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TOWARD A CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF ISAAC BREUER In the preceding exposition, I have sought to present the key philosophical elements and themes in Isaac Breuer's thought. I have attempted to convey both the depth at which he engaged his topics and the complexity of the argumentation and apparatus he employed . I have also sought to evoke the philosophical and religious sources from which he drew his ideas, as well as the cultural milieu that provided him with particular concerns. The question remains whether Isaac Breuer represents a living source for Jewish philosophy or an "episode."1 In a sense, this book has been a wager that elements of his thought and method do command the attention of the Jewish thinker and not only of the historian of Judaism. I would now like to argue that premise. Isaac Breuer provides, in my view, two sets of powerful arguments relevant to the renewal of Jewish thought in our time. He 175 TOWARD A CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF ISAAC BREUER In the preceding exposition, I have sought to present the key philosophical elements and themes in Isaac Breuer's thought. I have attempted to convey both the depth at which he engaged his topics and the complexity of the argumentation and apparatus he employed . I have also sought to evoke the philosophical and religious sources from which he drew his ideas, as well as the cultural milieu that provided him with particular concerns. The question remains whether Isaac Breuer represents a living source for Jewish philosophy or an "episode."l In a sense, this book has been a wager that elements of his thought and method do command the attention of the Jewish thinker and not only of the historian of Judaism. I would now like to argue that premise. Isaac Breuer provides, in my view, two sets of powerful arguments relevant to the renewal of Jewish thought in our time. He 175 176 FROM KANT TO KABBALAH argues for the primacy of Jewish Being, expressed as participation in and loyalty to normative Jewish community, over culturally conditioned projects of theoretical, theological reason. As such, he offers a postmodern, in the sense of postsynthetic, standpoint for the philosophical and ideological critique of Jewish and general modernity. Second, he argues for a renewal of Jewish peoplehood, based on a reappropriation of sacral and sacramental aspects of that peoplehood. He offers a version of a resacralized peoplehood that avoids, at least in principle, the dangerous pitfall of romantic nationalism. Having said this, I must also say that aspects of his thought are deeply flawed. I will attend to a critique of certain problems with his views before I develop the positive elements. While I believe that Breuer has much to say about the culturally and historically conditioned character of reason, such that he enables a fundamental Jewish critique of reason and its contemporary canons, I do not think that his particular attempt to critique scientific reason, for example, is a success. Breuer will not provide, at least on his own terms, a neutralization of the power of scientific worldviews and of their disintegrative effects on traditional cosmogonies. Whether he preserves a compatibility between a scientific appreciation of natural causality and divine, providential agency in history is another matter. Breuer's philosophical devotion to Kant, and particularly to Schopenhauer-perhaps more than his Jewish orthodoxy-causes him to truncate and misconstrue science. He stresses the primacy of Being, expressed as will, over reason and so delimits reason's grasp of Being. This move relegates science to the sphere of phenomena . Science is understood to be descriptive: it describes the order and connectedness of phenomena essentially through conscious articulation and repetition of the laws of thought. Science is the discourse of the dwellers of Plato's cave. Judaism is the discourse of those beyond its walls. Here I believe Breuer's idealism has brought him to a dead end. Breuer is forced to construe science as similar in kind to common sense. He cannot really grapple with particular scientific world-pictures because he has already decided that all knowledge is knowledge of phenomena and such knowledge is essentially commonsensical. The tissue of the common sense, mutatis mutandis, scientific world-picture is causality of a highly mechanistic kind. What would Breuer do with scientific world-pictures that, to be fair, are not in any way commensensical? 176 FROM KANT TO KABBALAH argues for the primacy of Jewish Being, expressed as participation in and loyalty to normative Jewish community...

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