their thought in an effort to provide a medium through which to scrutinize the interplay of ethics, politics, and theology. Beyond the detailed examination of the literary corpora of these figures, a main objective of this book is to offer a platform to contemplate a host of theoretical issues that still have pressing practical relevance in today’s perilously divisive environment, a milieu threatened, as it is, by the disintegration of claims to truth and the consequent collapse of the integrity and rectitude indispensable to securing the interdependence of individual and community.

All too often, as we have seen in public debate and various forms of social media, frequently cloaked under the cover of anonymity or pseudonymity, the deterioration of political discourse has brought about the dissolution of the inexorable need of the self to respond empathetically to the other and the collateral devolution of civility into reckless violence in word and in deed. Additionally, from an ecological perspective, the disregard of the nonhuman other is epitomized in the exploitation of natural resources that has led to the increasingly ominous premonition that our time is one in which time is running out. The indisputable decline in the ecosystem has triggered the trepidation that we are living not only in anticipation of but already in confrontation with a future when humans may be without the universe we presently inhabit and the universe may be without humans as we are currently constituted.¹ To make matters worse, the process of dehumanization has been exponentially augmented by the bifurcation of human intelligence and artificial intelligence even though the latter is patently the technological invention of the former.²

The bond that ties together the diverse and multifaceted worldviews promulgated by Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod is the mutual recognition of the need to enunciate a philosophical response to the calamities of the twentieth century, a response rendered all the more urgent by the vexing fact that in the twenty-first century, an age that extols difference and tolerance, invariably there is a difference that is tolerated only as intolerable, reinforced by an obsession with heterodox diversity that has menacingly evolved into an orthodox uniformity and an allegiance to liberalism that has too often fostered an illiberalism to dissenting voices. The complex musings of the women discussed in this book steadfastly resist simplification and popularization, but it is nonetheless striking that their respective philosophies have the potential to enhance our moral sensitivity in the present and to encourage participation in the ongoing struggle for meaning and decency, alerting us to the hazard of the homogeneous commitment to a heterogeneity that engenders the marginalization of anyone who stubbornly defies integration into the body that professes to exclude none but those who do not wish to be included. Moreover, in the writings of these philosophers, one can unearth an incontrovertible acknowledgment of the decadence and malevolence of human beings, without, however, succumbing to acrimony and disconsolateness.

Although the theorizing of each of these philosophers on melancholia and the tragicomedy of being is unquestionably intricate—exhibiting a plethora of nuances, subtle variations, and idiosyncrasies—we can identify a common denominator in their attempt to find the midpoint positioned between hope and hopelessness. In this regard, Taubes and Wyschogrod would have surely been sympathetic to Rose’s surmise in Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life, the riveting account of her fatal illness, that the only viable counsel against sorrow is buttressed by Staretz Silouan’s maxim “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.”³ Ironically, to keep the mind out of hell, one must keep the mind in hell. Not only is success in life to be gauged by failure, but disappointment is the catalyst that exhorts one to forgive both oneself and the other in an endless cycle of reprimand and exoneration. In a religious register, as Julia Kristeva has suggested, the aforecited axiom points to the experience of metanoia, the process of “deep transformation,” “change of spirit,” or “repentance,” a descent into the “memory of death,” which has been compared to depressive acts related to the existentialist experience of the absurd that pervades Sartre’s Nausea.⁴ The characterization of the turning of intellect or heart to repent, which perforce is instigated by an awareness of the downfall of the spirit separated from God, goes well with Rose’s evocation of the proverb of Silouan the Athonite to explain the acceptance of suffering as integral to happiness. Estrangement not only procures the possibility of reconciliation, but it is the mandatory first step in the process.

The speculative wisdom appropriated by Rose, and which I am applying to Taubes and Wyschogrod, pragmatically requires occupying the chiasm between the hope of hopelessness and the hopelessness of hope. The acquiescence that such an occupation necessitates is to be differentiated both from Thucydides’s renowned declaration about the incurable human propensity for hope that unvaryingly ends in disaster and ruin,⁵ and from the acerbic resignation that life is not worth living, as we find in Schopenhauer’s conjecture that the human will is an aimless striving that can never be wholly satisfied, and therefore existence is an unfaltering cause of torment from which there is no emancipation.⁶ Notwithstanding Taubes’s eventual suicide—and the understandable inference that she finally succumbed to the judgment that the horrors of life outweigh the horrors of death, as Schopenhauer opined on an individual’s decision to opt for self-destruction⁷—we should not lose sight of her impassioned proclamation that what is wrong with our existence is at once what is most precious:⁸ a philosophical adage that provides the psychological antidote to the renunciation of despondency by endorsing a tragic optimism,⁹ or perhaps what might be referred to as an optimistic pessimism that is concurrently a pessimistic optimism.¹⁰ Empathizing with the suffering that her psychoanalyst father, Sándor Feldman, bore in the world, Taubes granted that “human passions are dark dark things,”¹¹ but in the end, to paraphrase a passage from Lament for Julia, one must ride both horses: the tragic and the comic.¹²

The shared agenda to face the inevitability of misfortune and to eschew promoting the cultivation of eunoia was inspired by the exigencies of the historical moment in which the three thinkers discussed in this book lived and philosophized, the second half of the twentieth century, a moment that called for reaction to the nihilism that arose in the aftermath of the cataclysm of the Holocaust, the actual deployment and continued menace of nuclear power, the lingering dominance of totalitarian ideologies, and the escalating suppression of human liberties. In one way or another, Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod conceived of their philosophical undertaking in light of Nietzsche’s utilization in Human, All Too Human of the expression times of darkness (Dunkel-Zeiten) to name the situation of “all thinkers for whom the sun of humanity’s future has for a time disappeared.”¹³ If we attend carefully to these words, we can infer that the mission summoned by such times to counterbalance the darkness is not to dispel the clouds blocking the sunlight but to peer through the obstructions so that the disappearance disappears in the dissipation of its disappearance.

Despite the many differences that distinguish these three figures, they exemplify the larger point that the philosophical sensibility is informed by a nocturnal seeing, which is not merely a seeing in the night—an act of visualization associated with dreams¹⁴—but rather a seeing of the night. But how does one see the night? Can one envision darkness as one would envision light? The task, I propose, implies the ability to fathom the unfathomable as the epistemic sine qua non of what is fathomable, to sense the sensation of limit at the limit of sensation. Alternatively, to use the language of Derrida, we can say that the philosophical ponderings of Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod were anchored in perceiving the nocturnal luminosity as the “originary light, the very invisibility of visibility.”¹⁵ The seeing of this light, which divulges the nature of nocturnality—the nonphenomenal that makes all phenomena visible by eluding visibility, the supplement that “introduces the incalculable at the heart of the calculable”¹⁶—can be viewed as a protracted critical engagement with Heidegger’s supposition that history is a fallacy that of necessity emerges from the forgetfulness of being, an obliviousness that is not provoked by human negligence but belongs rather to the essential destiny of being that is concealed in the very beings in which it is revealed.¹⁷ Departing from Heidegger, as we may adduce from the three philosophers discussed in this book, it is not remembering the forgetfulness of being that is crucial to extracting significance from history, but rather commemorating the beings who have been forgotten and thereby bestowing a voice on those who have been silenced. The rejoinder to Heidegger is connected to what I have called nocturnal seeing, which, in contrast to the oxymoron “darkness visible”—Milton’s celebrated depiction in the first book of Paradise Lost of the flames emitted by the furnace of hell¹⁸—is a mode of being that champions the possibility of hope in the face of an unassailable hopelessness, a beam of light that permeates the murkiness of human existence, without, however, appealing to the nostalgia for origins and the purity of self-presence or to the affirmation of the play of becoming and the world of signs entangled in a web of interpretation that has no recourse to definitive truth,¹⁹ no unmasking that does not unmask another mask to be unmasked.²⁰

