20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Truth

Truth Peter Ochs I n Hebrew Scripture, in rabbinic literature, and for most Jewish thinkers, truth is a characteristic of personal relationships. Truth is fidelity to one's word, keeping promises, saying with the lips what one says in one's heart, bearing witness to what one has seen. Truth is the bond of trust between persons and between God and humanity. In the Western philosophical tradition, truth is a characteristic of the claims people make about the world they experience: the correspondence between a statement and the object it describes, or the coherence of a statement with what we already know about the world. As if divided by their dual allegiance to the traditions of Jerusalem and of Athens, Jewish philosophers often believe themselves forced to choose between the two meanings of truth, producing what we may call objectivist and personalist trends in Jewish thought. Before the time of Descartes, the objectivists tend to be Aristotelians. They identify the created world of Scripture with the finite cosmos of Hellenistic philosophy, and the spoken words of creation with the natural laws of the cosmos (logoi). They argue that the laws of personal relationship, 1018 TRUTH revealed in the Torah, are particular instances of natural law and that, therefore , the religious conception of truth as fidelity is derivative of the philosophic conception of truth as correspondence to the natural world. Saadiah Gaon exemplifies this approach, arguing that prophecy was necessary only to specify how Israel would enact the rational laws of the Torah, while Maimonides so emphasizes the dichotomy between moral and natural laws that he prefigures some of the argumentation of the modern or post-Cartesian objectivists. In his Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides claims that Adam's original intellect gave him the power to distinguish truth and falsehood, that is, scientific knowledge, which degenerated through his corporeal inclinations into the power to distinguish good and evil, which is to say merely moral knowledge. This suggests that the revealed laws of personal relationship may serve conventional, moral functions that the philosopher considers secondary to the task of uncovering cosmic truths. Pushing this dichotomy one crucial step further, Spinoza introduces modernity into Jewish thought by identifying the Torah with religion and thereby separating the conventional functions of Torah from the pursuit of scientific knowledge of the natural world. Modernity imposes on modern Jewish thinkers the burden of proving that Judaism, as a distinct faith, offers something more than a collection of particular, conventional rules of behavior. Personalists tend to defend the faith of Israel against what they consider the corrosive effects of philosophical criticism. Their arguments are often political as well as philosophical in that they are grounded in the observation that philosophers may condemn Jewish particularity in favor of a professed universalism that actually serves the political or economic interests of competing social groups. They argue that truth is correspondence not between a statement and the world, but between a statement and the intentions of the person who uttered it. Judah Halevi, for example, argues that the truths of philosophical reasoning are merely hypothetical, or relative to the conditions of knowing that give rise to them. They are reliable only when the philosopher controls those conditions-for example, in mathematics . In natural science and for moral knowledge, however, certainty is acquired only through experience, the experience of the senses and, ultimately , direct experience of God, in mystical life and prophecy. These experiences appear only within the particularity of Jewish history and are recorded only within Jewish tradition. In appearance a traditionalist, the personalist draws on neo-Platonic sources that eventually exert a radicalizing influence. From AI-Ghazali (1058-1111) to Giordano Bruno (ca. 1548-1600) and Descartes, the neoPlatonic tradition exhibits increasing distrust of mediated knowledge and a TRUTH 1019 preoccupation with cognition and epistemology, as opposed to tradition and hermeneutics. For Western and jewish philosophers, the effect is to unite personalists and objectivists in the vain search for nontraditional foundations that has characterized modern thought until the twentieth century. For students of Ludwig Wittgenstein, "foundationalism" is the attempt to discover rational foundations for rational inquiry. In practice, that definition is too restrictive. Since humans always seek reliable premises for action, foundationalism may be defined more broadly as the human response to a loss of trust in traditional systems of behavior. The Athenian philosophers mistrusted mythological traditions, but soon replaced them with traditions of rational inquiry grounded in...