Nexus Conference 2009 Reflections on Man after the End of History Part i . Faith, Death, and Freedom Sunday 6 September 2009 9.15 am — 5.30 pm Muziektheater Amsterdam Speakers Jonathan Sacks - Zainab Al-Suwaij - John Gray Yossi Klein Halevi - Anne Applebaum - Ernst Hirsch Ballin Elisabeth Young-Bruehl - Marc Sageman - Slavoj Žižek - David Modell Ramin Jahanbegloo - Leon Wieseltier - Eva Hoffman - Pierre Audi Charles Rosen - Moshe Halbertal - Nina Khrushcheva Pratap Bhanu Mehta - Tariq Ramadan - John Ralston Saul Karim Wasfi - Ladan Boroumand In cooperation with the Netherlands Opera Attendance at Nexus Conference 2009 We would be happy to welcome you as a member of the audience, but advance reservation of an admission ticket is compulsory. Please register online at our website, www.nexus-instituut.nl, or contact Ms. Ilja Hijink at [email protected]. The conference admission fee is € 75. A reduced rate of € 50 is available for subscribers to the periodical Nexus, who may bring up to three guests for the same reduced rate of € 50. A special youth rate of € 25 will be charged to those under the age of 26, provided they enclose a copy of their identity document with their registration form. The conference fee includes lunch and refreshments during the reception and breaks. Only written cancellations will be accepted. Cancellations received before 21 August 2009 will be free of charge; after that date the full fee will be charged. If you decide to register after 1 September, we would advise you to contact us by telephone to check for availability. The Nexus Conference will be held at the Muziektheater Amsterdam, Amstel 3, Amsterdam (parking and subway station Waterlooplein; please check details on www.muziektheater.nl). The conference will be conducted in English. The speakers will adapt their presentations into essays, which will be published in Nexus 54 in the winter of 2010. For more information, please contact the Nexus Institute at [email protected] or by telephone at +31 (0)13-466 3450, during office hours. We would further invite you to visit our website, www.nexus-instituut.nl. 2 Programme Nexus Conference Sunday 6 September 2009 9.15 am Introduction Rob Riemen 9.25 am Keynote lecture Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks 1 0 . 3 0 am Break 1 1 . 0 0 a m i. a passion for faith Panel debate with Ladan Boroumand, John Gray, Ernst Hirsch Ballin, Yossi Klein Halevi, Pratap Bahnu Metha, Tariq Ramadan and John Ralston Saul, moderated by Rob Riemen 1 2 . 3 0 pm Lunch 1 . 3 0 pm Visual presentation ‘A Passion for Faith and Death’ by David Modell 2.00 pm ii. a passion for death Panel debate Anne Applebaum, Moshe Halbertal, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Marc Sageman, Zainab Al-Suwaij and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, moderated by Rob Riemen 3.30 pm Break 4.00 pm iii. a passion for freedom Closing debate with Pierre Audi, Eva Hoffman, Nina Khrushcheva, Charles Rosen, Karim Wasfi, Leon Wieseltier and Slavoj Žižek, 3 moderated by Rob Riemen 5.30 pm Reception Reflections on Man after the End of History A Passion for Faith, Death, and Freedom in the Opera La Juive The Nexus conference, organised this year in cooperation with the Netherlands Opera, will take place in Amsterdam on Sunday 6 September 2009. Two days earlier, on 4 September, the new dno production of the opera La Juive (1835), directed by Pierre Audi, will receive its premiere. i It is now already a generation ago, in the summer of 1989, that Francis Fukuyama published his lecture ‘The End of History?’. While its title may have come to symbolise the triumph of liberalism and free, Western democracy, the conclusion of the lecture was surprisingly downbeat: ‘The end of history will be a very sad time.’ Fukuyama substantiated this conclusion in the book that was published subsequently. Certainly, liberal democracy has triumphed over monarchy, theocracy, aristocracy, fascism and totalitarian communism as the most rational form of government. In Europe religion, the source of so much war and intolerance, was finally overcome by liberalism; it has had to learn to be tolerant. Democratic values such as to be ‘participant’, ‘rational’, ‘secular’, ‘mobile’, ‘empathic’ have become second nature to us. We view tolerance as our most defining virtue. We have learned, and that is no coincidence, to put things in perspective. No authority, tradition or value has absolute meaning for us anymore; everything is relative, no more than a point of view, an opinion, even perhaps a prejudice. Fanaticism does not suit us. What do you mean, ‘the end of history will be a very sad time’!? Wasn’t this triumph of