Here it is apropos to recall Foucault’s comment on Nietzsche’s condemnation of the philosophical search for the paradigmatic depth of truth. The hermeneutical act may seem like a descent to excavate an interiority of meaning buried in the covering of a “glittering exteriority,” but “the movement of interpretation is, on the contrary, that of a projection [surplomb], of a more and more elevated projection, which always leaves depth above it to be displayed in a more and more visible fashion; and depth is now restored as an absolutely superficial secret.”²¹ The verticality of the ascent is verily a plummeting to the discovery that depth is “only a game and a surface fold. To the extent that the world becomes deeper under our gaze, we perceive that everything which elicited man’s depth was only child’s play.”²² The infinite task of interpretation, which is propelled by the discernment that beneath the surface there is only more surface, delineates the experience that Foucault considered critical to modern hermeneutics:

The farther one goes in interpretation, the closer one comes at the same time to an absolutely dangerous region where interpretation not only will find its point of return but where it will disappear as interpretation, perhaps involving the disappearance of the interpreter himself. The existence that always approached the absolute point of interpretation would be at the same time that of a point of rupture. . . . What is in question in the point of rupture of interpretation, in this convergence of interpretation on a point that renders it impossible, could well be something like the experience of madness. . . . This experience of madness would be the sanction of a movement of interpretation that approaches its center at infinity and that collapses, charred.²³

The nocturnal seeing of which I speak is to be sought exactly at this spot of madness where the absolute point of interpretation intersects with the point of the rupture of interpretation, and hence the interpretation of the interpretive gesture is indexical of the very impossibility of interpretation that makes interpretation possible.

The analyses of Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod that I offer in this book will shed light on the mandate to see darkness elucidated continuously by its own obscuration. For Taubes, night vision facilitates the wisdom to detect that perfection rests on the ability to accept imperfection unqualifyingly. The most suitable means to express this perspicacity is through the cessation of speech, albeit a cessation that is effectuated by speech attaining its own limit, as we find quintessentially in works of poetry. For Rose, the beholding of darkness entails positing an ecclesiological love situated in the broken middle between a radical universalism that effaces the particular and a radical particularism that effaces the universal. The antiutopian spirit of this middle is marked by the infiltration of the singular that mitigates against the setting in opposition of the law of the collective and the ethics of the individual. For Wyschogrod, cognizance of the gloomy depravity of the past prompts a reply that is principally ethical in nature, a form of witnessing on behalf of the deceased. Although everyone has a share in bearing witness, it is especially the responsibility of the historian to bestow a name on those who would otherwise have remained nameless and to speak of the inherently unspeakable atrocities.

Relatedly, a central concern of Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod—each from her own perspective—is an evaluation of the challenge that Gnosticism as world-denial presents to postmodern philosophy in its assessment of the relation of law and ethics in the sociopolitical domain, the respective merit assigned to truth and untruth in theopolitical discourse, and the viability of a secular religion centered on a radical sense of finitude and the rejection of a transcendence traditionally conceived as an eternality outside time. All three thinkers acknowledged that thinking in the time of darkness demands rejecting the misguided endeavor to envisage the fractured world as an undivided whole. The bolder and undoubtedly more risky response is to concede that there is no wholeness of which to speak but in the breach of the disjointed aggregate. The onus, then, is to accept the inchoate nature of the completeness of the incompleteness that inscribes the bookends of every individual’s lifetime. A final obliteration of suffering is not possible as it would occasion the eradication of the ontogenetic pattern of gestation and corruption to which every sentient organism is subject. To be healed, accordingly, the brokenness must be broken, but the brokenness cannot be broken except by allowing the brokenness to be unbroken. We are impelled to arrogate the perfection of the imperfection that is part and parcel of the imperfection of the perfection of our indubitably flawed deportment in an impoverished world. As Nietzsche sagaciously mused, “What ultimately are the truths of humanity?—They are the irrefutable errors of humanity.”²⁴

The trialogue between Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod serves as a prelude to the concluding chapter, which casts their cogitations on the shattered nature of the world and the inescapable deferment of an eschatological future in the larger context of the melancholic jouissance and the diremptive temporality of Jewish messianism. The assiduous waiting for a redeemer who is coming has yielded historically the impasse of waiting for a redeemer who can come only by not coming. Translated phenomenologically, the belief in a future that is always to be realized is equivalent to the lack of belief in a future that can ever be realized. The collocation of belief and unbelief is emblematic of the composition of melancholia in which the expectation of the future is foiled repeatedly by the apprehension that the future is the duplication of the past. More broadly, we can speak of Jewish messianic speculation as proffering the elemental conception of the cadence of every moment of time as the reiteration of the novel or the replication of the disparate, the tomorrow that is presumptively today because today is proleptically tomorrow. Apocalyptic hope resides in the interval between no longer and not yet, the temporal location subject to the constant unsettling of the linear alignment of past, present, and future, and the possibility of one modality being transposed into another.²⁵ In spite of the disillusionment that might arise from the apparently permanent postponement of the materialization of the soteriological promise in history, its melancholic nature signifies the surplus of time that surmounts the foreboding linked to our finitude and the ubiquitous fear of the fragmentariness to which we all unavoidably capitulate. From the vantage point of this temporal deficiency, death itself is apprehended as the expiration that cannot expire whence we further extrapolate that life is the brokenness of the broken middle that cannot be mended and endure as the bearer of the existence whose contingency is necessarily dependent on that brokenness remaining intact.

Many have opined on the nexus between the philosophical disposition and the psychological-emotional condition of melancholia.²⁶ Needless to say, melancholy, as any and every form of malaise, cannot be abstracted from the language in which it is expressed, a language that is embedded in historically and culturally specific ways of understanding and interpreting human experience. Hence, what may appear as immediacy is in fact rhetorical construction.²⁷ It is likely that this is the intent of Walter Benjamin’s quip, “On the melancholic’s Via Dolorosa, allegories are the stations.”²⁸ I accept the legitimacy of this hermeneutical truism, but I still accord validity to the hypothetical appraisal of the melancholic nature of philosophic reflection and the philosophic nature of melancholic rumination. Tellingly, in a letter dated May 27, 1810, to Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann, Hegel confessed to having suffered from a “hypochondria,” which he further described as the nocturnal point of the contraction of one’s essence.²⁹ The two characteristics mentioned by Hegel—nocturnality and contraction—are worthy of further consideration. Melancholia belongs essentially to the dim-sightedness we associate with nighttime and the constriction of breath that calls to mind the disquiet related to the sensation—whether imagined or real—of being in a state of danger and vulnerability. But what can these qualities tell us about the vocation of the philosopher? One would assume that the lover of wisdom more typically seeks illumination and amplification of spirit, the antitheses of the properties noted by Hegel. Upon closer inspection, however, one could argue that the attainment of these qualities is only possible from experiencing their opposite. From darkness one sees light, from constraint one feels expansiveness.

