~Franz Rosenzweig
But when philosophy denies the dark presupposition of all life, when it does not value death as something, but makes it into a nothing, it gives itself the appearance of having no presupposition. In fact, all cognition of the All has for its presupposition— nothing. For the one and universal cognition of the All, only the one and universal nothing is valid.
If philosophy did not want to stop its ears before the cry of frightened humanity, it would have to take the following as its point of departure— and consciously as its point of departure—: the nothing of death is a something, each renewed nothing of death is a new something that frightens anew, and that cannot be passed over in silence, nor be silenced.
And instead of the one and universal nothing that buries its head in the sand before the cry of mortal terror, and which alone philosophy wants to let precede the one and universal cognition, philosophy would have to have the courage to listen to that cry and not close its eyes before the terrible reality. The nothing is not nothing, it is something.
In the dark background of the world there rise up, as its inexhaustible presupposition, a thousand deaths; instead of the one nothing that would really be nothing, a thousand nothings rise up, which are something just because they are multiple.
The multiplicity of the nothing that philosophy presupposes, the reality of death that cannot be banished from the world, and announcing itself in its victim’s cry that cannot be stifled, it is this that makes a lie of the basic thought of philosophy, the thought of the one and universal cognition of the All, even before it is thought. Schopenhauer revealed, on its tombstone, the secret that philosophy had kept for two and a half thousand years: death was its Musaget;1 but this secret is losing its power over us.
We do not want a philosophy that puts itself in the service of death and deludes us about its lasting reign due to the one and universal harmony of its dance. We do not want any illusions. If death is something, then no philosophy is again going to make us avert our eyes with its assertion that it presupposes nothing.