“`I believe’ is the one great word against metaphysical fear.”
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918)
Donald Trump’s Middle East peace proposal will not help Israel. Plausibly, in short order, it will emerge as a net-negative. Though less conspicuously valueless than the Trump-brokered “Abraham Accords” (a contrived peace with non-adversarial Arab states), the 20-point Gaza Peace Plan will release the next generation of jihadi criminals[1] and place Arab armed forces as biased overseers in Gaza. Considered together with the American president’s mutual security pact with Qatar, this plan would ensure that an already-existing cauldron of anti-Israel violence becomes a continuously safe space for Islamist terrorists.
There is more. A conclusive defeat of Hamas will not result from the plan. Even if it could, the Islamic Resistance Movement represents just one recognizable source of jihadi terror. More to the point, following any Trump directed peace, Islamist ideologies will become more widely dispersed and insidiously potent.[2] In the final analysis, though generally overlooked, it is an all-consuming fear of personal death that is core motivator of jihadi criminal violence.
At first glance, this conclusion might seem self-contradictory. After all, don’t Hamas and its kindred organizations claim to “love death?” To clarify, capable analysts will need to look behind the boisterously necrophilous claims. In essence, the only “death” authentically loved by jihadists is one that grants “immortality” to the “martyr.”
The believing Islamist terrorist (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Houthi, Fatah, etc., it makes no difference) kills Israelis in order not to die. By this dual assault on human decency and human logic, the jihadi murderer seeks to kill himself or herself to acquire “power over death.” At the same time, current Hamas leaders and leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad stay clear of tangible battle fields in Gaza, limiting their “heroic risk-taking” to five-star hotels in Abu Dhabi, Istanbul and Qatar.[3]
What should these facts mean for Israeli decision-makers struggling to decipher Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”? To succeed in its continuing war against jihadi terrorism, Israel’s primary “battlefield” will need to be conceptual, not operational. Whatever else happens with the Trump Peace Plan, Islamist ideology will continue to imperil Israelis throughout the Middle East, arguably at increased levels of hatred and acrimony.
Donald Trumps’ 20-point plan will not serve Israel’s overarching security interests. To meaningfully maximize these interests, Jerusalem’s national security policies will need to address four factors that animate all its sub-state jihadi enemies, both present and future: (1) need to belong; (2) need for meaning; (3) need for ecstasy; and (4) need for immortality. This last factor is vital, though generally disregarded, and stems from ineradicable death fears. It follows that certain adversarial hopes for life-everlasting represent a fundamental security threat to Israel.
Human Foundations of Jihadi Terrorism
Background matters. Jihadi crimes are among the cruelest “political” manifestations of primal fear. In the Middle East, such faith-based eruptions of murder and mayhem are secondary to underlying personal apprehensions and patently illogical expectations. Prima facie, immortality is a contradiction in terms.
In philosophical context, ongoing jihadi fears are a motivating reflection (Plato would say “shadow”[4]) of defiling human emotions.[5] This means, among other things, that until Israeli scholars and policy makers can finally recognize the root causes of Islamist terrorism – i.e., the true sources of “reflection” – they will continue to minimize or ignore what is most genuinely determinative.
Israeli counter-terrorism should have more than just a passing acquaintance with jihadi enemy preferences. Everything in the social world begins with the individual human being. In world politics, refined explanations and predictions must originate with deeper-than-usual understandings of this force-multiplying “microcosm.”[6] Ultimately, Israeli security planners will need to acknowledge that the jihadi adversary, whether Sunni and Shiite, seeks one form of power more highly than sovereignty or statehood. This delusionary search is about acquiring “power over death.”
Even after Israel’s successful 12-day war against Iran, manifold particulars continue to challenge Israeli defense planners. “I believe,” observes Oswald Spengler in his 20th century classic The Decline of the West” (1918), “is the one great word (sic.) against metaphysical fear.” Though likely among the most insightful philosophical observations, determinative linkages between tribal geopolitics and personal immortality remain sorely under-examined. In part, this is because clarifying theory is accessible only by the Few, not the Many.[7] Moreover, for Israel, as for any other terrorism-beleaguered state, no such theory could ever be deciphered by politicians or pundits. This includes US President Donald J. Trump.
