"The Passion of Benjamin Fondane", by Ricardo L. Nirenberg

This article appeared in Exquisite Corpse, June-September 1989

With the renewed interest in Martin Heidegger's unrepented Nazi past, we learn that in 1934 he would refuse to greet his erstwhile teacher and protector, Husserl, in the streets of Freiburg.  The author of Being and Time and Nazi-appointed Rector Magnificus and Führer of the University would cross to the opposite sidewalk so as not to have to say good-day to Husserl, der Jud, by then seventy-five, to whom he had dedicated his main work.  Consistency required that Heidegger remove the dedication from his book, as well as Husserl's portrait from the University's hall.  Well, after all, Peter too denied his Master thrice, yet on him was built, as on a rock, the most powerful church in history.  But Peter, right after his triple denial had the decency, if we are to believe Matthew, of crying bitterly.  Nothing suggests that Heidegger ever cried bitterly over his denial.  Nor did he, as far as we know, ever utter a word, even after the war, about his treatment of Husserl (who died in 1938), or about Germany's treatment of the Jews.  All the same, a powerful church has been built upon Heidegger's rock, a church whose latter-day sects have come to dominate the discourse in the Humanities at our universities.  That discourse, as it turned out, has no more reference to the human person, to live human beings, than the technical language of, let us say, Physical Chemistry.

The drama I want to tell is in many ways the opposite of Heidegger's betrayal.  It also involves two men, two philosophers, a Master and a Disciple, a Father and a Son.  If we look up Leon Shestov's name in The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy edited by Paul Edwards, we find: "(1866-1938), Russian philosopher and religious thinker, was born in Kiev...  Perhaps most strongly influenced by Pascal, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche..."  There follows a summary of his thought in two columns of small print, and an incomplete bibliography.  He was the master.  As for the disciple, Benjamin Fondane, a Rumanian Jew born in 1899 who moved to Paris in 1923, he is not mentioned at all in that encyclopaedia.  Why tell the drama of two relatively obscure philosophers... In the hope that more of us will read them?  Those of us who would defend a belief in the dignity of the person against the current critical attacks need all the help we can find.  For the denial of the human being behind the word, the text, the artifact, requires only a modicum of ingenuity and dialectical skill plus a certain tone-deafness; but the opening of an I-Thou of author and reader, of poet and listener, the welcoming of a presence... that is something altogether different, and Shestov and Fondane, in their works and their lives, show us what that may be: they point to a way.  Let me hasten to clarify the Encyclopaedia's term, "religious thinker."  Both Jewish, neither Shestov nor Fondane belonged to any synagogue; they were not men who had found a faith, a truth, a niche; like Pascal, they searched in pain.  It is the search they tell us, not the results.  They belong to that kind of philosophers for whom thinking is participation, witnessing.  They seek to awaken us, to infect us with their insomnia, and they have nothing to say to those who have already found or to those who prefer to sit as mere spectators of reality.  Nor do they have any special wisdom to impart.  Often referred to as "the Russian existentialist," Shestov wrote with a style thoroughly purged of technical jargon: simple, unemphatic, striving for clarity above all, brightened by gentle, pungent irony.  As the French poet Yves Bonnefoy has put it, "(Shestov's) literary quality is as unessential as it is evidently superb."

Benjamin Fondane arrived in Paris in 1923, about three years after Shestov.  E. M. Cioran, a fellow Romanian who arrived in Paris in 1936 and who went on to become, in the words of Susan Sontag, "the most distinguished figure in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein writing today," met Fondane in 1942 and remembers him as a man of extraordinary charm, with a captivating voice, a fascinating talker wearing the attire of a clochard fantastique, a fantastic bum.  Steeped in French literature like most educated Romanians of that time, even before leaving his native country Fondane had published poems and literary criticism in the local avant-garde reviews.  Once in Paris, he met his compatriots Tristan Tzara, the father of Dada, and the sculptor Brancusi (later a witness at his marriage -- the other was Shestov), as well as many others.  But most importantly, in 1924 he met Shestov.  While still in Romania the young poet had read the Russian philosopher's studies on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and reviewed them for Romanian journals (Cioran tells me that during the 20's and 30's Shestov was the most widely read philosopher in Romania).  Fondane himself has recounted (Rencontres avec Léon Chestov, Ed. Plasma, Paris, 1982, p.42.) how the meeting of master and disciple came to pass.
  "But it wasn't until 1926 that a serious contact was established between the two of us.  He sent me a copy of the French translation, recently published by La Pléiade, of his La Philosophie de la Tragédie (Dostoïevsky et Nietzsche).  I wrote a letter of thanks, in which I told him, more or less, how hard it was to follow him, for to reach and penetrate his thought it was necessary, according to his own advice, to have experienced some intimate disaster...  And I added: where is the man who, for love of Truth, would wish upon himself such a disaster?  Who would willingly accept to be his disciple? 
A few days later I received an invitation from his daughter Tatiana.  There were guests, for a soirée, at her place in Rue de l'Abbé-Grégoire.  Shestov received me saying, `I am used to people writing to me that I'm so talented, how deeply I have grasped Dostoevsky, that my style... etc., and now, perhaps for the first time, someone understands what the real issue is.'  He showed my letter to everybody, making a great deal of it."

