The law of what right? On Arnold Schoenberg

At the opening of his opera Moses und Aron (Moses and Aaron), Arnold Schoenberg has Moses, alone on stage, hear the chorus at a very low volume; but since the chorus is not on the stage, at a precise point in space, Moses wonders where this voice comes from, from what bush the account he hears emanates — the account that describes what is about to happen. Why does he ask this question? One knows the answer, if one has read the Bible: because he is about to object to the voice that it would be better to entrust the mission to his brother Aaron, who is a good orator, whereas he, Moses, is “slow” of tongue. In short, he wants to know from where one is speaking to him, but he does not seem to ask who is speaking to him. Does he know? Apparently, yes; but the spectator of Schoenberg’s opera is not supposed to know it, and the musical device does not say it: of course, it may be a divine voice, which would fill all of space without coming from a precise point; but it may just as well be a voice interior to Moses, which he alone would hear and to which he would have to respond only after a sort of duplication of his personality. In the first case, the Law comes from outside, where its foundation, its legitimacy, its efficacy, and probably its aim are located; in the second case, it comes from within, from the subject himself, but from a subject who needs, if one dares say so, to “tell himself” that it comes from outside, that it is there like an object to whose existence and content “I” can do nothing. We would be in a situation of invocation by the subject of an “objectivity” that would relieve this subject of all responsibility. The invention of an alibi, of a screen; what Sartre calls bad faith. We know all too well the “I was only obeying orders.” It would seem that between the two interpretations — the law is exterior, or it is interior — one must choose. But Schoenberg does not choose, and indeed he carefully preserves the ambiguity throughout his opera. One must no doubt specify, if it is possible, what the law (or the Law, if one prefers) is before going further. One does not find in the opera a clear and complete answer to this question; but one finds a few elements. Broadly, one can say that the law is that of the primacy of the idea over facts, over action in particular. In this sense, Act II of the opera, which has three acts, treats the famous scene of the golden calf as the summary — it would be better to say the concentrate — of the law, of all law: the golden calf was erected only at the express demand of the “people”; with it and in its name were committed all the crimes that Moses will reproach Aaron for: superstition, rapes, murders, drunkennesses, submission to idols, polytheism, blasphemies. Whereas the mission that had been entrusted (by whom?) to Moses consisted precisely in warning the people against these crimes. Irony: this mission, in the first scene of Act I, Moses suggested entrusting to Aaron!

If the law wills that the idea be superior to what one calls “action,” one finds oneself in fact, whether one wishes it or not, whether one knows it or not, within a monotheistic system of thought. Indeed, polytheism necessarily admits a plurality of “laws,” a plurality of frames of reference, even if these are hierarchized. Achilles places himself under the aegis — that is, under the shield — of Athena; but he could have made another choice. The duality of “laws” is invoked by Antigone, who sets the law of Zeus against and alongside the law of Creon. But the superiority of the god over the king is already, and will remain for the following centuries, the seed of a monotheism. If the autocrats of Antiquity, from Ramses to Julius Caesar, called themselves gods, it was precisely to answer all possible Antigones. The Apollonian jurisdiction is not the same as the Poseidonian, for the good reason that these gods do not have to govern the same realm. The uniqueness of the law, on the contrary, follows from the unity of the Universe itself — whether or not it be the fruit of the uniqueness of its creator, whether or not it be deduced from the universality of its thinker, man.

A bad habit has taken hold among record publishers: that of releasing only the first two acts of the opera Moses und Aron, on the pretext that Schoenberg never composed the music of the third. Commercial reason? Perhaps. And yet it is in this third act, whose words are owed to Schoenberg, that the essential of the content of the law is most clearly expressed, in the reproaches Moses addresses to his brother:

Verraten hast du Gott an die Götter You have delivered God up to the gods,

thought up to images, and one is tempted to continue: you have delivered the subject up to objects, man up to things, the inner life up to appearance. You have preferred to words the blows of the staff (an allusion to the episode of the rock, Numbers XX, 8), to dialogue war — in short, to the law the event. Now, what is proper to the law is that it is not subject to the event, and that, on the contrary, it wills that the event conform to it.

