“How can you write at a time like this?” people sometimes ask me, and I feel ashamed. Many have remained silent over the past two years, speechless in the face of war. This silence is sometimes disappointing or infuriating, and may even feel like betrayal. The intellectuals are exposed in their weakness. And it is true: in the face of violence, thought is weak. The destruction and killing, the pain and suffering, on a massive industrial scale, dull the senses and erase any horizon of meaning. The purpose of thinking disappears, and with it, the power to think.

But this silence does not stem solely from helplessness. In the face of horror, not only is it difficult to think, but there is something obscene about thinking as such. To think, to speak, and to write requires time, space, silence, and life. It requires distance from war. Those who think and write about the massacre, even critically, in opposition and protest and in solidarity with the victims, signal to the world and to themselves that they are distant, uninvolved. Not only do they not stand with those who suffer; they stand against them—in the comfort zone of the powerful who are not only able to live with violence but live off it, are complicit in it.

And that is the truth. Thought takes part in war. If personal suffering and loss are meaningless, organized violence is not. It is precisely the scale of the destruction, the anonymity of the killing, the nameless terror: these express a kind of generality, a law. War is violence that is not personal but conceptual. One could even say that war is, in essence, a manifestation of thought. Philosophical traditions often describe intellectual pursuits and even the nature of being in terms of battle. At the dawn of Western philosophy, Heraclitus said that “war (pólemos) is the father of all things and the king of all things.” The rabbis of the Talmud speak in many places about “the war of the Torah.” Like war, radical thought undermines the world order and calls human existence into question.

After World War I, many thinkers became deeply preoccupied with the existential dimension of thought and pointed to the confrontation with death as founding the experience of truth. The German-Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig opened his 1921 philosophical-theological book, The Star of Redemption (Der Stern der Erlösung), which he began writing as a soldier on the Balkan front, with the words: “From death, from the fear of death, begins all awareness of the All.” A decade later, in 1932, Carl Schmitt described war as the most intense level of any dispute on which ideological positions and opposing worldviews solidify into enemy identities ready to kill each other.

In war, thought does not come to an end, but to its climax. The radicalization of ideological differences is not necessarily the cause of war, but sometimes its result: the outbreak of mass violence between opposing camps leads to an intensification of ideological tensions. Confrontation generates articulation. Either way, thought and war are intertwined.

Thinking Gaza

The philosopher Raef Zreik told me that he feels that during the months of war in Gaza, the relevance of philosophy to public discourse has actually increased. It seems to me that the extremity of the action sharpens the conversations in ways that bring fundamental concepts to the surface. The work of critical thinkers is made easier: the insight that reality is indeed based on conceptual foundations, and that these are problematic and require thought, becomes obvious and acute. War is collective deconstruction. No wonder the history of thought is punctuated by wars as turning points. Contemporary intellectual history divides 20th-century thought quite naturally into phases of pre-World War I, interwar, and post-World War II. World wars are manifestations of hostile worldviews on a global level, that is, of conflicting visions of human reality in the world at large. World wars are fought between possible worlds, in the sense that they pit rival concepts of the world against each other.

And since thought participates in war, war calls for thought. We are called upon to think in a way that distances us from the unbearable and paralyzing presence of pain, not in order to detach ourselves from suffering, but to expose the concepts in whose name violence is perpetrated, to reveal them, to think them through. If we succeed in thinking through these concepts, then perhaps we will also succeed in changing them. In the first stage, we can think against them—we can fight. Fighting does not mean killing. Thinkers are summoned to participate in the war, to influence its course, its end or future, by examining from a distance the ideas that drive it—the rival worldviews.

Gaza has become the local arena for such a global ideological struggle between opposing visions of the world. The extreme violence Israel has used and continues to use against Palestinians, even during the current lull in the fighting, calls on thinkers of all countries to intervene and take part. It calls on us to think of Gaza as world war.