Abstract
This essay underscores distinguishing and consistent features of Améry’s original work, as reflected in methodological passages from At the Mind’s Limits, On Aging, and On Suicide. The ensuing picture of Améry’s thought shows an intricate relation to the idea (or ideal) of philosophy as fabricated by its founders (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle). Philosophia means the Love of Wisdom, and philosophy was traditionally portrayed as the best and worthiest life. In his original work, as well as in his life, Améry presents a profoundly different image of the philosopher and of the contemplative life: the philosopher as not a particularly good thinker (or a particularly good person for that matter), and the contemplative life as not a good one at all. Instead of love, one finds in Améry a very nuanced conception of empathy and the effort to cultivate human relationships, precisely in those regions where affinity and fondness are lacking. Instead of wisdom, we find in him a devotion to honesty and the cultivation of thoughtfulness, especially in those “twilight” regions that seem most difficult and unrewarding to thought.
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Notes
- 1.
In the context of this essay I do not engage comprehensively with Améry’s many writings about figures or movements of the philosophical canon (the sixth volume of Améry’s Werke [2017] contains the bulk of his essays on philosophy, some of which have been translated and compiled in Radical Humanism [1984]). I have done more in-depth comparative studies of Améry and various philosophers in my dissertation (2012), and more specifically on his relation to the enlightenment in Ben-Shai 2014a and 2016; to Heidegger, Kant, and Wittgenstein in Ben-Shai 2010, 2011, and 2016; to Nietzsche in Ben-Shai 2014b, and to Arendt in Ben-Shai 2007.
- 2.
In “Jean Améry takes his life,” Susan Neiman 1997 comments on the affinity between Améry’s variant of rationalism and writing style and that of French Enlightenment thinkers. It can be added in the context that Améry endorsed that enduring image of the public intellectual in France, as a social critic especially in support of the oppressed groups—a figure or function he found woefully lacking in Germany, especially during the war. This image was epitomized for him in Emile Zola’s “J’accuse!” which he echoed in his Charles Bovary (1978), a book in which he defends the “simple man,” and in general the petite bourgeoisie, this too in the spirit of the enlightenment. It is for the same reasons that he particularly admired the French existentialists Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir, whose efforts to balance between philosophy and literature on the one hand, and between individualism and political resistance on the other, he aspired to reproduce in his own life and work.
- 3.
Améry’s relationship to Wittgenstein, I should note, is complex, and by no means as oppositional as this citation makes it sound. The “neopositivism inspired by Wittgenstein,” he admits, “is always simultaneously right and wrong” (Améry 1999, p. 24). Améry had a personal relationship to this brand of “positivism,” since during the 1920s he attended some of the meetings of the Vienna Circle. The group’s commitment to public, and informal venues of study accorded with its social democratic ethos, which Améry held in favor, just as he was suspicious, as I noted above, of some of the anti-positivist channels of continental thought. The type of thinking Améry espouses, in any case, while it challenges the absolute dominion of ordinary rationality—what he calls “the logic of life”—does not for all that undermine, or purport to ground, the logic of life or logic itself, nor does it venture into a “beyond.”
- 4.
It is useful in this context to observe that Améry’s approach to Auschwitz, as his general intellectual ethos, is diametrically opposed to that of another famous survivor, Viktor Frankl (2006 [1946]). Whereas Frankl insists on the capacity to establish meaning (and “optimism”) even in the most adverse or “tragic” of conditions, Améry insisted, and fought to show, that this capacity is limited, and better so. Since the premises of Frankl’s work are very much in tune with French existentialism (the decisive common influence on both being Nietzsche), the contrast to Frankl is also an opportunity to observe the decisive limits of Améry’s indebtedness to Sartre. His emphasis in At the Mind’s Limits on victimhood runs counter to the almost exclusive valorization in French existentialism of action and freedom.
- 5.
The idea that something about the human condition only gets noticed in an inhuman condition is echoed by South-African novelist, J.M. Coetzee, who, in his fictional narrative of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians, wrote: “My torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body that can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well … They did not come to force [a] story out of me … They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal …” (Coetzee 1982, p. 113).
- 6.
For example, “suicides tear to pieces a prescription of nature…” (Améry 1999, p. 13).
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Ben-Shai, R. (2019). Without Love or Wisdom: On Jean Améry’s Reluctant Philosophy. In: Ataria, Y., Kravitz, A., Pitcovski, E. (eds) Jean Améry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28095-6_11
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