Postmodern Jewish philosophy

CHAPTER 37
Postmodern Jewish philosophy
Richard A.Cohen
Assuming that what Jewish philosophy or Jewish thought is has been made clear enough,
then the distinctiveness of this chapter hinges on clarifying the meaning of the term
“postmodern.” The meaning of postmodern, however, is notoriously slippery. It appears
to be no more than a label, rubric, or family name. It may be no less than a pseudonym, a
nom de plume, a mask concealing a much older name. In any event, much of what passes
for postmodern writing is sufficiently novel, or rather sufficiently different, to elude
facile submission to prior standards of validity, or even canons of sense.
Not only are definition and hence also evaluation difficult, but postmodern writers
appear to delight in exacerbating precisely these two difficulties. At the same time they
seem also to delight in striving to overcome these difficulties, writing endless articles and
books about the meaning of postmodernism, instead of simply doing whatever it is
postmodernism does. It so happens, too, that to engage in both of these efforts, one no
less obscurantist than the other, is one of the marks of “successful” postmodernism.
It is safe to say that the postmodern is a kind of avant-gardism. It is avant-gardism
without limit, ad absurdum, rebellion without cause. Its discourse is deliberately strange
and self-estranged, not a metaphysics but a writing indeterminate and unsettled, like a
stream of consciousness neither fully awake nor fully asleep. Always in media res, it
attempts to articulate a submergence in history without origin or goal. It is a discourse
never univocal, indeed it vigilantly seeks and destroys all claims and vestiges of stability,
permanence, autochthony, hence it is Israelite in this sense rather than Canaanite, but
even more aptly it is Visigoth, or, more aptly still, cannibal.
Clearly it is a topic resistant to frontal approach. Another approach is called for. The
name postmodern literally means “after the modern.” Presumably, then, in some
important sense the postmodern is beyond the modern. To clarify exactly what it is that
the postmodern is beyond, what it comes after, that is, the modern, should bring us closer
to grasping the essentially elusive meaning of the postmodern. But although the
postmodern that concerns us in this chapter is philosophical and Jewish, by birth it is the
child of literary criticism. This is important because what is modern for philosophy is not
the same as what is modern for literary criticism. Thus two paths lie before us. I will
begin with the modern in philosophy. Let us note from the outset, none the less, that the
most characteristic symptom of postmodernism is a blurring of boundaries, especially
those which separate philosophy, literary criticism, and literature.
Broadly defined, philosophy is science, rational knowledge of such dimensions of
meaning as nature, art, ethics, and metaphysics. Chronologically, the modern period of
philosophy begins with Descartes’ methodological reflections on constructive geometry
and ends with Kant’s critical philosophy of nature, ethics, and aesthetics. It is preceded
by two periods: the ancient, which begins with Thales and ends with Plotinus, and the
History of Jewish philosophy
778
medieval, which comprises everything after Plotinus and before Descartes. Rational
knowing for the ancients meant ontology, cognizing being; for the medievals it meant
theology, cognizing God; and for the moderns it has meant epistemology, cognizing
knowing itself, with mathematical knowing taken as the ideal type.
To do postmodern philosophy, then, would mean philosophizing beyond the bounds
defining ontology, theology, and epistemology, with special emphasis on the latter since
its attractions are most recent and ascendent. And indeed one finds that trashing
Cartesianism and all its multifarious vestiges, both subtle and crude, is a sine qua non of
postmodernist writing. The corrosive forces of the social, historical, economic, and
psychological suspicions unleashed by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche are deployed to
undermine and expose the false posturing, the ersatz “grounds” of scientific subjectivity
and objectivity. All the positive spiritual efforts of ancient paganism, medieval religion,
and modern secular humanism, are rejected as empty optimism, simpleminded naivety.
There is a second more radical strain of postmodern philosophy. Here it is not enough
to offer the latest philosophical breakthrough beyond ontology, theology, and
epistemology, a new knowledge beyond these obsolete forms. Rather one must break
with rational knowledge altogether. The postmodern thus would be a rejection of
philosophy qua science, that is, a rejection of philosophy per se, philosophy itself, a
rejection of the “per se,” the “itself” of philosophy. What is postmodern would not simply
resist definition provisionally, then, as would its less radical strain, it would resist
definition in principle, attacking all such tasks as ruses of the philosophy it would deflect
or infect absolutely. In actual usage the term “postmodern” vacillates between its more
and its less radically deconstructive senses, further muddying already murky waters.
