A Philosophical Retrospective: Facts, Values, and Jewish Identity 9780231526791

Citation preview

A Philosophical Retrospective

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY

series editor Akeel Bilgrami  •  Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy  •  Columbia University Columbia Themes in Philosophy is a new series with a broad and accommodating thematic reach as well as an ecumenical approach to the outdated disjunction between analytical and European philosophy. It is committed to an examination of key themes in new and startling ways and to the exploration of new topics in philosophy.

Edward Said  Humanism and Democratic Criticism Michael Dummett  Truth and the Past John Searle  Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power Daniel Herwitz and Michael Kelly, eds.  Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto Michael Dummett  The Nature and Future of Philosophy Jean Bricmont and Julie Franck, eds.  Chomsky Notebook Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, eds.  Naturalism and Normativity

A Philosophical Retrospective Facts, Values, and Jewish Identity Alan Montefiore COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS  NE W YORK

columbia university press Publishers Since 1893 New York  Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Montefiore, Alan. A philosophical retrospective: facts, values, and Jewish identity / Alan Montefiore. p.  cm. — (Columbia themes in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-231-15300-3 (cloth :  alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-231-52679-1 (e-book) 1. Jews—Identity.  2. Identity (Philosophical concept)—Social aspects.  3. Identity (Psychology)—Social aspects.  4. Self-perception—Social aspects.  I. Title.  II. Series. ds143.m66  2010 305.892'4—dc22 2010028018

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c  10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. book design by vin dang

contents VII

Introduction 1

1.  Facts and Values? 8

2.  Identity, Responsibility, and Belonging 56

3.  Jewish Identity 1:  “choosing our identity”? 79

4.  Jewish Identity 2:  the universal and the particular 102

5.  Jewish Identity 3:  a purely secular version? 116

6.  An Attempt at Pulling Together Some Threads— and an Inconclusive Conclusion 143

7.  Some Extended Postscripts Notes 

173    •   Index  189

introduction This book has as its primary concern a reconsideration of two apparently quite distinct topics. The first is the question of whether the “facts” of who and what one is—if to take them simply as facts is indeed the proper way of thinking of them, the “facts” of one’s identity, in other words, do not constitute some sort of rationally compelling passage from statements of fact to certain value judgments and the second is the endlessly contentious subject of the nature of Jewish identity. There is, as may, I hope, become apparent, some small degree of genuine overlap between these two topics, but I have to confess that a large part of the explanation of why they here find themselves in juxtaposition lies in the fact that, although it does not pretend to be any sort of autobiography as such, this book certainly still bears many traces of its autobiographical origins. When, well over half a century ago, I found myself embarked on a university career as a “professional” philosopher, a problem of major interest to me was that of how best to understand the relationship between values and facts—or, rather, as I had as a student already been brought up to think of it, as that between value judgments and statements of fact. In more recent times I have tended to focus rather on the nature and importance of concepts of identity—identity not primarily in the essentially formal sense which logicians and metaphysicians of a

viii  INTRODUCTION

certain type struggle to pin down and to render more precise, but rather in whatever sense or senses underlie worries about the nature of personal identity as well as of those which may be taken to constitute the identities of the many different types of group or institution to which individuals may be taken, by themselves or by others, to belong. On the face of it, indeed, these may already seem to constitute distinctly different areas of concern; if one were to draw up student reading lists for them based on the standard literature in these two notably broad fields, there would not be too many evident overlaps. And yet there are certain very close connections between the two. The first concern of this book is, then, with the question as to whether matters of personal identity are to be seen as falling on one side or the other of the so often alleged divide between values and facts or, on the contrary, as providing in effect an integrative bridge across it. Questions of the nature and status of the fact/value distinction and those concerning the significance of personal identity have been among my principal preoccupations throughout the time of my involvements with philosophy, and another underlying concern of this book has been a search for a better retrospective understanding of how it was that these philosophical preoccupations came to have had their roots in preoccupations of “real” life existing far below the evident academic or professional surface. The particulars of my own case are, of course, particular to me; the question of what may be the factors that lead philosophers to concentrate more especially on certain areas of their overall subject rather than on others is, however, of much wider interest. And, though there is certainly no good reason why it should be of interest to anyone else, I have also to confess that a further particular interest for me in returning once again to these questions has been to see how far, and why, I may or may not still agree with what I previously thought and have written about them. So, although they may not entirely justify, these latter considerations may help to explain the undeniably autobiographical tone that may seem to pervade certain parts of what follows. There will, of course, be many different factors involved in leading philosophers to work more especially in one area of their overall sub-

I N T R O D U C T I O N i x

ject rather than in another—not least the combination of peer and career pressures that happen to exist in any particular place and at any particular time. In general the weight of one factor rather than that of another as effective in leading them to whatever may be their area of special concentration is more likely to be of interest as a matter of their personal biographies, or, possibly, as one of general intellectual history, than of any specifically philosophical interest in itself. In some cases, however, a situation of puzzlement encountered, as one might say, in “real,” in no way obviously philosophical, life may turn out to have its deeper roots in some problem of typical philosophical complexity. To try and think out a way through such a situation of puzzlement is itself, and whether one is aware of it or not, to engage, however clumsily, in genuinely philosophical thinking. Thus, or so it seems to me, philosophy may very often start before it knows itself as philosophy—and, if and when it does come to know itself as such, it may risk scaring itself off into paralysis. In my own case the question of whether in recognizing the “facts” of my own personal identity I might somehow be committing myself to endorsing certain values or to acknowledging certain obligations was intimately tied up with questions as to whether the indisputable fact that I was Jewish was inseparable from those of my own personal identity as such and, if so, what the implications of this might be; thus the much contested question of the nature of Jewish identity appears as the other central topic of this book. Unsurprisingly, my concern with this question goes well beyond its relevance, as an immediately illustrative example, to that of the overlapping relations between identity, fact, and value, central though this concern is to the book as a whole. At the same time, this book emphatically does not pretend to offer anything approaching exhaustive analyses or accounts of the existing literature on what it may be to be Jewish or, indeed, on any other of these notoriously complex topics. What is of major interest here, however, over and beyond that of these topics of primary concern for their own sake, are the ways in which they, and so many other topics of philosophical significance, are interwoven with each other and, beyond that, with the ways in which philosophical reflections may intersect with

x  INTRODUCTION

and contribute to considered reflection on one’s life as it may seem to confront one. And I hope that what follows may provide some support for what may be called an anticompartmentalizing view of philosophy and of philosophy’s relation to serious thought in general. Chapter 1 starts out, then, by recalling, very briefly, the relevant aspects of what presented itself as my given personal identity at the time of my setting out on a university career, before going on to an equally brief consideration of what is to be understood by reference to the two key terms of fact, on the one hand, and value, on the other. Chapter 2 is given over to a consideration of the notion of identity, in particular that of role identity, and of the associated notions of belonging and responsibility. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are all concerned with different aspects of the problem of Jewish identity. In chapter 6 I return to what has been the main guiding thread throughout these discussions, namely, the question of whether and when a role, which one may, as a matter of fact, occupy—or be held to occupy—in a given institution or community has to be accepted, together with all its associated obligations and responsibilities, as constituting an inescapably given aspect of one’s own personal identity or whether that identity should be seen as always in the last resort open to and even dependent on where one may oneself take (or fail to take) one’s stand as a matter of ultimately pure self-determination. Finally in chapter 7 I attempt, by way of conclusion to this particular version of the story, to show why there can in principle be no logically conclusive putting of an end to dilemmas and debates of these sorts and, by way of a scatter of very brief postscripts, to pick up on a few of the more important of its ancillary themes. When I start to think of all the people to whom I am in one sort of debt or another for everything to be found in this book—other, of course, than for my own quite possibly idiosyncratic views and all such actual errors of fact or of reasoning as it may contain—I realize just how impossible a task it would be to set out to list them all. Students, former students, colleagues, friends—classes that happily very largely overlap—have all been of indispensable help with their questions and, often enough, objections, in getting me to think, and rethink again and again, about the issues that concern me here—as indeed about many

I N T R O D U C T I O N  x i

others—and about how best to formulate my own thoughts. But there are just a few whose influence and support have been in one way or another so important that they stand out in my memory and gratitude. The first of these—alas, now too long since departed from amongst us—was undoubtedly R. M. Hare. Dick, as I observe in passing in a note to chapter 1, was never my tutor at Balliol, though when in 1961 I returned there as a tutor in philosophy myself, I was fortunate enough to find him still there as a senior colleague and friend. As a student I had been a PPE undergraduate and he, Dick, was the philosophy tutor responsible for those reading Greats (or, to give it its proper title, Literae Humaniores). Many of my friends were, however, students of his—among them Bernard Williams and John Lucas, but also a number of other very gifted student philosophers—and I was allowed to join in some of the reading parties that he conducted in Anglesey. Dick’s passion for philosophy was very clearly as much a moral as an intellectual one; he was—paradoxically enough, as one might well think—inspired by the conviction that it was of the utmost moral importance to understand that no value judgments whatsoever (moral value judgements included) could be taken as validly following from nonevaluative premises alone—including not only statements of fact but also the conceptual analyses of his own metaethics. This tension between, on the one hand, a conviction that every individual was to be seen as in the last resort responsible for determining whatever should be his or her own overriding or moral values by virtue of some act of founding resolution or choice and, on the other hand, one of the deep moral relevance of this allegedly value-neutral thesis was to come ever closer to the surface in his successive books as his work progressed from The Language of Morals (1952), through Freedom and Reason (1963), to Moral Thinking (1981), and in his many articles on issues of very practical ethics. But this is not a tension to be simply written off as if it were nothing but some sort of contradiction; it is, on the contrary, and if I am right, one that is deeply inscribed within the fundamentally individualist and liberal view of the world—and, I suppose, one with whose implications I have never ceased struggling. In many ways, indeed, this book may be seen as the latest round in this, my personal, struggle.

x ii  INTRODUCTION

For the emergence of this book in its present form I have, above all, to thank Akeel Bilgrami. When I told him that I had embarked on an extended (and, no doubt, potentially rambling) project of return to all the main topics of preoccupation about which I had written over the years to see how far I still agreed with my past self or not, he very sensibly suggested that I might do better to concentrate my efforts on topics connected with identity—and with Jewish identity in particular. Since then his repeated support and readiness to offer the hospitality of his series to the book which he has done so much to encourage has been a greatly appreciated incentive to buckle down and get on with it. I am also extremely grateful for the encouragement and suggestions for detailed improvement provided by Wendy Lochner, senior executive editor for religion, philosophy, and animal studies at Columbia University Press, and by their two anonymous readers; and very grateful too to Susan Pensak, senior manuscript editor at the Press, for her painstaking attention not only to the smallest needs of a hopefully final cleaning up of the text and to a checking of all references, but also, in my case, for all the detailed and repetitive work involved in converting the many characteristically British aspects of my spelling, my punctuation, and my turns of phrase into acceptable American. My research assistant, Danielle Sands, has throughout been of indispensable help both in spotting and getting me to disentangle overentangled or otherwise inadequately thought-through passages—if too many remain, that can only be due to my obstinacy rather than to any spotting failure on her part—and in helping to check so much of the detailed work of proofreading.. Finally, I am only too aware that I should almost certainly never have had the perseverance needed actually to complete something like this if it had not been for the constant support and encouragement and—far from least—the example of my wife, Catherine Audard, who in a similar space of time somehow manages to get through at least twice the amount of work that I seem able to manage myself. For her unfailing encouragement, support, and example, as for so much else, I am deeply grateful.

A Philosophical Retrospective

one FACTS AND VALUES?

A fact, we may say, is something that presents itself as a feature of the world within which one finds oneself, some aspect of one’s given reality, something that has to be accepted whether one likes it or not;1 a statement of fact presents itself as a proposition or, qua speech act, as an assertion that claims acceptance on similar terms. This is emphatically not to say that there is, or could ever be, just one uniquely appropriate way of articulating any given state of affairs, just one way of conceptualizing the way things are and, by so doing, of bringing it to a unique reflective awareness. For example, any full statement of my identity as the particular human being that I am will include the date of my birth, and this might equally well be given by reference to, say, either the Gregorian or the Hebrew calendar or, indeed, to a number of other possible calendars as well. The different ways of marking the relevant date can be shown to be equivalent; the one and the same underlying fact is conceptualized or picked out in notably (and notationally) different ways. The cultural significance of marking it in one way rather than another, however, may, in the relevant contexts, of course, be significantly different. That the notion of a fact as something with which one is confronted, whether one likes it or not, is indispensable to any form of reflective thought or communication may be shown by reference to a familiar

2  FACTS AND VALUES?

line of argument—associated most notably with the name of Wittgenstein, though elements of it are no doubt to be found elsewhere—concerning the necessary conditions of conceptualization as such. This, in very brief outline, may be summed up as follows. To understand and to use a language, to master its most fundamental elements and through them gain access to conceptually articulate thought, requires an ability to symbolize (and not merely to respond to signs as triggers of appropriately conditioned reactions). But to be capable of using a sound, a mark (or, indeed, anything else) as a symbol, it is not enough to be able simply to produce or to recognize it as something already encountered; one must also be able to distinguish between its proper and improper—or purely random—use. In other words: one must be capable of recognizing the difference between a right and a wrong way of using it, between an appropriate and an inappropriate occasion for its production. The peculiarly Wittgensteinian turn to the argument comes with the claims 1. that the ability to recognize this difference is crucially bound up with the possibility of finding oneself confronted with indisputable evidence that something has gone wrong, and that someone, oneself or one’s interlocutor, must have made a mistake,2 2. that only the possibility of an encounter with another member of the same language community as one’s own could offer the indispensable check on one’s otherwise free but essentially meaningless production of the sound or mark in question. (It is worth noting in passing the two senses of the term a check; it may be understood as a verification or test or simply as something that may hold one up, that may cause one to pause in some otherwise unimpeded venture. Not that an initial check of this latter sort need necessarily be regarded as final, as providing a definitive proof of error, still less of showing where, if any, the error might lie. But a check is no less a check for not being definitive; it is enough that it should be capable of holding one up.) In short, then, and whether or not the final “antiprivate language” turn of the argument can be made to stick, it is a condition of any form of conceptualized exchange or of conceptualizable reflection that one should be able to recognize something that confronts one as being

FAC TS A N D VA LU E S?  3

what it is whether one likes it or not, in other words that one should be able to recognize some things as prima facie obstinately given fact. If the notion of a fact is of that of some aspect of “reality”—of the world as given, which is as it is independently of whether one likes it or not and of which one has to take account as one makes one’s way through that world, a statement of fact is to be understood as claiming to present just some such feature. This may, of course, be describable— conceptualizable—in some other different, even very different, way, and it may be alterable from what it is “now” to become, in a shorter or longer time, some other state of affairs, but for a change to be brought or to come about is evidently not for it to be the case that the state of affairs that has undergone the change was not—or, more accurately, is not—a fact of the past. The whole point about facts is that one cannot make them be other than what they are by virtue of a simple preference that they should not be or should not have been so. So if there really are values that are bound up with certain facts as given—or if certain value judgments really do follow from certain statements of fact as a matter of logical entailment, then one must in all clear-sighted honesty accept that the values in question confront one in a similarly given and like-itor-not fashion as do the facts themselves. But what exactly is to be counted as coming under the head of “values” and how wide may be the range of what may reasonably be counted as value judgments? It is clear enough that, in learning to speak, any normal native speaker of, for example, English will be taught and eventually come to understand that there is a significant difference between calling something good and saying simply that one likes it or wants it. Different philosophers have tried to give exact expression to this difference in a number of ways: by theologically based reference, for example, or by reference to standards of approval and disapproval generally recognized as binding within the community to which any given individual may belong as opposed to whatever might or might not be the personal preferences of the individual concerned or, as in the case of R. M. Hare, by claiming that a judgment is to be recognized as a genuine judgment of value only if its author is prepared to back it

4  FACTS AND VALUES?

by reference to some set of criteria which he or she would be prepared to prescribe as having (logically) universal import. Alternatively, the whole weight of the alleged impossibility of deriving what others might characterize as value judgments from statements of fact might be laid on the in itself far from transparent concept of morality, the key impossibility being represented as one of deriving moral from nonmoral judgments, moral judgments themselves being thus allowed to retain their status as statements of fact, though admittedly a very special sort of (so-called non-natural) fact that was itself incapable of further analysis. In G. E. Moore’s well-known version of the story,3 this key impossibility is presented as being that of providing an analysis (or, as he argued, definition) of “goodness” in any other terms. That a state of affairs should possess the property of goodness, or what he called intrinsic value, was for him a matter of pure “non-natural fact,” and any attempt to analyze the property of goodness in so-called natural terms would, he claimed, involve one version or another of what he famously called the Naturalistic Fallacy. Many of the key terms in Moore’s account of the matter have been criticized as being hopelessly confused, and he himself confessed much later to being unsure as to what exactly he might earlier have meant by referring to “nature” in this way.4 And, of course, the whole set of questions concerning the status of values and of value judgments appear in quite different conceptual guise when debated in terms of “objectivity” than when the attempt is made somehow to distinguish values from facts and to discuss just how they might be related to each other. Nor, it seems to me, is the task made easier by the contemporary move to talking of “normative facts,” for to do so is simply to reintroduce the old problems in terms of such distinctions as may be made and such relations as may or may not exist between them and different sorts of non-normative facts. The extensive stories of the many different ways in which the terms value and value judgment, on the one hand, and moral and moral judgment, on the other, have been or might best be used or understood, together with the at least equally extensive stories of how one might best

FAC TS A N D VA LU E S?  5

understand the associated concepts of fact and truth and truth conditions, are, however, both too long and too specialized to justify any attempted retelling here. There is, too, the question of the relationship between what are often distinguished as values, on the one hand, and as norms, on the other, and those of whether the one may be analyzed in terms of (or reduced to) the other and, if so, of which is to be taken as being more fundamental.5 No matter. The more specific question from which I started out was whether the indisputable facts of my own immediate family identity (together with certain no doubt potentially slightly more disputable facts concerning its identity as a family within a community whose own properly continuing identity over time might also be open to challenge) committed me, as a matter of indisputable logical consistency, to accepting as equally indisputable certain judgments as to what I ought or ought not to do and, so far as the fact/value distinction is concerned, judgments of obligation—“ought” judgments, as one might call them—are surely to be counted as belonging to the “value” side of that alleged divide. I had also to accept that the question of what might be the views that prevailed among members of my family and/or the relevant wider community, as likewise of the strength with which they were held, was also in principle a matter of ascertainable fact, a fact with which I was confronted and which as fact about other people’s value judgments I had no choice but to accept. The crucial question became, then, one of whether I had also to accept that view of my obligations as being one that I had, willy-nilly, to endorse. Did I have to accept it as a judgment that I could not seriously dispute—whatever I might in practice decide to do by way of accepting or flouting what I had, however reluctantly, to recognize as being indeed my obligations? The underlying issues here at stake are extremely far-reaching, being no less than those of the autonomy of individuals as ultimately responsible for their own judgments as to what their obligations might or might not be—or, in a more general if slightly less determinate sense, the autonomy of the individual in being responsible for determining his or her own values. Such a view of individuals as being ultimately

6   FACTS AND VALUES?

responsible for the evaluative ground on which, as Charles Taylor has put it, “they are capable of taking a stand” is,6 as has been pointed out often enough, characteristic of a thoroughgoing liberal or Protestant view of the world, a view which, in a context of generally prevailing liberal and Protestant assumptions, may become so deeply integrated and embedded within the concepts and forms of thought of the period that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, even for those who in principle are neither liberals nor Protestants, to think or to express themselves otherwise than in its fundamental terms. (Taylor is himself, of course, a Catholic; and I remember how in a long ago discussion with the then abbot of Downside, he, the abbot, explained his understanding to be that, while the Church naturally expected the faithful to accept its moral teaching as given, it was in the end up to each individual to take personal responsibility for deciding whether or not to accept the Church’s claim to embody and to exercise proper authority in matters of moral judgment; as he saw it, it was as if each individual, on becoming a Catholic or in accepting his or her status as having been “born into the Church,” was to be understood as if signing their own personal blank moral check and as giving it over to the Church to be filled in, in all subsequent contexts, as deemed appropriate by its accredited representative. It thus remained the case that each and every individual must in the last resort be held to be personally responsible, directly or indirectly, for whatever moral position they adopted for themselves or endorsed on the accepted authority of the Church.) The question remains, however, whether there may not in the end be certain concepts in their own way equally characteristic of, or even perhaps indispensable to, the most liberal and Protestant forms of thought that will resist even the most determined attempts to analyze them out into their supposedly logically distinct factual and evaluative components. So far as the very general notions of values and value judgments are concerned, I have already noted that there is a powerful case to be made for the view that it is a necessary condition of participation in a language community, and of the capacity for conceptualized thought that such participation makes possible, that participants

FAC TS A N D VA LU E S?  7

should be able to recognize certain norms or standards of correct or appropriate usage and to accept them as given fact. And, in the more specific case of judgements of obligatory behavior, there remains the question of whether concepts of personal identity may not, in their own way, also function as conceptual bridges, resistant to all would-be analytic disentangling, between what has to be recognized and accepted as given personal and social fact and judgments of where obligations may properly lie. Concepts of what “we” may call personal identity do not, of course, function, or indeed exist, in any obvious and immediately translatable way within the practices and languages of all societies as they do within what some of us may, perhaps oversimplistically, like to think of as our own. But language communities and their associated practices do tend to evolve over time. In some cases this may happen very slowly and over an imperceptibly long period. In other cases—in particular those in which a society of long-established traditional stability is brought into sudden disruptive contact with another of a very different social pattern—major changes may take place within the lifetime of one generation. When this happens, those who have come to take for granted the newer patterns of social relations as well as those whose understandings and assumptions remain rooted in the older patterns may both find it almost impossible to grasp that, while the terms of their common language may still appear to be the same, the assumptions and “values” built into them may have changed in disconcertingly significant ways. It is thus that misunderstandings of fundamental crosspurpose may occur—cross, indeed, in more than one sense of the term.

two IDENTITY, BELONGING, AND RESPONSIBILITY

Different members of the same community, both of its older and of its younger generations, may agree, then, as on a matter of generally accepted fact, that within the community certain individuals are marked out by tradition as occupying given roles within it simply by virtue of their family position and/or by that family’s position within the community at large, yet they may strongly disagree in giving very different contemporary weight to the obligations attached to such roles as traditionally conceived. All may readily admit the undeniable possibility of countervailing considerations of sufficient weight to outweigh that which they would normally see as attaching to the standard obligations of the role—such, for example, as the existence of a manifestly disabling mental or physical handicap. But if members of the younger generation judge that reasons rooted in the needs of their own personal, even “moral,” flourishing could equally well outweigh those attaching to their role as determined by family or social tradition, this can only be in virtue of their possession of an at least outline concept of individual persons as in principle fully distinguishable from whatever roles they might occupy. For the ability even to conceive of disentangling the imperatives of a role-constituted obligation from the straightforwardly undeniable fact of a traditional role inheritance depends on possessing the conceptual resources necessary to thinking of the person as essen-

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  9

tially autonomous in relation to whatever commitments he or she may undertake, endorse, or reject and on the concomitant assumption that there are, and can be, no roles that are to be seen as so inseparable from their occupants’ own personal identities as to make escape from them and their attendant obligations strictly unthinkable. Even then, those to whom a concept of persons as essentially autonomous is indeed effectively available may still disagree, of course, as to the weight to be given to the demands of any given individual’s personal flourishing as compared with that proper to the obligations of his or her inherited role, to the sensitivities of the community into which one may have been born and in particular to those of its more senior members. This is not something to be determined on some basis of rigorous calculation, but is rather a matter for phronesis, for a capacity for judgment that, as Kant put it, “is a peculiar talent which can be practiced only, and cannot be taught. It is the specific quality of so-called mother wit; and its lack no school can make good.”1 In my own case the issue was, as I have explained, effectively one of whether the facts of my own identity, as the elder son of my own particular Jewish family, together with those not so easily determinate but still relatively indisputable facts concerning the generally accepted nature of the relevant family and community traditions, were so tightly tied to a certain set of positive and negative obligations as to render escape from them virtually unthinkable—so unthinkable as to make it impossible for me to acknowledge my own evident family and Jewish identity without thereby recognizing it as equally evident that these obligations were truly incumbent upon me. It is a very general condition of social life, and of modern social life in particular, that nearly everybody should find themselves wearing at different times a number of different hats—very often at one and the same time and with varying degrees of comfort or discomfort. That we wear and/or are taken to be wearing one hat or another is something that we may have to recognize and to accept as a fact; and that our wearing of any particular hat may commit us, while we wear it, to the acknowledgment of one sort of value judgment, one sort of obligation,

1 0   IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

or another we may have to recognize as another similarly inescapable fact—a fact about the nature of the hat in question. If, then, we are to be considered as free to dissent from or to make other value judgments than those to which we may be committed by virtue of the hats which belong to our heads, or to which perhaps our heads may be said to belong, we need to be free—in logic, but also in practice—to remove those hats at least for the time and context of our evaluation of our obligations. But this is bound up with the crucial question of the constitution of our identities, of how far and in what ways they may (or may not) be tied to the hats that we wear or are seen to wear and of how far we may think of ourselves (and/or be thought of by others) as free in choosing when or whether to wear them and thus to determine our identities according to our own resolve. The question is, then, whether the very facts of who or what I am are to be understood as including a commitment to the making or to the endorsing of value judgments of any sort—a commitment such that it has to be seen as rationally incoherent both to accept those facts and yet to reject the value judgments in question. Does acknowledgment of the facts of my own true identity commit me to recognizing myself as standing under certain obligations—free and able simply to refuse to fulfill them in practice, no doubt, but not in all rational honesty to deny them to be genuinely obligatory and, therefore, my refusal to fulfill them to be wrong, even perhaps morally wrong? And, if so, would this not mean that to determine anyone’s identity was not only to establish the relevant facts, but to arrive ipso facto and at the same time at a certain value judgment? So what exactly—or as exactly as possible—might we, then, be talking about when talking about someone’s identity or about who (or what) exactly—or as exactly as possible—he or she might be? A very real problem involved in attempting to arrive at a clearer view of these issues lies in the fact that so many of the other key terms that one needs to use are themselves in one way or another deeply problematic. In much of the relevant literature the concern has been explicitly directed to what is called personal identity. But, almost as often, the

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  1 1

focus has been on self-identity. When the emphasis falls on the concept of the self rather than on that of the person, attention is naturally directed to elements of reflexivity, to the conception that a self-conscious (or, perhaps better, self-aware) individual may have of himself or herself, in at least implicit contrast with the conceptions that others may form of the self or person in question. Compound terms of which the first part is self are, by and large, expressions for which certain languages do not have any immediately ready or naturally close translation equivalent. Many writers, in particular—but not exclusively—those writing as sociologists rather than as philosophers as such, have tended to refer to primarily other-based conceptions in terms of a social identity. And, again, some have wanted to insist on distinguishing the question of who from that of what one is. All these terms, in particular those of the person and the self, have their own histories, their own multiple complexities. But, for the present purposes of trying to determine the bearing of judgments of identity on the relations between statements of fact and value judgments, we may start by noting the following possible distinctions. So let us take note of 1. My identity as that by which it is possible to pick me out or to identify me as the particular individual that I am among all other individual members of the human species, that in virtue of which it is possible to place me on some family or more extended social map. 2. My identity as consisting in whatever it may be whereby I am in principle recognizable as continuing to be not just the same individual, but, crucially, one and the same person over time and throughout all the changes that time may bring. (Such continuity of personal self-identity is crucial to judgments of responsibility, which are, surely, to be regarded as one class of value judgments. As Vaclav Havel put it in one of the letters he wrote from prison to his then wife, Olga, “only by assuming full responsibility . . . to-day for one’s own yesterday . . . does the ‘I’ achieve continuity and thus identity with the self”).2 3. My identity as lying in whatever it is that constitutes the most significant center of meaning in or to my life. 4. My identity as lying in the fact and nature of what I recognize as my membership of or identification with either

1 2  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

some significant institution or group (real or even imagined) or some key set of values or, very typically, both, the one naturally involving the other. 5. My identity insofar as I am understood by others to be a member of certain institutions or groups, whether I like it or not. There are also the questions, 6. of what may be taken to constitute the identity of such institutions or groups themselves, together with that of the identity of such formal or informal roles as I may occupy, or be taken to occupy, within them. It is evident, moreover, that some of these senses may in practice coincide with or at least strongly overlap with each other—in particular, for example, senses 3 and 4. There exists, of course, a vast and varied literature on each and all of these ways of construing the notion of identity. The comment by Rina Benmayor and Andor Skotness, in their editorial introduction to Migration and Identity,3 sums up the situation with exemplary moderation: “both theoretically and empirically, the problem of identity is a complex and multi-faceted one.” Here, however, my principal focus will be on two central concerns. The first is this question of whether there may be facts concerning individual or personal identities that are both undeniable as such and yet involve, necessarily and inescapably, certain judgments as to the ways in which the persons in question should act or should have acted—and thus, in some cases at any rate, judgments concerning their moral standing as members of their communities. The second concern, of particular relevance to my own original perplexities and which unsurprisingly cannot be kept entirely distinct, is the question of what might additionally here remain to be said on the specific and notoriously vexed subject of the nature of Jewish identity. To that issue I shall return in the following chapters. The question of just how the facts of my identity might be relevant to judgments concerning what I ought or ought not to do was, then, very much a live issue for me at a time when I was trying to come to grips with what my education in philosophy taught me to think of as the essentially logical or conceptual question of the entailment relations that might or, as the great majority of my philosophical seniors then argued, could not be held to exist between what Richard Hare

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  1 3

had in The Language of Morals explicitly characterized as two “classes of sentences.” It is worth reemphasizing, however, that what is here at stake is far from being a matter of logically clear thinking alone. On the contrary; the stakes are not only of personal but more generally of the utmost moral, political, and religious significance. Certainly, there are a whole multitude of roles that are to be understood as committing their holders to behave in certain more or less well-defined ways; and there are, of course, many contexts in which a person may most naturally be picked out or identified as the holder of some given role. But should the holding of such a role be taken as constituting a merely contingent fact concerning the role holder or as forming part of his or her very identity as a person? May one—should one?—think rather of any such socially recognizable role as more like a hat the individual concerned may himself or herself decide when or whether to wear as a matter of essentially personal choice? A number of Hare’s critics did indeed make the point that in his allegedly purely logical (and as such evaluatively neutral) analysis of “the language of morals” he was in effect giving his own form of expression to the characteristically liberal and Protestant values of moral individualism—and as going so far as seeking to establish them as rooted in effect in the most fundamental rules of clear thinking. (Indeed, Hare himself in a way acknowledged this point when he agreed that he was, certainly, both a liberal and a Protestant “in some senses of those words,” while nevertheless insisting that his analysis was based on conceptual considerations alone.)4 But, to remain with the metaphor of hats, can the solubility or dissolubility of the relation that may exist between a person and the hat or hats that he or she may wear (or be deemed by others to wear) be determined by logical or conceptual considerations alone? Or, to put the matter more directly, how far can an individual be considered free to determine his or her own identity, and in what senses of that term, and, in doing so, remain conceptually free to determine in any given context what his or her course of action ought properly speaking to be and thus to determine the values or standards by which he or she is to be judged?

1 4  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

This is the question that I tried to address in a paper originally written in English, but published in a French version under the title “Choisir son identité?”5 What follows is in effect a combined reworking not only of the contents of the English version of that paper but also of those of a number of other papers given in other places and under other related titles, all attempting to come to grips with different aspects of the central problem of the relations between whatever may be taken to constitute the facts of a person’s identity and the value commitments that may or may not be understood to be caught up in them.6 My starting point in the first of these papers was that striking passage, which I have already quoted,7 taken from near the beginning of Taylor’s book Sources of the Self: “To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” There are two important points concerning this way of formulating his position that should be noted straightaway. The first, I have to confess, I failed to pick up on in my earlier attempts at responding to Taylor. It concerns a notable difference between his formulation and my version of the third sense of “identity”: “My identity as lying in whatever it is that constitutes the most significant centre of meaning in or to my life.” Taylor’s formulation takes it implicitly for granted that individual subjects can take their own stand not only as a matter of what they themselves most profoundly wish for or desire but as a determination of what they will commit themselves to by way of what they are ready to affirm as their own values and obligations. But this presupposes, of course, an already unproblematic availability of a conceptual vocabulary within which ends of one sort or another, however intensely and persistently desired or sought after, need no other endorsement than that of the individual concerned for them to count as values for that individual. The formulation “the most significant centre of meaning in or to my life,” on the other hand, leaves open the question of whether a

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  1 5

judgment of significance is ipso facto to be counted as a value judgment or whether, in many contexts, at any rate, it might not equally well be taken to be nothing more than a factual assessment of what matters most to something or to somebody. The point has significance, as one might say, beyond that of a mere terminological quibble, as what is at issue here is the whole question of how far and in what sort of cultural/ conceptual contexts individuals may be understood as having it within their own jurisdiction to determine which (if any) of their own most intense or long-term goals are to be accounted their personal values and/ or true obligations—and as such constituting a standard by which they may be judged. The second point turns on the question of whether, in Taylor’s formulation, coming to know where I stand is to be understood as a matter of discovery or of decision. Is “determining what is good or valuable” a matter of finding out or one of making up one’s mind? Is the ground where I stand basically given to me together with the horizon of my commitments and identifications? Or am I essentially autonomous in the sense of being always in principle free to choose where to take my stand and thus free, as it were, to make my own identity? Or is the proper answer rather that this is a matter of some not very clear-cut balance between discovery and decision? Whatever may be the complications in practice (and even in imaginative theory) involved in determining my identity in the first of the senses I have distinguished—i.e., “my identity as that by which it is possible to pick me out or to identify me as the particular individual that I am among all other individual members of the human species,” there can be no serious sense to the idea that I might be free to choose it to be different from that which it is as a matter of common given fact. This is the identity to which birth certificates, passports, identity cards, driving licences, etc., are designed to bear witness, my identity as that particular individual who was born to certain equally particular individual parents, at a particular time and in a particular place, and whose continuity over the time since birth is marked by being tied to a particular track through the spatiotemporal continuum, a track whose

1 6   IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

own particularity is tied in its turn to its (spatiotemporal) relations to the tracks of all other macrophysical items existing within that continuum. In practice, no doubt, there may be all sorts of reasons why people could find it difficult, if not at times next to impossible, to be altogether sure as to just what their own true particular sense 1 identity, or that of others, might be. Knowledge or evidence of the relevant facts might be missing—lost, forgotten, or, in some cases, deliberately concealed or destroyed. Again, one may choose to pretend to be someone other than the person who one in fact is, just as one might choose to pretend to possess some qualification or honor to which one has in fact no genuine title. One may even come so to believe in one’s own pretense as to take it for reality itself. But, despite whatever the critics of the very notion of an interpretation-independent truth may say, and however hard it may sometimes be to ascertain the truth of the matter, it really makes no “normal” sense to suppose that anyone could actually choose to adopt some other particularizing sense 1 identity than that which he or she will have borne from the very time of their birth. This is not to say, of course, that one cannot imagine—or can rule out all possibility of actually encountering—situations in which the “normal” criteria of continuing individual identity find no ready application and which might leave one uncertain not so much as to the facts of such exceptional cases as to how best to interpret or to conceptualize them. When, for example, and on the basis of what criteria, should one conclude that one individual has ceased to exist by virtue of being transformed into another? (Should we say, after all, that what emerges as a butterfly is the same whatever-it-might-be as the chrysalis and caterpillar from which it has eventually emerged and, if so, how is the whatever-it-might-be in question to be conceptualized?) Derek Parfit is among those philosophers who have shown the greatest ingenuity in probing the limits of any concept of continuing personal identity by challenging us to reflect on how we should deal with such cases of bodily fission or fusion as might make it impossible to keep consistently distinctive track of particular individuals throughout the whole paths of their lives from their moments of first appearance to those of their

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  1 7

own distinctive deaths; for under such conditions as he has imagined the tracks of their individualities might be thought of as merging into each other, only to separate out again in endlessly criss-crossing ways.8 And though human beings do not “normally” appear to behave in such ways, there are organisms that do, at least so far as fission is concerned. In any case whatever uncertainties may exist on the margins of their applicability, the criteria of identity for sense 1 are pretty clearly not based on the sort of facts from which it is plausible to think that value judgments might be derived. When it comes to human beings, however, the matter is complicated by the complexity of the relations between that sense of identity which has to do with the trackability through time of individual instances of their genus and those which tend to go under the names of personal or—though not necessarily with exactly the same connotations—self-identity. In sense 1 an individual retains his or her own particular identity whether alive, psychologically untroubled and in full possession of all normal human faculties, including that of memory, or psychologically disordered, terminally unconscious, amnesiac, or even dead and buried. This is the identity of a particular instance of a particular type of organism that is marked out by its incorporation in a particular body until the (no doubt not necessarily fully determinate) moment of that body’s final dissolution. But, as so many philosophers from at least Locke onward have argued, the criteria of personal or self-identity are in addition commonly understood as being tied in some way to certain continuities of memory and/or psychological characteristics. Moreover, for Locke “person” was what he called “a forensic term.” Or, as Amélie Rorty put it in The Identities of Persons, The idea of a person is the idea of a unified centre of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility. Having chosen, a person acts, and so is actionable, liable. It is in the idea of action that the legal and the theatrical sources of the concept of a person come together. Only when a legal system has abandoned clan or family responsibility, and individuals are seen as primary agents, does the class of persons coincide with the class of biological human beings. In principle, and often

1 8  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

in law, they need not. . . . Or an individual human being may be regarded as a host of personae, each of which is a distinct and unified agent, a locus of responsibility for a range of choices and actions.9

None of these connections are quite so clear-cut as to be beyond all possible theoretical question or even practical dispute. Prima facie one might well suppose continuity of memory for what one has done in the past to be a necessary constituent part of any idea of “a unified centre of choice and action [as a] unit of legal and theological responsibility.” One is reminded again of Vaclav Havel’s insistence that “only by assuming full responsibility . . . to-day for one’s own yesterday . . . does the “I” achieve continuity and thus identity with the self.”10 And one may recall too the case of Gunther Podola, a Pole who, having found refuge in the UK during the last great war, subsequently took to a life of armed crime. In the course of one of his enterprises, he shot and killed a policeman, after which he (not unnaturally) went on the run. In the upshot he was tracked down to a house in which he had sought refuge, where the pursuing group of police burst in and succeeded in arresting him. In the course of his arrest, he was indisputably somewhat knocked about—indisputably and, in all the circumstances, understandably, given that he had already killed one man and that he was known to be armed. Not only did the police have every reason to be apprehensive: they were naturally unlikely to be feeling very gently disposed toward someone who had recently killed one of their colleagues. At Podola’s subsequent trial, he maintained that as a result of concussion sustained during his arrest, he was unable to remember any of the relevant preceding events, including all the circumstances of his attempted robbery and the killing of the policeman. Neither he nor his defending counsel made any attempt to dispute the alleged facts of what had taken place. Their claim was quite simply that a man who was unable to remember having planned or performed any of the actions of which he was accused could not—in his present state of amnesia—properly assume responsibility, or be held responsible, for them. So far as matters of responsibility were concerned, these could only be seen as imput-

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  1 9

able to what, from the standpoint of the present, must be considered to have been a different “person.” At his trial the issue was additionally confused by disputes as to whether Podola’s claim to amnesia was genuine or not. This, however, was never conclusively proven to have been faked, and the case went on successive appeals right up to the House of Lords. Here his appeal was finally rejected, not on the grounds that persons must be held to be self-identical and thus responsible for their past actions irrespective of whether they had any memory of them or not, but on grounds of “public policy”—that is to say on the grounds that, once amnesia had been admitted as a successful defense in cases of this kind, criminals, knowing that they could, if necessary, have successful recourse to this plea, would have far less incentive to avoid the risks of killing in the course of their business. The death penalty being still in force at the time, Podola himself was in fact sent to the gallows still denying, if I remember correctly, any memory of the acts for which he was being executed. Among the jurists of the day, opinion was divided as to whether proper “moral” or “evaluative” justice had been done. Opinion may be similarly divided, of course, as to the appropriateness of condemning, and possibly executing, very aged, and quite possibly more or less senile, former war criminals many decades after their crimes have been committed and of which, in their very old age, they may have only the most uncertain memory or even, indeed, no longer any memory at all. It would not be difficult, no doubt, to construct a similarly utilitarian-type justification for the punishment of such aging (former?) criminals in terms of a public policy of respect for the feelings of survivors (or surviving near relatives of those who did not themselves survive) and, more generally, for those of all whose deepest feelings for what constitutes justice would be outraged by any failure so to punish them (or what they have become). But while there may—in the key cases at least—be no doubt that the “they” of the “them” in question are in the starkly factual terms of identity sense 1 the very same biological individuals as those who committed the crimes of which they are now accused, the question of whether they are properly to be taken

2 0  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

to be the same persons—the same “distinct and unified agents”— across the long gaps of time and failing memory is scarcely capable of resolution by evaluatively neutral factual or conceptual analysis alone. It seems clear, then, that the judgment as to whether the individual now before one is to be taken as being the same person as he or she who performed the acts responsibility for which is in question, may figure as the crucial premise in any argument leading to a surely evaluative concluding judgment as to how the person now before one ought or ought not to be dealt with. And clear too that individuals cannot coherently be held to be themselves free to choose whether to be counted as the same responsible person or not. As Amélie Rorty put it, “having chosen, a person acts, and so is actionable, liable.” Whatever the further problems lying behind the notion of a “free” choice—and they are, of course, of a notoriously endless complexity—all ideas of responsibility, accountability, actionability, liability, and so on would be wholly undermined by any suggestion that once having chosen and acted, one might yet be free simply to choose not to have done so of one’s own accord in the first place.11 For this would involve the logically absurd suggestion that one might choose the past—in this case one’s own past— to have been different from what it once was. Judgments of responsibility may thus be taken to constitute a special, indeed an especially important, subclass of what, if we are to continue to use this terminology, we should regard as value judgments. (And judgments of responsibility may very typically lead on to further judgments as to what ought now to be done by or to such persons as may be held to be or to have been responsible.) From which it would follow that, if Amélie Rorty was right in her view that to treat someone as a person is to treat them as “a locus of responsibility for a range of choices and actions,” judgments of personal identity are themselves to be regarded as containing an essentially evaluative component. And indeed this latter suggestion is far from implausible. As Kant famously put it in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, “Rational beings . . . are called persons because their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves—that is as something which ought not to be used mere-

