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

Modern Jewish Philosophy

Modern Jewish Philosophy nrc,nM ~3i~ ~""M" M"~'O'''''~ Steven s. Schwarzschild T he very notion of jewish philosophy (even leaving aside the notion of modernity) has been much debated. Isaac Husik, the standard historian of medieval jewish philosophy, held that starting with the Renaissance there could no more be j ewish (or any other religionist) philosophy_ than there could be such a thing as Canadian mathematics. julius Guttmann, the standard historian of the full sweep of jewish philosophical history, in a way went Husik one better, although to different effect, by esteeming modern "philosophy of judaism" quite as highly as its medieval predecessor, on the ground that the latter depended on Plato, Aristotle, the Kalam, and Al-Farabi no less than do the moderns on Hume, Kant, and Hegel. The view held here, on the other hand, is that philosophy is jewish by virtue of a transhistorical primacy of ethics; nonjewish thought will, of course, sometimes also arrive at such an ethical primacy by rational means to one degree or another, and jewish philosophy, like judaism at large, will then gratefully use or bend to its purpose its nonjewish infusions. 630 MODERN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY Philosophy that is both jewish and modern is by general consent dated as having begun with the eighteenth-century German jew Moses Mendelssohn . The character of the birth of modern jewish philosophy presages a number of important features of its life history. In the first place, modern jewish philosophy remained, as it began, in bulk a German-jewish enterprise until Nazism put an end to German jewry as well as to German-jewish philosophizing. During its career it increasingly branched out beyond German jewry, and it received significant input from elsewhere. At the present time, it is carried on very much in the places where jewish life is concentrated and under the impact of those cultures-first and foremost the United States and Israel, and then France, Britain, and elsewhere. Mendelssohn is, in the second place, rightly regarded as symbolically the first "modern" jew-that is, thoroughly jewish while reasonably integrated with modern European society and culture-but this is true in a historical, not in a philosophical, sense. Philosophically, he could really more accurately be described as the last Enlightenment rationalist and Popularphilosoph (ideologist). Well before Mendelssohn's death, Immanuel Kant had revolutionized the philosophical world, and, though always respectful of Mendelssohn both personally and intellectually, he thus also and in so many words made Mendelssohn's thought a matter of finished history. While the jewish community leaders in the subsequent period continued to flock to Mendelssohn's banner, jewish thinkers such as Marcus Herz, Solomon Maimon , and Lazarus Bendavid clustered around Kant and around his philosophical legacy. The conventional histories of modern philosophy describe fairly enough how German absolute idealism and especially Hegel and Hegelianism used (or misused) especially Kant's Critique ofJudgment, mostly in order to close the gap that, as they saw and still see it, Kant had opened up between experienced reality and theoretical, to them "metaphysical," truth-the latter heading encompassing matters that are usually regarded as the substance of religiOUS philosophy, including judaism. Somewhat simplistically one can say that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attempted philosophically to close the gap between noumenon and phenomenon, rationality and actuality, God and the world, in one of two fashions (which sometimes come to the same thing): either reality was made to disappear into ideality, as in the thought of Hegel, or ideality was made to collapse into actuality, as in Marxism and positivism. As soon as one sees things in this light it becomes clear that jewish philosophers and thinkers were likely to want to stipulate some significant reservations about the thesis that the actual is the rational or that there is MODERN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY 631 naught but the actual, for at least two reasons-one historical, the other conceptual: historically, jews continued to live in a real world that they could scarcely regard from their perspective, at least, as ideal; and conceptually , the absolute transcendence of God and everything he is taken to stand for is firmly embedded in the very foundations of historic jewish culture . As a consequence, the jewish Hegelian or quasi-Hegelian thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century all held, in one way or another, that judaism differed from Christianity (and paganism) in that it preserved the discreteness of God from nature...