Thus conceived, then, the law is intimately bound to monotheism, and this is historically and geographically bound to a small nomadic people, the Hebrews, who stand opposed to the empires surrounding their living space, whether toward Babylon or toward Egypt — empires built around polytheisms and absolute monarchies, a thousand times the object of figurations that would be catalogued under the name of “idols.” The prohibition of the idol and of the veneration of the idol, which is probably the most complete summary of what one calls Judaism, and which Schoenberg takes up in his Act III, can itself, of course, have two sources: either it is God himself who pronounced it, for example on Sinai, or it is the shepherds who discovered it while driving their herds through the vast expanses that separate the pagan empires. Ernest Renan says that “the desert is monotheistic,” which is sometimes true but sometimes false; but he means by this that a certain form of solitude in space can bring out the vanity of cities, of superfluities, and of the preoccupations they engender. The cobbler happier than the financier of the fable. It was certainly not there that the idea of god was born in a human brain, but it is no doubt there that the idea of a single god appeared.

With this idea there also appears a novelty: that the law does not ask only that groups and “individuals,” insofar as they exist, be objectively, externally conformed to what it prescribes; it also demands that this conformity be that of intention, that of thought, of decision. We know that three centuries before Paul of Tarsus, the Stoics had spread this theme, with incredible success, in the Greek world. When the first Christians came to announce that virtue was a question of inner disposition, the Greeks had long known it already: they had learned it from Zeno of Citium, who was, moreover, of Jewish origin. If the innumerable ethical orders that the human species has known are made of slow or rapid evolutions, of regressions too, we touch here on one of the most overwhelming revolutions: the appearance of the presence of the subject in the law. Of the subject subjected to the law, but also the legislator of that same law. If it is object, it is not only object. This is nothing less than the appearance of subjectivity in the ethical order, at once as the repository of the law, as the one responsible for its application, and as the beneficiary of its observance. As against the systems issued from polytheisms, which take no account of subjective intentions, but only of objective behaviors. The difference between the two conceptions of ethics is total, in this sense that polytheistic ethics are almost by definition compatible with the established social order, whatever it may be, since conformity demands only obedience to that order, whereas the monotheistic ethical order demands first of all conformity with a law (exterior or interior) that is posited according to the proper demands of conscience, demands to which the social order is supposed to conform. The result is a new type of conflict, probably insoluble moreover, for instead of the social structure engendering individual wills, it is the reverse that tends to impose itself, and this is not always, and not even often, possible, as one soon observes.

It suffices, to realize this, to look a little more closely at what happened in the intellectual itinerary of Arnold Schoenberg. For his opera Moses und Aron was not, with him, born of a caprice, but issued from a profound reflection on the compatibility or incompatibility of the ethical order with the social order. It is generally unknown that as early as 1927 Schoenberg had written a play (without music) entitled La voie biblique (Der biblische Weg — The Biblical Way), probably unstageable, and published a single time¹ in Italian. Without entering into details, let us note that it concerns an attempt, by young Viennese Jews, to create somewhere in so-called “black” Africa a modern Jewish State following the equitable partition of a territory with an African country named Ammongea — in other words, in Egypto-Greek pidgin: the Land of God. Of Zeus, more precisely. The initiator and head of the project is named Max Aruns. As fairly numerous Viennese Jews who bore the first name Moses, Moïse, called themselves (like Nordau) Max, it is easy to observe that in choosing this name for his principal hero, Schoenberg wanted to gather, to reunite, Moses and Aaron in a single person. And it is precisely there that the dramatic knot of the whole play lies. Asseino, the sage, the “just one,” the spiritual guide of the expedition, says it moreover directly to Max Aruns: “You want to be Moses and Aaron in one and the same person!” Moses, to whom God grants thought, but to whom the power of speech is lacking; and Aaron, who did not know how to conceive thought, but who was in a position to express it and to stir the masses. It is thus indeed in this passage that, in 1926 or 1927, Schoenberg states for the first time the impossibility of a dream that one has not finished cherishing: to be Moses and Aaron in a single person — that is, to master at once thought and action, the expression of the law and conformity to its demands. Turning to the necessities of building the new State, Aruns even goes so far as to ask Asseino to formulate a new law, one that does not oblige him to shut down the blast furnaces and the power plants every Friday! Reply: “What you ask of me there is as if Aaron had asked Moses to approve and help him erect the golden calf… We shall never come to an understanding.”

