The Intellectual Sublime

Philosophy of philosophy, which explores the sublime in philosophy versus the mythical in religion - through an unsentimental lens. Philosophy has accumulated many sentiments and myths throughout history, which obscure its true mode of operation, just as the myth of the artist conceals the process of creating art. From the love of wisdom, philosophy has ironically become the fear of wisdom, and has gained prestige as the highest discipline in the world of humanities, parallel to mathematics in natural sciences. What has made it so?

Only in a church without a roof can one see the sky  (Source)

A philosopher has no control over or ability to invent their philosophy; they are trapped in their thinking like everyone else, like all people of a particular era or place. What they do is clarify and purify and reach this thinking in its pure and skeletal form, and expose it. This is an activity of awareness, but they do not invent the thinking, and that's what I didn't understand before. Hence the sense of depth, because it's like archaeology that cleans around the skeleton, not like a sculptor carving a skeleton. It's not art.

Philosophy is a profession precisely because it's not an invention, but rather like in literature, it's about explicitly saying things that no one says, putting what's under the table on the table and exposing the shape of the table on which everything rests, exposing it in its arbitrariness despite it not being arbitrary because there's no ability to invent a table or free oneself from it. But to show how the non-arbitrary thing in which we're trapped appears arbitrary, to show how the innermost appears from the outside.

That's why Wittgenstein has two schools not because he was smarter and more cynical, but because he was active in two periods and two philosophical continents, Germany (in the sub-continent of Austria) and England, so in each he exposed, simply because people live longer and wander more in our times. And then once the basis is exposed, the next generations see it, notice its arbitrariness. But a period or place that doesn't have a philosopher simply changes gradually and the form of thinking drifts and no one remembers the change anymore and there's no evidence and it's very hard to even imagine in retrospect how they thought and perceived. Like periods in archaeology from which no material evidence remains and have disappeared, for example nomadic cultures.

Therefore, philosophy is most similar to archaeology - archaeology of thought that exposes itself in real-time and thus leaves remnants for future generations, who are always amazed at the thinking of the past, which suddenly they have a gateway to understand and how different it is. Not because the philosopher was a genius or invented the thinking of their era, but because they documented it, and it's the change that amazes us. Precisely because we perceive differently - so a very different perception is amazing.

Plato didn't invent the wisdom of Athens but documented it, and he seems the wisest because of the time that has passed and therefore the distance from him that has grown. That's why the further we get from him in time, the greater he becomes, like in archaeology where the same remains become bigger and bigger as time passes and the same structure is much more impressive from the Stone Age than from the Middle Ages, say. And meager remains from a million years ago are more impressive than a huge building from a thousand years ago. The past creates monumentality, because the same thing of the same size is viewed but from a greater distance of observation appears larger. And therefore the most sublime structures are in the past.

Here, Machiavelli was just a repulsive and despicable political operative, but when forced to retire and expose the foundations of his world, he became an important philosopher - a philosopher of the trashy world he came out of. Conversely, important worlds that didn't have an important writer or philosopher were forgotten and lost. And here Machiavelli provides a key to understanding the sublime, in that the ruler needs to evoke fear but not hatred. That is, the sublime, what seems to us so high that it cannot be challenged, needs to evoke aesthetic terror but not disgust, because Machiavelli says that fear is a negative emotion that prevents action, causes passivity, while hatred is a negative emotion that causes positive, active action. Therefore, the ruler, in order to maintain stability, needs fear, and that's why rulers build sublime structures, but not ugly ones, and that's why there's a tendency for unnecessary monumental construction throughout history.

Therefore, culture must evoke the fear of the masses through books they don't understand, enormous, vast bodies of knowledge, but not through nonsense. American culture doesn't evoke awe compared to European culture, and therefore the rabble rules, while in Russia the dictatorship succeeds thanks to the heavy Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Kafka is more Jewish than Proust because he wrote short, awe-inspiring texts - Jews inspire awe in their brevity. This is the Jewish paradox, which Borges tried to imitate but with too much awareness, and Agnon somewhat succeeded in a few of his short stories. That's why Jews evoke both hatred and awe, and this is anti-Semitism, because apparently anyone can write this but no one can.

The highest aesthetic category in Judaism is not the sublime, but the mythical, that's what they aspire to, including in Hebrew literature, and we see this also in the difference between a synagogue - a time machine (axis stretches furthest back in time and furthest forward to the future) versus a church - a spaceship (stretches highest to the heavens or lowest to hell, axis stretches furthest up and down). Therefore, the aesthetic ideal of Judaism is the deep and ancient, to get into the book, to be inside the foundational text. While the Western ideal is height, hence high culture, and the aspiration for superiority. And hence also philosophy, since the days of Socrates, as superior to all forms of discourse and bringing them to embarrassment - the acropolis of the spirit (which conceals that it is an archaeological site).