A Review of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon's 'The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art.'

Glancing at this book, someone might suppose that it offers a survey of new ideas that have arisen in these four broad fields over the course of the last forty years or so. This is true, but only if we look at the text quite superficially. Since Ben-Aharon discusses such a large number of scientists, philosophers, and artists, from Prigogine to Derrida to Andrew Wyeth, some might imagine that this book is only secondary literature, which is either trying to offer interpretations of the content and value of the ideas of the second scientific revolution, deconstruction, and post-modern art work, or trying to adopt or critique their ideas to suit some political, religious, or social aim. Not really. 

The inner core of the book is deeply penetrating, radically insightful, original research by Dr. Ben-Aharon himself. He has actually used the concepts, problems, and paradoxes of modern thought to build something. He has built a living formation in a dimension of real life that can be used to become a new type of human being altogether. He has built a tool, and has showed us how to begin building our own tools. Someone who has read his earlier books, might suspect that he has abandoned his earlier worldview altogether, since he no longer uses anthroposophical terminology. This would also be an error. The book stands in a class by itself, as does the author. He stands and moves and fights in between many different worldviews, many different concepts, and many different forces, without merely taking up with any one of them in a one-sided manner. He has become a singular middle man, who penetrates fully into a tremendous variety of ideas, but does not take them personally. He has tried to build an open living concept that is clearly able to be cognized in everyday consciousness, an organ that is no longer merely personal or egoistic, that has the capacity to be open to the new and real Event of our times – an un-thought Event that makes everything new. 

What is this book? This book is a call to the reader to act! But this action is a new science, the ability to create your own concepts in full consciousness, so that these real ideas can become a body without organs in which to become a new kind of human: a person that is not a subjective personality, nor some grandiose imaginary demi-god or revolutionary that wants to conquer or “save” the whole world with one simple idea. The concepts in this book should be worked on in meetings with real other people, our neighbors and colleagues – since one of its primary purposes is to show that the time of the hermetically sealed personality is done for. This book shows how the new scientific concepts themselves are overturning older simplistic views about nature, genetics, and matter – but this book is not Idealism. Ben-Aharon critiques both Communism and Capitalism as being reversals of their true, unrecognized source, never itself visible in history. 

He shows that our modern world is built on the very fact that we personalize, condense, and turn reality on its head in order to live our ‘life’ as free individuals. He then shows us how to de-personalize, expand, and propel our thinking to a middle spot that is able to watch this ever present cognitive process of destruction. A process of free becoming, encountering the real shock of the Other, allows ‘us’ to create anew out of this destruction. This book concentrates on drawing the reader’s attention to the reality of the field of life, sensations, meanings and concepts in themselves, but it is not phenomenology or mysticism. Furthermore, Ben-Aharon follows Deleuze in the creating of a virtual science, but in contrast to the French post-structuralists insists that the human can meet and create a real, consistent, self. Yet, this self cannot be captured by any of our mental pictures. The whole course of the book functions as an education and an impetus to develop free new concepts of the world and ourselves that can be used as gear to transform our consciousness in totally healthy ways.  


This is, hands down, the most important book to be written in the 21st century. Why? Because Ben-Aharon understands exactly where we are at this moment, and just what needs to be accomplished by human consciousness in order to take full advantage of the new possibilities of human culture which are just emerging now. The centerpiece of this text is a demonstration of how we can extract a virtual and living essence out of events in our biographies, artistic experience, and thinking, and develop creative concepts as real seeds for the development of humanity. We can then use these seeds to truly meet other people in a new community, through which we can work with a new impetus of real creativity.