There is more. In all likelihood, Israeli political leaderships will continue to focus on symptoms of terror-violence rather than its causes. The likely result of such misdirection is predictable and costly. Nonetheless. if jihadi criminal violence were approached as a broadly intellectual rather than narrowly tactical problem, Israel could still harbor justifiable hopes for effective counter-terrorism. Though such hopes would also require apt military measures against certain terrorist-mentor states, the Trump plan offers opacity, not clarity. For example, how should Israeli strategists factor in Russia’s evident return to post-Assad Syria? What about expanding Saudi-Qatari competition for influence in the region?
What specific remedies are now available to decision-makers in Jerusalem? Whatever their particulars, these correctives should first be uncovered at conceptual levels, not at “common-sense” levels favored by political leaders. More precisely, three basic concepts should be highlighted in all their bewildering overlaps and interactions. Here, these explanatory concepts will be identified as death, time and immortality. By definition, the “God factor” is integral to all three concepts and is central to both perpetrators and victims.
For scholars, analysts and government officials, assorted details need to be grasped. Though outside the mainstream of military or strategic theorizing, these concepts could represent the “building blocks” of a gainfully-enhanced Israeli orientation to national security. Derivatively, capable counter-terrorist planners could discover variously optimal methods of reaching pragmatic conclusions. Ipso facto, these methods would involve the examination and subsequent confirmation or disconfirmation of alternative hypotheses.
Vital Intersections
A “next question” dawns. How should Israel proceed in a world political system defined by accelerating acrimony, belligerent nationalism and spreading nuclear weapons?[8] What can the concepts of death, time and immortality teach the Jewish State about the world system’s sovereignty-centered landscape, both present and future?[9] How should this self-endangering planet allow itself to advance beyond the simplistic offerings of so-called “peace plans”?
To answer thoughtfully, analysts should always start with the individual human being, with the microcosm in all its common and universalized expressions. Though uniformly disregarded and inherently invisible, “power over death” represents the ultimate political reward for affirmations of “I believe.” Though uttered sotto voce, in whispers, there could be no greater power for anyone on earth. Incontestably, “power over death” offers jihadi terrorists an unmatched and unmatchable promise of immortality.[10]
In this connection, we may learn something of head-spinning import from Emmanuel Levinas: “It is through death,” says the philosopher, “that there is time….”[11] It follows that a state or sub-state that can seemingly enhance the promise of personal immortality could also heighten the associated promise of time.[12]
There are still more questions. What can such dense abstractions possibly have to do with tangible Israeli politics? These are not easy concepts to understand, especially in the context of a continuous preoccupation with individual personalities. Still, no nation willing to compromise truth on the bloodied altar of “anti-reason”[13] should reasonably expect to endure.
If chronology is contingent on death – in brief, because human mortality puts an irreversible “stop” to each single individual’s time[14] on earth – an antecedent question will need to be posed: How does one gain power over death,[15] and what does any such gain have to do with the fate of a state or nation? It is with this patently opaque question in mind that terrorism-related policy inquiries should be launched and sustained.
What next? Before venturing proper answers to many-sided operational questions, Israeli strategists should first distinguish between authentic power and the expectation that power must lie in acts of compliance to God. Unsurprisingly, all humans, not just jihadi inhabitants of the Middle East, seek certain palpable links to the Divine. The problem for Israel is that its terror-enemies link such ritualistic compliance with “martyrdom.”
In identifying relevant links – links that are presumptively prior to “power over death” – the most “time-tested” path has involved unquestioning religious faith. Though each of the world’s major religions offers adherents variously alluring promises of immortality, only jihadi terrorists link “power over death” to the lascivious slaughter of “unbelievers.” On its face, this is an incomparably lethal connection.
In world politics, the State of Israel is most conspicuously targeted by terrorists who look lasciviously over accumulated Jewish victims and see only eternal life for themselves. For these twisted foes, the “heroic armed struggle” is never about land or statehood. It is rather about the satisfaction of darkly personal and hideously primal wants.
Any Israeli agreement to a Palestinian state would undermine the Jewish State’s survival prospects. On October 7, 2023, when Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists raped, tortured and murdered Israeli noncombatants, they were not seeking legal or diplomatic satisfactions. Instead, they were implementing unutterably crude visions of pleasure and ecstasy.
