domingo, 12 de abril de 2015

like a shadow

"No mistake about it, Qohelet means to leave us no escape. He warns us that something very small (a dead fly) will suffice to ruin a jar of perfume or scholarly wisdom. I cannot help but think of certain more or less great philosophers of modern times whose entire system appears ruined by their support of a political error: the great G. W. F. Hegel, for instance, whom I cannot take seriously because he sees the culmination of History, Idea, and Spirit in the State! Everything he says is truly wonderful, but when I come up against this dead fly that corrupted and killed Western society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I cannot continue to take anything seriously in his preceding discourse on so many other problems.
The great Martin Heidegger, in whose work everything is so profound, enticing, and innovative, failed to display any lucidity at all in discerning the real nature of national socialism. Those few months of his support for Nazism suffice for me to consider the rest of his work null and void. How can anyone expect me to follow such a guide in his Holzwege, when he was unable to make the right choice in that one simple matter in his life? The dead fly - misplaced loyalty - may appear for just an instant! And I fully realize that by blackballing certain thinkers, I in turn deserve Qohelet´s other judgment in the same passage!
Wisdom is fragile - it can vanish when we change a single line. Even worse, wisdom is impossible. Anyone who thinks he has reached it has grasped only wind. Who knows anything? Who can pride himself on "knowing"? "Who knows what is good for a person during life, during the number of days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow?(6:12) Wisdom is as fragile as the person himself. After all, why should wisdom be surer and truer than those who create it? It is like a shadow. We can mesure, situate, and weigh everything, but not a shadow. It has no existence in itself, since it depends both on the object that projects it and on light, which changes constantly.
(...) As for us moderns, we have discovered a great many things. But, as we have already seen, the horizon continually moves farther from us. In this connection, Qohelet seems to posit a kind of absolute: no matter what he does, he cannot find the ultimate secret, the key that would enable him to understand everything. As little as I know, what strikes me most is that further we advance, the more everything we know becomes complex and elusive."
Jaques Ellul, Reason for Being - a Meditation on Ecclesiastes, (tr.) Eerdmans Pub., 1990,  pp.148-149.

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