Giving Beyond the Gift

Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania

Elliot R. Wolfson

• Editorial: Fordham University Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780823255726
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy of Religion

This book explores the co-dependency of monotheism and idolatry by examining the thought of several prominent twentieth-century Jewish philosophers—Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. While all of these thinkers were keenly aware of the pitfalls of scriptural theism, to differing degrees they each succumbed to the temptation to personify transcendence, even as they tried either to circumvent or to restrain it by apophatically purging kataphatic descriptions of the deity. Derrida and Wyschogrod, by contrast, carried the project of denegation one step further, embarking on a path that culminated in the aporetic suspension of belief and the consequent removal of all images from God, a move that seriously compromises the viability of devotional piety.The inquiry into apophasis, transcendence, and immanence in these Jewish thinkers is symptomatic of a larger question. Recent attempts to harness the apophatic tradition to construct a viable postmodern negative theology, a religion without religion, are not radical enough. Not only are these philosophies of transcendence guilty of a turn to theology that defies the phenomenological presupposition of an immanent phenomenality, but they fall short on their own terms, inasmuch as they persist in employing metaphorical language that personalizes transcendence and thereby runs the risk of undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent other.The logic of apophasis, if permitted to run its course fully, would exceed the need to posit some form of transcendence that is not ultimately a facet of immanence. Apophatic theologies, accordingly, must be supplanted by a more far-reaching apophasis that surpasses the theolatrous impulse lying coiled at the crux of theism, an apophasis of apophasis, based on accepting an absolute nothingness—to be distinguished from the nothingness of an absolute—that does not signify the unknowable One but rather the manifold that is the pleromatic abyss at being's core. Hence, the much-celebrated metaphor of the gift must give way to the more neutral and less theologically charged notion of an unconditional givenness in which the distinction between giver and given collapses. To think givenness in its most elemental, phenomenological sense is to allow the apparent to appear as given without presuming a causal agency that would turn that given into a gift.

CHAPTER 1

Via Negativa and the Imaginal Configuring of God

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

We can speak of a salient feature of modern Jewish thought as the dialogical imagination, an act of theopoiesis centered on the figural iconization of an allegedly invisible deity in anthropomorphic and anthropopathic terms.1 The emphasis on the dialogical, which proceeds philosophically from the logical notion of correlation enunciated by Cohen—what he calls in one place “a scientific elemental form of thought” (eine wissenschaftliche Grundform des Denkens)2— has been duly noted,3 but what has been less attended is that this conception bears the risk that what should not be subject to imaginary representation invariably will be so represented, even if in the guise of the irrepresentable. In his 1908 essay on the characteristic of Maimonidean ethics, Cohen observed that monotheism has preserved a nexus with pantheism, a tendency that can be overcome only when ethics dispenses with teleology.4 To comprehend this one must bear in mind that, for Cohen, “true teleology” gives rise to the “ethical convergence of nature and mind” (ethische Zusammenschluß von Natur und Geist), the proposition in light of which the history of philosophy within Judaism evolved.5 If we affirm reason as the origin of religious belief, as we must according to Cohen in both the so-called earlier and later periods of his intellectual development, it is inevitable that monotheism itself mandates that God become an object of thought that cannot be reduced to the course of nature, which is the crux of his vehement rejection of pantheism and idealism.6 To express the matter in a different terminological register: transcendence, which, in Cohen’s elocution, is a property of the uniqueness (Einzigkeit) as opposed to the unity (Einheit) of God,7 signifies the utter dissimilarity and incommensurability of the divine; inescapably, however, the transcendent becomes immanent to thinking insofar as there is no way to think the unthinkable that does not encroach on its unthinkability. How can the unthought be thought—even if merely thought as the unthought—without the closure of the breach between being and consciousness in a fashion that approximates the idealist worldview? Prima facie, the thought of difference should be differentiated from the difference of thought on the grounds that the latter comprises an alterity obliterated by the former. Yet, upon closer examination, thought of difference is no different from difference of thought to the extent that one as the other entraps reason in thinking being and nonbeing from the perspective of the production of being or nonbeing in thought.8 I surmise that Cohen has this inevitability in mind when he opines that “even Judaism could not and would not altogether resist the temptation of pantheism’s sweet poison,”9 and hence the correlation between God and human “constitutes the pantheistic element within monotheism [der Pantheismus im Monotheismus].”10 The repercussions of this confession have not commanded enough scholarly attention.

