Contemporary Jewish Philosophy

An Introduction

Irene Kajon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415341639
• eBook ISBN: 9781000082715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This text introduces the most important Jewish philosophers of contemporary times from the point of view of their original approach to both Judaism and philosophy and include: Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenweig, Martin Buber, Leo Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas.

It shows how for them the dialogue between Judaism and philosophy is necessary in order to avoid on one side, an attachment to Jewish tradition which is only nationalistic or non-rational; and on the other, an idea of philosophy which first of all focuses the problems of nature, human existence in the world, or God as the origin of being. In reconstructing the intellectual evolution of each of these twentieth-century philosophers with a view to their meaning today, this book is unique and goes beyond the standard historical account provided by other books. Contemporary Jewish Philosophy is essential reading for researchers and students of philosophy, Judaism and the history of religions.

1

PREMISES

1.1 The parabola of Western humanism

The Latin term parabola has two meanings. It means a parable or story, a teaching illustrated by plot or character. And as parabola it means a line that departs from a fixed point, extending itself to a climax and coming back to another point, distant but on the same plane.

Three books from the twentieth century on the history of philosophy each illustrate a parabola in both senses of the word. They contain parables that exemplify the general meaning of a culture, tales that tell of specific individuals and cultural currents, and parabolas or trajectories that are traced by the phenomena being studied. These books are aiming for much more than historical and philosophical review. By analyzing philosophical texts they describe a broader cultural reality; and they explain how events unfold, with a focus on their final ending. In addition, if these three works are considered in sequence, and in historical context, they represent a parabola, as will be seen. They appear as metaphors for the civilization of an entire age, and at the same time as different points of a descending line.

The first of these works was published by Bernhard Groethuysen in 1931 as Philosophical Anthropology.¹ Groethuysen uses the antithesis between “spirit” and “life” as a leitmotiv to interpret the history of Western philosophy from Plato to the dawn of modern times. According to the author the antithesis was already present in Plato’s doctrine. From there it develops in different ways, here turned more towards “life,” and here more towards “spirit.” Finally the antithesis shows itself in a more radical form. The mechanistic vision of nature that was brought about by the scientific studies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries contrasts with the vision of man as soul or inner self that was brought about by modern introspection. Following this underlying theme, Groethuysen emphasizes man’s inability to give a straightforward answer to the problem represented by his own being, since as a living human or individual he is a unique existence, and as a rational being he is pure conscience or human essence. Thus a deep laceration splits not only reflection on man, but Western culture too. It is a culture divided between on the one hand religion, literature, and “philosophy of life,” and on the other, natural science and philosophy as theory. So Groethuysen writes in his Philosophical Anthropology:

Know thyself, such is the theme of every philosophical anthropology. Philosophical anthropology is reflection on oneself, an effort to understand himself carried out by man and always renewed. But the reflection on oneself can mean two things, depending on whether man refers to what happened to him in life and wishes to represent himself, or if he and life become a problem of knowledge; thus on whether he asks the question in point of life or in point of knowledge.²

In answering the question on man, “philosophy of life” begins from life and returns to an individual existence, never elevating itself to universal or eternal truth. Philosophy as theory abandons life completely in answering the question, turning its focus on the general characteristics of human nature.

Groethuysen thinks that although these two views, underlying the history of Western thought, may at times coexist in one person, they never interweave or find a point of conjunction. So, whereas in his dialogues Plato contrasts the common man and the philosopher, the Aristotelian view is characterized by the idea of the difference between man belonging to nature, and man endowed with intellectual faculties. Later, in Graeco-Roman philosophy of life this contrast emerges as the battle between submission to one’s fate and the exercise of one’s individual will and power. In Renaissance philosophy, the split comes about between two tendencies, that is between human empirical reality in its natural form, or in the plurality of its forms (Machiavelli or Montaigne), and the pure intelligible or supersensible (Ficino or Nikolaus von Cusa). Then, the emphasis placed on the “I” as a single entity by the main religious personalities of the Reformation opposes the emphasis on knowledge required by Descartes and the Cartesians.