For this principal reason, and for others more empirical, Aruns’s project fails; in short, because the law is inflexible across the centuries and circumstances, and because human needs evolve. If there exists a solution — which, moreover, is by no means obvious — has one more chance of finding it by re-examining the law? Or by re-examining human needs? Because, after all, on the one hand the law in question was formulated by a people of high antiquity; because on the other hand it comprises a central core surrounded by peripheral zones, or if one prefers, degrees of importance — imperatives that are absolutely binding, others that are less so, others finally that are more of the order of superstition and that, as such, are moreover already at the margin of the law, if not even opposed to it. The only thing that matters is to see this “heart” of the law, what Edgar Morin might call “the law of the law.” It is customary to say that it is “thou shalt not kill.” This is true; and a moment ago, we drew from the legend of Moses and Aaron that it is the prohibition of idols. But, without being exactly one and the same, the two imperatives are linked: the prohibition of idols is the exclusion of polytheism, and the prohibition of killing is part of the affirmation of monotheism, inasmuch as to kill man would be to kill God, since the heart of man is the only dwelling worthy of the Eternal.

The unknown shepherds who first formulated these dreams of the desert — did they know that if they strayed into the cities, life would become much more difficult? No doubt. That it would become more manageable again when they returned to the desert? No doubt also. That they were legislating for the millennia to come? Perhaps. But we?

The innumerable philosophical systems that have succeeded one another over two thousand years have modulated rather widely these imperatives and those that derive from them, have foreseen various exceptions, have defined various limits. Certain theories have even gone against the biblical law, declaring, as is well known, that it had been proclaimed by the “weak” to enchain the “strong.” Is this, in some sense, in Nietzsche, the first, still anonymous formulation of the famous “Jewish plot”? Others, relying on history and anthropology, have set forth existing moralities, or moralities that once existed, which have nothing to do with the one of which we speak. It would seem that thus not only is the law powerless to ground itself on any legitimacy interior or exterior, subjective or objective, but that, in addition, it fails to give itself a content, even a minimal, roughly universal one. So then, really: by what right, the law?

