Nathan Devers. “My break with the Jewish religion was complete and final”

Why philosophy? Nathan Devers, more precisely, Nathan Nakach, his real name, tried to answer this eternal question through the book. Thinking against yourself, an autobiographical story that carries a decidedly romantic energy. Or how, this brilliant 25-year-old, winner of the general competitive exam in philosophy, normal, associate professor of philosophy, after a long time wanting to become a rabbi, when he left religion, what some would define as a simple university subject, when he had one. formed the center of his existence. the axis. The author with great intelligence and sensitivity Artificial links describes how, from revelations to breakdowns, he tries to pursue a search for meaning that he knows will never end.

Madame Figaro . – What made you become a rabbi?
Nathan Devers. – I was born in a Jewish family where the Jewish identity was very present, where we professed our religion and studied Jewish thought, the Bible, the Talmud, but we lived with the ideal that Judaism is a religion of law and that there is not. it is necessary to apply this law one hundred percent, with the exception of Yom Kippur. This caused a kind of surprise, from which I never got over; I don’t understand how you can be “half” religious, if you will. To me, it is a way of being that we cling to completely or not at all. So I had a desire to deepen my relationship with religion, and so I went to synagogue classes, visited Israel, studied the texts… The ENIO Synagogue (Oriental Israel Normal School), in Paris, which was Levinas, was really my school of connection. It was an extraordinary place, where all cultures mingled not in mild syncretism, but with specific requirements for each: Jewish thought, French culture, music, liturgy, and Eastern rituals.

But you didn’t become a rabbi…
I realized that everything I am, everything I thought, my lifestyle came from the fact that I was born on December 8, 1997 in this family. However, none of this was selected. If I had been born in another place, in another time, what I believed then, I probably wouldn’t have believed it. That was the trigger. reading of Preacher and the rest did the discovery of philosophical texts, which the master introduced me to with exceptional depth… The break with religion was complete and final. “The death of God” did not become Nietzsche’s word for me. I changed my universe, my worldview, my passion. God is not an idea, and as soon as we deny its existence, it disappears. I lost the way I imagined my future, my friends, or even, very specifically, my daily life. The Jewish religion is a religion of law. there are rules for everything. We have laws about diet, liturgy, and even shoe tying. When we let it go, every micro-action—what I was going to eat for lunch, the clothes I was going to wear…—provided a series of infinite possibilities. This is Dostoevsky’s famous formula: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

How does philosophy consist in “thinking against itself,” as you claim in the title of your book?
Philosophy allowed me to break the barrier of the arbitrariness of my birth and open up my search for meaning, even if some philosophers can be very dogmatic. In fact, the whole point of the book is to say that philosophy is not a university subject, not a field of knowledge, not a history of philosophy, not a scientific study, even if it exists, but above all, and much more radically than that, the desire to open the search by thinking against oneself : If philosophy, in principle, is not definable, many mention Deleuze and the art of creating concepts, but this is only one definition among others, on the other hand, philosophy… It is a way of being that consists of thinking against oneself. We never consider ourselves the owner of our ideas, we do not keep the truths we have shown as if they were our property. Descartes observes in the letter that once you have demonstrated something and become convinced, you can forget the demonstration and move on to the next step, like an algorithm. Thinking against yourself is the opposite.

In other words.
I hope that after twenty years, I will say in the book and honestly, I will not agree with this text, or, in any case, I will find the necessary distance from it. Thinking against itself is the idea that we are in an infinite dialectic, unlike the Hegelian dialectic, which has a fixed term from the beginning. It is walking as a path, that is, there is no already drawn path. And thinking against oneself also means thinking against oneself, that is, not perceiving one’s identity as something rigid, which means that our birth, our belonging to the community, social environment, and clan should determine our thinking. To think against oneself is to assert the claim of thought against the automatism of identities.

I don’t understand how you can be “half” religious

Nathan Devers

And what role does literature play in this for you, who are also a novelist?
Philosophy is not a disembodied discipline. it plays in the body, in our history, in our capabilities, in our passions, in our desires, in our anger; Thinking against yourself. Since then, we can no longer apply it to treatises and dissertations that stick to scientific discourse, make a grand display of logic, and use only intellectual and abstract concepts. The historically created schism between literature and philosophy, especially after Plato, seems harmful to me. In my opinion, Thinking against yourself is a text intended to be as much literary as philosophical, a meditation in the etymological sense, i.e., “healing oneself,” as in “meditating,” and in the sense of XVII;^e century. It’s embodied text, more like it A Discourse on Method, Descartes that his Metaphysical meditationsMoreover, who is not ashamed to think on an autobiographical level, but whose goal is not to photograph his belly. it begs the question to try to ask questions, to engage in research, to see existence as a quest…

Then religion is also a matter of mythology…
Religions are poetry made real, embedded in the world, with sublime texts that penetrate the imagination. I broke with the Jewish religion, but kept the respect and love for poetry, which alone can save us, that is, not to give meaning to existence, but to search for meaning, which will never find an end in the world. which does not have can be as happy as if we believe the world has meaning. That’s why I wanted to say in the book that the experience I lived was painful and difficult, but it was also true happiness, an experienced happiness that was put to the test and all the more intense for it.