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

1 Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein

In 1997 a long-lost notebook of Wittgenstein’s was published under the title Denkbewegungen (Thought-movements ).1 Wittgenstein had recorded this notebook in Cambridge in the years 1930–1932 and then again at Skjolden in Norway in 1936–1937. The first remark in the notebook (in my translation) reads: “Without some courage, one cannot write a sensible remark about oneself.” The second remark consists of just three words: “I believe sometimes” [Ich glaube manchmal ] (19). Ludwig Wittgenstein is not a “Jewish philosopher,” despite his Jewish ancestry.2 He came, after all, from a family that had been Christian for two generations, and whose own religious reflections, although certainly relevant to those who think about the philosophy of religion, were rarely3 on the Jewish religion, about which there is no reason to suppose he had any substantial knowledge. 1 Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein 10 Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life Nonetheless, I am going to discuss a certain similarity I find in Wittgenstein’s attitudes toward philosophy and those of Franz Rosenzweig, one of the best-known Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century.4 Wittgenstein is often thought of as virtually a “debunker ” of philosophy, an “antiphilosopher,” whose mission was to expose as confusions the problems that are of major concern to professional philosophers. And in fact, in Philosophical Investigations, §464 he himself described the aim of his later philosophy in this way: “to take you from something which is disguised nonsense to something which is undisguised nonsense,” and thus to show that the “disguised nonsense”—the grand philosophical “positions”— that so enchanted us was really patent nonsense all along. It is for this reason that Peter Gordon has criticized me for daring to compare Wittgenstein to Rosenzweig (in a book I very much admire, nonetheless). For Gordon, Wittgenstein is simply a philosopher who “meant to argue . . . that philosophy is a disease, and that we require only a therapy that will remind us of those common meanings that generally worked for us when we were going on about our daily and unphilosophical affairs.”5 Needless to say, I would never have made the comparison I did, and that I shall repeat in the present volume, if I thought this was an accurate description of Wittgenstein. In fact, this is an erroneous way to view Wittgenstein , as it considers his main concern to be that which is discussed in departments of philosophy.6 But the tendency to become enchanted with nonsense, and to try to force reality—or, as Rosenzweig will say, Man, World, and God—to allow itself to be seen through the lens of inappropriate pictures, is neither the monopoly nor the creation of professional philosophy. What concerned Wittgen- Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein 11 stein was something that he saw as lying deep in our lives with language (and he certainly did not think one could be “cured” of it once and for all, and certainly not by simply being reminded “of those common meanings that generally worked for us when we were going on about our daily and unphilosophical affairs”).7 If one really understands Wittgenstein, then one will see that the need for and the value of escaping the grip of inappropriate conceptual pictures is literally ubiquitous. The pursuit of clarity that Wittgenstein ’s work was meant to exemplify needs to go on whenever we engage in serious reflection. If this idea is grasped, we will see that far from being a way of bringing an end to philosophy, it represents a way to bring philosophical reflection to areas in which we often fail to see anything philosophical at all. Moreover—and this, I believe, is of utmost importance for understanding Wittgenstein—Wittgenstein never accepted the facile idea that religion is essentially a conceptual confusion or collection of confusions. To be sure, there are confusions to which religious people are subject, ranging from superstition to a temptation on which Wittgenstein remarks more than once in his Nachlass, the temptation to make religion into a theory rather than (what he thought it should be) a deep-going way of life. This is a temptation that Kierkegaard devoted much of his writing to combating as well, and is, I believe, one reason for Wittgenstein’s lifelong interest in Kierkegaard. But to consider religion as essentially “prescientific thinking,” as something that must be simply rejected as nonsense after “the Enlightenment,” is itself an example of a...