All laws, at the same time as they state their imperatives, say in the name of what they command: in the name of God, in the name of the king, in the name of the people; and one knows that it is roughly in that order, chronologically, that laws have commanded. But the essential is not there. What matters far more, here, is what hides, if one dares say so, behind God, the king, the people — each of these actors being in a sense only the legitimation, the legitimator proper to a given epoch, by turns theocrat, then monocrat, then democrat. Now, as concerns the Mosaic law, it is from the outset grounded at once on the divine and on the human, at once on God and on his dwelling of choice, “the heart of man.” So that an ethics that would be at once humanist and atheist would not be that of a Judaism “amputated” of God and consequently denatured, disfigured, but that of a Judaism in which the religious envelope would have been set aside, opened — as one opens the skin of a fruit — to let the content be seen in its purity, a content that is none other than the human will at last reattributed to its true author. It is not the secular Judaism of today that would be the sterile fragment of a millennial tradition; it is, on the contrary, the ritualization of the past, by clinging to the form of the law, that empties it of its content. The river is faithful to its source not by inventing dams for itself, but by flowing toward the sea, where it will realize the vocation of universality that is in it from the start. And if one holds more to what endures than to what changes, Schoenberg expressed this strongly in his opera, in that Act III which is the culmination of the whole conflict between the two brothers: the domain of the law gives access to the “extraordinary” (das Aussergewöhnliche). Which one can understand as the irruption of the divine into the human world, just as well as the irruption of the human into a world that is not human. In the age of the great empires of antiquity; but these “great empires,” having changed places, labels, political regimes, and means of oppression, have they also changed their cruelty, their egoism, their idolatry? Have they exorcised all the threats of barbarism? It is clear that Schoenberg is on the side of Moses, against Aaron. Sign of religiosity? Perhaps, even though, on the plane of religious practice, Arnold Schoenberg never observed the rituals, neither of the Protestantism he had joined at twenty-four, nor of the Judaism to which he returned in 1933. But he was a man very scrupulous in all domains of existence, sometimes to the point of mania. A worker, a perfectionist, demanding of himself and of others, he ceaselessly took extreme care of the least detail of each of his works. His general attitude toward the “law” is manifest in the battle he waged for the adoption of the twelve-tone system, perfected by him after the First World War; it is indeed, in the so-called serial system, a new and very strict law; but it presupposes the prior abolition of the previous law, just as demanding, entered into custom, and rich with the thousands of masterpieces it engendered: the law of tonality. Schoenberg, to tell the truth, does not declare it outdated, abrogated; on the contrary, he strives to present his own law of dodecaphony as an enlargement of the tonal law. But concretely, his system did indeed replace the old one. Thus, in music at least, it is necessary, according to Schoenberg, to make the law evolve toward a new state that one perceives to be the real continuation of the initial state. On condition of pinning down the essential in order to bring it back to life, and of isolating what is outdated in order to let it disappear. The law, in all this, no longer needs to legitimize itself — in music on acoustic phenomena, in morality on God; it henceforth finds its foundation and its force in itself, or rather, in music, on the works it makes possible, and in morality on its contributions to more justice among men.

Schoenberg’s opera in fact presents the theoretical face, or the expression on the plane of ideas, of an entirely practical and concrete problem, that of the creation of a Jewish State, which is the subject of the 1926 play, La voie biblique. One may think that if Schoenberg wrote this play, it was at least in part to clear up the relations of his thought with the Zionist movement, which not only he could not ignore, living in the city of Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, but with which he seems to have maintained relations sometimes benevolent, sometimes hostile. The play concludes in the clearest possible way: the creation of this Jewish State is impossible, both for empirical reasons such as the death of the “commander-in-chief,” the end of American support, the departure of Aruns’s wife, etc., and for ethical, theoretical, even religious reasons — the impossibility of being at once a sage and a man of action, Moses and Aaron, in the service of the idea and in the service of the cause, however noble it may be or may appear.

For Schoenberg, to pass from the 1926 drama to the 1933 opera was also, if one dares say so, to pass from the world of action to the world of the idea, and at the same time to rediscover the very text of the Torah and the myth of the golden calf. Twice in Act III, mention is almost explicitly made of Zionism. The first time, when Aaron wants to evoke, in order to exonerate himself, the Promised Land, and Moses replies curtly that it is “an image” (ein Bild). The second time, when Aaron claims that he wanted his listeners to become “ein Volk”: should this be translated as “a people,” as “a nation”? But Moses objects that these people were chosen “to be in the service of the idea of God.” And this service excludes, obviously, any other preoccupation. One finds again, between the two brothers (half-brothers, moreover!), the same opposition as, in the play, between Max Aruns and Asseino: “We shall never come to an understanding.” What is opposed here to the Zionist idea is not its practical impossibility; it is its incompatibility with Judaism in what it has of the essential. In short, if nothing stands in the way, on the practical plane, of creating a State, one must recognize that this State will not be able to be and to remain truly faithful to Jewish thought as it expresses itself in the Torah.

Notes