Often, more than anything else, the jihadi terrorist seeks “power over death.” The security problem, for Israel, is not its enemy’s unparalleled cowardice, but that his expectations of immortality are contingent on the mass murder of designated “others.” The most despised “other” is not “The Zionist,” but “The Jew.”[16]
“I believe.”
Additional particularities need to be noted. On occasion, the doctrinal priority “I believe” (a phrase taken from Oswald Spengler’s prophetic elucidations in The Decline of the West) can demand a faith-confirming end to the “martyr’s” life on earth. Among Israel’s Islamist foes, high-minded declarations of charity and compassion notwithstanding, this priority seemingly calls for the rape, torture and killing Jews. As a convenient subterfuge, the alleged intention of this perverse priority is to safeguard “the one true faith.”[17]
There is more. Jihadi terrorism is a specific form of religious sacrifice. Whatever the special circumstances involved[18] – and they need not be mutually exclusive – reason gives way to unreason. Ironically, such grotesque surrender is no less likely in our Age of Science than it was in the Age of Belief.[19] Regarding this worrisome continuity, the daily news offers us endlessly corroborative “evidence.”.
Several intersecting truths will warrant clarification. Any cumulative hopes for a death-fearing individual rising “above mortality” could have deleterious consequences for the “macrocosm,” that is, for Planet Earth in its entirety.[20] To be sure, there is nothing in Donald Trump’s proposed 20-point plan that addresses such consequences.
In the nineteenth century, in his posthumously published Lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.”[21] Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel had opined in Philosophy of Right (1820) that the state represents “the march of God in the world.” These widely-studied views in political science and philosophy tie loyalty to the state (usually a visceral or unquestioned loyalty) to the promise of “power over death.” This is always a monumental promise, one recognized only in Platonic “shadows” of tangible political activity.[22]
When the historian looks beyond the distracting shadows of images, he can discover no convincing evidence of such a promise ever being kept. Still, that discovery ought not to be welcomed by the beleaguered state of Israel. “It is in his failure,” observed 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, “that the believer finds his triumph.”
In candor, these are uniquely complicated concepts and interconnections. Immortality represents an unfulfillable promise on its face, but one that will still remain incomparable.[23] During his current tenure as US president,[24] Donald J. Trump’s openly pernicious brand of belligerent nationalism[25] (“America First”[26]) offers believing adherents a secular variant of this promise. In the end, because it is founded on rabid fusions of ahistorical outlook with doctrinal anti-reason, “America First” advances a vision of time that could only enlarge earthly spheres of violent death.[27]
Looking ahead, additional nuances will warrant competent intellectual examination. In these matters, faith and science will intersect with variously coinciding considerations of law.[28] The Islamist “deification” of realpolitik, a transformation of ideology from simple principle of action to sacred end in itself, draws germinal strength from the doctrine of sovereignty.[29] Conceived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a juridical idea of internal order, this doctrine has undergone several far-reaching metamorphoses, all of which then became a justifying legal rationale for international anarchy. This structural decentralization was famously identified by classical political philosophers (e.g., Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau) as the “state of nature.”[30]
Terror Crime and Sovereignty
To understand complex intersections involving jihadi terror-violence, Israeli and American policy-makers should more fully understand “sovereignty.” Established by Jean Bodin as a juristic concept in De Republica (1576), sovereignty came to be regarded as the supreme human political power, absolute and above all other forms of law.[31] In the oft-cited words of philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “Where there is no common Power, there is no law.”
As to any correspondences with time, which is how we have come to consider such complex issues in the first place, Hobbes explains why this “no law” condition should be called “war,” even when there exists no actual “fighting.” More precisely, because “war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time….,“[32] pertinent policy-makers will need to broaden their most fundamental ideas of “war.” Though this would first appear to be an esoteric requirement, one without discernible links to real-world terrorism issues, exactly the opposite is true.
When it is understood in terms of modern international relations, the doctrine of sovereignty encourages the refractory notion that states (a) lie above and beyond any legal regulation in their interactions with each other, and (b) act rationally whenever they seek specific benefits at the expense of other states or the global legal system as a whole.[33] Following repeated Trump derangements,[34] this doctrine threatens the wholesale collapse of civilizational order. This threat originates with the “timeless” human wish for immortality and associations of “wish fulfillment”[35] with “everyone for himself” foreign policies. “O my soul,” warned Pindar, “do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.”[36]
Without suitable changes in the Hobbesian “tract of time,” the global State of War, nurtured by refractory ideas regarding absolute sovereignty,[37] points not only toward an immutable human mortality, but also to unprecedented levels of violent death. One relevant notion is climate change denial, a posture of determined anti-reason still being expressed by Trump foreign policies. Left unchecked by valid considerations of refined intellection, such denial could actually hasten another mass extinction on Planet Earth. At that civilizational “end-point,” time will have lost all its residual meanings, and violent death will imperil all that still is.