A final complication. Until recently philosophizing after the modern period has been
called “contemporary philosophy.” Figures as diverse in place, time, and meaning as
Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Bergson, Dewey, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Russell, Wittgenstein,
Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty are in this sense all contemporary philosophers. “Postmodern”
is a late twentieth-century designation, icing on the contemporary cake. It refers to a
bolder awareness, a more deliberate acceleration of certain self-destructive tendencies
inherent in almost all contemporary philosophies. Its bravado and pace, the wit from
which postmodernism lives, though based on prefigured tendencies, have largely been
awakened and spurred on by developments in contemporary literary criticism, to which I
now turn.
Modernism in literary criticism took the earlier Romantic revolt against classicism and
turns it against the latent optimism it uncovers in Romanticism itself. In other words,
modernism raises the Romantic ante. Thus it is a writing permeated by the sense of loss,
disappointment, failure, disillusion, resignation, even ennui. Lionel Trilling has defined it
as “the disenchantement of our culture with culture itself.”
Literary postmodernism, then, would raise the ante yet again. It would extend the
modernist extension of the Romantic revolt against classicism to modernism itself. It
would be modernism sans nostalgia, a thoroughly modern modernism, right up to
embracing nihilist consequences. Classicism would be so utterly destroyed that such
basic distinctions as that between plagiary and originality, for example, or copying and
creating, would be obliterated. Culture and lack of culture would be indistinguishable.
Brillo boxes, laundry lists, chance remarks, Shakespeare’s plays would be the equal of
one another, and of everything else, and would all be unequal to one another too. The
Postmodern Jewish philosophy
779
only certainty would be that through all transformations and obliterations of genre, no
one and nothing would have the authority to legitimize or to delegitimize meanings,
much less rules of the game. Gone would be modern malaise and ill humor. There would
be no disappointment because there would be no hope. The center would no longer hold,
but no one would care or notice. Beyond deicide, regicide, and patricide…joyful suicide,
or maybe only oblivious suicide.
What do these preliminary considerations teach us about postmodern Jewish
philosophy? They serve, I hope, as warnings. Beware of the latest jargon. To stick the
label “postmodern” on to a self-destructive discourse in no way minimizes its negativity,
or justifies it. Quite simply, postmodernism cuts itself off from everything that has
hitherto counted as philosophy and Jewish thought. Its old and true name is sophism,
notwithstanding all the refinements of its tomfoolery, its theatrics, whining, bravado, selfadvertisement, ideology, tyranny, and all the other shenanigans, verbal and otherwise,
which may be seductive in the short run, or just plain silly, but can and do prove
dangerous. Postmodernism lacks, and indeed scorns, not only the straightforwardness and
decency of plain common sense, and not only the dignity, universality, and seriousness of
philosophy, but above all the profound and hard-won wisdom and the deep community
bonds of the Jewish tradition. Precisely where one hears the most noise about
transcending self, author, soul, tradition, law, God, etc., there and precisely there one
finds the least humility, indeed the most outrageous self-assertiveness, linked to the most
rigid and exclusive ideology.
It is time, then, to move on to better and more important matters. But before doing so,
let us take one last tack. Instead of trying and failing to define an essentially indefinable
postmodernism, let us ask more simply who is “doing” postmodern Jewish philosophy?
One name invariably suggests itself. Jacques Derrida (b. 1930), in Paris, is without
question the outstanding postmodern. It so happens, too, that he is born Jewish.
Furthermore, as Susan Handelman has shown in The Slayers of Moses (1982), subtitled
“The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory,” there are
similarities between key maneuvers employed by Derrida to deflate texts and techniques
used by the rabbis in traditional talmudic reasoning. Still, neither genealogy nor
similarities in technique add up to make Derrida’s postmodernism either Jewish (a point
which I take to be incontestable) or philosophy (an assessment which I admit is
debatable). Derrida himself has certainly never noted or cultivated these connections.