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  2 1

ly as a means—and consequently imposes to that extent a limit on all arbitrary treatment of them (and is an object of reverence). Persons, therefore, are not merely subjective ends whose existence as an effect of our actions has a value for us: they are objective ends—that is, things whose existence is in itself an end.”12 Understood in this way, the term person itself is to be taken, as Hare would no doubt have put it, as a “value-word.” One may think too of Carl Rogers’s well-known and clearly evaluative use of the term.13 But there are, of course, many other examples of its use in similarly evaluative ways. There are nevertheless important distinctions to be made between very different types of value judgment, distinctions that should not be elided or forgotten. In Amélie Rorty’s sense of the term, to judge someone to be a person is to take them to be a responsible agent, from which it would indeed follow that any judgment where a person identifiable as A should be taken to be directly responsible for what has been or might be done by a person identifiable as B would need to be underpinned by a judgment of personal identity between the said A and B. (The qualification “directly responsible” is there by way of acknowledgment of the fact that there are many contexts in which someone may very reasonably be taken to be responsible for what has actually been done by somebody else—as parents for the behavior of their children, for example.) But this is a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for responsibility. There are many contexts in which the term person may be used to refer to the (evaluative) status of those whom it would be implausible to treat as fully or even partially responsible agents— or, to use Amélie Rorty’s expression once again, as “unified centres of choice and action.” The term may be used of more or less small children, for example, of persons—as they may well be regarded—who are suffering from serious mental impairment of one sort or another, even of those who are no longer even alive. (A news item of the day of writing this very paragraph reports that the police have been able to establish the identity of a body found in some local woodland as being that of a certain missing person.) In all such contexts the term person is in effect being used to characterize the individual in question as deserv-

2 2  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

ing (prima facie at least) of a certain kind of respect—a respect which one may well think of as essentially Kantian, whether one accepts the fundamental thrusts of Kant’s theory of what it is to be a human being as such or not. It is to be noted, however, that the Kantian person as object of respect is so by virtue of being a particular or individual embodiment of the Universal, that is, of Reason as such—that is to say, to identify a given individual as a person in this Kantian sense is not so much a matter of ascribing to him or to her what might be called an effectively individuating identity. Individuation in the sense of being uniquely locatable in space and time is for Kant a (logically universal) necessary condition of appearance within the field of human experience. To identify an individual as a person is, certainly, to stand committed to certain crucial value judgments in regard to the individual in question; but the ascription of fundamental moral and political value to individuals as such, to what we may call their individual personal identities, belongs to an intertwining of this with many other stories. We may distinguish, then, between identification as a person in what we may call the Kantian sense and agent identity—i.e., personal identity in what we may call the Amélie Rorty sense. So far as agent identity is concerned, to identify someone as being the very same agent as the one who performed, instigated, or otherwise gave rise to a given act or series of acts is to judge the “person” in question to be “actionable, liable  .  .  . a locus of responsibility.” The term “to judge” is here wholly appropriate, and the judgment involved may not implausibly be called a “value judgment” rather than one of purely value-neutral fact. Strictly speaking, of course, agent identity is to be seen as only a necessary rather than a sufficient condition of, at any rate, legal responsibility. Whether or not the peculiar and themselves not altogether uncontroversial cases in which the doctrine of legally strict liability is held to apply may have their analogue in certain moral contexts is a matter for even more controversial argument. Someone unproblematically identifiable as one and the same agent may be causally responsible either in “acting” as the trigger for a sequence of events for which he may be ad-

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  2 3

judged to bear no direct agent responsibility of his own or for a failure to intervene so as to forestall such a sequence. Here again the reference to judgment is wholly appropriate; the complexity of the conditions governing the attribution of agent responsibility in contexts where causal responsibility may not be in doubt is as notorious as is the room they leave for considered disagreement. A judgment identifying someone as agent responsible may be regarded as having evaluative implications inasmuch as it may license or even commit one to further judgments on the (moral and/or legal) character of the agent concerned as well as to judgments as to what they ought or ought not to do or ought or ought not to have done—as well as to judgments as to how they ought or ought not to be treated. The question is whether it is not equally appropriate to regard it as a judgment of a particular sort of fact; in which case it would seem to be an instance of a fundamental inseparability or intertwining of facts and values. And this is indeed a conclusion that is hard to avoid. We have constantly to make judgments, by far the most common of them being implicit and, as it were, automatic, as to the agent-identities and attendant responsibilities of those with whom we have to deal in our ordinary daily lives. Such identities—or, indeed, failures of identity— confront us as among the most important of the facts of the world in which we live and with which we have to deal. This is—self-evidently— a human and essentially social world. So it is hardly surprising that the values of the world’s interactions should be built in to the facts of its workings as we learn to assess and to adapt to them. What, then, about judgments of personal identity in what I have called the Kantian sense? As we have just noted, to identify someone as a person is “to characterize the individual in question as deserving (prima facie at least) of a certain kind of respect—a respect which one may well think of as essentially Kantian.” And that, certainly, is to attribute to them a certain kind of value. But to treat someone as a person commits one to nothing whatsoever so far as determining their individual identity may be concerned, except presumably to a prima facie respect for whatever it may turn out to be as part of one’s respect for

2 4  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

them as a person. But, one has also to ask, how far does respect for a person commit one to respect for that person in his or her social identity? It is here that we come back to “the crucial question of the constitution of our identities, of how far and in what ways they may (or may not) be tied to the hats that we wear or be seen to wear.” Clearly, someone as committed as was Hare to a really strong—and, as such, highly individualistic—version of the doctrine known as the Autonomy of Morals will insist that no “hat,” no matter how well-fitting or fitted it may seem to be, can ever be so tightly attached to a person’s head as to make it impossible to conceive of him or her without it. We find ourselves here in one of those areas where conceptual analysis, while of the first importance to a degree of clarity that we may always strive towards, can never be entirely “pure,” and where we may have to recognize that the clarity towards which we are striving may never be unambiguously and uncontentiously attainable. If this is so, I have to admit that it is not a view that I have always held. For, as I have explained, it appeared that for many of those whose opinion mattered most to me it was a simple matter of fact that, being born into a family such as mine, I was under an obligation to follow certain paths of behavior just as there were others on which I had an obligation to turn my back; and this simply in virtue of the evidently indisputable facts of my place on my family map and of the nature of the generally accepted family and community traditions into which I had been born—and all this whether I liked it or not. In other words— though these were not yet the terms that I had learned in which to characterize such an argument—my given identity could be stated as a matter of straightforward fact, a fact from which certain to me distinctly unwelcome value judgments followed equally straightforwardly. And in this I believed them to be making what they should have been able to recognize as a definite logical mistake. When I first ran up against this sort of disagreement in real life, so to speak, I found it difficult enough to know exactly where the problem lay and was, certainly, hardly capable of presenting it in these conceptual terms. But the terms of argument that I learned to use a little later on,

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  2 5

and which I would no doubt have used then if I had known how, would have run along lines very similar to those of the argument which Hare put into the mouth of his imaginary warhorse in its response to finding itself condemned as a wholly inadequate charger when it reared up and galloped away with its rider from the field of battle. This was, in effect, that, so far as its own identity was concerned, it was simply a horse, a member of the genus equus quadrupes, and that if human beings chose to value it according to its suitability to certain purposes of their own and to build the criteria for that evaluation into their imposed labeling of it as a charger, that was entirely their own business and nothing to do with the horse’s own purely factual identity as such.14 My own argument, then, might have taken the form of a protest to the effect that I was simply a human being, a member of the species homo sapiens, and that if others chose to evaluate the ways in which I chose to behave in accordance with their own conceptions of how those born into certain family and social contexts should conduct their lives, that was simply a matter of their own ruling values and could in no way limit my own logically inalienable freedom to establish for myself my own ruling values by imposing upon me a value-laden identity that I had not myself chosen. The problem, however, was not that those who claimed to know with such certainty just what I ought or ought not to do with my life would have wished in any way to dispute my own “merely factual” identity as a member of the human species—a concept of which they had, no doubt, as clear a grasp as I had myself; but that they would—quite rightly, of course—have regarded it as falling far short of my individual personal identity as the particular human being that I was. Nor, for my part, would I have wished or been able to dispute their identification of me in terms of the place that I occupied on my own family map or that of my family as occupying the place that it did on the broader map of the community of which it formed a part both genealogically and in terms of that community’s history. In these identifications I could only acknowledge them to be basically correct in their understanding of the facts. (I say “basically correct” in that historical facts are always,

2 6   IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

of course, open to a certain, in itself disputable, degree of disputable interpretation. But basically correct all the same.) The issues between us may rather be understood as rooted in what would in effect have been our differing responses to two crucial questions. First, did the fact of my having been born to occupancy of the place that I did indisputably occupy on my family and community map amount, as a matter of equally indisputable fact, to my having been born into a certain wellrecognizable role with its own built-in set of obligations? And, second, if that was indeed the case, how far did my occupancy of that role form an indissociable part of my own particular personal identity? I should once have been inclined to argue, along with Hare and many other Autonomy of Morals philosophers, that in so far as the alleged role did really exist, it could readily be shown to consist of two essentially distinct sets of components—on the one hand, the factual, biological (or family tree) components (plus perhaps various equally verifiable components relating to the views held by various members of the family and of the wider society regarding the obligations they took to be inescapably incumbent on anyone occupying the biologically determined family and community position in question) and, on the other hand, a component consisting, as it were, of a blank space, within which anyone concerned could signify his or her endorsement or rejection of the value judgments underlying the alleged obligations. That there were these two parts or aspects to the “role” was something on which all concerned could agree. The sources of dispute, I would have argued, lay rather (and for many no doubt still lies) in either or both of two different, if closely connected, questions. The first was whether, while accepting as given facts both their position within their family and that (possibly more open to dispute) of their family in the structures of the community of which historically it formed a part, it must remain up to the individuals concerned to choose whether or not to identify themselves with any such role obligations as they may also accept, again as a matter of given fact, to be quite generally held to belong to the positions in question. Second, while it is evident that many, if not the great majority of, roles are indeed so defined as to

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  2 7

carry with them certain more or less specific obligations and responsibilities, the question remains as to whether or not it must always be possible for potential or prima facie occupants of such roles to step aside or to disassociate themselves from them in assessing their responsibilities in terms of their identities as the individual persons that they happen to be. In fact, of course, socially recognizable roles differ very greatly insofar as the generally accepted conditions for either entering into or departing from them may be concerned. Kinship roles or roles depending on given family position constitute a peculiarly complex but nevertheless very special case. The situation is very different in the case of roles, entrance into or exit from whose responsibilities are, or may be judged to be, matters for personal decision. While there may be no room for dispute that the post of director of a given institution carries with it certain relatively well-defined obligations and responsibilities—in certain cases well-defined by legally enforceable contract indeed, it is clear that no one is obliged to seek entrance into occupancy of such a role; equally it is always possible for the holder of such a role to resign (or even perhaps be expelled) from it, if he or she no longer wishes (or is no longer deemed fit and capable) to carry out the responsibilities attached to it. Evidently, nobody can decide simply of their own accord to take up such a role; they will depend on others for their appointment to it. Equally, resignation or even on-the-spot sacking may not necessarily carry with it immediate legal release from all contractually enforceable obligations. The possible variations of detail on this theme are potentially endless.15 The basic nature of the situation is, however, clear enough. I may have to recognize as given fact that in my role as director of “my” institution I do have certain obligations; but I remain conceptually (intelligibly, meaningfully) free to reassess what I may take to be my potentially overriding obligations as a person independently of whatever my present entanglements in the role. Being the director of the institution is no inseparable part of my personal identity as such. In determining how it ought to behave, Hare’s horse would not have been logically constrained to think of itself as a charger.

2 8  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

There are, however, other more or less optional roles which may well come closer to becoming embedded in what may be thought of as their holder’s own personal identity as an integral part of it. By “more or less optional” I mean here roles, entrance into which is, to whatever limited extent, a matter of deliberate choice rather than one of finding oneself cast willy-nilly within them by virtue of birth or social imposition, but exit from which may be much more problematic. There are, for example, those roles entrance into which is dependent on the solemn taking of vows before duly accredited witness in the course of some traditionally consecrated ceremony. The roles of husband or wife within the state of marriage, as it exists in its different forms in different religious and/or social traditions, are obvious examples. The modalities, indeed the very possibilities, of release from the vows and attendant responsibilities of marriage vary, as one knows, from one tradition to another. But most religious traditions do not allow individuals who have entered upon such a role to declare their own release from it without the need to obtain that release from others in accordance with the procedures recognized by the tradition to which they belong. It is, no doubt, always possible for married partners to declare that, so far as they themselves are concerned and whatever the tradition in accordance with which they were married in the first place, they no longer regard themselves as being so in despite of not having been accorded any such procedurally or legally certified recognition. But to do so is in effect for them to place themselves at least partially outside the tradition within which they originally got married and to which they prima facie belong—and within which they will in all probability remain legally accountable on a basis of being as yet still married (and by many, no doubt, be taken to remain morally accountable as well). Traditions differ also in that there are those accepting that individuals whom it has hitherto recognized to be among its members may, by their own unilateral decision, validly and acceptably regard themselves as being, from that moment on, either wholly or partially without it and thus as no longer bound by its norms and obligations. However, this is clearly not the case for all traditions. What is at stake here is something

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  2 9

other than the legally binding contractual agreements that someone may enter into on taking up a post or in agreeing to the terms on which to vacate it, even within the framework of the most individualistic of traditions. Cases such as these are in some ways analogous to that of individuals who have made promises that, for one reason or another, they subsequently decide not to fulfill, and it will be worth while to take a moment or two to look once again at this much discussed particular case.16 Promises, of course, are only intelligible as such and can only be made within the framework or general background context of what has been called the institution of promise making. It is normally clear enough that whether someone has or has not made a promise (with an adequate understanding of the constitutive rules of the institution) is, in principle, a matter of socially ascertainable fact, the fact being that of the promiser having placed himself or herself under a certain obligation. The question then arises as to whether, as a morally autonomous individual, the person in question is to be thought of as free to release himself or herself from this obligation, or even to deem themselves never really to have taken it upon themselves in the first place, by virtue of a personal opting out, as it were, of membership of this particular institution. This is not the same problem as that of how to conceptualize the situation of finding oneself with potentially competing and, in a given set of circumstances, in fact mutually incompatible obligations. That there can be circumstances in which one prima facie obligation has to be judged to take effective precedence over another is clear enough. There is, certainly, a deeply uncomfortable question as to whether a failure to keep a promise properly entered into, because of the unforeseen intervention of some obligation of seemingly overriding priority, carries with it, nevertheless, some sort of moral stain or whether the principle that “Ought” implies “Can” means that the failure to fulfill an obligation thus overridden no longer carries with it any such moral blame. It is clear, too, that it is possible for anyone in practice just to decide—however reprehensibly—not to keep a given promise, either as the result of a subsequent change of mind or even,

3 0  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

knowingly and deceivingly, at the very time of making it. But to decide to default on an explicitly undertaken obligation is one thing; to be able to make it the case that it no longer is (or never was) a genuine obligation at all, not simply because of the intervention of some other and overriding obligation but as a matter, so to speak, of personal evaluative decree, would be very much another. But would it make uncontroversially intelligible sense to say that it remains up to the individual concerned to decide whether or not the fact of having promised to do X means that he or she is now under an at least prima facie obligation to do it (if now is the time for doing it and if there are no factual constraints making it impossible to do so)? Would it make uncontroversially intelligible sense to maintain that someone who had gone through all the procedures and rituals their church required before one could be consecrated as nun or priest might unilaterally step out of the role and declare oneself to be no longer in any way bound by the tradition’s rules and obligations, as if this was a simple matter of what an individual might decide? No doubt that individuals can, in fact, claim to have vacated such roles and then act as if their claims were self-validating; the question remains as to whether such declarations have to be accepted as making uncontroversially intelligible sense. Does it make uncontroversially intelligible sense for someone born within a Moslem family simply to declare himself a convert to some other—say a Christian—religion and thus to be no longer a Moslem, bound by the rules and obligations of that tradition? And to return to my own particular personal history, did it make uncontroversially intelligible sense for me to insist against the counterinsistences of so many of the elder generation that I alone was in a position to determine for myself what my obligations should be to what they understood as the tradition? But just how is one to determine what is or is not to be accepted as making what I have tentatively called “uncontroversially intelligible sense”? It was not, of course, that those who took it to be a matter of indisputable fact that my obligations to family and community traditions were what they “knew” them to be could not even understand what I

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  3 1

was saying when I claimed that they were no such thing. But, equally of course, one might perfectly well understand what was being said by someone who insisted that the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle added up to something less than 180 degrees, even if one was unable to understand how anyone of normal intelligence could possibly believe this to be so. Indeed it would only be because one did understand what he was saying that one would be justified in taking him to be straightforwardly (and demonstrably) mistaken. That he was mistaken one would suppose to be provable on the basis of a logically incontrovertible argument, an argument that, if he continued to resist it, one would have rather to suppose him to be incapable of understanding. What was so puzzling about the disagreement in which I was involved was not that we did not seem to understand what each other was saying or claiming; we could both make prima facie sense of the other and understand only too well that we disagreed sharply about something of very real importance. What neither of us could make “proper” sense of was the fact that the other seemed unable to comprehend what each of us took to be the basic logical or conceptual incoherence of what the other was maintaining. What, then, was going wrong? What lay at the root of this mutual failure of communication? Could the source of the problem really lie in a simple inability (or possibly a sheer refusal) on the part of those who claimed to know where my obligations truly lay, to see that their claims were based on a logical confusion? True, the slogan derived from that famous passage in Hume and interpreted as asserting the impossibility of moving by rationally compelling inference from an “Is” to an “Ought” was,17 strictly speaking, no more than a slogan that called for a much more careful pinning down of the relevant uses of those two terms—or what might most plausibly be taken to be their more or less equivalents in different contexts and in different languages. True, too, that the attempts of philosophers such as G. E. Moore to make, broadly speaking, the same essential point in terms of an alleged impossibility of moving by way of valid argument from nonmoral premises to moral conclusions was equally in need of a pinning down of the relevant uses

3 2  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

of the term moral—and that there was no immediately uncontroversial way in which its many different uses might be disentangled.18 At the time of my starting out in philosophy there was, nevertheless, an in effect general consensus that this was a matter that it should in principle be possible definitively to clear up by an appropriate logical or conceptual analysis of the key terms and/or concepts involved.19 The view that I gradually came to work out for myself was no doubt considerably influenced by what I was able to take at that time from discussions with Alasdair MacIntyre and from my reading of his A Short History of Ethics.20 Roughly speaking, then, my view came to amount to something like this. In any language, and in any social or cultural context, people have necessarily to distinguish among all the other facts of their situation that of whether they find themselves liking that situation or not. In general, an inability to distinguish between the facts as one would wish them to be and as they actually are does not favor one’s chances of survival. Among the facts of their situation that confront everyone from very early on, and that they have to learn to deal with, are those relating to the established views and preferences of their family and wider society, facts concerning that which meets with general approval and that which—more or less emphatically—does not; and the weight of these prevailing attitudes of approval and disapproval will naturally bear with particular emphasis on those learning to determine their behavior in the light of the general expectations and pressures of the family and social contexts in which they may find themselves. Thus one of the earliest lessons that anyone will have to learn is that of having to distinguish between their own likings, wants, and desires and those of their surrounding world backed up by its own particular range of implicit and explicit sanctions. Many of these initially external preferences will, of course, come over time to be internalized as one’s own—as Hume already attempted to explain in his account of what he called the artificial virtues. But at a first early stage, and within the limits of one essentially unitary society, the crucial distinction for individuals has to be between their own likes and dislikes and those of their immediately surrounding world—that may or may not coincide with

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  3 3

their own but will, in any case, confront them as facts to which they have in one way or another to adapt. Their language—at this stage— will quite naturally reflect this distinction as one between personal preferences and desires, on the one hand, and the given preferences or “values” of the surrounding world, on the other, values with which they must come to terms as part of their learning to adapt in the face of the facts of that world. This, so my story went, is where virtually everyone has to begin. (Not quite everyone, no doubt, because there are those who for one reason or another have from their very beginning to face life within the context of a radically divided family or society.) Many, of course, will continue, or will have continued, for the whole of their lives within a framework of what we may call value stability, where what is good and what is bad, together with the nature of one’s obligations, is encountered and experienced as given fact, fact which one may choose not to respect, but whose status as such is largely taken for granted. But those who live on into times and circumstances of increasingly complex interaction between one type of society and another and who, as a consequence, come in effect to find themselves members of two or more different but overlapping communities with different and, very possibly, at points mutually incompatible sets of given obligations and values may by the force of such circumstances be forced to choose for themselves which of these values to adopt as their own. When this happens, that which had received its status as “value” as opposed to mere preference by virtue of being embedded in the forms of life and language of a hitherto unitary society only recovers its motivating force for the individuals concerned as and when they effectively endorse it for themselves. Otherwise it will remain for them a mere fact of standing convention or of other people’s values. And this outcome is, of course, almost exactly the situation as reflected in Hare’s account of the “logical” structure of value judgments and of their relations to statements of fact. Thus, according to this story, as society becomes less uniform, less stable, so its language and conception of values evolve in such a way as

3 4  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

to thrust upon each individual ultimate responsibility for the determination of his or her own most fundamental values. But MacIntyre, as I read him, seemed not only to be expressing a regret for the older and more indisputable rootedness of such fundamentals, but to be recommending a return to the older and not so individualistic ways of conceptualizing them. This, so it seemed to me, was not a possible option. For once the conceptual resources necessary to making explicit a clear distinction of principle between fact and value had become available within the language of one’s speech community, one could not coherently simply refuse to recognize it. Or so I argued. I have, however, to admit that I am now no longer quite so confident that the overall situation is really as clear-cut as that. For one thing it is, as I have here tried to argue, a condition of entrance into membership of any language community that one should learn to accept and to make one’s own its rules for the appropriate or “correct” usage of the sounds and marks peculiar to its own particular repertoire as properly meaningful symbols. The norms (or values?) of successful symbolic communication have first to be to be acknowledged as facts of the language to be learned before we can start to make use of them according to our own will and imagination. From this it follows, to repeat the central point, that at this conceptually fundamental level the interplay between personal or individual preference, on the one hand, and value judgment, on the other—judgment, that is to say, as to what may or may not be in acceptable accordance with the rules— is anchored in each participating individual’s membership of a certain community or society. For insofar as any self-consciously reflective recognition of what one’s own desires or preferences might be is possible only as expressed within the rules—according to the norms—of the language of the community of which one is a participating member, the formation of any project to bend those rules in ways that are more responsive to individually creative desires will be necessarily dependent on a prior general mastery of and respect for those very norms. The basic framework of one’s self-identity, of one’s ability to arrive at any reflectively self-aware conception of oneself, is thus already given

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  3 5

through one’s membership in a certain sort of norm-governed community or, in more complicated cases, in a set of such overlapping and criss-crossing communities. Nor is it in principle possible that one might formulate a conception of oneself as standing wholly outside all and any such communities were one, in fact, so wholly outside them. In the special case of linguistic rules or norms, at any rate, any such freedom as individuals might have in deciding whether to endorse, defy, or to modify the rules within which they have come to thinkable awareness of themselves is thus dependent on their prior recognition of those rules as facts of the framework within which they have come to be able to articulate their own thought. Thus our personal and self-identities are closely tied up with our membership of whatever speech community or communities to which we may belong and with the norms, however flexible they might be, that set the bounds of proper meaningfulness for their members. The next crucial question is, then, whether in all other cases we must, in principle, be able to think of ourselves as being indeed just simply ourselves independently of the fact of our membership in some given group or as (presumed) holders of some role within it; or whether, conversely, we have to accept our membership in the group in question as a given aspect of our own (personal) identities and hence as constitutive of the point of view from which we are thus bound to speak. In other words, are there norms other than those constitutive of language itself and of its conceptual structures, on whose dependence we have to accept as “factually” given elements of our identity—and for which failure of respect amounts therefore to a certain failure of self-respect? An example that Hare himself discusses is that of a judge who finds himself in personal disagreement with the judgment that he sees himself as bound by his professional obligations to render and to apply. Anyone, of course, may find themselves in a situation of wishing that their obligations were not what their own conscience told them they were or may personally regret having to pronounce some (value) judgment that, as holders of their given role, they find themselves unable to dispute. But “mere” personal preferences or wishes that one’s ob-

3 6   IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

ligations were other than what one knows them to be are one thing; dissenting as a matter of one’s own personal evaluation from the judgment that one nevertheless sees oneself as bound to uphold by virtue of the role that one occupies is very much another. But, according to the view that I came to work out for myself, to be able to express one’s dissent in the form of a dissenting value judgment, one must be in a position to make a conceptually clear distinction between persons individually identifiable as such and the social or institutional roles they may happen to hold. So if we find it easy enough to understand how a particular judge may find himself in (perhaps even fundamental) personal disagreement with the values inherent in the judgment that he recognizes himself as bound to pronounce qua representative of the law, this is because we have no difficulty in understanding that the person in question is not in all aspects of life always and inescapably a judge or tied to thinking of himself as such—and, crucially too, that resignation from that role is always an intelligible option; for if one is able to think in terms of resigning from a given position, one must ipso facto be capable of thinking of oneself as a person distinct from the role which one contemplates giving up. It now seems to me, however, that the complexity of the potential interrelations between what we may call personal, social, and role identity make the whole situation even more problematic. Here, it may be helpful to quote fairly extensively from the concluding pages of a brief and characteristically lucid essay by Bernard Williams (though he writes not so much of “social” as of “type” identity). “What is it,” he asks, for a general character or role or type to constitute my identity? Here the relations between type and particular individual are crucial. It is very important that an identity of this kind is not my identity in the particular sense. If it were, then . . . if the form of life that embodied that identity were destroyed, the people who possessed it would cease to exist. But it is not so. . . . If those disasters happen, the particular people will still exist. . . . If, for instance, native Americans on reservations are conscious of the loss of an identity, they are conscious precisely of their own

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  3 7

loss. . . . An essential part of the idea of social identity is that a particular human being can find or lose identity in social groups. Henri Tajfel, the founder of modern social identity theory, defined social identity as “the individual’s knowledge that he or she belongs to certain social groups together with some emotional or value significance to him or her of the group membership.”  .  .  . This account, however, goes rather wide as a definition of what might be called more strictly an identity. Thus someone may be very conscious of his or her membership of MENSA or of the Royal Society, and derive self-esteem from this, without its constituting or powerfully contributing to his or her identity. . . . One feature of the general or type classification that can help it to contribute to someone’s identity is that it is thought to explain or underlie a lot of the individual’s activities, emotions, reactions and, in general, life. . . . This in itself, of course, does not make it into a “sortal” concept—that is to say, a fundamental concept for counting: the number of Québecois people present is the same as the number of human beings present who are Québecois. But for those to whom “Québecois” is a powerful term of social identity it is as basic a classificatory term in culture as “human being” is in nature. . . . People may find their identity in a religious sect which they voluntarily join. But it is typical in such cases that they have some sense that this is not just opting for one group among others but constitutes finding something that was there; or coming home—one kind of obedience to Nietzsche’s splendid instruction “become what you are.” In such a case, though I may feel that I have come there voluntarily, what I have come to lies outside my will; something is given, even though I may choose to take it up. . . . The will may be exercised in coming to coincide with something that I already unchangeably am.21

Another way of getting at this entanglement of concepts may be by way of distinguishing between my identity as the person who I am and that in terms of what I am. We may say that who I am is that particular individual among all other particular individuals, who may be picked out as such by virtue of certain bodily (or spatiotemporal) features that may be taken to mark the continuity of my existence as a self-same

3 8  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

individual throughout the continuity of my path through the world from birth (or perhaps even conception) to death (or perhaps even beyond death to final decomposition). There will be problem cases, no doubt, where the normal criteria of particular individuating identity may have no easily determinate application, cases that occur most typically in the contexts of philosophical or otherwise fictional imagination, but sometimes also in some of the odder corners of real life. But in general the problems of establishing such identities lie not so much in indeterminacies of the relevant criteria as in practical difficulties in the way of arriving at the basic facts. In any case it remains clear enough that from whatever the facts of my particular identity in this sense may be, that is to say the bare facts of who I am as one among all other relevantly countable individuals, there are no challenging value judgments to be drawn. When it comes to what I am, however, the situation is by no means so clear. There are, as Williams pointed out, all sorts of descriptions that quite properly apply to me as belonging to a perfectly true account of what I am—in my case, for example, someone who was born and brought up in a London street very close to Regent’s Park, someone who as a small boy had a passion for potatoes and butter beans but who much disliked tomatoes and cheese, someone who speaks pretty good French but only inadequate Spanish, and so on and so on, without it being remotely plausible to regard any of these (quite genuine) facts as “constituting or powerfully contributing to my identity”: just how far any of them may (or may not) be of any interest or relevance to anyone will depend entirely on the context. And while there may well be occasions on which it is appropriate to identify someone as a judge or, in a given context, as the judge in a particular case, this, as we have already noted, is an identifying identity from which it is, in all normal circumstances, easy to slip out or distinguish oneself in one’s personal capacity. Thus a judge may say “Qua judge I am bound to give the following ruling, but in my personal opinion this is not how a case of this sort really ought to be treated,” a value judgment he may express by relying on a distinction between legal and moral obligations or, perhaps, by saying

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  3 9

that, in his personal opinion, the law concerning the matter in question ought to be changed. But what of those cases in which, as Williams says, “though I may feel that I have come there voluntarily, what I have come to lies outside my will: something is given, even though I may choose to take it up”? To which one may add that there are cases—of family obligations, for instance—in which, far from feeling themselves free to choose whether to take them upon themselves or not, there are those who may experience them as an assignment which there is simply no question of choosing not to accept. One needs, moreover, to take more sensitive account not only of the differences but also of the relations between what may be called the internal and external points of view. To return once more to the sort of situation from which I myself started out and to the obligations which, so it was claimed, were inherent in it, there was between myself and those who took a different view from my own, no disagreement concerning the facts of where and how I was to be identified by my place on the relevant family and community maps. Our conflict, though I would not have known how so to put it at the time, turned rather on whether my personal, social, and role identities could be clearly distinguished from each other and how they might or might not be seen as inextricably bound up with my particular identity as the individual who I was. An almost absurdly overbrief way of summing up these matters might be as follows. Everyone should in principle be able to agree on who exactly I am in the sense of my particular or individuating identity, of that identity which is determined by my given place on my particular branch of the particular family tree of which I was originally an offshoot. In practice one knows that any such agreement will depend on the availability to all concerned of the relevant information and that there will inevitably be cases in which some or all of it may be difficult to discover; all sorts of contingent circumstances may serve to conceal the relevant facts, not least the deliberate efforts of those who might wish to conceal them. Even allowing for those cases in which the normal criteria of individu-

4 0  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

ation may not be readily applicable, however, everyone should be able to agree that, if all relevant information was available, there would be no room for disputing the fact that I am Alan Montefiore, son of Leonard and Muriel, grandson of Claude, Thérèse, Adolph and Jeannetta, and so on and so on. But, from these in principle indisputable facts, no value judgment follows—at any rate no value judgment worthy of the name.22 One crucial reason why no worthwhile value judgment follows from the simple facts of my identity in this Registrar’s Office sense, without the addition of some distinctively evaluative but essentially independent premise, is that my place on the family tree would be exactly the same were I normally bright or, on the contrary, mentally hopelessly deficient, were I generally sane or, on the contrary, a victim of irrecoverable mental illness, or on some borderline between “normality” and these or any other radically disabling conditions. There are indeed those who would want to insist that, even suffering from some one or more of the most severely disabling conditions, as an offshoot of some distinctively human tree I am still to be regarded as a person and to be treated accordingly with appropriate respect, but while this would undoubtedly constitute a value judgment, albeit a not very specific one, as to the proper attitude to have toward me, it does not follow simply from the mere fact of my human offshootedness; it is based, rather, on an independent value principle concerning the respect to be shown to all beings of human origin. Where, however, the question is one of personal identity, conceived in terms in any way resembling Amélie Rorty’s account of what it is to be a person, we find ourselves already deep in value judgment territory. According to her, as we have seen, “the idea of a person is the idea of a unified centre of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility.” In other words, to treat someone as a person in this full sense is, inter alia but crucially, to treat them as liable to being held responsible for meeting whatever may properly be judged to be their obligations. But here we return to the problem of whether, or perhaps rather when, a person in his or her identity as such, and qua “unified centre of choice and action,” can be seen as clearly and distinctly separable

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  4 1

from his or her social and/or role identities. We have already in effect noted that the very conceivability of the possibility that what someone really ought to do may be different from what his or her obligations might be as the occupant of a generally recognized role is dependent on the availability of the concept of individual persons as responsible and self-determining agents.23 But, it would seem to be pretty widely agreed, the formation of any such concept is a historically relatively recent development and one, moreover, that has been more typically a feature of the development of societies influenced by some combination of the values of the Enlightenment and of a generally Protestant outlook on life. Conceptual developments of this kind, however, do not take place in one clean sweep, as it were, with the newly evolving configurations entering everyone’s conceptual consciousness at effectively the same time or with the same self-evident clarity in all the different contexts to which they might be thought or claimed to have application. Thus different people—and more particularly, no doubt, people of different generations—may come to find themselves conceptually estranged from each other without any ready understanding of where the roots of their estrangement lie. I have slid in the previous paragraph—almost, I confess, without noticing myself doing so—from Amélie Rorty’s formulation of the concept of a person as “the unit of legal and theological responsibility” to my own “a responsible and self-determining individual agent.” This slide is by no means an innocent one; it is, rather, of characteristic and crucial importance. For to take just one among many other possible examples, consider the role of a priest ordained as such according to the rites and concurrent obligations of the traditional Roman Catholic Church. No one, of course, will find themselves in such a role without having entered upon it of their own largely free and self-determining will. But that does not mean that, once admitted to this role, they will be acknowledged as freely entitled to divest themselves of it and its attendant obligations on the same self-determining basis. For the obligations they will have taken upon themselves as individual personal “units of legal and theological responsibility” include, for instance

4 2  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

that of celibacy, and, so far as the Church is concerned, they cannot of themselves simply choose—after no matter how prolonged and serious consideration—to step out of their role as priest in order to marry. The Church has, of course, its own procedures for the release of an individual from his role and obligations as a priest. But the question of whether these procedures have been duly carried out or not is one of in principle indisputable fact; if they have not been so observed, then, lacking an implicit reference to a concept of the person as an in all circumstances self-determining responsible agent, there can be equally no room for dispute as to what the obligations of the individual in question may still be in these matters. Or, to take just one other example, within the worldview of all those who hold to the belief that anyone born (to the role of) a Moslem has an absolute obligation not to convert to any other religion, there is simply no room for the concept of a person as someone responsible and self-determining as to his or her obligations across all the many different contexts of life. Such a concept of individual persons as responsible and self-determining agents is thus not necessarily readily available as an immediately recognizable and culturally invariant component of everyone’s conceptual vocabulary. However, a lack of ready availability is not necessarily to be thought of as amounting to total inaccessibility. Indeed, where, as so often in the world of today, communities bound together by strongly reinforced respect for the authority of tradition find themselves living within a common framework and interacting daily with others already habituated to much more individualistic forms of life, concepts of persons as individually responsible for setting their own value horizons will—so far at least as those of an older and more traditional formation are concerned and insofar as they understand what is happening—appear far too easily accessible to the generations that come after them. (It is, of course, in just such cases of concept/form-oflife transition that conflictual misunderstandings of the sort in which I myself found myself involved are most likely to occur.) But even at the far end of this very indeterminate scale—the end at which essentially unitary societies are to be found whose forms of life and thought ap-

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  4 3

pear to allow no room at all for the concept, let alone the worth, of a self-determining individual agent—even there it must in principle be possible to envisage the evolution of such a concept as a development of elements to be found among the discursive resources already available in any given language community. That such a development must in principle be possible is shown by the number of societies—of many very different types of social structure and of languages belonging to and reflecting the different forms of life shaped by these social structures—that have in fact evolved in such a way, whether as an aspect of their own internal development or as a result of interaction with societies already possessing this concept as a key aspect of their own forms of life. And if such a development, however difficult or unlikely, must be an empirical possibility for any and every society, either as a result of external impact or as one of essentially internal development, then it must in principle at least be possible that a member of such a society or language community should somehow think out for himself or herself, by way of successive steps of imaginative projection, what the actual stages of such a development might be—including those of progressive conceptual innovation. The fact remains that such feats of advance conceptual construction are not to be expected on the part of the vast majority of even the more imaginative members of a society within whose discourse and culture the concept of an individual self-determining agent does not already exist and for which there is no presently evident room. The position is bound to be much more complicated in the cases of the many different sorts of de facto multicultural—or, as one might also say, multiconceptual—societies that already exist. On the one hand, it would be quite unrealistic to expect most of the older generation of a traditionally role-bound community, recently immigrant to a long-established society of a predominantly “liberal” character, to be able (or indeed to want) to adapt the ways of thinking of their formative years concerning the ties that have always held their community together and ensured its continuing identity, as one might say, to those through which their host society has come to conceptualize its own internal re-

4 4  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

lations, the networks of rights and duties of which these are comprised, and, in general, the relationships between family and social roles and their occupants. On the other hand, the younger generations will have been exposed from an early stage in their lives not only to the ways of thinking of their elders but also to the very different concepts, practices, and expectations of the host society providing the wider context of their growing up. How they will react to the difficult experience of their double and potentially conflictual conceptual formation will naturally depend on a great variety of pressures and influences, some of an essentially general nature and some peculiar to purely individual circumstance. But it is easy to see how, in such a socially and conceptually evolving situation, those of the older generation may find themselves simply unable to understand the claims of the younger, while the younger in their turn find themselves unable to understand not so much that their elders disagree with their point of view as how it is that they seem unable even to understand what it is based on or what it really amounts to. Not, of course, that this is a problem of immigrant communities alone. As the forms of life of a society—its practices and their conceptualizations—evolve, members of the older generations, with their own long-standing and well-tested ways of structuring their lives and expectations, can get left conceptually behind. This type of evolution may equally give rise to a society containing a mixture of changing and incompatible concepts as of the practices of which the concepts form an integral part. Of course, if both of two mutually incompatible conceptualizations of agency and its associated families of concepts are to be found at work within the discursive resources of a society, it must always in principle be possible for those who conceive of their identity in terms of one set of conceptualizations to learn the workings, both theoretical and practical, of the other. However, it is naturally likely to be very difficult for those who have been brought up and lived the greater part of their lives within a framework of strictly traditional ways of thought and practice to come to understand how the concept of an individually self-determining agent functions within, and in so

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  4 5

doing determines, the ways of thought and practice of the newer generations. One should not, therefore, be surprised if, in situations of this sort, protagonists from either side of the generation gap should tend to take it—mistakenly—for granted that the other must be at least capable of understanding the point of view that he or she so emphatically rejects. Even genuine attempts at dialogue in any such situation may well be highly problematic in view of the inherent indeterminacy of the criteria by which the parties concerned might reasonably determine whether their understanding of the basis of personal identity was or was not the same as each other’s. This is a striking instance of the way in which to come to understand a given concept will amount to coming to understand the form of life in which it plays a crucial part. How, moreover, is one to tell whether the opposition with which one may be confronted comes from a lucid rejection of the form of life one inhabits and takes for the most part unreflectingly for granted—or, on the contrary, from some genuine failure to understand it for what it is and the values it incorporates? It may well be, indeed that the social-cum-conceptual context of what we may call value individualism—that is to say, the context within which individuals are seen as ultimately and irreducibly responsible for “choosing” or determining their own ruling values—is an essentially modern development from a time when individual members of society had no intelligible choice other than to recognize that, over and above the norms or “values” constitutive of the very meaning rules of their own language community, there was a whole range of other values, responsibilities, and obligations that were strictly inseparable from the very facts of their own particular situations. Those who find themselves with a firm grasp of the concept of the person as an individual self-determining agent, however, an agent responsible in the last resort for determining its own identity in Charles Taylor’s sense of what that means, should be better placed to understand the situation and outlook of those who have no such grasp than vice versa.24 They may even envy them, regarding a situation in which individuals have to

4 6  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

accept certain basic values as given, as one of greater moral assurance and thus as essentially preferable. What, paradoxically enough, they cannot do is to choose themselves back into a conceptual situation where, in effect, they have no such conceptually underwritten capacity or imposed responsibility of choice. The most they can do, like the one-time abbot of Downside,25 is to choose to have someone else act as authoritative chooser for them, their chosen chooser of all other value choices, of all except this most fundamental and all-encompassing one, a “choice” of acceptance for which they alone may still be deemed to remain inescapably and personally responsible. Those, on the other hand, who genuinely have no such grasp of this concept of individual value responsibility may find themselves in a situation of paradox that is almost the reverse. For, until they come, like it or not, to acquire such a grasp, they are in no position properly to understand those whose ways of conceiving their identity is based on and structured around it. Once they have come to this understanding, however, they will in effect have passed over to the other conceptual side and will no longer be able not to see that they too have to recognize themselves as ultimately responsible for establishing and affirming their own identity and, with it, their own value commitments. It would, of course, be quite wrong to suggest that this turn toward the establishment of the individual person as the ultimate foundation and bearer of values is somehow historically irreversible. Forms of life together with their constituent conceptualizations may change in all sorts of not easily predictable ways. But no one person can simply choose a way out of the form of life he inhabits into another conceptual network than that which, whether as a consequence of his upbringing or of his subsequent evolution, now structures the postulates, the possibilities, and the limits of his thinking. Quite specifically, and although there are many different kinds of contexts in which people may choose to put themselves into a situation in which they will have no further possibility of choice of any relevantly practical sort, it is paradoxical to suppose that those whose conceptual resources are such as to allocate to the persons concerned the ultimate responsibility for the choice of their own values could simply choose those resources to be other than what they are.

