Page 88 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
descent ascent. Thus, condemned to dwell amidst Pascal’s two infinite abysses, a real Job shall be free and not free, alive and dead, as if Schrodinger’s cat.480
Job is the Grecian incomprehensible. Job’s impotence does not triumph over power, as Cox argues, but fails against oppression. Omnipotence triumphs over Job. It shrinks his righteous revolt. It shrinks him into a renewed faith and trust in Yahweh who reveals not the truth of his wager and motive. Sisyphus knows the nature of his archenemy, Zeus, and will not negotiate. Sisyphus is Grecian and honed by heroism. He grasps four fundamental verities with clarity: he knows who Zeus is, Apollo is, Dionysus is, and the God of Plato is. Sisyphus’ realm is unequivocal: he loves his friends; and hates his enemies. Sisyphus experiences his endless toil and toil just as Josef K does, with dignity and in a steadfast clarity of the absurd, yet in rebellion against injustice, and not in submission to it. Job of the endless Jobel, however, shall be condemned to dwell amidst two infinite abysses, the vastly grand and the vastly small, never knowing God’s fickle hours by trusting Him blindly. Yahweh the merciful one is the unmerciful one. Job’s Sisyphean boulder is Yahweh. He must toil and toil with the Yahweh-boulder on his back in a pointless revolt, only to submit, only to revolt to submit, and on and on, ad infinitum, in dread and awe. Yet every time the boulder crushes him, Yahweh will lift it away and every time, Job shall believe to hopelessly renounce himself to fate. To an honour-loving Grecian, renunciation is indignant: it cultivates the infinite absurd: a horror. Indeed, “to nobly live or to nobly die” exemplifies the maxims of heroic Greece and Sisyphus, criss-crossed with K’s last hours.
K dwells in the midst of two infinites, the fury of the collective Dionysian, the innocence of Christ, the immanent man, and the lyric Apollonian principium individuationis.481 It shall be, indeed, in the lyric Apollonian individuation principle482 where K of the last breath shall aim to dwell, as he journeys terrified and calm to his end (T224). Josef K, unlike Job, implicitly renounces the particular for the heroic Grecian principle “to nobly live or to nobly die,”483 ancient maxim of Ajax and of Grecian heroes. Josef K knows that, as the knife floats from hand to hand above him, in nauseating courtesies, “it was his duty to seize it [the knife...] and plunge it into himself” (T230). But it is not to be so. The hidden Court and the pernicious trial deny him the “remnant of strength to do so” (T230). Just as Job of Jobel had wasted away like a wine skin, like a garment devoured by the moth” (13:28), K had also wasted away. Just as Job had been “shrivelled up”(16:8), Josef K, powerless against the Judge he had never seen, against the High Court he had never reached, and powerless against his own very will, cannot rise to the honourable occasion. Where every laudable effort to find the Judge and Lady Justice fails, where injustice and appearances
480 The paradox of Schrödinger's Cat demonstrates that simultaneity, “the idea that dead-and-alive cats exist, is not a serious possibility. Instead, the paradox is intended as a critique of the Copenhagen interpretation (the prevailing orthodoxy in 1935).” This experiment, “places a cat, along with a flask containing a poison and a radioactive source, in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when the box is opened, the cat is seen either alive or dead, not both alive and dead.” Moreover, Hugh Everett’s many worlds formulation of Schrödinger's Cat paradox posits that, “every event is a branch point; the cat is both alive and dead, irrespective of whether the box is opened, but the “alive” and “dead” cats are in different branches of the universe, both of which are equally real, but which cannot interact with each other.” These definitions appear in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat, December 1, 2012, based on the link to Schrödinger’s paper on the Cat Paradox. Please see http://www.tu-harburg.de/rzt/rzt/it/QM/cat.html#sect5 to access it. Schrödinger, Erwin. The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics. A Translation of Schrödinger’s “Cat Paradox Paper” by John D. Trimmer. This translation was originally published in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 124, 323-38. And then appeared as Section I.11 of Part I of Quantum Theory and Measurement. Ed. By J.A. Wheeler and W.H. Zurek. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.
481 Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. By Douglas Smith. USA: Oxford University Press, 2000. Ch. 16
482 Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. By Douglas Smith. USA: Oxford University Press, 2000. Ch. 16
483 Sophocles. Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus. Vol. I. Trans. By Hugh Lloyd-Jones. USA: Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library Vol. No. 20, 1994. See also
Sophocles II. Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes. Ed. By Grene & Lattimore. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969. 7-62 —88—