The ostensible banality of this platitude can be deceiving. If the reader decodes the directive to see darkness from light and to feel expansiveness from constraint in a rectilinear progression such that one thing unilaterally replaces its opposite, the cogency of the message I am trying to communicate is obfuscated. The affliction of melancholia should be compared figuratively to the crossing of a threshold, a crossing that dictates that passing from one side to the other transpires in such a manner that the side wherefrom the peripatetic has passed cannot be totally obliterated but rather must be persistently recrossed. The threshold, on this score, is the magical locus³⁰ where opposites converge in their divergence and diverge in their convergence. The movement of crossing, therefore, is predicated on the seemingly illogical assumption that a thing both is and is not its opposite. The coalescence of opposites should not be understood dialectically but rather dialetheically. That is, the sameness of the antinomies consists of the preservation of their difference as opposed to the sublation of that difference in the identity of identity and nonidentity. Opposites are the same in the opposition of their sameness, and hence α and ¬α are discriminated with reference to the same α only insofar as they are distinguished in their indistinguishability.

Melancholia has been classified as “a deviance from the ideal of a homeostatic balance of humors in the body.”³¹ This may very well be the case but perhaps, when specularized through the philosophical prism, the inability to sustain an internal stability while adjusting to changing external circumstances should be related to the fact that the melancholic temperament induces a repudiation of the law of noncontradiction and thereby reclaims the middle excluded by the logic of the excluded middle wherein opposites are identical in the identity of their opposition. This way of experiencing the world gives way to an irresolvable contradiction as any statement of truth doggedly presumes the paradoxical form α and ¬α, which translates into the disjunctive syllogism “if it is the case that α, then it is not the case that α,” a direct reproach of the more prevalent logic that for every proposition either α or ¬α is true, but both cannot be true at the same time and in the same relation. The standard logic persists as the primary way we structure our empirical reality as it readily accommodates a sense of stability and order and allows for the postulating of the laws of physics that impose a degree of predictability on the unpredictable and enable the determination of the indeterminate and the quantification of the unquantifiable. To deny the rudimentary principle of identity—α is α and not ¬α—is demonstrably disorienting and destabilizing. And yet, one afflicted with melancholia is acclimated precisely to the impediment implied in the belief that a statement can be simultaneously true and untrue.

The assault on a binary logic seems apposite to the physiological dearth of homeostasis in one diagnosed with melancholia and the psychological oscillation that leads to the blurring of the distinction between joy and grief, elation and dejection. And here it is pertinent to recall that in the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, we are told that the fluctuation of moods associated with the melancholic humor—the black bile present in human beings—is a mixture of heat and cold: when the cold predominates, one is dull and stupid, but when the heat predominates, one is frenzied and clever, erotic and easily moved to anger and desire, and in some cases more loquacious.³² The two ingredients of the mixture are separate, and hence the element of the black bile that is in the more extreme state prevails. Prima facie, it appears that no middle is established as an alternative to the extremes.³³ However, the vacillation from one state to its opposite must be logically grounded in the positing of an intermediate where there is a conjunction of heat and cold. Indeed, the text explicitly asserts that the black bile becomes both very hot and very cold because “the same thing naturally admits both heat and cold, like water, which, though cold, yet when it is sufficiently heated (for example, when it boils) is hotter than the actual flame which heats it, and similarly a stone or a piece of iron when thoroughly heated becomes hotter than charcoal, though they are naturally cold.”³⁴ The melancholic condition is marked by this coincidence. To borrow the locution of Kristeva, melancholy is a mood disorder of extreme sadness described as the black sun,³⁵ an image that conveys metaphorically the regulating principle of the mesótēs, the middle of “the controlled interaction of opposites.”³⁶ In this concurrence, dimness does not eclipse but rather illumines the radiance more brightly. Analogously, the philosopher—in kinship to the poet³⁷—discerns darkness coiled in light and munificence enfolded in compression.

The attentiveness to the underlying unity of opposites may explain the connection between the atrabilious persona and individuals eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts that are attested in the Problemata,³⁸ an idea reiterated in a variety of ways in the course of subsequent centuries including notably in the Renaissance philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, who highlighted the propensity of learned people to be driven by the bad effects of black bile to depression and folly.³⁹ Related to this motif is the delineation of the melancholic proclivity as exemplary of lucid thinking. It is worth recalling the comment made by Freud in his study “Mourning and Melancholia,” completed on May 4, 1915, but not published until 1917:

He also seems to us justified in certain other self-accusations; it is merely that he has a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic. When in his heightened self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to his understanding himself; we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind.⁴⁰

I would add to the Freudian insight that the keener eye of the melancholic is sensitized to the gnostic myth of the fallen self who experiences truth as a dark light that cannot be extricated from untruth. Thus, commenting on Heidegger’s notion of the ontological difference, rendered as the oblivion of being is oblivion to the difference between being and the being, Taubes wrote:

Because the self is lost to the world and has forgotten that it belongs to Being, forgotten the difference between the world and Being, the self is in error. Since the self is essentially fallen prey to the world (wesenhaft verfallend), the self is in untruth. The untruth is the veiling of the Being. This cover is not only a darkness; it has its own light, its own presence, a “dark” light, as the gnostic myth would say.⁴¹

It is incumbent to stress, however, that the correlativity of truth and untruth is to be differentiated from the cynical view that there is no truth or that all truths amount to a lie. The astuteness germane to melancholia is the upholding of the premise that truth can only be disclosed through the veil of untruth and untruth through the veil of truth. The melancholic dispenses with the fiction that there can be naked truth divested of every garment, that it is possible to behold the face without any mask. Even more profound is the apperception that there is no face that is not itself a mask of the face, the upshot of which may be the acute sense of being cut off from life in its quotidian minutiae.⁴² The appearance of truth is naught but the truth of appearance, which is to say, the illusion of reality debunked as the reality of illusion. Insofar as the distortion of truth is constituent of the truth, there can be no truth that is not itself grounded in the truth of distortion.⁴³ To maintain the truthfulness of there being no truth that is not concomitantly untruth is certainly prone to render problematic the more conventional forms of societal commerce and may even guide us to the point of translucence wherein the distinction between sanity and insanity is indefensible on phenomenological grounds.⁴⁴