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  4 7

The problems may, however, present themselves very differently to those who find themselves living at a time of institutional and conceptual intermingling and evolution within their own society—and in today’s world of proliferating emigrant and immigrant communities this must be a very widespread phenomenon. I came across a good example of the way in which a shift of this sort can occur—so far, at least, as I understood the situation—when on sabbatical leave in Singapore in 1968. At that time the Singapore government was conducting a campaign to encourage the people of Singapore in the idea of what, in its English-language version, they were calling responsible citizenship, and those university teachers who were themselves Singapore citizens were expected to take part by, among other things, going out to the villages and speaking in its favor. The question was how to understand the key notion of a responsible citizen. In its current English-language interpretation, responsible citizens were, broadly speaking, taken to be those ready and able to take responsibility for and upon themselves, to understand themselves to be accountable for their own decisions and actions rather than to expect always to be able to pass that responsibility on to somebody else. The standard Chinese translation used for the term responsible was an expression meaning roughly “feeling for [or sensitivity to] one’s responsibilities,” where these were naturally to be understood as the duties or obligations incumbent upon one in virtue of one’s given role. Thus the typical Chinese-speaking “responsible citizens” of the villages would be those who understood themselves as called upon to accept and to live up to their traditional “station and its duties.”26 There were, however, a great many Singapore Chinese for whom English was very much their first language. Their most natural understanding would have been that a “responsible citizen” was one prepared to make and to answer for his own individual contribution to whatever he saw to be the greater good of society without having to be told always what he should do. This, of course, corresponded much more closely to the practices and expectations of the (very active) business sectors in Singapore with their ramified international connections, sectors in which so many Singapore Chinese were employed. But it was also the case—at that time at any rate—that many of those

4 8  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

working in those sectors still came from the predominantly Chinesespeaking sections of society. So, not unnaturally, the meaning of the older Chinese expression was, in their own understanding of it, gradually coming to take on that of the newer English-language one. The result was that, over this period of change in working and social practices at any rate, different Chinese-speakers were tending to use the same expression with it bearing for some of them the one sense and for others the other. To what extent any of them were actually aware of this, I am in no position to say; but many, I suspect, were not. The differences between these two senses of responsibility, the one more modern (or “Western”) and the other more traditionally Chinese are, of course, neither total nor totally sharp. Either way, the responsible citizen is committed as such to respecting certain obligations. The more “modern” of the two may, certainly, be understood to have qua citizen such obligations as that to pay his or her taxes and, in general, to respect and to obey the law; but, for the rest, he or she is left with a much broader range of individual discretion to decide just what forms, if any, his or her more active contributions to civil society should take. Is it, for example, any part of his or her responsibilities to take part in local or national politics? Or in charitable or social work—and if so, of what kind? It is essentially up to him or her to decide what, if any, his or her obligations in these respects might be. And in this one’s responsibilities are understood in a very different way from those that are incumbent on members of more traditional societies who find themselves bound by their own self-understanding of the roles into which they may have been born or been placed—roles that form so large a part of the family and social structures of those societies—to observance of certain much more closely circumscribed obligations. In both cases, of course, there must always be a certain room for debate over the detailed interpretation of just what is to count as fulfilling the relevant obligations, and a certain margin of discretion must of necessity be left open to the individuals concerned. But there can be very significant, and no doubt highly debatable, differences in the amount of room that is left open. Insofar as the inhabitants of a practically and

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  4 9

conceptually “more modern” society will be familiar with the concept of an individually self-responsible agent, however, they have ipso facto to understand that it is they who are ultimately responsible for rejecting or endorsing as their own the values and obligations that inhere in the structures of the society in which they live. What this particular example shows most strikingly, however, is the way in which major conceptual shifts, rooted in shifts as between one form of life and another, can take place under cover of an apparently stable vocabulary, and how potentially important misunderstandings may arise as the result of members of one and the same language community using that vocabulary on the unnoticed bases of significantly different conceptual underpinnings.27 So what does all this amount to? We have first to recognize that the ability to inhabit and make use of a language comes only with the recognition and acceptance of the norms constitutive of its meanings and that, while these norms may always undergo, more or less gradual or more or less deliberate, more or less creative or more or less inadvertent, modifications, this is not something that can happen or be done to them all at once without a total breakdown of meaningful thought and communication. Nevertheless, and in spite of the ultimately irreducible messiness of any distinction that one may look to establish between the norms of conceptual meaningfulness and those governing other forms of personal and social behavior, no one whose conceptual resources include the elements necessary to a conception of individual agents capable of determining their own values and of establishing their own essential identities can be logically constrained by their recognition of facts, even the facts of their own social insertion, to any particular evaluation of those facts. They would perhaps have preferred to be able to think of their own chosen values as being anchored in indisputable fact such as everyone else would have to acknowledge, whether they liked it or not. They may disagree—even violently—with those who take a different view of how they may stand in relation to their roles or other obligations and responsibilities and who evaluate quite differently the priorities to be accorded to them. But insofar as

5 0  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

they share a common understanding of persons as irrevocably entitled (or condemned) to determine for themselves the values by which they will stand and, in so doing, their identities, they will in all consistency be bound to acknowledge that, even if they most strongly disagree with the values that others may affirm in analogous manner, these may nevertheless constitute genuinely alternative or rival declarations of value identity to their own—rather than mere obstinate refusals to recognize some one clear value truth. To this extent, they have in the end to agree with Hume that “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”28 (This does not mean, of course, that any and every affirmation of intended end, however strongly maintained, has to be accepted as the declaration of a value as such. For such a claim to be justified, one may well argue, other conceptual conditions would also have to be satisfied—for example, a readiness on the part of the declarer to accept some suitably worked out version of a test of universalizability.) None of this means that those who see certain roles (together with their inherent responsibilities and obligations) as constituents of identities from which their occupants cannot choose to escape, simply and of their own accord, are necessarily to be thought of as incapable of logically clear thinking. For, to be able to disentangle values from facts in this area, one does need some reasonably robust sense of the person as an individually self-determining agent. To lack any such concept is not just some “mere” conceptual inadequacy or the sign of an inability to think clearly. It is rather a matter of being rooted in a different form of life, based on and involving a different view of what it is to be a human being. One has, after all, to accept it as a fact about human beings that they are social animals, that the acquisition of language and with it the capacity for discourse and for reason is a very fundamental form of socialization and that there is almost certainly some incoherence lurking in the idea that there might be a total and systematic discontinuity between the conceptions that individuals may form of their own selfidentities and those through which society in general identifies them as being what and who they are. To my particular version of the prob-

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  5 1

lems that can arise from this interplay I return in the following chapters. For the moment, we may rest with the two somewhat inconclusive conclusions: 1. that, while values and facts, statements of fact, and value judgments are, in large areas of life and discourse, distinguishable from each other—and for the sake of both theoretical and practical clarity are indeed to be so distinguished—the extent of these areas and such degree of overlap as there might be will vary from one social/cultural/conceptual context to another and 2. that, where culturally different social and/or generational groups at different stages of conceptual development come to inhabit a common social space, the possibilities for failure of mutual understanding will be greatly increased—along with those of corresponding difficulties in the way of diagnosing the misunderstanding as being a case of genuine incomprehension or simply as one of fundamental disagreement. Moreover, one has in all this to recognize that the very concepts of “fact” and “value,” not to mention “identity” itself, are, together with their associated families, themselves sufficiently unstable at their margins that, no matter how hard one may be tempted to try and push them in one direction or another, there will in the end always be a level at which what we may properly continue to call facts and values will remain obstinately intertwined. Conceptual boundaries do tend to be messy, but so, too, of course, do many other aspects of life as well. I should add that it is only since struggling to draft this chapter that I have had the opportunity of reading Bhikhu Parekh’s recent book A New Politics of Identity.29 Much of its substance is given over to an illuminating series of discussions of some of the many problems confronting the so-called multicultural or plural societies of today, discussions that are essentially structured by the ways in which Parekh makes use of the term or concept of identity. These ways are set out and explained

5 2  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

in what, after his introduction, is in effect his opening chapter, “The Concept of Identity,” in which he distinguishes between what he calls “Personal,” “Social,” and “Human” identity and also discusses what may be counted as the identities of different types of group. Unsurprisingly, these distinctions overlap very closely without altogether matching those with which I have tried to work here, if not always under the same labels. There is, no doubt, simply no one best way of ordering this vocabulary. But, over and beyond its many details, there are two main things that stand out from the book’s discussions taken as a whole. The first is the way in which the term and concept family of “identity” has come to play a central organizing role in so many of today’s moral and political debates. One may be reminded of the way in which the term idea came to play an analogously central role in so many eighteenth-century discussions concerning the nature of knowledge and experience. Almost inevitably, later philosophers have been able to distinguish a whole number of different ways in which this term came to be used—it was, if I remember rightly, Gilbert Ryle who claimed to have distinguished no less than six significantly different ways in which the term was used by Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In much of the philosophy of the last century, in the Anglo-American world at least, the term logic came to be used in a similarly ubiquitous way; inevitably again, it then became a matter of distinguishing the more or less exact or inexact, more or less overlapping, roles which the term was playing in the different contexts of its use. For one reason and another, identity has come to play a similar quasi-organizing role in much contemporary moral, political, and psychological discourse— only quasi organizing in that, while it undoubtedly brings into a common field of view a number of important and more or less closely interrelated and often overlapping topics, its overgeneral use can make it difficult to discriminate between these different topics and thus to articulate the relationships between them. This sort of development in the uses of the term could be said to be a fair and appropriate reflection of the phenomena to which they refer and in which the different overlapping ideas of identity are themselves

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  5 3

actively implicated. Individual personal identities may, for example, be taken by those whose identities are in question and/or by the world around them to include as an essential element reference to their membership of a national or some other group. But in that case the very meaning of their “personal identity” will be somehow bound up with whatever may be taken to constitute the identity of the group in question. The criteria for the two cannot be exactly the same, but, equally, they cannot avoid becoming somehow entangled with each other. Moreover, concerns about the nature of personal or social (or role) identity are not simply concerns about the best way in which to understand and order these concepts; for the ways in which such concepts are understood contribute strongly to structuring the personal and social realities to which they are applied. Thus any attempted analysis of these phenomena in terms of some too clear-cut and determinate set of definitions would be more than likely to result in a distortion of the real-life complexity of the phenomena in question. A further complication lies in the fact that, in a world of increasing social complexity, individuals increasingly (and rightly) see, or at any rate feel, themselves as being what “essentially” they are in terms of a multiple identity, an identity that includes within it indispensable reference to their memberships in all those groups their experience of belonging to which has left an enduring mark on them (some of which may only too often, of course, be acutely incompatible with each other).30 Amin Maalouf, who was himself born and brought up in Lebanon until at the age of twenty-seven he moved to France, an author whose mother tongue is Arabic but whose language as a writer is French, illustrates the complexity with deeply felt clarity: Every person has an identity made up out of a whole mass of elements, elements which evidently go beyond those which are to be found in officially registered lists. For the great majority of people these include, of course, their belonging to a religious tradition; to a nationality, sometimes to two; to an ethnic or linguistic group; to a family (that may be more or less extended); to a profession; to an institution; to a certain social milieu. . . . But the list is still longer and is indeed virtually unlimited;

5 4  IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

one may feel more or less strongly a sense of belonging to a province, to a village, to a city quarter, to a clan or tribe, to a sporting or professional team, to a band of friends, to a Trade Union, to a business, to a party, to an association, to a parish, to a community of persons with the same passions, the same sexual preferences, the same physical handicaps or who suffer the same disadvantages. These different ways of belonging are obviously not all as important as each other, at any rate not at the same time. But none is altogether insignificant. They constitute the basic elements of personality.31 (My translation.)

Nevertheless, the second main lesson one may take away from A New Politics of Identity is its illustration of how, though the discourse of identity, as it moves between its different contexts, tends to slip over from one of its apparent senses to another, this seems hardly to affect the power and good sense of the arguments made out in these different contexts. This is, no doubt, a reflection of the close conceptual entanglements of our concerns with what we, or others, may take to represent our identity as that which most fundamentally we stand for, or as what we most essentially are, with concerns which have primarily to do with the nature of the groups in which we recognize ourselves, or are taken by others, to be members and with the nature of the roles which we may, or may be taken to, occupy within the groups of our identity. Parekh is, of course, far from being alone in his concern with these themes. A notably earlier example of this concern, striking both in its similarities with and differences from A New Politics of Identity would be Morwenna Griffiths’s Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity, which might, indeed, equally well have gone under the title of A Feminist Politics of Identity.32 Despite a clear difference in principal underlying concern, many of the points discussed in this present chapter find vivid illustration in Morwenna Griffiths’s discussions. As she herself notes, however, there is a two-fold intention to the argument of the book. In the first place, it is to investigate self-identity, including emotion, rational-

IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, A N D B E LO N G I N G  5 5

ity, autonomy and authenticity, because these issues are important to women—and to other groups seeking liberation and acknowledgement  .  .  . second, the intention is to redraw the boundaries of mainstream philosophical discussion of these subjects which tend to exclude such questions as peripheral.33

In my own case, of course—and although I certainly share with Morwenna Griffiths the belief that personal autobiography may have greater relevance to many philosophical concerns than would be commonly thought appropriate (or even decent?), my own underlying concern here remains that of the ways in which assertions of identity may, depending on how they are taken and on the contexts in which they are made, function as bridges across the so often presumed gap between statements of fact and judgments of value. In the following chapters, then, I turn to consider the nature of the group of which my own undisputed and surely indisputable membership was at the origin of my own preoccupations with the putative distinction between fact and value. One then has to ask whether any such distinction breaks down if membership of such a group has to be accepted as forming an inalienable part of what essentially I am, that is to say, an inalienable part of my own personal or self-identity.

three JEWISH IDENTITY 1 “CHOOSING OUR IDENTITY”?

I believe that the real problem for Jews is not the problem of identity—namely who we are—but the problem of identification—with whom should we identify. Whose values and views and qualities do we want to adopt as our own? The so-called identity crisis should be more accurately seen as an identification crisis. AV I S H A I M A R G A L I T  | New

York Review of Books

The “Who is a Jew” debate, which has been going on for decades, has generated much heat but little light. There is a widespread perception that the problem is peculiarly intractable, that there is something essentially mysterious about Jewish identity. But that is due to a failure to understand the semantics involved and, in particular, the distinction between law and reality. Once that confusion is cleared up, the mystery disappears. There is indeed much that is mysterious about the Jewish people and their religion, especially its origin and its persistence; but there is nothing mysterious about Jewish identity. J O H N R AY N E R  | “A

Paper on ‘Jewish Identity’ ”

Although I have some reservations about his use of the phrase “the real problem,” I have a great deal of instinctive sympathy with Avishai Margalit’s view as expressed in the epigraph to this chapter. In my own case, for instance, having been brought up in a context of essentially Reform Judaism at home, but having been to schools with only a mere scattering of other Jewish boys until the age of about fourteen, I remember very well my perplexity on then becoming a junior member of “Polacks,” the Jewish house at Clifton, an otherwise fairly typical

JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING O U R I D E N T I T Y ” ?  5 7

English public school, and there finding myself in close daily contact for a first time in my life with a number of boys from clearly Orthodox families, many of whose commitments and practices—such as the conscientious wearing of kippot or the getting up early in order to lay tephillin—were totally strange to me. The school as such, however, had been established in the tradition of Anglican Christianity, and its prevailing values were very much those of any British school of similar type of that period. So although, of course, the question never arose for us in such uncompromisingly intellectual terms, we were in effect faced in the detailed practices of everyday school life with questions of the values with which we should or would identify as opposed to those from which, by so many even small-scale choices, we would at least implicitly disassociate ourselves. So for myself, and for a number of my friends, “the real problem” was indeed that of “whose values and views and qualities [did] we want to adopt as our own.” I also, however, need to say something about the nature of my reservations. To regard a problem as “the real one” may be to pick it out as being the most important and/or tricky of its kind that, in a given context, the person or persons concerned may be called upon to face. For many, the real problem in this sense will have been that of whether they were to be counted by some relevant authority or quasi authority as being Jewish or not. As John Rayner argued so very clearly in the paper from which the chapter’s second epigraph is taken, the question of who is properly to be counted as Jewish is to be answered by reference to whatever set of rules may be appropriate to the relevant context, be they rules codified more or less precisely in some body of law or, on the other hand, the indeterminate and fluctuating “rules” of common understanding. Of course, and as he immediately pointed out, not even the legal or quasi-legal definitions will ever be absolutely precise. Borderline cases can always occur and may have to be decided by a competent authority. Even within rabbinic law there can be doubt, e.g. about a person’s maternity or the validity of a conversion. . . . Besides, there is a plurality of legal and quasi-legal universes of discourse in which the question may arise. Even non-Jewish systems—

5 8  JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING OUR IDENTITY” ?

Roman, Christian, Nazi, Soviet—have defined who is a Jew in their own ways and for their own purposes, and Judaism itself has not always taken the same view. Biblical Judaism emphasised the patrilineal line, Rabbinic Judaism the matrilineal. In modern times . . . the emergence of nonOrthodox Jewish religious movements with their own conversion procedures, as well as the re-assertion of the patrilineal principle by some of them: all these have added to the diversity.1

As for the “rules” by which common understanding manages, with whatever degree of greater or lesser (and not uncommonly disputed) agreement to settle on who is or is not to be counted as Jewish, these tend to provide criteria of identification in what Wittgenstein characterized as terms of family resemblance. As John Rayner says, different people in different social/cultural contexts or traditions will have their own implicit list of what counts for them as typical “Jewish-making” characteristics, and whoever possesses some indeterminately sufficient number of them may qualify to count in their eyes as Jewish. This does not mean that all those who may be so counted will necessarily possess all the same characteristics as each other, nor even that there is necessarily any one such characteristic that all will possess in common; but it does mean that the margins of uncertainty and/or of potential dispute provided by “rules” of this informal sort are likely to be notably broader and hazier than those ineliminable from even legal or quasilegal definitions. For many of those whose lives were caught up in the Nazi-dominated parts of Europe during the thirties and forties of the last century, it is only too obvious that “the real problem” lay in their Jewishness or non-Jewishness (or, indeed, in-betweenness) as determined by the essentially non-Jewish rules to which they were subject and by whoever might have the power or authority to adjudicate their application. Other people, living in very different situations and with very different primary existential preoccupations, will have been faced by “the real problem” of knowing whether the person they most wanted to marry, or even their own children, would be recognized as Jewish by halachic law as interpreted by the rabbinical authorities of the perhaps

JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING O U R I D E N T I T Y ” ?  5 9

strictly Orthodox community to which they belonged or from which, at any rate, they came. This, however, is not the place to embark on any attempt to articulate the range and variety of these possible and very “real” dilemmas, the many different ways in which people have sought to confront or to resolve them, or to argue the pros and cons of seeking to do so in one way rather than in some other. There is already an abundant and impressively learned literature on all these issues, a literature that goes far beyond my competence to master or to present in any new light. My immediate point is simply that, with the greatest respect for Avishai Margalit and sympathy with him in what he takes to be “the real problem,” one has to recognize that, whatever “values and views and qualities we [may] want to adopt as our own,” there can be many circumstances in which such a form of autoidentification may offer no prospect of practical success in solving the problem of who or what we are, of whether we are to be counted as Jews or not, whether by fellow Jews or by the largely non-Jewish world in which we may live. In any case, Margalit’s way of stating what he believes to be the real problem for Jews—“the problem of identification”—is as one of “with whom should we identify” (my emphasis). But who, more or less exactly, might be this “we”? The assumption must be that he, Margalit, is speaking as a Jew to and/or in the name of those whom he takes to be his fellow Jews and that he is raising for them, to confront and hopefully to resolve, a question of identity understood very much in the terms of Charles Taylor’s affirmation, already quoted in the preceding chapters but still worth requoting here: “To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” In this formulation the question of identity is treated very much as one for individuals to determine for themselves: “My identity is determined by the commitments . . . within which I can try to determine . . . what I endorse or oppose.” Margalit’s problem is one of “with whom should we identify.” In other words, and although his claim is, by implication, as trenchant-

6 0   JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING OUR IDENTITY” ?

ly voluntaristic as is Taylor’s, it is, to say the least, not individualistic in the singular in the way that his so explicitly is. “With whom should we identify?” But who exactly, or even inexactly, is to be understood as included in this “we”? It seems as if some answer appropriate to this latter, but tacitly preliminary, question is presupposed so naturally (and equally tacitly) as to assume uncontroversial acceptance by all those to whom the first question is explicitly addressed—as well, presumably, as by those who would neither be counted nor count themselves as belonging to that “we,” but who would be expected to understand what Margalit is talking about as well as to and on behalf of whom. It is as if we are somehow expected already to share a necessary presupposition of some form of insider discourse. Indeed, in order to be sure of and to whom Margalit is speaking here, we need already to possess at least some working idea of the nature of that “Jewish identity” by virtue of which “we” are who or what we are— the question that persists despite all attempts, such as that of Rabbi Rayner, to purge it of its apparently essentialist mystery. In Israeli practice, at any rate, and as John Rayner pointed out in that same paper, Jewish secularism, including secular Zionism, has always leant towards common sense rather than Halachah where the two conflict. . . . In 1955 the Minister of the Interior, Israel Ben-Yehudah, directed that “any person declaring in good faith that he is Jewish shall be registered as a Jew.” . . . The ensuing controversy prompted David Ben-Gurion to institute his famous enquiry, soliciting the opinions of a large number of Jewish scholars and thinkers around the world. “The answers he received ranged from reaffirmation of the Halachah to acceptance of inner emotional choice and labelling by the outside world as valid forms of Jewish identity.” (Encyclopaedia Judaica, 10:63)

None of the answers proposed will be immune to potential challenge in particular cases, and, on the margins of potential dispute, all of them are liable to conflict with each other. Still we shall probably

JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING O U R I D E N T I T Y ” ?  6 1

be pretty safe in glossing Avishai Margalit’s claim along the following lines: “The problem for all those who are prepared to endorse their identification as Jews must be to decide whose values and views and qualities they want to adopt as their own.” But, one has to ask, are there not going to be limits to the range of values and views and qualities that we—whoever exactly the “we” in question may be—can adopt as our own without transformation of whatever we may take to have been our identity up to that point? We are once again brought back to the presuppositional question of how best to determine that identity in virtue of which we are whoever we—presumably—are. It is perhaps typical rather than surprising that, in any attempt to close in on the notion of Jewish identity, one should find oneself, sooner rather than later, as if driven round in a series of circles. Rather than following them round, however, I propose in this and the next two chapters simply to look at four major issues (distinguishable from each other, if inevitably interlinked), which are all to be found lurking in the first few pages of this one. I look first, then, at the nature of the possible interplays between “acceptance of inner emotional choice and labelling by the outside world as valid forms of Jewish identity” and at the peculiarly voluntaristic nature both of Charles Taylor’s account of how one’s identity is to be determined and of the apparently more collective tone of Avishai Margalit’s version. The following chapter will be devoted to the underlying relevance in all this of the age-old logical, or perhaps more properly metaphysical, mutual dependence and tension between the particular and the universal—an issue of long-standing and peculiar relevance to the claims of Judaism to be both a religion of universal truth and import and yet at the same time that of a quite particular people—and a third chapter will take up the question of a possibly purely secular Jewish identity. Among the senses of “identity” that I attempted to distinguish toward the beginning of the previous chapter were “My identity as lying in whatever it is that constitutes the most significant center of meaning in or to my life” and “My identity as lying in the fact and nature of my membership of or identification with either some significant institu-

6 2   JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING OUR IDENTITY” ?

tion or group (real or even imagined) or some key set of values or, very typically, both, the one naturally involving the other.” This latter is very close to what is sometimes known as one’s social identity. The French philosopher Clément Rosset, for example, in referring to what he takes to be a commonsense distinction between a social and a personal identity, suggested as alternative terms for the latter “the intimate identity of the self, or psychological identity,” but added, “for my part I have always thought one’s social identity to be one’s only real identity, and the other, one’s alleged personal identity, to be a complete illusion.”2 (In this he evidently differs from Bhikhu Parekh, to whose own distinctions between personal, social, and what he calls human identity I have already referred.) Be this as it may, the immediate question is that of the relationship between my own self-identification with some significant institution or group and/or key set of values and my identification as a member of such a group by some relevantly significant set of others. The first looks to be very much the sort of self-identification that Margalit would have in mind, though it may take a more negative form—i.e., an insistence on what my values or those of my group are not (or are no longer)—as well as that of a positive self-commitment. The second may in certain circumstances be understood as nothing more than a useful classificatory labeling by the outside world. Classificatory labeling one way or another—as belonging, or not belonging, to a given social group or class—can, as Jews know only too well, have the most dramatic consequences for the lives of those who are so labeled. There can, notoriously, be circumstances in which the only possible way of escape from these consequences is by going into some form of public hiding or disguise; even then, escape is by no means guaranteed. But, such directly practical considerations apart, what sort of sense might it make for individuals to choose to identify themselves in some way quite different from that in which they are identified by their surrounding society? Any act of labeling, any identifying description of a given particular as a member of some classificatory class, may, of course, be quite simply mistaken. This applies just as much to cases of would-be self-iden-

JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING O U R I D E N T I T Y ” ?  6 3

tification as to identification by others. Such mistakes may be of many different origins and types, and mistaken identifications, if accepted as correct, may naturally have many of the same consequences as they would have had had they been accurate. The question is rather whether one may meaningfully contest an “external” identification not simply on the grounds of its being factually mistaken but in the dissenting name of some significantly different self-identification of one’s own. There are, of course, a whole host of contexts in which I may quite correctly be identified as coming within the extension of one descriptive predicate or another as a simple humdrum matter of fact. I am, to take just one essentially uninteresting instance, a member of the class of those who were called up to start their military service on August 16, 1945 (which, as it happened, was VJ day, the day on which the war against Japan was officially ended). If anyone should ever be interested in investigating what subsequently happened to such a haphazard collection of people, I could be perfectly correctly “identified” as a member of this class, and any claim on my part not to fall under this descriptive predicate would be straightforwardly false. However, this is just one of those innumerable facts about me which play no part in that sense of the term identity, which, “whatever the relation may be between the personal and the social” as Rosset also pointed out, “must owe much of its subsequent impact on so many contemporary forms of discourse to the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson.” In this he was surely correct. Erikson seems first to have made serious use of the term in his paper “Ego Development and Historical Change,”3 published, over fifty years ago. Probably his own most accessible account of what lay behind his use of it there and elsewhere is to be found, however, in a slightly later paper called “The Problem of Ego Identity.” In this paper Erikson explains himself as follows: First a word about the term “identity”. As far as I know Freud used it only once in a more than incidental way . . . when he tried to formulate his link to the Jewish people [and] spoke of an “inner identity,” which was less based on race or religion than on a common readiness to live in opposition and on a common freedom from prejudices which narrow

6 4  JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING OUR IDENTITY” ?

the intellect. Here the term “identity” points to an individual’s link with the unique values, fostered by a unique history, of his people. . . . It is this identity of something in the individual’s core with an essential aspect of a group’s inner coherence which is under consideration here; for the young individual must learn to be most himself where he means most to others—those others, to be sure, who have come to mean most to him. The term “identity” expresses such a mutual relation in that it connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself (self-sameness) and a persistent sharing of some kind of essential character with others. . . . At one time, [the term identity] will appear to refer to a conscious sense of individual identity; at another to an unconscious striving for a continuity of personal character; at a third, as a criterion for the silent doings of ego synthesis; and, finally, as a maintenance of an inner solidarity with a group’s ideals and identity.4

Erikson’s way of explaining his use of the term illustrates clearly enough the difficulty, even the impossibility, of making any very neat or sharp distinction between a personal and a social identity, whether conceptually or in terms of psychological formation. He is, however, very far from seeking to present personal identity as, in Rosset’s terms, “a complete illusion.” For him, on the contrary, “the term ‘identity’ connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself (self-sameness) and a persistent sharing of some sort of essential character with others.” It thus seems somehow to combine key elements from both the third and fourth of the senses that I myself tried earlier to distinguish: “3. ‘My identity as lying in whatever it is that constitutes the most significant centre of meaning in or to my life” and, 4. “My identity as lying in the fact and nature of my membership of or identification with either some significant institution or group (real or even imagined) or some key set of values or, very typically, both, the one naturally involving the other.” But one can well understand how an individual may wish to reject a labeling imposed upon him or her by the outside world as having little or nothing to do with what he or she might identify with as “constituting the most significant centre of meaning in or to his or her life,”

JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING O U R I D E N T I T Y ” ?  6 5

no matter how important the practical consequences of being, or of not being, thus labeled from the outside may be. (And this, incidentally, whether or not that labeling has any genuinely factual basis.) Annette Wieworka cites the example of Jean-Jacques Bernard, a French Jew who found himself held in Compiègne—in effect a transit concentration camp, where Jews, picked up in France during the time of Vichy and the German occupation, awaited their transfer to the fullblown concentration and extermination camps further east.5 Here, in conditions of the utmost misery, where Jews of established French nationality were thrown together with Jews of many other national origins, he pulled himself up on his bed in outraged protest against what he had just heard from a fellow sufferer in the next bed, himself of Turkish origin: “No need to look for any further explanation—we are all Jews, Jews, Jews!” To this his outraged reply was “That is not true—it is unacceptable. Here we are French and nothing else. We are not Jews, but French.” This does not mean that he would have wished to deny any of the establishable facts about the origins of the family into which he had been born, but rather that he regarded these facts as no more relevant to what in any public context he took to be “essential” to himself than I would take, say, the facts of my having commenced my military service in 1945 on VJ day to be “essential” to me or my own identity. (There may quite possibly have been other less desperate contexts in which he might have felt his Jewishness to be the most relevantly important thing about him. But for anyone, of whatever religion or none, brought up in the traditions of the French Republic, a citizen’s religion or “racial” origins are, officially at least, of no relevance whatsoever to his or to her public identity, an irrelevance the fundamental importance of which many may so internalize as to form an “essential” part of what they take to be most important about themselves.) Such a reaction in such circumstances is all at once understandable, heroic and yet somehow sadly absurd. “The young individual,” according to Erikson, “must learn to be most himself where he means most to others—those others, to be sure, who have come to mean most to him.” Unfortunately there are distinctly negative as well as positive

6 6   JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING OUR IDENTITY” ?

ways in which others— “significant others”—can take on dominant meaning for individuals. An “outside world” that insists on classifying you as a member of a group it regards and treats as irremediably inferior constitutes a source of denigration and restrictive disadvantage so constantly encountered as to amount to a major parameter of one’s life—a major dimension of its meaning. A possible reaction to finding oneself subject to such a hostile identification on the part of the outside world is simply to reject it as forming no part of the story of who and what “essentially” one is. This may most easily make sense for those for whom it is meaningful to see themselves as members of some other actual or at least potential group and, as such, an inhabitant of some other and far less forbidding outside world—for example, the pre-Vichy France in which all who had been born to or had acquired French nationality were equal citizens of the Republic. The Jewish prisoner in Compiègne could not hold off his fate by insisting that his Jewishness was nothing more than a minor and purely contingent fact about him (nor, naturally enough, was he able to convince his companions in disaster that their common identity as Jews was not in their present reality central to the situation in which they found themselves). One may imagine an individual member of traditional Hindu society similarly insisting to himself, and to anyone who might listen, that the fact of having been born into a Dalit family was merely incidental to the person that he was “in himself,” a person who might expect to find recognition as such in (what he could perhaps at least envision as) a caste-free Indian society of the future. But not only are individuals of such independent strength of mind, and of such visionary confidence in the possibility of another form of society than that in which they actually find themselves, extremely rare; there is still something sadly, if perhaps heroically, absurd in any such determined refusal to recognize the reality of one’s given social identity in terms of one’s identification by the outside world, where this is (a) not based on some straightforward error of fact and (b) is of obviously decisive importance in determining the possibilities and impossibilities of the life one may lead in the world in which, like it or not, one is placed.

JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING O U R I D E N T I T Y ” ?  6 7

The absurdity is in part the straightforwardly practical one of a refusal to recognize the realities of one’s situation, including, most notably, the realities of a predicament shared by all others identified as falling under the same classification, whether as Jews, as Dalits, or whatever. There is also the difficulty of giving a clear sense to the terms of a purely individual assertion of identity that is based on a refusal to recognize the applicability of an identifying classification whose terms are not only widely current in the social context in which the individual is placed, but which are of great significance to the opportunities and/ or treatment within that context of all whose “social identity” is thus determined. Jean-Jacques Bernard would “normally” have conceded, no doubt, that he would have counted as a Jew as that identification was commonly understood, while insisting that this should be seen as a strictly incidental fact about him, one that formed no part of his identity in the sense of who or what as a citizen he “essentially” was; but, in the situation in which he and his “fellow Jews” found themselves, this would seem to amount at best to a purely personal gesture of would-be political defiance. This is not to say that such a gesture could have no genuine symbolic worth in its purely personal terms for the individual or individuals concerned, even if they were entirely alone in making it. But, whatever the meaning of such a gesture might be for those individuals, it is perhaps best understood as a claim to an identity that might ideally find its realization in a recognition by others—that is to say, by the actual or, in the ideal, potential members of a confirming society. (Or, again, in the case of so many who find themselves with the multicultural complexity of identities of those born and brought up in and by families immigrant to societies of fundamentally different traditions and assumptions to those from which they came, as a claim to “essential” identification on the basis of just certain elements of that complexity and to a general recognition of their would-be self-determining choice to disidentify themselves from certain others.) Jean-Jacques Bernard may be understood, then, as appealing to the values of a French society that was strictly secular in the best Republican tradition and as reaffirming, in the face of extreme adversity, his

6 8  JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING OUR IDENTITY” ?

own self-understanding as a member of that society. Societies may, of course, disappear, as may all other recognizable groups and organization, leaving those who had known themselves above all as their members stranded, as it were, with a sense of personal identity that has lost its proper context of social recognition. Exceptional individuals may even be able to base their sense of personal identity, of who and what most fundamentally they are, on an aspiration to membership in a form of society that has yet to be brought into being. In practice a Dalit, as traditionally identified, would scarcely be able to sustain an active refusal of his imposed “social identity” in favor of some preferred alternative, if he had every reason to believe that he was doomed to remain strictly alone in his understanding of it. For Erikson, as we have noted, “the term ‘identity’ .  .  . connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself (self-sameness) and a persistent sharing of some kind of essential character with others.” One may presume that the “sameness within oneself” to which he refers is to be understood, as he says, both as a (more or less) “conscious sense of individual identity” and as “a continuity of personal character,” and that this latter must indeed be understood, as Rosset puts it, in terms of “the signs and actions of which I am the source and by which I am recognisable as being who I am.” (Once again, it would seem better to gloss this as “recognisable in principle as being who I am, even if there happen at the moment to be no others around actually capable of such recognition. There are, of course, other ways in which individuals may react to being “essentially” identified by their surrounding world on the basis of what they may regard as some purely inessential fact about themselves. They might, for example, recognize this labeling as signifying the given constitution of their identity in and for the world in which they have, as things are, to live, while resolving to act so as to transform the situation—and with it their identity as socially given back to them—in whatever way they may be able. Or they might simply internalize the identity that their society as given imposes upon them, acquiescing in it as their own and with it the outside world’s generally unfavorable view of what that identity connoted. (The case has been reported of an SS sergeant who,

JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING O U R I D E N T I T Y ” ?  6 9

on discovering the unwelcome facts of his own Jewish ancestry, is said to have turned himself in to be disposed of as a Jew. This, if indeed it actually occurred, would be a very extreme case; but it illustrates only too sharply a not altogether uncommon tendency to submit to some unfavorable stereotyping by the surrounding world in general and to accept it as one’s own self-devaluing self-image.) In counterpoint, as it were, to the cases of those who would, for whatever reason, contest their identification as Jews according to the terms of the outside world, there are those whose own “inner emotional choice” of themselves as Jews is rejected by that part of the outer world acceptance by whom would be most relevant to the identity of their own self-recognition. Again there are many well-known variations of this version of the story. There are mothers, fully accepted as members of a Liberal Jewish community into which they may have been converted, whose children will not be recognized as Jewish by the Orthodox into one of whose communities—themselves diverse in their degrees of strictness—they may wish in their turn to marry; these “Jews,” born and brought up in a Liberal Jewish family and as members of a Liberal Jewish congregation, may now find themselves called upon to convert in properly Orthodox style before being recognized as qualified for acceptance as truly Jewish. There are the children of marriages between an indisputably Jewish father and an equally indisputably non-Jewish mother who may themselves have been brought up in some sufficiently traditional Jewish manner to regard themselves as Jews, but who again will only be acceptable as such in the eyes of nonOrthodox Jewish communities. And so on and so on. All these are familiar as border disputes between one form of Jewish community and another. It remains the case that there is something highly implausible in a claim to be Jewish on a basis of “inner emotional choice” alone and without any support from the criteria of Jewish identity acceptable as such by some relevant sector of the “outside world.” (If, of course, an Israeli minister of the interior directs that “any person declaring in good faith that he is Jewish shall be registered as a Jew,” he indeed provides a criterion apparently acceptable as such by a highly relevant sec-

7 0   JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING OUR IDENTITY” ?

tor of the “outside world”; though one may be entitled to suspect that the systematic acceptance of such a criterion is likely to lead to serious problems for that sector at some point further down the line.) Be all this as it may, and whatever exactly we may mean by talking of personal identity (whether or not conceived of in terms of being Jewish), such an identity must surely be caught up in all sorts of social entanglements. From one point of view, this may be understood as one of the central lessons of psychoanalysis. So too, no doubt, is the fact that the ability both to reflect on and to commune freely with oneself about oneself is intricately bound up with the ability to communicate with others—and, psychologically speaking, with those whom Erikson called one’s “most significant others” (though significance can, of course, be measured in many different ways, negative as well as positive). The intellectual credentials of psychoanalysis are, notoriously, fiercely controversial. However, we have seen good, and widely accepted, philosophical reasons why the ability to speak meaningfully to or with oneself, about oneself, or indeed about anything else, is conceptually bound up with the ability to speak to and to be understood by others. It would seem, therefore, that while there are many different “possible interplays between acceptance of inner emotional choice and labeling by the outside world as valid forms of Jewish identity,” inner choice, whether properly speaking emotional or not, can never hope to cut itself off entirely from any form of reference to external endorsement or “labeling.” How far, on the other hand, should outside ascriptions of identity be regarded as essentially independent of any corresponding self-recognition on the part of those to whom its identifying labels are meant to apply? (Jews, who not only recognise but even cherish their identity as such, may, of course, seek to deny or to disguise it—as, for very obvious reasons, many have sought so to do in one historical context or another in order to try and escape from prevailing forms of discrimination or outright persecution. But that is another matter.)6 Clearly, different languages, both natural or more specialized, may develop a whole variety of different classificatory predicates for the ordering of the world without any suggestion that the meaningfulness

JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING O U R I D E N T I T Y ” ?  7 1

of that ordering be in any way dependent on its recognition by the objects or events that are subject to it. Neither sticks nor stones, hurricanes nor heat waves, nor, for that matter, newts or elephants have anything to contribute to the determination of their identities under one description or another. Human beings, and socially organized groups of human beings, language-using creatures capable of reflexive awareness, are evidently different. Different not in any entitled capacity to reject their classification under the great majority of factually descriptive predicates, but different in that predicates that would apply to them in virtue of their membership in any such socially significant groups can in general have no proper application if neither they nor the groups in question would recognize or acknowledge them to be members. Of course, this point needs spelling out in much greater and more careful detail. There are plenty of cases of people who have been for maybe the better part of their lives completely unaware of themselves as being Jewish, and who have never been taken to be Jewish by anyone around them, who at a given point have come to discover an unmistakeably Jewish ancestry. But to say this is to suppose that there must be (or at the very least must have been) somebody recognizably qualified as a judge of such matters who would indeed acknowledge (or have acknowledged) this ancestry to be such. However complex, manifold, and contested the ways of being Jewish may be, if there neither was nor had been anybody at all both willing and able to recognize anyone as Jewish, there could be, and could have been, no Jews. People may be quite properly described as belonging to a given blood group, whether they are aware of it, and even whether they are capable of understanding that description, or not. But to treat someone as belonging as member of a given human group with its own traditions, values, and (varieties of) self-understanding, in spite of the fact that neither he/she nor any properly authoritative member of the group in question was or would have been ready to recognize him/her as such, borders somewhere between the meaningless and the monstrous. It would seem, then, that neither “inner emotional choice” nor “labeling by the outside world” can in the last resort claim complete conceptual independence of all reference to the other, however variable,

7 2  JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING OUR IDENTITY” ?

indirect, and initially far from self-evident that reference might be. For this, among other reasons, to look for just one incontestable account of what constitutes Jewish identity is to look for the very wildest of geese. Both Charles Taylor’s account of how one’s identity may be determined and that of Avishai Margalit are markedly voluntaristic, both having as primary focus a deliberate decision to commit to a certain set of values. At the same time, the apparently uncompromising individualism of Taylor’s formulation—“To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. . . . In other words it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand”—differs strikingly from the explicitly plural reference of that of Margalit—“I believe that the real problem for Jews is . . . the problem of identification—with whom should we identify.” At first sight, the differences between the two accounts might seem to constitute nothing more than variations on the same basic theme; certainly much of my discussion of the ways in which an individual’s would-be self-determination of his or her own identity may be constrained would, if I am right, apply to Taylor’s claims. Margalit, however and by way of contrast, writes very clearly in terms of “we Jews” in the plural and as constituting, therefore, some sort of socially recognizable class or group. So we need also to ask just how far such a group may be thought of as being (always or just sometimes?) free to determine for itself its own identity as a group. If individuals in general exist within groups of one sort and another, groups in general exist within (and/or across) wider groups. But what sort of group might “we Jews” be thought to constitute? There is a minimal sense in which what might be called a group will be “created” as an extensional class by any successful use of a descriptive predicate contingently applicable to more than one individual. The vast majority of such “groups” or extensional classes will, however, have no sort of social reality. It is tempting to say that a necessary condition for the existence of a group in any socially significant sense is that some minimally sufficient number of its members must be able—willingly or unwillingly, as the case may be—to recognize themselves as being indeed members of it. But even to this prima facie minimal stipulation

JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING O U R I D E N T I T Y ” ?  7 3

one may think of counterexamples of potential social significance. A tyrannically ruling power might, for example, pick out for discriminatory treatment all those individuals to whom it considered as falling under some, on its view relevant, description and in this way create what would effectively amount to one sort of social group—even if none of the individuals in question had so far thought of themselves, and a fortiori each other, as coming under the description in question. So maybe one should say rather that a necessary condition for the existence of a group in any socially significant sense is that some minimally sufficient number of its members must recognize themselves—or be in principle capable of recognizing themselves—as belonging to it. (What in practice or in principle might be held to count as a minimally sufficient number will necessarily be open to—potentially controversial— debate in any given context or circumstance.) It is in any case clear that the group to which Avishai Margalit addresses himself contains within itself not merely a minimally sufficient number but a substantial majority of members aware of and ready to recognize themselves and (perhaps some of them more ready than others) each other as Jews. Indeed, in Margalit’s own context of Israel, where the background of recognized and recognizable membership (as contrasted with nonmembership) is evidently different from that of so many Diaspora contexts, this majority is no doubt overwhelming— even if one may expect to receive from them a variety of (not necessarily always very clear) answers to the question of what exactly it is that identifies them and each other as Jews. So the question is: how best should one understand Margalit’s claim that “the real problem for Jews [is that of] with whom should we identify”? We may take it as a starting point that his problem is one for people who, for whatever reason, feel able to assume without serious question that, taken together, they are to be counted as belonging to “we, the Jews.” (Their reasons may be as varied, as complex, and as subject to mutual controversy as any or more of those mentioned by John Rayner.) But what might it be for any group of people, let alone such an internally diverse one as the Jews, to (be led to) identify with, to

7 4  JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING OUR IDENTITY” ?

adopt for themselves, some other set of “values, views and qualities” than those which they may understand to be already inherent in what they take to be their existing tradition, which for many, though by no means all, will be (more or less) explicitly religious in some recognizable sense of that term? That strong-minded individuals might seek to take their own Charles Taylor–like stand in deciding with whom to identify themselves in the matter of “what ought to be done or what I endorse or oppose”—whether this be “from case to case” or as a stand of more general principle—is in itself in no way conceptually problematic. Someone brought up in a strictly Hasidic tradition may decide to take their own personal stand as, for example, a modern secular Jew or, for that matter, a Buddhist one;7 there are well-recorded instances of such personal transformations having taken place, often to the natural incomprehension of the families and friends of those so transformed. However, and as we have seen, things become problematic when the taking of such a stand is presented as a self-redetermination of the very identity of the person concerned. Among the different strands of meaning internal to the discourses of identity that have achieved such a wide contemporary currency, there are no doubt those which go a long way toward underpinning such a use of the term, though, as we have seen, there are others that seem to pull at least equally strongly in other directions; and it is significant that even Hasidic renegades would most naturally still be identified, and do in fact continue to identify themselves, as Jews— even if now as secular or Buddhist ones. Questions of what may be taken, and by who, to constitute individual identity are in general complicated enough and those of what may be taken to constitute individual Jewish identity are perhaps even more so. As Norman Solomon puts it, in very much the same terms as those of Amin Maalouf (quoted at the end of the previous chapter), “The identity of the individual incorporates many elements, and the Jewish elements are never more than part of a whole. European Jews of to-day form the Jewish aspects of their identity out of a wide range of options, opened up by study of the sources as well as through contact with other

JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING O U R I D E N T I T Y ” ?  7 5

Jews.”8 So a first question may be whether we are to take Margalit’s problem to be one concerning which strand of the multistrand Jewish tradition (or traditions) “we” might want to identify with by adopting “their values and views and qualities as our own.” How far it might make equally good sense to think of it as being open to Jews to adopt the values and qualities more obviously characteristic of some one or more of the traditions to be found in the clearly non-Jewish world, while yet remaining Jews, is another and further question. In actual and well-known fact, Jews in a great many parts of the world of the Diaspora have indeed adapted, to one degree or another, to the values and qualities of the (non-Jewish) cultures in which they have found themselves by adopting many of them as their own. “Jews,” as Herbert Samuel—I seem to remember9—used to say, “are like everybody else, only more so.” And my own grandfather, who was in his time known as a firm anti-Zionist, wrote that “we want to be Englishmen or Italians by nationality. . . . We want to be Jews in the old sense—the sense of our forefathers. ‘His Majesty’s subjects professing the Jewish religion’—and not in the new sense of nationality.”10 It was said of him that he was, and wished to be regarded as, an English gentleman of the Jewish religion. At the same time, he undoubtedly regarded Jews of fundamentally different religious commitments from his own, and even Jews of no particular religious commitment at all, as being as indisputably Jewish as he felt himself to be; moreover, in his earlier writings he not infrequently used the now virtually unusable expression “the Jewish race,” an expression which has by now largely given way to such (no doubt equally debatable, if less tarnished) alternatives as, for example, “the Jewish people.” But he himself, as a leading founder of his own distinctive brand of Liberal Judaism, with its critically selective attitude toward traditional authority, whether that of biblical texts or of those of the rabbis, came under intense attack from the more traditionally Orthodox members of the Jewish community for allegedly pointing to and smoothing the way toward assimilation and the eventual disappearance of Jews qua Jews. And this, indeed, is part of the background to my own story. For although I have never had the slightest doubt as

7 6   JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING OUR IDENTITY” ?

to my being as a Jew—how could I have had such doubts in the times through which I have lived?—it is undeniably true that this fact played no “essentially” central role in my self-identification or in the ways in which I lived at any rate the first part of my life. (It did, of course, play an undeniably significant part in my developing self-awareness as I became sensitized to the ways in which externally directed fingers might— in truth or in my imagination—be pointed at me as they identified me as a Jew.) Margalit’s challenge, at any rate, would seem pretty clearly to be addressed to those who have no serious doubt about their own status as Jews, even though they may well be in uncertain disagreement with each other as to what exactly it is that serves to mark them out as such. One may wonder, however, what exactly it might be that could provide us with such assurance while leaving it open to him to ask what should be our “values and views and qualities.” It would perhaps be easier to take him as asking with which strand of the Jewish tradition (or traditions) “we Jews” might want Jews in general to identify. For any unqualified and nonselective identification with the values, views, and qualities of clearly non-Jewish traditions of whatever sort, including presumably their religious views and values, would seem to constitute a pretty sure route toward eventual assimilation and disappearance as a distinctive community. And though the balance of the pros and cons of the disappearance of certain communities through their assimilation to others raises another whole series of essentially controversial questions, these are different questions from that which Margalit is addressing. While if we are to understand his question as being addressed to whoever may recognize themselves as Jewish in virtue of belonging to one or other of the already existing strands of Jewish tradition, it is obvious that Jews of such strikingly different existing commitments would, very naturally, give strikingly different answers. In any case, while it may make sense to call upon given individuals to determine—Charles Taylor–like—where among a socially available range of values, views, and qualities they are to take their stand, the work of getting a whole internally diverse and inherently conflic-

JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING O U R I D E N T I T Y ” ?  7 7

tual community of communities to agree on the values and qualities they should adopt as a community can only be understood as a political task in the broadest sense of that word. Such a task involves something more complicated than simply a sustained effort to persuade such individuals as one may be able to engage in appropriate discussion— though the term simply is surely misplaced even in reference to such prima facie “simple” contexts. But to lead a collective “we” to embrace any given set of values and qualities must involve working through that community’s key social institutions—most notably its educational, cultural, political, in the more obviously governmental sense as well, no doubt, as its religious institutions. So, while there is indeed a sense in which Margalit’s proposal presents itself as a voluntaristic one, the decisions involved call for a plan of action (conceived with an appropriate time scale in view) much more complex than such acts of individual will or strong personal self-determination as Taylor would seem to have had in mind.11 Individual decisions will, of course, be called for as to the identifications that need to be made, decisions concerning not only the taking of individual stands, but, with them, the commitment to act—with such other individuals as may be ready to take similar value stands—in whatever ways may be most effective in influencing institutional decisions to endorse, to inculcate, and to transmit the “values, views and qualities” in question. Answers to such problems of “collective” identification as Margalit apparently looks to pose must depend on the outcome of such institutional decisions, arrived at, no doubt, in response to the guidance and pressures exerted by committed individual holders of the key roles in the network of institutions, both formal and informal, that go to constitute the fabric of a people’s culture as it is lived and handed down. Which is not to say that the values, views, and qualities expressed in and through the traditions of a people identifiable as such may not, through time, evolve without anyone or any institution having ever taken any explicitly formulated or even conscious stand on the matter. To see “the real problem for Jews” as being one of “with whom should we identify, [with] whose values . . . do we want to adopt as our own?”