Perhaps postmodern Jewish philosophy is being “done” in recent Jewish feminist
writings, those, say, of Susannah Heschel, Paula Hyman, Judith Plaskow, or Chava
Weissler? The attack on tradition and any form of foundationalism which are
cornerstones of the postmodern is in the hands of feminists, generally, license to
challenge all gender differentiations whatsoever, and in the hand of Jewish feminists,
more particularly, license to challenge what is taken to be a completely distorted because
male chauvinist Jewish tradition. Liberated, Judaism would be completely egalitarian, all
vestiges of male privilege excised, from God’s masculine attributes to male rabbis and
minyans, from the paternalism of rabbinics to the no less pernicious paternalism of the
science of Judaism, unto Judaism’s fundamental division between public and private, that
is, between work and synagogue and home and family. One is left to wonder, however,
what remains that is Jewish. Total and permanent revolution is not only the price of
postmodernism, it is also its “nature.”
History of Jewish philosophy
780
Caution is required on this point. My advice regarding the tenuous Jewishness and
philosophical character of so called “postmodern Jewish philosophy” is to keep in mind
the reply of Moses Mendelssohn, in Jerusalem (1783), when he was, as he puts it,
accused of “the scandalous design of subverting the religion which I confess, and of
renouncing it, if not expressly, but as it were, in an underhand manner.” He wrote: ‘This
practice of wresting meanings should be forever discarded from the conversation of the
learned.” Most of what passes under the label “postmodern Jewish philosophy” is no
more and no less than wresting of meanings. More honest would be simply to attack
Judaism outright, and let the chips fall where they will.
So much for artifice and vanity. Let us now turn to what is genuinely new and
profound in contemporary Jewish thought. First I will turn to the ethical metaphysics of
Emmanuel Levinas (1906–96), which ranks, as I see it, at the forefront of contemporary
Jewish thought. Then I will turn to other bright but as yet still dimmer lights.
Levinas wrote voluminously both in philosophy and in Jewish thought from the late
1920s. His philosophy, in addition to being found in several collections of original and
secondary articles, appears in four main books (all of which have been translated into
English): Existence and Existents (1947), Time and the Other (1947), Totality and
Infinity (1961), and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974). The last two works
represent the mature expression of Levinas’ ethical metaphysics. His Jewish thought,
which is by no means sharply distinguished from his philosophy, has appeared in articles
which can be found in the following collections (most of which have been translated into
English): Difficult Freedom (1990a), Nine Talmudic Readings (1990b), From the Sacred
to the Holy (1977), Beyond the Verse (1994a), In the Time of the Nations (1994b).
Levinas overturns long-standing priorities in philosophy. His most basic move is to
anchor meaning in the good (morality, social justice) rather than in the true (knowledge,
science, opinion). But instead of dispensing with the true, or reducing it to an
epiphenomenon, like many contemporary philosophical critics, he shows how it is
conditioned by goodness. So instead of the priorities expressed in the Socratic dictum that
“to do the good one must know the good,” Levinas’ position echoes the order of the
famous biblical response said by the Jewish people at Mount Sinai: “we will hearken and
we will understand.” The philosophical, phenomenological basis for this revolution in
thought is the primacy Levinas sees in the moral transcendence which originally
constitutes social life, the primacy, that is to say, of inter-subjectivity as moral encounter.
Morality and justice, beginning with the other person one encounters face to face in
everyday life, precede philosophical justification, and “justify” it.
Levinas is thus concerned to preserve a moral sense of otherness irreducible to the
categories of classical philosophy. Rather than find such otherness in the endless play of
absent and present signifiers, where all language is reduced to textuality, Levinas is
concerned to account for the origin of the seriousness which constitutes moral relations,
to account for the urgency and exigency which constitute the responsibility one person
has for another. Indeed, responsibility to respond to the other is, for Levinas, the ultimate
starting point, the ground zero, of all signification. Hence first philosophy must be an
ethics rather than epistemology, theology, or ontology. From the primary obligation one
person has for another, moral obligation, Levinas discovers the obligation each person
has for all others, the call to justice, for those not present as well as those present.
