Contemplative Nation

A Philosophical Account of Jewish Theological Language

Cass Fisher

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804781008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Contemplative Nation challenges the long-standing view that theology is not a vital part of the Jewish tradition. For political and philosophical reasons, both scholars of Judaism and Jewish thinkers have sought to minimize the role of theology in Judaism. This book constructs a new model for understanding Jewish theological language that emphasizes the central role of theological reflection in Judaism and the close relationship between theological reflection and religious practice in the Jewish tradition. Drawing on diverse philosophical resources, Fisher's model of Jewish theology embraces the multiple forms and functions of Jewish theological language. Fisher demonstrates the utility of this model by undertaking close readings of an early rabbinic commentary on the book of Exodus ( Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael ) and a work of modern philosophical theology (Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption ). These readings advance the discussion of theology in rabbinics and modern Jewish thought and provide resources for constructive Jewish theology.

1

HERMENEUTIC THEORY AND THE STUDY OF JEWISH THEOLOGY

Toward a New Model of Jewish Theological Language

As I argued in the Introduction, since the inception of Wissenschaft des Judentums a variety of forces inimical to theology have shaped the study of Judaism. To be sure, there is nothing nefarious in this state of affairs. Early scholars of Judaism thought a rational presentation of the tradition was the key to political emancipation, while the more philosophically minded were simply reflecting the dominant trends in modern and postmodern philosophy when they rejected theology along with metaphysics. If, as I have claimed, the Jewish tradition has sustained a complex and substantial discourse on the divine, then it is an important task for scholars of Judaism that we find the means to situate theological reflection within the scholarly purview. Jewish theology will be best able to meet the challenges of its critics if it can give an account of itself that answers the common counterarguments that Judaism has no dogma, that Jewish discourse about God is not systematic, and that whatever theology does exist in Judaism is solely for the purposes of edification. These criticisms are based on the flawed notion that theology, by definition, is a coherent doctrinal system that compels assent.

Given the need for a new model for understanding Jewish theological language, what should serve as its basis? Two compelling reasons suggest taking philosophical hermeneutics as a starting point. Hermeneutics is the branch of philosophy that seeks to understand the various processes associated with the act of interpretation. As a scriptural tradition, interpretation has played a critical role in the development of Judaism and is a prominent element in its religious life. At the institutional level, the persistent interpretation and reinterpretation of its sacred texts has helped Judaism to endure profound political and social upheavals and to adapt to shifting cultural horizons. As for the individual, the Jewish practitioner not only lives by a calendar of liturgical reading, but constantly returns to the Torah, written and oral, for guidance about how to live the religious life and how to orient oneself toward the divine.¹ The first reason, then, that philosophical hermeneutics is a good starting point for thinking about Jewish theology is that interpretation is a basic feature of the Jewish tradition.

The travails of Jewish theology as an academic discipline provide the second reason why hermeneutics can make an important contribution to a new understanding of Jewish theological language. As I argued in the Introduction, scholars have repeatedly fixed the place of theology within the academic study of Judaism according to their own philosophical and theological commitments. For instance, commitments to a rational presentation of the Jewish tradition often lead to the claim that rabbinic theology is homiletic. Central to the hermeneutic inquiry into interpretation is a concern for how historical distance impacts one’s ability to understand. As I will discuss at length below, Hans-Georg Gadamer seeks to identify the contribution that our own commitments—what he calls prejudices—make in the act of interpretation. The second reason to turn to hermeneutics in order to help Jewish theology find a new footing is that the forces suppressing theology in Jewish studies are themselves hermeneutic in character.

Although I intend to demonstrate that the hermeneutic theories of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur can play an important role in rethinking Jewish theology, the application of their theories to classical Jewish literature is not without serious challenges. Like many forms of modern and postmodern philosophy, the hermeneutic theories of Gadamer and Ricoeur are deeply concerned with the limits of knowledge and language. While their strategies for circumscribing discourse are quite different, the result, I will contend, is the same: both thinkers undermine the possibility of theological language. As my model of Jewish theology will require that I bolster hermeneutic theory conceptually and epistemologically, it is imperative that I make clear the shortcomings of Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s work as well as the tremendous resources that their thought can bring to the study of Jewish theology.

In the discussion to follow, I will first offer a presentation and critical analysis of Gadamer’s work and then do the same for Ricoeur’s thought. The advantage of engaging the thinkers in this order is that Gadamer will provide insights about more general issues in the study of Jewish theology, while Ricoeur will contribute important structural features to my model of Jewish theological language that I will develop more fully in the following chapter. Given the voluminous and complex nature of both Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s writings, I will present their hermeneutic theories in a manner that emphasizes the potential resources for the study of Jewish theology as well as the most glaring difficulties. In an effort to keep the discussion centered on Jewish theology, after laying out each thinker’s hermeneutic theory, I will immediately assess the theory from the perspective of the study of Jewish theology.

Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Theory

As Gadamer develops his philosophical hermeneutics most fully in his magnum opus, Truth and Method, I will take it as the focus of my discussion.² An appreciation of the motives that propel Gadamer’s philosophy as well as the scope of his argument are crucial to understanding his hermeneutic theory. Gadamer is distressed by the fact that science has appropriated to itself the role of being the sole arbiter of truth.³ His concern is that we have been compelled to relinquish the idea that art and literature can be sources of knowledge. In an effort to resist these forces he argues:

Does not the experience of art contain a claim to truth which is certainly different from that of science, but just as certainly is not inferior to it? And is not the task of aesthetics precisely to ground the fact that the experience (Erfahrung) of art is a mode of knowledge of a unique kind, certainly different from that sensory knowledge which provides science with the ultimate data from which it constructs the knowledge of nature, and certainly different from all moral rational knowledge, and indeed from all conceptual knowledge—but still knowledge, i.e. conveying truth?⁴

In Gadamer’s view, it is critical that we find the means for preserving the belief that the arts and humanities are sources of truth just as much as the sciences. Gadamer’s first step in mounting a defense for a broader notion of truth is to argue that all knowledge—scientific and humanistic—arises under the same conditions: in all human cognition and experience the individual’s historicity plays a determinative role in the acquisition of knowledge. As Gadamer seeks to uncover the forces that affect all human understanding, he can argue that “the province of hermeneutics is universal.”⁵ Hermeneutics is not just a methodology for interpreting traditionary materials; rather, it is a “theory of the real experience that thinking is.”⁶ It is important to see that while Jewish studies may only be marginally interested in philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory claims to have something to say about all areas of human understanding, including Judaism.

For present purposes, I will pick up Gadamer’s argument where he offers his critique of aesthetics as it developed in the nineteenth century. The principal problem with aesthetics for Gadamer is that the aesthetic consciousness of the individual becomes “the experiencing (erlebende) center from which everything considered art is measured.”⁷ The emphasis upon the inner experience of the aesthete extracts the work of art from the social context in which the artist produced the work and also removes the socially established criteria by which the work can be judged. Even more destructive is the fact that in abolishing all “extra-aesthetic elements” the aesthetic consciousness ignores the content of the work, the very thing that can “induce us to take up a moral or religious stance towards it.”⁸ This process by which aesthetics reduces the work of art to the aesthetic experience of the individual is what Gadamer calls “aesthetic differentiation.” ⁹ For Gadamer, this act is ultimately a destructive one in that it “annihilates the unity of the work of art, the identity of the artist with himself, and the identity of the person understanding or enjoying the work of art.”¹⁰ A crucial task of Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory, then, will be to propose a more complex relationship between the artist, the work of art, and the individual who experiences and interprets the art object. What is most important for my purposes is that this relationship will have to be one in which the truth claim of the work of art is not diminished by the experience of its aesthetic properties.

Seeking to overcome the errors of aesthetics, Gadamer takes up the question of the ontology of the work of art. That is to say, he wants to inquire into the mode of being of the work of art and its relationship to being in general. Gadamer argues that it is the idea of “play” that reveals the most about the work of art from an ontological perspective. He is quick to clarify that by using the word play he does not mean that art, either in its creation or in our experience of it, is something “playful” or lacking seriousness. Play, he contends, is the means to “self-presentation,” which he considers a “universal ontological characteristic of nature.”¹¹ In applying the notion of play to art, Gadamer makes the following observations:

All presentation is potentially a representation for someone. That this possibility is intended is the characteristic feature of art as play. The closed world of play lets down one of its walls, as it were. A religious rite and a play in a theater obviously do not represent in the same sense as a child playing. Their being is not exhausted by the fact that they present themselves, for at the same time they point beyond themselves to the audience which participates by watching. Play here is no longer the mere self-presentation of an ordered movement, nor mere representation in which the child playing is totally absorbed, but it is “representing for someone.” The directedness proper to all representation comes to the fore here and is constitutive of the being of art.¹²

While it may seem that following Gadamer’s explorations into the phenomenology of art takes us a long way from the topic of Jewish theology, the point that Gadamer is seeking to make is crucial to his hermeneutic theory and, with slight modification, to Jewish theological language as well. It is worth noting that throughout Truth and Method, Gadamer often draws on religious parallels to art as a way of giving weight to his argument. In this case, part of what defines a ritual or theatrical performance is the fact that it projects itself toward an audience. The particular dynamic of play in theater and religious ritual transforms the audience into a participant, that is, a player. Gadamer goes so far to say that it is only in the presence of an audience that the performance “achieves its whole significance.”¹³ Although there is still much work to do on Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory before I can turn the discussion back to Jewish theology, I can make two points in anticipation of that discussion. First, it will be crucial to the model of Jewish theology that I develop in this and the next chapter that Jewish theological language is not just private speculation on things divine. Jewish theology intends its audience and in doing so it seeks to achieve certain ends. Second, in the same way that art turns its audience into a participant, Jewish theology is also self-promulgating and turns the reader or listener into a theologically reflective thinker.