7 8  JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING OUR IDENTITY” ?

is, however, to ask a question that seeks an explicit answer in the stands and practices to be adopted by both individuals and above all communities as they may express themselves through the changing resolutions of their constitutive institutions. There remains, however, the prior question of the sense of Jewish identity that we seem already to be taking for granted when asking that of the values, views, and qualities Jews should adopt as their own and with which they should identify.

four JEWISH IDENTITY 2 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PARTICULAR

We were still left at the end of the last chapter with the question of what might be at the basis of that sense of Jewish identity that we seem to take for granted when asking with Avishai Margalit whose values, views, and qualities should Jews adopt as their own and with which should they identify. In coming back to this question, however, we should look more closely at the ways in which Jewish identity may be tied to the paradoxically mutual dependence and tension between the particular and the universal. This is a topic with which I have, in fact, tried to engage on a number of previous occasions, and on looking back I find little that I would now wish simply to withdraw. It is, however, important to try to understand more clearly what links there might be between the two prima facie quite distinct angles from which I tried to approach the subject in those earlier pieces—pieces of which I shall here make quite extensive use.1 We need also to look again at the importance (or otherwise) of the religious strand in the complexities of Jewish tradition for ensuring the continuity of a distinctively Jewish identity.2 It is well known that Judaism somehow manages to conceive of itself as being both a religion of universal truth and universal import and yet at the same time the religion of a particular people. (As Norman Solomon tells the story of Judaism as it has developed throughout the

8 0  JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PA RT I C U L A R

ages of its history, it is “one in which relationships are important, and the ‘particular’ (Israel) is in constant interaction with the ‘universal’ (humanity as a whole, in the shape of the surrounding culture).”3 So a first (and already extensively debated) question—a specifically Jewish question—must be, quite simply: how can this be possible—how can these two claims be reconciled? Could it be, indeed, that it is the maintenance of this tension between the universal and the particular that, being itself universally necessary, provides the ground for a paradoxically needing always to be renewed “reconciliation” and that to be the site of this tension is what characterizes not only Jews but every human being as such? This thought starts indeed from a line of reflection that is far from being specifically Jewish. At the most general level, there is a sense in which every individual (thing or event) of any thinkable kind whatsoever may be seen as providing an instance of this duality of status. Individuals are as such particulars, while insofar as they are describable as being of any one kind rather than another they present themselves (or are treated) as falling under one or more logically universal predicates. Whether the innumerable individuatable items of our world contain this interplay of the universal in themselves or whether they acquire both their individuality and their logically universal characteristics only through being brought into the light of human meaningfulness, or language, is an old and infinitely debatable issue on which there is no need to take sides here. Either way, however, there is, of course, nothing especially paradoxical or tension making about this situation. Human beings, however, are not only describable, but are in general themselves capable of describing. Moreover, inasmuch as they are themselves producers of language, and not merely purveyors of or responders to it, they must necessarily be capable of referring to themselves as objects of possible self-description. They are thus committed, as to a necessary presupposition of their own capacity for reflective self-understanding, both to an implicit aspiration to the universal and each to his or her own self-acknowledgment as an identifiable particular or individual. The peculiarity, if not, indeed, the paradox, of this

JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND T H E PA RT I C U L A R  8 1

situation lies in the fact that neither the aspiration nor the acknowledgment are possible except insofar as each makes (at least covert) reference to the other. But this, it may well be argued, goes to constitute the peculiarity of the human situation in general. It may well be argued thus; it goes without saying, however, that the argument calls for a good deal of detailed spelling out. Some of its most important elements are already to be found in the Wittgensteinian type of “antiprivate language” sketched out in chapter 1. But an earlier version may be found in Kant—on my reading of him, at any rate. Within our relatively local modern Western philosophical tradition, it was Kant who signaled the move from a vision of the self (or the subject of experience) as capable of immediate self-awareness, independently of any awareness of the existence of anything else, to one of a self or subject whose own self-awareness depended precisely on the awareness of the existence of something that was not itself. Kant’s own writings are notorious for their difficulty and obscurity.4 Nevertheless, the many suggestive, if often controversial, insights that they contain justify an attempt to present a highly condensed version of the argument in Kantian terms. This might run somewhat as follows. (I should make it clear, however, that I do not think of what I call my reading of Kant as any sort of attempt to establish the reading that Kant himself might have been ready to endorse as he looked back at any given point at his work as it had developed so far. It reflects rather my own understanding of the forces at work in his philosophy and of the directions in which they were taking him, whether he liked it or not.)5 If one could not suppose that the appropriateness of one’s description or classification of any particular item of one’s given experience under some general term depended, at any rate in part, on some aspect of the item itself rather than simply on one’s own decision to characterize it in this way or that, then all recognition and classification would find itself reduced to the merely arbitrary—and so, in effect, cease to be recognition at all. Our ability to recognize anything whatsoever, to think of it as being of one kind rather than another, depends on the presupposition that there is sufficient objectivity in our experience to

8 2  JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PA RT I C U L A R

provide for the possibility that we might get our recognitions wrong; for did this possibility not exist, there would be equally little sense to the possibility that we might on the contrary get them right. In other words, there can be no discursively self-conscious experience other than on the assumption that we can in principle make the distinction (even if never on any particular occasion infallibly) between what is subjective and what is objective in our awareness of it. How, then, are we to understand this distinction and, more especially, this notion of objectivity? Kant was acutely aware of the need to avoid relapse into the confusions in which his empiricist predecessors had found themselves entrapped by the apparent double necessity and impossibility of having to account for knowledge of an object of experience that, in its essential objectivity, could never figure as a content of the subject’s consciousness at all. He was thus led to construe the very objectivity of the world as deriving from certain features of the subject’s way of apprehending its own experience. This clearly could not consist in any discernible differences in the contents of experience, which might mark off the objective from the merely subjective, given that ex hypothesi all experiences must, as such, form part of the contents of consciousness. It must, therefore, lie in the peculiar interplay between the manner in which all our experience is given to us and the ways in which we hold it together in consciousness as we relate its different elements one to another. The general form of our experience, according to Kant—and, certainly, the claim seems plausible enough— is essentially spatiotemporal. Not all our experiences, it is true, present themselves to us as spatially structured or related to each other in the way in which they all without exception present themselves as being temporally interrelated. But, Kant argues, it is a necessary presupposition of our capacity for discursive self-awareness that a significant proportion, at least, of what we experience should present itself as being spatially as well as temporally structured; for the concept of space is indispensably bound up with those of externality and, therefore, of objectivity itself. The endlessly temporal succession of our experience presents, however, a prima facie problem; for all recognition, all classification in-

JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND TH E PA RT I C U L A R  8 3

volves the relating of one thing to another, and were we unable to hold before our minds anything that was not immediately present to us, no application of concepts, no acts of recognition, and, indeed, no thinking at all would be possible. The Kantian answer is that we have, therefore, to suppose the thinking subject to be itself actively responsible for the holding together (or, as he puts it, “synthesis”) of the temporally given elements of its own experience. Moreover, since we are here concerned with an essentially rational subject, capable not merely of instinctive sensory but also of reflectively recognitional response, we cannot but suppose that the ways in which it relates the spatiotemporal elements of its experience to each other must correspond to the forms and working of the rational mind as such. One particularly significant example of the form of rational thought (of “unity in judgment,” in Kant’s phrase) through which the mind brings into a structured set of relationships the elements with which it has to deal is that of the hypothetical judgment—the relation of ground and consequent, of “if p, then q.” It is Kant’s contention that, when the mind has to deal not with the timeless elements of abstract thought but with the temporally related inputs of sensory intuition, the form taken by this relationship becomes that of cause and effect: that, since what is given in successive intuition only becomes thinkable insofar as it is “re-cognized,” or thought through these most basic forms of conceptual relationship, we cannot but think of the world of our experience as being subject to thoroughgoing laws of cause and effect and the thus necessarily causal structure of our experience makes a crucial contribution to its (necessary) objectivity. For it is only because we have to think of whatever we experience in terms of its being causally determined to appear to us when and where and in the way that it does, by the relations in which it stands to all other preceding and surrounding appearances (including those which are not presently apparent to us), that we can think of it, as we must, being whatever it in fact is, at least partly independently of whatever and however it may now seem to us to be. We have thus the following picture of the human situation. We find ourselves placed within an order of nature of which we cannot coherently think as other than governed by thoroughgoing laws of cause

8 4  JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PA RT I C U L A R

and effect, and, insofar as we ourselves indisputably belong to this order, we have to recognize ourselves to be equally subject to such laws. At the same time, however, we find ourselves having to think of these very laws, as indeed of the whole of that (“synthesising”) activity through which we bring structure into the otherwise unstructured or higgledy-piggledy manifold of what is given to us through our senses (both internal and external), as grounded in a power of which we can, strictly speaking, only attain knowledge through its manifestations in the organization of our experiences in space and time. We have nevertheless to acknowledge this power as itself having a fundamentally pretemporal and thus precausal status. It is a power of what he calls “spontaneity,” a power we cannot but recognize as lying within ourselves, a power of conceptual or, more generally, rational ordering of which, even though it can never be subject to observation as an object of our knowledge as such, we are nevertheless inescapably aware. As embodied members of the spatiotemporal order of the world, we must know ourselves to be governed in all our feelings, desires, and behavior by the (causal) laws that determine our interactions with everything else that exists or takes place within that world. But, in every exercise of our reasoning capacities, be it theoretical or practical (and the two are ultimately inseparable from each other), we cannot but presume the order of our reflection or action to derive from the exercise of that reason which lies within us—which constitutes, indeed, an indissociable aspect of our own thus radically dual nature. And, if the order of our empirically observable reactions and behavior is an order of determination through our causal relations with objects and events other than ourselves, an ordering that Kant calls one of “heteronomy,” that of our rational action and reflection derives from a principle intrinsic to ourselves and is thus an ordering of “autonomy” or freedom (in the sense of self-governance). This in barest outline is (my version of) the shape of the Kantian argument for a fundamental, if fundamentally paradoxical, human duality. Moreover, this way of characterizing the human situation is at the same time a characterization of the situation of morality. For, as Kant

JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND T H E PA RT I C U L A R  8 5

sees it, animals, as purely natural beings, have only what he calls an arbitrium brutum, that is to say, a wholly causally determined will, and thus do whatever they do as a matter of natural, unreflecting course; while purely rational creatures, on the other hand and if indeed there are any such, would have what he calls a “holy will” and would accordingly do whatever and only whatever was conformable to reason in any given situation. The human will, however, lies at the intersection between these two, and it is this that makes the human situation at once a moral and yet a deeply paradoxical one. If Kant’s account of the human situation embodies some of the profoundest insights, it also displays—or generates—some of the most intractable problems, the most notable of these being, no doubt, that of how we may even begin to understand the manner and implications of the interplay between what he sees as the two different though inextricably complementary aspects of our makeup—our spatiotemporally embodied and therefore causally determinate particularity, on the one hand, and our self-determining participation in universal reason, on the other. Indeed, at one well-known point Kant himself suggests that this is something of which we can only hope to comprehend the incomprehensibility.6 One of the most intractable implications of this interplay concerns the manner in which Kant may (or indeed may not) be able to understand the notion of such freedom of choice as might well be thought to be necessarily attributable to the morally situated agent. The problem arises from the fact that a purely rational will would have no more room for significant choice than would a fully causally determinate arbitrium brutum. It may well be true that the very different accounts of the nature of free choice offered by, say, a Humean-type analysis of causation in terms of a de facto constant conjunction that, as such, neither constrains nor compels, and that of an analysis of the freedom of agents in terms of a distinction between causal factors which are external and those which are internal to them, both end up by running, in the end, into major difficulties of their own. (That the ways of functioning of the internal causal factors call in turn for their own causal explanation makes the distinction, in any case, hard in the end to maintain.)

8 6  JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PA RT I C U L A R

But this does not absolve a Kant from the need to give some real sense to the notion of personal responsibility for the making of morally right or wrong choices. He does, in fact, make some exploration of the suggestion that we should distinguish in the human person between two types of will, the purely rational will (or Wille) and what Abbot translates in his version of Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone as “elective choice” (or Willkur). This might give some sort of picture of morally situated persons, having to make an elective choice between situating themselves in the order of nature, temporality, and causal determinism or in that of reason, logic, and self-determination. Any such power of elective choice would itself, however, be entirely mysterious, for one would have to suppose it to operate in some order prior to either of those between which it is its responsibility to choose, and there could, therefore, be no sense to any question of when or why the choice, whichever way it went, was made. In other words, a Kantian account of how morally situated human persons may be seen as freely responsible for their actions turns out to be as irreducibly paradoxical as the rest of his dual aspect account—as, indeed, is shown by his repeated struggles to resolve the tensions between the demands of causality and free will toward the end of his discussion of the Third Antimony.7 One may even go so far as to say that this is an account committed to what might well be called metaparadox, that is to say, the higher order paradox of being committed at once to the essentially rational demand for a resolution of all apparent contradictions and yet to the recognition that, however far one may pursue the matter, contradiction or paradox will always reappear in some new form or another.8 For the moment, however, the points to be emphasized are these. The principle of reason which, according to this Kantian account, constitutes at once our power of reflective thought and, through the application of its most basic concepts, the objectivity of the spatiotemporal order of which we are a part, resides within each one of us but is itself, qua reason, universal. At the same time, our embodiment, and, with it, our ability to know ourselves as creatures situated in space and time, is a necessary condition of our self-awareness as rational beings and a principle of individuation; it is only in our particularity that we can,

JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND T H E PA RT I C U L A R  8 7

properly speaking, know ourselves for the physically and historically conditioned creatures that we are. Our reason (or our rationality) is that aspect of ourselves whereby we are led to seek harmony and community with all other rational beings—with all other embodiments of that reason which only in its individual or particular embodiments is logically subjectable to such categories as unity or plurality. In theological terms, it may be said, it is by virtue of this reason within us that we are led to see ourselves as all one in (the boundless infinity of) God. Our spatiotemporally determined individuality, our human finitude, on the other hand, is that aspect of ourselves by which we are led through our bodily given desires, through the conditioned loyalties and passions of our family and national situations, to affirm ourselves as distinct from, and often opposed to, all other bodily and historically situated beings. Yet, for all the tensions involved, from neither of these, our two competing yet complementary perspectives, can we afford in the last resort not to acknowledge the respect due the other; for the very possibility of our own self-awareness, whether as rational beings or as embodied subjects animated by desires of all kinds, is rooted in our own deeper self-awareness of being both at once and in our remaining as true as we may manage to be to our own paradoxical duality. Whatever the more detailed merits and demerits, difficulties and insights, of such a generally Kantian account, the underlying but indissoluble tension between the pull of the universal and the counterpull of the particular may be said, on this view of the matter, to constitute the peculiarity of the human situation in general. The peculiar peculiarity of Judaism, as the religion of the Jewish people, may be said to lie in the way in which it commits itself to this tension, in its twin claims to be both the religion of universal truth, that of the one and only God of all mankind, and yet to be the religion of a very particular people, bearers of a very particular tradition having its roots in a very particular place on earth. It seems to me, as I look back, that in becoming aware of myself as Jewish in a largely non-Jewish surrounding world, I must at the same time have been becoming aware, however dimly, of this tension. I have already referred to my paternal grandfather, Claude Montefiore, or

8 8  JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PA RT I C U L A R

CGM as he was known to so many—a leading figure in the foundation of Liberal Judaism in this country and a major figure in my own family background.9 CGM himself died in 1938, when I was not yet even a teenager, and I have no memory at all of having discussed any of these issues with him, even in the very simplest of terms. Nevertheless, I must have grown up taking it somehow for granted that to be a Jew was to stand in some special sort of relationship—direct or indirect—to Judaism as the Jewish religion and that, although mainstream adherents of this religion seemed to be committed to all sorts of more or less curious and not evidently rational practices, the purest and most essential demand it placed on those who might properly understand themselves as Jews was that they should accept and uphold a certain core of religious belief or doctrine. As I have already noted, this view—and quite specifically my own grandfather as one of its principal proponents—was seriously attacked within the wider Jewish community of the time as being fatally likely to lead to assimilation and to the ultimate disappearance of Jews qua Jews. I was, then, very struck, when I came upon it, by what Michael Williams, (the British) rabbi of the congregation of the Rue Copernic in Paris had to say in his short piece “La recherche de la justice,” published in 1982, and by the fact that this was a Liberal rabbi saying it.10 To quote Rabbi Williams, then: Une assistance française risque simplement d’ignorer que le but du judaisme non-orthodoxe, liberal si vous voulez, est un but strictement pratique—comment garder nos juifs, juifs. . . . En un mot, nous ne sommes pas concernés par le fait de définir et de redéfinir le mot “juif” sans cesse . . . mais simplement par le fait de prendre pour acquis notre point de depart, notre appartenance à un peuple et à une communauté religieuse, et de poser la seule question qui compte—une question pratique; “et maintenant”?11

And secondly: “Que cela plaise ou non, la ligne de demarcation . . . entre le marxisme, n’importe quel système matérialiste et le judaisme reside en ceci: nous tenons que la raison n’a pas toujours raison.”12

JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND TH E PA RT I C U L A R  8 9

This seemed to me to stand in pretty sharp contrast with the spirit in which I had thought myself to have been brought up, and which I had always thought of as deriving from my grandfather and his conception of what Liberal Judaism should stand for, a spirit of what I had always taken to be a much more rationalistic and universalistic—one might say “Enlightenment”—nature. Let me cite again here some of the passages from the volume of his sermons delivered in the context of services at the Jewish Religious Union,13 which I quoted already in my 1984 memorial lecture. For example: 1. “There can be no opposition between Science and Religion, for Science must be a part of Religion. . . . If any doctrine of religion is in conflict with an ascertained law of science, that doctrine cannot be true; therefore it cannot be religious” (p. 3). Or 2. “Jews are a righteous people because of their religion. But is not truth universal and catholic? . . . Should not the truth which Israel possesses be carried afar?” (pp. 24/25). Or 3. “the question of making the truth known . . . is independent of the question of whether the Jews are not merely a religious community, but also a nation. . . . If the Jews are a nation, then it must be possible for the members of that nation to include believers in many creeds, and if Judaism is more than a tribal religion, then it must be possible for the believers in that religion to include members of many nations” (pp. 32/33). And, most significantly, 4. “what is most important in Judaism is not its ceremonial, but its teaching, not its rites but its doctrines. If the doctrine, so far as it is true and pure, prevails, we shall mind less about the embodiment; nor shall we, in the last resort, mind about the name. If Judaism triumphs under another name, if we can even help in and further such a triumph, we shall be content. ‘Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us be the glory’” (pp. 35/36). So far as these passages are concerned, the emphasis is evidently not so much on the importance of being, or remaining, Jewish as on that of holding to the truths enshrined in Judaism as the Jewish religion, truths that are here represented as being essentially a matter of doc-

9 0   JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PA RT I C U L A R

trine. This, certainly, was what I, as my grandfather’s grandson, grew up learning to believe. No doubt that I grew up with far too unquestioning a view as to what it is to accept or to believe in a body of doctrine, as to what might be involved in “purely intellectual” assent, or as to how such assent, to count as genuine, might or must find expression in “religious practice”—or, indeed, as to whether it may be possible to draw any ultimately very sharp distinction between the two. No matter: one thing at least seemed clear. The doctrines of Judaism, in claiming to be true of the nature of God and of his relation to mankind as a whole, ipso facto laid claim to universal assent; and the truths they claimed to embody must hold, if indeed true, for all mankind. It could be no part of these doctrines that the Jews, as a historically determined community (or even set of communities), were alone capable of understanding, accepting, and practicing the religion of the one true God, for to understand Judaism in any such way would be to treat it as constituting, in my grandfather’s words, no more than “a tribal religion.”14 This is a theme of the nature and paramount importance of Judaism as a religion, as a body of knowledge of the nature of God, as a commitment to his worship, and as a set of moral teachings concerning the nature and proper behavior of man. It is true that, for my grandfather, “religion is a wider term than morality” (p. 105) and that “the highest religion must contain a touch of rapture, of poetry, of mysticism” (p. 106). All the same, “If we say that God is good, this means that the test of divineness . . . is goodness” (p. 48) and “those who think the ceremonial laws good . . . need not worry themselves about their authority. The very fact that the laws are good is itself their authority, and an adequate authority” (pp. 50/51)—a view of recognizable goodness strikingly reminiscent of that put forward by G. E. Moore in Principia Ethica,15 published only a very few years before. There is, however, a second theme to be found even in this same volume of sermons, a theme that is at once complementary to the first and yet in tension with it. It is one of deep pride in and loyalty to what may perhaps best be called the Jewish people. Israel, of course, may very properly be called a nation—a nation-state, indeed—but to speak of

JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND T H E PA RT I C U L A R  9 1

the Jewish nation as such is to make a very political and, in more than one respect, very contestable claim. My grandfather, as it happens, seems to have made use of the expression “the Jewish race” at any rate around the time of these sermons, but this is hardly an expression that anyone could use very confidently or comfortably today. He talked also of “born Jews,” by which he must presumably have meant those who were born of Jewish mothers—who themselves to be accountable as Jewish must either have been born Jewesses or have been accepted as converts to the Jewish religion. But this, evidently, is only to push the problem back and would seem to point to the indispensability at some stage in the regress of a recognizably religious commitment on the part of some mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother. Orthodox Jews would generally insist that such recognizability must consist either in the fact of having been born into an already recognizably Jewish family and in a sufficient continuing acceptance of its traditions and practices or, in the case of a conversion, in that conversion having been carried out by an authentically Orthodox rabbi. Just what such a “continuing acceptance” would have to consist in to count as sufficient would no doubt be open to characteristically detailed dispute, but it would certainly have to be elastic enough to allow for even the most Orthodox to acknowledge the Jewishness of those whom they would regard as “bad” or “self-marginalizing” Jews. The problem for someone such as my grandfather lay rather in the fact, as he saw it, that “precisely the same beliefs as to the nature of God and man and their relations to each other which are held by a Jew” may also be held by Unitarians and Theists of no specifically Jewish attachment whatsoever. Nevertheless, “the fact that Jews may share “precisely the same beliefs” with others “is no reason whatever why we should falter in our allegiance to Judaism, or let the flame of our Jewish consciousness grow dim and flicker out. It is not for me,” he goes on, “to explain or defend the separate identity and the justified separate consciousness of those who hold the essence of the Jewish faith, but not the Jewish name; but it is for me to defend the retention of the Jewish name and the Jewish consciousness among those who hold, though even feebly and falteringly, the essence

9 2   JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PA RT I C U L A R

of the Jewish faith.”16 All this would seem to imply that to become a Jew even the appropriate doctrinal assent cannot, after all, be enough, but that the Jewish “name” and a Jewish consciousness must somehow be embraced as well, and this, presumably, must further involve some effective commitment to at least some of the principal practices of a recognizably Jewish way of life. And this, if it is indeed the case and if reference to the particularisms of Jewish tradition turns out to be in the last resort indispensable, leads us back to Rabbi Williams’s concern with what he takes to be the basic value and first importance of Jews being and remaining Jews. The tension between Judaism’s claim to universal truth as an account of the nature of God and of his relation to man, on the one hand, and the special status of the Jews as a very particular people (or nation or folk or race or whatever), on the other, did not, of course, have to await the development of Liberal Judaism to make itself apparent as a matter for deep reflection and debate. It struck me with particular clarity, however, as I found it so deeply embedded in the very strand of the tradition in which I myself had been brought up. Partly, no doubt, because of the personal immediacy of the questions that it posed. But also, it still seems to me, because of the unmistakable clarity of the tension as manifested in this particular version. Between C.G.M’s “what is most important in Judaism is not its ceremonial, but its teaching, not its rites but its doctrines” and Rabbi Williams’s “le but du judaisme non-orthodoxe, liberal si vous voulez, est un but strictement pratique—comment garder nos juifs, juifs” (discussed earlier), there would seem to be not merely a tension but an apparently outright contradiction. But even for my grandfather it was, as we have just seen, a matter of the deepest concern “to defend the retention of the Jewish name and the Jewish consciousness among those who hold, though even feebly and falteringly, the essence of the Jewish faith.” What is one to make of this tension or apparent contradiction? First, then, two more, slightly earlier passages from the same sermon 19. “We shall all, I hope, agree that some measure of religious belief is necessary to constitute the Jew. Birth is adequate as a test of race;

JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND TH E PA RT I C U L A R  9 3

it does not suffice for religion.”17 At the same time, “I too glory in the fact that Judaism is an ancient and historical religion. . . . This ethical theism in which we find the essence of Judaism. . . . Is it not ours by right of origin and history? Is it not ours by heritage and descent?”18 As with Avishai Margalit’s problem for Jews of knowing “with whom should we identify,”19 one has to ask to whom—exactly or even inexactly—can this unquestioning reference to “ours” be referring? Not inclusively, one has to presume, to the community of all those who share or who have shared the same body of essential doctrinal belief. For one thing, this would be to count a whole range of Unitarians and Theists of quite different heritage and descent as being Jews, unbeknown to themselves as such or indeed to virtually anybody else.20 And for another, at least equally important, there are many whose heritage and descent are indisputably Jewish, and who unhesitatingly recognize themselves as such, but who, whatever may or may not have been the religious beliefs of their mothers or grandmothers, have themselves no sense whatsoever of any such assent or commitment. My grandfather may indeed have hoped for general agreement that “some measure of religious belief [was] necessary to constitute the Jew.” The fact is, however, that if one way of achieving recognition (including self-recognition) as a Jew is simply to be known to have been born of a Jewish mother, the possession of “some measure of religious belief” cannot be counted as a necessary condition after all. In any case, one has also to take into most serious account the intense commitment to what they take to be their Jewish identity of so many who would see themselves as purely secular Jews and lead their lives in accordance with that commitment. One has, then, once more to recognize that there are multiple strands to the weave of any Jewish identity—as to so many others— and that possession of all, or, indeed, of any particular one, of them may not be necessary to the possession of such an identity by any given individual. But is there perhaps greater plausibility in the notion that the possession of ‘some measure of religious belief’ is a necessary constituent condition of the being of Jews “in general,” even if not necessarily so of any particular individual? Insofar, certainly, as the identity

9 4  JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PA RT I C U L A R

of individuals depends on their membership in a given group, the continuing existence of such an identity as a living possibility must depend on the continuing existence and identity of the group in question; and this must be as true for those whose membership is relatively partial or marginal—in view, perhaps, of the many different and often potentially conflicting claims and commitments of their other identities as members of other groups—as for those who may properly be regarded as members à part entière.21 This problem—that of the potentially problematic Jewish identity of those who find themselves situated, as it were, on the margins of the (or at any rate an) indisputably mainstream Jewish community—is one that I already tried to grapple with as far back as 1972 in my contribution, published under the title “Unstable Margins,” to the number of European Judaism dedicated to the memory of Michael Goulston, its founding editor and himself yet another Liberal Jewish rabbi. Michael Goulston, who died at a distressingly young age, had as one of his many concerns that of “how, somehow, to turn back the creative energies of the non-practising, marginal, yet, in some notoriously and endlessly contestable sense, still recognisably Jewish intellectual so that he might make his own characteristically ‘Jewish’ contribution to that central community in terms of whose margins he was himself in some essential part defined.”22 He provided thus yet another example of a leading figure of Liberal Judaism anxious to find ways not only of retaining the contribution to the broad Jewish mainstream of those who had become or were becoming in many ways marginal to the ongoing life of its fully committed communities as such, but actually to retain them as members. What did I mean by talking in this way of finding oneself at the Jewish margins? The first point to be stressed is that the margins in question are, as I, and I am quite sure Michael Goulston, understood them, in no way uncertainly Jewish. In this sense they are probably very different from, say, the Catholic margins. I recall, for example, a philosopher friend of long ago, who, having been brought up “in the Catholic Church,” but having by the time that I knew him lost all belief in its doctrines, con-

JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND TH E PA RT I C U L A R  9 5

tinued nevertheless to go fairly regularly to Mass and to take part in many of its traditional rituals. When I asked what he thought of himself as doing in this way, he explained that he had always had a great fondness for old baroque buildings and that the Catholic Church remained for him the closest analogy he knew of, in intellectual terms and in its theological structures, to the kind of old baroque building whose rambling corridors and great chambers he could explore with a sense of ever reawakening familiarity and through which he might wander to his heart’s content. And so, at the simple price of a “mere” suspension of belief, he knew where to go in order to find himself feeling at home and in familiar surroundings. Whether a Catholic equivalent to Michael Goulston would have judged my intellectually agnostic friend to be still as indisputably Catholic as Michael took to be the indisputable Jewishness of nonpracticing and intellectually agnostic Jews is not for me to say. What does seem clear, however, is that it was only thanks to the continuing existence of the Catholic Church as a religiously committed and functioning institution that my friend was able to continue his existence in what for him were its familiar and homely margins, and without its continuing existence there would have been nothing for him to be thus marginal to.23 In that earlier piece I was very much inclined to argue that the position of the “marginal” Jew was in this crucial respect closely analogous to that of the nonbelieving and thus marginal Catholic in that the continuing existence of those marginal spaces, where identity was nevertheless somehow preserved, depended in the Jewish case too on the continuing existence of a committed religious center to which it could see itself and be seen as marginal and yet incontestably Jewish all the same. But this I now recognize to have been, typically and unsurprisingly, very much the sort of argument to be expected of someone brought up in the tradition of the Liberal Judaism of my own grandfather. However, even in his case, the view that to be Jewish was simply to be an English man or woman—or, indeed, a French, an Italian, a German, or an American one—of the Jewish religion was complicated by the fact that, while recognizing that people of other origins or tradi-

9 6   JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PA RT I C U L A R

tions might share what were in effect the same central religious beliefs, he himself was proud to hold them in their Jewish version and, specifically, as a Jew—the inescapable implication of which must be that there is more to being a Jew than simply the holding of such beliefs. And the fact is, of course, that, from the very beginning, Judaism, as the religion of the Jews, made claim, however awkwardly, not only to embody a universal truth demanding acceptance by the whole of mankind yet also to recognition as the religion of a particular people with its own particular history. Moreover, it is, and has from the beginning been, a religion which, most notably in its more orthodox or traditional forms, places at least as much emphasis on practice as on belief—insofar, once again, as it may in the end be conceptually possible to maintain a clear and nonoverlapping distinction between the two. Whatever the potential complications of this latter point, and there are many, it is clear that there have always been two principal strands among the many contributing to the overall weave of Jewish identity, to that in virtue of which Jews may recognize themselves and be recognizable to others as Jews. There is that of religious commitment, however disputed its proper and most faithful form may be, and there is that of membership in a certain social and historically determined group entity, whether it be conceived of as a tribe, a people, a nation, a family of families, or even, in some loose and no longer easily admissible sense, as a race. Whatever the underlying differences and whatever the potential tensions between them may be, these two main strands have for very long stretches of time been so intertwined as to make it far from easy to see them clearly apart. One might indeed be tempted to argue that the social or community strand has always tended toward taking a certain precedence over that of religious commitment. To convert to Judaism as a matter of religious conviction is in most cases and for many very practical purposes strikingly analogous to acquiring another tribal identity or nationality, while there have always been Jews, of little or even no religious conviction or commitment at all, whose status as Jews—as members of a certain historical community—was (or is) beyond doubt. Yet to be recognizable as a member of a given tribe

JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND TH E PA RT I C U L A R  9 7

or nation is either to be born of parents who are already recognized as members or, in the case of those who are of no such recognizable descent, to be able, as a necessary if not necessarily sufficient condition, to show oneself familiar with its particular traditions and practices and, most typically, ready to participate in them. The Jews are doubtless far from unique in that so many of their most cherished traditional practices have their roots in “their” religion. But one has to wonder for how long such practices might survive if there were no longer any persons or community institutions still actively committed to the preservation of those roots as an indispensable source of community life and value. There can, of course, be no purely a priori answer to this question. It is clear, however, that the situation is radically transformed once it becomes possible to see the Jews as constitutive of a nation not simply in that somewhat indeterminate sense in which the term nation is more or less interchangeable with that of a people, but rather in that of an institutionally established political entity recognizable as such among other political entities of similar status, recognizable, in short, as a nation-state. That this should actually come about was, of course, the dream of religious and nonreligious Zionists alike. It is true that, even with reference to Israel, the terms Israeli and Jew cannot be taken as straightforwardly synonymous. Nevertheless, Israel represents itself as a Jewish state, and anyone referred to simply as an Israeli— rather, say, than as an Israeli Arab or as a Christian Israeli—would in many, perhaps even most, normal contexts be assumed to be Jewish. The existence of Israel as a Jewish state thus provides a space for a developing Jewish identity that takes as the main strand of its weave that of an essentially secular national membership alone. This is not to say that there will not be many for whom their understanding of their national commitment remains intimately bound up with what they understand of their religious commitments. It will doubtless remain true that certain key elements of the national culture, familiar in one form or another to everyone, will have had their roots in what was once practiced and in some sense, no doubt, believed in as a living God-centered religion. But it can, of course, come about that these roots be so suc-

9 8  JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PA RT I C U L A R

cessfully transplanted into the newly realized specifically national soil as to make it possible for this grounding to provide a reference point for a version of Jewish identity that no longer needs that which had been provided hitherto by the persistence of an active core of religious commitment. According to Menachem Brinker,24 this “symbiosis of religiosity and nationalism” started to break down long before the creation of the state of Israel. “Before the last two centuries,” as he says, “you could not ask a Jew if he looked upon belonging to the Jewish community in national or in religious terms. The question would not have made sense to him as separating religion from nationality was as inconceivable to him as it was for the image of the Jew in the mind of the gentile.” But with the coming of modernity this symbiosis broke down in two ways. First came the Jewish thinkers and leaders of the community in France, Germany and other west-European countries who were eager to join the new nation-states predicted by the thinkers of the Enlightenment and then realised by the French Revolution. There was a new deal which offered the Jews full civil rights on the condition that they give up their claim to be a separate nation and declare their loyalty to the territorial nation in which they lived. . . . According to this modern interpretation  .  .  . [the uniqueness of the Jews] is just a cultural affair; it is a confessional religion (on all fours with Catholicism or Protestantism) or it is an ethical school or a philosophy of life not necessarily tied to any specific ethnicity. . . . About a hundred years later came a counter-movement initiated mostly by Hebrew writing intellectuals and thinkers in Russia. They rejected angrily the western new philosophy of Judaism and its attempt to exorcise any nationalist trait out of Jewish identity. . . . According to this second modern outlook the Jews are above anything else a separate and distinct people . . . religion is only one of their cultural possessions . . . and a Jew is a member of this distinct nationality even when he is not a believer and when he does not practise religion. . . . Different Jews grasp today their communal identity in three different ways. There are the followers of the two modern conceptions—the older one is acceptable to the majority of Diaspora Jews

JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND TH E PA RT I C U L A R  9 9

and the recent nationalistic one is acceptable to most Israelis—and there are those who adhere to the oldest traditional view according to which you cannot separate in Jewishness nationality and religion. Since these three different conceptions are very much alive, there is no end to the confusion.25

In fact this more modern sense of a Jewish identity secured by the fact of “belonging” to an indisputably recognizable nation-state can no doubt extend to non-Israeli Jews of the Diaspora as well as to the actual citizens of that state—the more confidently so insofar as the option remains always open to them of aliyah, of their actually picking themselves up and going to take up Israeli citizenship, however remotely impractical that option may be in terms of their personal situations. To that extent, and to the (far from wholly unambiguous) extent that the state of Israel continues to provide on equal terms for its religious and secular citizens alike, there may indeed be many for whom the question of what it is that marks them out as Jewish can be effectively disentangled from all reference to any ongoing observance of Judaism as the religion of the Jews. As things still stand, of course, the history of the Jews as a diasporic and widely dispersed congeries of communities, related to each other more or less closely, more or less remotely by the overlapping varieties of a common core of religious tradition and practice (and, it can never be forgotten, by a varying, but generally common experience of discrimination, pressure, outright persecution, and semi-isolation from the surrounding non-Jewish worlds) remains of such vivid memory as to provide reference points still very largely sufficient for the recognition and self-recognition of the great majority of all those who might be counted or who would count themselves as Jews. Moreover, the religious tradition itself contains a multitude of unmistakable references to a Jewish “nation” that was once clearly established as such and support for which, as now reestablished, remains a matter of both ritual and deeply felt religious commitment. It may have been possible for people such as my grandfather, who died in 1938 before the war and well

1 0 0  JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PA RT I C U L A R

before the establishment of the state of Israel, to interpret these references in terms of some sort of spiritual symbolism rather than in those of any practical political program, but, as I well remember my own father saying in the late 1940s, after the establishment of that state, the old forms of Jewish anti-Zionism had simply lost their relevance. For the immediately foreseeable future, then, the two central strands of the multiweave (or “family relationship”) concept of a Jewish identity, namely, that of adherence to Judaism in one of its recognizable versions as the Jewish religion and that of membership of a certain recognizable community of communities will almost certainly remain intertwined to one degree or another. It is a community marked by a certain historical continuity of family ties and by a certain ensemble of traditions, whether this community of communities be thought of in terms of a “nation,” a “people,” or, with increasing implausibility, a “race.” The traditional “culture” of even the most secular of Israeli and Israel-orientated Jews will surely continue to have many of its recognizably ultimate roots in a tradition that was once genuinely religious, while the religious ceremonies and language of prayer of even those Jews most firmly rooted in the ways of life and national commitments of the different countries of their Diaspora will no doubt continue to carry seemingly ineliminable references to a Jerusalem and to an Israel of ancient times and of ancient aspiration. And within the broad and indeterminate area mapped out by this complex identity, different (and even very differing) communities or subgroups of those who recognize themselves or are recognized by others as Jews will equally surely attach very different weights to one strand or another of this identity— weights differing in particular as to what may be called the two central national and religious strands and differing even to the extent that not all those who identify themselves under one head or the other as Jews may even be willing to grant each other recognition as such. That said, there remains the basic apparent paradox of an identity fashioned around references both to a particular social or national entity and to a religion claiming to enshrine a truth of universal validity— a national entity which, moreover, contains among the most significant

JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND TH E PA RT I C U L A R  1 0 1

elements of its own traditional culture some that have indisputable roots in just such a religion, and a religion which, while claiming universal validity, has nevertheless always understood itself as being that of a particular people. This tension is to be found very well expressed in the passage that I have already quoted from my grandfather’s Truth in Religion and Other Sermons: “the question of making the truth known . . . is independent of the question whether the Jews are not merely a religious community, but also a nation. . . . If the Jews are a nation, then it must be possible for the members of that nation to include believers in many creeds, and if Judaism is more than a tribal religion, then it must be possible for the believers in that religion to include members of many nations.” What is one to make of an identity that embodies within itself the tension of a seemingly irresolvable paradox? A seemingly irresolvable paradox? There are, of course, those who would argue that its resolution is not only possible but is almost absurdly simple, once it is accepted that the religious strand in the weave of Jewish identity need be accorded no more importance than that of a cultural relic, a set of traditional practices whose strength as signifiers of continuity need in no way be weakened by the fact that they are no longer illuminated by any sort of cognitive belief nor encumbered, therefore, by an embarrassing commitment to universal validity. This argument is both so influential and so important in its own right that it calls for a further chapter to itself.

five JEWISH IDENTITY 3 A PURELY SECULAR VERSION?

