וָאֶתְחַנַּ֖ן אֶל־יְהֹוָ֑ה בָּעֵ֥ת הַהִ֖וא לֵאמֹֽר׃ אֲדֹנָ֣י יֱהֹוִ֗ה אַתָּ֤ה הַֽחִלּ֙וֹתָ֙ לְהַרְא֣וֹת אֶֽת־עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶ֨ת־גׇּדְלְךָ֔ וְאֶת־יָדְךָ֖ הַחֲזָקָ֑ה אֲשֶׁ֤ר מִי־אֵל֙ בַּשָּׁמַ֣יִם וּבָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־יַעֲשֶׂ֥ה כְמַעֲשֶׂ֖יךָ וְכִגְבוּרֹתֶֽךָ׃ אֶעְבְּרָה־נָּ֗א וְאֶרְאֶה֙ אֶת־הָאָ֣רֶץ הַטּוֹבָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֖ר בְּעֵ֣בֶר הַיַּרְדֵּ֑ן הָהָ֥ר הַטּ֛וֹב הַזֶּ֖ה וְהַלְּבָנֹֽן׃ וַיִּתְעַבֵּ֨ר יְהֹוָ֥ה בִּי֙ לְמַ֣עַנְכֶ֔ם וְלֹ֥א שָׁמַ֖ע אֵלָ֑י וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יְהֹוָ֤ה אֵלַי֙ רַב־לָ֔ךְ אַל־תּ֗וֹסֶף דַּבֵּ֥ר אֵלַ֛י ע֖וֹד בַּדָּבָ֥ר הַזֶּֽה׃ עֲלֵ֣ה ׀ רֹ֣אשׁ הַפִּסְגָּ֗ה וְשָׂ֥א עֵינֶ֛יךָ יָ֧מָּה וְצָפֹ֛נָה וְתֵימָ֥נָה וּמִזְרָ֖חָה וּרְאֵ֣ה בְעֵינֶ֑יךָ כִּי־לֹ֥א תַעֲבֹ֖ר אֶת־הַיַּרְדֵּ֥ן הַזֶּֽה׃ וְצַ֥ו אֶת־יְהוֹשֻׁ֖עַ וְחַזְּקֵ֣הוּ וְאַמְּצֵ֑הוּ כִּי־ה֣וּא יַעֲבֹ֗ר לִפְנֵי֙ הָעָ֣ם הַזֶּ֔ה וְהוּא֙ יַנְחִ֣יל אוֹתָ֔ם אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר תִּרְאֶֽה׃ וַנֵּ֣שֶׁב בַּגָּ֔יְא מ֖וּל בֵּ֥ית פְּעֽוֹר׃ {פ}
I pleaded with יהוה at that time, saying, “O lord יהוה, You who let Your servant see the first works of Your greatness and Your mighty hand, You whose powerful deeds no god in heaven or on earth can equal! Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan, that good hill country, and the Lebanon.” But יהוה was wrathful with me on your account and would not listen to me. יהוה said to me, “Enough! Never speak to Me of this matter again! Go up to the summit of Pisgah and gaze about, to the west, the north, the south, and the east. Look at it well, for you shall not go across yonder Jordan. Give Joshua his instructions, and imbue him with strength and courage, for he shall go across at the head of this people, and he shall allot to them the land that you may only see.” Meanwhile we stayed on in the valley near Beth-peor.
Midrash Tanchuma, Vaetchanan 6
(Townsend 1989 translation of Midrash Tanhuma, S. Buber Recension, edited and supplemented by R. Francis Nataf)
[So] they went and found him at the door of Joshua, with Joshua sitting and Moses standing. They said to Joshua, “What has come over you that Moses our master stands, while you sit?” When he raised his eyes and saw him, he immediately rent his clothes. Then sobbing and weeping, he said, “O my master, my master! My father, my father and lord!” Israel said to Moses, “Moses our master, teach us Torah.” He said to them, “I am not allowed.” They said to him, “We are not leaving you.” A heavenly voice (bat qol) came forth and said to them, “Learn from Joshua.” [So] they took upon themselves to sit and learn from the mouth of Joshua. Joshua sat at the head with Moses to his right and with [Elazar and Ithamar] to his left. So he sat and expounded in the presence of Moses. R. Samuel bar Nahmani said that R. Johanan said, “When Joshua opened by saying, ‘Blessed be the One who has chosen the righteous,” they took the traditions of wisdom from Moses and gave them to Joshua. Now Moses did not know what Joshua was expounding. After Israel arose [from the session], they said to Moses, “[Explain] the Torah [we have just heard] to us.” He said to them, “I do not know what to answer you.” So Moses our master was stumbling and falling. It was at that time that he said, “Master of the universe, up to now I requested life, but now here is my soul given over to You.”
