Eminentoes/Metaphysical Conceits
Ross, Mitchell S.
EMINENTOES METAPHYSICAL CONCEITS by Mitchell S.Ross In june 1977, while passing through Paris, I found myself unable to engage in learned chitchat without being referred to the latest literary...
...In the pages of Esquire magazine a critic undertook to revile me, in company with the distinguished obituarist, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...A few months later it was published in an American journal of opinion and I was paid an honorarium of $150 for it...
...The times are too tough for doubt...
...Glucksmann was the author of two major works of philosophical controversy, The Cook and the Man-Rater and The Master Thinkers...
...Then he disappeared into another room...
...Likewise a statement such as the following: "Antifascism is a new idea, in the West and in the East...
...Instead I summoned a friend, dug up a duckling, uncorked a bottle of champagne, and celebrated Les Nouveaux Philosophes in absentia...
...He denounced "the reactionary idea of progress" and replaced it with poetic pessimism...
...There was constant talk of a new wave of French thinkers, dubbed Les Nou-veaux Philosophes, who had overthrown the Marxian wisdom of Professor Louis Althusser and other luminaries that had guided them throughout the heady hours of May, 1968...
...Perhaps he is right...
...Like others young enough to have escaped the Holocaust he discovered in his fellow Jews a symbol of human strength and endurance: a community of wandering but also of light and confidence which, carried by fate to the very limits of sorrow, never surrendered the simple pride of being human...
...I doubt it...
...I will soon be thirty and I have betrayed the dream of my youth at least a hundred times...
...it is capital exaggerated, exacerbated, and unlimited...
...now, without bitterness, I live in the shadows of my past hopes...
...copies of the thing to pay for a lifetime's worth of baguettes...
...We must also say that it is a decadent and degenerate capital...
...He called his new book The Testament of God...
...A few days later I sorted out my notes and composed an article about Levy which generously referred to the philosopher's ideas and omitted mention of his manners...
...This may gain him new constituents, but it weakens the perception of what fascism really was, or is...
...EMINENTOES METAPHYSICAL CONCEITS by Mitchell S.Ross In june 1977, while passing through Paris, I found myself unable to engage in learned chitchat without being referred to the latest literary fashion which had swept through the city, and, indeed, all of France...
...Why should he think there is a capital difference between physical liquidation and metaphysical hatred...
...Traveling on the road to ethics he found it necessary to make several political stops...
...When he endeavors to forge his Jewish identity Levy is more interesting...
...VArhen Barbarism with a Human Face was translated into English and published in this country in 1979 I paid no attention to it...
...Yet Levy feels that his customers need this sort of analysis...
...Tyrrell took it well...
...By labeling them all fascist he employs the accredited, opprobrious language of the Left...
...Living in a country in which such basically ludicrous creeds as Gaul-lism and Communism have won large and enthusiastic followings, Levy is highly sensitive to the abuses of decency that have been committed in the name of liberty...
...whose first and last words are perhaps to wrest the subject away from the burdensome weights of the world, of nature, and of the history it calls 'idolatry,' and I, in more modern terms, call 'barbarism.' Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One: What I had in mind, throughout this journey, was a Number, simply a number, the number "One" of a monotheism whose testament knows neither the word nor the category "religion...
...Levy invited me to lunch with him at his apartment the following Sunday...
...There follows a highly personal reading of the Old Testament which evades, as do all such commentaries, the innumerable contradictions of the Book in favor of crafting a philosophical vision that suits Levy's needs...
...He preferred Rousseau to Voltaire...
...If the Devil and Billy Graham can quote Scripture for their purposes, then why not Bernard-Henri Levy...
...The rest of us, grounded in the liberal political tradition, feel no such compulsion to create tortured syntheses...
...Levy could tell the world that he was "the bastard child of an unholy union between fascism and Stalinism...
...I was less sanguine...
...In its place the new philosophers had taken up a rather gloomy sort of anti-Communism and were engaged in spreading their gospel around...
...All who approached Levy from any position save deep left field were grateful to discover a young French intellectual who frankly doubted the moral superiority of the USSR to the USA...
...for philosophers to forget about lunch...