Regarding identity—there is no need to teach identity. Identity is just a metaphor that says that we make an album for ourselves of many pictures, good and bad, that we take or that are taken of us. We can sharpen some images and remove others. So we should sharpen certain elements of our culture and by doing so perhaps we can create greater awareness of certain aspects of our identity. In Israel, where we live by the Jewish calendar, use the Sabbath as our day of rest, where the Jewish and Israeli holidays dictate our way of life, we have a Jewish identity anyway. We need to learn the culture, and this culture will reshape our identity, which has both empirical and intellectual aspects. D R . YA’A R A B A R O N , V I C E P R E S I D E N T F O R A C A D E M I C A F FA I R S

Bezalel Academy of Art and Design

The Posen Foundation, responsible for the organization of the conference at which Dr. Baron was a participant, is dedicated to making available a thoroughgoing program of education in what it calls secular Judaism. Felix Posen has given his own personal account of his motivations in establishing his foundation in an interview with Ruthie Blum Leibowitz when he attended the Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: I was born and grew up as an Orthodox Jew in Germany. When I was 10, my family emigrated to the United States . . . and I attended a Talmud Torah school. . . . We were taught to say prayers in a language we didn’t understand; it could have been Japanese or Sanskrit for all it mattered. . . . But very few religious Jewish kids who attend Talmud Torah schools

JEWISH IDENTITY 3: A PURELY SECU L A R V E R S I O N ?  1 0 3

really know what they’re doing. . . . Along with my own Torah studies, I also went to a regular high school, and eventually university, and I learned an awful lot of other things—other philosophies and other histories. . . . At that particular moment in time, I knew nothing whatsoever about any form of Judaism other than the strictly yekke [German-Jewish] Talmud Torah kind of schooling.  .  .  . [Judaism] most definitely is not a race. . . . If you ask the religious, they will say that Judaism is a religion. . . . Most secular Jews will tell you they don’t know what it is. Those of us who are interested in the field define Judaism as a culture, which includes religion. Most certainly, religion is part of our culture. . . . But whether one emphasizes the cultural part or the religious is personal. . . . The reason I went into what I’m doing, basically, is when I started talking to students at universities—friends of my grandchildren, for example—who called themselves Jewish, and I asked them what that means, the vast majority said “I don’t really know; my parents are Jewish; I went to Sunday school and learned prayers, but I don’t remember a thing.” And I thought: This is ridiculous. . . . Some of these people are going to be Nobel Prize winners, yet they talk about Judaism in kindergarten form. There must be something that can be done on a different level. So I ask myself; if you do not practise religion, what is left in Judaism? Why bother to call yourself a Jew? And that’s how the whole concept of teaching Judaism as a culture got started. And it is absolutely not an anti-religious thing; it’s only pro, pro, pro—pro-understanding what it means to be a Jew. . . . I have no problem studying religious Judaism—I just don’t believe in it. It’s part of our culture. Anyone who denies that doesn’t want to look at historical truths. I feel very positive about Jewish culture.1

The approach adopted by the Posen Foundation, then, “views a cultural perception of Judaism as one of several possibilities available to the modern secular Jew, along with outlooks such as national or ethnic perceptions.”2 But it is clearly betting on culture to provide the crucial thread of continuity to a Jewish identity that has lost or explicitly renounced all reference to Judaism as a living religion. “Culture” is likewise a key concept in Yaakov Malkin’s admirably succinct account of how he sees the matter in his What Do Secular Jews

1 0 4  JEWISH IDENTITY 3: A PURELY SECULAR VERS I O N ?

Believe: “FREE JEWS—that is, Jews free from the dominion of Halachic religion, free from an exclusive religious interpretation of mitzvot, from a religious interpretation of Jewish celebration, traditions and culture, Jews free of one inflexible view of the Bible and post-biblical literature—such Jews believe in: THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE the ways of realizing one’s Jewishness.”3 He would seem also to share Dr. Baron’s skepticism with regard to any possible usefulness of attempts to think in terms of a Jewish identity: “When Judaism is perceived as a pluralistic culture, the attempt to educate toward a particular Jewish identity and toward the acceptance of the ‘values of Judaism’ faces an obvious difficulty. Judaism is neither an ideology nor a religion but a culture encompassing many ideologies and different versions of religion. Hence it is both impossible and unnecessary to educate toward the ‘values of Judaism’”4 While neither Malkin nor Dr. Baron would seem, then, to attach too much importance to the concept of identity as such, or at any rate to its teaching, Dr. Baron is nevertheless clear that “in Israel, where we live by the Jewish calendar, use the Sabbath as our day of rest, where the Jewish and Israeli holidays dictate our way of life, we have a Jewish identity anyway.” But, as was the case with the passage from Avishai Margalit’s article in the New York Review of Books quoted at the beginning of chapter 3, we are left with the question of the proper reference of the “we” in whose name she is here speaking. In some sense it may just about be true that all who live in Israel do so by the Jewish calendar—though even this, if indeed a truth, must be in need of considerable qualification. But there is no plausible sense in which the nonJewish citizens of Israel could be said to use the Jewish Sabbath as their day of rest, still less to “have a Jewish identity anyway.” So we have, as before, this question of who exactly (or even inexactly) is to be understood as being included in this “we” whose reference is thus taken so naturally for granted. It is, of course, true that for Israelis in general—including the nonJewish citizens of Israel—the answer to this question may be presumed to be much less problematic than for those, Jews and non-Jews

JEWISH IDENTITY 3: A PURELY SECU L A R V E R S I O N ?  1 0 5

alike, who live in the “outside” world. Here, to take another example, is what Amos Oz, speaking for himself, had to say a few weeks after the Six-Day War:5 I am a Jew and a Zionist. In defining the nature of my identity I do not rely on religion, for I stand outside it. I have not learned to have recourse to verbal compromises like “the spirit of our Jewish past” or “the values of Jewish tradition,” for values and tradition alike derive directly from tenets of faith in which I cannot believe. I am incapable of separating Jewish values and Jewish tradition from their source, which is commandment, revelation and faith. . . . A Jew, in my vocabulary, is someone who regards himself as a Jew, and also someone who is forced to be a Jew. A Jew is someone who admits to being a Jew. . . . If he does not admit to any connection with the Jewish people, then, in my view at least, he is not a Jew, though religious law defines him as such. A Jew, in my opinion, is one who chooses to share the fate of other Jews, or who is condemned to do so. To be a Jew means to relate mentally to the Jewish past. . . . To be a Jew means to relate to the Jewish present . . . to take pride and participate in the achievement of Jews as Jews, and to share responsibility for injustice done by Jews as Jews (responsibility, not guilt). Finally, to be a Jew means to feel that when a Jew is persecuted because he is a Jew— that means you.

There is here something strikingly reminiscent of Israel Ben-Yehuda’s 1955 direction to the effect that “any person declaring in good faith that he is Jewish shall be registered as a Jew.”6 But this, however generous in implication and however charged with entirely understandable emotion, can only be a very secular view of the matter. The most liberal of Liberal rabbis is hardly likely to accept self-declaration as Jewish by a hitherto indisputably non-Jewish person to count as a proper form of conversion, even if the declaration appears to be made in the very best of good faith. In any case, and religious considerations apart, room has surely to be left for the perfectly realistic possibility that a person may, for whatever reason, be led to make such a declaration and yet be in all good faith mistaken.

1 0 6   JEWISH IDENTITY 3: A PURELY SECULAR VERSI O N ?

In “defining the nature of his identity,” Amos Oz declares that he has “not learned to have recourse to verbal compromises like ‘the spirit of our Jewish past’ or ‘the values of Jewish tradition,’ for values and tradition alike derive directly from tenets of faith in which I cannot believe.” For, he goes on, “I am incapable of separating Jewish values and Jewish tradition from their source, which is commandment, revelation and faith.” Again, however much one may sympathize with the spirit in which this is said, there remains something distinctly problematic about it. Is one, for example, to think of “the values of Jewish tradition” as exclusively Jewish or only as characteristically so? If it is the latter, then clearly enough one would not need to be Jewish in order to share whatever the values in question might be—very much as my grandfather maintained that one did not have to be Jewish to share what he took to be Judaism’s central doctrines concerning the nature of God. It is evident, however, that the Jewish tradition consists of much more than adherence to a certain set of values—unless, of course, but in the context rather implausibly, one takes his reference to “the values of Jewish tradition” to refer simply to the those attached to observance of the traditional (and for the most part traditionally religious) Jewish practices. So how is one to understand the terms in which Amos Oz does appear to “define his identity”? “A Jew, in my vocabulary, is someone who regards himself as a Jew, and also someone who is forced to be a Jew. . . . If he does not admit to any connection with the Jewish people, then, in my view at least, he is not a Jew, though religious law defines him as such.” But quite apart from the fact that there may exist different and disputed versions of how rightly to construe Jewish religious law, depending on the authority to whom such disputes may be referred, Israeli law regarding such matters as marriage, liability to military service, and so on is itself interdependent with religious law in its determination of the criteria for Jewish identity. And to declare oneself a Jew according to the terms of Oz’ vocabulary would clearly not be sufficient to satisfy either the religious or the relevant legal requirements. In his (admittedly actively controversial) book Comment le peuple juif fut inventé the

J EWISH IDENTITY 3: A PURELY SECU L A R V E R S I O N ?  1 0 7

historian Shlomo Sand recounts how Gisèle, a strictly nonreligious French student born of a non-Jewish mother (but whose Jewish father and paternal grandmother had both been caught up in the Holocaust), having decided to emigrate to Israel, applied to the Jewish Agency in Paris to be recognized as Jewish.7 She knew, of course, that, so far as the religious authorities were concerned, she could not be counted as such, but thought that her family history—her grandmother had in fact perished in Auschwitz—would provide her with sufficiently Jewish credentials. Faced with the inevitable refusal of her request, she asked the official dealing with her case if he himself was a religious believer. He acknowledged that he was not, whereupon she indignantly challenged him to explain how one indisputably nonreligious Jew could demand of another, equally nonreligious, that she should convert as a necessary condition for achieving recognition as a Jew in his country. To which his abrupt (but perfectly correct) reply was that this was the law, pointing out, in addition, that her father would not have been able to marry her mother in Israel. She was, says Sand, left to conclude that, although Jewish in her own eyes and, having declared herself a Zionist, in those of everyone who knew her as well, she was still not sufficiently Jewish to count as such for the State of Israel. Nor, of course, would however obstinate a refusal to admit to any connection with the Jewish people—whether out of personal conviction or for the only too practical purposes of social or even physical survival—have served to protect someone believed to be of Jewish origin from ostracism or persecution, above all from a persecution such as that of the Nazis. And it would be obviously absurd to suggest that Amos Oz does not know all this only too well. So how is one to take his declaration? Not, surely, as an attempt at a careful conceptual construction of a Jewish identity free of all possible entanglement with religiously determined criteria of any kind, but rather as some sort of personal Declaration of Independence of religion so far as his own certitude of being Jewish is concerned. The fact is, of course, that so far as the native-born citizens of Israel are concerned, there is no room for practical uncertainty as to who is to be counted as Jewish and who is

1 0 8  JEWISH IDENTITY 3: A PURELY SECULAR VERSI O N ?

not, for this is something that is recorded on their birth certificates. And here, once again, we find ourselves brought back to the strength and complexity of the ways in which the identification of Jews as Jews is in the end tied up with reference to traditional Jewish religious beliefs and practice. One does not, of course, have to be Jewish to be recognized as a citizen of the state of Israel. But it is a condition of this civic recognition that one should be at the same time officially recognizable as being either Jewish or non-Jewish. And if one does not start off as Jewish by virtue of birth to an already recognizably Jewish mother, then the only way in, so to speak, is that of some acceptable form of conversion to the Jewish religion. None of this is to deny the many, and frequently deep, differences between Jews of differing convictions as to what is or is not acceptable as properly Jewish religious doctrine and doctrinally associated practice and as to who is or is not to be accepted as authoritative in determining such matters—differences over the long course of time and differences between one form of Jewish community and another that only too clearly extend right up to the present day—nor that such differences include differences as to the criteria that should or should not be taken as basic to the establishment of a Jewish identity. Nor is it to deny that, as things are, both in Israel and the Diaspora, the notion of a purely secular Jewish identity, the option of characterizing oneself as a strictly nonreligious Jew or the nonoption of being so identified by others, make perfectly good sense. The question as before is, however, whether the meaningful availability of both does not ultimately depend on the continuing survival of a core community or variety of communities of religiously committed and actively practicing Jews. No doubt the question presents itself differently in the cases of Israel and of the Diaspora. In Israel, as Dr. Baron points out, “we live by the Jewish calendar, use the Sabbath as our day of rest, [and] the Jewish . . . holidays dictate our way of life.” Such a situation does not so much depend for its persisting survival on any reference, however covert, to, for example, the originally religious significance of the Sabbath day or to the survival of the synagogue with a still committed and

JEWISH IDENTITY 3: A PURELY SECU L A R V E R S I O N ?  1 0 9

active congregation as on the socially effective structures of a statedetermined working week and year8—though it is true that the (for the presently foreseeable future highly unlikely) disappearance of any religiously committed section of the population, and with it the disappearance both of all institutionalized religious authority and of all religiously defined political parties, would be bound to bring about changes in the criteria for specifically Jewish nationality and in the laws governing such things as marriage. One can imagine a variety of ways in which the state might simply “lay down the law” in such matters and how people in general might come simply to accept such politically and nonreligiously determined law as effectively definitive. But while such a transformed State of Israel might be able to sustain a recognizably Jewish cultural structure to everyday life within that state, and with it a concept of Jewish identity that had lost all contact with its one-time religious roots, it is much harder to see how the same could be true of the Jewish communities of the Diaspora. In his De Gaulle, Israel et les Juifs,9 Raymond Aron poses the question “La communauté juive est-elle ethnique, culturelle, religieuse ou nationale?” and answers himself “La réponse reflète inévitablement la complexité du reel, les equivoques des concepts et la singularité de l’expérience juive.”10 He is at one with all those who affirm that “les juifs ne constituent pas un groupe anthropologique distinct, comparable à ceux que les savants appellent une race”11 and maintains that “en l’absence d’une Eglise et d’une hiérarchie ecclésiastique, les communautés juives disperses ne vivaient pas la meme histoire et n’avaient pas consciemment la volonté d’être une nation.”12 As for these scattered Jewish communities, “[elles] n’avaient en commun que la religion (non sans variation secondaires des croyances et surtout des rites). Par rapport au milieu, les communautés juives constituaient plus et autre chose qu’une communauté religieuse. Les unes par rapport aux autres, elles n’avaient d’autres liens qu’une foi, fondée sur un Livre et ses commentaires.”13 It is no doubt true that, whatever their views about the policies pursued by the national government of Israel may be (and whatever their readiness or their reluctance to express

1 1 0   JEWISH IDE NTITY 3: A PURELY SECULAR VERSI O N ?

these views before the non-Jewish world at large), a great majority of Jews in the Diaspora of today—including the no doubt great majority of that majority who would have no intention of making aliyah and going there definitively to live—feel some deep attachment to and responsibility for Israel, both in what it does well and in what it does not, as if they in some sense shared in that responsibility. And no doubt true too that, as things are, Jews in their different Diaspora communities may choose to lead purely secular lives, taking their holidays at Christmas and Easter, on New Year’s Day and July 4th, as the local case may be; if they go to synagogue at all, many will do so only on the High Holy Days and then primarily in order to join in with family or friends and thus retain in their own eyes and in those of the world around them their identity as Jews. This is a no doubt entirely real possibility for them so long as synagogues with their faithful if diminishing congregations continue to function as such and so long as there remains a sufficient nucleus of those committed to keeping alive the religious practices and observances on which the wider and not specifically religious Jewish culture and learning is based. One has nevertheless to wonder how long such a secular Jewish identity would survive as a living option in a context where there was no state to impose the stability of a recognizably Jewish-symbolic structure of public life. One can indeed only wonder; for the question, being an essentially empirical one, can have no assured answer based on theoretical speculation alone. Societies may vary very significantly in the ways in which they relate to their own history, real or mythologized as it may be, and in their perception of their own continuity with it—just as individuals vary in their ways of relating to the time and continuities or discontinuities of their own lives. Thus for some the memories of a shared past may be sufficiently powerful to constitute, virtually on their own, an at least partially shared present. But memories, if they are to operate in this way, need to be kept genuinely alive by a shared public symbolic practice. There are, of course, many different ways in which a society may make of its memories a pervasive component and effectively living part of its ongoing public culture and self-conception—through

JEWISH IDENTITY 3: A PURELY SECU L A R V E R S I O N ?  1 1 1

its educational programs, its popular literature, the productions of its media, and so on. Or it may preserve its history as little more than a form of public ceremonial or “costume performance,” whose origins and once living significance may be very largely forgotten, while the outer trappings of that history continue to function as a more or less effective factor of reassurance in togetherness and in a shared social persistence in difference from others. (One may think, for instance, of the British monarchy, of Beefeaters, of much parliamentary ritual, among many other features of still contemporary British life.) A strictly secular state of Israel, if ever religious allegiances and, with them, the religious parties should in fact disappear, might nevertheless lay it down not only that the history of Judaism as the Jewish religion continue to be studied and taught in its schools and universities, but also that Israelis “continue to live by the Jewish calendar [and to] use the Sabbath as [their] day of rest, [while] the Jewish and Israeli holidays [continue to] dictate [their] way of life.” At the same (as of now still purely hypothetical) time, Jewish Israelis might still be distinguished from others by, on the one hand, reference to descent from mothers and grandmothers whose Jewishness had at some stage in that receding line been recognized as such by the appropriate religious authorities or, on the other hand, by the invention of some sort of secular naturalization ceremony as a substitute for what used to be an officially religious conversion. At that point Jewish Israelis might well be justified in saying that “we” have a secular Jewish identity anyway, give or take any remaining uncertainties there might be as to who exactly should be presumed to be included in that “we.” Jews who remain (and who intend to continue) rooted in their various homelands of the Diaspora could naturally not expect to have their lives as citizens regulated by the Jewish calendar and holidays, nor that Jewish history and tradition form part of the educational programs of whatever happened to be the nation-state in which they were domiciled. It is this latter deficit in the conditions necessary to the maintenance of a secular Jewish identity that the Posen Foundation seeks to remedy (not only in the Diaspora, indeed, but also in Israel itself inso-

1 1 2   JEWISH IDENTITY 3: A PURELY SECULAR VERSI O N ?

far as the transmission of the historical Jewish traditions and culture tends there too to remain largely in the hands of the religious establishments). There are already, of course, many decidedly nonbelieving Jews who nevertheless hold closely to their identity as members of a Jewish community by way of their synagogue attendance on the High Holy Days and, in many cases, by seeing to it that their children are in turn symbolically initiated into the community in performing their bar or bat mitzvah. It is true too that there exist secular—that is to say, agnostic or even atheistic—rabbis whose function it is to act as scholars and teachers of Jewish culture and traditions and, as such, as leaders and consolidators of the communities that so employ them. And yet . . . one has once again to wonder—to wonder for how long synagogues might continue to exist as living centers of their communities if services were no longer performed within them or if it was understood by all that they were performed simply in the spirit of a respectful historical charade with no other significance being attributed to the words that were spoken or to the enactments that accompanied them. There is, certainly, no theoretical limit to the time within which or to the number of generations across which communities and community identity might be sustained in this way without any inner core of those committed to upholding as true the fundamental religious beliefs expressed in their practice. Furthermore, pressures of one sort or another from the surrounding world can constitute a particularly effective factor in consolidating the communities concerned in their determination to resist and to persist as such. And so one comes back to the question of whether the persistence of a space for a purely secular or religiously agnostic Jewish identity is not in the end dependent on another persistence, namely, that of a central core of religiously fully committed Jews, practicing according to their beliefs (whether these take a fully Orthodox or a more Liberal form) to which the nonreligious are, as I used to put it to myself, in some sense marginal. (It might also be argued that the persistence of a relatively untroubled space within the wider non-Jewish world for that central religiously committed core is, in the last resort, reciprocally de-

JEWISH IDENTITY 3: A PURELY SECU L A R V E R S I O N ?  1 1 3

pendent on the existence on its margins of Jews who neither practice nor believe, but who are readily identifiable and self-identifying as such and who may be in very many ways better equipped to serve as an interface between the core community and the non-Jewish outer world.) Nor would it seem implausible to speculate that with the disappearance of all genuinely religious Jewish practice and belief, if ever that should come about, what might survive as a purely secular version of Jewish identity would tend to take increasingly different forms in Israel and the Diaspora, where the practical conditions and implications of adherence or nonadherence to that identity would inevitably be so very different. In a “Jewish State” the possession of a Jewish identity, while it might hardly be a matter of personal self-affirmation or choice, must surely figure as a, if not the, “most significant centre of meaning in or to my life” as “lying in the fact and nature of my membership of . . . some significant institution or group”;14 in the Diaspora, on the other hand, while it might still find general acknowledgment as a fact that this or that individual came from a family whose background was rooted in a tradition of Jewish culture and community, the chances that this fact should constitute the “most significant centre of meaning” in that individual’s life are far more likely to diminish over the generations. And that in turn—if, once again, it should ever in fact come about—could hardly be without influence on the ways in which and the feeling with which Israel as the Jewish State and the Jewish Diaspora (or Diasporas) lived and negotiated their relations with each other. As things are, of course, none of this can be more than what one might call motivated speculation—motivated by a concern for the many peculiarities and potential discomforts as well as by the countervailing potential advantages of an identity on the margins. That said, there is one other well-known problem, or set of problems, to be found lying within the very notion of a Jewish State, problems that would seem to remain even for the most secular of versions of its Jewish identity. It is generally claimed on Israel’s behalf that it is a democracy, the only example indeed of a working democracy in its part of the world; and there are, certainly, many important arguments to be made in sup-

1 1 4  JEWISH IDE NTITY 3: A PURELY SECULAR VERSI O N ?

port of such a claim. This is certainly not the place to take part in the already sufficiently complicated web of discussions concerning the institutional conditions and possibilities of different types of so-called democracy, but on any account of the matter it must surely be a matter of principle that a state that aspires to democracy must treat all its citizens as being equally part of its people. There is, of course, nothing self-contradictory in the notion of a state that would accord citizenship only to provable members of a given race (insofar as it might be possible to establish reliable criteria for such membership), of a given cultural allegiance (again insofar as it might be possible to establish reliable criteria for such allegiance), or of a given religion. But while Israel does not seek to impose any such restrictions on its rights of citizenship, it is clear that its non-Jewish citizens cannot really be counted as being “equally part of its people.” One is brought back once more to the source of tension, even of paradox, that has lain at the heart of Judaism, the religion of the Jews, from the earliest times of its self-understanding—that seemingly inescapable tension between the demands both of the particular and the universal: Israel, the Jewish State, that seeks impossibly to be, at one and the same time, both the state of the Jews and yet, democratically, that of all its citizens, Jew and non-Jew alike. In this, once again, the Jews somehow turn out to be “like everyone else only more so.” For this is not a problem of the Jewish State alone. It is one too, give or take many institutional differences of detail, for states that define themselves as Islamic, as well as, if in perhaps attenuated form, for those which, by their constitution or by virtue of their public traditions, present themselves to themselves and to the world as Christian. It may also be found lurking within the incommensurable values that underlie the more general and religiously nonspecific ideal of a liberal democracy itself. For, whatever others might find a place within a full list of those values, commitments both to universality and a basic respect for individuals are surely to be found among them. But states, however large, cannot be conceived of as committed to extending their boundaries of citizenship so far as to include absolutely everyone who might wish to be so included—whatever might seem to

JEWISH IDENTITY 3: A PURELY SECU L A R V E R S I O N ?  1 1 5

be the demands of a universal respect for all human beings in an equality of their relations with one another. In other words, the very notion of citizenship has as its inseparable correlates those of noncitizenship and civic exclusion. Here, however, we are in incipient danger of embarking on a very different and even larger chapter of our story. It is time to return to the concerns from which we started out.

six AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THREADS‚ AND AN INCONCLUSIVE CONCLUSION

The main guiding threads of the preceding chapters—those which, however disparate appearances may be, hold them (more or less) together—have been 1. the continuation of a long-time pursuit of a better understanding of the distinction and relations between value judgments and statements of fact and 2. a quasi-autobiographical concern to see where I stand now in relation to what, whether I was fully aware of it at the time or not, must have been one of the main questions to which I was seeking an answer when starting out in philosophy—a need, one might say, to establish my own identity both in the Charles Taylor sense of determining (i.e., deciding) where to take my (philosophical) stand and in that of determining (establishing) for myself a line of developing continuity over time. All biography, of course, is involved with and dependent on a whole set of assumptions concerning the identity over time of whoever its subject might be; and in the case of autobiography the author is bound to be involved, at various points and in various ways, in the taking of stands as well. These two guiding threads are, of course, closely interconnected—indeed, it would be equally true to say that the questions of their interconnection have in effect served as the overall guiding thread of this book. The main and more evidently “philosophical” concern throughout has after all been that of knowing whether in acknowledging the undeniable facts of who

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 1 7

and what I was in terms of my place in my family, and of its position in the community (or communities) to which it belonged, I was ipso facto committed to endorsing the judgment that certain specific obligations were incumbent upon me. In other words, did the facts of my own inherited identity as the eldest son of a particular Jewish family with its own well recognized tradition of service in and to the wider circles of Jewish community—did these facts, as they confronted me and as I had in my turn to confront them, include, as if by virtue of some demonstrably indissociable annex, a further set of as it were “normative facts” concerning how I ought or ought not to order my life. And if my three central chapters on different aspects of Jewish identity may not wholly unfairly be seen as expanding into something of a digression from that main “philosophical” argument as such, the questions there raised have in my case been so closely connected with my attempts to follow that argument through that the “digression” has in effect imposed itself as an informally necessary one. The actual starting point of my more properly “philosophical” concern, the point from which it took off, was a more specific worry regarding the status of judgments of duty or obligation rather than one regarding some not very easily definable class of value judgments in general. It was a worry as to whether one might have to accept that one stood under certain obligations, whether or not one had ever agreed to take them on, very much in the same way as one had to accept that the more obviously “empirically given” facts of one’s situation were not to be changed just because one might find them to be unwelcome. Certainly anyone who has been accepted as qualified to practice as a doctor is thereby placed under a normally binding obligation of care for their patients’ health. It is nevertheless always possible for anyone who so desires to step out from that role and from its attendant obligations. For just as no one is compelled to seek qualification as a doctor in the first place, anyone wishing to do so may retire from the profession as and when they please. My question was rather whether, in being generally recognized as the bearer of an “externally” given identity, complete with the obligations traditionally attached to it, one might have

1 1 8  AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

to admit to having no rationally compelling right of personal dissent by way of dissociating oneself from that identity as so given and in particular from the obligations said to be inherent in it by the affirmation of one’s own differing values and thus of one’s own personally self-determined identity. Once one starts to try and think more systematically about such matters, however, it becomes clear that the problem is not to be taken at face value as if it was somehow a straightforward matter of the logical status of sentences containing words such as ought. Different languages organize these matters differently from each other, something that can obviously make for some notably tricky problems of translation. In any case, the slogan No “Ought” from an “Is” (derived, so one was led to believe, from Hume himself) is no more than a slogan. That, for instance, anyone who leaves London in the morning to go to Oxford either by road or by rail ought to be there in time for an afternoon appointment is no more or less than a factual assessment of the distance and times involved. One is thus led to look for a way of distinguishing properly “evaluative” uses of such terms as ought from their idiomatically recognizable uses in reporting on simple matters of fact, to look for some more general characterization of the problem and so, because what is at stake is the nature of the binding constraints of rational argument, to pose the question in terms of a class of “value judgments” in general and of their relations to an equally general class of “statements of fact.” One has, nevertheless, to ask whether the hope of being able to settle the matter under any such general headings as those of “facts” and “statements of fact,” on the one hand, and “values” and “value judgments,” on the other, is not fated to turn out to be a case of hope endlessly deferred. Different learned contributors to the dauntingly extensive literature on and around the topic over at least the last century have tended to use the key terms involved in a disconcertingly, if unsurprisingly, large number of different ways, and any attempt to pin down a stable and precise meaning for them must involve the use of other terms carrying in their turn an unavoidable potential of instabil-

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 1 9

ity until such time as their own meaning may seem to have been pinned down by use of a yet further set of potentially unstable terms and so on and so on. The chances are all too high that it will eventually become clear that the whole process has been one of going round in terminological circles. There is always the temptation to have recourse to a formal logic to serve as an underpinning of stability. But here, too, the hope of being able to determine such a logically decisive dividing line, between “statements of fact” and “value judgments,” as might serve to mark the impossibility of any rationally constraining passage from the one to the other is bound to end in disillusion. For no formal system, however well-constructed and rigorous it might be, can contain within itself rules of equally compelling rigor governing the translation of the relevant terms of practical speech and thought into those of the formal system itself. In nearly all—perhaps even all—societies, there will be generally recognized roles by reference to which their current (and perhaps even past and future designate) holders may be marked out or identified as the particular individuals they happen to be without those roles being thought so to cling to those individuals as to form a permanent and essential part of any proper account of just what and/or who they are. Thus someone may be generally known or identified as a doctor with all the obligations normally appropriate to that role (or even, when the society in question is small and sufficiently well demarcated, to be known as the doctor) without this being taken to constitute an inalienable aspect of his or her person as such. Indeed, and whether it is found acceptable or not, there should be no difficulty in understanding the claim that doctors might sometimes be justified in disregarding their prima facie obligatory concern for their patients’ health in the light of other overriding considerations—for example, a doctor called upon to treat a notorious mass killer and so to enable him to carry on with his life and activities as before. The very intelligibility of any such claim depends, of course, on the assumption that the doctor in question may be seen as distinct, qua individual, from his or her role as a doctor. But for roles whose institutionalization is understood in ways broadly analo-

1 2 0  AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

gous to that which “we” in “our” societies understand to be appropriate to that of a doctor, this is a distinction that should pose no serious problem. As we have noted, however, there are societies, or subsocieties, not all of whose institutionally recognized roles are understood as being in principle thus open either to access (if qualified) or to retreat on the basis of free individual decision. Consider, for the sake of a simplifying example, the case of an essentially homogeneous society. Many of its institutionally recognizable roles—call them type A roles—may well be so constituted as to be open to entry by suitably qualified candidates according to their own free decision, it being left equally up to them to decide whether and when to step down or resign. It may, however, provide also for roles—call them type B—from which their holders, once accepted as such, can step out only by way of socially approved procedures, acceptance of which may be built into the defining conditions of the roles in question. And, finally, it may generally be held that from certain of its recognized roles—call them type C— there can normally never be any socially sanctioned exit. Individual members of such a society who find themselves identified according to the prevailing rules as incumbents of roles of either type B or type C, may, for one reason or another, feel themselves unhappy and entrapped in their thus given role situations—either because as type B role incumbents they are unable to obtain socially approved release on terms acceptable to them or because as type C incumbents there is (normally) no socially recognized way of release at all. Such individual discontent must surely be in one way or another expressible as such within the conceptual resources of any society, whatever may be its established form or life. One may be perfectly capable of recognizing a set of obligations, a standard of behavioral assessment, as given in the forms of life and ruling assumptions of the society to which one belongs and as enshrined within the terms and concepts of its common language, while actively resenting the practical and judgmental implications that these assumptions may have. One possible reaction may be simply to submit, however reluctantly, to what one finds it im-

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 2 1

possible to deny is one’s role incumbent duty. Or one may opt to rebel by acting in accord with one’s own overriding preferences, thus rejecting in one’s practice the claims of what one nevertheless acknowledges to be one’s duty, even while admitting that what one chooses to do is wrong and properly open to general condemnation as such.1 To claim for one’s own (at any rate stronger and more persistent) individual preferences the status of representing an alternative set of values—or, to avoid the use of that much compromised term, to claim the freedom to determine for oneself what are and are not one’s obligations—to claim this not only as a right but as one’s own inescapably ultimate responsibility for taking one’s own stand in such matters— is, however, altogether another affair. These, however, are the sort of claims that one may expect to encounter when dissatisfaction with the existing norms is sufficiently widespread and if the examples set by those unhappy at finding themselves held to their socially determined roles, whether of type B or, above all, of type C, are of a force sufficient to lead to the formation of such a socially significant center of convergent dissent as to constitute an alternative center of norms and values. When this happens, it introduces into what had hitherto been a normatively homogeneous society an effective normative plurality—effective in providing for at least two importantly different ways of marking the conceptually crucial contrast between individual preference and desire and what the language common to all may underwrite as socially endorsed “values,” “norms,” or “obligations.” And it is precisely because both those whose parameters of thought are formed by their attachment to such a newly formed center of normative dissidence and those whose parameters of understanding remain rooted in the older and more traditional forms of life still belong to one and the same overall language community, and use its established vocabulary for marking the distinction between individual preference and desire and such given values, norms, and responsibilities as each new generation may be confronted with as something independent of whether they happen to like it or not, that they may find it not only difficult to understand each other but difficult to

1 2 2  AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

the point of near impossibility to comprehend the source and nature of their misunderstandings. This, as it now seems to me, must have been the nature of the difficulties in which I found myself when trying to understand how it could be that even those close to me and I could remain at such apparently intractable cross-purposes, unable properly to understand where each other was coming from, as we tried to work out what lay behind our evident disagreements. But these were not the only sources of uncertainty and disagreement into which I would have needed to see more clearly. Roles such as those of a doctor or a priest differ in many ways, yet there is in principle no room for uncertainty as to whether any given individual has been formally admitted as qualified to hold that role or not, while the obligations, duties, and responsibilities incumbent on qualified holders are reasonably explicit both in their quasi-formal definitions and in the common understanding of them. My own uncertainties at the time concerned my personal identity as the occupant of a certain familydetermined position and the nature of my family’s role and associated responsibilities within the wider community of which it formed a part and, in particular, of course, the question of just how those responsibilities might be thought to fall upon its individual members. And if reference to membership in this or that group may in many cases be used as an indicator of an individual’s identity in the sense of who among all others they are, this is very reasonably to be understood simply as a way of situating them on some relevant map. That an individual’s place upon some family and/or community map should be taken as constituting that individual’s “essential” identity as the incumbent of a given role and thus subject to whatever are held to be its attendant responsibilities and obligations is another matter altogether and one that is by no means so immediately evident. It may be objected, perhaps, that to characterize what are held to be the responsibilities and obligations inherent in membership in a given group in terms of a role is to stretch the use of that term beyond its normally accepted scope. The terms of an institutionally recognizable role are typically more clear-cut, and its attendant obligations and re-

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 2 3

sponsibilities more closely and explicitly defined, than those expected of its members by a community according to its generally understood traditions. There are, however, communities of which this is, in certain key respects, not true, communities according to whose traditions, as explicitly proclaimed by traditionally authorized authority, those born into them have no recognized right of secession, while certain very definite and distinctive rights and/or obligations may be attributed to their members of one gender or the other. That there may, and over time almost certainly will be, disagreement among members of any community as to what exactly the commands of its constitutive traditions may be, and what status should be accorded to them, goes without saying—and such disagreement may go along with disagreement as to where exactly the bounds of the community should be taken to lie and as to the terms according to which membership should be understood. When such disagreements go beyond the limits of scattered individual dissent—that of a few scholars, perhaps, or of a relatively limited handful of the generally dissatisfied—fissures may start to appear within a previously homogeneous community, which itself may tend toward becoming something more like a community of subcommunities, more or less mutually cooperative or fractious as the case may be, or, if this process goes too far, it may come to a point even of schism and with it the development, as from that point on, of two or more newly distinct traditions, each with its own “system” of authoritative self-interpretation. The possible variations on these themes are manifold, many of them being well exemplified by recent and contemporary transformations and retransformations of certain well-known religious and political formations. My personal perplexity then, to recapitulate once more, came from a need to understand how anyone could seriously think that the question of how I should order my own life could be settled simply by reference to the evidently indisputable facts of my own family identity together with those of its “identity” within the wider Jewish community. No doubt these latter “facts” were more open to dispute than were those of my position within my own family; nevertheless, once

1 2 4  AN ATTEMP T AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

established and, if possible, agreed, they could be taken as facts, but, as I saw it, nothing more. So how, I asked myself, could anyone think that matter-of-fact facts such as these could somehow include as an inseparable aspect of themselves a further set of extra or “supervenient” facts concerning the obligations and responsibilities that might equally have to be taken as somehow incumbent upon me? No doubt at all that in retrospective and reconstructive memory of what is now long past, I exaggerate both the extent to which I was conscious of the mix of my underlying motivations and that to which I was able at the time to conceptualize them this way. It did, however, seem to me that there was something very odd about the nature of the disagreements in which I found myself caught up. Were they, and however stressful they might be, simply a matter of clashing views as to where my basic obligations lay? Or was there not something more difficult to disentangle involved—rooted in fundamentally different assumptions as to whether such a disagreement might or might not be settled on a basis in principle as independent of all personal acceptance or refusal as any other matter of given fact? That I was a member of the family into which I had been born was not open to question. Equally there was (and is) no disputing the fact that membership of an institution typically constitutes or carries with it occupancy of a role within the institution and, as one of the conditions of membership, acknowledgment of such obligations as may be partly definitive of the role in question. “As one of the conditions of membership”: but such conditions, so it seemed to me, are surely to be thought of as those attached to admission to membership (or, in the case of those whose membership is, as it were, given to them long before they are capable of deciding such things for themselves, attached to the continuation of membership once they are deemed to have reached such a stage). The crucial questions were (and for many no doubt still are) whether membership in a group or institution to which one finds oneself “always already” belonging, as one of the indisputable facts of just exactly who one is, can carry with it the same sort of normative or “value-laden” conditions and responsibilities—and whether one must or can not be seen

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 2 5

as (conceptually) freely responsible to decide for oneself whether to continue in that membership or not—or whether, at least, to opt out of its attendant responsibilities, if one judges them to be unacceptable. It was on issues such as these that I seemed to find myself caught in a tangle of misunderstandings the very nature of which were anything but mutually understandable. Misunderstandings stemming from conflicting but deeply embedded assumptions concerning the relations between that part of the facts of one’s identity that may be agreed to be given as such and the normative elements that some may see as embedded in them will no doubt have occurred (and continue to occur) in many different contexts of social tradition and change than that of my own experience. And there were, as we have seen, plenty of other complexities to that context, above all those inherent (and inherently contestable) in the very concept of a Jewish identity. A Liberal Jew such as my grandfather, proud as he undoubtedly was of his own Jewish identity and of the long traditions in which it was rooted, may have believed that the best, if not the only, way of ensuring the continuing commitment of future generations was to purge what he saw as Judaism’s pure doctrinal core of what he took to be the many arcane and in the modern world strikingly outmoded practices with which it had become encrusted. The more Orthodox members of the community, on the other hand—or perhaps one should speak rather of members of the more Orthodox Jewish communities in the plural, saw my grandfather’s Liberal Judaism, with its jettisoning of so much traditional practice, as nothing more than an intermediate pausing-place on the way toward total assimilation and thus to a loss of Jewish identity altogether. Both those primarily committed to the purity of religious doctrine and those to the pious fidelities and practices of traditional observance are, however, likely to agree that a “merely” secular Jewish identity can have at best only an irrecoverably diminishing prospect of a more enduring life before it—except perhaps in the very special context of a, or now the, Jewish state—and even there one may harbor more than one kind of anxious doubt. And perhaps even the theologically purest version of religious

1 2 6   AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

doctrine is fated to succumb to an extended version of its own criticism of “outmoded” practices—the practice of reciting what seem to be intellectually untenable or vacuous prayers, for example—as (the Liberal) Emeritus Rabbi David Goldberg writes by way of conclusion to his article “The God of the Prayer Book Is Dead, Let’s Face It”: “Where does this leave Progressive Judaism? In thirty years’ time will we still gather at religious services to proclaim our belief in the great, mighty and awesome God filtered through the vitiated formulations of Forms of Prayer and Siddur Lev Chadash? I doubt it.”2 In the light of all this, what exactly—though exactly can hardly be the most appropriate word—might the “facts” of my family membership Jewish identity amount to? I had, certainly, been born into a family that saw itself and was seen by all, Jews and non-Jews alike, as being quite indisputably Jewish; I had had a generally Jewish upbringing—though not, certainly again, in any remotely Orthodox sense, and indeed one that was, at the same time, very largely typical of a generally Anglo-Saxon upbringing of a certain social class; I had undoubtedly been sensitized to what by the overall standards of the time were the relatively very mild anti-Semitic prejudices of those parts of the surrounding Gentile society to which I had been exposed, and, thus knowing that I was in some not very definite sense but nevertheless beyond all possible doubt a Jew, I had learned to be vaguely proud of such positive achievements as might be ascribed to any other Jews and somewhat less vaguely ashamed of any of what might seem to be their undeniable misdoings. This was all rather similar, no doubt, to the way in which one may learn to “identify” with fellow members of whatever institution—club, school, team, village, political party, etc.—to which one may know oneself and/or be held to belong, as if participating to some reflected degree in whatever may be their more directly acquired glory or shame. The question was whether any set of these facts could or had to be taken as constituting such conditions of membership as to amount to the ascription of certain specific and rationally indisputable obligations either, or both, to myself, to my Jewish family as such, or to the