So Groethuysen reconstructs the histories of the “philosophies of life” and of the “philosophies of spirit,” and finds in the point reached by Western culture at the beginning of modernity a most dramatic antithesis, that is between man’s isolation within himself as an individual and his attainment of tranquility as a universal being within the sphere of contemplation. But in both cases man loses the universal sense of his being in the world, divided as he is between his existence and this sense.

The second book among contemporary works on the history of philosophy tracing parabolas is Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche, first published in 1941.³ Löwith looks at the thought of the period from the mid-1800s to the first decades of the 1900s. He distinguishes Christianity and philosophy, the path of the former aimed at asserting the individual, Transcendence and faith, the latter at affirming universality, nature, society and reason. Löwith says that in the Hegelian system Christianity and philosophy finally establish a close relationship, having failed until then to reach unity, their dialogue notwithstanding. In fact, in the Hegelian system Christian revelation and philosophical reason or Logos mutually found one another. Revelation is proven by philosophical thought and is also its premise. After Hegel, however, the Hegelian schools are divided between a right wing, advocating Christian revelation, and the left, supporter of philosophy. The division exemplifies the crisis in a culture whose highest point was Hegelian doctrine. Löwith qualifies as “Christian bourgeois” the culture that witnessed the practical conciliation of Christianity and philosophy, the former transmitting values of respect for the individual’s inner life, defence of personal rights, and freedom of conscience, and the latter transmitting values such as scientific learning, State tolerance of all religions, and citizen participation in politics as free and equal citizens, that is, as human beings. It was a conciliation achieved through the Hegelian centre. After Hegel, this culture was replaced by a world in which the individual and society, reference to God and existence in time, belief and knowledge oppose each other. Although Kierkegaard and Marx each stand for one side of the conflict, the first expressing as an individual a faith that is known to be in incurable contrast with the world, the second sustaining as philosopher a science solely directed towards social and political relationships, Nietzsche with his deep lacerations nearly represents the embodiment of both sides.

Typical of Hegelian thought was the discors concordia between eternity and history, Bildung and work. In its place a state of permanent and violent conflict comes about between the desire to escape the world and the desire to be immersed in it. So L6with writes in his book:

In place of the Hegelian mediation the will formed as a decision to separate what Hegel had unified: the ancients and Christianity, God and the world, the inner and outer self, essence and existence.⁴

Thus, although Hegel had hoped to overcome the dualism between Christian revelation and philosophical knowledge, in the period of the Hegelian crisis and the following decades it returns, and in a harder and harsher way. The final result of this turn of events is “nihilism,” which the author relates to German philosophy because in it he finds the focal point for all the rays of Western philosophy, and the many different tendencies of Western culture as well. L6with says that nihilism assumes two forms. The first form is the “nihilism of weakness,” denying existence and the variety and newness of experience. This is for the sake of finding a refuge from existence itself in the immobility of Being. The second is the “nihilism of power,” rejecting any presence of reason or spirit in existence in order to celebrate everything that exists and lives, including man’s selfish instincts. Nietzsche, who was divided between the thesis of the “eternal return” and the thesis of the “Will to power,” between the “One” and the “Dispersion of Being,” shows these two sides of nihilism. The crisis of Hegelianism, in Löwith’s interpretation, leads to Nietzsche.