liberalism and democracy the ideal we wanted? Guided by Socrates, Hegel and Nietzsche, Fukuyama also demonstrates the 4 flipside of this history, determined by human nature itself. The human soul, Socrates teaches, houses not only reason and desire but also thymos: our feeling of self-recognition and self-worth, the emotion of our human dignity. It is inherent in our essential nature to desire recognition of what we are, that we are. Hegel later formulated the understanding that what constitutes man’s identity as man, the most fundamental and unique human characteristic, is man’s ability to risk his own live for such recognition of his own self-worth. Hegel’s idea of freedom ties in with this. The freedom that makes humans human only exists when we are able to transcend our natural, animal existence and the soul creates a new self, acquires an identity of its own. Strong identities such as that of religion and nationalism are therefore rooted in the thymos. And there is literally profound indignation if what the believer or nationalist values, is denied or treated with contempt. It is in those deepest layers of the human soul that fanaticism, hate and obsession can develop when self-worth is aggrieved. Nietzsche, as an expert of the human soul, was convinced of the superiority of certain identities (those full of vitality, the masters), but simultaneously announced the advent of their antithesis: the ‘last man’, the victorious slave who has no interest in self-worth, ideals and principles, let alone know a feeling of superiority. This is the man in whose soul the thymos has been subdued and who exhausts himself in the desire for comfort, security, material abundance and happiness. Religiosity, nationalism and ideological drivers have disappeared because he no longer believes, or can believe, in anything. Freedom is no longer the freedom of the human spirit, the drive to be somebody, but only the absence of restrictions, a striving for complete physical satisfaction. That is why Fukuyama concludes at the end of his lecture in 1989: ‘The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.’ Fukuyama then rightly asked whether we can be satisfied with ourselves, given the emptiness and ennui that physical safety and material abundance produce. Only those who had forgotten that man has a soul, which can sometimes be extinguished but never subdued for ever, can have been surprised in the past decade at the rise of religions, nationalism, fanaticism and aggression. Macabre as this fact may be, ‘9/11’ symbolises a new spirit of the times. Only some politicians persist in the belief that more safety and more prosperity can contain the discontent in society. It cannot. But if we do not want to be swept along by history, we must at least try to understand it and fathom the tragic secrets and dark desires of the human soul. And because all major art is nothing but a mirror of the soul, it is uniquely able to help us understand what is so difficult to grasp: human being. ii La Juive, a ‘grand opéra’ by the librettist Eugène Scribe and the composer Fromental Halévy that received its premiere in 1835 in Paris, is a forgotten masterpiece. How could an opera that was admired by both Wagner (‘the music comes from the depths of man’s soul’) and Mahler (‘one of the greatest operas ever composed’) and whose famous aria ‘Rachel, quand du Seigneur’ was moreover immortalised 5 in Proust’s Recherche, come to be buried in oblivion? Perhaps because the opera confronts us with exactly those passions of the soul we had long forgotten: religi- osity, absolutism, fanaticism, passion for death in the name of love and truth, the cry for freedom. Written in the age when liberalism started to sweep all before it, written so that tolerance and religious and political freedom would prevail, this work was destined to disappear behind the scenes of the world stage at the end of history. That is, until history started again and this opera takes us back in 2009 to the early fifteenth century, to the Council of Constance. Emperor Sigismund has taken the initiative for this ecumenical meeting to restore the unity of a church that has three popes! They are deposed, a new pope is elected, unity is restored and the absolute authority of the Church is confirmed by the death by burning at the stake of the theologians Jan Hus and Hieronymus van Praag, two church reformers that are condemned as heretics by the princes of the Church. Against this dark backdrop of ecclesiastical power, inquisition and intolerance, Scribe and Halévy tell the story of the beautiful Rachel, daughter of the Jewish jeweller Eléazar, who lives with her father in Constance.