Exemplarity and Chosenness is a combined study of the philosophies of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) that explores the question: How may we account for the possibility of philosophy, of universalism in thinking, without denying that all thinking is also idiomatic and particular? The book traces Derrida's interest in this topic, particularly emphasizing his work on "philosophical nationality" and his insight that philosophy is challenged in a special way by its particular "national" instantiations and that, conversely, discourses invoking a nationality comprise a philosophical ambition, a claim to being "exemplary." Taking as its cue Derrida's readings of German-Jewish authors and his ongoing interest in questions of Jewishness, this book pairs his philosophy with that of Franz Rosenzweig, who developed a theory of Judaism for which election is essential and who understood chosenness in an "exemplarist" sense as constitutive of human individuality as well as of the Jews' role in universal human history.
Exemplarity and Chosenness is a combined study of the philosophies of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) that explores the question: How may we account for the possibility of philosophy, of universalism in thinking, without denying that all thinking is also idiomatic and particular? The book traces Derrida's interest in this topic, particularly emphasizing his work on "philosophical nationality" and his insight that philosophy is challenged in a special way by its particular "national" instantiations and that, conversely, discourses invoking a nationality comprise a philosophical ambition, a claim to being "exemplary." Taking as its cue Derrida's readings of German-Jewish authors and his ongoing interest in questions of Jewishness, this book pairs his philosophy with that of Franz Rosenzweig, who developed a theory of Judaism for which election is essential and who understood chosenness in an "exemplarist" sense as constitutive of human individuality as well as of the Jews' role in universal human history.
Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy
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Exemplarity and Chosenness is a combined study of the philosophies of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) that explores the question: How may we account for the possibility of philosophy, of universalism in thinking, without denying that all thinking is also idiomatic and particular? The book traces Derrida's interest in this topic, particularly emphasizing his work on "philosophical nationality" and his insight that philosophy is challenged in a special way by its particular "national" instantiations and that, conversely, discourses invoking a nationality comprise a philosophical ambition, a claim to being "exemplary." Taking as its cue Derrida's readings of German-Jewish authors and his ongoing interest in questions of Jewishness, this book pairs his philosophy with that of Franz Rosenzweig, who developed a theory of Judaism for which election is essential and who understood chosenness in an "exemplarist" sense as constitutive of human individuality as well as of the Jews' role in universal human history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804769976 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/28/2008 |
| Series: | Cultural Memory in the Present |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 804 KB |
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EXEMPLARITY AND CHOSENNESS
Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of PhilosophyBy Dana Hollander
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5521-4
Chapter One
On Rosenzweig's Reception of the Philosophy of Hermann CohenINDIVIDUALITY, JEWISH ELECTION, AND THE INFINITESIMAL
There is no question, and it has often been remarked, that Franz Rosenzweig's philosophy is very much "of its time." In his philosophical development Rosenzweig belongs to a generation of German intellectuals who in the 1910s and 1920s reacted against the dominant philosophical traditions of their day and believed in the need to start philosophizing in a new way. For our purposes, it is not important whether Rosenzweig should be regarded primarily as an exponent of "existentialism" (or "Jewish existentialism"), as a contributor to "dialogical philosophy," or as a proponent of the "new thinking." What all these movements, and Rosenzweig's philosophy in its proximity to them, have in common is, as Michael Theunissen puts it with respect to dialogism, (1) that they define themselves in opposition to traditional philosophy in such a way that their oppositional character must be understood as a positive feature that is intrinsic to them, rather than an extrinsic secondary characteristic; and (2) that they grow out ofan impulse to rescue concrete human individuality or facticity from philosophical generalization or abstraction.
But while Rosenzweig's "new thinking" can be understood as representative of these broader intellectual movements in its insistence on concrete human individuality, there is also a powerful and distinctive concern in his writings with developing an understanding of individuality as something that mediates between absolute particularity and absolute universality. This concern is articulated in Rosenzweig's interpretation of peoplehood, and especially of the Jews as the bearers of divine election-which he understands in terms of their unique role in universal human history. Both Rosenzweig's thinking of human individuality and his consideration of chosenness as a form of individuation between universality and singularity can be illuminated by examining his reception of the philosophy of Hermann Cohen. As I will show, this reception was anything but straightforward. Looking not only at what Rosenzweig acknowledges as his debt to Cohen, but also at those aspects of Cohen's thought that he does not directly acknowledge, but that nevertheless become effective in his thinking, will allow us to focus on how Rosenzweig framed and developed his thinking of individuality and chosenness/election.