...This Biblical criticism is climaxed by the issuance of seven commandments for modern man: 1) The Law, your Law, is holier than the event, 2) It will always be the time, for you, to manifest the good, 3) You must in every instance assume that the future is not your concern, 4) You will undertake nothing that is not immediately worthy of being instantly and perpetually repeated, 5) You must assume and convince yourself that truth, your truth, is foreign to the order of politics, 6) Without a theory or a revolutionary party, you will practice resistance, 7) You must, in order to commit yourself, begin by detaching yourself...
...He told me to come at one, which I did, without having eaten breakfast...
...He met me at the door, conveying, in spite of the early afternoon hour, the impression of an awakening Adonis: half-dressed, skinny, and sleepy-eyed...
...May I be permitted to doubt the notion of George Gilder that the spiritual qualities of capitalism have been insufficiently appreciated...
...And why call Vietnam "the most formidable colonial war in history...
...Next to le nouveau philosophe and "the thorny knots of his neo-Nietzschean arguments" Ross and Tyrrell were seen as mere "whippersnappers" who "carry no ideas, merely a quiverful of peeves and prejudices...
...His purpose is to gather all the modern tyrannies- Brezhnev's USSR, Khomeini's Iran, Pinochet's Chile, et al.-under one roof...
...Skepticism, he thinks, too easily becomes an "alibi for surrender...
...whose tradition has at least one singular characteristic, namely that, being refractory to any mysticism, it never ventured to establish an ontology, a cosmology, or a triumphal world-system...
...The first of these was Andre Glucksmann, whose punk haircut covered a head nearly middle-aged and filled with Teutonic intricacies...
...These commandments are exegetically woven together in a single chapter...
...For the next two hours he smoked and we discussed his philosophy, employing his English (bad) and my French (very bad) to review the deplorable condition of modern man.* In the midst of our colloquy we were joined *I recently saw Levy on "Sixty Minutes" and it appeared that his English had greatly improved...
...What was it to me...
...Well, antifascism is certainly not a new idea, but in Levy's hands it is a new rhetorical trick...
...Levy was a philosopher with a human face, a very handsome one indeed, and his frequent appearances on French television screens did nothing to deter sales of his book...
...Our civilization has in so many ways grown poorer with riches...
...Here again Levy seems to be nursing old barricade wounds as he writes...
...Martin Peretz's whoop notwithstanding, the book failed to create a sensation in this Republic, but it did elicit criticism of a respectful and even admiring sort...
...I for one am not inclined to judge such exercises harshly...
...I don't believe in man, either, and I am quite willing to agree with my worthy teachers that he is in the process of disappearing from the stage of thought...
...This was untrue but it worked...
...Am I alone in feeling utterly unmoved by all claims that the lot of Western man can be seriously improved by any political or economic policy, whether in the form of social-welfare schemes or supply-side theories...
...This was Bernard-Henri Levy, whose book, Barbarism with a Human Face, became a French bestseller soon after its publication that season...
...He found himself drawn to the faith of his fathers and sensed the stern majesty of the Mosaic law...
...Finally, feeling perhaps a little wiser and certainly much hungrier than when I had arrived, I took leave of Bernard and Sylvie...
...A bit strong, no...
...Had they not done so I would have assumed him to be a boy of sixteen...
...But if we approve of Levy's austere attitude, must we also follow him into monotheism...
...Fascistic democracy...
...Modestly but firmly, I would like to take up that idea, that challenge...
...He did not so much reject the Marxist notion of capital as he inverted the optimistic determinism that went with it: thus his strange declaration that capitalism is "the most formidable death machine that history has ever produced...
...Ardently, proudly, I choose to carry and exalt its colors...
...His face betrayed barely a whisker...
...before long, atheist spiritualism and austere libertinism failed to satisfy him...
...Like everyone else, I believed in a new and joyful 'liberation...
...Without ambiguity, I recognize myself in that community...
...I expected him to re-emerge bearing some kind of food or drink, but instead he carried nothing but a package of cigarettes when he returned and sat down across from me at the table...
...The first book constituted an unfavorable review of Soviet claims that mankind east of the Elbe lived closer to Utopia than their brothers in the West...
...Bernard-Henri Levy...
...This edifying critique would have been sublime had it not been written in a barbarous style reminiscent of the work of Glucksmann's victims...
...Finally Levy proclaimed his anti-credo: Of course I know that God has been dead since Nietzsche, but I believe in the virtues of an atheist spiritualism in the face of contemporary apathy and resignation-something like an austere libertinism for a time of catastrophe...
