Descartes stopped at this place, in 1942 (Note on philosophical modernity)

There is an idea of what the modern world is like and what it is to live in it, according to which there is basically an isolatable individual defined by his consciousness and a world that is like a totality to which he and other individuals are related. In philosophy, this idea is said to have begun with Descartes and found its fullest expression in Kant. Nietzsche and Heidegger refused this picture, while Hegel tried to solve its problems from within; his philosophy was largely assimilated to the developmental ideologies that arose with industrialism and colonialism and that must be said to include, at least in the uses to which their ideas were put, both Marx and Darwin.

In social life, the paradigm is that of modern society as unlike the feudal medieval world, in which people "are" what they are born as, in a society thought of as static, and a universe thought of as not only singular but centered, the world of Ptolemaic astronomy.

A characteristic experience that is "modern" in this sense is that of leaving one's familial home for a job in a factory in the city. According to a certain paradigm that uncritically celebrates modern urban, industrial capitalist (and socialist) society, you carefully pack your luggage, as you bring with you traces of your past, like memories; then you are arrive at the portal of the institution (factory, school, prison, hospital, army, etc.), where you are immediately dispossessed of the possessions you had been told to carefully pack and bring. Now you are a newbie - there are various names for this. If you are an army recruit, you are now a "private." This references the system according to which a hierarchical organization that paradigmatically is a military one has at its higher levels a concern for the general interest (at the top, they are called "generals") and at the bottom those with only personal cares who must just unthinkingly obey because they as yet have no part in the general concerns at the level of thought and representations, beyond the minimal identification with the organization and its sustaining myths, from patriotism to everything involved in what we might call the "Lili Marleen" phenomenon. So you are in this sense a "private" person. Now, the great work of the enterprise that you are involved requires a new man, whom ideologies have been prepared to announce the laborious creation of. And things like that. Your important identity now is your role, and it is taken entirely from the society/state complex ("society" is a totality of persons imagined from the point of view of the state that claims to represent it, and individuals indirectly as part of it). This model can also be seen in things like college fraternities. The model is widespread, and comes from the organization of labor, and now is associated often with what Marxists and others in political economy call "Fordism." This is a society with a welfare state, employment mostly in big firms that promise lifetime employment and so a management and prevention of precarity, and also a large administrative state..... and it is said that this model was replaced by the neoliberal one which is now in crisis.

This entire model has its forms and variations, its ideological defenses and its elaborations aimed at solving its own internal crises and problems. But it also has a refutation. This refutation is decisive and clear. It is not clear yet what the refutation implies in terms of social shifts, since the history of the shift indicated is still in progress and so it is much to soon to know. But the refutation can be given in a simple image. It is one of people arriving on a train with their possessions in suitcases, and then being selected for....

You may have guessed the name of this place and what happened there. The people would arrive to be selected for work or death. Yes, the name of this place is: Auschwitz.

And it names the fundamental problem of our time. This is because the problem is so much larger than what it discloses in its mere particularity. It was a singular event of universal significance. That is in part because of how much is involved in the picture of world and persons that is in this image so decisively refuted. The picture is refuted because Auschwitz really does sum up what it can and did lead to. The solution will have to involve changes in world society and its economy. We don't know all the details, nor how we will get there, but we do know that "cultivating one's own garden" (and defending it) as Voltaire advised is not the answer because it is not enough. This non-answer is the dominant one in the Jewish world for the same reason that it is dominant in the world at large. There is catastrophe that results from failing to recognize and take the measure of a catastrophe.