The third book outlining the history of Western thought under the guise of a parable/parabola is Michel Foucault’s work The Words and the Things, published in 1966.⁵ In order to shed light on the concepts used in the human sciences of the twentieth century, to reconstruct their genesis, and to derive from them a perspective about our times, Foucault analyzes the ways in which experience is organized in three different ages: first, the Cartesian age, then, the period between the end of the 1700s and the first decades of the 1800s, and finally the phase between the mid-1800s and the end of that century. Now, if one reconstructs this history – from Descartes until the crisis of positivism – one will notice, according to Foucault, how the idea of man at the centre, the subject organizing reality, belongs only to the second age. It is an idea upheld by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, Kant and the representatives of German idealism; is the base of economics, politics, all the other human and social sciences, a base forming their methods and concepts at this time. Now, in the Cartesian era, representations that reflect objective order, that is to say something existing outside man, are the criteria used to systematize data. The period running from the mid-1800s to the end of the century can be defined as the age when human consciousness disintegrates. It seems that the a priori of consciousness is not good enough to deal with the abundance of empirical situations and experiences. And so the concept of the non-centrality of man, maintained in an earlier period, before the humanism of the Enlighteners and idealists, returns in the era following the Enlightenment and idealism, if in a different guise. The anti-humanism of the age that had no more trust in reason has visible consequences in the twentieth century. Although interest in history was no longer supported by the notion of a universal human subject after the middle of the century, it still guided research in the human and social sciences at the end of the 1800s. Now it was replaced by an interest in certain norms, rules and systems sustaining human life, of which man himself seems unaware. So writes Foucault, considering the emergent situation in linguistics, economics, ethnology, and psychoanalysis from the first decades of the twentieth century onward.

On the horizon of any human science the plan exists to bring man’s consciousness back to its own true conditions, to return human consciousness to the contents and forms that gave it birth, and that elude consciousness.⁶

The idea that man is not master on this earth is shared by the human and social sciences in the twentieth century with the supporters of the rationality of a Cartesian or classical type. Certainly, these sciences have not merely returned to that rationality; they in no way go back to the notion of an external reality ordered according to hierarchies or structures having God as their beginning and final end. Once the human and social sciences reach awareness of their own status, they show Western culture as having an inherent direction, one that has not emerged until now. But this is only because, although it is weakened, the humanistic vision and inspiration of the previous period is still present. As Foucault says in the final pages of The Words and the Things:

If such tendencies should disappear as they have appeared, if they – as a consequence of some event which we can at the most forecast, of which however we do not know for now either the form or the promise – should precipitate as happened at the turn of the eighteenth century for the basis of classical thought, we can certainly venture that man would be cancelled, as on the edge of the sea a face made of sand.⁷

Thus Foucault, in an investigation directed to a specific field and to the analysis of a path that, moving away from its beginning, returns to exactly the same point, though on a different plane, reflects on the destiny of Western thought.

Now if these three books on different ages in the history of philosophy, all using the idea of the parable/parabola, are put together, then they themselves seem to form a parabola in both its meanings.

First of all, in fact, the parabola consists in the line that these works describe: from the split between living and philosophizing, making it impossible to find a univocal answer to the question of man, according to Groethuysen, one arrives at the cancellation of man sketched by Foucault, while having the rise and development of nihilism as represented by Löwith as an intermediate point.

In the second place, the parabola consists in the fact that these books which indeed dwell upon partial aspects, nevertheless relate the comprehensive history of Western civilization; they show how this civilization is hardly able to defend man and even seems to give up on the attempt. Groethuysen, Löwith and Foucault are three renowned representatives of that historiographic current that, in our times, acknowledges and analyzes a crisis in the course followed by humanistic ideas and dispositions. It is a crisis with deep roots in Europe and the West’s intellectual history.⁸ But why has not Western culture the strength – notwithstanding the richness and multiformity of its prevailing directions – to give an answer today to the question of man in a clearer and more convincing way than it did in past centuries? Perhaps the conceptual tools, used for the most part in Western philosophical and religious tradition until now, are not good enough to understand how in ancient times the idea of humanity entered ordinary life? After seeing the disquieting results of the history of Western thought, it could be instructive to examine carefully once again those human experiences which are the sources of this idea, before philosophy and the different religious doctrines establish their influence on hum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the English edition
• Preface to the Italian edition
• 1 Premises
• 2 Hermann Cohen (1842–1918)
• 3 Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929)
• 4 Martin Buber (1878–1965)
• 5 Leo Strauss (1899–1973)
• 6 Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–95)
• 7 A Final Remark: human rights, the truth of witnessing, a philosopher’s duty
• Notes
• Bibliographical note
• Index