Skepticism, Belief, and the Modern: Maimonides to Nietzsche (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 303-305 Aryeh Botwinick. Skepticism, Belief, and the Modern: Maimonides to Nietzsche. Contestations: Cornell Studies in Political Theory 12. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. 260. One of the most fascinating arguments of Botwinick's Postmodernism and Democratic Theory (1993) is in his chapter on Strauss and Maimonides . There, Botwinick claimed that the rigor of Maimonidean negative theology was so all-encompassing as to inaugurate what Botwinick calls a "generalized agnosticism." In his new book, Botwinick takes this focus on the fiiiitude of epistemology, and extends it in a multitude of directions, showing that it has more than a family resemblance with the skeptical arguments in Hobbes's Leviathan, the critique of justification in Lyotard, and the Dionysian aspects of Nietzsche. In other words, this is a wide-ranging book. The broad contours of its argument are undoubtedly correct: negative theology (which Botwinick claims is part and parcel of monotheism) inaugurates a critique of foundational accounts of the nature of being which then steers humans to focus on actions (particularly Oakeshott's articulation of the meaning of conversation ) as the source of meaning, and thereby to develop more democratic social systems. Botwinick thankfully exposes as facile academics' strict demarcations between the modern and the postmodern, theology and its modern critics, and the political left and right. But those who are not polymaths should be warned that Botwinick's book requires a great deal of work on the part of the reader. Although Skepticism, Belief, and the Modern is selfconsciously interdisciplinary, Botwinick does not appear to write for readers who are less interdisciplinary than he is. In other words, he does not seem to imagine a potential reader who might be somewhat knowledgeable in medieval Jewish thought, but who is a novice in the traditions of analytic philosophy that lie underneath the several references to Davidson, Putnam, and Polanyi, or in the political writings of Michael Oakeshott that are essential to Botwinick's closing vision of "conversation" as the essence of liberal democratic society. Furthermore, Botwinick introduces concepts from his prior books (the 1993 book, as well as the 1990 Skepticism and Political Participation) as if he assumes the reader is quite familiar with the arguments of his own earlier work. In short, despite the importance of the argument that Botwinick is making, there will be few readers who will be able to adequately evaluate the details of his arguments as he oscillates between medieval, modern, and postmodern sources. A book review can only comment briefly on Botwinick's treatment of Maimonides, although it is of paramount importance for the argument he is making. Botwinick begins the book by claiming that there is an incoherence 304THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW in Maimonides' negative theology. On the one hand, there is a set of claims throughout the first part of the Guide that rest on a nominalist philosophy of language, implying that God is wholly other. On the other hand, there is also another set of more realist claims in which the yawning gap between the human and the divine is slightly less infinite. Botwinick's conclusion might be summarized by stating that the true esoteric meaning of Maimonides ' discourse is that the blurring between these two discourses clears the way for a primarily pragmatic view of thinking (p. Ill), in which philosophical categories "are known by their fruits and not by the intrinsically compelling nature of their philosophical structures." While this conclusion certainly may be true, there are frustrating turns in Botwinick's argument. He cites Guide 1.35 ("the term existence can only be applied equivocally to His existence and to that of things other than He") and concludes (p. 15) that Maimonides "attacks the imputation of existence to God. In order for God to exist, he (logically) must not exist." While it is indeed the case that Maimonides attacks the imputation of an embodied existence to God, this means that the object of attack is a univocal use of "existence" that would erase the difference between embodied creatures and an incorporeal God. Maimonides never attacks the imputation of existence to God per se, and indeed at Guide...