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that loneliness and introversion have been long identified as clinical indicators of those afflicted with melancholy. As Jung succinctly noted, “Melancholics sink down into a sort of embryonic condition, therefore you find that accumulation of peculiar physical symptoms.”⁴⁵ While the philosopher may not suffer the same physical agony, on the emotional scale the life of contemplation warrants a comparable severance from intersocial affairs. One is reminded of the passage in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

“Where is—my home?” I asked, and I search and searched for it, but I have not found it. Oh eternal everywhere, oh eternal nowhere, oh eternal—in vain!⁴⁶

For the thinker, the homecoming (Heimkehr) is a return to the home that is one’s solitude (Du meine Heimat Einsamkeit), a home that beckons a sense of forsakenness and homelessness in the world.⁴⁷ The melancholic nature of the solitude of the philosopher was developed further by Heidegger. In the lecture course “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” given at the University of Freiburg in the winter semester of 1929–1930, building on Novalis’s dictum “Philosophy is really a homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere [Die Philosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh, ein Trieb über-all zu Hause zu sein],”⁴⁸ Heidegger set out to explicate how homesickness is the fundamental attunement (Grundstimmung) of philosophizing through which we can expound the questions concerning world, finitude, and individuation, which taken together circumscribe the metaphysical dilemma of human existence, that is, the fundamental predicament that defines being human.⁴⁹ Commenting on the aforementioned definition of Novalis, Heidegger wrote:

Philosophy can only be such an urge if we who philosophize are not at home everywhere [wenn wir, die philosophieren, überall nicht zu Hause sind]. . . . To be at home everywhere—what does that mean? Not merely here or there, nor even simply in every place, in all places taken together one after the other. Rather, to be at home everywhere means to be at once and at all times within the whole [im Ganzen sein]. We name this “within the whole” [“im Ganzen”] and its character of wholeness the world. We are, and to the extent that we are, we are always waiting for something. We are always called upon by something as whole. This “as a whole” is the world. . . . What is that—world? This is where we are driven [getrieben] in our homesickness: to being as a whole. Our very being is this restlessness [Getriebenheit].⁵⁰

From Novalis Heidegger found confirmation of the idea that the philosophical comportment—whence he deduced the more general status of humankind—is one of congenital restlessness. The philosopher is perpetually adrift, and hence the urge to be at home everywhere results from the fact that he, she, or they is at home nowhere. Heidegger adds that to be at home everywhere would mean to be within the whole, which is to say, the world. However, since to be human is to be in a never-ending condition of longing, to be as a whole is experienced as the melancholic nostalgia to return home.⁵¹

We are driven to the world as an imaginary confabulation of wholeness, but this only underscores the insufficiency of our being, what Heidegger called in Being and Time the fundamental mood (Grundbefindlichkeit) of anxiety (Angst) that leaves one disoriented as the tranquility and self-assurance of “being-at-home” (Zuhause-sein) in the everyday world slip away and one enters the existential “uncanniness” (Unheimlichkeit), the sense of “not-being-at-home” (Nicht-zuhause-sein), an ontological conditionality in which the familiar unfailingly is experienced as unfamiliar.⁵² The nature of human finitude (Endlichkeit) is not solely that we perish, that we come to an end, which is the fate of everything that is alive, but rather that we are incessantly underway (Unterwegs) or in transition (Übergang) such that we are continually “neither the one nor the other,” relentlessly wavering to and fro. This unrest of the not (Unruhe des Nicht) is our fundamental way of being (die Grundart unseres Seins), that is, the uncertainty that marks our innermost way of “being finite” (Verendlichung). In becoming finite, there occurs the individuation (Vereinzelung) of Dasein, the solitariness (Vereinsamung) through which each human being “enters into a nearness to what is essential in all things, a nearness to world.”⁵³

Novalis’s description of the urge to be at home everywhere signals the method of comprehension (Begreifen) by which we are gripped (ergriffen) in the attunement (Stimmung) that is the ground of Dasein. Philosophy happens in the space of this fundamental attunement.⁵⁴ Heidegger thus referred to philosophizing as the “ultimate pronouncement” in which the human being is “individuated” in relation to Dasein, a process that must be carried out in solitude in contrast to the teacher who seeks to address the masses and thus runs around “in the marketplace as a professor in public.”⁵⁵ From the exceptional calling of the philosopher we learn about humanity more generally. The homesickness, the being-lonely, reveals our sense of uniqueness, the solitude of our finitude, which sheds light as well on the nature of the world whose poverty and deprivation—when viewed from the human perspective—even “belongs to the animal’s being” such that pain and suffering “permeate the whole animal realm and the realm of life in general.”⁵⁶ Consistent with Heidegger’s earlier analysis of Dasein in Being and Time, the authenticity of being human is related to the submission to one’s mortality, the being-toward-death, but in this later account what is accentuated is that through finitude we draw closer to the world.

Assuredly, the individuation of self by which every human being can be considered unique (Einziger) is accomplished in solitude (Einsamkeit), for, as the poet William Cowper incisively put it, “We perish’d, each alone.”⁵⁷ However, as Heidegger recurrently emphasized, solitude is the means by which commonality (Gemeinsamkeit) can be achieved. Thus, touching on this theme in his notebooks, Heidegger wrote, “Only if and only as long as this originary aloneness [Alleinheit] of Dasein is experienced can true community [Gemeinschaft] grow indigenously; only thus is to be overcome all publicness of those who have come together and are driven together.”⁵⁸ Or, as he put it another passage, “The meeting of the solitary ones [Einsamen] can happen only in solitude.”⁵⁹ There is no question that Heidegger was committed to the conviction that “the highest discipline of knowledge-stimulated questioning” commands a great measure of sequestration,⁶⁰ and thus he recommended that when thinking and the act of meditation fall into the superficiality of the everyday, it is necessary for recollection to come as a call “by which the thoughtful mode of Dasein is withdrawn into the most extreme solitude.”⁶¹ Nevertheless, the withdrawal ultimately is for the purpose of inaugurating the “site of the opening up and founding of being [die Stätte des stiftenden Eröffnens des Seins] and thereby also of the ground of the creative affiliation [des Grundes der schaffenden Zugehörigkeit].”⁶²

The criticism of Heidegger leveled by Susan Taubes—in a way anticipating the reprimand of Levinas—that he treated the self in isolation without realizing that the topics essential to his analysis of the human being, such as language, freedom, guilt, and dread, are all categories of the community that describe relations to others⁶³ is itself subject to critique. Taubes’s rebuke of Heidegger turns on his argument that the individualizing nature of death discloses that the own-most possibility of Dasein is nonrelational (unbezügliche).⁶⁴ Despite the veracity of this claim, I submit that Taubes downplayed Heidegger’s notion of being-with (Mitsein): that is, the existential structure that undergirds the capacity for relationality in his understanding of the selfhood of Dasein as the subject of everydayness (Alltäglichkeit), the “they” of das Man, which is equiprimordial with being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) that is shaped ineludibly by being with other Daseins (Mitdasein).⁶⁵

Given the tendency to misread Heidegger on this decisive point, it is worth paying attention to his precise language in Being and Time:

The Dasein-with of others is disclosed only within the world, and so too for beings who are Daseins with us, because Dasein in itself is essentially being-with. The phenomenological statement that Dasein is essentially being-with has an existential-ontological meaning. It does not intend to ascertain ontically that I am factically not objectively present alone, rather that others of my kind also are [vorkommen]. If the statement that the being-in-the-world of Dasein is essentially constituted by being-with meant something like this, being-with would not be an existential attribute that belongs to Dasein of itself on the basis of its kind of being, but something which occurs at times on the basis of the existence of others. Being-with existentially determines Dasein even when an other is not factically present and perceived. The being-alone [Alleinsein] of Dasein, too, is being-with in the world. The other can be lacking only in and for a being-with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with, its possibility is a proof of the latter.⁶⁶

The discerning ear will hear in the assertion that Dasein-with is existentially constitutive for being-in-the-world, and thus the essential structure of being-with must be construed as an attribute of one’s own Dasein⁶⁷—encapsulated in the statement “The being-alone of Dasein, too, is being-with in the world” (Auch das Alleinsein des Daseins ist Mitsein in der Welt)—a foreshadowing of the idea later expressed by Heidegger that the sense of aloneness is rooted in the belief that an authentic community can only be formed on the basis of individuals resolutely fixated on their inimitable individuality. We might even go so far as to say that the Heideggerian ideas of uniqueness (Einmaligkeit) and singularity (Einzigkeit)—two terms that he often juxtaposed to demarcate the nonrepeatable univocity of being⁶⁸—are expressive of an ontological pluralism;⁶⁹ this is not to be understood in the traditional metaphysical sense of imagining one reality that can appear in multiple guises but rather in the decidedly nonmetaphysical sense of presuming that the one is intrinsically not one inasmuch as it is configured by the polyontological difference⁷⁰ of an infinitely systemic nondifferentiation that undulates between an absolute minimum of everything dissimilar by virtue of being similar and an absolute maximum of everything similar by virtue of being dissimilar.⁷¹ Be that as it may, the charge for the “creative ones” (Schaffenden) to abandon metaphysics and to arrive at beings out of the truth of beyng, or to bring beings into arrival out of that truth, can only take place in solitude,⁷² but the recoil of thinking is the thread from which the web of interconnectivity is woven. The desolation of solitude, consequently, is the womb that harbors the possibility of meaningful belonging-together (Zugehörigkeit). Heidegger’s position strikes me as parallel to what Hegel expressed in a letter to Christian Gotthold Zellman written on January 23, 1807: “philosophy has something solitary about it. It does not, to be sure, belong in alleys and marketplaces, but neither is it held aloof from the activity of men, from that in which they place their interest, nor from the [sort of] knowing to which they attach their vanity.”⁷³ Philosophical meditation requires retreat from society not because it is detached from social concerns but because those concerns are best served by seclusion.

The desynchronizing capability of depression aligns itself with the philosopher’s involvement with the natural world through the endless resolve of questioning its intelligibility. Philosophical inquiry is fueled by a skepticism that is tied to the obdurateness of our mortality and the heightened sense that the only intransient dimension of time is its transience. In the notorious words that Plato ascribed to Socrates, “true philosophers make dying their profession,” and thus, since they have trained themselves throughout their lives to live in a state as close as possible to death, “to them of all men death is least alarming.”⁷⁴ Death is not the mystery of the eventual inability to be but rather the aporia of the irrevocable ability to be. But how is the impossibility of the possible not impossible in light of the possibility of the impossible? At the core of these reflections is a thinking about time that seems to mark the distinctiveness of the human being on this planet. Obviously, the ravages of time affect every living entity, and thus it would be foolhardy to adopt an overtly anthropocentric view. And yet, the compulsion to impose a narrative framework on our temporal experience and the unremitting awareness of the looming demise do impart something unique about our species. Undeniably, we pass away like all other finite creatures, but the occurrence of the nonoccurrence of death is fundamentally different for human beings. The lifespan of each person is recounted from the perspective of an interminable termination—from the beginning we are moving toward the end, the moment of generation comprises the kernel of degeneration, and hence, as Hegel observed, the hour of birth is the hour of death.⁷⁵

Paradoxically, a corollary of the permanent impermanence of our contingent existence, and the attendant realization that depreciation is not antithetical to but is rather an integral component of maturation, is that the prospect of dying does not die. The evanescence of time evinces phenomenological affinity with the melancholic susceptibility to suffer intensely the autumnal nature of the ephemerality of being and to abide fervently in the sadness that proceeds from the anguish of yearning for the presence of an absence that has never been present and thus can only be represented as nonrepresentable. The luminal bleakness of the philosophical penchant for a hermeneutics of suspicion—the duplicitous ambiguity “always suspended between an excess and a deficiency of interpretation”⁷⁶—can be delineated, to invoke Derrida once more,⁷⁷ as the form of play that disrupts presence insofar as it exists before the alternative of presence and absence, the joyful avowal of an engrained joylessness that determines the noncenter otherwise than as the loss of the center, the unveiling of nothing that reveals there is nothing to reveal. It is in this sense that the veil of night becomes, in the words of Novalis, “the mighty womb of revelations.”⁷⁸

Notes

1. See Julia Grillmayr and Christine Hentschel, “World Without Humans, Humans Without World: Apocalyptic Passions in the Anthropocene,” in Worlds Ending, Ending Worlds: Understanding Apocalyptic Transformation, edited by Jenny Stümer, Michael Dunn, and David Eisler (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2024), pp. 209–225.

2. See the comment of Wittgenstein cited in ch. 3 n. 76.

3. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life, introduction by Michael Wood (New York: New York Review of Books, 2011), p. 105. See ch. 2 at n. 126, and compare Einat Avrahami, “‘Keep Your Mind in Hell and Despair Not’: Illness as Life Affair in Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work,” Narrative 9 (2001): 305–321.

4. Julia Kristeva, Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death or Language Haunted by Sex, translated by Armine Kotin Mortimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024), pp. 189–190. The maxim of Staretz Silouan, rendered here as “Keep your wits in hell and do not despair,” is cited without attribution. Kristeva mentions parenthetically Olivier Clément, evidently alluding to the references to metanoia in Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Text and Commentary, translated by Theodore Berkeley and Jeremy Hummerstone (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995), pp. 16, 126–127, 155, 339, 354. For discussion of the role of metanoia in Clément’s religious journey and philosophy of personal transcendence, see Stefanie Hugh-Donovan, “Olivier Clément: French Thinker and Theologian of the Eastern Orthodox Church in Dialogue with Western Catholic Thought on Ecclesiology, Theology and the Identity of Europe,” PhD dissertation, Heythrop College, University of London, 2015, pp. 34, 38, 114, 203, 205, 211, 232, 234. Finally, it is noteworthy that Clément’s spiritual mentor was Father Sophrony, a monk who eventually settled in the Monastery of Saint Panteleimon in Mount Athos where he became a disciple of Staretz Silouan.