Considered by itself, immortality remains an unworthy and unseemly human goal, both because it is nonsense[38] and because it fosters such endlessly injurious human behaviors as war, terrorism, and genocide. The dignified task, therefore, is not to remove individual human hopes to soar above death (that is, to achieve some palpable form of immortality),[39] but rather to “de-link” this futile search from vastly destructive human behaviors.[40]
Disconnecting Death Fear from Terrorist Calculations
How should Israeli planners proceed with such a multi-faceted task? This is not an easy question, nor one that could ever be answered in the philosophic genre of Platonic “shadows.”. There are no available science-based guidelines. Even if there were such availability, this is not just another ordinary problem that could yield to rational assessments or reason-based solutions. On the contrary, the infinitely-distressing wish to immortality and (correspondingly) ecstasy is so deeply compelling and naturally universal that it could never be dispelled solely by logical argument. What unreason could never accomplish, remarks philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, could never be accomplished by reason.[41]
Further clarifications are now in order. Philosopher Karl Jaspers writes in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952): “There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought but for the whisperings of the irrational….” The most seductive of these irrational whisperings are ones that offer to confer a distinctly selective power over death.[42] Reciprocally, it is from the expressed criteria of such “selection” that far-reaching evils can suddenly or incrementally “be born.” For Israel’s jihadi foes, any promised power over death demands the “sacrifice” of certain expressly despised “others.”[43]
For science, death is simply a function of biology. Moreover, because it “presents” together with decomposition and decay – and because it calls for human comprehension of “nothingness” within a continuous flow of time – there exist no plausible ways to replace mystery with rationality. By its very nature, which inevitably brings forth inconsolable terrors and paralyzing anxieties, individual death fear could never submit to management by Reason.
Still, at least in principle, some measure of existential relief could be discovered in transience, in the empathetic awareness that nothing is forever and that everything is impermanent. What is required, by this discovery, is some tangible reciprocal of human biological decomposition. This would mean deliberately cultivating the imagery of expanding human significance, an imagery that would stem from a much deeper awareness of life’s limited duration. In scientific terms, scholars might best describe this particular quality of life as a “scarcity value.”[44] Seemingly paradoxical, such a gainful “cultivation” could represent the optimal strategy for “overcoming” individual human mortality.[45]
How could humankind arrive at such an intellectually-challenging conclusion? We began this argument with the view that daily news reports are merely the changing “shadows” of deeper human activities. To deal satisfactorily with the recurrent horrors of jihadi terror-violence, Israeli planners will first have to understand the verifiably true sources of such images.[46]
It’s time for synthesis. The underpinnings of daily news events in the Middle East, Israeli planners should finally observe, are rooted in complex conceptual intersections of death, time and immortality. It is only with a more determined understanding of these intersections that Israel could meaningfully protect itself from murderers who link criminal-terrorism to presumed ecstasies (sometimes deviate sexual crimes, as on October 7, 2023) and crude fantasies.
In the end, for Israel. tangible geopolitics must remain a second-order activity, a distorting reflection of what is actually causal. For now, adversarial politics continue to thrive on a vast intellectual emptiness, on the evident delusion that mass killing of “others” can confer power over death. But this delusion is not “merely” murderous and medieval; it is also futile. “Conscious of his emptiness,” warns German philosopher Karl Jaspers in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), “man [human] tries to make a faith for himself (or herself) in the political realm. In Vain.”
Terrorism and “Clocks”
“Is it an end that draws near,” inquires Karl Jaspers in Man in the Modern Age (1951) “or a beginning.” The insightful answer, one which lies far beyond any measuring hands of clocks,[47] is by no means apparent. Yet, determining this challenging answer has now become a fundamental expectation of global political destiny. For the world as a whole, not just for Israel, nothing could be more important.