And so Fondane became Shestov's disciple; in fact, his only disciple, his son.  Many had admired him, but nobody else had ever believed with Shestov that at the crucial moment, when our reason testifies unhesitatingly that there is not and cannot be any hope, given a grain of faith we can awaken from reason, from the impersonal It, as we do from a bad dream.  Nobody but Fondane ever followed Shestov all along the arduous way leading, through the promise of a faith shining always ahead, into the realm of freedom where everything is possible, even canceling a tear, changing the past, restoring his children (his original children!) back to Job.  For such is Shestov's doctrine.  The dialectical skill and deep knowledge of the Western philosophical tradition that others deploy trying to dissolve the human personality into the It, he uses to insist that man can wrest from the It even what is most its: the irrevocable past.  Under the Russian expatriate's tutorship, the Rumanian expatriate read the philosophers.  Husserl, Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, the German idealists...  Husserl, because he was the thinker at the opposite extreme, the boldest and most articulate advocate of scientific thought, the champion of reason and the eternal truths, and therefore the one master Shestov chose to attack in order to free himself of those eternal truths.  Incidentally, Husserl became the Russian philosopher's appreciative contender.  "No one has ever attacked me so sharply as he," said Husserl, introducing Shestov to a group of American professors of philosophy, "and that's why we are such close friends." (See L. Shestov, "In Memory of a Great Philosopher" in Speculation and Revelation, Ohio U. Press, 1982.  On Shestov's attack on Husserl, see the former's "Memento Mori" and "What Is Truth" in Potestas Clavium, Ohio U. Press, 1968.)  A characteristically noble gesture on the part of a man whose most famous disciple was later to deny him before the world.  And always the one guiding idea, Shestov's stupendous idée fixe: to examine the credentials of philosophical reason; to expose the unreasonableness of reason's claim to sovereignty in all regions of experience; to return to us the absolute freedom that may have been ours before the Fall, before the eating of the fruit of Knowledge.  Fondane, of course, had his own style, different from Shestov's — more aggressive, richer in imagery and rhetorical fireworks — and his own preoccupations, stemming in great part from his own continuing poetic practice in French.  The nature of poetic inspiration, the denunciation of Surrealism in particular, and, in general, of poetry which pretends to the status of knowledge; the poetic and existential experience of Rimbaud, of Baudelaire.  These, and a vast array of other subjects, he brought to the crucible of Shestovian thought; all during the thirties he published sharply critical articles on major figures, the most formidable names: Husserl, Heidegger, Gide, Valéry, Bergson, Breton, Nietzsche, Lévy-Brühl, Freud...  (Fondane's Faux Traité d'esthétique, Rimbaud le voyou, Baudelaire et l'expérience du gouffre, as well as a collection of his essays, La conscience malheureuse, have been reissued by Editions Plasma, Paris.)  And to all he applied the critical method described by Cioran: "Truly, [Fondane] wasn't so much interested in what an author says as in what he could have said, in what he hides, making thus his Shestov's method, i.e. the pilgrimage through the souls, rather than through the doctrines."

