Saintly Influence: Edith Wyschogrod and the Possibilities of Philosophy of Religion

The Uncertainty Principle

The Uncertainty Principle M A R K C . TAY L O R Responsibility goes beyond being. In sincerity, in frankness, in the veracity of this saying, in the uncoveredness of suffering, being is altered. —Emmanuel Levinas1 Impossibility Edith Wyschogrod is first and foremost an ethical thinker. That is not to say she is an ethicist in the usual sense of the term; to the contrary, it is precisely because her work exceeds the bounds of ethics as traditionally defined that it is relevant today. All too often ethical reflection remains focused on specific problems and does not rise to a consideration of the broader social and cultural contexts in which it is situated. Furthermore, there is almost never any serious exploration of the question of the possibility of ethics as such: Ethicists simply presuppose the possibility of ethics and then proceed to argue about appropriate principles, maxims and norms. Wyschogrod, by contrast, develops a sophisticated analysis of the modern and postmodern conditions in which she examines the interrelation between the Western philosophical and theological tradition and science and technology. In today’s world, ethical reflection, she insists, is both imperative and impossible. By drawing on a broad range of philosophical , theological, literary, artistic and scientific sources, Wyschogrod develops what might be labeled an ethics of uncertainty, which provides helpful resources for the critical assessment of the conflicting absolutisms that threaten the world today. 16 Wyschogrod’s most interesting work emerges at the intersection of techno-logic and bio-logic. Though ranging across a rich array of disciplines , her writing has from the outset elaborated a remarkably consistent diagnosis of the cultural crisis of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She begins Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy by asking : ‘‘Why a postmodern ethic now?’’ The twentieth century is witness to the deaths of millions within ever more compressed time frames: death through nuclear, chemical , and biological warfare, through death camps, through concentration and slave labor camps, and by means of conventional weapons. Newly emerging biological and chemical instruments for mass destruction are in the process of development. Conflicts that have thus far remained local offer no guarantee of containment but, instead, may constitute potential flash points for global war.2 In an earlier book, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger and Man-Made Mass Death, Wyschogrod describes this new condition as the ‘‘death event.’’ While the Holocaust is never far from her mind, it is important to stress that the death event is not limited to a single historical occurrence but characterizes many twentieth-century tragedies. Wyschogrod actually goes so far as to argue that genocidal killing is ‘‘endemic to the world of postmodernity.’’3 Though calling for careful analysis, the death event is the cataclysm, which cannot be named. Echoing Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster4 and Derrida’s account of apophasis, Wyschogrod explains that the cataclysm is ‘‘the obverse of the sacred, a negative epiphany that can only be approached through the strategies of negative theology.’’5 Always exceeding thought, which it nonetheless provokes, the cataclysm is the event that cannot, yet must be thought. In the wake of catastrophe, no thinking is more impossible and more imperative than ethical reflection. Wyschogrod freely admits that a postmodern ethics seems to be a contradiction in terms. If postmodernism is a critical expression describing the subversion of philosophical language, a ‘‘mutant of Western humanism,’’ then how can one hope for an ethics when the conditions for the meaning are themselves under attack? But is not this paradox—the paradox of a postmodern ethic—just what is required if an ethic is to be postmodern? Does not the term postmodern so qualify the term ethics that the ideas of ethics, the stipulation of what is to count as lawful conduct, is subverted? And is a postmodern ethics then not an ethics Mark C. Taylor 17 of the subversion of ethics so that ethics turns into its opposite, a nihilism that is unconstrained by rules?6 The question, of course, is what constitutes nihilism. For its critics, postmodernism is nihilistic because it denies the possibility of theoretical and practical certainty and the security they bring. Morality, they assume, presupposes either universal norms or foundational principles, which can be clearly ascertained and confidently apprehended. As Wyschogrod points out: Critics of postmodernism argue that in unburdening itself of nomological structure it has thrown...