5. See Joel Alden Schlosser, “‘Hope, Danger’s Comforter’: Thucydides, Hope, Politics,” Journal of Politics 75 (2013): 169–182; Natalia Tsoumpra, “The Politics of Hopelessness: Thucydides and Aristophanes’ Knights,” in Hope in Ancient Literature, History, and Art, edited by George Kazantzidis and Dimos Spatharas (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2018), pp. 111–129.

6. See Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, vol. 2, translated and edited by Adrian del Caro and Christopher Janaway, with an introduction by Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 262:

If suffering is not the closest and most immediate goal of our life, then our existence is the most inexpedient thing in the world. For it is absurd to assume that endless pain, which springs from the distress that is essential to life and of which the world is everywhere full, should be pointless and purely accidental. Our sensitivity for pain is almost infinite, while that for pleasure has narrow limits. Each individual misfortune appears to be an exception, to be sure, but misfortune is the rule.

For discussion of pessimism in the Zeitgeist of German thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Andrew Cooper, The Tragedy of Philosophy: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Project of Aesthetics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016); Frederick C. Beiser, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 1–12; idem, “Schiller and Pessimism,” in Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Friedrich Schiller and Philosophy, edited by María del Rosario Acosta Lόpez and Jeffrey L. Powell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), pp. 83–97. Both Cooper, Tragedy (pp. 136–140, 145–148, 151, 154–155), and Beiser, Weltschmerz (pp. 13–66), discuss the legacy of Schopenhauer as it pertains to the adoption of a pessimistic worldview and the castigating of any possibility of alleviating misery as nothing but illusion. See also Jordi Fernández, “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2006): 646–694; Dennis Vanden Auweele, The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism (London: Routledge, 2017).

7. Schopenhauer, Parerga, p. 279.

8. Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, edited by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Fink, 2014), §191, p. 123. The full passage is cited in ch. 1 at n. 38. Compare Susan’s comments on suicide cited in ch. 1 at nn. 15, 88, and 201.

9. This is the expression coined by Steven S. Schwarzschild, The Tragedy of Optimism: Writings on Hermann Cohen, edited by George Y. Kohler (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), pp. 102–103, to describe Cohen’s acceptance of the neo-Kantian ethical ideal of regulative progress in spite of acknowledging the irrationality of history and rejecting Hegelian utopianism. Schwarzschild also designated this tragic optimism—or what he calls, following Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher, a pessimism of intellect and an optimism of will—an act of heroism.

10. See Mara van der Lugt, Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), pp. 152, 172–178.

11. Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, edited by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Fink, 2011), §24, p. 71.

12. Susan Taubes, Lament for Julia, introduction by Francesca Wade (New York: New York Review of Books, 2023), p. 13. See Elliot R. Wolfson, The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), pp. 201–202, and compare the additional comments of Susan and the passage of Nietzsche cited on p. 387 n. 84. See the language of Susan regarding her joyous and gloomy moods in a letter to her father cited in ch. 1 n. 184.

13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I–II, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzini Montinari (Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), p. 638; idem, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 358. It is of interest to recall the title of the work by Jacqueline Rose, Women in Dark Times (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), a feminist study that explores the lives of Rosa Luxemburg, Charlotte Salomon, Marilyn Monroe, Shafilea Ahmed, Heshu Yones, Fadime Sahindal, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Yael Bartana, and Thérèse Oulton.

14. This is attested scripturally in Genesis 46:2, Job 33:15, Daniel 2:19, 7:2, and Acts 16:9, 18:9. For the use of this motif in a contemporary work, compare Bert O. States, Seeing in the Dark: Reflections on Dreams and Dreaming (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

15. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, edited and with an introduction by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 55 (emphasis in original).

16. Ibid., p. 100.

17. Although Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod are not discussed in Daniel M. Herskowitz, Heidegger and His Jewish Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), my argument resonates with his hypothesis that the confrontation with Heidegger on the part of Jewish thinkers in the twentieth century was a reaction to two major crises: the breakdown of faith in progress and reason that emerged from the First World War and the catastrophe of the Second World War and the Holocaust. See ibid., p. 291: “From this perspective, the encounter with Heidegger is placed in the context of two major intersections of twentieth-century European and Jewish history—and appropriately so, for he is personally and philosophically tied to both.” My analyses differ from those of Herskowitz, but I concur with this assumption.

18. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited and with notes and introduction by Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), p. 213.

19. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated and with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 292. To be precise, Derrida contrasted two interpretations of interpretation: an ethics of nostalgia for origins associated with Lévi-Stauss and an affirmation of the play of the world associated with Nietzsche.

20. See the discussion of Foucault and Derrida in the section “The Limits of Unmasking” in Maurizio Ferraris, “The Aging of the ‘School of Suspicion,’” in Weak Thought, edited by Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti, translated and with an introduction by Peter Carravetta (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), pp. 140–143.

21. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), p. 273.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., pp. 274–275.

24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröte, Idyllen aus Messina, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), p. 518; idem, The Joyful Science, Idylls from Messina, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Joyful Science (Spring 1881–Summer 1882), translated and with an afterword by Adrian Del Caro (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), p. 160 (emphasis in original).

25. I have benefited from the analysis in Sanem Yazicioğlu, “Identity or Identities? The In-Between of ‘No Longer and Not Yet,’” in Phenomenological Perspectives on Plurality, edited by Gert-Jan van der Heiden (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 75–87.

26. See the discussion of this theme in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy in Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, translated by Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones, with a foreword by Judith N. Shklar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 75–86. Particularly instructive is the wide-ranging analysis of Alina N. Feld, Melancholy and the Otherness of God: A Study of the Hermeneutics of Depression (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011), and the more recent analysis of and challenge to the pessimistic proclivity of philosophers in Brian Treanor, Melancholic Joy: On Life Worth Living (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). See additional sources cited in ch. 4 n. 38.

27. Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 4.

28. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 663; idem, Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, translated by Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 167.

29. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, translated by Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler, with a commentary by Clark Butler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 561, cited in Francesca Brencio, “‘The Nocturnal Point of the Contraction’: Hegel and Melancholia,” in Melancholia: The Disease of the Soul, edited by Dariusz Skórczewski and Andrzej Wierciński (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2014), p. 152.

30. The image was suggested to me by Benjamin’s use of the expression dem Zauber der Schwelle in Das Passagen-Werken. See Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 141. For the English rendering “the magic of the threshold,” see Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 88.

31. Goodstein, Experience, p. 4.

32. Problemata 30.1, 954a1, 12–35, in Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 1500–1501. See William W. Fortenbaugh, “On Problemata 3: Wine-Drinking and Drunkenness,” in The Aristotelian Problemata Physica: Philosophical and Scientific Investigations, edited by Robert Mayhew (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 120; Eckart Schütrumpf, “Black Bile as the Cause of Human Accomplishments and Behaviors in Pr. 30.1: Is the Concept Aristotelian?” op. cit., pp. 362–363.