Soon, to survive as a species, not just a singular state, humankind will need to rise above (Nietzsche would say “overcome”) the defiling hazards of geopolitics, far beyond the homicidal “shadows” of what is most importantly underlying. Immutably, countless residents of planet earth will continue to regard “power over death” as the highest conceivable form of power. At some point, the flesh-and-blood consequences of this ubiquitous anti-reason could rival or exceed our planet’s encounters with total war. These consequences could be sui generis.
To look suitably beyond Platonic “shadows,” Israeli strategic thinkers and planners should soon acknowledge that their Islamist foes are animated by two often-complementary needs: meaning and belonging. These compelling needs represent values that are additional to ecstasy and immortality. Taken together, in varying but indeterminable proportions, they spawn the conceptual foundations of anti-Israel terror-violence. All Israeli military efforts against Hamas and other jihadi foes should take immediate operational note of these consequential drives.
This will not be a task for the intellectually faint of heart. This will not be a task for politicians or pundits. It will require the intellectual giftedness of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues on the Manhattan Project, but with an entirely different goal in mind. The task will not be to build “a bomb,” but rather to ensure that jihadi terrorists do not make it easier for Iran or other state adversary to fashion a “device” for use against Israel. In this connection, Israel’s leaders ought periodically to remind the “civilized world” about their country’s “strategic depth:”
Israel is less than half the size of America’s Lake Michigan.
In his modern philosophical classic, Being and Time (1953), Martin Heidegger laments what he calls (in German) das Mann, or “The They.” Drawing fruitfully upon earlier seminal insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud, Heidegger’s “The They” represents the ever-present herd, crowd, horde or mass, an “untruth” (the term favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) that can all-too-quickly suffocate intellectual growth. For Heidegger’s always-threatening “The They,” the crowning human untruth lies in (1) “herd” acceptance of immortality at institutional and personal levels; and in (2) herd encouragement of the notion that personal “power over death” is sometimes derivative (recall philosophers Hegel and Treitschke) from membership in nation-states. History reveals that this can become a dangerously insidious notion. And as we have just seen, this notion can also be associated with membership in sub-state terror groups.
Any reassuring hopes for personal immortality are invariably contingent on a specific group’s (state or sub-state) “sacredness.” Here, only membership in a presumptively sacred group could serve to confer “life-everlasting.” In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler underscores this ultimate form of power in world politics. By definition, a presumed “power over death” is essential to the conquest of Spengler’s “metaphysical fear.” By tradition, it has been associated with belligerent international relations. While not readily apparent, what we witnessing in barbarous jihadi crimes against Israel[48] is at least partially epiphenomenal. These Nuremberg-category crimes[49] are more-or-less reflective of starkly primal fears and expectations.
Before “civilized nations”[50] can be rescued from still-accumulating jihadi terror crimes – crimes that could sometime involve unconventional weapons – scholars and policy-makers will require a deeper theoretical understanding of the issues.[51] These issues concern variously intangible combinations of mass murder, belligerent nationalism and “metaphysical fear.” It follows that Islamist operations in Gaza and elsewhere should finally be understood at challenging intellectual levels. It is only with such an expanded foundation that counter-terrorist measures could meaningfully succeed.
For Israel’s struggle against jihadi insurgents, superiority in high-technology weapon systems remains essential. Nonetheless, going forward, something else will be just as important or manifestly more important. This other factor concerns presumptive enemy considerations of God, Death and Time. Inter alia, these considerations will not be affected by US President Trump’s 20-Point Middle East Peace Plan.
When jihadi terror-criminals are more-or-less driven by “metaphysical fear” (the existential dread noted by philosopher Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West), these adversaries cannot be defeated by military hardware alone. When Hamas or kindred Islamists declare audaciously “I believe,” Israel must prepare to make pragmatic sense of a uniquely hard-to-decipher “battlefield.” To succeed in this preparation, Jerusalem’s strategic planners and decision-makers will need to view the manifold challenges of counter-terrorism through a broadly-conceptual (not narrowly-operational) lens.
Taken in its entirety, US President Donald Trump’s 20-Point Plan represents a political rather than conceptual document. For Israel, though the promise of returning hostages is understandably welcome and overriding, the American plan’s cumulative effect will not be to Israel’s advantage. It will immediately incentivize new rounds of jihadi terrorism and enhance improper claims for Palestinian statehood. From the standpoint of authoritative international law, sovereignty is never created by acts of state-recognition, even at the UN General Assembly, but by verifiable satisfaction of explicit treaty-based requirements. For the jurisprudential record, these requirements are found at the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (Montevideo Convention) of 1933.
