The problem with what is referred to as the valorization of war in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is the close identification it encourages between wound and body. It compromises and diminishes redemption proper, prolonging and delaying relinquishment of the privation.

Whereas, among the conditions for self-invention or spontaneity of thought is the enabling or inserting of added time and distance in order to leave the place. In any case, you would speak in spite of the wound, ex tempore.

Since, according to Kant, the last given representation that the unifying conception of a judgement comprehends is immediately connected to its object, the question is how far of a remove from sensibility is necessary in order to effect understanding, where resistance would have fallen off, such that indeterminacy results rather than repetition.

The steps of remove are the steps by which the object may be brought under conceptualization, i.e., lifted out of the plane of the real (as much as it can be), to allow for spontaneity of thought, i.e., self-invention.

Perhaps that’s why the waiting list is so long. Perhaps the hope is that by the time it’s your turn (for reparation) there will have been no wound. But this outcome is more or less probable depending not solely on how deep is the cut, but on how closely one identifies with his wounds and, beyond this, how close is the identification with the service itself, rendered faithfully within an authorizing discourse.

Where you would call for recognition of the fact of having suffered, this constitutes a similarity or same-sidedness of the problem structured in accordance with good works placed in the service of self-promotion.

The argument is taken up again via the dialogue between the dissimulating king and his soldier in Shakespeare’s Henry V regarding the question of who ultimately is responsible for his wounds.

An identification between kinds of men and certain of their characteristics was posited by Justin Martyr in his attempt to answer why there is suffering, or why good people are persecuted (J. Franek 2016):

And when Socrates endeavored, by true reason and examination, to bring these things to light, and deliver men from the demons, then the demons themselves, by means of men who rejoiced in iniquity, compassed his death, as an atheist and profane person, on the charge that he was introducing new divinities; and in our case they display a similar activity. (First Apology, transl. M. Dods & G. Reith, in Franek p. 37)

Here there is posited not only men as a means but kinds of men, classified in this case on the basis of 1) there being iniquity, 2) a possibility, capability, and inclination to rejoice in it, and 3) this as a characteristic used to explain something (as to how a thing came to pass). It is a causal explanation in which the characteristic is assigned after the fact. Yet, even if we were to give ourselves over to the argument that there are in fact kinds of men, this and the fact of iniquity are two separate things. To assert differences among kinds of men, some who rejoice in iniquity, is not a causal condition of iniquity itself, as though to say ‘therefore there is iniquity because there are some who rejoice in it.’ And even then, if we grant that a class of men and a defining characteristic of it are practically interchangeable, there are always many different characteristics by which a given class may be defined (B. Russell). Thus there is not unity to be had or even uniqueness in this or that characteristic: one characteristic can fall away and another replace it.

If the shared characteristic itself is not the mark of like minds, of minds neither true or untrue, a consensus may nevertheless be forged by means of the investigation of reason, as Socrates was said to have exhorted men to do, according to Justin in his Second Apology (Franek 37). I find this exhortation to be consistent with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, in particular where he calls for a distinction between a kind of passive acquiescence that sometimes gets confused for love and an act of affirmation that may or may not obtain upon examination of the unknown worth of that ever-fixed mark in relation to you:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error, and upon me prov’d,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

Suppose on the other hand we are faithful in holding the phrase “Whose worth’s unknown” to the referent “every wand’ring bark.” Suppose further that the property or predicate (being of unknown worth) that attaches to this referent (every ship lost at sea) produces the profane meaning of a bastard condition, which then may be taken to say multiple things, one of which is a commentary on a general category of men who have attained to some standing in society merely by following custom. Yet what more can be said about such men than this single measurement of height? With what confidence can future generations look to such men for guidance, when they look only outward for authority, allowing themselves to be pulled along by the thing that happens to be brightest in the night sky, this structuring contradiction in relation to their own benighted state serving as a support that allows them to function while at the same time covering over the impediment of one who is in need of such supports? Nonetheless, the indeterminacy associated with being of unknown worth allows for the possibility to be otherwise, a point that is analogous to how we may regard a characteristic attaching to a class. It should not be anything unique or guaranteeing of the outcome. Rather a reasoned inquiry producing multiple interpretations slows the arrival at one position of certainty (the profane one) whose conclusion is made less relevant than is the interest generated along multiple and diverse lines, thereby giving an increase in value both literally on the basis of this increase and not literally insofar as it is phenomenal.

Moreover, if there is a condition of unknown worth and this is attached to the ever-fixed mark rather than the bark from which it follows serially, the question hasn’t gone away. It still has to do with authority and the individual. Where do you look for guidance, what pulls you along? You would need to determine this relationally with respect to the ever-fixed mark and thereby is its worth established.

Returning to Kant, the negative predicate “not mortal” in the proposition “the soul is not mortal” means not only that the soul cannot die but that it is not dead presently, an affirmation that it is alive. Kant rejected “resurrection-based knowing,” just as he rejected earlier brutal expulsion as the condition for knowing. Here, with this proposition he is saying you don’t need to die in order to be reborn, because in any case the soul cannot die. Kant rejected Christianity in all of its parts where it is used to justify political repression. Einstein did likewise. He rejected claims to the right to declare war that used religion to justify itself.

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