Postmodern Jewish philosophy
781
Levinas thus links transcendence, sociality, morality, and social justice. One thus
recognizes in Levinas’ thought, as well as in his references, examples, and phrases, the
deepest themes of Jewish ethics and spirituality, the grand gestures and minute details of
prophetic and rabbinic morality, defining a redemptive history not only for Jews but for
all humankind. In his metaphysical ethics Levinas weaves the specifics of the moral and
holy language of Judaism into a compelling and critical web with the most advanced
issues and idioms of contemporary continental philosophy. He thus reawakens the
unification of Hellenic and Judaic thought inaugurated by (Wolfson’s) Philo, not,
however, by binding philosophy’s commitment to logic with Judaism’s commitment to
scriptural revelation, as did Philo and his heirs, in a reconciliation finally undone by
Spinoza’s naturalism, but rather outflanking the primacy which both Philo and Spinoza
gave to epistemology, on the side of philosophy, by uncovering and binding philosophy’s
no less profound and no less constitutive commitment to ethics, to the “good beyond
being,” with Judaism’s commitment to personal transcendence, goodness, and social
justice. The brilliance of Levinas’ achievement is to have made of precisely this shift, the
troubling of the true by the good, the uplifting movement which defines the ethical. He
persuades not by citing proof-texts, which would have no force in philosophical discourse
in any event, but by giving voice to the prior and discordant claims of morality, to the
very priority of its claim, as exerted by the one who faces, the other person to whom the
morally elected self is obligated, the “orphan, widow, and stranger,” for whom and to
whom one is responsible unto death.
Levinas’ thought has influenced and inspired many other thinkers, Jewish, Christian,
and non-religious. In France, Jean-Luc Marion, in Idol and Distance (1977) and God
Without Being (1982), has produced a reading of Christianity pivoted on reconceiving
God’s mystery in terms of the radical otherness beyond being which, as we have seen,
moves Levinas’ thought. In Argentina, Enrique Dussel has articulated a liberation
theology, in Philosophy of Liberation (1980), for example, where the entire Third World
is thought in Levinasian terms of ethical otherness, though adapted to a more thoroughly
Christian and New Testament idiom.
In a non-religious context, Derrida, who has always acknowledged a certain technical
debt to Levinas, has recently come around also to the ethical dimension which is central
to Levinas’ entire project. In an address to the American Philosophical Association
(1988), published as an article entitled “On the Politics of Friendship,” for example, one
finds Derrida borrowing not only from Levinas’ ethical sensibility but from his precise
and distinctive phraseology. Also in Paris, Jacques Rolland, who edited several of
Levinas’ later publications, in Dostoyevsky: The Question of the Other (1983) gives a
Levinasian ethical reading to Dostoyevsky, and elsewhere does the same with some of
Kafka’s shorter writings.
In the Jewish intellectual world, Edith Wyschogrod, author of the first book in English
on Levinas, The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (1974), has more recently, in Spirit in
Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death (1985), and more recently still in
Saints and Postmodernism (1990), subtitled “Revisioning Moral Philosophy,” brought
Levinas’ social ethics to bear on contemporary continental philosophy, on Holocaust
studies, and on the image of the saint. In view of this chapter’s heading and the title of
her latest book, it should be emphasized that Wyschogrod, almost alone, must be credited
with a “postmodernism” where ethics is taken more seriously than aesthetic play.
History of Jewish philosophy
782
Catherine Chalier, in Paris, in a series of books on a variety of Jewish themes, including
Jewish themes in Levinas—Judaism and Alterity (1982), Feminine Figures (1982), The
Matriarchs (1985), The Perseverance of Evil (1987), The Alliance with Nature (1989),
Thoughts on Eternity (1993), and Levinas: The Utopia of Humanness (1993)—has shed
new light by giving a Levinasian ethical reading to them. The influence of Levinas’
ethical metaphysics is also visible, and acknowledged, in the masterful exposition of
Franz Rosenzweig’s magnum opus that Stephane Mosès has presented in System and
Revelation (1982), just as it permeates the reading Annette Aronowicz gives to the
writings of the French Catholic thinker Charles Péguy (1873–1914).
Moving on from Levinas and his wide influence, but still under the banner of new and
profound contemporary Jewish thought, several other fine thinkers have produced and are
in the process of producing works of a high caliber which merit mention. With apologies
to many, however, in the following I have chosen to single out two thinkers, David
Novak and Eugene Borowitz.
David Novak, who was for many years a synagogue rabbi and from 1997 a Professor
of Judaic Studies at the University of Toronto, does not claim the dubious honor of
postmodernity. His thought is rather a development in the positive-historical school of
modern Judaism, committed both to halakhic Judaism and to changing times. Novak’s
thought maintains a careful balance between the dual dangers of a Liberal capitulation to
modernity on the one side, and an Orthodox rejection of modernity on the other. Against
the assimilation tendencies of the former, Novak adheres to halakhah, and against the
isolationist tendencies of the latter, he calls for a more imaginative theology and a greater
social and political responsibility, especially in the light of the modern State of Israel.
