Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein

Notes

Notes Introduction (Autobiographical) 1. My first philosophical publication, “Synonymy and the Analysis of Belief Sentences,” was devoted to the question of the contribution that logical form makes to meaning; the topics of the next three were, in order, inductive logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the logic of quantum mechanics. 2. Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) contains my Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of St Andrews in 1990. 3. Collected in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief; Compiled from Notes Taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees and James Taylor, edited by Cyril Barrett (Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1966), 53–72. 4. Ibid., 148. 5. See Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, edited by Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 94. 6. Gordon Kaufman, In the Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 1. Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein 1. From the foreword to the 1999 publication as a “Fischer Taschenbook ,” I learned that this notebook had long been regarded as lost. It had, in fact, been in the possession of Wittgenstein’s sister, Margarete Stonborough in Gmunden, who upon Wittgenstein’s death gave it to Rudolf Koder (a friend of Wittgenstein’s from 1923 to his death, who shared his musical interests) and Koder’s sister Elisabeth as Erringerungsst ücke (remembrances). In 1993, Koder’s son, Professor Johannes Koder (who heads the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Vienna), contacted the Brenner Archive of the University of Innsbruck. Denkbewegungen; Tagebücher 1930–1932, 1936, 1937 was first published by Heymon-Verlag, Innsbruck in 1997, and then by Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1999. 2. The most reliable account of Wittgenstein’s complicated attitude to “Jewish mentality” (a topic hotly debated in Vienna in Wittgenstein ’s youth) is Yuval Lurie’s “Jews as a Metaphysical Species,” Philosophy 64 (1989): 323–347. 3. An exception is the remark reported by Drury that he had “the absolutely Hebraic sense” that what we do makes a difference in the end. Maurice O’Connor Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, edited by Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 161. 4. In fact, Wittgenstein (who was born in 1889) and Rosenzweig (who was born in 1886) were nearly the same age. And although Rosenzweig was brought up in Germany, in Cassel, and Wittgenstein in Vienna, they exemplify a very similar purity of motivation and a remarkable quality I find difficult to describe—“intense integrity,” or “integral intensity” are the closest I can come. 5. Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 178. 6. That it is profoundly erroneous is an insight I owe to valuable conversations, extending over many years, with Stanley Cavell and James Conant. 7. Although Stanley Cavell thinks that certain “ordinary language philosophers” do hold the position that Gordon ascribes to Wittgenstein , a central thesis of Cavell’s The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), is that Wittgensteinian philosophy is profoundly opposed to the view that anyone who departs from some fixed stock of “common meanings” is automatically guilty of talking nonsense. 8. L. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, edited by Rush Rhees (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1983). 9. Collected in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief; Compiled from Notes Taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees And James Taylor, edited by Cyril Barrett (Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1966), 53–72. 10. I discuss the nature of philosophical enlightenment(s) in my Spinoza Lectures, collected as part II of my Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 11. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), edited by Arnold Davidson. 12. Ibid., 265. 13. L. Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 1990), §913. 110 Notes to pages 9–13 14. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, 53–55. 15. “The Builders” [1937], collected in Franz Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning (New York: Schocken Books, 1955), edited by Nahum Glatzer , 78. 16. Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) was a founder of German Reform Judaism. 17. “The Builders,” 79–80, emphasis added. 18. “On Being a Jewish Person,” in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 2nd edition (New York: Schocken Books, 1953, 1962), edited by Nahum Glatzer, 222. “Liberalism...