Indeed. I once again recommend Marx's "On the Jewish Question," which argues for Jewish authenticity as expressed in the realization of universal humanity not as a retreat to a self-made or national ghetto.
Joanna
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I did. And I certainly agree. (We agree so often, we sometimes talk passed each other.) The quote was from Benhabib's review. I quoted it to encourage Chris to pursue his writing on Heidegger, Arendt and Loewith. Set the record straight, so to speak.
Anyway, Benhabib goes on in the conclusion:
``A democratic culture requires an appreciation for moments of historical dilemma, even as it also requires philosophy to keep us honest about the validity of our beliefs. Heidegger's critique of subject-object epistemology, his claim that "language is the house of being," and his phenomenological account of everydayness as well as his brilliant re-readings of Aristotle, Nicholas of Cusa, Kant, and Hegel will remain with us as instances of such philosophical honesty. And we will need to find serious answers to Foucault's critique that contemporary welfare states institute a new modality of power called "governmentality" that threatens the autonomous subject associated with the liberal understanding of rights. Likewise, whatever Jacques Derrida's pronouncements on this or that political cause, we should not dismiss his insights about the polyvocity of language, the indeterminacy of reference, and the problematic recurrence in metaphysics as well as politics of the moment of difference, otherness, and alterity-the instance that cannot be absorbed and neutralized by a coherent intellectual system. We cannot simply dismiss these ideas because someone who finds them attractive might do something horrible.
Too often these days we reduce philosophy to confession and intimacy to kitsch precisely because we live without a sense of the democratic res publica. No amount of voyeurism and biographical judgmentalism should distract us from engaging with unsettling questions.''
What Benhabib points out in Derrida, ``the polyvocity of language, the indeterminacy of reference, and the problematic recurrence in metaphysics as well as politics of the moment of difference, otherness, and alterity-the instance that cannot be absorbed and neutralized by a coherent intellectual system..'' can be recast back onto the problem of the autonomous subject, re-internalized so to speak. When that is performed, it opens the subject to his or her own quests to find a group voice, an identity so to speak.
In some sense language and subject are one and the same in the analogical mind and can be interchanged, which was also, with much more development, a central assumption in Levi-Strauss, Piaget, and Ernst Cassirer---that our symbolic systems, certainly our mythological-poetical voices are our collective minds externalized and made part of the material flow of history and the world (neo-Hegelianism?).
Arendt, Strauss, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and all the others are not particularly individuals as such, if they are read with such an analogical-historical view.
So then, what they reveal to me as I read them are reactions to the seemingly endless polyvocity, indetermincy, and recurrence of moments of difference, otherness, and alterity---of the modern world. They share the same problem, which in quite trivial terms can be called the continual crisis of bourgeois identity.
In the US at the current moment, all the conjuring arts of Kapital with all its mass media miracles in the universe can not erase---and of course endlessly retrace in one exacerbation after another, continually profiting along the way--the same problem. Every race, every facial stereotype, every identity conferring feature of the human species from Lucy of the Pleistocene to the latest CEO mug, frog marched out of his corporate HQ by the police---each is given a unique smile and bag of potato chips to die for. According to neoliberalism, we are all free consumers and that's good enough. Add some old time religious bigotry and there you go---according to the culturally bankrupt US rightwing.
Evidently a lot of the rest of the world isn't so sure. Although old time religion seems to sell almost as well as US sodas, chips, and cigarettes.
In the concluding scene of the video on Iraq (that I didn't recommend) one of the younger Iraqi men we had followed around was driving the cameraman and reporter somewhere out of Baghdad. He said, ``So I ask you, do I want a clean, juice big Mac with fries and all the trimmings? Or do I want a Kabob served in an open stall with flies all over it? ...Well, give the Kabob a chance...''
Returning to Benhabib:
``The dilemmas of Jewish assimilation, with its individual strategies of converting, passing, denying, or displacing are themselves part of the cultural-political toolbox which liberal democracies offer to ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities under conditions of modernity. Surely the kind of moral universalism to which all four thinkers aspired is no less an aspect of the Jewish experience in modernity than the assertion of Jewish particularism...''
The key phrase...`` with its individual strategies...are themselves part of the cultural-political toolbox which liberal democracies offer...minorities under conditions of modernity.'' is precisely what has broken down or is in the process of being broken down. Perhaps it never really existed, except for a few at various historical moments. Nonetheless that is the essential ideal of Enlightenment modernity, and it is what is under continuous assault in the US at the moment.
While Strauss and Arendt were Jewish, the fundamentally important political and philosophical point (for me) was their minority status--under threat--in which we can now see, the universal dilemmas (yes of the human condition) that have been repeated over and over in the US as well as in many other countries. They represent two differing directions which do in fact come down to the current separation between `real' liberals and the neoconservatives. (And I certainly agree the Democrats sound more like neocons everyday...)
CG