(Townsend 1989 translation of Midrash Tanhuma, S. Buber Recension, edited and supplemented by R. Francis Nataf)
[So] they went and found him at the door of Joshua, with Joshua sitting and Moses standing. They said to Joshua, “What has come over you that Moses our master stands, while you sit?” When he raised his eyes and saw him, he immediately rent his clothes. Then sobbing and weeping, he said, “O my master, my master! My father, my father and lord!” Israel said to Moses, “Moses our master, teach us Torah.” He said to them, “I am not allowed.” They said to him, “We are not leaving you.” A heavenly voice (bat qol) came forth and said to them, “Learn from Joshua.” [So] they took upon themselves to sit and learn from the mouth of Joshua. Joshua sat at the head with Moses to his right and with [Elazar and Ithamar] to his left. So he sat and expounded in the presence of Moses. R. Samuel bar Nahmani said that R. Johanan said, “When Joshua opened by saying, ‘Blessed be the One who has chosen the righteous,” they took the traditions of wisdom from Moses and gave them to Joshua. Now Moses did not know what Joshua was expounding. After Israel arose [from the session], they said to Moses, “[Explain] the Torah [we have just heard] to us.” He said to them, “I do not know what to answer you.” So Moses our master was stumbling and falling. It was at that time that he said, “Master of the universe, up to now I requested life, but now here is my soul given over to You.”
Questions for debate :
1. What can we relate to these texts about activism and fights?
2. Is there any limit to what we can fight for?
3. Is there any relation between disconformity- fights / Acceptance- Resignation?
1. What can we relate to these texts about activism and fights?
2. Is there any limit to what we can fight for?
3. Is there any relation between disconformity- fights / Acceptance- Resignation?
The inmortal, Jorge Luis Borges
To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal . . . Everything among the mortals has the value of irretrievable and the perilous. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (and every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, or the faithful presage of others that in the future will repeat it to a vertiginous degree . . . Nothing can happen only once, nothing is preciously precarious.
To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal . . . Everything among the mortals has the value of irretrievable and the perilous. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (and every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, or the faithful presage of others that in the future will repeat it to a vertiginous degree . . . Nothing can happen only once, nothing is preciously precarious.
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and its discontents, 1997
"To be aware of mortality means to imagine immortality; to dream of immortality; to work towards immortality – even if, as Borges warns, it is only that dream which fills life with meaning, while immortal life, if ever achieved, would only bring the death of meaning. Perhaps, if asked, Freud would reply that our perpetual drive towards immortality is itself the work of the death instinct...Or one could speak, following Hegel, of the cunning of reason: it consoles mortals by dangling before them the prospect of immortality – but only by hiding the fact that solely as long as they remain mortal the prospect of immortality may seem like a consolation . . ."
It is a paradox (or perhaps not much of a paradox after all), and irony of history (or perhaps not such an irony after all), that a realistic (at any rate, more realistic than ever before) offer of biological immortality is promised by science at a time when the cultural message is the excess and redundancy of life, and when, accordingly, avoidance, prevention and limitation of life turns into culturally approved and promoted value. Under these circumstances one can expect the offer, if it finally becomes not just realistic but real, to be taken up selectively – and so to become another, possibly the most powerful ever, stratifying and polarizing factor. In doing so, it will only follow the already visible trend to ‘privatization’ of everything, including the chance of survival or living longer.
It was the consciousness of death that breathed life into human history. Behind the boundless inventiveness sedimented in human culture stood the awareness of death, which made the brevity of life into an offence to human dignity a challenge to human wits which called for transcendence, stretched the imagination, spurred into action. Not knowing of death, animals live in immortality without really trying; humans must earn, gain, construct their immortality. They have finally done it, but only through ceding immortality to an artificial species, living its own immortality as a virtual reality. With the oppositions between reality and representation, sign and signification, virtual and the ‘real’ progressively effaced, would not the virtual, technical immortality steal the thunder which immortality as a task, as unfulfilled dream, once held? Is not the new technical, virtual immortality, the immortality-by-proxy, a round- about, twisted way back to the a priori immortality, immortality-by- ignorance of the non-human (and inhuman!) species?
The knowledge of death is the specifically human tragedy. It used also to be the undying source of the specifically human greatness, the motive of the finest of human achievements. We do not know whether the greatness will survive the tragedy: we have not tried it yet, we have not been here before. The world we have inhabited so far is bespattered by marks and traces left by our efforts to escape into immortality. Once we
have obtained an electronic equivalent of the portrait of Dorian Gray, we may have earned ourselves a world without wrinkles, but also without landscape, history, and purpose. We may well have found our way to Jorge Luis Borges’s City of the Immortals.
"To be aware of mortality means to imagine immortality; to dream of immortality; to work towards immortality – even if, as Borges warns, it is only that dream which fills life with meaning, while immortal life, if ever achieved, would only bring the death of meaning. Perhaps, if asked, Freud would reply that our perpetual drive towards immortality is itself the work of the death instinct...Or one could speak, following Hegel, of the cunning of reason: it consoles mortals by dangling before them the prospect of immortality – but only by hiding the fact that solely as long as they remain mortal the prospect of immortality may seem like a consolation . . ."