After the Trump Peace Proposal, Oswald Spengler’s “I believe” remains a vital motivator of terror crimes against Israel. Unless a proposal takes proper account of this motivator, no American presidential threats of Hamas “obliteration” could meaningfully serve Israel’s survival needs. Rather than seek safety through Trump spasms of bombastic threat, Jerusalem’s dedicated thinkers will need to address widely overlooked interactions between God, Death and Time. Above all, these gifted thinkers will need to fashion and assess pertinent theory. Unlike the disjointed and unpromising Trump proposal, their efforts would acknowledge that comprehensive theory is an indispensable “net” for all counter-terrorist planning.
For Israel, only by “casting” can they reasonably expect to “catch.”
—————-
[1] Among those scheduled to be released is terrorist Ibrahim Hamad, organizer of multiple suicide-bombings within Israel.
[2] To wit, in the West Bank (Judea/Samaria), Palestinian terrorists are starting to build assorted rocket weapons, mirroring what happened in Gaza in the late 1990s. Nothing about the Trump plan would inhibit or slow down this development. On the contrary, aided by plan-directed terrorist releases, Trump’s proposal will accelerate rocket manufacture and deployment. And this technological development is apt to extend to Egyptian border areas less susceptible to Israeli preemptions or reprisals.
[3] Following Donald Trump’s recent mutual security agreement with Qatar, jihadi terrorists will find it much easier to seek post-attack sanctuary in that country.
[4] See Plato, The Republic.
[5] See by this writer at Horasis (Zürich), Louis René Beres: https://horasis.org/looking-beyond-shadows-death-time-and-immortality/ Such human emotions include individual (hence existential) fears and expectations.
[6]Pertinent sentiments can be found in the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s remark: “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be built.” This is the present author’s own translation from the original German: “Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert warden.” See: Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, xi (Henry Handy, ed., 1991) quoting Immanuel Kant’s Idee Zu Einer Allgemeinen Geschichte In Weltburgerlicher Absicht (1784).
[7] This useful bifurcation is best known to political philosophers in terms of the work of Jose Ortega y’Gasset, especially The Revolt of the Masses (1932).
[8] See by this author, Louis René Beres: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2021/10/24/to-prevent-a-nuclear-war-americas-overriding-policy-imperative/
[9] A common aspect to these three core concepts is the inherently vague idea of “soul.” Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought of “soul” (in German, Seele) as the essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung ever provided a precise definition of the term, but it was not intended by either in an ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable and critical seat of mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in the present context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of America by express references to “soul.” He was plainly disgusted by a civilization so tangibly unmoved by considerations of true “consciousness” (e.g., an awareness of intellect and literature); Freud even thought that the crude American commitment to perpetually shallow optimism and material accomplishment would inevitably spawn sweeping psychological misery. Judging, among other things, by the extent of America’s opiate crisis, this prediction was entirely on-the-mark.
[10] This succinct phrase, the “hunger of immortality,” is central to Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life (1921). During my more than fifty years as a Purdue University professor, I often identified this seminal work as the single most important book I had ever read. Interestingly, it was another great Spanish existentialist, Jose Ortega y’Gasset, who came in as a close second.
[11] See Emmanuel Levinas, “Time Considered on the Basis of Death” (1976). In another essay, Levinas says: “An immortal person is a contradiction in terms.” Though seemingly an obvious assertion, it also runs counter to promises of the world’s principal religions and therefore to the most common catch-phrases of US domestic politics.
[12] For an early examination of time’s impact on foreign policy decision-making, see, by this author, Louis René Beres, “Time, Consciousness and Decision-making in Theories of International Relations,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. VIII, No.3., Fall 1974, pp. 175-186.
[13] For the best available assessment of this concept, see: Karl Jaspers, Reason and anti-Reason in our Time (1952). The German philosopher clarifies the “fog of the irrational” that bedeviled Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. In a distillation of his conspicuously grand thought, Jaspers proclaimed: “Reason is confronted again and again with the fact of a mass of believers who have lost all ability to listen, who can absorb no logical argument and who hold unshakably fast to the Absurd as an unassailable presupposition….”