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 2 7

community of Progressive Jews (including both Liberal and Reform) of which it was a member—or even, more generally perhaps, to the loose “community” of almost absurdly varying Jewish communities throughout the wider world. Many of these communities, of course, are committed to practices only very broadly recognizable to each other, and their views as to what is essential to an authentic Jewish life span a range notoriously and in some ways almost comically wide and disputatious. Among the problems involved in any attempt to sort out this entanglement are those of which class (or “community”) is to be included as a member of which other class (or “community”) as a matter of its own institutional identity, and those which turn around the question of individual membership transitivity. Thus was I, as a member of my own Jewish family, to be therefore counted as an ipso facto member of the community of Progressive Jews to which my family (part Liberal, part Reform) “belonged”? There was also (as there still is) room for much argument as to just what obligations and responsibilities are or are not to be counted as among the traditionally recognized conditions of membership of one class, community, group, or institution or another. All these arguments are highly resistant to any incontestably clear resolution. Important though they are, however, and whatever the facts as established might be as to the conditions and obligations commonly or traditionally attached to membership of this group or that, the crucial issues remain those of whether or not individuals are to be acknowledged as free and responsible for determining their “essential” identity for themselves. Is any such class membership as may be ascribed to them to be understood as no more than a contingently descriptive aid to their practical identification from among all other individuals—and, as such, no indissociable part of their identity either in the sense of that by and on which they might be expected to “take their stand” or in that of which marks them out as being the kind of the person that “essentially” they are? The fact is that virtually all the key concepts involved in any serious attempt to get a “logically” clear grip on these issues—concepts such as “value” and “value judgment,” “fact” and “statement of fact,” “mem-

1 2 8  AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

bership” and “belonging,” not to mention that of “identity” itself— turn out to be extraordinarily hard to pin down. Not that this should come as any sort of surprise. It is, after all, only within the artificial confines of a strictly formal language system that it makes sense to suppose that the use of terms, their meanings, and associated concepts can be kept from shifting about in their relationships with each other and, more generally, in the networks of meaning to which they “belong.” If a language, that of a given speech community just as that of any of that community’s individual members in his own particular use and understanding of it, is to be thought of as a form of life, it has to be recognized that a form of life inevitably evolves over time—and, very typically, in ways that not all the members of the community concerned may find it easy to adapt to, or even indeed to keep up with in their awareness of what has been happening to it and to them. The words that people use across the generations may remain for the most part ostensibly the same, while their contexts of common usage, including the ways in which people relate to themselves and each other, evolve in unforeseen and hitherto largely unforeseeable ways. (And this is one of the reasons why philosophy as an effort toward an ever better understanding of oneself, of one’s place in the world, and of the nature of one’s relations with others is an unending enterprise that calls for ever fresh beginnings which, “at the next cross-roads,”3 will in all probability turn out to have been less new than had at first appeared.) So is my identity to be thought of as a “fact,” a fact of who and what I am, something that I have to accept as given and with which I have somehow to come to terms—or is it something that I can or even have to choose or determine for myself? And, either way, does my identity somehow include, as something with which I have also to come to terms whether of acceptance or of personal refusal, any sort of commitments, responsibilities, or obligations? It is clear that I cannot, as an individual, choose what as a matter of fact are the responsibilities and obligations attached to a given role in any organization or social institution of which I am not the sole originator or for which I am not the sole socially recognized controlling agent—though there may always,

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 2 9

of course, be some greater or lesser margin of indeterminacy in the formulation of those responsibilities, a margin within which it may be up to me to determine just what they may involve in any given context or on any given occasion. But, the question remains, is it or is it not in the last resort up to me to determine for myself all the membership roles whose attendant obligations and responsibilities I am to acknowledge as mine? Or would the only options open to me be either to (try my best to) fulfill those obligations or, on the contrary, to flout them? When I first started out in philosophy, the widely prevailing view at the time was that the answer to this question was to be found in a proper understanding of the logic of rational argument. There was, certainly, a good deal of debate as to what sort of logic and what sort of rationality might be involved. At one extreme, I remember a colleague, a senior and very distinguished professor of logic and philosophy of science, showing me just two sheets of paper on which he had set down what he claimed to be a definitive proof of the impossibility of any valid deductive inference from purely factual premises to any sort of evaluative or normative conclusion. This consisted in a short sequence of symbolically formulated propositions, accompanied by an equally short set of definitions, claiming to show what the symbols were to be understood to represent. It goes without saying that in all its formal transitions his argument was impeccably valid. But this only meant, of course, that the whole problem was shifted one place back into that of how to understand the terms used in setting out the alleged definitions. Another widely discussed suggestion was that the problem was one to be analyzed in terms of the differences and relations between the logic of indicatives and that of imperatives. There were also a number of at the time influential attempts to recast the whole issue in terms of some sort of “informal logic,” for example that of so-called material rules of inference or of contextual implication.4 But, again, the ways in which any such implications or inferences might be judged to work or to fail would necessarily have to depend on how the overall context (in the very widest sense) was understood or on just what substantive content was taken to be included in any such “material rule”—

1 3 0  AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

and such understandings could obviously vary significantly as between different generations or between one part of a speech community and another and hence only too easily give rise to mutually misunderstood misunderstandings. The basic “fact of the matter” is that arguments and inferences can only be shown to be valid or invalid with, in principle, indisputable certainty when they are formulated within the meaning rules of a language system subject to the sort of commonly agreed and technically tight logical control under which it is naturally impossible that natural languages should ever be definitively brought. There are simply too many ways in which such terms as value, fact, norm, identity, and the rest can be pushed around in their relations with each other and with their many other more or less near idiomatic equivalents for it to be at all plausible that any one way of ordering them and their surrounding networks might stand as the only intellectually coherent and “perspective-invariant” account of how disagreements such as that from which I started out are to be settled. This does not mean that there is here no room for any seriously clarifying role for careful reasoning and analysis. But it does seem that one has in the end to recognize disagreements of this sort are not going to be resolved by purely logical considerations alone—whatever exactly one may or may not understand by referring in this way to “pure” logic. A language, it has by now been said often enough, is a form of life. That is to say, both that it grows and evolves, in response to the ways in which the varied social institutions, customs, and practices of the speech community of which it is the language evolve, and that a proper understanding of its meanings,5 as they are deployed in the construction and contests of argument and are thus crucial to their validation or invalidation, will be rooted in an at least implicit understanding of the forms of life in which they have their roots and which they reflect. In addition, moreover, to the evident problems involved in the translation from the language of one such community into that of another, and of the interpretation by members of one community, according to the terms of its own understandings, of the evidently (and not always so evidently) different practices and

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 3 1

understandings of others, speech communities do not in general have such sharp boundaries as might enable individuals to locate themselves with any immediate or transparent certainty in their conceptual relations with each other. Thus one generation may grow up to internalize a very different set of assumptions and expectations concerning the ways in which people relate to each other from those of their parents or grandparents, while still speaking what seems to them all to be the same language, even though many of its most relevant meanings may be in the course of rerooting themselves in a changed and changing social environment. How extensive and how gross do such shifts have to be for one to be justified in saying that, across the generations, people are to all intents and purposes no longer speaking the same language? To this too there will be no one definite answer to be found; all will depend on what one’s main intents and purposes in making the distinction might be. But the problem is clearly not one of transgenerational dislocation of meanings across the time of social evolution alone. Different elements of a society—different social classes, for example, or different immigrant groups with their own cultural and linguistic histories behind them—may speak what for most practical purposes may be recognized as a common language and yet in certain key contexts understand it in such different ways and on the basis of such significantly different presuppositions as to make mutual misunderstandings only too likely and frustratingly hard to pin down. So far as the so-called fact/value distinction is concerned, then, the possibly disappointing but, in the end, not very surprising answer has to be that all is going to depend on how far agreement may be possible on just how to pin down the terms fact and value and their cognates over any given range of contexts. Some contexts are clearly going to present much greater difficulties than others, and that of membership identity is undoubtedly one of the most problematic. In recent times there has been a great deal of attention focused on the term of identity itself and on the cluster of concepts associated with it. But the problem itself can be articulated without any special reliance on the use of this particular term as, for instance, one of, 1. whether the facts of who and

1 3 2  AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

what someone is are so bound up with their membership of one group or another as to be inseparable from it, 2. how far and in what cases the fact of membership is to be recognized as including a commitment to certain obligations or norms of behavior, and 3, how far and in what cases individuals are to be acknowledged as being in the last resort responsible for determining whether they are rightfully to be considered and treated as continuing members of any given group and, if so, on what terms. To none of these questions should one expect there to be straightforwardly noncontroversial answers—answers that anyone of “normal” rational competence should be expected to accept as a matter of clear thinking alone. Of these three questions the most crucial is probably the last one. But who is to say, and on what basis, whether or not individuals alone and as such have always the final responsibility, the last say, as it were, as to where their identities lies—as to with whom or with what they may choose to identify themselves, whether with such groups as those of which they may find themselves generally treated as members or with the values on which they may take their personal stand? Everything will depend on whether the ways in which the conceptual resources of those brought face to face with such a question allow or even commit them to thinking of individuals as ultimately and inescapably responsible for determining their own basic values and responsibilities and thus for their identities as the sort of persons they are “essentially” to be. But this cannot be just a matter of some somehow stand-alone concept of individuals on its own, so to speak, but one rather of how individuals are thought of in relation to society and societies in general, as also of the concepts available for the structure of thinking as to the nature and bases of obligations, responsibilities, and norms. Obligations are to be thought of as laid upon one as a charge— but by who or by what? By God, by one’s parents, by whatever group or groups to which one has to recognize oneself as belonging, by oneself? Once again the answers will depend not only on context, but—and in the most important contexts above all—on one’s whole system of beliefs and one’s manner of configuring the world. We come back once more to the notion of a language, a conceptual network, as a form of

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 3 3

life; and a form of life arises out of and will be sustained—if sustained it is—by a whole complex history and not, of course, as a pure construction of logical reasoning alone. If, as I have suggested, the antiprivate language argument is basically correct in claiming to show how individuals are dependent for their own access to intelligibility on their belonging to some at least potential speech community and being responsible to the constraints of its norms of meaningful usage, it can make little sense to suppose that they might set out to institute all their own meaning norms with no regard to their possible use in communication with others. On the other hand, once they have constituted themselves as members of a speech community with its own reciprocally established and/or generally recognized rules of meaning, once they are in possession of such membership and of the access to meanings that comes with it, they will no doubt be in a position to modify some of its rules and even to create new meanings for possible adoption by others—but not an entirely new system of meanings so far different as to be wholly inaccessible from within the language out of and from which it has been built. There is one further complication that has somehow to be taken into account. Logical relations such as those of implication and entailment, together with considerations of the validity or invalidity of arguments, hold, or fail to hold, between statements and/or propositions (and what may be at stake in opting to work out one’s position in terms of the one rather than the other is itself an issue of no little complexity). Whether one goes for statements or for propositions, however, the meanings of the terms employed in their formulation will obviously be crucial to any attempt to determine the nature of the logical relations between them. It is noteworthy, though, that, in the context of debates over the nature and status of the “fact/value distinction,” the talk is almost always of value judgments rather than of statements (or propositions) of value. One needs to ask, therefore, whether it would not be more appropriate to regard value judgments not so much as a class of propositions as one of a certain type of speech act, in which case one might argue that what constituted the utterance of a sentence as the

1 3 4  AN ATTEMP T AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

expression of a value judgment would be at least as much, if not indeed primarily, the force attaching to its utterance in the relevant context as the standard meanings of the terms employed in its formulation. Logical relations, one knows, hold between such nontemporal items as propositions or statements and not between events or acts as such. It is true that the term statement harbors its own ambiguity, as between the speech act of stating and that which is made or stated therein, and that, in a not so long ago usage, the term judgment behaved in very much the same dual way. It is true, too, that the question of just how and where to draw the distinction between meaning and force presents itself as a far from straightforward problem within the theory and philosophy of language and that, however complete one’s knowledge of the possible meanings of a given language’s vocabulary may be, if one is unaware of the forces standardly at play in their deployment in one context or another, one is in no position to use that language with any justified confidence as a means of mutually comprehensible communication.6 However all this may be, it is well known that the traditions, institutions, family structures, and “value systems” of some societies allow little space for the recognition and respect of individual persons as such and that those of others give to them a centrally important role. Overall, however, the relations of mutual dependence and always potential opposition between the demands of conformity to community norms and those of individual autonomy constitute yet another of those ultimately ineliminable polar tensions which characterize the human situation. The community in question may be a very small and restricted one, and the majority of the norms demanding a minimum conformity may be those of its language; but there can be no complete escape from the need to be capable of recognizing the distinction between the success and rewards of getting something right in accordance with those norms and the failure and inconveniences of getting it wrong. Equally, the sheer facts of our individuation through and by our spatiotemporal embodiments, and of the needs and desires associated with that embodiment, mean that the potential will always exist for individuation to provide a basis for the self-affirmations of individuality. Individuation

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 3 5

and the needs of individual identification can never be squeezed out altogether by the demands and pressures of group cohesion and conformity, but neither can individuals, reflective and aware of themselves as such, afford to ignore altogether the need to observe such norms as may be necessary to communication and basic survival within their group. There will be times and places when and where the balance is struck significantly more in favor of one set of pressures rather than the other. Such stability of the accommodations between these conflicting pressures as may be achieved at any one time, however, can never be totally stable or assured; for it is one that may always have to be sought—and at times fought for—afresh. What one can say is that an insistence on the impossibility of any logically compelling passage from nonevaluative premises, be they factual or “analytic,” to evaluative conclusions constitutes both an expression of and a major conceptual underpinning of a fundamentally individualistic culture, ideology, worldview, or whatever. Facts confront one on a basis of whether one likes it or not; but, if they neither carry values with them themselves nor commit one to any particular evaluation of the facts as such, one is left necessarily (and at times perhaps terrifyingly) free to evaluate them according to one’s own best, or worst, judgment. The individual is thus ultimately responsible for taking his or her own stand. Only those who have at their disposal the concepts necessary to a conception of persons as centers of thought, action, and individual worth, sufficiently independent of the society in which they have been formed to be able, in principle at least, to stand in contradistinction to it, will have the resources needed to conceptualize the possibility of individual value responsibility in this way. At the same time, and however much they might have preferred a society whose form of life did not make room for that degree of individual distinctiveness and autonomy, if their language of thought and the form of life of which it is both an expression and a part do make such concepts available to them, they will be unable to refute the arguments of those who may rely on the fact/value distinction in defense of the principle of individual value responsibility and all that it implies. The problem is

1 3 6   AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

not that different forms of logic apply in societies with different forms of life. It is rather that the meanings of the key terms as they appear in the arguments under dispute may only be properly understood in relation to a whole interrelated background of terms and practices and so will be understood as functioning quite differently depending on the forms of life that constitute the backgrounds in question. For logical argument to provide a stable and logically determinate outcome, it has to rely on a reliable and agreed stability of meanings throughout the whole range of terms in which it is expressed. What might be the relevance of all this to those long ago disagreements and disputes about the possible nature and status of my obligations as a member of my own particular Jewish family? In the first place, of course, what needed and needs explaining is not so much a difference concerning the nature of some important obligations as a mutual inability on the part of those then involved—including myself—to understand how anyone capable of rational thinking could fail to agree on such a matter. At the most general and abstract level, the answer, as it now seems to me, lies in the facts 1. that the distinction between what is to be counted as value or norm rather than as (“mere”) individual preference or desire is itself neither clearly invariant nor itself “evaluatively” neutral and 2. that the conceptual vocabularies of societies (or subsocieties) with notably different forms of life may embody very different ruling assumptions concerning the constitution of the individual identities of their members and that this can only too naturally give rise to quite different understandings of how they may stand in relation to such commitments and obligations as their membership may be taken to involve. Against this general background of contrasting assumptions, each particular case of conflict naturally has its own more specific complexities and potential for further disagreement. In my own case, what was at stake was not so much the freedom of individuals to distance themselves from the obligations attendant upon any particular institutionally well-defined role which they might have come, by one route or another, to occupy as their freedom to dissociate themselves from such

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 3 7

obligations as might be held to be involved in their membership in one sort of group or another—membership in their own immediate group and, by further extension, their own putatively transitive membership in such more inclusive groups of which their own immediate group might itself be a member. That I was myself Jewish by virtue of family descent and of upbringing was beyond question; so too, in broad outline, were the facts of my family’s position—in particular those of my father and grandfather in relation to the main subcommunities and institutions of the Anglo-Jewish community in general. This was, moreover, a time when the question of what it meant to be Jewish, presenting itself against the background of the still very recent horrors of the Holocaust and, as one of its not wholly indirect upshots, the creation in a context of conflict of the State of Israel, seemed to have taken on an even greater urgency and complexity than ever. Thus the question of whether the “facts” of my Jewish identity could or could not be taken to include or entail any “logically” irrefutable conclusions concerning my obligations was effectively intertwined with the question of what, in any case, the obligations in question might be. On that latter question too, even those who held that to be under certain obligations was part and parcel of what it is to be Jewish are more than capable of disagreeing among themselves. Indeed, disagreements of this sort clearly and perfectly naturally exist as between the Ultra-Orthodox, the more moderately Orthodox, the Reform, and the Liberal communities, not to mention those who think of themselves in terms of a strictly nonreligious secular Jewish identity. But, then, it is equally well known that among Jews as a whole striking disagreements are to be found both as to the necessary and the sufficient conditions of what is to be counted as a genuine Jewish identity. No doubt those who hold that it must always, in the last resort, be up to the individuals concerned to determine for themselves their own personal identities are in general more likely to be found among the secular or at the Liberal end of the religious spectrum. Whatever their other differences as to the nature of Jewish identity might be, even those who believe that it must in the last resort be a matter for individual self-determination whether to embrace a

1 3 8  AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

Jewish identity or not are unlikely to regard individuals as wholly free to determine for themselves just what the obligations attaching to their possession of a Jewish identity should be. So what does this mean for anyone who, while in no way disputing the facts of being Jewish in terms of family origin and of upbringing and of being identified as such by the world at large (Jewish and non-Jewish alike), cannot accept that he or she might be personally bound thereby, and independently of his or her own assent, to the acceptance of any particular set of obligations? Given that, according to any of the religious conceptions, Ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox, Reform, or Liberal, a Jew is faced as such with certain obligations, however divergent the different views as to just what these obligations might be, it would seem that anyone recognizing himself or herself to be Jewish, but who is at the same time committed to the autonomy of individual responsibility for a person’s own deepest value commitments and thus, by extension, for the determination of his or her own identity, must choose between having 1. to settle for some nonreligious or secular version of their Jewish identity—though that too might generally be held to entail certain national and/or cultural obligations—or 2. to accept that, if the bearing of a Jewish identity does necessarily involve a tie to Judaism as a religion in, at any rate, one of its versions, then, whatever the facts of family origin, upbringing, and/or identification by the world at large, he himself or she herself can only regard himself or herself as Jewish insofar as he or she is prepared autonomously to acknowledge the obligations entailed by whatever religious version of Jewish identity he himself or she herself is ready to endorse as his or her frame of reference. It may well be that a majority among contemporary Jews, both Israeli Jews and those of the wide-flung and varied Diaspora, would, if pressed, go for some version of option 1—an option that was the main object of discussion in the previous chapter. Of those for whom being Jewish does involve a continuing commitment to some version of Judaism as a religion, it would seem highly plausible to assume that a majority would find themselves more at home with Reform or Liberal Judaism or, at any rate, with one of the more moderate versions of

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 3 9

Orthodoxy as their frame of religious reference.7 What, then, of those “marginal” Jews who, in spite of being neither “believing” nor practicing, are fully committed to their Jewish identity, but who see the enduring possibility of their own self-recognition as Jewish as somehow dependent on the continuing existence of a practicing core of the religiously committed? They would seem to find themselves in the doubly paradoxical situation that their own generally recognizable identity as nonreligious Jews should depend not only on the continuing existence of a core group or groups committed to the practice of at least some version of Judaism as a religion, and to the observation of its attendant obligations, but also that the thus religiously committed should nevertheless still be prepared to recognize the freedom of nonpracticing Jews “to take their own stand” in respect to all such obligations without thereby risking the loss of their Jewish identity. All this is subject, of course, to the previously discussed limitations on the meaningful freedom of individuals to establish and to declare their own identities independently of how the rest of the world, and in particular the community of their own roots, might identify them. These constraints are very real and clearly more practically constraining in some circumstances than in others. At the same time, it is fair to say that, within the limits of whatever may be the conceptual resources available at any given time and in the context of any given form of life, they have never to be taken as absolute. After all, even the seemingly most stable forms of life, including the forms of language to which they give rise, are capable of evolution—something which is all the more likely in a world where the challenge and need to evolve arise so often out of the pressures of external stimulus. One has nevertheless to recognize that constraints do not have to be absolute for them to be genuinely constraining.

there is, and in principle can be, no final conclusion to this story—other than the recognition of its nonfinality. There is, however, a “nonfinal” or ongoing conclusion. It is, firstly, that to search for one

1 4 0  AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

universally clear-cut and indisputable answer to the question of the logical relations between “fact” and “value,” between “statements of fact” and “value judgments,” is to seek something that is not there for the finding. For one thing, and when it come down to crucial detail, the very terms fact and value, and with them their closest allies, are open to, and have in fact received, a disconcerting number of shifting interpretations. The same is true of the notions of personal identity and those of its nearest allies. It is true that so far as the individual members of any speech community are concerned, the main meaning rules or norms of their community confront them as facts to which they must learn to adapt, even as they may in their turn, and within certain never fully determinate limits, seek to exploit and to adapt them to new configurations of meaning and force. It is clear too that in any community there will be a great number and variety of other norms which, so far as its individual members are concerned, have, in any first instance at least, to be taken as given. But while there is, strictly speaking, no sense to the idea of an individual refusing in all reflective awareness to respect any of the linguistic norms of his community as his own,8 the same is not so immediately and self-evidently true for other social norms or values. Here, as we have seen, everything will depend on whether the form of life of the community or subcommunity in question has room within its structures and vocabulary for the concept of an individual subject capable and, in the last resort, uniquely responsible for determining its own core identity as the person that he or she “essentially” is. But this is not necessarily an all or nothing sort of matter, nor one to be determined by purely logical considerations alone. Individuals may be conceived of as being evaluatively sovereign within certain domains only, but not in others, or in certain contexts only, or only as subject to certain limitations and constraints as, for example, of age, education, and mental health. In short, to affirm and to defend the free responsibility of individuals for the determination of their own values and obligations in any or all walks of life is to defend not only a certain way of thinking about individual persons and the community or society of which they may be (or be held to be) members; it is also to affirm and

AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 4 1

to defend a certain form of life. And for those who would wish either to extend or to reduce the domain of individuals’ sovereignty as currently and generally recognized in the matter of such values and obligations, and thus of their personal identities as they may acknowledge on their own account, the struggle will be one having always to be renewed, the arguments needing always to be teased out again as they present themselves from within one context to another, and as having in that sense, indeed, no final conclusion. The context of my own concern at the beginning of this story—that of the special commitments and obligations which were held to be incumbent on Jews such as myself—has, as we have seen, its own further complications and indeterminacies. What exactly are these obligations and who has the authority to declare the relevant tradition or law? A time may come, perhaps, when serious disagreement no longer exists as to the proper answer to these questions—though the history of Jewish debate hardly holds out any very likely prospect of such a development. Meanwhile, all those—Jews included—who find themselves committed to the basic concepts and presuppositions of the so-called Autonomy of Morals may justify their understanding of such autonomy on what for them is the conceptually impregnable authority of individual subjects to determine their values for themselves irrespective of whatever the facts that confront them may be. They should not, however, think all those who see things differently to be necessarily deficient therefore in the abilities of clear and logical thinking. Concepts of identity—personal or just individual human identity—have been a central theme of many philosophical stories as they have been of this one—not, in this case, the identity that individuates and marks out particular individuals as identifiably distinct from each other, but that more elusive identity by virtue of which whoever possesses it is constituted as being what or who he or she (or indeed a given institution or group) “essentially” is, and which may quite typically be shared by a whole number of thus bonded individuals. It is a theme that threads its way through, and somehow links together, many prima facie very different sorts of philosophical puzzles. The particular identity

1 4 2  AN ATTEMP T AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THR E A DS

story that I have been trying to rework through here comprises, on the one hand, a puzzle about whether, and if so in what circumstances, the apparent “facts” of a person’s identity can somehow include, as among their given elements, a range of responsibilities and obligations incumbent upon the person whose identity it is and, on the other hand, the endlessly debated puzzle of what is to be understood as constituting Jewish identity. None of this should be read as meaning that to strive for a systematically clearer understanding of any of these major issues is a pointless endeavor. The focus of debate, both that which is primarily philosophical and that of more evidently practical urgency, can always be sharpened in whatever its particular context—sharpened but never finally frozen. And this must be as true of the debate that I have here been trying to pursue with my own past self and, so far as my memory of the positions they took is still accurate, with those with whom the nature of my disagreements were at the time both so puzzling and so disorientating. It does at present seem to me that it is possible to arrive at a better and sharper understanding both of what we had in common and of what set us apart, as well as of what was at stake. I do not believe, however, that I have somehow now managed to produce a set of arguments that would, after all, have settled the matter in my favor for some imaginary once and for all; for I do not now believe that, in matters of this sort, it is in principle possible to arrive at any such definitive and rationally indisputable closure.

seven SOME EXTENDED POSTSCRIPTS

In my attempted retelling of this story a number of other themes of long-standing philosophical puzzlement have either made some brief appearance or have remained lurking not very far in the wings. To have brought them out further onto the stage of discussion in their own right would have involved the distractions of too many fairly substantial digressions. Some are, nevertheless, of sufficient relevance to the main story as to merit further brief elaboration on their own account. Indeed, the very relevance of that relevance makes it more appropriate to gather them together in a final, as it were, postscriptorial chapter rather than to leave them hanging on as a series of apparently entirely distinct afterthoughts. P O ST SC RIPT NO. 1: IDENTITY AND LANGUAGE

At a number of points in the preceding chapters of this story, I have relied on an outline version of the antiprivate language argument in order to show how and why the ability of individuals to handle symbols and thus to enter into meaningful communication, even reflectively with themselves, presupposes their understanding and initial acceptance of the norms governing the use of whatever (marks or sounds and so on) may serve as the vehicle of the symbols in question and so how from the

1 4 4  SOME EXTENDED POSTSCRIPTS

very beginning their ability to think of themselves in terms of who and what they might be is bound up with a reference to the rules governing the ways in which other members of their (language) community may use the terms by virtue of which they may communicate and think. There is, of course, another way in which language may be said to shape a person’s identity. It is well enough known—it must, indeed, be the personal experience of nearly everyone who feels themselves at home in more than one natural language—that every language provides its own special way both of experiencing the world and of expressing one’s own feelings in the face of that experience. To be truly and thoroughly at home in more than one language is to know what it is to inhabit more than one form of life, and, though there are many partial and perhaps even near total exceptions, it must be comparatively rare for those who have grown up in just one language to come to see and to feel the world through another acquired significantly later in life, even if they have to all appearances come to master it fully. It is thus fair to say that, in the case of most people at least, the language—or, in some cases, the languages—of their primary and most instinctive relations with the world belong to what, following Erikson, I have been calling their essential identity. Jacques Derrida’s account in Le monolinguisme de l’autre provides an extraordinary and extraordinarily moving example of the complexity and intensity of the ways in which the language of someone’s most “natural” expression can come to form part of that person’s essential or most intimate identity.1 To try to illustrate this complexity and the intensity of the account that he gives in that book with mere snippets of quotations from it would be somehow to betray both its intensity and its complexity. There is, however, a poignantly direct passage from the very last interview which he gave to Jean Birnbaum only a few weeks before his death in October 2004, which is more easily quotable: [The French language] does not belong to me, even though it’s the only one that I have (and even then!). The experience of language is, of course, vital. . . . A series of contingencies have made of me a French Jew from Algeria born in the generation before the “war of independence”:

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS  1 4 5

so many singularities, even among Jews, and even among the Jews of Algeria. . . . My great-grandparents were still very close to the Arabs in language and customs. . . . And just as I love life, and my life, I love what made me what I am. The very element of which is language, this French language that is the only language that I was ever taught to cultivate, the only one for which I can say that I am more or less responsible. . . . I think that if I love this language like I love my life, and sometimes more than certain native French do, it is because I love it as a foreigner. Passion and hyperbolisation. All the French of Algeria share this with me, whether Jewish or not: those who came from metropolitan France were nonetheless foreigners—oppressors and standardisers, normalisers and moralisers. They provided a model . . . and one had to conform to it. . . . I have only one language, and, at the same time . . . this language does not belong to me. . . . A language is not something that belongs. . . . Whence the phantasms of property, appropriation and colonialist imposition.2

Not many people would be capable of articulating their relationship with the language or languages of their self-awareness and self-expression in such a way. But that should not lead one to underestimate the intimacy of this sort of connection between the language of a person’s self-awareness and what Erikson seemed to have in mind when he wrote of identity as “something in the individual’s core.”3 Nor is this just a matter of the particular way in which each language structures the world for those who inhabit the concepts which it provides for their communication with each other and, in their thinking, with themselves. It is clear—and in Le monolinguisme de l’autre Derrida made it even clearer—that his relation with the French language, for all its deeply felt intimacy and although and indeed because it was, as he says, the only language that he had, carried with it for him a never wholly suppressible sense of self-alienation, a sense, one might say, of dislocation within the very core of his own personal identity. (The word sense here functions as a sort of compromise, a way of avoiding having to choose between meaning and force, both of which might in some ways be more appropriate, but neither properly so.) For it carried with it,

1 4 6  SOME EXTENDED POSTSCRIPTS

as he said in that interview, “phantasms of colonialist imposition.” It was the language of his own sense of self, the language of his self-identity—yet his language whether he liked it or not and so not entirely his own. Hence the reference to colonialist imposition, a theme which had received a somewhat more elaborate treatment in Le monolinguisme de l’autre. Moreover, for Derrida his relationship to language—to French, the language of the colonialists, but equally that of his teachers who, coming, as they did, from mainland France, spoke it naturally with their own “Metropolitan” accents and taught it according to their own strictly imposed grammatical standards, were perceived and felt to be “foreigners”—for Derrida, the “French Jew from Algeria,” his relationship to language held yet further layers of complexity. For, as he says, his “great-grandparents were still very close to the Arabs in language and customs.” But even though Arabic may have been their language of everyday life and thought, it was not and could not be their language in the sense in which it was that of the Arabs among whom they were living—and it was certainly not the language of their identity as Jews. None of this is to say that differences in the ways people feel or experience their relationships to themselves and to the world as they articulate them in the language (or languages) in which they are best able to recognize and assert their identity should necessarily make for differences as to what in their reasoning they should count as being valid or invalid. Nevertheless, it is languages as forms of life that either provide or, on the contrary, make no immediate room for the conception of a subject that is ultimately responsible for the determination of its own values and obligations and thus, in this sense at least, for its own identity. Not everyone might say of a language—of “their” language (or languages)—that it was “the very element that had made them what they were.” It is not too much of an exaggeration, however, to say that it will be always one element among whatever others. Those who are equally at home in more than one language know what it is to “be themselves” in more than one way, as inhabitants of more than just one form of life—even if being equally at home does not necessarily mean being completely at home within any one, even indeed if it means that when confined by circumstances to one language alone there is always some-

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS  1 4 7

thing else, some other aspect of themselves, that is missing. And this can be just as much an effect of the transformations of what, according to most classifications, would count as being the same natural language as the form of life to which it belongs evolves from one generation to another. Such could be typical of the experience of many members of the younger generations of immigrant societies who, as they grow up, come to speak and, for the most part, to live in whatever the language of the host society and to react according to the norms implicit in its dominant forms of life, but who at home continue to speak and to interact in the languages of their parents and grandparents, the languages in which they will themselves have first learned to speak and to know themselves as distinct from all others. Thus the languages of their own later self-awareness, of their own multilayered self-identity, may, between them, both make room for and yet not make room for the network of interacting concepts that together institute that conception of the value-autonomous subject which is so crucial to the ruling out of any rationally compelling passage from statements of fact to judgments of norm or value (except perhaps in the residual limiting case of facts concerning the norms of meaningfulness that prevail within the speech community of the subject in question). It would be wrong, then, to suppose that what we might think of as “core” or “essential” personal identities are necessarily unitary, internally free of strains and stresses, of tensions and even outright contradictions. On the contrary, in today’s world of movement of all kinds there must be many, many people living with the complexities and internal stresses that come from finding themselves equally more or less “at home” in two, or perhaps even more, very different and always potentially incompatible forms of life and therefore never totally at home in either or any. When the incompatibilities are so far internalized as to have come to form part of one’s own self-identity, one has to negotiate the resulting conflicts not only with the surrounding worlds but even more fundamentally with oneself. There is nothing exclusively Jewish about this sort of situation; it will, however, have been and be quite common for Jews of one part or another of the Diaspora, and even from Israel itself, to experience themselves in such a way, with their personal

1 4 8  SOME EXTE NDED POSTSCRIPTS

identities inextricably rooted in both Jewish and non-Jewish forms of life. For many, moreover, even the Jewish part of their identities may contain its own peculiarly Jewish dislocations. Derrida’s last interview was originally published in Le Monde under the title “I am at war with myself,” and in his introduction to the English translation Jean Birnbaum recalls the name of Imre Kertsz and his Kaddish for a Child Not Born. “Let me simply mark,” he says, this double uncertainty, the double aporia with which the Hungarian author struggles: it is impossible, from childhood on, to know what it is “to be Jewish”—that’s the original problem of identity . . . Jewishness: a “lost child” of Judaism, Derrida often recalled the double movement of acquiescence and anxiety, of love and revolt, that characterised his relationship to the tradition of Israel. Evoking in this regard “the obscure and uncertain experience of inheritance,” he underscored the violence of an assignation of identity inscribed from the outset in the immemorial time of an interminable repetition, and first of all in “the memory without memory of circumcision.”4

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Derrida’s sense of his own Jewish identity, handed down to him and unrenounceable, would be that of all Jews sufficiently articulate and self-aware to reflect a sense of any such matter. Yet, highly individual as it is, there is undeniably something strangely typical about it. However, this does not so much bear directly on questions concerning the “Fact/Value Distinction” or the so-called Autonomy of Morals as signal the beginning of what would be another, if not altogether disconnected, story, one whose telling in any adequate detail would call for a far better informed teller than myself. So I move on to P O ST SCRIPT NO. 2: AUTONOMOUS SUBJECT S?

I have suggested that the underlying rationale of the situation from which I have here restarted lay chiefly in the fact that we who disagreed (largely, but not only, across the generations) were thinking and there-

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS   1 4 9

fore arguing on the basis of differing assumptions as to the constitution of individual human agents in relation to the societies to which, both by birth and by upbringing, they may be said to “belong.” These contrasting, but conceptually deeply embedded, sets of assumptions, differed, as I now see it, in the views they provided of the extent to which the identities of individuals—those of their features in virtue of which they were what and who they “essentially” were—could be so disentangled from reference to their societies of membership as to render them autonomously responsible for which of its obligations and values they might endorse as their own. Even the most determinedly individualist of moral autonomists, however, must as a matter of sheer common sense concede that it would be absurd to think of every individual human being, of whatever mental or physical capacity, as properly autonomous and responsible for arriving at his or her own considered decisions in matters of value—or indeed of virtually anything else. There are in fact, of course, a number of well-known problems with the notion of a properly autonomous subject. The most fundamental and philosophically notorious of these turns around the endlessly discussed complex of issues involved in the notion of free will and in the question of how best to understand its relation to the many possibilities of causal explanation for the choices that anyone may make and for the stands that he or she may take. At the same time, the nature of causality is itself equally a matter of intense and apparently endless debate. A great many philosophers, bound by their natural commitment to look always for rationally acceptable and nonparadoxical solutions, have tended to look for a credible account of free will in one variation or another on what is known as the compatibilist theme. Historically speaking, one of the best known models of this theme is that provided by David Hume in his account of causation as consisting essentially in observable constant conjunction. For, as he in effect pointed out, the opposite of constant conjunction is simply chance or the absence of any such regularity, while the opposite of freedom of choice is the existence of compulsion or constraint. Observable conjunctions, however constant they may seem to be, simply do not constrain or compel; if

1 5 0  SOME EXTENDED POSTSCRIPTS

anything, it is rather the regularities in the way in which events happen to occur as sheer matter of fact that lead or constrain us to form the causal generalizations that we do. In my own opinion, compatibilism of this sort runs into its own manner of virtually intractable difficulties; and I have to admit to being more attracted by some version or other of the Kantian account of the matter, as indicated, in no doubt misleadingly compressed form, in chapter 4. But however this may be as matter of general principle, the problem of knowing how to assess the impact and relevance of recognizable causal influences on the decisions that individuals may or may not be able to take has to be faced in a variety of more specific contexts as one that is in practice unavoidable. At what point in their development, in what circumstances and to what degree are children, for instance, to be regarded and treated as properly autonomous and responsible agents? What about those who are deemed to suffer from some degree of mental impairment or illness? This can already be controversial enough. But what, more controversially still, about those who suffer—or who are, at any rate, deemed to suffer—from disabling cultural and/or educational impoverishment? And what, even more controversially again, about those— such, for instance, as women—who in some cultures are deemed to be naturally as fully autonomous as anybody else, but who in other cultures are seen as being essentially incapable of taking full responsibility for themselves and, if ever they should actually lay claim to such self-responsibility, as being, in any case, not suitably entitled to it? And how, moreover, are such matters to be decided, and by whom? Some of these problems remain intrinsically problematic for even the most liberal of societies, the most commitedly individualistic in their culture. It would certainly seem to be nonsensical, for instance, to treat young children as if they were already capable of determining their values for themselves. Some distinctively liberal educationalists, committed to the goal of bringing up children to become fully self-reliant and self-responsible adult members of a community of their similarly autonomous fellows, have nevertheless thought that the best way of achieving such an aim would be to treat even very young children as

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS  1 5 1

if they were already capable of such autonomy. Summerhill School’s Web site, for example, states explicitly in its introductory explanation of what the school is all about that “staff do not use adult authority to impose values and solve problems; these are solved by the individual with the help of friends or ombudsmen or by the community in meetings”; and item 5 of its general policy statement reads: “All individuals create their own set of values based on the community within which they live. Summerhill is a community, which takes responsibility for itself. . . . All members of the community, adults and children, irrespective of age, are equal in terms of this process”5 (the italics are mine). “All members of the community” include, of course, the pupils, whose ages, according to the same Web site, range from five to eighteen. Whatever one might think, however, about the likely capacity of most individuals of the age of five to create “their own set of values,” the immediately following phrase in Summerhill’s general policy statement makes it clear that this individualism does have its limits: “All individuals create their own set of values based on the community within which they live” (my italics again). Clearly this is a community which places the very highest value on individual autonomy and on the capacity of a community to foster and in practice to contain such autonomy among its members by way of mutual and cooperative respect for each other’s autonomy, and it may be justified in its belief that the best hope of achieving such an outcome lies in the bringing up of children in the ways that it proposes. What, however, if any of them appeared to claim the freedom to set their own highest value on the ability to dominate others irrespective of what the perhaps very different preferences and opinions of those others might be? One might be tempted to react simply by saying that, whatever the underlying reason for such a failure of the basic project, and however regrettable it might be, individuals of such irreducibly, but hopefully exceptional, antisocial tendencies and temperament cannot be regarded or treated as full members of the community with all the rights of participation that full membership would carry with it. Or, as one might perhaps more naturally suppose, the would-be deviant individuals, however precocious they might be in their ability to

1 5 2  SOME EXTENDED POSTSCRIPTS

handle the language of values and obligations, may not have learned as yet how properly to conceptualize the distinction between the recognition and expression of desire, on the one hand, and judgments of right and wrong, on the other—a distinction which would still be needed even in the empirically unlikely case of individuals all of whose desires coincided exactly with what they recognized to be right or wrong. The younger the recalcitrant individuals in question, the more plausible would be this second line of reaction. (I still remember how one of my own children, while still very young, discovered that the chances of attaining some desirable end were very much better when bid for in terms of “I need” rather than “I want” and the time that it took to succeed in my efforts to explain and insist on the differences in meaning and appropriate use of these different expressions.) The inescapable fact is that, however highly one may value the ideals of individual autonomy and of a community of autonomous individuals working out how best to live with each other in a context of mutual respect and open discussion, there will always be cases of beings who are both indisputably human and indisputably incapable (even if hopefully only as yet) of taking any practical decision for themselves, let alone of creating their own sets of values. Where the care and education of children is concerned, the case is already tricky enough. Convinced autonomists—convinced liberals in at least one sense of that much disputed term—may have as their overriding aim the production of a society of genuinely autonomous individuals, but will still be faced with the unavoidable problems 1. of how to devise the environment best suited to imbue each succeeding generation with the same autonomist or liberal values as their own and 2. of determining at what point the developing child, adolescent, or young adult should be judged to have reached the stage of taking full responsibility for himself or herself. So, over and above the general and fundamental problem of finding a way to understand how a set of essentially causal influences can result in the “production” of genuinely autonomous agents, there is the more specific problem of how to determine the point at which it becomes appropriate to regard and to treat the said agents as having arrived at their

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS  1 5 3

autonomy. (Nor should it be thought that these problems are entirely distinct from each other.) The same sort of problem arises in other cases too. For it is not only at the beginning of life that the new human being is clearly not as yet autonomous; this can only too often become the situation of those arriving at the other end of life as well. But when exactly, under what conditions, and who is to determine this, and how? The status and treatment of adults with one sort or another of mental impairment, whether that of old age, of mental illness, or of mental retardation, present closely analogous puzzles. In none of such cases is there likely to be any clear-cut or from one moment to another sort of transition between a state of (relative) autonomy and one of (more or less) dependence upon others. So, although it is hard to see how general theoretical worries about the notions of free will and responsibility could ever in the actual practices of life and reflection lead to a total and self-consistent abandonment of any concept of an autonomous and responsible subject, it remains the case that a general appeal to one form or another of such a concept will always feel more natural than it will seem possible to work out exactly what its content might actually be and a fortiori to apply it in specific and potentially borderline cases—or indeed to determine just where the borderlines are to be found. In such borderline cases there can be no escaping the need for practical judgment, a judgment which, in the very nature of such cases, will always be potentially controversial. “Judgement,” Kant put it in one of the more austere parts of his Critique of Pure Reason, is the faculty of subsuming under rules; that is, of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a given rule. . . . [It] is a peculiar talent which can be practised only, and cannot be taught. It is the specific quality of so-called mother-wit; and its lack no school can make good. . . . A physician, a judge, or a ruler may have at command many excellent pathological, legal, or political rules . . . and yet, none the less, may easily stumble in their application. For, although admirable in understanding, he may be wanting in natural power of judgement. He may comprehend the universal in abstracto, and yet not be able to distinguish whether a

