Book Review

Bringing Jerusalem to Athens

Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture: a modern introduction

Franz Kafka’s diary entry for 24 October 1911 contains a paradigmatic moment in twentieth-century psycho-social awareness: “Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no ‘Mutter’... ‘Mutter’ is peculiarly German for the Jew, it unconsciously contains, together with the Christian splendour Christian coldness also … ” In the sensibility of this assimilated “secular” Czech Jew speaking and writing in German “…the Jewish woman who is called ‘Mutter’ therefore becomes not only comic but strange …”

Kafka’s dilemma of estrangement is emblematic, according to Victor Seidler, professor of social theory at Goldsmiths College, London, in his spirited critique of Western philosophical traditions that have distanced themselves from the language of feelings – from “heart” and “soul”. That is, “When Descartes says ‘I think therefore I am’, he is framing a concept of personal identity that we learn to take very much for granted within secular culture.” Hellenistic and Christian distinctions between the “purity” of ideas and spirit and the “sinfulness” of the body and emotional desires fed into the tradition of Enlightenment rationalism with its emphasis on reason, mind and conscious thought. One of the results of this within secular modernity is the sometimes pained discovery that “we have inherited ways of thinking and feeling – philosophies – that we have never been able to identify or name.”

Seidler’s discursive text, though it overlooks Kafka’s testimony, offers a model of how philosophical reflection can be enlivened and enhanced by attentiveness to alternative forms of “knowing”, emotional and somatic. He is as willing to share a dream as a dense page of Hegel or Kant; or to integrate a friend’s experience of family secrets and abuse into a discussion of Levinas’ philosophy of dialogue.

This idiosyncratic, unsystematic way of proceeding – almost amounting to an ethos of unruliness, in defiance, as it were, of the formal constraints of academic “logos” – is illustrative of the author’s wish to re­integrate the ways of “Jerusalem” into the ways of “Athens”. Jewish thinking and living is rooted in the personal, in the fluidity and messiness of everyday life, in ethical responsibilities within relationships, in the pragmatic realisation that the soul’s business, God’s business, can only be enacted by embodied men and women undaunted by unrealisable Greek  and Christian notions of perfection.

 Professor Seidler draws upon Matthew Arnold’s famous distinction in Culture and Anarchy between “Hellenism” and “Hebraism”, where Arnold recognised the Judaic pre­occupation with “strictness of conscience” in contrast to Greek thinkers who “sought restful contemplation of eternal truths”.  This allows him to trace lines of continuity between Arnold’s praise of a “Hebraism” morally attuned to the “impossibility of being at ease” – meaning could only emerge through facing life’s difficulties head-on – and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lost confidence in his search for an underlying structure to language and gradually developed the view (“my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic”) that it is through the everyday use of language that meaning is achieved.

As the 1930s wore on, Wittgenstein’s expressed need to re-examine his inner relationship with his denied Jewish ancestry (having been baptised into Catholicism) – “If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit...”  – symbolises for Seidler the problematic relationship between Western culture and its suppressed or neglected Jewish antecedents. The author’s tendentious view that “Christianity inherits a Greek vision of detachment that shapes its universalism and thus its claim to moral superiority against a supposedly particularistic Judaism” is starkly expressed, as is the polemical opinion into which it inevitably segues: that Christianity “has failed to take responsibility for the ways in which trad­itions of Christian anti-Semitism have helped shape Western traditions of philosophy and social theory”.

(Paradoxically, such rhetor­ical, generalised statements are antithetical to the Judaic spirit of groundedness in the complexities of everyday life to which the author elsewhere draws attention, as missing from contemporary philosophical thinking.) 
Where Seidler is at his most persuasive is in his discussion of those voices of modern­ity he believes have been marginalised by Western culture and social theory: rabbi and scholar Leo Baeck, schooled in German romanticism yet insistent on the unconditional imperative of ethical action in daily life, ethics as an urgent dynamic enactment of compassion and justice, rather than a space for contemplative thought (Baeck’s influence on Dietrich Bonhoeffer goes unremarked); Martin Buber’s rescuing of the emotional and spiritual core of earlier Hasidic teaching, and its integration into his “I-Thou” philosophy of dialogic immediacy, where the relationship between self and other is the ground from which meaning arises (“All real living is encounter/meeting”); and Franz Rosenzweig’s anti-metaphysical philosophy, rooted in “actual conversation” in which “something happens” (as opposed to Platonic-style dialogues in which “the thinker knows his thoughts in advance”).

For Seidler, Jewish philosophy has the inner emotional, spiritual and intellectual resources to perform the quasi-therapeutic task of helping all of us, religious and secular, towards “different ways of living and learning … on a precarious planet”. It’s just a shame that such a significant volume seems not to have been proofread by the ­publishers: it is littered with typographical errors, and leaves one wishing for a little more of the rigour of “Athens” and a little less of the everyday Judaic messiness of “Jerusalem”.

Back to homepage

       

The clear message that emerged from the symposium on child sexual abuse held in Rome from ...

According to the chairman of governors at the Cardinal Vaughan School, west London, one ...

There was an old Sixties TV series, Branded, about a disgraced soldier that always began ...