A prolific writer, Novak’s main work thus far is Jewish Social Ethics (1992). Centered
on social ethics, Novak provides a philosophical grounding of social good in the truth of
a natural law ontology, for which in turn he provides a religious ground in theonomy, a
theology of creation. But taking his place in a venerable tradition of Jewish thinkers,
Novak is not satisfied with mere deep thinking, with philosophical speculation, however
secure. His thinking is equally committed to the realm of the practical. The law must not
only be conceived in relation to its ground, principles of social good, and thus also in
relation to ontology and theonomy, but its very formulation must be tempered and must
proceed with the flexibility, specificity, and humaneness which are characteristic of the
rabbinic talmudic tradition, attuned as that tradition is to concrete instances, to judicious
application of law.
Eugene Borowitz, who is rabbi and professor of Jewish thought at the Hebrew Union
College in New York, rejects halakhah and accepts the postmodern label. Pursuing
Reform Judaism’s commitment to Enlightenment thought, for Borowitz halakhah and
individual autonomy contradict one another, and it is with the latter, with individual
autonomy, that he sides. Such is his modernity. But Borowitz’s recent and central work,
Renewing the Covenant (1991), is subtitled “A Theology for the Postmodern Jew.” His
postmodernity lies in two theses. First, attempting to stake out a middle path, he rejects
the “naivety” of both premodern theologism and modern humanism. Borowitz
reconceives religion as neither God-centered nor human-centered but as an exchange
between the two, between God and human and human and God. Second, again finding a
middle way, he rejects the particularist communion of the premodern conception of
revelation and the abstract universalism of the modern humanist conception. Instead,
Postmodern Jewish philosophy
783
Borowitz defends the worth and hence the continued existence of the Jewish people, but
does so in response to both the imposed devastation of the Holocaust, on the one hand,
and in opposition to the voluntary dissolution of the Jewish people through assimilation
and intermarriage, on the other.
In an interesting reversal, whose strength remains to be tested, Borowitz
believes he can temper his modernity, his unshakable belief in the
ultimacy of individual autonomy, precisely by his postmodernity, where
reliance on human freedom must be “reformed by being in a Godgrounded, particular context.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Texts
Borowitz, E. (1990) Exploring Jewish Ethics: Papers on Covenant
Responsibility (Detroit: Wayne State University Press).
——(1991) Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society).
Fackenheim, E. (1970) Quest for Past and Future: Essays in Jewish
Theology (Boston: Beacon).
——(1980) Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy (New
York: Schocken).
——(1982) To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought
(New York: Schocken).
Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity, translated by A.Lingis
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press).
——(1978) Existence and Existents, translated by A.Lingis (The Hague:
Nijhoff).
——(1981) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by
A.Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff).
——(1985) Ethics and Infinity, translated by R.Cohen (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press).
——(1987) Time and the Other, translated by R.Cohen (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press).
——(1990a) Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean
Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
——(1990b) Nine Talmudic Readings, translated by A.Aranowicz
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
History of Jewish philosophy
784
——(1993) Outside the Subject, translated by M.Smith (Stanford:
Stanford University Press).
——(1994a) Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures,
translated by G. Mole (London: Athlone).
——(1994b) In the Time of the Nations, translated by M.Smith (London:
Athlone).
Levy, B.-H. (1979) Barbarism with a Human Face, translated by G.Holoch
(New York: Harper & Row).
——(1980) The Testament of God, translated by G. Holoch (New York:
Harper & Row).
Novak, D. (1989) Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification (New
York: Oxford University Press).
——(1992) Jewish Social Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press).
——(1995) The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Wyschogrod, E. (1985) Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made
Mass Death (New Haven: Yale University Press).
——(1990) Saints and Postmodernism (Chicago: Chicago University
Press).
Studies
Cohen, R. (ed.) (1986) Face to Face with Emmanuel Levinas (Albany:
State University of New York Press).
——(1994) Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and
Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Handelman, S. (1982) The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic
Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of
New York Press).
——(1991) Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary
Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press).
Mosès, S. (1992) System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz
Rosenzweig, translated by C.Tihanyi (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press).
Rose, G. (1993) Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford:
Blackwell).