In 1932, at the time Fondane published his article on Heidegger (included in the book La conscience malheureuse), the latter's reputation was unblemished and his writings were being unanimously praised by the professional philosophers of France.  Shestov's disciple was undaunted.  Most critiques of Heidegger written in English charge him with logical inconsistency, empirical groundlessness, or false etymologies.  Fondane goes instead to the intention behind, the vis a tergo.  He sees in Heidegger's philosophy a compromise, a monstrous coupling of Kierkegaard's psychological contents and thought with Husserl's phenomenological method, and behind that compromise, a brazen attempt at subjecting the actual, live experience to the dictates of Knowledge.  Nothing could be more hateful to Shestov or Fondane, for in the uncompromising nature of the either/or, in the aggravation rather than the relaxing of the tension between Husserl's and Kierkegaard's opposite extremes, between Knowledge and Life, they saw the only chance of hope for civilization.  To talk of Nothingness as if it were something is a logical contradiction, it has been often noted.  Heidegger cut the Gordian knot by simply declaring Angst, or Dread, the feeling of dread before Nothingness, to be prior to Logic.  In so doing, the Freiburg Professor has a secret purpose, Fondane charges: to defang dread, to domesticate it, as it were (Fondane points out that he is concentrating on Heidegger's "Was ist Metaphysik?", his 1929 Inaugural Lecture, to which the quotations here belong).  By affirming that "Dread is in secret union with the purity and sweetness of the creative yearning," Heidegger would have Dread perform for us a useful service: to reveal Nothingness, and therefore to make Metaphysics -- the questioning about Being and Nothingness -- possible and respectable and professorial again.  To get Philosophy rolling...  Dread then, Pascal's abyss and Baudelaire's, the late Latin poet's anguished cry, "Timor mortis conturbat me," all these things, these awful, tragic things, looking at death in the eye, are neither ugly nor frightful; they become nothing but necessary, scientific steps toward Heidegger's metaphysical heights, from which we can, in the Freiburg's philosopher's words, "repossess for our understanding all of Being, as such and in its totality."

Dostoevsky had foreseen the monstrously totalitarian vocation of "our understanding," and had replied, in his "Notes from the Underground": "If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated -- chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!"  And Fondane himself responds to the future Rector Magnificus and Führer of Freiburg: "Tragedy — even the gods'— is not grand nor beautiful; human "finitude," its "forsaken and humiliated" character; all that has, even on Heidegger's lips, a cracked sound that turns your stomach.  Tragedy, even though accompanied by "solitary grandeur," makes whoever watches it sick and turns whoever experiences its deep meaning insane."

It is interesting to note that twenty-four years and a World War later, when Heidegger's doctrine of Dread had already become, in the guise of French existentialism, the world's most influential philosophy, another expatriate from an Eastern European country, the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz, criticized it in his Diary in very much the same terms as Fondane.  "Historically speaking, the plunge of the human spirit into this existential scandal, into its specific helpless rapacity and wise stupidity, was probably inevitable.  The history of culture indicates that stupidity is the twin sister of reason, it grows most luxuriously not on the soil of virgin ignorance, but on soil cultivated by the sweat of doctors and professors... The imperialism of reason is horrible.  Whenever reason notices that some part of reality eludes it, it immediately lunges at it to devour it... ...life ridicules reason.  This, reason could not bear and from then on its torments, which reach tragicomic heights in existentialism, begin."  This, which applies, mutatis mutandis, to much of today's critical discourse no less well than to the writings of Heidegger and Sartre, Gombrowicz wrote in Buenos Aires in 1956, when much of the century's horror had been played out, and probably without ever having read Fondane.  But only a prophetic spirit, open to the passion behind the word and not merely to the grammar, could have seen it so clearly back in 1932.

In October 1944, Fondane died at the gas chambers of Birkenau, near Auschwitz.  His master Shestov had died six years earlier, shortly after Husserl: both philosophical friends, old Jewish men, had been spared the worst.  Fondane, who had been naturalized French, served briefly in the French Army, was taken prisoner, escaped, was captured then freed, spent some time recovering at the Val de Grâce hospital, and then remained in Paris during the Nazi occupation, hiding, with his sister and wife, in his own apartment at 6 rue Rollin, a few yards from the house which had been Descartes'.  All along, Fondane knew his destiny was tragic.  Victoria Ocampo, the Argentine femme-de-lettres, has recounted that on July 18 1939, Fondane gave her a packet of letters from Shestov, as well as transcripts from conversations between master and disciple.  "It is my most precious possession," Fondane told her, and asked her to open the packet and have the texts published, in case of his death.  She tried to make light of the whole affair, but he insisted: the war was coming and he had the foreboding that was the last time they would see each other.  But why did he stay in Paris?  His Argentine friends tried to persuade him to go back to South America, where he had sojourned in 1929 and 1936.  He wouldn't leave his sister Line and his wife Geneviève; but even if they couldn't follow him across the ocean, why didn't they all hide somewhere in provincial France, as so many others did?  Or simply change lodgings in Paris, a most elementary precaution?  By 1943, it seems Fondane actually walked the streets openly, wearing his distinctive "fantastic bum" attire, until he was anonymously denounced to the Gestapo early in 1944.  Perfectly aware throughout of all the risks, yet, as Cioran has remarked, seemingly fascinated by his own tragic destiny.

