Imageless Refuge for All Images: Scholem in the Wake of Philosophy

It is not customary to think of Gershom Scholem, the great historian of the Kabbalah, in terms of his philosophy or as a philosopher. If anything, he cast himself as a painstaking philologist whose efforts were devoted to returning to Judaism those mythic energies that its liberal, philosophical apologists of the previous generations had banished. Here is Scholem, outlining his path in 1937:

I was struck by the impoverishment of what people were fond of designating as the philosophy of Judaism. The only three authors I knew--Saadia Ga'on, Maimonides, and Hermann Cohen--annoyed me, in that they saw their primary function as setting up antitheses to myth and pantheism and disproving them. It would have been more beneficial had they attempted to raise them to a higher level within which they would be negated. . . . It is not difficult to prove that myth and pantheism are mistaken. . . . It seemed to me that here [in the Kabbalah] . . . there was a realm of associations that should touch on our most human experiences. ¹

Given the last sentence of this quotation, it is easy to cast Scholem's Kabbalah as somehow the "other" of philosophy, as a recuperation of experience and of the irrational, as a rejection of demystification and the reign of reason. And yet we should pay special attention to Scholem's crypto-Hegelianism here, for he is arguing that the philosophers have not gone far enough, have not sublated pantheism; that is, they have not negated it while taking it to another level.

In fact, as the same text from 1937 shows, Scholem viewed philology as the most authentic guise philosophy can take:

It may, of course, be that fundamentally history is no more than an illusion. However, without this illusion it is impossible to penetrate through temporal reality to the essence of things in themselves. Through the unique perspective of philological criticism, there has been reflected to contemporary man for the first time, in the neatest possible way, that mystical totality of Truth [des Systems] whose existence disappears specifically because of its being thrust upon historical time. ²

Again Scholem's crypto-Hegelianism should be clear. While he argues in a platonic vein that the historical is mere appearance and inessential, he also indicates that it is precisely the medium of history that allows the truth to appear in the first place. But this appearance is dialectical: by becoming manifest in time, the truth as a totality disappears. So what is needed is a mode of representation that will take time into account while at the same time negating it. This difficult double play can be performed by the discipline of philology, which seems to be the only way to pursue true philosophical interests in the present day.

In the pages that follow, I will argue that one of the reasons Scholem turned to the Kabbalah was to find a solution to philosophical problems. I will maintain that if Scholem wanted to save Judaism from the rationalism of Hermann Cohen, the great neo-Kantian philosopher of Marburg, he wanted to save reason from Cohen as well. For, in spite of my comments about Scholem's crypto-Hegelianism, he was not, strictly speaking, a Hegelian. As Michael Meyer pointed out more than three decades ago, it is hard for a Jew to be a follower of Hegel. ³ Hegel's pantheistic monism, his commitment to immanence, conflict mightily with the Jewish belief in the transcendence of God. For that reason, Kant was always more popular than Hegel with German Jews. But what is a Jew to do who wants to go beyond the strict Kantian reduction of experience to the sensible? The answer seems to be to use Kant to go beyond Kant, to come up with a dialectics that refuses synthesis, that always stays just this side of sublation.

We know from Scholem's autobiography that during the second decade of this century he...