* * *
How does one assess the legacy of a philosophical school or movement? This was a question Franz Rosenzweig liked to raise with respect to Hermann Cohen, a figure whom he greatly admired, and his "school," Marburg Neo-Kantianism. About an "introduction" to Cohen's oeuvre written six years after his death by a Marburg disciple, he writes in a letter to his mother:
Unfortunately, Cohen really would have been pleased. -He is now caught in a predicament of fame, it cannot elude him; if in the end the school is right, he'll be famous as the head of the school; if I am right, he'll be famous as a revolutionary of thought.
To Rosenzweig, what was far more important than Cohen's groundbreaking new Kant interpretation or his own philosophical system-those works, in other words, on which his fame as a leader of a school were based-were two books written after he retired from his chair at Marburg: Der Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie (1915; The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy) and the posthumously published Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (1919/1929). Just as these writings marked Cohen's withdrawal from the work of the "school" and the intensification and consolidation of his efforts in the field of Jewish learning, they also marked, for Rosenzweig, the point at which his thought exceeded the bounds of his system: Rosenzweig maintained that by finally facing up to the question of religion, which he had repeatedly "deferred" in his systematic works, Cohen had found a way to account for the ultimate significance of the "human individual" over the supposedly "eternal" values of "culture" and "ethical law" held up by a "bourgeoisie of scholars" (Cohen-Einleitung, xliv).
In 1929, responding to reports of the famous public confrontation at Davos between Ernst Cassirer, Cohen's best-known student, and Martin Heidegger, Rosenzweig goes so far as to identify what he called Cohen's "Individuum quand même" with Heidegger's notion of Dasein. In a "reversal of the battlefronts," Rosenzweig writes, it is Heidegger, not Cassirer, who is the true heir of the "new thinking" pioneered by Cohen. What is Cohen's contribution to what Rosenzweig put forward as the "new thinking"? Rosenzweig finds it in Cohen's notion of "correlation," the reciprocity that characterizes both God's relationship to nature, and, more importantly, his relationship, as the one and only God, to the human individual (RV 101/87). "With [correlation]," Rosenzweig writes, "both a new concept of God and a new concept of man come to the fore." "The human being is no longer considered as a member of a universal class of "humanity," or as an abstract ethical subject, but as the bearer of suffering in the here and now, who cannot be consoled by appealing to an abstract eternity (Cohen-Einleitung, xlv). Indeed, in introducing his Concept of Religion, Cohen says explicitly that by turning his attention to the question of religion, he hopes to take account of the problem of the human individual (BR, v). Both his "Religion" books are concerned with redrawing the lines between ethics and religion such that "in ethics the I of man becomes the I of humanity," while it is religion that can recognize the "individuality" of this I. In this way, religion can take account of phenomena such as the "Thou," "suffering," and "compassion" that concern human beings in their individuality." Similarly, the concept of God, viewed under the aspect of "correlation," is no longer simply the guarantor of moral life, a possibility Cohen acknowledged in passing in his Ethics and all but dismissed as an expression of "religious sentiment." Rather, as Rosenzweig writes, God appears as the only one who can respond to the desperate cry of the only or singular individual-to forgive him for having sinned. This is what links God and man: that each is in its way singular, one, einzig: Man in the isolation and loneliness arising from his guilty conscience, which cannot be assuaged by thoughts of humanity in general-by the knowledge, for instance, that other people, too, have sinned (BR, 62); and God insofar as he is the one (unique) God, not responsible for humanity at large, but responsible to this one human being. Both sin and forgiveness are "individual"-and God and man are thereby linked, or "correlated," in their individuality.
God and man are also linked in their need for one another. Not only does the guilty individual depend on God's forgiveness; God, too, yearns for man: Cohen cites approvingly the mystical view that God "cries out for" his creature (BR, 134).