It is a paradox (or perhaps not much of a paradox after all), and irony of history (or perhaps not such an irony after all), that a realistic (at any rate, more realistic than ever before) offer of biological immortality is promised by science at a time when the cultural message is the excess and redundancy of life, and when, accordingly, avoidance, prevention and limitation of life turns into culturally approved and promoted value. Under these circumstances one can expect the offer, if it finally becomes not just realistic but real, to be taken up selectively – and so to become another, possibly the most powerful ever, stratifying and polarizing factor. In doing so, it will only follow the already visible trend to ‘privatization’ of everything, including the chance of survival or living longer.
It was the consciousness of death that breathed life into human history. Behind the boundless inventiveness sedimented in human culture stood the awareness of death, which made the brevity of life into an offence to human dignity a challenge to human wits which called for transcendence, stretched the imagination, spurred into action. Not knowing of death, animals live in immortality without really trying; humans must earn, gain, construct their immortality. They have finally done it, but only through ceding immortality to an artificial species, living its own immortality as a virtual reality. With the oppositions between reality and representation, sign and signification, virtual and the ‘real’ progressively effaced, would not the virtual, technical immortality steal the thunder which immortality as a task, as unfulfilled dream, once held? Is not the new technical, virtual immortality, the immortality-by-proxy, a round- about, twisted way back to the a priori immortality, immortality-by- ignorance of the non-human (and inhuman!) species?
The knowledge of death is the specifically human tragedy. It used also to be the undying source of the specifically human greatness, the motive of the finest of human achievements. We do not know whether the greatness will survive the tragedy: we have not tried it yet, we have not been here before. The world we have inhabited so far is bespattered by marks and traces left by our efforts to escape into immortality. Once we
have obtained an electronic equivalent of the portrait of Dorian Gray, we may have earned ourselves a world without wrinkles, but also without landscape, history, and purpose. We may well have found our way to Jorge Luis Borges’s City of the Immortals.
To debate- reflect
What are the relations between disconformity- mortality?
What had mortality brought to humanity?
What are the relations between disconformity- mortality?
What had mortality brought to humanity?
Interview to Yuval Harari- DW
DW: I'm really taken by the idea of overcoming death in your new book, "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow." I'm not especially keen on it myself. But how do you feel about immortality? Can you see yourself living to an age of 150+ years, or even 500, as you describe may be possible in the near future?
Regarding the feasibility: within a century or two, it's feasible this will be science and not science fiction. But my impression is that for my generation, it won't happen in the next 30, 40, 50 years. But in the long run it is certainly feasible.
As you say, we can't really imagine what the future will be. And if we look at some of the developments you touch on in the book: eugenics, for instance, and you can see how the CRISPR-cas9 technique is making human gene editing seem more socially acceptable, or bioelectronics, and we have our brains stored in databases, immortality may seem feasible. But even as we get more obsessed by the idea, immortality will not mean what it means to us today, so we're going to be disappointed, aren't we? And we'll realize we're not as important as we thought.
Yes, and this is one of the main dangers. The very same technology which will enable us to overcome old age and death will also make most humans irrelevant and redundant. To overcome old age and death you need to decipher the secrets of human biochemistry: how the body functions, how the brain functions, so that you can repair damage and fight deterioration of the system. But once you have the knowledge, you basically hack humanity and understand how the mechanism operates, at that point you also reach a situation in which external systems, external algorithms, artificial intelligence maybe, will understand us better than we understand ourselves, and out-perform us in almost any task and skill. At that point, yes, we could overcome old-age and death, but we'll also become redundant and irrelevant.
DW: I'm really taken by the idea of overcoming death in your new book, "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow." I'm not especially keen on it myself. But how do you feel about immortality? Can you see yourself living to an age of 150+ years, or even 500, as you describe may be possible in the near future?
Regarding the feasibility: within a century or two, it's feasible this will be science and not science fiction. But my impression is that for my generation, it won't happen in the next 30, 40, 50 years. But in the long run it is certainly feasible.
As you say, we can't really imagine what the future will be. And if we look at some of the developments you touch on in the book: eugenics, for instance, and you can see how the CRISPR-cas9 technique is making human gene editing seem more socially acceptable, or bioelectronics, and we have our brains stored in databases, immortality may seem feasible. But even as we get more obsessed by the idea, immortality will not mean what it means to us today, so we're going to be disappointed, aren't we? And we'll realize we're not as important as we thought.
Yes, and this is one of the main dangers. The very same technology which will enable us to overcome old age and death will also make most humans irrelevant and redundant. To overcome old age and death you need to decipher the secrets of human biochemistry: how the body functions, how the brain functions, so that you can repair damage and fight deterioration of the system. But once you have the knowledge, you basically hack humanity and understand how the mechanism operates, at that point you also reach a situation in which external systems, external algorithms, artificial intelligence maybe, will understand us better than we understand ourselves, and out-perform us in almost any task and skill. At that point, yes, we could overcome old-age and death, but we'll also become redundant and irrelevant.