1 5 4  SOME EXTE NDED POSTSCRIPTS

case in concreto comes under it. Or the error may be due to his not having received, through examples and actual practice, adequate training for this particular act of judgement. Such sharpening of the judgement is indeed the one great benefit of examples. Correctness and precision of intellectual insight, on the other hand, they more usually somewhat impair. For only very rarely do they adequately fulfil the requirements of the rule. . . . Examples are thus the go-cart of judgement; and those who are lacking in the natural talent can never dispense with them.6

Nor, when it comes to actual practice, can one ever dispense with the need for the skills and art of judgment itself. There is, moreover, one further complication of which one should never lose sight and which in its turn will often call for a yet further exercise of inherently debatable judgment. Individual autonomy and self-responsibility, in societies such as that in which I (and, I would suspect, nearly all readers of this book) have grown up, are indisputably major moral and political values, values that many, no doubt, would take to be generally overriding. Yet there are other widely and deeply held values with which they may come into serious competition. We have already noted the importance which even an institution such as Summerhill attaches—quite rightly—to the existence of strong community structures for the formation and transmission from one generation to another of that sense of individual self-reliance which it values so strongly. But such continuity of respect for family and/or community tradition is often, and very naturally, seen and felt as being of very great value in its own right; and liberal autonomists are thus confronted by an only too familiar dilemma when faced with families and communities whose whole traditional way of life is woven together with practices that are not easily compatible—and sometimes even flagrantly incompatible— with the autonomy of their individual members. Should a liberal seek to intervene in order to protect, even actively to promote, what he sees as the autonomy of those individuals? Or should he feel bound rather to respect the autonomous convictions of those—typically, but by no means necessarily, older—family or community members for whom

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS  1 5 5

the decision as to how to bring up, to educate, and, if deemed appropriate, to discipline their own children is both a right and a duty? To such a question there can once again be no general theoretical answer; it has as before to be seen as a matter for a weighing in the balance of practical judgment of a whole range of considerations as they may vary from one context to another. Such considerations include, for example, the value to be attached to the degree and nature of respect that a younger generation may (or may not) be expected to show to the feelings and traditions of its elders, the advantages or handicaps that a traditional upbringing and education may (or may not) be seen to confer on a generation growing up, as is now so often the case, to life in a society with a very different way of life from that in and by which their parents were formed, and the affront which adherence to the traditional values in question may (or may not) be adjudged to present to those of a wouldbe liberal, individualist society. The recognition of an essentially irreducible plurality of values and a toleration of the diversities involved in their pursuit is also very widely held to be a value of great importance to liberals7—with the inevitable double proviso that limits may always have to be set to such toleration and that the exact place where they may have to be drawn can only be a matter of judgment—a judgment that, once again, is always, in principle, debatable. No doubt that a strong commitment to the values of continuity and tradition will not always sit easily with an appeal to or even a reluctant recognition of the availability, within the resources of one’s vocabulary, of the concept of a strongly autonomous subject. (Attachment to a tradition of individual autonomy and to a community of like-mindedly autonomous members would constitute some sort of exception to this generalization, but an exception that, as we have seen, generates its own peculiar tension, tensions that in practice can only be resolved by the exercise of always potentially contentious judgment.) It is thus inherently more likely that the stronger the commitment to such values, the greater the weight given to them in comparison with that given the value of individual self-determination, the more difficult it will be even to make sense of any individual claim to have a conceptually inalien-

1 5 6  SOME EXTE NDED POSTSCRIPTS

able right to determine one’s own values for oneself—and, indeed, to bear the ultimate responsibility for doing so. To the more committed traditionalist, for whom the very concept of value as contrasted with that of individual desire is rooted in those of the norms of community practice, this must seem to present itself as a claim to determine for oneself the degree of importance to be attached to the value of self-determination for its own sake, something which will indeed hardly seem to make sense. All this, as I now look back upon it, must have been somehow at the root of that mutually frustrating experience of mixed understanding and misunderstanding of whose nature, rather late in the day, I have here been trying to gain at least some better understanding. It was only much later that I came across, and was able to appreciate something of the force of the way in which Louis Dumont summed up the situation in his Essais sur l’individualisme: “When we speak of ‘individuals’ we refer to two things at the same time: an object external to us and a value . . . on the one hand the empirical subject that speaks, thinks and wills . . . on the other the moral being, that is independent, autonomous and thus essentially non-social. . . . Seen from this point of view, there are two kinds of society. There where the Individual is the highest value, I speak of individualism; in the opposite case, where value rests in society as a whole, I speak of holism.”8 P O ST SCRIPT NO. 3: KANT ONCE MORE AND T HE READING OF PHILOSOPHICAL TEXT S

I have already made it clear that I am no Kantian scholar in the ways in which serious Kantian scholars are seriously scholarly. There is no doubt, however, that my encounters with the major Kantian texts have led me to a way of reading them which helps to shape the background of my thinking on a whole number of otherwise not so obviously connected topics. The Kant whom I first met when opting, as an undergraduate, to work for the PPE special paper9 on his Critique of Pure Reason and Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals was the Kant who, as he himself

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS  1 5 7

put it, was first awoken from his “dogmatic slumbers” as a result of reading Hume’s analysis of causation.10 The philosophy component of the PPE course started in those days with the obligatory “General Paper” based very largely on readings of Descartes and his empiricist successors Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Spinoza and Leibniz, on the other hand, were options that very few of us PPE students, at any rate, had time or, to be honest, inclination, to take up. So for me the natural way into Kant was by way of following his attempts to transcend the aporia of the Cartesian project of making an apparent capacity for immediate certainty of the contents of present consciousness the basis of one’s whole understanding of knowledge and of what it is to be a human being. Thus for me a principal fascination with Kant was with the ways in which he struggled for a coherent account of the nature of self-knowledge as contrasted with, yet at the same time dependent on, a knowledge of the external world as being somehow both genuinely external and yet available as an object of knowledge only on the basis of its appearances as a feature of “internal” awareness: for an account of causation that represented it as genuinely determinative of its effects but was nevertheless compatible with one of a freedom of the will that was both genuinely free and yet capable of bringing about effects within a fully causally determinate world, and, as a closely connected aspect of that latter problematic (as I realized a bit later), for an account of goal-directed action that was nevertheless compatible with a properly determinative explanation of such behavior as might result from the action in question. (This, incidentally, includes, as a particularly significant special case, the norm-governed actions involved in the production of meaningful speech.) These were pretty tall orders, amounting, in effect, to one excessively tall order for an account that would deal with all these at first sight distinct but, in the end, interconnected orders at once. This Kant claimed to provide with his distinction between the order of nature as it is given to us in objective experience and the, strictly speaking, unknowable but allegedly “thinkable” somehow underlying order of

1 5 8  SOME EXTENDED POSTSCRIPTS

things as they really are “in themselves,” an order in which we can— even must—think of ourselves as free and self-determining. Notoriously, it is this key distinction with all its attendant difficulties in the way of finding any understanding of how these two orders of reality, one properly knowable and the other not at all, could possibly interact with each other—as they must, of course, be presumed to interact, if any freely self-determined decision to act in one way rather than another is to have discernible consequences in the world of our actual experience—that the most notable of his successors, whether in the “continental” or the “analytic” tradition, have always found hardest to accept. At certain points in Kant’s own writings, indeed, one finds clear acknowledgment not only of the difficulty but even of the very impossibility of achieving any such understanding. I have already quoted the last sentence of his Groundwork to the Metaphysic of Morals,11 in which he writes of reason finding its ultimate limits in the comprehension of an incomprehensibility, and in his continued pursuit of an understanding of this sort in his subsequent and resolutely tortuous Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone one finds, for instance: “To seek the temporal origin of free acts as such (as though they were natural effects) is thus a contradiction.”12 Or again: “what we wish to understand and shall never understand is how predeterminism, according to which voluntary actions, as events, have their determining ground in antecedent time . . . can be consistent with freedom, according to which the act as well as its opposite must be within the power of the subject at the moment of its taking place.”13 I have to confess that I have always found this kind of rationally driven acceptance of the very limits of reason instinctively attractive—in much the same spirit as that in which, whatever one may make of the doctrines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, one may feel the attraction of its famous closing sentence: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”14 As far back as I can reliably remember, I have thought of myself not so much as the kind of agnostic who finds it impossible to determine the truth of clearly understood religious or theological propositions as one who, finding it impossible to assign any meaning

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS  1 5 9

to them clear enough to enable one to address the issues of their truth or falsity, takes them to provide a peculiarly important example of that whereof one cannot properly speak and so must remain silent. And this may be part of the explanation why I have always found it more natural to read Kant in a way that not only retains his prima facie rationally unworkable commitment to his two contrasting realms, together with his equally strong commitment to finding a rational solution to every theoretical dilemma, but which treats the peculiar tension generated by this higher-order dilemma (or metaparadox) as representing a very deep insight, however uncomfortably hard to express that insight may be—and however reluctant Kant himself may well have been to admit it fully to himself. This, certainly, has always felt to me personally to be a more convincing way of reading Kant, more convincing both than one that takes him to have provided some sort of as yet incomplete and imperfect stepping-stone to the later and better integrated insights of German Idealism or to a rereading that, doing away with his embarrassing appeal to a realm of unconceptualizable things in themselves, represents what remains as if it were in all essentials an impressively powerful example of early conceptual analysis.15 More convincing to me . . . but I should be hard put to it to justify any claim that such a reading is in some sense a better reading of the text than any possible other. It seems to me, on the contrary, that one of the things that make great texts great is precisely that they lend themselves to being read in more than one way, depending on the historical and general intellectual context of the reader and on the linguistic spectacles through which he or she is bound to read them—whether, indeed, in translation or not. This does not—of course—mean that the text itself does not function as an ultimate control of whatever reading may claim its support. But while it may, as control, rule certain of its putative readings out of court, that does not mean that it must be capable of ruling out all of them but just one, leaving that one as its sole champion, as it were. But perhaps this capacity of the great texts to tolerate—even maybe to encourage—more than one reading of themselves is to be thought

1 6 0   SOME EXTENDED POSTSCRIPTS

of as just one more manifestation of that ultimately unavoidable commitment to paradox that—on my reading at least—I seem to detect in Kant. P O ST SCRIPT NO. 4: PHILOSOPHY’S LACK OF B O U NDARIES BOTH INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL

Anyone who has tried to follow my tracking back over certain longstanding perplexities concerning the relation of values to facts, on the one hand, and the nature of Jewish identity, on the other, together with the question of how these two perplexities might or might not be connected, must have noticed how often I have been led to skirt around other not immediately or obviously related areas of philosophical debate. These have included a whole range of often formidably technical discussions of what exactly might or should be understood by references to the “logical” structures of argument, of the nature and status of imperative logic, and of whether it is or is not helpful to think in terms of “contextual logic” or of so-called material rules of inference: issues in the philosophy of language and of speech act theory concerning how best to represent the relationships between meaning and force (or “use”); issues which touch in their turn on the relationship between logic and rhetoric and on questions of what in different contexts may properly be regarded as rational or at any rate reasonable argument rather than “merely”causally effective persuasion; the immensely detailed area of discussions concerning the exact nature, status, and import of the so-called antiprivate Language argument; the tangled and intertwined webs of debate around the varied problems of free will and responsibility together with those of the nature of causal explanation and of its bearing on goal-directive and norm-governed accounts of activity; the questions of what constitutes belief or intellectual assent and of the sense and contexts in which belief is to be understood as finding implicit expression in practice; the far more learned and textbased analyses of Kantian scholarship than anything I have attempted or indeed would have able to provide—all these and no doubt much

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS  1 6 1

more beside. (Nor does this list include reference to the extensive sociological literature on the correlated concepts of “role” and “institution,” or that on the reciprocal relevance of philosophy and sociology to each other.) Even if I had the time, energy, and necessary competence here to attempt properly prepared excursions into all, or even just some, of these areas, it would have made for an intolerably long book within which there would have been a serious risk of its intended guiding threads becoming lost to view and ceasing thereby to provide any sort of guidance. It would nevertheless be wrong not to note, postscriptorially, at least, how any sustained attempt to think one’s way through any of the major philosophical issues must sooner or later involve an attempt to think through other adjoining ones. It is fair to say, indeed, that one of the largely unspoken themes running throughout the whole of these discussions has been that of philosophy’s characteristic ultimate lack of any sharp boundaries, whether internal boundaries as between one field of philosophical inquiry and another or external ones as between “professional” philosophy and any really seriously sustained effort at systematic thought on the major problems of “real life.” Nearly all the recognizably great philosophers have been led in the courses taken by their inquiries to follow them, as it were, across the whole board; an overintense specialization within the whole field of philosophy has an inevitable tendency to narrow the interest of its results just as they become more and more professionally exemplary. One major reason for this temptation, this veritable need, to expand lies in the impossibility of pinning down the meanings of all one’s key terms at once and in their relations to each other. As in philosophy, so in trying to make sense of one’s life in its relations to those of others and to the problems and conflicts we may share. Indeed, any serious attempt to think such matters through, when pursued persistently and consistently enough in all the directions in which they may lead, becomes in effect an attempt at properly philosophical thinking; when this happens, there will be no clear point at which a sustained effort of “normally” serious thought develops into the beginning of a philo-

1 6 2   SOME EXTENDED POSTSCRIPTS

sophical enterprise. In both cases, that of philosophical theory and that of practically engaged reflection, the hope for manifestly definitive answers of a sort to put an end to all further argument is both natural and illusory. There are and will always be yet further and different directions in which the key terms can be made to slide or in which it will be impossible to prevent them from doing so—always further issues which, as it may turn out, have yet to be brought into properly focused perspectives of relevance. P OST SCRIPT NO. 5: THE UNIVER SAL AND THE PARTICULAR ONCE MORE

Since working on the writing of chapter 4, “Jewish Identity 2: The Universal and the Particular,” I have come across the “special message for the Jewish festival of Pesach” which the present chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, addressed to the Jewish charity Tzedek for publication in their newsletter Arevut.16 It contains a passage so appropriate to the discussions of this book that I cannot resist quoting it at some length. Rather than going back to try to find a way of inserting it into that earlier chapter, it seems better to return to the theme in this postscript, not least as a way of marking the importance that it has for the problematic of human identities in general and for Jewish identity in particular: The Seder service begins with an invitation: “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all that are hungry come and eat. Let all who are needy come and celebrate Pesach.” Why the apparent repetition? . . . Rabbi Yaakov Emden, the eighteenth century sage of Altona, says that the first clause applies to non- Jews, the second to Jews. Pesach is the most Jewish of festivals, the story of our people and their suffering. The bread of affliction is about Jewish affliction, the bitter herbs are about Jewish pain. There is nothing universalist about Pesach, as there is, for example, about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.17 Yet according to Rabbi Emden, we preface the story of Jewish suffering with an invitation to non-Jews to come and eat. Why? . . . The

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS  1 6 3

rule [as articulated in the Talmud] is, “We must give sustenance to poor non-Jews as well as to poor Jews, because of the ways of peace.” There is something profound about this teaching. Particularity should lead to universality, not to inwardness and exclusion. Because we remember our people’s pain, we become sensitised to other peoples’ pain. We cannot eat in comfort while others go hungry. We cannot rest content in our freedom while other people suffer slavery. That is why, historically, Jews have been among the leaders in the fight against injustice, poverty, homelessness, disease, and oppression . . . Sharing food is the first act through which slaves become free human beings. One who fears to-morrow does not offer his bread to others. . . . Bread shared is no longer the bread of affliction. That is, I believe what motivates Tzedek and those who work for it. They know that Jewish particularity is our gateway to human universality, that to be a Jew is to be true to our faith while being a blessing to others regardless of their faith . . . it is by reaching out to others . . . that we bring freedom and justice into the world, and with them, God. Particularity should lead to universality, not to inwardness and exclusion. . . . It is by reaching out to others . . . that we bring freedom and justice into the world, and with them, God.

Toward the end of chapter 4, I suggested that “there remains the basic apparent paradox of [a Jewish identity] fashioned around references both to a particular social or national identity and to a religion claiming to enshrine a truth of universal validity,” asking myself what one was to “make of an identity that embodies within itself the tension of a seemingly irresolvable paradox?” To this I added that there were “those who would argue that its resolution is not only possible but is almost absurdly simple once it is accepted that the religious strand in the weave of Jewish identity need be accorded no more importance than that of a cultural relic,” before going on in the following chapter to consider the possibility of a purely secular version of Jewish identity. As Rabbi Sacks sees it, the passage within Jewish identity from particularity to universality is mediated through its fundamental reference to

1 6 4  SOME EXTENDED POSTSCRIPTS

Judaism as a religion and to God. Yet that does not appear as the only side to his argument. “Because we remember our people’s pain, we become sensitized to other peoples’ pain.” As a plain matter of fact, it does not—alas—always work like that. On the contrary, it would seem only too often to work the other way round, with people on whom suffering and indignities have been inflicted becoming only too ready to inflict them on others as if in some sort of revenge, or in a righting of some balance of fate, for what had been done to them. It may be true, as he also says, that “historically Jews have been among the leaders in the fight against injustice, poverty, homelessness, disease, and oppression,” but this can hardly be claimed to be as a matter of fact true of all Jews as such. In any case, insofar as this side to his claim does hold good, or equally insofar as it is to be taken as the expression of an ideal rather than as any sort of psychological or sociological generalization, it would seem to apply to everyone—including Jews, of course—in virtue of their common participation in the human condition. However, the human condition is, as I have also tried to argue, one of what in chapter 4 I called “a fundamental, if fundamentally paradoxical, human duality,” an argument which I there sought to present in essentially Kantian terms. The reference to Kant is not, however, essential to the argument, which is one that can be made at a number of different levels of generality and abstraction. It is, for instance, a basic and essentially (if not entirely straightforwardly) empirical fact about human beings that they will almost invariably find themselves with primary allegiance to fellow members of relatively restricted communities, as compared with, and in many cases almost inevitably opposed to, any solidarity they might otherwise have been expected, simply as fellow human beings, to feel and to show with “outsiders.” (For this there are many very plausible reasons ranging from a frequently prevalent scarcity of necessary resources to a normally natural psychological need for the warmth and security that may be experienced through the ties of belonging to some more or less immediately recognizable body of fellow members. It also provides the uncomfortably large grain of truth behind such widely influential political theories as those of Carl

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS   1 6 5

Schmitt.) Yet, however powerful their (empirically given) feelings of particularistic allegiance may be, it will, as Rabbi Sacks suggests, always make sense at least to appeal to their own awareness of what it is to be human with a view to awakening their sensitivity to the vulnerabilities they must in principle be able to recognize as belonging to the human condition as such. (In practice, of course, the strength of the pull of the particular will for many be such as to render the counterappeal of the universal almost, if not totally, ineffective; it is not uncommon to describe those who present very extreme cases of such deafness to the appeal of the universal as “behaving like animals,” an expression which may well remind one of certain key features of the Kantian argument.) It is worth remembering, too, that for many the very concept of “value,” and with it concepts such as “value judgment” and “evaluative,” are closely connected with that of universality—by way of contrast with the essential particularity of “mere” preference or desire. For Richard Hare, and his doctrine of “Universal Prescriptivism” this was, of course, presented as being fundamentally a matter of definition. Judgments formulated in the language of values were only to be counted as genuine value judgments if they could be shown to derive from principles that whoever claimed to assert them as such was prepared to prescribe universally; if not, they could only be understood as the expressions of individual preference or desire (perhaps quite general in scope) masquerading as value judgments with a view to conveying and carrying greater conviction. It is true that the logically universal scope of a value judgment according to Hare can be emptied of virtually all its effective content by the (logically endless) device of insisting in ever more, and prima facie ever more implausible, detail that what might have appeared to be cases coming under the same (logically universal) description can still be characterized as being in some respect different. No matter: it remains the case that to master the language of values and norms as distinct from that of wanting and preferring, learners have to take given account of the expectations of their surrounding world, the community of their universe of discourse, and of what in that “universe” are taken to be acceptable norms of speech and other forms of

1 6 6   SOME EXTE NDED POSTSCRIPTS

behavior. Their first universe of recognizable discourse will indeed be represented by their family and the speech community (or community of overlapping communities) to which their family in turn belongs; it is within this “universe” that they will first come to (conceptualizable) recognition of their own contrasting particularity. Later, in their actual or potential encounter with members of other communities, they may come to recognize them as marked out, like themselves, by the (universally) embodied particularity of the individual members of any human grouping whatsoever and to understand that, among their fellow members of this wider universe, all who are hungry and need to eat should be invited to come and do so. At the same time, each of these groupings, be they family, local, or national, constitute particular members of the appropriate universe of such groupings as a whole, and, once again, they will be subject to the always potentially conflicting demands of particular interest and self-affirmation, on the one hand, and of cooperation and concern for all, on the other. In short, and whether or not one finds it appropriate to make use of the ultimately logic-based categories of the universal and the particular, the language and concepts of norms and values contain a reference to something beyond individual particularities of wants and desires, a reference to desires and to expectations that are grounded in an order of choice over and above and always potentially resistant to their own, whether that ground be conceived to lie in the community in general, as in that which is greater than any of its individual members, in God, as in that which is greater than any human preference or desiring, or in some composite variation on both of these themes at once. Within the overall language and thinking of norms and values, there is the special area of the moral or the ethical—both of which terms have, of course, their own long and often contested history of shifting usage and understanding, both within “ordinary” language(s) and in more scholarly analyses. This history may also be read very convincingly as one of conflicting pulls between a morality of primary commitment and loyalty to one’s own particular group, on the one hand, and one of universal human respect and solidarity, on the other. The ten-

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS  1 6 7

sion between the two is, I have argued, built into the human condition as such, and I have also suggested that an account in Kantian terms can make for a notably good telling of this story. This is a tension that in principle allows of no definitive solution. The philosophical literature is full of examples of the sorts of moral dilemma to which it may give rise: so too is real life. Human beings, one might say, as creatures individuated by the realities of their physical embodiment that are yet endowed with the powers and possibilities of reflection and of reflective communication with each other, are thus caught in a situation of underlying and paradoxical tension. Insofar, then, as the typical Jewish identity is inextricably bound up both with membership of a people with its own very, and very self-consciously, particular history and with an attachment to a religion claiming to be one of universal truth and import, and however remote for some this culturally mediated attachment may have become, one may once again be justified in the suggestion that in this too the Jews are like everybody else only more so. P OST SCRIPT NO. 6: J E WISH IDENTITY AND BRITISH LAW

The many variations to be found on the theme of Jewish identity, and the many characteristic disagreements on the significance and validity of this variation or that to be found both among Jews and non-Jews has been a repeated theme of earlier chapters. The Law Report to be found in the Times of July 8, 2009, provides a further illustration of the range and potentially far-reaching complexity of both these variations and these disagreements. To have included a summary of this (already highly compressed) report in any of those earlier chapters might seriously have unbalanced them. The illustration that it provides is nevertheless sufficiently striking to justify a postscript of its own; and it is in any case not inappropriate that it should provide the final postscript in this final postscriptorial chapter. The report in question concerned a judgment of the Court of Appeal

1 6 8  SOME EXTE NDED POSTSCRIPTS

in allowing two appeals brought by E., who was Jewish by birth and whose former wife was Jewish by a progressive conversion, which was not recognised by the Office of the Chief Rabbi, against the dismissal . . . of his appeal against decisions of (i) the governing body of the Jewish Free School to refuse his son, M, a place and (ii) of the Schools Adjudicator in upholding that refusal. Lord Justice Sedley, delivering the judgement of the court, said that JFS, in contrast to other faith schools, admitted children whose families did not share the Jewish faith, but were simply recognised as Jewish by the Office of the Chief Rabbi. That clearly discriminated between Jewish and non-Jewish children, which was permissible if made on religious grounds, but unlawful if made on racial grounds . . . Their Lordships entirely accepted the theological origin and character of the Chief Rabbi’s definition of Jewishness, but . . . what remained to be decided was whether a school whose admissions policy was based explicitly on it was discriminating on racial grounds. Lord Pannick [appearing for the Office of the Chief Rabbi] accepted that for all purposes except those of the Office of the Chief Rabbi and the school, M was Jewish. That was not an easy position to maintain, but its corollary, if it could be maintained, was that what excluded M was not his race or ethnicity, but his eligibility to be regarded in orthodox eyes as Jewish, as a matter of pure theology. Ms.Rose [appearing for E] did not contest the source of the doctrine, but asked what the test, whatever its motivation, actually required. It required that the boy’s mother had to be regarded as Jewish . . . and being Jewish, however it was ascertained, meant being a member of an ethnic group. M was refused admission to JFS because his mother, and therefore he, was not regarded as Jewish. . . . There were theological reasons why M was not regarded as Jewish, but they were not the ground of non-admission; they were the motive for adopting it. The reason why the refusal to admit M because he was not regarded as matrilineally Jewish constituted discrimination on racial grounds emerged from Mandla v Dowellee ([1983] 2 AC 548).

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS  1 6 9

Applying the reasoning of that case, it was clear that (a) Jews constituted a racial group defined principally by ethnic origin or conversion and (b) to discriminate against a person on the ground that he was or was not Jewish was to discriminate on racial grounds. The motive for the discrimination was irrelevant . . . The refusal of JFS to admit M was therefore less favourable treatment of him on racial grounds. That did not mean that no Jewish faith school could ever give preference to Jewish children. It meant that, as one would expect, eligibility must depend on faith, and not ethnicity.

If the conclusion of the Court of Appeal is that eligibility for recognition as Jewish must depend on faith, it looks very much as if British law is somehow involved in this prima facie internal Jewish dispute on the side of those who, like my grandfather, saw adherence to Judaism, as the religious faith of the Jews, as being that which is of crucial importance in what it means to be Jewish. But, then, neither my grandfather nor the Court of Appeal found it possible to remain entirely and exclusively consistent in this view. In chapter 4 I quoted my grandfather as saying, for instance, that the “Jews are a righteous people because of their religion”; this very way of putting it assumes a definite distinction between whatever it may be that marks them out as being indeed a people and the religion which may be theirs. And, to the Court of Appeal, it was “clear,” as they argued in proper legal manner from precedent, that “Jews constituted a racial group defined principally by ethnic origin or conversion”; from which it would seem to follow “clearly enough” that while adherence to the Jewish faith might be a sufficient, it would not be a necessary, condition for being countable as Jewish. This, in turn, would seem to imply that the court was in effect marking a distinction between that which in general might be held to constitute Jews as Jews and that which made them “eligible for recognition” as such in the eyes of the law of the land. In principle such a distinction might seem to be a distinctly odd one; but there are other oddities enough about the judgment of the court, at any rate as here reported. There would seem to be something implausibly miraculous about a religious conversion that

1 7 0   SOME EXTE NDED POSTSCRIPTS

had as one of its effects a change in the racial group to which the newly converted person might properly be said to belong. But, in any case, there are sufficient well-known opacities among the meaning criteria for terms such as race and ethnic origin to allow room for much anxious debate as to exactly which individuals should be counted as belonging to which putative race or ethnic group. The terms of the report also seem to imply some important distinction between religious and “purely” theological considerations. There is certainly some important distinction, or set of distinctions to be made, but is far from clear that it—or they—would work in the same way with respect to all religious faiths. Some faiths, one might say, are much more theologically structured than others. Moreover, the closer the tie with theology, the closer the tie with dependence on scholarly and, by further implication, institutional, authority; at which point the distinction between religious and theological authority may itself become both theoretically and practically unclear. As, one might well say, in the case of M, who was refused admission to the Jewish Free School because the Office of the Chief Rabbi held that his mother, who had been converted to Judaism by a rabbi lacking proper Orthodox credentials, could not on that account be recognized as Jewish in the— “theologically” or “religiously”?—relevant sense of the term. If these, as the other principle issues of actual and potential disagreements under discussion in this book, are unlikely to find any definitive settlement, at any rate in any nearly foreseeable future, one may at least hope to have achieved some better glimmer of understanding of why this is so and so, hopefully, but no more than hopefully, to be in a better position to cope with the consequences of the misunderstandings to which such disagreements can only too easily give rise. There may, after all, be much to be said for the tenacious flexibility of a community which somehow allows its members of such disputatiously different convictions as to the community’s governing identity to continue to insist on their claims to membership, with powers of excommunication by any who refuse to accept such claims in effect limited to those of exclusion from one or another subcommunity within it. It is

SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS  1 7 1

perhaps appropriately symbolic of the state of these arguments that at the very moment of writing this postscript the case of the Jewish Free School and its admissions policy has gone to yet further appeal to the recently instituted UK Supreme Court, amid concern that whatever it decides may have as yet unclear but potentially far-reaching implications for the admission policies of schools of many other faiths within the United Kingdom. The immediate point of law will no doubt have found its resolution by the time that this book is published. But, one may be sure, the arguments of principle will go on for some yet indefinite time.18

notes 1. FACT S AND VALUES?

1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Such facts may, of course, include a wide variety of facts about oneself, facts that demand recognition and which, though they may be open to possible transformation, cannot be simply wished away. It might, of course, have been a deliberate mistake if one’s interlocutor was deliberately seeking to mislead or to confuse. See, especially, G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). See G. E. Moore, “Reply to My Critics” in The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1942). See, for example, the discussion of these issues in Ruwen Ogien and Christine Tappolet, Les Concepts de l’Ethique (Paris: Hermann, 2008) “To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 27.

1 7 4  2. IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

2 . I D ENTITY, BELONGING, AND RESP ONSIBILITY

1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

“Urteilskraft aber ein besonderes Talent sei, welche gar nicht belehrt, sondern nur geübt sein will. Daher ist diese auch das Spezifische des sogenannten Mutterwitzes, dessen Mangel keine Schule ersetzen kann.” Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A133/B172. Vaclav Havel, Letters to Olga (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 350. Rina Benmayor and Andor Skotness, Migration and Identity, International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 3. Richard Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp.192–202. This paper is to found in its French version, Alan Montefiore, “Choisir son identité?” in the proceedings of a conference held at the Centre Culturel de Cerisy-la Salle on Charles Taylor et l’interprétation de l’identité moderne, ed. Guy Laforest and Philippe de Lara and published under the same title (Paris: Cerf, 1998), pp. 372 ff. The papers in question came under such titles as “Personal Identity and Family Commitment,” “Identity and Integrity,” “Moral Identity,” “Personal Identity and Cultural Identity,” “Personal Identity, Social Roles and Responsibility,” “Memory and Identity,” and include also one, given to a seminar at the Wiener Library in London under the same title as that of the paper given at Cerisy, but with largely different contents. Most, but not all, of these papers have in fact been published in one context or another. It is nevertheless fair to say that they all overlap to one degree or another, reflecting no doubt the paths of overlap among my own preoccupations. There were also papers under such titles as “Jewish Identity” and “Structures of Personal Identity and Cultural Identity—Interplays between the Universal and the Particular,” the leading themes of which I shall pick up in subsequent chapters, but which also and unsurprisingly present similar overlaps. Note 6 in chapter 1. See Derek Parfit, in his by this time classic Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Amélie Rorty, The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 309. See note 2, this chapter.

2. IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AN D B E LO N G I N G  1 7 5

11. Which is not to say, of course, that the past—including one’s own part in it—may not be open to potentially endless possibilities of potentially endlessly contentious reinterpretation. 12. In Immanuel Kant, trans. H. J. Paton, The Moral Law, Hutchinson’s University Library, (London: Hutchinson, 1947), p. 96. 13. See, for example, Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1995 [1961]). 14. See his reply to an earlier article by Peter Geach in the same volume of Analysis: Richard Hare, “Geach: Good and Evil,” Analysis 17 (1956): 103–111. 15. One may think of the ways in which the price of success of negotiations for compensation for instant dismissal from certain kinds of posts in, for example, financial institutions in the city of London may involve the acceptance of certain effectively enforceable obligations to refrain from a whole range of activities during an agreed period of what is known as “gardening leave.” 16. See, for instance, John R. Searle, “‘How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is,’” Philosophical Review, no.73 (1964): 43–58, and Hare’s reply “The Promising Game,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 70 (1946); also W. D. Hudson, ed., The Is/Ought Question (London: Macmillan, 1968). 17. See note 2, chapter 1. 18. See note 3, chapter 1. 19. See, for example, note 7, chapter 1. 20. Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1966). 21. Bernard Williams, “Identity and Identities” in Henry Harris, ed., Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1995), and republished in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, a volume of posthumously published essays by Bernard Williams, selected and edited with an introduction by A. W. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). It is worth adding, by way of a final quotation from this essay, “All this helps us, perhaps, to see why identity should be so essential to our life now. Ever since the Enlightenment a recurrent aspiration of distinctively modern politics has been for a life that is indeed individual, particular, mine, within the reach of my will, yet at the same time expresses more than me, and shapes my life in terms that mean something because they lie beyond the will and are concretely given to me. It is the politics, if you like, of selfrealisation. That term contains in itself obvious difficulties; it is even grammatically ambiguous between activity and passivity, and illuminatingly so.

1 7 6   2. IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

These obscurities are the product not of mere semantic inefficiency, but of unresolved political and personal tensions. This is one application of a more general lesson about philosophical problems of identity, that if we find it systematically hard to know what to say, the problem lies probably not in our words but in our world.” It would be pointless to allow oneself to be distracted at this stage into a discussion of whether the notion of a value judgment should or should not be stretched to cover the normally automatic application of the “standard” criteria of human individuation—even while admitting that in certain wholly exceptional (and most typically imaginary) cases one’s personal or culturally acquired values could be decisive in inclining one to adjust the normal criteria in one direction or another. The phrase “generally recognized” has here to be understood as covering an overlapping diversity of contexts of recognition, themselves by no means always easy to pin down and each of them calling for their own much more detailed analysis: recognition in and by the relevant community or by society more “generally at large,” recognition within the institutionally more formal framework of, say, some religious or theological tradition, recognition within the frameworks of other more or less restricted institutions, and so on. To repeat once more that striking passage from his Sources of the Self: “To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 27. See chapter 1, p. 6. See F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927, 1928 [1876]), essay no. 5. A further, and not unrelated, illustration of the problems that may be encountered in the undertaking to move between and across different languages and different forms of life, is provided by those involved in any attempt to render Taylor’s striking formulation of what is at stake in matters of identity into acceptable Chinese. When I consulted Tan Sor Hoon, currently head of the Department of Philosophy at the National University

2. IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AN D B E LO N G I N G  1 7 7

of Singapore and a specialist in Confucian (including modern Confucian) thought, she sent me her version of a translation together with the following note, a note which is worth quoting at some length. I believe the translation captures most of the meaning, although certain connotations to a phrase such as “where I stand” due to the literary and philosophical allusions found in the Judeo-Christian tradition would be missing for a Chinese reader unfamiliar with that tradition. There are also a number of points worth noting in comparing the translation with the original. To Chinese readers the translation of “where I stand” would have quite different connotations from being embedded in a different tradition. In the Analects (8.8) there is a passage which relates “knowing where to stand” to a person learning “the rites” (Li). For Confucians the rites are more than customary rituals, they refer to virtuous practices aimed at the value of harmony, and [their acquisition] is therefore a virtue which relates a person to his or her community. Clearly, talking about “where I stand” in the Chinese context is going to turn out less individualistic than that discussion in the Western context. The standard translation for personal identity is shenfen. . . . This emphasises the relation of the person to society, locating identity in the person’s role or lot in life arising from who that person is vis-à-vis others (e.g., family descent). There is no hint of any concern with sameness through time; if that were the issue, identity would be translated as tongyi, literally same one. The issue of sameness or at least similarity is, however, captured in the translation of identification as rentong (“recognising sameness or similarity”). The sense of identity found in identifying with something or some group is acknowledged in contemporary discussions about cultural identity in the Chinese language employing the term wenhua rentong.  .  .  . The etymological relation between “identity” and “identification” in the English language is lost in the translation—but I have tried to bring it back by translating identity as shenfen rentong, which implies understanding identity in terms of identification. 28. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, book 2, part 2, section 3, para 4.

1 7 8  2. IDENTITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND BELONGING

29. Bhikhu Parekh, A New Politics of Identity (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). 30. The vividly expressive term split identity occurs already in the very title of Yirmiyahu Yovel’s The Other Within: The Marranos, Split Identity, and Emerging Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 31. L’identité de chaque personne est constituée d’une foule d’éléments qui ne se limitent évidemment pas à ceux qui figurent sur les registres officials. Il y a, bien sûr, pour la grande majorité des gens, l’appartenance à une tradition religieuse; à une nationalité, parfois deux; à un groupe ethnique ou linguistique; à une famille plus ou moins élargie; à une profession; à une institution; à un certain milieu social. . . . Mais la liste est bien plus longue encore, virtuellement illimitée; on peut ressentir une appartenance plus ou moins forte à une province, à un village, à un quartier; à un clan, à une équipe sportive ou profesionnelle, à une bande d’amis, à un syndicat, à une enterprise, à un parti, à une association, à une paroisse, à une communauté de personnes ayant les memes passions, les memes préférences sexuelles, les mêmes handicaps physiques, ou qui sont confrontées aux mêmes nuisances. Toutes ces appartenances n’ont évidemment pas la même importance, en tout cas pas au même moment. Mais aucune n’est totalement insignifiante. Ce sont les éléments constitutifs de la personnalité. The passage comes from the first section of Amin Maalouf, Les Identités Meurtrières (Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1998), pp. 16/17; the section is entitled, most appropriately, “Mon identité, mes appartenances”—“My identity, my ways of belonging.” 32. Morwenna Griffiths, Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity (London: Routledge, 1995). 33. Ibid, p. 5. 3. JEWISH IDENTITY 1

The second quotation in this chapter’s epigraph comes from a paper given by the late John Rayner, a senior Liberal Jewish rabbi of great intellectual distinction, to a seminar on the general theme of “identity” that I gave at the Wiener

3. JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING O U R I D E N T I T Y ” ?  1 7 9

Library in London at some point during the late 1990s. I have to confess to being unsure whether it is also to be found in either an antecedent or a subsequent publication by him. 1. Ibid. 2. Clément Rosset, Loin de moi: étude sur l’identité (Paris: Minuit, 1999), pp. 10–11 (the translation is mine) 3. Erik Erikson, “Ego Development and Historical Change,” in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), 2:359–396. 4. Erik Erikson, “The Problem of Ego Identity,” in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 4 (1956): 56–121; it is now most easily to be found in a small paperback called Identity and the Life Cycle, which includes, indeed, both these papers together with a third intermediate one, “Growth and Crises of the Healthy Personality,” itself first published in 1950. Identity and the Life Cycle was first published as a Norton (New York) paperback in 1980 and reissued in 1994. 5. Annette Wieworka, Déportation et Génocide: Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992), pp. 286–87. Annette Wieworka is here quoting from Jean-Jacques Bernard’s own book Le Camp de la mort lente: Compiègne, 1941–1942 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1944), p. 226. 6. See, for example, Seth D. Kunin, Juggling Identities: Identity and Authenticity Among the Crypto-Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 7. See, for example, Akiva Tatz and David Gottlieb, Letters to a Buddhist Jew (Southfield, MI: Targum, 2005). 8. Norman Solomon, Judaism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 16. Compare also what Raphael Loewe called his “tentative working definition of Judaism” in his article “Defining Judaism: Some Ground-Clearing,” Jewish Journal of Sociology 7, no. 2 (1965): 153–175, a definition which he used as the starting point for a renewed discussion in his “Judaism’s Eternal Triangle,” Journal of Religious Studies 23 (1987): 309–323. “Judaism is a complex of faith and social ethics, of universal significance and possibly of universal relevance, resting upon the sanction of uncompromised and absolute monotheism: expressing itself mainly through a pattern of religious symbolism the cultural features of which are predominantly concrete, and the transmission of which is predominantly by descent; and having as its object the sublimation of the material con-

1 8 0  3. JEWISH IDENTITY 1: “CHOOSING OUR IDENTI T Y ” ?

cerns of humanity by pervading them with such spiritual considerations as will not compromise the monotheistic basis of the whole.” Loewe then goes on to distinguish “Judaism” in the sense thus tentatively defined from, 1. “Jewishness,” which is, he says, “a matter of status, as claimed and as acknowledged by the effective majority of whatever Jewish community it is in which the claim is advanced.” and, 2., “Judaicity,” which he uses “to describe.  .  .  . the standpoint of someone whose status as a Jew (Jewishness) is unquestioned and who is concerned both to affirm certain ethical values as being Jewish and to endeavour to implement them, although regarding himself as an agnostic (perhaps even an atheist), and consequently denying any theological sanction for his code, which he regards as being essentially humanistic.” He adds that “an acknowledgement of the power of Jewish traditions and institutions to foster those values may well lead such a person to participate, for the sake of solidarity, in religious ceremonies . . . despite tacit disavowal of any theological link-up.” 9. But Bernard Wasserstein tells me that I have probably misremembered— he thinks that the saying comes from Chaim Weitzmann. 10. The passage in question comes from Claude G. Montefiore, The Dangers of Zionism (London: Jewish Religious Union 1918), p. 3, and is quoted in Chaim Bermant’s The Cousinhood: The Anglo-Jewish Gentry (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1971), p. 318. 11. Given that Taylor is very well known as a liberal-minded Catholic, there are some strangely Protestant echoes to be found in his formulation. It is not only that it seems to be up to the individual to decide for himself or herself just what values and what identity to adopt—one cannot help being reminded of the famous expression “Here I stand; I can no other.” 4. JEWISH IDENTITY 2

1.

The principal pieces in question are 1. “The Jewish Religion—Universal Truth and Particular Tradition,” the text of which was delivered (in 1984) as a Claude G. Montefiore Memorial Lecture at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St. John’s Wood, London, and 2. “Jewish Identity: The Interplay Between the Universal and the Particular,” a contribution to the conference “Remembering for the Future,” held in Oxford in 1988, and to be found on pages 1923–1933 of the subsequently published Proceedings of that conference. I also have in my (admittedly not impeccably systematic)

4. JEWISH IDENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND TH E PA RT I C U L A R  1 8 1

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

files the typescript of a probably older paper apparently bearing the twin titles of “The Universal and the Particular—a Kantian Account of the Elements of Self-identity” and “A Liberal Identity—the Identity of a Liberal,” but I seem to have no record of the occasion for which this paper was written. There are notable (but quite unsystematic) overlaps between these papers, and in what follows I shall be making use of material drawn from all three of them. My contribution, “Structures of Personal Identity and Cultural Identity,” to the collection of essays on Jewish Identity edited by David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993) consisted of a slightly different attempt to tackle some of these same problems. Among the other essays in this collection, that by Gordon Lafer, “Universalism and Particularism in Jewish Law: Making Sense of Political Loyalties,” may be noted as one of particular interest in this context. Here I shall find myself referring back to my paper “Unstable Margins,” which appeared in European Judaism 7, no. 1 (Winter 1972/73), a number dedicated to the memory of its founding editor, Rabbi Michael Goulston. Norman Solomon, Judaism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 3. In fact, the vision of immediate and integral self-recognition had already revealed itself, in the hands of Descartes’s empiricist successors, most notably in those of Hume, as radically incoherent; but that belongs, as a major subplot, to the empiricist side of this piece of philosophical history. This raises as a yet further and far-reaching question that of the limits of legitimacy in the reading of philosophical texts. To pursue it here would constitute too much of an interruption to this attempt to set out the bare bones of my own reading of Kant. It is, however, one well worth pursuing, if for now only a little further; and I try to do this in one of the postscripts to be found gathered together in chapter 7. “So we truly don’t comprehend the unconditional practical necessity of the moral imperative; but we do comprehend its incomprehensibility, which is all that can fairly be asked of a philosophy that in its principles forces its way out to the boundaries of human reason.” The closing sentence of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals in the translation by Jonathan Bennett (available on Bennett’s own Internet Web page). As Bennett rightly points out, Groundwork is here best understood in the sense of a laying of the ground rather than in that of a foundation.