But the term "correlation" is not meant only to describe a connection between two terms. In their reciprocity, the correlates also remain distinct: neither can be encompassed by, rooted in, or exhausted by the other. Nor can they be mediated or joined by way of a third term; they remain irreducible and heterogeneous-this is Cohen's way of guarding a notion of transcendence against the Spinozism/pantheism that he is at constant pains to expose and oppose. Thus, writing about one of the expressions of correlation of the "holiness" or "holy spirit" that God and man share (as is evidenced, for instance, in the biblical formulations in which God's saying "I am holy" is concurrent with his demand that his people "shall be holy," shall "sanctify themselves" [RV,111/96, 120/103]), Cohen notes that
the correlation of God to man actualizes the idea of God's uniqueness by averting any mediation that might creep into this correlation. If the holy spirit were to be isolated in a person of its own, the correlation would be destroyed. The holy spirit can be neither God alone nor man alone, but neither can it be God and man at the same time. (RV, 121/104)
For Cohen, this avoidance of "mediation" is necessary in order to maintain a "conceptual abstraction" when speaking of correlation: "As soon as [correlation] is not confined to a strict conceptual abstraction, as soon as it is imagined as a quasi-material combination of powers, which thereupon become persons, the connection assumes the form of a community" (RV, 116-17/100-101). Similarly, when Cohen considers the "good" as that which brings God and man together (for Cohen's interest in religion is also an interest in how religion supplements and surpasses ethics), he writes that "God and man come into a necessary community with respect to the problem of the good." The German original reads: "am Problem des Guten," that is, not within or through, but adjoining, at, with respect to, or occasioned by the problem of the good (RV, 39/33; emphasis added).
These aspects of what Cohen calls the correlation of God and man are familiar as the basic motivations for the philosophical approach taken by Franz Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig's fundamental premise is that the philosophical tradition, in its apparently successful attempt to account conceptually for the whole of existence, has forgotten the human being. As he writes in the 197 letter that later became known as the "Germ Cell" (Urzelle) of his major work, The Star of Redemption:
Philosophizing reason stands on its own feet, it is self-sufficient. All things are comprehended/conceived in it, and in the end it even conceives of itself.... And once it has taken everything into itself and proclaimed its exclusive existence, then suddenly the human being discovers that he, who has, after all, long been philosophically digested, is still there.
By "man," Rosenzweig goes on to say, he means "I, the quite ordinary private subject, I first and last name, I dust and ashes, I am still there. And philosophize, that is, I have the impudence to philosophize omnipotent philosophy" (Urzelle, 126-27/48; PTW, 53).
In the introduction to his Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig offers a sketch of the history of philosophy that elaborates on this forgetting of the concrete human being and identifies the beginnings of philosophy's at tempts to overcome this forgetting. Rosenzweig situates his own work in a line of efforts-by Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche-to give human individuality its due. Describing this movement in philosophy, he writes:
Thus man-no, not man, but a man, one particular man-became a power over philosophy-no, over his philosophy. The philosopher ceased to be a negligible quantity for his philosophy.... [Philosophy] had to acknowledge [man], acknowledge him as something which it could not comprehend but which, because of the power he had over it, it could not deny. Man in the utter singularity of his own being, in his being determined by a first and a last name, stepped out of the world which knew itself as the thinkable world, out of the All of philosophy. (S, 10/10)
But if Rosenzweig is inspired by Cohen's notion of correlation, it is not only because Cohen endeavors to "rescue the individual" (BR, 134). For Cohen the correlation of God and man is "expressed" in numerous ways. Among these "expressions" are creation, revelation, and redemption-these find their way into Rosenzweig's system as the relationships that develop between the three irreducible "elements," God, the world, and man. Likewise, by insisting on the irreducibility of the elements, but at the same time seeking to describe the "paths" they take toward one another, Rosenzweig builds on the balance Cohen sought to capture, by means of the notion of "correlation," between connection and separation of the correlates.
Returning to Rosenzweig's assessment, in "Reversed Battlefronts," of the implications of Davos, we can thus say that it can first of all be read as a straightforward testimony to Cohen's influence on Rosenzweig. As such, Rosenzweig's essay has not been a controversial text. By contrast, Rosenzweig's identification of his own ideas with what he knew of Heidegger's philosophy of Dasein has of course drawn attention from, and even impressed, a number of commentators. "Indeed, Rosenzweig's thought was understood as a "philosophy of existence" by some of his earliest readers." Most notably, Karl Löwith in 1942 wrote a convincing account, subtitled "a postscript to Being and Time," of why Rosenzweig was Heidegger's only contemporary in a more than "chronological sense." Löwith cited their shared emphasis on the facticity of human existence, on death and finitude as constitutive of human being, and on the analysis of temporality and language. The tendency to read Rosenzweig in the context of Existenzphilosophie may seem somewhat outmoded today, and of course such readings have their limits, but Rosenzweig's "Reversed Battlefronts" is a reminder that this can indeed be a primary context in which to view his work.