...They add up to a stern doctrine...
...No, we must speak that way only if we have graduated from Marxism and are addressing ourselves to those still in school-Levy's position precisely...
...I too well remembered its author as a man who had nearly starved me to think of him as someone who could change a generation's mind...
...Thereupon I ceased thinking about Bernard-Henri Levy...
...There were appreciations in Le Figaro, demurrals in Le Monde, denunciations of M. Levy's virtue in the Red organ, L 'Humanite...
...and whose effect in the world was thus perhaps nothing but a perpetual suspension of all adhesions to ontology in which men get lost, dissolve, and busy themselves...
...In a word, the "One" of a resistance...
...but I simply believe that without a certain idea of man the State soon surrenders to the whirlpool of fascism...
...Or: "there has never been and no doubt never will be any democracy except formal democracy, any concrete freedom except through respect for its abstract forms, any broadened democracy except an authoritarian and fascistic democracy...
...The Master Thinkers balled out German philosophers for infecting the mind of man with fantasies of dominance...
...She arranged for me to meet Levy by informing his associates at the publishing firm of Grasset that I represented an important American periodical and had come to Paris for the purpose of investigating Les Nouveaux Philosophes firsthand...
...I forgot Bernard as I am sure he forgot me...
...Because his faith, his moral life, depends on it...
...As a guide to democratic behavior, then, The Testament of God is useless for anyone who has never shed a tear at hearing the strains of the Internationale...
...and Martin Peretz could declare the book "one of those rare works which changes the mind of an entire generation...
...As in Barbarism with a Human Face these are of dubious value to those of us who have never tied red ribbons around our ideology...
...There is this: "the best constitution is the one that decrees that happiness is a totalitarian idea...
...I turned back to Barbarism with a Human Face...
...Levy was charming in a melancholy fashion...
...I can now confirm: I needed the memory of the monothe-ist function (or should I say fiction...
...I advertised my fascination and was lucky enough to elicit the services of an American woman blessed with a touch of gall...
...Mind and soul grew restless...
...By that time I was far from France and so unable to invite Levy over for a lunch of cigar smoke...
...Time passed...
...The publicity sheets had identified the year of his birth as 1948...
...They were a sizable but fairly well-defined agglomeration, and two men had risen from the ranks to attain glamor and gloire...
...Our good works were thoroughly belittled...
...There is really no way to judge these things in advance-which, by the way, is why it is unwise for philosophers to forget about lunch...
...I determined that if Bernard-Henri Levy was going to touch my life in unexpected ways I had best make myself thoroughly familiar with his thinking, thorny knots and all...
...The term makes no sense, except in the context of extremist eyewash...
...This seems to me more a matter of temperament than of necessity...
...They were unfavorably compared with works of...
...Barbarism, I said, is capital and nothing but capital...
...My French, alas, has not...
...They were dismissed...
...by a lovely young woman named Sylvie who assisted in translation but otherwise failed to improve upon the philosopher's standard of hospitality...
...The debate raged on...
...Then, in August of 1980, fate reunited us in a most unexpected way...
...In the age of Gulag free men require the presence of God on their side...
...He wouldn't have said this if he had thought harder before writing, but he was too much wedded to dialectical formulations of the ancien regime to avoid such silly orotundities...
...Levy vaguely directed me to sit at a long wooden table in an otherwise empty room while he finished dressing...
...He had never, after all, lunched at Levy's...
...The second leader among Les Nouveaux Philosophes emerged in the spring of 1977...
...To a citizen of this great American Republic, in which serious thinkers tend to be stamped a"nd then quarantined by the popular press as if they were carriers of communicable disease, it seemed a fascinating spectacle...
...But his thinking provides a bracing antidote for citizens of these States, too...
...By June booksellers had sold enough Mitchell S. Ross is the author of The Literary Politicians and An Invitation to Our Times...
...The same writer who so casually tosses all tyrants into a fascist pot is eager to distinguish between Hitler's crimes against the Jews and violations of the rest of humanity: "To place [the Holocaust] on the same level as the murder of the Poles, the communists, or the 'asocial' is thus not only a moral outrage but an historical error, which neglects the capital difference between physical liquidation and the metaphysical hatred whose goal was to erase even the memory of the people of the Bible...
Vol. 14 • August 1981 • No. 8