1 8 2  4. JEWISH I DENTITY 2: THE UNIVERSAL AND TH E PA RT I C U L A R

7. See Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in the Kemp Smith translation (London: MacMillan, 1950), pp. 464–479. 8. A paradox, as I understand the term here and mostly elsewhere, involves not just any contradiction, but that rare and peculiarly challenging form of contradiction that consists of a pair of apparently irreconciliably opposed propositions neither of which does it seem rationally possible to give up. 9. In the preceding chapter. 10. See the seventh number of the review Combat pour la Diaspora—a number given over to the theme of education. 11. “A French audience runs the risk of simply failing to see that the purpose of non-orthodox Judaism, Liberal Judaism if one prefers, is a strictly practical one—how to keep our Jews Jewish. . . . In a word, we are not concerned endlessly to define and to redefine the term ‘Jew’ but, taking our startingpoint simply for granted, namely our belonging to a people and to a religious community, to ask the only question that counts—a practical question: ‘And what now?’” 12. “Whether one likes it or not, the line of demarcation . . . between Marxism, or whatever materialist system, and Judaism lies in the fact that we maintain that reason is not always right.” 13. Claude G. Montefiore, Truth in Religion and Other Sermons (London: MacMillan, 1906). 14. There are, of course, philosophers who would analyze the concept of belief very largely in terms of observable behavior, while there are Jewish thinkers who, without necessarily assimilating concepts of belief altogether to those of practice, would nevertheless see the elements within them that refer to purely intellectual assent as being in the end irreducibly indeterminable—far less determinate in any case than those that make reference to actual observance. Moreover, while those who hold to a traditionally orthodox understanding of what they take to have been the original covenant between the Jewish “people” and God would surely reject any pejorative undertones of the expression “a tribal religion,” they would still insist that what really matters for Jews is not so much that irreducibly uncertain element of inner assent as the committed resolve to fulfill the many commandments or mitzvot with which, as they see it, God has charged them. For a very interesting and scholarly elaboration of this point of view, see, for example, Menachem Kellner, Must a Jew Believe Anything? 2d ed. (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 2006), pp. x, 204.

5. J EWISH IDENTITY 3: A PURELY SECU L A R V E R S I O N ?  1 8 3

15. G. E. Moore in Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). 16. Montefiore, Truth in Religion, p. 271 (from sermon 19). 17. Ibid., p. 259. 18. Ibid., p. 267. 19. As in the quotation from Avishai Margalit’s article in the New York Review of Books, April 12, 2007, cited as the first epigraph to chapter 3. 20. One may be reminded of how and why the great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner was led to characterize all those whom he took to be men or women of genuine virtue and integrity as “anonymous Christians,” unbeknown to themselves as such, including, no doubt, many such as my grandfather who took themselves to belong to some quite other religious tradition. See, for example, A Rahner Reader, ed. Gerald A. McCool (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975); and also the essay by the Reverend Norman Wong Cheong Sau on “Karl Rahner’s Concept of the ‘Anonymous Christian’—An Inclusivist View of Religions” in Church and Society in Asia Today 4, no. 1 (2001): 23–39, for a brief general account of Rahner’s views. However, and so far as I know at least, CGM was never tempted to go so far as to regard Unitarians, for example, as honorary or anonymous Jews. 21. Or, if one prefers, “of the other strands of their personal identities.” 22. Montefiore, “Unstable Margins,” p. 8. 23. Marginal to a memory perhaps—but for how long could this have been a real possibility for him before it degenerated into a kind of historical make-believe? 24. In a talk given to the London Jewish Book Week in February 2008. 25. Ibid. 5. JEWISH IDENTITY 3

The epigraph is taken from the proceedings of a conference on “Judaism as Culture in Israeli Universities” organized by the Posen Foundation Israel and held at the Institute for Policy and Strategy, Interdisciplinary Centre, Herzliya, in May 2006. 1.

Ruthie Blum Leibowitz, interview with Felix Posen, Jerusalem Post, August 13, 2009. 2. From the summary of the aforementioned conference.

1 8 4  5. JEWISH I DENTITY 3: A PURELY SECULAR VER S I O N ?

3. Yaakov Malkin, What Do Secular Jews Believe: Pluralism in Judaism, Culture of a Nation, translated from the Hebrew by Batya Stein (Jerusalem: Free Judaism, with Ikan Mass Media, 1998), p. 11. 4. Ibid., p. 53. It is worth noting in passing the very clear echo to be heard in the first of these short passages from Malkin of the strikingly voluntaristic nature of those from Margalit and Taylor referred to in earlier chapters. On the other hand, he would not appear—in the second passage at any rate—to share Margalit’s apparent confidence in the worth of a reference to “values.” It is also worth noting the contrast between his understanding of the term Judaism itself and those to be found in the passages from Raphael Loewe and my own grandfather as quoted in note 8, to chapter 3, and in the main body of chapter 4 respectively. 5. In an article first published in Davar and republished in New Outlook, January 1988. 6. See chapter 3, p. 60. 7. Translated from the Hebrew into French by Sivan Cohen-Wiesenfeld and Levana Frenk (Paris: Fayard, 2008)—and, more recently, into English by Yael Lotan under the title The Invention of the Jewish People (New York: Verso, 2009). 8. Compare once again Malkin: “Free Jews believe in holiday celebrations as expressions of unique family and community values. . . . The Sabbath and the national holidays are celebrated by secular Jews in forms free from the rigidity and exclusivity of religious interpretation. These secular celebrations . . . become points of reference and enrichment for Jewish culture.” Malkin, What Do Secular Jews Believe, p. 14. 9. Raymond Aron, De Gaulle, Israel et les Juifs (Paris: Plon, 1968), and republished in Essais sur la condition juive contemporaine, ed. Perrine Simon-Nahum (Paris: Fallois, 1989), pp. 167/168. 10. “Is the Jewish community one that is ethnic, cultural, religious or national? The reply inevitably reflects both the complexity of the [historical] reality, the indeterminacies of the concepts [in question] and the peculiarity of the Jewish experience.” 11. “The Jews do not constitute a distinct anthropological group, comparable to those that scholars call a race.” 12. “In the absence of a Church and of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, the scattered Jewish communities did not live the same history and were without any conscious resolve of forming a nation.”

6. AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER S O M E T H R E A DS  1 8 5

13. “[They] had in common nothing but their religion (which was not without its secondary variations of belief and above all of ritual). In relation to their surrounding context, the Jewish communities constituted something both more and other than a religious community. But in relation to each other, their only binding link was a faith, based on a Book and the commentaries on it.” 14. See chapter 3, p. 64. 6 . A N AT T E M PT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME THREADS

1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

Those whose precommitted acceptance of the so-called Socratic Paradox—according to which to know the good or the right is ipso facto to seek it—is so deeply embedded in their ways of ordering the network of relevantly interlocking concepts as to be invisible to them, as just one way of thinking among others, will naturally be unable to conceptualize a refusal to follow the norms as one of deliberate and self-conscious wrongdoing. I have tried to discuss some of the possible alternative strategies that may be provided by the conceptual resources available to them in my paper “Deliberate Wrong-doing,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4, no. 70 (1964): 413–431. For a much shorter and more recent version, but under the same title, see also Think 2 (Autumn 2002): 27–50. Rabbi David Goldberg, “The God of the Prayer Book Is Dead, Let’s Face It,” Manna, no. 101 (Autumn 2008). Give or take some major differences in tone of voice, David Goldberg is far from being alone, See also, for example, Rabbi Howard Cooper’s essay “Picking the Sacred Out of the Commonplace” in the following issue of Manna, no. 102 (Winter 2009). As the button molder puts it in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. See, for example, Stephen Toulmin, An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 [1950]); and Patrick Nowell Smith, Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954). Not to mention the changes from one generation to another in the force that may attach to the use of what would appear to be the same term in the production of speech acts. The whole question of how best to articulate the relationships between force and meaning is, however, another matter altogether; strictly speaking, it will be on meanings that rest the validity or invalidity of arguments, whatever their effectively persuasive force may or may not be.

1 8 6  6. AN ATTEMPT AT PULLING TOGETHER SOME T H R E A DS

6. It is clear enough that there must be some important distinction to be made between the “meanings” of terms, as one might expect to find them in a dictionary, for instance, and the “force” of the speech acts in which they might be employed in one situation or another. It is not, however, a distinction that is at all easy to draw in any theoretically satisfactorily hard and fast way. Even if it were within my technical competence, which I fear it is not, to comment usefully on Robert Brandom’s important efforts to confront this problem, this would not be the place to undertake any such attempt. But see, for example, Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 7. In speaking of Reform, Liberal, and Orthodox forms of Judaism, I am, of course, using these terms according to my understanding of them as I grew up and came to live in a British rather than in an American context. Exactly how best to translate them into that context, if indeed there is any very exact translation to be found, I must leave it to American readers to decide. 8. Individuals may, no doubt, resolve to remain totally silent (except perhaps for the utterance of meaningless noises) rather than to display their respect for such norms, but, if the antiprivate language argument is basically correct, they could not formulate this intention even to themselves without according them at least their tacit inward respect. 7. SOME EXTENDED P OST SCRIPT S

1.

Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1996), in English translation, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2. The interview was first published in Le Monde of August 19, 2004, and subsequently in 2005 by Les Editions Galilée/Le Monde under the title Apprendre à vivre enfin: Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum. The English translation by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview—Jacques Derrida) was first published in the United States in 2005 by Melville House Publishing and in 2007 in the UK by Palgrave Macmillan. The passage quoted comes from pp. 34/38 of the latter edition. 3. See chapter 3, p. 64. 4. Cf. “Circonfession” in Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

7. SOME EXTENDED P OSTS C R I P TS   1 8 7

5. Summerhill, one of the most famous of all progressive schools, was founded by A. S. Neill in 1921. 6. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: MacMillan, 1950 [1929]), pp. 177–178. The passage quoted comes from the Transcendental Analytic, book 2, “Introduction—Transcendental Judgement in General.” The term go-cart is used by Kemp Smith to translate the German Gångelwagen, which is perhaps better understood as a child’s pusher, something by which the very young child may steady itself as it learns to walk—and which is dispensed with as its walking becomes, as one might say, autonomous. 7. For some indication of the complexities of the philosophical literature devoted to this topic see, for example, the articles on “Value Pluralism” and “Incommensurable Values” in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy and the extensive bibliographies attached to each of them. One has to say that, though the topics are of evidently great importance, the fine detail of the arguments, together with the niceties of the competing terminological proposals deployed throughout the learned debates to which both articles refer, are irresistibly reminiscent of those of high scholasticism. 8. “Quand nous parlons d’‘individu’ nous désignons deux choses à la fois— un objet hors de nous et une valeur . . . d’un côté le sujet empirique, parlant, pensant et voulant . . . de l’autre, l’être moral, indépendant, autonome et par suite esentiellement non social. Là où l’individu est la valeur suprême, je parle de l’individualisme; dans le cas opposé, où la valeur se trouve dans la société comme un tout, je parle de holisme.” Louis Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme (Paris: Seuil, 1983), p. 37. 9. The Oxford undergraduate course in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, commonly known by its acronym. 10. In the preface to Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783). 11. See chapter 4, note 6. 12. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, quoted from the translation by Theodore M.Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper, 1960), p. 35. John R. Silber’s essay, “The Ethical Significance of Kant’s Religion,” included as one of the two main introductory essays to this edition, is also well worth consulting for those seeking their own further understanding of this very Kantian incomprehensibility. 13. Ibid., p. 45.

1 8 8  7. SOME EXTENDED POSTSCRIPTS

14. “Wovon mann nicht sprechen kann, darauf muss man schweigen.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922; Dover rpt., 1999). 15. In my earlier time, Peter Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen) and Jonathan Bennett’s Kant’s Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), both of which were published in 1966, were among the most impressive and influential examples of this way of approaching Kant. 16. Sir Jonathan Sacks, “Special Message for the Jewish Festival of Pesach,” Arevut, no. 8 (Spring 2009). 17. Pesach is, of course, Passover; Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur the Day of Atonement. 18. Indeed, it has in fact been continuing in the relatively short time between my delivery of the body of this book to the press and the present moment— June 2010—of my opportunity to go over the edited MS. I am thus just in time to be able to signal the very lucid analysis of this case to be found in an article by J. H. H.Weiler, “Discrimination and Identity in London: The Jewish Free School Case,” in the first issue of the newly appearing Jewish Review of Books, no 1 (Spring 2010): 45–46).

index Abbot, Thomas Kingsmill, 86 Abbot of Downside, 6, 46 Affirmations, values and, 50 Agent identity, 23; person v., 22 Analysis, purity of, 24 Arbitrium brutum, 85 Arevut, 162–63 Aron, Raymond, 109, 185n13 Authority, Jewish identity and, 71 Autobiography, viii–x, 5, 9–10, 12, 55; autonomy in, 24–26; education in, 56–57; facts in, 39–40, 117, 123–24, 126; grandfather in, 87–88; Jewish identity in, 56–57, 126; obligations in, 116–17, 124; responsibility in, 122; understanding in, 30–31, 121– 22, 125, 136, 142; see also CGM Autonomy: in autobiography, 24–26; children and, 150–51; choice and, 46; chooser v., 46; community v.,

9; context v., 15; culture v., 150; degree of, 48, 152–53; environment v., 152; facts v., 15–16, 135; family obligations and, 39; free will v., 149; generations and, 41; human duality and, 84; identity and, 13, 15–16, 25, 49–50, 127, 132, 139; in Jewish identity, 59, 69–70, 138; membership and, 124–25, 129, 132, 136–37, 149; mental impairment and, 153; moral judgment and, 6; obligations and, 5–6, 15, 26–27, 29, 33, 48–49, 121, 138, 140–41; promises and, 29–30; Protestantism and, 41; reinterpretation and, 175n11; responsibility and, 48–49; role departure and, 27–30; roles and, 8–9, 13, 27, 120–21; social identity and, 37; societal evolution and, 47; tradition v., 30, 155–56; understand-

1 9 0   INDEX

Autonomy (continued ) ing and, 46; value individualism and, 45–46; value judgments and, xi; values and, 5–6, 154–55 Autonomy of Morals, 24, 141, 148 Awareness: of how one is classified, 70–71; of Jewish identity, 71; sensory awareness, 82–83; see also Self-awareness Baron, Ya’ara, 102, 104, 108 Belief and practice, 160; CGM and, 91; Jewish identity and, 91–93, 96, 101, 105, 107; Judaism and, 89–90, 182n14; obligations and, 132; Secular Judaism and, 103–4; see also Observance Ben-Gurion, David, 60 Benmayor, Rina, 12 Bennett, Jonathan, 181n6 Ben-Yehudah, Israel, 60, 105 Bernard, Jean-Jacques, 65, 67–68 Birnbaum, Jean, 144–45, 148 Brandom, Robert, 186n6 Brinker, Menachem, 98–99 British law: conversion and, 168–70; Jewish identity and, 167–71; recognition in, 169; religious Judaism and, 169 Catholic Church, 6, 41–42, 94–95 Causality, 150; free will v., 149–50; human duality and, 83–85; objectivity and, 83–84; space-time and, 84 Cause and effect: objectivity and, 83–84; space-time and, 84

CGM, see Montefiore, Claude Change, within language communities, 7, 128 Children: autonomy and, 150–51; Jewish identity of, 69, 91–93, 148, 168–71; values and, 151 Choice: autonomy and, 46; morality and, 85–86; responsibility and, 86 Christians: “anonymous,” 183n20; Catholic Church, 6, 41–42, 94–95; Protestantism, 41, 180n11; Unitarians, 93, 183n20 The Church, 6 Classification: awareness of how one is classified, 70–71; language and, 70–71; objectivity and, 81–82 Comment le peuple juif fut inventé (Sand), 106–7 Communication: misunderstanding in, 30–31, 148–49; see also Language Community: agreement within, 76–77; autonomy v., 9; individuality v., 134; in Jewish identity, 96–97; norms and, 134–35, 140; obligations v., 9; reason and, 87; self-identity v., 34–35; Summerhill as, 151; values v., 151–52 Community identity: family identity v., 5; generations and, 43–45; societal evolution and, 43–45, 51; tradition and, 43–45, 77–78 Concepts, analysis of, 6–7 Confucians, 176–77n27 Consciousness, Judaism and, 91–92 Context(s): autonomy v., 15; focus of debate and, 142; Jewish identity

I N D E X  1 9 1

and, 56–57; philosophical texts and, 159–60; of recognition, 176n23; relevance of facts and, 38; senses of identity and, 53–54 Continuing identity, 5, 11, 17–20, 43 Continuity of memory: legal responsibility and, 18–19; personal identity v., 17–20; persons v., 18–20; Podola and, 18–19; public policy and, 19–20 Conversion: British law and, 168–70; Jewish identity and, 57–58, 69, 91, 96, 105, 107–8, 111, 168–70; race and, 169–70 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 153–54, 156–57 Cultural identity, 176–77n27, 177 Culture: autonomy v., 150; identity and, 102; Jewish identity and, 102–4; non-Jewish, 75, 76 Dalits, 67, 68 Decision, discovery v., 15 “Defining Judaism: Some GroundClearing” (Solomon), 179–80n8 De Gaulle, Israel et les Juifs (Aron), 109 Derrida, Jacques, 144–46, 148 Descartes, René, 157 Desires, value judgments v., 136, 151–52, 165–66 Diaspora, 185n13; Israel v., 108–10, 113; Jewish identity in, 98–100, 108–13; nation v., 184n12 Discovery, decision v., 15 Dumont, Louis, 156 Emden, Yaakov, 162–63

Enlightenment, 98 Erikson, Erik, 63–66, 68, 145 Essais sur l’individualisme (Dumont), 156 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 52 Fact(s), 31; acceptance of, 2–3; in autobiography, 39–40, 117, 123–24, 126; autonomy v., 15–16, 135; as basis, 1–2; change and, 3; context and, 38; definition of, 1, 173n1; diverse articulations of, 1; identification and, 63, 66–67; identity and, vii, 38–40, 49–51, 128, 131–32, 137, 142; judgments of responsibility and, 23; language and, 118–19; moral judgments and, 4; obligations v., 126–27; personal identity v., 24; preferences v., 3; reality and, 3; of social identity, 66–67; of social values, 32; value judgments v., 4, 24–25, 33, 118–19; values and, vii–x, 3, 23, 32, 49, 51, 55, 118–19, 131, 133, 139–40; value stability and, 33; Wittgenstein and, 1–2 Family identity: community and, 127; community identity v., 5; individuation v., 39–40; obligations v., 26–27; “ought” judgments and, 5; personal identity v., 24–26; roles v., x Family obligations: autonomy and, 39; internal v. external views on, 39 Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity (Griffiths), 54–55

1 9 2   INDEX

Form(s) of life: identity and, 36; individualism and, 42–43, 140–41; language and, 49, 128, 130, 132–33, 135, 144, 146–47; meanings and, 130, 135–36, 185n5; societal evolution and, 44 Freedom, role identity and, 9–10 Free will, autonomy v., 149–50 Freud, Sigmund, 63–64 Generations: autonomy and, 41; community identity and, 43–45; language and, 185n5; language communities and, 121–22, 128, 131; misunderstandings across, 30–31, 44–45, 121–22; respect and, 155; societal evolution and, 43–45, 51; tradition and, 155 God: capacity for reason and, 87; goodness v., 90; Judaism’s particular v. universal and, 163; Judaism v., 90 Goldberg, David, 126 Goodness: analysis of, 4; God v., 90; Moore v., 90 Goulston, Michael, 94–95 Griffiths, Morwenna, 54–55 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (Kant), 20–21, 158, 181n6 Groups: recognition and, 72–73; selfidentity v., 53–55, 72–73 Halachah, 60 Hare, Richard M., 3–4, 12, 24–26, 33, 165; critics of, 13; person as a value-word and, 21; values of, 13 Havel, Vaclav, 11, 18

“Heteronomy,” 84 Hoon, Tan Sor, 176–77n27 Human duality: autonomy and, 84; causality and, 83–85; divided allegiance and, 164–65; morality and, 84–85; particularism and, 164–65 Human individuation, see Individuation Human will, morality and, 84–86 Hume, David, 31–32, 50, 157; causality and, 149–50; Kant on causation v., 85, 149–50; no “Ought” from an “Is” and, 118; self-recognition and, 181n4 Identification(s), 126; external labeling as, 70; facts and, 63, 66–67; family map, place on, 39; identity v., 63, 64; institutions and, 77; Jewish identity v., 56; mistakes in, 62–63; relevance of, 65–66, 68; self-devaluation in, 68–69; selfidentification v., 62 The Identities of Persons (Rorty), 17–18 Identity(ies), 68; agent identity, 22–23; autonomy and, 13, 15–16, 25, 49–50, 127, 132, 139; bilingualism and, 144, 146–47; body v., 17; as center, 11, 14–15; chooser for, 46; community identity, 5, 43–45, 77–78; concepts of, vii–viii; contexts and, 53–54, 142; continuing, 5, 11, 17–20, 43–44; cultural identity, 176–77n27, 177; culture and, 102; definition of, 11, 14; difficulty with, 16; facts and, vii, 38–40, 49–51, 128, 131–32, 137, 142;

I N D E X  1 9 3

fact/value and, vii–x; form of life and, 36; identification v., 63, 64; judgments of, 22; language and, 143–48; language communities and, 143–44; logic and, 50; meaning for, 65–66; multiple identity as, 53–54, 67; obligations and, 5, 7, 10; other v., 11–12; Parekh on, 51–52; particularism and, 17, 37–39; persons v., 21–22; in philosophy, 141; pretense and, 16; responsibility and, 122; roles and, 12, 13, 52–53, 119–20; self-determination and, 45–46, 176n24; within society, 44–45; “sortal” concepts and, 37; Taylor and, 5–6, 14, 45, 173n6, 176– 77n27, 176n24; transformation and, 16; value identities, 50; value judgments and, 10, 40; values and, 63–64; voluntarism and, 72; who v. what in, 37–39; Williams, B., and, 38; see also Family identity; Jewish identity; Personal identity; Selfidentity; Social identity Individualism, 13, 151; Confucians and, 176–77n27; forms of life and, 42–43, 140–41; holism v., 156; value individualism, 45–46 Individuality: community v., 134; individuation v., 134–35; role v., 8 Individual preferences, social preferences v., 32–33 Individuation: family identity v., 39– 40; individuality v., 134–35; spacetime and, 86–87; value judgments and, 39–40, 176n22 Institution of promise making, 29

Islam, see Moslem Israel: democracy of, 113–14; Diaspora v., 108–10, 113; Israelis v., 97; Jewish identity and, 60, 69–70, 73, 97–99, 102, 104–5, 107–9, 111; Jewish nation v., 90–91; non-Jews in, 104–5, 114 Jewish communities, 96–97, 107; community of communities, 100, 170; flexibility of, 170; variety among, 127 Jewish Free School, 168–71 Jewish identity: authority and, 71; in autobiography, 56–57, 126; autonomy in, 59, 69–70, 138; awareness of, 71; belief and practice and, 91–93, 96, 101, 105, 107; British law and, 167–71; characteristics for, 58; of children, 69, 91–93, 148, 168–71; civil rights v., 98; collectivity in, 59–61, 104, 111; commitment and, 93, 96; community in, 96–97, 107; context and, 56–57; controversy of, 60; conversion and, 57–58, 69, 91, 96, 105, 107–8, 111, 168–70; culture and, 102–4; demand of, 88; in Diaspora, 98–100, 108–12; education and, 102–4, 110–12; halachic law and, 58–59; identification v., 56; identity v., vii, ix; intermarriage and, 69; Israel and, 60, 69–70, 73, 97–99, 102, 104–5, 107–9, 111; in Israel v. Diaspora, 108–9, 113; Jewish religious doctrine v., 108, 168; Judaism’s particular v. universal

1 9 4  INDEX

Jewish identity (continued ) and, 163–64, 167; language and, 145–46; legal systems and, 57–58, 106–7, 167–71; multiple identity as, 74–75, 94; mystery of, 56; national identity v., 65, 75, 97–101; nation and, 97, 99–100; Nazism and, 58, 65, 68–69, 107; obligations and, 137–39; Orthodox Judaism and, 91, 125, 168–71; personal identity v., 9, 74–75, 137–38, 183n21; practices and, 96–97; race v., 109, 168–70, 184n11; recognition and, 60, 69, 73, 105, 106, 169; rejection of, 65–67, 69; relevance of, 65–67; responsibility in, 105; secularism and, 60, 112; self-awareness and, 76; selfdeclaration for, 60, 105; tensions within, 147–48; theology v., 170; tradition v., 73–74; values and, 106 Jewish nation, Israel v., 90–91 Jewish religious doctrine, Jewish identity v., 108, 168 Jewish Religious Union, 89 Judaism: beliefs and, 89–90, 182n14; consciousness and, 91–92; continuity of, 112; definition of, 179–80n8; discrimination and, 168–70; Enlightenment and, 98; forms of, 138–39, 186n7; God v., 90; importance in, 89; Jewishness v., 179–80n8; Judaicity v., 179–80n8; margins of, 94–95, 139; Marxism v., 182n12; observance and, 89–90, 182n14; prayer in, 126; truth and, 89–90; see also Liberal Judaism; Orthodox Judaism; Secular Judaism

“Judaism’s Eternal Triangle” (Solomon), 179–80n8 Judaism’s particular v. universal: God and, 163; Jewish identity and, 163– 64, 167; Liberal Judaism and, 92; paradox of, 46, 79–80, 100–101, 101, 114, 163; Pesach and, 162–63; reconciliation for, 80; tension between, 79–80, 87–88 Judgment(s): of continuing identity, 11, 17–20; how persons should act, 12; of identities, 22; Kant and, 9, 153–54, 187n6; statement v., 134; see also Moral judgment(s); Value judgments Judgments of responsibility, 19; facts and, 23; person and, 22; value judgments v., 20 Kaddish for a Child Not Born (Kertsz), 148 Kant, Immanuel: cause and effect and, 83–84; different forms of will and, 84–86; different readings of, 159; Hume on causation v., 85, 149–50; judgment and, 9, 153–54, 187n6; objectivity and, 82; orders of reality and, 158; particularism v. universalism and, 85; persons and, 20–22; phronesis and, 9; PPE and, 156–57; self-awareness and, 81–82, 181n4; self-knowledge and, 157; Third Antimony of, 86; understanding and, 158, 181n6 Kertsz, Imre, 148 Language: anti-Private Language argument, 160; Arabic, 145–46; argu-

I N D E X  1 9 5

ments and, 129–31; bilingualism, 144, 146–47; checks for, 2; Chinese, 47–48; classification and, 70–71; colonialism and, 145–46; disagreements and, 130; dislocation and, 145–46; evolution of, 130–31, 139; facts and, 118–19; forms of life and, 49, 128, 130, 132–33, 135, 144, 146– 47; French, 144–45; generations and, 185n5; identity and, 143–48; Jewish identity and, 145–46; key concepts and, 127–28; logic v., 135–36; meaning and, 130, 135–36, 185n5; meaning v. force and, 133– 34, 185n5, 186n6; mistakes and, 2, 173n2; particularism v. universalism and, 80–81; self and, 11; selfawareness and, 144–45; silence v., 158–59; symbolization and, 2; values v., 6–7, 118–19 Language communities: change within, 7, 128; generations and, 121–22, 128, 131; identity and, 143–44; logic and, 129–30; meaning rules and, 34, 133, 140; misunderstandings within and between, 7, 49, 121–22, 131, 136, 176–77n27; participating membership within, 34; particularism v. universalism and, 166; responsibilities and, 47–48; translation between, 130–31; values of, 7 The Language of Morals (Hare), 12–13 Legal system(s), 19; British law, 167–71; Jewish identity and, 57–58, 106–7, 167–71; legal responsibility, continuity of memory and, 18–19; persons and, 17–18

Leibniz, Gottfried, 157 Leibowitz, Ruthie Blum, 102–3 Liberal Judaism: assimilation and, 75; CGM in, 87–88; Goulston for, 94–95; Judaism’s particular v. universal and, 92; Orthodox Judaism v., 125; practicality in, 88, 182n11 Locke, John, 17, 52, 157 Loewe, Raphael, 179–80n8, 184n4 Logic, 160; confusion in, 31; fact/value distinction and, 31–32; forms of, 118–19, 129–30, 135, 160; meanings and, 133; rationality and, 129; role of the term  logic, 52; stability of meanings and, 136 Logical relations, 133–34, 139–40 Maalouf, Amin, 53–54 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 32, 34 Malkin, Yaakov, 103–4, 184n4, 184n8 Margalit, Avishai, 56, 104; possible action plan and, 77; Taylor v., 59–60, 61, 72, 76–77; voluntarism and, 72, 77; “We Jews” for, 59–60, 61, 72–77 Marriage: intermarriage, 69; roles in, 28 Meaning(s): force v., 133–34, 145, 160, 185n5, 186n6; forms of life and, 130, 135–36, 185n5; for identity, 65–66; language communities and, 34, 133, 140; logical relations and, 133; norms and, 49; philosophy and, 161–62 Membership: autonomy and, 124–25, 129, 132, 136–37, 149; individual deviance v., 151–52; obligations and, 124–25, 132; personal identity v., 35, 149

1 9 6   INDEX

Metaparadox, 86, 159 Migration and Identity (Benmayor and Skotness), 12 Le monolinguisme de l’autre (Derrida), 144, 145–46 Montefiore, Claude (CGM), 87–88, 101, 184n4; beliefs and, 91; practices and, 125; Unitarians and, 93, 183n20; Williams, M., v., 92 Moore, G. E., 4, 31–32, 90 Moral individualism, 13 Morality: choice and, 85–86; human duality and, 84–85; human situation and, 84–86; Moore and, 31–32; particularism v. universalism and, 166–67; religion v., 90 Moral judgment(s): autonomy and, 6; the Church and, 6; facts and, 4–5 Moslem, 30, 42, 114 Multiple identity: as identity, 53–54, 67; Jewish identity as, 74–75, 94 National identity, Jewish identity v., 65, 75, 97–101 Naturalistic Fallacy, 4 A New Politics of Identity (Parekh), 51–52, 54 New York Review of Books, 56 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 37 Non-Jewish cultures, assimilation v., 75–76 Non-Jews: in Israel, 104–5, 114; universality and, 162–63 Normative facts, 4 Norms, 34; alternative norms, 121; community and, 134–35, 140;

meanings and, 49; preference and desire v., 136; refusal of, 185n1; respect for, 186n8; self-identity v., 34–35; values v., 5 Objectivity: causality and, 83–84; cause and effect and, 83–84; classification and, 81–82; consciousness and, 82; Kant and, 82; spacetime and, 82–83; subjectivity v., 81–83; values v., 4 Obligations: in autobiography, 116–17, 124; autonomy and, 5–6, 15, 26–27, 29, 33, 48–49, 121, 138, 140–41; community v., 9; facts v., 126–27; family identity v., 26–27; family obligations, 39; genuineness of, 30; identity and, 5, 7, 10; incompatibility of, 29, 33; Jewish identity and, 137–39; membership and, 124–25, 132; others’ values v., 33; personal identity and, 5, 117–18; of priests, 30, 41–42; responsible citizenship and, 47–48; regarding role departure, 27, 175n15; roles and, 8–10, 26–27, 117–18, 122–23, 128–29; self-determination and, 42; system of beliefs and, 132; value judgments v., 26, 35–36, 38– 39, 117–18; see also Responsibility Observance: beliefs v., 89–90, 99, 110, 125–26, 182n14; Judaism and, 89– 90, 182n14; tradition and, 182n14; values v., 106 Optional roles, personal identity and, 28

I N D E X  1 9 7

Orthodox Judaism: Jewish identity and, 91, 125, 168–71; Liberal Judaism v., 125 Oz, Amos, 105, 106 “A Paper on ‘Jewish Identity’” (Rayner), 56 Paradox, 46, 80–81, 139, 182n8; of Judaism’s particular v. universal, 46, 79–80, 100–101, 114, 163; metaparadox, 86, 159; Socratic Paradox, 185n1 Parekh, Bhikhu, 51–52, 54, 62 Parfit, Derek, 16–17 Particularism: human duality and, 164–65; identity and, 17, 37–39 Particularism v. universalism: human duality and, 164–65; Kant and, 85; language and, 80–81; language communities and, 166; morality and, 166–67; understanding and, 85; see also Judaism’s particular v. universal Passover; see Pesach Past, reinterpretation of, 175n11 Persons: agent identity v., 22; continuity of memory v., 18–20; as an evaluative concept, 25, 40–41; Hare and, 21; identity v., 21–22; individuals as, 22; Kant and, 20–22; legal systems and, 17–18; as objective ends, 20–21; respect v., 21–24; responsibility v., 20–22; roles v., 36; unified center of action v., 17–18 Personal identity: Confucians and, 176–77n27; continuity of memory

and, 17–20; facts v., 24; family identity v., 24–26; fission and, 16–17; Jewish identity v., 9, 74–75, 137–38, 183n21; membership v., 35, 149; obligations and, 5, 117–18; optional roles and, 28; psychoanalysis and, 70; rejection and, 45; responsibility v., 17–21; roles and, 28, 35; self-identity v., 10–11; self-redetermination of, 74; social identity v., 53, 62, 64, 176–77n27; societal evolution and, 68; tensions within, 147; understanding of, 45; value judgments and, 24–25, 40–41 Personal preference, value judgment v., 34 Pesach (Passover), 188n17; Judaism’s particular v. universal and, 162–63 Philosophical texts: contexts of reading and, 159–60; legitimacy of readings and, 181n5 Philosophy: boundaries in, 160–62; concepts of identity in, 141; meaning and, 161–62; real life v., viii, ix–x, 161; as an unending enterprise, 128 Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), 156–57, 187n9 Phronesis, 9 Podola, Gunther, 18–19 Posen, Felix, 102–3 Posen Foundation, 102–3, 111–12 PPE; see Philosophy, Politics and Economics Preferences: facts v., 3, 32; preferences as facts, 32–33; values and, 34

1 9 8  INDEX

Principia Ethica (Moore), 90 Progressive Jews, 126–27 Promises: autonomy and, 29–30; default on, 29–30; institution of promise making, 29; roles and, 28–29 Protestantism, 41, 180n11 Psychoanalysis, 70 Public policy, 19–20 Race: conversion and, 169–70; Jewish identity v., 109, 168–70, 184n11 Rahner, Karl, 183n20 Rationality, logic and, 129 Rational thought, 83 Rational will: arbitrium brutum v., 85; “elective choice” v., 86 Rayner, John, 56–58 Reality, facts and, 3 Real life: philosophy v., viii, ix–x, 161; understanding of, 158 Reason: capacity for, God and, 87; community and, 87; embodiments of, 86–87; limits of, 158, 187; “the slave of the passions” (Hume), 50; universality of, 86 “La recherche de la justice” (Williams, M.), 88 Recognition: of context, 176n23; diverse contexts of, 176n23; groups and, 72–73; institutional, of roles, 119–20; Jewish identity and, 60, 69, 73, 105, 106, 169; as Jewish in British law, 169; self-recognition, 181n4 Religion: citizenship v., 114–15; morality v., 90; science v., 89; theology v., 170; truth v., 89

Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone (Kant), 86, 158 Religious Judaism: British law and, 169; secular Judaism v., 108, 110, 112–13, 125–26, 138–39, 184n8 Respect: generations and, 155; for meaning norms, 186n8; persons v., 21–24; social identity and, 23–24; traditional values and, 40, 154–55; value judgments and, 40 Responsibility(ies): in autobiography, 122; autonomy and, 48–49; choice, the Kantian paradox and, 86; identity and, 122; in Jewish identity, 105; judgments of, 19–20, 22–23; language communities and, 47–48; personal identity v., 17–21; persons v., 20–22; roles and, 47–48, 122; Rorty, Amélie, and, 20–22; understanding of, 48–49 Responsible citizenship, obligations and, 47–48 Rogers, Carl, 21 Role(s), x, 75–76; autonomy and, 8–9, 13, 27, 120–21; freedom of escape from, 9–10; of idea, 52; identity and, 12, 13, 52–53, 119–20; individuality, 8; institutional recognition of, 119–20; in marriage, 28; obligations and, 8–10, 26–27, 117–18, 122–23, 128–29; optional, personal identity and, 28; personal identity and, 28, 35; persons v., 36; of priest, 30, 41–42; promises and, 28–29; responsibility and, 47–48, 122; tradition and, 8, 28–29, 122–23; value judgments v., 9–10, 36

I N D E X  1 9 9

Role departure: autonomy and, 27–30; discontent with role and rebellion, 120–21; obligations regarding, 27, 175n15 Rorty, Amélie, 17–18, 40–41; responsibility and, 20–22 Rosh Hashanah, 162, 188n17 Rosset, Clément, 62, 63, 68 Ryle, Gilbert, 52 Sacks, Jonathan, 162–65 Samuel, Herbert, 75 Sand, Shlomo, 106–7 Schmitt, Carl, 164–65 Science, religion v., 89 Secular Judaism: beliefs and, 103–4; in Israel v. Diaspora, 113; Jewish identity and, 60, 112; religious Judaism v., 108, 110, 112–13, 125–26, 138–39, 184n8 Self, language and, 11 Self-awareness: duality and, 87; identity and, 11; Jewish identity and, 76; Kant and, 81–82, 181n4; language and, 144–45; sensory intuition and, 83; space-time and, 82–83 Self-determination: identity and, 45–46, 176n24; obligations and, 42; possibility of, 43; in society, 43; tradition and, 42–45; understanding and, 45–46, 176–77n27 Self-devaluation, 68–69 Self-identification, identification v., 62 Self-identity: groups v., 53–55, 72–73; Havel on, 11, 18; identity v., 17; norms v., 34–35; personal identity

v., 10–11; society v., 50–51; speech communities v., 34–35 Self-knowledge, external world v., 157 Self-realization, politics of, 175–76n21 Self-recognition, 181n4 Self-redetermination, of personal identity, 74 Sensory intuition, 83 A Short History of Ethics (MacIntyre), 32 Singapore, 47–48 Skotness, Andor, 12 Social identity: autonomy and, 37; definition of, 37; facts of, 66–67; particular identity v., 36–37; personal identity v., 53, 62, 64, 176– 77n27; rejection of, 66–67; respect and, 23–24; sociologists and, 11 Social values: facts of, 32; personal values v., 33–34 Societal evolution: community identity and, 43–45; forms of life and, 44; generations and, 43–45, 51; personal identity and, 68 Society: continuity of, 110–11; public ceremony and ritual in, 111; role identity within, 44–45; selfdetermination in, 43; self-identity v,., 50–51 Socratic Paradox, 185n1 Solomon, Norman, 74–75, 79–80 Sources of the Self (Taylor), 14, 173n6, 176n24 Space-time: causality and, 84; cause and effect and, 84; individuation and, 86–87; objectivity and, 82–83; self-awareness and, 82–83; “synthesis” and, 83–84

2 0 0   INDEX

Speech communities: self-identity v., 34–35; see also Language communities Spinoza, Baruch, 157 Statement, judgment v., 134 Subjectivity: objectivity v., 81–83; “synthesis” and, 83–84 Summerhill, 151, 154, 187n5 Symbolization: language and, 2; mistakes and, 2, 173n2; usage of, 2 “Synthesis,” subjectivity and, 83–84 Tajfel, Henri, 37 Taylor, Charles, 15; identity and, 5–6, 14, 45, 173n6, 176–77n27, 176n24; Margalit v., 59–60, 61, 72, 76–77; Protestantism and, 180n11; values and, 6, 14–15; voluntarism and, 72, 74 Times, 167–69 Tractatus (Wittgenstein), 158, 188n14 Tradition: autonomy v., 30, 155–56; commitment to, 155–56; community identity and, 43–45, 77–78; disagreements about, 123; evolution and, 77–78; generations and, 43–45, 155; Jewish identity v., 73–74; observance and, 182n14; role release and, 28–29; roles and, 8, 28–29, 122–23; schisms and, 123; self-determination and, 42–45 Truth: Judaism and, 89–90; religion v., 89 Truth in Religion and Other Sermons (Montefiore, C. G.), 101 Understanding: in autobiography, 30–31, 121–22, 125, 136, 142; au-

tonomy and, 46; concepts of selfdetermination and, 45–46, 176– 77n27; generations and, 44–45; Kant and, 158, 181n6; in language communities, 49, 121–22, 131, 136, 176–77n27; misunderstandings, 7, 30–31, 44–45, 49, 121–22, 131, 136, 148, 176–77n27; particularism v. universalism and, 85; of relations between different orders of reality, 158; of responsibilities, 48–49; role structure and, 53 Unitarians, 93, 183n20 Universalism: non-Jews and, 162–63; see also Particularism v. universalism Universality: of reason, 86; value and, 165; value judgments v., 165 Values, 184n4; affirmations and, 50; autonomy and, 5–6, 154–55; children and, 151; community v., 151–52; facts and, vii–x, 3, 23, 32, 49, 51, 55, 118–19, 131, 133, 139–40; of Hare, 13; identity and, 63–64; Jewish identity and, 106; of language communities, 7; language v., 6–7, 118–19; liberals and, 155; norms v., 5; objectivity v., 4; obligations v., 33; observance v., 106; respect and, 40, 154–55; social values, 32–34; Taylor and, 6, 14–15; universality and, 165; value judgments v., 3–5, 133 Value identities, 50 Value individualism, 45–46 Value judgments: acceptance of, 5;

I N D E X  2 0 1

autonomy and, xi; desires v., 136, 151–52, 165–66; distinctions between, 21–22; facts v., 4, 24–25, 33, 118–19; force v. meaning in, 133–34; identity and, 10, 40; individuation and, 39–40, 176n22; judgments of responsibility v., 20; judgment v., 22; obligations v., 26, 35–36, 38–39, 117–18; personal identity and, 24–25, 40–41; personal preference v., 34; persons v. roles and, 36; respect and, 40; roles v., 9–10, 36; universality v., 165; values v., 3–5, 133 Value stability, facts and, 33 Voluntarism: identity and, 72; Mar-

galit and, 72, 77; Taylor and, 72, 74; see also Autonomy Wasserstain, Bernard, 180n9 Weitzmann, Chaim, 180n9 What Do Secular Jews Believe (Malkin), 103–4 Wieworka, Annette, 65 Wille v. Willkür, 86 Williams, Bernard, ix, 36–39, 175–76n21 Williams, Michael, 88; CGM. v., 92 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 58, 158, 188n14; facts and, 1–2; symbolization mistakes and, 2, 173n2 Yom Kippur, 162, 188n17