[14] The charming idea that time can somehow “have a stop” is raised by Indiana writer Kurt Vonnegut. in Slaughterhouse Five (1969).
[15] Observes Spanish existentialist philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in Man and Crisis (1958): “History is an illustrious war against death.”
[16] On the primacy of hatred toward Judaism, not Israel (i.e., Israel is despised be-
cause it is Jewish), the Hamas Charter states: “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish
and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims. ‘Let the eyes of
the cowards not fall asleep.”‘
[17] But killing need not always be linked to promises of power over death. Sometimes, per Eugene Ionesco, “People kill and are killed in order to prove to themselves that life exists.” See the Romanian playwright’s only novel, The Hermit, 102 (1973).
[18] Already aware that blind fanaticism is the ultimate scourge of all decent politics, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard recognized that there are too many individuals, not too few, who take it as their sacred duty to sacrifice others on the blood-stained altars of personal immortality.
[19] See, for example, by this author: Louis René Beres, https://besacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1053-Terrorism-as-Power-over-Death-Beres-final.pdf
[20] Here it ought also to be kept in mind that the incremental destruction of biodiversity on Planet Earth is producing a continuous natural climate catastrophe, one that naturalist David Attenborough suggests will likely end in another mass extinction. This means, inter alia, more-or-less predictable synergies between growing catastrophes of the natural world and catastrophes of specifically human misunderstanding. In synergistic interactions, by definition, the cumulative harm (the “whole”) is greater than the sum of component sufferings (the “parts”).
[21] By using the modifier “earthly,” von Treitschke may be suggesting that this particular realization of immortality falls short of an authentic power over death, that it represents more a triumph of personal fame or recognition than a true life everlasting.
[22] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at Horasis (Zürich): https://horasis.org/looking-beyond-shadows-death-time-and-immortality/
[23] Still, we should consider the contra view of Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1932). Here, Ortega identifies the state not as a convenient source of immortality, but as the very opposite. For him, the state is “the greatest danger,” mustering its immense and irresistible resources “to crush beneath it any creative minority that disturbs it….” Earlier, in his chapter “On the New Idol” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote similarly: “State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters…All-too-many are born – for the superfluous the state was invented.” Later, in the same chapter: “A hellish artifice was invented there (the state), a horse of death…Indeed, a dying for many was invented there; verily, a great service to all preachers of death!”
[24] The Trump White House still seeks to persuade by simplification. On the plausible consequences of all such deceptive measures, see Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation in On Certainty: “Remember that one is sometimes convinced of the correctness of a view by its simplicity or symmetry….”
[25] The belligerent nationalism of current US president Donald Trump stands in marked contrast to authoritative legal assumptions concerning solidarity between states. These jurisprudential assumptions concern a presumptively common legal struggle against aggression and terrorism. Such a “peremptory” expectation, known formally in law as a jus cogens assumption, had already been mentioned in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis (533 CE); Hugo Grotius, 2 De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres, Ch. 20 (Francis W. Kesey., tr, Clarendon Press, 1925) (1690); and Emmerich de Vattel, 1 Le Droit des Gens, Ch. 19 (1758).
[26] See, for example, by this author, at JURIST, Louis René Beres, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/05/louis-beres-america-first-2/; and https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2019/06/louis-beres-america-first/
[27] To wit, consider current Russian aggressions against Ukraine and accelerated North Korean processes of nuclearization.
[28] Though still not widely understood, international law is a part of US law. In the words of Mr. Justice Gray, delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900): “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction….” (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)). The more specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called “Supremacy Clause.” For pertinent earlier decisions by Justice John Marshall, see: The Antelope, 23 U.S. (10 Wheat.) 66, 120 (1825); The Nereide, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) 388, 423 (1815); Rose v. Himely, 8 U.S. (4 Cranch) 241, 277 (1808) and Murray v. The Schooner Charming Betsy, 6 U.S. (2 Cranch) 64, 118 (1804).
[29] On this doctrine, see, by this author: Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (1984). By definition, the doctrine of sovereignty is at cross-purposes with humankind’s most overriding goal. “The ultimate aim of history and philosophy,” we learn from Karl Jaspers’ Truth and Symbol (1959) (Von Der Wahrheit), “is the unity of mankind.”
[30] See by this author at JURIST: Louis René Beres, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2022/01/louis-beres-international-law-state-of-nature/