33. Schütrumpf, “Black Bile,” pp. 367–368.

34. Problemata 30.1, 954a1, 15–20, in Complete Works of Aristotle, p. 1500.

35. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

36. Ibid., p. 7.

37. Compare the view attributed to Baudelaire that melancholy is the source of all sincere poetry cited by Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 315; idem, Arcades Project, p. 243. Also relevant is the comment of Baudelaire in a letter to Jules Janin that melancholy is always inseparable from the feeling for beauty, cited by Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 365; idem, Arcades Project, p. 286. On Baudelaire and melancholy, see Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, pp. 414, 421, 437, 1231, 1232; idem, Arcades Project, pp. 328, 334, 346, 894, 895, 896.

38. Problemata 30.1, 953a1, 10–30, in Complete Works of Aristotle, pp. 1498–1499. See Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 128, 250 n. 104. See also Feld, Melancholy, pp. 7–11; Schütrumpf, “Black Bile,” pp. 364–367; and the more extensive exploration in László F. Földényi, Melancholy = Melankólia, translated by Tim Wilkinson, with a foreword by Alberto Manguel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 7–48. Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 7, surmised that the treatment of melancholia, counterbalanced by genius, in the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata “is coextensive with man’s anxiety in Being,” and it can thus “be seen as the forerunner of Heidegger’s anguish as the Stimmung of thought. Schelling found in it, in similar fashion, the ‘essence of human freedom,’ an indication of ‘man’s affinity with nature.’”

39. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation, introduction and notes by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Tempe: Renaissance Society of America, 1998), pp. 112–123.

40. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14: On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Meta-Psychology and Other Works (1914–1916), translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 246.

41. See Susan Anima Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism,” Journal of Religion 34 (1954): 169–170 (emphasis in original). For previous analysis, see Wolfson, Philosophical Pathos, p. 166. As I noted there, the image of the dark light is also reminiscent of Hölderlin’s memorable catchword das dunkle Licht, which conveys that illumination does not dispel darkness but rather is its innermost inflection, appearing in the nonappearing of appearance, manifesting in the refusal to manifest but as the nonmanifestation. See Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken” [GA 52] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), p. 149; idem, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), p. 127; Wolfson, Philosophical Pathos, pp. 258 and 427 n. 181, where I mentioned the monograph of Herbert Leerink, Das dunkle Licht: Gnosis, Irrsinn und Genialität im Werk Friedrich Hölderlins (Varik: De Betuwsche Morgen, 2019).

42. Carl G. Jung, Psychological Types, a revision by R. F. C. Hull of the translation by H. G. Baynes [CW 6] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 279–280. Perhaps the subversion of the distinction between face and mask underlies Wittgenstein’s aside in Moments of Thought: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Diary, 1930–1932 and 1936–1937, translated by Alfred Nordmann, edited by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordman, with an introduction by Ray Monk (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), p. 47: “And on the whole the theater of masks, as I mean it, is of a spiritualist character. Therefore it is perhaps (also) that only Jews will tend toward this theater.” For the continuation of this passage, see ch. 4 n. 10. Also of relevance is the remark about self-knowledge in Wittgenstein, Moments, p. 50: “When a certain number of veils is left upon me, I still see clearly, namely the veils. But if they are removed so that my gaze could penetrate closer to my self [mein ich], my image begins to blur for me.”

43. My formulation here is indebted to Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), p. 86:

Perhaps this is how one can understand Heidegger’s notion that metaphysics is unable fully to endorse this interplay of truth and the monstrous concealed kernel at its very heart: the ‘illusion’ of metaphysics is that this monstrous foreign body is ultimately accidental, affecting not the truth itself but only our access to it—that is, metaphysics is not ready to admit that our distortion of truth is grounded in an inherent distortion constitutive of the truth itself.

44. Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), p. 64.

45. Carl G. Jung, The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings, translated by R. F. C. Hull [CW 18] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 32.

46. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra I–IV, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), p. 341; idem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, translated by Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 222 (emphasis in original).

47. Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, pp. 231, 232; idem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 146, 147. On the affinities between melancholia and solitude, see Lepenies, Melancholy, pp. 62–66.

48. Novalis, Novalis: Philosophical Writings, translated by Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 135.

49. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit [GA 29/30] (Frankfurt am main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), p. 7; idem, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 5.

50. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, pp. 7–8; idem, Fundamental Concepts, p. 5 (emphasis in original). For an analysis of this passage, see Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, vol. 2, edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 29–30, 32–33, 37, 94–98; and my previous discussion in Wolfson, Duplicity, pp. 67–68.

51. Goodstein, Experience, pp. 299–300; Barbara Cassin, Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 51.

52. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), §40, pp. 188–189; idem, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), pp. 182–183. For an extensive discussion of this theme, see Katherine Withy, Heidegger on Being Uncanny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 48–101.

53. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, p. 8; idem, Fundamental Concepts, p. 6.

54. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, pp. 9–10; idem, Fundamental Concepts, p. 7.

55. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, pp. 18–19; idem, Fundamental Concepts, p. 13.

56. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, p. 393; idem, Fundamental Concepts, p. 271. Žižek, Fragile Absolute, p. 87, detects in this Heideggerian text an influence of Schelling’s idea of the infinite melancholy that covers living nature like a veil. See the text cited in ch. 4 at n. 38, and compare the analysis in Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2014), pp. 174–175. On Heidegger’s sharp contrast of the human and the animal in relation to death, see the passage cited in ch. 3 at n. 63.

57. The line is from the poem “The Castaway” (March 20, 1799) in William Cowper, The Poetical Works of William Cowper: Complete Edition (New York: John Wurtele Lovell, 1881), p. 511. It was referenced several times in Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927), pp. 219, 220, 247, 249, 284, 308.

58. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938) [GA 94] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), p. 59; idem, Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938, translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 45 (emphasis in original). The passage is previously cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), p. 326 n. 126. Note the comment of Gershom Scholem mentioned there that the renewal of Zionism should be based on the principle that the community will be established by the common solitude of the Jewish people. The text is quoted in ch. 4 at n. 162.

59. Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI, p. 112; idem, Ponderings II–VI, p. 82.

60. Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI, p. 304; idem, Ponderings II–VI, p. 222.

61. Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI, p. 251; idem, Ponderings II–VI, p. 184. See also Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI, p. 71; idem, Ponderings II–VI, p. 54, cited in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 313.

62. Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI, p. 285; idem, Ponderings II–VI, p. 209. On the link between Einsamkeit and Zugehörigkeit, see also Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI, p. 288; idem, Ponderings II–VI, p. 211. And consider the portrayal of the intensification of Hölderlin’s solitude in the application of his poetry to “cultural politics” (Kulturpolitik) noted by Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI, p. 340; idem, Ponderings II–VI, p. 247.

63. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, §187, p. 115.

64. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §53, p. 263; idem, Being and Time, p. 252. Susan’s criticism of Heidegger resounds with the comments of Paul-Louis Landsberg, The Experience of Death: The Moral Problem of Suicide, translated by Cynthia Rowland (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953), p. 19:

The possibility of a change in our own being, considered as “being towards Death” (Sein zum Tode) which may follow on the experience of the death of a fellow-creature, is based on the possibility of personal love. No one would claim that the experience of the death of one’s neighbor is the same as an experience of one’s own death, which one has to meet: but its personal significance is so profound that it is an essential part of oneself, and not of the impersonal “one.”

