That onto which a People is always thrown is the Earth — their Earth — the self-enclosing ground, the There wherein they are.
— Martin Heidegger*
Society, however, is actually made up of social beings in a matrix of relations, backward and forward in time, laterally in the present. The individual then identifies him or herself in a web or fabric of relationships. [. . .] We have our own history, shaped by many people and experiences. As I am to-day, I think of myself as being made up not only of my blood forbears but of the many people that have shaped my life as well as the experiences I have had. [. . .] Similarly, in the present I am part of a visible community, not only that I see about me, but that I am part of around the world. These lateral relations include not just humans, but all kinds of non-humans as well. In a real sense, I know that ‘all my relations’ includes a vast array of humans and non-humans.
— Brewster Kneen**
The Earth to which one belongs by birth need not be any tract of land, nor need one’s nationality have any essential connection to some nation-state located somewhere on the globe. Rather, our birthland, our Earth, the ground of our being as humans, is our heritage, the tradition into which we are born, each to our own.
Johan von Goethe in the 18th and 19th centuries, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, Gershom Scholem, and Simone Weil in the 20th, Abdullah Öcalan in the 20th and 21st, and countless others throughout all the centuries have shared that very insight. They have all seen, each in their own way, that Earth is not, in its own most fundamental — its own most Earthen sense — the third planet from the sun or any such astronomical entity. It is, rather, the territory onto which we are cast by our birth, the living and rooted tradition into which we are born, the whole heritage we inherit by birth—that heritage which, to borrow a Goethean formulation, we must, each by each one’s self, acquire and make our own.
It is only by claiming our own individual and individuating heritage as our own, each of us in our own fashion, that we can grow into and eventually bloom full-grown as just who we are, and not be left forever floating aimlessly. It is only there, in such soil, that we can sink our roots.
Each and every one of us has such a heritage, such a home soil. It is only as born upon such soil, granted such heritage, that each of has as birthright the possibility of becoming who we are, alongside everyone else, who is granted that same possibility. What is common to us all is that each of us is born to become the irreplaceably unique individuals we all are. That’s what’s so special about us all — that none of us is anybody special.
No walls can separate us on that Earth. No one at all is excluded from such common human soil.
* * *
National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension.
— Franz Fanon***
Zionism had made it possible for Jews to explore the most heretical moments in Jewish history since it freed them from the need to justify themselves in the eyes of the non-Jewish world. In later years, Scholem would emphasize repeatedly that Zionism should not dictate view of Jewish history but rather make possible the fullest exploration of all facets of the Jewish experience.
— David Biale ****
Nor, therefore, should we try to exclude others. If we do, we are abandoning our common human heritage, and thereby abandoning our own soil, the very tradition we inherited at birth, so richly and enrichingly different from all the world’s other traditions, but with none of them being anything exclusively special.
The confusion of nations with nation-states, with countries, is a catastrophe for all of humanity. The conflation of the two inevitably engenders defensiveness and exclusion — defense of the borders of the nation-state against, and to the exclusion of, all of “them” who are not one of “us”—instead of allowing us not only to recognize but also to celebrate the enriching and fecundating differences between our wonderfully diverse cultures.+
Genuine nations can and do easily share territories with other nations. They cannot, however, share nation-states, countries, without typically inducing murderous divisions between the nations, the genuine nationalities, who share the territory the nation-state has usurped and enclosed. The quotation above from Fanon that serves as the first epigraph to this section of the present post points to the need for keeping the distinction between nations and nation-states clear. As he knew and shared with all who cared to read him, blurring that distinction feeds colonialism, imperialism, and war.
May all nation-states die, that nations might live — in peace and with joy in their differences!
Gershom Scholem
NOTE: The difference between territories and countries, or nation-states, will be the topic of one of my future blogposts at this website. As for a non-defensive and non-exclusionary understanding of borders, see my earlier post, “Border Crossings,” available in the archive at this same website.
REFERENCES
(FOR THE FOUR SECTION-EPIGRAPHS, PLUS ONE NOTE)
* “Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” first draft of a famous lecture, composed in 1935, in Vorträge: Gesamtausgabe Bd. 80.2 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2020), p. 587.
** The Tyranny of Rights (Ottowa, Canada: The Rams Horn Press), p. 29.
*** The Wretched of the Earth, new English translation by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 179.
**** Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), p. 125.
+ The difference between territories and countries, or nation-states, will be the topic of one of my future blogposts at this website. As for a non-defensive and non-exclusionary understanding of borders, see my earlier post, available in the archive at this website: “Border Crossings.”