VIA NEGATIVA AND THE INFINITUDE OF TRANSCENDENCE

For Cohen, the divine and the human are united—though not identified—through the very reason that preserves their difference. This is expressed most notably in the moral imperative, the pursuit of which he affirms as the “life true to monotheism” and the most “precious achievement” of reason.11 Cohen turns to Maimonides to buttress his position,12 since the medieval sage harbored a “basic aversion to intuitionism and mysticism,” but he nonetheless affirmed the “ethical motif of pantheism” to the extent that he accepted the “unity of reason” (Einheit der Vernunft) as the element that joins what is ostensibly disparate, the very unity that served as the “foundation for his theory of prophecy.”13 From this it follows that “cognition is the task and telos of religion, and consequently of ethics.”14 Even if one were to accept Rosenzweig’s claim that Cohen modified his earlier Kantian position by arguing for the autonomy of religion vis-à-vis ethics,15 forging a Jewish rationalism16 by which the ostensibly incompatible forces of Scripture and philosophy are harnessed together in such a way that the deductive reasoning of scientific discourse is significantly modified by the prophetic idiom and its decidedly nonsystematic rhetorical style,17 one would have to admit that even in the later work it is still the cognitive value of the ethical (Erkenntniswert der Ethik) that alone justifies the knowledge of God (Gotteserkenntnis).18 Maimonides is the paragon of one who secured the interdependence of ethics upon religion by establishing the latter on the principles that are operative in the former. Yet, as Cohen is well aware, Maimonides severely constricted our capacity to know God’s substance or essence by denying the validity of positive attributes. Simply put, if an object is divested of attributes, how can it be known?19 The apophatic dimension, accordingly, “spells something rather suspicious and oppressive” to the extent that we are “bidden to put our trust in the content of revelation, relying but upon its rational moorings, and yet we deprive rational cognition of its positive conceptuality: what foundation remains at our disposal for knowing God if we are left to operate merely with negative attributes? Would it not appear that a latent trait of aversion and of distrust against the very foundation of the God-concept, against its cognitive validity, prevailed throughout this entire Maimonidean argument?”20 Cohen understood that if negative theology is the logical conclusion of philosophical speculation, then rationalism itself presents the greatest challenge to Judaism, which is based on a revelatory encounter and an absolute faith in the factuality of God. Cohen’s solution is anchored in an innovative interpretation of the doctrine of negative theology: the attributes about God, which are specified only by revelation and thus accessible through textual exegesis rather than deductive reasoning,21 portray the divine exclusively as a being beholden to the standard of morality.22 The cognition of God, therefore, is the cognition of the basic premise regarding the ethical comportment of divine volition as it is expressed in the world, the ideal of providence that serves as the paradigm for human emulation.23

Cohen goes so far as to say that it is only in virtue of the via negativa that the “entire Maimonidean philosophy emerges as a unified system,” for “in combating positive divine attributes,” Maimonides “was motivated not merely by scholastic subtlety, nor even theological concern for maintaining the conceptual purity of divine unity, but primarily by the pure rationalism of his ethics.” This insight leads Cohen to explicate Maimonidean negative theology in light of the Platonic conception of the Good as the nonfoundation (Ungrundlegung, τò ἀνυπόθɛτoν),24 which he claims is rendered incorrectly as “the unconditioned” (das Unbedingte) or “the absolute” (das Absolute), terms that convey the idealist sense of a rationally discernible foundation or an immutable essence. The ontological implications of these renderings contradict the intent of Plato’s description of the Good as the nonhypothesis, a privative expression that denotes that which is beyond being and rational deduction.25 In Cohen’s words:

Let us recall, however, how even Plato formulates his idea of the Good in seemingly negative terms as non-foundation.… I would venture to propose that in similar fashion, Maimonides by no means conceives of the negative attributes in a purely negative vein, but rather relates them to infinite judgment [unendlichen Urteil], which only apparently takes on the form of negation in that its formulation employs a negating principle [Negationspartikel].… Hence, Maimonides was able to find in Plato as well as in neo-Platonism the point of departure and support for developing his own fundamental doctrine of Knowing God: it is not through negation, but rather through a negation that is only apparent [scheinbare Negation], that we attain a true and fast affirmation of God.26

For Cohen, the Platonic idea resonates as well with his understanding of the notion of origin (Ursprung), the transcendental ground that accords priority to what is unknown over what is known, a “new thinking” based on seeing the aught (Ichts) as originating in the naught (Nichts), which is further demarcated as the “naught of knowledge,” that is, a negation that generates an affirmation in virtue of negating itself as negation and hence a negation that merely appears to be a negation, since there is no thing to negate in the unremitting becoming-other that is the true meaning of the originative principle that establishes “permanence” (Fortbestand) and secures “continuous preservation” (Forterhaltung), in contradistinction to the “first beginning” (ersten Anfang), a temporal conception that is mythological in nature.27 This notion of the actual potential, which is the potentiality of the actual, finds its theoretical grounding in the delineation of infinity as the limit-concept (Grenzbegriff) that fosters an ongoing critique of the penchant to subsume particularity within an all-inclusive totality.28 The infinitude of transcendence is unknowable, not because there is some hidden essence that cannot be known, but because transcendence is expressive of the continuous manifestations of finitude by which the unlimited is delimited.29 In Cohen’s opinion, this is to be applied to Maimonides, who related the negative attributes to the infinite judgment that is expressed through a negating particle and thus assumes the form of negation. Following the lead of Plato and the Neoplatonic tradition, Maimonides presumes that the affirmative knowledge of God is attained through the negation that is only apparently negative.30 We can have “true knowledge of God,” but this knowledge is “exclusively through negative attributes,”31 which means the very attributes that attest to the ungrounding of the ground through which the human being can know God as the “ultrapositive infinite,” the notional justification for the ethical-religious life.32

The intent of Cohen’s interpretation of Maimonides is made clear in Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, published posthumously in 1919. Maimonides is described as the “genuine philosopher of monotheism,” insofar as he provided a “foundation for the positivity, the affirmation of being” by wedding the concepts of infinity and negation through which “privation became the infinite judgment.”33 The problem of negative attributes is elucidated “through the connection of negation and privation,” which is to say, the attributes of privation, and not the positive attributes, are negated.34 Affirmative propositions arise out of infinite judgments that are based on the negation of privative statements. Cohen’s underlying metaphysical agnosticism—or, as some have suggested, his outright critique of ontology—is that the idea of infinity (derived from the notion of the differential and the infinitesimal calculus35) implies the absence of a predetermined body of knowledge rather than the lack of any particular property that formed part of an integrated system and therefore could be potentially apprehended by reason. To negate the privation is a double negative that yields the ground of positivity, the ground that, as we have seen, is an unground, the nonfoundation, an-archic. Nothing is not nothing but no thing, the indefiniteness that alone can be ascribed to the concept of God, which is the true Being (Sein) that can never be identical to the beings to which actual existence (Dasein) is attributed. In Der Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie (1915), Cohen had already argued that the object of our knowledge of God is exclusively being and that existen...