That the work of art directs itself toward its audience is an indication that the play of art produces meaning that it seeks to communicate. Gadamer calls the process by which the meaning of artistic play comes into being “transformation into structure.”¹⁴ What he seeks to capture by this phrase is that through the play of art a work emerges that has “absolute autonomy” over both the players and the spectators.¹⁵ As an indication of this autonomy, Gadamer points to the fact that in a theatrical performance we no longer ask about the players as individuals; instead the audience perceives them only as participants in the play. In the same way that the actors are drawn into the world of the play, so too is the audience. Gadamer describes this transformation of the world in the following terms:

But, above all, what no longer exists is the world in which we live as our own. Transformation into structure is not simply transposition into another world. Certainly the play takes place in another, closed world. But inasmuch as it is a structure, it is, so to speak, its own measure and measures itself by nothing outside it. Thus the action of a drama—in this respect it still entirely resembles the religious act—exists as something that rests absolutely within itself. It no longer permits of any comparison with reality as the secret measure of all verisimilitude. It is raised above all such comparisons—and hence also above the question of whether it is all real—because a superior truth speaks from it.¹⁶

In tracing the notion of play as it culminates in transformation into structure, Gadamer arrives at the ontological mode of the work of art that he was pursuing. For Gadamer, transformation into structure is a process that has a privileged access to both being and truth. As he goes on to say, “the transformation is a transformation into the true . . . it is itself redemption and transformation back into true being.”¹⁷ It helps to understand this turgid language to note that Gadamer, like Ricoeur, adopts a Heideggerian notion of truth as manifestation.¹⁸ Whereas Heidegger focuses on the disclosure and concealment of being as the source of truth, Gadamer explores the process of play and the accompanying transformation into structure as a vehicle for truth to disclose itself. For Gadamer, the world that emerges in “the play of presentation” is our world “in the heightened truth of its being.”¹⁹ While there will be more to say about the topic of truth further on, what is important to establish at present is that, for Gadamer, the ontological mode of the work of art is an “event of being” in which truth is disclosed.

Although Gadamer begins his exploration of the ontology of the work of art by focusing on theatrical performance, he quickly extends his argument by showing that painting, the plastic arts, and literature all share the same ontological structure. For the purposes of this study, it is literature that is of ultimate importance. In addressing the topic of literature, Gadamer gives considerable attention to the act of reading. Reading for Gadamer “is always a kind of reproduction, performance, and interpretation.” As he sees it, the meaning of a text is dependent on the act of reading. From an ontological perspective, it is reading that gives to literature the structure of “an event in which the content comes to presentation.”²⁰ The emphasis on reading in Gadamer’s account of literature raises the question of what types of texts qualify as literature. It would seem that the reading of any text whatsoever requires the same performative component and, indeed, Gadamer claims that “all written texts share in the mode of being of literature.”²¹ According to Gadamer, the difference between what we would normally consider literature and other types of texts is “not so fundamental.” If there is any distinction at all to be made among texts it is in regard to “the claims to truth that each makes.”²² The phenomenological traits of reading also serve to expand the scope of Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory to a universalist position.

While the act of reading is crucial in producing meaning for Gadamer, this dependence on the reader does not undermine the possibility of the text communicating its message. Gadamer captures this tension between textuality and interpretation when he says that “nothing is so purely the trace of the mind as writing, but nothing is so dependent on the understanding mind either.” Reading is, for Gadamer, an astounding human power that transforms dead signs into a living voice. This voice, he says, “is to such an extent pure mind that it speaks to us as if in the present.” Those who have the power to read can “produce and achieve the sheer presence of the past.”²³ Literature holds a privileged place from a hermeneutical perspective, not only because it is the most direct and content-rich form of artistic expression, but also because it requires the full resources of the human understanding in order to communicate its message.

As Gadamer constructs his hermeneutic theory, a central concern for him is the question of how knowledge in the human sciences is related to scientific knowledge. For Gadamer, this question receives a decisive answer with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, which asserts that understanding is the “original form of the realization of Dasein.”²⁴ That is to say that understanding is t...