In March 1944 Fondane and his sister Line were arrested and taken first to the Prefecture de Police, then to a camp at Drancy, near Paris.  His wife Geneviève (née Tissier), not being Jewish, wasn't arrested.  She retired to a convent in 1949, where she died in 1954.  While Fondane was detained at the Prefecture de Police, Cioran went there with the Romanian Cultural Attaché, to try to get his friend sent to his native land.  Fondane, the Attaché claimed, was translating an important Romanian poet into French, and was therefore of great value to the Romanian State.  Although Romania was Germany's ally, he would have been safe there, Cioran tells me.  But this ploy didn't succeed.  Once at the Drancy camp, Fondane didn't even want his friends to do too much on his behalf for, he said, a Jewish doctor there had told him, "While I'm here you have nothing to fear."  One day, however, a prisoner failed to return from leave, and all the others were deported as punishment.  In May, Fondane was sent to Auschwitz, where he was registered under his old family name, Benjamin Wechsler.

Thus ended Fondane's life.  A dream of pristine, absolute freedom turned into a nightmare of brutal, absolute necessity.  Is that grotesque paradox the meaning of our philosopher's death?  I shall propose another possibility.  With open eyes Fondane had become Shestov's disciple.  Their letters, their writings give us a vivid glimpse of the high love between the two philosophers.  Then, on November 20 1938, Shestov died.  Gone, as Plato was convinced Socrates was, to other gods who are wise and good?  Or simply dead, like a dog?  The English poet David Gascoyne has told Cioran that he was haunted for months by the image of Fondane whom he encountered by chance, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the day of Shestov's death.  Was this, then, Fondane's intimate, necessary disaster?  How hard to come by, that beginning, that grain of faith.  Perhaps farther on, deeper down, till every single trace of hope has been extinguished?  His later poems suggest (but in these matters "suggest" is, I feel, too positive a word) that at some point after Shestov's death, and perhaps because of it, Fondane had a momentous insight. I do not know whether he saw it vaguely or distinctly, suddenly or by degrees: Shestov was wrong.  Even if that most difficult thing were obtained, that seed of faith; even if one could erase Job's ordeal and Socrates' execution, even if one could cancel all the tears in the world... it would still not be absolute freedom.  For it is not in eliminating suffering from the world, but in assuming it, taking it all on oneself: there — tremendous there — resides the only real possibility of freedom.  And how could he refuse such a gift?

But what is most significant for us lies on this side of their possible divergence on the meaning of freedom.  The meaning of faith was the same for both Shestov and Fondane: to believe, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that each human being can be -- and therefore is -- unique, irreplaceable, infinitely important.  If our animal nature makes that faith ever hard to sustain, humanistic culture at least used to come to the rescue.  But what are we to do today, if literary texts are meant to refer to nothing but themselves and other texts, if paintings are supposed to be only about painting and music speaks to us only about the qualities of sound; when we open, for example, The Times Literary Supplement (May 13-19, 1988, p.537) to find A. C. Danto writing with admiring approval that Diebenkorn's art, like his life, "is a systematic effort to expunge from itself whatever is other than itself."  For what is true of much of present-day art is originally and primarily true of reason.  In the finished mathematical theorem we are not expected to feel the mathematician's breath.  It is of the essence of reason systematically to expunge from itself whatever is other than itself.  And that means, above all, the live human person.  With what passion would Fondane have written, had he lived to see them, against these exacerbations of reason!  Yes, a belief in the person is difficult to sustain today.  The lives, the words and the love of these two men, Shestov and Fondane, provide us with a precious help, an invaluable testimony.