In the accompanying note, Landsberg added, “Heidegger does not seem to grasp the importance of this distinction. His ‘Mitsein’ is always a highly formalised concept. His philosophy does not include love, just as it includes neither faith nor hope.” On Susan’s reference to Landsberg’s study and her endorsement of his denunciation of Heidegger, see ch. 1 at n. 84.

65. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 114; idem, Being and Time, p. 111. See Wolfson, Philosophical Pathos, p. 191, and references to other scholars cited on p. 383 n. 34.

66. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §26, p. 120; idem, Being and Time, p. 117 (emphasis in original).

67. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §26, p. 121: “Mitsein ist eine Bestimmtheit des je eigenen Daseins. . . . Das eigene Dasein ist nur, sofern es die Wesensstruktur des Mitseins hat, als für Andere begegnend Mitdasein.” English translation in idem, Being and Time, pp. 117–118: “Being-with is an attribute of one’s own Dasein. . . . Only because it has the essential structure of being-with, is one’s own Dasein encounterable by others as Dasein-with.” Compare Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §26, p. 118; idem, Being and Time, p. 115–116. Rather than understanding the encountering of others as a transition from an isolated subject to others, Heidegger argued that “others” signifies

those from whom one mostly does not distinguish oneself, those among whom one also is. . . . The “with” is of the character of Dasein, the “also” means the sameness of being [die Gleichheit des Seins] as circumspect, heedful being-in-the-world. “With” and “also” are to be understood existentially [existenzial] not categorially. On the basis of this with-bound [mithaften] being-in-the-world, the world is always already the one that I share with others. The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is being-with others [Das In-sein ist Mitsein mit Anderen]. The innerworldly being-in-itself [Ansichsein] of others is Dasein-with [Mitdasein] (emphasis in original).

And see Sein und Zeit, §26, pp. 124–125; idem, Being and Time, p. 121. Although Heidegger rejected the presupposition that Dasein’s being towards the other should be identified with its being toward itself, maintaining that the being-with, or the being towards others, is an autonomous and irreducible relationship of being, he did not deny that

a lively mutual acquaintanceship on the basis of being-with often depends upon how far one’s own Dasein has actually understood itself, but this only means that it depends upon how far it has made one’s essential being with others transparent and not disguised it. This is possible only if Dasein as being-in-the-world is always already with others. “Empathy” does not first constitute being-with, but is first possible on its basis, and is motivated by the prevailing deficient modes of being-with in their inevitability.

68. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 80 and 93 n. 169.

69. This term has been discussed by a variety of philosophers from different methodological perspectives. See Jason Turner, “Ontological Pluralism,” Journal of Philosophy 107 (2010): 5–34; idem, “Logic and Ontological Pluralism,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 41 (2012): 419–448; Sara Bernstein, “Ontological Pluralism About Non-Being,” in Non-Being: New Essays on the Metaphysics of Non-Existence, edited by Sara Bernstein and Tyron Goldschmidt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 1–16; Byron Simmons, “Ontological Pluralism and the Generic Conception of Being,” Erkenntnis 87 (2022): 1275–1293. My own use of the expression has benefited from the analysis in Matthew David Segall, Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Olympia: Integral Imprint, 2023), pp. 145–147.

70. My use of this terminology is beholden to the thought of David G. Leahy. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 94–95 n. 173; idem, “Heeding the Law Beyond the Law: Transgendering Alterity and the Hypernomian Perimeter of the Ethical,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 14 (2020): 220 n. 11.

71. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 80–82, 93–94 n. 170, 94 n. 173, 140, 222, 225–226. For a different approach that emphasizes Heidegger’s “organic monadism which renders thinking about the plural and the different difficult,” see Nicholas Davey, “Towards a Community of the Plural: Philosophical Pluralism, Hermeneutics, and Practice,” in Phenomenological Perspectives on Plurality, p. 94. In my opinion, Davey has imposed a problematic binary on Heidegger by failing to grasp that his sense of singularity encompasses plurality, and hence there is a hermeneutical possibility to achieve a reciprocal understanding between historical communities individuated by different orientations to their past and future.

72. Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI, pp. 449–450; idem, Ponderings II–VI, p. 326. On the precarious repercussions of this solitude, see Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI, p. 481: “Groβen Denker können nicht geliebt werden—die eisige Einsamkeit, die um sie sein muβ und in die nur der fragende Kampf mit ihnen einbricht, versagt jeden ausruhenden und behüteten Bezug” (emphasis in original). English translation in idem, Ponderings II–VI, p. 349: “Great thinkers cannot be loved—the icy solitude which must surround them, and which can be penetrated only by an interrogative battle with them, repudiates any restful and protected relation” (emphasis in original).

73. Hegel: The Letters, p. 122. The remark of Hegel was referenced by Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, edited by Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 298. According to Arendt’s interpretation, the solitariness of the philosophical life is related to the unsayable and the incommunicable element of thought, an idea that she traced back to Plato. The Heideggerian position is implicit in the distinction that Arendt made between the solitude that is the philosopher’s authentic way of life and the more general experience of loneliness. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, second edition, introduction by Margaret Canovan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 76. Both passages are cited and discussed in Wolfson, Duplicity, pp. 114–115.

74. Plato, Phaedo 67e, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, with introduction and prefatory notes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 50.

75. The relevant passage of Hegel is cited in ch. 3 at n. 11, and see discussion in Elliot R. Wolfson, Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 8–9. It goes without saying that this insight is hardly unique to Western philosophy. Consider, for instance, the poetic reflection of Chandrakīrti in his Cathuḥśatakaṭīkā, cited in Tsongkhapa, The Middle-Length Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, translated by Philip Quarcoo (Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2021), p. 84: “Hero of humanity, beginning from that first night / of entering a womb in this world—/ one starts to proceed day by day, / without pausing a step, toward the Lord of Death.” This precept is applied more broadly by Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, to the fundamental Buddhist maxim that all conditioned phenomena are impermanent and the further conjecture that impermanence signifies the insubstantial momentariness of the present. See Tenzin Gyatso and Thubten Chodron, The Foundation of Buddhist Practice (Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2018), p. 8:

All the main Buddhist philosophical tenet schools (except for Vaibhāṣika, which has a slightly different understanding of the process of change and cessation), accept that the moment a thing comes into being, it contains the seed of its own cessation simply by the fact that it is produced by causes and conditions. . . . From the very first moment of a thing’s existence, it has the nature of coming to an end. The very nature of conditioned phenomena is that they do not last from one moment to the next.

Ostensibly, the positivity of coming into being and the negativity of ceasing to be might seem incompatible and contradictory, but “if we reflect on the deeper meaning of impermanence, we see that its very definition—momentary change—applies to both the arising and ceasing of a thing. Nothing, whether it is in the process of arising or the process of ending, lasts into the next moment.”

76. Ferraris, “Aging,” p. 141.

77. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 292.

78. Novalis, Hymns to the Night, third edition, translated by Dick Higgins (Kingston: McPherson & Company, 1988), p. 29.