Ambiguity and the Absolute: Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty on the Question of Truth

Preface

xv Preface In , as he was still reeling from the death of his first child, an infant boy named Rumbartus, a young Rembrandt composed one of his most direct and explicit works, the remarkable etching Abraham Caressing Isaac. This was not his first attempt at unraveling the mysteries attached to the most famous infanticide in Western culture. In the months following Rumbartus’s death, Rembrandt had already used this theme as the basis for one of his early masterpieces, The Sacrifice of Isaac. If the earlier painting used vivid colors to display the brutal resolve of the father in stark contrast with the innocent exposition of the child— with Abraham forcefully covering his son’s face, on the verge of breaking his neck—the later etching was more reflexive, and beyond the obvious outrage before the broken filial trust (and, it may be assumed, the incomprehension before a father willingly bringing upon himself the pain that Rembrandt himself was dealt by fate), the etching now asked a question that can be seen no longer as psychological, but as cultural. Rembrandt’s etching had now moved to depicting a duel of principles, not of individuals . The etching seems to be asking: What sort of thinking does it take to kill one’s own child? And further: What sort of thinking must this child represent that requires elimination? The etching is not as starkly violent as the painting. A younger Isaac is seen smiling in a near ravished way at an apple he is holding in his hand, half toy, half temptation. The already aged Abraham decorously sits behind the child in great attire, his frame overwhelming the young child’s xvi ■ Preface outlines, and his hand already holding the child’s neck with an ambiguous firmness, between protection and strangulation. Abraham is not looking at the child, he is gazing straight into the viewer’s eyes with a defiant and selfcon fident stare. Isaac, however, in his playful fascination with the apple, is oblivious to the threat of the father. The future crime is painted all over the etching, but Rembrandt’s choice of an earlier time, long before the divine beckoning and the actual sacrifice, points to his true concern: it is a matter of looking beyond the legend, with its twisted chain of events that conveniently removes all questions of agency by replacing them with a praise of obedience. Rembrandt seems to suggest that only a personality like Abraham could become this child’s killer. In short, he is questioning something we now would call the fanatical spirit, the spirit that values the divine over the earthly, an abstract god over a living child. In this light, many of his visual choices seem to aggregate: Abraham’s gaze is untroubled, lucid, and objective ; its directness acknowledges the viewer while its defiance establishes an insurmountable distance from them. Judgment is not for the others to give, and Abraham’s strength of resolve is clearly drawn from a reference to the absolute that no common moral convention or emotion can break. Isaac, “He-Who-Shall-Laugh,” however, keeps nothing at a distance. Indeed, his whole body is enveloped in the frame and heavy clothing of his father, his neck is touched by his father’s hands, while his own hands are full—one holding the apple and the other resting on his father’s knee. Even his right foot, whose heel is playfully lifted, is resting on his own left foot, maintaining the child’s complete embeddedness in the world. The child looks away, and we only have a lateral view of his luminous and joyful face. He is oblivious of us like he is oblivious of his father, so fully involved is he in his relationship with a world he does not keep at bay. Two spirits, Rembrandt seems to say to us, one of objective consciousness , a piercing gaze whose reference and only allegiance is to the absolute; and the other spirit, one of playful engagement, oblivious to most things, but nonetheless fully saturated with its encounter with the world. The first spirit engaged in a fight to the death against the other. The Dutch Republic of Rembrandt’s time was a country of rationalist optimism where human reason was enjoying an unprecedented triumph, and there is little doubt that the painter himself was sensitive to and in- fluenced by the new ideas. In this context, should we still say that this etching represents...