Where "Reversed Battlefronts," as well as Rosenzweig's 1924 introduction to Cohen's "Jewish Writings," have drawn criticism, however, is in their assessment of Cohen. In particular, the discontinuity Rosenzweig asserts between the main body of Cohen's thought and the two "Religion" books-despite the fact that it made a decisive mark on a generation of Jewish thinkers who were avid readers of Rosenzweig-has been challenged from many sides. Thus, some have argued that Rosenzweig overemphasizes the extent to which the "Religion" books represent a new departure and that even the posthumous Religion of Reason finally remains within the "idealist" confines of Cohen's earlier thought. (Rosenzweig himself had written in the 1924 introduction that, though Cohen may not himself have seen this, the notion of correlation and what it enabled, namely the rediscovery of nature and humanity in their "factuality," had begun to puncture "the magic circle of idealism" [Cohen-Einleitung, xlviii-xlix].) The challenge to this view dates back to a 1962 article by Alexander Altmann, who demonstrates that "correlation" is above all a logical term, rooted in the first part of Cohen's philosophical system, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (1902/1914; Logic of Pure Cognition)" Altmann further points out that correlation is a relation between concepts-in particular between the concepts of God and man-and recalls Cohen's insistence that as concepts, God and man are products of thought. With this point, Altmann takes up the terms of Rosenzweig's remarks on Cohen, for, as already mentioned, Rosenzweig's polemics are consistently directed against classical philosophy's tendency to cover up factual reality with concepts. Echoing the language of the "Germ Cell of the Star of Redemption," Rosenzweig writes that in Cohen's earlier philosophy, "nature and humanity were ... conceptually derived, conceived, explained, their foundation was laid, but the fact that they were there before any derivation, explanation, or foundation, this factuality that preceded all objectivity ... remained excluded from consideration" (Cohen-Einleitung, xlviii-xlix).
It is necessary here to consider briefly the status of Cohen's insistence on remaining within "thought" and, more generally, what it means to speak of Cohen's system as a form of idealism. Cohen's interpretation of Kant is noted for its emphasis on the spontaneity of thought as evidenced in the Analytic of Principles, at the expense of Kant's view that cognition is dependent on intuition. In Cohen's own system, this concern develops into an insistence on the autonomy of thought and a rejection of the notion that anything is "given" to thought. Rather, it is thinking itself that generates the matter of cognition. "For thought, only that may be considered 'given' what it itself can find," Cohen writes in his Logic of Pure Cognition (LRE, 82).
Now, Cohen does at times characterize his thought as a form of idealism, but he sharply demarcates this idealism from that of post-Kantian philosophy-from what he calls "romantic idealism." In Logic of Pure Cognition, he describes his own idealism as "idealism, but not [an idealism] of consciousness or of self-consciousness" (LRE, 594). Cohen's inquiry into the productivity of thought is not founded in self-consciousness, in transcendental apperception, or in intellectual intuition. Instead, he associates idealism with the Platonic idea, which he interprets as hypothesis. In his 1878 essay on Plato's theory of ideas, which represents an important step in the development of his thought, Cohen argues against the view, inherited from the Aristotelian tradition, that the ideas belong to a realm apart from things in the world, as well as against subjectivist interpretations of the idea as Vorstellung, as mental representation. At the same time, it is important to distinguish Cohen's use of "hypothesis" from the modern empiricist use of the word: As hypothesis, the Platonic idea represents a method of "supposing that which is sought as already having been found" (LRE, 361); it is the pro-ject or projection (Vorwurf) of thought (BR, 29). Cohen thus thinks Platonic hypothesis and the corresponding anamnesis dynamically as the generation of the object. An interpretative problem that emerges from this is how Cohen can think the productivity of pure thought apart from any reference to consciousness or self-consciousness. But this is not our problem here. For our purposes, it is enough to point out that the term "idealism" suffices neither for characterizing Cohen's system nor for getting at what Rosenzweig regarded as the originality of the "Religion" books. Similarly, if Altmann and others have found grounds for exploring the continuities between Cohen's system and the "Religion" books, this cannot be fruitfully described either by calling his thought "idealist" or by pointing to his continued reliance on "concepts." Nor can it be a matter of closing the discussion of the Cohen-Rosenzweig relationship once and for all, as Altmann seems to want to do, simply because Rosenzweig himself did not produce an adequate account of what he had drawn from Cohen's thought.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from EXEMPLARITY AND CHOSENNESS by Dana Hollander Copyright © 2008 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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